WestphalianPeace
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User ID: 184
WestphalianPeace
7mo ago
China. The world issue is China. In 1600 China was 29% of world GDP. By 1913 it was 8%. A small island nation on the fringes of Europe was capable of crossing the entire globe and imposing it's will upon the Heavenly Kingdom. Austria-Hungary, that corpse of an empire, would send troops to fight the Boxers. Germany had concession near Beijing.
Today the Chinese fraction of world GDP is back to ~20% and rising. It has aircraft carriers. It's the number one trading partner of almost every nation on earth. It's over 50% of world steel production. Over 50% of concrete production. Every single supply chain in the world interacts with China. In 1990 Shenzhen has 800k people. Today it has over 17 million. An entire NYC greater metro area has been birthed between that book in 1992 and today. And every country in the world has to adjust. The entire globe has gone from treating China as a non-issue to having to reconcile the return of China to global affairs. A world stage unseen for literally hundreds of years. What does the Chinese leadership want? How integrated should each nation be with it? How can any global treaty be efficacious if China is not on board?
Do you want to affect climate change? China is over 50% of global coal consumption. Chinese domestic coal consumption is a World Issue.
Do you want to affect global poverty? Chinese development alone has done the majority of lifting the global poor out of poverty, by sheer population scale. Any growing market today has to consider China as a factor, whereas previously the only game in town was the West.
Global security? World Peace? China. Now that Russia has torn itself asunder in Ukraine China is the last source of Great Power conflict.
For the longest time 'global issues' were just a proxy for 'concerns of the global community'. which in turn just meant this map. Now every country, on all issues, has to deal with sheer scale of the factor that China is back.
WestphalianPeace
2mo ago
When Uganda decolonized it immediately engaged in ethnic expulsion of 90% of it's businesses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Asians_from_Uganda
At the time of their deportation Indians owned 90% of the country's businesses and accounted for 90% of Uganda's tax revenue. The real value of salaries and wages plummeted by 90% in less than a decade following the expulsion
Zimbabwe promptly used literally North Korea trained death squads to commit genocide against the Ndebele as soon as it could.
Algeria promptly ethnically cleansed 10% of it's population upon de-colonization. About 1 million Pied Noir were expelled. No one calls it ethnic cleansing or genocide though, because they were told they had a choice. the choice given to them:
the suitcase or the coffin
Kenyan independence immediately led the the complete destruction of the Arabs of Zanzibar.
Even Singapore itself was effectively born from ethnic race riots. See the 1964 Race Riots. Plural.
I blame our collective forgetting about it all on Franz Fanon. Who made it clear that ethnic hate wasn't a coincidence, it was the point. He would regard modern Singapore as a failure and modern Zimbabwe as success.
WestphalianPeace
11mo ago
My intuition is that it's
- an internal propaganda offensive to shore up internal support. Something to avoid the grinding stalemate narrative.
- a social taboo coup. US has restrictions on it's equipment being used to attack into Russian territory. Perhaps this offensive is intended to normalize the idea of fighting on Russia soil itself until the US gives permission to use donated equipment to strike inside Russia territory. There are many cases of Russia artillery attacking target in Ukraine and then scooting across the border to avoid retaliation. Get permission now and normalize the idea before the US presidential dice roll.
- There is no politics involved and it was just an intended to draw away Russian troops from further south. Russia has been slowly but successfully grinding forward there.
but mostly, be skeptical of anyone saying with certainty they know what it is.
WestphalianPeace
11mo ago
The problem with trying to make language rules explicit for students is that it violates two department's inclinations.
Linguistics majors are predisposed to fetishize change. They find language stability boring. Stability isn't why they got into this niche subject.
Meanwhile Education majors find education programs that work tremendously boring. They hate Direct Instruction, the 'Banking Model' of education, and they hate repetition. Doing sentence diagrams day after day isn't what inspired them to get into teaching.
What happens when you combine a group that finds teaching sentence structure boring with a group that thinks teaching kids grammar at all is inherently evil is that each group feeds into the other. The teachers are given an worldview that says they never need to teach sentence diagrams, they don't need to repeatedly explain the same concepts over and over again, and they don't have to awkwardly watch as some kids get it and some don't. The teachers in turn advocate for the linguist worldview. A Gordian knot is born.
