Author here. Noticed a lot of traffic from this post - so thanks. Thanks especially for all these thoughtful comments. Just dropping in to say I appreciate the attention - and am grateful that most posters here don't seem to mind that I'm unable to draw hard conclusions in my original article. I also like the posts here that point towards the fact that atomisation maybe has had something to do with things (as well as the hardening of inequalities and etc.) Interesting! Perhaps it was more possible to share jokes in 2003 than it is now? (The concept that jokes either punch up or punch down seems an indication of that... Feels quite recent to me. And What if the intention isn't to hit anyone, really, just to make each other laugh?)
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.
I remember Crap Towns, I loved it! And the Idler! Which had an entire section on jokes for which punchlines had been half-forgotten.
Great and thoughtful reflection piece too.
I’d like to add a few other ideas into the mix as for some reason I’m uncomfortable with the idea “you can’t say that anymore” that I wonder if it’s become a thought-terminating cliche.
Firstly, I suspect there’s always been two forms of puritanism: one with power and one without power. We didn’t historically hear much from puritans without power (famously some shipped off elsewhere and founded an empire). And the ones in power? Well a fish doesn’t know it’s wet…and all the other sods now have X accounts and podcasts!
The second point is to reflect on the fact that British humour is a curious thing. You noticed yourself that satire may have curiously little real world bite.
Maybe there’s been a category error: humour isn’t a mechanism for social change, it’s a coping strategy (I live in Luton, not Hull, TFFT). Or worse mechanism for social control. In my brief time in the Uk I noticed that “banter” often chipped at eccentricities or quirks, and served to bring people into line with group orthodoxy.
In short, and to mirror your uncertainties, I’m just not so sure it’s as clear cut that free speech has been curtailed somehow. Or that humour was ever about just having a laugh.
Taking offense when none was tendered is a special kind of social malfeasance that has gained popularity among the idle and boorish class of recent years. I appreciate it as a facile outward indication of low character and questionable intellect.
Went through the entire article expecting imminently to get to the paragraph where you perceive that Crap Towns was a mistake because it makes fun of the poor, and that the reason it couldn't be published now is that poverty in the UK is far worse than it was 20 years ago.
Loved the fact that this post didn't go where I expected it to (or at least, didn't remain there). That a book like this probably wouldn't be published today, or would be less popular today, is a point that has been made many times by many people, about many different books, TV shows, jokes, etc. But the author actually moves on from there; the observation is that even in his own opinion, the same joke isn't funny today — in fact, the equivalent thing being done today just looks “grubby”.
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…)
Often when someone, especially a comedian, complains about “political correctness”, what they actually mean is: nobody is laughing at the same joke I told 20 years ago
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.
> Often when someone, especially a comedian, complains about “political correctness”, what they actually mean is: nobody is laughing at the same joke I told 20 years ago
Don't rephrase others' sentiments to suit your own narrative. Soothsayers are bullshitters.
When comedians complain about political correctness, there is no alternate meaning. They are upset that they can't tell the same jokes they told 20 years ago, to the same audiences from 20 years ago that continue to enjoy them, because external forces mob, heckle, and harass them so they cannot serve their customers...
...which conveniently provides opportunities for those younger people to "build great careers," by eliminating all legacy competition.
In any other context it'd be driving the local kebab shop owner out of town because someone with influence wants to open a salad bar in its place.
comedians no longer complain about that, contemporary comedy is merely repeating the commonly accepted societal mantrae, and laughing at and trivialising opposition or criticism to or of it.
Wit, satire, and criticism are still funny, but aren't permissible.
The same phenomenon exists when people talk about the movie Blazing Saddles.
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.
I think the difference is between, let's say, Ricky Gervais making a joke about a little boy with cancer, and Ricky Gervais making a joke about THAT little boy with cancer right there in Seat 7G. Everyone now knows these crap towns are dying.
If someone looks a bit pale and sickly, it's often considered fair game to make fun of their appearance (eat some vegetables, get some exercise etc)... Whereas if they have severe health problems it's no longer tasteful. This fact has not changed, it's basic human decency. The situation is what's changed.
This is a good question..it just occurred to me that perhaps its because its so much easier for the people who would be the target of the joke to answer back now?
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)
Oh, that's insightful. Author could have encountered a light form of elite convergence 20 years ago when interacting with fellow writers and journalists, who probably didn't live in the blighted areas, and could take the joke on behalf of their cities. Being from a crap town is fine if you're don't live in the crappy part of town.
I'll add that the decade-long austerity measures let people know that it's actual class warfare, and it's no longer a laughing matter as it was in 2003 when it seemed fixable. Now it's clear the people in charge are not interested in fixing anything. A joke about someone's health situation is received better if the condition is treatable, but less so of they are terminal.
> "I mean: incredibly, governments and local councils didn’t read my work and decide to mend their ways. The UK did not get better. Instead we got more than a decade of Tory austerity, Brexit, and all the accompanying neglect and bad feeling."
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.
I was curious - what was the angle on Hythe in the book?
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.
Crap Towns called Hythe "...quite possibly the most spirit-crushingly tedious town in Kent." and "...the place that makes nearby Folkestone look like Las Vegas."
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.
That sounds to me as a product of something I see a lot of in society in general. Governments think hoi polloi are stupid, and they are clever, and therefore solutions imposed from above are superior to local solutions.
I think that's a misdiagnosis. The suggestions of the "hoi polloi" are obvious, and would solve the problem. Government prefers instead a solution that is both cheaper, so they can instead direct funds to things that they prefer, and more indirect, so they can route funds through friends and family.
The government's main effort is to complicate or denounce the "obvious" solutions. It's why they put so little effort into devising the programs that actually get rolled out; instead they just copy them directly from some non-profit that the government has been indirectly and almost entirely financing, and is directed by The Honorable Lord or Lady Somebody's Cousin.
Twenty years ago, I think there was still a sense that we were collectively laughing with each other about the dullness of small towns. We all had the same shops - Woolworths, Dixons, Our Price, BHS. We all had a leisure centre that looked like everyone else's leisure centre. Some towns were better off than others, some towns had parts that you were better off avoiding after dark, but the majority of towns belonged to the same broad spectrum of bland mediocrity.
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.
This is what I was going to say. Back then, a book like this would have been perceived as the UK making fun of itself. Now it’s perceived as being cruel to those less fortunate.
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).
Not sure about homelessness rising versus the 90s. Possibly the rate is similar to 1998. I looked at ourworldindata, but their graph only goes back to 2010. Wikipedia has wildly different figures from the charities Shelter and Crisis because they're counting different things. It then gives government figures: just over 100,000 in 1998, 135,000 in 2003, 40,000 in 2009 and 2010 (so ourworldindata gives a chart that begins with this low), and "record levels, with 104,510 people" in 2023, though that's less than 135,000 so the way in which this is a record is not specified.
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.
The chief economist of the resolution foundation spoke about this quite eloquently. The divide began in the 80 with the “new industries” (finance, pharma, technology, telecoms), it’s just that it is less visible during good times. When the tide retreats it uncovers the ugly rocks and the unevenness of the underlying strata.
> 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.
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)
Banks and privatised utilities (used for money laundering.) Politicians (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.
> 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.
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.
I’d argue that your last paragraph has the cause-and-effect reversed:
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.
That seems an extremely cynical take to me, I don't think that's true at all. It divides people into monoliths and makes assumptions then uses those assumptions to restrict and hold back.
