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And with outright hostilities like that you can't be surprised when we see you as an obstacle towards our own success and want to see you and yours removed from any and all positions of power and influence. It's a shame really because white people on average are generally more competent than most other ethic groups and having competent people running things is good for society as a whole, it's your culture that's screwed up to the point of no return.
Do you think outsiders are treated better in your civilization? It seems to gradually oppress and murder its way to a 99% majority, and when it has reached the total cohesion so dear to FC, the full glory of muhammad’s vision comes into view: obscurantism, poverty , weakness, always teetering on the brink of civil and uncivil wars.
You’re a smart guy, part of the elite. Are you not ashamed of what your class and vision has produced for your civilization?
Oh, it's extremely shameful, the problems with our society are really really bad. However they are by and large due to incompetence rather than the culture itself being poor. Not to say our culture doesn't have problems, it definitely does, but they are easier to fix than the bastardised mutant of liberalism that rules the roost in the West right now (I'm talking about the elite culture, not the prole culture, that thing is no better than modern western "liberalism").
Again, you can blame us for not domesticating our lower classes properly like they've done so in the west (this is something I actually admire the west for, you've domesticated the common man really well) and that really is our failure but modern western elite culture now has far worse problems.
For what it's worth, I think you're right.
But why are your people flocking to the west, if not to act as mere parasites?
I wouldn't say it's to act as parasites, but in search of a better life with more creature comforts. Nobody says they're gonna go migrate just so they can parasitize the natives, but rather they say they want to go to live a better life. There is a huge lack of opportunity back home which pushes people away while the west (rightly or wrongly) is seen as a land of milk and honey so people want to go there. I personally pay so so much tax that I feel like the natives are parasitizing off of me.
Now a lot of the reasons for why things are so bad back home are because of us ourselves, but that doesn't get rid of the perceived differential in living standards (I would argue it's exaggerated actually, being a top 1% earner back home isn't that much worse than being top 1% earner in the UK when you consider how much more labour you can buy with your money back home). It is this difference that's causing people to flock over and why the only real way to end the hordes descending upon Europe is to either lower your own QoL a lot or raise living standards in their home countries to the point where the added benefits of migrating aren't worth the costs like being away from your family.
Oh, my friend, there are so many other ways to stop invading hordes.
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This is a version of ‘the incompetent boyars and the virtuous tsar’. If your culture is so easy to fix, why don’t you fix it? It’s only been 1300 years, and your societies are lagging far behind those apparently problem-ridden western ones. The mechanisms that make reform impossible in your society are apparent, resilient and formidable : religiously mandated murder of critics and apostates. Reforming the west is a piece of cake by comparison.
You didn’t answer my question about outsiders to your culture. You have been treated very kindly by your hosts by historical and world standards. Minotaur’s hostility has always been the norm, yours is unseemly .
In the early 18th Century Mughal India overtook Imperial China to become the largest economy of the world, responsible for 25% of total worldwide production, more than the entirety of Western Europe combined.
You guys got lucky with the industrial revolution, nothing more, nothing less. Before that the "centre of the world" was at various points all over Eurasia.
Oh, absolutely, the mullahs need to be put down (metaphorically). However western cultural poison is seeping through to the youth anyways and the mullah's days are numbered, in about 50 years I expect them to not be an issue any more, however the issue is whether the cure will end up being worse than the disease (and it's a pretty terrible disease too, just goes to show you how dangerous the cure is).
I am not a refugee. I agree refugees are treated extremely well these days and they should show gratitude to their hosts. However as the descendent of economic immigrants only let in because the western government needed their labour to raise tax to pay for its spending commitments the relationship between us and the west is not that of host and guest, but rather that of employer and employee. In this case while the employee promises to follow the rules set by the employer during "working hours", he has no obligation to be grateful and adopt the employers ways as his own. Both sides benefit from the transaction and that's how the western governments talk about it too, with economic migrants they don't say "we should let them in so they can live a better life" but rather say "we should let them in so they pay tax and we can use that money for ourselves", the decision to let us in was to benefit themselves, not to enrich us (no different to why an employer hires someone). Well, we'll treat you as an employer and behave like any employee: keeping our own belief systems and slacking off whenever we get the opportunity.
In a way I actually respect Japan which didn't take this bargain and are now going through a fourth lost decade, they decided to take the economic hit and as a result get to keep their culture. The west wanted to keep the good times rolling and as a result now have to deal with us and our descendants forever.
I'm not even that hostile to white culture, my disdain towards whites when they try to force their cultural values on us comes from the same place as that of an employee pissed off because his employed is trying to control what he does off the job in his free time.
