Harlequin5942
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User ID: 1062
Having lived in quite a few European countries and knowing British history in some detail, I would put it this way: the UK had a period of great comparative success across a huge range of fields (prior to about 1945) where European countries they didn't outperform economically (France, Germany) were outperformed militarily/diplomatically, and the UK developed a fairly "laissez faire" type of imperialism that had some definite advantages over Belgian rapaciousness, French assimilationism etc.
The UK had a period of relative decline in 1945-1979. This was only relative (this was a period of mostly solid growth) and with some exceptions (UK unemployment rates were low in this period, even compared to e.g. the US).
The UK had a concerted and successful effort to combat relative decline from about 1979-2007. This took different forms, e.g. Thatcher had great confidence in Victorian institutions, practices, and values; Blair had a huge love of America (especially Clintonian America) public service modernisation, and wanted the UK to lead the EU into a modernist, progressive, American-style supra-state; Major was somewhere in between, with a strange sort of quiet iconoclasm in favour of "ordinary people" that ranged from the clever (getting rid of stupid regulations on everything from employment agencies to service stations) to the absurd (the "Cones Hotline").
For various reasons, I mostly blame Brown and subsequent UK politicians, and of course the UK voters to whom they pander. For example, the UK has a great edge in financial and business services. UK business services are one area where the UK still does great, partly due to language, partly due to regulation, and partly due to agglomeration in London/South-East England. What do UK politicians and voters love? MANUFACTURING. Steel. SHIPBUILDING. It's like a tall, scrawny but fast kid wanting to play rugby and set weightlifting records rather than basketball and netball - admirable, but stupid. So the UK overregulates and taxes its financial sector (as well as the occasional kick to its oil sector) and then wonders why its economy underperforms.
Similarly, the UK voters hate paying taxes at the levels of European countries. So they have the opportunity to e.g. save more of their own money for retirement, taking advantage of the huge long-term gains that private investment can make relative to pay-as-you-go state pensions. But they also want state pensions at European levels (no Boomer left behind) so politicians have introduced an unsustainable pensions uprating scheme that has meant that, despite significant spending cuts in some areas (welfare, education etc.) and despite tax rises to about peacetime highs, the UK public finances are still shit. This is not how a serious country deals with an ageing population.
And there's the UK national religion, the NHS, a healthcare system designed to save the UK Labour party from the wrath of doctors in the 1950 election, which voters think (a) should be improved, (b) should not be changed, and (c) should not cost them personally any more in taxes or fees. I suppose there are some religions with more absurd origins and principles...
Scotland is the beak of the UK ostrich: deepest into the sand it has buried itself.
I have lived in Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, Italy, Greece, and other places. These countries all have their own chronic problems and a similar lack of ambition in dealing with them. For me, it just stands out more in the UK (and more recently in the US) because the Limeys used to have some leaders and an electorate who were serious about tough changes. For all her faults, Margaret Thatcher was about the closest the West has come to a Lee Kuan Yew figure: someone who really thought, "If a policy is too popular, then we are being too careful."
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
But to make it worse, DC is filled with people who have open contempt for the residents of "flyover states". They devote all of their energy to social signalling and fail at their actual jobs.
This is an important point. When you're part of an elite that has captured the institutions, then your rise can be very disconnected from your performance. Ursula von der Leyen was caught plagiarising her PhD, she was a failure as German Ministry of Defence, and thus became President of Europe.
Yet she was born to parents in the first Brussels elites, attended the right educational establishments, and she was skilled at being an ostensibly conservative politician who did/said what the German centre-left wanted.
She now fails upward in things like the EU's covid vaccination programme (where she apparently forgot that Northern Ireland and Ireland share an open border when she was threatening the UK with sanctions for having a more successful programme and thus embarassing the EU - she dropped the threats when someone smarter in Brussels told her that they'd just been negotiating for most of the past 5 years to keep that border open) and a future leadership position at the UN or IMF is something she is "earning."
