The Political Thread

[Jim_Campbell]

One or two people would be a coincidence, but ninety-one thousand?  Ninety-one thousand people are dead and no-one cares.

I crunched the raw data from the last set of figures a while back. On those figures, it turned out the mortality rate of people on the various sickness/disability benefits was roughly twice the average of the general population.

There are really only two ways to read that statistic: either these people were really sick, in which case IDS and his little ATOS gestapo should have been leaving them alone, or the bureaucratic machine they were being ground through was causing the increased the mortality rate, and IDS and his gestapo should be held accountable for it.

Cheers

Jim

[ZenArcade]

A cause effect argument for the number boffins with real pain and death as the data....well done you baseball cap wearing fuck.  Z

[HdE]

Iain Duncan Smith, a man who I heard say, without a hint of irony, on the Today programme: "I believe that work sets you free". He'd not long returned from a visit to Auschwitz, and so cannot have been unaware of the resonances of the words Arbeit Macht Frei.

Yes, this government is an absolute abomination.

'Work sets you free?' So much bitter irony in that. Work, by this government's definition, does anything but.

The reality of the current system is that, very simply, we're all being reduced to little more than cattle. We're spending our working lives on a teadmill that, so long as we continue to subscribe to capitalist ideals, is only ever going to reard us by making us work harder, for longer, and for shitty money. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the insistance that we all of us - irrespective of health concerns annd personal circumstances - should be active parts of this system has gone beyond asinine and into terrifying.

And people are still buying into it and accepting it.

Baffling.

[ZenArcade]

Dunno, I'm told by the media people are buying this shite....haven't met one yet. Z

[Professor Bear]

People don't buy it at all, it's just that only the interests of a select few are represented by the media and the political establishment and they don't publicise people's discontent or give them an outlet or means of changing anything.

[ZenArcade]

Guess they really hate that whole vote Corbyn thingy then. Z

[Professor Bear]

You will note how the supposedly "liberal" media outlets like the Guardian and Huffington Post are hostile towards Corbyn to the point it doesn't really make sense... until you remember that Corbyn has put taxing the rich and closing tax avoidance loopholes high on the agenda, which kind of sucks if you're The Guardian and are funded by tax avoidance and your board of directors are ex-bankers and corporate lobbyists who will be personally out of pocket - at that point, the hostility and openly lying headlines make much more sense.
There's no such thing as unbiased media.

[ZenArcade]

The Guardian have did little but reinforce defeat since May 2010. Z

[TordelBack]

Am  I reading a thread where 'bad winters' are presented as an explanation for massively increased deaths amongst the long term sick and disabled, and this is NOT seen as the government's responsibility?  I'd aspire to live in a society where the vulnerable are provided with the warmth, food and attention that ensures they are protected from the vagaries of the seasons and I'd try to elect a governing body that shares that aim.

Not picking on you in particular Tankie, but it seems that a shrug of the shoulders and 'it was the cold, not the cuts' seems like a pretty scary perspective.

[The Legendary Shark]

In the 1960s, US psychologist Martin Seligman conducted experiments on dogs. What he discovered was a phenomena called "learned helplessness." There is a school of thought that says our societies are suffering from a mass form of this phenomena because, no matter who we vote for nothing changes. If they come for our money, we fork it over; if they sell our public services, we let them; if their policies kill people, we shrug it off and blame the weather. There's nothing we can do, we have learned, so we do nothing.
.
The other side of this coin, however, is learned optimism. I think we need a bit of that right now...

[Old Tankie]

'Morning, TB.  Look, I have no truck with this Tory government or IDS.  I am one of the long term sick and disabled that you are talking about and have been affected by benefit changes.  I pointed out the factual inaccuracies on one thread about Employment and Support Allowance.

