The Capital of England
Seen on Twitter:
Daily Express Froths at the Mouth
In an advanced case of political rabies, pro-Brexit rag the Daily Express froths at the mouth over the audacity of the evil, perfidious EU who have dared to plan upgrades to their railway system and not include the UK, which chose to leave the EU in 2020.
Express reporter Tim McNutty writes:
Scheming EU countries leave UK out of 'landmark' transport plans as map reveals betrayal
The UK is omitted from a major trans-European transport project poised for approval by the EU Commission.
.
I do sometimes wonder whether the Express isn't a deliberate parody, whose writers compete on how absurd they can make it without their readers realising that they are having the piss taken out of them.
Devereux on the rules-based order
In response to this question:
Explain to me a single material benefit the average American making 45k a year gets from supporting Ukraine or Israel.
Bret Devereux wrote a thread explaining why it is in America's interest to help its friends and allies (and what are the advantages, in general, in being a security provider), which I except:
The short version is: the USA wrote the rules of the international system after WWII in ways that benefit us, including the average American. Consequently, defending the system is good for Joe Taxpayer.
Remember how during COVID supply chains were borked and so some basic goods were suddenly hard to get? And how after COVID, problems with those same chains caused a ton of rising prices? Or more recently, how the Russian invasion of Ukraine caused price-spikes which spread to the United States in things like grain because the war disrupted Ukrainian grain exports?
Those disruptions are what a world without the 'rules-based order' would be like all the time. The 'rules-based international order' is a very complex thing, but we can boil it down a bit to some basic premises:
1) free trade and the free flow of capital is on net good for Americans; it makes the things we buy cheaper and lets us sell our expensive products abroad.
2) Big wars of conquest are bad for Americans, even when they happen far away, because they disrupt those supply chains that stock our groceries, supply our consumer goods, and provide markets for our products. We want to discourage those sorts of wars.
3) state stability generally - countries have borders, those borders don't change, those states are responsible for the people in them - is good for Americans, because stable states are good economic partners.
The major challenge we face are 'revisionist' powers, who want to disrupt one or all of these. Russia evidently wants to reconquer Eastern Europe - left unchecked that would mean a series of massive wars which would disrupt trade and make life more expensive for Americans. Likewise, the People's Republic of China is a revisionist power, with active territorial disputes with India, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Bhutan, the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia.
We do not want China to resolve those disputes by force (read: conquest), for the reasons above. Part of the way we avoid a war in the Asia-Pacific region is by communicating our commitment to the 'rules-based international order' to China, so they understand that we would impose big costs, making it not worth it for them to use force.
As Perun has pointed out, the benefits to the USA of being a security provider are a lot less obvious than the costs. Therefore, while it is in the USA's interests for it to continue to be a security provider, that truth is not obvious to a lot of that country's citizens.
The rise of Mohammed bin Salman
@AaronWatsonPiper discusses the rise of Mohammed bin Salman the Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia:
My take on this is:
MBS is 38 years old and therefore could be running Saudi Arabia for the next 4 decades
He clearly is an autocrat with no respect for human rights (e.g. Khashoggi murder)
He runs an aggressive foreign policy (e.g. war in Yemen, Qatar diplomatic crisis)
He also has big plans to transform KSA's economy (e.g. Neom)
Thus he has the potential to make Saudi Arabia into a thriving successful country, or to break it (and possibly much of South-West Asia) in warfare and economic decline. Either way, he's definitely one to watch.
The War to Annihilate Sex
Arty Morty writes that the trans ideology is to wokism as the Vietnam war was to the USA:
There is a huge conflict going on right now, but it's not “anti-trans” versus “pro-trans.”
It's science versus superstition. It's sound medical treatment versus charlatans selling snake oil. Biological reality versus tribalistic make-believe.
It's a group of rational, open-minded, pragmatic transsexuals, gays, therapists, sexologists, and biologists, backed by a knowledge base built up over more than a century, versus a brand-new, social-media-fuelled, furious activist movement that is at war against anything to do with the facts of biology and sex.
And this latter faction have become supercharged by aligning themselves with toxic culture-war politics. They have framed those of us who dare to raise even the mildest concerns as evil, right-wing bigots. They've created a climate of paranoia among progressive-minded people, which has quickly devolved into a witch hunt, turning workplaces into political minefields, and ripping families and social circles apart.
Morty adds
This has led to a purity spiral: a moral-righteousness bidding contest.
