> when the swivel-eyed loons claim that the COVID lockdowns were a pretense to control everyday people while rich people swanned around having a lovely time, they’re not entirely wrong.
I don't really believe that it's a "pretense" but rather that people in power tend to take every opportunity to keep and bolster their power and freedom and care less about the power and freedom of the already disadvantaged.
Something being leveraged for somebody's advantage doesn't mean that it was created for that advantage.
It's not even that. Plenty of everyday people "swanned around having a lovely time" too; or at least, didn't think the restrictions should apply to them. Sure, in some of the cases he cites there's rank hypocrisy involved that should be called out, and the burden of the restrictions impacted the poor and underpivilged relatively more harshly and some leeway can be given there. But to imply it was just the former is bollocks.
Yeah, although the stuff I saw first-hand around vaccine distribution in affluent/elite circles was mind blowing.
People found so many ways of gaming the system and getting the vaccine instead of the prioritized elderly/immune-compromised. I knew rich college kids with parents who had ownership stakes in elder care companies so they got the shot early, etc. etc., in SF many seemed to get hold of the special codes that were given to communities with low vaccine uptake, etc.
A few of my friends also got the vaccine much earlier than they should, but they aren't rich or well connected. They merely lied about having preexisting conditions.
To be fair, if you are living in SF and a commentator on HN (as I assume you are), then your friends are certainly among the 1% richest people in the world and likely top 5% in the US.
> But to imply it was just the former is bollocks.
It is epistemically unsound, as is calling it bollocks.
Because of this, herding sheep is easy, thus I am hyper-vigilant about identifying potential sheep herding maneuvers, of which there were many during the whole covid debacle.
Which again is a charge of hypocrisy by the most powerful, and is a legitimate charge, but doesn’t mean the swivel eyed loons have a point.
Non swivel eyed non loons have been pointing out the hypocrisy of the govt and those in charge for a long time. Even the Cummings example created outrage and if it wasn’t for the UK being led by probably the most unethical PM in its history, he would likely have gotten into far more trouble (or more likely wouldn’t have acted so blatantly illegally). Ironically, the reason Boris Johnson was PM was entirely due to Brexit, which the swivel eyed loons at least disproportionately, if not all of them, likely voted for.
Person A tells Persons B and C that they're under a grave threat if they step outside and must stay indoors. B and C then observe A strolling around outside without a care in the world. B says, "A is a hypocrite, and they must have been lying to me! I'm not going to follow their edicts" and resumes living life outside as normal. C says, "A is a hypocrite! They're behaving just like that degenerate B and refusing to take this deadly threat seriously!"
Who is the "swivel eyed loon" in this scenario again?
Trying to read people's minds and intentions and looking for a master plan, rather than seeing coordination problems and simple human weakness and fault is obviously the main source of conspiracy theories. It's so hard for humans not to try to find a sensible pattern and accept that not everything make sense.
The fundamental problem is that structural incentives often look exactly like a master plan (which is why we sometimes call incentives an "invisible hand")
> Trying to read people's minds and intentions and looking for a master plan, rather than seeing coordination problems and simple human weakness and fault is obviously the main source of conspiracy theories.
Sure there is often times a plan, it typically doesn't deserve the term "master plan" though and certainly doesn't deserve to be associated with the images the term invokes. Plans are usually badly though-out, watered-down for compromises and ignore second order effects. In addition, the things people latch on to were clearly not part of the plan. There wasn't a COVID lockdown, so that the guy in charge was able to visit a castle without other visitors there. At the risk of practicing mind-reading myself, I am pretty sure that visiting the castle didn't come up at any stage of the decision-making process that led to a lockdown. The cast visit wasn't part of the master plan. Like Gavin Newsom's visit to the French Laundry wasn't part of the plan for the lockdown in California. It's just shit leadership and inability to lead by example.
All these things are usually bad compromises that came out of some group or committee that's not nearly as homogenous and aligned as conspiracy theorists like to believe.
Edit: what is Agenda 2023? Google shows me links to places wehre I can buy a planner for 2023.
If I tell people not to go out "for their safety", and then I go out, it is reasonable to question whether I believe those rules are actually necessary to keep people safe. It is also reasonable to question whether I understand how normal human nature is going to react to the revelation that I didn't keep the rules that I myself made, and whether I understand how pervasive cameras are these days.
But for it to be a pretext or pretense for the restrictions, the powerful would have to benefit in some way from the rest of the folks abiding by those restrictions. I don't think the world got more enjoyable for the rich just because the rest of us were hunkering down. They might have not played by the same rules, but the didn't get an outsized benefit - only less encumbered.
The wealthy and powerful have read their Marx, and understand that for them to maintain their station requires that the vast majority of humanity be pressed into ever-worsening material conditions. What better way to get everyone to accept a lower standard of living, worse education for their children, and amped up surveillance and restrictions on their movements, than to sell it as a pandemic response that's all "for their own good"? The part where they forced huge swaths of small/medium sized firms out of business and consolidated their market share for huge corporations was just a bonus.
Nobody but Marxists read him and take him seriously. Their theory of mind are all universally godawful in that they expect everyone richer than them to think like a cross between a mustache twirling villain using their twisted and stunted vocabularies.
This is a case where the privilege of wealth and political connections is made starkly clear by contrast. Part of the point of accumulating wealth and connections is to insulate yourself from the oppressive grind that is the daily life of the rabble. This is the way it is every day, regardless of whether there is 'pretense' for it or not. We're just largely blind to until something happens to draw the eye to it. (see also: 2009 financial crisis)
> A reason or excuse given to hide the real reason for something.
> That which is assumed as a cloak or means of concealment; something under cover of which a true purpose is hidden; an ostensible reason, motive, or occasion; a pretense.
The main thing, though, is that we need to figure out how to validate that these people have spotted some bullshit, while helping them to expand their context. It is entirely possible that it's far too late for any such meliorations, and it is necessarily going to have to take to the streets before we bring it back to the table. I hope not.
