Crowstep
2mo ago
You forget that the people interpreting whether you've broken any rules are people, not rule-enforcing automatons. They can see what you're trying to do. They could just as easily crack down on you more because they are annoyed by your cynical attempt at rules-lawyering.
Crowstep
2mo ago
I remember feeling like that when I was learning as a teenager. My lessons were two hours long but after 1.5 hours I really struggled to concentrate.
The more you drive, the easier it gets. Especially with modern assistance (sat nav, automatic gearbox, cruise control etc). Once you pass your test and start driving regularly, your driving stamina will increase a lot.
Crowstep
2mo ago
When a political party replaces one candidate with another candidate (who is in fact the deputy of the current candidate) that can hardly be called a coup. Coups involve replacing the government, Kamala's government position (VP) hasn't changed, she's just now the person standing to be the next president instead of Biden.
Candidate choice is an internal party matter for the Democrats (as it is for any political party). There is nothing even remotely coup-like about this.
Crowstep
3mo ago
I've thought the same thing, like ugly Zoomer fashion is just young women trying to act out a sexual counter-revolution without having to dress up like it's the 1950s.
But then I remember that young men have moustaches and mullets now, and I don't believe for a second that they are trying to desexualise themselves. Fashion is just arbitrary and weird (which, I suppose, seems pretty obvious when I look back at how some of my more fashionable friends dressed when we were teenagers).
I'm fascinated by discussions of Baltimore or Gary, Indiana and other similar places on Reddit. It's usually a mixture of people describing their own terrible experiences (while studiously omitting the demographics of the perpetrators), economic explanations and occasionally cryptic comments alluding to the real cause that the mods haven't spotted. This is an example.
I can't remember where I read it, but I saw a blog post once that showed you could predict 80% of a US city's crime rate by measuring its African American population.
Crowstep
3mo ago
How's does that work exactly? Are you gay or bisexual?
I'm struggling to envision what genderless dating looks like, at least between a man and a woman. I'm not talking about hopes and dreams or whatever, I mean that mundane stuff. Like do you ask him/her out? Do you go in for the kiss?
Crowstep
3mo ago
Interestingly, I've found that some women are very good at describing what they like and don't like, so my assumption is that the rest are just dissimulating. I can see why the instinct would be to obscure what you like. If you say it explicitly, then men might try and fake it, which would make it harder to choose the man she wants.
Crowstep
3mo ago
See ArjinFerman's answer basically. There can be a difference between second and first generation immigrants, and a difference between second generation immigrants and natives.
The fact that SSAs commit boatloads of crime wherever they are in the world suggests that the causes of this are genetic, rather than cultural. That is to say, whatever British cultural norms 2nd gens adopt, they clearly aren't enough to reduce their crime rates to the native average. British culture also seems incapable of causing Chinese people to drink as much and commit as much crime as the natives. The British-born Chinese stubbornly remain model citizens no matter how much integration they experience.
Of course, even that assumes that it is only possible for 2nd gens to adopt the culture of their home country. The existence of UK-born jihadis (adopting wahabi islamist ideology) or drill music (adopting African American hip hop culture) demonstrate otherwise.
As for the second part of your question, I think the answer the median Briton would give would depend on how you define 'meaningful difference'.
Crowstep
3mo ago
Every Conservative prime minister since Cameron said immigration is too high and promised to reduce it. Tony Blair said immigration was too high and promised to reduce it (in 2005!). Kier Starmer said the same. I think we agree that these parties lack credibility on the issue, but you can hardly argue that voting for politicians who promise to reduce immigration doesn't count as voting for lower immigration. Especially since UK Prime Ministers usually resign after they lose an election, which means that in each election, the voters are voting for a different potential government.
Plus, a general election is not a single issue referendum on immigration. It's voting for MPs under a massively undemocratic electoral system which essentially forces voters to choose between the two main parties. The fact that Reform didn't win a majority is in no way evidence that people support higher immigration.
Crowstep
3mo ago
we have to ask about UK culture at least to some degree
There's nothing unique to the UK about Subsaharan Africans committing massive amounts of crime. It's true in the USA, it's true in Sweden, it's true in Brazil, it's true in France, and of course it's true in Africa and the Caribbean.
The rioters know this. They also know they are being ethnically replaced. Trying to muddy the waters by saying things like 'Axel was born in Cardiff' (as if he might be a Welshman called David Llywelyn) is asking them to ignore their own lying eyes, and all the crime statistics.
Crowstep
3mo ago
You're right that the public don't care, but journalists desperate for scandal will write articles are how shocked, shocked they are that an insurance company advert is appearing next to an ISIS beheading video or whatever. Those articles are what the companies react to. My guess is that in the risk-averse world of marketing/PR, it's safer to pull ads than run them and risk your boss yelling at you because his press summary included a few articles like that.
Crowstep
3mo ago
Fascinating, my experience has been middle class people insisting that they're working class.
I'm not sure you can call it DEI, in the sense of being non-meritocratic. Harris isn't planning to pick a midwestern white guy because she believes that midwestern white guys are unfairly underrepresented or suffer discrimination or she believes that x% of politicians should be midwestern white guys because of vague equity reasons.
She's planning to pick him because she thinks it will help her win, and helping her win is the VP candidate's only job (at least before the election). In that sense, she's trying to pick the most qualified candidate.
Now of course there are cases of quotas where 'representation' may actually be part of the role, even if it isn't exactly part of the job's day to day tasks. For example, in Northern Ireland the police force had quotas for Catholic recruits in order to get rid of the (basically correct) perception that the force was a protestant militia. This is very different from the recent case with air traffic controllers.
