Sampson

I think we all have different opinions on this. I agree with CornwallFox that the financial crisis was the inflection point but not necessarily austerity as although some parts have been more pronounced in the uk . quality of life has been falling in every western country, even those who remained social democratic after the end of the post-war consensus period at the end of the 1970s. For me, capitalism had already blown its load before Covid, although Covid has massively accelerated it. I used to consider myself a liberal but I’ve definitely become more left wing over the past few years because I just can’t escape that a lot of the things the left used to say in the 80s and 90s about capitalism have come true. I do think capitalism can be fantastic for a generation or two, it can and did “grow the pie” as Liz Truss said. It did allow a lot of people to become comfortable and it did grow the middle class and upper working class and allowed a lot of people from generations of struggling to genuinely work hard and be able to give more comfortable and better lives to them and their family - and if thar happens then the growing inequality between the corporate class and the middle and upper working classes doesn’t really matter because it’s causing most of the country to have better lives. But I think like technology or sporting achievement it operates on a bell curve - and you eventually get to a point where the corporate class get too rich and begin the squeeze the middle and upper working classes, because they’ve hoovered up most of the housing, because corporate classes have more and more of the economy sitting in bank accounts earning interest as opposed to the working and middle classes who spend more and keep it circulating. Or they’ve got more and more of a monopoly or oligarchy that take more power from the state. You see it in football or F1 - the quality of both massively improved when the sky money first came in, but eventually it just caused a much less competitive and meant the middle of the pack couldn’t really compete anymore. Covid was definitely a huge accelerator in that it’s allowed an oligarchy of tech companies to almost corner and control the world market - certainty the American market. And the richest companies and people have gone from being hundreds of millionaires or tens of billionaires to becoming trillionaires and richer than basically all countries but the US and China. Not to mention their control over data and information through stuff like Palantir and Twitter means Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are basically richer and more powerful than the countries of the United Kingdom, France, Germany or Japan nowadays. With regards to the surveillance state, 9/11 definitely does have part of that. But I think bad actors have just been clever in using emotional individual cases to shouting about “getting hard on crime and immigration” for votes and power (not just politicians, people like Musk and Thiel are at the forefront of this because they get so rich off it). I think a lot of people still naively feel that “getting tough on crime and immigration” still means just hiring extra police or border guards in 2026 in an era where AI can find in a couple of minutes every drunk or half asleep and on auto-pilot Google search and post online a person made from 20 years ago they don’t even remember and present them out of context in a couple of minutes and employers or authorities can make decisions based on these, or it actually meaning more biometric checks for everyone, more facial recognition technology and AI driven cameras in normal streets, it means hotels sharing data with everyone’s stay, it means health services sharing data with everyone’s visits to the gp or hospital, it means making it easier to go through everyone’s bank transactions etc. I also think so much of the surveillance state actually comes through private companies and so much of our media that predicted these things predicted them to come through the government which is why it has been easier to enact that expected. Most people understandably have scepticism towards too much government power, but not enough people have had enough scepticism towards mega-corporate power as well, which has meant it was easier for this to all come through fighting for deregulation and corporations be able to create these massive data sharing and mining schemes like Palantir. This is probably just rambling nonsense in 2026 though. Dunno how much of this will still look the same in 5 or 10 years

I used to have a theory that South Park getting popular in Europe was a big part of the importation of that very ultra-cynical American Libertarianism philosophy of “let’s just attack all sides of the debate and not stand for anything but just stand against everything, because caring about anything is for losers” to Europe but idk.

I actually see the 2008 financial crisis as the big “before and after” moment and think 9/11 didn’t really have as much of an impact as other 21st century moments like the financial crisis, Orban/Balsanaro/Erdogan starting the age of populism, brexit, Covid, Ukrainian war etc.

I think one of the huge problems with the social internet is that it has produced a society of an insane amount of cynicism about everything that goes way beyond “healthy scepticism” and “don’t believe everything you read” into “be cynical of everything” and “don’t believe anything you read.” People don’t take people earnestly or on their word anymore and so assume everyone is performing and always have to find some terrible angle or noticeably cruel take on everything. In a way, I think the social internet has almost caused a lot of adults and thus much of politics and society to regress to being 13 year old teenagers again - that kind of everyone is fake or sheeple, you can’t just like that band/book/film, you have to be a poser or un-earnestly faking it attitude. And that kind of teenage attitude of assuming everyone else are just sheeple always just performing has really gotten its claws into politics and society over the past 10-15 years. It is a hard balance to get right though - a balance of healthy scepticism without spilling over into cynicism - but I think a lot of the social internet is kind of geared towards pushing that healthy scepticism way too far.