Sheer weight of numbers. At that time western european powers were already far ahead, capable of fighting and winning wars on multiple continents with superior technology, while the mughals sat satisfied counting their starving peasants.
I don't share your optimism. Strong men like Mustafa Kemal have tried to banish this ancient evil, but it always manages to creep back up and obscure the light of humanity.
I think muslims in particular make terrible ‘employees’ and if that was the extent of the relationship they should be ‘let go’(rapatriated) and replaced with less hostile ones or machines a la japan. The reason why this isn’t happening is because progressives really do want to help them live a better life and the rest believes they have a duty to be graceful hosts to those already here (imo we should assimilate them and close the border to any more substandard immigrants).
Although I cautioned BurdensomeCount on using GDP reconstructions too liberally, I would also push back against something like this, since the technology disparity between Europe and the rest of the world wasn’t that pronounced, and states with some degree of organization outside of Europe often were able to maintain some level of parity with European arms (e.g. 16-18C was the era of gunpowder empires in the Near East and South Asia, and neither China nor Japan had issues in adopting western improvements to guns during the Ming and early Qing and the Warring States period respectively). Many of these wars (at this stage) were limited, and many were pretty embarrassing, too, like the Anglo-Mughal war.
This is not to mention things like patterns of trade; the global silver trade in this period had not Europe as its most important agent, but China. (I am to understand that the most, uh, ?industrialised? and mercantile regions of China and (maybe) South Asia, for example, were also not really that far behind in per-capita terms vis a vis e.g. Britain.)
All of this doesn’t really tell a story of Europeans pwning everyone effortlessly. Conclusive departure from the norm such that the rest of the world was unable to easily catch up probably only started sometime in the 18th century (and only really solidified in the 19th with the industrial revolution), even if per capita conditions in Europe were already favourable leading up to that, and even though many of the preexisting institutions and intellectual currents that led (?) to these changes were being built centuries before (though not with growth and industrialisation in mind).
(All I mean to say is that to presuppose obvious European dominance of the world pre-sometime-in-the-18/19C is pants-on-head historically silly, even if the conditions that would lead to their future dominance were planted early; there is also a separate argument that you are discounting advances made elsewhere in the world with the sole focus on European domination, but that is for another time.)
Equivocate all you want, the weight of all these 'almost equal to' means clear superiority for european empires. In addition to the ability to project power on the other side of the world, which is still today used as a measure of power.
Really, 'pants on head' silly? Shouldn't you at least try to make a case for non-western superiority in the early 18th century, before you start throwing accusations of total silliness around?
And still, early 18th century is way too conservative imo, the portuguese were projecting power and winning battles due to superior tech in the indian sea in the early 16th century.
Sounds interesting, I'd like to read the source.
That seems to me to be half a matter of exceptional European maritime competency and half exceptional European drive, both explainable by that Europe had been, for centuries, trying to get more direct access to Asian markets for luxuries, while the main Asian players were largely uninterested in actively seeking out Europe. There are cases, as you note, like some of the Portuguese conquests (e.g. Malacca), where there was an overwhelming difference in technology which lead to European victory (in Malacca, the lack of knowledge of gunpowder weapons). But even then it is only because the Portuguese had an incentive to conquer e.g. Malacca; notably, if the Ottomans or the Ming or the Delhi Sultanate or the Safavids had the will to send a thousand soldiers with gunpowder weapons to conquer Malacca, they would also have been able to do so (and out of these states, the Ming and Ottomans certainly had the shipbuilding technology, + I would be surprised if the Indians or the Iranians wouldn't have been able to muster up something). China had sporadic clashes with Europeans all the way up to the Opium Wars, and in general they didn't fare too badly - not because Chinese military technology was necessarily superior, but the Europeans were campaigning too far from home; the Ming freely admit in their annals that European shipbuilding and fortbuilding (and guns!) were superior, and had adopted innovations re: guns, and were starting to adopt e.g. the star fortress before collapsing. (In this I am thinking of Dutch Formosa and the various Qing-Russian border conflicts, though I think there are more.)
