I know Thatcher was a polarising individual; for her politics and actions during the mining strikes etc.
However, she rose to the top of an extremely male dominated field through conviction and sheer force of personality. And I think that deserves respect in itself.
Given the current issues surrounding gender equality in many fields, her example should serve as inspiration.
(Fact I have just learned; she was born just down the road from me! I'm quite surprised Grantham doesn't make a bigger deal of her roots there)
I cannot disagree more. The fact she made it to the top of a male dominated fields cannot and should not in any way be tied to a notion of respect.
Take a trip to North Lanarkshire and you can still see the impact that the closing of Ravenscraig has had on the area. No-one says the name Thatcher in Scotland, it has to be whispered. After having a successful independence referendum scrapped by a labour government she went back on the promise she made to the Scottish people about increased devolution for Scotland, instead turning her into a testing ground for some of the most unpopular Tory policies of all time.
This is in no way a personal attack on a woman who is now no longer with us. She was someone's mother and sister and my heart goes out to her family at what most people would agree is a terrible time for a family. However the words "respect" and "inspiration" when describing Margaret Thatcher is not a position that will be shared by many people in Scotland.
But like anything political there is the other side of the coin.
For many who simply wanted to continue their work as usual found themselves involved with the consequences of a dispute of miners. Ultimately people like to choose a side to blame for catastrophes such as the 3 day working week (due to power shortages because of the coal strike, electricity had to be rationed). How much hard did that do to other industries. My grandfather at the time an electrical engineer lost his job due rather directly to the 3 day week.
For people like them Thatcher was a good thing, ultimately it was not her fault that the unions did not want to compromise on closing mines. The reaction of unions towards a shift from being a publicly subsidised industry I don't think can be described in anyway as sustainable or even 'long term OK'.
I find it someone disingenuous of certain areas to blame the government for the result, when the unions often negotiated with such a simple all or nothing mentality. Ultimately blaming her after going all-in isn't right.
Very true. An entire country held hostage by a tiny proportion of workers deciding to go on strike. I can definitely see the argument that any private body with that kind of power has to have that power removed.
Did the bankers choose to simply turn off everyone's electricity in the evening? They aren't holding anyone hostage. They're just taking all the money they can get their hands on and we're choosing to hand it over.
They were in a position where all the ATMs and point of sale machines would stop (Chip-n-Pin is critical in the UK). The UK goverment was actually at the stage of considering whether it would have to implement emergency powers to prevent widespread civil unrest.
For a start of your talking retail banking rather than trading banking?
All deposits were guaranteed up to £25k which is now £100k. Why the hell would a high street bank profit from cutting of ATM or chip and pin? Do you know how much merchant fees are!
Quite the opposite they do everything they can to make people spend more. Granted they aren't lending money as easily as they used too, but that was what created the mess we were in before.
So you're assuming all high street banks are RBS? That the government wouldn't have been able to support the payment deposit scheme?
I think you're a little bit confused between retail and commercial banking. It was the latter which was bailed out, not the former. A collapse in it wouldn't have stopped ATMs working, but would have quite likely had dire consequences for the global economy and businesses, simple things like an airline hedging their fuel price would have suddenly turned into an airline losing their money (depending on the product bought it might just be a premium or a the whole lot). In that one simple example imagine the main airlines going bust, owing all the money for previously sold tickets etc. That is the kind of doomsday disaster a collapse of commercial banking could have lead too.
The ATMs would still be there, there just might be no cash in them due to hyperinflation and lack of consumer confidence. However the retail banks would do all they could to keep operating.
As for reading Alistair Darling's autobiography, I don't really get why I would, the guy didn't really get round to doing anything, but had been a cheerleader for the team that deregulated much of the commercial banking industry. People forget that all Thatcher did was to open it up to people outside of Eton, Brown's light touch and continued deregulation helped encourage it to grow and grow.
So the guy was only Chancellor of the Exchequer - what would he know?
If he says that the Government was worried that a collapse of RBS, HBOS and others might have led to the banking system ceasing to function in the UK then I'm inclined to believe him.
Is that what the bankers said? Is there some collective banker mafia who chose to destroy the economy because we didn't hand over protection money when they came calling? No.
They were greedy and incompetent and we let them do it. No holding hostage. No extortion. No protection rackets. Greed and incompetence and lack of oversight and deregulation.
This happens a lot in any industry that loses its relevance.
I grew up in Massachusetts. Cities like Lowell and Worcester are very depressed now because they lost what made them big - manufacturing. Should we have subsidized that industry despite it being overpriced and underperforming compared to its competitors? What about the horse and buggy industry when automobiles came around? The whaling industry once petroleum refineries started being built?
Those coal mines were outdated and inefficient. Unfortunately, the government subsidized them for far too long, which created dependence on them as well as the assurance that the jobs would always be there.
Sadly, there is displacement whenever there is a change. But it's far worse to cling to the status quo when it's blatantly impractical. We should be learning the opposite lesson from the hardship created by these mine closings - it's far better to bite the bullet and take the immediate effects than prop up an outdated system and finally get rid of it once it becomes too much to bear.
The change could have been done more smoothly. Or to put it another way, how could it have been worse?
I don't pretend to have a perfect solution, but going to some of the areas hit by this is really depressing. The towns may never have been flash to start with but visiting mines and talking to people there is not that different to talking to someone who is describing to you a war they were in.
Or to put it another way, how could it have been worse?