Indeed. Anyone in woke-influenced circles who wants to keep their woke friends (or even their job) has to go along with the wokists. It is heresy to point out the emperor has no clothes.
A whole bunch of people forming a social movement around a passionately held metaphysical belief about their inner spiritual selves which contradicts material reality? There’s a name for this: religion.
Indeed, wokism is a religion, as many have pointed out.
Adolescents who transition are mostly people who a few decades ago would be gay or lesbian:
Many gays and lesbians express their gender in creative and individualistic ways all through their lives. We’ve always been a proudly gender-bending community. But until social media came along, very few of us experienced such long-lasting mental anguish about our gender expression that we adopted transgender identities and underwent “sex change” treatments. Nowadays, the rate of medical interventions on gay & lesbian people’s bodies is so high, alarm bells are going off all over the world.
The wave of regret has begun
Increasing numbers of people are coming out as detransitioners, people who regret the medical therapies they feel they were misled or coerced into carrying out, under the influence of Gender Fundamentalism. Irreversible damage has been done to their bodies. Upon meeting some of them, the penny dropped for my acquaintance Helen Joyce, a former editor at The Economist who went on to write the bestselling book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality and who now co-directs the advocacy group Sex Matters.
She put it this way: “Oh my God, they’re sterilizing gay kids.”
As the joke has it, a wokie is a person who thinks "pray the gay away" is evil but "trans the gay away" is wonderful.
All this has lead to children being transed and suffering life-long health problems as a consequence:
Today, the very first cohort of children who were told from early childhood that they were born innately transgender is just coming into adulthood. Some are severely disabled due to experimental drugs and surgical procedures, which have scarred their genitals, brittled their bones, stunted their sexual function, and wrought havoc on their mental health.
They are disillusioned, unhappy, and they believe that they were medically abused and exploited in the service of adult activists' political objectives.
While it is obvious that things are going horribly wrong, the woke cannot say so. They cannot even admit to themselves that anything is wrong -- such heresy would be punished by being excommunicated from wokism -- and therefore the transing of kids will continue until the problem is too big to ignore.
The upshot of this will not be the end of wokism -- as an ideology it is here to stay -- but it may well be that its nastier aspects get toned down.
The un-Scottish undemocratic unsocialist unparty
From @Mattlyall78, this:
The reality is that the Scottish Labour Party is neither Scottish (they take their orders from London), nor democratic (Labour's leadership opposes PR even though most of their members are for it), nor socialist (he's not called "Sir Kid Starver" for nothing), nor a party (it's merely an accounting unit of the Labour Party, and registered as such by the Electoral Commission, not a separate organisation).
Ethiopia to get port access in Somaliland
The BBC reports:
Ethiopia has taken the first legal steps on a path that could one day enable the landlocked country to gain access to the sea, its government says.
It has signed what is known as a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the self-declared republic of Somaliland to use one of its ports.
This is potentially a good deal for both countries -- Ethiopia because it gets access to the sea, and Somaliland because it gets international recognition.
If Labour fails too
Former shadow chancellor John McDonell warns of the consequences of Labour failing:
The disillusionment with the Conservatives is on such a scale that the most realistic prospect will remain the election of a Labour government. The more significant danger from the far right then emerges if having placed their faith in Labour, people do not see the change in our society that they hoped for after the election.
People will be patient as they fully realise how broken Britain is, but the foundations of credible and radical change will have to be seen to be being laid early in the life of the incoming Labour government. People will need to see how there is a real strategy to restore the value of wages and incomes held back for so long under the Tories, how investment in our public services is taking place and how reform doesn’t mean more privatisation, and how the grotesque levels of inequality in our society are being reduced.
If Labour fails to set out early on a path of radical change to secure the all-round wellbeing and security of our people, then inevitably disillusionment will set in. The risk then is the potential for a significant shift in our politics to the right, with the return of a Conservative party, completely shorn of any traditional one nation Tories and under the dominance of the populist right both within the party and beyond.
I think this basically right. People are pissed off with the Tories, because their living standards are no better (and often worse) than before the financial crash of 2008.
So if Labour fail too many will conclude that democracy isn't working and think we need an authoritarian government. We could end up with Führer Nigel Farage of the National Socialist British Republic.
