BaronVSS
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These are all my observations as a britbong.
When the UK voted to leave the EU, this caused a political stalemate in the UK's lower chamber that lasted 2 years. Theresa May, who became PM after Cameron resigned, did not have the numbers required to pass her deal and invoke Article 50, which was to agree to a settlement with the EU and terminate all other aspects of EU membership. This was unpopular with those parties to the left of the Tories, who wanted to remain part of the EU and those on the right of her own party, who wanted to leave the EU without any concessions offered. She quit in the spring of 2019, after a third failed attempt to push her deal through the House of Commons.
Boris wins the resulting leadership election. His plan, partially concocted by Dom Cummings was to force a GE and campaign on the basis that, if given a majority, he would end the deadlock and leave the EU under a repackaged version of May's deal. In December, he won an 380 seat majority, and passed A50 just before the new year.
In 2020, the coof hits. The original plan of the UK government, which is to encourage individual measures such as handwashing and voluntary distancing, is thrown out for the lockdownist policy that originated in China and was copied by countless other nations. Cummings is of the impression that, if we had done this earlier, we could have reduced the number of deaths. I disagree highly, the UK does not have the culture, geography, nor the dystopian panopticon required for the results seen in east asian countries and its primary hobbies consist of Greggs and Alcoholism, but that is another topic for another time. I also do not think it is the reason he was eventually knifed.
Dom Cummings is exiled from the government as he and Boris' wife Carrie took huge dislikings to each other, resulting in interfactional squabbles until Carrie's faction won. He is now on the outside looking in.
During the winter of 2020 while the country is in Lockdown and the common citizen is denied freedom of association, Boris and his colleagues host several parties at Number 10. This is leaked to the press a year later around the time a fourth lockdown is being proposed. After several months of political obstructionism, Boris is eventually fined, issues a weak apology and moves on.
In the Spring/Summer of this year, a story emerges about a sex pest in the Tory party having molested several people at an event. It is revealed that Boris ran interference and prevented action from being taken against this person. Tory MPs, sick and tired of having to defend the actions of the PM and his inner circle, propose a VoNC, which he passes with the worst numbers for a PM to date. His cabinent shortly resigns in quick succession, and he gives up the ghost and resigns.
After his own leadership election, Liz Truss wins. Liz Truss is, as was discussed on the subreddit, extremely stupid. She appoints longtime ally/adultery partner Kwasi Karteng as Chancellor (chief money guy), who unveils a budget with tax cuts and spending rises funded by borrowing. This is the event that caused the pound to crap itself and nearly killed off the pension industry. Truss eventually U-Turns and replaces Karteng with Jeremy Hunt, who immediately undoes the budget and replaces it with one reminiscient of the pro-Austerity Cameron government. Her position still awful, she elected to resign today.
Boris is being suggested primarily as a replacement for Truss by the membership, who are rural pensioners with opinions far to the right of even the populist public.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
There will be no appraisals. It behooves nobody in the journalist/politician alliance to examine whatever the fuck it was that they had a hand in making. We will be seeing countless knock on effects for years. The only silver lining is that in our (UK) official inquiry there will be some investigation into the effects the pandemic has had on the young. I feel desperately sad for them - their early years are so vitally important and the government did everything it possibly could to disrupt them.
Hate to say this but this has more relevance than when it is usually used, but UK poster here.
It feels quite eerie. The Queen is (was now, I suppose) a part of the country in a way that will be felt. You could at any time in any place put on a voice of an old woman speaking in an extra refined RP accent and people could immediately tell who you were referring to. Moreover, she lived through several decades of incredible, breakneck change. Several PMs have said of her weekly meetings that they were the most valuable time in their week, to be able to talk to someone who was as close as you could get to impartial advice and had such experience.
She was also the only thing the country could have theoretically united around as a single cultural marker. Before the Jubilee you could go outside and see union jacks and banners depicting the queen's face on almost every house, then on the day everything shut down and neighbours roped off streets to get large open spaces so that they could celebrate the event. That is gone now. Charles does not have the benefit of being a still point in a moving world and comes with several bizzare views about coffee enemas, and it is likely he will be King for the rest of this decade. We may very well see the end of the Monarchy as a cultural touchpoint and the transformation of this country into a complete satellite state of the US will be done.
