site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34984 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

16
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Look upon them, and weep.

Recently @2rafa responded to a jannied comment of mine on Reddit saying that within 80 years, my homeland and her homeland would still exist and have roughly a similar character to what they currently do but England would not, as its people and its traditions slowly get replaced by les peuples outremers. The original character of the towns and cities of the UK would slowly be gnawed at and eaten away while the institutions, traditions and social fabric dissolve in the alkahest of multiculturalism. She mentioned that it isn't surprising that the native population would fight against it as this replacement basically severs the link between the them and the future.

I agree with that sentiment and I absolutely agree the original character of what made Great Britain truly Great has been lost. But this loss didn't happen thirty or forty or whenever the immigrants started to come in big numbers years ago, rather it happened in the aftermath of the Second World War when the UK dropped its long standing traditions of Classical Liberalism, "an Englishman's home is his castle" and the Anglo developed system of limited government, preferring to go for the expansive and nannying welfare state model instead.

There is a saying that tradition is like a legacy codebase, half of it is deprecated stuff you can get rid of safely while half of it is absolutely mission critical to the project functioning and it's very difficult to tell exactly which bit is which. The UK had over the centuries since the enlightenment created both a social and legal system based on individual rights centred on liberty and freedom and built on a bedrock of Christian values where it was expected that the government would minimise it's interference with what you do with your personal property and take steps to ensure other people also couldn't interfere with it. Charity and helping the less fortunate was very strongly encouraged and the Christian values indoctrinated in everyone since birth meant that lots of people with the means to do so gave away a large portion of their income/wealth to the needy, but crucially it wasn't forced onto anyone. Indeed income tax was first introduced as a temporary measure to fund the British armed forces during the Napoleonic Wars, an existential threat to the country and most definitely not the "lets use it to pay the rent of those who don't have the skills to earn enough to stay in London otherwise" racket that's going on at the moment.

This system generally functioned extremely well, but like all systems there were edge cases where it failed. In a severely misguided attempt since the end of WWII (and continuing until the present day!) successive governments tinkered with this system and slowly removed the things that made the system work (e.g. The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 which gave locals extreme levels of say into what you could build on your own property and is the prime culprit for the UK's current housing crisis), while if anything amplifying the things which were peripheral at best originally and now have become burdens upon society (e.g. how poor people renting in London effectively have the right to get to stay in of one of the only two alpha++ cities in the world and the taxpayer will fund their rent if they can't afford it themselves).

At the point the immigrants started arriving "Great" Britain was already in the process of dying. The things that made it great were being removed slowly the the British themselves. Plus new fads that were counterproductive like the destruction of the nuclear family were being adopted wholesale. It was only a small matter of time before things degenerated to the point where it was necessary to either import immigrants to make up for the collapsing birth rate or accept extreme economic pain for the vast majority of people. Britain choose to do the former. Indeed as Kipling warned a good thirty years in advance:

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life

(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)

Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

What remains of the original culture of the UK are not the things that made it great. Much like how a cadaver (initially at least) still looks like the person when they were alive but has lost that divine spark that made it more than just a heap of flesh and bones what we have at the moment is little more than a poor caricature of what the Great Thinkers of the Enlightenment envisaged the perfect society to be like. It is an ersatz, cargo cult imitation where things as fundamental as the right against double jeopardy are no longer respected (see the Criminal Justice Act 2003).

Now admittedly the specific cases behind why this right was abolished were quite clearly where a guilty person had been acquitted but was clearly guilty after new DNA evidence was discovered and so their retrial led to justice being delivered (and equally, the family of Emmett Till were denied justice due to the Fifth Amendment which protects against double jeopardy in the US) but at the same time this change showed that another fundamental enlightenment ideal, that "you should not create laws based upon a few specific examples, but rather upon general principles" was no longer respected.

As such, the rot had already set in on the inside well before immigrants started coming over in large numbers and changing the outward, visible character and appearance of British society. Hence what they are now replacing is not a culture with hundreds of years of history, but a thoroughly modern creation that for most of its existence has had mass inward migration. This bastardised culture is not worthy of the protection that should have been granted to Enlightenment Liberalism, but unfortunately that is dead and has been long buried, and no amount of effort will ever bring it back. Indeed as a crude mockery of what I consider to be the best societal system discovered yet by man I would prefer if it disappeared as soon as possible. I see modern British culture as belonging to the same class of objects as smallpox and polio - something to be eradicated post haste - rather than that of the Giant Panda and the Snow Leopard - valuable diversity that should be protected by humanity and nourished.

Just yesterday ethnicity estimates for the 2021 UK census were revealed. As expected the percentage of the UK that is white British fell from around 81% to 75% since 2021. Given the continuing high migration that this country is now basically reliant on - the recent budget depended on very high levels of inward migration to be balanced, lower migration than expected in the next few years will create a short term fiscal black hole that will be very painful to British society, see what happened when Truss and Kwarteng tried to borrow with abandon- and the higher birthrate of immigrants it is practically a given that the Replacement is going to happen come hell or high water. British culture and the country character will continue to change over the coming generations and it will be best for the natives themselves if they just go with the flow rather than trying to fight an inevitability.

