There are a lot of ways to describe the new political divide. We have nationalists versus internationalists, globalists versus populists and identitarians versus multiculturalists. All of those are true, but another way of thinking about it is that the debate is now moving upstream. For a long time, public debate was focused on economics or maybe politics. Those are downstream from institutions, culture, and biology. Now, the debate has moved upstream, to the stuff that really matters.
Not everyone has figured out that the debate has changed. The Bernie Bros, for example, are like the Japanese soldiers, who were cut off in the war and lived in the jungle for years, still fighting the war. The Bernie Bros still think the Democrats are the party of the working man, as if anyone in Washington cares about the working man. The legacy conservatives are similarly trapped in a bygone era. You see that in this post, by our old friend Sloppy Williamson, on the ravages of socialism on Venezuela.
The United States has resigned in protest from the UN Human Rights Council, which has a long and ignominious record of protecting the world’s worst abusers of human rights. The proximate cause of the U.S. resignation was the council’s unwillingness to act on the matter of Venezuela, where the socialist government of Nicolas Maduro is engaged in political massacres and the use of Soviet-style hunger-terror against its political enemies. Venezuela remains, incredibly enough, not only protected by the Human Rights Council but an active member of it, an honor shared Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its political assassins, the People’s Republic of China and its organ harvesters, and the Castro dictatorship in Cuba with its torturers and al paredón justice.
Venezuela and North Korea could not be more dissimilar in terms of their respective cultures, peoples, and histories. And yet they have arrived in approximately the same place: at the terminus of F. A. Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom.”
For generations, it has been an article of faith among conservatives that everything depends upon economics. Get the economics right, then the miracle of the marketplace will usher in the the age of bliss. Choose the wrong eco9nomic model and terrible things must follow. Bad tax policy not only makes people poor, it makes them corrupt, violent and cheat on their wives. Like Marxists, they think the system makes the man, so there is a moral imperative to adopt the correct economics.
Well, what about Venezuela? What’s really going on? Here’s the per capita GDP.
That’s in constant dollars and it shows a remarkable thing. After the turmoil that brought Hugo Chavez to power, the Venezuelan economy started a nice run. Per capita GDP is a benchmark number that economists love to use to measure the health of a country. Here’s what wages look like in the country:
source: tradingeconomics.com
Now, wages and economic growth don’t tell the whole story. Venezuela suffers from the curse of natural resources, which in her case is oil. What dumb people call socialism is just the way things operate in countries with limited human capital. The elites monopolize the natural resources and the profits that come from selling them on the international market. They spread enough money around to prevent a revolt, but keep the majority for themselves.
In other words, what ails Venezuela is not ideology. It is biology. It is the way it is because of its people. What determines the nature and character of a country is not the tax code or the regulatory regime. Venezuela lacks the human capital to operate a modern economy. It has and always will suffer from the smart fraction problem. That is, it lacks a large enough smart population to carry the rest of the population into a modern economy. It is stuck in a model suited for its people.
Put another way, it is people, not pots. Replace the Venezuelan population with Finns and they will figure out how to make a mild form of Nordic socialism work. Fill the place up with Japanese and the country will look like an Asian tiger. Fill up the United States with Latin Americans and it is going to start to look like Latin America. That’s why your newly imported replacements are running on platforms familiar to anyone getting ready to vote in the upcoming Mexican elections.
Of course, the reason that raging cucks like Sloppy Williamson avoid the obvious is that it is much safer to focus on trivialities. Lefty mobs are not going to swarm his Rascal Scooter as long as he avoids taboo subjects. That and these guys have been playing the role of useful idiot for so long, it is second nature. They operate like a cargo cult, convinced they can pretend it remains the 1980’s and it will magically be so. National Review is like a weird living museum to the Reagan era.
The world has changed and the debate has shifted upstream. People are noticing that when you elect a new people, you don’t actually end up with a new people. You end up with a culture that reflects the biology of the people you imported. Whites in America are now coming to terms with the choices in front of them. Keep their head down and play make believe while they are replaced, or risk moral condemnation for defending their heritage and their culture. That’s the debate.
The GDP per capita graph on Venezuela is interesting, but doesn’t tell the whole story. Socialism is kind of like cocaine; it actually works brilliantly… for a while. Your first couple of months snorting coke, everything seems great – you have more energy, you feel good, you work longer hours and you make more money. But after that initial burst of goodness, things start turning bad. Eventually, very bad. Same with socialism – it works brilliantly until, as Margaret Thatcher noted, you run out of other people’s money. Can people with a high IQ make a shitty system work better… Read more »
We have 20 years of Chavez-Maduro now. The libertarians rubbing their hands together telling us that “any day now it will collapse” sound a little foolish. Frankly, Venezuela is better suited to latin fascism, which is what they have now. Western style liberal democracy cannot work with an 85-IQ population. Darwin never used the phrase “survival of the fittest.” That was coined by a libertarian political theorist named Herbert Spencer. Evolution hinges on reproductive success. Traits that tend to make it more likely for a species to make more copies of itself will, on average, flourish, at the expense of… Read more »
People are certainly most important, but stupid economics can cripple an otherwise high-achieving population – just look at China under Maoism. Venezuela is certainly never going to be a major player in the world, but the people are basically the same as they were forty years ago, and yet they were not, as far as I know, eating zoo animals back then. Anatoly Karlin, the Russian blogger (and certainly no fanatical anti-communist) has done some fine work with regard to the retarding effects of bad systems on otherwise high-achieving people. Williamson is, as always, full of sh*t, but we don’t… Read more »
Agree. I think culture and biology form a cybernetic loop. Both influence one another over long enough period of time. For example if a Western country adopts certain political-social-economic policies that at first glance look positive or harmless but has down the road result in dropping the marriage and birthrate enough so that they end up in a death spiral. Then it’s not a matter of the people, it’s the ideology they adopt that’s the culprit. Example feminism is taking out a lot of bright white females from the gene pool by convincing them that a corporate career is the… Read more »
Why would they sound foolish? In the end, they were right. Doesn’t seem foolish to me.
