The young people of today etc:
It was buried in the latest poll from YouGov. It showed that an extraordinary 47 per cent of those aged 18-24 are now planning to vote Green — almost three times the number voting Labour.
The Greens hit all the right notes but it’s the wrong tune. For upon examintion nothing they say actually makes sense.
Sigh.
“aged 18-24 are now planning to vote Green”.
Shirley a nailed on reason to raise the voting age to 30, and only available to those who’ve been net contributors to the system for at least ten years………
A stats article in today’s STimes reveals that only about 40% of households are net contributors.
Well duh.
“Making sense” is exactly what the Greens are not about.
Nationally the LibDems make no sense either, indeed have no purpose, but have efficient local operations and at this level are sometimes quite sensible ( eg my local County Councillor ).
This isn’t good. We want the mad leftist vote to be as split as possible. Maybe Corbyn can start a few more parties for us?
on latest substack..
“Age RestrictedThis post is hidden due to your country’s Online Safety Act content restrictions.”
Only a matter of time before Tim’s spicy content required identity papers.
In my local last week, a chap (50s?) observed that there are only two current politicians who are good communicators, Zac and Nigel….Heads nodded. Hypnotits (h/t JuliaM) is cutting through, unfortunately.
Julia’s is certainly better than “enchanter for embonpoint” using that second noun in its ‘nudge, nudge, wink, wink’ sense. “Magus for mammaries” is a bit laboured too. Julia wins.
Come to think of it, if he is elected to the Commons he could be called the Member for Mammaries. I quite like that.
Let’s hope that Zac’s political career soon passes into mammary…
I’m sure I was slightly unhinged when I was 15-sittig in the bath wearing my 501s to get the fit just right-but at least I didn’t want to inflict my foibles on anyone else.By the time I was 21 I’d qualified and was married at 24. By then I would have been appalled at the idiocy of the Greens, the unscientific twaddle, actually longing for extinction as a way of life…
In fairness to the article it makes just that point – Yes, of course we know the Greens are idiots but until there is a party (yes – even Reform) that calls out the WEF, UN and makes mention of projects like the Great Replacement and the Great Reset and starts arresting the likes of George Soros, Bill Gates and so on then this will be the result. Raising the voting age to 30 will simply result in more people leaving (and of course I do suggest raising the voting age but a more effective method of ensuring the changes we need is the reintroduction of plural voting – so
Homeowners, Asset owners, private sector workers and so on would have additional votes)
…projects like the Great Replacement…
The originator of the Great Replacement Theory, Renaud Camus, is a gay French poet and novelist – with all the lack of rigour you would expect! – who provides no evidence for his theory and then conflates complicity with conspiracy.
To believers, the ‘evidence’ for the GRT is simply the outcome – mass immigration. But it does not follow from (1) ‘X looks-to-me like F’ that (2) ‘X is [actually] F’. So the inference is invalid.
Occam’s Razor does for most conspiracy theories*, because there are simpler explanations. So what are the alternatives to the GRT? Why have elites allowed mass immigration? Plausible explanations here might be – the post-WW2 delusional belief that ‘racism’ is the Original Sin…the short-termism and electoral self-interest of elected representatives…utopian multiculturalism…stupidity and incompetence…etc, etc.
*PS the OED defines ‘conspiracy theory’ as ‘a belief that some influential or controlling organization or group is secretly responsible for a notable event or phenomenon.’ That is the meaning of the term. Unless you are Humpty-Dumpty, words don’t mean what one wants them to mean.
Theo, don’t forget shoaling behaviour and how this has been facilitated by social media. The shoal behaves as a single unit as a consequence of near-instantaneous communication between individuals but there is no overall controller. Obviously some of this communication is via private WhatsApp groups but plenty – probably most – is via wide-open social media that anyone can join. No secrets required.
Widely-separated collectivists can now act collectively in near-realtime, and we see plenty of evidence for this daily. Look at how migrant-lovers pile into attempted deportations or demos against migrant hotels. They do it within minutes.
As rhoda says, the result is indistinguishable from that of a conspiracy. All that is required is general ideological agreement among people in a moral fervour primarily motivated by anxiety about their in-group social status. and if Myers-Briggs are to be believes, that describes the majority of personality types.
[Me? My M-B personality type – and that of my wife – accounts for about 1% of the population. No wonder we’ve always been such fucking misfits, unable to understand and predict the desires and interests of the majority. What a relief it was to learn that.
In fact, apart from typical youthful idealism and the arrogance that we could do better, I’d ascribe much of my prior leftydom to the intuition that I didn’t really share the instincts and intuitions of others, so used general intelligence instead to compensate, making the mistakes typical of that category-error approach.]
Further, you could describe social media shoaling as some kind of equivalent of price signals in an open market.
