2rafa
4hr ago
Klaus Schwab
The turning of a befuddled, milquetoast neoliberal German finance professor who started a conference into the arch-villain of modernity is quite something.
2rafa
5hr ago
Like I said, it wouldn’t come to it. Chinese trade isn’t enough to keep Texas alive. It all comes back to the fact that secession without a comprehensive, EEA-style free trade and movement treaty would be suicide. A single sanction prohibiting US-domiciled corporations from doing business in Texas (which would be a day-one emergency bill through congress) would be enough to kill the Texan economy. The US couldn’t survive the loss of 10+ states for long, but Texas? Yeah, it would be weakened, but it probably could.
The question is ‘how much is the average Texan prepared to suffer for independence?’ After all, unlike Russia, Texas is a democracy. The US would gladly welcome back smart refugees. The average Texan is not ethnically or culturally discriminated against by the rest of the United States. They share the majority of their culture, religions and values. How badly do they believe in independence, how much is the average car mechanic in Fort Worth or defense attorney in Dallas prepared to sacrifice to live in broadly the same kind of state they already live in?
2rafa
5hr ago
My suspicion has always been that the CCP elite is less committed to increasing the birthrate than is often suggested.
2rafa
5hr ago
I largely agree. Most historic societies have had similar things (chariot races etc). Arguably in a more functioning society there would be even more need, because there would be higher birth rates and as such more young men.
2rafa
5hr ago
Yeah, and the United States could close shipping traffic to the Gulf (which in any case requires ships from China to take the long way around) and could block imports from California.
2rafa
1d ago
Is the primary complaint of women in Korea really that the men don’t have enough money, then? That hasn’t been widely reported.
2rafa
1d ago
I agree, but none of that means Germans and British and French are likely to recognize a hard-right independent Texas without the approval of the rUS. The Union was much less powerful internationally and up against a stronger foe in the civil war and even then no other country officially recognized the CSA.
Really the only optimistic case for Texas secession is a full breakup of the US with limited hard feelings and no large and powerful bicoastal blue bloc, which seems unlikely.
2rafa
1d ago
No need, in this scenario China has already won and has no real need not to keep trading with both parties.
The PMC would leave, the media (both domestic and international) would frame it as a racist restoration of Dixie, the demographics of the seceded states would be terrible, the European countries and likely all of Latin America (which is either leftist or allied with Washington, neither of which are sympathetic to a free conservative south) would sanction it to hell, all national and international businesses would leave, unemployment would skyrocket, a lack of federal subsidies would make programs that keep the underclass in these states under control and pliable impossible, what would be left?
A small population of true believer white elites; middle class people of all races who would suffer tremendously; some Hispanics; a vast population of poor black people who would be no fans of the new arrangement. Little viable industry or commerce. The only way states are seceding is a peaceable National Divorce with an explicit and structured economic union between the new countries, a neutral court of arbitration, something like the European Union pre-1994. Even that would be tough for the South.
I think stuff like this is good, and I think red state governors should be encouraged to do more of it.
However, most of the big issues the country faces can’t be solved by red states. Immigration in particular is a federal issue. If the US government issues visas for a hundred million inhabitants of the third world to come to the US, Texas can’t do anything about it other than secede.
And I think people overestimate the will for secession, too. Most Texans are politically inactive and see themselves as Americans. They are not willing to risk any reduction in quality of life as a result of political change. An independent Texas would be a pariah state - the US would force all Western countries not to recognize it, so its passport would be worthless. Most smart and wealthy people would emigrate. The state would be sanctioned and embargoed into poverty.
A committed Democratic President can destroy states that nullify federal instruction without ever sending a single soldier in. They can instruct banks to make minor changes to who they do business with and how that would destroy their economies in months. They can pull funding for key infrastructure. They can stymie interstate commerce by claiming that Texas or whoever isn’t following the rules, which would destroy their economy further.
Red states could challenge this, but SCOTUS (even now with Kavanaugh and Barrett much more leftist than anticipated on every non-Tradcath issue) wouldn’t help them and cases would be tied up in legal wrangling for years, all the while anyone with any money or skills would emigrate.
