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Notes -
On ruling well as a substitute for morality
Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif was an Alawite King of Morocco who ruled from 1672 to 1727. As a minor son of the first king of the Alawite dynasty and with his mother being a black slave, he only managed to ascend to power due to a fortuitous series of events where two of his higher ranking half brothers took the throne in succession, quarreling against each other until one of them was killed by forces of the other, and then the other died in a horse accident during a campaign a few years later. Even then, he only really got his hands on power because he managed to make it to Fez and proclaim himself Sultan before any of the other people who could conceivably lay a claim to the throne managed to do it.
As you would expect, his reign started out with a very divided Morocco. A rival claimant to the throne rushed to Marrakesh and had himself proclaimed Sultan. Moulay Ismail had to defeat him multiple times over many years because like a goblin, as soon as the Sultan’s forces went to a city to subdue his revolt he would disappear from there and reappear soon after in a different city where he would agitate the nobles there to rebel against the sultan.
Eventually Moulay Ismail managed to subjugate all the pretenders and unify Morocco as a single state under him as the undisputed king. This led to a period of relative stability where the median inhabitants of the empire could by and large go about their lives in peace. His army reforms also led to the creation of the first professional Moroccan Army, the Black Guards, who owed their loyalty directly to the Moroccan state (and by extension to Moulay Ismail) rather than being a collection of fighters from disparate tribes.
He also invested heavily in building structures, creating over 75 forts over his reign all over Morocco. Not only this, he was also a great lover of nature and created a multitude of gardens in the deserts of western north Africa. He basically built the city of Meknes as a new capital for Morocco, raising it from a few derelict villages to such a splendor that it is now recognised as one of the four Imperial Cities of Morocco. To this day his constructions are some of the most noteworthy landmarks any tourist could visit in the country.
And not just this, but what man can overlook his personal harem of over 500 women, through which he sired over 800 confirmed children, putting him as the second most prolific confirmed father throughout all of history, seconded only by Genghis Khan. He was also quite active in the diplomatic arena, sending letters and ambassadors as far as Great Britain to the court of James II, at one point extorting him to convert to Islam for his own spiritual benefit.
His reign is by and large seen as a golden age for Morocco. He brought order and security to the empire, and his reign was described by the historian Ahmad ibn Khalid al-Nasiri as:
He was often compared to his contemporary, Louis XIV of France with whom he had an alliance and was considered to be the Moroccan Sun King (at one point he even tried to get married to one of the illegitimate daughters of Louis XIV). He had grown Morocco to its largest size ever and not only this, the empire’s economy was also doing well. His rule was a high water mark for Morocco: after his death his multitude of sons had another big power struggle which had the dubious distinction of having a single person, Moulay Abdallah, become Sultan on six separate occasions.
Regardless, it is clear that an ordinary citizen of Morocco would have had a far better life during the reign of Moulay Ismail than either the time before his Sultanate or after it. A comparison can be made here to the Three Kingdoms period of Imperial China between the Han and Jin dynasties when due to strife and extensive bloody competition between small warring polities China lost half of its population in merely 60 years. In many ways the reign of Moulay Ismail was the inverse of this, Morocco thrived and flourished during his almost 60 years on the throne.
One might wonder why such an accomplished king and ruler is so unknown these days, why the name of Moulay Ismail is not mentioned more widely in discourse. Even amongst the well read who know something about the history of Africa the name “Moulay Ismail” is not likely to raise too many eyebrows in recognition. This is because despite all the general prosperity and welfare generated by his half century rule over Morocco, his behavior in his personal life and dealings was very much the opposite, indeed Moulay Ismail is better known to people these days as Ismail the bloodthirsty.
His atrocities were myriad, his actions so extreme that even his contemporaries of the 17th century questioned them. A french captive described his appearance as thus:
Estimates vary, but point to him having killed or ordered the deaths of over 50,000 people during his reign (not including losses in battle). He was exceptionally cruel to his personal slaves. One of his favorite pastimes when out riding was to pull out his sword as he was climbing his horse and decapitate the slave who was holding the stirrup. Why? Because he could. Ismail the bloodthirsty needed no other reason.
