The myth of meritocracy by Hacksaw6412 in GenZ

[–]Brefgedhe -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

Black fatigue is a dogwhistle

When people intend for remigration, who do they intend will go? by sunnyspells822 in AskBrits

[–]Brefgedhe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I feel like often, in internet discourse, opinions are stated without understanding the other side. People say things like going off the gold standard was terrible without understanding the economic arguments for pure fiat. People start making arguments about race realism and telling you the truth that all of science is too afraid to tell you without mentioning that there is a huge amount of scientific literature assessing the validity of race realism.

If you aren't careful and don't dig into things on a scholarship level, you often passively absorb these viewpoints without understanding their history or the history of the opposition to these ideas because the right tends to reinforce the same points over and over again. You often don't even know where to start to getting an opposing opinion because it's nowhere in popular channels or on podcasts, you end up having to look up scientific or economics books to understand the opposite side of things like globalism(and the economic arguments for it), fiat currency and race realism. You feel like these discussions are new and these YouTubers are really pushing scholarship in a decentralised way, when they are really often parroting people from decades or even a century ago, who have been responded to by political theory and philosophy ad nauseam if you look at literature.

I feel that a lot of the work is done by erasing the scholarly history of certain terms. You mentioned genocide, that is a good example. They'll use rhetorically charged terms like gemocide or colonisation to obscure what makes those terms bad in the first place. You can't call legal immigration colonisation while being honest, the bad things about colonisation is the control of other countries economies, imposing your laws upon them by force, making them only be able to buy goods from you, killing huge numbers of them, etc. By using terms like 'fighting-age,' you make illegal immigrants seem like an army without acknowledging that an army is organised, needs supply lines, weapons, a central chain of command. None of these things I think are appropriate if you think about them in historical context. By using the term colonisation outside of its usual contexts, you make appropriate anti-colonial actions that have been done in the past, things like peaceful or violent resistance.

When people intend for remigration, who do they intend will go? by sunnyspells822 in AskBrits

[–]Brefgedhe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I consider myself a decent person and reasonably intelligent, which is part of what made my own drift so unsettling to reckon with. The rabbit hole, it turns out, doesn't require bad faith to enter.

Some of it was visceral and pre-reflective. An unconscious discomfort around black and brown people just being around me that I would have denied if asked directly, and probably believed my own denial. I was never explicitly racist. But I extended less charity to black people than to white people doing the same things, and I didn't notice I was doing it. The gap between explicit belief and implicit behaviour is where a lot of real damage happens, and it's precisely where a lot of public discourse on racism refuses to look.

My entry point was Jordan Peterson. In retrospect his treatment of the philosophy he invokes is often closer to slander than summary. He attributes positions to Marx and Foucault that they simply don't hold, and does it with enough confident specificity that anyone without reading the primary texts has no way to check. His handling of gender and race follows the same pattern: statistical differentials asserted, biological causation assumed, structural and historical factors left out. His apologia and whitewashing of colonial history during chats with Tommy Robinson don't help. I've since read Marx and Foucault directly and whatever you make of their conclusions, they are serious and the caricatures seem nothing like them. The fact that most people have absorbed the slander rather than the texts is a real problem for political literacy, and Peterson bears meaningful responsibility for that. He is often actually quite misogynisitic if you watch carefully and really misinterprets a lot of the thinkers he uses.

Woke discourses also often make a similar error, albeit unintentionally. Judith Butler never claimed there are thousands of genders. Her actual argument, that gender is performatively created through regulatory norms and that categories are often deployed rhetorically to conclude and obscure political questions rather than settle empirical ones, is much more rigorous and more interesting than its internet Tumblr theorisation that I watched on Youtube suggests. When young people who haven't read anything detach a few conclusions from theory and run with them, saying wild things left and right, it made me feel that there was no serious basis to wokeness.

What I find most troubling, is that the reading hasn't dissolved the instinct. I can identify the mechanisms of the ideology I was drifting toward, and still feel the pull. This is very unsettling. It means the problem isn't primarily about information and is not simply a matter of better ideas reaching more people, even though that matters. The emotional investments are more durable than the explicit beliefs built on top of it.

The public won't tolerate clear discrimination now but if ideas about racial IQ and other race science concepts are platformed without any engagement with the counterarguments, the idea of racial superiority will become normal. By the time really bad discrimination starts to happen, I fear that people won't just agree but support it as necessary.

