2rafa
1hr ago
Nicotine seems very tough to quit. A lot of people with not hugely addictive personalities who can control their gambling / drinking / weed use / etc seem to very much struggle with it.
2rafa
39m ago
Yeah I agree I don’t think there are major issues with regular nicotine consumption from vapes. One of the few smart policy decisions from the UK in recent years is allowing large scale advertising of vaping which I think has contributed to the decline in smoking. Vaping is essentially harmless as far as I’m aware, fears of health issues were always overblown.
2rafa
1hr ago
I think some form of this is going to be extremely popular. It would have to be sold as affirmation, as about confidence, that kind of thing.
2rafa
57m ago
Fine, yeah. But consider how many times the Soviet Union used extremely harsh measures to try to eradicate ethnic identity and still failed at doing so. Nothing is guaranteed. But the option is still better than either (a) fighting impotently and getting crushed or (b) doing nothing and guaranteeing failure.
Again, the only alternative is coup-complete and in that case the far right just doesn’t have the necessary amount of elite human capital versus the center and left as Tracing and others have (in my opinion) persuasively argued.
2rafa
2hr ago
Right. The Atlantic magazine article linked talks to a bunch of upper-middle class English-speaking Koreans, many of whom studied in the US (something very few Koreans ever do unless they come from rich families). The birthrate collapse can’t be blamed on them really, cities have been IQ shredders for affluent strivers for a thousand years, possibly forever.
2rafa
1hr ago
You don’t do it waiting for judgment day, you do it so that when the opportunity arises, and it may well do, you can eventually seize power. Not of the whole country, but of some kind of defensible territory. Look at the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The Jews waited 2000 years. But if you have a tight knit group, with money, that practices endogamy, that produces children, eventually you may well have the opportunity to exercise some kind of power. And on a more practical and immediate note, it also allows you to impose your own kind of order on a community, preserving a space for yourself and people like you even as the wider nation might shift radically.
2rafa
8hr 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.
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
9hr 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
9hr ago
2rafa
9hr ago
My suspicion has always been that the CCP elite is less committed to increasing the birthrate than is often suggested.
2rafa
9hr 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.
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.
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 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.
2rafa
2d 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
2d 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
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.
2rafa
2d ago
No need, in this scenario China has already won and has no real need not to keep trading with both parties.
2rafa
4d ago
Ashkenazim are genetically a mix between Jewish paternal and Italian maternal DNA. The origin population is theorized to be Jewish traders who moved to Italy under Roman rule and married Italian women whom they converted to Judaism.
Some Ashkenazim have small amounts of German or Frankish genetic ancestry, but significant Slavic ancestry is quite rare except in recent ex-Soviet immigrants to Israel of questionable halachic status (and that intermarriage occurred within the past century).
The European populations most similar genetically to Ashkenazi Jews are Sicilians and others who have a mixture of Italian and semitic/near East genetics.
2rafa
9d ago
Great post. It’s an extreme loss of state capacity for internal violence. Look at Mao’s China, successful eradication of a centuries-long opioid epidemic (in which as many as 1/4 to 1/3 of urban young men were heavy addicts) in fifteen years. And it wasn’t because he killed everyone; he killed the more obvious dealers, sure, but you actually don’t need to kill that many people to trigger prosocial change. If the US army rolls into the South Side of Chicago, or Baltimore, or St Louis, and starts blasting, you could quite possibly limit the death toll to three or low four figures in each city (ie barely above the actual homicide rate) and still seriously dissuade violent crime. And as you note, the Malayan Emergency, Mau Mau and really the entire history of British India show that you don’t actually need that many people or that much violence to accomplish this. 15,000 British ruled over 400,000,000 Indians. In 2003, 130,000 NATO forces ruled over 20,000,000 Afghans, a vastly more favorable ratio. And yet they lost, because they were too afraid to do the needful.
We were discussing South Africa earlier in the thread, and there are parallels to that situation (even though I disagree with apartheid and think the Boers are largely responsible for their presently poor condition). Even with the whole world against them, there is no way that 5 million Dutch and English in a country with a huge resource bounty and extensive arable land armed with literal nuclear weapons and modern technology, and bordered by countries that (unlike Israel’s foes) had no capable armed forces and definitely did not want a war with them, could not have held out indefinitely - even at a relatively high standard of living. But there was no will for it. The situation in American cities, as I noted in my post on Seattle a couple of months ago, is the same. It’s not a resource question, a few armed police could clear out the homeless permanently in a few hours. It’s a will question, like a hoarder who lives in filth because they just can’t throw anything away for psychological reasons even though there’s a dumpster right outside.
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.
A lot of European leftist politicians will know of him and have read at least some of what he’s written. That’s not a huge amount of influence but probably more than most successful philosophers have in the 21st century.
The most influential modern philosophers among politicians will be neolibs with very mainstream books like Stephen Pinker. But that’s questionable ‘influence’ really.
More options
Context Copy link