Corvos
2hr ago
pathologically always doing their own thing leaves them in a much better spot than the rest of the Euros.
Can you clarify? I'm not sure I see what you're gesturing at.
No need to list examples of these Indian or Arab mayors in UK. It's just hypocritical to hear it from US and even current administration.
This is not just mayors. These are the leaders/president-equivalents of the UK, Scotland and Ireland: the most powerful people in the land.
What I am trying to say is that, if we were talking about alcoholism, then maybe Japan is teetotal and the US sometimes comes home drunk from parties, but the UK is an alcoholic drinking fortified beer at 9am. Is it hypocritical for the US to tell the UK they drink too much? Sort of. But it's still true.
I don't know, it feels like something changed with respect to speech between 2010 and 2020. Like, people would look down on you for saying non-PC things loudly in public, but you didn't get arrested for it. And as for the VP's wife being Indian, for a while we had in the UK:
- The Prime Minister of the UK
- The Taoiseach of Ireland
- The First Minister of Scotland
- The mayors of almost all major English cities
All either Indian or Arab, at the same time.
From the Telegraph this morning:
A TEACHER was banned from working with children after telling a Muslim child that “Britain is still a Christian state”, The Telegraph can disclose.
The primary school teacher was referred to his local child protection board over comments made to the pupil at an inner-city primary school in London. A senior detective from the Met’s child abuse investigation team also became involved.
In this case, the teacher was suspended and subsequently sacked for an incident in which he allegedly admonished students for washing their feet in the sinks in the boys’ toilets. Police were also called in to investigate an alleged hate crime.
According to the child who made the complaint, the teacher told them the school was not a religious one but that there was an Islamic school a mile away if they wished to go there instead. He also told them: “Britain is still a Christian state” and pointed out that the King was head of the Church of England.
The teacher tried to explain to the year six class the importance of British values of tolerance. It was claimed he reminded the children that Islam remained a minority religion in the UK.
In his legal claim against the local authority, lawyers for the teacher pointed out the school was a non-faith school and that prayers had been informally banned from the playground – and by extension that included washing feet in the toilets – and confined to a prayer room set aside for the purpose.
But the school suspended the teacher in March last year and subsequently sacked him. A month later in April 2024, he was informed he was being referred to the local safeguarding board as well as to the Met. The police inquiry was subsequently dropped.
Is it an indictement that there was a policy inquiry, or reassuring that it was dropped? Pick your poison.
Take nuclear waste for example - if you can just throw your highly radioactive waste into the river, fucking the nearby ecosystem and causing a massive spike in cancer for every living thing that is connected to that river (which is more than you'd think if you haven't studied ecology) you've actually created a problem that will be substantially more expensive to fix than simply following the regulation. Building nuclear reactors on earthquake fault lines is in fact a bad idea, as is building them in floodplains or directly next to the sea. Your nuclear reactor should also be built to rigorous construction standards rather than relying on cheap contractors who half-arse everything and replace a bunch of structural cement with styrofoam to reduce construction costs.
But I don't think many people can accurately determine which regulations fall into the former category and which fall into the latter.
At the risk of embarrassing myself, I feel like I could pretty easily sort them into 'yes' (most of the stuff you mentioned), 'no', and 'demands further enquiry' if I didn't have political considerations to worry about.
Corvos
20hr ago
Presumably the trick would be to release the news to the parents (possibly via Facebook/WhatsApp) and the children (if possible) before the school. Then the children won’t take the teacher seriously and when parents ask why their children are being taught by a porn star, the school’s response would be “WTF why did we hire a porn star?” rather than “we’re aware and it’s really none of your business”.
The other traditional method for disguising an attack is the old ‘expression of support’. “It’s disgusting that people are accusing Teacher X of being the famous porn star Y” or “there’s no way this is X, right?”.
As a wise man once said, “It is necessary to put yourself firmly behind somebody before you can stab them in the back.”
Corvos
22hr ago
I think he is saying that the economists are telling the data to go away and stop bothering them, not telling you to shut up.
