RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
26d ago
Yeah, the Arabs/Berbers did manage to conquer the Spanish, the Tunisians did manage to go around slave-raiding and raping the Mediterranean (they even got to Iceland at one point IIRC), the Moroccans managed to beat Portugal badly at one point... but really he means sub-Saharan Africa not North Africa or Phoenicians in Africa. It's tedious to constantly add sub-Saharan though.
Imagine The Motte in 1904, before the Battle of Tsushima, and the confident essays about how East Asians “just don’t have civilizational war in them.”
But the East Asians were clearly pretty good at war even before 1904? Attila the Hun and the Mongols both managed to beat Europeans in their day. Notably China also developed the compass and gunpowder weapons. China was a big source of porcelain, silk and other manufactured goods.
If one side got centuries of relatively (I acknowledge "relative" is a load-bearing word) unmolested compounding (trade routes, gunpowder iteration, fiscal states, etc.) and the other got geographical isolation, depopulation, extraction, arms restrictions, and arbitrary boundary-drawing
OK and what's the root cause of that compounding then? Sub-saharan Africa had plenty of gold, ivory, arable land, they certainly had things that people wanted. But they consistently failed to produce powerful states and institutions (you need to be highly organized and orderly for that), they failed to take control of trade routes (you need advanced financial abilities, strong laws, shipbuilding and seamanship), they failed to develop advanced metallurgy/textiles for industry and weapons (you need to be smart for this). Even today, the sub-Saharan African countries still can't make any advanced technology domestically, only apartheid South Africa could make their own jet fighters, nuclear weapons or pioneer heart transplants.
They had a shield of disease that prevented more capable foreigners from conquering them, that's how they retained independence (and how they expanded to the Caribbean tbh). But the moment that quinine pierced the shield, the Scramble for Africa.
Meanwhile Poland got carved up, plundered, colonized, genocided, communismed for a few centuries and they're now highly developed, producing infrared photonics, AAA video games, high-precision plasma generators. The Ottomans were slave-raiding, plundering, raping Eastern Europe for centuries. Eastern Europe is now highly developed. They make tanks, steel, nuclear reactors, aircraft carriers, hypersonic missiles... China got wrecked for a century, then hit with a particularly bad strain of communism but they're a superpower today.
Historical compounding and catch-up growth is a consequence of innate ability. Yes, there are historical and geographical factors that matter. But they matter less than innate ability. Even under Maoism, China was a major world power that could fight the US to a draw in Korea, develop ICBMs and H-bombs. Innate ability is the key. That's the best way to explain this trend.
If this scenario happened in Europe — say, between Russia and Georgia — we don’t suddenly say “there must be something deficient about Georgian ancestry.”
This scenario didn't happen in Europe. The Russians (a full army and air force) went in on Georgia and walloped them, imposing a limited defeat. It was not a small band of adventurers like Wagner that took over a whole country and exploited their natural resources.
But notice what happens rhetorically: when Africans win at long odds against a European power, it gets filed under “numbers and technology, nothing to see here.”
The strongest African powers occasionally hold off the weakest European powers but almost always lose. That's the key trend. Numbers and technology are of course very important. Mobilizing that is the whole aim of the game. Any win is still a win. But it's a very different kind of win to Russia fighting a very strong European power's full offensive power (making their own weapons) and marching their troops into Paris! The Russians did not merely fend off the French, they all but conquered France. The Ethiopians never conquered Italy.
What I mean by political vs military victory is kind of the difference between Saigon becoming Ho Chi Minh city and New York becoming Vo Nguyen Giap City. That's a wholly different kind of victory, a total success at arms when all political resources were fully committed to the struggle. Some black countries achieved the former, never the latter.
You’d also need to say what sort of controlled datasets or natural experiments might actually distinguish “genes → institutions → capital” from “history/geography/path-dependence → institutions → capital”.
Well if we introduced Africans to a very high human-capital civilization like America we'd assume the institutions would rub off on them right, they'd suddenly realize (like the East Asians did) how to do things effectively? Right? There'd be no chronic dysfunction, massively high crime rate, no poverty issues, no massive crime rate? They'd start getting STEM Nobels?
Or a US-supported black colony in Africa, with a constitution directly copied from America, shielded from any external threat by US power, that'd do well right?
Or all these black refugees/economic migrants heading to Europe, they'd be doctors and lawyers, not rapey welfare-abusers right?
