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The 21st will be the Chinese century. Nebulafox on a few reasons why:
In the case of China, the true believer democracy-enthusiasts simply do not have the power to override the deep financial dealings that our bipartisan elites (this is far from limited to the wokesters, just look at McConnell’s wife) have with the Chinese government. If we were talking about Vladimir Putin’s Russia instead, which has no such financial or social pull, only nuclear weapons, then I’d be a bit more inclined to take the regime’s talk about Washington’s malign intentions at face value as genuine existential fear. But I suspect many people in Beijing know deep down that America’s elites do not seek the overthrow of the CCP, especially given their conditioning on how the media works.
That’s not to say that I *don’t* think the Chinese are genuinely worried about American intentions at all, mind, or that we wouldn’t try to weaken them. But this isn’t 2000. The Chinese populace tends to think “democracy” and visions of 1990s Russia or 2000s Iraq (or India) pop up in their mind. There’s no major discontent with the CCP. The Chinese are confident enough in the stability of their own government that they seriously see themselves as promoting an alternative to the American one globally, long-term. And honestly, if I were some aspiring African Kagame-style developmentarian, I’d take a good hard look at the US and question whether that’s something I want to imitate. That’s what the neocon/neoliberal crowd doesn’t get: you do a much more effective job by saying less and having your own ship in order.
The establishment talks a tough game regarding Russia because Russia has little leverage over elite American interests. China, on the other hand, has enormous leverage. Big bad Lebron James decrying putative social injustice in America assumes the fetal position like a little bitch when the CCP tells him to shut his stupid mouth.
The ship metaphor is a favorite. At the risk of sounding Petersonesque, it is better to quietly steady your own ship against the sea than it is to exert all your energy screaming at the storm as your rickety vessel takes on water.
Continuing on the topic of our future Sinitic overlords, who I too like a little bitch welcome, TG on how there is more to the US-China relationship than treasury holdings:
Perhaps it simply doesn’t matter what China does or does not do with US treasuries?
The corrupt US elites have gifted China with a massive industrial base. For a time, the rich in the US made a lot of money over all of that lovely cheap labor. But now China has real productive capacity, and the US has a debt-driven mirage. Sooner or later, China will just say “so long!” and it will all be over.
Not to worry though, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and the Walton family etc. will move to luxury gated estates and they’ll live out their lives in luxury that would have embarrassed Crassus. So, it’s all good.
Zuck isn’t going to let Pompey pull a fast one on him, though. He’ll ensure there is no question about who quelled the slave rebellion in the Americanique province. Who are the slaves, you ask? If you don’t know who the patsy at the table is…
To round things out, an audaciously shameless self-quote:
MMT is easier to understand than the way the federal government currently finances itself. In essence, MMT allows the TreasureFed to say it has however much money it deems necessary to have at any given time. If it feels there is too much money out there in private hands and it doesn’t want to cause price increases by arbitrarily increasing its own accounts to reduce the share of dollars in private hands, it raises taxes to suck money currently in private circulation out of the system. Taxation becomes an entirely monetary tool, not a revenue raising tool, since revenue need not be raised when it can simply be created, directly, at any time.
With MMT, the federal government doesn’t have to auction off debt. If it is holding $1 trillion but wants to hold $2 trillion, it simply changes its digital holdings from $1 trillion to $2 trillion and, voila, it has $2 trillion. If $2 trillion is held by rest of the public (ie not the federal government but including private individuals, companies, state and local governments, etc) and the federal government wants to reduce that to $1 trillion, it levies an additional $1 trillion in taxes and now the public only has $1 trillion. It can add that $1 trillion in taxes to its own balances if it wants to, but it can already do that whenever it feels like it without raising taxes, so it may instead elect to have that $1 trillion simply disappear.
If the rest of the world plays along with the MMT game, it’s an unbelievable coup. I’m fond of referring to its potential success as akin to having found the modern day Midas Touch. I’m highly skeptical the rest of the world will play along, but I unironically support MMT if we’re able to pull it off.
The TreasureFed has no way out of the QEternity trap it’s in under current arrangements without crashing the financial markets. Modern Monetary Theory theoretically offers a way out that. If it doesn’t break the dollar, it’s the way to go. If it breaks the dollar, well, the dollar is going to break anyway, so it’s still the way to go. And so it is the way we will go. As such, it’s worth familiarizing ourselves with MMT’s conceptual framework.
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I guess it depends on what your definition of “major” is.
Drastic Food Shortages in ChinaChinese Chairman Xi Jinping has come out officially acknowledging the food crisis in China by asking people not to waste food. China’s rice farmers are fighting insects and weeds the traditional way by bringing in hungry ducks. Meanwhile, China is facing serious shortages of both grains and pork. Months of flooding have wiped out the crops while insect infestations attack the rice fields. Then there is simultaneously the rapidly spreading African swine fever (ASF) which is now even starting to make its way into Europe. On top of all of this has been the orchestrated Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) which may have been deliberately leaked from the lab there by people who planned this take over of the world with a New Green World Order.As I have mentioned before, these people have succeeded in subjugating Europe. They need to overthrow Trump to subjugate the USA. They are seeking to force Western investors from hedge funds to pension funds to sell all Chinese investments to force them to comply with their demands. Trump could not dare talk about this prior to the election, for the media is in the pocket of these people and would call him a conspiracy nut not worthy of the office. Investigating all the people behind this convenient plan must be done carefully. I believe that the media MUST be ordered to be unbiased and present both sides or they lose their license as propaganda.Everything is metastable, and it appears some things are going to get more meta than others.Replies: @Daniel Chieh
In the long run, China doesn’t need the U.S. for anything. The U.S. is just in its way, and will be an ever smaller obstacle as time passes.
It's quite possible that quality of life in the US will deteriorate for many years amidst overcrowding and increasing diversity and degeneracy, even as the regime in DC grows in power. If we imagine that instead of the US splintering, we have mostly uninterrupted and unified control of government by Democrats for an age, then Washington's absolute ability to project power may well increase as the century goes on.Replies: @Hypnotoad666
TBH, AE, I sometimes question how right I am on that. I’m not an expert, or even all that well educated, just a random commentator here.
One thing I’m picking up from Tanner Greer’s blog is that ideology does play a tremendous role in how Xi views the world: I always assumed that, like Deng Xiaoping (whose eldest son was tortured and crippled for life in front of his eyes by Red Guards), he couldn’t possibly be nostalgic for the Mao era, but I was wrong. I can actually see how that is very plausible, especially in the context of an increasingly materialistic and “soft” society. I don’t think that necessarily means conflict is inevitable-it wasn’t with the Soviets, who held fears about American intentions that were no less existential well into the 1980s-but I do find the thesis of China wanting to “opt out” of the traditional US dominant world order and pose an alternative. Hell, all you need to do is look at the popularity of soft eugenics thinking in Beijing to understand how divorced they’ve become from the traditional global order. And while I don’t want to sound like a Beijing apologist, but that traditional order has indeed failed. One thing to disagree with what a foreign government is saying, another to insist they are crazy or delusional. (But then again, the Beltway still can’t understand why North Korea and Iran are, in fact, not crazy for developing nuclear programs just because they take seriously stuff like racial nationalism or religion.)
Anyway, I don’t think it is just a matter of interests, but social ties as well. Chinese elites have a lot more industrial ties with the US economy, whereas Russia is predominantly oil based and has a lot more hold in, say, Berlin. And it was not uncommon for the kids of Chinese elites to end up at Harvard and taking internships with McKinsey. Russia’s elite kids, from my understanding, are more likely to be based in Europe to the extent they leave the country at all.
Speaking more broadly, the heft that personal ties with the mandarinate can hold in foreign policy is not just limited to China: part of the reason Pakistan has traditionally punched above its weight in the Beltway is the personal relationships they have within the MI complex. Pakistan does not send dummies to West Point. Until the last decade when Big Tech became a dominant force within Washington, India couldn’t match them because the elite kids who ended up in America were more likely to end up at Caltech or MIT. I don’t know why, maybe the Congress prince types were still focused on landing positions in London?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl959QnD3lM
Peace.Replies: @nebulafox, @nebulafox
Just because you think the global order is crumbling or has failed to deliver on its promises doesn’t make you an apologist for Xi’s China. I think people around here are more nuanced than that. I found your analysis helpful personally in understanding the situation. A example of “soft eugenics” would be appreciated.
Take away; Putin’s Russia is predominantly oil…and based:
Peace.
That being said, even the MSM can't deny it anymore.
https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c
This is coupled with barely veiled state encouragement for middle class Han to be more fertile. Eugenics does not have the same stigma in East Asia that it does in the West: most parents would not hesitate to abort retarded children, even in Japan or Korea. I'm sure you can use your imagination for what this means given the degree of progress genetics and biological engineering research in China have attained over the last decade.
As another example, Singapore's immigration system tacitly revolves around keeping the Han solidly demographically dominant and-very subtly-keeping the Malays in check. It's not a secret that the Malays lag behind in professional attainment and the like, and Singapore's leadership going back to LKY barely disguised their social Darwinian beliefs, including HBD-esque racial views. Singaporean Malay birth-rates, BTW, are below replacement level, but nowhere near as much as the other ethnic groups. So, practically, since Singaporean Chinese have the lowest birth rates in the world, this means mass immigration from mainland China, as Singapore has already tapped the Indonesian and Malaysian Chinese as far as they could. Native Singaporeans of all races are not big fans of the new arrivals, who were subject to none of the intensive social coaching that LKY pushed on Singaporean Chinese in the 1970s and 1980s.
(Calling the Malays stupid as some ethnic Chinese do is unfair, IMO: they are simply a middle of the pack on global standards IQed race competing with two of the highest IQed contingents on earth in Southeastern Chinese and Tamils. They are also a culture which is devoted more to religion and family than professional attainment. There are drawbacks to that, but also benefits: you'll never meet more loyal, stick-by-you people than Malays, and on the whole, they seem happier than Chinese on average despite earning less. It's worth noting that religion is not as much of a factor as assumed on the surface: the local Indian Muslims have no appreciable difference in test scores, education, or professional attainment than their Hindu co-ethnics here.)
That being said, even the MSM can't deny it anymore, despite their aversion to implying that Racism Is Found Outside The West.
https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c
This is coupled with barely veiled state encouragement for middle class Han to be more fertile. Eugenics does not have the same stigma in East Asia that it does in the West: most parents would not hesitate to abort retarded children, even in Japan or Korea. I'm sure you can use your imagination for what this means given the degree of progress genetics and biological engineering research in China have attained over the last decade.
As another example, Singapore's immigration system tacitly revolves around keeping the Han solidly demographically dominant and-very subtly-keeping the Malays in check. It's not a secret that the Malays lag behind in professional attainment and the like, and Singapore's leadership going back to LKY barely disguised their social Darwinian beliefs, including HBD-esque racial views. Singaporean Malay birth-rates, BTW, are below replacement level, but nowhere near as much as the other ethnic groups. So, practically, since Singaporean Chinese have the lowest birth rates in the world, this means mass immigration from mainland China, as Singapore has already tapped the Indonesian and Malaysian Chinese as far as they could. Native Singaporeans of all races are not big fans of the new arrivals, who were subject to none of the intensive social coaching that LKY pushed on Singaporean Chinese in the 1970s and 1980s.
(Calling the Malays stupid as some ethnic Chinese do is unfair, IMO: they are simply a middle of the pack on global standards IQed race competing with two of the highest IQed contingents on earth in Southeastern Chinese and Tamils. They are also a culture which is devoted more to religion and family than professional attainment. There are drawbacks to that, but also benefits: you'll never meet more loyal, stick-by-you people than Malays, and on the whole, they seem happier than Chinese on average despite earning less. It's worth noting that religion is not as much of a factor as assumed on the surface: the local Indian Muslims have no appreciable difference in test scores, education, or professional attainment than their Hindu co-ethnics here.)Replies: @Talha, @songbird, @Mungerite
It is good that you recognize MMT as a form of colonialism, and that it is only possible if other countries “play along”. MMT is not the way to go and will do more harm to America than good.
First off, what are we going to spend the money on? Do you nievely think it will be spent on Americans? Or do you recognize that MMT sucks the wealth out of foreign countries? So that excess money will need to go to the military to be sure that countries “play along”.
MMT introduces moral hazard, where something for nothing misaligns productive capacity into the wrong industries.
The only way forward for America is a hard reset and to take our medicine and not rely on tricks to bring our house in order.
Colonialism. I might ask who is being colonized right NOW.
We already have MMT but the only people that get the free money are those who have lots of it already and FED friends.
"...First off, what are we going to spend the money on?..."
He maybe we can own all the productive assets in the country like the wealthy do now because they used FED zero interest loans to buy EVERYTHING. Wouldn't it be better if the population that was on the hook for the money supply actually got the benefits of it?
"...Or do you recognize that MMT sucks the wealth out of foreign countries?..."
What??? No. Even if it does better to put it into the public's pocket rather than the Oligarchs.
"MMT introduces moral hazard, where something for nothing misaligns productive capacity into the wrong industries."
Maybe but better in my pocket than in the Oligarchs.
Let's not pretend the FED system is not some crack head thinking stupidity because it is. A system where all money is borrowed. All of it and the only way to pay back the interest is...borrow more money. What stupidity. The end result is it will fail because you can never pay off the interest. We are approaching that point now. The Chinese and Japanese, not being idiots or run by blackmailing pedo Jews, run their own FED and when the debt gets too high they just zero a portion of it out. Which sound a great deal like MMT, and is, and China is booming. Japan while greatly slowing down because their population is so old is far from collapsing.
"The only way forward for America is a hard reset and to take our medicine and not rely on tricks to bring our house in order."
How about we take all the assets bought up by the banks and their lackies since the housing crisis. I've heard numbers of $39 Trillion but it wouldn't surprise me if it was much more. They got $6 trillion recently. Let's let them take the hard reset FIRST. The US population has been stuck on a hard reset for decades already.
This “America gifted its industrial base to China” argument does not seem valid. China is a large country with a relatively more advanced race of people than a lot of other places, so it was bound to build up its economy after the crazy turmoil it had for a century. America at the same time was increasingly replacing its population with inferior races and inferior societal ideologies, so it is bound to lose its productive power with time. Besides all that, the American economy could not be like it was in 1945, with time the rest of the world is not going remain a ruined economic backwater forever.
It could be said that the US (and its allies/vassals) could have made moves to delay (but not entirely deny) the growth of Chinese industry and the decline of its own. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether it should have; either way I wouldn't label this as a top 10 problem facing Western Civilization today.
China had a lot of labor and a lot of potential, but it was capital-starved. It's fully rational behavior that capital will seek out such places over time, like air seeking to fill a vacuum. For the record, the US has been a net importer of capital for basically its entire history -- American industrialization was largely funded with British capital. You can try to tame capital for the sake of other national interests, but there's a big difference between saying that capital was insufficiently restricted in pursuing the profit motive and saying that infrastructure was "gifted".
"Gifting" infrastructure is probably a more apt description of what the colonial powers did with Africa, and possibly what China has been doing with Africa in recent years -- a policy choice not really motivated by rational economic behavior.
China has a large trade surplus, how would this trade surplus exist if not for the gutting of Western manufacturing and willingness of the Western elite to turn their own nations into a dumping ground for cheap goods? Who would they sell their stuff to without the West being so easy on them? Perhaps they might have sold some trinkets to the Third World, but the Third World back then was very poor so not much money would have been made in that manner.
The actual implication of MMT is that monetary policy isn’t nearly as important as claimed, and that what determines fiscal policy, “political determinations,” we’ll call them, are factors which macroeconomists(including all MMTers) have almost nothing to say about.
Permanent zero percent interest rates is something that MMTer Warren Mosler advocates and is what happens naturally.
I am skeptical of the idea that a country which quietly steadies its own ship is one which poor countries will emulate. It sounds like a reasonable idea, but when has it ever been the case in history? Why did any countries ever emulate the Soviet Union? What excites people is “soft power,” money, novelty, or an altar to collectively sacrifice themselves upon.
Even the most China hating politician in America went into a business with a Chinese state owned enterprise.
Steve Bannon also has a connection. He joined a failed online game gold mining startup and lived in Shanghai in the 2000s. Both Bannon and Pompeo are also similar in that they weren’t particularly successful as businessmen. Pompeo entered Congress with a net worth of $500k and Bannon probably has a 7 digit net worth. Much is made about his Seinfeld residuals but it’s like $50k a year.
Since we tend to associate red with communism, how did the Repubes manage to lose control of blue. The thumbnail of this video from 1980 would today make a Repub soil his boxers.
