The problem is that people we are allowing in have too much power over us. Also, most of them are stupid people, and when their children go to school, the Cathedral teaches them to hate us and attack us.
When nonwhites have the majority, whites will be a market dominant minority, like Jews or overseas Chinese. In nonwhite countries, market dominant minorities seldom exist, because they get exterminated or expelled. In the middle east, sometimes enslaved.
Smart fraction theory implies that intelligence primarily produces externalities, benefits for other people.
Thus, people of below average intelligence produce large negative externalities.
The policy of the King of Dubai, assuming that policy to reflect the best interests of an undeniably able monarch, indicates that even when stupid people are not allowed welfare, not allowed to vote, are subject to an ironfisted law enforcement system that completely eliminates the kind of crimes that stupid people might commit, are subject to the iron fisted control of employers, who may at any moment expel their employees back to their home countries to face the horrors of those governments that they democratically elected, even with all that, stupid people still have substantial negative externalities.
If Mexicans were being brought in to work, like their equivalents in Dubai, the benefit would be mutual.
But Dubai has a policy of not letting perpetually low income people set down roots, which implies that such people have substantial negative externalities.
In Dubai they cannot bring in their families, and if they remain low income indefinitely, they get the heave ho even if their employer wants them to stay.
However, in the United States, Mexicans are not being brought in to work, but to vote. It is illegal for them to work, but they get privileged access to welfare, onerous regulations are less enforced on Mexicans than on Californians, and they get to drive without a license. A illegal immigrant female who spawns an anchor thuglet to some random thug, a little Democrat voter, gets far more money than the illegal immigrant who mows Bryan Caplan’s lawn, which shows you what the priorities of the open borders crowd is.
If we replace one smart person with one dumb person, it’s pretty obvious that this has a negative externality.
But if we add one person, arguably this has a positive externality. The larger the society, the richer, often enough, presumably due to specialization.
There is however a certain size beyond which further specialization is impossible, limited by technology. and intelligence.
Therefore beyond a certain size, there is no difference between adding a person and replacing a person. Holding specialization constant, adding a stupid person is like replacing a smart person with a stupid person. Moreover, stupid people reduce the degree of specialization, and so their addition is a double whammy.
Still, it’s not completely obvious why the smart fraction of the population in Dubai is vulnerable to the addition of a stupid person, even if the total size of the population is beyond what is necessary for full specialization. At the very least,they ought to be able simply to exclude the moron.
Of course, in the US, this is racism, sexism, and what have you. Observe that the housing bubble was, at least in California where I could see what happening, entirely Mexicans buying house no money down.
But in Dubai, complete freedom of association. Why don’t they just exclude the moron?
The stupid person is like spam. A spam filter runs the risk of blocking good email. A stupid person takes up a recruiter’s time. Time is wasted identifying and rejecting the stupid, and the rejection is not perfect, so a stupid person can end up getting placed, pushing aside a smart person.
Observe the very poor performance of the Chinese mandarinate system, which wound up admitting not the able, but those good at gaming the system. The emperor wants the best, but is unable to accurately assess whether examiners are truly selecting the best. If the examiners grade mechanically, then the system can be gamed. It is quite difficult to grade in a way that resists being gamed.
Furthermore, social relationships are considerably less tightly protected than business relationships. People are more vulnerable to knowing a stupid person socially than to hiring a stupid person. The stupid can therefore pollute the culture by their presence. They debase the culture, as we now see in the US.
The one variable in this replacement system is can the USG keep military dominance with a military that’s non white? It’s pretty clear that places like South Africa would return to white rule pretty quick without the USG military keeping blacks in power. Can the USG government rule American if they replace white enforcers with blacks and mexicans?
Sulla: Roman Legionaries versus freed slaves and foreign troops.
I think we’re being too realpolitick when we say that it’s the US military keeping South Africa ruled by kleptocratic Blacks. A return to White supremacy may mean sanctions for South Africa. The sanctions weren’t want killed South Africa.
