One of the unique realities of both British and American imperialism is that Empire was and is not central to the national identity of either people.
British Imperial identity was, as many historians have relatively well argued, invented wholesale in the last thirty years of Empire. In fact, the greatest and only real grand celebrations of Empire occurred between 1918 and the Second World War, when Britain’s relative global power had been in decline for more than fifty years. At the true height of Empire in the mid-19th century, identity was more English than Imperial, and international competition was more focused on the French than anyone else (even as the opium wars raged, as the scramble for Africa slowly began, as British money surged into South and Central America, as settlement in Australia grew rapidly etc etc etc). Pomp and ceremony in the colonies, even India, was very limited until the 1920s.
Similarly, in America, most American identity has nothing to do with America’s global power or prestige. America is much larger and more geographically diverse than England, unlike that country it doesn’t really even need to trade with its regional peers. Unlike those final days of the British Empire, most American media doesn’t really reference American imperialism. Most stories are set solely domestically, while even most international ones treat the rest of the world the way a pre-imperial American might have a century and a half ago, with a certain distance, a foreignness from petty domestic conflict (see Indiana Jones versus James Bond, for example). Most Americans have no major opinions on foreign policy.
America is often called a reluctant hegemon. I disagree, it’s an incidental one. The empire is not important to the American psyche, to American identity. I won’t comment on the Russian or Soviet empires, but I get the feeling they may have meant more to their inhabitants, at least some of them, than the American Empire does. In part, this is reflected in the fact that even most Americans consider the wars in which America participates done either for moral reasons or self-interested ones. Economists say that American hegemony makes the world safe for profitable American companies, but most of these still make the vast majority of their revenue in-country. I think, on balance, this is like an Englishman in 1910 extolling the virtuous export of Britannic Civilisation, namely a very nice just-so story to explain how things came to be so.
This is true even for more politically aware, heterodox thinkers. People will say America goes to war for powerful banana companies, for oil, for revenge, because of the Jews, because of some leader’s personal grudge. An earnest interest in world domination and American political hegemony is considered laughable, even if it’s mentioned in a PNAC leaflet everybody treats it as a ruse. Nobody believes in it. “America’s mission is to export liberal democracy to the world”. No, I don’t think even Hillary Clinton believes that.
But America can cope spiritually with the collapse of its global power better than most other historical empires for one reason. Because an invasion of the homeland is so unlikely, and because the domestic market is so large, and because they have so many resources, Americans can simply stop caring about the outside world if the news gets worse.
It’s the rest of the world that will be less lucky, and which will experience radically more upheaval. The Chinese will need to solidify their offer for new vassal nations though, because currently it isn’t particularly compelling, and they have a quality around them that seems to make a lot of enemies, which means their hegemony might be resisted more than the present arrangement.
2rafa
2hr ago
Software is special because the previous wave of applicants didn’t just need the H1B, they also needed whatever local cartel was required. The bar and going to law school in America and the fact the law is a verbal heavy field strongly preference native speakers raised in the US. The AMA locks foreign doctors out of any desirable residency places (which it mandates for almost all foreign doctors). Engineering has various local licensing requirements, and a lot of federal stuff requires you to be a citizen anyway. Meanwhile, sales, consulting, finance and a lot of other professional service jobs have a strong sales/relationship component which again makes it harder for Indians and Chinese applying from overseas.
Software engineering was unique in that it didn’t really require social skills, doesn’t usually require client interaction, paid well enough to get the visa, didn’t have a domestic licensing cartel and could be taught as a technical skill in foreign universities and schools.
2rafa
2hr ago
Amusingly, this will only make it easier for smart Indians to import their countrymen. It’s just that instead of Infosys it will be some motel owner in Iowa who figures out that there’s a local shortage of massage therapists or health administrators or insurance salesmen or machinery operators or vegetable traders or whatever is both in demand and locally deemed hard to hire for and sets up a business that brings over people who did a bullshit 3 month fake degree in whatever it is from an amendable university in his hometown.
The only thing that would really fix the program (other than scrapping it) is to limit no more than 10% of visas to a single country.
2rafa
3hr ago
Quite a sweet story, Love Actually indeed (it’s interesting that there isn’t a comma in the actual movie, maybe because both “love, actually, is all around us” and “love actually is all around us” are grammatically correct? I’m no English lecturer).
Anybody is capable of cheating in the right circumstances, and so the first duty of the maritally faithful is to avoid those situations. But just like the propensity to get drunk various from person to person, with people who can have have four or five drinks and cut themselves off without a second thought and people who cannot have a sip of alcohol without a one hundred percent chance of blacking out, propensity to cheat varies too, especially in middle ground situations that are neither “my spouse is the only non-geriatric adult of the opposite sex I interact with in any real capacity, ever” nor “I regularly get drunk and do MDMA with a group of hot beautiful people I’m attracted to who all want to have sex with me”.
