RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
On the contrary, it would mean historical arrest. The tyrant’s dream is to stop things from changing, since for him any change can only be for the worse—in the same way that, for a man atop a pyramid, moving in any direction means going downward. When a country settles into this kind of malign stasis—as in today’s Russia and China, where it is quite inconceivable that the ruler will ever leave office voluntarily—the only consolation is the knowledge that even the tyrant is less powerful than death.
This is storytelling from Compact Mag, it doesn't have anything to do with reality. Xi's dream is not to 'stop things from changing'. His dream is to make change, to reunite Taiwan into China and make it the most powerful country in the world, reshape the world system.
contradistinction to the majority of transhumanist aspirations which are of a fundamentally childish nature
There's too much mysticism and obscurantism in discourse about transhumanism, I think at least in part because people are pattern-matching mystic, obscurantist religious dogma to transhumanism since both promise immortality and transcendent power. It's story-reasoning, not real reasoning. 'Tyrants don't want change'. Depends on the change! 'Xi Xinping wants to be immortal, as some eternal guardian of Chinese stasis'. That's fiction. Xi is a normal kind of leader. He wants more power. He wants advantageous change but not instability. The whole Marxist dialectic that Xi studies is in large part about systemic change due to technological and social development. He accepts the need to adapt.
The ideas behind transhumanism are actually based on something, it's not schizobabble. They're based on understanding of the human mind as an information system, not a soul or something forever tied to an organic body.
If you can render one person immortal, you can render many immortal. Xi Xinping is very unlikely to be so powerful that he can restrain the rest of the politburo from living together, not to mention business leaders pursuing immortality in secret. Whatever technology that allows for immortality will probably have many other economic and social effects that will likely destabilize the system and bring about new leadership dynamics. If he is so powerful as to suppress human greed for longevity, technological diffusion and economic-military-social transformations of the world, then transhumanism is secondary to whatever his personal hegemony is derived from, that's the interesting thing in this scenario.
He stands as the lone pillar that structures a great many ever-changing forces and events, an isolated outpost of stability, made all the more enigmatic by his remoteness from ordinary affairs
This is a story idea. It's super abstract. I just don't see how you can call other, rooted-in-reality discussion of transhumanism childish and then write this.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Davis argues that "Millions died, not outside the 'modern world system', but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were murdered ... by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill."
Yeah I read that part, the 'many were murdered' part and that's what made me unhappy with the thesis. OK, the British killed some people at Amritsar. That's what state killing looks like, shooting guns. Or active collectivization where they're moving people around and intensively interfering with agriculture, or in wartime when armies pass by and loot/wreck irrigation and cause famines. That's killing/murder, or at least much closer to what we mean by murder.
by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill
I don't accept that people were dying due to the ideals of Bentham. There were no Benthamite death squads, the very idea is a contradiction.
the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight (320,000 tons) of wheat, which made the region more vulnerable.
This is bad but it's not like he was sending troops to take the grain off to England. The grain export was due to the governments commitment to laissez-faire economics and practical limits on its power, as it says. The fundamental cause was that the Indian economy wasn't very developed, people who had grain didn't want to sell it to starving people who had no money, the govt had little capacity to force them to do so and didn't try very hard. So if one wants to say the British were negligent in their governance, then sure. But that's not actually murder, it's just not-saving, not-reforming the economy, not-reforming land distribution.
However, is the main standard argument for colonial rule not the idea that it results in a higher level of flourishing and prosperity for its subjects compared to the dictatorship of their native brutish elites?
Colonial rule is an innately imbalanced thing, it's about a stronger side controlling a weaker. So in a purely moral level, it's never really justified if you believe in sovereignty and autonomy of peoples.
