incognitomaorach
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User ID: 1274
incognitomaorach
23d ago
Ready to play the respectability politics and then lose when push comes to shove
There's a hard limit on appetite for explicitly ethnonationalist politics in Britain, from the native side at least. This is just not a world view that anyone subscribes to. Even the most hardcore 10% of the population have a conception of nationalism that includes "the good ones" nowadays. How likely do you think they'd be to win a general election by going full blood and soil?
Rupert Lowe's twitter account might hint at a full throated vision of what could be, and yet that's also a mirage, he doesn't believe half the stuff that gets posted, the full consequences of "deport everybody" aren't discussed or confined, and instead net out to deporting foreign/dual national criminals, recent Boriswavers, and destitute non-citizens. This is effectively the same as the Reform 2024 manifesto commitments.
Be prim and proper, don't rock the boat, keep a stiff upper lip
This is clearly shifting, Farage has long been a Fabian about these things, purging UKIP of it's nonsensical elements whilst the British public wouldn't stand for it, and yet look where we are. He's a wave surfer perhaps if you're being discharitable, but he clearly isn't a pure grifter. The man was in the trenches speaking to grumbling boomers in village halls in the dark blairite years.
And regarding prim and proper: they decided to stand a candidate in one of the most important by elections in years with an explicitly shit posting, "scaffolder humour" past, haven't backed down from the choice, and are now engaged in an all against all war against the BBC and uni party over language policing regarding the Nowak case.
Incessant doomerism isn't necessary. Obviously he's not perfect, but considering where the British political scene was in 2021 this is better than I could have hoped.
incognitomaorach
24d ago
There is no culture war. A war means it is still being fought. The UK lost already and the rearguard is being squeezed and told to let themselves be murdered by minorities to not make minorities look bad.
Given that the leader of the party that is currently sitting top of the polls has come out with his one of his strongest statements regarding race relations since his moderate pivot, at least that I can remember, and has been widely hounded by the political-media class (including in Parliament itself), I'd say the war is far from over. The police situation is exacerbated by the fact that there has been huge churn in the last few years, and so many (most?) are young, incompetent, and/or ideologically captured. Things can change just as easily as they changed in the first place.
incognitomaorach
2mo ago
To relate this back to the chip export issue: even if you don't believe in the immediate threat or power of AI (you deny that the sprint finish scenario is going to happen), it seems obvious to me that there are intermediate abilities unlocked by advanced AI (and therefore enabled by advanced chips) that can threaten either side in this conflict. Cyber security threats are maybe first and foremost, and are of immediate relevance in the ideological/soft power battle. If AI advances to the point of rendering non-frontier AI driven cyber security obsolete, then how would that impact the ability of the Chinese regime to maintain the great firewall? What if advanced AI was able to hack or manipulate the censorship system, or edit broadcasts, or enabled manipulation of the Douyin algorithm? These kind of capabilities alone (if you assume an attack vs defence paradigm) would justify interest developing not just advanced AI systems, but systems that exceed the opponent's in capability. Chip export restrictions would then be relevant in this scenario.
incognitomaorach
2mo ago
I drank somewhere between 5 and 25 drinks a week for approximately my entire late teens and twenties. This is pretty normal in Britain, although most people usually moderate as they get older. I'd mostly stopped what I'd consider binge drinking (5+ drinks in a sitting) by 25 (with the exception of perhaps a wedding or Christmas) but would still drink, just with more moderation. I was probably down to 5-10 drinks a week. That works out to be considerably more than recommended.
I did full sobriety for approximately 6 months as I had to get some other issues in my life under control and realised my drinking was a barrier to this. It was much easier than I expected, I was extremely productive, but still felt like I missed out on enjoying some things as much as I might have after the perfect 2 drink mark (mostly nice dinners). I gradually returned to drinking 1 or 2 drinks a week, sometimes not drinking for a couple of weeks, sometimes having a couple of drinks a day on a holiday. I feel extremely happy with this current level of drinking and have maintained it for about 2 years, and although I haven't been properly drunk in a very long time, I intend to break this boring streak at an upcoming bachelor party.
incognitomaorach
6mo ago
Perhaps Brown and Cameron re-emphasised the Civil War in the curriculum. I'll admit though that after the age of 14 "history" seemed to entirely consist of the 30 year span between 1914 and 1945.
incognitomaorach
6mo ago
Hmm, the two major things you've missed out there that I was under the impression every schoolchild in England was taught were the English Civil War, and then the naval stuff so Trafalgar and the Spanish armada. Roundheads vs. Cavaliers featured very heavily in my education at least. Trafalgar also featured heavily as part of the post-WW2 vision of plucky old England against the tyrant of the continent. The rest of the Napoleonic wars barely featured, but Trafalgar and to an extent Waterloo definitely did.