Easy. The coal mining industry could have continued existing for another thirty years, bringing huge losses each year, subsidized by the taxpayer. Like, say, in Poland, which is where you get your cheap labor from, and not the other way around, and the two facts are not entirely unrelated.
Head out to some of the Rust Belt states - New York. Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. You'll find towns that are just that - empty and gutted. There are cities that lost more than 80% of their manufacturing jobs in less than 10 years.
It was just the way of the future - the Southeast had lower labor costs, lower cost of land, and advantageous shipping arrangements. The cities just couldn't keep up, and they fell by the wayside.
And yes, it's pretty crappy to go to these cities and tell the people who are struggling there that their businesses deserved to go bankrupt or leave, but there's no other way to do it. The alternative is to subsidize them, and that ends up discouraging progress and also creating a culture of dependence on the government. After all, why invent new stuff if the government will increase the subsidy to keep up with your new manufacturing process?
Letting the free market purge badly competing industry is good for the country and also good for everyone in the long term.
I wouldn't call what Thatcher brought in 'free market' per se, although I dont think this is what you are saying. Many of the formerly nationalised companies that are now supposedly private depend heavily on state subsidies. Her implementation of change swapped one inefficiency for another while setting vast swaths of the country at loggerheads. Other countries have managed to implement painful change without the friction experienced in the UK. It's a sad period of history.
So your position is the world exists as a comic book, where a person is all good or all bad, and there are no in-betweens? Can't a person just be a person who does some good things, and some bad things, some deserving of respect and others being reprehensible perhaps (and others still being neutral or up for debate)?
I hear what you're saying however that might not be a good example. I'm sure there are people who have good things to say about Hitler (perhaps he was nice to his mum, or patted a kitten once?) but you're not going to win any arguments on that.
So, bearing in mind the above, I'd say that overall Maggie was a pretty awful leader but she inspired a lot of good (but depressing) 80's music.
Hmm, well I think you're going a bit far. She did achieve some OK things as a leader.
Churchill was pretty sexist, homophobic, and all the rest: but he is revered as an excellent wartime leader. Everyone can have significant character flaws and still be, at their core, a good person.
Whether Thatcher was an awful leader or not is certainly a point of debate. There are good arguments either way. She supported Section 28, didn't support sanctions on South Africa, Poll Tax - all of which were bad (I don't necessarily include the miners strike because, as I mentioned in another comment, those industries were fairly doomed anyway - the clashes with the unions heightened its notability. And, anyway, as many people love her for breaking the unions as hate her for it.). But then she did some good things for the economy, and pushed Britain to the front of the financial industry (I'd argue later leaders failed to execute on this strategy, but lets not get too bogged down in arguing merits). Lots of people love her, lots hate her; what they seem to share is how strongly they feel either way!!
People should have lots of good things to say about Hitler. To completely demonise him, and turn him into something completely 'other', ignoring how hugely popular and effective he was, makes it too easy to pretend that what happened was a freak aberration, rather than something we need to be actively vigilant against happening again.
I don't think anyone is going to call him a good person, but perhaps an effective leader. Pol Pot was easily just as evil even if he was responsible for fewer deaths, but Pol Pot left nothing so useful as the German autobahns.
On that scale Thatcher is far from evil. Her economic reforms where necessary even if they left many worse off.
"Take a trip to North Lanarkshire and you can still see the impact that the closing of Ravenscraig has had on the area."
Might be worth mentioning that Ravenscraig had a very up to date seamless stainless steel tube rolling mill and brand new blast furnaces just completed when it was closed.
Seamless stainless steel tubes with mapped stress patterns 30cm in diameter and a few metres long used to cost my project about £300 to £400 a pop then. When the facility closed, we had to source from specialist mills in the then West Germany. £2000+.
(I spent some time in Shotts and Paisley around that time)
That's dire. What did you use the pipes for? And was there the option for some private crowd to buy up any of the works? How did your company deal with this - I know materials aren't all the cost of a big job, but a 500% percent rise in material cost is pretty hard for anyone to absorb.
Ravenscraig steel works was, er, rather large so buying it up would require very significant capital. The rest of the supply chain was being disrupted at the same time.
I don't have a firm view on this; however, history is littered with examples of areas devastated by changing economies and new technology.
Specifically with regards to the miners - that industry had been in substantial decline since the early 1900s and I'd suggest that whatever happened we'd still be looking at devastated areas today.
What happened, though, was as it all came to a head in the 80s, it also coincided with Thatcher's politics of forcing the trade unions to heel. Hence, clusterfuck.
(My interest/view here is academic; I've no real strong opinion on who was "good" or "bad", as I've no connection with what happened and so have no right to hold one)
Exactly the problem that Emma Goldman had with feminism, if women are looking to hold the same morally bankrupt positions of power that men have then equality is a false hope for all.
She fucked over a lot of people, she is hated still by a large portion of the British people to do this as a woman within the male dominated power structures of the time is nothing to be proud of.
Or - She saved a country from economic collapse and restored the UK to a position of being one of the world's most powerful voices.
The UK was as Greece is today in 1979. Hell there were three months of strikes by miners employed by the government in an unsustainable, unprofitable industry BEFORE she even took office.
And people still bitch that their kids didn't get free milk at school for lunch.
She didn't save the economy for the long term. She sold the family silver, squandered the resulting cash on tax cuts at the top, and left the same or worse structural problems in place.
Same thing is happening in Louisiana currently. Bobby Jindal is an extremely intelligent man, but he has sold his soul to the Republican Party because he wants to be president. He is selling everything that isn't nailed down to the floor in an effort to balance budgets, has been hellbent on destroying the state pension system, has turned down federal money which would help to fund social programs, and is now trying to implement a ridiculously regressive taxation system.
