MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
No bio...
User ID: 1678
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
They've been losing support but they are seen as too conciliatory towards whites. The guy who leads ANC is one of the richest black elites in the country. EFF will turbocharge South Africa's descent into Zimbabwe. However, I ultimately think it won't be allowed to happen since even Western countries put pressure on ANC to tamp down the flirtation with overt black racism.
Pompeo even publicly warned SA over "appropriation without compensation" of white wealth that was making the rounds within ANC circles. The Biden admin doesn't seem to mollycoddle them either. SA has an important position for the world's mineral markets, which is why I suspect there will be far greater pressure to maintain the status quo compared to what we saw in Zimbabwe.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Worth noting that whether or not you think Europe has fallen behind largely depends if you accept nominal or PPP as the basis for your GDP accounting. By PPP, Europe and the US are largely neck-and-neck.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD?locations=EU-US
There are also other, non-economic metrics, that determine quality of life such as far lower crime/homelessness/drug epidemics and more vacation days. That's why we don't see a surge of European migrants to the US. QoL is largely similar between the two countries, but Americans prize money and work whereas Europeans prefer leisure.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
The outperformance of the US versus the EU doesn't have anything to do with the EU's governing structure
I disagree. Europe's problem is too much fragmentation. That makes everything from fundraising to intra-European trade (especially in services!) harder. But the solution - full fiscal and political federalism - is simply unacceptable to Northern countries as the South is seen as overindebted and lazy. Yes, these are stereotypes, but they are very much live.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
If your culture can figure out a way to bridge gaps between different cultures, ethnicities, and groups, if you can truly make disparate peoples unite under one flag, one cause, one set of ideals, you can rule the world.
How much of America's perceived success on immigrant assimilation is simply driven by two massive oceans flanking it on both sides? This acts as a great natural filter to weed out the third world riffraff. So the people from e.g. Pakistan that you get tend to be the richest and often the most liberal elements. Ditto goes for almost all other countries. Unsurprisingly, they do well both economically and culturally.
The great exception is of course Central- and South America, which due to the land bridge means that you get a much less skilled immigrant profile. But those people are already heavily Westernised, so there's none of the cultural baggage that low-skilled moslem immigrants bring to Europe.
In other words, I am skeptical about the role of culture in the receiving countries. I think we're really dealing with accidental geography that works to some countries' advantage and to others' disadvantage.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
I personally never understood the reverence for the Southern Cause/Dixie Pride among the right. It was largely thanks to the slave states that the US got such a big black population, which in turn is responsible for turning formerly great cities like Detroit into basket cases and making downtowns of cities like Baltimore, St Louis, Memphis and many others very dangerous. Don't forget that some of these Southern plantation oligarchs even talked about incorporating parts of the Carribean directly to aid the plantation economy.
The argument that "what ruined Detroit was letting black settle there" is unconvincing because once you have such a large population, they will have to go somewhere. And Jim Crow could never have been kept forever. Really, the plantation owners were just greedy capitalists putting profits over their own people, not unlike their contemporary equivalents. Why glorify the generals who fought for such a system?
From what I understand, most of these statues were put up after the civil war as a way to placate Southerners at a time when Southern identity was still a live issue. So basically a form of pragmatism. As the years have gone by, and as whites in the US have become more monolithic, the need that necessitated these statues has faded. I suspect that's why you see these muted reactions. It may have been a big issue 100 years ago or perhaps even 50 years ago. But not now.
Hopefully the US right can come to understand two things. First, the south in the civil war deserved to lose. Second, they should have been stopped way earlier.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Musks buyout of twitter has helped the right a lot with activision. Protests work now. Lack of censorship helps them get there more intellectual debates out there which they couldn’t before.
I agree and was a bit amused when certain people on the right, who seem to think everything can be quantified, were gasping that he paid tens of billions for a business that was either barely making money or none at all. But this ignores the central role Twitter has in our politics. It is, as Musk noted, the closest thing we have to a "town square". Facebook, Whatsapp or Instagram are not political in the same way. Sure, Whatsapp forwards can have political content but there's no "public arena" aspect to it as on Twitter.