incognitomaorach
9mo ago
Dominion is a good read and makes the argument much better than I could. I don't think I agree with you about China though. By secularism I mean both the concept of separation of church and state, but also the general conceptual rendering that comes with "render unto Caesar", that there is a realm of life which isn't governed by the religious. Worth noting of course this has often been ignored by Christian states themselves, but was picked up with more seriousness later down the line. But Chinese emperors and dynasties had the Mandate of Heaven, oracle bones, and neo-Confucianism.
incognitomaorach
9mo ago
I guess if you say that all the atheism is just Christian heresy (would be quite a claim)
This has been a pretty popular take I've seen floating around over the last few years actually. Tom Holland pushes it and repeats it on pretty much every religiously adjacent podcast he goes on. His view (at least expressed in his book 'Dominion') is that a) necessarily European modes of thought are themselves Christian, so that liberalism, enlightenment thought, rationality, and so on, are themselves essentially Christian, and b) specifically the concept of the secular is unique to Christianity, which ties in with atheistic modes of thought via some extra steps. For context, Holland is a pretty milquetoast liberal, albeit a (cultural?) Christian.
I've also seen versions of the view popular in NRx circles. Nick Land has been on a liberalism = anglo-being kick for a while now, and I think would agree that Dawkins style New Atheism is itself essentially Anglo (and therefore Protestant). I can't remember who else off the top of my head has made similar claims but the narrower "atheism is just protestantism taken to it's logical conclusion" view is also one of I've seen pushed by online Catholics.
incognitomaorach
9mo ago
I think they were pretty tied to capitalism and business development. One early example in English would be the East India Company, who had EIC on their merchant mark. The gilded age in America saw company marks and names like AT&T, plus the similar practice of abbreviating names like "Nabisco" or "Esso". I imagine WW1 saw it take off in the public sphere. The concatenating type always struck me as a practice that was faintly German (Gestapo, Stasi etc.) with the Russians sometimes going with the acronym (KGB) and sometimes with the abbreviated form (Komsomol).
incognitomaorach
10mo ago
That's interesting. I know of these differences just from reading around, wikipedia and the like.
I suppose why I said that they, to me, seem like different religions is that the differences theologically between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are essentially whether the single supreme God (who we all agree behaved in the same way up to ~0 AD, and is the same entity) sent a Messiah or not, the nature of that Messiah, and then subsequent contact and contracts he had with the human world (via a prophet and a book). Then there are somewhat different practical legal matters that must be resolved. Islam and Judaism differ remarkably little in core theology imo.
The differences between the branches of Christianity, which have sparked wars, range from the relatively large (the precise metaphysical nature of Jesus, or different aspects of God) to the small (the matters of ordination, celibacy amongst priests). Considering your own former branch vs. say Advaita Vedanta (or even your current path), one strictly monist, one dualist, the different devotional practices and liturgy, the different teachers, the different Gods, the disagreements in the nature of those entities. I'm sure you know much more about this than me, and I guess you could say "well at the end of the day they still have the same origin", but they do seem rather different. What counts as a religion is probably a bit like what counts as a different language, relying on socio-political aspects as well.
And then finally it doesn't appear to me to be immediately obvious that the more refined and philosophically elite practices of Hinduism (e.g. Kashmir Shaivism or Advaita Vedanta) are the same religion as that of the Indo-Aryans, let alone the Indo-Europeans. There have been centuries of Buddhist, Jain and Islamic influence on these practices, even Christian, so a 19th century or 20th century revival which posits essentially a monotheistic faith with dharmic elements doesn't appear to me to be obviously close to ancient polytheism as does say neo-Platonism or Sol Invictus to the faith of the anicent Greeks or Romans. And as we know, those practices influenced early Christianity heavily, especially aesthetically.
incognitomaorach
10mo ago
Perhaps somewhat off topic but do you mind if I ask your personal theology when it comes to God(s)? Do you see Shiva as your personal god above a multitiude of others (who also exist) or as the ultimate, true God of which the others are simply aspects? Or Shiva perhaps as a co-reflection of a more ultimate divine source? Honestly I think the religious commitments between the 4 largest branches of Hinduism seem to be much, much larger than the gap between e.g. Protestantism/Catholicisim, to the point where I'm not sure it makes sense to refer to them all as the same religion.
incognitomaorach
10mo ago
The next obvious question then is, if some people can join together to become another people (ethnogenesis, or if you prefer collective identity formation) then what are the lines of demarcation which define in-group and out-group? In the British case, the factors seem to be:
- Common subjects of the same monarch for ~400 years
- Common language (strongly with the Scots and the English, weakly with the Celts and the Germanics) and especially shared literary traditions
- Common culture, cuisine, and traditions (most centrally religion of course, but these are myriad - most underrated is the musical tradition which is essentially common across the entire Isles, and also sheep farming)
- and Geographic proximity
- Common blood - the people exist on a spectrum of Celtic flavoured NW European to Germanic NW European, and practically all are somewhere on this spectrum.
