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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26049 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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To be honest, I'm not sure because you often write in such a way that it's hard for me to figure out what you really believe as opposed to what you are just playing with. Are you one of those guys who thinks that Russia is a crypto-colony of the British?

More or less.

"Crypto-colony" does not mean anything falsifiable and predicts nothing. I think Russia is a generic low-agency country, in the manner countries with negative selection in elites tend to be, and consistently acts against both its "geopolitical" and its population's long-term interests, yet in the interests of savvier countries, mainly the US and the UK although it seems that Russians both high and low interpret their retarded and harmful activity as self-interested. This is also strangely accompanied by Russian petty elites squealing like teen girls about the prospect of their child becoming a Londoner; there's a distinct vibe that it's better to be a struggling student in the Metropole than an oligarch at "home", and I've seen this repeatedly since childhood. The prestige of UK is out of proportion with that nation's observable merit.

To what extent this is due to any deliberate effort, or just historical inertia, or needs any explanation at all, I am not sure.

Could you elaborate on your reasons for considering the UK savvy? AUKUS looks to have been a good move, and Brexit is too complicated and long-term to judge right now, but beyond that our foreign policy seems to be mostly self-harming. We cut ourselves off from cheap oil while refusing to develop our own reserves, we sold our factories and our best R&D companies to foreign owners, we fought in Iraq and Afghanistan for no reason. What are you seeing that I don't?

This is also strangely accompanied by Russian petty elites squealing like teen girls about the prospect of their child becoming a Londoner; there's a distinct vibe that it's better to be a struggling student in the Metropole than an oligarch at "home", and I've seen this repeatedly since childhood. The prestige of UK is out of proportion with that nation's observable merit.

This on the other hand I get. I feel relatively confident in saying that the upper-bound for opportunities for high-merit people in London is greater than that of St. Petersburg / Moscow. The median standard of living may be lower, on the other hand. So it depends on your situation and your prospects. Also, prestige takes a couple of centuries to really fade.

None of this is particularly damaging, and foreign owners of consequential companies are fellow Anglos; fighting NATO wars helps build team spirit. Anyway, what matters is differential damage – consider how gimped Germany is by the ongoing war, and how relatively unscathed is the UK. (Or, as the all-time greatest example, how Anglos got us to whittle down Napoleon, whereas the most rational move would have been to side with him… and again in WWI…) Russians tend to think of geopolitics in terms of handicapping and undermining civilizational competitors, and point to Albion as the chief culprit. But even as far as the positive agenda goes – somehow the moribund, overregulated UK has both DeepMind (despite it nominally being bought by an American company) and the lead in regulating AI for everyone else.

upper-bound for opportunities for high-merit people in London is greater than that of St. Petersburg / Moscow

It's not just about Moscow, it's about the entire rest of the world. You can be an oligarch's son in the Motherland, or if you have any merit, you can have a career in the US, but somehow they all salivate about the degree from London School of Economics, or even shaking hands with Brits.

That said, I personally do not feel like the UK is very important.

(Or, as the all-time greatest example, how Anglos got us to whittle down Napoleon, whereas the most rational move would have been to side with him… and again in WWI…)

I don't see how any of these make sense for the Russian elite. In the Napoleonic wars Napoleon was forcing liberalization throughout Europe which was against the interests of the aristocratic Russian elites. In WW1 it was the Russians who started things against the Germans with their alliance with Serbia and an alliance with Germany would just lead to them conquering France and becoming strong enough to invade Russia, like they did in WW2.

You presume compromises and contingencies which have taken place in reality, and Anglo narratives about them. Napoleon was not essentially committed to liberalize Russia, and indeed did not emancipate the serfs on territories he entered, which is part of the reason for his failure.

Okay, I think I see where you're coming from. To sum up as briefly as possible: the Anglos have always been good at handicapping civilisational competitors (Napoleon, Axis, Russia) and continue to be so. Anglo powers are still number 1 and so clearly their foreign policy is still effective. Is that about right?

A few serious points of contention:

  1. I was thinking of policy in the last 50 years rather than the last 200. Quite happy to admit that Napoleonic and WW era policy was mostly pretty decent.
  2. I do not see America and Britain as comfortably belonging to the same civilisation group. We've been somewhat hostile for most of our history, and the social structure & cultural mores were very different before 20 years ago. American policy over the 20th century has been to bring Britain down from 'friendly rival' to 'cringing servant', and IMO has done so successfully. We also share a language, so British culture is rapidly being overwhelmed by the culture of Imperial Centre.
  3. As a consequence of the above, the fact that British companies are mostly IPOing in America isn't comforting to me. We're being drained dry of anything that could let us stand on our own two feet. And I've seen nothing to indicate that British AI regulation is anything other than Rishi Sunak's desperate (and self-harming) bid for relevance. Those who can, do. Those who can't, regulate. Witness Tsarist attempts to outlaw machine guns prior to WW1.
  4. I agree with you that Germany does seem to have suffered much worse from the war. I'm not sure how much of that is just that they were a booming manufacturer with further to fall, but it does seem odd.

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