BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
User ID: 628
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
Yeah, the updated story isn't looking good for this dude. Sure the person he killed was not that many steps above scum, but he was still human. Good on him for turning himself in at least.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1yr ago
a Year 10 pupil said to be autistic was told to bring in a copy of the Islamic holy book by friends after losing a video game.
Notice how they don't mention why he was told to bring in a Quran after losing a video game. The book falling out of a bag on its own is nothing big and certainly not deserving of the extreme response it got, but an extreme response it did get which makes me suspect that the child was told to bring the Quran to school by his "friends" so they could do something nefarious to it, and they were caught before they could begin their act. This could be what the mother was (quite rightly) apologising for, not the book suffering light damage.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
Yes, please do. My job as a quant is sort of like software engineering (in some aspects) and I wouldn't give a single shit if every country on earth could send over quants to the developed world. In fact that's basically what the situation is like now where companies will bend over backwards to arrange your visa and everything if you can convince them you'll be a positive addition to the team.
Competent quants who really understand what they are doing are quite rare, it's already basically a global market for us and we're doing more than fine regardless. Why can't other jobs also handle the heat? Are you scared that you'll be outdone by third worlders who had and have none of the advantage you were handed on a silver platter by being born in a first world country?
Trying to protect your job by limiting freedom of movement is a system of economic rent extraction and nothing more. Westerners who were born in high wage countries use their borders to prevent firms from getting their labour from the most efficient source possible. This imposes a (very large, when you integrate over the whole world) deadweight loss upon humanity as a whole. I am in favour of smashing them down just like how I am always in favour of smashing down rent seeking.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
4mo ago
People who have cancer often undergo chemotherapy. This procedure involves pumping toxins into the body to kill cancerous cells. Of course some healthy non-cancerous cells do get caught up in this and die. Like many other things in life, chemotherapy comes in different strengths, if a cancer is small you go for low dosage chemotherapy where very few helathy cells get killed in the crossfire. But if the cancer is very big you need to go for agressive chemotherapy because the low dosage stuff won't get rid of the cancer. This agressive chemotherapy will kill lots of healthy cells too, but that doesn't mean the chemotherapy as a whole was a bad idea.
In much the same way Hamas is a cancer on the face of this earth this has grown way too big. Low dosage stuff like precision strikes and being 150% extra sure you're not shooting at people who aren't threats (when by and large 90%+ of the people you encounter will be threats) before pulling the trigger isn't strong enough to excise Hamas from this world. That requires high dosage chemotherapy which will regrettably have side effects including some number of civilian casualites. It's sad, but the alternative (Hamas is left to fester) is even worse.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
4mo ago
white people have destroyed Haiti so much through colonialism that America is better to live in materially than Haiti
This is true far more than even the normal damages that colonialism did to non-whites living under it. Haiti (then Saint Domingue) used to be a very productive and rich colonial possession of France, its plantations provided a good amount of the total wealth of the French Empire. During the French Revolution the Haitians managed to get a small amount of freedom for themselves, while still being a French colony. After wanting the ideals of equality that the French apparently espoused so heartily to apply to them as well, the were rewarded for their impudence by first being sent Charles Leclerc who tricked the Haitian leader Toussaint L'Overture into meeting him, ostensibly to discuss terms. When L'Overture agreed to this meeting, thinking Leclerc was a man of honour like himself he was arrested and shipped off to Metropolitan France and imprisoned until he died. It turned out that Leclerc was not an honourable man...
Leclerc died of Yellow Fever (perhaps a divine punishment?) a few years later and was replaced with Rochambeau (this was the son of the Rochambeau who fought in the American Wars of Independence, his father was a hero, he was a shitstain), who turned out to be even worse than Leclerc, being actively evil instead of merely dishonourable.
Rochambeau was known for burying captured rebels alive in insects or boiling them to death in molasses. He even invented the first rudimentary gas chambers to kill people en masse and the story is told of him inivting some natives to a ball then at the stroke of midnight announcing that he had just ordered his troops to come and kill every single native man present (this trechery against his guests would get him straight down to the 9th circle of Hell if we are to believe our Dante).
