For most people, there are only three forms of immortality: that which comes from God, that which comes from having children, and that which stems from the knowledge that although we personally will perish, much of what we value will remain. This third form of immortality is best described as cultural continuity, it’s the comfort of knowing future generations will live similar lives, share a common history and cultural tradition, enjoy the same plethora of opportunities, even though the types of opportunities may change due to the unrelenting march of technology. Although music, culture, fashion and food may change, it will still flow from the same river of tradition, a mighty river marked by proud history and landmark events, and characterised by massive improvements in living standards achieved through the striving and struggles of previous generations, in a story which spans centuries. In many ways, this cultural immortality is like an intergenerational relay race, the baton of legacy inherited from our antecedents and passed to our inheritors.
For the lucky few, there is fourth form of immortality- that which exists as a possibility in the minds and aspirations of creatives. At best it’s a precarious and elusive hope, the desire to create a cultural legacy, a magnus opus, which lasts beyond death, though perhaps we view legacy too narrowly. After all, didn’t the man who invented those metal foldable nail clippers which once populated the more expensive Christmas Crackers (back when Christmas Crackers were entirely more generous) engage in an act of creation? Similarly, aren’t the entrepreneurs, the men and women who summon new businesses from air, through voluntary association and the assumption of risk, also alchemists of creation? There is huge overlap, after all. Many creatives find working for others stifling, just as many of the more obstinate entrepreneurs admit to having little choice in deciding to start their own business, tacitly admitting that they simply couldn’t stand to work for others any longer.
But even broadening the category of creative to include these other domains of creatively, the task confronting the creative class is daunting. Many people possess a limited degree of unrealised creativity, but it’s perhaps only 5% of the population who possess the right combination of talent, psychological traits, inclination and desire to seriously contemplate the prospect of pursuing a future as a creative. For us, the prospects are grim. For every 1000 aspiring actors, 20 to 50 can make a living, and a further 100 to 150 can land roles, but need to supplement their acting with side jobs. The stats show that writing is perhaps a little less bleak, with the best chances for financial self-sufficiency through creativity enjoyed by visual artists. The tinkerers of this world, the inventors, enjoy prospects just as bleak as actors. The entrepreneurs have it best, because although only 10% of startups succeed, it’s a culture of tenacity, where war stories of getting knocked down, getting back up, and eventually succeeding after numerous failures are more common than not. The culture of commerce inherently inculcates persistence.
But this essay isn’t about successfully creativity, it’s about the incredibly catastrophic damage done by frustrated creatives when they give up on their creative endeavours and consign themselves to an ordinary, clocking-in and paying the bills. For most people, the 95%, work is one of the four pillars of happiness- Faith (or life’s meaning), Family, Friends and Work are the key ingredients to living a happy fulfilling life. Not so the frustrated creative. For the rare and lucky few, the Gordon Comstock’s of this world, the selling out of creative ambition can at least be harnessed to a career or vocation which makes use of their creative abilities, but most jobs just aren’t like that. A frustrated artist in a supermarket may enjoy the task of arranging a stand more than stacking the shelves, but they still have to stack the shelves. Let’s face it, when Henry David Thoreau wrote “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation” he perhaps painted a little broadly with his brush- he wasn’t describing everyone, he was describing us, as a class.
And when frustrated creatives are consigned to a life or career which isn’t suited to their temperament and desires, the results aren’t good. A frustrated creative is like a psychic amputee, or victim of an industrial accident, limb atrophied and withered- they can still feel their limb, the perennial numb ache and occasional crippling pain, but whichever of the main professions- like Gordon Comstock- they’ve chosen as suboptimal compensation for giving up on the creative’s dream- academia, media or politics their worldview will all too often be afflicted jaded cynicism which naturally arises as a result of realising they will never be the next Ernest Hemmingway. It’s not quite as bleak as all that. In many ways STEM is better place, with better opportunities, for the tinkerer, than their garage. Those who teach Business & Economics can at least feel pride in creating the next generation of business leaders and entrepreneurs who will sustain and grow all of the prosperity of a society. But one can judge the social scientists by whether their work has been making the world a better place, and the humanities by whether they’ve done a good job of introducing the Western Canon, the great art, music, philosophy and literature of centuries, to a new generations of young minds
Many will baulk at this description, but they have to recognise that it’s a process, a software which has been running for multiple generations, as the denizens of Aesop’s Manger try to usher successive generations of kids who might have made it as creatives into careers as academics or journalists, or worse still, politicians or activists. The manifestation of this sickness can be judged by one simply criteria- do we seek to teach our children to be grateful and understand the world, or do we seek to teach them the world is a horrible dangerous place which drastically needs profound change?
Frustrated creativity is prone to not only creating psychic agony for the individual, but at the collective level it’s like a cancer. For when the frustrated creative doesn’t even attempt to take chisel to rock to sculpt a work of sublime beauty, the tools of the creative are always available for other purposes. The creative mind will always apply itself creatively, and it’s a far easier to blame the world for our misery, than it is to turn our gaze inwards and find deficits in ourselves. And with generation the malaise has only deepened. Literature can not longer be viewed through the meaning the author attempts to convey or the skill with which they attempt to convey their observation, but only through the cynical groups power interests they represent. Symphonies are the provenance of dead white men, and to be dismissed, not admired or emulated. Old art is old hat, even though the juxtaposition of sublime beauty with modern art is often embarrassing.
The sculptor’s chisel, once an implement for fashioning great works, has become a weapon in the hand of those intent upon cultural vandalism, those who honestly believe that "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" and the observation that "The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past but only from the future. It must abandon all superstition about the past." must be applied literally, at the cultural layer. They never state these aims explicitly, but it’s notable that it’s on ongoing discussion in education whether kids in the UK, the home of Shakespeare, should really be required to read him. At the very least, the critics argue, Shakespeare should be decolonised, not simply appreciated for his mastery and command of the English language or creating stories replete with meaning as relevant today, as when they were written, but judged solely as an agent of his class and arbitrary groups, in others words a straight white man.
But the worst thing about this cultural degeneration caused by frustrated creatives, is not the destruction wrought on the cultural sphere, but rather the fact that its all become a matter of instrumental rationality in service to political transformation. The cultural and social erosion envisaged by those who would see national cultures and histories washed away under a tsunami of mass migration. So many of them now imagine the West was an evil thing, they see little harm in the cultural destruction of a corrupt inheritance Frustrated by their inability to put pen to paper and summon forth great literature or poetry, they taught the next generation to feel bitter about the world, so much so that when the next generations meagre efforts trickle into our cultural consciousness, they are invariably warped and stunted mockeries of what came before. They led them to these poor young and impressionable kids to seek out jobs in fields which allowed them to at least make use of their creative abilities, but with the already embittered cynical worldview of their professors already baked in.
And what better natural canvas for a frustrated creative than the world itself? If the world’s at fault for that unrealised potential, why not change it? They taught children to imagine an apocalypse which never came, which to date has caused nothing more than world ever so slightly more prone to extreme weather, whilst fewer people die each year from heat or cold, deserts reverse, the world greens, crops become naturally more abundant, the science discovers that the Black Swan long feared by the more intelligent climate worriers, the melting of permafrost, is "not a climate tipping element" likely to cause runaway climate change. They taught children to dwell upon poverty in the world, to fixate on wars in terrible distant lands, even as both, through modernity and the prosperity it brings, miraculously become much rarer.
Meanwhile, populism is on the rise, both in America and Europe, and they have to gall imagine that it’s because of racism. It’s not about race, it’s about culture. If the establishment class, possessed of it’s tyrannical power, wants to invite multiple millions of people into Europe and America each year, at least have the decency to insist they learn our language, our customs, adhere to cultural values and obey our laws. They imagine those hostile to mass migration are against people. Nothing could be further from the truth. Other than the very rare outright genuine racist, I haven’t meet anyone who holds this view. It’s not about who were against, it’s about what we’re for. They may sneer at great works of art and literature (secretly envying them). They may smirk at the quant love of country and flag. They may paint the West as a home of intolerable and intolerant oppressors, when it’s the only Empire in human history which emancipated its slaves, and developed a system which raised 90% of humanity out of semi-permanent malnutrition and brutally short lives. But it’s our culture and we love it. The fear of losing it is like contemplating the death of a relative, or the destruction of a cherished family home we still live in.
More than anything else they are destroying our temporal immortality, the comfort in the knowledge that although we will die, our children and those lucky to be born in the West will be fortunate to born as part of a continuing river of culture, history, tradition and science which ultimately stretches back 2,000 years, to the day when humanity first dared to hope. They are attempt to paint a supranational world order of globalism and one world governance on a tapestry replete with innumerable cultures and soaring achievements. It’s tantamount to giving a child crayons and letting them draw on the Mona Lisa.
The theme of the frustrated creative is interesting, although I liked the toe clippers in the Christmas crackers to be a wonderful example, writ small, of creative outlet. It’s hubris to believe every writer will achieve Shakespeare - yet the striving brings joy. When it transmutes to envy, though, it’s bitter indeed.
I think at the core you have to like yourself and accept your unique gifts, then use your agency to work your will on what you can.
Thanks! I think you've hit the nail on the head with agency. A while back I found a 2018 survey of small businesses in the UK. Over 75% of employees rated themselves either very or extremely happy with their workplace environment. It really makes a difference when your boss is a human being, willing to negotiate and explain, and not bound by the top-down rules and HR bureaucracies common to larger companies or organisations.
Working for a larger employer became more common than working for a small employer for the first time in American history in the 2000s. The jobs I enjoyed most were the ones where I was able to employ my creativity. I loathed the ones where I couldn't.
Indeed! Since you also spoke to education and several comments were aimed at same,
I’ll share that I spent 12 years as a k-8 math teacher and it was absolutely thrilling to use the real world to make math concepts sing. A few examples:
- red vines and cut up oranges to teach fractions
- stop watch playground races to teach decimals
- estimates and actual backpack weighing with attendant graphing
- sidewalk grids to learn Cartesian coordinates
Practical work with math ideas - not mindless repetition. The work of Marilyn Burns was core. And best of all I had an administrator that simply asked that my kids exceeded state standards. If you raise the bar they ask how high.
Some of my best, most innovative work was done in those classrooms and those kids left loving math.
Great stuff! Practical examples of how to use Maths helps prove its relevance. Have you heard of cognitive load theory? In essence, it's based upon the idea that kids need to have certain types of useable knowledge stored in long-term memory, because working memory is puny. It's particularly salient for Maths in terms of times tables. Put simply, it's not enough for a kid to be able to work out 9 x 7 = 63- they have to have the knowledge stored in long-term memory for easy recall.
The reason is the potential for cognitive overload- the observation that as they are introduced to more complicated Maths problems, unless they've got it stored in long-term memory, the number of components in a more complex equation will overload them. Memory can remove components. It's particular important for kids who are dyslexic. My brother is dyslexic, although he's also very bright. Generally, dyslexics don't have as many channels in their working memory as other kids- 5 or 6 instead of the usual 7. Interestingly, people who have been trained to memorise numbers in 3 or 4 bit block segments, are better at memorising numbers than those who've been taught to memorise in 2 bit blocks (one used to see with the way phone numbers were written or printed in the UK, as opposed to America).
One of things which alarmed me a while back, was looking at Cognitive Load Theory educational sources from America a while back. It was several sources. I noticed that they almost never focused on the importance of storing knowledge in long-term memory and instead focused myopically on avoiding the cognitive overload. It's entirely the wrong approach, focusing on symptoms rather than root causes. I understand Cognitive Load Theory has been undergoing a bit of a revival and joined the cycle of educational faddism.
I found an interesting titbit recently. They've tried examining the four types of learning theory (kinetic learning, etc) at colleges. They found that although many college kids did find certain types of learning more fun and enjoyable, and that this varied amongst students, teaching using different methods didn't really help improve results. What has been proven to work is using two channels of learning in class- spoken word (auditory) explanation paired with written materials. This challenged my assumptions- I had previously thought (from presenting information to adults) that handing out written materials before giving a talk distracted from the talk- although there are obviously other methods, like partly covered projectors back in the old days, or Power Point.
I think there is a certain degree of intelligence-induced blindness in education. Your obviously bright, teach Maths. I'm the same (although I don't teach Maths). I used to find reciting multiplication tables unutterably boring. Used to perform root series in my head, and perform long division just to relieve the boredom. I just didn't consider the the experience of the other kids in the class. Like most at that age, it was a mixed ability class. Without times tables, a far higher percentage of those kids were going to end up functionally innumerate than might otherwise have been the case. There is a class of building block knowledge which is absolutely vital, but often underemphasised, especially by those who favour a false dichotomy between skills and knowledge (a skill is just knowledge which is easier to teach through demonstration and imitation, than it is through explanation). Obviously Maths reasoning is in a different category- probably the accumulation of learned logical processes applied creatively. With English and grammar, sentence structure is probably the main thing which needs to be drilled in. Without it, kids spend too much mental energy thinking about how to write something, rather than thinking about what to write.
My brother spent a stint as a Maths teacher. After his training, he worked in an underprivileged school in the region. I talked to him about the times table thing and he completely agreed. He was teaching older kids preparing for their GCSE's (taken at 16). By then it was entirely too late. No kidding- he had to teach them to perform multiplications by adding multiple times. Education is very much a relay race, isn't it? What a tragedy.
He left the profession because at the time there were almost no online resources for Maths lesson plans online. He basically had to build the lesson plans to teach the curriculum from scratch. There were plenty of lesson plans online for teaching English, History, Geography, Science- but almost nothing for Maths at the time. I think it was probably because there was a real shortage of qualified Maths teachers in the UK at the time. Anyone with halfway decent Maths was being drafted in from other subjects. I think the lack of online resources was due to teachers lacking the confidence to draft online, because it wasn't their subject area- they probably worried the theorists would tell them they were doing it all wrong.
> It's particularly salient for Maths in terms of times tables.
I'm a math tutor and the first thing I do with any student is make sure they know their times tables. We will do nothing else until that is in the bag. And it can be done in a single session.
What a fantastic, thought-provoking essay! Really hit the nail on the head.
I feel a deep sense of sadness each time I visit the U.K. An unfathomable sense of loss. Hungary, where I now live, still has a strong sense of social cohesion and pride in their culture, history, literature. You feel it, and it gives you a sense of strength and belonging.
'It's not race, it's culture' I said the very same thing to an American friend recently. After venting about Trump, she asked me to tell her what's going on in Europe and I mentioned the recent terrorist attacks in Austria and Germany, and the connection to a certain ideology. She thought I'd gone over to the dark side, and hinted that I was racist. And, anyway, she said, these attacks were more about mental health issues.
Just to clarify, I am not agianst immigration. But numbers matter, as does culture. Not insisting on integration has been the U.K's undoing.
Vetting is a huge issue as well. Just asking someone whether they have a criminal record in their country of origin doesn't really cut it, does it? During the pandemic, civil service numbers rose from 400k to 600k, and there don't seem to be plans to cut them anytime soon. We should reallocate 10,000 to learning how to administer lie detector tests. We could vet all legal, illegal and asylum seeking migration.
1) Do you believe your life would be in danger if you returned to your home country?
2) Have you ever killed someone?
3) Have you ever forced a woman to have sex with you (some cultures only recently created a word or phrase to describe 'rape')?
4) Have you ever been a part of an organised criminal enterprise?
5) Do you believe Jews are subhuman or naturally prone towards evil?
The mental illness thing is a common distraction. They really pull out all the stops whenever a new Islamist act of violence occurs. Keir Starmer recently claimed that there was a new form of terrorism. Apparently, they had moved the goalposts in the past by claiming that terrorism could only be terrorism if it had a clear political objective.
I'm the same. I don't think I know a single person who would be opposed to sane levels of migration. Perhaps 50K per year for a few years, whilst we absorb some of the huge numbers we've taken, and expel the extremists and criminals, rising to 100K after that. But legal migration last year was 900K plus. We simply don't have the housing. Plus, what exactly is wrong with the Australian approach? We welcome you, if you move here- but we insist you become Australian first, and whatever else second.
There seems to be a false assumption that learning a new culture necessarily entails erasing the old one. It's complete garbage. Without fail, the most successful migrants to other countries around the world are the ones who are the most bicultural.
That is not the Australian approach. I read and hear variations on this myth time and again from the English. I don’t know where they get the idea that Australia’s immigration system is a model to be emulated.
So how does it differ from my preconceptions? The vetting thing was a separate issue.
I understood, Australia operatives a Skilled Priority Migration List. It was perhaps a bad idea to start including blue collar trades, but other than that I thought it worked quite well. Are you aware of the realities of UK mass migration? The OBR did it's best to massage the figures and sugar coat the news, but 60% of legal migration falls into the no skilled or low skilled category, while only 5% of legal migrants are net contributors. Boris Johnson removed a requirement to advertise jobs first in the UK...
That's pretty typical of most non-selective migration in the West, and some of the skilled priority migration lists which seek to copy Australia are far more lax in what they will allow onto the list. Sweden allows basic cooks!
One Aussie just today claimed that the only real failure in recent Australian migration was the Lebanese community, or is she setting a particularly low bar?
'One Aussie just today claimed that the only real failure in recent Australian migration was the Lebanese community, or is she setting a particularly low bar?'
Who is she? Tell me where to search, that I may flay her.
In fact I wouldn't know where to start...oh ok here's a couple: rampant Sudanese and other African gangs in Malbourne; Indian-owned real estate agents now *everywhere* in suburbs on the eastern seaboard, directing their advertising at Indian clients--naturally, for who else would be interested?--of the same sub-nationality/etnoreligious group/(sub-)caste/clan. Still I suppose it depends on what your criteria are for 'success'--b-b-b-but they're increasing our GDP!
'Are you aware of the realities of UK mass migration?'
Yes; did you know that something like 1.4 million immigrants have arrived in Australia since the virus panic?
'Sweden allows basic cooks!'
Australia is full of Indian and Chinese cooks working in Italian restaurants, pube-pullers from Thailand and the rest. 'Skilled occupations' is a phrase that covers a multitude of sins. Then there's the student visa -> permanent residence -> citizenship racket. I could go on...
'we insist you become Australian first, and whatever else second'
I say to you genuinely (not performatively) that I can't think where you might have got this. Australia has has an *official policy* of 'multiculturalism' for 50 years. 'Australian' in officialese is as meaningless category in Australia as 'British' is in the yookay. There's no requirement that the foreigner give up his original nationality. Again I could go on...
Absolutely completely agree with everything you say here. I don't know anyone who is truly racist (in the original meaning of the word) I used to be much more left/liberal when it came to immigration, but the events of the last 10 years or so challenged my long-held cherished beliefs. There's a massive amount of gaslighting going on, though, when anyone dares question the wisdom of allowing almost 1 million people (many from vastly different cultural backgrounds) into a country which is also fraying at the seams, with a creaking infrastructure, lack of housing, etc.. Not to mention the very real ways overpopulation and overcrowding impacts your daily life. The first thing I notice when I visit England is the constant congestion, crowded streets, queues, etc.. And I come from the West Country, which is less crowded than London, for example. I just don't see how this is sustainable.
I live in Norfolk- my aunt is a former teacher who did a stint as an estate agent. I mentioned about the way many people in many parts of the country felt as though they were loosing their culture, and she exclaimed and explained that many of the prospective buyers she used to meet were people from more metropolitan areas or Essex, who wanted to move because of the crime, or because of feeling like a stranger in their own country. Many of them were young couples with young kids.
Konstantin Kisin made a good point about immigration in a recent debate. It was perhaps plausible to make the claim that the 3% who were concerned about immigration back in the early nineties when migration was below 50K a year were racists, but when 53% of the population expresses concern over more than a decade of what can only be described as mass migration with little to no policy for integration, the claim of racism is rendered completely invalid. Since the debate, the figure has risen to 76%, indicative of a preference cascade where people finally feel they can be more honest about their feelings.
For a long time my argument was purely economic. GDP grows during periods of inward migration, but at the cost of GDP per capita. We know this from America- the boom period was characterised by tight labour markets, causing companies to invest significant amounts of capital in productivity because of fears of failing to find sufficient employees. I looked at the stats. During tight labour market periods, American productivity growth was twice as high as during periods when available labour was plentiful.
Here's a Nobel Prize winning economist schooling Paul Krugman on the subject.
For the past decade, we've basically been recruiting people from abroad for a Deliveroo economy, earning £18K a year. It's an economic strategy guaranteed to shrink healthcare and public services for ordinary citizens on a per person basis. It's also why Britain now looks like a shithole to visitors- we cannot afford basic maintenance. Most economists now grudgingly admit that the whole 'let's bring in people to pay for our pensions' argument was huge mistake.
I had a friend at Uni from the West Country. We reckoned the only thing different about the local accents was the pitch went up at the end of the sentence for one, and down for the other (I can't remember which). Cornwall seems a bit like North Norfolk these days (otherwise known as Chelsea-on-Sea). Lots and lots of second homes sitting vacant, with local young people even more unable to afford to buy a home.
I occasionally watch a YouTube channel called Turdtowns. Four weeks ago they dropped a Poshtowns episode about the eight most expensive towns in Cornwall. The title of the episode begins 'Second home APOCALYPSE...'
My favorite conspiracy theory: Follow the Money: The world is ruled by a cabal of rent collectors. Immigrant's main function is keeping the squeeze on rents. Yes, the globalist plutocracy -- the Davoisee -- screw the working people by:
- exporting all good jobs.
- importing 3d worlders to do the jobs that cant' be exported.
- creating and cultivating a culture of division.
... but in main thing is that the immigrants drive up rents (and the cost of homes too of course), and that's by far the easiest way to screw people's standard of living.
It’s more like finance is the ultimate client of government, the true root of evil in this world. One could confiscate all billionaire wealth in America, most of which is invested in productive companies, and it would only fund the federal government for six months.
The true role of many within the Davos crowd (but by no means all), is rather like a client trying to purchase a royal monopoly from the king. Government possesses almost all power in this world- understanding the myth requires recognising that elected politicians only hold the power in theory. In practice, under conventional circumstances, institutional government holds all the power.
It’s only in recent times that the destabilising influence of information freed on the internet has shifted the power back from the tower (government) to the square (people). Without social media and the internet, Trump and Milei simply wouldn’t have been possible.
There's more than one way to look at it. Yours is slightly different than mine, but I think we're both right. A deep deconstruction of all this is needed. Nuts, even the Olde Commies call it Late Stage Capitalism.
> institutional government holds all the power.
But some say that governments are now helpless pawns of the Davoisie. Somehow either answer works.
Wow, Norfolk. I've never actually been but have heard it's lovely. I'm actually from Somerset, and despite having lived abroad for more than 20 years I have not lost my accent. If anything, it has got stronger! Yes, the 76% figure you mentioned is interesting, as (apparently) that does include some or many on the left. I still consider myself more left but no longer recongise the Labour party of today. I like Paul Embery's ideas and the whole Blue Labour movement, which seems more like the old style Labour. What's more, regarding immigration, I think the Overton window is shifting again and it's no longer the verboten subject it once was. This is a huge shift. Finally, we can hopefully begin to discuss it rationally, without fear. I love Konstantin Kisin, and his comments (which you quoted) make sense. You know a true racist when you meet one, and conflating natural concern with unsustainable levels of immigration and racism has deliberately been used to stifle discussion. Finally, very interesting what you mentioned about the economy, unfortunately a subject I don't know too much about. However, I have read many articles basically saying the economic advantages have been disproven.
I follow Paul Emberly. I have a lot of time for the old class-based Labour party. Economic progressivism on the Left is where all the remaining virtue resides. Andrew Doyle recently made the point that the BBC would probably be a lot more ‘diverse’ if they decided to reduce the percentage of senior management who attended private school to 30% within five years.
“You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they're on the same boards of directors, they're in the same country clubs, they have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting, they know what's good for them and they're getting it." - George Carlin.
It’s a bit different for the British Upper Middle classes, but not much. Only the signifiers are different. To a man (and woman), they’ve all adopted the same luxury beliefs to signal their virtue and class. Of course, it’s also a form of force-fielding. If they actively signal their status as ‘White Allies’ they are less likely to be for the chop.
A genuine movement for equality would identify talented kids from the bottom 60% and devote resources to helping them achieve their full potential, regardless of race. Vocational training is another method for obtaining longer-term social mobility, because the higher likelihood of a couple staying together when the man earns good money, provides an intergeneration from of uplift, probably worth about 5 to 10 points of IQ when one considers both the ability of fathers to shield kids from negative factors during childhood development (particularly adverse peer groups), and the benign developmental parenting style fathers bring to the table.
My family on my mother’s side benefitted from the British Grammar School. My nan never let go of her grievance that she wasn’t able to attend grammar school, because the family couldn’t afford a second set of school uniform (plus, she was a girl). I didn’t blame her. She did alright though. Her husband did the business start-up and then she ran the first sixties-style coffee shop in Norwich. The upstairs catered to working men. She used to fiddle the wages so the chefs didn’t have to pay as much tax!
Andrew Doyle is spot on there (I follow him, too) This is the problem, in that Labour and many of the insitutions are full of virtue signalling types with their 'luxury beliefs' (as Rob Henderson describes them) who are living in a bubble. They are not suffering from the consequences of their policies, whether it's Defund the police in the U.S or mass immigration in the U.K. That's what makes them so hypocritical. Totally agree with you regarding equality and education. I love what the Michaela school have achieved. And vocational training needs to be brought back. Vocational schools are still popular in Hungary and (according to a friend) are being encouraged by the government, with financial incentives on graduation. Your nan sounds like a real character!
> Finally, very interesting what you mentioned about the economy, unfortunately a subject I don't know too much about
We dolphins can help you there: Dolphinomics: If you are hungry you have to go and catch a fish. You have the fish you catch. It's really that simple. Well ok, it's harder for monkeys because they also like to steal things or 'borrow' them with the hope of never paying them back (government debt). And monkeys like to play tricks on each other, one of which is pretending that 'money' is something in itself and that one can have stuff without making it. What's interesting is that it can take decades for the smoke to clear and countries to realize that they are now poor. Meanwhile the magicians have left town with the money.
> I don't know anyone who is truly racist (in the original meaning of the word)
I think I now am. It's been a long internal struggle -- I'm still appalled by the change in myself -- but, buffeted by reality -- I'm forced to face the ugly fact that there is something more than coincidence involved with the fact that civilization and 'whiteness' seem to be linked. Almost everything we value comes from white people and the fewer of them there are in a country, the worse everything gets with an astonishingly high predictive value.
But it's not as easy as just admitting that there's an elephant in the room. The bedrock values of white/Christian civilization forbid the above to be even contemplated so it's a bit of a dilemma. Somehow the Overton Window needs to be reshaped so as to admit that the best people to entrust with looking after white civilization are ... white people ... without somehow opening the door to Hitler. Comparable to re-engineering physics after we find out that the Earth is flat after all. Perhaps a starting point is Kipling: White Man's Burden and all theet. You cringe. I cringe too. But it's got to be done. How?
It's not white people, it's Western civilisation. We aren't the first. There have been market periods in brief moments of history in the past. The ancient Chinese were probably the first. They had periods of Statism and periods where the market prevailed. The market periods were always more prosperous and even much less likely to generate famines.
Citizens operating through association and trade always vastly outperform technocratic rule- but the intellectuals don't like being consigned to the point of irrelevance, so government is always waiting in the wings, ready to ruin everything.
One might think there were good periods of government in the past. This would be an illusion. For example, once one removes wartime spending, the FDR government was far smaller and leaner than today. Ditto for Canada and the UK, and virtually everywhere else.
There's no binary here. Western civ. isn't the world's one and only and we all know that during 'our' Dark Age, Islam held the torch of civilization. The Chinese can beat anyone at any game anytime they chose. Yet more and more I find it unavoidable: Western civ. and white people are more than coincidentally linked. Chinese civilization has always been different and maybe that's because the Chinese are different. Africa always finished last, maybe that's a comment on Africans.
> One might think there were good periods of government in the past. This would be an illusion.
That seems overdrawn? Never a good government? Or at least, surely, some governments have been less bad than others? But yes, all else equal, we prefer small, efficient government to bloat and waste and corruption.
I think Christianity made government somewhat better. The fear of punishment in the next life probably kept many people more honest.
Tim Pool popped into my feed just today, Apparently, Google searches for Fraud, Suicide and Criminal Defence Lawyer had all experienced a bump in the D.C. area. No prizes for guessing that fraud topped the list my a significant margin.
Africa did have a relatively advanced civilisation in East Africa. It was called the Kingdom of Kush and was an equivalent of sister kingdom to Egypt and escaped much of the Egyptian decline. Islam destroyed it. Africa had a number of problems. The temperature was too high for start- leading to more frequent and more serious disease outbreaks. The farmland was also not ideal, with a mixture of soils ranging from the poor to the barely adequate.
The farmland was a key issue. It meant that tribal groups supplemented their farming with secondary hunting. This in turn made them more territorial and less prone to consolidating into proto-nation states.
Africa in the modern context was more a matter of socialism. The decolonial movement might have been about getting rid of colonialism, but it was just as much about disposing of Western capitalism in Africa. It was billed as a fresh start and chance for them to get back to their pre-colonial culture, but in reality the Western academics encouraged them to swap Western capitalism for Western socialism, with predictably disastrous results. The Soviets were selling the same shoddy bill of goods.
India tried a mixture of big government Keynesian economics and socialism after gaining Independence, and poverty remained consistent. Indian living standards barely rose at all. Until they tried free market capitalism in 1991, and they've been growing in terms of wealth and living standards every since. Of course, they still have desperate poverty, but it affects a far smaller percentage of the population than was previously the case.
Even rotten old racist me says the biggest issue is not the number who get in, but the difficulty in removing the misfits. Civilization is the main issue. Tho as you know I'm not joyful at the prospect of the end of the white race, should it be that everyone in Scotland is black *but* they are Scotsmen in every other possible way ... so be it. And the test should not be having killed someone, the test should be 'ideal candidate for citizenship':
Dear Mr. Abu-Jihad:
HM government has determined that you are not adapting to life in a modern secular liberal democracy as well as we had hoped. Please leave the UK within 90 days for the Islamic paradise of your choice. If you are still here at that time we will pick one for you.
Yeah ... but I want to call them on it. I ain't runnin' no mo. As long as we let them control what we can and can't say, they are in charge. Let them swoon. Let them misinterpret. I used to argue about with with Kurt back in the day. My 'University of Whiteness' ... of course it's a joke! He says not to tell it. I say tell it. I say put the burr under their saddle. Sane people get the joke, they read the satire. Let the woke swoon. ... but I'm not sure I'm right. But sarcasm works. Satire works. Standup comedy works.
Ah! ... Right, sorry, I'm forgetting that what gets said here rather obviously impacts yourself. Apologies. The things I say would get me arrested over there and guilt by association is now grounds for cancelling at the very least. Yes, we all pick the hill we are ready to die on and I can't pick yours for you.
So, who voted for open border mass migration and flooding West with peoples that hate Western Christian virtue-based culture?
It's culture murder and frankly we do not know who is destroying our lives and futures. Does that not bother you? What other poison and destruction with those secrete White Christain culture destruction is next? They Hate us and want us dead, we and all we love suffering until we die.
What to do? Well, this serious enough that mobs could find and hang powerful wealthy families, hang every adult. And just keep killing and killing, Justice is Death to those above the law. Perhaps after killing 800 family adults then check if the evil Satanic poisons stop.
No? Keep killing and killing because no one gets wealthy and powerful without siding with Satan's minions and so power and wealth is the sign to fill graves, and park trees and streetlights with swinging Satanic betrayers.
After the mass immigrants see long miles of streets where the Satan's helpers hang from every streetlight and all near trees, when we say - "I want you gone by month's end or you will die" - they will leave, and those once Satanic powerful wealthy, they will finely have served us - as a warning.
The links were interesting. I particularly liked the one on Cooperation and Doubt. I've always fallen into a particularly rare group on Trump- ambivalent. There needed to be drastic change, though. It had become clear that the pace of disaster relief was being slowed as a means of securing more funding. I can't prove it, of course, but the level of incompetence required for volunteers using makeshift tools and transport to so drastically outperform fully equipped and trained relief workers doing nothing other than posting guards to secure warehousing containing vital supplies people desperately needed raises other concerns, if it was simply structural incompetence, rather than institutional corruption.
We saw the same thing with Grenfell Towers here in the UK. Ordinary people and small business opened their doors, mustered supplies (even though they themselves were poor), whilst every level of government did nothing- adopting a 'not my job' attitude. Being ready to help in emergencies is one of government's most basic duties and functions- a substantial portion of its raison d'être. With the notable exception of a couple of agencies which performed reasonably well at East Palestine and were singled out for praise, it's been one disastrous response to disaster, after another. Little wonder then it's left many wondering whether government hasn't become a form of white collar welfare, a job creation scheme for indoctrinated college kids.
My Trump ambivalence is near to exploding my head. Even admitting that I support some of his actions (ending DEI and gender madness) feels like the Pope admitting that Luther had a few points. But then there's all the other bullshit, like calling Zelensky a dictator -- outrageous -- and renaming the G of M -- embarrassing. Yet ... yet ... his ad lib Q and A sessions with the press -- no script, no teleprompter in sight, he just answers the questions the way an ordinary person answers questions. I LOVE it. Somehow his moronic bullshit is more honest that the carefully scripted politok of a Biden or a Harris. Shut down the Department of Education! Yes! Do it Elon, it is demonstrably useless. $70,000 for a DEI opera in ... Ireland? The Ancien Régime has fallen and the sans-culottes are in the palace. Yes there will be a mess, but the Establishment brought this down on their own heads.
Whether or not Zelensky is a dictator is a side issue- he's not a dictator by the way, but he has employed dictatorial measures in banning opposition parties, exercising a draconian grip over the media and in indefinitely suspending elections.
It's a sideshow. Despite Ukraine's early victories, Russia is winning- resoundingly. The Russian economy, although experiencing some strain through lost manpower is probably structurally stronger than at the start of the war. Meanwhile, the Russian military- once a ramshackle organisation, had transformed into a modern military with teeth. It's something that I feared at the start of the conflict, given Soviet history, and something which military experts I knew at the time confirmed.
The time to deal was about the time that Biden sent Boris Johnson to scupper the legitimate peace talks in which both sides were engaging in Istanbul. At the time Russia had received a bloody nose, appeared weak on the world stage, and it was an optimal time to make a deal, given there was no serious prospect of the Ukrainian situation improving.
Let's look at plausible or semi-plausible future scenarios. What the West would dearly love is for Ukraine to retake the Eastern Oblasts. This simply isn't feasible without NATO committing quite significant numbers of troops to the meat grinder, and Western populations simply aren't going to wear it. The most likely scenario is frozen war- both countries stuck in a deadlocked permanent attritional war. This is what Western planners want. They have the insane belief that this might repeat the collapse seen partially as a result of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. If this is seriously what they believe then they are ill-educated children with no understanding of history. Sure, the need to keep pace with SDI helped and was pure genius on the part of Reagan, and sure, Afghanistan was a factor, albeit a somewhat minor one. But what really did for the Russians was the inner malaise which had beset the Soviets internally.
I visited the Soviet Union before the Berlin Wall fell. It had become a deeply dysfunctional society and beneath the gloss presented for Westerners nothing worked. Soviets were expected to lie to themselves and others, and never to acknowledge all the faults around them. That sort of cultural epistemological fraudulence exacts a heavy toll on a society, and the CIA were at least partially successful in letting Russians see the gleaming consumerism, exciting movies and music of the West, and functional productive societies so unlike their own. The Soviets collapsed because we succeeded at demoralising them. If anything, today we are the ones demoralised and support for Putin is likely to remain strong regardless of which way the war turns or how long it lasts.
Since the Ukrainian counter offensive failed and they through anyway troops and materiel in offensives which were symbolic, but militarily inadvisable, the only real prospect for an end to the war is a negotiated peace involving territorial concessions on the part of the Ukrainians. Anyone who argues otherwise is lying to themselves or lying to others. In many ways, Trump is actually being generous to Zelensky. He knows that Ukraine will need to concede at least of the four Eastern Oblasts and agree not to join NATO, although EU membership is probably still on the table. If he is feeling generous he might leave a little room for Zelensky to improve the deal once he joins the negotiations, but knowing Trump, his vanity couldn't take the idea anyone else might appear to get a better deal than his self-lauded deal-making prowess.
The other option is renewed Russian offensive success. There is moderate possibility that either this year or next year, Russia marshals the troops and materiels to take Odessa. This makes Ukraine a landlocked rump state, and puts the Russians very much in the driving seat for future negotiations. It's less likely this year, but still a possibility.
On anything related to Ukraine, I always go outside the West for news.
Even broader: Russian history. They have this ability to have the shit kicked out of them at the start of any particular war, but then rebound and go on to win. Sorta like Rocky and Drago but reversed.
Sure, I see now. For some reason, comments sometimes address themselves to the author, rather than the originator of a comment thread. It also doesn't help that authors seem to get a slightly different view of their comments than everybody else.
Re: the 'Except he isn't really getting much done' comment, that's why I highlighted the bureaucracy of mandatory spending. In theory, the federal government has deferred mandatory spending to the state level. In practice, mandatory spending bureaucracy is heavily regulated. This even extends to TANF through the Davis-Bacon act and labour standards.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was possible to cut 10% of the non-medical mandatory spending bill without affecting citizen recipients one iota. The claim is that admin only accounts for 5% of total non-medical mandatory spending. That's pure bullshit, as I highlighted in my previous post.
I understand that medical is tempting and it's also the most inefficient, but I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. Too much potential for the Left to deliberately sabotage efforts aimed at efficiency and make it appear that Trump is trying to cut healthcare for hardworking Americans who've paid into the system.
MAGA populism actually aligns somewhat to the Left on healthcare as an issue. It's the wrong side of the 80%/20% stick which the Right has been beating the Left with.
I largely agree. Didn’t vote for the guy and I like getting rid of DEI and the DOE. But his stance on Ukraine is atrocious and there’s the daily embarrassment of watching his sycophants fall over themselves to explain to us how brilliant everything he does is.
Whatcanyado? His whole circus is at one and the same time grotesquely unsuitable and yet he's the only clown in town who might be able to get some stuff done. I just throw up my flippers and watch the show.
For me the end of DEI is almost worth the rest. It seems he's reduced irregular migration. Throw in the end of gender madness and it's definitely something.
Well, that part I agree on. $55 billion is drop in the ocean in federal spending terms- although I did chortle the other day when I found out on X that house prices in DC had fallen by $139K. The real meat is buried in the State infrastructure with bureaucracy administering mandatory spending. It's a little known fact that the States are pretty tightly straitjacketed in admin terms if they want to receive the federal funds. The claim is that for the non-medical mandatory spending admin only accounts for 5% of the mandatory budget. That's pure bullshit. I know how the bureaucratic mind works. Costing for oversight, employee liability, critical and permanent illness cover (the government acting as its own insurer), and, of course, public pensions liabilities. I would be very surprised if the bureaucracy doesn't cost 20% of total non-medical spending.
But for that kind of change, he needs Congress to pass legislation to reform the way mandatory spending bureaucracy is regulated. I wouldn't touch the medical stuff though- it's less a third rail than a nuclear landmine.
The best thing he could do would be to partner with NICE in the UK. It's probably the best cost benefit analysis unit on drugs versus surgery and other therapeutic options in the world. The Dems would never expect it, but it would piss off pharma royally. Everybody uses NICE, even though they have their own units and cooperate reciprocally with their own drug trial research.
On a related note, you're American, aren't you buddy? I would seriously consider looking up wraparound policies on Chat GPT 4.0. It's a type of secondary cover which mitigates the expenditure which aren't covered under normal policies. If more Americans knew about it, there would be far fewer medical bankruptcies.
> The Black Swan long feared by the more intelligent climate worriers, the melting of permafrost, is "not a climate tipping element" likely to cause runaway climate change.
That's what spooks me. We see the methane bubbling up from thawing lakes in the tundra, it looks like the perfect example of a 'runaway greenhouse' situation -- more methane, more warming, more warming more methane.
That's not the right tack to take if you want to win, mate. We are having an impact, but the effect we have is grossly exaggerated. Let's look at this source about sea level rise. The rate of sea level rise has doubled in recent years. We have no idea how much of this is due to periodic natural oscillations (and given the Maunder minimum, we know they vary a great deal). At current levels, that means that sea levels rise globally by 50cm in 120 years, instead of 25cm. Even assuming the rate doubles again (which is a big assumption), that's only another 75cm by 2145.
Here's an interesting piece of political climate history. The maximum target threshold for global warming was initially set at 2.0 C. This was a political consideration because it was perceived that the goal was inherently sympathetic to low lying countries like Bangladesh and the Pacific Island states. Then they realised the goal lacked political immediacy. The threshold was too far off for anyone to care about it, politically. So they arbitrary lowered the target threshold for 'irrevocable harm' to 1.5 C!
And it's all based on a faulty premise. The Netherlands recovered significant tracts of land, with technology significantly inferior than anything we have today. There are parts of the Netherlands which are 7 metres below sea level. The earliest Dutch efforts to reclaim land date back to the 11th century, yet today the presumption is we can't even build coastal defences, with significantly superior technology.
The theme of the frustrated creative is interesting, although I liked the toe clippers in the Christmas crackers to be a wonderful example, writ small, of creative outlet. It’s hubris to believe every writer will achieve Shakespeare - yet the striving brings joy. When it transmutes to envy, though, it’s bitter indeed.
I think at the core you have to like yourself and accept your unique gifts, then use your agency to work your will on what you can.
Thanks! I think you've hit the nail on the head with agency. A while back I found a 2018 survey of small businesses in the UK. Over 75% of employees rated themselves either very or extremely happy with their workplace environment. It really makes a difference when your boss is a human being, willing to negotiate and explain, and not bound by the top-down rules and HR bureaucracies common to larger companies or organisations.
Working for a larger employer became more common than working for a small employer for the first time in American history in the 2000s. The jobs I enjoyed most were the ones where I was able to employ my creativity. I loathed the ones where I couldn't.
Indeed! Since you also spoke to education and several comments were aimed at same,
I’ll share that I spent 12 years as a k-8 math teacher and it was absolutely thrilling to use the real world to make math concepts sing. A few examples:
- red vines and cut up oranges to teach fractions
- stop watch playground races to teach decimals
- estimates and actual backpack weighing with attendant graphing
- sidewalk grids to learn Cartesian coordinates
Practical work with math ideas - not mindless repetition. The work of Marilyn Burns was core. And best of all I had an administrator that simply asked that my kids exceeded state standards. If you raise the bar they ask how high.
Some of my best, most innovative work was done in those classrooms and those kids left loving math.
Great stuff! Practical examples of how to use Maths helps prove its relevance. Have you heard of cognitive load theory? In essence, it's based upon the idea that kids need to have certain types of useable knowledge stored in long-term memory, because working memory is puny. It's particularly salient for Maths in terms of times tables. Put simply, it's not enough for a kid to be able to work out 9 x 7 = 63- they have to have the knowledge stored in long-term memory for easy recall.
The reason is the potential for cognitive overload- the observation that as they are introduced to more complicated Maths problems, unless they've got it stored in long-term memory, the number of components in a more complex equation will overload them. Memory can remove components. It's particular important for kids who are dyslexic. My brother is dyslexic, although he's also very bright. Generally, dyslexics don't have as many channels in their working memory as other kids- 5 or 6 instead of the usual 7. Interestingly, people who have been trained to memorise numbers in 3 or 4 bit block segments, are better at memorising numbers than those who've been taught to memorise in 2 bit blocks (one used to see with the way phone numbers were written or printed in the UK, as opposed to America).
One of things which alarmed me a while back, was looking at Cognitive Load Theory educational sources from America a while back. It was several sources. I noticed that they almost never focused on the importance of storing knowledge in long-term memory and instead focused myopically on avoiding the cognitive overload. It's entirely the wrong approach, focusing on symptoms rather than root causes. I understand Cognitive Load Theory has been undergoing a bit of a revival and joined the cycle of educational faddism.
I found an interesting titbit recently. They've tried examining the four types of learning theory (kinetic learning, etc) at colleges. They found that although many college kids did find certain types of learning more fun and enjoyable, and that this varied amongst students, teaching using different methods didn't really help improve results. What has been proven to work is using two channels of learning in class- spoken word (auditory) explanation paired with written materials. This challenged my assumptions- I had previously thought (from presenting information to adults) that handing out written materials before giving a talk distracted from the talk- although there are obviously other methods, like partly covered projectors back in the old days, or Power Point.
I think there is a certain degree of intelligence-induced blindness in education. Your obviously bright, teach Maths. I'm the same (although I don't teach Maths). I used to find reciting multiplication tables unutterably boring. Used to perform root series in my head, and perform long division just to relieve the boredom. I just didn't consider the the experience of the other kids in the class. Like most at that age, it was a mixed ability class. Without times tables, a far higher percentage of those kids were going to end up functionally innumerate than might otherwise have been the case. There is a class of building block knowledge which is absolutely vital, but often underemphasised, especially by those who favour a false dichotomy between skills and knowledge (a skill is just knowledge which is easier to teach through demonstration and imitation, than it is through explanation). Obviously Maths reasoning is in a different category- probably the accumulation of learned logical processes applied creatively. With English and grammar, sentence structure is probably the main thing which needs to be drilled in. Without it, kids spend too much mental energy thinking about how to write something, rather than thinking about what to write.
My brother spent a stint as a Maths teacher. After his training, he worked in an underprivileged school in the region. I talked to him about the times table thing and he completely agreed. He was teaching older kids preparing for their GCSE's (taken at 16). By then it was entirely too late. No kidding- he had to teach them to perform multiplications by adding multiple times. Education is very much a relay race, isn't it? What a tragedy.
He left the profession because at the time there were almost no online resources for Maths lesson plans online. He basically had to build the lesson plans to teach the curriculum from scratch. There were plenty of lesson plans online for teaching English, History, Geography, Science- but almost nothing for Maths at the time. I think it was probably because there was a real shortage of qualified Maths teachers in the UK at the time. Anyone with halfway decent Maths was being drafted in from other subjects. I think the lack of online resources was due to teachers lacking the confidence to draft online, because it wasn't their subject area- they probably worried the theorists would tell them they were doing it all wrong.
> It's particularly salient for Maths in terms of times tables.
I'm a math tutor and the first thing I do with any student is make sure they know their times tables. We will do nothing else until that is in the bag. And it can be done in a single session.
Cool. I didn’t know that about you. Do you work one-to-one or with groups/classes?
Just one on one. It's a sort of 'calling' -- I'm good at it and I enjoy helping stuck kids.
What a fantastic, thought-provoking essay! Really hit the nail on the head.
I feel a deep sense of sadness each time I visit the U.K. An unfathomable sense of loss. Hungary, where I now live, still has a strong sense of social cohesion and pride in their culture, history, literature. You feel it, and it gives you a sense of strength and belonging.
'It's not race, it's culture' I said the very same thing to an American friend recently. After venting about Trump, she asked me to tell her what's going on in Europe and I mentioned the recent terrorist attacks in Austria and Germany, and the connection to a certain ideology. She thought I'd gone over to the dark side, and hinted that I was racist. And, anyway, she said, these attacks were more about mental health issues.
Just to clarify, I am not agianst immigration. But numbers matter, as does culture. Not insisting on integration has been the U.K's undoing.
Vetting is a huge issue as well. Just asking someone whether they have a criminal record in their country of origin doesn't really cut it, does it? During the pandemic, civil service numbers rose from 400k to 600k, and there don't seem to be plans to cut them anytime soon. We should reallocate 10,000 to learning how to administer lie detector tests. We could vet all legal, illegal and asylum seeking migration.
1) Do you believe your life would be in danger if you returned to your home country?
2) Have you ever killed someone?
3) Have you ever forced a woman to have sex with you (some cultures only recently created a word or phrase to describe 'rape')?
4) Have you ever been a part of an organised criminal enterprise?
5) Do you believe Jews are subhuman or naturally prone towards evil?
The mental illness thing is a common distraction. They really pull out all the stops whenever a new Islamist act of violence occurs. Keir Starmer recently claimed that there was a new form of terrorism. Apparently, they had moved the goalposts in the past by claiming that terrorism could only be terrorism if it had a clear political objective.
I'm the same. I don't think I know a single person who would be opposed to sane levels of migration. Perhaps 50K per year for a few years, whilst we absorb some of the huge numbers we've taken, and expel the extremists and criminals, rising to 100K after that. But legal migration last year was 900K plus. We simply don't have the housing. Plus, what exactly is wrong with the Australian approach? We welcome you, if you move here- but we insist you become Australian first, and whatever else second.
There seems to be a false assumption that learning a new culture necessarily entails erasing the old one. It's complete garbage. Without fail, the most successful migrants to other countries around the world are the ones who are the most bicultural.
That is not the Australian approach. I read and hear variations on this myth time and again from the English. I don’t know where they get the idea that Australia’s immigration system is a model to be emulated.
So how does it differ from my preconceptions? The vetting thing was a separate issue.
I understood, Australia operatives a Skilled Priority Migration List. It was perhaps a bad idea to start including blue collar trades, but other than that I thought it worked quite well. Are you aware of the realities of UK mass migration? The OBR did it's best to massage the figures and sugar coat the news, but 60% of legal migration falls into the no skilled or low skilled category, while only 5% of legal migrants are net contributors. Boris Johnson removed a requirement to advertise jobs first in the UK...
That's pretty typical of most non-selective migration in the West, and some of the skilled priority migration lists which seek to copy Australia are far more lax in what they will allow onto the list. Sweden allows basic cooks!
One Aussie just today claimed that the only real failure in recent Australian migration was the Lebanese community, or is she setting a particularly low bar?
'One Aussie just today claimed that the only real failure in recent Australian migration was the Lebanese community, or is she setting a particularly low bar?'
Who is she? Tell me where to search, that I may flay her.
In fact I wouldn't know where to start...oh ok here's a couple: rampant Sudanese and other African gangs in Malbourne; Indian-owned real estate agents now *everywhere* in suburbs on the eastern seaboard, directing their advertising at Indian clients--naturally, for who else would be interested?--of the same sub-nationality/etnoreligious group/(sub-)caste/clan. Still I suppose it depends on what your criteria are for 'success'--b-b-b-but they're increasing our GDP!
'Are you aware of the realities of UK mass migration?'
Yes; did you know that something like 1.4 million immigrants have arrived in Australia since the virus panic?
'Sweden allows basic cooks!'
Australia is full of Indian and Chinese cooks working in Italian restaurants, pube-pullers from Thailand and the rest. 'Skilled occupations' is a phrase that covers a multitude of sins. Then there's the student visa -> permanent residence -> citizenship racket. I could go on...
'we insist you become Australian first, and whatever else second'
I say to you genuinely (not performatively) that I can't think where you might have got this. Australia has has an *official policy* of 'multiculturalism' for 50 years. 'Australian' in officialese is as meaningless category in Australia as 'British' is in the yookay. There's no requirement that the foreigner give up his original nationality. Again I could go on...
Absolutely completely agree with everything you say here. I don't know anyone who is truly racist (in the original meaning of the word) I used to be much more left/liberal when it came to immigration, but the events of the last 10 years or so challenged my long-held cherished beliefs. There's a massive amount of gaslighting going on, though, when anyone dares question the wisdom of allowing almost 1 million people (many from vastly different cultural backgrounds) into a country which is also fraying at the seams, with a creaking infrastructure, lack of housing, etc.. Not to mention the very real ways overpopulation and overcrowding impacts your daily life. The first thing I notice when I visit England is the constant congestion, crowded streets, queues, etc.. And I come from the West Country, which is less crowded than London, for example. I just don't see how this is sustainable.
I live in Norfolk- my aunt is a former teacher who did a stint as an estate agent. I mentioned about the way many people in many parts of the country felt as though they were loosing their culture, and she exclaimed and explained that many of the prospective buyers she used to meet were people from more metropolitan areas or Essex, who wanted to move because of the crime, or because of feeling like a stranger in their own country. Many of them were young couples with young kids.
Konstantin Kisin made a good point about immigration in a recent debate. It was perhaps plausible to make the claim that the 3% who were concerned about immigration back in the early nineties when migration was below 50K a year were racists, but when 53% of the population expresses concern over more than a decade of what can only be described as mass migration with little to no policy for integration, the claim of racism is rendered completely invalid. Since the debate, the figure has risen to 76%, indicative of a preference cascade where people finally feel they can be more honest about their feelings.
For a long time my argument was purely economic. GDP grows during periods of inward migration, but at the cost of GDP per capita. We know this from America- the boom period was characterised by tight labour markets, causing companies to invest significant amounts of capital in productivity because of fears of failing to find sufficient employees. I looked at the stats. During tight labour market periods, American productivity growth was twice as high as during periods when available labour was plentiful.
Here's a Nobel Prize winning economist schooling Paul Krugman on the subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRBsDcHoWZU
For the past decade, we've basically been recruiting people from abroad for a Deliveroo economy, earning £18K a year. It's an economic strategy guaranteed to shrink healthcare and public services for ordinary citizens on a per person basis. It's also why Britain now looks like a shithole to visitors- we cannot afford basic maintenance. Most economists now grudgingly admit that the whole 'let's bring in people to pay for our pensions' argument was huge mistake.
I had a friend at Uni from the West Country. We reckoned the only thing different about the local accents was the pitch went up at the end of the sentence for one, and down for the other (I can't remember which). Cornwall seems a bit like North Norfolk these days (otherwise known as Chelsea-on-Sea). Lots and lots of second homes sitting vacant, with local young people even more unable to afford to buy a home.
I occasionally watch a YouTube channel called Turdtowns. Four weeks ago they dropped a Poshtowns episode about the eight most expensive towns in Cornwall. The title of the episode begins 'Second home APOCALYPSE...'
My favorite conspiracy theory: Follow the Money: The world is ruled by a cabal of rent collectors. Immigrant's main function is keeping the squeeze on rents. Yes, the globalist plutocracy -- the Davoisee -- screw the working people by:
- exporting all good jobs.
- importing 3d worlders to do the jobs that cant' be exported.
- creating and cultivating a culture of division.
... but in main thing is that the immigrants drive up rents (and the cost of homes too of course), and that's by far the easiest way to screw people's standard of living.
It’s more like finance is the ultimate client of government, the true root of evil in this world. One could confiscate all billionaire wealth in America, most of which is invested in productive companies, and it would only fund the federal government for six months.
The true role of many within the Davos crowd (but by no means all), is rather like a client trying to purchase a royal monopoly from the king. Government possesses almost all power in this world- understanding the myth requires recognising that elected politicians only hold the power in theory. In practice, under conventional circumstances, institutional government holds all the power.
It’s only in recent times that the destabilising influence of information freed on the internet has shifted the power back from the tower (government) to the square (people). Without social media and the internet, Trump and Milei simply wouldn’t have been possible.
There's more than one way to look at it. Yours is slightly different than mine, but I think we're both right. A deep deconstruction of all this is needed. Nuts, even the Olde Commies call it Late Stage Capitalism.
> institutional government holds all the power.
But some say that governments are now helpless pawns of the Davoisie. Somehow either answer works.
Wow, Norfolk. I've never actually been but have heard it's lovely. I'm actually from Somerset, and despite having lived abroad for more than 20 years I have not lost my accent. If anything, it has got stronger! Yes, the 76% figure you mentioned is interesting, as (apparently) that does include some or many on the left. I still consider myself more left but no longer recongise the Labour party of today. I like Paul Embery's ideas and the whole Blue Labour movement, which seems more like the old style Labour. What's more, regarding immigration, I think the Overton window is shifting again and it's no longer the verboten subject it once was. This is a huge shift. Finally, we can hopefully begin to discuss it rationally, without fear. I love Konstantin Kisin, and his comments (which you quoted) make sense. You know a true racist when you meet one, and conflating natural concern with unsustainable levels of immigration and racism has deliberately been used to stifle discussion. Finally, very interesting what you mentioned about the economy, unfortunately a subject I don't know too much about. However, I have read many articles basically saying the economic advantages have been disproven.
I follow Paul Emberly. I have a lot of time for the old class-based Labour party. Economic progressivism on the Left is where all the remaining virtue resides. Andrew Doyle recently made the point that the BBC would probably be a lot more ‘diverse’ if they decided to reduce the percentage of senior management who attended private school to 30% within five years.
“You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they're on the same boards of directors, they're in the same country clubs, they have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting, they know what's good for them and they're getting it." - George Carlin.
It’s a bit different for the British Upper Middle classes, but not much. Only the signifiers are different. To a man (and woman), they’ve all adopted the same luxury beliefs to signal their virtue and class. Of course, it’s also a form of force-fielding. If they actively signal their status as ‘White Allies’ they are less likely to be for the chop.
A genuine movement for equality would identify talented kids from the bottom 60% and devote resources to helping them achieve their full potential, regardless of race. Vocational training is another method for obtaining longer-term social mobility, because the higher likelihood of a couple staying together when the man earns good money, provides an intergeneration from of uplift, probably worth about 5 to 10 points of IQ when one considers both the ability of fathers to shield kids from negative factors during childhood development (particularly adverse peer groups), and the benign developmental parenting style fathers bring to the table.
My family on my mother’s side benefitted from the British Grammar School. My nan never let go of her grievance that she wasn’t able to attend grammar school, because the family couldn’t afford a second set of school uniform (plus, she was a girl). I didn’t blame her. She did alright though. Her husband did the business start-up and then she ran the first sixties-style coffee shop in Norwich. The upstairs catered to working men. She used to fiddle the wages so the chefs didn’t have to pay as much tax!
Andrew Doyle is spot on there (I follow him, too) This is the problem, in that Labour and many of the insitutions are full of virtue signalling types with their 'luxury beliefs' (as Rob Henderson describes them) who are living in a bubble. They are not suffering from the consequences of their policies, whether it's Defund the police in the U.S or mass immigration in the U.K. That's what makes them so hypocritical. Totally agree with you regarding equality and education. I love what the Michaela school have achieved. And vocational training needs to be brought back. Vocational schools are still popular in Hungary and (according to a friend) are being encouraged by the government, with financial incentives on graduation. Your nan sounds like a real character!
> Finally, very interesting what you mentioned about the economy, unfortunately a subject I don't know too much about
We dolphins can help you there: Dolphinomics: If you are hungry you have to go and catch a fish. You have the fish you catch. It's really that simple. Well ok, it's harder for monkeys because they also like to steal things or 'borrow' them with the hope of never paying them back (government debt). And monkeys like to play tricks on each other, one of which is pretending that 'money' is something in itself and that one can have stuff without making it. What's interesting is that it can take decades for the smoke to clear and countries to realize that they are now poor. Meanwhile the magicians have left town with the money.
When the bankers run, it's usually because the government has destroyed the currency. Other than that, they're usually like barnacles.
> I don't know anyone who is truly racist (in the original meaning of the word)
I think I now am. It's been a long internal struggle -- I'm still appalled by the change in myself -- but, buffeted by reality -- I'm forced to face the ugly fact that there is something more than coincidence involved with the fact that civilization and 'whiteness' seem to be linked. Almost everything we value comes from white people and the fewer of them there are in a country, the worse everything gets with an astonishingly high predictive value.
But it's not as easy as just admitting that there's an elephant in the room. The bedrock values of white/Christian civilization forbid the above to be even contemplated so it's a bit of a dilemma. Somehow the Overton Window needs to be reshaped so as to admit that the best people to entrust with looking after white civilization are ... white people ... without somehow opening the door to Hitler. Comparable to re-engineering physics after we find out that the Earth is flat after all. Perhaps a starting point is Kipling: White Man's Burden and all theet. You cringe. I cringe too. But it's got to be done. How?
It's not white people, it's Western civilisation. We aren't the first. There have been market periods in brief moments of history in the past. The ancient Chinese were probably the first. They had periods of Statism and periods where the market prevailed. The market periods were always more prosperous and even much less likely to generate famines.
Citizens operating through association and trade always vastly outperform technocratic rule- but the intellectuals don't like being consigned to the point of irrelevance, so government is always waiting in the wings, ready to ruin everything.
One might think there were good periods of government in the past. This would be an illusion. For example, once one removes wartime spending, the FDR government was far smaller and leaner than today. Ditto for Canada and the UK, and virtually everywhere else.
There's no binary here. Western civ. isn't the world's one and only and we all know that during 'our' Dark Age, Islam held the torch of civilization. The Chinese can beat anyone at any game anytime they chose. Yet more and more I find it unavoidable: Western civ. and white people are more than coincidentally linked. Chinese civilization has always been different and maybe that's because the Chinese are different. Africa always finished last, maybe that's a comment on Africans.
> One might think there were good periods of government in the past. This would be an illusion.
That seems overdrawn? Never a good government? Or at least, surely, some governments have been less bad than others? But yes, all else equal, we prefer small, efficient government to bloat and waste and corruption.
I think Christianity made government somewhat better. The fear of punishment in the next life probably kept many people more honest.
Tim Pool popped into my feed just today, Apparently, Google searches for Fraud, Suicide and Criminal Defence Lawyer had all experienced a bump in the D.C. area. No prizes for guessing that fraud topped the list my a significant margin.
Africa did have a relatively advanced civilisation in East Africa. It was called the Kingdom of Kush and was an equivalent of sister kingdom to Egypt and escaped much of the Egyptian decline. Islam destroyed it. Africa had a number of problems. The temperature was too high for start- leading to more frequent and more serious disease outbreaks. The farmland was also not ideal, with a mixture of soils ranging from the poor to the barely adequate.
The farmland was a key issue. It meant that tribal groups supplemented their farming with secondary hunting. This in turn made them more territorial and less prone to consolidating into proto-nation states.
Africa in the modern context was more a matter of socialism. The decolonial movement might have been about getting rid of colonialism, but it was just as much about disposing of Western capitalism in Africa. It was billed as a fresh start and chance for them to get back to their pre-colonial culture, but in reality the Western academics encouraged them to swap Western capitalism for Western socialism, with predictably disastrous results. The Soviets were selling the same shoddy bill of goods.
India tried a mixture of big government Keynesian economics and socialism after gaining Independence, and poverty remained consistent. Indian living standards barely rose at all. Until they tried free market capitalism in 1991, and they've been growing in terms of wealth and living standards every since. Of course, they still have desperate poverty, but it affects a far smaller percentage of the population than was previously the case.
> Vetting is a huge issue as well.
Even rotten old racist me says the biggest issue is not the number who get in, but the difficulty in removing the misfits. Civilization is the main issue. Tho as you know I'm not joyful at the prospect of the end of the white race, should it be that everyone in Scotland is black *but* they are Scotsmen in every other possible way ... so be it. And the test should not be having killed someone, the test should be 'ideal candidate for citizenship':
Dear Mr. Abu-Jihad:
HM government has determined that you are not adapting to life in a modern secular liberal democracy as well as we had hoped. Please leave the UK within 90 days for the Islamic paradise of your choice. If you are still here at that time we will pick one for you.
Thank you for your interest in the UK:
xxx
Immigration Bureaucrat.
Ray, how many times do I have to tell you- don't joke about that shit! Satire and irony are deliberately misinterpreted by the Left.
Yeah ... but I want to call them on it. I ain't runnin' no mo. As long as we let them control what we can and can't say, they are in charge. Let them swoon. Let them misinterpret. I used to argue about with with Kurt back in the day. My 'University of Whiteness' ... of course it's a joke! He says not to tell it. I say tell it. I say put the burr under their saddle. Sane people get the joke, they read the satire. Let the woke swoon. ... but I'm not sure I'm right. But sarcasm works. Satire works. Standup comedy works.
Sure, I agree! But I live in the UK, and one hope to publish a sci fi novel!
Ah! ... Right, sorry, I'm forgetting that what gets said here rather obviously impacts yourself. Apologies. The things I say would get me arrested over there and guilt by association is now grounds for cancelling at the very least. Yes, we all pick the hill we are ready to die on and I can't pick yours for you.
So, who voted for open border mass migration and flooding West with peoples that hate Western Christian virtue-based culture?
It's culture murder and frankly we do not know who is destroying our lives and futures. Does that not bother you? What other poison and destruction with those secrete White Christain culture destruction is next? They Hate us and want us dead, we and all we love suffering until we die.
What to do? Well, this serious enough that mobs could find and hang powerful wealthy families, hang every adult. And just keep killing and killing, Justice is Death to those above the law. Perhaps after killing 800 family adults then check if the evil Satanic poisons stop.
No? Keep killing and killing because no one gets wealthy and powerful without siding with Satan's minions and so power and wealth is the sign to fill graves, and park trees and streetlights with swinging Satanic betrayers.
After the mass immigrants see long miles of streets where the Satan's helpers hang from every streetlight and all near trees, when we say - "I want you gone by month's end or you will die" - they will leave, and those once Satanic powerful wealthy, they will finely have served us - as a warning.
Please find an interesting perspective on the state of humankind in 2025.
http://beezone.com/current/frustrationuniverdisease.html
In their collective frustration quite often vote for someone who claims that only he can "save" them. I am of course referring to the Orange Oaf.
http://beezone.com/latest/death_message.html Death as the Constant message of Life
http://beezone.com/current/stresschemistry.html
http://beezone.com/adida/cooperation-and-doubt.html
http://beezone.com/current/the-big-picture.html
The links were interesting. I particularly liked the one on Cooperation and Doubt. I've always fallen into a particularly rare group on Trump- ambivalent. There needed to be drastic change, though. It had become clear that the pace of disaster relief was being slowed as a means of securing more funding. I can't prove it, of course, but the level of incompetence required for volunteers using makeshift tools and transport to so drastically outperform fully equipped and trained relief workers doing nothing other than posting guards to secure warehousing containing vital supplies people desperately needed raises other concerns, if it was simply structural incompetence, rather than institutional corruption.
We saw the same thing with Grenfell Towers here in the UK. Ordinary people and small business opened their doors, mustered supplies (even though they themselves were poor), whilst every level of government did nothing- adopting a 'not my job' attitude. Being ready to help in emergencies is one of government's most basic duties and functions- a substantial portion of its raison d'être. With the notable exception of a couple of agencies which performed reasonably well at East Palestine and were singled out for praise, it's been one disastrous response to disaster, after another. Little wonder then it's left many wondering whether government hasn't become a form of white collar welfare, a job creation scheme for indoctrinated college kids.
My Trump ambivalence is near to exploding my head. Even admitting that I support some of his actions (ending DEI and gender madness) feels like the Pope admitting that Luther had a few points. But then there's all the other bullshit, like calling Zelensky a dictator -- outrageous -- and renaming the G of M -- embarrassing. Yet ... yet ... his ad lib Q and A sessions with the press -- no script, no teleprompter in sight, he just answers the questions the way an ordinary person answers questions. I LOVE it. Somehow his moronic bullshit is more honest that the carefully scripted politok of a Biden or a Harris. Shut down the Department of Education! Yes! Do it Elon, it is demonstrably useless. $70,000 for a DEI opera in ... Ireland? The Ancien Régime has fallen and the sans-culottes are in the palace. Yes there will be a mess, but the Establishment brought this down on their own heads.
Whether or not Zelensky is a dictator is a side issue- he's not a dictator by the way, but he has employed dictatorial measures in banning opposition parties, exercising a draconian grip over the media and in indefinitely suspending elections.
It's a sideshow. Despite Ukraine's early victories, Russia is winning- resoundingly. The Russian economy, although experiencing some strain through lost manpower is probably structurally stronger than at the start of the war. Meanwhile, the Russian military- once a ramshackle organisation, had transformed into a modern military with teeth. It's something that I feared at the start of the conflict, given Soviet history, and something which military experts I knew at the time confirmed.
The time to deal was about the time that Biden sent Boris Johnson to scupper the legitimate peace talks in which both sides were engaging in Istanbul. At the time Russia had received a bloody nose, appeared weak on the world stage, and it was an optimal time to make a deal, given there was no serious prospect of the Ukrainian situation improving.
Let's look at plausible or semi-plausible future scenarios. What the West would dearly love is for Ukraine to retake the Eastern Oblasts. This simply isn't feasible without NATO committing quite significant numbers of troops to the meat grinder, and Western populations simply aren't going to wear it. The most likely scenario is frozen war- both countries stuck in a deadlocked permanent attritional war. This is what Western planners want. They have the insane belief that this might repeat the collapse seen partially as a result of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. If this is seriously what they believe then they are ill-educated children with no understanding of history. Sure, the need to keep pace with SDI helped and was pure genius on the part of Reagan, and sure, Afghanistan was a factor, albeit a somewhat minor one. But what really did for the Russians was the inner malaise which had beset the Soviets internally.
I visited the Soviet Union before the Berlin Wall fell. It had become a deeply dysfunctional society and beneath the gloss presented for Westerners nothing worked. Soviets were expected to lie to themselves and others, and never to acknowledge all the faults around them. That sort of cultural epistemological fraudulence exacts a heavy toll on a society, and the CIA were at least partially successful in letting Russians see the gleaming consumerism, exciting movies and music of the West, and functional productive societies so unlike their own. The Soviets collapsed because we succeeded at demoralising them. If anything, today we are the ones demoralised and support for Putin is likely to remain strong regardless of which way the war turns or how long it lasts.
Since the Ukrainian counter offensive failed and they through anyway troops and materiel in offensives which were symbolic, but militarily inadvisable, the only real prospect for an end to the war is a negotiated peace involving territorial concessions on the part of the Ukrainians. Anyone who argues otherwise is lying to themselves or lying to others. In many ways, Trump is actually being generous to Zelensky. He knows that Ukraine will need to concede at least of the four Eastern Oblasts and agree not to join NATO, although EU membership is probably still on the table. If he is feeling generous he might leave a little room for Zelensky to improve the deal once he joins the negotiations, but knowing Trump, his vanity couldn't take the idea anyone else might appear to get a better deal than his self-lauded deal-making prowess.
The other option is renewed Russian offensive success. There is moderate possibility that either this year or next year, Russia marshals the troops and materiels to take Odessa. This makes Ukraine a landlocked rump state, and puts the Russians very much in the driving seat for future negotiations. It's less likely this year, but still a possibility.
On anything related to Ukraine, I always go outside the West for news.
> given Soviet history
Even broader: Russian history. They have this ability to have the shit kicked out of them at the start of any particular war, but then rebound and go on to win. Sorta like Rocky and Drago but reversed.
Yes, they did. Recompense is overdue and richly deserved. Not to mention necessary to survival.
Sorry, mate. Not sure which comment you're referencing.
Ben's last sentence above.
Sure, I see now. For some reason, comments sometimes address themselves to the author, rather than the originator of a comment thread. It also doesn't help that authors seem to get a slightly different view of their comments than everybody else.
Re: the 'Except he isn't really getting much done' comment, that's why I highlighted the bureaucracy of mandatory spending. In theory, the federal government has deferred mandatory spending to the state level. In practice, mandatory spending bureaucracy is heavily regulated. This even extends to TANF through the Davis-Bacon act and labour standards.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was possible to cut 10% of the non-medical mandatory spending bill without affecting citizen recipients one iota. The claim is that admin only accounts for 5% of total non-medical mandatory spending. That's pure bullshit, as I highlighted in my previous post.
I understand that medical is tempting and it's also the most inefficient, but I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. Too much potential for the Left to deliberately sabotage efforts aimed at efficiency and make it appear that Trump is trying to cut healthcare for hardworking Americans who've paid into the system.
MAGA populism actually aligns somewhat to the Left on healthcare as an issue. It's the wrong side of the 80%/20% stick which the Right has been beating the Left with.
I largely agree. Didn’t vote for the guy and I like getting rid of DEI and the DOE. But his stance on Ukraine is atrocious and there’s the daily embarrassment of watching his sycophants fall over themselves to explain to us how brilliant everything he does is.
Whatcanyado? His whole circus is at one and the same time grotesquely unsuitable and yet he's the only clown in town who might be able to get some stuff done. I just throw up my flippers and watch the show.
Except he isn’t really getting much done. He makes a lot of noise, as does Musk, but there isn’t much there there when you really drill down.
For me the end of DEI is almost worth the rest. It seems he's reduced irregular migration. Throw in the end of gender madness and it's definitely something.
Well, that part I agree on. $55 billion is drop in the ocean in federal spending terms- although I did chortle the other day when I found out on X that house prices in DC had fallen by $139K. The real meat is buried in the State infrastructure with bureaucracy administering mandatory spending. It's a little known fact that the States are pretty tightly straitjacketed in admin terms if they want to receive the federal funds. The claim is that for the non-medical mandatory spending admin only accounts for 5% of the mandatory budget. That's pure bullshit. I know how the bureaucratic mind works. Costing for oversight, employee liability, critical and permanent illness cover (the government acting as its own insurer), and, of course, public pensions liabilities. I would be very surprised if the bureaucracy doesn't cost 20% of total non-medical spending.
But for that kind of change, he needs Congress to pass legislation to reform the way mandatory spending bureaucracy is regulated. I wouldn't touch the medical stuff though- it's less a third rail than a nuclear landmine.
The best thing he could do would be to partner with NICE in the UK. It's probably the best cost benefit analysis unit on drugs versus surgery and other therapeutic options in the world. The Dems would never expect it, but it would piss off pharma royally. Everybody uses NICE, even though they have their own units and cooperate reciprocally with their own drug trial research.
On a related note, you're American, aren't you buddy? I would seriously consider looking up wraparound policies on Chat GPT 4.0. It's a type of secondary cover which mitigates the expenditure which aren't covered under normal policies. If more Americans knew about it, there would be far fewer medical bankruptcies.
> The Black Swan long feared by the more intelligent climate worriers, the melting of permafrost, is "not a climate tipping element" likely to cause runaway climate change.
That's what spooks me. We see the methane bubbling up from thawing lakes in the tundra, it looks like the perfect example of a 'runaway greenhouse' situation -- more methane, more warming, more warming more methane.
The climate has been changing for millenia. Out impact is negligible. Adapt.
That's not the right tack to take if you want to win, mate. We are having an impact, but the effect we have is grossly exaggerated. Let's look at this source about sea level rise. The rate of sea level rise has doubled in recent years. We have no idea how much of this is due to periodic natural oscillations (and given the Maunder minimum, we know they vary a great deal). At current levels, that means that sea levels rise globally by 50cm in 120 years, instead of 25cm. Even assuming the rate doubles again (which is a big assumption), that's only another 75cm by 2145.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/global-mean-sea-levels-have-increased-by-around-25-centimeters-since-1880
Here's an interesting piece of political climate history. The maximum target threshold for global warming was initially set at 2.0 C. This was a political consideration because it was perceived that the goal was inherently sympathetic to low lying countries like Bangladesh and the Pacific Island states. Then they realised the goal lacked political immediacy. The threshold was too far off for anyone to care about it, politically. So they arbitrary lowered the target threshold for 'irrevocable harm' to 1.5 C!
And it's all based on a faulty premise. The Netherlands recovered significant tracts of land, with technology significantly inferior than anything we have today. There are parts of the Netherlands which are 7 metres below sea level. The earliest Dutch efforts to reclaim land date back to the 11th century, yet today the presumption is we can't even build coastal defences, with significantly superior technology.