The Crazy Years, UK edition - Adventures of the 52nd(?) State

[Mongrel]

New partial estimate on how much wealth Britain stole from India:

$45 Trillion

[mharr]

It's okay they're only 2020 trillions. Barely worth a billion at the time of the alleged offence.

[Mongrel]

Mere piffle!

[Friday]

This narrative has found considerable traction in the popular imagination: according to a 2014 YouGov poll, 50 percent of people in Britain believe that colonialism was beneficial to the colonies.

holy

FUCK

[Friday]

size 200 is the limit for this forum but imagine that FUCK being 10 times larger and on fire

[zaratustra]

This narrative has found considerable traction in the popular imagination: according to a 2014 YouGov poll, 50 percent of people in Britain believe that colonialism was beneficial to the colonies.

holy

FUCK

yeah uh think of all the white-washing US schools do about slavery

here it's about imperial rule

[mharr]

I'm going to assume that 50% lean religious and think replacing all the cool foreign gods with the vaguely concussed face of Cesare Borgia had some kind of merit.

[JD]

I think it's more a matter of national pride. A lot of British (particularly English) people are fiercely patriotic, and many are proud of the former British Empire. YouGov found that 59% felt the British empire was something to be proud of, and 34% would like if Britain still had an empire.

Patriotism was a major factor in Brexit, as were racism, Islamophobia and xenophobia. In Britain, these things are often linked. You'll particularly see it with people who identify strongly as "English" rather than "British". There's a photo somewhere of an English football supporter (translation: a fan of the England national soccer team) with a swastika tattoo and performing the Nazi salute, which is a bizarre confusion of ideas.

There was a widely spread and false claim that Turkey was going to join the EU soon (it's not), that 70 million would immediately emigrate to the UK (most of their population; and why they would choose the UK is a mystery as there's already a major Turkish community in Germany), and that the UK had to leave the EU to prevent this (the UK always had the right to close its borders to EU migrants).

The UK also had posterboards everywhere claiming Brexit would save £350m/week (£18.2 billion/year), which could be give to the National Health Service, which suffers from a shortage of funding lately. A lot of people voted because they assumed it meant the government would actually give the money to the National Health Service. The government party in power were the ones responsible for causing the funding shortage so they could lower tax on the rich.

[Büge]

I'm going to assume that 50% lean religious and think replacing all the cool foreign gods with the vaguely concussed face of Cesare Borgia had some kind of merit.

hmmmmm

[JD]

The latest news is that the UK is trying to outlaw causing a nuisance. This sounds hilariously British until you learn that it has a maximum sentence of ten years, and civil rights groups expect it will used to criminalize protests, such as the recent vigil for a woman shot by police, which was in turn shut down by the police.

[mharr]

I look forward to hearing that the far right government my family voted for aren't hurting the right people. Meanwhile our opposition party have abandoned the left wing youth and gone full neoliberal. Might as well apply to be a satellite state of the US at this rate.

Except we have no value as a trading outpost with Europe now of course.

In other news, the faceless stormtrooper policing of crowds since Sarah Everard's murder has borne the intended fruit in Bristol, with nice cinematic burning police vehicles and some broken limbs in uniform, so now the Tory base are terrified and ready to abandon all of democracy by next week end. Adventure awaits, huzzah.

Edit: Turns out the police just made up injuries and the press took them at their word. Nurses reported wards overflowing with injured protestors while the units set aside to treat officers stood idle.

[mharr]

I have no political insights on this beyond popcorn.gif, but just for the record Grand Vizier Dominic Cummings has chosen this election cycle, which will select the members of parliament for Scotland and Wales, to most loyally throw Mr. Johnson under the bus.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ster-leaks





Dark comedy aside: Our unrepresented young left wing have taken to calling Labour's current leader Piers Corbyn.

[Friday]

I wonder how long before Scotland just fucks off from the UK.

[Brantly B.]

So do the Scots.

[mharr]

This whole country seems to have a much clearer idea of who the Tories are, and a fierce desire to avoid twenty fresh years of Thatcherism 2.0 Gaiden. Still worried about a lot of things but much more hopeful than if we were still living down in the south west.

It was a joke at the time, but with hindsight the least destructive thing England could have done after the referendum was secede from the union themselves, automatically losing EU membership. Less destructive in the very real 'fewer corpses' sense.

[mharr]

Well... That was a weird rabbit hole. My first Scottish general election tomorrow, and we have an 'Additional Member' system here where you vote for a party to lead the country in general, then vote separately for an individual representative for your area. An 'other' group called ALBA have been pushing the narrative that their candidates are a good strategic second vote if you're looking for another go at independence.

So I look them up, and run into good ol' Stuart Campbell, formative UK games journalist of Your Sinclair and Amiga Power fame and once close associate to the Rock Paper Shotgun gang. Used to love that guy's writing. He now runs a popular Scottish Independence blog that bats pretty hard for ALBA... Because he's completely gone off the rails and is obsessed with stopping Nicola Sturgeon and her woke tumblr army from banning gender or some such peak boomer brainpuke. Maybe gamergate got to him back in the day, idk.

Put it this way, the sane left wing Scottish crowd online call his fans 'StuAnon'. Yikes.

So all-in-all not quite the complex decision making process I was expecting. SNP / Green it is.

[Thad]

I remember reading an interview, in the early aughts, with a guy whose work I'd enjoyed in game magazines in the '90s. Wished I hadn't read the interview, because he mostly kept ranting about how the news media are all communists except Fox News.

The guy in question doesn't seem to have any online presence, or any recent work to boycott, so I don't think mentioning his name will accomplish anything besides ruining other fans' day.

[Friday]

I really have been pushing that way, way more people than you could ever imagine are completely fucking insane for a long time now. I think most people have caught up to my worldview at this point thanks to 74 million Trump voters in 2020.

People say things like that adage where you're at a pizza place with 4 other people and 2 of them vote for cannibalism instead of pizza, but they don't really FEEL it until someone they've known for awhile (their family, some video game person they liked, an artist they liked, a friend, whatever) suddenly goes full shove the jews into an oven.

It's equally important to not fall into the "everyone is shit and sucks" trap that I did in my 20s. Treat humanity as if it's about 2/5ths crazy, 2/5ths fine, and 1/5th pretty damn cool, because that's what the fucking numbers bear out.

[mharr]

I remind myself that every year we've existed since the Cold War has been an unexpected free 1UP last chance play, and just maybe science will find a cure for the 2/5 crazy.

It's also a reassuring moment when you find a search term like this. They highlight years of articles from the 3/5 going "These guys are crazy right? It's not just me?"

[Mongrel]