UKMT Summer 2023 - Too fat and woke to fight

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > UKMT Summer 2023 - Too fat and woke to fight

kingturnip: Apr 18, 2008

More or less everything good about London is because of the people who live here
And more or less everything bad about London is because of politicians and capitalism

Which is probably like everywhere, although why you'd ever want to live somewhere other than London, I have no idea

# ? Jul 23, 2023 14:50

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# ? May 24, 2024 13:16

DesperateDan: Dec 10, 2005; Where's my cow?

Is that my cow?

No it isn't, but it still tramples my bloody lavender.

I'm gonna drive across london in my diesel 4x4 next weekend

will try and have the right opinions about it

# ? Jul 23, 2023 14:51

kecske: Feb 28, 2011; it's round, like always

london has been a lot of fun to live in and I recommend it if you're a cool person who likes to have a good time with friends, but conversely sometimes a homeless man leaves a big poo poo on my doorstep and a poop smeared handprint on the door glass as a calling card. in short a land of contrasts

# ? Jul 23, 2023 14:52

Jedit: Dec 10, 2011; Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

OwlFancier posted:

No it doesn't, it assumes that london as a region, as a concentration of wealth embodied in buildings and infrastructure and service provision, is a function of the way our society works.

As I said, no party is going to stop the transfer of wealth into the place. It doesn't make any difference who you vote for, they will still do it. But saying "well london has all the cool stuff in it so it's not bad" is entirely missing the point that it has the cool stuff at the expense of everywhere else.

Of all the hills someone could pick to die on, Muswell has to be the worst.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 14:53

forkboy84: Jun 13, 2012; Corgis love bread. And Puro

Comrade Fakename posted:

Always weird when people on the left performatively slag off the most solidly left-wing place in the country. If the rest of the UK was like London we�d be celebrating the eternal rule of God-Emperor Corbyn.

Is it? Is it really? I seem to remember Mayor Boris Johnson? That wasn't particularly long ago. Last I checked the Tories have 9 of the 25 seats in the London Assembly. It wasn't Manchester that elected BNP councillors, it was Barking & Dagenham. For every Jeremy Corbyn you can point to there's a Iain Duncan Smith, a Sir Kid Starver, a Theresa Villiers, a Wes Streeting, a Neil Coyle. London mostly votes red, regardless of who the candidate is, which makes it no better or worse than most other metropolitan areas in the country. Excluding Scotland where different parties are competitive.

It wasn't London that had Britain's last Communist councillor, it was Ballingry in the heart of Fife mining country, who only stepped down in 2016. So is London more "solidly left-wing" than Liverpool or Glasgow or Cardiff or some of the old mining communities that Thatcher destroyed & Blair & Brown left to rot? How do you even measure it unless you blindly accept that voting Labour is left-wing, something that has barely been true for most of our lifetimes? It's a stupid question.

Honestly as funny as I've found reading frytechnician hysterical overreaction to the laziest generic criticism of London, the topic is pointless. There's lots of reasons to like & dislike everywhere. It's not a personal attack on the inhabitants. But if you live on the periphery it's very easy to feel left behind. Yes, it's all the fault of politicians and so on, so forth, but that's not actually going to stop resentment growing when you live somewhere with a once an hour during the day & then even less frequent in the evening bus service, while London is getting a massive cost high speed railway line to link it to the 2nd biggest city in the country

kingturnip posted:

More or less everything good about London is because of the people who live here
And more or less everything bad about London is because of politicians and capitalism

Which is probably like everywhere, although why you'd ever want to live somewhere other than London, I have no idea

Cost of living mainly. Or not being a city person. Or having an attachment to where you grew up. Or a dozen other reasons. I mean, there's a difference between living in Glasgow, a city of 650,000 (& even the Greater Glasgow area is still under 2,000,000) and living in London. It's not going to be for everyone.

forkboy84 fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Jul 23, 2023

# ? Jul 23, 2023 14:54

Tesseraction: Apr 5, 2009

The UK being a primarily services based economy is why a lot of it went to poo poo.

