2rafa
2d ago
Germany, Sweden and continental countries are also much whiter and more homogenous than Australia, the UK
Is this actually true? In Germany in 2019, 40% of children born had at least one parent born abroad, the situation has accelerated further since then.
In the UK in 2021 77% of the population were White British or Irish. In Germany only 71% of the population have no “Migrationshintergrund”, however that 29% category does include remaining returning Ostsiedler. Nevertheless, I would assume the native percentage in Germany is around 75% or so too. 25% of Swedes had both parents born abroad or themselves immigrated, while an additional 10% had one parent born abroad and one in Sweden (which includes many people of immigrant descent). So again, Sweden is likely less than 75% native, although many migrants are Finns. Perhaps 75% of Australians are ethnically European according to most estimates.
So again, neither Germany nor Sweden retain a higher percentage of their indigenous populations than the UK. They are likely whiter due to differences in migrant country of origin, but not considerably so.
2rafa
2d ago
The difference is that in Europe existing parties tried desperately to keep out ‘new right’ populists almost everywhere so young people still believe things can actually change.
When the AfD joins a governing coalition and turns out - just like Meloni in Italy - to be another center-right party that in practice will do nothing about mass immigration, their supporters will probably abandon them pretty quickly. Le Pen in France is another example, she’s much less reactionary on immigration than people think (only Zemmour was the truly anti-immigration candidate). The Sweden Democrats have strongly moderated too, they’re barely to the left of the Danish Social Democrats if at all.
2rafa
2d ago
The argument re. London / England is indeed largely bullshit but the evidence that perhaps 5-10% of Lisbon was black in the 16th century is not inconsiderable, the Portuguese were in part the progenitors of the a European slave trade to the Americas, but the effort started with slave plantations in Madeira which was settled from the early 15th century. After the ravages of the Black Death Portugal was a weird place and, again, modern Portuguese do have significantly more sub-Saharan ancestry than other Europeans (including Spaniards, so this is not simply a matter of mixing during the Moorish era), including those in very rural parts of inland Portugal that have seen no major immigration for centuries, which is further evidence for the hypothesis.
2rafa
2d ago
I think your rational concession is likely correct. When very stressed or busy it is easy to make it to the evening without eating anything; over a prolonged period in many people this will mean a calorie deficit and therefore weight loss.
2rafa
2d ago
Completely agree, this was the most progress on illegal immigration since the 1990s and the GOP squandered it to pander to Trump who might not even win in November and won’t be able to do something better even if he does.
2rafa
2d ago
It doesn’t matter. Unless Trump has a trifecta with an unrealistic senate majority (which isn’t going to happen) this was better than ANYTHING he can accomplish in office. It is truly an unbelievable blackpill that the bill didn’t pass, it represented a huge concession from the Dems in an election year and the GOP were unfathomably retarded to reject it.
2rafa
2d ago
They have (like the Native Americans) a right to resist, but they also must accept being utterly vanquished in response.
Long story, cut very short. I think I lost my most expensive watch, and she hasn't been so kind as to check.
I’m convinced my brother’s sketchy (I would use the word ratchet, but I feel like that has connotations of being black, and she was definitely white) college hookup stole a very nice vintage cartier watch my grandmother gifted to me. It wasn’t worth a lot of money (I assume she took it because of the brand) but it was very valuable to me. I had left it in my parents kitchen because I wanted my dad to take it to be repaired.
It’s part of the reason I could never have a one night stand. The idea of letting a complete stranger into your house surrounded by all your valuables, private documents (even stuff like bills lying around, wallets full of cash and credit cards, medical data) and then going to sleep such that they could literally get up and help themselves to whatever they want and you wouldn’t even know if they’d taken something you don’t use often or if they’d just photographed private information or something seems so irresponsible. I’m probably just neurotic but my trust in the kindness of strangers isn’t that high.
And as you say, once it’s gone, what can you do? “Oh, I happen to have recently lost a necklace, can you look for it?”. It’s not as if you have enough to go to the police, and it might take weeks or months to realize it’s gone.
If you mean in Syria, not many US soldiers have died in the occupation of Syria.
I think they’re referring to the 240 US military personnel who were killed by Hezbollah (or rather its immediate precursor) in Beirut in 1983, which is the single highest one-day death toll for the US marines since Iwo Jima and for the entire US military since Vietnam.
Hezbollah has had a neighbouring country flooded with jihadists who are down right genocidal toward Hezbollah and Syrians of the same religious and ethnic background as Hezbollah. Why wouldn't they fight?
Israel has a neighboring territory flooded with jihadists who are downright and openly genocidal towards Israelis of Jewish ethnic and religious background, so I’m glad you’ve come around on the war in Gaza. In any case, Syrian jihadists were never particularly set on conquering Lebanon, it wasn’t a primary target for them and it would be just about the only thing that could unite the Maronites and the Shiites.
2rafa
2d ago
I think the main reason is that Portugal’s population was much smaller than the big Western European powers (especially England) and so they were quickly supplanted in Asia. The second golden age happened well after the 16th century and was finished off by the great earthquake and subsequent war.
