incognitomaorach
No bio...
User ID: 1274
As I got older, I realized that a version of “the law of attraction” or “the secret” or “practice gratitude journaling to make you happy” was in fact pretty much true.
It's basically the inverse of "misery loves company" - both are self-reinforcing loops where your internal state shapes who you spend time with and what you pay attention to, which then reinforces the original state.
I was just rereading DFW's E Pluribus Unum where he talks about the same mechanism with loneliness: lonely people watch TV (or some other isolating hobby) for connection → less real-world interaction → more isolated → more TV. The medium becomes a kind of attractor state that keeps pulling you back.
Same principle whether it's gratitude journaling pulling you toward noticing good things, or doom-scrolling pulling you toward catastrophe. Once you're in the loop, the feedback mechanism does the rest. Knowing about the loop doesn't necessarily free you from it, you can see the curtain and still get caught in the performance. The hard part, like you say, is trying to forget or pretend not to do the curtain checking practice. I have some friends who swear by psychedelic usage as lifting them out of depressive states etc. but ultimately I think if you're pretty well adjusted or don't have some kind of PTSD or OCD, psychedelic use (even one off!) can make it really hard to break out of the "it's all a farce, look at us it's just monkeys [playing status games/performing characters/etc.]" mindset. Like yeah that's kinda true, just try not to think about it and you'll be much happier.
incognitomaorach
28d ago
I mean famously the Iranians aren't Arabs. An under appreciated aspect of the whole dynamic is precisely the struggle between the Persian/Shia side and the Arab/Sunni side. Iran has been remarkably resilient to civil conflict in comparison to the rest of the region.
incognitomaorach
5mo ago
Nah this won't be a teas and biscuits job, they have separate staff for that, the catering team are usually at the beck and call of senior civil servants at City Hall.
You're right that this isn't a "deputy chief of staff", but I'd be pretty sure they'll be doing slightly more challenging work than pure diary management - the casework part in the ad gives a clue. Still overpaid vs. standard EA at Westminster though.
incognitomaorach
5mo ago
Sure, but it is still technically a secretarial role that is being advertised at about a 25-50% premium compared to the other secretaries in the same organisation. However, secretaries at the top of government bureaucracies don't necessarily function the same as secretaries lower down, or in private businesses. Basically agreeing with you that the pay is more reasonable than it seems given context but also a little eye brow raising.
incognitomaorach
5mo ago
The salary advertised here is at the grade for entry (or occasionally mid) level management roles, on the central London local govt pay scale. The Head of CEx office position (usual "right hand man" role) will be paid £70-£90k at WCC, and would be this person's line manager. Usually an EA role at Westminster Council would be paid £35-45k. This post will almost certainly be at the bottom of the payscale advertised (standard way it works in local govt. with roles at this level) and £54k for the CEx EA starts to sound more reasonable.
The DEI stuff is standard boilerplate WCC use on all their adverts (still a bit mad). I'd be very surprised if it was sinecured, more likely a way for the CEx to get someone with a bit of brains into his office by using a budgeted role who can fill in with doing some other stuff. Worth remembering too that WCC is the richest council by far and can afford to do this type of thing easily.
incognitomaorach
7mo ago
Wes Streeting is an openly gay man and has (like a lot of the Labour cabinet) a fairly consistent record of being pro-LGB and trans sceptic. This is often framed as a matter of "they want to make gay kids trans instead of letting them be gay". Trans activists often frame this anti-trans attitude, the one area of an agenda which the country has otherwise enthusiastically embraced, as being due to the tabloid press. I have to say I agree, the media which has been broadly pro-refugee, gay rights etc. (with the only dissent coming sporadically from the Sun and Express) has been in near lockstep over the trans issue, at least since the Tavistock scandal. Even the Guardian publishes regular TERF-y op eds. Why? Honestly no idea, I mean the outrage stuff clearly sells, but it isn't as if the politicans are all anti-woke, just specifically on this issue.
Far out speculation: there might be a link to the fact that the Conservative party activist wing and MPs are incredibly homosexual from top to bottom, as is Fleet Street. They legalised gay marriage so have their credentials with the LGB crowd already, rather than in the US where it tends to be either LGBT rights OR anti-LGBT. Something there..?
incognitomaorach
7mo ago
Yeah somewhere in-between one of the first and second groups of places you mentioned. I've just checked the data and it's actually around the 70th percentile for income for inner London, 90th percentile for London as a whole.
Different parts of London can be a bubble of course but I feel relatively confident talking about the demographics of the arrivals- I suspect many of them are living in zones 2-5 in North West as I see them on the tube and around baker street.
