Oh, they’re 10 or 20 years ahead of the rest of Europe: over a decade ago the local equivalent of MAGA whilst taking over their rightmost main party ended up causing Brexit and in government with an absolute parliamentary majority (and, remember, Britain is not a presidential system).

In most of Europe the Far-Right is not in power, much less fucking their country up with something as bad as Brexit.

They’re so Racist that during the whole Brexit shitshow racism towards other Europeans became pretty overt at all levels.

Also having lived in Britain and with friends which unlike me didn’t look like the locals, I heard lots of stories from them about being discriminated against in Britain and even have one myself (you could tell I was not a local if I spoke, since my accent wasn’t any of the local ones).

Whilst Britain is good at image management, what’s under that carefully cultivated image is quite a lot darker.

Having lived in Britain during the time of the Referendum and seen all of that shitshow first hand, I would say that Brexit is the product of British Politics having been taken over by the local version of MAGA (so, less loud and obnoxious, more posh sleaze).

This was to the point that they even had a Trump lookalike called Boris Johnson.

You seem to somehow have missed the whole Brexit shitshow, including the Tory party becoming openly Anti-Immigrant, Racist and ultra-nationalist with massive national delusions of grandeur (made oh so painfully obvious when the pranced into the EU exit negotiation loudly proclaiming they held all the cards, ultimatilly showing that they did not and not getting the things they wanted the most).

(And lets not forget Britain’s very own version of Trump: Boris Johnson)

You also seem to have missed the insane Civil Society Surveillance levels as disclosed in the Snowden Revelations and the recent legislation forcing Britons to ID themselves on the Internet, which is now being further tightenned with proposed restrictions to VPN use.

And lets not forget the anti-Demonstration legislation of the last decade as well as the anti-Terrorism legislation and how it was recently used to arrest anti-Genocide demonstrators as “Terrorism Supporters”.

This is not normal in Democracy.

I’ve lived in multiple countries in Europe, including Britain, and in my view the UK is the most Fascist country in Europe after Belarous and Russia, it’s just that British politicians don’t play the loud and obnoxious strongman role like Trump or Orban, they play the posh vaguelly aristocratic type who rather than fight the Justice System subverts it to make it a tool to punish those of the riff-raff who are a bit more uppity, hence things like using anti-Terrorism legislation to crack down on those who demonstrate against His Majesty’s Government’s active support of Genocide.

Granted, given how far the Overtoon Window is to the Right in Britain, I can understand that whilst those outside see the present day Tories as a Far-Right party, for those inside that kind of politics is now so normalized that it’s hard for most to recognize just how Far-Right the present day Tories are both in broader European terms and even in historical British terms, so they only see the even-more-Far-Right insane nutters of Reform as Far-Right.

Mind you in my experience the shift to and normalization of the Far-Right is one of the things Britain is ahead of the rest of Europe in: I’m seing happening were I am now the kind of thing I saw happen in Britain over a decade ago.

Having lived there, I agree that Britain is the most Fascist nation in Europe after Belarous and Russia, though theirs is the Posh Aristocratic version, so it’s not as loud and obvious as “strongman” Fascism.

Or gets the ones who do speak at least one foreign language, which aren’t going to be the close-minded kind that thinks everything that matters starts and stops with America, so that’s also good.

Sounds like the police in Britain has automated arresting people for the “crime” of walking on the street whilst not looking white enough.

Reference material

Exactly.

People behaving as “consumers” supports the current system and hence supports the harmful side effects of such system, from the systemic suffering from wealth inequality to ecological destruction.

Whilst very few of us, living within this system, can in practice stop living within the system, we can refrain from living in accordance with the rules of the system which are not imposed on us via removing all other choices or force, but which we are “nudged” or manipulated to follow using marketing or even propaganda, and pretty much everything which is “impulse” or “deriving a momentary pleasure from buying” are the latter kind of thing.

