Crabcake - ask you anything

[certified hummus supporter 🇵🇸🤝🇺🇸🤝🇺🇦]

Sure, go ahead

[Battista Minola 1616]

I appreciate your posts and especially your sense of humour (which this unorthodox thread exemplifies). Go ahead.

[Dr. Arch]

It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.

Have you ever been banned from anywhere - offline or online? If the answer is no, then what's the closest you've got to being banned?

Ask away 🙂

As someone who last paid attention to Puerto Rican politics in that insane year with the leaked WhatsApp message, I'd like to know what the current political temperature is? Do you have any optimism for any political tendency there?

Ask away 🙂

What is the most profoundly mediocre book you've ever read?

The thing about PR is that we're not constantly in election mode like the U.S. is. We have general elections once every 4 years for all elected positions, and people tend to tune out and rest from politics in the meanwhile unless things get out of control like what happened in the example you provided.

Right now, it's pretty much quiet. People are getting restless about inflation, as most other folks are around the world, and there's huge importance given to worker's unions and worker's rights here, so there are a lot of striking unions looking for raises and more benefits that are receiving public support. However, nothing generally earth shattering is happening yet. I could answer with more specifics if you're looking for more specifics.

[Skunk]

Sure, why not?

[Pedocon Theory is not a theory]

I need to get some crabcakes sometime.

[kaoras]

Adelante

[Pink Panther]

I apologize in advance for the trainwreck that is about to ensue.

Nastiest restaurant you've ever been in?

In my hometown, I was once in a KFC. If you don't know, KFC locations are infamous here in the states for being hodgepodges of grease, dirt, and in general nasty things. While inside of the location, I saw all of that and above. Their decor and floor simply were not clean at all. It almost made me sick.

[Alcibiades]

I’m game!

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

Sure

What is your favourite (fine) artistic movement, and your most underrated artist in that movement?

Impressionism, unsurprisingly. As for the second half of your question, I've long been partial to Clarence Gagnon's landscapes.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Tony Blair was one of the UK's best Prime Ministers.

[LabourJersey]

Sure!

[Sol]

Sure yeah

What was the topic of the last essay you remember writing?

Dull paper on foreign aid in Africa.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

What's your opinion on the Chamberlain family and their impact on Birmingham?

I don't have a high opinion of any of the political Chamberlains in general terms - fundamentally they were not good people and were motivated by narcissistic egomania to an extent unusual even amongst politicians: that they were all, in the end, essentially failures is not terribly surprising given that - but the question of their impact on Birmingham is a complicated one. Or at least the matter of Joseph's influence is: Austen only ever used Birmingham as a parliamentary base and had nothing to do with the running of the city,* while Neville's involvement in municipal politics ceased in 1918 and he was not involved in the operation of the Unionist political machine in the city.

In general I tend to think of Joseph's impact on Birmingham as being something of a curates egg. On the one hand the civic improvements made or planned during his tenure as Mayor (which notably lasted for three consecutive terms rather than the usual year: his blending of ceremonial and real political leadership was atypical even for the period) benefited - and in some cases continue to benefit - the city enormously,** on the other the Chamberlain myth that then developed (which he, of course, encouraged) had a negative impact on the city's development over the longer term, leading to complacent civic leadership, a marked tendency towards authoritarian paternalism amongst corporation officers and undue deference towards the council from the population. Unionist administrations that were, in reality, highly conservative and loathe to embark on serious civic reform continued to trade off the image of Birmingham Corporation as an efficiently-run engine of civic improvement fifty years after this had actually been the case, something that particularly baleful long-term consequences in terms of housing policy.

_{*Or, frankly, even with his constituency in general: his complete shock at his slashed majority in 1929 speaks volumes as to quite how out of touch he had become.
**Though even Chamberlain's most iconic achievement - the building of Corporation Street: arguably the first slum-clearance scheme in Britain - was not quite the absolute triumph often assumed: while the fate of the residents of the slums cleared fared better than those who had lived on what became New Street thirty years earlier they were not re-housed by the council for what amounted to ideological reasons disguised as financial ones.}