MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6m ago
I think it is just that the rot spread through different parts of English-speaking academia at different speeds. Small liberal-arts colleges in the US fell first, then second-tier institutions on both sides of the pond, then the Ivies, then Oxbridge, with the specialist STEM schools like MIT, Caltech and Imperial holding out longest. So at any given point in time a good British university is less rotten than a good US university.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
11m ago
At Cambridge, all the essay-mill adverts I got wanted us to write for them, not hire them. They were subject to the same level of ridicule.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
21m ago
Trivially true; look at election maps of my [admittedly newly-added] example over the last 150 years and you'll see exactly what I mean. The cities always only ever vote for themselves with a brief exception perhaps once every 30 years.
One party in the US two-party system was based on an (admittedly corrupt) alliance between the northern urban political machines and the rural south from about 1910 to about 1980, which is a third of America's history. For much of the other two thirds politics was sectional (New England and friends vs the South and friends) with cities and their hinterlands voting together. AFAIK the only period "urban vs rural" has been the best simple model of national politics in the US was the last twenty years, and it has been a 50-50 split with suburbs as swing territory. [I think you can make an argument for rural Jacksonians vs urban Whigs as a model for the 1820-1840 period, but it isn't the standard one]
In the rest of the democratic world, big-tent centre-right parties which consistently win the countryside and are competitive in the cities are dominant in most countries most of the time. In the UK specifically, the Tories are competitive in the big industrial cities until Thatcher, and in London until Brexit - in both cases until they stopped trying. (Labour's heartland was the coal-mining areas, not the cities) For example, the last time Manchester elected a Tory-majority council was 1967-1971, and 1982-1984 for Birmingham.
Running against urbanism and cities is a choice made by some right-wing parties for their own internal reasons. If right-wing parties choose to do that, they don't get to say that urbanites hating them back is an unfairness that needs to be remedied with malapportionment.
The country needs the city far less than the city needs the country. This is a significant strategic liability for the city, actually- the city needs water and food and raw materials (to convert into finished goods) far beyond subsistence levels by its nature of being a city. Thus the power the city derives from centralization is dependent on the rest of the country, not the other way around.
Coastal cities are built around ports, usually at river mouths (which gives you access to fresh water). Rich cities relying on food and raw materials imported by sea because they didn't control a large enough rural hinterland to feed themselves goes at least as far back as ancient Athens - Rome was fed from the Nile Delta. And higher value raw materials come from even further afield. The archaeology is ambiguous, but it is likely that Athenian hoplites were going into battle wearing bronze armour where the tin in the alloy came from Cornwall.
New York City doesn't need Idaho because they have Elizabeth, and Elizabeth plus cash gives them the world. If you look at the blue/red state map, every blue state has blue-or-Canadian-controlled access to the sea. (I agree that there are blue cities in red states which don't). Technically all red states have red-controlled access to the sea via the Gulf coast, but in practice using that access would overwhelm the capacity of the Gulf coast ports, and also require the use of railway junctions in blue states. So in the case of a peaceful-but-hostile split, the reds would run out of raw materials first.
There have been times and places where the economy of the city is based on a threat to shoot up the country - see Rome passim. (Urbanites make much better soldiers than yokels, it's just that they have sufficiently good alternative employment opportunities that they don't volunteer for peacetime garrison duty). The modern US is not one of them - rural America is subsidy-dependent, and the largest paypig in the system is Big Tech.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2hr ago
Canada has not seen an irregular change to its constitution or boundaries or large-scale political violence since Confederation in 1867. That makes the current Canadian order about the same age as the (post-Civil War) American one, or significantly older if you consider any or all of Redemption, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights era as irregular and/or violent constitutional changes.
Australia likewise since Federation in 1901.
The UK has not seen an irregular change to the constitution since 1688, or a violent one since 1660. There has been political violence due to Irish secessionist movements, but Irish Home Rule would have been handled peacefully if WW1 hadn't happened at the wrong time.
As a separate issue, the main reason why the Anglosphere has so much democratic continuity compared to continental Europe is a lack of foreign invasions, not a lack of revolutions.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2hr ago
The American founding fathers were some of the most brilliant and successful political theorists in the history of mankind. Don't throw out the political technologies they invented because it has been recently expedient.