He was also extremely jealous in guarding the women of his harem. Each of them had their own eunuch to guard her from straying. For a man, merely looking at one of his concubines carried the death penalty and it was common for men to throw themselves face first upon the ground with their eyes down to prevent any accusations from the king, which he was very liberal in brandishing, truth be damned. Once he had one of his viziers executed because a storm hit his traveling army and caused large losses, even though the vizier had zero control over it.
It wasn’t like he behaved any better towards the women of his harem either. Any one even suspected of being unfaithful to him was sentenced to, you guessed it, death. In this case the Sultan himself would strangle the unfortunate woman, or if he wanted to be extra cruel, first cut off the breasts and remove the teeth of his victim. And his method of acquiring these women in the first place was not particularly nice either, one of his conditions to make peace with a tribe he had defeated was that he would be given a daughter of the tribe’s chief for himself.
Even blood kinship did not limit his personal depravity. He had multiple of his own sons killed, perhaps most famously Moulay Mohammed al-Alim who was once the Sultan’s favourite son, but was convinced by another one of his wives to revolt as she wanted her own son to be heir to the throne. When Moulay Mohammed was captured his father ordered one of his executioners to cut an arm and a leg off in punishment. The executioner refused to spill royal blood and Moulay Ismail had to get a backup executioner to do the deed. Moulay Mohammed died of his injuries two days later.
Afterwards Moulay Ismail had both of the executioners killed as well, the first one for refusing to obey the Sultan’s orders, and the second one for spilling royal blood… I needn’t go on with further examples of Moulay Ismail’s personal depravity, although there is a lot I’m leaving out (the reason his proposed marriage with the daughter of Louis XIV did not work out was because the French feared for how she would be treated by him if she went to Morocco).
The point of the matter is, despite how immoral and nasty a person or group may be themselves, it is still possible for them to be a net good for the world on a consequential level, and this possibility only goes up the more power they have. A nasty but competent weak person will not influence wider society at all, all they will do is make life worse for those close to them. A nasty but competent powerful person has the ability to enforce order and stability throughout society, and the positive knock on effects of this can very easily outweigh all the bad stuff they get up to In their personal life.
The nastiness doesn’t have to be restricted to your personal life either, Moulay Ismail treated his Christian slaves extremely cruelly, but as long as the damage your nastiness causes is less than the benefits you provide through your competence, and there is no believable alternative that would be plausibly better, it is best for the world if you are the person/group in charge.
Note the necessity of the plausibility of the alternatives being better. The multitude of different factions competing for the Sultanship before/after Moulay Ismail all believed that they would be better for the country than any one else, but because none of them were able to convince enough nobles etc. enough to consolidate power, there was a lot of strife and the country as a whole suffered. It could even very well be true that a certain claimant to the throne after Moulay Ismail would have been a better ruler had he been given the chance, but because he could not convince wider society of this, the end result was that people were worse off.
There was a comment here a few weeks ago which mentioned that on societal scales, there is no difference between stupid and evil. I think that not only is this true, but even more, you can be so much more competent compared to the alternative (as Moulay Ismail was compared to the lawlessness that was prevalent either side of his reign) that from a consequentialist point of view it is far better for you to be running things than the alternative, your outbursts of evil notwithstanding.
Connecting this to more topical matters: Israel is obviously a morally questionable but technologically/socially superior power compared to the Arabs of the middle east. Even when they aren’t busy killing each other in internecine conflicts (see Saudi Arabia vs Yemen etc.), the are hardly able to create technologically advanced societies where humanity can flourish unless they were blessed by nature with huge oil wealth right under their feet. You can compare e.g. the UAE vs Tunisia, both are similar sized states with very similar cultures, the only big difference is that the former has oil and the latter doesn’t.
The way to see whether Israel is good or bad for the Arabs is not to compare the quality of life led by your average Israeli Jew vs your average Israeli Arab, but to compare the quality of life of an Israeli Arab vs a non-Israeli Arab. Sure, Israel treats it’s Arab citizens as second class citizens compared to the Jews, but this absolutely does not necessarily mean that the Arabs of Israel are worse off than they would be in the counterfactual.
