Today, I think it's clear who would be being laughed at by whom. The fates of places have so radically diverged that we no longer have a sense of collective identity. All of the places listed in Crap Towns are now unrecognisable, for better or worse. Those familiar shops are now gone; in some places they have been replaced by artisan bakeries and pop-up boutiques, while in others they have been replaced by charity shops or nothing at all. Half the leisure centres have shut and we all know which half.
The upper middle class might have become more humourless and puritanical, but I think that's a subconscious self-defence mechanism, a manifestation of noblesse oblige without real obligation. The working class are too angry to laugh and certainly aren't willing to be laughed at. We all know that we're teetering on the brink of a populist wave, but no-one in a position of power seems willing or able to do anything about it.
I think it’s worth putting into context that the economy was doing great in the era this book was first published and huge progress was being made with things like homelessness, inequality, and poverty. It felt like the country had turned a corner from the lows of the 80s.
Since then, we’ve had the global financial crisis, local councils being bankrupted, and a huge rise in homelessness and inequality. The rich have more and the poor have less.
If you published that book today, the contents might be the same, but the story it tells would be quite different.
One problem may be that the UK is very London-centric in a way that is markably different from France being Paris-centric.
Just my perception (and I know London much better than Paris) is that in France, if you are not in Paris you are seen as "living in the 'province'", but politicians still fight for farmers there etc. In contrast, in the UK, on the surface there is the appearance that yes, London is the capital and more important, but that people are trying to do initiatives like moving part of the BBC to Glasgow and Manchester - to decentralize a bit.
Yet the wealth concentrated in Greater London and its commutable satellites - as contrasted with the rest of the country - is many orders of magnitude bigger, also due to the financial industry there.
If you live in Knightsbridge and commute to your trader job in Canary Wharf you will never see how derelict Portsmouth or Blackpool really are (the only time I went to Portsmouth, I recall some people sitting in the street with nothing to do).
https://equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed/
What has actually changed? A whole bunch of other economic malaise, but also perceptions, amplified to your personal taste by social media.
This is a structural change. We now have at least one, and perhaps two, generations of people who can't really alter their economic situation through hard work. That's the classic recipe for populism to thrive.
[1] https://www.schroders.com/en-gb/uk/individual/insights/what-...
I will bash Maggie all day, for her refusal to effectively manage industrial decline in Britain, for her boneheaded belief that a top-ranking economy could exist solely on services, and, most of all, for her idiotic squandering of our North Sea oil wealth. But, Right to Buy was a rare hit for me. I see it as having been a forward-looking policy which aimed to reward people for work -- play the game, and you too can have a tangible slice of society in the form of your own home to possess and care for as you wish. The problem is that we didn't replace the social housing lost to RtB.
https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/
“for the UK as a whole, the WID found that the top 0.1% had share of total wealth double between 1984 and 2013, reaching 9%.”
“If the wealth of the super rich continues to grow at the rate it has been, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK GDP.”
Etc.
Those things are measured in different units, which automatically throws doubt on the ability of the source to be statistically rigorous in any other way.
Very little change in U.K. over 20 years
Thank God we have this one number from some Credit Suisse marketing material to invalidate all of that.
The curve can be skewed without the Gini number changing significantly if, say, the bottom 99% became increasingly more equal in income/wealth by becoming poorer overall, transferring income/wealth to the upper 1%.
My point is: the Gini coefficient might indicate what your country's income distribution looks like, it however does not tell anything about actual life conditions.
Switzerland has 98 days of maternity leave,
Afghanistan has 90(+15) days of maternity leave
(Wikipedia even puts it at #1 worldwide with two years,
but that may be incorrect?).
In Switzerland, women have been able to vote since 1971.
In Afghanistan, women have been able to vote since 1919
(but interrupted during the *previous* Taliban regime).Looking at housing costs, life expectancy, food insecurity or poverty rates do a much better job at capturing this.
The value of grants paid from central government to local government have fallen by over 80%. In 2005, the poorest local authorities received most of their funding from central government; today, they're dependent on council tax and business rates for the vast majority of their income. During that time, demand for social care has vastly increased, disproportionately so in the poorest local authorities, eating away at the already shrinking resources of local authorities.