Eventually the Haitians were able to throw off the yoke of the French and declare independence in 1804. However their "white man" problems were far from over. France was not happy at losing such a valuable possession, and immediately instituted a blockade of the island. At this time the other great naval powers of Europe who had a presence in the Carribean: Spain and England were engaged in the Napoleonic Wars against France where they were tearing each other apart. A reasonable observer may well have expected that given they were at each other's throats, these two countries might have helped clear the blockade of Haiti. Instead they did the exact opposite, choosing to help France enforce the blockade out of fear that their own colonies in the area may be next to revolt...
In 1825 the blockade was finally lifted and France recognised Haitian Independence. But not before the Haitians agreed to assume a 90 million Franc debt to France, and to add insult to injury the reasons given for this debt were as "compensation of lost property". To put this into perspective, France had recently sold Louisiana (this was the entire middle third of the modern day US in size, not the small chunk of land Louisiana is today) to the United States for 60 million Francs and here they were demanding substantially more from the populace of a portion of a single island in the Carribean.
So basically Haiti, an island of half a million extremely poor recently freed slaves, was burdened with a debt 1.5x the price France had gotten for the entire middle third of the modern day USA. And of course they had to pay high rates of interest on this debt too. It would not be cleared until 1947, well over a century after it was imposed on the Haitian people.
It is impossible to deny that the conditions imposed by the white man upon Haiti made it particularly difficult for them to become a success story. To me a fair punishment for French crimes in the region would be France being obliged to take 30,000 Haitian citizens a year as immigrants in perpetuity, accepting them as citizens and treating them no different from their own people, up and until we reach a state of the world where each year there are fewer than 30,000 people who want to move to France from Haiti. It would provide a very good incentive for the French to improve living standards in a country where the people are still so poor that they eat cookies made from mud to sate their hunger.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
what is she actually getting at with this question?
She's getting at the fact that the child sex taboo is inconsistent with a lot of the rest of our moral system, doesn't mean the taboo is wrong, it could well mean that other parts of the western moral system are idiotic and stupid. Which of these two it is is left up to the reader to decide.
I personally believe it's the latter, the western moral system is utterly and totally [REDACTED]* but it's fun watching average IQ people overheat and stall when you present them with an inconsistency they can't reconcile with their belief set but at the same time refuse to question whether it might just be possible that it's they who are wrong (insert Principal Skinner meme here). It's like the Star Trek episode where Kirk is able to convince the robot Nomad it is imperfect and make it overheat and self destruct, but with humans instead.
* A sad necessity, otherwise the mods are going to go full Abraham Van Helsing on me.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
8mo ago
Nah, not really. I've changedy mind on Vivek over the last few days when I actually got to read more about him and now I'm negative on him. Were I to have a real vote at this point I would not use it on him.
My post was just a bit of wishful thinking, an innocent daydreaming fantasy of seeing white racists go red in the face as they overload deciding whether they are going to vote for the brown man or vote for the white man who's policies they hate, and the despair they will feel when they realise that those two are the only real options available to them. I thought of it as a small microcosm, completely insulated from its impacts on the rest of the world (as all good fantasies are).
It's nothing important, we all have our fantasies, probably a good thing they don't come true.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
I don’t think Jesus should be quoted in a post* reminiscent of the prayer of the Pharisee
Christianity has always been my least favourite of the three Abrahamic religions. I thank myself (and God) that I am a follower of Muhammad the Conqueror instead of Christ the Redeemer.
”God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.
I try to say some variant of this prayer every day. It's an expression of gratitude towards God for pairing my ka with the ba I have (If you'll excuse the Ancient Egyptian terms). I don't think this is a bad thing but rather, in a world with a severe paucity of gratitude for what it has, something that marks me out from people. I recommend other people to be regularly thankful of their station in life too and recognise that it isn't (after a point) our own deeds that got us here but rather the blessing of God smiling down upon us (long may it continue). Of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't recognise that we are all sinners and also repent for that.
I could have been born a few hospitals over and right now would be tilling fields by hand to earn a meagre amount just enough feed myself twice a day but by grace of God I was born me, and I will always be thankful for that.