2rafa
3d ago
That’s insane when the leaks from like 5+ years ago that correctly named Jason and Lucia said they would be dual protagonists.
2rafa
3d ago
Starfield’s writing is no worse than that of Skyrim, Oblivion, or Fallout 3/4. Morrowind also had bad quest writing but was elevated by the the weird fiction aspects, some good worldbuilding, and narrative constraints imposed by a tight deadline that mercifully limited quest text volume.
2rafa
3d ago
Your comment reminded me that Dick Fuld, infamous boss of Lehman Brothers for the fifteen years before it collapsed, had a very harsh policy against adultery for senior executives. He fired the bank’s president for it (along with several others over the years) and warned every executive that any extramarital affair was an immediately fireable offense. He also policed their behavior around their wives. Apparently he even told the wives, on their annual executive family retreat, that if they came to him with an affair, he’d fire their husbands but make sure they were looked after.
I read a good post a long time ago about how the main effect of the 70s serial killer wave culturally was not only (as is widely noted) to make way for a lower trust society in general - teenagers don’t hitchhike much anymore, etc - but specifically to make way for the end of a society (the Protestant European America, Canada, Britain, and much of the rest of Northwestern Europe of, say, 1890 to 1965) in which sociopathic behavior was uniquely easy to get away with compared to almost any other time and place in human history. You can see this even in period crime novels, at which one sometimes guffaws at the preposterousness of the trusting behavior shown by e.g. victims, but which was in fact seemingly accurate for the time.
Countries like Japan and Spain are relatively high trust, although less so than say Denmark, but they’re high trust in a completely different way to the kind of ‘sitting duck’ societies that the NW Euro Protestants had constructed in places like England and Minnesota by the 1950s. There’s still an inherent sense of friend and family and tribe and the stranger. As you point out for Catholic Ireland (and the same is true in Islamic countries as in North Africa), the same social stipulations worked or work on a much more ‘objective’ level that at least attempted to guard against the possibility of lying.
2rafa
3d ago
The marker was clearly an ideological zealot and should be removed from teaching duties on that basis. It was a poor essay, but you give that a 10/25, not a 0.
2rafa
3d ago
The topic is interesting enough, but you’ve been here long enough that it didn’t feel like the man’s usual writing.
2rafa
3d ago
Yeah they’re not committed to aggressively stamping out Cantonese, if anything I think over the last decade there has been more of a vaguely nationalist drive to preserve Chinese culture including regional languages in a way that, in fifty years, might actually lead to the kind of thing you see in parts of Europe with declining regional languages. But for now Hong Kong is fine to keep using it.
2rafa
4d ago
I agree with you that using LLM output directly in an answer should be banned, if not as a rule (not least because it’s impossible) then by mutual gentle(wo)man’s agreement of the regular commentariat.
2rafa
4d ago
Hong Kong seems to be doing better now, it’s fully politically pacified and the conclusion of the Jimmy Lai case marks the end of a big chapter in the city’s history. There were a lot of IPOs over the last year, it’s again the preferred listing location for a lot of regional / Sinosphere companies. The big quant shops are expanding their presence. A lot of bankers and lawyers are back from Singapore, which can never really replace what Hong Kong offers (and which has worse weather for much of the years, Hong Kong you can go walk on the peak in the morning in October and not feel like you’re hiking through a rainforest).
I’ve long considered moving there, although it would have to be for the right package and job, and I would want to at least try to learn Cantonese (mainly for my own amusement) which is notoriously difficult.
2rafa
4d ago
Polymarket only has limited CFTC approval for some contracts in the US (officially) right now, it’s Kalshi that has much more freedom and they’ve signalled they’re fine with.
2rafa
5d ago
And people BET ON IT. This is like betting on the outcome of a TV show. How are gambling commissions allowing that to happen?
Gambling commissions are fine with Kalshi bets on who Taylor Swift will invite to her wedding, bets on who Trump will pick as Fed chair and so on, where obviously at least some people will have material non-public information before the wider market.
2rafa
6d ago
It’s more that, and I get that you imply this, both the Amish and Haredim (the latter are more dysfunctional) are kind of quirky minorities who exist within the envelope or the umbrella of the wider, modern, largely secular societies they inhabit. In Israel where they’re only 10-15% of the population they are already causing a lot of problems, refusing to fight despite the country being surrounded on almost all sides by a billion Muslims who would, if their own governments let them, gladly give everything to destroy them, and the leading haredi politicians go on TV to say that young haredi men can’t be conscripted because they do as much for Israel by praying as the soldiers do by fighting (seriously, this is the current line). It’s not sustainable. The Amish are less parasitic, but again if they got to 15%++ of the population there would be more concerns about assimilation, participation in wider society, demands for a renegotiation of their social security exemption etc would be more common.