Portuguese do have more sub-Saharan African ancestry than other European peoples (iirc around 2.5%) because of African slavery in places like Madeira and domestically in Lisbon before they started large scale plantations in Brazil, but their PISA scores are comparable to other European countries with much lower percentage SSA DNA, so I don’t think the reason for their decline can be expressed primarily in HBD terms.
2rafa
3d ago
Well, we can just make it Portland. Or Skid Row. The problem comes when every downtown starts to look like Skid Row.
2rafa
3d ago
Hard to tell what the Chinese game plan is here. The partial ambition for their intervention in support of the rebels was to deal with the Chinese crime lords who were tolerated by the junta and who were involved in a lot of corruption, scamming, bribery, organized crime in China proper and harboring wanted Chinese fugitives that the CCP didn’t want to let disappear. But if the whole country collapses that problem will only get worse for the Chinese since absolute lawlessness will likely only allow for further criminal activity, make it easier to disappear and so on.
2rafa
3d ago
It’s interesting. The thing that seems to be driving popular outrage against mass immigration in Ireland and Canada is that the government does it with a smile on its face, calls those who oppose it bigots, winks at them, then dares them to blink. Kind of like being patronized by an annoying teacher.
By contrast, politicians in Britain, America and Australia, which have the same migration situation but less monolithically progressive politics and media, will publicly say more should be done to control illegal immigration, stop the boats, it’s not right, it’s a crisis, propose some measures blah blah (I mean even Biden does this to some extent) but then actually do nothing. And in a way, that seems to stifle some of the dissent.
There has been some of this thing (rioting against migrant camps) in Britain, but proportionally it has been much, much rarer than in Ireland. And in Canada one senses even normal centrists are getting increasingly angry about their own situation. I wonder if the Irish politicians will clock on and embrace the Tory policy of talking the talk on migration and then just not doing anything about it (or indeed increasing it further).
You really do encounter some idiosyncratic characters now and again. It sounds fake, but the boyfriend of one of my good friends, an Arab woman, for about a year at college was a black Muslim African guy (raised in Europe, but first generation and his family mostly still lived in their home country) who was a huge fan of Moldbug and Pat Buchanan. He was ambivalent about HBD/The Bell Curve (which I’ve always found is a remarkably widely-read book for wrongthink) but would discuss it with almost everyone he did coke with, which was a lot of people.
2rafa
3d ago
I’m sympathetic to monarchism (I mean I live in a monarchy, and I don’t think it would be a worse place if the king had much more power). I do think it’s a failure state to be aware of, though.
2rafa
3d ago
Respect for the wisdom and status of the elderly is a feature of many societies including those that Nietzscheans would not consider to practice slave morality.
2rafa
3d ago
I think views on conversion in Hinduism vary widely by religious flavor since there are so many different kinds of Hindu belief. For example the Hare Krishnas, despite their new-age-cult reputation, are situated within Hinduism proper and obviously accept, embrace and proselytize to converts. Historically caste was based on profession and there were limited ways in which people could change caste (for example some Brahmins historically changed to the warrior/leader caste iirc). Today the system is more ossified. Converts to Hinduism who have no Hindu background almost always do so for marriage and so would become part of the caste they are marrying into; I know of some cross-caste marriages in India, I'm not sure which caste the children become. Hypothetically if some larger group converted to Hinduism they could be assigned a caste, although there has been a debate about whether the government might issue a "no caste" certificate.
Most Hindus have no problem with foreign converts to Hinduism and the Hare Krishna founder who brought it to the West is often quite respected by at least some religious Hindus, but perhaps it would be best to ask one of our Indian regulars like @self_made_human.
2rafa
3d ago
I would hope that my ideal regime would help to make me (and you) not a useless parasite. But perhaps that just means you have more self-awareness than me!
2rafa
3d ago
Again, I don't think I or @To_Mandalay are defending this viewpoint, but I've seen this perspective argued many times online. The argument is that for most of European modernity ancient philosophy, Greek and Roman texts, language, culture, architecture, aesthetics, poetry, theater and so on were core parts of the way young men of wealth and power were educated.
These texts obviously largely predated early modern Christian Europe, although the way they were interpreted did not. Even in the 19th century British imperial administrators learnt Latin and Greek (Classics), studied Classical Civilization, went on Grand Tours to see the remnants of Roman civilization and so on. They could quote Virgil and recite Greek aphorisms, and saw themselves in the tradition of their civilizations.
Therefore, as Mandalay says, the argument goes that even though they were (mostly) Christians, they retained some aspect of the pre-Christian or extra-Christian European identity, which held Christianity's egalitarian / slave morality aspects in check. As this faded by the mid 20th century, Christianity and its implications paradoxically or unexpectedly became more central to the way that elite culture imagined itself even though religious observance itself began to fade from the early 1960s.
2rafa
3d ago
Monotheism, certainly Abrahamic religion, seems uniquely good at supplanting paganism. Christian missionaries in West Africa and Southeast Asia - even under full colonial rule - often barely even attempted to convert Muslims whom the Arabs had already converted, for example, because they always rejected Christianity and it caused social tensions and civil conflict when they killed or expelled the white missionaries. Pagans almost always embraced it. Muhammad very quickly replaced polytheism in Arabia. Even where it took longer there were major inroads in the Indian subcontinent, in East Asia and so on. In the Americas it happened quite quickly.