This is something the left has understood intuitively for a long time. All those conservatives making fun of those humanities NGO losers didn't understand the latter were playing the long game, and a different game at that. A slow filtering into the institutions where the main currency is social clout and influence. That's basically what Twitter generates. Whoever controls it, has a very strong influence on public discourse.
For the same reason, when boomer conservatives gave up on cities and told everyone to ignore university and just focus on money, look at where that led us. The steady march of insanity from the 1990s up until 2020 couldn't have happened without unilateral surrender. Elon isn't even that right-wing, but at least he's fighting back. IMO, his Twitter purchase shouldn't been seen as a business investment so much as political activism.
P.S. it also seems Threads is tanking badly after a brief surge, so there's that. D.S.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Creative in this context means more than just acting or music. It would include things like hairdressers or fashion designers.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
The Hollywood actors guild is on a strike. They are joining the Hollywood writers' strike, which has been ongoing for a few months. I did not know this, but apparently Fran Drescher (the loudly nasal woman from "The Nanny") is the president of the union.
Is this strike a big deal? Well, for one, it's the biggest strike for over 60 years. But what caught my eye was her rationalisation. You can read a summary of the demands.
A key demand has been surrounding generative AI. Actors do not want companies to create their own AI replicas of actors, nor to use generated voices and faces.
One possibility could be the actors raising the AI bogeyman as a cover to demand better pay. And to be sure, they are asking for a fairer split from the streaming model. Yet the AI demands are not directly linked to compensation per se, but rather asks about blanket bans. This does suggest that AI fears are genuine and real. Given very rapid progress in the generative field in recent years, perhaps they are right to be so.
Whenever I've read about jobs displacement from AI, invariably experts have opined that "the creative stuff will go last". Clearly the people who know their trade best are disagreeing with the experts. I'm not sure if this means that actors are paranoid or if we should disregard the expert consensus. Either way, I suspect we may see more and more of these kinds of Luddite strikes in the future, but perhaps not from those who people expected it from.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Their position on the world's ladder (and status is a lot more relevant than income here) is probably why they sympathize with, and LARP as Rednecks to begin with.
The people who do it are usually liberals, and I doubt they feel sympathy for their LARPing targets. It's a form of mild mockery, the way some kid might dress up as an English aristocrat snob and fake an exaggerated accent. There's an underlying sense of poking fun at your target, but fascination might not necessarily be excluded either. People are complicated.
Have they actually been exported?
There was plenty of daytime Jerry Springer when I was growing up. This was early 2000s. But Jerry Springer is really a red herring. US cultural dominance over Europe is near-total. Virtually every European knows about the redneck, trailer trash stereotypes etc. You don't need Jerry Springer for that.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Not really. Lithuania is nearly twice the level of white Americans. US white numbers are above the EU median but nothing unheard of, and certainly not "sky high".
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Young Europeans will often know who JFK or Reagan were but will draw a blank on Mitterand or Helmut Kohl, unless they come from the country of respective leader. So I am not sure if @jeroboam is wrong here.
Interestingly, I've often found much higher name recognition for someone like Thatcher, but that could also just be an offhand sign of the status of English as the lingua franca.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
what has always galled me is how much more beautiful European cities and frankly people are compared to their American counterparts
Old European cities have their own problems. Visiting Florence, I was struck by how little greenery there was on the streets. Yes, the city is old but it's also mostly just narrow cobblestone streets. One nice thing about having had your city ruined during WWII is that it gives ample space to redesign streets in a way that living in an openair museum doesn't, because there is little resistance to demolishing some shabby commiebloc.
Many of these older Italian and Spanish cities also allow cars on these narrow streets, which is less than pleasant. The solution ought to be to limit cars, but that would also require better public transportation and you can't really do much given the narrow width of these streets. Cities which grew big in later periods (e.g. Copenhagen) don't have the same problem as these old Italian cities do, given that during the 1800s the idea of boulevards became popular and even non-boulevard streets became wider.
It's also worth noting that just adding bicycle lanes isn't the only issue, planting new trees and adding greenery requires space too. That's why many Eastern European cities have added a huge number of bicycle tracks and general greenery in their inner cities in recent years, but you don't get the same activity in old Italian or Spanish cities because of these inherent limitations. As a result, they may be pretty at first blush but often feel sterile.
