Revanchism is generally understood in 20th century Leninist or Maoist terms: the capitalist / imperialist classes lashing out against their progressive tormentors. But it might equally be applied to the thought-processes of those of the woke persuasion who see reparations as the appropriate form of justice against, well, anything they don't like. This generally means lining up western white folks and seeking to empty their pockets on some spurious pretext or other.
Here's a really hilarious one that shows just how deep this nonsense runs: a writer in the Graun (where else?) who reckons that those brought up speaking English as their mother tongue enjoy unfair advantages in the world, which he is pleased to call "linguistic injustice". He reports favourably on:
"compensatory measures [to] help reduce global linguistic injustice. Philippe Van Parijs, of the University of Louvain, has, somewhat provocatively, proposed a linguistic tax on English-speaking countries to compensate for the costs of teaching English in other countries. This would involve establishing a global tax on countries where the majority of the population speaks English as a native language and distributing the revenue to countries where English is taught in schools as a foreign language"
Etc etc with further anti-English measures he likes the sound of. He doesn't make it clear whether India and any African countries would fall into his net (Nigeria comes to mind, and SA of course) - in fact he doesn't mention India at all. These omissions are rather cowardly, I feel.
It seems we shall have to put up with this increasingly insolent stuff forever. It rather overlooks the bountiful innovations issuing forth from these islands and its colonies and former colonies over several centuries, a list too long to insert here - enjoyed today by most of the rest of the world in some degree or other. The great Lee Kwan Yew used to speak in very much those tones, I recall. We should therefore respond with a "gratitude tax" on all those billions who benefit from English and its associated cultural boons (e.g. trade under Common Law jurisdiction, to name but one): we could call it the Lee Levy in his honour.
ND
27 comments:
Well, according to Genesis, God saw a monoglot world trying to build the Tower of Babel and threw a bag of spanners into the works by giving the world linguistic 'Diversity'. Not surprising therefore that today's soi disant Gods should object to the economic benefits of widespread use of one language and tell us to stop it at once.
Giving the gibbering nonsense that permeates the Graun any publicity does you no credit, ND
Just wondering how long the UK will be majority 'English' speaking.
M.
Surely wokism has had it's day...we seem to have reached peak madness.
The suggestion isn't the problem - academics are meant to throw ideas in the air and play agent provocateur - it's the probability of it being implemented.
Part of the role of governing is knowing where the Silly Bollocks pile is, and what to put on it, a skill tragically lacking these days.
The Graun is in the same brain compartment of mine as the BBC. Educated morons who preach rubbish that is best ignored from the pulpits of their ivory towered residences. The Graun because it preaches loadsa taxes for the commoners but sheltered its gains on the sale of Autotrader offshore to avoid, err, tax. Auntie for lots of reasons but all examples of its blatant hypocrisy.
OT but bad news (again). We are run by foreign agents.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-wales-68023528
"Tata Steel is to push ahead with plans to close both blast furnaces at its Port Talbot works in south Wales, the BBC understands. This is expected to lead to the loss of 3,000 jobs. Although this figure is understood to be UK-wide, the majority would be from the Port Talbot site. A large proportion of these are expected to be gone by September."
Nationalise without compensation...
Goodbye Shap Fell lime kilns, as seen from the M6.
https://solwayshorewalker.co.uk/2021/12/01/limestone-the-tata-shapfell-kilns/
The motorway sweeps down past the smooth rounded ‘sleeping elephants’ of the Howgill fells, down into the valley by Tebay, and then up again onto the moorland heights of Shap. Suddenly, incongruously, you see a tall vertical array of cylinders and truncated cones, pale greyish-green, streaked with rust, with steam drifting from the chimneys. You pass so quickly that there is barely time to register how bizarrely out of place is this industrial machinery amongst the grazing sheep and the moorland of the distant hills.
The imposing structure is a bank of four kilns, for ‘burning’ limestone to produce quicklime, and they are the remaining active processes of the once-busy Shapfells or Hardendale quarry.
Steel has had its day. As has gas. And cash. And cars. And flying and holidays.
It will all be done by A.I.
"It will all be done by A.I."
And online!
How will it be done online at night and when the wind isn't blowing (so renewables are fuck all use).
"The UK government's deal with Tata Steel is a "good news story", the secretary of state for business and trade, Kemi Badenoch, has said.
https://twitter.com/premnsikka/status/1748320265983979639
"Nationalise steel".
Port Talbot produced 37 thousand tons in a single week in 1951.
Bring back Old Labour.
