Also lived in other countries in Europe for similar or greater periods.
Britain is definitely at least a decade or two “ahead” in this shit, plus they have very specific and highly entrenched problems around classism, hypocrisy, dynastic elites and how the scions of the elites are pretty much sent to the kind of private school (curiously called “public schools” in Britain) that specializes in turning them into sociopaths (being an “English Gentleman” isn’t actually about being honorable, it’s about maintaining a very specific complex image - complete with a unique non-regional accent - that conveys the impression that one comes from the upper classes).
It’s not by chance that the Snowden revelations showed that Britain was even worse than the US and, whilst in the US they actually walked back (for a while) the anti-constitutional elements of their state surveillance apparatus, in the UK they just retroactively made the whole thing legal and sent a bunch of D-Notices (the British censorship mechanism) to newspapers to shut them up.
Britain has great image management wrapped around a rotten core.
All good points. Been here nearly 50 years and not noticed most of it but then again I keep myself to my family. Or maybe it’s because I’m white so I don’t see the worst of it. I do find a lot of people around me are incredibly racist which is a real shame.
The higher the social class the more the faking: whilst working class people are generally pretty straightforward, appearances management goes up as you go into the middle class (for example, think about how voiced judgment of quality are all inflated: “it’s interesting” actually means “it’s shit”, “ok” means “bad”, “great” means “mediocre/average”, “amazing” means “good” and so on) and upper class people are pretty much as a fake as it gets (and from the ones I actually knew personally, it wasn’t a thing done with bad intentions, it was purely them having been taught that “that’s how one is supposed to behave”, though that practice in being a fake can easily be leveraged for personal upside maximization with no regard for others)
Also it’s more an English thing than something from the other nations - certainly Scots and Irish are generally not like that.
For me it doesn’t help that before living in Britain I lived in The Netherlands, as the Dutch are probably the most blunt and direct people in Europe, so the contrast was glaring.
And yeah, as a side note, being white with blue eyes (and thus indistinguishable from the natives on appearance alone) I got a lot less racism in Britain than friends of mine with Black, Middle Eastern and even Indian ancestry. “Anti” Racism laws in Britain are all about stopping people from voicing racist things (i.e. they’re really just to manage appearances), but there is little or nothing pushing back on racist discrimination in the way one treats people, so people with different races just get treated different (just try and report a theft to the police whilst being Indian and see how much they care) whilst those doing it never actually voice racist opinions.
I lived in the UK for over a decade.
Also lived in other countries in Europe for similar or greater periods.
Britain is definitely at least a decade or two “ahead” in this shit, plus they have very specific and highly entrenched problems around classism, hypocrisy, dynastic elites and how the scions of the elites are pretty much sent to the kind of private school (curiously called “public schools” in Britain) that specializes in turning them into sociopaths (being an “English Gentleman” isn’t actually about being honorable, it’s about maintaining a very specific complex image - complete with a unique non-regional accent - that conveys the impression that one comes from the upper classes).
It’s not by chance that the Snowden revelations showed that Britain was even worse than the US and, whilst in the US they actually walked back (for a while) the anti-constitutional elements of their state surveillance apparatus, in the UK they just retroactively made the whole thing legal and sent a bunch of D-Notices (the British censorship mechanism) to newspapers to shut them up.
Britain has great image management wrapped around a rotten core.
All good points. Been here nearly 50 years and not noticed most of it but then again I keep myself to my family. Or maybe it’s because I’m white so I don’t see the worst of it. I do find a lot of people around me are incredibly racist which is a real shame.
It really depends who you actually know directly.
The higher the social class the more the faking: whilst working class people are generally pretty straightforward, appearances management goes up as you go into the middle class (for example, think about how voiced judgment of quality are all inflated: “it’s interesting” actually means “it’s shit”, “ok” means “bad”, “great” means “mediocre/average”, “amazing” means “good” and so on) and upper class people are pretty much as a fake as it gets (and from the ones I actually knew personally, it wasn’t a thing done with bad intentions, it was purely them having been taught that “that’s how one is supposed to behave”, though that practice in being a fake can easily be leveraged for personal upside maximization with no regard for others)
Also it’s more an English thing than something from the other nations - certainly Scots and Irish are generally not like that.
For me it doesn’t help that before living in Britain I lived in The Netherlands, as the Dutch are probably the most blunt and direct people in Europe, so the contrast was glaring.
And yeah, as a side note, being white with blue eyes (and thus indistinguishable from the natives on appearance alone) I got a lot less racism in Britain than friends of mine with Black, Middle Eastern and even Indian ancestry. “Anti” Racism laws in Britain are all about stopping people from voicing racist things (i.e. they’re really just to manage appearances), but there is little or nothing pushing back on racist discrimination in the way one treats people, so people with different races just get treated different (just try and report a theft to the police whilst being Indian and see how much they care) whilst those doing it never actually voice racist opinions.