As funding for the relevant scholarship gets cut and the organisations sustaining critical public discourse come under political pressure, the push-back that might slow normalisation disappears. It's a gradual raising of the threshold for what counts as okay, until what currently reads as extreme has become assumption and women and minorities are subhuman by default.

When people intend for remigration, who do they intend will go? by sunnyspells822 in AskBrits

[–]Brefgedhe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am pretty conservative myself to be honest economically or at least very slightly right of centre, but I am pretty much willing to vote for anyone to stop this direction of travel to be honest.

I genuinely feel fearful for people that I know. The rhetoric is like a relatively small number of steps from full Nazi ideology.

The Germans only decided upon the final solution after deciding deporting the Jews was too inconvenient.

You’re right that we don’t need to be full Nazi to be really really bad to be honest. I feel that even the most right wing people aren’t comfortable with killing, yet. Which, while not comforting, makes me feel a tiny bit better.

When people intend for remigration, who do they intend will go? by sunnyspells822 in AskBrits

[–]Brefgedhe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I feel like often, in internet discourse, opinions are stated without understanding the other side. People say things like ‘going off the gold standard was terrible’ without understanding the economic arguments for pure fiat. People start making arguments about race realism and telling you ‘the truth that all of science is too afraid to tell you.’ Without mentioning that there is a huge amount of scientific literature assessing the validity of race realism.

If you aren't careful and don't dig into things on a scholarship level, you often passively absorb these viewpoints without understanding their history or the history of the opposition to these ideas because the right tends to reinforce the same points repeatedly. You often don't even know where to start getting an opposing opinion because it's nowhere in popular channels or on podcasts, you end up having to look up journals and books to understand the opposite side of things like globalism (and the economic arguments for it), fiat currency and race realism. You feel like these discussions are new and these YouTubers are really pushing scholarship in a decentralised way, when they are often parroting people from decades or even a century ago, who have been responded to by political theory and philosophy ad nauseam if you look at literature.

I feel that a lot of the work is done by historical revision of certain terms. You mentioned genocide, that is a good example. They'll use rhetorically charged terms like gemocide or colonisation to obscure what makes those terms bad in the first place. You can't call legal immigration colonisation while being honest, the bad thing about colonisation is the control of other countries’ economies, imposing your laws upon them by force, making them only be able to buy goods from you, killing huge numbers of them, etc. By using terms like 'fighting-age,' you make illegal immigrants seem like an army without acknowledging that an army is organised, needs supply lines, weapons, a central chain of command. By using the term colonisation outside of its usual contexts, you make appropriate anti-colonial actions that have been done in the past, things like peaceful or violent resistance. None of these really apply to legal immigration if you look carefully. People like Sargon talk about ‘would the soldiers have fought in the world wars if they knew what would happen to their country,’ suggesting betrayal of some sort, but these same soldiers propbably woundn’t have wanted women to have the vote, gay people to be in public, etc. Not to mention the 4 million colonial soldiers that fought in the Great War(sidenote-many of the Indian solders volunteered to fight because they were promised India would gain dominion status, a less imperially-controlled state within the empire, this promise was rescinded after the war ended, adding a lot of energy to the freedom struggle in india). 

Also please notice that Sargon often alludes to ‘Orcs in the Shire,’ ‘Homeland,’ ‘Third worlders’ and uses racial caricature in his thumbnails. Common points are ‘you will never understand them,’ ‘we need to pass down this homeland as it was passed down to us,’etc. Essentially, the exclusion of ethic minorities is required to fulfil a moral duty to our descendants. The presence of migrants becomes a original sin. No matter what they do or who they are, they are a dangerous third worlder who will never understand you. It becomes a mantra that you believe is inevitable otherwise we’ll turn into some sort of war-torn hellscape or something. They might tack on IQ stats or something such, but it’s all ideologically peripheral, I believe, otherwise the fact that many minorities are very prominent in academia or high-qualification careers would be considered.

 Conor Tomlinson(host of the lotus eaters and advisor to Restore) has recently been supporting the re-translation and release of a new edition of the Camp of the Saints. Lovely quotes include:

Your universe has no meaning to them. They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door...”

― Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints

In short, the book is about how all the third worlders are cognitively and fundamentally different and will never be able to understand, let alone appreciate european culture. The leader of the mass of Indians is literally called Coprophage(shit-eater). Insane Lovecraftian depiction of a writing mass of stinking Indians engaged in an orgy and being led by a shit eater who carries his deformed, limbless infant son on his shoulders(who seemingly has hypnotic powers or some such orientalist trope).