BTW, there are a lot of great old ads in this …
This is a great post, I like how China, lacking both soft and hard power, manages to turn so many a strong man into a little bitch. On a more serious note, to me, this gets to the heart of your “dollar death” theme. Because the only possible replacement for the dollar is the yuan, all other major currencies are more fundamentally flawed than the dollar itself. Problem is, this will only happen when China is ready for it to happen, since it entails the opening of capital accounts and making the yuan fully convertible. And the Chinese think very long term, decades, centuries even, and there’s no indication they are in any rush.
Laughable, the Chinese century has been cancelled. Their economy is screwed, the entire world is turning their backs on them, and as they learned in their recent skirmishes with India, their military is ineffectual. It’s just another aging, unmotivated country with no direction and a dysfunctional, asexual population of hermaphroditic toads. Lots and lots of online propaganda though.
Realistically thinking and planning in 20 year terms sure but not centuries.
I agree.
It could be said that the US (and its allies/vassals) could have made moves to delay (but not entirely deny) the growth of Chinese industry and the decline of its own. I don’t really have a strong opinion on whether it should have; either way I wouldn’t label this as a top 10 problem facing Western Civilization today.
China had a lot of labor and a lot of potential, but it was capital-starved. It’s fully rational behavior that capital will seek out such places over time, like air seeking to fill a vacuum. For the record, the US has been a net importer of capital for basically its entire history — American industrialization was largely funded with British capital. You can try to tame capital for the sake of other national interests, but there’s a big difference between saying that capital was insufficiently restricted in pursuing the profit motive and saying that infrastructure was “gifted”.
“Gifting” infrastructure is probably a more apt description of what the colonial powers did with Africa, and possibly what China has been doing with Africa in recent years — a policy choice not really motivated by rational economic behavior.
Case in point:
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/markets-by-sector/agriculture/china-drastic-food-shortages/
Drastic Food Shortages in China
Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping has come out officially acknowledging the food crisis in China by asking people not to waste food. China’s rice farmers are fighting insects and weeds the traditional way by bringing in hungry ducks. Meanwhile, China is facing serious shortages of both grains and pork. Months of flooding have wiped out the crops while insect infestations attack the rice fields. Then there is simultaneously the rapidly spreading African swine fever (ASF) which is now even starting to make its way into Europe. On top of all of this has been the orchestrated Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) which may have been deliberately leaked from the lab there by people who planned this take over of the world with a New Green World Order.
As I have mentioned before, these people have succeeded in subjugating Europe. They need to overthrow Trump to subjugate the USA. They are seeking to force Western investors from hedge funds to pension funds to sell all Chinese investments to force them to comply with their demands. Trump could not dare talk about this prior to the election, for the media is in the pocket of these people and would call him a conspiracy nut not worthy of the office. Investigating all the people behind this convenient plan must be done carefully. I believe that the media MUST be ordered to be unbiased and present both sides or they lose their license as propaganda.
Everything is metastable, and it appears some things are going to get more meta than others.
*one of the most amusing articles was one that showed Western sources predicting the collapse of China for every year since 2005. 15 years later of being wrong, China is still on the verge of collapse any time now.Replies: @Ash Williams, @Sam J.
Hi there CCP!
This might be true in the very long run, but I think as far as the 21st century is concerned, China kind of looks like it’s reaching a near-term peak. The reason being that its productivity gains are slowing, even as its labor force seems to have peaked in size, and its total population will peak soon as well. So the CCP’s absolute power in terms of resources at its command may basically be stagnating, with any gains in productivity offset by declines in the size of its labor force.
It’s quite possible that quality of life in the US will deteriorate for many years amidst overcrowding and increasing diversity and degeneracy, even as the regime in DC grows in power. If we imagine that instead of the US splintering, we have mostly uninterrupted and unified control of government by Democrats for an age, then Washington’s absolute ability to project power may well increase as the century goes on.
But the real question is how much will its productivity growth rate slow down as it converges with the West? And where will it come to rest, relative to the U.S.?
But China's economy could still grow 300% if it can get to South Korean productivity levels, or 400% if it can get to those of Japan. So it's still got a lot of room even without population growth.Replies: @Wency
China is playing a very dangerous game – trying to show Africans that they are not racists. You can see it in films such as Wolfwarrior 2 and Dragon Blade I imagine one can see it in the number of educational visas they grant to Africans. It is a game that the West played – and lost.
I’m not sure that Chinese have the acumen to play. Compare the pithy “antisemite” to the clunky “hurts the feelings of the Chinese people.” It seems to me that the only winning move is not to play.
And they seem distracted by the red herring of military power. The real destructive power of the US lies in its ability to export culture. Some believe that the Chinese are psychologically immune to this negative influence, but China, despite its apparent wealth and power, is in a different stage of development than the US. There are older people in China who have never used soap because it wasn’t available to them when they were young, and they aren’t in the habit of using it. Potable tap water is uncommon. The Chinese are not yet as soft as they will be.
https://mobile.twitter.com/IsmailRoyer/status/1305478207353872384
As in the Saudi example, the political aspect is not as troubling to the elites. If they can get you to liberalize socially, then they know that whoever is in charge temporarily wins short term, but they will win out on the cultural/social front long term and that will naturally trickle up anyway given enough time.
Peace.Replies: @songbird
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fsud8Sqsh8I&ab_channel=SonsOfYusuf
I posted this a while back:
Even Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore is struggling with this:LKY’s right-hand man, Goh Keng Swee (Wealth of East Asian Nations) as well:Replies: @Talha, @songbird
I disagree, China would have no reason to build up such large industries if Western elite had not completely moved manufacturing to China as well as discouraged Western countries from practising protectionism in all areas, although they are now belatedly waking up as we see with 5G and TikTok.
China has a large trade surplus, how would this trade surplus exist if not for the gutting of Western manufacturing and willingness of the Western elite to turn their own nations into a dumping ground for cheap goods? Who would they sell their stuff to without the West being so easy on them? Perhaps they might have sold some trinkets to the Third World, but the Third World back then was very poor so not much money would have been made in that manner.
I'm not sure that Chinese have the acumen to play. Compare the pithy "antisemite" to the clunky "hurts the feelings of the Chinese people." It seems to me that the only winning move is not to play.
And they seem distracted by the red herring of military power. The real destructive power of the US lies in its ability to export culture. Some believe that the Chinese are psychologically immune to this negative influence, but China, despite its apparent wealth and power, is in a different stage of development than the US. There are older people in China who have never used soap because it wasn't available to them when they were young, and they aren't in the habit of using it. Potable tap water is uncommon. The Chinese are not yet as soft as they will be.Replies: @The Spirit of Enoch Powell, @Talha, @Yahya K., @anonymous
It is mostly to build soft power with the African Union, to contrast the tolerant and progressive China with bigoted and backwards AmeriKKKa. Chinese are in reality very ethnocentric and wouldn’t stand for mass migration from the Third World into China. They are also very anti-black.
I'm not sure that Chinese have the acumen to play. Compare the pithy "antisemite" to the clunky "hurts the feelings of the Chinese people." It seems to me that the only winning move is not to play.
And they seem distracted by the red herring of military power. The real destructive power of the US lies in its ability to export culture. Some believe that the Chinese are psychologically immune to this negative influence, but China, despite its apparent wealth and power, is in a different stage of development than the US. There are older people in China who have never used soap because it wasn't available to them when they were young, and they aren't in the habit of using it. Potable tap water is uncommon. The Chinese are not yet as soft as they will be.Replies: @The Spirit of Enoch Powell, @Talha, @Yahya K., @anonymous
This. And it is the way that it is done, through deals that seem like they are making concessions.
https://mobile.twitter.com/IsmailRoyer/status/1305478207353872384
As in the Saudi example, the political aspect is not as troubling to the elites. If they can get you to liberalize socially, then they know that whoever is in charge temporarily wins short term, but they will win out on the cultural/social front long term and that will naturally trickle up anyway given enough time.
Peace.
I mean, when studios owned a lot of theaters, it was easy to picket them. Then the government said that was monopolistic, so they became a lot harder to picket. TV came around - it was cleaner, at first, even with the Motion Picture Production Code, but people who made movies got an excuse that they had to differentiate the product, win people back to the theaters, so rules were loosened, and then nearly abolished. Movies which were focused on America (they used to reshoot English films) became more universal, they got a bigger audience. Cable came along, with more channels, and loosened things for TV, and now many of the commercials on broadcast TV would not even pass the old Motion Picture Production Code.
Netflix seems like the culmination of it all. They don't have any commercial sponsors to potentially boycott. You can't picket the theater because it's in people's homes all over the world. They save money on distribution, so they can pour it back into content production, pushing the boundaries more. And other big, evil companies, like Disney, are taking lessons from them.Replies: @Talha
True to a certain extent. But you also have to remember that the US isn’t the only player in the game. Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Europe were just as instrumental, if not more, in building up China’s industrial base.
And I don’t think it’s fair to ascribe all of it to “corruption” and self-dealing. I’m sure some of it was, but you have to remember that the neo-liberal consensus at the time was that free trade is good for everyone, and would help democratize the world eventually. That could have been a mistaken belief, but its best to ascribe their motives to stupidity rather than malice (occam’s razor).
Ultimately, I think China’s rise was an inevitable. Even if the US didn’t trade with them, the rest of the world probably would have. The rise would have been slower, but it would have happened all the same. You’re not going to keep the sleeping dragon with 1.4 billion high-IQ people down forever.
To paraphrase: The dogs may bark, the dragon moves on…
China does not have universal rule of law.
China does not have secure private property rights.
China does not have free capital markets.
A centrally directed economy cannot produce as much value as a free capitalist economy.
It can not respond to changes as quickly and effectively.
It was easy for China to post double digit GDP growth when they were switching from smelting iron in their back yard to copying western industry and western data science (things invented in a free capitalistic society). They do not have a system that rewards creating value. Everything is politically directed and subject to political incentives.
When Bezos created Amazon he did not have to have to have weekly meetings with the Mayor’s man, and the Governor’s man, and the FTC, and the IRS and his senator. Maybe now he lobbies as he’s a fat target, but when he created it he was free to conduct business as he saw fit.
More so than the West, I think China has tapped into the materialist lowest common denominator in much of human society. And I think they may well outstrip the West in that regard within our lifetimes and show everyone what impressive heights materialism and technological progress can reach when all other concerns take a back seat.
Peace.Replies: @Daniel Chieh
for example, "group buying"--where many people aggregate their purchasing power to secure favorable rates comparable to wholesale--is commonplace in China; we haven't even scratched the surface. ditto Livestreamed Shopping--think QVC, except done by anybody.
in conclusion, you're a clueless boomer working from assumptions at least 30 years out of date. OUR INSTITUTIONS MAKE US GREAT, DURR!Replies: @utu
I'm not sure that Chinese have the acumen to play. Compare the pithy "antisemite" to the clunky "hurts the feelings of the Chinese people." It seems to me that the only winning move is not to play.
And they seem distracted by the red herring of military power. The real destructive power of the US lies in its ability to export culture. Some believe that the Chinese are psychologically immune to this negative influence, but China, despite its apparent wealth and power, is in a different stage of development than the US. There are older people in China who have never used soap because it wasn't available to them when they were young, and they aren't in the habit of using it. Potable tap water is uncommon. The Chinese are not yet as soft as they will be.Replies: @The Spirit of Enoch Powell, @Talha, @Yahya K., @anonymous
No-one is immune.
I posted this a while back:
Even Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore is struggling with this:
LKY’s right-hand man, Goh Keng Swee (Wealth of East Asian Nations) as well:
Imagine someone trying to create Amazon under stakeholder capitalism:
You: my idea is people order stuff online and I deliver it to their door. Less cost and faster.
Handler: What about communities of color which are often underserved by internet providers. How will they order? You will have to accept telephone and mail orders to treat then equally. And many inner city buildings will not accept and hold packages for residents. You will have to arrange delivery to local stores who will hold products and release them to the rightful owner. And many people are underbanked and have no credit card or bank account or vemo, you will have to accept cash. So if you use Sears business model, OK, you can open.
China does not have secure private property rights.
China does not have free capital markets.A centrally directed economy cannot produce as much value as a free capitalist economy.
It can not respond to changes as quickly and effectively. It was easy for China to post double digit GDP growth when they were switching from smelting iron in their back yard to copying western industry and western data science (things invented in a free capitalistic society). They do not have a system that rewards creating value. Everything is politically directed and subject to political incentives. When Bezos created Amazon he did not have to have to have weekly meetings with the Mayor's man, and the Governor's man, and the FTC, and the IRS and his senator. Maybe now he lobbies as he's a fat target, but when he created it he was free to conduct business as he saw fit.Replies: @Talha, @Big Dick Bandit
Well yeah, if they can tell you how many babies you’re allowed to have, you have higher level concerns about government intrusion than whether you can own your own bicycle or not.
From what it seems, they do; the value creation is simply circumscribed by political concerns. I think you can do whatever you want as long as the value you create is only material and does not lead to any loss of power by the party which seems to give a wide (enough) berth to dock that ship.
More so than the West, I think China has tapped into the materialist lowest common denominator in much of human society. And I think they may well outstrip the West in that regard within our lifetimes and show everyone what impressive heights materialism and technological progress can reach when all other concerns take a back seat.
Peace.
China’s only strategy is getting Biden elected.
They are in a lot of trouble.
PEACE 😇
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fsud8Sqsh8I&ab_channel=SonsOfYusuf
I posted this a while back:
Even Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore is struggling with this:LKY’s right-hand man, Goh Keng Swee (Wealth of East Asian Nations) as well:Replies: @Talha, @songbird
And here lies the difficulty, because these ideologies have their own view of right/wrong and their own heroes and villains and mythos. In a globalized world, how does one ground it in something more than simply and accident of birth based on which borders one was born inside?
Gangsta rap from the hard streets of Singapore!
Wa salaam.
It's quite possible that quality of life in the US will deteriorate for many years amidst overcrowding and increasing diversity and degeneracy, even as the regime in DC grows in power. If we imagine that instead of the US splintering, we have mostly uninterrupted and unified control of government by Democrats for an age, then Washington's absolute ability to project power may well increase as the century goes on.Replies: @Hypnotoad666
For the past 40 years, China had an easy time picking low hanging fruit by importing technology and capital while exploiting its cheap labor and high savings rate. For the reasons you say, it could be all played out — like Japan in 1990.
But the real question is how much will its productivity growth rate slow down as it converges with the West? And where will it come to rest, relative to the U.S.?
But China’s economy could still grow 300% if it can get to South Korean productivity levels, or 400% if it can get to those of Japan. So it’s still got a lot of room even without population growth.
The other question that needs to be raised is how long populations can exist with crushingly low TFRs. There has been some debate on this elsewhere on this site, but really no one knows. I think accepting low TFRs and refusing to accept immigrants is a better long run move for the people, but upside-down population pyramids are not a good thing in the short run. They seem to be a negative for economic development, and China will have to deal with one as a much poorer country than Korea or Japan.
So in the short-to-medium term, and particularly from a geopolitics perspective, I guess I don't think the open borders economists are entirely wrong here. The US does manage to generally integrate its immigrants into taxpaying citizens of its corporate economy. And with a labor force that keeps growing compared to a Chinese one that is set to shrink at an accelerating rate, the US could very easily have over 50% the labor force size of China by 2100, compared to less than 25% today.Replies: @Talha, @scrivener3
More so than the West, I think China has tapped into the materialist lowest common denominator in much of human society. And I think they may well outstrip the West in that regard within our lifetimes and show everyone what impressive heights materialism and technological progress can reach when all other concerns take a back seat.
Peace.Replies: @Daniel Chieh
“Materialist” or not, China seems most likely to advance to genetically engineering intelligence. A biosingularity society has very little concern for anything else if it gains a foothold on such.
Peace.
We don't know that this is the ticket. We've go a lot of smart people making bad decisions.Replies: @Daniel Chieh, @Talha
Drastic Food Shortages in ChinaChinese Chairman Xi Jinping has come out officially acknowledging the food crisis in China by asking people not to waste food. China’s rice farmers are fighting insects and weeds the traditional way by bringing in hungry ducks. Meanwhile, China is facing serious shortages of both grains and pork. Months of flooding have wiped out the crops while insect infestations attack the rice fields. Then there is simultaneously the rapidly spreading African swine fever (ASF) which is now even starting to make its way into Europe. On top of all of this has been the orchestrated Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) which may have been deliberately leaked from the lab there by people who planned this take over of the world with a New Green World Order.As I have mentioned before, these people have succeeded in subjugating Europe. They need to overthrow Trump to subjugate the USA. They are seeking to force Western investors from hedge funds to pension funds to sell all Chinese investments to force them to comply with their demands. Trump could not dare talk about this prior to the election, for the media is in the pocket of these people and would call him a conspiracy nut not worthy of the office. Investigating all the people behind this convenient plan must be done carefully. I believe that the media MUST be ordered to be unbiased and present both sides or they lose their license as propaganda.Everything is metastable, and it appears some things are going to get more meta than others.Replies: @Daniel Chieh
Food waste controls have to do with fighting “displays of wealth” by the wealthy who literally waste food in order to demonstrate their wealth, and little to do with impending starvation, though just like all other collapses of China*, that certainly won’t let you be dissuaded.