WestphalianPeace
2mo ago
Eliezer is 'The Prophet', aka the originator. and Scott is 'the rightful caliph', aka successor.
in cultural influence Scott exceeded Eliezer years & years ago.
WestphalianPeace
11mo ago
There's also a few Hmong in French Guiana. Instead of bringing old allied Hmong to the metropole the French basically looked around, found an equivalent jungle geography, and sent them there. And instead of getting culture-bound diseases they flourished instead!
There's also several large enclaves of Mennonites/Anabaptists. I recall specifically in Bolivia and Argentina but there are probably some elsewhere.
Brazil used to have a sizeable Japanese diaspora in the millions.
WestphalianPeace
3mo ago
I'm Old Stock born in Toronto with family in Brampton. Every single expression of whatever the name given to my culture is treated as the most heinous evil possible that must be 'dismantled' as quickly as possible. I am mostly in mourning.
WestphalianPeace
9mo ago
Ck3's gameplay loop is kinda immersion breaking once figured out. You start seeing the same events over and over.
Two solutions
- Roleplay as your character. Instead of minmaxxing you're stats ask instead how your character would respond. Take joy in long plots to murder every single one of your rivals family before kidnapping him and making him die of old age in the oubliette.
- Set weird or interesting goals for yourself. Form the kingdom of Jerusalem and then eventually Outremer. As Norse go to India. Creating a tall Brittania with the goal not of expansion but instead of crusade to spread your dynasty everywhere. Form New England. Play a hyper tall Wales.
Of cultural note relevant to this forum specifically. CK2's After the End mod actually had a bunch of rat references. Yudkowsky founds the empire of California, founds a religion whose focus is to emphasize different teachers but no singular authoritative source, and you start with the rare artifact "Meditations on Moloch"
The CK3 mod did away with all of this and I believe the cultural uniqueness of AtE is worse for it.
WestphalianPeace
7mo ago
I would completely agree that the World Issue is also the United States. I consider the important difference to be that of familiarity. Countries have been navigating a world with the US as a Great Power for 100 years, and as a Superpower for 30-60 depending on your definition. China is relatively new, and every country, ngo, and ethnicity has to navigate that space of what it means for them now that China's back.
In the 50's China was still 80%+ farming. In the 70's it was still 77% farming. Today it affects every single industrial chain in the world and the Pentagon is tearing it's hair out trying to figure out how to build anything without it relying on Chinese firms at some point. The Great Divergence was an assumed global condition.
Behold this comparative composition of world GDP by country over time.
The world has known a what it means on a daily basis to deal with European & American global dominance. But that Chinese trendline? That collapse 200 years ago and sharp rise to today? That's something new. Because it's one thing when a country is massive but it's pre-industrial. Zheng He sought tribute, not Naval bases in Djibouti. This is a genuine arrival of a new industrial power on a world scale. And every country from Colombia to Kenya has to account for it.
I'd love to read those US DoD comments if you can drag up the link. Not challenging it as wrong. Just enjoy reading this kinda stuff.
well why not? Canada is an uncountry, comprised of no one, & representing nothing.
Canadians do not even exist. There is no Canadian history and no Canadian culture. There is a Quebecois/First Nations history, and any annexation of Quebec/First Nations should be negotiated separately. But Canada is merely a term of geography in which nations reside, not a nation in itself. Not a controversial idea. The government proclaims it regularly, lest anyone look back farther than June 15th, 1964.
Maybe there was once a culture called Canada. But it's long dead now. Canada is now Terra Nullis. It's for no one and belongs to no one. So annexation is completely acceptable.
WestphalianPeace
11mo ago
Sid Meir observed that people simply cannot process probabilities.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MtzCLd93SyU&t=1168
"We found that there is this point, and it's kinda around 3 to 1, 4 to 1, where people do expect to pretty much win everytime"
30% doesn't mean about 1 in 3. It means impossible. He had to manipulate how the numbers played out in the background so that it fit with people's sense of what probabilities mean, rather than actual probabilities playing themselves out.
