Politics/Slapfights - Ancient history to modern day!

[Joblom]

increase people wages so they can afford having a family and a bit more free time so they can actually enjoy the family they wish to create and as a bonus for USA get a European kind of health system so it doesn't put people in so much debt and maybe make so it's not so expensive to go to college.

If you want to do that you need to end immigration and start deporting debilitating racial group. "Diversity" is not enriching the American people and is slowly ripping the country to pieces.

[Sinekein]

Now, do I agree that governmental policy would change to suit those coming to this country?
Well that would imply that this is what they came here for, our policies and way of life, so I'd hope they'd not want to change the thing they came to take advantage of as it seems silly to go to a better place and say "wow, this place is so much better than the place we left, so let's introduce the problems of the place we left into it!"

I'm teaching in a high school full of second or third-generation immigrant children (some even first-gen - I have two Sri Lankan girls who arrived less than five years ago). The whole country is the one with by far the largest immigrant rate in the country.

Kids who get a real shot at good education don't want to use it to recreate Little Casablanca/Abidjan/Hanoi in their backyard. They want to make themselves a good life in the country. Sure, they'll bring parts of their culture, but those will be very minor changes compared to what they will embrace.

On the other hand, those who can't get a good education are way more likely to embrace their "original culture" to the fullest and outright reject French values.

Hence why the kids part mentioned by Raga above is so important. If parents get no time to educate their kids, they're unlikely to succeed in school - the class I'm the leading teacher of is mostly made of good students, and all the parents I've met bar a few exceptions are extremely supportive of their kids and acutely follow their results, even though they never reached high school themselves. So when immigrants have to combine crappy jobs and have no time whatsoever to educate their children, you are just creating tykebombs that will blow in your face 15 to 20 years later when you get a new generation with no real future.

[Sinekein]

the differences brought by medical or technological progress are way more important than those brought by religion (especially monotheistic ones) or genetics.

I would pick at this a little because there's no Enlightenment without Protestantism and there's arguably no Scientific Method formalized as we know it without the Enlightenment. But inasmuch as pretty much every developed country on Earth has adopted the Scientific Method at least (and pretty much every democracy has embraced the Enlightenment to some degree or other) and has since mostly secularized, it's a historical point and not really a modern cultural one.

Indeed, I'm not denying the influence of religious scholars on progresses in science, both Christian and Muslim ones. One of the most prominent ones in France is Blaise Pascal who is maybe the quintessential example of theologian scientist - in school you are equally likely to study him in philosophy/literature class because he wrote the Pensées, than you are to do so in mathematics (because of his triangle) or physics (he gave his name to the SI pressure unit).

[Raga]

I'll also say for the umpteenth time that most of this is a speed issue. It's not really about what projected ethnic demographics will or won't be in X years. Most people don't care about that and only think in those terms when their immediate environment is changing so fast that they feel like a fish out of water.

We can handle any kind of change at all if it happens at a sustainable rate. And sustainability has a lot to do with economics *but* it also has a lot to do with the native population's tolerance for change.

A given population is only willing to accept so much change at so much of a rate. I have no magic formulas for calculating this, but I believe it's a law that's as inexorable as any that various number pushing academics use. If you push people to change too much, they *will* rebel.

[Joblom]

Not really

You are a symptom of what is destroying the United States and the entire Western World. The only people on Earth who don't care about this kind of thing are the European peoples. The white people. Everyone else, virtually everyone, cares about this. It is human nature. Even whites innately DO care about it but every message given to them, and only them, by society, by the media, their institutions, and government, works hard to condition them against this. That's what it takes to override human nature and it isn't even 100% successful. The reason the modern right wing or "Alt-Right" or "race realists" need to be censored so hard is because just by speaking truth they can break decades of conditioning and return their populations to a more natural state. A state of being that existed for thousands of years and only began to be suppressed a few generations ago. Within living memory, in fact.

Modern, nice, prosperous, safe, inventive, and democratic countries are creations of white people. With few exceptions, other people cannot create them or maintain them. It's a fucking fact. Only whites, specifically men, support the policies and values that create and maintain these kinds of countries. The kinds of countries that the desperate alien masses are so eager to immigrate to, leech off of, subvert, and destroy through their short-sighted and selfish greed. The data is clear on this.

You SHOULD care Raga, if you enjoy the kind of life you live or that your parents lived and want future generations to do the same. If you don't then I bet you take your luxuries for granted. It can be hard to see what is in front of one's nose. My people built this country and only my people can maintain it. It will cease to exist when it has become dominated by foreigners with no connection or affection for its founding fathers and their ideas.

The fatal flaw in Europeans is that the same traits which have let us work together and form stable societies with the luxury of liberalism and guilt, are the same traits that let our enemies exploit us. It lead us to giving women the vote, to giving everyone the vote, enabled the creation of dysgenic welfare policies and technology, and lead us to grant outsiders equal status, and even let them invade our nations. It helps hamper us with restraint when bold and decisive action is needed. We wish to try and maintain what we created and are not happy or eager to rip it apart, even when it has been allowed to rot to its core. Traitors and foreigners have no problem subverting the pillars of society because they have no ancestral or ideological investment in it and don't consider it theirs. It's not something they have any innate desire to maintain; only to exploit. We'll have to rebound and correct course or watch helplessly as our civilization crumbles to dust and our enemies fight over the meager scraps. I hope we can come to our senses and fix this, but I am very pessimistic. Entropy is winning and right now my only hope is that in some future era sensible and strong men will resurrect true civilization out of the ashes once all the parasites have died off.

IIt's not really about what projected ethnic demographics will or won't be in X years. Most people don't care about that and only think in those terms when their immediate environment is changing so fast that they feel like a fish out of water.

They don't care, not consciously anyway, among whites at least, but they should. These changes will have very severe consequences. Liberty will erode, what faith is left in our traditional institutions will evaporate completely, and any sense of national unity or local community will disappear. You can't have a country when there is nothing shared between its populace and they are all in competition with one another on an instinctual level. No shared language, no shared religion, no shared history, no shared race, no shared ideology or values, no shared culture. Of-course, that's exactly what certain people want.

We can handle any kind of change at all if it happens at a sustainable rate.

Yes, sustainability is sustainable. That's the nature of it, isn't it? How insightful. Indeed, if we had not let in tens of millions, maybe has high as a hundred million immigrants in the last 60 years or so we might not be having these problems. Homogeneity is happiness. You can create it out of diversity, but only with time. Historically we were wise enough to restrict immigration to similar peoples as the founding stock, who had more of a shared heritage, and we also closed off immigration at will for years at a time. On top of that, we didn't have a welfare state to incentivize failure and parasitism. Many immigrants who couldn't cut it went back to their home countries. Only the successful and adaptable stayed and eventually assimilated.

Boil the frog too quickly and it will jump out of the pot. Mostly the frog has been boiled slowly. At this point it is probably too cooked to escape, but it may still try.

[Sinekein]

No shared language, no shared religion, no shared history, no shared race, no shared ideology or values, no shared culture. Of-course, that's exactly what certain people want.

Skin color aside I would love to hear more about what Protestant Germans and Catholic Irish share, being the two ethnicities that make up most of America's white population.

[Mazder]

I'm teaching in a high school full of second or third-generation immigrant children (some even first-gen - I have two Sri Lankan girls who arrived less than five years ago). The whole country is the one with by far the largest immigrant rate in the country.

Kids who get a real shot at good education don't want to use it to recreate Little Casablanca/Abidjan/Hanoi in their backyard. They want to make themselves a good life in the country. Sure, they'll bring parts of their culture, but those will be very minor changes compared to what they will embrace.

On the other hand, those who can't get a good education are way more likely to embrace their "original culture" to the fullest and outright reject French values.

