The Geopolitics of it all

[Kirkhill]

Indulging in cliches.

Of babies and bathwater.
Of reform
Of enlightenment
Of progress made
Of power shared
Of privilege relinquished
Of sacrifices made

Of progress made, power shared, privilege relinquished, sacrifices made voluntarily out of enlightened self-interest and an understanding of common humanity.

Of failure to acknowledge what has been given and what has been achieved.

....

Of the universality of feet of clay.

....

Of struggling to stay on top.

....

It is hard to give up power. Power is safety. Power is control and control is what keeps families safe. To give up control is to put family and future at risk. It requires a strong argument to voluntarily relinquish power. To accept risk. To put faith in others. To trust. To accept enlightened self-interest as a viable basis for organizing society.

People will resist relinquishing power which explains the undying attraction of feudalism in all its guises in all ages and all places. They will resist harder if progress is forced on them. If change is involuntary.

You can't force someone to be liberal.

....

Liberalism is hard to sustain because it demands tolerance. Acceptance of the other. Others don't have to accept liberalism. Others feel free to exploit liberalism.

...

Acknowledgement of progress, of sacrifices made, of power shared, of privileges relinquished, of opportunities offered would take the sting out of change.

But

Stinging is what is wanted by those that seek to retain power.

Aggravation, division, factionalism, tribalism - those are the keys to power

The key to power is to make every day "Day Zero" and to tell the tale that will invoke the revolution.


....

Of the hoi polloi, the polis, the demos, the populis, the public.

Not a democracy of the demos but democratic. Not a republic of the public but republican. Not real but realistic.

....ish.

 

[Kirkhill]

We are too stupid to see the Dark Ages are back​

Quiet quitting is not just about jobs. We are also abandoning parenthood, religion and relationships
TIM STANLEY18 February 2024 • 7:48pm


Idleness goes meritocratic: It is not just the aristocracy who can be wastrels today CREDIT: William Hogarth

