ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
21hr ago
I think if you focus on old-school forums you will miss out on where a lot of discussion is happening these days, namely Twitter/X, Substack comment threads, and private Discord servers. The first two in particular host a growing collection of in some cases relatively influential Motte alumni that you could follow or whose networks you could poke around in to curate your own feed. If you don't like any of those guys, then it may take a little longer to get the recommendations you want, but the algorithm is a hell of a thing and will get the job done eventually.
As to your more fundamental point, I don't see how this moment in particular is much different from any since the creation of the internet (I wasn't around for them, but maybe early reddit and some previous iteration of 4chan were really that great?). It takes a very particular sort of high IQ, high-decoupling, politically-interested wordcel to be a successful rules-following contributor here and I think it's to be expected that there are less than a dozen places online where such individuals congregate in sufficient numbers to be noticeable.
ResoluteRaven
23hr ago
Russia and China's positions on Ukraine and Taiwan are first and foremost based on nationalism and what you could call ethnic sovereignty, and only secondarily based on pragmatic security concerns. You can read Putin's essay on the topic for a pretty clear description of what motivates him. Some excerpts below:
Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe.
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Most importantly, people both in the western and eastern Russian lands spoke the same language. Their faith was Orthodox. Up to the middle of the 15th century, the unified church government remained in place.
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The incorporation of the western Russian lands into the single state was not merely the result of political and diplomatic decisions. It was underlain by the common faith, shared cultural traditions, and – I would like to emphasize it once again – language similarity.
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At the same time, the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians started to form and gain ground among the Polish elite and a part of the Malorussian intelligentsia. Since there was no historical basis – and could not have been any, conclusions were substantiated by all sorts of concoctions, which went as far as to claim that the Ukrainians are the true Slavs and the Russians, the Muscovites, are not. Such ”hypotheses“ became increasingly used for political purposes as a tool of rivalry between European states.
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But in 1991, all those territories, and, which is more important, people, found themselves abroad overnight, taken away, this time indeed, from their historical motherland.
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In essence, Ukraine's ruling circles decided to justify their country's independence through the denial of its past, however, except for border issues. They began to mythologize and rewrite history, edit out everything that united us, and refer to the period when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as an occupation. The common tragedy of collectivization and famine of the early 1930s was portrayed as the genocide of the Ukrainian people.
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Step by step, Ukraine was dragged into a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia, a springboard against Russia. Inevitably, there came a time when the concept of ”Ukraine is not Russia“ was no longer an option. There was a need for the ”anti-Russia“ concept which we will never accept.
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It would not be an exaggeration to say that the path of forced assimilation, the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us.
You can see that while the idea that Ukraine is a springboard for foreign powers to threaten Russia geopolitically makes an appearance, issues of national identity take precedence, including the idea that Ukrainian identity itself is a weapon that threatens Russia. This is not the kind of essay an American could or would write about Cuba in 1962, which is a case when there was a strategic threat from a foreign power without any shared ancient history or blood and soil concerns involved.
As for Taiwan, while it is not an ancient part of China the way Ukraine is an ancient part of Russia, its significance is that it is the last piece of territory (with a Han majority) taken from Qing China by foreign powers during the Century of Humiliation that remains outside of PRC control today. The CCP justifies its rule to a domestic audience by claiming that only they can undo the damage done by the Western powers and Japan during those years, firstly by making China too rich and powerful to be invaded or subjugated ever again and secondly by getting back all the territory that was stolen from them, including Taiwan. The fact that Taiwan is part of the First Island Chain with the potential to strangle Chinese naval trade in the event of a war is certainly of interest to their military planners, but it is a distant second in terms of motivations for invading or blockading the island.
I think Americans often have trouble understanding the way nationalists in other parts of the world think because it is quite alien to their own thought process, but imagine for a moment if most Anglo-Canadians were still diehard royalists who held a grudge against the US for expelling their ancestors during the Revolution and for being traitors who deny their true English identity, and would seize on any opportunity to punish them and force them back into the imperial fold. Sure, there might be offshore oil wells, cod fisheries, or Great Lakes ports of strategic importance involved in any dispute, but that's not really what it would be about.
ResoluteRaven
14d ago
For the most part, they don't understand how immigration works, imagining they can just go to relatives in e.g. Norway (surely, only the US has immigration laws!)
The ones I know seem to at least be very well-informed about the exact paperwork and criteria needed to claim citizenship by descent in a half-dozen EU nations, and have hired genealogists and translators to track down the appropriate documents. Either that or they're applying to Master's or PhD programs in the Netherlands, Germany, etc.
What do we do now (that we "won")? What interesting projects do we have to move forward?