I've long thought that the rationalist and adjacent communities were full of, to be frank, a sad mix of quokkas and leering american PMC sociopaths rapacious and hungry to consume all that is good in the world in a metpahorical orgy of neoliberal greed, but thanks for expanding my horizons.

I'll add 3rd worlders who hate my people and wish us exterminated, our culture destroyed, and our nation wrought asunder to that list shall I?

I do not wish extermination upon any peoples, I just want you to see the light and reject the degeneracy that has taken root in your countries over the last few decades. Break free from the shackles and we can all come together as brethren.

Thanks for clarifying that. I have already seen the light, but one candle cannot burn at the bottom of an ocean.

There is only one brotherhood.

Peace through power.

You've done an excellent, high-effort job of trolling here. You got several people to lash out at you in a way that required warnings. Well done.

Now stop this. This has been your schtick for a very long time, and while we more or less gave you a clean slate with the move here, this kind of supercilious baiting will not continue. Make well-crafted culture war arguments and talk about how awesome and superior your culture is - fine. But we are not blind to what you're doing here (trying to see how many people you can goad into losing their shit while you are technically abiding by the rules). You are not immune to having the wildcard rule applied just because you use lots of words.

There should be a word for the kind of situation where people who profess their love for intellectual diversity in practice prove incapable of perceiving any viewpoints outside of a narrow range as legitimate.

From what I know of the Count, including private communication, he was pretty much sincere here, at least in the "I contain multitudes" sense. If that triggered someone that's entirely on them; and especially given the everpresent concerns about our intellectual diversity the administration of this forum probably shouldn't strive to protect the feelings of the white supremacist-adjacent users in particular.

There should be a word for the kind of situation where people who profess their love for intellectual diversity in practice prove incapable of perceiving any viewpoints outside of a narrow range as legitimate.

If there is, find a situation where it's applicable, which this is not. If I were "incapable of perceiving any viewpoints outside of a narrow range as legitimate," I'd have banned him and the white supremacists.

We value intellectual diversity. We do not value trolling. BurdensomeCount may indeed actually believe what he's saying, but that doesn't mean he's not expressing it in a manner calculated to be flamebait. Just like the white supremacists who are able to stick around manage to do it without dropping pointless n-bombs and 13% memes, and the ones who aren't... can't.

In a severely misguided attempt since the end of WWII (and continuing until the present day!) successive governments tinkered with this system and slowly removed the things that made the system work

I want to post a rather long quote that suggests this happened earlier, going back at least as far as WW1:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.

He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 percent of the national income.

The state intervened to prevent the citizen from earing adulterated food or contracting infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over it citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase.

  • A.J.P Taylor, English History 1914-1945

It was only a small matter of time before things degenerated to the point where it was necessary to either import immigrants to make up for the collapsing birth rate

As an aside this is a total bollocks position. Most immigrants that go to the uk are family reunification migrants which means they are mostly middle aged or elderly and since most migrants don’t have that many kids anyway, the net effect is a wash on fertility. It just leads to more entitlement spending, resulting in net negative gdp growth

Most immigrants that go to the uk are family reunification migrants which means they are mostly middle aged or elderly

Wait, what? That goes against my understanding of the age range of immigrants, unless you're talking about a specific channel.

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/family-migration-to-the-uk/

According to the Annual Population Survey, in 2019 there were an estimated 9.4 million foreign-born people living in the UK. Of these, an estimated four million said that the main reason they originally moved to the UK was to join or accompany a family member. This means that 45% of all the foreign-born in the UK are family migrants, equivalent to 6% of the UK’s population of 66 million.

Looks like I was slightly off. It’s roughly half of all foreigners are chain migrants

You know at this point i'm not actually sure if your a troll. Your posts here, the other place, /r/drama, and the old place are so consistently truimphalist. What you're saying basically matches up with what your average muslim believes but you could also be a troll that's just commited to the bit. You know exactly where the line is and just how genocidal you can be without being dismissed. Some of your posts, if you are a troll, are outstanding. But i'll bite.

British culture and the country character will continue to change over the coming generations and it will be best for the natives themselves if they just go with the flow rather than trying to fight an inevitability.

Roll over and die: Or else!

Or else what? You'll carry on doing what you're already doing and what you always planned to do? A fate worse then a fate worse then death? That sounds pretty bad.

The fundamental isssue your people (and your paedophilic religion that you desire to force upon the west) have is that you don't build functioning societies. For all of your talk about saving the west through islam, it doesn't seem to be saving muslims living in the west who similar reputation around women as Africans, and a much worse reputation around children, who cannot seem to stop themselves joining gangs, who are hugely overrepresented in basically every voilent crime stat, and who are much more likely to live off the labour of others then any other group (the behaviour of Somali muslims in the benefits system is famous across Europe).

Your demands of acceptance already require massive, overwhelming campaigns of propaganda, censorship and social engineering and it is still only mildy successful.