Who said anything about Democrats? It'd be nice if he simply didn't govern like a complete imbecile. He's raided the state's emergency funds and sold off state assets in order to prove that he can balance a budget, and has in effect put the state in a worse position than it was under the previous administration, and THAT'S saying something.
You do your argument a disservice in saying he sold his soul to the Republicans. I think it's more likely that his goal is using his "extreme intelligence" for the things he wants to do, and it just so happens the Republicans decided to fund his "startup" (so to speak).
> She is essentially the reason the UK still uses Pound sterling and not the Euro.
How so? She was out before Maastricht was signed. Germany wasn't even unified when she was around.
She lost her job because frankly she presided over 3 terms in which she completely lost her mind part-way through the second and into the third and had to be removed by her own party who saw the writing on the wall. We don't have a term limit in the UK (and perhaps we should), but I still remember the "We have become a grandmother" moment which may sound trivial but was a shining example of how mental she became towards the end.
I would say if anything the thing leading to her being stabbed in the back was the way the poll tax was handled. The conservatives knew that if pushed through it gave Labour a credible chance of re-election, and that her reactions to it rendered her completely uncontrollable. They needed someone that senior tories could manage, which is why we had John Major (who for my money was one of the best PM's we had in a long time).
Tony Blair was another 3-termer who lost it completely, again elected not because he was the best candidate but simply because the opposition weren't credible.
I completely agree with a two term limit, would be a great thing to have here although somehow someone would find a way around it.
She's certainly a big part of the reason for that. I think it's quite sad that the criticisms of Southern European countries like Greece, Spain, Italy, by Northern European countries about the state of their economics and politics were seen as nothing but xenophobia. Now that Germany is forced to bail them all out I think some of those critiques seem prescient. Of course no-one will ever know if the added weight of the UK in the currency block would have strengthened the whole project, but right now it's looking like it's on the verge of collapse. Not sure Britain will steer clear of any fallout though.
That being said she lost her job for a lot more than that. Poll tax was a much bigger social issue at the time. Her rough style had left her isolated in her own party and then she mishandled the challenges to her leadership at a crucial moment. The EU element was merely the trigger, the gun was already long in place.
She didn't sell coal mines. Her administration did however sell off as much oil as possible as fast as possible which cratered the market for oil so low it helped bankrupt the USSR at our expense. Now the UK is a net importer of oil ten times as expensive. Just one example of short term policies that allowed tax cuts to make us feel good while screwing the UK in the long term.
This is an overly simplistic understanding of modern global trade that is unfortunately common with many on the left of the spectrum.
No country is an island - the idea that you should produce everything, even when it makes little to no economic sense, is a product of a bygone era. Countries become richer overall by focusing on that which they are most efficient. For a country like the UK, that's knowledge and finance.
That's an overly simplistic understanding of the energy industry and upcoming resource crunches that is unfortunately common with people who have never worked in the energy industry. Knowledge and finance doesn't replace the UK's need for energy which costs ten times what we sold off our reserves for in the 1980s. On Hacker News of all places you must be aware of that key idiom "you cannee change the laws of Physics, Jim".
You realize you are talking about coal mines here correct?
If anything, Thatcher's move to get the government out of the coal business was prophetic in many more ways than she could have realized. The market for UK coal was non-existent: the resource was already dead to natural gas and oil.
The modernization strategies of Thatcher in the UK, Reagan in the US and even Mulroney in Canada were painful, but necessary requirements of countries that were trying to stay ahead of the curve.
No, I'm not talking about coal mines at all. I'm talking about oil. Read the thread. You mentioned coal mines, you keep referencing coal mines, incorrectly assuming that is what I was referring to in my comment, which I then clarified as being about oil. Your comment about mines though was wrong anyway. She didn't sell off coal mines. You're just wrong about that. She just shut them down, for a whole bunch of reasons. You appear so eager to argue the thread that you're not actually reading what's been said.
The UK's oil facilities are profitable. Ergo those jobs are secure.
The fact that the UK is a net importer of oil is irrelevant, given that this has more to do with high consumption than it does the industry itself.
One way or another the UK is going to pay for it's energy. The difference between the coal mines that Thatcher ditched and oil is that with the coal the UK was paying for that as well.
You're seriously going to have to cite your sources (objective, peer-reviewed only, please) instead of relying on anecdotal data presumably from your experience working in the sector.
Sources for what? What's the controversial point in dispute, I'm unclear?
Oil prices? The current oil price and the oil price during the time of peak oil production of the North Sea fields is publicly available and googleable as are flow rates and production stats.
..or the fact that the West used oil prices as a weapon against the Soviets? Again a much-written about topic that you can do your own research on quite easily.
TheOilDrum.com has a lot of good links to info. What is the point that you deem controversial and in need of sourcing?
Edit: Oh wait, I see the point that you need a source for, that was Scottie in Star Trek.
Second Edit: Now, if this isn't just a rhetorical point of yours and if you are seriously interested in the oil industry and trends regarding North Sea production, and the problems the UK is facing because it flipped from 4th largest exporter in the world to net importer a few years back, I'm happy to chat about it and do the leg work to find you some interesting reads on that, but this post probably isn't the place for it (though I'll be blogging from richarddjordan.com as soon as I get by github pages set up, and you can always ask me there). It's a fascinating topic, and one that often takes people by surprise when they learn some of the rather concerning details.