There was rain and thunderstorms here all throughout the afternoon, which if you believe in portents is not a good sign.
In what is perhaps the first win Secularism has experienced in a long time, a high court judge has ruled against a challenge brought forward by a muslim pupil claiming that lack of prayer rooms at hier school were a substantial opposition to her faith. The judge's reasoning is that the school explicitly advertised itself as secular and would not permit certain activities in an attempt to minise friction between pupils. This outcome was accomplished in spite of threats and bomb scares made to the school and criminal damage to both the school and a few of the homes of the staff who worked there.
Michaela Community School is not a typical institution, hence why it was not only able to fight back against Islamists, but also win. Situated in a particularly deprived part of London, it boasts extremely successful grades compared to not only the borough but the wider country as a whole. It accomplishes this through rules many consider extreme, including no talking in corridors, demerits for failing to remove your book from your bag and flip to the correct page in under 10 seconds and mirrors removed from bathrooms in order to avoid distractions.
Its head, Katharine Birbalsingh, is not a typical educator. An Indo-Guyanese woman and once a Conservative advisor for social mobility, her comments on education, society and the role of its members routinely antagonise left of centre commentators. Michaela is a free school, indepedent of the local authority and thus she is immunised against potential attempts by that local authority and other insitutions to instill accepted views into her school. This is I think a large part of why she won - she ultimately only answers to herself and those parents in her community who are in favour of her school and the way she runs it, and can thus ignore detractors in a way that an LEA controlled, union dependent teacher can't.
BaronVSS
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11mo ago
When I was 16, I and every other boy in my RS class was made to stand up and recieve chastisement by our then RS teacher, who proclaimed that the world was made for us, by people like us (my school was 99% white working class), that we had it the easiest out of any group of people and that we had a duty to right this imbalance. This is not my lived experience (though I attribute that to my undiagnosed and untreated autism), and it is broadly not the lived experience of young men, who have worse outcomes than their fathers and are expected their bear the dwindling of their piece of the socioeconomic pie and the societal narrative that this is not so with a smile on their face.
And frankly, given the events of the pandemic, I am not so convinced that there is a large divide between the British and Chinese states.
My brain is broken as a result of the past few years, and I feel not the slightest inclination to fix it.
To surmise a very long story, I was an r9k tier NEET sadsack up until a few years ago when I began the uphill struggle to rebuild my life. By 2019 I had managed to get a job I would normally have required a degree for and normal friends I went to the pub with, both of which are things I thought I could never obtain. At the start of 2020 I was looking for a place of my own, which is exactly when the (UK) lockdowns hit.
I ended up losing the place I was going to move into, all of my hard earned friends moved away. I was able to hold onto my job, which for around seven months consisted of me travelling to and from an empty, freezing office and spoke to no one real and constitutes possibly the worst time of my entire life. Government actions rapidly deflated the value of my savings and put a fire under the already burning housing market. There are more parking spaces for rent than there are 1bed or studio flats in the city where I work. I cannot afford anything within 20 miles of where I live. It wasn't fucking like this pre-pandemic. Even if I engaged with the spook of "mental health", what would be the point? My life is materially worse in every conceivable way. My prospects are permanently damaged as a result of government action, cheered on by both strangers the system purports to be my "countrymen" and people close to me that I once respected, but now no longer.
Despite all of that, it is the cognitive dissonance that bothers me most. How can a person proclaim that a virus is deadly enough to ban recreational outdoor activity, but tolerate certain outdoor political protest? Why are tampons and clothes considered "inessential goods"? Why does going sledding outdoors in a country where snows once every 2 years make you a granny killer? I go back and read my old posts sometimes, and there was shit I got angry about then that I had apparently forgotten now. The most blackpilling thing about all of this is that indeed, just forgetting what was done to you and changing what you Care About in the way you change your clothes is most successful way to approach life. It amazes me that humanity has developed any capacity for individualist, introspective thought at all.
It probably does not help that I elected to read Nietzsche and Stirner at the same time during my aformentioned 7 months alone in that building. My "Good Morning, I hate _" could fill a book of its own.
