#uk government systems

[neighbourhoodtwo]

usamericans please stop putting your "congrats uk!! hope this happens to us in november!!" posts in the uk politics tag please please you have no idea

[nando161mando]

Palestine Action shuts down supplier of Israel's largest arms firm

Palestine Action group occupied Grid Defence Systems, physically destroying part of the supply chain for weapons that supply the Israeli military’s campaign in Gaza.

The targeting of Grid Defence Systems, was cracked down upon by riot police. The company is a military hardware suppliers for several arms companies including Israel’s largest weapons firm, Elbit Systems. While the U.K. government continue to arm Israel’s ongoing war crimes, Palestine Action escalates its attempts to prevent such weapons being creating in Britain to begin with.

[vryivs]

I always forget that monarchists exist and then I see someone with the username duchessofmyheartforever or williamisababe posting about how it's mean to giggle at an ultrarich economic leech experiencing just a fraction of struggle and inconvenience (because lets be honest, he probably wont kick the bucket—his doctors are paid to keep his corpse animated long after it ceases to be humane)

[violent-femmess]

imagine if we put the kings coronation money towards fixing food poverty in the UK, the cost of the queens funeral + the coronation is enough to solve the child food poverty crisis in the UK but instead tax payers money was wasted on a dead woman and a dying princess in a golden fucking cart. the potholes in the road were temporarily filled with sand because they "didnt have the funds" because apparently £100 MILLION POUNDS of TAXPAYERS MONEY is better spent on a cunt in a cart than itd be if it was spent on fixing our roads for our safety or saving children in poverty from dying due to malnutrition, they wont get a fucking gold cart, they wont even get their gcses because the government DONT CARE ABOUT THE PEOPLE THEY CARE ABOUT THE PROFIT.

THEY DO NOT CARE IF WE DIE AS LONG AS THEY ARE LIVING IN LUXURY

[declanisms]

if u r not pro palestine u r pro genocide and pro war crimes xx

[karliahs]

hey so after reading through your entire ao3 account i just have to tell you that you’re hands down one of the most moving writers i’ve read in a long long time?? i guess i was just wondering what kinds of things influence your writing style and if you have any favorite books you’d recommend!! basically your prose is incredible and i would absolutely eat up more of it/anything like it

💛💛💛💛💛💛 this is such a sweet message and i can't tell you how happy it made me!! that means a great deal to me that you like my stuff enough to want to read more things like it

i don't necessarily know that there are writers who i feel like i'm emulating with my prose/writing style, or who i feel are similar to me. it's kind of hard to see that stuff with your own work, maybe? BUT i will absolutely ramble about some of my fave authors/books that i think everyone should read

i do think my stuff is influenced by the fact that i have read a lot of children's fiction - i studied children's lit a fair bit at uni and it's what i wrote my undergrad dissertation about. and while i know adults read/enjoy my work as well as teens, i think i take a fair bit from the children's/YA world in terms of writing about big/intense topics but gently

one of my fave children's authors and authors in general is frances hardinge. she is just...christ. her imagination, her world-building, her characters. one of the best things a book can do imo is take you to a really dark place and then back out of it with equal conviction, and the lie tree is one of the best examples i've seen of that. and i think about a face like glass and its worldbuilding constantly, and a skinful of shadows has the sickest premise on earth and absolutely delivers on it

i do also read a lot of short stories! they are underrated imo and very much their own artform. in the fic world if you lean towards oneshots/shorter works like mine then i'd recommend trying them out! i will say my taste in short stories tends to lean towards the weird and unsettling...like mouthful of birds by samanta schweblin, how to gut a fish by sheila armstrong, salt slow by julia armfield, eyes guts throat bones by moira fowley-doyle

hmmm people have previously commented on my writing being quite introspective and grounded, more about people feeling things than about plot, and my favourite book along those lines is very cold people by sarah manguso. it's so vivid and emotive and well-told. i have recced it to several people by being like listen nothing happens in this book and also it slaps.

i try to infuse my writing with a sense of compassion, and authors who do this really well imo are becky chambers, a long way to a small angry planet especially, and martha wells with murderbot, too.

uhhh these next ones i don't think i can draw even a tenuous connection with my own writing, but i think they're so good and everyone should read them. the mercies and the dance tree by kiran millwood hargrave are gorgeous and devastating. so is idaho by emily ruskovich, one of those books that's too good for me to even really talk about it coherently. piranesi by susanna clarke also - too good, can't say anything about it. courtney summers writes with uncomprising vivid rage, and i come back to her work often because of it: the project and sadie are my biggest recs, though maybe look up content warnings for sadie first because it's...a lot. actually lots of the ones in this paragraph have some very heavy subject matter so read with caution/possibly look up warnings first

i don't know that i answered the question you asked exactly but thank you very much for asking it, and happy reading!