Hence why the kids part mentioned by Raga above is so important. If parents get no time to educate their kids, they're unlikely to succeed in school - the class I'm the leading teacher of is mostly made of good students, and all the parents I've met bar a few exceptions are extremely supportive of their kids and acutely follow their results, even though they never reached high school themselves. So when immigrants have to combine crappy jobs and have no time whatsoever to educate their children, you are just creating tykebombs that will blow in your face 15 to 20 years later when you get a new generation with no real future.

I mean, the similar things happen in the UK.
Cheeky Kebab or Curry after a night on the piss would not be possible if people from Turkey/Greece or India didn't want to come here and didn't influence our lives for the better.

And that is really the crux of the problem. Poorer education bred distrust.
Now that by no means implies those of a lesser education are inherently stupid, and nor should they feel threatened by it, but there will come a time where that blend of educated vs not-educated will be destructive.
Especially if there is a certain upper class of educated to exploit that.
I mean it's basically Feudalisms problem being slowly eroded away.

[TTTX]

If you want to do that you need to end immigration and start deporting debilitating racial group. "Diversity" is not enriching the American people and is slowly ripping the country to pieces.

not necessarily, heavy or properly regularitet can also do the job and deporting illegal immigrants should be a thing and maybe remove the law where if they have children in your country they can't be removed, that law is old and dumb at this point in history.

If you think you have problems with immigrants, then I have news for you we Europeans have been dealing a lot more problems thanks to immigrants problems the USA started and later the EU stupid decisions, hell a few years ago Germany almost got split in two over the issue and Sweden well you try and ask SWM how bad it was/is in his country when the immigrants caused problems.

[Raga]

Skin color aside I would love to hear more about what Protestant Germans and Catholic Irish share, being the two ethnicities that make up most of America's white population.

Apologies in advance. This will be a long post.

I'm actually going to use this mostly as a springboard to respond to Joblom, but also because it does touch on something I said a while back that you disagreed with that I didn't really elaborate on at the time. I said the United States was *the* melting pot country, more so than any other country I know about.

*Whiteness* as such is indeed what they have in common, but what people often fail to understand with this word as it relates to the United States is that "whiteness" here functions as an ethnic identity. It isn't *just* a statement about where somebody stands in a constructed hierarchy, though it has and does serve this function. It isn't just a statement about race and whatever you think that does or doesn't signify about underlying biology.

It's a cultural/ethnic descriptor. So what do the Protestant Germans and the Catholic Irish share in the US? Well, they both share the experience of having gotten stuck into that much maligned melting pot and coming out the other end as the generic "white American." Ironically, this is a perfect descriptor of my niece and nephews. Their dad (my brother-in-law) is German Protestant stock. Their mother (through my half Irish mom) is Catholic Irish stock. And they are generic American white people. The only European stock who have consistently and meaningfully eluded this process are the Jews and some statistically trivial religious minorities like the Amish. And in the last 50 or so years even that has broken down to such an extent that Jews are pretty much de facto regarded as white. (Hence why nobody in my conservative, Southern family gives a single shit that my partner is Jewish).

It's true that the mold for "whiteness" was WASP, but when you break that down into its constituent parts, it becomes clear that's not nearly as prescriptive as people act like it is. "Anglo-Saxon" in operation ends up meaning "speaks English" and "inherits/gains the cultural baggage of the English common law system." "Protestantism" ends up meaning "rugged individualism as an ideal." Because of that, actual Anglo-Saxon ancestry becomes increasingly irrelevant and American Catholicism becomes obnoxiously Protestant in demeanor by Old World Catholic standards. This system is also obviously ethnically agnostic as pretty much anybody can 1) speak English, 2) accept the legal and cultural realities of a common law system, and 3) adopt rugged individualism as an ideal. Historically, the only thing you couldn't shift to fit into the mold was the white skin part. Either you had this or you didn't.

The exact same process has happened with black people here. "Black people" in the US as an ethnic/cultural descriptor refers to all those people of dozens of different tribes of West Africa who got shoved forcibly into a melting pot and came out the other end with their own dialect of English, their own version of Protestantism, and their own distinctive types of art, food, and dress.

It's what happens here. People show up and get shoved into some master category. "Latino," "POC," and "Asian" are arguably more recent attempts at creating something like this process again.

The issue is that we've had melting pots(s) and have never succeeded in having one big one. However, there's simply no getting around the fact that we have had two successful ones: whiteness and blackness. My metric for "success" here is how irrevocable this process has been and isn't a statement about how harmonious or quality the end result of the process has been. There is no separating white Americans back out into their constituent European parts. There is no separating black Americans back out into their constituent West African parts. That ship has sailed.

What the hell does this have to do with what Joblom said? Well, obviously, when we are talking at the level of ethnic identity (whiteness/blackness here) we are talking about abstracted kinship ties. It's an evolutionary truism that organisms favor their own kin and that this explains much of the appearance of cooperation and altruism in the natural world. What makes humans distinctive is that we are capable of carrying this to the level of kin abstraction found in huge categories like "ethnostate," "linguistic group," "race," "religion," or whatever where our actual kinship is utterly trivial or even nonexistent.

So, sure, people care about this. We are genetically engineered to care about this. And it's a myth that European (stock) don't. You (Joblom) are also pretending that I don't care about this when everything I said says that I do. (Remember how I said I cared if we were Balkanized or not?) What I don't give two shits about is whatever genetics might or might not underlie a particular abstracted kinship group of this kind.

Humans are hardwired to be tribal just like we are hardwired to learn language. But we are tribally agnostic just as we are linguistically agnostic. Take a Chinese baby and teach it only English and it will do just fine. Take a white girl and raise her in an Indian tribe and she will do just fine. (Yes, yes, I know about studies that show that babies show preferences for same race adults. If you dig into this though, you find they have preference for whatever the race of their caregivers are: so a black baby raised by white people prefers white faces and vice versa).

Social cohesion actually matters. And, yes, everybody should care about it. What's less obvious is whether or not that social cohesion at the level of abstracted kinship group should be based on underlying genetic similarity because it doesn't have to be. As humans, we have that luxury.

Since we've already had the conversation about the supposed undeniability of the genetic superiority of white people (as the race and not the American ethnic group) at making non shit civilizations, I see no point in retreading it.

Likewise, no sense in rehashing the thoroughly trod road of how social arrangements designed to deal with subsistence farming in premodern times are somehow magically still the ideal ones for dealing with industrialized modernity.

@Sinekein

I have more thoughts on what you said about trade, the US economy's dependence on developing countries, and the Global North/South divide, but I'll deal with that later.

*Edit* A lot of this could sort of be summarized by saying that humans are suffering from a lot of evolutionary mismatch in modernity. Duh. What's not apparent is why the solution to this should be "make everything socially how it was 150 years ago but keep penicillin and all this groovy technology and knowledge." You can't do this. Not without giving up the tech. They go hand in hand.

[Mobius_118]

Joblom, the basis for the United States is built on diversity. There will always be resistance to the new immigrant, like the Irish, the Chinese, the Germans, the Africans who were forced here, Hispanic folk. Someone always bitches.

Now it's folks from the Middle East who just want to live in a place without worrying about being dragged out and shot for religious differences. They're not trying to impose shariah law, rape the white women, or displace the white folk. What is funny is the people who REEEEEEEEEEEE about the new Immigrant push would love to impose their own christian form of shariah law. There's not that many discrepancies between the two.

You want to keep racial purity or some other bullshit, then you're a symptom of a fucked up perspective.

[Vol]

increase people wages so they can afford having a family and a bit more free time so they can actually enjoy the family they wish to create and as a bonus for USA get a European kind of health system so it doesn't put people in so much debt and maybe make so it's not so expensive to go to college.