There was an observation made by Scott on one of his old posts that the best place to be an Arab in the Middle East outside of the oil rich states was Israel. Regardless of the lack of rights afforded to Israeli Arabs compared to their Jewish counterparts, the level of ambient prosperity in Israel is so so high compared to non Oil-Rich Arab states that the quality of life enjoyed by as Israeli Arab is higher than the Arabs unfortunate enough to be born elsewhere in the middle east.
Note that is argument is general, it doesn’t apply to just the neighbours of Israel (for which you can claim that the consequences of Israeli actions have damaged those states so much that their citizens now live a much worse life not due to any faults of their own, but rather those of Israel), but to all of the non Oil-Rich Middle East. It is certainly better to be an Israeli Arab compared to a Tunisian Arab and you can’t say that the current situation of Tunisia can largely be blamed onto Israel.
Now someone may counter by saying that it doesn’t matter how much material prosperity you may have if you don’t have political rights and “freedom”, defined in some nebulous way that aligns with how westerners think of it. Except that empirically, people behave in the complete opposite way, gladly sacrificing those things for higher prosperity.
For instance, you can make a strong argument that the average hetero man back in my home country has a lot more “freedom” than if he were to go to, say the UK (freedom to own and shoot guns, freedom to drive without having to follow a huge amount of safety regulations and low speed limits, freedom to develop his property as he wishes, freedom from an onerous tax burden, freedom to buy most medicines by just showing up at the pharmacy and asking for them instead of needing to waste a GP’s and his own time, freedom to hire servants at a mutually agreeable wage instead of minimum wage regulations getting in your way etc.). I feel this personally too, when I go back home to visit my extended family compared to the life I live in the UK. However the difference in the sheer amount of “stuff” a person can buy in the UK vs back home is big enough to create a pool of millions of people who would love nothing more than to give up all this freedom just so they can go and live in the west and be able to buy more things, while there is minimal demand for my co-ethnics in the west to go back home and enjoy all this extra freedom.
You also see this on the other end of the spectrum. Amongst business professionals expat postings that come with higher salaries/fringe benefits in exchange for being sent to a different country where you have zero political rights and are always at the risk of being expelled from the land because your visa renewal was refused are generally highly prized rather than being seen as a trap to avoid. If “political representation” and “right to choose those who lead you” were really all that valuable these professionals wouldn’t be jumping over each other to get these postings where you get paid 75% more and are given two return tickets back home each year to leave your homeland in live amongst foreigners who probably don’t even speak the same language as you.
Another demonstration of the low value of a representative vote to choose what the future will look like vs getting more material prosperity can be seen in the share prices of public companies that issue multiple classes of stock. Often there is a B class of shares that are exactly the same as the standard A class of shares when it comes to dividends and portion of ownership of the company’s assets, except that the B class shares don’t get a vote. The value of a vote can then be computed by comparing the price difference between the two classes of shares.
Yesterday the Alphabet Class A share (which gets voting rights) closed at 138.06, while the Class C share (which is equivalent to the class A share but does not get voting rights) closed at 139.20 . So actually the share with voting rights was selling for ~1% less than the share without voting rights (this is a quirk of the system caused by a short term supply/demand imbalance, normally the shares are within a few cents of each other). This goes to show how much a vote is actually worth, namely very very little compared to using the extra money in buying cheaper shares to buy more of them and get a better return on your capital (in Google’s case the founders have a majority of voting power so you can sort of explain why a vote you can buy isn’t worth anything, but even for companies where this is not the case, voting stock tends to be valued within a few cents of the equivalent non-voting stock).
Putting it all together it’s quite clear, both from the high level outside view, as well as the empirical evidence of where people choose to go if they are allowed to, that even though the rulers of a society may not be deontologically acting in particularly nice ways, and that there is a subgroup which is doing worse than they would otherwise be doing if the rulers would “just change their behavior” and allow them more say in how the place is run, the choice in reality is often not “nasty” rulers vs “nice” rulers, but rather “nasty” rulers vs even nastier alternative, and in that case the net change in sum total welfare of those “oppressed” by these rulers may well be more positive than every other plausible world, and so the “nasty” rulers are good for humanity as a whole and should be seen as such.
