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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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If there’s a huge global crisis I think there will be few worse places to be than the Gulf, a place with no loyalty to its foreign residents, no ability to grow any food for itself, utterly reliant on global commerce and trade flows, with no safety net and an extremely heterogenous population.

The best bet is some rural or semi-rural community in a European or North American country where you know everyone and that is far away from major population centers to be irrelevant. Or somewhere similar. There’s a reason Thiel and co built their compounds around Lake Wanaka on New Zealand’s South Island; it’s probably the safest place on earth.

New Zealand is a great place to retreat to in the event of a global economic collapse, but its a terrible place in terms of personal income tax. If you're at the billionaire level and just take loans out against your assets instead of 'earning income' then this probably won't bother you.

New Zealand does seem pretty safe, but its violent crime rates are significantly above those of places like Japan and even, to some extent, Germany. I suppose that the Maori have a lot to do with that.

On the plus side, New Zealand seems pretty unlikely to get nuked in the case of WW3, because there would be very little benefit in nuking it.

Is there a particularly large Māori population around Wanaka? I just looked it up and apparently that region has the lowest Maori population of anywhere in the country; they’re largely concentrated on the North Island.