MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
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User ID: 1678
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
11mo ago
Top people are the ones who need the most loyalty, instead the WASP-elites are surrounded by foreigners while much of the elite are actual foreigners. This puts the elite and the people in different universes, while dismantling any sense of noblesse oblige.
This is an important argument but it would be difficult to combine it with recruiting the best from the world. You'd have to essentially put in practice an officially-sanctioned discriminatory system that tells the best and the brightest from abroad that they will always operate under a glass ceiling despite their abilities. That in of itself would act as a great repellent for any prospective talent. Why work hard in a society where there are limited avenues for personal growth?
So in my view, you'd essentially have to make a choice: either you welcome the best from the world over but with differing loyalties or you aim to consolidate a very homogenous elite but accept that their capabilities will be less. You can't have both. The US elite apparently chose the former and so far, at least, it isn't obvious to me that the US has suffered from it. That may change, then again, it may not.
Importing tens of thousands of Chinese people into the university system, getting China up to speed, and then trying to keep them making plastic toys won't work. They were obviously going to bring a lot of that know how home.
True, but a lot of them also ended up staying. A non-trivial fraction of top AI talent comes from China. Almost 90% of Chinese postgrads choose to stay in the US. In my view, the US has benefited more than China from this exchange. Just as the US has benefited more than India from their brain drain.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
11mo ago
Why wouldn't they return to China?
Twenty or even ten years ago they probably wouldn't because the opportunities back home would have been meager, so instead of the US they'd likely move to Western countries without such a racial system of institutionalised discrimination. That may still happen to some extent, but the difference today is that their domestic research ecosystem is already world-class. That makes all the difference, so there is not only a pull-factor but it's combined with a push-factor (China initative).
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
11mo ago
I suppose the argument is that one shouldn't treat all ethnic Chinese as a giant blog of Borg working in perfect co-ordination. While the Chinese government and some of their VC firms do act like you describe, many ordinary Chinese people have nothing to do with it but were unfairly targeted in a broad campaign that often was remarkably crass in its target-selection - as even former administrators of the program now admit.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Countries are shifting supply chains away from China
Yes, but China's share of world's manufacturing output keeps increasing anyway. This merely tells us that they are no longer as dependent on foreign suppliers as in the past and the domestic champions are outgrowing them.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Also, forgot to mention: where do you think people are supposed to keep those big, heavy cargo bikes? Most of the apartment buildings in Europe don’t even have elevators.
Outdoors. It depends which city you live in but crime tends to be significantly lower than in the US generally speaking. That said, I agree with your points that some naïve center-left Americans have a very rose-tinted view of how car-dependent cities are in Europe, even in fairly progressive cities. But there has certainly been a huge amount of progress and it just keeps snowballing.
what makes them choose other modes of transportation than driving (spoiler: most of the time it is simply the cost).
This isn't so obvious anymore, depending on your class situation. There's more than enough of "climate conscious" middle-class families with fairly comfortable incomes who may have a car for occasional usage, but who typically use bikes and public transportation for most daily needs. It also depends whether we're talking about someone owning a house or not. Most families in big cities live in large apartments.
Remember the big energy crisis that Europe was supposed to be doomed with for years to come? Yeah, it's pretty much gone. Worth pointing out two things.
First, natural gas demand has been much weaker than anticipated since China is weaker. Indeed, there is now a surplus of gas in the world market.Some people claim that "last winter we got lucky", but this doesn't explain how gas storage is at historically high levels. Germany, Europe's biggest gas consumer, has an excellent position going into the autumn.
Second, renewable energy is beating new records by the day. In Northern Europe, electricity prices are bouncing around zero and occasionally dipping below the line into negative territory.There's also a structural trend of rapidly growing renewable energy, which means that even as gas prices return to historical norms, it is unlikely that consumption will stay the same. The shift now underway to renewable and clean energy (e.g. nuclear) is permanent. Russia had its chance at energy blackmail and it turned out it was a dud.
I think there are a couple of conclusions to draw from this. The most important one is that scaremongering and hysteria rarely pays to listen to. We can broaden this to a discussion about climate change or even immigration. Sure, there will be issues, but the doomsters on both issues were proven wrong historically. So were the doomsters on Europe's supposedly "permanent energy crisis" thesis.Then why do people persist by wallowing in fear? I don't have a clear answer but perhaps there are evolutionary adaptions that were beneficial to those who were erring on the side of caution?