Quite possible, I live in one of the nice but not elite areas of zone 2. Demographically speaking it is probably similar to the other nicer parts of inner London, low in white British but relatively high in general white population via Americans/Europeans, more (2nd gen/upper class) Indians and Chinese than Pakistanis/Bangladeshis etc. My exposure to the recent arrivals then are mostly through service job interactions and the swathes of food delivery couriers, and the tube. I have practically 0 interaction with the NHS, so this could be correct. Nigerians I think are almost certainly more balanced demographically. Given the huge changes in HMO licensing and rental patterns, I don't think that these new mostly male Indian arrivals have wives or girlfriends at home, but rather live 8 to a flat with other single 20-something men. A lot of the time the landlords for these properties are themselves upper class and/or 2nd gen Indians who extract/exploit the maximum they can from these new tenants.
Take the recent scandal from Jas Athwal, the labour MP recently as a slum landlord in East London. Anecdotally, a property I used to rent a long time ago I saw has been converted from a 3 bed to a 5 bed (by turning everyone room except the kitchen and bathroom into bedrooms). The landlady is (unsurprisingly) a 2nd gen East African Gujarati who rotates between London/Dubai/Kenya. This is quite a common pattern that I have seen from parents of friends and colleagues.
Edit: of course the other possibility is that a similar but gender reversed situation is taking place with Indian women, where they live in large HMOs and all work in the NHS, in some kind of parallel world. But I don't think is happening, at least not on the same scale as the men.
incognitomaorach
7mo ago
I actually think these statistics are relatively difficult to get access to- the 2021 Census a) missed the large numbers of people who arrived 2021-2024 and b) almost certainly vastly undercounted. Roughly 3 million people have arrived in the country Jan 2021-Dec 2023 according to migration observatory, and most of these arrivals won't feature in the Census data, plus whatever the 2024 numbers are. The census estimated 1.9m Indians living in the UK in 2021. Between 2021-2023, the official preliminary numbers estimated 670,000 Indian nationals arrived on long term visas. Adding in people overstaying short term visas, plus the 2024 numbers, and 1 million total Indian arrivals since the Census took place looks reasonable. My 95% confidence interval for Indians in the UK would be 2.75m-3.5m, as I have no idea what the potential undercount might be. This doesn't include Sri Lankans, Nepalese, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis but does include 2nd and 3rd gens ticking the Indian ethnicity box.
Going just off the primary language census data (with the caveats noted above), Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi and Tamil speakers have seen the largest proportional increases since 2011. So mostly South Indians/Dravidians. The established languages have all either plateaued (Punjabi, Urdu) or fallen (Bengali, Gujarati) which probably reflects the maturation of these groups as their 2nd gen offspring use English as a main language. Of course Bengali, Urdu and Punjabi speakers are probably mostly of Bangladeshi or Pakistani origin.
I repeat that, anecdotally, very recent Indian migration in particular seems to heavily skew towards men. This might be a feature of where I live rather than for the whole of the UK. I can't find any stats to back this up, especially as trying to make estimates that don't factor in the 1m post-census arrivals would be redundant.
incognitomaorach
7mo ago
This is a legacy of the majority of British-Indians pre-2010 being relatively highly educated, often very highly educated, and generally well acclimatised. There were teething issues of course- black and white skinheads would team up to do a bit of 'paki bashing' that usually targeted brown people indiscriminately.
But 1 in 6 British Indians were of East African extraction (read, middleman minority) as late as 2001, with the remainder being largely merchant-class Gujaratis. Essentially the same stereotype and class of people as Indians in America.
These positive feelings will soon fade with the latest Boriswave. Vast numbers of single men working as deliveroo drivers do not a model minority make. Anecdotally, my 2nd Gen British-Indian friends used to mock and make fun of "freshies" (fresh off the boat people) for being crude, uneducated etc. when in reality most of them were visiting accountants from Bombay. Those mocking comments have largely stopped as I think they see that the the new wave of Indian migrants do fit all the stereotypes. An interesting dynamic to say the least. I don't see the positive attitude lasting, and I think sooner rather than later the 2nd and 3rd gen British Indians will get over their semi-ethnic solidarity and realise that these new arrivals are giving them a bad name, and advocate for their removal. Braverman/Patel gave this rhetoric at least, although their actions are questionable. Due to these largely being single men with unstable employment, they should be easy to remove with a bit of willpower. Not the same dynamic as established families and communities.
incognitomaorach
8mo ago
Fair enough, my mistake.
incognitomaorach
8mo ago
Seems relevant that Tucker is a true believing Christian. UAPs being supernatural rather than extra-terrestrial, and demonic mauling/nuclear activity seems parsimonious with that.
incognitomaorach
8mo ago
Think you've missed a trick here. The russians did fund the German green movement, and mostly because of the dynamics re imports and exports of energy. If you look at the Petra Kelly/Gert Bastian situation for example, the whole thing glows as bright as the sun. And it doesn't take rocket science to work out why. If you're pro green energy, at least at the time with 90s/00s level tech, then you're going to need (even if you don't acknowledge it) some stable energy source to make up the down periods. And at the time gas was by far the best option other than nuclear. You essentially had a domestic production of nuclear/coal which could be demonised as dirty and possibly even evil. The anti domestic side didn't say "and we'd like russian gas to smooth out the gaps" but this was an inevitability.