What leads them down these toxic paths is that they lack the full context; they have been primed on decades of Pelican Brief X Files Conspiracy turds to not trust certain parties, but somehow they've missed that there are worse parties than those.
There is your problem, right there. You still think in "we" vs "them" in 2023, and express yourself with an air of superiority towards people with a different world-view than you.
Ahh yes, I forgot that we are all actually just one freefloating being and all divisions are mere hallucinations brought on by the hangups of society, man.
> I don't really believe that it's a "pretense" but rather that people in power tend to take every opportunity to keep and bolster their power and freedom and care less about the power and freedom of the already disadvantaged.
My take is that the rich and powerful get special treatment and never have to follow the rules so why would they during a pandemic. Its just that it was a bit more noticeable then during their rule flouting during normal times.
that's really what the article was saying. that, yes, there's a thing, and that the powerful will work to use it to their advantage, and the swivel eyed loons _notice_ that and start constructing wingnut theories and reaction against it.
(regardless of what the crisis says on the tin, or the response formally says on the tin, this is a thing and the wingnuts aren't... entirely wrong in noticing that there's something off about the world)
This form of argument by the author breaks down very quickly.
Rich people get away with a lot of shit poor people don’t. Theft, scams, murder, genocide, illegal wars, etc.
The equivalent of this argument would be that locking people up for murder is simply a pretext for rich people controlling the masses because they rarely if ever get caught whereas the poor and ordinary are locked up for it all the time, therefore those advocating for legalizing murder are not really wrong.
This is essentially a tl;dr for the article, but phrased as if it's a rebuttal.
> The antilockdown movement exploited the legitimate anger of everyday people about elites ignoring the rules they set for the rest of us. These everyday people were then mobilized to fight for the rights of factory owners, logistics companies and other large corporations to murder their workers with a policy of “let ’er rip.”
The idea that continuing with life as normal -- especially various forms of essential social contact and economic activity -- amounts to "murdering workers" when a somewhat bad respiratory virus is going around was one of the most risible bits of nonsense pushed into widespread adoption during the COVID response. Just because Doctorow may not mind extended social isolation with only his computer to keep him company, does not mean that everyone else was somehow uninformed if they weren't agitating for the same restrictions to be applied to themselves. Life is more than the pathologically assiduous avoidance of death.
People in power created the lockdown policies, and told their subjects they were necessary because of a uniquely threatening contagion which everyone needed to avoid until vaccines could be distributed. They then carried on with their own lives as normal, indicating no fear of the virus on their own part whatsoever. Doesn't that suggest the rationale for the lockdowns was a pretense from the start?
Although, Boris Johnson, whose misdemeanors Doctorow somewhat misrepresents, nearly died of COVID—he was hospitalized and on a ventilator. He understood the risks.
(And, an irrelevant aside while I'm on the topic. Cummings, rat though he is, did not 'drive 275 miles to Durham to check in on his family' as Doctorow claims. He drove there to take his autistic child, who needs round-the-clock care, to his parent's house because he believed he and his wife were infected. There was no real excuse for the Barnard Castle trip though)
A lot of people loony or not are terrified of international organizations and non-democratic foundations and networks forcing down a global system of governance against their wishes and local desires, there are all sorts of reasons for this and so these people see the '15 minute' cities as a step into being less autonomous or able to travel freely which there is some truth to. The bigger problem though is that we are in a time where even the US politicians seem to defer decisions to international bodies and try to get them down stream to voters, and people are recognizing this and reacting to it with the only power and limited information they can muster.... So, yes, silly protest or loony or whatever, these people are fearful of a very real thing taking place all over the world and announced widely by the people propagating it.
There is a wider issue here where some people value individual liberty and some people value order, environment or public health more. For some people seeing the WEF declare you will own nothing and eat insects, all sorts of folks saying you wont drive cars, etc etc - people can see this as an amazing step forward in [environment or equity in this case] - other people see this as a totalitarian step into removing their autonomy.
It's good to keep in mind that discarding grievances as being 'woke' or 'conspiracy minded' or apparently 'swivel-eyed loonish' (this term tickles me a lot as a non UK person lol) is a good way to feel right and morally sound but the end results for society at large will probably be less than exciting.
But - outside of performative activism and spleen-venting - do they have any interest in sustained or intelligent actions which might address a few of the problems?
On paper, the UK's Liberal Democratic Party sounds like the perfect place for people alarmed by a creepy, authoritarian state. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Democrats_(UK)#Ideolog... ) Wikipedia says the Liberal Dem. Party had under 75,000 members in 2021 (a touch over 0.1% of the UK's population). The next UK general election - where their nearly-all-powerful Parliament will be elected - must happen by 28 Jan 2025.
Anyone up for actually doing stuff?
EDIT: Yes, the LD's have at least as much of a "Faithless Elector" problem as any political party. How much of that is due to their party having a micro-membership, and the voters having no attention spans nor memories? Vs. (example) back in the "golden era" of America's National Rifle Association - the NRA kept "forever" records on how every congressman voted on every bill of interest to the NRA, and gave their loyal members "scorecards" on the candidates before every election. NRA Membership was ~1% of America's population...but Congressmen who didn't want to become ex-Congressmen generally thought very, very hard before they voted against the NRA on anything related to guns.
The problem with the LibDems is the gap between what they say and what they do. The reason they are in such dire straits is that when they got a sniff of power and joined a coalition with the Tories, they abandoned a number of key election promises and royally pissed off their core vote.
(And when they were punished in the polls for this, their leader quit and got a job as Facebook's amoral bullshitter in chief.)
Plus, the LibDems support all the amoral creepy shit, anyway. Unfortunately, it's got cross-party support, as has the Online Safety Bill.
I don't get why we put up with political parties at all... is it to have somebody to blame, somebody who is not ourselves? Because, if it wasn't so, we would enact direct democracy, and the next time that a lobby group wants to pocket a politician, it would have to pocket each and every single citizen...which I guess they could do by paying voluntary taxes...
> I don't get why we put up with political parties at all...