Re-read what I wrote - being black is nowhere as correlated with suffering systemic abuses from wealth inequality as is being poor or working class, more so for gender as per your own numbers: women earning in average 80% of what men earn is far less unequal than the average worker earning less than 0.3% of what a CEO earns (and way less than that when compared to a billionaire).

There is no inherent poverty in being black or a woman, there’s only that which has been placed there by people who - like Reagan - when they look at other human beings don’t see people, they see ethnicity or gender, and by following a logic that expects afro-americans or women to all be “something” and “having an obligation to behave in certain way” purely because of their race or gender, you’re following THE EXACT SAME MENTAL ARCHITECTURE as the racists and sexists like Reagan of classifying people based on genetics and then having expectations on them and determining what they deserve based on that.

(Emphasys and big caps because that’s the part that really pisses me off)

Fighting inequality by using the very same proxies of worth and deserving as the Far-Right is validating and prolonging the very fundations of Far-Right thinking that say that people should be treated first and foremost based on race and gender. Those who do so, whether they think that they’re leftwing or not, are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

It’s thus not surprising that this kind of thinking is most widespread in Neoliberal countries whose Overtoon Window is way to the right of most countries - you don’t shift politics to the Left by limiting yourself to the perspective on other human being of the Fascists.

You fight the suffering of systemic abuses by punishing and stopping the abusers and helping the ACTUAL victims, not by accepting the reductive and prejudicial proxies of the abusers themselves and shaping your thinking on the subject and fighting around those - that’s just willfully playing by the rules of the Fascists.

PS: But don’t trust me, just look at the actual results - Identity Politics has been way worse than things like Social Democracy or even Unionism in reducing the systemic abuses its supporters claim to want to address. In fact in the countries and period were Identity Politics dominated left-of-center (relative to the local Overtoon Window) politics, the suffering due to systemic abuses has actually worsened when compared to periods and places were Social-Democracy or even just Unionism were more dominant.

So best change your investment strategy, then.

If people persist in riding this bubble out of greed, it’s only fair if they get burned when it blows up.

Agreed.

One single potentially good thing in the middle of bad things still adds to something bad.

My point is that this shit is happening either way no matter how shit it all is, so if we can recognize and extract one good thing out of it at least on the other side we’ll have one good thing, whilst if we don’t, we’ll have nothing good at all.

The silver lining in all this is that when this bubble explodes we’ll probably have a glut in the supply of HDDs and SSDs, driving prices down.

Just hold any plans to upgrade your hardware for a year or two and you’ll end up better of (for many it will even be a good exercise to wean oneself out of the mindless “instant gratification” impulses one is indoctrinated into by Consumer Society).

I, for one, applaud anything that helps destroy the current Intellectual Property system.

Not the other things, though.

as an individual who has undoubtedly been subject to those systemic abuses

Bullshit!

Plenty of black women are part of the Owner Class, plenty of white men are part of the Working Class - what’s almost perfectly correlated with being subject the systemic abuses of class is “Wealth”. Race (even in the US, which is extra fucked up) is only somewhat positivelly correlated and gender is barelly so (the difference in average incomes between rich and poor is literally thousands of times greater than the difference in average incomes between men and women).

There is no reason to pull out “identitarian markers” when talking about class inequality unless one has been indoctrinated in a Neoliberal “divide and conquer” fake-Leftist political ideology designed to divide the fight for Equality For All into a hierarchy of “differently deserving of having Equality” based on things people wore born with rather than on Need, a view of others and how deserving they are that mirrors the way the Far-Right sees the world.

Not being filthy rich and having to slog in the mud like the rest of us to just keep one’s head above the surface is infinitelly more correlated to not being in the Owner Class than one’s count of X chromossomes in pair 23 or one’s gene for melanine production.

It really pisses me off how people from some political cultures with very right-shifted Overtoon Windows, even whilst they have the best of intentions, have been brainwashed into classifying their fellow human beings and having expectations on them (i.e. Prejudices) using the very same architecture of thinking as the Far-Right, to the point that even when they talk about “class inequality” their mind sees “identitarian markers” (just like the Fascists) rather than “Working Class” which is from where the actual expression “class inequality” originates from.