And now a hundred years later, what remains are a few monuments, and the colossal negative impact he had on the gene pool. Are you sure you mean to be constructing a defense of Moulay Ismail on utilitarian grounds?
Negative impact on the gene pool? What negative impact would this be, having 1,000 children in a society of millions of humans will do pretty much nothing to the effective population size compared to if those children all had different fathers. You might complain about inbreeding but the portion of that that's attributable to him directly starts falling off after 10 generations due to how recombination works (more than that amount of time has passed now).
Your description of Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif suggests he was a psychopath. Psychopathy is largely genetic. Now I can understand that a resurrected vampire might find it novel or even contentious to think that increasing the incidence of psychopathic traits across the population might be undesirable. But trust me, we mortals are pretty leery of the Dark Triad.
But can you turn that one-sentence pitch into a 12-page treatment in time for lunch next Tuesday with Mr. Penn? (And Wednesday with Mr. Cage, the safety school of Hollywood Productions.)
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By the way, the question if that is true won the Ig Nobel prize:
https://www.thelocal.at/20150918/austrian-wins-ig-nobel-for-sexual-prowess-study
The paper:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0085292
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Reminds me very much of Vlad the Impaler. By Romanians themselves he is regarded as a just tyrant that defended his homeland. He was exceptionally cruel to his enemies, but he - together with many Romanians - saw that as necessary to keep order and peace. By his enemies, he was allegedly slandered as a petty psychopath.
You obviously need to be careful either way, but it's imo very notable that on everything important and relatively verifiable, Moulay always was cruel only to true enemies. Nobody even claims that the sons or wifes he killed weren't conspiring against him. As far as I can see the claimed exceptional depravity strictly was about unverifiable slaves and such. I wouldn't be surprised if he was in truth a relatively just ruler, even if extremely cruel.
Of course, it could also be the other way - that Vlad was inappropriately idealized by Romanians. I wouldn't be surprised about that either, and in history this kind of ambiguity is kind of fundamental.
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Are you arguing that ruthlessness and effective rule are correlated, or merely that effective rule is not necessarily nice?
Ruthlessness isn’t a proxy for ruling well. His lopping-off slaves’s heads character trait is at best orthogonal to his ruling quality. Pol Pot and the Kims are ruthless, most of the failed states are ruled by psychos. Look at africa, Moulay’s roots, and bask in the good times these hard men have brought.
Merely that effective rule is not necessarily nice. I'm not saying at all that being ruthless gives you something positive by itself to help you rule better.
Would you agree that modern regimes are, as a whole, nicer, that historical ones? Why is that? Is it a good thing? During the Napoleonic wars, which of the two main powers, England and France, were 'nicer' to the other powers of Europe?
To me there is a civilisational floor of 'incivility' below which the returns of cruelty are infinitely higher than above it. This is due to focus of states tending outside of its borders as its own stability, be it Republican longevity or Monarchic pedigree, increases. Or, to put it another way, when you have a group of neighbouring states that are primarily concerned with internal affairs, the likelihood of collective action to punish (/exploit their weakness for personal gain) any one is less likely. Cruelty gives a great excuse for intervention.
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You know who this Moulay Ismail reminds me of? Joseph Stalin. Your apology reads exactly like Stalinist apology. Order and security, relative stability, building monumental structures all over the country, being respected by the leaders of other superpowers... Did Moroccan peasants actually enjoy his rule, or did his tight control over the country result in their successful overexploitation to fuel his war or construction efforts?
The difference is that Russia under Stalin was still so poor that by the early 50s East Germany, which had been totally destroyed by the war and had its most valuable surviving industrial equipment shipped wholesale to Russia as war loot, was already the richest country in the Eastern Bloc merely because of the legacy of industrial capitalism from the pre-communist era. Stalin oversaw famines and starvation, threw mountains of men at Hitler in a series of severe strategic blunders, and failed by 1953 to ensure a standard of living even close to a western capitalist country, or indeed what a Russia that had remained capitalist after 1917 might have reasonably achieved.
If Stalin’s Russia in 1953 was as wealthy as France (by median household income, say), very few in history would consider him a bad leader and - of course - the trajectory of socialist economics would likely be very different.