For two reasons:
First, because politics is an ecosystem, and political parties are much stronger than unorganized political actors, so they outcompete and win. Your effectiveness is multiplied tremendously if you have an organized group which can fundraise, make small compromises among its members to reach common goals, scan membership to find compelling leaders, etc. Unorganized political actors have no chance against parties, and so they adapt (by becoming parties themselves) or die.
Second, because "political parties" are just a fact of gathering large numbers of humans: they will always have different opinions, and form tribes and cliques with like-minded people. If you don't have explicit parties, you will have hidden, implicit, internal ones, and that is much worse. See The Tyranny of Structurelessness, or alternatively one-party states like China, which still do have political factions, because having political factions is something people naturally do, but hide these behind the opacity of the CCP, leading to much less transparent decision-making.
If we had direct democracy in the UK, immigration would be banned, Brexit would have happened in the 1980s, and murderers and child molesters would be hanged.
> You basically have to choose the least bad options.
Do you? I choose not to vote because I refuse to participate in a charade of false consensus. If you pick the lesser of two evils, you are still picking evil.
The obvious -- yet never stated -- reason voter turnout is so bad in the United States is that the candidates offered are such garbage.
In the case that the greater of two evils wins, you are then complicit.
The world isn't perfect. There will always be issues with candidates, because the world is messy and complex. If you chose not to vote for the lesser of two evils, you leave more opportunity for the _greater_ to succeed.
I get entirely what you mean, I just consider it naive utopianism. Dreams without any plan are just delusions.
The system is going to continue on, for the near future at least. If you've got some plan to fix 'the current shitshow', do that, _while making the best out of the current shitshow_.
You say you are refusing to eat dog shit. You're not. You're just letting society decide which shit you eat, without putting your vote in. The better, or worse, of two evils is still going to be elected. You're still going to be part of that system unless you're entirely off grid and self sufficient.
Yeah, I've got the same question, and I see the same trend in American political issues. There's an obvious problem, and the left-leaning want to try to solve it by either increasing power and control of one (usually governmental) group or decreasing the power and control of a group (like the police). The right leaning ones protest this desire, but tend to not provide any ideas or solutions at all. They claim the problem is unsolvable, or not a problem, or often that it doesn't even exist.
I get the paranoia, but where are your solutions? Wouldn't it be more effective to instead come up with a fix that you prefer?
> The right leaning ones protest this desire, but tend to not provide any ideas or solutions at all.
I think we can all look at places like Florida to see what the right has in mind, and it certainly isn't reducing the size or intrusiveness of government.
It would be nice if these policies could be part of the campaigns, rather than just ranting against the other party's plan. Let's be upfront about possible policies and compare those. I get that things might change as rubber hits the road, but typically we get heavily watered-down versions of proposals and don't start out with nothing to reason about to begin with and then get the policy.
My point is that things are happening right now in Florida, and the guy in charge of Florida is the one the GOP establishment apparently wants as their Presidential candidate next year. Florida is, therefore, pretty close to what the GOP's vision for the future looks like, were the GOP in charge of the whole country. It couldn't really get any clearer.
From the amount of Ted Kascynski memes I see circle around the right wing internet, I'd probably start paying more attention to what they're actually saying without the filter of partisan bloggers.
I actually don't agree about the point you make about american politics. I think the left wing "solutions" are broadcasted on entertainment and media channels a lot louder where as the right wing "solutions" are generally silo'd and not propagated in a "mainstream" fashion (or just to be lampooned) so the perception is one side loudly demanding things and the others simply protesting it.
The spectrum of opinions and solutions from people on both sides seems to be massive at a grassroots level but there are massive interests involved in the media distilling them into two camps of people with zero nuance.
Re-shoring manufacturing in the US to eliminate the environmental impact of china/india and the shipping industry is one I've personally heard to reduce our environmental impact from conservative Americans.
This isn't just my perspective from media, but from living in a city with a very conservative base (Colorado Springs). I've seen very little political action from conservatives that wasn't reactionary and to the tone of "actually, we don't want anything to change, anywhere at all, unless it means legally enforcing my religious ideals".
When it comes to major issues like "how do we handle this virus?" I haven't seen any answers at all from the right other than "we don't want anything the other side of the fence wants".
How does the right plan to handle many of the largest problems? Food monoculture? Environmental problems? Wealth inequality? Racial inequality?
I live in a pool of conservatism, and the answer is always "what's the problem? My life is good."
Wealth inequality: reducing regulatory capture and ease of doing business to encourage more competition and wealth across all levels of industry.
Food monoculture: reducing globalization of trade and exports to focus on local farming and agriculture
Environmental problems: reducing globalization of trade and exports to reduce shipping and much worse pollution and environmental damage in countries of origin (while also promoting manufacturing here to help with wealth inequality)
Racial inequality: of what?*
*edit now that I re-read it, I mean what particular race and inequality are we addressing, there are plenty and there is no blanket solution.
It helps by putting more emphasis on growing things native to a region, rather than feeding the entire world on corn, rice, wheat, dairy, pork, beef, and chicken.
Those are reasonable approaches. You must interact with more reasonable conservatives than I do. The ones I interact with regularly tend to worship the rich and reject any approach that involves any change at all.
As far as "racial inequality" goes, it's loaded and difficult. I disagree with the common approaches I've heard on both sides (the left tends to push for an oversimplified hypercorrection, which causes different sets of problems). It's like cancer, in that it's often lumped into a single category, but it's actually a huge set of problems without a single solution. Most of the conservatives I've talked to reject that any inequality exists at all.
What you are talking about is what I'd really consider to be "true conservatism", but in my interactions, a lot of real life conservatives I've talked to sound more like 4chan trolls. Maybe I need to get out of this city.
> But - outside of performative activism and spleen-venting - do they have any interest in sustained or intelligent actions which might address a few of the problems?
Well, that would like under the purview of your conundrums of political science, not stuff for the hoi polloi. You don't want a tyranny of the majority, but - I believe this is the point being made - just dismissing popular concerns which have at least a grain of truth will bite you in the arse and take down not just your one pet project, but everything else even vaguely connected.
