Obama is of course a Muslim, progressive, and anticolonialist who hates America and wishes to see America defeated, but allowing Ramadi, and indeed Iraq, to be lost was pretty sensible.
The underlying Bush theory was that Iraq would become a well run democracy, like Switzerland, where the Shia majority elected nice moderate progressives, thereby counterbalancing the dangerous influence of the Shia religious crazies in Iran.  The middle east would become moderate progressive, rather than Muslim.
As it worked out the elected government Shia government in Iraq was oppressive and intolerant, its primary function being to distribute goodies to voting blocks.  The populace conspicuously failed to throw flowers at our troops. The Sunni murderously hated us for removing them from power. The Shia hated us for revealing to the world their incapacity to rule. The influence of Iran keeps them saner – well, less insane – than they would otherwise be.
Progressives, including Obama, misremembered Bush as saying “We will go in to steal their oil”, and so believed that when they were running things, instead of Bush, then the locals would throw flowers at us and elect nice moderate progressives. Â Thus, “Arab Spring”, which was Bush on steroids with double the already grating optimism. They then discovered that the Iraqi willingness to elect moderate progressives was proportional to US willingness to kick ass, and the locals figured the progressives had no will to kick ass.
Tunisia is perhaps proceeding to democratic progressivism, as originally envisaged in Arab Spring. Morocco is undemocratically proceeding to progressivism because the King commands progressivism.  The rest of the countries of the Arab spring were disasters.
The past history of progressive kings is that usually King gets violently overthrown, is remembered as an incredibly brutal reactionary, and is replaced by a horrifying tyranny, but so far Tunisia and Morroco are working out OK – for progressives. Rest of the progressive plan is going to hell.
[…] Losing Ramadi […]
Progressive or not, Morocco is almost unbelievably well-run for a country with an average IQ of around 90. I was shocked to find it on par with (or even above) countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Not to mention that taking a walk in Casablanca feels much, much safer than taking a walk in Paris.
The only reason countries like Morocco or Jordan currently survive their progressivism, is because their kings are willing and capable to kick ass. An unprincipled exception to progressivism, that of nondemocratic monarchy that sticks to its guns, allows them to survive.
Once they die, and are replaced by kings who are too progressive to kick ass and “don’t want to be tyrants”, there is gonna be revolution.
Revolutions in history happened because government stopped using force to suppress violent revolutionaries. (bar few exceptions, like Russian 1917 which just collapsed due to war)
haha, Jim loves talking about 1917 Russia and how the Tsar was rightfully executed for his failure to maintain the nomos and execute dangerous criminals, and the Orthodox Church was rightfully suppressed for its failure to protect the people from heresy.
Well, didn’t govt send in troops to suppress the February revolution? The troops just refused to follow orders and joined revolutionaries.
Tsarist government was admittingly lax when dealing with dissidents, sending them to siberia, not to work in gulags, but on paid vacations essentially. Where they were free to conspire overthrow of tsar who was paying for their vacation. Half of Romanovs were unapologetic liberals, and unsurprisingly, this half was purged harder than the rest.
Putin on the other hand, had just outlawed foreign undesirable NGOs operating in Russia. And US State Department went batshit over it, since it means their spies are even more restricted from meddle in Russia.
Similar problem in Hong Kong. Solution is simple. You need an inquisition to make sure the officers are loyal.
The aristocratic officers of the Russian Crown like those of the German Crown could hardly force their conscript soldiers to gun down protesting civilian women who in many cases were the wives, sisters and mothers of the conscripts. But once the Emperor was removed, leaving the tricky question of what was to replace him, the aristocratic officer corps in both empires was more than willing to take advantage of the chaos by launching counter-revolutions. Heck, as I recall, there was one naval incident with the Russian Whites where former officers were used as grunts and suicide bombers. Tl;dr: The aristocratic officer corps upheld the monarchy where it made strategic sense to do so!
The problem was not that the troops were disloyal (that is communist mythology) but that the high ranking officers were disloyal. Same problem as Hong Kong. As Charles the first said: “No Bishop, No King”.
All historians who disagree with my newly invented neoreactionary ideology are communist myth makers!
Transparently so. If the Tsar had had the balls to hang Guchkov, Stalin, and Lenin, he would have been fine. Indeed, he could have allowed Lenin and Stalin to run loose, and if he had hung Guchkov, would have been fine.
Mobs are irrelevant except as mascots for people like Guchkov. If the mob is violent, you will not have any difficulty getting troops to kill them all, indeed the hard part is restraining the troops from killing them all. If the mob is not very violent, you arrest them, and then disappear them, or just keep them locked up in a prison camp somewhere until normality returns.
The proposition that a Tsar who would not execute, or even arrest, or even fire, high level traitors and enemies of the state, ordered troops to shoot women is ludicrous.
A Tsar that will not arrest Guchkov, is not going to arrest, let alone shoot, a bunch of protestors.
Yes we can spend lots of time on alternate histories where the Tsar’s men were absolutists rather than constitutionists. Even many radicals observe that reform periods are the most dangerous times for entrenched establishments. But what we know for sure is that central governments have long known that it is a good idea to rotate their troops both enlisted and officers to cut off potential ties to local communities. I mean would you shoot your own sister for neoreactionary if you won’t even snitch on relatives who are pederasts? The tsar apparently did not rotate his troops sufficiently. Another thing we know for sure is that when the counter-revolution came the aristocratic officers organized it, not exactly indicative of revolutionary fervor.
The Czar’s men were demotists instead of monarchists, because Czars fashionably went with progressivism. Viewing the consequences, clearly they made a huge mistake. The alternative history is that the Empire of the Russias was not plunged into chaos and bloodshed, and did not threaten the world with terror and mass murder.
You are still living in the fantasy world where the Tsars were horribly extreme right wing tyrants who ordered the troops to massacre innocent peaceful protesters, and were disobeyed. Actual history is that they prevented the arrest of criminal violent protesters who were industriously murdering capitalists and Jews, that, just as Obama is dangerous to America’s friends and helpful to America’s enemies, they were dangerous to monarchists and helpful to demotists.