That's a generic boo outgrop. Stalin had just about 2x more men at his disposal, overall losses are about 1.5 Soviet soldier of 1 killed German soldier.
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Perhaps the difference is that Stalin acted in a technological society (in relation to the 18th century), in which much was invested in the capital and human development, because they are the main determinants of economic fortune; wars are destructive in this environment, even for the winner. Moulay Ismail, on the other hand, acted in pre-modern agarian society, where the land is a key economic contribution, and the war of conquest is quickly profitable, even if the peasants are killed - it has not undergone a demographic transformation, so the population is quickly recovering.
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If you or others are interested, the blogger Nintil did a cool deep dive into the claims for vs against economic growth under Stalin. The tl;dr is that Stalin probably achieved more industrialization than Czarist Russia would have if it continued on its present path (which it's worth remembering was basically Import Substitute Industrialization and probably would have pewtered out). Stalinism still achieved less than a counterfactual Czarist Russia likely could have achieved if they had genuinely liberalized, but who knows if they would have done that.
This is leaving aside of course the cost of human suffering, which would have made the system not worth it either way.
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If anyone wants to see this idea explored in a fantasy setting you should check out The Black Company. As the series go on, you think of the initial antagonist in a different light based on how the other leaders of the world are and you see her point of view. Spoiler alert for a book series that ended 20 years ago:
In fiction it is relatively easy to whitewash any monster by ensuring that everyone else is a even a greater monster.
Nevertheless, my experience from reading history is that, if anything, fiction has a tendency to be idealized & sanitized compared to it. "Everyone else was a greater monster" was very often the best thing you could say about a larger number of rulers.
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Let’s apply this principle to other cases (all may answer of course):
Should we surrender to the Han Chinese, once the Chinese Middle Class is wealthier than ours? We may eventually have to speak Chinese and surely we will all eventually have a Han Chinese genetic infusion. Would this be the correct choice implying China is wealthier than us? Invite them to conquer us?
Was Ancient Israel in the wrong for revolting against Rome? From a purely material standpoint, ancient Israel would have been more prosperous under perpetual Roman occupation, and all they would need to do is worship the emperor and the Roman pantheon. There would probably be no Judaism left as a result. How many Jews would say this was actually the right choice? Instead the Jews fought back; they were defeated but continued their religion; 1800 years later they have their own nation again. And they rejoice at this fact that, though they were in the wilderness, they held faithfully to the promised land. The Palestinians, of course, are also the descendants of the ancient Jews.
Every economic projection of note, within a time span relevant, suggests this not going to happen and that China will plateau before catching up to the US.
So an obvious no.
It was a stupid decision, given that the Romans beat the snot out of them. If you don't expect to win the revolution, don't bother.
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To apply @BurdensomeCountTheWhite's argument to these situations, the Chinese and Romans would have to establish their rule by force and maintain order. Then they could be judged as least-worst among all the other contenders based on how beneficial the pax China/Romana was. If the subjugated peoples are considering revolt then the rulers haven't done their job yet.
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Except that empirically, many people also gladly sacrifice prosperity, or even their lives, in an effort to obtain or preserve civil rights and, more importantly, the dignity that recognition of rights entails. Your analysis is way too neat; it fails to explain, among other things, the actions of the Hamas fighters who died in the attack; surely, if they valued prosperity above all things, they would be pushing for the recognition of Israel's right to exist, or staying home playing video games, or doing anything other than risking their lives. It also fails to explain why people ever quit jobs when they are treated in a way which they consider unjust. Nor even why people will often refuse to patronize a store with the lowest prices, but rudest employees, in town. Nor why some people choose to sacrifice income and comfort to live in rural areas where they are left alone.
Not all actions are instrumentally rationality; there is such thing as value rationality as well ["Value-rational behavior is produced by a conscious “ethical, aesthetic, religious or other” belief, “independently of its prospects of success.”6 Behavior, when driven by such values, can consciously embrace great personal sacrifices. Some spheres or goals of life are considered so valuable that they would not normally be up for sale or compromise, however costly the pursuit of their realization might be."].
Bottom line: Whether Arabs in Israel are "better off" overall simply because they have greater material comfort is a normative question that has no single correct answer.
