[HN Gopher] I wrote a book called "Crap Towns". It seemed funny ...
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I wrote a book called "Crap Towns". It seemed funny at the time
Author : url
Score : 364 points
Date : 2025-04-26 00:30 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (samj.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (samj.substack.com)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Yes, it's a problem that something like that is insulting to
| publish.
| tom_ wrote:
| I'm not sure. Times change, and things that were acceptable
| become not so - and vice versa.
| iterance wrote:
| It's not just acceptability. Jokes written even just five or
| ten years ago often fail to land on modern audiences. That
| taste in humor changes is neither morally positive nor
| negative. It's easy to look for deeper meaning in the notion
| that what once was funny now isn't, but often, there isn't a
| deeper meaning to find. Life is different now; so too must
| humor change.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| When I re-watch comedy like 'The Young Ones' or many other
| funny series from the 80s or 90s, I don't find it funny any
| more. It's not that the jokes weren't good and that I
| didn't find it funny at the time, it's just that humour
| changes. In that case, it's nothing to do with the jokes
| becoming 'unacceptable'.
| harvey9 wrote:
| I find Yes Minister funny now, and I'm too young to have
| watched when it first aired.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| I watched the entirety of Yes (Prime) Minister relatively
| recently despite being younger than the show and not
| British; and found it delightfully entertaining and often
| surprisingly relevant to contemporary political issues.
| teamonkey wrote:
| I used to find The Thick of It hilarious but now I find
| it a depressing reminder of how ludicrous modern politics
| has become
| harvey9 wrote:
| Yes Minister is a reminder that politics has been
| ludicrous for a long time, but I think its style is much
| lighter than The Thick of It.
| chgs wrote:
| The institution yes minister makes fun of has barely
| changed in 400 years, let alone 40, the jokes on the
| whole thus remain fresh.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Not necessarily. I think the interesting idea the article
| dances around is changing attitudes and sensibilities. In many
| ways, I think media of the 90s and even 2000s had a different
| balance of optimism and cynicism. Critical commentary was an
| edgy (or in this case humorous) counterpoint. 1999 saw dark
| edgy and dystopian films like the matrix, fight club that felt
| like a warning, criticism of a future to be avoided.
|
| Similar subjects today are noticably darker without the
| buttress of social optimism. Films like The Joker seem less
| like a cautionary tale and more like a documentary. Is the
| joker now the protagonist?
| zeristor wrote:
| Or could it be about "Othering" these destitute places, and
| realising far more of us are engulfed in humdrum of life
| collapsing.
| relaxing wrote:
| I'd be pretty upset if the value of my home was harmed because
| someone decided to make it common knowledge that the town I
| lived in was crap.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| That is a very British take. Constant worry about the value
| of something you don't want to sell. Thinking about your home
| as a financial investment, rather than a...home.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Unfortunately it's become embedded in the system with the
| houses themselves becoming vastly over inflated.
| zeristor wrote:
| A Ponzi scheme.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Thinking about your home as a financial investment,
| rather than a...home.
|
| Sadly, the way _all_ Western economies have devolved over
| the last decades, real estate equity is the only form of
| wealth that at least _some_ part of the 99% has for
| retirement.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Broad market index funds have performed spectacularly
| over the last few decades, and far more than 1% have them
| (or could have had them) for retirement. It has been the
| standard recommendation since I graduated college in the
| early 2000s.
|
| Of course, many people prefer to invest in extra big and
| luxurious
| houses/cars/vacations/restaurants/alcohol/coffee/etc out
| and I would even throw in educations with low ROI, rather
| than broad market index funds.
|
| This is specifically about those who had been earning
| money in the ~1980 to ~2010 period, for the vast
| majority, their house should not have been the only
| equity.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Of course, many people prefer to invest in extra big
| and luxurious
| houses/cars/vacations/restaurants/alcohol/coffee/etc out
| and I would even throw in educations with low ROI, rather
| than broad market index funds.
|
| The problem is, index funds have no inherent value, they
| (just like all stocks and other financial
| derivatives/instruments) are effectively a paper with one
| or another form of "IOU" written on it. Economic crashes,
| wars, tariffs, morons in politics, whatever, there are
| tons of ways massive amounts of value can be straight up
| destroyed in a matter of days.
|
| A house however? As long as it's reasonably well built,
| come what may, you still have a roof over your head. No
| one's gonna come and kick you out of it. And that's
| inherent value.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| > No one's gonna come and kick you out of it.
|
| Real estate suffers from the whims of the market,
| governmental policy and especially war. Even if you rule
| out outliers like imminent domain (used on many many
| homeowners in the first half of the 20th century in the
| US) or destruction via war, simple economic changes as we
| saw in 2008 cause people to lose their homes.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _index funds have no inherent value, they (just like
| all stocks and other financial derivatives /instruments)
| are effectively a paper with one or another form of "IOU"
| written on it_
|
| What do you think a real-estate deed is?
|
| > _No one 's gonna come and kick you out of it_
|
| Property tax. Title fraud. Mortgage fraud. Mistaken
| foreclosure. (Legitimate foreclosure.) Squatters' rights.
| Eminent domain.
|
| The difference between real estate and financial assets
| is possession. But every time you're away from your home,
| you aren't in possession of it. And possession, control
| and ownership are three overlapping but ultimately
| separate concepts.
| brewdad wrote:
| Presumably, anyone looking to buy your home would visit and
| quickly ascertain whether or not your town is crap.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _pretty upset if the value of my home was harmed because
| someone decided to make it common knowledge that the town I
| lived in was crap_
|
| I could argue this for the journalism disclosing Flint's lead
| problems. The root cause isn't the commentary. It's the
| reality. Balancing one's property value is the fraud conveyed
| on a prospective buyer.
| protocolture wrote:
| Be harder to identify the non crap towns tbh.
| casey2 wrote:
| It's exactly this kind of structuralism induced fatalism that
| makes more towns than ought shit.
|
| If you know a town is shit, it's your moral obligation to tell
| them so that their kids and smart residents move out. Post
| 2000s progressive seem to think that Towns, religions and
| culture can form opinions. They are trying to be "empathetic"
| and so get tricked by scammers who personally benefit from
| these horrible situations.
| refulgentis wrote:
| What?
| stuaxo wrote:
| This reads like the old amanfrommars comments on theregister
| back in the day.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| a comedians biggest fear is that one day everyone starts taking
| them seriously
| parpfish wrote:
| Unless you're Nathan fielder and you just want to talk about
| aviation safety
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| The author writes well. Within a few paragraphs the reader
| entirely forgets that _" I couldn't publish Crap Towns today"_ is
| a hypothetical.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| Yeah I kept reading for the part where the author addresses the
| thesis, but that's not what it's about.
| dandellion wrote:
| Is it about keeping you reading for long enough to show you a
| pop-up for his newsletter?
| hkt wrote:
| Just disable JavaScript and get on with your life
| hnarn wrote:
| Just because these types of annoyances can be easily
| disabled by someone with a little bit of technical know-
| how doesn't mean that one doesn't have the right to be
| annoyed by the tendency and call it out.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| I thought that too, it it quite hard to uncover the logical
| argument there. Appears to be sourced from conversations with
| journalists. I ended up just trusting that it was true in order
| to engage with the rest of the piece.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| In my experience there are only a few cities in the U.S that
| literate people are proud enough to live in, that they would be
| insulted that you put that into your crap town book.
|
| Thus I wonder what demographic that at one time would have bought
| this book is not going to be buying this book now.
| stryan wrote:
| Considering the book is about "crap towns" in the UK, I imagine
| it could be a very different demographic than the one you're
| thinking of
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| hmm, maybe. In the U.S you have often the person who moved
| from a 'crap' town to some place they consider great, who
| gets really emotional about the crappiness they escaped to be
| able to think freely and the like. And often these people are
| the ones I would think of as customers for a book like this,
| and if their new town isn't in the book they certainly won't
| be offended.
| wyager wrote:
| A good way to identify which cities suck is to say to a native
| "<their city> sucks".
|
| If they agree that it sucks, it probably sucks.
|
| If they get really mad and defensive about it, it definitely
| sucks.
|
| If they're just bemused or laugh it off, it's probably nice.
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| The funniest thing about that is that the cities where these
| proudly smug people live have the most actual crap on their
| streets.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember a Web site, in the early oughts, called
| "sheppeyscum.com". That URL now redirects to one that makes
| Sheppey look good.
|
| The original one did not.
|
| It was all about insulting the Isle of Sheppey (Western UK). I
| think an ex-Shep wrote it.
|
| Looks like all traces are gone. I understand that death threats
| were involved.
| ctxc wrote:
| Crazy stuff, you got me curious
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20040411225059/http://www.sheppe...
|
| > The island was shat from the arse of the Norse god Fuctup
| whilst he was suffering a bout of diarrhoea as a side effect of
| his recent withdrawal from scag. And that's true, as true as
| I'm sitting here. > A large number of policefolk who work on
| Sheppey are "Specials", which by a startling coincidence is
| also an affectionate term used to describe people with learning
| disabilities. > Christian based cults aside, the main religious
| practices on the island usually resemble primitive tribal type
| worship. Drug induced trances are a common tool for reaching
| the spirits beyond. These trances are often extended to include
| ritual drug induced self sacrifice- a deeply sacred activity
| known commonly to the natives as "Overdose".
|
| You go to the "culture" section and there's just a single word,
| "NO." xD
| cjrp wrote:
| If it's the Sheppey I'm thinking of, it's in Kent (SE England)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| You are correct.
|
| Got my right and left mixed up.
| addicted wrote:
| So it's not that it won't be published today.
|
| It just won't be as popular today. And would, ironically, be
| crapped on by other people, which is what the author is unhappy
| about.
|
| Thats what the author means, and represents the entirety of the
| "Oh I am so oppressed because I can't say shitty unfunny jokes
| because other people will make shitty unfunny jokes about me in
| response" genre of argument.
|
| The difference between then and now is that the people in the
| "crap towns" have the opportunity to call the author out.
| svat wrote:
| That's not the author's main point -- the author's point is the
| surprising observation that "That joke isn't funny any more",
| even to the author himself. This is something deeper than the
| usual "genre of argument" you're referring to.
| relaxing wrote:
| Eh, he goes out of his way to say
|
| > The good news is that I don't think that the illiberalism
| of identity politics will endure much longer. Especially when
| it comes to the literal policing of humour - and cancellation
| of comedians for telling the wrong kinds of jokes.
|
| I think it's still his point.
| brazzy wrote:
| No; that's at most a sidenote.
| girvo wrote:
| If you believe that single sentence (that I disagree with
| him about, but that's neither here nor their) is the entire
| point of the article, I'd really suggest you read it again,
| it's far more interesting than that.
| Yossarrian22 wrote:
| The problem is those towns weren't crap within living memory when
| the books were written. Now anyone who remembers otherwise is
| close to dead
| jhbadger wrote:
| Some of them maybe have gentrified (not to ignore that this in
| itself isn't 100% a good thing). Others are if anything worse
| than when he wrote the book.
| notahacker wrote:
| Nah, several of them were always running jokes, some of them
| were a lot worse a decade or three earlier, and some of them
| were picked far more for their snobbishness or for being
| homogenous sanitised suburbia than their decline.