I think green is genuinely gettable though tbf although tough. Purple is too Americanised that I think you have to be very lucky to get it as a non American

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”Education” and ”should be taught in schools” feel like a very long term solution though. The population is old and getting older, the median average aged voter started school at the end of the 1970s. A good proportion of the voting public were in school in the 1950s. Even if you started teaching things in school tomorrow it’s take half a century to properly influence voter habits and god knows what the AI slop-ified world looks like then. There’s a half decent chance that by then AI has mapped and understood human brain chemistry and AI can do things to get humans to make decisions without the human knowing they’re being programmed to make that decision with 99% success rate.

It’s just like anything in late stage capitalism mixed with the age of social media - it always eventually leads to being all about the money which eventually leads to oligarchy where a small number of people have the majority of the money and soft power. It’s no longer about going to have a fun day out with your friends or family on a Saturday. It’s just a mirror of society and economy becoming broken in general since 2008.

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Worse than Akinbiyi

Yeah it’s usually attributed to Stalin and is a very well known quote I thought

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It’s because Trump’s party have become a cult of personality and he has papal infallibility where what he says *is* their party philosophy amongst his followers. Farage is the same, Reform MPs would just be saying what Farage says is our philosophy. I suspect Polanski could potentially do the same if he wanted.

Finished Operation Bounce House and really enjoyed it. Going to start Red Rising now. I borrowed the original trilogy from a friend.

Labour’s problem is their manifesto was all about what they weren’t going to do - they weren’t going to raise taxes, they weren’t going to rejoin the European single market, they weren’t going to cut pensions and sort out the real albatross round the neck in the benefits system instead of asylum hotels or disability benefits, because it was all about defending themselves against the Tory attack line. The problem is, with how we bounce from one crisis to another in the Age of Populism, 5 years in politics is a hell of a long time nowadays, much more than it was last time Labour were in government under Gordon Brown. now boxed themselves in and have now given themselves nothing to sell or any narrative to change that and they’ve boxed themselves off from many of the levers they could and should be using to respond to these crisis. I don’t see how a change of leader changes that, the fact is they’ve already trapped themselves with an extremely park-the-bus style defensive manifesto. Given Trump and the war in Ukraine, a closer relationship to Europe and rejoining Europe economically while building a military alliance would be an easy narrative to tell for example, it widely popular in polls and would probably gain them quite a lot of voters from Greens and LibDems, but they’ve ruled that out already, so they can’t do it. Given the rise in AI, proper regulation around AI to protect people’s jobs, mental health and well lives instead of this stupid growth at all costs strategy would probably be very popular, and would give an easy attack in Reform given how in bed they are with Trump and the tech oligarchs who want the safety nets around AI smashed, but they’ve already gone after this growth strategy where they were on about AI being the forefront of it. To me, I don’t see what a leadership change really changes given the party has already trapped itself with its manifesto and would require a new general election to really be able to unshackle themselves from the disastrous 2024 manifesto to be able create a narrative to sell, and well… they aren’t going to call an election for 3 years given how behind they are in the polls. They’re just ultimately going to have to hold on and hope events take over in the next 3 years (which they probably will given how we have a new once in a lifetime global crisis every 6 months nowadays).

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Yeah, as time has gone on, I’m convinced the social internet is the worst thing to happen to humanity. It was sold as making all our lives easier and us more prosperous but I’d bet that an average working or middle class European feel like their life is way shitter than it was in the mid-90s or even the mid-00s before social media when none of us really had internet access yet. Not necessarily their job or even personal economy, but how they feel day to day and moment to moment in the pit of their stomach. Regardless of the economic side - there’s way more mental health problems because of the constant barrage of bad news and manafactured perfect people to compare yourselves to, people are way more paranoid about saying the wrong thing or making a drunken or naive mistake and making yourself easily Googleable and therefore unemployable for life, personal data everywhere online, way more crap desk or retail jobs and nothing that gives you the satisfaction of actually making something, studies show people have way worse attention spans, way less friends and way less sex and romantic relationships these days because even dating and friendships have become fast food app culture and everyone is ****ing addicted (myself included so no judgement) because it was too profitable for tech companies to get us so addicted to the social internet (which incidentally is probably the single most addictive thing mankind have ever made and if it was a natural drug it’d be considered class A and thered be endless public health campaigns about cutting down online useage). And then to top it all off, most of us aren’t really better off than we would’ve been in the mid 90s, whilst the richest tech people have gone from being hundreds of millionaires to being trillionaires and the richest tech companies are now richer than the country of the UK. AI is going to be all this but 100 times worse too. Sadly, as the great philosopher Quasar once said: “You can’t un-lick a butthole that’s already been licked.”

I think green and blue are gettable today but purple and yellow are absolutely brutal Have no idea how that is a yellow category.

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