The result of those cuts have been drastic for people living in poorer communities, particularly the poorest members of those communities. They quite justifiably feel abandoned by society. Youth clubs and children's centres, social work, homelessness provision, subsidised bus routes, parks and libraries have all been cut to the bone. None of that is captured in the Gini coefficient, but it's felt acutely by the people who rely on those services.
The wealthy are largely unaffected by this, because they live in local authorities that were never particularly reliant on central government funding and because they never really relied on council services anyway. For the very poorest, the impact of austerity is often dominated by one big failure of provision - being stuck in unsuitable temporary accommodation for months or years because there's no social housing available, being denied support for a disabled child etc. For the majority, it's just a slow but pervasive erosion of their quality of life - their kids have nowhere to go after school, their street is full of potholes, the bus they take into town has been cut from four an hour to one an hour, their back alley is full of rubbish because the council can't afford to deal with fly-tipping.
https://neweconomics.org/uploads/files/NEF_Local_Government_...
https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cbrwp51...
This is especially true in formerly undesirable areas of London (e.g. Hackney, #10 on the 2003 list) and towns within commuting distance of London (e.g. Hythe, #3).
Presumably this is due to the gradual shift to a London-centric services economy as well as the increasingly ludicrous price of houses in Central London.
The bottom 50% is unchanged in aggregate , but there will be groups within in that have done a lot worse.
I would also guess (I cannot find numbers) that the proportion of income that is spent on essentials has risen.
But anyway, gini is a coarse measure. Look at the chart below that, showing income percentages going steadily upwards for the top 10 and 1%.
Most worryingly, look at the decline of the middle 40%. A healthy middle class keeps countries stable. You need a good chunk of society who feel like the system works for them.
And it’s not just perceptions, it’s fundamental stuff. A teacher could afford a house in the 90s; they can’t now. For all the boomers bang on about mobile phones and flat screen TVs, in the end those are luxuries compared to clean, secure accommodation. The days of getting a mortgage on one income, or having access to nice council housing are gone.
In summary, it goes up and down a lot, is counted in different ways, was (counted to be) far lower in 2010 (two years after the financial crisis?), but pretty much the same as now in 1998, although the kind of people who have an interest in saying "homelessness has hit record levels" are saying that homelessness has hit record levels.
This makes me nostalgic for 1991 when the Big Issue was first published, and there were songs like Gypsy Woman by Crystal Waters and Walking Down Madison by Kirsty MacColl.
Edit: was your "80s" a typo for "90s" perhaps?
Charity shops, vape shops (used for money laundering), Turkish Barbers (used for money laundering), Automated Laundrettes (used for money laundering), Car Washes (used for money laundering), Phone shops (used for money laundering), Kebab shops (used for money laundering)
This is the UK's entire economy now - extracting the wealth of the people who work in the UK and moving it to foreign owners.
London looks rich because some of the money sticks to the sides while it's passing through, but it's still being siphoned from the provinces through the City and out - to tax havens, foreign mafias, foreign aristocrats, and giant foreign corporations.
It's important the population isn't allowed to understand that the UK is a colonised country. So there's a huge media machine making sure the peasants blame "immigrants" for small-scale criminality, and poor people for being feckless and unproductive. It's useful to make sure everyone keeps fighting about racism/immigration and gender issues to keep them from looking at structural economics and the destruction of democracy.
A few decades of compounding inequality transforms what used to be good natured ribbing amongst chums into bullying.
14 years of Conservative government made this country more equal, not less, because they flattened the income distribution by making everybody poorer.
The big pattern among rich people in the UK nowadays is not that they're getting richer, it's that they're leaving.
If you think the problem with the UK is that rich people are leaving, then you have no idea about the reality of living in the UK. Visiting some of the towns in this book would be a starting point.
Is that supposed to prove me wrong? I said that everybody is getting poorer.
> Wealth inequality is through the roof.