Ultimately here that means solving some thornier problems, because it is an amazing but accurate stereotype these days that the person riding a bike in most cities is more privileged than the person driving. The former could afford a nice place in the city, which is way more than the cost of car ownership - and almost certainly relied on nepotism in some way. To fix that, alternative transit to suburbs NEED to exist, even in the face of negligent or outright malicious government. Accommodation in cities NEEDS to be cheaper, something I'm not sure has ever happened without urban decay and collapse. And lastly, crime, in cities and on transit, NEEDS to be controlled at relatively low levels - yes, even if the perpetrators are minorities. I have to really strongly disagree with the idea that automation makes the law less fair. That's a cheap shot, the progressive's equivalent of "think of the children". High crime areas are not romantic anti-racist utopias where the downtrodden mix rap with ceilidhs. They are shit, they are devastating to any real investment and growth, they hold no opportunity whatsoever to any decent person of any ethnicity, and discussion of policing shouldn't ignore that.
> Ultimately here that means solving some thornier problems, because it is an amazing but accurate stereotype these days that the person riding a bike in most cities is more privileged than the person driving. The former could afford a nice place in the city, which is way more than the cost of car ownership - and almost certainly relied on nepotism in some way.
During the pandemic SF closed a section of Great Highway, a road that runs along the ocean in the Sunset district, so people could get out and exercise on it and not have to get close to others. Now, Great Highway is also one of the fastest ways to go north-south through the area. I met one guy who lived in Sunset who was welding up caltrops to throw on the road if it was reopened to car traffic. Surely those noble caltrops would know better than to puncture the tires of a single mother driving in from out of town to work at his local coffee shop, though. Talk about privilege.
The UK has the same problem as the US: it's effectively a two-party system, with a majority of the votes going to the large Tory and Labour block. For example, in the 2019 election 11.5% voted for LibDem, and instead of the 74 seats they'd have gained in a proportionally fair system as the German Bundestag, they got 11 of 650.
> On paper, the UK's Liberal Democratic Party sounds like the perfect place for people alarmed by a creepy, authoritarian state.
They were pro lockdown (even after the basis was undermined in 2021) and gain most of their MPs from local issues such as promising to stop the building of housing estates etc.
They have no political agenda that is in anyway related to their historical basis
> The thing is, the UK government has a long history of abusing this kind of power. The Metropolitan London police ran a 40-year covert operation to infiltrate, track, and disrupt trade union organizers and activists, from students to Members of Parliament. The Met also colluded with large construction firms to maintain a secret blacklist of union organizers who were denied employment and had their lives ruined.
And yet, people right here on this platform routinely imply that there's no risk of such technology being abused (e.g. [1] but that's far from the only time I've had to read such hot takes)...
> Our computers and phones – often devices that we ourselves were expected to pay for – were enlisted to the corporate IT system and then enshittified with bossware that spies on our keystrokes, plunders our filesystems, monitors our network activity, and for some workers, watches and listens to them constantly through their devices’ cameras and microphones.
Corporate owned devices are one thing (and bad enough), but who the hell onboards their personal devices onto corporate MDMs? If corporate wants me to be reachable out of working hours they better provide me a corporate phone.
You've got it wrong - he explains how employers use remote work as a pretext to introduce surveillance!
And he definitely has a point there. The worst amount of bullshit (keyloggers, screen capture) are illegal here in Europe under labour law but completely legal in wide parts of the US.
Generally on board with the author, but this didn’t ring as true:
> Oyster payment cards are virtually impossible to use anonymously
You can just buy them with cash from the machines, right? Isn’t it a rare example of a public service in the UK that does not involve a bunch of surveillance?
How many different anonymous oyster cards will you use.
Likely one card, for years? At best it's pseudonymous not anonymous - a dataset identified by a GUID not a name.
That card has a unique id, and so a large data history attached to it. Commuting habits will be evident in the data. Should the person who uses the card need to be identified, it won't be that hard to find a clear image of them using the card to enter or exit at an otherwise quiet station in that history.
The frustrating thing about Doctorow's articles is that he makes good points, but always supports them with anecdotes or hypotheticals that make it seem only minorities have anything to worry about (and the occasional labour union).
No mention of the overbearing hate-speech laws that threaten seven years jail time for something as vague as "stirring up hatred", even within one's home [1,2], the foster parents whose foster children were taken away for being members of UKIP [3], the police investigation launched targeting "It's okay to be white" posters on public lamp-posts [4], or police recording "non-crime hate incidents" by children, that will become part of their background checks [5].
It's too much lying by omission for my taste, despite strongly agreeing with the overt part of his message.
[3] A couple have had three foster children removed from their care because they belong to the UK Independence Party. - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20474120
Well, your comment is going to be flagged for mentioning these things, just like his article would get flagged if it did the same. I am new to this person but he seems intelligent, and intelligent people understand that the plights of minorities garner more sympathy than the plights of the (western) majority. He's walking a fine line already; he's advocating for not entirely writing off the views of disagreeable people, which is pretty much the exact opposite of what everyone in power wants us to do.
Maybe I'm just being optimistic, but I think that if he really does care about the examples in the article, he cares about the ones you listed too, and he just knows it's not politically correct to mention them.
I predict that by the time that happens we will have stopped using the term "minority" and will have replaced it with a new term that serves the same purpose.
It's a a great sentiment to have in hindsight but will only take another crisis for comfortable people to get rid of their "common ground" and peacetime understanding of others and be happy with whatever eroding of freedoms are needed for the greater good. We will see it happen again.
The real question therefore should not be "lets find common ground now its peacetime and be friends" but "how can we be resilient to not be enemies in the next war?".
It's a difficult and deep question which requires a kind of secure moral framework to operate in.
Not far off reality. And it is palpable through another pathway that played out in real time, memeticly communicated as "the conspiracy you are suggesting isn't happening, but even if it did here's why it's a good thing" [1] which is precisely what happened in the UK regarding the 15 minute cities plans.
