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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   24582 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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The current War of Northern Aggression "discourse" has brought to mind the top 100 first place greatest mistake in US state craft: not letting Burnen' Sherman just march back and forth for a couple years or finishing hardcore full reconstruction.

Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from the South's special position as a rebellious territory that was allowed to maintain it's cultural legitimacy, or second order effect from it. Imagine the conservatives we could have in this country if the wellspring of the tendency was John Adams and the federalists; rather than Rutherford and the lost causers.

Wrapping up the entire holographic southern cultural package with opposition to Washington eg. the North, eg the technocratic, rich part of the country has led to a situation where Technocratic Tech-billionaire Technologists are shackled to the cultural traditions of south, either Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension lacking any of the actual cultural roots that european aristocrats have; or hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin.

You can watch these tendencies poison Republican politics live all the time; it's why even though the Democratic party is jam packed full of passionless ossified corporate aphorism chat bots, when republicans have all three wings of the government they STILL can't get anything done. There is a deep state problem, but it's not the 'unelected bureaucrats' in washington, it's the decaying corpses of Jefferson Davis and Johnny Reb clinging on to conservatism's ankles and dragging it down into the mud.

  • -24

Boo outgroup post, again. Permaban for now. Will discuss with other mods if they want to make this not permanent.

Past examples of us telling you not to do this:

https://www.themotte.org/post/253/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/47021?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/304/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/53213?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/427/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/82679?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/521/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/105435?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/601/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/124016?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/610/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/125473?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/632/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/130783?context=8#context

I don't think anyone minded the boo-outgroup stuff nearly as much as the folksy hick-lib gimmick coming from a jewish guy whose job is literally "managing family rental properties."
The "don't y'all folx think us rednecks should stick together and Respect Trans Identities" thing got really old.

I really think you need to read some actual histories of Reconstruction.

finishing hardcore full reconstruction.

Reconstruction was extremely unpopular in the North because, 15 years after the Civil War, it was incredibly costly to continue maintaining occupation governments in the South. This begs the question of why, if you think the South needed to be exterminated, you also cannot countenance secession. What you're suggesting is homeland Imperialism. It was tried and failed.

from the South's special position as a rebellious territory that was allowed to maintain it's cultural legitimacy

Please note that, under current Civil Rights Law, the South is still held to more rigorous standards than any other part of the country. (Congressional districts especially have to be gerrymandered explicitly to have enough black-majority districts.)

Imagine the conservatives we could have in this country if the wellspring of the tendency was John Adams and the federalists

John Adams and the Federalists were not conservatives.

or hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin.

Sincerely, this is not healthy. I think this is the kind of rhetoric that leads to genocides.

This begs the question of why, if you think the South needed to be exterminated, you also cannot countenance secession.

Because of the Sacred Blacks.

Exterminate the brutes. How is this post not pure boo outgroup?

Oh don't you know? Poor white Southerners are the latest acceptable target! You can say anything you like about them - you can daydream about exiling them, kidnapping their children, razing half the country, even just straight up exterminating them - and nobody gives a shit, not even on a forum with rules about speaking as if everyone is listening and against pure outgroup degradation. Just one long run of venom, strawman and just so stories - absolutely no fucking data, just pure Yankee fart huffing - all of which, by the way, falls apart when you talk to some of the generous, conscientious and intelligent Southerners on this very forum, proving that if it isn't bait it's just fucking stupid. But it is people who reply who get dinged!

Does your objection hold, now that they've recieved a permaban?

For reference, while I found their post both idiotic and deeply repugnant, I did not think it constituted a rules violation.

Believe me, the mods do give a shit, Cjet just got around to hitting him with a permaban.

In my opinion, while this particular comment was inflammatory and bad, it wasn't worth more than a rap on the knuckles, but the consistent pattern of obnoxiousness despite being warned makes the permaban deserved.

A rap on the knuckles would have been great, and is really all I thought it deserved too. I am used to bait of that calibre getting slapped down a lot quicker usually, but I know this is a busy time of the year for everyone. And congrats on the mod hat.

I noticed it sitting in the mod queue with a bunch of reports, but as a greenhorn moderator I didn't quite feel ready to take drastic action, especially since I wasn't aware of all the context with previous warnings. Well, better late than never!

And thank you, I'll try and keep the place tidy and let Amadan get some sleep on occasion.

Congrats, I’m glad to see they finally moved on new mods. Just have to check on the other finalists.

Thank you! I'd say it's hard work, but I've just been practising ethical dilemmas for an upcoming exam, and Jesus Christ I think I'd need to hire one of the dozen lawyers here to deal with some of them. In contrast, handling the Motte only requires me not to do an obviously worse job than the other mods who have been hard at work keeping it tidy haha.

The current War of Northern Aggression "discourse" has brought to mind the top 100 first place greatest mistake in US state craft: not letting Burnen' Sherman just march back and forth for a couple years or finishing hardcore full reconstruction.

What's your opinion on Israel's actions in Gaza? Or Hiroshima, for that matter?

The current War of Northern Aggression "discourse" has brought to mind the top 100 first place greatest mistake in US state craft: not letting Burnen' Sherman just march back and forth for a couple years or finishing hardcore full reconstruction.

Sherman was certainly a ruthless man, but he hated war. His cruelty was motivated by a desire to bring the war to an end quickly.

When he sat down to negotiate a surrender with Johnston, despite the fact that Lee had already surrendered and the war was clearly won, Sherman nonetheless agreed to terms that were more generous than he was authorised to accept rather than allow the intransigence of Jefferson Davis to extend the war any longer.

He would have been disgusted by your suggestion.

How is burning down the South going to raise the average IQs of a particular subset of the population you didn’t mention at all but who have managed to wreck just about every place they live in at any appreciable fraction of the population and whose behavior are responsible for most of the South’s worst QOL indicators?

You can't just blame black people for your own failures as a society. Enterococcus faecalis is a gut bacteria that all healthy humans have in our digestive tract. It helps keeping our gut healthy and is even used as a probiotic is some of those probiotic yoghurts etc. you can buy at the supermarket. However sometimes it leaks from the gut and gets into the human bloodsteam. Once there it wrecks havoc on you and if left untreated, eventually kills you.

Just because E. faecalis kills you if it gets into your bloodstream does not mean it isn't a "good bacteria" to have if properly controlled. Much the same with black people, you can't blame them when your society is set up in such a way that brings out the worst in them (i.e. lets the bacteria into the bloodstream) and lets it run rampant (i.e. not treating the bloodstream infection) rather than the best in them (i.e. keeps the bacteria confined to the gut where it aids in digestion).

  • -15

your society is set up in such a way that brings out the worst in them

As opposed to...which other society of that era, exactly?

Detroit and Chicago vs Atlanta and Houston... Hmmmmmmm. There's something... I can't quite put my finger on it...

Yes, that something is the tabula rasa insanity believed by the left leaning sorts who are in power in Detroit and Chicago; nothing more, nothing less. It's like believing E. faecalis is no different from H. pylori and treating both of them in the same way.

I have to be honest bro, I preferred arrogant royalty to this nazi scientist thing.

They say that what we percieve is in the eye of the beholder. I don't see myself as either "arrogant royalty" or "nazi scientist". Those are labels you project upon me, while I and my beliefs exist independent of them.

Pray tell, what were you thinking of when you said "Detroit and Chicago vs Atlanta and Houston", Altlanta is almost half black, Detroit is almost 4/5ths black, while Chicago is less than 30%, so it can't have been that.

Oh yes, you're being thoughtful and sincere when you associate black people with both disease and shit.

As for my point, it's that it's not the dirty Southerners who need to hear your revolting advice. Black Americans in cities like Atlanta and Houston are doing just fine, while black Americans in cities like Detroit and Chicago and Baltimore suffer immensely. But oh no, it's somehow different when Northern cities mismanage the shit out of everything, that's on leftists, and nothing else. It's only half the country's fault when you dip below the mason dixon line.

Isn't that just cherry picking (or perhaps peach picking) tho? Did they do well in Houston through Hurricane Harvey? Did they do well in News Orleans through Katrina? Cities that grew with big industry are not doing that well after decades of deindustrialization while cities that have other niches (logistics, transportation or energy) do better. So do their underclass.

Perhaps it is true that it is better to be black in the South of the US, and I would wager that it has to do with a better understanding between black and white Southerners.

Perhaps the whites that could not stand living with them already went North, or never moved to the South in the first place, just like they retreated from the city of Detroit to the suburbs when the federal government started bussing their kids to black schools, in living memory.

I could see a difference between a 'racist' plantation owner who entrusts his children to a black servant in his own home and a 'racist' Midwestern who refuses to share a ZIP code with them.

I was giving examples, not passing moral judgement. Those are what came first to mind. E. faecalis was in the news recently for being involved in an outbreak which is why I remembered the name, while H. pylori is about the most quintessential gut bacteria you can get, if someone can name just one bacteria that's associated with the gut I would say it's probably H. pylori (maybe other than E. coli, but that's not gut specific).

I frequently and happily compare the behaviour of what my people are doing to the west as being like an invasive species colonisng a new landsape which has no defensive mechanisms against it. I don't do it to disparage my people, I do it because I genuinely think that the invasive species model is the best way to understand the dynamics of what's going on in the west with regards to immigration right now. Doesn't mean I think we should stop the immigration (in fact, I think the opposite).

Equally I have zero qualms calling Islam a memetic virus (which it absolutely is); I'm not trying to pass judgement, just doing my best to describe things in the most accurate way I can, regardless of the "moral" valance of my choice of comparisons and I find that calling it a memetic virus is a more accurate description of it than other phrases with the same level of lexical complexity.

If someone reads my comparisons and then claims I am associating X with Y rather than just associating a trait of X with a trait of Y then that's completely on them and not me as well as being an indictment of their own low decoupling behaviour because they are creating links from their own imagination and beliefs that I never intended.

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Man, the OP has generated some of the worst discussion here in recent memory.

I'm just going to tag this response as one of the worst offenders because you're the most blatant about it without actually being willing to speak plainly.

If you want to say "All our problems are because black people are stupid criminals," you need to say that (and then be able to defend it, because just saying that is clearly a sweeping generalization, so get your arguments properly formed rather than just taking the opportunity to vent your hatred of black people).

hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin.

Is this sort of demeaning caricature where we mock the accent of our outgroup and misapply the things they believe acceptable now? Because while the response you tagged wasn't great, at least he wasn't "we wuz kangz n sheeit" posting.

It's funny that FCfromSSC saying "hey, maybe violence is justified in self defense" is enough to send every leftist into paroxysms of performative denunciation and triggered a crisis that led to the schisming of the whole community. But leftists talking about how their political enemies just need "the mao treatment" "annihilating them and their families" is just fine and only people who downvote and push back are "the worst offenders."

Leftists exterminating their victims as a class is just part of the plan, I guess. But if anyone fights back you lose your fucking mind.

It's funny that FCfromSSC saying "hey, maybe violence is justified in self defense" is enough to send every leftist into paroxysms of performative denunciation and triggered a crisis that led to the schisming of the whole community.

You don't actually quote a specific post, but most of my posts that fit your description were not a central example of "justifying violence in self-defense". They argued that Blue Tribe had collectively engaged in organized political violence and gotten away with it, and that this removed most good-faith objections to Red Tribe doing the same. There was an exchange about self-defense specifically, but I'd be surprised if that was the one you were referring to.

Given the references to the schisming, probably talking about this event and this comment, referencing this post, which was about those good-faith objections.

That said, yakultbingedrinker's comment (that were also highlighted as "evil sentiment and a precursor to atrocities", and received more emphasis) were about self-defense; Tyre_Inflator may have confused you and him.

The comment I was thinking of was linked in your first link, here, which was about self-defense and Tracing Woodgrain's comment that Kyle should have just let his attackers beat him as much as they wanted and hope they had the mercy not to kill him, rather than fighting back.
yakultbingedrinker's comment was very similar though.

@FCfromSSC this was the post of yours I meant, which was cited as justification for the schism.

I think even later a strong case can be made against escalating to deadly force. So far, 32 people have died during these protests, four for reasons other than being shot. It's impossible to get a precise count of the number of physical confrontations that have gone on, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect many more than that. Could they have killed him? Yes. Would they have killed him? From a probabilistic standpoint, I'd give it maybe 1-2% odds at most assuming he was passive/compliant.

Color me surprised.

In any case, I would still disagree that leftists generally were upset about arguments for self-defense. In the first place, it was an extremely aggressive argument in favor of self-defense, and in the second place, it wasn't just that argument, but also me arguing that if blues could justify lawless political violence, reds could and would as well. My posts in that era are not fairly summarized as "hey, maybe violence is justified in self defense". I still stand by the arguments I made, but I also lament that I failed to find a better way to make the point, and the damage that resulted.

Kyle should have just let his attackers beat him as much as they wanted and hope they had the mercy not to kill him, rather than fighting back.

That's not even close to what he said, he said Rittenhouse's life would have been better if he had not killed anyone, which was controllable on more bases than not pulling the trigger, i.e., presumably, not willingly walking into a riot by himself (which itself was a massive self-endangerment). There's a world where you can frame that as "Letting communities be besieged by rioters" or something, (although he evidently would have preferred the government step in), but he said absolutely nothing remotely resembling "you should let people beat you and hope they have the heart to be gentle."

Could they have killed him? Yes. Would they have killed him? From a probabilistic standpoint, I'd give it maybe 1-2% odds at most assuming he was passive/compliant.

He literally said Kyle should have been "passive and compliant" and let the attackers beat him, because he was replying to LotsRegret question specifying "when he was being pummeled by the people later."

Trace’s argument is similar to the pro-russia argument that if ukraine had simply rolled over and surrendered itself into russia’s power, a lot of people who did not ‘need to’ die 'probably' wouldn’t have, even if ukraine had the right to fight. Although I don’t recall you or @FCfromSSC making that argument (as opposed to other pro-russia commenters).

At no point have I ever argued that Ukraine doesn't have a right to fight. It seems to me that if it weren't for us intentionally trying to fuck around with Russia since the end of the cold war, there probably wouldn't be a fight for them to be involved in. Likewise, now that there is a fight, I do not agree that we have either an interest or a responsibility to involve ourselves in any way, and would be wiser not to. None of this has anything to do with Ukraine's rights or its interests. They can surrender tomorrow or fight till they either conquer Moscow or depopulate their country entirely. I don't care.

None of this has much bearing on what should be done when one is attacked. In Rittenhouse's case, self-defense was practical and an extremely good idea. There are situations where that is not the case, and it is better to give ground, make concessions, accept loses, etc. Defense is a means to an end, not a terminal goal in its own right.

Possibly because they're not against Ukraine defending itself. But if you want to point out inconsistencies, it's weird how you haven't brought up Trace making that argument re: Russia.

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Ah, thanks. Sorry for the confusion

Thanks for the link. I was having a hard time googling it. (It seems like a lot of twitter and reddit posts are no longer searchable?)

Tracing Woodgrain's comment that Kyle should have just let his attackers beat him as much as they wanted and hope they had the mercy not to kill him, rather than fighting back.

Man, it's not even that long ago, and I already forgot how far even the most respectable went back then...

I know this is not what this comment was about, but why was a 1-2% odds of Kyle getting killed assigned in this case?

