Youtube comments of William Innes (@williaminnes6635).
-
782
-
156
-
152
-
112
-
94
-
75
-
62
-
54
-
42
-
42
-
38
-
37
-
36
-
35
-
34
-
33
-
32
-
31
-
28
-
28
-
26
-
26
-
26
-
I joined some Zimbabwean groups out of genuine curiosity. The ones that call it Rhodesia are all nostalgia from boomers for the 1970s, for old school mates, old work and army buddies, old cars, old bars, if they emigrated, the weather - they get this cumulonimbus along with light drizzle very often and they have a specific word for it - the flora, the landscapes. The ones that call it Zimbabwe are all people swopping tips on how to get somewhere with better wages - now that there are long term leases, it's possible to hold on to land for long enough to do something with it in Zimbabwe, but their wages are very depressed - and the main language they use, according to Google translate, besides English, is Shona. The big complaint is the cost of health care. Personally I think Zimbabwe has nowhere to go but up.
26
-
25
-
25
-
25
-
24
-
22
-
20
-
20
-
20
-
19
-
18
-
18
-
18
-
17
-
17
-
17
-
17
-
17
-
16
-
16
-
15
-
15
-
15
-
15
-
15
-
15
-
15
-
15
-
14
-
14
-
14
-
14
-
14
-
14
-
14
-
14
-
14
-
14
-
Pierre committed a genocide according to the definition all ready agreed upon by Canada as an entity, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that he was more than a symptom of the slow motion collapse of Canada as a nation dating from secularization in the 1960s. 1840s-1960s Canada was built on the idea of a minimum standard of second class citizenship for the overall Catholic minority, accompanied by what turned out to have been a doomed attempt to integrate the FNs. (When the visionary dies and the bureaucracy takes over, the vision tends to fail.) If one has a confessional basis for a nation - which worked, actually, compare Canada to Northern Ireland, for instance, which didn't have a MacDonald to sketch out a path to get around their similar confessional dynamic - the difference was that MacDonald had his mind focused by the first wave of Irish terrorism, which beat the militia - we only introduced the police in the 1840s to deal with the Irish who were all ready here, St. Patrick's Day is really more a commemoration of immigrant-ness in general than anything else, which is the meaning it carries in the food colouring and novelty jerseys for the Leafs - then when society secularizes, it destroys the basis of it. I mean, I actually like what has replaced the 1840s-1960s version around Toronto - which was the extension of that same floor of second class citizenship to every other imaginable minority besides Catholics and then gradual equalization by the 1990s - symbolized by the equalization of funding for the Catholic school boards - when multiculturalism as an ideology was at its peak in United States - making us effectively culturally frozen in time as 90s midwesterners with a bit of an Upstate New York influence - but I know that isn't how it is in other parts of Confederation, due to their relatively greater cultural similarities to their adjacent portions of the United States. It is almost the opposite process through which went Italy following unification by Garibaldi, when there was a push to create a national identity - we have started with Canada, and we have ceased to have Canadians. However, one must recall that prior to Garibaldi, the Italian peninsula contained Siciians, Savoyards, Calabrians, Milanese, Romans, Genoese, and so forth. Sorry to ramble.
13
-
13
-
13
-
13
-
13
-
12
-
12
-
12
-
12
-
Multiculturalism works, in the western hemisphere, assuming a suburban overcultural matrix.
What I notice is that at the same time as multiculturalism here, where it works, is under attack by "urbanists," "transit advocates," people who are in favour of "densification," carbon people, and anti-car people; parts of the world whose monoculture has historically allowed them to function as urban societies are seeing multiculturalism forced down their throats.
In short, clearly enough these ideas have been brought outside the social contexts in which they evolved and thus weaponized against the people on the ground.
If this is not the result of deliberate malice, then it is the result of bestial idiocy.
12
-
11
-
11
-
11
-
11
-
11
-
11
-
11
-
10
-
10
-
10
-
10
-
10
-
10
-
9
-
9
-
9
-
9
-
9
-
9
-
8
-
8
-
8
-
8
-
Kind of.
At the beginning of the French Revolution, the first wave of revolutionaries decreed an end to slavery, including in the French empire outside of France.
At that point, the Haitians were probably the world's most enthusiastic French citizens.
Later, a different group of French revolutionaries realized that they really needed the money from sugar sales to fund the wars that broke out against Prussia, Russia, Austria, Britain, Portugal, and later Spain.
(The French really pissed in everybody's coffee around the turn of the 19th century.)
Napoleon sent Rochambeau to Haiti with the mission of suppressing the (fairly understandable) resistance the Haitians had to being told it was time to go back to being slaves.
Dessalines was a maniac, but Rochambeau became the name of the South Park game of kick the other guy in the nuts for a reason, because that was his strategy for convincing people who had just been told they were free that they had to go back to being slaves.
The guy literally invented a primitive version of the gas chamber to execute Haitians he suspected were involved with arming the Haitian revolutionaries.
He'd burn sulfur in the holds of ships to suffocate people.
He'd put nails in barrels and use them to roll people down hills.
So, the mass lynchings of French and collaborationist Haitian planters LOOK nasty in those old cartoons, but...people were pissed.
Really it's more similar to the War in the Vendee, except that the French central government was too weak to pull off a full genocide the way they were able to in what became mainland France. Partially this was because of the distance, partially because the Royal Navy went back and forth from helping the French when it looked like the Haitian Revolution would make problems in British possessions to helping the Haitian revolutionaries when it looked like a great way to grief the French - smaller version of what the French did to the British in America. The American Revolution just wasn't quite as barbaric as the French Revolution.
The psychological thing was almost as bad as the indemnity.
Given how nasty the war was, once Louverture got in, there was no way of convincing the average person to go back to working on a plantation. That was the only way they could have kept up their exports, because sugar was the one thing they were set up to produce.
In a world where the later French revolutionaries had decided to keep slavery off the books, Haiti would have probably developed as a standard banana republic. They would have had a sharecrop economy for a century and change then gradually diversified. It'd be an upper middle income nation today. If you told somebody from that timeline our timeline's version of what happened, it would sound insane to them, and if they were from Haiti, they'd probably take it as an insult.
Even had somebody who wasn't as brutal as Rochambeau been sent by Napoleon, it would still have been possible to convince the average person to work as a sharecropper.
but after all the shit they went through because of Rochambeau?
They weren't going to do that.
and that meant you then had a century plus where instead of exporting something, they exported nothing.
The tertiary tragedy of the way the Haitian Revolution happened - besides the horrific atrocities and destroying Haiti's exports for a hundred years - was that when the early French revolutionaries declared an end to slavery, in 1792 IIRC, the debate on slavery had just entered Common as a result of Wilberforce pushing it.
The argument got made to see how it would work out for the French before rushing in.
Then the wars with France distracted Commons from the issue until 1815, and it was just sort of forgotten until 1834, when, after a frenzy of changes to the way the system was set up started by getting rid of electoral districts where everybody was on the take, the decision was finally made to get rid of it.
In other words, it was the initial catalyst for delay. Slavery might have ended 42 years earlier in the British Empire had things gone differently. That might have meant pressure on Spain and Portugal got started earlier.
Titbit number four, the first wave of refugees welcomed by the United States as an independent country were Haitians and Frenchmen fleeing the Haitian Revolution. This was because South Carolina and North Carolina had disproportionately been settled by planters who had failed at growing sugar in the Caribbean, and who were automatically sympathetic to Haitian and French planters who lost their plantations during the Haitian Revolution.
8
-
8
-
8
-
8
-
8
-
The Shona and the Matabele had both been there prior to 1898, off the top of my head. The Matabele I believed had been Johnny-come-latelies, being a people loosely related to the Zulu who had fled north after losing a war over territory. It was also definitely not Europe. The whole attachment people had was to the specific place, which was in Africa and of Africa. People whose ancestors had moved to America from somewhere else in the 1900s or 1910s by the 1960s and 1970s would have felt American. There was also a definite Angloizing process. I remember reading somebody writing about traveling there while Mugabe was in office who said there was a stark contrast between the press which depicted Mugabe as this bloodthirsty tyrant, and the people one actually met in Zimbabwe, who spoke "an archaic form of English, using anachronistic syntax and turns of phrase that had not been common in the rest of the English-speaking world for a century." On the guilt shame fear cultural motivations tracker map, Zimbabwe shows up a darker than Prussian blue for moderately guilt motivated, like most of Latin America, all of the traditional developed world except Japan, and randomly Malaysia. Shona speakers will sometimes in writing insert English phrases and words intermixed with the Shona. Weirdly I haven't noticed anybody speaking Matabele on social media. I remember speaking with a fellow who had served with a UK light infantry regiment who said he had local people ask him how closely he felt his regiment was related to theirs and he said he'd reply that it was like the Ugandans, the connection was there, but it was distant. Writer of popular histories and non-speaker of Latin Barbara Tuchmann quoted 1 Corinthians 13:12 in describing what it was like to read secondaries on medieval people - "for now we see through a glass, darkly." One twist or another - one of the Trudeaus being a bit more insane, for instance - and we could easily have ben in Zimbabwe's shoes.
8
-
8
-
8
-
8
-
8
-
8
-
8
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
France got to the point where it is due to the French Revolution being a cultural revolution during which the cultural genocide of local ethnic groups who had prior to that point been culturally distinct and originally politically autonomous, having been only been brought under the control of the kings in Paris as a result of a bumpy and uneven process of centralization starting from at least several decades prior to the Hundred Years War - which was initially fought, in part, on the issue of the extent to which the nobility ought to be subservient to the king - which only resulted in a centralized system, <<t'etat policier>>, under Louis XIV. One could probably make a loose case that the difference between England and the continent stems from differing experiences to the Norse invasions resulting in different experiences of centralization. England centralized politically much earlier under William the Conqueror, but the Normans always knew they could only push the local ethnic majorities so far, which over the centuries resulted in an intense distrust of the centralized government. Whereas the kings in Paris had been forced to create the Normans in the first place by allowing Viking settlement as a preferable alternative to having to deal with periodic sieges of Paris. The European project's emphasis on a European identity and its antidemocratic instincts could be said to reflect the tendency in the process of centralization originating in Paris toward the cultural genocide of local ethnic groups in order to make their local majorities more amenable to a greater degree of centralization.
China's growth is somewhat analogous though slower and with greater assimilation taking place over time. China proper in northeastern mainland China was unified around two centuries before Christ if my chronology serves me. Chinese traditional chronicles record people further south and inland as barbarians or as semibarbarians depending on the century. Unlike France, China actually did end up with two foreign dynasties - the Mongols and the Manchus - the two traditional majority nonHan regions nearest to the Chinese capital region in China proper - which has been reflected since the end of the Chinese Civil War in the Yalu being an area of particular sensitivity to Peking - since the third traditionally nonHan majority region closest to China proper after Mongolia and Manchuria is Korea. One might argue that like France, China proper has faced an uneven road to centralization and cultural homogenization, and has perhaps been less shy, certainly in the past few centuries, about the cultural genocide of local majorities in order to get them to accept what one might call greater centralization. The first asterisk here is that the Chinese Communist Party apparatus in fact gives a tremendous degree of autonomy to provincial level communist cells, who often guard their jurisdictions fiercely. Old Chinese proverbs reflect the reality that centralized authority is often more remote to the day-to-day lives of ordinary Chinamen than the purview of provincial officials. "The mountains are tall and the Emperor is far away." "Become an official, and get rich." The second asterisk is that there are mainland Chinese subcultures which have managed to survive with parallel structures of authority to those of the centralized government, or government at all. The best known of these are probably the south Chinese secret societies formed as the Ming, having been reduced to south China, were gradually conquered over the course of the...mid 17th century, if my chronology serves me. They still have buildings marked "secret society meeting hall."
