ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
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
4mo ago
For the events of the Mao era, Frank Dikötter's People's Trilogy will tell you more than you ever wanted to know. I haven't read his more recent book covering the last half century, although I think the focus there is more on the economic side of things. It's hard to find unbiased accounts of the 1989 protests and events since then in English, so your best bet might be to supplement whichever interchangeable mainstream source you choose to consult with something like Carl Zha's Silk and Steel podcast (unfortunately most of his newer stuff is paywalled), which will give you the opposite perspective, and split the difference. I tend to get my own information on these things secondhand from older relatives who are plugged in to the Chinese language media ecosystem.
The main item you left out of your list was the extreme covid lockdowns and subsequent CCP crackdown on anti-lockdown protestors in 2022. This is the proximate cause of the current wave of emigration that has sent hundreds of thousands of their citizens fleeing to Thailand, Singapore, Japan, and the US in the last 3 years. Dan Wang's 2023 letter gives a good rundown of this. There's also the ever-present persecution of religious adherents, though the Falun Gong diaspora take it a bit far with overblown claims of mass executions of prisoners to harvest their organs (though feel free to investigate this yourself). Most of the rest is bog-standard developing country stuff that isn't China-specific e.g. air pollution from factories causing illness, infrastructure projects built too fast that occasionally collapse, lax safety standards in food and consumer products, and so on.
I don't know about general world history books, as that seems a bit too broad of a topic for a single volume that isn't a college textbook, but for pre-modern China, Mote's Imperial China is in the running for best history book I've ever read. For Korea, I have a few books on my list, but haven't gotten around to them yet, so can't give an informed recommendation.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Fascist states have an even poorer track record than communist ones as far as longevity is concerned. Monarchies are stable in the Middle East for now, but their European counterparts were all overthrown or defanged centuries ago, being themselves the soil from which liberalism sprouted in the first place. Just as the printing press and mass literacy fatally weakened the Catholic order of medieval Europe, modern communication technologies pose a dire risk to would-be authoritarians of any ideological bent wherever they have taken root. The CCP has the best chance at riding this particular lion, and newer technolgies may turn the tide in their favor, but so far they are losing the hearts and minds of their younger generations, who are fleeing en masse to Thailand and the West.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I think liberalism is in for another rough century, but assuming it isn't rendered obsolete by AI-backed surveillance states of some sort, I think the same lessons that Europeans learned by 1648 will be re-learned by an even larger fraction of the human race this time around (tree of liberty, blood of tyrants, you know how it goes). It may take a couple more swings of the pendulum back and forth between right-wing and left-wing illiberalism and who knows how many deaths along the way, but people will eventually realize that trying to crush their ideological enemies underfoot has a tendency to backfire and that the revolution always eats her children. This is little consolation to those of us who have to live through it, but so it goes.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
No, I don't go around assigning exact numerical values to how much taxpayer money should be spent on foreign aid, or healthcare, or the military, or exactly how many American lives we ought to be willing to sacrifice in a war to defend our allies. If you believe that everyone who doesn't autistically prepare spreadsheets of such figures is incapable of moral reasoning, then I have some bad news for you (or good news, if you want to ignore everyone's opinions, I suppose). Not that I couldn't put such a list together, but it would be a lie, as these things are decided intuitively on a case by case basis, as below.
You could spend one trillion dollars on a program that encases every newborn African in a suit of power armor to protect them from cradle to the age of majority under the justification of the non-zero value of human life.
If this were being proposed at a time when every American did not also have such a suit of power armor and this would be an immense strain on the economy, then it would be a violation of the ordo amoris as properly understood. If, however, there comes a day when every US citizen is a member of the Brotherhood of Steel and mass produced power armor costs next to nothing to export, then why not send them some? You give decreasing amounts to each concentric circle of care, moving outwards, but if you are fantastically wealthy the people on the outside still get quite a lot in absolute terms.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Africans leave Africa and cause problems with crime and low IQ any place they go.
This is not a problem if you have sensible immigration policies. If Europeans are so dumb that the only way to save them from themselves is to hope that every African drops dead before they can be invited in, then they are already doomed.
They also make living in Africa impossible because it's full of Africans.
We haven't exactly run out of space in the rest of the world yet. If that ever becomes an issue it will be easy enough for other nations to re-colonize Africa and clear the land.
Lots of money is spent helping Africa that could be spent elsewhere.