That's my gut reaction, however, among people who _do_ have free time and wealth and can easily afford healthcare and such, they then in turn do not have very large families. The Mormons being a notable exception, along with Ultra-orthodox Jews, theirs is a philosophical need to breed that appears to be lost in today's psuedo-Catholics.

What's actually kind of remarkable is that the black population as a percentage of the USA is fairly stable at around 10-15% for over a century. However, today, over half of all black babies are aborted. But they remain 13% of the population, with plenty of children to offset the losses. So that implies that even that heinously high abortion rate isn't actually a significant factor in maintaining the equilibrium. Which also implies some rather gruesome theories about how legal abortion is utilized.

But back to my point, the solid middle class, the people with time for vacations, money in the bank, long term assets, multiple insurances, good healthcare, they don't have 6+ kids on average. They have 1 or 2, tending towards 1 in urban areas, where the wealthiest congregate. So while it seems the problem is economic, in practice, I can't see the correlation. Otherwise the birth rate would correlate with wealth, instead of the opposite.

@Europeans: So what I'm getting is that you guys don't feel there's an ethnic requirement to being your nationality, so much as it's about integration, into the acceptable range of beliefs and actions.

So a thought experiment then. All magically consensual, everyone agrees to it.

All babies born in your country, to parents of your specific ethnicity, are swapped with babies from Africa, Asia, Middle East, anyplace there's no recent common ancestry. Everything else is the same. Same upbringings, culturally they're whatever you are, dress like you, talk like you, eat like you. Ethnically, your people will no longer exist in your nation. Does this change anything?

Not really. With some qualifications. Namely: have they assimilated into whatever the overarching American culture evolves to be or are we Balkanized? If we are still demonstrably culturally the same people and not dozens of different peoples, I don't really care what the ethnic makeup of the country happens to be or if we are no longer identifiably WASP anymore. We have that luxury because we aren't an ethnostate. Secondly: are they destitute or do they actually have wealth, especially land and houses? If they have land and houses, one would assume they live here and care about the long-term health of the communities they live in and not just what they can or can't get in government aid packages.

If they are middle class and culturally American (meanly they accept the realities of the Constitution and what it means), I don't really give a shit where their ancestors came from or whether or not they've been here 20 years or 200 years.

As has been said, America is a special case in this regard. But I'm interested in your in-group preference. Obviously, we all have one. But by the grace of sapience, we can suppress it for higher purposes. If given the option, would you not prefer the nation be mostly people of your in-group or as close to it as possible? Because you're expressing a total indifference to the ethnic makeup, and I understand why philosophically. But that seems to come with the caveat that we're not allowed to have an opinion on who is let in, much less a preference. The 65' immigration reform specifically aimed to alter the demographics of the country. And as a result, it sure seems that we are Balkanizing.




As you yourself have said, there has been a radical change in American culture in a very short period of time. Our demographics have been massively shifted in a way only seen in conquests. There is little common identity anymore, much less purpose. But so long as these changing trends continue whatever we have now, you disregard your in-group preference?

To note, I'm using you as a mirror, trying to work out what I should believe, because I have a lot of sympathy for what Joblom has said, but I also temper that with a lot of intellectual honesty. It's not as simple as ethnicity is irrelevant to anything but visual appearance, Mr. Mugabe can be a Chinaman too, or, only Italians can make good tomato sauce and Germans will always try to conquer Europe. Though it's academic, as our leaders did in '65, as they do now, but now they need bodies to prop up the pyramid schemes of our economic systems, as well as the orthodoxy.

...The only people on Earth who don't care about this kind of thing are the European peoples. The white people. Everyone else, virtually everyone, cares about this. It is human nature. Even whites innately DO care about it but every message given to them, and only them, by society, by the media, their institutions, and government, works hard to condition them against this. That's what it takes to override human nature and it isn't even 100% successful...

This part is completely true tho. Nations with white majorities are the only ones voluntarily undergoing the process of making themselves into minorities, bleeding themselves for global initiatives, while putting in place systems that can be used against themselves when they no longer have the power to assert their own interests. You can argue that it doesn't matter if we're minorities, we're all people, same culture, as we've seen. Maybe true, maybe not, but no other nations and ethnic groups seem to agree with that idea as immigrate by the millions to live with us. Western Europe, North America, the lands of milk and honey. I'm going to assume illegal immigrants, refugees, possibly legal immigrants, they're not interrogated to find out how they feel about discarding their ethnic/national identities, and may in fact carry them into our countries.

And that concept hinges on everyone else agreeing to those principles too. If they don't, and our populations remain divided on racial lines, and the trend of equality through mockery and marginalization of whites continues, then the white folk are in for a very rough time when their well meaning policies to help the former minorities, now the plurality, are then used against them. We can look at Rhodesia and South Africa for how turnabout has played out, albeit on an expedited scale. As we've seen with other civil issues, the inertia oft makes the movement overshoot the target. There is no peaceful, multicultural society achieved through retribution.

I'm not referring to cackling hordes of brown people conspiring to stomp out the remaining white folk in a tide of tribal darkness either. It can be as simple as wanting to benefit yourself, your family, as much as possible with the laws and policies in place, magnified by the population. Innocuous acts through the lens of a very different time. Would you get rid of a policy to give your kids a massive boost to their odds of attending an elite college? Would you work to undo the "representation" movement once the reality of demographics has shifted to a new equilibrium? Would you demand more police presence in your neighborhoods because you're no longer disproportionately targeted? Would you demand harsher sentences in court because you now have the power to affect the laws of the land?

Of course not. That level of cultural or ethnic self-sacrifice would be completely unfair to expect from any group, if not bigoted, and, oh wait.

[Vol]

The only European stock who have consistently and meaningfully eluded this process are the Jews and some statistically trivial religious minorities like the Amish. And in the last 50 or so years even that has broken down to such an extent that Jews are pretty much de facto regarded as white. (Hence why nobody in my conservative, Southern family gives a single shit that my partner is Jewish).

Just to pluck this out, I've noticed that the most centrist issue of them all appears to be support for Israel and tolerance of Jews in general. Dead center on the compass, if you polled the average person within the Overton window, they would express support or neutrality. Once you go into the extremes in any direction, you find antisemitism. An odd commonality.

[Raga]

@ Vol

I mean are we dealing with this at the level of people's LalaLand utopia of choice that most aligns with their feelings or with what policywise is something that happens to push the country in the direction they want while being plausibly acheivable? Because if we are dealing at the level of Lalaland, then sure, yeah, I obviously have massive in-group preference. My secret ornery redneck's heart desire is that Texas (and maybe the rest of the rural South and/or the Rocky Mountain West) could run off and be it's own country and fuck the rest of the US.

But you to have to live at the level of the plausible. And I know for a fact that 3 things absolutely aren't changing:

1) The people for whom massive in-group preference is a psychological hurdle they cannot or will not even try to suppress aren't going away.
2) The people who for whatever reason highly prize diversity and variety aren't going away.
3) The immigrants who are already here aren't going anywhere and even if we somehow completely suppress immigration we would still end up being 40% plus nonwhite in the next 50 years.

Pretending that any of these things are going to change in some fundamental way (barring some random, unforeseen catastrophe like being invaded by China or something) is not being rational. How I *feel* about this is irrelevant.

The US has an advantage with this in that we *aren't* an ethnostate and have never been, unsuccessful attempts to make us one aside. Maybe this is a terrible idea and any state that isn't an obvious ethnostate with a native ancestry going back 1000 years is doomed to failure. I guess we'll find out.