Not all “Latin fascism” is equal. Pinochet brought prosperity. Chavez-Maduro brought poverty. Doesn’t seem the same to me.
Nothing you said about Darwin refutes my point. We seem to have discovered the limits of high IQ’s ability to aid in winning at Darwin, which in the end is the only game that matters. Check out Japan’s TFR. Then check out Nigeria’s. Doesn’t seem like high IQ is winning to me.
It’s not only a numbers game. I’d bet a future sixty million Japanese against a future six hundred million Nigerians in any contest of economics or war. When all you have are great numbers of stupid people this represents anything but an asset.
Numbers still win many fights.
Sherman Tanks
Tiger Tanks
Which one won the war?
neither:
T-34 won.
The one with access to oil.
Especially when resources start to become in short supply. Nigeria can’t feed itself now…
We in the white nations need numbers in a way that the Japanese do not. The Japanese have not had masses of people of alien race imported to outbreed and outnumber them as we whites have. A racial numbers war is being waged against us in our own countries, and we have to procreate heartily.
Very good point. High IQ does not guarantee Darwinian success. Countries with average IQs of 85 might be in the Darwinain sweet spot. Smart enough to be in the second world and survive, but dumb enough to need reproduction for laborers. Even the very low IQ African countries seem to be replacing their populations, despite (or perhaps because of) squalor and starvation. The high IQ countries guarantee a great standard of living, until the invasions from the south deliver the “not enough smart people’ problem to their mix, and overwhelm the IQ advantage.
Chavez/Maduro have been very successful in driving out the former elite and middle class. Much whiter and higher IQ than the remainder population. Chavez even got the Jews to leave, though most seem to have ended up in the US or Spain, rather than Israel.
The communists can stay in power in Venezeula as long as Russia and China bail them out. But in time they will become a colony. The Venezuelan VP is actually a Hezbollah member.
The “very low IQ African countries seem to be replacing their populations” because we intelligent-yet-idiotic white people keep sustaining them with money, food, vaccines. Basta! No more aid to Africa. No more paying for our own demise by creating a sub-Saharan tsunami to come our way.
Once you accept the premise that Africans cannot take care of themselves due to their biology, there are good humanitarian arguments for helping them survive where they are. Not though with public funds, or bringing them here. However, much of the aid goes to the tribal leaders to spend on their military squads, so there is a good argument for staying out of it as well.
The “premise that Africans cannot take care of themselves due to their biology” is exactly *why* we should not interfere. Let nature run its course. For the good of the world! Why is it good to help these destructive, low-IQ people and unleash the horrors to come when millions of them invade white countries?
Can’t feed all the stray cats. Or let them in the house. Some carry disease, too.
But politicians need their skim, and charity to conniving warlord thieves make sure allies on the split.
Remember carbon credits? We were going to pay dictators for producing… nothing?
There are no good arguments. Humanitarianism is just white ppl feel-good BS.
It makes me nauseous just thinking about it.
Lauren Southern’s new documentary on S Africa, “Homelands,” is now up on YouTube. I highly suggest everyone go watch it.
Even the very low IQ African countries seem to be replacing their populations, despite (or perhaps because of) squalor and starvation.
Yes, because high-IQ societies rescue them in a play of moral exhibitionism. Otherwise, nature would take its course and the Africans’ survival would be commensurate with their mental equipment.
Yes, the AmSpectator types in the 80s were eagerly anticipating the imminent collapse of Sweden. They wrote a whole book about it: The Future that Doesn’t Work.
Sweden is hardly hell on Earth. Since Swedes are highly cooperative by nature if they sent the hostile foreigners home , they money they saved could easily prop up the Swedish system. The problem isn’t a reciprocal arrangement like Sweden has but foreign parasites and virtue signaling cucks that bring them in Same as here really though America has native race issue and is much less cooperative Minus kebab Sweden is safe. pleasant enough and with little grinding poverty like the US has. Everyone can have basic health care, a place to live, food to eat and a small stipend… Read more »
grinding poverty like the US has.
The US has almost no “grinding poverty.”
Keep in mind that most of what we hear about US poverty is produced by the poverty-industrial complex — a vast web of government and charitable organizations whose existence depends upon magnifying the state of poverty as much as possible.
One trick used is to keep changing the definition of “poverty.” What would have been living like a king 100 years ago we are supposed to regard as intolerable poverty.
In my experience whatever “grinding poverty” exists in the United States – is due solely to the complete and total stupidity or laziness of the people living in it. I know a number who could be considered “poor” . They got there by doing stupid shit. Over and over and over and over again. Giving 3 choices – they will inevitably choose the worst one – or the one based on the most amount of emotional craziness. I grown to have no sympathy for the “no fault of their own” argument in defense of poor people. I’ve never met a… Read more »
I was always amused however, by the swarthy chap on Fifth Ave and 22nd St soliciting donations for “The United Negro Pizza Fund”.
