Nice.

Related: I lived in England as a kid and have fond memories. Lots of friends and some relatives there still. We travelled extensively, driving around Britain in our VW van on weekends and holidays, visiting every museum, castle, or ruin my dad could find. I still have a huge collection of leather bookmarks, something that you can occasionally find here in the US, but which are prevalent at every interesting sightseeing activity in Britain.

I probably won’t go back, just because I could be hauled into court for something innocuous or attacked by the immigrant population somewhere I should feel safe.

Hey Old NFO,

As much as I want to visit the U.K, I have concerns that I will get my happy a$$ scooped up going through customs because I have been critical of the “new population” and their “Social Norms” that run counter to western values. As much as I want to go visit the Imperial War Museum, or the HMS Belfast or any other of the things that are righteously cool in the former G.B. So far the E.U hasn’t done this…..yet.

One interpretation of the colonial/became-the-americans dispute with the official leadership of the then UK was playing divide and rule games. IE, balancing barbarians and civilized. Now, the revisionists who favor what the crown tried to do will talk about the poor indians.

There are also discussions of various events in the actual island chain.

Now, could be argued that there was no choice but to develop some sort of weird and persistant mindset. For example, the Scots and Englsih borderers, who maybe were a lot more functional after they started over again in the new world.

Anyohw, from my perspective, UK academics and academic trained are a special case of academics and academic trained who have wandered into serious error, or are ‘wackjobs’. A population with a pre existing peace, and a government which had functioned cannot help but have a) ‘common wisdom’ about how everything works or ‘just works’ b) factions. The factions can have different information and transmit distinct models of how what works.

Academics it is maybe natural for them to assume that they can change what they do, and that the rest of society won’t calculate and then change behavior in response. At least not for whatever first possibility one brainstorms for the secondary change. Academics may also buy in hard to the story that they are the big brains, and have somebody somewhere who has figured things out, so if their consensus is ‘no problem’, there must be no problem.

Keir has a couple of law degrees, so may have been trained by law facutly during his formative years. Certainly, probably has some deeply ingrained assumptions about law, about peace, and about stability, that he should have been able to forecast being able to fuck up if he obtained enough influence over the course of his career. His legal and political career seems to be a series of fuck ups where he has gradually made problems for his fellows thinking that no consequences could ever occur. Those allegations about the handling of the rape gangs.

Alternative model is that he is a bitter and destructively vindictive man paying everyone back for Brexit.

Anyway, UK academics I see as a special case of continental academics. Their academics and professionals seem to have deeply convinced themselves of the importance of certain models of international cooperation. Which are sure to be effectively untrue at times, simply because the underlying model of all cultures being basically the same is untrue. Key example that they can’t sweep under the rug of calling critics racist is the cultural differences between US and UK.

Anyway, any xenophobia or xenomiscy on my part is not relevant to what I see as the broader question, and the more specific case closer to my own home. I have reservations about US academics, and am not sure that drastic funding cuts that also result in me seeking very different opportunities would be at all bad. I talk shit more about the behavioral fields, but medicine should have had some valid research somewhere during the past five to ten years, and I feel that there are doubts even there, unrelated to the obvious/public scandals about the value actually delivered.