Another point in regard to numerous things like this is that those who promote them do so largely undemocratically. They use issues that are seen as above politics (e.g. climate), then apply some very tenuous statistics that could be undermined by a child to promote them and apply them in ways that will have no measurable benefit to the vocal goal they articulated.
Living in the middle of this new politics one gets a sense further that the goal is not stated. Tenuous evidence based policies are repeatedly implemented to erode people's standards of living and their ease of living. Preferring instead punishment and self flagellation from the citizenry. All with the more tangible side effect of extracting hundreds of millions of pounds from them.
Not helped that local politics especially in the UK is fundamentally broken. People are voting on modern day religious grounds, not for policies, leaving a vocal minority of usually highly unempathetic and emotionally questionable people making impactful decisions about day to day life for millions of citizens.
One also gets a sense of civil society as we have known it in the UK for a few hundred years of ending. The reasons are many and the actors motivations hard to articulate simply because all they want is to destroy that which currently exists; with no plan for that which replaces it
> One also gets a sense of civil society as we have known it in the UK for a few hundred years of ending
British history over the last few hundred years is underlaid by dissent and violent. We've had a civil war, war between England, Ireland and Scotland, regicide, restoration and a whole mass of protesting groups: luddites, levellers, diggers, ranters, suffragettes too name a few, and massive social upheavals caused by defeudalisation and then industrialisation/urbanisation.
To be clear, I also believe that the UK is getting more, ermm, 'agitated' than it has been since WW2, but IMO this is reverting to type rather than something that has never been seen before.
The English civil war had ended 370 years ago. I choose the number 300 for a reason
> To be clear, I also believe that the UK is getting more, ermm, 'agitated' than it has been since WW2, but IMO this is reverting to type rather than something that has never been seen before.
The upheavals of the past had relatively little conferred interference on the everyday lives of most people due to the structure of society.
Modern upheavals are visited upon us with unprecedented latency and at a granularity that's far more effecting. Reading contemporary accounts of the restoration you'd barely think anything had happened
I remember when MKUltra was just some nutty idea passed around by, well, swivel-eyed loons. The idea that oil companies knew about climate change before the Summer of Love and we're ready to gaslight us for a few decades? Gibbering madness.
I don't really care if the people noticing (let's call them Noticers) if they blame aliens or the Knights Templar (to make a nod to Umberto Eco), they've picked up on something.
I ran into this in the real world the other day. Every year, the university I work at has raised parking pass prices (while slashing parking, but that's another problem). We've gone from $80 to $260 in the last 5 years. I recently bought a 2016 Hyundai Sonata hybrid with 180,000 miles. I found out that the university offers a 15% discount to parking passes for "low emission vehicles", presumably as some sort of incentive to fight climate change or something. They referenced a list of low emission vehicles that qualify, created by a third party called LEED:
I made the mistake of scrolling through this list. On the list: 2022 M850i xDrive Coupe 4.4L V8. A vehicle of pure excess, entirely unnecessary, getting 20mpg while transporting like two people. Not on the list: my 1988 Ford Bronco with a 2.9L V6 that can haul cargo, move people and dead animals, drive off-road and gets ~20 mpg.
So in the eyes of the university and LEEDS list people, it would be better for me to ditch my perfectly functional 1988 vehicle and instead purchase a brand new 2022 V8 sports coupe. This is literally just a poor person tax.
It will end in the same way Cash4Clunkers did in the US: Poorly and hardly trying to hide the fact it's a government subsidy for the automotive industry at the expense of poor and middle class.
Exactly. ULEZ allows euro 6 diesels at 4-6L, but disallows euro 4 diesels at 1-2L. The emissions are worse by volume for the newer car.
If ULEZ and CAZ were serious about air quality they’d tax based on per passenger emissions, which would end up taxing the rich people in excessive luxury cars.
I mean neither of those cars would be on the road if we were serious about climate change, right?
I’m slightly confused by the existence of that list, USBGC provides LEED certification to buildings, not cars, right? Is it possible that someone at your university was tricked?
Oops, cut off the quote too early, it was in response to "Is it possible that someone at your university was tricked?"
The list is real and it is part of a LEED standard. Technically it's compiled by ACEEE and just referenced by USGBC, but it's a real thing and not trickery.
I don't totally disagree, but it's tough to imagine a scenario where building and driving a new electric vehicle of the same capability as my 1988 Bronco is more climate friendly simply continuing to drive my Bronco a few thousand miles a year.
There must be more to the Universities use of that list. The list appears to rate all vehicles on fuel economy and emissions. It does not look like a list of "better" vehicles. The Ford Bronco Sport is on the list. The list only goes as far back as 1999, which is why earlier Bronco's aren't on the list. The BMW 850i is shown as having being among the worst in the "Green Score" column.
So, did the Uni specify that their discount applied to vehicles which got better than a certain "Green Score" according to that list? If not, then everybody is eligible for the discount, even Ford Bronco's if they're newer than 1999.
If you have a Ford with the 2.9L V6 still going after all these years that is impressive. Between the oil pump only making 6 psi at maximum RPM and the cylinder head's including a design that was very likely to crack they didn't last long out on the road.
Also keep in mind, the emissions of pollutants is much higher from this older engine while the emission of CO2 is probably lower.
> ULEZ and CAZ mostly force poor people to spend money on newer cars.
I don't think there's any reason to believe they mostly do this. Mostly what they do is encourage people to use public transport to get to areas well-served by public transport.
The initiative behind the ULEZ in particular is that it is a strong disincentive to owning/using a car at all in these areas, not just one that happens to be an old banger. Doubly so when considered on top of the congestion charge.
Luxury/sport vehicles tend to be new enough to be at least euro 6, despite having very large engines and often fewer seats, thus much higher volume of emissions per passenger compared to a small older car. Also, the fixed fee hardly matters for rich people, so even old luxury/sports cars are de facto exempt.
Taxis are exempt, despite plenty being diesels older than even euro 4.
Plenty of delivery vans with significant emissions are de facto exempt because the fee is negligible when compared to other expenses.