Wealth inequality, while high, is still roughly where it was in 2007. (Source: https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/)
> If you think the problem with the UK is that rich people are leaving
I said it's a problem, not the problem. And it's not just the ultra-rich who are leaving, but vast swathes of the middle classes. Many poor people would leave too if they had the means.
You and the other replier seem to think I'm defending the status quo. How on earth did I imply that? You think I think it's a good thing for the entire country to get poorer?
This is not whats represented in the source you cited?
In the graph titled "Top 10% and Bottom 50% Wealth Shares in The UK 1900-2020" you can clearly see the wealth owned by the top 10% increased from 54.4% in 2007 to 57% in 2020 and likely even higher now 5 years later.
In fact, according to that chart wealth inequality today is much lower than it was in the 1970s, although it increased throughout the 1990s.
The same link shows that the UK has unremarkable wealth inequality by the standards of developed countries: we're bang in the middle of the OECD, with lower levels of wealth inequality than Sweden, Denmark, Finland or Norway. (That's funny, I thought the Nordics were egalitarian utopias?)
I'm not saying that wealth inequality is low, or that it's not a problem. I'm merely responding to the claim that "wealth inequality is through the roof", which I take to mean that wealth inequality has increased substantially in recent years. As far as I can tell that's not true.
Personally I think we need more economic growth, not more taxes. We already have the highest taxes since WWII, soon to be the highest taxes in the entire history of the UK, and all it's doing is strangling the economy and making productive people flee.
The rich people living here for the last 40 years all leaving does not bother most people. In fact, it's cause for celebration. They're leeches who don't pay tax on their piles of cash held in off-shore accounts - they just drive up the price of everything, particularly property. Meanwhile there are plenty of people trying to get here from the US to replace them who understand the purpose of capital is to put it to work and create jobs, not stare at it on a screen.
Your kind of thinking is not unusual within centre right politics, but it's also why nationalist populism is a credible threat. Farage is currently favourite with most bookmakers to be next PM because of the kind of defence of Tory policy you're making. Please think on that.
You: "How dare you defend the Tories?"
Learn to read.
The other major change is the continual divergence of wealth.
If you are a 20 year old living near London you can get a crap paying junior job and live rent free for 5 years with parents while you save a 100k deposit (which using things like LISAs).
By the time you’re in your early 30s you have a decent paying job, have met a partner with a similar income, and can buy a house and repeat the cycle.
If you don’t you get the same job but have to pay rent to someone else’s parents, and you never get that deposit, so you’re trapped in the rent cycle.
Kids who’s parents who are well off but wouldn’t pay for college is an entire cohort who are functionally locked out of the housing market. For most of my generation, there is little opportunity, only gatekeeping.
That can’t be a particularly large set. Parents well off is already a small minority case and only a minority of that small minority won’t give support to their kids.
For people in that tiny sliver, I’m sure it feels bad but it doesn’t seem like a solution that works for other “starting from zero” young adults would need changes to also work for this set.
If you want to put multiple children through uni then it can get very burdensome.
One of many ways in which our system is regressive.
Not to mention the 60% effective marginal rate between £100k and £125k - 69% if you have student debt, oh and that's not even counting employee's NICs.
And don't get me started on the stealth tax that is employer's NICs. (Those were just increased even further, and the morons are all defending it by pretending it doesn't come from wages... where exactly do they think the employer gets the money from?)
Plus all the insane traps where earning extra money can actually reduce your net income. E.g. there are situations in which increasing your salary by £1 can leave you thousands of pounds poorer because certain benefits are withdrawn with a cliff.
What's the point in working harder? You'd think that with such eye-wateringly high levels of taxation, we'd at least have something to show for it in the public sector, but... okay, I need to stop writing now for the sake of my blood pressure.
This, I believe, is because the problem is psychological more than political: social division and alienation.
Of course, an increase in economic prosperity will lessen populism.
But if people continue to be alienated then they will be drawn to populists offering collective causes against perceived wrongdoers.
The large majority of online activities increase social alienation and social division.
Local, apolitical activities that breed cohension rather than division will decrease the psychological benefits that populism offers the alienated. I see no other solution.
