Morning, it’s Friday, that’s all that matters.
Safe to say there’s been a vibe shift 😂
The problem for the Democrats is that when you’ve been feeding people a false narrative for so long and enforcing people towing the line through social rebukes and humiliation, as soon as a crack shows it’s incredibly difficult to hold the tide back. Once it bursts it’s over, you get Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt off and chanting ‘Trump-a-mania’ at you. Bidens’s performance in the debate was the first substantial crack, Trump’s failed assassination attempt was the breakthrough. It’s over for them, even if they deploy Big Mike.
So as always when we’re talking about the Police everyone knows I’m supportive of those in that profession, that should go without saying. I know there’s a lot of frustration with where leadership has taken the job. I believe this started because of something to do with social services removing Roma kids. But regardless, explain to me why there’s no riot police shutting this down hours before it escalated to this point and beyond, from a Police car getting attacked? Are West Yorkshire Police (surely not them again?) taking the approach the MET has so often, withdrawing and then using video evidence to make arrests afterwards? I can understand the temptation to do that, confronting the mob risks injury and needs numbers, especially when you lose control of it initially. The problem with doing that is you give power to the mob, you look weak and powerless, when it’s specific communities involved you look biased and you lose the trust of those local to the event but not involved. All of this starts with lines (we have lines, they’re call the law) not been enforced early. A direct response to allowing things to escalate so far is that you will see more of it and we will. The UK is in for some dark times unless the Government do something about the leadership of the Police. It won’t be pretty, sometimes you have to beat people with batons. I’m quite happy to say that in this case it’s not happening because the people that would be hit are brown and predominantly Muslim and there’s a concern about optics and ‘social cohesion’. Well if this part of society has cohesion’d itself into thinking they can do this, then you’ve lost that battle already, you must think about the cohesion of the country and draw a line.
There was also a riot in Whitechapel, London because a man was shot… in Bangladesh.
We are an island, the source is not our concern and throwing money at at will do nothing, because there is no incentive for those countries to stop people trying to come. That money will disappear into the pockets of NGO’s who are actually facilitating people coming.
‘Programs’ - Translation - NGO’s.
Chris is whinging about the Just Stop Oil protestors who planned to block the M25 getting custodial sentences of around 5 years. What you seeing here is a line being drawn. The Government have decided that they’re going to make an example of this lot to deter similar in future. Despise JSO as I do, if I’m honest I think 5 years is a long time for the offence even if they don’t do that long, especially when we have rapists walking free from court with no custodial sentence and they’re about to release thousands from prisons. But it highlights how Government and power work, they can do anything they want, if they’re not doing something, it’s because it doesn’t suit them to do so at the time.
A lot of the reaction to this has been about the right to peaceful protest being infringed. But that’s being dishonest. The vast majority of JSO protests - that are against government policy - appeared peaceful because they were genrally a load of wet fish walking in front of cars and blocking main transit routes. But the results of them doing that aren’t peaceful, ordinary peoples lives were disrupted unduly. How many people died due to delayed ambulances? How many jobs were lost through lateness or missing interviews? How many relationships destroyed and families impacted because important one off events were missed. JSO hide behind their physical patheticness, but what they do is violence to society. A society that as a majority, do not share their apocalyptic views.
Whether this genuinely is the first time it’s happened or not is less important than that it did. I’ve spoken here and on Horizon Scan about the levers of power and whether you have the access code to make them work. Basically do you have the influence within the blob (permanent institutions/civil service etc) to ensure they pull the lever when you tell them to. We saw that during the Conservative Government’s tenure, often when they pull the lever nothing happened, because the blob has become partisan. That’s not me excusing the previous Government, they were also weak and shit, because you CAN force the levers to move, they didn’t want to. We are seeing now that under the Labour Government, at least initially, when Starmer says do something the retina scanner enabling the lever picks up his Blairite DNA and activates. Much of the reforms carried out by the New Labour Government during Blairs time in office are still in place today, just waiting for the Dark Lord’s influence to return. Blair understands how power works, it’s very possible we see his influence grow as time goes on and many of the things Conservative voters wanted end up enacted by Labour, especially the low hanging fruit stuff in order to steal ground from the right and entrench Labour long term.
If you haven’t had a chance to answer the two question survey about subscription pricing that I sent you yesterday, please take the time to do so. It’s literally a multiple choice and a comment box, takes two secs. If it’s been lost in your inbox you can find it here. There have been some very interesting responses from it. One that struck me in particular was that a lot of the content has become too political. Now I can see that’s true with the the Substack content, Horizon Scan and now The Scroll were always intended to be an outlet for me personally to speak about what’s happening in the world, which will always end up with a political angle. I made the point when I started Substack that I wanted it to be a SEG product - it can’t not be, it’s me - but it be clear that SEG isn’t just me, it’s all backgrounds so remains separate and non-partisan as a thing. The person who responded said he’d be willing to pay £10 a month for content that was like I used to do a few years ago when I put things on the YouTube channel, pieces to camera, very SEG YAYA inspired stuff, how you apply the ethos to daily life etc. I have no problem doing that if there’s is demand for it and perhaps I should rejig the subscription so that there is the £2 option, but then his £10 that also gives access to the kind of thing he’s requesting?
The reason I’m hesitant to do so is primarily because I’m a mong. I have certain experience, worldview, practices and beliefs that are helpful to me personally, but I’m really wary of setting myself up as some kind of motivational coach or guru. I know there’s the running joke within the SEG community about it being a cult, but I’m concerned that if I start providing the sort of YAYA content that’s being requested we’re getting quite close to that.There’s also the time constraint that producing that type of content entails and I’m just one guy running SEG (bar Nic doing the customer service), it would mean I’d have to have that higher tier subscription available to justify it at a time when I’m trying to reduce it for the majority. I’ll have to have a look back at the kind of content I used to do on YouTube and see what I think.
Drop me a message, they’re private, let me know your thoughts on it.
Enjoy your weekend 👊🏻