This is a column about work, but I’m going to start with religion (atheists, bear with).
A Telegraph analysis reveals that Church of England attendance has fallen by about 20 per cent since Covid. Some of that will be old folks dying off; some of it, people losing the habit. But it’s also an illustration of how we respond to cultural cues. By closing churches in the middle of the “Greatest Crisis Since the War”, Christian leaders sent the message that collective worship isn’t essential – and if it didn’t matter then, why would it matter now?
The lesson of lockdown was that nothing – not your religion, your relationships, education or career – matters more than your health. Therefore, it’s no surprise that today, despite almost one million vacancies, more than nine million of us of working age are economically inactive, including two and a half million on a sickie.
The state told us we could stay at home and be paid to do it, that any cost will be covered by the future taxpayer. What mug would choose to get a job?!
There are very good reasons not to work. A lot of modern employment is insecure and badly paid. The failure to invest in state social care has compelled many to look after relatives.
But while I’m sure the incoming Labour government has countless policies to fix these problems (tumbleweed blows across the page), what they’ll really struggle with is the changing shape of work – the rise of the click-based, content creating “non-job” – and the cultural perception that much of what we do is simply a waste of time.
Britons once built ships. Now we work in HR and events management. I’m convinced that one reason why we adore the NHS is that it remains a rare locus of expertise and hard work, where people do something that matters.
Yet even the doctors are on strike. This is the Dropout Generation. If we’re not getting what we want, we walk away – when we can be bothered.
Academics have identified a curious phenomenon called quiet quitting, whereby employees stay in their job, they just do less of it, having neither the will to climb the ladder nor the energy to hop off.
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This is demonstrable – UK workers have lost 4.5 working days a year since Covid – and the term is being creatively applied to relationships (where the precarious nature of online dating reflects the gig economy for work).
Britons are having less sex, marrying later – if at all – and putting off babies for good, causing populations to shrink. The replacement rate is circa 2.1 babies per woman; in South Korea it’s 0.78. The silver lining of civilisational collapse is we might finally see the end of K-pop.
Once upon a time, the key unit in society was the family. Today it is the individual. The only principle we can agree matters is choice, though with the death of religion and philosophy, the range of choices that we can imagine has narrowed drastically, as culture and faith have been replaced by holiday photos and video games.
I’m with the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre: we live in the new Dark Ages, we’re just too illiterate to realise how dumb we are. Harold Macmillan sat in the trenches reading Aeschylus. Rishi Sunak is a fan of Taylor Swift.
The PM wills Britain to grow, but being the product of a bland corporate culture, cannot explain why we should make the effort. To make the most of one’s talents, perhaps; to contribute, to enjoy responsibility, to pass something on. Prevailing against such optimism, the stuff that gets us out of bed in the morning, the green movement glues roads to a halt and predicts there won’t even be a tomorrow to enjoy.
In a culture saturated with despair, people sigh “I can’t cope!” Pharma companies say “You don’t have to”. And doctors write the prescription.
Rather than ask why capitalism makes people mad or unwell, we invite citizens to drop out of it. Rather than encouraging partners to make a relationship work, we celebrate them for having the “courage to walk away”.
And if you don’t want to brush your own kid’s teeth, says Labour, we’ll do it for them in school (that actually is a policy of theirs). Labour’s abandonment of proper socialism, that is sacrificing today for a better tomorrow, strikes a chord among an electorate that doubts society can remake itself and is gradually giving up on democracy.
Polling suggests young people favour a dictatorship. I don’t think they’re dreaming of Stalin. Rather they regard politics as stupid, occasionally harmful, and they’d prefer it to go away.
In a Deliveroo society where one doesn’t even cook the food one eats – let alone kill it and pluck it – we want stuff to be done for us, fast and anonymously. The ideal dictator would be a hard-working immigrant. “If you’ve enjoyed this military junta, please remember to leave a review.”
My point is this: it’s tempting to see Covid as the Great Disruptor, an event of such unusual force that it shook society to its foundations, and that we only need to pass some bills and kick a few deadbeats off welfare to put things back. But that’s wrong. Lockdown went with the grain, confirming the slow death of vitality in British life, and sending the state in to take the place of the engaged citizen.
We’ve been complaining about our work ethic for years. The baby glut has been a long-time coming. And Christianity has been ebbing away since the 1970s. We have a spiritual crisis, which is to say we’re a society without a motivating spirit.

 

[OldSolduer]

Dark Ages - yes I agree to a point

 

[Kirkhill]

The origin of Tim Stanley's crisis and the Western loss of confidence.



The Neo-Malthusian Bible and its companion piece The Limits To Growth as promoted by The Club of Rome

Before this everything was possible - This was the golden age of science fiction, man was on the moon, nuclear power plants were delivering energy around the world, the green revolution was feeding billions that had previously starved.

After this nothing was possible -

The Population Bomb - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Limits to Growth - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Club of Rome - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Kirkhill]

Typical growth curve. True of bacteria, harp seals and people.​

“In this world you're either growing or you're dying so get in motion and grow.”​

― Lou Holtz

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Indulging in cliches.

Of babies and bathwater.
Of reform
Of enlightenment
Of progress made
Of power shared
Of privilege relinquished
Of sacrifices made

Of progress made, power shared, privilege relinquished, sacrifices made voluntarily out of enlightened self-interest and an understanding of common humanity.

Of failure to acknowledge what has been given and what has been achieved.

....

Of the universality of feet of clay.

....

Of struggling to stay on top.

....

It is hard to give up power. Power is safety. Power is control and control is what keeps families safe. To give up control is to put family and future at risk. It requires a strong argument to voluntarily relinquish power. To accept risk. To put faith in others. To trust. To accept enlightened self-interest as a viable basis for organizing society.