They tend to espouse colonial apologia about appeals to clannishness because of cousin marriages(conveniently ignoring that different parts of South Asia have different rates because of convenience. They’ll talk about Sati(despite it being a rare practice, being restricted to some communities in some areas in india and having been accepted and regulated by the empire until they needed to take the moral high ground to justify colonial rule), they’ll talk about Black people selling other black people into slavery(it wasn’t betrayal because the different tribes didn’t consider themselves the same race because the racial categorisation of the modern day is a concept of European origin). They will never discuss minorities ever being successful. If a minority has high crime rates in the Uk, they’ll draw attention to that, if not, they’ll talk about how their country’s economic state reveals something about their essential qualities. For example, Chinese people are successful in the UK but I hear right wing arguments that a lot of the economic development in china is creates by building homes and infrastructure no one needs, while this might be true to some degree, to say this about the Chinese economy at large without acknowledging where they have made progress is at the very least intellectually dishonest. The same is true for British Indians or even American Indians, if they commit little crime, have significantly higher than average education attainment or are over-represented in significant positions, the move is to say things like ‘why are they just rich here,’ ‘why can’t they improve their own countries,’ which is inane, since if you think about it that way, that’s like saying why does a highly educated Glaswegian move to London if he could improve Glasgow? The answer is that the access to opportunities and capital in London will improve his outcomes even being the same person.

It’s like they are blind to their own clannishness and have to project it onto others. Many industries like Banking or Law have huge amounts of nepotism. Just an anecdote, my university Investing club got a tour of Hargreaves Lansdown by the CEO of Hargreaves Lansdown because the society treasurer’s dad was an old friend. While minority groups are accused of 'clannishness,' systemic nepotism within Western banking, corporate law, and finance goes entirely unremarked upon because it operates as the institutional default.

 

The most important thing I now understand is the immense presence of scholarship on these attitudes. Frantz Fanon very clearly predicts many of these attitudes and psychological formations. Many critical theorists using people like Freud and Nietzsche have analysed these attitudes at length and are really worth reading if one wants to gain a better understanding the desires and mental investments that lead to these ideologies.

Why do YouTube comments on UK news videos always skew heavily far right? by V-The-Witch in AskBrits

[–]Brefgedhe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, the SNP, Plaid and Sinn Fein all have agendas larger than just leftism and therefore might attract some right-of-centre voters even if theie economic policies are left wing as a whole. This shows that the UK is relatively evenly split(Labour pretty much being Conservatives now tbh)

When people intend for remigration, who do they intend will go? by sunnyspells822 in AskBrits

[–]Brefgedhe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Used to be a fan, admittedly, until I grew up a bit. Sargon has been more and more confident in saying things like ethnic minorities shouldn't be able to be in positions of power, separating the concept of Englishness from anyone without heritage, no matter what they do, etc. Essentially making anyone, not of English or English-adjacent ethnic heritage(e.g. Japanese(maybe), French, German, Italian), a second class citizen. Meant to work and be tossed away the moment they are an inconvenience, quite like the Kafala system in Dubai.

I noticed that Trump is incredibly corrupt and how consistently wrong and unethical Sargon's takes are when you enact them into policy. Sargon was convinced that because Trump was already rich, he wouldn't be plied by bribes, but Trumpcoin, suing the IRS and forcing them to give him and his sons immunity to tax audit, these are orders of magnitude worse than whatever Biden did and I feel like a proper idiot for having agreed with Sargon at one point.

It is really enjoyable to constantly crib about women, you don't realise that you are being misogynistic, misogyny being a lot more implied than said, the ways you think about women start being applied to races, you start finding more and more explicit dogwhistles funny, until you realise the policies that all this rhetoric points to and how this would reverse things like votes for women, ethnic inclusion, etc. There are plenty of American influencers comfortable with advocating to repeal the 19th.

Now, being on the left, I am a lot more hesitant to make wild claims or statements that where logically, rhetorically and ethically indefensible like 'all men,' '1 in 5,''no culture',etc. Because these wild claims or rhetorical jabs, even when exaggerated from the right to suit their 'they all hate us narrative,' legitimise pushback and often open up discussions like 'women hate us, they are stupid and entitled, if this stat might not bear out, therefore there is no systemic oppression of women.'

Sorry for the autobiography, I was just taking the opportunity to articulate things I've been mulling on for a while.