A history where the Tsar orders the troops to massacre women and children is as bizarre as would be a history of the recent Baltimore riots where the Mayor acts similarly – which is to say, wildly inconsistent with his normal behavior and public expectations at the time. The protesters expected to be indulged, as they had been indulged in the most horrifying behavior over and over and over again.
These are not the Tsars that nearly executed Dostoevsky. This is the Tsar that gave Lenin and Stalin a little vacation in the woods. This is the Tsar that would not interrogate Guchkov under torture to find his treasonous co conspirators, would not execute Guchkov for treason, would not arrest Guchkov for treason, would not fire Guchkov for treason.
And events proved that this was a terrible mistake.
I never said the Tsar ordered the protesting women shot. Probably the presence of the soldiers was supposed to intimidate opposing civilians. Instead the protesting civilians got the soldiers to defect. Once the soldiers defected, the Tsar’s officers convinced him to resign since the Imperial Army was then defunct.
The problem with this story is that the Guchkov was already working on the other imperial officers to demand that the Tsar resign before any of these events happened – indicating that you have causation backwards. The mob was indulged because the Tsar was sympathetic to it and the officers were even more sympathetic to it, and were mascots, not a genuine reason. The Tsar was industriously undermining the monarchy, and encouraging those who wanted to undermined further and faster, who proceeded to manufacture these events to undermine the monarchy.
In retrospect, it is clear that Tsar should have hung Stalin, hung Lenin, hung Kerensky, interrogated Guchkov under torture then hung Guchkov and his co conspirators, backed Pyotr Stolypin, indeed encouraged him to be far more reactionary, and ordered troops to shoot rioters and looters – in short, acted the repressive way you lot imagine him acting.
The problem with a worldview concerning history that doesn’t match recorded history is that the burden of proof is on you, Jim, not me.
Recorded history is that the last Tsars indulged protestors, rioters, looters, and criminal revolutionaries inside and outside their government, Lenin and Stalin among them.
The official politically correct interpretation of this history is that the Tsar was some kind of right wing extremist. If he was some kind of right wing extremist, communism would never have gotten off the ground because Lenin and Stalin would have died horribly under prolonged interrogation.
You are not giving me recorded history. I am giving you recorded history. You are giving me what the mainstream historians would like recorded history be, what they talk as if it was, not what in fact they record it as being. You are giving me the mainstream interpretation of recorded history, and then misremembering actual recorded history to fit with that interpretation.
In your interpretation of history, the Tsar had to resign in the final riot because he could not massacre the protestors. The trouble with this story is the other 101 riots over the previous several decades, many of them involving arson, looting, and murder, where he did not massacre, or even punish, the protestors.
The Tsar could handle riots of hundreds and thousands of people so obviously he could handle demonstrators of hundreds of thousands or millions of people as soldiers defected en mass to the demonstrators. OK! Regardless if you going to interpret historical records differently than the professionals who do it for a living, then you can at least cite primary sources (though that begs the question of whether you’re fluent in Russian).
You are writing about a parallel universe that reflects the way historians feel about events, but does not reflect the actual events that historians record.
The Tsar was not removed by a mass movement but an elite movement. The Tsar was not a brutal authoritarian reactionary, but a radical leftist. The masses were mere mascots.
Yes, Jim, the masses don’t have agency. Wealthy people suffer more from the progressive income tax than commoners do from being serfs or slaves.
History, in particular the history of the Russian “Revolution” (more accurately, the Russian coup) shows the masses never have agency. We see a few exceptions from ancient history where the “masses” were small landowners and minor gentry, generally owning a few slaves or serfs themselves, but the kind of masses that modern progressives are keen on have never shown agency. Recall what happened with the black battalions in the civil war. Or indeed ancient progressives. When Marius attempted to make an army out of gladiators and freed slaves, you can guess what happened. Marius’s slave army could (like the thugs of Baltimore summoned by the New York Times) loot, rape, burn, and murder, but could not fight and never really tried to fight.
The problem with progressive tax is not that it oppresses the rich, but that it oppresses the poor. Politicians tax the shit out of the masses, and get them to accept high taxes on the basis that people that they are encouraged to hate are taxed even more.
Yes forget the Slave Revolts, especially the Spartacus Revolt. Or the Jewish Revolt.
The Jewish revolt was an elite revolt – the pharisees, not the masses.
Spartacus did not exactly lead a revolt. More like a crime wave that grew into a mass escape attempt, an attempt to fight their way out of the Roman Empire into Gaul. They defeated several police type operations, with the result that the Romans started taking them seriously and sent the legions. The escaped slaves tried to avoid battle, but found themselves trapped, the only way to Gaul being through the legions. So they tried to go through one of the legions, and died.
There is no indication that they ever envisaged changing the Roman Empire, defeating the legions, ending slavery, etc. Their plan was to punch a hole through one point in the Roman line and then run like hell.
Had they succeeded, the result would not have been revolution, but higher levels of crime and slave flight.
<>
This is disingenuous from a guy who questions the very existence of altruism towards out-groups. If I remember correctly, you are a person with above-average income/wealth. You really think that the entire world and all its people should be shaped as closely as possible to your self-interest and therefore really think that the progressive income tax causes more pain and suffering than the ownership and servitude of real thinking, breathing human beings.
The problem with progressive tax is not that it oppresses the rich, but that it oppresses the poor. Politicians tax the shit out of the masses, and get them to accept high taxes on the basis that people that they are encouraged to hate are taxed even more.
This is what I meant to post.
>The Jewish revolt was an elite revolt – the pharisees, not the masses.
Come again?
If you read your Josephus, you’d know that he says that the masses were on the side of the pharisees, long before the revolt, and that the sadducees were the party of the elite.
And the masses, allegedly, were on the side of the Communist party in Russia. But whether they were or they were not, they were pretty much irrelevant to the revolution.
First of all, you brought it up, and now all of a sudden, it’s irrelevant whose side the masses were on? Why’d you bring it up, then?
Second, what do you mean, “allegedly”? We have Josephus, a primary source and the only one with anything to say on the matter, saying the masses were on the side of the rabbis (the rabbis say the same thing, but since they wrote down their tradition some time later, you probably wouldn’t consider them primary sources.)