For Whites, it’s all about ideology.
When the US stops being Lincoln’s “new nation dedicated to the principle that…”, or otherwise fails, that will be a massive psychological blow to anti-racist progressivism, hopefully, one from which it will never recover.
Does today’s average White South African fully understand that no amount of education and affirmative action will turn Black into White? Wait, no, that’s the democratic fallacy again; this time being fascist. Do the opinion leaders in control of South Africa understand that? If they do, do they believe they have more to gain from the current chaos than they would from order?
I was in Dubai for a couple years. They import talent because they have 1.) no native talent to speak of and 2.) no desire to break a sweat– both unlike the US. Emiratis absolutely know that more progressive immigration would destroy their cushy deal. But the whole place is so transient and accidental I’m not sure what lessons it represents in other NRx considerations.
I suspect our military capabilities have already been degraded by the imposition of diversity training, etc. The SA military used to be ferocious– now they can’t even field an air force or navy due to non white leadership. There are no doubt as many AA officers as can reasonably be justified– how this talent performs in the field is something I’ve not seen anything on. Any serving or retired military types able to speak to this?
The US Military in general is undergoing a radical purge of officers and has recently given in to feminists on women in combat roles and homo activists on open sodomy. Obama’s future plans include a much smaller military with slashed benefits. Before long, America will be losing the battles along with all the wars.
The populares feared the Roman legions.
The “very poor performance of the Chinese mandarinate”?
Give them a break. They were the best and then the second best for most of human history. Their job was to uphold the dynasty they served, and a median age of 250 years ain’t half bad.
China has been in Dark age from the end of the Song Dynasty to the beginning of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.
Garnet Joseph Wolseley was seriously unimpressed by mandarin military officers.
You need to read up on the Song’s military officers. If anything the ones Wolseley met were a huge improvement.
The Song was a huge military failure which caused the first time ever the whole land was taken by foreigners. Mandarins had all the power, and generals who excelled in the battlefield were killed along with their families by jealous mandarins, e.g. Yue Fei.
Of course in exchange the Song had a very elitist culture with a very advanced economy, sea-borne trade (as they lost access to the land Silk Road to the Tanguts), and the best art, literature and scholarship since Confucius’s time.
Still they lost the damn country to Jurchens and Mongols. Later dynasties found it all too reasonable to focus more on the military and less on those damn mandarins which lost all the privileges and were made to kneel in court. As a result the economy was de-emphasized, peasants became semi-serfs, and technology declined.
You can’t have it all. Calling the Ming-Qing era “Dark Ages” is way beyond hyperbole.
The Chinese are known to have higher IQs than Whites. The Mandarin system ensured that high-IQ Chinese from every social class could become Mandarins, gain some power, and presumably could afford to have more kids.
Any progressive or neoreactionary would tell you that this is a recipe for success. What went wrong?
The Japanese didn’t have mandarins and have the same IQ as the Chinese. So the eugenic effect of the mandarinate wasn’t that big.
“What went wrong” is a long story of which hundreds of books have been written. But still it didn’t go as wrong as people paint it. Qing China wasn’t that bad.
If eugenic effect small, mandarinate tests gamed. Which explains why Viscount Garnet was thoroughly unimpressed by mandarins.
Song dynasty copper production shows up in the arctic record. Qing dynasty does not. So Song created something like ten times the GDP of Qing. Song dynasty GDP, or at least its copper production, was many times that of the entire rest of the world.
The Chinese are known to have a 2 point higher IQ than Americans, based on test data that is putting it mildly less honest than ours. IOW bullshit.
The Chinese in America have a reputation for being smarter than whites because we skimmed the geniuses, or perhaps the Chinese did as part of the global enterprise of skimming us.
China isn’t your problem or our problem unless your Chinese.
Our problem isn’t that our fighting is done by fools. It isn’t. The only foolish thing they’re doing is being obedient. Disloyalty or breach is a big step, it doesn’t come naturally to some people. Not everyone can be an academic.