| Centigonal wrote:
| If you're about to write a diatrabe about the harms of political
| correctness or scold the writer on inventing a victimhood complex
| for themselves, please read the ending of the OP:
|
| > _Much as I'd like to, I can't just blame the puritans if my old
| jokes don't work any more. Nor can I claim that the Crap Towns
| books were an unqualified success_
|
| [...]
|
| > _before closing, I should admit that there is a more
| straightforward answer to the question of whether you can still
| get away with doing something like Crap Towns._
|
| > _That answer is: yes. There's a website (I won't link to it)
| that has kept on running a survey of the worst places in the UK
| for years and years- and, honestly, when I look at it, I hate it.
| Partly because I feel like they're ripping off my project, but
| mainly because when I read the comments on there about incels and
| chavs and carbuncles and brutalism it all just seems grubby.
| Maybe even cruel._
|
| > _I could argue that I don't like this website because their
| approach and criteria are different to mine - and I hope there
| would be some truth in that. But I also know that I now also just
| react against the whole thing. It's been done. It's grown stale.
| It doesn't fit - especially since so much has changed around it.
| In short, the world has moved on. And maybe that's not such a bad
| thing?_
| svat wrote:
| Loved the fact that this post didn't go where I expected it to
| (or at least, didn't remain there). That a book like this
| probably wouldn't be published today, or would be less popular
| today, is a point that has been made many times by many people,
| about many different books, TV shows, jokes, etc. But the author
| actually moves on from there; the observation is that even _in
| his own opinion_ , the same joke isn't funny today -- in fact,
| the equivalent thing being done today just looks "grubby".
|
| So it's something deeper than the usual "political correctness"
| debate: the question really is, what is it about the world today
| that trumps the hallowed British traditions of celebrating
| failure, of moaning, of affectionate self-mockery? Why isn't the
| joke funny any more, or why doesn't the mocking seem
| affectionate?
|
| (He points at the malaise that exists today--it was only funny
| when there was some hope--but I'm not sure that's the only
| answer...)
| casey2 wrote:
| It went straight into the self-flagellation territory I knew
| I'd get from a British author. It makes perfect sense that he
| would change his opinion to naive structuralism cause that's
| what's politically popular in the UK right now.
| top1bobby wrote:
| I heard overwrought reductionism is the new thing.
| necovek wrote:
| I though I had a decent command of English language, even
| if I am not a native speaker, but I have no ide what is
| "naive structuralism" or "overwrought reductionism" in this
| context.
|
| Would any of you care to elaborate? I am serious, I am not
| familiar much with the UK political scene so can't tie
| these normal sounding phrases to anything, and would
| honestly appreciate some help.
| ear7h wrote:
| This sounds like an intellectual debate but there's
| nothing of substance being said here lol. casey2 thinks
| British people today are wrongly (naively) complaining
| about the rich/powerful/elite (structuralism). top1bobby
| is making fun of casey2 because the latter is using a lot
| of big words (overwrought) while _reducing_ complicated
| politics to a single issue; basically "you think you're
| smart with fancy words but you are just as bad as the
| people you complain about (P.S. I can use fancy words
| too)"
| karlgkk wrote:
| Often when someone, especially a comedian, complains about
| "political correctness", what they actually mean is: nobody is
| laughing at the same joke I told 20 years ago
|
| Sensibilities change. The sense of what is and isn't punching
| down changes. Even the appetite for punching down changes.
|
| People who whine about "PC" always pretend like it's the death
| of comedy or speech or whatever, and yet... there are younger
| people building great careers!
|
| And yes, there is a real worrying erosion of free speech - but
| 98% these people could keep saying exactly what they've been
| saying - they're just not getting the laughs they think they're
| entitled to.
| vanviegen wrote:
| > Sensibilities change. The sense of what is and isn't
| punching down changes. Even the appetite for punching down
| changes.
|
| Yes, and the way it changes tells us something about our
| society, which I believe this article is trying to address.
| tempaway4738438 wrote:
| Read the article, its much more interesting and reflective
| that that
| karlgkk wrote:
| I did, I'm just commenting one facet
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > Sensibilities change
|
| If people are literally calling the police, they aren't
| changing, they are being suppressed/punished.
|
| > they're just not getting the laughs they think they're
| entitled to
|
| Why are the comedians 'entitled' rather than the people who
| go to their show and complain?
| karlgkk wrote:
| It's not zero sum. Expand your thinking lol
| clown_strike wrote:
| > Often when someone, especially a comedian, complains about
| "political correctness", what they actually mean is: nobody
| is laughing at the same joke I told 20 years ago
|
| Don't rephrase others' sentiments to suit your own narrative.
| Soothsayers are bullshitters.
|
| When comedians complain about political correctness, there is
| no alternate meaning. They are upset that they can't tell the
| same jokes they told 20 years ago, to the same audiences from
| 20 years ago that continue to enjoy them, because external
| forces mob, heckle, and harass them so they cannot serve
| their customers...
|
| ...which conveniently provides opportunities for those
| younger people to "build great careers," by eliminating all
| legacy competition.
|
| In any other context it'd be driving the local kebab shop
| owner out of town because someone with influence wants to
| open a salad bar in its place.
|
| It's mob rule, not "social justice."
| immibis wrote:
| Mob rule is when people don't like my comedy any more. Got
| it.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > Got it.
|
| No you haven't, and it seems you don't care to.
| djeastm wrote:
| >mob rule
|
| Unless there's some kind of threat of physical force
| involved it's not. It's just a critical mass of people
| having opinions you don't like and voicing those opinions.
|
| If the market of ideas decides your ideas are not valuable
| anymore for whatever reason you're going to suffer what
| scarcity feels like.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| > Unless there's some kind of threat of physical force
| involved
|
| Last time I checked the mob called for these people lives
| to be destroyed by asking for them to lose all
| possibility of ever having a job and threatening anyone
| who would employ them or support them of dire
| repercussions while slapping themselves in the back for
| what a positive impact they made.
|
| So yes, it's very much about threat of violence.
| karlgkk wrote:
| "Mob rule" is just how conservatives say "I shouldn't face
| consequences". Freedom doesn't include freedom from
| repercussions
| tempaeay4747274 wrote:
| This is a good question..it just occurred to me that perhaps
| its because its so much easier for the people who would be the
| target of the joke to answer back now?
|
| Social media gives the possibility of instant reply, whereas if
| you publish a book in 2003 called 'crap towns' how can the so-
| called chavs answer back? Publish their own book? Write to the
| local paper?
|
| So its a side effect of how we can all hear each other better
| now (for better or for worse)
| overfeed wrote:
| Oh, that's insightful. Author could have encountered a light
| form of elite convergence 20 years ago when interacting with
| fellow writers and journalists, who probably didn't live in
| the blighted areas, and could take the joke on behalf of
| their cities. Being from a crap town is fine if you're don't
| live in the crappy part of town.
|
| I'll add that the decade-long austerity measures let people
| know that it's actual class warfare, and it's no longer a
| laughing matter as it was in 2003 when it seemed fixable. Now
| it's clear the people in charge are not interested in fixing
| anything. A joke about someone's health situation is received
| better if the condition is treatable, but less so of they are
| terminal.
| Terr_ wrote:
| The same phenomenon exists when people talk about the movie
| Blazing Saddles.
|
| It's transgressive content worked because it was satirizing
| "wholesome" Wild West shows, holding up a funhouse mirror to
| their less-obvious absurdities and racist aspects. It was so
| successful, its targets don't exist anymore.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=jzMFoNZeZm0
| globalise83 wrote:
| I think the difference is between, let's say, Ricky Gervais
| making a joke about a little boy with cancer, and Ricky Gervais
| making a joke about THAT little boy with cancer right there in
| Seat 7G. Everyone now knows these crap towns are dying.
| HPsquared wrote:
| If someone looks a bit pale and sickly, it's often considered
| fair game to make fun of their appearance (eat some
| vegetables, get some exercise etc)... Whereas if they have
| severe health problems it's no longer tasteful. This fact has
| not changed, it's basic human decency. The situation is
| what's changed.
| eleveriven wrote:
| Humor is as much about context as content
| Tourniquet wrote:
| My home town featured (33rd!). We considered it vindication!
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Vindication like what Ohioans would have felt when Charles
| Dickens visited America and said that St. Louis was a nice
| enough place, but "not likely ever to vie, in point of elegance
| or beauty, with Cincinnati"?
| stuaxo wrote:
| Lots of people in the UK grow up in crap towns, and having a
| book validate that feeling can be good.
| amiga386 wrote:
| > There's a website (I won't link to it) that has kept on running
| a survey of the worst places in the UK for years and years
|
| I will, it's ChavTowns.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20061013053524/http://www.chavto...
|
| Still running as https://www.ilivehere.co.uk/
|
| Also the owner is giving up on it as of the start of this year --
| mainly because nobody visits the site; churnalists just freeboot
| it and they rank higher on google.
| https://www.ilivehere.co.uk/top-10-worst-places-to-live-in-e...
| mvdtnz wrote:
| That author on Slough,
|
| > Ricky Gervais encapsulated its brutalist new town grim with
| 'The Office' before giving up and writing lame punching-down
| anti-woke "gags" for the educationally subnormal
|
| That's a very strange reading on Gervais' post-The Office
| career. After The Office he did things like Extras, a sitcom
| about extras on TV and film sets, Derek, an emotional series
| about a well-meaning care worker who thinks it's more important
| to be kind than popular, and After Life, a series about a man
| who loses his wife young and how he deals with grief.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| There's also his standup career of being extra atheist as if
| the world has never seen a famous lapsed Christian Brit
| labrador wrote:
| I concluded Noah's Arc was bollocks when I was 8 so I don't
| know why he goes on about it at his age
| mckn1ght wrote:
| Because people in power of a similar age still go on
| about how they think it's true?
| graemep wrote:
| Who?
|
| I know there is the odd biblical literalist in power in
| the US, but have never come across one in the UK. The
| biggest group of Christians in the UK are Anglicans (who
| are not usually biblical literalists, although there are
| evangelical groups within it that might be) and Catholics
| (church firmly against Biblical literalism, although
| there might be odd individuals).
|
| I think the reason atheists argue with Bibilical
| literalists is that its easy. It is somehting of a straw
| man: you pick a sub-group that is easy to
| debunk/discredit and then discredit the whole group by
| association. This has always been a problem: St Augustine
| talked about the damage done by people who interpreted
| the scriptures as contradicting what is known to be true
| in the 4th century.
| hkt wrote:
| There's good money in it, I expect.
|
| Plus, there's no harm in making a career (or a joke) out
| of being vaguely anti-nonsense.
| harvey9 wrote:
| Charlie Hebdo's publishers might disagree.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Have you not been following the news this week? A
| tremendous number of people still put a huge amount of
| stock into their silly superstitions.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Because it was edgy and transgressive when he was doing
| it 15 years ago.
|
| Nowadays not so much.
| notahacker wrote:
| To be honest, like most of his subsequent attempts to be
| edgy and transgressive, it wasn't really 15 years ago
| either. His entire career as a standup and Twitter
| commentator feels like an extension of the Brent "I don't
| live by The Rules you know" persona
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > lapsed Christian Brit
|
| I don't think he is a lapsed Christian though?