US cities are absurdly car-centric, yes, but generally speaking it is much easier to remake a street that is too wide than too narrow. Once buildings, especially old buildings, are built it is very hard to reshape a city due to "historical preservation" NIMBY:ism. Removing a few lanes is trivial by comparison. So while progress is slow in the US, the potential for fast improvement is there.
it's not about GDP numbers, or even general economic strength. More generally, Euro-elitists smugly enjoy a sense of superiority over things like crime, urbanism, healthcare, which isn't really directly related to GDP growth, and more about systemic factors directly rooted in US life—not easily gotten rid of with a bigger economy.
Elitism over issues like crime is often a way to signal leftist ideals to boost one's social status, e.g. saying that crime is bad because of racism. That's the preferred way to explain disproportionate shares of black criminality in society. Hence the implication that white Americans are in effect partly to blame for this state of affairs due to their past and present sins.
It's not even elitism that's intelligent, which would be arguing that the US should police violent people more harshly without regard to race, so it comes across as fairly meaningless. Europe's lower crime rates are an accident of history (few imported slaves) rather than an inherently superior system.
So my contention is that even in areas where there are reasons for Europeans to be objectively smug over Americans, the way it's done is often incoherent and displays ignorance of the root causes of US dysfunction, such as crime in this instance.
As for healthcare, that is partially about income too. While I am no expert on healthcare, I think the meme that a large proportion of Americans are just one paycheck away from medically-induce bankruptcy has been disproven countless times yet it keeps resurrecting itself. I'm not sold on the idea that Europeans have better healthcare than Americans. If you look at the amount of innovation in the US healthcare system, nowhere in Europe does there seem to be any equivalent. Perhaps only Switzerland comes close in per capita.
everyone in the world sees Americans middle/lower class. We export voyeurship of that.
This is a good point. The export of shows like Jerry Springer in the 1990s and later exposés of how poor whites (derisively called "trailer trash") live their lives gave an unfounded impression that America is far poorer than it actually is. In a way, it's inadvertently proving US cultural dominance.
It reminds me of 4th of July LARPing in Eastern Europe. Yes, it's actually a thing and as you can see, many are going for the "redneck living in a trailer aesthetic". Which is ironic given their own position in the world's income ladder.
I think shale oil is extremely underrated for boosting American wealth.
US energy prices are absurdly cheap compared to the EU, even before the 2022 war broke out. I'd also add that the US is the world's largest magnet to top talent from all around the world. It's often the very high-end who are driving prosperity and everyone else is just sort of going along for the ride.
you don't seem to have much to say here
Then I did not succeed in trying to point out that there's been an unbearable sense of superiority among a certain segment of Europeans, and as an European myself, I'm not sure if this counts as "boo outgroup bad" given that it's essentially self-criticism. The post also tried to weave together a narrative how US liberals like Michael Moore spent much of the first decade of the 2000s trying to glorify Europe, and how the latest developments may try to undermine that. Perhaps if I had made clear that I was European, people would have been less offended. Many responses assumed I was American.
So I am not sure if I agree that there isn't material to mine here, though I will agree that using low-effort slurs like europoor was probably a bad choice of words and I'll try to keep that in mind going forward. It was meant as a tongue-in-cheek way to open the conversation but clearly it didn't land.
The last gasp of the europoor
For years, I've been treated to a steady diet of smug elitism coming from effete liberal Europeans laughing at obese, gun-toting and bible-thumpin' Americans. This reached its crescendo during the George W. Bush administration, took a lull during the Obama years and was resurrected after Trump took office.
The American was an ignoramus, a loud-mouth, a religious fundamentalist and irreversibly stupid. Hopelessly inferior to us sophisticated and cosmopolitan Europeans. Did you know half of Americans don't even own a passport? Most don't even know a second language!? Ha! And don't get me started on their healthcare, their gun crime and all other sorts of social pathologies. America, you see, is a third world nation masquerading as a first world one.
But as the years went by, these smirks felt increasingly hollow. The economic distance - and with it, standard of living - between the two major partners is growing wider by the day. A young French econ professor at Wharton lays out the bad news over just how deluded his fellow Europeans are on this question. Prominent FT columnists have noted the same.
