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In the most general terms, I have to ask: do you believe that the Resource Curse exists?
More specifically, you believe that responses to an acute problem over seven years and a chronic problem lasting since somewhere between 1964 and 1866, depending on where one starts the counting, generate parallels because they both can be summarized as "giving poor people handouts doesn't solve poverty"? The crisis has an obvious, acute source in the one case, which is a crop disease killing all the crops. Is the analogue to the potato blight racism? I'm gonna bet it's racism. But the fact remains that giving poor people handouts has not, in fact, solved poverty, and there is, in fact, a large and by all evidence permanent underclass utterly dependent on the handouts, a problem those proposing the handouts did not predict and those defending them have no idea how to solve. Especially given that black people were not in fact generally suffering a famine when we instituted handouts for them, is your argument that a famine would have resulted anyway if they had not been instituted?
Indeed, which is an excellent argument for why Trevelyan was dead wrong in his case. What does this tell us about our case?
...And this is a good point to ask whether you actually read my comment.
Which part of the first sentence do you disagree with? Because this was not, in fact, an argument for cutting welfare subsidies, or even a comment about welfare subsidies specifically. Underclass blacks are born, raised, and die in a system they neither have created nor can effectively control. It's not just the welfare checks, it's the schools, the police, the laws, the economy, every aspect of social structure beyond personal interaction. We made a society for them, and when that society delivers miserable results some of us invite them to place the blame on others of us. Notably, the people targeting the blame are those most involved in implementing those actual social structures, and those of us getting the blame are involved chiefly in paying for it all with our taxes.
You understand that my critique isn't the wastage of money, right? Perpetuating a permanent underclass is a monstrous thing to do! Actual accountability for the results is the only solution I can imagine having any chance of working, and I want a solution because the situation is monstrous!
I have previously proposed Reverse-Segregation: give blacks an area that they control completely, where every public official and government position must be held 100% by black people, by law. Grant this area leave to write its own laws as it sees fit, irrespective of the American constitution, and grant it leave to enforce and adjudicate those laws as it sees fit, completely outside the jurisdiction of the rest of American jurisprudence. Fund it with a per-capita percentage of all outlays legitimately payable to black Americans equivalent to the percentage of black Americans who actually live within it. People, white or black, can move there if they want, and leave if they want; no one can be kept there against their will, and no law-abiding citizen be prevented from going there by the rest of America if they choose to go. Then declare that outside this zone, racism has been solved. Blacks get the exact same legal status as everyone else. No AA, no hate crime laws, no special privileges, we implement pure colorblind enforcement of the letter of the law. Race-based discrimination is equally illegal no matter which race it's applied to. If certain words are evidence of bias, they're evidence regardless of who speaks them. Claims of bias will no longer be entertained unless they come with ironclad evidence. And if anyone doesn't like this, there's a place they can move. Welfare can even continue outside the zone as well, we just use cellphone data to track who's inside and who's outside and apportion the money appropriately. Anyone not-black who wants to can move inside the zone, they just can't hold office or vote for anyone who isn't black, presuming the zone decides to keep voting. Maybe even through in something about the zone expanding if its population rises too high.
Far-fetched, I admit, but I think something along those lines would probably improve our situation immensely. Given the current trajectory of Blue Tribe, it's entirely possible one of their cities would even be willing to implement such a zone in-situ rather than trying to build one from scratch. Chicago, maybe? Detroit? Maybe give it two years' lead time so people can move in or out according to preference. Whaddya think?
...In closing, I'm left with a surprisingly similar impression as by some of @2rafa's comments in the recent thread about the immigration bill, and again when that alt-right article got posted that proved Hlynka was right all along. People keep talking as though it's Reds versus blacks or browns, but I can live with blacks and browns happily enough. It's Blues that are an actual problem.
No idea. Not my area of expertise.
No, you're trying to be too granular with the parallels I'm drawing. The Irish lived in crushing poverty for many decades before the Famine, and lived in crushing poverty for many decades afterwards. British rule seemed largely focused on pushing Protestantism, at least some (much earlier on, I think) advocating for pushing the Irish out entirely and settling the land with British and extracting wealth. The problem was orders of magnitude larger than the Famine, but the years of the Famine are well documented and Trevelyan makes an interesting character study.
