Best products from r/ukpolitics

>The common market and the single market are synonymous.

No. No. No. No. No.

Very different things, and represent very different things.

>Well, they aren't, but in the eyes of the EU they are -

Then your eyes are wrong. A common market is very different to a single market.

A common market still exists and the EU has one with many both non-EU countries in Europe and on the borders of Europe.

The common market and single market both exist and are existing at the same time. Supporting a common market literally means leaving the single market and its freedom of movement for labour.

It is nonsensical to argue that access to a common market can only exist with freedom of movement of people, because that is the thing among other that differentiates between what is a common market and what is a single market.

>Are you sure you know what he's advocating here?

Yes. He spells it out quite clearly in his book.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Plan-Twelve-months-Britain/dp/0955979900

>He speaks favourably of both Norway and Switzerland

And Macedonia, as examples of how the EU has trade relations right across Europe and not just constrained by being in the EU, to lend credibility that they're not interested in not having a UK trade deal. He argues for the necessity for the UK to be able to negotiate its own free trade deals. Switzerland was in EFTA for 40 years before it decided to negotiate its own free movement of people deal and put it to a vote, for eight years they were in a European Free Trade Area that had access to a single market, formed by Maastricht, without any free movement of people.

If he says "Common Market" he does not mean "Single Market", however synonymous you like to think of them whilst admitting they're different things.

>Misinformation after all works both ways.

Yes, it does. And when I see it working the other way I'll correct them too.

But you are wrong.

Especially when you even accept it, when your own response's first line is,

"The common market and the single market
are synonymous. Well, they aren't, but in the
eyes of the EU they are"

Another person that doesn't understand the GFA.

I will repost an excellent summary by u/TerrorBanjo of why a hard border must be avoided.


"The GFA stipulates the "normalisation" of security arrangements in N.I.

1/ The participants note that the development of a peaceful environment on the basis of this agreement can and should mean a normalisation of security arrangements and practices. The British Government will make progress towards the objective of as early a return as possible to normal security arrangements in Northern Ireland
Security heading, section 1, subparagraph (ii) states:

> (ii) the removal of security installations;

Now people with limited memory, or perhaps too young to remember, perhaps forget that a major part of this agreement, right up until 2007, was removing military and police checkpoints at the border.

The entire purpose of this was to resume normalisation of the country, and since both EU members, have an open border like what would have happened if the troubles didn't begin. This would satisfy the nationalist community both sides of the border, as they could go about their business and would be like a de-facto united Ireland, with the only major difference being currency. The removal of military installations combined with the North/South ministerial council would assure both nations would be aligned in such away that the differences would eventually appear artificial.

This was one of the two major issues that was left over in that time period (early 2000s). The IRA said they wouldn't decommission until the British removed the installations at the border, and the British Government said wouldn't remove the installations until the IRA had decommissioned. There was also the complications that none of the Loyalist paramilitaries had decommissioned and refused to do so until the IRA did (some still have not). The IRA refusing to do so until the British removed the border installations, and the British refusing to remove the border installations until the IRA decommissioned. This literally went on for years, nearly a decade, until the IRA decided to show good faith, announced all members to dump all arms in the presence of the IMC watch dogs, and started to decommission in July 2005. The British noting the good faith, started to slowly dismantle installations around cities, but kept the border installations relatively intact. Then when the IMC confirmed decommissioning in 2006, the British removed the rest of the outposts and completed their end of the bargain by 2007.

2007! Yet in every thread about this in /r/ukpolitics people seem to have collective amnesia like it was decades ago. Acting like the border is no big deal, like it never was. "Not technically written down in plain English in the GFA, so no biggie right?" It was the biggest hurdle to peace. We thought we all came a long way with the GFA."

And u/AngloAlbannach since you are wilfully misunderstand this stuff now I highly recommend reading around the GFA, specifically the travaux preparatoires, I'd start with Bews authoritative account and Mitchell's (who chaired the negotiations) personal account.

>I'm intrigued by this, do you have anything more concrete in terms of how you would hope it would work? My personal view is that we should ban the concept of parties from the electoral process, but leave the structures and processes essentially unchanged.

The 'market mechanism', as I see it at present, is that MPs owe their future careers to the party machine, so they become lobby-fodder. If however they have a 'personal' mandate, having won selection in a competitive primary, I think the party machine has less ability to threaten them, while the prospect of future candidate selection primaries mean that they know they will have to face their electorates with the record of their actions, and should 'keep them honest'. They will act as independents, rather than cyphers.

