Anglosphere

Quote of the Day

by

Dominic Cummings:

The EU has kneecapped itself and is failing in all important areas: productivity, debt, public order, immigration, defence, technology, political extremism. Brussels chose self-sabotage on advanced technology. Unlike Britain which at least has DeepMind here, the EU has none of the leading labs. As the Commission said, we will be leaders not in AI but ‘trust in AI’! Mission semi-accomplished comrades! Brussels can kneecap itself and other countries that choose to follow its regulations but it will not compete with US and PRC or shape the global struggle over AI. Valley companies have already made clear they will simply not release models in the EU rather than follow EU regs. Taliban today can download new models now blocked for Brussels elites. Those who think AI will be like aspects of post-war car regulation are wrong. AI is ultimately about power and Great Powers will not let Brussels set the rules. I’ve watched SW1 repeat soundbites from the EU for 25 years on ‘strategic autonomy’ and ‘now we’re going to get serious on technology’. They’ve always been hollow. I said in 2022-4 that covid predicted that not even wanting to prevail in Ukraine would force either the MoD or Brussels to stop the delusions. They babbled and watched. They left defence industry and procurement a farce. They encouraged deindustrialisation and sabotaged industrial production while babbling about net zero. Thanks to Brexit and the work we did in 2020 with the secret part of the Integrated review exposing the disaster zone of the MoD and agreeing a plan for radical change, we could have sorted ourselves out. Instead, 2021-4 the Tories worked with the worst parts of the MoD to continue the lies and delusions and followed the EU into escalating a dumb war which could have been avoided. The latest defence review is a disaster and the UK and EU will be humiliated month after month.

 

Thoughts:

1. There but for the grace of God go we.

2. UK and EU politics and culture are farther gone than ours. However, as in the 1970s with Thatcher and perhaps now with Trump, political and cultural course reversals are possible given gifted opposition leaders and a preference cascade or two.

3. The British establishment, by criminalizing dissent, insure that even more than our Democrats  they will not see the political wave coming that turns them out of power.

4. It’s never over.

At Long Last…

by

… and probably too late for the largest portion of the British ruling cadre (such as it is, and to include their national establishment media, political and intellectual class) to emerge with any honor and credit – now that the industrial-scope sexual trafficking and abuse of mostly white lower-class British girls at the hands of Moslem and Pakistani men has blown up into an international concern. Abuse which was enabled and hastily buried away from attention because .. well, musn’t hurt the delicate feewings of a favored minority class by pointing out rampant lawlessness on their part. One mussent point anything so infra dig, don’tcha know, because they are an essential and obedient voting bloc for the Ruling Cadre … and the segment of the population that they prey upon are so … (shudder) deplorable. I mean, one just doesn’t! It would be so raaacist…

Read more

Reaching for the Alien Shore

by

So, about those drones. Treating the current social contagion as a subset of the ongoing “UAP” fad, how are we to evaluate the obsession with extraterrestrial aliens? Lest my output appear misleadingly prodigious, I wrote most of what follows in late summer 2023 and have modestly updated it for our situation as of (very) late autumn 2024. The organization of this post is an attempt at a hierarchy from most immediate/local to greatest space/time extent.

NOTICE! In compliance with the Manifoldian Transparency Pledge of 2024, which I just thought up:

  • this thing runs > 8k words, reading time potentially exceeds 30 minutes, and that doesn’t account for
  • lots of math and possible inducement to wander off down various rabbit trails invoked thereby (besides the homework/syllabus assignments), which you may or may not regard as part of the fun; and
  • not to overlook the obvious, I will address the concomitant obsession with foreign infiltration, and OCD contamination phobia in general, in at least one separate post.

Read more

The Coming Deluge?

by

“The official version of events in the UK media is that the murders are an isolated incident and the public must stop talking about it, let the police handle it, but the protests are a nationally coordinated far right extremist conspiracy, which must be met with aggressive force and further destruction of what few civil liberties remain.”

A comment from a guest post at Postcards from Barsoom, which can be read here: Who Speaks for the Children?

Violent protests, and even riots are happening in Manchester and other English cities, following a bloody knife attack on a children’s dance workshop by the teenaged son of Rwandan refugees. Three little girls were murdered and several more girls and their teachers badly injured – and such protests might indicate to distant observers such as myself that the native British are finally fed to the teeth with a flood-tide of migrants, and violent criminal depredations by recent immigrants that are basically excused when they aren’t outright ignored by politicians, the press, academics and activists. Popular historians often make note of social snobbery in the Victorian era – where the upper classes looked down on anyone “in trade” and sneered at the working class … but I don’t see that the Victorians thoroughly despised their fellow countrymen to the degree that the modern British ruling class despises everything about the ordinary native British working folks.

Norms

by

Walking through my own neighborhood this week, I was reflecting on norms not this Norm, but the established, accepted and socially-enforced norms make a neighborhood like mine a rather pleasant, secure and safe place to live, as well as being mildly attractive. We really don’t have to worry, even now, about plants and ornaments routinely being stolen, vandalism or random violence. Such incidents do happen, as noted on Next Door but are not routine and are cause for much comment when they occur.

The accepted norms and standards for housekeeping and public behavior make for a pleasant and livable community, especially in a high-trust society. When violation of the established norms becomes routine that becomes grounds for unhappiness and worse, especially in the minds of those who remember and valued the old, high-trust norms. There aren’t many ways to fight back effectively against a collapse of high-trust norms and the rule of law, other than moving away, or socially shunning the offenders. The English Daily Mail offered up an example of a community fighting back, this week.

Read more