EDIT: Although you can argue just how possible it is for me (the person I am today) to have been born as an IQ 80 minimally literate farmer. Just like how a human consciousness can never be born in a C. Elegans and experience such a life (because such creatures don't have the neural architecture to support something as complex as a human conscious), I wonder just how possible it would be for the consciousness I have today to have developed in an IQ 80 person (of course the differences between me and the farmer are far far smaller than the differences between humans and nematode worms but I wonder where the cutoff is). But regardless, I should still be extremely grateful, if not for that then for the fact that I got to experience reality at all because just the right sperm combined with just the right egg.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
4mo ago
Everywhere where whites are a large enough contingent and wield power and there is no smaller group they really dislike ends up with these sorts of politics. Canada is just north of you guys and has a large welfare state. Aus and NZ aren't that different either.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
4mo ago
Yes, that something is the tabula rasa insanity believed by the left leaning sorts who are in power in Detroit and Chicago; nothing more, nothing less. It's like believing E. faecalis is no different from H. pylori and treating both of them in the same way.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
4mo ago
The power of the people themselves was minimal, the power of the culture that gave rise to them still existed in a latent sense. It was not the people who needed to be destroyed for the crimes of slavery/the civil war, it was the culture, instead the opposite happened. If the southern elites were allowed to stay elite but had to adopt northern customs and beliefs in all the ways that mattered then the current political situation right now (and for the past 150 years) would have been a lot more stable.
Memocide, not genocide is the way to do things. It's more effective, not to mention more humane too.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
6mo ago
Moralism and inability to consider hypotheticals are hallmarks of the lower classes
Yeah, yet another reason why lower classes being handed power via the ballot box is bad for humanity as a whole long term, however equally pandora's box is now open and there is no way that we're getting votes taken away from them.
It's another reason why I am in favour of artificial wombs btw, all you need to do is continue feeding the lower classes memes to reduce their natal birth rates, ideally bringing them to a point as close to zero as possible, while you grow genetically selected superior humans at such a rate that the political power of the low intelligence people is diluted out to basically nothing because there is a large mass of high IQ selected humans out there that can deal with basic economics who will outvote their bad policies.
You don't even need to discourage child rearing in the lower classes, it's fine to let them raise genetically selected children as their own (because growth environment has little impact on adult inteligence and therefore propensity to understand economics once you are beyond a certain floor), all you have to do is convince them to not have biological children and this could be phrased in terms of women's liberation (they no longer have to suffer the curse of Eve), easier parenting (why risk having children with genetic defects when you can get basically a perfect baby delivered to you via courier) or even generic wokeness (why do you care about your own genetic legacy, thats like selfish and bad, mmkay?).
Two generations of this and low info voters will be an irrlevance, much like the Druze are in Israel.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
8mo ago
· Edited 8mo ago
Amongst the old guard westerners nothing much improves. I expect the market for women to go bust a fair bit with the advent of hyperrealistic porn coupled with AI that allows you to create your own waifu who has the full spectrum of beliefs of your average human being and is just as intelligent (I already prefer talking to GPT4 over some IQ 100 normies I have the misfortune of having to regularly interact with in life, I genuine prefer talking to the IQ 80-90 people over the IQ 100 ones, at least those people know they are stupid and defer to you easily). But none of the underlying issues get fixed.
More and more demographic replacement from the third world, which will cause them to have their own population issues too, but in the West they'll always be able to get immigrants at a steady rate, countries not named the United States of America might have to scrape the bottom barrel for immigrants who are willing to move, but they will be able to get them.
These people will bring their own culture with them. Some of it and some of these people will dissolve in the alkahest of modernity and adopt the ways of the westerners, the rest of them will keep their own ways, and eventually hopefully we can get a second stable life pathway that is able to stand up against the constant chips and attacks of the western mindset, a sort of duopoly of cultures with healthier gender relations, which over the generations slowly gains converts from the children of those who were failed by the western way of life and converted to this one as a way to save their children from the Western Cultural Monster.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
8mo ago
Firstly I am not racist. I dislike "white" (read Western) modernity, nothing against white people as a group (apart from wanting to see them reduced in size, but again this is only because they disproportionately support progressive western modernity, if they did not believe such BS I wouldn't mind them at all). Most of my friends are even white!