In the meantime though, why not try to use the intrinsic elasticity of "Americaness" to try to forge some comprehensive whole out of the people in 1-3? There's a note of naive utopianism in that too probably, but considering we did successfully forge all the warring ethnicities of Europe into something like a new whole, it's at least a utopianism with some basis in historical precedence and its success doesn't hinge on utterly ignoring one or more of the groups in 1-3. I do know that whatever policy you chose *has* to account for all 3 of those groups or it won't work because each one is independently powerful enough to fuck up the system for everybody else if you try to ignore them.

There's a reason I shunted the question of Europe to the side. Europe is different because many of the countries in Europe *are* ethnostates. If I was European, I would almost certainly have a much more essentialist view on immigration, culture, and ethnicity than I do. But I'm not European, so I don't really get any say in what they do or don't chose to do over there.

I will say though that what Europe does absolutely partially fuels the sentiments of white people in group 1 here (and probably in the other colonies too). White Americans aren't Europeans anymore, but the allure of the mystical "Old Country" is still psychologically comforting to many people here. Americans are fond of dreaming of ancestral Ireland or France or Scandinavia or wherever. (I think this partially explains the overwhelming white infatuation with Israel that you mentioned earlier. Here's a people that actually went out and recreated their mythical ancestral homeland, by Jove). There's something to be said for the sentiment of "Things here will always change, but at least Germany/England/France/wherever will always be there." If *all* of those places appear to be going towards ethnic or racial agnosticism, it absolutely fuels people's sense of existential dread here. There's reasons why American conservatives love people like Viktor Orban and it's not just because they want to emulate him here. They are actually uinronically cheering for his success in Hungary for the sake of the continuance of Hungary as an ethnostate as well. Same with American conservatives being stoked about Brexit. "Yes! It looks like good old England will still be there afterall! Tea! Crumpets!" is absolutely part of the sentiment. (*Edit* Just a random additional thought I had on this front. When Notre Dame was burning, there were absolutely people wondering around here crying. People with 0 French ancestry who had never stepped foot in France. NPR played a recording of the all the church bells in Paris tolling for Notre Dame and it knotted up my heart. Meanwhile, when ISIS blows up an ancient city in the Middle East people just have a vague sentiment of "that's too bad.")

The EU could *maybe* succeed in forging some kind of true pan-European identity that's as elastic as "Americaness" but I think it would have to be way more powerful (including militarily) to really succeed at this.

@ birth rate stuff

Why the hell would you want people in developed countries to have birthrates of 6 kids per family instead of replacement/modest continual growth?

[Raga]

Considering there's a kind of low thrum of evolutionary psychology going on in this thread right now, I'll plug this book:



It's a great intro for lay people on the topic.

[TTTX]

That's my gut reaction, however, among people who _do_ have free time and wealth and can easily afford healthcare and such, they then in turn do not have very large families. The Mormons being a notable exception, along with Ultra-orthodox Jews, theirs is a philosophical need to breed that appears to be lost in today's psuedo-Catholics.

What's actually kind of remarkable is that the black population as a percentage of the USA is fairly stable at around 10-15% for over a century. However, today, over half of all black babies are aborted. But they remain 13% of the population, with plenty of children to offset the losses. So that implies that even that heinously high abortion rate isn't actually a significant factor in maintaining the equilibrium. Which also implies some rather gruesome theories about how legal abortion is utilized.

But back to my point, the solid middle class, the people with time for vacations, money in the bank, long term assets, multiple insurances, good healthcare, they don't have 6+ kids on average. They have 1 or 2, tending towards 1 in urban areas, where the wealthiest congregate. So while it seems the problem is economic, in practice, I can't see the correlation. Otherwise the birth rate would correlate with wealth, instead of the opposite.

@Europeans: So what I'm getting is that you guys don't feel there's an ethnic requirement to being your nationality, so much as it's about integration, into the acceptable range of beliefs and actions.

So a thought experiment then. All magically consensual, everyone agrees to it.

All babies born in your country, to parents of your specific ethnicity, are swapped with babies from Africa, Asia, Middle East, anyplace there's no recent common ancestry. Everything else is the same. Same upbringings, culturally they're whatever you are, dress like you, talk like you, eat like you. Ethnically, your people will no longer exist in your nation. Does this change anything?

Kids are expensive and there can be a long list as to why and some of them are just what if.

But there is also other stuff playing a part like the culture of owning a lot of stuff to show off how rich and how well you are doing.

@European stuff.
not really because out culture will exist kind like how the Mandalorian culture work in SW.

[Sinekein]

Once you go into the extremes in any direction, you find antisemitism. An odd commonality.

On the right, you find run-of-the-mill antisemitism. You also find a bit of it on the left because some people are dumb. But you also have people on the left (like Bernie Sanders) who are not antisemitic but are extremely critical of Israel's policies. Even Russia or China don't dare to pull some of the shit Israel does in Cisjordania with their neighbours.

A huge problem in France is that many people, Jewish or not, are trying to turn any criticism of Israeli policies into antisemitism, and it is really annoying. You can be critical of the policies of the U.S. without being racist against Americans, you can be critical of Germany without hating on Germans, hell, I'm pretty fucking critical of French policies without being racist against French people. But suddenly, if I say Israel's colony policies are disgusting, it's antisemitism. And it's not even a "that's because they are a religious country" explanation, because we are all pretty free to hate on Qatar, Saudi Arabia or Iran without being called islamophobes.

[Grand Admiral Cheesecake]

That isn't just a problem in France.

[Sinekein]

This part is completely true tho. Nations with white majorities are the only ones voluntarily undergoing the process of making themselves into minorities, bleeding themselves for global initiatives, while putting in place systems that can be used against themselves when they no longer have the power to assert their own interests. You can argue that it doesn't matter if we're minorities, we're all people, same culture, as we've seen. Maybe true, maybe not, but no other nations and ethnic groups seem to agree with that idea as immigrate by the millions to live with us. Western Europe, North America, the lands of milk and honey. I'm going to assume illegal immigrants, refugees, possibly legal immigrants, they're not interrogated to find out how they feel about discarding their ethnic/national identities, and may in fact carry them into our countries.

Calling it voluntary is conspiracy theory B.S. And the increase in foreign-born people in rich countries is extremely logical with some basic knowledge of A/Ecology, and B/Economics, in that order.

Ecology because of the r/K strategy. In the wild, it is a rule that says that reproduction is costly and an investment for any given organism. As such, you have two different approaches.

- K strategy organisms have few eggs and few children, so they don't spend much energy in the reproduction per se. However, they will invest a lot of energy to groom, feed and raise the babies. That is the strategy of most large mammals like whales, bears or elephants, or many birds like albatrosses. Those are the animals that will aggressively defend their offspring and waste a ton of energy foraging to feed them.
- r strategy organisms invest all their energy birthing as many babies as possible, but once it's done, they allocate little to no energy to help them grow. That is the strategy used by most fishes, or toads, and you can say some high birthrate-low life expectancy mammals like rats or rabbits also fit even though among mammals there is always a degree of maternal care.

And because humans follow ecological laws, you see a drop in birthrate in societies that get wealthier. Because of B/Economics, which say that raising a kid is more expensive the richer the country is, so instead of having five or six children but no way to pay for their studies, people tend to only have one, two or three, and spend a lot of energy - or, since we're humans, money - to ensure their success. That's a pure K strategy.

But the poorer the country, or the community, the more they will go for the r strategy: having many children because there is a significant risk of one of them not living for long, and because they don't have many resources to invest in them anyway - but the more children there are, the most likely it is for one of them to succeed (with the added fact that in humans, the offspring can also help the older generation, which is seldom seen in the wild).

So it's not that white people want to be replaced, it's just that they got richer - in part due to exploiting the rest of the world, let's face it - so now they are in full K strategies, and their birthrate is super low. You want it to change? Well, you need another 1929 crisis that turns the Western world into a bunch of developing countries while others like China or Brazil really thrive - then you'll see that white people can breed like rabbits too if they are in a situation that makes it more sensible.