2rafa
2d ago
But for all this ridiculousness, these seem to be the only way of maintaining key social technologies including fundamental prosocial memes, at least in the West.
Secular reactionaries can come up with countless legitimate reasons for many aspects of traditional morality, but it seems to mean nothing in the West without “you will go to the fire pit for eternity if you break the rules”.
“Why not have free love?”“Well, actually, you know various studies have shown that things like promiscuity can have deleterious effects on partner bonding with later partners, increasing the risk of blah blah blah…”
Secular justifications for traditional social technology just don’t work with normal people of average and below ability, and even with most above them. Yes it’s stupid, but it’s better for our children to believe it than not.
You don’t need to believe it. You just need your kids to believe it, and religious schooling and so on can accomplish that with at least some degree of efficacy.
Secular society has no competent alternative to religious social engineering. All alternatives so far have failed.
2rafa
2d ago
Monkeys are trained to pick coconuts in Thailand commercially, that’s the central example of monkey labor as far as I know. There have been a few historic examples like the baboon in South Africa trained to be a railroad signalman (albeit one under supervision, apparently). I don’t think we really want large numbers of semi-wild monkeys living near populated places in Western countries; in the countries that do have them labor is usually cheap enough that it might not be worth it for many things.
If I was a white gentile I’d probably become a tradcath. I have no particular fondness for Catholicism, but I get the impression many tradcaths don’t either, especially when it comes to the Pope, the Vatican and the actual hierarchical structure and institution of the Catholic Church in practice.
As @coffee_enjoyer said, you need to pick some kind of religious narrative, and almost all invented or new age religions fail and have failed. Tight knit traditionalist religious groups have the best chance of being able to preserve functioning communities.
The only viable option is to pick an existing one. That leaves you with various insular forms of Protestantism, like the Mennonites/Amish, but they take few converts and would require an unlikely degree of adaptation to a new life, with Orthodoxy, which is very ethnically tied to some specific groups like Greeks and Russians in the US, or with Catholicism. Mormonism is in rapid decline and is very goofy. Tradcath groups see many converts, many from mainstream Catholicism but sometimes from outside it too.
There may be fundamental issues with Christianity having some kind of inherent leftward drift (I think the evidence is inconclusive) but in the near/medium term this is probably the best option.
It feels like intelligence agencies could surely find out. Trudeau is at hundreds of events where a drinking glass or whatever could be quietly lifted and the CIA surely has Castro’s DNA from something over the years, plus one of his biological daughters defected to the West and her DNA could be used too.
2rafa
3d 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
3d 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
4d ago
The movement largely consisted of working class veterans who saw jewish communists take over Munich and have a predecessor to a BLM rally and decided to shut it down.
Jews were not mostly disloyal to Germany. Most were not involved in politics at all. Jews were well represented in the Freikorps beyond Prussia despite their substantially antisemitic character in the North especially re. certain chants, among them heroic anti-communists like Weissenstein (killed by communists defending Essen in the Ruhr insurrection) and men like Ernst Kantorowicz, who was of course later famous for The King’s Two Bodies and remained a lifelong German patriot even after the Holocaust.
Ernst and Gertrud Kantorowicz were typical of German Jews…They were passionate nationalists, as völkisch as you could get. Like other Germans, they celebrated the outbreak of war as a momentous chance for national renewal. The late historian Fritz Stern remarked that the passionate German response to the war went beyond mere patriotism. Many intellectuals, especially, saw the guns of August as a triumphant release from dead-end bourgeois culture, a call to a new nobility and manliness.
In summer 1914, during the first frenzy of battle, even German Zionists declared that there was “no difference” between Jews and other Germans. Martin Buber wrote enthusiastically in August, “Never has the concept of the Volk been such a reality to me than during these last weeks.”
And yet years later these were the same Jews blamed both for Germany’s defeat and the Treaty of Versailles, and even amid that, many still served in right-wing anticommunist paramilitaries. The great majority of German Jews were apolitical and loyal to their country.
