Election Debate... thoughts?

I think it was sterile, bland and predictable. Mainstream politics is still depressingly old school ties, white, male RP dominated ( I know Brown is Scottish, but he doesn't sound it ). None of these men has one ounce of charisma or passion that would get my attention and ultimately my vote.
Frankie Boyle today described Nick Clegg as "a man who looks like he would leave a stag night early because he didn't want to miss Holby City."

• 14 years ago
• 1

Policies not personalities!

• 14 years ago
• 2

Frankie Boyle for PM!!!! :O)

• 14 years ago
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They were all slimier than frog sputum. All I wanted them to do was answer the question...all incapable of doing so.

Won't be voting for any of these clowns.

• 14 years ago
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I was tempted to watch reruns of Strictly Come Dancing...instead I updated my profile pages on my websites....cleaned the house and took my cat for a walk...

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.imdb.com%2Fname%2Fnm2584297%2F&h=aa34d3cc6308823a88f71a61d4568f6e

• 14 years ago
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In seriousness, I think the debate was as pointless as it was because the essential element that was really needed to galvanise it, which was public contribution, was so resolutely damped down. It seems representative to me of the state of the current democracy that the a forum supposedly allowing a questioning and auditing of our potential (and actual) political leadership was deprived of the single most important contribution, the public voice. Instead, a carefully policed debate, with a hand picked and quiescent audience sat in the studio for several hours. What was the point? No-one was ever at risk of being heckled, or seriously taken to task for their statements. They might as well have stuck to the usual vapid statements of policy and left things at that. Moreover, where does the preceived need to suddenly start aping American electoral practices stem from? The hope that something of say, American charisma may rub off on the English electoral debate, perhaps?

While I will always stand by the fact that living in a pluralist and tolerant commercial democracy is a better option than living under the sort of regimes that govern about 75% of the earth's land surface, it's fair to say that the English electorate are, by now, being presented with what is effectively a non-choice between leading parties who have moved so closely towards occupying exactly the same centre ground that the policies which they collectively believe in are virtually identical, and those that distinguish them one from the other are precisely the ones that no-one wishes to support. Large numbers are washing their hands of the voting process because they feel they are being presented with equally dire choices, and some will vote in the attitude that it really no longer matters who is in power and who is out because the same line will be followed, regardless. I am convinced that the country is heading for a hung parliament, and that this may well be the biggest wake-up call the main parties can recieve as it will show them clearly how little the electorate actually cares for *any* of their declared positions.

• 14 years ago
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I watched it and am taking an active interest in British politics for the 1st time in my life! I too will not be voting for any of the main parties because none of them had the ability to answer any of the questions put to them with anything other than pre rehersed manifesto statements!

For God sake vote guys, but don't vote for the big 3 and don't vote for any of our incumbent MP's! We the people can force change in this country and to do that we have to remind the polititians who has the real power!

• 14 years ago
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Just about to film 3 ppb spoofs. They've all left themselves open to ridicule again!! Thank God!! However, Nick Clegg did come over as the most relaxed and personable so we'll reflect that!

As for Debate thoughts..... unfortunately I feel it was so stage managed it was practically a pointless exercise.

But at least Clegg finally got the media to recognise him. As for Cameron Direct his youtube site is so easy to spoof already!! And as for Mr B I do feel very sorry for him being pushed thru media hoops.

I hear the BBC want to make them all do The Wall...... ;-)

• 14 years ago
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If you're worried about freedom of speech (and especially for those of you who are script writers etc...), then you need to think seriously about NOT voting Labour. In my humble opinion... :)

• 14 years ago
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At the beginning of World War 2 .... I'm afraid America sat on its arse for three years .. plenty of time therefore, to start upgrading their War machine !!

• 14 years ago
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Hi Luke - there's a slight flaw to your argument. Yes, society can provide all sorts of medical services, food, etc.. but I think you'll agree we have a problem sharing it around the world (and even the country) equally. Removing money won't solve one of our biggest problems which is our innate capacity for selfishness. We will still make sure that there's a hierarchy when it comes to wealth distribution, whatever the wealth is defined as (money, food, peanuts etc..). also if, as you say, we are "outgrowing" every service that requires money - I'm not sure where that leaves us - no doctors, lawyers, teachers, refuse removal workers, water purifucation plant workers, electricity plant workers. Do we really not need ANY of those things? Even actors?!!! Are we all expected to be paid in half a dozen eggs or three goats. In which case, as some stage the goats will become more precious than the eggs (or vice versa) and you are STILL left with a monetary system - it's just not printed on paper! Do we all have to work for nothing? I'm slightly confused!! :)

