incognitomaorach
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User ID: 1274
incognitomaorach
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo ago
Fair enough, my mistake.
incognitomaorach
1mo 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
1mo 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
2mo 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
3mo 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.
incognitomaorach
6mo ago
More high trust and pro social than the current inhabitants of London, which of course is mostly not British.
incognitomaorach
6mo ago
If I've understood you correctly you think that there's a 1-2% daily chance of nuclear exchange conditional on ROW joining a war between Taiwan and the PRC? Given an 80% chance of the ROW joining the war, this should work out to about 50-70% chance of a nuclear exchange by D-100 of a war. Not sure what your odds of the war breaking out at all in the next 5 years or so would be (presumably pretty high).
incognitomaorach
6mo ago
Worth noting that GPT-4o (the currently available text only version that is) is less intelligent than GPT-4, it's just much faster and more efficient in terms of compute i.e. cheaper. Would be worth testing with GPT-4.
incognitomaorach
6mo ago
I'd take umbridge with the idea that the closest parallel to Starmer is Rishi Sunak, or that he is a neoliberal centrist. Whilst Starmer is fundamentally a manager rather than a leader, and is very comfortable with the grey bureaucratic blob of the civil service, Starmer has been deeply ideological since his younger days, where he was a Eurocommunist/Left-Green. Whilst I'm not quite as convinced as Peter Hitchens that Starmer is secretly an ultra-leftist waiting to pounce (he has certainly moved to the centre) his instincts are deeply "woke", for lack of a better term.
For those who don't know, Eurocommunism was that strain of non-USSR aligned leftism that started the whole intersectionality craze, where various oppressed/marginal groups could become objects for the revolution now that the industrial working class had either been co-opted or ceased to exist in the affluent west. And this wasn't just a university debate club phase! Starmer wrote for Trotsykist adjacent magazines well into his 20s, and was chair of the Society of Labour Lawyers, which was well on the left of the party, well into the 2000s.
Now this isn't to deny that he is a 'centrist' figure, or has moved the party to the right. He abandoned various left wing policies and commitments pretty quickly, and I think his economic views are certainly well to the right of Corbyn. But his political instincts and ideological basis are certainly on the left in a cultural/social sense (read: woke) in a way that they very much aren't for investment banker Sunak. Perhaps the best description of Starmer would be as a "cultural" or post-68 Leftist. Starmer spent decades advocating as a lawyer for migrant rights, environmental activists, civil liberty organisations and so on.
This is all to say that whilst Sunak and the Conservatives have let the country drift to the left on social views, and presided over massive overhauls, Starmer would not only allow this for political reasons but positively embrace it.
Also worth noting for those not in the know, that despite the frothing allegations that Reform and Farage are neo-fascists, they are in fact basically Thatcherite. Farage is a classical liberal- his anti immigration commitment is getting net migration down to ~0, and if outflows were in the hundreds of thousands he'd bite the bullet and allow inflows of a similar amount. This is not the same kind of politics as the Identitarians over the channel. Having said that, the voter base is pretty similar, and sits firmly in the socially conservative, economically left wing corner of the political compass. Farage is very much a top-righter. From the social media content they are putting out I suspect that many of the Reform activists/staff lean toward the redpilled side of things, but seeing as the party has little to no chance of being in power, it is most likely a marriage of convenience. Farage's play is presumably to try and destroy the Conservatives even further to lead whatever remains of the right in 10 years time (or to set up someone else to do so).
incognitomaorach
6mo ago
The Normans and the Vikings left remarkably little genetic impact on the island. There were only around 8000 Norman conquerors, and outside of Cornwall and some parts of the North, there is very little visible genetic distance in the English population. Where phenotypic differences do exist I suspect it is largely due to intermarriage and self selection (with limited franco-german exchange into the upper classes). A caste of people who only marry themselves, wealthy semi-foreigners, or those of the lower orders who successfully rise to the top will tend to look somewhat different. Nutrition etc. also played a large part. The "white urban working class" of most UK cities, has also had huge amounts of Irish influx. Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and even London must have upwards of a 25% Irish component in their traditional working class populations.
incognitomaorach
6mo ago
Two of the videos were riding the "Deano" wave as re-popularised by semi-obscure esoteric RW anons on twitter (e.g. https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1572994810499432448 )- which is sort of a British archetypal "working class lad done well" but with the modern consumer culture modernity dialled up to 11. The other two both fall more into the "Gammon" genre, popularised during Brexit and also Euro 2020. They often feature Tango (this chap: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11486337/England-superfan-Tango-Man-apologises-going-topless-Qatar.html) or other Brexit/Nationalistic discussion. These things come and go in waves, TiKTok seems to play a large part, but they're always getting shared by slightly elderly relatives a couple of years after they did the rounds the first time. It mostly seems to be middle class white Brits laughing at their lower class brethren, rather than inter ethnic or anything, and Americans sometimes get involved as well.