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This argument has been deployed in the past to justify chattel slavery and segregation, also with a large element of truth. I am sympathetic to this argument, by the way, but the problem is we were supposed to have "learned our lessons" and reformed society to reject these arguments that justified structures of alleged racial oppression. The United States emancipated the slaves, racially integrated public spaces and has essentially outlawed segregation even in private spaces, and granted equal rights to racial minorities all in a rejection of this argument you have presented. Immigration has been liberalized so much that demographic change is inevitable, and opposing demographic change makes you an evil Nazi. Accepting masses of refugees and illegal immigrants with open arms is supposed to be downstream of these lessons we have learned, lessons which were brought to us from the 20th century mythos- a mythos in which Jews played a central role.
Hoffmeister recently suggested that the Zionists tossing aside 20th century moralizing to solve this problem may awaken something in Europeans. But Carl Schmitt wrote "Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception", and Zionism has declared a state of exception to these 20th century moral lessons that the rest of us are forced to live under, and are forced to accept all the radical consequences thereof. I don't really support Palestine, but I reject Zionism declaring the state of exception because I reject its sovereignty, not because I think your argument is wrong. I'm not going to give Zionism a pass because experience has proven beyond doubt that White people supporting Zionism earns -zero- reciprocity, supporting their declaration of the state of exception is not going grant one iota of benefit in my opposition to this moral paradigm. It's not even going to undermine the moral paradigm, as the sovereign declaring a state of exception solidifies the status of the sovereign and the underlying paradigm.
If Israel were to follow the post-war moral paradigm which has been forced upon Europe and the Western World, it would have long ago advocated a single-state solution with full equal political rights afforded to the Palestinians, right of return, outlawed ethnic segregation, pushed Affirmative Action for Palestinians in University and Government, accepted large-scale immigration from its Arab neighbors, and socially and legally repressed every Jewish Israeli who had anything bad to say about their emancipated Arab compatriots.
Israel was pretty famously one of the last countries in the world backing and arming the white minority governments of South Africa and Rhodesia, and the current government has always preferred and advocated for conservative, anti-immigration parties in the US.
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There are plenty of Jews who support or supported that kind of thing, or who (like George Soros) supported NGOs that worked to undermine Israeli policy on African mass immigration, the treatment of Arabs, etc. But most have been radicalized by reality.
One thing you forget is that no European terror attack has been as visceral or even 1/10th as large (as a percentage of the total population) as this in terms of casualty count. Islamist attacks in Europe are still rare, there has still not been, 20 years later, an attack even close to the size of 9/11 against a Westen country, and while one is probably inevitable it hasn’t yet materialized. Additional secondary consequences of mass immigration like Rotherham primarily involved underclass victims and unfolded over a long period of time with limited public photographic or video evidence for obvious reasons, and higher crime rates are both hard to quantify and in most of Europe rates are still down on the 90s or early 00s peak.
If what had happened to Israel in the weekend had happened in Germany (with the victims German civilians) I think your insinuation that policy toward Islamism and mass immigration wouldn’t change is wrong. It really doesn’t take much to radicalize Europeans, and ironically the far right often buys into the “culture is totally supreme over biology” leftist blank statism when it comes to the supposed effect of 20th century progressive ideas on Western publics far more than it ought to.
Why do you reject its sovereignty?
The Madrid bombings were. Spain responded by capitulating.
(never mind, I though the 1/10th as large referred to 9/11, which you mentioned later. 9/11 was 9 deaths per million, Madrid was 4)
The Madrid bombings were an order of magnitude less destructive than the Hamas raid on Israel, in a country an order of magnitude larger. They also didn't involve sexual humiliation of Spanish women.
It probably doesn't matter, but any attempt to unite the country was blown by the Aznar government telling the ridiculously obvious lie that the bombings had been carried out by ETA.
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Spain has 50 million people and 200 died. I don’t know that that’s comparable. But yeah, that whole episode is often forgotten in the whole ‘terrorism doesn’t work’ discourse.