Harlequin5942
10mo ago
It's akin to the restrictions created by Christianity: to some degree, they can make for a better story, but not when they become too tight. So C. S. Lewis could, operating within a fairly but not entirely stuffy kind of Christian ethos and worldview, produce great children's stories that appeal even to the unconverted, but hardcore fundamentalists are infamously bad story tellers.
This trend goes back about as far as human culture: Aristophanes was conservative in contrast to Socrates and Plato, but not entirely pious. He wouldn't mock Zeus, but he did mock Dionysus. Constraints, to some degree, are good for creativity - that's one of the secrets of good poetry - provided those constraints stay within constraints. Even great conservative films like Ben Hur or The Dark Knight have a pinch of deviancy in them, perhaps because it's hard for profoundly creative people to stay within orthodoxy in all respects. Also, even great children's stories make one think, and the compatibility of orthodoxy (whether conservative or progressive) with thinking is a matter of degree.
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
giving myself any sort of self actualizing goal and getting busy is the best and most immediate cure.
And a lot cheaper than going to therapy. Even classically "useless" male coping mechanisms like chopping wood or fantasy football are cheaper, while potentially disproving negative thoughts like "I can never do anything right!" that people often experience when depressed.
Today, I passed a forest path that I cleared for a summer job as a teenager, when I was very depressed and almost crippled with social anxieties. Working on that path wasn't the whole story of how I got better, but it was one of the early moves in the right direction. Of course my work was sporadic, ill-organised, slow, and so on, but it was something where I made progress every day, received some positive feedback, and achieved something that looked impressive at the end.
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
I came to similar conclusions based on reading/hearing the thoughts of Mark Noble, a neuroscientist:
https://feelinggood.com/2019/11/18/167-feeling-great-professor-mark-noble-on-team-cbt-and-the-brain/
Basically, a good rule-of-thumb in neuroscience is "what fires together, wires together." So classic talk therapy (going over thoughts again and again with an interested but passive, unjudgemental or supportive therapist) might actually strengthen neural pathways that lead to depressed, anxious, angry, or otherwise undesired mental states.
This also explains why, if possible, just ignoring thoughts like "I'm useless" or "This is going to end terribly" or "It's SO unfair!" can be remarkably effective at avoiding the concomitant emotional problems; I think there was some research on this recently. It also explains why men's "just don't dwell on it" coping strategies are associated with lower levels of depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts than among women, despite the ideology that "repression" is a bad thing. Men have more successful suicide attempts, but this can be explained by higher levels of aggression. It also explains research suggesting that the behavioural activation methods in CBT are the most effective, since these are focused on rapidly removing negative thoughts/habits (e.g. by falsifying your hypothesis that holding a house spider will kill you with its venom or that your old friends will hate you if you get back in touch with them).
Mark Noble argues that approaches like David Burns's TEAM therapy, which aim at rapid recovery, will be more successful, partly because they minimise the amount of time spent on therapy or brooding outside of therapy. Noble also thinks there also reasons to think that each element of TEAM (Testing emotions/therapist performance before and after sessions, Empathising with the client, Agenda-setting to deal with client resistance to change, Methods for rapid and client-calibrated recovery) has a neuroscientific basis for effectiveness.
However, even if TEAM doesn't have these properties, I think that the idea of gradual change and the elevation of emotional expression have quite possibly damaged millions of people's mental health.
Income tax rates have never been lower.
This is not true. It's true that they have been higher.
Obamacare was effectively a subsidy for large health insurance corporations—far from single payer that progressives really want.
Obamacare is one of your examples of conservatives winning, because it was a subsidy?
Unrestricted immigration continues to depress low-skilled wages.
Mass immigration is an example of conservatives winning?
You also deftly avoided social issues, where - apart from recently on abortion - conservatives have had a long, long rout. They can't even vote to get rid of gay marriage any more, while DEI is the official ideology of one institution after another. For all the culture war's early focus on higher education, you have to provide a DEI statement to even apply to teach at most US colleges.