Nevertheless, in this instance I think that the British ran India quite generously as compared to other potential rulers, foreign or local. The British could've been much more extractive and heavy-handed if they wanted. It was a British former civil servant who initially organized what became the Indian National Congress because he thought they hadn't solved the country's economic problems. The meeting was approved by the Viceroy. They could've pulled a Mao and invited people to speak freely about their opinions and then arrested anyone who opposed the government. They could've had a zero-tolerance policy for dissent. They could've forced Indians into humiliation rituals like the queue hairstyle in China.
Colonialism is basically about power dynamics, that the British were at all thinking about it as 'how can we have a cordial win-win relationship rather than a I win, you submit relationship' is a sign they really weren't that evil. Just think about the different mindsets. The British have this narrative that 'colonialism was good because we kept order, built railroads' or 'colonialism was bad because we caused famines, intruded on other people's sovereignty' where it's all coached in this moral frame. Turkey doesn't really care about any of that, their official attitude towards Armenia is closer to 'it never happened and they were enemies anyway, they had it coming, we were a great empire'. No Libyan will apologize for slave-raiding the Mediterranean coast, though they have more pressing issues. The Mongols put up statues to Genghis Khan, he's a national hero to them, not a genocidal murderer.
The British were/are uniquely concerned with the well-being of their subjects as an imperial power, it follows that they weren't that bad.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Can someone steelman the anti-legalization stance to me better than I've been trying to do?
The most harmful drugs are tobacco and alcohol. Tobacco and alcohol are not particularly potent, they are simply very widely consumed.
If drugs are legalized and the effects are bad, it will be difficult to recriminalize them again since there will be lobby groups and tax revenue at risk.
Drugs are usually much more potent than alcohol and tobacco, THC content in marijuana has been rising massively over time. New ones are discovered all the time - Fentanyl for instance which might be the optimal drug in cost-effective highs... but also very dangerous.
Drugs also have a risk of big systematic problems, like how Russia got extremely drunk on vodka or how the Qing empire got extremely addicted on opium. If we're entering an era of mass unemployment due to AI do we really want widely accessible drugs?
Addiction isn't just for poor losers, it can be for anyone who makes a bad decision, has the wrong friends, is just overburdened by circumstances and needs something to take the edge off and then lacks the willpower to keep it under control.
My more controversial conclusion: I think that the drug dealers should be systematically rooted out and destroyed. Find a drug dealer (if drug addicts can do this, so can police with drones, cameras, wiretapping, troops). Point a gun at him until he tells you where he got his drugs from. Go to them, point guns at them... repeat until you've gotten all the drug dealers and all domestic suppliers/importers. If they refuse to tell you, blow their heads off. If they're turning people into fentanyl zombies, they should be treated like necromancers in an RPG, inherent enemies of society. There should be a gradation of responses, the dumbass blonde girl dealing coke to upper middle class users isn't turning people into fentanyl zombies and shouldn't have her head blown off but if she doesn't reveal her supplier then keep ramping up punishment until she does. You could have creative responses like tattooing 'drug dealer' on her forehead, caning... The legal system we have isn't well-adapted to deal with large criminal gangs with large revenues and strong coercive capabilities. These are small, borderless state actors that deserve a more militarized response.
Sticking criminals in prison is not a sufficient deterrent to the gangsters 'if you snitch, we will kill you and make an example of your mutilated corpse'. Often they just end up running their gangs from prison, executing drug deals from prison, intimidating other gangs from prison. If you go to prison, you can't be so easily killed by a rival gang and you can brutalize/rape members of rival gangs who get imprisoned in prisons you control! You can exchange tricks with other career criminals and abuse prisoners who aren't career criminals or part of a gang.
None of this is working properly, it's a legalist fantasy, just going through the motions. It's a parallel to the 'let out the retarded, violent criminal after his 14th crime (he's too retarded to be held responsible) wait until after he murders some random person to crack down on him' equilibrium. No 15th chances. If he's clearly a bad guy, blow him away. Killing bad guys is actively good, not a last resort. The present bad equilibrium needs to be smashed with a major effort, then we can all enjoy a superior equilibrium.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
With the British there Russia couldn't really do that much and didn't really want to conquer India. But without the British there, it's almost free real estate like all the khanates and small states in Central Asia that Russia swallowed up. It would be a feeding frenzy like Africa. The mountains in Afghanistan are certainly a problem but not impossible to overcome, invasions were launched down from Afghanistan into India from time to time.