*one of the most amusing articles was one that showed Western sources predicting the collapse of China for every year since 2005. 15 years later of being wrong, China is still on the verge of collapse any time now.
Except that the only reason you would suppress this is b/c some people are having a hard time affording food, which breeds resentment.
Or are they also discouraging rich people driving fancy cars?I don't think China will collapse, just the CCP.Replies: @Daniel Chieh
China will not collapse. Mainly because they seem to have realized that a prosperous economy is made by high energy use. Assuming it's not all wasted, the conversion of matter with energy IS an advanced economy and the Chinese are pushing advanced reactors to keep this energy cost low.
It is the apex of Technopoly and its inevitable outcome; and the Chinese seem primed in position to lead the way to human v2.0.
Peace.
Mr. Epigone says:
The TreasureFed has no way out of the QEternity trap it’s in under current arrangements without crashing the financial markets. Modern Monetary Theory theoretically offers a way out that. If it doesn’t break the dollar, it’s the way to go. If it breaks the dollar, well, the dollar is going to break anyway, so it’s still the way to go. And so it is the way we will go. As such, it’s worth familiarizing ourselves with MMT’s conceptual framework.
I said in 2015:
The CHARLES PEWITT write-in campaign for president of the USA has taken bold stands on the China Question and those stands must be reiterated to compare and contrast with the other candidates running.
China was used by the JEW/WASP Ruling Class of the American Empire for labor arbitrage and for financialization purposes and to further destroy the sovereignty of the USA.
Trump and the rancid Republican Party have taken nothing but ineffectual measures to curb the frisky Chinese and Mitch McConnell is making money through his wife’s family’s very open commercial and political connections to the CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY. Mitch McConnell is a treasonous politician who voted for Ronny Reagan’s 1986 amnesty for illegal alien invaders and McConnell is in bed with the Chinese Communist Party.
I wrote this in November of 2017:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/trump-in-china/#comment-2071113
Trump has been as weak as a rotting pile of soybeans in his putrid dealings with the Chinese Communist Party. Trump should have politically and rhetorically destroyed the treasonous China First faction in the USA and Trump should have cut off all contact with the Chinese Communist Party — except for military-to-military contact — but Trump listened to the slobs in the China First gang at the Wall Street Journal and the money-grubbers who profit from cheap Chinese labor and Trump went soft on China.
I wrote this in November of 2017 about China and the JEW/WASP Ruling Class of the American Empire:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/trump-in-china/#comment-2071113
The only way is through religion.
I don’t think values can be inculcated through some generic teaching of ‘ethics’ in schools, as LKY seems to imply. It has to be religion based, and parentally inculcated for it to stick.
The Chinese are going to turn their country into a mega-sized Singapore.
Salam.
when China holds US debts that USA has China in its hand. When the USA says: we won’t pay it back China looses a fortune can do nothing about it.
I personally don’t really see another serious way that will stick long term; ethics is downhill from existential purpose. If you don’t really have a good answer for the latter, trying to ground details like ethics is like building an edifice on mud.
I think they can surpass Singapore since Singapore has concerns like making sure sizeable minority ethnic populations can get along. Singapore doesn’t also seem willing to become a hyper security-state; at least not from what I’ve seen thus far. They seem to still have some left over from British influence (as you mentioned, Goh Keng Swee said “regard for individual liberty” was an admirable thing).
Also, in Singapore only around 15-20% report having no religion (and Christianity and Islam, combined, hold significant a 1/3 stake) whereas in China over 50% report having no religion. Leads to different outcomes obviously.
Wa salaam.
China seems most likely to advance to genetically engineering intelligence.
We don’t know that this is the ticket. We’ve go a lot of smart people making bad decisions.
Peace.
We don't know that this is the ticket. We've go a lot of smart people making bad decisions.Replies: @Daniel Chieh, @Talha
For everything else, catgirls.
Guide to coping in the New Chinese Century:
I’m reminded of a recent instance when a reporter asked Orban if he wants to be like western countries and he just laughed. There is no universally applicable system, to each (country), its own.
One has to give credit where credit is due.
Thanks to Trump, “Western” is now a meaningless term. “Left” and “Right” are also deceased.
— Does Orban want to be a deranged, genocidal, “Western” SJW Muslim Globalist like Mutti Mullah Merkel? Of course not.
— Does Orban want to be a “Western” Christian Populist like Trump? Yes.
Orban laughed at the reporter, because the question was inherently vague & thus stupid. Those who use the term “Western“, like CNN’s The Saker, will always return failed analysis.
PEACE 😇
China’s downhill slide to oblivion continues…
PEACE 😇
.
China does not have secure private property rights.
China does not have free capital markets.A centrally directed economy cannot produce as much value as a free capitalist economy.
It can not respond to changes as quickly and effectively. It was easy for China to post double digit GDP growth when they were switching from smelting iron in their back yard to copying western industry and western data science (things invented in a free capitalistic society). They do not have a system that rewards creating value. Everything is politically directed and subject to political incentives. When Bezos created Amazon he did not have to have to have weekly meetings with the Mayor's man, and the Governor's man, and the FTC, and the IRS and his senator. Maybe now he lobbies as he's a fat target, but when he created it he was free to conduct business as he saw fit.Replies: @Talha, @Big Dick Bandit
TenCent, Ali Baba, TikTok….these are 3 of the most important new tech companies in the last few decades. China is light years ahead of America when it comes to e-commerce innovation (yes, i’m including Amazon) because they went straight to mobile and skipped the whole PC era; that direct leap enabled them to innovate much more rapidly than us.
for example, “group buying”–where many people aggregate their purchasing power to secure favorable rates comparable to wholesale–is commonplace in China; we haven’t even scratched the surface. ditto Livestreamed Shopping–think QVC, except done by anybody.
in conclusion, you’re a clueless boomer working from assumptions at least 30 years out of date. OUR INSTITUTIONS MAKE US GREAT, DURR!
PEACE 😇
.
https://twitter.com/GordonGChang/status/1305481572943044609?s=20Replies: @Daniel Chieh
Gordon Chang predicts China collapse every year since 2001.
for example, "group buying"--where many people aggregate their purchasing power to secure favorable rates comparable to wholesale--is commonplace in China; we haven't even scratched the surface. ditto Livestreamed Shopping--think QVC, except done by anybody.
in conclusion, you're a clueless boomer working from assumptions at least 30 years out of date. OUR INSTITUTIONS MAKE US GREAT, DURR!Replies: @utu
Is China ahead also in internet scams?
I'm not sure that Chinese have the acumen to play. Compare the pithy "antisemite" to the clunky "hurts the feelings of the Chinese people." It seems to me that the only winning move is not to play.
And they seem distracted by the red herring of military power. The real destructive power of the US lies in its ability to export culture. Some believe that the Chinese are psychologically immune to this negative influence, but China, despite its apparent wealth and power, is in a different stage of development than the US. There are older people in China who have never used soap because it wasn't available to them when they were young, and they aren't in the habit of using it. Potable tap water is uncommon. The Chinese are not yet as soft as they will be.Replies: @The Spirit of Enoch Powell, @Talha, @Yahya K., @anonymous
Trying to invest in soft power with Africa through education scholarships doesn’t sound like a beneficial initiative but it’s working. In African countries with education orientated middle classes like Ghana and Zambia there are several thousand tuition paying students sent by each country each year. I don’t see what China can gain from soft power in Africa. Resources are obviously better spent on gaining soft power in Asia.
Their offspring will inevitably ask the question, "Am I Chinese?" And some people will answer, "Yes, due to your obvious love of China, you are even more Chinese than the rest of us." And that sort of thing makes it difficult to have borders.
With that in mind, I think it costs too much.
MMT would instakill the world economy. Don’t think even the most rabid pro-american pozzistans would play along.
Michael Hudson’s system, however…
All China has to do is sell the debt. Preferably to american allies. Ultimate subversion
We don't know that this is the ticket. We've go a lot of smart people making bad decisions.Replies: @Daniel Chieh, @Talha
Intelligence does not equate to wisdom.
Peace.
That would be India.
https://mobile.twitter.com/IsmailRoyer/status/1305478207353872384
As in the Saudi example, the political aspect is not as troubling to the elites. If they can get you to liberalize socially, then they know that whoever is in charge temporarily wins short term, but they will win out on the cultural/social front long term and that will naturally trickle up anyway given enough time.
Peace.Replies: @songbird
When streaming was new, I thought it might disrupt the entertainment industry. Maybe, somehow lead to more moral content. Guess I was pretty naive. It doesn’t match historical trends.
I mean, when studios owned a lot of theaters, it was easy to picket them. Then the government said that was monopolistic, so they became a lot harder to picket. TV came around – it was cleaner, at first, even with the Motion Picture Production Code, but people who made movies got an excuse that they had to differentiate the product, win people back to the theaters, so rules were loosened, and then nearly abolished. Movies which were focused on America (they used to reshoot English films) became more universal, they got a bigger audience. Cable came along, with more channels, and loosened things for TV, and now many of the commercials on broadcast TV would not even pass the old Motion Picture Production Code.
Netflix seems like the culmination of it all. They don’t have any commercial sponsors to potentially boycott. You can’t picket the theater because it’s in people’s homes all over the world. They save money on distribution, so they can pour it back into content production, pushing the boundaries more. And other big, evil companies, like Disney, are taking lessons from them.
Let others pay them to destroy their own families, one need not participate in that self-destructive garbage.
Peace.Replies: @songbird, @Audacious Epigone
Trouble is that it will help erode Chinese identity. Some of the male students will knock-up Chinese women. It has basically happened everywhere these programs have been in place.
Their offspring will inevitably ask the question, “Am I Chinese?” And some people will answer, “Yes, due to your obvious love of China, you are even more Chinese than the rest of us.” And that sort of thing makes it difficult to have borders.
With that in mind, I think it costs too much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fsud8Sqsh8I&ab_channel=SonsOfYusuf
I posted this a while back:
Even Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore is struggling with this:LKY’s right-hand man, Goh Keng Swee (Wealth of East Asian Nations) as well:Replies: @Talha, @songbird
Years before the Great Awokening, I used to think that there were limits to how insane things could get in the West. That, at least, if from nothing else, literacy and wealth could prevent something like the communist insanity. I no longer believe that, and I think it would also be a mistake for the Chinese to think they are done with insanities.
Peace.Replies: @iffen
Decadence seems to be the eventual outcome of material opulence. Approach at your own risk.
Peace.
It's only becomes decadence when numbers of peons are able to get in on the action.Replies: @Talha
I mean, when studios owned a lot of theaters, it was easy to picket them. Then the government said that was monopolistic, so they became a lot harder to picket. TV came around - it was cleaner, at first, even with the Motion Picture Production Code, but people who made movies got an excuse that they had to differentiate the product, win people back to the theaters, so rules were loosened, and then nearly abolished. Movies which were focused on America (they used to reshoot English films) became more universal, they got a bigger audience. Cable came along, with more channels, and loosened things for TV, and now many of the commercials on broadcast TV would not even pass the old Motion Picture Production Code.
Netflix seems like the culmination of it all. They don't have any commercial sponsors to potentially boycott. You can't picket the theater because it's in people's homes all over the world. They save money on distribution, so they can pour it back into content production, pushing the boundaries more. And other big, evil companies, like Disney, are taking lessons from them.Replies: @Talha
The only option is to pull out your money like I recently did. You can vote with your wallet.
Let others pay them to destroy their own families, one need not participate in that self-destructive garbage.
Peace.
I take pleasure in denying them my money, but I don't think they really notice it. Hate to say it, but I think it might be practically impossible to form a successful boycott against a global entertainment company. Too many people don't care. They might not like drag queens, but their only response is to watch something else, not open a book.
What I'd like to see is the re-assertion of cultural identities, so people will take pride in the production of movies, etc. that show off their culture. Like take Japan - I'm not saying that all they produce is 100% moral or that they don't have problems as a society, but I think, pound for pound, that they produce more moral content than the West. You'll see a lot of intergenerational messages - respect your elders and traditions and future generations - in their content.
IMO, Europeans have a lot of great culture, but they are kind of resting on their laurels. I think it is the same with most other people, but it's the most notable in Europeans, who have been the most subordinated to Hollywood - being fooled into thinking that it is theirs, when it is not.Replies: @Talha
Peace.Replies: @iffen
Decadence seems to be the eventual outcome of material opulence.
It’s only becomes decadence when numbers of peons are able to get in on the action.
Part of life is understanding not everyone can be a pimp; stay in your lane.
Peace.Replies: @Yahya K.
Yet more China failure: (1)
China’s highly inefficient State Owned Enterprises thrive on exploitation and an unfair playing field. Without the ability to steal IP and cheat on international trade, China will encounter severe financial difficulties sooner rather than later.
PEACE 😇
_______
(1) https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3099459/us-sanctions-chinas-huawei-spell-trouble-shenzhen-economy
Do you think they will share the technology? It would be of massive benefit for all of humanity but the Third World in particular, but with this would come the consequences of Africans being able to use their own resources for a change thus depriving China of them?
It's only becomes decadence when numbers of peons are able to get in on the action.Replies: @Talha
True. As long as the degeneracy is isolated to the elite, that is usually expected and the common people are inoculated from the fallout. When everyone besides Trump (or some rich Gulf prince) is going around trying to grab ****y, then we have problems.
Part of life is understanding not everyone can be a pimp; stay in your lane.
Peace.
*one of the most amusing articles was one that showed Western sources predicting the collapse of China for every year since 2005. 15 years later of being wrong, China is still on the verge of collapse any time now.Replies: @Ash Williams, @Sam J.
”
Except that the only reason you would suppress this is b/c some people are having a hard time affording food, which breeds resentment.
Or are they also discouraging rich people driving fancy cars?
I don’t think China will collapse, just the CCP.
But the real question is how much will its productivity growth rate slow down as it converges with the West? And where will it come to rest, relative to the U.S.?
But China's economy could still grow 300% if it can get to South Korean productivity levels, or 400% if it can get to those of Japan. So it's still got a lot of room even without population growth.Replies: @Wency
This could all be valid. The trouble is that right now China’s productivity gains aren’t high enough to bring it to convergence anytime soon — it looked like it was coming much sooner back when China was growing 10%+/year, compared to 5-6% now.
The other question that needs to be raised is how long populations can exist with crushingly low TFRs. There has been some debate on this elsewhere on this site, but really no one knows. I think accepting low TFRs and refusing to accept immigrants is a better long run move for the people, but upside-down population pyramids are not a good thing in the short run. They seem to be a negative for economic development, and China will have to deal with one as a much poorer country than Korea or Japan.
So in the short-to-medium term, and particularly from a geopolitics perspective, I guess I don’t think the open borders economists are entirely wrong here. The US does manage to generally integrate its immigrants into taxpaying citizens of its corporate economy. And with a labor force that keeps growing compared to a Chinese one that is set to shrink at an accelerating rate, the US could very easily have over 50% the labor force size of China by 2100, compared to less than 25% today.
"China’s birthrate has fallen to the lowest level since the Communist country was founded in 1949, in a sign that efforts to head off a demographic crisis have so far failed.
There were 14.6 million births in China in 2019, a drop of about 500,000 from the year before and the third year in a row that the number of births fallen, according to a report from the National Bureau of Statistics published on Friday. It was the lowest number in seven decades, with the exception of 1961, the last year of a famine that left tens of millions dead."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/17/chinas-birthrate-falls-to-lowest-level-despite-push-for-more-babiesIt seems stopping people from having babies is relatively straightforward; you can forcibly abort fetuses or sterilize people, etc.Reversing this seems to be a bit more complicated than policy makers have bargained for.Peace.Replies: @Wency
The other question that needs to be raised is how long populations can exist with crushingly low TFRs. There has been some debate on this elsewhere on this site, but really no one knows. I think accepting low TFRs and refusing to accept immigrants is a better long run move for the people, but upside-down population pyramids are not a good thing in the short run. They seem to be a negative for economic development, and China will have to deal with one as a much poorer country than Korea or Japan.
So in the short-to-medium term, and particularly from a geopolitics perspective, I guess I don't think the open borders economists are entirely wrong here. The US does manage to generally integrate its immigrants into taxpaying citizens of its corporate economy. And with a labor force that keeps growing compared to a Chinese one that is set to shrink at an accelerating rate, the US could very easily have over 50% the labor force size of China by 2100, compared to less than 25% today.Replies: @Talha, @scrivener3
Over the years, I’ve been reading on how China has been encouraging and incentivizing (financially and otherwise) people to have more babies due to this concern. Nothing has worked thus far long term:
“China’s birthrate has fallen to the lowest level since the Communist country was founded in 1949, in a sign that efforts to head off a demographic crisis have so far failed.