We’re entering into a populist phase because the managerial class is incapable of addressing the problems experienced by most people — so they’re going to try dismantling the current elite systems and rebuilding them. To say that the problem is elites inability to suppress populism is to miss that the elites own chronic failures is what caused the populist surge.
Similar to populist waves circa 1900, where aristocratic systems were replaced with managerialism via populist revolts. Now, managerialism has failed so we’re again seeing the stirrings of change. At a broad scale, communism, fascism, and progressivism were all different technocratic managerial solutions to the problems and excesses of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
I think it’ll be interesting to see what comes next.
There is very strong evidence that this will not be the case by the time this wave you have imagined gets really rolling.
I hope it does not happen for decades yet, because frankly: I cannot see the working class (of which I am part of) win that conflict.
I think between the rise of China, America's reaction to it, and the general shift in economic power to Asia from the west, and the lack of trust in government in the west, things will change.
I’d argue that your perspective means that the time to revolt is now (ie, next few years) — while the technical and social systems are in mutual flux and before a new regime solidifies. A regime that might be more autocratic totalitarian in nature (as you suggest will be the case).
People will reasonably come to different conclusions.
One thing the real puritans are against that people have turned against very strongly is alcohol. It never stopped being a problem in the US, of course, but there are far more preachy teetotalers in the UK than there used to be, and government policy is very anti too.
Then there is the push for achievement and the acquisition of wealth. You are supposed to dedicate your life to the cause of high achievement, rather than stop to enjoy it.
Sex acts online actually fit in with all this as they are safe and controlled alternative to enjoying sex in real life.
People get into sex work for money - they can’t afford rent.
Weimar berlin was very open about this stuff too and was followed by a puritanical backlash. The world feels like it is going through something very similar.
So it's something deeper than the usual “political correctness” debate: the question really is, what is it about the world today that trumps the hallowed British traditions of celebrating failure, of moaning, of affectionate self-mockery? Why isn't the joke funny any more, or why doesn't the mocking seem affectionate?
(He points at the malaise that exists today—it was only funny when there was some hope—but I'm not sure that's the only answer…)
Sensibilities change. The sense of what is and isn’t punching down changes. Even the appetite for punching down changes.
People who whine about “PC” always pretend like it’s the death of comedy or speech or whatever, and yet… there are younger people building great careers!
And yes, there is a real worrying erosion of free speech - but 98% these people could keep saying exactly what they’ve been saying - they’re just not getting the laughs they think they’re entitled to.
Yes, and the way it changes tells us something about our society, which I believe this article is trying to address.
It's transgressive content worked because it was satirizing "wholesome" Wild West shows, holding up a funhouse mirror to their less-obvious absurdities and racist aspects. It was so successful, its targets don't exist anymore.
Social media gives the possibility of instant reply, whereas if you publish a book in 2003 called 'crap towns' how can the so-called chavs answer back? Publish their own book? Write to the local paper?
So its a side effect of how we can all hear each other better now (for better or for worse)
I will, it's ChavTowns.
https://web.archive.org/web/20061013053524/http://www.chavto...
Still running as https://www.ilivehere.co.uk/
Also the owner is giving up on it as of the start of this year -- mainly because nobody visits the site; churnalists just freeboot it and they rank higher on google. https://www.ilivehere.co.uk/top-10-worst-places-to-live-in-e...
Once the big news networks (DELFI.lt, 15min.lt, lrytas.lt, alfa.lt and few others) bought out the largest blogs and connected them to their own domains, there isn't much of an independent web left. Owners of the websites back then gladly sold out (and I would have done it too), because it seemed like a great idea to sell your work back in the 2008-ish for real profit, an unique chance (imagine monetising your content when you have only 3 mil. theoretical consumers! There isn't much lithuanian speakers) and especially during the economic crisis.
Then the other blogs were attached to the networks by the generous offers of "let us publish and we will give backlinks, maybe" + "we will just copy it because we know that you won't bother taking us to court, it's too small of a country, you know".
So now whatever you google, you get mostly these results: 7 big network sites and subsites, 2 auto-translated AI slop generated by someone in other side of the planet, 0.9 of business pages and 0.1 something actually personal.