Third, of course the masses were relevant. What, you think that Beitar, which was besieged by Romans for three years before it fell and whose citizens fought them down to the children and were all massacred, was propped up by rabbinical Commissar blocking squads shooting those who attempted to retreat in the back with machine guns? How do you think Bar Giora’s guys, armed with defective weapons and without serious military training or supplies, wrecked a Roman legion in open battle?
Fourth, even in the Russian revolution, the masses were hugely relevant. Hence the total failure of the the Whites, who were reduced to using officers as infantry troops, and the Social Democrats and Cadets. Hence the collapse of the government in Russian Central Asia, as the urban proletariat of e.g. Tashkent revolted (and my source here is Nazarov, who was a true hero and fought against them as much as humanly possible.) Hence the rebellion of the Bashkirs and Tatars and everyone else. Granted, the masses require propaganda to come around to a certain point of view and constant and harsh discipline to show consistent adherence to that point of view-but so do professional soldiers and revolutionaries.
You misread me. I never brought it up.
I don’t recall him attributing a position on the Jewish revolt to the masses. Hence “allegedly”. He says that the masses supported the pharisees against sadducees. Quite likely they did. I don’t see why you care which side the masses supported. If the masses supported the pharisees it is not evidence that the pharisees were right and the sadducees wrong. Even less is it evidence that something like the pharisees existed in Old Testament times.
Recall the elaborate and ingenious measures that Josephus took to avoid being forcibly suicided. So yes, that is pretty much what I think. The Jewish revolt was Jonestown, religious fanaticism carried to its logical and inevitable conclusion. Josephus could not flee, so even less could the women and children flee.
The communists seized power by a coup involving a handful of people, continued to rule through the existing state apparatus (notoriously the KGB has organizational continuity all the way back), and that state apparatus proceeded to tax and conscript the masses to fight a civil war in ways it had been reluctant to do to fight an external enemy.
>You misread me. I never brought it up.
Fine, Hidden Author brought it up.
>I don’t see why you care which side the masses supported. If the masses supported the pharisees it is not evidence that the pharisees were right and the sadducees wrong.
We disagree. Hillel, when he couldn’t remember a law, said that whatever the Jewish people were doing was right-“if they’re not prophets, they’re the sons of prophets.”
By the way, I don’t think the Great Revolt was orchestrated by the Sanhedrin or any particular rabbinical branch. If you have primary sources saying otherwise, I’d love to see them.
>Even less is it evidence that something like the pharisees existed in Old Testament times.
Josephus says they did.
>Recall the elaborate and ingenious measures that Josephus took to avoid being forcibly suicided. So yes, that is pretty much what I think. The Jewish revolt was Jonestown, religious fanaticism carried to its logical and inevitable conclusion. Josephus could not flee, so even less could the women and children flee.
The Jewish Revolts (there were three great ones) were not Jonestown. Warriors in a no-win tactical situation and massively outnumbered killing themselves to avoid being tortured to death, and killing their children and women to avoid seeing them sold for whores and catamites (as happened after the Great Revolt en masse) are not cultists drinking poison Kool Aid in the jungle. Have some respect.
All the more so, during the actual war itself. There is no mention of commissars.
>The communists seized power by a coup involving a handful of people, continued to rule through the existing state apparatus (notoriously the KGB has organizational continuity all the way back), and that state apparatus proceeded to tax and conscript the masses to fight a civil war in ways it had been reluctant to do to fight an external enemy.
The Whites also taxed and conscripted the masses quite ruthlessly and were not above executions. Nonetheless, they did not seem to be able to get those masses to fight for them very effectively, except for the Cossacks (who split down the middle, breaking White and Red.) The great tragedy of the Civil War was the loss of Makhno’s Ukrainian anarchists, who were boned by geography and numbers.
Judging by the enthusiasm with which the masses participated in the post-war destruction of churches, looting and denunciations, their agenda was aligned quite well with that of the Bolsheviks, similar to the agendae of the Baltimore simians and their overlords align.
How does he know? The pharisees told him. That the pharisees told him then is more credible than the rabbis telling us now, because he and they were closer to the times, but still, not altogether convincing.
OK, you are right, not Jonestown. But neither is it evidence for mass enthusiasm for the revolt. Jesus foresaw the revolt and prophesied that they would be toast, and closer to the events, when the revolt was imminent, the Jewish Christians foresaw the revolt, prophesied the revolutionaries would be toast, and ran like hell. I don’t think either prophesy required any supernatural powers or is indicative of any supernatural powers.
Josephus is one of the few survivors, and he was walking on eggshells like a heterosexual male at Harvard.
The reds inherited the state apparatus for taxation and conscription. The whites had to whip up their own apparatus on the spur of the moment.
It is never hard to get the masses to participate in some denunciations, if there is some loot going.
Recall it took ten years of the most unrelenting terror to get most of the peasants into collectives. The government could not just snap its fingers to recollectivize the peasants.
>How does he know? The pharisees told him. That the pharisees told him then is more credible than the rabbis telling us now, because he and they were closer to the times, but still, not altogether convincing.
Yes, Josephus was an innocent little sheep, credulous, and ignorant of all other historical sources. He had no idea there were different versions of history.
>OK, you are right, not Jonestown. But neither is it evidence for mass enthusiasm for the revolt.
Wrecking a Roman legion and its auxilia in open combat, not in the woods and with scrap for weapons (I don’t think ANY other guerrilla force did anything comparable) and the Romans having to come back with four legions and taking years to reconquer the land-those are evidence for mass enthusiasm.
>Jesus foresaw the revolt and prophesied that they would be toast, and closer to the events, when the revolt was imminent, the Jewish Christians foresaw the revolt, prophesied the revolutionaries would be toast, and ran like hell.
Where did they prophecy this?
In any case, when you are being preyed upon, you don’t just fight if you think you can win. Fighting to inflict an unacceptable cost on the enemy while losing might be a best option. The fact that your people have lost the balls to do this is the reason that their black class enemies have been able to drive them out of their cities with low level predation.