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Yeah that's unclear, I mean the sovereignty of International Zionism writ large, its sovereignty over me. The sovereignty of Zionist Jews to tell me I'm the most evil person in the world and have no right to have any sort of ethnic identity or advocate for my ethnic interests, and then they turn around and say they are the exception to the 20th century moral lessons and can basically do anything necessary to secure their ethno-state. They haven't recently been "radicalized", they've always been radicalized, their hostility towards White ethnic identity and interests combined with their hyper-ethno nationalism has always been radical, it's just that they can no longer even pretend to care about following the same rules they enforce on the rest of us.
The fact they are able to basically toss out the rule book with the support of the Western world is proof of their undue sovereignty over the international community. Europeans are thrown in jail for saying mean things about immigrants, while Israel just lives in an entirely different moral universe. It's proof of their centrality to the moral paradigm we live under, that they are above and beyond it and can declare a state of exception in their own conquests. But this isn't going to weaken or fracture the underlying moral paradigm, it's literally just "you have to follow the rules and we don't, we decide when and where the rules apply and we decide the rules don't apply to us here, there's nothing you can do about it", it's an exercise in sovereignty.
So what’s your view on Israelis in Israel and what they ought, in your moral framework, to do?
My view is that Zionism exerts undue and harmful influence over my own civilization. They have exerted influence in all areas of economic and cultural life to browbeat white gentiles with "moral lessons" that have disarmed them from essential and necessary ethnic self-regard, with irreversible consequences (Rep. Israel is now talking about the "least heinous option" when defending Israel by the way). They view white identity and ethnocentrism as intrinsically hostile to their self-interest, a belief which you share, so they work to suppress it while extracting financial, military, and political benefit from the Western world toward their own ethno-nationalist project.
You are correct that the anti-Zionism from the DR isn't going to change demographics or even the short-term migrant trends in the United States and Europe. But pointing out that the Zionists are poised to engage in an ethnic cleansing with the support of the US State Department goes a long way in discrediting the notion of Jews as the moral light unto the world. It is very strong evidence for the DR argument that Jewish moralizing towards white gentiles is their mode of engaging in conflict with perceived ethnic rivals and is motivated by ethnic self-interest rather than universal morality.
My moral framework relies on dispelling the pathologizing of white identity. Supporting the Zionists does nothing for that, except it reinforces their status as being above and beyond the standards that are imposed on us.
As far as what they should do, of course ethnic cleansing is the most practical solution here, but my moral framework would suggest I hold Zionists accountable to the moral framework that has been imposed on the West. I gain nothing by supporting their own ethnonationalism while knowing for a fact they will continue to work against white ethnonationalism.
So in effect you admit that, were you a Jew, you’d do exactly what they’re doing?
If I were a Jewish Zionist in all likelihood I would support what they are planning to do, but that doesn't undermine any of my reasons for opposing it as a non-Jew. I certainly wouldn't want the standards that Rep. Israel is advocating for whites to be applied to myself, either (and neither does Rep. Israel!).
But yeah, if I were a Jewish Zionist I would be unlikely to have a problem with the "rules for thee but not for me" state of affairs. I would like to think I have more intellectual honesty than that but empirically the chances of that being true don't look great.
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I think you meant "imposed" here.
Thanks.
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I agree, and I think another great example is North Korea. North Korea isn’t the ultimate example of a hellhole country because it’s a dictatorship, or because the Kim family are absolute monarchs, or because its political system is brutally repressive, or even because of the lack of real rule of law. I’d go further and say it’s not even the gulags. It’s because North Korea is unfathomably poor. The bulk of the population live in grinding poverty almost unheard elsewhere on earth. According to some estimates, North Korea’s average wage is $2-3 a month at black market exchange rates, South Korea’s is $3,000 a month.
If North Korea’s median income was $20,000 or even $10,000 a year, it would be merely another moderate income tyranny, like others around the world. More brutal, perhaps, and more geopolitically relevant, certainly, but otherwise uninteresting. It is because North Korea’s rulers (who oversee its centrally planned economy) are so incompetent at providing a materially decent life for their subjects in the modern era that their country has become a universal byword for hell on earth. Stories of people shot for saying the wrong thing are sad, but the true horror of North Korea is millions starving because they don’t have enough food.