Hypothetically speaking, if Kyle had not shown up with a rifle, perhaps he would have been fine, but what if I recall correctly happened was that one crazy guy, who kept antagonizing Kyle's crew all evening prior to the dramatic conclusion, ran after him and attacked him from behind, while a second character actually shot at Kyle.

While perhaps Kyle would have been fine if he hadn't started shooting, the combination of getting melee-attacked and a second character closing in on him with a gun does not give me a 98% confidence in his survival.

People routinely die from their head hitting the ground after getting punched, multiple grown men (convicted felons) ganging up on one person with no accountability in sight doesn't forebode well.

At least Kyle made a good example pour encourager les autres. When there's a riot and ACAB, sometimes punching nazis is not enough, especially if the nazis in question are full-grown teenagers with more martial instinct than half a dozen antifas combined.

A second (still uncaught and unknown!) character shot toward Rittenhouse before Rittenhouse raised his gun, and then latter Grosskruetz drew an illegally-concealed handgun and prepared to fire at Rittenhouse.

Charitably, Trace may have been examining things less in the red team exercise sense of what would have happened had he gone into the same environment and done all the same things except had the gone, and more making measures in a more frequentist analysis of what the typical counterprotester/counterrioter encountered. If you assumed only 32 deaths, a 1% fatality rate requires only 3200 confrontations.

Of course, then you dive into the actual facts on the ground, and the definition of 'confrontation' becomes very important. How many people were in a vocal disagreement that maybe involved a thrown punch? Tons. How many ended up completely alone and surrounded by a violent mob, including many who were illegally carrying concealed firearms?

And then we're back to conceding the public commons to whoever could get away with bringing the violent mob there.

It's just bizarre all around.

Both your first and your second sentence are bad faith paraphrasings of what both respective parties said, and disingenuous representations of what the reactions were.

My second sentence is literal quotes from ImmanuelCanNot in this very thread.

leftists talking about how their political enemies just need "the mao treatment" "annihilating them and their families"

Is not a literal quote of:

A genocide would have been overkill. The top southern 1%-2% being subject to the mao landlord treatment and their holdings redistributed would have led the country to a much better place long term.

I do not agree with ImmanuelCanNot's sentiments, and you can certainly object to them. But there is a difference between talking about how it would have been good to do something to "The top southern 1%-2%" in 1865 and "leftists talking about their political enemies." Of course if you would like to claim that what ImmanuelCanNot actually meant was "the left's political enemies today," you can do that, but you will have to substantiate it rather than just mindreading or projecting. Given that your interpretation of FCfromSSC's accelerationist post is an even more egregious misrepresentation, I suggest you invest some effort before making such an attempt.

I am curious how much effort annihilating them and their families would actually have been. It couldn't have been more then one or two thousand. You could even just exile them to south America or Cuba if you were feeling particularly merciful.

What is wrong with you?! I just read that whole conversation you had with Gattsuru and you seem completely miserable about the way you engage people, but you never change it!

Reading comprehension test:

Who is "them"?

(a) Leftists' political enemies. (b) The top 1%-2% of Southern landowners during the Civil War.

I’m going to echo the chorus of ‘but the OP started it’- yes, this was a bad comment, but we should be evenhanded- the post was also bad.

@hydroacetylene @IGI-111 @winedark

The OP's post is bad (11 reports so far, 1 AAQC) but I'm leaving it to the other mods to decide whether it breaks the rules. I don't think it does, because clearly stating "Our historical problems are for this reason" - even if "this reason" is "Da Joos" or "importing Africans to America" or "White Southerners" and why you think that - is allowed. You are allowed to criticize your outgroup, but it requires laying out a thesis, which can be debated (as is happening here).

"Black people are the worst" is just booing without offering much to debate.

OP's post is similar in quality to other top level posts here, save for whose sacred cows it brings to the slaughter.

And top level posts get modded for antagonism and boo outgroup regularly.

This post is of the same caliber as OP. Neither are particularly unusual in terms of quality, but "why are progressives stupid and terrible?" gets a round of applause while "why are southern conservatives so stupid and terrible?" makes a lot of users feel personally attacked.

I agree that they're both bad, but there's a bit of a difference between "It's actually insane to me that much of the the <X> in America thinks <Y>" and "Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from <X>". And I say that as someone who thinks the Reconstruction got backstabbed, even if the real version of that is more complicated than the colloquial one.

If we're going to allow or disallow posting "this group is the root of all evil and should be or have been exterminated" we should probably be even handed about it.

The OP is literally "it didn't happen but it should have" for the ACW.

I mean, this post is literally about how white southerners are the root of all America's problems.

Why are so many Americans committed to sneering at and impugning the traditions of their warrior class? We all know that the South provides a disproportionate number of soldiers. Washington DC has the lowest enlistment ratio proportionate to population (this reveals a lot about how the US works), South Carolinas has the highest. Furthermore whites take up a larger proportion of the combat arms, diversity is more prevalent in rear areas and admin. I conclude that Southern whites are integral to the US war machine.

Nearly all of the people here are white-collar, I assume. A few have military experience but not very many. It's not our place to belittle those who march off to fight and die at our direction, at the will of the white-collar class. We can give orders, we can enjoy a privileged position at the top of a hierarchy, we can enjoy the fruits of war without sharing in the costs (should there be any fruits) - the bare minimum we should do is give some respect to those who do the fighting.

In Australia we had this case where some of our special forces were a bit overenthusiastic, they shot a couple of prisoners because there was no room on the helicopter, according to legend they stole one guy's artificial leg for use as a drinking trophy. There was a huge media storm about it, a Royal Commission, a massive defamation trial trial that our special forces guy Roberts-Smith lost. He was uncouth, the whole thing was a bit of a shambles. You could tell that the legal class were disgusted and repulsed by this guy and he despised them back.

OK, so Australian special forces killed a few dozen people they shouldn't have. That's a drop in the ocean compared to the West extending the war 10 years past the point we'd clearly lost, allying with the child molesters and drug exporters against the Taliban. The vast majority of the moral harms were committed by careless policymakers and senior officers who committed troops to achieving the unachievable. A huge part of it must have been embarrassment over losing to a small band of semi-literate goatherders with no advanced weapons, foreign backers or money.

And yet nobody dragged Bush, Obama, Petraeus or Trump over the coals - no Royal Commissions (or whatever American equivalent) for them, not for disastrous wars at least. If our leaders get zero accountability for huge crimes, those who follow their commands and deal with the farcical conditions should enjoy immunity for small crimes, let alone not being sufficiently classy.

Who wants to join special forces, do intense training, go off to fight a meaningless, futile war and be hauled over the coals for any excesses?

Who wants to join the US army if the war memorials and bases for their subculture are going to be defaced and renamed, if they're going to be sneered at for being uncouth hill people? Perhaps this is why the US military is so understrength in a time of global crisis. You don't tend to get classy, sophisticated people joining as infantry (who are still vital) - we should appreciate this and not demand this from them.

Do you want to go and risk getting turned to meat paste by Chinese hypersonics? Do you want to risk getting your guts ripped out by HE, get burned to the point everyone is repulsed by the sight of you? No. I don't either. Those who take that risk are making a special social contract and deserve support from the top of the pyramid, not contempt.

7.3 percent of all living Americans have served in the military at some point in their lives.

According to fiscal year 2017 data, the most recent available, the South's share of the U.S. young adult population was 33 percent, but it provided 41 percent of new military enlistees nationwide. As a result, the region's representation ratio is 1.2, which means it provided 20 percent more military recruits than might be expected given its young adult population.

This is a factor of ten smaller of a difference than would justify the above comment. 90% southerners never serve in the military, and those that do serve only 20% more often than northerners. Calling them the 'warrior class' is absurd.

Or, you know, maybe the first numbers on Google are wrong. That's possible. (I skimmed the articles, they seem reasonable). But if you're going to make fiery moral pronouncements, maybe bring a number or two with it, so we can check if the claim is justified?

I'm curious if people who downvoted can explain why? I just don't think there's a significant material link between the South and America's modern "warrior class". Or was it tone? The third paragraph was intended to be self-deprecating and indicate my uncertainty.

I didn't downvote, don't know either.

I'm still fairly confident that Southern White men are integral to the strength of the US military. Total numbers are one thing, boots on the ground are another. The primary sacrifices in war (and the key to victory) comes from those who are doing the fighting. Military enlistees includes maintenance, catering, admin and so on which are all important but secondary to the primary combat function.

See an article complaining that there aren't enough Blacks in combat arms, meaning they can't be officers, meaning they can't get high-ranking command positions: https://mwi.usma.edu/strategic-problem-army-doesnt-seem-care-african-americans-arent-branching-combat-arms/

This article says that US casualties in Iraq were predominantly White Southern men from working class backgrounds: https://www.baltimoresun.com/2005/10/30/iraq-war-casualties-mostly-white-working-class/

I think I'd maybe slightly disagree with that because occupations are fungible, but not really that strongly and I don't know much.

My much bigger disagreement is I don't understand why that undermines DBDr's original post. He's insulting the South for bad reasons, but (see math below) the south is like 9% "warrior" while the non-south is 6% "warrior", so it doesn't feel like the insults are motivated by, or really related to, that 'warrior class' aspect. And I think it's quite plausible (not true though) for the South to have significant negative cultural features while also providing 41% more of the military than you'd expect, and it'd reasonable to criticize those. If, hypothetically, the black community provided much more than its share of America's soldiers, I'd still support far-right statements about black culture because they're true!

occupations are fungible

Are they though? Are you ready to march off to war, not merely to some IT/intel-analysis job that befits our class but actual boots on the ground? I'm not.

What I'm trying to say is that the people he sneers at provide a useful service to the 'rich technocratic part of the country', who also have many serious flaws. They do things we don't want to, it's division of labour. A country is at its best when united, not divided.

Furthermore, OP didn't provide reasonable criticism. He's not saying 'and some, I suppose are good people'. He's saying that the South consists of unreconstructed (literally) traitors and some combination of proudly stupid hill people and pretentious faux-aristocratic hedonists. He's saying everything's really simple, that there's a broadly good North with some bad elements and a totally worthless South that needed/needs Forceful Correction. That's a gross and aggressive simplification. Imagine if I just valorised our special forces or the working class and demonized the elites like that, it would be a distortion. He even got modded, it was an egregious post.

I didn't downvote you but here is my guess:

41 to 33 is closer to 1.24. This also means the non-South's share is lower, so the South is 41% more likely to serve, not 20%. (I just plugged (41/33)/((100-41)/(100-33)) into a calculator, I may have calculated incorrectly so someone correct me if I'm wrong). The disparity between north/south may be greater or lower since this is specifically non-south states, not north states. There is a chart in this article here that shows by state breakdown using 2018 data: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military. You can see the ratios go from 0.3 (Washington DC) to 1.5 (South Carolina).

Regarding what constitutes a "warrior class" that's a semantics argument, so people are in disagreement with you that you need a 200% difference to qualify the existence of a warrior class. You could cherry-pick specific states (e.g. Washington DC to South Carolina) and get a 400% difference in the ratio, though, but the 41% is probably close to the actual number.

It's also important to consider the culture and attitude surrounding the military, and not just who serves in the military. The military is more red-tribe-aligned than blue-tribe-aligned. I don't think it's unreasonable to see how people from a state like New York think about the military (disinterest to disdain) to people from Texas (generally supportive). Your average Southerner may not have been in the military, but they sure as hell are more likely to support it than your average Northerner. If there ever was a draft for a conflict I believe it's reasonable to assume Southerners will be more likely to support their country while the Northern people are likely to protest it. For example, if we look at protests during the Vietnam War, a disproportionate amount of protests came from northeastern states relative to their population, enrollment rates, and deaths from war. There are some other things to consider, such as why people join the military (is it pride for the country? Or because the military provides an opportunity for the economically disadvantaged?), or how long people serve, or how many people choose to stay in the reserve forces after active duty.

Essentially, I think the data point you brought up was simply inadequate to convince people that the South does not constitute more of the "warrior class" compared to the North. Furthermore, even if you were able to provide more facts/statistics, whether or not the South constitutes a "warrior class" is not relevant to the core argument of @RandomRanger's comment, which is regarding people's attitudes toward the military.

That being said, I personally would not downvote your post, as I think it adds an interesting point of discussion to consider, but people will vote however they want. I have seen similar sentiment recently regarding voting patterns here. I can't remember who but I saw someone with a flair that essentially said to comment if downvoting and nobody else put a reason why. It would be nice to get a response from someone who actually downvoted but the most likely explanation is they just didn't agree with what you said, and I suspect my points above would not be that different for why they didn't agree with what you said.

I think your 41% number is correct. And if half of the US population served in the military, then I'd be comfortable calling the South the warrior class informally. But since only 7% ever serve, I don't think that makes sense.

In particular, OP's inference was that people who insult the south are "sneering at our warrior class". To whatever extent the South has distinct cultural attributes from the rest of the US, I don't think it's reasonable to call criticism of that culture 'sneering at the warrior class'. Things like "Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension" aren't really true IMO, but they could be, and if they were I don't see what criticizing that has to do with sneering at a warrior class. The people he's criticizing are mostly not warriors! 9% of them are warriors, as opposed to 6% of the people he's not criticizing.

Like, Ranger's post just feels like a non-sequitur to me.

I'd say it's right there in your first sentence: a warrior class.

Americans are allergic to the concept. Or at least to talking about it openly. When something implies the existence of a class divide, we tend to get real uncomfortable real fast, and start casting about for alternate explanations. You can have military families just like you can have legacy admissions, so long as they're framed as pure personal preference.

"Warrior class" isn't the right word, anyway. We're not talking about kshatriyas or samurai or knights. Those classes are no longer economically viable. Back in the days of subsistence farming, feudal dues were one of the more effective ways to support specialization of labor. Peasants farmed, lords taxed, and when it came time for violence, the necessary logistics and command structures were already in place. As food production improved, and state capacity generally expanded, this relationship was no longer the only game in town. The standing armies of Renaissance Europe were already decoupled from retinue-of-retinues feudal structures.

Simultaneously, the proliferation of firearms and fire artillery was closing the technological gap between the aristocracy and the plebes. By the modern era, the warrior aristocracy was no longer load-bearing. Officers got down in the mud and choked on mustard gas just like their lowborn brethren. The most successful militaries coming out of the World Wars adapted to this reality by treating military expertise like any other economic niche. Career soldiers are no longer a class. They're a commodity.

So there is a class of Americans which makes up the tip of the spear. But they're not a warrior class. They're just another one of the socioeconomic strata which form our vast, Byzantine economy. As with doctors, lawyers, police officers and chronic welfare recipients, membership in this class is to some extent inherited. Members hail from certain regions and tend to hold particular political beliefs. Their parents were likely in the class, and their children may find themselves making suspiciously similar choices.

On the flip side, we don't allocate greater rights to our doctors and lawyers and other extreme specialists. At least not explicitly. The privileges of rank, and of choosing to commit oneself to a particular niche, are supposed to be folded into pure economics. If, on noticing your material wealth and stable retirement prospects, others choose to treat you better...well, that's their prerogative, isn't it? Once again, any implication of class barriers is swept under the rug.

I cannot stress how important this is to our national mythos! As such, I can't endorse giving the military class some sort of immunity or credibility. Just look at how much damage the perception of such immunity has done to American politics. The cult of personal responsibility may be one of our greatest pretensions, but it's also one of our most effective. I think we should be trying to repair it rather than work around it.