[mystuffgoeshere]

I'm reblogging this again to add to it, for almost all of history you could go and live wherever you liked, you could just walk there and nobody would care, people don't realise how new and arbitrary the borders we have in the modern day are. You can't tell me you can look at this map and instantly know where every border goes, nobody could do that because they're arbitrary:

I often think about these maps without country borders, this is what the world once looked like to a person travelling, you could walk from the Urals to the Strait of Gibraltar without encountering any official governing body and especially no border checkpoints. You wouldn't even be able to tell when you crossed a border (if we're in a time period when there were one). Borders are an unnatural invention, and an incredibly recent one, it wasn't really until after the 1st World War countries began introducing them.

We should welcome people where we live, I am even in favour of helping people get here. I'm so annoyed that the government of the place where I live is currently engaging in active and passive denial of people to come here which will result in many of their deaths, even when they're fleeing oppressive regimes. Not to mention especially in recent years how the media has managed to successfully manipulated even the liberals into believing there's "just to many people here".

I feel so sick of hearing over the last couple of years from the apparent "political sensibles" and liberals claiming "I care and want to welcome people, but we're just accepting too many". I understand it's a matter of media manipulation but if you find yourself telling yourself that I really want you to look inward and question it more, whatever barrier you think there is to accepting everyone who wants to come here just does not exist. I am certain any conditions you can think of are consequences of the society we have built around us and not inherent to where you live, it may require work and investment, but this is what many societies need today regardless, and we can accept more people.

[nando161mando]

[Glascoed, Cymru]

Early this morning on January 3rd, over 60 activists from the Cymru Peace Coalition have shut down BAE Systems PLC Glascoed site, one of the UK's largest munitions factories.

[lexlawuk]

UK Skilled Worker Visa Reforms 2025

The Government’s 2025 Immigration White Paper marks a significant turning point in the evolution of the Skilled Worker visa system. It proposes sweeping reforms aimed at curbing low-skilled migration, raising skill thresholds, and aligning immigration with workforce planning and domestic training strategies. The paper also signals the UK’s intent to pivot away from dependency on international…

[wild-at-mind]

gotta be honest, it's really annoying after a victory for the right wing (or even the centrist only slightly left like the current UK labour party) for pundits to be all like 'this shows that really what we need is something much more left wing. Like the most left wing you could possibly imagine. that is what the people want, and they showed it in their vote today. It's a shame :'( that this cannot be provided for The People. And when it is provided and no one wants it, that was a smear campaign.'

What the fuck can we do about it then? Do you have suggestions, labour party leaver Owen Jones?

[readerviews]

"An Alternative Government System" by Ahmed Abu Latif

A Bold and Incisive Work Presenting Fresh Solutions in Governance #books #bookreview #reading #readerviews

An Alternative Government System Ahmed Abu LatifAuthor House UK (2024)ISBN: 979-8823087506Reviewed by Lily Andrews for Reader Views (09/2024) “An Alternative Government System: New Provisional Income Tax System, New Election and Voting System” by Ahmed Abu Latif is a revolutionary work that presents a fresh new paradigm for running a responsible, transparent, and properly regulated…

[gaysindistress]

Things that I feel like would happen when you’re in a relationship with Simon Riley.

Simon Riley masterlist

1. First off he hates the word ‘boyfriend’.

Maybe it’s because he’s in his mid thirties or something but he can’t stand being called your boyfriend. He’s more than that but also not at the same time. You live together, have access to each other’s bank accounts (which is only because he hates it when you try to fight him about him giving you money), and you’re each others emergency contact. He thinks of himself as your husband. The man wears a silicone ring when he’s home and a necklace with the ring that’s totally not a wedding band when he’s working. Price has seen the chain once or twice and smirks, shooting him a knowing look but never says a word.