You do realize the UK shifted to oil and gas right? While these are more expensive to consumers - or rather, not subsidized through taxes to the same extent - the country actually makes a net profit from this industry.
The UK has most definitely not shifted away from a dependency on coal - ~30% of electricity generated in the UK is from coal (a lot less than it used to be, but no way is that going down to zero any time soon).
Slight tangent, but it's not unsurprising that Brits, especially older Brits, might hold this view btw (that everything should be produced at home if possible). Prior to the world wars, the UK imported many things from the empire; during the war (particularly WWI), and with the closure of the seaways, there was a massive food problem because home industry was so far behind the modern times as to be useless. This has lesson has somewhat echoed down the years.
Isolationism is a fool's game, even for countries like the United States, let alone tiny Great Britain.
I doubt very highly that the UK could even physically grow the food it requires, let alone maintain all other industries a modern country needs to not only function, but expand.
As an American, I don't think I can possibly understand the mentality of late 70's/early 80's Britain.
Is there a large percentage of the population in Britain that views WHAT she did as wrong or is it HOW she did it? I can understand the HOW, but why would people think that handouts aren't first hand-ins? Do people really believe there is a such thing as FREE milk?
When I hear about the mining strikes causing 3 day work weeks for the entire country, my thought is the same as any other sane individual: You, sir, are cancelled.
Britain was bankrupt after the Second World War (and in hock to the US for billions of dollars as well). As part of the attempt to rebuild the country a consensus was formed that the British state would step in and help people - hence the NHS, hence free school milk (as rickets was a very common disease). The unions had too much power for much of that time, but British industry also had terrible management practices so I would put both "sides" as bad as each other.
But while Thatcher shook things up and modernised many parts of the economy, she did it in an extremely divisive and many would say callous way - by devastating communities (especially in the north of England), destroying British manufacturing and putting unemployment up to 3 million (with millions more on disability, to make the jobless figures look better).
And these are legacies that still live on today - where I grew up there are still houses with barbed wire between neighbours who have lived there for years - as a result of the miner's strike. The north is still significantly poorer than the south, with much higher unemployment. The current government has just pushed through an extremely painful reform of disability allowance that appears to be punishing the genuinely disabled as much as the "skivers". And in Scotland she is so despised that you can't even say her name in public after shutting down much of the country's industry and taking North Sea oil revenue down south.
For the most part, nowadays, the question isn't whether the reforms were needed, but whether they had to be done so painfully and whether the benefits of those reforms were shared fairly. There is definitely a north-south divide within the country on that.
(American here - I have a basic grasp of the events, but I don't know the entire picture)
Was there a less painful way to do it? From what I've read, Britain was in some really serious trouble. I wouldn't say that they were at Greece's level of stagnation and financial trouble, but they were definitely hurting. People were going to get hurt regardless of what policy was implemented, and I think it was better to get it all done in one harsh, nasty blow than to slowly cut away the problems and create decades of uncertainty.
I honestly don't know about the economics of it. But threatening to leave a whole city (Liverpool) to rot was typical - and the fact that she is still sung about at football matches over 20 years after she was forced out (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=x...) shows how deep the scars run.
Some people think she was involved in a class war - I don't, I think she honestly believed in social mobility (unlike the current government which is rule by the rich for the rich). But she did devastate huge parts of the country and just regarded it as a fact, not even something to be regretted.
You should have a look at Liverpool now. It's doing really well for itself. We have a vibrant startup and technology scene, and the city center has been drastically transformed since 2008 when it was Capital Of Culture. I can honestly see it becoming the San Francisco of the UK.
| Do people really believe there is a such thing as FREE milk?
No. The milk was good systems thinking. In the post-war period it was cheaper to provide milk to help reduce the incidence of childhood malnutrition than pay for the resulting health problems.
People were happy to pay for it because it was cheaper than not paying for it. The miracle of the post-war government was that they managed to explain this to people. Perhaps wartime had trained people to believe in top-down authority and expect a decent outcome.
By the 1970s wealth and diets had improved and malnutrition was a smaller problem. Only children of the poorest and poorest educated had the problem. Thus it didn't make financial sense any more and the government cut it. But this really did hurt the poorest, most vulnerable people in the country. Political nightmare.
A similar argument applies for the mining and other industries. It was worth running unprofitable mines for a while since the cost to society of thousands of unemployed men would be too high. At some point this would change, as the employment opportunities widened with new technology. But holy hell this was a difficult period in British history.
Opinion is polarized: either Thatcher did a hard job with firmness and saved Britain, or she put economics (some say incorrect economics) over compassion and screwed the poorest to the benefit of rich and upper-middle class. Both of these things _could_ be true at the same time.
It's hard to explain now how passionately hated Thatcher was in popular culture back then. Imagine if the George Bush hating of the 2000's magnified until people rioted in the street and burned their own downtown area in their fury.
I'm not sure why you think women in positions of power should lead to an intrinsically better world? Obviously women being properly represented in all walks of life is better in and of itself, but the outcomes beyond equality?
This is succinctly summed up in one of the dilbert books -
Phenomenon: Equal rights and representation of women in the workplace. Result: Everyone realises women are just as stupid and selfish as men.
I am not British, and was 5 when she was in power. I may be wrong, but Thatcher, in my view, falls in the class of politicians with a medium/long term plan.
She could have been wrong, but as current events show, it is even worse to be led by politicians who have no idea where Europe will be ten years from now.
The disagreement is typically around whether the plan was really about necessary economic restructuring or just the latest assault in Britain's 1000 year-old class war.