Just look at how much damage the perception of such immunity has done to American politics.

Perception of immunity only happens when there's actual immunity. If there was a true system of personal responsibility, that would be great, near-ideal. But since there isn't, immunity and special privileges should be distributed outside the elite.

Even if we don't call it a class, class is still there. In the US, there are the Harvard and Stanford people, people with connections.

And isn't there this whole cult of veteranhood in the US, how soldiers get discounts on certain goods? Don't they get cheaper education and preferences in employment, in some places? Isn't there Veteran's Day, (like we have ANZAC day)? It seems like they're a class with positive privileges. I simply propose the negative privilege of not having the predominant, load-bearing echelon be harassed or insulted by their leaders.

A man does not have himself killed for a half pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him.

Napoleon is right IMO. Soldiers aren't just an economic product, they need some kind of ideal to fight for. If there's one lesson from the Middle East, it's that money is secondary to will. The hatred, fanaticism and self-confidence of the Taliban overcame our firepower and funding.

The people who will stop Chinese hypersonic missiles will be, and I am only slightly being hyperbolic, are trans furry military members in some bunker in Nevada piloting drones or other military gear, not some guy who signed up for reasonable reasons like access to college or career training or the darker reasons.

We already saw this in Ukraine - lots of hype over the true non-woke military, and it's regularly getting shredded by missiles that are largely being guided by a they/them army.

The actual thing that'll probably stop Chinese hypersonic missiles is a combination of they probably don't really exist in the way that anti-woke people hype them up online in the obsessive way they tend too, a corrupt Chinese procurement process that makes the US process look clean and normal, and the fact we've probably got stuff we're working on that we don't have to hype up the way the Chinese do to look strong.

The people who will stop Chinese hypersonic missiles do not exist in America and are unlikely to for the near future.

Good thing Chinese hypersonic missiles can't hit targets, then.

re trans furry military members in some bunker in Nevada piloting drones or other military gear,

This is untrue. Military does not produce or design weapons. Yes, furries can operate weapon system, but they won't have them because the US military and industry contracting system is broken.

The 'war' with China is already lost, if we go by statements of a former foreign minister of Singapore, who says both militaries understand US cannot win a conventional war, which is why the Chinese are now building a more robust nuclear force that'd deter the US from escalating in case of a conventional war.

and it's regularly getting shredded by missiles that are largely being guided by a they/them army.

Which is why Ukraine army is advancing, their offensive has succeeded and Russians do not have fire or aerial superiority over the front line. Because 'they/them' army has destroyed their ability to make things go boom. Yes, very true.

Of course a land war over Taiwan is unwinnable for the US. Taiwan is directly next to China’s 1.4 billion people and 2m soldiers, with easy resupply and colossal domestic manufacturing capacity next door. The US is thousands of miles away, has a vastly longer supply chain even to nearby bases in Japan and South Korea, has much less casualty tolerance, and is honest that the main strategic value of Taiwan is chip factories that thoroughly destroying would defeat the point of the defense, preventing any easy repulsion of an attack once large numbers of Chinese forces had landed.

But this doesn’t mean the US is weak, any more than a weak man beating a strong one on home territory while his opponent is only allowed to use his pinky finger serves as a good way to judge their respective actual fighting capacity.

As for Ukraine, Western intelligence predicted a full and successful invasion and Ukrainian surrender in a matter of days, which is why everyone was pulled out and all embassies closed. Two years later Russia has suffered 300,000 casualties, many of its best units have been destroyed by death and injury, and not a single American soldier has died for it. The only price has been a tiny fraction of GDP that’s less dear than many individual federal programs which accomplish much less.

Of course a land war over Taiwan is unwinnable for the US.

I meant that the naval war is unwinnable.

main strategic value of Taiwan is chip factories that thoroughly destroying would defeat the point of the defense,

Seeing as China is catching up, destruction of these chip factories would probably hurt the US and the 'free world' more than losing access to their products would hurt China.

But this doesn’t mean the US is weak,

It's not ? Why then can't it even keep it's ships manned? Why is the Navy shrinking ? Why can't it supply Ukraine with enough artillery shells, anti-air missiles, drone defences ? Is that strength ?

Two years later Russia has suffered 300,000 casualties, many of its best units have been destroyed by death and injury, and not a single American soldier has died for it.

It's estimated that they lost 50-70k. IIRc direct count of deaths online and in FB got to 35k. They weren't very good, and unless their army structure is completely dysfunctional, this war is going to strenghten, not weaken their army and air forces. They figured out what works, they got practice in, they saw which commanders are competent and which aren't.

not a single American soldier has died for it.

You believe that ? Russian MOD says it's killed 300+ Americans. Special forces are reputed to be in there, odds are, some got killed.

The only price has been a tiny fraction of GDP

Let me name some other consequences:

  • deindustrialization of US 'allies'. IIRC, a significant fraction (20%) of EU chemical industry went titsup, as in, ceased production.

  • loss of prestige because US kept loudly talking about defeating Putler for 1.5 years, shipped what fifty billion in hardware to Ukraine. It's likely going to end up with Ukraine losing a lot, possibly even sea access. Russians are in no mood to negotiate, Ukraine has no one to send to the front, and arms shipments are down.

  • revelation that the 'mighty' US war machine is hollow, unprepared for wars against anyone but mud hut dwellers. E.g. US can't even source blackpowder domestically, because the single factory blew up 2 years ago. How things would work out in an actual big war, with sabotage groups using drones to blow up critical industries would be even more interesting. I strongly doubt US internal security would be on par with e.g. China's, or even as good as in WW2. US doesn't really have solid reserves of anti-air missiles, artillery shells. It doesn't have production capacity for same. Satellites it relies on heavily would probably all get shot down within a week. Is there a stockpile of ready-to-launch replacements? No. You had funny stories such as Raytheon searching for retirees from Stinger manufacture to restart the mfg process, because somehow the 'free world' with its vast GDP doesn't have a live MANPADS production ability to supply a fairly sedate war with ~200k frontline troops.

  • wasn't there also marked decline in the willingness of foreign countries to hold USD ?

For years the idea that Western governments could actually lock a billion Westerners used to protesting for "muh rights" at every opportunity up for a year with almost zero major dissent also seemed absurd, until it happened and was 'always possible' of course.

The reality is that Western state capacity, in particular American state capacity, hasn't been tested since WW2 and the current sclerotic, inefficient functioning of the government, including defense, is a malaise both enabled and tolerated by American hegemony and prosperity. To paraphrase the apocryphal Churchill quote, Americans do the right thing only after exhausting every other option. The war in Ukraine is not important enough to create the fear of god that drives Americans to exert their state capacity in a meaningful way, it simply isn't a good indicator of what the country is capable of.

By casualties I meant KIA and WIA. KIA I think 70-120k is a common estimate for KIA.

year with almost zero major dissent also seemed absurd,

Zero dissent? Up to a year ? It was some months, and it created a vast amount of radicalised people and extreme unwillingness to repeat it. To the point that if quarantine was now actually needed because of yet another lab leak of this time interestingly lethal disease, it'd probably not happen.

it simply isn't a good indicator of what the country is capable of.

US had an entire industrial base and was entirely self sufficient in basically everything. Ball bearings, steel production, building materials, electronics chemicals, etc. Anything you can name, around 1950s US was making it, usually in world class quality. That's not true anymore.

That industrial base was hollowed out and largely outsourced since 1980. US industry now largely depends on imports from rival powers. So, in the event of a crisis involving said hostile powers, you'd be half a decade away from merely being self-sufficient.

And let's not even go into something such as level of trust in state institutions, the government, political polarization and so on. Incomparably worse now, especially since the USG seems to regard it's core sustaining population-whites with deep suspicion and paranoia.

Yes, Ukraine war isn't a big enough crisis, but a big enough crisis might just result in a collapse of yet another WW2 victor.

To the point that if quarantine was now actually needed because of yet another lab leak of this time interestingly lethal disease, it'd probably not happen.

Can confirm. Sample size of one. Next "vaccine" they come up with for as of yet unnamed global pandemic they are gonna have to shove it up their own behinds. And if they make it mandatory they're are going to literally get home grown terrorism, not that fake glow in the dark shit FBI tricking special needs students to do a terrorism.

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Zero dissent? Up to a year ? It was some months, and it created a vast amount of radicalised people and extreme unwillingness to repeat it.

More than a year in some places. And as far as I can tell the Overton window on the subject runs from "Of course it was worth it" to "We should have gone full China".

As for Ukraine, Western intelligence predicted a full and successful invasion and Ukrainian surrender in a matter of days, which is why everyone was pulled out and all embassies closed. Two years later Russia has suffered 300,000 casualties, many of its best units have been destroyed by death and injury, and not a single American soldier has died for it.

Western intelligence agencies predicted this because they, like Russian intelligence agencies, expected Ukraine not to fight, not because Russia was unstoppable- it was known at the time that the army Russia had on the borders wasn’t big enough to take on a Ukraine which fought, and it shocked everyone when Ukraine fought.

Of course a land war over Taiwan is unwinnable for the US.

Which is why it's a damn good thing Taiwan is an island. Deny China the strait, and everything changes.

I meant a war with boots-on-the-ground, probably the wrong term.

Do Americans have it in them to setup a durable blockade that can escalate to a nuclear war for long enough to make it meaningful? Do they have it in them to completely wreck their (and the world's) economy and to scramble to get local industrial capacity back online?

Every time I read about a sustained conflict between modern great powers, the first two moves sound reasonable and after that it's basically reading like the end of the world as we know it, even in the scenarios that are explicitly not nuclear.

Do Americans have it in them to setup a durable blockade

If neither side fully escalates it is a matter of who is willing to escalate further. If both sides are willing to escalate, but stop short of nuclear weapons, there is no existent navel force, or combination of navel forces, which can sustain a Taiwanese blockade in the face of Chinese opposition.

Do Americans have it in them to setup a durable blockade that can escalate to a nuclear war for long enough to make it meaningful?

If China's asking, the answer is "fuck around and find out". A "blockade" is not the limit of what the US can do, anyway -- the US could also sink every Chinese ship capable of taking troops to Taiwan.

Do they have it in them to completely wreck their (and the world's) economy and to scramble to get local industrial capacity back online?

Not doing so is not a choice. The alternative to defending Taiwan by force is not just letting China take over and then business as usual. It's the usual dumbass sanctions regime that hurts the US just as much as a Chinese embargo would, without actually helping anyone.

Every time I read about a sustained conflict between modern great powers, the first two moves sound reasonable and after that it's basically reading like the end of the world as we know it, even in the scenarios that are explicitly not nuclear.

Yes, a sustained conflict between modern great powers is not a reasonable thing. Why would you expect it to be?

Why would you expect it to be?

I suppose all previous ones were also completely unreasonable. Fuck.

Russia is putting all its abilities into winning, the US considers the Ukraine war an afterthought. And yet, despite being an afterthought they/them are able to check the entire might of the great "masculine" Russian bear.

No, the military and government and people of Ukraine did that. It was the fact that none of those 3 crumpled that stopped Ukraine being overrun in weeks like Russia expected, not that the U.S. had sent them some Javelins/small-arms/intelligence. The more substantial supply of equipment came later, and has made it more difficult for Russia to grind down Ukraine with the sheer size difference, but even then it is nonsense to pretend that donating some spare equipment (without even dramatically ramping up production) means Ukrainian performance can be attributed to the U.S. military. If you want to see how "afterthought" support from the U.S. military does when it is backing a people without a sense of patriotism for their country and a military that isn't already competent, look at post-withdrawal Afghanistan.

This is pure ideology trying to analyze pure ideology.

Join me in the real world, where Russia has successfully attained its stated military goals at decent but significant costs and NATO has made it difficult for them but not difficult enough that they failed or destroyed their economy.

Russia is poised to successfully prevent a NATO Ukraine with any significant fighting power at the price of becoming a junior partner to China. And traded a limited amount of manpower for a now booming arms industry.

Nobody but NATO's proxy is fighting with all they got, sexual minorities are so insignificant in their population as to have no influence except as fodder for online flamewars and regular plain old white men of all ages are catching shrapnel in the mud the same way they have for centuries.

So at the end Ukraine has lost, Russia has won a meager victory that, at best - and at extraordinary cost - gets them back to the level of influence over (half) of Ukraine that they had in the halcyon days of...2013 (truly an extraordinary, Catherine-the-Great esque imperial victory), and the US bled one of its two main geopolitical opponents at negligible cost for several years. What's the problem?

Ironically, pro-Russian activists appear to value hypothetical Ukrainian lives more than Ukrainians. From what I can tell, they wanted to fight, and now they are. They may suffer for it, but it was not forced upon them by the Americans, who did after all expect them to surrender.

Military action is not judged in the absolute but relative to the available alternatives. Orderly retreat is a success.

Russia is certainly not doing great, but they've successfully avoided having a knife to their throat. Which was their stated goal. And it didn't cost them total war.

I think they're correctly allocating their ressources. The biggest risk was that the Western economic sanctions would actually have some bite, and they did not.

Ironically, pro-Russian activists appear to value hypothetical Ukrainian lives more than Ukrainians.

It's sad, but indeed nobody actually seems to care about Ukrainians lives. Not even Ukrainians.

I won't pretend I do. I hate this senseless waste, but ultimately the fate of some far away people is not my problem.

What's the problem?

From America's point of view? I think this whole endeavor was a long term blunder. Antagonizing Russia, which was never really a threat, as should be all too evident now, does not serve long term American interests. It just pushes them and China closer together, when the opposite is desirable and would likely have been achievable were the State department not made up of moralist morons and cold war relics.

If there is a large scale China-US conflict, the full extent of the mistake of further aligning China with a country that has large amounts of natural ressources, loads of nuclear weapons and engineers that know how to make aircraft engines will be felt pretty hard.

Don't get me wrong, this whole affair is still a great coup for the US, but it has nothing to do with undermining Russia and everything to do with kneecapping Europe.

Still, spending 75B to make sure your allies never get uppity just seems petty. And that's yet more people that won't come to your help in any significance if there is a big war. Hell, they're already declining to help put down a handful of Iran backed irregulars.

Antagonizing Russia, which was never really a threat, as should be all too evident now

And there lies russia’s error. On the strength of their stalingrad cred, all the old american cold war warriors bought the myth of the unbeatable red army, russia could have stolen pots indefinitely. Their assumed strength was way higher than their actual strength, so they never should have let it come to a showdown. They’re never getting the baltic russians now that everybody knows they could never in a million years get past the bug and the vistula.

I was never fooled – gdp is destiny – but the suckers at the table, americans who never updated their fulda gap division calculations, and german pacifists, would have let putin bluff them indefinitely.

Russia is certainly not doing great, but they've successfully avoided having a knife to their throat. Which was their stated goal. And it didn't cost them total war.

They traded the distant possibility that a future Ukrainian state might join NATO for the certainty that Sweden and Finland did, I suppose.

I don’t think we’re likely to see the Russians allying with the US in a US-China conflict. They’ve had their differences but unless it seemed overwhelmingly likely the Chinese would completely wipeout US global hegemony forever (unlikely I’d say) Russia would have nothing to gain by helping the US.