| abraae wrote:
| Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
|
| It isn't fit for humans now,
|
| There isn't grass to graze a cow.
|
| Swarm over, Death!
|
| John Betjeman (1906 - 1984)
| arrowsmith wrote:
| He also did _The Invention of Lying_ , which, 16 years since
| I watched it in the cinema, is still the answer I give
| without hesitation to "what's the worst movie you've ever
| seen?"
| HideousKojima wrote:
| For me that has to be _High Life_. Pitched to me as
| "Robert Pattinson has to to take care of a baby in space",
| in reality it was basically a side plot to "serial killers
| and rapists are stuck on a spaceship together" and all that
| implies.
| stavros wrote:
| Yeah I don't know, you're selling it well. I kind of want
| to watch that.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| > organisations who despite their name, do not give a flying **
| about their social housing stock
|
| > and run-down decaying towns in the whole country
|
| You cannot simultaneously have landlords living in Spain and
| well maintained local housing. Both are expensive. Pick only
| one. There exists a sweet spot when people are desperate enough
| to live in a place and pay every rent for any housing, but the
| sugar coating has washed off.
|
| PS. How could they miss Bedford in the ranking?!
| harvey9 wrote:
| The social housing stock is run by corporate landlords with
| UK offices. It's still poorly maintained anyway.
| anovikov wrote:
| Not sure how living in Spain is expensive compared to UK.
| Cheaper living, lower taxes.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| "Expat's cost of living" is different from "native's cost
| of living".
| lodovic wrote:
| Now that's an interesting trend. It's no longer feasible to
| have an independent web site, because nobody will visit it
| because you don't have the page rank. Journalists that do find
| your site copy your data and may add a link (that noone vists).
| Their pagerank is much higher, so they get all search engine
| links and all the ads, for your content.
| debesyla wrote:
| We have this situation in lithuanian web for a two decades
| now.
|
| Once the big news networks (DELFI.lt, 15min.lt, lrytas.lt,
| alfa.lt and few others) bought out the largest blogs and
| connected them to their own domains, there isn't much of an
| independent web left. Owners of the websites back then gladly
| sold out (and I would have done it too), because it seemed
| like a great idea to sell your work back in the 2008-ish for
| real profit, an unique chance (imagine monetising your
| content when you have only 3 mil. theoretical consumers!
| There isn't much lithuanian speakers) and especially during
| the economic crisis.
|
| Then the other blogs were attached to the networks by the
| generous offers of "let us publish and we will give
| backlinks, maybe" + "we will just copy it because we know
| that you won't bother taking us to court, it's too small of a
| country, you know".
|
| So now whatever you google, you get mostly these results: 7
| big network sites and subsites, 2 auto-translated AI slop
| generated by someone in other side of the planet, 0.9 of
| business pages and 0.1 something actually personal.
|
| No wonder that almost all content creators moved to social
| networks by the 2015-ish. They still are there.
|
| I wonder what will change this. A web apocalypse? Mass demand
| of in-person, non-online "content"? I wonder...
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Between that, Google reposting your content and AI's
| hoovering up everything in site it hardly seems worth
| publishing online anymore.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Yikes, I spent 15 years living in one of the Top 10 and my
| summers in another one. I probably agree, though. The rot was
| showing in most of those by the late 80s and they went very
| swiftly downhill after that.
|
| To counter those depressing places, these towns and villages
| seem lovely:
|
| https://www.thetimes.com/best-places-to-live/location-guide/...
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I can't see the list because of the paywall but my guess is
| they are all medium sized market towns. Large enough to have
| the facilities you need but not so big that they become
| impersonal.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| Edit: seems not
| petesergeant wrote:
| > but mainly because when I read the comments on there about
| incels and chavs and carbuncles and brutalism it all just seems
| grubby. Maybe even cruel.
|
| There we go. People shift from being the out-group to being more
| sympathetic and unfortunate, and humour that targeted them moves
| into being punching down. I was shocked at how less funny Bill
| Hicks feels 20 years on, because now it just sounds like he's
| being an asshole about people who are struggling.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Great article with links to others, like this one:
|
| https://arena.org.au/stay-in-your-lane-the-oxymoron-of-authe...
|
| With quotes (re cultural appropriation) like "the ultimate
| endpoint of keeping our mitts off experience that doesn't belong
| to us is that there is no fiction... All that's left is memoir"
|
| We've been suffering under the yoke of the intellectualization of
| deliberalization, censorship and oppression of ideas via our
| leading thinkers, institutions and platforms who have been acting
| out of fear. Fear of being strung up on the town square and fear
| that not signaling support for what has been happening signals
| disapproval.
|
| What I find infuriating is that our youth have been driving this
| conformist, enforcement, rule making and rule following mentality
| and trend. Our youth should be questioning the rules, not forming
| up as a conformist jack booted militia and persecuting those who
| don't follow the rules. History has shown that the latter ends in
| tears.
|
| We saw this in Germany in the 30s, in China in the 60s and 70s
| where the red guards in the cultural revolution were mostly
| teens, under the Khmer Rouge in the 70s where kids were police,
| and with the Young Pioneers and Komsomol in the early and mid
| 20th century Soviet Union.
|
| When youth stop questioning and start enforcing, it often marks
| the end of a healthy society and the beginning of something much
| darker.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Personally I see it the other way around: the youth's
| increasing intolerance of politically incorrect ideas is caused
| by the increasing power of the "jack booted militia" on the
| right. It's not surprising that people try to suppress
| intolerant ideas when there is a very real risk of them being
| adopted by those in power.
| vixen99 wrote:
| "jack booted militia" is a nastily evocative & suggestive
| phrase that lingers like a rotten smell. I am worried & want
| to know who and where. Which are the ideas that we all agree
| are intolerant? Sounds as if you are addressing a club of the
| like-minded.
| mmaunder wrote:
| > the youth's increasing intolerance of politically incorrect
| ideas is caused ...
|
| So, wrongthink. This is my point. And it's incredible how the
| history of passing legislation to censor being ultimately
| used by the opposition just keeps on repeating.
| firefoxd wrote:
| One thing that has been accentuated over the past few decades is
| the idea that you are responsible for your success. When you were
| poor, lacked means, or didn't have a good job, it was because the
| god of fortune didn't smile on you. Only the fortunate
| experienced success.
|
| Now only losers are broke and live in crap towns, and winners
| drive expensive cars. With this idea in mind, calling it crap
| towns becomes an attack on the people, rather then the town
| itself.
|
| This idea is thoroughly explored in Alain de Botton's "Status
| Anxiety"
| stuaxo wrote:
| As Thatchers children we've all internalised some of those
| ideas to an extent, even those who vehemently are against here.
|
| Individualism, atomisation and other Randian bullshit.
| globular-toast wrote:
| People in crap towns drive expensive cars too. The inequality
| between a crap place and a nice place is now enough that people
| can afford a ghastly Lamborghini SUV thing before they can
| afford to move out of a crap town.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Only the drug dealers and landlords.
|
| I remember a few years ago a politician was vilified for
| suggesting there wasn't much you could do about the derelict
| seaside towns. I have a feeling that what he said was
| probably quite close to the truth.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I feel like the opposite has been accentuated for around 15+
| years now, especially after the 2008 recession.
|
| The 1990s/2000s felt like "you make your own luck", but since I
| got out of college, it seems the 90% luck / 10% effort idea is
| the mainstream (including "who you know is more important than
| what you know"). Maybe it is just me growing up, or maybe it's
| the proliferation of access to data due to the internet, such
| as opportunityatlas.org
|
| I wonder if the increased acceptance of this fact can cause a
| type of societal malaise.
| James_K wrote:
| I would estimate the bigger cause of malaise is the fact that
| things just seem to get worse. Housing gets more expensive,
| shops close down, towns die. One can't help but get the
| feeling there is a continual tightening of the screws. Every
| year, the country sinks a little further down. What can you
| do if you want to stop it? Brexit? Reform? Very unsatisfying
| answers, but the only ones people are given beyond "lay down
| and accept it".
| refulgentis wrote:
| I read some guy complaining some podcast complained about his
| book and elevate it into some weird organized political movement
| that he's already declared is dead, and he's happy those kind of
| rancid speech-haters are gone...punchline... _they 're_ the
| illiberals!
|
| Okay then!
|
| Be honest with yourself, O Reader!
|
| Are you _sure_ he 's not writing a satire of the same piece
| you've seen written every year since 1990, just with a shifting
| name for it?
|
| He is a comedian after all...
|
| Are you _sure_ he 's serious?
| RoddyRags wrote:
| I was sure there was going to be a series of these books
|
| Crap Governments Crap Businesses Crap Websites Crap Engineers
| Crap Media....
| scythe wrote:
| >One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands
| all the others in its own ugly way.
|
| I couldn't help but keep thinking about this Wittgenstein quote
| as I read this. I find it harder to say exactly why. Obviously,
| we felt differently in the past. Not _my_ past, of course: I was
| a child, barely able to integrate by parts or fold a shirt
| correctly.
|
| There is another possibility. The usual complaint is that
| oversensitivity has constrained humor. The usual retort is that
| what we did before was harmful and we're better off not doing it.
| But the problem with logical-seeming dilemmas is that existential
| propositions can only seem logical. The world, unlike logic, is
| malleable. Perhaps the jokes really _are_ worse today than they
| were in the past?
|
| Twenty years ago, our crap towns were something we experienced
| with the other townsfolk first and foremost, and only to a lesser
| degree did we bear the weight of the outside world's eyes upon
| us. Today it is not like this. Communication across great
| distances has gone from difficult to convenient to pervasive and
| unavoidable.
|
| Locality has frayed in more domains than the spatial. Recently
| /r/MedicalPhysics had a spat with /r/sysadmin about hospital IT
| policies. Such a civil war would have been unthinkable in the
| 2000s. Humans used to spend much more time socializing with their
| friends or at least comrades-in-something than with almost
| complete strangers. Our egos are exposed to the elements in a new
| and phase-changing way.
|
| I think that the social fabric has already begun to fight this
| trend from the bottom up. At the risk of sounding like an
| advertisement, Discord has made non-discoverability its greatest
| feature. The gladiatorial aspect of modern discourse has never
| sat well with me. I don't want to have a conversation for the
| audience. But here I am. Please clap.
| econ wrote:
| Without a definition of a shit town I can't make much sense of
| what he wrote here. I'm tempted to define it myself but I won't
| fall for the trap.
| klooney wrote:
| > And when hope was actually something people might consider
| voting for?
|
| A link to an American politician, of course.
| jdietrich wrote:
| Twenty years ago, I think there was still a sense that we were
| collectively laughing with each other about the dullness of small
| towns. We all had the same shops - Woolworths, Dixons, Our Price,
| BHS. We all had a leisure centre that looked like everyone else's
| leisure centre. Some towns were better off than others, some
| towns had parts that you were better off avoiding after dark, but
| the majority of towns belonged to the same broad spectrum of
| bland mediocrity.
|
| Today, I think it's clear who would be being laughed at by whom.
| The fates of places have so radically diverged that we no longer
| have a sense of collective identity. All of the places listed in
| _Crap Towns_ are now unrecognisable, for better or worse. Those
| familiar shops are now gone; in some places they have been
| replaced by artisan bakeries and pop-up boutiques, while in
| others they have been replaced by charity shops or nothing at
| all. Half the leisure centres have shut and we all know which
| half.
