Only a petty-minded pedant, such as myself, would see a contradiction between Oliver Kamm's complaint
thatthe mixed signals given by the Government have not helped confidence in the banking system.and his pompous declaration
thatpeople's mental states are no business of government.
13 Comments:
HP has pronounced on the deepest financial crisis of the postwar period - apparently what matters most is that the Hamas spokesperson in the Gaza Strip has blamed it on the Jewish lobby. Cue Decent laughathon, ha ha it's the Joooos, lol, where did you hide the money Gene etc etc. But somehow it all suddenly looks very dated and - what's the word - unserious.
That'll be five nicker for the HP box ta.
well the HP box is probably one of the safer places you can put your money these days.
I'm minded to defend Kamm here.
'Confidence' as used in the first quotation is less a mental state than a (quasi-) measurable quantity. To say that 'confidence is the banking system' has declined is to say that money is being withdrawn even when there are penalties (loss of interest) for doing so.
OTOH, I think he's right about individual's mental states. OK is having one of his best periods, IMO. If he stays away from Trident and a few other topics, I may start reading him again.
Well you're minded wrong then Chardonnay Chap. "Confidence" is precisely a function of the beliefs people have about the the economy, and beliefs are "mental states" in Kamm's sense.
Off topic but...
Courtesy of HP Sauce, welcome to a new low.
http://www.hurryupharry.org/2008/10/07/swp-activist-appointed-government-advisor/
Von Pseud
No, that is on topic, but god, how depressing.
Blimey. David T has really lost it.
“You do realise that the SWP actually organise against the BNP in Bradford”
In what way?
They have recruitment drives, around the theme of the BNP.
One racist totalitarian party recruits members by attacking another one.
Exit planet Decent, I think.
No, this (ie the general hounding and making absurd accusations at anyone to the left of you) is a fundamental principle of Decency, and this (ie, the specific thesis that the SWP is a far-right party) has been a view of David T's, though not of anyone else as far as I can see, for quite some while. It's just that David used to regard this as a view of his to be argued for - by now he's been speaking into the mirror for so long that he's forgotten it's an old punchline of his, and believes it to be an unarguable, obvious fact, of roughly the same status as the belief that they speak French in France.
In the same thread, David T's arguments actually go downhill -
“My guess is that the Daily Mail is closer to the mainstream of British Muslim opinion than the Guardian.”
and
"The Daily Mail, by contrast [to the Daily Express], is equivocal. At the present, it is a particular sort of conservative paper: and not a prominent promoter of racism. It has, in fact, run anti-racist campaigns. It is mildly, generally, xenophobic."
I'm not sure which basic rule David T is breaking there - the one about not believing your own propaganda or the one about not snorting your own product.
Either way, it's car crash stuff. A fifty car pile-up, in fact, on black ice.
How dare you sir! I'm as repelled by Harry's Place as the next sane man, but I won't have you associating AC/DC's new album with them.
Von Pseud
Oh, all right, if I must....
....while I think that the extent to which Decency derives from far-left roots is sometimes exaggerated, there is a particular trope of intra-far-left polemic which David T, regardless of his personal political origins, has a particular liking for.
This may be fairly described as:
"the targets of my criticism are tiny, ludicrous and irrelevant - and that's why I spend most of my time discussing them".
(Also see Socialist Unity Network, political discussion on Urban75, etcetctetc.)
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