• 14 years ago
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C'mon, Luke ... where are you going ??. This smacks of a perfect brainwashing, and a fool you are not !!. Money ... in any shape or form, is the l.c.d. of bartering. These scientists, that help us all ... how are they paid ? ... two cauliflowers and a cabbage ?? ... and the equipment ?? ... a bag of prawns ??. The list is endless that requires payment of some kind ... before we receive the benefit of their expertise.
Your theory is all well and good in some small village in the outback ... but try applying it to a Company like the NHS, with hundreds and thousands of employees. I can hear the workforce now, as they arrive to work ..
" Christ ... we're getting paid in turnips today !!". ... " sod that for a game of dominoes " !!.

• 14 years ago
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..Bartering is a useful tool but most items bartered are 'cash converted'eventually.
Money in one shape or form has been around since people! Ancient coins are being dug up all the time;They just didn't know how to print it until the printing press was invented
a few hundred years ago!

• 14 years ago
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I have a lot of sympathy with this sort of argument, Luke, as I have brought myself up on a complicated diet of predictive science-fiction, futurism, Anarchist and Socialist theory, the history of revolutionary movements, and the work of thinker-humourists such as Robert Anton Wilson, and having taken a close look at your posts, I see how the theory works. Others on the forums, I think, are a bit baffled because they cannot inherently trust that such utopian ideals could ever become a reality, and that remains an open question. There is a good argument to say that, if enough people have begun to question the system and to demand raised expectations, then the system will have to change in line with their attitudes, but I can also appreciate that people recognise the inertia and longevity of certain human practices - which we have tended to evolve because they have proven useful to us, and not simply because they have become imposed by 'capitalist society'.

The creation of a monetary economy is a case in point - it tends to evolve at the point at which a society complexifies and becomes populous, because there is no longer any easy way to mark and order transactions that are being made between extensive numbers of people. There is liable to be too much possibility of cheating and short measure when a society has grown beyond the boundaries of being, say, a village society within which a certain communal, often patriarchal, authority is held over everyone, and a representative economy emerges to help regulate these transactions. I can easily believe that money was first introduced as a medium of 'trust exchange' and 'credit' by working merchants, whilst the true progenitors of modern capitalism, the landlords, literally counted their wealth in the number of slaves and fields they physically controlled. The idea that there is even such a thing as 'capitalism', and that inherent value accrues in theoretical stocks of virtual, rather than actual, liquid wealth, is of fairly recent derivation in comparison. Similarly, the ideal of the abolition of all representative wealth as a means of exchange is as old as human wish-fulfillment: Plato and Plutarch wanted it abolished, St. Augustine condemned lending at interest, during the Reformation, many Protestant sects attempted to live by barter economy, the French and Russian revolutionaries destroyed the financial infrastructures of their nations in their attempts to redefine economy and came close to the abolition of money. In some respects, all of these ideals changed the world, but in other respects, they have left us continuing to be saddled with the same problems in new forms. Therefore, to simply formulate a 21st century version of the type of thinking that informed Sir Thomas More when he inveighed against clerical rapacity in 'Utopia' in 1516, or Prince Kropotkin when he formulated co-operative Anarchist principles in 'Mutual Aid' in the late 19th century, or Buckminster Fuller's ideals of sustainable energy growth and systems synthesis from the 1950's, is not enough in itself, because we have been here before, addressing these self-same problems and have singularly failed in making these ideals into a reality. This is not to say that they could not, one day, BECOME a reality, which has been the hope of reformers and progressive thinkers throughout the ages - but the lineage is always checkered. Plato stands probably near the start of it, and while on the one hand, he depicted the ideal of a society run on a basis of perfect equality with the most intelligent and rationalising technocrats in control of it, there is a valid argument to say that Hitler actually came near to realising that kind of societal vision in Nazi Germany. In many ways, if you had stripped him of his political concerns, the society he was attempting to build was a 'forward thinking' technocracy, urgently combining the best modern values with the values of tradition, and rationalising its existence in accordance with the latest 'scientific' principles (whether that be building more enviromentally friendly housing or adopting eugenics programmes). This is one reason why he was so admired throughout Europe regardless of his complete lack of humanity before he precipitated mass war.

