I like restore Britain's current manifesto, however I would say it has one major weakness:
Restore Britain wants to cut taxes, welfare, and make business easier. That's all well and good, but it doesn't directly address the main issue that the British economy currently faces: Britain manages wealth without creating it.
Liberalisation can make existing businesses more efficient, and it can encourage the creation of new ones. But it doesn't solve our core issue: Efficiency alone cannot replace the absence of a productive base.
Policies that favour cheaper energy and more productive agriculture will help address that issue to a certain degree, but marginally so. Cheaper energy and lower taxes will make it easier for people to open a store, run a pub, and move goods which are all good in themselves. However the issue is that most of these services will still be relying heavily on imports. It won't address Britain's fundamental issue: that it is now primarily a service economy reliant on wealth created elsewhere.
Of course, many will point to the 80s and 90s as proof of how successful a service economy can be. However, that success was heavily reliant on the privatisation, financialisation, and sale of assets accumulated across generations. In the process, Britain traded much of its productive base for short-term growth, contributing to both today's stagnation and the decline of many local economies.
A liberal economy has its perks. But further liberalising the economy today will have little effect when there is so little remaining to sell off. We sold off our brands, our factories, our trains, our buses, our housing stock and more, and with it all the future of our nation.
Measures such as having the unemployed pick up rubbish will make the country look nicer but it doesn't solve the core issue: They are not producing wealth.
As such I offer a recommendation, one that has precedent: Alongside liberalising the middle class economy through making small businesses more productive, pursue a national policy based on making wealth creation the heart of the British economy.
Taking inspiration from nations such as France, Japan, and Korea during their economic miracles. The British state should focus heavily on supporting industries that it deems key to its future development. We already have the best universities in the world to do the research, we just need a cohesive, national plan to make that research reality.
To give a specific example: If the UK were to pursue high value industrial automation it would not only allow us to produce wealth, create a healthier internal market, but also weather the demographic pressures of the future. But as things stand, after the failure of mass migration, we are making ourselves completely dependent on the Chinese and a lesser extent the Americans to safeguard us during that future. Assuming that we even still have the wealth by then to buy their products.
We must move away from an economy that relies heavily on rent-seeking and managing wealth that was created elsewhere. But the monumental scale of that change can only be engineered by the state. I believe that this is a reality we must accept as a nation if we are to truly go beyond reactionary politics and create a genuinely prosperous future for us all.
That's also a problem for new neighbourhoods in Europe. Anything that resembles anything built over a century ago is seen as highly suspicious.
There is some truth behind the pastiche criticism but it shouldn't be an excuse in itself to shut down any project that follows classical principles. We need to rethink both car-centric infrastructure and contemporary ideas of urbanism.
New stricter rules for acquiring Swedish citizenship were introduced today on the National Day of Sweden.
- 8 years of residence instead 5
- A self-sufficiency requirement
- Swedish language & society exam
- Good character (the most controversial change)
The conduct requirement was strengthened from “hederligt levnadssätt” (honest way of life) to “skötsamt och hederligt levnadssätt” (orderly and honest way of life).
Applicants now must have been living “an orderly life”
This means that you can forget about citizenship if you have:
- A criminal record
- Restraining orders
- Financial irresponsibility (debts and patterns of non-payment)
- Repeated minor offences
- Non-compliance with authorities
- Ties to groups involved in grave human rights abuses
And a number of behaviors that aren’t illegal but deemed unwanted in Sweden.
The fatal flaw in this logic is that there is no response to those who refuse to do so. How do 50 individuals respond to 20 people who decided to organise along shared ethnic or religious interests?
This is the main issue that western governments have been facing the past few decades and their response has usually been to capitulate to the organised 20 at the expense of the 50 individuals.
Which of course makes sense from the ruler's perspective, because the 20 are more of a direct threat than an individual. But the consequence of that is that the 50 eventually feel they need to organise out of pure necessity.
So what is the solution now? How do you address the actual reality on the ground? Just telling people to be individuals won't work anymore.
The philosophical traditions of ancient Greece, which serve as the foundation for rational thought, did not distance themselves from the metaphysical but instead developed it further.
To claim that the more we know, the less we need religion is what creates incoherent frameworks that tip strongly into the irrational, leading people like Dawkins to believe that AI is conscious.
Beyond that, even with all of our science, our secular institutions, and our ability to measure most things, none of those have actually been able to address the vacuum that emerges when religion is removed. They cannot address the low TFR, they cannot address the collapse in social cohesion, and they cannot address the lack of meaning that has stalled human flourishing as "purely rational" ideologies have taken religion's place.