This depends on your definition of "lots of money." Foreign aid is less than 1% of the US federal budget, and PEPFAR even less than that.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Yes, the State department funds "democratization" programs that are a front for destabilization of foreign governments and the subversion of their civil society with progressive ideology. I won't lose any sleep if all of that gets tossed in the trash heap of history. But Scott and I are not talking about the entire NGO complex; we are talking about PEPFAR. And I see little daylight between giving lifesaving medicine to the deathly ill and the unborn and any sort of traditional religous charity.
You can object to it because it involves providing contraception, performing circumcisions, or because the recipients are African, but to consider it a net negative requires placing either zero or negative value on tens of millions of human lives. Even I, someone who doesn't particularly like Africans (I lived there for 3 years; I have no illusions about what they are like), wouldn't want them in my country, and thinks it would be better if most of them had never been born, believe they're worth something, and that if it is possible to save them from certain death for the cost of a rounding error of our budget, then to not do so would be a crime against humanity.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
The US withdrawing foreign aid to Africa is not going to decrease the amount of future Africans, unless you can get the rest of the world to agree to a policy of blockade and imposed famine. As it stands, the Chinese, Europeans, Japanese, etc. would be more than happy to pick up the slack and claim the moral high ground, meaning the only result would be damaging America's international reputation while saving a miniscule fraction of the federal budget.
If you want to lower the African population, all you have to do is accelerate their demographic transition through development work i.e. what organizations like USAID are supposed to be doing anyway. Getting girls in school and providing them with contraceptives will tank the birthrate faster than waiting around for them to starve or die in a pandemic (even if you tried bombing them you'd have about as much luck as Israel has had in Gaza). They don't have to become rich to stop having children; France underwent the transition in the 19th century when they were poorer than anywhere on Earth today.
Moreover, if your problem with Africans is their migration to western countries, then all you have to do is not let them in and it becomes a non-issue. If you assume that this is impossible because white people are too altruistic then I don't see how you can imagine getting them to cut off foreign aid either. If your problem is that Africans are taking up land and resources that would be better utilized by higher IQ populations then I refer you to the previous paragraph (or we could just invest in eugenics).
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
It seems odd to me to associate this type of charity with rationalism/EA specifically when it has been a common practice for centuries for religious institutions to collect a larger fraction of congregant's income than the US spends on foreign aid and at least in theory distribute it to feed, clothe, and house destitute strangers. If giving away your posessions to the poor were an inherently suicidal worldview, then the world would not be full of Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists instead of Nietzschean neoreactionary twitter pagans.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Details tend to bubble up on various OSINT twitter accounts when they aren't distracted by other events, but you're unlikely to get as much reliable information on this or other contemporary wars in places people don't care about e.g. Burma or Sudan by dint of fewer people putting in the effort to collect and disseminate on-the-ground reports to a foreign audience.
I have not been following this particular round in much detail, but it doesn't seem like too much of an aberration in the grand scheme of things. After the Rwandan genocide, the Tutsis followed the Israeli example and built an organized military machine that has only been prevented from conquering huge swathes of East and Central Africa by an alliance of most of their neighbors and heavy UN pressure to abide by various ceasefire agreements. With the gloves off they could probably steamroll almost all of the Congo by themselves, but that would ruin their international image and probably lead to things like foreign aid being cut off, so they are content to use their proxies for the time being.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I'm hopeful that Vietnam can follow the same developmental trajectory as its neighbors in the Sinosphere, and the clearing out of motorbikes and ordering of street traffic is certainly part of that (unless you're Taiwan). So far they've only just managed to climb out of the rut the wars of the 20th century left them in and the real test of their economic potential is yet to come. Assuming their PISA scores are not all fake, then I am optimistic that they can get to around where China is now within a couple of decades.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I would draw the dividing line in Virginia to include only Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William, and Fauquier counties in the new expanded DC. In my experience, it starts to feel like the South about halfway to Charlottesville. I'd also push the borders of the now shrunken New York a little farther north and east into Connecticut.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
As far as I can tell, the dearth of innovation across contemporary music, architecture, literature, etc. is symptomatic of a deeper cultural malaise and applying palliative care to any one area, whether through documentaries or executive orders, is unlikely to do much to slow the decay until something more fundamental changes. There can be plenty of disagreement over what exactly has gone wrong or when (if you quizzed a group of online reactionaries, you'd get answers ranging from 1965 to 0 AD), but reaching a consensus is neither sufficient nor likely even necessary to build something new and beautiful for its own sake.
Of course when we look back on history, we see a punctuated equilibrium where short periods of years or decades can outshine the centuries surrounding them in terms of art, architecture, music, poetry, and other measures of cultural achievement, leaving a long trail of decaying imitations in their wake. Is this an artifact of chance historical preservation and the biases of those who recorded the works of their contemporaries, or do whole societies really just suddenly stop producing anything interesting or worthy of remembrance? Our own example seems like evidence for the latter, but I remain unsure.