So far the only luck i've ever had explaining it to people is to say "most pollsters thought it was impossible. Silver said it was unlikely but about the same chance as hitting a baseball. and people do hit baseballs"
For some reason the baseball analogy is the only thing that seems to crack the innumeracy.
WestphalianPeace
5mo ago
Wesphalian Peace mentioned in proxy!
Occasional reminder that the Nazi's rhetorical explanation for giving up at the end of ww2 was "if this continues the devastation will approach that of the 30 years war and we don't want that"
WestphalianPeace
11mo ago
I'd like to apologize to the critics of my post. Their comments deserve to be read as well.
It's a bad habit of mine to write in a fit of passion and then find myself unable to find the time or willpower to respond to critiques of my comments. But really, if you read my comment please also make time to read other people's criticism's of my case.
WestphalianPeace
2mo ago
tl; dr
“Once their rage explodes, they recover their lost coherence, they experience self-knowledge through reconstruction of themselves; from afar we see their war as the triumph of barbarity; but it proceeds on its own to gradually emancipate the fighter and progressively eliminates the colonial darkness inside and out. As soon as it begins it is merciless. Either one must remain terrified or become terrifying—which means surrendering to the dissociations of a fabricated life or conquering the unity of one’s native soil. When the peasants lay hands on a gun, the old myths fade, and one by one the taboos are overturned: a fighter’s weapon is his humanity. For in the first phase of the revolt killing is a necessity: killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free;” ― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
epistemic status: Not a Fanon scholar. Pretty much this.
Everything I say is going to be crude but direct. A Fanon-ist would disagree with my characterization, instead opting for language and terms that takes his world view in more gushing tones. Nevertheless I think my characterization is broadly correctly.
Fanon believed colonization had wormed its way into the character and self-conception of every colonized people. That the very ethnic identity of everyone living under colonial rule had altered their morals, values, ethnic self-conception, and ultimately, their own personal psychology. He mixes Marxism, esoteric psychology, and Race/ethnicity and comes up with own model of colonization as psychological totalitarianism. That colonial rule has tainted everything with no escape. So what is to be done? How do you liberate your people and also yourself when you live in a totalitarian system?
You commit acts of violence. You get your whole community together and bomb innocent civilians. You beat up innocent passerby's because they are of the race of your colonial masters. Because there are no innocents. Because they are part of the colonial power structure.
and when you do that you personally rupture yourself away from the Colonial Worldview. Your personal acts of violence emancipate you from the totalitarian thought control of your overlords. All of this from exploding disco's where young people went to dance.
He structures this all in extremely high-falutin terms. terms which are absolute catnip to a certain type of intellectual inclined to give the status of High Cause to what is, on the ground, really just old tribal-brain us vs them hatred. Colonialism is frozen Hegelian dialectic between colonizer and colonized. Violence breaks the frozen system and restarts the dialectic so that the oppressed can restart progress.
"In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich"
So lets compare to Singapore & Zimbabwe
Lee Kuan Yee's first language was English. His grandfather named him Harry. He once had the British Foreign Secretary
threw an arm around Lee. "Harry," he said, "You're the best bloody Englishman East of Suez."
Later he visits London and notices
"...he travelled to Piccadilly Circus by tube train, and as he emerged onto the pavement he stood and watched an unsupervised newspaper stall. He saw people stop and take a newspaper and then put their money in an old cardboard box next to the stall. He even saw people put in money notes and take out exactly the right change. Otherwise, no one interfered with or touched the money left uncovered and open to the world. He said to himself 'This is a well-ordered and disciplined society.'
....."he returned to Singapore determined that his country would be run on the principles he saw in operation in this country. Inspired by the level of social order and respect for private property he had witnessed during his visit to the UK, he not only changed Singapore from a war-ravaged and desperately poor country into one of the wealthiest of nations, but he also made it one of the safest; it now has one of the lowest crime ate of any modern developed country."