If the fee was at least a percentage of income/revenue or a percentage of the value of the vehicle, it would be a bit less bad. If it also scaled measured emissions by passenger instead of using the flawed emission standards, then it might even become useful. If it also included free vehicle replacements funded with revenue from the taxes on the excessive cars, then it might even be good.
Isn't that the point of those laws? It isn't royalty, politicians, or the wealthy drive around in 23 year old clunkers that can barely pass a road safety test. No one passes law like this and announces "The Queen of England herself will now have to replace her 1993 Toyota Corolla!"
"Here?" I don't know what you think you're saying; but you should not assume that you know me; who or where I am. Yeah there are lots of cars in London; there are even more people.
I see also you're throwing out random numbers (50% according to who? ) that even if true, don't directly relate to or contradict what I said - "households" are not "people", "people" are not the same stat as "poor people", car owners are not evenly distributed, and IDK why "Flatshare people" are something subhuman that you scorn and exclude from counts.
TfL have official information on this, it's not a random number.
I'm not doing your research for you. The poor and middle class do drive in London. If you think otherwise you're simply mistaken, even in a back of the envelope sense. There are over 2 million cars in London, I don't know who you think owns them if not ordinary people.
I didn't say that "it doesn't happen" just that it's not prevalent.
> There are over 2 million cars in London
Did you notice that the number of people in London is a multiple of that? "ordinary people" is broad, do you think that it varies within that, and varies in sync with disposable income, or is evenly distributed?
> "Londoners are more likely to own a car if they live in outer London, live in an area with poor access to public transport, have a higher income, have a child in the house,
and are of Western European nationality."
have a higher income, household car access rises as income increases, live out in the suburbs.
I think most people would be happier if they could drive less and had fewer cars to contend with while walking.
Forcing people to be pedestrians would be likely a significant improvement for their health and quality of life.
As an American in a major city, the alternative sucks. I'm forced to be a driver, car costs eat a significant portion of my income, my neighborhood doesn't even have sidewalks between the residences and shops (which are across a highway that has a cross walk with no sidewalk leading up to it), and I end up having to drive at least 5 hours every week just to work and get my kids to and from school. This increases pollution in my city and comes with a regular risk of injury and death from a car accident, which is one of the leading causes of preventable death.
I'd rather be forced to be a pedestrian than a driver. Having the choice would really be great.
There are a ton of pedestrian friendly cities in the US. Is it less viable/desirable to move to a new town than it is to force poor people back onto the bus?
There really aren't, proportionally. Most of the cities are not reasonable to live in without owning a car.
And I'd rather if the bus was an option at all. The bus is expensive and unreliable in most US cities. Getting somewhere by car that takes 20 minutes can take hours by bus due to scheduling. This is a stark contrast to London, which has an actual public transit system.
Maybe I'm biased by living in Colorado Springs, where it might be particularly bad, but cities with sprawling suburbs are usually terrible for living without a car, and the US has tons of suburbs.
proportionally, sure, but there are a lot of cities you can live without owning a car in the united states. Just about every metropolitan area and nearly any city over 150k people on the west coast seem to be navigable by at most a bike.
Point not without merit, but I’d say there are quite few pedestrian-friendly places in this country unless your standards for that are very low. Most pedestrian-friendly areas might be limited to a couple blocks downtown with a little or no decent non-luxury housing available.
I think adding more pedestrian-friendly places, or at least stopping building ones that are outright hostile to everyone but car-drivers, is very important.
Of course, master. Or lord. It won't happen again. Please don't take my computer, like you're going to take my car.
But seriously: I can not count the times in my life when people have been telling me the government should ban this or ban that, or force people to do this or that. Every time - without exception - those same people when asked if they will lead by example, they of course won't. No, they shouldn't give up their car, but the government should ban cars. No, they don't want to pay more taxes, but the government should double the taxes. No, they're not going to stop drinking, but the government should ban alcohol.
It's just a power fantasy, people imagining themselves banning or forcing this and that, while they are completely powerless in everyday life.
> No, the plan is to force poor people into becoming pedestrians,
Poor people in London already mostly do not own cars. And also they disproportionately suffer the negative effects of pollution from cars. (1)
If by "pedestrians" you mean people who get around on foot, on bicycles, on busses, on London Underground trains, on overground trains, in taxis, Minicabs and Ubers then sure, they are "pedestrians" .
In my case, if I needed a car I could arrange to buy one, but where would I put it, how would I secure it and what would I do with it? It would be nothing than an expressive source of hassle and worry. It's cheaper and less hassle to use busses to commute, cabs or ubers when I need to travel other short distances, rental cars a couple of times per year.
Groceries? There's a small shop in walking distance that way, and others in walking distance the other way, and a similar near the office, but the main shopping _comes to me_ not vice versa.
>The WEF’s plan for a “Great Reset” in which people “own nothing” by the year 2030 is, in fact, creepy.
I like Cory Doctorow: he's a rare case of doing a good job of critiquing the establishment liberals without playing to the resurgent paleoconservatives. But one thing I really don't like is when anyone puts something true next to something not-so-true and makes it a chore to pare apart the good information from the, hopefully, mistakes.
The "Great Reset" is a real WEF initiative. The idea of taking advantage of a crisis that killed millions of people to achieve some geopolitical objectives is indeed creepy.
However, the "own nothing" line was never officially endorsed by the WEF and owes its existence to an ill-advised essay by a Danish politician who has belonged to three different political parties (including both socialist and liberal) and might be charitably described as careerist. It should not appear in serious critique except when it is necessary to dispel misconceptions about it.
I think most people's introduction of the "own nothing" line was the "8 predictions for the world in 2030" video published by the WEF[1]. I think it's understandable for people seeing such a video to see it as endorsement of input from their "Global Future Councils".[2] This was also published in text form on their site[3] with reference to the Danish MPs essay, but I think most saw the video version.
Overall I think the whole thing is puff that was never really intended to be seriously considered, but I think there's some meaning in what is curated.