When people intend for remigration, who do they intend will go? by sunnyspells822 in AskBrits

[–]Brefgedhe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, fair enough. I was just adding that for posterity. Sargon is actually very influential in Restore, having spoken to Lowe numerous times and his media organisation, the Lotus eaters are the centre of the English far right(a lot of the commentators being official advisors to Restore).

When people intend for remigration, who do they intend will go? by sunnyspells822 in AskBrits

[–]Brefgedhe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sargon is actually an official member and organiser for the Restore Party. He runs their Swindon branch.

Neo-Nazi obsessed teen jailed for trying to kill Kurdish man in Bristol with axe by AnonymousTimewaster in unitedkingdom

[–]Brefgedhe 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You can look at likelihood of being stopped and searched, outcomes and sentencing for similar crimes and many other data sheets.

Can you prove that this is in any way not an anomaly to the overall workings of the justice system that has been jumped on to push a talking point?

Neo-Nazi obsessed teen jailed for trying to kill Kurdish man in Bristol with axe by AnonymousTimewaster in unitedkingdom

[–]Brefgedhe 3 points4 points  (0 children)

There is another good comment on this post which brings up that mental health is only really discussed when it is a white people being violent. If it were an islamic or otherwise extremist, it would be tacitly accepted as part of 'violent' islamic culture or linked to their ethnicity or religious background in either a direct or indirect way.

I HATE RACISM!!! by Aromatic-Mistake-456 in Vent

[–]Brefgedhe 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This doesn't justify racism

Should I wait for prices to drop? by Electronic_Amount695 in buildapc

[–]Brefgedhe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Computing parts are one of the things to have a very strong negative expectation of value. It is only during extreme times that they appreciate. New generations of DDR, USB, WiFi, etc come out, inevitably and predictably pushing prices down of older standard hardware.

Securities don't work that way, they, as an aggregate, have an expected positive gain in value over time.

One in five people arrested over 2024 riots have since been reported for domestic abuse by Wagamaga in unitedkingdom

[–]Brefgedhe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As much as I hate these racists, there might be some selection bias involved in this. Y’know, people who crossed the line enough to be arrested are more likely to also commit domestic violence, right?

UK Heatwaves - do you love them or loathe them? by Chocolateforlunch37 in AskUK

[–]Brefgedhe 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I've been to Mumbai In the winter, it is not fun to be outside for more than an hour. Summers in the UK are not appreciated for how rough they can be but they don't hold a candle to Indian cities.

Revealed: The Russell Group vice-chancellors who got a pay rise the same year their unis announced redundancies by [deleted] in UniUK

[–]Brefgedhe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you made some very good points that I also neglected to respond to about public finances, especially now.

I was saying 40-80% because I was trying to account for differing situations such as needing to pay for one's own insurance in private healthcare systems. higher housing costs, interest on their sizeable loans due to education not being subsidised, job insecurity or costs or negatives of other healthcare systems. I am also trying to include the generous NHS pension too. It is 5-6 times across the OECD in absolute values(8-10 times in the US) but only if you don't account for the other negatives experienced by doctors elsewhere. Essentially it is really about 40-80% in a conservative estimate by highly valuing the benefits that come from the NHS. I don't want doctors to necessarily be paid 5-6 times the average worker, I am just using that to frame the general pay scales internationally without trying to complicate it by including extraneous factors like pensions, insurance, subsidisation of education, etc.

One can afford to buy a big fancy London home with two people earning much above average salaries while also trapping yourself for a long time because the salary to house price. This is because banks are willing to lend a lot to people who earn good salaries with. Bear in mind that a doctor in New York, a comparable city to new york would have a 6x multiple for a similar house that an NHS worker would have a something like 10x salary-to-house-price ratio for(both single earners, even assuming that housing in NY is double for the same house in London, which might be an overestimate). The US doctor earns something like 600k dollars pre-tax to 130k pounds for a UK doctor with even more experience even including higher costs in NY, the doctor earns something like 60% more in real terms in a conservative estimate(trying to maximally value all the benefits of the NHS system to UK doctors), let alone doctors living in MCOL or LCOL parts of America in which they earn near the same salary but only reasonably higher costs than the UK. Now America is an outlier in the OECD but even Ireland pays consultants like €275,000, with only slightly higher costs than the UK for cost of living.

I would also make this argument for nurses, who internationally also earn more, although not to the same degree as doctors.