Yet, perhaps there is still time to save the last shreds of honor for us poor Europeans. For one, the gap in PPP terms doesn't seem to be changing much. Europe has been behind for a long time. In terms of total GDP, the situation is much the same. Another aspect is that Europeans tend to work fewer hours.
While some of these arguments may have some validity, they all feel like desperate excuses. I for one am very much happy to see the insufferable elitism of Europeans slowly being wiped off our collective smug faces. The uncouth and primitive barbarian across the ocean turned out to be smarter and harder-working all along.
Perhaps this can also lead to a more pro-capitalist liberalism in the US. For much of my upbringing, liberal Americans were typified by folks such as Michael Moore and his obsessive admiration of the European welfare state. Colbert's snark about the embarrassing Red State American always felt like an underhanded way to gain favor with declassé elites across the ocean. Ann Coulter's observation that liberal elites in the US loved soccer because it is European surely hit closer to home than many in the media were willing to admit.
Of course, there is still some amount of liberal American simping left in the bag. This is perhaps most obvious whenever there are discussions on urban policy and the words "walkable city" invariably comes up. (To be clear, I actually think Europe gets this part better than the US).
Outside of an increasingly narrowing set of areas where Europe still outperforms, we are slowly witnessing a reshuffling of the deck. The old illusions are slowly coming undone and reddit-tier arguments about the US being a third world hellhole are convincing fewer by the day. At long last, after years of insufferable and unjustified smug elitism, the europoor is finally unmasked as the sham living on a lie that he always was. And I couldn't be happier.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
The geopolitical significance of the US oil boom combined with the EV surge in Europe and China (and eventually in the US) spell big trouble for the gulf states in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has terrible human capital. Without oil, they'd just be another Egypt. The transition period will take years - decades probably - but it is ongoing. Russia is another state which will have to seek another model of development though I am more optimistic there given their fairly well-educated workforce. Saudis are just pretty dumb.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Men are vastly more likely to be victims of the worst kind of violent crime: murder.
Men are also vastly more likely to be the murderers. You can't have one without the other. The overwhelming majority of violent crime is committed by men. People on the edgy right like to talk about race and crime but refuse to talk about the link between gender and crime. Very curious.
Painting Meloni as “far right” was always weird. Another contradiction - she’s an unmarried mother living ‘in sin’ and yet claims to be a good Catholic.
Mussolini did not lead a very conservative lifestyle yet I don't think anyone disputes that he was, well, a fascist. Admittedly, being a conservative and a fascist aren't the same things. But the "far-right" epithet contains multitudes, as it were. Someone's personal habits isn't always indicative of their political beliefs, at least stated ones.
I can’t find any sources online that suggest those kinds of visa counts to citizens of Muslim majority countries are being granted. Which countries are they?
These are being collated by a Polish-American who lives in Krakow. The source is the ministry of labour and the PiS government isn't even disputing them as far as I am aware. After all, why would they? It's their own ministry. These numbers are quite recent and haven't filtered in the wider Anglophone press, probably because of the language barrier. The dataset is in Polish, hence the translation. I've looked at Eurostat data and seen supporting evidence, though their methodology slightly differs and as such probably underestimates the number. Eurostat also hasn't released their 2022 numbers yet, that will only happen this autumn.
As for countries, it's places like Central Asia, Azerbaijan, Turkey etc. Lots of Uzbek cab drivers in Warsaw these days.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Good points and I've wondered the same thing. Yet I think there's a certain kind of mildly autistic right-winger who keeps trying to show charts and tables to GOP functionairies saying "See! if you continue on this path, you'll be permanently out of power. Look at California!". The thing is.. they know and they've already heard that pitch 50 times. So ignorance cannot be the answer here.
So why don't they care? I suspect it may simply be due to donor influence. The rich people donating to the GOP want the gravy train to go on and ultimately the voters don't matter much.
Additionally, even very diverse states like Texas or Florida are now fairly red so the "demographics is destiny" argument is weaker today than in the past.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Does your theory predict collapse in immigration once AI-powered automation makes this (already net budget negative over lifetime, in many cases) addition clearly counterproductive?