Getting back to buildings, I recall once looking for any example of a contemporary style of architecture whose designs I liked, and all I found was the Neo-Andean of Bolivia. Some mixture of that, Art Deco, and whatever you call the supertrees in Singapore (solarpunk, I suppose), is what I'd like to see more of if I had a say in such things, though I would value having regional or climatic differentiation above all else. When I read Albion's Seed years ago, one of the things that struck me was the extent to which people's homes in colonial America (and basically every society ever except the one we live in now) were designed to either take advantage of or mitigate local factors such as snowfall, wind direction, humidity, and so on, rather than simply copying and pasting the same suburban floorplan, adding air conditioning or heating as needed, and calling it a day. There is something profoundly wrong with the fact that apartment buildings in Chicago look the same as ones in Miami.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
In the event that there's really a coordination problem, that it can't be done via charity for some unclear reason, why isn't it an internationally shared expense?
This could certainly be done, but cutting funding effective immediately and leaving the doctors and administrators of the existing program in the lurch doesn't seem like a particularly sensible way to initiate such a transition.
At the end of the day, my real question is why the hell HIV spreads so well in Africa. I've read the explanations and they just don't really make much sense to me. In the United States, Europe, and Asia, HIV just spreads really poorly among heterosexual populations that don't use intravenous drugs.
Because Sub-Saharan Africans are more sexually active with more partners and with worse hygiene than their counterparts in other parts of the world. Transmission of HIV from women to men can occur when both have open cuts or sores and are engaging in some of the practices others downthread have referenced, particulary for men who frequent brothels where everyone else is infected. This lack of hygiene is also why circumcision reduces the risk of getting HIV for men in Africa but not nearly as much in other parts of the world, or so I've been told.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
In the fields I'm familiar with, this was true ten years ago, but there has been significant improvement in the quality of Chinese publications since then. My understanding is that this is the result of targeted government pressure in a few areas deemed nationally significant and may not generalize.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I've used an Italian ceramic pan from Ballarini for a couple of years and it seems more durable than your run-of-the-mill teflon pan. I still treat it as I would any other non-stick cookware out of an abundance of caution e.g. use only plastic or wooden tools, don't cook with it above medium heat, and clean it with soft sponges that won't scratch. I'm not actually sure how much one costs, as it was a gift, but I think you can find good discounts on their cookware sets.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
The elimination of DEI programs was a separate executive order and one that I have no problems with, but certainly if progressive beauracrats tie themselves like a dead weight to programs or people that do actual work and threaten to drag them down into the depths then any damage done is on them and not the fault of the Trump administration.
Doctors letting patients die intentionally to make a point about abortion seems much less likely to me than them being incompetent and dealing with idiot patients, but I haven't looked into the details of these cases so I could be wrong. Most people I know working on government research grants (in the physical or non-medical life sciences) just want to do their jobs and resent any interruption, so halting or sabotaging their work as a protest would be inconceivable to them. NIH may have a different internal culture, and it seems the hammer came down on them first and harder than the rest.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
As long as we assume that living with a botched circumcision is still better than dying of AIDS, I don't see how this is sufficient grounds to condemn an organization that has saved tens of millions of lives, perhaps more than any other foreign aid program in history.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I can understand the logic of cutting off all funding first and then re-opening the spigot only to programs that reveal themselves as essential, so I will reserve judgement on this policy (if it even survives its first appearance in court) until we see how the second part is supposed to work. If it ends up taking long enough that most university and national lab research grinds to a halt and children in Africa start dying of AIDS because local workers are not allowed to hand over drugs that have been already been purchased and delivered, then I will consider it a grave blunder.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
My mother grew up in a two bedroom house with her parents and five siblings, and I remember how silly she found the American idea of each child having their own room. Since there is clearly no material limitation on PMC couples raising large families, the problem is entirely cultural and I doubt it can be addressed directly through government intervention.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
The primary reason is founder effects. Being a part of the rationalist diaspora, this community started out with a disproportionate amount of techno-optimist libertarians and has mostly shrunk since then. There are ways to get here from the collapsnik corner of the internet, but the path is much less straightforward than from the tech world, especially these days. I came by that road once upon a time, but it has since become overgrown and the markers have been lost.
You'll find a more receptive audience in the comments section at John Greer's blog, assuming you're not already a regular. His posts about astrology and magic may be offputting to some (then again, we have a lot of kooky ideas floating around here ourselves), but he wrote most of what he needed to about collapse at his old blog (archived here and several other places) and seems like the kind of person you might have found posting in some alternate universe 70's environmentalist version of the Motte.