Our problem is our thinkers are cowards, and they’re in charge. Oh, they’re fools as well.
Just blame democracy when posterity asks why.did.you.fail?
Before hearing from Moldbug and Carlyle, I would have said “it’s complicated” about what’s wrong with the US today, and suggested that what we are doing is probably about the best we could be doing.
I understood that there were activists/lobbyists, journalists, respectable opinion leaders such as professors of political science; and politicians. I thought that democracy was a great goal, but there needed to be some centralism as well, a czar here or there to push something through.
China did fail.
They had gunpowder first, and failed to develop rifles and armies of riflemen; the last decision they made was to ban opium which was being brought to them from the factories of British India by Boston smugglers.
They had built the biggest ships the world had seen, and failed to expand and colonize – Australia was closer to China than to England, but now it is home to Englishmen.
They, and the Romans, had waterwheels and steam power; they failed to develop modern textiles, as had the Romans.
Why did they stagnate and fall prey to drug smugglers and private security companies?
Even if the Mandarin exams were gamed, they still enabled anyone who could learn their characters, study philosophy, and write, to rise into the Mandarin class. Even if that meant only extraordinary peasants, instead of merely well above average peasants, so that there would be no eugenic effect, they still had their best and brightest in positions of influence.
According to progressivism, the US isn’t really doing anything wrong. It is, according to neoreaction.
According to neoreaction, China wasn’t really doing anything wrong. It was, according to progressivism: progressives would accuse China of lacking in diversity, individuality, and democracy.
Can you come up with a way to explain China’s failure, and the apparent poignancy of the progressive criticism?
What is the difference between China’s big ships and Europe’s small ships that conquered the world?
China’s big ships were under the command of a court eunuch, who had sacrificed his genitals to get closer to the emperor.
British, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch ships were under the command of pirates and adventurers, often organized as joint stock corporations, most famously or infamously the East India Company.
Insert usual Ayn Rand rant.
The rise of the west, relative to the west, began with the restoration. Among the many actions of Charles the Second, he authorized the East India Company to make war and peace, though this was arguably merely making legal and official Queen Elizabeth’s famous practice of closing her eyes to the actions of British pirates and adventurers.
Analogously, when Julius Caesar suppressed piracy in the Mediterranean, an essential step in the creation of an Mediterranean centered empire, he did so as a private citizen, using a private militia.
in other words, China had too much monarchy and not enough diversity or individualism?
Help me out here. Do we not like eunuch-generals because it’s an unChristian institution?
Did the West lose its way recently, becoming enamored with the wrong kinds of diversity and individualism, while emphasizing the wrong kind?
Was the Enlightenment not an apostasy, but a heresy, denying the diversity and individualism that exists in favor of a false version of our cherished Western tradition?
The Chinese state crushed civil society, which is the source of revenue and technology.
We need more great pirates like Clive of India. Before World War I, merchant ships generally carried weapons. After World War II, forbidden.
Western civilization is founded on double entry accounting, the scientific method, and the joint stock company.
Double entry accounting enables wealthy people to cooperate, hence the joint stock company. Hence the western development of technology, and the conquest of the British empire. These have been destroyed.
During the financial crisis, it was revealed that SOX accounting is disconnected from reality, that the underlying records frequently just do not exist. This makes it impossible for rich people to work together, since it becomes unclear whether one of them has cheated another.
It was restoration England that brought the west science, technology, and empire, and it has been downhill since then.
Authorizing private corporations to make war and peace is not what progressives mean by individualism and diversity.
The enlightenment is an apostatic version of Christianity, a good news religion. Christianity has always been a problem for the west, in that you need a King who is able and willing to keep the priests in order.
And when the pirates had done their thing, the Crown reeled them in; the pirates didn’t have the interests of the human or capital development of the Empire at heart; certainly not more so than the Crown.
