"Currants Bw..."

[HCZ_Reborn]

Not sure id go as far as saying the UK is good for most people (although it’s all relative I guess) but it feels like the mid-late 1970s in uk and USA. The inflation bordering on stagflation, the sense of malaise, a government in waiting that embodies positivity as much as Jimmy Carter did in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech.

The talk then was of irreversible decline as well. NQ has a little bit of a point about protests….the police won’t touch mass protests like the pro Palestine mob no matter how badly some of them behave. But the odd low hanging fruit are much easier for them.
But It’s less about authoritarianism and more about police deciding they aren’t well funded or staffed to do their job properly and then make easy and often unnecessary arrests to make up for it.



Everyone thinks we are at an inflection point (or perhaps hope we are) but ultimately we are looking at slow decay more than a forest fire.

[Letters]

Not sure id go as far as saying the UK is good for most people (although it’s all relative I guess)

I'd agree that's less true than it used to be with the cost of living stuff going on.
I do get a bit weary of oldiewonks going on about how great things used to be - when they're talking about an era before the NHS and the welfare state.

Everyone thinks we are at an inflection point (or perhaps hope we are) but ultimately we are looking at slow decay more than a forest fire.

Slow decay of what? And over what time period are you talking?

[HCZ_Reborn]

Britain is currently in a state of entropy. You can point at it as a recent thing or you can go back forty/fifty years or more. It’s the same as what the cause is and what form it’s even taking…it depends on who you ask.

A recent happiness survey had Britain as just behind Uzbekistan in overall sense of negativity


And that’s the thing, people aren’t happy….no matter the many things that divide us, the one thing that seems to unite us is that something is not right and someone is to blame

There’s often interestingly an inverse relationship between standard of living and happiness. The more people have, the more miserable they are.

Take that gobshite Lee Anderson today, he said “I want my country back”. A totally nebulous expression. But one that will resonate with some people…because people feel they have lost something even if they are crying for the moon. Too many immigrants?, too many ways in which you feel you can’t speak your mind anymore, too many people who seem to get everything handed to them whilst I’ve had to work hard….theres a febrile sense of resentment.

And I don’t think it’s going anywhere.

[Letters]

Interesting. Where did you see this? I had a quick Google and found this which puts us 19th. That's from 2022 so we may have dropped since

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/happiness/

[HCZ_Reborn]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/d...erable-nation/


We know it doesn’t take much to go from being comfortable in mid table to being in a real relegation scrap

[Letters]

Interesting. That's such a different result from other "happiness indexes" - where we're not mid table, we're top 20 (just!) - I can't help thinking they're measuring different things.

[HCZ_Reborn]

Interesting. That's such a different result from other "happiness indexes" - where we're not mid table, we're top 20 (just!) - I can't help thinking they're measuring different things.

More than likely

From what I can gather, the telegraph article alludes to mental wellbeing

Now you can look at the spike in Anxiety amongst younger generations, but I don’t see how that wouldn’t account for other countries especially those in the Anglosphere

This is also a greater problem in the US, but I do feel it’s catching on here. Anxiety by its nature becomes a problem when there’s no actual reason to feel Anxious or indeed the amount of Anxiety you feel is completely out of proportion with the issue of concern.

And I think there’s an element of setting up kids to fail. Too much helicopter parenting (supervised activities rather than letting kids go off and play by themselves), safetyism (if one kid has a slight peanut allergy the whole school bans peanuts from the premise) and over analysis of feelings. If a child loses a beloved grandparent or even a family pet, they haven’t suffered a trauma they are going through the very normal process of grief…they don’t need to see a therapist…they need to understand that feeling sad is normal it doesn’t need to be fixed and that time is a healer. But most importantly that adversity or bad things happening won’t break them.

Theres a need to delineate the every day/mundane from genuine trauma and instill a bit of resilience. But we don’t, because we remember feeling awkward, ashamed, embarrassed, even scared as a child and we foolishly think we need to protect our own kids from ever feeling bad.


Much of what I’ve said doesn’t relate to British misery at all, but it is a pet peeve of mine

[The Wengerbabies]

Warning: Extreme gore: Hatian plays with dead decapitated head and pulls it's eyeballs out:

https://i.imgur.com/PiFaHMb.mp4

Warning

These are the kinds of people the left are happy to import.

They are animals.

[Letters]

And I think there’s an element of setting up kids to fail. Too much helicopter parenting (supervised activities rather than letting kids go off and play by themselves), safetyism (if one kid has a slight peanut allergy the whole school bans peanuts from the premise) and over analysis of feelings. If a child loses a beloved grandparent or even a family pet, they haven’t suffered a trauma they are going through the very normal process of grief…they don’t need to see a therapist…they need to understand that feeling sad is normal it doesn’t need to be fixed and that time is a healer. But most importantly that adversity or bad things happening won’t break them.

Theres a need to delineate the every day/mundane from genuine trauma and instill a bit of resilience. But we don’t, because we remember feeling awkward, ashamed, embarrassed, even scared as a child and we foolishly think we need to protect our own kids from ever feeling bad.

Like most things in life, there needs to be a bit of balance.
Oldiewonks often complain about health and safety and how they never got hurt when they were kids. Well there's a fair bit of survivor's bias there. They might not have been hurt, that doesn't mean that things were safe and some of these measures aren't a good idea and keep people safer.
Or "a good thrashing never did me any harm". Well...didn't it? Is physically beating a child really a good method of discipline?

I think some of these changes have been good, being more mindful of kids' mental state. Being kinder, basically.
But of course these things can go too far, kids need to develop a bit of resilience too and some of these things could stop them doing that.
But I'm also mindful that I'm an old bastard and some of my feeling about these things may just be me getting old and grumpy.

[Letters]

These are the kinds of people the left are happy to import.

No it isn't