>Josephus is one of the few survivors, and he was walking on eggshells like a heterosexual male at Harvard.
Sorry, when? When he was writing for the Romans?
>The reds inherited the state apparatus for taxation and conscription. The whites had to whip up their own apparatus on the spur of the moment.
What apparatus did they inherit?
>It is never hard to get the masses to participate in some denunciations, if there is some loot going.
If your masses are scum, sure. And large parts of the masses in 1917 Russia were scum.
>Recall it took ten years of the most unrelenting terror to get most of the peasants into collectives. The government could not just snap its fingers to recollectivize the peasants.
Well, sure, when it was their ox getting gored, they didn’t like it. See: Bryansk revolt. But they wanted to see the middle and upper classes to get boned enough to give significant and essential support to the Bolsheviks at first. Without that support, no Bolsheviks.
The Germans defeated the Roman Legions and regained their independence with a proud aristocratic warrior elite demanding the restoration of their ancient privileges. Jews got clobbered hard and did not recover for two thousand years. The success of the Jewish revolt is not evidence of mass support because they did not in fact succeed, and because mass support never matters much anyway.
Josephus clearly was no fan of the Jewish revolt, but had to conceal his preferences and opinions. The sane knew the revolt would fail catastrophically, but no one dared say so.
For many years the Bolsheviks had no power in the countryside. They ruled the cities. Therefore, no peasant support. And they ruled the cities by siege. They would cut off the movement of food and goods between city and countryside, and use food supply to rule the city. This shows their basis of support was the existing state apparatus, the army and police, not the proletariat, whom they subdued through starvation, not the peasants, whom they did not even attempt to subdue until after they had captured the cities. The Bolsheviks were the government making war upon the people, the result of ever leftwards movement within the government.
Morocco only pretends to democracy. It is actually an absolute monarchy with a competent King who takes no shit. The State Department wanted Arab Spring, so he gave them a sufficiently good simulation of Arab Spring that they could believe it if they were sufficiently determined to believe.
The wife of the King of Morocco is a redhead. In photos, he generally looks the same color as his subjects, yet the royals have been marrying white women for generations. Maybe he suns himself or sloshes himself with fake tanning lotion.
http://dienekes.blogspot.co.il/2007/03/debate-on-skin-color-sexual-dimorphism.html
There are not too many redheaded women among ordinary Moroccans.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Berber_people#Genetics
Which may explain the functionality of Morocco.
http://qr.ae/7XXjvt
A place where bribes are a daily fact of life is “functional” only in a limited way. Their GDP per capita is about half that of Algeria, which was wrecked by a massive civil war a couple of decades ago. Algeria, too, has a high Berber component.
Both have a higher level of corruption and a lower GDP per capita than Botswana, which has no Berbers at all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Botswana
You might somehow justify corruption, if it’s done in a regular way according to protocol, as a workable arrangement. But the reality is that the people a country most needs to stay and reproduce, the most productive ones, tend to be the ones most offended by the constant need to grovel and bribe their intellectual and cultural inferiors. They tend to leave when given the option.
“Both [Algeria and Morocco] have a higher level of corruption and a lower GDP per capita than Botswana, which has no Berbers at allâ€
Botswana is a subsidiary of the De Beers mining company (run by whites.) And it doesn’t hurt that the country is largely monoethnic (~80% Tswana), while royal family members are leading political figures (the current president is a descendant of Khama III.)
Neo-colonial crypto-monarchism does a nation good, even in the most unlikely conditions.
Yes, I too have read Moldbug.
How many whites does DeBeers have in Botswana? How do they prevent the Botswanan cops from shaking down negro drivers, or the Botswanan DMV from making it understood to their Botswanan customers that if you want your license today, some bakshish is necessary?
The typical functional postcolonialist arrangement with foreign resource extracting companies is that the locals run their business as they choose and refrain from predation on the corporations. See: http://qr.ae/7XTGnW
Somehow, the Botswanan royal family runs their country in such a way that the vast majority of citizens never feel compelled to bribe an official, whether for doing his job or refraining from screwing them. This is not something that the Moroccan royal family has been able to achieve, nor the military-intelligence junta running Algeria, nor the juntas running Russia, Belorussia, the Ukraine, Uzbekistan or Pakistan. I can only assume that this is because the Botswanan royal family is largely white and descended from Alexander the Great, or something. The current president is half white and about the same shade as Cory Booker (who runs Trenton NJ, though his results aren’t as good), but more than that, if you look closely at his ancestors, you can discern a distinct Macedonian cast to their features:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Chief-khama-III.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/da/SeretseKhama.jpg
Doesn’t it jump out at you?
“Yes, I too have read Moldbug. â€
Not convinced that hereditary monarchy is the cure for what ails us (Moldbug needs to resort to science fiction — crypto-locks? — to make it work smoothly.) But it clearly has not been a raw deal for Botswana.
“How many whites does DeBeers have in Botswana?â€
The Board of Directors of Debswana, the 50/50 private-public joint venture that controls De Beers’ operations in Botswana, is unsurprisingly racially mixed:
http://www.debswana.com/About%20Debswana/Board%20of%20Directors/in this case toPages/Directors.aspx
The Board of Directors of Anglo American, which controls De Beers, looks pretty pale and male:
http://www.angloamerican.com/about-us/leadership-team/board
And the Oppenheimer family, who ran the company until 2011, is white:
http://www.luxlife.co.za/blog/billionaire-life/oppenheimers-sell-de-beers-to-anglo-for-r40bn
“How do they prevent the Botswanan cops from shaking down negro drivers, or the Botswanan DMV from making it understood to their Botswanan customers that if you want your license today, some bakshish is necessary?â€
The flip side of corruption is kinship. Corruption is an other name for ‘family values’. Among tight-knit peoples, relatives take a dim view of family members who fail to exploit their public office for family gain. And the higher you climb the greasy pole, the more relatives come out of the woodwork with hand extended.
Taiwan and Singapore managed to side-step this kinship-corruption problem through the use of foreign auditors. Foreign accountants (Dutch in the case of S’pore, American in the case of Taiwan) are not burdened by the obligations of anyone’s local kinship network, and are difficult to retaliate against because they can do their job honestly, piss people off, and go home.