As for London, I don't hate but my extended family live in Croydon and Croydon is a complete shithole and the people living there deserve better. Walking through Canary Wharf I suddenly felt that al-Qaeda might have been on to something.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 14:56

big scary monsters: Sep 2, 2011; -~Ｓｋｕｌｌｗａｖｅ~-

Gonzo McFee posted:

Glasgow is better.

Finally a good take on London.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 14:56

happyhippy: Feb 21, 2005; Playing games, watching movies, owning goons. 'sup; Pillbug

If London is so great, why is it not named back to Londinium which is much cooler.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 15:04

big scary monsters: Sep 2, 2011; -~Ｓｋｕｌｌｗａｖｅ~-

The central belt has some of the same problems as London in terms of getting funding and turning outlying towns into commuter dorms, but at least everyone who lives there isn't constantly going on about how great it is.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 15:05

kingturnip: Apr 18, 2008

happyhippy posted:

If London is so great, why is it not named back to Londinium which is much cooler.

I thought we chose Londonistan instead?

# ? Jul 23, 2023 15:09

Scientastic: Mar 1, 2010; TRULY scientastic.
🔬🍒

I like living in London. I liked most of the other places I lived, but London is my favourite.

I don�t mind if other people like other places, really.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 15:11

forkboy84: Jun 13, 2012; Corgis love bread. And Puro

big scary monsters posted:

The central belt has some of the same problems as London in terms of getting funding and turning outlying towns into commuter dorms, but at least everyone who lives there isn't constantly going on about how great it is.

Oh undoubtedly. I was having a gurn earlier at the coverage of yesterday's Ross County game in my mam's paper today: which is to say that it was 1 line which also mentioned 4 other sides. Who those 5 teams beat wasn't even mentioned, nor the scorelines. Although it's also hardly a shock because The National is a comic, but there's absolutely a feeling of being left behind at the expense of Edinburgh & Glasgow. And then people in the Highlands resent that Inverness gets all the attention from Highland Council at the expense of the rest of a council area the size of Belgium.

Inverness to Wick is about 100 miles, the train takes over 4 & a half hours. Inverness to Glasgow is 170 miles & the train takes 3 hours 15. Glasgow to London is 400 miles & takes under 6 hours. The further away from the capital you get the shittier the transport links are.

I'd quite like to see the political capital moved north. But it's all a moot point. There's bigger problems than where the capital is. Like the economic system.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 15:15

OwlFancier: Aug 22, 2013

Has the north not suffered enough without having to also have politicians in it?

# ? Jul 23, 2023 15:23

Mr Phillby: Apr 8, 2009; ~TRAVIS~

This all feels like a lot of crab bucket turn on each other poo poo tbh.

Yeah londons poo poo its in Britain. Your town loving sucks too. Everything you like about it is overshadowed by poo poo governance, underfunding, privatisation and the people there who voted for our current poo poo government.

London isn't overfunded everywhere else is underfunded and what small joy you gain by having a go at other people for living closer to the source of our problems isn't worth it in the long run. Solidarity with the people who live and work in the city is whats needed, not some dick waving contest about your area being more deprived than thou, and therefore morally superior or w/e.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 15:30

Miftan: Mar 31, 2012; Terry knows what he can do with his bloody chocolate orange...

Mr Phillby posted:

This all feels like a lot of crab bucket turn on each other poo poo tbh.

Yeah londons poo poo its in Britain. Your town loving sucks too. Everything you like about it is overshadowed by poo poo governance, underfunding, privatisation and the people there who voted for our current poo poo government.

London isn't overfunded everywhere else is underfunded and what small joy you gain by having a go at other people for living closer to the source of our problems isn't worth it in the long run. Solidarity with the people who live and work in the city is whats needed, not some dick waving contest about your area being more deprived than thou, and therefore morally superior or w/e.

This is all true except nobody was having a go at people for living in London, nobody has said you are morally inferior for living in London, they have simply laid out various reasons why London existing in its current state is to the detriment of the rest of the country in some way.