There were 14.6 million births in China in 2019, a drop of about 500,000 from the year before and the third year in a row that the number of births fallen, according to a report from the National Bureau of Statistics published on Friday. It was the lowest number in seven decades, with the exception of 1961, the last year of a famine that left tens of millions dead.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/17/chinas-birthrate-falls-to-lowest-level-despite-push-for-more-babies
It seems stopping people from having babies is relatively straightforward; you can forcibly abort fetuses or sterilize people, etc.
Reversing this seems to be a bit more complicated than policy makers have bargained for.
Peace.
I've seen Poland named as a success story with pro-natal policies, but basically what they've accomplished is moving TFR from 1.3 to 1.4. Sweden is also sometimes cited as a success story, with generous maternal leave and so on, but its TFR seems to be cyclical due to people gaming various systems. Sometimes it gets cited as 1.9, but other times it's more like 1.5. Finland also has generous policies and its TFR has collapsed.
China does perhaps have one possible tool in its kit that the West can't really use at this time, and that's an all-out propaganda offensive. They've started doing this in the last few years with more messages about the value of children and family, and pressuring upwardly mobile party members to have families of a certain size, but they haven't really gone all-in. That would basically mean censoring any and all media that portrays singleness and childlessness as anything but shameful, and ensuring that basically all publicly-available media associates large families with happiness and success. But I don't know, China might be too open and modern for this to work now.
So at this point I'm inclined to bet on this thing only running its course when breeders inherit the Earth, through a combination of genes and sub-cultures that are persistently pro-natal.Replies: @Talha, @dfordoom
Except that the only reason you would suppress this is b/c some people are having a hard time affording food, which breeds resentment.
Or are they also discouraging rich people driving fancy cars?I don't think China will collapse, just the CCP.Replies: @Daniel Chieh
That’s because you have no idea of how specifically they are attempting to demonstrate their wealth. Its a specific form of ostentatious display to irritate others – which in a way is very Chinese, especially with the fu er dai but it is also Chinese to be paternalistic and attempt to reign in such excesses.
Cars just don’t irritate people at much. But actually yes, Xi went on various random measures to limit displays of wealth for awhile(though it mostly went after Party officials).
The CCP at the moment in many ways more or less operates much like a typical dynastic government for better or worse. Its pretty parasitical, but so was much dynastic governance.
China can certainly do better, but not from blinkered analysis by midwits.
Part of life is understanding not everyone can be a pimp; stay in your lane.
Peace.Replies: @Yahya K.
The problem in the West is that the plebs are the ones engaging in degeneracy (drug use, out-of-wedlock births, alcoholism), while the upper middle class is behaving quite well (they get married before behaving kids, don’t use drugs after college etc. according to Charles Murray). I guess that’s why the West is in decline.
In Egypt, you get pretty much the opposite situation. The upper class has become quite decadent, while the lower classes are behaving quite well (may Allah bless them and reward their good conduct).
In the upper classes, most people drink alcohol. Back when I was in school, most of the boys started drinking alcohol openly by high school, and continue to this day. Some even took hard drugs and such. The girls didn’t drink alcohol in open, but they may have in private. Fornication isn’t widespread. I can only recall two or three who engaged in pre-marital sex. Quite a few did date though. None had teenage pregnancy.
In the lower classes, you won’t see much alcohol use since its still taboo. However, occasionally you’ll see them ask foreign tourists to buy them a bottle, but they’ll never buy it themselves. Although, the lower classes do frequently use an Egyptian version of marijuana called hashish, because some say its permissible in Islam (i’ll defer to you on whether that’s correct or not. I’m not too well versed in jurisprudence.) Fornication is pretty much non-existent in the lower classes.
I’ll say this though, even though the upper and lower classes have their fair share of vices, the one important vice both avoided is teenage pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births. Both of these figures are near zero. I think that out-of-wedlock births is the primary indicator of degeneracy and civilizational decline, so we can sleep safely as long as that figure is low.
Salam.
Allah swt often tests with wealth in ways He doesn't test with poverty.Helping to get people out of poverty is beneficial, but opulence is something that Muslim societies be keen on avoiding. This should be one of our foundational cultural values that we shun material opulence. Beyond the spiritual problems like greed, envy, ingratitude and what not that corrupt the soul, they make your society become soft and entitled. This is not good, especially for men."Look at those who are beneath you and do not look at those who are above you, for it is more suitable that you should not consider as less the blessing of Allah." - reported in Ibn MajahRemember what the Prophet (pbuh) was concerned for us:
"By Allah, it is not poverty I fear for you, rather I fear you will be given the wealth of the world, just as it was given to those before you. You will compete for it just as they competed for it and it will destroy you just as it destroy them." - reported in Bukhari and MuslimMy father (who recently passed) was not a rich man by any means, but he was beloved by his local community far more than the people who have ten times as much wealth in community than he did. He was generous with what he had; time, wealth, advice, encouragement. He would help people pay for their weddings if they needed it, help people pay for their education, float people loans (non-interest of course). People appreciate generosity.I'm now back home, but I really appreciated visiting the graveyard every day for the last three weeks; it really helps to serve as a good reminder and for evaluating priorities.This is good. As one of Egypt's best leaders is reported to have said:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/61/6f/a5/616fa50cb3e4418c113e09f2c0f7b488.jpgThis is one of the biggest issues a society can face, and possibly the most crucial. As Prof. Jonathan Brown mentioned in a lecture about the importance of family:
"Family is really, really important and it doesn’t matter who’s president or how awful the government is or whether it’s a thousand years ago or a thousand years from today human beings live in families and the basis of our lives are families. And the basis of our family is gender, right? So this is really, really, really important. And if you don’t care about this you don’t take this seriously because someone’s telling you that; “you know this political issue or that political issue is more pressing” – that’s not a helpful piece of advice. That person might be sincere but that person is accidentally or perhaps intentionally misleading you this is a really, really important question and the thing that you should care most about in politics is the school board."I'm not qualified to issue rulings. You'd have to ask a knowledgeable scholar who understands what this local material is and the effect it has on the intellect. In general, anything that causes intoxication or loss of senses is considered prohibited - but one has to analyze on a case-by-case basis.Excellent - may Allah swt continue to protect them from these vices.I remember that recently I was in a Lyft ride and was chatting with the driver about his experiences and he mentioned an incident where a girl was so drunk that fell asleep and slipped onto the floor between the front and back seats. When he got to the girl's house (late at night) he had to wake up the father who was super-upset (seemed to be a regular occurrence) to come get his daughter since he didn't want to touch her. The father was at least appreciative, since the last driver left his daughter on the front steps, rang the bell and left. All of this occurred in a very high-scale neighborhood with huge homes.This same girl ended up in this guy's car again (not as drunk as the previous time) a few months later and he told her about how he gave her a ride the last time. She was also appreciative that he didn't leave her on the doorstep, but had no intention of listening to her father's counsel about cleaning up her life.What good is all that wealth if you can't prevent your kids from ruining their lives in this manner? What good is it if all it does it provide opportunities for them to ruin themselves?Replies: @iffen
Ameen. And since the upper class is not that vast in a place like Egypt, this helps mitigate the issue.
See the rest under the MORE tag.
Wa salaam.
Allah swt often tests with wealth in ways He doesn’t test with poverty.
Helping to get people out of poverty is beneficial, but opulence is something that Muslim societies be keen on avoiding. This should be one of our foundational cultural values that we shun material opulence. Beyond the spiritual problems like greed, envy, ingratitude and what not that corrupt the soul, they make your society become soft and entitled. This is not good, especially for men.
“Look at those who are beneath you and do not look at those who are above you, for it is more suitable that you should not consider as less the blessing of Allah.” – reported in Ibn Majah
Remember what the Prophet (pbuh) was concerned for us:
“By Allah, it is not poverty I fear for you, rather I fear you will be given the wealth of the world, just as it was given to those before you. You will compete for it just as they competed for it and it will destroy you just as it destroy them.” – reported in Bukhari and Muslim
My father (who recently passed) was not a rich man by any means, but he was beloved by his local community far more than the people who have ten times as much wealth in community than he did. He was generous with what he had; time, wealth, advice, encouragement. He would help people pay for their weddings if they needed it, help people pay for their education, float people loans (non-interest of course). People appreciate generosity.
I’m now back home, but I really appreciated visiting the graveyard every day for the last three weeks; it really helps to serve as a good reminder and for evaluating priorities.
This is good. As one of Egypt’s best leaders is reported to have said:
This is one of the biggest issues a society can face, and possibly the most crucial. As Prof. Jonathan Brown mentioned in a lecture about the importance of family:
“Family is really, really important and it doesn’t matter who’s president or how awful the government is or whether it’s a thousand years ago or a thousand years from today human beings live in families and the basis of our lives are families. And the basis of our family is gender, right? So this is really, really, really important. And if you don’t care about this you don’t take this seriously because someone’s telling you that; “you know this political issue or that political issue is more pressing” – that’s not a helpful piece of advice. That person might be sincere but that person is accidentally or perhaps intentionally misleading you this is a really, really important question and the thing that you should care most about in politics is the school board.”
I’m not qualified to issue rulings. You’d have to ask a knowledgeable scholar who understands what this local material is and the effect it has on the intellect. In general, anything that causes intoxication or loss of senses is considered prohibited – but one has to analyze on a case-by-case basis.
Excellent – may Allah swt continue to protect them from these vices.
I remember that recently I was in a Lyft ride and was chatting with the driver about his experiences and he mentioned an incident where a girl was so drunk that fell asleep and slipped onto the floor between the front and back seats. When he got to the girl’s house (late at night) he had to wake up the father who was super-upset (seemed to be a regular occurrence) to come get his daughter since he didn’t want to touch her. The father was at least appreciative, since the last driver left his daughter on the front steps, rang the bell and left. All of this occurred in a very high-scale neighborhood with huge homes.
This same girl ended up in this guy’s car again (not as drunk as the previous time) a few months later and he told her about how he gave her a ride the last time. She was also appreciative that he didn’t leave her on the doorstep, but had no intention of listening to her father’s counsel about cleaning up her life.
What good is all that wealth if you can’t prevent your kids from ruining their lives in this manner? What good is it if all it does it provide opportunities for them to ruin themselves?
Allah swt often tests with wealth in ways He doesn't test with poverty.Helping to get people out of poverty is beneficial, but opulence is something that Muslim societies be keen on avoiding. This should be one of our foundational cultural values that we shun material opulence. Beyond the spiritual problems like greed, envy, ingratitude and what not that corrupt the soul, they make your society become soft and entitled. This is not good, especially for men."Look at those who are beneath you and do not look at those who are above you, for it is more suitable that you should not consider as less the blessing of Allah." - reported in Ibn MajahRemember what the Prophet (pbuh) was concerned for us:
"By Allah, it is not poverty I fear for you, rather I fear you will be given the wealth of the world, just as it was given to those before you. You will compete for it just as they competed for it and it will destroy you just as it destroy them." - reported in Bukhari and MuslimMy father (who recently passed) was not a rich man by any means, but he was beloved by his local community far more than the people who have ten times as much wealth in community than he did. He was generous with what he had; time, wealth, advice, encouragement. He would help people pay for their weddings if they needed it, help people pay for their education, float people loans (non-interest of course). People appreciate generosity.I'm now back home, but I really appreciated visiting the graveyard every day for the last three weeks; it really helps to serve as a good reminder and for evaluating priorities.This is good. As one of Egypt's best leaders is reported to have said:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/61/6f/a5/616fa50cb3e4418c113e09f2c0f7b488.jpgThis is one of the biggest issues a society can face, and possibly the most crucial. As Prof. Jonathan Brown mentioned in a lecture about the importance of family:
"Family is really, really important and it doesn’t matter who’s president or how awful the government is or whether it’s a thousand years ago or a thousand years from today human beings live in families and the basis of our lives are families. And the basis of our family is gender, right? So this is really, really, really important. And if you don’t care about this you don’t take this seriously because someone’s telling you that; “you know this political issue or that political issue is more pressing” – that’s not a helpful piece of advice. That person might be sincere but that person is accidentally or perhaps intentionally misleading you this is a really, really important question and the thing that you should care most about in politics is the school board."I'm not qualified to issue rulings. You'd have to ask a knowledgeable scholar who understands what this local material is and the effect it has on the intellect. In general, anything that causes intoxication or loss of senses is considered prohibited - but one has to analyze on a case-by-case basis.Excellent - may Allah swt continue to protect them from these vices.I remember that recently I was in a Lyft ride and was chatting with the driver about his experiences and he mentioned an incident where a girl was so drunk that fell asleep and slipped onto the floor between the front and back seats. When he got to the girl's house (late at night) he had to wake up the father who was super-upset (seemed to be a regular occurrence) to come get his daughter since he didn't want to touch her. The father was at least appreciative, since the last driver left his daughter on the front steps, rang the bell and left. All of this occurred in a very high-scale neighborhood with huge homes.This same girl ended up in this guy's car again (not as drunk as the previous time) a few months later and he told her about how he gave her a ride the last time. She was also appreciative that he didn't leave her on the doorstep, but had no intention of listening to her father's counsel about cleaning up her life.What good is all that wealth if you can't prevent your kids from ruining their lives in this manner? What good is it if all it does it provide opportunities for them to ruin themselves?Replies: @iffen
We are getting way OT on this degeneracy, but I’m not all in with the fornication angle. People be fornicating since Adam and Eve.
Peace.
There are simply inescapable consequences to society-wide trends. Keeping family as a foundational institution and cornerstone of society requires keeping it in one's pants. Look, my parts all work (alhamdulillah), I'd like to "hit it" as much as the next guy...but it would mess up other priorities I have going on.
If you have a society where everyone eats whatever they want with few limitations, you end up with a healthcare problem.
If you have a society where everyone sleeps with whoever they want with few limitations, you end up with a different problem.
When you have a quarter or more of the population doing those things you have a real problem.
The problem with fornication is that it leads to out-of-wedlock births.
And of course once you get a child growing up in a single parent household, a lot of other vices follow.
That’s not a very good argument.
It’s been discouraged and tamed before, even in the US.
Which is why I used the MORE tag.
Peace.
There are simply inescapable consequences to society-wide trends. Keeping family as a foundational institution and cornerstone of society requires keeping it in one’s pants. Look, my parts all work (alhamdulillah), I’d like to “hit it” as much as the next guy…but it would mess up other priorities I have going on.
If you have a society where everyone eats whatever they want with few limitations, you end up with a healthcare problem.
If you have a society where everyone sleeps with whoever they want with few limitations, you end up with a different problem.
"China’s birthrate has fallen to the lowest level since the Communist country was founded in 1949, in a sign that efforts to head off a demographic crisis have so far failed.
There were 14.6 million births in China in 2019, a drop of about 500,000 from the year before and the third year in a row that the number of births fallen, according to a report from the National Bureau of Statistics published on Friday. It was the lowest number in seven decades, with the exception of 1961, the last year of a famine that left tens of millions dead."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/17/chinas-birthrate-falls-to-lowest-level-despite-push-for-more-babiesIt seems stopping people from having babies is relatively straightforward; you can forcibly abort fetuses or sterilize people, etc.Reversing this seems to be a bit more complicated than policy makers have bargained for.Peace.Replies: @Wency
Yes, I think we’ve basically learned that pro-natal monetary incentives can’t move the needle enough, at least without some truly massive amount of spending that’s not really politically viable.
I’ve seen Poland named as a success story with pro-natal policies, but basically what they’ve accomplished is moving TFR from 1.3 to 1.4. Sweden is also sometimes cited as a success story, with generous maternal leave and so on, but its TFR seems to be cyclical due to people gaming various systems. Sometimes it gets cited as 1.9, but other times it’s more like 1.5. Finland also has generous policies and its TFR has collapsed.
China does perhaps have one possible tool in its kit that the West can’t really use at this time, and that’s an all-out propaganda offensive. They’ve started doing this in the last few years with more messages about the value of children and family, and pressuring upwardly mobile party members to have families of a certain size, but they haven’t really gone all-in. That would basically mean censoring any and all media that portrays singleness and childlessness as anything but shameful, and ensuring that basically all publicly-available media associates large families with happiness and success. But I don’t know, China might be too open and modern for this to work now.
So at this point I’m inclined to bet on this thing only running its course when breeders inherit the Earth, through a combination of genes and sub-cultures that are persistently pro-natal.
Peace.
As for pro-natal sub-cultures it's possible that they only work on a fairly small scale. They may only work when their numbers are small enough to allow them to effectively isolate themselves from the mainstream. If they ever became the mainstream they'd most likely experience the same catastrophic drop in fertility that almost every other society has experienced.