There was an interesting article in The Guardian recently:

> Since MPs were first paid in 1911, just two governments have fallen as a result of parliamentary votes: Ramsay MacDonald's first Labour government in 1924 - in any case a minority administration living on suffrance - and James Callaghan's Labour government in 1979, which had seen its Commons majority in effect evaporate.

>Now go back a hundred years in the opposite direction from 1911, and recall that every British government between 1837 and 1874 fell following a Commons vote. That happened again in 1886 and 1895. Political conditions were different, and politicians drawn from a narrow elite. All the same, there really was a golden age of parliamentary government, when the Commons was the master of the ministry - rather than the other way round, as now. And that was connected with the fact that for most MPs politics was not a "job" that they lived in dread of losing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/25/iraq-war-jacqui-smith-mps

There's a old interview with Douglas Carswell on YouTube where he talks about the potential of some of this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SD3M5aMYzU

>increasing the interest and peoples potential involvement in the political process (outside of elections which I don't see as real involvement anyway..) is the key to increasing the size and diversity of the demographic from which potential politicians are drawn

In 'Big Bang Localism', Simon Jenkins argued that the decrease in local political involvement could be traced to the centralisation of power in the 1980s, and that to reverse it, power must be decentralised. People will not get involved in local politics, if they cannot effect change with their efforts.

http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/publications/publication.cgi?id=41

At the next election, I'll in a sense be voting for a fictional manifesto. I'd like to be able to vote for The Plan

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Plan-Twelve-Months-Renew-Britain/dp/0955979900/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238366581&sr=1-1

But I'll vote Conservative in the hope that the Direct Democracy wing will push the Conservatives towards the greater democratic accountability that I want to see, they already seem to be moving in that direction.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/17/cameron-decentralisation-local-government

Well, here are a list of sources that talk about 'cultural marxism' from academics that have literally nothing to do with conspiracies, or nazis that I found while looking into it:

1. Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450
   
   
2. Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014
   
   Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg
   
   
3. "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144
   
   Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".
   
   
4. "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093
   
   
5. "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artefacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd
   
   
6. The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf
   
   Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.
   
   
7. For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."
   
   
8. You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.

>Your viewpoint seems to be just "it is not fair that some people got together to make trade easier without including everyone else too" which is just ridiculous.

You'd better tell Columbia University's Jagdish Bhagwati, one of the world's most famous trade economists. He wrote an [entire book] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B001OD41SO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) arguing the opposite. To [summarise] (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/eu-referendum-why-the-economic-consensus-on-brexit-is-flawed-a7057306.html):

> There is no gain in exporting to Germany, Spain and Poland rather than to the United States, Korea and China. In fact, if preferential access diverts trade away from the United States to Germany, then departure from the country’s comparative advantage hurts rather than helps, as Columbia University’s trade theorist Jagdish Bhagwati has long argued.

Bhagwati's argument is that we should be working to make the WTO better, rather than ganging up into protectionist regional blocs.

> If Chile makes better, cheaper wine than france, then they can negotiate with the EU to reduce/remove any taxes or tariffs that may be in place on Chilean wine

Don't you think there's a chance that the French government might veto this tariff-removal?

I mean, British taxpayers already have to subsidise French vineyards to the tune of [billions of euros] (http://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Europes-Billion-Euro-Wine-Spillage.pdf), courtesy of the Common Agricultural Policy. Given we've had no luck trying to end that situation, why so confident on tariffs?

> part of the reason to use JiT is to reduce waste and increase productivity.

I have a more cynical explanation.

Adverts on Spotify have recently been informing me that Vauxhall has been a "British brand since 1897!"

Which is curiously phrased. Because while it's true that some Vauxhalls are assembled in Wales, their British content is about 25%, and they look exactly the same as Opels, generally considered German and now French-owned.

So it could be that supply chains are scattered around Europe to give consumers the false impression that cars like Vauxhalls and Fords are somehow "British". It's a marketing ruse, one that's been rumbled by Brexit - it turns out that the Toyotas and Nissan being "built" here also have less than 45% British content, meaning that they would qualify for 10% import tariffs on cars.

Volkswagen at least has the honestly to build absolutely nothing in Britain, its 4th most important market.

First appreciate the concept of the overton window. That political shifts are relative to the era they occur in. You do not suddenly go from an authoritarian theocracy to a progressive democracy over night. It's a gradual process sometimes spanning generations.