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
They can't really attack her for being a right wing extremist when her world famous books are a pretty clear allegory of Racism Bad.
As the TERF controversies showed, agreeing with right wing extremists on Current Year issues is enough to be judged guilty by association. For example, Julie Bindel is far to the left of almost all of her critics, on most issues. Controversies-of-the-day create weird alliances: think of Christopher Hitchens and neoconservatives on the Iraq War.
The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion?
This is the problem brought up in David Stove's What's Wrong with Benevolence? His answer to the title is: nothing, if it is combined with other virtues. The elevation of benevolence to the status of fundamental virtue, which began around the 18th century and which was accelerated by utilitarians.
What is required is the recognition that other virtues have a fundamental value, e.g. justice and prudence. This is not easy, even if the arguments are good, because most people are highly agreeable (in the Big Five sense) so they fear conflict, and they tend to see benevolence as a route to conflict-avoidance: "If only we are kind enough to the unhoused darlings, they won't cause any trouble to us."
It's the same dynamic with a lot of woke activism. Disagreeable radicals can bully around most people, because most people's default model for handling such conflicts is to bend the knee and hope it saves their own necks.
So elevating benevolence as the sole virtue has the persuasive power of elevating most people's submissive natures into approved virtues, and hence it has both philosophical arguments and self-interest in its favour. That's also why people's benevolence tends to extend to e.g. accepting misbehaviour by the homeless, but not Peter Singer-style austerity of living like a monk and donating all your income to the poor. Accepting abuse is much easier to market than undertaking privation.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
Men are physically stronger and so have the option of choosing a blue-collar of manual-labor career. Women pretty much have to do intellectual labor (or marry a rich husband) to be successful.
I thought of it the other way around: due to higher conscientiousness (in adolescence at least) and agreeableness, girls will do better at school - at least up until grad school - and this gives them the pick of what they study. Due to higher interest in people over things or ideas, plus somewhat higher Big Five Neuroticism, females tend to prefer the humanities and social sciences, as well as jobs like teaching and HR, even when these don't pay well, because they are relatively secure and very people-orientated. Insofar as women aren't smart, there are people-orientated jobs in retail, childcare etc.
This leaves everything else for men, whose choices are also influenced by the way that certain subjects and jobs become coded as "girly". Insofar as men are smart, they can end up in relatively well-paid jobs that aren't fun and which are maybe insecure. Insofar as they aren't, there are jobs where they can do better if they're strong and/or well-coordinated. If a man isn't smart or strong or well-coordinated, things start getting very tough.
I have been through grad school and its academic extensions. One interesting factor is that, as the conscientiousness gap narrows in people's late 20s, and very high agreeableness becomes less of an advantageous trait (your supervisor might even like it if you respectfully disagree with them) the competitions among men and women become more even. Obsessive interest in the subject becomes more important, which tends to be an advantage for men in thing and idea orientated subjects. For various reasons, women still have an advantage, including in the academic job market (I think partly because entry-level jobs in academia are mostly about being nice, compliant, caring, and diligent) but the hyper-productive young academics that I know are almost all male. So you end up with e.g. men publishing more and women having an easier time getting opportunities to publish.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
I think the concept of government is, like, melting. It used to be oriented around war, but wars are getting rarer and governments are getting disoriented now that they've lost their original reason to exist. Now they're just power for power's sake, unmoored from anything, floundering for a purpose and settling on something between welfare state and propaganda state.
And safetyist state. As humanity ages and becomes more neurotic and/or risk averse, I expect governments to have a greater role, as agencies for (a) extracting resources from working-age people and distributing them towards larger, older cohorts, and (b) protecting people against ever smaller risks and discomforts.
Since neurotic risk-assessment is often incoherent and irrational, role (b) could end up looking very weird. A random example: a state interior minister in Germany said, in reaction to the 2015-2016 mass rapes of German women by immigrants:
What happens on the right-wing platforms and in chat rooms is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women...
