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I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

samj.substack.com

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Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#52

Twenty years ago, I think there was still a sense that we were collectively laughing with each other about the dullness of small towns. We all had the same shops - Woolworths, Dixons, Our Price, BHS. We all had a leisure centre that looked like everyone else's leisure centre. Some towns were better off than others, some towns had parts that you were better off avoiding after dark, but the majority of towns belonged t…

A popular protestantism is not a bandwagon the current political circus troupe will fit on.

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also his standup career of being extra atheist as if the world has never seen a famous lapsed Christian Brit

I concluded Noah's Arc was bollocks when I was 8 so I don't know why he goes on about it at his age

Because people in power of a similar age still go on about how they think it’s true?

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#55
post #40

> There’s a website (I won’t link to it) that has kept on running a survey of the worst places in the UK for years and years I will, it's ChavTowns. https://web.archive.org/web/20061013053524/http://www.chavto... Still running as https://www.ilivehere.co.uk/ Also the owner is giving up on it as of the start of this year -- mainly because nobody visits the site; churnalists just freeboot it and they rank higher on goo…

That author on Slough, > Ricky Gervais encapsulated its brutalist new town grim with ‘The Office’ before giving up and writing lame punching-down anti-woke “gags” for the educationally subnormal That's a very strange reading on Gervais' post-The Office career. After The Office he did things like Extras, a sitcom about extras on TV and film sets, Derek, an emotional series about a well-meaning care worker who thinks i…

He also did The Invention of Lying, which, 16 years since I watched it in the cinema, is still the answer I give without hesitation to "what's the worst movie you've ever seen?"

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also his standup career of being extra atheist as if the world has never seen a famous lapsed Christian Brit

I concluded Noah's Arc was bollocks when I was 8 so I don't know why he goes on about it at his age

There's good money in it, I expect.

Plus, there's no harm in making a career (or a joke) out of being vaguely anti-nonsense.

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#57

Twenty years ago, I think there was still a sense that we were collectively laughing with each other about the dullness of small towns. We all had the same shops - Woolworths, Dixons, Our Price, BHS. We all had a leisure centre that looked like everyone else's leisure centre. Some towns were better off than others, some towns had parts that you were better off avoiding after dark, but the majority of towns belonged t…

I’d argue that your last paragraph has the cause-and-effect reversed:

We’re entering into a populist phase because the managerial class is incapable of addressing the problems experienced by most people — so they’re going to try dismantling the current elite systems and rebuilding them. To say that the problem is elites inability to suppress populism is to miss that the elites own chronic failures is what caused the populist surge.

Similar to populist waves circa 1900, where aristocratic systems were replaced with managerialism via populist revolts. Now, managerialism has failed so we’re again seeing the stirrings of change. At a broad scale, communism, fascism, and progressivism were all different technocratic managerial solutions to the problems and excesses of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

I think it’ll be interesting to see what comes next.

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I kept reading for the part where the author addresses the thesis, but that's not what it's about.

Is it about keeping you reading for long enough to show you a pop-up for his newsletter?

Just disable JavaScript and get on with your life

Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

#59

Twenty years ago, I think there was still a sense that we were collectively laughing with each other about the dullness of small towns. We all had the same shops - Woolworths, Dixons, Our Price, BHS. We all had a leisure centre that looked like everyone else's leisure centre. Some towns were better off than others, some towns had parts that you were better off avoiding after dark, but the majority of towns belonged t…

Well put. A few decades of compounding inequality transforms what used to be good natured ribbing amongst chums into bullying.

What compounding inequality? The UK's Gini coefficient has been trending downwards since the global financial crisis.

14 years of Conservative government made this country more equal, not less, because they flattened the income distribution by making everybody poorer.

The big pattern among rich people in the UK nowadays is not that they're getting richer, it's that they're leaving.

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