There is one, up until now relatively Sinophile, major European nation that will likely receive a massive influx of Chinese immigrants over the next decade – possibly as many a million – and radically transform as a consequence.
I am talking, of course, about Britain.
While there are currently 300,000 active BN(O)’s in Hong Kong, this is mainly on account of people who had let them expire; up to 3 million can (re)acquire them with relative ease. (Though this issue appears to have been made moot anyway). Now, following the new national security law, FM Dominic Raab is talking of getting rid of the current 6 month limit on Hong Konger stays in the UK, increasing it to 12 months, making it extensible, and “opening a path for future citizenship.” We may thus be in for a massive influx of Hong Kongers into the UK over the next decade.
What does this mean? Well, it probably makes this particular piece of speculation from 2018 is now obsolete:
Not sure. UK has good relations with China, so in the coming cold war between the American Empire and the Sinosphere, it may well be like Austria in the original cold war (neutral-ish territory for diplomatic events, and repository for offshore Chinese money, espionage).
— Anatoly Karlin (@powerfultakes) December 6, 2018
Moneyed & highly educated, the Hong Kong emigre oligarchs will form a powerful anti-China lobbying group in UK.
The UK has been a relatively Sinophile part of the West. Search the Tweets of Tory bigwigs (BoJo, Raab, etc) and while you will find their Russia commentary to be almost uniformly negative, China was only ever mentioned in a neutral or positive light. Which is no surprise, as the UK doesn’t have the frictions with China that the US and even many of the major European nations have – no big manufacturing sector to pilfer industrial secrets from; financial sector that benefited from its connections to Hong Kong, China’s main pipeline for foreign investment.
But this era will soon come to an end, firmly anchoring Britain within the American sphere post-Great Bifurcation and flipping it into one of the most Sinophobic nations.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
That’s bad news for UK economy, right? They are picking fights with both Russia and China, and the Arab sheikdoms are ruined by the collapse of oil. Where is money going to come from?
As I put in a comment a few days ago, this idea has been floated for a long time in Tory circles and publications like the Spectator. Gross migration to the UK is 677,000 per year, so if even a fraction of the BNOs come to Britain, it would be significant. I am sceptical about AK’s thesis that they will have a significant impact on the UK’s attitude towards China. Perhaps some of the richest like the anti-CCP billionaire who funds Bannon will, but there are already about 500,000 Chinese in the UK and they have almost no political or cultural impact (in contrast with the similar number of Jews). I think there are 3 Chinese MPs and none of them are important.
Most of the rioters are young people born after 1997, and not eligible for the BNO. If the British really go through with it, they’ll end up with a bunch of the money-grubbing boomers emigrating from a Hong Kong utterly demolished by years of chimpouts.
I am not convinced either but the neocons and the US libertarian think tanks are all aggressively pushing this. The neocons really hijacked Brexit, wouldn’t be surprised if they push, the largely useless otherwise, Johnson out and put Gove in, Murdoch press already started on this.
There is strong full on propaganda campaign against China, starting after that NATO meeting when they agreed to go after China. Interestingly on the political forum I use I have been slipping in pro Russia and Putin comments, no Russian troll allegations. When the many anti Chinese editorials pop up and I say not my fight, the Chinese troll alligations flow freely.
Anyway the US will lose this fight, their debt and currency are really in trouble, my gold investments just keep powering up.
Much of the rich people in the world just want to live in London (not because of anglophilia, but because of some mix of its multiculturalism, beautiful houses, expensive shopping and geographical location). So, London will not probably worry about that.
Sometimes London can receive more rich immigrants when the economic situation of the home country is unstable. For example, one of main increases of property investors in recent years to London, was from Greece.
Also Arabian elites of the poor non-oil exporting Arab countries (Sudan, Jordan, Syria, etc), flood to London. So it’s not dependent on excess oil wealth. Even some people in Assad family eccentrically try to live in London, despite brutal English sanctions against them (their bank accounts frozen by the London police without reason) https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/assad-family-cash-frozen-after-dictators-niece-found-living-in-london-a4121211.html
–
London is not worried enough, that they didn’t begin to persecute rich people, from less civilized countries, they introduced an “unexplained wealth order law” to reduce the number of wealthy immigrants.
https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/c12jr19lngdt/unexplained-wealth-orders
Not that a year ago, Kazakhs open this in Pall Mall.
https://i.imgur.com/PGGJIF5.jpg
And at the same time, the English media writes brutal propaganda about Kazakh officials that invest in London, and the police investigate about freezing their houses:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/11/criminal-wealth-khazak-dictator-lives-london-nca-tells-high/
For those of us who have been in the UK, something does match observations of how many Chinese faces you see there. Anyone who visits a few minutes in Great Britain, will assume there are millions of Chinese living in the UK.
So, most of those Chinese faces, must be tourists, guest workers and students who will return to China.
According to Wikipedia only 433,150 permanent Chinese ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Chinese)
–
Many Chinese in the UK, are clearly bourgeois people, and more expensive restaurants you visit, the more young Chinese couples are there.
Jews are around 290,000, which is far higher than I imagined for the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Jews
Presumably they will soon be dominated by a rapidly growing Haredim (Ultra-Orthodox Jews), which are the ones you see in London, and have eight children each.
You are correct, the reason they seem overrepresented is because you (and most visitors to the UK) visit university towns and a huge proportion of them arrive as students. Many of the students stay however, at least for several years.
Although I can’t say I see many young Chinese couples in restaurants; usually it is either a large group of student-age Chinese or a white man and Chinese woman.