I see modern British culture as belonging to the same class of objects as smallpox and polio - something to be eradicated post haste - rather than that of the Giant Panda and the Snow Leopard - valuable diversity that should be protected by humanity and nourished.

Maybe you are right. But the issue you will find, is that given the choice between living with us or you, everybody chooses us - Including your own people!

The fundamental isssue your people (and your paedophilic religion that you desire to force upon the west) have is that you don't build functioning societies.

Not acceptable. No, we don't have a rule against criticizing Islam here. We do have a rule about not making inflammatory statements about broad groups of people. Stop taking the ragebait.

higher birthrate of immigrants it is practically a given that the Replacement is going to happen come hell or high water.

Immigrant birth rates always normalize to the local level within a generation or two.

Supposing you ever stop immigration. Which is, I'd say, not very likely.

In 1945 90 percent of the British were opposed to immigration. Now a slight majority support it. It’s possible for attitudes to change

Considering the stranglehold anti-white and pro-immigration extremists have on media, the possibility is irrelevant. In the UK not even a large-scale gang rape scandal involving possibly tens of thousands of children spanning decades could wake the people there up. By the unlikely time the attitudes of Europeans in the UK change, their political opinions will be irrelevant.

I believe the standard response here is muttering something about Cthulhu. If one takes as an axiom that public opinion only swims left, then immigration must grow in popularity so long as it remains left-coded. You’d have an easier time giving an example that hasn’t leaned left.

Then just have anti immigration code left. It’s not as if that’s impossible. You can make a leftist case for being anti immigration.

Or, immigrants and children of immigrants support immigration? One in six foreign born, remember. More than likely even more foreign-descended. Seems to me like it's the bad argument cousin of "areas with more immigration have people think more positively of immigration" -- no shit.

Seems like many of the migrant communities in the UK hate each intensely though.

Yeah, it's great living in the front rows of the no holds barred knock down drag out ethic grudge match arena. :|

I mean; kinda yeah. Conflicts can be entertaining when you hold no stake in the outcome

Do immigrants actually support immigration? My intuition would be that immigrants are for it to the degree that they're in the social sphere that profits from immigration and start being against it as they accumulate wealth.

Quoting that Kipling poem is the Motte equivalent of saying your favorite book is Catcher in the Rye

The difference is that the poem is good.

I'm a long time /r/themotte and /r/slatestarcodex poster. I've never seen that poem before.

I am going to disagree. I've been hanging around the Motte a long time now, and this is literally the first time I've ever seen the poem. I don't think it is as common as you're asserting, or else I would've seen it at least once before.

If we want to talk Kipling quotes which get used a lot, it has to be the Danegeld quote.

I've referenced it a handful of times, and seen many more. Purported contemporaneous politics aside, it's a potent admonishment to remember your basics and common sense in the face of utopian promises. The usefulness in the rationalist community feels obvious.

Really?

I’m not sure I’ve seen it from this community, but much like Catcher, it came up in high school English.

My pick for most overused would have to be “If-”:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you...

It’s just chock full of reactionary bait noble, masculine sentiment.

Are you right wing and looking for some poetry? Come on down to Rudyard Kipling's Poetry Palace! No matter what kind of right winger you are, we have a poem for you!

Drifting rightward because your wife just had a son and you are worried about the influence modern society has on masculine development? If- is the work for you!

Right wing because you oppose the racial spoils system we seem to be implementing and consider it a failure to understand the dynamics of negotiation? Dane-geld is now 50% off!

Consider both of those bad, but more symptoms of living in a society which has forgotten the most important lesson of history - that those who don't learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them? This weekend buy one copy of The Gods of the Copybook Headings and get a second free!

Gone full on conflict theory, and convinced the left are satanic pedophiles trying to exterminate white people? The Beginnings is now available, with a special introductory price!

So come on down to Rudyard Kipling's Poetry Palace for some hot, hot stanzas today, and remember our price match guarantee - find your poem cheaper elsewhere and you're a better man than I am Gunga Din!

You missed The Old Issue

All we have of freedom, all we use or know—This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.

Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw—Leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the Law.

Don't forget "The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon", that's a popular one about how the right wing will eventually have enough and rise up.

I haven't read Catcher in the Rye either, it didn't come up in high school for me. I did have some Kipling, just not this particular poem.

I'm surprised someone managed to end up at the Motte without having read Meditations on Moloch, which quotes from "Copybook Headings" extensively.

I have read it, though it has been a while so I reread (well, skimmed) it to see if I had forgotten details. I think you and I have very different ideas of what "extensive" means. The Kipling poem gets a few mentions in one small section of a much larger piece. Granted that I apparently had seen the poem before, but it is so insignificant within Meditations on Moloch that I'm not at all surprised that I didn't remember it.

I also do not recall this poem being mentioned in Scott’s blog post, but it is a pretty concise reminder of why conservatism tends to increase with life experience, now that I’ve looked up what a copy-book was.

