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The Enlightenment Posthumously Eats Its Children

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RSDB kicks off the COTW with some reactionary fire:

The Enlightenment (posthumously) eats its children.

Nebulafox on the millennial mind, anxious and insecure:

Problems feel more existential if your relationship with authority all your life has been a passive-aggressive mix of awed respect and loathing, mainly stemming from a mix of the random capriciousness of the system and consciousness of the consequences of failure. Life used to be harder in many ways, but it was also clearer, and with easier chances to rebound: if you wanted to just disappear and start over in a new city, it used to be feasible. Much harder to go anonymous and start again these days without your past dogging you.

Let me put this another way: talk to many a typical Millennial from a position of direct authority over them, and ask them a clear but loaded yes/no question that puts them on the spot. More than with older generations, you won’t get a straight response: you’ll get a “well…” and then full minutes of word salad that tries to cloak the answer. That’s a conditioned response. The real feeling it betrays is: “How do I disengage from this situation ASAP without saying the wrong thing to this guy who could potentially damage my life if I get this wrong?” There’s understandably less willingness to take risks in a world that remembers them much more and might not let you recover.

Exaggerated? Yes. But completely illogical given the circumstances of many of their upbringings, and their experiences as young adults? No. It is a rational if poor response to what they’ve largely been taught: you are replaceable with hundreds of other struggling 20 and 30-somethings who are treading ground that could collapse at any moment. Unfortunately, this also leads to a willingness to dump your problem off someone else: if there’s a chance for the Millennial to redirect you to someone else, they will try that first.

Not My Economy on Wokeness as the neo-liberal atma weapon preventing the populist left, right, and center from ever converging on the establishment:

They won’t be coming for the banks. The rage people feel has been masterfully re-directed away from the system itself and toward that system’s enemies. Yale graduates genuinely believe that a welder who makes 25 bucks an hour is who is preventing them from living the boomer-consumer dream lifestyle.

This is not an organic expression of grassroots anti-cop sentiment, nothing about the left is organic. This is basic coalition/machine politics. Municipal budgets are BTFO, so something is going to get cut. Democrats found an opening to cut the money that goes heavily to blue collar right wing men. It’s about leverage for negotiating police union contracts and getting the guys with guns under idealogical control.

Still, OP could be right, in the long run. Some of these white libs may wake up and realize they got memed into implementing the Cato Institute neoliberal wet dream small government agenda in exchange for a statue of Pepsi presents: Lin Manuel Miranda, sponsored by BNY Mellon. If that happens it will be very interesting to see where it goes.

As the commercial and residential real estate markets collapse in the coming months, the currently untenable financial situations of municipalities across the country are going to become catastrophic. The Fed preemptively promised months ago to cover the shortfalls, because the dollar is invincible and inflation is impossible so there’s nothing to worry about. Didn’t you see we trimmed the balance sheet a bit last week? Oh, the market dropped 3% over those five days? Purely coincidental!

For those insist Thomm is a pure-blooded troll, exhibit A as evidence to the contrary:

George Floyd and a dozen other blacks were all up to no good when they were killed.

But there are others who were not. People here point to Justine Damond, but the greatest injustice of all in this category was Daniel Shaver.

The murder of Daniel Shaver was unusually disturbing. Really in a class by itself.

He truly could not have avoided execution. They were absolutely intent on killing him, and were getting frustrated that it was taking longer than they wanted for him to make a mistake. This is the sort of killing where I saw that it could happen to any of us.

A white cop killing a white civilian, so there is no dimension of race here at all.

The cop who killed him had everything pointing to him being a bad cop. His gun had ‘You’re Fucked’ engraved on it, for Christ’s sake.

If there was one killing that was completely beyond any possible chance of framing as ‘the cop made an error’, it is this one. There is really no other example that is this bad. Truly. Again, this could happen to any of us.

Hard to argue (viewer discretion is advised).

Twinkie provides an opportunity to repeat that had Trump brought Pat Buchanan on as chief of staff instead of Saboteur Priebus, the president’s first term would’ve looked much different than it does today:

There used to be similar grumbling at the Reagan White House – that most of the key personnel at the Reagan White House were not Reaganites. That’s always been the great failure of conservatives and now nationalists – fixating on the soundness of ideas and neglecting the inculcation and development of a wide pool of competent public intellectuals, elected officials, and administrators who can govern well once the elections are won.

So the consequence of rightist electoral victories are so much sound and fury that energize the opposition, but little in the way of achieving desirable police goals.

More than anything else, Trump needed someone to ensure the congruence of his instincts and his personnel. He never got that person because he never demanded to.

•�Category: Culture/Society, Ideology •�Tags: COTW
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  1. “The real feeling it betrays is: “How do I disengage from this situation ASAP without saying the wrong thing to this guy who could potentially damage my life if I get this wrong?”

    I am not sue about this disappearing business. But the idea of disengaging without offense is neither new or unique to any generation or any person. it matters not ho you are departing company from people who are dangerous to you and your future has always required taking a very high road.

    it is still possible to change your name in this country and start one’s life anew. But maintaining a good name — which can be a chore is probably a preferable road to take. And I am keenly aware that people can besmirch another’s name out of vicious motive.

  2. The Enlightenment (posthumously) eats its children.

    If you don’t like being ruled by politicians, you’d hate being ruled by Kings and churches. See Meghan and Harry for a preview.

    •�Replies: @Cloudbuster
    @Alexander Turok

    There's a certain type on the right that thinks monarchy is the answer to all the problems with democracy. This fills me with so much anger I can barely stand to talk to them. It's not as if we don't have millennia of examples of monarchy to see that it is in no way a particularly superior form of government. I'm not saying it is always worse -- there can be well-managed monarchies and badly-managed republics, but the problems with monarchy are legion and obvious.

    Replies: @Rosie, @neutral, @Intelligent Dasein
    , @RSDB
    @Alexander Turok

    Rule by kings and churches is however better than rule by enlightened kings without churches which is what Voltaire liked.
    , @Almost Missouri
    @Alexander Turok

    But need we "be ruled" at all?

    Of course, I know the answer to this. It was "a republic, if you can keep it." "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

    We the people are no longer "moral and religious". It needn't have been that way, but it is. So now do we keep pretending that we are still the two-century-ago people, or do we accept that much of our population cannot self-govern and must be governed, i.e., ruled? And if ruled, how? Note that per the previous paragraph, a Constitutional Republic is wholly inadequate.

    Replies: @Alexander Turok, @dfordoom
    , @advancedatheist
    @Alexander Turok

    And yet our fantasy lives tell us the truth about what we really want: Despite a quarter-millennium of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment propaganda about the evils of hierarchies, traditions, aristocracies, monarchs, etc., we still find stories set in such worlds emotionally engaging and fulfilling. The pre-Enlightenment social model even works in a "futuristic," science-fiction setting, as we can see from yet another film adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel Dune in the works.

    We also see this revealed preference in some popular comic book characters, notably Wonder Woman. WW comes from a traditional, hierarchical (but all female) society ruled by a queen; and her people emphasize self-discipline, obedience to authority, chastity, physical fitness and martial skills.

    In other words, WW's value system rejects equality, democracy, individualism, waywardness, sexual freedom, fat acceptance and nonviolence. This makes WW about the polar opposite of a Wokevik.
    , @songbird
    @Alexander Turok


    See Meghan and Harry for a preview.
    You don't even have to go to Meghan and Harry. You can go to the Queen who made Stephen Lawrence's mother a baroness, or to William and his wife who both attended a worship service of Stephen, like the anniversary of his death was a saint's day.

    But perhaps, the Windsors aren't a good example, never having had much real power. If you think about it, their power is based on celebrity - and so they must fit into the celebrity mold, which, of course, is woke. Imagine, if they were neo-reactionaries. How long before they were assassinated, or their wealth seized?

    The Queen, if she (and her father before her) had the power to push people out of helicopters, might be an entirely different person. And England might be an entirely different place.

    Replies: @Jake, @YetAnotherAnon
    , @dfordoom
    @Alexander Turok


    If you don’t like being ruled by politicians, you’d hate being ruled by Kings and churches.
    I'd certainly hate to be ruled by churches. Whether they're liberal churches or traditionalist churches, either way I don't want to be ruled by them.

    That's why I'm glad that a Christian revival is not going to happen.

    As for monarchies vs democracies, it's six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. With a monarchy you can get a spectacularly good king or a spectacularly bad king. With democracy you get one corrupt mediocrity after another.

    I think that the current models of representative democracy are so severely flawed that they are entirely incapable of dealing with any major crisis. They are going to lead us to disaster. But I tend to agree with you that monarchy is not necessarily the right answer to the problem.

    Your point about Meghan and Harry is well taken although it's worth pointing out that Britain has not been an actual monarchy since 1688.

    Replies: @RSDB, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
    , @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
    @Alexander Turok

    Equating Meghan and Harry with traditional Christian monarchy is just the kind of lunacy I have come to expect from you.

    Replies: @Alexander Turok
  3. The hardest thing to take about the Daniel Shaver murder was that not only did the cop get off completely, he was allowed to retired with a $2500/month pension due to his PTSD over murdering Shaver, poor guy.

    Not one city was looted and burned.

    •�Replies: @Intelligent Dasein
    @Cloudbuster


    Not one city was looted and burned.
    They're being looted and burned now, and it isn't for George Floyd. This is what I was talking about in my previous comment that AE called "going meta."

    5/6ths of the BLM rioters are white. They don't really know or care anything about George Floyd. They think they do, but they don't. What they do know, subconsciously, is that the death of a black man in police custody grants permission to run wild according to the current narrative while the death of a white man in similar circumstances does not. They didn't riot over Daniel Shaver because they could not; such a thing is not a valid move in the social game as it's currently played. But even the death of George Floyd would have been powerless to impel any action unless some underlying desire was already there. That desire is provided by an inarticulate sense that the system, of which the police are the visible representatives, is horribly out of control and unfair. The Daniel Shaver murder certainly creates that impression and provides it with weight, even if nobody consciously links back to it. Shaver is the reality; George Floyd is the pretext.

    There is something inside human beings that is so tender that it can scarcely express itself unless it is cloaked in pretext, irony, and lies. Daniel Shaver is having his revenge through the unlikely instrument of BLM.

    Replies: @EmailAsID
    , @Curmudgeon
    @Cloudbuster


    he was allowed to retired with a $2500/month pension due to his PTSD over murdering Shaver,
    It would be nice if the pension red herring were stopped. Pensions are paid by the rules of the pension plan eligibility. The only link to employment is whether the person is an active member, i.e. the plan still receiving contributions.
    While I agree it is a travesty that the cop walked without prosecution, to a pension plan the only issue is whether, under the rules of the plan, he is entitled to a pension. It wouldn't matter if he were in prison anymore than it would for someone with a 401k.
    In the case of "his PTSD" while some pension plans have a disability benefit as part of the plan, the norm is some form of disability insurance. In either case, the benefit is only payable while medical information confirms that the person is, in fact, disabled. Therefore, until the cop reaches eligibility for retirement, he is not "retired" he is disabled. Again, even if he were in prison, as long as he is disabled an insurance company could be required to pay him, depending on the plan text.
    Let's stick to the issue of culpability and not drag in irrelevant matters to the issue at hand.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @anon, @botazefa
  4. @Alexander Turok

    The Enlightenment (posthumously) eats its children.
    If you don't like being ruled by politicians, you'd hate being ruled by Kings and churches. See Meghan and Harry for a preview.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @RSDB, @Almost Missouri, @advancedatheist, @songbird, @dfordoom, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan

    There’s a certain type on the right that thinks monarchy is the answer to all the problems with democracy. This fills me with so much anger I can barely stand to talk to them. It’s not as if we don’t have millennia of examples of monarchy to see that it is in no way a particularly superior form of government. I’m not saying it is always worse — there can be well-managed monarchies and badly-managed republics, but the problems with monarchy are legion and obvious.

    •�Replies: @Rosie
    @Cloudbuster


    There’s a certain type on the right that thinks monarchy is the answer to all the problems with democracy.
    Indeed. Reactionaries think they know better than the reformers who were eyewitnesses to the problems that necessitated the reforms to begin with.

    The mere fact that a reform occurred does not, ipso facto, imply that it was good, but it certainly does counsel against going back rather than looking for new solutions.

    Replies: @Wency, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
    , @neutral
    @Cloudbuster

    Monarchy has problems, but by now everyone should agree that democracy is the worst form of government, any alternative is better than democracy.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster
    , @Intelligent Dasein
    @Cloudbuster

    Monarchy is the only type of government that makes explicit what is cryptically present in all the others---that there is always a hierarchy and there is always only one ruler-will at the top. Monarchy is not an idea someone had nor is it one alternative among many types of government. It is government, and no power that ever existed, existed in any other form but this.

    The real power of a king can be effectively limited by other real powers so that it doesn't become tyrannical. I doubt whether there has ever been a larger proportion of contented ordinary people than there has under monarchy.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @SunBakedSuburb, @Old Palo Altan
  5. @Cloudbuster
    The hardest thing to take about the Daniel Shaver murder was that not only did the cop get off completely, he was allowed to retired with a $2500/month pension due to his PTSD over murdering Shaver, poor guy.

    Not one city was looted and burned.

    Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @Curmudgeon

    Not one city was looted and burned.

    They’re being looted and burned now, and it isn’t for George Floyd. This is what I was talking about in my previous comment that AE called “going meta.”

    5/6ths of the BLM rioters are white. They don’t really know or care anything about George Floyd. They think they do, but they don’t. What they do know, subconsciously, is that the death of a black man in police custody grants permission to run wild according to the current narrative while the death of a white man in similar circumstances does not. They didn’t riot over Daniel Shaver because they could not; such a thing is not a valid move in the social game as it’s currently played. But even the death of George Floyd would have been powerless to impel any action unless some underlying desire was already there. That desire is provided by an inarticulate sense that the system, of which the police are the visible representatives, is horribly out of control and unfair. The Daniel Shaver murder certainly creates that impression and provides it with weight, even if nobody consciously links back to it. Shaver is the reality; George Floyd is the pretext.

    There is something inside human beings that is so tender that it can scarcely express itself unless it is cloaked in pretext, irony, and lies. Daniel Shaver is having his revenge through the unlikely instrument of BLM.

    •�Replies: @EmailAsID
    @Intelligent Dasein

    All your race-neutral explanations of foundational causes do not change the fact that the BLM protests have accelerated the process of whites being made into second-class citizens in a country where they are still the majority. Because of this, your analysis is harmful to whites.

    After all, haven't we have all been recently taught that

    silence = violence
  6. “Trump needed someone to ensure the congruence of his instincts and his personnel.”

    This will sound far-fetched, but I think that the deep state would prevent that by going after such a proficient person; a perjury trap, bankrupt him, even threaten to go after his son.

    I agree that there is coming an economic collapse. Some of the essayists on this website think that the unraveling will be restricted to being a cultural collapse.

    •�Replies: @Audacious Epigone
    @SafeNow

    Naming Pat Buchanan isn't merely the result of salience and convenience. He would've been perfect--as well-respected as a genuinely America First figure can be in DC, no career prospects to be held hostage, financial independence, affability, and he doesn't have any children to target like Michael Flynn does.
  7. “A white cop killing a white civilian, so there is no dimension of race here at all.”

    That may be accurate for this particular incident. However, any suggestion that the system is not tiered against people of color, especially blacks, especially black males, is just destroyed by the record, not merely playing the numbers game with the extreme incidents leading to death.

    it would be nice to think that is not the case, but is simply does not bare out when one tracks us history including the present. And I am going to roundly reject the suggestion that anyone in police custody be shorn of their due process rights because you or anyone thinks they inhabit some state if deserving the same. You undercut your case by highlighting a wrong and then proceed to justify the same wrong in some circumstance you decide or the system you decry decides —-

    totally unacceptable and rejected on its face.

    •�Replies: @anon
    @EliteCommInc.


    That may be accurate for this particular incident. However, any suggestion that the system is not tiered against people of color, especially blacks, especially black males, is just destroyed by the record
    That's not true at all. How many times does this nonsense have to be debunked before it goes away?

    FBI Data: Blacks, Who Are Only 13.4% of the Population, Were 54.9% of Known Murder Offenders in 2018

    https://www.unz.com/isteve/fbi-blacks-who-are-only-13-4-of-the-population-were-54-9-of-known-murder-offenders-in-2018/

    Police are more likely to shoot whites, not blacks

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/13/why-a-massive-new-study-on-police-shootings-of-whites-and-blacks-is-so-controversial/?utm_term=.1db63f3f7797

    blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well. Blacks are also overrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes—by 50 percent—according to the most recent Justice Department data from 2017; whites are underrepresented by 24 percent.

    https://www.city-journal.org/democratic-candidates-racism-crime

    "There is no empirical evidence demonstrating any racial bias in drug arrest rates, and ... no bias in arrest rates for violent crimes .. black and white police officers do not differ in their propensity to arrest African Americans."

    https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/american-racism-and-the-anti-white-left/


    The Myth of Systemic Police Racism

    Hold officers accountable who use excessive force. But there’s no evidence of widespread racial bias.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-systemic-police-racism-11591119883

    There are many other links available. At some point, we should declare these kinds of false statements blood libel hate speech and punish them.
    , @Curmudgeon
    @EliteCommInc.


    However, any suggestion that the system is not tiered against people of color, especially blacks, especially black males, is just destroyed by the record, not merely playing the numbers game with the extreme incidents leading to death.
    Is the numbers game the FBI crime statistics that show cops are more likely to shoot Whites than Blacks and that Black cops are more likely to shoot Blacks than White cops are?

    How is the system "tiered" against Blacks? The NYC statistics showed that Blacks and Hispanics were involved in 90% of the crime in New York, with Blacks being approximately twice that of Hispanics. If Blacks are identified as suspects in crime at 6 times the rate of Whites, that would mean 6 times the likelihood of interaction with police. How is that tiered? Is it the fault of police if witnesses say the perp was Black?

    Of course no one should be shorn of their due process rights, irrespective of colour. The problem is the system(s) has been corrupted. It is no longer a justice system, it is a prosecution system. Justice is a process where all evidence is weighed not a guaranteed result where evidence is hidden, manufactured, or ignored. There are Whites that are wrongfully convicted as well as Blacks. The fact that Blacks are identified by witnesses at higher rates than Whites increases the possibility of wrongful convictions, particularly when finding a suspect not the correct suspect is the goal.
  8. Rosie says:
    @Cloudbuster
    @Alexander Turok

    There's a certain type on the right that thinks monarchy is the answer to all the problems with democracy. This fills me with so much anger I can barely stand to talk to them. It's not as if we don't have millennia of examples of monarchy to see that it is in no way a particularly superior form of government. I'm not saying it is always worse -- there can be well-managed monarchies and badly-managed republics, but the problems with monarchy are legion and obvious.

    Replies: @Rosie, @neutral, @Intelligent Dasein

    There’s a certain type on the right that thinks monarchy is the answer to all the problems with democracy.

    Indeed. Reactionaries think they know better than the reformers who were eyewitnesses to the problems that necessitated the reforms to begin with.

    The mere fact that a reform occurred does not, ipso facto, imply that it was good, but it certainly does counsel against going back rather than looking for new solutions.

    •�Replies: @Wency
    @Rosie

    The lesson I would take from reformers is not to be blind to the problems of past systems. Some of the reformers were very reasonable people. Stolypin comes to mind. But also, there are always reformers. Someone always wants to change the system. William the Conqueror was a reformer.

    The whole debate about monarchy is moot, because it's impossible to go back, even if you want to. If you wanted to implement and maintain a traditional Christian monarchy, you would have to do it with a brutal police state and massive purges that those traditional Christian monarchies didn't actually have.

    It's kind of like the saying "you can never go home again".

    Russia would almost certainly be better off today if the Romanovs had stayed in power. So the tendency to pine for the Romanovs is somewhat understandable. But the fact of the matter is that the dynasty ended when it produced a czar who was entirely unsuited to resisting leftist agitation, and the result was the worst and most destructive leftist signaling spiral in the history of Europe. It's foolish to think another Romanov-like dynasty wouldn't have the same problem.

    Replies: @Jake, @V. K. Ovelund
    , @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
    @Rosie

    Dead wrong.

    Those who destroyed the monarchies were not reformers. They were revolutionaries. If they wanted reform, then they would have produced reformed the given monarchies.

    There is, of course, precedent throughout history for the reformation of monarchies. Unfortunately, modern history (at least since 1517) is loaded with revolutionaries who subverted movements for reform to destroy existing order.

    Replies: @Rosie, @Corvinus
  9. Rosie says:

    This will sound far-fetched, but I think that the deep state would prevent that by going after such a proficient person; a perjury trap, bankrupt him, even threaten to go after his son.

    Right again. We are not victims of tough luck (not having the right person in the right place at the right time). We are victims of organized, deliberate subversion.

  10. @Alexander Turok

    The Enlightenment (posthumously) eats its children.
    If you don't like being ruled by politicians, you'd hate being ruled by Kings and churches. See Meghan and Harry for a preview.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @RSDB, @Almost Missouri, @advancedatheist, @songbird, @dfordoom, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan

    Rule by kings and churches is however better than rule by enlightened kings without churches which is what Voltaire liked.

  11. Yale graduates genuinely believe that a welder who makes 25 bucks an hour is who is preventing them from living the boomer-consumer dream lifestyle.

    No. Yale graduates are the banks and the establishment. Mnuchin and Kavanaugh are not weird exceptions, that’s what Yale is designed for – educating the people in power. Harvard is the same way. At an institutional level Yale and Harvard just want a seat at the table. Most of the lefty types with Ivy degrees are to provide plausible deniability. Those people never donate to the university, don’t run the endowments and if occasionally one ends up at the NYT or running a social program for a Democratic President, that’s gravy. Changing the name of a residential college is a small price to pay for having both a Supreme Court Justice and the Secretary of Treasury.

    Also anti-cop sentiment is more prevalent than you would think even among wealthy “conservatives”. The first time a Master of the Universe is pulled over for speeding and some strutting high school graduate with a badge tries to put him in his place, is when a lot of conservatives start moving to Murray Rothbard world.

    •�Agree: iffen
  12. This must be what happens to WEIRD people when institutions begin to fail.

  13. @Alexander Turok

    The Enlightenment (posthumously) eats its children.
    If you don't like being ruled by politicians, you'd hate being ruled by Kings and churches. See Meghan and Harry for a preview.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @RSDB, @Almost Missouri, @advancedatheist, @songbird, @dfordoom, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan

    But need we “be ruled” at all?

    Of course, I know the answer to this. It was “a republic, if you can keep it.” “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

    We the people are no longer “moral and religious”. It needn’t have been that way, but it is. So now do we keep pretending that we are still the two-century-ago people, or do we accept that much of our population cannot self-govern and must be governed, i.e., ruled? And if ruled, how? Note that per the previous paragraph, a Constitutional Republic is wholly inadequate.

    •�Replies: @Alexander Turok
    @Almost Missouri

    That's a quote from John Adams, who was succeeded by Thomas Jefferson, a deist. So maybe the republic was not nearly as "moral and religious" as you believe. It featured the same culture war over religion as we experience today.

    As to how it would look if it were more religious, just look at how the churches have reacted to Hurricane Floyd.

    Replies: @Almost Missouri, @Wency
    , @dfordoom
    @Almost Missouri


    We the people are no longer “moral and religious”.
    At the time of the American Revolution the decline of Christianity had already begun. How religious were the Founding Fathers? Weren't many of them Deists (which is just a fancy name for agnostics)?

    As for moral, that depends on your definition of morality. We all believe that we're moral. You can't base a nation on morality because there is no absolute morality. Many if not most of the Founding Fathers who wanted a moral and religious people also thought slavery was moral.

    Morality changes. No, I don't like the fact that it changes either, but it does. And even in a specific time period there are wild disagreements about what is moral and what is not.

    or do we accept that much of our population cannot self-govern and must be governed, i.e., ruled?
    Or, even more scary, do we accept that the whole of the population cannot self-govern and must be governed?
  14. @Alexander Turok

    The Enlightenment (posthumously) eats its children.
    If you don't like being ruled by politicians, you'd hate being ruled by Kings and churches. See Meghan and Harry for a preview.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @RSDB, @Almost Missouri, @advancedatheist, @songbird, @dfordoom, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan

    And yet our fantasy lives tell us the truth about what we really want: Despite a quarter-millennium of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment propaganda about the evils of hierarchies, traditions, aristocracies, monarchs, etc., we still find stories set in such worlds emotionally engaging and fulfilling. The pre-Enlightenment social model even works in a “futuristic,” science-fiction setting, as we can see from yet another film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune in the works.

    We also see this revealed preference in some popular comic book characters, notably Wonder Woman. WW comes from a traditional, hierarchical (but all female) society ruled by a queen; and her people emphasize self-discipline, obedience to authority, chastity, physical fitness and martial skills.

    In other words, WW’s value system rejects equality, democracy, individualism, waywardness, sexual freedom, fat acceptance and nonviolence. This makes WW about the polar opposite of a Wokevik.

  15. More than anything else, Trump needed someone to ensure the congruence of his instincts and his personnel. He never got that person because he never demanded to.

    He had Steve Bannon. Buchanan would have been a great hire as a kind of eminence grise whose job it is to say “does this take us in the right direction?” when policy is mooted.

    I must say we’ve got the opposite in the UK. Boris is no ideologue other than ‘what’s good for Boris’, but what’s good for Boris includes staying as PM. Fortunately he has Dominic Cummings as chief of staff, who is Enemy No 1 for the Guardian/BBC axis of evil after masterminding the Leave campaign which won the Brexit vote AND the GE campaign that installed Boris in No 10.

    Boris and Dom are certainly clearing the personnel decks for action, just as Blair did when he politicised the Civil Service. I don’t think they can furiously tug at the levers of institutional change as Blair did until the UK is out of the EU, and we must remember Boris is a globalist, but it’s a good start.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/28/mark-sedwill-expected-to-quit-as-uks-top-civil-servant

    Sir Mark Sedwill, the UK’s most senior civil servant, has announced he will stand down in September, prompting anger from former colleagues who say he has been unfairly smeared by Boris Johnson’s aides over the government’s coronavirus failings and for supposedly blocking changes in Whitehall.

    After weeks of tense negotiations over his job, Sedwill said in a letter to the prime minister that he would quit as cabinet secretary and head of the civil service. His other role as national security adviser will be taken by Johnson’s chief Brexit adviser, David Frost.

    His departure will be seen as a victory for Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s most senior aide, who has had a tense relationship with Sedwill, and Michael Gove, the cabinet minister who is pushing through a restructuring of government departments.

    Gove is an Intellectual Yet Idiot*, but he’s good at the detail of change.

    Johnson replied that Sedwill had made a “massive contribution” to public life over the past 30 years and had been a source of “shrewd advice”.

    “You have done it all in Whitehall: from Afghanistan to the modernisation of the civil service; from immigration policy to Brexit and defeating coronavirus,” he said.

    I like to think there was some sarcasm there, given the great success of our Afghanistan and immigration policy, but he’s probably sincere. Remember Boris has in the past called for an amnesty for illegals and for Turkey to join the EU.

    * when Muslims in Birmingham drove prostitutes off their local turf by violence and threats of riot, Gove praised it as an example of positive community action rather than the deplorable violence it would have been were the vigilantes Christian (in true CoE style, the local vicar was on the side of the prostitutes).

    •�Replies: @Ray P
    @YetAnotherAnon

    The recent English scandals (Rotherham etc.) of underage white girls being turned out by brown (mostly Muslim) men suggests that this anti-prostitute action may have the purpose of getting Muslim pimps total control over vice in the city.
  16. @Alexander Turok

    The Enlightenment (posthumously) eats its children.
    If you don't like being ruled by politicians, you'd hate being ruled by Kings and churches. See Meghan and Harry for a preview.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @RSDB, @Almost Missouri, @advancedatheist, @songbird, @dfordoom, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan

    See Meghan and Harry for a preview.

    You don’t even have to go to Meghan and Harry. You can go to the Queen who made Stephen Lawrence’s mother a baroness, or to William and his wife who both attended a worship service of Stephen, like the anniversary of his death was a saint’s day.

    But perhaps, the Windsors aren’t a good example, never having had much real power. If you think about it, their power is based on celebrity – and so they must fit into the celebrity mold, which, of course, is woke. Imagine, if they were neo-reactionaries. How long before they were assassinated, or their wealth seized?

    The Queen, if she (and her father before her) had the power to push people out of helicopters, might be an entirely different person. And England might be an entirely different place.

    •�Replies: @Jake
    @songbird

    The Brit monarchy has been almost purely ceremonial since 'The Glorious Revolution.' That was when the bankers and globalist merchants made it clear that they owned all government and would do whatever they pleased.

    As the majority of those important bankers not living in England were Jewish, and Jewish bankers in England had become a very powerful source in less than half a century of legality, it is fair to say that with the bankers/merchants coup that placed William&Mary on the throne, whatever England ruled, and then culturally conditioned and determined, became part of the Anglo-Zionist Empire.
    , @YetAnotherAnon
    @songbird

    "the Queen who made Stephen Lawrence’s mother a baroness"

    She does what the politicians tell her, even as her country is destroyed around her. Poor lady has been doing what she thinks is her duty for 60-odd years.

    Prince Charles was praising diversity to the sky last week. But it's only the Native Brits and the old Commonwealth ladies (like the Jamaicans who still wear hats and gloves to church) who care about them. The diverse young don't give a hoot and the native young have been to university and are indoctrinated with the usual views.

    When Harry and Meghan inevitably divorce it'll be like the death of Diana all over again - only this time it'll be #RoyalsSoWhite. We'll find out then how effective Charles' kowtowing has been.
  17. Twinkie provides an opportunity to repeat that had Trump brought Pat Buchanan on as chief of staff instead of Saboteur Priebus, the president’s first term would’ve looked much different than it does today:

    There used to be similar grumbling at the Reagan White House – that most of the key personnel at the Reagan White House were not Reaganites.

    I usually agree with Twinkie, but I have to take partial exception here. While it is true that Trump did himself no favors by appointing the Swamp to drain the Swamp, I don’t think the same thing can be said of Reagan. Among other things, Reagan was notable for bringing a lot of outside-the-Beltway, often non-Republican Party people. There were free-wheeling businessmen, (e.g., Weinberger, Donovan), many were from the West before there was the concept of “Left Coast” and all that implies. They had almost all worked real jobs in the real economy outside of the DC “public service” grift. (It was also notable how many of them had served in the military, often joining in the enlisted ranks, often during a real shooting war.) And even when they were in the Party, they were more often from the iconoclastic wing (e.g., Kirkpatrick, Watt).

    For a taste of what might have been, check the comments when Sailer canvassed his readers for recommendations for the Trump cabinet.

    https://www.unz.com/isteve/who-should-be-in-the-trump-administration

    •�Replies: @Twinkie
    @Almost Missouri

    This is from 1982 - NYT of all places: “The Conservative Digest delegate poll gave the President [Reagan] a D on the issue of appointing ''non-Reaganites'' to high office...”

    Look at these names: https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/sreference/cabinet-members

    How many were Reaganites, do you think?

    Replies: @Johann Ricke
    , @Anon
    @Almost Missouri

    Few men or women could’ve withstood the anti-Trump hurricane-force headwinds for even 4 seconds which Trump has had to withstand, even if clumsily, for 4 years. The FBI secret police has targeted everyone around Trump starting in 2015 and no doubt has secretly threatened those around him to agree to become informants for them, or else.

    Forty years ago Deep State and the permanent bureaucracy didn’t have the stranglehold on all levers of power like they have today. And while the media had a liberal bent during the Reagan Era it was far from the media we have nowadays which makes DPRK media look like real news.

    At this point I don’t think Deep State and the permanent bureaucracy can be eradicated or even pushed back one iota. It’s a cancer that has metastasized into every organ of the body and every cell of the brain.
  18. @Rosie
    @Cloudbuster


    There’s a certain type on the right that thinks monarchy is the answer to all the problems with democracy.
    Indeed. Reactionaries think they know better than the reformers who were eyewitnesses to the problems that necessitated the reforms to begin with.

    The mere fact that a reform occurred does not, ipso facto, imply that it was good, but it certainly does counsel against going back rather than looking for new solutions.

    Replies: @Wency, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan

    The lesson I would take from reformers is not to be blind to the problems of past systems. Some of the reformers were very reasonable people. Stolypin comes to mind. But also, there are always reformers. Someone always wants to change the system. William the Conqueror was a reformer.

    The whole debate about monarchy is moot, because it’s impossible to go back, even if you want to. If you wanted to implement and maintain a traditional Christian monarchy, you would have to do it with a brutal police state and massive purges that those traditional Christian monarchies didn’t actually have.

    It’s kind of like the saying “you can never go home again”.

    Russia would almost certainly be better off today if the Romanovs had stayed in power. So the tendency to pine for the Romanovs is somewhat understandable. But the fact of the matter is that the dynasty ended when it produced a czar who was entirely unsuited to resisting leftist agitation, and the result was the worst and most destructive leftist signaling spiral in the history of Europe. It’s foolish to think another Romanov-like dynasty wouldn’t have the same problem.

    •�Replies: @Jake
    @Wency

    After nearly 400 years? That's a hell of a lot better than multicultural democracy.

    Russia faltered less because Nicholas II was a weak Tsar than because most of the West wanted Tsarist Russia reduced and 'reformed.'

    In other words. ever liberalizing Western democracies kept acting in ways that placed growing pressure on Russia, because they were in rather open rebellion against whatever deep culture of Christendom remained in their lands.

    It is either Christ and Christendom or Satan's multi-culti, Democratic/Capitalist/Globalist Chaos.

    Replies: @dfordoom
    , @V. K. Ovelund
    @Wency


    ... it’s impossible to go back, ...
    What do you mean?

    Replies: @Wency
  19. Jake says:

    Sailer quotes Twinkie: “That’s always been the great failure of conservatives and now nationalists – fixating on the soundness of ideas and neglecting the inculcation and development of a wide pool of competent public intellectuals, elected officials, and administrators who can govern well once the elections are won.”

    That was not the great failure of the Reagan administration, which was mentioned just before the quoted line. THE great failure of the Reagan administration was in allowing the Neocons to take control of foreign policy and – even worse, much worse – of policy related to national history and culture.

    The Reagan administration picked the wrong idea, a very bad idea, an evil idea, meant both to have the US play Permanent War for Perpetual Peace and to accelerate the until then fairly mild culture war against white middle American males.

    •�Replies: @Lowe
    @Jake

    Not creating a pool of public intellectuals is not a failure or conservatives or nationalists, anyway. It's a consequence of their ideology.

    The ideology that provides the best means to secure power is the one that will create a large pool of intellectuals, because it attracts them. That is why classical Marcism

    Replies: @Lowe
  20. Jake says:
    @Wency
    @Rosie

    The lesson I would take from reformers is not to be blind to the problems of past systems. Some of the reformers were very reasonable people. Stolypin comes to mind. But also, there are always reformers. Someone always wants to change the system. William the Conqueror was a reformer.

    The whole debate about monarchy is moot, because it's impossible to go back, even if you want to. If you wanted to implement and maintain a traditional Christian monarchy, you would have to do it with a brutal police state and massive purges that those traditional Christian monarchies didn't actually have.

    It's kind of like the saying "you can never go home again".

    Russia would almost certainly be better off today if the Romanovs had stayed in power. So the tendency to pine for the Romanovs is somewhat understandable. But the fact of the matter is that the dynasty ended when it produced a czar who was entirely unsuited to resisting leftist agitation, and the result was the worst and most destructive leftist signaling spiral in the history of Europe. It's foolish to think another Romanov-like dynasty wouldn't have the same problem.

    Replies: @Jake, @V. K. Ovelund

    After nearly 400 years? That’s a hell of a lot better than multicultural democracy.

    Russia faltered less because Nicholas II was a weak Tsar than because most of the West wanted Tsarist Russia reduced and ‘reformed.’

    In other words. ever liberalizing Western democracies kept acting in ways that placed growing pressure on Russia, because they were in rather open rebellion against whatever deep culture of Christendom remained in their lands.

    It is either Christ and Christendom or Satan’s multi-culti, Democratic/Capitalist/Globalist Chaos.

    •�Replies: @dfordoom
    @Jake


    It is either Christ and Christendom or Satan’s multi-culti, Democratic/Capitalist/Globalist Chaos.
    Given that Christendom is as dead as the dodo and Christianity itself is a dying religion you'd better start looking for a third alternative.

    As other commenters have said, you can't go back. Christendom is not coming back.

    Replies: @Hearts on Fire
  21. Jake says:
    @songbird
    @Alexander Turok


    See Meghan and Harry for a preview.
    You don't even have to go to Meghan and Harry. You can go to the Queen who made Stephen Lawrence's mother a baroness, or to William and his wife who both attended a worship service of Stephen, like the anniversary of his death was a saint's day.

    But perhaps, the Windsors aren't a good example, never having had much real power. If you think about it, their power is based on celebrity - and so they must fit into the celebrity mold, which, of course, is woke. Imagine, if they were neo-reactionaries. How long before they were assassinated, or their wealth seized?

    The Queen, if she (and her father before her) had the power to push people out of helicopters, might be an entirely different person. And England might be an entirely different place.

    Replies: @Jake, @YetAnotherAnon

    The Brit monarchy has been almost purely ceremonial since ‘The Glorious Revolution.’ That was when the bankers and globalist merchants made it clear that they owned all government and would do whatever they pleased.