7
-
7
-
7
-
7
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
6
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
5
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
@goofygrandlouis6296 It's just the Singaporeans, the Malays, you, us, the guys with whom we share a Parliament, and those ANZAC lamers in the Commonwealth overlap. Then it's the Viets, the Japanese, the Chileans, the Peruvians, and the Mexicans. None of these are countries that wouldn't have decent bilateral ties in the absence of the CPTPP, so it isn't a massive deal, but it is another talk shop and a marginal improvement in trade.
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
4
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
In between Deng and Jiang, while the mainland ran low on "political freedoms," and had also been deliberately making the Uighurs and Tibetans into minorities in their own regions, it was on a path to developing a set of norms in somewhat of a Westminster vein - term limits for leadership, a stuttering beginning at rule of law, some plurality of systems with Hong Kong's status honoured and Inner Mongolia left to be itself. Mainlanders had immediately prior to Xi if anything more economic freedom and more personal freedom, set aside the right to talk smack about politics, than people in the traditional developed world outside of a few red states and possibly Japan.
One can take the position that this was always a trick and Xi simply made a strategic mistake. If one does not, though, one has to agree that it certainly seemed for a while, for decades, as though the mainland was on its own path to becoming its own selectively authoritarian hybrid regime and mixed economy, similar to older versions of Europe, and that Xi represented and represents an iteration of an old archetype from Chinese history, the bad emperor.
3
-
@Eärmehtar This side of the world is still regional, and there are ethnic differences by region. Because the people who last settled in my region were culturally descended from Quakers from the English midlands who had all ready had their experience of being forced to live next to an ethnically different Protestant sect (the German Anabaptists) in their first colony - around Philadelphia - it was sort of an organic if uneven process towards a certain level of pluralism. To be clear, when my grandfather was a little kid in a small town one region over from this region, the norm still was, two minority families maximum per small town, and that included Catholics and Jews. In larger towns, there were formal rules against blacks, Jews, Chinese and Catholics being allowed in some neighbourhoods. When my dad walked to school, the norm was you crossed the street to avoid the Catholic kids, because they were more likely to get violent. We have also had continuous immigrant gang fighting and sometimes terrorism for centuries, most prominently by the Catholics. I could walk to a plaque to the lone Sicilian immigrant who was not a member of the local fascist society in the 1920s and 1930s. When I was a little kid, it was the Vietnamese who would fight each other with machetes in the tough neighbourhoods. (Even the Anabaptists, who are known as archpacifists who live a traditional lifestyle today - they're the ones who stick with horses and buggies, run farms, help new villages get set up with the savings from the old village, and have seven children per woman - but back in the 17th century in Germany, they were one of the most insanely violent factions of the Thirty Years War. Their whole existence is the result of their cultural Quakerization.) That's part of how we are who we are. We didn't come out of the obsessively ideological or honour-driven settlements. (Hence, southerners have flair and hospitality, New Englanders are assholes whose intellectual culture is an ideological plague cauldron, and us midwesterners are in the spectrum of polite to lame.) Your country is your country. We may have been a colony set up by colonists from another colony who didn't want to stop being a colony, but that's different than what the old motherland has become.
I apologize for rambling but given the excuse to speak about heritage and regional identity on behalf of a part of the world that prides itself on being dull
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
I put this question to a chatbot.
It seemed to feel like Hungary and Poland would be on their way out of the European project soon enough on their own, but that Holland, Italy, Sweden, and Denmark might need a smart nudge in the right direction.
What you have to consider is that from the perspective of the EU as a centralized organization, the indigenous cultures of the countries inside it are exactly as much an obstacle to the propagation of a generically "European" identity, so past a certain point, as the bureaucracy pushes homogenization, it will gain an inevitable denationalizing traction, wiping out the sense these countries have of themselves.
It is very unlikely either the German or French nationalists will be able to defeat this trend in their own country, unless trends in favour of those nationalisms accelerate.
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
@dvvass In the CAD currency union, mass migration will not turn off, ever.
Best thing for it, new program, you get your visa extended, but you agree to a corresponding term of service, in an auxiliary formation run by the military, with the object of training builders, and a mandate and budget to ram through infrastructure where there won't be a war with local NIMBYs and the land is conventionally developable. (rest is long)
There is a fuck ton of basically empty land with decent road access and no real crippler social issues, from the perspective of mass migrant integration,* between just east of the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border and the foothills of the Rockies along the 10 and the 16.
Private developers need to make deals that make profit for themselves or their shareholders.
The civil service will always be very inefficient.
Contractors with whom existing relationships exist to build new infrastructure are used to approaching these contracts as pork barrels of one size or another - as they should.
The solution is to use the one part of the state apparatus whose entire thing is doing as they are told for the greater good, where there is no on-the-ground opposition to mass development, to approach an engineering problem as though it were an engineering problem.
Then you avoid rubbing the existing locals the wrong way by giving any small town with any kind of resistance to the idea a little mini green belt - just go around them completely - as well as by setting the standard that for out west provincial and federal elections, while residents are counted as wherever they live for the purposes of seat calculation, they can not actually vote in an out west provincial or federal election until they have lived there for at least seven years.
It doesn't matter if some guy talks in clicks when he gets off the boat.
After seven years out west, he'll be bitching about his taxes and enthusing about his F150, his Armalite, and his dressage girlfriend.
*Southern Ontario has the green belt, which is half a scam to benefit real estate investors, and half the boomer death instinct made manifest.
The green belt is a huge cemetery in the same way as an Egyptian pyramid is a huge version of one of the cairns of stones erected by primitive man to prevent the jackals from eating his dead.
East of Rideau is all have-not provinces which will always be a chronic drag on the overall economy.
Actual down east is well known never fully to accept anybody who is not from the specific small town in question, and for various reasons is chronically economically moribund.
Quebec has its own weird cultural problems which are best simply avoided completely by never counting on Quebec ever to help with anything ever and never trusting any interest group based in Quebec ever to be honest or do the right thing ever.
Northern Ontario has the Canadian shield, which is not conventionally developable.
British Columbia has the Rockies themselves, which are a similar hard topographical obstacle to conventional development.
Actual up north is remote.
Process of elimination, given mass migration can not be halted, is mass development must happen out west.
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
@sevenproxies4255 yeah national sovereignty and cuius regio is about where I've been at for a while too
Personally, for where I happen currently to live, I'm fine with multiculturalism, freedom of religion, etc. but that is because the original wave of settlers, the mutations of whose social values still form the skeleton of our norms for the use of public spaces, had prototypes of those ideas as the whole reason why they left the English Midlands for Philadelphia four centuries ago, and multiculturalism, freedom of religion, etc. are thus fairly organic parts of our civic construct.
I am just very, very comfortable with being friends or cooperating with with any antiliberal or antileftist anywhere in the world, whatever his or her alternative social philosophy, whatever the set of civic norms or ethnic identities inform his or her commitment, because it's very clearly either we get to the left and the liberals over there, or else they'll be trying to get to us over here.
The only asterisk on that for me is the American alliance structure, but that's an asterisk which has lost a point or two in the last few years.
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
eh that one is a feature rather than a bug of the English language and one if anything enhanced by the fact that the French language has an official academy. Obviously there's...who was the poet with whom Dr. Johnson had the argument? the one who insisted that English ought to be conjugated like Latin? horrible that his name isn't coming to me right now - at any rate, that guy's views on written English,* and the actual Received Pronunciation accent at the center of the English language, but it rises like a secant of a sphere out of ever-lapping liminal local pidgins. Naturally, we need to have "good English" so that English continues to be a thing - when the axis to the apex of the secant has a value of zero, then there is no secant, for all intents and purposes - thus certain conventions must thus always be granted the status of primus inter pares in order for mutual intelligibility to be achieved, but "bad English" is in and of itself is not anything not to celebrate. Any weird island where a bunch of poms ran a racket three hundred years ago no doubt has its own local pidgin, dialect, and accent; any random immigrant neighbourhood in any English-speaking part of the world has its shorter-lived versions of the same thing; really every last one of the more prominent dialects of English outside of England are products of these two processes run to one extreme or another; and those things are good. English is a...damn my vocabulary today, the quality of looseness in sexual mores, a promiscuous language, combining with loan words to indicate concepts more efficiently expressed by other languages without self-doubt. Neither ought preexisting local distinctions be removed nor ought the organic evolution of an approaching uncountable number of neologisms be resisted. *John Dryden. "Good English" is John Dryden grammar and a Received Pronunciation accent. Everything else is a bit down the curvature of the secant toward being a pidgin. "From where did the rule not to end a sentence with a preposition come?" is the way in which one asks Google that question.
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
@macbird-lt8de sure, when we're talking about an ethnostate that happens all ready to exist.
i. e. if - if - Israel is, in fact, venomously racist toward non-Jews and persons of partial Jewish heritage, then that is their prerogative as the Jewish ethnostate that happens all ready to exist and whose object as an ethnostate is to conserve the existence of the Jewish ethnicity. If we're talking about a society which historically has been driven by fits and starts of migration and which has defined itself more along an imagined common set of ideals than an imagined common ethnic origin, then ethnonationalism is just sort of silly.*
Note also that hardly anywhere in Africa would qualify either, since postcolonial African governments inherited borders that more often cut through ethnic groups where they happened to have migrated when the Scramble for Africa happened than formed Lesotho-sized countries for Sotho-sized ethnic groups. Mostly this is just a process that applies to the former Ottoman, Russian, and Austrian Empires, and to a lesser extent to parts of East Asia.
*The asterisk is of course that once you start getting state failure, people become highly ethnically conscious, and with good reason.
Lebanon for instance after independence from the French chose to build diversity hiring into its constitution, which was a very fragile way of doing things, and caused a civil war when the PLO crossed their border in the 1970s and then relentlessly baited Israel into intervening in Lebanon. This is a tangential argument against Lebanese or Indian National Congress style diversity hiring practices as much as it is for border control. Lebanese people report the lowest level of comfort with somebody of a different ethnic group living around them of any country in the world - hence they are "the most racist country in the world" - largely because of a solid decade or more of other Lebanese ethnic groups having tried to kill them.
Note that Indians also report a very high level of discomfort with persons of other ethnic identity, despite the various local-level Indian uprisings never actually having fractured the control of the Indian bureaucratic state, which must intuitively have quite a bit to do with Congress' failed experiment in diversity hiring.
Somalis only seem like Somalis outside of Somalia. Inside Somalia, they all know EXACTLY what subclan they are with, with whom they are allied, with whom they are at war, etc. This is a logical response on their part to the collapse of the Barre government following its failed irredentist invasion of the ethnic Somali majority region of Ethiopia in the 1980s.