Basically yes, Vance is trivially correct that the German greens were funded by the Russians, and for relatively sensible reasons.
incognitomaorach
8mo ago
It's extremely unlikely that there will be a full blown war over Taiwan at all, in my opinion. The Chinese have no need to risk it all to secure territorial integrity, and as other commenters have suggested, there's no rush for China either. Economic warfare (cessation of PRC-ROC trade rather than outright blockade) is more likely. AFAICT the mainline scenario is where the US continues to onshore the useful productive capacity of Taiwan (chip fab), with possible human capital absorption as well. Eventually, the value of Taiwan for the US will decrease to the point where it isn't worth going to war, and a Hong Kong style handover will begin. This would disrupt the island chain strategy of course, but the reality is that as the Taiwanese economy becomes increasingly reliant on the PRC, and the value of it to the US decreases, there's only one likely direction of travel. Plenty of unknowns but I'd put a 40% likelihood on this kind of scenario playing out in the next 5-10 years or so, much more likely than a hot war involving the 2 superpowers.
incognitomaorach
9mo ago
This is a bit of a myth actually. There are two main areas where "positive discrimination" comes into the admissions process. Probably most importantly, the extensive outreach and support provided to target backgrounds and demographics, schemes such as UNIQ and reserved open days/state specific mentoring mean that smart state school kids can often get their hand held throughout the admissions process. This might also include admissions test help and mock interviews, provided by current students or that way inclined profs. In practice this tends to benefit the middle class state school kids more than those right at the bottom of the pack, ignoring base rate intelligence. And you probably wouldn't be able to take advantage of this unless you did at least 2 years of state sixth form, and then they'd still likely check your prior history. On top of the long standing class based programs there are increasingly racially oriented schemes.
The other obvious way the scales have been tipped is by dropping standards. Classics admissions, for example, no longer require prior knowledge of Latin/Greek, although I think there are only a few of these places available where they fast track you up after you've arrived. If you lower the bar, then more people get over the bar, and so you can start to do a bit of selection for people who may be "diamonds in the rough".
In terms of direct discrimination in applications, officially this very much doesn't happen, or at least that was the case 10 years ago. Occasionally there was some extra leeway afforded over grades (getting AAB for example), but having seen behind the curtain a bit the only point where the thumb can actually get on the scale is the interviews/GCSEs, as future grades and entrance exam are scored identically for all.
As interviews are semi-subjective (although scored by multiple tutors), ideologically inclined tutors could happily penalise a posh Eton boy and help out the nervous inner city kid, but this would vary substantially. But the interviews make up at most 25% of the scoring process (tends to be a semi filtering and then 50% admissions test, 50% other stuff depending on subject). So in theory sending your kid to the good state sixth form probably shouldn't have that much of an impact unless you want to try and take advantage of the tutoring/open day opportunities. But if you go to a good enough private school then this shouldn't outweigh the benefits.
Having said all that, there are some particular sixth form colleges which seem to do exceptionally well (Hills Road, Peter Symonds) either through an extremely middle class catchment area, or extremely selective admissions (Harris Academy). The top 10 schools for admissions in 2024 are split 5/5 for state/private, and of those 10 there's a 37% admission for the private sector and 29% for the state. So it doesn't look like things have substantially changed in the last 5 years.
Anecdata but my views have changed substantially (civ nat/soc dem to "quite a bit further right") via online discourse, osmosis, and frankly I think my views coming into contact with reality. A large amount of my IRL contacts have also moved further to the right on social issues specifically, mostly driven my immigration, or at least online discourse and media that is shaped by immigration. How much of this is driven my argumentation vs. just looking at reality is difficult to parse, but what I would say is once certain dominoes fall, one becomes much more receptive to argumentation around other points and policies. The nature of tribalism means that it's extremely hard to remain iconoclastic and the step from "I'm on the left except for the extreme culture war stuff" to "I'm on the right" is an order of magnitude smaller than the step from "I'm on the left" to "I'm on the right".
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