Simon cannot stand it when people get nosy and want to know what your relationship status is. You’re together and that’s all that matters. No one needs to know that you’re the beneficiary of his will and life insurance policy or that he’s put you on all of his accounts. No one needs to know that he buys you anything you want but has only ever bought you two rings; a thin gold band with a flower engraved on it and its twin a matching emerald ring. No one needs to know that when he gifted them to you, there were tears and promises of safety, love, and happiness whispered against feverish skin. No one needs to know that he has your name woven into his chest tattoo.

No one needs to know any of that because your relationship is between him and you only.

2. You are not some submissive little house wife. You are a strong independent woman and he prefers it that way.

I know this one goes against what most people say but hear me out on this. Simon has been independent since birth practically. He’s only had himself to count on for years. Even in the military, he’s only been able to rely himself. Sure the others watch out for him but if it came down to it, he’s the only one who’s going to get himself out alive.

The thought of someone else relying on him in that way is terrifying. He can’t even fathom what it would be like to look at another person and fully trust them in that way. Half the time he feels like he can’t even be trusted to take care of himself let alone another human. In theory a sweet docile housewife is great with the meals and clean house but not for him. He needs to know that you can hold your own. He needs to know that you can be independent and carry on without him if something happened while he was working. He needs to know that you will be okay if he doesn’t come back.

You have to be okay without him no matter how much it pains him to think about it.

Like I said before, he’s made you the beneficiary of everything so he knows you’ll be set financially but that’s not enough. He’s made Price promise to keep an eye out for you. He’s made you promise to let Price do that and you agreed because it’s Simon who’s asking but you’d tell anyone else to fuck off.

In addition to all of that, he’s installed the best security system the government has to offer in your house. You have a very expensive and large safe in your shared closet that he’s instructed you to only open if you feel unsafe. While you might not like it, you agree to go shooting with him so he can sleep at night knowing that you could protect yourself if he’s not home. He’s gone as far as to make sure you have all of the licenses and certificates that are needed to legally own firearms in the UK.

He’s not leaving any opportunity for you to be vulnerable or have your ‘safety checks’, as he calls them, taken away.

3. Simon Riley is a godless man…until he meets you.

Now this is entirely my own headcannon with no evidence to support it so bear with me.

Simon had a shitty childhood where his mom would pray to a god who never listened and his dad would shout verses at him when he was drunk. God was a mythical figure that he was told stories off with nothing to show for it. He did believe at one point but then his dad never got better, his mom wore bruises of every shade, and his brother found comfort in drugs.

He found himself praying when he was being tortured by the Mexican cartel. Between the flashbacks of his abusive past, he prayed to a god who had failed him so many times before to help him. He prayed again as he dug himself out of that Texas grave with the major’s jaw bone. He wailed his prayers when he found his family executed after Sparks tried to kill him.

After that he deemed himself a Godless man. Years of praying had passed with nothing. This god had decided that Simon was not worthy of a miracle so why would he continue to worship him?

That was until he met you. He finds himself praying before every mission, every time he has to leave you, every time he’s on his way home, and just about any other time he thinks of you. He doesn’t know what exactly he’s praying for other than for you to be there when he gets back.

He whispers his prayers to an absent god against your skin as he worships your body, soul, and heart. He promises to be devoted to you until his last breath and vows to find you again in whatever afterlife awaits you. He pledges to find solace in you and only you when his haunting nightmares return. He makes an oath to your heart that it will never weather another storm alone again for his will take whatever beating that comes your way. He shows you that he will love you in the same manner as a Hozier song; putting you above all else because you have become his religion, his faith, his beliefs, his life.

You have become all that he is and he thanks the god he once believed in for you. He prays again but to you, his heart, his love, and his beacon through the enteral storm of life.

[nando161mando]

[Maidenhead , UK]

Call to rally support for four actionists from Palestine Action at the local copshop after they are detained for trashing the offices of Elbit Systems, (war profiteers) (SL6 8LP)

[idkimnotreal]

three countries, different meanings for “middle class”.

united states: the bulk of families. office jobs and college education, able to live comfortably. live in suburban homes far from the city centre.

united kingdom: skilled lower class, urban workers. will never be upper class, not even through economic ascension (unless marrying up i guess). live in modest suburban homes with limited space.

brazil: the top 5% earners. not only able to live comfortably, but can afford additional expenses, such as travel, private healthcare, private education. either college educated or a public servant. live in wealthy vertical suburbs near the city centre.