Not sure how corruption is controlled in Botswana. Wouldn’t be surprised if something similar happens. If anyone knows a good, detailed history of Botswana, I’d be interested.
“The typical functional postcolonialist arrangement with foreign resource extracting companies is that the locals run their business as they choose and refrain from predation on the corporations. See: http://qr.ae/7XTGnWâ€
Nice article.
“Somehow, the Botswanan royal family runs their country in such a way that the vast majority of citizens never feel compelled to bribe an official, whether for doing his job or refraining from screwing them. This is not something that the Moroccan royal family has been able to achieve, nor the military-intelligence junta running Algeria,â€
Comparing Morocco and Angola to Botswana is a bit like comparing Tom Cruise and Peter Dinklage to Yao Ming and implying that East Asians are taller than Europeans. Recollect that the context of this sub-thread was a discussion about whether or not sub-Saharan Africans could be counted among the civilized races of man. Nobody here denies that there is variation among sub-Saharans. Botswanans are more equal than other sub-Saharans. And the royal family of Botswana is more equal than most. A more apt comparison would be between Morocco and Angola on the one hand, and Nigeria (s-S Africa’s most populous country) or the Congo (s-S Africa’s largest country) on the other.
“[…] nor the juntas running Russia, Belorussia, the Ukraine, Uzbekistan or Pakistan.â€
Observe the Corruptions Perceptions Index. Most of the countries that crowd the top of the list are Northwest European. Corruption is the flip side of kinship. NW Euros have long practiced out-marriage. It should come as no surprise that the Caucasian countries you mention are on the other side of the Hajnal Line.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajnal_line
“I can only assume that this is because the Botswanan royal family is largely white and descended from Alexander the Great, or something.â€
Khama III secured his throne through the good graces of the British Crown (white folk.)
Here is a picture of the current president:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Khama#/media/File:Ian_Khama_%282014%29.jpg
Looks like he could be Obama’s Botswanan brother (which is not surprising since his mother was English.) His royal father, grandfather, and great-grandfather? Not so much.
>Not convinced that hereditary monarchy is the cure for what ails us (Moldbug needs to resort to science fiction — crypto-locks? — to make it work smoothly.) But it clearly has not been a raw deal for Botswana.
Quality of rule depends more on the quality of the rulers than on the system they rule by. America has an oligopoly. Medieval Venice had an oligopoly. Botswana has a monarchy. Iraq and Egypt had monarchies. If the rulers (and people) are swine, quality of rule will be poor.
>The Board of Directors of Debswana, the 50/50 private-public joint venture that controls De Beers’ operations in Botswana, is unsurprisingly racially mixed…And the Oppenheimer family, who ran the company until 2011, is white:
And every time a Botswanan DMV clerk implies to one of his clients that their driver’s license might get lost in the mail, but on the other hand, could show up today, depending…those Oppenheimers and directors show up to kick ass and take names? If Botswanans don’t have corruption, it’s because Botswanans don’t WANT corruption.
>The flip side of corruption is kinship. Corruption is an other name for ‘family values’. Among tight-knit peoples, relatives take a dim view of family members who fail to exploit their public office for family gain. And the higher you climb the greasy pole, the more relatives come out of the woodwork with hand extended.
Well, Botswanans are pretty tightly knit. Yet, no corruption. Russians are famously non-kinship oriented (in Soviet military, the only ethnic groups that didn’t form gangs for protection and predation were Russians and Ukrainians.) Yet they are very corrupt.
>Comparing Morocco and Angola to Botswana is a bit like comparing Tom Cruise and Peter Dinklage to Yao Ming and implying that East Asians are taller than Europeans. Recollect that the context of this sub-thread was a discussion about whether or not sub-Saharan Africans could be counted among the civilized races of man. Nobody here denies that there is variation among sub-Saharans. Botswanans are more equal than other sub-Saharans. And the royal family of Botswana is more equal than most. A more apt comparison would be between Morocco and Angola on the one hand, and Nigeria (s-S Africa’s most populous country) or the Congo (s-S Africa’s largest country) on the other.
You mean Algeria, not Angola. BTW, Angola can also be compared to Botswana, since it’s next door and also produces diamonds, yet is a giant abortion of a country.
I’ve met plenty of civilized Nigerians. The Igbo, for instance, are known as the Jews of Africa, and not because they have large swinging forelocks.
If the question is whether many subsaharan Africans are civilized, the answer is plainly “yes.” If the question is whether less of them, proportionately, are civilized than NW Euros, the answer is plainly “no.” The NW Euros, 2000 years ago, were plainly uncivilized, but within 1200 years became civilized. So I’m not sure what the practical conclusion is.
>Observe the Corruptions Perceptions Index. Most of the countries that crowd the top of the list are Northwest European. Corruption is the flip side of kinship. NW Euros have long practiced out-marriage. It should come as no surprise that the Caucasian countries you mention are on the other side of the Hajnal Line.
Hajnal-shmajnal. I bet if you slipped those overworked British medical workers some cash, they’d keep grandpa off the Liverpool pathway.
>His royal father, grandfather, and great-grandfather? Not so much.
Yet they seem to have been noble gentlemen nonetheless.
Everywhere is always an oligarchy. Aristocracies, rule by the best, generaly produce good results. We have a victimocracy, in that the ruling myth is not will of the people, nor divine right of Kings, but victimization,hence rule by the worst.
Botswanans love corruption. But they have a king, thinly disguised to avoid offending the Cathedral, so what they want does not matter much.
Because it does not matter who you are related to, unless related to royalty.
Same thing as makes Dubai honest.
Black people have never built cities. (The Great Zimbabwe was built by Hebrew gold miners) Therefore, black people not civilized.
“Quality of rule depends more on the quality of the rulers than on the system they rule by.
America has an oligopoly. Medieval Venice had an oligopoly. Botswana has a monarchy. Iraq and Egypt had monarchies. If the rulers (and people) are swine, quality of rule will be poor.â€
Aristotle said there are three kinds of government: by one, by few, or by many. By that thinking, monarchy is the modal condition of man since the advent of civilization.