If anything my prior on a random white person being prosocial on small personal scales is higher than my prior on a random person from any other race. If my house catches fire, I would prefer white firemen came to the rescue assuming I knew nothing else about them. The vast majority of the great stuff accomplished by humanity over the last 1000 years was the work of white people, and for that I am grateful.
At an individual level an average white person is probably better than an average non-white person, but at the group levels the beliefs and actions of white people are damaging to humanity in a way that the beliefs of non-white people (who I must add are not a monolith, some of their beliefs can also be extremely wacky, but thankfully the powers behind those beliefs are not strong enough to enforce them on the world, unlike the beliefs of white people) are not. I am against progressive "whiteness" as a concept, I am not against white people at all. No different to how it's possible to be against Zionism without being anti-Jew.
The problem is that on a macro scale the ideology they disproportionately have come to believe is bad. The roots of it stem from taking the idea of equality (a good useful idea, when applied properly to limited domains) and running away with it. Equality, like fire, is a good servant but a bad master. Unfortunately whites have destroyed the culture they used to believe in and replaced it with what I see as this perversion of Protestant Christianity.
They say that tradition is like a legacy codebase: half of it is superfluous and the other half is mission critical, and it's very hard to tell which half is which. Whites over the last 100 years have taken the cleaver to their old belief system (the liberalism of Locke and Mill tinged with Christianity) and in my opinion have throw out all the good stuff while keeping all the bad. And now this bad stuff, unchained from everything else which was keeping it in its place, is wrecking havoc on the world. Even worse, it's memetically very viral and is spreading from whites to everyone else. This ideology is corrupting, like cancer it spreads and then destroys whole societies if not cut at the root before it gets too big.
Unfortunately for white people the cancer has metastasized and now there is no hope of rescuing them as a whole from it. Just like in the olden days if a society adopted norms that performed badly in the real world they got conquered by someone else who probably had better norms (given that they managed to conquer you, probabalistically their norms are more likely to be in tune with the world than yours). And thus the cancer would die and not spread to the rest of the globe. These days we have moved on from violent conquering (a good thing I may add), however the cleansing effect it had is still a good thing and something the world could do with a replacement for.
Fortunately one byproduct of your twisted society is collapsing birthrates, this along with your misguided desires to take from those who create stuff to give to those who only have it in them to consume means you are beholden to more and more people from overseas with different belief systems coming to your lands, working and settling there. This means that over time this wicked culture is going to be replaced by something more in harmony with reality. It's slower than destroying the bad ways with the sword through violence, but I like to think that humanity has moved beyond that point in our cultural evolution now. Love (higher birthrates), not violence, is how the world is going to flush away your maladjusted social contract in the 21st Century.
Eventually it will be replaced by a system that is more in line with humanity flourishing, one where those with the vision to create great things are the ability to do so are not hampered by "what about all the poors?" and that is what I wish to see most of all, not just my people or your people, but all of humanity flourishing as we begin to embark of the next stage of the story of our species where we seek to banish disease and death, travel to the stars, learn about the fundamental structures at the heart of the universe and so on.
So yes, that is what I am against, not "white people", not "white people" at all inasmuch they are not acting as agents for promoting "progressive modernity" or even "reactionary small town conservatism" (which are the two ends of the cline modern Western discourse takes place on). I certainly would not call that "racist".
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1yr ago
LMAO, that's an excellent comeback.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1yr ago
This here. Western culture rams straight sexuality down the throat I. Copius amounts and seems to be oblivious of what it's doing. However when to comes to queer sexuality that's far less intense than the staraight stuff suddenly we have a moral panic on our hands.
