"those needing a passport or driver’s license must frequently wait for several months."
How the heck did that happen? The only idea I have is that a lot of those workers retired, or got disabled, or there's huge amounts of sick time being used. No other way they can still have months of back logs.
May 13, 2023·edited May 14, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
Yikes! I read what you wrote about the UK and wonder, is that our destiny as Americans? Seems like it, unless some black swan event knocks down the established order; and in today's world, black swan events seem likelier than ever, and our regime lacks the resilience to deal effectively with them and recover. A black-swan induced collapse would bring some crazy chaos, which could get really ugly, but the alternative seems to be a slow, steady, ineluctable decline like the trends you observe happening in the UK. Of these two bad options, I think a black-swan induced collapse provides the only possibility of long-term improvement. Contrary to what Dr Pangloss claimed, we are definitely not living in the best of all possible worlds!
It's striking and depressing to think how long, how hard and how intractable Britain's economic malaise it and has been. He was basically wrong about everything, but Tony Benn was, in a way, more on the money than Mrs Thatcher was about our national travails. It was his repeated insistence that Britain had been a rentier society since at least the 1870s that was behind his socialist 'alternative economic strategy' in the 70s (about which, more here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4h9qv1HQ4w8&t=1199s&pp=ygUaQWdhaW5zdCB0aGUgdGlkZSB0b255IGJlbm4%3D)
But what's more of a blackpill is the more recent and more total collapse in social capital. In the 70s, Britain was, famously, a n economic basketcase. But I think plenty of people beyond our island would agree that it was also the fount of much of the best popular culture in the world (way out of proportion to our size).
I'm nearer to 30 than 35 but even I remember the untroubled sense of superiority we once had in, say, comedy. But comedy - perhaps especially British comedy - was a kind of set of family in-jokes. And when, in twenty years, your family goes from being over 90% to just two-thirds of your household, the family in-jokes stop. You have to cater to what everyone finds funny. And what is the one comedy everyone knows? Yeah: fucking Friends.
As recently as 2010, when I was at university, we were producing stuff like The Thick Of It and Mitchell and Webb. But then the British post-War comedy tradition did what such rich cultural traditions almost never do: it stopped. I find almost nothing that's happened to us more upsetting, and more chilling, as it should be to other countries, than that.
We'll see. Not about British decline - that's real, and the stagnation of the last fifteen years has no precedent in the last two centuries. But there's no relative decline as compared to France, Italy or Germany. Western Europe is doing really, really badly. Hence Brexit.
One corpse unshackling itself from the others, if you're feeling gloomy. One symptom of Europe finally starting to wake up and face reality, if you're not. We'll see.
As an Englishman, this is painful for me but I have felt for some time now that my country's decline is probably irreversible. I have no idea how long this wretched downtrend will take, where it will end or what, if anything, follows the eventual bottoming-out.
Ireland, too, but in a different way. It appears that the Irish have decided that their nation is not worth saving. The Irish could organise against this despotism but I get the impression that not enough of them can be bothered to do so and a few individuals or small groups can and will be easily picked off.
Postscript: while economic and political arrangements play a role, my view is that the malaise is civic, psychological and spiritual. A once relatively high-trust and cohesive society has been transformed into a low-trust and diffused one. Many Brits, me included, feel that it is just not our country anymore and that we no longer have a stake in it. It's just an economic zone in which the indigenous British have no no say, no representation and no power. We have been reduced to voiceless serfs, toiling on our hedge-fund-manager-lord's estates. Both opposition and organised resistance have been made impossible. Our past is being erased and our future is "brown". Is it any wonder that a long, dark teatime of the soul has set it?
I still have some hope for the UK. The middle class was highly entrepreneurial in the 1800s - that has mostly died today, but the idea amongst the youth of working for life in government or a job with a big old school corporation is much more prevalent in sclerotic France or Germany than in the UK.