I step over homeless people all the time bro. You also ought to Google “Hunger in America”and read up And while a lot of US poverty is caused by broken homes and there is some exaggeration, the US distribution curve is 3rd world. The term for this is the precariat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat and while this is always the case with the poor , it normally stops with the stupid. This is much less the case now. Those other classes of course resolved the problem often by not having children . They still can’t save but hey, no people no problem am… Read more »
Used to be, if you lived in the park (or not) in Salt Lake, or Ft. Wayne, a temp co would give you a bus token in the morning and cash pay when you got back. That was when the bus lines fed assembly line manufactories outside the city. Saw a whole load of happy housewives decamping at Cape Girardeau. And anybody, everybody followed seasonal work at the harvest, for cash. Training wages and summer jobs for kids have been replaced by migrant labor and year-round, afterschool programs. I had a dream- I wanted armies of bum streetsweepers cleaning up… Read more »
Yeah, I searched on “Hunger in America.” Link after link from the poverty-industrial complex, as I said. Complete bullshit. If you’re stepping over homeless people all the time, you’re probably living in a Democrat-run city that is literally attracting and creating homeless people through its policies.
You aren’t getting out of paying the cost for civilization and keeping the civilization. Technology means complexity and it means more costs. Now if you can magically bring back the high employment industrial economy where a hard working 16 year old without a high school degree can get into the middle class and gets the same or near the same percentage of GDP as wages his forefathers did, you can lower your costs Otherwise you can’t and while you are more that welcome to opt out this means that other groups have no reciprocal moral obligation to you You may… Read more »
FU YT???
F*ck You Whitey
You’ll either be made to pay, be disarmed and genocided or end up in an ethnic war .
If those are the only choices you are offering me, I choose war. Bring it.
I’m not offering anything but you don’t think you can win this with votes do you?
President Trump can buy some much needed time but he can’t solve the underlying issue, a US that isn’t 80% or more White and mostly Right isn’t the US . Its Novo Brasil
Once that is done we can talk economics and all that crap, not before.
That message, culture first , money second falls on deaf ears for most of the Republicans but its what has to happen
Much as I enjoy the Z Man’s writings, whenever I see “IQ” I’m confused. Regarding “IQ”, I’m not interested in how well people do on little puzzles on paper. The definition of intelligence is how much freedom do you create and enjoy? Creating and enjoying freedom = high intelligence.
Careful, they hang libertarians around here
The talk is moving to flaying and selling the skins on the market for the irony
As the Derb says, life is an IQ test. If you have done reasonably well and are contented, that’s a high enough score.
I believe that is Zman’s point. Only the higher IQ populations can organize free countries. Many of the civilization advances of the the last century, from computers to communications to modern medicine, have come from solving little puzzles on paper.
However if a nations GDP is entirely concentrated at the top, it effectively make the GDP lower for most people. Its not linear of course there are still some goods in common but concentration of wealth into private goods into too few hands is as disastrous as socialism The US example, 10% of people got all the gains thus 90% of them live in a nation with 1.8 trillion GDP topped up by government spending which at 40% GDP minus waste and such is a real GDP of around I don’t know 6 trillion which is a real GDP of… Read more »
I think they’re both dummies. The whites are dummies for allowing mass immigration of nonwhites, thus putting the white race squarely on the road to extinction. The nonwhites are dummies for doing anything to push the whites toward extinction, as the whites are, overwhelmingly, the ‘goose that laid the golden egg’ in terms of having revolutionized this world via their accomplishments that have massively improved the quality of life worldwide. Compare the old South Africa and Rhodesia with the South Africa and Zimbabwe of today.
Did you notice that little latina who won the congressional primary yesterday first order of business will be to remove border enforcement if she gains office?
Yes, it is the people. They double down so we must also.
The speed at which the Democrat Party is becoming the anti-white party is surprising even to Democrats. It’s quickly becoming angry twats from human resources and non-whites. The leadership is trying now to apply the brakes, but it is too late.
The frenzy of radicalization the Democrats are displaying simply helps expose what was always under the surface. More, please. It helps even partially blind people see how evil they are.
The frenzy of radicalization the Bolsheviks displayed simply helped expose what was always under the surface. It helped even partially blind people see how evil they were.
How did that work out? More please?
Well if they’re coming for you would you rather they come slobbering and shouting or do you prefer ” The Long March Through the Institutions”?
If they came at us swinging we would react. It’s the slow corrosive that’s killing us
Exactly. “Killing us softly” as the old song goes.
They’ve already been engaged in a long march thru the institutions. That’s the problem with so many of the cuckservatives – they utterly fail to acknowledge that fact. As far back as the 1930’s Garet Garrett acknowledged that kind of behavior when he wrote: ” There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.” Up until just very recently – I saw absolutely… Read more »
Just Sayin, good question. It’s a helluva choice, we’re not actually given a choice, and one of the choices has already been accomplished.
Now that the Long March has done its work, I’m not sure that enough people are alarmed by the slobbering and shouting. There was plenty of slobbering and shouting going on before the election, and it almost went the wrong way.
But I agree with your essential point. The evil is increasingly apparent.
