After the earthquake, Haiti suffered something even more devastating than an earthquake, something even more devastating than a genetically low IQ population, something far more brutal and destructive than rule by genetically low IQ overlords.
Worse than cholera, worse than the earthquake, Haiti suffered a devastating influx of aid agencies and high IQ Harvard graduates with billions of dollars of aid money.
Rolling Stone tells us
CHF, which works out of two spacious mansions in Port-au-Prince and maintains a fleet of brand-new vehicles, is generally considered one of the most ostentatious NGOs in Haiti. It is also one of the largest USAID contractors in Haiti and enjoys a cozy relationship with Washington: Its president and CEO, David Weiss, is a former State Department official and lobbyist. “There is a shocking lack of transparency and accountability in aid, and it’s crystallized in this relief effort,” says Schwartz, the anthropologist. “For an NGO in Haiti, the criteria for success is raising money, filling out paperwork and making sure the money is ‘accounted for’ — meaning they can show donors that they spent the money. But nobody goes out there and judges the project, or even verifies that the project exists. In the majority of the cases, nobody even talks to the community.”
Bertin Voise, a 30-year-old carpenter, lives with his wife and five other members of his family in the courtyard of what was once a spacious home in Ravine Pintade. It is now marked with a giant red “X,” signifying that it is not only irreparable but a hazard. Standing outside his broken house, Voise tells us that he has every intention of rebuilding it, as soon as he has enough money. This clearly bothers Lee, who has just finished explaining how CHF wants to raze houses like his and replace them with two-story steel-framed plywood shelters. While the construction of new homes is taking place, Lee wants to move everyone into temporary shelters in the area — what she calls “T-shelter hotels.” She seems excited by the idea. Voise, who would have to relinquish his four-bedroom home for one slightly larger than a doghouse, is unmoved.
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There was a great deal of frustration among international actors that the current Haitian administration couldn’t just take land under eminent domain to dump rubble or build housing
Which problem was soon fixed by the election of a Haitian president sponsored by the usual suspects from Harvard.
But despite all that has been promised, almost nothing has been built back in Haiti, better or otherwise. Within Port-au-Prince, some 3 million people languish in permanent misery, subject to myriad experiments at “fixing” a nation that, to those who are attempting it, stubbornly refuses to be fixed. Mountains of rubble remain in the streets, hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in weather-beaten tents, and cholera, a disease that hadn’t been seen in Haiti for 60 years, has swept over the land, infecting more than a quarter million people.
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“At least with Duvalier, we had lights.”
Let us think about that carpenter and that doghouse. If low IQ peasant owns some land, and can get some wood, even if only roundwood, and some mud and some stone and such, he will, in time, build a quite nice house for himself.
If, however, he is in temporary housing, built for him by his high IQ betters from Harvard, he won’t do anything, he cannot do anything, and those high IQ people from Harvard are not really going to do anything much for anyone other than themselves. As is proven by the fact that the gigantic flood of money and PhDs have left Haiti covered in mud, refugees, and human excreta.
There is no effective way to help people, if they are not allowed to help themselves.
The problem with Haiti, first and foremost, is Haitians. A plague of kind-hearted locusts eager to conspicuously display their compassion is unlikely to help. But can you point to parts of Haiti untouched by bleeding hearts that have developed faster?
One good indicator of development is electric lights. People are saying “At least with Duvalier, we had lights.” The Duvaliers were deposed for defying Harvard, and Haiti has been undeveloping ever since.
Another good indicator of undevelopment is human faeces where they should not be. The old testament commands the Israelites to bury their faeces, and the decline of Athens began with the relaxation of standards of cleanliness during the seige. People who report on Haiti these days complain about the faeces. In all the condemnations of the Duvaliers, no one ever complained about the faeces.
If everyone left Haiti alone it would get better, but probably wouldn’t industrialize.
Hypothesis: the problem isn’t average IQ or culture, but simply raw numbers of socially connected innovation-class IQs, something Haiti doesn’t have enough carrying capacity to amass.
I wonder if the PhDs think they’re helping or realize they’re not. Either way they’re felony-class professional busybodies; is Haiti allowed to toss them off their land? Of course not. Didn’t think so.
Test:
“For an NGO
in Haiti,the criteria for success is raising money, filling out paperwork and making sure the money is ‘accounted for’”Indeed, this is a general problem with the entire governmental and quasi governmental sector (counting too big to fail businesses, and businesses that derive their income from regulatory authority and privilege, among others, as quasi governmental) Our elite has rendered the controls that make organizations act cohesively and act for a purpose ineffectual, hence Mencius Moldbug’s description of the system as “anarcho tyranny”. Sarbannes Oxley was sincerely intended to forbid meaningless accounting, but has in practice made it mandatory.
Mencius is very astute and knowledgeable but he didn’t come up with the phrase “anarcho tyranny”. Sam Francis did.
Sam Francis is a conservative anti capitalist. His usage of anarcho-tyranny is that everything is policed except crime.
I, however, am also applying it to the lack of cohesion in the state, that each government bureaucracy now has its own swat team, and funds itself through its own confiscations and regulatory payoffs, that government is lots of mobile bandits instead of one big stationary bandit.
Yeah, I’m sure Haiti would be pretty f***ed up without any outside intervention, but never underestimate the power of Harvard Ph.D’s to make things worse. I mean, listening to guys from Harvard pretty much destroyed Russia, who almost beat us in the Cold War, they tanked Japan’s economy, which was going gangbusters in the late 1980’s, and, as we all know, they are on the verge of taking down the U.S., the most powerful country in human history. If these guys can do this to superpowers, just think what they can do to poor Haiti. Talk about Weapons of Mass Destruction…
Read the comments below the article: the Harvard graduates weren’t the problem. The issues are “complex,” more is needed, etc. Always more.