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Ironically, pro-Russian activists appear to value hypothetical Ukrainian lives more than Ukrainians. From what I can tell, they wanted to fight, and now they are.

If you're referring to the Ukrainian people valuing their lives less, that seems to be contradicted by the ban on fighting-age men leaving the country, and forced conscription.

If you're referring to the Ukrainian government, that seems to be contradicted by the reports on them wanting to negotiate with the Russians and being pushed to war by the West.

I do not know of any polls about how many Ukrainians believe people born with a "non-binary gender identity" exist, or that people should avoid "misgendering" them, but I doubt it is a significant number. I do not even know if anyone has invented "non-binary pronouns" in Ukrainian, I assume a few Ukrainians on Tumblr have done so but I do not know of them successfully convincing major Ukrainian institutions that their adoption is a civil rights issue. Searching finds an article about a soldier who identifies as "non-binary" and says that "some even used my she pronoun", with no mention of "non-binary pronouns" as a concept. Ukrainians are of course not using singular they as a pronoun to indicate "non-binary" people, since less than 30% speak even "some English".

By comparison, in a 2023 poll 44% of Ukrainians supported common-law same-sex marriage and 30% believed same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt children. I do not think it is useful to base your understanding of major world events on bizarre gotchas against conservatives from /r/politicalhumor.

I think it’s the US army that provides the intel that’s being referred to as the they/them army.

Right, I saw that part of the sentence but skipped past that part of the argument, I should have explicitly said why I was talking about the military of Ukraine. I think it is deeply silly to attribute Ukrainian military performance to the politics of the U.S. army because of U.S. intelligence passing them some information. Also, even if we were talking about the U.S. military, soldiers are more right-wing than the general public and belief in "non-binary gender identity" is far from consensus in the U.S. even outside the right.

To the extent talking about "the they/them army beating Russia!" is a real argument at all, it is a response to those who have said it weakens the U.S. army when it adopts policies such as lowering standards to let in more women and pandering to divisive left-wing political groups who are not particularly patriotic/nationalistic or likely to join the military. Those criticisms have essentially no relevance to the U.S. keeping a spy drone over international waters and passing some of its data to Ukraine. Meanwhile the actual Ukrainian army is not particularly left-wing, owes much of its success to the Ukrainian people being more patriotic/nationalistic than Russia expected, and by the way a surprisingly successful force in pushing that sense of anti-Russian patriotism was a militia of literal neo-Nazis who were subsequently successfully integrated into the mainstream army and political system. (Meanwhile the U.S. military brags about campaigns to root out supposed "right-wing extremism".)

Meanwhile the actual Ukrainian army is not particularly left-wing, owes much of its success to the Ukrainian people being more patriotic/nationalistic than Russia expected, and by the way a surprisingly successful force in pushing that sense of anti-Russian patriotism was a militia of literal neo-Nazis who were subsequently successfully integrated into the mainstream army and political system.

I agree. The Ukraine government is oddly successful at sending men to their death. You'd expect from all these street press gang videos that at least a few low-level officers would get shot by desperate soldiers, but they must be really good at compartimentalizing.

Perhaps the new recruits only get ammunition 5min before going to clear the minefield with their legs, or maybe they really get fired up by the patriotic speech at the camp?

I really wonder what I would do in such a situation, probably not much. It'd only take a couple guys to carry me into a van and after that it's probably game over?

And then there's all these men. Imagine being the guy shoving Ukrainian men into a van to send them to the trench. You didn't manage to escape and you have to keep doing it, and the more you do it, the longer the war lasts, the more likely you are to get sent as well. Then you end up in the minefield and all you can think about is 'if only I killed that commanding officer on day 1, how many men could I have saved?'.

I talked to a guy who was doing business importing sunflower oil from Ukraine, but he ran into personnel issues. He'd hire a Ukrainian man to pick up and deliver across the border but then they'd abandon the truck after crossing.

You'd expect from all these street press gang videos that at least a few low-level officers would get shot by desperate soldiers, but they must be really good at compartimentalizing.

...or that the street press gang videos being spread by pro-Russians as a form of propaganda are really not reflective of the situation at large.

Perhaps the videos were not reflective of the situation up to this point. Perhaps the Ukrainians who did not flee immediately as soon as orders were given by whoever is in charge of the West were really willing to die. Then they got their wishes and we have a lot more videos as impressment becomes more urgent. I suppose this is more recent development, here's an article from a month ago.

At the River Tisa, which acts as the border from southwestern Ukraine to Romania, guard patrols used to focus on catching tobacco smugglers but now collar fleeing draft dodgers. About 6,000 people have been detained trying to leave across that stretch, the border guards told Reuters. One of them, Dyma Cherevychenko, said at least 19 people had drowned trying to flee the country during the conflict.

The more striking act of resistance so far, a couple weeks old. A village councillor in western Ukraine has thrown grenades on to the floor of a council meeting, wounding 26 people, police say.

How did he get those grenades, and why is he the only one doing it?

My prediction for 2024: there will be few male Ukrainians ready to die for the Ukraine government, and the ones that do will be quite old.

It really is a marvel of media bubble. I wonder how many Ukrainians who died on the battlefield ever read a quote from the Americans who 'support' them.

“American support for Ukraine is not charity. It’s an investment in our own direct interests,” the top Senate Republican said. “Degrading Russia’s military power helps to deter our primary strategic adversary, China,” McConnell added.

This is what some of the Americans who in practice support TUD seem to believe:

The US won in Ukraine by the first week of the war. Everything since then is bleeding Russia for free without risking a single American serviceman’s life. The cost is minuscule - food stamps cost vastly more, as do countless other bullshit federal programs - and much of Russia’s most elite fighting capacity has been slaughtered and replaced with 80 IQ Central Asian peasant conscripts using WW1 trench tactics. Sure, Ukraine is destroyed, but they wanted to fight and, to paraphrase the immortal words of Lord Farquad, that’s a price we’re willing to pay.

lots of hype over the true non-woke military, and it's regularly getting shredded by missiles that are largely being guided by a they/them army

  1. The Ukrainian military is by no means woke, there are/were a lot of nationalists, sexists, homophobes in it, as you'd expect from Eastern Europe. They are doing the fighting and dying.
  2. They're losing. National Affairs is starting to admit this. The TLDR of the article is that the US sent a lot of weapons to Ukraine, they failed to take any ground and that Ukraine ought to start negotiating as quickly as they can. If you're being urged to the negotiating table, it follows that you're losing the war since your negotiating position is getting worse as time passes.

Even the New York Times is busting out the high-grade copium: 'Ukraine doesn't need all its territory to beat Putin'. The tone is that of a rear-guard action, trying to salvage credibility for the next phase of this disaster. Full text here: https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/18sb5l0/ua_pov_ukraine_doesnt_need_all_its_territory_to/

a corrupt Chinese procurement process that makes the US process look clean and normal

Whatever issues China has with procurement, they're light-years ahead of the US. China's navy is growing while the US fleet shrinks. They also have 232x times more shipbuilding capacity than the US, per US estimates. I'd be wary before fighting a naval war (as an industrial dwarf) against the world's leading shipbuilder.

we've probably got stuff we're working on that we don't have to hype up

I'll take failures out in the open over a secret, unknown, hypothetical success. If the US fleet is so powerful, why can't US allies get their shipping through Suez? If it's so easy to shoot down these missiles, hypersonic or otherwise, why are Ukrainian cities constantly being bombed? Patriots were provided after all.

Can you imagine how insane the current situation would have seemed in February 2022 in Ukraine? “Oh, Ukraine is losing an ongoing war of attrition in December 2023 while still controlling the vast majority of the country, while Russia has thrown 300,000 lives and unfathomable amounts of its best hardware at the conflict, what?”. The official intelligence assessment on the eve of the war by the West was so dire that they evacuated every major embassy in Kiev (likely after the usual kind of warning from Russia) to avoid any risky diplomatic incidents during the Russian invasion, which they presumed would certainly be successful at capturing Kiev.

The US won in Ukraine by the first week of the war. Everything since then is bleeding Russia for free without risking a single American serviceman’s life. The cost is minuscule - food stamps cost vastly more, as do countless other bullshit federal programs - and much of Russia’s most elite fighting capacity has been slaughtered and replaced with 80 IQ Central Asian peasant conscripts using WW1 trench tactics. Sure, Ukraine is destroyed, but they wanted to fight and, to paraphrase the immortal words of Lord Farquad, that’s a price we’re willing to pay.

The reason the US is reluctant to attack the Houthis on land is that a big goal of US foreign policy under Biden was to support the Saudi peace deal with the Houthis. Biden personally promised that the US would cut support for Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war, essentially pressuring them into peace. It would be an embarrassing move for the Democrats to reverse course now and to fight the Saudis’ war against the Houthis for them. If the neocons had been listened to (Trump listened to them, which is why he vetoed a plan to stop US support for anti-Houthi forces) the Houthis might well no longer be an issue.

  1. A very large proportion of Western munitions has been deployed and expended in Ukraine. Stingers, Javelins, HIMARS, Patriot interceptors, artillery shells. It will take many years to rebuild these reserves, which are needed for deterrence and potential war in Asia.
  2. The Russian military is larger and more capable now than it was at the start of the war, they're much more experienced. They actually increased their military production significantly (and we didn't). This is why the European NATO members are scrambling around like headless chickens, sending a German brigade to Lithuania, trying to rapidly arm themselves.
  3. If the Ukrainians aren't winning, then what we were told about these incredible Russian casualties and materiel losses must have been wrong. If they'd killed 300,000 Russians like you seem to think, there'd be at least a million wounded or dead and Russia wouldn't have an army anymore let alone be capable of offensives. Since the Russians have more materiel it stands to reason that they suffer fewer casualties than Ukraine. Likewise, we see all these videos of Ukrainian men being dragged into vans by draft officers - it seems that their need for manpower is very high.

80 IQ Central Asian peasant conscripts using WW1 trench tactics

Coincidentally, just today I saw a video of Ukrainian soldiers mocking a mentally retarded conscript sent to their trench. https://twitter.com/Alex_Oloyede2/status/1740797508400632195#m

  1. The same media and military 'experts' that assured us that victory was just around the corner in Iraq and Afghanistan (send in another Surge, oohrah!) aren't reliable sources on the War in Ukraine, especially when they say things are going well. Either it's incompetence, since we lost those wars. Or they're just there to lie, prop up support for these wars. The Pentagon says the Russians have lost twice as much as Ukraine or more... So what?

The West is not bleeding Russia for 'free'. It's expensive in terms of munitions, wealth and prestige. Europe is suffering considerable energy costs (in the trillions) as a result of their sanctions program, part of the economic war against Russia. Much of our media went around saying 'oh Ukraine must win to preserve the rules-based order and deter Xi in Taiwan', yet Ukraine is losing. This sets an unhelpful precedent for Xi in China - if there are setbacks at the start of the war, just double down and power on through to ultimate victory.

Once Ukraine is beaten, we'll face a powerful, angry Russia in Europe, closely aligned with China. China is the real winner, they get cheaper gas, a useful ally and a weaker West distracted from Asia.

The much vaunted gas crisis never materialized; European gas prices largely returned to pre-2019 levels in 2023; I said 300,000 casualties, including WIA - KIA is likely in the 70-120k bracket; I don’t think fever dreams of Ed Krassenstein Twitter types mean that the Pentagon “expected” Ukraine to win (if anything quite the opposite).

The Russian military is larger and more capable now than it was at the start of the war, they're much more experienced. They actually increased their military production significantly (and we didn't). This is why the European NATO members are scrambling around like headless chickens, sending a German brigade to Lithuania, trying to rapidly arm themselves.

This means exactly the opposite of what you think it does. If even an interminably corrupt, poor, kleptocratic, bureaucratic shithole like Russia can get its act together this much in a crisis, it means the US and other Western could likely jump to serious war footing much faster than naysayers predict. They merely do not yet care, because bleeding Russia in Ukraine for as long as possible is so minor in terms of both blood and treasure for the United States.

Can you imagine how insane the current situation would have seemed in February 2022 in Ukraine?

No? It seems like this is exactly what you'd expect through mere triangulation of extreme takes being made at the time.

The US won in Ukraine by the first week of the war. Everything since then is bleeding Russia for free without risking a single American serviceman’s life.

Man, Ukrainians must love reading stuff like this...

Sure, Ukraine is destroyed, but they wanted to fight

Didn't they want to negotiate, and got pressured out of it by the UK?

No? It seems like this is exactly what you'd expect through mere triangulation of extreme takes being made at the time.

People disagreed about whether the invasion would happen and how ambitious Russian objectives would be, there was some disagreement about whether there would be much guerilla/resistance fighting, but I don't recall anyone here suggesting Ukraine would largely successfully repel a full-scale invasion in a matter of weeks.

I remember prediction of the entire Russian economy collapsing within weeks, part of the disagreement over whether Russian will invade stemming from the prediction that Ukrainians will be able to defend itself, and I definitely do not recall the pro-Ukraine side predicting an immediate collapse of the defense (that was the pro-Russia side).

The people who will stop Chinese hypersonic missiles will be the nerds who design and the blue collars who build the high tech military gear. Especially with something as fast as hypersonics, a trans furry, or well any other human, would just be too slow to really matter. If we want successful products from nerds/builders, we probably ought let them be meritocratic in their own domains rather than force them to include a bunch of trans furries or other diversity hires.

There might be some trans furries designing and building the gear, though they'll be working for contractors rather than military members (I knew one trans person when I was in that field. No furries as far as I know, but they tended to keep it (that is, their tail) in their pants back then).

I gather that trans/furries/trans furries are greatly overrepresented among the relevant nerds.

Myths are powerful things. Anyone can just tell a story, and whether it's believed tells you more about the culture that believes the myth than it does about the subject of the story.

Steve Hsu estimated Chinese engineering pipeline produces 10-15x more graduates per year than the US one.

Chinese government as of late has tried to lower investment into IT bullshit and promote investment into industry and actual tangible technologies, not just apps.

Graduate quality depends. Per capita that's only 2-3x more than the US, on a quality adjusted per capita basis it's probably roughly the same. And once you add in the US's allies (including India, they'll definitely choose US over China) the total "quality" available to the US probably equals that available to China, and if you include the fact that the US poaches the best Chinese while the reverse doesn't happen the US (and its allies) come out ahead compared to China.

Every now and then it leaks that some German military group has a private chat where they post nationalist memes and comments. The sorts of people proactively seeking to join German defense forces are commonly German nationalists. Not really a profound point.

But, this is always characterized as far right, Nazi adjacent groups have infiltrated German police and military. I suspect a more level-headed reframing would be "nationalists who generally lean right of course compose a disproportionate amount of the door-kickers and spec ops". They're not a bunch of tender progressive PMC types and that's not a coincidence. Their manners and interests are largely opposed to the PMC, and that doesn't mean the PMC is better or somehow in the right here.

So it seems denigrating the attitudes and norms of the warrior class is popular in America and other Western countries.

It's because they're not viewed as a warrior class, they're viewed as backwards, stupid, dangerous, bigoted toxic males who probably signed up because they were too stupid to do anything else and/or they wanted to kill brown people.

There used to be a tiny grudging admission that at the end of the day these people actually did have some merit since they were putting life and limb on the line, but even that has evaporated as evidenced by the queering/feminization of the military (and recent ham-fisted attempts to walk some of it back).