More obviously, if the Haredim were the overwhelming majority in Israel, Israel would either be destroyed or the Haredim would have to radically change their culture. This is the clearest point in favor of your argument.
It’s interesting that even in Western far right antisemitic circles (eg groypers) they are much more focused on things like Jews in finance, (where there is overrepresentation, sure, but far from dominance) or media (where one could make more of an argument, although it’s certainly no longer the situation it was in the 1990s) than on AI.
Every single major Western AI foundation model company (except xAI, if you want to include it) is owned or run by Jews. OpenAI has Sam Altman, Meta has Zuckerberg, Google is still ultimately controlled by Sergey and Larry, and Anthropic is run by the Amodei siblings, who are also Jewish. Generative AI itself is not an entirely Jewish invention, although Jews were highly overrepresented in its development and in the development of many of the computing innovations that preceded it.
2rafa
7d ago
I must say that the whole "look at the parents to gauge their offspring" is wise, and something I learned from bitter experience. A girl from a well-adjusted, caring family? There's cause for hope.
That is the most important thing. When I was maybe 14, my friend’s mother, scion of the single most politically important dynasty in a small Latin American nation of little note, told me that when marrying, you marry a family more than a man or a woman. The advice has stuck with me since, and it was correct.
2rafa
8d ago
Like you I’m a neurotic, which is unfortunate in this particular aspect of life, in which neuroticism can so easily ruin everything.
I needed a framework to take risks (otherwise I would take none), which ended up being instrumental to my own happiness. It was something like this (unlike you, I never write anything about my personal life, no journals or diaries, but I had it in my head):
- Are they not a (known) cheater, known to be very promiscuous or otherwise have signs, explicitly or implicitly, of a wandering eye?
- Are their parents happily married (the happily is almost as important as the married)? You can usually get the answer to this very quickly because people enjoy psychologizing their own parents, even on an early date
- Do they want to settle down and are they looking for something permanent, now?
- Are they a liar? You can figure this out quickly, it’s just a matter of not deluding yourself about the implications.
If the answer is yes to all, and you like all the other stuff, then you owe it to yourself to pursue it, even if it seems hard or unlikely or you have doubts (which a neurotic always does).
2rafa
8d ago
There is reason to believe that Internet activism is significantly less effective at mobilizing actual people.
An extremely good and rarely made point. The proportion of Muslims radicalized at Western mosques (eg the one in Berlin connected to a number of the 9/11 attackers) in 1998 was perhaps not vastly higher than the proportion radicalized today online (although the latter is a much larger absolute number), but the propensity to commit a real life terror attack seems much much lower in the latter group.
There is still Islamist terrorist violence done by men who have been fully radicalized online, of course, but when you look at the total number out of the tens of millions of Muslim men (at least) fed extremist, violent anti-Western, antisemitic and so on propaganda on social media it’s a very very low proportion who actually leave the house and do this.
Modern online leftism, which lacks the physical real world presence that conservative Islam (or any major religion) still obviously has is even more telling. Millions of people cheering that guy Luigi, wishing violent deaths on capitalists, insurance executives, arms firm executives, finance people, and yet (thankfully!) copycats seem thin on the ground.
2rafa
9d ago
The left wing attacks that we’ve seen recently, using a broad definition (the Kirk and United Healthcare assassinations for example) have been mostly lone wolf attacks
The problem with meritocracy is that it’s pointless.
If you want meritocracy, just administer a single IQ test to every child at 10 years old and distribute every accolade and job based upon that and whatever protected characteristics you want to prioritize (‘Other Backward Castes’, ‘Pardo’, ‘gender diversity’, ‘URM’, ‘BAME’, whatever) and you will be more efficient than the entire wretched body of meritocracy - not just in America - but in even more degenerate systems like those of South Korea, India and elsewhere.
The whole making kids study for 7 hours after school to pass bullshit tests isn’t meritocracy, it isn’t education, it doesn’t make for a successful society. It’s pure ideology. It doesn’t serve the objective of allocating power, resources or status in any way, since along whatever lines you want, you can do it more efficiently in another way.
Well, except one line.
Imagine your children are second or third generation immigrants. You are wealthy. Pure meritocracy will see your children (due to IQ reversion to mean) likely outcompeted by others - either immigrants or natives. Pure status hierarchy, legacy, families with centuries of history and deep social ties to those who run the august intellectual bodies that are the leading universities will outcompete you. Looks and charisma will also largely favor the beautiful, tall, etc, which probably isn’t your kids.
So what is one to do?
Build a ridiculous status system that specifically prioritizes an absurd and unreasonable level of parental investment. Monetarily yes, but also in terms of time, your children’s and yours. Make the kids suffer, so that parents from nicer cultures that care more about kids choose not to push them through the ridiculous pantomime. Poor families won’t have the knowledge, time or money to compete with you. Very rich ones won’t care to. And the future is yours.
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