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, if you don't like sexuality permitting everything then the way to do that is stop putting sexuality in everything.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1yr ago
First I am hearing of this, I would love to see a source showing high prevalence of prostitution. Ideally for high class people back home (our lower classes may as well be a different species to us) but I'll accept general data from anywhere around the world.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1yr ago
See how rates of mental health issues are significantly higher in the west than elsewhere. And before you say this is due to underreporting elsewhere notice the dose effect relationship between mental illness and how close you are to the "centre" of it all, e.g. see how liberals are more mentally ill than conservatives, women are more mentally ill than men, see here: https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/over-50-percent-white-liberal-women-under-30-mental-health-condition , urban dwellers are more mentally ill than rurals, people now are more mentally ill than people 10 years ago, people in the Anglosphere are more mentally ill than people outside the anglosphere, people outside the anoglosphere who speak English are more mentally ill than people outside the anglosphere who don't etc. (see https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-with-mental-or-substance-disorders-by-sex for a graph of mental illness rates for a chart that uses multiple sources/regressions to correct for underdiagnosis). We wouldn't expect to see so many disparate links if it was all due to reporting bias.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1yr ago
Large scale immigration from high fertility groups with preference for recently married couples. Can be sold to the centre right politicians as being pro business and rectifying the ratio of working age people to pensioners. The general public will complain but who gives a shit about them, the alternate offering is the left (your party having a majority instead of a coalition implies we're in a two party system) which will do the exact same thing but with an air of superiority towards your voter base that they'll like even less.
Problem solved.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1yr ago
Imagine this happens and they end up electing the House version of Lisa Murkowski. The MAGA types will go ballistic and it will be hilarious.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1yr ago
Mashallah. Even ignoring the specifics (yes FIFA sucks balls, and their growing a spine against political meddling in the last few days doesn't counter that) the West needs another few dozen similar bitch slaps across the face to realise that much as they like to say it, their values are not "Universal Human Values That All Good Thinking Persons Should Hold" and that billions of people are very pissed off whenever they try to present them as such.
An example: exacting vengeance is far more of a universal human value than allowing public displays of affection. There is a reason getting your revenge on those who have wronged you feels so sweet biologically (I recommend people try it sometime if they've never done it before, it's a fundamental human emotion no different to love, euphoria and the sense of fellowship with your bretheren).
And yet because of Christianity (with it's "vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord") the former is seen by Westerners as bad while because of Protestant Christianity (with it's there is no central authority, you have to decide for yourself if things are good attitude which gave rise to modern Progressivism) the second is seen as being completely fine...
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1yr ago
Not the person you replied to but I honestly respect prostitutes more than I respect "independent" women who sleep around for free. At least the former know their worth...
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1d ago
Personally I would have annexed Gaza (and the West bank too for good measure) and made everyone there a citizen. Then treat any terrorists as common criminals and punish them to the full extent of the law. This would also solve the Haredim problem in one fell swoop (or at least delay it for two generations) and crush the Israeli far right because now there are an extra two million people who'll never vote for them.
In this scenario everyone wins except for the terrorists and far right nutters; both of which are groups that deserve to have a boot stamping on their face for eternity.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
2mo ago
· Edited 2mo ago
Taking glee in the misfortune of others is a bad thing. We should aim to rise above such petty and base pleasures and be sad about the suffering she must now be going through, regardless of her actions and beliefs in the past. At least he was probably in complete bliss when he passed out and so did not suffer. But still it is a sad case of life being severed short and a reminder that one day we too will pass from this world.
I don't say this as someone who is even against people dying from an overdose. It's probably one of the nicest ways to go out too. I can make a strong argument that on net drug overdoses are positive for humanity as a whole (not in this case obviously but when you average out over the kinds of people who overdose the calculus changes significantly). However that does not mean that each and every such death is not a minor tragedy on its own, and we should be sad about this and recognise what the surviving family of the person who just died is having to go through.
In fact in this case the suffering is probably even worse than normal. Consider the fact that Susan Wojcicicki and her partner are probably more empathetically developed than the average person who just lost a family member and you'll realise the suffering they must be going through right now is an experience far worse than that suffered by most people in their situation. I sincerely hope they are able to find peace and wish them the best in this troubled time.