    As the majority of those important bankers not living in England were Jewish, and Jewish bankers in England had become a very powerful source in less than half a century of legality, it is fair to say that with the bankers/merchants coup that placed William&Mary on the throne, whatever England ruled, and then culturally conditioned and determined, became part of the Anglo-Zionist Empire.

  22. @songbird
    @Alexander Turok


    See Meghan and Harry for a preview.
    You don't even have to go to Meghan and Harry. You can go to the Queen who made Stephen Lawrence's mother a baroness, or to William and his wife who both attended a worship service of Stephen, like the anniversary of his death was a saint's day.

    But perhaps, the Windsors aren't a good example, never having had much real power. If you think about it, their power is based on celebrity - and so they must fit into the celebrity mold, which, of course, is woke. Imagine, if they were neo-reactionaries. How long before they were assassinated, or their wealth seized?

    The Queen, if she (and her father before her) had the power to push people out of helicopters, might be an entirely different person. And England might be an entirely different place.

    Replies: @Jake, @YetAnotherAnon

    “the Queen who made Stephen Lawrence’s mother a baroness”

    She does what the politicians tell her, even as her country is destroyed around her. Poor lady has been doing what she thinks is her duty for 60-odd years.

    Prince Charles was praising diversity to the sky last week. But it’s only the Native Brits and the old Commonwealth ladies (like the Jamaicans who still wear hats and gloves to church) who care about them. The diverse young don’t give a hoot and the native young have been to university and are indoctrinated with the usual views.

    When Harry and Meghan inevitably divorce it’ll be like the death of Diana all over again – only this time it’ll be #RoyalsSoWhite. We’ll find out then how effective Charles’ kowtowing has been.

  23. anon[129] •�Disclaimer says:
    @EliteCommInc.
    "A white cop killing a white civilian, so there is no dimension of race here at all."


    That may be accurate for this particular incident. However, any suggestion that the system is not tiered against people of color, especially blacks, especially black males, is just destroyed by the record, not merely playing the numbers game with the extreme incidents leading to death.


    it would be nice to think that is not the case, but is simply does not bare out when one tracks us history including the present. And I am going to roundly reject the suggestion that anyone in police custody be shorn of their due process rights because you or anyone thinks they inhabit some state if deserving the same. You undercut your case by highlighting a wrong and then proceed to justify the same wrong in some circumstance you decide or the system you decry decides ----

    totally unacceptable and rejected on its face.

    Replies: @anon, @Curmudgeon

    That may be accurate for this particular incident. However, any suggestion that the system is not tiered against people of color, especially blacks, especially black males, is just destroyed by the record

    That’s not true at all. How many times does this nonsense have to be debunked before it goes away?

    FBI Data: Blacks, Who Are Only 13.4% of the Population, Were 54.9% of Known Murder Offenders in 2018

    https://www.unz.com/isteve/fbi-blacks-who-are-only-13-4-of-the-population-were-54-9-of-known-murder-offenders-in-2018/

    Police are more likely to shoot whites, not blacks

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/13/why-a-massive-new-study-on-police-shootings-of-whites-and-blacks-is-so-controversial/?utm_term=.1db63f3f7797

    blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well. Blacks are also overrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes—by 50 percent—according to the most recent Justice Department data from 2017; whites are underrepresented by 24 percent.

    https://www.city-journal.org/democratic-candidates-racism-crime

    “There is no empirical evidence demonstrating any racial bias in drug arrest rates, and … no bias in arrest rates for violent crimes .. black and white police officers do not differ in their propensity to arrest African Americans.”

    https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/american-racism-and-the-anti-white-left/

    The Myth of Systemic Police Racism

    Hold officers accountable who use excessive force. But there’s no evidence of widespread racial bias.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-systemic-police-racism-11591119883

    There are many other links available. At some point, we should declare these kinds of false statements blood libel hate speech and punish them.

    •�Agree: V. K. Ovelund
  24. @Cloudbuster
    @Alexander Turok

    There's a certain type on the right that thinks monarchy is the answer to all the problems with democracy. This fills me with so much anger I can barely stand to talk to them. It's not as if we don't have millennia of examples of monarchy to see that it is in no way a particularly superior form of government. I'm not saying it is always worse -- there can be well-managed monarchies and badly-managed republics, but the problems with monarchy are legion and obvious.

    Replies: @Rosie, @neutral, @Intelligent Dasein

    Monarchy has problems, but by now everyone should agree that democracy is the worst form of government, any alternative is better than democracy.

    •�Replies: @Cloudbuster
    @neutral

    Oh, should we?

    Replies: @Athletic and Whitesplosive
  25. Wency says:

    In the Shaver killing, my understanding is the cop giving the confusing directions in the video was not the one who did the shooting. I think the one giving instructions should also have been punished. He was basically an accessory to the crime, and seems to have amped up the one who actually shot him, by constantly threatening to shoot the guy.

    I don’t really understand the mentality that led to this situation. The basic situation the cops were responding to is “Someone saw a gun at night.” This taking place in a suburb, in a generally pro-gun state. No report of shots fired, the wielder wasn’t making any threats or insane proclamations. Just, someone had a gun.

    And the police seem to have responded to the call as if this guy was John Wilkes Booth, armed, dangerous, and cornered after shooting the President.

    I still believe it’s best to comply with the police, but the lesson I learned from this is if you’re getting confusing, difficult-to-follow directions, just tell the police you’re confused, you’re going to assume a single, non-threatening pose, then slowly assume that pose, and don’t do anything else. He was already on the ground. Just say “I’m going to lie down, spread-eagle.” And then ignore everything else they yell at you until they either go away or put you in cuffs.

    •�Replies: @Adam Smith
    @Wency


    And then ignore everything else they yell at you until they either go away or put you in cuffs.
    Or kill you for failure to obey.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYRRSdjdcbo

    I think the one giving instructions should also have been punished.
    Also?

    Not only did Brailsford get off scot-free, after his acquittal he was temporarily rehired by the same department so he could apply for a disability pension. He claims he has PTSD because of the murder he committed. He now collects $2,569.21 each month on disability. At $30,830.52 a year, he will collect $1,109,898.72 if he lives to the retirement age of 66 years old. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mesa gave this worthless thug a medal for bravery or something.

    Meanwhile Laney Sweet, Daniel Shaver’s widow, still fights for compensation for the wrongful death of her husband.

    https://www.gofundme.com/f/RelentlessJustice

    What happened to Daniel Shaver could happen to any of us.
    The police are a danger to us all.

  26. @neutral
    @Cloudbuster

    Monarchy has problems, but by now everyone should agree that democracy is the worst form of government, any alternative is better than democracy.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster

    Oh, should we?

    •�Agree: Lockean Proviso
    •�Replies: @Athletic and Whitesplosive
    @Cloudbuster

    Examples of Monarchies that pursued total ethnic replacement as their central governing strategy? (Obviously an invasion of a foreign land to be replaced by their own citizens wouldn't count, as foreigners weren't citizens. Besides, this is a much less perverse policy if still unethical).

    The problems of monarchy have been severe, but recoverable (short of mistakes that got their entire kingdom wiped out, but that's usually not purely bad governance, and there are no roving barbarian hordes now that could challenge the military of any modern state). But liberal democracy is bent on destroying western nations permanently within the next century, it's literally the worst thing that a government could possibly do to its subjects.

    And besides that, most of monarchy's problems stem from having a permanent ruler (or ruling class) that can't be removed for governing badly. Well, does anyone with a brain really think the rulers of the Western world change every few years? It's more like their tools for interacting with the levers of power change slightly every year. But this of course is messy and harder to manage, and since they have no 'de jure' legitimacy for their rule, this leads to the totally destructive schemes we're currently subject to as methods of ensuring a smoother transition between the managerial class.

    I believe with absolute certainty that we would be better of with direct legal rule beneath EVEN the current ruling class, because then these convoluted vote rigging schemes and labor arbitrage with the third world (to please the business class) wouldn't be necessary. Further, it would lead to a clearer understanding of how power works (which is totally non existent in the west), and counterintuitively, at least some measure of responsibility and accountability for their actions. Nobles, kings, etc occasionally got killed for doing a terrible job. If you think middlemen getting voted out of office (complete with fat pension) is accountability, you're dreaming.

    Today, all discontent with governance is directed at the 'system'. If you think anger at the 'system' (which 99.9% of people have absolutely no understanding of, and which they can only conceive of in a way that the propaganda of the ruling class dictates) worries international Oligarchs, I promise you it doesn't. Now imagine if all of this violent and aimless anger were instead directed at those few particular people who were responsible for how society operates. Now that's an incentive not to fuck everyone over.

    Replies: @JohnPlywood
  27. @Almost Missouri
    @Alexander Turok

    But need we "be ruled" at all?

    Of course, I know the answer to this. It was "a republic, if you can keep it." "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

    We the people are no longer "moral and religious". It needn't have been that way, but it is. So now do we keep pretending that we are still the two-century-ago people, or do we accept that much of our population cannot self-govern and must be governed, i.e., ruled? And if ruled, how? Note that per the previous paragraph, a Constitutional Republic is wholly inadequate.

    Replies: @Alexander Turok, @dfordoom

    That’s a quote from John Adams, who was succeeded by Thomas Jefferson, a deist. So maybe the republic was not nearly as “moral and religious” as you believe. It featured the same culture war over religion as we experience today.

    As to how it would look if it were more religious, just look at how the churches have reacted to Hurricane Floyd.

    •�Replies: @Almost Missouri
    @Alexander Turok

    The difference between enlightened moral Congregationalist Adams versus enlightened moral Deist Jefferson is as nothing compared to the difference between them versus what we have today.

    just look at how the churches have reacted to Hurricane Floyd.
    Besides some names and some buildings, how much do the churches of today share with those of Adams's time?
    , @Wency
    @Alexander Turok

    Outside the mainliners, I'm not aware of all that much over the top here. At my evangelical church, the first week this was going on, our pastor spent about 10 minutes talking about the issues condemning racism, praying for leadership and healing, affirming that all people are made in the image of God, and then moved on. There was also a note about it in the weekly e-mail. I think that, in practice, something like this is what most churches have done. Most evangelical churches aspire to a fair degree of apoliticism from the pulpit.
  28. @Intelligent Dasein
    @Cloudbuster


    Not one city was looted and burned.
    They're being looted and burned now, and it isn't for George Floyd. This is what I was talking about in my previous comment that AE called "going meta."

    5/6ths of the BLM rioters are white. They don't really know or care anything about George Floyd. They think they do, but they don't. What they do know, subconsciously, is that the death of a black man in police custody grants permission to run wild according to the current narrative while the death of a white man in similar circumstances does not. They didn't riot over Daniel Shaver because they could not; such a thing is not a valid move in the social game as it's currently played. But even the death of George Floyd would have been powerless to impel any action unless some underlying desire was already there. That desire is provided by an inarticulate sense that the system, of which the police are the visible representatives, is horribly out of control and unfair. The Daniel Shaver murder certainly creates that impression and provides it with weight, even if nobody consciously links back to it. Shaver is the reality; George Floyd is the pretext.

    There is something inside human beings that is so tender that it can scarcely express itself unless it is cloaked in pretext, irony, and lies. Daniel Shaver is having his revenge through the unlikely instrument of BLM.

    Replies: @EmailAsID

    All your race-neutral explanations of foundational causes do not change the fact that the BLM protests have accelerated the process of whites being made into second-class citizens in a country where they are still the majority. Because of this, your analysis is harmful to whites.

    After all, haven’t we have all been recently taught that

    silence = violence

  29. @Cloudbuster
    @Alexander Turok

    There's a certain type on the right that thinks monarchy is the answer to all the problems with democracy. This fills me with so much anger I can barely stand to talk to them. It's not as if we don't have millennia of examples of monarchy to see that it is in no way a particularly superior form of government. I'm not saying it is always worse -- there can be well-managed monarchies and badly-managed republics, but the problems with monarchy are legion and obvious.

    Replies: @Rosie, @neutral, @Intelligent Dasein

    Monarchy is the only type of government that makes explicit what is cryptically present in all the others—that there is always a hierarchy and there is always only one ruler-will at the top. Monarchy is not an idea someone had nor is it one alternative among many types of government. It is government, and no power that ever existed, existed in any other form but this.

    The real power of a king can be effectively limited by other real powers so that it doesn’t become tyrannical. I doubt whether there has ever been a larger proportion of contented ordinary people than there has under monarchy.

    •�Replies: @Cloudbuster
    @Intelligent Dasein

    The real power of a king can be effectively limited by other real powers so that it doesn’t become tyrannical.

    That conflicts with your previous statement that monarchy is government, that there is "always only one ruler-will on top." As we see all the "real" powers eventually move toward consolidation, as it benefits them.

    I doubt whether there has ever been a larger proportion of contented ordinary people than there has under monarchy.

    That is a conveniently unverifiable statement.

    To the degree people were ever happy under monarchy, it was because most powerful monarchies existed in pre-technological times and the power of the monarch to interfere in his peoples' ordinary lives was greatly limited. As Wency says:

    "The whole debate about monarchy is moot, because it’s impossible to go back, even if you want to. If you wanted to implement and maintain a traditional Christian monarchy, you would have to do it with a brutal police state and massive purges that those traditional Christian monarchies didn’t actually have."

    Both the nature of the people and the nature of government have changed. That genie can't go back in the bottle. I, for one, don't want to live in North Korea, under a Supreme Leader. I don't even want to live in China under the watchful eye of a near omnipresent, intrusive state. Maybe that works for East Asians, but it doesn't work for many Westerners. I think most people in Eastern Europe were glad to be rid of the Soviets and their strong, intrusive state.

    Westerners live better in relatively small, homogeneous polities, like Iceland, that allow the citizens a great deal of freedom. Homogeneous and small being the key words there. I don't know what the upper bound is, but I'm pretty sure it is somewhere below the current size of the US and the EU, but their problems are probably due nearly as much to heterogeneity as size.

    Replies: @128, @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    , @SunBakedSuburb
    @Intelligent Dasein

    "contented ordinary people ... under monarchy"

    Is there a system between chaos and the ancient rule by bloodline sickness? Let's try that one.
    , @Old Palo Altan
    @Intelligent Dasein

    It's like with the blacks.

    We all see in their case that they are unlike all other races in some way which we cannot explain, but all races know, just like the dog who knows that the coyote is perhaps similar, but not the same, and thus approachable only with peril, and integrable not at all.

    We know that monarchy is the natural form of government and, pace one of your commentators, don't need to bother "proving" it: it speaks for itself, if only to those who can hear.

    The end of monarchy in Europe in 1918 was the end of Europe. This would have been clear only to those who could see and hear in 1918, but now it is only those who refuse to use eye or ear (or cannot, blinded as they are by comical illusions of "progress") who do not grasp this melancholy but inescapable truth.

    Replies: @anon, @dfordoom
  30. @Alexander Turok
    @Almost Missouri

    That's a quote from John Adams, who was succeeded by Thomas Jefferson, a deist. So maybe the republic was not nearly as "moral and religious" as you believe. It featured the same culture war over religion as we experience today.

    As to how it would look if it were more religious, just look at how the churches have reacted to Hurricane Floyd.

    Replies: @Almost Missouri, @Wency

    The difference between enlightened moral Congregationalist Adams versus enlightened moral Deist Jefferson is as nothing compared to the difference between them versus what we have today.

    just look at how the churches have reacted to Hurricane Floyd.

    Besides some names and some buildings, how much do the churches of today share with those of Adams’s time?

  31. @Almost Missouri

    Twinkie provides an opportunity to repeat that had Trump brought Pat Buchanan on as chief of staff instead of Saboteur Priebus, the president’s first term would’ve looked much different than it does today:

    There used to be similar grumbling at the Reagan White House – that most of the key personnel at the Reagan White House were not Reaganites.

    I usually agree with Twinkie, but I have to take partial exception here. While it is true that Trump did himself no favors by appointing the Swamp to drain the Swamp, I don't think the same thing can be said of Reagan. Among other things, Reagan was notable for bringing a lot of outside-the-Beltway, often non-Republican Party people. There were free-wheeling businessmen, (e.g., Weinberger, Donovan), many were from the West before there was the concept of "Left Coast" and all that implies. They had almost all worked real jobs in the real economy outside of the DC "public service" grift. (It was also notable how many of them had served in the military, often joining in the enlisted ranks, often during a real shooting war.) And even when they were in the Party, they were more often from the iconoclastic wing (e.g., Kirkpatrick, Watt).

    For a taste of what might have been, check the comments when Sailer canvassed his readers for recommendations for the Trump cabinet.

    https://www.unz.com/isteve/who-should-be-in-the-trump-administration

    Replies: @Twinkie, @Anon

    This is from 1982 – NYT of all places: “The Conservative Digest delegate poll gave the President [Reagan] a D on the issue of appointing ”non-Reaganites” to high office…”

    Look at these names: https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/sreference/cabinet-members

    How many were Reaganites, do you think?

    •�Replies: @Johann Ricke
    @Twinkie


    Look at these names: https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/sreference/cabinet-members

    How many were Reaganites, do you think?
    James Watt, the Interior guy, was my favorite Reagan appointee.
  32. @Wency
    In the Shaver killing, my understanding is the cop giving the confusing directions in the video was not the one who did the shooting. I think the one giving instructions should also have been punished. He was basically an accessory to the crime, and seems to have amped up the one who actually shot him, by constantly threatening to shoot the guy.

    I don't really understand the mentality that led to this situation. The basic situation the cops were responding to is "Someone saw a gun at night." This taking place in a suburb, in a generally pro-gun state. No report of shots fired, the wielder wasn't making any threats or insane proclamations. Just, someone had a gun.

    And the police seem to have responded to the call as if this guy was John Wilkes Booth, armed, dangerous, and cornered after shooting the President.

    I still believe it's best to comply with the police, but the lesson I learned from this is if you're getting confusing, difficult-to-follow directions, just tell the police you're confused, you're going to assume a single, non-threatening pose, then slowly assume that pose, and don't do anything else. He was already on the ground. Just say "I'm going to lie down, spread-eagle." And then ignore everything else they yell at you until they either go away or put you in cuffs.

    Replies: @Adam Smith

    And then ignore everything else they yell at you until they either go away or put you in cuffs.

    Or kill you for failure to obey.

    I think the one giving instructions should also have been punished.

    Also?

    Not only did Brailsford get off scot-free, after his acquittal he was temporarily rehired by the same department so he could apply for a disability pension. He claims he has PTSD because of the murder he committed. He now collects $2,569.21 each month on disability. At $30,830.52 a year, he will collect $1,109,898.72 if he lives to the retirement age of 66 years old. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mesa gave this worthless thug a medal for bravery or something.

    Meanwhile Laney Sweet, Daniel Shaver’s widow, still fights for compensation for the wrongful death of her husband.

    https://www.gofundme.com/f/RelentlessJustice

    What happened to Daniel Shaver could happen to any of us.
    The police are a danger to us all.

    •�Agree: Mr. Rational, botazefa
  33. @Cloudbuster
    The hardest thing to take about the Daniel Shaver murder was that not only did the cop get off completely, he was allowed to retired with a $2500/month pension due to his PTSD over murdering Shaver, poor guy.

    Not one city was looted and burned.

    Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @Curmudgeon

    he was allowed to retired with a $2500/month pension due to his PTSD over murdering Shaver,

    It would be nice if the pension red herring were stopped. Pensions are paid by the rules of the pension plan eligibility. The only link to employment is whether the person is an active member, i.e. the plan still receiving contributions.
    While I agree it is a travesty that the cop walked without prosecution, to a pension plan the only issue is whether, under the rules of the plan, he is entitled to a pension. It wouldn’t matter if he were in prison anymore than it would for someone with a 401k.
    In the case of “his PTSD” while some pension plans have a disability benefit as part of the plan, the norm is some form of disability insurance. In either case, the benefit is only payable while medical information confirms that the person is, in fact, disabled. Therefore, until the cop reaches eligibility for retirement, he is not “retired” he is disabled. Again, even if he were in prison, as long as he is disabled an insurance company could be required to pay him, depending on the plan text.
    Let’s stick to the issue of culpability and not drag in irrelevant matters to the issue at hand.

    •�Replies: @Cloudbuster
    @Curmudgeon

    I don't regard it as an irrelevant matter, since his supposed "disability" was caused by his murder. He was effectively rewarded for murdering a man.

    Replies: @V. Hickel, @Curmudgeon
    , @anon
    @Curmudgeon

    It would be nice if the pension red herring were stopped. Pensions are paid by the rules of the pension plan eligibility. The only link to employment is whether the person is an active member, i.e. the plan still receiving contributions.
    While I agree it is a travesty that the cop walked without prosecution, to a pension plan the only issue is whether, under the rules of the plan, he is entitled to a pension.

    Read Cloudbuster's comment and view the video.

    Then search on the case. If that's too hard for you, consider that the cop in question;;

    *Was originally hired rather nepotistically
    * Was fired after this shooting
    * Was indicted on 2nd degree murder charges
    * Had a dust cover on his gun with the words "YOU'RE FUCKED" engraved inside such that when he chambered a round that slogan would become visible. The judge in the case refused to allow it as evidence of mindset, in my personal opinion that judge should have been removed.
    * Was found "not guilty"
    * Then, and only then, was re-hired just long enough for him to apply for a disability due to PTSD allegedly caused by the shooting.

    Do you see anything wrong with any of this? Did you know any of it until now? If now, why are you commenting at all?

    It baffles me why so many people who comment on this site can't figure out how to Google anything.

    Replies: @Curmudgeon
    , @botazefa
    @Curmudgeon


    Let’s stick to the issue of culpability and not drag in irrelevant matters to the issue at hand.
    I think it is relevant that he profited from murder. That isn't supposed to happen.

    Yeah I know - so did OJ
  34. Trump dumped all the nationalists that brought him to the White House.

    His son-in-law and daughter are now his chief advisors.

    That’s why his poll numbers are going down.

    BLM is NOT about the Enlightenment, BTW.

    Quite the reverse actually.

  35. @EliteCommInc.
    "A white cop killing a white civilian, so there is no dimension of race here at all."


    That may be accurate for this particular incident. However, any suggestion that the system is not tiered against people of color, especially blacks, especially black males, is just destroyed by the record, not merely playing the numbers game with the extreme incidents leading to death.


    it would be nice to think that is not the case, but is simply does not bare out when one tracks us history including the present. And I am going to roundly reject the suggestion that anyone in police custody be shorn of their due process rights because you or anyone thinks they inhabit some state if deserving the same. You undercut your case by highlighting a wrong and then proceed to justify the same wrong in some circumstance you decide or the system you decry decides ----

    totally unacceptable and rejected on its face.

    Replies: @anon, @Curmudgeon

    However, any suggestion that the system is not tiered against people of color, especially blacks, especially black males, is just destroyed by the record, not merely playing the numbers game with the extreme incidents leading to death.

    Is the numbers game the FBI crime statistics that show cops are more likely to shoot Whites than Blacks and that Black cops are more likely to shoot Blacks than White cops are?

    How is the system “tiered” against Blacks? The NYC statistics showed that Blacks and Hispanics were involved in 90% of the crime in New York, with Blacks being approximately twice that of Hispanics. If Blacks are identified as suspects in crime at 6 times the rate of Whites, that would mean 6 times the likelihood of interaction with police. How is that tiered? Is it the fault of police if witnesses say the perp was Black?

    Of course no one should be shorn of their due process rights, irrespective of colour. The problem is the system(s) has been corrupted. It is no longer a justice system, it is a prosecution system. Justice is a process where all evidence is weighed not a guaranteed result where evidence is hidden, manufactured, or ignored. There are Whites that are wrongfully convicted as well as Blacks. The fact that Blacks are identified by witnesses at higher rates than Whites increases the possibility of wrongful convictions, particularly when finding a suspect not the correct suspect is the goal.

  36. @YetAnotherAnon

    More than anything else, Trump needed someone to ensure the congruence of his instincts and his personnel. He never got that person because he never demanded to.
    He had Steve Bannon. Buchanan would have been a great hire as a kind of eminence grise whose job it is to say "does this take us in the right direction?" when policy is mooted.

    I must say we've got the opposite in the UK. Boris is no ideologue other than 'what's good for Boris', but what's good for Boris includes staying as PM. Fortunately he has Dominic Cummings as chief of staff, who is Enemy No 1 for the Guardian/BBC axis of evil after masterminding the Leave campaign which won the Brexit vote AND the GE campaign that installed Boris in No 10.

    Boris and Dom are certainly clearing the personnel decks for action, just as Blair did when he politicised the Civil Service. I don't think they can furiously tug at the levers of institutional change as Blair did until the UK is out of the EU, and we must remember Boris is a globalist, but it's a good start.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/28/mark-sedwill-expected-to-quit-as-uks-top-civil-servant

    Sir Mark Sedwill, the UK’s most senior civil servant, has announced he will stand down in September, prompting anger from former colleagues who say he has been unfairly smeared by Boris Johnson’s aides over the government’s coronavirus failings and for supposedly blocking changes in Whitehall.

    After weeks of tense negotiations over his job, Sedwill said in a letter to the prime minister that he would quit as cabinet secretary and head of the civil service. His other role as national security adviser will be taken by Johnson’s chief Brexit adviser, David Frost.

    His departure will be seen as a victory for Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s most senior aide, who has had a tense relationship with Sedwill, and Michael Gove, the cabinet minister who is pushing through a restructuring of government departments.
    Gove is an Intellectual Yet Idiot*, but he's good at the detail of change.

    Johnson replied that Sedwill had made a “massive contribution” to public life over the past 30 years and had been a source of “shrewd advice”.

    “You have done it all in Whitehall: from Afghanistan to the modernisation of the civil service; from immigration policy to Brexit and defeating coronavirus,” he said.
    I like to think there was some sarcasm there, given the great success of our Afghanistan and immigration policy, but he's probably sincere. Remember Boris has in the past called for an amnesty for illegals and for Turkey to join the EU.


    * when Muslims in Birmingham drove prostitutes off their local turf by violence and threats of riot, Gove praised it as an example of positive community action rather than the deplorable violence it would have been were the vigilantes Christian (in true CoE style, the local vicar was on the side of the prostitutes).

    Replies: @Ray P

    The recent English scandals (Rotherham etc.) of underage white girls being turned out by brown (mostly Muslim) men suggests that this anti-prostitute action may have the purpose of getting Muslim pimps total control over vice in the city.

  37. Hell is a monarchy; but, then, so is Heaven. Democracy lies somewhere betwixt the two, leaning one way or the other.

  38. @Curmudgeon
    @Cloudbuster


    he was allowed to retired with a $2500/month pension due to his PTSD over murdering Shaver,
    It would be nice if the pension red herring were stopped. Pensions are paid by the rules of the pension plan eligibility. The only link to employment is whether the person is an active member, i.e. the plan still receiving contributions.
    While I agree it is a travesty that the cop walked without prosecution, to a pension plan the only issue is whether, under the rules of the plan, he is entitled to a pension. It wouldn't matter if he were in prison anymore than it would for someone with a 401k.
    In the case of "his PTSD" while some pension plans have a disability benefit as part of the plan, the norm is some form of disability insurance. In either case, the benefit is only payable while medical information confirms that the person is, in fact, disabled. Therefore, until the cop reaches eligibility for retirement, he is not "retired" he is disabled. Again, even if he were in prison, as long as he is disabled an insurance company could be required to pay him, depending on the plan text.
    Let's stick to the issue of culpability and not drag in irrelevant matters to the issue at hand.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @anon, @botazefa

    I don’t regard it as an irrelevant matter, since his supposed “disability” was caused by his murder. He was effectively rewarded for murdering a man.

    •�Replies: @V. Hickel
    @Cloudbuster

    and if he had been terminated, as he should have been, he would lost any claim to said pension.
    , @Curmudgeon
    @Cloudbuster

    Apparently, you don't get it.
    An employer doesn't get to decide whether someone gets a pension, the pension plan does. The employer's actions, like terminating employment, might result in a reduced pension, but not a cancellation of a pension benefit, of some sort. The same goes for an insurance company. If the termination of employment occurs after the disability, the insurance company may try to avoid payment, but will likely be unsuccessful. This would be no different than an insurance company cancelling your house insurance and refusing to pay, after your house burned down and resulted in a fatality.
    Whether or not he was "effectively rewarded for murdering a man", is out of his hands. He didn't reward himself. I am astonished that no charges were laid, it seemed obvious to me that the guy was on a power trip. However, whether charged or not, the third party entity(s) - the pension plan and/or insurance companies have to follow their legal obligations.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster
  39. @Intelligent Dasein
    @Cloudbuster

    Monarchy is the only type of government that makes explicit what is cryptically present in all the others---that there is always a hierarchy and there is always only one ruler-will at the top. Monarchy is not an idea someone had nor is it one alternative among many types of government. It is government, and no power that ever existed, existed in any other form but this.

    The real power of a king can be effectively limited by other real powers so that it doesn't become tyrannical. I doubt whether there has ever been a larger proportion of contented ordinary people than there has under monarchy.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @SunBakedSuburb, @Old Palo Altan

    The real power of a king can be effectively limited by other real powers so that it doesn’t become tyrannical.

    That conflicts with your previous statement that monarchy is government, that there is “always only one ruler-will on top.” As we see all the “real” powers eventually move toward consolidation, as it benefits them.

    I doubt whether there has ever been a larger proportion of contented ordinary people than there has under monarchy.

    That is a conveniently unverifiable statement.

    To the degree people were ever happy under monarchy, it was because most powerful monarchies existed in pre-technological times and the power of the monarch to interfere in his peoples’ ordinary lives was greatly limited. As Wency says:

    “The whole debate about monarchy is moot, because it’s impossible to go back, even if you want to. If you wanted to implement and maintain a traditional Christian monarchy, you would have to do it with a brutal police state and massive purges that those traditional Christian monarchies didn’t actually have.”

    Both the nature of the people and the nature of government have changed. That genie can’t go back in the bottle. I, for one, don’t want to live in North Korea, under a Supreme Leader. I don’t even want to live in China under the watchful eye of a near omnipresent, intrusive state. Maybe that works for East Asians, but it doesn’t work for many Westerners. I think most people in Eastern Europe were glad to be rid of the Soviets and their strong, intrusive state.

    Westerners live better in relatively small, homogeneous polities, like Iceland, that allow the citizens a great deal of freedom. Homogeneous and small being the key words there. I don’t know what the upper bound is, but I’m pretty sure it is somewhere below the current size of the US and the EU, but their problems are probably due nearly as much to heterogeneity as size.

    •�Replies: @128
    @Cloudbuster

    What makes you think the fundamental moral order of the universe has somehow changed, compared to 1500, just because you perceived it has changed?
    , @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    @Cloudbuster


    I, for one, don’t want to live in North Korea, under a Supreme Leader. I don’t even want to live in China under the watchful eye of a near omnipresent, intrusive state.
    This is a complete strawman, as is Wency's claim that a monarchy would require a "brutal police state." There is absolutely no reason to believe that a monarchy would need to be more brutal or moniter its citizens more closely than a democracy.

    In fact it's quite the opposite; a democratic ruler is directly dependent on public opinion to retain power. So in a democracy, the government is incentivized to manipulate public opinion by any means possible. Can this become any more apparent than in the 24/7 propganda monstrosity that characterizes modern America? By contrast, in a monarchy, the ruler is still dependent on public opinion to a certain degree, if he wants to avoid revolution, but not nearly so directly. If 55% of the population would rather have a different King, he isn't going to get thrown out immediately.

    So logically speaking we would expect stuff like censorship and propaganda to be far worse in a democracy than in a monarchy. Even if you don't buy this argument, no has offered any logical reason it would work the other way.
  40. anon[912] •�Disclaimer says:
    @Curmudgeon
    @Cloudbuster


    he was allowed to retired with a $2500/month pension due to his PTSD over murdering Shaver,
    It would be nice if the pension red herring were stopped. Pensions are paid by the rules of the pension plan eligibility. The only link to employment is whether the person is an active member, i.e. the plan still receiving contributions.
    While I agree it is a travesty that the cop walked without prosecution, to a pension plan the only issue is whether, under the rules of the plan, he is entitled to a pension. It wouldn't matter if he were in prison anymore than it would for someone with a 401k.
    In the case of "his PTSD" while some pension plans have a disability benefit as part of the plan, the norm is some form of disability insurance. In either case, the benefit is only payable while medical information confirms that the person is, in fact, disabled. Therefore, until the cop reaches eligibility for retirement, he is not "retired" he is disabled. Again, even if he were in prison, as long as he is disabled an insurance company could be required to pay him, depending on the plan text.
    Let's stick to the issue of culpability and not drag in irrelevant matters to the issue at hand.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @anon, @botazefa

    It would be nice if the pension red herring were stopped. Pensions are paid by the rules of the pension plan eligibility. The only link to employment is whether the person is an active member, i.e. the plan still receiving contributions.
    While I agree it is a travesty that the cop walked without prosecution, to a pension plan the only issue is whether, under the rules of the plan, he is entitled to a pension.

    Read Cloudbuster’s comment and view the video.

    Then search on the case. If that’s too hard for you, consider that the cop in question;;

    *Was originally hired rather nepotistically
    * Was fired after this shooting
    * Was indicted on 2nd degree murder charges
    * Had a dust cover on his gun with the words “YOU’RE FUCKED” engraved inside such that when he chambered a round that slogan would become visible. The judge in the case refused to allow it as evidence of mindset, in my personal opinion that judge should have been removed.
    * Was found “not guilty”
    * Then, and only then, was re-hired just long enough for him to apply for a disability due to PTSD allegedly caused by the shooting.

    Do you see anything wrong with any of this? Did you know any of it until now? If now, why are you commenting at all?

    It baffles me why so many people who comment on this site can’t figure out how to Google anything.

    •�Replies: @Curmudgeon
    @anon

    You assume I know nothing of this. I saw the video and followed the story.
    Here's how employment law works. An employee terminated for "committing a crime" will be re-instated if found not guilty. If not, the employee will file a wrongful dismissal suit. Courts cannot order re-instatement, arbitration boards can. His re-instatement, after being found not guilty was a lead pipe cinch, irrespective of the crime committed. Re-instatement unless specifically ordered otherwise, with something like a suspension, will connect the time between a dismissal and re-instatement as continuous employment.
    The cop did not find himself "not guilty" a judge or jury decides whether people are guilty or not guilty. If the prosecution believed the judge erred, the prosecution can appeal. If the judge did err, it's not the cop's fault. If the prosecution did not appeal, that is not the cop's fault. The cop did not re-instate himself. Whether the cop was re-instated or not, there would be medical evidence confirming or denying that he had PTSD.
    I am not privvy to whether the cop's application was to an insurance company, or the pension plan, or the plan text that decides who is eligible. Are you? I am not privvy to his medical evidence required to file for a successful application for disability. Are you? Disability plans are not charitable organizations. They do not pay benefits unless the criteria is met, which always requires objective medical evidence, beyond "allegedly". Sometimes disability plans seek second opinions on the medical evidence. Sometimes they are sued for denial of benefits. All of that is independent of whether the applicant is Joan of Arc or Attila the Hun. If the cop was not eligible for a pension or disability, he wouldn't have received them. He didn't decide whether he was or wasn't, a 3rd party did.

    I see lots wrong, starting with the police force that would militarize like that. Do you have an inside track on that information? I have no idea whether the cop followed established protocol. If he didn't, I don't see how he could have be re-instated, much less found not guilty. That said, if he did follow protocol, the idiot who drew it up should have been charged with him. Regardless, re-instatement was not his decision.
    Based on the video, I have a hard time believing that the departmental protocol would ramp up confrontation that quickly, but I don't know. His conduct, based on the video, should be considered unacceptable by all, irrespective of his shooting someone, but I don't know if that is SOP for that police department. There is always more to these things that we don't know, than we do know.

    What I do know is that as stated above, pension plans and disability plans are not charitable organizations. The only pay out what they have to, for as long as they have to, providing they receive documentation meeting their criteria for payment. The cop's conduct is a different issue.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @anon
  41. @Wency
    @Rosie

    The lesson I would take from reformers is not to be blind to the problems of past systems. Some of the reformers were very reasonable people. Stolypin comes to mind. But also, there are always reformers. Someone always wants to change the system. William the Conqueror was a reformer.

    The whole debate about monarchy is moot, because it's impossible to go back, even if you want to. If you wanted to implement and maintain a traditional Christian monarchy, you would have to do it with a brutal police state and massive purges that those traditional Christian monarchies didn't actually have.

    It's kind of like the saying "you can never go home again".

    Russia would almost certainly be better off today if the Romanovs had stayed in power. So the tendency to pine for the Romanovs is somewhat understandable. But the fact of the matter is that the dynasty ended when it produced a czar who was entirely unsuited to resisting leftist agitation, and the result was the worst and most destructive leftist signaling spiral in the history of Europe. It's foolish to think another Romanov-like dynasty wouldn't have the same problem.

    Replies: @Jake, @V. K. Ovelund

    … it’s impossible to go back, …

    What do you mean?

    •�Replies: @Wency
    @V. K. Ovelund

    Read the next sentence in my comment.
  42. As the commercial and residential real estate markets collapse in the coming months, …

    Interesting. Would you like to elaborate?