I'll give the response to your 5 points from Greer's perspective (I read every post of his for about a decade, so I have a pretty good sense of it) rather than my own, because my beliefs are both more uncertain and less interesting than his:
While it's true that our society is in a downward spiral, these things take many lifetimes to play out (insert a reference to The Long Emergency by Kunstler) and worrying about imminent doom is simply the inverse of the idea that the AI singularity will solve all our problems overnight and usher in an age of fully-automated luxury space communism. In both cases, it serves as an excuse to abdicate responsibility for the future, since who cares what we do now if we'll all either die from climate change or be uploaded into a virtual utopia by our benevolant AI overlords?
What things will look like on the ground is that each successive generation will use a little less energy than their parents. There will be no abrupt discontinuity, outside of the wars and conflicts to which humans are prone in any age. The future won't look like a carbon copy of some period in the distant and barbaric past, as though you rewound the tape of history, but many innovations and inventions of our modern world will persist in some form, even if you falsely assume that all remaining nuclear or fossil fuels will be completely used up or inaccessible (the radio, the printing press, the bicycle, ultralight solar-powered aircraft, the germ theory of medicine, trains, hydropower, etc. don't need oil or coal to work). We aren't the first civilization to decline and we won't be the last; this cycle of birth and decay is something the Greeks, Indians, and Chinese all figured out and learned to live with thousands of years ago.
Climate change may render parts of the world undesirable to live in, but the Earth's flora and fauna, humans included, will rearrange themselves and find ways to adapt to this (in geologic terms) puny extinction event. Pandemics are nothing new either, and the Black Death didn't destroy Latin Christendom. If all our chickens and cows die from bird flu, then I guess that serves us right for factory farming, but it's not as though we'll run out of food (unless you're Jordan Peterson and on a carnivore diet or something). The birthrate problem is one that solves itself, as people who want to have children will quickly replace the ones who don't. Lastly, we won't have to worry about maintaining industrial civilization, because industrial civilization is by its nature unsustainable.
If you want someone else's very different thoughts on that last point, then check out Anatoly Karlin's series on Malthusian industrialism. The long and the short of it is that maybe dysgenics will trap us temporarily in a bad equilibrium where our descendants are just smart enough to preserve civilization but too dumb to make any advancements, living in crowded slums like third world megacities today, but this situation will itself provide eugenic selective pressure and bring IQ's back up enough to climb out of the hole.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Serbia (>80% Serb and ranked 104 out of 180 by the CPI), Belarus (85% Belarusian and ranked 98 out of 180 by the CPI), Albania (>90% Albanian and tied with Belarus by the CPI), Kosovo (also >90% Albanian and ranked 83 out of 180 by the CPI), Cambodia (>95% Khmer and ranked 158 out of 180 by the CPI), and if we feel like stretching the definition of Southeast Asia we can throw in Bangladesh (99% Bengali and ranked 149 out of 180 by the CPI) too.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Meaning a high IQ Russian has more in common with an average Russian than a high IQ Persian. This is why a high IQ member of a nation in history continued identifying with their nation.
The Russian elite were for centuries francophiles who disdained the slavic culture of their peasant countrymen. In fact the entire project of 19th century European nationalists was essentially the convincing of high IQ individuals to stop identifying as part of a multinational imperial elite and start identifying with poor farmers who spoke the same language, so it was clearly non-obvious to them that they should do this.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Preserving a nation enables trust and strengthens the benefits of meritocracy while limiting the weaknesses. You can trust that the other guy isn't lying about his exams, that he won't screw you over and steal your IP because you share a background, you're of the same tribe.
There are quite a few low-trust ethnostates in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, while places like Singapore and the UAE sit near the top of the corruption perception indices, so preserving one's nation does not appear to be necessary or sufficient for maintaining trust.
What happens when you bring in a million smart people from a foreign ethnic group and they start working together to infiltrate your institutions and build up their own power base, bootstrapping their merit into corruption?
They win a bunch of Nobels and found companies and institutions in your name, making major scientific and literary contributions to your society, before losing their internal cohesion and assimilating into the broader population as their ethnic and religious solidarity is eroded by the overwhelming tidal forces of modernity?
Classical liberalism emerged out of centuries of vicious religious conflict as a truce between warring parties that had just beaten each other to a bloody pulp and were too tired to continue, and functioned so long as a cultural memory of that struggle endured that was strong enough to put down any would-be challengers. Now that those lessons have been forgotten (because [the other side] violated the truce first, everyone says) they will have to be re-learned the hard way.
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