Yes, we could potentially reverse that, it's not a fact of life, but it is the current situation and nobody in politics within a whiff of power wants to change that so people complain about it.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 15:35

Jakabite: Jul 31, 2010

Miftan posted:

This is all true except nobody was having a go at people for living in London, nobody has said you are morally inferior for living in London, they have simply laid out various reasons why London existing in its current state is to the detriment of the rest of the country in some way.

Yes, we could potentially reverse that, it's not a fact of life, but it is the current situation and nobody in politics within a whiff of power wants to change that so people complain about it.

Eh, intentional or not I do find that if you insult someone�s home, it usually comes off as a dig at them.

Also my town isn�t poo poo, it�s great and I love living here.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 15:43

Apraxin: Feb 22, 2006; General-Admiral

https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1683116204976742402

quote:

The home secretary, Suella Braverman, has personally intervened to bar a man living in exile in Turkey from being reunited in the UK with his British son.

Siyabonga Twala from Chester has been in limbo in Ankara for more than six months after he was blocked from boarding a flight back to Manchester last December. He wrote to the Home Office asking to be allowed to come back but instead Braverman has ordered his exclusion �on the basis of serious criminality� because of a cannabis offence from five years ago. Twala�s lawyer said Braverman�s intervention set a �worrying precedent�.

Twala was on his way back from a family holiday to South Africa with his nine-year-old son, Mason, and his parents and siblings when he was prevented from boarding a flight home at Istanbul airport on 30 December. The trip was the first time that Twala, 34, had returned since his family relocated from Durban to Chester when he was 15.

Twala had residency in the UK having grown up in Britain but had not yet applied for citizenship. His immigration status now hangs in the balance because of a 2018 conviction for possession of cannabis with intent to supply. He has not offended before or since and served four months of a nine-month sentence � lower than the 12-month threshold that triggers automatic deportation.

A letter from the Home Office to Twala�s lawyer sent on 14 July, says: �The secretary of state has personally directed that you should be excluded from the United Kingdom (UK) on the grounds that your exclusion is conducive to the public good.�

The letter concedes that Twala is considered at a low risk of reoffending but maintains that exclusion is appropriate �on the basis of serious criminality� because a court deemed that he dealt cannabis. The intervention carries no right of appeal or administrative review.

don't think i have comment on this one apart from stuff that will get me prob'd

# ? Jul 23, 2023 15:46

Jakabite: Jul 31, 2010

What an evil oval office she is. I hope she dies an extremely painful death, miserable and alone.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 15:50

Darth Walrus: Feb 13, 2012

Nothingtoseehere posted:

London doesn't consume the wealth of the country, it creates it.

The UK, like every other rich country that isn't a petro-state, is a service based economy. Service industries - office based thing like banking and insurance, have always benefited from being in urban centres, and having other service industries around them - there's a reason london has always had them. As such, the jobs and work being done there isn't because London is stealing other places wealth, it's that it's not been solely industrial unlike most of the rest of the country that deindustralised. While the political and journalistic monofocus on it sucks, wealth flows out of London into supporting the services of the rest of the country, not the other way round.

Funny you should mention petrostates, because there's a certain amount of scholarship suggesting that our hyperfocus on the finance sector is our own version of a petrostate's 'resource curse'.

quote:

In the 1990s, I was a correspondent for Reuters and the Financial Times in Angola, a country rich with oil and diamonds that was being torn apart by a murderous civil war. Every western visitor asked me a version of the same question: how could the citizens of a country with vast mineral wealth be so shockingly destitute?

One answer was corruption: a lobster-eating, champagne-drinking elite was getting very rich in the capital while their impoverished compatriots slaughtered each other out in the dusty provinces. Another answer was that the oil and diamond industries were financing the war. But neither of these facts told the whole story.

There was something else going on. Around this same time, economists were beginning to put together a new theory about what was troubling countries like Angola. They called it the resource curse.