People will resist relinquishing power which explains the undying attraction of feudalism in all its guises in all ages and all places. They will resist harder if progress is forced on them. If change is involuntary.

You can't force someone to be liberal.

....

Liberalism is hard to sustain because it demands tolerance. Acceptance of the other. Others don't have to accept liberalism. Others feel free to exploit liberalism.

...

Acknowledgement of progress, of sacrifices made, of power shared, of privileges relinquished, of opportunities offered would take the sting out of change.

But

Stinging is what is wanted by those that seek to retain power.

Aggravation, division, factionalism, tribalism - those are the keys to power

The key to power is to make every day "Day Zero" and to tell the tale that will invoke the revolution.


....

Of the hoi polloi, the polis, the demos, the populis, the public.

Not a democracy of the demos but democratic. Not a republic of the public but republican. Not real but realistic.

....ish.

Multiculturalism only works when the parent culture is strong and dominant. then the other cultures become branches on the tree. But those branches must be kept in check. We welcome your food, music and dance. Politics, religion and bias must be inline with the dominant culture or it is rejected. For people coming here that line must be made painfully clear.

 

[Kirkhill]

Liberals of all sorts.

‘Indian Schindler’ rediscovered after name recognised on cricket board​

Sir Digvijaysinhji created camps in western India during the war for 1,000 Polish refugees who had fled Siberian gulags in the Soviet Union

Tim Sigsworth19 February 2024 • 4:51pm

Sir Digvijaysinhji Ranjitsinhji Jadeja, the Maharaja of Nawanagar played for Malvern College
A historian rediscovered the story of “India’s Oskar Schindler” after recognising his surname in a top British public school’s cricketing hall of fame.
Sir Digvijaysinhji Ranjitsinhji Jadeja, the Maharaja of Nawanagar and a member of Winston Churchill’s imperial war cabinet, created camps in western India during the war for 1,000 Polish refugees who had fled Siberian gulags in the Soviet Union.
But Malvern College, the Worcestershire public school he had attended, was not aware of his humanitarian achievements until Andrew Murtagh, his biographer and a former housemaster and cricket coach at the school, recalled his name from its cricket pavilion.
“When I looked him up, I noticed the name of his son, who is the current Maharaja of Nawanagar, and thought to myself - where had I seen that before?” said Mr Murtagh, 74.
“Suddenly the penny dropped. At Malvern College, on the wall in the Long Room are the names of all the school’s cricket teams since 1865.”
Mr Murtagh joked it was a name you “couldn’t miss” because it was so long it went “halfway around the room”.

Sir Digvijaysinhji, who was a pupil at Malvern College between 1910 and 1915, is being featured in a book by a former teacher and housemaster at the school
Sir Digvijaysinhji has been branded the “Indian Oskar Schindler” for taking in 500 Polish orphans in 1941 and clothing, feeding and schooling them at his summer palace near Bombay.
The children and their families had been rounded up after Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland in 1939, being transported on cattle trucks for three weeks to labour camps in Siberia.
But when Adolf Hitler turned on Joseph Stalin and invaded by surprise in 1941, the Soviets enlisted the interned men as soldiers and set the women and children free under a condition set by Britain and France for an alliance.
What followed, Mr Murtagh says, was a 3,000-mile walk “mapped out by heaps of bodies at the sides of the road” to then-British Mandatory Palestine, with many of the internees dying of weakness and exhaustion along the way.
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“But there the authorities did not know what to do with them,” he explains. “At a meeting of the imperial war cabinet, Poland’s prime minister in exile explained their plight and Sir Digvijaysinhji listened and said he’d take some of the orphans in.”