> but the majority of towns belonged to the same broad spectrum of bland mediocrity
Isn't it to be expected that the majority of X are average (mediocre)? I mean, you could have a statistically skewed distribution, but would that be very desirable?
Yet another signal of the sad state of affairs is that you probably genuinely think we're "on the brink" and not well over the cliff, Wile E.-style. Buildings burned during leftist protests (whether or not leftists actually set the fires is up for debate), and the Capital was ransacked by a mob looking to overthrow an election.
That was half a decade ago.
The interim has consisted of a corrupt centrist presidential administration that spent most of its time denying that things are getting worse ("It's not a recession"; "We didn't fumble the Afghanistan draw-down"; "Those weren't significant bank failures"; "That's not a genocide"), followed by a corrupt fascist admin that is openly dedicated to making things worse.
All the while, the intellectuals who understand what is happening - not just what will happen, what is happening - have been begging anyone who will listen to take the situation seriously - to understand that their attempted conservation of the previous normal is actually vascillation, while the ground falls out from under us. But my property values! But my American dream! But my rules-based order! They're already dead. And we can't start rebuilding until people with money and influence face it.
I think you're from the USA and the commenter you're replying to is British, which probably explains the difference. Those shop names are recognisably British.
How is this your #1 problem? We have so much serious issues and you are hung up on women having sex? Let them fuck how much they want. Nobody stopped men from fucking and if it works, doesn't that indicate a different problem?
There is more to puritanical attitudes than sex. It generally means anti-pleasure.
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.
puritanism is often linked to a backlash against this type of thing.
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.
These are… specific examples. Something on your mind? Puritanical cultures do have an association with being sex-negative lack of a better term because purity culture sounds circular. But they're far from the only aspect of culture that can embody puritan thinking.
Now that's an interesting trend. It's no longer feasible to have an independent web site, because nobody will visit it because you don't have the page rank. Journalists that do find your site copy your data and may add a link (that noone vists). Their pagerank is much higher, so they get all search engine links and all the ads, for your content.
We have this situation in lithuanian web for a two decades now.
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...
> organisations who despite their name, do not give a flying ** about their social housing stock
> 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.
Yikes, I spent 15 years living in one of the Top 10 and my summers in another one. I probably agree, though. The rot was showing in most of those by the late 80s and they went very swiftly downhill after that.
To counter those depressing places, these towns and villages seem lovely:
I can't see the list because of the paywall but my guess is they are all medium sized market towns. Large enough to have the facilities you need but not so big that they become impersonal.
> 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.
He also did The Invention of Lying, which, 16 years since I watched it in the cinema, is still the answer I give without hesitation to "what's the worst movie you've ever seen?"
If you're about to write a diatrabe about the harms of political correctness or scold the writer on inventing a victimhood complex for themselves, please read the ending of the OP:
> 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?
I say, try. Publish "Crap Towns, 20 Year Update" and ask what's changed? Revisit some of the original places, take some new photos. Plenty of scope to continue the humour, but also scope to hint at some wider reflections and continue the conversation. Having recognition of the first book also adds some authority to your commentary.
He says he won't, but he's also right that if it's funny, it works. Humour has a wonderful way of being able to say things you couldn't otherwise be able to communicate so effectively.
And a book that dares to go beyond the humour and reflect on 20 years of progress, would love to see it.
One thing that has been accentuated over the past few decades is the idea that you are responsible for your success. When you were poor, lacked means, or didn't have a good job, it was because the god of fortune didn't smile on you. Only the fortunate experienced success.
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"
I feel like the opposite has been accentuated for around 15+ years now, especially after the 2008 recession.
The 1990s/2000s felt like "you make your own luck", but since I got out of college, it seems the 90% luck / 10% effort idea is the mainstream (including "who you know is more important than what you know"). Maybe it is just me growing up, or maybe it's the proliferation of access to data due to the internet, such as opportunityatlas.org
I wonder if the increased acceptance of this fact can cause a type of societal malaise.
I would estimate the bigger cause of malaise is the fact that things just seem to get worse. Housing gets more expensive, shops close down, towns die. One can't help but get the feeling there is a continual tightening of the screws. Every year, the country sinks a little further down. What can you do if you want to stop it? Brexit? Reform? Very unsatisfying answers, but the only ones people are given beyond "lay down and accept it".
People in crap towns drive expensive cars too. The inequality between a crap place and a nice place is now enough that people can afford a ghastly Lamborghini SUV thing before they can afford to move out of a crap town.
I remember a few years ago a politician was vilified for suggesting there wasn't much you could do about the derelict seaside towns. I have a feeling that what he said was probably quite close to the truth.
I thought that too, it it quite hard to uncover the logical argument there. Appears to be sourced from conversations with journalists. I ended up just trusting that it was true in order to engage with the rest of the piece.
Some of them maybe have gentrified (not to ignore that this in itself isn't 100% a good thing). Others are if anything worse than when he wrote the book.
Nah, several of them were always running jokes, some of them were a lot worse a decade or three earlier, and some of them were picked far more for their snobbishness or for being homogenous sanitised suburbia than their decline.
>One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.
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.
> 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
The road to Wigan Pier (1937) would be a humourless response. His main issue is the lack of acceptance of current satirical humour, "modern life is rubbish" being 22 years old.
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.
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?
If, as a humorist, you are concerned about whether you can publish your humorous book you can be certain that you live in a cursed timeline. Additionally if you think there are two kinds of jokes: those that were once funny and those that were never funny, then I suggest that your jokes were at best lazy. The human condition is pretty constant throughout the ages and those jokes that are aimed at such universal experiences continue to amuse for centuries or millennia.
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.
> If, as a humorist, you are concerned about whether you can publish your humorous book you can be certain that you live in a cursed timeline.
This has literally always been the case. The topics have shifted, and some other details have changed, but in essence it's no difference. Try publishing a humorist book about, say, sex or religion in the 50s. Or the world wars, or maybe something that features gay characters. Or civil rights-type stuff (in US).
The counter culture did just that in trove by the end of the 50s and it had started long before. That was pretty much the whole point and it offended the polite society very much.
This is, unfortunately, the world that we live in right now. There are stand-up comedians who privately admit it’s almost impossible to do their jobs any more because of the faux outrage.
A fellow Elbonian made a book [1] depicting the ugliest places in our town.
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...
> I even worry that in trying to diagnose some of the alienation, boredom and despair that people in the UK were starting to feel, I actually might have added to the malaise.
That's usually how it goes with personal scale self-deprecating humor too. It was instrumental to my own misery, and I didn't quite notice this until I've let go of it for a while.
Another thing to ponder is the second hand effects. For the one making the joke it's a very different headspace to someone who sees it from the outside, and internalizes it as some sort of style. I'm fairly sure this kind of "saying a body, hearing a skeleton" game is how the author got to the point of seeing that site carrying the torch, but not really appreciating what he sees there. It's a kind of effect people making humorous content always seem to learn the hard way, like it was the case for e.g. idubbz, and countless others. Or like weakly racist jokes are to any odd fellow European.
Not to pass judgement though, I can see how overcorrections and the "puritanism" are definitely not any good either. But yeah, that's how these things tend to go.