Academics had worked out that many countries with abundant natural resources seemed to suffer from slower economic growth, more corruption, more conflict, more authoritarian politics and more poverty than their peers with fewer resources. (Some mineral-rich countries, including Norway, admittedly seem to have escaped the curse.) Crucially, this poor performance wasn�t only because powerful crooks stole the money and stashed it offshore, though that was also true. The startling idea was that all this money flowing from natural resources could make their people even worse off than if the riches had never been discovered. More money can make you poorer: that is why the resource curse is also sometimes known as the Paradox of Poverty from Plenty.

Back in the 1990s, John Christensen was the official economic adviser to the British tax haven of Jersey. While I was writing about the resource curse in Angola, he was reading about it, and noticing more and more parallels with what he was seeing in Jersey. A massive financial sector on the tiny island was making a visible minority filthy rich, while many Jerseyfolk were suffering extreme hardship. But he could see an even more powerful parallel: the same thing was happening in Britain. Christensen left Jersey and helped set up the Tax Justice Network, an organisation that fights against tax havens. In 2007, he contacted me, and we began to study what we called the finance curse.

It may seem bizarre to compare wartorn Angola with contemporary Britain, but it turned out that the finance curse had more parallels with the resource curse than we had first imagined. For one thing, in both cases the dominant sector sucks the best-educated people out of other economic sectors, government, civil society and the media, and into high-salaried oil or finance jobs. �Finance literally bids rocket scientists away from the satellite industry,� in the words of a landmark academic study of how finance can damage growth. �People who might have become scientists, who in another age dreamt of curing cancer or flying people to Mars, today dream of becoming hedge-fund managers.�

In Angola, the cascading inflows of oil wealth raised the local price levels of goods and services, from housing to haircuts. This high-price environment caused another wave of destruction to local industry and agriculture, which found it ever harder to compete with imported goods. Likewise, inflows of money into the City of London (and money created in the City of London) have had a similar effect on house prices and on local price levels, making it harder for British exporters to compete with foreign competitors.

Oil booms and busts also had a disastrous effect in Angola. Cranes would festoon the Luanda skyline in good times, then would leave a residue of half-finished concrete hulks when the bust came. Massive borrowing in the good times and a buildup of debt arrears in the bad times magnified the problem. In Britain�s case, the booms and busts of finance are differently timed and mostly caused by different things. But just as with oil booms, in good times the dominant sector damages alternative economic sectors, but when the bust comes, the destroyed sectors are not easily rebuilt.

Of course, the City proudly trumpets its contribution to Britain�s economy: 360,000 banking jobs, �31bn in direct tax revenues last year and a �60bn financial services trade surplus to boot. Official data in 2017 showed that the average Londoner paid �3,070 more in tax than they received in public spending, while in the country�s poorer hinterlands, it was the other way around. In fact, if London was a nation state, explained Chris Giles in the Financial Times, it would have a budget surplus of 7% of gross domestic product, better than Norway. �London is the UK�s cash cow,� he said. �Endanger its economy and it damages UK public finances.�

To argue that the City hurts Britain�s economy might seem crazy. But research increasingly shows that all the money swirling around our oversized financial sector may actually be making us collectively poorer. As Britain�s economy has steadily become re-engineered towards serving finance, other parts of the economy have struggled to survive in its shadow, like seedlings starved of light and water under the canopy of a giant, deep-rooted and invasive tree. Generations of leaders from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair to Theresa May have believed that the City is the goose that lays Britain�s golden eggs, to be prioritised, pampered and protected. But the finance curse analysis shows an oversized City to be a different bird: a cuckoo in the nest, crowding out other sectors.

More in the article. It's a worthwhile read.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 15:58

Julio Cruz: May 19, 2006

complaining about a high-speed rail link between the biggest city and the second biggest city in the country is extremely dumb

turns out that lots of people need to travel between big cities quite often, who�d have thought

# ? Jul 23, 2023 16:00

Miftan: Mar 31, 2012; Terry knows what he can do with his bloody chocolate orange...

Jakabite posted:

Eh, intentional or not I do find that if you insult someone�s home, it usually comes off as a dig at them.

