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Notes -
Questioning the Core
Recently Tucker Carlson, who everyone knows, did an interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former British MP for the Tories. JRM is a known quantity in British politics as an upper class Englishman with a neoliberal stripe who manages to say enough things 'wrong' for the far left and right to dislike him. But on the flipside he does say those things with a very pleasing accent. He earned this particular interview with Carlson due to his firm anti-Russia stance and recent agitation that Britain needed to prepare for war.
The interview itself was mostly boring. Tucker seemed to not really know what his own point was for the first half of the interview, aside from JAQing off about NATO aggression. And JRM didn't feel like giving Tucker any rope to pull on. To that end both parties came across as snide. JRM never directly engages with what exactly the point of NATO is or what Britain or the EU is even doing at this point, and Tucker never directly asserts that the liberal moral order has been the catalyst for more harm than good. Instead they both circle around their underlying points but never directly engage with them.
The surface level Tucker Carlson argument here is that Britain is weak, its allies are weak, and Russia is strong. So Britain should sue for peace.
JRM's argument is that Britain is good, and Russia is evil. So there will be no peace.
They are both correct. Insofar as Britain is weak, Russia is also weak. And as far as Russia is evil, Britain is also evil. Failing demographics with corrupt and inept leaders suppressing their subjects alongside shocking news of unconscionable crimes on a huge scale, signaling deep social decline. No offers of a positive vision for the future are anywhere to be found. Only fatalism and the faint promise of a coming metamorphosis. Worry not for your pain. You, the English, will soon cease to exist. And so will the Russians (as far as any westerner has an analog to what a Russian is). A complete separation of state and folk. The death of nations.
It's fair to say that neither party wants to engage with this reality. As admitting to anything real here would be tantamount to ponder whether Hitler was actually right. Since neither can, neither will. Though they do get close:
The Liberal World Order gambit that JRM employs is simple enough: If Hitler was evil, everything is vindicated. So we just repeat that for Putin, right?
Well, Tucker doesn't raise this point directly enough, but leaving aside the question of whether looking at world events through the eyes of a 10 year old to decide who is good and who is evil is beneficial or not, has the consequence of being on the side of 'good' been of benefit to the people? The obvious answer is no. And that's not the fault of Hitler, but the people who came after him. So why should anyone take their word for anything? They are fast becoming literally worse than Hitler.
Whilst not directly questioned, it should be. Are Angela Merkel, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Ursula von der Leyen really the best a man can get? Can you really take the light of critical inquiry seriously if it can only be shone at those who have already been determined to be evil? So we pretend the Ukrainian state isn't a cesspool of corruption and shame, but rather the bastion of good against evil. That the EU isn't a bureaucratic hellscape that hates its citizens. Or that the US isn't going to industrially and culturally decline along with its demographics.
The big question is: Are any of the big movements that now define modern society worth dying for? Is continuing the status quo of 'good' in anyone's best interest except those who are evil? The cynic in me believes you can always draft enough young men to die in any war no matter what. And that indignance towards dying for the ruling class has and always will exist. And maybe I'm in that bubble of indignance. But I want to believe that things are different now. The current state of affairs is just so ridiculous.
In that case the side of “good” winning was followed by the post WW2 economic boom, aka the Golden Age of Capitalism, when growth rates were so high that in many countries it was called an economic miracle. Sure, the causes are more complicated than just the Allies winning, but if the Nazis had won, there’s no indication that they would suddenly have switched from their extractive economy based on slave labour and exploiting conquered countries for raw materials.
The average person is obviously worse off in a Russian-aligned economy, I don’t see how you can argue otherwise. Look at Hungary, which went from one of the more prosperous Eastern European economies to being worse off than Romania, thanks to Orban and his policies which gave control of industries to oligarchs and used government funds to enrich himself and his cronies.
As someone who lives in a EU country, that’s just plain false. I can live, work and retire in 27 countries, I have some of the best consumer rights in the world, best food regulations, and we got Apple to put USB C in iPhones. Taxes are high, but in terms of bureaucracy, they’re way simpler for the average person than whatever is going on in the US. You see something offered for a certain price, that’s how much you’ll pay, tax included. You don’t get screwed by hidden fees, whether you’re booking a plane ticket or getting a hotel.
There’s flaws, but you don’t have to burn the whole thing down to fix them.
People are willing to die for movements that appeal to their emotions, not for those that will improve their lives the most. Anarchist terrorists were a serious threat in the 19th century, not so much Georgists, even though the land value tax has a better track record at improving economic efficiency.
I don't understand. It doesn't seem to me that german economy was any more dependent on slave labor than any other european country, arguably less since they didn't have any colonies. The countries they conquered during WW2 they had for a handful of year, all of which spent at war.
I don't know, to be honest, that you can extrapolate the past into the future. The EU has made some serious mistakes in the past 15 years, it seems to me that we are set for irrecoverable decline. Not that Putin's rule would make things better, but also not much worse either.
No, you can't. You can work in 27 countries and you can live there as long as you can prove to be self sufficient but not retire. Even access to healthcare, beyond emergency stuff, is going to be complicated.
Well, actually, regardin hotels a lot of places now have a tourism tax that you get charged for at checkin time. That sales tax is always included is really cool but the EU is still a bureaucratic mess, I'll refer you to Draghi's various reports on the difficulties of starting cross-border european companies.
It's difficult to defend Nazi Germany as having used slave labour pre-WW2 (as they didn't), other issues with the economy aside. That said, for post-war planning, one can look at Generalplan Ost...
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If you could simply make children out of GDP going up you would have a point. But that is not the case. And as far as I can tell the 'good' see little reason to care, and would rather short circuit the system with mass immigration and mass female employment, since it's much easier and they can make more money that way in the short term. Every other effect, including the baby boom, was secondary.
The most crucial thing the third Reich promised and delivered on, for the short time it existed outside of wartime, was an increase in births. Low birthrates were already a looming threat back then, and the threat was met and dealt with. To that extent there is no indication that they would have stopped doing that. On top of that I would argue that the claims of the German economy relying on slave labour are quaint Libertarian fiction. Germany is, after all, the most industrially and technologically proficient nation on earth. To assume they would rely on labour camps in perpetuity is childish at best. Similarly, the term 'extraction based economy' is just silly. Every economy importing raw materials is extraction based. But if you happen upon resources during wartime that are necessary for your wartime economy, what do you do? 'Not extract' them? Again, to assume the Germans would have settled on a perpetual wartime economy is quaint Libertarian fiction.
Aside from that I don't see your point. Was Russia not on the good side in WW2? The entire war was practically a war between Russia and Germany! My argument applies equally to both the European West and the East. In fact one could argue the 'good' side winning is directly at fault for dooming the East to suffer under the Soviet Union.
You, me and every migrant on earth can enjoy those very same benefits at your expense. Hence why the EU is burning down one way or another. I'd prefer to burn it down before the rot reaches the nursery. And personally I'm tired of hearing stories from my new coworkers of how they walked from Turkey to Austria, before taking a plane ride to my hometown.
As far as you want to personalize the excellence of the EU nations, I want to tell you that you suck. There is no coming back from what is going on today.
I don't disagree. Which is why I don't understand the veneration of the 'good' side, given we see the disastrous consequences of their supremacy. Your nations, culture and people are living on borrowed time for reasons no one can articulate. Is it greed? Corruption? Power? All anyone can say when asked why this is the case is to backpedal towards Hitler and how he was evil and therefor, by defeating Hitler we are good no matter what comes after. That's a pretty cheap rubric to fall under, in my view.
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