In the context of these internet communities. You create various sock puppet accounts to make it look as though the communities are more popular than they are. Then use those various accounts to normalize concepts. Spam racism. Downvote dissenting posts. Tell them it's just edgy humour and they need to stop being so uptight. Upvote other peoples accounts that adopt the behaviours your desire like parroting racism.

Over time through an instinctual desire for group conformity you end up with communities that are a mix of genuine racists and people who think racism is just a really funny joke. Now the actual brainwashing can begin. They are no longer repulsed by racism. It's just a joke. Nationalism is just memes. HAHA! They start posting more serious content. That another rape by a minority group occurred. That murderer is an immigrant. That the innocent kid who was murdered by police was really some kind of gangster thug. You still keep pumping memes because you want to your community to grow. But now you start posting links to discussions on other sites and forums. And your racists and trolls go and normalise such views in the real world. Imitating the behaviour they have been programmed with.

When governments do it. It's called psychological warfare or psyops. This is carried out by many nations. Russia's internet research agency is a noteworthy one. There have been reports of the Isreali Defence Force posting pro-israel propaganda on forums. There were even allegedly grants given to students that took part in such operations. And don't take this as some liberal lefty getting butt hurt over trump. Or some casual antisemitism. Every major power is involved in this shit. We are. America is. China is. India is. Everybody is. Maybe not targetting us specifically all the time, but you'd better believe when they see an opportunity like brexit they seize it.

Then there's civilian groups that tend to use it to secure funding for their movements. Like how the far-right use various chat servers to coordinate misinformation.

And that leaves us in our current predicament. There's no way of telling who is real, and who is a troll, or who is a part of a foreign intelligence community, or who is a sock puppet account for a political group trying to lobby support for their self-interested cause. When the fascists aren't boasting that they're printing their ideology on beermats it's a lot harder to know if they're really British.

For me. It's not about censoring anonymity. It's about creating verified communities.

Oh and I almost forgot. This isn't just limited to politics and hybrid warfare. It's also widely used by marketing firms. Google "influencer pricing".

Edit: Oh, a great book on the subject is Manufacturing Consent. Though this is more of a historical approach when such operations could only really be run by large media groups like newspapers, tv, and radio.

>Really ? Can you give me one example where in any social science women are treated as the majority group.

academia is much larger than social science.

here is one example:

>The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Majority-Finds-Its-Past-Placing/dp/0807856061/

Another which talks about demographics which is a social science... Any form of geography that deals with demographics is a social science and will talk about statistics and women are in fact a statistical majority in the UK.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89-503-x/2010001/article/11475-eng.htm

>In the statistical sense it is definitely true. Feel free to look at the number of women in position in power. I think you mean that numerically women are not a minority. Which is true. But when people talk about minorities in the context of social groups, it almost never means in a numerical sense.

Nobody mentioned women in power. They were only mentioned as a percentage of population. If you want to say women are a minority of MPs, CEOs etc, then that is true, but you MUST specify the specific situation. Just to say women are a minority generally implies to most people in terms of total population, which is not true in the UK.

>I think you mean that numerically women are not a minority

Of course I do, people in this country do, I don't think I know anyone in my social or professional life who doesn't use minority to use statistical minority (I did a STEM PhD).

>But when people talk about minorities in the context of social groups, it almost never means in a numerical sense.

Outside of certain social sciences (not including geography) it is uncommon for people to do that.

>Everybody that would discuss this with any BASIC KNOWLEDGE would understand that it's perfectly valid to describe women as minority group. Give that you apparently find Oxford reliable may I suggest the dictionary of sociology

Basic knowledge of sociology as used by a particular part of the field..... Outside of that field, people would not get what your are saying as most people only deal with statistic majorities.

It seems the term minority has been used to equate/compare women to statistical minority groups. As someone who deals with numbers on a regular basis, this terminology is rather counter intuitive. It is strange to use it when the exact opposite is true statistically.

No, I don't think it is. When you start reading any academic discussions about different voting systems then very, very rarely does one see a particular system being described as 'more democratic'. This is because when you start digging into the mathematical mechanics of voting theory, you find that there are paradoxes and inconsistencies within all of them which can lead to perverse results, as documented in arrows' impossibility theorem. Hence, most discussions tend to revolve around the particular political dynamics generated by different systems and whether they encourage stability, deliberation, direct accountability, entrenchment of parties and so on. There are compromises and trade-offs and no one system is inherently better. Fundamentally the discussion we're having around our voting system in this country (and especially on reddit) is pretty facile, as it never gets beyond looking at numer of and distribution of votes to thinking about what sort of dynamics different systems would introduce.