The Irish hate speech law looks to me like a sign of anxiety on the government's part. There have been reports of quite large protests against the mass immigration the government is enabling, tensions exploding between locals and African migrants, the usual kind of thing. In one story a migrant's van got firebombed after a rape.
If the government felt secure, it wouldn't bother with such a heavy-handed law. Which doesn't mean it won't be used to crack down on dissent of course. Will be interesting to see how that famous Irish temper handles it. Or, for that matter, their poetic tradition - it's often possible to find ways of saying things that need to be said that skirt around the censor's attention, while managing to be all the more inspiring. The intellectual and creative flowering of right wing Twitter under the selective pressure of Trust and Safety is a case in point.
On Britain - my family over there more or less confirm these accounts. The island has seemed like a sleepy backwater lost in the dreams of past greatness for a very long time, however. Emigration to the colonies likely served as a sort of brain drain, albeit it wasn't brains so much as spirit that left. Then there's the influence of the Great War. The best of the aristocracy were culled in the trenches. Those left behind were the ones who were too weak or cowardly to serve, and their descendents rule still. Martial cowardice seems like it would extend to a certain lack of boldness and energy in other respects - hence the absence of commercial or industrial vision, the preference to live off of rents while the country rots as they sell it off to their former colonies.
That England, Scotland, and Ireland now all have leaders from the subcontinent says quite a bit.
The shenanigans (was that an Irish slur? did it provoke hatred of me ancestral people? will the Hibernians come after me?) of NGOs are yet another reason to abolish non-profit status in the United States or at least severely limit it.
How does it work in other countries, are "do-gooder" organizations allowed to avoid taxes?
[my thought about all this is that it isnt just thatcher or failed elites - its also e.g. the change in value of glasgow and bristol due to the age of sail ending; it also isnt one basket except in the wide sense of the southeast of the UK - arguably Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire are proportionally more powerful relative to London than a century ago...Blackpool lost out to Spain but Brighton is still going well...compare and contrast...]
battering ram --> blame-game battering ram
[there's nothing grammatically wrong here but adding this makes sense of what battering metaphor is directed to]
A quick comment on the burden of proof on that Irish hate law. From what I can see it could be a lot worse - genuine religious discourse is excluded from coverage by the law (its a defence; any priest's homily is immediately not affected by this), the burden of proof is still occurring in that the law requires the state to prove that it isnt in a permitted category (e.g. genuine religious artistic academic work) & to prove that it is reasonable to think it wasnt just for personal use (so personal use is ok; your browser cache is ok), and that only in instances where the state makes those proofs is there a deeming principle that it should be then taken to be intended for publication. So your non-museum warehouse full of nazi lampost stickers will run into problems. No seepage of cases, and rule of law still ok. In a reasonable legal system this sort of processing of forcing the state to exclude other intentionalities is used regularly to distinguish e.g. personal versus commercial possession; and parallels legal bans in places like Canada of firearms for self-defence versus legit uses like hunting, or regulating possession of raw materials specific to explosives manufacturing or specialised drug making. The nature of making possessions illegal requires this sort of probing into intentionality, and just because there is a deeming element of intention in such laws which looks like a reversal of presumption of innocence taken just as one phrase if one doesnt notice the careful requirement to prove other intentions arent at play, does not mean the onus of proof in general has been overturned.
We seem to need these sorts of laws on some sorts of item possession - not-kiddie-porn-but-some-child-photography, guns, explosive precursor chemicals etc. Its messy but only American libertarians play with thin edge of wedge arguments to stoke up their adenalino-fear to which they are clearly addicted...and to feed the fantasy of being the Freedom Fighter against the Oppressive Apparatus. (Liberals used the same set of edge of wedge arguments on pornography possession back in the day).
But its less frightening than you conclude. Dont feed the endorphins of the permanent adolescent libertarians!
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Fukuyama has gone woke. The universe may now conclude its existence.
"those needing a passport or driver’s license must frequently wait for several months."