I'd be vary of the author really hopping on that "they're cancelling us" bus. If he doesn't appreciate what he sees on that site, he's in for a world of hurt when he realizes where people who constantly play around with this topic right now will get him to. This is all a setup to the next chapter, where humorists will actually get unfairly censored, but then they won't be able to properly reach audiences with it anymore, as the memetic background for that has been appropriated and spent by then, by those actually malicious, a long time ago.
The Connections series by James Burke from around the same time posited that politics is irrelevant and progress is mostly due to science. The consumer society of today is much better than when Crap Towns was written although improvement is not uniform. But even the least improved towns are better now than they were due to all the regional, national, and international improvements in services.
Unfortunately I’m not sure this is true. My home town is one of the Crap Towns and in the last 25 years more or less the entire high street economy has collapsed and nothing has replaced it. It increasingly exists as a cheap undesirable housing spot with a 30 min commute to the next city.
The sense of self importance and overanalysis in this writeup on a silly book called "Crap Towns" is almost as hilarious as the book itself.
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.
It’s probably very important to the author, though, in the sense that it shaped their life and clearly became briefly very famous. So I don’t think it’s particularly fair to snipe at them for writing a reflective blog post about that. It’s not like you have to read it.
I recently started a subscription to https://www.the-fence.com/ as set out in the opening to this piece and it's truly a lovely object. Highly recommend.
A society that can laugh at itself is an homogenous society where citizens share the same values. Today unfortunately that's not the case anymore.
This is not a racism problem (the UK historically had a lot of well-integrated immigration in the previous centuries), but about minorities that don't want to be integrated and want to impose their culture (look at Sharia tribunals in the UK) - and criminals from poorer countries abusing the EU freedom to travel, the welfare state and how lax the police is.
The UK is not the only society to have been destroyed in the name of globalisation, but it's certainly a sad state of affair.
It's exactly this kind of structuralism induced fatalism that makes more towns than ought shit.
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.
There's a lot of honest reflection here that you don't often get from writers revisiting their earlier work. I think it captures something important about how the culture around humor, offense, and public discourse has shifted. It's easy to blame "people being too sensitive" or to nostalgize the past, but the truth is more complicated: humor that punches up tends to age better than humor that punches down, and the line between the two can shift as society changes.
It's not about identity politics. It's not about self-deprecation. It's not even about if the material is particularly funny or not.
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.
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.
> It's whether you're punching up or punching down.
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.
> It's whether you're punching up or punching down.
I think the problem with the “punching up/down” perspective of comedy is that power is relative so the same exact humor and joke can be both punching up and down at the exact same time. Consider the current political moment in the US. Right wing, conservative, religious groups have power currently, so your average Daily Show or SNL writer feels pretty justified that they’re “punching up” when they take their potshots at “god and country” types. And to an extent they are. But at the same time, your average “god and country” type that their humor is skewering is also a punch down because unlike the SNL or Daily Show writer, they don’t have a national TV show in which to broadcast their views. They are (if you believe the writers) uneducated, ignorant and duped into believing lies that the rich and powerful have sold them. But if that’s the case, then by definition they are not the powerful, and “punching” them must be “punching down” (or at least laterally). Is it right (or at least ok) to be skewering “god and country” types for the ridiculous things they do? Probably. But I don’t think it’s because it’s somehow “speaking truth to power” or “punching up”. It’s right and ok because they are ridiculous things and people are allowed to find ridiculous things funny and skewer them, regardless of the relative power disparities
> 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.
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.
Vindication like what Ohioans would have felt when Charles Dickens visited America and said that St. Louis was a nice enough place, but “not likely ever to vie, in point of elegance or beauty, with Cincinnati”?
Over time, people change the weapons they use to hurt each other with. What used to have nothing in common with words meant to hurt now demands mental energy to decide whether it is an attack.
Political correctness is about cleanly dividing ideas into ones obviously meant to hurt and ones obviously meant to be harmless. It is impossible to even come close to succeeding at this, but it is still worth trying.
I remember laughing at this, my hometown was included it’s worth saying. I suspect the purchasers were largely people who lived in one of the ‘crap towns’
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.
I have always admired the British[1] ability to take the piss out of themselves with humour. Underlying the self-deprecation, there's always a sense of pride (misplaced?).
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.
Went through the entire article expecting imminently to get to the paragraph where the author perceives that Crap Towns was a mistake because it makes fun of the poor, and that the reason it couldn't be published now is that poverty in the UK is far worse than it was 20 years ago. But, no, "identity politics". Good riddance.
The UK has gone in a dark direction, with the police arresting people for thoughts they post on social media that run counter to popular narratives. Feels like the mob attitude that killed Socrates. It is important every nation enshrines free speech into their constitutions.
In my experience there are only a few cities in the U.S that literate people are proud enough to live in, that they would be insulted that you put that into your crap town book.
Thus I wonder what demographic that at one time would have bought this book is not going to be buying this book now.
hmm, maybe. In the U.S you have often the person who moved from a 'crap' town to some place they consider great, who gets really emotional about the crappiness they escaped to be able to think freely and the like. And often these people are the ones I would think of as customers for a book like this, and if their new town isn't in the book they certainly won't be offended.
There is a fairly popular tiktok account doing much the same thing. Travelling from town to town to point out the worst parts of them. Although I'll admit it sometimes feels more depressing than funny.
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.
That's not the author's main point — the author's point is the surprising observation that “That joke isn't funny any more”, even to the author himself. This is something deeper than the usual “genre of argument” you're referring to.
> 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 grew up in the "rust belt", just north of Flint, Michigan. A GM town at the time. I loved it as a kid. But it was many would consider a "crap town".
Even though it was already declining (economically replaced with healthcare, a fucking sign) it had nature and woods.
That was magical.
Anyways, I'd like to talk about bat guano.
I'd love to have a local nature conservancy or non-profit do a kids educational showing. Wouldn't that be fun? Just a deep dive into how much you can still learn, whether you're old or young. That even with limits, we can still inspire joy through gross natural things.
Kids love gross shit.
There are so many models you could experiment with. Traveling nature discovery labs... Art-train things. Robotic teleprescence to let kids take apart their own guano pile...
I'm obviously not comparing UK towns or my home town to bat shit.
I suppose there are so many liability issues around bat handling that's just a job in itself. Believe me when I say I can't work with my brother who does similar work. Those liability concerns will save lives, but I'd like my own story. Maybe somebody I love in the future can have their own story too.
the book author says "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"
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.
There's one thing I honestly don't understand about this post and the comments here.
NOWHERE does the author, or the people commenting here, mention the reason why such a book might be deemed "offensive". Of course it's easy to repell the criticism if you don't address the reasons in it ! But to me, it feels weird and classist to make a book about shitty places in a country. Aren't they often simply... poor ? Is it OK to laugh at the lower class ? The "shavs" ?
I don't know much about the UK but I feel like such a book in France would cause an uproar. Of course concrete suburbs are ugly as fuck ! Of course small towns in northern France, hit by unemployment, are often quite sad and grey and depressing ! But is it okay for people who don't live there to publish a book saying "lol look at how these people live" ? Sounds like the definition of punching down, to me.
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.
Personally I see it the other way around: the youth's increasing intolerance of politically incorrect ideas is caused by the increasing power of the "jack booted militia" on the right. It's not surprising that people try to suppress intolerant ideas when there is a very real risk of them being adopted by those in power.