I never understood that. America, I can understand, but London is grey, rainy, miserable, multicultural, and despite some nice spots, in general uglier than most other European capitals. They have some great museums and the National Gallery, but I don’t think anyone is interested in that. Must be the English language. Or maybe it’s a question of taxes.
Brits need money from the Chinese, Arabs and others to finance trade deficits.
Don’t forget non-dom taxation.
Have expat lobbies ever been successful at anything other than draining taxpayer funds of their host nations and leading those host nations into foreign policy disasters?
The only exception I can think of is Israel – those guys and gals run top notch operation. As for the rest, ugh. Cubans expats – Bay of Pigs, not too good, also Missile Crisis. French and Vietnamese Catholics – Vietnam War, yikes. Ahmed Chalabi and Iraqis – Iraq war, terrible. Venezuelans – only gods know what they are doing. Russian expats – drove Russia into Chinese arms when apparently war with China is whats for dinner. Horrible performance. For the record, I opposed this and always thought US should be friends with Russia. America of the 80’s and modern Russia could enjoy a beer and each others’ company, i think. Alas, that is not likely to be happening.
So, they must be coming with the student visa (if the UK investment visa is not so common). When I go to a restaurant – and actually walking in the street, it’s commonly young Chinese couples, with expensive clothes. Well, often guys are dressed in American basketball clothes, but their girlfriends can be more smart. I also assume they are buying a lot of the new apartments which are constructed.
I don’t think I notice this kind of Chinese in UK, mixing with white people. I guess Chinese come to spend their parents’ money, rather than because of interest in English culture.
I’ve been in the plane flying between London and Israel, in both directions. On the plane from London to Israel, it seems like you have almost 1/2 Haredim and 1/2 Russian-speaking people (with a few Israelis).
(By comparison, when on a plane between Israel and Russia, the Haredim population is small enough I do not remember seeing them, flying from different airports).
Here’s an astonishing stat for you about Jews in the UK. I read it a while ago, noted it down to a Jewish friend on WhatsApp and can therefore be certain that I am reporting it correctly, but I can’t remember the source.
Anyway, at some point – I think 2015, Chassidic births reached 51% of Jewish births in the UK, while, at the same time, being just 3% of deaths!
Has any population in human history been so radically transformed so fast?
And yes, rich young Chinese come to London mostly to go shopping. Endless shopping is what the women want and it is normal for the young men to simply have to hand over their credit card at the beginning of the trip – obviously really paid for by his parents. That is literally it.
There are others who are interested in art and culture but they are not the ones you are seeing. The arty ones are an alienated minority who run to the West. Alienated by the only expectation in life being endless consumerism by the woman and enslavement of the man to that enslavement itself.
London is similar to New York in some respects. Both are multi-cultural shitholes; both have this aura of “intense life buzz is located here”; they’re capitals of Anglosphere, which is the dominant force that attracts many/most rootless cosmopolitans; both are highly overrated with regard to just about everything; both have a rich cultural history & much to offer to cultured connoisseurs- just, this isn’t what attracts rootless cosmopolitans.
Highly creative people in arts, sciences, … don’t care about metropolises.
Just, it seems to me that both London & New York are very attractive for two categories of people: entertainers (chattering classes, musicians, actors, journalists, various hangers-on, …) & financiers (bankers, entrepreneurs, various dealers in global financial world, …).
Does anyone seriously think that some sheikhs or oligarchs are visitors to British Museum or Met?
The bourgeoisie of the Arabs specifically enjoy London in the summer, because of the comparatively cool climate. A lot of Arabs ship their expensive Italian/Germans cars into London every summer, with their Arab country’s plates (which is idiotic – but perhaps the UK is intelligently generating import tariffs or shipping fees from them).
For anyone from Northern Europe, Russia, etc – London is normal weather, without too much extremes.
Houses in London (and a lot of architecture) is really beautiful, although not relative to the prices.
And then London is very interesting for any educated or cultured people (not that we are talking about them now), because of the amount of history contained in most of the streets. It is a paradise for the fans of English history and literature, although some of it has been destroyed from bombing in the Second World War.
This is why ordinary middle class tourists (whether from Mexico and Paraguay, to Japan and Australia), are visiting London. However, I agree, that it is not why it is popular with rich people.
When you walk in the museums in London, almost all the people are ordinary middle class tourists. Strangely, you do not see many English visiting their native museums. (This is different to in Russia or in America, where most museum visitors are the native people).
Multiculturalism of rich people, is not the same atmosphere as of the poor people. In the latter, it’s stressful, and sometimes dangerous immigrant, competing for your jobs. In the former, it’s able to network and make friends with similar people from other nationalities.
Sounds like you would agree with Duke of Qin:
It’s a mystery to me why Hong Kongers would want to leave one of the safest and most prosperous cities in the world to live in London and other grimy, violent British cities.
This is not third world peasants we’re talking about for whom emigrating anywhere is a step up, these are people who mostly have a significantly higher standard of living than the average British person.
Jewish power in America exceeds that of every other ethnic group by many orders of magnitude.
London, has a undeveloped country problem of heavy air pollution in the city.
But if one of the otherwise wealthy, historical, cities, is a “shithole”, then – how do you see a medium level city in world terms, like Chelyabinsk, or Kurgan and a Barnaul.
And if you could not live in a Barnaul, then how will you survive a day in Mexico. And if you are snobby about Mexico, then what is an Indian city to you?
When you walk in East London, you can notice how your standards are distorted. You see brown people, a few broken windows, and some old cars – and say to yourself “this is such a primitive Bangladesh”.
But then East London buildings, would be considered middle class streets in my native city. Building quality even poor East London is higher than most cities, and the poor browns are more rich than any international average.