Corvos
1d ago
I was thinking of the big change-your-life medical claims, plus some problems my friend once had with house insurance after part of the house collapsed and needed to be rebuilt. The insurance company shrugged and said 'you bought a house with a hidden structural defect decades ago, that's not our problem' and indeed that is broadly what the contract says, but the endless list of opt-outs in the contract doesn't fit with what 'insurance' is meant to be.
Corvos
1d ago
For better and worse, university admissions often play pretty fast and loose. The admissions questions are jumping-off points for you to persuade the university that you're interesting and a good long-term investment. They're not a points-based assessment, especially not somewhere like Stanford, and this guy would surely have known that.
In the UK, Oxford has a reputation for having much more interview-based admissions based (in theory) on future potential and interestingness, whereas Cambridge admissions have the reputation of being much more reliant on strict grade ranking and standardised testing. Neither of them is considered a clear winner and both strategies appear to have their pros and cons.
Corvos
1d ago
I have met and disliked these people before, so I mostly agree with your position. However my understanding is that American top-level universities have always seen their job as being 'identify, gather and acculturate future influential people' and whether you or I like it or not, I'm pretty sure that this guy is legitimately the kind of guy they want and that their admissions system is designed to identify.
Admissions questions aren't essays, and often aren't marked by a rubric. They're prompts designed to ferret out, 'are you the kind of guy we want?' and I'm pretty sure he would have got in with or without daddy's deep pockets and BLM.
Corvos
2d ago
Technically, in normal gambling you are stastically certain to lose over time, whereas if you don't change your purchasing habits here you can only win.
(Give the Devil his due.)
But yes, obviously that's not going to be how it goes and this thing should be nuked from orbit.
From a foreign perspective, it looks like the problem is less general economic disenfranchisement and more than American medical care structuring really is uniquely awful and there isn’t the state capacity to rip it out and replace it with a new kind of system (most likely the kind they have in France, Japan etc.).
I might go further and say that insurance in general is just totally broken in the West.
Firstly, the stuff that people want to insure against (big, unpredictable disasters that result in ongoing costs) aren’t what insurance companies want to cover.
Secondly, the likelihood that an insurance company will pay you depends less on the terms of your contract and more on its own PR and financials. And those financials depend on how new the company is and how its investments are going than anything to do with you and your problems. All the incentives are massively perverted - it’s a way to milk money off people to use for stock market gambling whilst paying out the minimum possible until you inevitably go bust.
Corvos
3d ago
To (reluctantly) be fair, the teen in question had supposedly extremely high grades, had been to the White House dinner and was recognised by Barack Obama, and is clearly a social media star of some sort. Writing BlackLivesMatter over and over again on his application was cheap rhetoric but it was in response to a specific question on his application rather than an essay:
In response to a question asking “What matters to you, and why?" the teen wrote "#BlackLivesMatter" exactly 100 times.
it's not literally all he had going for him.
Stanford didn't just accept some total rando because he wrote Black Live Matter.
Makes all the stories posters tell about their five-year-old kids a lot grimmer, doesn't it?
Corvos
5d ago
Currently? Being ruled by decent people (and having seen off their Leftist movement in the latter half of the 20th century). I have no proof but I strongly suspect that Japanese people are capable of pivoting quite handily for another Mao or another Hirohito. It’s the nature of a hierarchical, collectivist society.
Corvos
6d ago
Aren’t the groypers disproportionately minorities? And maybe working class (?). I would be more worried about losing educated white voters.
Point taken. I must admit I cannot imagine fundamentalist Islam advancing to technological and economic parity with the West without becoming something quite different, so that doesn’t concern me hugely right now.
(Caveats: yes, there was a very advanced Muslim society pre-Renaissance, but they were cosmopolitan and borrowed heavily from Greek and Roman writings, as opposed to being insular and traditionalist.)
In general I think that advocating (even slow, non-violent) regime change for anyone who might one day be a threat is both deeply impractical and exactly the kind of behaviour that makes people perceive America and the West as relentlessly hostile! I’m no dove, but ‘we’ll figure out how to exterminate you some day’ does not strike me as a good basis for foreign policy.
