Crowstep
7d ago
From her annotated version of Philsopher's Stone:
"[Quidditch] was invented in a small hotel in Manchester after a row with my then boyfriend. I had been pondering the things that hold a society together, cause it to congregate and signify its particular character and knew I needed a sport.
It infuriates men...which is quite satisfying given my state of mind when I invented it."
Crowstep
7d ago
It's like when the Ashes (Cricket) used to be played between lords in England and Australia.
I'm pretty sure the 'Lords' you've heard referred to in cricket is the cricket ground. Cricket isn't played by literal lords, it's a middle class sport in England and Australia and a working man's sport in the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent.
Aristocrats play (or played) badminton, croquet and polo.
Crowstep
8d ago
Fascinating. Quotas in multi-ethnic society make some degree of sense, but it's like they wanted to create a quota system and then, upon discovering that their country was 99% Bengali, just decided to bodge one together anyway.
Reading the Wikipedia, it seems that the founders of the system wanted to:
- Reward their fellow soldiers who fought in the war
- Reward women who were raped by Pakistani forces during the war
- Give out 'traditional' quotas for the poor (those from 'underrepresented districts')
What seems to have happened is that as the first two groups aged out, rather than replacing these positions with merit appointees, they expanded the rape victim quota to all women and expanded the soldier/political faction quota to the children and later grandchildren of those who previously held it.
It's a really interesting example of how this kind of corruption can be self-reinforcing. Even when a system is obviously not doing what it claims/claimed to do, it may still be kept in place due to the self-interest of those who benefit from it.
Crowstep
8d ago
Ooof, that sounds kinda bleak. Are you happy with spending that much time on your phone?
That list is hilarious. The male words seem to be mostly technical (thermistor, teraflop), scientific (boson, piezoelectricity) or relating to fighting (howitzer, bushido). Also, the inclusion of katana, bushido and yakuza makes us look like a bunch of weebs.
Meanwhile, the female list seems to be almost entirely relating to fabric and clothing. Of the female list, the only ones I can say I knew a specific definition for were kohl and doula. The rest I could vaguely recognise as relating to fabric or can see the etymology without knowing the English meaning (voile - veil, boucle - buckle). Half the words seem to be French loanwords.
Apparently a pessary is some kind of gynocological medical device and not something religious or funereal, as I would have guessed.
Crowstep
11d ago
Guess it has a better ring to it that '100 best books from the first quarter of the 21st century'.
Looks like they asked writers to name their favourite books, which was always doomed to failure. It's like asking architects to name their favourite buildings. They've been too exposed to the art form to have normal, human tastes, so they end up chasing weirdness and pretence. Only art forms that are subject to public opinion can produce good work. Fortunately, normal people still read books, so we can get a much better list from them.
Crowstep
11d ago
I remember reading that the Secret Service travels with donor blood ready to go for the President in case he needs a rapid transfusion.
Crowstep
12d ago
Well as I said, it's a giant moral hazard. If you grant any child born on US soil citizenship, then you allow the parents to stay to look after the child, then you incentivise parents to come to your country illegally. You reward criminals instead of punishing them, which incentivises the crime. The appropriate thing for parents who give birth abroad to do is to go back to their home country, where all three members of the family have citizenship. That's what the rest of the world does and it works absolutely fine. Nobody thinks there's any wrong being done when foreign tourists take their newborn home rather than using them as a tool to stay in a country they are not allowed to be in.
Indeed, the justification you gave conveniently skips the decade or so when the parents could have returned to their home country. There is zero reason for a newborn to stay in a foreign country, even if he was born there. He's not losing any emotional ties or severing any relationships. Indeed, that justification only works if a country has de facto open borders and gives illegal immigrants all of the benefits of legal residence in spite of their crimes. And well, we don't need to speculate about what happens when a country does that.
Crowstep
12d ago
The patterns you're describing aren't happening. If we take the US as an example, crime has been declining since the early 90s (when people were much skinnier). US PISA scores peaked in 2014 before declining to their 2000 levels today (this is probably related to smartphones). Drug use seems to have peaked around 2000, while alcohol peaked around 1980.
One thing that has skyrocketed is vegetable oil consumption. I think the introduction and ubiquity of an evolutionarily novel food is a greater explanation for obesity than the whole world getting lazier in the 1970s for no reason.
Crowstep
13d ago
While I'm quite sympathetic to your position, it's harder to be sympathetic to your mother and other people like her. She knowingly and willingly broke the law of a country that was kind enough to let her in. She is, in a quite literal sense, a criminal. Ultimately, laws only work if they are enforced. All Trump is planning to do is actually enforce rules that most of the political class (claim to) agree with.