Even a spokesperson for disabled people against the cuts said it would take time to analyse the figures.  You can't blame any government for all winter deaths.  My own 85 year old seriously ill father, who has COPD and is attached to a breathing machine (provided by the NHS) in his house decided, (despite being told by us time and time again not to go out of the house in winter), to get on his mobility scooter in December and drive round the village dressed in just trousers and a cardigan.  Guess what, he caught an infection and almost died!  He was saved by the NHS.  But, if he had died, would that have been the government's fault?

[The Legendary Shark]

To be pedantic, it wasn't the NHS that saved your dad; it was doctors and nurses - human beings who have decided to give their lives to medicine and healing. The NHS is a thing, a construct, a network.
.
Yes, in theory the NHS is a Good Thing but, in practice, is increasingly becoming a tool for social control and a redistributor of wealth. So long as "governments" control it, the NHS will continue to spiral out of control and restrict the treatments and services available, no matter how heroically the doctors and nurses constrained by it work.

[Theblazeuk]

Meh. Lies, damn lies and statistics.

But since one of the most widely used statistics is always complete bollocks (Average income), and could be easily offered in a more accurate way (mode rather than mean, which is skewed by the vast disparity in ranges), it is just as valid to use broad, senseless figures to condemn as it is to justify. The only crime is the motives behind your interpretation.

Personally I don't think the blood is on the government's hand in a direct fashion but it's as good an indicator as any that little to nothing is being done to mitigate harm.

[IndigoPrime]

Catching up a bit...

Why don't you think Corbyn will win?

Because he has to get 50%, and I don't think he will. Either he simply won't have that level of support (polling is almost certainly overstating it) or Labour will ban enough people that Cooper wins. I hope I'm wrong.

and why the SNP were able to annihalate all opposition on an anti-austerity ticket

The SNP's election run was audacious. Just by appearing to be a bit leftie and human, they cleaned up. Says a lot. (SNP policy on the whole isn't especially leftie, but then nor is quite a lot of what Corbyn's saying, as per Jim's earlier post.)

I don't care who treats me as long as I'm well looked after and the NHS pays for it.

The point is the path we're on is heading towards the point the NHS won't pay for it. At best, the NHS becomes a shield for private corporations who can take a load of cash and leg it when things go south. At worst—and this is likely—we will within another decade end up with a US-style—NOT a European-style—insurance-based system. Basically, if you're not fairly wealthy, you'll be totally fucked, and unless you're not rich, you'll only be slightly fucked. And the care won't get any better, obv.

As for IDS, I've had people arguing with me about the new "few hours a week idea", because, hey, plenty of disabled people would probably like the opportunity to work for a few hours a week. I'm sure many would. But that's clearly not what this legislation will be designed for.

I'm sick of all of the hard-working people bullshit. It's so transparently designed to set people who are currently in financial shit against those on benefits. It's about educating the working class to be against people who should be their allies, which politicians and their friends take all of the money. The sooner we somehow manage to get these arseholes out of power, the better. (But then even Corbyn's not exactly been strong on electoral reform, and that's about the only thing that would see majority Conservative governments gone forever.)

So long as "governments" control it, the NHS will continue to spiral out of control and restrict the treatments and services available, no matter how heroically the doctors and nurses constrained by it work.

Better government-led than Richard Branson.

[Professor Bear]

Why don't you think Corbyn will win?

Because he has to get 50%, and I don't think he will. Either he simply won't have that level of support (polling is almost certainly overstating it) or Labour will ban enough people that Cooper wins. I hope I'm wrong.

I hope Corbyn wins, too, but in the same way I got an odd feeling when David Cameron out of the blue started talking about "shy Tories" a day before the General Election, I got an odd feeling reading the hustings and seeing Cooper suddenly talking about "creating a narrative", and can't shake the feeling the fix is in.

Strange but true: a mate tells of how 9 members of his family signed up to vote for Corbyn, and of them all, the only one to get sent a ballot was his dad - whose only online presence is the Facebook page where he posts right-wing and often politically incorrect things that border on racism.