"jack booted militia" is a nastily evocative & suggestive phrase that lingers like a rotten smell. I am worried & want to know who and where. Which are the ideas that we all agree are intolerant? Sounds as if you are addressing a club of the like-minded.
> the youth's increasing intolerance of politically incorrect ideas is caused …
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.
maybe the rules they're questioning simply aren't the ones you want them to question
for example: the usa has long had a social "rule" to tolerate intolerance, but now that youth see where that has led, many are questioning that rule
they were long warned that it leads to bad censorship, and they look around now, and see that the intolerant who warned are themselves perpetrating a wave of censorship anyways, and the argument is dissolved
a good person might want whichever rules do less harm in the end (and perhaps ones that do more good), it naturally follows that those primary goals should inform decisions regarding rules and policy and economy and government
It's not just acceptability. Jokes written even just five or ten years ago often fail to land on modern audiences. That taste in humor changes is neither morally positive nor negative. It's easy to look for deeper meaning in the notion that what once was funny now isn't, but often, there isn't a deeper meaning to find. Life is different now; so too must humor change.
Not necessarily. I think the interesting idea the article dances around is changing attitudes and sensibilities. In many ways, I think media of the 90s and even 2000s had a different balance of optimism and cynicism. Critical commentary was an edgy (or in this case humorous) counterpoint. 1999 saw dark edgy and dystopian films like the matrix, fight club that felt like a warning, criticism of a future to be avoided.
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?
That is a very British take. Constant worry about the value of something you don't want to sell. Thinking about your home as a financial investment, rather than a...home.
> pretty upset if the value of my home was harmed because someone decided to make it common knowledge that the town I lived in was crap
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.
Because now it means immigrant neighbourhoods more explicitly, and we cannot call that out now. That's why it's a bygone time. The writing was on the wall. And we just laughed "ahah how can it be so bad!!" well now here it is.
I though I had a decent command of English language, even if I am not a native speaker, but I have no ide what is "naive structuralism" or "overwrought reductionism" in this context.
Would any of you care to elaborate? I am serious, I am not familiar much with the UK political scene so can't tie these normal sounding phrases to anything, and would honestly appreciate some help.
I read some guy complaining some podcast complained about his book and elevate it into some weird organized political movement that he's already declared is dead, and he's happy those kind of rancid speech-haters are gone...punchline... they're the illiberals!
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?
> The good news is that I don’t think that the illiberalism of identity politics will endure much longer.
That's a weird thing to say in 2025 , considering what the US government is deporting people for having the wrong opinions domestically, and attempting to export the identity politics of the current administration via tarde deals with the UK. I suppose one might be blind to it because of their own political persuasion, suggesting that identity politics peaked in 2021 says more about the author's biases than the present reality.
> attempting to export the identity politics of the current administration via tarde deals with the UK
Not only can I not understand how you could imagine this to be the motive; I can't imagine how you even understand the term "identity politics" such that they could even in principle be "exported" in such a manner.
Are you suggesting, for example, that tariffs are somehow being differentially applied to different products from the same country, according to the ethnicity, gender, etc. of the manufacturers?
> No one has been deported for their opinions, yet
You probably thought I was talking about El Salvador. I wasn't.
Is it not deportations when multiple university students have stripped of their visas without notice, by order of "Little Marco" and forced to leave the country?
> How would you react to 10 million tourists moving to your country, buying up all the food from your grocery stores, drinking and driving, stealing, dealing drugs,...
Author here. Noticed a lot of traffic from this post - so thanks. Thanks especially for all these thoughtful comments. Just dropping in to say I appreciate the attention - and am grateful that most posters here don't seem to mind that I'm unable to draw hard conclusions in my original article. I also like the posts here that point towards the fact that atomisation maybe has had something to do with things (as well as the hardening of inequalities and etc.) Interesting! Perhaps it was more possible to share jokes in 2003 than it is now? (The concept that jokes either punch up or punch down seems an indication of that... Feels quite recent to me. And What if the intention isn't to hit anyone, really, just to make each other laugh?)
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.
Hi Sam
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.
I remember Crap Towns, I loved it! And the Idler! Which had an entire section on jokes for which punchlines had been half-forgotten.
Great and thoughtful reflection piece too.
I’d like to add a few other ideas into the mix as for some reason I’m uncomfortable with the idea “you can’t say that anymore” that I wonder if it’s become a thought-terminating cliche.
Firstly, I suspect there’s always been two forms of puritanism: one with power and one without power. We didn’t historically hear much from puritans without power (famously some shipped off elsewhere and founded an empire). And the ones in power? Well a fish doesn’t know it’s wet…and all the other sods now have X accounts and podcasts!
The second point is to reflect on the fact that British humour is a curious thing. You noticed yourself that satire may have curiously little real world bite.
Maybe there’s been a category error: humour isn’t a mechanism for social change, it’s a coping strategy (I live in Luton, not Hull, TFFT). Or worse mechanism for social control. In my brief time in the Uk I noticed that “banter” often chipped at eccentricities or quirks, and served to bring people into line with group orthodoxy.
In short, and to mirror your uncertainties, I’m just not so sure it’s as clear cut that free speech has been curtailed somehow. Or that humour was ever about just having a laugh.
Thank you!!
Perhaps it was more possible to share jokes in 2003 than it is now
Its much more possible for people who are the target of jokes to reply now, compared to pre-social-media 2003
Taking offense when none was tendered is a special kind of social malfeasance that has gained popularity among the idle and boorish class of recent years. I appreciate it as a facile outward indication of low character and questionable intellect.
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Went through the entire article expecting imminently to get to the paragraph where you perceive that Crap Towns was a mistake because it makes fun of the poor, and that the reason it couldn't be published now is that poverty in the UK is far worse than it was 20 years ago.
[flagged]
Loved the fact that this post didn't go where I expected it to (or at least, didn't remain there). That a book like this probably wouldn't be published today, or would be less popular today, is a point that has been made many times by many people, about many different books, TV shows, jokes, etc. But the author actually moves on from there; the observation is that even in his own opinion, the same joke isn't funny today — in fact, the equivalent thing being done today just looks “grubby”.
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…)
Often when someone, especially a comedian, complains about “political correctness”, what they actually mean is: nobody is laughing at the same joke I told 20 years ago
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.
> Sensibilities change. The sense of what is and isn’t punching down changes. Even the appetite for punching down changes.
Yes, and the way it changes tells us something about our society, which I believe this article is trying to address.
Read the article, its much more interesting and reflective that that
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> Sensibilities change
If people are literally calling the police, they aren't changing, they are being suppressed/punished.
> they’re just not getting the laughs they think they’re entitled to
Why are the comedians 'entitled' rather than the people who go to their show and complain?
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> Often when someone, especially a comedian, complains about “political correctness”, what they actually mean is: nobody is laughing at the same joke I told 20 years ago
Don't rephrase others' sentiments to suit your own narrative. Soothsayers are bullshitters.
When comedians complain about political correctness, there is no alternate meaning. They are upset that they can't tell the same jokes they told 20 years ago, to the same audiences from 20 years ago that continue to enjoy them, because external forces mob, heckle, and harass them so they cannot serve their customers...
...which conveniently provides opportunities for those younger people to "build great careers," by eliminating all legacy competition.
In any other context it'd be driving the local kebab shop owner out of town because someone with influence wants to open a salad bar in its place.
It's mob rule, not "social justice."