The actions taken towards the communities she "restructured" since her premiership seem to show evidence in favor of the latter. If thatcher and the tories were really concerned with improving the country as a whole, they would have taken action on the long-term systemic problems with our workforce (education etc) and given the communities they destroyed something to do between then and now. Instead what they did was simply replace the industry with foreign financial wizardry, while leaving the workers to rot. 30 years later, they use the gap in achievement between these two groups as a stick with which to beat the poor even harder.
And that's the last I'm saying on this subject today.
Viewed from outside, it looks like Britain's gambit towards financial services was highly successful. True, Britain completely destroyed the industrial might it had in the first half of the XX century. It gained, in the process, European leadership in finance.
A number of questions arise, of course. Does finance employ the same people that worked in factory floors? No. Is finance sustainable in the long term? I doubt it, as it is much more mobile than manufacturing (Germany is attacking the British stronghold in finance). Would manufacturing decline anyway? Possibly; in the US it did, but in Germany it didn't. In the end, it is always a game of what-ifs.
Anyhow, I'm not in the position to have a sustained opinion on Thatcher's policies. I was way too young, and did not really study British history from the period. I have no idea if they were positive or negative overall.
She did have a plan, though. I wish current European leaders had one too, beyond "let's grab what we can while the Titanic is going down".
I'm not entirely convinced she did have a plan, to be honest. She had strong beliefs and wasn't afraid to follow her intuition when a large part of the country disagreed with her, but the popular appeal of policies like the "right-to-buy" were more or less a side-effect and her most controversial policy stance on disinflation was so comprehensively reversed under her second Chancellor Lawson that inflation (and interest rates) were approaching the same levels towards the end of her reign as it reached at the beginning. And of course the biggest boon to her political career was Argentina invading. Other policies like the Community Charge were an unmitigated disaster.
Overall, the big change with modern politicians isn't so much that she had a plan as her willingness to take radical actions that weren't part of the plan or some near-consensus view
It was not really like that. Britain was always big in financial services, that came from ships and Empire (insurance really). Plus then the US created the euro bond markets and oil created petrodollars. But it was an old boys club and very inefficient. Industry in the UK was already in a bad state and was going away already. As much accident as plan.
Not necessarily. Consider a society with two kinds of "Sneetches." One kind has stars, one does not. They begin with equal numbers on an island with equal opportunities, but socially they have network effects: They prefer to do business with "their own kind" and so forth.
Such a system could be unstable: A small, random increase in power by either group could accelerate over time the way tribes in survivor can create coïlitionsn and eliminate everyone else.
Now let's say we end up with all the positions of power held by the Sneetches with stars. A Sneetch without a star might make a similar comment. But perhaps, this Sneetch has the insight to see that what needs to be changed is the system, rather than merely shuffling the players around. Putting Sneetches without stars into positions of power in and of itself won't change the inherent problem of network effects. Perhaps things will realign around Sneetches from the West side of the Island, or Sneetches that like a particular sport, but still be discriminatory in a way.
This Sneetch might simply want to change the underlying mechanism of Sneetch society. Go for a cure, you might say, rather than relieve a symptom.
To suggest there is even a such a thing as being "like a man" is as inherently sexist as suggesting that all women are "too emotional" for any real position of power.
Goldman's argument is a version of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. Uchikoma is correct to discount it for what it is.
To suggest there is even a such a thing as being "like a man" is as inherently sexist as suggesting that all women are "too emotional" for any real position of power.
Seriously?
Maybe I misunderstand you, but it sounds like the following:
Woman stands up: "All the positions of power are held by men, who promote other men into positions of power. It is obvious that men are sexist!"
To which you reply: "To suggest that men are something-something is as inherently sexist as suggesting that women are too emotional to hold power. You are a sexist!!!!!"
Black person stands up: "And another thing, all the men in power are white!"
Somebody else replies, "Possibly, but the fact is that we are colour-blind and never noticed it. You are a racist!"
(the problem) Emma Goldman had with feminism, if women are looking to hold the same morally bankrupt positions of power that men have then equality is a false hope for all.
i.e.: If women obtain power their positions should be different from men because men hold morally bankrupt positions. Women who obtain power by being competent at the game as it stands/expressing views similar to men are not worth celebrating at all.
I'm not sure what you are arguing, but this is the original point and of course it is obviously a sexist position.
Not exactly. I see what you're getting at - but the original point is criticizing those positions of power as morally bankrupt and noting that although it is equality to see women in those same positions, those claiming it would be beneficial by making those positions more moral are holding to a false premise.
i.e. that women entering these positions, which the commenter holds as morally bankrupt, won't make them better.
Suppose that the people in power are doing things wrong. It is valid and not sexist to point out that putting other kinds of people in power to do the same things wrong, will not solve the real problem. The problem is that they are doing things wrong, not which plumbing they have.
He's saying that it's the position of power that is morally bankrupt, not the man that happens to be filling it today.
If tomorrow a woman was in the same position of power then it would still be morally bankrupt, because it is the position which leads to moral bankruptcy, not the person filling the position.
This is the kind of claim that is made by those arguing for systemic changes; i.e. that the system itself is corrupt and can't be fixed just by inserting "good people".
Thanks, that's a much better explanation in half as many words.
Personally, because I don't automatically view a position of power as corrupting, it's not a view I can support. 'Good people' make measurable differences everyday, and if women want to be those good people than all the power to them.
Should the first female nominee for U.S. Vice Present from the republican party, who rose to the top of an extremely male dominated field, serve as an inspiration for gender equality?
edit: mpyne said it best somewhere else in this thread:
"He's saying that it's the position of power that
is morally bankrupt, not the man that happens to
be filling it today.