No wonder that almost all content creators moved to social networks by the 2015-ish. They still are there.
I wonder what will change this. A web apocalypse? Mass demand of in-person, non-online "content"? I wonder...
To counter those depressing places, these towns and villages seem lovely:
https://www.thetimes.com/best-places-to-live/location-guide/...
> and run-down decaying towns in the whole country
You cannot simultaneously have landlords living in Spain and well maintained local housing. Both are expensive. Pick only one. There exists a sweet spot when people are desperate enough to live in a place and pay every rent for any housing, but the sugar coating has washed off.
PS. How could they miss Bedford in the ranking?!
> Ricky Gervais encapsulated its brutalist new town grim with ‘The Office’ before giving up and writing lame punching-down anti-woke “gags” for the educationally subnormal
That's a very strange reading on Gervais' post-The Office career. After The Office he did things like Extras, a sitcom about extras on TV and film sets, Derek, an emotional series about a well-meaning care worker who thinks it's more important to be kind than popular, and After Life, a series about a man who loses his wife young and how he deals with grief.
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!
John Betjeman (1906 - 1984)
I know there is the odd biblical literalist in power in the US, but have never come across one in the UK. The biggest group of Christians in the UK are Anglicans (who are not usually biblical literalists, although there are evangelical groups within it that might be) and Catholics (church firmly against Biblical literalism, although there might be odd individuals).
I think the reason atheists argue with Bibilical literalists is that its easy. It is somehting of a straw man: you pick a sub-group that is easy to debunk/discredit and then discredit the whole group by association. This has always been a problem: St Augustine talked about the damage done by people who interpreted the scriptures as contradicting what is known to be true in the 4th century.
Nowadays not so much.
Plus, there's no harm in making a career (or a joke) out of being vaguely anti-nonsense.
This bit made me laugh.
I read the original book when it came out and it was funny and - in some ways - true. I was born and bought up in the town ranked #4 in the original list (Hythe), but when I read it I was living in Hackney (#10 on the list). So I could shove the book in the faces of my friends and colleagues and say: look at me! I've moved up in the world!
The reason I laughed is because around the time of publication (2003?) I was working in the Government's Social Exclusion Unit. Prior to that I had spent time in the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit; later on I'd go on to work for the Lyons Inquiry. Part of my work included meeting people, and one thing I took away from those meetings would be how incredibly proud people could be about their neighbourhoods and towns: however deeply sunk into poverty the area was, they still cherished the place. The other thing I learned was, more often than not, those people often had good ideas about how to fix some of the issues - local solutions for local problems. All they needed was a little help and support from authorities to get those solutions off the ground.
So when the author claims that "governments" didn't read the book - some of us did. We enjoyed it, and we tried to do things to help people make their towns just a little bit less crap. Sadly it wasn't enough, but if people don't try then nothing will ever get fixed.
These days Hythe seems like a posh seaside town with a Waitrose, a nice canalside park, a cute steam railway, lots of boutiquey shops and cafes, etc.
I know a lot of places in the area (e.g. Folkestone, Margate, Whitstable) have all been heavily "gentrified" in the last few years, but I sort of assumed Hythe was always this way? Is that not the case?
And even allowing for a bit of gentrification, it seems wild in 2025 to select it for a "crap towns" award ahead of somewhere like Dover or New Romney.
As someone who grew up in Hythe in the 80s and 90s I'd point out that the Rotunda was a far cry from Vegas.
https://www.warrenpress.net/FolkestoneThenNow/The_Demolition...
This is an extremely high bar to hit in a county that also contains Ashford.
Anyway, to respond to a couple of other things on here. I'm not really a comedian. Sorry! I do work in the publishing industry, so while I can't prove my ideas about publishers being nervous, I would hope I have a reasonable insight and instinct.
Thanks for writing the piece in the first place – I thought it was a wonderfully self-reflective and mature look back at the book, why you created it, and how times have changed.
As a mid 40something in the UK, formerly a creative writer, I have experienced exactly the same shifting attitudes as yourself. The primary reasons, as many have said, are probably the fact that people are more polarised in their thinking and less versed in nuance, but also that the whole of the UK has become a bit crap really, so the joke’s a bit too on the nail.