The Ottoman Empire, China and Japan were some of the strongest non-European states in this period and mostly avoided colonization. India was colonized and if it were not colonized by the British probably wouldn't have been that strong.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Yeah, they game the entrance system. Canada too supposedly has a 'skills based' immigration system but like Australia it's a joke. Universities are supposed to admit people who pass a rigorous test but they're phenomenally greedy and the entrance requirement is de facto 'has money and a pulse', nevermind plagiarism or anything else. And then there are fake journal articles they write to seem smart...
Every test becomes something to game and it's hard to convince people to test rigorously if their financial interests are advanced by bringing in high fee paying foreign students. On balance I think it'd be better for universities to receive no more money from foreign students than domestics, possibly less. Right now there are perverse incentives. The university business model should be to educate the domestic talent base first rather than bring in as many foreign students as physically possible, only if there's surplus capacity should foreign students be admitted, or if there's some other special reason like exceptional talent.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
It is absolutely standard, expected practice for imperial subjects to pay for things that benefit the overlord. If they rebel, it's also expected that a larger garrison of loyal troops from the metropole will be deployed there. Control of Egypt also had a great deal to do with India since much Europe-Indian trade passed through Egypt/Suez.
Upon investigating further, there seems to be a lot of uncertainty about how the home charge system actually worked, with various British commissions saying more should be done to pay rebates to India. Perhaps the repayment system was more honoured in the breach than observance. Nevertheless, the fact that there was even debate about repayment being insufficient indicates that this is not harsh imperialism.
The Mughals who previously ruled India fielded a huge army, it's hard to see how the relatively small British/Indian forces based in India, around 300,000, were unduly taxing the Indian economy. The Qing fielded a million men and embarked on their own expensive indigenous naval programs. If India weren't colonized by Britain, it would likely have undertaken similar expenditure and/or get invaded by someone, resulting in an increased fiscal burden. Russia for instance spent about 30% of its budget on the military around 1900.
Likewise, it's hard to see how a few thousand British administrators running the whole country could cause famine actively, though they were not great at stopping famine. The Raj was not run like a top-down Soviet machine, rule was largely indirect and delegated to Indians. I dispute Mike Davis's 'Late Victorian Holocausts' thesis. Firstly, it's inappropriate to compare to a Holocaust since a famine isn't an organized mass killing so much as a mildly disorganized mass not-saving. Secondly, much more severe famines were occurring right next door in China in this period. India has innately inconsistent weather via the monsoons and famines will happen in a subsistence economy.
Preventing famines isn't passive, it's active. It requires early warning, the suppression of hoarding and speculation, circulation of money so that poor people can buy grain and don't just get extorted by landlords and most importantly land reform... which the British weren't in a position to do given the size of the country and their hands-off stance. Indian food security still has not been fixed even today, hundreds of millions are stunted due to malnutrition.
What do you mean 'high skill immigrant workers'?
There's a world of difference between 'mid javascript jockey', 'mid accountant', 'mid miscellaneous office worker' and 'fabulously talented UV lithography genius' or 'hypersonic plasma fluid dynamics expert'.
I suspect you don't mean the latter but the former, since you're talking about 'the job pool' rather than 'high powered R&D positions'.
If mass immigration were so great, we'd see the rich countries with the highest immigration rates having huge productivity growth, right? Canada and Australia have been much more aggressive in mass migration than the US. They're fairly free market anglo-derived liberal democracies, the closest analogues to the US. Australia has a points system supposedly targeting skills shortages and 'high skill migrants'. Both Australia and Canada have had a terrible time in terms of prosperity and economic growth, despite (because of) all this immigration. Canadian GDP per capita has been stagnant for about a decade. In truth it's not high-skill immigrant workers that are coming in, many of them just do food delivery. There are a small fraction of actually-high-skill workers and a huge number of people gaming the system to work or gain access to a richer country than their birthplace, which is understandable but not necessarily in the national interest.