Also my town isn�t poo poo, it�s great and I love living here.

Wrong. Your town specifically is the worst and I hate it more than chocolate oranges.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 16:05

Jakabite: Jul 31, 2010

Miftan posted:

Wrong. Your town specifically is the worst and I hate it more than chocolate oranges.

I had chocolate orange cookie dough two nights ago. Would you like me to send the address of the establishment so you can get yourself some?

# ? Jul 23, 2023 16:12

forkboy84: Jun 13, 2012; Corgis love bread. And Puro

Julio Cruz posted:

complaining about a high-speed rail link between the biggest city and the second biggest city in the country is extremely dumb

turns out that lots of people need to travel between big cities quite often, who�d have thought

I'm not opposed to the high speed rail, I'm opposed to the current plans of only having a high speed link as far north as Birmingham. Because what we really don't need is the 2nd biggest city becoming a commuter town for the biggest. What we don't need is yet another way to concentrate wealth in the south east at the expense of everywhere else. There's already a huge braindrain towards London, I don't think making it worse is really going to work.

I feel like a lot of Londoners don't really get how absolutely bleak a lot of places are that used to have heavy industry & were left to wither away by Thatcher. Meanwhile, oh look, another infrastructure project for the benefit of London, & just after Crossrail.

Jakabite posted:

Eh, intentional or not I do find that if you insult someone�s home, it usually comes off as a dig at them.

It shouldn't. Inverness is poo poo & I don't mind anyone saying that. I love Glasgow dearly & I'm quite aware of its flaws, of which there are oh so many, not least that it's a depressingly unequal place; some parts of the East End are among the most deprived in the country & not to mention all the sectarian poo poo you have to deal with, especially if you lived where I lived.

forkboy84 fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Jul 23, 2023

# ? Jul 23, 2023 16:13

Julio Cruz: May 19, 2006

forkboy84 posted:

I'm not opposed to the high speed rail, I'm opposed to the current plans of only having a high speed link as far north as Birmingham. Because what we really don't need is the 2nd biggest city becoming a commuter town for the biggest. What we don't need is yet another way to concentrate wealth in the south east at the expense of everywhere else. There's already a huge braindrain towards London, I don't think making it worse is really going to work.

I feel like a lot of Londoners don't really get how absolutely bleak a lot of places are that used to have heavy industry & were left to wither away by Thatcher. Meanwhile, oh look, another infrastructure project for the benefit of London, & just after Crossrail.

HS2 is planned as far as Manchester

and acting as if connecting Birmingham and London is going to have no benefits at all for the former is ridiculous

like you can�t complain about the fate of �places that used to have heavy industry� and then also say that Birmingham doesn�t need better transport links

Julio Cruz fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Jul 23, 2023

# ? Jul 23, 2023 16:16

Dabir: Nov 10, 2012

DesperateDan posted:

I'm gonna drive across london in my diesel 4x4 next weekend

will try and have the right opinions about it

Sadly it's a bit too big to crush beneath your tires which is the only possible reason I can think of to drive a 4x4 in a city

# ? Jul 23, 2023 16:18

Pablo Bluth: Sep 7, 2007; I've made a huge mistake.

HS2 will release a lot of capacity on the existing lines, as running local and national services on the same line is apparently inefficient. It should never have been sold primarily as faster A-B.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 16:23

OwlFancier: Aug 22, 2013

I find it a bit difficult to be especially enthusiastic about trains that are too expensive travelling between places I have no desire to go.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 16:27

Julio Cruz: May 19, 2006

ideally having all the direct Birmingham-London traffic on HS2 means that someone who only wants to go from Rugby to Milton Keynes would pay less and also actually get a seat to sit on

(this won�t happen but that�s because rail companies are run by bastards)

# ? Jul 23, 2023 16:38

Tesseraction: Apr 5, 2009

The main problem with mass transit is that it's expensive yeah. And it's not because train drivers get paid too much etc. it's because the cunts in charge are parasites killing this country.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 17:06