2
-
2
-
I don't know that this will be as bad as you think.
Japan does the world's product development. Japan does not do immigration. More than one foreigner per village is one too many in their view. Japan has known it has had issues with its birth rate since well before pandemic. During the aftermath of the Baby Gammy fiasco, in which an Australian woman who has managed to remain anonymous abandoned a child she had paid a surrogate to bear in Thailand because the child, Baby Gammy, had been born with Down Syndrome, the Thai authorities cracked down on the surrogacy industry. One apparent customer was a Japanese businessman who was in a nursery with eleven or twelve children, forget which. He claimed he was their biological father, and that he just loved children. This was accepted as a sufficient explanation by the Thai authorities.
After that point, various developments in artificial reproduction began to be reported. A sheep embryo was grown to a healthy lamb in a plastic bag. A technique for turning stem cells into gametes was discovered. This stuff all made the press, and should all still be up on the internet. So, there is the motive - for Japan to survive as a country which does not do immigration and which has a low birth rate - and the means - Japan is the number one product developer in the world - and then a pattern of pure research innovations which suggest that artificial reproduction had been moving forward, all in the press, all prior to pandemic.
My suspicion is that the idea is to sandbag this technology, keeping it a strictly Japanese thing, for as long as possible, to prevent it from leaking to mainland China, in order to use demography as a strategic weapon against the Xiists. A bit of mass migration will provide a medium term patch for the rest of the traditional developed world. Whenever the Xiists collapse, the tech will be allowed out of Japan, which will allow for replacement to occur artificially, at the moment in which what I might term "the great deshitholeization" - a general advancement, powered by the spread of modern infrastructure, of most current actual Third World countries toward the level of upper middle income nations, and of enough upper middle income nations toward the level at which for instance Greece or Chile are today - the liminal First World - will be nuking the incentive for people to leave traditional sources of mass migration and those birth rates lower to the point that the population pressure comes off.
Most likely organizations similar to central banks, but carrying the mandate to maintain a steady expansion of the supply of population, rather than a steady expansion of the supply of money, will take on the role of ensuring that population is kept up at the gentlest of rates of increases, similar to the old argument that a one to two percent rate of inflation was preferable to truly sound money. This would also provide the opportunity for a bit of salutary eugenics, arresting the Idiocracy scenario by the simple expedient of making sure the genes of high IQ people were overrepresented in reproduction, and perhaps also compelling the reproduction above what would occur given birth control of the genes of more attractive people as well. The world would be too depressing were it full of fuggos alone. The establishment of such organizations would also allow for the more rapid peopling of anything we as a species are able to terraform between one and two centuries from now.
Not to get overly techno optimistic about it, but people aren't potatoes, they don't just sit there, especially during existential crises.
2
-
2
-
Out of my ass, I'd say strategic hamlets, in the Sinai, after a massive development project for water, power, broadband.
You get 5-7 families per hamlet, they get one mosque or church that doubles as a school/kindergarten/first aid station, and people get in and out of the hamlet in a bus controlled by the Israelis.
Hamlet's surrounded by a double fence, between hamlets are free fire zones patrolled by full timers and interspersed with bunkers.
That would cut Hamas' supply, and instead of Israel going back to a scenario of reoccupying Gaza, would allow for Israel militarily to defeat Hamas.
The argument against the strategic hamlet system is moot. Gazans have immune systems used to the presence of other Gazans, and cutting Hamas' supply would allow Palestine as a movement to get resources to the Gazans in the strategic hamlets. This would mean the problems with civilian casualties which occurred with this strategy when the British used it to win the Second Boer War would not be repeated.
2
-
@RobBCactive I don't know if that would have done the trick. Sure, the Mongols had a civilization-warping effect where they conquered and are responsible for many of the characteristics of Russian society. However, Genghis died in 1227 and Ogedei was still able to expand into Mesopotamia, sacking Baghdad in 1258, wiping out Classical Islam in the process. While teleology is as dirty a word as presentism when it comes to history, the steppe would still have been as good horse archer country as it was tank country, and historically the second wave of Mongols was stopped because the medieval armies learned to position themselves to funnel feigned retreats toward rivers and other natural obstacles. Possibly had the early Ming broken character with their self-conception as the centre of civilization and agreed upon some sort of nontributary alliance system with Outer Mongolia Russia might have been deterred from conquering Siberia - but this would require that the impact of the Yuan was fundamentally different on the way literate Chinese thought about their civilization than it was in our timeline. Stretching the medieval warm period so Mongolia was still as good a place to graze horses in the 13th century as it was in the 12th and getting rid of the little ice age would have some impacts outside of Mongolia, if we want to allow for a set of climate-altering satellites and reverse Snowpiercer type equipment loaded up into time tubes for this scenario. (the rest is a tangent on that subject) It wouldn't interfere with the initial English constitutional development which lead to the signature of Magna Carta, but Wales was only conquered during the little ice age, meaning a population armed with weapons which could pose a credible threat to their feudal overlords might simply not have arisen to insist upon their rights any more than a population within which a plurality of workers were waged labourers rather than serfs. Absolutism in the West was to become the aspiration of governance, at least on the continent, between the 17th and 18th centuries. American-style ideals of governance - within which "police state" is an insult to government rather than a self-adopted label for its gold standard - were an eccentric deviation from an eccentric deviation from the divine right of kings that had been the norm in the West. One could even argue minus the birth of America that the absolutists would never have had the cash crunch which lead to the development of continental systems which so much as rhymed with it - and had classical liberalism remained simply a set of ideas on the continent, suppressed by the local secret police forces of the Holy Roman Empire and Austria and the centralized secret police force of the Kingdoms of France and Spain, would we even have a "West" that was horrified by the prospect of Russian-style absolutism? Assuming the English constitutional process even occurred, would the civilizational outsider then not be the empire where Home Rule was even on the agenda for the colonies?
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
see for that scenario, you just speed up the introduction of the wireless to the point that indigenous states with medium access to trade goods could have had one set, for their leader. In our timeline, once he was able to speak directly to the British public after the war, Ceteswayo rapidly became a sympathetic figure, widely considered to have been done poorly by Bartleby-Frere. With his skills of rhetoric and persuasion, and given Gladstone's stated antientanglement stance, a direct line may have been all Ceteswayo needed.
For this timeline - to paint a sky castle, in other words - Marconi's uncle invents the wireless one generation ahead of schedule. Ceteswayo makes his case directly to the British metropolitan public for why his response at Isandlwana was proportionate and is heard with grudging acceptance. He surrenders the colonel who broke ranks to raid Rourke's Drift to stand trial in Natal and allows for the construction of a British military cemetery at the site of the battle prior to signing a border treaty. Bartleby-Frere is recalled in disgrace for having gone directly against Gladstone's stated antiwar policy. Zululand remains an independent kingdom within Africa, eventually accepting an offer of British protection in a similar manner to Eswatini but maintaining internal self-governance, becoming primarily a country of ranchers, driving its livestock to market across the border in Port Natal while maintaining its militia tradition, characterized by periodic exercises and regular parades, and slowly expanding rail, telegraph and electric networks up from the coast, completing its first water treatment plant with the help of money raised during the 1920s Wall Street boom in 1928 and its first bullet factory shortly thereafter.
With the exception of having hosted a thousand Boer women and children fleeing internment during the Second Boer War, an incident overlooked by the British as it was felt the Zulu border police would prevent the resupply of any Boer commando within Zululand itself, Zululand would remain neutral in world conflicts as its male population recovered its demographics, up until 1940, when it would send a group of volunteers in the form of the Mixed Battalion to reinforce Field Marshall Jans Smut in north and east Africa, using traditional practices such as cutting the bellies of the enemy fallen as a form of terror tactics against the Italian colonial troops. The Mixed Battalion would return home following participation in Operation Husky, earning three paragraphs around the two thirds point of The Hinge of Fate for the performance of one specific platoon against a string of bunkers held by falschirmjagern.
In the ensuing decades, Zulu veterans would seek pay days and adrenaline in the Congolese and Nigerian crises, prominent mercenary commander Mike Hoare ultimately being offered the honourary rank of Major in the Zulu army and escaping imprisonment following the debacle in The Seychelles by having the charter flight land in Zululand, which for decades thereafter would acquire a reputation for operational and cultural ease of fit for men of a certain skill set, and to take a certain perverse pride in the number of Zulu names involved at the fringes of coups, arms deals, and discrete counterterror operations.
With its monarchy having evolved along loosely Brazilian lines - neither absolute despot nor mere ceremonial figurehead - and stubbornly maintaining a system of limited franchise for married Zulu men to elect advisors to the Royal Council, modern Zululand has been edging in and out of but progressively higher within the lower end of the ranks of First World countries in terms of real GDP per capita for three decades as it slowly diversifies its economy away from ranching, cereals, mining, and limited manufacturing for the mining, armaments, and energy industries toward technology, luxury real estate, and tax and wealth management services as it copes as best as it can with an intermittent pattern of regulatory harassment from its larger neighbour dating from the Mbeki administration, the ANC increasingly regarding its plucky independence and medium term success in developing itself as a subtle insults to black economic empowerment, and the EFF openly calling for its annexation in order to seize control of its resources.
Isolated within the African Union, too distant an ally of the former West, and with regular condemnations of it in the United Nations, the current Zulu king stands at ease in his office of state in his palace, oil portraits of his ancestors and gifts from thousands of foreign dignitaries interspersing assegais, iKthwulu, cowhide shields, and domestic clones of FN-FALs and LAWs on its walls, watching the plume of dust rise from a dry season cattle drive in the distance, where the irrigation does not reach, the latest of a series of irritating negotiations over allegations of bovine spongiform encephalitis concluded with Pretoria. As the loose dry earth twists in the sluggish hot breeze which suspends it beyond the blazer-frosty air conditioning clouding the edges of the bullet-proof glass, his eyes crease slightly as he privately muses whether these latest insults mean that he will ultimately be compelled to call up his reserve regiments to defend his side of the river in the manner of his ancestor.
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
I think Salazar would have had to have lived another ten years, since he was really the voice saying that Portugal would not give up what it saw as integral parts of itself, long enough to begin to win the peace in Angola, to make Angolans think of themselves as Portuguese first, from the province of Angola second, and of their tribe and lineage third and fourth; as well as solidifying his own eccentric not-anything-else ideology onto Portugal. Then there would have been a two-fold effect, as both the troops necessary to pacify the province would have been freed up, as well it would have been possible to recruit more as well as more enthusiastic troops from it. In that scenario, I don't know if Portugal would have been treated like Turkey by the organizations which preceded Europe, for remaining committed to Salazar's vision of a noncommunist nonfascist noncapitalist society, or if they would have admitted them. Then the question would be, would the membership of a country which included a portion of Africa more significant than Ceuta and Melilla alter the nature of negotiations toward ever-closer union - say Portugal joined the African Union in the talk shop phase as well as the EEC - or would Europe today then have borders with the south of Africa?
