“Enough is enough”: Campaigners call on housing developers to reopen community cycling path after a 6-month closure turns into 3 years

Just wondering what your proposed alternative to capitalism is?

Easy to spout meaningless slogans online, a bit harder to propose a meaningful alternative.

There are alternatives, but as Corbyn found out, proposing them brings the entire force of the establishment down on you.

It was obviously an establishment plot against Corbyn.

Strangely, that same establishment then brought down Truss.

I'm guessing the Deep State are just a bunch of centrist dads?

No, Truss brought down Truss. Even by tory standards she was/is regarded as a swivel eyed loon.

That's what the deep state wants you to think anyway. Wake up, sheeple.

She had just won a leadership election so there must have been some members of the Conservative party who thought she was worth a shot.

She was brought to heel by the bond markets ultimately.

Can't simultaneously borrow billions for tax cuts and energy subsidies.

Since Truss, Starmer has had to massively reel in his spending plans too.

The bond market has awoken from its post 2008 torpor and is back to doing what it's always done.

Rich_cb wrote:

She had just won a leadership election so there must have been some members of the Conservative party who thought she was worth a shot.

She was brought to heel by the bond markets ultimately.

I thought she was chosen because if people squinted, they thought they could see Thatcher*?

Presumably if it hadn't been the bond markets it would have been the realisation that the lady was very much for turning - indeed the envy of Mr. Flip-flop on the other benches. (Apparently Thatcher was amenable to being persuaded one way or another *before* coming out on a particular issue and going deaf to contrary advice - as most enduring politicians must be).

* For some reason this is considered electoral gold. Indeed there have been some unlikely "tribute acts" based on those principles including a couple of women and even a man (Tony Blair).

Rich_cb wrote:

She had just won a leadership election so there must have been some members of the Conservative party who thought she was worth a shot. She was brought to heel by the bond markets ultimately. Can't simultaneously borrow billions for tax cuts and energy subsidies. Since Truss, Starmer has had to massively reel in his spending plans too. The bond market has awoken from its post 2008 torpor and is back to doing what it's always done.

To be fair, I think Truss got voted in as the Tory members(!) didn't want a non-white leader. She also made a lot of promises which appealed to them too, but we don't know why the members(!) voted the way they did. It's notable that Sunak was in the lead until it came down to a choice between Sunak and Truss which does imply to me that ethnicity became more important than competence.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-60037657

I think your own prejudices may have clouded your interpretation of the result.

Zahawi and Braverman both endorsed Truss as did Mordaunt. It's not surprising that a majority of their supporters followed suit.

Concluding that large numbers of Conservative party members are voting based on racist prejudice after a leadership contest that was incredibly diverse seems misguided.

Even more so when you consider that Braverman and Baddenoch are some of the most popular MPs with conservative members.

https://conservativehome.com/2023/12/28/our-survey-kemi-badenoch-is-fron...

Rich_cb wrote:

I think your own prejudices may have clouded your interpretation of the result. Zahawi and Braverman both endorsed Truss as did Mordaunt. It's not surprising that a majority of their supporters followed suit. Concluding that large numbers of Conservative party members are voting based on racist prejudice after a leadership contest that was incredibly diverse seems misguided. Even more so when you consider that Braverman and Baddenoch are some of the most popular MPs with conservative members. https://conservativehome.com/2023/12/28/our-survey-kemi-badenoch-is-fron...

It's purely conjecture, but it's notable how Sunak was the clear winner in all the ballots and then lost in the direct choice between the two.

Members and MPs have different priorities.

Conservative party members tend to be to the right of many of their MPs so it's unsurprising that they opted for the right wing candidate.

The fact that Braverman and Baddenoch are membership favourites does pour some cold water on your conjecture.

In fact, based on that it would be more reasonable to assume they voted for Truss based on gender.

Not so long ago Humans discovered a large sack of used fivers under the bed (fossil fuels). They are now in the process of wasting it on shiny baubles for short term gain at the expense of their own medium term future (and that of much of the rest of Earth's biomass). Unfortunately, this is regardless of politics, either democratic or demagogic.

Earth as a planet will be fine.

Confusing capital with income indeed.

OTOH one might also ask how it could be different. Evolution lacks foresight and is notorious for favoring "good enough, right now" *. Where there is balance it seems it is dynamic rather than static ("punctuated equilibrium" is an observation where much depends on the "eye of the observer"). Things act to propagate themselves but that's just "into the next round".

Of course coalitions and conspiracies can arise but it's rather difficult to set up "collective voluntary restraint". At least for humans we tend to chafe at restrictions and are strongly attracted by shiny things (or greater social prestige).

* Despite that producing some amazing designs. Turns out of you throw an excess of fools at an open field of problems for long enough...

It's a good test to see if intelligence (we know enough of the science) can overcome evolutionary instincts (irrational under current circumstances).

levestane wrote:

It's a good test to see if intelligence (we know enough of the science) can overcome evolutionary instincts (irrational under current circumstances).

Hmm... I think I understand where you're coming from there, and I also am sympathetic to more "long term, low resource" ideas.   But ... it's a day of rabbit holes!  A lot to unpack in that short sentence.

Fundamentally - you seem to be alluding to a disagreement between "mind and body" in some way - which is a very deep rabbit hole!