    •�Replies: @Audacious Epigone
    @V. K. Ovelund

    The CARES Act eviction protections and unemployment benefits are set to expire at the end of this month. If allowed to occur, this will cause a collapse in real estate. On a national scale we will see some combination of evictions, abandonments, defaults, and renegotiated rental arrangements. All of these things will have downward pressure on real estate as there will be a glut of vacancies combined with a reduction in rental rates.
  43. @Twinkie
    @Almost Missouri

    This is from 1982 - NYT of all places: “The Conservative Digest delegate poll gave the President [Reagan] a D on the issue of appointing ''non-Reaganites'' to high office...”

    Look at these names: https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/sreference/cabinet-members

    How many were Reaganites, do you think?

    Replies: @Johann Ricke

    Look at these names: https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/sreference/cabinet-members

    How many were Reaganites, do you think?

    James Watt, the Interior guy, was my favorite Reagan appointee.

  44. @Cloudbuster
    @Curmudgeon

    I don't regard it as an irrelevant matter, since his supposed "disability" was caused by his murder. He was effectively rewarded for murdering a man.

    Replies: @V. Hickel, @Curmudgeon

    and if he had been terminated, as he should have been, he would lost any claim to said pension.

  45. Wency says:
    @Alexander Turok
    @Almost Missouri

    That's a quote from John Adams, who was succeeded by Thomas Jefferson, a deist. So maybe the republic was not nearly as "moral and religious" as you believe. It featured the same culture war over religion as we experience today.

    As to how it would look if it were more religious, just look at how the churches have reacted to Hurricane Floyd.

    Replies: @Almost Missouri, @Wency

    Outside the mainliners, I’m not aware of all that much over the top here. At my evangelical church, the first week this was going on, our pastor spent about 10 minutes talking about the issues condemning racism, praying for leadership and healing, affirming that all people are made in the image of God, and then moved on. There was also a note about it in the weekly e-mail. I think that, in practice, something like this is what most churches have done. Most evangelical churches aspire to a fair degree of apoliticism from the pulpit.

  46. dfordoom says: •�Website
    @Alexander Turok

    The Enlightenment (posthumously) eats its children.
    If you don't like being ruled by politicians, you'd hate being ruled by Kings and churches. See Meghan and Harry for a preview.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @RSDB, @Almost Missouri, @advancedatheist, @songbird, @dfordoom, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan

    If you don’t like being ruled by politicians, you’d hate being ruled by Kings and churches.

    I’d certainly hate to be ruled by churches. Whether they’re liberal churches or traditionalist churches, either way I don’t want to be ruled by them.

    That’s why I’m glad that a Christian revival is not going to happen.

    As for monarchies vs democracies, it’s six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. With a monarchy you can get a spectacularly good king or a spectacularly bad king. With democracy you get one corrupt mediocrity after another.

    I think that the current models of representative democracy are so severely flawed that they are entirely incapable of dealing with any major crisis. They are going to lead us to disaster. But I tend to agree with you that monarchy is not necessarily the right answer to the problem.

    Your point about Meghan and Harry is well taken although it’s worth pointing out that Britain has not been an actual monarchy since 1688.

    •�Replies: @RSDB
    @dfordoom


    But I tend to agree with you that monarchy is not necessarily the right answer to the problem.
    Given your username, do you suspect there is any "right answer" to "the problem"?

    Replies: @Talha, @iffen, @dfordoom
    , @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
    @dfordoom


    I’d certainly hate to be ruled by churches. Whether they’re liberal churches or traditionalist churches, either way I don’t want to be ruled by them.
    You're ruled by the church of secularism, aka the spirit of Barabbas, but the water was boiled so slowly that you didn't notice it.

    Replies: @dfordoom
  47. “Is the numbers game the FBI crime statistics that show cops are more likely to shoot Whites than Blacks and that Black cops are more likely to shoot Blacks than White cops are?

    How is the system “tiered” against Blacks?”

    I have responded to this so many times. it is accurate that people in low income environments experience more incidence of of criminal activity. It is also true that most of the communities are inhabited by black citizens. It is not accurate to use that stat to describe 43 million blacks, very few of whom are engaged in criminal conduct, including those black/african american citizens who occupy lower income environments.

    That description is an incorrect narrative regarding crime. However, it shapes how crime enforcement is engaged and why african americans across the board are subject to police involvement by the very nature of your argument endemic and rooted in the system.

    it is inaccurate that any black is 9x more likely to commit a crime. It might be accurate that a certain black in certain environments might be . . but that cannot be applied in some manner for randomness generalize-able pose and you present and has been presented for more than 100 plus years. It essentially makes every black a suspect, hen very few blacks engage in criminal conduct. But as described in the reference — of that is the manner in which officers conduct themselves with whites, how much more dangerous their conduct when they mistakenly believe that the blacks they encounter are more likely to be guilty . . . .

    Furthermore as indicated numerous times over the years here. It is not just the extreme cases — in which a citizen loses their life. But the more than ten million arrests that occur across the country. And there the numbers reveal a staggering extrajudicial conduct against african americans by as high as 30- 50%.

    science and statisticians have been misapplying the statistical analysis regarding crime before the 1900’s. Used to shape social policy and to justify violations of the law by government in dealing with american americans/blacks.

    Even in the study you reference which i had previously responded to noting that attempts to replicate the same data sets in the hard sets have not born out, but even there, the use use of excessive force as acknowledged by the officers — rate several magnitudes higher for black citizens.

    It is accurate that government acting in this manner is a cause for concern for the general population. But one can do that without watering down the reality that we as a nation have tolerated, encouraged, dismissed . . . supported, excused, etc. more of this conduct against the black population as target by skin color.

    —————–

    Law enforcement as a management tool of government demands as much accountability as to the freedom empower to do their functions.

    •�Replies: @anon
    @EliteCommInc.

    None of that makes any sense. It's not a valid reply in any case, just handwaving.

    it is inaccurate that any black is 9x more likely to commit a crime. It might be accurate that a certain black in certain environments might be . .
    It's completely accurate. These stats are widely available. It is appropriate to make this claim as there is evidence to support it. Just count the number of murder victims (or thefts or home invasions ... ) and perpetrators and compare across races; the environment is the entire country. This trend is also replicated across country in numerous locales as well, so it's not a fluke or the result of regional bias. It's additionally not impossible to account for every conceivable factor you can think of ranging from income to age to educational background, which has already been done. You're trying to parse hairs to obfuscate a truth for which you have no valid reply. Notice how the commenter provides no detailed critique on any of the points mentioned in the comment. All he does is assert something isn't true (without reason) and demand you accept it because he says so.

    "It might be accurate that a certain black in certain environments might be"

    It's totally not true that violent felons are more likely to offend than ordinary people. It might be accurate that a certain felon in certain environments might be.
  48. @dfordoom
    @Alexander Turok


    If you don’t like being ruled by politicians, you’d hate being ruled by Kings and churches.
    I'd certainly hate to be ruled by churches. Whether they're liberal churches or traditionalist churches, either way I don't want to be ruled by them.

    That's why I'm glad that a Christian revival is not going to happen.

    As for monarchies vs democracies, it's six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. With a monarchy you can get a spectacularly good king or a spectacularly bad king. With democracy you get one corrupt mediocrity after another.

    I think that the current models of representative democracy are so severely flawed that they are entirely incapable of dealing with any major crisis. They are going to lead us to disaster. But I tend to agree with you that monarchy is not necessarily the right answer to the problem.

    Your point about Meghan and Harry is well taken although it's worth pointing out that Britain has not been an actual monarchy since 1688.

    Replies: @RSDB, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan

    But I tend to agree with you that monarchy is not necessarily the right answer to the problem.

    Given your username, do you suspect there is any “right answer” to “the problem”?

    •�LOL: Audacious Epigone
    •�Replies: @Talha
    @RSDB

    LOOOL! OK dfordoom, you gotta admit, you kind of set that one up a while back.

    Peace.
    , @iffen
    @RSDB

    Given your username, do you suspect there is any “right answer” to “the problem”?

    LOL

    Replies: @Talha
    , @dfordoom
    @RSDB


    Given your username, do you suspect there is any “right answer” to “the problem”?
    Fair question!

    It's not a matter of finding right answers but rather finding answers that are possible. Monarchy might be great but realistically I don't see it making a comeback.

    About the best you can hope for is small improvements to the system you've got. In the case of the U.S. there are several very obvious things that need to be dome. The power of the donors has to be broken. Not easy, since both parties are equally corrupt and therefore equally determined to keep the current system by which politicians are openly for sale. Maybe a massive grass-roots campaign might help, but without some elite support it would be incredibly difficult.

    Obviously the power of social media to control, and throttle, political debate has to be broken. Very easy to do and Trump could have done it but he didn't.

    So the first thing you'd need to do is to convince enough normies that major political reforms such as these are essential.

    All you can do is try to make a flawed system work slightly less badly.

    I don't believe there's a perfect political system. You can have very good kings and very bad kings. You can have reasonably wise benevolent dictatorships and totally evil insane dictatorships. You can have representative democracies that work not too badly or ones that just give you a succession of corrupt mediocrities. You could have a theocracy that might work OK if the whole population shared the same religion and you could have a theocracy that would be an oppressive nightmare.

    Replies: @Elmer's Washable School Glue
  49. No statue is safe.

    Despite being vertically challenged, this guy just was not woke enough. He was probably caught abusing Lawn People of Color [LPOC], like Smurfs.

    Hey Gnomie… Smurf Lives Matter!

    Smurfs are Blue…. Does that mean Blue Lives Matter?

    PEACE 😇

  50. @Curmudgeon
    @Cloudbuster


    he was allowed to retired with a $2500/month pension due to his PTSD over murdering Shaver,
    It would be nice if the pension red herring were stopped. Pensions are paid by the rules of the pension plan eligibility. The only link to employment is whether the person is an active member, i.e. the plan still receiving contributions.
    While I agree it is a travesty that the cop walked without prosecution, to a pension plan the only issue is whether, under the rules of the plan, he is entitled to a pension. It wouldn't matter if he were in prison anymore than it would for someone with a 401k.
    In the case of "his PTSD" while some pension plans have a disability benefit as part of the plan, the norm is some form of disability insurance. In either case, the benefit is only payable while medical information confirms that the person is, in fact, disabled. Therefore, until the cop reaches eligibility for retirement, he is not "retired" he is disabled. Again, even if he were in prison, as long as he is disabled an insurance company could be required to pay him, depending on the plan text.
    Let's stick to the issue of culpability and not drag in irrelevant matters to the issue at hand.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @anon, @botazefa

    Let’s stick to the issue of culpability and not drag in irrelevant matters to the issue at hand.

    I think it is relevant that he profited from murder. That isn’t supposed to happen.

    Yeah I know – so did OJ

  51. @Cloudbuster
    @Curmudgeon

    I don't regard it as an irrelevant matter, since his supposed "disability" was caused by his murder. He was effectively rewarded for murdering a man.

    Replies: @V. Hickel, @Curmudgeon

    Apparently, you don’t get it.
    An employer doesn’t get to decide whether someone gets a pension, the pension plan does. The employer’s actions, like terminating employment, might result in a reduced pension, but not a cancellation of a pension benefit, of some sort. The same goes for an insurance company. If the termination of employment occurs after the disability, the insurance company may try to avoid payment, but will likely be unsuccessful. This would be no different than an insurance company cancelling your house insurance and refusing to pay, after your house burned down and resulted in a fatality.
    Whether or not he was “effectively rewarded for murdering a man”, is out of his hands. He didn’t reward himself. I am astonished that no charges were laid, it seemed obvious to me that the guy was on a power trip. However, whether charged or not, the third party entity(s) – the pension plan and/or insurance companies have to follow their legal obligations.

    •�Replies: @Cloudbuster
    @Curmudgeon

    The fact that a byzantine set of regulations allowed it to happen doesn't make it right.

    In this case, the employer did get to decide that he got a benefit. He was rehired temporarily specifically so that he could claim disability over the shooting and receive the disability pension.

    Your attitude seems to be "Oh, well, them's the laws." We're not restricted to that consideration here.
  52. anon[222] •�Disclaimer says:
    @EliteCommInc.
    "Is the numbers game the FBI crime statistics that show cops are more likely to shoot Whites than Blacks and that Black cops are more likely to shoot Blacks than White cops are?

    How is the system “tiered” against Blacks?"


    I have responded to this so many times. it is accurate that people in low income environments experience more incidence of of criminal activity. It is also true that most of the communities are inhabited by black citizens. It is not accurate to use that stat to describe 43 million blacks, very few of whom are engaged in criminal conduct, including those black/african american citizens who occupy lower income environments.

    That description is an incorrect narrative regarding crime. However, it shapes how crime enforcement is engaged and why african americans across the board are subject to police involvement by the very nature of your argument endemic and rooted in the system.

    it is inaccurate that any black is 9x more likely to commit a crime. It might be accurate that a certain black in certain environments might be . . but that cannot be applied in some manner for randomness generalize-able pose and you present and has been presented for more than 100 plus years. It essentially makes every black a suspect, hen very few blacks engage in criminal conduct. But as described in the reference -- of that is the manner in which officers conduct themselves with whites, how much more dangerous their conduct when they mistakenly believe that the blacks they encounter are more likely to be guilty . . . .


    Furthermore as indicated numerous times over the years here. It is not just the extreme cases -- in which a citizen loses their life. But the more than ten million arrests that occur across the country. And there the numbers reveal a staggering extrajudicial conduct against african americans by as high as 30- 50%.

    science and statisticians have been misapplying the statistical analysis regarding crime before the 1900's. Used to shape social policy and to justify violations of the law by government in dealing with american americans/blacks.

    Even in the study you reference which i had previously responded to noting that attempts to replicate the same data sets in the hard sets have not born out, but even there, the use use of excessive force as acknowledged by the officers -- rate several magnitudes higher for black citizens.

    It is accurate that government acting in this manner is a cause for concern for the general population. But one can do that without watering down the reality that we as a nation have tolerated, encouraged, dismissed . . . supported, excused, etc. more of this conduct against the black population as target by skin color.

    -----------------


    Law enforcement as a management tool of government demands as much accountability as to the freedom empower to do their functions.

    Replies: @anon

    None of that makes any sense. It’s not a valid reply in any case, just handwaving.

    it is inaccurate that any black is 9x more likely to commit a crime. It might be accurate that a certain black in certain environments might be . .

    It’s completely accurate. These stats are widely available. It is appropriate to make this claim as there is evidence to support it. Just count the number of murder victims (or thefts or home invasions … ) and perpetrators and compare across races; the environment is the entire country. This trend is also replicated across country in numerous locales as well, so it’s not a fluke or the result of regional bias. It’s additionally not impossible to account for every conceivable factor you can think of ranging from income to age to educational background, which has already been done. You’re trying to parse hairs to obfuscate a truth for which you have no valid reply. Notice how the commenter provides no detailed critique on any of the points mentioned in the comment. All he does is assert something isn’t true (without reason) and demand you accept it because he says so.

    “It might be accurate that a certain black in certain environments might be”

    It’s totally not true that violent felons are more likely to offend than ordinary people. It might be accurate that a certain felon in certain environments might be.

  53. @RSDB
    @dfordoom


    But I tend to agree with you that monarchy is not necessarily the right answer to the problem.
    Given your username, do you suspect there is any "right answer" to "the problem"?

    Replies: @Talha, @iffen, @dfordoom

    LOOOL! OK dfordoom, you gotta admit, you kind of set that one up a while back.

    Peace.

  54. @Cloudbuster
    @Intelligent Dasein

    The real power of a king can be effectively limited by other real powers so that it doesn’t become tyrannical.

    That conflicts with your previous statement that monarchy is government, that there is "always only one ruler-will on top." As we see all the "real" powers eventually move toward consolidation, as it benefits them.

    I doubt whether there has ever been a larger proportion of contented ordinary people than there has under monarchy.

    That is a conveniently unverifiable statement.

    To the degree people were ever happy under monarchy, it was because most powerful monarchies existed in pre-technological times and the power of the monarch to interfere in his peoples' ordinary lives was greatly limited. As Wency says:

    "The whole debate about monarchy is moot, because it’s impossible to go back, even if you want to. If you wanted to implement and maintain a traditional Christian monarchy, you would have to do it with a brutal police state and massive purges that those traditional Christian monarchies didn’t actually have."

    Both the nature of the people and the nature of government have changed. That genie can't go back in the bottle. I, for one, don't want to live in North Korea, under a Supreme Leader. I don't even want to live in China under the watchful eye of a near omnipresent, intrusive state. Maybe that works for East Asians, but it doesn't work for many Westerners. I think most people in Eastern Europe were glad to be rid of the Soviets and their strong, intrusive state.

    Westerners live better in relatively small, homogeneous polities, like Iceland, that allow the citizens a great deal of freedom. Homogeneous and small being the key words there. I don't know what the upper bound is, but I'm pretty sure it is somewhere below the current size of the US and the EU, but their problems are probably due nearly as much to heterogeneity as size.

    Replies: @128, @Elmer's Washable School Glue

    What makes you think the fundamental moral order of the universe has somehow changed, compared to 1500, just because you perceived it has changed?

  55. @anon
    @Curmudgeon

    It would be nice if the pension red herring were stopped. Pensions are paid by the rules of the pension plan eligibility. The only link to employment is whether the person is an active member, i.e. the plan still receiving contributions.
    While I agree it is a travesty that the cop walked without prosecution, to a pension plan the only issue is whether, under the rules of the plan, he is entitled to a pension.

    Read Cloudbuster's comment and view the video.

    Then search on the case. If that's too hard for you, consider that the cop in question;;

    *Was originally hired rather nepotistically
    * Was fired after this shooting
    * Was indicted on 2nd degree murder charges
    * Had a dust cover on his gun with the words "YOU'RE FUCKED" engraved inside such that when he chambered a round that slogan would become visible. The judge in the case refused to allow it as evidence of mindset, in my personal opinion that judge should have been removed.
    * Was found "not guilty"
    * Then, and only then, was re-hired just long enough for him to apply for a disability due to PTSD allegedly caused by the shooting.

    Do you see anything wrong with any of this? Did you know any of it until now? If now, why are you commenting at all?

    It baffles me why so many people who comment on this site can't figure out how to Google anything.

    Replies: @Curmudgeon

    You assume I know nothing of this. I saw the video and followed the story.
    Here’s how employment law works. An employee terminated for “committing a crime” will be re-instated if found not guilty. If not, the employee will file a wrongful dismissal suit. Courts cannot order re-instatement, arbitration boards can. His re-instatement, after being found not guilty was a lead pipe cinch, irrespective of the crime committed. Re-instatement unless specifically ordered otherwise, with something like a suspension, will connect the time between a dismissal and re-instatement as continuous employment.
    The cop did not find himself “not guilty” a judge or jury decides whether people are guilty or not guilty. If the prosecution believed the judge erred, the prosecution can appeal. If the judge did err, it’s not the cop’s fault. If the prosecution did not appeal, that is not the cop’s fault. The cop did not re-instate himself. Whether the cop was re-instated or not, there would be medical evidence confirming or denying that he had PTSD.
    I am not privvy to whether the cop’s application was to an insurance company, or the pension plan, or the plan text that decides who is eligible. Are you? I am not privvy to his medical evidence required to file for a successful application for disability. Are you? Disability plans are not charitable organizations. They do not pay benefits unless the criteria is met, which always requires objective medical evidence, beyond “allegedly”. Sometimes disability plans seek second opinions on the medical evidence. Sometimes they are sued for denial of benefits. All of that is independent of whether the applicant is Joan of Arc or Attila the Hun. If the cop was not eligible for a pension or disability, he wouldn’t have received them. He didn’t decide whether he was or wasn’t, a 3rd party did.

    I see lots wrong, starting with the police force that would militarize like that. Do you have an inside track on that information? I have no idea whether the cop followed established protocol. If he didn’t, I don’t see how he could have be re-instated, much less found not guilty. That said, if he did follow protocol, the idiot who drew it up should have been charged with him. Regardless, re-instatement was not his decision.
    Based on the video, I have a hard time believing that the departmental protocol would ramp up confrontation that quickly, but I don’t know. His conduct, based on the video, should be considered unacceptable by all, irrespective of his shooting someone, but I don’t know if that is SOP for that police department. There is always more to these things that we don’t know, than we do know.

    What I do know is that as stated above, pension plans and disability plans are not charitable organizations. The only pay out what they have to, for as long as they have to, providing they receive documentation meeting their criteria for payment. The cop’s conduct is a different issue.

    •�Replies: @Cloudbuster
    @Curmudgeon

    Most states are "at will" employment states. Was there an obligation that the agency re-hire the officer? Union contract perhaps? Many officers have been fired over behavior that did not result in convictions in court.

    Replies: @Curmudgeon
    , @anon
    @Curmudgeon

    You assume I know nothing of this.

    Correct. You obviously know nothing of this.

    I saw the video and followed the story.

    Obviously you did not follow the story, because you know nothing.

    His re-instatement, after being found not guilty was a lead pipe cinch, irrespective of the crime committed. Re-instatement unless specifically ordered otherwise, with something like a suspension, will connect the time between a dismissal and re-instatement as continuous employment.

    His rehiring was for just long enough to snag a disability pension for PTSD: 42 days. You say "should" but we are pointing out what really happened. In real life. In the real world.

    Please look up the word "nepotism" and ponder what it means.

    I am not privvy to whether the cop’s application was to an insurance company, or the pension plan, or the plan text that decides who is eligible.

    That is because you don't know anything.
    HINT: What does "nepotism" mean?

    PS: What does the engraving YOU'RE FUCKED on a gun privately owned by a cop that he carries on duty imply about his mindset? Why do you suppose the judge made sure the jury never knew about that detail?

    View the vid again and tell us all exactly why the shooting of Shaver was justified. Was the drunk crying on the floor a fleeing felon? Was he armed? If so, armed with what? Were the officers in danger of grave bodily harm or death? Explain in detail the justification for firing multiple rounds of .223 rifle ammo into him.

    If you could somehow learn to use complicated, high level computer applications like http://www.duckduckgo.com then you, too, could find elusive bits of information such as this:

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/daniel-shaver-killing/594091/

    Replies: @Curmudgeon
  56. @Curmudgeon
    @Cloudbuster

    Apparently, you don't get it.
    An employer doesn't get to decide whether someone gets a pension, the pension plan does. The employer's actions, like terminating employment, might result in a reduced pension, but not a cancellation of a pension benefit, of some sort. The same goes for an insurance company. If the termination of employment occurs after the disability, the insurance company may try to avoid payment, but will likely be unsuccessful. This would be no different than an insurance company cancelling your house insurance and refusing to pay, after your house burned down and resulted in a fatality.
    Whether or not he was "effectively rewarded for murdering a man", is out of his hands. He didn't reward himself. I am astonished that no charges were laid, it seemed obvious to me that the guy was on a power trip. However, whether charged or not, the third party entity(s) - the pension plan and/or insurance companies have to follow their legal obligations.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster

    The fact that a byzantine set of regulations allowed it to happen doesn’t make it right.

    In this case, the employer did get to decide that he got a benefit. He was rehired temporarily specifically so that he could claim disability over the shooting and receive the disability pension.

    Your attitude seems to be “Oh, well, them’s the laws.” We’re not restricted to that consideration here.

  57. @Curmudgeon
    @anon

    You assume I know nothing of this. I saw the video and followed the story.
    Here's how employment law works. An employee terminated for "committing a crime" will be re-instated if found not guilty. If not, the employee will file a wrongful dismissal suit. Courts cannot order re-instatement, arbitration boards can. His re-instatement, after being found not guilty was a lead pipe cinch, irrespective of the crime committed. Re-instatement unless specifically ordered otherwise, with something like a suspension, will connect the time between a dismissal and re-instatement as continuous employment.
    The cop did not find himself "not guilty" a judge or jury decides whether people are guilty or not guilty. If the prosecution believed the judge erred, the prosecution can appeal. If the judge did err, it's not the cop's fault. If the prosecution did not appeal, that is not the cop's fault. The cop did not re-instate himself. Whether the cop was re-instated or not, there would be medical evidence confirming or denying that he had PTSD.
    I am not privvy to whether the cop's application was to an insurance company, or the pension plan, or the plan text that decides who is eligible. Are you? I am not privvy to his medical evidence required to file for a successful application for disability. Are you? Disability plans are not charitable organizations. They do not pay benefits unless the criteria is met, which always requires objective medical evidence, beyond "allegedly". Sometimes disability plans seek second opinions on the medical evidence. Sometimes they are sued for denial of benefits. All of that is independent of whether the applicant is Joan of Arc or Attila the Hun. If the cop was not eligible for a pension or disability, he wouldn't have received them. He didn't decide whether he was or wasn't, a 3rd party did.

    I see lots wrong, starting with the police force that would militarize like that. Do you have an inside track on that information? I have no idea whether the cop followed established protocol. If he didn't, I don't see how he could have be re-instated, much less found not guilty. That said, if he did follow protocol, the idiot who drew it up should have been charged with him. Regardless, re-instatement was not his decision.
    Based on the video, I have a hard time believing that the departmental protocol would ramp up confrontation that quickly, but I don't know. His conduct, based on the video, should be considered unacceptable by all, irrespective of his shooting someone, but I don't know if that is SOP for that police department. There is always more to these things that we don't know, than we do know.

    What I do know is that as stated above, pension plans and disability plans are not charitable organizations. The only pay out what they have to, for as long as they have to, providing they receive documentation meeting their criteria for payment. The cop's conduct is a different issue.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @anon

    Most states are “at will” employment states. Was there an obligation that the agency re-hire the officer? Union contract perhaps? Many officers have been fired over behavior that did not result in convictions in court.

    •�Replies: @Curmudgeon
    @Cloudbuster


    Here’s how employment law works. An employee terminated for “committing a crime” will be re-instated if found not guilty. If not, the employee will file a wrongful dismissal suit. Courts cannot order re-instatement, arbitration boards can.
    Had he not been rehired, in an "at will" setting, there would be a wrongful dismissal law suit. The lawsuit would not be confined to lost wages, and would claim other damages, such as loss of reputation. The potential for a couple of million in damages would be incentive to rehire.
    If he was unionized, an arbitration can and almost always will, order re-instatement. It is important to understand, that once the penalty has been spoken, and the reasons given, whether lawsuit or especially before an arbitration board, the employer cannot change the reason. It would seem that the re-hiring was an economic decision.

    At no point have I condoned what he has done. As I stated if he had followed departmental protocol, then the person who wrote them should have been tried as an accessory. I find it difficult to believe that a protocol would be written in such a manner to virtually guarantee someone would be shot.

    I admit, I do not know the details of his re-instatement, and I would be surprised if any news outlet did. However, my point is, that even if he were re-instated, the pension plan, or insurance company would pay under their own rules. He can apply all he wants, it doesn't make him eligible to receive a benefit unless he meet the criteria established by the insurance company or pension plan. In either case, any disability benefit requires objective medical evidence to state the diagnosis, why that diagnosis prevents the person from doing his/her job, course of treatment, and estimated date of return to work, if known. I repeat, these are independent of the employer, and not charitable organizations. If the cop was entitled to disability, or a pension, the pension plan or insurance company would almost certainly be sued if they failed to pay it.

    As for specifically being re-hired so he could apply, perhaps you have better information than do, but it is SOP in most jurisdictions for a psychiatrist or psychologist to assess an officer after any shooting incident to determine whether there are psychological issues of any kind. I have found no information on whether that was done, or what the result was. I am not in a position to say whether he was in the process of applying for disability when he was terminated. That would be confidential information, unless it comes out at a trial in the context of his likely being psychologicaly unstable prior to the shooting incident.
  58. @Almost Missouri
    @Alexander Turok

    But need we "be ruled" at all?

    Of course, I know the answer to this. It was "a republic, if you can keep it." "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

    We the people are no longer "moral and religious". It needn't have been that way, but it is. So now do we keep pretending that we are still the two-century-ago people, or do we accept that much of our population cannot self-govern and must be governed, i.e., ruled? And if ruled, how? Note that per the previous paragraph, a Constitutional Republic is wholly inadequate.

    Replies: @Alexander Turok, @dfordoom

    We the people are no longer “moral and religious”.

    At the time of the American Revolution the decline of Christianity had already begun. How religious were the Founding Fathers? Weren’t many of them Deists (which is just a fancy name for agnostics)?

    As for moral, that depends on your definition of morality. We all believe that we’re moral. You can’t base a nation on morality because there is no absolute morality. Many if not most of the Founding Fathers who wanted a moral and religious people also thought slavery was moral.

    Morality changes. No, I don’t like the fact that it changes either, but it does. And even in a specific time period there are wild disagreements about what is moral and what is not.

    or do we accept that much of our population cannot self-govern and must be governed, i.e., ruled?

    Or, even more scary, do we accept that the whole of the population cannot self-govern and must be governed?

  59. @Jake
    @Wency

    After nearly 400 years? That's a hell of a lot better than multicultural democracy.

    Russia faltered less because Nicholas II was a weak Tsar than because most of the West wanted Tsarist Russia reduced and 'reformed.'

    In other words. ever liberalizing Western democracies kept acting in ways that placed growing pressure on Russia, because they were in rather open rebellion against whatever deep culture of Christendom remained in their lands.

    It is either Christ and Christendom or Satan's multi-culti, Democratic/Capitalist/Globalist Chaos.

    Replies: @dfordoom

    It is either Christ and Christendom or Satan’s multi-culti, Democratic/Capitalist/Globalist Chaos.

    Given that Christendom is as dead as the dodo and Christianity itself is a dying religion you’d better start looking for a third alternative.

    As other commenters have said, you can’t go back. Christendom is not coming back.

    •�Replies: @Hearts on Fire
    @dfordoom


    Christendom is not coming back.

    So certain r u?

    Major world religions have experienced periods of contraction and expansion. The entire history of islam, for instance, is a long procession of expanding and contracting religious authority and religious fervor.

    Replies: @dfordoom
  60. @RSDB
    @dfordoom


    But I tend to agree with you that monarchy is not necessarily the right answer to the problem.
    Given your username, do you suspect there is any "right answer" to "the problem"?

    Replies: @Talha, @iffen, @dfordoom

    Given your username, do you suspect there is any “right answer” to “the problem”?

    LOL

    •�Replies: @Talha
    @iffen

    Heat death of the universe solves everything.

    Peace.
  61. anon[356] •�Disclaimer says:
    @Curmudgeon
    @anon

    You assume I know nothing of this. I saw the video and followed the story.
    Here's how employment law works. An employee terminated for "committing a crime" will be re-instated if found not guilty. If not, the employee will file a wrongful dismissal suit. Courts cannot order re-instatement, arbitration boards can. His re-instatement, after being found not guilty was a lead pipe cinch, irrespective of the crime committed. Re-instatement unless specifically ordered otherwise, with something like a suspension, will connect the time between a dismissal and re-instatement as continuous employment.
    The cop did not find himself "not guilty" a judge or jury decides whether people are guilty or not guilty. If the prosecution believed the judge erred, the prosecution can appeal. If the judge did err, it's not the cop's fault. If the prosecution did not appeal, that is not the cop's fault. The cop did not re-instate himself. Whether the cop was re-instated or not, there would be medical evidence confirming or denying that he had PTSD.
    I am not privvy to whether the cop's application was to an insurance company, or the pension plan, or the plan text that decides who is eligible. Are you? I am not privvy to his medical evidence required to file for a successful application for disability. Are you? Disability plans are not charitable organizations. They do not pay benefits unless the criteria is met, which always requires objective medical evidence, beyond "allegedly". Sometimes disability plans seek second opinions on the medical evidence. Sometimes they are sued for denial of benefits. All of that is independent of whether the applicant is Joan of Arc or Attila the Hun. If the cop was not eligible for a pension or disability, he wouldn't have received them. He didn't decide whether he was or wasn't, a 3rd party did.

    I see lots wrong, starting with the police force that would militarize like that. Do you have an inside track on that information? I have no idea whether the cop followed established protocol. If he didn't, I don't see how he could have be re-instated, much less found not guilty. That said, if he did follow protocol, the idiot who drew it up should have been charged with him. Regardless, re-instatement was not his decision.
    Based on the video, I have a hard time believing that the departmental protocol would ramp up confrontation that quickly, but I don't know. His conduct, based on the video, should be considered unacceptable by all, irrespective of his shooting someone, but I don't know if that is SOP for that police department. There is always more to these things that we don't know, than we do know.

    What I do know is that as stated above, pension plans and disability plans are not charitable organizations. The only pay out what they have to, for as long as they have to, providing they receive documentation meeting their criteria for payment. The cop's conduct is a different issue.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @anon

    You assume I know nothing of this.

    Correct. You obviously know nothing of this.

    I saw the video and followed the story.

    Obviously you did not follow the story, because you know nothing.

    His re-instatement, after being found not guilty was a lead pipe cinch, irrespective of the crime committed. Re-instatement unless specifically ordered otherwise, with something like a suspension, will connect the time between a dismissal and re-instatement as continuous employment.

    His rehiring was for just long enough to snag a disability pension for PTSD: 42 days. You say “should” but we are pointing out what really happened. In real life. In the real world.

    Please look up the word “nepotism” and ponder what it means.

    I am not privvy to whether the cop’s application was to an insurance company, or the pension plan, or the plan text that decides who is eligible.

    That is because you don’t know anything.
    HINT: What does “nepotism” mean?

    PS: What does the engraving YOU’RE FUCKED on a gun privately owned by a cop that he carries on duty imply about his mindset? Why do you suppose the judge made sure the jury never knew about that detail?

    View the vid again and tell us all exactly why the shooting of Shaver was justified. Was the drunk crying on the floor a fleeing felon? Was he armed? If so, armed with what? Were the officers in danger of grave bodily harm or death? Explain in detail the justification for firing multiple rounds of .223 rifle ammo into him.

    If you could somehow learn to use complicated, high level computer applications like http://www.duckduckgo.com then you, too, could find elusive bits of information such as this:

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/daniel-shaver-killing/594091/

    •�Replies: @Curmudgeon
    @anon

    I have replied to @Cloudbuster covering many of your points. It appears that you cannot separate issues.

    News sources are not reliable, and The Atlantic contains articles that I consider comic relief.
    Please identify where I have said the shooting was justified. I have in fact, gone beyond your screed and stated:

    if he did follow protocol, the idiot who drew it up should have been charged with him.
    My point in my first reply was that benefits from insurance plans and pension plans are paid by the rules of those plans, and have nothing to do with the employer.

    His rehiring was for just long enough to snag a disability pension for PTSD: 42 days.
    You appear to have knowledge of the plan text. Was that 42 calendar days or 42 working days. Please provide the information on the length of the waiting period for the disability benefit, and whether the officer met the criteria for the benefit.
    The Atlantic apparently knows that the rehiring was temporary. Perhaps you could provide a copy the letter of re-instatement that states that.

    If you have proof of nepotism, I suggest you send it to the Mayor or Prosecutor responsible for the district for them to investigate.

    What does the engraving YOU’RE FUCKED on a gun privately owned by a cop that he carries on duty imply about his mindset? Why do you suppose the judge made sure the jury never knew about that detail?
    Anything that I, you, or the prosecution implies about the engraving is speculation, not fact. The only person who can answer that is the person who engraved it. I can only speculate why the judge ruled that way. Perhaps it was because he understood the difference between inference or speculation and fact, and that juries have to rule on facts not speculation.
  62. Laugh.

    “That’s not true at all. How many times does this nonsense have to be debunked before it goes away?”

    And laugh.

    No kidding news to me. Uhhh . . . . not at all my position, but do keep restating the position – though it it is totally non-responsive.

    It is not as if this issue is new.
    ————————————————————————-

    “Of course no one should be shorn of their due process rights, irrespective of colour. The problem is the system(s) has been corrupted. ”

    And those with the least effective means of self defense are the most likely to be on the receiving end of that corruption. As tiresome as it is — a look the current record reflects the past history.

    I used to defend the system tirelessly, until I actually started reading the research on the judicial system. And that wake-up call arrived for me a few tears out of high school. And as someone who actually believes in a conservative lifestyle and approach — it was depressing. And more depressing is tat people of faith and practice and high moral stature actually defended the matter out of some knee-jerk response.

    That the population as a whole is in some manner of wake-up as government intended to wok on its behalf has been less than accommodating is encouraging, but the manner of the response is largely the fault of my side of aisle engaging in just the kinds of fecitious defenses as are machined gunned around on this sight broadcast as science or statistical truth. It can be dome because majority population seeks the least path of resistance to its own benefit. And it is done without the least bit of embarrassment.

    And that anyone would bring Christ into these types immoral legalistic quagmires in which law and order supplants justice as staple as opposed to the reverse — I used to laugh a lo because I took so much of these comments with a lb of salt. But that has changed. considering the population size and the increasing number of supposed intelligent writers endorsing by excuse government abuse as long as its against one particular group —–

    it’s that fateful debate of the founders every time to endorse slavery and it is deeply tragic. this has nothing to do with defending criminals or crime or some notion that blacks are all sugar and spice and everything nice. But non one standing, kneeling or sitting before the one who is, who and is to come not be sicked o their core at its defense. The very least, the very least I can do is admit the reality. To do other wise makes mockery of the God, the Christ i say I lean in the direction of.

    And no I don;t have to endorse same sex choices, illegal immigration, outsourcing, hiring foreign workers . . . or defend the murder of children in the womb to acknowledge that deep flaw in our character, much less defend it. I have enough troubles for the day of my own character.