The real issue is: given that the principles of reforming society in terms of a brighter, rationally planned and equalised future are so appealling (and, I suspect, would, at root, be of interest to the vast majority of the population could they be implemented tomorrow), how is this to actually be achieved? And I mean that in practical terms? What is it about this plan that ensures it can come to fruition? What is there about it that ensures it can gradually replace the way we actually structure the governmental systems of the world now? When, say, Socialist and Anarchist groups hoped to reform the inequalities of industrial (and yes, capitalist) society in the 19th century, they had to face precisely these kinds of thorny arguments. There were 'gradualists' who assumed the triumph of the Marxist proletariat was inevitable, and were prepared to work within the system until it inevitably collapsed - perhaps we might argue a similar policy could be in place here, and the world will come around to reforming in terms of a communal consciousness once society is no longer sustainable in its present form. But might this not be a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted? Others in the 19th century attempted to speed the process of the transfer of power - the only way they could come up with to do that was to initiate violent coup d'etats and forcible seizures of power, which tended to blight the security and honesty of their intentions from the start. Working through electoral candidacy, party manifesto and the ballot box tends to be a more acceptable alternative, but can a wholesale change ever be initiated in this way unless the movement becomes a mass party garnering unstoppable levels of support?

I would be interested to hear if there are more concrete plans as to what the project is aiming to do to raise awareness and alter existing practices, as opposed to what the theory states, because a theory can state anything it cares to, and still effect no practical change whatsoever.

• 14 years ago
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Luke surely Actions in this case speak a lot louder than words which are extremely cheap as a lot of politicians can testify to.... For Venus to work everyone has to be in general agreement and acknowledge that we have set resources most people don't. I also see a certain brainwashing with the whole venus ideology... which makes me highly suspicious.

• 14 years ago
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Well, Luke, I was interested to read the commentary on the Federal Reserve, which did, indeed, raise many salient points, though, not, it must be said, anything that I had not encountered before in economic histories of the 20th century. I think you misunderstood my point about essential economic patternings rooted in a system of cash exchange which were not that I find them necessarily desirable, but that all good sociological and historical material indicates that there are reasons why we, as human beings, evolved this technology of transaction. That is not the same as saying it is a necessary, only a logical outgrowth of complex societal mores and it has tended to emerge in all societies complex enough to build nations unless these societies based themselves more nakedly on forcible exploitation and tribute levying. The emergence of trade in cash was not necessarily in origin a world wide 'top down' enforcement, although it is certainly true that we know historically that the first true coins were cast by royal mints in an attempt to pay soldiers (that they bore the seal of the king was the guarantee of their metallic content) and that, for many centuries, coin circulated in lieu of bulkier tribute alongside working barter economies. Nonetheless, traders in the Babylonian marketplace were cutting up ingots of silver to better enable their own transactions centuries before coinage had even been invented. This is not trying to score a political point, or argue that nothing may ever change in the future, but simply to acknowledge what appears to be a historical constant. As you pointed out, over time, the actual face value of centrally issued coinage tended to depreciate (and cause inflation) because the metal content was no longer in itself so pure, and the 'guarantee' that the coin was redeemable became more and more specious. In itself, this tended to encourage the rise of paper cash, supposedly redeemable on the basis of centrally held reserves, the spread of promissory notes that precursored the use of cheques and so on. Indeed, once we enter into the world of banking and conceptual means of exchange (i.e. the trading of paper and virtual stocks that are not necessarily underpinned by requisite land and/or reserves of specie, but whose 'value' is defined speculatively only), then the issues at stake begin to become very different. These are certainly good and necessary points to be making politically and economically in my opinion.

I do feel a blanket statement like this one, however, 'Your suspicion is completely understandable. You have never been exposed to this idea so of course you are. In order for me to be right, most of everything you have ever learnt has to be a lie. Please don't use those grounds to reject it. Research it for yourself. I urge everybody to come together and find out for sure if your suspicions are based in reality.' is assumptionist. I have personally studied in a great many schools of philosophical, religious, economic and political modes of thought in my (relatively) short lifetime so far. I have been, at times, enamoured of New Age Spiritualism and the tradition of the Commune, fascinated with conspiracy theory and the workings of the secret state, studied in depth revolutionary politics of the French and Russian varieties, written theses on patterns of messianic redemption, etc. etc. I don't wish to speak for anyone else but the reason I am suspicious is not because these ideas are *new*, but because they are *old* - as old as following the way of the Tao, as traditional as hoping for peasant solidarity to build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, as hopeful as the 'Going to the People' Movement in Russia in the 1870's, and as critical of the established banking systems as any Midwest Progressive, Radical Libertarian or member of the Action Francaise.

