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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.
I see most of the modern west as currupt and morally bankrupt as most of it really has no reason to exist other than nothing has replaced it yet. European civilization doesn’t serve much of a purpose, it doesn’t see itself as anything worth protecting or with any missions worth accomplishing. It’s just a political system that exists to manage whoever happens to be there while not protecting its natives from harm. If Europeans still believed in their own civilization or values, or saw themselves as something worth protecting, there’d be hope for the EU. Americans still see themselves as a people and a civilization worth working for. They have residual Christian faith (most are at least nominal) and residual belief in their system even if the government they live under barely resembles the government the Constitution describes or the founders intended.
NATO doesn’t really have even a pretend reason to exist. It’s supposed to protect Europe from Soviet communism. But given how much of European society has embraced most of the tenets of socialism, they wouldn’t have much to fear from communists. And the Soviets haven’t existed since the early 1990s. It’s basically an institution that has no real reason to continue, and other than the US, no serious military to speak of. Nobody is afraid of European military intervention, German tanks or British aircraft are not the enemy that would make anyone tremble. Only the USA has a military worthy of the name. Increasingly, however, we are afraid to use it, especially afraid of putting boots on the ground to occupy territory and destroy the enemy.
Modern Europe was created by America for what it's worth. And I personally think the US is going the way of Brazil-style lusotropicalism while Europe is just in terminal demographic decline. White America's views and TFR are also not that far of Europe.
While certainly the TFR is nothing to brag about, the U.S. white fertility rate has held steady while other races have fallen steeply. Black fertility has fallen definitively below white fertility, and Hispanic will soon. As usual, Asians are reticent breeders. (Note: this is based on race of the mother. Asian male fertility is apocalyptic).
I saw something like this on Twitter but couldn't find it. Sol 6.1 was able to recreate from the Wonder Database on light effort. Incredible. So, take with grain of salt but it matches what I remember from twitter.
Combine this with a large drop in the foreign born population and the US is likely now growing whiter for the first time in probably at least 100 years. The absolute number matters a lot less than the relative number. The cake can get smaller, but you can't replace sugar with salt.
Elsewhere of note, the Hispanic world is now entering the accelerated phase of the demographic transition. Here's some fertility rates that might surprise you. I wonder what's going on?
I think it's pretty simple.
My hypothesis: TFR and current economic projections on the value of a future human are linked.
When TFR is 2.0, it means today's projection of the total projected economic productivity over the average future citizen's life is zero.
A TFR under that means it's negative (population is in surplus), a TFR over that means it's positive (population is in shortage).
Market distortions can affect this, especially when the sum of people born in positive-value conditions attains more political power than the sum of those who were born into eras of zero or negative value, because they will always inherently believe those conditions exist (which is generally how you get Great Replacement-ism).
As for why the collapse in future human value is more pronounced outside the modern West? Well, countries that were extremely late to the industrialization party- South Korea being the standout example at a TFR of 0.7- never enjoyed the kind of automation-induced economic boom in the '50s-'70s. Remember, that was back when
AImechanization wasn't yet good enough to do all the work itself; operators were not only required, but paid handsomely.Once you hit the '80s and '90s, automation gets so good that the demand for unskilled operators ends completely in favor of its new manifestation, robotics- but in countries that were just industrializing at that time, that demand never materialized in the first place (they mostly skipped straight to the advanced implementation). They never really had a legacy economy full of rich former operators to mine, either (which is also part of why Europe is also not as affected as they should be) so there's no other residual economic value to be captured.
What the total value of a future human being is depends also on culture; again, South Korea (and India) being two standout examples of that given how they treat their kids. Education at that intensity is entirely worthless, yet it must be conducted precisely because it's a ritual sacrifice of child [and an increasing portion of young adult] life that legitimizes the society's choice to gradually wind the overpopulation down non-violently (for the alternative is 'you get a good 20 years of early life, then you go to war and die'). [This is the future of all societies where enough humans exist that automation/State capacity can be leveraged to consume the totality of a human's life as a sacrifice for "not being killed in war as the ultimate price of economic uselessness"- Ingsoc being the best fictional example.]
Otherwise, you end up like Europe in the early 20th century where you set up the Fields of Ritual Suicide in scenic northern France and order every man you can get your hands on straight into the machine guns. Or, once automation (and being outcompeted for 10 years due to neighboring countries that could afford to embrace it) does wreck your society as well as reparations imposed for killing more of your own men, you proceed to declare yourself the Master Race and as such decide to depopulate the nations to your East to punt on your current/eventual overpopulation.
And now there's even more advanced automation: though the short-term effects remain to be seen as increasing or decreasing the value of a human being, the long-term effects are clear that it will decrease. This is a problem that's here to stay (and not engaging with it leads to destruction as soon as a neighboring country decides it has a population problem that you or your land could conveniently solve; Butlerian Jihad might be topical, but is ultimately an isolated demand for rigor if you think about it for more than 5 seconds).
Im going to push back on Asian education being a sacrifice, I’d say it’s more like tryouts. You have limited slots of good-enough jobs for a huge population, so you need to sort the population so that if there are maybe a million really good jobs, 5 million decent jobs, another 10 million good-enough jobs, and a population of 50 million, the population has to be sorted, and the education system is probably the best place to do th3 sorting. Given that the results will be life long, people push educational systems to their logical limit.
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