    The tough issue here is how to redress or delimit the abuse, not whether it’s more real for blacks than whites. that is simply a debate one loses – prima facie.

  63. Did the Enlightenment pop out of a vacuum? Per Spengler, let’s go back even further and say that ultimately Christianity itself eats its children.

    •�Replies: @Rosie
    @hfel


    Did the Enlightenment pop out of a vacuum? Per Spengler, let’s go back even further and say that ultimately Christianity itself eats its children.
    Heck, why stop there? I say the rot goes all the way back to the domestication of fire.

    https://greatist.com/eat/raw-meat-diet#1
  64. @iffen
    @RSDB

    Given your username, do you suspect there is any “right answer” to “the problem”?

    LOL

    Replies: @Talha

    Heat death of the universe solves everything.

    Peace.

  65. @Alexander Turok

    The Enlightenment (posthumously) eats its children.
    If you don't like being ruled by politicians, you'd hate being ruled by Kings and churches. See Meghan and Harry for a preview.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @RSDB, @Almost Missouri, @advancedatheist, @songbird, @dfordoom, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan

    Equating Meghan and Harry with traditional Christian monarchy is just the kind of lunacy I have come to expect from you.

    •�Replies: @Alexander Turok
    @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan

    They are part of the British royal family. That's a fact. You can tell me it's not true communism monarchy all the live long day, what I care about is the real world.
  66. @Rosie
    @Cloudbuster


    There’s a certain type on the right that thinks monarchy is the answer to all the problems with democracy.
    Indeed. Reactionaries think they know better than the reformers who were eyewitnesses to the problems that necessitated the reforms to begin with.

    The mere fact that a reform occurred does not, ipso facto, imply that it was good, but it certainly does counsel against going back rather than looking for new solutions.

    Replies: @Wency, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan

    Dead wrong.

    Those who destroyed the monarchies were not reformers. They were revolutionaries. If they wanted reform, then they would have produced reformed the given monarchies.

    There is, of course, precedent throughout history for the reformation of monarchies. Unfortunately, modern history (at least since 1517) is loaded with revolutionaries who subverted movements for reform to destroy existing order.

    •�Replies: @Rosie
    @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan


    Those who destroyed the monarchies were not reformers. They were revolutionaries.
    Call them revolutionaries, then, but the point still stands. If revolutionaries are wrong for throwing the baby out with the bathwater, are reactionaries (who weren't there) not wrong for precisely the same reason?

    Replies: @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    , @Corvinus
    @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan

    "Those who destroyed the monarchies were not reformers. They were revolutionaries."

    Revolutionaries who made reforms given how the monarchies which were deposed had demonstrated they were other than willing to meet the needs of the citizens.
  67. @dfordoom
    @Alexander Turok


    If you don’t like being ruled by politicians, you’d hate being ruled by Kings and churches.
    I'd certainly hate to be ruled by churches. Whether they're liberal churches or traditionalist churches, either way I don't want to be ruled by them.

    That's why I'm glad that a Christian revival is not going to happen.

    As for monarchies vs democracies, it's six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. With a monarchy you can get a spectacularly good king or a spectacularly bad king. With democracy you get one corrupt mediocrity after another.

    I think that the current models of representative democracy are so severely flawed that they are entirely incapable of dealing with any major crisis. They are going to lead us to disaster. But I tend to agree with you that monarchy is not necessarily the right answer to the problem.

    Your point about Meghan and Harry is well taken although it's worth pointing out that Britain has not been an actual monarchy since 1688.

    Replies: @RSDB, @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan

    I’d certainly hate to be ruled by churches. Whether they’re liberal churches or traditionalist churches, either way I don’t want to be ruled by them.

    You’re ruled by the church of secularism, aka the spirit of Barabbas, but the water was boiled so slowly that you didn’t notice it.

    •�Replies: @dfordoom
    @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan



    I’d certainly hate to be ruled by churches. Whether they’re liberal churches or traditionalist churches, either way I don’t want to be ruled by them.
    You’re ruled by the church of secularism, aka the spirit of Barabbas, but the water was boiled so slowly that you didn’t notice it.
    That might well be true but it doesn't change the fact that I would hate to live under the rule of any kind of Christian church. The fact that I would not care to live in a theocracy does not imply that I approve of the current world order.

    But I think it does need to be accepted that whether we like it or not secularism is here to stay. Wishful thinking about a revival of Christianity or Christendom is just that, wishful thinking. You might as well wish for a revival of Zoroastrianism.

    Somehow we need to work towards a saner sort of secularism. Secularism is not evil in and of itself.

    Replies: @Elmer's Washable School Glue
  68. @RSDB
    @dfordoom


    But I tend to agree with you that monarchy is not necessarily the right answer to the problem.
    Given your username, do you suspect there is any "right answer" to "the problem"?

    Replies: @Talha, @iffen, @dfordoom

    Given your username, do you suspect there is any “right answer” to “the problem”?

    Fair question!

    It’s not a matter of finding right answers but rather finding answers that are possible. Monarchy might be great but realistically I don’t see it making a comeback.

    About the best you can hope for is small improvements to the system you’ve got. In the case of the U.S. there are several very obvious things that need to be dome. The power of the donors has to be broken. Not easy, since both parties are equally corrupt and therefore equally determined to keep the current system by which politicians are openly for sale. Maybe a massive grass-roots campaign might help, but without some elite support it would be incredibly difficult.

    Obviously the power of social media to control, and throttle, political debate has to be broken. Very easy to do and Trump could have done it but he didn’t.

    So the first thing you’d need to do is to convince enough normies that major political reforms such as these are essential.

    All you can do is try to make a flawed system work slightly less badly.

    I don’t believe there’s a perfect political system. You can have very good kings and very bad kings. You can have reasonably wise benevolent dictatorships and totally evil insane dictatorships. You can have representative democracies that work not too badly or ones that just give you a succession of corrupt mediocrities. You could have a theocracy that might work OK if the whole population shared the same religion and you could have a theocracy that would be an oppressive nightmare.

    •�Agree: V. K. Ovelund
    •�Replies: @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    @dfordoom


    Monarchy might be great but realistically I don’t see it making a comeback.
    Monarchy--absolute monarchy even--exists today. My favorite example is the Sultanate of Oman; I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that it represents the greatest success story in the entire Middle East, going from a barren British colonial afterthought in the 60s to basically first world (on par with Poland and Hungary in GDP) today. In 2010, the United Nations Development Program ranked Oman as the most improved nation in the world in terms of development during the preceding 40 years. Oman also has a degree of religious tolerance far beyond the vast majority of popular governments.

    Yes, Oman does have some oil reserves, though not nearly as much its northern neighbors. The most comparable nation in terms of natural resources and geography is almost certainly the Republic of Yemen, that poster child of "failed states." The difference between the two in terms of success could not be more stark.

    Is this possible in the near term for the west? Maybe not by means of revolution, but by means of self-organization, of people forming an imperium in imperio and preparing for the coming instability...absolutely. There are religious and cultural groups doing so right now.

    I don’t believe there’s a perfect political system.
    I agree, but this doesn't mean some aren't better than others on balance.

    Replies: @nebulafox, @dfordoom, @songbird
  69. @Cloudbuster
    @Intelligent Dasein

    The real power of a king can be effectively limited by other real powers so that it doesn’t become tyrannical.

    That conflicts with your previous statement that monarchy is government, that there is "always only one ruler-will on top." As we see all the "real" powers eventually move toward consolidation, as it benefits them.

    I doubt whether there has ever been a larger proportion of contented ordinary people than there has under monarchy.

    That is a conveniently unverifiable statement.

    To the degree people were ever happy under monarchy, it was because most powerful monarchies existed in pre-technological times and the power of the monarch to interfere in his peoples' ordinary lives was greatly limited. As Wency says:

    "The whole debate about monarchy is moot, because it’s impossible to go back, even if you want to. If you wanted to implement and maintain a traditional Christian monarchy, you would have to do it with a brutal police state and massive purges that those traditional Christian monarchies didn’t actually have."

    Both the nature of the people and the nature of government have changed. That genie can't go back in the bottle. I, for one, don't want to live in North Korea, under a Supreme Leader. I don't even want to live in China under the watchful eye of a near omnipresent, intrusive state. Maybe that works for East Asians, but it doesn't work for many Westerners. I think most people in Eastern Europe were glad to be rid of the Soviets and their strong, intrusive state.

    Westerners live better in relatively small, homogeneous polities, like Iceland, that allow the citizens a great deal of freedom. Homogeneous and small being the key words there. I don't know what the upper bound is, but I'm pretty sure it is somewhere below the current size of the US and the EU, but their problems are probably due nearly as much to heterogeneity as size.

    Replies: @128, @Elmer's Washable School Glue

    I, for one, don’t want to live in North Korea, under a Supreme Leader. I don’t even want to live in China under the watchful eye of a near omnipresent, intrusive state.

    This is a complete strawman, as is Wency’s claim that a monarchy would require a “brutal police state.” There is absolutely no reason to believe that a monarchy would need to be more brutal or moniter its citizens more closely than a democracy.

    In fact it’s quite the opposite; a democratic ruler is directly dependent on public opinion to retain power. So in a democracy, the government is incentivized to manipulate public opinion by any means possible. Can this become any more apparent than in the 24/7 propganda monstrosity that characterizes modern America? By contrast, in a monarchy, the ruler is still dependent on public opinion to a certain degree, if he wants to avoid revolution, but not nearly so directly. If 55% of the population would rather have a different King, he isn’t going to get thrown out immediately.

    So logically speaking we would expect stuff like censorship and propaganda to be far worse in a democracy than in a monarchy. Even if you don’t buy this argument, no has offered any logical reason it would work the other way.

  70. @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
    @dfordoom


    I’d certainly hate to be ruled by churches. Whether they’re liberal churches or traditionalist churches, either way I don’t want to be ruled by them.
    You're ruled by the church of secularism, aka the spirit of Barabbas, but the water was boiled so slowly that you didn't notice it.

    Replies: @dfordoom

    I’d certainly hate to be ruled by churches. Whether they’re liberal churches or traditionalist churches, either way I don’t want to be ruled by them.

    You’re ruled by the church of secularism, aka the spirit of Barabbas, but the water was boiled so slowly that you didn’t notice it.

    That might well be true but it doesn’t change the fact that I would hate to live under the rule of any kind of Christian church. The fact that I would not care to live in a theocracy does not imply that I approve of the current world order.

    But I think it does need to be accepted that whether we like it or not secularism is here to stay. Wishful thinking about a revival of Christianity or Christendom is just that, wishful thinking. You might as well wish for a revival of Zoroastrianism.

    Somehow we need to work towards a saner sort of secularism. Secularism is not evil in and of itself.

    •�Replies: @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    @dfordoom


    That might well be true but it doesn’t change the fact that I would hate to live under the rule of any kind of Christian church. The fact that I would not care to live in a theocracy does not imply that I approve of the current world order.
    This particular discussion is silly to begin with. "Theocracy" is pretty much a fake meme, theocracies have never existed in Indo-European cultures with their three-caste system, and seem extremely rare in other cultures as well (although someone can offer a counterexample if they have one; China and India FWIW were basically never theocracies.)

    The bishoprics of the Middle Ages may have technically been theocracies but in practice they were ruled exactly like the neighboring kingdoms and duchies, with bishops leaving actual governance to the landed gentry and knights. Bishops who did exercise political authority, like Richelieu, pretty much always put political concerns over religious ones.

    Replies: @nebulafox
  71. @dfordoom
    @RSDB


    Given your username, do you suspect there is any “right answer” to “the problem”?
    Fair question!

    It's not a matter of finding right answers but rather finding answers that are possible. Monarchy might be great but realistically I don't see it making a comeback.

    About the best you can hope for is small improvements to the system you've got. In the case of the U.S. there are several very obvious things that need to be dome. The power of the donors has to be broken. Not easy, since both parties are equally corrupt and therefore equally determined to keep the current system by which politicians are openly for sale. Maybe a massive grass-roots campaign might help, but without some elite support it would be incredibly difficult.

    Obviously the power of social media to control, and throttle, political debate has to be broken. Very easy to do and Trump could have done it but he didn't.

    So the first thing you'd need to do is to convince enough normies that major political reforms such as these are essential.

    All you can do is try to make a flawed system work slightly less badly.

    I don't believe there's a perfect political system. You can have very good kings and very bad kings. You can have reasonably wise benevolent dictatorships and totally evil insane dictatorships. You can have representative democracies that work not too badly or ones that just give you a succession of corrupt mediocrities. You could have a theocracy that might work OK if the whole population shared the same religion and you could have a theocracy that would be an oppressive nightmare.

    Replies: @Elmer's Washable School Glue

    Monarchy might be great but realistically I don’t see it making a comeback.

    Monarchy–absolute monarchy even–exists today. My favorite example is the Sultanate of Oman; I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that it represents the greatest success story in the entire Middle East, going from a barren British colonial afterthought in the 60s to basically first world (on par with Poland and Hungary in GDP) today. In 2010, the United Nations Development Program ranked Oman as the most improved nation in the world in terms of development during the preceding 40 years. Oman also has a degree of religious tolerance far beyond the vast majority of popular governments.

    Yes, Oman does have some oil reserves, though not nearly as much its northern neighbors. The most comparable nation in terms of natural resources and geography is almost certainly the Republic of Yemen, that poster child of “failed states.” The difference between the two in terms of success could not be more stark.

    Is this possible in the near term for the west? Maybe not by means of revolution, but by means of self-organization, of people forming an imperium in imperio and preparing for the coming instability…absolutely. There are religious and cultural groups doing so right now.

    I don’t believe there’s a perfect political system.

    I agree, but this doesn’t mean some aren’t better than others on balance.

    •�Replies: @nebulafox
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue

    Oman's an interesting country: absolute monarchy with theocratic overtones, but quite functional and a weirdly "chill" kind of place, from what I've heard from expats. The late Sultan ruled very well, kind of a Middle Eastern, Islamic version of an Asian technocrat.

    The local brand of Islam is descended from the Kharijites and is extremely conservative with a strong emphasis on austerity and plain living: you won't find the same kind of garishness on display in the rest of the Gulf. That said, Shi'ites have a degree of religious freedom that they lack elsewhere in the region, and foreigners are left to their own devices as long as long as you show the common sense that you'd show in any Muslim country (don't take a six-pack into a mosque).

    > I agree, but this doesn’t mean some aren’t better than others on balance.

    I think different countries evolve naturally to political systems and spectrum that fit the local culture and circumstances, and I believe most of the problems with US foreign policy can be boiled down to a refusal to accept this, both on the Left and the Right. Singapore has a system that works great for Singapore, but I wouldn't try to apply it to the US.

    This doesn't mean I don't think there are some political systems that are always better than others: you can't really point to a successful classical Communist country (these days, China and Vietnam are more capitalist than Europe) for a reason. But we've taken universalism wayyyyy too far. You can even see that strain of thinking behind much of the current nonsense.
    , @dfordoom
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue


    Is this possible in the near term for the west?
    Clearly the answer is no.

    Maybe not by means of revolution, but by means of self-organization, of people forming an imperium in imperio and preparing for the coming instability…absolutely.
    The coming instability is more right-wing wishful thinking.

    There are religious and cultural groups doing so right now.
    Those groups can be, and will be, very easily crushed. More right-wing daydreams.

    Replies: @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    , @songbird
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue

    Muslim monarchies are probably more workable because of polygamy - it is a good tool for building clans. Oil is surely a significant tool to facilitate patronage. Arguably not reproducible outside of oil-based economies. Look at Venezuela - there's been no coup.

    I'm not really familiar with Yemen's history, but it is plausible that their instability is partly due to attempts of their neighbors to keep them from pumping. Essentially, that they were late to the party.

    I'm not an anti-monarchist, but it is difficult to reconcile the idea of monarchy with the fact that practically all monarchs in the West were deposed after WWI. I think we are talking about some profound socio-technical change that made monarchy impossible in the West. Perhaps, the end of land-based aristocrats, and agriculturally based economies.

    Not that I think monarchy is fundamentally impossible for Europeans. In principal, I think traditionalists are open to the idea, if there were some reforms, but the trouble is that one cannot separate traditionalists from radical egalitarians. Not unless there was a lot of empty, unclaimed land, ripe for setting up colonies - empty Earth-like planets and faster-than-light travel - which is probably a fantasy scenario. And anyway, in that case, people would probably prefer direct democracy, or limited franchise.

    Replies: @nebulafox
  72. @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
    @Rosie

    Dead wrong.

    Those who destroyed the monarchies were not reformers. They were revolutionaries. If they wanted reform, then they would have produced reformed the given monarchies.

    There is, of course, precedent throughout history for the reformation of monarchies. Unfortunately, modern history (at least since 1517) is loaded with revolutionaries who subverted movements for reform to destroy existing order.

    Replies: @Rosie, @Corvinus

    Those who destroyed the monarchies were not reformers. They were revolutionaries.

    Call them revolutionaries, then, but the point still stands. If revolutionaries are wrong for throwing the baby out with the bathwater, are reactionaries (who weren’t there) not wrong for precisely the same reason?

    •�Replies: @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    @Rosie

    The difference is that we now have the benefit of hindsight. We might charitably say that the late enlightenment revolutionaries conducted a kind a grand experiment spanning centuries and nations to see if they could improve on their contemporary system. Now, 200 years later, when it has become clear that this experiment failed catastrophically, it is entirely reasonable to want to undo their changes.

    We can see both the "before" and the "after;" they could see only the "before." And what we see is that most of the problems the reformers/revolutionaries set out to solve have gotten worse, not better.

    Replies: @Rosie, @dfordoom
  73. @hfel
    Did the Enlightenment pop out of a vacuum? Per Spengler, let's go back even further and say that ultimately Christianity itself eats its children.

    Replies: @Rosie

    Did the Enlightenment pop out of a vacuum? Per Spengler, let’s go back even further and say that ultimately Christianity itself eats its children.

    Heck, why stop there? I say the rot goes all the way back to the domestication of fire.

    https://greatist.com/eat/raw-meat-diet#1

    •�LOL: iffen
  74. @dfordoom
    @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan



    I’d certainly hate to be ruled by churches. Whether they’re liberal churches or traditionalist churches, either way I don’t want to be ruled by them.
    You’re ruled by the church of secularism, aka the spirit of Barabbas, but the water was boiled so slowly that you didn’t notice it.
    That might well be true but it doesn't change the fact that I would hate to live under the rule of any kind of Christian church. The fact that I would not care to live in a theocracy does not imply that I approve of the current world order.

    But I think it does need to be accepted that whether we like it or not secularism is here to stay. Wishful thinking about a revival of Christianity or Christendom is just that, wishful thinking. You might as well wish for a revival of Zoroastrianism.

    Somehow we need to work towards a saner sort of secularism. Secularism is not evil in and of itself.

    Replies: @Elmer's Washable School Glue

    That might well be true but it doesn’t change the fact that I would hate to live under the rule of any kind of Christian church. The fact that I would not care to live in a theocracy does not imply that I approve of the current world order.

    This particular discussion is silly to begin with. “Theocracy” is pretty much a fake meme, theocracies have never existed in Indo-European cultures with their three-caste system, and seem extremely rare in other cultures as well (although someone can offer a counterexample if they have one; China and India FWIW were basically never theocracies.)

    The bishoprics of the Middle Ages may have technically been theocracies but in practice they were ruled exactly like the neighboring kingdoms and duchies, with bishops leaving actual governance to the landed gentry and knights. Bishops who did exercise political authority, like Richelieu, pretty much always put political concerns over religious ones.

    •�Replies: @nebulafox
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue

    I don't think they were. Until the papal reform movement, the church was very much subordinate to the state, and the state lacked the same kind of centralization you saw in Byzantium or the caliphate (which eventually drew heavily from Persian imperial traditions) or China because of the near civilizational collapse that occurred in the West. Byzantium went through a similar process of ruralization and declining literacy after the 7th Century catastrophes, but never to the same degree, and the bureaucracy of Constantinople continued to function.

    There's a case to be made that the subsequent struggle between church and state defined a lot of what is unique about Western political culture. It's funny to think about it given its image in popular history, but the Catholic Church kicked off that process rather than retarding it.
  75. >He never got that person because he never demanded to.

    This implies that Trump himself was a Trumpist to begin with. I’ve never seen any convincing evidence of that. You’d think that logical self-interest would dictate populist policies, of course, but Trump’s just not that deep or long-term of a thinker, never has been.

    We can speculate endlessly on the matter, but it doesn’t really matter anyway, any more than whether Putin really believes in God or what Xi really thinks of the Cultural Revolution. What matters is the course that these men follow in power.

    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/why-some-early-maga-adopters-went-against-trumps-virus-doctrine

    “But the simplest answer may be that Trump, if he was ever Trumpist to begin with, became something else once he came to Washington. It was Trump’s late adopters who came to prevail in most of the power struggles in the White House. Cutting taxes, worrying about Iran more than China, easing up on the border hawkishness, and siding more with business than workers—these are some of the preferences of the later adopters. By contrast the early Trump adopters are mostly on the outside today. Whether you think that’s a good or bad thing overall will depend on your ideology—whether you find the outlook of the early supporters or the late supporters easier to take. What’s clear is that on the issue of this pandemic, though, we’d all have been better off if Trump had listened to the former.”

    •�Agree: V. K. Ovelund
  76. @Intelligent Dasein
    @Cloudbuster

    Monarchy is the only type of government that makes explicit what is cryptically present in all the others---that there is always a hierarchy and there is always only one ruler-will at the top. Monarchy is not an idea someone had nor is it one alternative among many types of government. It is government, and no power that ever existed, existed in any other form but this.

    The real power of a king can be effectively limited by other real powers so that it doesn't become tyrannical. I doubt whether there has ever been a larger proportion of contented ordinary people than there has under monarchy.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @SunBakedSuburb, @Old Palo Altan

    “contented ordinary people … under monarchy”

    Is there a system between chaos and the ancient rule by bloodline sickness? Let’s try that one.

  77. @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    @dfordoom


    Monarchy might be great but realistically I don’t see it making a comeback.
    Monarchy--absolute monarchy even--exists today. My favorite example is the Sultanate of Oman; I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that it represents the greatest success story in the entire Middle East, going from a barren British colonial afterthought in the 60s to basically first world (on par with Poland and Hungary in GDP) today. In 2010, the United Nations Development Program ranked Oman as the most improved nation in the world in terms of development during the preceding 40 years. Oman also has a degree of religious tolerance far beyond the vast majority of popular governments.

    Yes, Oman does have some oil reserves, though not nearly as much its northern neighbors. The most comparable nation in terms of natural resources and geography is almost certainly the Republic of Yemen, that poster child of "failed states." The difference between the two in terms of success could not be more stark.

    Is this possible in the near term for the west? Maybe not by means of revolution, but by means of self-organization, of people forming an imperium in imperio and preparing for the coming instability...absolutely. There are religious and cultural groups doing so right now.

    I don’t believe there’s a perfect political system.
    I agree, but this doesn't mean some aren't better than others on balance.

    Replies: @nebulafox, @dfordoom, @songbird

    Oman’s an interesting country: absolute monarchy with theocratic overtones, but quite functional and a weirdly “chill” kind of place, from what I’ve heard from expats. The late Sultan ruled very well, kind of a Middle Eastern, Islamic version of an Asian technocrat.

    The local brand of Islam is descended from the Kharijites and is extremely conservative with a strong emphasis on austerity and plain living: you won’t find the same kind of garishness on display in the rest of the Gulf. That said, Shi’ites have a degree of religious freedom that they lack elsewhere in the region, and foreigners are left to their own devices as long as long as you show the common sense that you’d show in any Muslim country (don’t take a six-pack into a mosque).

    > I agree, but this doesn’t mean some aren’t better than others on balance.

    I think different countries evolve naturally to political systems and spectrum that fit the local culture and circumstances, and I believe most of the problems with US foreign policy can be boiled down to a refusal to accept this, both on the Left and the Right. Singapore has a system that works great for Singapore, but I wouldn’t try to apply it to the US.

    This doesn’t mean I don’t think there are some political systems that are always better than others: you can’t really point to a successful classical Communist country (these days, China and Vietnam are more capitalist than Europe) for a reason. But we’ve taken universalism wayyyyy too far. You can even see that strain of thinking behind much of the current nonsense.

  78. @Rosie
    @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan


    Those who destroyed the monarchies were not reformers. They were revolutionaries.
    Call them revolutionaries, then, but the point still stands. If revolutionaries are wrong for throwing the baby out with the bathwater, are reactionaries (who weren't there) not wrong for precisely the same reason?

    Replies: @Elmer's Washable School Glue

    The difference is that we now have the benefit of hindsight. We might charitably say that the late enlightenment revolutionaries conducted a kind a grand experiment spanning centuries and nations to see if they could improve on their contemporary system. Now, 200 years later, when it has become clear that this experiment failed catastrophically, it is entirely reasonable to want to undo their changes.

    We can see both the “before” and the “after;” they could see only the “before.” And what we see is that most of the problems the reformers/revolutionaries set out to solve have gotten worse, not better.

    •�Replies: @Rosie
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue


    We can see both the “before” and the “after;” they could see only the “before.” And what we see is that most of the problems the reformers/revolutionaries set out to solve have gotten worse, not better.
    Except that you don't know if it's worse, because you weren't there. Reactionaries have a tendency to romanticize the past.

    Moreover, you have artificially limited the possibilities to two: before and after.

    The before was obviously unsatisfactory to many of our ancestors. Today, we have problems of our own. Why assume there is no solution other than reaction?

    Replies: @dfordoom
    , @dfordoom
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue


    The difference is that we now have the benefit of hindsight. We might charitably say that the late enlightenment revolutionaries conducted a kind a grand experiment spanning centuries and nations to see if they could improve on their contemporary system. Now, 200 years later, when it has become clear that this experiment failed catastrophically, it is entirely reasonable to want to undo their changes.

    We can see both the “before” and the “after;” they could see only the “before.” And what we see is that most of the problems the reformers/revolutionaries set out to solve have gotten worse, not better.
    The problem is that in many ways things have improved to an extraordinary extent. We live much longer healthier lives. We enjoy material abundance that no-one 200 years ago could have dreamt of. The poor today enjoy higher living standards than the filthy rich of 200 years ago.

    The vast majority of the population believes, with justification, that they are much much better off today.

    The number of people who seriously think that things are so bad today that we should entirely dismantle modern civilisation and return to the political, economic, social and cultural practices of 200 years ago is so tiny as to be almost non-existent. Basically, a handful of cranks on the internet.

    Whatever you think of the changes of the past 20o years, whatever you think of industrialisation, urbanisation, democracy, capitalism, liberalism what you can't get away from is that these things have delivered enormous benefits. They have come at a price but for most people the benefits far outweigh the costs.

    You have a few thousand people, at most, who actually want to undo all the changes of the past 200 years. The other 99.99% of the population has absolutely zero desire to undo those changes.

    And as much as reactionaries might bewail the collapse of Christianity, Christianity collapsed because most people believed (and still believe) that it has nothing to offer. And as much as reactionaries might bewail the collapse of social conservative values those values collapsed because they no longer had any appeal to most people. Socially conservative sexual mores collapsed because people didn't want them any more.

    Most people really do believe that there has been enormous progress within the past 200 years and you're going to have an uphill battle to convince them that they're wrong.

    And, just to throw in a really heretical thought, you'll have trouble persuading people that globalism should be abandoned because in a strictly economic sense it really has brought huge benefits. People actually like paying low prices for consumer goods.

    So the problem with reactionary ideas is that to most of the population such ideas have zero appeal.

    Replies: @Intelligent Dasein
  79. @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    @dfordoom


    That might well be true but it doesn’t change the fact that I would hate to live under the rule of any kind of Christian church. The fact that I would not care to live in a theocracy does not imply that I approve of the current world order.
    This particular discussion is silly to begin with. "Theocracy" is pretty much a fake meme, theocracies have never existed in Indo-European cultures with their three-caste system, and seem extremely rare in other cultures as well (although someone can offer a counterexample if they have one; China and India FWIW were basically never theocracies.)

    The bishoprics of the Middle Ages may have technically been theocracies but in practice they were ruled exactly like the neighboring kingdoms and duchies, with bishops leaving actual governance to the landed gentry and knights. Bishops who did exercise political authority, like Richelieu, pretty much always put political concerns over religious ones.

    Replies: @nebulafox

    I don’t think they were. Until the papal reform movement, the church was very much subordinate to the state, and the state lacked the same kind of centralization you saw in Byzantium or the caliphate (which eventually drew heavily from Persian imperial traditions) or China because of the near civilizational collapse that occurred in the West. Byzantium went through a similar process of ruralization and declining literacy after the 7th Century catastrophes, but never to the same degree, and the bureaucracy of Constantinople continued to function.

    There’s a case to be made that the subsequent struggle between church and state defined a lot of what is unique about Western political culture. It’s funny to think about it given its image in popular history, but the Catholic Church kicked off that process rather than retarding it.

  80. Oman’s an interesting country: absolute monarchy with theocratic overtones

    I very seriously doubt that Oman is an absolute monarchy. It has a constitution of sorts, which necessarily precludes absolute power, unless it is a totally useless dead letter.

    •�Replies: @nebulafox
    @Rosie

    The closest thing Oman's got is a "Basic Statute" that was issued in 1996, which explicitly states that the system of government is a hereditary sultanate in which the sultan is supreme commander of the armed forces, head of state, in charge of the legal system, and responsible for creating and issuing laws. It also states that Islam is the state religion, though it simultaneously forbids religious discrimination-Qaboos was way too much of a pragmatist to sacrifice useful imported talent and also had the kind of legitimacy needed for this that the Sauds struggle with-and that non-Muslims are free to practice their faiths as long as "it does not disrupt public order or conflict with accepted standards of behavior.”

    (Read: accept Muslim social supremacy and toe the line on things like homosexuality, public drinking, respect for the Qu'ran, or pornography, and we'll mostly leave you alone. That's the best realistic deal you are going to get in that part of the world.)

    The Omani sultanate is one of the world's more benevolent, successful dictatorships, especially by the standards of that region. But a Islamist dictatorship nonetheless it is.

    Replies: @Talha, @Rosie
  81. Rosie says:
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    @Rosie

    The difference is that we now have the benefit of hindsight. We might charitably say that the late enlightenment revolutionaries conducted a kind a grand experiment spanning centuries and nations to see if they could improve on their contemporary system. Now, 200 years later, when it has become clear that this experiment failed catastrophically, it is entirely reasonable to want to undo their changes.

    We can see both the "before" and the "after;" they could see only the "before." And what we see is that most of the problems the reformers/revolutionaries set out to solve have gotten worse, not better.

    Replies: @Rosie, @dfordoom

    We can see both the “before” and the “after;” they could see only the “before.” And what we see is that most of the problems the reformers/revolutionaries set out to solve have gotten worse, not better.

    Except that you don’t know if it’s worse, because you weren’t there. Reactionaries have a tendency to romanticize the past.

    Moreover, you have artificially limited the possibilities to two: before and after.

    The before was obviously unsatisfactory to many of our ancestors. Today, we have problems of our own. Why assume there is no solution other than reaction?

    •�Replies: @dfordoom
    @Rosie


    Except that you don’t know if it’s worse, because you weren’t there. Reactionaries have a tendency to romanticize the past.
    Yes, I definitely agree with you on that point. Reactionaries and traditionalists wildly overestimate the appeal of traditional societies and traditional values. People who have had experience of living in traditional societies more often than not hated every minute of it and couldn't wait to escape such societies. It's yet another example of the right-wing tendency to live in a fantasy world.

    Moreover, you have artificially limited the possibilities to two: before and after.

    The before was obviously unsatisfactory to many of our ancestors. Today, we have problems of our own. Why assume there is no solution other than reaction?
    I have to agree with you again.

    Reactionaries are essentially pursuing a lost cause. We cannot go back to the way things were. All we can do is take what we have now and try to improve it and make the society we have more liveable.

    Which is one of the reasons the Left has so much more appeal than the Right. The Left is often wrong but at least they are saying, let's make things better. If the Right doesn't like the Left's plans for making things better they need to come up with their own positive visions for a better society. And no, constantly increasing GDP and constantly increasing corporate profits do not qualify as positive visions of a better society. Nor do the wild hate-fuelled fantasies of the alt-right qualify as positive visions of a better society.

    Replies: @AaronB
  82. Anon[369] •�Disclaimer says:
    @Almost Missouri

    Twinkie provides an opportunity to repeat that had Trump brought Pat Buchanan on as chief of staff instead of Saboteur Priebus, the president’s first term would’ve looked much different than it does today:

    There used to be similar grumbling at the Reagan White House – that most of the key personnel at the Reagan White House were not Reaganites.

    I usually agree with Twinkie, but I have to take partial exception here. While it is true that Trump did himself no favors by appointing the Swamp to drain the Swamp, I don't think the same thing can be said of Reagan. Among other things, Reagan was notable for bringing a lot of outside-the-Beltway, often non-Republican Party people. There were free-wheeling businessmen, (e.g., Weinberger, Donovan), many were from the West before there was the concept of "Left Coast" and all that implies. They had almost all worked real jobs in the real economy outside of the DC "public service" grift. (It was also notable how many of them had served in the military, often joining in the enlisted ranks, often during a real shooting war.) And even when they were in the Party, they were more often from the iconoclastic wing (e.g., Kirkpatrick, Watt).

    For a taste of what might have been, check the comments when Sailer canvassed his readers for recommendations for the Trump cabinet.

    https://www.unz.com/isteve/who-should-be-in-the-trump-administration

    Replies: @Twinkie, @Anon

    Few men or women could’ve withstood the anti-Trump hurricane-force headwinds for even 4 seconds which Trump has had to withstand, even if clumsily, for 4 years. The FBI secret police has targeted everyone around Trump starting in 2015 and no doubt has secretly threatened those around him to agree to become informants for them, or else.

    Forty years ago Deep State and the permanent bureaucracy didn’t have the stranglehold on all levers of power like they have today. And while the media had a liberal bent during the Reagan Era it was far from the media we have nowadays which makes DPRK media look like real news.

    At this point I don’t think Deep State and the permanent bureaucracy can be eradicated or even pushed back one iota. It’s a cancer that has metastasized into every organ of the body and every cell of the brain.

  83. @Rosie

    Oman’s an interesting country: absolute monarchy with theocratic overtones
    I very seriously doubt that Oman is an absolute monarchy. It has a constitution of sorts, which necessarily precludes absolute power, unless it is a totally useless dead letter.

    Replies: @nebulafox

    The closest thing Oman’s got is a “Basic Statute” that was issued in 1996, which explicitly states that the system of government is a hereditary sultanate in which the sultan is supreme commander of the armed forces, head of state, in charge of the legal system, and responsible for creating and issuing laws. It also states that Islam is the state religion, though it simultaneously forbids religious discrimination-Qaboos was way too much of a pragmatist to sacrifice useful imported talent and also had the kind of legitimacy needed for this that the Sauds struggle with-and that non-Muslims are free to practice their faiths as long as “it does not disrupt public order or conflict with accepted standards of behavior.”

    (Read: accept Muslim social supremacy and toe the line on things like homosexuality, public drinking, respect for the Qu’ran, or pornography, and we’ll mostly leave you alone. That’s the best realistic deal you are going to get in that part of the world.)

    The Omani sultanate is one of the world’s more benevolent, successful dictatorships, especially by the standards of that region. But a Islamist dictatorship nonetheless it is.

    •�Agree: Talha
    •�Replies: @Talha
    @nebulafox

    I mostly agree with you here except with a minor quibble about the term "Islamist". The Ibadis are one of the traditional schools (though not Sunni, but fairly close) and would probably take umbrage at the term Islamist (which is usually reserved for either Salafi types or Ikhwanis). It is definitely a dictatorship/monarchy with Islam as its legitimizing foundation.

    And I agree, it is a pretty crazy success.

    Peace.

    Replies: @nebulafox
    , @Rosie
    @nebulafox

    OK. But what does this "basic statute" (i.e. constitution) say about the rights of the accused, civil liberties, etc? If it makes no provision for these things, and there is no separation of powers, then absolute monarchy is a fair characterization. Otherwise, it is a constitutional monarchy, which is a whole 'nother breed of cat.
  84. dfordoom says: •�Website
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    @dfordoom


    Monarchy might be great but realistically I don’t see it making a comeback.
    Monarchy--absolute monarchy even--exists today. My favorite example is the Sultanate of Oman; I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that it represents the greatest success story in the entire Middle East, going from a barren British colonial afterthought in the 60s to basically first world (on par with Poland and Hungary in GDP) today. In 2010, the United Nations Development Program ranked Oman as the most improved nation in the world in terms of development during the preceding 40 years. Oman also has a degree of religious tolerance far beyond the vast majority of popular governments.

    Yes, Oman does have some oil reserves, though not nearly as much its northern neighbors. The most comparable nation in terms of natural resources and geography is almost certainly the Republic of Yemen, that poster child of "failed states." The difference between the two in terms of success could not be more stark.

    Is this possible in the near term for the west? Maybe not by means of revolution, but by means of self-organization, of people forming an imperium in imperio and preparing for the coming instability...absolutely. There are religious and cultural groups doing so right now.

    I don’t believe there’s a perfect political system.
    I agree, but this doesn't mean some aren't better than others on balance.

    Replies: @nebulafox, @dfordoom, @songbird

    Is this possible in the near term for the west?