Orphanage helped 1,000 children​

Mr Murtagh’s research has revealed that Sir Digvijaysinhji raised £25,000 to fund the orphanage, which helped a total of 1,000 children and “provided a sanctuary for weak bodies and broken minds”.
There the children were taught English and Polish, ministered to by Catholic priests and one Christmas provided with three camel-loads of presents.
After the war, most of the orphans emigrated to Australia, Canada and New Zealand, with those whose fathers fought for Polish formations within the British armed forces able to apply for British citizenship.
Bronislawa Piotrowska, one of the refugees, did so and later became friends with Mr Murtagh, encouraging him to write the book. “I owed the Good Maharaja my life,” she told him.
Sir Digvijaysinhji’s generosity is well-remembered in Poland, which posthumously awarded him its highest civilian honour in 2011 and where a school and a square in Warsaw, the capital, are named after him.
But his achievements are less known in Britain, something retiree Mr Murtagh is hoping to change with a new book that he is writing about him.
“There are references to him in the archives at the college, but nothing about this,” Mr Murtagh said.
“His story has flown under the radar and the school has remained unaware of his humanitarian deeds – until now.”
Mr Murtagh, a former Hampshire cricketer, has written five biographies since retiring as housemaster and cricket coach at Malvern College, which was attended by CS Lewis, Monty Don and Jeremy Paxman.

‘Indian Schindler’ rediscovered after name recognised on cricket board

Sir Digvijaysinhji created camps in western India during the war for 1,000 Polish refugees who had fled Siberian gulags in the Soviet Union

www.telegraph.co.uk

 

[Kirkhill]

And how an institution swings from left to right.

Sinn Fein was darling of the Left. The Irish would have identified themselves as being of the Left and Sinn Fein supporters.

Now Sinn Fein is swinging too far and is leaving the people behind.

Are the people any less of the Left? Have they become of the Right? Or is Sinn Fein too far to the Left?

Ireland’s anti-immigration backlash is spiralling into country-wide unrest

Republican voters are turning against Sinn Fein as they reject the party’s open borders stance

www.telegraph.co.uk

Ireland’s anti-immigration backlash has spiralled into country-wide unrest. Protests, arson attacks and hardening anti-immigration views have transfused Irish politics with a fervour not seen since the Troubles.

I went to Ireland to make a documentary for The Telegraph to find out what Irish people make of the growing strife.

I started my journey in Dublin, where hundreds of people turned out for an anti-immigration march. Amid a sea of Irish tricolour flags, protestors chanted “get them out” about the government over its support for mass migration – which many felt was conferring already sparse housing and public services to foreigners, to the detriment of Irish citizens. One woman said she was scared to leave the house because of the amount of “unvetted male people” who’ve arrived in Ireland in recent years.

The Irish government were not the only villains of the event – much ire was directed at “higher powers’’, variously the European Union and the World Economic Forum. Leo Varadkar’s trip to Davos last month when anti-immigration protests across the country reached a high-point no doubt did little to disabuse them of the impression that his priorities lie elsewhere. Some gripes were flagrantly conspiratorial: Mr Varadkar’s government, not known for its Anglophilia, was accused multiple times of being in thrall to King Charles.

Demonstrators also belted “Ireland is for the Irish” and other slogans which would usually be the preserve of the republicans of Sinn Fein. But the party’s support for mass migration has alienated their Irish nationalist base, with many at the march branding them “traitors”.

To find out more about where the anger is coming from, I travelled to Roscrea, a sleepy town in County Tipperary, where locals have been protesting for three weeks outside of the town’s only hotel – closed down last month after the government struck a deal with its owner to house more than 160 asylum seekers there. Mary-Claire Doran, a Roscrea resident, told me the town had been transformed by an influx of around 1,000 refugees in recent years, swelling the town’s population of 5,000 by 20 per cent.

Unlike in recent years in Britain and continental Europe, immigration has never been a dominant issue in Irish politics ahead of an election. But the surge in asylum seekers arriving in Ireland has catapulted it to voters’ number one concern, with most of the Irish public now in favour of tougher immigration controls, according to recent polls.