For what it’s worth, I thought the original idea for the book was pretty funny, and I still do even now! Keep doing what you do – create things from the heart, you can’t predict the future and you can’t cover for everyone’s reactions.
> Much as I’d like to, I can’t just blame the puritans if my old jokes don’t work any more. Nor can I claim that the Crap Towns books were an unqualified success
[...]
> before closing, I should admit that there is a more straightforward answer to the question of whether you can still get away with doing something like Crap Towns.
> That answer is: yes. There’s a website (I won’t link to it) that has kept on running a survey of the worst places in the UK for years and years- and, honestly, when I look at it, I hate it. Partly because I feel like they’re ripping off my project, but mainly because when I read the comments on there about incels and chavs and carbuncles and brutalism it all just seems grubby. Maybe even cruel.
> I could argue that I don’t like this website because their approach and criteria are different to mine - and I hope there would be some truth in that. But I also know that I now also just react against the whole thing. It’s been done. It’s grown stale. It doesn’t fit - especially since so much has changed around it. In short, the world has moved on. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing?
Understandably the humor of the inexperienced 20-something will differ from that of the 40+ year-old. The simple and absolute world that we believe to see and understand in our younger years tends to vanish from our grasp as we become older and attain the wisdom of experience. Perhaps the author's belief that "it has been done already" reflects some of that wisdom, and just maybe those of a certain age at the time of the publishing of "Crap Towns" felt exactly the same way about his book. It seems, after all, that every generation believes that it is the first to do or discover a thing without considering that humans have been doing human things for an awfully long time and that the observation "there is nothing new under the sun" has some merit.
I think he's wrong to say you couldn't publish it now. I think he is right it would be misunderstood and misinterpreted.
Bill Bryson and Paul Thoroux wrote extensively of how shit English towns can be in winter after 4pm when the shops are shut and the pub isn't open.
Now only losers are broke and live in crap towns, and winners drive expensive cars. With this idea in mind, calling it crap towns becomes an attack on the people, rather then the town itself.
This idea is thoroughly explored in Alain de Botton's "Status Anxiety"
Individualism, atomisation and other Randian bullshit.
The original one did not.
It was all about insulting the Isle of Sheppey (Western UK). I think an ex-Shep wrote it.
Looks like all traces are gone. I understand that death threats were involved.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040411225059/http://www.sheppe...
> The island was shat from the arse of the Norse god Fuctup whilst he was suffering a bout of diarrhoea as a side effect of his recent withdrawal from scag. And that's true, as true as I'm sitting here. > A large number of policefolk who work on Sheppey are "Specials", which by a startling coincidence is also an affectionate term used to describe people with learning disabilities. > Christian based cults aside, the main religious practices on the island usually resemble primitive tribal type worship. Drug induced trances are a common tool for reaching the spirits beyond. These trances are often extended to include ritual drug induced self sacrifice- a deeply sacred activity known commonly to the natives as "Overdose".
You go to the "culture" section and there's just a single word, "NO." xD
Got my right and left mixed up.
This kind of humor still exists and I think it’s still most popular with young people. I followed an Instagram account in Chicago that mocks local bars and the people who go to them, but they’re all bars for people in their 20s, so I’ve rarely heard of them and don’t fully get the descriptions. There’s also that trend of “cynical maps” (Google it) of city neighborhoods, country regions, etc that peaked a few years ago and still circulates.
I don’t see this selling as a book now, but I also don’t see humorous coffee table books in general as a category the way they were 25 years ago?
Despite the tongue-in-a-cheek mood it's a great piece of nostalgia trip spiced with some interesting local history lessons.
He also have an automotive youtube channel dedicated to popular old cars and he loves to film them in these obscure and sordid locations mentioned in the book.
EDIT: fun note - when MS released their first digital encyclopedia in Elbonia, somewhere in mid 90's, the Elbonia entry, apart from having accurate information about the country and up to date statistics had an illustration image subtitled "Elbonians in front of typical dwelling" depicting something like this: https://strojeludowe.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/1.3-600x...
