This is Soviet level civilisational gaslighting.

https://twitter.com/FraserNelson/status/1949896107430949310

Our country is a violent slum.

https://x.com/XiaoVilin99/status/1681386035521961984?t=uGkoxCDMgCwNdjCFH77tlA&s=19

Peaky Blinders has been remarkably effective at making normal people believe that Britain in the 1920s was incredibly corrupt and violent.

It is far better propaganda than any government sloganeering or fiddling with the national curriculum, because it is actually entertaining.

https://twitter.com/XiaoVilin99/status/1757010178140983682

There are now Peaky tours and experiences, Peaky restaurants and even Peaky weddings.

Not since the Krays has organised crime been so popular, and whoever thought flatcaps would come back so hard and fast?

This is a crucial point. The right, especially the mainstream, often operates on an ideological level only, and not a practical one. They whinge about wokeness, occasionally making an effort to explain that communism is Bad Actually... and that's it.

https://twitter.com/LaoCaiLarry1/status/1597929149481746433

For all that the Right often claims to be "anti-intellectual", these people do little other than talking. They hope that if they explain their opinion, often enough, in slow, clear English, as if to a foreign waiter, the system will correct itself.

https://twitter.com/LaoCaiLarry1/status/1597929143018344448?s=20&t=EsDnMzbdkYUJjoRSK9bPMg

Many of around Monbiot's age and background feel this way. The postwar generations grew up in a shabby Britain, still full of bomb craters. They were restless and bored, and their reaction was to try to destroy everything around themselves in a wave of nihilism and spite.

https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1597683473653063681

Some of his generation eventually grew up and realised what they had done. Most never did, and never will.

This book is quite illuminating, and goes up to the early New Labour years. If you compressed all the crimes committed in Britain in 2000 into a cube, it would be quite big.

People lamenting the state of higher education in Britain fail to understand its purpose, which is in part to hide youth unemployment and make the young pay their own dole via loans, but more vitally it serves Britain's grand geopolitical strategy. Britain hosts almost a quarter of a million Chinese students. It charges them more than ten thousand pounds a year to let them pretend to have written their own essays for three years, at which point they are given a certificate with fake gold leaf on it, and then sent home.

What is interesting about this argument is not that it is silly (though it is), but that it is so old.

That legalising/regulating some behaviour will result in less of it has been argued variously for prostitution, drugs, abortions, divorce and immigration for almost a century. In each and every case, the behaviour that was supposed to diminish in frequency as a result of liberalisation has, in fact, increased.

Now, the people who make these arguments are generally not stupid. Indeed, they are normally well-educated and middle-class.

This would have it that telling someone that they do not need to change sex, that they could be happy as they are, is itself a "conversion" therapy. It is surely the opposite, because they would not then be converting from or to anything.

https://twitter.com/PhilipPullman/status/1511396477674864640

Transgenderism is not only trans about gender. One has to contort oneself into a kind of meta-transgenderism for it to make sense.

This could only really have been written by someone who hasn't visited many churches and cathedrals.

War imagery is ubiquitous across Western churches, perhaps in Britain most of all. This should surprise nobody, given that people need faith in wartime more than any other time.

https://twitter.com/anotherartur/status/1504124383832457216

First and foremost, virtually every church in Britain older than the world wars has a war memorial, often with explicit martial imagery. Here are two, in Barnet and York.

My generation is going to be the last in the West to remember life before the internet. I don't think anyone yet appreciates the scale of this psychological rift, or how jarring it really is. Virtually everyone I have met in the last decade has an online presence. I can follow a lot of what they do in life, and could reach out and speak to them instantly, if I chose.

I once worked in an office which encouraged everybody to have a collection of plants, soft toys, action figures and pictures of pets on his or her desk.

This assortment of effects was referred to officially as your Personality. The rules, as repeated often in office emails, were that your Personality wasn't allowed to contain anything that might upset anybody, and that your Personality could not become so large that it got in the way of the cleaners.

Some AI art. AI trained on image searches produces ur-images that feel half-conscious.

They work best if you use fairly niche terms, where many of the available internet images will be similar to each other. "Pygmy Tribe"

British Slop Thread The taxonomy of British takeaway food is woefully underdeveloped. Britain has evolved a cuisine like no other in the world, taking the institutional study of deep fried grease and battered calories to a level of which no other race has dared to dream.

When and how did pre-1960's children's tales and nursery rhymes become 'creepy'? You see this kind of thing everywhere now. First authors like Lewis Carroll or Beatrix Potter became 'Victorian' and 'stodgy', but now they are almost exclusively used for an eerie effect. Sadly, both pulp fiction and high fantasy in the 20thC are probably responsible for turning castles from a place where noble people live to where sinister things lurk.