Attempting to manouver round that - evolutionary instincts vs. intelligence: absent a religious explanation both appear products of an evolutionary process and both "natural" (arguments still rage about ideas / cutural transmission) - they may differ but in the human case both "ideas" and "humans" currently require a human to continue!  (We can store or transmit ideas via other media but after even a short period we can have great difficulty simply reading these messages, never mind getting the full "meanings" of them).

Without getting sci-fi and distopian, say you could de-couple "intelligence" from the "biological human" - would that "intelligence" be more or less interested in the long-term future?  If it had a finite physical manifestation it might be no more interested in the longer term than the presumed more grubby "evolutionary instincts".

It could be either way - perhaps humans would be no more relevant to it than e.g. brine shrimps are to us.  OTOH although computer viruses can replicate themselves they ultimately (currently) rely on humans providing and maintaining computers for them to run on.  So at least for now they also should "care" about having humans in the future.  Or such an intellect might simply differ in detail about the timescale of future it was concerned about.  Our pets, domesticated plants and cold viruses all in various ways are "interested" in a future which contains humans - but their timescales can be very different (as is their degree of dependence of course).

The time period we're talking about is important.  At a certain point this becomes rather abstract.  How much should we weight the interest of our putative (children's)^n children over that of those currently alive?

It's almost certain in the future eventually there won't be "humans" - if only because "evolution" likely changes us into something sufficiently different (in the way that we don't tend to call humans chimps, or fish, or possibly "weird sponges").  Since evolution doesn't necessarily have a preferred "direction" even if our direct "line" continues there's no guarantee that "intelligence" is maintained in our descendants.  Beyond that our location may be uninhabitable within a billion years, and even if we spread to further worlds space is apparently expanding and thermodynamics applies so eventually there may be no low-entropy regions to harness...

In the more immediate term - if we could navigate a more sustainable way forward - for how long and at what "developmental level"?  Who gets to choose?  How is that enforced?

Because "humans" there may not be a realistic "play" which leads us to e.g. a much reduced level of resource consumption.  If that were so what benefit to continue to wear a hair shirt while Rome burns?

OR perhaps there is a way to do this but it requires some unpalatable social changes.  Perhaps like North Korea - they've reduced the resource use of a large section of their population (in many cases lethally).  Albeit that is not necessarily an overall reduction e.g. they're stinting the populace to boost the military and benefit the elite...

Would we care to live in a long-term society which more resembles that of social insects?  Or with an expansive system of "eco-religious taboos"?

Much as I generally enjoy your posts, this is too longwinded, and doesn't really improve on the initial argument.
The question is really simple, can our individual intelligence which, apparently in a majority is enough to make them comprehend the problem of climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss, and wish for changes apt to stop them, supersede our more socially oriented instincts of belonging to a group, and obtaining a more elevated status in that group by whichever means that group uses for that purpose at any given time, which by and large make us disregard, what we know about our current status symbols being unsustainable for the planet we live on.
No need to invoke the distant future when the actual problems will make life as we know it impossible on most of the planet in so short a timescale as a single digit number of generations.
And I'm a bit disappointed in the limited number of actual solutions you envisage, that don't seem to expand a lot on what some of the more antagonistic posters on here are capable to imagine (or rather to dig up from the past).

I bored you, I bored myself!

Indeed an example of the problem? We'll often splurge today when we can - and in a sense that *is* "life as we know it? At the same time we hope / expect to be here tomorrow so it's of benefit to our future selves not to make a mess.

Practical solutions to pressing issues, I agree. And we know several *proved* ones like cycling - but there are a bunch of practical ways to "do more with less".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seymour_(author)

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

And people have even had some thoughts on the "how" of that overall (couple of random examples):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful

https://longnow.org/

Given humans are rather social creatures I'd say its more a "group" or systems question than just an "individuals vs. society". We are self-interested but humans seem to be - more or less - mainly concerned with other humans.

Just on "solutions" even the apparently simple "everyone benefits" open goal ones like providing for active travel are at best ... very slow to "take"?

So ... I think my ramble was tilting at a slightly different question. What does "sustainable" mean to relatively short-lived creatures, in shortish-duration social organisations? Indeed ones whose "life as we know it" has been changing at an accelerating rate?

Worth remembering that for millenia humans have had radical impacts on their environment. Albeit orders of magnitude less than now. And possibly for even longer although some early examples are now less certain eg.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07897-1

That question is not necessarily one that has an answer.

This is it in a nutshell.

I wouldn't be surprised if the developer is hoping to renegotiate how many houses it can built or whether it can ditch or modify certain planning conditions to maximise their profits. They might even be hoping to suppress demand for the active travel route.

But, the main reason this sort of thing happens is because it's convenient for developers to fence things off, and forget about it until it's convenient for them. And Planning Authorities are too naive/under-resourced to have enfordeable policies that are actually enforced to prevent this sort of thing. The odds are the case officer who was dealing with this application has left to work at another council, and no-one will be assigned the case until something happens with it. Which could be pressure from a local campaign group and/or sympathetic councillor.

I hope they get a result. What a shame to have the route cut off for such a long period of time. The developers will presumably make noises about needing to keep out fly-tippers, and ordinarily that might fly, but after such a long period, they could invest that bit extra to open up a gap in the fencing which lets cyclists in, but not tipper lorries. They'll just have to take their chances on anti-social motorbikes.

Unfortunately it's not on the legal definitive map of PROWs (it should be) so the developer or whomever is getting away with it

mattw wrote:

Time to apply "Unlawful Obstruction of a Highway", if it is a PROW.

Well said