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Ollie

@gapthatexists.bsky.social
157 followers 372 following 15 posts
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Ollie @gapthatexists.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
Sure, but not 'pandering to the bond markets', by which I assume you mean increasing borrowing, would just to be to give more money to bond investors, which you don't want to do? (as well as being a drag on the economy and people's wages and increasing the cost of living via interest rates)
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Ollie @gapthatexists.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
This is paying them less and doing the opposite.
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Ollie @gapthatexists.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
End racism and discrimination? I agree this is a no. Plenty of racist rich people out there to show this doesn’t change
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Ollie @gapthatexists.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
Liveable wages, it certainly helps towards that end - more stuff being produced = more demand for labour = price of labour goes up = wages go up. House prices down? No, but disinflation isn’t great either. If wages go up they can become more affordable if supply increases, which govt can encourage
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Ollie @gapthatexists.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
I mean that’s not accurate (and much less the case in this country than others) but even so, an increase in prosperity for all people, even if unevenly distributed, and an increase in money available for public services and infrastructure, is objectively a good thing.
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Ollie @gapthatexists.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
That’s what growth is…
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Ollie @gapthatexists.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
The stuff around megalothymia and isothymia really gets into the weeds, but the general notion I think is genuinely useful for analysing cultural trends and attitudes since the Cold War, which imo is its greatest contribution.
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Ollie @gapthatexists.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
Hahaha. Absolutely agree and despite his clunky readings I and shaky philosophical grounding (mainly inconsistencies around his analysis of ‘the event’) he does point out something very important about what arose in public perception.
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Ollie @gapthatexists.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
He does cede to your first point, though there is a broad spectrum for systems of (re)distribution under the umbrella of LD. On your last, people are discontent with not having a cause to fight for, so are attracted to backsliding movements that undermine democracy against their own interests.
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Ollie @gapthatexists.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
Derrida makes a decent critique in Spectres of Marx.
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Ollie @gapthatexists.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
Though Fukuyama doesn't emphasise it as much, for Hegel the 'end' in the 'end of history' is meant more in terms of end as in goal or telos — so the final telos of history has been achieved in its discovery, if one believes, as Fukuyama does, that liberal democracy is the best form of government.
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Ollie @gapthatexists.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
He asserts the success of Liberal democracy to be 'the end of history' as it finally solves the internal contradictions of previous systems of government - so we have reached its end in finding it. 'History' is in the Hegelian sense of the development of ideas, not the chronological order of events
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Ollie @gapthatexists.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
Tbf Fukuyama, even in his original essay in 1989 before he wrote the book, does say he expects liberal democracy to not be stable because people have too much of an appetite for the fight of history, and things will change essentially out of boredom. That's what the entire 'last man' bit is about.
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Ollie @gapthatexists.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
That’s certainly true, would be interesting to know how much that’s taken into consideration for these sorts of appointments
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Ollie @gapthatexists.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Incidentally the same school that John Major attended - an ex-grammar school that retained a prefect’s croquet lawn, so I wouldn’t have thought his education has influenced the selection all that much
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