If tomorrow a woman was in the same position of
power then it would still be morally bankrupt,
because it is the position which leads to moral
bankruptcy, not the person filling the position."
Perhaps most politicians aren't good role-models because a career in politics doesn't attract the kind of people who are good role-models.
Should the first female nominee for U.S. Vice Present from the republican party, who rose to the top of an extremely male dominated field, serve as an inspiration for gender equality?
I don't entirely like her politics, but have always found Condoleezza Rice quite inspiring. This might be an odd way of putting it (and don't misconstrue what I'm trying to say), but it always seemed that no one ever noticed she was a woman.
Proof positive that gender simply doesn't matter if you are the best at what you do.
That's because she's a Republican. Black republicans aren't held up as examples of racial progress. Instead, their motives are attacked by the liberal media[1].
Probably nobody has suffered more vile attacks than Clarence Thomas[2] for the crime of being Republican while black. To be an inspirational black politician, you must be liberal.
Colin Powell and Condi Rice are both reviled for their roles in the Iraq lie. As far as I know they are still considered examples of racial progress, despite this fact.
This cluster-fsck in Iraq doesn't boil down to one statement. A great book, recommended by Colin Powell as the most accurate, is Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies."
There's probably no-one truly objective on the subject, as politics are entwined in every aspect... but Clarke worked under four administrations. Tenet's book sheds light on the subject as well.
Out of curiosity, how would you describe the Iraq adventure? Is there anything good that can be said about it?
I met a man from Kirkuk 2 days ago - family scattered around the globe, and says he can't go home, or he will be dead in a week. The country is in ruins.
I very much doubt you'll get a useful answer. As you can see the person is hung up on a black/white/pedantic point of the use of the word lie up top. He won't be satisfied by anything less than absolutes.
While some were truly evil, I tend to believe that Bush wanted to believe it enough that he convinced himself of it. The human mind is a subject of its own.
That's absolutely ridiculous. The animus toward black republicans starts in the black community, not in the liberal community. Very very few black people identify as republican, it's practically taken for granted that the republican party does a terrible job of making blacks feel like we are part of their constituency. Furthermore most republican leaders are from districts with either few blacks altogether or few affluent blacks.
Liberals are not destroying the credibility of black republicans, the black community has a profoundly negative view of black republicans.
Indeed, there is a great hole in my heart today, MG was a good example of how a lady can balance both feminism, and supposed masculine activities of leadership, strong influence, unshakable character, and above all, the ability to change the world as we know it.
IG, was a similar case, though unpopular in west, due to the political situations back then, but here is a video, that dives into her personality.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKiQboyDMUo
PPS: I was in Liverpool today when the news arrived. For various complex reasons, there are actually street parties happening tonight. You had to be there in the 1980s to understand this otherwise rather odd fetish like response. I have memories of arriving back in Liverpool Lime Street rail station on a visit from University in the late 70s, walking up Brownlow Hill and being turned back by policemen armed with dust bin lids to catch the bricks being lobbed at them. I had to take the undergound to get to the other side of the 'lines' to get to my Dad. We then had to drive 30 miles around the city to get home (New Brighton). Later that night we watched the smoke plumes over the Anglican Cathedral.
I am one of "Thatcher's children" having grown up in the late seventies and eighties. I clearly remember watching her enter Downing St and my mother telling me that things were going to get better now a woman was in charge.
She oversaw wrenching shifts in Britain's social and economic structures, was hated, respected, but rarely loved and kicked out without ceremony.
But my abiding memories are of something getting done. Rarely were there somethings that everyone agreed upon, rarely was it done well, but things were done. Thatcher had an agenda when she came to power. Her "success" over the Falklands enabled her to push that agenda - one of massive economic change. It seemed obvious and overdue to her and her main advisors that the semi-Keynesian establishment needed shaking up. And she and her band of, at the time, outsiders, did just that. Something happened. Something inevitable.
In the deadlocked worlds of politics I see in the UK and US, this is a trait that might be worth admiring.
But now in my own middle age, well, if I were PM now, my personal focus would be on the changes needed to deal with the Internet as the Central nervous system of humankind - issues of privacy, of government accessibility, of security of networks and national assets, of education policy. Those are my "Bleedin obvious" policy shifts. Things I would drive home ruthlessly, because not to do so would be like a time traveller knowing the all the days winning horses and still not betting.
So, to sum up, doing something in politics takes a special kind of ruthlessness. Sometimes we need to have people who will sacrifice others in order to make the inevitable happen now - there are many mining towns feeling the sacrifice to this day.
But we need now not to debate the issues of 1980, but to look at the next inevitable changes - and do our best to get ahead of them. Much of the Eurozone troubles are down to the countries missing a Thatcher, and having politicians who simply waited till the inevitable happened. Can anyone spot a politician who gets the needs of 2040?
The economist Professor Frank Hahn also passed away recently this year. He was the instigator of the famous letter to her, signed by 364 economists, saying that her policies have no basis in economics and will deepen the recession.
He did redeem himself many years later when he signed a letter sympathising with her resistance against joining the EU monetary union. This was also the issue that was a big part of her downfall, while it now appears that her concerns showed much foresight.
Wrong is a loaded term. In politics I seem to be finding that there is the wrong goal, the wrong execution and the wrong consequences.
And all of this derives from ones initial starting point.