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
@MrWick-fi8vo Winnipeg I think is more affordable, at least if you can work remote, but the weather is even worse, I have heard they have mosquitos and blackflies, and IIRC the homicide is Thunder Bay like. The one guy I knew who doubled back to the 'peg used to say that everything was nicer in the fairly humble corner of the western Toronto suburbs where we lived - he'd make this comment while we were rolling down one of the chronically underdeveloped streets - and illustrate his point by the relatively more attractive appearance of our drug addicted prostitutes. Anyway upon arrival in Winnipeg I believe he was almost instantaneously imprisoned, which was my takeaway after he began posting a bunch of stuff about how the behaviour of the local FNs really got to him following a long hiatus. When I helped some people I knew move cross country, the other guy with whom I was driving who had done the drive before made a point to avoid Winnipeg. I also knew one guy who trained nurses on hospital equipment who said Winnipeg was the grimmest place he had ever visited, that it made the bad bits of western Toronto suburbs look nice. It might be it's fine so long as you stay out of town on the right side of town with the right overlap of police patrols, but it sort of makes the impression on people that it makes. Southeastern Manitoba did look sort of appealing, if you're a remote worker, especially in late summer when you basically get two climates in one by going east one hour uphill into Ontario.
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
@TheJrr71 different obstacles to social advancement - health insurance in America vs taxes and rent in Canada. Objectively superior passport. Objectively worse weather. No homicide pockets - well, Nunavut is some years as murdery as St. Louis, but, it only takes a few murders with their population for it to look that way. Definitely better place to incorporate. Definitely worse place to develop. Better place to live? Depends. Probably about even for brokes and the rich, and a bit worse, overall, for the middle class, especially employees. Personally, I don't see Canada surviving as a country on the map in the medium run due to its slow failure as a nation since the 1960s, but this is my optimism speaking, another theory is that it will just become increasingly authoritarian as it succumbs to the same geographical determinism that made Russia a secret police state.
The failure of Canada as a nation is even something acknowledged by the Prime Minister. Nobody would refer to Somalia as a "post-state nation." It is a failed state. The Somalis know they are Somalis, speak Somali, have their culture, heritage, and lineages close to heart - "the soul of Somalia is poetry" - and are plainly a nation, but did not make a state work, at least not since the 1990s .A "postnational state" is thus plainly a euphemism for a failed nation. You don't see America taking down statues of George Washington. This is not necessarily a bad or a good thing, but it is obviously a thing.
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
@falcor200 A scenario where Canada stops existing is the optimistic one, because it's one where the successor states are able to stay in the First World with some shreds of democratic institutions remaining for them.
The problem is that it became a postnational state starting in the 1960s with secularization. Ontario went in the direction of extending the minimum standard of citizenship rights guaranteed to Catholics as second class citizens to every other minority, then gradually equalizing the citizenship rights of all minorities, becoming stuck in time with the equalization of Catholic school funding in the 1990s under Premier Harris at the high water mark of multiculturalism as an ideology in America, creating a set of soft expectations that American-style rights would predominate, which was not hurt by heavy spending by the Koch brothers on propaganda meant to push the idea of individual rights in the American sense anywhere that spoke English. The reason why there has been no Rivers of Blood scenario in Ontario is because of the 1990s suburban midwestern overculture evolved within a context of enclaves being a feature and not a bug. Whether this survives boomer opposition to housing development sufficient to accommodate the increasing numbers of people with decreasing average points system scores is up for debate. Quebec had the francophone secular tradition which guided its evolution. Outside of obscure online libertarian circles - so this is specifically men, generally post college aged, who choose a specific ideological group - libertarian girls aren't the ones who argue about theory, libertarian girls want to put on their Gadsden bikini and shoot a carbine at an unregistered range until it is time to homeschool their kids. It's exactly the way male sports fans memorize the statistics and female sports fans make sure the bunting is up in the house for the big game - the French and English traditions tend to be oil and water.
Secularism and multiculturalism are not compatible as they exist in these provinces, since there can be only one overarching ideology. The writing should have been on the wall about what that means for over eight years at this point, or when Harper introduced the niqab as a wedge issue and Mulcair's optimism that he could bridge the gap had the effect that it had. It is fair in my view to term this result "Canadian defeat in the War on Terror." The absence of an overarching ideology or close working substitute means that there is not common set of civic values, therefore that in the Benedict Anderson sense of an imagined community, Canada has been failing as a nation for six decades. The pre1960s ideology arguably went back to the 1840s but was codified into a set of formal minimum standards for minority rights by MacDonald. For being one guy with Victorian norms, MacDonald did an excellent job, given there were no Canadian equivalent to The Troubles in Northern Ireland, which had a similar demographic situation of a Protestant majority and Catholic minority.* We have to remember, whereas America was a project of several years of intense discussion, Canada was significantly the project of a lone colonial official deep in a Scotch-powered shamanic meditation who did a three year rush job getting the buy-in from officials in other British possessions. The worst thing Confederation did was give MacDonald's counterparts in Cape and Natal Colony similar ambitions.
The main effect of the "patriation of the constitution" was to sever ties with traditional restraints held by the elites against state overreach. In the absence of these restraints and with nothing in common at the level of civic values between the different provinces, this means that democratic norms will inevitably erode to nothing, unless centralized authority does first.
Bilingualism has been an utterly failed policy whose primary role has been to entrench an unaccountable managerial caste whose collective instincts will always be those of the Stalinist apparatchik. I say this as a bilingual.
A controlled and gradual phase-out of Confederation would be the most logical course of action from the perspective of anybody who might have family who might have to stay in these provinces. Other than the monarchy as a legal entity west of the Rideau - or in provinces which were recognized in 1763 as Indian Territory - and loose cooperation through the Bank of Canada which would be needed to stabilize the value of world CAD deposits and oversee their orderly and controlled redemption into provincial currencies which would, ideally, be allowed to float against one another as much as possible to ward off the Dutch disease, there ought not to be any other shared institutions.
A logical first place to begin would be by devolving the Criminal Code to the provinces. Montreal has anxieties about tools termed varmint guns in points west of Thunder Bay since Quebec people actually become mass shooters. Trying to hold up some kind of half-measure of property rights in Quebec will just result in the collapse of property rights in other provinces.
*I blame the way the Indian Affairs bureaucracy evolved for the damage done to First Nations as economies and cultures. MacDonald is on record as wanting to incorporate the FNs as ridings within the Parliamentary system. Even Egerton Ryerson had nothing to do with the abuses by pedophiles and other bad actors enabled by bureaucrats in the residential school system.
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
In the Middle Ages, sure, somebody who was, for instance, a reasonably senior Benedictine monk might have had a sense of common connection to other Latin-speaking Roman Catholic literate elites - or to fellow Arabic-speaking Sunni Muslim literate elites in the case of, say, a translator for a Mameluke vizier. However, ordinary people generally did not read and write and written materials were very restricted as the printing press had yet to be invented, and thus tended to identify with a specific village or quarter of a town - in terms of concrete day-to-day physical relationships. That's the line between where Dr. Beckeld begins to go in this clip and the Benedict Anderson view of a nation, which is the result of print media and a set of literate middling and lower orders, which come to see themselves as representing a similar sort of imagined community based on what they come to view as either a common ethnic origin and connection to the land, a common set of civic values, or some other set of underlying assumptions maintained in the popular imaginary as transmitted by mass media. To insinuate that a nation can be an elite project alone thus erodes the coherence of a lot of the way this stuff has been discussed, if I do not mistake my limited education on the subject.
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
Canada did begin to lose its core identity roughly around the time that Pierre Trudeau got in - who had committed genocide as Minister of Indian Affairs prior to becoming elected Prime Minister - but this was also around the same time that the British Empire was well and truly wound up.
Again in comparison to India, in India, prior to independence, the nationalists were a separate group from the imperialists. When imperialism in the colonies was fatally weakened by WWI, Indians who ceased to be imperialists could become nationalists as a distinct entity.
In Canada, however, there was no such sharp distinction between nationalists and imperialists. Thus as the Empire wound up in the 1960s, there was this psychic hole created in some Canadian elites and thinkers, which was filled by various surrogates - the United Nations, NATO, and, for left-leaning ones, gay race communism and its attendant aid-based cultural imperium.
Multiculturalism - of a very bland sort, acceptance of ethnic enclaves, acknowledgement of cultural differences, and the absence of any defining ethnic character of mainstream society - is, for the majority of the Canadian population and certainly several regions in Canada, a default background assumption of social interaction. To be clear, though, this limited, pre-Justin success of multiculturalism in some Canadian regions built on centuries of slow acceptance, in particular of the Roman Catholic minority, a group associated with the imposition of tyranny, beginning from granting it a certain floor of second class citizenship by the 1830s in southern Canada, which became applied to the remaining regions of what is now Canada by the 1860s when Confederation was formed, significantly in response to Roman Catholic terrorism. The original settlers of this region of Canada were also themselves the blandest and most accepting of the subsets of 16th and 17th century Englishmen who had previously established the Thirteen Colonies.
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
would argue US should focus on the core Indo-Pacific and Japan first, LATAM second, UK+ third, India fourth, and Europe and Africa if it has energy. In chess, one wins based on control of the middle four squares of the board, and on the world chessboard, those are Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and Vietnam.
2
-
2
-
@dawnmclaren8723 This stuff isn't instantaneous. I imagine were I a prosecutor in a state with a governor who would not issue a pardon and I had decided that if there was no longer a gentlemen's agreement not to go after former elected officials above a certain level who had committed even as minor crimes as failures of accountancy, that I was going to nail, for instance, Obama for the two American minors whose deaths he ordered, I'd have an extremely cold trail of evidence on the other side of the world, I'd have witnesses who last saw something about ten years ago, who maybe do not speak English, I'd be trying to cooperate with local bureaucrats and police officers in the Third World, who might not have the same standards of professionalism to which I am accustomed, I would need to rely on enough of a percentage of the Foreign Service seeing things in my terms to make this happen, etc.
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
Long comment.
There's a pedantic argument that says that because genetic studies prove the modern Jewish X chromosome disproportionately originates in 14th century northern Italy and because Judaism as it exists today is an extreme mutation of the next most heterodox sect of Second Temple times - the most heterodox sect being the Christians - that when we discuss "Judaism" prior to around 200 AD, when Mishnah was completed, or the commentary on the Pentateuch, the first five books of The Bible, composed to explains how, if God is all powerful, he could have allowed the temple of his chosen people to be destroyed, we really discuss pre-Jewish religion.
Jews don't have a hereditary priest caste and they don't have a central site of animal sacrifice by knife and/or fire. These were the two defining features of the religion of the Second Temple era.
The Second Temple era had a less prominent role for community leadership by textual experts - due to the hereditary priest caste - and a lower emphasis on personal study and prayer, which are the three strongest defining features of Judaism.
The medieval Grand Rabbis were inventions of the Ottoman Empire, as Judaism to that point lacked hierarchy above the level of rabbi, and the Ottomans needed to make the odd man out fit their system of the Sultan or Grand Vizier being able to sort out matters with the Patriarch of each dhimmi.
So if you think about it, Israel really fits best as the late outlier in the slow process of disintegration of the old multiethnic empires of the east - Austria, Russia, and the Ottomans - into ethnostates, in the same way as Greece fits as the early outlier.
Not that there is anything more wrong with Israeli nationalist historiography than there is with any other nationalist historiography, of course. Any nation-state, as an imagined community, is going to appropriate, distort, and partially invent its own imagined past, whether as an ethnostate, a propositional nation, or a tribal confederacy.
