Just for anyone still following this odd developing story, Corbyn has now issued a statement in which he says ‘discussions are still ongoing’ about a ‘real alternative’, but does not say he’s going to be co-leader of anything. This seems to me to match what Jessica Elgot and Gabriel Pogrund were reporting yesterday: that, contra Zarah Sultana’s statement, there’s not (yet) a new party and Corbyn is not co-leader.

Cc. @geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml

No. You’ve taken one thing - the BBC pressurises their journalists to cover Israel positively, which I agree is true - and assumed it means a second thing - that (1) the BBC (2) smeared Corbyn (3) as an antisemite (numbers here because these are three separate claims that you haven’t justified, within the broader claim you also haven’t justified). You’ve then additionally taken that bundle of unproven claims as evidence of another different claim: that ‘the media’ as a whole, i.e., not just the BBC, ‘smeared Corbyn’ because he ‘opposed Israel’.

With respect, this is exactly what I meant about conspiracist thinking: you’re taking loosely related ideas (some of them true, some of them not) and bundled them together to claim a vaguely defined malevolent entity (‘the media’) is out to get someone. This is conspiracist thinking! That’s what that is!

Yes, it’s fair - and indeed, good and right - to be sceptical. But we have to temper the scepticism with realism, which is the tricky bit!

Not about Corbyn!

This is not inconsistent with anything I said yesterday or, indeed, this morning.

There was not an organised media smear campaign against Corbyn. ‘The media’ is not in any sense a group of people who said ‘Let’s all agree to tell lies about Corbyn’, which is what an organised smear campaign would have to look like. The media has always been persistently unfair, to the level of insanity, about everyone to the left of the Conservatives, but there’s nothing organised about it, it’s just powerful people representing their own interests.

I always call out this conspiracist stuff when the right do it, so I’ll do exactly the same when it come from the left.

As @flamingos-cant@feddit.uk put it, ‘either those reports are true or Corbyn went radio silent on the announcement of his new party and let there be room for this speculation.’ In fact, both sides are true: the party has been ‘launched’ without a coherent structure, leadership or even a name (if I’m wrong about this, just… tell me the name), and Corbyn has chosen to say nothing about it. These are facts. There’s no smear involved.

Accidentally launching a party co-lead by someone who doesn’t want to lead it is something only the British left could’ve accomplished.

Jessica Elgot, on BlueSky:

-There have long been significant divisions between senior figures close to Corbyn over how such a movement on the left should operate - some keen to begin as a new party and others less so. Sources adamant tonight Corbyn not agreed to any joint leadership of a new party.

I don’t think R2B’s ever worked that way, it’s always been tenants only!

Corbyn’s already said he’s not joining, amazing stuff.

the actual tenants who want to buy the homes they’ve raised kids in will simply not be able to afford the homes

But only they will be eligible to buy them. So, either they get to buy them or they just get to stay. Win-win?

Doesn’t go as far forward as I’d like, but I don’t see a backward step here. More homes is good, more money for more homes is good, social housing is the best kind of housing, and mitigating the worst of right to buy is still a forward move, even if it’s not a whole step forward. So I make that 3.5 steps forward, 0 steps back!

Exactly. MPs doing their job by listening to voters; government doing its job by listening to MPs.

It’s job? The vacuum guitar schema. Rough!

Bonus fun: watching YouTube’s auto-generated subtitles try to deal with Klingon.

Okay, apologies for the repetition, but I feel this requires it:

This isn’t ‘Labour’. This is from the Blue Labour campaign group, membership: four MPs.

Actual Labour, the leadership and the government, is currently in the process of strengthening the Equalities Act!

McSweeney is very bad, but he’s not part of Blue Labour and this didn’t come from him! It came from the four (count 'em!) MPs who call themselves the Blue Labour Campaign Group.

This is irrelevant to the discussion, which was not ‘Is it an alternate timeline/who likes it?’ but ‘does it possess certain qualities?’.

Yep. I just watched ‘Past Tense’ this week, where DS9 spends an entire two-parter advocating for the humane treatment of homeless and unemployed people through an economic policy of full employment. The characters succeed in bringing this about by staging an armed uprising largely led by a black man. It’s not only ‘woke’ but explicitly socialist!

For me, trek was about people overcoming their differences and trying to work things out despite them, and being kind to each other. Newer shows lack this ideas, in my opinion.

In Discovery, a Vulcan woman gets married to a seven-foot tall walking squid man. In seasons 4-5, Book nearly destroys the galaxy and they forgive him because they understand he was traumatised. These strike me as pretty clear examples (just two, I could add more!) of people ‘overcoming their differences and trying to work things out despite them, and being kind to each other’.

This is entirely separate from the question of whether those plots lines and character arcs were well-written - they largely weren’t, IMO. But they did happen!