This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
J. K. Rowling challenges new Scottish hate speech legislation, openly challenging them to arrest her for calling trans criminals men who pretend to be women:
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1774747068944265615
#ArrestMe is, dare I say it, brave and powerful. At least she's putting skin in the game. It's also pretty well calculated in my opinion.
They can't really attack her for being a right wing extremist when her world famous books are a pretty clear allegory of Racism Bad. She even makes sure to target India Willoughby, who is apparently anti-black. Rowling has an enormous pot of money for expensive litigation and automatic worldwide attention on her. It's hard to righteously defend people such as
It's very practical politics to fish out the worst of the enemy milieu to preface one's normative statements. I think Rowling has a good shot at tactical victory - either the govt won't charge her or she'll win in court. On the other hand, only systemic change is going to change the progressive-leaning status quo. You need an Orban or some similar force to drag out the weed by the roots, rather than just pruning away when it grows particularly egregious. Rowling is no Orban, that's probably far too extreme for her.
The legislation is here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2021/14/contents
Crimes include 'stirring up hate' by 'behaving in a manner that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening, abusive or insulting' to select groups. Looks like it allows nigh-limitless opportunities for selective enforcement. And a huge drain on police resources, given they can't even investigate all crimes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-68703684
While Rowling's crusade is admirable, I think what's really needed is a Scottish DeSantis to immediately turn these dystopian laws on the left. The only thing that stops this train is leftists being jailed for hate speech.
By the way, what's up with Scotland? What about their culture has made them go so loony, first with Covid and now with this? They honestly are starting to seem like China with worse food and weather.
Britain's a deeply broken country IMO, drowning in decline. Scotland has effectively permanent SNP leftist-progressive govt. Traditional heavy industry left, north sea oil is depleted. There's not much growing of the pie, only taking someone else's share - SNP policies lean in that direction.
Real GDP per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=GB
You can see the trend line of growth has fallen off since 2007 - and British growth is concentrated heavily around London, I expect things in Scotland are much worse than the country as a whole.
Potemkin villages: https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/1761798659396518342
Warships being scrapped: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/britain-to-scrap-two-royal-navy-frigates-say-reports/
NHS spends twice as much on legal payouts due to their horrendous maternity service than maternity itself: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/maternity-payouts-twice-cost-of-care-times-health-commission-svdhsjhqk
If you've seen Clarkson's Farm you'll appreciate how hard it is for anyone to build anything, even if they're a global superstar. Everything is very expensive and takes forever, for no good reason. The UK border is totally out of control, despite being an island. Plus there were the Pakistani child rape gangs that operated for years because police were too scared of being racist and covered them up.
If I could buy puts for countries, I think puts on Britain would have the most alpha. Everyone thinks 'oh it's a P5 nuclear power, they invented industrial civilization, it'll be fine'. It's really not fine in the UK. I think it's systemically broken. Every single institution broken, incentives broken. I know Dominic Cummings is a contested figure here but he did work in the British govt for some time and I think he was driven a bit mad by the cosmic horror of it all, he wrote these essays about how everything was broken and the leaders were clowns:
https://dominiccummings.com/2014/06/16/gesture-without-motion-from-the-hollow-men-in-the-bubble-and-a-free-simple-idea-to-improve-things-a-lot-which-could-be-implemented-in-one-day-part-i/
https://dominiccummings.com/2014/10/30/the-hollow-men-ii-some-reflections-on-westminster-and-whitehall-dysfunction/
(for the juicy horror stories skip down to four stories in the second link)
Okay, I snorted a little at this one. Anything else happen after 2007 I should know about?
All in all, it’s hard for me to see the British situation as unusual. Dysfunction yes, disaster no. A distinct shortage of car bombings. Even the foreign threats seem so tame compared to the 20th century!
More options
Context Copy link
Eh, this is a bit too doomer in my opinion. Sure, the UK is doing worse than the US (and will probably continue doing worse than them) but it's absolutely not the highest alpha country to get a put on. Many many Western European countries have the same problems we have but even worse, plus they don't have English either acting as a draw for high end immigrants (which the UK disproportionately gets compared to the dregs that end up in Europe). I'd take out puts on France, Spain and Canada before I took them out on the UK, perhaps even Germany before the UK (their demographics are down the toilet, average age is approaching 50).
Planning and building is absolutely fucked but I have hope that when Starmer takes power later this year he'll swiftly liberalise the system: it's basically the only way left to stimulate growth as even he now realises the government can't just spend their way out of this crisis.
I'm actually putting my money where my mouth is: with the upcoming tax year and renewed ISA allowance I'm strongly considering investing the money in a FTSE 250 ETF instead of the standard S&P 500 one I usually buy (deep down part of me already knows I'll regret this, but who knows, also the usual disclaimer: this is not financial advice yada yada).