It must be noted that there are several sources from ancient and late antique Israel which the modern state of Israel keeps under lock and key.
Further, anybody who wants to work on such sources to which the Israeli authorities do permit access most likely wants to be invited back to continue to study them, and will therefore follow the Israeli nationalist historiographical line as a matter of being a good guest. This is most likely the root of some of this confusion.
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
1
-
I think he had a bit on the Marathas where he argued they would have burned themselves out with constant warfare. The way to have India never get colonized by the British is you just have Plassey go the other way. Either it doesn't rain that day and the Nawab's weekend warriors are able to fire their muskets, or the Nawab's one general doesn't take Clive's money and actually leads his contingent to reinforce the Nawab, or Clive himself has a bad curry the night before and his judgement is off. Without a win at Plassey, the Seven Years War doesn't result in the East India Company expanding across the continent, with them remaining confined to a couple of coastal trading forts, and possibly getting kicked out of Bengal. The industrial revolution still happens, but the 2BE without India isn't the same thing. UK is not the industrial powerhouse it was in our timeline without the captive market of Company-controlled India. There's also no strategic imperative for the 2BE to be in the Mediterranean, for instance, without the most important colony on the other side of the Suez Canal. British involvement in Africa has much less motivation - the strategic aspect of Cape Colony was identical to that of Gibraltar or Egypt, hold open the sea lane to India - so the pressures which lead to the Scramble for Africa are reduced. Egypt possibly still carves out a swathe of territory uphill of the Nile rapids under that Albanian dynasty. Holland possibly continues to hold Cape Colony - with a dramatically different ethnic composition - Spain and Portugal still hold their enclaves, and indigenous empires like the Sokoto and the Zulus who had the aggression and warrior spirit to expand in our timeline up until they ran into the 2BE might just have kept going. There is no Great Game with Russia over Afghanistan, but, Afghan empires are never prevented from snowballing their way into the Indian princely states every couple of decades. Afghanistan could easily be a major world power today without the legacy left by the imposition of the frontier which divided Pathanstan. With nobody to conquer them besides the Afghans, the Punjabi Empire which started in the 17th century would have most likely continued to be a thing into present day, and most likely be in an ongoing state of intermittent war with Afghanistan. I could see it causing a lengthier period of tensions with America, since South American markets would become relatively more important to colonize with India taken out of the picture. In our timeline, Royal Navy reformer Thomas Cochrane lead South American revolutionary fleets while working as a mercenary in the waters surrounding that continent in the early 19th century. This might, if the British were still the guarantors of Belgian neutrality in 1914 and matters still came to a head then, mean America enters WWI sooner, on the side of the Ottomans, Austrians, and Germans, to get revenge on the British over chronic violations of the Monroe Doctrine. No colonization would also mean no decolonization. There would be no pressure for west Eurasian states to leave their coastal exclaves around the world.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
The Liberals gave up.
I'd like to say it was some kind of thing that the Conservatives did,* but the Liberals knew that to get back in, they had to keep the suburbs of the Canadian rustbelt as apathetic as they usually are, and when you increase a tax on carbon, you are signaling that you are not trying to reach the suburbs.
*To be fair, 2021 was a Conservative loss because trying to message to imaginary moderates in the French-speaking majority region in between Canadian New England and the Canadian rust belt fucks up the messaging to everybody else. O'Toole had a projection that would have got him a minority with the ability to pass budgets with support from the French Canadian regional fourth party, then he had a trick question about semiautomatic rifles, and his projection collapsed.
The takeaway is, you want to stay on speaking terms with the French Canadian regional fourth party, and not antagonize any existing electoral districts you have, but you do NOT want to chase the Liberal seats in central Montreal, on the island.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
A digression, lengthy due to my laziness with editing, and which may or may not have any relevance to your country - I am less familiar with the legal and constitutional ins and outs of it - British Columbia is the bit of Canada the 2BE accidentally had in its pocket when it left the store, having paid for everything in its basket.
The situation it has created has been that for any development, 39/40 of the elected and hereditary governments of the small towns along the path of the development or affected by the development in where they can claim their ancestors hunted, fished, or picked berries can agree that they're getting a fair to great deal, and the 40th government can block the entire thing.
The way to go about this sort of situation for Canada, because the body of rulings surrounding the Indian Act makes it so that Registered Indian Bands can only surrender indigenous rights to the Crown, is to set up a Crown corporation to operate a three-in-one digital service.
This would hold a Royal Charter granting it power of the Crown to alienate indigenous rights, which would then operate a dealer brokerage to solicit asks for partial indigenous rights from each of the hereditary and elected governments of each Registered Indian Band for specifically surveyed chunks of land, as well as registering each sale and the ownership of each specific partial right, and allowing members of the public and authorized foreign buyers* to bid on the primary market as well as to trade with one another on a supported platform for the secondary market.
By allowing trading through the legal instrument of the Crown to get around the restrictions placed on the surrender of indigenous rights by rulings on the Indian Act, this corporation would ultimately create greater liquidity in the market for developers to purchase deindigenized rights, as well as for Registered Indian Bands to get a sense of the probably market value they would receive through the deindigenization of their rights. Understandably, given the opacity of the process in modern times, many Registered Indians are hesitant to give their full approval to these projects. Chiefs would share a standard managers' commission of 1% on the sale price of any rights deindigenized by their council, with proceeds being divided equally on each sale into accounts linked to each Indian registered to that Band's membership list, which would automatically disburse when they hit logical thresholds. In effect this process would allow for the creation of bespoke treaties specific to each project through the circulation of treaty strips, in the same way in which banks build their own bonds by picking up separate coupon and principal payments. The corporation would have it further stated in its Charter to take only the spread necessary to cover the average expense of settling the trades themselves.
You'll notice this proposal is very specific to the legal precedents set in Canada between legally recognized groups and is meant to resolve a specific legal gray area which causes real problems for energy and infrastructure. Behind the rhetoric, which sounds at times like things a lobotomized Care Bear from Wish might say were its string pulled, the issue is one of law. Some of these Bands have valid grievances which have not been addressed.
If there is not a similar legal hole to be addressed in Australia, then it is inapplicable. The rest of the cogovernance thing has emerged largely because of the tolerance of foreign-funded economic ecoterrorists and the fact that enough calls in from small town politicians who can preface their request with a sob story about how their grandfathers were screwed over in the bad old days is helpful to sting a reaction out of the stereotypical sluggishness of the bureaucracy. For instance, to note that the mercury levels in rivers Band members often visit vastly exceed that deemed unacceptable by environmental regulations, or that a given species is not in fact particularly endangered, but perhaps common enough to make good eating several times a year. In some cases, elements within Bands which are in the anthropological sense not indigenous to the land they have been assigned are quite happy to take advantage of their legal gray status and the cloud of unaccountability created by the media to shake down taxpayers adjacent to that land for another percentage, at least where their representatives have been sufficiently foolish to have engaged in posturing on their behalf. Environmental remediation efforts - specifically to deal with the disposal of raw human waste into the watershed - have been stalled in some parts of Canada by the veiled threat of a riot presented by these people.
I would strongly recommend against enabling any similar elements in any other part of the world with a legal structure sufficiently similar to that of Canada. Naturally, groups which ought to have been legally recognized in some capacity according to the norms of the rest of the jurisdiction but were not ought to have an avenue to gain that access through a mutually consensual, orderly, and legal process; and due to the nature of Canada as a state structure founded on the legal instrument of the Crown and maintaining some characteristics of the cultural heritage surrounding this legal instrument, in this case, rule of law, for Canada, the claims of these groups must be addressed.
One can further expect nothing but bad faith engagement from the social justice crowd - death and misery is their game, and racial division simply a means to an end. The entire Canadian arrangement does teeter rather closer to the edge of being a Maoist hellscape than perhaps GAFC would like one to believe, and the law is one of the few brakes preventing its wholesale consumption by a system of thought regarding human beings as disposable chunks of protein interchangeable except for the colour of their skin and their genital preference, to be submerged in a system of totalitarian control, Dailits beneath the heel of an unaccountable managerial technocracy.+ I don't expect these people are very different anywhere in the world one finds them, misanthropes and people with personality disorders preying on institutional inertia, youthful naivete, and the slowly fading conventions of what had been the liberal democratic nation state will tend to rise to the occasion to make utter nuisances of themselves.
*no mainlanders, Russians, or Iranians; Hong Kongians, Macauans, Syrians, Iraqis, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians might also have to be excluded for practical reasons; much as I personally like Hong Kongians and Soviet-era migrants from The Ukraine and the Arab Republic, it would obviously just be too easy for somebody to pose as one of them. It's all well and good to have ones own investment rules - who doesn't like a suitcase of Rials? - at least when the bank draft actually clears, George R. R. Martin's character who claims to be the wealthiest man in Easteros but has little but vases in his vault is very clearly based on one specific culture - but one ought to be cautious about allowing people from some places to buy the legal arrangement which exists between land and people within the very foundation of a state entity. I would personally be against allowing the Qataris to buy anything like that as well, because they're generally up to no good. Look at how much money they've pumped into the poison currently afflicting too much of the world. Trump was able to convince Mohammed bin Salman to dial down the aid to the Salafists, but the Qataris continue their execrable influence on the entire world as though they regarded it as some sort of Doha port-a-potty.
+The way to decode who it is who thinks this way from Canada is if they express admiration of Sweden.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
I mean...I am all for keeping a door open to the left well under the X axis, on the assumption that if lib left is mostly teenagers to just post college aged people, and if auth left is going to syphon off of lib left by offering them money to do bad things, then talking about ideas with them ought inevitably to create a small syphon effect toward the right. After all, Edmund Burke was an anarchist when he was just finished university, and went on to invent conservativism in middle age.
Actually, here's one for you to throw around with any hippies you should encounter, gift economies possess the same characteristics as informal options markets, since participants have in effect exchanged zero strike calls on the results of a given period of production with one another - for instance, I agree to give one sixth of any elk I shoot with my stone arrows to each of my five buddies in exchange for their agreement to do the same with me - motivated by precisely the same concerns as any deal between two large banks - the reduction of risk. QED in the absence of the state, it is accurate to state that prehistoric man's behaviour was motivated by the market.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@anthonysaunders345 You know what, for the sake of argument, I'm going to assume you're speaking in good faith.
There is an intrinsic incompatibility from first principles built in to the predominant evolved forms of regional civic sentiment in these provinces. Multiculturalism in the form in which it exists on the ground with its felt and understood but often unthought and unarticulated assumptions about individual rights can not be reconciled with secularism in the francophone tradition, due to the implicit assumptions multiculturalism makes about individual rights.
By Benedict Anderson definition, a nation represents an imagined community, held together in Anderson's view by specifically print media.
1830s-1840s through 1960s, the old nationalism worked on a system of guaranteed standards of second class citizenship for the nonProtestant minority groups.
I'd argue that this in and of itself was something specifically southern Ontario was able to do because of its heritage in having been originally settled - set aside the Neutral Nation who had been ethnically cleansed by the Iroquois - by Pennsylvania Loyalists who were themselves heir to the culture imported by the Religious Society of Friends along the Black Walnut Trail following the Revolution.