    Clearly the answer is no.

    Maybe not by means of revolution, but by means of self-organization, of people forming an imperium in imperio and preparing for the coming instability…absolutely.

    The coming instability is more right-wing wishful thinking.

    There are religious and cultural groups doing so right now.

    Those groups can be, and will be, very easily crushed. More right-wing daydreams.

    •�Replies: @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    @dfordoom


    The coming instability is more right-wing wishful thinking.
    D, I actually agree with you to a certain extent. I think the "coming civil war" crowd is deluded (and thankfully so, war sucks). Ditto for the "US has only 10 years before a financial apocalypse" people, I've argued against that exact line of reasoning in these comments before.

    By "instability" I just mean a gradual weakening of our state and its institutions, which many would say is not only inevitable, but already upon us. We all know the US isn't functioning, on balance, as well as it did in the past. Maybe there will be a collapse but more likely it will just be a gradual fading away. Remember, if you asked a Western European in AD 500 whether the Roman Empire still existed in the West, he would have answered "of course" it did. The vast majority of the barbarian invaders ruled in the name of Rome, most famously Odoacer. The Italian economy largely continued to function as it had before into the mid 6th century. The "Fall of Rome" as a single event or date is an incredibly stupid concept, one reflected in today's doomerists.

    My point is this: a monarchy (or any other heterodox government) in North America doesn't require a violent reaction. It doesn't even necessarily require some kind of dramatic collapse. As the American state gradually weakens, and its official institutions fail to perform competently, parallel institutions have the potential to step in and fill those roles. I mean, look at the Latino gangs defending their neighborhoods from looters. That is literally a return to warlords circa 500 BC. Can you get any more "traditional" than that?

    Replies: @dfordoom
  85. Talha says:
    @nebulafox
    @Rosie

    The closest thing Oman's got is a "Basic Statute" that was issued in 1996, which explicitly states that the system of government is a hereditary sultanate in which the sultan is supreme commander of the armed forces, head of state, in charge of the legal system, and responsible for creating and issuing laws. It also states that Islam is the state religion, though it simultaneously forbids religious discrimination-Qaboos was way too much of a pragmatist to sacrifice useful imported talent and also had the kind of legitimacy needed for this that the Sauds struggle with-and that non-Muslims are free to practice their faiths as long as "it does not disrupt public order or conflict with accepted standards of behavior.”

    (Read: accept Muslim social supremacy and toe the line on things like homosexuality, public drinking, respect for the Qu'ran, or pornography, and we'll mostly leave you alone. That's the best realistic deal you are going to get in that part of the world.)

    The Omani sultanate is one of the world's more benevolent, successful dictatorships, especially by the standards of that region. But a Islamist dictatorship nonetheless it is.

    Replies: @Talha, @Rosie

    I mostly agree with you here except with a minor quibble about the term “Islamist”. The Ibadis are one of the traditional schools (though not Sunni, but fairly close) and would probably take umbrage at the term Islamist (which is usually reserved for either Salafi types or Ikhwanis). It is definitely a dictatorship/monarchy with Islam as its legitimizing foundation.

    And I agree, it is a pretty crazy success.

    Peace.

    •�Replies: @nebulafox
    @Talha

    My mistake.

    I never got the sense that the Ibadis are viewed in the same heretical light as some jihadists view the Shi'ites, but that could just because they are too off the beaten path for many people to know about. Even most Muslims don't seem aware of the existence of Ibadism, though granted, I'm in Southeast Asia, not the Middle East.

    The Omanis seem to be quite happy to be just left alone and not publicizing themselves, at any rate. And I would be too, in their shoes.

    Replies: @Talha
  86. @Talha
    @nebulafox

    I mostly agree with you here except with a minor quibble about the term "Islamist". The Ibadis are one of the traditional schools (though not Sunni, but fairly close) and would probably take umbrage at the term Islamist (which is usually reserved for either Salafi types or Ikhwanis). It is definitely a dictatorship/monarchy with Islam as its legitimizing foundation.

    And I agree, it is a pretty crazy success.

    Peace.

    Replies: @nebulafox

    My mistake.

    I never got the sense that the Ibadis are viewed in the same heretical light as some jihadists view the Shi’ites, but that could just because they are too off the beaten path for many people to know about. Even most Muslims don’t seem aware of the existence of Ibadism, though granted, I’m in Southeast Asia, not the Middle East.

    The Omanis seem to be quite happy to be just left alone and not publicizing themselves, at any rate. And I would be too, in their shoes.

    •�Replies: @Talha
    @nebulafox

    Heterodoxy is a spectrum. The Ibadis are close to Sunnis, they just have a few differences but less than that between Sunnis and (Twelver) Shias. They are like Mu'tazilites in some of their positions.

    If you are interested, the Kingdom of Jordan (another relatively benign monarchy) puts out a yearly review of the state of the Muslims world and the most influential Muslims. It also has a great summary of the various Muslim flavors and a summary of what distinguishes them from one another. See the section titled "MAJOR DOCTRINAL DIVISIONS WITHIN ISLAM" starting on page 28-33:
    https://www.themuslim500.com/download/

    Even most Muslims don’t seem aware of the existence of Ibadism
    Yeah, I didn't even here about them until maybe less than a decade ago. I mean they are basically in Oman and that's it and comprise a around .5% of all Muslims.

    The Omanis seem to be quite happy to be just left alone and not publicizing themselves
    Yup. I have yet to see them even care to debate/discuss issues/doctrines with other Muslim groups. Unlike Sunni-Shia debates which are par for the course, these guys don't really seem to care. It is quite fascinating that they are admittedly descended from the Khawarij (the original extremist offshoot from Islam). It took them a while, but they've learned to chill out.

    Peace.
  87. Talha says:
    @nebulafox
    @Talha

    My mistake.

    I never got the sense that the Ibadis are viewed in the same heretical light as some jihadists view the Shi'ites, but that could just because they are too off the beaten path for many people to know about. Even most Muslims don't seem aware of the existence of Ibadism, though granted, I'm in Southeast Asia, not the Middle East.

    The Omanis seem to be quite happy to be just left alone and not publicizing themselves, at any rate. And I would be too, in their shoes.

    Replies: @Talha

    Heterodoxy is a spectrum. The Ibadis are close to Sunnis, they just have a few differences but less than that between Sunnis and (Twelver) Shias. They are like Mu’tazilites in some of their positions.

    If you are interested, the Kingdom of Jordan (another relatively benign monarchy) puts out a yearly review of the state of the Muslims world and the most influential Muslims. It also has a great summary of the various Muslim flavors and a summary of what distinguishes them from one another. See the section titled “MAJOR DOCTRINAL DIVISIONS WITHIN ISLAM” starting on page 28-33:
    https://www.themuslim500.com/download/

    Even most Muslims don’t seem aware of the existence of Ibadism

    Yeah, I didn’t even here about them until maybe less than a decade ago. I mean they are basically in Oman and that’s it and comprise a around .5% of all Muslims.

    The Omanis seem to be quite happy to be just left alone and not publicizing themselves

    Yup. I have yet to see them even care to debate/discuss issues/doctrines with other Muslim groups. Unlike Sunni-Shia debates which are par for the course, these guys don’t really seem to care. It is quite fascinating that they are admittedly descended from the Khawarij (the original extremist offshoot from Islam). It took them a while, but they’ve learned to chill out.

    Peace.

  88. @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
    @Alexander Turok

    Equating Meghan and Harry with traditional Christian monarchy is just the kind of lunacy I have come to expect from you.

    Replies: @Alexander Turok

    They are part of the British royal family. That’s a fact. You can tell me it’s not true communism monarchy all the live long day, what I care about is the real world.

  89. @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    @dfordoom


    Monarchy might be great but realistically I don’t see it making a comeback.
    Monarchy--absolute monarchy even--exists today. My favorite example is the Sultanate of Oman; I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that it represents the greatest success story in the entire Middle East, going from a barren British colonial afterthought in the 60s to basically first world (on par with Poland and Hungary in GDP) today. In 2010, the United Nations Development Program ranked Oman as the most improved nation in the world in terms of development during the preceding 40 years. Oman also has a degree of religious tolerance far beyond the vast majority of popular governments.

    Yes, Oman does have some oil reserves, though not nearly as much its northern neighbors. The most comparable nation in terms of natural resources and geography is almost certainly the Republic of Yemen, that poster child of "failed states." The difference between the two in terms of success could not be more stark.

    Is this possible in the near term for the west? Maybe not by means of revolution, but by means of self-organization, of people forming an imperium in imperio and preparing for the coming instability...absolutely. There are religious and cultural groups doing so right now.

    I don’t believe there’s a perfect political system.
    I agree, but this doesn't mean some aren't better than others on balance.

    Replies: @nebulafox, @dfordoom, @songbird

    Muslim monarchies are probably more workable because of polygamy – it is a good tool for building clans. Oil is surely a significant tool to facilitate patronage. Arguably not reproducible outside of oil-based economies. Look at Venezuela – there’s been no coup.

    I’m not really familiar with Yemen’s history, but it is plausible that their instability is partly due to attempts of their neighbors to keep them from pumping. Essentially, that they were late to the party.

    I’m not an anti-monarchist, but it is difficult to reconcile the idea of monarchy with the fact that practically all monarchs in the West were deposed after WWI. I think we are talking about some profound socio-technical change that made monarchy impossible in the West. Perhaps, the end of land-based aristocrats, and agriculturally based economies.

    Not that I think monarchy is fundamentally impossible for Europeans. In principal, I think traditionalists are open to the idea, if there were some reforms, but the trouble is that one cannot separate traditionalists from radical egalitarians. Not unless there was a lot of empty, unclaimed land, ripe for setting up colonies – empty Earth-like planets and faster-than-light travel – which is probably a fantasy scenario. And anyway, in that case, people would probably prefer direct democracy, or limited franchise.

    •�Replies: @nebulafox
    @songbird

    I disagree. The only reason polygamy works in Saudi Arabia is mass exportation of excess young men to go stir up trouble in other countries.

    >I’m not an anti-monarchist, but it is difficult to reconcile the idea of monarchy with the fact that practically all monarchs in the West were deposed after WWI.

    I agree. I personally believe that the general American bias against monarchy-one which Wilson exemplified-had extremely negative consequences when applied to Europe in WWI. As Churchill commented, a constitutional monarchy on the British model with an infant grandson of the Kaiser put on the throne would have gone a long way to defusing the radical right in Germany, for example. Even in Russia, the economic growth and modernization that culminated in Stalin's era was well underway during the late Tsarist period: the autocracy desperately needed political reform into something more reconcilable with modernity, but big gap between that and asserting their extirpation was necessary.

    But it's long too late to put that broken jar together. Monarchy's just not relevant to today's Europe.

    Replies: @songbird
  90. “It’s completely accurate. These stats are widely available. It is appropriate to make this claim as there is evidence to support it. Just count the number of murder victims (or thefts or home invasions … ) ”

    find a single reference where I am talking about the death rate of blacks killed by government alone — find one. You won’t. But the further point is that even the study in question the use of excessive force — nonlethal is several times larger than it is for blacks. which goes to whether there is bias.

    It’s one thing to know a stat, it’s quite another to understand what it means in understanding hi man behavior. And your grasp on that is as previously stated — inaccurate. You are not alone. This kind of rhetorical analysis is ingrained in the our teaching on this subject.

    It’s also one thing to argue something not on the table and pretend it matters.

  91. @songbird
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue

    Muslim monarchies are probably more workable because of polygamy - it is a good tool for building clans. Oil is surely a significant tool to facilitate patronage. Arguably not reproducible outside of oil-based economies. Look at Venezuela - there's been no coup.

    I'm not really familiar with Yemen's history, but it is plausible that their instability is partly due to attempts of their neighbors to keep them from pumping. Essentially, that they were late to the party.

    I'm not an anti-monarchist, but it is difficult to reconcile the idea of monarchy with the fact that practically all monarchs in the West were deposed after WWI. I think we are talking about some profound socio-technical change that made monarchy impossible in the West. Perhaps, the end of land-based aristocrats, and agriculturally based economies.

    Not that I think monarchy is fundamentally impossible for Europeans. In principal, I think traditionalists are open to the idea, if there were some reforms, but the trouble is that one cannot separate traditionalists from radical egalitarians. Not unless there was a lot of empty, unclaimed land, ripe for setting up colonies - empty Earth-like planets and faster-than-light travel - which is probably a fantasy scenario. And anyway, in that case, people would probably prefer direct democracy, or limited franchise.

    Replies: @nebulafox

    I disagree. The only reason polygamy works in Saudi Arabia is mass exportation of excess young men to go stir up trouble in other countries.

    >I’m not an anti-monarchist, but it is difficult to reconcile the idea of monarchy with the fact that practically all monarchs in the West were deposed after WWI.

    I agree. I personally believe that the general American bias against monarchy-one which Wilson exemplified-had extremely negative consequences when applied to Europe in WWI. As Churchill commented, a constitutional monarchy on the British model with an infant grandson of the Kaiser put on the throne would have gone a long way to defusing the radical right in Germany, for example. Even in Russia, the economic growth and modernization that culminated in Stalin’s era was well underway during the late Tsarist period: the autocracy desperately needed political reform into something more reconcilable with modernity, but big gap between that and asserting their extirpation was necessary.

    But it’s long too late to put that broken jar together. Monarchy’s just not relevant to today’s Europe.

    •�Replies: @songbird
    @nebulafox

    Some people seem to think polygamy is eugenic, but I tend to think polygamy is bad for a society, in the long term. It is my theory that it led to a lot of miscegenation among Arabs, which seems to cause some social rifts today, and which likely negatively impacts IQ. Some people believe that polygamy in Africa was the reason for the slave trade - essentially that the locals had surplus captive males, after raiding for women.

    I believe it probably increases average paternal age, which means more mutations.

    I'm not really too familiar with the details of the practice today in Saudi Arabia, but I think it would be very interesting to learn about. Specifically, I wonder how common it is, and what percentage of woman are foreign and where do they come from.

    I'm open to the idea that limited polygamy might promote stability. Say, if a king, alone of all men, were allowed to have three wives. An alternative might be to adopt a system of tanistry, but it seems like it was a very bloody system, which promoted instability, although the clans themselves were remarkably resilient.

    Replies: @Talha, @nebulafox
  92. dfordoom says: •�Website
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    @Rosie

    The difference is that we now have the benefit of hindsight. We might charitably say that the late enlightenment revolutionaries conducted a kind a grand experiment spanning centuries and nations to see if they could improve on their contemporary system. Now, 200 years later, when it has become clear that this experiment failed catastrophically, it is entirely reasonable to want to undo their changes.

    We can see both the "before" and the "after;" they could see only the "before." And what we see is that most of the problems the reformers/revolutionaries set out to solve have gotten worse, not better.

    Replies: @Rosie, @dfordoom

    The difference is that we now have the benefit of hindsight. We might charitably say that the late enlightenment revolutionaries conducted a kind a grand experiment spanning centuries and nations to see if they could improve on their contemporary system. Now, 200 years later, when it has become clear that this experiment failed catastrophically, it is entirely reasonable to want to undo their changes.

    We can see both the “before” and the “after;” they could see only the “before.” And what we see is that most of the problems the reformers/revolutionaries set out to solve have gotten worse, not better.

    The problem is that in many ways things have improved to an extraordinary extent. We live much longer healthier lives. We enjoy material abundance that no-one 200 years ago could have dreamt of. The poor today enjoy higher living standards than the filthy rich of 200 years ago.

    The vast majority of the population believes, with justification, that they are much much better off today.

    The number of people who seriously think that things are so bad today that we should entirely dismantle modern civilisation and return to the political, economic, social and cultural practices of 200 years ago is so tiny as to be almost non-existent. Basically, a handful of cranks on the internet.

    Whatever you think of the changes of the past 20o years, whatever you think of industrialisation, urbanisation, democracy, capitalism, liberalism what you can’t get away from is that these things have delivered enormous benefits. They have come at a price but for most people the benefits far outweigh the costs.

    You have a few thousand people, at most, who actually want to undo all the changes of the past 200 years. The other 99.99% of the population has absolutely zero desire to undo those changes.

    And as much as reactionaries might bewail the collapse of Christianity, Christianity collapsed because most people believed (and still believe) that it has nothing to offer. And as much as reactionaries might bewail the collapse of social conservative values those values collapsed because they no longer had any appeal to most people. Socially conservative sexual mores collapsed because people didn’t want them any more.

    Most people really do believe that there has been enormous progress within the past 200 years and you’re going to have an uphill battle to convince them that they’re wrong.

    And, just to throw in a really heretical thought, you’ll have trouble persuading people that globalism should be abandoned because in a strictly economic sense it really has brought huge benefits. People actually like paying low prices for consumer goods.

    So the problem with reactionary ideas is that to most of the population such ideas have zero appeal.

    •�Replies: @Intelligent Dasein
    @dfordoom

    Your reflexively contrarian horsecrap is getting rather tiresome of late. Let me explain a couple of things to you.

    First of all, Christianity is not at all interested in its mass appeal. It explicitly says "straight and narrow is the way that leads to salvation, and few are they who enter thereby." It says "deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me." It does not say "go ye into all the world and tell the world what it wants to hear." It makes no effort to submit itself to the approval of the hoi polloi. But this is the only way to save your soul.

    Likewise, traditional society places limits on what the flesh craves. It insists that you do not consume everything you want at the expense of the tribe's future. It tells you to respect your elders rather than mocking and killing them. It says that sex should be used as a means of reproduction rather than a mutual masturbatory amusement. All this is odious to the flesh, but it is the only way to win the battle for existence.

    Modern society is nothing more than a successful rebellion. Of course the rebels in their reverie don't want to hear about how wrong they are. That does not change anything. They are still headed for self-destruction just the same.

    Replies: @dfordoom
  93. Look, the Enlightenment is about Logic and Science.

    This Humanist Cult is Anti-science and against logic.

    Its all about EMOTIONS and the “feels”.

    Its a neo-luddite globalist gulag run by Greedy Fruity Nuts.

    THIS IS NOT THE ENLIGHTENMENT.

    •�Replies: @Talha
    @Dr. Doom


    THIS IS NOT THE ENLIGHTENMENT.
    Agreed. It is its walking zombie corpse...thus; eating its children posthumously.

    Peace.
  94. dfordoom says: •�Website
    @Rosie
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue


    We can see both the “before” and the “after;” they could see only the “before.” And what we see is that most of the problems the reformers/revolutionaries set out to solve have gotten worse, not better.
    Except that you don't know if it's worse, because you weren't there. Reactionaries have a tendency to romanticize the past.

    Moreover, you have artificially limited the possibilities to two: before and after.

    The before was obviously unsatisfactory to many of our ancestors. Today, we have problems of our own. Why assume there is no solution other than reaction?

    Replies: @dfordoom

    Except that you don’t know if it’s worse, because you weren’t there. Reactionaries have a tendency to romanticize the past.

    Yes, I definitely agree with you on that point. Reactionaries and traditionalists wildly overestimate the appeal of traditional societies and traditional values. People who have had experience of living in traditional societies more often than not hated every minute of it and couldn’t wait to escape such societies. It’s yet another example of the right-wing tendency to live in a fantasy world.

    Moreover, you have artificially limited the possibilities to two: before and after.

    The before was obviously unsatisfactory to many of our ancestors. Today, we have problems of our own. Why assume there is no solution other than reaction?

    I have to agree with you again.

    Reactionaries are essentially pursuing a lost cause. We cannot go back to the way things were. All we can do is take what we have now and try to improve it and make the society we have more liveable.

    Which is one of the reasons the Left has so much more appeal than the Right. The Left is often wrong but at least they are saying, let’s make things better. If the Right doesn’t like the Left’s plans for making things better they need to come up with their own positive visions for a better society. And no, constantly increasing GDP and constantly increasing corporate profits do not qualify as positive visions of a better society. Nor do the wild hate-fuelled fantasies of the alt-right qualify as positive visions of a better society.

    •�Replies: @AaronB
    @dfordoom

    I'm not convinced that's true. There are clearly lots of people who would definitely like to live in a traditional society. Just as obviously many people would hate it - I like many things about traditional societies but I am far too eccentric to ever live in one.

    The problem is Cultural Imperialism - where one set of people try and force everyone else to live by their rules. They do not accept that there is an immense variety of psychological types and are sure they know what's best for humanity. As someone said, the problems of the world are that one half of humanity hates what the other half love.

    I think a healthy society has to be a mosaic of cultural communities negotiating a common public space - organized as a hierarchy. There will always be one mainstream dominant culture, belonging to which will grant access to the best jobs and most power, but it cannot be exclusive, either. Everyone has to get some share.

    The Islamic millet system is not what I mean - while it did allow different cultural communities their own space, those communities were repressive and did not allow for different psychological types within them. Moreover, in practice people living under Muslim rule always felt humiliated and unhappy, because there is always a strong universalist and imperialist strain.

    Inherent in Islam and Christianity is an extreme form of Universalism, unfortunately, and both are innately Cultural Imperialists.

    Probably the best model for this is Mahayana Buddhism - which believes there are a variety of legitimate paths suitable to ones level and psychological type - the opposite of Cultural Imperialism. (Judaism too, but that's an unpopular position here so I won't get into it).

    A healthy society is more like a mosaic of psychological types negotiating a shared public space and accommodating each other - while it will inevitably be organized hierarchically, it ought not to be too harshly so.

    Of course, there is one psychological type that cannot live at peace with others and will always try and repress and control others - this type goes by many names in history, and will always be with us. The Cultural Imperialists.

    While this type may seem to represent Order, it is actually what prevents a stable society of people willing to accommodate each other from ever lasting - so this control and repress type is actually the principle of Chaos and the ferment of history. He always provokes backlashes.

    So we have to recognize that due to this eternal type, a stable society that gives happiness to the majority can never last.

    This does not mean it is not worthwhile to work for the good kind of mosaic society I described in the interim, just that we should be aware it will not last. But it will also always be recovered. Such is life.

    **** While I describe Islam and Christianity as inherently Cultural Imperialists, there were periods when it was pretty accommodating to a wide variety of psychological types and granted happiness to most people living in it. So its not all black and white even here.

    Replies: @dfordoom
  95. @Dr. Doom
    Look, the Enlightenment is about Logic and Science.

    This Humanist Cult is Anti-science and against logic.

    Its all about EMOTIONS and the "feels".

    Its a neo-luddite globalist gulag run by Greedy Fruity Nuts.

    THIS IS NOT THE ENLIGHTENMENT.

    Replies: @Talha

    THIS IS NOT THE ENLIGHTENMENT.

    Agreed. It is its walking zombie corpse…thus; eating its children posthumously.

    Peace.

  96. @nebulafox
    @songbird

    I disagree. The only reason polygamy works in Saudi Arabia is mass exportation of excess young men to go stir up trouble in other countries.

    >I’m not an anti-monarchist, but it is difficult to reconcile the idea of monarchy with the fact that practically all monarchs in the West were deposed after WWI.

    I agree. I personally believe that the general American bias against monarchy-one which Wilson exemplified-had extremely negative consequences when applied to Europe in WWI. As Churchill commented, a constitutional monarchy on the British model with an infant grandson of the Kaiser put on the throne would have gone a long way to defusing the radical right in Germany, for example. Even in Russia, the economic growth and modernization that culminated in Stalin's era was well underway during the late Tsarist period: the autocracy desperately needed political reform into something more reconcilable with modernity, but big gap between that and asserting their extirpation was necessary.

    But it's long too late to put that broken jar together. Monarchy's just not relevant to today's Europe.

    Replies: @songbird

    Some people seem to think polygamy is eugenic, but I tend to think polygamy is bad for a society, in the long term. It is my theory that it led to a lot of miscegenation among Arabs, which seems to cause some social rifts today, and which likely negatively impacts IQ. Some people believe that polygamy in Africa was the reason for the slave trade – essentially that the locals had surplus captive males, after raiding for women.

    I believe it probably increases average paternal age, which means more mutations.

    I’m not really too familiar with the details of the practice today in Saudi Arabia, but I think it would be very interesting to learn about. Specifically, I wonder how common it is, and what percentage of woman are foreign and where do they come from.

    I’m open to the idea that limited polygamy might promote stability. Say, if a king, alone of all men, were allowed to have three wives. An alternative might be to adopt a system of tanistry, but it seems like it was a very bloody system, which promoted instability, although the clans themselves were remarkably resilient.

    •�Agree: Rosie
    •�Replies: @Talha
    @songbird


    but it seems like it was a very bloody system, which promoted instability
    Well, let's see if this passes the smell test. Look at the anthropological breakdown (from 1998) of almost 1250 distinct cultures on our planet (section ‘9: Marital Composition’). Strictly monogamous cultures are in the minority (15-20%) – the rest of the world is occasionally or frequently polygamous. The breakdown is between 15-10% monogamous and 75-80% polygamous:
    Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society (Cambridge Univ. Press)

    If the minority of cultures are monogamous then there needs to be some level of proof-is-in-the-pudding to show they are more stable. So let's look at the most obvious example of Europe. Europe has been monogamous for a very long time, but it has also been a very bloody continent - more bloody relative to others:
    https://necrometrics.com/pre1700a.htm#20worst

    The Chinese region has also been very, very bloody.

    Now if you throw history out the window and start the clock at around 1950 or something, then maybe you have a case, but why should we ignore the overwhelming historical data?

    Peace.

    Replies: @Athletic and Whitesplosive, @songbird, @songbird
    , @nebulafox
    @songbird

    >Some people seem to think polygamy is eugenic, but I tend to think polygamy is bad for a society, in the long term.

    I believe polygamy has two major deletrious effects, one of which I already mentioned. The other is the messed up family dynamics: the father will not invest in his children as much as he should (one family is tough enough to manage!), and the different wives end up competing with each other. Political succession crises provide a very good example of how this can play out on the highest societal level: the civil war that started Abbasid disintegration was fought between two half-brothers, and the main reason the Ottomans lasted for so long was that it was expected the next sultan would leave a lot of dead or mentally crippled half-brothers in his wake.

    Furthermore, polygamy takes a lot money. Do we really need more pro-oligarchic trends?

    >Specifically, I wonder how common it is, and what percentage of woman are foreign and where do they come from.

    The Saudis are a rather closed off bunch who don't take foreign wives, though they are quite happy to rape Filipina or Indonesian maids.

    >I’m open to the idea that limited polygamy might promote stability.

    I don't buy that. The reason polygamy worked in the past was that many young men could be counted to die in war or disease. That's not the case anymore, and in any rate, something working doesn't mean it is optimal for a developed, civilized society. With over 7 billion human beings in an urbanized world, we couldn't be more removed from Biblical agrarian conditions.

    Emphasizing the nuclear family at the expense of wider tribal connections is a huge part of why the West was so successful. The rest of the world did notice. Even in the Islamic World, polygamy is the exception to the rule these days, and nonexistent in more countries than not.

    Replies: @songbird
  97. Lowe says:
    @Jake
    Sailer quotes Twinkie: "That’s always been the great failure of conservatives and now nationalists – fixating on the soundness of ideas and neglecting the inculcation and development of a wide pool of competent public intellectuals, elected officials, and administrators who can govern well once the elections are won."

    That was not the great failure of the Reagan administration, which was mentioned just before the quoted line. THE great failure of the Reagan administration was in allowing the Neocons to take control of foreign policy and - even worse, much worse - of policy related to national history and culture.

    The Reagan administration picked the wrong idea, a very bad idea, an evil idea, meant both to have the US play Permanent War for Perpetual Peace and to accelerate the until then fairly mild culture war against white middle American males.

    Replies: @Lowe

    Not creating a pool of public intellectuals is not a failure or conservatives or nationalists, anyway. It’s a consequence of their ideology.

    The ideology that provides the best means to secure power is the one that will create a large pool of intellectuals, because it attracts them. That is why classical Marcism

    •�Replies: @Lowe
    @Lowe

    Oops...

    That is why classical Marxism/Leninism was once popular with intellectuals, and now Wokeism/Bioleninism is. They provide the best means to gain followers and justify access public and corporate funds.

    This is a natural selective process, and it is well outside the control of individuals or groups. People don't make plans. Just look around you.
  98. Lowe says:
    @Lowe
    @Jake

    Not creating a pool of public intellectuals is not a failure or conservatives or nationalists, anyway. It's a consequence of their ideology.

    The ideology that provides the best means to secure power is the one that will create a large pool of intellectuals, because it attracts them. That is why classical Marcism

    Replies: @Lowe

    Oops…

    That is why classical Marxism/Leninism was once popular with intellectuals, and now Wokeism/Bioleninism is. They provide the best means to gain followers and justify access public and corporate funds.

    This is a natural selective process, and it is well outside the control of individuals or groups. People don’t make plans. Just look around you.

  99. @nebulafox
    @Rosie

    The closest thing Oman's got is a "Basic Statute" that was issued in 1996, which explicitly states that the system of government is a hereditary sultanate in which the sultan is supreme commander of the armed forces, head of state, in charge of the legal system, and responsible for creating and issuing laws. It also states that Islam is the state religion, though it simultaneously forbids religious discrimination-Qaboos was way too much of a pragmatist to sacrifice useful imported talent and also had the kind of legitimacy needed for this that the Sauds struggle with-and that non-Muslims are free to practice their faiths as long as "it does not disrupt public order or conflict with accepted standards of behavior.”

    (Read: accept Muslim social supremacy and toe the line on things like homosexuality, public drinking, respect for the Qu'ran, or pornography, and we'll mostly leave you alone. That's the best realistic deal you are going to get in that part of the world.)

    The Omani sultanate is one of the world's more benevolent, successful dictatorships, especially by the standards of that region. But a Islamist dictatorship nonetheless it is.

    Replies: @Talha, @Rosie

    OK. But what does this “basic statute” (i.e. constitution) say about the rights of the accused, civil liberties, etc? If it makes no provision for these things, and there is no separation of powers, then absolute monarchy is a fair characterization. Otherwise, it is a constitutional monarchy, which is a whole ‘nother breed of cat.

  100. @dfordoom
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue


    The difference is that we now have the benefit of hindsight. We might charitably say that the late enlightenment revolutionaries conducted a kind a grand experiment spanning centuries and nations to see if they could improve on their contemporary system. Now, 200 years later, when it has become clear that this experiment failed catastrophically, it is entirely reasonable to want to undo their changes.

    We can see both the “before” and the “after;” they could see only the “before.” And what we see is that most of the problems the reformers/revolutionaries set out to solve have gotten worse, not better.
    The problem is that in many ways things have improved to an extraordinary extent. We live much longer healthier lives. We enjoy material abundance that no-one 200 years ago could have dreamt of. The poor today enjoy higher living standards than the filthy rich of 200 years ago.

    The vast majority of the population believes, with justification, that they are much much better off today.

    The number of people who seriously think that things are so bad today that we should entirely dismantle modern civilisation and return to the political, economic, social and cultural practices of 200 years ago is so tiny as to be almost non-existent. Basically, a handful of cranks on the internet.

    Whatever you think of the changes of the past 20o years, whatever you think of industrialisation, urbanisation, democracy, capitalism, liberalism what you can't get away from is that these things have delivered enormous benefits. They have come at a price but for most people the benefits far outweigh the costs.

    You have a few thousand people, at most, who actually want to undo all the changes of the past 200 years. The other 99.99% of the population has absolutely zero desire to undo those changes.

    And as much as reactionaries might bewail the collapse of Christianity, Christianity collapsed because most people believed (and still believe) that it has nothing to offer. And as much as reactionaries might bewail the collapse of social conservative values those values collapsed because they no longer had any appeal to most people. Socially conservative sexual mores collapsed because people didn't want them any more.

    Most people really do believe that there has been enormous progress within the past 200 years and you're going to have an uphill battle to convince them that they're wrong.

    And, just to throw in a really heretical thought, you'll have trouble persuading people that globalism should be abandoned because in a strictly economic sense it really has brought huge benefits. People actually like paying low prices for consumer goods.

    So the problem with reactionary ideas is that to most of the population such ideas have zero appeal.

    Replies: @Intelligent Dasein

    Your reflexively contrarian horsecrap is getting rather tiresome of late. Let me explain a couple of things to you.

    First of all, Christianity is not at all interested in its mass appeal. It explicitly says “straight and narrow is the way that leads to salvation, and few are they who enter thereby.” It says “deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.” It does not say “go ye into all the world and tell the world what it wants to hear.” It makes no effort to submit itself to the approval of the hoi polloi. But this is the only way to save your soul.

    Likewise, traditional society places limits on what the flesh craves. It insists that you do not consume everything you want at the expense of the tribe’s future. It tells you to respect your elders rather than mocking and killing them. It says that sex should be used as a means of reproduction rather than a mutual masturbatory amusement. All this is odious to the flesh, but it is the only way to win the battle for existence.

    Modern society is nothing more than a successful rebellion. Of course the rebels in their reverie don’t want to hear about how wrong they are. That does not change anything. They are still headed for self-destruction just the same.

    •�Replies: @dfordoom
    @Intelligent Dasein


    First of all, Christianity is not at all interested in its mass appeal. It explicitly says “straight and narrow is the way that leads to salvation, and few are they who enter thereby.” It says “deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.” It does not say “go ye into all the world and tell the world what it wants to hear.” It makes no effort to submit itself to the approval of the hoi polloi. But this is the only way to save your soul.
    That's fine but I'm not interested in religion as religion. I'm interested in religion as a political and social and cultural factor. As a political/cultural/social factor it's largely irrelevant now and will almost certainly remain irrelevant. To be a political/cultural/social factor you need some mass appeal.

    Christianity will survive as a minor personal religion but the days when it could shape society and culture are gone.

    You believe Christianity is true and that it's the path to salvation and that's fine but it's not really relevant to the discussion. This is not really a religious site. Here we're mostly concerned with the political, social and cultural dimensions.

    Likewise, traditional society places limits on what the flesh craves. It insists that you do not consume everything you want at the expense of the tribe’s future. It tells you to respect your elders rather than mocking and killing them. It says that sex should be used as a means of reproduction rather than a mutual masturbatory amusement. All this is odious to the flesh, but it is the only way to win the battle for existence.

    Modern society is nothing more than a successful rebellion. Of course the rebels in their reverie don’t want to hear about how wrong they are. That does not change anything. They are still headed for self-destruction just the same.
    That's all fine and may well be true, but the point I was trying to make is that people in general do not want to return to traditional society. I was not making an actual judgment on whether traditional society is better or worse than what we have. I was merely pointing out that a return to traditional society is not going to happen because most people do not want it. That train has left the station. Most people, rightly or wrongly, think that what we have now is a whole lot better than what traditional society offered.

    It seems to me that the best approach is to take what we have today and make it a bit more workable and a bit more healthy. Advocating a return to traditional society is pretty much a waste of energy.
  101. “Twinkie provides an opportunity to repeat that had Trump brought Pat Buchanan on as chief of staff instead of Saboteur Priebus, the president’s first term would’ve looked much different than it does today”.

    MAY have looked different. Besides, it was all about framing and optics for Trump. Priebus served as a useful idiot before he was discarded to the dumpster. Buchanan would have been sent packing, too. You would think by now that people would realize Trump cares not about governing or policies, but it is about securing gimmedats and free stuff.

  102. @John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan
    @Rosie

    Dead wrong.

    Those who destroyed the monarchies were not reformers. They were revolutionaries. If they wanted reform, then they would have produced reformed the given monarchies.

    There is, of course, precedent throughout history for the reformation of monarchies. Unfortunately, modern history (at least since 1517) is loaded with revolutionaries who subverted movements for reform to destroy existing order.

    Replies: @Rosie, @Corvinus

    “Those who destroyed the monarchies were not reformers. They were revolutionaries.”

    Revolutionaries who made reforms given how the monarchies which were deposed had demonstrated they were other than willing to meet the needs of the citizens.

  103. @dfordoom
    @Rosie


    Except that you don’t know if it’s worse, because you weren’t there. Reactionaries have a tendency to romanticize the past.
    Yes, I definitely agree with you on that point. Reactionaries and traditionalists wildly overestimate the appeal of traditional societies and traditional values. People who have had experience of living in traditional societies more often than not hated every minute of it and couldn't wait to escape such societies. It's yet another example of the right-wing tendency to live in a fantasy world.

    Moreover, you have artificially limited the possibilities to two: before and after.

    The before was obviously unsatisfactory to many of our ancestors. Today, we have problems of our own. Why assume there is no solution other than reaction?
    I have to agree with you again.

    Reactionaries are essentially pursuing a lost cause. We cannot go back to the way things were. All we can do is take what we have now and try to improve it and make the society we have more liveable.

    Which is one of the reasons the Left has so much more appeal than the Right. The Left is often wrong but at least they are saying, let's make things better. If the Right doesn't like the Left's plans for making things better they need to come up with their own positive visions for a better society. And no, constantly increasing GDP and constantly increasing corporate profits do not qualify as positive visions of a better society. Nor do the wild hate-fuelled fantasies of the alt-right qualify as positive visions of a better society.

    Replies: @AaronB

    I’m not convinced that’s true. There are clearly lots of people who would definitely like to live in a traditional society. Just as obviously many people would hate it – I like many things about traditional societies but I am far too eccentric to ever live in one.

    The problem is Cultural Imperialism – where one set of people try and force everyone else to live by their rules. They do not accept that there is an immense variety of psychological types and are sure they know what’s best for humanity. As someone said, the problems of the world are that one half of humanity hates what the other half love.