The main problem with this is that even with technological superiority, complete antagonism only really worked with limited conflict, often with smaller players, and doesn't really dovetail well with the idea that Europe was simply so strong that it could muscle its way everywhere through sheer civilisational superiority. I suggested the embarrassing episode of the BEIC squabbling with the Mughals, leading to an obvious Mughal victory without them even doing much, because despite European superiority in technology, it's just hard to wage war far away from home. (Same goes with e.g. the Anglo-Marathan War.) which makes it difficult to really dominate somewhere unless you're able to play local parties against one another (e.g. the British conquest of India), or you have such a overwhelming technological, socially or materially, that your opponents can't catch up (the Malaccan example above, Scramble for Africa, etc.). European domination of the world, or Asia in particular, would not have materialised with relatively slight advantages, far from home, against larger states, not until other circumstances changed (e.g. industrial revolution capitalising on the scientific revolution, fracturing of India, catastrophic Qing weakness starting in early 19C, etc.)
And this isn't even mentioning that relatively organised states could readily adapt to new changes. Consider Korea at the turn of the 16th century; it started out as a poorly militarised state when the Japanese, at the time likely fielding the largest army in the world, invaded in 1592; it came out of the war (+ Ming help) with one of, if not the, best-trained and armed musketeer forces in the world.
But my point is that I don't need to prove non-Western superiority to make the case that the focus on Western abstract superiority tells us very little about how power actually flowed in Asia, at least until the industrial revolution!
An easy source for China for comparing is China, Europe, and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980–1850, where the authors argue:
And suggest that:
If you're interested in a graphical view and explanation:
The Figure 8 in question below.
Edit: This is not even to go into different labour market pressures in Europe vs in China, which is another huge topic all on its own; Elvin's theory of the High Level Equilibrium Trap is one such theory for why such pressures (+ other factors) lead to China not maintaining a "civilisational lead", though I am not entirely convinced by it and tend to think it was much messier.
Regarding technology transfers re: gunpowder weapons, an interesting recent resource is The Gunpowder Age which argues for relative parity in gunpowder weaponry (at least with China) until mid-18C, though I would be surprised if this finding didn't replicate to some extent with other Asian states.
I am less sure about the Indian subcontinent, but I am led to understand that out of all the Mughal provinces, Bengal was very rich, producing something like half of the entire empire's wealth or something.
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I would be careful with statements like these, if only because GDP projections into the past are based on assumptions larger than the solar system, even if how we come to these results are interesting and informative. Just to casually rebuff your assessment, I’m guessing you took these estimates from Maddison? A more recent reconstruction by Broadberry gives us quite different GDPs, with India never quite getting over Chinese GDP (both per-capita and in gross, given that the populations were relatively similar in 1700 at ~150-160m) during the 18th century, even as Qing Chinese GDP per capita fell steadily throughout the 18th century. Maddison’s reconstructions (esp. the earlier reconstructions), I believe, simply has population equating to total wealth in pre-industrial societies, due to the assumption that most everyone were subsistence farmers in pre-industrial society. Notably this Malthusian assumption isn’t really quite how things were, especially in e.g. Song China, or in the the more mercantile areas of Europe, etc.
Even without those estimates and reconstructions, I would be skeptical of the claim that India eclipsed China at the beginning of the 18th century; it would make more sense for India to have overtaken China during the 17th century, especially during the enormously destructive implosion of the Ming and its conquest by the Manchu Qing, and while the Mughals were still strong; and it makes no sense for (Mughal!) India to have overtaken China in the start of the 18th century, when the Qing had entered the High Qing golden age, and the Mughals had just decisively lost against the Marathas (and soon to disintegrate), with the 3-decade war causing/exacerbating plague and famine in India!
Edit: I didn’t even mention differences in wealth and productivity per capita, which likely had Europe leap ahead of esp. India quite early (though not all due to positive events)!
I took it from Wikipedia, but you're right the reference for this on there comes from Maddison. The early 18th century was a bit of a misnomer from me, the Wiki reference used the date 1700 (technically still the 17th century) as the time of the takeover and indeed that was the height of their territorial/cultural power. The Mughals did decline during the 18th century but equally at the same time the Marathas were growing a lot and they still count as India.
I hadn't heard of Broadberry, I'll take a look.
On a further tangent, whether China > India or India > China specifically at 1700 is kind of whatever to me, potayto potahto; but the most egregious part of the Maddison statistics I find personally is its assessment of Song dynasty China as significantly behind India during its early-mid medieval period, when Song dynasty China was pretty much unquestionably the most advanced and richest economy in the world during its existence. I think that is indicative of poor methodology or better current understanding (and my understanding is as above: Maddison, being the first to even try to do comparative historical GDP reconstructions, made an assumption that is now getting revised).
I don’t blame you for using that data since it’s most easily available, but unfortunately things can be misleading sometimes, and the truth is often so much more interesting.
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Yes, I understand why you and yours would want to parasitize a White society, I just trust you understand why not every White is so masochistic as to tolerate it.
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