|
| The upper middle class might have become more humourless and
| puritanical, but I think that's a subconscious self-defence
| mechanism, a manifestation of noblesse oblige without real
| obligation. The working class are too angry to laugh and
| certainly aren't willing to be laughed _at_. We all know that we
| 're teetering on the brink of a populist wave, but no-one in a
| position of power seems willing or able to do anything about it.
| parpfish wrote:
| Well put.
|
| A few decades of compounding inequality transforms what used to
| be good natured ribbing amongst chums into bullying.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| What compounding inequality? The UK's Gini coefficient has
| been trending downwards since the global financial crisis.
|
| 14 years of Conservative government made this country _more_
| equal, not less, because they flattened the income
| distribution by making everybody poorer.
|
| The big pattern among rich people in the UK nowadays is not
| that they're getting richer, it's that they're leaving.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| You're looking at the wrong numbers. Wealth, not income.
| Wealth inequality is through the roof. Poverty is through
| the roof. More people using food banks than ever. More
| people on zero hours and low paid contracts.
|
| If you think the problem with the UK is that rich people
| are leaving, then you have no idea about the reality of
| living in the UK. Visiting some of the towns in this book
| would be a starting point.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| > Poverty is through the roof. More people using food
| banks than ever. More people on zero hours and low paid
| contracts.
|
| Is that supposed to prove me wrong? I said that
| _everybody_ is getting poorer.
|
| > Wealth inequality is through the roof.
|
| Wealth inequality, while high, is still roughly where it
| was in 2007. (Source: https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-
| economic-inequality-uk/)
|
| > If you think the problem with the UK is that rich
| people are leaving
|
| I said it's _a_ problem, not _the_ problem. And it 's not
| just the ultra-rich who are leaving, but vast swathes of
| the middle classes. Many poor people would leave too if
| they had the means.
|
| You and the other replier seem to think I'm defending the
| status quo. How on earth did I imply that? You think I
| think it's a good thing for the entire country to get
| poorer?
| a_dabbler wrote:
| "Wealth inequality, while high, is still roughly where it
| was in 2007"
|
| This is not whats represented in the source you cited?
|
| In the graph titled "Top 10% and Bottom 50% Wealth Shares
| in The UK 1900-2020" you can clearly see the wealth owned
| by the top 10% increased from 54.4% in 2007 to 57% in
| 2020 and likely even higher now 5 years later.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Yes, that's only a 2.6% increase. I don't think it's
| unfair to call that "roughly where it was".
|
| In fact, according to that chart wealth inequality today
| is _much_ lower than it was in the 1970s, although it
| increased throughout the 1990s.
|
| The same link shows that the UK has unremarkable wealth
| inequality by the standards of developed countries: we're
| bang in the middle of the OECD, with lower levels of
| wealth inequality than Sweden, Denmark, Finland or
| Norway. (That's funny, I thought the Nordics were
| egalitarian utopias?)
|
| I'm not saying that wealth inequality is low, or that
| it's not a problem. I'm merely responding to the claim
| that "wealth inequality is through the roof", which I
| take to mean that wealth inequality has increased
| substantially in recent years. As far as I can tell
| that's not true.
|
| Personally I think we need more economic growth, not more
| taxes. We already have the highest taxes since WWII, soon
| to be the highest taxes in the entire history of the UK,
| and all it's doing is strangling the economy and making
| productive people flee.
| stavros wrote:
| Right, but the maximum is 92.7% and the minimum is 46%. A
| 3% difference seems small enough to be noise.
| chownie wrote:
| If the floor is 46% and the ceiling is 92.7% that 3% is
| much less likely to be noise.
| 93po wrote:
| The statistics they provide are the result of self-
| reporting by people they interview, and they themselves
| talk at length about the challenges and errors that may
| exist in their data and sampling: https://www.ons.gov.uk/
| peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
|
| I think this is inherently going to be a poor way to get
| an accurate representation of wealth inequality, because
| if you ask a bunch of really wealthy people worth $100mm+
| how much money and assets they have, and especailly when
| these are very privacy focused people, they're going to
| either:
|
| 1. decline to respond in any way
|
| 2. if they do respond, they are very likely to
| misrepresent and downplay their wealth
|
| 3. very likely to have wealth that isn't UK based and
| therefore wouldn't disclose it to anyone for any reason
|
| 4. have a lot of very valuable things, like owning a
| private businesses, that may not necessarily have a price
| tag attached to them, and so therefore hard to represent
| when asked "how much money do you have?"
|
| even though reports throughout years would always have
| this same issue, i think the problem is that as wealth
| for the 0.1% rises, that rise is not going to get well
| represented or collected
| chgs wrote:
| The problem in the U.K. is the availability of housing.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| If only our problems could be reduced to a single "the".
| chgs wrote:
| Pretty much all other problems stem from that.
|
| Well there's the weather I guess.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Go get an airbnb in a poor suburb for a few weeks and live
| there, talk to people, and ask them if they think they're
| more or less equal with other Britons in the last 15 years.
| Show them your Gini coefficient and see what they think of
| it. Ask them if they feel the income distribution has been
| flattened in a way that favours them.
|
| The rich people living here for the last 40 years all
| leaving does not bother most people. In fact, it's cause
| for celebration. They're leeches who don't pay tax on their
| piles of cash held in off-shore accounts - they just drive
| up the price of everything, particularly property.
| Meanwhile there are plenty of people trying to get here
| from the US to replace them who understand the purpose of
| capital is to put it to work and create jobs, not stare at
| it on a screen.
|
| Your kind of thinking is not unusual within centre right
| politics, but it's also why nationalist populism is a
| credible threat. Farage is currently favourite with most
| bookmakers to be next PM because of the kind of defence of
| Tory policy you're making. Please think on that.
| chgs wrote:
| The major change to income levels has been the massive
| increase in minimum wage. This removes the incentive to
| work hard and get skills because they aren't valued,
| especially outside of London.
|
| The other major change is the continual divergence of
| wealth.
|
| If you are a 20 year old living near London you can get a
| crap paying junior job and live rent free for 5 years with
| parents while you save a 100k deposit (which using things
| like LISAs).
|
| By the time you're in your early 30s you have a decent
| paying job, have met a partner with a similar income, and
| can buy a house and repeat the cycle.
|
| If you don't you get the same job but have to pay rent to
| someone else's parents, and you never get that deposit, so
| you're trapped in the rent cycle.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| We've also seen a huge compression in _net_ income as the
| tax thresholds haven 't kept up with inflation. So
| someone who paid a 20% marginal rate twenty years ago is
| now paying 40% on the same real-terms income. And the 0%
| personal allowance has been eroded too.
|
| Not to mention the 60% effective marginal rate between
| PS100k and PS125k - 69% if you have student debt, oh and
| that's not even counting employee's NICs.
|
| And don't get me started on the stealth tax that is
| _employer 's_ NICs. (Those were just increased even
| further, and the morons are all defending it by
| pretending it doesn't come from wages... where exactly do
| they think the employer gets the money from?)
|
| Plus all the insane traps where earning extra money can
| actually _reduce_ your net income. E.g. there are
| situations in which increasing your salary by PS1 can
| leave you thousands of pounds poorer because certain
| benefits are withdrawn with a cliff.
|
| What's the point in working harder? You'd think that with
| such eye-wateringly high levels of taxation, we'd at
| least have something to show for it in the public sector,
| but... okay, I need to stop writing now for the sake of
| my blood pressure.
| chgs wrote:
| Everyone goes on about the 100k issue. For 10 years I
| paid 60% between 50 and 60k due to child tax. The child
| tax has recently shifted to between 60k and 80k and
| reduced so it's now about 51% (plus student loans)
| taurath wrote:
| Shocking how similar the fates of the US and the UK are
| similar. I'm in my 30s and the divergence is starting to
| become extremely stark between people who had middle
| class financially supportive parents and those who
| didn't.
|
| Kids who's parents who are well off but wouldn't pay for
| college is an entire cohort who are functionally locked
| out of the housing market. For most of my generation,
| there is little opportunity, only gatekeeping.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > Kids [whose] parents who are well off but wouldn't pay
| for college is an entire cohort who are functionally
| locked out of the housing market.
|
| That can't be a particularly large set. Parents well off
| is already a small minority case and only a minority of
| that small minority won't give support to their kids.
|
| For people in that tiny sliver, I'm sure it feels bad but
| it doesn't seem like a solution that works for other
| "starting from zero" young adults would need changes to
| also work for this set.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| If you want to support your child at university in the
| UK, there's a particular band of middle-class income
| where you get the worst of both worlds. You make too much
| to get certain kinds of government support, but you don't
| make enough that you can comfortably make up the
| difference.
|
| If you want to put multiple children through uni then it
| can get _very_ burdensome.
|
| One of many ways in which our system is regressive.
| chgs wrote:
| In 2000 I received the minimum loan, which was enough for
| full board university accommodation.
|
| Today the minimum loan needs a PS250 a month top up to
| pay for the same accommodation.
|
| The only benefit is that you don't have to pay for
| tuition fees until you're earning a really good wage -
| rather than having to work all summer to pay for them.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I don't know about the UK, but in the US (20+ years ago),
| the metrics used to determine "well off" for the purposes
| of receiving lower prices for higher education had
| nothing to do with the parents' wealth, and only their
| income, with no accounting for assets and number of other
| children, not to mention jobs without access to
| subsidized healthcare and/or healthcare costs, etc.
|
| In my case, immigrant parents just started earning a
| little money around the time I go to college, which means
| I don't qualify for any assistance, parents don't have
| enough money to pay for my college, nor would I want them
| to as it would hurt their ability to support my
| grandparents and my younger sister, so I am taking out
| loans at full price.
|
| Using income as a proxy for wealth has screwed the
| middle/upper middle for such a long time, and the
| actually rich love it (can throw in the nonsense that is
| earned income taxes here).
| taurath wrote:
| You'd be surprised - parents of an entire generation
| basically paid for their entire schooling with a part
| time job. They pay less on their mortgage for a 3 bedroom
| house than a studio apartment.
|
| In their mind, they made it on their own, and their
| entire parenting strategy was to teach the lessons of how
| they made it to their kids.
|
| This is incredibly common with conservatives.
| parpfish wrote:
| We're talking about inequality between regions/towns, not
| individuals.
|
| Do to self selection and sorting, you could have a
| situation where individual level inequality is unchanged
| but the geographical disparities change
| nickdothutton wrote:
| The chief economist of the resolution foundation spoke about
| this quite eloquently. The divide began in the 80 with the
| "new industries" (finance, pharma, technology, telecoms),
| it's just that it is less visible during good times. When the
| tide retreats it uncovers the ugly rocks and the unevenness
| of the underlying strata.
| throwaway519 wrote:
| A popular protestantism is not a bandwagon the current
| political circus troupe will fit on.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I'd argue that your last paragraph has the cause-and-effect
| reversed:
|
| We're entering into a populist phase because the managerial
| class is incapable of addressing the problems experienced by
| most people -- so they're going to try dismantling the current
| elite systems and rebuilding them. To say that the problem is
| elites inability to suppress populism is to miss that the
| elites own chronic failures is what caused the populist surge.