But that isn’t even the question here. The majority of German Jews fled the Nazis well before 1939. If it had been a mere expulsion of German Jews, the few hundred thousand would be removed and the whole chapter would be just another expulsion of many. What happened, however, was the invasion and occupation of other countries and the murder of their Jewish populations. Greek or Dutch Jews were not Germans or (in almost all cases) communists, and had no intention of becoming so.
And the Soviet Union’s role in WW2’s early years was as Nazi ally whose territorial conquest of Poland was accomplished hand-in-hand with the Germans. By the late 1930s many old Bolshevik Jews had already been purged, even Yagoda was dead, and you seem to ignore that the predominant impulse behind Soviet policy in Eastern Europe by this time certainly was gentile. Was alleged (minority) Jewish involvement in German communist movements enough to justify cleansing the entirety of continental Europe of them, as was the plan? I don’t think you’ve made a case for that.
2rafa
4d ago
The two main changes (in addition to planning reform) that a government that actually wanted to restore some kind of positive economic trajectory would have to do, namely abolishing the NHS and replacing it with European style healthcare and means-testing the state pension, are so catastrophically unpopular that they can never happen. It is what it is, it’s not like the UK is a failed state, it’s just in slow decline and has been for a long time, still a very nice place to live by any standards.
White reactionaries are performatively anti-zionist and say they support white ethnocentrism and oppose Jewish ethnocentrism. Your criteria for being a Jew who does not oppose white ethnocentrism is to be like Ron Unz, who in American Pravda blames Jews for literally everything that he (and the right more broadly) dislikes that occurred in America in the entire 20th century. This is no different to saying that a black person is anti-white unless they agree with the most extreme anti-black position imaginable and agree that all problems in modern America are overwhelmingly the fault of black pathology. It is a requirement well above that which can be expected of even a self-aware individual who agrees with you politically and accepts their fair share of tribal responsibility.
Unz is a caricature, the equivalent of the most extreme self-hating white who believes that black people built this country and that we’d be living in Wakanda if the pale skinned barbarians had not ruined everything. It’s not a standard you would accept for your own people in any kind of political relationship or alliance. Is there any way for a reactionary Jew to be tolerant of white ethnocentrism without agreeing to blame Jewish people for (at least almost) everything wrong with the modern West? I’ve asked you this question several times and the impression I get is ‘no’.
Since pathological self-hatred is rare among non-northwest Europeans, you’ve created an impossible standard for Jewish reactionaries to live up to (‘denounce your entire people and agree to take absolute responsibility for everything wrong with modernity or you’re subversive’) which you would (and do) consider it unjust to apply in reverse to your own people, or perhaps even to other non-Jewish peoples. It is not even enough to abandon Judaism, to intermarry with white gentiles, and to have no particular affinity for Israel, since your demand requires the active, Unz-style repudiation of Jewishness itself on a genetic-memetic level as fundamentally destructive and anti-civilization, a demand you would never accept if anyone appeared to make it toward those of your own ethnic origin.
2rafa
4d ago
Of course, as you know even Turks and (largely Sephardic at that time) Jews were ‘white’ in the colonial and early independent American hierarchy, which was tripartite (white, native, black). Nevertheless ‘pure’ along with the rest of the quote and a desire to preserve that purity suggests this is not merely a matter of being partial to one’s own tribe but an actual judgment of the gradation of races. There is no doubt that while many founding Anglo-Americans were willing to accept European settlers of diverse backgrounds as fellow citizens they wished to preserve a predominantly Anglo character and ethnic supermajority in their new country. My original point was that WASPs did practice in-group tribalism and loyalty, it just faded or they could not keep up with (or did not wish to stop) the rate of inbound migration. There was consternation about losing Philadelphia, Boston, New York to the white ethnics. As late as Lovecraft’s time it was a topic of considerable debate, although by that point the ship had long sailed.
2rafa
4d 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.
A similarly stupid but very popular online question.
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