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Let's talk socialism and the NYC mayoral race. Apparently the All-in podcast people think it's a sweeping wave that will drown out Progress with a capital P. London, Vienna, Chicago, and of course the California cities have already had socialist mayors for a while. Why not New York?
Honestly despite being a "conservative" I am broadly quite sympathetic to socialist arguments. I do think free markets actually kind of suck, inasmuch as we can even have free markets. Personally I think free markets don't really exist when you take into account that power abhors a vacuum, but they are a fiction with extremely high utility to create material goods.
Anyway, socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class. It's weary writing and thinking about politics when even the best laid plans seem to inevitably just get ground down by the dumbest things. I can completely understand why young folks want to just socialize everything.
Not that I agree with them, but hey, sometimes I wish I were still naive enough to think socialism or any -ism could fix the ills of our society. I sadly am not that optimistic.
That being said, I don't think society is unfixable. I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.
I think political solutions can encourage personal/political virtue. Imagine a really intense anti-corruption campaign, where high ranking people were actually given long prison sentences or executed for corruption? Wouldn't that work on the simple, clear level of 'cant commit crime if dead'? China has become less corrupt since the mid 2000s after pursuing this approach.
How does a culture become virtuous in the first place if not severe punishment crushing the bad elements? If the bottom-up anti-corruption from virtue angle isn't working, then one may as well try top-down. In the US this kind of approach is complicated because there are certain groups that are innately clannish and corrupt or so inclined in that direction that it's nigh-impossible to correct. I don't know why anyone expects West Africans to perform well in anything. You can look at West Africans in West Africa and uniformly it's a mess, regardless of history or laws (Liberia stands out here). You can look at West Africans in Haiti - standard West African demographics and outcomes but in the Western Hemisphere instead. And you can look at West Africans with a non-trivial amount of white admixture in the US, plus a constant inflow of white money - much less of a mess but still a mess. Certain parts of Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, even areas of Washington DC... these are not places one wants to be!
If you don't want a bloated, grossly inefficient, corrupt government, don't let them have any political power.
To clarify - 'them' in the last sentence means West Africans? Politically empowered West Africans means a bloated and corrupt government, you think?
Do you think the US should aim to disempower West Africans? What would that mean? Banning them from running for office? Banning them from voting?
The US can clearly do fine with a modest number of West Africans dragging it down. But if you want first-world performance... If you want safe, efficient, orderly public transport... If you want a lower burden of progressive taxation and affirmative action... If you want crime at civilized, first world levels...
Then you need to address the problem at the root cause. If you let them have political power they'll cause all kinds of problems, they'll West Africanize the country to a lesser or greater extent based on their number, admixture and so on. Bloated and corrupt government is just one and not even the worst problem necessarily.
Consider a thought experiment - what if all the politicians and powerful officials in America had to be black? Give it 20 years for the effects to settle. What do you expect the outcome would be in terms of performance? Would it look more like a high performance country (Japan, Switzerland) or a low performance country like South Africa? Naturally the US has plenty of capable demographics to squander so the decline wouldn't be as severe as South Africa, whose murder rate is actually comparable to the death toll in the Russia-Ukraine war. Nevertheless, there are no white poor performance countries and no black high performance countries. Even on a city level one can observe that having politics dominated by blacks is not a recipe for good outcomes: Detroit.
Now consider the reverse. All the politicians and powerful officials in America have to be non-black. Give it 20 years. Would the outcome be better than the alternate? Is the US really losing much by banning them from office? All that would happen is some rioting, which can be quickly and easily put down with a little effort. West Africans are notoriously bad at fighting, disorganized and inaccurate marksmen. Of course it's a totally moot point since as bad as West Africans are at fighting, US whites are even less willing to force the issue.
I asked a second question as well. To repeat:
Okay, I've processed that you think that West Africans are inherently destructive to national health. Sure. So, you say, you must not "let them have political power". Can you translate that for me into a practical programme? What do you think the US should do?
