horsemouth is up and about. (ok well he's gone into the kitchen and made coffee). last night while he slept some friends far away played an on-u sound session.
last night more lone wolf and cub. disgraced the former executioner for the shogun wanders feudal japan as an assassin for hire all the while pushing a babycart containing his young son. the child is an interested observer of the carnage.
zatoichi, as a mere yakuza or gangster, is down with the common people, lone wolf, while he helps people, is more concerned with social form, that people have a code one they are living by, that elevates their actions above mere self interest. it is not as 47 ronin for example where the maintenance of society requires vast amounts of suppression and death (this horsemouth just finds depressing).
zatoichi likes to get drunk. he likes to eat. he likes to laugh. he likes to gamble. lone wolf does none of this.
nonetheless there is something deeply enjoyable in the design of everything. the material frugality of it appeals to horsemouth (he is a make do with less kind of guy).
yesterday horsemouth was bored (and boring). he went out for a womble but his heart wasn't in it. he has walser's masquerade to be getting on with (but he made no progress).
he spent an inordinate amount of time 'proving' that nothing could be told from the hartlepool election result (the tories got in in what used to be a safe labour seat).
let's look at the conservative victory in hartlepool in detail shall we? 52% vote for the conservative on a turnout of 42% of the registered electorate. so at best 22% of the registered electorate voted conservative. this is (of course) given the government's handling of coronavirus on its own is 22% too much.
elections are elections and deeper social processes are deeper social processes - as a way of working out what people are actually thinking first past the post elections are a very blunt tool. and much of the chattering about them is really just chatter. this is especially true of elections in which only 48% of registered voters can be arsed to vote (and frankly that's most of them these days).
incumbent governments often lose by-elections (we take it as a consolation, they are in power but at least we gave them a bloody nose) but not in their heartlands - there their share of the vote might go down (to much oohing and aahing) but the locals might just have correctly reasoned that they were going to get in anyway (so why go vote).
in the local elections labour has lost councillors by the shedload and this has been translated into losses of control at a handful of councils because of inbuilt labour majorities (where they have a majority).
horsemouth says build whatever theory suits you because on that sand it won't stay up for long. events will soon knock it down.
the game the establishment plays is called divide and rule and all the stuff about it being the fault of london, the woke, the young, the left, labour remainers etc. is just division. the young are your kids and you are launching them into a world that will offer them far less opportunity than even britain in the 80ies under thatcher.
the poor labour showing in hartlepool might have been caused by the colour of keir's tie, or his policies (or lack of them), the attitude of the left, or maybe corbyn's policies or brexit or 1066 and all that. everyone will have a story that makes sense. what people won't do is travel up to hartlepool and interview loads of monkey hangers (the abusive british term for people from hartlepool google it) about why they did it.
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