    I think a healthy society has to be a mosaic of cultural communities negotiating a common public space – organized as a hierarchy. There will always be one mainstream dominant culture, belonging to which will grant access to the best jobs and most power, but it cannot be exclusive, either. Everyone has to get some share.

    The Islamic millet system is not what I mean – while it did allow different cultural communities their own space, those communities were repressive and did not allow for different psychological types within them. Moreover, in practice people living under Muslim rule always felt humiliated and unhappy, because there is always a strong universalist and imperialist strain.

    Inherent in Islam and Christianity is an extreme form of Universalism, unfortunately, and both are innately Cultural Imperialists.

    Probably the best model for this is Mahayana Buddhism – which believes there are a variety of legitimate paths suitable to ones level and psychological type – the opposite of Cultural Imperialism. (Judaism too, but that’s an unpopular position here so I won’t get into it).

    A healthy society is more like a mosaic of psychological types negotiating a shared public space and accommodating each other – while it will inevitably be organized hierarchically, it ought not to be too harshly so.

    Of course, there is one psychological type that cannot live at peace with others and will always try and repress and control others – this type goes by many names in history, and will always be with us. The Cultural Imperialists.

    While this type may seem to represent Order, it is actually what prevents a stable society of people willing to accommodate each other from ever lasting – so this control and repress type is actually the principle of Chaos and the ferment of history. He always provokes backlashes.

    So we have to recognize that due to this eternal type, a stable society that gives happiness to the majority can never last.

    This does not mean it is not worthwhile to work for the good kind of mosaic society I described in the interim, just that we should be aware it will not last. But it will also always be recovered. Such is life.

    **** While I describe Islam and Christianity as inherently Cultural Imperialists, there were periods when it was pretty accommodating to a wide variety of psychological types and granted happiness to most people living in it. So its not all black and white even here.

    •�Replies: @dfordoom
    @AaronB


    The problem is Cultural Imperialism – where one set of people try and force everyone else to live by their rules.
    Which is exactly what traditional societies do, which is why most people want nothing to do with them.

    There are clearly lots of people who would definitely like to live in a traditional society.
    Until recently there was nothing stopping them from doing so. There was not exactly a flood of people wanting to do so. The Amish were proof that it could be done. The "lots of people" wanting to live in a traditional society seemed in practice to be a tiny minority.

    I'd like to see people have the option of living in a traditional society, I just don't think many people would choose that option. And as a solution to out current societal problems it's a complete non-starter.

    Replies: @AaronB, @Elmer's Washable School Glue
  104. Talha says:
    @songbird
    @nebulafox

    Some people seem to think polygamy is eugenic, but I tend to think polygamy is bad for a society, in the long term. It is my theory that it led to a lot of miscegenation among Arabs, which seems to cause some social rifts today, and which likely negatively impacts IQ. Some people believe that polygamy in Africa was the reason for the slave trade - essentially that the locals had surplus captive males, after raiding for women.

    I believe it probably increases average paternal age, which means more mutations.

    I'm not really too familiar with the details of the practice today in Saudi Arabia, but I think it would be very interesting to learn about. Specifically, I wonder how common it is, and what percentage of woman are foreign and where do they come from.

    I'm open to the idea that limited polygamy might promote stability. Say, if a king, alone of all men, were allowed to have three wives. An alternative might be to adopt a system of tanistry, but it seems like it was a very bloody system, which promoted instability, although the clans themselves were remarkably resilient.

    Replies: @Talha, @nebulafox

    but it seems like it was a very bloody system, which promoted instability

    Well, let’s see if this passes the smell test. Look at the anthropological breakdown (from 1998) of almost 1250 distinct cultures on our planet (section ‘9: Marital Composition’). Strictly monogamous cultures are in the minority (15-20%) – the rest of the world is occasionally or frequently polygamous. The breakdown is between 15-10% monogamous and 75-80% polygamous:
    Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society (Cambridge Univ. Press)

    If the minority of cultures are monogamous then there needs to be some level of proof-is-in-the-pudding to show they are more stable. So let’s look at the most obvious example of Europe. Europe has been monogamous for a very long time, but it has also been a very bloody continent – more bloody relative to others:
    https://necrometrics.com/pre1700a.htm#20worst

    The Chinese region has also been very, very bloody.

    Now if you throw history out the window and start the clock at around 1950 or something, then maybe you have a case, but why should we ignore the overwhelming historical data?

    Peace.

    •�Replies: @Athletic and Whitesplosive
    @Talha

    Well the proof-is-in-the-pudding for monogamous cultures leading to more stable societies is that stable = large and free from existential internal threats that would result in breakdown of governance, so greater stability is demonstrated in how vastly more successful and large (in both population and capability) monogamous cultures became than polygamous ones.

    When you say 'bloody', you must mean in terms of body-counts of large-scale warfare (because they obviously have much lower random or intra-state organized violence)? This is totally wrongheaded. The ability to wage war on a large scale is proof of stability, not counter to it. Unstable and disorganized states aren't capable of large-scale wars. The ability to coordinate large-scale organized violence and suppress random or intra-state small scale organized violence is practically the definition of a stable state. Why do you think Russia alone has greater military capacity than all of the much more populous Africa combined? Because Africa is so much more stable?

    You could argue that maybe we'd be better off without this capacity for violence, but then maybe we should just have never left the stone age and so still be subject to the caprice of Grug wanting to club us in the head and animal predation.

    Replies: @Talha
    , @songbird
    @Talha


    but it seems like it was a very bloody system, which promoted instability
    This comment of mine refers to tanistry. (Sorry, for any confusion)

    Tanistry was an old Gaelic custom, where succession was available to a group of men called the roydammna. The size of this group varied according to the particular system used by a clan, but often it included every man who had the same great grandfather. The advantage of this system was that it wasn't the roll of a dice that primogeniture was. Strong, capable men were naturally preferred, over any kind of birth order or daughters, and there was an election by the roydammna to choose the leader, with a successor, called the "tanist" chosen beforehand.

    But, as I said, it was a bloody system. Cousins and brothers often killed each other. Sometimes, they brought in outsiders to try to gain power. I guess it was very different from what the Ottomans did, and their society was arguably more successful, but I do certainly see some advantages and disadvantages when compared to the standard practice of Christian primogeniture. The nobility of Ireland were almost uniquely old. At least sometimes, they survived large massacres. Interestingly, the Pope actually gave Ireland to the crown of England, sometime after the Irish high king refused to give up polygamy - early Christian kings were at least sometimes polygamous.

    The Chinese region has also been very, very bloody.
    I think the Chinese were polygamous to a certain degree, but I'm not trying to argue the point. (I said I thought it made Saudi Arabia more stable) When it comes to large-scale instability, I mainly think it was bad for Africa - see HIV. (but of course that is a issue with lack of marriage). Interestingly, I have heard that the Coloreds of South Africa (meaning people with more Khoisan ancestry, less Bantu) are more prone to criminality than South African blacks, though I think the Khoisan were more monogamous. The difference there is thought to be from them not having been farmers, though, so it might not be widely applicable.

    Replies: @Talha
    , @songbird
    @Talha


    Europe has been monogamous for a very long time, but it has also been a very bloody continent – more bloody relative to others:
    I'm quite skeptical of that assertion - I don't think the continents can be ranked in any technical sense, beyond estimated population density. Of course, WW2 included Asia. But I don't think we have anything like reliable historical stats about killings, even in the 20th century, and certainly not on a 2000-year timescale.

    Replies: @Talha
  105. Note to Rosie: I haven’t walked in a while. we actually had a curfew in my small neighborhood. As it turned out it was a godsend, because it forced me to take a break from walking, And low and behold, I was walking injured for weeks. So I need this time to heal up.

    nonetheless, I thought I would encourage your weight loss goals by telling you keep walking.

    accusations that I am off topic in this post would be correct. excuse the interruption

  106. @Cloudbuster
    @neutral

    Oh, should we?

    Replies: @Athletic and Whitesplosive

    Examples of Monarchies that pursued total ethnic replacement as their central governing strategy? (Obviously an invasion of a foreign land to be replaced by their own citizens wouldn’t count, as foreigners weren’t citizens. Besides, this is a much less perverse policy if still unethical).

    The problems of monarchy have been severe, but recoverable (short of mistakes that got their entire kingdom wiped out, but that’s usually not purely bad governance, and there are no roving barbarian hordes now that could challenge the military of any modern state). But liberal democracy is bent on destroying western nations permanently within the next century, it’s literally the worst thing that a government could possibly do to its subjects.

    And besides that, most of monarchy’s problems stem from having a permanent ruler (or ruling class) that can’t be removed for governing badly. Well, does anyone with a brain really think the rulers of the Western world change every few years? It’s more like their tools for interacting with the levers of power change slightly every year. But this of course is messy and harder to manage, and since they have no ‘de jure’ legitimacy for their rule, this leads to the totally destructive schemes we’re currently subject to as methods of ensuring a smoother transition between the managerial class.

    I believe with absolute certainty that we would be better of with direct legal rule beneath EVEN the current ruling class, because then these convoluted vote rigging schemes and labor arbitrage with the third world (to please the business class) wouldn’t be necessary. Further, it would lead to a clearer understanding of how power works (which is totally non existent in the west), and counterintuitively, at least some measure of responsibility and accountability for their actions. Nobles, kings, etc occasionally got killed for doing a terrible job. If you think middlemen getting voted out of office (complete with fat pension) is accountability, you’re dreaming.

    Today, all discontent with governance is directed at the ‘system’. If you think anger at the ‘system’ (which 99.9% of people have absolutely no understanding of, and which they can only conceive of in a way that the propaganda of the ruling class dictates) worries international Oligarchs, I promise you it doesn’t. Now imagine if all of this violent and aimless anger were instead directed at those few particular people who were responsible for how society operates. Now that’s an incentive not to fuck everyone over.

    •�Replies: @JohnPlywood
    @Athletic and Whitesplosive


    examples of monarchies that promoted ethnic replacement
    Yes, there are several examples. The Vandals under King Gaiseric, having conquered Rome, then "Romanized themselves, largely adopting the language, customs, architecture, and even the administrative systems of their enemies. As a result, little distinctly "Vandal" evidence of their occupation now exists."

    - quote taken from page 65 of "The Atlas of Military History", Simon and Schuster

    Replies: @nebulafox
  107. @Talha
    @songbird


    but it seems like it was a very bloody system, which promoted instability
    Well, let's see if this passes the smell test. Look at the anthropological breakdown (from 1998) of almost 1250 distinct cultures on our planet (section ‘9: Marital Composition’). Strictly monogamous cultures are in the minority (15-20%) – the rest of the world is occasionally or frequently polygamous. The breakdown is between 15-10% monogamous and 75-80% polygamous:
    Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society (Cambridge Univ. Press)

    If the minority of cultures are monogamous then there needs to be some level of proof-is-in-the-pudding to show they are more stable. So let's look at the most obvious example of Europe. Europe has been monogamous for a very long time, but it has also been a very bloody continent - more bloody relative to others:
    https://necrometrics.com/pre1700a.htm#20worst

    The Chinese region has also been very, very bloody.

    Now if you throw history out the window and start the clock at around 1950 or something, then maybe you have a case, but why should we ignore the overwhelming historical data?

    Peace.

    Replies: @Athletic and Whitesplosive, @songbird, @songbird

    Well the proof-is-in-the-pudding for monogamous cultures leading to more stable societies is that stable = large and free from existential internal threats that would result in breakdown of governance, so greater stability is demonstrated in how vastly more successful and large (in both population and capability) monogamous cultures became than polygamous ones.

    When you say ‘bloody’, you must mean in terms of body-counts of large-scale warfare (because they obviously have much lower random or intra-state organized violence)? This is totally wrongheaded. The ability to wage war on a large scale is proof of stability, not counter to it. Unstable and disorganized states aren’t capable of large-scale wars. The ability to coordinate large-scale organized violence and suppress random or intra-state small scale organized violence is practically the definition of a stable state. Why do you think Russia alone has greater military capacity than all of the much more populous Africa combined? Because Africa is so much more stable?

    You could argue that maybe we’d be better off without this capacity for violence, but then maybe we should just have never left the stone age and so still be subject to the caprice of Grug wanting to club us in the head and animal predation.

    •�Replies: @Talha
    @Athletic and Whitesplosive


    This is totally wrongheaded.
    Why? Why isn't total blood count a valid metric from internal or external warfare? If monogamous societies lead to hyper-states that are hyper-violent to each other, why is that not a consideration?

    large and free from existential internal threats that would result in breakdown of governance
    Well, there were plenty of internal bloody upheavals and civil wars historically in Europe also (French Revolution, English Civil War, War of the Roses, all the way down to Spanish Civil War, etc.), so I'm not sure why that simply should be put aside.

    I mean one of the reasons Europe is relatively stable now is due to the massive amount of bloodshed, ethnic cleansing and redrawing of borders in WW2. And places like Yugoslavia that weren't allowed to fully carry on their ethnic cleansing and violence due to outside interference are still unstable. And the fact that they have a constantly aging population should not be discounted in why they aren't as violent; young people fight, old people don't.

    And furthermore this should be explored; is this the general trajectory of strictly monogamous societies? Does strict monogamy in a society lead to eventual population terminus?

    The ability to wage war on a large scale is proof of stability, not counter to it. Unstable and disorganized states aren’t capable of large-scale wars.
    Good - why is that not positive in the larger picture?

    You could argue that maybe we’d be better off without this capacity for violence
    Well that certainly should be considered.

    but then maybe we should just have never left the stone age
    Why? Other societies left the Stone Age and still didn't rack up those kill counts. Why does it have to be either or?

    Peace.
  108. Talha says:
    @Athletic and Whitesplosive
    @Talha

    Well the proof-is-in-the-pudding for monogamous cultures leading to more stable societies is that stable = large and free from existential internal threats that would result in breakdown of governance, so greater stability is demonstrated in how vastly more successful and large (in both population and capability) monogamous cultures became than polygamous ones.

    When you say 'bloody', you must mean in terms of body-counts of large-scale warfare (because they obviously have much lower random or intra-state organized violence)? This is totally wrongheaded. The ability to wage war on a large scale is proof of stability, not counter to it. Unstable and disorganized states aren't capable of large-scale wars. The ability to coordinate large-scale organized violence and suppress random or intra-state small scale organized violence is practically the definition of a stable state. Why do you think Russia alone has greater military capacity than all of the much more populous Africa combined? Because Africa is so much more stable?

    You could argue that maybe we'd be better off without this capacity for violence, but then maybe we should just have never left the stone age and so still be subject to the caprice of Grug wanting to club us in the head and animal predation.

    Replies: @Talha

    This is totally wrongheaded.

    Why? Why isn’t total blood count a valid metric from internal or external warfare? If monogamous societies lead to hyper-states that are hyper-violent to each other, why is that not a consideration?

    large and free from existential internal threats that would result in breakdown of governance

    Well, there were plenty of internal bloody upheavals and civil wars historically in Europe also (French Revolution, English Civil War, War of the Roses, all the way down to Spanish Civil War, etc.), so I’m not sure why that simply should be put aside.

    I mean one of the reasons Europe is relatively stable now is due to the massive amount of bloodshed, ethnic cleansing and redrawing of borders in WW2. And places like Yugoslavia that weren’t allowed to fully carry on their ethnic cleansing and violence due to outside interference are still unstable. And the fact that they have a constantly aging population should not be discounted in why they aren’t as violent; young people fight, old people don’t.

    And furthermore this should be explored; is this the general trajectory of strictly monogamous societies? Does strict monogamy in a society lead to eventual population terminus?

    The ability to wage war on a large scale is proof of stability, not counter to it. Unstable and disorganized states aren’t capable of large-scale wars.

    Good – why is that not positive in the larger picture?

    You could argue that maybe we’d be better off without this capacity for violence

    Well that certainly should be considered.

    but then maybe we should just have never left the stone age

    Why? Other societies left the Stone Age and still didn’t rack up those kill counts. Why does it have to be either or?

    Peace.

  109. Well, I’m really quite glad that my unoriginal throwaway comment, which AE has very kindly but inexplicably reposted, has provoked such an interesting discussion.

    •�Replies: @Talha
    @RSDB

    Greek mythology rehash.

    Peace.

    https://i.pinimg.com/474x/64/e4/88/64e4887dcc9fb0011b21b5da6f60368a.jpg

    https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57125c2c2b8dde54a34b537f/1558438583085-NEUOY900RGCVZPKV38OK/ke17ZwdGBToddI8pDm48kPsBiU6FMuNcfoCZ5wsLw6lZw-zPPgdn4jUwVcJE1ZvWEtT5uBSRWt4vQZAgTJucoTqqXjS3CfNDSuuf31e0tVHtC2-mPyV1CKVfuhZVL_8gvwT-mxXlZ9P7eDlaZoUQ6KEcAfnVBrEqrgp1UxUHGkY/Saturn+Devouring+His+Son+by+Peter+Paul+Rubens+1636.png

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Francisco_de_Goya%2C_Saturno_devorando_a_su_hijo_%281819-1823%29.jpg

    Replies: @RSDB
  110. Talha says:
    @RSDB
    Well, I'm really quite glad that my unoriginal throwaway comment, which AE has very kindly but inexplicably reposted, has provoked such an interesting discussion.

    Replies: @Talha

    Greek mythology rehash.

    Peace.

    [MORE]

    •�Replies: @RSDB
    @Talha

    Yes, that was it, and also there was a similar quip during the Reign of Terror by the French monarchist Mallet du Pan.
  111. We have reached an Age of not Kings or Princes, but Dictators and Emperors.

    The “elites” are REVOLTING, in more ways than one.

    You cannot expect to put up Principalities in an Age of Empires.

    Amerika is a Fallen Empire; it must be replaced with another or disintegrate.

    Disintegration would kill a lot more people than a CIVIL WAR II.

  112. @Talha
    @songbird


    but it seems like it was a very bloody system, which promoted instability
    Well, let's see if this passes the smell test. Look at the anthropological breakdown (from 1998) of almost 1250 distinct cultures on our planet (section ‘9: Marital Composition’). Strictly monogamous cultures are in the minority (15-20%) – the rest of the world is occasionally or frequently polygamous. The breakdown is between 15-10% monogamous and 75-80% polygamous:
    Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society (Cambridge Univ. Press)

    If the minority of cultures are monogamous then there needs to be some level of proof-is-in-the-pudding to show they are more stable. So let's look at the most obvious example of Europe. Europe has been monogamous for a very long time, but it has also been a very bloody continent - more bloody relative to others:
    https://necrometrics.com/pre1700a.htm#20worst

    The Chinese region has also been very, very bloody.

    Now if you throw history out the window and start the clock at around 1950 or something, then maybe you have a case, but why should we ignore the overwhelming historical data?

    Peace.

    Replies: @Athletic and Whitesplosive, @songbird, @songbird

    but it seems like it was a very bloody system, which promoted instability

    This comment of mine refers to tanistry. (Sorry, for any confusion)

    Tanistry was an old Gaelic custom, where succession was available to a group of men called the roydammna. The size of this group varied according to the particular system used by a clan, but often it included every man who had the same great grandfather. The advantage of this system was that it wasn’t the roll of a dice that primogeniture was. Strong, capable men were naturally preferred, over any kind of birth order or daughters, and there was an election by the roydammna to choose the leader, with a successor, called the “tanist” chosen beforehand.

    But, as I said, it was a bloody system. Cousins and brothers often killed each other. Sometimes, they brought in outsiders to try to gain power. I guess it was very different from what the Ottomans did, and their society was arguably more successful, but I do certainly see some advantages and disadvantages when compared to the standard practice of Christian primogeniture. The nobility of Ireland were almost uniquely old. At least sometimes, they survived large massacres. Interestingly, the Pope actually gave Ireland to the crown of England, sometime after the Irish high king refused to give up polygamy – early Christian kings were at least sometimes polygamous.

    The Chinese region has also been very, very bloody.

    I think the Chinese were polygamous to a certain degree, but I’m not trying to argue the point. (I said I thought it made Saudi Arabia more stable) When it comes to large-scale instability, I mainly think it was bad for Africa – see HIV. (but of course that is a issue with lack of marriage). Interestingly, I have heard that the Coloreds of South Africa (meaning people with more Khoisan ancestry, less Bantu) are more prone to criminality than South African blacks, though I think the Khoisan were more monogamous. The difference there is thought to be from them not having been farmers, though, so it might not be widely applicable.

    •�Replies: @Talha
    @songbird


    This comment of mine refers to tanistry. (Sorry, for any confusion)
    OK - yeah - I misunderstood then.

    I guess it was very different from what the Ottomans did, and their society was arguably more successful
    That didn't come without cost. The Ottomans basically legalized fratricide among the ruling house. First guy to get to the capital after the current caliph died could have his brothers, uncles, etc executed - eventually it became a practice where rival males were basically allowed to live a prisoners in one part of the palace, cut off from the world:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN7LgUIOAVw

    early Christian kings were at least sometimes polygamous.
    This is a good point. The Church was flexible with the rules especially when new people became Christian and came to an "understanding". It was like this with Arab princes, who became Christian, being granted concessions as well.

    I think the Chinese were polygamous to a certain degree, but I’m not trying to argue the point.
    Yup, but I'm not sure it was polygamy as much as concubinage (though perhaps the outcome is the same) - I'm not very well read on that either. And I think this was more among the nobles and elite rather than the average man (whereas in other societies, polygamy is more prevalent).

    The difference there is thought to be from them not having been farmers, though, so it might not be widely applicable.
    It's definitely a subject that should be explored; lots of factors at play.

    Peace.
  113. @Intelligent Dasein
    @Cloudbuster

    Monarchy is the only type of government that makes explicit what is cryptically present in all the others---that there is always a hierarchy and there is always only one ruler-will at the top. Monarchy is not an idea someone had nor is it one alternative among many types of government. It is government, and no power that ever existed, existed in any other form but this.

    The real power of a king can be effectively limited by other real powers so that it doesn't become tyrannical. I doubt whether there has ever been a larger proportion of contented ordinary people than there has under monarchy.

    Replies: @Cloudbuster, @SunBakedSuburb, @Old Palo Altan

    It’s like with the blacks.

    We all see in their case that they are unlike all other races in some way which we cannot explain, but all races know, just like the dog who knows that the coyote is perhaps similar, but not the same, and thus approachable only with peril, and integrable not at all.

    We know that monarchy is the natural form of government and, pace one of your commentators, don’t need to bother “proving” it: it speaks for itself, if only to those who can hear.

    The end of monarchy in Europe in 1918 was the end of Europe. This would have been clear only to those who could see and hear in 1918, but now it is only those who refuse to use eye or ear (or cannot, blinded as they are by comical illusions of “progress”) who do not grasp this melancholy but inescapable truth.

    •�Replies: @anon
    @Old Palo Altan

    We know that monarchy is the natural form of government

    Have you informed the Helvetican Confederation yet?

    pace one of your commentators, don’t need to bother “proving” it: it speaks for itself, if only to those who can hear.

    lol. Bringing back the Holy Roman Empire any time soon?

    Everyone needs a hobby, I guess.
    , @dfordoom
    @Old Palo Altan


    We know that monarchy is the natural form of government
    It may well be true that monarchy is the natural form of government for pre-industrial states. But is there evidence that it is the natural form of government for industrialised or post-industrial states?

    Pre-industrial states, industrialised and post-industrial states are very different things which arguably cannot be governed in the same way. Just a thought.

    Replies: @Talha
  114. Talha says:
    @songbird
    @Talha


    but it seems like it was a very bloody system, which promoted instability
    This comment of mine refers to tanistry. (Sorry, for any confusion)

    Tanistry was an old Gaelic custom, where succession was available to a group of men called the roydammna. The size of this group varied according to the particular system used by a clan, but often it included every man who had the same great grandfather. The advantage of this system was that it wasn't the roll of a dice that primogeniture was. Strong, capable men were naturally preferred, over any kind of birth order or daughters, and there was an election by the roydammna to choose the leader, with a successor, called the "tanist" chosen beforehand.

    But, as I said, it was a bloody system. Cousins and brothers often killed each other. Sometimes, they brought in outsiders to try to gain power. I guess it was very different from what the Ottomans did, and their society was arguably more successful, but I do certainly see some advantages and disadvantages when compared to the standard practice of Christian primogeniture. The nobility of Ireland were almost uniquely old. At least sometimes, they survived large massacres. Interestingly, the Pope actually gave Ireland to the crown of England, sometime after the Irish high king refused to give up polygamy - early Christian kings were at least sometimes polygamous.

    The Chinese region has also been very, very bloody.
    I think the Chinese were polygamous to a certain degree, but I'm not trying to argue the point. (I said I thought it made Saudi Arabia more stable) When it comes to large-scale instability, I mainly think it was bad for Africa - see HIV. (but of course that is a issue with lack of marriage). Interestingly, I have heard that the Coloreds of South Africa (meaning people with more Khoisan ancestry, less Bantu) are more prone to criminality than South African blacks, though I think the Khoisan were more monogamous. The difference there is thought to be from them not having been farmers, though, so it might not be widely applicable.

    Replies: @Talha

    This comment of mine refers to tanistry. (Sorry, for any confusion)

    OK – yeah – I misunderstood then.

    I guess it was very different from what the Ottomans did, and their society was arguably more successful

    That didn’t come without cost. The Ottomans basically legalized fratricide among the ruling house. First guy to get to the capital after the current caliph died could have his brothers, uncles, etc executed – eventually it became a practice where rival males were basically allowed to live a prisoners in one part of the palace, cut off from the world:

    early Christian kings were at least sometimes polygamous.

    This is a good point. The Church was flexible with the rules especially when new people became Christian and came to an “understanding”. It was like this with Arab princes, who became Christian, being granted concessions as well.

    I think the Chinese were polygamous to a certain degree, but I’m not trying to argue the point.

    Yup, but I’m not sure it was polygamy as much as concubinage (though perhaps the outcome is the same) – I’m not very well read on that either. And I think this was more among the nobles and elite rather than the average man (whereas in other societies, polygamy is more prevalent).

    The difference there is thought to be from them not having been farmers, though, so it might not be widely applicable.

    It’s definitely a subject that should be explored; lots of factors at play.

    Peace.

  115. @Talha
    @songbird


    but it seems like it was a very bloody system, which promoted instability
    Well, let's see if this passes the smell test. Look at the anthropological breakdown (from 1998) of almost 1250 distinct cultures on our planet (section ‘9: Marital Composition’). Strictly monogamous cultures are in the minority (15-20%) – the rest of the world is occasionally or frequently polygamous. The breakdown is between 15-10% monogamous and 75-80% polygamous:
    Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society (Cambridge Univ. Press)

    If the minority of cultures are monogamous then there needs to be some level of proof-is-in-the-pudding to show they are more stable. So let's look at the most obvious example of Europe. Europe has been monogamous for a very long time, but it has also been a very bloody continent - more bloody relative to others:
    https://necrometrics.com/pre1700a.htm#20worst

    The Chinese region has also been very, very bloody.

    Now if you throw history out the window and start the clock at around 1950 or something, then maybe you have a case, but why should we ignore the overwhelming historical data?

    Peace.

    Replies: @Athletic and Whitesplosive, @songbird, @songbird

    Europe has been monogamous for a very long time, but it has also been a very bloody continent – more bloody relative to others:

    I’m quite skeptical of that assertion – I don’t think the continents can be ranked in any technical sense, beyond estimated population density. Of course, WW2 included Asia. But I don’t think we have anything like reliable historical stats about killings, even in the 20th century, and certainly not on a 2000-year timescale.

    •�Replies: @Talha
    @songbird

    Please explore Necrometrics (https://necrometrics.com/index.htm). He breaks down practically every conflict that has been documented according to century, region, etc. It is a great resource, just unfortunately on a very old framework with old-school navigation. He looks at the various reports and tries to come up with a way to draw conclusions about the numbers based on a methodology he outlines. His work has been referenced by Steven Pinker (in his work on historic trends of violence).

    If some Bantu tribe destroyed another one and we have no knowledge of it, then OK, but that can only be speculated upon just like if some Germanic or Celtic tribe killed off some other one back in the day without any records. We can only work with the data we have.

    But it is good to come with some healthy skepticism, I'll agree there.

    Peace.

    Replies: @songbird
  116. anon[115] •�Disclaimer says:
    @Old Palo Altan
    @Intelligent Dasein

    It's like with the blacks.

    We all see in their case that they are unlike all other races in some way which we cannot explain, but all races know, just like the dog who knows that the coyote is perhaps similar, but not the same, and thus approachable only with peril, and integrable not at all.

    We know that monarchy is the natural form of government and, pace one of your commentators, don't need to bother "proving" it: it speaks for itself, if only to those who can hear.

    The end of monarchy in Europe in 1918 was the end of Europe. This would have been clear only to those who could see and hear in 1918, but now it is only those who refuse to use eye or ear (or cannot, blinded as they are by comical illusions of "progress") who do not grasp this melancholy but inescapable truth.

    Replies: @anon, @dfordoom

    We know that monarchy is the natural form of government

    Have you informed the Helvetican Confederation yet?

    pace one of your commentators, don’t need to bother “proving” it: it speaks for itself, if only to those who can hear.

    lol. Bringing back the Holy Roman Empire any time soon?

    Everyone needs a hobby, I guess.

  117. Talha says:
    @songbird
    @Talha


    Europe has been monogamous for a very long time, but it has also been a very bloody continent – more bloody relative to others:
    I'm quite skeptical of that assertion - I don't think the continents can be ranked in any technical sense, beyond estimated population density. Of course, WW2 included Asia. But I don't think we have anything like reliable historical stats about killings, even in the 20th century, and certainly not on a 2000-year timescale.

    Replies: @Talha

    Please explore Necrometrics (https://necrometrics.com/index.htm). He breaks down practically every conflict that has been documented according to century, region, etc. It is a great resource, just unfortunately on a very old framework with old-school navigation. He looks at the various reports and tries to come up with a way to draw conclusions about the numbers based on a methodology he outlines. His work has been referenced by Steven Pinker (in his work on historic trends of violence).

    If some Bantu tribe destroyed another one and we have no knowledge of it, then OK, but that can only be speculated upon just like if some Germanic or Celtic tribe killed off some other one back in the day without any records. We can only work with the data we have.

    But it is good to come with some healthy skepticism, I’ll agree there.

    Peace.

    •�Replies: @songbird
    @Talha

    Thanks for the resource.

    I remember the Pinker reference vaguely - the idea of a globo-historical catalog for every battle and conflict. It's an interesting concept. Reminds me a bit of the work to catalog national IQ studies, globally. Might come out a bit like Swiss cheese, but that doesn't mean that it isn't interesting, or worthwhile.

    I tend to think of the World Wars more in terms of elite dynamics, than culture or genetics. I'm not a big Malcolm Gadwell fan, (mostly think he is full of bunk) but he had an interesting idea, called cockpit culture or something. Basically, the idea that some plane crashes happened because of social hierarchy. For example, on a Korean plane, the co-pilot might say something like, "We are running out of fuel!" And in the event the pilot doesn't understand and take action, the co-pilot, through social fear, might remain quiet, rather than asserting himself, by repeating himself - causing the plane to crash.

    I don't really know if there is anything to the theory, but there was something very weird going on with the elite in WW2, call it "hubris" or something. By any reasonable logic, it was insane to declare war on the US - particularly for Italy, which had trouble conquering Greece. I'm not talking about provocation - I just mean that it was easy to see that the US was a monstrous, unparalleled behemoth of latent power, a power with which war out to have been avoided at all costs, especially, in the case of Germany, which was already fighting Russia, which is massive itself.

    The Axis leaders were not stupid, but they did something so unwise that I think it can only be explained as some odd, social dynamic, and not some isolated decision. America did some pretty weird things too, like bombing civilians. It seems like there was a lack of scrutiny, or popular feedback. One can blame censorship, but I don't think we are immune to these crazy, destructive decisions today, even if they are not as obviously violent. I think there has to be a way to lance these ideas - that there should be an attempt to build it into the system: Joe Smoe gets to ask Pelosi and Trump some difficult questions in front of a public audience (or something.) Suppose it would be easy to game...

    Replies: @Talha
  118. dfordoom says: •�Website
    @Old Palo Altan
    @Intelligent Dasein

    It's like with the blacks.

    We all see in their case that they are unlike all other races in some way which we cannot explain, but all races know, just like the dog who knows that the coyote is perhaps similar, but not the same, and thus approachable only with peril, and integrable not at all.

    We know that monarchy is the natural form of government and, pace one of your commentators, don't need to bother "proving" it: it speaks for itself, if only to those who can hear.

    The end of monarchy in Europe in 1918 was the end of Europe. This would have been clear only to those who could see and hear in 1918, but now it is only those who refuse to use eye or ear (or cannot, blinded as they are by comical illusions of "progress") who do not grasp this melancholy but inescapable truth.

    Replies: @anon, @dfordoom

    We know that monarchy is the natural form of government

    It may well be true that monarchy is the natural form of government for pre-industrial states. But is there evidence that it is the natural form of government for industrialised or post-industrial states?

    Pre-industrial states, industrialised and post-industrial states are very different things which arguably cannot be governed in the same way. Just a thought.

    •�Thanks: Talha
    •�Replies: @Talha
    @dfordoom

    Post-industrial states may well be naturally inclined towards being run by financial conglomerates. They having the power of the estate-holding nobles of the past who were power structure holding up the king. Economic strength may have replaced military strength in that regard.

    Peacde.

    Replies: @Talha
  119. @dfordoom
    @Old Palo Altan


    We know that monarchy is the natural form of government
    It may well be true that monarchy is the natural form of government for pre-industrial states. But is there evidence that it is the natural form of government for industrialised or post-industrial states?

    Pre-industrial states, industrialised and post-industrial states are very different things which arguably cannot be governed in the same way. Just a thought.

    Replies: @Talha

    Post-industrial states may well be naturally inclined towards being run by financial conglomerates. They having the power of the estate-holding nobles of the past who were power structure holding up the king. Economic strength may have replaced military strength in that regard.

    Peacde.

    •�Agree: dfordoom
    •�Replies: @Talha
    @Talha

    Very interesting - Mad Mamluks had Edward Dutton on their show - somewhat related to the topic at hand, but not sure, so...

    Peace.

    Perhaps a summary could be:
    The virgin high-IQ, high-openness society

    vs

    The chad low-IQ, high-Asabiyah Muslim society
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjvJ0C13Qwo

    It may become the selling point we are looking for:
    Embrace the Islamic Imperium; only it can guarantee the viable steampunk future!!!
  120. Limited polygamy: because guys like this should not be able to score more than four.

    Peace.

  121. @V. K. Ovelund
    @Wency


    ... it’s impossible to go back, ...
    What do you mean?

    Replies: @Wency

    Read the next sentence in my comment.

  122. @Talha
    @songbird

    Please explore Necrometrics (https://necrometrics.com/index.htm). He breaks down practically every conflict that has been documented according to century, region, etc. It is a great resource, just unfortunately on a very old framework with old-school navigation. He looks at the various reports and tries to come up with a way to draw conclusions about the numbers based on a methodology he outlines. His work has been referenced by Steven Pinker (in his work on historic trends of violence).

    If some Bantu tribe destroyed another one and we have no knowledge of it, then OK, but that can only be speculated upon just like if some Germanic or Celtic tribe killed off some other one back in the day without any records. We can only work with the data we have.

    But it is good to come with some healthy skepticism, I'll agree there.

    Peace.

    Replies: @songbird

    Thanks for the resource.

    I remember the Pinker reference vaguely – the idea of a globo-historical catalog for every battle and conflict. It’s an interesting concept. Reminds me a bit of the work to catalog national IQ studies, globally. Might come out a bit like Swiss cheese, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t interesting, or worthwhile.

    I tend to think of the World Wars more in terms of elite dynamics, than culture or genetics. I’m not a big Malcolm Gadwell fan, (mostly think he is full of bunk) but he had an interesting idea, called cockpit culture or something. Basically, the idea that some plane crashes happened because of social hierarchy. For example, on a Korean plane, the co-pilot might say something like, “We are running out of fuel!” And in the event the pilot doesn’t understand and take action, the co-pilot, through social fear, might remain quiet, rather than asserting himself, by repeating himself – causing the plane to crash.

    I don’t really know if there is anything to the theory, but there was something very weird going on with the elite in WW2, call it “hubris” or something. By any reasonable logic, it was insane to declare war on the US – particularly for Italy, which had trouble conquering Greece. I’m not talking about provocation – I just mean that it was easy to see that the US was a monstrous, unparalleled behemoth of latent power, a power with which war out to have been avoided at all costs, especially, in the case of Germany, which was already fighting Russia, which is massive itself.

    The Axis leaders were not stupid, but they did something so unwise that I think it can only be explained as some odd, social dynamic, and not some isolated decision. America did some pretty weird things too, like bombing civilians. It seems like there was a lack of scrutiny, or popular feedback. One can blame censorship, but I don’t think we are immune to these crazy, destructive decisions today, even if they are not as obviously violent. I think there has to be a way to lance these ideas – that there should be an attempt to build it into the system: Joe Smoe gets to ask Pelosi and Trump some difficult questions in front of a public audience (or something.) Suppose it would be easy to game…

    •�Replies: @Talha
    @songbird


    but I don’t think we are immune to these crazy, destructive decisions today
    Yup, see below.