But an upper class Indian from Calcutta also fits many of these. They were subjects of the Crown for 300 years (and are still members of the Commonwealth), they speak English, and their own mother-tongue is an Indo-European one. If they're of a certain milieu, they read a paper called the Times, they definitely play cricket, and they might even be Christian. At the very least they're familiar with Shakespeare and Kipling. And of course this person might have grandchildren who are third-generation British born. So they could satisfy the 4th condition.
And yet that 5th will never be satisfied, until intermarriage and mixing occurs. Until recently the vast majority of people in Britain would be willing to acknowledge this hypothetical individual as British, just British (Indian), like British (Welsh). But I suppose something has changed recently, as the previous imperial identity breaks down, and the Anglo identity reasserts itself. In my view this is predominantly down to cascade effects and critical masses. The grandson of the chap from Calcutta might be British (Indian), but does the guy who just flew in from Bihar, who speaks terrible English, who thinks of Manchester, Melbourne, and Milwaukee as interchangeable places that are functionally the same, does that mean that he is British Indian? "But look, people who look like me can be British!" Perhaps, but not you. And then people start to notice that these people who are definitely not British (but who they're told are) actually seem to be pretty similar to these people who they thought were British before.
But back to the question. If e) is important then how come the two "founding stock" Americans are as diametrically opposed as possible? Anglo/NW Europeans and West Africans. Well frankly its because time changes things- most namely it means there's a whole load of "intermarriage" (or, Jeffersonian style encounters) and if the South African Coloureds count as having some commonality with the Europeans, then so do African-Americans. This also solves for sticky identities which persist over time despite consistent marriage with their neighbours, e.g. the Ashkenazi. A Christianised (or secularised) Mischling in say southern France or Italy is of such minute difference to the local population that it's hardly worth differentiating.
The long and short of it is that until extensive mixing and partial homogenisation occurs, collective identity cannot (or at least, it won't stick). The migrant populations must become hyphenated, and hyphenation is not just a matter of paperwork. This hyphenation cannot occur when the numbers are too large OR too concentrated (as there will be the possibility of insularity), but given time, can become a new part of the nation.
Huh, the more you know. I wonder if they'll make the switch at some point in the future to shorten supply chains further.
incognitomaorach
10mo ago
The UK was doing well, or at least okay, until the middle 2000s. It was growing at a rate somewhat comparable to the US, or at least other Commonwealth Anglosphere nations. A British person could, with a straight face, claim to have a comparable standard of living.
Britain was exceeding the US standard of living in the middle 2000s. This was largely an artefact of exchange rates and over financialisaton but it was common place for middle class families to not just holiday in the US but specifically go there for shopping trips. Semi-regular trips to Florida, shopping in New York and so on was within reach for swathes of the PMC and even upper-blue collar workers as the exchange rate was 2:1. I distinctly remember video games that would cost £30 costing $30 (and thus being half price). This era, combined with the standard "free healthcare and no shootings" mantra that Europeans love, meant we could genuinely argue for a better standard of living than our cousins over the pond. This all collapsed from 2007-2009 and never recovered. Obviously it was an unsustainable period in retrospect, fuelled by sell offs and credit, but you didn't hear of people leaving to go to Australia and such in that New Labour era. Now that world seems a million miles away.
incognitomaorach
10mo ago
Asahi in the UK is actually brewed at what was/is the Fuller's Brewery site in West London. Now I thought that Peroni that we got in the UK is imported from Italy directly, although I've seen some conflicting information that it might be brewed in Scotland. Regardless, I don't think that the Asahi-Peroni identity holds true in Britain at least. All the other "foreign" supermarket lagers (except some of the Czech ones) are brewed in the UK, mostly up near Stoke and in the North West.
I agree in the sense that no politician on the right (or centre-left for that matter) has fully grokked the Moldbuggian "what is to be done" stuff here. I'm not entirely sure who the SBC predecessors are. Boris? The European context is dominated by based candidates getting elected into minor satrapies sublimated to the EU, with no room to manoeuvre at all. It doesn't seem obvious to me why a British situation couldn't work out differently in principle.
Reform are expressly standing on manifesto commitments to repeal vast swathes of Blairite era legislation, so in theory should be able to push it through if they got a majority. Would they also have the guts to overthrow the civil service, reform Councils etc. etc. No, almost certainly not. But anything close to the level of radicalism that we saw between say 1997-2001 or 1945-1951 would be a good starting point.
If Farage does prove to be a completely useless release valve that achieves nothing of any sort (a la Meloni perhaps?) then the electorate will bring someone else in (or begin looking at other avenues).
Sometimes I do have the twinge of fear at the scale of what is facing us. But what else is to be done? We need someone to win the next election, and no one is going to be coming at it from a standing start - Reform are about as fast as one can go in these things (within the British parliamentary tradition). I imagine one failure-mode may be the emergence of Northern Irish style politics (and non-politics) in the urban rings. In that situation perhaps a radical solution will self emerge. Argentina is another oft floated end point - slow terminal decline - but Argentina doesn't have the ethnic element which makes conflict semi unavoidable.
Regardless, I'm confident the problem is much smaller than that of the US or even France, because of both the scale and our political system.
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