When people criticise DEI quotas, the criticism is usually directed towards the latter and much less towards the former. Having a police force that is trusted by the majority ethnic group or having a ticket that wins an election are far more sympathetic aims than getting (percentage) of (demographic) in (industry) for unproven assertions that (industry) would be exactly (percentage)(demographic) without claimed discrimination.
The UK, like the US, has essentially full employment, in that everyone who wants a job can get one. There is still huge amounts of unskilled labour to be done due to a few things:
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A huge number of people who could work, don't. This goes beyond the normal numbers of underclass people who are incapable or unable to hold down a job. The UK lags behind the rest of the developed world here. It seems to be a case of our easy to access welfare system coinciding with COVID idleness and people moving onto disability benefits due to 'mental health issues' (what proportion of these are malingerers are left as an question for the reader).
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The previous Conservative government seemed to believe the dire warnings from business and threw open the borders to all comers to avoid labour shortages post-Brexit. It turned out that most of those being imported were inactive (either students or dependents) and lacked the high labour participation rate that previous EU immigrants showed. They later tightened up the rules a bit. So the labour market's needs weren't met by these immigrants.
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Business wanting to keep down wages. This is most obvious in the care sector. The previous government explicitly allowed wages for work visas to be 20% lower than the standard in the UK, although they did abandon this after Labour flanked them on it.
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Low productivity growth. UK business is addicted to cheap labour from abroad, obligingly provided by every government since Tony Blair. This means they don't invest in productivity enhancements, which means that the only way governments can generate more tax revenue and GDP growth is through yet more immigration.
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Left-wing pro-immigration attitudes. In my view, these are best described as anti-anti-immigration attitudes. Left wingers don't make an explicit case for importing deliveroo drivers from Pakistan, but they (and their base) are strongly opposed to any restrictions on immigration, which smell of nativism to them.
The current government is saying that they expect immigration to reduce to 'reasonable numbers' (a net figure of 200,000 per year, still massive of course). It's unclear what Kier Starmer actually believes on immigration at the moment. His authoritarian streak has shown itself in his reaction to the recent anti-immigration riots, but whether he will follow this up with more immigration (to spite the nasty racists) or less immigration (to avoid future riots) is unclear.
Crowstep
3mo ago
Given what happened with the EU cookie warning law, I feel like signing this would be one of those 'be careful what you wish for' things.
Crowstep
3mo ago
I don't think I've ever commented on here about sex ed in schools.
'The forum' isn't a person. You can't act as if it is and then claim hypocrisy when the comments of one user don't apply the same inferred values of a completely different user.
Crowstep
3mo ago
There's quite a few differences you're glossing over.
Companies can fail and be born, and there are thousands of them at any one time. Plus they can get information from the price system that central state planners cannot. They also pay people according to negotiation, rather than according to needs.
Crowstep
3mo ago
Hmmm, 'thief' is a little more broad, but yeah it does have connotations of stealing an old lady's bag. I'd prefer embezzler or fraudster in both those cases.
Crowstep
3mo ago
Just because he committed a crime doesn't give us carte blanche to commit the worst argument in the world.
Crowstep
3mo ago
Except he didn't rape her, in the commonly understood way of forcing her against her will. The law decides she was too young to consent (and I'm fine with that line existing) but the only reason we're using the word rape is because the law calls it 'statutory rape', not because it corresponds particularly to a violent sexual attack.
Crowstep
4mo ago
Treating people as individuals is one of those secret sauce things that the modern Anglosphere takes for granted but which isn't that common globally or historically and which is part of what makes modern society work.
In terms of establishing democracy and capitalism, individualism has been great. And clearly more clannish attitudes haven't stopped birth rate declines elsewhere (looking at you Southern Europe, nobody's having kids when you live with your momma until you're 32). That said, I think a little intergenerational responsibility can be a good thing. Sam Kriss' excellent feature describes elderly retirees in Florida 'absconding from their duty as old people, which is too be a link between the past and the future'. I think old people sticking around to care for children and give them a sense of belonging is something tragic to lose, of course, that requires the young people to stick around too, which can't be taken for granted any more.
Crowstep
4mo ago
From her annotated version of Philsopher's Stone:
"[Quidditch] was invented in a small hotel in Manchester after a row with my then boyfriend. I had been pondering the things that hold a society together, cause it to congregate and signify its particular character and knew I needed a sport.
It infuriates men...which is quite satisfying given my state of mind when I invented it."
Crowstep
4mo ago
It's like when the Ashes (Cricket) used to be played between lords in England and Australia.
I'm pretty sure the 'Lords' you've heard referred to in cricket is the cricket ground. Cricket isn't played by literal lords, it's a middle class sport in England and Australia and a working man's sport in the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent.
Aristocrats play (or played) badminton, croquet and polo.
Crowstep
4mo ago
Fascinating. Quotas in multi-ethnic society make some degree of sense, but it's like they wanted to create a quota system and then, upon discovering that their country was 99% Bengali, just decided to bodge one together anyway.
Reading the Wikipedia, it seems that the founders of the system wanted to:
- Reward their fellow soldiers who fought in the war
- Reward women who were raped by Pakistani forces during the war
- Give out 'traditional' quotas for the poor (those from 'underrepresented districts')
What seems to have happened is that as the first two groups aged out, rather than replacing these positions with merit appointees, they expanded the rape victim quota to all women and expanded the soldier/political faction quota to the children and later grandchildren of those who previously held it.
It's a really interesting example of how this kind of corruption can be self-reinforcing. Even when a system is obviously not doing what it claims/claimed to do, it may still be kept in place due to the self-interest of those who benefit from it.
You could try something like rucking? All you need is a rucksack and something heavy to put in it.
Why isn't jogging an option?
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