There’s something for the ASI to get its teeth into.
…and thinking more about that, I’d propose that whereas price signals in an open market promote competition and are anti-monopolistic, social media shoaling does the opposite: it promotes the majority orthodoxy and suppresses dissent: cancel culture.
This is certainly what we appear to see.
Norman
Then the shoal with “no secrets required” is not a conspiracy but merely a social phenomenon – eg a mass delusion, like socialism or the covid panic. But then the shoal phenomenon is not “indistinguishable from that of a conspiracy” because a conspiracy has some different properties to a shoal – eg secrets. No two things are ever exactly alike.
That’s true, Theo, but we concern ourselves with outcomes. Shoaling can now produce what conspiracists could only dream of.
And then, of course, there are “influencers”.
But we do not concern ourselves only with outcomes. When formulating explanations of human behaviour, we look for evidence revealing purposes, incentives, intentions, beliefs, motives, preferences, priorities…not forgetting unintended consequences, incompetence, error, trade-offs, power dynamics, cui bono etc. Focussing only on outcomes limits the range of possible explanations…and inclines people to conspiracy theories.
Sure, but ultimately it’s outcomes that matter. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. If you don’t want to end up in hell, no matter your intentions, you might want to look at the road you’re walking down.
Why, when seeking explanations of human behaviour, would you give priority to outcomes, given that outcomes-based analyses are self-limiting (see above)? Taking intentions etc into account gives a fuller and richer picture, which is useful for determining remedial action and for avoiding repeated errors.
Your GRT shoal theory doesn’t tell us what is behind the shoal’s behaviour, what the motivation of the mavens in the shoal are, or how to combat the shoal. To do any of those things you need more than outcomes.
If I look at shoals of fish or flocks of starlings I don’t see any deep purpose beyond getting everyone together to reduce the chance of an individual being picked off by predators, sorting themselves out to roost, or migrating/travelling from roost to feeding grounds.
For progressives, social media provides information on the attitudes, morals, ethics, causes célèbre and enemies do jour, and thus informed to broadcast (and reinforce for yourself) your virtue, engage in digital pile-ons, and co-ordinate physical action.
I posit that the progressive shoaling we now see is an outcome of social media usage. To stop this shoaling we have to kill social media, and other digital comms, and go back to letters in the post and newspapers. Slow everything back down again and reintroduce filters and gatekeepers.
That’s not going to happen, is it? So the question then becomes that of how to prevent social media simply facilitating shoaling and reinforcing the orthodoxy. That’s where we take intentions and the rest into account, but we already know them, don’t we?
Still, the outcome is eve greater gurgling in the plughole as social media facilitates our spiral down it. Oh, and inform the Global Majority that this place is bennies El Dorado, how to get here, and how to supplant Whitey in the process.
‘Shoal analysis/interpretation’ tells us little: it is largely descriptive. Yes, people move in herds/shoals/murmerations…but why in this particular shoal and which mavens are leading it?? Outcomes-based analysis will tell you little…because intentions etc matter!
And the solution is not banning ‘social’ media – which is now impossible – but targeting the left-liberal mavens on ‘social’ media, having identified their weaknesses…and take ’em down.
I generally don’t buy into smart political conspiracy theories because politicians aren’t Francis Urquhart. They’re mostly thick-skinned narcissists with money behind them and just not that bright. If they were bright they’d be running major corporations.
Mass immigration is about bad economics (we can get richer importing lots of cheap people to be baristas and taxi drivers), supported by the richer section of the population that wants cheap servants. And the falling cost of travel. And broadly speaking, unopposed for some time because of “Immigration is good”* or people’s limited knowledge of immigrants**
It simply doesn’t add up. Immigrants are now, on average, a cost.
* Yes, we want George Clooney and Mr Tetra Pak coming here, and probably lots of engineers and film directors
** I include myself in this, as the immigrants I know are software people who fit in fine.
I generally don’t buy into smart political conspiracy theories…
Because you are often wrong [IMO], but you are wise and smart..
The Great Replacement Theory is nonsense, the Great Replacement Observation is observed fact.
Theo
JGH beat me to it. The Theory from
Camus is slightly off the wall but in practice look at vast swathes of the U.K. and see that even if it wasn’t intentional that has what happened. I agree it probably more cock- up than conspiracy but the result is quite similar. The colonisation of the country by swathes of headhackers.
Most of London is quite horrible now. A nigwog hellhole populated by people who behave as if they own the place, because actually, they do.
A nigwog hellhole populated by people who behave as if they own the place, because actually, they do.
Central London is generally fine. The City is very clean; and the wogs professional. Outside of the centre of London, a lot of London is a third-world shit-hole
That depends on what you call “Central”, Theo. Hackney needs nuking. Shoreditch is little better. Marble Arch up the Edgware Road is a camel ride. The South Bank, behind the riverbank strip, is Africa.