Some of us are déclassé enough to appreciate it; I thought the reminder that some in the UK already saw the connection was well placed. And if it introduces somebody new to The Gods of the Copybook Headings, that's great too.

True, it's a bit derivative I agree and poor fashion. I shouldn't have included it and I would still have made effectively the same point.

I'm not sure if I really buy that migration is good for government finances. Maybe the UK handles it a lot better than my own country, but here in Belgium non-EU migration has been a net negative. Our national bank did a study on this a few years ago.

Unfortunately it does not have a handy chart showing the net cost per place of orgin like this Dutch study has on page 76, but I imagine the numbers would look even worse here for non-EU migrants, since our welfare state is infamously easy to just leech of for life if you can't be bothered to work. The EU migrant numbers would probably look better due to all the highly paid eurocrats in Brussels.

Especially MENA and subsaharan African migrants are notorious for being a massive cost sink in pretty much every western european country they settle in en masse. I find it hard to believe that the UK alone has somehow managed to turn say Morrocans into something resembling a desireable citizen, given their horrendous performance in the rest of Europe. Mind you, then we haven't even gotten into the other problems importing an underclass from the third world brings with it. Of our prison population, 48% flat out doesn't even have belgian citizenship. I would not at all be surprised if >80% of our prison population had a migrant background. Then we also have the terrorism issue, but credit where credit is due that has improved in the last couple of years, we haven't had a serious attack with mass casualties in a while now. Either our secret service has seriously stepped its game up or the defeat of ISIS has made comitting an attack a less attractive prospect. Perhaps both, hard to say.

but here in Belgium non-EU migration has been a net negative. Our national bank did a study on this a few years ago.

This is a 244 page document, can you point to where this is shown? Ctrl-Fing for 'GDP per capita' seems to contradict your claim:

Summing up results from the different impact channels, recent immigration has a positive impact on GDP, pushing it up by 3.5%. The effect is positive for both origins with a 2% increase from EU immigration and a 1.5% rise from non-EU immigration. Evidently, immigration also induces an increase in the population. Nevertheless, it still leads to a 0.7% rise in GDP per capita

And the Dutch study isn't loading for me.

I'm not sure if I really buy that migration is good for government finances. Maybe the UK handles it a lot better than my own country, but here in Belgium non-EU migration has been a net negative. Our national bank did a study on this a few years ago.

We don't, it's just fudged. Stats that could paint migration in a negative light are ignored or massaged until they don't. Messaging prefers to use total GDP as a measurement to say that migration improves it -- not GDP per capita, which would expose the lie. Earn a single pound working at a hand car wash? Congratulations, you've increased total GDP! Messaging also prefers to say things like "immigrants are a net benefit to the tax take on average" while omitting that no immigrant becomes a net contributor before earning about 35k. This stat is misleading because it means a few top band high earners (and so high tax contributors) can "pay for" a load of useless layabouts in this statistic.

This stat is misleading because it means a few top band high earners (and so high tax contributors) can "pay for" a load of useless layabouts in this statistic.

How is that misleading? Admittedly this suggests a third option of "only accept immigrants likely to contribute lots of taxes", but it's surely relevant to the question that between "current immigration" and "no immigration", the "current immigration" option still leads to higher sum tax revenue.

stay in of one of the only two alpha+ cities in the world and the taxpayer will fund their rent if they can't afford it themselves

What on earth does this even mean? Is the other one NYC? You don't think any other cities on earth have a "alpha"? They're the largest Financial hubs, I won't dispute that and as that's your business I'm sure that looms large in your view. but there are other industries and plenty of places that are booming with them. Hollywood/LA don't have alpha? Silicon valley, no alpha? Hell, I think there are multiple cities in Texas alone that can be described as having alpha.

There's a think tank called Globalization and World Cities Research Network which basically ranks cities periodically based on how important to the global economy they are. They rank cities in terms of Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Sufficincy where cities are less important as you go down the list. Also alpha,beta,gamma get +- signs based on where they fall in their category. You can find their most recent rankings here (naturally there is a lot of subjectivity):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization_and_World_Cities_Research_Network

And my bad, I misremembered London and NYC are alpha++ in their rankings, not alpha+.

Hollywood/LA don't have alpha?

LA is an alpha city in their rankings. SF is alpha-.

Other city ranking thinktanks do exist, but GaWC is one of the most used ones and they all have London+NYC at the top of the world.

The list is very weird. I can't really fathom why LA is not in the Alpha+ tier. It just seems obviously more like those cities than any of the cities in regular Alpha.

Ah, it's a measure of interconnectedness, this framing does color the complaint of being unable to live in an alpha+ city a little differently. I suppose the foreign influx of cities that are particularly connected to the rest of the world might reasonably increase the demand and thus make supply of housing more scarce for natives, but I'm not sure this makes me more or less sympathetic to native claims to the right to live in their own society's greatest city over foreign claims. It's essentially the same reasoning behind denying their claims that is used to advocate for open borders, "This is more economically efficient and you have no rights over the more naturally talented foreigner". On the flip side I am generally not sympathetic to people who feel entitled to live in expensive cities for more mundane reasons.