Failed Imagineer: Sep 22, 2018

I got instantly hosed with a 50 quid fine the other week, getting on the wrong train from Manchester Airport. Obviously I'm a dumbass, but it seemed like the whole place was designed to misdirect and lure tourists on to the wrong trains so they could shake them down over an innocent mistake

It didn't make me bitter about Manchester tho, still a cool city with a very handsome statue of Engels and some good pictures of bees everywhere. Instead, I reflected how capitalism is a gently caress, and that it's nice I live in a normal country that only has one rail system that kinda works

# ? Jul 23, 2023 17:17

Miftan: Mar 31, 2012; Terry knows what he can do with his bloody chocolate orange...

Jakabite posted:

I had chocolate orange cookie dough two nights ago. Would you like me to send the address of the establishment so you can get yourself some?

Not if I have to go to your town for it :v:

# ? Jul 23, 2023 17:35

Jakabite: Jul 31, 2010

We need to be careful about summoning lisa nandy with all this t-word talk

# ? Jul 23, 2023 17:47

DesperateDan: Dec 10, 2005; Where's my cow?

Is that my cow?

No it isn't, but it still tramples my bloody lavender.

Dabir posted:

Sadly it's a bit too big to crush beneath your tires which is the only possible reason I can think of to drive a 4x4 in a city

even if there weren't a bunch of rail strikes that would make it difficult up the workers, I need to help a friend move some poo poo around and don't feel like hiring a van that would probably pollute more

if the charging network locally to me wasn't absolutely poo poo and/or I could safely charge at home, I would have broken the bank and gone electric instead

my previous petrol car was the same approximate street dimensions, weight, drivetrain and arguably worse pollution output but didn't get nearly the same derision as a "diesel 4x4" does

# ? Jul 23, 2023 17:58

bessantj: Jul 27, 2004

Mr Phillby posted:

This all feels like a lot of crab bucket turn on each other poo poo tbh.

My post about London was a bit of a joke though some things that London does as Owlfancier has stated isn't great. But it always depresses me when I hear people slating other places in this country it's like when someone talks about the Rhondda its "Oh Llwynypia is a poo poo hole" or "Pen-y-graig is a dump." or "Ynyshir is a poo poo hole." well yes they maybe those things but why are we so gleeful to describe these places this way and not angry that these places are this way.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 18:17

smellmycheese: Feb 1, 2016

Thread Quiz Time! Have a guess how much the evil , avaricious Jeremiah Crubbin pissed away greedily on this outrageous misuse?

# ? Jul 23, 2023 18:27

Diet Crack: Jan 15, 2001

Skarsnik posted:

But no for real london is the worst by a mile

I could think of worse places to be.

*points at all of England and Wales*

# ? Jul 23, 2023 18:34

Shazback: Jan 26, 2013

Darth Walrus posted:

Funny you should mention petrostates, because there's a certain amount of scholarship suggesting that our hyperfocus on the finance sector is our own version of a petrostate's 'resource curse'.

More in the article. It's a worthwhile read.

Is this a... Brexit benefit?

# ? Jul 23, 2023 18:35

Tesseraction: Apr 5, 2009

smellmycheese posted:

Thread Quiz Time! Have a guess how much the evil , avaricious Jeremiah Crubbin pissed away greedily on this outrageous misuse?

£400

# ? Jul 23, 2023 18:46

Gorn Myson: Aug 8, 2007

frytechnician posted:

You must live in a much better place than London, I'm sure, lmao. Please, do thrill me with more of your stunning insight, you loving dipshit. Actually, wait, never mind; this would require more thought and originality than your decaying poo poo heap of a mind could exercise. Apologies on your opinions being as garbage as your ability to explain them, I guess.

Love to spend �8 on a pint and then get told the place is closing at eleven. Greatest place on earth.

# ? Jul 23, 2023 19:00

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# ? May 24, 2024 13:16

sinky: Feb 22, 2011; Slippery Tilde

Wonder who should be costing the policies :iiam:

# ? Jul 23, 2023 19:02

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > UKMT Summer 2023 - Too fat and woke to fight

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