I've been hearing about the automation makes work superflous for well over a decade now. It reached a crescendo in 2016-17 with Erik Brynjolfsson's book and subsequent forecasts by various institutions of a rapid job less. Never happened. Can AI be different? It could, but people are vastly overestimating AI progress. The key to productivity displacing jobs is when programmers themselves are no longer as needed and AI can self-improve. We're still a long away from that.
the people supporting mass immigration are driven by basically moral considerations (though their morality may be different from what we believe), and would rather slow down productivity growth than allow their clients to be made patenly uneconomical for "capitalism".
Alternatively, some capitalists prefer high immigration as a way to cheap out, reduce bargaining power for workers and saving on productivity-enhancing investments while pocketing the change in terms of dividends. To be clear, I think some on the left are driven by moralistic arguments but they aren't the ones driving policy. Capitalists are, but they are opportunistic enough to use the shield of leftist morality to bludgeon their political opponents. It has the added benefit of raising one's social status in the domestic arena and people care deeply about status, too.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
selecting people for a work permit based on the salary of the job they're getting would be a much better way than race/country of origin to pick out immigrants Italy might want
No, it wouldn't because Western countries need all kinds of workers not just high skilled ones. And culture is intrinsically tied with race to a greater extent than even religion (e.g. I'd prefer moslem Indonesians over Christian Nigerians). There are many people willing to work for low wages as streetsweepers, garbage men, nurses etc. You're not just importing workers. You're importing a people with its own distinctive culture. And cultures are sticky (tied to ethnicity/race). Denying this is the blank slate approach which has failed and continues to fail.
This is exactly why immigration concerns are so often dismissed as motivated mostly by literal racism
Some amount of racism is necessary, but it should be pragmatic/selective and not universal, e.g. you prefer some groups over others rather than penalising everyone with a darker skin color. There's no point in pussyfooting around this issue and the right should drop its naïve colorblind approach.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
The median age of Western countries was much lower in previous eras. Had the demographic structure been similar as now, there's no reason why things would have been different. Besides, most migration was intra-European in previous eras. Plus travel was more expensive. All those structural factors are different, precisely because of much greater wealth (in turn a consequence of capitalism).
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
So Georgia Meloni, the supposed far-right firebrand of Italy, is now planning to radically open up visa access for non-EU migrants. PiS in Poland are planning similar measures, even as they've let in record number of workers from moslem-majority countries since they've took power. Of course, the rhetoric from both the Italian and the Poles are all about asylum seekers and illegal migration. Sort of reminds me of GOP rhetoric about stopping people at the border even as they get jawboned by business lobbies to liberalise legal avenues for work visas.
It's the same thing here and it deserves to be pointed out that these fake populists in Europe are ultimately in thrall to the same power system as the old parties are. What's driving large-scale migration isn't some evil plot. It's not Soros or even the Kalergi plan. It's just capitalism. Both of those individuals may be colorful but ultimately the driving force is structural.
Of course, my explanation is boring, perhaps even banal, which is why it will never take off. Not enough drama. As for these developments, I think Europe should be a bit "pragmatically racist" in selecting groups from countries that have a track record of integrating well, e.g. I'd give preference for South-East Asia, but it appears that such a moderate policy is too racist even for the "far-right".
Incidentally, when reading about Max Weber's life in recent days, I found out that he was quite nationalistic as a young man and even campaigned against cheap foreign labour (principally from Eastern Europe). Quite ironic for someone who later became a liberal intellectual, but also amusing in that it shows that this thing has been going on for a lot longer than people realise and it likely won't end soon either.
Around 80% of South African youths are functionally illiterate.
https://www.africanews.com/2023/05/17/over-80-of-south-african-children-around-10-years-old-have-difficulty-reading-study//
It's fair to say that if the black radicals get what they want, South Africa will quickly become Congo (at best).
Thus far, black elites are smart enough to understand that, which is why they don't give in to those radical demands. But if I were a white South African, I wouldn't make any long-term bets on the country. Then again, some of these white families have lived there for centuries, so I can understand their reluctance to just walk away. Easier said than done.
More options
Context Copy link