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comedians no longer complain about that, contemporary comedy is merely repeating the commonly accepted societal mantrae, and laughing at and trivialising opposition or criticism to or of it.
Wit, satire, and criticism are still funny, but aren't permissible.
The same phenomenon exists when people talk about the movie Blazing Saddles.
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.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jzMFoNZeZm0
I think the difference is between, let's say, Ricky Gervais making a joke about a little boy with cancer, and Ricky Gervais making a joke about THAT little boy with cancer right there in Seat 7G. Everyone now knows these crap towns are dying.
If someone looks a bit pale and sickly, it's often considered fair game to make fun of their appearance (eat some vegetables, get some exercise etc)... Whereas if they have severe health problems it's no longer tasteful. This fact has not changed, it's basic human decency. The situation is what's changed.
This is a good question..it just occurred to me that perhaps its because its so much easier for the people who would be the target of the joke to answer back now?
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)
Oh, that's insightful. Author could have encountered a light form of elite convergence 20 years ago when interacting with fellow writers and journalists, who probably didn't live in the blighted areas, and could take the joke on behalf of their cities. Being from a crap town is fine if you're don't live in the crappy part of town.
I'll add that the decade-long austerity measures let people know that it's actual class warfare, and it's no longer a laughing matter as it was in 2003 when it seemed fixable. Now it's clear the people in charge are not interested in fixing anything. A joke about someone's health situation is received better if the condition is treatable, but less so of they are terminal.
It was 2003, not 1993 - the article even has a screenshot of people answering back online.
The competing website they don't want to name has Internet Archive pages dating back to 2004.
Humor is as much about context as content
and yet there is a whole youtube channel successfully doing the same
> "I mean: incredibly, governments and local councils didn’t read my work and decide to mend their ways. The UK did not get better. Instead we got more than a decade of Tory austerity, Brexit, and all the accompanying neglect and bad feeling."
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.
I was curious - what was the angle on Hythe in the book?
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.
Crap Towns called Hythe "...quite possibly the most spirit-crushingly tedious town in Kent." and "...the place that makes nearby Folkestone look like Las Vegas."
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...
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That sounds to me as a product of something I see a lot of in society in general. Governments think hoi polloi are stupid, and they are clever, and therefore solutions imposed from above are superior to local solutions.
I think that's a misdiagnosis. The suggestions of the "hoi polloi" are obvious, and would solve the problem. Government prefers instead a solution that is both cheaper, so they can instead direct funds to things that they prefer, and more indirect, so they can route funds through friends and family.
The government's main effort is to complicate or denounce the "obvious" solutions. It's why they put so little effort into devising the programs that actually get rolled out; instead they just copy them directly from some non-profit that the government has been indirectly and almost entirely financing, and is directed by The Honorable Lord or Lady Somebody's Cousin.
> I was born and _bought_ up in the town ranked #4 in the original list (Hythe)
Blimey, it must have been horribly dreadful there if people were selling and buying children
Twenty years ago, I think there was still a sense that we were collectively laughing with each other about the dullness of small towns. We all had the same shops - Woolworths, Dixons, Our Price, BHS. We all had a leisure centre that looked like everyone else's leisure centre. Some towns were better off than others, some towns had parts that you were better off avoiding after dark, but the majority of towns belonged to the same broad spectrum of bland mediocrity.
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.
This is what I was going to say. Back then, a book like this would have been perceived as the UK making fun of itself. Now it’s perceived as being cruel to those less fortunate.
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.
Good point re: facts versus story.
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).
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The Gini coefficient of the UK is about the same now as it was then:
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.
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Not sure about homelessness rising versus the 90s. Possibly the rate is similar to 1998. I looked at ourworldindata, but their graph only goes back to 2010. Wikipedia has wildly different figures from the charities Shelter and Crisis because they're counting different things. It then gives government figures: just over 100,000 in 1998, 135,000 in 2003, 40,000 in 2009 and 2010 (so ourworldindata gives a chart that begins with this low), and "record levels, with 104,510 people" in 2023, though that's less than 135,000 so the way in which this is a record is not specified.
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?
Well put.
A few decades of compounding inequality transforms what used to be good natured ribbing amongst chums into bullying.
What compounding inequality? The UK's Gini coefficient has been trending downwards since the global financial crisis.
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.
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The chief economist of the resolution foundation spoke about this quite eloquently. The divide began in the 80 with the “new industries” (finance, pharma, technology, telecoms), it’s just that it is less visible during good times. When the tide retreats it uncovers the ugly rocks and the unevenness of the underlying strata.
> 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.
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)
Banks and privatised utilities (used for money laundering.) Politicians (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.
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We really do excel at money laundering. Go UK !
> 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.
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.
I’d argue that your last paragraph has the cause-and-effect reversed:
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.
The only issue is that - in the past - weapons had to be wielded by people. The same working people that revolted.
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.
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That seems an extremely cynical take to me, I don't think that's true at all. It divides people into monoliths and makes assumptions then uses those assumptions to restrict and hold back.
> but the majority of towns belonged to the same broad spectrum of bland mediocrity
Isn't it to be expected that the majority of X are average (mediocre)? I mean, you could have a statistically skewed distribution, but would that be very desirable?
If you recognize deep inequality but feel powerless (or complicit), doubling down on seriousness might feel like the only "responsible" move.
But we were promised that "AGI" will save us and humanity and AI will be able to clean up the crap towns and turn them into cool towns.
Yet another signal of the sad state of affairs is that you probably genuinely think we're "on the brink" and not well over the cliff, Wile E.-style. Buildings burned during leftist protests (whether or not leftists actually set the fires is up for debate), and the Capital was ransacked by a mob looking to overthrow an election.
That was half a decade ago.
The interim has consisted of a corrupt centrist presidential administration that spent most of its time denying that things are getting worse ("It's not a recession"; "We didn't fumble the Afghanistan draw-down"; "Those weren't significant bank failures"; "That's not a genocide"), followed by a corrupt fascist admin that is openly dedicated to making things worse.
All the while, the intellectuals who understand what is happening - not just what will happen, what is happening - have been begging anyone who will listen to take the situation seriously - to understand that their attempted conservation of the previous normal is actually vascillation, while the ground falls out from under us. But my property values! But my American dream! But my rules-based order! They're already dead. And we can't start rebuilding until people with money and influence face it.
I think you're from the USA and the commenter you're replying to is British, which probably explains the difference. Those shop names are recognisably British.
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I've not heard a compelling description of what 'facing it' looks like, and I'd like to hear your opinion on the matter
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How is this your #1 problem? We have so much serious issues and you are hung up on women having sex? Let them fuck how much they want. Nobody stopped men from fucking and if it works, doesn't that indicate a different problem?
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There is more to puritanical attitudes than sex. It generally means anti-pleasure.
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.
The amount of people having sex has dropped quite a bit in the last decade.
People get into sex work for money - they can’t afford rent.
Girls are having sex with 1000 guys a day and some people clearly still aren't getting any... Inequality in theUUK is even worse than I thought :(
puritanism is often linked to a backlash against this type of thing.
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.
These are… specific examples. Something on your mind? Puritanical cultures do have an association with being sex-negative lack of a better term because purity culture sounds circular. But they're far from the only aspect of culture that can embody puritan thinking.
They've been a naughty girls, they let their knickers down!
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A popular protestantism is not a bandwagon the current political circus troupe will fit on.
> 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
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...