I suspect that seeing either breeder genes or pro-natal sub-cultures as long-term solutions is just wishful thinking.Replies: @iffen, @Wency
I've seen Poland named as a success story with pro-natal policies, but basically what they've accomplished is moving TFR from 1.3 to 1.4. Sweden is also sometimes cited as a success story, with generous maternal leave and so on, but its TFR seems to be cyclical due to people gaming various systems. Sometimes it gets cited as 1.9, but other times it's more like 1.5. Finland also has generous policies and its TFR has collapsed.
China does perhaps have one possible tool in its kit that the West can't really use at this time, and that's an all-out propaganda offensive. They've started doing this in the last few years with more messages about the value of children and family, and pressuring upwardly mobile party members to have families of a certain size, but they haven't really gone all-in. That would basically mean censoring any and all media that portrays singleness and childlessness as anything but shameful, and ensuring that basically all publicly-available media associates large families with happiness and success. But I don't know, China might be too open and modern for this to work now.
So at this point I'm inclined to bet on this thing only running its course when breeders inherit the Earth, through a combination of genes and sub-cultures that are persistently pro-natal.Replies: @Talha, @dfordoom
That would certainly be a very interesting thing to see if it plays out. Many other countries would be watching this with interest, even if they couldn’t pull off the policies (that you outlined) that would be necessary to pull it off.
Peace.
The other question that needs to be raised is how long populations can exist with crushingly low TFRs. There has been some debate on this elsewhere on this site, but really no one knows. I think accepting low TFRs and refusing to accept immigrants is a better long run move for the people, but upside-down population pyramids are not a good thing in the short run. They seem to be a negative for economic development, and China will have to deal with one as a much poorer country than Korea or Japan.
So in the short-to-medium term, and particularly from a geopolitics perspective, I guess I don't think the open borders economists are entirely wrong here. The US does manage to generally integrate its immigrants into taxpaying citizens of its corporate economy. And with a labor force that keeps growing compared to a Chinese one that is set to shrink at an accelerating rate, the US could very easily have over 50% the labor force size of China by 2100, compared to less than 25% today.Replies: @Talha, @scrivener3
declining population is “negative for economic development”?
Is there some sort of prize for the largest GDP? That we need to import people to marginally add to total production? How much GDP do immigrants add to California production when about half of Californian production is created by 500 people?
What is economic development? Is it not an economy that produces things that satisfy the wants and needs of the population? By that measure the US is doing gangbusters. My house cleaner, who cannot read or write has a new Toyota RAV4.
China’s problem is not declining population, although that is a byproduct of central direction of a people, but its system. Everything is political. It is not just you can make money as long as you do not threaten the ruling people; it is that you must actively support the fashions, mistakes, prejudices, and self-deceptions of the CCP.
Watch that series about Chernobyl, the people in power made stupid/cowardly/cheap decisions about the design of reactors. For a person to speak the truth about what caused the suffering and death, was not a death sentence but the end of a career. Truth was not the issue, truth did not get you rewards. The system rewarded only agreeing with the party line and facts that made whatever decisions the powers that be made, the right decisions, even if they were the wrong decisions.
Rewarding the wrong decisions will get you destruction of value instead of production of value
Mostly the CCP doesn't intervene though if you're trying to disrupt 'traditional values' as defined by the Ministry of Culture by say, promoting gay values or drug use too overtly, you might get censored. This is not a concern for most people though.
That said, I'm not hugely pro-censorship myself, I should note and I do think allowing busybodies to intervene isn't ideal. But its probably better than letting globohomo run rampant.Yes, rewarding globohomo isn't a good idea. China is not the main offender of this.
There always have been, and always will be, a small minority who indulge in promiscuity, drink too much, gamble, etc. As long as it’s a small minority (no more than 5% of the population or so) it’s a problem that can safely be ignored and the best policy is to leave those people alone.
When you have a quarter or more of the population doing those things you have a real problem.
I've seen Poland named as a success story with pro-natal policies, but basically what they've accomplished is moving TFR from 1.3 to 1.4. Sweden is also sometimes cited as a success story, with generous maternal leave and so on, but its TFR seems to be cyclical due to people gaming various systems. Sometimes it gets cited as 1.9, but other times it's more like 1.5. Finland also has generous policies and its TFR has collapsed.
China does perhaps have one possible tool in its kit that the West can't really use at this time, and that's an all-out propaganda offensive. They've started doing this in the last few years with more messages about the value of children and family, and pressuring upwardly mobile party members to have families of a certain size, but they haven't really gone all-in. That would basically mean censoring any and all media that portrays singleness and childlessness as anything but shameful, and ensuring that basically all publicly-available media associates large families with happiness and success. But I don't know, China might be too open and modern for this to work now.
So at this point I'm inclined to bet on this thing only running its course when breeders inherit the Earth, through a combination of genes and sub-cultures that are persistently pro-natal.Replies: @Talha, @dfordoom
Is there the slightest actual evidence that there are such things as breeder genes?
As for pro-natal sub-cultures it’s possible that they only work on a fairly small scale. They may only work when their numbers are small enough to allow them to effectively isolate themselves from the mainstream. If they ever became the mainstream they’d most likely experience the same catastrophic drop in fertility that almost every other society has experienced.
I suspect that seeing either breeder genes or pro-natal sub-cultures as long-term solutions is just wishful thinking.
AK did a series of posts on the subject, start here if you are interested:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/breeding-breeders/?highlight=breeder+genes#p_1_10
Unless I am way above my paygrade my understanding is that genes influence our behavior. If the culture and environment is neutralized, that is, it is the same, then that only leaves genes and randomness, and randomness can be identified and eliminated.Replies: @Talha
Let others pay them to destroy their own families, one need not participate in that self-destructive garbage.
Peace.Replies: @songbird, @Audacious Epigone
Another thing I forgot to mention was how they successfully lobbied for copyright to be extended, so if you are trying to watch something clean from an earlier era, the profits funnel toward filth.
I take pleasure in denying them my money, but I don’t think they really notice it. Hate to say it, but I think it might be practically impossible to form a successful boycott against a global entertainment company. Too many people don’t care. They might not like drag queens, but their only response is to watch something else, not open a book.
What I’d like to see is the re-assertion of cultural identities, so people will take pride in the production of movies, etc. that show off their culture. Like take Japan – I’m not saying that all they produce is 100% moral or that they don’t have problems as a society, but I think, pound for pound, that they produce more moral content than the West. You’ll see a lot of intergenerational messages – respect your elders and traditions and future generations – in their content.
IMO, Europeans have a lot of great culture, but they are kind of resting on their laurels. I think it is the same with most other people, but it’s the most notable in Europeans, who have been the most subordinated to Hollywood – being fooled into thinking that it is theirs, when it is not.
The Prophet (pbuh) both predicted the victory the Muslims would have and advised them not to lose their edge:
"Lands shall be thrown open to you and Allah will suffice you (against your enemies), but none of you should give up playing with his arrows." - reported in Muslim
Uqbah ibn Amir (ra) was told:
"You go back and forth between these two targets and you are an old man, so you will be finding it very hard." 'Uqba said: "But for a thing I heard from the Prophet (pbuh), I would not strain myself." Harith (one of the narrators in the chain of transmitters) said: "I asked Ibn Shamasa: 'What was that?'" He said that he (the Prophet [pbuh]) said: "Whoever learned archery and then gave it up is not from us or he has been guilty of disobedience." -reported in Muslim
You get too comfortable and rest, then others will take over your institutions (or in the above case, Mongol hordes will come through and make towers out of your skulls inside of your city walls instead of you making piles of theirs outside).
Peace.Replies: @songbird
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl959QnD3lM
Peace.Replies: @nebulafox, @nebulafox
Well, in the case of the PRC, it might not be considered soft, but “hard eugenics” to me is akin to Nazism. What’s going on in Xinjiang is pretty awful, but it still isn’t Third Reich levels, IMO.
That being said, even the MSM can’t deny it anymore.
https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c
This is coupled with barely veiled state encouragement for middle class Han to be more fertile. Eugenics does not have the same stigma in East Asia that it does in the West: most parents would not hesitate to abort retarded children, even in Japan or Korea. I’m sure you can use your imagination for what this means given the degree of progress genetics and biological engineering research in China have attained over the last decade.
As another example, Singapore’s immigration system tacitly revolves around keeping the Han solidly demographically dominant and-very subtly-keeping the Malays in check. It’s not a secret that the Malays lag behind in professional attainment and the like, and Singapore’s leadership going back to LKY barely disguised their social Darwinian beliefs, including HBD-esque racial views. Singaporean Malay birth-rates, BTW, are below replacement level, but nowhere near as much as the other ethnic groups. So, practically, since Singaporean Chinese have the lowest birth rates in the world, this means mass immigration from mainland China, as Singapore has already tapped the Indonesian and Malaysian Chinese as far as they could. Native Singaporeans of all races are not big fans of the new arrivals, who were subject to none of the intensive social coaching that LKY pushed on Singaporean Chinese in the 1970s and 1980s.
(Calling the Malays stupid as some ethnic Chinese do is unfair, IMO: they are simply a middle of the pack on global standards IQed race competing with two of the highest IQed contingents on earth in Southeastern Chinese and Tamils. They are also a culture which is devoted more to religion and family than professional attainment. There are drawbacks to that, but also benefits: you’ll never meet more loyal, stick-by-you people than Malays, and on the whole, they seem happier than Chinese on average despite earning less. It’s worth noting that religion is not as much of a factor as assumed on the surface: the local Indian Muslims have no appreciable difference in test scores, education, or professional attainment than their Hindu co-ethnics here.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl959QnD3lM
Peace.Replies: @nebulafox, @nebulafox
Well, in the case of the PRC, it might not be considered soft, but “hard eugenics” to me is akin to Nazism. What’s going on in Xinjiang is pretty awful, but it still isn’t Third Reich levels, IMO.
That being said, even the MSM can’t deny it anymore, despite their aversion to implying that Racism Is Found Outside The West.
https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c
This is coupled with barely veiled state encouragement for middle class Han to be more fertile. Eugenics does not have the same stigma in East Asia that it does in the West: most parents would not hesitate to abort retarded children, even in Japan or Korea. I’m sure you can use your imagination for what this means given the degree of progress genetics and biological engineering research in China have attained over the last decade.
As another example, Singapore’s immigration system tacitly revolves around keeping the Han solidly demographically dominant and-very subtly-keeping the Malays in check. It’s not a secret that the Malays lag behind in professional attainment and the like, and Singapore’s leadership going back to LKY barely disguised their social Darwinian beliefs, including HBD-esque racial views. Singaporean Malay birth-rates, BTW, are below replacement level, but nowhere near as much as the other ethnic groups. So, practically, since Singaporean Chinese have the lowest birth rates in the world, this means mass immigration from mainland China, as Singapore has already tapped the Indonesian and Malaysian Chinese as far as they could. Native Singaporeans of all races are not big fans of the new arrivals, who were subject to none of the intensive social coaching that LKY pushed on Singaporean Chinese in the 1970s and 1980s.
(Calling the Malays stupid as some ethnic Chinese do is unfair, IMO: they are simply a middle of the pack on global standards IQed race competing with two of the highest IQed contingents on earth in Southeastern Chinese and Tamils. They are also a culture which is devoted more to religion and family than professional attainment. There are drawbacks to that, but also benefits: you’ll never meet more loyal, stick-by-you people than Malays, and on the whole, they seem happier than Chinese on average despite earning less. It’s worth noting that religion is not as much of a factor as assumed on the surface: the local Indian Muslims have no appreciable difference in test scores, education, or professional attainment than their Hindu co-ethnics here.)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/642137/malaysia-fertility-rates-by-ethnic-group/Like you said, benefits to being more devoted to family than profession has the benefit of sustaining a family-friendly culture in which more children are prized.Interesting. Do the Muslims and the Hindus tend to originate from the same region in India?Peace.Replies: @nebulafox
When he says something like (paraphrasing), "I'm against a Malay Malaysia" , I get the feeling that he thinks Darwinian selection would favor the Chinese in Malaysia against all other comers.Replies: @Talha
That said, your impression of the Malays is rather more favorable than my own: I found their insularity and general listlessness hard to work with/around. Also, political Islam is an ugly beast.
That’s why birth control was probably the most significant invention of the 20th Century, which in an age that brought instant communication and information access, nuclear weapons, the discovery of DNA, the Green Revolution, etc, is saying a lot. For the first time in human history, sex could be completely divorced from the risk of childbirth. And the two great biological imperatives are eating and reproduction.
It’s not as if people in previous times did not bone for the sake of boning: they did, and did regularly. We’re just human animals in the end. But the chance of pregnancy was always there, and social structures-including getting people married before they could “make a mistake” in choosing a partner and have a baby with the “wrong person”-revolved around that assumption.
It’s fruitless to think about turning back the clock, whatever your feelings on the subject. What I think we can all agree upon is that American sexual culture is a weird mix of hyper-sensitivity and the over-the-top fascination/obsession. I.e, how teenagers would view it.
Peace.
Somehow we have to find a way to deal with recreational sex as a reality.Yep.
https://infogalactic.com/info/SilphiumThe more extreme population control measures are known to history: leaving unwanted babies on the hillside (ancient Greece, a major plot point of Oedipus rex), sending certain young men to work far away from home (ancient China's Great Wall was a known "sink" for men) and so forth. It’s not as if people in previous times did not bone for the sake of boning: they did, and did regularly. We’re just human animals in the end. But the chance of pregnancy was always there,The chance of pregnancy is not always there, women are only fertile for a few days per month during ovulation, and abortofacients have been known for a long time - it's in the original Hippocratic Oath circa 400 BC.Ascribing the known flaws of human nature to objects is a form of superstition. "Guns cause murder!" is not much different from "Contraception causes sexual promiscuity". Orgies are things that have happened over and over in human recorded history; not just ancient Rome, but ancient Egypt, ancient Babylon, etc. The Ancien' Regime in France was notorious for all manner of sexual debauchery with only herbal preparations available - plus plenty of orphanages. Birthing a baby and giving it away may seem a bit heartless to modern people, but it was standard for thousands of years. Early Christians often picked up the abandoned in the Roman empire. The great composer Vivaldi wrote much of his music for the all-girl band he was assigned to teach in Venice, every player was an abandoned baby. The foundling house had a drawer like a night-deposit at a modern bank - put the child in, push the drawer or a lever, all done. A nun inside received the latest offering. I'm going to point to Glubb Pasha again here, his 1974 monograph on the "Fate of Empires" isn't footnoted, was never peer reviewed, didn't get published in any very important journal, but he did read Arabic and other scripts & he did supposedly view original sources from the Caliphate era. The complaints of the 13th century Arab writers regarding young men, women, what's appropriate, etc. are just a bit too similar to more recent complaints. Remember in that era the Islamic empire was middleman between Europe and Asia - they had a monopoly on goods transported, and grew rich on that and slavery. Rich people often do stuff the rest of us do not do, such as travel to islands for orgies. However by the standards of human history virtually everyone in the industrialized world is "rich", and our hindbrains have not changed substantially in the last 10,000 years or more. Without getting into r/K, it's human nature to fill up a biological niche, we are the descendents of the horniest.I've had this discussion before, and it's always the same essence: technologies do not cause humans to do bad things. Humans have intrinsic flaws, or sins, that simply get amped up by some technologies. It's what lies in the human heart that matters, and we all are unpleasant somewhere deep inside. Remember Casanova? Cleopatra didn't have The Pill. Neither did Catharine, Tzarina of Russia. 18th century French aristocrats didn't either. Unlimited, uncontrolled sexuality isn't exactly new, it's what we humans tend to do whenever we think can get away with it.Replies: @dfordoom
I don’t see why the Chinese ultimately won’t sell anything they can. Its more of a question whether it’d be embraced by others.
Mostly I don’t think Chinese think in terms of “if Africans could use the resources, we couldn’t” since Chinese don’t largely think of themselves in that kind of racial way. Its all very “scattered like sand” which is a form of individualistic materialism. I guess you could have the CCP trying to herd things in a single direction, but its akin to herding cats.
The part before the colon is mostly correct.
Mostly the CCP doesn’t intervene though if you’re trying to disrupt ‘traditional values’ as defined by the Ministry of Culture by say, promoting gay values or drug use too overtly, you might get censored. This is not a concern for most people though.
That said, I’m not hugely pro-censorship myself, I should note and I do think allowing busybodies to intervene isn’t ideal. But its probably better than letting globohomo run rampant.
Yes, rewarding globohomo isn’t a good idea. China is not the main offender of this.
That being said, even the MSM can't deny it anymore, despite their aversion to implying that Racism Is Found Outside The West.
https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c
This is coupled with barely veiled state encouragement for middle class Han to be more fertile. Eugenics does not have the same stigma in East Asia that it does in the West: most parents would not hesitate to abort retarded children, even in Japan or Korea. I'm sure you can use your imagination for what this means given the degree of progress genetics and biological engineering research in China have attained over the last decade.