It’s attractive, only if you can afford to invest in there. For normal middle class people, prices are too high.
For entertainers, such large cities might be the only places to work – as this is where the theatres, drama school, television, (or wherever such kind of people work) etc are located.
They are not always so bad. For example, the ruling elite of Oman are obsessed with classical music and opera, and tried to convert Muscat to be the Middle Eastern Salzburg.
The main cultural problem in London, is that it not a such a good city for classical music – to the bad acoustics of their concert halls (apart from Wigmore Hall, which has only chamber music).
London Symphony Orchestra need a new concert hall with better acoustics so that is where the UK should be directing money of rich foreign residents. https://acousticengineering.wordpress.com/2015/03/09/what-is-wrong-with-londons-concert-halls
Well, “temporary exhibition” in Oman, looks like some pieces of black cardboard with names of cities that developed opera – but evidently Oman’s sheikhs view themselves as inheriting and wanting to continue the opera patronizing tradition.
The UK might be in Brexit state, but its still very integrated in the EU and Atlanticist order.
https://theprint.in/world/uk-wants-5g-alliance-of-10-countries-including-india-to-avoid-reliance-on-chinese-huawei/431735/
The sinophobia is already flaring everywhere for the anglos
I agree. Brexit was, in part, a big bet that the UK would do better separately as a center of global finance, especially as a center for China & other Asian countries. More freedom to exploit opportunities in Asia and elsewhere was supposed to more than make up for opportunities lost in the EU.
Now, not only will London lose business in the EU (especially since negotiations are not going well), it will lose business in Asia as well (especially since HK, with HK’s British-linked firms, such as HSBC, was already losing prominence as financial center for China to Shanghai).
Now, it seems that Johnson’s support is largely merely negative in nature: some people might prefer him to the alternatives for now; but they have lost confidence & enthusiasm for him.
Now that Labour has a new leader, polling shows increased support for Labour, at the expense of Johnson. I would not have predicted this back in January.
I thought that Labour would be in the wilderness for another decade or more; but maybe this will not be so.
Dominic Cummings?
ASMF is one of the best known chamber music groups in the World.
DC has been an embarrassment since Johnson became PM. Johnson should let him go. What’s the point of keeping DC on?
Each & every Western city which is not more than 80% white is, basically, a shithole. No architecture or cultural history can alter this. More black & brown, more down.
As regards non-Western cities (Kyoto, Calcutta, ..)- it depends. North Asian big cities are anthills; Indian (and even more African metropolises like Lagos) are worse than shitholes- they’re literally black holes.
With regard to question: why would anyone like to live in a shithole like London? I would answer: it depends. I am not inclined to write something long, so…
mystique of opportunity & radiant life. What was Paris in the 18th & 19th C, London & some North American power cities radiate in post-WW2 world: trend-setting allure & aphrodisiacal magnetism of “life is enchanting & possibilities are limitless here” feeling. This is irrational, but attraction is real & it draws many non-traditional (especially young, “modern globalist”) people like a moth to a flame. There is a hypnotic & powerful illusion that a person’s life has immensely more possibilities for enrichment & glow than elsewhere. Some kind of magical thinking, as if being in places seen in movies & associated with legendary and “hip” cultural currents could transform an individual automatically. I know it sounds silly, but I know a few people who feel- at least for some time- this attraction (though, I must confess, it applies more to NYC).
See this hotel? Jack Nicholson was there. See that house? Mick Jagger had been living there.
Of course, many people would not agree. Probably they have a different outlook on life.
London seems even more globalist than New York does in my opinion. London has really gone in for the globalist “world city” thing, most Londoners arguably don’t even perceive themselves as British any more and are proud of the fact, even a lot of the native British ones.
New York still seems more “American” in mentality and thinks of itself more as the centre of American culture than of globalist culture. There’s a significant element of Londoners who would like to become a city-state, a sort of European Singapore, whereas I’ve never heard of New Yorkers expressing any sort of separatist sentiment from the rest of the US.
I’d love to kick NYC out of the US.
London: the weather is terrible, the food is ordinary unless you are prepared to pay a lot, real estate prices are too high, cultural spots are few, isolated and most of it is stolen anyway, the women are generally rotund, there are few native Englishmen around, the football lacks artistry. It really does not compel most sensible people to want to visit or live there. After visiting and staying for extended periods of times a few times, one subsequently disembarks from Heathrow with a sense of frustration and boredom. For work I have to often visit some of the best lunch/dinner and bar venues and most of the patrons are Asians, Arabs and Russia. It surprises me that the English have handed most of the commanding heights of their political economy to non-Englishmen but that is their problem. The rule of law and tax loopholes is the reason most non-Englishman want to live there, or at least have some real estate there, but one must wonder how long that will last.
London is a global power city shithole. It is not an English city anymore. Being crammed with English & British historical culture (Westminster Abbey, the Tower, Big Ben, various monuments, the City, British Museum, ..) is not what matters most.
If an imaginary German invasion took place in 1940, Londoners would have fought. Because they were the people of that nation, whichever their regional or ethnic differences. And now- who would fight any real invasion? For whom?
Who are these people, living in London?
I am aware that one example doesn’t prove anything. So, just as an illustration: I have an acquaintance from here, SE Europe, PhD in physics, who has been living in London for 8 years. He is in his early 30s. Married a Chinese colleague- a real Chinese, from Communist China. She’s also PhD in physics. Both work in their respective fields (he’s more like science manager, while she’s in research). Good money, although not something extravagant. They have more free time than before, and yet…
They delay children because they cannot afford them (so they say). Years go & they remain childless. This is a delicate issue & I don’t want to stick my nose in something that is not my business. Just, I think they would like to have a child, but, as yet- nothing. Their social life is rather limited (they socialize mostly with similar, science educated white-Asian couples).
