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May 14, 2023
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Interesting insight. Thank you.

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Hit the like button at the very top of the page to like this entry and use the share button to share this across social media.

Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so (be nice!), and please consider subscribing if you haven't done so already.

...and don't forget to join me on Substack Notes - https://niccolo.substack.com/p/introducing-substack-notes

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This upcoming week I will be publishing:

1. a new interview

2. a deep dive into Jake Sullivan's speech at Brookings re: new US Foreign Policy

and I will be appearing on a podcast.

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It has been entirely too long since the last time we got one of your interviews.

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Fukuyama has gone woke. The universe may now conclude its existence.

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...was probably inevitable.

The pressure from his brunch pals in the faculty lounge must be enormous—Denounce or be denounced! is the ambient vibe of any cozy corner of the progressive oligarchy.

Maybe he has daughters or granddaughters too—they always wanna make sure papa or grandpa aint a "racist" like all those bad other geezers that lurk inside their nightmares.

We are living through a possibly unprecedented eruption of class formation and the memo has gone out: you are either w us or w the white supremacists.

Fukuyama has alway seemed like an institutionalist at heart.

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Institutionalist? That is a fancy name for a company man.

It is all about the political/social pheromones. Fukuyama can smell the odour of authority. Monkeys present their rumps. Intellectuals change their convictions. Simple.

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i like to phrase it as house cats vs street cats...

u know which one we are!

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He's deeply embedded in the NGO complex. His only choice is to object and be erased, along with his work.

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"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.

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Personal annecdote - dual citizen - lives in South Pacific - UK passport expired - applied for renewal April 7 2023 - replacement passport in hand May 4 2023. Rest of article was convincing but had a clear agenda.

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Yeah...usual caveats apply to Der Spiegel...in this case anti-Tory and especially anti-Brexit.

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I'm confused. He first talked of it as a personal anecdote, later to refer to an article. What was it, he knew them or read about it??

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He's saying that Der Spiegel is being selective regarding matters like passport issuance in order to paint the UK in the darkest light possible.

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Thanks, hmm so it sounds like they're just trying to build more discontent by reporting this dire issue lol.

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Take a lot of truth, put an even more negative spin on it to attack those who you do not favour.

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It is a bit of a lottery. I've had mine back using the normal service within a week, whereas my mother once had to wait months. It depends on the processing centre I guess.

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It was a personal anecdote - let me spell it out - I ORDERED THE PASSPORT - sheesh.....

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hahha

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Certain embers of the UK press love to lay the blame for the UK's malaise on Brexit. Apparently, the response to the pandemic and the worst energy crisis of a generation just don't apply.

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German media can be just as bad and biased as any outlet in Anglo-America. A notorious example is that of Claas Relotius, a star reporter for Der Speigel who fabricated numerous details in his story about a small town in Minnesota that voted for Trump. Since then I have taken anything written in Der Spiegel about the US with a grain of salt. Their reporting about the UK is probably similar as well.

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It's the most objective Spiegel article that I've ever read, and it still felt like a Pravda report.

Brexit ruined us, but Labour is ready to help. Also: starving Brits. Yeah, sure.

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I bought a flat in February last year (lol) and my ownership is not due to be logged in the Land Registry database until April 2024. This is supposed to be a digital service, as well.

You go to a cash machine and it's a 50/50 chance that it works. And if it does, it's 50/50 that there will be any money in it.

We can't register my two-year old with a dentist. We will have to go private. And when he was born, the NHS was so incompetent at the point of service that we ended up being raced to the hospital in an ambulance because the people we were dealing with didn't believe me when I described my wife's symptoms. I had to go full Karen mode to ensure she and my baby didn't die. Luckily the surgeon was incredible.

The country isn't an open air mental asylum as America apparently is. The life we live is safe and prosperous. But it convenience and the lifestyle that supports is fraying at the edges and I don't see how this will be arrested.

Little things, such as booking a train ticket to go to the airport - you can't rely on any of it working. First world problems but... this is a first world country, right?

I look at the American right and as cucked as they are, at least they are having conversations and forming factions and spending energy. What do the Tories offer? Just lol.

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I’m in the uk - I had to wait 16 (!) months for my driving license to be renewed.

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UK malaise, Irish tyranny

Doom on you British Isles

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I have never been to Ireland, so it's difficult to gauge the sentiment there from afar as all the media that we consume is heavily-tilted to one side.

As for the UK, I've spent quite a lot of time there over the past decade or so, and the mood has noticeably soured these past two years. London is very fun if you have money.

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Michael Brendan Dougherty: "I’ve read the legislation and I’ll probably be leaving my phone safely here in the land of the 1st and 4th Amendments, next time I go visit family."

https://twitter.com/michaelbd/status/1656224887252320256

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Saddled with a D4 set which is the successor to repressive colonialism and its control of institutions - combined with the Northern issues has always held Ireland back in terms of a focused nationalism

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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!

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Black swan is irredeemably racist; the stout guardians of our democracy will never ever let one spread its wings—egads! 🤦

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🤣 And if one appears, they will deny that it exists, and once they are forced to admit it exists, they will deny that it's black. ("This is a normal swan event!") Then *they* will be revealed as the real racists, denying the blackness of the swan!

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Revelation? What revelation?—viduously gape gazillions of eyes rendered too blind to see long ago in the inky depths of time.

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That's why I call it a Romanian Duck.

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No, America will not suffer the same fate because one of the most annoying traits we Brits have is to 'not getting carried away' and to not make such a fuss about anything. Great in an emergency but not the best approach to a long and slow collapse. Americans are crazy as shit but they at least have some gumption.

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You never know. I thought Canadians would put up with anything, but the Trucker Convoy really impressed the hell out of me. I know Justin "Fidelito" Turd-eau pulled out all the stops to crush it, but so did Bull Connor against the 1963 civil rights marchers -- and we all know how that eventually turned out. That Trucker Convoy protest was a solid PR victory for the protesters. Anyway, your fellow Brits may surprise you the way the truckers surprised everyone who had previously thought Canada was a lost cause.

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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.

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No country has for so long punched above its own weight as much as the UK has for decades when it comes to soft power, whether music, comedy, or even BBC News.

..yet this strange adoption of shit American popular culture came crashing through shortly after Britpop's demise in the late 90s. I'm still trying to make sense of it. it bothers me when Brits admit to enjoying "Friends", for example.

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I don't actually think anyone enjoys Friends. It just shows, as blue jeans once did, that's you're in touch with America.

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American conquered the UK a long time ago but only recently had the cultural conquest of the UK "elites" (what we would call "upper classes") feels much more recent.

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I think it's the same problem we see in many Western countries. A detached elite who no longer care for their country of origin or the people therein. John Major, even Tony Blair before he became the Dark Lord, appeared or at least feigned a worry about the fate of the country. These modern midwits - I don't know what they're thinking.

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It was generational. The old elite were slowly excluded. The 'new men' of the 70s (Murdoch, Tiny Rowland) were colonials with little interest in the UK. They helped foster the transition to the generation born and raised after the empire (which expired legally with George VI). The Oxbridge educated arrivistes like Blair are fiercely and intuitively pro-American because they understand at a cellular level that their status rests on replacing the old order and on rubbishing its legacy at every opportunity.

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This time next year we’ll be millionaires...

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The late 90s and aughts produced a lot of good music though

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Native British culture compliantly took its place in the back seat when we submitted to Washington. Still, it may have squeaked along were it not for the rise of the DIE commissars (another carcinogenic US import) and their cultural directives, now strictly applied to all media producers. The requirement for scripts and casting to meet political approval pretty much kills off any hope of any authentic or organic output, which is probably as intended.

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My biggest hope for us is that this sort of thing only foreclosed the possibility of British culture WITHIN the institutions and that we'll have the creativity and the wit to ensure it survives elsewhere. I'm enough of a cultural chauvinist to be confident that if we get to that point out culture will survive because of its innate quality (not in things like painting or classical music, of course, at which we've always sucked.)

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England was just about the only country in Europe to preserve classical teachings and thought through the dark ages, so maybe you're right.

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No that was Ireland not Anglo-Saxon England

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No, it was England. Maybe Ireland too.

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No even Bead and, much later, Spenser, go through this (the latter going so far as attributing English literacy to the Irish - "[f]or it is certain that Ireland hath had the use of letters very anciently and long before England; that they had letters anciently is nothing doubtful, for the Saxons of England are said to have their letters and learning, and learned men, from the Irish"). Professor Heinrich Zimmer also references this phenomenon.

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Thinking aloud here, but I would be interested in what you think.

Could it be that the high profile centralised vehicles of comedy have gone, such as Porridge, A Fish Called Wanda, The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin, and what is left is now appearing in small clubs and pubs, very high quality but with a small local reach, or just producing Reels on Instagram and so on, much less `visible`?

I say this because I found something similar in Brazil, where the indigenous Bossa Nova and samba music, by the time I got there, was no longer being produced by Tom Jobim, João Gilberto and Elis Regina, but was in very good condition in bars and clubs in a more dispersed manner but very much alive.

Can anyone put forward supporting evidence or refute my hypothesis?

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I miss LITTLE BRITAIN.

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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.

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I think that the main thing is cultural. What's happened to us in that respect seems way stronger that what's happened to the French or the Germans. I know a bit more about Spain and they're the same as ever they were. We really aren't.

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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.

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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?

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"A palpable sense of despair has set in."

I think I remember from Bram Stoker's "Dracula" that after you get bit by a vampire, you don't die or immediately become a slave zombie, but kind of wander around in a gloomy daze, knowing you're a walking corpse better off dead.

This is the state the downscale "traditional populations" (ahem) of the Anglosphere countries find themselves in. These people have no hope, no future, nothing to do or say but exhale the occasional sigh of despair.

The only difference is the name of this vampire wasn't Count Dracula but the global corporate state, more specifically its finance and banking wings, which sucked the lifeblood out of our countries and who have fled to their distant castles to plot new ways to drain the peasantry.

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Good analogy. I have long thought that the likely terminus of social trends will result in something like the vampire infested town in SALEM'S LOT.

The emergence of the 'deaths of despair', above all the epidemic abuse of fentanyl and other opioids, is chilling. The incidence of addiction is bad enough. What is far worse is that the wider society is adjusting to this new norm with resignation. The lack of outrage or any effective pressure for the authorities to take the measures to halt the phenomenon is proof that something is very wrong at a basic level.

The rising incidence of chronic metabolic disorders, plunging fertility etc all indicate that too many are not thriving. I think of it all as Cthulhuland or Cthulhustan...where sociocide (the dissolution of social ties) is a defining feature of a people in a state of moral, psychic and physical decline and where the authorities like it that way.

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once i saw dads letting their kids be sex changed by the state and raise nary a peep, i knew we'd reached a desolate place and a populace as defeated as any colonized group in history.

at least w the pagans having your son made a sacred eunuch gave your fam a bump up in status...hey, wait a minute, maybe it's not so different after all...;))

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Castration with parental consent is deeply depressing. It answers the question of how humans have been able to put up with cruelty, atrocity, injustice from time immemorial...they, we, will put up with anything so long as the burden falls more heavily on someone else. Anything. There are no limits. We are a substantially domesticated species and our rulers know this perfectly well. All of this chills me.

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It may simply be due to the fact that the UK was successful enough to have avoided the crises that would have forced the country to remake itself. Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain have all been torn apart by revolution, invasion, civil war and have had to resolve fundamental issues in a decisive way.

The UK pioneered modern imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and parliamentary rule without any intense civil conflicts fully comparable to those of her peers. The UK has been on the winning side of every global conflict since the early 18th c. The victories in the 20th c were Pyrrhic, but, nonetheless, they enabled the state to postpone real reform.

This has ultimately led to a degree of stagnation and entropy during which the successor empire, the US, took control and gutted the countries institutions so that the elite has been remade to serve the imperial interest, not that of the British people.

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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.

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Civil Service doesn't pay all that well.

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No- but the job security and work requirements are attractive.

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Niccolo, please check this out...

https://fortaeneas.substack.com/p/something-is-wrong-with-our-society

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sure

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This is just the first post. There are at least 8 more posts laying out the plan.

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Thank you!

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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.

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The performance of the Irish over what their government has done has been an inspiration. You've rightly assumed moral leadership over the British Isles, frankly. I don't imagine this will be any comfort, given that it hasn't stopped them doing it, but you've shown that you're alive and you care. It's the absence of this that makes us on the other, gayer, island seem alone and palely loitering.

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Civil disobedience en masse renders any law ineffective.

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Yes. This should be more widely understood.

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Re the poetic tradition, I have long thought that an essential weapon to bring down the regime would be music. Plato said that if you wanted to change the regime in a city first change the music.

The hate crime laws would be great if they inspired an anti-woke 'rebel song'. The Irish could atone for the crime of inflicting Bono, Bob Geldof or Sinead O'Connor upon us.

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Any song that successfully achieves mass recognition in today's fractured environment will have done something quite remarkable indeed, the more so if it's a rebel anthem. But this is not impossible, such songs were spreading long before mass media....

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Mass recognition is not that hard. The target audience are white Americans who have any number of very rich musical traditions. These transfer easily enough across sub-elite white groups of all sorts...as music has always done in Europe.

If I were Trump (or on his campaign) I'd find an experienced musician songwriter (preferably with a strong background in country or folk-rock and tons of experience performing before a live audience) and get them to rework a classic (country, classic rock, whatever). Put some lyrics in simple metre, nursery rhyme style. Tear Biden and the Establishment apart.

Authoritarian regimes are very sensitive to musical provocation. Rembetika (the music of the Greek underground) was criminalized for decades in Greece. The Turks did the same to a lot of Kurdish musicians.

The Soviets, interestingly, were smart enough to let people sing some stuff with pre or mildly anti-Soviet lyrics. I doubt that the Dems are sophisticated enough for that.

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Don't forget that a rebel anthem does not need to persuade opponents. It motivates and cheers up partisans. Anything that does that will be explosive. A million enthusiastic deplorables are more disruptive than five million joyless Karens or wojacks.

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Yes, that's always been the function of pretest music - a morale booster playing directly on the emotions, helping to solidify solidarity via the experience of singing along with the crowd.

The trick right now is distribution. Or more accurately penetration. To be effective, it must go viral to a shocking degree. Very hard for any one song to rise above the noise.

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Podcasts. Twitter. Paradoxically, censorship helps legitimize the message. There are vast numbers of people within the tech world who are fed up too. Victor Hugo once write that nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.

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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.

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Yes, WWI killed Britain.

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I certainly think there's some element of truth to the WWI killed Britain hypothesis (though, I suppose this is sensitive given that I descend from people who didn't die in Flanders; my great uncle went down on Black Prince at Jutland, though). But Britain has repeatedly lost a lot of people who, by definition, were amoung it's most enterprising. It didn't seem to have the enervating effect it has now until c. 2000. This must count for something.

I can't get out of my head, though, that tweet by, I forget whom (maybe Steve Sailer?) which shows the graph of immigration to America by year (and obviously shows a depression between 1925-1965) and says "Gee, American culture must have REALLY sucked between 1925 and 1965."

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We're all descendants of the survivors of WWI. Of course, the question is how people survived.... In some cases admittedly, the soldiers left kids behind, women love a man in uniform and all. So not a total genetic loss, but still.

Britain's been on a long decline since then, and a very noticeable one. Even visiting in the 90s I noted how shabby everything was in comparison to Canada. Comfy, but shabby. Since the 2000s though it's become a death spiral.

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Yeah, but compared to what? Do you remember visiting the UK before WWI? I don't, in general, disagree with you: you couldn't, if you tried, come up with a better dygenics machine yo apply to Britain, France, Germany, Russia and Austria than August 1914, for example.

But the effect of WWI on Britain can't possibly have been as great as the emigrations to the New World, Australia, southern Africa and New Zealand. And it was duting the periods of these emigration that the British achieved the things that will enable them to be unembarrassedly placed with Babylonia, Egypt, Persia and Rome by historians of the future.

Even after WWII they showed every sign of vitality through culture, even though their power had been destroyed. It died when something else happened.

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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?

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Good question.

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Thanks. Just trying to do a very un-American thing of trying to understand if there's a better way to do this than us American's are doing it.

You have an international set of commenters here, so hoping to get some ideas.

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There is no simple way out. 'Reform' is a racket. The way to go is countervailing power. NGOs are going to get funded. That cannot be stopped. But the financiers need to be identified and to pay a price, reputational or otherwise, for supporting mischief. Delegitimation by exposure and unrelenting opposition.

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I wouldn't think it matters. If you're an NGO on the side of the 'International Community', and you're furthering it's interest, you can pay your prostitutes in platinum cups filled with liquid bitcoin and you won't be allowed to go out of business.

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Fair enough, but then at least Soros and his ilk would have those monies taxed. I'm conflicted on this though because likely taxing NGOs won't decrease taxes in general (much less my own).

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In the UK, NGOs are almost always set up as charities or what is termed 'community companies'. They are forbidden from making profits and so pay no taxes. However, that has no bearing on the eye-watering sums of donor cash they can direct to "good causes" and it doesn't stop their officers and directors from being awarded handsome emoluments.

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Thanks. Sounds much like the US.

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Redefine charity so that it does not get abused. NGOs are welfare for the email caste. Tax the NGOs. Break up the foundations. Seize the endowments. It worked for Henry VIII. Nothing wrong with going Tudor if the alternative is an endless 'war of the roses' between oligarchs.

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Yes, "we're gonna get Tudor on yo' ass, boy". Agreed that the status of 'charity' must be awarded only to those whose activities are strictly confined to the distribution of hot soup to the poor.

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