BaronVSS
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2mo ago
We have now had a parliamentary crisis of procedure over a remote dispute between two combatants who have little to no social or material relation to this country. The giga blackpill feed forcibly attached to my veins continues to deliver.
A comparatively small handful of Islamo-lefists were able to overturn the policy of the opposition party through threats of violence and intimidation against a handful of elected politicians and get it to completely agree with its goals in about 5 months of persistent activity. Granted, they had help from the sympathetic media class, but even then the rate of change is incredible. In most other unpopular decisions (the Iraq war, Brexit) the British state largely plowed ahead and either ignored or steamrolled over public outrage. The only loss they've ever taken was on Poll Tax.
The outcome of this is that threats and violence have been proven to work in an established, mature democracy. I expect this trend to continue.
I wonder if there isn't a vault full of scripts somewhere entitled things like "High Fantasy Series #3" or "Sci-Fi Series #91" that are wheeled out whenever a big studio acquires the rights to a famous name, and the plot and characters of that script are retroactively wrangled to fit that script. It would explain whatever paramount did their rendition of Halo, in which the Arbiter is not an alien prophet but instead John Halo's human love interest and a heaping of necessary space politics so vast it puts the Phantom Menace to shame.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
The worst part of all this is unlike any other disaster, say loss of immediate family or assault, I have absolutely no one in real life I can talk to, completely uncensored, about how I felt about it or how I feel now. At best all I have ever had are online friends and anonymous spaces like this one, baduk and LockdownSkepticism. Everywhere else just dogpiled you.
There is no actionable goal in that statement, particularly not if it's coming from a white person. Your friend was uttering the signals they did in order to remain part of and have high standing in their chosen group. The only useful thing you can take away from this is to know that this belies an inherent resentment to a group you (and he) are also part of.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
A relevant link to a highly memorable thread on this subject on the original motte.
Ignoring international blowback, the plan has a significant flaw. To establish a nation, and not a handful of disparate gangs battling for control over an area (which is what we have now), some social or cultural cohesion is required between the rulers and the ruled. It is highly likely that the hypothetical billionaire and his security force will be white, or at the very least Western, and thus appear to Haitians as the original french colonialists come again. The current gangs will proclaim themselves freedom fighters against this imperialist threat, and even if you overpower them in a conventional war they can go undercover in a decentralised war which the IRA and Taliban pulled off to great effect.
BaronVSS
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2mo ago
The UK seems to have an extreme version of the humanist slave morality that is in fashion across the west (this stated reason being given by Ian Hislop for why he wouldn't publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, as it would be "punching down"). It is the prevailing viewpoint of most people who work for the civil service, as well as the centrist or left wing media class. Dom Cummings once pointed out that the people who live or work in the SW1 postcode care immensely about their perception among their peers. Unlike the US, there is no temporing influence among anyone in power - all major parties largely agree on the same things, with the sole difference being that tories pretend to be right wing in order to win the vote of ultra-right shire boomers, who never seem to notice that the tories don't deliver anything they promise.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
Sometimes I see faded, expiring one way labels on the floor in shops. They'll remain there until they completely perish.
What a mess we made, when it all went wrong.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
Boris hosted a party shortly after he left hospital, I doubt he was that shaken by it. I think most of his COVID policy was motivated by public opinion and the media response.
BaronVSS
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6mo ago
This post was spurred by the latest episode of the Israel and Palestine Show and me accessing the frontpage of my national brodacaster and seeing only one story on the right hand that directly concerned the lives of people living in this country.
The News Problem
It occurs to me that much of the connected world is gripped by "News Problems". A "News Problem" is a problem that ceases to affect you the moment you turn off the news. To determine whether something is a news problem or not, ask yourself this question: if I was suddenly made to forget the information I had just watched or read about, would my life be any different?