[Sinekein]

That isn't just a problem in France.

I don't know about the rest of the world honestly. And here we have an asshole that tried to write it in law that any criticism of Israeli expansionist policies could be assimilated to antisemitism.

[Raga]

One more additional thought:

There's really two levels of discussion going on here as well. Half of the conversation is happening at the gene level and half of it is happening at the meme level.

So a shorter way of putting my above sentiments. I really don't care about group maintenance at the gene level because I don't believe that the genetic differences are noteworthy enough between groups to warrant genetic hygiene policies or whatever.

I very much care about group maintenance at the *meme* level because I am a fairly unapologetic proponent of the idea that the bundle of ideas that broadly goes around under the umbrella term "Western Civilization" is among the best (if not the best) bundle of collective ideas that humans have ever come up with.

But inasmuch as most of what's best about this is very much tied up in ideas of individualism, democratic government, a logically/scientifically definable reality separate from whatever opinions people might have about reality and all of that requires inquiry and high degrees of individual autonomy, policies designed to try to put all this inside some kind of museum case will inevitably destroy it.

I want the memes perpetuated, but I sincerely don't give a fuck about the genes of the people perpetuating them.

[Sinekein]

That's a view I can get behind, with some caveats regarding the collective ideas of the Western Civilization when it comes to what happens in other areas of the world. But yeah, there have been enough successful non-white people in Western Countries to prove time and time again that genes and ethnicity are not what is sustaining it.

[Raga]

Never heard of this guy. Seems to be some kind of Brazilian Steve Bannon crossed with Jordan Peterson. But he's apparently a huge deal in Brazil and he lives in the US:

Olavo de Carvalho

[Raga]

The Greatest Sexual Revolution A bunch of interesting stuff about social history in WWII that reframes conventional wisdom on the 1950s.

Harry Potter and the Trans Revolution

[Joblom]

not necessarily, heavy or properly regularitet can also do the job and deporting illegal immigrants should be a thing and maybe remove the law where if they have children in your country they can't be removed, that law is old and dumb at this point in history.

You can't do that now for two reasons: the minority populations are too big and powerful, and secondly the really important people, who actually matter, don't want it. No "Operation Wetback" in the modern day. No "English as the National language". All of these problems could have been solved or entirely avoided decades ago but that didn't happen. We're already beyond the point of no return.

I'm aware of the European situation but as I'm American, American problems feature first in my mind.

[Joblom]

That's my gut reaction, however, among people who _do_ have free time and wealth and can easily afford healthcare and such, they then in turn do not have very large families. The Mormons being a notable exception, along with Ultra-orthodox Jews, theirs is a philosophical need to breed that appears to be lost in today's psuedo-Catholics.

Feminism is the issue here. You can't maintain the same fertility rate when your women are busy with education and careers in their most fertile years. You can't afford a family when you have both men and women working because that lowers wages, making it even harder for traditional households to function.

What's actually kind of remarkable is that the black population as a percentage of the USA is fairly stable at around 10-15% for over a century.

I don't know what the numbers are but I'd speculate that part of this is immigration from Africa, Haiti, and such. As well modern black culture is extremely promiscuous. How many abortions are had vs how many don't bother? There is some financial incentive to have children if you aren't paying for them yourself. Our current system is structured to punish careful, responsible parents or would-be parents and to subsidize the irresponsible. Over the long term this will have a dysgenic effect and people recognized such a century ago.

@Europeans: So what I'm getting is that you guys don't feel there's an ethnic requirement to being your nationality, so much as it's about integration, into the acceptable range of beliefs and actions.

This is what they think but they are wrong. Americans in the modern age think this too. They are under the mistaken belief that people are a blank slate and can be shaped into any other people if put in the right environment and taught to be that way. The truth is, people are not a blank slate. Populations are rooted in biology and distinguished by their individual conglomerations of genes, which affect their behavior, which affects the kinds of societies they can create. If you replaced every white American with a Nigerian, even if they all spoke English and went to the same public school I did, you would not have the same country. It's character would be fundamentally different. Ditto replacing Japanese or Chinese with Europeans, or any other group with any other group.

In the modern day so called "Progressives" rally against this and deny it with all their might, putting their hands over their ears and shrieking to drown out the truth, but the truth is evident and well documented by this point. Lies don't need to be censored; only truth. Lies don't need to be fought with intimidation and coercion; only truth. Human diversity is the natural result of Darwinian evolution. It was after all the minor diversity in appearance and function between the various breeds of Finch on the Galapagos Islands that prompted Darwin to postulate his theory. It's obvious, logical, and undeniable to an honest and informed person.

The knee jerk reaction of progressives, their drive to censor it, only makes the current issues we face worse. It only increases the likelihood of a more severe and harsh prescription for the these problems in the long run. It would be far better to openly recognize this fact of human evolution and have an open discussion about it. To let reasonable and moderate people shape the direction of the polices we so desperately need that will finally take these facts into account. Trying to bury the truth will just hand the future to extremists.

Because you're expressing a total indifference to the ethnic makeup, and I understand why philosophically.

She thinks it makes no difference. She's wrong. She thinks she will be able to enjoy the same lifestyle she does now in a country of Africans or Mestizos or Chinese. If I, like her, believed that all people were fundamentally the same then I'd also agree with her. Waking up from that delusion is not pleasant.

intellectual honesty. It's not as simple as ethnicity is irrelevant to anything but visual appearance, Mr. Mugabe can be a Chinaman too, or, only Italians can make good tomato sauce and Germans will always try to conquer Europe.

I'm being intellectually honest too. It was only by being honest about this, with myself, that I was able to reach this conclusion. It was only by being willing to question what I believed and felt that I got here. Ironically, it was "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond that was a large part of the revelation for me. Now he explicitly denies this at the end but after looking at the evidence that he himself presented, I felt that he was being dishonest and not carrying his theories or observations through to their logical conclusion. Richard Dawkins did the rest.

You listed two extremes here but that isn't what I'm proposing. Individuals can be judged and individuals and groups can be judged as groups. When I speak about America not being America when its founding stock is outnumbered and marginalized, I'm not saying that no Asians, Africans, Indians, or anyone else can't be true Americans. A minority can be and this is most likely to happen with very selective immigration policies, the absence of a welfare state, and with a dominant native culture. When I talk about the character of these groups I'm talking about the averages. Where the average falls is important because anything else is an outlier.

Take men and women for example. You find men distributed more heavily than women at the higher and lower ends of the IQ charts. More geniuses and more idiots. A society of men will therefore display different characteristics, on average, than one of women. However individually within each society you would see some men who buck the trend or might actually fit in better with women and you'll find women who would do well in the male group. Just as you still find some female or black geniuses and still find low IQ people among Jews or whites.

I stress. Averages. You can accept people as individuals based on their character and still recognize the broad characteristics of their ethnic group and the consequences of that group being a large part of or the dominant demographic in society.

Nations with white majorities are the only ones voluntarily undergoing the process of making themselves into minorities, bleeding themselves for global initiatives, while putting in place systems that can be used against themselves when they no longer have the power to assert their own interests.

Voluntarily you say? The American people never voted for the Hart-Celler act. They have never been in favor of mass immigration and have wanted it toned down or shut off for decades. Historically, they were even occasionally successful in accomplishing this. However things seem to have gradually changed in 20th century...

As for Europe, I'm not as familiar with their polling and trust it even less than American polling anyway. I certainly see a lot of Europeans resisting this in one form or another. Of-course I also have my own theory about Europe and its people. It would make sense that Americans might, genetically, be of somewhat different character than the mother continent. After all, the people who settled North American had to possess certain traits, particular drives, and this remained true up until about mid way through the 20th century. I've seen people mock Europeans as being serfs or peasants and I suspect there could be some truth to it.