Another important takeaway for me is once a crisis gets going you should never underestimate humanity's capacity for adaption and change. The system we inhabit may look brittle, but it's probably a lot more sturdy than we give it credit for. Some of us still remember the panicked predictions about the food supply chains breaking down when Covid hit, and plenty people stocked up on tons of canned food, often for no good reason. Some even talked of famine.
Perhaps being the optimist just isn't socially profitable. You're taken more seriously by being a "deeply concerned" pessimist. If this is true, then social incentives will be skewed to having the bad take. People who will be aware of this will probably draw the right conclusions in times when most other folks are losing their minds in fear.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
I don't think anyone has had a spotless record in this war. US intelligence got the invasion right but then publicly claimed that Kiev was in danger of falling 'within days'. How did that pan out?
But the facts speak their own language: if Ukraine was doing well, they wouldn't need to ask for NATO materiel when the same NATO countries no longer have "easy" choices available to them, such as mothbolled ex-Soviet stuff.
At any rate, trying to handicap the chances of UA victory wasn't the primary aim of my OP, but rather to question the assumption that victory in this conflict for the pro-NATO side is of such titantic importance that the media and the political class would have us believe. As I outlined in my OP, Russia is unlikely to be a long-term winner even in the event of battlefield victory and Ukraine's importance has also been grossly overstated.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
And that was still an improvement in most QoL measures over the previous socialist government.
Interesting, have you lived in Somalia during this period?
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
An anonymous substacker has written up a good piece on the Rise of the West. Essentially, he comes to the conclusion that the divergence began in the 1000-1500 A.D. period and that subsequent colonisation efforts by Europe of the rest of the world was simply an outgrowth of those earlier advantages.
This of course upends the familiar trope of "the West got rich by the backs of the Third World" so popular with leftists in the West and in countries like India, across the political spectrum. I bring this up because if the poor countries of the world today have any hope of catching up, they should first re-examine honestly why they fell behind in the first place. Yet I see precious little of that, except mostly moral grandstanding about the evils of the exploitative West.
This also has domestic political implications because a lot of white guilt-driven narratives are sprung from the narrative that the West got rich by exploitation and thus the logical corollary is that evil white people should repent (preferably through monetary reparations). The narrative that colonisation was simply a natural outgrowth of European pre-existing advantages that grew over time naturally undermines it. One could also note that the Barbary slave trade, or the slave auctions in the Ottoman Empire, shows that the Third World was far from innocent. But of course these historical facts don't have high political payoffs in the contemporary era, so they are ignored or underplayed.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
6mo ago
Why do you think the book isn't doing gangbusters
Because the thesis of the book is wrong. News recently came out that 94% of new jobs went to PoC in the US, thanks to corporate pledges in the wake of the BLM riots. A straight reading of the civil rights law would have prevented that, so clearly the rulebook isn't as important as Hanania claims. The people who claim that the system is run on anti-White animus are correct and Hanania is wrong.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Perhaps a silly metaobservation, but I am somewhat disappointed with a schlubby nerd like SBF being the villain of our time. Fraudsters in the past used to be a lot more charismatic and often partied with the jetset. Even Madoff was known as having a huge stash of cocaine, going to parties with supermodels etc. SBF bagged Caroline Ellison and did a bunch of weird nootropical experiments while playing video games like LoL.
I can't help but feel that our culture has regressed into becoming more boring - perhaps suitable for the hyperdigital age. I know it may sound weird, but I think who the bad guys are in any society says a lot about that culture. And I'm afraid SBF being our villain says a lot of bad things about ours.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
8mo ago
Vivek Ramaswamy has written an article on his foreign policy doctrine, focusing on China.
He is squarely taking aim at the "neocons and liberal internationalists", in other words the two main constituents of what Obama referred to as "the Blob" dominating foreign policy in D.C. He is predictably being called an isolationist and WaPo columnists are freaking out.
WaPo columnists themselves are not relevant but they are often mouthpieces for more powerful interests. Trump was hated for many things but one underappreciated aspect of why the Blob hated him was his instinct not to start new wars. In fact, he is one of the few presidents in recent memory who did not start a new war and he tried to get out of Syria - twice - but was undermined by his own bureaucracy.