I'd be somewhat inclined to go long on Canada (over a longer time frame admittedly) purely based on geography - with all that habitable land and and the natural resources that are going to get more accessible as the planet warms it's hard to think things could go seriously wrong for them.
It's not really that habitable, though. Most of Ontario (and Newfoundland) is bedrock, Quebec is bedrock and French, most of Manitoba is bedrock or underwater, the Maritimes are nearly dead of neglect (to the point the Canadian government will pay you to leave under certain circumstances), -30C isn't meaningfully different from -40C for AB/SK and their cities are already expanding as fast as their construction crews can go, there are no logistics for expansion into the territories, and it's illegal to develop the areas of BC that aren't just solid rock already.
Are those things fixable? For BC repealing the ALR is coup-complete, and for the Maritimes, while it's certainly possible to turn it into another megalopolis, it's going to be very expensive even though it is technically possible with existing technology (but critically, not Canadian technology).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And here I felt stupid for holding some VGK to diversify away from the US. FTSE smells of regret and cold mushy peas.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Britain's a deeply broken country IMO, drowning in decline. Scotland has effectively permanent SNP leftist-progressive govt. Traditional heavy industry left, north sea oil is depleted. There's not much growing of the pie, only taking someone else's share - SNP policies lean in that direction.
This is indeed the crux of the issue, but it's also true for most of Europe. Britain's main difference here is we don't have bad unemployment figures to go with it. Instead, we have the peculiar combination of US very low unemployment but EU bad wage growth.
Dominic Cummings is not some outside figure diagnosing the problem. He, being pro-lockdown, was a contributor to it.
More options
Context Copy link
I’d offer a limited defense of this country.
The UK’s growth trend since 2007 is largely because the UK was one of the fastest growing major economies in the previous decade, and because of various second-order effects of the US dollar being highly depressed from the late 90s until 2008/2009 and then surging in value until now. For a brief moment the UK’s nominal gdp/capita was even slightly higher than the US in 2007, again because of an FX quirk after the dotcom bust and mid-2000s oil bubble sent the dollar cratering. The fiscal problem is, as others have said, obvious and has long been obvious. Brits expect continental European social democracy at American tax rates. It isn’t possible and has never been possible. Therefore the UK will continue to run high deficits and struggle with poor public services. It is what it is, but it isn’t collapse-tier really. Every major party has acknowledged it in private, there just aren’t any palatable solutions.
The immigration problem is significant but France and Sweden’s problems with immigration and Islamism are still much worse. As a percentage of non-European immigrants, the UK has fewer migrants from the Islamic world than almost anywhere else in Northern Europe, including France, Germany, Benelux and the Nordics. Again, a collapse is more likely elsewhere (probably France). The UK is closer to the US on the “pace of being destroyed by mass immigration” scale than worse-off countries elsewhere in Western Europe, and more likely to end up Brazilified than Lebanonified.
32 year old warships being scrapped. The biggest problem for the British military is America’s snail-level pace at building F-35s which means that it will be 15+ years after the two aircraft carriers came in before they have enough planes to operate them as intentioned.
The core problem with the British civil service is that it’s run by figures like Cummings who believe issues are a result of stupidity or inefficiency instead of deep-rooted political realities (like the tax situation I describe above, and views on planning among the electorate) that can’t be changed by putting a few smart autists in power in Whitehall.
He says the opposite, that the culture of government is deeply broken. A few smart people can't fix it without full control over staffing, hiring and sacking - they need to break the power of the Civil Service and recruit a new class of elected politician educated in a fundamentally different way.
The culture of government wasn’t the primary problem though, it was a banal economic issue that requires telling the public something they don’t want to hear and then fixing it knowing it will cost you the next election, and likely the one after that.
Cummings would be shocked at how little difference replacing the bureaucracy made; the bulk of expenditure isn’t on stereotypical faceless bureaucrats inefficiently faxing documents around large office buildings, it’s on pensions and healthcare.
British healthcare is not run excellently: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/maternity-payouts-twice-cost-of-care-times-health-commission-svdhsjhqk
https://unherd.com/2020/09/lets-be-honest-the-nhs-is-awful/
https://www.themotte.org/post/829/friday-fun-thread-for-january-12/178889?context=8#context
If the country was governed well, everything would improve, health included. There are ways to do more with less. They could've managed HS2 properly for one thing. And when was the bureaucracy replaced?
They can’t manage HS2 properly for the same reason that California can’t built HSR or that infrastructure projects in all Anglo countries cost 5x as much as they do anywhere else, namely common law and restrictions on eminent domain that allow more challenges and more legal action. Only parliament can solve it but they don’t want to because the people don’t want it; Boris Johnson proposed planning reform and people in deep-blue Tory constituencies flipped to the Liberal Democrats in protest at the idea that local small town councils would no longer be able to veto any construction. Not really a bureaucracy problem.