In my opinion: very fine, warm, moral & productive people -but: rootless cosmopolitans. Why would a Croatian-Chinese couple harbor any special attachment to anything historically English? They are not destructive; they are good citizens; they certainly contribute to the wealth of England.
But, the invisible force that binds individuals into a people is naturally absent here.
David Riesman: lonely crowd.
Or Andrei Zhdanov: rootless cosmopolitans.
Deutsche Grammophon has released a set of all their recording – €93.99 at Amazon Germany at the moment…
https://www.amazon.de/60-Jahre-Academy-Martin-Fields/dp/B07XGSC351.
The best therapy for NYC:
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/AcademicEasygoingArrowana-small.gif
What cites, do you consider are not a shithole? Add a few examples of cities to understand what your tastes can be.
It depends which person you refer to by “you”?
I might be unrepresentative, but since I was working in the West – I would describe my personal situation as “underworked”, and relaxing and stable in a boring way (as you might see from high number of commenting here lol).
Relative to the salary every month, my emotion is that I do not work sufficiently.
A secret they do not tell, is that for office cattle in a wealthy industry in a richer company – it’s possible that your work will only require about two hours of difficult concentration each day, and as employee you might not necessarily be judged for the high standard you would expect from the promotional brochures and training sessions.
I imagine that I am a multiple times less industrious and conscientious worker, than an average nurse or school teacher, not to say a builder or coal miner.
A lot of the propaganda about “overworked people” and “terrible office life”, and so on, can be just a funny lie and fake propaganda, and really in the office you might have been half of this afternoon watching YouTube videos and browsing Amazon.
I cannot understand this from a working perspective. I just looked at the largest companies and their entrance requirement, like most people.
From a tourist perspective – yes. Although I have never lived in one beyond for tourism, I am sure there is a sense of “magic” in the historical, ancient and capital cities, to be close to all the history and power, and the ghosts of all those millions of souls who were in the streets before you. cities.
Come on, – too privileged Englishman – it sounds like you need a few years working in Vorkuta.
This is a good time to mention that the new Labour leader is married to a Jewess and “supports Zionism without qualifications”.
https://twitter.com/AliAbunimah/status/1246397791150190592
What’s not generally known is that the US government funds these expat groups. Basically we have a cycle:
US taxpayers funds expat lobby -> Lobby spreads an ‘independent’ narrative about their nasty government in order to manufacture consent -> US government relies on manufactured consent to commence economically hostile action against country -> US funded expats smell money and build up narrative that economic sanctions aren’t working -> US taxpayers eventually fund another ‘moral’ war.
You write “Highly creative people in arts, sciences, … don’t care about metropolises.” Balderdash! One could readily produce myriads of creatives whose work was uniquely stimulated by the zeitgeist of particular cities and / or which was nourished by the conception of certain cities as motherland/fatherland. As a merely desultory off the cuff sampling of such cases, one could point to the importance of Chicago to luminous writers like Carl Sandberg, Saul Bellow or Nelson Algren, the inspiration of the NYC urban milieu upon brilliant ‘New York School’ composers like Morton Feldman, the impression London made on Rimbaud and Verlaine during their sojourns there, the palpable sensibility Thomas Mann’s literature evinces for Hamburg over Munich or Berlin, or the Saint Petersburg vs Moscow dialectics which manifest variously in Russian literature. Of course, one could produce a great many artists and such for whom an intense nexis with a particular city is neither here nor there, but those who tendentiously spurn the urban (EG, Bela Bartok) are distinctly less numerous than those whose cultural context is ineluctably intertwined with that of certain cities.
London, like Switzerland, is a safe haven for dirty money.
I believe AK is mistaken on this. Fact is the British are even better than the Americans at all talk and no action. Plus, most of the rabid HK terrorists wannabes are the youths, who have no BNO status. To the degree that they actually accept more anti China jokers with money, hey, that is actually better for China to be rid of them. China would be pleased if they all exile themselves.
This is a bad take. It will never happen.
Why would 3 million HK even want to go to the UK? To what life? Are they going to work in a sweat shops? Why leave then?
The Anglo way is always to bring in the elite with power, money, and connections. This will amount to no more than 1000 HK people.
Besides, I can see a considerable chance that this rouse could backfire. The West is not kind to any kind of Asian right now. You think the average Anglo is going to care if a Chinese looking person is HK or Chinese? They will treat both the same and say racist things and spit at them. If they are old they will get pushed onto railway tracks.
The HK will learn quick how Anglos are and will not be sacrificed to be used in some war like what keeps happening to the Kurds.
Does anyone seriously think that some sheikhs or oligarchs are visitors to British Museum or Met?
Maybe not the oligarchs themselves but their wives, mistresses and children certainly are.
I am skeptical of this. When the control of Hong Kong was turned over to China, many moneyed people from Hong Kong bought houses in Vancouver, BC in Canada. While they parked their wives and children there, they often stayed in business in Hong Kong and flew back and forth (hence known as “astronauts”).
Did they become a powerful anti-China lobbying group in Canada?
Disagree with the take.
HK protesters run young and middle-class. For example, just take a look at a list of protest leaders. They’re mostly all Joshua Wong types – students or young services workers. And it’s no coincidence these groups have valid grievances against the mainlanders in the form of competition for jobs, housing, etc.
Hong Kong elites, on the other hand, have mainland business interests and benefit from interchange with the PRC. After a year of massive economic damage, I’d wager the HK business elite might even be quietly relieved there seems to be stability on the horizon.