But Aristotle could have simplified things greatly by observing that all government is oligopoly. Always has been. Always will be.
“ If Botswanans don’t have corruption, it’s because Botswanans don’t WANT corruption.â€
As in other places, they want corruption and they don’t want corruption. Rare is the people who loudly announce they want corruption. Yet corruption is the norm. Northwest Europeans are the oddballs.
The DMV clerk answers to someone, who answers to someone, who answers so someone, who answers to someone at De Beers. In a population of two million, it only takes a handful of one-in-a-million type people to make a difference. And it doesn’t hurt that Botswana is a country where family, clan, tribe, and nation are the same: Tswana.
“Russians are famously non-kinship oriented (in Soviet military, the only ethnic groups that didn’t form gangs for protection and predation were Russians and Ukrainians.) Yet they are very corrupt.â€
Compared to Chechens, Russians are not very clannish. Compared to Dutchmen, they are.
“You mean Algeria, not Angola. BTW, Angola can also be compared to Botswana, since it’s next door and also produces diamonds, yet is a giant abortion of a country.â€
Unlike Botswana, Angola is a multicultural country ruled by erstwhile-Marxists cum social-democrats. Unlike Angola, Botswana is an Anglophile monoculture under the iron heel of neo-colonialist globalization.
“Diversity is Strength!†“Marx was right about a lot of things!†“Colonialism is bad, and neo-colonialism is no better!” In theory, Angola should be doing better than Botswana. Except it isn’t.
Resources are a “curse  except when they aren’t. It’s people, not resources, that matter most.
In the case of Angola, oil was a prize that rival tribes fought over under the guise of ideological struggle during the Cold War. Had the population of Botswana included a sizable percentage of rival Ndebele, their history would have likely turned out differently.
“I’ve met plenty of civilized Nigerians. The Igbo, for instance, are known as the Jews of Africa, and not because they have large swinging forelocks.â€
Just as Botswana is the exception that proves the rule for sub-Saharan Africa, Igbos are the exception that proves the rule for Nigeria. sub-Sahara Nigeria scores lower than either Berber Morocco or Berber Algeria on the Corruption Index. And they are less prosperous.
And, come to think of it, I haven’t received any emails from distressed members of the royal family of Morocco promising me a large sum of money in exchange for a small up-front payment.
“If the question is whether many subsaharan Africans are civilized, the answer is plainly “yes.†If the question is whether less of them, proportionately, are civilized than NW Euros, the answer is plainly “no.†The NW Euros, 2000 years ago, were plainly uncivilized, but within 1200 years became civilized. So I’m not sure what the practical conclusion is. â€
The practical conclusion is that it might take several centuries ~at best~ before Sun People and Winter People can see eye-to-eye — and that’s assuming that sub-Saharans and Euros are as genetically distant from each other as Italians are from Normans.
>Everywhere is always an oligarchy. Aristocracies, rule by the best, generaly produce good results.
Aristocracy rapidly ceases to be rule by the best and becomes rule by the descendants of the best, who are, due to regression to the mean, NOT the best by definition. Unless you have an open entry aristocracy. But the aristocrats who openly entered frequently try to pull the ladder up behind them, as happened in the US.
Machiavelli pointed out that there’s a constant cycle (which you never address):
I must at the beginning observe that some of the writers on politics distinguished three kinds of government, viz. the monarchical, the aristocratic, and the democratic; and maintain that the legislators of a people must choose from these three the one that seems to them most suitable. Other authors, wiser according to the opinion of many, count six kinds of governments, three of which are very bad, and three good in themselves, but so liable to be corrupted that they become absolutely bad. The three good ones are those which we have just named; the three bad ones result from the degradation of the other three, and each of them resembles its corresponding original, so that the transition from the one to the other is very easy. Thus monarchy becomes tyranny; aristocracy degenerates into oligarchy; and the popular government lapses readily into licentiousness. So that a legislator who gives to a state which he founds, either of these three forms of government, constitutes it but for a brief time; for no precautions can prevent either one of the three that are reputed good, from degenerating into its opposite kind; so great are in these the attractions and resemblances between the good and the evil.
>We have a victimocracy, in that the ruling myth is not will of the people, nor divine right of Kings, but victimization,hence rule by the worst.
I do not notice that the people who are Western victim martyrs tend to hold any actual power. Jamie Dimon, who holds power, projects an image inside JP Morgan which is quite similar to your ideal. Pink haired shrieking chick doesn’t “rule” in any sense of the word, and is the ovaried equivalent of the gold-teefed shitbag jacking whitey between his jail stints: a disposable meatsack, a pair of flex cuffs, a one-use tool.
>Botswanans love corruption.
How do you know?
>Same thing as makes Dubai honest.
Dubai is not honest. Dubai is shit. Even this retired cop (not particularly sophisticated by global standards, but quite observant) noticed: http://timdees.com/blog/?cat=7
>Black people have never built cities. (The Great Zimbabwe was built by Hebrew gold miners) Therefore, black people not civilized.
Benin was a city, comparable in size to most cities in the ancient world.
>But Aristotle could have simplified things greatly by observing that all government is oligopoly. Always has been. Always will be.
He could have, but he didn’t, because it’s trivial. The interesting thing is whether the oligopoly is centered on a monarch, on a mob or on itself.
>Rare is the people who loudly announce they want corruption. Yet corruption is the norm. Northwest Europeans are the oddballs.
Most people announce they want corruption in other terms. For instance, by saying “I’ve got a family to feed.”
>Compared to Chechens, Russians are not very clannish. Compared to Dutchmen, they are.
It is precisely their lack of clannishness that explains the Russians’ failure to organize and stand up for each other and their opportunistic and predatory behavior towards each other. As the saying in their military went, “when you beat up your landsman, you feel like you’re back home.”
No aristocracy ever succeeds in being all that hereditary. There is always a great deal of churn. Consider the career of William the Marshal.
Regression to the mean is a moderate effect – in practice, does not go all the way to the mean, worst case is around half way to the mean or so. Otherwise horsebreeders would never get anywhere. Dingos have not gone all the way back to being wolves. They are still pretty much dogs, except of course for greater independence and initiative, required by being independent for the last ten thousand years or so.