(I would argue that FPTP isn't democratic and thus democracy hasn't been tried in the UK. It is the system -- the cosy two-party Labservative duopoly that sits at the top of Britain's ruling class -- that has failed and needs to be destroyed. One solution, for Scotland at least, would be independence. Another would be to reform Westminster; but I think Westminster will be very hard or impossible to reform.)
Do clever people prefer boobs to butts?
Yes, apparently:
Dots on the scattergraph represent countries. The x-axis is average IQ for that country, and the y-axis is preference for breasts over buttocks, according to Google and PornHub searches, so 75 means 75% prefer breasts.
The Right's Stupidity Problem
Nathan Cofnas needs to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem. Excerpts:
Attributions of low intelligence are considered insults—something we lob at our enemies, not our friends. So why should I, who am committed to the defeat of leftism, say that my own side is the dumb one? I cannot shame my political allies into having higher IQs. Talking about the right’s intellectual limitations seems demoralizing and mean. What’s wrong with letting conservatives view themselves as intellectually superior to the “libtards” who invent vaccines and run academia, big tech, and our major corporations?
Why are the left woke:
If smart people overwhelmingly choose wokism over right-wing alternatives, we need to understand why. [...] I argue that wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously, given a background of Christian morality. Both the mainstream left and right believe that innate cognitive ability and temperament are distributed equally among races, and probably the sexes, too. (Mainstream conservatives acknowledge the existence of physical sex differences, but they rarely chalk up disparities in, for example, mathematical achievement to differences in innate ability—at least not publicly.) As I will explain, wokesters correctly follow the equality thesis to its logical conclusion, whereas conservatives fail to recognize the implications of their own beliefs.
In other words, wokists take it as given that all races have equal intelligence, and conclude that differences in outcome must therefore be due to racism.
Conservative media are too stupid to point out truths favourable to conservatives:
In fact, liberal magazines are often better at reporting news that favors conservatives than the conservative media itself. The New Yorker recently published the best report I’ve seen on the major fraud scandals in behavioral science—a story that is highly damaging to the liberal establishment, and which is barely on the radar of the conservative press. The “replication crisis” refers to the fact that many alleged scientific findings—especially in anti-conservative fields like social psychology—are bogus. A search of foxnews.com for “replication crisis” turns up a single instance in one article in 2018. A search of nationalreview.com for “replication crisis” gets 34 hits, while a search for “Chuck Schumer” (a New York senator disliked by conservatives) gets 5,280 hits. The New York Times has given almost twice as much coverage to the replication crisis as National Review, with a search of the Times’s website turning up 64 results. [...] The collective intelligence of the community from which an institution arises can be just as important as the wisdom of its guiding visionaries.
Snippety snip
Arty Morty thinks Freddie deBoer should bet his cock that his political beliefs are right:
So how about you put your own skin in the game. If it turns out you’re wrong and there is a massive wave of gender nonconforming people who’ve been misled and horribly, irreversibly harmed by gender identity extremism, how about you surgically give up your own cock in solidarity with the men who’ve lost theirs, and the women whose bodies have been harmed, too?
I am reminded of the physical option in Iain M. Banks' Player of Games:
'Let me explain something to you, Jernau Gurgeh,' the drone said. 'The game of Azad is a gambling game, frequently even at the highest levels. The form these wagers take is occasionally macabre. I very much doubt that you'd be involved on the sort of levels you'd be playing at if you did agree to take part, but it is quite usual for them to wager prestige, honours, possessions, slaves, favours, land and even physical licence on the outcome of games.'
Gurgeh waited, but eventually sighed and said, 'All right… what's "physical licence"?'
'The players wager tortures and mutilations against each other.
'You mean, if you lose a game… you have… these things done to you?'
'Exactly. One might bet, say, the loss of a finger against aggravated male-to-apex rectal rape.'
Gurgeh looked levelly at the machine for a few seconds, then said slowly, nodding, 'Well… that is barbaric.'
'Actually it's a later development in the game, and seen as a rather liberal concession by the ruling class, as in theory it allows a poor person to keep up in the bidding with a rich person. Before the introduction of the physical licence option, the latter could always outbid the former.'
The Trump and Biden show, 2024 edition
John Cardillo asks:
I expect if you asked a sample of Americans, "What 2 people are best qualified to be President?" less than 1% would say "Biden and Trump". Probably most would not mention either name.
So why are they likely to be the candidates this year? Because of the way the electoral system works. The "Democratic" and Republican parties, the primary system, FPTP and the electoral college -- these are all mechanisms for denying democracy and thwarting the will of the people.