Vivek is a much smarter guy than Trump, so I wonder if the Blob would be able to run circles around him the way they did around Trump. I doubt it and I suspect they doubt it too, which is why I think a campaign to destroy Vivek is likely to ramp up before too long. Trump couldn't be controlled outright but at least he could be misled.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
You know things are bad when even liberals are despairing at DeSantis' poor performance. I think her analysis is mostly correct. Voters don't really care about issues so much as who is the strong candidate. Trump is funny but also strong. DeSantis is neither - despite being the actual principled conservative by comparison.
Given Kamala's own exposure as a weak air-head, it seems almost inevitable to me that we will see Biden vs Trump once again in 2024. I try not to be ageist but American politics is really becoming a gerontocracy. The refusal of Dianne Feinstein to step down is par for the course.
That said, while I believe the author is right about the primal nature of Trump's appeal, it's probably a mistake to ascribe his popularity entirely to it. I suspect many in the media still haven't understood that he rose as a consequence of structural changes that will outlast him. Seeing the GOP as the more anti-war party would never have crossed my mind during the Bush era when accusations of insufficient liberal patriotism was rife. Now it appears to me that the veneration of the CIA, Pentagon and FBI are all highly liberal-coded.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Is there a crisis of Holocaust revisionism in video games? ADL certainly thinks so and publicly calls out Fortnite along with Call of Duty for being insufficiently tough on their gamers. While I generally speaking have a low opinion of mass-market video games, I'm surprised how politicised games are these days. When I was young, there was total freedom to name yourself whatever and say anything you wanted. I want kids' innocent hobbies to remain that way, without getting the ADL-sponsored Holocaust triggers and censorships baked into games. Is that too much to ask?
It reminds me of the brouhaha over transexuals in the latest Harry Potter game. JK Rowling's stance is well-known but the devs couldn't resist smacking gamers over the head with pro-trans content. If Holocaust denial is a concern, will we soon see Anne Frank adventure games for kids to play (whether they want it or not)?
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
7mo ago
Why did support for Ukraine split along the left/right the way it did
I am not someone who likes excessive racialisation of politics, but I think some on the left may be correct in speculating that Russia being a conservative, white Christian country has a lot to do with it. Ukraine is very similar, but there is simply more respect to Russia since it resembles the USA in many ways (frontier culture, etc).
I also think a lot of right-wingers have this obsession against China for the same reason. It's an alien race, on top of actually being a real threat in a way that Russia is not. And to counter China, it'd be remarkably foolish if you were to push Russia and China together instead (which is what the US has done). I think Beinart wrote about these dynamics well a few weeks ago.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Lapdogs don't call the shots.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
8mo ago
Linking your real email adress to accounts commenting on outright white nationalist websites seems like an incredibly low IQ thing to do, and all the more weird for someone as obsessed with IQ as Hanania.
In recent years, he's been explicitly condemning the HBD right, even going on Emil Kirkegaard's blog to trash it to his face. I suspect Hanania probably understood that wignat politics was a dead end, but at the same time he couldn't pretend that HBD was false. So he tried to triangulate into a "moderate centrist" position, but apparently the ruling elite and its attack dogs are never far behind.
This will be an important test for the US right. The history of these doxxing events has shown that the right is all too happy to throw people under the bus for offending liberal sensibilities on issues like race. We'll see if this time is different.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
10mo ago
Sixth-generation American secular Jewish academics with a fertility rate of 0.9 who volunteer for 'Jewish Voice for Peace' and whose conception of Judaism is essentially identical to progressive social justice (much as is the Christianity of the average modern Episcopalian/Anglican priest) and hardcore Israeli religious Zionists intent on colonizing the West Bank and having 5+ children, who couldn't give less of a shit about American politics are two very different groups of people
The overwhelming majority of Jews in elite positions are Zionists. Most may identify as liberal Zionists - if one can be a "liberal ethno-nationalist" - but they are Zionists. These JVP types are fringe elements. It's a fact that many Jews in the US preach liberal ideology to the goyim while heavily supporting an ethno-nationalist creed for Israel.