    I think there has to be a way to lance these ideas
    Well, we basically destroyed or destabilized multiple countries within the last couple of decades with no provocation and in full public view of the electorate. I don't think there has been a public discussion about how many people died as a result and why and if people should be held accountable. There were no repercussions or anything, so...

    Peace.

    Replies: @songbird
  123. Talha says:
    @songbird
    @Talha

    Thanks for the resource.

    I remember the Pinker reference vaguely - the idea of a globo-historical catalog for every battle and conflict. It's an interesting concept. Reminds me a bit of the work to catalog national IQ studies, globally. Might come out a bit like Swiss cheese, but that doesn't mean that it isn't interesting, or worthwhile.

    I tend to think of the World Wars more in terms of elite dynamics, than culture or genetics. I'm not a big Malcolm Gadwell fan, (mostly think he is full of bunk) but he had an interesting idea, called cockpit culture or something. Basically, the idea that some plane crashes happened because of social hierarchy. For example, on a Korean plane, the co-pilot might say something like, "We are running out of fuel!" And in the event the pilot doesn't understand and take action, the co-pilot, through social fear, might remain quiet, rather than asserting himself, by repeating himself - causing the plane to crash.

    I don't really know if there is anything to the theory, but there was something very weird going on with the elite in WW2, call it "hubris" or something. By any reasonable logic, it was insane to declare war on the US - particularly for Italy, which had trouble conquering Greece. I'm not talking about provocation - I just mean that it was easy to see that the US was a monstrous, unparalleled behemoth of latent power, a power with which war out to have been avoided at all costs, especially, in the case of Germany, which was already fighting Russia, which is massive itself.

    The Axis leaders were not stupid, but they did something so unwise that I think it can only be explained as some odd, social dynamic, and not some isolated decision. America did some pretty weird things too, like bombing civilians. It seems like there was a lack of scrutiny, or popular feedback. One can blame censorship, but I don't think we are immune to these crazy, destructive decisions today, even if they are not as obviously violent. I think there has to be a way to lance these ideas - that there should be an attempt to build it into the system: Joe Smoe gets to ask Pelosi and Trump some difficult questions in front of a public audience (or something.) Suppose it would be easy to game...

    Replies: @Talha

    but I don’t think we are immune to these crazy, destructive decisions today

    Yup, see below.

    I think there has to be a way to lance these ideas

    Well, we basically destroyed or destabilized multiple countries within the last couple of decades with no provocation and in full public view of the electorate. I don’t think there has been a public discussion about how many people died as a result and why and if people should be held accountable. There were no repercussions or anything, so…

    Peace.

    •�Replies: @songbird
    @Talha

    It would be great if Congress were put on the spot regularly, as individuals. and forced to answer a few basic questions - stuff like, "Why is the US in the Middle East?" Or "Why does it have X bases overseas?" Or "What country does the Golan Heights belong to?"

    I also like the idea of forcing them to take quizzes: locate Iraq and Iran on a map (with timestamp). Wouldn't hurt to regularly make them go on the record with testable predictions either - to help quantify their lack of foresight. At worst, it would be good busywork.

    Suppose it would probably require a revolution to institute, but I think simple ideas like these could have an impact, if one was trying to design a constitution from scratch.

    Replies: @Talha, @Rosie
  124. dfordoom says: •�Website
    @Intelligent Dasein
    @dfordoom

    Your reflexively contrarian horsecrap is getting rather tiresome of late. Let me explain a couple of things to you.

    First of all, Christianity is not at all interested in its mass appeal. It explicitly says "straight and narrow is the way that leads to salvation, and few are they who enter thereby." It says "deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me." It does not say "go ye into all the world and tell the world what it wants to hear." It makes no effort to submit itself to the approval of the hoi polloi. But this is the only way to save your soul.

    Likewise, traditional society places limits on what the flesh craves. It insists that you do not consume everything you want at the expense of the tribe's future. It tells you to respect your elders rather than mocking and killing them. It says that sex should be used as a means of reproduction rather than a mutual masturbatory amusement. All this is odious to the flesh, but it is the only way to win the battle for existence.

    Modern society is nothing more than a successful rebellion. Of course the rebels in their reverie don't want to hear about how wrong they are. That does not change anything. They are still headed for self-destruction just the same.

    Replies: @dfordoom

    First of all, Christianity is not at all interested in its mass appeal. It explicitly says “straight and narrow is the way that leads to salvation, and few are they who enter thereby.” It says “deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.” It does not say “go ye into all the world and tell the world what it wants to hear.” It makes no effort to submit itself to the approval of the hoi polloi. But this is the only way to save your soul.

    That’s fine but I’m not interested in religion as religion. I’m interested in religion as a political and social and cultural factor. As a political/cultural/social factor it’s largely irrelevant now and will almost certainly remain irrelevant. To be a political/cultural/social factor you need some mass appeal.

    Christianity will survive as a minor personal religion but the days when it could shape society and culture are gone.

    You believe Christianity is true and that it’s the path to salvation and that’s fine but it’s not really relevant to the discussion. This is not really a religious site. Here we’re mostly concerned with the political, social and cultural dimensions.

    Likewise, traditional society places limits on what the flesh craves. It insists that you do not consume everything you want at the expense of the tribe’s future. It tells you to respect your elders rather than mocking and killing them. It says that sex should be used as a means of reproduction rather than a mutual masturbatory amusement. All this is odious to the flesh, but it is the only way to win the battle for existence.

    Modern society is nothing more than a successful rebellion. Of course the rebels in their reverie don’t want to hear about how wrong they are. That does not change anything. They are still headed for self-destruction just the same.

    That’s all fine and may well be true, but the point I was trying to make is that people in general do not want to return to traditional society. I was not making an actual judgment on whether traditional society is better or worse than what we have. I was merely pointing out that a return to traditional society is not going to happen because most people do not want it. That train has left the station. Most people, rightly or wrongly, think that what we have now is a whole lot better than what traditional society offered.

    It seems to me that the best approach is to take what we have today and make it a bit more workable and a bit more healthy. Advocating a return to traditional society is pretty much a waste of energy.

  125. dfordoom says: •�Website
    @AaronB
    @dfordoom

    I'm not convinced that's true. There are clearly lots of people who would definitely like to live in a traditional society. Just as obviously many people would hate it - I like many things about traditional societies but I am far too eccentric to ever live in one.

    The problem is Cultural Imperialism - where one set of people try and force everyone else to live by their rules. They do not accept that there is an immense variety of psychological types and are sure they know what's best for humanity. As someone said, the problems of the world are that one half of humanity hates what the other half love.

    I think a healthy society has to be a mosaic of cultural communities negotiating a common public space - organized as a hierarchy. There will always be one mainstream dominant culture, belonging to which will grant access to the best jobs and most power, but it cannot be exclusive, either. Everyone has to get some share.

    The Islamic millet system is not what I mean - while it did allow different cultural communities their own space, those communities were repressive and did not allow for different psychological types within them. Moreover, in practice people living under Muslim rule always felt humiliated and unhappy, because there is always a strong universalist and imperialist strain.

    Inherent in Islam and Christianity is an extreme form of Universalism, unfortunately, and both are innately Cultural Imperialists.

    Probably the best model for this is Mahayana Buddhism - which believes there are a variety of legitimate paths suitable to ones level and psychological type - the opposite of Cultural Imperialism. (Judaism too, but that's an unpopular position here so I won't get into it).

    A healthy society is more like a mosaic of psychological types negotiating a shared public space and accommodating each other - while it will inevitably be organized hierarchically, it ought not to be too harshly so.

    Of course, there is one psychological type that cannot live at peace with others and will always try and repress and control others - this type goes by many names in history, and will always be with us. The Cultural Imperialists.

    While this type may seem to represent Order, it is actually what prevents a stable society of people willing to accommodate each other from ever lasting - so this control and repress type is actually the principle of Chaos and the ferment of history. He always provokes backlashes.

    So we have to recognize that due to this eternal type, a stable society that gives happiness to the majority can never last.

    This does not mean it is not worthwhile to work for the good kind of mosaic society I described in the interim, just that we should be aware it will not last. But it will also always be recovered. Such is life.

    **** While I describe Islam and Christianity as inherently Cultural Imperialists, there were periods when it was pretty accommodating to a wide variety of psychological types and granted happiness to most people living in it. So its not all black and white even here.

    Replies: @dfordoom

    The problem is Cultural Imperialism – where one set of people try and force everyone else to live by their rules.

    Which is exactly what traditional societies do, which is why most people want nothing to do with them.

    There are clearly lots of people who would definitely like to live in a traditional society.

    Until recently there was nothing stopping them from doing so. There was not exactly a flood of people wanting to do so. The Amish were proof that it could be done. The “lots of people” wanting to live in a traditional society seemed in practice to be a tiny minority.

    I’d like to see people have the option of living in a traditional society, I just don’t think many people would choose that option. And as a solution to out current societal problems it’s a complete non-starter.

    •�Replies: @AaronB
    @dfordoom


    I’d like to see people have the option of living in a traditional society, I just don’t think many people would choose that option. And as a solution to out current societal problems it’s a complete non-starter.
    Mostly agree, but I don't mean no technology like the Amish - I mean orthodox Jews, religious Muslims, and some Christians. These communities are reasonably large, and I know from personal experience that they are deeply satisfying to a decent amount of people.

    But yes, most people are not going to opt for this today - and the idea that they should be forced to is terrible.

    Traditional societies often become very repressive and restrictive, that's undeniable, but then we are now seeing that secular modern societies can become so as well.

    There have been eras and times where traditional societies have been fairly tolerant and accepting of eccentrics - I would have made a pretty decent Sufi pretending to believe in mainstream Islam while secretly having values significantly different from mainstream (and all significant Sufi figures held significantly different values from mainstream Islam), and I could have made a pretty happy Christian mystic mouthing the pieties while believing with Eckhardt in a view of the world in many ways quite different from mainstream Christianity, and I could - and do - make a fairly eccentric Jew, inspired more by the Kabbalah than Talmudic Judaism.

    And then the traditional societies of Asia always provided an escape from social convention.

    The point is - I am not sure the wrapping matters so much. Modern secular societies are becoming repressive - traditional societies have often tolerated - even approved - escapes from social convention.

    Which means any calls for a return to tradition are largely beside the point - and in today's climate, are likely just calls for a return to a different kind of repressive society. In that much I agree with you.

    I am quite sure that Intelligent Dasein, for all his quirky insights, would create a harshly repressive and conformist society that would be a nightmare for me to live in - and Jews and eccentrics in general.

    So instead of focusing on the wrapping, on the idiom in which one expresses oneself, I focus on the psychological type. I have found that people use the conventional language of their time - but what matters is the underlying psychological attitude, which is often just an old attitude expressed in modern idiom. (IQ and HBD is just old school racism updated in sciency language).

    Which means I actually agree with you largely - calls to return to tradition are pointless. Let us use current idioms and language to fashion a society based on timeless principles of mutual accommodation - traditionalist people should be allowed to self-organize, but no single psychological type should completely dominate, although inequality is inevitable.

    Of course, such an arrangement can never last - but they are worth trying to build, and human history means constantly building up and destroying this arrangement.

    Replies: @V. K. Ovelund
    , @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    @dfordoom


    Which is exactly what traditional societies do, which is why most people want nothing to do with them.
    100% modernist propaganda. In the present world there is an almost perfect inverse correlation between how "traditionalist" a society is and how much "cultural imperialism" it practices.

    This holds up historically as well in many places. Off the top of my head, Athens was far more culturally imperialistic (and Greco-chauvinistic for that matter) than their evil Spartan adversaries; absolutist Bourbon France established fantastic relations with Native Americans, largely supporting their traditional society, while the progressive parliamentarian British which Voltaire so admired were busy genociding them.

    Just as with the issue of censorship, modern democrats are masters of projection here.

    Replies: @dfordoom
  126. @dfordoom
    @AaronB


    The problem is Cultural Imperialism – where one set of people try and force everyone else to live by their rules.
    Which is exactly what traditional societies do, which is why most people want nothing to do with them.

    There are clearly lots of people who would definitely like to live in a traditional society.
    Until recently there was nothing stopping them from doing so. There was not exactly a flood of people wanting to do so. The Amish were proof that it could be done. The "lots of people" wanting to live in a traditional society seemed in practice to be a tiny minority.

    I'd like to see people have the option of living in a traditional society, I just don't think many people would choose that option. And as a solution to out current societal problems it's a complete non-starter.

    Replies: @AaronB, @Elmer's Washable School Glue

    I’d like to see people have the option of living in a traditional society, I just don’t think many people would choose that option. And as a solution to out current societal problems it’s a complete non-starter.

    Mostly agree, but I don’t mean no technology like the Amish – I mean orthodox Jews, religious Muslims, and some Christians. These communities are reasonably large, and I know from personal experience that they are deeply satisfying to a decent amount of people.

    But yes, most people are not going to opt for this today – and the idea that they should be forced to is terrible.

    Traditional societies often become very repressive and restrictive, that’s undeniable, but then we are now seeing that secular modern societies can become so as well.

    There have been eras and times where traditional societies have been fairly tolerant and accepting of eccentrics – I would have made a pretty decent Sufi pretending to believe in mainstream Islam while secretly having values significantly different from mainstream (and all significant Sufi figures held significantly different values from mainstream Islam), and I could have made a pretty happy Christian mystic mouthing the pieties while believing with Eckhardt in a view of the world in many ways quite different from mainstream Christianity, and I could – and do – make a fairly eccentric Jew, inspired more by the Kabbalah than Talmudic Judaism.

    And then the traditional societies of Asia always provided an escape from social convention.

    The point is – I am not sure the wrapping matters so much. Modern secular societies are becoming repressive – traditional societies have often tolerated – even approved – escapes from social convention.

    Which means any calls for a return to tradition are largely beside the point – and in today’s climate, are likely just calls for a return to a different kind of repressive society. In that much I agree with you.

    I am quite sure that Intelligent Dasein, for all his quirky insights, would create a harshly repressive and conformist society that would be a nightmare for me to live in – and Jews and eccentrics in general.

    So instead of focusing on the wrapping, on the idiom in which one expresses oneself, I focus on the psychological type. I have found that people use the conventional language of their time – but what matters is the underlying psychological attitude, which is often just an old attitude expressed in modern idiom. (IQ and HBD is just old school racism updated in sciency language).

    Which means I actually agree with you largely – calls to return to tradition are pointless. Let us use current idioms and language to fashion a society based on timeless principles of mutual accommodation – traditionalist people should be allowed to self-organize, but no single psychological type should completely dominate, although inequality is inevitable.

    Of course, such an arrangement can never last – but they are worth trying to build, and human history means constantly building up and destroying this arrangement.

    •�Replies: @V. K. Ovelund
    @AaronB


    I am quite sure that Intelligent Dasein, for all his quirky insights, would create a harshly repressive and conformist society that would be a nightmare for me to live in – and Jews and eccentrics in general.
    How I loathe the eternal Jewish conviction that he was, is and shall be a victim. How I hate being conscripted into the r�le of villain in the Jews' never-ending perverse morality play.

    Kindly shove off, go to Israel or the moon or wherever you wish, and leave us Gentiles to solve our problems in our own way without Jews' constant manipulating interference help.

    We want to be left alone.

    Replies: @AaronB
  127. @dfordoom
    @AaronB


    The problem is Cultural Imperialism – where one set of people try and force everyone else to live by their rules.
    Which is exactly what traditional societies do, which is why most people want nothing to do with them.

    There are clearly lots of people who would definitely like to live in a traditional society.
    Until recently there was nothing stopping them from doing so. There was not exactly a flood of people wanting to do so. The Amish were proof that it could be done. The "lots of people" wanting to live in a traditional society seemed in practice to be a tiny minority.

    I'd like to see people have the option of living in a traditional society, I just don't think many people would choose that option. And as a solution to out current societal problems it's a complete non-starter.

    Replies: @AaronB, @Elmer's Washable School Glue

    Which is exactly what traditional societies do, which is why most people want nothing to do with them.

    100% modernist propaganda. In the present world there is an almost perfect inverse correlation between how “traditionalist” a society is and how much “cultural imperialism” it practices.

    This holds up historically as well in many places. Off the top of my head, Athens was far more culturally imperialistic (and Greco-chauvinistic for that matter) than their evil Spartan adversaries; absolutist Bourbon France established fantastic relations with Native Americans, largely supporting their traditional society, while the progressive parliamentarian British which Voltaire so admired were busy genociding them.

    Just as with the issue of censorship, modern democrats are masters of projection here.

    •�Replies: @dfordoom
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue



    Which is exactly what traditional societies do, which is why most people want nothing to do with them.
    100% modernist propaganda. In the present world there is an almost perfect inverse correlation between how “traditionalist” a society is and how much “cultural imperialism” it practices.
    I'm not sure we're really in disagreement here. I certainly agree that the modern western secular culture has become horrifyingly repressive and imperialistic. And I do agree that, whatever faults they may have, traditional societies in the modern world are very non-imperialistic. For the most part they really do not seek to impose their values on outsiders.

    Where we perhaps differ is that I do think that traditional societies tend to be very repressive in the way they impose conformity on insiders.
  128. @dfordoom
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue


    Is this possible in the near term for the west?
    Clearly the answer is no.

    Maybe not by means of revolution, but by means of self-organization, of people forming an imperium in imperio and preparing for the coming instability…absolutely.
    The coming instability is more right-wing wishful thinking.

    There are religious and cultural groups doing so right now.
    Those groups can be, and will be, very easily crushed. More right-wing daydreams.

    Replies: @Elmer's Washable School Glue

    The coming instability is more right-wing wishful thinking.

    D, I actually agree with you to a certain extent. I think the “coming civil war” crowd is deluded (and thankfully so, war sucks). Ditto for the “US has only 10 years before a financial apocalypse” people, I’ve argued against that exact line of reasoning in these comments before.

    By “instability” I just mean a gradual weakening of our state and its institutions, which many would say is not only inevitable, but already upon us. We all know the US isn’t functioning, on balance, as well as it did in the past. Maybe there will be a collapse but more likely it will just be a gradual fading away. Remember, if you asked a Western European in AD 500 whether the Roman Empire still existed in the West, he would have answered “of course” it did. The vast majority of the barbarian invaders ruled in the name of Rome, most famously Odoacer. The Italian economy largely continued to function as it had before into the mid 6th century. The “Fall of Rome” as a single event or date is an incredibly stupid concept, one reflected in today’s doomerists.

    My point is this: a monarchy (or any other heterodox government) in North America doesn’t require a violent reaction. It doesn’t even necessarily require some kind of dramatic collapse. As the American state gradually weakens, and its official institutions fail to perform competently, parallel institutions have the potential to step in and fill those roles. I mean, look at the Latino gangs defending their neighborhoods from looters. That is literally a return to warlords circa 500 BC. Can you get any more “traditional” than that?

    •�Replies: @dfordoom
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue


    My point is this: a monarchy (or any other heterodox government) in North America doesn’t require a violent reaction. It doesn’t even necessarily require some kind of dramatic collapse. As the American state gradually weakens, and its official institutions fail to perform competently, parallel institutions have the potential to step in and fill those roles.
    That's possible. But it's also possible that a gradually declining US will become increasingly authoritarian and totalitarian. It's even possible that both will happen - that quasi-self governing microstates will emerge for a while, and then get savagely crushed.

    It's a horrible thought but it may be possible have both totalitarianism and chaos at the same time.

    Or it could be like the Roman Empire, going through periods of chaos followed by periods of stability which are then followed by further periods of chaos.

    But I don't think the kinds of things you have in mind are likely to be possible in the short or medium terms. Maybe in another half a century. Rome took a long long time to die.
  129. @Athletic and Whitesplosive
    @Cloudbuster

    Examples of Monarchies that pursued total ethnic replacement as their central governing strategy? (Obviously an invasion of a foreign land to be replaced by their own citizens wouldn't count, as foreigners weren't citizens. Besides, this is a much less perverse policy if still unethical).

    The problems of monarchy have been severe, but recoverable (short of mistakes that got their entire kingdom wiped out, but that's usually not purely bad governance, and there are no roving barbarian hordes now that could challenge the military of any modern state). But liberal democracy is bent on destroying western nations permanently within the next century, it's literally the worst thing that a government could possibly do to its subjects.

    And besides that, most of monarchy's problems stem from having a permanent ruler (or ruling class) that can't be removed for governing badly. Well, does anyone with a brain really think the rulers of the Western world change every few years? It's more like their tools for interacting with the levers of power change slightly every year. But this of course is messy and harder to manage, and since they have no 'de jure' legitimacy for their rule, this leads to the totally destructive schemes we're currently subject to as methods of ensuring a smoother transition between the managerial class.

    I believe with absolute certainty that we would be better of with direct legal rule beneath EVEN the current ruling class, because then these convoluted vote rigging schemes and labor arbitrage with the third world (to please the business class) wouldn't be necessary. Further, it would lead to a clearer understanding of how power works (which is totally non existent in the west), and counterintuitively, at least some measure of responsibility and accountability for their actions. Nobles, kings, etc occasionally got killed for doing a terrible job. If you think middlemen getting voted out of office (complete with fat pension) is accountability, you're dreaming.

    Today, all discontent with governance is directed at the 'system'. If you think anger at the 'system' (which 99.9% of people have absolutely no understanding of, and which they can only conceive of in a way that the propaganda of the ruling class dictates) worries international Oligarchs, I promise you it doesn't. Now imagine if all of this violent and aimless anger were instead directed at those few particular people who were responsible for how society operates. Now that's an incentive not to fuck everyone over.

    Replies: @JohnPlywood

    examples of monarchies that promoted ethnic replacement

    Yes, there are several examples. The Vandals under King Gaiseric, having conquered Rome, then “Romanized themselves, largely adopting the language, customs, architecture, and even the administrative systems of their enemies. As a result, little distinctly “Vandal” evidence of their occupation now exists.”

    – quote taken from page 65 of “The Atlas of Military History”, Simon and Schuster

    •�Replies: @nebulafox
    @JohnPlywood

    I was under the impression that the Vandal conquest of Africa had different, more negative dynamics at work than the other Germanic invasions, and did resemble more than anything else a foreign occupation. Their high-handed governing methods-including religious persecution of their orthodox subjects-in North Africa were a huge part in why Justinian's reconquest succeeded. The locals deeply resented them by the time Belisarius landed.

    The Ostrogoths and Franks were more tactful: and much more Romanizable.
  130. @Talha
    @dfordoom

    Post-industrial states may well be naturally inclined towards being run by financial conglomerates. They having the power of the estate-holding nobles of the past who were power structure holding up the king. Economic strength may have replaced military strength in that regard.

    Peacde.

    Replies: @Talha

    Very interesting – Mad Mamluks had Edward Dutton on their show – somewhat related to the topic at hand, but not sure, so…

    Peace.

    [MORE]

    Perhaps a summary could be:
    The virgin high-IQ, high-openness society

    vs

    The chad low-IQ, high-Asabiyah Muslim society

    It may become the selling point we are looking for:
    Embrace the Islamic Imperium; only it can guarantee the viable steampunk future!!!

  131. @Talha
    @songbird


    but I don’t think we are immune to these crazy, destructive decisions today
    Yup, see below.

    I think there has to be a way to lance these ideas
    Well, we basically destroyed or destabilized multiple countries within the last couple of decades with no provocation and in full public view of the electorate. I don't think there has been a public discussion about how many people died as a result and why and if people should be held accountable. There were no repercussions or anything, so...

    Peace.

    Replies: @songbird

    It would be great if Congress were put on the spot regularly, as individuals. and forced to answer a few basic questions – stuff like, “Why is the US in the Middle East?” Or “Why does it have X bases overseas?” Or “What country does the Golan Heights belong to?”

    I also like the idea of forcing them to take quizzes: locate Iraq and Iran on a map (with timestamp). Wouldn’t hurt to regularly make them go on the record with testable predictions either – to help quantify their lack of foresight. At worst, it would be good busywork.

    Suppose it would probably require a revolution to institute, but I think simple ideas like these could have an impact, if one was trying to design a constitution from scratch.

    •�Replies: @Talha
    @songbird

    I would love to see those changes instituted as well. The issue is that I don't expect them to do much better than much of the public on something like "locate Iraq and Iran on a map"...perhaps we get the leadership we deserve.

    Peace.
    , @Rosie
    @songbird


    It would be great if Congress were put on the spot regularly, as individuals. and forced to answer a few basic questions – stuff like, “Why is the US in the Middle East?” Or “Why does it have X bases overseas?” Or “What country does the Golan Heights belong to?”
    To learn who rules over you, simply find out who is allowed to ask the questions.
  132. @songbird
    @Talha

    It would be great if Congress were put on the spot regularly, as individuals. and forced to answer a few basic questions - stuff like, "Why is the US in the Middle East?" Or "Why does it have X bases overseas?" Or "What country does the Golan Heights belong to?"

    I also like the idea of forcing them to take quizzes: locate Iraq and Iran on a map (with timestamp). Wouldn't hurt to regularly make them go on the record with testable predictions either - to help quantify their lack of foresight. At worst, it would be good busywork.

    Suppose it would probably require a revolution to institute, but I think simple ideas like these could have an impact, if one was trying to design a constitution from scratch.

    Replies: @Talha, @Rosie

    I would love to see those changes instituted as well. The issue is that I don’t expect them to do much better than much of the public on something like “locate Iraq and Iran on a map”…perhaps we get the leadership we deserve.

    Peace.

  133. @JohnPlywood
    @Athletic and Whitesplosive


    examples of monarchies that promoted ethnic replacement
    Yes, there are several examples. The Vandals under King Gaiseric, having conquered Rome, then "Romanized themselves, largely adopting the language, customs, architecture, and even the administrative systems of their enemies. As a result, little distinctly "Vandal" evidence of their occupation now exists."

    - quote taken from page 65 of "The Atlas of Military History", Simon and Schuster

    Replies: @nebulafox

    I was under the impression that the Vandal conquest of Africa had different, more negative dynamics at work than the other Germanic invasions, and did resemble more than anything else a foreign occupation. Their high-handed governing methods-including religious persecution of their orthodox subjects-in North Africa were a huge part in why Justinian’s reconquest succeeded. The locals deeply resented them by the time Belisarius landed.

    The Ostrogoths and Franks were more tactful: and much more Romanizable.

  134. @songbird
    @nebulafox

    Some people seem to think polygamy is eugenic, but I tend to think polygamy is bad for a society, in the long term. It is my theory that it led to a lot of miscegenation among Arabs, which seems to cause some social rifts today, and which likely negatively impacts IQ. Some people believe that polygamy in Africa was the reason for the slave trade - essentially that the locals had surplus captive males, after raiding for women.

    I believe it probably increases average paternal age, which means more mutations.

    I'm not really too familiar with the details of the practice today in Saudi Arabia, but I think it would be very interesting to learn about. Specifically, I wonder how common it is, and what percentage of woman are foreign and where do they come from.

    I'm open to the idea that limited polygamy might promote stability. Say, if a king, alone of all men, were allowed to have three wives. An alternative might be to adopt a system of tanistry, but it seems like it was a very bloody system, which promoted instability, although the clans themselves were remarkably resilient.

    Replies: @Talha, @nebulafox

    >Some people seem to think polygamy is eugenic, but I tend to think polygamy is bad for a society, in the long term.

    I believe polygamy has two major deletrious effects, one of which I already mentioned. The other is the messed up family dynamics: the father will not invest in his children as much as he should (one family is tough enough to manage!), and the different wives end up competing with each other. Political succession crises provide a very good example of how this can play out on the highest societal level: the civil war that started Abbasid disintegration was fought between two half-brothers, and the main reason the Ottomans lasted for so long was that it was expected the next sultan would leave a lot of dead or mentally crippled half-brothers in his wake.

    Furthermore, polygamy takes a lot money. Do we really need more pro-oligarchic trends?

    >Specifically, I wonder how common it is, and what percentage of woman are foreign and where do they come from.

    The Saudis are a rather closed off bunch who don’t take foreign wives, though they are quite happy to rape Filipina or Indonesian maids.

    >I’m open to the idea that limited polygamy might promote stability.

    I don’t buy that. The reason polygamy worked in the past was that many young men could be counted to die in war or disease. That’s not the case anymore, and in any rate, something working doesn’t mean it is optimal for a developed, civilized society. With over 7 billion human beings in an urbanized world, we couldn’t be more removed from Biblical agrarian conditions.

    Emphasizing the nuclear family at the expense of wider tribal connections is a huge part of why the West was so successful. The rest of the world did notice. Even in the Islamic World, polygamy is the exception to the rule these days, and nonexistent in more countries than not.

    •�Replies: @songbird
    @nebulafox

    I've often wondered how much more common fratricide is among half-brothers than full brothers. In the Middle Ages in Europe, of course, it was very common for a noble to marry two or three times, as his previous wives died, though often there is no clear indication of who a man's mother was. In a similar vein, I wonder how often when a son turned against his father, his mother had already died and been replaced.

    The reason polygamy worked in the past was that many young men could be counted to die in war or disease. That’s not the case anymore,
    There are a lot of old maids and single mothers, i.e. the pool of mateable women without husbands is larger than that which is utilized. As to kings, presumably, we live in less bloody times - times in which better communications and travel unite countries - so I'm not sure the historical examples run true. (Though I am primarily a proponent of monogamy - more thinking of it on the level of kings.) Many succession crises resulted because a king had no heir, or his heir was an idiot, or had hemophilia, or something. My thought is that, today, more male heirs would increase stability. And this would allow succession to always be patriarchal, which I think would be better for society.

    The Saudis are a rather closed off bunch who don’t take foreign wives
    I believe that commentator Yahya K mentioned that his mother was Egyptian, but that he had a Saudi father. And that citizenship was only obtainable by having a Saudi father, which makes it seem like it is occurs at least sometimes. I would presume that Muslims from oil countries have an advantage over over those without oil when it comes to having extra wives (and thus have more foreign wives), although there might be confounding factors. Perhaps, there might be HBD reasons for varying policies in the Muslim world.

    Emphasizing the nuclear family at the expense of wider tribal connections is a huge part of why the West was so successful
    There is something profoundly wrong with the West today. I am open to the idea that it takes a clan or a tribe to promote and protect a nuclear family.

    Replies: @V. K. Ovelund, @Talha
  135. dfordoom says: •�Website
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    @dfordoom


    Which is exactly what traditional societies do, which is why most people want nothing to do with them.
    100% modernist propaganda. In the present world there is an almost perfect inverse correlation between how "traditionalist" a society is and how much "cultural imperialism" it practices.

    This holds up historically as well in many places. Off the top of my head, Athens was far more culturally imperialistic (and Greco-chauvinistic for that matter) than their evil Spartan adversaries; absolutist Bourbon France established fantastic relations with Native Americans, largely supporting their traditional society, while the progressive parliamentarian British which Voltaire so admired were busy genociding them.

    Just as with the issue of censorship, modern democrats are masters of projection here.

    Replies: @dfordoom

    Which is exactly what traditional societies do, which is why most people want nothing to do with them.

    100% modernist propaganda. In the present world there is an almost perfect inverse correlation between how “traditionalist” a society is and how much “cultural imperialism” it practices.

    I’m not sure we’re really in disagreement here. I certainly agree that the modern western secular culture has become horrifyingly repressive and imperialistic. And I do agree that, whatever faults they may have, traditional societies in the modern world are very non-imperialistic. For the most part they really do not seek to impose their values on outsiders.

    Where we perhaps differ is that I do think that traditional societies tend to be very repressive in the way they impose conformity on insiders.

  136. dfordoom says: •�Website
    @Elmer's Washable School Glue
    @dfordoom


    The coming instability is more right-wing wishful thinking.
    D, I actually agree with you to a certain extent. I think the "coming civil war" crowd is deluded (and thankfully so, war sucks). Ditto for the "US has only 10 years before a financial apocalypse" people, I've argued against that exact line of reasoning in these comments before.

    By "instability" I just mean a gradual weakening of our state and its institutions, which many would say is not only inevitable, but already upon us. We all know the US isn't functioning, on balance, as well as it did in the past. Maybe there will be a collapse but more likely it will just be a gradual fading away. Remember, if you asked a Western European in AD 500 whether the Roman Empire still existed in the West, he would have answered "of course" it did. The vast majority of the barbarian invaders ruled in the name of Rome, most famously Odoacer. The Italian economy largely continued to function as it had before into the mid 6th century. The "Fall of Rome" as a single event or date is an incredibly stupid concept, one reflected in today's doomerists.

    My point is this: a monarchy (or any other heterodox government) in North America doesn't require a violent reaction. It doesn't even necessarily require some kind of dramatic collapse. As the American state gradually weakens, and its official institutions fail to perform competently, parallel institutions have the potential to step in and fill those roles. I mean, look at the Latino gangs defending their neighborhoods from looters. That is literally a return to warlords circa 500 BC. Can you get any more "traditional" than that?

    Replies: @dfordoom

    My point is this: a monarchy (or any other heterodox government) in North America doesn’t require a violent reaction. It doesn’t even necessarily require some kind of dramatic collapse. As the American state gradually weakens, and its official institutions fail to perform competently, parallel institutions have the potential to step in and fill those roles.

    That’s possible. But it’s also possible that a gradually declining US will become increasingly authoritarian and totalitarian. It’s even possible that both will happen – that quasi-self governing microstates will emerge for a while, and then get savagely crushed.

    It’s a horrible thought but it may be possible have both totalitarianism and chaos at the same time.

    Or it could be like the Roman Empire, going through periods of chaos followed by periods of stability which are then followed by further periods of chaos.

    But I don’t think the kinds of things you have in mind are likely to be possible in the short or medium terms. Maybe in another half a century. Rome took a long long time to die.

  137. Rosie says:
    @songbird
    @Talha

    It would be great if Congress were put on the spot regularly, as individuals. and forced to answer a few basic questions - stuff like, "Why is the US in the Middle East?" Or "Why does it have X bases overseas?" Or "What country does the Golan Heights belong to?"

    I also like the idea of forcing them to take quizzes: locate Iraq and Iran on a map (with timestamp). Wouldn't hurt to regularly make them go on the record with testable predictions either - to help quantify their lack of foresight. At worst, it would be good busywork.

    Suppose it would probably require a revolution to institute, but I think simple ideas like these could have an impact, if one was trying to design a constitution from scratch.

    Replies: @Talha, @Rosie

    It would be great if Congress were put on the spot regularly, as individuals. and forced to answer a few basic questions – stuff like, “Why is the US in the Middle East?” Or “Why does it have X bases overseas?” Or “What country does the Golan Heights belong to?”

    To learn who rules over you, simply find out who is allowed to ask the questions.

  138. the currently untenable financial situations of municipalities across the country are going to become catastrophic.

    After the election, when Pelosi and Co. are in control of the House, the Senate and the Presidency, blue cities and states will be bailed out.

  139. @dfordoom
    @Jake


    It is either Christ and Christendom or Satan’s multi-culti, Democratic/Capitalist/Globalist Chaos.
    Given that Christendom is as dead as the dodo and Christianity itself is a dying religion you'd better start looking for a third alternative.

    As other commenters have said, you can't go back. Christendom is not coming back.

    Replies: @Hearts on Fire

    Christendom is not coming back.

    So certain r u?

    Major world religions have experienced periods of contraction and expansion. The entire history of islam, for instance, is a long procession of expanding and contracting religious authority and religious fervor.

    •�Replies: @dfordoom
    @Hearts on Fire



    Christendom is not coming back.
    So certain r u?

    Major world religions have experienced periods of contraction and expansion.
    Yes, I am certain. It's a different world. Modernity has changed everything. The Industrial Revolution, the scientific revolutions of the 19th century, urbanisation, mass media, mass education - these have changed the West's mental outlook permanently. They represent a break from the past as significant as the break between hunter-gatherer societies and agricultural societies.

    The West no longer provides the soil in which religion can flourish.

    In the West all religions, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam, are doomed to slow decay.

    Islam may survive, but only in the Islamic world. Give it another two or three generations and Muslims in places like Britain, Europe and North America will be thoroughly secularised.

    If the West does find a new belief system it will be a secular belief system, possibly with very shallow quasi-spiritual overtones (rather like environmentalism). Secular pseudo-religions such as environmentalism and Social Justice are not religions. The resemblances between these belief systems and religion are superficial and misleading.

    And any new secular belief system will be primarily political and cultural.
  140. @AaronB
    @dfordoom


    I’d like to see people have the option of living in a traditional society, I just don’t think many people would choose that option. And as a solution to out current societal problems it’s a complete non-starter.
    Mostly agree, but I don't mean no technology like the Amish - I mean orthodox Jews, religious Muslims, and some Christians. These communities are reasonably large, and I know from personal experience that they are deeply satisfying to a decent amount of people.

    But yes, most people are not going to opt for this today - and the idea that they should be forced to is terrible.

    Traditional societies often become very repressive and restrictive, that's undeniable, but then we are now seeing that secular modern societies can become so as well.

    There have been eras and times where traditional societies have been fairly tolerant and accepting of eccentrics - I would have made a pretty decent Sufi pretending to believe in mainstream Islam while secretly having values significantly different from mainstream (and all significant Sufi figures held significantly different values from mainstream Islam), and I could have made a pretty happy Christian mystic mouthing the pieties while believing with Eckhardt in a view of the world in many ways quite different from mainstream Christianity, and I could - and do - make a fairly eccentric Jew, inspired more by the Kabbalah than Talmudic Judaism.