They're going through a bout of electoral reform anxiety in Canda right now, and there's some interesting [commentary] (http://induecourse.ca/trump-and-electoral-reform-connecting-the-dots/) coming from various academics and commentators.

To be honest the weight placed on elections is probably too much anyway. There's minimal evidence that any one type produces significantly better policy, and there's mountains of evidence that people are terrible at voting in the way that most democratic theories (including the one which implicitly underlies the idea that PR is some kind of ideal) need them to. The evidence for that claim is in this book, which is excellent reading if you're an insomniac. Review and summary here.

You're right to not trust Ferguson. He's the media face of popular perceptions of the British Empire. Big publishers like Routledge have their own guides to the British Empire/the fall of the British Empire that are good. There's tons of historians who have been writing critically about Empire, race, and Britain since the 1980s. Have a look for things written by Peter Fryer, Colin Holmes, Shompa Lahiri, Rozina Visram, Mary Chamberlain, Panikos Panayi, Bill Schwarz, Avtah Brah, Barbara Bush, Diane Frost, Kathleen Paul, Wendy Webster. David Olusoga's writes great public history books on the topic that are backed up by solid research and the views of people mentioned above; his documentaries on Forgotten Black British History and Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners are also fantastic and available on iplayer and youtube. I've recently picked this up and it's about the similar points that I discuss in my comment above https://www.amazon.co.uk/Education-Empire-Brexit-Sally-Tomlinson/dp/1447345843

Actually the economic development plan that included the opening of the economy and low commercial taxation dates from the late 1950s with a new raft of politicians and our most famous civil servant T.K. Whitaker ( one of several books on the man: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Planning-Irelands-Future-Legacy-Whitaker/dp/0907606814 ).

We applied to join the EEC/EU before the UK in July 1961. Our biggest issue was the continued links with the UK. As one senior civil servant wrote to another in early 1961: "There is also the question of whether the EEC would be favourably disposed towards an application from Ireland in advance of a solution to the problem of linking the UK with the community.". Unlike the UK, our first application was not rejected, merely frozen at our request until a solution to the trade links with the UK could be found.

It's not the case that low corporation tax is the cornerstone of our economic success... it's only one of a whole host of strategies that started with that original economic plan. Things like substantial investment in infrastructure, education and school curriculum aligned to the economy's skill needs. Heavy Foreign Direct Investment, the encouragement of industrial development (although this was a minor part of the original plan) and encouragement of entrepreneurship.

You're just getting recommended anti-EU stuff whereas it sounds like you're looking for a more apolitical understanding of the mechanisms by which the EU functions?


Great start would be this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/European-Union-Short-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0199681694/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1542642759&sr=1-5&keywords=introduction+to+the+eu


Bought it in preparation for when studying the EU as an institution at uni, and still found it useful as a reference when I'd moved on to European security the following year


By all means read the more political stuff, but if you didn't feel knowledgable enough to cast a vote in 2016 I'd strongly recommend understanding it as a supra-national institution and to begin with.

If you want a good grounding in European Union politics, since that is my speciality, I can help you there.

Firstly, I would avoid all of the 'airport' read books written by journalists of a particular bent pushing their narrative on today's politics or Brexit, so "All out War", etc. (This goes for whether you want more info about Westminster politics, or UK interaction with EU politics.) Whilst they may be entertaining, they're written to "push" a narrative or viewpoint of the author, and aren't meant to be neutral accounts or fact laden at all.

For EU affairs I recommend two textbooks that would be required reading for any undergraduate studying EU politics, and serve as a core quick reference texts for any postgrad looking at it too. These will help you to actually base your opinions on the EU on some core facts and/or well established arguments (something that is sorely lacking on here).

• European Union Politics (Fifth Edition) by Michelle Cini and Nieves Pérez-Solórzano Borragán
  
  
• The Government and Politics of the European Union (8th edition), The European Union Series by Neill Nugent
  
  Both of these should be fairly cheap to pick up second hand, but I do not recommend purchasing earlier versions than those I have listed, since a lot has happened in the intervening years since their previous editions were published.
  