LKY then works tirelessly to work with an incredibly complicated multi-ethnic city-state. But everything is done pragmatically. It's about making sure every community feels like they are being given a fair shake in their city. That not one is exploiting them just because they are small, but also that meritocracy itself isn't being dismantled for the sake of equity. There is a ruthless pragmatism, but never an outlook of resentment.
For Fanon this hard fought public safety & ethnic harmony isn't success. This is total failure. Abdication of the fight for Liberation & Decolonization. Algeria ethnically cleansed itself of 13% of it's population to free itself from European influence/psychology/ways of knowing/epistemics/ethics/etc. Now it has dignity. That's success. Meanwhile LKY has become the colonizer himself. His society is a farcical continuation of colonization by "westernized elites". Only now without the British having to do the heavy work.
In this sense even Zimbabwe is richer than Singapore. Because Zimbabwe has overthrown is colonial superstructure for native rule. It's people might be poorer as a matter of GDP. But they are mentally far richer since, having committed prolonged acts of violence against their colonial masters, they've emancipated their minds from colonial influence.
“For a colonized people the most essential value, because [it is] the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” ― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
so this is actually one of the really interesting parts of Wages of Destruction. It drives home the incredible degree to which Nazi Germany was this backwards economy pulling off a Potemkin village of industrialization. I'm recalling from memory but if i recall correctly
- an ongoing housing crisis sucking up peoples meager wages
- bizarre financialization schemes to trick people into buying vehicles they'd never get
- the inability to create a decent radio that could compete in the international market
- the average german still being so poor that their diet lacks sufficient protein
- lack of mechanization on farms
- large swaths of the economy still being literally small land owning peasant farmers
- subsequently an obsessions with land inheritance laws as early at 1933.
- price controls on both ends of the market for the purpose of political support.
- lack of enough labour for the farms requiring requisition/corvee labour/slavery
- still not enough food to create a net calorie balance
and finally not enough steel for everything. there's just not enough steel for construction, fortifications, tanks, airplanes, ships, & ammunition. Let alone the domestic economy. And so one of the central ideas in Wages of Destruction is that the Nazi state uses this scarcity of steel and turns it into a means of political control. Dolling out steel here and there to favour one industry/military faction over another.
The Nazi's take this total control and use it to focus everything into one area or another the result is visible, legible, & shocking. But it's going all out for short term sugar highs over and over again. And the underlying health of the economy is nowhere near that of the US, UK, or France. And it doesn't have the comparative scale of the capacity of the USSR.
Should we bring back thee & thou?
We should.
As George Fox points out in his classic book titled
A Battle-Door For Teachers & Professors To Learn Singular & Plural; You to Many, and Thou to One: Singular One, Thou; Plural Many, You.
Wherein is shewed forth by Grammer, or Scripture Examples, how several Nations and People have made a distinction between Singular and Plural. And first, In the former part of this Book, Called The English Battle-Door, may be seen how several People have spoken Singular and Plural; As the Apharsathchites, the Tarpelites, the Apharsites, the Archevites, the Babylonians, the Susanchites, the Dehavites, the Elamites, the Temanites, the Naomites, the Shuites, the Buzites, the Moabites, the Hivites, the Edomites, the Philistines, Amalekites, the Sodomites, the Hittites, the Medianites, & c.
Also, In this Book is set forth Examples of the Singular and Plural, about Thou, and You, in several Languages, divided into distinct Battle-Doors, or Formes, or Examples; English, Latine, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, Caldee, Syriack, Arabick, Persiack, Ethiopick, Samaritan, Coptick, or Egyptick, Armenian, Saxon, Welch, Mence, Cornish, French, Spanish, Portugal, High-Dutch, Low-Dutch, Danish, Bohemian, Slavonian: And how Emperors and others have used the Singular word to One; and how the word You came from the Pope.
Likewise some Examples, in the Polonian, Lithvanian, Irish, and East-Indian, together with the Singular and Plural words, thou and you, in Sweedish, Turkish, Muscovian, and Curlandian, tongues.
In the latter part of this Book are contained severall bad unsavoury Words, gathered forth of certain School-Books, which have been taught Boyes in England, which is a Rod and a Whip to the School-Masters in England and elsewhere who teach such Books
We should value our language.
WestphalianPeace
5mo ago
Going off memory. Change your worldview from saving's as a denial of your income to instead that of "Paying Yourself First". Your saving's are something to be smiled upon and take pride in. Not a prevention of your ability to consume.
For the average person, get out of the cycle of living on whatever is your current income and instead get into the simplest of all possible budget plans.
Save 10% of your income. Pay off your debts. Then, once stable, invest.
It's a bit folksy. Often it's advise is outdated from an era of "just give him a good handshake and explain your situation". But humans intuit stories better than raw lists, and the advise is great for someone who is otherwise winging it at life.
WestphalianPeace
2mo ago
your link does not seem to work.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
By 1941 there were already signs of mounting discontent due to the inadequate food supply. In Belgium and France, the official ration allocated to 'normal consumers' of as little as 1,300 calories per day, was an open invitation to resort to the black market. Daily allocations in Norway and the Czech Protectorate hovered around 1,600 calories
well that's fine i'll just intensify agricultural production with fertilizers. wait. what's that? The explosive industry needs the same inputs?
But French grain yields depended, as they did in Germany, on large quantities of nitrogen-based fertilizer, which could be supplied only at the expense of the production of explosives. And like German agriculture, the farms of Western Europe depended on huge herds of draught animals and on the daily labour of millions of farm workers. The removal of horses, manpower, fertilizer and animal feed that followed the outbreak of war set off a disastrous chain reaction in the delicate ecology of European peasant farming. By the summer of 1940, Germany was facing a Europe- wide agricultural crisis. Danish farmers began systematically to cull their swine herds and poultry flocks. Dutch yields steadily deteriorated in line with the fall in fertilizer supplies. Most dramatic of all was the situation in France, where the grain harvest in 1940 was less than half what it had been in 1938.
This is fine
WestphalianPeace
6mo ago
Such a great series.
Novawar (now Iamnova) also did an entire let's play of Legend of Dragoon for those who are irrationally attached to that ancient rpg.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
By the late 1930s, virtually every family in Germany held at least one 'savings book' (Sparbuch). The accounts of the Sparkassen thus provide a direct insight into the everyday financial dispositions of German households. In the months immediately preced- ing the war, they showed an unusually large net withdrawal, as millions of families did their best to stockpile necessities. Then, from the first months of 1940 onwards, as rationing began to bite and the shelves of the German shops emptied, the accounts of the savings banks swelled with a completely unprecedented volume of deposits. By 1941, the inflow was running at the rate of more than a billion Reichsmarks per month. Under normal circumstances, these funds would have been put to work as loans to local government, or mortgages for small businesses.
But wartime restrictions not only hit civilian consumption, they also bottled up civilian investment. Whilst construction of new armaments capacity accelerated after September 1939, investment in housing was cut to the bone. In 1937, the peak year for civilian construction in the Third Reich, a total of 320,057 apartments were added to the housing stock. By 1939, annual net additions had already fallen to just over 206,000, under the pressure of military construction demands. The year 1940 saw only 105,458 apartments added to the housing stock and by 1942 the annual total came to less than 40,000, a reduction relative to 1937 of 85 per cent."
In 1940 the Sparkassen alone channelled 8 billion Reichsmarks into the war effort. In 1941 they contributed 12.8 billion Reichsmarks. Private investors who held their funds beyond the Reichsbank's immediate reach were directed into government debt through the simple expedient of restricting the issue of any other forms of interest-bearing asset and putting a tight cap on stock exchange speculation. No compulsion was necessary. There was simply nothing other than government debt to invest in.
I'm told that the best possible economy is one where you literally can't do anything with your money except invest in Government debt. It's a good thing the government is propping up my wages. And also propping up prices. But the prices are hidden. But the wages are hidden. But also I can't change jobs.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
The rail administrators struggled to ease the problems of freight traffic by cutting passenger services wholesale. But even drastic measures could not prevent a crisis. By early 1940, tens of thousands of freight cars were frozen in kilometres of traffic jams. By January, turn-around times had risen to more than a week. The effective carrying capacity of the Reichsbahn's rolling stock plummeted and the immediate result was an interruption to coal supplies. By December, the mines were warning of an impending 'transportation calamity'. In the freezing city of Berlin, coal ran so short that even a leading armaments firm such as Rheinmetall could not protect its deliveries from requisitioning by the desperate municipal authorities. Meanwhile, at the pitheads in the Ruhr, the mountains of undelivered coal reached dangerous levels, forcing the mines to slow down production. In total, in the early months of 1940 almost 10 per cent of German armaments plants were affected by the coal shortages. In the central industrial district around Kassel the figure was as high as 27 per cent. In January 1940 Goering described transport as the problem of the German war economy.
pg343-344
My ideal economy is one where lack of capacity of steel production results in a failing transport network where i have to cut off passenger service and yet still have a shortage of coal. In Germany.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
Some skilled construction workers were rumoured to earn better wages than senior army officers. And this was no accident. In May 1938, Hitler had removed control of the Westwall from the army's engineering depart- ment and handed it to Fritz Todt, the man idolized as the master-builder of the autobahns. Todt's mission was to complete the fortifications before the outbreak of hostilities and he was to do so regardless of cost. Goering's decree on labour conscription provided Todt with all necessary legal powers to secure the quarter of a million workers he needed. But typically for the situation of the German economy in the late 1930s he chose to supplement conscription with monetary incentives. The contractors on the Westwall were freed from standard military procurement rules, allowing them to inflate both their profits and their wage bills. By the summer of 1939, Todt had completed his mission. The most vulnerable sections of Germany's western frontier were reinforced with thousands of bunkers and gun emplacements. The price, however, was a huge inflationary shock to the labour market.
wages of destruction, pg 265
wanting to eat their cake and have it to. I want all my workers to have high wages. and i want the Westwall made quickly. but don't make it inflationary. and don't make it so that the high wage low-skill labour competes with agriculture.
WestphalianPeace
11mo ago
Likewise for me.
One of the things Scott does not bring up is the lack of an easy narrative from the anti-woke right to allow people to an easy out. If you want victory over your opponents then make it narratively easy for people to recuse themselves until your opponent's coalition is miniscule. Give them plausible deniability, even if it's hollow. Make it as cheap as possible to defect from a coalition.
Your inspiration should be Winston Churchill fighting on behalf of Eastern Front legend General Erich Von Manstein to get him cleared of war crimes charges.
Within living memory of the war itself America & Europe constructed a narrative that recast Nazi's on the Eastern Front into Simple Soldiers merely Doing Their Duty, unaware of the war crimes amidst them. Even the former SS members were recast as what David Glantz describes "above reproach, knights engaged in a crusade to defend Western civilization against the barbaric hordes of Bolshevism". Which is bullshit of course, and to be clear Glantz arguing against this absurdity. But consider the power of the following narrative in giving people an out from their previous enmeshment with a regime.
For decades that narrative gave people an excuse. It took until the 90's for Germans to confront the reality of what the Wehrmacht did. But in that crucial period after the war there was a narrative path for millions of people to distance themselves from evil. Interested WW2 amateurs today decry the existence of wehraboo's and how many Japanese and West German officials were former members of their respective regimes but when I compare what happened with de-baathification it sure looks pretty efficacious.
and what's remarkable is that Scott directly links to Yarvin but only regarding Yarvin's coining of the term Brown Scare. And merely linking to Yarvin is a massive risk to Scott's reputability. But in spite of taking that risk he avoids the more relevant to the point at hand which is that Yarvin, from the ultra-right, makes a similar case for avoiding cycles of retaliation by means of giving people an out.
Yarvin is also fond of telling parables of Caesar constantly forgiving his enemies. He tells a tale of Caesar winning a battle and scavenging a bag full of letters that would allow his faction to engage in reprisals against every single person who supported his enemies. And that's Caesar's response was to burn the bag. A point independently echoed by Mike Duncan of the History of Rome podcast where Duncan points out that resolution of the civil war basically required someone to take it on the chin and not engage in property confiscation and tribunals after total victory.
So lets simplify and add one more bullet to Scott's list at the end of how to approach this problem instead of massive retaliation.
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