I already answered this. There's no practical program because you'd need a game-changing event for this to be possible. We may as well theorize about the balance of power between Earth and Mars or how to restore the Bourbon Dynasty to the throne of France. Maybe I think the Bourbons would be amazing for France. But I obviously have no practical idea to make this happen because it's impractical and would require an incredible turn of fortune to be even conceivable.
Really don't understand the point of trying to get these 'damning' confessions of wrongthink out of me.
I'm not angling for a confession of wrongthink - I'm angling to translate either feeling or theory into practicable action. A political platform naturally requires some sort of plan for implementation. That plan doesn't have to be constrained by the Overton Window. A Yarvin-esque plan to build a shadow regime and step into power when the inevitable crisis of legitimacy comes is a valid answer; likewise a postliberal-esque plan to slowly build intellectual credibility while developing a new consensus in the shell of the old is a valid answer.
But in this case, if I'm reading you rightly, what you've got is basically "West Africans are really bad, and there's nothing that can be done about it".
Okay, so, what's the practical takeaway from that? It can just be "well, the United States is screwed", at which point the next question is, "given that, what do you plan to do, or recommend that others do?" Prepare to leave the US, so that if/when continuing to live there is untenable, you can get out? Build some sort of resilient, presumably West-African-free, community in some part of the US and focus on local welfare? Something else entirely?
It's not unreasonable or searching for gotchas to probe someone as to the practical implications of their politics. I'm not arguing with you in this thread! I haven't contradicted you or challenged any of your points! I'm asking you to elaborate on their practical implications because I'm interested in where they lead you.
Well I have a vague theory that China will demolish the US military in Asia and create the actual conditions for real political change in the US and elsewhere (military defeat + huge economic crisis are a tried and tested combo), whereupon previously unthinkable options become possible.
But the problem with basing a theory on a hypothetical is that it feels like wishing, the infamous 'my ideology will be the one to arise from the ashes'. Trying to predict the world after an epoch-changing event is like trying to look inside or beyond a singularity. Maybe Trump gets the blame for fooling around and the old regime capitalizes it. Maybe the military gets blamed for losing and the US doubles down on democratic-socialist isolationism. Maybe there's a nuclear exchange. Maybe there's an AI singularity. Nothing is inevitable, even assuming a contested hypothetical.
Of course it'd be good to have more accurate, adaptive ideas flowing more widely. The US does not, in my opinion, need more Haitians, quite the opposite. The US shouldn't be spreading multicultural propaganda around the world, that's not a recipe for good outcomes. America isn't screwed, it's powerful and innovative in many areas. But it's running well below peak performance, there are fractures and internal weaknesses based on unsound ideas of human equality.
As for personal advice, well I've read Nightmare Vision's Rosedale thread https://x.com/GodCloseMyEyes/status/1414619671056297984 and 'Don't make the Black kids angry', it seems pretty clear that black parts of the US, London and elsewhere are dangerous and one shouldn't go there or live there. The author of the latter has seemingly been driven into this state of insanity where he just goes on and on, listing all these grievous attacks and perverse instances where white racism gets blamed for black misbehaviour, one after another after another.
How do you change this state of mind, where people speak in code to realtors because they're not allowed to ask about crime, because it's too racist and discriminatory? Who knows, it's bizarre and weird.
I'm not even American and so my theories about US politics are really limited in skin-in-the-game beyond having a lot of money tied up in US shares. Lots of cool stuff is happening in America, it's a country of contradictions.
Well, I think it's reasonable to take a position like, "the current order cannot or will not hold, massive changes are likely to come, therefore I/we should try to be resilient for now while being flexible to changing possibilities". If the political order is likely to radically change, in ways you cannot predict but which change the space of what's possible, then it makes sense to avoid investing too much in the current order while remaining open to the winds of change.
That said, oops, I had assumed you were American. Presumably you would need to adapt your specific concerns to your particular country.
Thank you for the serious answer, though. I appreciate it.
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