[1] https://paskudnik.com/strona-glowna/6--ebook-paskudnik-warsz...
I still think the idea of the book is funny. There's a certain art to taking something bad and hilariously describing its terribleness. For some reason this has always made me laugh, but honestly not everyone gets it, and this has always been the case.
This kind of book can only happen in a place and a community with enough confidence and stability to handle it. Of course you can "get away" with it today, it's easier than ever to publish just about anything - but humor has changed and I don't expect it to go "viral" the way it did. Not all old jokes age well and we have all made products that no longer fit after some time.
But the author, oh boy. Dear sir, your tongue in cheek picturebook from 20 years ago is not as important as you imagine.
I’m not sure how anyone could have read it and not understood it was a joke. At the same time, I do think that he’s right that it wouldn’t get published today, not because the content wasn’t true, but people are much more quick to take offense over things like this.
Perhaps things on the isles have turned to shite over time, and the pride has dwindled?
[1] maybe British is the wrong word since the Scots and Irish do similar. I'm from the ex-colonies so the correct words for UK country and peoples are confusing to me.
https://arena.org.au/stay-in-your-lane-the-oxymoron-of-authe...
With quotes (re cultural appropriation) like “the ultimate endpoint of keeping our mitts off experience that doesn’t belong to us is that there is no fiction… All that’s left is memoir”
We’ve been suffering under the yoke of the intellectualization of deliberalization, censorship and oppression of ideas via our leading thinkers, institutions and platforms who have been acting out of fear. Fear of being strung up on the town square and fear that not signaling support for what has been happening signals disapproval.
What I find infuriating is that our youth have been driving this conformist, enforcement, rule making and rule following mentality and trend. Our youth should be questioning the rules, not forming up as a conformist jack booted militia and persecuting those who don’t follow the rules. History has shown that the latter ends in tears.
We saw this in Germany in the 30s, in China in the 60s and 70s where the red guards in the cultural revolution were mostly teens, under the Khmer Rouge in the 70s where kids were police, and with the Young Pioneers and Komsomol in the early and mid 20th century Soviet Union.
When youth stop questioning and start enforcing, it often marks the end of a healthy society and the beginning of something much darker.
So, wrongthink. This is my point. And it’s incredible how the history of passing legislation to censor being ultimately used by the opposition just keeps on repeating.
If you know a town is shit, it's your moral obligation to tell them so that their kids and smart residents move out. Post 2000s progressive seem to think that Towns, religions and culture can form opinions. They are trying to be "empathetic" and so get tricked by scammers who personally benefit from these horrible situations.
It's whether you're punching up or punching down.
If the purpose of Crap Towns is to punch up, speak to power, to point out the failures of Thatcherism, decreased social mobility through a perptuation of failing center-right politics thanks to an overly-powerful media and political class that is divorced from reality, the absurd dominance of PPE graduates within policy making, and on, and on, on... well, it's great satire.
If it's just to point at working class people and go "haha, their streets are dirty and they eat bad food", well... you're punching down, and it's rare that can work as comedy. It's just mean bullying.
So yes, you can write Crap Towns today, but it lands better if you draw the line from Thatcher through Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak and Starmer, and their acolytes - the PPE mafia on both sides of the House, and point out how their crappy politics has caused all this, not their victims.
Funnier comedy is "look at us, hahaha!"
Note that punching up is the same mechanism of humour as punching down. "look at people who are not like us, ha ha ha"
I always found the funnier things were not about punching up or down but were applicable to anyone. Restricting comedy to only be about punching up turns it into a political tool and not an art form that makes us feel better. Comedy that is only allowed if it sends a political message is firstly propaganda and then humour. It's why most modern comedy elicits a smile at best and no belly laughs any more. It can still be amusing but it has no universality.
The best comedy has truth about ourselves in it. Psychologically "punching up" is a rejection of these things in ourselves. Ideologically, "punching up" is a tactic reinforcing group identity coherence.