An obvious example of something that is not a News Problem would be stories about inflation: inflation trickles all the way down to the consumer. It is made immediately obvious when the price of your favourite foods goes up, or when your money gets you less petrol than it used to at the pump. The topics involved in the story are those that directly affect the material world around you. To go back further, during the terrible time when a large chunk of the world was denied Freedom of Association over a virus with a 99%> chance of survival, the information coming out of the news outlets was of varying utility. For some people, Covid: The Virus was a just News Problem but for almost everyone, the actions taken by the State to control the virus were not News Problems.
In regards to story I initially mentioned, whether the debate starts begins on who you are: if you have family or friends in the region, or if they have been affected by the recent attacks, then this is very much not a news problem. If you are Jewish and living in a city with a large Muslim population (or a population of people who care very strongly about the issue despite neither being Muslim nor Jewish), you may or may be directly affected by the events as they occur in the region, but you may certainly care about how that population responds to you, particularly if you present as being Jewish.
So, can you ignore news problems? The answer, to my eternal chargin, is no. Even if the story has no material affect on my life, I am still surrounded by people who care about it, and in turn expect me to care about it. Should the conversation emerge at my place of work (so far it hasn't, and for that I am extremely grateful), I may be asked for my opinion, and my genuine opinion would piss off everyone in the room. During the summer of 2020, depending upon your position in society, you might have faced social repercussions if you didn't agree with the rhetoric at the time. This could have been something as simple as nodding along to what was being said, or, if you were in a position of power, expected to divert your resources, energy and face to something you strongly disagreed with.
Will there be an end to the News Problem? The obvious cure is to take the grillpill, which in this sense means turning off your device and going outside, but this only works if everyone takes the grillpill. Had you taken the grillpill in a city, you might have bumped into protests about the dispute.
I think this has nothing to do with AI. This guy was a terminally online type who became radicalised due to the lack of meaning/purpose in his life and tried to let out one last primordial scream before he went.
On a side note, this case indicates that you should never commit a high profile crime and be taken alive, because your embarrasing post history will be read out in court for the whole country to witness.
If we are judged to be ranting buffoons by a third party, what does that matter?
I made a post I think last year on subreddit as to why the echo chamber is the ultimate destination for any kind of social group. Even on this place most people are in alignment on things like SocJus and transgenderism and such. When your style of communication is incompatible with another person's, let alone held values, how can you deal with them? People would rather hang out in places that are agreeable to them.
I remember a particular banpost that was made shortly after Roe V Wade was undone, and there were all these non-regulars you'd never seen before. There was one woman asking about a particular type of diet, and when questioned on aspects of that diet she devolved into ALLCAPS insults. This was a person simply not capable of engaging with the sort of deconstruction of ideas that occurs here. Most people I think are not: to them, ideas gives them grounding in this confusing, frightening world. Ideas are not things they defend with argumentation, they are things they defend with passion.
To you, the old lady was a ranting buffon. Perhaps in her eyes, you were just one of many sheeple.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
slatestarcodex
Scott's attempts to clean his name were entirely for nothing.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
All those seem to me like load-bearing walls for civilization, and we shouldn't dismantle them just to get an advantage in some other debate.
They are load bearing walls for this civilisation, which is a very unique take on human existence that has been around for few centuries at absolute most. The SocJus professional class, who are busy knocking said walls down, are doing so because it is highly unlikely that their enemies will ever sieze control of important institutions like payment providers or media platforms.
As for dead values, I miss how willing people were to read and write lengthy things. You can go and read old news articles on news outlets and they are significantly longer and more verbose than the stuff that is put out now. Any idea that cannot be condensed into a tweet struggles to spread, and I think this is one of many reasons politics is the way that it is now.
The film is overly hyped imo, though that might be because I have had all morally spooked notions like fairness and equality beaten out of me by the mere act of observing how the world works. The lines about white people just bounced off me. I no longer expect to be seen as anything other than an oppressor at this point.
The worst thing about this film is that it's a romcom (and therefore an automatic 0/10) wearing the skin of something far more interesting. If black people have magic and thus are able to do anything they want, why do they devote substantial amounts of time to keeping white people happy when they could instead
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establish a concealed, seperate society like the wizards have done in Harry Potter, or
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BTFO the white muggles with magic and create their own nation?