Morrowind for the Dunmer!
Blackmarsh for the Argonians!
Elsweyr for the Cat Folk!
Valenwood for the Bosmer!
Alinor for the Altmer!
...but the countries of men are for everybody!

We can look at Rhodesia and South Africa for how turnabout has played out...

You can also look at those countries generally in see how drastically things change once the European populations are driven from power. Everything starts to collapse. South Africa is a much worse off country today than it was under Apartheid rule.

It can be as simple as wanting to benefit yourself, your family, as much as possible with the laws and policies in place, magnified by the population.

That's all it is at its core; self interest. The interest of the group as the group is the self in this case. Animosity towards other ethnic groups is just a natural way to get what you want. More for me, even if it means less for you. Granted, there are some interesting polls out there where different racial groups are asked if they would support a policy specifically designed to hurt whites. In all cases except one support fell when this was the case.

Like I said, one of the destructive forces in this case is that at their core, these 'minority' groups don't feel they have any genuine ownership of American (or presumably European) institutions. I don't mean literal institutions, but even internalized beliefs which govern how we conduct ourselves. As such they feel free to subvert and destroy this, egged on by the Left, and don't care about the damage they are doing to the greater whole at large. Including to themselves. The high trust societies we have built are eroding and will vanish completely because in their grab for power the invaders, and Leftists especially, have corrupted and subverted all these institutions. No one will believe in the legitimacy of the courts, or elections, or public offices, or even basic moral values.

Saul Alinksy was right when he described the best way to take over a country or culture, but he didn't account for the cost of doing. It's easier to destroy something as intricate as a culture than it is to build one.

[Joblom]

No shared language, no shared religion, no shared history, no shared race, no shared ideology or values, no shared culture. Of-course, that's exactly what certain people want.

Skin color aside I would love to hear more about what Protestant Germans and Catholic Irish share, being the two ethnicities that make up most of America's white population.

Would you say they are more alike to one another than they are to Han Chinese or Haitians or people from Bangladesh or El Salvador? Likeness is on a gradient and you can get different groups to function well together depending on where you baseline for the gradient begins. Starting with the founding English stock of America it appears that people from Europe can integrate well. They can learn reverence for the Founding Fathers, their ideas, and share in the culture, truly becoming part of it with time. The differences, which still exist, can be subsumed by the shared characteristics. Both come from Europe after all. Many of the same holidays, and historical experiences, some shared philosophers, some shared roots. Even biologically, they are closer to one another than either would be to a Mestizo or an sub-Saharan African. You won't see many Irish or Germans calling George Washington and Thomas Jefferson "Some old dead white guys".

[TTTX]

You can't do that now for two reasons: the minority populations are too big and powerful, and secondly the really important people, who actually matter, don't want it. No "Operation Wetback" in the modern day. No "English as the National language". All of these problems could have been solved or entirely avoided decades ago but that didn't happen. We're already beyond the point of no return.

I'm aware of the European situation but as I'm American, American problems feature first in my mind.

it's a solution, unfortunately not all solutions in a imperfect world that are good for people gets used.

yeah most people tend to focus on their own or their countries problems, those who don't don't care until it affects them or idealist who think globalization is a thing that will make everyone happy and make the world a utopia and probably more I forget about.

[Raga]

Not seeing anything in any of that that undermines the argument I've been making for years now to revamp our immigration system away from low skill towards high skill (and also to drastically reduce the overall number of immigrants we let in, which I've also been advocating).

If *individuals* within racial groups can still be geniuses or whatever, wouldn't the fact that high skill people are at the top of the pecking order in their own societies be at least good circumstantial evidence that they defy the averages of their groups?

And if you let high achieving people get out of shithole locations into a place where they can buy property, give their kids good educations, and be paid way more than they could in their home country, wouldn't they generally tend towards appreciation for the system that let them escape? And by extension want to make sure it survived?

And if in 150 years, if the end result of this process is that the overarching American population is mestizo, descended from the native stock and these various high achievers we let in, then so what?

My reasons for wanting this have nothing to do with suppositions about people's underlying genetics (*edit* at the racial level) and everything to do with economics and social and psychological truths about humans everywhere. However, there's nothing in this position that contradicts a concern about genetics, unless you really do just believe that high quantities of non-white genes are somehow intrinsically toxic to civilizational health, regardless of the "quality" of the non-white individuals who brought them here.

[Sinekein]

Skin color aside I would love to hear more about what Protestant Germans and Catholic Irish share, being the two ethnicities that make up most of America's white population.

Would you say they are more alike to one another than they are to Han Chinese or Haitians or people from Bangladesh or El Salvador? Likeness is on a gradient and you can get different groups to function well together depending on where you baseline for the gradient begins.

So you're saying absolutely nothing except "but there are people that are even more different". Which has nothing to do with what you initially claimed.

Starting with the founding English stock of America it appears that people from Europe can integrate well. They can learn reverence for the Founding Fathers, their ideas, and share in the culture, truly becoming part of it with time. The differences, which still exist, can be subsumed by the shared characteristics. Both come from Europe after all. Many of the same holidays, and historical experiences, some shared philosophers, some shared roots.

Roots, no, historical experiences, no, philosophers, no. To say something like that you must know absolutely zilch about European history. Unless you mean Greek philosophers, in which case, sure - but they also heavily influenced Arab populations, probably as much if not more than they did Irish.

So that's bullshit.

Even biologically, they are closer to one another than either would be to a Mestizo or an sub-Saharan African.

Again, "there are people more different than them". My point was that they had next to nothing in common, and you have done nothing to disprove it. Also, stop trying to reference biology, you have proven time, and time, and time again that you had absolutely no understanding whatsoever of that discipline.

Even though there is some entertainment value, like old politicians trying to talk about video games despite obviously not grasping anything of what that means.

[Sinekein]

As for Europe, I'm not as familiar with their polling and trust it even less than American polling anyway. I certainly see a lot of Europeans resisting this in one form or another. Of-course I also have my own theory about Europe and its people. It would make sense that Americans might, genetically, be of somewhat different character than the mother continent. After all, the people who settled North American had to possess certain traits, particular drives, and this remained true up until about mid way through the 20th century. I've seen people mock Europeans as being serfs or peasants and I suspect there could be some truth to it.

I managed to get through the entire post, even though it's more akin to keyboard diarrhea than anything, but I'll only quote that because it stands out in the middle of an ocean of stupidity.

The "drive" that the vast majority of migrants to North America possessed is that they were poor.

So in order to avoid having a totally shitty life in Europe because they were socially lower than average (note: I absolutely make zero link with genetics or intrinsic qualities or flaws here, they were just simply lower-class in difficult times), they took their chance someplace else. Those who were successful, surprise surprise, stayed home.

That's about the extent of the "genetic superiority" of those who became Americans: they had failed to make a life for themselves in crowded Europe.

Going from there to mocking those who stayed...I've seen people mock Americans as being completely ignorant of history and I suspect there could be some truth to it.

[Sinekein]

Not seeing anything in any of that that undermines the argument I've been making for years now to revamp our immigration system away from low skill towards high skill (and also to drastically reduce the overall number of immigrants we let in, which I've also been advocating).

If *individuals* within racial groups can still be geniuses or whatever, wouldn't the fact that high skill people are at the top of the pecking order in their own societies be at least good circumstantial evidence that they defy the averages of their groups?

And if you let high achieving people get out of shithole locations into a place where they can buy property, give their kids good educations, and be paid way more than they could in their home country, wouldn't they generally tend towards appreciation for the system that let them escape? And by extension want to make sure it survived?