I suppose once humans start trading language becomes a marketplace, the most common or most profitable comes out on top. Anyway, a bit stout to blame the English, the most common language is American, but sadly not Earse. Anyway, just a puff piece from a minor academic to fill a few column inches.
A bit of a fuss about steel and industrial strategy. But Prof Minford has told us the UK should get out of manufacturing. Snag is that no one, especially not the PPE geniuses who run the country has any idea what to use the 80% of the population who are not marketing consultants or AI creatives for. Steel, coal and car making was quite useful for that job but not so fashionable now. All you had to do was breed them, give minimal schooling and send them to work at 14.
Meanwhile I thought about getting one of these EVs. Should be going cheap soon. But the Smartmeter question comes up. One of the snags is I have no 2G or 3G or 4G signal in my house. Well not in the cupboard under the stairs but yes if you put the phone in the cactus plant in my upstairs office window.
Reparations to say, a black in the Caribbean.
Really ?
Average $7000 gdp Jamaica vs $3000 West Africa ? We did them a favour !!!
OK. It may have been hard on the original captives but the younger generations are wealthier than if their families had stayed in Africa. They didn't cultivate sugar and I didn't keep slaves.
My own ancestors toiled down mines and in the bowels of ships.
GDP differential works even better for the descendants of African slaves in America !!!
They owe whitey some money !!!
PS. My predictions 2024.
Alien life and UK lasers. I've been telling you about lasers for a few years (from a reliable source.)
Yes, I see Qinetiq are very pleased with their laser test. IF it scales, it could alter the £5m missile vs 5k drone equation.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/advanced-future-military-laser-achieves-uk-first
Glitter and glue should put a stop to lasers. The delivered power on-target is what counts. There are only a few economically feasible colours to use, just reflect or ablate those. Depends a bit if you are trying to burn a hole or blind a camera in an AI vision tracker. Narrowband filters are your friend - but maybe not on eBay.
I should imagine that anyone wishing to attack a target with drones will simply schedule it for when it's raining ( or foggy ) .
How about nap of the earth flying using ai to get close to a target? Or how about just chucking a drone swarm at a target to overwhelm the laser defenses?
Not much rain or fog in the Red Sea or Gulf though, so it could have its uses. Kharkov in February maybe not so much. £10 a shot certainly makes it cheap to fire though.
Sand/dust, different thermal boundaries deflecting the beam or just making tracking difficult. This is before we even start discussing drone countermeasures. Ever notice how anti-tank missiles never fly a straight path?
Anyone know what kind of laser they're using for this? Would be interested to know how quickly they can fire each shot.
Also aren't there several treaties restricting lasers on the battlefield? Why not use lasers to blind enemy pilots/comabatants instead of trying to vapourize them.
Also, what happened to using rail-guns? Is that another technology that initially seemed good, but proved harder to make work effectively than initially thought?
Glitter or mirrors won't do a damn thing to stop a high powered laser. Add in short-time pulsing, and very few physical things can remain cohesive under that amount of energy hitting it.
It's restrictions will be mostly mechanical, e.g. how quickly can it move from its current position to the correct one (the shot is effectively instantaneous), and volume of attacks.
I imagine its use cases will be ocean-going, where no one can use terrain to hide air attacks, and orbital, where you don't really want things exploding, but precision removal of cameras and communications can leave satellites intact, but useless.
The main countermeasure is frying its electrics, using another energy weapon powerful enough to defeat any hardening. Sadly our near-future sci-fi wars will be a lot more prosaic than phasers or lightsabers.
@EK - you could be right on alien life, there have been a few comments about it in relevant circles.
More than likely it'll be about finding a biological signature rather than a technological one (so probably space bacteria, not Mr Spock) and they're waiting for as many 9s certainty as they can, as its not the kind of thing you come back from as a serious scientist if it turns out to be a false reading.
CH - Enough to raise the odds of intelligent life being out there somewhere.
I don't think we'll ever meet but we'll see each other, one in the past the other in the future.
CH - "and orbital, where you don't really want things exploding, but precision removal of cameras and communications can leave satellites intact, but useless."
I can just see nations without the technology but with ballistic missiles allowing their sats to be blinded. At that point they'll retaliate kinetically, earth orbits will be full of junk, goodbye space travel, space telescopes, astronomy, GPS, satellite communications etc.
Then, we're back to who can produce lots of carriers, lots of long-range ELINT planes (but remember, they can't get data back by satellite), lots of long-range drones, missiles, aircraft of all types, perhaps comms ships acting as relays. Who's todays great manufacturing nation? We may yet regret castrating Germany.
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