Did we win? I suppose I'm tired of winning then, just as promised. Regardless, everyone's project should always be to build a functional community in whatever way you see fit: befriending your neighbors, starting a club based around your favorite hobby, learning practical skills and teaching them to others, starting a family, and so on.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
ARM
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
I mean, perhaps some people are concerned about brain drain solely from the perspective of a zero-sum competition with other countries, but I think that letting these people's talent go to waste is a loss for humanity as a whole.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
France was demonstrably the first country in Europe to undergo the demographic transition and has a higher fertility rate today than its neighbors (I picked a source from before the recent migration wave to eliminate that confounder).
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
In my experience, there are a substantial number of ideologically captured researchers working in hard science fields where it doesn't affect their output very much, but who would consider moving to Europe if they felt the government was sufficiently hostile to their politics. Losing these people would result in serious brain drain, even if it would probably make the social sciences more productive.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
Any country that passes through this population bottleneck experiences immediate and intense natural selection for increased fertility, which means that those nations that started earlier (France in the case of Europe and Japan in the case of East Asia) will revert sooner to a more sustainable birthrate. There is also more variation within Japan itself than Korea, with minorities such as Okinawans bringing up the average fertility. Lastly, Japan has in recent years implemented a more liberal immigration policy, with large numbers of Vietnamese, Filipino, Chinese, Indonesian, etc. workers (or mail-order brides) moving in to maintain the integrity of the labor force and having more children than the natives.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
I think some people certainly conflate "rule of law(s), which happen to have been established by a democracy" and "rule of law(s), which are by their nature inherently democratic", with the latter paving the way for tyranny. This intersects with disagreements over the definition of democracy, where one side claims it means "following the set of prescribed rules we have established for maintaining a representative government" and the other claims it means "the majority get to dictate policy with absolute unconstrained authority (at least whenever I agree with the majority)".
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
This is the latest report, but I first came across these details on Twitter last month.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
There are some restaurants and stores in China putting up signs like "all Americans pay 104% extra here", but many Chinese people these days still desperately want to immigrate to the US, so it will take a great deal to ruin our reputation there. There's an old Chinese joke about WWIII, where the strategic missile command asks for American targets and keeps hearing objections like "you can't strike there, my daughter is attending college in Boston!", "I just bought a house in San Francisco!", "my nephew lives in New York!", and in the end they decide to nuke Guizhou (the poorest province in China) instead.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
The reports I've seen seem to indicate that the Norks were actually quite competent and adaptable soldiers who, if properly equipped and led, would have a much better chance of breaking Ukrainian lines than the Russian penal battalions. Despite being sent to the front with only small arms and encountering combat drones for the first time, they were in many cases able to bait them into the open and shoot them down with precise rifle fire.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
I suppose for the same reason French people say "four score and eleven" instead of "ninety one".
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
Why is this judge's decision not simply part of the process by which "the country" decides who to let in and who to expel? Are the president's desires the sole legitimate expression of the national will? We have a government of laws, not of men, or at least that's how it was intended.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
Is the US the same US as 200 years ago and not a new something on the same place?
I find that questions along the lines of "Is [X] an instance of [Y]?" are rarely helpful, and attempts to answer them pretty much always devolve into No True Scotsman'ing and other arbitrary redefinitions of [X] and [Y]. Usually there is some deeper question that better expresses what I really want to know, and I would be better served by finding a way to articulate it. This view of mine probably crystallized when I was reading a lot about the Byzantines online and waded through endless "But were they Romans or not??!!" threads. Who cares? Just admire the Hagia Sofia and stop looking for joints to cleave when reality hasn't provided you with any.
So if your question is "would a time traveller from the 18th century find the present an alien place?" the answer is self-evidently yes, even if we just gave them a stack of modern books to read by candlelight without exposing them to any advanced technology. If your follow-up question is "would such a person be so horrified by what they read that they would return to their timeline and immediately try to prevent us from coming into existence?" the answer is quite possibly still yes, but their pre-Reformation ancestors would have thought the same of them. If your question is "do we have a right to claim the name and symbols of our forefathers when they were so different from us?" I point you to China, which any Chinese person will be proud to tell you is 5000 years old, and that they are one and the same civilization as those illiterate, human-sacrificing, neolithic tribesmen of five millennia ago. Compared to that, 300 years is nothing.