The US gets most of the best anyway, since why would anyone really talented think 'I want to move to Australia and start a company there.' Tiny market size, limited capital, great distance from the rest of the world, barren manufacturing sector, high energy prices...
If you're gonna have immigration, better 'high skill migrants' than refugees from shithole countries. But better still to just skim the very best, the actually high skill migrants. If a company wants to bring someone in, charge them 200K as a flat fee to ensure they're really getting their money's worth, that they absolutely need this person. If a university wants to bring someone in, make sure they'd be in the top 5% of domestic students, were they a domestic. The US could cut immigration 98% and do just fine.
See also: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/brain-drain-as-geopolitical-strategy
jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth
Do we then need jobs programs for the civilizationally impaired, those peoples who couldn't make a rich, safe country themselves? This line of reasoning cuts both ways. If Americans are so lazy, inept and stupid, shouldn't these talented and deserving foreigners stay at home rather than come to babysit these lowlife Americans who don't know how to do anything? Americans invented Javascript, one imagines they can find some mid Javascript developers at home.
The British were not kind to India.
They were incredibly kind to India as an imperial overlord.
They actually paid money to the Raj government when deploying Indian troops for imperial operations that didn't have to do with the defence of India. The cost of war would be borne by the British treasury, not the Indian treasury. India also got access to British technology and investment. When WW2 ended, India had twice the rail network of China.
In some respects India got a better deal than the US gives its allies today. Britain and Australia don't get rebates for joining in US wars in the Middle East, they get sneered at for not spending enough of their own money on 'defence'.
Who prevented Russia from gobbling up India in their southward push through Central Asia in the 19th century? Who protected India from the Japanese (world-class experts in the field of imperial cruelty)? The British, despite huge 'Quit India' protests. The Bengal Famine was mainly due to the Japanese invasion of Burma. Unsurprisingly, if rice imports from Burma are cut off and millions of refugees flee North, during a time of wartime strain, there will be problems in Bengal. Wherever the Japanese went, there was famine. Famine in the Philippines, famine in Indonesia, famine in China and famine in East India.
And we see the same incredible overgenerosity today where Indians/ex-Raj ethnicities get all kinds of special privileges in the UK - jobs that are safeguarded for non-whites, police refusing to crack down on them despite unmentionable abuses lest they seem racist. Then there's all the foreign aid they gave India post-independence.
India just finds it easier to blame Britain for everything that goes wrong, all the poverty that remains. It also helps unite the country, there's nothing so universally popular as hating and blaming outsiders. The British and Europeans generally did far more harm to China with the Opium Wars and unequal treaties (let alone the Japanese) yet China has come out well ahead of India today.
If the British were half as cruel as the Indian media likes to suggest, India would be a servile, loyal colony today. They could've liquidated Gandhi on the spot or prevented any Indian intellectual class emerging in the first place. They could've crushed any revolt with heavy-handed suppression, machine-gun fire, gas and incendiary attacks. Just imagine the amount of devastation they inflicted on rich, industrialized Germany, all the millions of men they put into the field instead redirected instead to repress India. Success would be assured. They could've used Indians as cheap labour in factories, instead they let them start their own trade unions. Britain even let Indians become the commercial class of East Africa, enjoying the fruits of empire as a subject.
Many women, even some who literally worked pro-bono for leftist NGOs, thought wokeness was nauseating crap but were too conflict avoidant to complain about it because they didn't want to make a scene. They would complain and bitch in private about the 'piety' of these people but passively uphold its hegemony in public, preface their private statements with 'you should never say this' and even look down on anyone who was actually honest in going against the consensus as a cringeworthy troublemaker. And there's an intense, seething hatred for transgender ideology too.