|
| Similar to populist waves circa 1900, where aristocratic
| systems were replaced with managerialism via populist revolts.
| Now, managerialism has failed so we're again seeing the
| stirrings of change. At a broad scale, communism, fascism, and
| progressivism were all different technocratic managerial
| solutions to the problems and excesses of the late 1800s and
| early 1900s.
|
| I think it'll be interesting to see what comes next.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| The only issue is that - in the past - weapons had to be
| wielded by people. The same working people that revolted.
|
| There is very strong evidence that this will not be the case
| by the time this wave you have imagined gets really rolling.
|
| I hope it does not happen for decades yet, because frankly: I
| cannot see the working class (of which I am part of) win that
| conflict.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Currently, weapons and logistics are not automated to that
| extent; I don't think it's meaningful to guess about
| decades from now, given the current flux.
|
| I'd argue that your perspective means that the time to
| revolt is now (ie, next few years) -- while the technical
| and social systems are in mutual flux and before a new
| regime solidifies. A regime that might be more autocratic
| totalitarian in nature (as you suggest will be the case).
|
| People will reasonably come to different conclusions.
| graemep wrote:
| Change does not have to be violent, let alone be a violent
| internal conflict.
|
| I think between the rise of China, America's reaction to
| it, and the general shift in economic power to Asia from
| the west, and the lack of trust in government in the west,
| things will change.
| JimDabell wrote:
| This is what I was going to say. Back then, a book like this
| would have been perceived as the UK making fun of itself. Now
| it's perceived as being cruel to those less fortunate.
|
| I think it's worth putting into context that the economy was
| doing great in the era this book was first published and huge
| progress was being made with things like homelessness,
| inequality, and poverty. It felt like the country had turned a
| corner from the lows of the 80s.
|
| Since then, we've had the global financial crisis, local
| councils being bankrupted, and a huge rise in homelessness and
| inequality. The rich have more and the poor have less.
|
| If you published that book today, the contents might be the
| same, but the story it tells would be quite different.
| jl6 wrote:
| The Gini coefficient of the UK is about the same now as it
| was then:
|
| https://equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed/
|
| What has actually changed? A whole bunch of other economic
| malaise, but also perceptions, amplified to your personal
| taste by social media.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Look at the graphs as a whole, not just individual points.
| Compare the 90s to the 10s.
| quantumgarbage wrote:
| Switzerland and Afghanistan have an almost equal Gini
| coefficient.
|
| My point is: the Gini coefficient might indicate what your
| country's income distribution looks like, it however does
| not tell anything about actual life conditions.
| jolux wrote:
| Sure but that's a bit silly. Switzerland's GDP is
| something like 50x that of Afghanistan. UK GDP in 2025 is
| much higher than in 2003, too. Of course not 5000%
| quantumgarbage wrote:
| Again, gini coefficients or GDP growth measures are, at
| best, proxies to understand the conditions the bottom
| decile of your country lives in.
|
| Looking at housing costs, life expectancy, food
| insecurity or poverty rates do a much better job at
| capturing this.
| graemep wrote:
| Yes, and and increases in the price of essentials (food,
| housing, utilities) have a greater effect on livings
| standards of the worse off and are not captured in the
| numbers.
| decimalenough wrote:
| The Human Development Index, on the other hand, does.
| Switzerland is #1 at 0.967, improving at 0.25% per year.
| Afghanistan is #182 at 0.462 and dropping, the UK is a
| respectable #15 at 0.940 (between Finland and New
| Zealand) and also improving.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
| jll29 wrote:
| Quality of life encompasses many factors, e.g.
| Switzerland has 98 days of maternity leave,
| Afghanistan has 90(+15) days of maternity leave
| (Wikipedia even puts it at #1 worldwide with two years,
| but that may be incorrect?). In Switzerland,
| women have been able to vote since 1971. In
| Afghanistan, women have been able to vote since 1919
| (but interrupted during the *previous* Taliban regime).
| darkwater wrote:
| Oh, lies, damned lies and statistics. One could also say
| that the Gini coefficient rose, reached its peak ~2006 and
| now is going down...
| teamonkey wrote:
| Gini coefficient usually only measures income inequality.
| Wealth inequality is hard to measure for various reasons
| but...
|
| https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/
|
| "for the UK as a whole, the WID found that the top 0.1% had
| share of total wealth double between 1984 and 2013,
| reaching 9%."
|
| "If the wealth of the super rich continues to grow at the
| rate it has been, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200
| families will be larger than the whole UK GDP."
|
| Etc.
| chgs wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_
| by_...
|
| Very little change in U.K. over 20 years
| ferbivore wrote:
| It looks to me like Equality Trust put a fair amount of
| thought and research into their website, did their best
| to paint a picture of what's going on in the UK by using
| multiple reputable sources, and tried to explain why that
| picture is dire, not just for those with a net worth that
| rounds to PS0 but for the nation at large, with several
| dozen citations to back that up.
|
| Thank God we have this one number from some Credit Suisse
| marketing material to invalidate all of that.
| teamonkey wrote:
| Gini is a very rough tool. It's trying to describe the
| shape of a curve with a single number. It describes the
| average inequality between any two people.
|
| The curve can be skewed without the Gini number changing
| significantly if, say, the bottom 99% became increasingly
| more equal in income/wealth by becoming poorer overall,
| transferring income/wealth to the upper 1%.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| I the numbers maybe not, but in the public perception? In
| society?
| chgs wrote:
| Perception in solicit is we should take people in PS200k
| or PS800k a year a lot more and leaver those with PS100m
| in assets alone.
|
| We're up in arms when people block roads to highlight
| problems with climate change, but when millionaires get
| worried they'll have less of a loophole with tax, we're
| supporting it in droves.
| dmurray wrote:
| > by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be
| larger than the whole UK GDP
|
| Those things are measured in different units, which
| automatically throws doubt on the ability of the source
| to be statistically rigorous in any other way.
| amenhotep wrote:
| One is measured in pounds. The other is measured in
| pounds. Seems pretty comparable.
|
| If you're being deliberately stupid you could pretend
| it's a comparison between pounds and pounds per year, but
| everyone who is at least minimally literate in the
| subject understands that "GDP" here means "the amount of
| value produced in a year".
| anovikov wrote:
| Highly unlikely because the rich are now just running
| away from UK pulling all their cash with them; it's
| likely that leftists will get what they want - reduction
| of wealth inequality - just not in the way that pleases
| them: with the cash being simply gone.
| ferbivore wrote:
| Sounds good to me. The problem is the rich don't actually
| take their money and fuck off, they just keep owning
| wealth _here_ forever. I expect that won 't change until
| the UK gets an actual leftist government, which seems
| unlikely to happen in the next 10 years.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| The super rich aren't the problem. 200 families is too
| few to have any meaningful effect on the housing market.
|
| By all means tax them til their eyes bleed, but it'll
| mostly just make people feel better rather than being a
| useful contribution to public finances.
| incangold wrote:
| "About the same" is not "the same", and there are tipping
| points. The gini coefficient has still seen a decent bump.
|
| But anyway, gini is a coarse measure. Look at the chart
| below that, showing income percentages going steadily
| upwards for the top 10 and 1%.
|
| Most worryingly, look at the decline of the middle 40%. A
| healthy middle class keeps countries stable. You need a
| good chunk of society who feel like the system works for
| them.
|
| And it's not just perceptions, it's fundamental stuff. A
| teacher could afford a house in the 90s; they can't now.
| For all the boomers bang on about mobile phones and flat
| screen TVs, in the end those are luxuries compared to
| clean, secure accommodation. The days of getting a mortgage
| on one income, or having access to nice council housing are
| gone.
| graemep wrote:
| The share of the middle 40% has fallen sharply according to
| the bottom chart on that page.
|
| The bottom 50% is unchanged in aggregate , but there will
| be groups within in that have done a lot worse.
|
| I would also guess (I cannot find numbers) that the
| proportion of income that is spent on essentials has risen.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| What has actually changed is that _thirty_ years ago, the
| ratio between house prices and average earnings was about
| 4. By twenty years ago it had doubled and, most
| importantly, it has been at that level ever since with no
| real sign of dropping [1].
|
| This is a structural change. We now have at least one, and
| perhaps two, generations of people who can't really alter
| their economic situation through hard work. That's the
| classic recipe for populism to thrive.
|
| [1] https://www.schroders.com/en-
| gb/uk/individual/insights/what-...
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| And as with so many modern issues, the housing problem
| was largely created by Thatcher - her Right to Buy
| policy.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| I couldn't disagree more! I think the housing cost issue
| is pure supply and demand, we have a country which
| doesn't like to permit building and an increasing
| population due to (legal) immigration.
|
| I will bash Maggie all day, for her refusal to
| effectively manage industrial decline in Britain, for her
| boneheaded belief that a top-ranking economy could exist
| solely on services, and, most of all, for her idiotic
| squandering of our North Sea oil wealth. But, Right to
| Buy was a rare hit for me. I see it as having been a
| forward-looking policy which aimed to reward people for
| work -- play the game, and you too can have a tangible
| slice of society in the form of your own home to possess
| and care for as you wish. The problem is that we didn't
| _replace_ the social housing lost to RtB.
| calcifer wrote:
| > The problem is that we didn't replace the social
| housing lost to RtB.
|
| _We_ didn 't fail that - Councils wanted to build more
| social housing with RtB and Thatcher viciously destroyed
| those programs. She created RtB not because it was a
| "forward-looking policy aimed to reward people for work"
| but because she hated the social security apparatus and
| wanted to destroy it. And she was _never_ covert nor
| apologetic about it.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Right to Buy does not explain why the same trend is
| visible all over the Anglosphere, from Dublin, Ireland,
| to Wellington, New Zealand, to Sydney, Australia, to
| Vancouver, Canada.
|
| The people don't want housing built near them and the
| politicians listened. Lower supply than demand for
| decades leads to steadily rising prices. If you want to
| see the alternative look to Tokyo, Austin or Seattle.
| Build so much housing that the returns on investment are
| low and people can afford housing.
| fire_lake wrote:
| The problem is _potential_ residents don't get a say -
| only the incumbents. The only solution is national level
| housing policy.
| thechao wrote:
| Austin? I thought my house was outrageously overpriced in
| 2014 when I bought it -- compared to every other major
| city in Texas it was 2x/ft. It's tripled in "value" since
| then; new builds are quadruple. The rest of Texas is only
| up ~50% in the same period.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| To me the biggest problem is the buy-to-let market, which
| means anything affordable is snapped up in seconds by
| people with money to invest, rather than people who just
| want a home to live in.
|
| I think it's mainly a symptom of the unusualy low
| interest rates over the last 20 years: people have
| invested in residential property not because they
| particularly want to be landlords, but because it's
| perceived as the easiest way to get a better return on
| your money than a savings account that pays near zero
| interest.
|
| I know of more than one person who's now looking to sell
| their rental property because they found out the hard way
| that "landlord" is actually a job title, not just the
| name of their savings account, that properties need to be
| maintained and that letting agents will find a way to
| swallow the vast majority of any profits.