Now that's an interesting trend. It's no longer feasible to have an independent web site, because nobody will visit it because you don't have the page rank. Journalists that do find your site copy your data and may add a link (that noone vists). Their pagerank is much higher, so they get all search engine links and all the ads, for your content.
Between that, Google reposting your content and AI's hoovering up everything in site it hardly seems worth publishing online anymore.
We have this situation in lithuanian web for a two decades now.
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...
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> organisations who despite their name, do not give a flying ** about their social housing stock
> 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?!
The social housing stock is run by corporate landlords with UK offices. It's still poorly maintained anyway.
Not sure how living in Spain is expensive compared to UK. Cheaper living, lower taxes.
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Yikes, I spent 15 years living in one of the Top 10 and my summers in another one. I probably agree, though. The rot was showing in most of those by the late 80s and they went very swiftly downhill after that.
To counter those depressing places, these towns and villages seem lovely:
https://www.thetimes.com/best-places-to-live/location-guide/...
I can't see the list because of the paywall but my guess is they are all medium sized market towns. Large enough to have the facilities you need but not so big that they become impersonal.
That author on Slough,
> 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.
He also did The Invention of Lying, which, 16 years since I watched it in the cinema, is still the answer I give without hesitation to "what's the worst movie you've ever seen?"
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Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!
John Betjeman (1906 - 1984)
There’s also his standup career of being extra atheist as if the world has never seen a famous lapsed Christian Brit
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Edit: seems not
If you're about to write a diatrabe about the harms of political correctness or scold the writer on inventing a victimhood complex for themselves, please read the ending of the OP:
> 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?
> “Of course, you wouldn't get away with it now.”
I say, try. Publish "Crap Towns, 20 Year Update" and ask what's changed? Revisit some of the original places, take some new photos. Plenty of scope to continue the humour, but also scope to hint at some wider reflections and continue the conversation. Having recognition of the first book also adds some authority to your commentary.
He says he won't, but he's also right that if it's funny, it works. Humour has a wonderful way of being able to say things you couldn't otherwise be able to communicate so effectively.
And a book that dares to go beyond the humour and reflect on 20 years of progress, would love to see it.
One thing that has been accentuated over the past few decades is the idea that you are responsible for your success. When you were poor, lacked means, or didn't have a good job, it was because the god of fortune didn't smile on you. Only the fortunate experienced success.
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"
I feel like the opposite has been accentuated for around 15+ years now, especially after the 2008 recession.
The 1990s/2000s felt like "you make your own luck", but since I got out of college, it seems the 90% luck / 10% effort idea is the mainstream (including "who you know is more important than what you know"). Maybe it is just me growing up, or maybe it's the proliferation of access to data due to the internet, such as opportunityatlas.org
I wonder if the increased acceptance of this fact can cause a type of societal malaise.
I would estimate the bigger cause of malaise is the fact that things just seem to get worse. Housing gets more expensive, shops close down, towns die. One can't help but get the feeling there is a continual tightening of the screws. Every year, the country sinks a little further down. What can you do if you want to stop it? Brexit? Reform? Very unsatisfying answers, but the only ones people are given beyond "lay down and accept it".
People in crap towns drive expensive cars too. The inequality between a crap place and a nice place is now enough that people can afford a ghastly Lamborghini SUV thing before they can afford to move out of a crap town.
Only the drug dealers and landlords.
I remember a few years ago a politician was vilified for suggesting there wasn't much you could do about the derelict seaside towns. I have a feeling that what he said was probably quite close to the truth.
As Thatchers children we've all internalised some of those ideas to an extent, even those who vehemently are against here.
Individualism, atomisation and other Randian bullshit.
The author writes well. Within a few paragraphs the reader entirely forgets that "I couldn't publish Crap Towns today" is a hypothetical.
Yeah I kept reading for the part where the author addresses the thesis, but that's not what it's about.
Is it about keeping you reading for long enough to show you a pop-up for his newsletter?
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I thought that too, it it quite hard to uncover the logical argument there. Appears to be sourced from conversations with journalists. I ended up just trusting that it was true in order to engage with the rest of the piece.
The problem is those towns weren’t crap within living memory when the books were written. Now anyone who remembers otherwise is close to dead
Some of them maybe have gentrified (not to ignore that this in itself isn't 100% a good thing). Others are if anything worse than when he wrote the book.
Nah, several of them were always running jokes, some of them were a lot worse a decade or three earlier, and some of them were picked far more for their snobbishness or for being homogenous sanitised suburbia than their decline.
>One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.
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.
Reddit is cancer. Discord is a cancerous black hole. (Platforms are evil.)
The issue is not so much discoverability as scale (as you hinted at), as well as some social media aspects.
PhpBB-style forums are both discoverable, rarely grow large enough to become toxic, can be 'owned', and the exit option is much more viable.
I remember a Web site, in the early oughts, called “sheppeyscum.com”. That URL now redirects to one that makes Sheppey look good.
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.
Crazy stuff, you got me curious
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
If it’s the Sheppey I’m thinking of, it’s in Kent (SE England)
You are correct.
Got my right and left mixed up.
The road to Wigan Pier (1937) would be a humourless response. His main issue is the lack of acceptance of current satirical humour, "modern life is rubbish" being 22 years old.
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.
Great article.
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?
If, as a humorist, you are concerned about whether you can publish your humorous book you can be certain that you live in a cursed timeline. Additionally if you think there are two kinds of jokes: those that were once funny and those that were never funny, then I suggest that your jokes were at best lazy. The human condition is pretty constant throughout the ages and those jokes that are aimed at such universal experiences continue to amuse for centuries or millennia.
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.
> If, as a humorist, you are concerned about whether you can publish your humorous book you can be certain that you live in a cursed timeline.
This has literally always been the case. The topics have shifted, and some other details have changed, but in essence it's no difference. Try publishing a humorist book about, say, sex or religion in the 50s. Or the world wars, or maybe something that features gay characters. Or civil rights-type stuff (in US).
The counter culture did just that in trove by the end of the 50s and it had started long before. That was pretty much the whole point and it offended the polite society very much.
This is, unfortunately, the world that we live in right now. There are stand-up comedians who privately admit it’s almost impossible to do their jobs any more because of the faux outrage.
But there are other stand-up comedians who don't have that problem and are wildly successful. I wonder what the difference is?
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A fellow Elbonian made a book [1] depicting the ugliest places in our town.
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...
"We do our best with the worst."
> I even worry that in trying to diagnose some of the alienation, boredom and despair that people in the UK were starting to feel, I actually might have added to the malaise.
That's usually how it goes with personal scale self-deprecating humor too. It was instrumental to my own misery, and I didn't quite notice this until I've let go of it for a while.
Another thing to ponder is the second hand effects. For the one making the joke it's a very different headspace to someone who sees it from the outside, and internalizes it as some sort of style. I'm fairly sure this kind of "saying a body, hearing a skeleton" game is how the author got to the point of seeing that site carrying the torch, but not really appreciating what he sees there. It's a kind of effect people making humorous content always seem to learn the hard way, like it was the case for e.g. idubbz, and countless others. Or like weakly racist jokes are to any odd fellow European.
Not to pass judgement though, I can see how overcorrections and the "puritanism" are definitely not any good either. But yeah, that's how these things tend to go.