>We have a victimocracy, in that the ruling myth is not will of the people, nor divine right of Kings, but victimization,hence rule by the worst.
A lot of our elite is female, gay or ladyboy. Quite suddenly a shitload of ladyboys. One drop of faintly brownish blood allowed Angelo Mozilo to steal billions and piss away trillions. Looks like real power to me. Anil Dash can capriciously destroy businesses and businessmen according to his alarming whims. That is power with knobs on.
Who is this pink haired chick to which you refer? Jamie Dimon is a male heterosexual Jewish banker who has had less scandalous conduct than most of the rest of the US banking industry.
Strong kinship networks.
Dubai has less corruption than Israel.
Bullshit.
All references to Benin as a substantial city date to about a century after first Portuguese occupation.
The word “Benin” is Portuguese, and the language used to be pidgin Portuguese. Though ruled by an African king, it was a Portuguese trade depot.
Qualification: the retired cop is writing about Abu Dhabi. Dubai is basically the same thing. Obviously, by the standards of the Middle East, Dubai is not shit. But by Western standards, in terms of honesty, functionality, bureaucracy, Dubai and the rest of the Gulf suck.
According to the perceptions of corruption index, Quatar and UAE (Duba) are less corrupt than Israel.
>No aristocracy ever succeeds in being all that hereditary.
Then explain the Kyklos of Machiavelli, Polybius, etc. Why does aristocracy degenerate?
>Regression to the mean is a moderate effect – in practice, does not go all the way to the mean, worst case is around half way to the mean or so.
It is enough (in conjunction with good living making them soft) to make the aristocracy lose that edge to the upstarts from the general population and its own bastards. The Fabians were concerned enough about this to build their system around it. Their system still stands and their descendants still run it, while you are anonymously carping online, so I suspect they were on to something.
>A lot of our elite is female, gay or ladyboy. Quite suddenly a shitload of ladyboys. One drop of faintly brownish blood allowed Angelo Mozilo to steal billions and piss away trillions. Looks like real power to me. Anil Dash can capriciously destroy businesses and businessmen according to his alarming whims. That is power with knobs on.
Nah. A commissar has no real power. He is a functionary. Quotas come down. If he doesn’t meet them, if he injects his own ideas, or if he pisses someone off, he’s gone, airbrushed out of the pics. Needless to say, the guys pulling triggers and operating bulldozers at the commissar’s orders have even less power.
>Who is this pink haired chick to which you refer?
An archetype.
>Jamie Dimon is a male heterosexual Jewish banker who has had less scandalous conduct than most of the rest of the US banking industry.
Dimon is not Jewish. He is Greek. And he has quite a bit of pull. In 2008, the govt bailed JP Morgan out, effectively subsidizing its acquisition of Bear Stearns, allowing them to increase market cap by $12 billion for what turned out to be a $1.2 billion purchase.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/jpmorgans-12-billion-bailout/
>Strong kinship networks.
So you don’t know, you’re just assuming.
>Dubai has less corruption than Israel.
I live in Israel, and have never seen corruption in day-to-day life. On the level of politics and big business, we just put a former Prime Minister in jail for corruption. Numerous MKs have gone to jail for this stuff. When Dubai starts going after corrupt politicians on this level, there may be something to talk about.
>All references to Benin as a substantial city date to about a century after first Portuguese occupation.
>The word “Benin†is Portuguese, and the language used to be pidgin Portuguese. Though ruled by an African king, it was a Portuguese trade depot.
Portuguese trade depots in West Africa were coastal fortresses. Living inland was certain death from tropical diseases. They did not tell their African trade partners how to run their affairs. From the descriptions of Benin that we have a century after the Portuguese (Dutch sources collected by Olfert Dapper,) Benin appears to have been a large city with wide streets and an extensive palace complex. I doubt that the Portuguese, with their small trade mission, were responsible.
Angelo Mozillo had power. Looks to me that white males were dancing to his tune, not the other way around.
Nah, Israel put him in jail for losing the 2006 Lebanon war. Corruption was an excuse and rationalization. If he had won the war, he would be sweet.
You have not attempted to start a new business, or develop some undeveloped land, so would not have encountered the usual forms of corruption.
Perhaps, quite possibly you are right, but among the loot from Benin in the British museum is a depiction of a uniformed sixteenth century Portuguese soldier – perhaps a reminder of that the King was backed by technologically superior westerners, clearly an indication of white influence from the beginning. How is that for a primary source?
Like the great Zimbabwe, we see no sign of blacks building stuff without white guidance. Whether or not it is fair to call Benin a Portuguese depot, substantial Portuguese influence is evident. Their “bronze” is not bronze. It is brass.
>Angelo Mozillo had power. Looks to me that white males were dancing to his tune, not the other way around.
He was a commissar, passing orders and quotas down and maybe adding to them a bit.
>Nah, Israel put him in jail for losing the 2006 Lebanon war. Corruption was an excuse and rationalization. If he had won the war, he would be sweet.
I’d like to see that assertion backed up with a bit of evidence.
>You have not attempted to start a new business, or develop some undeveloped land, so would not have encountered the usual forms of corruption.
I haven’t? Really? You make a lot of assumptions.
>Perhaps, quite possibly you are right, but among the loot from Benin in the British museum is a depiction of a uniformed sixteenth century Portuguese soldier – perhaps a reminder of that the King was backed by technologically superior westerners, clearly an indication of white influence from the beginning. How is that for a primary source?
Quite poor. Your argument is of the typical leftist form: something of no direct relevance, followed by “could one not infer that…?”
Let me help you. A primary source is something like this: a 15th century account, by a European explorer, of what became Benin, reading something like “a scattering of miserable grass huts with goats nibbling at the roofs and desultory savages squatting in the mud with flies crawling on their faces.”
>Whether or not it is fair to call Benin a Portuguese depot, substantial Portuguese influence is evident. Their “bronze†is not bronze. It is brass.