For having had, since the Potato Famine, an analogous ethnoconfessional dynamic to that Northern Ireland imported to it, this ought to be seen as stroke of good fortune that the basic ingredients necessary to build multiculturalism had all ready existed here for so long.
Just because this is going to get to be about five times as long as that, I'd just like to clarify with you that you are, in fact, about 75 years old and speak English as your first language; and would like to ask you in which part of which province or territory you live, and if you or your parents or grandparents moved there from somewhere else. I'm from around Toronto.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
He got it about right I'd say, but he's a bit too optimistic about mutual secession being the way it would go, rather than Ottawa simply becoming a truly authoritarian regime, and privileging the secret police within its power structure to maintain order. Given the death of Canada as a nation since the 1960s, thanks to the collapse of common civic values, and the absence of any dominant ethnic group since forever - the FNs were sixty separate ethnicities prior to colonization, then none of the genocides were full-scale, with the exception of ethnically cleansing the Acadians out of Nova Scotia, and the Beothuks dying of smallpox - which the Prime Minister acknowledged in 2015 as "the postnational state," nothing will stand against geographical determinism, and taken as a unit, Confederation is closest among other countries to Russia, being population centres dispersed along linear infrastructure in a bad temperate climate. All they'd have to do is set up an oprichniki and fiddle the elections just a little bit more each year. Canada lost the War on Terror the worst out of any member of the American alliance structure.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@ShimobeSama Malaysia on the source material I know for a fact he used - the guilt shame fear cultural motivations website - is an interesting anomaly in being a majority Muslim country that is primarily guilt motivated. While there might be a "Coming of Age in Samoa" effect - the Samoans were joking in the interviews they gave to Margaret Meade, and Margaret Meade took them literally and then published their jokes as though they were a serious description of Samoan life, which the Samoans found embarrassing after the fact - the fact is that that is the way Malaysia shows up on that website. I feel like unless the explanation is that it was seen as a joke, then there must be something in Malay culture which means they are in fact guilt motivated.
Malaysia was coincidentally the only place the British ever decolonized properly, though they accidentally had the one-off resource of an army of veteran jungle fighters, thanks to the campaign in Burma twelve years earlier, which meant the problems a communist insurgency could have left the young country were completely avoided. It is also the inspiration for the pretend society of Naboo in Star Wars, in that it has an elected monarchy, selected from among the aristocratic families who settle the archipelago before colonziation, and was between about three and one year ago a darling of live and invest abroad social media.
(I remember Korea is another one of the guilt motivated societies in the Western Pacific, but Korea is a Protestant country. Hardly anybody is majority fear motivated, and the strongest shame motivation is in the belt of African countries immediately south of the Sahara. The only guilt motivated African countries showed up as Zimbabwe and South Africa. Latin America and eastern Europe are a blend of mild guilt motivation and mild shame motivation. Russia on that website came out with a mild shame motivation. Japan and most of the rest of the world showed up with a mild shame motivation, except for the rest of the traditional developed world, who were all either mildly or strongly guilt motivated. I'm not sure if the website itself is one hundred percent accurate, but it was for a while the most accessible illustration of the guilt shame split.)
1
-
@ShimobeSama yeah it seems intuitive that Christianity is the key element in guilt motivation.
I'd have to check SoKo's wiki entry my perception had been that the Proddies were the prominent set of denominations there.
Guilt motivation was a thing I remember came up in the one Freud I read where he argues that in child development terms - Freud had a lot of kids and has been allowed to be as wrong as he was about his theories because they were all based in watching his own kids develop - children at first show no reaction to doing anything bad except when they are caught, and then they begin to internalize it into a sense of guilt for doing something they have been taught is bad.
(I have a strong memory one time of having got in trouble because as a preteen my parents thought I punched my preteen brother in the gut, then he recovered and said that our developmentally disabled elementary school aged sister had used her Sesame Street toddler sized broom like a halberd to hit him in the face with full leverage as I distracted him, she was completely happy with everything up until she got confronted by an authority figure, when her mood shifted instantly. My brain always calls up that memory when I bring up that argument from Freud.)
The difference with Islam is that while Islam also makes requirements for conformity to objective moral standards based on the idea that man is made in the image of God, Christianity obsesses over repentance, and there is probably an element of reinforcing repentance in culturally Christian childrearing.
Guilt-motivation if it does provide a society-wide advantage would be that individual people are more prone to police themselves, and therefore a higher degree of trust between strangers is possible, with people who do not have a guilt reaction considered to have a personality disorder. Guilt motivation I would suspect acts like vaccination - in the old sense, infection with a weaker disease that provides immunity and intransmissibility against a worse disease, not this lIfE sAvInG vAcCiNeS crap - in that at a certain level of buy-in, people really do trust strangers.
(However, this doesn't account for ultra high trust mildly shame based societies such as Japan who have always been if anything even better at that stuff than anywhere with a guilt motivation - though Japan has extremely high emphasis on consultation and conscientiousness.)
(Further, when one gets into the spread of different motivations in shame based societies, the question of "shame in what?" poses itself. A society which says that the highest callings are craftsmanship for craftsmanship's sake and to put always the interests of ones actual community first is going to put a mountain of shame pressure on people for some behaviours, and none at all on other. A society which says that it is always permissible to lie about anything at all and that the object is always to be able to posture as though one has the highest stature will pressure people in quite different ways than the craftsman society.)
I find persuasive the argument that some of these movements were engineered language viruses designed specifically to weaken guilt-motivated cultures by paralyzing people into indecision.
Past a certain point, though, if one is in one of these guilt overloaded systems, the guilt motivation weakens as the sense of a person's impact on a culture vanishes to zero, and one becomes driven by guilt only insofar as one does things which affect people one actually knows, and by fear with respect to a crumbling ruin of a power structure no longer capable of producing anything of value.
Which is to say, in the sense that the nation is an imagined community, if this is the case, then pushing the guilt reflex to the point of breaking it is in fact an ingenious means of breaking any nation whose civic values include any appeal to the ability of the unpoliced individual to do the right thing at any point ever.
As far as "the West" goes, you know, I'm personally good with the old civilization having had its moment.
Something else will will take its place and mutate out of some of the cultural attributes it used to possess, in the same way as Buddhism ceased to be a civilizationally dominant force in the continent of India by the turn of the second millennium after Christ, but dispersed as an influence through China Proper and into the Western Pacific.
No doubt what societies in different chunks of it take forward with them will be as divergent as what the diadochic kingdoms took with them out of the slow collapse of Hellenistic civilization.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@deerinheadlights100 If that isn't a request for storytime, ignore this comment.
If it is, click see more.
'
so in 2015, the Harper Conservatives had been in office for about ten years. The perennial Canadian third party, the NDP, under then-leader Thomas Mulcair, turned hard to the right and made a run directly at the centre, aiming to form government. The issue with this, from the perspective of enough of the Canadian oligarchy, was that they traditionally never donated anywhere near as much to the NDP as they donated to the Liberals and the Conservatives. Harper in retrospect clearly had an understanding that common civic values in Canada had collapsed either prior to him getting in office or sometime during his government, most likely finished off by the social strains caused by the War on Terror on a system which had had no hard constitutional protections nor traditional constitutional protections for the rights of the individual since 1981. Harper appeared to have deliberately stickhandled the 2015 election to Trudeau by nuking Mulcair's campaign by expert use of a wedge issue designed to demolish him on the reality of the failure of Canada as a nation by Benedict Anderson definition - an imagined community built on a common set of civic values - Confederation was never going to be an ethnostate, it was originally a British supercolony, and the British Empire just wasn't quite genocidey enough get rid of all the francophones and all the Amerindians, so it always leaned on a rhyming set of common understandings of tiered citizenship with agreed-upon minimum standards for second class citizens, which had always been framed in denominational terms - Protestants on top. The specific wedge issue chosen was to drag Mulcair into a conversation in one specific province - Candian analog to an American state - which had not, since secularization in the 1960s, evolved toward anything even vaguely resembling the soft core version of American-style individual rights taken as a tacit assumption in, for instance, the Canadian rust belt - socially understood and assumed, if rarely articulated or unpacked. This played on anxieties about specifically Muslim migrants who had arrived since then which the War on Terror had been exacerbating. Mulcair, to his credit, really was the last Canadian nationalist, and stood up to make the case for the speech rights of the individual as they related to minorities of conscience in said province, which would have played perfectly for him in the Canadian rust belt, but nuked him in said other region. Since the public at large was tired of Harper, this meant that the rest of the vote fell in behind the Liberals, who happened to have Trudeau at the helm. Hence Trudeau's remarks about the "postnational state." The Liberals also suited the oligarchy, as they were in a position to benefit either way, from boutique tax credits under the Conservatives, or from more traditionally loose fiscal policy under the Liberals.
Not the cleanest explanation I have made of it, and I will put the asterisk on it that there is no hard evidence that Harper himself knew that common civic values had collapsed when he behaved as if he understood that reality perfectly in making sure the other party to whom the oligarchy tended to donate got in.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
well the natural corollary of the removal of women as labour from the process of the creation of children is their substitution by technology
This has all ready been pushed by the closing of trade-in-services to surrogacy.
(examples in more)
in the late 2010s, following the Baby Gammy fiasco in which an Australian woman who has so far remained anonymous abandoned a child who had developed from an embryo implanted into a Thai surrogate she had hired because the child, Baby Gammy, had been born with Down Syndrome, the Thai police cracked down hard on the surrogacy industry. Among the people they encountered while raiding these nurseries was a Japanese businessman, who was able to avoid arrest by simply stating that all of the eleven children in this nursery were his biological children, and that he just always wanted to be a father and loved children.
Within 24 months, the authorities in India had shuttered the white market Indian surrogacy industry. The issue in India was that the benefits of working as a surrogate, even at the tiny percentage of fees which made it to the surrogate, were so huge - jobs with surrogacy companies were often the first instruction many of these women received in how properly to conduct themselves during a pregnancy - that it was seen as an automatic decision by many of them. These were not women from the middle income nation segments of India comparable to Latin America or Eastern Europe, but from its pockets of full on National Geographic style Third World poverty.
At around the time they closed the Indian surrogacy industry, it began to be reported that various pure research breakthroughs toward human cloning were being achieved. A healthy lamb was delivered, conceived within a plastic bag in which a sheep embryo had been grown into a viable fetus and nurtured to maturity. A technique was developed to turn stem cells into gametes, which previously had to be harvested from semen samples provided by men or from the ovaries of women.
The main intuitive reason why this technology has been kept on the downlow since has been the effective outbreak of the Second Cold War since the first election of Xi Jinping and the ensuing mainlander incursion into western The Philippines. The Obama administration acted as if Xi was a General Secretary in the vein of mainlander General Secretaries between Deng and Jiang, assumed it was a mix-up, and mediated a mutual stand-down. The Philippine navy stood down. The mainlanders stole western The Philippines.
This incident is intuitively the moment which must have signaled to the American establishment that it needed to allow the American hybrid regime system to function as a constitutional republic in hopes of attracting fresh leadership from outside the usual machinery.