  Both of these textbooks are laid out in a concise and simple to follow manner, with key infoboxes for further reading and detail. They both look at theories of integration (why member states chose to integrate/who are the actors), the history and evolution of the Union, and the logic behind certain policies, how its institutions operate and have evolved, how they interact with each other both in theory and practice, arguments as to what the "Union" is, and finally critiques (and counterarguments to them) of the Union and its policies.
  
  You can either read through them chapter by chapter, or keep them at hand, and when something comes up, flick through and examine them.
  
  I can recommend further text books if you so wish.
  
  Edit: PS. I see others on this post are recommending several political theory texts from 17th century authors and later. My tip is to find textbooks on political theory if that is something you want to look into. Whilst those texts are important, there are many interpretations of them and their often flowery, and to put it bluntly longwinded prose, (Hobbes taking several pages to discuss what is "power" springs to mind) can make digesting them difficult. A good textbook will digest the key arguments from political theory texts and lay them out in a nice concise manner, with critiques and counter arguments. You can then go and read the actual texts that stand out if you so wish.

If you read Revolt on the right (which is the best book about UKIP right now) they suggest that the BNP hindered UKIP's success in the north when they were prominent and that up to 2010 one of UKIPs main aims was to squeeze them out iirc.

A bit of a different book from me.

The Politics Book - Paul Kelly

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1409364453/ref=cm_sw_r_other_apa_VvB1xbAZFK029

It is a good, fairly unbiased, summary of politics and philosophy from history and is great for beginners who want to grasp political ideas and understand political history at a basic level.

The layout is modern and easy to understand so I highly recommend it.

When you say "Radicalized" do you mean, like UKIP, because if so I highly recomend Revolt on the Right.

I assumed you meant non-fiction, but if you meant fiction, perhaps you'd like House of Cards.

Other than that, books are usually released at the end of a particular era in politics such as Tony Blair's Premiership, although I haven't read it. One of the political memoirs of either himself or Alastair Campbell.

Hope this helps.

There are no books that can adequately cover British politics to the extent that you're asking. Also, politics and economics are intertwined to the point that you cannot understand one without the other. Freakonomics, for example explains how the two cannot be meaningful separated and is an interesting place to start any political journey.

Depending on your background knowledge 30-Second Politics can give you a grounding of what all the different terminology means and Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box provides useful insight as to the difference between how politics is preached and practiced. Also, The Plan is essential reading to understand our current government.

You've already mentioned Douglass Murray's Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, which I would also thoroughly endorse. Further to that I'd recommend Thomas Pikkety's Capital in the 21st Century which although about economics is so closely tied to current political thought that it really is extremely useful reading

>don't realise that when guys like Carswell and Hannan

You should read their manifesto The Plan: Twelve months to renew Britain. Central to their idea of freedom is radical decentralised democracy. There is a lot to like in it even for the left.

Well it was, for the most part, the colonial nations that drew the lines and I agree that is certainly a cause for continued conflict in Africa.

Read a good book on this a few years back called the State of Africa, recommend: https://www.amazon.co.uk/State-Africa-History-Continent-Independence/dp/0857203886

>“The Laws of Physics” are by definition products of inductive reasoning.

Yes and no. Or rather, this is a very live issue in philosophy of science and the issue is far more complicated than anyone who hasn't studied philosophy of science is likely to realise. The question "what are natural laws?" is one of the key questions in philosophy of science, and there is no consensus on what the answer is. Another key question is "why does science work?", and a variation of it is "how can science work if it based on inductive reasoning and inductive reasoning is flawed?"

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/inductive-reasoning-in-science/


This is opening a can of worms. A fascinating can of worms that leads down all sorts of other rabbit holes, but a can of worms nevertheless. Should anybody be interested then this book is recommended:


https://www.amazon.co.uk/Philosophy-Science-Fundamentals-Alexander-Bird/dp/1857285042

> The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History
> https://www.amazon.co.uk/Majority-Finds-Its-Past-Placing/dp/0807856061/

May I guess you never read the book ? She was a radical socialist and feminist, with the title almost surely like this because it plays on the contradiction of women being a minority group despite being a numerical majority.

>Gerda Lerner. One of the most influential feminist historians, Lerner is often credited with being the first to offer college courses in women's history. Lerner was a giant in her field: she rose to prominence in the 1960s, a time of tremendous expansion in the field of history. During this time, social history became popular: increasingly historians began to pay attention to every-day people, including women, the African Americans, the poor, and other minorities, as opposed to the ''great men'' embodied in generals like Robert E. Lee. and politicians like Thomas Jefferson.