It's about time that the US got rid of birth right citizenship too. It's a bizarre custom which seems to only exist in the Americas for some reason. Like the right of a asylum, it's a gigantic moral hazard. If you want people to obey the laws of your country, you shouldn't reward them for breaking those laws.
While I'm grumbling, the disingenuous conflation of 'immigrants' and 'illegal immigrants' is also very frustrating. Conflating the two is like conflating renters with squatters or shoplifters with customers. Ditto for euphemisms like 'undocumented immigrants' (did they leave their visas at the hotel?) or 'irregular migrants' (A North Korean migrant is irregular, a Mexican who snuck is just a regular criminal).
Crowstep
13d ago
That which changed is obvious to everyone but aspies like us: It's individualism.
The fattest countries (outside of Pacific islands) are mostly Arab countries.
The most individualist countries are Anglosphere or Northern European countries. Arab countries score very low on individualism comparatively.
Moralism is tempting, but the real explanation is more likely to be biological.
Crowstep
13d ago
People in the 1970s weren't skinny because food was too expensive.
The fattest countries in the world aren't the richest countries in the world, nor the countries where food is the cheapest. Look at this list, the fattest countries are Pacific islands (where the necessity of importing food makes it expensive) and Middle Eastern countries (which can be poor like Libya or rich like Qatar). Whatever's causing obesity, it isn't cheap calories.
I personally think that the global obesity epidemic has something to do with the fact that we replaced animal fats with an agricultural waste product that is evolutionarily novel.
Crowstep
18d ago
Since the 2000s every young person who drinks, smokes or buys scissors has gotten used to carrying ID, typically a provisional or qualified driving licence. It's basically impossible to function as a young adult without it, whereas older people don't get asked for ID when buying alcohol or cigarettes and so are much more likely to go without one.
Also, the list includes PASS cards, which are specifically intended to be used as youth identity cards. They are much more common than youth bus passes, which I have never seen in the wild.
These figures bear out my intuition, which is that old people are more likely to be ID-less than young people.
Crowstep
18d ago
I don't think you can reasonably describe disproportionate (and therefore undemocratic) voting as a recent issue. FPTP has been pushing out 3rd+ parties since we've had modern political parties. The Liberals were crowded out by Labour a century ago. Just because FPTP was more successful in the past doesn't make it more legitimate. There are more than two political positions and there always will be.
FPTP is like the rent control of politics, rewarding incumbents and disadvantaging everyone else.
Crowstep
18d ago
I bought an apron. I was tired of getting grease stains on my clothes from cooking. I tried buying a couple on Amazon but both the expensive and cheap ones were low quality. Finally I went to a local catering supply shop which had a huge selection to choose from, all at reasonable prices.
Crowstep
20d ago
If we had a democratic voter system, we wouldn't be in a situation where the two main parties agree on Open Borders and the public has to choose the lesser of two evils. Sure, the current system can indirectly force the Tories to move to the right when they see their votes going to Reform, but imagine what a Conservative-Reform coalition would look like! Farage as Immigration Minister, Tice as Minister for de-Wokifying Institutions or whatever. Instead, the public gets a choice between Islington dinner party guests with blue ties, and Islington dinner party guests with red ties.
Crowstep
21d ago
It's not either or. Our population has already grown, and we need to build houses for these people. Even if we got net zero migration, faster housebuilding would bring prices down for current residents faster.
Plus, the green belt was a bad idea to begin with. Allowing cities to expand allows people to live and raise children near to where they work. Instead, we force them to live in far away towns and make them take long, misery-inducing commutes while prime land outside of productive cities is used to grow turnips instead of housing humans. I live in a popular city and am currently looking for a house. It drives me mad that you can drive for 20 minutes from the city centre and be surrounded by cows instead of suburbs. What a waste!
If there is beautiful land that we want to preserve, we should make it explicit with national parks and the like, not by freezing all of our cities at the size they were in the 1950s.
Crowstep
21d ago
Oh I'm aware that Cajun French is basically dead, my metaphor was about a hypothetical Louisiana where it was a significant language, I should have made that clear.
Crowstep
21d ago
The only possibility as I see it would be a 2029 election where Labour loses their majority and is forced to go into coalition with the Lib Dems, who put electoral reform as a condition of their support.
In 2010 Nick Clegg was bamboozled by Cameron into agreeing on a referendum on version of FPTP which was almost as disproportional as the current system, I can't see them making that mistake again. I would expect them to demand actual change to the voting system without a referendum that could go wrong.