Besides, any Hong Kong oligarch would long ago have bought UK citizenship through investments if they wanted to in the first place.
Bravado is all well and good – it would work better if the government didn’t explicitly contradict your take on the situation.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/29/three-million-hong-kong-residents-eligible-for-uk-citizenship
They should really seed northern UK towns with HK Chinese to get the towns out of their economic funk. Evenly spread across the north – no centralised Chinatowns. A few families or singletons in each town. There’s no room in London or the big southern cities.
Most London museums have a lot artifacts from other countries, I guess that’s what you mean by “stolen”, but as do most museums in say Paris or Berlin and other major cities. Also, London is regionally probably the driest major city in North West Europe and among the warmest on average, it’s not true that London has bad weather regionally speaking. There are plenty of places in the UK that do have bad weather, but London isn’t one of them.
As for most women in London being “rotund”, most women in London are not native English (which I guess is the snide remark you’re making) and as for food which is obviously related, most communities in London just eat their own native food and London probably has the most varied restaurants in terms of different cuisines anywhere. Native English food is the one you’d struggle to find in London.
To be honest most of your criticisms don’t make sense to me unless you’re using the word London as a synonym for “England” as a whole and mistakenly conflating the two, as foreigners often do.
So the millions of Muslims and Africans in Britain who stab, rape and murder and have turned Britain into the biggest shithole in Europe are all the monnied, connected elites of their native countries?
A lot of posters here don’t half talk some shit.
It seems you have a problem understanding English. I will dumb it down for you. The London weather is crap compared to southern Spain. I am not interested in comparing its weather to the region because the region’s weather is crap also. As for cuisine, I am personally not interested in eating milk from Yap on Wednesdays and braised chicken feet from Myanmar on Thursdays. I want good Mediterranean food and sometimes Indian. Granted, some of the Indian restaurants in London are quite good but the rest of the food is tasteless because it is shipped in from elsewhere. English and non-native English women are fat oafs. Of course, most Western women today are similarly girthed. A lot of the cultural artifacts in Paris and Berlin are stolen also but those countries did have interesting artistic cultures of their own. The English produced very little of their own. Lastly, English football lacks skill and intrigue. Unfortunately, most of the top-line continental leagues have become overly concentrated but Spanish and Italian football remains more interesting and the food after the game is better. Nothing better than watching the Seville derby in Spring and then visiting the bars after the game.
I am referring only to London and not England. As for the rest of England…lets not go there.
There was no reason to be anti-China while HK had SAR status. The situation has changed dramatically and to the extent that HK will remain a focal point for US/China tensions, they will have more motivation now. Also, we don’t know to what extent they’re working behind the scenes, the Chinese are a bit more savvy than, say, Ukrainians. It was Canada who detained Huawei lady after all, at considerable potential risk to the country’s relations with China.
I used to spend a lot of time in London. I usually stayed at the hotel across from Harrods. I preferred the small boutique hotels on the sidestreets but it was too much trouble to make arrangements. My company was on the circuit and picked up the tab for the ridiculously expensive business hotels.
My favorite pass time was wondering restaurants looking for British people. I typically couldn’t find many … perhaps only a cabbie or two living in rent-controlled housing. During restaurant breaks, my favorite pass time was watching African potentates arriving in front of Harrods in limousines. A number wore animal skins across their shoulders. It was common for them to have up to five gorgeous black women in tow dressed to the 10s. My passing thought was that foreign aid paid very well for those who could finagle their way into the free money streams.
This raised a question: Where to the British live and what do they do? I had the same question on a recent tour of Scotland. I found it hard to find British people wherever I went … except perhaps when walking the area around the University of St. Andrew. Although obviously coincidental, I ran into large numbers of very friendly young people from Poland. It sounded like they were in Britain to stay as they clerked their counters or poured pints in “British” pubs.
Having since read Ben Judah’s excellent book, “This is London [a.k.a.Londonistan],” there is still the question: Where do the British live and what do they do? A related question: Which will be the first Western nation to evaporate due to unbridled immigration from alien and often hostile cultures … Britain, Sweden, or the United States?
If you have money London is the best place in the world, sounds like you don’t.
Moscow is great too, winters too harsh though. New York is easily the most overrated, actually preferred Boston.
Lol this is so true.
I’d bet on Britain. The United States differs from Sweden and Britain in that it is a settler society. The only way London could become English again would be a similar scenario as suffered by Rome in late antiquity. We would need barbarian invasions (that is already well underway) and then some devastating financial crisis or pandemic which would either force the non-English to flee or die. London would act as a demographic sink. Then after a century or two of depopulation, the English who still predominate in smaller towns and the country, would repopulate the large urban centres like London and even Birmingham or Manchester. A very similar process happened in Rome resulting in the Romans of today resembling the Romans of early Rome but do not really resemble the Romans of the Imperial period when millions of non-Romans flooded the city primarily from the East.
Simple answer is they are working and you will see them at commuter hours. Harrods is a tourist store.
A lot of British people love mass immigration as long as it evokes a nostalgia for the empire. Indians, Windrushers from the West Indies, Christian Africans, HK Chinese, etc, are all very popular.
British anti-immigration sentiment is mainly confined to two types, anti-Muslim and anti-Eastern European. I would say largely because neither evoke any sense of empire nostalgia and in fact represent Britain being colonised by competing empires, the Muslim empire and in the case of Eastern Europeans, the Franco-German EU empire of which Eastern Europeans are seen as the foot soldiers.
New York is nice, but overpriced and dirty. Boston is small and boring (though pleasant). The best American city is Chicago (at least the northern half of it – the southern half is another Detroit). Great theater, architecture, food, people.