As another example, Singapore's immigration system tacitly revolves around keeping the Han solidly demographically dominant and-very subtly-keeping the Malays in check. It's not a secret that the Malays lag behind in professional attainment and the like, and Singapore's leadership going back to LKY barely disguised their social Darwinian beliefs, including HBD-esque racial views. Singaporean Malay birth-rates, BTW, are below replacement level, but nowhere near as much as the other ethnic groups. So, practically, since Singaporean Chinese have the lowest birth rates in the world, this means mass immigration from mainland China, as Singapore has already tapped the Indonesian and Malaysian Chinese as far as they could. Native Singaporeans of all races are not big fans of the new arrivals, who were subject to none of the intensive social coaching that LKY pushed on Singaporean Chinese in the 1970s and 1980s.
(Calling the Malays stupid as some ethnic Chinese do is unfair, IMO: they are simply a middle of the pack on global standards IQed race competing with two of the highest IQed contingents on earth in Southeastern Chinese and Tamils. They are also a culture which is devoted more to religion and family than professional attainment. There are drawbacks to that, but also benefits: you'll never meet more loyal, stick-by-you people than Malays, and on the whole, they seem happier than Chinese on average despite earning less. It's worth noting that religion is not as much of a factor as assumed on the surface: the local Indian Muslims have no appreciable difference in test scores, education, or professional attainment than their Hindu co-ethnics here.)Replies: @Talha, @songbird, @Mungerite
Agreed. Hell it’s not even at the level of what the Chinese Communists were willing to do to their own people.
Yup. As I’ve stated – this is not the West’s fight. This is the Muslim world’s fight – they could force serious concessions by imposing major oil sanctions and such – and frankly, the Muslim world has dropped the ball massively on that one. We’re a bigger Ummah than the Chinese, can’t blame anyone else for us being divided and not getting our act together. May God not hold us to account for our inaction and cowardice.
I assume they have no ethical boundaries when it comes to this subject to be honest; a broadly acceptable form of utilitarianism seems to be the approach. If it comes out they are doing biological experiments on Uighur babies or prisoners or whatever, I simply wouldn’t be surprised in the least.
Yeah – tough neighborhood.
If human beings find fulfillment and contentment and purpose in one or other aspect of life, they are less concerned about the lack of it in another.
Unfortunately, that is one group of Muslims I haven’t interacted much with in the US; they simply don’t immigrate here in any significant numbers (which means their country is not a corrupt basket case like some others). A large group of them came to UCLA once when I was part of the MSA and another brother and I gave them a tour of the campus. They were all very nice and well-mannered (and a few of the sisters were very cute).
A white convert brother spent some time in Malaysia and came back recently and reported a very nice stay overall. The place seems to have a few different sultanates (I believe it is a unique revolving power-sharing monarchy system) that have their own local flavor – if I recall, Penang is the big Chinese hub.
If I was to choose, I’d likely try my luck in Kelantan, though I know Selangor is more realistic for an expatriate.
As far as TFR jn Malaysia, the local Malays seem to be doing just fine, but the Chinese are tanking as much as anywhere else:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/642137/malaysia-fertility-rates-by-ethnic-group/
Like you said, benefits to being more devoted to family than profession has the benefit of sustaining a family-friendly culture in which more children are prized.
Interesting. Do the Muslims and the Hindus tend to originate from the same region in India?
Peace.
Honestly never thought this through before, but you make a very compelling case.
Peace.
Correct. That’s something that social conservatives find very hard to accept. No matter how great you might think the morality of the 50s was the harsh fact is that the sexual morality of the pre-Pill era is gone for good. And there is no way you’re ever going to persuade people to abandon the idea that recreational sex is a good thing. That train left the station decades ago.
Somehow we have to find a way to deal with recreational sex as a reality.
Yep.
As for pro-natal sub-cultures it's possible that they only work on a fairly small scale. They may only work when their numbers are small enough to allow them to effectively isolate themselves from the mainstream. If they ever became the mainstream they'd most likely experience the same catastrophic drop in fertility that almost every other society has experienced.
I suspect that seeing either breeder genes or pro-natal sub-cultures as long-term solutions is just wishful thinking.Replies: @iffen, @Wency
Is there the slightest actual evidence that there are such things as breeder genes?
AK did a series of posts on the subject, start here if you are interested:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/breeding-breeders/?highlight=breeder+genes#p_1_10
Unless I am way above my paygrade my understanding is that genes influence our behavior. If the culture and environment is neutralized, that is, it is the same, then that only leaves genes and randomness, and randomness can be identified and eliminated.
Hang around with enough of these guys...well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efo26lgbeFA
I asked this question of another white convert I know well; if you hadn't become Muslim, would you have been married and with three kids at this point in your life?
He said no, there was no way he would have been on this trajectory and pointed out his similar genetic peer group (aka his siblings cousins) and the fact that the vast majority of them aren't married and childless. Now he hangs around a bunch of guys that ask him if he'll go for a fourth. His genes didn't change, his outlook and priorities did. We were discussing that if things stay on the same trajectory with his extended family, his toddler son may well be the only one to carry on his family name from his generation.
I am baffled by how much money and effort is being into trying to get something so basic off the ground as encouraging people to get married and have children.
Peace.Replies: @Wency
It’s the demographics, stupid.
Or to borrow a line from Hero of the People, Brenton Tarrant:
It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates.
China imposed the one-child policy on itself. When and where China has lifted the one-child policy, the birthrates did not go back up.
China has thrown itself headlong into the demographic transition associated with the agricultural-industrial shift, without the slightest understanding of what they were getting into or what the consequences would be. Assuming no meaningful changes to current trends – and right now, on a global scale, the only meaningful errors in demographic predictions are for birthrates to be LOWER than expected – China will lose half its population over the course of the next hundred years.
China does not have the wealth to handle this. Industrial complexes building ghost cities can’t fix this and can’t handle the ongoing burden of the elderly and an inverted demographic pyramid.
China also does not have the honesty to recognize the problem in time to do anything meaningful about it – because it will require pointing out facts needing changing, facts which are a direct consequence of Communist party policies and therefore make the Communist party look bad.
Also the treatment must be very deliberately and unavoidably anti-communist. It’s not possible to fix society-wide demographic trends of this nature without devolving power to patriarchal heads of households, which the Communist party will not and can not tolerate.
I haven’t even started on the topics of China being a net food importer, of every single one of its neighbors being fearful and suspicious of it, of their demonstrated total incapability at diplomacy in situations not involving them just bribing or forcing others to do what they want, or even the plain fact that – strategic stupidity notwithstanding – the US military has 20 years’ worth of rotating pretty much its entire military corps through active tactical experience and the Chinese military does not.
China has a window to invade Taiwan that will be pretty much closed by 2030; their internal contradictions will have started catching up to them by then. They could have invaded Taiwan, probably successfully, 20 years ago. They haven’t yet – they’re still “preparing”. There’s a fair chance they’ll keep on preparing right past the point of no return, because a Communist bureacracy supressing criticism of itself will not become aware of the problems until it’s too late.
This glorification of China and desperate willingness to believe in the superiority of the alien enemy is one of the alt-right’s biggest flaws, and a symptom of the basic character flaws that will prevent the alt-right from accomplishing much of any of what it wants, just as they have contributed to the alt-right’s self-destruction over the course of the past four years.
I’ve become convinced that when sanity returns, it will be counter-revolution from within the Left.
I won't comment much on China's policy practices though. Our politics are so broken, I don't see the point in arguing whose are worse.
I will say that the one-child policy probably doesn't deserve that much blame. It was never a good idea, but it was always swimming with the current. The fact is that China's TFR is still above Korea and Japan's. Asian fertility in the US is also low. Whatever is suppressing white fertility (and to some degree fertility of all other races) seems to go double for NE Asian fertility.
And as I discussed elsewhere on this post, governments haven't been very successful at raising TFR anywhere in the world. At this point, doing so in a top-down way seems like it would take drastic action that no one is really prepared to implement.
Yes, there’s a lot of reason to think this (but we haven’t yet seen the full effects of a crashing population on an economy, so buckle up). Having a large percentage of the population in the labor force seems to be a positive — what’s called a demographic dividend. A lot of economic booms have taken place when countries undergo an initial demographic transition towards fewer children, as more of the population is now in the labor force. But we should anticipate the opposite as a rapidly shrinking share of the population is in the labor force and much of the economy is just trying to keep old people alive.
Yeah, there is. For the people in power. It doesn’t benefit the people living there, but this thread was about the relative power of the regimes in Washington and Beijing, not about the quality of life for the people living in those places. I would take China or Japan’s low immigration trade-offs for my family and myself, but powerful people have other incentives.
CA is the 7th richest state by median household income. So the median person in CA is still doing pretty well. A lot of the entrepreneurial and technical talent of Asia is there. And someone still needs to dig ditches and take out the trash.
Or to borrow a line from Hero of the People, Brenton Tarrant:
It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates.
China imposed the one-child policy on itself. When and where China has lifted the one-child policy, the birthrates did not go back up.
China has thrown itself headlong into the demographic transition associated with the agricultural-industrial shift, without the slightest understanding of what they were getting into or what the consequences would be. Assuming no meaningful changes to current trends - and right now, on a global scale, the only meaningful errors in demographic predictions are for birthrates to be LOWER than expected - China will lose half its population over the course of the next hundred years.
China does not have the wealth to handle this. Industrial complexes building ghost cities can't fix this and can't handle the ongoing burden of the elderly and an inverted demographic pyramid.
China also does not have the honesty to recognize the problem in time to do anything meaningful about it - because it will require pointing out facts needing changing, facts which are a direct consequence of Communist party policies and therefore make the Communist party look bad.
Also the treatment must be very deliberately and unavoidably anti-communist. It's not possible to fix society-wide demographic trends of this nature without devolving power to patriarchal heads of households, which the Communist party will not and can not tolerate.
I haven't even started on the topics of China being a net food importer, of every single one of its neighbors being fearful and suspicious of it, of their demonstrated total incapability at diplomacy in situations not involving them just bribing or forcing others to do what they want, or even the plain fact that - strategic stupidity notwithstanding - the US military has 20 years' worth of rotating pretty much its entire military corps through active tactical experience and the Chinese military does not.
China has a window to invade Taiwan that will be pretty much closed by 2030; their internal contradictions will have started catching up to them by then. They could have invaded Taiwan, probably successfully, 20 years ago. They haven't yet - they're still "preparing". There's a fair chance they'll keep on preparing right past the point of no return, because a Communist bureacracy supressing criticism of itself will not become aware of the problems until it's too late.
This glorification of China and desperate willingness to believe in the superiority of the alien enemy is one of the alt-right's biggest flaws, and a symptom of the basic character flaws that will prevent the alt-right from accomplishing much of any of what it wants, just as they have contributed to the alt-right's self-destruction over the course of the past four years.
I've become convinced that when sanity returns, it will be counter-revolution from within the Left.Replies: @Wency
I agree directionally — it is about the demographics. A power with its population crashing is not a power on the rise, unless everyone else is facing an even worse collapse. And I just don’t see it quite yet. I think the US can still tread water for quite a while.
I won’t comment much on China’s policy practices though. Our politics are so broken, I don’t see the point in arguing whose are worse.
I will say that the one-child policy probably doesn’t deserve that much blame. It was never a good idea, but it was always swimming with the current. The fact is that China’s TFR is still above Korea and Japan’s. Asian fertility in the US is also low. Whatever is suppressing white fertility (and to some degree fertility of all other races) seems to go double for NE Asian fertility.
And as I discussed elsewhere on this post, governments haven’t been very successful at raising TFR anywhere in the world. At this point, doing so in a top-down way seems like it would take drastic action that no one is really prepared to implement.
As for pro-natal sub-cultures it's possible that they only work on a fairly small scale. They may only work when their numbers are small enough to allow them to effectively isolate themselves from the mainstream. If they ever became the mainstream they'd most likely experience the same catastrophic drop in fertility that almost every other society has experienced.
I suspect that seeing either breeder genes or pro-natal sub-cultures as long-term solutions is just wishful thinking.Replies: @iffen, @Wency
If you believe in natural selection, you have to believe this to be true. The problem is that society has been changing so fast that it’s tough to select for these genes. For example, number of lifetime sexual partners was positively correlated with male fertility until fairly recently, and now it’s negatively correlated.
It might be the case that our environment continues to change so rapidly and the human lifecycle is so long that we won’t be able to keep up. In that case, we’ll go extinct as a species, as other species have that couldn’t adapt to a changing environment.
But my expectation is that this is not what will happen. Human beings are too widespread and varied in our practices. At some point, TFR will exceed 2 again.
And your point might be valid about small sub-cultures like Amish, we just don’t really know. There is one large pro-natal culture, and that’s sub-Saharan Africa. If no one else can get it together, I speculate that some core of Africa will always remain pro-natal and keep sending out waves of migrants to colonize the rest of the world, until the pro-natal culture catches on everywhere.
To be clear though, I don’t expect much of anything to change this century. At most, some hint of what’s going to happen in the 22nd century will start to become clear in the next 50 years, for those watching closely.
AK did a series of posts on the subject, start here if you are interested:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/breeding-breeders/?highlight=breeder+genes#p_1_10
Unless I am way above my paygrade my understanding is that genes influence our behavior. If the culture and environment is neutralized, that is, it is the same, then that only leaves genes and randomness, and randomness can be identified and eliminated.Replies: @Talha
Culture is huge as determinant. I had an online conversation with a British convert recently; he has two kids (mashaAllah), wants four total (inshaAllah). He posted a picture of him and three other white convert friends of his (that have joined Club Fecundity) from last Eid. What shifted was a culture and environment paradigm – hang around with enough people who have kids and value families, suddenly your focus starts shifting.
Hang around with enough of these guys…well:
I asked this question of another white convert I know well; if you hadn’t become Muslim, would you have been married and with three kids at this point in your life?
He said no, there was no way he would have been on this trajectory and pointed out his similar genetic peer group (aka his siblings cousins) and the fact that the vast majority of them aren’t married and childless. Now he hangs around a bunch of guys that ask him if he’ll go for a fourth. His genes didn’t change, his outlook and priorities did. We were discussing that if things stay on the same trajectory with his extended family, his toddler son may well be the only one to carry on his family name from his generation.
I am baffled by how much money and effort is being into trying to get something so basic off the ground as encouraging people to get married and have children.
Peace.
But the trouble is that pro-natal peer groups are under siege. Too many children defect from them and join the materialist mass culture. Either natalism needs to gain more mindshare somehow, or people need to develop a stronger biological propensity for it.Replies: @Talha, @dfordoom
That being said, even the MSM can't deny it anymore, despite their aversion to implying that Racism Is Found Outside The West.
https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c
This is coupled with barely veiled state encouragement for middle class Han to be more fertile. Eugenics does not have the same stigma in East Asia that it does in the West: most parents would not hesitate to abort retarded children, even in Japan or Korea. I'm sure you can use your imagination for what this means given the degree of progress genetics and biological engineering research in China have attained over the last decade.
As another example, Singapore's immigration system tacitly revolves around keeping the Han solidly demographically dominant and-very subtly-keeping the Malays in check. It's not a secret that the Malays lag behind in professional attainment and the like, and Singapore's leadership going back to LKY barely disguised their social Darwinian beliefs, including HBD-esque racial views. Singaporean Malay birth-rates, BTW, are below replacement level, but nowhere near as much as the other ethnic groups. So, practically, since Singaporean Chinese have the lowest birth rates in the world, this means mass immigration from mainland China, as Singapore has already tapped the Indonesian and Malaysian Chinese as far as they could. Native Singaporeans of all races are not big fans of the new arrivals, who were subject to none of the intensive social coaching that LKY pushed on Singaporean Chinese in the 1970s and 1980s.
(Calling the Malays stupid as some ethnic Chinese do is unfair, IMO: they are simply a middle of the pack on global standards IQed race competing with two of the highest IQed contingents on earth in Southeastern Chinese and Tamils. They are also a culture which is devoted more to religion and family than professional attainment. There are drawbacks to that, but also benefits: you'll never meet more loyal, stick-by-you people than Malays, and on the whole, they seem happier than Chinese on average despite earning less. It's worth noting that religion is not as much of a factor as assumed on the surface: the local Indian Muslims have no appreciable difference in test scores, education, or professional attainment than their Hindu co-ethnics here.)Replies: @Talha, @songbird, @Mungerite
It’s strange how many neo-liberals seem to have endorsed LKY’s book, given how based he apparently was. Maybe, they didn’t actually read it? Or he got a pass because they thought it was more important to signal economic policy towards China? (And the Third World)
When he says something like (paraphrasing), “I’m against a Malay Malaysia” , I get the feeling that he thinks Darwinian selection would favor the Chinese in Malaysia against all other comers.