In 1979, the UK was recovering from a terrible decade, we had gone bankrupt (loans from IMF in 74, suffered years of
Union-led disruption (rubbish piled up in streets for months). New York was in a similar position as you can see from films of the period, with less overt union action.
So successive Tory (UK republicans) governments had had their entire, democratically elected, mandates wrecked by
unelected union leaders. You could see this as labour rectifiying biased institutions in favour of the working class, or you could see it as an attack on democracy. Neither would be "wrong". Thatcher saw it as latter and set out to destroy the power of the Unions. This also chimed with her personal views on self-reliance.
The goal she set out to achieve (to break unions "holding back business") she was mostly successful in.
It was not a "wrong" goal.
The execution was at times brutal - the 1984 miners strike divided our nation and is still being felt. One can argue it was wrong to do it that way. But three previous tory governments had tried other ways and failed.
As for consequences, well, UK industry contracted terribly, the Big Bang lit a fuse under the London financial sector and ... Greece and Spain and Portugal and France and Italy did not break their unions power in the 80s or 90s. Now both the unions power and their economies are broken.
At certain scales, and at certain time scales, wrong is really hard - I think you need to start measuring wrong in body counts, not ideology.
rich kid's tantrums. same as tatcher. how about thinking of 4th generation unemployment, starving people or anything else that will make a difference to the world?
you don't think differently. don't kid yourself. you like the rich kid's war
I've recently changed my view on this. HN hasn't been "just about tech and startups" for some time - the community is simply too diverse.
That's not necessarily a bad thing; I still always learn unique insights or new facts from threads one might consider off-topic. And that is the defining aspect of HN IMO (it's why I first joined years ago)
There are plenty of others who grew up in Thatcher's Britain I understand the negative sentiment of many Britons towards her.
My main beef is the squandering of Britain's oil. We had a one time bounty of oil in the UK and to deliver temporary tax cuts at the high end of the tax bracket her government sold off as much oil as possible as fast as possible at low low rates (<$10 per barrel) - a policy also aimed at financially attacking the Soviet Union. However as the UK slipped from the fourth largest exporter in the world to a net importer of oil, oil which is ten times as expensive, the UK has serious problems. The tax cuts are long gone, and I'm pretty sure nobody is paying for the UK's oil as a thank you for helping bankrupt the USSR.
I guess the point is while the social effects of her policies are the main focus of criticism for many, her economic prowess was based on a giveaway if a one-time resource wil long term negative strategic consequences for the country.
"I opposed almost everything she did (but found myself following many of them when I tried to get the Bosnian economy going by lowering taxes and freeing up the market). Though there will be many who saw her as the author of much destruction that we still mourn, much that she pulled down needed to be pulled down."
"She was better as destroyer of old tired institutions and lazy ways of thinking than she was as the builder of new ones; better at defining divisions than building cohesion. But probably that's what Britain needed then. Had we on the left not grown so lazy about our addictions to the easy ways of state corporatism, she would perhaps have been less successful at so cruelly exposing their hollowness."
"If politics is the ability to have views, hold to them and drive them through to success, she was undoubtedly the greatest prime minister of our age, and maybe even the greatest politician."
Didn't you hear? HN is now a general discussion forum where super intelligent technical people have wonderfully stimulating discussions about every topic in the news, and do it in a respectful and mature way.
Margaret Thatcher was a research chemist, a barrister and former "Secretary of State for Education and Science". Thatcher may also may have helped invent "soft-serve ice cream" [0].
RIP, the Great Iron Lady. You were a big inspiration to me. There would never be anyone like you and late Indra Gandhi. The two Maiden-de-People of mid-80s.
I dont know a lot about Thatcher but when Indira Gandhi's election was overturned by the courts on ground of election fraud she proceeded to suspend elections and civil liberties. I hope that you are correct and we would never see anyone like Indira Gandhi, no nation deserves to be ruled by a tyrant like her.
Right. Most people in the west don't know about The Emergency [1] following the fraud that got her elected. Then her political and social interference with the Sikh community (part of the most vocal opposition to the Emergency [2]), which lead to Operation Bluestar [3] and subsequently her assassination [4].
These events form the worst part of Indian politics since independence. Her rise to power was not due to her personality or skill. She was simply the daughter of Nehru, the first prime minister of India and a close aide of MK Gandhi.
I know Thatcher only from films and articles but Indira Gandhi was no maiden-de-people and if at all she was anything she was a spoil(and neglected) brat with perverted and suppressed sexual traits(since teenage), dictatorial attitude, a misleading/misguiding cabinet(cocoon of shrewd cronies) and a lunatic son who most probably desired to outdo Hitler(died in a plane crash, some say mum got him done).
[In the comparison her daughter-in-law seems so stoic and regal with a clean past, but supposedly(not guilty till proven) too corrupt to...]
She successfully exhibited the second trait, when she was was done for in a fair election, by imposing emergency rule over India - which essentially means what a coup-d'etat does to a democracy.
PS. Thatcher was not born a Baroness. So, she accepted it later it seems. Well, unlike most other parts of world them Brits still love their royals! Good going :-)
UK politics was dominated by the unions in a way that is unthinkable now and tax policy has changed a lot. It feels more honest than today's politics although what was proposed and what was delivered were not entirely in line.
The papers on that site are fascinating... I was only 10 when she came to power but she was a huge figure of that time.
I'm still confused why even relatively normal tech/libertarian-lite Scottish people seem to hate her so much (e.g. cstross), to the point of dancing on her grave.
