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Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

ft.com

41–50 of 128 posts

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#41
post #10

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If they are fed up with immigration they are stupid. “Gee we have declining birth rates and we want to deny this pool of labor that might correct course because they are brown.” The american empire was built on easy immigration. Turns out the tired and poor that we took in can build empires and win europe’s major wars for them.

Immigration is a duct tape solution to fixing things at this point. It is not going to build you an empire today.

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#42
post #38

Yeah that article is missing a very major point that immigration in the UK hasn't meant assimilation or a coherent mixing of cultures as people want or may have observed at times. The problems in the UK are actually focused around sticky blobbyness caused by a) lack of integration, b) left vs right flavor of the moment causing further segregation and c) long term socioeconomic factors leading to govt(councils) fixing…

British people miss the fact that assimilation happens in the generation after the immigrant generation. Italian immigrants were looked down on in the US too. Too catholic, not speaking the language and not engaging in american culture practices. The next generation speaks fluent english and is scarcely different than any other american out of the school system.

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#43
I agree with most of what the article has to say, but I feel like it's dancing around the fundamental issue. Like:

> These apparently disparate events all feature one obvious commonality: race. In each case, the riots were sparked by an act of violence in which the victim(s) were white and the attackers were not. The context: these events were focused largely in ethnically diverse working-class neighbourhoods, communities where resources are stretched.

I know the author is smart and informed enough to see the parallels between this and a number of high-profile incidents in the past decade. There's an increasingly widespread idea that this is simply how a wise person should see interracial crime, not as a series of tragic individual incidents but as attacks on the whole of Group X by the whole of Group Y. The idea has achieved enough prominence that it's starting to overcome the hard-fought taboo on white identitarianism, and now for the first time in decades we have to deal with it as an open political force.

I emphasize that white identitarianism is a bad ideology, incompatible with many of the nice things we enjoy about the modern world, and we have to defeat rather than accommodate it. But defeating it requires taking a serious look at the factors that allow it to grow.

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#44
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are fed up with immigration they are stupid. “Gee we have declining birth rates and we want to deny this pool of labor that might correct course because they are brown.” The american empire was built on easy immigration. Turns out the tired and poor that we took in can build empires and win europe’s major wars for them.

The job market has imploded and the economy hasn't been growing since 2008. There definitely needs to be a cap.

If only there were more customers to grow markets! Hmm I wonder how that could be done…

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#46
post #8

The whole reason the British government pushed Brexit was so Britain could control its immigration. That's how Brexit was presented to the population, that's why people voted for it. Then the government got Brexit, and then Boris Johnson more than tripled immigration, chasing away EU immigration and getting all the immigrants from the (very coincidentally very low-wage Pakistan, I mean there aren't very many countrie…

Which government pushed for Brexit? The government at the time of Brexit campaigned to remain.

People voted for Brexit for a lot of reasons. The leaders of both Vote Leave and Leave.EU said they wanted more skilled immigration.

> raised taxes on everybody except immigrants.

immigrants pay the same taxes as everyone else plus extra taxes such as the NHS surcharge and huge visa renewal fees.

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#48
post #30

Same reason as always: Wealthy people want less taxes, more power, and will lobby for the parties that always promise less taxes: Those on the right. The problem is that the conservative and traditional right aren't too popular, so they need to go for the far-right. Those parties are in full MAGA-mode, focusing on things like immigration. It is so, so much easier to sway public opinion by blowing up incidents involvi…

[flagged]

Trust me, the climate is in as rough a shape as those so-called extremists would have you believe. You can quite literally read it off the veniers, or at least we could until we hired a strong man to smash them.

Nuclear is another matter -- I reckon the European anti-nuclear movement set climate change ahead by at least several years, but these days the cost/benefit leans solar, as political unrest pairs poorly with nuclear hazards, as Ukraine has learned in the past five years.

Nevertheless, the UK's administrative class' fetish for "sensible" solutions works great except during a generational upheaval, when they can't (to borrow a metaphor from aviation) see the horizon and must trust their instruments and the data they deliver.

It's the same here in Canada, I am sorry to report. A Commonwealth cultural tic we would all best be mindful of, lest we wear sensible shoes that take us all the way to calumny.

Re: Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

#49
post #38

Yeah that article is missing a very major point that immigration in the UK hasn't meant assimilation or a coherent mixing of cultures as people want or may have observed at times. The problems in the UK are actually focused around sticky blobbyness caused by a) lack of integration, b) left vs right flavor of the moment causing further segregation and c) long term socioeconomic factors leading to govt(councils) fixing…

Most immigrants in UK do assimilate. Seen the stories about the high proportion of births where at least one parent is foreign born? In most cases the other parent is British born.
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