Guthrie in reply to me:
Was the British Empire bad or Good? Well, that is a very long argument.
A bunch of Angels? Get real. There were some right bastards -- such as the Hongs who basically used Hong Kong to push opium to the Chinese. Or the Sugar Plantations of the Carribean. But, the British were no worse than other powers, including non european powers (consider the Arab slave trade for a minute, or the Turkish janissaries if you have the stomach for it)
But did it work, and the answer to that is... it did. I don't know if James Belich (NZ Historian, and probably of the left) has made it to the UK but he points out that the New Zealand and Canadian and Australian dominions (and south african and rhodesian) did two things -- they acted as large farms that fed the UK allowing for a massive concentration of people well beyond the carrying capacity of the land given the agricultural technology of the day, and the drained excess population.
Did the Brits oppress and enslave? No, not really. They were mildly to moderately oppressive (and still are: for which we should be grateful). The Soviet experiment killed millions, the Maoist experiment probably billions. In most colonies, the British Governers saw a duty to protect the natives: this is one of the reasons for the wars of 1776 and 1812 in North America, and it is one of the reasons that the Canadian Indian peoples (liek the Maori can have a renaissance.
If you really want to see genocide within the former empire, I suggest you look at the race wars (or tribal wars) that have occured since nationalism restarted: from Ulster to Sri Lanka to Rhodesia.
I think the fashion for being guilty for the Empire is a tad to twee.
Charlie (comment 72) has a better set of ideas: but back to it -- if people have nothing to do they generally suffer. It's one of the big issues with people I see @ work: they cannot get jobs -- and they often want one. Bullshit jobs (what a horrible term) included. Because it gets them out of the house, gives them a structure, and gets them meeting people: it may be acceptable to do business and the long font in Edinburgh, but it is not in Dunedin.
I do not know if anyone has a model of an economy of oversupply that does not include inflation and distress (the best historical example I know of is Spain during the time of the conquistores when gold was cheap, and land hideously expensive). The solution for Philip I was to invade England.
Well, we know how that worked.
]]>I'd argue the Victorian compromise was one that worked: with one proviso -- which I'm stealing from Moldbug -- that the education system of the time, by and large, led to a fairly sober and moral bunch of burghers who could vote. These are the kind of people who set up the Scottish Enlightenment (I'm thinking of Hume and his coterie) and moved fairly rapidly into setting up the model towns in northern England (Cadbury etc.)
By then England, Charlie, was not a monarchy. It was a constitutional republic with a (German & Protestant) King who smiled and waved while his prime minister and cabinet did the heavy lifting. But the key bit of genius was that you had to qualify to vote.
(At this point most leftists and moderns are running away, screaming "unclean")... but universal voting /loud/ did not exist /endloud/ until fairly late in the Victorian period. This led to some unusual constitutional quirks in the colonies -- the reason there are Maori electorates in NZ (where I live) is because Maori land was tribal and thus no Maori man could have enough land to vote... so they had their own electorates in the 1857 constitution. The constitution has gone, but the seats remain.
I'd argue that to vote you have to pay taxes. If you don't pay taxes, (and this includes people paid by the state) you don't vote. I've now nicely disenfranchised myself -- but the model here is local government. The ratepayers want good property values, but they know that whatever is done they will have to fund (and they do not, cannot in many cases, afford too great an increase in property tax). Those who do not pay rates... or taxes... have no interest in such matters -- to them it is merely free money from some tap.
The augustinian republic worked while we kept it, but it is now long gone.
On the accelerationists -- and acknowledging that Ken is probably reliable and they are not lizardmen in Armani -- their position has been moved to ridiculousness, and the contradictions exposed, but the quasi fascist (the state may not own the banks, but if you are not friends with the state, you will have your toys taken away) crony capitalism of Obama and Bernacke. There is now no true market in the USA, and the tipping point is coming if not already here: perhaps a two decade decline, akin to Japan, is the most favourable outcome they can expect for the sheer stupidity of the economic policies the US coastal elite have adopted (regardless of who is in power) over the last three decades.
You cannot be a revolutionary when the more mendacious revolutionaries are running the country.
]]>One of the side effects of modern education is that no one reads the war poets any more. There are no recollections of the people who died. And there are no old servicemen whispering what happened.
And when we forget, it could happen. All over again: in fact the more pagan and nationalistic we become (the current "unamerican" meme -- which is similar to "inconsistent with European values" scares the shite out of me) the more likely it is that will happen again.
With two teenage sons who would both be enlistable by WWI standards I thus pray (without apologies to the athiests) that it will not be in my time, or that of my children
]]>Thanks for the thread. My Hebrew is not up the with the good Vicar Pete, but the gnostic stuff was amusing. And wrong, which is why it is amusing.
On the Prosperity / Fundamentalists issue, the big error in the codex was that most reformed think the fundamentalists are heretics because they in effect treat God as an occult box that you can manipulate by certain formulae. Which gets creepily close to the Laundry, and section four.
But what will happen if the Laundry itself gets hacked? The current situation where we are moving into a panoptican state (and yes, I've read your books on this and they gave me nightmares) is a pretty good analogy for where we are right now -- what I'm writing will be stored somewhere in the NSA ad aeternum.
Given that the infovores are out there and find information nice and crunchy, (a) will the Laundry leave a big honking back door open now that one of the few competent IT geeks (Yes, I mean Bob) has been promoted and cannot do his BOFH magick and (b) are the Black Chamber accelerating the move towards Case Nightmare Green by cross funding the NSA?
And if you can make the Vampires anything but romantic and misunderstood semi erotic creatures a la everyone from Anne Rice to that stupid Twilight woman I will buy your books in the dead tree and inky version and (if the DRM is disabled) ebook as well. Hell, I have most of them in both already.
YOu are as addictive as a certain American pulp writer with the name of a Beatle, but with a better vocabulary and style.
]]>For those of us who are antipodeans, has the standard commonwealth promotion system for academics been broken (for the yanks Lecturer --> Senior Lecturer --> Associate Prof --> Prof is the same as Assistant Prof --> Associate Prof -->Prof --> Chair and Head of Department). It's diffucult enough dealing with Canadians and Americans who follow academic trends with evangelical fervor, let alone the Managerialist corruption of the accepted "red brick" University Grades.
Finally, Charlie, no snarks about the advance. It sounds about right -- and given that the average house in Edinburgh is going for over 270K you will need all the shekels you can keep.
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