2rafa
23d ago
As I’ve said here before (I think last year when we had the last big Argentina discussion) I completely agree with you that some unique quirks like the ability for state governments to effectively print money are substantially responsible for Argentina’s condition.
But I think that again you discount the weirdness of Argentina. The stagnation is unusual for a population of that quality and historic development even with severe economic mismanagement. Look at the regular catastrophic economic decisions taken by successive postwar Italian governments, for example, the endless (stupid, to appease unions and voters in the short-term) devaluation of the Lira. And yet Italy saw a huge amount of growth and was (the worst parts of the south excepted) broadly a prosperous modern country well before full Euro integration. Franco’s abortive attempt at autarky was quickly fixed. Ireland saw a huge economic boom after liberalization. Yes, these examples all have confounding factors. Yes, you can’t ignore proximity, EU economic integration even pre-Euro and so on. But the sheer mismatch between human capital and population prosperity in Argentina versus country of origin (ie Spain/Italy) is unmatched in any settler population, anywhere in the world.
Even bad politicians, provided they don’t literally abolish even the last vestiges of a market economy, which even Peron didn’t, don’t typically result in growth charts as bad as Argentina’s.
2rafa
4d ago
Princeton and Brown both have gentile presidents (their names are Christian and Christina, respectively).
2rafa
21d ago
Yeah yeah you can’t believe anything the government says etc etc. This is a trite, banal, useless, pointless, infantile, irrelevant and altogether worthless criticism. It says nothing and means nothing. Yes, I think the broad outline of events as described in the article is true. There is little reason to believe otherwise. Likewise, there are truths discussed in the Russian and Chinese state press. In this case, this has to do with a longstanding and very real series of events that have been unfolding for many years, mostly in public view. The real sheeple, as ever, question everything without believing anything, which means - of course - that they know nothing at all.
2rafa
22d ago
All great civilisations have a death drive. Consider the fin de siècle or Edwardian obsession with the occult, or the proliferation of millenarian new age movements at the height of postwar American dominance.
2rafa
15hr ago
Your gym will have a list, presumably you can ask for someone more into cardio and then try a few to see whose personality fits.
2rafa
1d ago
Franklin considered the Saxons (whom he was discussing in this instance) to be white, but the other Germans to be ‘tawny/swarthy’ (like the Spaniards and Italians), unlike the ‘pure white’ English.
leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.
2rafa
1d ago
No, for the far left (who do not, for obvious reasons, see their ideology and worldview as Jewish trickery)! I understand that was unclear, and edited my answer.
2rafa
1d ago
It wouldn’t necessarily limit Dem presidents much, but it would allow a GOP President much more discretion against mass illegal immigration. Given the Dems will do what they want anyway, that would have been a win.
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
9d ago
Figures in the UK and US are skewed by immigration. In upper-middle class circles the average height of a man of European descent is 6’ or taller.
2rafa
13d ago
I don’t support regime change ops in Iran, but I think the regime has questionable vitality now and, while not at late-80s-USSR level, is kind of coasting on inertia and the successful purging of most internal resistance more than it has huge domestic support.
2rafa
15hr ago
I bet there are a lot of people who hire a trainer once or twice a week for years (possibly decades) who wouldn’t have the motivation to do it by themselves, and in their case it makes a big difference.
2rafa
1d ago
That wasn’t really my point, which was that I don’t think these protests increase the popularity of the dissident right policy platform at all, which is fundamentally hostile to the interests and politics of almost all these protestors.
Do you see the leftist DEI advocates and BLM fans protesting as ‘true’ rather than fake opposition now that they oppose Israel?
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
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.
Yeah I completely agree with everything you say here. But Malay discrimination against the Chinese (or indeed Bangladeshis) has no basis in Muslim scripture and isn’t justified religiously locally; the Chinese are infidels, sure, but so are the Christian bumiputera who benefit from affirmative action policies. In fact the Malaysia constitution guarantees that Christian bumiputera get the special privileges etc. What happens in Malaysia is just the standard thing that happens with market dominant minorities anywhere in the world, and compared to the historic treatment of Jews, the way the Ugandans treated the Indians, arguably even the way that the South Africans treat the whites now, the Chinese actually have it very good.
As for the Malay Arab worship/LARP, I’ve commented on it before (it’s far from unique, the Maldivians engage in it too, even more northern Desi Muslims do to some extent). The point is that racial discrimination against foreign or minority Muslims (not non-Muslims) in the Islamic world isn’t justified using scripture but by paeans to nativism or for economic purposes. The same is true in the Middle East. Everyone knows that Islam itself doesn’t encourage ethnic separatism and is a universalist religion.
2rafa
4d ago
It would be remiss not to say that the national mood around leftist riots has shifted considerably since 2020.
2rafa
5d ago
Probably Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens type stuff. Tucker and Musk obviously alluded to it. You don’t have to far on Twitter to find right-wing antisemitism.
2rafa
5d ago
Nigeria has ongoing sectarian conflict with Islamist terrorists in the North and Northeast and between Fulani pastoralists and settled people that involve hundreds of murders on a very regular basis (all of which are recorded by the military). The US murder rate also spiked in 2001 for obvious reasons.
Do you believe the true homicide rate in West Africa is on the order of 50-90 per 100k as in these high crime American cities? What do you think the ballpark figure is?
2rafa
6d ago
If what you say is true, why hasn’t the judiciary destroyed Google for the fact that fewer than 15% of software engineers there are black?
2rafa
8d ago
Would even a conventional war between NATO and Russia really be decided by artillery shell production rates?
To some extent Pygonyangification is a risk, but the current elite already has the power to ruin your life, strip you of your livelihood and take your money (something that effectively means you're going to have to move out of Manhattan anyway), so what's the difference?
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