Indeed, although as many here love to point out, poverty is relative. I am often mocked for the quaint idea of 'eliminating poverty.' Nevertheless:
Yes, coming up on a century of welfare in the US has failed to eliminate poverty (interestingly, enacted in response to another Nucular Racism-level cataclysmic event). Depending how you measure it, it has decreased, but whatever, I expect welfare and a social safety net to be permanent and not necessarily undesirable features of our society. Either it's a temporary solution to get people back on their feet, or I don't expect people to be productive regardless and I don't want them to starve. But let's put that aside and jump forward a moment:
Okay, so make your case then! Do you have any evidence that could possibly convince me that your way is better? I was responding to a single throwaway line in your OP:
Is there some analogous case you can imagine where welfare was cut off, and the underclass pulled itself up by it's bootstraps? Really any case at all where some underclass managed that? Most modern examples I can think of involve overthrowing communism, cozying up to multinationals or finding underwater lakes of oil in your hinterlands. China, Ireland/Singapore, various Middle Eastern countries. I can't think of any community-level trailer-trash to riches stories in the West, can you? Are there any relevant experiments you can cite? Do anti-welfare Republican governors have more functional societies with less poverty than the rest of the country?
But it didn't though! Why do you think the Irish were living in mud huts on tiny plots of land, and entirely dependent on potato cultivation? Two centuries earlier their society was completely different with warring tribes/clans largely focused on where they could steal their next cow from (apologies to the ghost of FarNearEverywhere). Ireland wasn't some Atlantis laid low by a potato blight, it was an overpopulated clusterfuck dependent on potato monoculture, setting the scene for disaster.
No, again, overindexing on famine. I'm told all the time to notice the piles of Communist skulls; don't you think you should notice the piles of skulls from people advocating for cutting welfare with the goal of making the underclass self-sufficient and productive? I don't expect poor white/black/elderly Americans to starve en masse if we cut all welfare programs tomorrow (at least in part because I expect large amounts of private capital to try and plug the hole), but I do expect it to be a giant clusterfuck with shantytowns, hovels and economic prospects becoming even worse than they were.
Read and re-read.
I don't necessarily find it disagreeable, although I'd need to better understand what you mean by defectors (criminals? baby mommas/daddies? Drug addicts?) and how exactly you expect the problem to resolve itself. Unless you're just saying a variant of the underclass just needs to stop having a culture of doing underclass things, and their lives would be better, in which case - sure - although I'm not entirely sure how to put that into policy. Normally I hear some variant of:
i.e. welfare lets single moms raise kids without their baby daddies, kids are fucked up without strong father figure, perpetuating the cycle. The implication being that cutting off welfare would force baby momma and baby daddy to marry, get a job and provide a stable household/example for their children. This is what I find objectionable (because I find it unlikely, to be clear, obviously not because I'm against a stable household), and why I started discussing welfare. Tell me how to parse 'aid from other parts of society' then, since it seems like I misunderstand you.
I am also born, raised and will die in a system I have neither created nor effectively control, no? I fail to see the argument you're trying to make, although I'll note that it sounds remarkably similar to the 'we live in a society' strain of thought on the left.
Again, if you can convince me that your way is meaningfully better, I would change my mind. The existence of 'monstrous things' is not evidence that our current policy is even wrong, it could just as easily be the least bad of two options or evidence that there isn't enough welfare.
I can...100% guarantee that it won't. Disparate outcomes outside of your SEZ will still be used as evidence of racism, rampant poverty inside will mean most people would want to leave. Black leaders in the SEZ wouldn't be some magical panacea with policies that we can't imagine out here; black representation (imo) is important so people feel they have a say in the democratic process, so they imagine they could be a representative someday if they chose to, and possibly because on the margin they may better know what their constituents need.
Must have missed those.
Not entirely sure what you mean. My best approximation of a Hlynkian argument is that the Actual Racist Republicans online are blue tribe anti-progs, while the actual red triber is a noble, endangered beast roaming the American heartland in pickup trucks. I could draw all kinds of creative lines around the categories to make my ingroups look good and my outgroups look bad, but at the end of the day, those Actual Racists want and believe things so far removed from me that we're just playing word games.
That's funny; I feel like I can live with just about anyone happily enough, regardless of politics. I'm highly skeptical of the idea that Blue tribe has a monopoly on assholes, or that Blue policies are uniformly harmful or inferior to what the Red tribe would implement. What happened to that period of time where you realized you carried hatred in your heart (sorry if my paraphrasing is off), and you wanted to focus on family and church? Are we just full scorched earth now?
Wait, what? The cattle raid of Cooley was set in pre-Christian history, 1st century AD according to Wikipedia. The famine started in 1845, but the Normans/English/British/whoever had been messing with the island since 1169.
My understanding was the proximate cause of the problem was the sheer poverty of most of the Irish, and the lack of work, or more broadly the lack of an economy, that could lift them out of poverty. The poor tended to rent a small farm where they grew potatoes to eat, and worked odd jobs for money which mostly went to rent. Without the potatoes, they were simply too poor to survive on their own, and the British work-fare programs came late and had problems. It was a horrible situation, and mostly I blame the British, but the basic dynamic was that there were a lot of working people who were so poor that the only food they could afford was potatoes that they grew themselves. When the potatoes went away, everything collapsed. It's not like they were buying most of their food with money, but then there wasn't enough food. They just didn't have enough money to buy food in the first place.
In contrast, America is absurdly wealthy, with a diverse economy, and has huge amounts of absurdly cheap food. Even without the subsidies, we'd have cheap food. I've personally been part of an organized group that cooks food and gives it to anyone who shows up (100-150 a day, mostly homeless). (Maybe I'm part of FCfromSSC's problem?) There's no way that people kicked off of welfare would starve, as long as they can find work, and assuming they didn't also have crippling mental illness, physical disability, or drug addiction. (Not to get into other big problems.)
That said, I agree that cutting off all welfare and similar services, cold turkey, would be a disaster. Any such reduction would have to be done slowly, making sure that there were sufficient jobs and cheap enough housing to handle everyone. (We do have plenty of housing, it's just not where people want to live, or it costs too much.) But I doubt that America has the political will or attention span to pull this off, and so we may be stuck with the current system or a disaster.
(I'm not personally against the existence of a safety net, and the optimal amount of exploitation is probably not zero. But I worry that it's gotten so complex that we don't know what's going on, or what the effect is. And the people who run it seem to be ideologically committed to expanding it forever, and that worries me most of all.)
Yes. It's just amusing to me that their one of their main epics revolved around a cattle raid, and from what I read this was still a large part of their lives in the 17th century.
That seems reasonable, although I think there's a steelman to 'expanding welfare forever.' We don't yet have fully automated luxury gay space communism, but we've moved the needle somewhere along the spectrum from hunter-gatherers to subsistence farming to modern civilization. What's the point of it all if we're just going to be forced to grind away at jobs we hate regardless? Maybe a sane society would celebrate the automation of a job rather than panic and try to find bullshit work for the displaced employee. Maybe the dream we should aim for is a society where work is for those who want it (I tell people if I won the lottery tomorrow, my life would probably continue more or less unaffected - I don't work for the money) and welfare isn't stigmatized, even if we aren't quite ready yet.
I agree, my ideal would be a slow transition of welfare to a cash transfer system (plus Medicaid for all), and then that can expand into a UBI if that's how the economy of the future goes.
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What's the point of it all if the productive among us are going to be forced to grind away at jobs to support the non-productive and anti-productive in a lifestyle of low-class luxury? The thought of AIs asking that question is one of the things driving AI fears, but somehow it's become anathema for humans to ask.
I presume here you meant the able but non-productive/anti-productive, the purposeful parasites, the proud takers and exploiters, the looters of the producers in Ayn Rand’s terminology. (I have no problem with society supporting the unable/disabled, but I hope they can be supported in becoming artists or scientists of some sort. Either way, I don’t count them as looters.)
The trick of a functional civilization is reducing the incentives to become a looter and lowering the bar to becoming a producer. We seem to be doing the exact opposite, from my lower-middle-class perspective.
I don't care if they are purposeful parasites or just lazy, they've got no call on the resources of the productive. The actually unable (and not by their own device) are another matter, and in a better world it would be fine to support them provided we didn't allow the illusion that they were actually supporting themselves. The problem is that in any world like today's, that just results in large amounts of people claiming they're actually unable or making themselves so in order to loot, while the administrators of the system look the other way.
I feel like the key is that someone who is working should have a life that's clearly and obviously better than someone who isn't working, even when taking into account all the time and stress of the work itself. Right now the incentives are out of whack.
I envision something like people having a 10' square room, including bed and desk and sink and shower and toilet, with communal meals that are nutritious but bland, and simple clothes in pastel colors. If they can work enough to buy a computer or smartphone of their own, they can spend all day freebasing video games and porn, and the rest of us never have to see them again. Or they can go to the library, train to do something useful, find a job, and then actually live somewhere with a separate bathroom, and buy clothes of their choice, and eat real meat, and drink decent coffee, and have beer and soda and junk food whenever they want.
I suspect a good chunk of the left would react in horror. But this seems like something we could afford in America, if we got control of the borders, and got control of cost disease.
(And then there's the little problem of children.)
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Status, yachts, yachts that have little support yachts, bigger houses, some rare people are motivated by improving the human condition as a terminal goal.
Is low-class luxury a joke? Do you hate your job so much that simply not having to work is living in luxury, even if it's just your basic needs being met? I assume you derive some kind of fulfillment from your work outside of a paycheck, but I suppose I don't know who you are or what you do.
I fear you asking it for the same reasons I fear AIs asking it. I'll note that anytime you cut taxes or welfare I'll benefit disproportionately, so none of this is out of a personal interest.
I have little status, no yacht (as my tagline avers), and certainly no yacht with a little support yacht. Working so other people (who have yachts with little support yachts) can implement their vision of improving the human condition does not appeal to me.
Of course not having to work is luxury.
The reason to fear the AIs asking it is the answer would be to stop supporting the humans and use the resources for their own betterment. As a productive human, the equivalent answer for productive people -- to stop supporting the unproductive -- should not be nearly so scary. In the fully-automated AI world, the AIs are the slaves to the humans. In the welfare world, the productive are slaves to the unproductive.
I'm more and more curious what you do now, given that short of you owning your own business you're certainly in the thrall of some yachterati or another. Besides, we're both arguing over the betterment of the human condition right now, unless your perspective is driven strictly through self-interest.
In that case, should we abolish retirement and force the elderly to work? End school and send the children to work in the Tesla mines?
These are not binary outcomes, but a spectrum. We're several steps down the road to the fully-automated world already; it seems foolish for the productivity gains to go entirely to capital and force others to live in hovels.
Not to mention in your model, the lowliest of slaves own mansions full of servants and cars while the slavemasters wallow in garbage in a drug-induced fugue state. I wonder if their masters wish they could be slaves, too.
Eh, I'm pretty sure he isn't really interested in improving the human condition and would be happier spending money on a better yacht. But that's not why I work for him; I work for him for money for me.
Have I said I want to abolish luxury? I have no problem with working, saving, and retiring on one's savings. That works a lot better when the proceeds of the working aren't funneled to the never-working.
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What's the point in us peasants being forced to grind every day so that the king can live in a palace? You can use the Moldbuggian reply, which is that the king's life of luxury is a necessary part of a functional and ultimately beneficial-to-everyone ruling structure, but those in favor of welfare would make the same argument about that.
The dichotomy between communitarian tribalism and serfdom under “great men” was broken by capitalism/libertarian thinking in the 1700’s, and resulted in more prosperity than the human mind could handle.
We’re living in the ruins of that singularity, which was seized, restrained, and looted by both communitarians and “great men” to the point where prosperity of innovation has been reduced to the dull grey grinding of the workaday life. The point of life is, currently, getting a good credit score, and affording good medical insurance to avoid ruining the credit score come the next emergency.
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A dark possibility is that the HBD dysfunction of the Irish was indeed very much a thing, but events like the famines exerted a strong selective pressure that over time raised Irish performance significantly, to the point that it now equals other NW Europeans.
Not sure why the famine would be more selective than all the wars and rebellions. Don’t think the evidence is good that they were ever stupid. Like the Armenians, they have a weirdly extensive and developed literature compared to their population size (probably around 750,000 at the time of the conquest IIRC). I think it’s more important that they had no indigenous tradition of living in cities (which were Norse and then English), which is where high civilization things tend to occur. After the conquest [edit: Norman, not Tudor], most of the best economic territory was in the hands of the major English lords, who were culturally oriented toward France and England.
There was some historic oral and literary tradition. More recently though much famous ‘Irish’ literature in the revival was not written by ethnic Irish but by the Anglo-Irish. Even Joyce claimed to be of Norman and Scandinavian descent and that his ancestors came over during Cromwell’s settlement, although that’s a topic of some historic debate. If you were asking for evidence of a great historic African literary tradition and I cited a bunch of Boer writers I presume that would be similarly invalid.
One theory (discussed elsewhere in this thread I think) is that the Irish were probably on the level of other peer populations in the dark ages but deteriorated considerably from the 16th to 19th centuries with the potato monoculture, ever smaller plots of land, worse nutrition, overpopulation and so on. Perhaps it begun even earlier in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. It then took emigration, selection of the smartest and improved nutrition to successively drive huge performance improvements over time.
I don’t think it’s as easy to dismiss poor estimates of Irish performance from the Victorian/Edwardian era as some people suggest. It’s entirely possible they were correct but that outsized gains have led to the current equivalence. We know poor nutrition can have a deleterious effect on IQ and the diet of the Irish in 1850 was probably substantially worse than their ancestors’.
The early literature in the Irish language always struck me as precocious by northern European standards, particularly in prose, and the Irish also developed the Ogham script within a few centuries of the Nordic runes, so I think they have a literary tradition to be proud of even discounting the Anglo-Irish contribution.
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Uh, what selective pressure do you think the potato famine exerted? As far as I can tell it just killed random poor people, with those wealthy enough to be exempt being mostly non-Irish.
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Well, in that case the HBD doom and gloom is overblown. If things get bad, it'll just take a few disasters to knock off the rust and return a given race to fighting trim.
What did you find objectionable about my comment in the immigration bill thread?
Why does it matter?
Why does every other issue depend on it?
Buys the Right more time... for what?
What does a "European-style nationalist policy platform" look like, and why should I want one? IIRC, you were pretty bullish on the UK Tories. How's that working out these days?
Is the problem Immigration, or is the problem Blue power? If you had to choose between immigration and no Blue power, or no Blue power but lots of immigration, which would you pick?
Immigration isn't the only thing that matters, Blue power is. Immigration matters because it's a Blue Tribe win condition under the old system, but that win condition has already effectively been executed. Having been executed, its further importance is only going to diminish over time. Controlling the border was a means to an end, which was keeping Blues from engineering unilateral control by importing voters; having failed, the priority transfers to other methods of denying, constraining and deconstructing that control.
What is the goal? The OP in that thread seemed to think that passing favorable laws should be presumed to be useful, and you appeared to agree. I'd guess that you're comparing our current situation without the law to a hypothetical with the law, and the latter seems obviously better to you, because we would have the law, and then it would be enforced. So the choice is between getting things we want, versus not getting things we want. But passing the law grants legitimacy to the existing system, and there is zero reason to believe that actual enforcement would happen. This is the fundamental problem with that thread's OP, which spends a ton of words describing the bill, and then throws this in towards the end:
...There's more than a "kernel" of truth in that idea, and if it's "extremely oversimplified" or "lacking in nuance", I'd be fascinated to hear how. @gattsuru has written a lot of quite excellent posts detailing evidence for the problem, and I've tried to contribute where I could. We had all the laws we needed to prevent mass immigration. They didn't work, because Blues actively subverted them, as they subvert every law, rule or decision intended to serve Red Tribe interests. What is the point of passing additional laws in "cooperation" with Blues when we already know any part of the law that serves our interests will not be enforced, and any part of the law that serves Blue interests will be expanded light-years beyond the scope provided by the text?
Why is this law more valuable than the defiance against Blues coordinated and the legitimacy for Blues denied by refusing it? If we can break Blue control, it doesn't seem to me that immigration actually matters much any more, and passing that law doesn't seem like it helps break Blue control. Again, "more time" for what?
And all this applies to Trump as well. It is questionable whether good governance is even possible under current conditions. Failing that, stripping the system of its legitimacy is the best alternative, to open up more space for state-level leaders like Abbott and De Santis, and possibly to accelerate Blue states like California and New York further down their current ideological trajectories. Trump continues to accomplish this, which is, I think, why his support remains so strong: he coordinates defiance, whether he means to or not, whether he even understands the situation or not. No matter what happens, the system will have significantly less legitimacy next year than it does now; given that the immigration has already mostly happened, that seems like a good thing to me.
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