Bingbong
2d ago
Industrial Revolution is a series of processes that is widely copied and not a random windfall.
Bingbong
3d ago
Exactly. Good for the emerging world peoples and tax-avoidant who've been able to take advantage of the Gulf States, but the whole thing is borne on essentially a massive oil lottery win and all the neighboring states sans oil are absolute messes. Being able to just buy luxury space communism for a tiny population (which isn't going to necessarily last and has already crumbled before) for 50-100 years is pretty piss poor in the terms of broader civilizational accomplishment.
Bingbong
3d ago
Are we giving all the civilizational accomplishments of the Chinese to the Mongolians since they had whatever tenure as colonial overlords?
Bingbong
3d ago
He does seem to be drinking the Techbro Abundance Kool Aid a bit too hard and I'm skeptical he's going to be successful longterm. I do agree with you that I'd rather 'Arabs spend a lot of money trying to actually build productive things even if too ambitious' to the 'Whores' or 'Wahabbism' alternate routes on the tech tree, though.
Bingbong
3d ago
Brother the folks running Iran are not better. They also live off oil revenue and are degenerate.
Yeah but they've had periods where they've managed to genuinely better themselves and hold actual jobs and whatnot.
Bingbong
3d ago
Are they? Egyptians are pretty separate to Arabs especially the vintage that made Egypt a big deal initially. That's like saying the Byzantines were Turks.
Bingbong
3d ago
Broadly agreed. Iran atleast capable of putting together a solid situation whilst essentially everything South of there has nil chance outside of occasional massive petrochemical windfalls that they will inevitably squander in the longrun.
Bingbong
5d ago
Yeah Persians are way more organized and productive than the vast majority of the region. Turks might be able to compete, and other groups just can't really do functional society in absence of massive Oil lottery wins.
Bingbong
5d ago
Really? The US military kills lots of civilians in all prior wars, even up to the very end of the Afghan war they were accidentally hitting random people with suspicious tubes in their truck.
The conditions and scrutiny of most recent US military campaigns would be totally insane by any historical metric. 'You must only hit confirmed military targets in a hostile populace who have every incentive to deliberately misreport the status of casualties and have a bunch of weapons that can be profoundly lethal out of nowhere plus you have an aggressive media operation actively jumping on any excuse' is not a proposition that could really exist in any prior period.
Bingbong
6d ago
Though, admittedly, my first quick search for a small-sized tightly-clustered student population didn't support my theory. Only 56% of Los Alamos High School seniors took any AP exams, and only 43% passed at least one? What the hell? Do the good nuclear physicists just not have enough kids?
Surely there'd be effects like the senior personnel having more resources for boarding school/private education whilst the shitkickers on base are just putting their kids into the local school regardless. Also I'd imagine there are some nearby actual Los Alamosans who'd likely skew redneck/native as hell.
This is essentially the issue with so much Western discourse where people assume that 'middle class person in a Western Democracy' is the natural water level for human existence since they don't have any real understanding of how shit the world is/was a country over or a century back.
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