The NHS is awful because the UK spends much less, both absolutely per-person and as a proportion of GDP, than other wealthy nations. Everything is done at the cheapest price, because of the tax/spend conundrum I discussed. The people won’t accept more taxes and won’t accept privatization, so there it is. Again, it’s a people problem, not a state problem. The compromise that the UK has (mediocre public services and moderate taxation levels) is one the public have selected. There are no administrative solutions, no magic sauce in the bureaucracy that can fix it. It’s just basic math. Either taxes go up or services get worse, the public will accept neither.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Uh, the US’s largest states are white minority, gen z is the last white majority generation, there’s no functioning border, and we have more immigrants than births every year.
Now I don’t think a Hispanic majority- or plurality or whatever- is a death knell, but ‘control of immigration’ is not an American strength.
Yes, but fundamentally the US probably isn’t going to experience major ethnic conflict because of immigration. Latinos are mostly Christian (either devout or secularized catholics), quickly adopt American dress and have high intermarriage rates by the third generation. Most of Central America moving north will manifest itself in, long term, a lower performing population, higher inequality, more corruption and crime, and general civilizational decline, probably. But there will be no grand clash of civilizations, thus Brazilification.
In much of continental Europe, non-European immigration is overwhelmingly Muslim. Assimilation is limited, cultural identities strong. Very few German or Austrian second-generation Muslim immigrants consider themselves German or Austrian, for example. They conceive of themselves as having a strong, separate identity. This makes Lebanonization that descends into open ethno-religious conflict much more likely in countries like France, Sweden, Germany etc.
The UK sits kind of between the two. Immigrants are a lot more diverse, with large Chinese and Indian (Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist) contingents, many African Christians from former colonies (France’s former colonies are largely Muslim, by contrast) plus a large number of additional groups from all over the world who speak English (eg. Filipinos are the third most common nationality in the NHS after British and Indians). Islamic immigration remains high, and there have been terror attacks, the grooming gangs scandals and so on, but it is a smaller proportion of the total than in continental Europe. Most non-Muslim groups also have relatively high intermarriage rates.
I think the UK is therefore more likely to Brazilify than to Lebanonify.
Something I've never been clear on, which I think you might be able to explain due to your (astoundingly broad and deep!) geopolitical knowledge:
What exactly does "brazilification" mean? I've seen it used enough and I'm familiar enough with the popular perception of Brazil that I think I've picked up the "vibe", but I find myself wondering if there isn't more to it than just "extreme inequality and crime, favelas in every city where the wealthy never go." Is there a racial component in Brazil, or is it just a socioeconomic thing? Is there a specific historical path that is necessary to count as brazilification?
Brazil has a racial hierarchy but it’s in denial and likes to pretend that there’s a ‘Brazilian’ race instead of many races which could all be Brazilian, in order to cover up the massive drag of high human capital demographics subsidizing lower human capital ones which then proceed to repay them with crime.
More options
Context Copy link
It started decades ago as a progressive economics term to argue that rising economic inequality risked America looking more like much of Latin America, where the top 5% live like Americans while the bottom 90% are poor. Over time it was adopted by the right in light of ongoing mass immigration, keeping some of its original meaning but adding the idea that Brazil is also poorer, more corrupt, more violent, more dysfunctional. On the internet right the Brazilification thesis stands in contrast to the ‘Balkanization’ or Lebanon scenarios in which ethnic tensions crystallize into hot conflict. Brazil, by contrast, has little significant racial strife of the kind far rightists sometimes predict in the West’s future.
Got it, thanks.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ah, appreciate the clarification. I’d thought that Britain’s immigrants were highly Pakistani or unassimilating Hindus; sort of like France or Germany. A comparatively small number of Pakistanis in a context of mostly assimilating migration from throughout the former empire is a meaningful improvement over that assumption.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You'd better make sure your put-writer has enough money (and will survive) to actually pay out, or you're not the one making alpha.
More options
Context Copy link
Can't you just buy puts on a UK-focused index fund (Vanguard page)?
More options
Context Copy link
Having lived in quite a few European countries and knowing British history in some detail, I would put it this way: the UK had a period of great comparative success across a huge range of fields (prior to about 1945) where European countries they didn't outperform economically (France, Germany) were outperformed militarily/diplomatically, and the UK developed a fairly "laissez faire" type of imperialism that had some definite advantages over Belgian rapaciousness, French assimilationism etc.
The UK had a period of relative decline in 1945-1979. This was only relative (this was a period of mostly solid growth) and with some exceptions (UK unemployment rates were low in this period, even compared to e.g. the US).