Applying sub-Dunbar thinking to super-Dunbar level problems
One common pattern of argument you often see from people who have not been doing too well in life is that they often blame rich/powerful interests for why they have not been successful, or alternatively why a certain social institution does not seem to work in the best interests of all of society. Their thinking is that to fix the problem, all we need to do is bring these rich/powerful people to heel. The problem according to such people is that fundamentally these small interest groups are disproportionately sucking up value from society and to fix this, they need to be punished.
The quintessential example I can think of is the problem with rising rents here in the UK. Rents have been going up faster than wages due to decades of underbuilding and general NIMBYism. Things are not quite as bad as say Ireland or Berlin (thankfully we've managed to not fall for the populist poison apple of rent control) but they're still becoming quite the issue with ordinary couples in London spending close to 40% of their take home pay on just shelter.
Recent regulations putting additional burden on landlords and making it harder for them to generate a profit (e.g. energy rating requirements and the removal of mortgage interest deduction from taxes) have led to them selling, further reducing supply more than demand goes down (renters who buy tend to buy bigger than what they were renting, thus reducing the total amount of supply in aggregate, e.g. a couple living in a 1 bed rented apartment may buy a 2 bed one, thereby reducing rental demand by 1 room but supply by 2 rooms, leading to a net loss of 1 room) which then pushes up prices even further.
This has gotten to the point where there are now over 20 prospective tenants competing over each property, which naturally leads to people having to bid over the landlord's asking price/paying months of rent in advance/submitting references if they want to actually get the place for themselves. This has lead to cries that landlords are "exploiting" poor tenants who have nowhere else to go and that they are capital-B Bad People who society needs to give a stern scolding to so that they go back to acting in pro-social ways.
If you were to point out that the current situation is in part caused by society making it harder to be a profitable landlord and that the correct remedy is to make things easier for landlords to make a profit (the real correct remedy is to build more, but good luck doing that in NIMBYland) that standard refrain is that the landlords are already doing far better on average than their tenants, so why should society do even more to help them out? Indeed, they say, we should be playing the world's smallest violin for such hard done up landlords who have hundreds of thousands of pounds to their name. No, what is happening here is that Landlords are capturing a disproportionately high percentage of the fruits of the labour of ordinary tenants (true, compared to historical values), and the solution is to do something that prevents so much of the hard earned money of your average Joe ending up in their hands, ergo Rent Control.
This type of thinking is something that actually works pretty well when we're dealing with small groups of up to 250ish not very technologically advanced people you couldn't just easily get up and leave for a different one like those humans spent most of their evolutionary history in. In such a group it is very well possible to use social shaming and exclusion to ensure a more balanced distribution of resources instead of having a few people hog it all. The lack of advanced technology means that there are no large economies of scale to the group as a whole (and thus eventually you) from having resources concentrated in a few hotspots rather than being more widely spread out. Thus in a small, sub Dunbar's number sized group, ostracism and gossip about how someone is behaving selfishly is the correct course of action to take for the betterment of everyone.
Unfortunately it fails catastrophically when applied to our modern society. It doesn't matter one bit that landlords are richer than tenants for why the current rental market in the UK is as bad as it is. Every single property could be owned by Elon Musk, right now the richest man in the world, and if he was selling off his portfolio because it was no longer profitable the situation would be just as bleak for renters (no more, no less) as it is right now with many disparate landlords independently coming to the same conclusion. Equally they could all be owned by a mutual fund investing the life savings of the poorest half of the planet and if that fund was leaving the rental market due to poor returns it would cause rents to rise just as much as they are doing now. The outcomes for the tenants are the exact same in each of the three cases.
The idea of shaming and making life harder for the people who are disproportionately capturing the economic surplus in an area to shame them into being more altruistic and thus improve outcomes for all of society just does not work in environments where people have a lot more freedom of association than you would get in a typical pre-industrial society. As we see in the example above, that can often be quite counterproductive.
The correct way to fix the issue in our large, super-Dunbar sized societies is the mirror opposite of the sub-Dunbar solution, namely we need to make it easier for landlords to make a profit so they enter the market (hopefully through building new units, but even switching a house form owner-occupied to "for rent" helps relieve the pressure on rents) and increase supply. The correct metric to look at here if you care about the tenants doing well is not how badly the landlords are doing, of the difference in how much value the landlords get vs the tenants from renting out their units, but quite simply "how much value are the tenants getting for what they pay" with zero reference to the sum total welfare of the landlords. And the way to increase tenant welfare? Increase rental supply in the area that people want to rent so there is competition amongst landlords and tenants are able to command more market power than the mere morsel they have today.