In a sense, this is a higher-IQ version of German Turks who vote for the left in the Germany but support Erdogan when voting from abroad. In my view, the true underlying values of a community can only be revealed when they are in the majority. There are too many ethnic self-interest incentives when you're a minority.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
I suspect they will fail. But some of them have gotten smarter over the years. It was common to come across "America on the brink of collapse" doomsday talk in previous years. Some of that may have been due to crossovers from the GOP hard-right, the kind of folks who watched Alex Jones and became even more radicalised.
These days, my impression is that they understand that the beast they are fighting isn't going down easily. But I don't even think they bother with taking power in conventional ways. Gathering a significant block of whites to cause significant friction will be sufficient in their minds.
I think the system understood this and has in response pulled back from the most extreme anti-white rhetoric. You see it everywhere now in the media. It may work for some time, but I think the racial dynamics of America is such that it will be hard to sustain the fantasy that "we're all in this together" as whites become a clear and distinct minority.
The US army being unable to recruit people doesn't portend well for the future in terms of patriotic attachment of the nation's youth. Why would white men die for a system that hates them?
Yet, my expectation is that while America will slowly slide into further dysfunction, it is unlikely to ever become critical. A slow descent is more likely and white elites can still do very well for themselves in America. That is important since intra-political conflict often needs a significant elite fractional support. That's a major missing ingredient for them. And I don't see it suddenly changing.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
In any case, while I sympathize with South Africans of British or Bantu or most other origins, I can’t stand Afrikaners whining about the state of their country. It was Afrikaners who campaigned vigorously against white settlement by non-Boers and who therefore ensured South Africa’s present-day demographics. If they had welcomed more Brits, the country might well have a European majority to this day. But the Dutch have always been an obstinate people.
Reminds me of the US south, which was largely populated by the Brits (compared to the more mixed-German Midwest). It was they who insisted on importing massive amounts of slaves to feed their plantations. Had they won the civil war, the US black population would have been >30% instead of 13%. So I don't think it's a Dutch issue. It's just white autism.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Apparently the UK's entire net worth was £10.7 trillions in 2020 according to the ONS, their chief statistic agency. What's remarkable is that a whopping 60% of that is "non-produced, non-financial assets".
That's a fancy way of saying land. Why isn't this fact more well known? Should we expect it to be different for other countries? And why aren't more people talking about Georgism?
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
9mo ago
Worth noting that whether or not you think Europe has fallen behind largely depends if you accept nominal or PPP as the basis for your GDP accounting. By PPP, Europe and the US are largely neck-and-neck.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD?locations=EU-US
There are also other, non-economic metrics, that determine quality of life such as far lower crime/homelessness/drug epidemics and more vacation days. That's why we don't see a surge of European migrants to the US. QoL is largely similar between the two countries, but Americans prize money and work whereas Europeans prefer leisure.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
10mo ago
Wagner has no chance of doing anything. Russian MoD can easily crush them. Putin used Wagner to avoid mass mobilisation early on but this strategy has now backfired. He also likes playing all sides against each other to keep them on their toes. This includes his own generals.
Prigozhin simply didn't understand he was just a chess piece in a greater game, he thought he was an actual leader. He will learn very shortly who is the real boss. Ultimately he isn't a threat, but this entire situation was allowed to develop because of Putin's inability to call a war what it needs to be called: a war, rather than his SMO bullshit. He should never have allowed these militias to proliferate and should have called up a much bigger mobilisation drive to begin with. But that's water under the bridge. Wagner as a group is now a spent force in Russia. They could survive as mercs in MENA/Africa, going back to their original, smaller roots.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
11mo ago
On the same day.
Not sure how this decoupling/containment business is going, but it sure doesn't seem to be flying with all colors. I'm not someone who buys into the de-dollarisation thesis, nor do I think the US with its allies (vassals?) is going to be displaced. But neither is China. It'd be nice if US policy would take on a more realistic bent and acknowledge these basic facts instead of pursuing futile policies doomed to failure. We might even have auxiliary benefits such as less need to spend on a bloated military as a consequence. Fat chance, I know, but hope is the last thing that leaves man.
The median age of Western countries was much lower in previous eras. Had the demographic structure been similar as now, there's no reason why things would have been different. Besides, most migration was intra-European in previous eras. Plus travel was more expensive. All those structural factors are different, precisely because of much greater wealth (in turn a consequence of capitalism).
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