[nonrandomstring]

> unfortunately this can't last as those who go hard on progress and tear down everything and rebuilding again

A notion of "bare progress" is the elephant in the room. Progress is a vector. It has magnitude and direction. People talk of moving "forward or back", but science also has a steering wheel.

> and the Americans and Chinese will make us adopt their ways.

This very notion of "progress" as a totalitarian force is also dangerous. The boot is on the other foot from 80 years ago. When Europe was starting a 1000 year technological master-race, more measured minds had to extinguish that fire. I see many similarities today - people seeing "progress" simply as dominance.

I liked the brain-dump in TFA, but I think it's over-complex and too tied to a contemporary interpretation of capital investment.

We've been spooging away our talent for generations here. Look at how we treated Turing. We mismanage or sell-off everything cool we invent.

What Britain still suffers from is class disloyalty. We still have a strong but invisible class system which is now international financiers. Those sorts "float above" the ordinary economy, they are disconnected from UK interests and don't give a toss about engineering, science, knowledge, education...

[robertlagrant]

> When Europe was starting a 1000 year technological master-race, more measured minds had to extinguish that fire

A lot of the measured minds were saying eugenics was a good idea. It took the horror of seeing experiments and concentration camps to make it so deeply unfashionable the idea couldn't even survive in academia.

[nonrandomstring]

I believe you're right. Edwin Black's "IBM and the Holocaust" and Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day" both played their part in revising my naive ideas about simple narratives of WW2.

But look at this post made here a couple of days ago [0]. It's absolutely back in fashion. I think technofascism really is a thing now - you can feel certain people getting quite giddy with thoughts of power.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42735539

[robertlagrant]

Power's always in fashion. Academics seem to love socialism, because it (in practice) centralises decision-making nationally to a group of smart people (and the academics might imagine themselves to be these insanely powerful people).

Eugenics was the same. It was a Progressive way of thinking, if I remember correctly.

[nonrandomstring]

> academics might imagine themselves to be these insanely powerful people

It long ago escaped academia. Everyone wants to imagine themselves "insanely powerful people" now. It's part of the sell.

But based on experience I'm with Chomsky, that the majority of academics are abject cowards (if we weren't we'd take back the universities)

> Eugenics was the same. It was a Progressive way of thinking.

Again I think you're right, painful as the truth is. I met many oh-so humane "Humanists" eager to stop the suffering of those poor untermensch.

[robertlagrant]

> Everyone wants to imagine themselves "insanely powerful people" now. It's part of the sell.

I'm not sure this is true. Socialism does have a surprising foothold, but I think that's largely due to the larger number of people flowing through academia.