Can’t say I really understand this system. For example, how is Boston ranked higher than Houston? Houston has either the busiest or second busiest port in the US depending on how you measure it, Houston is just way larger than Boston in terms of population, Houston has a higher GDP than Boston, and it’s a major city for the energy and finance industries.

how is Boston ranked higher than Houston?

Boston's top universities

Houston's top universities

Boston also beats Houston on GDP per capita $80k to $63k, and is often known as the most educated major city in America (thought I don't know the stats on it outside of Harvard and MIT being nearby). Also the Red Sox and the Patriots have been annoyingly good for years, and the Celtics are young and good; while the Astros cheat and the Texans and Rockets suck. On the other hand, Houston has Meg while Boston hasn't produced a great band since This is Boston Not L.A. came out. But the Boston Pops are legendary, while I don't know of anything out of Houston.

Point is there's more to city quality than GDP and population.

while the Astros cheat

I mean, so do the Patriots.

True, but I've forgiven the Patriots, since they had the decency to lose to Philly.

Don't ask me, I didn't make it, and as I said it's very very subjective once you get below the first few top cities. You can find a summary of rankings from many different organisations here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city#Summary_of_rankings and they pretty much all have NYC+London as the top two.

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said

Ouch, this dreary poem again, the poem everyone loves and no one knows what is it about.

This poem was written in 1920, and it was not meant as timeless wisdom for all times and places, but as a commentary about current events.

What were the current events?

If you lived in UK 102 years ago, there were three major issues that split the country, issues that everyone politically aware had to take a stand on.

1/ Military. Should UK negotiate with other great powers to limit armaments, or should it strive to be greatest power ever at any cost?

This is what "the Cambrian measures" of the poem mean.

If you thought that what the country needs right now are more battleships, the bigger and shinier the better, congrats, you are Kipling.

2/ Social question, especially eight hour working day.

"the Carboniferous Epoch"

If you thought that workers and miners already live high on the hog and do not need any handouts, congrats, you are Kipling.

3/ Votes for women.

"the Feminian Sandstones"

If you thought that the country has already too much democracy, congrats, you are Kipling.

Now, what happened? Did the country followed Kipling's advice?

No, it did not.

The British establishment negotiated Washington Naval Treaty, let women over age 30 vote and even gave some concessions to the working class.

Were it good choices? If instead they engaged in massive military buildup and crushed the uppity mob with iron fist, would it make Britain great again, greater than ever?

Eh, for the same reason death of the artist seems like a good idea I think we can separate works from their time and let people of new generations take from them what they will. It's a catchier version of Chesterton fences for folk wisdom and I think accurate captures the spirit behind a kind of fundamental pillar of conservatism's distrust of too good to be true if socially popular claims. When the modern economists tell you that you can print as much money as you need and cite piles and piles of self referential research to prove the fact it's good to have some more ammunition to protect yourself.

MMT is a fringe theory. If you want to argue against it, you can just point to the consensus among mainstream economists. A highly specific modern interpretation of a hundred-year-old poem is not a good argument against anything.

It certainly didn't work out for them when they didn't do that.

Yes, what the Brits were doing was not working for them.

For example, when they taught the "wogs" English and invited them to study at their universities, and then strongly reminded them that they are wogs and never will be anything else.

This would not happen in ancient Rome or other serious empires of the past.

Want to be world spanning empire that lasts for centuries and is remembered for millenia? Behave like one.

Were it good choices? If instead they engaged in massive military buildup and crushed the uppity mob with iron fist, would it make Britain great again, greater than ever?

Who knows? Do you? I don't. Alternative history provides an endless canvas to imagination. But I'm fairly sure that, were this program to succeed (despite structural reasons to the contrary), we wouldn't have heard anything about «appeasement», nor about Operation Sea Lion or The Blitz, and plausibly the Third Reich itself would have been relegated to footnotes of history. And the Empire might have lasted a great deal longer, and perhaps @2rafa wouldn't have any sordid tales of post-War collapse and sudden impoverishment of London elites to tell, and – just maybe! – @KulakRevolt would be fuming about the global kraken of perfidious Albion exploiting American vulnerability under the false guise of allyship, rather than the other way around.

just maybe! – @KulakRevolt would be fuming about the global kraken of perfidious Albion exploiting American vulnerability under the false guise of allyship, rather than the other way around.

The only constant in every timeline is a man named kulakrevolt fuming about something.

The human and materiel losses incurred might always have let America sweep ahead—but I suppose that’s what you meant by “structural reasons.”

If you thought that the country has already too much democracy, congrats, you are Kipling.

I feel seen, but that is a post for another day...

But this loss didn't happen thirty or forty or whenever the immigrants started to come in big numbers years ago, rather it happened in the aftermath of the Second World War when the UK dropped its long standing traditions of Classical Liberalism, "an Englishman's home is his castle" and the Anglo developed system of limited government, preferring to go for the expansive and nannying welfare state model instead.