|
| I also know more than one person living in rented
| accommodation with appalling maintenance lapses. One had
| a shoddy roof repair last year which left the gutter
| missing. When the next rainstorm caused water to cascade
| down the outside wall and flow in above the back door,
| the letting agent had the nerve to shrug and say "old
| properties do that".
|
| Another had a rotten wooden lintel above a street door
| scraped out, filled with expanding foam and painted over.
| specialist wrote:
| I vaguely recall a criticism of neoliberalism related to
| the emphasis on home ownership. Something about policy,
| homes being the primary vehicle for building wealth (vs
| say pensions), etc. And, ultimately, begetting NIMBYism.
|
| I'm just repeating stuff I've heard. A lot of it feels
| like unintended consequences.
|
| The NIMBYism part seems pretty clear.
|
| If others have ideas, sources, rebuttals, please share.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Interest rates were much higher back then which accounts
| for most of the change. The base rate was around 6%
| through most of the nineties (it hit 15% at its peak).
| acatnamedjoe wrote:
| I think the argument is less that inequality has increased
| overall, and more that the country is increasingly
| stratified by geography - with greater concentrations of
| wealth in the South East relative to the rest of the
| country.
|
| This is especially true in formerly undesirable areas of
| London (e.g. Hackney, #10 on the 2003 list) and towns
| within commuting distance of London (e.g. Hythe, #3).
|
| Presumably this is due to the gradual shift to a London-
| centric services economy as well as the increasingly
| ludicrous price of houses in Central London.
| jdietrich wrote:
| _> What has actually changed?_
|
| The value of grants paid from central government to local
| government have fallen by over 80%. In 2005, the poorest
| local authorities received most of their funding from
| central government; today, they're dependent on council tax
| and business rates for the vast majority of their income.
| During that time, demand for social care has vastly
| increased, disproportionately so in the poorest local
| authorities, eating away at the already shrinking resources
| of local authorities.
|
| The result of those cuts have been drastic for people
| living in poorer communities, particularly the poorest
| members of those communities. They quite justifiably feel
| abandoned by society. Youth clubs and children's centres,
| social work, homelessness provision, subsidised bus routes,
| parks and libraries have all been cut to the bone. None of
| that is captured in the Gini coefficient, but it's felt
| acutely by the people who rely on those services.
|
| The wealthy are largely unaffected by this, because they
| live in local authorities that were never particularly
| reliant on central government funding and because they
| never really relied on council services anyway. For the
| very poorest, the impact of austerity is often dominated by
| one big failure of provision - being stuck in unsuitable
| temporary accommodation for months or years because there's
| no social housing available, being denied support for a
| disabled child etc. For the majority, it's just a slow but
| pervasive erosion of their quality of life - their kids
| have nowhere to go after school, their street is full of
| potholes, the bus they take into town has been cut from
| four an hour to one an hour, their back alley is full of
| rubbish because the council can't afford to deal with fly-
| tipping.
|
| https://neweconomics.org/uploads/files/NEF_Local_Government
| _...
|
| https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/wp-
| content/uploads/2023/05/cbrwp51...
| scotty79 wrote:
| Gini coefficient of what? Income or wealth?
|
| Is borrowing money with appreciating assets as collateral
| treated as income for purposes of thsese calculations?
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Wealth has moved from public to private, and consumer
| spending from high streets to out-of-town shopping centres
| and Amazon, Deliveroo etc.
|
| Leaving a badly depleted public sphere.
| card_zero wrote:
| Not sure about homelessness rising versus the _90s._ Possibly
| the rate is similar to 1998. I looked at ourworldindata, but
| their graph only goes back to 2010. Wikipedia has wildly
| different figures from the charities Shelter and Crisis
| because they 're counting different things. It then gives
| government figures: just over 100,000 in 1998, 135,000 in
| 2003, 40,000 in 2009 and 2010 (so ourworldindata gives a
| chart that begins with this low), and "record levels, with
| 104,510 people" in 2023, though that's less than 135,000 so
| the way in which this is a record is not specified.
|
| In summary, it goes up and down a lot, is counted in
| different ways, was (counted to be) far lower in 2010 (two
| years after the financial crisis?), but pretty much the same
| as now in 1998, although the kind of people who have an
| interest in saying "homelessness has hit record levels" are
| saying that homelessness has hit record levels.
|
| This makes me nostalgic for 1991 when the Big Issue was first
| published, and there were songs like Gypsy Woman by Crystal
| Waters and Walking Down Madison by Kirsty MacColl.
|
| Edit: was your "80s" a typo for "90s" perhaps?
| jll29 wrote:
| Good point re: facts versus story.
|
| One problem may be that the UK is very London-centric in a
| way that is markably different from France being Paris-
| centric.
|
| Just my perception (and I know London much better than Paris)
| is that in France, if you are not in Paris you are seen as
| "living in the 'province'", but politicians still fight for
| farmers there etc. In contrast, in the UK, on the surface
| there is the appearance that yes, London is the capital and
| more important, but that people are trying to do initiatives
| like moving part of the BBC to Glasgow and Manchester - to
| decentralize a bit.
|
| Yet the wealth concentrated in Greater London and its
| commutable satellites - as contrasted with the rest of the
| country - is many orders of magnitude bigger, also due to the
| financial industry there.
|
| If you live in Knightsbridge and commute to your trader job
| in Canary Wharf you will never see how derelict Portsmouth or
| Blackpool really are (the only time I went to Portsmouth, I
| recall some people sitting in the street with nothing to do).
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Meh. As someone who's in the opposite situation (familiar
| with France and not with the UK), I get the feeling that
| what you're saying applies here, too.
|
| It's funny you should talk about farmers. Yes, politicians
| say they'll move mountains for them. Yet, in practice,
| farmers are still barely making ends meet. And we also have
| the EU on top, which is run by bureaucrats even more
| removed from the actual "bas peuple". Just look at the
| whole situation with the Mercosur treaty.
|
| Politicians keep yapping about how ICE cars are the devil
| and should be banned. After all, you can take a bike or
| ride the metro, right? It's not like anybody lives outside
| Paris or its close "satellites". It's very easy when you
| don't even have an idea how much a ticket costs, since
| you're carted around by police escort on the people's dime.
|
| We've also had a push for "decentralization", with all
| kinds of hilariously bad results.
|
| I don't know about Portsmouth nor Blackpool, but I ride
| around France a fair bit, and outside the biggest cities,
| many small towns have empty, run-down centers, with mayors
| fighting to get stores and whatnot back. But people simply
| move out for lack of jobs.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Fun UK fact. only
|
| >One in five civil servants are based in London (20.1%),
| down from 20.7% in 2022.
|
| https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/civil-service-
| stati...
| jdietrich wrote:
| True, but "civil servant" is a very broad term. A
| majority of civil servants - a very large majority
| outside of London - work in Operational Delivery. They
| work in JobCentres or prisons, they do clerical work in
| the DVLA or the Passport Office, but they have no actual
| involvement in or influence over policy. The centre of
| power is still overwhelmingly in London.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| You can walk out of Canary Wharf, within a mile or two
| you'll see much the same.
|
| Not that the Knightsbridge set ever do.
|
| Heck, even from Knightsbridge itself you don't have to go
| that far. North End Road is what, two, three miles?
|
| I don't know of anywhere in London that has quite the
| profound sense of hopelessness you find in Blackpool, but a
| lot of it's really not great.
| Neil44 wrote:
| That seems an extremely cynical take to me, I don't think
| that's true at all. It divides people into monoliths and makes
| assumptions then uses those assumptions to restrict and hold
| back.
| tomaytotomato wrote:
| > in some places they have been replaced by artisan bakeries
| and pop-up boutiques, while in others they have been replaced
| by charity shops or nothing at all.
|
| Charity shops, vape shops (used for money laundering), Turkish
| Barbers (used for money laundering), Automated Laundrettes
| (used for money laundering), Car Washes (used for money
| laundering), Phone shops (used for money laundering), Kebab
| shops (used for money laundering)
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Banks and privatised utilities (used for money laundering.)
| Politicians (used for money laundering.)
|
| This is the UK's entire economy now - extracting the wealth
| of the people who work in the UK and moving it to foreign
| owners.
|
| London looks rich because some of the money sticks to the
| sides while it's passing through, but it's still being
| siphoned from the provinces through the City and _out_ - to
| tax havens, foreign mafias, foreign aristocrats, and giant
| foreign corporations.
|
| It's important the population isn't allowed to understand
| that the UK is a colonised country. So there's a huge media
| machine making sure the peasants blame "immigrants" for
| small-scale criminality, and poor people for being feckless
| and unproductive. It's useful to make sure everyone keeps
| fighting about racism/immigration and gender issues to keep
| them from looking at structural economics and the destruction
| of democracy.
| switch007 wrote:
| Too real for a Saturday morning. Sigh
| throwaway2562 wrote:
| How can invest in money laundering? Serious question. No
| crypto please, I do have some limits.
| switch007 wrote:
| We really do excel at money laundering. Go UK !
| tarkin2 wrote:
| > We all know that we're teetering on the brink of a populist
| wave, but no-one in a position of power seems willing or able
| to do anything about it.
|
| This, I believe, is because the problem is psychological more
| than political: social division and alienation.
|
| Of course, an increase in economic prosperity will lessen
| populism.
|
| But if people continue to be alienated then they will be drawn
| to populists offering collective causes against perceived
| wrongdoers.
|
| The large majority of online activities increase social
| alienation and social division.
|
| Local, apolitical activities that breed cohension rather than
| division will decrease the psychological benefits that populism
| offers the alienated. I see no other solution.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Yet another signal of the sad state of affairs is that you
| probably genuinely think we're "on the brink" and not well over
| the cliff, Wile E.-style. Buildings burned during leftist
| protests (whether or not leftists actually set the fires is up
| for debate), and the Capital was ransacked by a mob looking to
| overthrow an election.
|
| That was half a decade ago.
|
| The interim has consisted of a corrupt centrist presidential
| administration that spent most of its time denying that things
| are getting worse ("It's not a recession"; "We didn't fumble
| the Afghanistan draw-down"; "Those weren't significant bank
| failures"; "That's not a genocide"), followed by a corrupt
| fascist admin that is openly dedicated to making things worse.
|
| All the while, the intellectuals who understand what is
| happening - not just what will happen, what is happen _ing_ -
| have been begging anyone who will listen to take the situation
| seriously - to understand that their attempted conservation of
| the previous normal is actually vascillation, while the ground
| falls out from under us. But my property values! But my
| American dream! But my rules-based order! They 're already
| dead. And we can't start rebuilding until people with money and
| influence face it.
| frereubu wrote:
| I think you're from the USA and the commenter you're replying
| to is British, which probably explains the difference. Those
| shop names are recognisably British.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Ah, I'd thought that that Woolworths and Dixons were
| defunct regional chains (of which America has many, that
| Americans from other regions would not recognize or would
| have only heard about in passing). My bad.
|
| Still, GP accurately describes much of the American East,
| Midwest, and South. Likewise, I would have to /s if I were
| to say that the British upper class were known for their
| down-to-Earth character. No one who is "posh" has ever been
| described as out-of-touch or "living in a bubble",
| particularly on the development of populist issues, after
| all. (/s)
| eleveriven wrote:
| If you recognize deep inequality but feel powerless (or
| complicit), doubling down on seriousness might feel like the
| only "responsible" move.