But Moscow beats them all.
I find it odd how these people seem obviously concerned that if HK Chinese moved to Britain they would inevitably be racially and culturally diluted into the coffee coloured melting pot that is London and other major British cities if specific measures weren’t taken to avoid that (like the establishment of a HK Chinese city/ethnic enclave in Britain) yet don’t extend the same concerns of racial and cultural purity to native British people.
The big advantages of huge cities come from economies of scale – they concentrate people, including a disproportionate share of the more interesting, intelligent, and/or rich, together. This creates the largest scope for creating groups of common interests, even the most obscure. Along with the things that come in their wake – attractions, entertainment, restaurants, theaters, museums and historic sites, etc. Big cities also largely nullify the effects of weather – mostly indirectly (most things happen indoors), but also, to a small extent, at least so far as cold winters are concerned, even directly (urban heat island effect). If one has the means, they’re pretty much the perfect environment, if one is fine with the hyper-urban environment psychologically. On that note, I am not even sure they are all conflictual with evolved human nature; “urban jungles” would not seem to be much more evolutionarily foreign than flat, open suburban asphalt deserts.
As the U.S. (and the West in general) is right now committing suicide
in front of the whole world, it is striking that it’s all based on outdated
theology. The West needs to accept science, and realize that even though God
exists He did not create our bodies. Our bodies, incl. our brains, are
products of evolution. Biologically we are primitive predatory primates.
We’re certainly primates, and we are predatory because we need to kill in
order to eat. The continuing wars, arms race, as well as continuing criminality
prove that we are still rather primitive although we’ve somehow managed
to avoid a global conflagration in the last 75 years so there is hope for us
after all.
Once we accept that at this primitive stage of our spiritual evolution, we’re
basically smart chimps, everything falls into place. We tend to be tribal,
territorial, aggressive, lustful, and status-seeking (i.e., seeking dominance
in our interactions with others). As long as we follow the Aristotelian/Buddhist
Principle of the Golden Mean, i.e., moderation in all things (and its corollary
saying that size is the root of all evil, e.g., countries and cities should not
be too large for there is a Goldilocks zone for everything in life), we shall become
more forgiving of others, and even ourselves. Hence at our stage of evolution
it’s perfectly normal to be a bit violent (e.g., in self defense), racist (there I’ve
said it!), sexist, counter-Semitic for Christians, anti-gentilist for Jews, etc.
Being a bit prejudiced in favor of our own people is perfectly normal, and
it appears to be built into our paleomammalian brains. As long we don’t
push it to extremes we’ll be fine.
But sometimes differences among individuals and groups are so large that
the groups need to take a divorce from each other, based on irreconcilable diff-
erences. For example, one outcome of WW II in Central and Eastern Europe is
that Jews and Germanics on one hand, and Slavs on the other have largely taken
a divorce from each other. For the first time in many centuries Germanics
and Jews have been mostly removed from the Slavic territories, and the Slavs
are breathing a little easier. I believe that the Western Slavs are more highly
evolved spiritually than the Germanics or Jews. In fact, I believe that all Slavs
are on average more spiritually advanced than Germanics or Jews. Hence
interacting with Germanics or Jews has often been painful for us over the
centuries. It’s like interacting with teenage bullies. It’s not the most pleasant
thing in the world. Of course, it is possible to accelerate one’s spiritual
evolution, and I know the Germanics are trying so I wish them well.
The concept of God I subscribe to is primarily the immanent God. In this view,
known as panentheism, the Universe is immersed in God, so God
permeates our bodies and everything around us.
It’s really quite simple, there are some that they would like to permanently exile. While there are others that will never be allowed to leave. The British won’t get to decide which is which, the mainland will. Luckily for both the Hongkies and China, the CCP will allow the average Joe to decide his own fate, leave or stay, it’ll be up to them. But for a select few, example the Joshua Wong’s of this world, that time has now passed.
Xi Jinping Vs Joshua Wong
https://youtu.be/htHBquu_4Xo
I think that cities 3 – 5 million in population don’t violate the principle
of moderation in all things. For example, Boston is world-class, and yet
human-sized while New York (with 18 million in the tri-state area) is
a monstrosity, an ecological disaster waiting to happen, and is happening
now. From the evolutionary perspective we’ve evolved surrounded by
nature so in order to thrive we still need to be surrounded by nature.
“Culture is not our friend.” Very large cities tend to produce millions
of urban neurotic nerds, and present obstacles to our spiritual evolution
which requires periodic periods of silence and withdrawal from the
“madding crowd.”
Change “periodic periods of silence” to “daily periods of silence so you can commune with God”
That appears to be contrary to the expressed wishes of the Foreign Ministry, who are not enthusiastic about the prospect of mass emigration.
If they saw it as an empty move, there wouldn’t be diplomatic protests. Instead, there would merely be a gloating and smug article from Global Times or a joyful comment from the Plenipotentiary Extraordinaire to the Court of Saint Twitter.
There are a lot of commenters on this forum currently as well as last year who saying good riddance and how Hong Kong descending into chaos can only benefit China.
However, so far the actions of the CCP seem like they want to take over the property and make sure the current house still stands, rather than take over the property, demolish the house and build a department store on the land.
Personally, I would consider seriously accepting the loss of human capital and simply allow all who want to emigrate to leave (excepting perhaps certain politically prominent people) and then fill the city with loyalists from the mainland to stabilise the city, but that doesn’t seem like the current approach.
So at the moment, it still seems like bravado to me.
