Includes violent imagery, which compounds my concerns about my personal safety as a result of the threats I think implicit in what Grace has written.
Or does she just borrow that one from the Isle of Man?
By the way the threats, so called, are here.
Includes violent imagery, which compounds my concerns about my personal safety as a result of the threats I think implicit in what Grace has written.
Or does she just borrow that one from the Isle of Man?
By the way the threats, so called, are here.
He’s absurd.
He is about the imagery,. Because it’s clear the context is state violence against the “workers”.
But it is the usual socialist screed that talks about “class war” “fighting battles” etc. Strange how they get away with it. It’s exactly the sort of talk got Lucy Connolly banged up. Incitement to violence.
OK… Lots of waffle in that article, but it *is* a coherent piece filleting Spud,including actual quotes and stuff…
The “Violent Imagery” is used to make a point about “Class War” , and not even aimed at Spud.
The only thing that *is* aimed at Spud directly is her declaring that he is not a (Green) Socialist.
Which he indeed is not, as is clear by all his Output: He is a Fascist. Technically Socialist, but…not in the sandbox madame Blakeley plays around in.
She may be part of the Barmy Green, but she’s got Spud down to rights. so she can’t be *entirely* Stoopid.
But threats? I don’t think even a Hoomun Rites Lawyer can find them in there.
Lots of waffle in that article
I’m not so sure. You could say much the same things from the opposite perspective, on trying to implement possible Reform policies. If Reform ever manages to have any policies.
Absolutely NOT. He is a communist. Obviously.
So we have a socialist arguing with a communist. Nothing was learned.
Nice tits.
“given that I joined the Greens to endorse Polanski very early on in the leadership race.”
They must have got bigger recently.
It’s the only thing to recommend the left. They do have better totty. How I account for my earlier, socialist years. Market forces.
I’m not so sure. They can be very attractive in that angsty sort of way but if you want unbridled bed fun, go upper class. Or forrin, as you know.
You’re definitely right about the upper classes. But there are so few of them & they’re not easy to get at. For a sport, it’s like taking up polo or Himalayan climbing. You need all sorts of specialist equipment.
That’s why forrin, or black, brown, or yellow. As I’m sure you know.
Not black. Bestiality is disgusting.
Oh, I have a couple of fond memories… as my Billy Ocean keyboard tech once leeringly said to me, sprawling pissed in the crew bus after a gig somewhere in the Deep South (Arkansas? Nashville?) with his arm around a very obvious low-end groupie: “Sometimes you need a little roughage in your diet.”
They do not have better totty.
I’ve been to Conservative Association do’s. Reminiscent of Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.
Conservative Associations are full of matrons, not totty.
Undoubtedly. Have you seen Antifa?
IME, ugly, stupid and neurotic women gravitate towards the left. Attractive women understand that the sexual marketplace reflects how life works and so lean right…
Attractive women generally understand their value in that marketplace, whether or not they pretend not to. Attractive lefty women are generally outranking da sistas, and or pulling the alpha revolutionary. Lovely, egalitarian, caring girls, the lot of ’em.
Attractive lefty women are also often nutjobs – a maelstrom of leftist neuroses (‘is x racist/sexist/classist/capitalist/fascist?’) coupled with stupidity and gullibility…
So I discovered…
One of the things that first struck me about the Palestine marches was how many young white men tagged along, then I realised how many young women there were and how stupid they were, judging by the answers they gave to questions like which river in river to the sea.
Someone then nailed it on X. Lots of young women suddenly say lots of dead babies in their TikTok timeline and were outraged and joined the protests because dead babies bad. Sound men, potting an opportunity just tagged along.
I’ll fisk the post shortly because it’s almost absurd to the point of self-parody. I don’t know if the Greens have a Wet Squad but the SUV similar to one being used by the US Secret Service and parking it up in Murphy’s street looks like an almost irresistible prospect!
Blakely said:
“ Like they were forced to back in 1945 when organised workers pushed a reticent Labour Party to create the NHS and the wider welfare state”
And how well has that actually worked out? The states been in complete control of it since its inception, if there were ever two things we could look at and judge the effectiveness of state control…
Is anyone under, say, sixty capable of distinguishing “reticent” from “reluctant”?
Is ignorance to flow down the generations?
The Labour Party adopted an NHS policy because the Conservatives and Liberals had already done so and it seemed popular. It was, as far as I know, nowt to do with “organised workers” in particular.