| rvz wrote:
| But we were promised that "AGI" will save us and humanity and
| AI will be able to clean up the crap towns and turn them into
| cool towns.
| amelius wrote:
| > but the majority of towns belonged to the same broad spectrum
| of bland mediocrity
|
| Isn't it to be expected that the majority of X are average
| (mediocre)? I mean, you could have a statistically skewed
| distribution, but would that be very desirable?
| brickfaced wrote:
| It's characteristic that your comment says nothing about mass
| migration, cultural dispossession, and ethnic alienation, for
| example the Muslim grooming gangs which have gang-raped and
| abused at least tens, and possibly hundreds of thousands of
| white British girls:
|
| https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/grooming-gang-victim-i...
|
| If the English were doing this to Pakistanis or Nigerians in
| their own countries you'd be protesting for their deportation
| and removal.
| zeroq wrote:
| A fellow Elbonian made a book [1] depicting the ugliest places in
| our town.
|
| Despite the tongue-in-a-cheek mood it's a great piece of
| nostalgia trip spiced with some interesting local history
| lessons.
|
| He also have an automotive youtube channel dedicated to popular
| old cars and he loves to film them in these obscure and sordid
| locations mentioned in the book.
|
| EDIT: fun note - when MS released their first digital
| encyclopedia in Elbonia, somewhere in mid 90's, the Elbonia
| entry, apart from having accurate information about the country
| and up to date statistics had an illustration image subtitled
| "Elbonians in front of typical dwelling" depicting something like
| this: https://strojeludowe.net/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/11/1.3-600x...
|
| [1] https://paskudnik.com/strona-glowna/6--ebook-paskudnik-
| warsz...
| fallous wrote:
| "We do our best with the worst."
| Sparkyte wrote:
| I think this is awesome! Should be done more often, gives people
| perspectives on areas they wouldn't otherwise know or think
| about.
| betelgeuse6 wrote:
| Maybe now the crappiest places have something common that should
| not be mentioned.
| teamonkey wrote:
| They don't have a Pret A Manger?
| fallous wrote:
| If, as a humorist, you are concerned about whether you can
| publish your humorous book you can be certain that you live in a
| cursed timeline. Additionally if you think there are two kinds of
| jokes: those that were once funny and those that were never
| funny, then I suggest that your jokes were at best lazy. The
| human condition is pretty constant throughout the ages and those
| jokes that are aimed at such universal experiences continue to
| amuse for centuries or millennia.
|
| Understandably the humor of the inexperienced 20-something will
| differ from that of the 40+ year-old. The simple and absolute
| world that we believe to see and understand in our younger years
| tends to vanish from our grasp as we become older and attain the
| wisdom of experience. Perhaps the author's belief that "it has
| been done already" reflects some of that wisdom, and just maybe
| those of a certain age at the time of the publishing of "Crap
| Towns" felt exactly the same way about his book. It seems, after
| all, that every generation believes that it is the first to do or
| discover a thing without considering that humans have been doing
| human things for an awfully long time and that the observation
| "there is nothing new under the sun" has some merit.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| This is, unfortunately, the world that we live in right now.
| There are stand-up comedians who privately admit it's almost
| impossible to do their jobs any more because of the faux
| outrage.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| But there are other stand-up comedians who don't have that
| problem and are wildly successful. I wonder what the
| difference is?
| pessimizer wrote:
| This reads like Iranian government twitter.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I didn't think most Western governments censor comedians.
| arp242 wrote:
| > If, as a humorist, you are concerned about whether you can
| publish your humorous book you can be certain that you live in
| a cursed timeline.
|
| This has literally always been the case. The topics have
| shifted, and some other details have changed, but in essence
| it's no difference. Try publishing a humorist book about, say,
| sex or religion in the 50s. Or the world wars, or maybe
| something that features gay characters. Or civil rights-type
| stuff (in US).
| smelendez wrote:
| Great article.
|
| This kind of humor still exists and I think it's still most
| popular with young people. I followed an Instagram account in
| Chicago that mocks local bars and the people who go to them, but
| they're all bars for people in their 20s, so I've rarely heard of
| them and don't fully get the descriptions. There's also that
| trend of "cynical maps" (Google it) of city neighborhoods,
| country regions, etc that peaked a few years ago and still
| circulates.
|
| I don't see this selling as a book now, but I also don't see
| humorous coffee table books in general as a category the way they
| were 25 years ago?
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| It's not about identity politics. It's not about self-
| deprecation. It's not even about if the material is particularly
| funny or not.
|
| It's whether you're punching up or punching down.
|
| If the purpose of _Crap Towns_ is to punch up, speak to power, to
| point out the failures of Thatcherism, decreased social mobility
| through a perptuation of failing center-right politics thanks to
| an overly-powerful media and political class that is divorced
| from reality, the absurd dominance of PPE graduates within policy
| making, and on, and on, on... well, it 's great satire.
|
| If it's just to point at working class people and go "haha, their
| streets are dirty and they eat bad food", well... you're punching
| down, and it's rare that can work as comedy. It's just mean
| bullying.
|
| So yes, you can write Crap Towns today, but it lands better if
| you draw the line from Thatcher through Major, Blair, Brown,
| Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak and Starmer, and their
| acolytes - the PPE mafia on both sides of the House, and point
| out how their crappy politics has caused all this, not their
| victims.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Punching up is "look at them, ha ha ha"
|
| Funnier comedy is "look at us, hahaha!"
|
| Note that punching up is the same mechanism of humour as
| punching down. "look at people who are not like us, ha ha ha"
|
| I always found the funnier things were not about punching up or
| down but were applicable to anyone. Restricting comedy to only
| be about punching up turns it into a political tool and not an
| art form that makes us feel better. Comedy that is only allowed
| if it sends a political message is firstly propaganda and then
| humour. It's why most modern comedy elicits a smile at best and
| no belly laughs any more. It can still be amusing but it has no
| universality.
|
| The best comedy has truth about ourselves in it.
| Psychologically "punching up" is a rejection of these things in
| ourselves. Ideologically, "punching up" is a tactic reinforcing
| group identity coherence.
| TMWNN wrote:
| > It's whether you're punching up or punching down.
|
| I disagree with the idea that one is "OK" and the other is
| "bad", "wrong" or, even worse, "problematic" (i.e., the _bien-
| pensant_ 's own "blasphemous"). It just makes one an eternal
| sacred cow, and the other the eternal punching bag, no matter
| either's virtues or vices.
|
| And this, in fact, has already been the case for a long time.
| In the US, producer Dick Wolf's five _Law & Order_ TV shows
| (and, now, his three _Chicago_ shows) taught us over 30 years
| that the "wealthy CEO" or "high-powered corporate lawyer" is
| _always_ guilty, and the large companies they own /work for are
| just as crooked. The only upscale demographic that is never the
| criminal is, strangely enough, the famous TV-show producer.
| physicsguy wrote:
| I remember laughing at this, my hometown was included it's worth
| saying. I suspect the purchasers were largely people who lived in
| one of the 'crap towns'
|
| I'm not sure how anyone could have read it and not understood it
| was a joke. At the same time, I do think that he's right that it
| wouldn't get published today, not because the content wasn't
| true, but people are much more quick to take offense over things
| like this.
| robocat wrote:
| I have always admired the British[1] ability to take the piss
| out of themselves with humour. Underlying the self-deprecation,
| there's always a sense of pride (misplaced?).
|
| Perhaps things on the isles have turned to shite over time, and
| the pride has dwindled?
|
| [1] maybe British is the wrong word since the Scots and Irish
| do similar. I'm from the ex-colonies so the correct words for
| UK country and peoples are confusing to me.
| Lio wrote:
| The Scots are 100% Brits and at least some portion of the
| people in Northern Ireland strongly identify as Brits too.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| The question is: "what are we laughing at now that in 20 years we
| won't think is funny?"
|
| ---
|
| I have hope that we might see that laughing at our neighbours for
| their political views might be seen as inappropriate.
| bcraven wrote:
| I recently started a subscription to https://www.the-fence.com/
| as set out in the opening to this piece and it's truly a lovely
| object. Highly recommend.
| ggm wrote:
| The road to Wigan Pier (1937) would be a humourless response. His
| main issue is the lack of acceptance of current satirical humour,
| "modern life is rubbish" being 22 years old.
|
| I think he's wrong to say you couldn't publish it now. I think he
| is right it would be misunderstood and misinterpreted.
|
| Bill Bryson and Paul Thoroux wrote extensively of how shit
| English towns can be in winter after 4pm when the shops are shut
| and the pub isn't open.
| surfingdino wrote:
| If you can't be bothered reading a book, or if you find it funny
| and want more, https://loudribs.com/product-category/postcard/
| has a "Rubbish Seaside Postcard" series.
| OliC wrote:
| There is a fairly popular tiktok account doing much the same
| thing. Travelling from town to town to point out the worst parts
| of them. Although I'll admit it sometimes feels more depressing
| than funny.
| rikroots wrote:
| > "I mean: incredibly, governments and local councils didn't read
| my work and decide to mend their ways. The UK did not get better.
| Instead we got more than a decade of Tory austerity, Brexit, and
| all the accompanying neglect and bad feeling."
|
| This bit made me laugh.
|
| I read the original book when it came out and it was funny and -
| in some ways - true. I was born and bought up in the town ranked
| #4 in the original list (Hythe), but when I read it I was living
| in Hackney (#10 on the list). So I could shove the book in the
| faces of my friends and colleagues and say: look at me! I've
| moved up in the world!
|
| The reason I laughed is because around the time of publication
| (2003?) I was working in the Government's Social Exclusion Unit.
| Prior to that I had spent time in the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit;
| later on I'd go on to work for the Lyons Inquiry. Part of my work
| included meeting people, and one thing I took away from those
| meetings would be how incredibly proud people could be about
| their neighbourhoods and towns: however deeply sunk into poverty
| the area was, they still cherished the place. The other thing I
| learned was, more often than not, those people often had good
| ideas about how to fix some of the issues - local solutions for
| local problems. All they needed was a little help and support
| from authorities to get those solutions off the ground.
|
| So when the author claims that "governments" didn't read the book
| - some of us did. We enjoyed it, and we tried to do things to
| help people make their towns just a little bit less crap. Sadly
| it wasn't enough, but if people don't try then nothing will ever
| get fixed.
| acatnamedjoe wrote:
| I was curious - what was the angle on Hythe in the book?
|
| These days Hythe seems like a posh seaside town with a
| Waitrose, a nice canalside park, a cute steam railway, lots of
| boutiquey shops and cafes, etc.
|
| I know a lot of places in the area (e.g. Folkestone, Margate,
| Whitstable) have all been heavily "gentrified" in the last few
| years, but I sort of assumed Hythe was always this way? Is that
| not the case?
|
| And even allowing for a bit of gentrification, it seems wild in
| 2025 to select it for a "crap towns" award ahead of somewhere
| like Dover or New Romney.
| mattrad wrote:
| Crap Towns called Hythe "...quite possibly the most spirit-
| crushingly tedious town in Kent." and "...the place that
| makes nearby Folkestone look like Las Vegas."
|
| As someone who grew up in Hythe in the 80s and 90s I'd point
| out that the Rotunda was a far cry from Vegas.
