hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
The most likely end of a new American civil war is balkanization, not reconstitution. US terrain and human geography pushes towards this strongly(it's basically impossible to conquer a peer opponent over the rockies, the US defeated some primitives and religious fanatics with substantial local assistance after the territory was ceded to them by treaty ending a war fought mostly in a different theater). We have multiple imperial cores and a serious war is going to wind up with them not wanting to share power.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
Germany performed respectably during the war and lost because it was facing multiple peer adversaries simultaneously+the British naval blockade.
There are also multiple contemporary examples; aside from Singapore there's Liechtenstein(the only country in the world to vote to go back to an absolute monarchy, outcomes very similar to neighboring Switzerland), the gulf monarchies(and if you insist on saying resource wealth is cheating, I will point out that the UAE does not make most of its money from oil), and partially Andorra(which is technically a Catholic theocracy, although in practice that mostly comes into play in setting its abortion policy). Monarchies generally are places to live that are pretty average for their neighborhood; life in Morocco is a lot like life in Algeria. They hate each other, but that's also pretty normal for the neighborhood. In the recent past there were a number of other examples, most notably South Korea.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
The south was poor into the late twentieth century. Not subsistence farming poor, that was over by the seventies, but still poor.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman are also very nice places for citizens to live, by global standards, Nevermind Arab or middle eastern ones.
As far as civil freedom goes, people don’t like horrendous oppression. It makes places a less nice place to live, and enlightened despots were seen as excellent rulers for it in their own day- but the history of enlightened despotism indicates that this is not an impossible concept(there’s currently four examples- the UAE, Singapore, Andorra, and Liechtenstein. To explain the paucity I would point to the tendency to democratize being very pronounced). It is also difficult to achieve a high income economy without economic freedom, which is in turn very difficult to maintain without economic freedom.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
The collapse of democratic legitimacy in the country is actually literally a both sides process and it wouldn’t be a problem in the counterfactual that it wasn’t, because it would fizzle.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
‘I voted for Trump’. If they’re liberals I have a canned rant about Biden’s ‘war on domestic terror’ being escalated against targets thé police officers in place kept warning political appointees were not white supremacists or a terror threat(and we do, in fact, have FBI memos about this).
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Abortion clinic protests were actually highly adaptive to their specific circumstances- local authorities that wanted to ban abortion but were prevented from doing so by their superiors. They reduced abortion access quite a bit without bloodshed.
Their success in blue states has been a lot more mixed, but they still kinda worked in mildly reducing abortion access instead of the counterfactual where a bunch of assassins and firebombers go to jail forever.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
The thing about Brett Devereaux is that his arguments tend to be right- but he likes to use them to say things his arguments don’t address. His fremen mirage series does a great job pointing out that GDP and population determines the outcomes of wars 90% of the time, but then he strongly implies this disproves all sorts of patriarchal theses. It doesn’t, he literally doesn’t address the topic. Etc, etc.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
Singapore, Liechtenstein, and the UAE are not democracies and all outpace neighboring countries in being nice places to live. Notably they have more civil freedom than a typical dictatorship, but they’re still not democracies. Andorra is arguably a partial example as well.
And the typical monarchy is pretty average for its neighborhood; they do, however, seem to avoid the dumbest mistakes very reliably, like communism or retarded foreign policy. Notably thé monarchy/dictatorship distinction is pretty core to the definition of both; you can reject the distinction, but it does seem to predict real trends in the real world. You can find past examples of benevolent dictatorships, if you look. You have to do a similar degree of looking to find terrible monarchs.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
Black ghetto thug culture is not markedly different from white southern trailer thrash culture, and the south invented segregation(literally; a ‘normal’ class first approach wouldn’t have done that, see eg Mexico, Brazil).