I’d guess that Labour’s original opposition to the idea was based on the old commie creed that “the worse the better”.
Blakely is 32. Carla Denyer is 40. Both went to Farnborough Sixth Form College, an institution that boasts one of the highest state sector Oxbridge entries, and a place I attended (but of which I have unpleasant memories) when it was still a grammar school. Stephen Timms was in the year above me.
Mmm. Might be interesting to look at the staff and who was teaching what to whom.
>The states been in complete control of it since its inception
Only for very woolly definitions of “complete control” or “the state”.
Westminster has control over how much money is shovelled into it, but can’t exercise that control without being replaced in the next election. Actual decisions as to what the NHS does are carried out by hundreds of thousands of unelected managerial types. It’s probably not possible for the Prime Minister or even the cabinet and maybe even for the entire government to come up with a single coherent plan for the NHS to do something, and then actually get the NHS to do it. The organisation is just too big and too complex and has too many people in the decision-making process for any kind of top-down control to impose anything but the broadest of suggestions.
Entirely agree that’s where we are. And we’re there because the state created it, lost control of it and continued to throw money at it.
Doctors have been in charge right from the start when they had their mouths stuffed with gold. The junior doctors strikes just emphasise the point and they don’t even care about hiding it now.
From Guido:
We should be calling it Their NHS not Our NHS because we have no say and nowhere else to go, and the doctors know it.
And yet the silly fuckers are shooting themselves in the foot, because the real problem is not their pay but the lack of training places stymying their career progression. If they weren’t such commie cretins they’d put pay on the back burner and concentrate on this, pointing out what an idiotic waste of resources it is spending £250K training a doctor, only to stop them progressing and causing them to quit or emigrate.
And replacing them with people who neither speak English well nor have much sympathy for our culture, to patients’ detriment. “Who do you want tending to Grandma? Someone who understands her, or someone who doesn’t?” Mind you, that opens another can of worms.
The NHS was proposed by Beveridge, a Liberal, in his report to Churchill’s government (a Conservative-led coalition). Grace Blakeley has clearly read 1984 and treats it as an instruction manual instead of a warning, re-writing the past in order to mislead the masses and thereby control the future.
While she makes some good points, from the wrong direction but credit to her, I see she’s peddling the old “costs of operating a business are a government subsidy” fuckwittery.
There’s a guilt within my mind
There’s a guilt within my mind
I know this feeling is a lie
I know this feeling is a lie
I don’t need this pressure on
I don’t need this pressure on
I don’t need this pressure on
I don’t need this pressure on
I don’t need this pressure on
I don’t need this pressure on
, Grace Blakeley has commented on the posts I made over the weekend (here, here, here and here) on her Substack, which is free to access. Doing so, she chose to do three things:
Does she not know who it is she’s criticising? He seems to have an issue with strong women…
2. Not share her comments here, as I invited her to do.
Because of course this blog is such a renowned repository of free and robust debate
3.Not answer any of the reasonable questions I asked in a spirit of curiosity.
8 loaded questions which were clearly designed to elicit a response which could facilitate Murphy’s equivalent of a ‘Gotcha’ moment were rejected. I’m sure if he wanted to debate more broadly there’s 20,000 people or more who have been blocked on ‘X’ – but we’d better not go there had we?
I guess that’s what I should have expected, given that she has declared me an enemy in her class struggle, but it was disappointing, nonetheless, most especially as I had tried from the outset to make clear I was seeking to discuss ideas, and nothing else. I will still try to do that, although I accept it is getting harder now it is clear that I am apparently her enemy and she will not make clear what might happen to me as a consequence when she wins her “class struggle”.
It’s the same sensitivity I recall you displaying with either Tim or the great Christie Malry. Also – you don’t seem very knowledgeable about Left wing politics for someone who proclaims himself an expert on ‘political economy’ – the violence is intrinsic to left wing ideology. Without it doesn’t really carry the same impetus
That said, let me address what she has written on Substack.
In summary, in my opinion, the response:
The lack of self awareness , although to be expected is really quite hard to interpret without the strong suspicion that its a clever parody. If we didn’t know he was serious, you’d have to assume its satire.
Is riddled with ad hominem attacks.
Because calling all your opponents ‘fascists’ is a powerful argument
Includes violent imagery, which compounds my concerns about my personal safety as a result of the threats I think implicit in what Grace has written.
Is it the Orgreave photo? Maybe he was a member of the UDM or works for MI5?
