ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
25d ago
1. Yes
2. Yes
3. +10 on the highway, +5 otherwise
4. Left lane is for faster traffic, but not for passing only except on highways with 3 or more lanes
5. No
6. No
ResoluteRaven
2mo 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
5mo ago
I don't think Gavin Newsom ever really had a shot at becoming president. It would take a political genius of the highest order to thread the needle of a road to Damascus style conversion on the issues of urban dysfunction and public order in California to neutralize that angle of attack, while preventing defections from his existing base of support, so unless he can somehow turn San Francisco into Singapore in the next 3 years all his opponents need to do is show live footage of open-air drug markets and homeless encampments in the streets to end his campaign before it begins.
As far as LA is concerned, the fires are only nibbling away at the edges of the city and not reducing downtown to ash, so not much rebuilding is even necessary. I think a large earthquake would provide more opportunities for that type of renewal, as it would damage or destroy buildings over a much larger area. Not that I hope such a thing happens, but it seems inevitable that one of the major west coast cities will be hit by one within the next decade or two.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
This is the latest report, but I first came across these details on Twitter last month.
ResoluteRaven
2mo 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
2mo 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
4mo ago
Revolutions are cool. They have happened in every country. Many countries are better after the fact.
As far as I can tell, very few countries have been made better by revolutions. Look at France and Britain: the former abolished their monarchy via revolution and ended up with millions dead and a century of chaotic and unstable governments (three monarchies, two empires, and five republics) while the latter defanged their monarchy piecemeal over hundreds of years and took its place as the richest and most powerful country in the world. Certainly the various communist and Islamic revolutions have been disasters for the nations in which they took place. Whether the American Revolution was an improvement depends on how you feel about Enlightenment values. Perhaps only the Glorious Revolution counts as an unmitigated success.
ResoluteRaven
6mo ago
There are a lot of variables that determine how people will respond to mass migration, including the number of migrants, the speed with which they arrive, the cultural distance between them and the native population, and how innately tolerant that native population is. You probably couldn't move 10 people across a mountain valley in New Guinea without triggering some sort of tribal war, while as we all know Anglos and their Germanic cousins are capable of passively accepting millions of alien newcomers every year without murdering them. This difference is partially genetic, but also in large part due to the development of social technologies that allow for cooperation across groups larger than Dunbar's number, of which organized religion, nationalism, and confucianism (if you consider it distinct from the other two) have been the most successful.
Now overall I'm pretty happy with the fact that most of us nowadays don't kill strangers on sight and think a continued expansion of our circle of care would be a good thing, but advancements in communication and transportation are threatening to overwhelm the capacities of our existing social technologies, and until they either adapt to the times or new ones are born from the ashes of our society, we are in a dangerous and volatile transition period (see all the comparisons between our present moment and European history between Martin Luther and Westphalia). This sense of an impending storm contributes to the growing wave of isolationist and nativist sentiment around the world but, conditional on continued economic growth and us all not getting turned into paperclips, it is in the longer view merely a tactical retreat, as competition between groups ultimately favors those able to marshall a larger population and greater resources.
Bringing things back down to Earth, I've been thinking a lot about my own sense of identity and belonging as a result of the recent immigration kerfuffle. Growing up as a mixed-race State Department kid, I never really had a hometown, a nation (in the blood and soil sense), a church, or many of the other things that root people in time and space (though it turns out a few formative years in sub-Saharan Africa is a pretty good inoculation against many stupid ideologies). To the extent that I have a people to call my own, it is the coastal American PMC class with its mixture of whites and "elite" immigrants. I don't know whether the Indians (and others) I went to school with and whose weddings I attended represent the top 1%, 0.5%, 0.1%, or whatever of their cousins in the mother country, or what visas their parents came here on, but they are good people and at the end of the day no man should betray his friends.
I have looked for the old American nation that this class replaced and found only ghosts and the dusty pages of Tocqueville and Fischer. Once upon a time my grandfather was a school principal and a Mason who read Latin and coached wrestling in a small town with a general store and a train station and town hall meetings out of a Rockwell painting. There was one black family in town, courtesy of the Great Migration, but apart from that there was hardly even an Ellis Islander in sight (I'm told the previous generation had not been fond of Catholics or Jews). Now, half the buildings are empty and the meetings are about how to beg the federal government for grant money to fix the rusty pipes, or when they will have to finally close down the school because the only children born in the county are Amish. Whomever you blame for this state of affairs, the culture that built that place is dead and no amount of nationalistic necromancy will conjure up anything functional out of its corpse.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Why not just offer citizenship to illegal migrants who volunteer to fight in Ukraine? The US already more or less does this with our military and the French have their foreign legion. It will get a decent number of problematic young men out of your country for the time being and most of them will probably be killed. As long as your army still has a high enough fraction of natives the survivors will forge bonds of fellowship with their new countrymen that will prevent fragmentation of the state after the war. This strategy worked for the Romans and Chinese for centuries, only failing for the former after a period longer than our present political system has existed.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Another missed opportunity was not opening the borders to Hong Kongers trying to flee to the West prior to the handover and during the repeated waves of protests since then. Hopefully we'll at least get all the TSMC engineers before Taiwan is taken over.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
What is the evidence that admitting foreign students is taking spots away from domestic students, rather than subsidizing them as Noah Smith claims? Why should we even be trying to increase the enrollment of (normie) white students when all making college education quasi-compulsory has done is inflate the minimum credentials needed to get a decent job and waste a bunch of people's time and money? It has never been easier to get an education in whatever subject you want on your own or start your own company, so to say that the weak (by world standards) form of discrimination that white students face in school is depriving them of opportunities they need to make something of themselves seems like a bit of a stretch to me. Their ancestors, the generation that produced all the marvelous inventions that underpin modern life, had it far harder. They couldn't study electrical or chemical engineering or computer science because they had to go out and invent those fields from scratch themselves, after spending their childhoods translating Latin in unventilated schoolhouses. The only thing students today want for is purpose, and that is not something that tinkering with college admissions is going to resolve.