    And then the traditional societies of Asia always provided an escape from social convention.

    The point is - I am not sure the wrapping matters so much. Modern secular societies are becoming repressive - traditional societies have often tolerated - even approved - escapes from social convention.

    Which means any calls for a return to tradition are largely beside the point - and in today's climate, are likely just calls for a return to a different kind of repressive society. In that much I agree with you.

    I am quite sure that Intelligent Dasein, for all his quirky insights, would create a harshly repressive and conformist society that would be a nightmare for me to live in - and Jews and eccentrics in general.

    So instead of focusing on the wrapping, on the idiom in which one expresses oneself, I focus on the psychological type. I have found that people use the conventional language of their time - but what matters is the underlying psychological attitude, which is often just an old attitude expressed in modern idiom. (IQ and HBD is just old school racism updated in sciency language).

    Which means I actually agree with you largely - calls to return to tradition are pointless. Let us use current idioms and language to fashion a society based on timeless principles of mutual accommodation - traditionalist people should be allowed to self-organize, but no single psychological type should completely dominate, although inequality is inevitable.

    Of course, such an arrangement can never last - but they are worth trying to build, and human history means constantly building up and destroying this arrangement.

    Replies: @V. K. Ovelund

    I am quite sure that Intelligent Dasein, for all his quirky insights, would create a harshly repressive and conformist society that would be a nightmare for me to live in – and Jews and eccentrics in general.

    How I loathe the eternal Jewish conviction that he was, is and shall be a victim. How I hate being conscripted into the r�le of villain in the Jews’ never-ending perverse morality play.

    Kindly shove off, go to Israel or the moon or wherever you wish, and leave us Gentiles to solve our problems in our own way without Jews’ constant manipulating interference help.

    We want to be left alone.

    •�Agree: Mr. Rational
    •�Replies: @AaronB
    @V. K. Ovelund

    Well, again, I fully support your right to have a harshly repressive social group that excludes Jews and eccentrics. That's what I've been saying.

    I understand that you are a different psychological type than me. I accept and respect that. I am not one of those Jews who seek to force secular Enlightenment values on you. And hopefully you are not one of those whites who will force your values in me.

    To me, a good society is one that gives you and Dasein space to be yourselves - just as you wish to be with no one trying to impose their values on you.

    I firmly believe that all psychological types have a "right" to exist - they are all part of the patchwork mosaic of reality, and fit into jigsaw puzzle somewhere, somehow.

    So instead of you and Dasein forcing your self on me - or me forcing myself on you < we can tolerate and respect each others spaces.

    Now, if you can't do that, and insist on making it a fight, you may win. But then you'll provoke a backlash, and I'll win. And that's the cycle of history.

    And if that's where you're at, that's fine too. I accept that these cycles inevitably happen. But there are "interim" periods where genuine happiness and flourishing is possible for large numbers of people. And I'm interested in that.

    Also, I did not say that Jews are always victims. Just that in a system created by Dasein, Jews - and eccentrics and outsiders - would be victims. In a system created by some Jews I know, you would surely be a victim.

    As for going to Israel, that is my plan. But America belongs to any one who can hold it. Europeans took it from the Indians.

    Replies: @Audacious Epigone
  141. @nebulafox
    @songbird

    >Some people seem to think polygamy is eugenic, but I tend to think polygamy is bad for a society, in the long term.

    I believe polygamy has two major deletrious effects, one of which I already mentioned. The other is the messed up family dynamics: the father will not invest in his children as much as he should (one family is tough enough to manage!), and the different wives end up competing with each other. Political succession crises provide a very good example of how this can play out on the highest societal level: the civil war that started Abbasid disintegration was fought between two half-brothers, and the main reason the Ottomans lasted for so long was that it was expected the next sultan would leave a lot of dead or mentally crippled half-brothers in his wake.

    Furthermore, polygamy takes a lot money. Do we really need more pro-oligarchic trends?

    >Specifically, I wonder how common it is, and what percentage of woman are foreign and where do they come from.

    The Saudis are a rather closed off bunch who don't take foreign wives, though they are quite happy to rape Filipina or Indonesian maids.

    >I’m open to the idea that limited polygamy might promote stability.

    I don't buy that. The reason polygamy worked in the past was that many young men could be counted to die in war or disease. That's not the case anymore, and in any rate, something working doesn't mean it is optimal for a developed, civilized society. With over 7 billion human beings in an urbanized world, we couldn't be more removed from Biblical agrarian conditions.

    Emphasizing the nuclear family at the expense of wider tribal connections is a huge part of why the West was so successful. The rest of the world did notice. Even in the Islamic World, polygamy is the exception to the rule these days, and nonexistent in more countries than not.

    Replies: @songbird

    I’ve often wondered how much more common fratricide is among half-brothers than full brothers. In the Middle Ages in Europe, of course, it was very common for a noble to marry two or three times, as his previous wives died, though often there is no clear indication of who a man’s mother was. In a similar vein, I wonder how often when a son turned against his father, his mother had already died and been replaced.

    The reason polygamy worked in the past was that many young men could be counted to die in war or disease. That’s not the case anymore,

    There are a lot of old maids and single mothers, i.e. the pool of mateable women without husbands is larger than that which is utilized. As to kings, presumably, we live in less bloody times – times in which better communications and travel unite countries – so I’m not sure the historical examples run true. (Though I am primarily a proponent of monogamy – more thinking of it on the level of kings.) Many succession crises resulted because a king had no heir, or his heir was an idiot, or had hemophilia, or something. My thought is that, today, more male heirs would increase stability. And this would allow succession to always be patriarchal, which I think would be better for society.

    The Saudis are a rather closed off bunch who don’t take foreign wives

    I believe that commentator Yahya K mentioned that his mother was Egyptian, but that he had a Saudi father. And that citizenship was only obtainable by having a Saudi father, which makes it seem like it is occurs at least sometimes. I would presume that Muslims from oil countries have an advantage over over those without oil when it comes to having extra wives (and thus have more foreign wives), although there might be confounding factors. Perhaps, there might be HBD reasons for varying policies in the Muslim world.

    Emphasizing the nuclear family at the expense of wider tribal connections is a huge part of why the West was so successful

    There is something profoundly wrong with the West today. I am open to the idea that it takes a clan or a tribe to promote and protect a nuclear family.

    •�Replies: @V. K. Ovelund
    @songbird


    There is something profoundly wrong with the West today. I am open to the idea that ...
    One could end the last sentence in any of a hundred ways.

    Well put. An excellent syllogism. My sentiments exactly.
    , @Talha
    @songbird


    Many succession crises resulted because a king had no heir, or his heir was an idiot, or had hemophilia, or something.
    In the subject of succession of ruler/leadership, I find that the Rashidun were quite unique in the annals of history in how they figured out successors without splitting the community.

    I am open to the idea that it takes a clan or a tribe to promote and protect a nuclear family.
    People aren't ready for this conversation.

    Peace.

    Abu Bakr (ra) was chosen by a group of people from the community and, before he died, he appointed Umar (ra) - instead of one of his own many sons. Umar (ra) appointed a committee of 6 worthy people to decide among themselves with a specific command that his own son would NOT be one of those people, saying; it was enough of a burden on the Day of Judgment that one man from his family line had to answer for it. Then, of course Uthman (ra) was chosen from these and he ruled until there was the crisis of the Khawarij who killed him. The people chose Ali (ra) at this point (not any of Uthman's sons), but the fragmentation caused by the Khawarij revolt had split the community - Persia and Arabia on one side, Levant and Egypt on the other.

    The Ummayads took over after the death of Ali (ra) after negotiating a transfer of power from his son Hassan (ra) who the people of Persia and Arabia sided with as opposed to Muawiyyah (ra) whose power base was the more powerful Levant and Egypt. And then it basically went into monarchy mode from there, with all the rest of succession wars and what not, but was not unexpected:
    "'There will be Prophethood for as long as Allah wills it to be, then He will remove it when He wills, then there will be Khilafah on the Prophetic method and it will be for as long as Allah wills, then He will remove it when He wills, then there will be biting Kingship for as long as Allah Wills, then He will remove it when He wills, then there will be oppressive kingship for as long as Allah wills, then he will remove it when He wills, and then there will be Khilafah upon the Prophetic method.' and then he remained silent." - reported in the Musnad of Imam Ahmad (ra)

    Very unique though it was admittedly short-lived, perhaps because of it being so idealistic at the core.

    I believe this is one of the reasons why the early Muslim fighters were so motivated; they had leadership that was part of the community - they weren't fighting for the glory of one or another dynasty. Their leaders lived very frugal and austere lives, specifically shunning opulence and finery as part of the worldly order they had just kicked over. This enthusiasm started tanking significantly with the Umayyads and then Abbassids - and is one of the reason for so many slave armies cropping up in the Muslim world, since the common man didn't feel like fighting and dying for some palace brat against his brat brother or uncle.

    Replies: @songbird
  142. AaronB says:
    @V. K. Ovelund
    @AaronB


    I am quite sure that Intelligent Dasein, for all his quirky insights, would create a harshly repressive and conformist society that would be a nightmare for me to live in – and Jews and eccentrics in general.
    How I loathe the eternal Jewish conviction that he was, is and shall be a victim. How I hate being conscripted into the r�le of villain in the Jews' never-ending perverse morality play.

    Kindly shove off, go to Israel or the moon or wherever you wish, and leave us Gentiles to solve our problems in our own way without Jews' constant manipulating interference help.

    We want to be left alone.

    Replies: @AaronB

    Well, again, I fully support your right to have a harshly repressive social group that excludes Jews and eccentrics. That’s what I’ve been saying.

    I understand that you are a different psychological type than me. I accept and respect that. I am not one of those Jews who seek to force secular Enlightenment values on you. And hopefully you are not one of those whites who will force your values in me.

    To me, a good society is one that gives you and Dasein space to be yourselves – just as you wish to be with no one trying to impose their values on you.

    I firmly believe that all psychological types have a “right” to exist – they are all part of the patchwork mosaic of reality, and fit into jigsaw puzzle somewhere, somehow.

    So instead of you and Dasein forcing your self on me – or me forcing myself on you < we can tolerate and respect each others spaces.

    Now, if you can't do that, and insist on making it a fight, you may win. But then you'll provoke a backlash, and I'll win. And that's the cycle of history.

    And if that's where you're at, that's fine too. I accept that these cycles inevitably happen. But there are "interim" periods where genuine happiness and flourishing is possible for large numbers of people. And I'm interested in that.

    Also, I did not say that Jews are always victims. Just that in a system created by Dasein, Jews – and eccentrics and outsiders – would be victims. In a system created by some Jews I know, you would surely be a victim.

    As for going to Israel, that is my plan. But America belongs to any one who can hold it. Europeans took it from the Indians.

    •�Replies: @Audacious Epigone
    @AaronB

    But America belongs to any one who can hold it. Europeans took it from the Indians.

    So does the Levant, then.
  143. @songbird
    @nebulafox

    I've often wondered how much more common fratricide is among half-brothers than full brothers. In the Middle Ages in Europe, of course, it was very common for a noble to marry two or three times, as his previous wives died, though often there is no clear indication of who a man's mother was. In a similar vein, I wonder how often when a son turned against his father, his mother had already died and been replaced.

    The reason polygamy worked in the past was that many young men could be counted to die in war or disease. That’s not the case anymore,
    There are a lot of old maids and single mothers, i.e. the pool of mateable women without husbands is larger than that which is utilized. As to kings, presumably, we live in less bloody times - times in which better communications and travel unite countries - so I'm not sure the historical examples run true. (Though I am primarily a proponent of monogamy - more thinking of it on the level of kings.) Many succession crises resulted because a king had no heir, or his heir was an idiot, or had hemophilia, or something. My thought is that, today, more male heirs would increase stability. And this would allow succession to always be patriarchal, which I think would be better for society.

    The Saudis are a rather closed off bunch who don’t take foreign wives
    I believe that commentator Yahya K mentioned that his mother was Egyptian, but that he had a Saudi father. And that citizenship was only obtainable by having a Saudi father, which makes it seem like it is occurs at least sometimes. I would presume that Muslims from oil countries have an advantage over over those without oil when it comes to having extra wives (and thus have more foreign wives), although there might be confounding factors. Perhaps, there might be HBD reasons for varying policies in the Muslim world.

    Emphasizing the nuclear family at the expense of wider tribal connections is a huge part of why the West was so successful
    There is something profoundly wrong with the West today. I am open to the idea that it takes a clan or a tribe to promote and protect a nuclear family.

    Replies: @V. K. Ovelund, @Talha

    There is something profoundly wrong with the West today. I am open to the idea that …

    One could end the last sentence in any of a hundred ways.

    Well put. An excellent syllogism. My sentiments exactly.

    •�Thanks: songbird
  144. Talha says:
    @songbird
    @nebulafox

    I've often wondered how much more common fratricide is among half-brothers than full brothers. In the Middle Ages in Europe, of course, it was very common for a noble to marry two or three times, as his previous wives died, though often there is no clear indication of who a man's mother was. In a similar vein, I wonder how often when a son turned against his father, his mother had already died and been replaced.

    The reason polygamy worked in the past was that many young men could be counted to die in war or disease. That’s not the case anymore,
    There are a lot of old maids and single mothers, i.e. the pool of mateable women without husbands is larger than that which is utilized. As to kings, presumably, we live in less bloody times - times in which better communications and travel unite countries - so I'm not sure the historical examples run true. (Though I am primarily a proponent of monogamy - more thinking of it on the level of kings.) Many succession crises resulted because a king had no heir, or his heir was an idiot, or had hemophilia, or something. My thought is that, today, more male heirs would increase stability. And this would allow succession to always be patriarchal, which I think would be better for society.

    The Saudis are a rather closed off bunch who don’t take foreign wives
    I believe that commentator Yahya K mentioned that his mother was Egyptian, but that he had a Saudi father. And that citizenship was only obtainable by having a Saudi father, which makes it seem like it is occurs at least sometimes. I would presume that Muslims from oil countries have an advantage over over those without oil when it comes to having extra wives (and thus have more foreign wives), although there might be confounding factors. Perhaps, there might be HBD reasons for varying policies in the Muslim world.

    Emphasizing the nuclear family at the expense of wider tribal connections is a huge part of why the West was so successful
    There is something profoundly wrong with the West today. I am open to the idea that it takes a clan or a tribe to promote and protect a nuclear family.

    Replies: @V. K. Ovelund, @Talha

    Many succession crises resulted because a king had no heir, or his heir was an idiot, or had hemophilia, or something.

    In the subject of succession of ruler/leadership, I find that the Rashidun were quite unique in the annals of history in how they figured out successors without splitting the community.

    I am open to the idea that it takes a clan or a tribe to promote and protect a nuclear family.

    People aren’t ready for this conversation.

    Peace.

    [MORE]

    Abu Bakr (ra) was chosen by a group of people from the community and, before he died, he appointed Umar (ra) – instead of one of his own many sons. Umar (ra) appointed a committee of 6 worthy people to decide among themselves with a specific command that his own son would NOT be one of those people, saying; it was enough of a burden on the Day of Judgment that one man from his family line had to answer for it. Then, of course Uthman (ra) was chosen from these and he ruled until there was the crisis of the Khawarij who killed him. The people chose Ali (ra) at this point (not any of Uthman’s sons), but the fragmentation caused by the Khawarij revolt had split the community – Persia and Arabia on one side, Levant and Egypt on the other.

    The Ummayads took over after the death of Ali (ra) after negotiating a transfer of power from his son Hassan (ra) who the people of Persia and Arabia sided with as opposed to Muawiyyah (ra) whose power base was the more powerful Levant and Egypt. And then it basically went into monarchy mode from there, with all the rest of succession wars and what not, but was not unexpected:
    “‘There will be Prophethood for as long as Allah wills it to be, then He will remove it when He wills, then there will be Khilafah on the Prophetic method and it will be for as long as Allah wills, then He will remove it when He wills, then there will be biting Kingship for as long as Allah Wills, then He will remove it when He wills, then there will be oppressive kingship for as long as Allah wills, then he will remove it when He wills, and then there will be Khilafah upon the Prophetic method.’ and then he remained silent.” – reported in the Musnad of Imam Ahmad (ra)

    Very unique though it was admittedly short-lived, perhaps because of it being so idealistic at the core.

    I believe this is one of the reasons why the early Muslim fighters were so motivated; they had leadership that was part of the community – they weren’t fighting for the glory of one or another dynasty. Their leaders lived very frugal and austere lives, specifically shunning opulence and finery as part of the worldly order they had just kicked over. This enthusiasm started tanking significantly with the Umayyads and then Abbassids – and is one of the reason for so many slave armies cropping up in the Muslim world, since the common man didn’t feel like fighting and dying for some palace brat against his brat brother or uncle.

    •�Replies: @songbird
    @Talha

    Must have been pretty difficult to try to hold things together. Maybe, this period of succession was an acknowledgement of that - choose the most capable or powerful.

    I kind of like that idea in a monarchy. A pool of candidates. I think ideally, you would want that. I mean, I just think how our ancestors bred horses and dogs, etc. - they were ruthlessly selective. But that never really happened to kings. It stands to reason that we should put at least as much effort into trying to breed good kings, as we did into trying to breed good goats, etc. Of coarse, I'm not talking about culling them or gelding them, but the idea is that you would become unroyal, after so many generations, removed from the pool.

    I'm not sure the fears of civil war in a succession are all that pertinent today. Got to figure, there were a lot of pretenders leading armies back then - that sort of thing seems pretty unlikely now.

    Replies: @Talha
  145. dfordoom says: •�Website
    @Hearts on Fire
    @dfordoom


    Christendom is not coming back.

    So certain r u?

    Major world religions have experienced periods of contraction and expansion. The entire history of islam, for instance, is a long procession of expanding and contracting religious authority and religious fervor.

    Replies: @dfordoom

    Christendom is not coming back.

    So certain r u?

    Major world religions have experienced periods of contraction and expansion.

    Yes, I am certain. It’s a different world. Modernity has changed everything. The Industrial Revolution, the scientific revolutions of the 19th century, urbanisation, mass media, mass education – these have changed the West’s mental outlook permanently. They represent a break from the past as significant as the break between hunter-gatherer societies and agricultural societies.

    The West no longer provides the soil in which religion can flourish.

    In the West all religions, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam, are doomed to slow decay.

    Islam may survive, but only in the Islamic world. Give it another two or three generations and Muslims in places like Britain, Europe and North America will be thoroughly secularised.

    If the West does find a new belief system it will be a secular belief system, possibly with very shallow quasi-spiritual overtones (rather like environmentalism). Secular pseudo-religions such as environmentalism and Social Justice are not religions. The resemblances between these belief systems and religion are superficial and misleading.

    And any new secular belief system will be primarily political and cultural.

  146. @Cloudbuster
    @Curmudgeon

    Most states are "at will" employment states. Was there an obligation that the agency re-hire the officer? Union contract perhaps? Many officers have been fired over behavior that did not result in convictions in court.

    Replies: @Curmudgeon

    Here’s how employment law works. An employee terminated for “committing a crime” will be re-instated if found not guilty. If not, the employee will file a wrongful dismissal suit. Courts cannot order re-instatement, arbitration boards can.

    Had he not been rehired, in an “at will” setting, there would be a wrongful dismissal law suit. The lawsuit would not be confined to lost wages, and would claim other damages, such as loss of reputation. The potential for a couple of million in damages would be incentive to rehire.
    If he was unionized, an arbitration can and almost always will, order re-instatement. It is important to understand, that once the penalty has been spoken, and the reasons given, whether lawsuit or especially before an arbitration board, the employer cannot change the reason. It would seem that the re-hiring was an economic decision.

    At no point have I condoned what he has done. As I stated if he had followed departmental protocol, then the person who wrote them should have been tried as an accessory. I find it difficult to believe that a protocol would be written in such a manner to virtually guarantee someone would be shot.

    I admit, I do not know the details of his re-instatement, and I would be surprised if any news outlet did. However, my point is, that even if he were re-instated, the pension plan, or insurance company would pay under their own rules. He can apply all he wants, it doesn’t make him eligible to receive a benefit unless he meet the criteria established by the insurance company or pension plan. In either case, any disability benefit requires objective medical evidence to state the diagnosis, why that diagnosis prevents the person from doing his/her job, course of treatment, and estimated date of return to work, if known. I repeat, these are independent of the employer, and not charitable organizations. If the cop was entitled to disability, or a pension, the pension plan or insurance company would almost certainly be sued if they failed to pay it.

    As for specifically being re-hired so he could apply, perhaps you have better information than do, but it is SOP in most jurisdictions for a psychiatrist or psychologist to assess an officer after any shooting incident to determine whether there are psychological issues of any kind. I have found no information on whether that was done, or what the result was. I am not in a position to say whether he was in the process of applying for disability when he was terminated. That would be confidential information, unless it comes out at a trial in the context of his likely being psychologicaly unstable prior to the shooting incident.

  147. @anon
    @Curmudgeon

    You assume I know nothing of this.

    Correct. You obviously know nothing of this.

    I saw the video and followed the story.

    Obviously you did not follow the story, because you know nothing.

    His re-instatement, after being found not guilty was a lead pipe cinch, irrespective of the crime committed. Re-instatement unless specifically ordered otherwise, with something like a suspension, will connect the time between a dismissal and re-instatement as continuous employment.

    His rehiring was for just long enough to snag a disability pension for PTSD: 42 days. You say "should" but we are pointing out what really happened. In real life. In the real world.

    Please look up the word "nepotism" and ponder what it means.

    I am not privvy to whether the cop’s application was to an insurance company, or the pension plan, or the plan text that decides who is eligible.

    That is because you don't know anything.
    HINT: What does "nepotism" mean?

    PS: What does the engraving YOU'RE FUCKED on a gun privately owned by a cop that he carries on duty imply about his mindset? Why do you suppose the judge made sure the jury never knew about that detail?

    View the vid again and tell us all exactly why the shooting of Shaver was justified. Was the drunk crying on the floor a fleeing felon? Was he armed? If so, armed with what? Were the officers in danger of grave bodily harm or death? Explain in detail the justification for firing multiple rounds of .223 rifle ammo into him.

    If you could somehow learn to use complicated, high level computer applications like http://www.duckduckgo.com then you, too, could find elusive bits of information such as this:

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/daniel-shaver-killing/594091/

    Replies: @Curmudgeon

    I have replied to covering many of your points. It appears that you cannot separate issues.

    News sources are not reliable, and The Atlantic contains articles that I consider comic relief.
    Please identify where I have said the shooting was justified. I have in fact, gone beyond your screed and stated:

    if he did follow protocol, the idiot who drew it up should have been charged with him.

    My point in my first reply was that benefits from insurance plans and pension plans are paid by the rules of those plans, and have nothing to do with the employer.

    His rehiring was for just long enough to snag a disability pension for PTSD: 42 days.

    You appear to have knowledge of the plan text. Was that 42 calendar days or 42 working days. Please provide the information on the length of the waiting period for the disability benefit, and whether the officer met the criteria for the benefit.
    The Atlantic apparently knows that the rehiring was temporary. Perhaps you could provide a copy the letter of re-instatement that states that.

    If you have proof of nepotism, I suggest you send it to the Mayor or Prosecutor responsible for the district for them to investigate.

    What does the engraving YOU’RE FUCKED on a gun privately owned by a cop that he carries on duty imply about his mindset? Why do you suppose the judge made sure the jury never knew about that detail?

    Anything that I, you, or the prosecution implies about the engraving is speculation, not fact. The only person who can answer that is the person who engraved it. I can only speculate why the judge ruled that way. Perhaps it was because he understood the difference between inference or speculation and fact, and that juries have to rule on facts not speculation.

  148. @Talha
    @songbird


    Many succession crises resulted because a king had no heir, or his heir was an idiot, or had hemophilia, or something.
    In the subject of succession of ruler/leadership, I find that the Rashidun were quite unique in the annals of history in how they figured out successors without splitting the community.

    I am open to the idea that it takes a clan or a tribe to promote and protect a nuclear family.
    People aren't ready for this conversation.

    Peace.

    Abu Bakr (ra) was chosen by a group of people from the community and, before he died, he appointed Umar (ra) - instead of one of his own many sons. Umar (ra) appointed a committee of 6 worthy people to decide among themselves with a specific command that his own son would NOT be one of those people, saying; it was enough of a burden on the Day of Judgment that one man from his family line had to answer for it. Then, of course Uthman (ra) was chosen from these and he ruled until there was the crisis of the Khawarij who killed him. The people chose Ali (ra) at this point (not any of Uthman's sons), but the fragmentation caused by the Khawarij revolt had split the community - Persia and Arabia on one side, Levant and Egypt on the other.

    The Ummayads took over after the death of Ali (ra) after negotiating a transfer of power from his son Hassan (ra) who the people of Persia and Arabia sided with as opposed to Muawiyyah (ra) whose power base was the more powerful Levant and Egypt. And then it basically went into monarchy mode from there, with all the rest of succession wars and what not, but was not unexpected:
    "'There will be Prophethood for as long as Allah wills it to be, then He will remove it when He wills, then there will be Khilafah on the Prophetic method and it will be for as long as Allah wills, then He will remove it when He wills, then there will be biting Kingship for as long as Allah Wills, then He will remove it when He wills, then there will be oppressive kingship for as long as Allah wills, then he will remove it when He wills, and then there will be Khilafah upon the Prophetic method.' and then he remained silent." - reported in the Musnad of Imam Ahmad (ra)

    Very unique though it was admittedly short-lived, perhaps because of it being so idealistic at the core.

    I believe this is one of the reasons why the early Muslim fighters were so motivated; they had leadership that was part of the community - they weren't fighting for the glory of one or another dynasty. Their leaders lived very frugal and austere lives, specifically shunning opulence and finery as part of the worldly order they had just kicked over. This enthusiasm started tanking significantly with the Umayyads and then Abbassids - and is one of the reason for so many slave armies cropping up in the Muslim world, since the common man didn't feel like fighting and dying for some palace brat against his brat brother or uncle.

    Replies: @songbird

    Must have been pretty difficult to try to hold things together. Maybe, this period of succession was an acknowledgement of that – choose the most capable or powerful.

    I kind of like that idea in a monarchy. A pool of candidates. I think ideally, you would want that. I mean, I just think how our ancestors bred horses and dogs, etc. – they were ruthlessly selective. But that never really happened to kings. It stands to reason that we should put at least as much effort into trying to breed good kings, as we did into trying to breed good goats, etc. Of coarse, I’m not talking about culling them or gelding them, but the idea is that you would become unroyal, after so many generations, removed from the pool.

    I’m not sure the fears of civil war in a succession are all that pertinent today. Got to figure, there were a lot of pretenders leading armies back then – that sort of thing seems pretty unlikely now.

    •�Replies: @Talha
    @songbird


    Must have been pretty difficult to try to hold things together. Maybe, this period of succession was an acknowledgement of that – choose the most capable or powerful.
    Herculean task. I mean, think of other major conquerors like Alexander, the Mongols and see how long things lasted after them before fragmentation and infighting begins.

    And they were not just keeping an empire together, but making sure a religious legacy was preserved - another tremendous task.

    I’m not sure the fears of civil war in a succession are all that pertinent today.
    Definitely an interesting topic. There were some of these in the Gulf Arab states as they were coming up and power was being consolidated, but now it seems you have one monarch or successor who the hidden military-intelligence apparatus throws its weight behind and takes care of the rest. We saw this when MBS arrested a bunch of his potential rivals:
    "Saudi authorities have detained three princes including King Salman's brother and nephew on charges of plotting a coup, the US media reported on Friday, signalling a further consolidation of power by the kingdom's de facto ruler."
    https://english.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2020/3/7/mbs-orders-arrest-of-uncle-cousins-over-coup-plot

    "By dawn on Sunday, more than 30 of Saudi Arabia’s most senior figures, among them blood relatives of senior rulers, were locked inside the hotel, accused of corruption."
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/06/how-saudi-elite-became-five-star-prisoners-at-the-riyadh-ritz-carlton

    Peace.

    Uniting the Arabs was hard enough, immediately out of the gate, many of the Arab tribes revolted and refused to give allegiance to the central leadership of the Hijaz. Not only refusal of taxes, some said they only had allegiance as long as the Prophet (pbuh) was alive, and on top of that multiple false prophets arose. This is a good summary (bonus: epic buff stick-figure Khalid ibn Walid [ra]):
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1w0Y-7BiEY

    Then, after that is resolved, on top of that you had a rapidly expanding empire on three - THREE - fronts under various different leadership (sometimes switching - for instance Khalid [ra] starts out on the Persian front then gets sent to the Levant, and others are swapped around as needed). And murmurs of new Muslims coming into the religion from different backgrounds (now you have to ward of syncretism) and they are arguing at the periphery about the recitation of the Qur'an (so now you have to make sure everyone is on the same page as far as the Qur'an is concerned and have to produce codices and make sure everyone is using them to recite from).

    If they didn't get it right in those short 30 years, and I am still shocked that they did, Islam itself (much less the empire) would have been a short-lived memory.
  149. I am not convinced that christianity is not going anywhere. It may be smaller. But its existence is not dependent on numbers. It’s a belief system held up not by the edicts of men but by a Holy Spirit.

  150. Christianity has been infiltrated and subsumed. This “Judeo-Christianity” is a suicide cult.

    That dark skinned Jesus they are pushing is no messiah.

    The Zionists have hollowed out America, and oppose Western Civilization.

    Their infernal master fed them a line about global conquest and 2800 brown slaves each.

    There’s a sucker born every twenty seconds now.

    Why anyone would believe the World’s Greatest Liar is debatable I suppose.

    Just don’t call them smart. They’re the latest suckers of The Great Con…

  151. anon[105] •�Disclaimer says:

    It is obvious that you cannot see the difference between “ought” and “is”. It is a settled fact that the killer of Shaver was reinstated, obtained a disability pension for PTSD, claiming the shooting traumatized him. You can say that this “ought” not to have happened all you want, it will not change the fact of what “is” true. Contend with the facts all you like, they won’t change.

    It is extremely obvious you knew and still know little or nothing about the case, but rather opine from your position of ignorance. You did not even know a trial had been held, for example. Really bad showing on your part.

    Now, on the subject of the dust cover words.

    I can only speculate why the judge ruled that way. Perhaps it was because he understood the difference between inference or speculation and fact, and that juries have to rule on facts not speculation.

    The dust cover indicated mindset or mental state of the officer. A mental state is a factor in certain crimes. The judge deliberately excluded evidence, in my humble opinion. Here is a legal concept you appear to also know nothing about.

    https://infogalactic.com/info/Mens_rea

    Is there any actual point you are trying to make? If so, please spell it out.

  152. Talha says:
    @songbird
    @Talha

    Must have been pretty difficult to try to hold things together. Maybe, this period of succession was an acknowledgement of that - choose the most capable or powerful.

    I kind of like that idea in a monarchy. A pool of candidates. I think ideally, you would want that. I mean, I just think how our ancestors bred horses and dogs, etc. - they were ruthlessly selective. But that never really happened to kings. It stands to reason that we should put at least as much effort into trying to breed good kings, as we did into trying to breed good goats, etc. Of coarse, I'm not talking about culling them or gelding them, but the idea is that you would become unroyal, after so many generations, removed from the pool.

    I'm not sure the fears of civil war in a succession are all that pertinent today. Got to figure, there were a lot of pretenders leading armies back then - that sort of thing seems pretty unlikely now.

    Replies: @Talha

    Must have been pretty difficult to try to hold things together. Maybe, this period of succession was an acknowledgement of that – choose the most capable or powerful.

    Herculean task. I mean, think of other major conquerors like Alexander, the Mongols and see how long things lasted after them before fragmentation and infighting begins.

    And they were not just keeping an empire together, but making sure a religious legacy was preserved – another tremendous task.

    I’m not sure the fears of civil war in a succession are all that pertinent today.

    Definitely an interesting topic. There were some of these in the Gulf Arab states as they were coming up and power was being consolidated, but now it seems you have one monarch or successor who the hidden military-intelligence apparatus throws its weight behind and takes care of the rest. We saw this when MBS arrested a bunch of his potential rivals:
    “Saudi authorities have detained three princes including King Salman’s brother and nephew on charges of plotting a coup, the US media reported on Friday, signalling a further consolidation of power by the kingdom’s de facto ruler.”
    https://english.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2020/3/7/mbs-orders-arrest-of-uncle-cousins-over-coup-plot

    “By dawn on Sunday, more than 30 of Saudi Arabia’s most senior figures, among them blood relatives of senior rulers, were locked inside the hotel, accused of corruption.”
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/06/how-saudi-elite-became-five-star-prisoners-at-the-riyadh-ritz-carlton

    Peace.

    [MORE]

    Uniting the Arabs was hard enough, immediately out of the gate, many of the Arab tribes revolted and refused to give allegiance to the central leadership of the Hijaz. Not only refusal of taxes, some said they only had allegiance as long as the Prophet (pbuh) was alive, and on top of that multiple false prophets arose. This is a good summary (bonus: epic buff stick-figure Khalid ibn Walid [ra]):

    Then, after that is resolved, on top of that you had a rapidly expanding empire on three – THREE – fronts under various different leadership (sometimes switching – for instance Khalid [ra] starts out on the Persian front then gets sent to the Levant, and others are swapped around as needed). And murmurs of new Muslims coming into the religion from different backgrounds (now you have to ward of syncretism) and they are arguing at the periphery about the recitation of the Qur’an (so now you have to make sure everyone is on the same page as far as the Qur’an is concerned and have to produce codices and make sure everyone is using them to recite from).

    If they didn’t get it right in those short 30 years, and I am still shocked that they did, Islam itself (much less the empire) would have been a short-lived memory.

  153. @SafeNow
    “Trump needed someone to ensure the congruence of his instincts and his personnel.”

    This will sound far-fetched, but I think that the deep state would prevent that by going after such a proficient person; a perjury trap, bankrupt him, even threaten to go after his son.

    I agree that there is coming an economic collapse. Some of the essayists on this website think that the unraveling will be restricted to being a cultural collapse.

    Replies: @Audacious Epigone

    Naming Pat Buchanan isn’t merely the result of salience and convenience. He would’ve been perfect–as well-respected as a genuinely America First figure can be in DC, no career prospects to be held hostage, financial independence, affability, and he doesn’t have any children to target like Michael Flynn does.

    •�Agree: Talha, Not Only Wrathful
  154. @AaronB
    @V. K. Ovelund

    Well, again, I fully support your right to have a harshly repressive social group that excludes Jews and eccentrics. That's what I've been saying.

    I understand that you are a different psychological type than me. I accept and respect that. I am not one of those Jews who seek to force secular Enlightenment values on you. And hopefully you are not one of those whites who will force your values in me.

    To me, a good society is one that gives you and Dasein space to be yourselves - just as you wish to be with no one trying to impose their values on you.

    I firmly believe that all psychological types have a "right" to exist - they are all part of the patchwork mosaic of reality, and fit into jigsaw puzzle somewhere, somehow.

    So instead of you and Dasein forcing your self on me - or me forcing myself on you < we can tolerate and respect each others spaces.

    Now, if you can't do that, and insist on making it a fight, you may win. But then you'll provoke a backlash, and I'll win. And that's the cycle of history.

    And if that's where you're at, that's fine too. I accept that these cycles inevitably happen. But there are "interim" periods where genuine happiness and flourishing is possible for large numbers of people. And I'm interested in that.

    Also, I did not say that Jews are always victims. Just that in a system created by Dasein, Jews - and eccentrics and outsiders - would be victims. In a system created by some Jews I know, you would surely be a victim.

    As for going to Israel, that is my plan. But America belongs to any one who can hold it. Europeans took it from the Indians.

    Replies: @Audacious Epigone

    But America belongs to any one who can hold it. Europeans took it from the Indians.

    So does the Levant, then.

    •�Agree: Talha
  155. @V. K. Ovelund

    As the commercial and residential real estate markets collapse in the coming months, ...
    Interesting. Would you like to elaborate?

    Replies: @Audacious Epigone

    The CARES Act eviction protections and unemployment benefits are set to expire at the end of this month. If allowed to occur, this will cause a collapse in real estate. On a national scale we will see some combination of evictions, abandonments, defaults, and renegotiated rental arrangements. All of these things will have downward pressure on real estate as there will be a glut of vacancies combined with a reduction in rental rates.

    •�Thanks: V. K. Ovelund
  156. @Talha
    @RSDB

    Greek mythology rehash.

    Peace.

    https://i.pinimg.com/474x/64/e4/88/64e4887dcc9fb0011b21b5da6f60368a.jpg

    https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57125c2c2b8dde54a34b537f/1558438583085-NEUOY900RGCVZPKV38OK/ke17ZwdGBToddI8pDm48kPsBiU6FMuNcfoCZ5wsLw6lZw-zPPgdn4jUwVcJE1ZvWEtT5uBSRWt4vQZAgTJucoTqqXjS3CfNDSuuf31e0tVHtC2-mPyV1CKVfuhZVL_8gvwT-mxXlZ9P7eDlaZoUQ6KEcAfnVBrEqrgp1UxUHGkY/Saturn+Devouring+His+Son+by+Peter+Paul+Rubens+1636.png

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Francisco_de_Goya%2C_Saturno_devorando_a_su_hijo_%281819-1823%29.jpg

    Replies: @RSDB

    Yes, that was it, and also there was a similar quip during the Reign of Terror by the French monarchist Mallet du Pan.

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