I discussed the political fallout with Ben Scallan, a journalist for Gript, a media startup that has become a formidable challenger to the progressive orthodoxy espoused by the Irish government. “I think the Irish government is primarily concerned with appearing to be a modern European country,” Ben said. “They admire their European colleagues; they admire Scandinavian countries like Sweden which are progressive and very trendy.”

Ben said he was baffled that the Irish government was repeating the blunders of its European neighbours by ramping up mass migration, with little consideration for the dissenting views of the Irish public. “It seems like having seen the failure of that policy in countries like Sweden, Germany and France, they want to replicate it for some reason that I don’t really understand.”

Protests against the government’s immigration policy have been mostly peaceful, but some have turned violent – including in Dublin last year where riots broke out after three young children and a woman were stabbed, allegedly by a man of Algerian origin. There has also been a spate of more than a dozen arson attacks in Ireland over the past year on migrant facilities and venues wrongly thought to be housing migrants.

The Irish state last year accepted more refugees than it could accommodate, forcing the government to offer asylum applicants tents and sleeping bags as they arrived in Dublin. Since the Russian invasion, nearly 100,000 Ukrainians have also been offered sanctuary in Ireland. I spoke to one Ukrainian refugee outside of an asylum processing centre in Dublin, who told me that despite sleeping rough in Ireland, he was nonetheless grateful for refuge from Vladamir Putin’s forces in Ukraine.

The number of asylum seekers arriving into Ireland has shot up to more than 26,000 over the past two years, the highest annual figures on record, and a growth of nearly 200 per cent from 2019. Last year, most asylum seekers arriving in Ireland came from Nigeria, Algeria, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Georgia.

There are some TDs who have spoken out against “unsustainable” levels of immigration in the Irish parliament. Six of them have formed a loose coalition called the Rural Independent Group. I sat down with one of their members, Carol Nolan, to hear their side of the story. “I have never seen the feeling as strong on the issue of immigration as it is now,” Ms Nolan said. “I do feel that people will protest at the ballot box and I do feel that if the government doesn’t change direction quickly…that they will be punished.”

Ms Nolan said she felt anti-EU sentiment was being stoked by the government’s immigration policy. “There is a lot of frustration over the EU dictating everything a country should do – the numbers they should take in and so forth. So there is definitely frustration over that dictatorship as some people see it.”

Leo Varadkar’s government says it can tackle the problems around immigration with better messaging and tougher laws to censor what it deems as “hate speech”. But the Irish public say their concerns are legitimate – a view which is becoming harder to ignore as it gains political momentum. It’s beginning to look like the Irish government’s vision of an Ireland which looks more like its European neighbours is coming true – a multicultural country, ripe for a populist revolt.

 

[Kirkhill]

Modern history, which I'll define as from the start of the industrial revolution for the sake of my thoughts, has always included a struggle between socialism and capitalism. Even though they can co-exist, they find themselves pitted against each other.

As the old western hereditary systems eroded (ie Kings and Queens), largely because the means of production allowed a general rise in everyone's condition, the middle class became the center of the economic engine. In a utopia, the appetite of the middle class does not exceed resources available, the appetite of the upper class does not consume so much resources that the engine sputters, and the appetite of the lower class can be naturally fed by the efficiency of the whole.

However, people are greedy.

So the struggle is between a greedy upper class that wants to take too much wealth and power than the system can provide, and a set of elites that want to provide more to the lower class than the system can provide, in order to feed their own wealth and power. All with the background that the appetite of the middle class must be sufficiently controlled to note overburden the resource pool.

Capitalism got out of hand in the late 1800's and had be reigned in; I'd argue that that is the case now as well (the concentration of wealth is much more dangerous than the spread of wokism; I'd even argue that the specter of wokism is being used as a propaganda tool to hide that concentration). Socialism got out of hand with the rise of Soviet style communism.

Both of those are caused by a power hungry ruling class; the solution is a continual rebalancing.