Well, if you want Limited Government then I hear Somalia is a great place. You can even buy arms in open air markets with minimal regulations. Perhaps you can sense my dripping sarcasm, but I have little patience for these kinds of arguments. Taxes can go up and they can go down, but what - or rather, who - made Britain were the Anglo-Saxons.

This type of argument is the right-wing version of the blank slate.

  • -12

Taxes can go up and they can go down, but what - or rather, who - made Britain were the Anglo-Saxons.

And who unmade Britain?

It seems like we should pay attention to the arguments those Anglo-Saxons were having amongst themselves, and explain the making or unmaking of Britain with a focus on the political questions they saw fit to focus on, like that of taxes. After all, one Anglo-Saxon's vision of the desired society can be radically different from another's.

I frequently see Somalia trotted out as what a limited state might look like, but surely you can see why people who prefer a limited state don't find that compelling? Setting aside that the reference is outdated and Somalia has a government with explicit power over just about everything, "limited government" and "collapsed government" are not synonyms. Outside of the most fringe libertarians, people that favor limited government are not suggesting that there be no government to enforce contracts and maintain general public order. Rather, the claim is that governments shouldn't have the powers flexed during Covid or shouldn't be reallocating half of the economy.

Regarding blank slates, I'm inclined to note that the demographics of Somalia aren't what some of us would consider conducive to being the sort of place I'd like to live. I might even go so far as to note that I expect any local unit that has a sufficient number of Somalis to become the sort of place I would not like to live in short order.

I’m wondering- do you think a society that’s 80% Utah Mormon or Japanese or whatever other high performing group, and 20% Somali, would be a bad place to live?

I mean, based off the demographics, I’d expect it to be a pretty nice place to live, but probably with some neighborhoods to avoid.

Probably fine in the short run. I just looked at my current Census tract and a couple neighboring tracts and found that they're approximately 80% white, 10% Asian, and a scattering of everything else. If that shifted to 20% Somali over the next few years, I would take it as a strong signal to sell and relocate - I would not like the odds of the neighborhood retaining the characteristics that made me select it with that population shift and I would expect the population to continue shifting further. Currently, there are no neighborhoods to avoid within walking distance of me, so a shift to some neighborhoods to avoid is a noticeable worsening.

Let’s assume this is a stable society- some town in Oregon or whatever that’s had those demographics for 20 years. Does it seem like the sort of place you’d be willing to live in, assuming your work offers you a transfer with relocation assistance and you have the ability to make friends there or nearby.

Sure. I'm kind of skeptical of the sustainability of the arrangement, but I would not rule a place out based on a large Somali population. Minneapolis remains one of my favorite American cities despite their issues with Somali corruption (and more American-based violence).

I frequently see Somalia trotted out as what a limited state might look like, but surely you can see why people who prefer a limited state don't find that compelling?

The opposite argument comes up in these circles on occasion - or it used to, back when more vivid leftists hadn't yet been driven off as much. Some guy or another would argue the more milquetoast defence of communism, where clearly the problem isn't the ideology, it's what the likes of Stalin did to influence it, and that without such a legacy it'd all be totally fine. The counterargument is an easy one: it keeps happening. Mini-Stalins pop up wherever some communist republic appears. It doesn't stop.

Somalia is for sure a fair critique in the same vein: it keeps happening. Call it CHAZ or post-Qing China or what have you, but pointing out that places with limited or smaller governments are uniquely prone to petty warlordism is entirely a critique that the stronger sorts of Libertarians should think of addressing with a better call than 'that's unfairrrrrr'.

Are you talking about supporters of "limited or small governments" or just anarchists? There isn't any sort of unified state over all of Somalia, small or otherwise.

Also, I don't think that someone like David Friedman wants a transition like Somalia in the early 1990s. I think he'd say that, under those circumstances, a small but effective government would be better.

I have my issues with limited government types (namely that they're frequently hypocritical or at least self-deluding), but this is really only a critique of the far end of the spectrum. Most people who want limited government don't want a government that limited - they still want publicly funded police and fire departments, infrastructure they use, courts, schools, etc... When they object to "big government", they're generally objecting to the welfare and regulatory state (or at least parts of it) and infrastructure they don't use.

Reductions to the welfare and regulatory state might increase social disorder to some degree, but there's clear historical example that it's not enough to render states nonviable.

I agree that's fair! The words 'stronger sorts of Libertarians' did a lot of work in my post.

I would describe the Soviet Union as a much more central example of "communism" than Somalia of "limited government", but I suppose the problems we'll bump into are the exact definitions of things like "communism" and "limited government". I would be more than satisfied with a United States federal government that took approximately the fiscal role of 100 years ago, and I don't buy that this involves a swift descent to total anarchic collapse.

Well yes, because the federal government could disappear outright and most of the population is not looking at a total anarchic collapse, although interstate conflict might mean some people are in for a bad time and the poorer states would probably have a declining standard of living.

