incognitomaorach
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User ID: 1274
incognitomaorach
2mo ago
Good post, I'll write a substantial comment shortly but a minor nitpick first: Arday was the youngest ever black professor at Cambridge (presumably not of a particularly long list). I'm not sure who the youngest overall/white professor was, but Newton was 26 when he was appointed Lucasian professor, a full decade younger than Arday.
incognitomaorach
3mo ago
And of course Revelations 13:7 is popular with the anti-NWO crowd at pointing precisely against this kind of thing. And depending on your reading of the Tower of Babel story, either God punishes hubris by scattering the nations, or God intervenes benevolently to scatter the nations for our long term health.
incognitomaorach
3mo ago
I think you'd expect there to be different dynamics between the Church and migration in countries that are institutionally and autochthonously Catholic and countries that aren't. The establishment institutions, and powerholders in the US are still fundamentally protestant-judeo-atheist, and so further migration from the Catholic new world is required to increase raw and elite numbers. In Italy or Spain, new migration (unless from South America) would be necessarily diluting the Catholic % of the country. All this to say that you wouldn't necessarily assume that the more Catholic a country, the more migration you'd expect.
There's probably also a dynamic with new and old world Catholicism - it isn't a coincidence that Francis and Leo are both ultimately 2nd and 3rd gen migrants themselves. North American Catholic congregations would always have had a huge percentage of their congregants as recent migrants, and the same with Argentina. This dynamic does not extend to Italy, France, or Spain.
incognitomaorach
4mo ago
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.
incognitomaorach
4mo 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
4mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
9mo 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
9mo 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.
Sure, sub 40 is definitely impressive. Same age as Hawking when he won his professorship, just not the youngest!
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