This man, who had power regarding the security of a large German state, literally said that unwholesome speech is as awful as sexual assault (maybe worse). And from a policing perspective, cracking down on people saying unwholesome things Twitter and Discord is a lot easier than solving rape, theft, or murder cases. The future could look very weird, because neuroticism is very weird, and rising neuroticism is the best explanation I have of safetyism. The safetyist state, like the welfare state, is rising out of democratic tendencies, but will change democracy into something unrecognisable to those who lived before it, and due to public choice reasons it may be as hard (for the forseeable future, impossible) to remove as the welfare state.
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
Anecdotal: I have a look recently at women playing Super Seducer. I thought it might be an insight into how at least some of them think of seduction and dating. Plus, Richard La Ruina operates in an interesting borderland of acceptability, where e.g. the woker girl gamers feel like they should demonise him but keep on saying "Huh, that's actually good advice."
Where they tend to fail is that their basic plan for a man to pursue a woman is to try and make them his friend. This makes sense: for straight women and even lesbians, befriending is their main interaction with other women. Many women, even seemingly "awkward" women, are actually very good at this task. They know how to flatter women, find common interests, make women feel comfortable around them etc.
While these skills can obviously be useful for dating women, it's not surprising that a lot of these women's advice are textbook paths to the friendzone, because that's what they're designed to do.
Also, even if a woman thinks "How do guys seduce me?" it's hard to answer that honestly, because a woman being seduced is potentially a status loss, so it's necessary to say things like "He has to know me for months and be kind and just treat me like any other friend" etc., because something like "His best strategy is to be confident, asserive, push things forward, one step ahead, and stand out from all my other guy friends in some way" suggests that she's prone to manipulation, and nobody likes to admit that. Men too: I have seem men been obviously lured into a relationship and hate to admit that the woman was actually the one coordinating the interaction. Never me, of course...
Harlequin5942
2mo ago
Do you know what was widely enjoyed by male audiences, with positive reviews, fond memories, and enough cultural cachet to spawn respectful memes and callbacks?
Jean Claude Van Damme movies.
Can you give 5 examples, please?
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
Is anyone else here pretty shocked by many on the Left's support of Hamas after these attacks? I'm not talking Biden type people on the Left, but DSA type leftists who support "The Squad".
No, this has always been their position when it comes to Israel vs. Palestine. I also remember similar people, back in 2001, suggesting or outright saying that the US brought 9/11 on themselves.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
If subways become excessively creepy and weird and violent, the middle classes will get Ubers, and vote for candidates who defund public transit. In short, if the middle classes (who have options) decide not to make use of public options, then public options will die their democratic death.
To put this in perspective, I live in an extremely densely populated city (Hong Kong) that would be unlivable as a car city. However, if the buses or metro became dangerous, then the middle classes could switch to the taxis, which aren't that much more expensive due to ultra-cheap labour.
The metro is uncomfortable and noisy - most carriages have TVs playing news and advertising - but crime on the trains is inconceivable. The only "offence" that I have seen is someone taking a surreptitious drink of water on a hot day, since eating and drinking anything is banned on the metro or in the paid areas of metro stations.
If I were a criminologist, I would spent my career studying how HK has eliminated most forms of crime, without usually feeling like a "police state". To what extent is it cultural? Institutional? Economic? Selection (so much of this city of made up of immigrants like myself, who were indirectly selected for conscientiousness)?
Just responding to the manufacturing point, I don't think British voters particularly fetishise heavy industry so much as they feel that the return of these jobs will allow these poorer regions in the midlands and north to thrive again.
That's part of it, I agree. The LKY solution would be to build lots of houses where there are jobs, so more people can escape dependency and joblessness. If people complain about losing the green belt or excess urban density or the loss of the beautiful Essex countryside, then you're doing it right.