And Dubai, of course, is another example. As I think many of us (yourself included) said when the soccer world cup was happening last year, a life as a laborer in the Gulf is for many a young South Asian man preferable - despite the lack of a vote, possible racial discrimination, no rights - to a life back home in South Asia. So what really matters? You could say that rulers can be evaluated domestically on two primary metrics: civil order (including crime) and societal prosperity. In truth, rich repressive countries still allow most citizens to live decent, comfortable enough lives. No extremely poor countries do so, regardless of their level of freedom.
It's unfathomably poor because of all the factors from your first sentence.
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The average wage is worthless because it's a socialist economy. Their de facto pay is organized outside the market system, via rations and other such methods.
During the 1990s a few hundred thousand died in famine. North Korea is a poor country but not that poor. Life expectancy is slightly above world average.
Is that a product of affluency beyond avoiding starvation, though? North Korea doesn't have the issues with random stateless violence, Civil War, HIV and tropical diseases that I'd imagine define the very low life expectancies of a lot of countries.
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I can't say I disagree, while I haven't read much of Moldbug, his politics being rather unappealing, I think I would be largely indifferent to living under the rule of Fnargl, right up till the end of his reign when his incentives to maximize productivity through means conducive to human flourishing cease to exist.
Prosperity is moderately contagious, even if trickledown economics is dubious (I hold no strong opinion on the latter), Palestinians would be far better served being the Mexico to Israel's US instead of doing, well, whatever they've been doing.
But revealed preferences suggest that quite a few angry young men are ready to die for their "freedom", and I wish them well, at least in the dying part.
Besides, it always struck me as very confusing how much the average citizen in the West values their political power, my single vote in India is outweighed by over a billion others, and the marginal influence of the average person is near nonexistent even when the denominator is a mere few millions.
Democracy was born in Athenian city states, and that's where it's strongest. I'll take Singapore myself, not that they'll take me.
I've linked this elsewhere today as well, but you'll probably enjoy Nozick's The tale of a slave if you haven't seen it before.
At 5 we mostly cross from slavery: notably, someone can do nothing whatsoever or whatever they want.
Main sticking point would be
depending on how it works in practise (there is a substantial difference between ban (1) on selling stuff heavily radioactive food / poisonous milk for small children / fentanyl / cigarettes from (2) need to obtain permission before pregnancy or ban on mountain climbing)
I see what author tried to achieve, but no it does not prove that taxes are morally equivalent to slavery. And no, not equivalent to robbery or theft either.
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Well, I certainly get the points that libertarians try to make that living under a state is only a difference in degree and not kind from being a slave. I'm not a card carrying one myself, just sympathetic and believing that the government should restrict the activities of its people to the bare minimum necessary. Maybe that makes me a minarchist, but categories were made for man and it's not always a cozy fit.
The average person is politically impotent, they wouldn't even notice if procedural democracy was replaced by a dictator and the media just kept on acting like nothing had changed. I am at peace with that, even if I wish otherwise, and it can't be otherwise until everyone owns a Von Neumann replicator that provides all the products of technological civilization, and is a Sovereign Citizen in the same way that states are sovereign. And even then they'll have to deal with the Uranian Home Owner's Association, which is just about as much a PITA as it sounds.
Hmm, I'll work that one into my novel.
I don't think this applies to just the average person. Do you really think that even high IQ individuals would notice if votes and polling were both altered to reflect the wishes of the hidden dictator? We could very plausibly be living in a world like that right now.
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Expand a word's definition enough and you end up with a useless word and a smug feeling.
At 5 we cross from slavery as I expect a reasonable person to understand it to subjecthood (as in "subject of the Crown", perhaps).
Right. At 4, the slave is still beaten for not picking cotton, and has to live on the master's plantation. At 5, the slave can move to LA and pay for a fourth of an apartment by working as a plumber, buy a laptop, get a girlfriend or a boyfriend, and start posting a lot on Tumblr, and maybe even quit their job as a plumber if they get enough fanart commissions. This really is a substantial difference, and is much of what people would object to about slavery. (I'd rather be able to decide my occupation and place of residence but be beaten sometimes than the opposite). The best arguments for voting, liberal democracy, etc are that it preserves the substantive rights and abilities that people gain between 2 and 5.
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