It's like they were hard-coded many years ago 'the left wing is good and the right sordid and smelly, good deeds include helping refugees, giving money to international charity and helping poor brown people have more political power'. They might recognize from experience that poor brown people are often stupid and can't understand the byzantine political process in a Western liberal democracy, giving them power is often an exercise in futility. Or they see that the power is taken by greedy intermediaries who pocket most of the loot. Or they know that non-Western cultures treat women poorly, importing them harms their own interests. But they then just try not to think about the incoherency between their knowledge of the world and beliefs about what should be done and lean towards various cope arguments that the media likes to put forward about why progressivism isn't working out so well.
It's like Ceausescu support withering the moment people stopped being afraid of the secret police, his support was based not on enthusiastic consent but grudging obedience. Light novel title: 'I can't believe the sex that wasn't selected for martial bravery turns out to be cowardly in their politics too!'
To bring up the Ukrainians and the Russians, either side would be completely annihilated by a modern western combined-arms military in a war of maneuver
Doubtful in its own terms, and irrelevant when Khinzal or Oreshnik or Sarmat with thermonuclear warheads show up. Again, African militaries don't have that kind of firepower.
If Hannibal tried to do his thing today with Numidian horsemen and iron age weapons, I'd call him very weak, only capable of beating very weak forces in exceptional circumstances, with no hope of longterm success.
So who counts as 'white'?
Anglo-Saxons, Swedes, Poles, Frenchmen, Germans and others... It's really not a relevant or interesting question. Normal people can give a good approximation of 'who is white' with some uncertainty in the case of Southern Italy/Balkans/Greece-Turkey.
Can non-white countries adapt 'white' ways of war?
Sure can, to differing degrees. East Asians are the best at it, co-equal IMO.
What would be a real message to the Middle East is if the much-vaunted Israeli army actually moves into Gaza and destroys Hamas with ground troops. Not a chevauchee where they go into one part of Gaza, blow things up and leave whereupon Hamas returns, then do it again to another part of Gaza. But if they actually attack and keep attacking until they defeat Hamas, take all weapons caches, clear out the tunnels, defeat the fighting men, then they actually win.
All this precision-strike stuff is very pretty and impressive but it doesn't actually do anything by itself. You can blow up Hamas leader A and Hamas leader B will replace him. You can blow up Osama Bin Laden and there's basically no effect. Al Qaeda trundles on, they're still doing their thing. Blow up Trump and nothing would happen, they'd just replace him. A state or any statelike entity cannot be defeated from the top down, only from the bottom-up by destroying their soldiers and their revenue sources, their territorial control.
This is why Israel remains in 'small-dog' territory, they don't seem to have this capability or at least they aren't using it when it's the sole solution to their military-political problem. All the exo-atmospheric interceptions and fancy long-range strike in the world cannot substitute for ground combat power like Ukraine or Russia have, where they take and actually hold territory after capturing it. Precision strikes are only
Israel is in a very dangerous position, doubling down on fear tactics and intimidation while lacking the actual power/will to win. I sense a 'oh but they could go in and blow up hamas and keep attacking till they win but the real plan is to keep skirmishing until the Palestinian population is reduced by starvation, bombing or migration thus letting them annex Gaza' argument and that may be the strategy but it's not politically workable. They can't blow up all the humanitarian aid lest they lose overseas support. If they get sanctioned, then Israel is sure to lose and may even collapse entirely. Small, high-tech economies require overseas market access. Sanctionproofing is impossible for such a small country.
All the stalling tactics and assassinations in the world cannot bypass the basic logic of war, you have to destroy the enemy's ability to resist, not blow up the negotiators. And it's especially dumb against a population of notorious bravery. Arabs might often be poorly led, uncoordinated and generally inferior to European troops in combat power but the guys who popularized suicide bombing as a military tactic should not be considered cowardly!
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