Among the logical approaches to an economic war of attrition - and the Second Cold War will be a long term slow and cold grind down of the mainlanders, up until Xi either dies in office or the pressure triggers a dynasty change event according to the laws of Chinese history - is to deny the enemy.
and the technology to resolve the demographic death sentence which faces mainland China is one which the Pentagon and State Department are no doubt quite keen to deny from that particular enemy
Hence my prediction is that around the time the 2CW wraps up later this century, what remains of the American alliance structure will shift from mass migration to cloning.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
naw this was damned to happen since the 1960s.
The old majoritarian Protestantism lost its self-confidence when decolonization kicked off outside of India and Ireland. Every bit of pull Canada ever had where it punched above its weight class comes from the point in history when it was, by default, the most important British possession in the British Empire. Had majoritarian Protestants had their self-confidence, it wouldn't have been known as the Quiet Revolution, it would have been known as the Quebec Emergency, and it would have gone as well for Jean Lesage and his faction as the Malayan Emergency went for the chicoms.
It was never going to be an ethnostate, because the Gascon-Breton-Norman admixies never got fully genocided by the British in 1763, and there was never enough admixture between the second and third waves of migration and the sixty or so FN groups.
For a while in the 18th century, there was a chance that enough of what is now Canada would have ended up like Mexico, everybody would be on a common continuum of Amerindian-settler admixture, but that never happened.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
I admire the way Singapore is set up, at least on paper. Worked with builders for a while. There was a housing project across from one of our sites. Place had been built 20 years prior and was unoccupied, having been declared unfit for human habitation. It was in a neighbourhood where it was surrounded by century homes. My boss at the time commented that it frustrated him because he knew he could easily have turned a profit while getting the right people to maintain it, but everything was controlled by people with political connections. Public housing here is a bit of a meme as housing goes, but it is an excellent jobs program. The builders who know the developers who know and donate to the politicians get the contracts. If they can get some diversity Becky of an architect who leaves a blueprint riddled with errors, so much the better, that then becomes time and materials. The maintenance guys get to be low level patronage picks, as if the entire structure degrades, it means a contract to have it demolished, and a contract to have it replaced. Then the cycle can repeat itself. In Singapore, on the other hand, with their lack of land, they would beat you black and blue for acting like the affordable housing maintenance guys, shoot you for acting like the politicians, and are able to have a system where housing projects are the default place people live, except for the ultra-rich. However, becoming a Singapore is difficult, since nobody all ready involved in a less strict system wants to be caned or shot for carrying on as they have in the past.
1
-
1
-
By American First Cold War definitions, yes, all NSDAP policies with the exception of privatizing a few railways for a shot in the arm of cash were far left.
"Liberal Fascism" by the guy with the super Jewish name IIRC - it was like Isaac Goldbaum or some shit - made the point that the association of Hitler with the far right was an artifact of Stalin's genius at propaganda and communications. Stalin was so heterodox in having abandoned communism's commitment to worldwide revolution - he embraced the Monroe Doctrine at a point in history in which the United States did not subscribe to it - as well as in his open adoption of the mixed economy, relying on the import of foreign capital and entrepreneurship, the second and fourth factors of production, to achieve the Five Year Plans, that he attracted criticism at one point from members of the Communist Party, who claimed - accurately within the context of Marxism - that he was far right. Stalin was able to diffuse this criticism by pointing to Hitler, as an arbitrary foreign dictator, and claiming that his critics in truth meant to describe Hitler. This was at the point in time in which the Soviets and NSDAP were in open cooperation with one another. There are these hilarious chapters in basically any book on German armour development where the Soviets visit Germany in that period and get angry at the Germans because they think the Germans are holding out on them by showing them these pissant little machines with 20mm cannon. Stalin having had a lifelong obsession with messaging dating back to his interest in the clergy - the bully pulpit of the pulpit being the closest thing to the bully pulpit of the press in the days before mass media, and Stalin being from a slightly backward region of the Russian Empire - was able to make this argument with such conviction and with such perfect use of media techniques that it has stood the test of time ever since, much like the old British cover story for radar that their pilots ate a lot of carrots to see the Junkers and Messerschmitts in the dark.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@Eärmehtar Post-Trudeau, who only got in because the Canadian version of the Lib Dems was never big enough to get corporate donations, decided under this guy, Mulcair, to campaign as if they intended to form government, were deliberately nuked by Harper, the previous PM, who introduced the issue of freedom of speech in Quebec - where their culture did not evolve to integrate individual rights but went down a separate path which has proven in retrospect to be incompatible with that of ours - which Mulcair, who was, with the benefit of hindsight, the last Canadian nationalist, stood up to defend, and was promptly melted by the deep-seated authoritarianism and collectivism of Montreal, the only thing a person who accepts, at some level, the dichotomy of socialist death march on one hand and the nation on the other can have in what was, under the British Empire, the nation of Canada, is his own sense of connection to his home region.
because Trudeau was right
It had become a postnational state.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
Some forms of mining lead to the destruction - the temporary destruction, if they are mines owned directly by going concerns whom properly fund their asset retirement obligations - of a limited portion of the surrounding ecosystem. If the destruction of the ecosystem gets to the point where more than the village which was compensated for their relocation expenses, lost wages, and property damage experiences water and soil contamination, if it is in a country with environmental regulations, the mine is asked to cease operations. If the miner has not properly funded his corporation's ARO and decides with the loss of his mine to file for bankruptcy, then this becomes an indirect subsidy to him. The refugee-industrial complex thus strikes me as possessing, at heart, the characteristics of a mine legally owned by a separately listed corporation. If populations known to be fleeing genuine persecution and war can not depend on the set of conventions originally intended for their protection and must depend on the passage of bespoke schemes by sympathetic legislatures, then this proves that the industrialists have exhausted the sociological carrying capacity of their activities for some time. Perhaps it would be appropriate quietly and privately to offer them some form of compensation - an indirect subsidy, in other words - for the closure of the vast asset upon whose licit exploitation their trade depends.
1
-
1
-
1
-
@johnmoser3594 Interesting. I know the Danes in their employment law and union culture - they have a very high rate of labour organization - put a very high emphasis on working conditions and wages, but don't protect job security longer than the duration of any one contract. I wasn't aware the Swedes and Finns did it somewhat that way.
The big issue with addressing income stability through centralized programs is that it comes out of the pockets of other employees, due to wage stickiness from inflation through money printing, or through taxation, which would most likely result in fairly humble people giving three fifths of their paycheque to the government, as do long term residents in much of Europe.
Layman and foreigner opinion, America would benefit immensely from a federal subsidy to states implementing a taper to welfare, as well as a taper to Medicaid, to eliminate the welfare cliff, but it would take a triumvirate of human bulldozers leading the House, Senate, and Executive to wage the legislative jihad it would require to clear up the real fiscal space to avoid the two outcomes which would negate the desired effect.
Look at how hard and bold the entrenched corporate interests are willing to fight to preserve the Affordable Care Act, for instance. They've gone right for the most toxic social externalities caused by the least honest and most parasitic elements of the pharmaceutical and psychological industrial complexes, and attempted to depict support for these outcomes as a marker of compassion. They know it's bad for people. They also know it makes them a mountain of cash.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
Ryan Dawson was my go-to guy for a while.
My takeaway out of trying actively to follow the Forever War in Syria though was that there is sort of no point in it, because at most you will see two months into the future of the narrative by listening to gonzo journalists and people at the edge of being a really intellectually honest conspiracy theorist and a rogue analyst, as a VERY active listener, prior to the late 2010s big tech crackdowns.
Made 35% on the runup in General Dynamics by buying in the second Trump's Hail Mary lawsuits failed, then selling because I didn't want to get greedy. Figured there were good odds the markets had priced in the increased chance of war, but that wasn't hard to see. Nobody removes a peace president if they don't have a war in mind. That might as well have been the shadow of Odin bringing back his spear.
I remember I was genuinely concerned and had a sense of it being the dawn of a new age when I heard Russia was invading The Ukraine. I thought to myself, holy crap, we're back to great powers and spheres of influence - we've gone back in time from the early 21st century to mid 19th century.
Then Johnson went to Kiev, at the exact moment that if it was a limited war being waged with the objective of maintaining The Ukraine as a buffer zone between NATO and Russia, the powers that be would have been downgrading it to negotiations - right after the Russian abandonment of the Dnieper offensive.
I looked at the news, looked at what else I had to do with myself, realized it was just another Forever War, realized that I had been had, realized that I had no chance against a professional propaganda campaign, realized I had no time to stay two months ahead of the narrative, and have resolutely tuned it out ever since, barring the occasional failure not to rise to the bait set by the subgenus of utter prat who supports The Ukraine on social media.
I suppose my other takeaway is this, next time I'm not selling my war stocks until the war starts.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
Israel is going to get its support one way or the other, because it is part of the structure on every side.
There's no percentage with picking a fight with them, or in dictating to them which way they ought to do things, nor even in meddling in which faction will win - all though, frankly, the good guys ARE winning at Israeli politics if the secularists and the liberals have created this situation with the Palestinians etc. and the ultra orthodoxes will take over thanks to their demographic advantage.
The way Israel wins permanently over Hamas would be the strategic hamlet system, which would require mass development in Sinai, to provide tiny villages of perhaps five to seven families with utilities in order to receive supplies and transit to employment, and in sufficient numbers to host 2m souls. These would be separated by free fire zones patrolled by full timers. There would be no humanitarian catastrophe with this strategy as Palestine as a movement would ensure a steady flow of donations to these hamlets, and the immune systems of Gazans are used to the close proximity of other Gazans, which, in combination with modern medicine, would prevent any tragic externalities of this strategy as when the British used it to win the Second Boer War.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@AL-ku1zq Canada's two directions to go, as a place where local communities have sort of progressively lost anything like the US Constitution as a source of overlapping civic values since the end of the British Empire, are either to devolve a LOT of authority to the provinces, to the point that it is only really as much of a united country as American foreign policy requires it to be, or else for the bureaucrats of its federal government to embrace the authoritarian implications of the long term erosion of individual rights, which, coupled with the fact that as a whole Canada's geography is most similar to that of Russia, population centres disperses on an east-west axis along linear infrastructure, will probably just lead to the creation of a Russia-style authoritarian system based on giving the secret police everything they need to suppress dissent, which is how Ivan the Terrible held Muscovy together, and how every other Russian leader has held Russia together ever since, even if one likes to imagine Yeltsin, Kerensky, and Alexander the Liberator did not have their hearts in it.
Either way, it is very clear that there is zero future for Canada as anything so much as resembling the united liberal democratic nation state it was able to be for the last three decades of the British Empire.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@TheFoolish727 I mean...I agree with the literal meaning of the words he typed, since the video itself literally says that it won't engage with communist ideas themselves.
My head canon is that Marx was just trolling for fun, but he was a compulsive who couldn't stop himself. Because he was a fairly heavy reader, it seems plausible to me that Marx would have been aware that Jean-Baptiste Say had disproven the labour theory of value as articulated by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations. Marx therefore initially for his own entertainment and later because as a compulsive he could not control himself wrote a series of long shitposts which begun with the pretense that the labour theory of value had not been disproven.
