Which fading empire is more fucked, USA or UK

From elsewhere, don’t care

there's an option for that!

the stuff going on with voting rights in the US makes the US worse, imo

Terf Island seems pretty extra specially horrible from the outside I think

Different kinds of worse - the US will try its best to go Christian identitarian white minority rule but at least we have more nukes to keep us in the running as a global hegemon. The UK is just going to shit in a more dreary, depressing way.

Hard to weigh out all the different ways and degrees each fading empire is fucked, but the fact that UK has universal health care and the USA doesn't weighs pretty damn heavily in those scales. I'll think about it some more before I vote.

not sure if fucked means "closer to collapse" or "more shit" or if that matters. also not sure how to answer. the fate of both of these monstrosities is linked and looks pretty bleak. the connection makes the competition harder until you get into specifics like whether citizens can afford healthcare (increasingly not, even here)

(it also makes any my-country-is-better-than-yours between brits & americans feel particularly toothless - in particular the kind of nothing-to-do-with-me-guv america-bashing that is so popular in this country is transparent imperial-guilt-projection among other things & the fact that it codes as enlightened & progressive to people really does speak volumes about how fucked we are in every sense of the word)

truly we needed a poll to summarise the last 5 years of ILX

i live in the u.k. it's been a mostly okay place to live. i've never lived anywhere else so maybe loads of places are nicer to live in. don't care if the u.k's global influence is zero tbh.
don't think about america enough to have a good idea about it.

The UK a fading empire? What year is this, 1956?

Guns and health make this america and its no contest at all tbh

I think the UK is still a marginally better place to live because of the NHS and the relatively tiny amount of gun crime. But I'd argue it's last moments as a fading empire had gone by the 70's. Post Suez they have been a self-governing dominion of the US empire, albeit one with shitloads of overseas military bases and some of the phantom limb delusions of a former empire. Obv not mentioning NI would be wrong but I don't do longposts very well!

Yes, the whole guns thing is the clincher, that's just insane. There's a lot of delusional guff talked about the NHS in the UK though.

oh the NHS is on borrowed time, but what is left of it is still better than having to pay a grand if you call an ambulance or women getting billed for hugging their newborn.

We're kind of conditioned in the UK, to patiently wait in line (for months, years even) for the NHS (i.e. the state) to ladle out little carefully costed packets of healthcare, I'm not sure Americans are quite ready for that.

https://i1.wp.com/bespokeunit.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Bespoke-Unit-Guide-to-Fade-Levels.jpg

the stuff going on with voting rights in the US makes the US worse, imo

― J Edgar Noothgrush

UK voting rights not looking too sacrosanct right now either.

I'm simply laughing. This is funny to me.

chap at 4:48 22 Jun 21

the stuff going on with voting rights in the US makes the US worse, imo

― J Edgar Noothgrush

UK voting rights not looking too sacrosanct right now either.

yeah this is basically why I started the poll, the whole end of democracy thing makes the US look more fucked to me and I wanted to know if Britishers agreed. or if, in their nigh-Olympian trans-Atlantic perspective, they'd see a steadier foundation 'neath Columbia's feet than she herself can encompass.

the mass shootings thing is a good point too, though.

People here mostly think they’re fine afaict, cost of doing business

voted America, we will be The United States of MyPillow by 2041

The UK a fading empire? What year is this, 1956?

― Are Animated Dads Getting Hotter? (Tom D.), Tuesday, June 22, 2021 2:01 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i must concur

yeah this is basically why I started the poll, the whole end of democracy thing makes the US look more fucked to me and I wanted to know if Britishers agreed. or if, in their nigh-Olympian trans-Atlantic perspective, they'd see a steadier foundation 'neath Columbia's feet than she herself can encompass.

I'm sure you won't be too surprised to find Britishers spend roughly 0.000000000001% of their time thinking about US democracy.

Admittedly that's 0.000000000001% more than most non-Americans.

NHS is so-so by European standards but obv better than what the US has.