They're a think tank. They think up "concepts" and then rally influential people around them. Just like concept cars and high fashion, they don't intend to bring that stuff literally to reality, but it absolutely does mark out the direction in which they intend to move things.
Besides, this lenience of "don't take everything so literally" might equally be applied to whatever the swivel-eyed loons are saying, but somehow in that case any surface-level weirdness is seen as grounds to dismiss their subtler points entirely.
A fair correction. I was only aware of the essay; I tend to avoid watching videos whenever possible.
Notably, most of the other ideas in that video are also improbable: drone-delivery is not as easy as it sounds; multilateralism is hard; organ printing is extremely unlikely (growing in a vat has been pursued for decades but is still nascent); the displacement of the whole population of Africa seems more than a little hyperbolic; the widespread implementation of carbon taxes doesn't feel any closer (sadly); we are nowhere near sending humans to Mars or supporting long-term space residents; meat alternatives have yet to reach market acceptance (or meat-equivalent RPER). But one part is true: Western governments are feeling quite unstable lately.
The problem is the problem with a number of slogans: You can't really make a Big Pronouncement and then successfully walk it back. Nobody hears or cares about the walk-back, and the Big Pronouncement is what gets repeated.
> They’re not wrong. Just look at London, where a (again, perfectly sensible) system of “congestion charging” and “low-emissions zones”
Just wanted to point out that the rich in London see this as more of a tax. i.e. Poor people are banned from driving in London, whilst it has made no difference to the rich.
I knew someone who regularly sped in the bus lane, and saw the fines he got everyday as a fee for doing so.
Fines make no sense unless they're weighted against your taxes (though of course, the rich find ways around paying tax too).
This is ignoring the fact that the material basis for the 15 minute city people's complaints and the complaints of, for example, privacy advocates are not only completely different but irreconcilable. The right-wing complaints come from a wealthy, usually retired, small business/property-owning class threatened by the march of global capital consolidating away their footholds into economic growth and placing them or their children in the same bucket as the disgusting poors they've spent their entire lives campaigning to immiserate. They aren't mad about the fact that the systems of repression they're protesting against exist, they're mad that the systems want used against undesirables might be turned against them.
The surface-level rhetoric sounds vaguely similar, but look under the surface and you'll find that the people behind opposition to global capital from the right have less in common with the people who oppose it from the left than with their supposed shared enemy.
The Swivel-Eyed Loons usually cannot concisely articulate what they are mad at, but in my experience mass surveillance doesn't stand out as the main thing. When I see someone going off about 15 minute cities they're usually unhinged, unstructured and involve talking about about communism, socialism, George Soros, the Jewish faith, "wokeness" and all the current hot-button issues on the right.
If they really cared about mass surveillance they wouldn't roll it up with all sorts of other off-putting things that virtually guarantee the rest of us won't take them seriously. But my feeling is that they're not, they're just generally fucked off with various parts of modern-day life, possibly a bit bored and definitely a little too Online.
> I would love it if my local library or community group had a couple of floating drills that were of the sort that a contractor might use – a beautifully made, well-maintained work of art that would easily replace fifty minimum viable drills in my neighborhood, digitally tracked for routine maintenance and to gather telemetry that could feed into the next product design iteration to make its successors even better.
He would love this if the drill he were to borrow was (more or less) in as good of shape as his own is now. But why would that be so? Do you want to ride around in a bus that has the odor and cleanliness of the worst car you've ever seen on those gross-out subreddits?
If book lending libraries don't have to deal with this (and I concede that they mostly don't have to), then it is down to the fact that the vast majority of people are semi-illiterate quarterwits who wouldn't be caught near a book if they thought there were hundred dollar bills hidden between the pages.
It seems to me sometimes that the same people who have always used the "tragedy of the commons" as a counter-argument to any libertarianish comment I made are now turning around and wanting to force me to live that same tragedy of the commons. The pro-"you'll own nothing and like it" aren't very convincing to me, not even his "neighborhood drill" version. He's playing good cop to their bad cop, but the grift's still the same.
There was a tool lending library near where I grew up in England in the 1990s. There was also a toy library, where we borrowed toys for a month or so at a time.
I doubt either exists now, but I'm sure the buses do. They don't smell. The cleaning contract for the buses will have been outsourced to the lowest bidder, but they still do the job.
Tool lending libraries exist and function perfectly well - there are 3 or 4 in my city (the nearest is a... oh wait, 15 minute walk from my house.) They have tool maintenance and repair nights every month - I've attended and it's a great group of volunteers who donate time and work to build a community of people dedicated to helping others.
I also live in a city with one of the highest-rated public transit systems in the US. The buses don't smell and they're affordable and provide great jobs to thousands of city residents while making it possible to cross the city for $2.50 (or $5 for the entire day.)
And lastly, no one is talking about "forcing" you to do anything. You're welcome to own your own set of tools if you don't want to use the libraries (I own a set of my own, but it can be much smaller because I can always pop by the library for something I don't own.) The commons are opt-in, aside from the rare cases where they need to be protected from people who refuse to be a part of the community that cares for the commons.
Even if I were to take your anecdotes at face value... what makes you believe that scales?
We're not talking about a tool club with limited membership and everyone that wants to be part of it (and therefor quite likely behaves themselves). We're talking about doing that to an entire country, and dismantling some or all of the infrastructure that would allow others to "opt out" of such nonsense.
It's great that your public transit system is awesome and as clean as a hospital operating room with butt-massaging warmed-seat seating. I don't give a shit about the best public transit system... I'm worried about the worst. Personal experience shows me that in such cases, I'm much more likely to have to deal with the worst of X, than I ever am to deal with the best of X.
> And lastly, no one is talking about "forcing" you to do anything. Y
Yeh, they are. No one who's not a gullible cretin believes otherwise. That's just your propaganda strategy early on. But if we get to a point a few years from now where one of the advocates is frustrated in public and loses his cool, or where you've managed to neutralize some of the opposition, then the truth will come out. You just can't afford to be honest right now.
