"A lot of younger people talk about where they’d emigrate to escape economic stagnation, political instability, housing costs and general enshittifcation."
Like Churchill and democracy, I feel quite passionately that this country is the worst place to live, except for everywhere else.
"The loudest calls for political violence, displayed on social media, come from those who would be more obviously the victims than the perpetrators of the outcome they demand"
This is accurate and perspicacious reading of a growing mood on both sides of the political divide. Be warned.
For my sins, I have seen street violence and was in the company of violent men for many years of my young manhood and the phenomenon is almost always accompanied by psychotic (though often charming) individuals laundering their dangerous anomie beneath a noble 'cause'.
People think civil wars are fought by men like Hampden or Washington or Garibaldi. But it is thugs, para-criminals and sadists who quickly come to the fore.
I suspect that so many physically fragile people call for political violence online because they're accustomed to nursing revenge fantasies in which they horribly murder the bullies whom they failed to stand up to in real life.
I don't actually know this for certain, but I suspect that people who are able to physically dominate others do not spend much time sitting in their rooms obsessing about how much they'd love to dismember this or that enemy.
The drop is a rare piece of good news that very few people really know about it. Latin American murder rates are sometimes awful. I went to Medellin once and in some communities IIRC had murder rates in the 80s and 90s similar to British soldier casualty rates in WWI. (Andalusia was the communidad I think)
Ed, About Musk, his acquisition of Twitter was obv. a pivotal moment in the Right’s change of fortunes (as was his support of Trump) and his messaging about eg grooming gangs and immigration has been far more effective in breaking taboos than anything else. As with Trump he is not to my middle class sensibilities but I realise that middle class sensibilities are precisely the problem at present and most likely to derail getting vital things done. Not everything has to be reasonable.
It’s a mess, of course. But surely things are far better than 12, 24 or 36 months ago. Is this not what we wanted? The 2 party system appears to be broken and there is a huge rightward shift which does not need much to maintain it because it is rooted in what we have formerly referred to as factory settings, the restoration of which, for now, looks settled as the progressive taboos of the past 40 + years lose power through over use.
Ed, you quote without comment a Substack describing President Trump's Cabinet as having "blabbering incoherence." It links to a clip of RFK, Jr. being interviewed as supporting this claim.
Kennedy suffers from a physical speech condition known as spasmodic dysphonia. Your quoted author is thus leveling ridicule at a disability, a rather ugly thing to do. Kennedy is by no means incoherent if any attention is paid to what he is actually saying rather than his difficulties in speech. He is a lawyer with a long record of successful litigation on environmental matters. He is credited with cleaning up the badly polluted Hudson River. He is also the author of a recent impressive book critical of how public health has been managed by Anthony Fauci. The book has over two thousand supporting footnotes, and has received no substantive criticism. While one need not agree with his views, he is certainly not incoherent. And to label the whole Cabinet in this manner is simply name-calling. Are we to infer you approve of this sort of rhetoric?
I used to think that too, thanks to all the negative propaganda against him, much of it coming from the pharmaceutical industry. But then I read his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, and realized I had been mistaken.
So much great stuff here Ed! But i have to say that my life would have been much better if I was just blissfully unaware of so much of this stuff, the most infuriatingculprit here being the gratuitous Gustav III casting! On the other hand, every mildly negative Sweden- related news piece just instinctively warns the cockles if my heart fir 5 minutes or so and that negates some of the grating feelings
"Feminisation equals wokeness. Everything you think of as wokeness is simply an epiphenomenon of feminisation. Think about everything that wokeness means: valuing empathy over rationality, safety over risk, conformity and cohesion over competition and hierarchy. All of these things are privileging the feminine over the masculine."
It seems to me that hierarchy and competition are opposites and hierarchy and conformity are synonyms. Hierarchy implies submission to a static order where people know their place, don't challenge or contest their superiors and obey the norms enforced by them. That sounds like conformity to me!
Anthropologist Mary Douglas distinguished between "hierarchical", "individualistic", and "egalitarian" cultures in the 1980s.
Note that the word "Fairness" in the Cologne "Fairness Agreement" is an English word -- one more evidence that wokeism spreads outwards from the US through the Anglosphere and beyond...
One other note: How long is "our lifetime"? Mine is 58 years right now. I would put the assassinations of Anwar Sadat and of Yitzhak Rabin (both in my lifetime) as far, far more momentous than Charlie Kirk's murder. Both those men had real power-- and the trajectory of Middle Eastern history was utterly changed (largely for the worse) by their murders.
Re: As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism
A quibble but capitalism dates back to Renaissance Italy, facilitated by the introduction of Arabic numerals and double entry bookkeeping.
On reading this must be why I am all but immune to tin-hoil hat thinking: I get the vast majority of my information by the written word. I avoid podcasts and Youtube maunderings like the plague. When one writes there's at least some pressure to organize one's thought. Spoken things (including, alas, too, many sermons) ramble and beat around the bush
Re: All of these things are privileging the feminine over the masculine.
Another quibble: Women have hierarchies too. They are ordered a bit differently from men's, but they exist-- women are not naturally egalitarian either. Anyone who has been around high school girls knows this.
I read that if you control for (substitute in the western world average for the actual number) homicides, motor vehicle deaths, and drug overdoses, that the US would have by far the highest life expectancy in the world.
Time spent online is expanding at the expense of time spent on print, even though print was largely responsible for human flourishing, e.g. the Enlightenment.
So this is Wrong Side of History #69.
Meanwhile "Brahmins" is nowhere to be seen.
Just sayin', as I've learned online somewhere. (I definitely didn't get it from a book).
The only unexploded bombs I can think of that matter (and in very extreme ways) are all the nukes sleeping in their silos. Should they wake up someday, well, I'll just quote the old Monty Python show: "And now for something totally different".
"Canon Club event is tomorrow, with Dr Bijan Omrani talking about Euripides."
Please, please, please can someone there tell the joke of the man walking into an ancient Greek tailors with a pair of torn trousers.
The Ancient Greek Tailor says "Euripides?"
The Man says, "Yeah. Eumenides?"
haha
"A lot of younger people talk about where they’d emigrate to escape economic stagnation, political instability, housing costs and general enshittifcation."
Like Churchill and democracy, I feel quite passionately that this country is the worst place to live, except for everywhere else.
"The loudest calls for political violence, displayed on social media, come from those who would be more obviously the victims than the perpetrators of the outcome they demand"
This is accurate and perspicacious reading of a growing mood on both sides of the political divide. Be warned.
For my sins, I have seen street violence and was in the company of violent men for many years of my young manhood and the phenomenon is almost always accompanied by psychotic (though often charming) individuals laundering their dangerous anomie beneath a noble 'cause'.
People think civil wars are fought by men like Hampden or Washington or Garibaldi. But it is thugs, para-criminals and sadists who quickly come to the fore.
". . . there is notably a late tsarist tendency among younger American leftists to revel in political violence. "
There is much competition, but this may be the most troubling thing you've ever written.
I suspect that so many physically fragile people call for political violence online because they're accustomed to nursing revenge fantasies in which they horribly murder the bullies whom they failed to stand up to in real life.
I don't actually know this for certain, but I suspect that people who are able to physically dominate others do not spend much time sitting in their rooms obsessing about how much they'd love to dismember this or that enemy.
My only post so far https://substack.com/@reginaldaster/p-156782163 was about an assassination that backfired in Colombia.
A country where three different murders (4 victims) backfiring in the 80s and 90s really changed the history (not entirely positively)
6,809 murders in one year! Wow
You've named your substack after my ignorance ;)
I don't even remember commenting on that
The drop is a rare piece of good news that very few people really know about it. Latin American murder rates are sometimes awful. I went to Medellin once and in some communities IIRC had murder rates in the 80s and 90s similar to British soldier casualty rates in WWI. (Andalusia was the communidad I think)
Ed, About Musk, his acquisition of Twitter was obv. a pivotal moment in the Right’s change of fortunes (as was his support of Trump) and his messaging about eg grooming gangs and immigration has been far more effective in breaking taboos than anything else. As with Trump he is not to my middle class sensibilities but I realise that middle class sensibilities are precisely the problem at present and most likely to derail getting vital things done. Not everything has to be reasonable.
there are no good choices. This is what we have.
It’s a mess, of course. But surely things are far better than 12, 24 or 36 months ago. Is this not what we wanted? The 2 party system appears to be broken and there is a huge rightward shift which does not need much to maintain it because it is rooted in what we have formerly referred to as factory settings, the restoration of which, for now, looks settled as the progressive taboos of the past 40 + years lose power through over use.
I think this is possibly the first time in my lifetime that the right is actually setting the agenda.
Ed, you quote without comment a Substack describing President Trump's Cabinet as having "blabbering incoherence." It links to a clip of RFK, Jr. being interviewed as supporting this claim.
Kennedy suffers from a physical speech condition known as spasmodic dysphonia. Your quoted author is thus leveling ridicule at a disability, a rather ugly thing to do. Kennedy is by no means incoherent if any attention is paid to what he is actually saying rather than his difficulties in speech. He is a lawyer with a long record of successful litigation on environmental matters. He is credited with cleaning up the badly polluted Hudson River. He is also the author of a recent impressive book critical of how public health has been managed by Anthony Fauci. The book has over two thousand supporting footnotes, and has received no substantive criticism. While one need not agree with his views, he is certainly not incoherent. And to label the whole Cabinet in this manner is simply name-calling. Are we to infer you approve of this sort of rhetoric?
He seems like a bit of a crank to me!
I used to think that too, thanks to all the negative propaganda against him, much of it coming from the pharmaceutical industry. But then I read his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, and realized I had been mistaken.
Does British English have the slang term "quack" for a fallacious medical "authority"? That's my label for RFK Jr.
Yes
So much great stuff here Ed! But i have to say that my life would have been much better if I was just blissfully unaware of so much of this stuff, the most infuriatingculprit here being the gratuitous Gustav III casting! On the other hand, every mildly negative Sweden- related news piece just instinctively warns the cockles if my heart fir 5 minutes or so and that negates some of the grating feelings
"Feminisation equals wokeness. Everything you think of as wokeness is simply an epiphenomenon of feminisation. Think about everything that wokeness means: valuing empathy over rationality, safety over risk, conformity and cohesion over competition and hierarchy. All of these things are privileging the feminine over the masculine."
It seems to me that hierarchy and competition are opposites and hierarchy and conformity are synonyms. Hierarchy implies submission to a static order where people know their place, don't challenge or contest their superiors and obey the norms enforced by them. That sounds like conformity to me!
Anthropologist Mary Douglas distinguished between "hierarchical", "individualistic", and "egalitarian" cultures in the 1980s.
https://www.dustinstoltz.com/blog/2014/06/04/diagram-of-theory-douglas-and-wildavskys-gridgroup-typology-of-worldviews/
Note that the word "Fairness" in the Cologne "Fairness Agreement" is an English word -- one more evidence that wokeism spreads outwards from the US through the Anglosphere and beyond...
One other note: How long is "our lifetime"? Mine is 58 years right now. I would put the assassinations of Anwar Sadat and of Yitzhak Rabin (both in my lifetime) as far, far more momentous than Charlie Kirk's murder. Both those men had real power-- and the trajectory of Middle Eastern history was utterly changed (largely for the worse) by their murders.
Re: As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism
A quibble but capitalism dates back to Renaissance Italy, facilitated by the introduction of Arabic numerals and double entry bookkeeping.
On reading this must be why I am all but immune to tin-hoil hat thinking: I get the vast majority of my information by the written word. I avoid podcasts and Youtube maunderings like the plague. When one writes there's at least some pressure to organize one's thought. Spoken things (including, alas, too, many sermons) ramble and beat around the bush
Re: All of these things are privileging the feminine over the masculine.
Another quibble: Women have hierarchies too. They are ordered a bit differently from men's, but they exist-- women are not naturally egalitarian either. Anyone who has been around high school girls knows this.
I read that if you control for (substitute in the western world average for the actual number) homicides, motor vehicle deaths, and drug overdoses, that the US would have by far the highest life expectancy in the world.
Uh, how is that not cherry picking? "Let's just deep six the bad parts and only tout the good parts".
Time spent online is expanding at the expense of time spent on print, even though print was largely responsible for human flourishing, e.g. the Enlightenment.
So this is Wrong Side of History #69.
Meanwhile "Brahmins" is nowhere to be seen.
Just sayin', as I've learned online somewhere. (I definitely didn't get it from a book).
It's actually written, or at least a draft is written, but I'm not happy with it, so it's sort of hold for now.
I guess you started writing it in 2022 or 2023 and I would imagine anything written then has been substantially overtaken by events.
Not your fault.
I think a lot of the other stories begin as displacement activities around "Darwin's unexploded bomb".
indeed, much of our era's politics involves avoiding the ticking sound
Even in completely unrelated areas like education and trans issues, it feels there is a nervousness in discussing biology that comes from the ticking.
What is "Darwin's unexploded bomb"?
The only unexploded bombs I can think of that matter (and in very extreme ways) are all the nukes sleeping in their silos. Should they wake up someday, well, I'll just quote the old Monty Python show: "And now for something totally different".