[13thpythagoras]

*you guys are getting paid reaction*

Rome's power didn't evolve into the Catholic Church?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ideas Lying Around

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in DC TOMORROW (Mar 4), and in RICHMOND on WEDNESDAY (Mar 5). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

I get a special pleasure from citing Milton Friedman. I like to imagine that as I do, he groans around the red-hot spit protruding from his jaws, prompting howls of laughter from the demons who pelt him with molten faeces for all eternity.

If you're lucky enough not to know about Friedman, here's the short version. Friedman was a kind of court sorcerer to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet, and other assorted authoritarian, hard-right leaders who set us on the path to the hellscape we inhabit today. But before Friedman rose to prominence and influence, he was a crank. Specifically, he was a crank who dedicated his life to rolling back all the progress of the New Deal and re-establishing the Gilded Age:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

In his crank days, people were justifiably skeptical of this project. "Milton," they'd say, "people like New Deal programs. They like the minimum wage, the 40-hour work-week, and the assurance that they won't be maimed, poisoned, burned alive, or otherwise killed on the job. They relish a dignified retirement, quality education for their children, and the assurance that no one is starving to death in their country's borders. People like national parks! They like Medicare! They like libraries, museums, and reliable weather forecasts! How, Milton, do you propose to convince the vast majority of people that they should settle for being forelock-tugging plebs, groveling before their social betters for the chance to scrub their toilets?"

Friedman had an answer: "In times of crisis, ideas can move from the fringe to the center in an eyeblink. Our job is to keep good ideas lying around, in anticipation of that crisis."

When the oil crisis hit, when prices spiked in the USA and abroad, Friedman seized his opportunity. The years following the oil crisis saw a violent political revolution in which organized labor, social justice movements, and the political opposition to oligarchy were crushed under police batons and the guns of Pinochet's thugs. The world was transformed. Left parties like UK Labour were remade as austerity-pilled neoliberals (not for nothing did Margaret Thatcher call Tony Blair "her greatest accomplishment," and it took Bill Clinton to pass a welfare "reform" bill that was too extreme even for Reagan to get through Congress).

Friedman was a monster.

But.

He had a hell of a theory of change.

When prices spiral, when people can't pay their bills anymore, when their retirement savings are wiped out, anything is possible. The oil crisis wasn't Jimmy Carter's fault, but the voters still delivered a Ba'ath Party-style Republican majority in 1980. The covid shocks weren't the fault of the world governments that presided over pandemic inflation, but they were creamed in the ensuing elections.

Let's talk about Trump's tariffs here. Trump's goal is to force a re-shoring of the American industrial capacity that was shipped to low-wage, low-regulation corporate havens around the world after the Reagan revolution. The pandemic provided a vivid lesson about the problems with long, brittle supply chains where all the slack has been extracted and converted to dividends and stock buybacks. That kind of system may work well – at least to the extent that it keeps Walmart's shelves full of cheap goods – but holy shit did it ever fail badly. Re-shoring is a good idea, as are other forms of pro-resiliency industrial policy.

But re-shoring doesn't happen overnight. As we saw during China's covid lockdowns, when one supplier ceases to ship goods, other suppliers can't spring up overnight to take up the slack. China itself became a manufacturing powerhouse thanks to extensive state support and planning, and it took decades. That kind of patient, long-run, planned process is the best-case scenario (and it still caused wrenching dislocations to Chinese society). Simply throwing up tariff walls and demanding that industry figure it out – amid the resulting economic chaos and the political instability it brings – isn't a plan, it's a disaster.

Redistributing the means of production around the world is a necessary and urgent project, but it won't be advanced through Trump's rapid, unscheduled mid-air disassembly of the global system of trade. Tariffs will cause breakdowns in neoliberalism's fragile supply chains, and the ensuing chaos – mass unemployment, shortages, political rage – will make it even harder for countries (including the USA) to rebuild the productive capacity vaporized by 40 years of neoliberalism.

This is our oil crisis, in other worlds: a moment in which a belligerent superpower's ill-considered monkeying with the underpinnings of global production will cause chaos, the crisis in which "ideas can move from the periphery to the center" in an eyeblink. If Steve Bannon can call himself a Leninist, then leftists can call themselves Friedmanites. This is our opportunity.

Or rather, it's our opportunity to seize – or lose. Governments are defaulting to retaliatory tariffs as the best response to Trump's tariffs. This is political poison: making everything your country imports from the USA more expensive is a very weird way to punish America for its trade war. Remember the glaring lesson of pandemic inflation: a government that presides over rising prices will be destroyed by the electorate.