Really you’re talking about the West End and the City. Even Knightsbridge is fucking awful.
>To believers, the ‘evidence’ for the GRT is simply the outcome – mass immigration
That’s because it is. The “great replacement” merely documents the fact that every election since 1970something, the public has voted for a party whose manifesto says they’ll lower immigration, and then that party has done the exact opposite. And this has happened all across Europe. And a lot of the politicians who’ve done these exactly-contrary-to-their-mandate things all meet up in Switzerland at a club called the “World Economic Forum” to listen to a man who sounds and dresses like Ernst Stavro Blofeld talk about the “Great Reset”.
The wikipedia playbook is as follows:
– take something obvious and common-sense
– append “BECAUSE OF THE JEWS!”
– call the whole thing a “conspiracy theory”
– imply that anyone who’s convinced that the thing is happening also believes it’s BECAUSE OF THE JEWS and is therefore a conspiracy nut whose claims can be dismissed without examination
– therefore an obvious thing that’s happening can also be dismissed without examination because it’s part of a conspiracy theory
I used to point out that in an earlier generation I’d have had one constituency vote and two more for different University seats. Of course nowadays the idea of university seats would be ludicrous. It mighty be wiser to ban graduates from voting unless they’d graduated in sensible subjects from serious universities. But are there any serious universities left?
Or, how about this? Ban them from voting until they’ve cleared their student loans. I quite like that.
DM, I think you’d find TPTB would deem PPE from Oxford a “sensible subject from a serious university” because that’s what they all have. Back to square one, then.
The thing is, if you put yourself in the shoes of a lot of young people, this isn’t as crazy as it seems.
You reach the age of 40, you’re paying for eco bollocks through taxes. You also have to drive the kids to violin lessons. You live in provincial towns where cars are the way you get around.
What are 18 year olds doing? We’ve forced them to stay in school to 18 now. We’ve fucked up insurance because of dodgy claims, so a lot of them don’t drive now. About half of them are students. Housing is fucked up. The incentives for women all nudge them towards work rather than husbands.
What was in their manifesto from 2024? More homes. Popular. Better NHS. Well, if you’re not paying tax, that’s great. Greener transport? They get around without cars, so yeah. And again, someone else is paying for it all.
If you want young people to vote more sensibly you need to stop treating them like infants. Get most of them out of school at 16, or even 14 and starting to build working lives. End most uni so people go to work. Build more housing.
I’d like to see some party hierarchy explaining how they were once communist sympathisers in their teens. Before I earned money I never thought anyone needed it in big amounts to invest themselves. Anyone wanting to go to Africa to drill bore holes did it for their own and the recipients satisfaction ‘cos we’re all a communal family.
Of course no Labour MPs could tell their pre-social democrat story because they’re all still commies.
It appears then that Labour’s insane energy policies aren’t suicidal enough. But then this is the generation that has been indoctrinated for years in schools that we are destroying the planet and that CO2 is a pollutant. They genuinely believe that windmills and solar panels can replace coal, gas and oil for providing energy and that electric cars are clean.
…and that the only use for oil is to burn it as fuel.
Without oil to make the PVC to insulate the electricity cables, how will the unicorn farts keep your lights on and your home heated?
(Fingers in ears) la-la-la-la-la…
Cheer up: it might inhibit Labour from dropping the voting age to 16. (Personally I’d prefer it be 35.)
Better solution: franchise is qualified on having paid at least £1 more in income tax than received in benefits for at least 4 of the last 5 years.
It’s sort of funny, because it’s a prime backfire in certain strategies.
You indoctrinate the Young in their Formative Years with Lefty Ideas, so they’ll vote Leftie.
Now what options do they have….
Labour? That’s what the Boomers vote for. Besides, they’re obviously Losers.
LibDems? That’s the oozie-woozie globalist crap from the ’60’s and ’70’s.. That’s your (grand)parents, for gods’ sake..
Socialists? No specific Party in the UK, and if they are there, they’re troughing it in Labour… And neo-Socialism is sooooo Last Millennium.
So…Greens… Fits with both the Gaia and Socialist lies they’ve been fed all their lives, allows for the proper Virtue Signalling, and they Upset the Status Quo while promising Green Mountains of Gold..
Of course, the Greens *were* meant to be a tame Labour satellite, but hey…
And that’s *if* you believe a YouGov poll result as-is..But wouldn’t surprise me if it were actually accurate. It’s simply the modern version of “Left in Youth, Right after you’ve actually had a bit of Life™ under your belt”.
A lot in that age category *do* vote Socialist/Green, especially the “University” indoctrinated.
Most of them grow out of it soon enough.