chess | (no subject)

First, a practical thing: does anyone know much about chiropody in Cambridge? I appear to have ingrowing toenails which keep being ingrowing again after I attack them viciously with toenail-cutting implements, and I'd like to find someone competent to work out what's gone wrong, but I don't really know how to go about this without it costing lots of money.

Second, http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/ is a very good website, and reminds me why I am distinctly puzzled how otherwise perfectly nice people can vote Tory, given their vast preference for the 'hanging/flogging' and 'free market' end of the scale. The free market is not very nice (it promotes inequality which makes people resentful, it means some people starve whilst others live in luxury, it is *not very nice*) and punishing criminals rather than trying to rehabilitate them is also not very nice. I probably have more cogent arguements why each is a bad idea, but fundamentally I object to them because they are Not Very Nice.

Thirdly, it's springtime and sunny, but everything still feels and tastes like dust and ashes to me. I just walked out of church this morning and went home because I felt I was harming the important things that were going on there (lots of prayer for the summer mission and some people going out to do primary healthcare stuff in rural India) just by being there. I'm not really sure what's wrong; I just have that big cloak of cobwebs back.

Current Mood: depressed

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*hugs*

I think I know those feelings well. Ingrown toenails are treated on the NHS. However, they're really annoying, and the only thing to really do is let them grow out, which can take several months and is very painful to boot. Get corn pads or something to take the pressure off, and keep the area clean and free from infection. Drink lots of water, eat lots of fruit and veg to help the immune system, and wear open-toe sandals if you can. The toe may look ugly, but keeping it cool like that really helped.

I suffered from them for 10 years or more. I had half a toe-nail removed in my early teens, but it's all well now.

If the toenails are infected, then surgery is essential. Get it done straight away rather than waiting. The pain will affect every part of your being if you don't. I speak from my own 1980 experience.

I had one clear up without surgery, and it's in far better shape than the one that did have surgery. The surgery meant I had to be off school and couldn't do games for some time. Growing out took longer once I figured out how to do it, but ultimately healed far better.

I also find it hard to understand people who vote for the Tories; the best explanation I can think of is that the typical Tory voter is someone who has always been adequately rewarded for the amount of work they've done and therefore buys into the "each according to his merits" thing, because they've never experienced what it's like to spend a whole lifetime working for a pittance and then retiring on a niggardly state pension. Perhaps also, Tory voters are guided by a fear of seeing their hard-earned cash taken away to be given to the "undeserving" poor - incidentally, I think it's a special feature of the right wing that they believe there is a distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, and that politicians are the people best qualified to decide who is who among the poor. But none of this completely explains Toryism to me.

Hey,

What do you mean when you say you felt that you were 'harming' what was going on? I think I have an idea, but I just wanted to check...

I should say that I voted Conservative last time round, but I'm not a party member; the question of for whom I shall vote is still an open one.

Yes, I understand that it's not fair for someone to spend a lifetime working for a pittance and then retire on a small state pension. But neither is it at all productive to pay people such unemployment benefits that it is more profitable to spend one's time working the benefit system than to work - and then to make such a thing socially acceptable! Such an attitude is at least as enforcing of the distinction between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' than any right-wing pseudo-apartheid. It's not just the fact that Tories dislike having their money taken from them and given to those more deserving of it. It's also that the complexity of the regulations to prove whether one is deserving of it or not deters many actually deserving people from claiming benefit! Would it not be easier to charge less tax on pensions, say, than to give pensioners a tax credit? And while we're on the subject of pensioners, I have never been given a good justification of the taxing of pension funds that has left black holes in the retirement provision of millions of people and seriously damaged companies that provide pensions.

At the same time, there is a perception (true or false) among the British public that the law has much greater provision for protecting the rights of criminals and punishing the minor misdemeanors of law-abiding folk than for actually punishing crime. There are endless stories about how careful the police need to be, how much paperwork needs filling in for each reported crime (let alone an actual arrest), and so on. This leads on to the question of waste in public services.

There is such regulation in the public sector that people have to be employed to spend all their time doing nothing but ensuring that these targets are met - not on the regulatory end, but at the point of provision. Specifically in healthcare, promises to add additional money in return for increased 'results' will result in much of that money being taken up in tracking whether or not those results are occuring. In schools, the linking of funding and prestige to test results has led predictably to children being schooled precisely in how to pass the tests rather than in any particular knowledge. And it's not as if the tests result in useful qualifications; does nobody understand what a rising pass rate on a standardised test means?