Peace.Replies: @Talha, @nebulafox
When he says something like (paraphrasing), "I'm against a Malay Malaysia" , I get the feeling that he thinks Darwinian selection would favor the Chinese in Malaysia against all other comers.Replies: @Talha
Boy, did homeboy get that one wrong. Check the link I posted by ethnic TFR breakdown in Malaysia.
Peace.
https://twitter.com/kaichoyce/status/1305776845053280257
Nah, this is just taking up the spaces people like you are leaving open. That's not a "soccer mom", that's a "soccer team mom"!
The girls could use some longer shorts, but otherwise cute kids. Mom still looks young, let's see if she can beat my grandma's count of 14.Replies: @Yahya K., @songbird, @Audacious Epigone
I take pleasure in denying them my money, but I don't think they really notice it. Hate to say it, but I think it might be practically impossible to form a successful boycott against a global entertainment company. Too many people don't care. They might not like drag queens, but their only response is to watch something else, not open a book.
What I'd like to see is the re-assertion of cultural identities, so people will take pride in the production of movies, etc. that show off their culture. Like take Japan - I'm not saying that all they produce is 100% moral or that they don't have problems as a society, but I think, pound for pound, that they produce more moral content than the West. You'll see a lot of intergenerational messages - respect your elders and traditions and future generations - in their content.
IMO, Europeans have a lot of great culture, but they are kind of resting on their laurels. I think it is the same with most other people, but it's the most notable in Europeans, who have been the most subordinated to Hollywood - being fooled into thinking that it is theirs, when it is not.Replies: @Talha
Yup, major problem…but again, one can choose not to participate in things like smoking weed even though everyone else is doing it.
Some of my favorite films are from classic Japanese cinema days. I’ve watched a couple of their modern films here and there (13 Assassins was particularly good), but it’s probably time to check again to see what they’ve been up to. My kids and I have enjoyed some of their family-friendly cartoons as well (very well done).
This is what happens to everyone when they achieve success. They get soft or lazy or start losing their edge.
The Prophet (pbuh) both predicted the victory the Muslims would have and advised them not to lose their edge:
“Lands shall be thrown open to you and Allah will suffice you (against your enemies), but none of you should give up playing with his arrows.” – reported in Muslim
Uqbah ibn Amir (ra) was told:
“You go back and forth between these two targets and you are an old man, so you will be finding it very hard.” ‘Uqba said: “But for a thing I heard from the Prophet (pbuh), I would not strain myself.” Harith (one of the narrators in the chain of transmitters) said: “I asked Ibn Shamasa: ‘What was that?’” He said that he (the Prophet [pbuh]) said: “Whoever learned archery and then gave it up is not from us or he has been guilty of disobedience.” -reported in Muslim
You get too comfortable and rest, then others will take over your institutions (or in the above case, Mongol hordes will come through and make towers out of your skulls inside of your city walls instead of you making piles of theirs outside).
Peace.
For all the prominence of walls in pop culture, (mostly thinly veiled open border messages) I find that there are some astonishing gaps in my education regarding them. Like, I swear I was never taught that the Spartans disdained walls, and called people who lived behind them women. (Though it is not just a negative picture that the book paints). It mentions the early Middle East at some length.Replies: @Talha
Peace.Replies: @Talha, @nebulafox
..these folks
https://twitter.com/kaichoyce/status/1305776845053280257
Nah, this is just taking up the spaces people like you are leaving open. That’s not a “soccer mom”, that’s a “soccer team mom”!
The girls could use some longer shorts, but otherwise cute kids. Mom still looks young, let’s see if she can beat my grandma’s count of 14.
https://images.app.goo.gl/V95SYCrukkA88HM89Replies: @Talha
https://twitter.com/kaichoyce/status/1305776845053280257
Nah, this is just taking up the spaces people like you are leaving open. That's not a "soccer mom", that's a "soccer team mom"!
The girls could use some longer shorts, but otherwise cute kids. Mom still looks young, let's see if she can beat my grandma's count of 14.Replies: @Yahya K., @songbird, @Audacious Epigone
You’re grandmother had 14 kids? Mashallah. My grandmother had 10, but 4 of them died at childbirth (Saudi Arabia’s healthcare system at the time was medieval).
I don’t think the Islamic World can be considered as one Ummah anymore. At least not as long as the nation-state model of governance is the order of the day (though that order seems to be changing.) No-one is really making a push for pan-Islamism anymore. The last leader I can think of was King Faisal of Saudi Arabia.
Though I used to be a nationalist, i’m starting to shift towards pan-Islamist views. We should start by expanding the OIC into some sort of Islamic version of the EU – The Islamic Union, then work from there.
He gets a lot of respect from much of the Ummah for this push for Muslim unity.Nationalism is what Muslims were taught by others who had their own interests in mind when they taught it to them. A bunch of Europeans with handle-bar mustaches who killed their forefathers drew straight lines* in the sands and said; you are this and you are that - now dance monkey, to the tune we are playing...and man did the Muslims dance!And I do mean straight lines, have you seen how unnatural the borders are in the Muslim world?! Literally straight lines. Now imagine Muslims took over Europe and then left it after drawing up borders like this:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C-gSp9nXkAAdI_-.jpgWhich self-respecting European would accept the borders someone else from Asia or Africa drew up for them? But somehow Muslims are supposed to accept them. Complete and utter nonsense.The first step is simply a shift in attitude among Muslims themselves in rejecting a narrative someone else wrote for them.I would love to see a military-economic cooperative/bloc in the Muslim world - a blend of the EU and NATO - within my lifetime. Historically, Muslim strength lies in their unity despite very real differences. It goes without saying that; "divided we fall", but this is also a warning from Allah swt - evry Muslim should be familiar with the verses of ukuwwah (brotherhood):
"And hold firmly to the rope of Allah all together and do not become divided. And remember the favor of Allah upon you - when you were enemies and He brought your hearts together and you became, by His favor, brothers. And you were on the edge of a pit of the Fire, and He saved you from it. Thus does Allah make clear to you His signs, that you may be guided." (3:103)"And obey Allah and His Messenger; and fall into no disputes, lest you lose heart and your power depart. And be patient and persevering. For Allah is with those who patiently persevere." (8:46)"The Believers are but a single brotherhood. So make peace and reconciliation between your brothers; and fear Allah, that you may receive Mercy." (49:10)It is in other peoples' interest that Muslims are convinced that their unity is unnatural and that they remain divided in order to take advantage of the disunity. It is only the fault of Muslims themselves if they are willing to take these peoples' opinions over Allah's. In which case, He reserves the right to humiliate His servants at the hands of others until they finally get their act together.Replies: @iffen
Yes, alhmdulillah – all of them were born healthy. Though one had polio when very young, but survived. Other grandma had 8 – alhamdulillah – all of them also born healthy.
Wa salaam.
He gets a lot of respect from much of the Ummah for this push for Muslim unity.
Nationalism is what Muslims were taught by others who had their own interests in mind when they taught it to them. A bunch of Europeans with handle-bar mustaches who killed their forefathers drew straight lines* in the sands and said; you are this and you are that – now dance monkey, to the tune we are playing…and man did the Muslims dance!
And I do mean straight lines, have you seen how unnatural the borders are in the Muslim world?! Literally straight lines. Now imagine Muslims took over Europe and then left it after drawing up borders like this:
Which self-respecting European would accept the borders someone else from Asia or Africa drew up for them? But somehow Muslims are supposed to accept them. Complete and utter nonsense.
The first step is simply a shift in attitude among Muslims themselves in rejecting a narrative someone else wrote for them.
I would love to see a military-economic cooperative/bloc in the Muslim world – a blend of the EU and NATO – within my lifetime.
Historically, Muslim strength lies in their unity despite very real differences. It goes without saying that; “divided we fall”, but this is also a warning from Allah swt – evry Muslim should be familiar with the verses of ukuwwah (brotherhood):
“And hold firmly to the rope of Allah all together and do not become divided. And remember the favor of Allah upon you – when you were enemies and He brought your hearts together and you became, by His favor, brothers. And you were on the edge of a pit of the Fire, and He saved you from it. Thus does Allah make clear to you His signs, that you may be guided.” (3:103)
“And obey Allah and His Messenger; and fall into no disputes, lest you lose heart and your power depart. And be patient and persevering. For Allah is with those who patiently persevere.” (8:46)
“The Believers are but a single brotherhood. So make peace and reconciliation between your brothers; and fear Allah, that you may receive Mercy.” (49:10)
It is in other peoples’ interest that Muslims are convinced that their unity is unnatural and that they remain divided in order to take advantage of the disunity. It is only the fault of Muslims themselves if they are willing to take these peoples’ opinions over Allah’s. In which case, He reserves the right to humiliate His servants at the hands of others until they finally get their act together.
You are smarter than this.Replies: @Talha, @songbird
That’s why birth control was probably the most significant invention of the 20th Century, which in an age that brought instant communication and information access, nuclear weapons, the discovery of DNA, the Green Revolution, etc, is saying a lot. For the first time in human history, sex could be completely divorced from the risk of childbirth. And the two great biological imperatives are eating and reproduction.
It is ironic that you should write this, since as a rule people who do so generally are completely ignorant of history — you are not. But the fact remains that humans have been controlling excess population both pre and post partum for a very, very long time.
It would be more accurate to state that “consistently reliable and easy to use contraception” was a significant invention of the mid 20th century. Even that is questionable; the contraceptive diaphragm or pessary predated Charles Goodyear’s discovery of how to vulcanize rubber, but certainly became easier to use afterwards. Margaret Sanger went to jail at least once about 100 years ago for showing women the rubber diaphragm – it is a late 19th century invention.
There are any number of herbal preparations that pregnant women must avoid – because they induce labor / cause miscarriage. 19th century Anglosphere women had herbal teas that they used to “regulate the menses”, in other words as a kind of monthly morning-after tincture.
The condom is a 17th century invention, although they didn’t become more common until the 19th century.
Pliny wrote of an “inducer of mensturation” that was known in ancient Egypt:
https://infogalactic.com/info/Silphium
The more extreme population control measures are known to history: leaving unwanted babies on the hillside (ancient Greece, a major plot point of Oedipus rex), sending certain young men to work far away from home (ancient China’s Great Wall was a known “sink” for men) and so forth.
It’s not as if people in previous times did not bone for the sake of boning: they did, and did regularly. We’re just human animals in the end. But the chance of pregnancy was always there,
The chance of pregnancy is not always there, women are only fertile for a few days per month during ovulation, and abortofacients have been known for a long time – it’s in the original Hippocratic Oath circa 400 BC.
Ascribing the known flaws of human nature to objects is a form of superstition. “Guns cause murder!” is not much different from “Contraception causes sexual promiscuity”.
Orgies are things that have happened over and over in human recorded history; not just ancient Rome, but ancient Egypt, ancient Babylon, etc. The Ancien’ Regime in France was notorious for all manner of sexual debauchery with only herbal preparations available – plus plenty of orphanages. Birthing a baby and giving it away may seem a bit heartless to modern people, but it was standard for thousands of years. Early Christians often picked up the abandoned in the Roman empire. The great composer Vivaldi wrote much of his music for the all-girl band he was assigned to teach in Venice, every player was an abandoned baby. The foundling house had a drawer like a night-deposit at a modern bank – put the child in, push the drawer or a lever, all done. A nun inside received the latest offering.
I’m going to point to Glubb Pasha again here, his 1974 monograph on the “Fate of Empires” isn’t footnoted, was never peer reviewed, didn’t get published in any very important journal, but he did read Arabic and other scripts & he did supposedly view original sources from the Caliphate era. The complaints of the 13th century Arab writers regarding young men, women, what’s appropriate, etc. are just a bit too similar to more recent complaints. Remember in that era the Islamic empire was middleman between Europe and Asia – they had a monopoly on goods transported, and grew rich on that and slavery.
Rich people often do stuff the rest of us do not do, such as travel to islands for orgies. However by the standards of human history virtually everyone in the industrialized world is “rich”, and our hindbrains have not changed substantially in the last 10,000 years or more. Without getting into r/K, it’s human nature to fill up a biological niche, we are the descendents of the horniest.
I’ve had this discussion before, and it’s always the same essence: technologies do not cause humans to do bad things. Humans have intrinsic flaws, or sins, that simply get amped up by some technologies. It’s what lies in the human heart that matters, and we all are unpleasant somewhere deep inside. Remember Casanova?
Cleopatra didn’t have The Pill. Neither did Catharine, Tzarina of Russia. 18th century French aristocrats didn’t either. Unlimited, uncontrolled sexuality isn’t exactly new, it’s what we humans tend to do whenever we think can get away with it.
These advantages were sufficient to constitute a social revolution. Contraception become almost universally used, rather than being something that a minority of sexually active people used. That was indeed a sea change.Technologies can make it a whole lot easier for humans to do bad things. It makes a huge difference when doing bad things becomes easy. An obvious example is war crimes. Prior to the 20th century it was possible to massacre huge numbers of civilians but it involved a lot of effort and it required the perpetrators to overcome major psychological barriers. Thanks to technology by the 1940s it was possible to massacre hundreds of thousands of civilians by dropping bombs on them and that was a lot easier because you didn't even need to see the faces of the people you were killing. So massacres of civilian populations went from being relatively rare to being commonplace.
He gets a lot of respect from much of the Ummah for this push for Muslim unity.Nationalism is what Muslims were taught by others who had their own interests in mind when they taught it to them. A bunch of Europeans with handle-bar mustaches who killed their forefathers drew straight lines* in the sands and said; you are this and you are that - now dance monkey, to the tune we are playing...and man did the Muslims dance!And I do mean straight lines, have you seen how unnatural the borders are in the Muslim world?! Literally straight lines. Now imagine Muslims took over Europe and then left it after drawing up borders like this:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C-gSp9nXkAAdI_-.jpgWhich self-respecting European would accept the borders someone else from Asia or Africa drew up for them? But somehow Muslims are supposed to accept them. Complete and utter nonsense.The first step is simply a shift in attitude among Muslims themselves in rejecting a narrative someone else wrote for them.I would love to see a military-economic cooperative/bloc in the Muslim world - a blend of the EU and NATO - within my lifetime. Historically, Muslim strength lies in their unity despite very real differences. It goes without saying that; "divided we fall", but this is also a warning from Allah swt - evry Muslim should be familiar with the verses of ukuwwah (brotherhood):
"And hold firmly to the rope of Allah all together and do not become divided. And remember the favor of Allah upon you - when you were enemies and He brought your hearts together and you became, by His favor, brothers. And you were on the edge of a pit of the Fire, and He saved you from it. Thus does Allah make clear to you His signs, that you may be guided." (3:103)"And obey Allah and His Messenger; and fall into no disputes, lest you lose heart and your power depart. And be patient and persevering. For Allah is with those who patiently persevere." (8:46)"The Believers are but a single brotherhood. So make peace and reconciliation between your brothers; and fear Allah, that you may receive Mercy." (49:10)It is in other peoples' interest that Muslims are convinced that their unity is unnatural and that they remain divided in order to take advantage of the disunity. It is only the fault of Muslims themselves if they are willing to take these peoples' opinions over Allah's. In which case, He reserves the right to humiliate His servants at the hands of others until they finally get their act together.Replies: @iffen
Nationalism is what Muslims were taught by others who had their own interests in mind when they taught it to them. A bunch of Europeans with handle-bar mustaches who killed their forefathers drew straight lines* in the sands and said; you are this and you are that – now dance monkey, to the tune we are playing…and man did the Muslims dance!
You are smarter than this.
But I do think the smaller Gulf countries, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE basically owe their existence to Europeans (USA), and personally I think it is a negative thing. Small countries invite in the military of larger ones. And they don't have the labor force or the human capital to develop quickly, so they invite that in too. They essentially become outposts of globohomo.
You are smarter than this.Replies: @Talha, @songbird
That’s what I keep on trying to tell the Muslims, but hey some people really like straight lines.
So nationalism it is until we learn not to dance like monkeys.
Peace.
Hang around with enough of these guys...well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efo26lgbeFA
I asked this question of another white convert I know well; if you hadn't become Muslim, would you have been married and with three kids at this point in your life?
He said no, there was no way he would have been on this trajectory and pointed out his similar genetic peer group (aka his siblings cousins) and the fact that the vast majority of them aren't married and childless. Now he hangs around a bunch of guys that ask him if he'll go for a fourth. His genes didn't change, his outlook and priorities did. We were discussing that if things stay on the same trajectory with his extended family, his toddler son may well be the only one to carry on his family name from his generation.
I am baffled by how much money and effort is being into trying to get something so basic off the ground as encouraging people to get married and have children.
Peace.Replies: @Wency
I agree that peer group has a lot of sway. Our grandparents or great grandparents came from much larger families — clearly genes haven’t changed that much. But I also think that characters in media function psychologically as something of a peer group and can have an influence on those who overconsume (see the video you posted).