I even allow that you personally know nothing of the agenda, but that you're just parroting the party line, as a loyalist would. True believer, you can't even imagine that it would be anything other than the truth. That's even more pathetic.
> The commons are opt-in, aside from the rare cases where they need to be protected from people who refuse to be a part of the community that cares for the commons.
These commons are meant to crowd out the non-commons until nothing else exists. And no one with any sense believes otherwise.
>He would love this if the drill he were to borrow was (more or less) in as good of shape as his own is now. But why would that be so?
Exactly. I would also like the Neighbourhood Makita toolbox. But then, who has the incentives to make this work? Who tracks down the person that keeps it for two months? Who sources this stuff? Who sets the budget? What else is there? A community gym? Well, top quality stuff is thousands, and there are many kinds of gym - weightlifting, gymnastics, boxing... What other resources would you want?
There's no way any of this could happen and actually be good. It's just... thermodynamically going to end up crap. There are so many ways for a commons system to be shit, and only one way for it to be good.
I have the "Neighbourhood Makita toolbox" today: Max across the street is into woodworking and lends his tools freely & happily rents you his time for the price of a beer or two. David will let you pull your car into his garage for an oil change because he has a nice car lift. I'm less useful, but lift my share of heavy things & set my share of fence posts and am always around when their computers act up.
When I was younger I grew up in a rural area with decent poverty, and this went even deeper. Farmers knew they could each get a small mower that takes forever to clear their field, or could pool their cash and share one big PTO-driven Bush Hog that did the job better & faster. There wasn't any worry about "who keeps it nice": you washed it and sharpened the blades if needed when you were done because you know your neighbor washed it and sharpened the blades when he was.
Is the rub that Cory talks about "the library" being the source, giving a vision of some faceless Other going to a big building downtown and renting the drill in exchange for their library card, nothing else, with no incentive to keep it nice for the next person? Maybe that's it; I'd argue, however, that a 15-minute city implies more libraries serving fewer people, so the Other isn't faceless, it's Max or Dave.
Yeah, I'm also surprised that folks here seem so pessimistic about building a community that supports each other. It's not a political stance, to help your neighbor.
Maybe "the library" concept reeks too much of socialism for the average individualistic American.
But the tool library near me is a group of old guys who volunteer to run it out of a church basement. No faceless Other, just a community of people who want to work with others and put in the work to keep it going.
This is a weird train of thought that assumes the end and then builds to it. I'm a member of a tool library and it is and has been great. Even without that experience, these are trivial questions: the person/people that set up the tool library handles it, and they're incentivized to do so from their salary they get paid by the tool library, which it in turn gets from membership dues.
The one jackass last week who was caught trying to get into the engineer's cockpit of the train in the UK, so he could film a Tiktok video.
If not you, then some of us somewhere will be sharing the tools with him. He'll dump our community's tools in the quarry, or set them on fire with thermite. You know, so it will go viral.
He'll be ordered to do restitution, but that won't help me when it takes 12+ months to replace them (if indeed he ever does pay the restitution). Some communities will institute laws to prohibit such people from the tool libraries for life, but that will be struck down because now that no one can have their own tools, prohibiting him from the library leaves him tool-less and it violates his human rights. I mean, even I can't argue against that logic. It'd be true, my arguments would only amount to that it would still be just.
It's not a weird train of thought. It's the correct train of thought. It's how I do my work. I imagine the various things that can go wrong, and then I design solutions to prevent those.
Apparently you work in a completely different tech field where you just imagine scenarios where nothing ever goes wrong, and "poof" they appear in reality in a puff of smoke like magic.
> Some communities will institute laws to prohibit such people from the tool libraries for life, but that will be struck down because now that no one can have their own tools, prohibiting him from the library leaves him tool-less and it violates his human rights.
See, this is where you're just inventing an entire hypothetical oppressive regime to support your meandering train of thought. You've decided you don't like tool libraries. That's fine, you do you. I'll enjoy my tool library that continues to be great, despite your protests that reality can't be real.
Also, that's not correct thinking. Like, apolitically, I hope your work isn't paying you for that. Thinking of ways things can go wrong is great. Skipping the part where you weigh the odds of things going wrong and how to mitigate that and then declaring "there's no way this can possibly work" is not something you should be admitting to publicly.
Not to mention the fact that the sort of drill a contractor might use will not be a "beautifully made work of art". It will be a Hole Hawg, and it might kill you if you use it wrong. Ugly, graceless, but it is well made and will get the job done. Not the kind of thing you just lend out to anyone in the community, though.
Neal Stephenson did a whole thing about the Hole Hawg, you'd think Cory Doctorow of all people would have read it.
To be honest, this sounds like you've made up your mind that poor people are icky and gross and of course you shouldn't have to touch anything they might've touched or else you'll get poor cooties.
Tool libraries work great. They can even utilize the free market so you don't have to get icky poor germs and can touch only tools used by other upstanding freedom-loving Libertarian tools, or whatever floats your boat.
I think this would have been a stronger article if he had been more even handed in his examples he had chosen. There were plenty of left wingers that ignored //edit//COVID lockdowns.
And anyone who doesn't think a large motivating force for 15 minute cities is the fines revenue it will generate doesn't know local councils very well.
This is about knowing your audience. In absolute terms, it's true.
I'd rather that we didn't tie 15 minute cities to very low emissions or car restrictions other than reducing parking minimums and eliminating free parking on public property. You then don't have to worry about that whole class of surveillance.
The thing is, if you eliminate free or cheap parking on local shops, people will just drive to their nearest large supermarket. The local council then complains that "the High Street is dying".
One could build dedicated parking structures. Those use up less space that we can use for much better stuff, make it so that you don't have cars circling blocks trying to find parking. If a business decides that they need parking, nobody stops them from building it themselves. No reason to dictate this or have the public give up collectively owned land for this.
I don't really believe that it's a "pretense" but rather that people in power tend to take every opportunity to keep and bolster their power and freedom and care less about the power and freedom of the already disadvantaged.
Something being leveraged for somebody's advantage doesn't mean that it was created for that advantage.