Yet despite these continued failures, you still insist on pushing your single-sentence gotchas. So who really is the irrational one here?
In the face of so many failures have you ever asked yourself that you may be the one relying the most strongly on faith?
@1bxss@antuan1530898@kunley_drukpa You can get a studio in a middle class safe-ish neighbourhood for less than 400usd per month. That's cheap by British standards.
Throughout all of history there has always been a "ruling class". Even the soviet union had a ruling class. We have a ruling class under mass democracy.
Until liberalism can find a defence against Machiavellianism, of which it currently has none, you can't fault the people for turning away from it.
However, if you have found a solution, please go on, what system guarantees there being no ruling class and actually works?
@antuan1530898@kunley_drukpa Rio is pretty cheap if you have a western revenue source. Getting a studio in a decent neighbourhood does not cost a lot. I am fully willing to bet that he got a place in the favelas as a choice.
Agreed. It's not feeling like they're fighting an abstract social issue that will convince Americans to return to denser urban living. Especially since electric heating tends to be more expensive than gas.
Urban planners should focus on making apartment blocks feel safer and secure than living in houses. One of the main issues many people don't want to leave the suburbs is that they have no control over their immediate surroundings if they do.
And honestly, I can't blame them. Living in an apartment can be hell with the wrong neighbours. In the suburbs at least that issue is mitigated through distance between the houses.
If we compare continuous urban areas. But the continuous Chicago urban area is around half the size of that of LA. So either the representation above has Chicago double its actual size relative to the LA area or it includes a huge area beyond the continuous urban area that has a lot more rural land than the LA metro area.
For once I agree with Hanania. The main reason is material.
Eugenics implies that they are doing it for a reason beyond themselves. When there is little chance that the child reproduces, they're not affecting the wider gene-pool. They are making a decision based on personal comfort.
It's a reasonable question to ask, but not the gotcha as it is presented to be.
The Polemic makes sense in the modern context of Christianity and especially in the context of Islam and Judaism. Religions that are primarily revelation. When the religion is based primarily on what God says/didn't say then you cannot justify why, and therefore you cannot convincingly answer why evil happens beyond personal theory.
Classical Christianity, however, offers a much more convincing rebut. With philosophers such as Saint Augustine defining the nature of God as being the metaphysical source of the Good, based on reason first perfected by the ancient Greeks, we move beyond theory and into a framework that coherently explains the nature of evil.
Through Augustine's hierarchy of goods, evil is no longer defined as an attribute, it is not a rival to good, but an absence of good, or the disorder of goods, which leads to evil occurring. The ultimate cost of free will.
To prioritise one lesser good over a greater one, like feeding a neighbour at the cost of your children starving, is denying the natural divine order, inviting chaos into reality and therefore creating evil.
To turn your back on God, that is to close your heart off to the source of Good, abandons yourself to chaos. Every desire serving a purpose that it wasn't meant to, leading to evil.
This also explains heaven and hell. Hell is often presented as a dungeon where people are thrown for not being obedient enough. In the Augustinian view, however, hell is separation from the source of all Good. If God is the highest Good, then to reject God is to reject the very thing for which we were made. Abandoning ourselves to all that is evil.
Therefore the fact that bad things happen isn't lack of proof that God exists, it's proof that he does, for if bad objectively exists, then so does the good, and if bad is the absence of Good, then the Good must come from somewhere, that somewhere being God himself.
Putting your private life in the public eye for clout then complaining that the response wasn't positive is insane.
I hope that no matter where you stand on the issue that we can agree in that regard.
Jesse and Ashley Ridgway on the backlash for aborting their baby with Down Syndrome:
"[People are saying] I don't deserve to be a mother because of the decision that we just made."
"We've seen the darkest side of humanity through this."
"Population genetics can show broad group continuity. It cannot prove an individual’s family tree to 1026 ."
But it can? You may not be able to formally map it, but genetic bottlenecks means that if you're genetically British then you will have a family tree dating even beyond 1026 on the islands.
The issue with your arguments is that they're pointless.
@MrHreviews I would love for someone to ask her on camera how she defines traitor.
It reminds me of when the ANC were accusing Afrikaaners of being traitors for making a big deal out of being murdered.
The far left is defined by its environment. Because immigrants in France are primarily Muslim, pork becomes more symbolic than it would in the USA.
I wouldn't consider them worse though. Each group prioritises issues depending on what outsider group they want to defend or what social issues they deem the most relevant.