I'm not inclined to watch a video comparing wokism to communism or Marxist Leninism as that, in my opinion is not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is certain ruling classes on both ends of the capitalism - communism spectrum manipulating the middle class in order to gain power; the current culture wars, in my opinion, are just an extension of that, and need to go away.

We are still in the process of equalizing society, so that everyone is given an equal chance (and no, I don't have an answer for what that really means). Problem is, in order to fix societal inequities, the wealth and the power of the middle class must be spread over a larger base. That process scares two groups of people: the largely European male group who fear they are losing their status, and the others who fear they will never get an equal status.

.. and the problem comes in when when one or the other ruling class preys on those fears for their own ends.

I'll pose this thought experiment: a modern democratic military is supposed to exist in order to defend the nation state that supports it. In other words, we pool our national treasure and blood in order to protect what is important to us. Is that not socialist behavior?

I will give another thought bubble: when one of the historically disadvantaged members of society hear European males say society broke when we started to move away from those same European males holding all the power and wealth, what reaction are they supposed to have?

Many people of a visceral support for Trump (and other's like him, Viktor Orbán of Hungary is worse) because they strongly believe that we need to "Make [a place] Better Again" and that person represents that.

However, just as many have a visceral reaction against him because the "better" they hear being referred to, by usually narcissist power hungry people, is when institutional racism, classism, and misogyny were the norm.

On communism and socialism.

Communism arose out of socialism and socialism arose out of the co-operative movement and dissenting churches. The dissenters relied on a sense of brotherhood to survive in the face of establishment opposition.

Britain didn't invent the concept but the concept gained purchase in enlightened Britain with the rise of the dissenters as whigs and the establishment of the whig supremacy. Dissenters became establishment. The "Establishment" became "Dissenters". The transition was aided by the Hanoverians who were opposed by the "Establishment" of Church of England Jacobites and Tories. The Hanoverians and Whigs became natural allies. After Culloden the Establishment and the Whigs merged.

Dissenters found other outlets, in particular through the Chartist movements which found expression through Mechanics Institutes, Socialist Sunday Schools and the Andersonian. They founded their own libraries. They founded their own co-operatives. They founded their own social clubs - often identifed as Masonic.

In my view there is a straight line from Shaftesbury's Masons of 1709, to the Methodists of the Great Awakening, to Co-Operation, to Abolitionism, to Socialism to Communism.

1787



1795

Then let us pray that come it may,
As come it will for a’ that,
That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth
Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that.
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s comin yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man the warld o’er
Shall brithers be for a’ that.

A Man's a Man for a' That by Robert Burns - Scottish Poetry Library

Is there for honest Poverty / That hings his head, an' a' that; / The coward-slave, we pass him by, / We dare be poor for...

www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk

Along the way people were freed. Along the way people learned to used the new rules to their advantage. And some retained position and privilege regardless of the rules in effect.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Tanks! to everyone that took time to contribute, especially all the work by Kirkhill. It has certainly given me much more to chew on.

 

[daftandbarmy]

Modern history, which I'll define as from the start of the industrial revolution for the sake of my thoughts, has always included a struggle between socialism and capitalism. Even though they can co-exist, they find themselves pitted against each other.

As the old western hereditary systems eroded (ie Kings and Queens), largely because the means of production allowed a general rise in everyone's condition, the middle class became the center of the economic engine. In a utopia, the appetite of the middle class does not exceed resources available, the appetite of the upper class does not consume so much resources that the engine sputters, and the appetite of the lower class can be naturally fed by the efficiency of the whole.

However, people are greedy.

So the struggle is between a greedy upper class that wants to take too much wealth and power than the system can provide, and a set of elites that want to provide more to the lower class than the system can provide, in order to feed their own wealth and power. All with the background that the appetite of the middle class must be sufficiently controlled to note overburden the resource pool.