There is the issue that cherry-picking high achieving people from poor areas to move them away and profit from their skills means that the poor area is not going to improve, the depth between the poor and the wealthy will widen, and you will have more and more people trying their luck at immigration because what they were given at birth sucks so much that they easily make the choice to try their luck someplace else.

Instead of helping improve their place of birth, those people will make a wealthy country wealthier (or keep it as wealthy as it is). You aren't solving anything by doing that if you have an issue with how many people are trying to illegally come to the U.S.A. As long as Venezuela, Haiti or El Salvador are total shitholes you will see people giving up on succeeding there and hoping they will be lucky where there actually is money.

[Raga]

@ stuff about European emigration to the US back in the day

Another huge kink in these arguments about how Europe is nothing but "the descendants of all the people too afraid to get on the boats" that get trafficked sometimes, is that huge numbers of people who came here actually *returned* to Europe. That whole "go work in the US for a few years and then go home with your money" thing isn't, as it turns out, just something that young Mexican men do.

(*Edit* This has nothing to do with anything other than being a fun aside from a good comic I just read, but this is precisely what Scrooge McDuck originally sets out to do. He makes his money in the Klondike and tries to go home and settle in Scotland).

[Raga]

There is the issue that cherry-picking high achieving people from poor areas to move them away and profit from their skills means that the poor area is not going to improve, the depth between the poor and the wealthy will widen, and you will have more and more people trying their luck at immigration because what they were given at birth sucks so much that they easily make the choice to try their luck someplace else.

Instead of helping improve their place of birth, those people will make a wealthy country wealthier (or keep it as wealthy as it is). You aren't solving anything by doing that if you have an issue with how many people are trying to illegally come to the U.S.A. As long as Venezuela, Haiti or El Salvador are total shitholes you will see people giving up on succeeding there and hoping they will be lucky where there actually is money.

This is meant to go hand in hand with other substantial shifts in our trade policies. And ideally with some pretty marked changes in the way that entities like the IMF and the World Bank conduct policy as well. Those things, if done, would result in a steady improvement in the quality of life in the developed world without being such a drain on the developing world. I'm feeling lazy so I'll just point at this guy's ideas as a good starting point for the kind of things I have in mind (specifically for development in the Third World Not so much on domestic policy).

All of that is admittedly based on a sort of idealized master image of the way that the world should be and what needs doing to make the planet better for everybody. But then again, so are arguments about how massive immigration from the Third World to the developed world will eventually iron out the divide between the Global North/South or whatever.

And if we aren't dealing at the level of master images and just at the level of "letting in X number of poor immigrants is worthwhile just because it's good for those immigrants," I'll just counter that disallowing such immigrants is equally as good because it's good for low-skill native workers. And since I live here and not in Bangladesh so obviously I'm more concerned about the well-being of my immediate neighbors.

[Raga]

One other additional thought in all this conversation about genetics. None of this has even touched on epigenetics which is a whole other complicating factor.

[Grand Admiral Cheesecake]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmNZWG2TQto

Not really related to the current discussion but an interesting thing to show people that claim doom and darkness about there being no chance of reducing immigration.

[Mobius_118]

Funny, President Obama had a targeted policy focusing on criminal offenders, while trump is basically "fuck everyone".

And his deportation number is still waaaay behind President Obama's. Some winning there, bud. Your boy has zero idea on what to do.

[Grand Admiral Cheesecake]

And here we see an extremely far left person's reaction to me posting a video by someone closer to center left than he.

[Mobius_118]

I like how I'm extreme far left just because I posted some easily verifiable truth.

It's like watching someone with a degenerative mental disorder claim windmills cause cancer with you, man.

[Grand Admiral Cheesecake]

Everyone who crosses the border illegally is a criminal Mobius. Obama's catch and release nonsense caused huge problems for everyone only slightly mollified by the fact that he would actually deport people.

Something that he didn't get criticized for because the Media loved to polish his knob.

[Mobius_118]

Ya boy's numbers still do not equal President Obama's by far. Probably (definitely) because trump is attempting to get rid of all of them, even the ones who are here legally, which is far beyond ICE's capabilities and funding.

So, my original statement still stands: He knows fuckall about anything. Hey, that's something you two have in common.

[Mobius_118]

So trump orders the assassination of an Iranian official, threatening war with Iran during his impeachment for abuse of power and obstructing Congress. He did so without Congressional approval. Acts of war require Congressional approval. This was an act of war, which needs to go through the proper channel. That Iranian general was an enemy of the US, no doubt. But you have to know that there's consequences for pulling out of the Iran deal, which actually was working.

There's always a fucking tweet.

[Sinekein]

At that point, I assume Trump is secretly an Obama admirer.

[Raga]

This is one of those things where I really don't have anything like an educated opinion of what's likely to happen. I can see everything from tit for tat escalation resulting in actual war, to Iran doing nothing in the hopes that Iraq will throw us out so they can then push their interests in the region with no US interference, to them wanting to respond but not really being able to target anybody because most of our civilians have been ordered to leave Iraq and they never were going to be able to target anyone that's as important as the general, to a marked escalation in which we do nothing but Israel and other anti-Iranian regional powers attacking them.

Too early to call it really.

I suppose this is an excuse for me to become less ignorant about Iran. Found a short book about Iranian history of the last 40 years so I'll see where that goes.

[Sinekein]

I don't think there is going to be an all-out war because Iran doesn't have the power to take on the U.S. As for Trump, I'm not sure he really wants to have to defend an offensive war - it's bound to give ammunition to his opponents considering his previous claims that he is not a hawk and that the U.S. should withdraw from the Middle East. I know his fans are great at mental gymnastics but at some point the splits are going to start to hurt, and in a campaign it's usually better to be the one calling for peace. Bush in 2003 could cash in on patriotic fervor thanks to 9/11, and started the war 2 years before the next election, which means that when the campaign came the big chunk of the fighting was done, and Saddam Hussein was removed - I might add that it will be way harder to create a boogeyman whose death (if it happens) make people feel like it's won. Neither Khamenei nor Rohani are as good as villains as Saddam, al-Baghdadi or bin Laden.

And of course, in 2003, Iraq was basically alone. Thanks to the Syrian war, Iran has de facto allied with Russia (whose power has greatly increased since 20 years ago). And, because of Trump's removal from the nuclear deal, they have cosied up with China, with for example the Chinese National oil company having infrastructures there (the initial deal was with French company Total, but they withdrew when the US torpedoed the deal). The EU is also currently working on a way to circumvent the US economic sanctions on Iran so as to trade without using dollars, so there won't be allies to be found here (even Johnson has publicly opposed Trump's policies regarding Iran - plus he's still dealing with Brexit so I highly doubt he'll decide to play wargames).

In all likelihood, all operational support for the US in a war in Iran would be Saudi Arabia...and it's hard to frame an alliance with them and only them as "being the good guys" if you're running for reelection.

[Raga]

Just an idle thought. It seems like pretty much all of our foreign policy with developing countries since like 1910 has consisted of mostly failures and ambiguous stalemates and disappointments with only about 25% success rate. I define success as a lot more than just helping them with humanitarian crises. That's nice but we're not really getting anything from that. I mean some sort of transaction in which we don't colonize them and they cooperate with us and we both get some kind of tangible good from the interaction and don't end up hating each other in the process.

And then I got to thinking, what developed power has actually had a better success rate than this? China maybe? And arguably it's too soon to tell with them because their whole Belt and Road initiative or whatever is only about 8 years old.

If this is true and not just something that appears to be true, it's an extremely strong argument for staying the heck at home and minding your own business.