- The poll tax being first implemented here in Scotland
- Implicit support for South Africa's apartheid regime
- Squandering Scottish oil revenues on unsustainable tax cuts
- Allowing the US to station nuclear cruise missiles in the UK when there was very strong anti-nuclear feelings
- Ruthlessly closing heavy industries with no apparent thought for the social costs ("no such thing as society") - this hit central Scotland really badly
- The "Sermon on the Mound" - which upset a lot of Christians in Scotland
- The violence and oppression of the Miners Strike (mind you, not that the miners were saints)
- Insensitive handling of Northern Ireland (e.g. the hunger strikers)
NB I'm not necessarily saying that I agree with all of these points - but there is still a lot of bitterness in Scotland about the Thatcher years.
Personally, I think she probably did more good than harm for the UK as a whole - but lets not pretend that there was a lot of harm caused by her goverment and a whole generation of people in Scotland will never forget that.
cstross isn't Scottish though he lives in Edinburgh, but I think he's Northern English so the same general principle applies:
Being a Scottish Tory is like being an African-American Republican. Even if you agree with some or most of their stated policies, you're all too aware of the fact that in reality they've been waging class-warfare against you, your family and neighbors for decades and that often the libertarian (or otherwise) economic theories are just convenient masks for the worst kind of nepotistic crony capitalism, and that wide support for their polices is gained via populist xenophobia.
She was one of those people who manage to inspire emotion in others.
A lot of bad, but she garnered (and still does somewhat) a huge amount of respect.
For someone who has so much public hatred around her, you have to remember she still managed to win elections while all this was far more raw and happening around her.
Her election success is only because the voting system here is biased and most of the population aren't really evolved past primate level. The media control the outcome of an election.
Her popularity is a myth perpetrated by the media.
There is no respect from anyone who knows the facts.
she (god) sure will if she's not a miner... otherwise, she'll be in for a rough time. either way, the sooner she's forgotten, the better for all mankind. the rich already have it better, it's the poor that need help.
i'm sorry you feel that way. losing your soul must be traumatic
Not quite true - particularly of WW2 where is was big and long. Dresden, Hiroshima, Russian treatment of German prisoners etc. The list is very long. And where do you draw the line between aggressor and defender? Were Germany and Japan the aggressors in 1945?
New Zealand helped defend the UK, as did many dominion nations. However while the threat to New Zealand was felt (from Japan), it was hardly playing the role of a defender (and declared war on Germany before the UK did). This position is common in many conflicts.
Email from my father at 7.17 this morning: >>I just looked at the Grauniad, Independent, TImes, Telegraph - all have front pages dominated by her. I then went to the Scotsman to see what the view was… there was no mention at all….<<
I see she is there now.
She put hundreds of thousands of UK citizens under secret service surveillance for the crime of disagreeing with her government's decisions.
I was one of them. Aged sixteen I walked out of our house on the way to school every morning and passed the fake BT engineer changing the tape in the green switch box outside the house next door, reattaching something to our house phone with crocodile clips.
Mail took weeks to arrive because it was intercepted and read en route. I was stopped for questioning at every border point I passed in Europe until I was in my late 20s.
All this because not being a Thatcherite in Britain in the 1980s made us "enemies of the state".
Yep. I saw this with my own eyes once. I had a disreputable youth in the 1980s which involved trying to steal linesman sets (for phreaking) from those old yellow BT Bedford vans (anyone remember Busby?)
One of them turned out to be a spook wagon. This was in Islington in north London. Really nearly got in deep shit on that one.
People might think you are nuts but its spot on and its worse now than ever.
He also wrote a book about the amount of police surveillance going on in the UK.
I hated Thatcher. I wouldn't put the surveillance down to just her. There were plenty of other people involved in making lists and monitoring people. (The building industry would use blacklists of agitators. This was so severe it was one of the drivers for the data protection act, and it was this list that caused the act to be extended to cover non-computerised information too.)
Certainly, it would be odd for people to blame Thatcher for the number of CCTV in the UK now. The UK has about 20% of all the world's CCTV! (I haven't checked this, it was a comment on a Radio 4 news programme so maybe it's nonsense).
Well there was the collusion between the government, police, and courts during the miners strike and also the use of blacklisting.
Then there's the homophobia (another common strand with the kind of control freaks who are attracted to fascism) - guess who said: "children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay".
Then there was the support of war-criminal, torturer, and undisputed actual-Fascist Pinochet, whom she protected from trial and described as "bringing democracy to Chile". There's a reason they say you can tell a lot about a man from his friends.
A telling detail on the corporatocracy was when her economic advisor, Alan Walters, admitted in an interview that they had deliberately kept unemployment high to drive down wages.
I don't consider her explicitly a Fascist, (my own contrary view is that she was more a massive opportunist and somewhat a political fraud, which might even be amusing at some level if it hadn't involved so many deaths) - but some have sincere reasons to see her as having conducted a kind of fascism-lite. If it walks like a duck...
On reflection for measure and balance, I guess I should also have mentioned her support of apartheid (describing Nelson Mandela as "a terrorist"), and her support of the Khmer Rouge :/
Where would you place Blair? I'm unsure what to think of his hidden religious side, but have strong views on his Murdoch ties, Bush pandering and subsequent obfuscating of his role in the Iraq debacle.
However, she rose to the top of an extremely male dominated field through conviction and sheer force of personality. And I think that deserves respect in itself.
Given the current issues surrounding gender equality in many fields, her example should serve as inspiration.
(Fact I have just learned; she was born just down the road from me! I'm quite surprised Grantham doesn't make a bigger deal of her roots there)