A lot of the Hong Kong rioters give the impression of being ANTIFA types to me, if large numbers of them emigrated to Britain I highly doubt they would be right wing, pro-British sort of voters.
If Chinese voting habits and politics in the US is anything to go by, they would most likely boost Labour’s vote and and be inclined to support “diversity” and the “melting pot”, especially the sort of Chinese who would be prepared to leave their homeland in the first place.
Chinese in the West are usually left wing and “progressive”, probably more in theory than practice, but I doubt the Conservative Party would benefit much from millions of Chinese voters.
Huge cities are a kind of “wild” – too large and chaotic to be controlled, they form a sort of wilderness ecosystem. The “energy” and sense of freedom one feels in a huge city is similar to the freedom one feels in the wild, and for the same reason.
The epitome of a tightly controlled environment would be manicured suburbia – which is why people find them soulless.
That being said, large cities suffer from too much noise, stress, and too little nature, so the urge to escape can grow irresistible for more spiritual people. Big cities are exhilarating but insufferable.
I have always loved huge cities, but as I get older I crave more and more the wilderness and the countryside, and no longer wish to live in one.
Didn’t some of the protesters have pro-Trump signs?
They might be like anti-Commie older waves of Asian immigrants whose children or grandchildren get on the diversity train.
LOL. London sucks, period. Overcrowded, smelly, grey. Of the “rich”, only trashy Arabs and trashy Russians (((mobsters))) live in London. For the middle class, it’s hell on earth. Expensive, filled with trashy Chinese tourists, you’ll never afford anything and forget about being able to have kids and pay school, etc. Entertainment consists in getting drunk in a pub before 11pm and passing out. Some parts of the city look like Jamaica or Africa, you can walk miles and never see a white face.
Whites are so cucked that their own cities have become a status symbol for foreigners. Now that I think about it Beverly Hills is also a hangout for rich foreigners. (Israelis, Iranians, well mostly Iranian Jews I think.). Chinkouver is half Chinese.
Let them come, maybe the Hongkongers will displace the blacks from South London.
Funniest line of your whole ridiculous post. The Kurds routinely fight on both sides of conflicts and are quicker than anyone to switch loyalties. No one has “used” them. They’re violent separatists who invite atrocities committed against them.
Weird, I’ve never seen a hairless chimp. (Or one that could free-dive 100 meters, for that matter.)
Yeah, Anglos bring in immigrants to be their peasant class. But the UK has no need for 3 million HK.
They just need 1 thousand of the richest and most privileged to help them tar China.
lol.
Yeah, it is the Kurds that are playing the noble Anglo.
The peasant class in England is the native English underclass, they’re the majority of homeless, have the lowest education levels and are the poorest demographic generally.
This is not even a controversial statement to make, even most leftists acknowledge (often gladly so) that the native English working class are the bottom of British society.
It is a bit fake news and propaganda in the internet about the difficult life of office plankton, when as a class we are something approximate to aristocrats of the 21st century.
Sure, that many people are overworked in small, poor companies, in declining industries, having bosses with a personality disorder,free membership of only lower quality gym, etc, and this is the kind of person who might complain on the internet. But so many aristocrats had been impoverished on small, unfertile estates, with declining industries, without refuting that their role as a class was to live off fat of the land (just that land does not always produce fat).
If you are not yet a senior, then you have sit in ass in the office all day. But so even middle owners of a banana plantation in Caribbean, were tied to their estates, and probably had to wake up on time.
This anti-office plankton propaganda has some ideological function though, so we are not seen too much like Marie Antoinette, and people like Bardon above seem to imagine we must be a very stressed and hard working people, who were not half the afternoon browsing on Amazon, etc.
^ No it’s because some idiots have overpaid you much, that you can now buy a house in an exotic Tazmania, and pretend your profession is “wine farmer” because your garden had some vines in it.
While I do agree about historic sites and, perhaps, on rich folks & entertainers, it seems that there is a difference between old & new world with regard to intelligent (accomplished etc.) people.
Without going into distant future, let’s see only post-WW2 world. In Europe, and I mean continental Europe (Paris, Vienna, Moscow), it is certainly true that most accomplished people (sciences, arts etc.) are living or working in big cities.
But, in the US & most of Anglosphere – not so. Top universities, institutes, art academies, .. are outside of big cities (with exceptions, of course). Most Anglospheroid Nobel prize winners, for instance, don’t live or work in big cities. They, of course, visit them, now & then – but don’t spend most of their time there.
I am sympathetic to your position on moderation, but I think it misses the mark s bit.
The true spiritual attitude is surely better described as spontaneity and a kind of catholic universality in refusing to exclude any aspect of life (which I think is what you are getting at with moderation, since extremes exclude their opposites by definition).
An artificially imposed moderation doesn’t quite work. By that logic, I should only enjoy landscapes that are moderate, but I love extremes of mountain and dessert. I should not enjoy wilderness but only cultivated countryside. And so on and so forth.
Plus, true moderation would have to mean being moderate about moderation and indulging in extremes occasionally.
Still, balance and harmony are indeed essential ideas in spirituality, but I do not think an artificially imposed moderation in the Aristotelian fashion is what is meant – that implies a state of rigid control, which is anti-spiritual.
Rather, not artificially excluding any aspect of life will lead to not committing to any extreme, but to flow along in a free and natural manner.
But I am sure your Slavic Highness will not deign to answer anyone as spiritually undeveloped as I.
This model makes sense for some industries where there is a huge amount of work which needs to be done in a short time for one part of the year, but little to do during the rest of the year. Doubtless in the future the capitalists will work out a way to eliminate this inefficiency and crush workers in these industries even further.
An excellent comment that showcases your ever evolving articulate writing style!