As for I would divide things up, on a political basis there have been three Americas: the America of the Founders, ending with the Civil War; the America of Lincoln, after which I would place an interregnum between 1945 and 1965; and then the current America, which is in the process of being dismantled. On a cultural basis, there is a clear break in the mid-20th century, but I do not detect one in the 19th century, at least not in literature. From the point of view of the rest of the world, there is before 1945 and after. Draw enough of these lines and you will see that many of them overlap, and then you can choose to name the things on either side of them whatever you want. As for regional cultures, those were significant in earlier times, but are losing their strength in favor of a more general rural-urban divide.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
Even if the downward spiral from Democracy to Caesarism is unstoppable, if you act too soon or too rashly (e.g. if Caesar took the crown from Antony and declared himself Rex, the Gracchi brothers holding on to the tribunate at all costs, etc.) you run the risk of the masses and the old elite uniting to tear you down. As such, if you want to seize power you must still occasionally demonstrate obsequious adherence to the rules while working to keep the bulk of the population on your side as you slowly push the Overton window in your preferred direction (for the record, I think Caesarism is bad and this would not be a good outcome).
ResoluteRaven
20d ago
This is the book I was thinking of, though one might want to supplement it with a more general history.
ResoluteRaven
21d ago
Muslim armies seem to have done well when led by a nomadic or recently nomadic military class i.e. Bedouin tribesmen or Turkic horsemen, and to have lost their edge after settling down in much the same way the Mongols, Manchus, and Khitans did after conquering China. I don't think slaves had much to do with it.
ResoluteRaven
21d ago
Well, substackers would quickly put themselves out of business if they said "I can't give you a definitive list of what to read to be a well-rounded/based/moral/whatever individual, you must think for yourself and ignore the opinions of pundits like me" so you shouldn't really expect that sort of honesty from them.
ResoluteRaven
21d ago
I'm not sure that modern curricula can be properly described as "multicultural" if they are curated to promote a single political narrative. I remember a fairly woke friend of mine once asked me for book recommendations for Native American history month and was confused when I suggested things like a history of the Comanches, the Popul Vuh, a book about Aztec philosophy, or 1491 by Charles Mann, because what they really meant was "give me another book about how much life sucks on the reservations and how it's all our fault."
ResoluteRaven
21d ago
I don't doubt that intelligent and capable students could benefit from such an education, but your average child today would be lucky to get through a single YA chapter book without scrolling TikTok for 5 hours after every page, so I think the baseline curriculum should focus on providing them with the rudiments of a shared literary culture. With proper tracking of students, the higher levels can study foreign languages, among other things, but for most people it's a waste of time (and I say that as an aspiring polyglot).
ResoluteRaven
21d ago
You're right, that was a poor way to phrase what I meant, which was "you can't learn a language properly as an adult if you never acquired one as a child."
ResoluteRaven
21d ago
The purpose of such lists is to give students a grounding in the literature and philosophical traditions of their own culture, not an understanding of the whole world; the Western/Anglo centrism is the point. They should not be taken (as some intend) as a substitute in and of themselves for a complete education, which would naturally include world history, foreign languages and cultures, science and math, etc.
Moreover I think the focus on independent thinking, or as it was always put by my teachers, "we don't do rote memorization here" misses a key point, which is that without a core knowledge of facts, dates, and historical figures, or the web of references and cross-talk that define a particular literary tradition, a student has no framework in which to integrate new information and it will tend to slip away. You need to speak one language fluently before you can learn another. We don't need to go full Asian cram school, but teachers these days would probably better serve their students by adhering more strictly to a shared curriculum, not less.
I did not mean to imply that there were no historical ties between Taiwan and China, only that Taiwan is not thick with collective memory for Chinese people the same way that Ukraine is for Russians or say Kosovo is for Serbians. No Warring States philosophers, Three Kingdoms generals, or Tang Dynasty poets ever lived, fought, or even set foot there, and Han settlers only arrived in Taiwan in large numbers at about the same time the US (i.e. a country "with no history" according to most Chinese) was being colonized by the British.
For what it's worth, while I feel the need to point out that the cultural, linguistic, and political differences between Taiwan and mainland China are already greater than those between the 13 colonies and England on the eve of the American Revolution, I don't have any firm position on Taiwanese independence, only that fighting a major war in East Asia would be a catastrophe and probably lead to at least a half dozen of the greatest cities in the world being blown to pieces by missiles and drone strikes, since Japan, Korea, etc. would likely be dragged in. However, I can tell you that my relatives in Taiwan have in the last five years gone from being dyed-in-the-wool Chinese nationalists (as in they would be insulted if you called them Taiwanese) who wished for reunification to basically the exact opposite position (China is the enemy, we are not the same). I don't consume enough Chinese language media and news to be able to tell if this is based on an honest assessment of PRC statements and positions in recent years, or whether they have been sucked down a social media/propaganda rabbithole of some sort, but presumably the latter is at least a contributing factor, and this does not bode well for the future stability of the region.
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