There's a much better alternative, one that strikes at the very roots of American oligarchy, whose extreme wealth and corrosive political influence comes from its holdings in rent-extracting monopolies, especially Big Tech monopolies.

Tech giants are the major factor in US economic health. Take Big Tech stocks out of the S&P 500 and you've got a stagnant market punctuated by periods of decline. Superficially, US tech companies have different sources of extraordinary profit, but a closer look reveals that they all share the same foundation: Big Tech makes the bulk of its money in the form of monopoly rents, backstopped by global IP treaties.

Apple and Google take a 30% cut of every dollar spent in an app, and it's a felony to jailbreak a phone to make a new app store with the industry standard 1-3% transaction fees. Google and Meta take 51% out of every ad dollar, and publishers and advertisers are locked into their ecosystems by abusive contracts and technological countermeasures. HP charges $10,000/gallon for the colored water you put in your printer, and third-party ink and refills violate the anti-circumvention laws the US has crammed down the throats of every country's legislature. Tesla makes its fattest margins by renting you features that are installed in your car at the factory, from autopilot to the ability to use your battery's whole charge, raking in monthly fees from you and anyone you sell your car to – and the reason your mechanic can't just permanently unlock all that DLC for $50 is the IP laws that your country agreed to enforce in order to trade with the USA. Mechanics pay $10k/year per manufacturer for the tools to interpret the error codes generated by your car, and the only reason no one is selling a $50/month universal diagnostic service is – once again – US-originated IP laws that came in a parcel with trade agreements that gave your country's exporters access to US markets. Farmers pay John Deere $200 every time they fix their own tractors, because the repairs won't work until a technician comes out and types an unlock code into the tractor's keyboard – and bypassing that unlock code is a crime under the laws passed to comply with international treaties.

These aren't profits – they're rents. It's money Big Tech gets from owning a factor of production, not money it gets from actually making something. The app maker takes all the risks, but Apple and Google cream off 30% of their gross income. Big Tech's profits are almost an afterthought when compared to its rents, the junk-fee platform fees and farcically expensive consumables. For tech firms, capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism…and technofeudalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

America's robust GDP figures are a mirage, artificially buoyed up by the monopoly rents extracted by US Big Tech, who prey on Americans and foreigners:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/18/pikettys-productivity/#reaganomics-revenge

But foreigners don't have to tolerate this nonsense. Governments around the world signed up to protect giant American companies from small domestic competitors (from local app stores – for phones, games consoles, and IoT gadgets – to local printer cartridge remanufacturers) on the promise of tariff-free access to US markets. With Trump imposing tariffs will-ye or nill-ye on America's trading partners large and small, there is no reason to go on delivering rents to US Big Tech.

The first country or bloc (hi there, EU!) to do this will have a giant first-mover advantage, and could become a global export powerhouse, dominating the lucrative markets for tools that strike at the highest-margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in the history of the human race. Like Jeff Bezos told the publishers: "your margin is my opportunity":

https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/the-cost-of-your-margin-is-my-opportunity

In times of crisis, ideas can move from the periphery to the center in an eyeblink. Many of us have spent decades organizing and mobilizing against these extractive, dangerous, destabilizing abuses of technology, where the computer-powered devices we rely on for everything are designed to serve their manufacturers' shareholders, at our expense. And yet, these technologies have only proliferated, infecting everything from insulin pumps and ventilators to coffee makers and "smart" TVs.

It's time for a global race to the top – for countries to compete with one another to see who will capture US Big Tech's margins the fastest and most aggressively. Not only will this make things cheaper for everyone else in the world – it'll also make things cheaper for Americans, because once there is a global, profitable trade in software that jailbreaks your Big Tech devices and services, it will surely leak across the US border. Canada doesn't have to confine itself to selling reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to beleaguered Americans – it can also set up a brisk trade in the tools of technological self-determination and liberation from Big Tech bondage.

Taking the margins for Big Tech's most profitable enterprises to zero, globally, will strike at the very heart of American oligarchy, and the hundreds of millions tech giants flushed into the political system to put Trump into office again. A race to the top for technological liberation benefits everyone – including Americans.

Truly, it would be a rising tide that lifted all boats (except for oligarchs' superyachts - those, it will swamp and sink).

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh