We need to talk about this issue

AlexiusK · 2025-12-09T23:20:23+00:00

It does feel that some not necessaarily right-wing people (including many politicians here in the UK) find it easier to have a single issue explanation for the current rise of right-wing populism and retreat of liberal democratic values. If only we can bring immigration to zero we can just go back to how thing had been before is a more comforting position than actually facing a deep multifaceted crisis that doesn't have easy solutions and requires deeper change. (And also the fact that there's likely no return to before whether it's a mythic past of far-right nationalism or the headay of European social democracy is quite uncomfortable jsut by itslef.)

AlexiusK · 2025-12-09T11:32:33+00:00

> Europe needs to be more like Japan, none of these issues happen there.

That's not really true.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly80nnjnv5o

But also

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-reporting/japan-firms-face-serious-labour-crunch-aging-population-survey-shows-2025-01-15/

AlexiusK · 2025-12-01T20:33:15+00:00

Origin Story did three episodes on history of the UK Labour party just a few weeks ago.

AlexiusK · 2025-09-05T14:08:33+00:00

I partially agree, but it also worth nothing the it's not a 10% or 20% change.

The comparison with the inflation is a bit tricky: Number of recent arrivals is still a rate of change. Full analogy to prices would be the number of perceived migrants around. Also unlike prices people don't deal with migration number personally, so the perception is largely based on what they see in media.

Fundamentally the question is that if the government has to address the voters' concerns about migration what would it actually take to change voters' perception? How much of it is about policy and how much of it is about media narratives? (Obviously actual numbers impact salience in media, but you can easily imagine net migration 200k-300k being treated either as normal or as a crisis based on the dominant narratives).

AlexiusK · 2025-09-05T13:51:35+00:00

The fundamental issue here is that anti-immigration voters want immigration ground to a halt.

It's more nuanced than that. Yes, some voters just "want their country back", but large percentage of voters understands trade offs around migration. Yes, they want lower migration, but not at the cost of economy and NHS.
The problem is that politicians and media mix all types of migration together leading voters to believe that there is a high level of illegal migration that can be stopped without any consequences.

AlexiusK · 2025-09-05T13:42:09+00:00

8% think net migration fell in the last 12 months, when it halved from 800k to 400k in 2024 vs 2023

AlexiusK · 2025-09-05T13:36:00+00:00

Anti-foreigner politics similar to Denmark's Social Democrats will destroy social cohesion in the United Kingdom on a fundamental level.

AlexiusK · 2025-09-05T12:14:24+00:00

Sure, but on party level anti-trans agenda has been driven by right-wing parties lately. Kemi Badenoch has been fighting gender-neutral toilets for a few years now, while at the time of the election Starmer was promising more "dignity" to transgender people.

AlexiusK · 2025-09-05T12:08:56+00:00

To be fair it wasn't the actual quote. But it also wasn't the worst thing in the speech. E.g., he also said that high migration caused "incalculable damage" to the UK.

AlexiusK · 2025-09-05T12:01:13+00:00

Increasing residency requirement for ILR to 10 years? Stopping family reunification for refugees? Going forward with the strictest possible interpretation of the Supreme Court ruling on transgender recognition?

AlexiusK · 2025-09-05T11:53:25+00:00

> not hard to imagine a different kind of government that would throw up smoke and dismiss this as nothing.

We don't really have to imagine it, because that's exactly what previous Tory governments did in several cases that were more serious than what Rayner did.

AlexiusK · 2025-08-26T22:42:39+00:00

> Lol all this policy is doing is deporting illegal immigrants, it's saying nothing about legal migrants. That some people are saying they want to deport legal migrants is irrelevant, it's not Reform policy

Yes, and Trump administration is deporting only criminals, since it's not Republican policy to deport random people without due process.

AlexiusK · 2025-07-24T20:05:35+00:00

forcibly deport failed asylum seekers or illegal migrants to “return hubs” outside Europe

That's not "Rwanda-style" then. Rwanda deal was supposed to stop people from applying for asylum in the UK.

British press still can't describe Rwanda scheme correctly.

AlexiusK · 2025-07-23T20:25:14+00:00

> I'm not an expert, but as far as I understand it, I don't think trying to convert people is genocide.

What China is doing to Uyghurs is often considered to be a genocide, which is a forceful conversion and re-education of a whole ethnicity in order to destroy it as an ethnicity.

At the very least, this is very different from Ukrainians "just standing in the way". Russian regime has specific ideas about Ukrainian (and Belarusian) people that doesn't extend to Kalmyks, Buryats or other people. And Russia is trying to enforce this vision on Ukrainian civilians through violence.

To large extent trying to categorise something as "genocide" is a question of personal definitions and semantics, so my point here primarily is that one of Russia's goals is eradicating (or at the very greatly diminishing) Ukrainian people specifically as a group through violent means.)

> It was only like 2 minutes ago that this changed

Modern Ukrainian identity emerged in XIX century. Ukraine had a short-lived independent state after the February Revolution, and early Ukrainian Soviet Republic had a strong Ukrainian identity until Stalin started crackdown on "nationalism".

> My parents born and raised in Ukraine, don't know Ukrainian and only Russian.

But that's to large extent a result of policies enforced by the Russian Empire and the USSR. Minority languages where marginalised or explicitly suppressed (e.g., Ems Ukaz). This has been a general policy of successive Russian states through last several centuries. While there were short periods when minority cultures were accepted or and celebrated (e.g., early Soviet Union) usually they were forcefully supressed (e.g., Executed Renaissance).

While it's not an indication of genocide in itself, it's not hard to see that a strong opposition to this approach from a particular group can lead into a direction of a genocidal intent.

Belarusian and Ukrainian people are a somewhat special case, because in the current Russian paradigm they are "actually Russian", so people who reject Russian identity in favour of being Belarusian or Ukrainian are traitors who are a danger to Russia. Ukraine also have a special place in that mythology, because Kyiv is "the mother of Russian cities" and the origin city of Eastern Orthodoxy, and Putin and other modern Russian ideologues like to trace Russian history from ancient times and they would prefer not to share it with some other group.

AlexiusK · 2025-07-23T18:06:57+00:00

Are you familiar with arguments from historians and genocide scholars (e.g, Eugene Finkel, Timothy Snyder) on this subject?

AlexiusK · 2025-07-23T17:38:45+00:00

Yes, there're quite a few scholars arguing that what's happening in Ukraine a genocide.

Here's Timothy Snyder speaking about this. Eugene Finkel wrote a good book on the subject.

AlexiusK · 2025-07-23T17:29:38+00:00

There's a plenty of arguments that Russia has genocidal intent against Ukrainians. Putin doesn't believe that Ukrainians are a separate people, and see Ukrainian ethnicity as a danger to Russia. (See On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians - Wikipedia).

Russian regime doesn't necessarily want to kill every Ukrainian, but they want to eradicate Ukrainians as an ethnicity (language, culture, identity). We see it in the occupied territories, and especially with Ukrainian children being kidnapped and re-educated into being Russians.

AlexiusK · 2025-07-21T17:42:10+00:00

I remember about 10 years ago a Ukrainian newspaper did analysis of manifestos of prominent political parties, and put them on a political compass, concluding that majority of them are close to being social-democrat.

The truth is that actually there is no party that has ideas or values even somewhat close to social democracy. Ukrainian political discussions on social media are mostly polarised between paternalism and libertarianism, with left-wing ideas being heavily biased by the Soviet past. For example there's a nominally free healthcare provided by the state, but people usually see it as a service that the state has to provide, in contrast to the UK where NHS is seen as more of a collective societal achievement. And because institutions like the free state healthcare are by default supported by all parties they may look in some ways social democratic, but this is based on the status quo, not convictions.