As for the value of educating foreigners who do not intend to stay, it consists chiefly in the spread of liberal American values to the elite of neutral or enemy nations, destabilizing governments that are hostile to us and creating a naturally pro-American constituency and reserve of goodwill that can be drawn from in the event of a geopolitical crisis. We are also implicitly holding the children of high officials in China, South Korea, India, etc. hostage should a conflict develop with their home countries. In medieval times, you usually had to beat sombody in a war to get that kind of deal, but today they come here willingly.
ResoluteRaven
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo ago
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.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Yes, many second-generation African and Caribbean immigrants from an upper middle-class, college-educated background have this personality type, just the same as their peers of whatever race.
ResoluteRaven
6mo ago
But in today's age of high information availability, more subtlety is required. Even if you can convince the average person with a braindead argument like "Putin = Hitler", there will always be a subset of more intelligent people who demand a real argument. Since the more intelligent people tend to have out-sized influence, if you fail to offer them anything, they will not truly support you, or may even undermine you.
This doesn't seem true to me. Political speeches have been decreasing in sophistication for nearly a century at this point, at least in Democracies where you can have the votes of every thinking person but, in the words of Adlai Stevenson, "still need a majority." If the voters demand something contradictory like "we want to give billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine but not pay more in taxes or suffer any material consequences" then all the smartest politicians will spend their days coming up with ways to trick the populace into thinking they can have their cake and eat it too, praying that they won't be the one left standing when the game of musical chairs ends.
As far as convincing the averge person in the west to support Ukraine, "Putin is like Hitler" will work a lot better than "the system of international norms that have prevented large-scale interstate conflict in Europe since 1945 are dependent on all nations renouncing territorial annexation as a means of resolving their disputes, and any violator of these norms must be swiftly and severely punished to prevent a return to the bloodshed that characterized the first half of the twentieth century", but the latter is there if you want it.
But he has to let go of the idea that he will get all of the land back.
There is no way he or anyone close to him genuinely believes this, but it would be stupid to undermine his bargaining position before ever setting foot in the negotiating room. Such concessions need to be made privately to avoid public humiliation (or potential defenestration).
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
The Romans and the Ottomans certainly were. Hell, Egypt was run by Circassians for centuries and the elite of Tsarist Russia was disproportionately Volga German. An empire by definition consists of multiple peoples without a common ethnic heritage, so all this nationalist talk of "foreign brains" would be alien to them.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Dark chocolate truffles for something sweet and Korean BBQ pork jerky for something savory.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
For all the talk of mass deportations and ICE kicking down doors to round up millions of illegals, I haven't seen much action on that front amidst all this other chaos except a few flights to Guantanamo and an executive order blocked by the courts. There's a lot of performative signaling about how little this administration cares about foreigners, but a symbolic victory with no practical results would be worse than nothing, as it invites an extreme reaction from the other side without having moved the baseline.
ResoluteRaven
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo ago
I believe the exams were scored by officials who had previously passed, except for the highest levels, where essays would be personally judged by the emperor. So for the weed-out stages there was some sort of rubric that over time accumulated increasingly arbitrary standards for how to compose a properly formatted "eight-legged essay," but there was always a bit of randomness based on the emperor's personal whims.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Regaining the ability to defend themselves means that Europe will be free to pursue its own independent foreign policy without the nagging fear that if they step out of line they will be left out in the cold without America's guns to back them up. That could mean a more aggressive posture towards Russia, an economic realignment with China, maintaining Danish control over Greenland and its associated Arctic resources, restoring France's neo-colonial relationship with West Africa, or catching up to the US and China in dual-use technologies such as AI and rocketry. It's not that all of these things are impossible otherwise, but having a big stick provides a certain helpful sense of confidence akin to exercising and getting into shape on a personal level.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Any sort of tension will grow. I don’t think it’s going to just simmer in the background doing nothing.
The tension will only persist over long periods of time if the populations do not intermarry and remain distinct for generations due to self-segregation along religious or cultural lines e.g. Black and White Americans, Malays and Chinese in Malaysia, or the different castes in India. Note that even in those cases the situation has not spiraled out of control into a race war despite centuries of unfriendly interactions and close proximity. In other cases the groups will merge and any distinctions will fade away. In the US rates of intermarriage between Whites and every modern immigrant group will ensure this; it may be different with Muslim populations in Europe.
The question then becomes what is that new mixed population like and do we consider its creation a desirable outcome. In some cases we might consider the results neutral or positive e.g. your descendants become 5% Japanese, and in others we might consider them negative e.g. your descendants become 50% Haitian. Of course, some may reject all of these outcomes because they value racial purity in and of itself, at which point we reach an impasse.
I would say the argument for Chinese immersion over Spanish immersion is that it's a lot easier for an adult English-speaker to pick up Spanish down the line if they have a need for or interest in it, whereas they will be unlikely to ever master Chinese pronunciation unless they were exposed to the language at an early age.
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