It took just a few centuries for the Egyptians to abandon paganism (there were a couple of remote sanctuaries that made it to 500, but most Egyptians had converted within 150 years of Christianity being introduced). By contrast, it took 800-1000 years for the Arabs to convert the majority of Egyptians from Christianity to Islam, often using much harsher methods. To some extent it's almost a historical quirk that some of the Asian civilizations retained aspects of their earlier religious traditions; without the Portuguese and British an Islamic conquest of the Hindus was probably inevitable, and in the case of the Chinese the Taiping rebellion which involved a twisted form of quasi-Christian belief was only defeated with the help of the British and French. By the time Christians conquered Japan in 1945 they didn't really care to convert defeated populations anymore.
Pagans can arguably be easily converted because the Abrahamic God can initially live 'alongside' their other gods, and then supplant them/become dominant, and then the others can be abandoned or forgotten. This is, of course, what happened to the Jews themselves in their ancient history.
2rafa
3d ago
The reasons Americans use it is that during the heyday of American civic nationalism that saw a resurgence of interest in the War of Independence around the bicentenary in 1976 one of the big things that was supposed to be different about America was that Americans were 'citizens' (ie. members) of a country rather than 'subjects' of (ie. submissive to) the Crown. I don't think it was really about the empire (at least post-18th century) or British identity per se.
I completely agree. All political radicals face this issue, no communist thinks they’d be a manual laborer on the collective farm, they think they’d be a playwright in good standing or an academic or on the politburo.
But I also think you need to look at our current level of economic development. If a Western country became an absolute monarchy tomorrow there wouldn't be millions of peasants because farmwork has been largely automated; it would just look like a modern country that is an absolute dictatorship, and there are many examples of those.
2rafa
3d ago
I agree. Any Indian could legally move to England through the entire period of the British occupation of India. There were even Indian MPs, Indian students at elite public schools and British universities and so on. But there was little demand to immigrate. A big reason for mass immigration is ease of travel and mass media. The UK only imposed restrictions on Commonwealth/Empire immigration years after WW2.
2rafa
3d ago
I don’t disagree with the nuance you discuss, but it’s also true that people don’t necessarily fully think through the implications of the political and ideological positions they advocate. This is a big point of Moldbug’s: by our standards many of the key thinkers of the enlightenment were deeply conservative/reactionary, they didn’t seek to dismantle a lot of the things that subsequent liberal thinkers did, but they nevertheless established forms of ideological enquiry that through processes like the Hegelian dialectic created modern progressivism in a continuous process.
It can both be true that 1776 leads inexorably to 2024 and that none of the founding fathers would be remotely happy with the current ruling ideology of the United States. Similarly, it can be true that the early Christians established a religion that had a tendency towards universalism and universal equality even though the early Christians still believed in the vast majority of social institutions (slavery, patriarchy, tribalism) of their age.
I agree that the dissident right is overdosing on hopium regarding antisemitism.
With the exception of some of the Muslims (and not even all of them, since many at elite universities are largely secularized DEI libs who do not or barely follow any tenets of Islam) these protestors are not racially or religiously hostile to Jews in and of themselves. At most they consider Jews to be ‘white people’, whom they may dislike, but that is hardly the basis for a coalition with white rightists.If this is how young progressives protest against what they perceive as ‘white ethnonationalism’ on the far side of the world, it does not take a great intellect to imagine how they feel about white ethnonationalism in the United States, which is the central policy position on the dissident right.
It is cathartic for far rightists to see Jewish people finally getting their supposed ‘comeuppance’ for supporting progressive policies in the diaspora while defending an ethnic homeland in Israel (allegations of hypocrisy were not unfounded, although many did ‘pick a side’ and advocate liberalism in both, like Soros, or in neither, like many Jewish conservatives).
In practice, though, the most strategic thing for the dissident right to do would be to shut up. Each major Jewish donor or lobbyist who leaves the left because of its anti-Israel activism, even if they merely become politically neutral rather than center-right (let alone hard right, let alone far right) is a win for conservatives. Richard Hanania made this point more eloquently.
The coming together of leftist and rightist antisemitism is not particularly likely. Blue haired DEI activists who think Israel is a white nationalist fascist police state oppressing innocent people of color (much like Amerikkka amirite) are unlikely to agree that the progressive ideology, media, art and culture they love, which in fact is the impetus behind their antizionism itself (!) is in fact degenerate art and subversion created by the very Jews they are protesting against. The protestors like everything the rightists dislike about Jews except their zionism, while the antisemitic far right sympathize on some level with ethnonationalism but dislike everything else.
However, I disagree that antisemitism will not rise. It is clearly rising, as is visible in everything from comments on mainstream YouTube and TikTok content, in Zoomers memes and in real life among younger people, both white and non-white in the West. That does not mean that things will necessarily get very bad for Jews, at least in the Anglosphere (it was still much worse a century ago), but it is undeniable.
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