Capitalism got out of hand in the late 1800's and had be reigned in; I'd argue that that is the case now as well (the concentration of wealth is much more dangerous than the spread of wokism; I'd even argue that the specter of wokism is being used as a propaganda tool to hide that concentration). Socialism got out of hand with the rise of Soviet style communism.

Both of those are caused by a power hungry ruling class; the solution is a continual rebalancing.

I'm not inclined to watch a video comparing wokism to communism or Marxist Leninism as that, in my opinion is not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is certain ruling classes on both ends of the capitalism - communism spectrum manipulating the middle class in order to gain power; the current culture wars, in my opinion, are just an extension of that, and need to go away.

We are still in the process of equalizing society, so that everyone is given an equal chance (and no, I don't have an answer for what that really means). Problem is, in order to fix societal inequities, the wealth and the power of the middle class must be spread over a larger base. That process scares two groups of people: the largely European male group who fear they are losing their status, and the others who fear they will never get an equal status.

.. and the problem comes in when when one or the other ruling class preys on those fears for their own ends.

I'll pose this thought experiment: a modern democratic military is supposed to exist in order to defend the nation state that supports it. In other words, we pool our national treasure and blood in order to protect what is important to us. Is that not socialist behavior?



On communism and socialism.

Communism arose out of socialism and socialism arose out of the co-operative movement and dissenting churches. The dissenters relied on a sense of brotherhood to survive in the face of establishment opposition.

Britain didn't invent the concept but the concept gained purchase in enlightened Britain with the rise of the dissenters as whigs and the establishment of the whig supremacy. Dissenters became establishment. The "Establishment" became "Dissenters". The transition was aided by the Hanoverians who were opposed by the "Establishment" of Church of England Jacobites and Tories. The Hanoverians and Whigs became natural allies. After Culloden the Establishment and the Whigs merged.

Dissenters found other outlets, in particular through the Chartist movements which found expression through Mechanics Institutes, Socialist Sunday Schools and the Andersonian. They founded their own libraries. They founded their own co-operatives. They founded their own social clubs - often identifed as Masonic.

In my view there is a straight line from Shaftesbury's Masons of 1709, to the Methodists of the Great Awakening, to Co-Operation, to Abolitionism, to Socialism to Communism.

1787

View attachment 83245

1795

A Man's a Man for a' That by Robert Burns - Scottish Poetry Library

Is there for honest Poverty / That hings his head, an' a' that; / The coward-slave, we pass him by, / We dare be poor for...

www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk

Along the way people were freed. Along the way people learned to used the new rules to their advantage. And some retained position and privilege regardless of the rules in effect.

And then there was Amerinidian slave ownership, an interesting little historical sidenote


Indigenous peoples of the Americas slave ownership refers to the ownership of enslaved people by indigenous peoples of the Americas from the colonial period to the abolition of slavery. Indigenous people enslaved Amerindians, Africans, and —occasionally— Europeans.

In North America, waves of European colonization brought Amerindian dislocation and modern weapons which enabled the industrialization of Amerindian slave-raiding of Amerindians for about a century. Soon afterwards, as an accelerating Atlantic slave trade brought enslaved Africans to North America, many indigenous tribes acquired more Africans as slaves and traded them among themselves and to the colonists. Many prominent people from the "Five Civilized Tribes" purchased slaves and became members of the planter class. A number of Indian nations of the time are considered “slave societies”, comparable to the canonical models of Greece, Rome, Portuguese America and others.

The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation only applied to States in rebellion, and did not legally affect slavery in Native American areas that fought for the Confederate States of America. Upon ratification of the 13th Amendment, slaves in the U.S. were emancipated in 1865.[1] In practice, slavery continued in some Native American territories. The "Five Civilized Tribes negotiated new treaties in 1866, in which they agreed to end slavery.[2]

Amerindian slave ownership - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Kirkhill]

Tanks! to everyone that took time to contribute, especially all the work by Kirkhill. It has certainly given me much more to chew on.

