Here's hoping. Unfortunately they do have a lot to show for 13 years of governing - a path of destruction and devastation!
BananaTrifleViolin
joined 1 year ago
Yeah this sounds reasonable and I hope it's how things playout.
My concern is that he remains popular with the Tory membership who do not reflect the general views of the population, and the tories ejected a lot of the moderate centerist MPs over Brexit. The rump party may be decidedly right wing, obsessed with brexit and a good breeding ground for a Boris comeback. He certainly won't be leader before the next election but I can see him being painted as a messiah in a narrower deminished party desperate for success. They struggled to replace him already with a disasterous right wing Truss despite the MPs not favouring her.
He reminds me of Silvio Berlusconi in some ways - that guy was dogged with scandals throughout his career and his governments collapsed, but he bounced back multiple times. Italian politics is very different of course and Berlusconi was a media mogul so he could control the narrative in a way Boris cannot. But also Donald Trump, that guy has done things that would have seemed shocking only 10 years ago, and yet he remains the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for the next presidential election.
I don't think Boris will achieve the same success as people like Berlusconi or Trump, but I wouldn't put it past a rump defeated Conservative party to be so desperate they're drawn to him again and we see him back in frontline politics unfortunately.
They're hoping that but it's looking increasingly unachievable. In particular the time bomb is people who fixed at 1-2% but next year they'll be facing deals new deals next year that are looking like 5-6% at a minimum barring a rapid cooling of inflation.
But yeah, it's not impossible they can benefit from an improvement in the economy and slashing taxes. I just don't see it working personally even if they can get into a position to do it.
These concerns are valid.
Some are transitory however - 1, 3 and 4 all reflect the current state of Lemmy and the similar Kbin are in currently. The Reddit issues were unexpected and people have migrated en masse to Lemmy/Kbin and have found was is in many ways Alpha software. This issues will mostly be resolved with time, and that is probably accelerated now as more people means more people interested in development, and motivated by anger at Reddit. I don't think Lemmy/Kbin will replace Reddit right now, but I think a new trajectory has been set. Communities are hitting critical mass to keep growing.
Look at Mastodon, it's at 1.2m-2m active users each month; it is still small fry and niche compared to Twitter but it exploded thanks to Twitter's mess, and is growing. I think we're seeing something similar with Lemmy and Kbin, but this is just the start of a long road and an expanded community will accelerate improvement and growth.
But point 2 is fundamental to the fediverse - fragmentation due to defederating could be a concern. I get Beehaw's motivation but I think their actions will consign them to a niche part of the Fediverse, but that may be what they want. Ultimately I suspect the biggest servers will dominate a main interconnected fediverse through sheer size and notoriety - new servers will need to federate to the big players to grow. It's not necessairly a bad thing - but people may end up signed up to a "main" large interconnected "fediverse" and separately to smaller niche communities they're interested in but sitting in their own walled gardens/bubbles. It's not necessairly a bad thing though - it is just different to what people are used to with social media like Reddit. It'll be a trade off - servers and communities have complete independence and some will go for what suits them - part of a big fediverse or only federating to smaller aligned communities.
Part of the problem may be the bugs on the Lemmy instances which have not been showing "hot" content correctly. This may be giving a false impression of an obsession over reddit as posts are stuck on the front page?
I've been browsing a few different communities and am finding things are active, they're just not reaching the default Lemmy front pages. Sorting by new or diving deeper into communities shows a lot of new content.
For example I'm currently browsing from Feddit.uk and this seems to have exploded into an active community in just a week; it's really heartening to seen. I've also seen different content when viewing from Kbin based instances like Kbin.Social or Fedia.io (including from Lemmy.world).
This is a strawman argument. I was merely trying to give an example of the difficulties in absolutism when talking about moderation. My example may not be the best one but the concern is valid - anyone who thinks moderation will be easy in the Fediverse because everyone will be in harmony and agree on what is acceptable and what is not, is naive to be honest. There are already communities that don't adhere to the same rules and standards as others, and as you scale up the fediverse into millions of people and lots of communities exposed to each otherthe complexity will come to the fore.
Basically don't see the fediverse as a golden bullet for solving moderation issues or coming to a happy consensus. It removes the corporate control and influence but each community will come to it's own consensus about what is and isn't acceptable. Beehaw is an early example of that - they wish to control and vet who can participate in their community; that is an understandable aim due to the ethos of their community but it may be very difficult to stay federated and achieve that.
The fediverse is a great concept but I suspect we're going to see a lot of fragmentation into "miniverses" around acceptable codes of conduct and content, because a single broad consensus is very difficult to maintain at scale.
Yeah I understand that concern. It's difficult though - public utilities like Water have languished in private ownership; treated like expensive assets to hold, use to acquire cheap debt - but there is 0 competition in water provision so privatising it never made much sense.
Openreach is arguably less like the Water companies; the competition is actually the layer down with the consumer facing companies that are either paying for Openreach services which drives the investment or building competing networks (often via access given to them to Openreaches infrastructure by regulation). Who owns Openreach is arguably less important?
I'm personally of the opinion that basic services like Railways, Healthcare, and Water should be in public hands. The profit motive just doesn't work in those. But it seems to be working in Telecommunications, probably because there is sense in paying "more" for "premium" services. People will pay more for faster connections that they want or businesses need, which drives investment. You can't really pay for "better" water, and "better" healthcare isn't generally a thing (as in we should and can be providing the best healthcare options to anyone with proper investment in the NHS; premium in healthcare is jumping the queues but that is a manufactured demand due to poor investment in the service which can't keep up with demand. The staff in the private sector are actually the same as in the NHS, and private healthcare will never provide the complex and acute stuff without extreme cost; they just cherry pick the easy stuff)
This is now two Tory run authorities in similar boats with very similar reasons - extreme bad management, breaching of fiscal rules, and lack of accountability for their actions.
Woking Council is in even more dire straits, with £1.2bn deficit (guardian article - Jun 23).
And on top of that two Tory county councils have warned they are on the financial brink - Kent and Hampshire (guardian article - Feb 23).
It may not just be Tory councils of course, but so far it looks like a pattern - at the minimum poor governance and a lack of oversight of councils by central government for loans given to councils.
It'll be interesting if the Tories can hold any of them. May give a hint at how much their core vote holds up in the next election. Could be the difference between a Labour government and a Hung parliament. A tory revival looks extremely unlikely.
The question is what does Boris do next? In some ways resigning made sense as a gamble - he could get out of his marginal seat and potentially step into a safe seat vacated by an ally. But if the Tory leadership block him for being a candidate then what does he do? Stand as an independent? Stand for Mayor of London again as is rumoured (which would be a disaster for him as he's not popular in London anymore).
I can't see him just giving up and returning to journalism. Maybe the next leader of the tories will be an ally who will work to bring him back to "save the party" (as the party will probably be a rump party after the next election and has been shaped in his image)
I'm not sure how I feel about this. Credit to him for changing his mind but that he thought it was appropriate in the first place says a lot. To be clear, tory MPs are abstaining not to "move on from the drama" as he puts it, but because they are worried about how Tory members in their local associations will react if they vote in favour. This is tempered by concerns that in the upcoming election next year opposition candidates might use their unwillingness to vote against them.
The tory mess just keeps going and going.