The North American colonies were divested, and divested could tear up treaties and make arrangements with other parts of the world. Was this a benefit or a loss for the Empire? for the world?
Obviously the divesture of Rhodesia and South Africa has been much less successful. But there are good divestures, and there’s spinning off assets into the hands of your buddies Mandela and Mugabe. What progressives are guilty of is then merely control fraud.
The wholly owned subsidiary Puerto Rico is designed to allow capital and commodities to flow while keeping the liability, millions of Blacks, off of USG’s books. Nominally independant Lebanon is in between three nuclear powers. Is Puerto Rico a good idea? How does Lebanon fit in with the theorem about asset distribution; should one of the nuclear powers buy out the interests of the others; does anyone else care about a strip of desert with a few Arabs; does that imply that it should be truly independant?
Is the disagreement between Enlightenment and Dark Enlightenment
merely the answer to the question, is Jamaica being governed in a manner conducive to its capital development?
Moldbug thinks that that government is best which governs in a manner conducive to the capital development of a Patch; which is not without a hint of universalism. Progressives think that that government is best which governs in a manner conducive to the human development of a Patch. Moldbug and Carlyle think that they’re wrong about what’s conducive to human development; Carlyle is sour on the idea of government for capital development.
The same argument leads to the conclusion that socialism will work better than capitalism, because pirates are murderous cuthroats apt to engage in mass murder, while the bureaucrats are full of benevolence
One of bibles of the Dark Enlightenment is “The Bow of Ulysses” by James Anthony Froude. According to Froude, replacing pirates by do-gooder bureaucrats was a disaster for the colonized, and a bigger disaster for the colonizers, that would inevitably lead, and was leading, to the fall of empire. Froude accurately foresaw that imperialism (imperialism being the left wing position in his day) would have the consequences that it did in fact have.
But back to China, we’ve been hearing a lot about the greatness of the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns. Where were the Chinese Metternichs and Bismarks – eunuchs? Where were the Chinese Fredrick the Greats and Charles Vs – sequestered in the Forbidden City to rule over a harem of 27 women and avoid assassination?
Is the true NR criticism of China that it was hollow, with no one in charge; the same NR criticism of USG?
Garnet reports that the emperor was kept out of contact with reality.
But no, I think the problem was that the emperors cut the heads off the tall poppies. As I said, the Chinese fleet was run by eunuch, a slave of the emperor. The restoration equivalent fleet was the East India Company, was Charles the Second granting the East India Company the right to make war and peace, something it had long been doing, but rather more furtively. The Chinese fleet’s objective was to get pretty things for the ladies of the imperial harem, the East India Company to make a profit by trade, conquest, and piracy.
You need civil society. You need capitalists. You need both James Watt and Clive of India. The eighteenth century history of Britain, and recent history of China, tells us capitalism and capitalists is where wealth and industrial civilization comes from.
Around 1830 or so, we suppressed the likes of Clive of India, and emancipated women. That is where we went wrong.
That is the Ming-Qing-Communist era.
Garnet’s description is of a poor, backward, primitive, savage, cruel disorganized country, run by traitors, degenerates, and nitwits.
He is very impressed, however, by ordinary Chinese, and fears that some British adventurer will make himself emperor and clean up governance with an anglo chinese dynasty, in which case he predicts, that pretty soon the Chinese fleet will be making unfriendly visits to Britain, rather than the British fleet making unfriendly visits to China.
And this somewhat resembled what did in fact happen in the end, in that China consciously imported Hong Kong (anglo chinese) governance.
Comparative advantage breaks down when one considers intrinsic limitations. Yes, many Africans can run fast but there is limited demand for that. Most athletic markets are winner take all markets, where only a few at the top get most of the cash.
That is applicable to the Song too, or any dynasty really. Especially in their late days.
The Eugenic effect of the imperial examination is hard to measure. One data point is that Koreans and Japanese have the same IQs without a mandarinate, so that would mean the mandarinate didn’t mean much.