Also, in my experience Brits consistently conflate manufacturing output with manufacturing employment. Thatcher's policies led to a boom in UK manufacturing, just not UK manufacturing employment: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/10/22/1413987501531_wps_2_SPT_Ben1_jpg.jpg
So if you ask a Brit if they think that the UK produces more today than in the days of coal mining, Ravenscraig etc., they'll think, "Certainly not." This is partly because they conflate manufacturing with "a man's work" i.e. something dirty and smelly you do with your hands (but in public).
Of course, this sort of sentiment is almost universal, but for a while, the UK had the leaders and the electorate to plough forward with tough, realistic decisions.
Unfortunately, these days people often just use "red tribe" to mean Republican and "blue tribe" to mean Democrat, even though thre are loads of blue tribe Republicans (even a lot of the Republican leadership would feel more comfortable at a dinner party with professors in Rhode Island than at a barbecue with plumbers in Texas) and red tribe Democrats (someone like Jim Cornette is a classic example, albeit imperfect since he's an atheist).
"Social conservativism" isn't something that IMO can reasonably be separated from its religious roots.
Not sure about that. David Stove was a socially conservative philosopher. Many of the sharper defenders of social conservativism, e.g. Fitzgerald-Stephen and de Maistre, did so using arguments that weren't religious; Fitzgerald-Stephen's criticism of Mill's social liberalism was brilliant exactly because they were both utilitarians. One of the most successful books in the US culture war, The Closing of the American Mind, was written by Allan Bloom, a secular Jew, and the book's critique of liberal academia does not rely on a single religious premise. (You might say that Bloom was not conservative in his own life, but he'd probably joke that he was so reactionary that he'd gone past Christianity and all the way to Classical Athenian homosexuality.)
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
It is the possibility of smashing their idols, of redacting and retracting the belief in liberty, equality, and fraternity.
It's not clear to me that those aren't the value of the American right, at least since they kicked the Royalists up to British North America. The differences between the mainstream American right and the mainstream American left are marginal:
Liberty: The right tends to put more emphasis on negative freedom rather than positive freedom. There have been times when, on social issues, the right has been sceptical of particular cases of negative freedom, but the basic assumption of the US right has almost always been individualist rather than paternalist; things like the Religious Right and the anti-woke movement have to justify themselves in terms of "This person's exercise of liberty X actually affects our liberty Y," which is fundamentally different from, "God says no" or "The man in Whitehall knows best."
Equality: Equality of opportunity (not in the silly sense of an equal chance, but in terms of equal legal rights and no unjustified discrimination) is the ideology of just about every last American. American conservatives might argue about the existence of certain types of discrimination or whether some particular case of discrimination is justified, but equality has always been integrally part of the American right's ideology, if not their practice. Of course, there will be the aberrant Nietzschean, Dominionist, Blood and Soil nationalist etc., but they are as alien to the American right as a working class Stalinist in the US left.
Fraternity: The US is unusual in being founded on an ideology (classical liberalism) and with the supposition that religion, ethnicity etc. are personal and/or local, rather than an integral part of the federal state. Trump is fraternal with gay people, trans people, hispanics, blacks etc. Some of his best friends are black. Some of his biggest supporters are hispanics. Friendship across race, religion, and "lifestyles" is as American as apple pie, and as American conservative as loving the US military, which itself has been multiracially fraternal for as long as most people can remember.
As you suggest, for the terminally online, it might seem like a different kind of conservativism had an ascendency in 2016. However, in fact, Trump and Trumpism was just mainstream US conservativism with balls. The average Trump supporter is as fundamentally opposed to reactionaries, Nazis, and the like as the average Hillary supporter.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
Catholics have had a sense of victimhood for a long time, but a traditional tactic of dealing with this victimhood was voting Democrat, which isn't exactly an effective defence against mockery of Catholic symbolism and values by progressives in the 21st century. I don't think it's that Catholics don't think that anti-Catholic animus isn't a thing or even that they don't try to talk about it, but that they don't have an effective strategy for doing anything about it.
For example, Catholics' ethics don't allow them to use the strategy that blocks the LA Dodgers doing an equivalent thing with a group of trans people mocking Islam - that some Muslims would try to kill the members of such a group and people associated with them, while also claiming victimhood. A child that cries and hits will attract more attention from an overindulgent parent than a child that just cries. Professed Catholics in America have many different ethical beliefs, but a common theme is that almost all of them aren't keen on violently attacking those who mock them. I think that's less "silent stoicism" and more "ethical passivity".
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
Maybe they think it's not as simple as you do?
For example, a moderately more complex story could be "Group A tries to appeal to Group B with an ad that Group B likes because it offends Group C." Is A talking to C? Well, that depends on how you precisify "talking to".
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
I do believe that an inclination towards academics is not the same thing as being smart or competent.
Is this about IQ? IQ doesn't measure "inclination towards academics." The relationship is confounded by all sorts of things, like agreeableness and conscientiousness.
Good IQ tests are inductive reasoning problems that can be given to naked spear-wielding tribesmen in savage jungles who have never heard of a school or university, without cultural bias, because they are testing aptitude in cognitive skills that are (a) common across humans and (b) correlated with capacity for other cognitive skills. An Amazonian wild man might not be able to read, but we can estimate his ability to quickly learn to read based on his IQ score in pattern-recognition problems.
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
True, but that's the audience to whom attackers of J. K. Rowling are appealing. In the long run, small groups of politics-obsessed extremists can have a huge impact; just compare the changes on trans issues in the past 20 years.
Harlequin5942
3mo ago
To tie it back to wokeness, wokeness is designed to distract from and cope with this structural reality. Say you have 10 graduate students in a chemistry program and there’s a job for only one of them at the end. You’re engaged in a Malthusian struggle, fistfights over beakers and Bunsen burners. Then somebody says something slightly racist or slightly inappropriate. What a relief – you can throw that one person off the overcrowded bus! That kind of phenomenon is perfectly natural, and could be avoided with more growth.
There is some truth in this, but (a) there really are true believers of hardcore wokeness in academia, I've known many, and (b) even for the cynical people jumping on the bandwagon as part of a status game, it's explanatorily weak to say that they do so out of status competition; the challenge is to explain why wokeness rather than any number of alternative possible status games.
Here is an expanded explanation: wokeness appeals to people who are low in orderliness (and thus love accepting LGBTQI2S++ identities) and have strong maternal instincts towards those they perceive to be marginalised. These people are attracted to progressive spaces, like academia, teaching, journalism, or social work, especially where they can be compassionate towards diverse and "interesting" people like students. The fact that these jobs are free from "obscene profit-making" helps too. And even though many people in these areas are not true believers, they are sufficiently agreeable and partisan to try and appease the true believers, especially because not doing so can be bad for their careers.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
Sort of a double win if you're a social democrat: not only do you get diversity, but also a way to extort support for your policies via the threat that the alternative will lead to violence.
I grew up in a relatively conservative community. There was one boy who, at age 4-ish, liked to dress in girl's outfits when we played dress-up games. He also liked some "girl's" toys, e.g. Polly Pocket. He was also fearful of competitive sports and tended to make friends better with girls rather than boys (I was an exception).
As often happens, he's just gay. He often finds it easier to identify with women and empathise with them, perhaps because he has more of a lady-brain (who knows?). People in this relatively conservative community generally ignored it, reasoning "He'll grow out of it," and they were right, since he is (99%) a typical adult guy these days.
The same thing happened with a girl in my neighbourhood, who just turned out to have a very active imagination as a child. She's now married to a man, with kids etc. She had a very religious family, who treated it as a game (like a child who decides that they are a dinosaur) and within a year she had forgotten even that she used to insist that she was a boy.
Kids are weird. Sometimes, it's because there is something deeply different about them. It's hard to know why, so it's best to enjoy the ride (within sensible boundaries e.g. keeping them from sexual experimentation) and offer them love throughout the process.
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