The UK had a concerted and successful effort to combat relative decline from about 1979-2007. This took different forms, e.g. Thatcher had great confidence in Victorian institutions, practices, and values; Blair had a huge love of America (especially Clintonian America) public service modernisation, and wanted the UK to lead the EU into a modernist, progressive, American-style supra-state; Major was somewhere in between, with a strange sort of quiet iconoclasm in favour of "ordinary people" that ranged from the clever (getting rid of stupid regulations on everything from employment agencies to service stations) to the absurd (the "Cones Hotline").
For various reasons, I mostly blame Brown and subsequent UK politicians, and of course the UK voters to whom they pander. For example, the UK has a great edge in financial and business services. UK business services are one area where the UK still does great, partly due to language, partly due to regulation, and partly due to agglomeration in London/South-East England. What do UK politicians and voters love? MANUFACTURING. Steel. SHIPBUILDING. It's like a tall, scrawny but fast kid wanting to play rugby and set weightlifting records rather than basketball and netball - admirable, but stupid. So the UK overregulates and taxes its financial sector (as well as the occasional kick to its oil sector) and then wonders why its economy underperforms.
Similarly, the UK voters hate paying taxes at the levels of European countries. So they have the opportunity to e.g. save more of their own money for retirement, taking advantage of the huge long-term gains that private investment can make relative to pay-as-you-go state pensions. But they also want state pensions at European levels (no Boomer left behind) so politicians have introduced an unsustainable pensions uprating scheme that has meant that, despite significant spending cuts in some areas (welfare, education etc.) and despite tax rises to about peacetime highs, the UK public finances are still shit. This is not how a serious country deals with an ageing population.
And there's the UK national religion, the NHS, a healthcare system designed to save the UK Labour party from the wrath of doctors in the 1950 election, which voters think (a) should be improved, (b) should not be changed, and (c) should not cost them personally any more in taxes or fees. I suppose there are some religions with more absurd origins and principles...
Scotland is the beak of the UK ostrich: deepest into the sand it has buried itself.
I have lived in Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, Italy, Greece, and other places. These countries all have their own chronic problems and a similar lack of ambition in dealing with them. For me, it just stands out more in the UK (and more recently in the US) because the Limeys used to have some leaders and an electorate who were serious about tough changes. For all her faults, Margaret Thatcher was about the closest the West has come to a Lee Kuan Yew figure: someone who really thought, "If a policy is too popular, then we are being too careful."
Just responding to the manufacturing point, I don't think British voters particularly fetishise heavy industry so much as they feel that the return of these jobs will allow these poorer regions in the midlands and north to thrive again. This probably isn't going to happen but until politicians can figure out a more realistic way to revitalise those areas they have to promise something to get people from these areas to vote for them.
These jobs are never coming back. The UK manufactures more today in real value terms that it ever did in the past, but automation means we need fewer and fewer jobs each year to support this manufacturing. This trend is not going to change and if anything is going to accelerate (see how Tata is closing down their old labour intensive steel furnace and replacing it with a more efficient highly automated furnace that's going to pump out a lot more steel with a lot fewer workers). These towns and regions are dead and will stay dead. People need to realise this and move on.
I thought the steel plant was profitable and produced very good (ie. difficult to replace) steel but was being shut down for burning coal and is being 'replaced' with an electric one that will use mindboggling amounts of a scarce resource while producing inferior steel to the existing plant?
Looking at it in more depth you seem to be right. Also the electric arc furnace seems to work by taking scrap steel as input instead of iron ore like the blast furnace does. This changes my view of the project significantly, I'm now much less in favour of the change. I wouldn't even call the new thing a steel producer, it's more a "steel recycler".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's part of it, I agree. The LKY solution would be to build lots of houses where there are jobs, so more people can escape dependency and joblessness. If people complain about losing the green belt or excess urban density or the loss of the beautiful Essex countryside, then you're doing it right.
Also, in my experience Brits consistently conflate manufacturing output with manufacturing employment. Thatcher's policies led to a boom in UK manufacturing, just not UK manufacturing employment: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/10/22/1413987501531_wps_2_SPT_Ben1_jpg.jpg
So if you ask a Brit if they think that the UK produces more today than in the days of coal mining, Ravenscraig etc., they'll think, "Certainly not." This is partly because they conflate manufacturing with "a man's work" i.e. something dirty and smelly you do with your hands (but in public).
Of course, this sort of sentiment is almost universal, but for a while, the UK had the leaders and the electorate to plough forward with tough, realistic decisions.
One thing I feel certain LKY never dealt with was the problems of rural areas.
Yes, it's an extrapolation from his approach in other areas.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link