Cerulean, hard to imagine that ordinary Democrats support the radical hard Marxism we’re seeing, but probably they do. I’ve said since TDS was identified in late 2016 that what we’re seeing on one side is politics and on the other mental illness. But I believe it helps the more the face of Leftism becomes clearly Off-Their-Rocker Looney-Tunes. Helps promote internal implosion, might buy us a few more hours.
Pardon the ignorance? What is TDS?
Trump Derangement Syndrome
Cerulean, regarding the Bolsheviks, it did work out. Cucks and CONservatives represent the tendencies of white Americans to a distressing degree. Our current problems literally could have been solved with a wave of the hand fifty years ago. Even now, for many white people, mild economic improvement means ‘the Fifties are back!” If it takes social disaster to force these people out if their comfort zones, it is worth it. Whatever it takes.
I’d never stopped to think how universal suffrage could bite the hand that feeds it. Amusing and satisfying.
I used to get into arguments with my Democrat friends in the South. They were so sure of themselves. Back in the 80s and 90s they were always caving to their left wing and I would point out that they were embracing things they would never have considered ten years ago. They insisted they were “evolving.” I told them that eventually the party would become so radical, they would abandon it. And I was right. Not that I particularly want them in the GOP. They are unreliable types.
Sort of. We all saw the level of ethnic and political hatred at the San Jose Trump rally where the mayor had a bunch of Mexicans and Blacks beat the shit out of white Trump supporters. Trump ran away like a scared kid over that episode. We also saw that in AZ where Trump’s motorcade was stopped on the freeway by a bunch of thugs. Again the police did nothing. The point is we’re already in a fight and most whities don’t know it or don’t care. And this makes it worse because the Left thinks we’ll just roll over… Read more »
I know Democrats who voted for Trump. These are MA Democrats. So something is brewing.
Pretty much it’s been ” fuck TRUMP
And fuck white” ppl since before 2016.
That’s another reason “She lost” !
I read a response regarding that yesterday that posits now that she put the strong incumbent out of the race, it could now go to a republican in her state if enough conservatives get out and vote. Nice theory but we shall see.
Her district is only 18% White, so I think it is very likely she will win election.
The election of the “democratic socialist” in the Bronx reminded me of Zman’s AltJew post. The wise young Latina has supposedly referred to Israel’s defending its borders as a “massacre”. There was a picture of her taken at a rally or victory party and nearby was a man who had run for NYC city council calling for the defeat of “dirty Jewish landlords”.
Leftism is so ingrained in American Jews I don’t expect them to flee en masse to the right, but things will get very interesting in the Democratic Party.
Wretchard at Belmont Club:
“Once the Revolution is over, the Left gets down to the truly important work of denouncing each other”
I don’t want (((them))) in the GOP. They cause trouble.
Said it in the comment section of one of Zman’s previous articles: The two party systems needs to be blown up. The Founders of this country thought that political parties were cancer anyway – and the Repubs and the Dems have locked up the political system and the government and made it their own little personal playground. That is NOT the way it was supposed to be. In any case – given all the competing political forces – it would seem to make for a more likely chance of success if the different elements were squared off against each other.… Read more »
Jews are going to jump ship from the Democratic Party? Are you serious? 99.44 percent would cut their own wrists first.
Can you imagine one of the Tribe saying to another in conversation after the synagogue service, “Maybe the Democrats aren’t always good for the Jews. I’m sort of rethinking things … “? Instant social death.
Yes, our new wise little Latinx is BFFs with another well-known locally, political Latino dude, who helped get her elected. He has in his Twitter bio that the biggest issue for him is “stopping the greedy Jewish landlords.”
In fact, he’s also been quite vocal about it, and his dislike of what he calls “Uncle Tom coon ni&&ers.”
Should be interesting to watch play out.
Can tell you from the buzz around NY today that this caught the Dem establishment completely flatfooted. Crowley was busy planning his ascendency into the Speakership or Minority Leader.
Poor Joe Crowley – devoured by the anti-white demographic revolution that he, as a white liberal, championed. Not two years ago, I read of a Mexican, a student at a US university, who wrote a piece for the school paper. It was addressed to white America, and it was entitled “Your DNA Is An Abomination”. All you white liberals who have insisted that these masses of nonwhites be imported, that condemnation includes you. No matter how radical-leftist you are, no matter how friendly you are to the nonwhites, they still consider you alien to them because of your DNA. The… Read more »
I don’t know if you’re familiar with The Root.com, it’s a major hub for black discourse. Sort of the black Gawker or HuffPo. Anyway, they did a Pick 16 bracket contest on their site of what they deemed to be THE WORST PEOPLE OF THE YEAR. The battle, after hundreds of thousands of votes, came down to Andrew Anglin vs. White “Allies,” to the black community. White Allies won, by a fairly large margin. They actually hate the white ppl that “help” them, more than a guy whose site writes dozens of articles a week calling them Nig Nogs, n*ggers,… Read more »
“Per capita GDP is a benchmark number that economists love to use to measure the health of a country.”
Economics (and economists), generally speaking, seems to be about as useful as alchemy or astrology in dealing with today’s problems.
“Demographics is Destiny.” Pat Buchanan used to say that years ago, and made the neocons and liberals gasp and shriek. As usual, Pat was right.
In electing a new people did you have Bertolt Brecht in mind?
“After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers’ Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?”