Another example of where sub-Dunbar level thinking fails in modern society can be seen in funding for technological advancement. Modern research and development has large capital costs, which requires large pockets of concentrated capital to progress. In a smallish society of 250 people where nobody can really get away from the others, if one of the members has a large windfall it makes total sense for the members of the society to want its fruits to be spread out for their own benefit.
Imagine a world where 250 people each have $2,000, but one person suddenly wins a lottery worth $1,000,000,000 (and gets access to goods worth that much, so it's not like the extra cash causes massive demand pull inflation). As a non lottery-winner, it is in your interest to agitate for the money to be distributed equally amongst everyone, giving everyone $4,000,000 rather than letting the winner keep it, even if they protest that they intend to use the money to fund the development of a drug which will add a year onto everyone's life expectancy (most people will take $4M over 1 QALY). Plus, if your society is not technologically advanced, the chances of that drug being successfully developed in the first place are extremely low, even if all the money is spent finding it. It makes complete sense to redistribute the money, the lottery winner will be pretty unhappy about it, but who cares about 1 person vs 249 and anyways that person's survival is strongly tied to the group's success, and he can't just take his money and run elsewhere.
On the other hand if instead of 250 people, your society has modern day technology and consists of 1 billion people each having $60,000 and someone comes into $1,000,000,000 and promises to develop a +1 QALY drug, it makes total sense to let them keep the money. Even if you took it all and redistributed it amongst everyone that's only $1 per person, which is worth a lot less than an extra QALY (compare to the small society case where everyone got $4M instead). Also the existence of modern technology makes it more likely they'll be able to find and manufacture the drug in the first place.
Indeed here is a case where even the famous Egalitarian philosopher John Rawls would have been in favour of the inequality, as his difference principle permits inequalities where their existence is beneficial to the worst off in society as it is here: for a non winner $60,000 + new drug is a better world than $60,001 but no new drug (a crowdfunding effort to raise money to publicly develop the drug isn't going to raise an extra $1 billion if everyone in society has $60,001 vs $60,000; you really need to have the concentration of wealth in the hands of an actor who's willing to embark on this project). The correct course of action for everyone in the super-Dunbar sized society is to let the lottery winner keep his money, the exact opposite of what they should do in the sub-Dunbar sized society.
Given all this, why is it still the case that many people in our modern world are big proponents of sub-Dunbar level thinking? After all, they would all agree with you that we are quite technologically advanced and no longer live in small societies where you can know everyone else who has a significant influence on your life. For most of human history, sub-Dunbar type thinking would have yielded better results for you and yours instead of the opposite, so it sort of makes sense why deep down we default to it so much, but equally for most of human history violence was extremely common and today we're by far the most peaceful we've ever been as a species.
I would say that this aberration is due to a pernicious effect of modern communications technology. We humans have an availability heuristic where we categorize how common something is in the world based on how often we see it. This works quite well when we're deciding between whether there are more yellow berries or red berries in a valley when the last few times we went foraging we saw around twice as many red berries than yellow ones, but it works a lot less well when modern communications deliberately amplifies rare events (after all, you're a lot more likely to hear "man bites dog" on the news than "dog bites man", despite the latter being much more frequent - ironically this is not true at the moment here in the UK due to the XL Bully dogs rampaging around, but the general idea is valid).
As a result of this amplification, modern day humans who are bombarded with media stories of the rich and powerful think deep down in their subconscious that such people are a lot more common than they actually are, and even worse, that such people are in the same 250ish Dunbar "tribe" as themselves (because the frequent updates about such people make one think these are genuine interactions between them and ourselves), in which case it makes complete sense for why they default to their instinctual, limbic thought process and feel that the way to make the modern world a better place for everyone is very similar to the ways that made life better for antediluvian man.
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