I disagree with the idea that one is "OK" and the other is "bad", "wrong" or, even worse, "problematic" (i.e., the bien-pensant's own "blasphemous"). It just makes one an eternal sacred cow, and the other the eternal punching bag, no matter either's virtues or vices.
And this, in fact, has already been the case for a long time. In the US, producer Dick Wolf's five Law & Order TV shows (and, now, his three Chicago shows) taught us over 30 years that the "wealthy CEO" or "high-powered corporate lawyer" is always guilty, and the large companies they own/work for are just as crooked. The only upscale demographic that is never the criminal is, strangely enough, the famous TV-show producer.
A link to an American politician, of course.
Thus I wonder what demographic that at one time would have bought this book is not going to be buying this book now.
If they agree that it sucks, it probably sucks.
If they get really mad and defensive about it, it definitely sucks.
If they're just bemused or laugh it off, it's probably nice.
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I have hope that we might see that laughing at our neighbours for their political views might be seen as inappropriate.
I couldn't help but keep thinking about this Wittgenstein quote as I read this. I find it harder to say exactly why. Obviously, we felt differently in the past. Not my past, of course: I was a child, barely able to integrate by parts or fold a shirt correctly.
There is another possibility. The usual complaint is that oversensitivity has constrained humor. The usual retort is that what we did before was harmful and we're better off not doing it. But the problem with logical-seeming dilemmas is that existential propositions can only seem logical. The world, unlike logic, is malleable. Perhaps the jokes really are worse today than they were in the past?
Twenty years ago, our crap towns were something we experienced with the other townsfolk first and foremost, and only to a lesser degree did we bear the weight of the outside world's eyes upon us. Today it is not like this. Communication across great distances has gone from difficult to convenient to pervasive and unavoidable.
Locality has frayed in more domains than the spatial. Recently /r/MedicalPhysics had a spat with /r/sysadmin about hospital IT policies. Such a civil war would have been unthinkable in the 2000s. Humans used to spend much more time socializing with their friends or at least comrades-in-something than with almost complete strangers. Our egos are exposed to the elements in a new and phase-changing way.
I think that the social fabric has already begun to fight this trend from the bottom up. At the risk of sounding like an advertisement, Discord has made non-discoverability its greatest feature. The gladiatorial aspect of modern discourse has never sat well with me. I don't want to have a conversation for the audience. But here I am. Please clap.
They almost always say that and it’s almost never true.
this is why we should cherish the [indie] web. we can still almost publish anything in incredible detail, keep it alive for a long time and not worry about being canceled.
plus i have low opinion of people that wont share a link they know is relevant to the topic.
I could argue this for the journalism disclosing Flint’s lead problems. The root cause isn’t the commentary. It’s the reality. Balancing one’s property value is the fraud conveyed on a prospective buyer.
Sadly, the way all Western economies have devolved over the last decades, real estate equity is the only form of wealth that at least some part of the 99% has for retirement.
Similar subjects today are noticably darker without the buttress of social optimism. Films like The Joker seem less like a cautionary tale and more like a documentary. Is the joker now the protagonist?
There we go. People shift from being the out-group to being more sympathetic and unfortunate, and humour that targeted them moves into being punching down. I was shocked at how less funny Bill Hicks feels 20 years on, because now it just sounds like he's being an asshole about people who are struggling.
It just won’t be as popular today. And would, ironically, be crapped on by other people, which is what the author is unhappy about.
Thats what the author means, and represents the entirety of the “Oh I am so oppressed because I can’t say shitty unfunny jokes because other people will make shitty unfunny jokes about me in response” genre of argument.
The difference between then and now is that the people in the “crap towns” have the opportunity to call the author out.
> The good news is that I don’t think that the illiberalism of identity politics will endure much longer. Especially when it comes to the literal policing of humour - and cancellation of comedians for telling the wrong kinds of jokes.
I think it’s still his point.
Okay then!
Be honest with yourself, O Reader!
Are you sure he's not writing a satire of the same piece you've seen written every year since 1990, just with a shifting name for it?
He is a comedian after all...
Are you sure he's serious?
Crap Governments Crap Businesses Crap Websites Crap Engineers Crap Media....