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
He’s not really ‘woke’; he seems at most mildly liberal, strongly TDS but not progressive. I wouldn’t be shocked to find out he’d donated to pro-life groups or supported republicans downballot.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Anti-nuclear protestors in the US have been successfully dismantled by arresting them with a gentle touch and issuing press releases that make them sound like hippie lunatics.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Deveraux is basically right about the object level, but his severe case of TDS blinds him to quite a lot- notably the protestors have done quite a bit that a more competent regime could spin as they had it coming, for one. For another, a lot of what the protestors are doing is actually illegal. De-arrests, interfering in lawful police operations, resisting arrest, etc is all very illegal and these people have open-shut cases. It’s also a ‘page five story’ strategy that won’t generate immense amounts of controversy- he can issue warrants for US Marshall’s to go after these people once they’re identified. This is probably what the databases of protestor license plates and subpoenaing data from social media sites is all about.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
I mean, if the US government is cleansing red tribers in Alaska of all places, then it's not a civil war anymore- the blue have already won so convincingly that there's no real civil disturbance.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Alexander to Actium(the Peter Green version). So far, slow going- I expected a more challenging read, but the cultural changes in Athens are a bit dull.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
It's unclear that hip-hop and the ghetto thug culture could only have come from African Americans, at the very least. Most modern day observers way overestimate the cultural differences between poor southern whites and blacks in the period; the white underclass often behaves in very similar ways to ghetto blacks and trailer trash could easily have invented(and arguably did) thug culture, we associate it with AADOS because that's more visible to us. Hip hop I'm less sure about but the rhythms that became rock n roll were not ethnic specific at the time.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
At the end of the day, the protestors win by making the government's enforcement arm look bad, which forces their political goal. This is non-violent protest theory 101. Dogs and waterhoses are good for the protestors, a bunch of them going to jail for things like 'obstructing police proceedings' is not, because nobody pays attention to that outside of the activist core.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
The changes to law codes imposed by Christian missionaries are, afaik, not really disputable; they do seem to involve women being asked their consent to marriage. This process occasionally happens today in parts of the deep third world where Christianization imposes huge increases in the rights of women over very low baselines.
It's fair to point out that Christianity does not immediately solve every problem with poor treatment of marginalized groups, and that societies which are not Christian often have some informal pressure for women to get the rights Christian law codes later guarantee(the Viking sagas are quite explicit that a woman's father's consent is important to a marriage, not hers, but use the girl's consent as a trope marker for good fatherhood). But anthropologists are still making hay out of cultural differences between villages in polynesia and remote parts of Africa and the Amazon which were Christianized at different times. It seems to be a robust finding that women and girls in traditional societies have a much better go(albeit not up to modern western societies) when their village is Christian.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Wait how do you live off of that? IIRC you live on your own, right?
No country particularly wants somebody it’s paying pensions for itself, although Russia is very happy to take you into the army(hope you like дедовсчина) and plenty of third world countries don't have the capacity to exclude you if you just fly in and hang around(do you speak Swahili?), they’re not cutting you a check.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Being raped by strangers in your sleep is not a common occurrence. It's entirely possible that she thought her husband was having sex with her while she slept and even if she didn't like it she didn't see what the big deal was. Like if you know your husband doesn't always take no for an answer you'd just assume it was him doing it.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
If you have truly passive income, then Costa Rica and Paraguay welcome you and your social security check.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
IIRC the most common job for the wives of high earning men, like for women from wealthy families generally, is 'k-12 teacher', narrowly beating out 'homemaker'.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Labour in the postbellum south was generally very cheap, with no shortage of poor whites doing the exact same jobs as blacks.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
All of these countries are much poorer than the US and people who can afford to drive usually prefer that. There's precious few examples of places where driving is a realistic option and it isn't preferred to busses.
The last civil war was fought on a north south axis(across mostly flat), with a single imperial core(NYC running into the Great Lakes region and lower New England). The planter class was defeated due to overwhelming material and manpower superiority on the part of the northern elite; although the planter class was politically influential and individually wealthy, it didn’t hold a candle to the northeast and Great Lakes.
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