Fails to answer any of my quite genuine questions, including as to what my fate might be for being her chosen, supposedly capitalist, enemy in her class warfare if she were to win the “struggle”.
In fairness to her – her substack post is the usual Hard Left rubbish seeing conspiracies everywhere but its light years more coherent than Murphy. Indeed she sums him up quite well for me!!
Is internally incoherent.
Says the man who set a new record on the internet for the use of the words ‘tenthly’ eleventhly’ and ‘twelfthly’
However, in a spirit of generosity (despite the venom aimed in my direction), let me note Grace (whose first name I will continue to use, since that is how I would greet her if we met again, even though she persistently refers to me as Murphy), saying this:
Wasn’t this the guy who ‘speaks truth to power’ – remarkably sensitive for such a sturdy tribune of the working class?
So, to let me summarise:
You see he is allowed to contradict himself – she is not. That’s a privileged reserved for someone who ‘maintains editorial control’?
She now claims a superior knowledge of MMT, presumably seeking to put me in my place. After all, what do I know?
In fairness it’s a question asked here every day. He is the embodiment of the quote from Axel Foley in ‘Beverley Hills Cop’
‘You guys don’t know nuthin about nuthin, do you?
She says even if the theory is correct that it doesn’t address her original post which was about the need for radical change.
That is, apparently, because the state as it now is has been, in her opinion, irretrievably corrupted by capitalism, presumably requiring the overthrow of the state as we now have it through the class struggle she now promotes in workplaces, communities and on the streets, which I can only presume means that there is to be a direct confrontation with democracy in any form that we now recognise it, and it is this need that we do not understand – because I am genuinely confused as to what else it is that I do not comprehend.
I’d better retreat back into the comfort of a good old strawman
If Murphy isn’t a Socialist then I’m from Ulan Bator – he is very far to the Left of North Korea and would provide a tyranny more monstrous than any yet known. My guess is he isn’t sufficiently radical for her but given Kemi Badenoch’s cabinet contains a lot of Socialists so far to the Left has the Overton window swung he certainly is one.
I would argue that what I do here, and what I propose, is the exact opposite of a technocratic, paternalistic project. My aim is always to:
Quite simply, I aim to provide people with agency, power and the right to decide for themselves
Even if that diagnosis is completely and utterly incoherent Goddamn it I’m gonna do it anyway!!
I’ll leave this audience to decide if Citizen Spud will be the man to lead the revolution. Based on Tim’s other post on this category today there’s some loonies out there.
Whereas of course Murphy
The last thing I can see Grace Blackley doing is recognising people’s agency.There is much else I could say, but I will do so from now on without reference to Grace, her declaration that I am an enemy of working people with the threats implicit in that, and her obvious contempt for working people, all of which I think are profoundly unsavoury and suggest to me:
To quote from Luke 6:38
‘Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap”
He has consistently provided vitriol to numerous commentators. Called valid criticism trolling. Asked for people to be violently assaulted if they are deemed by him to be fascistic, and has called for the expropriation of Assets on numerous occasions. But when such rhetoric is leveled against him (even though I don’t think Blakely did) suddenly it’s ‘unacceptable’.
I’ll be intrigued to see her response – if she can bothered to engage again…
It’s time to move on. Answers are needed, and Grace Blakeley has none, so I had better work on them instead.
Well it seems the ‘Ragging on Ritchie’ section will continue for a while longer….
I read (some of) Blakeley’s blog post. She’s very obviously a watermelon, and doing the usual lefty thing of mischaracterising Orgreave as specifically an attack on the ‘workers’ as opposed to an attempt to keep it operating (blast furnaces starved of coke die terminally).
The whole spat is just a slightly higher level version of the Judean Peoples Front name calling that is currently going on in Your Party. The YP stuff is just amusing, but not a fun as Life of Brian, but the participants can’t see that, which is the funny bit.
Murphy complains that she did “Not tell me she had replied to my comments”
She says that the spat started when “Richard Murphy wrote a blog post on Friday, naming me as someone who deserves criticism for failing to advocate Modern Monetary Theory”
I wonder whether Murphy told Ms Blakeley that he had criticised her in public? Or checked the assumptions he made about her and her motives.
Well… there is *one* threat to Spud, and it’s basically the entire article…
Spud’s been brown-nosing the Greens of late, and she’s basically saying:
“I’ve seen through your spiel, and got your measure. You’re not getting a foot in if I can help it…”
Roadblocking Spud’s dreams of Continued Funding, Influence, and possibly Aspirations to Ermine is a genuine threat to his physical and mental well-being.