I simply wouldnt ask any britishers tbh

In the UK we have the tag-team attack on democracy by both a Starmer Labour opposition that is so diabolically tory that it encourages people to give up on parliamentary democracy. And then the actual real tories looking to sneak in voter ID and electoral boundary reforms designed to keep them in power forever, while millions of voters already dgaf about democracy as a serious means for harm reduction or meaningful change anymore.

Terf Island seems pretty extra specially horrible from the outside I think

It's my experience that much of the media class throughout Europe is as bad or worse than the UK on this particular issue, it's just magnified for the UK because it's the only country the US pays marginal attention to.

Admittedly that's 0.000000000001% more than most non-Americans.

Also more than yer average GOP voter in America too.

between them I've only been to the US, but I think living with the UK press/media would drive me (more) insane so they get my vote

if someone could use the spotify api to find out which country has more playlists titled 'fucking faded'

uk is no longer a fading empire, the empire is finished and the uk is really not particularly important in a geo-political sense anymore. america is the world hegemon rn, although china is of course catching up and may overtake soon.

america probably a more fucked place to live in if you are poor. the numbers of homeless are staggering in the big cities ive been to and some of the more depressed areas ive seen make middlesborough look nice

conservatives are going to be in power for like the next 20 years in the uk without cheating, otoh trump might be president again in a few years, and the electoral system is a joke in the US

The electoral system is very much a joke in the UK too.

most global democracy hinges on the idea that everybody is good people and will respect norms and that is why it fails

not in comparison to the US though. electoral college and the whole "try and stop black people voting whenever possible" aspect is just unbelievable

we also just had a sitting President attempt a self-coup

the empire is not finished, it's a collaborative project

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Justice_(Diego_Garcia)

yes, one sign of the fuckedness of the UK is that calling it "an empire" is largely perceived as a pity-compliment for a once-proud nation fallen on hard times. Not sure that's worse than the US's steadfast commitment to denying the blatantly obvious, mind

on that note, while the US might be fading on multiple fronts, I don't think its imperialism is one of them

Wait, isn't the US part of the UK's faded empire?

Wooooooaaahh

I seem to remember....a before times. We weren't America. we were...something....smaller, I think? clothes were different, colors were different. different people to give us instructions. an angry mob throwing product off of a boat.

guns and stabwounds and blood. and it goes black and then it was like different people.

but it's faint and i don't recall anybody know what that's about

believe you are recalling the KISS Cruise (AKA the KISS Kruise)

'Has it worse' as an empire or as a country to live in? As countries to live in, these two remain some of the best countries in the world to live in, by quite some distance.

UK still has plenty of empire-like elements and influence, if only through its multiples international corporations like BP, Rio Tinto and finance giants.

Yes, we need to remind ourselves that literally hundreds of thousands of people are trying to relocate to these miserable faded empires.

Wait, isn't the US part of the UK's faded empire?

― Andy the Grasshopper,

no, in the US there was a patriotic revolt in the late 1700s that was all about Taxed Enough Already and partying. and by 1833, when slavery was banned in most of the british empire, that was the final straw for the United States. like, no way would the US re-join the british empire after that

i mean yes, but as far as rich first-world countires go these are not among the most desirable to live in imo

best way to reunite UK and US would be to have a big meetup at a gas station. then everyone who is a true United Empire citizen just stands there talking and breathing in fumes, talking about gas vs petrol and that kind of stuff, lifts, elevators, and gettin reel dum dum together again

there are 53 countries with a higher gini index than the unites states. five large ones brazil turkey mexico philipinnes and south africa have a combined population of around 600 million, about 8.5% percent of the world population

― flopson, Sunday, June 27, 2021 2:24 AM (twelve hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

if you update these numbers: about 1.5 billion people (around 20% of the population of the world) live in countries with a higher gini index than the usa

all the countries with higher gini than the us also had lower median income. so to the extent that there is a trade off between living in a less unequal country and living in a richer one (i.e., it's better to live in a poorer country if it is more equal) for 1/5th of the world, they are both poorer and more unequal than the us

ty 4 yr service itt flopson

all the countries with higher gini than the us also had lower median income. so to the extent that there is a trade off between living in a less unequal country and living in a richer one (i.e., it's better to live in a poorer country if it is more equal) for 1/5th of the world, they are both poorer and more unequal than the us