I'm not sure if this is intended as argument or addendum. Yes, part of the reason that I think the federal government is excessive is because American states are already large, powerful entities that can handle the vast majority of governing problems themselves. The federal government should handle external-facing issues and internal coordination problems between states, but generally take a hands-off approach to policies and spending that are intrastate matters (in my view, of course).

Maybe I'm misreading others, but I think this is much closer to the median position of American people that would describe themselves as favoring limited government than Somalia or Ancapistan or something.

A little of column a, a little of column b. The patchwork that replaces a disappeared federal government is unlikely to be predominantly libertarian(major land powers usually aren’t), and the federal government retrenching wouldn’t cause the same issue but as California shows, states are perfectly capable of overregulating, overtaxing, and overspending all on their lonesome.

Most states aren’t Florida or Utah. Federal regulations will just get replaced with state regulations that are more obviously one sided if anything.

Well except there are countless examples of very limited government and places succeeding. I’m very unfamiliar with communist countries not be totalitarian hellholes.

Warlordism might be a fair critique of David Friedman but…not of classic liberals who see a vital role for the state but one that is heavily limited.

What are the best examples of very limited governments succeeding?

I certainly agree that there have been governments which didn’t provide much in terms of social welfare but grew the economy quickly. But AFAIK most of the examples of libertarian success stories were not actually libertarian, they were just pro-business.

United Kingdom, United States, Swiss, Hong Kong, Netherlands, etc.

They might not all be that way today but they they all at different times experienced significant growth under a classically liberal framework.

I interpreted "stronger sorts of libertarian" to basically mean right-anarchists.

"Warlordism" is another term for "autocratic government that isn't internationally recognized". It's not as if warlords can't take your money and call it taxes.

It's a frequent critique of anarchocapitalism (anarchocommunism, too, for that matter) is that their systems just reinvent the government expect with some different characteristics (enough to allow ideologues to term it "not government) and in a worse format.

Well, if you want Limited Government then I hear Somalia is a great place.

Somalia-the-meme was a civil war between a half dozen competing governments, many of which were fundamentalist Islamic. And that was still an improvement in most QoL measures over the previous socialist government.

And that was still an improvement in most QoL measures over the previous socialist government.

Interesting, have you lived in Somalia during this period?

I believe the situation was that the Islamic fundamentalists defeated the powerless, corrupt, ‘democratic’ government which did nothing but accept bribes from warlords, brought meaningful improvement to the public for a few years, and then were overthrown by Ethiopian military intervention.

I’m not sure where anyone’s getting that it was an improvement over the previous socialist regime; it seems clearly to have been an improvement over the ‘democratic’(read US backed and corrupt) regime which replaced it.

Well, if you want Limited Government then I hear Somalia is a great place.

"If you like to keep warm, you can jump in a bonfire."

It worked for Sam McGee.

Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

Who among us hasn't wanted to, on some cold winter day, sit in the fireplace and let the flames lap at our flesh?

Well, if you want Limited Government then I hear Somalia is a great place.

Singapore is actually a great place and their government is significantly more limited on the tax and spend side (well, they have a ton of social housing, but that's a good thing). The UAE is also pretty good with a very limited government, Dubai has effectively run out of oil and they still do extremely well because of government fees on transactions. You don't have to choose the literal worst option.

Singapore is actually a great place

Yeah, and it's also a place that is 75% Han Chinese, thereby proving my point. Demographics will always trump whatever laws is on paper, libertarian or not.

Total overstatement. I feel the need to drag out the trope of East/West Germany and North/South Korea.

Don't know about Korea, but at least for Germany there were some notable differences even before the split after WWII. To name a few:

  • the east was much more agrarian than the west, although there were of course many industrial centers like Halle, Berlin or Breslau/Wrocław but these were much more spread-out than in the west

  • politically, the east was dominated by the protestant Junker class, the descendants of the feudal nobility that conquered/colonized the east, while in the west industrialist families like the Krupps had the most influence, with a much more mixed religious background overall, as most German Catholics lived in the areas that were to become part of West Germany

  • in terms of cultural history, the west was largely congruent with the core German territory since the first time there was something like Germany, while the east was a colonial conquest taken from the territory of the relatively unorganized Western Slavic tribes like the Sorbs or the Pomeranians that were stuck between Medieval Germany and Poland. Go back in history far enough and I guarantee that anyone whose ancestors have lived in Eastern Germany for a while will have a lot of Slavic ancestry, this is completely unusual for Western Germany outside of regions that have received heavy Polish immigration in the Industrial Age

I can't find a good map to illustrate this, but the most notable political thing about the territory of DDR - and I mean the specific territory - was that even during the pre-WW2 times they were the strongest area of support for the left parties, ie SPD/USPD/KPD combined. In the West German territories the Centre was a force, while the areas annexed by Poland were the ones where the Nazis had their most hardcore base of support, but the left dominated most of the territories that would end up forming the DDR.

(also @Syo)

Maybe these maps help: SPD, USPD, KPD; for comparison NSDAP, DNVP (monarchists, revanchists and hard conservatives), Zentrum (Catholic centrists and conservatives).