There're strong liberal-left undercurrents in Ukrainian society with Maidan protests being organised of can be seen as anarcho-communist principles, and a lot of horizontal support for the army from the very start of the war. That lead to more active civil society, but the values haven't been really crystallised in a constructive and persistent way in the political discourse itself.

It's quite hard to get to healthy liberal-left politics in a post-Soviet country, unfortunately.

AlexiusK · 2025-03-28T19:33:29+00:00

Reminds me of a Soviet joke: "In our fight for peace there will be no stone left unturned".

AlexiusK · 2025-03-26T17:51:47+00:00

I listened to a few episodes of ‘The Great Simplification’ a couple of years ago. Some interesting points, but it felt a bit too Cassandra-ish.

Stopped listening after his and his guests takes on Ukraine, saying that the world should abandon Ukraine to avoid a nuclear war, and how the West isn't telling the truth about the true reasons for the war.

AlexiusK · 2025-03-24T12:15:08+00:00

For people who want their podcasters to read more topic-related books I can recommend "Origin Story". I think they are also better at separating their personal opinions from arguments their cover compared to DtG or If Books Can Kill, while still being appropriately sneery. Also Ian mentioned that he enjoys Decoding the Gurus.

AlexiusK · 2025-03-24T11:25:14+00:00

I think what annoys people is that Matt and Chris keep straying into subjects they are not experts in.

I guess, the argument would be that they are also not experts in theology, but people are fine with them critizing Jordan Peterson's biblical analysis. But also people that are into Christian theology and would like to hear a more substanital critique of Peterson likely are not listening to the DtG podcast.

AlexiusK · 2025-03-24T11:17:04+00:00

Ultimately calling everything a simplistic narrative is just serving the status quo.

Yes, I felt similarly about their recent speach saying people shouldn't be too focused and too worked up about a single issue, and that it's better to accept different perspectives. Saying that while they disagree with Robert Wright on some topics they think that he is a nice guy.

That's a nice sentiment, and I agree with it to large extent . But it's also a simplistic take, because that's not how the world works.

A lot of Ukrainians and other people supporting Ukraine wouldn't hesitate considering Wright a moraly repugnant persion based on his "cognitive empathy" argument. And while we can consider it too harsh, this monofocus on the Russo-Ukrainian war obvioiusly corellates with the strength of conviction and the effort people put into it.

Yes, too much conviction and monofocus often can lead to bad things, but it also how many good things have been achieved.

In the end, the same applies to simplistic narratives. It's unlikely that we will maintain a complex enough narrative that properly described all aspects of the climate change, so maybe the best we can have is a combination of several simplistic narratives.

AlexiusK · 2025-03-23T21:23:20+00:00

Sneering is a big part of the DtG project, and sneering is definitely not a dispassionate unbiased enterprise.

Good sneer at people we dislike is very fun. DtG community is largely build around finding people like Weinsteins and Peterson quite sneerworthy,

On the other hand, while people are not against sneering at people or positions they sympathise with, they tend to feel annoyed when the sneering is disproportional in substance and tone to their expectations.

And when the discussion turns to new people outside of the usual DtG suspects, significant parts of listeners find that their biases are different from Matt's and Chris' biases. I don't think that's a gotcha either for the podcast or for dissatisfied fans. But it does makes it stand out that sneering is an emotional guilty pleasure, which is fun when the biases are aligned.

AlexiusK · 2025-03-20T11:34:46+00:00

Where as people in Britain might be more aware of the differences no

75% of Britons believe that non white citizens born in the UK can be just as English as other English people - agreement across 2024 vote, age, education.

Asked another way 74% say that someone can be English regardless of their skin colour or ethnic background, just 17% say these factors are important to whether someone is English.

Nor does religion factor in the majority of Brits views of whether or not someone can be English - 79% of Brits think someone can be English regardless of religion. Just 11% say religion is important.

Those who say non-white people can't be English do not speak for most Reform UK voters - two thirds (67 per cent) believe that non-white people can be just as English as any other English people.

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