Because this is exactly what the elites/libertarians are doing to us.
And shitheads like Williamson like this just fine.
Lefty mobs are not going to swarm his Rascal scooter…
Heh….so cheeky, Zman!
I agree with the basic premise of this article, but we have a clear test case in east/west Germany in the Soviet era. Easy Germany was waaay behind west, but still east Germany was not an unlivable hellhole. Of course Germans are notoriously smart and high functioning, like Scandinavians. might there be a population on the cusp where the difference between a sensible economic structure and a communist fantasy would make or break the level of civilization? Just brainstorming.
The culture, if not the nature, of Germans in the East was severely affected by the occupation. Now we are seeing that the culture of the Germans in the West has been severely infected by the worst qualities of the American left. Our German commenter here is essentially a cultural American.
WRT East Germany….PJ O’Rourke said something to the effect of…”Communism somehow made a poor country…..out of Germans!”
Import the third world…become the third world. I don’t recall where I first read this, but it seems a succinct summary. (Might have gotten it from Z himself.)
What is a nation if not the ethnicity of it’s people? Overwhelm the people living in one place is to convert that territory to different nation. The ancients seemed to understand this quite well. However, we are too smart for basics. California is 50% mexican (I heard). We should offer that benighted territory to the spics in exchange for the wall and expulsion of their brethren.
Years ago on some Usenet forum I was challenging some libertarian to explain the success and happiness of the Scandinavians and he retorted “Oh, that just proves that white people can make any economic system, no matter how stupd work well enough.” Might have been my red pill moment.
The Soviets got to space, didn’t they?
It is human nature to help yourself to as much as you can, to the detriment of others, if need be. The Scandinavians likely pursued a socialistic system with a clear responsibility to maintain the well-being of their neighbors, and a social network that would punish those who overtly harmed their neighbors with their selfishness. The homogeneity of the culture, along with smaller local populations, probably had a lot to do with it. Go with concentratated populations (big cities) and a heterogeneous cultural population, and all hell breaks loose.
Much of the culture of Scandinavian socialism dates back to the days of the Vikings. A ship owner had to entice others to join his ship to go a Viking (used as a verb). The owner of the ship took a larger percentage of the booty to cover the costs of the ship, but the remaining booty from the Viking excursions was split equally among the members of the raiding party.
They pay high taxes in, expecting full measure in return. Everybody was on the same page.
I think I figured out that race was a hell of a lot more important than ideology when the whole Alvin Greene debacle went down. For those who forget, Greene was the first black guy to be nominated by a major party for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina. He also had a sub-room temperature IQ (bad enough that even Don Lemon was exasperated with him in their interview) and pending sexual harassment cases against him when he ran (he would show up at university libraries and share porn images with unsuspecting young coeds). How did he get so far?… Read more »
I had forgotten about old Alvin G, lol.
Thanks for the reminder. His IQ was lower than my Labrador’s. What a hoot he was.
Z-man – I’m generally with you (and Derbyshire) on institutions and culture, and grasp the genetic/biological piece. But isn’t “culture” (or worldview) the predominant force of the three? E.g. When a Japanese business model is brought to a mid-TN car-manufacturing plant, those workers submit to a unique Japanese business culture irrespective of biology, turning out cars just like a Japanese plant. I live near an Amish community, which of course is a nearly-closed gene pool. But I would argue that it’s their religion – their worldview & shunning of mainstream culture – that makes them as they are; not so… Read more »
It has always been bizarre to me the way that people separate biology and culture, as though the biology of a population has no influence on the sort of culture it will develop. To me, it seems to bw putting the cart before the horse. High testosterone, low future time orientation, low iq populations tend to develop cultures that reflect those traits, and this is true for other traits as well. I tend to think this plays a large part in the failures of our misadventures in the middle east to “spread democracy”. Those populations have traits which predispose them… Read more »
I’ll do a post on this next week, but the short version is this. The great chain of causality is Biology->Culture->Institutions->Politics->Economics. Culture certainly helps shape biology, just as biology shapes culture. There is an interplay between these items. But, the people on top of the hill will always have greater influence on the people down the hill, than the other way around. Start with a collection of Swedes and they will build a Swedish culture and those institutions, politics and economics will follow a predictable course. The Nordic countries made socialism work for a very long time. Socialism is not… Read more »
Maybe it’s the same pathogen that made them choose socialism in the first place. The Kumbaya pathogen. It causes the disease of smugness/moral superiority.
The Nords were socialist before the term existed. Read up on Viking culture and you see an economic model that grew out of their strange geography. They lived on to resources that could not be privatized – the ocean and raiding. They made socialism work for a long time. They still do, despite having imported a nuisance population. They also seem to be waking up to the reality of their situation. Anti-immigrant parties are on the rise all over the Scandinavian realm.
I lived in northern Germany for a few years and my observation was the same. The Germans had such a high trust culture that socialism was really something genetically ingrained in them. They had a bureaucracy that was like them and which they trusted. Contrast that with our government over the last fifty years.
If oceans and raiding are what supported the ancient Nordic economic model before there was such a thing as the term “socialist” – then we’re still back at that observation made by Margaret Thatcher: ” socialism works until you run out of other people’s money”.
In the context of the Nords – their economic model works until they empty the sea of fish – or run out of lands to raid.
Kumbaya pathogen. I love it.
Well, guess who owns their media.
