Yeah I think the main driver is neoliberal austerity doing what it does. The wing of the party in charge are basically Thatcherites. They want to the market to decide who gets access to basic necessities and bureaucracy to decide anything else.

In general I think neoliberals are becoming embarrassed by the fact that evidence based medicine is increasingly at odds with capitalistic ideals around how workforces should comply with the rich. So they want to introduce an apparently technocratic (which will inevitably be as low skilled tickbox bureaucratic as you like) body to replace actually qualified people - doctors- in this area.

I think it's also a bit of a reaction to changes in the geopolitical scene. They're hoping that in the event of further war in Europe that desperate but physically able people will be coerced into the military. By taking the ability to decide who is sick out of the hands of doctors and into the state they make this a lot easier. Similarly, more money for manpower and munitions by not paying out in benefits.

A few thoughts: we're not that poor, a lot of the current distribution of wealth and government spending aims are the result of neoliberal ideology first and foremost.

That said our nominal GDP growth has been harmed by neoliberal policies which have shifted the UK away from producing very much and towards playing many silly games with money. We measure how much we move abstract representations of currency around (which usually represents some probabilistic measure of value of money, which in itself is really just numbers with no intrinsic value) and go "hey, great job, we've really grown the economy!"

We saw the financial crisis in 2008 and apparently thought to ourselves "let's have some more of that".

So we're in a situation where our overseers are seeing our GDP failing to grow as it should, panicking, and implementing more of the same policies that cause that situation in the first place. The UK isn't poor yet but it will be soon. The young and the poor are the ones who are feeling the bleeding edge of this trend but it's filtering through to the middle class now as well.

For-profit US tech boycott club!

Yeah it's sort of shitty but by the looks of it she was talking directly to them

I'd love to say Starmer was merely spineless, but he had plenty of spine standing up to left wing members of the Labour party. It's pretty clear his allegiance is to the US and its idea of a global order, no matter what form that takes.

Starmer represents the insidious ingress of US fascism, paving the way for Reform.

To understand this you need to understand the theory. Marx outlined that socialism and communism each had to be transitioned to after reaching a given level of social/economic development. In particular there is the notion of "withering away of the state" which would happen after a global revolution, which is the aim of this classless/moniless society they outlined.

The communist manifesto is a short read!

In fact the USSR implemented explicit market policies, a sort of contained capitalism, which was designed to facilitate reaching the necessary preconditions for socialism and communism. Essentially all of the "communist" states we've seen so far have been some play on the notion of just "socialism in one country" in the Marxist-Leninist version of communist parties, who have/had the goal of eventually reaching communism.

What's probably most interesting is that the idea behind the USSR wasn't initially to have the state direct everything from the top, but in fact to facilitate worker councils (soviets) to direct their workplaces.

But you have to remember this all happened in the context of a state which had recently undergone a revolution, was rife with counterrevolutonary action (see revolutionary France and civil war Britain to see how this played out during the birth of liberalism) and was then plunged into WW2 where most states involved were acting fairly dictatorially for the duration of it. Followed shortly by the US making it an explicit goal to prevent world communism through e.g. CIA intervention because they feared "domino theory"

Fascism on the rise? Better get their list making and person finding mechanisms sorted out for them in advance.

-liberals everywhere

It's more like, a blog is a personal thing. Using some off the shelf solutions removes that sense of personality to me I guess. It kind of makes the act of publishing the post feel like I've cheated somehow, when, all I'm really doing is putting text on the internet and I'm perfectly capable of doing that myself from a technical POV.

I get this with game dev as well, I'm much happier with games where I feel like I've worked with lower level tooling than a pre made engine. Sort of a personal not made here syndrome thing I suppose.

I've had a few hosted ones but I kind of hate them. I think I'll build and self host a solution at some point because I just like things that I've made myself better.

I bought a collection of Dreamcast bits, Sonic Adventure and Powerstone (yes I know they're easy to pirate, but the ✨vibes✨) a while back on a whim without owning the console and now I've got a whole setup with a CRT. Living the retro dream(cast).

All well and good until you turn up to see Farage posing with a pint.

Any time there's a ready meal from the supermarket and for some reason the adhesive is way stronger than the plastic film. You end up with loads of bits of film just sort of stuck to the rim of it. Super annoying.