But the trouble is that pro-natal peer groups are under siege. Too many children defect from them and join the materialist mass culture. Either natalism needs to gain more mindshare somehow, or people need to develop a stronger biological propensity for it.
Peace.
Social conservatism in general has a massive image problem. To most people it seems negative, miserable, humourless, life-denying and suffocating. I'm not saying social conservatives are negative, miserable, humourless, life-denying and suffocating but that's the way they appear to the average person.Replies: @iffen
But the trouble is that pro-natal peer groups are under siege. Too many children defect from them and join the materialist mass culture. Either natalism needs to gain more mindshare somehow, or people need to develop a stronger biological propensity for it.Replies: @Talha, @dfordoom
You make some good points. I don’t know what the solution is, but I do think encouraging natalism and traditional family formation in the circles one has influence in is a good way to go. Immediate family, extended family, etc.
Peace.
The Prophet (pbuh) both predicted the victory the Muslims would have and advised them not to lose their edge:
"Lands shall be thrown open to you and Allah will suffice you (against your enemies), but none of you should give up playing with his arrows." - reported in Muslim
Uqbah ibn Amir (ra) was told:
"You go back and forth between these two targets and you are an old man, so you will be finding it very hard." 'Uqba said: "But for a thing I heard from the Prophet (pbuh), I would not strain myself." Harith (one of the narrators in the chain of transmitters) said: "I asked Ibn Shamasa: 'What was that?'" He said that he (the Prophet [pbuh]) said: "Whoever learned archery and then gave it up is not from us or he has been guilty of disobedience." -reported in Muslim
You get too comfortable and rest, then others will take over your institutions (or in the above case, Mongol hordes will come through and make towers out of your skulls inside of your city walls instead of you making piles of theirs outside).
Peace.Replies: @songbird
Lately, I’ve been reading a book Sailer mentioned a while back, Walls: a History of Civilization in Blood and Brick by David Frye. It’s pretty interesting. I’m not far into it, but one of the themes it covers is this idea that people get soft behind a wall.
For all the prominence of walls in pop culture, (mostly thinly veiled open border messages) I find that there are some astonishing gaps in my education regarding them. Like, I swear I was never taught that the Spartans disdained walls, and called people who lived behind them women. (Though it is not just a negative picture that the book paints). It mentions the early Middle East at some length.
"They will not fight you united except with the protection of fortified towns or from behind walls. " (59:14)
It really is a difficult thing to escape from, namely going soft once one has struggled to reach a place of comfort...seems like one of those things that civilizations can't figure out a way from. The new Dune movie is coming out; this stagnation and life of ease (and decadence) after victory is also a major theme and tension in Dune.
Peace.
https://twitter.com/kaichoyce/status/1305776845053280257
Nah, this is just taking up the spaces people like you are leaving open. That's not a "soccer mom", that's a "soccer team mom"!
The girls could use some longer shorts, but otherwise cute kids. Mom still looks young, let's see if she can beat my grandma's count of 14.Replies: @Yahya K., @songbird, @Audacious Epigone
My great grandmother had 16. That was back on the farm, but the ability is certainly still there.
Peace.
You are smarter than this.Replies: @Talha, @songbird
I think Sykes-Picot is overemphasized. And, in a way, I think the Turks, acting gullibly, helped create Israel.
But I do think the smaller Gulf countries, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE basically owe their existence to Europeans (USA), and personally I think it is a negative thing. Small countries invite in the military of larger ones. And they don’t have the labor force or the human capital to develop quickly, so they invite that in too. They essentially become outposts of globohomo.
For all the prominence of walls in pop culture, (mostly thinly veiled open border messages) I find that there are some astonishing gaps in my education regarding them. Like, I swear I was never taught that the Spartans disdained walls, and called people who lived behind them women. (Though it is not just a negative picture that the book paints). It mentions the early Middle East at some length.Replies: @Talha
Interestingly, the Qur’an mentions this sort of thing:
“They will not fight you united except with the protection of fortified towns or from behind walls. ” (59:14)
It really is a difficult thing to escape from, namely going soft once one has struggled to reach a place of comfort…seems like one of those things that civilizations can’t figure out a way from. The new Dune movie is coming out; this stagnation and life of ease (and decadence) after victory is also a major theme and tension in Dune.
Peace.
Wow! Absolutely incredible! That really is crazy that this was just a couple of generations ago. To go from that to our current situation is a testament to how much has changed due to the invention of contraception as Nebulafox was mentioning.
Peace.
https://infogalactic.com/info/SilphiumThe more extreme population control measures are known to history: leaving unwanted babies on the hillside (ancient Greece, a major plot point of Oedipus rex), sending certain young men to work far away from home (ancient China's Great Wall was a known "sink" for men) and so forth. It’s not as if people in previous times did not bone for the sake of boning: they did, and did regularly. We’re just human animals in the end. But the chance of pregnancy was always there,The chance of pregnancy is not always there, women are only fertile for a few days per month during ovulation, and abortofacients have been known for a long time - it's in the original Hippocratic Oath circa 400 BC.Ascribing the known flaws of human nature to objects is a form of superstition. "Guns cause murder!" is not much different from "Contraception causes sexual promiscuity". Orgies are things that have happened over and over in human recorded history; not just ancient Rome, but ancient Egypt, ancient Babylon, etc. The Ancien' Regime in France was notorious for all manner of sexual debauchery with only herbal preparations available - plus plenty of orphanages. Birthing a baby and giving it away may seem a bit heartless to modern people, but it was standard for thousands of years. Early Christians often picked up the abandoned in the Roman empire. The great composer Vivaldi wrote much of his music for the all-girl band he was assigned to teach in Venice, every player was an abandoned baby. The foundling house had a drawer like a night-deposit at a modern bank - put the child in, push the drawer or a lever, all done. A nun inside received the latest offering. I'm going to point to Glubb Pasha again here, his 1974 monograph on the "Fate of Empires" isn't footnoted, was never peer reviewed, didn't get published in any very important journal, but he did read Arabic and other scripts & he did supposedly view original sources from the Caliphate era. The complaints of the 13th century Arab writers regarding young men, women, what's appropriate, etc. are just a bit too similar to more recent complaints. Remember in that era the Islamic empire was middleman between Europe and Asia - they had a monopoly on goods transported, and grew rich on that and slavery. Rich people often do stuff the rest of us do not do, such as travel to islands for orgies. However by the standards of human history virtually everyone in the industrialized world is "rich", and our hindbrains have not changed substantially in the last 10,000 years or more. Without getting into r/K, it's human nature to fill up a biological niche, we are the descendents of the horniest.I've had this discussion before, and it's always the same essence: technologies do not cause humans to do bad things. Humans have intrinsic flaws, or sins, that simply get amped up by some technologies. It's what lies in the human heart that matters, and we all are unpleasant somewhere deep inside. Remember Casanova? Cleopatra didn't have The Pill. Neither did Catharine, Tzarina of Russia. 18th century French aristocrats didn't either. Unlimited, uncontrolled sexuality isn't exactly new, it's what we humans tend to do whenever we think can get away with it.Replies: @dfordoom
That would indeed be more accurate, but nebulafox’s point still stands. Contraception did become significantly easier and more convenient and more reliable in the mid-20th century. And using the contraceptive pill had other huge advantages – it avoided the social embarrassment of having to go into a drugstore to buy condoms, and for women it meant not having to fiddle about with devices before going on dates (which made women feel like sluts). Women liked the pill because they could tell themselves it was just a precaution and it didn’t mean they were going to jump into bed with every man they dated.
These advantages were sufficient to constitute a social revolution. Contraception become almost universally used, rather than being something that a minority of sexually active people used. That was indeed a sea change.
Technologies can make it a whole lot easier for humans to do bad things. It makes a huge difference when doing bad things becomes easy. An obvious example is war crimes. Prior to the 20th century it was possible to massacre huge numbers of civilians but it involved a lot of effort and it required the perpetrators to overcome major psychological barriers. Thanks to technology by the 1940s it was possible to massacre hundreds of thousands of civilians by dropping bombs on them and that was a lot easier because you didn’t even need to see the faces of the people you were killing. So massacres of civilian populations went from being relatively rare to being commonplace.
But the trouble is that pro-natal peer groups are under siege. Too many children defect from them and join the materialist mass culture. Either natalism needs to gain more mindshare somehow, or people need to develop a stronger biological propensity for it.Replies: @Talha, @dfordoom
The materialist mass culture is cool and glamorous. To young people pro-natal groups tend to seem boring and oppressive and humourless. When you mention the word Amish people don’t immediately think, “Wow, those fun-loving Amish are so awesomely cool.” Teenage girls don’t daydream about dressing like Amish women. Teenage boys don’t fantasise about attracting girls by tooling around the streets in a horse and buggy.
Social conservatism in general has a massive image problem. To most people it seems negative, miserable, humourless, life-denying and suffocating. I’m not saying social conservatives are negative, miserable, humourless, life-denying and suffocating but that’s the way they appear to the average person.
First off, what are we going to spend the money on? Do you nievely think it will be spent on Americans? Or do you recognize that MMT sucks the wealth out of foreign countries? So that excess money will need to go to the military to be sure that countries "play along".
MMT introduces moral hazard, where something for nothing misaligns productive capacity into the wrong industries.
The only way forward for America is a hard reset and to take our medicine and not rely on tricks to bring our house in order.Replies: @Sam J.
“…MMT as a form of colonialism, and that it is only possible if other countries “play along”…”
Colonialism. I might ask who is being colonized right NOW.
We already have MMT but the only people that get the free money are those who have lots of it already and FED friends.
“…First off, what are we going to spend the money on?…”
He maybe we can own all the productive assets in the country like the wealthy do now because they used FED zero interest loans to buy EVERYTHING. Wouldn’t it be better if the population that was on the hook for the money supply actually got the benefits of it?
“…Or do you recognize that MMT sucks the wealth out of foreign countries?…”
What??? No. Even if it does better to put it into the public’s pocket rather than the Oligarchs.
“MMT introduces moral hazard, where something for nothing misaligns productive capacity into the wrong industries.”
Maybe but better in my pocket than in the Oligarchs.
Let’s not pretend the FED system is not some crack head thinking stupidity because it is. A system where all money is borrowed. All of it and the only way to pay back the interest is…borrow more money. What stupidity. The end result is it will fail because you can never pay off the interest. We are approaching that point now. The Chinese and Japanese, not being idiots or run by blackmailing pedo Jews, run their own FED and when the debt gets too high they just zero a portion of it out. Which sound a great deal like MMT, and is, and China is booming. Japan while greatly slowing down because their population is so old is far from collapsing.
“The only way forward for America is a hard reset and to take our medicine and not rely on tricks to bring our house in order.”
How about we take all the assets bought up by the banks and their lackies since the housing crisis. I’ve heard numbers of $39 Trillion but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was much more. They got $6 trillion recently. Let’s let them take the hard reset FIRST. The US population has been stuck on a hard reset for decades already.
*one of the most amusing articles was one that showed Western sources predicting the collapse of China for every year since 2005. 15 years later of being wrong, China is still on the verge of collapse any time now.Replies: @Ash Williams, @Sam J.
“…*one of the most amusing articles was one that showed Western sources predicting the collapse of China for every year since 2005. 15 years later of being wrong, China is still on the verge of collapse any time now…”
China will not collapse. Mainly because they seem to have realized that a prosperous economy is made by high energy use. Assuming it’s not all wasted, the conversion of matter with energy IS an advanced economy and the Chinese are pushing advanced reactors to keep this energy cost low.
But who be dumb enough to buy debts of the United States when everybody knows that nobody can enforce debt service in this case?
Yeah, this too.
Peace.Replies: @Talha, @nebulafox
Malaysian Chinese who can, leave. On one hand, massive brain drain and Malaysia did not become the Fifth Asian Tiger it was promising to be in the 1980s and 1990s before Soros… eh, economics. On the other hand, average Malays are not at hock to a middleman minority that openly holds them in contempt like elsewhere in SEA. Pick and choose in life, right?
The ethnic Indians usually do not have money, unlike in Singapore (far more ethnically homogenous and blue collar on average), so they drive most of the organized crime in KL and JB.
Peace.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/642137/malaysia-fertility-rates-by-ethnic-group/Like you said, benefits to being more devoted to family than profession has the benefit of sustaining a family-friendly culture in which more children are prized.Interesting. Do the Muslims and the Hindus tend to originate from the same region in India?Peace.Replies: @nebulafox
In Singapore, some are Tamil, some are from elsewhere in India, or what is now Pakistan.
One interesting difference beteen Malaysia and Singapore is that the ethnic Indian population in the latter is much more diverse. Almost half were not Tamil (yet had to learn the language in the 70s! The Chinese also had to learn Mandarin despite most not speaking it, but gap far less harsh). There is a distinctive Tamil Muslim minority, though, known as mamaks in local parlance-their food is very popular, both in Singapore and Malaysia. Often 24 hours in Malaysia, so bailed me out whenever I had to meet my boss back in America at 2 AM. 🙂
Yup. If I heard correctly, this is an issue with Chinese in the Philippines.
Peace.
It is obvious the US will never pay it back, period. The question is how long China will continue to accept new IOUs as payment for the maturation of older IOUs. At some point they’re going to realize–I suspect they already have realized–it’s time to cut their losses.
Let others pay them to destroy their own families, one need not participate in that self-destructive garbage.
Peace.Replies: @songbird, @Audacious Epigone
Or if that’s too much, watch without paying. There are lots of ways to do this, some available from Netflix itself.
https://twitter.com/kaichoyce/status/1305776845053280257
Nah, this is just taking up the spaces people like you are leaving open. That's not a "soccer mom", that's a "soccer team mom"!
The girls could use some longer shorts, but otherwise cute kids. Mom still looks young, let's see if she can beat my grandma's count of 14.Replies: @Yahya K., @songbird, @Audacious Epigone
Okay “kai choyce”, now do this one:
https://images.app.goo.gl/V95SYCrukkA88HM89
Peace.
https://images.app.goo.gl/V95SYCrukkA88HM89Replies: @Talha
Dang! They’re starting their own clan right there!
Peace.
Social conservatism in general has a massive image problem. To most people it seems negative, miserable, humourless, life-denying and suffocating. I'm not saying social conservatives are negative, miserable, humourless, life-denying and suffocating but that's the way they appear to the average person.Replies: @iffen
I keep forgetting to tell you, doom, if you live long enough to see Red China move, with military force, to protect the Chinese diaspora in Australia, don’t you f*****g dare come running to Uncle Sam for help.
That being said, even the MSM can't deny it anymore, despite their aversion to implying that Racism Is Found Outside The West.
https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c
This is coupled with barely veiled state encouragement for middle class Han to be more fertile. Eugenics does not have the same stigma in East Asia that it does in the West: most parents would not hesitate to abort retarded children, even in Japan or Korea. I'm sure you can use your imagination for what this means given the degree of progress genetics and biological engineering research in China have attained over the last decade.
As another example, Singapore's immigration system tacitly revolves around keeping the Han solidly demographically dominant and-very subtly-keeping the Malays in check. It's not a secret that the Malays lag behind in professional attainment and the like, and Singapore's leadership going back to LKY barely disguised their social Darwinian beliefs, including HBD-esque racial views. Singaporean Malay birth-rates, BTW, are below replacement level, but nowhere near as much as the other ethnic groups. So, practically, since Singaporean Chinese have the lowest birth rates in the world, this means mass immigration from mainland China, as Singapore has already tapped the Indonesian and Malaysian Chinese as far as they could. Native Singaporeans of all races are not big fans of the new arrivals, who were subject to none of the intensive social coaching that LKY pushed on Singaporean Chinese in the 1970s and 1980s.
(Calling the Malays stupid as some ethnic Chinese do is unfair, IMO: they are simply a middle of the pack on global standards IQed race competing with two of the highest IQed contingents on earth in Southeastern Chinese and Tamils. They are also a culture which is devoted more to religion and family than professional attainment. There are drawbacks to that, but also benefits: you'll never meet more loyal, stick-by-you people than Malays, and on the whole, they seem happier than Chinese on average despite earning less. It's worth noting that religion is not as much of a factor as assumed on the surface: the local Indian Muslims have no appreciable difference in test scores, education, or professional attainment than their Hindu co-ethnics here.)Replies: @Talha, @songbird, @Mungerite
Hm — my appreciation for the position of the Malays has improved after many years in the US, and having a better appreciation for the fact that it makes eminent sense for a less talented majority to maintain tight political control of the commanding heights of politics and the economy, efficiency be damned (in contrast to the American majority happily encouraging the growth of an overclass whose interests don’t perfectly align with their own [while simultaneously encouraging the even faster growth of an underclass].
That said, your impression of the Malays is rather more favorable than my own: I found their insularity and general listlessness hard to work with/around. Also, political Islam is an ugly beast.