In Spud’s Opinion at least. Other people may have a different opinion on that.
My impression was the like Gary Stevenson before him, Polanski spent enough time with Murphy (even if only an afternoon) to conclude he needed to steer clear!!
The Hypnotits was bigging up Murphy in a TV interview at the weekend, as one of the people who taught him about MMT.
That I was unaware of – there’s one born every minute as they say!!
Posted in error….
>The issue with the entire discussion around MMT is that its proponents believe they’ve discovered the secrets of the universe.
Can’t in any way disagree with her. She’s absolutely right about this, MMT is completely coherent because it’s just traditionally-understood economic theory with all the equations upside-down. Economic Phlogiston Theory, if you will. Phlogiston Theory is entirely consistent because it’s just “Oxygen Theory” with an elementary particle of “not having any Oxygen”. And while both a silly way of looking at things, PT and MMT also both make the same correct predictions because they’re just a more sensible theory turned upside-down.
But then MMT proponents go on to look at the temporal separation between “creating money” and “having to ‘remove’ the ‘excess money’ so as not to have inflation”, and don’t realise it’s exactly the same as being able to use the toaster even though you’ve not yet paid the electricity bill under the “household model”.
And then they seem to go on to think we can just print a lot of money* and fund the Welfare State, NHS, HS2 and all that guff without ever needing to pay for it in the traditional sense. And everyone who says you can’t is just stupid and heartless.
There’s this weird doublethink amongst MMT proselytisers where OF COURSE you can’t just print infinity money and not tax it back out the system, but for some reason you can print a reasonable amount of money and not tax it out the system, as if they don’t realise it’s a matter not of degree but of principle.
As I frequently point out, the money printers and the taxers are different organizations. The taxers have their own priorities. And they don’t want to take the heat for tax increases forced by a different organization.
In theory, MAYBE it could be done. In reality, it can’t, and you will be destroyed by inflation.
Someone should tell him that crying about ‘threats of violence’ only works on simps of mid chicks – the rest of us stopped caring 10 years ago.
Internet culture is coarse and full of people with no self-control online – GIFT (Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory) tells you that if you give a man anonymity he will yell racial slurs online;)
The upside here is that its extremely clear that the only reason the modern world isn’t a blood bath is that these people are also extremely lazy and unmotivated.
Finally read her article. Farnborough is – or was – a comfortable middle-class dormitory town. The kids who go to that sixth-form college have everything they want. It’s not Grimsby, or a muslim hellhole.
Perhaps I’m dense, but…
…can anyone tell me the point in the government printing up a shitload of money just immediately to tax it away and destroy it again? In what way does this have anything to do with goods & service production and provision in society?
I don’t get it, either.
From what I get of that… using an analogy.. It’s to imitate a chain of chemical reactions along an energy gradient.
You elevate the “energy” at one end by printing money, create a Sink through Tax at the other end, and have the money percolate through the system along the gradient having it do Work.
Which….could work.. if the economy were linear and fixed. Which it… very much isn’t.
They also make the fatal flaw of assuming it is exclusively the tokens of exchange that make the economy Happen.
Which it isn’t. It’s the Work that makes up the economy, the token of exchange used in it is irrelevant, as it can be *anything* partners in an exchange agree on.
Think of it on a personal level. If you have only experienced fast food restaurants, you’re accustomed to paying first, then your food is prepared, and then you eat. Imagine someone comes along and tells you of a new magical type of restaurant where you can get your food first and only pay later. This may seem a fairly trivial difference to you – it avoids a minor nuisance in needing a separate transaction when you decide you want dessert after all, or an extra coffee. But to some people it sounds magical! You get food without paying! The paying later is something they just don’t think about. Or they think that the payment period can be stretched. Or that if they never leave they can keep eating and deferring payment. Or that if they have no money, they’ll eat first and worry about the payment later.
So that’s one aspect of it.The taxing it back is just a minor detail that can be ignored.
But even if tha taxing it back is fully accepted, MMT has the wonderful property that you can spend money now, when people are not motivated to notice how much you are paying, and then tax them when the money is long spent and it’s far too late to associate the debt with what it was spent on. With our current system people can complain about this budget raising taxes now to pay for spending in this budget. Under MMT the taxation can be presented as just some technical thing based on historic spending by a previous government and no reason to criticise the current government which is buying you lots of nice things.