Crowstep
21d ago
This is a good summary. A few thoughts:
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Hopefully the Lib Dems' strong showing could set the UK up for electoral reform in the future. The lack of enthusiasm for Labour and the difficult problems they'll have to face could lead to a hung parliament next time. The Lib Dems would certainly demand a change to the electoral system in exchange for their support, and should not be bamboozled in the same way Nick Clegg was.
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One area where I think Keir Starmer could genuinely change things is in the planning system. The UK (like most Anglo countries) makes it almost impossible to build houses and other infrastructure. Labour's manifesto did promise planning reform, and hopefully his strong majority and lack of reliance on middle class rural voters (like the Conservatives) would allow him to push it through. He seems to believe the only way he can be reelected is through strong economic growth, so I think he'd be willing to spend political capital on this, particularly if the UK continues with high immigration (very likely).
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The next Scottish Parliament election is in 2016. I expect we'll see a collapse in SNP support as we did yesterday, but who those seats go to is another question. I can imagine a relatively even split between the five main parties (Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dems, Greens and SNP) once independence fades into the background as a serious prospect. Previously, Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems fought for the Unionist vote. Now they might actually have to campaign on Policy!
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I don't expect Welsh nationalism to come anywhere near Scottish nationalism. Wales is poor, and the only reason it has a national identity is due to its language. Given that UK governments are broadly positive towards the Welsh cultural project (primarily Welsh medium schools) the only thing Wales has to gain from independence is the loss of vast subsidies from London. Wales becoming independent would be like Louisiana trying to secede because it has a large French-speaking population.
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This is the first UK general election where voter ID was required, having previously been trialled for local elections. Unlike in the US, this is considered by most to be a sensible technocratic fix rather than a sinister plot to disenfranchise anyone (although a few UK lefties seem to have imbibed US memes enough to see it as such).
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The fact that Commonwealth citizens can vote in UK general elections is looking more and more absurd. Polish and Italian nationals who have lived here for more than a decade and have visas that allow them to stay indefinitely cannot vote for the government that rules them, while Indian or Nigerian nationals on tourist or student visas can vote without knowing anything about UK politics or even knowing how to speak English. I do not expect the new Labour government to change this.
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I think the Conservatives will elect a true right-winger. They lost because right-wing voters were furious with ever higher immigration, ever higher taxes and woke takeover of every institution. Their only path back to government is to win these voters back and they're not going to do this with more Blairism.
Crowstep
23d ago
That's an interesting idea, could you give some examples of what you mean?
2020 is when net migration tripled, due to policies put in place by Boris Johnson and continued by Rishi Sunak. Conservative voters feel betrayed, so they are voting for the low-immigration Reform party instead. If you combine the vote shares of those two parties, you get around 37%, which isn't far off what Labour is getting.
Conservative popularity was declining before Johnson reinvigorated it with his charisma. But when right-wing voters discovered that he was just an open-borders extremist with a blue rosette, they turned against him.
Combine that with damage to the traditional image of competence that the party benefits from due to a failing health system, high inflation and poor economic growth, and voters don't really have any reason to vote Conservative. After all, we already had crazy-high immigration, reckless money-printing, economic stagnation and activists wokeifying institutions during a decade of Conservative government. What's the worst a Labour government could do?
This election is best understood as the Conservatives losing, rather than Labour winning.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Yes! Bizarrely I searched for it using the TRANS tag but only one article came up. It may have just been a bug in the website.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I think it's just natural churn. Life gets in the way, and long time users will eventually fall away. I know I've been purposely trying to reduce my 'arguing on the internet' time.
On Reddit, this wasn't a problem because there was a constant source of new users. On here that's not the case.
I guess the future of the forum is to decline to nothing or go back to Reddit (and maybe get banned for wrongthink there in a few years).
Treating people as individuals is one of those secret sauce things that the modern Anglosphere takes for granted but which isn't that common globally or historically and which is part of what makes modern society work.
In terms of establishing democracy and capitalism, individualism has been great. And clearly more clannish attitudes haven't stopped birth rate declines elsewhere (looking at you Southern Europe, nobody's having kids when you live with your momma until you're 32). That said, I think a little intergenerational responsibility can be a good thing. Sam Kriss' excellent feature describes elderly retirees in Florida 'absconding from their duty as old people, which is too be a link between the past and the future'. I think old people sticking around to care for children and give them a sense of belonging is something tragic to lose, of course, that requires the young people to stick around too, which can't be taken for granted any more.
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