How the heck did that happen? The only idea I have is that a lot of those workers retired, or got disabled, or there's huge amounts of sick time being used. No other way they can still have months of back logs.
UK malaise, Irish tyranny
Doom on you British Isles
Yikes! I read what you wrote about the UK and wonder, is that our destiny as Americans? Seems like it, unless some black swan event knocks down the established order; and in today's world, black swan events seem likelier than ever, and our regime lacks the resilience to deal effectively with them and recover. A black-swan induced collapse would bring some crazy chaos, which could get really ugly, but the alternative seems to be a slow, steady, ineluctable decline like the trends you observe happening in the UK. Of these two bad options, I think a black-swan induced collapse provides the only possibility of long-term improvement. Contrary to what Dr Pangloss claimed, we are definitely not living in the best of all possible worlds!
It's striking and depressing to think how long, how hard and how intractable Britain's economic malaise it and has been. He was basically wrong about everything, but Tony Benn was, in a way, more on the money than Mrs Thatcher was about our national travails. It was his repeated insistence that Britain had been a rentier society since at least the 1870s that was behind his socialist 'alternative economic strategy' in the 70s (about which, more here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4h9qv1HQ4w8&t=1199s&pp=ygUaQWdhaW5zdCB0aGUgdGlkZSB0b255IGJlbm4%3D)
But what's more of a blackpill is the more recent and more total collapse in social capital. In the 70s, Britain was, famously, a n economic basketcase. But I think plenty of people beyond our island would agree that it was also the fount of much of the best popular culture in the world (way out of proportion to our size).
I'm nearer to 30 than 35 but even I remember the untroubled sense of superiority we once had in, say, comedy. But comedy - perhaps especially British comedy - was a kind of set of family in-jokes. And when, in twenty years, your family goes from being over 90% to just two-thirds of your household, the family in-jokes stop. You have to cater to what everyone finds funny. And what is the one comedy everyone knows? Yeah: fucking Friends.
As recently as 2010, when I was at university, we were producing stuff like The Thick Of It and Mitchell and Webb. But then the British post-War comedy tradition did what such rich cultural traditions almost never do: it stopped. I find almost nothing that's happened to us more upsetting, and more chilling, as it should be to other countries, than that.
We'll see. Not about British decline - that's real, and the stagnation of the last fifteen years has no precedent in the last two centuries. But there's no relative decline as compared to France, Italy or Germany. Western Europe is doing really, really badly. Hence Brexit.
One corpse unshackling itself from the others, if you're feeling gloomy. One symptom of Europe finally starting to wake up and face reality, if you're not. We'll see.
As an Englishman, this is painful for me but I have felt for some time now that my country's decline is probably irreversible. I have no idea how long this wretched downtrend will take, where it will end or what, if anything, follows the eventual bottoming-out.
Ireland, too, but in a different way. It appears that the Irish have decided that their nation is not worth saving. The Irish could organise against this despotism but I get the impression that not enough of them can be bothered to do so and a few individuals or small groups can and will be easily picked off.
Postscript: while economic and political arrangements play a role, my view is that the malaise is civic, psychological and spiritual. A once relatively high-trust and cohesive society has been transformed into a low-trust and diffused one. Many Brits, me included, feel that it is just not our country anymore and that we no longer have a stake in it. It's just an economic zone in which the indigenous British have no no say, no representation and no power. We have been reduced to voiceless serfs, toiling on our hedge-fund-manager-lord's estates. Both opposition and organised resistance have been made impossible. Our past is being erased and our future is "brown". Is it any wonder that a long, dark teatime of the soul has set it?
I still have some hope for the UK. The middle class was highly entrepreneurial in the 1800s - that has mostly died today, but the idea amongst the youth of working for life in government or a job with a big old school corporation is much more prevalent in sclerotic France or Germany than in the UK.
Also, the NGO piece was bang on, thank you.
Niccolo, please check this out...
https://fortaeneas.substack.com/p/something-is-wrong-with-our-society
The Irish hate speech law looks to me like a sign of anxiety on the government's part. There have been reports of quite large protests against the mass immigration the government is enabling, tensions exploding between locals and African migrants, the usual kind of thing. In one story a migrant's van got firebombed after a rape.
If the government felt secure, it wouldn't bother with such a heavy-handed law. Which doesn't mean it won't be used to crack down on dissent of course. Will be interesting to see how that famous Irish temper handles it. Or, for that matter, their poetic tradition - it's often possible to find ways of saying things that need to be said that skirt around the censor's attention, while managing to be all the more inspiring. The intellectual and creative flowering of right wing Twitter under the selective pressure of Trust and Safety is a case in point.
On Britain - my family over there more or less confirm these accounts. The island has seemed like a sleepy backwater lost in the dreams of past greatness for a very long time, however. Emigration to the colonies likely served as a sort of brain drain, albeit it wasn't brains so much as spirit that left. Then there's the influence of the Great War. The best of the aristocracy were culled in the trenches. Those left behind were the ones who were too weak or cowardly to serve, and their descendents rule still. Martial cowardice seems like it would extend to a certain lack of boldness and energy in other respects - hence the absence of commercial or industrial vision, the preference to live off of rents while the country rots as they sell it off to their former colonies.
That England, Scotland, and Ireland now all have leaders from the subcontinent says quite a bit.
The shenanigans (was that an Irish slur? did it provoke hatred of me ancestral people? will the Hibernians come after me?) of NGOs are yet another reason to abolish non-profit status in the United States or at least severely limit it.
How does it work in other countries, are "do-gooder" organizations allowed to avoid taxes?
centre --> center
eggs in one basket
[my thought about all this is that it isnt just thatcher or failed elites - its also e.g. the change in value of glasgow and bristol due to the age of sail ending; it also isnt one basket except in the wide sense of the southeast of the UK - arguably Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire are proportionally more powerful relative to London than a century ago...Blackpool lost out to Spain but Brighton is still going well...compare and contrast...]
battering ram --> blame-game battering ram
[there's nothing grammatically wrong here but adding this makes sense of what battering metaphor is directed to]
A quick comment on the burden of proof on that Irish hate law. From what I can see it could be a lot worse - genuine religious discourse is excluded from coverage by the law (its a defence; any priest's homily is immediately not affected by this), the burden of proof is still occurring in that the law requires the state to prove that it isnt in a permitted category (e.g. genuine religious artistic academic work) & to prove that it is reasonable to think it wasnt just for personal use (so personal use is ok; your browser cache is ok), and that only in instances where the state makes those proofs is there a deeming principle that it should be then taken to be intended for publication. So your non-museum warehouse full of nazi lampost stickers will run into problems. No seepage of cases, and rule of law still ok. In a reasonable legal system this sort of processing of forcing the state to exclude other intentionalities is used regularly to distinguish e.g. personal versus commercial possession; and parallels legal bans in places like Canada of firearms for self-defence versus legit uses like hunting, or regulating possession of raw materials specific to explosives manufacturing or specialised drug making. The nature of making possessions illegal requires this sort of probing into intentionality, and just because there is a deeming element of intention in such laws which looks like a reversal of presumption of innocence taken just as one phrase if one doesnt notice the careful requirement to prove other intentions arent at play, does not mean the onus of proof in general has been overturned.
We seem to need these sorts of laws on some sorts of item possession - not-kiddie-porn-but-some-child-photography, guns, explosive precursor chemicals etc. Its messy but only American libertarians play with thin edge of wedge arguments to stoke up their adenalino-fear to which they are clearly addicted...and to feed the fantasy of being the Freedom Fighter against the Oppressive Apparatus. (Liberals used the same set of edge of wedge arguments on pornography possession back in the day).
But its less frightening than you conclude. Dont feed the endorphins of the permanent adolescent libertarians!