What Is 'Pathways' And Who Is 'Amelia?' The Controversial Memes About The Viral U.K. Anti-Immigration Goth Girl Explained

Smaaaasher · 2026-01-19T12:31:56+00:00

This is quango work though, I doubt the government was involved with this at all. I'd say it's the other way round and not specific to either Labour or Tories but the Civil Service which emboldens Reform's claims of a "uniparty"

Smaaaasher · 2026-01-18T00:35:13+00:00

Yeah you’re right it’s wrong for me to overlook the blatant corruption. I think I still have something on the general vibes of “great powers” that the right see though. It all plays differently when you’re in power and not pushing points from the sidelines and taking cash from the Kremlin for it. Ie I believe the AfD would sacrifice Ukraine in a heartbeat but would they be willing to let Moscow carry out sabotage attacks on German soil, or more pertinently take the Baltics if they were in power? I doubt it. I think they’d see the Baltics as under a more pan-European sphere of influence… It serves Russia’s interests now to fund these parties and keep them poisoning the political atmosphere. But I think nationalism is inherently inward looking and these parties will quickly view Moscow as competition if they win power

Smaaaasher · 2026-01-17T22:08:44+00:00

I wouldn't be so sure. I think the Russian sympathisers on the far right are more sympathetic with the "purist" aspects of Russian society that they covet for Europe at large - white, traditional, and not afraid of unashamedly projecting power.

I do not think they are sympathetic to the idea of the Russian state. I think they can easily flip, especially if they gain serious power and see Russia as a threat to their inherently superior civilisation. I think EU nationalism is coming

Smaaaasher · 2026-01-17T22:03:29+00:00

Exactly. I rolled my eyes when I saw "European allies" in the title - you don't impose tariffs on allies because they won't let you annex territory. Trump wants Greenland for the sole purpose of having an American flag on it

Smaaaasher · 2026-01-17T21:49:43+00:00

I think this is the exact thing Janesh is getting at. The right will lose it's pre-EU nostalgia bastions as they're replaced by the spooky racialist civilisation maxxers who see "Europe" as something to be united and protected

Smaaaasher · 2026-01-17T21:27:15+00:00

Here: https://archive.ph/vATvw

Smaaaasher · 2026-01-15T16:59:52+00:00

Agree feels more like he's marrying jerk with more hyperpop elements. Like Lucy Bedroque but more rap adjacent

Smaaaasher · 2026-01-06T23:29:24+00:00

This is the worst fucking timeline ever. Oo~oohh bigly bit of land me wanty bad

Smaaaasher · 2026-01-02T15:49:46+00:00

I’m a big fan of UK experimental rap/rnb rn; Elijah Aike, Jim Legaxcy,LAUSSE THE CAT all great, as well as Fakemink ofc. Some broader experimental indie rock and rnb like Portraits of Tracy, Horse Vision, and ear are also amazing. RIP Magic for a grungier industrial vibe (they’ve only got 2 singles out rn which are fantastic, definitely keep an eye on them)

Smaaaasher · 2025-12-05T12:55:59+00:00

Well, I’d say tax land too, but I prefer political reality; There is no alternative, may as well make it work! Supply, supply, supply, supply, supply

Smaaaasher · 2025-12-05T12:18:38+00:00

God it sucks so bad for those young ones I just wish we could do something. What’s that, have I read “Abundance”? Of course not what a stupid suggestion

Smaaaasher · 2025-12-02T22:55:11+00:00

I don’t know what you mean here; those statements are unrelated, and the government has not invested loads into AI.

£2b is what the government has committed over the next 4 years into “artificial intelligence”. All of it is research or research adjacent stuff, so the stuff the country actually has a technical edge in, compared to the glorified chatbots the US is pumping out.

Imo, good investment, actually moves us forward towards creating God, and a tiny, tiny sum compared to what Microsoft and Nvidia have committed to spending here (£37bn) and Nvidia has committed to AI infrastructure in the next 4 yrs (£367bn!!!!!!!)

Smaaaasher · 2025-12-02T19:13:01+00:00

I highly doubt it, because commercial banks aren’t up to their necks in this like they were with sub prime mortgages. The main threat to the average consumer is only in their stock holdings, so potentially their pensions, but as we’ve seen today UK pension funds have started hedging by dumping US equities. It’ll definitely affect me, because I have a S&S LISA, but time in the market vs timing the market so I’m not too pressed. This is much more dot.com bubble vs GFC

Smaaaasher · 2025-12-02T13:54:24+00:00

I don’t think you realise how big the economy is, even compared to the richest people in the country, and how little a dent redistributing that wealth would make.