I am also increasingly dubious about the use of Munich as an intuition pump for foreign policy. Yes, one time a country signed a peace treaty with somebody they were capable of beating militarily, and the other party didn’t hold to it. There must surely have been loads of other times when a peace treaty was signed and the other party stuck to it, or got distracted making war elsewhere, or busied himself with internal affairs. Likewise, there were lots of times when two countries didn’t sign a peace treaty because they each thought they could win, and one found to their horror that they were mistaken. The lesson from Munich cannot be ‘even if a warlike nation offers peace, you must set your sights on destroying them. Only once everyone who dislikes you is dead can there be peace’. Humanity is a warlike race and we will never be short of potential Hitlers; some distrust and hoarding of one’s own strength is appropriate but meeting each with a campaign of elimination will cause far more bloodshed than it solves.
Corvos
6d ago
That’s the point of the Erdogan biography though. Turkey had secular democratic government for generations (under the oversight of the army who were mostly strict but not despotic).
That is, they had a democratic government in which it was against the constitution to advocate for explicitly Muslim policy.
Erdogan rose to power in large part as an expression of deep fury by the Muslim majority whose desires and way of life were being discounted.
Personally I do not despair of human nature because other people have different religions and preferred ways of running society. What I do require is that they do so in their own countries and far away from me, which is why I am a firm advocate of very low immigration.
I think the belief that everyone, given time, will approach something that liberalish Europeans are comfortable with is load-bearing for immigration advocacy and also that it is mistaken.
Corvos
7d ago
The main thing that I got out of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan is that most of the people in Islamic countries really are very devout muslims, who want the same in their leaders. There's a reason that most of the Arab Spring countries turned into Islamic theocracies - people want those, they don't want to be ruled by The Great Satan or by Moloch. Secularism in the Middle East is and always has been a project of the sultan and/or the army, it's pretty much never bottom up. Be careful before you make assumptions.
I think the right wing can be too cavalier about this, but there's definitely a spectrum no matter where you personally place the line.
On guns: from selling to a man who tells you outright 'I want this gun to shoot my wife' to selling to an army known for indiscriminate mass murders, to selling to an allied military, to selling to society in general knowing that some may misuse it, to selling only to men of good background with good references.
On alcohol: from selling spirits to the man whose family came into your corner shop to beg you not to sell to him, to the off-license on the motorway, to society in general, to society parties only.
And so on. "Either you hold people responsible for what's done with their products or you don't," seems like a false binary.
Corvos
7d ago
In significant part because the end of the Raj split off famine-prone Bangladesh (the main site of the Bengal famine in 1943) into a separate country.
Bangladesh continued to have serious famines long after independence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_famine_of_1974
The postwar advent of intensive agriculture and chemical fertiliser presumably also helped.
Corvos
7d ago
Interestingly, Marx came from a family of atheist Jews, who had converted to Christianity before his birth.
It makes more sense if you switch from
No house == homeless
to
No house == renter
If your home goes up hugely in value, and you sell without buying another house, then yes in a manner of speaking you have only acquired the approximate equivalent of a few decades of rental value which you will now have to pay, making the transaction net zero.
But if you had been renting all that time, you would still have to pay the new inflated price but you would have no assets to set off against them.
EDIT: I apologise, I see some of this was in your original post.
Corvos
7d ago
Oh, sorry, I agree with your broader point. You see the same with the very stern rule of the samurai in Japan. I just wanted to make a joke about poor old Australia.
I've often speculated that the frontier served a similar purpose for the US, actually, functioning as a place where you could send those who struggled to fit in or behave, or where they would remove themselves. A sort of capital punishment where nobody has to lose their capita if you will.
Look at AUKUS (where the Americans and the UK undermined French submarine sales), or the recent Palantir contract in the UK (where the US undermined UK AI development). America wants cheaper, more easily defended vassals, not peers. Paying for a standing army (controlled by the Americans, natch) is expensive and doesn't really have any use except when the Russians are actually literally invading, which isn't really a concern for most of Europe at the moment since the rich nations who fund the thing are on the opposite side of the continent. Development is where the money, influence and power projection is, and the Americans guard it jealously.
None of which is to say that the Europeans don't also shoot them/ourselves in the foot by working hard to destroy their own industries and repel investment at all costs.
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