Harvard selects its students on the basis of cynicism, savvy and intelligence. The things you need on an application to get in are things that no sincere high school student would do – if someone actually cared as much as is required that an applicant pretend to they would lose their minds (or simply not apply to Harvard and instead continue to do the “charity” work that they did before). Successful applicants are specifically experienced in the art of pretending to help others while enriching themselves.
They then go to Haiti and make the place even worse while simultaneously ensuring that the NGOs involved get more and more funding.
Does that script sound familiar?
That is not the intent: The intent is to select them on the basis of political correctness, adherence to the ideology of the state. Of course, in practice, they tend to cynically pretend to political correctness.
However, in the banking crisis, it became obvious that a lot of bankers and regulators sincerely did believe six impossible things before breakfast every morning. The worst behaved banks lost the most money, because they really truly sincerely did believe that there was a large market out there that was being under served for racist reasons.
There was a mad rush to get out of toxic assets starting 2005 November, but it appears to me that the big boys, for example Goldman and Sach, dismissed the panic as irrational racism and bigotry by ignorant racist sister fucking rednecks, and did not try to get out until early 2007.
So, not so cynical. They sincerely believed.
I’m really inclined to believe the cynicism explanation (at least in part).
http://gonzalolira.blogspot.com/2010/11/selecting-for-cynicism-in-ivy-league.html
As for the banking crisis and Goldman Sachs they didn’t dismiss the idea that the panic had a rational basis – far from it. They actually made billions of dollars from betting that the mortgage bond market would completely collapse. Those bets were with AIG. Which was then “bailed out” in the sense that the financial services firm went under (with various sleazy shenanigans going on in the process) but all the counterparties (the largest of which was the ever so connected Goldman Sachs) were made whole.
That really sounds much more cynical than sincere.
Goldman and Sach got out from under their exposure during 2007-2008
The boys from Harvard consider that the crisis occurred with the run on the repo market in September 2008, when everyone was trying to get out from under their exposure at the same time, but the panic set in in 2005 September – just that the big boys from Harvard failed to join it until 2007-2008.
A lot of banks, such as Washington Mutual and Countrywide, remained heavily exposed all the way till they were shut down.
Goldman and Sach got out in time, but only because a federal bailout kept the jaws of doom from closing on them. Lots of financial institutions did not get out in time. Therefore, they believed.
Panic set in among ordinary people in 2005 November. Goldman and Sach did set to covering their asses until 2007 or so. The market did not collapse, or the collapse was hidden with everyone pretending things were normal, until Harvard graduates controlling big money tried to get out, and they were the last to get out.
What Steve Johnson said. Goldman “sincerely believed” that the federal government would make good on their otherwise insane bets, which it did. Not everybody is a sucker. A few people are the con men.
Washington Mutual, however, were suckers. They did believe.
They were suckers. There are also a far higher proportion of Harvard grads at Goldman Sachs. In fact, Washington Mutual was headquartered in Seattle and likely had 0 or close to 0 Harvard grads.
Harvard manages to sucker plenty of people. There are people who sincerely believe in “progressivism”*. That doesn’t mean that the main drivers of it aren’t cynically benefiting from the systematic stupidity.
* My favorite example is the hysteria over IQ testing. Who benefits from this? Elite and decent quality colleges. As long as everyone believes IQ is bunk and those that know better are cowed into submission businesses can’t use IQ testing as employment screening tests. The result? They turn to colleges that certify that their grads have IQs in a certain band. Those colleges benefit – they’re con men. The people who are hysterical about the idea? They’re the suckers.
On checking, I find you are correct. The biggest suckers, and simultaneously biggest fraudsters, were Washington Mutual’s Kerry Killinger, University of Iowa, and Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo, Fordham University.
Thus the truest believers and biggest disasters were not from the Ivy League. Kerry Killinger and Angelo Mozilo conned a lot of people, but they believed, and were their own biggest victims.
Interesting.
Charly Leffler…
[…]What is wrong with Haiti « Jim’s Blog[…]…
Really proves Moldbug’s theory of communism being non-empathic altruism. Doubtlessly charities and NGOs want to help the Haitians but they care about looking like they’re helping 10x more than they care about actually helping.
I would expect Puerto Rico to have similar results.
Communism completely levels the field for a short time and destroys the best human capitol. This is the last thing Haiti needs, it would make things considerably worse. Haiti’s populace is low IQ. And Haiti has virtually no resources, this is actually the best thing Haiti has got going for it. This means the only way to improve is by developing human capitol and local infrastructure. See “The Dictator’s Handbook”. You can look it up on YouTube.
Social justice style moralizing virtue signaling NGO’s hiding in there compounds are not doing much real good, probably doing more harm by enriching local despots and there cronies.
What does Haiti have right now that is valuable? Haitian poon. This is likely the only real way to up the IQ gap. You would target guys in places like Silicon Valley or any place else that collects higher IQ sorts. Offer vacation getaways with Haitian girlfriends (make sure its very hard to export these girls). Unprotected sex should be in every way encouraged. You get an immediate injection of higher IQ genes and guys who will be far more invested in on the ground real development of Haiti. If a guy wants a Visa to enter Haiti he has to pass a minimum IQ. For a permanent Visa make it a requirement that he has blown his load at lest 10 times in his Haitian girlfriend.
Despotic dictators is how Haiti has been run and this will likely continue. No loans, grants of money or debt forgiveness . As long as Haiti has little natural resources the only way the dictator can enrich themselves and their supporting cronies is by developing human capitol and local infrastructure.