@Fishbone Jones

Just to be clear most of my submission was generated by @Baz. My fingers failed to properly lift his quote. My work is only that below the Baz quote that was properly attributed.

Cheers.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

@Fishbone Jones

Just to be clear most of my submission was generated by @Baz. My fingers failed to properly lift his quote. My work is only that below the Baz quote that was properly attributed.

Cheers.

Of course, no problem. Baz kicked it off and I'm greatful.

 

[Kirkhill]

Janet Daley - American born. Brit. Of the Left but came to the Right.

There is a common pattern here: from the professionally orchestrated, internationally-based Islamist movement to the hare-brained narcissism of the entitled eco mob, the voice of the professional activist can be heard. The code has not changed much since my youth on the New Left. Wherever there is dissatisfaction or alienation (to use the old Marxist term), there is scope for infiltration and influence.

Get inside the organisation and rise to the top. Encourage the naively idealistic followers – who may be seeking nothing more than the emotional bonding of late adolescence – to believe that all of their discontents are rooted in the evils of Western capitalism.

Engaging in subversion of this kind used to be risky because it was being done in the name of an official enemy power. Now, when nobody has any clear idea of who is on which side, or even what the argument is about, we are in danger of being defeated not by communism but by nihilism.

This nihilistic new era of protest is a danger to British democracy

The idea that people can demonstrate outside MPs' homes is so outrageous that it shouldn’t even be up for debate

www.telegraph.co.uk

 

[daftandbarmy]

In other news, our species is at risk due to low fertility rates:


Global Fertility Rates

Fertility is declining globally, with rates in more than half of all countries and territories in 2021 below replacement level. Trends since 2000 show considerable heterogeneity in the steepness of declines, and only a small number of countries experienced even a slight fertility rebound after their lowest observed rate, with none reaching replacement level. Additionally, the distribution of livebirths across the globe is shifting, with a greater proportion occurring in the lowest-income countries. Future fertility rates will continue to decline worldwide and will remain low even under successful implementation of pro-natal policies. These changes will have far-reaching economic and societal consequences due to ageing populations and declining workforces in higher-income countries, combined with an increasing share of livebirths among the already poorest regions of the world.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)00550-6/fulltext?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=LNCH%20%2020240321%20%20House%20ads%20%20HT+CID_e9ab7c70f1f9cabea3af8ddc9d92b227

 

[Halifax Tar]

In other news, our species is at risk due to low fertility rates:


Global Fertility Rates

Fertility is declining globally, with rates in more than half of all countries and territories in 2021 below replacement level. Trends since 2000 show considerable heterogeneity in the steepness of declines, and only a small number of countries experienced even a slight fertility rebound after their lowest observed rate, with none reaching replacement level. Additionally, the distribution of livebirths across the globe is shifting, with a greater proportion occurring in the lowest-income countries. Future fertility rates will continue to decline worldwide and will remain low even under successful implementation of pro-natal policies. These changes will have far-reaching economic and societal consequences due to ageing populations and declining workforces in higher-income countries, combined with an increasing share of livebirths among the already poorest regions of the world.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)00550-6/fulltext?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=LNCH%20%2020240321%20%20House%20ads%20%20HT+CID_e9ab7c70f1f9cabea3af8ddc9d92b227

This should be a good thing and help the environment, no ?

 

[Remius]

This should be a good thing and help the environment, no ?

Not if it does not correlate to global population decline.

 

[daftandbarmy]

This should be a good thing and help the environment, no ?

Not after the overwhelmingly larger, destitute populations from the 'poor south' overwhelm the dissipated 'rich north' and eat Greta and her woke retinue

 

[suffolkowner]

at a global average fertility rate of 1.2 children per woman we will reach an extinction threshold around 2700

 

[Kirkhill]

at a global average fertility rate of 1.2 children per woman we will reach an extinction threshold around 2700

That is a lot of weeks.

In the meantime....