Soldiers have very rarely been viewed highly. Voluntary enlistments throughout history have usually not been motivated by patriotism, but been petty criminals or roustabouts with no other options.

The Duke of Wellington’s description of his troops is the mainstream historical attitude.

The Duke of Wellington’s description of his troops is the mainstream historical attitude.


In 1813 the Duke of Wellington, angered by incidents of looting amongst his army, wrote sourly: 'We have in the service the scum of the earth as common soldiers.

Plus ça change...

Although at least back then the army whipped you into shape, the quote from Wellington continues:

It really is wonderful that we should have made them into the fine fellows that they are.

Why are so many Americans committed to sneering at and impugning the traditions of their warrior class?

White Southerners are not the American warrior class. Enlisting at a somewhat higher rate doesn't overcome the weight of demographics.

That rate isn't just somewhat higher. White Southerner men are markedly overrepresented in the combat arms. Again, I'm aware that this is an important qualifier.

I looked for metrics on this and found that whites are 52% of infantry: https://www.zippia.com/11b-infantryman-jobs/demographics/

That’s just slightly more than the demographics for the population. Census says whites are 50.5% of 18-24 year olds.

Though that doesn’t seem to jibe with documentaries like Restrepo. I wonder how much checking the Hispanic box changes the infantry number.

Do Southern whites enlist more than Northern whites because they’re culturally warriors, or because they’re poorer and come from places with less opportunity? One sees similar patterns in most wealthy Western nations.

Higher southern unemployment rates are surely a factor, but cultural reasons are definitely big; Texas provides 25% of the combat branches despite being dramatically wealthier than the rest of the south and southern Whites dominate the combat arms much more so than the comparably safe, easy logistical and support roles(which is where you see a disproportionate amount of recruits from the black ghettos- and that one probably is mostly about potential soldiers coming from poor families and not having great jobs available). I think they're also just as overrepresented in the officer class, which is not what you'd expect if it was mostly because of poverty and lack of opportunity.

It's not our place to belittle those who march off to fight and die at our direction, at the will of the white-collar class.

They sign up to potentially kill complete strangers on government orders, because they believe in the cause and/or for money. They willingly turn themselves into tools of the government. Hence I will belittle and mock them just as surely as I belittle and mock the government itself. If you are fine with belittling and mocking the government, then there is no reason not to belittle and mock the people who willingly make themselves into that government's agents.

The vast majority of the moral harms were committed by careless policymakers and senior officers who committed troops to achieving the unachievable.

100% of the actual harms were committed by the soldiers, not the politicians. If the soldiers did not follow the orders, the harms would not have happened.

Do you want to go and risk getting turned to meat paste by Chinese hypersonics?

Nobody has to risk that to begin with. The US is more than well-enough protected by its nuclear arsenal and, on top of that, by the oceans. If some American decides that going to fight for Taiwan or South Korea or whatever is really important to him - either because he cares about those countries or because he cares about maintaining US global military dominance and economic might - then alright, fine, but I'm not going to pretend that it has anything to do with defending the US itself from a threat of being militarily attacked.

Every truly great Western nation in history has aspired to imperial dominion. The isolationist position is so pathetic precisely because it runs contrary to that great impulse to conquer, to lead, to rule, to expand that drove the settlement of the Americas in the first place.

Isolationist conservatives ironically reject this core aspect of traditional European civilization.

If you are fine with belittling and mocking the government, then there is no reason not to belittle and mock the people who willingly make themselves into that government's agents.

Given that the aus SF execution happened in afganistan - what would be your response to 9/11 if we had no govenment agents? Nuke them? How does the US deal with houthis attacking shipping? Nuke them too?

An isolationist US wouldn’t take responsibility for freedom of the seas; that would probably be France or Britain(after all, the suez is their canal).

My argument is that we need a military. Every state needs a military. Or an alliance with a state that has one. What other state has ever existed without a military? If you can think of an example - how tenable is it for the US to emulate that example in a 21st century globalized economy? I contend that no such state exists, and if it did exist it would be completely untenable for the US to emulate it. I contend so because even in @Goodguy's response he acknowledges the need for a military - who else would be doing the physical act of nuclear deterrence but the military? I contend so because he offers no serious resolution to acts of hostility by state or sub state actors that clearly do not merit a nuclear response.

You yourself reference other states taking responsibility for stopping piracy or freedom the seas - do you see any value in this? What happens when you generalize @Goodguy's argument - should the UK or France also mock their armed forces? I would also like to point out that you yourself have made a foreign policy critique here.

So the question is: If we need a military and cannot exist as a state without then why hold them in contempt? Why blame those that serve for the failure of our foreign policy? It is misguided and misdirected ire, we need a military regardless of the competence of the state department.

If I had been in charge of US foreign policy for the last 60 years or so, 9/11 would not have happened and the Houthis would not be attacking any US shipping because I would not have intervened militarily in the Middle East or supported Israel, so Middle Eastern military and paramilitary groups would not have had any reason to resort to such drastic measures against the US.

Would Somali pirates have happened on your watch? Please explain without retreating to the counterfactual. Do you honestly take yourself to be such an adroit statesman that the US could just... not have a navy? You hold those who serve in such contempt. But even in your own response you aren't actually taking issue with the soldiers and sailors themselves, you are pointing to US foreign policy as the problem.

I'd still have a navy to fight pirates. Because while I'm not in favor of supporting Israel, I still think it's reasonable to spend a bit of effort to keep innocent merchant ships from getting stolen.

And no, I am absolutely taking issue with the soldiers and sailors themselves. They carry out the policy and as such, are the ones most to blame. At the end of the day, they are the ones who pull the triggers.

Why were people living in a cave in Afghanistan allowed to enter the US? Why had the US pissed off so much of the middle east?

As for the war it caused a surge in heroin production and pushed waves of migrants into the west.

I don't think Afghans should be let into the US. I also think the US has had poor foreign policy on the mid east. But these are policy critiques, the people that serve in the armed forces do not decide these. Why hold the armed forces in such contempt for decisions they didn't make? What is the alternative to having them? If there is no alternative then why mock them instead of those who make the decisions that you actually disagree with in your response?

  1. A lot of them knew what they signed up for. They signed up for the war. I am sure there were some unlucky soldiers who signed up in 2000 who were forced to deploy.

  2. They haven't really done anything that helps the average person in the west.

A lot of them knew what they signed up for. They signed up for the war. I am sure there were some unlucky soldiers who signed up in 2000 who were forced to deploy.

Again - I agree with you regarding US policy in the ME, I also think that is and has been poor. Again I will point out that this is a decision that was not made by those individuals who enlisted.

They haven't really done anything that helps the average person in the west.

The US imports $3 trillion in goods every year, the majority of which is by sea. Does that benefit the average westerner? The US exports $2 trillion of goods a year, the majority of which is by sea. Does that benefit the average westerner? The US Navy ensures freedom of trade on the oceans which enables this trade to exist. Until England and later the US ensured this fact the reality has been widespread piracy. Within the timeframe you describe the US Navy has dealt with piracy from Somalia in one of the busiest shipping lanes used by the west. Does that benefit the average westerner? Even if I were to concede that 99% of what the US military does is misguided that last 1% is materially vital enough to justify its existence. We absolutely need people doing this job, there is no alternative to having a military. It is makes no sense to hold them to account for foreign policy decisions that they have not made. Blame the state department.

There's a distinction between despising someone for being tools of the government and despising them for being

hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin

OP isn't anti-US government. He's calling for more aggressive use of state force against Southerners - Sherman.

If the soldiers did not follow the orders, the harms would not have happened.

Their whole job is to follow orders! The division of labour is that the elite decides who is the enemy, then the soldiers destroy them as directed. When a bridge fails, the engineer can't just throw up his hands and say 'if the builders didn't follow my retarded schematics then we wouldn't have wasted all those trillions of dollars and thousands of lives'. It's the engineer who is to blame.

Nobody has to risk that to begin with. The US is more than well-enough protected by its nuclear arsenal and, on top of that, by the oceans.

The US has global interests and it's straightforward that protecting them incurs risks. Taiwan and South Korea are really important to the US. He who controls East Asia and semiconductors rules the world. Plus a good part of America's living standards relies on being the strongest great power, if that mantle is lost then the US is in for a very tough time. Instant depression IMO as the US dollar stops being a safe haven, equities dumped, interest payments on bonds soar, terms of trade get markedly worse, plus a massive political crisis.

Gr8 b8 m8 I rate 8/8

What you are forgetting is that for a large percentage of the North, eliminating slavery was never the point of the Civil War. The large business conglomerates of the north hated slavery for the same reason they hated communism a century later: because it was a rival economic system and a threat to the northern capitalist order. Secession and dissolution of the Union would wreck the Northern economic system by removing cheap raw materials inputs. The alternate solution, allowing the South to stay in the Union with slavery intact would allow the Slave Power to eventually spread and supplant the capitalist order.

Morals had nothing to do with it. This was the motivation of many working class people in the North too. Slavery was a threat to the economic system they lived in, and they feared subordination into the yeoman peonage system that the vast majority southern whites lived in.

There was a lot of genuine moral and religious disgust in the North against slavery. But the “Puritan Jihadists” like John Brown, Henry David Thoreau and Fredrick Douglas were never the dominant partners in the Northern coalition. More and more Puritan jihadist rhetoric was introduced as things got tough in 1863 and 1864, to ensure that the war effort held together.

That is why you never saw an attempt to pull out the slave system and racial inequality root and branch. The goal was to apply enough pressure to neutralize the competing economic system. Once that was accomplished, the Northern business interests that ran the Republican Party quickly lost interest. They had what they wanted. And they weren’t going to risk a years long paramilitary insurgency to try and elevate Southern African Americans or yeomen Southern whites.

Now the real pickle is that the Northern business interests covertly used the anti-slavery movement as an anvil to break the Republic on, and they quickly began consolidating the newly reformed country into more and more intense forms of authoritarian capitalism. Not that the South was any better, they were veering into an authoritarian feudal system, and that process would have intensified even more if they had won.

I don't fully agree with this take (and am happy to stan national unity), but it's not really wrong. I am a bit surprised that the far right hasn't tried to appropriate (both ironically and seriously?) leftist talking points by calling it "the War of Northern Imperialism" and shouting about Lincoln's colonialism. I do wonder how much longer slavery would have persisted in an independent South (my guess is a decade or two, which is admittedly still too long).

That said, the last time I saw a Sons of Confederate Veterans group out and about (within the last month or two, protesting a proposed monument removal) they were absolutely waving 50-star flags, along with Confederate, Army of Virginia, Gadsden, and, oddly, Israeli. Shit's weird, man.

Also there is some amusing irony that since air conditioning has become ubiquitous, there has been a lot more economic growth in the South, and some degree of stagnation in the Rust Belt.

I am a bit surprised that the far right hasn't tried to appropriate (both ironically and seriously?) leftist talking points by calling it "the War of Northern Imperialism" and shouting about Lincoln's colonialism

Maarek of the Good Ol' Boyz podcast (mentioned in Vanity Fair's "Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets" as 'autodidact Southern gamers') has, as his pinned Tweet, this joking comment from Nov. 2019:

Kicked out of the Richmond DSA for opening up the floor with a reminder that we are meeting on occupied Confederate land

I do wonder how much longer slavery would have persisted in an independent South (my guess is a decade or two, which is admittedly still too long).

Cuba was the last western-ish country to abolish slavery, in the 1880’s, but legal slavery persisted into the mid-20th century in the Middle East. The economic rationale for slavery would’ve disappeared in the 30’s. So a worst case scenario is slavery goes away in 1950 or so, a best case is an 1880’s abolition.

Also, eliminating disparate outcomes for Southern Blacks was never actually an official goal of Reconstruction.

Imagine the conservatives we could have in this country if the wellspring of the tendency was John Adams and the federalists; rather than Rutherford and the lost causers.

I suggest that you tell us rather than asking us to imagine it.

I have a lot of doubts about your theory of how modern US conservatism is overwhelmingly influenced by the Civil War South.

The so-called "hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin" that you talk about somehow didn't stop Southerners from voting overwhelmingly for FDR, a well-educated big government technocrat from an elite New York family. And it didn't stop them from voting overwhelmingly for JFK, a rich and well-educated Harvard grad pretty boy from New England.

Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from the South's special position as a rebellious territory that was allowed to maintain it's cultural legitimacy, or second order effect from it

If I'm in a bad mood, I'll say the key failing was insufficiently humiliating the South, but the real failing was giving Southern elites a pass for trying to destroy the country. Within a few decades, the Southern aristocracy was back with its power and status only slightly attenuated.

It's easy to dump on the hillbillies and rednecks, but every corner of the earth has people like them. Somehow, it hasn't been a problem for the Midwest.

The Southern elites were of the same race and class as the Northern elites, so the Northern elites didn't feel comfortable holding a grudge against them.

It's much easier to hate the poor white people who didn't actually own slaves.

The scorn for ordinary southerners is largely retrospective and based more on the social history of the post-war South.

The Southern elites were of the same race and class as the Northern elites

They weren't. Southern elites were agrarian landowners, Northern elites were businessmen and industrialists.

The gentle treatment of Southern elites owes more to war exhaustion, a general indifference to the fate and fortunes of freedmen, and specific obstruction by southern sympathizers than to class affinity between Northern and Southern elites.

We get it, you hate the red tribe and want waspy conservatives to run everything. But nobody who goes on these anti-southern rants ever seems to specify what they want reconstruction to have looked like- do you wish the south had been subjected to genocide?

I think the assassination conspirators' success in killing Lincoln but failure to simultaneously kill Andrew Johnson as planned deeply wounded America. President Johnson was just the wrong person to implement reconstruction.

"As planned"? Can you elaborate please?

George Atzerodt was tasked with killing Vice President Andrew Johnson, but he could not bring himself to carry out the deed. Atzerodt's name was implicated early in the investigation. A search of his hotel room turned up evidence which included a loaded revolver and a knife. He was arrested five days later in Maryland.

The plan was to kill President Lincoln and Vice President Johnson. The assasin for Lincoln followed through with it. The assasin for Johnson got nerves and backed out.

The conspirators also planned to assassinate a number of other senior Lincoln administration officials, including Johnson, but the assassins either failed or lost their nerve.

To be fair, some of the blame can be put on Lincoln for overreacting and putting a basically pro-slavery Democrat like Johnson as VP. America's a far better place if Hamlin is the President after April 1865, plus Hannibal Hamlin is an awesome name for a President.

Please, Tell me Alternate History Hub has a video on this?

Here's one thing I've been wondering about about this question, as a non-American..

You've got the paleoconservatives and the related tendencies (ie. the paleolibertarians, the more openly racist ones like the alt-right etc.) in US politics. One of the things that unifies these is that they are non-interventionist. They don't think the US should be participating in foreign wars of the sort it's done since, well, forever, or giving foreign aid or being involved in international organizations. Often they've got a precise analysis tying the US interventionism, especially after WW2, to the other things they hate, like civil rights laws or "wokeness", whatever whichever speaker in question means, or the general ballooning of the US government or so on.

Right, while I don't agree with them, this seems like one of the things that does have legs; I feel there is a genuine connection between the US becoming the global hegemon and the world policeman and with various tendecies that have contributed to American liberalism, like secularism (to compete with the Soviets for the hearts and minds of the secularized global intellectual class), quest for racial equality (to compete with the Soviets for the Third World), the Great Society and other post-New-Deal welfare programs (to present an alternative for socialism to working classes all over) and so on.