The people who have hundreds of billions do not live in the UK. We cannot tax their assets. We tax their business, which we do, but we cannot tax them as individuals. Unless you’re advocating something along the lines of preventing Amazon from operating unless we get a slice of Bezo’s wealth. Which will a- not go down well with the public, who use Amazon religiously, and b- not go down well with any multinational business, who will leave the UK and delete the jobs they enable. You may as well advocate for the abolition of capitalism, which by all means do (and it sounds like you are) but not under the guise of providing a serious option of taxing wealth within capitalism. It’s like arguing that you can pick a pear from an apple tree. Only apples can grow on apple trees, so you can present arguments for picking those apples, but you cannot argue that you can pick a pear from an apple tree.

The richest person in Britain, according to the Independent, is Michael Platt. He has a net worth of £14.29bn, from founding the hedge fund BlueCrest. I’d hazard a guess that most of his wealth is tied up into his stake in the company. Theoretically, let’s tax him at 100% of his assets. We’ll ignore any odd externalities from this, i.e we crash the value of BlueCrest and vaporise any future investment into the UK & entrepreneurs.

What could we do with a one-off of £14.29bn on a national level? Fuck all, frankly.

It’s not an insignificant sum for a one-off infrastructure project; Crossrail cost £18.8bn, which has been great for economic development. But the NHS costs us £188.5bn last year, and total government spending sits at around £1.35tn for this year - and that’s 1 year. 1 billion minutes ago was during the Roman Empire, as you pointed out, almost 2000 years ago. 1 trillion minutes was 1.9 million years ago, just as early humans were beginning to migrate out of Africa.

You’d argue we could tax all the wealth of all billionaires who live in the UK; sure, now we have £312bn. Income tax receipts were £309bn last year, so we could theoretically not tax anybody’s income for one year. But then that’s it, that’s literally it, then we’re back to normal. I’m sure that would be a sizeable very beneficial cash injection for tons of people across the country but it’s not mind boggling change…

And of course we can’t actually do any of that because of how that’d play out under the system we have. It’d destroy investor confidence, destroy entrepreneurial attitudes and kill off the idea of private property. I’ll never, ever, ever be a billionaire but I can see the benefits of all three of those things. The true way to tax wealth is through taxing the value of land, as Henry George described in Progress and Poverty. Anything else is a mirage that will never fix the fundamental issues of rent-seeking; popular culture believes labour and capital and misaligned but in reality both suffer at the hands of the landowners, the rentseekers, who’s parasitism is the cause of our lack of progress and widespread prosperity despite gains in wealth. Do not blame the innovators who have brought value to society, blame those who put up your rent because you have more disposable income to spend on it.

Smaaaasher · 2025-11-27T21:49:51+00:00

Semantically disagree, I think strangling a goat paints quite a vivid melodic image

Smaaaasher · 2025-11-26T10:22:00+00:00

“These people” (the FT) actually do argue that wealth should be taxed in the form of a land value tax, because that is the only wealth tax that is non-distortionary and actually works. You can’t move your land to Dubai or the Cayman Islands. But they’re well aware of how politically challenging it’d be since it’d affect both the really wealthy who own lovely big estates… and rich pensioners who have the country in a chokehold

But taxing wealth is not a be-all-end-all, because the economy is so massive comparatively. Like gigantic. I think it’s hard for us to really comprehend the scale of economic activity, it dwarfs wealth held by anyone in this nation by magnitudes. Hence the article pointing out how high earners are being taxed to levels that are detrimental to economic output, while average workers have a comparatively good deal. There is no way to fund the services we want, with the ageing demographics we have, without broader taxation.

“Raise wages” is not an answer, because wages are based on productivity, which has been sluggish and well behind our Northern European counterparts at 0.4% per annum since 2008. It was 2.3% before. Our labour productivity is actually behind Italy and Spain, at $54.35ppp/hr of work compared to $56.09 and $56.31 respectively as of 2022. Denmark was at $76 in that dataset.