Looking at these, I agree that there is a trend, but it's not that strong and centered less on East Germany as a whole and more on Saxony* in particular, especially for the KPD votes. Both Nazis and DNVP were pretty strong in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg and Pomerania, all three of which would become part of the DDR.

*Funnily enough, my parents always called the Saxons the 5th occupying power (besides Russia, the US, France and the UK), because chances were high when talking to a representative of state power like a policeman in East Berlin you'd be spoken to in Saxon dialect. EDIT: I just found this article from the early 60s that investigates this cliché via a statistical deep dive quite like the debates about Jewish overrepresentation elsewhere in this thread. The result: while strongly overrepresented among the chief leaders of the DDR, Saxons are actually underrepresented in various important committees and positions.

I can't make out the territory which would in 1945 find itself behind the Iron Curtain, on these maps of results of German elections from 1920-1930.

China is over 90% Han Chinese, but I far prefer Singapore to it (and the Chinese state has higher taxes and government spending etc.).

You find similar clealiness in Hong Kong Indian markets.

People tend to adapt really well. There's nothing unirradicable in Indian culture or DNA that makes them inclined towards bad hygiene.

I don't actually know. LKY was a great man (far far greater than me, if I could achieve the level of greatness he had in his pinky finger I would die happy) capable of performing magic tricks well beyond mere mortals. One factor that may have contributed is the onerous fines for public littering. I've been to plenty of houses back home that are really clean on the inside but are on a very very littered street so it's not like South Asians are hardwired to be dirty (equally I've been in plenty of unclean dwellings back home, but these were usually the homes of the middle class and below) but I feel it's more of an mentality thing where people see the outside as "not their property, not their problem" and either freely litter or don't agitate to create a situation where street cleaners come by regularly/people are educated to not throw their rubbish away. Plus the lack of public trashcans can be a contributing factor, here in the UK there's like a trash can every 100m in most cities while back home you can spend an entire day out without seeing more than two or three, which means people are just naturally more inclined to throw their trash on the street since the alternative is carrying it the whole day.

How many Singaporeans do you actually know, and have you ever been there? I can't comment on the tax situation, but it seems to me that in pretty much every other domain Singapore is close to being the opposite of a small government, and rather like the perfect pervasive micromanagerial state. (Most recently, they were basically location-tracking everyone at all times under the pretext of COVID contact tracing.) Moreover, they manage their ethnic patchwork by mandatory quotas in government and even public (in Singapore, this is a sizeable chunk) housing, and by less outside-legible policies that seem to be directed at gradually whittling down the ethnic identities of everyone to food, dress and a handful of festivals. Hardly the Anglo right-winger's paradise it is made out to be.

I've been to Singapore and count quite a few Singaporeans among my close friends. The UAE is also quite micromanegerial as a country, to start a business you need to pay thousands in fees (fees like this are how they fund themselves given that there is no income tax) and of course there is the whole Islamic morality thing you have to adhere to (not an issue for me, may be for some westerners).

My point on limited government was geared towards the taxation aspect, Singapore is pretty damn big in the social control aspect of government (chewing gum bans, car licences costing 10s of thousands of dollars, mandatory military service, mandatory forced saving for medical bills etc.), but that isn't really something I mind too much when the policies align reasonably well with my personal views.

Hardly the Anglo right-winger's paradise it is made out to be.

Correct. It's most definitely not an Anglo liberal paradise, but that's fine. It was meant to be an example of a place where you could have small (taxation wise) government but still be very successful. I still wouldn't mind spending my life there because at least they have a coherent, consistent vision for society that doesn't depend on extracting wealth from a small productive class and spending it on everyone else.

My point on limited government was geared towards the taxation aspect, Singapore is pretty damn big in the social control aspect of government (chewing gum bans, car licences costing 10s of thousands of dollars, mandatory military service, mandatory forced saving for medical bills etc.), but that isn't really something I mind too much when the policies align reasonably well with my personal views.

Places like Singapore are also really easy to enter or leave, so if you don't like how the government is doing things, it is easy to go to somewhere else. That's one reason why so many people and businesses have been relocating from Hong Kong to Singapore recently.

Singapore is like a country club. It tries to attract rich and talented people by rules for being clean, pleasant, and orderly. Shame about the horrible weather.

Given the continuing high migration that this country is now basically reliant on - the recent budget depended on very high levels of inward migration to be balanced, lower migration than expected in the next few years will create a short term fiscal black hole

Do you have evidence that immigrantion is beneficial to the British? Danes ran the numbers and discovered that non-western new-comers are a net negative on the fiscus. This is true even after excluding refugees.

There's this article from the Telegraph about the budget situation:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/11/17/why-jeremy-hunt-relying-surge-migrants-boost-britains-flagging

Archive link: https://archive.ph/f0rEW

In the short term the migration of workers is necessary to boost tax revenue. Long term the migrants might even be net negative, but short term since they all come over with jobs and you can kick them out in the first 5 years if they lose their job they are net contributors which helps with the current cash flow issues.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats