TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
No bio...
User ID: 2854
As do I! But I have to admit that most of what I hate about cities is more or less optional, in that better policies (and demographics) could fix it.
Given that you didn't address the object-level point at all, either you don't understand what's being proposed here or you're not interested in discussing it, so... Do give your veteran relatives my thanks, but I'm not sure I have much else to say.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
10hr ago
I'd be interested in an analysis to that effect, whether your own or someone else's. I know there was a major such movement at that time, and I don't think blacks had much to do with the Great Depression. I'd like to think some degree of American spirit would have warded off communism, but really don't know enough to guess.
To be clear it's not my contention that without blacks everything would have gone great. I'm not a believer in earthly Utopia. But this timeline is a specific kind of ugly and I wish I could even imagine what an alternative might look like.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
11hr ago
Thanks, that's pithy. I went into a bit more detail in other posts.
Very fair. I'm badly underslept and overheated atm.
social catastrophe
The decline of our cities, communities, culture, educational system, academia, politics, etc. -- all ruined by black presence or poisoned in reaction to the horror experienced when black outcomes are observed. Thus, we cannot be ourselves.
Imagine a US where ~all the blacks had been sent back. Where the great cities of the East and Midwest are still glittering beacons of civilization. Where Academia never caved to blank slatism. Where young couples promenade in the town square in the evenings, unconcerned about violent crime. Where people still felt invested in their communities and the 'bowling alone' effect never kicked in. Where our schools pursue excellence instead of dumbing themselves and everyone else down in pursuit of equal outcomes. Where politics isn't influenced by a racial spoils system.
Can you imagine that? I can't, even. We never got to find out what America might have been.
We cannot be ourselves.
That's pretty straightforward to me. The main point is that given a Northern victory in the civil war, America was overdetermined to become the cultural and economic pole of the Anglosphere and the West in general, simply due to geography.
America's institutions, however, were designed for Anglos. American schools, communities, politics, etc. simply go to pieces when blacks are admitted en masse as presumed equal members.
I think there were four options:
- Send them back
- Keep them separate and establish separate legal codes
- Treat everyone equally under the law and be prepared for disparities. Like the Irish, I expect that within a few generations they'd have mostly failed to reproduce, and the few (plus hybrids) able to participate in our society would have remained but generally lost their separate identity.
- Try so hard to hammer Western society into a shape that generates equal results that it breaks
I think 1 would have been best. 2 was tried, but long-term untenable due to inevitable social forces. 3 would have been my preference given the failure of 1 and 2, but also proved untenable due to social forces.
That leaves 4, and I think 4 is both unrecoverable and must inevitably metastasize given US cultural and economic hegemony.
Obviously the 'social forces' I'm talking about here are key to this, so I'll take a swing at what I mean.
Perhaps it starts with the strain of Puritan idealism that led to so much popular support for fighting the Civil War to 'end slavery' in the first place. Whatever the elites actually thought they were doing there, this was the popular justification for the war, and it didn't go away once the war was won. Blank slatism/egalitarianism became firmly embedded in polite American society. This continued to serve as a guiding principle throughout the decades and, once the US had won WW2, became a perennial casus belli for justifying intervention across the globe. Needless to say this was only massively amplified by setting Hitler up as the polar opposite of American values.
I just don't think it could have gone any other way.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
13hr ago
Oh, this is not a hobby horse of mine and I can barely remember.
Something to the effect that the damage to the side of the building was not consistent with a plane collision and that the wreckage on the lawn wasn't either; that it was all covered up (as with literal fabric covers) and disposed of immediately with almost no extant photos.
Something to the effect that the, uh, side of the pentagon that was hit was shut down and devoid of personnel, just by happy circumstance -- but also that it was being used to store records about large amounts of missing money; the records themselves also going missing in the event naturally enough.
I remember the government releasing some incredibly bad security camera footage that showed nothing at all. An unidentifiable blur in one part of one frame. I also remember news media loudly declaring that the evidence was in and the matter could be put to bed, and no one pushed back at all.
Stuff like that.
I don't know much about it because there's not much to know. As I said, it's rarely ever discussed. Building 7 gets much more play.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
14hr ago
What's more interesting is the trading activity on 9/10. Evidently it was investigated and the findings were classified. All they released was "We have determined it wasn't Al-Queda."
The pentagon situation has also bugged me ever since, but it's rarely discussed.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
14hr ago
Hoping for a lively 9/11 thread tomorrow but I'm not currently in position to host one.
I really wish people were more capable of noticing, let alone publicly agreeing, that the presence of substantial numbers of blacks is just generally a social catastrophe. How many prominent men in American history had great compassion for the negro and despised slavery, but were straightforward in their belief that sending them back to Africa was best for everyone because an integrated society could not possibly work out? Have they not been thoroughly vindicated? And yet the position is so far outside the overton window that afact it's literally unimaginable to most whites. I'm not even sure I'm allowed to propound it here without any amount of pussyfooting. But in this case I think consensus is appropriate.
At some point we need to be prepared to call a spade a spade.
And the social damage whites inflict upon ourselves as we struggle to reconcile our high-minded optimism with reality is likely even worse. I'm in mind of Dan Carlin's point about how 9/11 was as a flea biting a dog, compared to the unbelievable amount of damage the dog then did to itself tearing at the itch.
I'm not sure the West was long-term viable after the decision was made to keep millions of blacks in the US. We simply cannot be ourselves with them here, and they're not going anywhere. I don't think segregation was long-term viable either but golly it sure did help!
What now? I guess at this point every thought experiment gets derailed by the AI wildcard, and bracketing that out for the sake of conversation seems masturbatory. It's just so unbelievably tragic, how this has all played out.
IDK, if you think I should be more nuanced about this by all means let me know.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
17hr ago
The problem is the modern electorate.
How has the electorate changed to make this the case?
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
17hr ago
I think you're correct. My main gripe actually is that Trump is too old to serve effectively in that role, and there's no clear successor.
But I'd like to see you make the case rather than just stipulate it.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
Or, as Alexander Fraser Tytler put it:
I seem to recall this being deToqueville but maybe they just made similar points.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
Yeah it's negligible for me and I have plenty of kids.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
Oh, lovely. Sounds about right.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
My household would benefit from this and it would be nice. Would the income be taxable? Because that means it's gonna come out of my highest bracket.
What I'd much rather see is something like a 25% tax negation per child. Frankly, I'd rather incentivize people who pay substantial taxes to have more kids rather than stimulating the segments of the population for whom $9k is a life-changing amount of money.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
2d ago
But it's also painfully woke
Yeah I just don't have time for that stuff any more. There are plenty of good books.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
2d ago
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
3d ago
It is entirely possible I misread the graph.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
3d ago
I liked the slow burn, but the later portions definitely get more exciting and I thought the climax was very good.
Well, capricorns are the worst.
I'll just throw it out there that while I've looked into the actual data on astrology, which consistently seems to show no significant correlation with personality etc., I can't help but wonder if the right questions aren't being asked. At the very least I'd expect natal sunlight exposure, outdoor activity, etc. to correlate with something.
Then there's my personal experience which is that actually most people do behave as I'd expect based on their star signs. Confirmation bias? Very likely. Still uncanny though.
Oh yeah and then there was the time I happened to encounter an actual professional astrologer in a public place (let's say we were waiting in line for coffee) and struck up a conversation. After a few minutes of chatting I couldn't help but ask what she thought my sign was. She responded accurately and without hesitation, as though she'd made up her mind well before I asked and was sort of remembering it as an afterthought.
Epistemic status: Man, I don't know anything anymore.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
3d ago
To me the key point here is that AfD support correlates with youth. The younger the German, the more likely he is to support AfD. This is linear and substantial.
No I think most societies had stopped routine exposure of infants the time of colonization.
I'm not just talking about exposure of infants, and either way I disagree. The New World was absolutely rife with ritual child murder. Exposure was also very common in East Asia and India at time of European contact, especially for girls. Sub-Saharan Africa was ofc its own special hell. So, I'm categorically rejecting this one.
But honor killings are not just applied to teens. Check this case out.
There are dozens of independent moral codes that have come up with these rules
I don't think so; and to the degree that this might technically be true it doesn't matter unless those moral codes were influential enough to stop the practices at scale, which they clearly were not. Where they did exist, they generally applied only to the ingroup. When it comes to rape, well, a lot gets lost in cultural understanding of what that means. But the Christian insistence that the woman must consent to a marriage is probably worth thinking about. And even if, hypothetically, several of these systems could have worked, we may observe that only one actually did.
I don't think we needed Christianity to end the practice given that o one does it anymore expect maybe some far out hunter gatherers
I think we do. I think even in the West it's becoming a lot more popular without Christianity. Why would I expect non-Westerners to not do it when apparently even we can't manage that?
This isn't just some line to feed Westerners. It's not like the Gulf Monarchs are pro-Jihad they try to get their own population to by it and work with the CIA to crush Islamists everywhere.
Because they are personally dependent upon their relationship with the West, yes, obviously. Do you think that rhetoric will hold longer than the very instant it is once again advantageous for them to rile their people up to take territory from the kafir? Has it ever, historically?
The ones that got totally curbstomped by Christian societies intent on enforcing Christian values, and who desperately recast themselves to be more palatable to Christian superpowers?
Yeah, I think if that pressure goes away, so too does the change in behavior. There's some inertia, sure, but there's no such thing as obvious universal human morality that includes such oddities as "don't kill your children" or "rape is wrong" or "everyone should be treated with basic dignity."
Also, plenty of Islamic societies absolutely do allow child murder, especially in cases of e.g. honor killings. Smart governments talk a lot about putting such things behind them, but that's playing to what they perceive as Western sensibilities. You know, like when they say "Jihad just means personal internal struggle, lol" or "These aren't slaves, they're guest workers benefiting from economic opportunity!"
I think I generally understood you here but still find much of it impenetrable.
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