I will concede that, in theory at least, the Venus Project has a communal, libertarian ethos at its heart that appears to combine the best tenets of an anarcho-cooperative with modern environmentalist 'greening' and the principles of mutually beneficially exchange. I admire the stance of hoping that, by showing this model to function in the face of the increasing bankruptcy of the existent social systems, the world will begin to take note. It is possible, perhaps, that if the experimentations were taken primarily in regions of the world where there is primary impoverishment and perhaps less stringent central control and regulation they might begin to serve as model communes. A central co-ordinating bureau would be a necessity, I think, to make the ideal realisable in any meaningful sense - but here one is presented with the usual collectivist issue of how far does the writ of the authorising body run, for the sake of the benefit of the whole. Crafting exemplars and pressure groups is one thing, of course: actually forcing substantive change on the world is another. And if the best that the project can come up with is the notion that, once the systems in place fail irrevocably (should they, in fact, do so- they have proved themselves resilient for 500+ years so far), all those who have made it their interest to bolster these regimes (bankers, the political mainstream, army commands and so on) will relinquish their grip on power easily, then I think it is fooling itself. The history of all revolutions shows that either these forces go into outright opposition to the new system, or that they gradually inveigle their way into new positions of benefit to themselves - and all historic appeals to human altruism have tended to founder on the basis that many of the leading power brokers in our societies (which is, indeed, no doubt, what makes them power hungry in the first instance) are devoid of truly altruistic feelings for their fellow human beings. It is not so much a question of what the new system offers potentially - as to how the old system will actually be replaced? Is it replaced forcibly, by placing enemies up against the wall and shooting? Is it replaced by compromise of the original values? Does it fail to be replaced entirely and the new system only operates in small, distinct particulars? I can't say, but I'm not sure that the theorists behind the project can either.

As to what we can do, I consider that *I*, at least, already do it: I don't trust a word of media spin, ever since at the age of 18, Robert Anton Wilson taught me to see all information as mediated by its source; I support energy saving measures, I don't vote for mainstream political parties and consider the two party system in this country bankrupt of real ideas, and I work in a creative, forward thinking and liberal leaning industry. What difference has that actually made to the world? Does it make a difference that I, a naturally open minded, impoverished and left leaning sort, agree broadly with the aims of the project, but most merchant bankers probably wouldn't when presented with the same criteria? How do you bring the powerless into some kind of position of authority whilst humbling those who have power, and ensuring that the powerless do not, in the process, themselves become new tyrants and oppressors? This is the sort of question that has troubled human society for centuries, and we have never yet reached definitive and palatable answers. What makes the difference this time around? That's what I'm dying to know.

• 14 years ago
• 16

May I suggest a gentle movement sideways ... to Speakers Corner, with this soapbox !!.

• 14 years ago
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I think we're willing to listen, Luke, but i have to agree (having had a quick look at the Venus Project website) that it does look a bit brainwashy and weird. Sorry to sound rude! I for one am happy that I have a police force, a power supply and a health system. Yes, they are flawed because (going back to my previous point about human nature) WE are flawed and our behaviour is effected by our selfishness, hedonism, greed what-have-you on a day to day basis. But ALL political systems (and your suggested way of life IS a political system, it's just a different one to the one we have in place) are open to manipulation by people who are in it for the power. Marxism proved that. The website says that it's a new way of life (and that freaks me out as it reminds me of so many regimes and ideologies controlled by bad-ass dictators in one form or another) for a new global family. Well - we are already a gobal family and we've mucked it up, chances are it will be exactly the same all over again, whatever the system - because it goes back to human nature and it's innate capacity to inflict suffering and cruelty on it's fellow human beings for personal gain or in the name of personal agendas. Or simply because it feels like it. Fix that and you might start getting somewhere! Depressing, but true! :)

• 14 years ago
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Luke ... I get the impression somehow, that you are an American by birth. If that is so, I can but repeat what one of your countrymen has said i.e.
" I might not agree with what you say .. but I will defend, unto my dying day, the right for you to say it ".
I had no intentions of backing you into a corner, but ... you have put forward a view, and thus, must expect not to win over all and sundry, on your first foray.

• 14 years ago
• 19

Not to cause a ruckus, but I feel we have swam off course somewhat....

I liked Clegg.

• 14 years ago
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