And exerts undue influence in their feminist-friendly universities and law schools, the gateways to a political career.
Every. Single. Time.
The racial-cultural pathogen hijacks women.
They are it’s carrier, less resistant to it than men. It uses their same negative traits.
This. The snarky response to Capt S might be: how many African Amish communities do you see? Or for that matter, how many Italian Amish communities?
The answer is zero because Amish culture was a particularly German adaptation of Christianity. Biology->Culture->Institutions->Politics->Economics.
Would Africans who are Christian and unable to, or refuse to use modern technology technically Amish in a way?
But Nordic countries *didn’t* make socialism work. You can’t separate the economic socialism they engaged in from the cultural socialism that made them stop reproducing and start inviting in hordes of foreigners. They are of the same substance, linked, two expressions of the same idea: egalitarianism. You can say that once you have biology, culture, institutions, politics, and economics will follow, but they really don’t. I mean, they do to some degree, of course, but not to the degree you’re making them out to. If this was the case, how can you explain the vast differences we see on the… Read more »
Sure they did. It is simply nonsense to claim otherwise. You are committing the fallacy of the undistributed middle. To update and expand on this. There is no causal relationship between Sweden’s economic model and their bizarre decision to import Muslims. You’re assuming a causal relationship, where one does not exist. After all, where in socialist dogma does it say you must import Muslims? Why after a century or more of socialism in these countries did they suddenly decided on open borders? You are also making the same error as Sloppy Williamson. He assumes that socialism always leads to bad… Read more »
I’ve found that there’s an odd phenomenon that many (especially on the race-focused end of things) on the “dissident right” seem to be there not so much because they want to defeat liberalism but because they want to save it. They blame blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and other nonwhites for its failure and insist that not only *can* it work if the right people tried it, but it *has* worked when the right people tried it (despite the countries of those “right people” having coincidentally somehow ended up a shambles after they did). Socialism is a manifestation of egalitarianism, and egalitarianism… Read more »
You’re saying some system or ideology is independent of the people within it.
Proper design depends, first, on the materials at hand.
Whenever these debates about nature vs nurture comes up I am always reminded of Jared Taylor’s challenge to the nurture side; if you are correct that it is freedom, low taxes, small government, few if any restrictions on guns, a vigorous religious society that makes for a successful society- I give you Afghanistan. But the truth is that all of the nurturists would much prefer to live in a country like Sweden, which has none of the above mentioned freedoms. Your argument that the insane self hatred of the Swedes stems from the same egalitarianism as does their socialism is… Read more »
Kind of easy when you sit on Oil or a Geothermal hotspot. Not to mention the US subsidizing NATO. Let’s see how well Scandinavian Socialism faces off against Russia alone without evil American rednecks backing them up.
Swedish design, German engineering, and Polish labor skills combined with Russian resources. The horrors.
My gods, those evil Russkies might try to sell them some gas. NATO must act!
“After all, where in socialist dogma does it say you must import Muslims? ” Even last year Bernie was talking about illegals, until they shut him up, or he wised up himself. Compare those vids of Hillary and even Bill ranting about illegals. it’s not socialism as such but the increasing power of Hispanics etc + liberal guilt.
1. Greek city-states were more alike than dissimilar. All had city-state polities. All had, at one time or another, kings/hereditary monarchs. All were slave economies. Land-locked/land powers did differ from those on the coast, but the Spartans showed that they had what it took to start a fleet from scratch and whup Athens. 2. Not all Greeks were of the same stock. Greek stock changed from Minoan & Cretan times, ancient times, bronze dark age, classical greece, Byzantine greece, and post-Byzantine greece. Due to invasions/migrations. ============ The scandis made it work pretty well. They did not have the explosive post-WW2… Read more »
1. Not really. You can always make things seem more alike than they really were by listing the similarities and not even mentioning the differences. But seriously, the Greek city-states had vastly different ways of doing things. Also, they were “city-state polities” except when they weren’t; for example when fortune gave them the chance to become big empires, as happened with Alexander and with the Byzantines. And they had hereditary kings except when they didn’t, as with the Athenian democracy, which was kind of a big deal. 2. The small differences in Greek genetic stock doesn’t explain the vast differences… Read more »
Environmental parameters would have a sorting effect regardless of the fact they shared genetic stock. Those inclined to make a living trading lived in Athens, those inclined to eugenics and militarism lived in Sparta.
It was the same In the original 13 colonies of the United States, we shared a federal government based on shared principles and choose to live in different states based on how they wanted to realize those principles.
I blame Thracians, myself. Degenerates.
Were they the same stock, though?
Were the periods of turmoil also periods of movement and migration?
The Athenians were of different stock, pre-dating the blue-blond-red carrying stock that made it down from the far north which populated most other Greek states, including Sparta. Athenians were olive skinned, brown eyed, dark haired. The sparks that ignited a sudden and entirely different world in the ancient Med was genetic, and genetics made the culture. The culture that formed through the accelerated competition of city-states was rapid because it was not broadly dominated by one as in other civilizations of the Med. That is why Europe later had it’s 800 year run at greatness while the Chinese never could… Read more »
It’s very likely that the high cooperation (socialism) model found in Scandinavian cultures is related to the environment of the high latitudes (e.g. long & extremely cold winters). During these extended periods of scarcity, group sharing of resources probably improved survivability of the tribe or village on the evolutionary timescale. Raiding behavior probably evolved as a desperate final stage before winter starvation occurred.