But no, Liberia is a shithole, it's just the same as other West African countries. US blacks are violent, unproductive money-sinks. Europe is getting very sick of these refugees. I don't understand why centuries of poverty and brutal oppression immediately washes off Poles, Irish, Russians, Chinese, Koreans and they can immediately go out and do great things once free but blacks are somehow uniquely vulnerable to slavery and mistreatment that they'd be permanently degraded by this (in Ethiopia's case it was only a few years of Italian rule). The simplest scenario is that they're innately less capable.
It is dangerous to believe that there is some inherent, innate strength by being of some particular race, biological marking when the relationship is so tenuous. That's all the steps needed before arrogance, and then ignorance, and ultimately, defeat.
I think it's much more dangerous to think that one's strength is in institutions or ideology rather than race. Racists like Stoddard (he wrote 'the rising tide of color') were extremely farsighted in predicting the power of China by observing the ability of the Chinese people. Whereas institution/culture people still deny Chinese potential, recall all the cope about how 'communists can't innovate.' We don't hear that much any more.
It's only dangerous if I'm wrong. But the predictions of racists have been proven more accurate than the anti-racists. The integrationists of the 50s and 60s thought that US blacks would be performing as if they were white, the investment would've paid off by now. But it hasn't. This is the arrogance that has cost trillions in fruitless, unjust DEI, tens of thousands of raped or murdered whites who 'didn't want to be racist', whole books like 'White girl bleed a lot' or 'Don't make the black kids angry' which are nothing but compilations of the tragicomedic failure of the antiracist worldview and the endless media/education work that's needed to prop it up.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
26d ago
And if the only response to that reality is calling everyone an anti-semite or a nazi then what is even the point of this?
Well it worked pretty well, boomers have already had their opinions set by the television.
I read somewhere an argument about how stable systems were inherently unstable in a changing world. They set up the whole ADL/AIPAC/lobbying/media machine to suppress and drown out dissenters. It worked well. But it works by suppressing rather than adapting. Things change, people get increasingly upset about the anomaly of them funding bombs for Israel to blow up random Palestinians, while the usual suspects in the media are still talking about how Israel is the 'most moral army.' That works if you have total media dominance but not if the battlefield is somewhat contested, it backfires if there are videos of Israeli parliamentarians enthusiastically justifying torture, if they go around shooting unarmed protestors or people trying to get food. Trying to stick to the maximalist narrative just further delegitimizes that media power.
They keep mashing the 'suppress' button but the suppression isn't working. The system is designed to be stable, not to change. The goal and methods and mindset is fixed. There is some evidence of adaptation (Team Israel is working to try and manipulate the Tiktok algorithm and LLM training data for instance) but the system as a whole is breaking down.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
I keep thinking that in instances like this it would be very instructive to arbitrarily equalize something that affects the deciding party, give them a taste of equality.
In Birmingham, some judges decided it was unfair that some female-dominated council jobs got paid less, had fewer perks than binmen. The council, now short of cash decided to lower the binmen's salary and perks in part to pay compensation to the women. This caused the binmen to go on strike, no waste to be collected, a strike which continues to this day (though agency workers are collecting waste, and are likely more expensive to boot).
I think the judges in question should have had their salaries reduced to those of the binmen. If this were done, they'd quickly uncover new and interesting legal theories about why different jobs have different pay and perks and how this may indeed be equitable. Probably this is very illegal, judges would surely find that it's against the Rule of Law to reduce the privileges of judges. But I don't think they'd quickly do such things again if it were done and the judicial bitching and whining were ignored, they have the latitude to interpret retarded laws more or less reasonably.
Officials, judges and councillors would not be so high-handed if there were more direct consequences for their actions. I know this does go against separation of powers but they're not really separated, when a government really wants something they can just do it, to hell with the law or anything in the way. Government just needs to be more aligned.
IMO the modern modal church isn't too Christian, nor does it have any real political effect in so far as it's Christian. Christianity in the West seems mostly to be another thing that progressives have eaten.
If we look around, we see lots that's against Christian dogma. Over a billion abortions since 1980, more abortions than all those who died in every war in human history. Marriage is not really 'till death do us part' anymore, marriage has been annexed by the state. Cohabitation before marriage - very common. It's judges and lawyers who control marriage (straight or gay) and divorce, the church only provides a venue and music. Pornography is in full bloom. Pride parades are in full bloom. Greed and materialism, superabundant. Self-promotion and narcissism on social media. Sabbath breaking. Blasphemy. Gluttony and excess. Sloth. Need I go on?
My main experience with church was Catholic Jesuits, not anyone terribly based or trad. But the trad don't seem to have done much. What have they accomplished? Poland, Russia, Africa... maybe Christianity really is influencing policy and values there. In the West it seems to be old people, ritual, progressivism and a pale shadow of its former power.
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