― flopson, Sunday, June 27, 2021 3:18 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's possible to go a little bit further than this with the numbers i gave

0% of the world is richer and more unequal than the us

0.6% of the world is both more equal and has a higher median income than the us

79.4% of the world is less unequal and has a lower median income than the us

https://i.ibb.co/g4BTLjx/Screen-Shot-2021-06-27-at-12-47-49-PM.png

this chart has mean not median income so it's more sensitive to inequality, but basically this is saying that if you drew a vertical and horizontal line at the us, there are 0 countries in the top right quadrant, 0.6% percent of the world live in the bottom right quadrant, 80% of the world live in the bottom left quadrant, and 20% live in the top left.

Is real GDP per capita a passable way for a median or above income USAmerican to estimate the standard of living for someone in say Poland or Japan who makes less money than they do?

Optimism index now pls

thank you, flopson. wikipedia has something called "Gini after taxes". Is that a worse metric? It seems like a good idea, but I'm not sure.

Sometimes a nation can be truly fucked up and yet contain many happy people who have not yet realized how bad their lives are.

The fools

Is real GDP per capita a passable way for a median or above income USAmerican to estimate the standard of living for someone in say Poland or Japan who makes less money than they do?

― Clara Lemlich stan account (silby), Sunday, June 27, 2021 4:16 PM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

imho it's good for broad comparisons

for all its faults, gdp per capita is highly positively correlated with its alternatives (happiness, quality of life, life satisfaction)

it's easy to calculate since it only relies on 2 numbers: an estimate of output and an estimate of population. compared to something like median household income, which requires a survey, and where it can be hard to get comparable estimates.

the happiness surveys are actually quite good in terms of comparability since they have been doing them consistently everywhere for years. one problem there is more interpretability, since the data is inherently non-quantitative, so different transformations of the same ordering can give different results

thank you, flopson. wikipedia has something called "Gini after taxes". Is that a worse metric? It seems like a good idea, but I'm not sure.

― butyrate humbucker bobbins (Sufjan Grafton), Sunday, June 27, 2021 4:36 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'm not a huge fan of gini index (one issue is it's not very good at capturing the tails of inequality--the extremely rich or extreme poor--since it puts the most weight on the middle of the income distribution) but if you're going to use it it makes sense to use post-taxes data. gini is convenient because people have calculated it for lots of countries in the world. most new inequality research is focused on things like 90-10 percentile ratio, top 1% share, top 0.1% share. but it's still a work in progress to get those for many countries

Lived in both. It’s the US and it’s not even close.

Why’d you have kids here then

a little difficult to have kids that live in a different country than u

nah I'd say growing a weebo takes less time and effort

No pull-out-game shaming.

well this is charming

Will anyone admit they believe their kids will have nice lives

they will be fine. Just like that thread.

Sometimes a nation can be truly fucked up and yet contain many happy people who have not yet realized how bad their lives are.

― What's It All About, Althea? (Aimless), Sunday, June 27, 2021 4:37 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

The opposite is more common, in my experience.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

35 otm

Sometimes a nation can be truly fucked up and yet contain many happy people who have not yet realized how bad their lives are.

― What's It All About, Althea? (Aimless), Sunday, June 27, 2021 4:37 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

The opposite is more common, in my experience.

― Van Horn Street, Sunday, June 27, 2021 11:51 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

smarminess though can be found just about anywhere

same goes for pettiness

Tom Pettiness

smarminess though can be found just about anywhere

― Linda and Jodie Rocco (map), Sunday, June 27, 2021 8:19 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh the absolute misery of living in the United States of all possible places and dealing with smarmy people. Someone send help.

The UK's universal healthcare may be rickety, but it's still there. I'm always amazed at the amount people have to pay for health insurance in the US, and the fact that two thirds of bankruptcies there involve health issues. Throw in guns, and that's enough for me not to want to live in the US

man


they are probably both fucked in their own way
I don't know

I'm from the USA and the UK has it worse

lol tell me more

Shoodawopbop

With the analyses above can we do a quick check on which of the countries involved are fading anglo empires

It's entirely possible the UK might not exist in 10 years, which I don't believe is true of the USA, fwiw.

that’s a good point

The US will be 20 nation states

Neandz - that wasn’t a joke from Tom D!

