#reform

[probablyasocialecologist]

Gorton and Denton byelection: Polanski says Greens best party to defeat Reform after Hannah Spencer wins – UK politics live

Reform UK finished second and Labour is pushed into third place in bad news for PM Keir Starmer

[noah-wyles]

"rubbish is building up right beneath my very nose"

*cuts to nigel farage*

THE WAY I LOST IT

[eelhound]

"The idea of reforming Omelas is a pleasant idea, to be sure, but it is one that Le Guin herself specifically tells us is not an option. No reform of Omelas is possible — at least, not without destroying Omelas itself:

If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.

'Those are the terms', indeed. Le Guin’s original story is careful to cast the underlying evil of Omelas as un-addressable — not, as some have suggested, to 'cheat' or create a false dilemma, but as an intentionally insurmountable challenge to the reader. The premise of Omelas feels unfair because it is meant to be unfair. Instead of racing to find a clever solution ('Free the child! Replace it with a robot! Have everyone suffer a little bit instead of one person all at once!'), the reader is forced to consider how they might cope with moral injustice that is so foundational to their very way of life that it cannot be undone. Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are — at this very moment! — already in exactly this situation. At what cost does our happiness come? And, even more significantly, at whose expense? And what, in fact, can be done? Can anything?

This is the essential and agonizing question that Le Guin poses, and we avoid it at our peril. It’s easy, but thoroughly besides the point, to say — as the narrator of 'The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away' does — that you would simply keep the nice things about Omelas, and work to address the bad. You might as well say that you would solve the trolley problem by putting rockets on the trolley and having it jump over the people tied to the tracks. Le Guin’s challenge is one that can only be resolved by introspection, because the challenge is one levied against the discomforting awareness of our own complicity; to 'reject the premise' is to reject this (all too real) discomfort in favor of empty wish fulfillment. A happy fairytale about the nobility of our imagined efforts against a hypothetical evil profits no one but ourselves (and I would argue that in the long run it robs us as well).

But in addition to being morally evasive, treating Omelas as a puzzle to be solved (or as a piece of straightforward didactic moralism) also flattens the depth of the original story. We are not really meant to understand Le Guin’s 'walking away' as a literal abandonment of a problem, nor as a self-satisfied 'Sounds bad, but I’m outta here', the way Vivier’s response piece or others of its ilk do; rather, it is framed as a rejection of complacency. This is why those who leave are shown not as triumphant heroes, but as harried and desperate fools; hopeless, troubled souls setting forth on a journey that may well be doomed from the start — because isn’t that the fate of most people who set out to fight the injustices they see, and that they cannot help but see once they have been made aware of it? The story is a metaphor, not a math problem, and 'walking away' might just as easily encompass any form of sincere and fully committed struggle against injustice: a lonely, often thankless journey, yet one which is no less essential for its difficulty."

- Kurt Schiller, from "Omelas, Je T'aime." Blood Knife, 8 July 2022.

[ratantics]

Politicians on the left need to be more vocally critical of the Online Safety Act because this kind of censorship is only going to get worse.

[duchessofostergotlands]

While the current situation is depressing for my English friends, here are some things to focus on:

As I mentioned earlier, for England it is a council election and not a general election so while it's important, there are things that they cannot do at council level.

While Reform have - as of the time I'm writing - won 1443 council seats in England which is the most of any party, there were over 5000 available which means most councillors elected were from a party other than Reform.

Sharing the number of council seats is misleading because if you win 50 in one area and none in another area but another party wins 25 in two areas the count will just say 50 for both. While Reform won the most councillors, they have actually only won control of 14 councils out of 136 at the time of writing. If they win all the ones remaining that would be 20, meaning that most councils who voted do not have Reform in control

Sky did a thing where they used the council data to predict the outcome of a national election and found that Reform's vote share is lower than it was just a year ago, meaning a drop in popularity.

Finally, the councils being contested today have for the most part not had elections since 2022 when Reform were barely even a thing. This means they are gains, the councils haven't been Reform before. The real test will be whether Reform can hold on to those councils once they actually get to enact their "plans".

[naturalatdisaster]

[neon-junkie]

I know that Reform has taken over the media with their bollocks, but I promise you, a solid 90% of English people HATE those twats. we do NOT want them in power, political power or just in the spotlight. if you stand up and say "I vote reform!" you will have ten thousand tomatoes pelted at you. please don't assume that, because they're all over the media, it means that the English are voting them in. they wont get fuck all praise, nor attention from us