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London Meetup on June 16 (Date TBC) (with Lambert)

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I am attending to some long-deferred family business in London (the UK) this week, and so I thought a London meetup might be fun.

As in 2010, our venue will be the Jerusalem Tavern in Farringdon at 6:30 PM. Here’s a map with details:

NOTE I’m not anticipating enormous attendance; perhaps 10? But if you will let me know if you’ll be attending in comments, that would be great. Thank you!

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

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29 comments

    1. Clive

      Yes, sorry, confirmation of date to be provided shortly, no time machines should be required.

    2. Lambert Strether Post author

      Yikes. Remind me never to press the submit button when I hear the announcement that the train is going to leave.

      The date is Friday, June 16, the time is 6:30, location as above. (I picked up April from the 2010 meetup announcement, which I took as a template.)

      My bad, and thank you to Clive for stepping in.

    1. Clive

      Appologies, I’ve pinged him a note to double-check and edited the title accordingly. Update to follow, as they say.

      (Richard and I have undoubtedly fried his brain with our insistence on using the British English DD-MM-YY date format…)

        1. clinical wasteman

          I respectfully disagree: one’s as good as the other in all-numerical form provided it’s clear which it is, but putting the number first messes up the flow of a sentence, assuming the elided articles and prepositions are still implicitly there. “The 21st of June” is needlessly clunky compared with “June 21st”, while “21st June” (the 21st in which series of Junes?) doesn’t work at all.
          I kind of dread opening the following can of tapeworms — and I enjoy H.L. Mencken at least as much as the next Trümmermensch does — but one thing you learn growing up in an outlying part of the anglosphere, especially in a period already saturated with (analogue) electronic media and with print before that, is that all claims to codify “American” vs. “British” English have been bad science fiction for decades if not centuries. Would that be Orcadian or Glasgow Scots- or Mancunian-, Scouse-, Estuary-, Afro-Caribbean-inflected-London-, ex-Yiddish-Noth-London- or wretched BBC-“British-English”? Same question goes for “American”, the examples don’t even need spelling out, although their continental reach is relevant — speech styles in Nova Scotia, Ontario and British Columbia no more resemble each other than they do those of New York or Texas. (Don’t even get me started on attempts to codify “Canadian”, “Australian” and “New Zealand” English, which seem to be the work of the same Microsoft grammarians who consider the passive voice an autocorrectable mistake.) The variations between all these loosely defined tendencies in writing and speech are real, endlessly fascinating and often a gift to rhetoric, but no attempt to index them corresponds much more to reality than “GDP” does to real economic life in any ghetto or gated palace compound within those territories.

          1. a different chris

            I equally respectfully (but very lightly) disagree with you on one point: it makes life simpler at least in the computer world if there is a hierarchy of “things”. Either year-month-day or day-month-year, but putting the day in the middle always makes the computer grumble.

            Of course “AI” will understand all this… yeah.

            1. clinical wasteman

              point taken on that that point: sticking to one simple formula where the difference between the various options is trivial, as in numerical shortcuts like ’06/21/17′, makes sense even in the absence of a grumbling computer, and still more so when there is one. To think about it is a waste of thinking. But the nice thing about sentence structure and syntax at large is that it can and should be intelligible even when slightly unfamiliar at first glance, so that — unlike, say, statistical tables or algebriac equations — it can be meaningful without the exact agreement of every reader on conventions of decorum that are neither here nor there as far as meaning goes. My equally slight point was just that ‘American vs. British English’ is mostly a matter of petty decorum, given the hugely subdivided nature of both and their almost perfect mutual (or rather multilateral) intelligibility, give or take a few bits of caste dialect treated as ‘standard’ (or as they call it, ‘received’!) by the BBC percentile. Mentioned in the first place only because the gall of BBC-class-speakers (NOT you Clive, Colonel or anyone else here! I’m thinking more of the Telegraph and Guardian “style guides” and occasional outbursts of the wrong sort of pedantry in the otherwise mostly admirable ‘Private Eye’) is so galling when they presume their dialect to be more ‘correct’ than the equally intelligible English written and spoken by other people all over their ex-empire, including geographical Britain itself. I’ve noticed similar smarm in certain Parisians and Castilians regarding, respectively, Québecois/Caribbean/African/Oceanic French (for which the concise term is: “French”), and American/Caribbean Spanish (i.e.: “Spanish”). I’d love to hear from anyone who knows whether and if so how such prejudices work in other international languages, eg. Mandarin, Arabic, Bengali, Malay/Bahasa Indonesia/Tagalog.

  3. clinical wasteman

    a) Wednesday June 21? Or: b) Friday June 23? Or: c) April 21, 2018, whatever day of the week that is?
    Hope it’s either a) or c) because I can make it to either of those, but probably not to b), and I’d be despondent if I missed it.

  5. gonzomarx

    Hurrah for NC in the UK, bugger it’s midweek and I’m in the North!
    Oh well maybe in seven years time….

  6. paul

    I’ve been looking forward for an excuse to a visit to mordor, as many of my friends live and work in its foothills, but the timing is wrong for me.
    I wish you all a merry old time in londinium.

  8. John

    I live in India but will be in London on the weekend of July 14-16. Have never lived anywhere near a city that does NC meetups before so am gutted to have to miss this!

  15. vidimi

    i missed Yves when she was in paris because i was in london and now i will miss lambert in london because i will be in paris. :(

    have a good meetup one and all.

  16. Lambert Strether Post author

    Apologies, dear readers; I should never press the Submit button merely because my train has been called.

    I’ve emailed everyone on this thread with the confirmed date (the 16th of June). Hopefully my Yahoo address will make it past everyone’s spam filters….

  17. Over the pond

    Man wish I could be there.
    Again hope you will find your way to Mexico someday soon
    Enjoy the Organic Bitters!

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