She’s not a class traitor because she’s black or because she’s a woman, she’s a class traitor because she works for a living and is cooperating in suppressing news about the problems caused by the Owner Class.

I thought that was just in the UK…

It’s not only misogyny.

Social media absolutely removes the inhibitions of just about all kinds of assholes, builds pat-each-other-on-the-back support groups for them by putting them together with like minded assholes and then algorithmically shovels all that shit on everybody else because anything that elicits strong emotions means more clicks and anger from being offended is one such emotion.

By the way, this also applies to unhealthy gender expectations on males (including misandry), though this being The Guardian I expect this is about the UK, which IMHO (having lived there and also elsewhere in Europe) is a country with serious problems when it comes to gender expectations around women and insidious “benevolent” sexism (“benevolent” not because it’s good but because it follows the whole “women are fragile creatures” and subsequent subtle disemplowering of women “to protect them” or because “they’re emotional creatures”) which far too often taints the articles in The Guardian because they’re very much from the British upper-middle class Acceptable Feminism, which tends to underestimate the strength of women and favor “protection” “solutions” over empowerment and agency.

So whilst I absolutely believe in all of this and in misogyny online being very bad, especially in certain countries, the choice of focusing on misogyny rather than as a whole in the problem of social media’s Profit Driven amplification of societal dysfunctions in general, is very much a typical privileged British Upper Middle Class “Third Wave Feminist” perspective and choice.

It still makes no difference: in the bully pattern of behaviour early concessions just increase the likelihood and intensity of latter violence, since they’re read by the bully as proof of weakness hence the victim is seen as less likely to be able to violently reciprocate.

Note how the whole Greenland Invasion thing, which came after the whole strong-arming and concessions on Trade interaction, was only walked back after several large European nations started deploying trigger forces to Greenland and planning for a military confrontation with the US.

The EU leadership originally displayed the same kind of reaction to Russian aggression at a point were Russia was back to following a logic of “Might makes right” in Crimea and with Georgia (same mindset as the US under Trump) and that led to the recent invasion and attempt at full conquest of Ukraine, so how long does it takes for those crooks to learn the lesson that certain kinds of leaders in very nationalist countries only ever respond to actual pain and proof of Might (not necessarilly purelly of the Military kind) and see attempts at finding a common ground as weakness.

I mean, any half way competent leadership of a large nation of trade block should have had Psychological Profiles made on at least the leaders of major nations.

Almost a decade in Investment Banking and I started reading a lot about Economics (from books, not random websites) after the 2008 Crash to try and understand what the fuck had happenned and what was being done about it.

That said, take what I wrote with a large pinch of salt, especially the first part which is an idea that I have of how that part of things work (based on Mathematics and Finance industry knowledge), not a proper peer reviewed theory from Economics.

I’ve pieced together a lot of knowledge I read about with understanding I gained from the inside of the Finance Industry (such as their way of valuing future money as well as things like fair value and fundamentals when it comes to markets), but the assembled thing as a whole is my own theory.

That said, my money is were my mouth is, and I’ve been highly invested in Gold (known as the ultimate safe asset) since 2012, and that has so far returned 500% on the original investment during that period, thus so far I seem to be at least partially right about the direction things are going (some kind over overall devaluation of traditional strong currencies and near-stagflation getting worse as the inherent disfunctionalities of the current value allocation system make it harder and harder for it to keep going as is), though that doesn’t mean I’m right on the Why.

PS: Recommended books to read - “This Time is Different” for an Historical perspective on Economic Crashes and “Freakonomics” for a look of on human decision making in an Economics context (which turns out to be very different from the homo economicus human behaviour model that underpins Free Market Economics theories) from Behaviour Economics which is the only part of Economics that actually conducts experiments.

The British version of Rule Of Law!