Toryism is about decentralisation and middle-class values, about decreases in central control and about simplification of the whole system; it is about improvements in efficiency and attempts to have a competently run country rather than a country that concentrates on appearing as if it is competently run. Tories believe that the country is tired of the concentration on style over substance that has dogged this Government.

I'm not sure how much of the above rhetoric I believe, to be honest. It's full of simplifications and I know there are counterexamples (but I can actually back most of that up; it's not just trolling). But the above would be some of my basic arguments, if not for voting Tory, then at least for voting 'Not Labour'.

Sorry for the party political broadcast above... ^^;

The idea of conservatism is that it's the philosophy of choosing the 'least bad' alternative. Punishing criminals is Not Very Nice, but concentrating upon rehabilitation has a distinctly dodgy record as a deterrent - which is, after all, why crimes are punished at all. There's a middle ground.

The free market is Not Very Nice, which is why we have taxes - at their basic level, they are the government enforcing you giving to charities that help the poor. But the alternative to a free market, well, that is Even Worse. Again, there's a middle ground. The parties argue over where that middle ground is.

The site... I found many of its questions rather oversimplified. I guess that may be a symptom of my generic view that The World Is More Complicated Than That.

I guess that the conservative philosophy that I subscribe to could be stated as "It would be nice if People were nice. They aren't."

Since you're not sure how much you believe, it's probably best I don't get too bogged down in a big argument with you :) but rest assured you don't come across as at all trollish. There are certainly many reasons for not voting Labour; my main reason for avoiding Labour is because of the way they've failed to deliver on their promises in the field of education, scrapping free university education (thereby putting "rich" middle-class kids at the mercy of parents when it comes to university choice) and introducing endless SATS.

But neither is it at all productive to pay people such unemployment benefits that it is more profitable to spend one's time working the benefit system than to work - and then to make such a thing socially acceptable!
It sounds as if you +do+ adhere to this part of the Tory ethos (though I may be wrong!), and I agree that, if it was really the case that working the system was generally easier than working full stop, then they might have a point. But myself and several members of my family have run the gauntlet of the dole office when claiming JSA and sickness benefit, and have found the whole process quite nightmarish! I would much rather spend my life working at a respected, decently-paid job than navigating that bureaucratic midden.

"It's also that the complexity of the regulations to prove whether one is deserving of it or not deters many actually deserving people from claiming benefit"
This sentence confuses me, as it sounds as if it might contradict the presvious statement I quoted - is it easier to draw the dole than to work, or not, in your opinion? Personally, I think that the best way to encourage the scroungers among us to get back to work is to bring in a minimum wage that isn't laughable, and pay "unskilled" and manual workers a lot better (not to mention nurses!); sadly neither the Tories nor Labour have done anywhere near enough in this department.

I'll have to take your word for it about decentralization, as I've not heard any Tories mention that lately.What do you mean exactly by "middle-class values" though?

"It's also that the complexity of the regulations to prove whether one is deserving of it or not deters many actually deserving people from claiming benefit"
As in, if you can't afford to spend much time finding out what your rights are because you're working all day at some minimum-wage job...

Yes, one way to get scroungers into work could be to raise minimum wage. It's a difficult problem, because raising the minimum wage hits the economy by increasing overheads for labour-intensive companies - they then go abroad. Witness the callcentre people.

----
'Decentralisation' as in the relaxing of central control somewhat (targets and so on) - linked to the cutting of waste in public services. I guess 'decentralisation' isn't so much the right phrase as 'letting public service providers just get on with doing their job'.

'Middle-class values' - generally, the promotion of ethical and honest behaviour, the protection of law-abiding citizens, the promotion of marriage and the family unit (*without* the gay-bashing that people associate with that position), the idea of self-betterment through hard work, and other things people really shouldn't have a problem with. All the cool parties promote them. For more information, see the broadsheet news.

"As in, if you can't afford to spend much time finding out what your rights are because you're working all day at some minimum-wage job..."
I was more wondering how that statement fitted in with the previous one, than confused as to it's actual meaning.

Regarding the middle-class values you mention, I have indeed seen a lot about them in the "broadsheet news" (though they vary wildly from broadsheet to broadsheet, hence my need to know which values in particular you personally were referring to), and am currently hard put to name a single middle-class person I know who espouses all those values, though I guess most people from all walks of life espouse one or two. For instance, though I am middle-class, I feel nothing but contempt for the ideal of marriage; I also question the universal worth of the family unit as it seems to be defined currently. I think the nuclear model of the family owes too much to patriarchy and social control of the working classes. These are just examples, but what I'm getting at is that the Tories' (or any political parties') claim to voice the deep emotions of the middle-classes is deeply suspicious.