I'd be vary of the author really hopping on that "they're cancelling us" bus. If he doesn't appreciate what he sees on that site, he's in for a world of hurt when he realizes where people who constantly play around with this topic right now will get him to. This is all a setup to the next chapter, where humorists will actually get unfairly censored, but then they won't be able to properly reach audiences with it anymore, as the memetic background for that has been appropriated and spent by then, by those actually malicious, a long time ago.
The Connections series by James Burke from around the same time posited that politics is irrelevant and progress is mostly due to science. The consumer society of today is much better than when Crap Towns was written although improvement is not uniform. But even the least improved towns are better now than they were due to all the regional, national, and international improvements in services.
Unfortunately I’m not sure this is true. My home town is one of the Crap Towns and in the last 25 years more or less the entire high street economy has collapsed and nothing has replaced it. It increasingly exists as a cheap undesirable housing spot with a 30 min commute to the next city.
Uh, the internet, smartphones, flat panel TVS, craft beer, Moore's Law.
The sense of self importance and overanalysis in this writeup on a silly book called "Crap Towns" is almost as hilarious as the book itself.
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.
It’s probably very important to the author, though, in the sense that it shaped their life and clearly became briefly very famous. So I don’t think it’s particularly fair to snipe at them for writing a reflective blog post about that. It’s not like you have to read it.
Why is it unfair to snipe at a bloke that’s made a career at snipping at others?
The towns he calls crap are important to the people that live there. If they can take it so can he.
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If you can't be bothered reading a book, or if you find it funny and want more, https://loudribs.com/product-category/postcard/ has a "Rubbish Seaside Postcard" series.
I recently started a subscription to https://www.the-fence.com/ as set out in the opening to this piece and it's truly a lovely object. Highly recommend.
A society that can laugh at itself is an homogenous society where citizens share the same values. Today unfortunately that's not the case anymore.
This is not a racism problem (the UK historically had a lot of well-integrated immigration in the previous centuries), but about minorities that don't want to be integrated and want to impose their culture (look at Sharia tribunals in the UK) - and criminals from poorer countries abusing the EU freedom to travel, the welfare state and how lax the police is.
The UK is not the only society to have been destroyed in the name of globalisation, but it's certainly a sad state of affair.
Be harder to identify the non crap towns tbh.
It's exactly this kind of structuralism induced fatalism that makes more towns than ought shit.
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.
This reads like the old amanfrommars comments on theregister back in the day.
What?
a comedians biggest fear is that one day everyone starts taking them seriously
Unless you’re Nathan fielder and you just want to talk about aviation safety
There's a lot of honest reflection here that you don't often get from writers revisiting their earlier work. I think it captures something important about how the culture around humor, offense, and public discourse has shifted. It's easy to blame "people being too sensitive" or to nostalgize the past, but the truth is more complicated: humor that punches up tends to age better than humor that punches down, and the line between the two can shift as society changes.
For an earlier example see KLF - It's Grim Up North https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20XLWEjN9eI
As a non British I though this was always a bit of dark British humour tradition.
See Black Adder, also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Heroic_Failures - which mentions towns like Keynes.
It's not about identity politics. It's not about self-deprecation. It's not even about if the material is particularly funny or not.
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.
Punching up is "look at them, ha ha ha"
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.
> It's whether you're punching up or punching down.
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.
> It's whether you're punching up or punching down.
I think the problem with the “punching up/down” perspective of comedy is that power is relative so the same exact humor and joke can be both punching up and down at the exact same time. Consider the current political moment in the US. Right wing, conservative, religious groups have power currently, so your average Daily Show or SNL writer feels pretty justified that they’re “punching up” when they take their potshots at “god and country” types. And to an extent they are. But at the same time, your average “god and country” type that their humor is skewering is also a punch down because unlike the SNL or Daily Show writer, they don’t have a national TV show in which to broadcast their views. They are (if you believe the writers) uneducated, ignorant and duped into believing lies that the rich and powerful have sold them. But if that’s the case, then by definition they are not the powerful, and “punching” them must be “punching down” (or at least laterally). Is it right (or at least ok) to be skewering “god and country” types for the ridiculous things they do? Probably. But I don’t think it’s because it’s somehow “speaking truth to power” or “punching up”. It’s right and ok because they are ridiculous things and people are allowed to find ridiculous things funny and skewer them, regardless of the relative power disparities
> 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.
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.
My home town featured (33rd!). We considered it vindication!
Vindication like what Ohioans would have felt when Charles Dickens visited America and said that St. Louis was a nice enough place, but “not likely ever to vie, in point of elegance or beauty, with Cincinnati”?
Lots of people in the UK grow up in crap towns, and having a book validate that feeling can be good.
Without a definition of a shit town I can't make much sense of what he wrote here. I'm tempted to define it myself but I won't fall for the trap.
Over time, people change the weapons they use to hurt each other with. What used to have nothing in common with words meant to hurt now demands mental energy to decide whether it is an attack.
Political correctness is about cleanly dividing ideas into ones obviously meant to hurt and ones obviously meant to be harmless. It is impossible to even come close to succeeding at this, but it is still worth trying.
I remember laughing at this, my hometown was included it’s worth saying. I suspect the purchasers were largely people who lived in one of the ‘crap towns’
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.
I have always admired the British[1] ability to take the piss out of themselves with humour. Underlying the self-deprecation, there's always a sense of pride (misplaced?).
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.
The Scots are 100% Brits and at least some portion of the people in Northern Ireland strongly identify as Brits too.
Went through the entire article expecting imminently to get to the paragraph where the author perceives that Crap Towns was a mistake because it makes fun of the poor, and that the reason it couldn't be published now is that poverty in the UK is far worse than it was 20 years ago. But, no, "identity politics". Good riddance.
I think this is awesome! Should be done more often, gives people perspectives on areas they wouldn't otherwise know or think about.
The UK has gone in a dark direction, with the police arresting people for thoughts they post on social media that run counter to popular narratives. Feels like the mob attitude that killed Socrates. It is important every nation enshrines free speech into their constitutions.
> And when hope was actually something people might consider voting for?
A link to an American politician, of course.
In my experience there are only a few cities in the U.S that literate people are proud enough to live in, that they would be insulted that you put that into your crap town book.
Thus I wonder what demographic that at one time would have bought this book is not going to be buying this book now.
Considering the book is about "crap towns" in the UK, I imagine it could be a very different demographic than the one you're thinking of
hmm, maybe. In the U.S you have often the person who moved from a 'crap' town to some place they consider great, who gets really emotional about the crappiness they escaped to be able to think freely and the like. And often these people are the ones I would think of as customers for a book like this, and if their new town isn't in the book they certainly won't be offended.
A good way to identify which cities suck is to say to a native "<their city> sucks".
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.
The funniest thing about that is that the cities where these proudly smug people live have the most actual crap on their streets.
There is a fairly popular tiktok account doing much the same thing. Travelling from town to town to point out the worst parts of them. Although I'll admit it sometimes feels more depressing than funny.
So it’s not that it won’t be published today.
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.
That's not the author's main point — the author's point is the surprising observation that “That joke isn't funny any more”, even to the author himself. This is something deeper than the usual “genre of argument” you're referring to.
Eh, he goes out of his way to say
> 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.
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Consider the Vector, not just the Scalar. The direction, the trajectory, of these places.
I grew up in the "rust belt", just north of Flint, Michigan. A GM town at the time. I loved it as a kid. But it was many would consider a "crap town".