And? The Japanese gained quite a bit of tech from the Portuguese, and their art of the period portrays the Portuguese, yet this is obviously not evidence that they learned everything from the Portuguese. Obviously, Benin was not Edo. Equally obviously, they had things like ironworking before the Portuguese introduced them to bronze.
That quotas were in effect gave him the opportunity to enthusiastically overfulfill them. That dumping the resulting dud loans on Fannie and Freddy was quietly accepted meant he could bribe people to accept far more, bigger, and worse dud loans than he was supposed to. His corruption fitted the ideological climate, but, by bribing and pressuring the authorities, he also fitted the ideological climate to his corruption.
The brass soldier proves that Benin was subject to substantial western power and influence from the beginning. To show that blacks can build cities, you need a black city built without western power, influence, and guns.
Africa is full of such villages, so no one would make note of it. By the time anyone first makes note of Benin, because it had become a true city, the people there had been speaking pidgin Portuguese for a hundred years – which suggests that for the previous hundred years, it was indeed a few savages squatting in the mud.
If one corrupt politician, then many. Show me an indictment of a politician who is not in political trouble.
“Most people announce they want corruption in other terms. For instance, by saying “I’ve got a family to feed.â€â€œ
Yes. And the history and structure of kinship goes a long way toward explaining much of the observed variance in corruption between countries.
“It is precisely their lack of clannishness that explains the Russians’ failure to organize and stand up for each other and their opportunistic and predatory behavior towards each other. As the saying in their military went, “when you beat up your landsman, you feel like you’re back home.â€â€œ
NW Europeans have been subject to a ban on consanguineous marriage longer than Russians have.
Here is hbdchick on consanguinous marriage in Russia and NW Europe:
“it seems as though the russians had a ban on consanguineous marriages (first and second cousin marriages) for just about 500 years, whereas (north)western europeans have had such a ban for almost 1600 years. that’s an 1100 year difference. if we calculate generations at 20 years, that’s a whopping 55 generations difference.â€
“Qualification: the retired cop is writing about Abu Dhabi.â€
The cop is writing about how the police in Abu Dhabi (evidently run by a Canadian, btw) are enforcing work rules.
This is an odd way to prove that Gulf States are a world of suck.
>That quotas were in effect gave him the opportunity to enthusiastically overfulfill them.
That is the case with every commissar, at all times. The train conductor does not own the railroad.
>The brass soldier proves that Benin was subject to substantial western power and influence from the beginning. To show that blacks can build cities, you need a black city built without western power, influence, and guns.
Do Japanese depictions of Portuguese prove that Japan was subject to substantial western power and influence from the beginning?
Apparently, they had bronze long before European contact: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology_of_Igbo-Ukwu
Iron as well: https://crossroadsofempires.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/preview_robion-brunner-etal-jaa13-1-2015.pdf
>Africa is full of such villages, so no one would make note of it. By the time anyone first makes note of Benin, because it had become a true city, the people there had been speaking pidgin Portuguese for a hundred years – which suggests that for the previous hundred years, it was indeed a few savages squatting in the mud.
So, you have no primary sources and declare them significant by their absence. Interestingly, we have records for the founding of Singapore and Hong Kong by the Europeans, which had previously been the SEA equivalent of the miserable goat village.
>If one corrupt politician, then many.
Every political system has many. We put ours on trial.
>Show me an indictment of a politician who is not in political trouble.
Sure. Moshe Katsav. Avigdor Lieberman, Arye Deri.
>The cop is writing about how the police in Abu Dhabi (evidently run by a Canadian, btw) are enforcing work rules.
>This is an odd way to prove that Gulf States are a world of suck.
Them enforcing these rules is not business as usual, as demonstrated by the company proprietor’s demeanor and history.
“Them enforcing these rules is not business as usual, as demonstrated by the company proprietor’s demeanor and history.â€
The proprietor’s history included fines for two prior violations of private-security service regulations. Two other companies that week were having their tags pulled for their third strike, which suggests enforcement that is persistent and impartial.
ISIS seems unstoppable at this point. It looks like they have Assad’s army in Syria in full retreat as well. The fact is, the Caliphate is back and it will be a feature of the Middle East for the foreseeable future. How far it spreads depends entirely on the resolve and wherewithal of the Iranian regime and the Gulf monarchies.
Any insights on Yemen, Jim? Saudis are pounding the heck out of it, but without ground troops, I see it being split like it used to be. Shi’ites get the north.
If this entire episode has taught us anything it’s that no, you cannot win any war using just planes. Planes cannot hold territory.
planes cannot hold territory. also, you can’t hug a child with nuclear arms.
Damn Peppermint that’s pretty good.
‘planes cannot hold territory. also, you can’t hug a child with nuclear arms.’
And its the progressive leftist Syrian Kurds that are defeating them. Not so unstoppable as it seems.
A kurdish faction that has long been at war with other Kurdish factions, threatened by Islamic State, signed up with a Kurdish faction that can call in American bombers on specific targets, and suddenly was kicking ass. In the middle east, every faction is in a state of war and near war with all the other factions, and frequently switches sides for momentary advantage. The interesting thing was that a very short time ago, these left wing Kurds were at war with Islamic State and with US allies. Doubtless this is bad news for Islamic state, but the sudden strengthening of this faction is not good news for progressives. It does not make the Middle East less of a quagmire. It pushes Islamic State further from victory, but does not bring progressives nearer to victory.
Also, the Kurds have long pined for an independent state. They have little interest in beating back ISIS any further than past their own borders, so while they are a roadblock, they’re not really a huge threat.
L.O.L. Well written. But the M.E. is still a low priority…
ISIS is trolling the ever-loving $hit out of the Western World right now.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/isis-jihadi-bride-claims-forced-sex-with-yazidi-girls-is-never-rape-because-koran-condones-it-10271703.html
“And who knows, maybe Michelle Obama’s price won’t even exceed a third of a dÄ«nÄr, and a third of a dÄ«nÄr is too much for her [in the slave markets that we have here, because its 2015 after all].â€
C’mon, guys, now that’s just mean. Won’t someone defend her honor?
She has honor?
[…] is Jim on Losing Ramadi. And extensive commentary on Raping Sanza Stark, or rather on the hubbub about it and what that […]