When the larder was bare, a Viking wife would serve shackles on a bare plate to her husband. Time to go make some money.
Roger all – thanks for engaging. I’d also be interested in how you sense religion (which drives worldview) works into the chain of causality. Some would just meld culture and religion, but my sense from history is that religion is what drives the culture. E.g. Viking religion is what drove Nordic culture. Segue to Haiti: having spent time in Haiti, I believe that island is what it is due more to voodoo animism than biology. Haiti is an interesting case study because right next door we have Dom Rep, which is hardly prosperous but leaps/bounds more functional than Haiti; lo… Read more »
I say religion reflects biology. Biology first. It’s a good chicken/egg question. I see Christianity as a White religion, with the New Testament as the primary, not secondary, document. Murdering Jebusites- well, that’s the Middle East for ya. Religion does function as a common language. Christianity reflects, focuses, and shapes what is in us, and everybody wants what we are. I’m glad we’re worthy of emulation, it won’t be the same, but close enough. I’ve studied Voodoo. You’re right, Haiti is Voodoo while Saint Dominica is Catholic, boy what a glaring difference the religious guidelines make. Our foundations shape our… Read more »
Biology/genetics before all. Everything else comes afterward.
You are what you believe. Or in other words: What you believe, you achieve. (Sorry to sound self-helpy.) What starts in our minds gets translated into reality. Everything comes from a desire to be.
The Japanese business model descends from American teachers like Edwards Deming. The fact that Americans wouldn’t listen to teachers in their own midst – is the fault of Americans – not the Japanese. It took getting our asses kicked by the Japanese in industries (especially) like automobiles – to realize that things needed to reform. https://www.amazon.com/Dr-Deming-American-Japanese-Quality/dp/0671746219 The Japanese seem to have a talent for looking around and adopting things that lead to success. They did it in the 1800’s and were a world power by the WW2 timeframe. They got their asses kicked militarily – and then went a different… Read more »
Cultures are an expression of the genes of the people who make them. It’s really as simple as that.
I have been having exactly this conversation with a number of libertarians of my acquaintance who, aside from still peddling the “open borders” mummery, insist that all the conflict and misery of the world is caused entirely by welfare states and lack of economic reform. They seem oblivious to the fact that the tectonic plates of discourse have shifted under their feet and that the ideological battleground is no longer economic but demographic. My own view is that libertarianism (as a political movement) is finished. The have welded themselves to this fairy-tale notion of “open borders” and rested upon it… Read more »
I didn’t leave the libertarian party, they left me. When they were Constitutional libertarians, demanding 10th Amendment solutions for a 90% white nation, it would’ve worked as well as Scandinavia or Switzerland. Really, as Teadoc sneered, it was all about the weeeed. The narrow slice of federal drug law has corroded our just criminal law as another narrow slice- ‘Civil Rights’- has corroded civil law. The Libertarian party already tried the economic argument. Candidate G. Harry Browne’s slogan was “wouldn’t you like to abolish the IRS?” Clinton won. Then Bob Barr got in and went full United Way fundraiser dot… Read more »
Then the Zman told us that autumn leaves reminded him that there might be a God, and of why he hated libertarians.
I had begun my journey.
Never underestimate the power of the Dark Enlightenment.
I can see that. Angelic singing on one of the prettiest songs ever, and such bitter-sweet lyrics. It’s so white bread it hurts, in the best way. It’s very sad that the world that inspired this sound and feeling has been taken from us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qAgtgo3ecw The falling leaves Drift by my windows The autumn leaves Of red and gold I see your lips The summer kisses The sunburned hands I used to hold Since you went away The days grow long And soon I’ll hear Old winter’s song But I miss you most of all My darling When autumn leaves… Read more »
>>>National Review is like a weird living museum to the Reagan era.
And Mr. George Will opines that his readership must actively help elect more Democrats to both houses of Congress. Fortunately, George’s readership is down to about a dozen, including his editor.
Cracks me up how hard they fought Trump. Now he’s going to get his second, of maybe 3-4, SCOTUS appointments. What a bunch of morons over there.
Re-institute colonialism. There, I said it. Even Jonah Goldberg, of all people, actually made this argument back in the late 90s, re: Africa (I’m sure NR has memory-holed it). There are still enough Rhodesians around to ask: Would you rather have Mugabe, or Ian Smith? My guess is 100%, black AND white, would have Smith back in a heartbeat. If we don’t do it, the Chinese will — they are — and those guys think King Leopold’s Ghost is a how-to manual.
I don’t know if Hayek was unique among Austrian school thinkers, but he believed economics followed people and not the other way around, that people and cultures were remarkably different and not interchangeable. And he was addressing just the differences in Europeans. His essay on the dissimilarities between the English and Germans is hilarious in a Hayek way.
It is beyond dispute that the socialist Scandinavian countries were great places to live before the invasion. It is also clear that socialism can be a drag on an economy (Soviet East Germany and USSR).
The white race has within it two different spirits, one socialist and one libertarian. I’d like an ethnostate containing socialist and libertarian states bound together in a federation. People who care deeply about supporting the community and less competent can go to the former and people who obsess over the free rider problem and “liberty” can go to the latter.
Lefty mobs are not going to swarm his Rascal scooter
That cracked me up!
Lefty mobs are not going to swarm his Rascal scooter
But Mr. George Will remains at high risk.