However... the same paleoconservatives also adore, love and defend to pieces the South; the region that has never seen a war fought by the US that they didn't love, expect the one where they fought against the US, and they love to dwell on that war, too. My studies in American history would indicate that whether we're talking about the war of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the World Wars, Vietnam, Iraq, whatever, the South has always been the region to fight that war, both concretely (ie. sending in the soldiers) and in the Southern political class being the one voting the involvement in those wars through and advocating for those wars.

It's the northern states that have been far more reticent to participate in foreign wars - again, whichever the war is in question. Even though the America Firsters opposing the WW2 or the college students marching against Vietnam and Iraq might have believed in vastly different ideologies, they still represented the same broad American region.

Of course, a lot of the paleo types come from the South, so there's the nostalgic attachment at the least, but many others don't. What are they also so insistent on loving the Confederacy and getting weepy about the Lost Cause?

I suggest you look at Britain for a parallel. After the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, the local conservatives of the day developed a strong sense of nostalgia for the bucolic past of the British countryside, its traditions and old way of life.

I don't mean this in the sense of conservatives (well, on the right side of conservatism, or regionally) in general admiring the South, I meant in the sense of specifically the faction associated with opposition to foreign wars admiring the region that historically has loved foreign wars and couldn't have got enough of foreign wars if it tried. British conservatives (small c or big C) have never, to my knowledge, been particularly isolationist.

Maybe Southerner white men are prone to volunteer for military service, whether that entails the real chance of being deployed in some overseas intervention or not, because they originate from a peculiar culture with a palpable warrior ethos. (I guess it'd indeed be a stretch to call them a "warrior class" though.)

It's easy to explain really. Lincoln, the GOP and the civil war are the birth of Empire in these United States.

It's the moment that marks the Unitarian nature of power in that State, the dominion of one ruling class and the primacy of the global industrial agenda thereof.

Lincoln was the US's Stalin. A hard managerial ruler for what was to become an empire backed by it's administration rather than a federation of nation-states. One that fought his own great patriotic war to settle the authority of his administration.

What is there in that that would be sympathetic to a paleocon or paleolib, besides abolishing slavery?

I meant specifically the interventionism part. Evidently US was quite capable and willing regarding fighting foreign wars before the Civil War, as evinced by the Mexican-American War, or the War of 1812.

Are these really foreign wars? I don't want to gerrymander the category but we're talking about stuff happening at the US's own borders that involves Americans pretty directly.

The break I'm talking about pretty clearly demarcates the Manifest Destiny era from the New Imperialism era. Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, Samoa, the Philippines, now these are foreign wars.

Maybe you could find some paleos to agree that the whole Texas thing was interventionism, but I don't think you'll find as many as would condemn getting treaty ports with extraterritorial jurisdiction from China.

I'm at loss as to what really separates the Spanish-American War from the Mexican-American War, beyond one being a naval war and one being a ground war. Both lead to acquisition of new territories, though less was annexed directly in case of the first one than the latter one.

It's also worth noting that it was 33 years from the end of the Civil War to the Spanish-American War - over three decades of the supposed imperial state just chilling (and killing Indians) before it got the whole imperialism business going.

I simply can't consider the Philippines as obviously an American affair as Texas because of sheer distance.

Maybe it is just that, that you're properly an empire once you have a navy powerful enough the whole world is your business.

Conservative politics in the US is extremely Southernized - the South is cultural heart of American conservatism (especially the paleo varieties). Loving the South and Southern myths Southern iconography is very common, even if you're not from the South yourself. Attacking them is off limits.

Part of it might have to do with the Civil War and Lincoln's lasting legacy being a vastly expanded central government and greatly weakened states.

That's pretty much Thomas DiLorenzo's shtick

Right, but when it comes to the specific question of getting wars on, America seemed to be quite capable of that even without the expanded central government.

Not to the same degree. And not with pure executive control unshackled by Congress as it is now.

There is a deep state problem, but it's not the 'unelected bureaucrats' in washington, it's the decaying corpses of Jefferson Davis and Johnny Reb clinging on to conservatism's ankles and dragging it down into the mud.

Are you really saying FDR, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Revolution and the rise of the US managerialism is mostly due to.. the confederacy having been imperfectly dealt with?

It's not a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely puzzled.

Are you really saying FDR, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Revolution and the rise of the US managerialism is mostly due to.. the confederacy having been imperfectly dealt with?

I mean, at least one of them clearly is, but I rather suspect they're saying that no, they're simply not the problem. Or at least, they are not the problem with conservative politics. Rather, that the political and ideological culture of the south is a corruption in the heart of American conservatism.

However, this is @DBDr 's post, so I suppose they can speak for themself.

Rather, that the political and ideological culture of the south is a corruption in the heart of American conservatism.

Is it? Or is it more that conservatism worldwide is generally braindead. If anything British 'conservatives', who have not been influenced in the slightest by the Lost Cause seem even worse than US ones, and let us not even speak about European 'conservative' parties. All contemptible as far as I know. Actual RW parties (SD, AfD, Reconquista) that might halt the rot are all new radicals and have little 'conservative' pedigree.

The problem lies probably somewhere in that they want to 'conserve' what they grew up with, but as society keeps moving leftwards, so do they. They lack a coherent worldview or ideology.

All Western conservative movements are continuously affected by online discourse filled with American right-wing thought (some of it derived from the Southern variety of conservatism, or paleoconservatism in general), though, even when that though isn't in itself particularly suitable to the culture where it's imported to.

But to what degree? Of course there's some effect, but I'd be surprised if e.g. AfD leadership were routinely reading English texts.

I daresay that all European political party leaderships (at least in countries where excellent command of English is basically something that's expected from most academically trained people, presuming the leadership consists of such people) read English texts all the time, at least insofar as they have time to read anything. And anyway the activist class below them tends to spend a great deal of time on Twitter and other social medias, almost by definition being exposed to Anglo thought there.

I really doubt that e.g. Bjorn Hocke, or the lesbian who runs AfD or Zemmour read much English... I'll have to check.

Mind you, Alice Weidel speaks Mandarin and spent 6 yrs in China working for GS..

Are you really saying FDR, the New Deal

Not sure what he means by what he wrote but for what it's worth: 1932 US presidential election results by county.

Ofc South voted Democratic. Democrats were back then still yet segregationists. I'm not sure how much of a factor that was in enabling democrat presidencies.

But FDR's statism and a move towards the managerial state - was that inspired by the poor and undeveloped South, or rather by what was going on in Europe ?

If there is one thing about online rhetoric regarding the Civil War and the South has taught me, is that the South should have simply emulated the Arabic slave trade, or the Central American slave trade, as that would have solved alot of problems.

Sadly, here we are.

But the point was keeping a self-sustaining captive population. Cutting their testicles off would have ruined the plan. They couldn't even legally import fresh slaves from Africa after 1808. That's just giving up, from the point of view of slave-holders.

As a Southern borderer I deeply wish Reconstruction had actually been completed because of the sheer damage that the psychopathic slaver caste was allowed to unleash upon freedman, unionists and anyone not on-board with white supremacist terror and segregation that echoes to this day in our damaged societies, de facto segregation, extractive economies, major brain drain and lack of local democratic rights. Christianity in the south still radically differs from elsewhere in the country due to abolitionist preachers being murdered or forced to flee for their lives and a lobotomized form promoted to enforce a slave society. They just straight up overthrew local governments when they lost elections, killed or intimidated the winners, and installed KKK, Red Hat & co approved office holders in their place. The feds merely enforcing laws against murder would've made for a significant improvement.

It's a quite baffling case where after winning the war, the majority that supported the winners gets taken out of power in a dirty war by the loser minority, who are given free reign to terrorize the loyalists, erase and rewrite southern history, implement Jim Crow, then promote neoconfederate propaganda in the public schools, public worker and law enforcement academies, etc to the present. My area was actually a heavy unionist area of the rural south but you'd never know from how hard that was put down the memory hole by neoconfederates.

It’s because the loser minority knew the truth and the black community is ungovernable. There is zero evidence any where in the world that 100% sub Saharan African descent can create first world countries. 100% African descent has failed countries, 85% african descent South Africa has failed, the south still has worse SES outcomes in those communities, the northern US has issues in those communities.

Sure there are members who can rise up like a Clarence Thomas but for every Clarence Thomas there are 30 that can’t do anything in an advanced society.

No matter what perfect policy of reconstruction we could have done nothing would have changed in the south because the populations group level average IQ is too low to function in an advanced society.

I honestly am getting annoyed with leftist who can see what looks extremely well statistically supported to me.

If a group fails in every environment it’s probably because the group has issues. If a group succeeds in a lot of environments it’s probably something about the group.

Edit: doesn’t seem like fair modding to me at all as there are multiple un-modded posts that are low effort calling for white genocide yet anything touching on black community weaknesses being the cause of southern dysfunction you are expected to write a full treatise (despite Im assuming most posters are aware of the bell curve and US criminal statistics).

This is just obviously not true. I believe in HBD etc but the idea that black are just violent entities is just absurd.

But if you make all the low IQ people slaves again, most of them would be white men.

Is that really what white supremacy is arguing for these days?

Most sharecroppers were white.

Even if we take as a hypothetical that enslaving low IQ people again (Make the Low IQ Slaves Again!) would be a goal of White Supremacists (as opposed to the mass deportation of blacks and illegal immigrants or something), what makes you so confident about that assertion?

I imagine most Very Online White Supremacists wouldn't get too upset about <=70 IQ white men getting enslaved, if slavery must be a thing again to be applied evenly across the board with respect to IQ.

Let's assume an average IQ of 100 for American non-Hispanic whites and 85 for American blacks, and a standard deviation of 16 for males and 14 for females (to acknowledge potential greater male variability), and simplify to American whites and blacks only as about 60% and 12% of the US population, respectively. Applying the normal distribution and a threshold model where the <70 IQ get enslaved, we get about 15%, 28%, 26%, and 32% for white females, white males, black females, and black males, respectively, as proportions of those enslaved.

So not only would the hypothetical slave population be easily less than 50% white, it'd be only about 28% white male. If we incorporate latinos (especially with their lower average IQ) and Asians (despite their higher average IQ), the 43% and 28% of the white and white male proportion of the hypothetical slave population would only go down.

I imagine most Very Online White Supremacists wouldn't get too upset about <=70 IQ white men getting enslaved

I do not know how upset most of them would be, but I think that most of them would not be in favor of it. The average very online white nationalist or white supremacist is much more like somebody on 4chan /pol/ than he is like almost anyone on The Motte. The average white nationalist or white supremacist doesn't care about applying some sort of IQ policy consistently, he wants to keep whites and get rid of blacks. If he ever managed to get rid of blacks, then at that point he would probably find some group of whites to target, but he hasn't thought that far ahead.

Even here on The Motte, a lot of the wordy rational arguing is just a thin disguise for visceral emotion. The average very online white nationalist or white supremacist has an even thinner disguise, and in many cases no disguise at all. They are, on average, pretty simple and stupid people. There is a thin upper caste of well-spoken ones, the type who write lengthy articles in various kinds of alternative media online, but that does not represent the average.

For a message board response best I can tell is your numbers seem correct for relative proportion.

<70 IQ is a point where I think the modern world becomes completely confusing to you. Likely many could still function as laborers but where filling out a tax return would be extremely painful and things like lotto tickets are just stealing your money. A point where never having to ever think about money and instead having housing, groceries, clothing all paid for would be superior.

Based on percentages it seems as though I should see far more white homeless on the streets or doing random crime annoyances but that isn’t true. My guess is this is where averages matters and the white being bigger standard deviations from the mean matter quite a bit. Easier to hide a family IQ of 85 with the occasional 70 IQ within a family.

Violent crime rates are missing something here. 54% is the often quoted black murder rate. These proportions aren’t working out on pure IQ so something else is going on.

If we ever lived in this described world I think standardized testing would be super interesting. If someone scored a 68 on a practice test would they do crazy study hours or decide to take the easier life? Like being sub <70 means your required to put 30 hrs a week in at McDonald’s and get your housing paid for but other freedoms restricted.

Yes it was a hunch based on tail effects but realised after posting that would be safer bet with just black-non black.

How normal are the tails though? If you adjust your thresholds, what is the sensitivity to your estimate? I contend there is still a chance you have majority non-blacks, let's forget about the sexes...

My point running alongside the white majority question is that if you find the explanatory factor at the root of OPs HBD motivation, then you should apply your theories, policies on the basis of that factor, so you would run it across all races.

I don't know what the policies are for people like OP but whatever they are I'd be more inclined to agree with them if they were universally applied, it wouldn't be scientific to do it any other way.

And yes I'm aware there does exist racial favouritism in regards to university admission etc and I'm against that too.

If that's true (and im inclined to agree with you) the correct move was deporting all the freed slaves back to Africa after the Civil War. Why didn't we do that?

@DradisPing brought up the founding of Liberia, but in fact that was only one of several large-scale but ultimately abortive attempts to achieve what was called, at the time, “colonization” of freed blacks. Liberia was a project primarily of the American Colonization Society, an organization about which I’ve spoken in this forum numerous times, and which included as its members and supporters an absolute all-star cast of American Founding Fathers and political heavyweights. Unfortunately, the ACS could not achieve the level of funding and logistics necessary to undertake the process on anywhere near the scale they had hoped for. They were not the only ones attempting to make it happen, though.

Abe Lincoln, a supporter of the ACS and of “colonization” since early in his political career, invited a delegation of black political/religious leaders to the White House in 1862 to try and convince them to support the mass deportation of blacks - this time, to a proposed Central American colony which he wanted to name Linconia. The black leaders were opposed, though, as were the various Central American nations who felt threatened and/or had their own territorial designs on the region. After Lincoln’s death, his particular proposal was never pursued by any of his successors.

However, in 1869 Ulysses S. Grant attempted to initiate the annexation of what is now the Dominican Republic (called “Santo Domingo” at the time) for similar purposes. Grant was actually able to secure a treaty proposal with the Dominican president; Grant also sent a committee, which included Frederick Douglass, to investigate the country and the feasibility of annexation. Sadly, this treaty was defeated in Congress.

There was also a private initiative in 1862 by Floridian entrepreneur and plantation owner Bernard Kock to purchase the Haitian island of Île-à-Vache and to invite blacks to come work there, offering Haitian citizenship (and revocation of American citizenship) to any takers. This initiative also failed after the financiers reneged on their promised investment.

Ultimately, the staggering costs and logistical realities of mass deportation of blacks were simply insurmountable at the time, to say nothing of the political difficulties and opposition from various important political constituencies.

They set up Liberia, but there was never broad support for mass deportations.

Truthful feels cruel to me to send them back since they have very little connection to Africa at that point.

I’ve probably come to a position of something like a lot of IQ testing to filter and some form of institutionalization for the rest. I’ve just seen too many black homeless that would seem to be better off in a controlled environment doing light manual labor than their ability to be fully functioning adults.

I’m fine with some form of Jim Crow to deal with areas like the south side of Chicago. Semi functioning people with way too much criminality.

Constitutionally probably impossible at this point.