|
| https://www.warrenpress.net/FolkestoneThenNow/The_Demolition.
| ..
| rikroots wrote:
| I worked at Portex back in the 80s. After a shift at that
| factory it was a pleasure to get home, slip on the shell
| suit and spend the evening drinking and discussing minor,
| mindless vandalism opportunities. I moved away in the end
| (to a squat in London) because I knew, deep down, there had
| to be something better for me out there.
| acatnamedjoe wrote:
| > quite possibly the most spirit-crushingly tedious town in
| Kent.
|
| This is an extremely high bar to hit in a county that also
| contains Ashford.
| rikroots wrote:
| Ashford at least has a high-speed rail connection to
| London. If nominations were to open today, I'd vote
| Dover.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| It used to have one to Paris however when you look at how
| they voted in the referendum you can see why it doesn't
| anymore.
| graemep wrote:
| That sounds to me as a product of something I see a lot of in
| society in general. Governments think hoi polloi are stupid,
| and they are clever, and therefore solutions imposed from above
| are superior to local solutions.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I think that's a misdiagnosis. The suggestions of the "hoi
| polloi" are obvious, and would solve the problem. Government
| prefers instead a solution that is both cheaper, so they can
| instead direct funds to things that they prefer, and more
| indirect, so they can route funds through friends and family.
|
| The government's main effort is to complicate or denounce the
| "obvious" solutions. It's why they put so little effort into
| devising the programs that actually get rolled out; instead
| they just copy them directly from some non-profit that the
| government has been indirectly and almost entirely financing,
| and is directed by The Honorable Lord or Lady Somebody's
| Cousin.
| dave333 wrote:
| The Connections series by James Burke from around the same time
| posited that politics is irrelevant and progress is mostly due to
| science. The consumer society of today is much better than when
| Crap Towns was written although improvement is not uniform. But
| even the least improved towns are better now than they were due
| to all the regional, national, and international improvements in
| services.
| drawfloat wrote:
| Unfortunately I'm not sure this is true. My home town is one of
| the Crap Towns and in the last 25 years more or less the entire
| high street economy has collapsed and nothing has replaced it.
| It increasingly exists as a cheap undesirable housing spot with
| a 30 min commute to the next city.
| dave333 wrote:
| Uh, the internet, smartphones, flat panel TVS, craft beer,
| Moore's Law.
| uwagar wrote:
| the book author says "There's a website (I won't link to it) that
| has kept on running a survey of the worst places in the UK for
| years and years- and, honestly, when I look at it, I hate it.
| Partly because I feel like they're ripping off my project"
|
| this is why we should cherish the [indie] web. we can still
| almost publish anything in incredible detail, keep it alive for a
| long time and not worry about being canceled.
|
| plus i have low opinion of people that wont share a link they
| know is relevant to the topic.
| yapyap wrote:
| > You wouldn't get away with it now
|
| They almost always say that and it's almost never true.
| SnazzyUncle wrote:
| There is no way Tropic Thunder would be made today and this is
| true of many comedy movies before the 2010s.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| The sense of self importance and overanalysis in this writeup on
| a silly book called "Crap Towns" is almost as hilarious as the
| book itself.
|
| I still think the idea of the book is funny. There's a certain
| art to taking something bad and hilariously describing its
| terribleness. For some reason this has always made me laugh, but
| honestly not everyone gets it, and this has always been the case.
|
| This kind of book can only happen in a place and a community with
| enough confidence and stability to handle it. Of course you can
| "get away" with it today, it's easier than ever to publish just
| about anything - but humor has changed and I don't expect it to
| go "viral" the way it did. Not all old jokes age well and we have
| all made products that no longer fit after some time.
|
| But the author, oh boy. Dear sir, your tongue in cheek
| picturebook from 20 years ago is not as important as you imagine.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| It's probably very important to the author, though, in the
| sense that it shaped their life and clearly became briefly very
| famous. So I don't think it's particularly fair to snipe at
| them for writing a reflective blog post about that. It's not
| like you have to read it.
| Lio wrote:
| Why is it unfair to snipe at a bloke that's made a career at
| snipping at others?
|
| The towns he calls crap are important to the people that live
| there. If they can take it so can he.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Consider the Vector, not just the Scalar. The direction, the
| trajectory, of these places.
| SamJordison wrote:
| Author here. Noticed a lot of traffic from this post - so thanks.
| Thanks especially for all these thoughtful comments. Just
| dropping in to say I appreciate the attention - and am grateful
| that most posters here don't seem to mind that I'm unable to draw
| hard conclusions in my original article. I also like the posts
| here that point towards the fact that atomisation maybe has had
| something to do with things (as well as the hardening of
| inequalities and etc.) Interesting! Perhaps it was more possible
| to share jokes in 2003 than it is now? (The concept that jokes
| either punch up or punch down seems an indication of that...
| Feels quite recent to me. And What if the intention isn't to hit
| anyone, really, just to make each other laugh?)
|
| Anyway, to respond to a couple of other things on here. I'm not
| really a comedian. Sorry! I do work in the publishing industry,
| so while I can't prove my ideas about publishers being nervous, I
| would hope I have a reasonable insight and instinct.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Hi Sam
|
| Thanks for writing the piece in the first place - I thought it
| was a wonderfully self-reflective and mature look back at the
| book, why you created it, and how times have changed.
|
| As a mid 40something in the UK, formerly a creative writer, I
| have experienced exactly the same shifting attitudes as
| yourself. The primary reasons, as many have said, are probably
| the fact that people are more polarised in their thinking and
| less versed in nuance, but also that the whole of the UK has
| become a bit crap really, so the joke's a bit too on the nail.
|
| For what it's worth, I thought the original idea for the book
| was pretty funny, and I still do even now! Keep doing what you
| do - create things from the heart, you can't predict the future
| and you can't cover for everyone's reactions.
| SamJordison wrote:
| Thank you!!
| codeulike wrote:
| _Perhaps it was more possible to share jokes in 2003 than it is
| now_
|
| Its much more possible for people who are the target of jokes
| to reply now, compared to pre-social-media 2003
| wrasee wrote:
| > "Of course, you wouldn't get away with it now."
|
| I say, try. Publish "Crap Towns, 20 Year Update" and ask what's
| changed? Revisit some of the original places, take some new
| photos. Plenty of scope to continue the humour, but also scope to
| hint at some wider reflections and continue the conversation.
| Having recognition of the first book also adds some authority to
| your commentary.
|
| He says he won't, but he's also right that if it's funny, it
| works. Humour has a wonderful way of being able to say things you
| couldn't otherwise be able to communicate so effectively.
|
| And a book that dares to go beyond the humour and reflect on 20
| years of progress, would love to see it.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| A society that can laugh at itself is an homogenous society where
| citizens share the same values. Today unfortunately that's not
| the case anymore.
|
| This is not a racism problem (the UK historically had a lot of
| well-integrated immigration in the previous centuries), but about
| minorities that don't want to be integrated and want to impose
| their culture (look at Sharia tribunals in the UK) - and
| criminals from poorer countries abusing the EU freedom to travel,
| the welfare state and how lax the police is.
|
| The UK is not the only society to have been destroyed in the name
| of globalisation, but it's certainly a sad state of affair.
| Biganon wrote:
| There's one thing I honestly don't understand about this post and
| the comments here.
|
| NOWHERE does the author, or the people commenting here, mention
| the reason why such a book might be deemed "offensive". Of course
| it's easy to repell the criticism if you don't address the
| reasons in it ! But to me, it feels weird and classist to make a
| book about shitty places in a country. Aren't they often
| simply... poor ? Is it OK to laugh at the lower class ? The
| "shavs" ?
|
| I don't know much about the UK but I feel like such a book in
| France would cause an uproar. Of course concrete suburbs are ugly
| as fuck ! Of course small towns in northern France, hit by
| unemployment, are often quite sad and grey and depressing ! But
| is it okay for people who don't live there to publish a book
| saying "lol look at how these people live" ? Sounds like the
| definition of punching down, to me.
| sireat wrote:
| For an earlier example see KLF - It's Grim Up North
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20XLWEjN9eI
|
| As a non British I though this was always a bit of dark British
| humour tradition.
|
| See Black Adder, also
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Heroic_Failures - which
| mentions towns like Keynes.
| eleveriven wrote:
| There's a lot of honest reflection here that you don't often get
| from writers revisiting their earlier work. I think it captures
| something important about how the culture around humor, offense,
| and public discourse has shifted. It's easy to blame "people
| being too sensitive" or to nostalgize the past, but the truth is
| more complicated: humor that punches up tends to age better than
| humor that punches down, and the line between the two can shift
| as society changes.
| brickfaced wrote:
| Nothing about the towns with massive gang-rape grooming gangs.
| Well, we know why:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-46684638
| overfeed wrote:
| > The good news is that I don't think that the illiberalism of
| identity politics will endure much longer.
|
| That's a weird thing to say in 2025 , considering what the US
| government is deporting people for having the wrong opinions
| domestically, and attempting to export the identity politics of
| the current administration via tarde deals with the UK. I suppose
| one might be blind to it because of their own political
| persuasion, suggesting that identity politics peaked in 2021 says
| more about the author's biases than the present reality.
| fleek wrote:
| No one has been deported for their opinions, yet. It's a
| reaction to the massive influx of foreigners who don't share
| our cultural norms and flout our laws. How would you react to
| 10 million tourists moving to your country, buying up all the
| food from your grocery stores, drinking and driving, stealing,
| dealing drugs, killing intentionally or accidentally your
| friends and neighbors because they have 0 education not
| understanding of the law?
| overfeed wrote:
| > No one has been deported for their opinions, yet
|
| You probably thought I was talking about El Salvador. I
| wasn't.
|
| Is it not deportations when multiple university students have
| stripped of their visas without notice, by order of "Little
| Marco" and forced to leave the country?
|
| > How would you react to 10 million tourists moving to your
| country, buying up all the food from your grocery stores,
| drinking and driving, stealing, dealing drugs,...
|
| ...ask the kingdom of Hawai'i
| zahlman wrote:
| > attempting to export the identity politics of the current
| administration via tarde deals with the UK
|
| Not only can I not understand how you could imagine this to be
| the motive; I can't imagine how you even understand the term
| "identity politics" such that they could even in principle be
| "exported" in such a manner.
|
| Are you suggesting, for example, that tariffs are somehow being
| differentially applied to different products from the same
| country, according to the ethnicity, gender, etc. of the
| manufacturers?
| silexia wrote:
| The UK has gone in a dark direction, with the police arresting
| people for thoughts they post on social media that run counter to
| popular narratives. Feels like the mob attitude that killed
| Socrates. It is important every nation enshrines free speech into
| their constitutions.
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| If you say it cannot be made now - why not ?!
|
| Why can't I say "This is a shit, because of this and this" ?
|
| What sort of society have we become that we cannot write facts
| like that any more ?
| CFLAddLoader wrote:
| Over time, people change the weapons they use to hurt each other
| with. What used to have nothing in common with words meant to
| hurt now demands mental energy to decide whether it is an attack.
|
| Political correctness is about cleanly dividing ideas into ones
| obviously meant to hurt and ones obviously meant to be harmless.
| It is impossible to even come close to succeeding at this, but it
| is still worth trying.
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