Crowstep
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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).
Crowstep
1yr ago
Do you see a "vibe shift" around attitudes towards LGBT, and if so, is it generational?
A few days ago I read a Reductress article (now apparently memory holed) mocking a man who had identified as a straight man, followed by a gay woman, followed by something else. I was pretty surprised to see a women's magazine (albeit a satirical one) be willing to mock a member of the rainbow flag crowd, given how on board young women usually are. It definitely felt like evidence of a vibe shift to me.
Of course, the fact that the article ended up being removed anyway suggests that either management or outraged readers decided it needed to be taken down, so I guess these things take time.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I'd argue that in the developed world, nobody has any gains to be made. We've removed lead from gasoline, famine and malnutrition are distant memories. In terms of IQ, we've picked all the low-hanging fruit. If there was a way to actually increase a child's IQ beyond avoiding stressors like malnutrition or poisoning, the tiger mothers and educational establishment would have found it by now.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I would say it mainly depends on how young a woman you can attract, which only you can answer. It is literally possible for men in their 80s to father children, but it rarely happens outside of Hollywood because for a guy in his 60s or 70s to attract a woman of reproductive age usually requires him to be very rich, very famous or (ideally) both.
A man's biological fertility really only starts to decline in his forties, and doesn't have the hard cut-off that female fertility does, although the risk of sub- and infertility increases with time. Even then, IVF allows you to increase the odds in your favour.
Get yourself a marriage-minded woman in her twenties and get busy!
Crowstep
1yr ago
A few years ago the UK had a brief moral panic about 'needle spiking'. The idea that sexual predators were walking around with syringes full of rohypnol and stabbing unsuspecting women on nights out. Needless the say, the police didn't find a single case of it actually happening.
That said, our country's most prolific rapist actually did use GHB to rape over 200 young men, so it's not as if it can't be used for that purpose.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Patent laws are national, not international.
My understanding is that once a variant has been donated to say, Bangladesh, it cannot be 'undonated' unless Bangladesh's government decides to issue a patent there.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Golden rice was developed by a non-profit in collaboration with universities. It doesn't have terminator genes (indeed, no crop with terminator genes has ever been sold, the technology was essentially abandoned in the early 2000s).
It does include patented genes, but patent law is national, not international. Only 12 of the patents are applicable outside of America, and all 12 have been waived by their owners. Any farmer who buys golden rice seeds can replant them forever.
Greenpeace isn't opposed to Golden Rice because they're worried about farmers' welfare. They're opposed to it because of their knee-jerk technophobia.
Crowstep
1yr ago
My expectation is that the illegal immigration situation will continue to be as dysfunctional as it has been under the Conservatives. I think Labour's plan was to swap our boat people for France's boat people, though it isn't clear what the purpose of this is exactly.
As for legal migration, probably we'll see a more liberal visa regime, followed by public opposition, followed by tightening up, followed by party revolts in favour of looser rules, and so on in a circle. Basically what we've had for the last decade.
Crowstep
1yr ago
That is precisely why so many former Conservative voters are voting Reform. Conservatism just meant Blairism with right-wing rhetoric.
Labour will win, of course. My hope is that the Tories will see how many of their voters went to reform and will choose an actual conservative as their leader.
As for what Labour will do, Keir Starmer has been very careful to not reveal anything of what he actually believes. He'll mock the government for tripling immigration after promising to reduce it, but he won't say that reducing it is actually a good thing to do. He'll criticise the government for being unpatriotic, and then give a job to a woman who is most well known for mocking the national flag.
My hope is that he's a Lee Kwan Yew-style pragmatist. Hell, I'd settle for rainbow flags on every town hall if he makes it possible to actually build houses.
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.
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