I’d probably be fine though with going back to the deals we had on race in the 1980’s. Small amount of affirmative action, strict policing, and nobody tries to use disparate outcomes to claim everything is about race.

The same reason you can't just send black people back to Africa today. Who's going to take them? No poor African country wants afew million more impovrished mouths to feed, you'd have to pay them massively for it, which is a huge short term cost, much more expedient to let them stay and only bear a small annual cost instead.

Whatever it cost in 1865 would have been worth it

You can say that with the benefit of hindsight, whether the people actually living in 1865 thought the same way is another matter entirely.

The Greeks and Romans used to exile people, there's no reason we can't do the same. "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here."

I have posted before about the difficulties with such a scheme. In short, prepare to piss off the entire rest of the world if you go that route. Of course, as a non-American bristling under the pax Americana I would actually welcome a development that would make my country look for the light at the end of Uncle Sam's anal passage again, but do you think that for the US and its citizens, the future you suggest would still be net beneficial if on top of everything its network of allies of ideology rather than convenience cools on it?

And what happens if the exilee can't find another country to take him in?

I don't see why that matters to the society that does the exiling. In fact, if it mattered, it wouldn't really be exile, would it?

This post needs a lot more elaboration. Many mottizens are straightforwardly conservatives, so 'degenerate tendencies in Con politics', conservatives coming from 'lost causers', 'proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion' aren't going to land as anything other than insults. And even if we were all on your team, it's still better to explain why something is true than just state it. As someone who disagrees - I don't love 'conservatism' either but just don't see the strong connections to the South - why should this persuade me?

This is a somewhat popular opinion on 'the left' though, I've seen it on twitter a bunch.

Counterfactuals are lots of fun...

But for my money, the really great mistake was not having the religious fundamentalists of New England secede during the War of 1812, as nearly happened. It would have clearly been better for everyone in the long run.

https://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2012/06/15/new-england-succession

Somehow nearly everywhere else in the West managed to draw down slavery peacefully despite the massive amounts of money involved and how ingrained it was socially. Slavery was ubiquitous, and yet somehow everyone else managed to move past it.

Now, it could be that there was something uniquely horrible or monstrous about Southerners at the time, although they don't seem especially unusual if you read deeply about them. No saints, of course, but not really all that unusual people for the time. What does seem unusual for the time, however, is that Massachusetts was founded by, functionally, the Taliban, and though the particular beliefs of their descendants clearly drifted over time, the core tendency of a great many of them towards intensely held spiteful extremism, with a sharp inclination towards fire and brimstone and apocalypse and Manicheanism and radicalism and sharpening confrontation, clearly never did.

I'm glad slavery ended, and I'm sorry that America ended up relying on the absolutely worst, most disastrous, most scarring way to end it. America certainly would be hugely better off if the South hadn't been dragged along as, essentially, a wrecked, impoverished internal colony from the time of the end of the Civil War until World War 2, with all the damaged legacy that left for people in the South, both black and white. But ignoring or even praising the role of religious extremists in bringing about the most violent, scarring way to end slavery is both unfortunate and typical, and has itself left a disastrous legacy in American politics.

It's probably no accident that the British, who wisely marginalized and broke the back of their Puritan Bolsheviks by the end of their civil war, were actually able to wind down slavery without resorting to bloodshed.

Of course, maybe I'm playing a little fast and loose with details here and slagging off entire groups of people somewhat lazily in a situation that really does demand incredible nuance, but hey, if that's what we're doing, that's what we're doing.

I went digging for numbers and found:

  • In 1833, Britain abolished slavery (mostly); about about 1% of the population were slaves
  • In 1837, Mexico abolished slavery; about about 0.1% of the population were slaves
  • In 1860, the South fought a ware to keep slavery; about 32% of the population were slaves
  • In 1867, Spain largely freed its slaves; I can't find specific numbers :(
  • In 1888, Brazil abolished slavery; about about 5% of the population were slaves

Slavery was a much bigger deal in the South than other places that freed slaves. The only other place I'm familiar with that had a similar proportion of slaves was Cuba, where slavery was abolished in 1886. However, as with the South, this wasn't chosen by Cuba - it was imposed by an outside power (Spain).

Given the trend in when slavery was abolished across the world, I think it's quite reasonable to suppose, if given the choice, the South would've continued with slavery into the 20th century. None of this requires assuming Southerners were "uniquely horrible or monstrous" - all it requires is assuming the more reason you give someone to avoid uncomfortable moral reasoning, the more they will avoid said reasoning.

Here's are the two questions one really needs to answer to argue whether we should have postponed ending slavery to avoid a Civil War:

  1. How many additional generations would you be willing to consign to chattel slavery in order to avoid the Civil War?
  2. How many additional generations would it have taken for the South to change its mind?

The Civil War resulted in ~700k deaths and free 4m slaves. If I assume a year lived as a slave is half as valuable as a year lived as a free man, the naive utilitarian answer to (1) is something like 18 years. I personally rather doubt the South would've gone along with ending slavery before 1879, so I think the utilitarian answer is to prefer the Civil War.

The non-utilitarian answer is, imo, "wtf you monster - slavery is wrong".

I went digging for numbers and found:

In 1833, Britain abolished slavery (mostly); about about 1% of the population were slaves In 1837, Mexico abolished slavery; about about 0.1% of the population were slaves In 1860, the South fought a ware to keep slavery; about 32% of the population were slaves In 1867, Spain largely freed its slaves; I can't find specific numbers :( In 1888, Brazil abolished slavery; about about 5% of the population were slaves

Why the percentage of the South that were slaves and not the U.S. as a whole? You didn't divide those other countries into the pro-slave and anti-slave factions. Seems like a stolen base, especially when it was the anti-slave half of the U.S. that precipitated the end of slavery, just like in those other countries that weren't carved up for stats.

The entire purpose of this exercise is to consider how likely the South was to either choose to end slavery on its own or consent to have it chosen for them without bloodshed. The relevant metric, therefore, is how important slavery was to the South.

More concretely, the Civil War depended on individual state governments choosing to secede, so the geographic concentration of slavery in the US is extremely relevant. If slavery was evenly distributed in the US, I

  1. strongly don't think the Civil War would have been on the table to begin with
  2. tentatively think slavery would have been ended in the 1870s or 1880s

I'd say the unique factor in the south wasn't awfulness per se; but a planter aristocratic class who's entire position depended on directly chattel slavery right in their back yards.

In the rest of the western world, the owning class was insulated from whatever they owned by a couple layers of middle class professional technocrats. "Doing business? How dreadfully plebeian my dear, now pass the port and deal me another hand".

I think the crops grown by slaves were a rather substantial part of the exports of the slave states which didn’t industrialize as quickly as the north did. Being dependent on the output of slaves to keep the economy running would make slavery a politically important institution. Proposing to end slavery in the southern states would be like trying to shut down oil fields in Texas or fracking in Oklahoma today — that industry makes too much money to be shut down without major problems.

The British were able to end slavery because (a) many slavers (or those more broadly involved in the triangle passage) were ‘new money’ with less political influence on Parliament than their wealth might suggest and (b) the domestic slave-owning constituency was pretty limited (I think there were fewer than 10,000 slaves in Britain, and the aforementioned Caribbean plantation owning class was not hugely powerful) and the terms of manumission very generous.

I remember being struck by the grandeur of Bristol, a mere provincial English city, the first time I visited. It was all funded by the slave trade, but the Gloucestershire and wider West Country merchants who made the riches (and who lent the famous arr me hearty “pirate accent” its affect) weren’t the highest status people in the realm, and it would take another century for their descendants to climb the class ladder to the top.

The idea that Bristol's wealth (or Britain's more broadly) was "all funded by the slave trade" is a nonsense.

The slave trade never contributed more than roughly 12% of Bristol's total trade clearances, and that only for a brief period between 1728 and 1732. This may underestimate the trade's economic impact, especially indirectly, but otherwise the trade was consistently <10% of total clearances (pg.4).

To be clear, the slave trade certainly contributed to Bristol's overall trade and economic importance during the 18th century, but it did not fund all, or even most, of it. There's a really good literature review of the historiography of slavery's importance to Britain's economic growth here. (Highly recommended if this topic interests you.)

This is the same attitude as removed the memorial to the Confederate Soldiers which is a really fucking stupid decision.

It was a civil war. Now, since you are all going to have to live in the same country after the war, and these were (in some cases literally) your brothers and not a buncha foreigners, are you going to conduct yourself as "vae victis" or are you going to try and heal the wounds and all live together?

Because if you go the "we won, bitches, bend over and take it" route, then you are setting up for more civil wars. Do you think North America would really have been better off to emulate South America, where nearly every country had a new insurrection and replacement as soon as the wind changed direction?

You may not like them, but if the entire fucking point of the war was "you are our fellow citizens, you can't just up and leave and start your own country", then afterwards you have to act like it.

And that includes memorials to young men who went out to fight not because they were ravening racists, but because they lived in a state where they were told to fight for their homeland. "We shoulda wiped the bastards out when we had the chance" is only proving that they were right to fight against the aggressors, because that's how you're behaving.

Not every war is as simple as "they're the Nazis so that makes us the Good Guys" and civil wars are particularly tricky in that fashion. And if you're saying "well they're not my fellow citizens, they're nothing to do with me", then they should have been permitted to leave and set up their own nation; the territory of the continent is big enough for two separate nation-states.

Not to mention that Reconstruction, if pushed to excesses by Northern hardliners, could have easily ended up being a long-term political catastrophe in a myriad of ways.

I don't think it's "stupid". I think it's a power move - showing that in fact those who want the monuments to stay are not "fellow citizens", but a disgusting basket of deplorables, and moreover, that the opposite side is feeling so strong they do not need to hide their sentiment anymore, neither out of respect nor out of practical necessity.

then they should have been permitted to leave and set up their own nation

But why would they be permitted anything? That would require considering them equals and peers, entitled to the same rights and freedoms as everybody else. But they are not, they are a disgusting basket of deplorables. They are not permitted anything except to shut up and be thankful they are not being sent to reeducation camps. At least not yet.

Because if you go the "we won, bitches, bend over and take it" route, then you are setting up for more civil wars

The Left feels they own pretty much every institution in the nation, and the right owns what? A bunch of rednecks with guns in their basements? They spoke openly and repeatedly at how they consider it to be laughable against the power of the government. And they are not entirely wrong in that. The Left has been willing to apply both chaotic power (antifa, BLM, now Hamas support gangs) and the lawful power (look what happened to Proud Boys and Jan 6 protestors) very forcefully and successfully, and the Right, with all their bragging about how many guns they have, has not been able to do jack about it. So no wonder they are very confident about pressing further, and are totally unafraid of any escalation. They feel they can handle anything, and easily.

why would they be permitted anything?

Natural law.

Your country is not founded on the sole primacy of might. You'd have to be fine with slavery if it was.

But you can't fight for self determination only when convenient. Lest you tarnish the political formula into mere power.

And at that point, yeah anyone's entirely justified in opposing you to the death so long as they win. Not a position anyone reasonable wants to be in.

Natural law only applies to men of honour who will kill for that honour and glory.

Hobbes, locke, and the founding fathers assumed they lived in a world where men would look a man in the eye and murder him rituallistically as his friends watched, because the man had insulted him, and that that man would sooner stare down a pistol and "Recieve fire" than reveal himself a coward.

Unless you're willing to die and kill for your personal pride and pride alone you are not a free man with natural rights but a slave.

We are doomed to be slowly conquered by the cartels, they will slowly take over and slaughter all who oppose them and we'll deserve it and the gods will howl in rage that they show us any mercy.

Much as this could be brought up and debated in other contexts, is there any other American foe that is more worthy of being called men of honor in this sense than the Confederacy? But let's not take easy asides, your real objection to what I'm saying is that you think power is the thing-in-itself and the fictions I'm talking about have no reality except as to describe the relationships between the weak and the strong.

I disagree because I think there is such a thing as magic. The sentimentality that binds people into being a nation and not just a warband is a spell that has to be taken into account. Mere brutes are not lasting rulers. Women lord it over men that could easily overpower them. The story people tell about what they're doing, though it cannot replace the reality of the deed, is still very important.

And though as you justly point out, the higher levels of civilization Hobbes calls out for are only possible if we retain the ability to do violence. These higher levels are still real, desirable, meaningful and -- insofar as the Enlightenment is wrong about there ever being a state of nature -- natural.

Your country is not founded on the sole primacy of might.

The founding of the country was a long time ago, and the current powers on the Left consider the founders to be irredeemably evil racists, whose legacy should be wiped out. So I don't see how you can expect them to operate within the same ethical framework as the Founders did. In fact, we know they aren't - a lot of heinous crimes are easily justified by the Left as part of "decolonization" and "resistance"- why you expect they would make any exceptions for their ideological enemies? You can consult your modern history textbooks to see what the Left does to their ideological enemies when they get to power. None of the dead old white patriarchal male chauvinist pigs and none of the old parchments would stop them from doing the same. They openly and explicitly rejected this framework already.

Plenty of tree branches in the South, and there weren't that many rich planters. Hand the planters land over to white and black farmers, and there we go.

Because if you go the "we won, bitches, bend over and take it" route, then you are setting up for more civil wars.

That's fine, you just keep winning until they are thoroughly beaten down or all dead. There are few political problems that cannot be solved with sufficient application of violence, supposing you have the capacity to apply it.

And all that to achieve...what? That 13% of all brain surgeons and software developers are Black?

No, the beating down is its own reward.

From 1984 by George Orwell:

"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"

...

"The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men." He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: "How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?"

Winston thought. "By making him suffer," he said.

"Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."

That's fine, you just keep winning until they are thoroughly beaten down or all dead. There are few political problems that cannot be solved with sufficient application of violence, supposing you have the capacity to apply it.

Worked like charm in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. Winning pitched battles is one thing.

Having a population of civilians that is really keen on backstabbing everyone with a yankee accent is really hard to govern.

The US cared about civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. At first we were trying to win hearts and minds, not subjugate them under our boot. By the end that was gone, but we never tried a serious campaign of crushing them and genocide was never on the table. (In Vietnam, of course, there was another superpower-backed army)

Those arguing that Reconstruction wasn't tough enough have no similar compunctions about subjugating Southerners.

I am fairly sure. I am talking about logistics though. The nazis had better technology, better records, much smaller (and better pacified) territory than the south, targeted a way smaller percentage of the population and they still managed to half ass the thing.

As far as genocides go, they didn’t half ass it, 85% of Jews in nazi occupied territory were killed. And if you’re talking about resistance movements in general, it was mostly pretty minimal for much of the war, particularly in Western Europe.

I think Nybbler's referring to the genocide option, or even the decimation option (every time there's a revolt, kill a random 10% of the population).

Killing 100% of the population of Iraq would, trivially, have prevented any uprising. It would also, of course, have been terrible.

In Vietnam you don't even need to go that far into "lol war crimes"; simply being willing to invade North Vietnam (and fight the PLA) would probably have sufficed, although that's a huge expenditure of men and money.

Yep. If the south kept resisting then a simple policy of "take the children of whites from them at age 6 and indoctrinate them in the memes of the north, only sending them back after the age of 18" would clear away the problem in a single generation (this could be paid for by taxing the south for the upbringing of its children) once the people indoctrinated with northern values started making up a large portion of the south.