If people were nice we wouldn't need a system. Employers would pay a fair wage and charitable institutions would take care of the poor and needy - the Libertarians appear to believe that we are nice... I disagree. If we were nice then communists would split everything up so everyone had enough and people with enough would be happy...

We aren't nice. We need regulating. But the torries are wrong about what regulating we need...

Or rather the Tories are racist, homophobic,sexist pieces of shit (the ones in charge are anyway) and I'm not voting for anyone who thinks I'm a second class citizen. Which is a totally different issue to how much tax we ought to pay and what it needs to be spent on and since everyone is going to raise taxes and spend it on health care, education and invading the middle east I'd rather vote according to who has the most agreeable social policies.

Like all Americans I know nothing of politics outside of my own country, so which candidate ought I to favour in this election?

And it has been a very cobwebby week. I wish it would just STOP that.

Blair. If the Democrats had Blair and the Tories had Kerry, both parties would have somebody they could support with a straight face.

I thought Tories were conservative, though? Kerry's a liberal, albeit a poor one. Or perhaps my dichotomy of liberal and conservative is too Americanised.

The Conservative Party are on about the same wavelength as the Democrats. There are no left-wing parties in America; the Republicans are also represented in the Conservatives, but most of the Tories have more centerist leanings than them.

The Labour Party used to be a left-wing opposition gradually dragging itself up from strict communism but in order to get into power a little while ago decided to steal all of the Conservative Party's policies. Blair is basically a neo-conservative as far as Britain understands them, and is in line with basically all the Democrat policies, with the addition of knowing how to make a speech.

The Liberal Democrats used to be the centerists, but now they are the leftists; they actually say 'we shall raise taxes to increase public services, we believe that income tax is a Good Thing and obviously fairer than all of these other taxes that the governments have been sneaking in because they're less obvious so we're going to consolodate on that, mmkay?'

Blair is a good Democrat. He is not very good as the head of the party who was traditionally heavily into state ownership of the means of production and good working conditions for the common working man. He masterminded Labour's rise to victory by stealing most of the Tories' policies and implementing them in a half-hearted fashion. He embodies what we see from the Democrats; 'yes, we know everyone likes less tax and free-market economics and moral values, and we can be less obnoxious about them than the other guys'.

Kerry would be an excellent Tory leader because the Tories stand for middle-class values and Kerry seems to us to be very non-threatening, which is the kind of thing that the Tories could do with more of - they work best when they're fluffy.

If your vote is in Peterborough, vote Conservative; it's a vaguely-marginal (4% swing would take it) Labour-held from Conservative seat in which voting against Labour is the correct route for a Libertarian of any stripe.

If your vote is in Cambridge, it really wouldn't matter who you vote for, Anne Campbell will almost certainly be returned barring disasters for Labour (such a swing replicated nationwide would produce a Conservative majority).

Oh, thanks, it makes more sense now. Are Tories and Labour the only parties with a real chance?

Labour does sound a lot like American Democrats, who used to be the solidarity-forever-workers-rights party. I would say that the biggest difference between Democrats and Republicans here is that the Republican Party has a definite right wing and the Democrats have a definite left. Neither is a majority, though the Republican mainstream is creeping slowly right. Instead of retaliating by leaning further left, the Democrats are creeping after the Republicans.

Kerry was actually a very poor middle-class leader. He's quite wealthy and came off as elitist to most of red-blooded America. But he's dead on with the fluff.

Kerry is an honest, and exceptionally able, liberal politician. There aren't many around - in Britain the Conservatives have one, Oliver Letwin; the Liberals have one, Simon Hughes, and Labour has one, Frank Field. He'd make a wonderful Prime Minister. He'd have made an excellent President. *sighs*

There hasn't been a true liberal in power in England or America since Johnson (in Britain, arguably since Asquith, although you could make claims about Lloyd George (disqualified on "politician's politician" grounds), Chamberlain (comes closest), Heath (disqualified on uselessness) or Thatcher (disqualified on grounds of appointing Willie Whitelaw as Home Secretary).

The Liberal Democrats like to think they have a chance at every election, and can get up to 20% of the vote; unfortunately first-past-the-post then converts this into not very many seats.

