UK Politics 2022

[dubsartur]

Sounds like you see groups in the UK overlap with the groups in the US who want medical exams to verify sex in school sports!

Now that sounds like a great way to keep kids safe from sexual abuse. Can't imagine any unnecessary trauma there.

There was a case where a Republican state governor vetoed a bill like that saying "I can find one out trans person in high-school girl's sports in my state.  I don't understand why they feel they way they feel, but I can't believe that further excluding them would help anyone."

Re transphobia in politics generally, again it's not really something I've looked into, but it does often seem to largely be a weird mix of people who are also homophobic and generally right wing, along with people who could be described as the "man hating" feminists that the reactionary types are always railing about. Those types seem to think (if I very crudely boil it down) men = dangerous/bad -> transwomen = men pretending to be women so they can take advantage of cis woman because men dangerous. There are also the genuine issues where more "normal" people get dragged into it and it's hard to guess the intent, like with sports or prisons.[/size]

There are also lesbians who suspect that many gender nonconforming youths today decide they are trans, whereas a few decades they would have decided they are lesbians.  That drains off support for some aspects of the LGB movement, both practical ones such as employment discrimination against women and their theoretical argument that gender stereotypes are made up and that understanding this will reduce the amount of suffering in the world.

There are many people pushing contradictory theories about where the trans trend comes from and whether shadowy forces are pushing it, and my own experience only covers a little bit of a few corners.  I don't grok the 20th century sports culture which lead to medical exams and pee tests, and I don't know how to separate weird Internet ideas and newsroom fashions from real movements which will cause harm to real people, so I try to be polite to people I know and to avoid having an opinion on things which are beyond my experience or my training.

[Jubal]

not sure how twitter works but all the responses I saw (presumably the most popular?) were very much opposed to the tweet, either there's a lot of transphobes on twitter (or a lot of twitter transphobes are drawn to such tweets)

These things both play a big factor, because social media algorithms prioritise engagement so heavily, so if you reply or quote-tweet a post to tell people how awful it is, it'll spread to your follower base more easily, so it's pretty easy for these sorts of things to rapidly go viral among the people who hate them most (who are also more likely to reply generally). Also a lot of the most obsessive people on Twitter on all sides do things like running five accounts via TweetDeck just to boost their own posts more and create more of a sense of wide public outcry. That's not to say that the original was necessarily good messaging, I didn't see the original case, but enormous dogpiles from transphobes are very much a Twitter thing these days. I believe that Spritelady's work had one a few months ago after they used the term 'pregnant people' on a journal cover and suddenly their mentions were full of people claiming this was erasure of women or something.


Anyway, Liz Truss has resigned, making her the shortest serving British Prime Minister ever at 44 days in office from appointment to resignation, absolutely smashing to pieces the previous 119 day record set by PM George Canning in 1827.

The Conservatives are reportedly going to try and do a very expedited leadership process to get a replacement in office as fast as possible, over the next week or so.

[dubsartur]

Sounds like another good reason not to be on birdsite!  Its like the lottery in 1984, almost everyone puts in far more than they get out because they hear stories about someone somewhere striking it rich.  Anyone who was on the Internet in the 1990s knows that worthwhile sites need moderators, and you can't effectively moderate hundreds of millions of people.  And algorithmic social media has dangerous positive feedback loops (or scams where to be seen you have to pay- Facebook starts cutting off views to businesses' pages when it believes they depend on the page to reach customers, then offers to boost posts on the page for a small fee).

Edit: even if one believes that the rise in trans and nonbinary identities is just a result of greater awareness and more acceptance, that is a cause for the trend (ie. "society changed in ways which allow more people to recognize and express their trans and nonbinary identities, therefore more people recognize and express them")

[Jubal]

Well, in Rishi Sunak the UK now has its first Hindu prime minister, indeed the first to actively follow a non-Christian faith (he's the second ethnic minority Prime Minister: the first being Benjamin Disraeli who was ethnically Jewish).

Unfortunately he's out of touch, exorbitantly rich, and whilst he probably won't crash the economy as badly as Truss the likelihood of him being willing to fund adequate support for people who need it this winter is minimal. And he's played into some very right-wing social policy tropes in recent months too.


Also, ballots drop for the internal Lib Dem elections today, so it'll be an interesting one to watch: I keep meaning to put together some data to see if I can work out anything that actually correlates with winning (whether that's manifesto length/quality, endorsements from particular endorsers, etc), but I never seem to find the time.

[dubsartur]

Birdsite people say that only one UK Prime Minister since the war had a degree from anywhere but Oxford.  Is that really true?  Educated people with fancy jobs often pass around claims about personal politics or current events which a child could show to be false.

I would expect the opposition parties to be laying out a clear policy program at this time in preparation for forming government.  Committing to things in advance makes it easier to overcome the intertia in the system, and lets you think about them at leisure.

[Jubal]

I think that's correct - several didn't have degrees, but only one non-Oxford university is represented (at least at undergrad level, not sure which of them did graduate study and where etc).

The opposition are surprisingly quiet on that front: I think there's this sort of dug in terror on the centre and centre-left that saying anything about anything will give an angle for the press to attack. It's proving a major issue in the aforementioned Lib Dem internal elections, where having a stronger view on policy (especially on Europe) is a major demand of the two non-incumbent presidential candidates and several other people running for office.

[Jubal]

In case anyone wants a really excessive 4000 word read on Lib Dem internal politics, I've written one for your edification and delight:

https://thoughtsofprogress.wordpress.com/2022/11/12/the-lib-dem-internal-elections-watching-the-results/

[Jubal]

And its sequel (spoiler alert, I was not elected to things):
https://thoughtsofprogress.wordpress.com/2022/12/17/the-lib-dem-election-results/