[Vol]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the blase attitude towards the theory of purposeful ethnic replacement. Presumably only when it involves European majority nations. Leaves the same impression as people who spout off that communism works on paper, but requires more delicate wording to discuss. The people who agree to those principles, and live by them, are the ones who get fucked the hardest, as they will cease to exist, along with their philosophy, because the replacement groups are not going to shackle themselves to a self-destructive ideology because it's what the group that's actively helping itself wane professes.

Regardless. As much as that general deserved to die ignominiously, the forever-war is ridiculous. Yeah, it's a tenant of globalism that we must meddle with everyone until they're pliable to our needs for their resources, so the Middle East will always be a mess of international hijinks until they give up their ways and become good modern drones. Support democracy, blah blah. But Trump's not supposed to prop that system up, he was voted in on pulling back on our time in the sand trap. To his credit, he's made some progress on it, but I'd honestly sooner pull out instantly and let it all collapse, let the rest of the world sort it out with bleeding hearts or closed fists. We've done enough, and it's done little to help the region.

@ Raga: The Romans? They were also the reason the Middle East ever had it's golden age, but by the track record of other empires, they did pretty damn well. But I don't think America has the appetite for their style of foreign policy. Best if we left well enough alone, licked our wounds, and worried about ourselves for a change.

[Raga]

One immediate takeaway from this book on Iran:

The clerics were supportive of the coup and reinstatement of the Shah in 1953. They were in fact one of the only reasons the coup succeeded. The chief American architect of the coup, Kermit Roosevelt, could not have done it without support from the clerics. So there's some pretty intense pot calling the kettle black whenever the powers that be in Iran waggle their fingers at us over this coup.

@ leaving the Middle East

It looks like the Iraqis have voted to kick us out. If Trump was smart, he'd basically take a position of something like "Okay, awesome! We've been wanting an explicit excuse to get the fuck out of here for ten years anyway. Bye!" Follow that up with a doubling down on our own oil resources and a more aggressive commitment to green tech with a promise that "Any time Iran kills some Americans, we will rain bombs on the head of some high ranking government official. You might be able to continue using Soleimeini tactics as a big wig in Iran, but you damn well better be doing it inside a bunker."

@ replacement ideology

As far as I can tell, there's two sentiments going on here. One is that the collective sins and evil of ethnic Europeans at large are so horrible and so persistent that they've basically forfeited the right to any variety of ethnic nationalism. This is stupid, but it's at least logically consistent and isn't self contradictory.

The other more prominent sentiment is by far the dumber of the two. It's not so much a stance in and of itself as it is an unavoidable endpoint of the "liberation" philosophies. If you principally divide the world into "oppressed" and "oppressor" and "has power" vs "doesn't have power," this also becomes the central consideration in determining justified or unjustified action. In that moral universe, an action undertaken by an oppressed group (say destruction of property in a riot) is perfectly justified because they don't have power while the same action taken by people in power is illegitimate. This is inane because the instant the formerly oppressed come into power (even by the legitimate action of overthrowing their oppressors), they lose legitimacy by virtue of now being in power. This pretty much explains the Western turnaround on Zionism among other things.

So basically, ethnic homelands are something you are entitled to have and protect against erosion from outside influence *only* if said ethnic homeland is being used as a means to protect yourself from some hostile, powerful aggressor or other. The instant you become the powerful one, you forfeit the right.

[Sinekein]

The other more prominent sentiment is by far the dumber of the two. It's not so much a stance in and of itself as it is an unavoidable endpoint of the "liberation" philosophies. If you principally divide the world into "oppressed" and "oppressor" and "has power" vs "doesn't have power," this also becomes the central consideration in determining justified or unjustified action. In that moral universe, an action undertaken by an oppressed group (say destruction of property in a riot) is perfectly justified because they don't have power while the same action taken by people in power is illegitimate. This is inane because the instant the formerly oppressed come into power (even by the legitimate action of overthrowing their oppressors), they lose legitimacy by virtue of now being in power. This pretty much explains the Western turnaround on Zionism among other things.

No no no, the loss of legitimacy comes when, once in power, you start behaving exactly like those who oppressed you. That's basically Israel in a nutshell. All of Europe would gladly support them if they were actually defending themselves from outside threats, instead of pulling a quiet invasion of Cisjordania.

The philosophy here is that if you suffered by being oppressed, you should be wiser if you manage to reach a point of equality - or even dominance - and avoid behaving like those who ruined your life. It's not "dumb" in theory. In practice though, there are few Mandelas compared to the number of revengeful assholes who start behaving terribly as soon as they're given a modicum of power.

As for white ethnic nationalism, seriously, Americans should stop trying to pull Europeans into their toxic worldview. White people have spent two millenias trying to kill each other in Europe. They have zero reason to band together against an outside threat as nebulous as "not-white people". And it's the same with roughly all ethnicities because humans tend to fight those that are close to them.

If you think being racist towards nonwhites is what unites white Americans, then fine, but stop calling yourself "ethnic Europeans" or "Caucasians" as a way to include us, call yourselves "white Americans". Don't drag us into this shit. Or better, pick those who actually believe it, like Anders Breivik or the NZ shooter, and leave the rest of us alone trying to solve our problems stemming from the fact that Brits, Germans, Frenchs, Italians, Spaniards, Poles, Swedes and Danes are not one and the same and have been like this since the Middle Ages or before.

[Raga]

Ethnic Europeans is a convenient shorthand. It's easier to say than "ethnic French oh and also Anglo-Saxons oh and also ethnic Germans oh and also ethnic Italians, etc, etc, etc." There are some racist conspiracy theorists who really do mean some kind of global ethnicity by this, but pretending like this is what most people mean when they talk about this is willfully misconstruing what's being said so as to make it easier to dismiss. The overarching take home point is "developed ethnostates that pursue policies trying to keep their native ethnicity the main inhabitant of that state." People freak out when countries in Western Europe and the Anglosphere do this. Nobody cares that Japan or South Korea do this. Call that whatever you want to call it, but Vol isn't wrong to point out that it's a real thing. Why at the core is okay for Japan to say something like "We will never let the population of Japan be made up of more than 5% non Japanese people," but not for the UK or France or Germany or Sweden to do this? I'm also not talking about economics or what's *sensible.* This is very much framed in a right/wrong, immoral/moral kind of way most of the time.

@ Israel

There's a reason I said Zionism and not "Israeli policy." It's easy enough to criticize expansionist policy and still allow for the legitimacy of a Jewish state. But's there been a pretty marked flip in that there was once support for the establishment of an explicitly Jewish state because of the global plight of the Jews, and now there is growing sentiment that "a Jewish state" is intrinsically colonialist because by definition a Jewish state is not one which would ever allow non-Jews to outnumber or hold more power than Jews in its borders.

[Sinekein]

People don't say it's OK in Japan. There are a ton of people who idolize Japan in the West while completely ignoring many awful truths about Japanese society. A former colleague of mine lived there for four years as a postdoc student and praised the country while also pointing out that Japanese were crazy racist and that he never felt welcomed there despite coming as a highly qualified student - I'd say that is a rather healthy stance on the matter.

It's not mentioned because people either ignore it or figure that since it's happening 10k kilometers away from them it's not something they have much pull on and they should instead focus on the issues close to them.

It's not a matter of it being OK, it is mostly that it is not known and that many don't want their idealized Japan to be flawed. Just like they tend not to care much about the insane suicide rates or the consequences of the absurd repressed sexuality there. China is not a very welcoming country either to say the least, and it only has recently emerged that the way they treat minorities - Uighurs - is brutal. It's not that it was OK 10 years ago, it's just that most people didn't even know there were muslims in China. Aung San Suu Kyi is another example I could have used.

I will also add that Japan is in the shit due to its extreme rejection of immigration. Because while losing population might not be that much of an issue - the fact that those that will remain will be extremely old on average is.