Not saying this would be the right thing to do or even moral, but it is a possibility.

If the south kept resisting then a simple policy of "take the children of whites from them at age 6 and indoctrinate them in the memes of the north, only sending them back after the age of 18" would clear away the problem in a single generation

Ah yes, and this is why the implementation of the Residential Schools resulted in the complete erasure of Indian/First Nations groups, which today are mere memories with no relevance or political salience at all.

Education doesn’t raise IQ levels… not sure why this would do better than the last 70 years of public education has done at raising achievement rates for a particular section of the population.

You just described the public education system.

Except states set their own curricula and Southern states aren't exactly known for their wholehearted embrace of Anti-Racist memes.

Fair point.

South's special position as a rebellious territory

Stop, your tyranny is showing.

First, the South was not a territory, the member states of the Confederacy were themselves independent states in their own right, and were not territories of anyone or anything. You can't seem to conceive of independent states voluntarily joining a union, and then deciding to withdraw from that very same union. I would suggest starting by forgetting what you think know and relearning from original sources, instead of projecting the 21st century backwards through time.

Second, the rebellious territories are all of these United States of America. Massachusetts was perhaps the MOST rebellious territory, the most specially positioned, not anywhere in the South. They were legitimately territories of Britain, and were legitimately rebellious.

Third, there was no reason for South Carolina or Georgia to agree to form a Union with Pennsylvania or Massachusetts without the very concessions they achieved, and when those concessions were ignored and trampled on, they voluntarily left the union they had voluntarily joined.

Fourth and finally, the biggest mistake of US statecraft was stopping at Berlin in 1945, instead of pushing to Moscow, but that was determined decades before because Roosevelt was a communist sympathizer whose administration was shot through with genuine communists and Soviet spies.

either Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension lacking any of the actual cultural roots that european aristocrats have; or hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin.

It sounds like you just hate the South and hate Southerners. Your contempt is clouding your judgment and betrays your calls to vengeance for what they are.

I think the biggest mistake was the U.S. not joining the First World War at the outset. Teddy might have done it if he was president. American troops, ships, and materiel deployed at the outset would have given the Entente such a commanding advantage that the war would have been shorter and less brutal. Russian revolution would probably have been avoided, the Ottoman Empire dismembered in a less openly grasping way by Britain and France, etc. In general, American forces as expeditionary forces capturing littoral territories all over Europe Gallipoli-style would have been probably great for their long-term governance.

Huge missed opportunity.

Third, there was no reason for South Carolina or Georgia to agree to form a Union with Pennsylvania or Massachusetts without the very concessions they achieved, and when those concessions were ignored and trampled on, they voluntarily left the union they had voluntarily joined.

But none of those concessions were ignored or trampled on. The concessions made to the slave states in the Constitution were:

  • The trans-Atlantic slave trade not to be abolished before 1808 (spent by the time of the Civil War)
  • The fugitive slave clause (still operational on the eve of the Civil War)
  • The three fifths clause (still operational on the eve of the Civil War)
  • Implicitly, the fact that the powers of the federal government did not extend to regulating slavery within a slave state (something that the Corwin amendment, which Lincoln did not object to, would have made explicit and permanent).

The main stated grievance of the South in the 1850's was about the extension of slavery to the new territories captured in the Mexican-American war - there had already been a convention in Nashville in 1850 where several states threatened to secede if this was not permitted. But this issue was in effect resolved in favour of the slave states by Dred Scott. The stated grievance of the South in 1860 was that Lincoln's personal views on slavery made him an unacceptable president.

Unless you want to argue that Dred Scott was rightly decided (implying that the Northwest Ordinance was unconstitutional, despite being broadly supported by the same people who ratified the Constitution), secession was a fit of pique at losing an election, not a response to wrongdoing by the federal government.

Fourth and finally, the biggest mistake of US statecraft was stopping at Berlin in 1945, instead of pushing to Moscow

It genuinely astounds me that anyone thinks they could have actually done this. Sure, the Soviet Union had taken huge hits, but they still had a reservoir of experienced soldiers and a running wartime economy to supply them to at least adequately; certainly enough to put up a mighty struggle against any other invading armies. Apart from the British, maybe, the only other force the Americans could have mustered to fight besides them would have been the Germans, but at that point utilizing them would have been enough to turn everyone else, French and Italians included, to the Soviet side.

Even in America the country would have, in 1945, gone through several years of propaganda about how the Russian is Also Your Friend and Fights For Freedom, it's hard to see the country gearing up for several more years of war against them all of the sudden for no clear reason in sight at that point.

The US had the atom bomb which the Soviets didn’t - together with no Lend Lease this would have made the USA unbeatable.

I don't think that the US atomic bomb production was at that point at the phase where they could produce more than an occasional bomb, and in any case - as the movie Oppenheimer showed - a huge amount of the folks related to the weapons development in this arena were in it specifically to beat the Nazis and would have pulled brakes on the programme hard if the US had suddenly palled with the Nazis to attack the Soviets.

The United States basically had plans and the means to produce one A bomb a month basically indefinitely in 1945.

Indeed they had zero bombs for a few months after V-E day -- I'm sure they could have managed to stall or otherwise create chaos for a while, but it would have been an awfully big risk to take on that basis considering that hardly anyone even knew about the thing, and those who did couldn't really be sure that it would work.

It may make sense militarily but how in the hell do you sell it politically?

How do you not look like a duplicitous bastard of a nation for the next century? Let alone justify the horror if prolonging the most destructive war of all time for a good few years?

A more realistic alternative would have been halting Lend-Lease after Stalin didn't provide any support for the Warsaw Uprising. That would have limited the USSR's expansion.

Marching to Moscow wouldn't make sense. The war against Japan was still ongoing.

Plus, there were already riots by soldiers in 1945 over not being demobilized. World War II was sold on beating the Japanese and the Nazi's. Not continuing on to Moscow.

Even in America the country would have, in 1945, gone through several years of propaganda about how the Russian is Also Your Friend and Fights For Freedom

You can push the failure of statecraft further backward in time if you like. The premise is the same: if we fought on the side of the Soviets, we were fighting on the wrong side. After all, the Soviets and Nazis were allied for two years, from 1939-41.

Also, I was of the understanding that USSR was reliant on lend-lease for the materiel necessary to wage war, and that while they had the manpower, they didn't have the weaponry.

Apart from the British, maybe, the only other force the Americans could have mustered to fight besides them would have been the Germans, but at that point utilizing them would have been enough to turn everyone else, French and Italians included, to the Soviet side.

I can't imagine the Italians fighting on the side of the USSR to keep American out of Moscow. I'll have to take your word for it.

P.S. Patton seemed to think it could be done, and he knew more than you or I. Others disagreed, but if someone who was actually in charge of troops thought it could be done, and should be done, then I'm willing to entertain the possibility.

You can push the failure of statecraft further backward in time if you like. The premise is the same: if we fought on the side of the Soviets, we were fighting on the wrong side. After all, the Soviets and Nazis were allied for two years, from 1939-41.

The US didn't get to choose which side they fought on, or even whether to fight - Hitler's ally bombed Pearl Harbour and Hitler honoured the alliance by declaring war. Assuming that Barbarossa happens in any alternative timeline, the only way the US avoids ending up on the same side as the Soviet Union is to cut a deal with Japan such that Pearl Harbour never happens.

The world where the US gives the Japanese explicit permission to carve up the European colonial empires in Asia as long as they stay away from the Philipines and supports the Nazis over the Soviets in post-Barbarossa Europe is obviously worse for humanity (either the Nazis win, or WW2 is even bloodier because it takes the Allies longer to win). I don't think either result looks good for the US either. In both cases, the US ends up as the weakest of three blocs (with the other two allied), doesn't have access to the Middle East oilfields, and is almost certainly on the wrong end of a nuclear monopoly. (The Allied bomb effort in our timeline was dependent on refugee talent who went to Los Alamos specifically to oppose Nazi Germany - if the US is neutral, then the Allied bomb project ends up in some suitably out-of-the-way part of the British Empire, and the German bomb project has more time and resources).

Shortly before Patton's untimely death in a traffic accident, he was going on about how the Jews he was assigned to 'liberate' were loathsome and subhuman, how he much preferred Nazis. That's why he got dismissed from commanding his army.

Either we trust Patton and drop the retrospective moral justification for the war in the garbage, or distrust him.

Either we trust Patton and drop the retrospective moral justification for the war in the garbage, or distrust him.

Patton had been fighting the Nazis for years and respected them as opponents.

Seeing Jews coming out of the camps in terrible shape triggered his disgust reflex.

An ideal person would have reflected on that. But he was an Army General, not some humanitarian leader.

Either we trust Patton and drop the retrospective moral justification for the war

I, for one, trust George Smith Patton when it comes to war in Europe.

Also, I was of the understanding that USSR was reliant on lend-lease for the materiel necessary to wage war, and that while they had the manpower, they didn't have the weaponry.

At least according to this, Lend-Lease made up 10-12 % of Soviet production during WW2. More than I remembered, but could have been replaceable, and the Soviets would have been fighting a defensive war instead of an offensive one again.

I can't imagine the Italians fighting on the side of the USSR to keep American out of Moscow. I'll have to take your word for it.

Italy was on the verge of Communist takeover after WW2, with the main things making that not happen being herculean American effort under the scenes to support DC and other non-Communist parties, as well as Stalin's reticence. If US had actually attacked the Soviets, especially together with the Nazis, I don't think they would have had the moral credibility to do the former, and the latter certainly wouldn't have been a factor. Same might apply to France in lesser decree. Once firmly Communist they would have participated on the Soviet side one way or the other.

It sounds like you just hate the South and hate Southerners. Your contempt is clouding your judgment and betrays your calls to vengeance for what they are. I do, actually. I find southern identity and culture alternately shallow or ridiculous or gross, but my complaints are separate from that. I would grit my teeth and bear the culture I dislike if the rest of my complaining was addressed, even if it meant my leftist politics were defeated more often.

The north had it's own set of piccadillies and fucked up bullshit, but the south was uniquely bad at elite generation outside of specific, narrow fields (cavalry and cavalry officers). It's why they lost the war even when the majority of the professional military class defected; why the north had time to spin up an entire new military and MIC after dumpstering two or three armies one after another.

It's not even that the south was poor, the south had tons of money at the begging of the war. It's that the south was committed to a form of social organization that had become outdated decades before they decided to have a war over it.

Stop, your tyranny is showing. No, it really isn't. The war started at all because the south decided it had the right and privilege to dictate the laws of the rest of the union; and there was no allowance to succession in the constitution. If the south had the juice to win the war they would have established that right, but they didn't and it wasn't. Your revisionist take ignores the massive concession made to the south up to the very line of "we get everything we want, and you get nothing you want"; and just kinda avoids thinking of the moral crime of chattel slavery. If you want to defend the peculiar institution be my guest but don't just pretend it wasn't there.

Fourth and finally, the biggest mistake of US statecraft was stopping at Berlin in 1945, instead of pushing to Moscow Yes, the US would defeat the 12 million man soviet army, the most powerful in the world at the time, in a land war in russia. Be serious, my dude. We would have gotten BTFO because the idea was clearly stupid; which is why nobody of substance gave it any thought at the time. The winning move was to clearly wait, build up a stock of a-bombs, and dictate terms from a place strength. The fact the Soviets got them from us torpedoed this, but the alternative plan was even more impossible.

Your quote formatting is messed up, you need an empty line between the quote and your response.

specific, narrow fields (cavalry and cavalry officers)

You mean warriors and soldiers? You mean the people who conquered the continent, defeated the Spanish empire, and were the majority responsible for the expansion of the very territory that they were then denied access to?

The best statesmen in the country came from two places: Virginia and Massachusetts. The first president not from one of these two places was from Carolina. I think the south was worth considerably more to the American elite than simply cavalry.

that had become outdated decades before they decided to have a war over it.

They did not decide to have a war. They decided to secede. Abraham Lincoln and the New England puritans who backed him decided to turn a secession crisis into a war. It truly was the War of Northern Aggression, or the War Between the States, but as Richmond never deigned to assert control of Washington, I don't think it can be called a civil war.

Be serious, my dude. We would have gotten BTFO because the idea was clearly stupid;

Indeed, Hitler had just failed at this very objective with a much larger army, far better supply lines and a much less prepared enemy a few short years ago. Why would the USA think it could do any better?

Hitler wasn’t facing an enemy that he supplied with materiel and had just lost 10 million people?

Presumably, strategic bombing including with nukes. London-Moscow is around the same distance as the Enola Gay flew AIUI.

Not saying it would have been easy, but it's plausible that the WAllies could have done it.

It sounds like you just hate the South and hate Southerners. Your contempt is clouding your judgment and betrays your calls to vengeance for what they are.

That's opposition to some specific subcultures and political tendencies, not the South and Southerners overall. Plenty of us don't like those tendencies of aristocrats and anti-intellectualism.

You can't seem to conceive of independent states voluntarily joining a union, and then deciding to withdraw from that very same union

Fourth and finally, the biggest mistake of US statecraft was stopping at Berlin in 1945, instead of pushing to Moscow

Right, so the law of nations is determined more by military might than mutual consent. If you can invade one sovereign nation because it's in your eyes immoral, why not another? (to be clear, i'm not defending OP's claims)

Stop, your tyranny is showing.

So many historical revolts and risings in the name of 'freedom' are really calls for petty local tyrants to maintain their personal absolutisms in the face of a greater central authority threatening to temper their abuses. The Southern slaveholders revolting for the freedom to tyrannize their slaves (and to a lesser extent, everyone else in the antebellum south, which was a pro-slavery police state where it was literally illegal to be anti-slavery) is the best-known and most relevant example of this dynamic for an American audience, but there are also any number of European aristocratic revolts against some horrible tyrant king whose crime is trying to circumscribe the power of the landed nobles over their subjects, or even the conspirators who killed Julius Caesar.

Often 'tyranny' is narrowly defined as the tyranny of the centralized state, while the tyranny of clerics, slave masters, regional notables, the paterfamilias, etc. are defined as 'liberty.'

Often 'tyranny' is narrowly defined as the tyranny of the centralized state

I approve of this definition, and would add that centralization is necessary for tyranny. Your examples are all centralized, after all.

Tyranny is the undue restriction of liberty, and especially historically, there are many powers besides the state that can restrict liberty. However, as the state expands, it generally displaces and destroys these smaller power centers, which is generally a good thing.

I can't find a definition of "tyrant" that skips over the requirement that they are (or are similar to) a ruler. "Tyranny" is a bit less specific, but it still tilts heavily towards oppressive power from a specific centralized source.

Yes, you can have a tyrannical boss or romantic partner, but that's generally exaggeration for effect instead of a true description.

In the modern developed world we've mostly but not entirely gotten rid of non-state tyrannies. In the past, I think it would be appropriate to refer to a slaveholder or a the head of a clan as a tyrant over his subjects.

A good thing for the state but not necessarily for the people being centralized. A centralized government that can tax and conscript you efficiently is a mixed blessing at best.

And yet all the places people want to live have such governments...

Not by choice.

There are places with weaker and stronger governments on the earth and generally people do not move from places with stronger governments to places with weaker governments.

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People have wanted to move to the US since long before it had a powerful central government. In fact escaping absolutist governments in Europe drove some of the biggest immigration waves we've had.

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