We know what the founding fathers were trying to do with the Electoral College because they tell us in their writings, and it had nothing to do with any of the modern arguments for using the Electoral College to count a partisan election. The whole point of the Electoral College according to the people who set it up was to avoid a partisan election for the President. It failed, demonstrating that the genius of the founding fathers was finite and necessitating the 12th amendment as a bugfix.
Something like the modern partisan Electoral College makes sense in a world where states run their own elections, because it means a fully corrupt one-party state can't steal any more Presidential votes than it already has, but it isn't a technology invented by the framers except accidentally.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2hr ago
The US has, incredibly, managed to make it to 248.
While this is a valuable myth for Americans, it is false. The Civil War is fairly obviously a total failure of the OG Constitution and the worst outbreak of political violence in the history of the English-speaking world. The Reconstruction amendments were passed by force, not by using the Article V amendment process in the way the framers intended. I think Redemption was also an important de facto amendment of the Constitution (namely de facto repeal of the 15th amendment) achieved by political violence.
It is conventional wisdom on the right (and, in my view, correct) that the New Deal and Civil Rights Era represent irregular changes to the small-c constitution, but they were achieved with broad democratic legitimacy and with very limited political violence, so I don't think they count as a break in continuity. So I would say the US has gone for about 140 years since the last violent regime change, which is still a good run, though no longer outstanding for English-speaking countries.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3hr ago
The key thing that makes the difference in the UK (and, AFIAK, other Commonwealth countries) is that there is a small amount of wiggle-room on equal electorates, allowing most districts to align with local government boundaries that change a lot less often than the redistricting cycle.
If the non-partisan merit criterion is "draw as many district boundaries on municipal boundaries as possible, conditional on all districts having equal electorates to within 5%" then there may even be a knowable optimum answer, and in any case there is less wiggle-room than "draw compact districts with exactly equal census populations" because you can't tweak boundaries at census tract level.
When the UK Boundary Commission consults on map changes, they get two types of response:
- Responses organised by political parties for partisan purposes, where the actual arguments made are specious.
- Responses saying that they should tolerate even more population inequality than we already do to better align district boundaries with natural boundaries (which are usually, but not always, municipal boundaries).
At least in the UK, real normie voters would rather be mildly under-represented than have an unnatural constituency drawn based on a size criterion. The textbook example is the Isle of Wight where the locals insisted on having a single constituency with 113k voters (vs a national target of 73k) rather than having 40k of them share an MP with part of the mainland. In my own mis-spent youth as a local politician when I was in grad school in Cambridge, Cambridge residents similarly felt that the City of Cambridge (c. 90k voters) should be a single constituency with an aligned boundary, although the Boundary Commission ignored them and drew right-size constituencies that put one ward into the adjacent rural seat. Uncontroversially, the whole county of Cambridgeshire got exactly 8 constituencies (with no constituency crossing the county line) despite an electorate that would justify about 8.2.
That just a who’s watching the watchers game. A fight to gain political power within the selection committee.
It is a solved problem in every other democracy with single-member districts, despite the stakes being even higher in Parliamentary systems. I agree that the level of partisan rancour in the US right now is that it couldn't be done from scratch, with the possible exception where a non-partisan populist governor in a purple state like Jesse Ventura decided to make ending gerrymandering in the state part of his legacy. In the US context, proportional representation within states (or large multi-member districts in the largest states - NY could have separate lists for NYC+LI and upstate, for example) is the obviously correct approach.
But a bigger issue and a huge Chesterton Fence is it would be an attack on State’s Rights and their internal politics.
This is a good rhetorical point for conservatives to make to each other, but the moral logic of States' Rights doesn't include a state's right to organise its government in a sufficiently non-democratic way. There isn't a Chesterton's Fence here - the general principle is in the Constitution (the "republican form of government" clause) and there is a history of successful federal interventions against insufficiently internally democratic states during the civil rights era. (Under current SCOTUS doctrine there are no grounds for intervention, but "current SCOTUS doctrine" is not a moral argument, and in a world where "everyone knows" that SCOTUS is a partisan institution that doesn't really believe in the rule of law it isn't a legal argument either.)
There are some purple states (notably North Carolina and Wisconsin) where the state legislature is so gerrymandered (and has the power to continue to gerrymander itself in perpetuity) that state legislators are no longer meaningfully accountable to voters. In the current year there is no federal authority that could intervene as anything other than a blatant partisan flex, but if SCOTUS still had the credibility it did in 1964 then intervening would be very much within the tradition of American constitutionalism.
Federal Election gerrymandering is bad but if everyone does it then it’s overall effect on federal politics is smaller.
Federal election gerrymandering ultimately destroys state-level politics by making state elections proxy federal elections. This is a large part of why the OG Progressives supported the 17th amendment. (The other was that US senate elections in state legislatures were a bribe magnet). This is an old problem - the 1858 state legislative elections in Illinois are famous for a series of debates between US Senate candidates who were not on the ballot.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4hr ago
IIRC a number of noisy affirmative-action opponents have said they would be willing to hold noses and support a compromise where affirmative action (and laws like disparate impact that de facto mandate it) was credibly restricted to ADOS blacks and tribally enrolled native Americans.
This isn't going to happen because
- Machine politicians of other ethnicities are a key element of the Democratic coalition that could punish politicians for doing the deal.
- White anti-black racists are a key element of the Republican coalition likewise
- The vast majority of the problems caused by low-human-capital sub-populations in the US are caused by ADOS blacks anyway.
But affirmative action in favour of poorly assimilated immigrant-descended sub-populations is one of the most socially corrosive things you can do.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
There is a reason why I use "spergery" and "sperg" rather than "autism" to talk about the social dysfunction which is common (but not universal) in high-functioning autism and the people who display it. "Autism" or "ASD" with the modern diagnostic criteria covers a very broad spectrum from "not actually disabling at all" to "about as functional as a pet rock", and moderate-to-severe autism can be disabling in different ways. "Having an ASD diagnosis" is definitely anticorrelated with IQ, because the most severe cases are more likely to be diagnosed.
My personal view is that there are two different aetiologies of autism, which I call "familial autism" and "fucked-head autism" - the second of which is caused by some kind of brain damage and typically comes along with multiple other disabilities and a very low IQ. This would make autism anticorrelated with intelligence because fucked-head autism exists. I don't know what sign the correlation between familial autism and IQ is, although anecdotally it is positive.
There is definitely a positive correlation between visible spergery and visible intelligence. My darkly cynical view on this is that neurotypical people recognise that the socially correct thing for smart people in normal social environments (and especially mainstream schools) is to act dumber than they are so they fit in with the top quarter of the local IQ distribution. So only spergs show a visible high IQ. There is also a selection effect, where 90 IQ moderately autistic people can't manage their own condition and end up removed from the public realm due to e.g. frequent meltdowns.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
13hr ago
75% of blacks voted for FDR in 1936, for example.
75% of blacks who could vote. In 1936 most blacks lived in the Jim Crow South and couldn't vote.
My rough model is that in the New Deal era Northeast and Midwest, the Republicans were the party of monied elites plus rural and small town voters and the Democrats were the party of the big city political machines. In that model Northern blacks vote Dem because they live in the cities and benefit from the political machines.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
23hr ago
Tom Holland's Persian Fire is nominally about the Greek-Persian war, but about half the page count is the history of Achaemenid Persia up to that point. His In the Shadow of the Sword is mostly a debunking of the "official" story of Muhammed and the origins of Islam, but it includes a good, long chapter on Sassanid Persia.
Holland is an extremely talented writer (he was a successful mass-market novelist before he took up history) and his status as a freelance historian with no academic affiliation allows him to be considerably more based than academic historians writing for a mass audience. His books are considered not-bullshit by serious academic historians, although they attract criticism for writing narrative descriptions of events which we imply we are more certain about what happened than we really are.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
23hr ago
I'm equally unfamiliar, but the origins are definitely Japanese - it claims to be selling the insights that underlie Taiichi Ohno's Toyota Production System. The question of how much the TPS is a native Japanese thing and how much it is just W Edwards Deming's ideas being applied in a country where all the vested interests that could sabotage them had been nuked into oblivion is controversial in the process improvement world.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
"Nigger" isn't harsh because of the sound or the meaning, it is harsh because of the history. "Bugger" used to refer to male homosexuality (which is not the primary meaning in modern British English) has the same issue.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The Sherlock TV show fandom had almost as strong a Britpicking culture as the Harry Potter fandom - if you wanted to write fanfic you were expected to get it Britpicked, and there were lots of British fans willing to Britpick it for you. But I guess the Doyle's Sherlock Holmes doesn't have the same kind of organised fandom.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Private medical insurance in the UK pays you £100-200 a day if you receive NHS treatment for a covered condition. Almost nobody takes up the offer.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Basically, they have terrible pricing models for rating the evilness of actions.
NOOOOOO. You just gave me a brainworm about trying to develop a market risk or counterparty credit model downstream of such a terrible pricing model and now I want to drink a pitcher of sulphuric acid or zip all my confidential e-mails and leak them to FT Alphaville or something similarly stupid.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
In contemporary America, you expect everybody to know and accept that murder is bad.
Gangster movies are almost always written with an implied moral framework where murder is not bad if done in a way which complies with the unwritten rules of gangsterism - with the paradigmatic example being the various killing Michael Corleone is involved with in The Godfather.
The child murder in In Bruges was bad because Colin Farrell's character killed (a) the wrong person by mistake and (b) a child. A clean hit on the priest he had been paid to kill would not have been a problem in gangster movie world. Although I agree with other posters that In Bruges is not actually written in this moral framework, and is arguably satirising it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I thought it was fairly explicitly tied into Japanese spirituality via martial arts, so presumably some mix of Shinto and Buddhism.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
"Cunt" would be at least a write-up in a white-collar workplace in the UK, and probably a firing offence for someone without unfair dismissal protection*. The Australian usage is Australian-only. (There was a survey about what words were unacceptable on British TV even after the watershed, and "cunt", "nigger" and "Paki" were in a class of their own for offensiveness, well above "fuck")
The difference between the US and UK usage of "cunt" is that in the US the primary meaning is as a misogynistic slur (so the cuntiest cunt in America is Hilary Clinton) whereas the primary usage in the UK is as an generic slur for obnoxious and/or unpopular people (so the cuntiest cunt in the UK is Boris Johnson).
* Under British employment law, once you have been in post for two years you can't be fired for a single offence unless it meets the legal bar for "gross misconduct". Calling a male cow-orker a cunt would be misconduct, but would only be gross misconduct if your workplace had a written policy saying that foul language was gross misconduct.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
That usage of "bugger" - basically as a milder version of the nonsexual use of "fuck" also exists in BrE. When turned into a noun, it becomes "buggeration".* "Bugger off" means "go away", with the implication that the person you are telling to bugger off is annoying but not necessarily hostile - you could tell a friend trying to strike up a conversation while you are busy to bugger off but not to fuck off.
* "Bugger" as a noun is an extremely severe homophobic slur unless it is obvious from the context that you are talking about Ender's Game. @gattsuru below is correct to point out that "silly bugger" is another exception.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The difference is that the innocent meaning does not exist in BrE, so even where the innocent meaning is clear from context, British ears default to the obscene one.
The classic is "fanny" which means "bum" in USE and "vagina" in BrE, although it is now an old-fashioned term that suggests "Carry On" films rather than pornos. But American tourists talking about their fanny packs will definitely still be laughed at.
Also "jock" is a stereotypical high-school athlete or a piece of male underwear in USE and a mild slur for Scottish people in BrE (and a nickname for "John" in Scots dialect, like "Jack" is in standard BrE). I don't know how you get an easy innuendo out of that, but it should be possible.
Also endorsing @FtttG below - "pants" has a lot of potential.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Media coverage makes three arguments for a mild daughter preference in the modern rich world:
- When US IVF clinics offer sex selection at no or trivial extra cost, most patients choose girls. (Patients who explicitly seek out sex selection and are willing to pay a premium for it are mostly non-whites with a cultural preference for boys).
- Adoption agencies say boys are harder to place than girls, and are able to extract more money from adoptive parents who get a healthy girl than they do from parents who get a healthy boy.
- Last children skew female, suggesting that couples who have a girl are satisfied but couples who have a boy are more likely to try for a girl.
In the west it is an issue where people lie on surveys because "no preference" is definitely the politically correct answer (except for families with one child preferring the opposite sex for the second - "one of each" remains an acceptable, and common, preference for two-child families), but see for example this Korean poll showing a dramatic, recent shift in Korean preferences, with people now openly preferring daughters in surveys.
There is a lot of discussion about mechanism, but my suspicion is the dominant one is that most parents in cisHajnal societies have an own-sex preference, coupled with the feminist norm that having children is something women should make the decisions about.
In these parts I think it's okay to call a pikey a pikey.
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