Still Chinese aren’t genetically equal to Japanese or Koreans. China assimilated millions of southern ethnicities, which to this day look sorta Southeast Asian, but today these Southerners IQs are equal to the Han, if not higher. The Southeastern coastal provinces sent more officials than the north for hundreds of years.
Normally is the North of a country which has smarter people, only China is the reverse. We don’t know why.
In India, too, lots of poverty in the North — I think that’s where the most poor places are, while places South like Kerala and Tamil Nadu seem to be doing a little better.
Capitalism is killing the oceans:
http://mindweaponsinragnarok.com/2014/02/18/i-got-on-the-peter-schiff-show-2182014-at-about-47-minutes-into-first-hour-against-a-plastics-industry-hack-to-talk-about-the-oceans/
Really a serious question:Would this be happening if the true greenie Hitler had won? The environmental/green movement today is mainly performance art combined with rent-seeking.
The oceans should serve man. We need to privatize the oceans. This is made difficult by ocean currents, but some currents are less of a problem than others. For example privatizing the circumpolar current would be easy.
Hey Jim,
Here’s an idea for privatizing the oceans.
The ocean is comprised of different things.
1. The territory, including the surface and ocean bed and mining rights.
2. The quality of the water (ocean dumping). This does not observe territory.
3. The species, many valuable for fishing, others not. This also does not observe territory very well.
So, how to balance property rights? One cannot simply divide by territory – this encourages dumping and overfishing.
If something has value but doesn’t observe territory, why not simply assign it separate ownership?
Someone can own ocean water quality, many people can own plots of territory, and many people can own individual species.
Perhaps something similar could be done with air quality, space debris, etc. The market, arbitration and courts could work out a lot of the ambiguity. E.g. regional air quality contracts between air quality owner and territory owners.
There are many obvious problems with this. The alternative seems to be government. It’s a hard problem. What do you think?
The great problem with privatizing the oceans is avoiding the tragedy of the commons, overfishing, etc. One model that works on a small scale is the lobster industry off the coast of Maine. Lobstering is regualted such that the supply remains fairly constant and the lobsters are not trapped to extinction. Scaling this up to a world wide solution is challenging, but there has been some success with whale conservation. Right now the US is the dominant world power and so the US throws enough weight around to prevent the worst of ocean abuse. As the US declines expect to see a lot more depletion of fisheries.
I don’t see any need for any further immigration to the west. We have ethnic diversity, we have high unemployment, we have a viable underclass to do the menial jobs – and we don’t really need any more stinky cab drivers or Quickee Marts.
If I were King Of North America I would slam the doors on immigration, legal and illegal. If you don’t have anything to offer the country – you are out. Deportation of illegals would be preceded by 90 days of hard forced labour on border fortifications.
And that would be just for starters.
OT, some fine examples of America’s addiction to callous altruism: http://www.cracked.com/article_20299_5-depressing-realities-behind-popular-reality-tv-shows.html
Not merely callous, perhaps downright sadistic altruism.
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Jim said:
“Of course, in the US, this is racism, sexism, and what have you. Observe that the housing bubble was, at least in California where I could see what happening, entirely Mexicans buying houses no money down.”
I observed mostly Mexicans as well when I was digging this up just a bit ago.
Will whites really be a market dominant minority? Are whites in Mexico or Brazil a market dominant minority? If there is sufficient interbreeding bloody schisms will be prevented.
Took a long period of dictatorship.
It is quite difficult to grade in a way that resists being gamed.
there is, of course, no way to prevent ALL gaming of the system. even raw proxies for IQ like the SAT / GRE / ASVAB are still subject to distortions via test prepping.
however, this is not a question which has never been answered before.
there is a good essay on the selection process that the English ( used to ) use in “The Stupidity Problem”.
http://www.amazon.com/Stupidity-Problem-Other-Harassments/dp/B000P9SPEO/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1393219567&sr=1-3&keywords=the+stupidity+problem
OT: good news on the AGW front.
…or, maybe not.
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