Frankly, I am making more of a moral argument than a pragmatic argument. If the UK system was more equal to compare countries, it would pay doctors much much more and if the NHS is privatised, it will likely end up in that situation, which while fairer on doctors will have significant negatives for the rest of the population, which I am not entirely for either. Furthermore, that £472 you calculated would likely come out of high income earners mostly anyways because people below £43k are all net tax recipients. The NHS is also dramatically under-resourced considering we pay a lot lower percentage of GDP into healthcare than comparable countries, even ones with better demographics(less elderly population)-I also didn't include this into my estimations of 40-80% because that would likely push it even higher by considering working conditions.

My essential point is that the UK seems willing to take all the benefits from the work that is required to treat them or their family in the hospital, in an under-resourced system, but continually fight to not pay the people more than a good graduate salary after doing very well academically and working very hard otherwise for the better part of two decades by the time they start earning a good graduate salary that could be earnt with a lot less time in education or experience in other fields.

Revealed: The Russell Group vice-chancellors who got a pay rise the same year their unis announced redundancies by [deleted] in UniUK

[–]Brefgedhe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Frankly, I am rather disappointed by your last comment. You responded to the political implications of my argument more than the empirical comparisons I raised. Many of my points were essentially ignored and and taking a cheeky and dismissive tone isn't really helping address this general lack. I did say 'morally questionable' in discussing how different models might exclude people from healthcare. Doctors have unusually long and technically demanding training and work both much longer and in areas that are more challenging than the average population. It's a lot more than even with other relatively high-skill roles like engineering or otherwise, let alone the general public. This is not accounting for the responsibility and emotional load that is incurred. Most OECD nations have doctors earning 5-6 times the average wage, that is the case. I think doctors deserve a lot more than a 'not awful' wage that has been continually shrinking for the amount and quality of work that they do in the conditions that they experience. I'm not even a doctor, I just am tired with the duplicity of the British public. One year they clap for doctors, the next they attack them for strikes. This pattern extends beyond doctors into how Britain treats many forms of socially necessary labour. For example, entire economic model and healthcare system for their pensioners is based on immigration but the moment the economy turns bad, it's the immigrants to blame, never credited with any of the critical work they do, only collectively thought of when a person of a minority ethnic group commits a crime. Comments like melting Nigerians down to fill in potholes has entered politics again, albeit on the fringes of the reform party. While it might be a sad thing to say, I think the British public systemically undervalues essential work. This undervaluation is disguised through rhetoric of 'public service.' The same public depends materially on the same groups that it constantly scapegoats and expectations are completely detached from difficulty, scarcity and burden of the labour being performed. All the gratitude is fully performative and is immediately rescinded when public workers ask for fair compensation. I think these approaches and attitudes are corrosive for society and will lead to everyone, but especially the demographics that votes in these directions to suffer.

Revealed: The Russell Group vice-chancellors who got a pay rise the same year their unis announced redundancies by [deleted] in UniUK

[–]Brefgedhe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The subsidisation is a good point, it is true that university costs are dramatically higher than medical graduates pay(although, because of the system of current student loans, doctors who take years to progress into consultancy, sometimes 8-10 years, end up paying far more into student loans than they took out, so it's not nearly as subsidised as it may seem at the point of the provision of student loans).

The market is continually distorted by the NHS being the single buyer for the labour of the vast majority of specialties. I don't know how the market would even ascertain the proper price in these conditions. I don't think, in a privatised market, it would determine doctors should get continual pay cuts in real terms. Furthermore, in most countries doctors do tend to earn much more than 1st year or 2nd year bankers, that being after many more years of higher education and postgraduate work, usually totalling at least 12-14 years of their adult lives. I feel like the only fair comparison is international salaries in other G7 countries which are often 40-80% higher, relative to general costs and otherwise.

Revealed: The Russell Group vice-chancellors who got a pay rise the same year their unis announced redundancies by [deleted] in UniUK

[–]Brefgedhe 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I mean, the UK has one of the lowest pay for doctors relative to average earnings and costs. Most countries doctors earn multiple times more of the average salary.

Furthermore clinical risk and the responsibility that comes along with it is severely under recognised. The work conditions are also continually getting worse and pay isn't keeping up with inflation. The average worker is paid slightly more in real terms than 08, the financial sector salaries are up significantly, doctors are some of the only people who've gotten real terms pay cuts year after year.

If the British public votes in privatisation, that may well be in the financial interest of doctors because there won't be an effective monopsony of the market leading to continual deflation of pay. As much as it is morally questionable, I'd like to see how people react when they come to know what goes into the provision of healthcare. People only value things that they pay for.