Oh I know. My absurdist quip was meant to suggest that democracy is in peril in the US and although it's unlikely for us to outright stop existing, who knows what we'll look like in ten years.

I'm already terrified of 2022 and 2024 election results being upended

Two of the four countries of the UK already have goverments that are entirely or partly led by political parties whose goal is the dismantling of the UK, we just need Plaid Cymru to get their fingers out and complete the set.

I could see various autonomous regions springing up. NY/NJ/CT could easily secede, though PA would probably want in and I'm not sure how I feel about that. Let the Confederacy realign, as long as they sign non-aggression pacts with everybody else. All the Western states destined to eventually burn/drought themselves to death could become one big desert empire, except California which I'm sure wants no part of that bullshit. The biggest conflicts would likely come between, like, Vermont and New Hampshire or Minnesota and Wisconsin.

That's all fantasy though, I'm talking reality here.

Two of the four countries of the UK already have goverments that are entirely or partly led by political parties whose goal is the dismantling of the UK, we just need Plaid Cymru to get their fingers out and complete the set.

― Are Animated Dads Getting Hotter? (Tom D.), Monday, 28 June 2021 17:14 (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Three

A de jure breakup of the USA is much less plausible to me than a de facto diminution of federal power as passing legislation becomes impossible and governing by executive order and continuing resolution ossifies into the only means of doing business. Some Supreme Court ruling or other will lead to a nullification crisis of some kind, west coast and Acela corridor states will enter into miscellaneous intergovernmental agreements, federal tax revenues will decline precipitously, that sort of thing

The military (and nuclear arsenal) make an actual dissolution of the US almost unthinkable barring nigh end of the world global catastrophe. Fort Hood has 50k troops, only a sliver of which at any given time are from Texas.

A federalism where the only real federal superstructure is the military and intelligence community... now that's possible.

https://www.axios.com/gop-megadonor-south-dakota-troops-border-21881b13-f0d8-461f-a7af-fe6288b5bcbd.html

A Tennessee billionaire and high-dollar Republican donor is funding the deployment of South Dakota National Guard troops to the U.S. Mexico border.

The UK a fading empire? What year is this, 1956?

this was stupid, yes.

eh fading can take a long time. When I become a Canadian citizen, I have to swear loyalty to the queen. Plus there's this whole thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Overseas_Territories#Current_overseas_territories

xpost

The deployment of the National Guard from SD is insane, it sets a worrying precedent. I can imagine all kinds of scenarios where Republican-led states use National Guard to amplify conflict, and it could draw in elements of the militia movement etc.

My issue with most analysis setting out scenarios of US breakup is that they treat the South as one distinct political unit but that’s simply not the case now. The political divisions in the country now are much more along urban-rural lines than along the big geographical divides of the 19th century. Alabama now has more in common with South Dakota than with Virginia, politically speaking.

I’m not sure how whether this really makes breakup of the US less likely, but it does seem plausible that nominally Red states like Georgia will have to focus on repressing internal dissent.

A federalism where the only real federal superstructure is the military and intelligence community... now that's possible.

Sort of the Grover Norquist ideal, right? To the extent there is a coherent Republican strategy right now (and I'm not saying it's very coherent), I think that's it. Seize more-or-less unshakable control of the federal govt, and then strip it down, dismantle the regulatory state, theoretically leave things like environmental regulation up to the states, but then of course use federal leverage to penalize California/NY/anyone who steps out of line.

It is definitely among the possible scenarios.

That’s not unlikely, but basically lose-lose for California in particular considering climate change is one of the main points of contention, CA is getting some of the worst effects of it, CA also pays more than its share of taxes, and the US military has been (and maybe still is) the single organization with the largest carbon footprint.

this was stupid, yes.

o rly

https://i.imgur.com/93Ltr2V.jpg