“It’s the economy, stupid.”
How fervently we believed, as desperate a faith as a drowning man clutching at straws.
We’re going to have to put the apocalypse on hold. Kennedy is retiring. Don’t forget to wear your earmuffs if you watch cable news today. It’s gonna be shrill.
Get ready for the crazy.
Great topic. Like most of Z’s posts, filled with a lot of reasoned responses. (Too bad “we” are the only ones having such conversations at the moment, though as Z has pointed out, it will only spread.) Mokita no longer. =) One thought came to mind WRT socialism. It’s not a dirty word. “Socialism” in a sense has been embraced throughout human history, as time and circumstance dictate. The Amish weren’t the only ones to do communal barn raisings. And look at the history of the LDS church…..perhaps the most reliably conservative voting bloc in today’s political landscape. But they… Read more »
Socialism can work very well in small groups from the bottom up, where people are close enough together to look out for each other and also look out for the larger (but still small) group. Socialism in large groups, especially of the top down sort, ultimately fails because those at the top take for themselves, without responsibility for or accountability to those below them. Human selfishness and all. The genius of our Founding Fathers was to disburse the political power down, all the way into small local groups in some instances, with accountability up the political ladder and accountability down… Read more »
Egads. Kapitalism is also failing “because those at the top take for themselves, without responsibility for or accountability to those below them.”
Ann Coulter at Taki’s said the rich are like sharks, all appetite. They can’t see beyond the next quarter.
Either socialism or capitalism can and do work. The problem is when a citizen’s economy becomes a political economy.
I don’t think we have the accounting terms to accurately describe or predict a political economy.
Heh. Social Security, like clockwork with no muss or fuss, is a bit of national socialism, innit?
PS- now I get it, “socialism” is our shorthand for ‘a political economy’, but it’s too vague, so I end up splitting hairs.
Then there’s the Second Amendment. The mechanic in Venezuela gets annoyed he is less likely to arm himself and march on city hall. After WWII the returned car mechanics (and other trades) in one town did just that.
Part of making things work is having faith in the culture, and in the governing system, whatever it is. Lefties and socialists have a starting point of assuming it is a free-for-all, so put somebody smart in charge to dole things out. The right trusts the system and human ingenuity to allow people to find their place in things. The Left is fundamentally pessimistic, distrustful, and grasping. The Right is fundamentally optimistic and trustful. This is a starting point for a bunch of other things. I am not so sure about downstream/upstream. Any element can be a good starting point.
All very interesting and I agree with much of the content. But it seems like you’re only touching on the surface of the bigger issue of the US being subjected to blatant foreign invasion supported by a foreign government. I mean the Mexican government. Right now there is a candidate, Obradors, who openly states that if elected he will stop fighting the cartels, legalize opium and marijuana production intended for export to the US and advocates the right of all migrants to immigrate into the US regardless of what the American people or government want. In short, for the last… Read more »
It is the people. Not too much difference between the Soviet Union and today’s Russia. Same knuckleheads. But the good news is that there are a lot of Dems who are going to secretly vote for Trump precisely because of immigration. They won’t admit it. It is too shameful for them. But they really don’t like the immigration situation. The question becomes how can we change the minds of our own knuckleheads here who think Socialism is great. I hate to tell you that they are very white. BTW, Venezuela did have some human capital for some time. But the… Read more »
Yup, Chile is majority Nordic and Germanic while Argentina is full of Mezzos.
Its only incidental that they have different political systems. Wait, Chilie has a different political system because the people are so different from the people of the rest of South and Central America. A world historical individual like Pinochet had little to do with it.
Outside of Europe, Argentina is the most genetically European country in the world. Chile is much more Mestizo.
FWIW, I have no political or ethnographic axe to grind here… it’s just a fact on the ground
And I would also say, East Germany and West Germany; No Korea and South Korea undercut the Zman’s argument. Certainly genetics has something to do with the cultures people create but so do ideas.
East Germans and North Koreans didn’t fall back into their natural state. They’re not Nigerian.
Uh, what about Murrica? We are the most genetically European country in the world outside of Europe….well, minus our negroes and imports, that is. Same for the Canacucks and Austrailains. The whites are all genetically Euro. Are you not counting any of us because of the imports?
Unfettered, economic freedom is one of the most essential elements of having liberty. Something that has not existed in our republic for too long to remember. Culture is upstream of politics. How do I say this… Politics is war by other means on the dirt people for the fun profit and power of the Amerikan Nomenklaturer. Though the hour is seemingly growing late, Alt-Right is enevitable. Reality has a way of waking up and red pilling the dirt people. Interesting thing about dirt people, through history, time and time again, it is always and nobody else, in the final equation… Read more »
It never ceases to amaze to amaze that the most murderous thugs on the planet: the US govt. never loses an opportunity to humiliate itself by pontificating on “human rights”.
How’s the child starvation, cholera program in Yemen going chaps?
Completely agree that race is an under appreciated factor concerning the success of nations, BUT, the notion that economics has nothing to do with it is absurd. The Finns and the Western Europe couldn’t make socialism work because socialism is paradoxically anti natalist and a ponzi scheme. That’s why Europe ended up with short sighted guest worker programs that kick started their diversity problems. Socialism lite failed and Europe hasn’t yet come to grips with that failure. Multiculturalism is the bastard spawn of that cognitive dissonance.