The poking fun between classes genre has always existed, but the underlying "Gammon" concept can be traced back at least as far as Enfield's Self-Righteous brothers sketches: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CvbXwwob8Kw.
incognitomaorach
6mo ago
Yes, but if any of those three places were referred to in anything other than hyper local media (perhaps the local radio station) then they'd be referred to as New York in North Yorkshire, for obvious reasons. Similarly, if a British press piece was covering something in London, Ontario, then I'd be nearly 100% sure that they'd refer to it as "London in Ontario" or "London, the city in Canada", again for self explanatory reasons.
(FWIW, I don't think that "New York, North Yorkshire" qualifies as a real place. There's an old mill, now with some other commercial uses, but it is at best a single road in Summerbridge. I was surprised as I have some familiarity with the area and had never heard of it.)
incognitomaorach
7mo ago
Absolutely, the main point does stand. I'm unfamiliar with the French case, but London's role as a central capital of a single polity probably contributes to this phenomenon. London's been an immigrant city (internal migrants) for 600 years, the closest thing to "standard" English is based on the London prestige dialect, which itself was just a variety of that spoken in the East Midlands- the population churn was constant. Prior to 1750 there was basically London, a few market towns, the other national capitals (Dublin really) and that was it for cities. Places like Rome, Milan, Naples, Munich, Cologne etc. were all independent city states, or capitals of smaller polities which later unified, which must have encouraged the decentralised growth.
incognitomaorach
7mo ago
Britain is really lopsided in that London might as well be a different country economically speaking, with vastly higher wages, economic opportunity and so on, but by any reasonable definition London is only 3-4x larger than Manchester. It's just a boundaries definition, a bit like when Paris gets reported as having a population of 3m. Greater Manchester is ~3m people and Greater London is 9-12m depending on the source. There's a case to be made that the Liverpool-Manchester urban region is a Ruhr equivalent conurbation, with bad transport holding back the economic integration.
incognitomaorach
7mo ago
I really liked Busan the two times I visited- nicer climate than Seoul, although in summer it becomes overrun with a spring break type atmosphere. Beaches, near to more historic/rural parts of the country as well. The night life felt more relaxed and the food was more varied. In terms of opportunities, its the centre of the main industrial zone (with Ulsan/Daegu). It's also a bit different politically. For the number 2 city to be 3m/7.5m metro in a country of 50m sounds pretty large to me!
incognitomaorach
11mo ago
I very much doubt it is the largest reason for racial disparities in professional sports, given we have the international Olympics where we can plainly see which (usually homogenous) countries are represented in which sports. The Caribbean overrepresentation in sprinting is due to starting sports training earlier?
Not to mention the assortment that takes places in US sports, e.g. QB vs RB demographics. I know differences in puberty onset is technically HBD (well 'HBD lite' that may plausibly be impacted by environmental factors such as diet/BMI), but I buy that other socio-economic factors definitely impact professional sports participation. Which sport played, which roles, which positions and so on. But to pretend that the number one factor isn't adult biomechanical differences I struggle with- a 6'9'' 300lb man is more likely to be a basketball player than a 6'2'' man regardless of whether they hit puberty 3 years later.
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
That's my mistake. But I still don't see how density is a reasonable cause- there's the classic Japan example, swathes of China, Singapore (any city state).
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
Well England's population density was around 160/km² in 1870, 22m in total. Maharashtra has a population density of 365/km². Mumbai now must be 3 or 4x denser than the West Midlands of the time if the state as a whole is that dense. I don't think density is the key at all (look at the Ganges valley, UP and Bihar combined is ~USA worth of people!).
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
Sure, Ambani can pull that off, if he made it a priority. That leaves about 99.999% of us. Certainly the few hundred million middle class who wish it were otherwise
There's clearly either a revealed preference here or some kind of skill issue. India is around 41% urbanised. Take away the rural classes and a "few hundred million" people represents like 30-50% of the urban population, which would be even higher in non-slum areas. If those people and a smattering of billionaires can't or won't clean up their cities then I'm not sure what would get them to. There doesn't appear to be that spirit of municipal capitalism that was prominent in, say, the late 19th century in England. Mumbai must have greater resource than 1870s Birmingham, and look at Chamberlain! And if not grand paternalistic mayors, then at least naked self interest to carve out a space for those few hundred million you mention.
incognitomaorach
1yr ago
Judging by online reaction there are a hell of a lot of people who believe it. Some believe a CP version (also doesn't pass smell test). It's been amplified by some DR voices online, presumably just as engagement bait.
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..?
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