You can read maybe The Creation of Patriarchy :P To make sure that she would probably have no issue with describing women as a minority group and would surely understand.

>Of course I do, people in this country do, I don't think I know anyone in my social or professional life who doesn't use minority to use statistical minority (I did a STEM PhD).

Why do you use statistical majority, when you mean numerical majority ? This is the second time now and it's confusing me a bit. And again, sure you and your friends might use the colloquial definition of minority. Which is totally fine, but pretending that women can't be called a minority is just wrong and shows that you have no understanding of minority groups and the social sciences.

>Basic knowledge of sociology as used by a particular part of the field..... Outside of that field, people would not get what your are saying as most people only deal with statistic majorities.

Is what we are discussing right now related to the social sciences or more to numerics ? Also you are kinda not telling the truth when you talk people are dealing with statistic majorities. Because which groups are you dealing with ? Blonde people ? They are a statistical minority. Would you want to give me a list of minorities you are thinking of when you talk about minority ? Because I seriously doubt it coincides with "statistical minorities"

>It seems the term minority has been used to equate/compare women to statistical minority groups. As someone

No, it seems like you don't understand what minority groups are. Like most of society. The term comes from academia, and people just perverse the meaning.

It's a lie to claim people think of "statistical minorities" because then they would think of blonde people, brown eyed people, people with super high IQ, aristocrats, etc etc. There are many many people that you are almost surely not thinking about when talking about minorities. Maybe you mean ethnic minorities. Maybe.

>It is strange to use it when the exact opposite is true statistically.

It's stranger to use it in a way that's completely inconsistent. And ignores the history of the word. Even stranger to not know the multiple meanings of the word, and defend your ignorance like the problem is people who spent decades on this topic know less than you.

This is not about the Guardian and 'what it believes'. If we can be mature for a moment, this is another fascinating article by the irrepressible Matt Goodwin and Robert Ford, professors at Manchester University and regular columnists to the Guardian, who have spent 10 years surveying UKIP support and have a greater understanding of their support-base than anybody else right now.

Their credentials are indisputable. If you don't like well researched observations (rather than bigotry and arrogance)... you can always lump it and bury your head in the sand.

If you give a shit (and I have a feeling you don't), read, their widely acclaimed book on this subject

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0198749953/?coliid=I1VZM8NH4D8427&colid=2ZKBN4RSJSYJV&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it - Catherine Barnard - The Substantive Law of the EU: The Four Freedoms.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0198789130/?coliid=I3FQZDCZWZQQW7&colid=2ZKBN4RSJSYJV&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it - Catherine Barnard and Steve Peers (as mentioned above, he is really very good)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0198708939/?coliid=I2G9WKHW05Z4U3&colid=2ZKBN4RSJSYJV&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it - EU Politics.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Institutions-European-Union-New/dp/0198737416/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524610636&sr=1-2-fkmr1&keywords=dermot+oleary+eu - Dermot Hodson, John Peterson 9eds) - Institutions of the EU.

A simple look on Amazon or Oxford University Press/Routledge etc will give you a great start for this type of text book and references will point you to further reading if you find yourself interested. The links I posted are most recent versions which I have read a bit but this type was my UG and PG essentially.

Well, Carswell certainly made his own position on the NHS very clear in his pro-privatisation book, The Plan.

>My plan this time around is to base a collection of ten threads each based on a chapter of 'The Politics Book' published by Dorling Kindersley.

I bought that yesterday! Asdas for £8, cheaper than Amazon, I thought it was a bargain considering how clear and yet how jam packed it was.

for those not familiar- dont listen to this guy

read it for yourselves, then look back at this guys comment

Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450

Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014

"Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093

Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd

The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf

see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies"

"Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology

Manufacturing consent is as relevant as ever.

Sadly, most journalists seem to read it and think it's a text on best practices.

He and Daniel Hannan have certainly worked closely together in the past - they co-authored "The Plan".

Carswell wrote a book called The Plan.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0822319144/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1480358452&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=cultural+marxism&dpPl=1&dpID=414j9KPiZeL&ref=plSrch
Dennis Dworkin
Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Post-Contemporary Interventions

Bit wishy-washy at times although he did contribute to The Plan with Carswell, not sure how much though.