I disagree. All coverage I see of it, excluding The Telegraph, is framed with the assumption that 200K people died and this is an utterly horrific failure of the government and not an inevitability of a nation state becoming fat and old. I look at all the headline images that journalists choose to run and I Cannot Help But Notice that most of those wearing placards or holding up pictures of the deceased are old people lamenting even older people.
I fear the response to the pandemic has been normalised: when something like this happens again, we will shut down schools and places of free association, we will usher everyone inside their homes to look at screens all day, and we will demonise anyone pointing out the utter disaster of this policy. The operating policy of the country is determined by what is best for the all powerful owner occupier class and the national religion.
BaronVSS
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9mo ago
Not all measures were removed in all countries at the same time. In the UK, the restrictions were 99% gone by February, but many places in the anglosphere or adjacent continued until the late year.
Personally, I think the following things contributed to society's funny amnesia moment:
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The length of the pandemic. It had gone on for nearly 2 years, and as time went on the average person gradually stopped being as afraid.
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Non-terrible vaccines had been administered into a majority of 50+ individuals in WEIRD anglospheric nations, which are the only countries that matter. At this point, much of the functional threat of the virus has been eliminated.
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The increasing number of leaks that lawmakers, particularly those at the very top, were throwing racous lockdown parties while everyone else was being denied freedom of association. In the UK, partygate rendered any further restrictions politically difficult for the government to implement.
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The timing of the Ukraine war. Socially, it immediately supplanted COVID as the Big Thing Everyone Cares about and governments were no longer rewarded for spending vast amounts of state resource on it. Politically, governments had to rapidly change their priorities to account for the war and its knock on effects.
BaronVSS
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10mo ago
In their defence, the official app (and new reddit) is utterly horrific and using anything else is a requirement to browse the site.
Society vs Male Radicalisation II - Male Role Models/Surely This Time Our Plan Will Work
I was on the internet this week, and I found this:
Labour to help schools develop male influencers to combat Tate misogyny
It is interesting to note that there is an increasing shift towards talking about "role models" for young men and boys as a means of cooling the gender kerfuffle, rather than by repeating feminist talking points at males until they concede as was the case when I was a teenager. The Labour Party, the UK's apparent next government, has come up with policy to reduce the influence of Andrew Tate among schoolboys with the intended aim of safeguarding women and girls. It means to do this by creating counter role models to whom boys can look up to. This would not even the utterly embarrasing 30 year old boomers trying to guess what resonates with children, but would consist instead of older volunteer boys taken from within the same school. This if it is implemented, will have educators select the real life version of Will from Inbetweeners as its senior male role model and think themselves of sound mind for doing so. You are only ever going to get uncool loser types volunteering, and it is the fear of becoming an uncool loser (or worse) that motivates young men to go and consume manosphere content.
Feminism's defenders will counter that there are many existing role models available for men, often listing real or fictional people like Ryan Gosling, Marcus Rashford or Ted Lasso. These men are either fake or literal one percenters whose lifestyle an average young man has no hope of to attaining. This betrays a complete lack of understanding about why men choose the role models they do and how they attempt to emulate them. These role models are deliberately or implicitly chosen as role models for young men by people who aren't young men often because they display qualities that are useful, rather than valued, to society. This is because almost all policy dreamt up by institutions concerning Men and Boys is not to their benefit, but instead to neuter a perceived threat against Women, Girls and the wider society. For every Marcus Rashford, there are multiple Mason Greenwoods or Kurt Zoumas who continue to receive all the signifiers of male success and receive no punishment for any of their transgressions.
It is clear that what educational and social institutions want are meek, inoffensive and productive men who do not question the rules of society. This is in direct contrast to what young men want, which is to be outspoken, to be popular with women, to be socially and economically successful. No role model ever produced or selected by the state could manage this, particularly not when operating under the notion that it must maintain women's liberation, which itself requires the stifling of men. I question for how much longer this approach will be kept in place. There are hundreds of people like Andrew Tate across SM, each ready to teach boys what society is unable to teach them. Educators can more easily dispel Tate because of the sex trafficking offences and because Tate himself is a clown, but people like Hamza, whose lived experience is much closer to the boys he is trying to proselytize to than that of Tate's, they have no counterargument.
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