Even though it was already declining (economically replaced with healthcare, a fucking sign) it had nature and woods.
That was magical.
Anyways, I'd like to talk about bat guano.
I'd love to have a local nature conservancy or non-profit do a kids educational showing. Wouldn't that be fun? Just a deep dive into how much you can still learn, whether you're old or young. That even with limits, we can still inspire joy through gross natural things.
Kids love gross shit.
There are so many models you could experiment with. Traveling nature discovery labs... Art-train things. Robotic teleprescence to let kids take apart their own guano pile...
I'm obviously not comparing UK towns or my home town to bat shit.
I suppose there are so many liability issues around bat handling that's just a job in itself. Believe me when I say I can't work with my brother who does similar work. Those liability concerns will save lives, but I'd like my own story. Maybe somebody I love in the future can have their own story too.
Sorry for "crapping" in the thread.
> You wouldn’t get away with it now
They almost always say that and it’s almost never true.
There is no way Tropic Thunder would be made today and this is true of many comedy movies before the 2010s.
The question is: "what are we laughing at now that in 20 years we won't think is funny?"
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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.
the book author says "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"
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.
There's one thing I honestly don't understand about this post and the comments here.
NOWHERE does the author, or the people commenting here, mention the reason why such a book might be deemed "offensive". Of course it's easy to repell the criticism if you don't address the reasons in it ! But to me, it feels weird and classist to make a book about shitty places in a country. Aren't they often simply... poor ? Is it OK to laugh at the lower class ? The "shavs" ?
I don't know much about the UK but I feel like such a book in France would cause an uproar. Of course concrete suburbs are ugly as fuck ! Of course small towns in northern France, hit by unemployment, are often quite sad and grey and depressing ! But is it okay for people who don't live there to publish a book saying "lol look at how these people live" ? Sounds like the definition of punching down, to me.
Great article with links to others, like this one:
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.
Personally I see it the other way around: the youth's increasing intolerance of politically incorrect ideas is caused by the increasing power of the "jack booted militia" on the right. It's not surprising that people try to suppress intolerant ideas when there is a very real risk of them being adopted by those in power.
"jack booted militia" is a nastily evocative & suggestive phrase that lingers like a rotten smell. I am worried & want to know who and where. Which are the ideas that we all agree are intolerant? Sounds as if you are addressing a club of the like-minded.
> the youth's increasing intolerance of politically incorrect ideas is caused …
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.
> youth should be questioning the rules
that sounds like a rule to me
maybe the rules they're questioning simply aren't the ones you want them to question
for example: the usa has long had a social "rule" to tolerate intolerance, but now that youth see where that has led, many are questioning that rule
they were long warned that it leads to bad censorship, and they look around now, and see that the intolerant who warned are themselves perpetrating a wave of censorship anyways, and the argument is dissolved
a good person might want whichever rules do less harm in the end (and perhaps ones that do more good), it naturally follows that those primary goals should inform decisions regarding rules and policy and economy and government
we're good with questioning the rules, right?
Since a couple of years, in Germany , you wouldn’t get away with it
Yes, it’s a problem that something like that is insulting to publish.
I'm not sure. Times change, and things that were acceptable become not so - and vice versa.
It's not just acceptability. Jokes written even just five or ten years ago often fail to land on modern audiences. That taste in humor changes is neither morally positive nor negative. It's easy to look for deeper meaning in the notion that what once was funny now isn't, but often, there isn't a deeper meaning to find. Life is different now; so too must humor change.
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Not necessarily. I think the interesting idea the article dances around is changing attitudes and sensibilities. In many ways, I think media of the 90s and even 2000s had a different balance of optimism and cynicism. Critical commentary was an edgy (or in this case humorous) counterpoint. 1999 saw dark edgy and dystopian films like the matrix, fight club that felt like a warning, criticism of a future to be avoided.
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?
Or could it be about “Othering” these destitute places, and realising far more of us are engulfed in humdrum of life collapsing.
I’d be pretty upset if the value of my home was harmed because someone decided to make it common knowledge that the town I lived in was crap.
That is a very British take. Constant worry about the value of something you don't want to sell. Thinking about your home as a financial investment, rather than a...home.
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> pretty upset if the value of my home was harmed because someone decided to make it common knowledge that the town I lived in was crap
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.
It sounds like he made the places famous and gentrified them.
Hackney is now full of this: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/160955729
Presumably, anyone looking to buy your home would visit and quickly ascertain whether or not your town is crap.
Because now it means immigrant neighbourhoods more explicitly, and we cannot call that out now. That's why it's a bygone time. The writing was on the wall. And we just laughed "ahah how can it be so bad!!" well now here it is.
Maybe now the crappiest places have something common that should not be mentioned.
They don’t have a Pret A Manger?
If you say it cannot be made now - why not ?!
Why can't I say "This is a shit, because of this and this" ?
What sort of society have we become that we cannot write facts like that any more ?
Nothing about the towns with massive gang-rape grooming gangs. Well, we know why:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-46684638
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Please don't start nationalistic flamewars on HN. Last thing we need here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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I though I had a decent command of English language, even if I am not a native speaker, but I have no ide what is "naive structuralism" or "overwrought reductionism" in this context.
Would any of you care to elaborate? I am serious, I am not familiar much with the UK political scene so can't tie these normal sounding phrases to anything, and would honestly appreciate some help.
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I read some guy complaining some podcast complained about his book and elevate it into some weird organized political movement that he's already declared is dead, and he's happy those kind of rancid speech-haters are gone...punchline... they're the illiberals!
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?
I was sure there was going to be a series of these books
Crap Governments Crap Businesses Crap Websites Crap Engineers Crap Media....
> The good news is that I don’t think that the illiberalism of identity politics will endure much longer.
That's a weird thing to say in 2025 , considering what the US government is deporting people for having the wrong opinions domestically, and attempting to export the identity politics of the current administration via tarde deals with the UK. I suppose one might be blind to it because of their own political persuasion, suggesting that identity politics peaked in 2021 says more about the author's biases than the present reality.
> attempting to export the identity politics of the current administration via tarde deals with the UK
Not only can I not understand how you could imagine this to be the motive; I can't imagine how you even understand the term "identity politics" such that they could even in principle be "exported" in such a manner.
Are you suggesting, for example, that tariffs are somehow being differentially applied to different products from the same country, according to the ethnicity, gender, etc. of the manufacturers?
> Not only can I not understand how you could imagine this to be the motive
That's a fair question, and I suppose you may not consume British media and may be missing the necessary context.
> I can't imagine how you even understand the term "identity politics" such that they could even in principle be "exported" in such a manner.
I got you: the Trump admin wants to export its ideology on gender-identity by coercing the UK into changing its LGBTQ policies as a prerequisite to a trade deal with the US. The European right is not as crotchety about non-heteronomative relationship as the American right, and the Trump admin would like to change that. You may start here https://www.advocate.com/politics/us-uk-trade-deal-lgbtq https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/04/18/trump-uk-trade-lgbtq-...
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> No one has been deported for their opinions, yet
You probably thought I was talking about El Salvador. I wasn't.
Is it not deportations when multiple university students have stripped of their visas without notice, by order of "Little Marco" and forced to leave the country?
> How would you react to 10 million tourists moving to your country, buying up all the food from your grocery stores, drinking and driving, stealing, dealing drugs,...
...ask the kingdom of Hawai'i
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