I agree with the first part of your comment, about the grouping of social movers of large city environments that help promote cultural and entertainment resources, but do have a differing opinion regarding “hyper urban environments” including “cold winters’.
Modern cities are usually long drawn out affairs with wide boundaries. One often thinks twice about venturing into the outdoors to travel very far when cold air and slippery streets are waiting to greet you. Dark, cloudy skies also help mitigate any desire to travel, especially if a fresh snowstorm necessitates and hour and a half of strenuous shoveling of snow, before you make it to your favorite theater…you get my drift?
https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/incoming/article1648617.ece/alternates/BASE_LANDSCAPE/2932108%2Bduluth%20halloween%20blizzard.gif
A different view of Minneapolis than you’ll see today. Halloween 1991 (I was there).
A typical Minneapolis winter street scene “Harriet Avenue” as depicted by Oleksa Bulavitsky:
https://wilcockgallery.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Harriet-ave.jpg
Hmmm…shall I stay in and have another cup of hot coffee, or dress up and go downtown to see and hear the latest of the orchestra’s new repertoire?…just sayin. 🙂
(My audiophile components don’t get enough of a workout as it is)…
I must admit that made me chuckle.
The U.K. is a U.S. vassal. Its politicians model themselves on their counterparts in the U.S. With or without foreign lobbyists, I expect U.K.-China relations to become more hostile. Also, with arrangements like the Five Eyes alliance, the U.S. does have a stake in U.K.-China relations.
Sounds like they want/do not mind “British Empire in one country”.
In hindsight, Brits should not have withdrawn from so much of their empire, and kept at least as much as Russians and French did.
Americans have about as much regard for the UK as they do for Sweden, Americans care nothing for this country despite the fact Tories strongly believe in the “special relationship”, something Americans have never heard of.
I would like it if Boris one day announced that he is going to sign Britain up to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative post-Brexit and give up with trying to tag along with the dying nation that is America. Boris has already suggested that HS2 could be built by the Chinese state railway company so joining the Belt and Road Initiative is not that far-fetched.
Now that Hong Kong is about to become a backwater Chinese city, thanks to the elimination of its preferred status with the West, from a trade and financial markets standpoint, I expect a chunk of that population to depart. The handful of Hongkongers I’m acquainted with are startlingly and ferociously anti-Chinese. Of course, your mileage may vary.
I’m personally skeptical about admitting them, but not hugely for or against. Besides, the decision won’t be made by Unz’ers or even the American public. We’ll have to wait to find out what Trump decides.
From watching n reading about this in Chinese, my rough understanding is the mainland Chinese and the govt wants all those who wants to leave, to really leave. Even the regular Hong Kong people not part of the protesters wants them all gone. Essentially when that law passes, they are all fucked if they stay in Hong Kong.
“I think a Cathar-style solution is needed for the Libertarian question.” – Kill them all and let God sort them out. Lolbertarians must perish.
It won’t be the US the obligation falls on to admit Hong Kongers, it’ll be the UK. Trump stirs up the trouble but ultimately it’s Britain that will be expected to handle the fall out.
I’m also surprised that the US is taking the decision to stop treating HK as separate to China, because surely that is doing the Chinese government a huge favour in their agenda to integrate Hong Kong fully into mainland China?
Hannan is Jewish. Bowman possibly?
I do wonder how much appeal life in Britain would have to Hong Kongers though. The average Hong Konger is significantly wealthier and has a higher standard of living than the average British person.
Hong Kong also has a fraction of the violent crime of Britain, especially London. For most of them going to live in Britain would mean taking a significant drop in living standards. Also, Hong Kongers are (or were) the kings of their own castle, but in Britain they’ll just be another immigrant group competing with all the other immigrant groups in the multi-ethnic “melting pots” that are major British cities.
Beijing does not want to integrate HK into the Mainland ASAP.
Beijing wants HK to retain the parts of autonomy Beijing likes, and reduce the ones that are problematic for them.
They want HK to be more like Macau.
Yes, in some weeks we need to concentrate around 7-8 hours each day and often I work all night. But in most weeks we can go slowly and I guess it can be 2 hours of concentration a day.
I usually procrastinate over a day – with something like 30 minutes of concentration, then 2 hours relax, then 30 minutes of concentration,etc.
In terms of “capitalists crushing us even further” – from what I can see personally, we are the opposite of “crushed” at the moment, but rather beneficiaries of the current stage of capitalism, as aristocrats had been parasitic beneficiaries of the feudal economy. At least until this pandemic, it’s a time of cornucopia in the Western countries, and there is more money than understanding of what to spend it on.
If the bubble of overspending will burst (as it should), then the middle people in the office, can be one of the more ineliminable type, as they still need us to do work. People above us, accepting more management responsibility, should be more eliminable as they have a still worse ratio of real work to income.
You were saying that London is a shithole though, not American cities.
Partly because of the curse of the automobile, American cities are often more like a large suburb, and not like “real cities”, in the European sense (with a mixed use historical centre, districts of different historical character, etc).
So, it’s not surprising that such “uninteresting suburbs” which are the American city, does not especially attract the intelligent or cultural life of America.
But London, is quite paradigmatic of the European metropolis, and interesting to walk around and explore. It is also the only place in near region you could see a painting or listen to a symphony*.
*Although somehow the acoustics of all the concert halls of London are really so bad sounding, due to mysterious English architectural incompetence, that you might hear more to listen to the symphony at home.
They live in a research bubble, almost make-believe. They are an artificial couple, brought together by lust (and perhaps desperation – scientists are a huge catch), and rootlessness.
Why would they have children? Their children will be even more fake than them.