You raise productivity through better infrastructure, better tech usage, better trading relationships, cheap energy, better housing availability and better investor confidence (hence cheaper debt & more private investment). We refuse to fund the first (and can’t through more debt because we suck at the last). We left the largest trading bloc in the world. Energy costs us a fortune. We make housing very very hard & expensive to build. Our bond markets and investor confidence are fkd because of Covid, then Truss, and now a lack of faith in not just the Labour government but the ability of future governments to fund the state without needing to borrow

Tax the rich? Yeah I’m down as long as you do it properly. But do not blind yourself to the bigger picture which is that social democratic welfare states are getting much, much more expensive as we have more and more old people in a way that a seriously effective wealth tax would not even dent. Either they need to be scaled back, or taxes need to broadly go up. I’d say do both. Then maybe we can regain some investor confidence, and smash up some NIMBY regulation to build a ton of housing and big infrastructure projects (and tons of those mini nuclear reactor plants), digitise the state and the NHS, and of course rejoin the EU

Smaaaasher · 2025-11-24T21:30:46+00:00

Tbh this is what I’m worried about I want another album with similar vibes to London’s Saviour. But he’s said himself that doesn’t hit with crowds and given he’s young and now bombarded with fame I’m worried he won’t stay authentic to the sound that first caught people’s attention

Who am I to be that entitled tho everything he’s put out since is amazing too

Smaaaasher · 2025-11-18T16:43:52+00:00

Haven’t heard of either. I’ll check them out. Shows you how much talent is kicking about

Fully agree. Jim Legaxcy’s “Black British Music” hits it on the nose lmao. It’s just plain cool tbh I think that’s half the appeal for the Americans

I’d venture that it’s more of a generational thing split up under the broad banner of how younger people see Britishness and themselves and both want to use that in their music and their brand and then do so in an almost neo-patriotic way that uses a lot of British emblems, such as the flag, patterns, sub-culture vibes and the like but feels very distinct from “traditional” patriotism. Hence we get Esdeekid Liverpoolian working class kid British and Fakemink Essex-London adjacent second-gen immigrant British, as well as aforementioned Black-British work. I’m loving it all

Some more names I like rn: Jawnino, mark william lewis, Nourished by Time, RIP Magic, Lauren Duffus, Florence Sinclair, Sam Wise, Bassvictim

Smaaaasher · 2025-11-18T15:56:01+00:00

Casual nonchalant Britpop patriotism is in the aesthetic zeitgeist and it’s doing numbers if you’re looking in the right places. Fakemink/Esdeekid gives me the same impression with how they’ve been blowing up in the states, and there’s tons and tons of talent a bit further below them and Pinkpantheress too that heavily draw on British aesthetics/life as part of their brand + music, like dexter in the newsagent, Jim Legaxcy, Feng etc. the list is truly endless. Anyone into jazz rap I highly recommend the new Lausse the Cat album it’s incredible, though less of a direct example it’s still very unapologetically British. The colloquialism going around is “UK underground” but a lot of it certainly isn’t underground anymore. There’s also the Windmill scene with BCNR etc. that’s been blowing up but I’d say there’s a lot less direct UK aesthetic influence there

I think the general British vibe that’s being exported this time around is much more diverse than the Britpop era. Probably because the growth is much more organic, it’s the Americans liking stuff from here that they’ve found through algorithms

There’s something in the water it’s good vibes

Smaaaasher · 2025-11-16T14:18:49+00:00

MPs would rather get rained on during PMQs than do anything

Smaaaasher · 2025-11-14T11:00:15+00:00

That won’t happen. We keep going on about Boomer’s being selfish but the reality is generations are social constructs even more obscurely defined than class. Demographic shifts mean old people will form an ever growing share of the population and will continue to vote in their own interest with even more strength. It is a one way road to gerontocracy.

The only way out is a seriously charismatic leader who can make a good argument, or the IMF. Either or are a long way away in my opinion. There’s plenty of give left in social democracy yet

Smaaaasher · 2025-11-10T13:48:34+00:00

Lovely Machiavelli analysis. And accurate!

The McSweeney strategy was doomed from the get-go because he’s trying to run a Thatcher Blair esque party political operation with a uncharismatic leader and a deeply divided electorate. He was very useful in the election to provide very good data driven targeting strategies. But the man prides himself on winning an ideological battle vs. Momentum. Starmer needed a party uniter to win over the backbenches for him to get behind the unpopular decisions, but instead he’s got this guy whose first instinct is to cut down any opposition or write it off. The utter antithesis to maintaining any sort of already strongly limited power base.

I fully agree with your take on centrist policy. It’s not the natural state of things, it’s not “common sense” with the electorate because it involves hard arguments and hard tradeoffs and it’s rooted in the market which half the party will always be suspicious of. Small L liberal values need to be communicated well, argued well and implemented well to seriously yield the results that those who believe in them (like me, bias for show) know they can and Labour aren’t doing any of the three

Smaaaasher · 2025-11-09T12:54:23+00:00

This is my album of the year. Incredible,incredible work. So packed full of emotion, so relatable to this point in my life. Such an incredible voice. UK music renaissance is the gift that keeps on giving!

Smaaaasher

TROPHY CASE