I dislike, in general, the idea of 'letting public service providers just get on with doing their job', because I've seen it translate into 'letting public service providers get away with seeing almost no patients, having endless meetings about what colour the paper of a certain form ought to be, getting expensive caterers in for said meals, and generally being lazy and living it up because there are no managers to check the budget is being spent sensibly'.

I agree. Whatever one's views on privatisation in theory, I don't think it's possible to argue that it's been disastrous in practise over a number of sectors in this country - my local NHS is a sorry farce, and so are my local bus and train services (I also seriously doubt whether they could be improved by greater decentralization, because I'd hate to think of the current brood of chimpanzees running the Devon NHS having sole say in the matter of my health.) Obviously setting as many people to watch public services raises the question "who will watch over the watchers?", and increased surveillance won't be enough to eradicate all abuse of power (an actual work ethic is required too) but I do think the current public services need to be far more accountable to the public than they are.

North West Cambridgeshire, safe Tory seat (Brian Mawhinney). Except that he's stepping down and I know /nothing/ about the new man Shavinder Kalcutt.

People vote Conservative for all sorts of reasons. I used to be much further to the right on the political survey 2005 map because I was raised in an environment where I "had to struggle against the odds to get where I was and no damned fool was going to get what I had despite being a lazy arse" - so I even had a big problem with privately educated students when I first arrived at Cambridge, as I had an overpowering perception that they had had it all handed to them on a plate and it wasn't fair that I had to graft for seven years to get good A-levels. Similarly regarding criminals - "my family lived on a tight budget and I was bullied at school but I didn't turn to crime as a way out."

University and church moderated my views substantially, partly because I now understand the complexities of each situation. This makes me quite pragmatic in practice. However, I still have some slightly-right-of-centre leanings, for example I am massively in favour of rehabilitation, and I even cried when I read a Big Issue article reporting on a successful pilot scheme for restorative justice which told how a victim of a violent crime forgave her attacker and he met her to say how sorry he was. Nevertheless, I know that rehab doesn't always work, and when it doesn't you have to resort to the next best alternative, which is to make the punishment fit the crime. Even God punishes those who don't repent/accept Jesus.

Economically I think private sector is usually best at running the show at a low level, and the only problem is the prats who ruin it for the rest by being incompetent at a high level and being paid a fortune for it. I would be far happier if employment law were relaxed so that idiot managing directors of large companies and utilities could be dismissed more easily. Heh, who'd have thought that woolly worker protectionism would help the fat cats?!

I am well aware that state benefits are an absolute pittance, but I know as well that you have to be careful about how you tax people if you want to make minimum incomes a bit more comfortable. If you're too mean to the people who have moveable assets (who tend to be wealthier) then they will just take them somewhere else. And then we're all screwed.

To be honest I think that what we need are much more personal solutions. Too many people think that the solution to poverty is just to throw money at it. What they don't realise is that first you have to plug up all the holes which perpetuate poverty like debt, gambling, drink, drugs and low self-esteem. Otherwise you're just throwing good money after bad because people will spend more to accommodate their increased income. Yes, it doesn't apply to everyone but it applies to the people who need help most and I know this because I have seen them walk through the door of the Citizens Advice Bureau week after week. The solution isn't easy but if it can be found then it'd be much more effective. A kind of socio-emotional rehabilitation, if you like.

What do you think of them apples?

The NHS is very far from privatised. Even the Internal Market set up by Ken Clarke was pretty much dismantled under Labour; the NHS is your classic inefficient state-run mess.

The statistics about rail privatisation are pretty much unanswerable - capacity, total number of passengers carried, investment and number of services have all actually increased rapidly since privatisation - despite the fact that it was done horribly badly, and it could be improved very easily by introducing (gasp) actual compettition, which the public appear to be scared of. What has fallen (by about five percent) is punctuality; but this was almost inevitable and is mostly due to mass obsolesence (which is due to the country being unable to afford to run a nationalised rail service...).

What's also unanswerable is the American and Australian rail networks, both of which are *necessary* to each country and are therefore run privately, as it's far too serious a business to be left to the politicians.

Furthermore, consider our own history. The time Britain lead the world in rail transport was pre-1945, when the Railways were privatised.

The most obvious example of privatisation working is British Airways; a dead weight nationalised, a profitable corporation (even now, when most airlines are losing money) privatised.

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Michelle Taylor

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