In fact, during Marx' life, he actually managed to get under the skin of the finance minister of the Austrian Empire, Eugene Bohm von Bawerk, to the point that the latter wrote a point by point refutation of Marx' ideas - the farmer with the six sacks of grain, the last of which he feeds to some parrots whose chattering amuses him, is the image from the summary of this refutation which has always stuck with me. (I still have yet to read the full text of Karl Marx and the Close of his System.)
The subjective theory of value, as articulated by Say and Bohm von Bawerk, is the origin of those econ graphs that show a consumer and producer surplus existing to either side of a price point, as well as the refutation of the central point of orthodox Marxism. Without the labour theory of value, there is no exploitation.
So this video is not really a debunking of Marxist ideas so much as it is an articulation of a theory of why it is that Marxist ideas continue to appeal despite their foundation on a 250 year old theory that was debunked about a decade or so after its publication. The video is an attempt at social history, in broad strokes, not intellectual history. It's more akin to "libertarianism is male astrology" than a blow-by-blow debunking.
After all, somebody could be drawn to a particular argument purely on emotional grounds or due to their own self-serving bias, and that argument could independently of why they support it actually be both valid and make true assumptions.
Tangentially, I disagree with the inclusion of Stalin. Stalin was the best thing that could have happened to the Soviet Union and the world at the time. He rejected worldwide revolution, held the bureaucracy to account during The Great Purge, was able to attract sufficient foreign capital and managerial expertise by embracing the mixed economy in order to make the Five Year Plans succeed and to industrialize the Soviet Union, and is rejected - I would say with some degree of intellectual honesty - as a communist by orthodox Marxists as well as enough Leninists and Trotkskyists. Stalinism to the extent that one approaches it through the lens of Marxism is a system which has come about in a fair bit of the former west, albeit in an iteration which lacks a Stalin. The Purge is seen as a bad thing mostly because it targeted the Soviet equivalent of the modern managerial elite, and this is the caste which controls the discourse.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@donkeysaurusrex7881 compulsive ramble
I can rarely help but thinking of a scenario where it wasn't Rochambeau - who invented a version of the gas chamber, as an illustration of how badly he escalated things - and Haiti didn't bleed as badly as it did during independence - which is to say, to the point of demolishing the plantation system root and branch and turning to small scale agriculture because nobody could be asked so much as to touch the old system after what they had had to endure.
Instead, with less bad feeling between the different prerevolutionary social ranks, say some of the planters who weren't France-supporters stuck around and ran their plantations on a sharecrop system, paying taxes in kind to the Haitian state, France-supporter plantations were seized by the Haitian state and run on the colonial French corvee system, labour in lieu of taxes, with non-France-supporter planters expected to donate managerial skills as well as paying for their share of labour.
Say Haiti thus maintained most of its exports, was thus not affected by a compounding problem to its independence indemnity, and a Haiti that had not been crippled in the cradle was today a low level First World country, having developed as a standard issue banana republic with the distinctions of speaking French in its own accent and being the product of a revolution within a revolution, robbing popular culture of zombies - Jean Zombi was a character who was a symptom of how bad the Haitian Revolution got - and to whose people the suggestion of how our Haiti got to be where it is would be the insult of a madman, but...
replying mostly because my brain carried it to the tangent where not only was there never the dynamic between Dominican Republic and Haiti where the Haitians have nowhere else to go and the Dominicans remember their independence as having been from the Haitians from whom the Spanish Empire could not protect them.
Say neither of the Roosevelts caused the Dominican Republic to become an independent country behind schedule, whether as a stretch goal after Cuba during the Spanish American War or as America getting involved in the Spanish Civil War, effectively on the side of the Spanish left with the Soviets, and possibly getting stuck in to WWII years ahead of schedule - resulting in a rump Spanish Empire.
The Spaniards from Hispaniola would then have caused the Francoists to win a bit more quickly, since they would have sent a battalion or so to the mother peninsula in a similar but less decisive manner as the involvement of the regiments stationed in Morocco. Hemingway would have obsessed about the Francoists in Hispaniola as well as the German U-boots when he lived in Cuba, and would certainly have written an anachronistic contribution to the invasion genre.
By the 1950s Cuban entrepreneurs fleeing the Cuban revolution might have been drawn to Spanish Hispaniola as much as to Florida, increasing the pace of its development. Say during the Bay of Pigs Andres Garcia La Calle nominally commanded several wings of "lost" Vought 47U Cutlasses flown by mercenaries under the colour of the Spanish air force out of Hispaniolan airfields as part of a CIA back up plan.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@thinkpolhub Which could have lead to some weird stuff in the rest of the world. Brazil was the seat of the Portuguese royal family and IIRC Rio was technically the capital of Portugal for the duration of the wars with France, but that was the relocation of the seat of administration of a preindustrial power, say Belgium had been evacuated to Congo, that would have been the skilled labour to industrialize, and Congo would have been the only land Belgium had as an empire. That would have meant they would have had no option but to double down on industrializing it. Without War One, the strains on India would not have happened - the Army of India was well suited to colonial policing actions but not to trench warfare - which would have meant figures like Gandhi would not have become nationalists - Gandhi stalled the debate on Indian Home Rule for some time - and India could easily have become a Dominion in the 1930s or 1940s - probably the 1930s famine would have been avoided by Indian self-government, the way subsequent bad harvests in our timeline did not turn into famines under the Republic of India - and stayed a Dominion until the 1980s or 1990s. Africa would have looked a lot different, with an industrializing Congo at its heart, not having had for instance the effects of the scorched earth tactics employed by von Lettow-Vorbeck in our timeline. An industrial Congo would have caused heavier infrastructure investment in British possessions to make sense, and the notion that there was something intrinsic to Africa that made it poor as opposed to it being simply a very big place with very many engineering challenges to be overcome would probably be laughed at. Psychologically, the French, Germans, Russians, and Austrians might have got a bit bummed out about the meaning of life if things still bogged down into trench warfare, and the Ottomans would have the fatigue factor of dealing with the way their region would be in their absence, but...that wouldn't have affected the British, Belgians, Portuguese, Japanese or Americans. etc. Mental tangent.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
The idea I had for a Zulu War picture was to do companion piece to Zulu, in the manner of Letters from Iwo Jima to Flags of our Fathers, with Mel Gibson as the director, shot from the perspective of the Zulu regiment that attacked Rorke's Drift, roughly on the Apocalypto plot structure.
so the first third is just a story about three groups of friends in Zululand, living in an agrarian society as peasants, realizing they aren't getting recognition or being allowed to marry, sitting on mats facing the rear during battle sequences, not required to be committed, entirely shot in the Zulu language, cast, Apocalypto-fashion, among amateur and first-time professional Zulu actors who speak Zulu as a first or second language, and subtitled in English.
then the other two acts are the news of Isandlwana and the subsequent march on Rorke's drift, and then the battle itself and the aftermath
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
I personally don't mind self-described communists as individual people, at least in my part of the world. One of them introduced me to Robert Nozick's arguments while trying to make an argument against anarchism prior to beginning to identify as the opposite gender following a number of police contacts after he - at the time - had given lip to a cop after calling the cops on his own library room event claiming the Proud Boys - before they had been listed as terrorists in this jurisdiction - had taken over his library room for a ritual fist fight, and when the cop asked him to leave as a person who had not registered his organization as an official student club, he had decided to try to argue his case - clearly enough he just wanted the attention - then he got a bit spicy about a year or two later at a counterdemonstration for an antiimmigraiton rally, and the police took that as his third strike. Not a bad guy, just a bit off. One of my good friends is a communist, though not that into it, which may be as a result of having a diagnosis for a mental illness for which he is medicated.
Self-described socialists, on the other hand, are bags of dog shit as human beings and the least intellectually honest and ethically inclined individuals I have ever met. I have bottomless contempt for the kind of person - at least from this part of the world - who openly claims to admire Sweden or similar Scandinavian systems. You'll never pin down a socialist on what exactly they believe, but they will always be the most useless parasitic incivil unpleasant selfish immoral shit stains you will ever encounter, at least in this part of the world. What's socialism? Who knows. What's a socialist? The worst asswipe you will ever meet in your life.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
well...do you count Scotland as European in modern times?
Sure, Scotland used to be part of Europe, and as somebody who is ~40% ethnic Scottish - I'm either a shitty blended malt or a great party - two fifths of scotch makes any party better - I am clearly biased to believe the land of the Y chromosome could totally undergo a series of painful, austerity-inducing reforms, and pop back out as a colder and more mountainous Singapore at the other end of them.
However, Scotland has been part of UK since the 1707 union of Parliaments, the union of Crowns goes back even further, the Scottish rebellion against the idea of a union of Parliaments wound up in the 1740s, around when the people who were a bit broker than my ancestors started to get kicked out of Scotland and became hillbillies in America, and UK voted not to be part of Europe.
Europe doesn't have a distinct continental plate - unlike, for instance, India, Africa, the Caribbean, or North America less California - and Scotland has no land connection to mainland Europe. The Seychelles, for instance, are at least on the African continental plate, as well as the only First World country currently in the African Union, even if Sechellians on paper look more like Caribbeans than Africans, and The Seychelles are separated by a fair chunk of the Indian Ocean from mainland Africa. Europe as a continent however has no continental plate. Chunks of eastern and northern France are on the same continental plate as chunks of China proper.
Even if the majority in Scotland did vote to remain in Europe, Europe as a thing includes Scotland about as much as it includes Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla being an analogous asterisk to Gibraltar, and the majority in Scotland also voted to stay part of UK. ("Britain" sort of leaves out the Northern Irish, which isn't fair to people who live in Northern Ireland for the health care, much as I intensely dislike the New World Northern Irish.)
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
I actually liked the first half of this movie. I don't mind medium-written topical content, which might be more of a statement about the fact that well-written topical content simply doesn't make it onto Netflix. The next third of it I was a bit less enthusiastic about. The ending was uninspired and felt like the writers had been holding in a spiteful taunt for the audience that they didn't quite have the courage fully to express. If I had to grade it, I'd give it an A- for the first half, a C+ for the middle third, and a D- for the ending, for a grade of B overall. However, if they're going to go on doing movies in this franchise, they need to begin to vary the way they play with Agatha Christie type tropes just a bit more. Personally, I think just playing the third one completely straight as caricatures from modern times dropped as supporting characters into a deliberately anachronistic narrative conceit - because they're pretty explicit about it, we don't have gentleman sleuths in modern times, Benoit Blanc is every bit as much a fossil of a dead age as Daniel Craig's Bond, and Craig does in effect the same job of playing perhaps not a man out of time but certainly at least a high-line count caricature of a man from another time - granted I have been told his Louisiana accent is much less than convincing - with just enough perspective-splitting exposition to fill in the audience would work perfectly fine. Tangentially, I seem to recall seeing a few mysteries in the fancy local bookstore of the old neighbourhood within which the conceit was that it was Agatha Christie times but Sherlock Holmes was still alive, still consulting as a detective, still addicted to cocaine, and still as Victorian as a monocle and a beaver hat. Another anecdote, from a separate medium, Tom MacDonald topped the hip hop charts several times over the past few years, sounding almost exactly like a B-grade professional rapper from 2008. I think there is a general mood that modern society, if not modern technology, sort of sucks, which feeds a widespread appetite for anachronism and nostalgia. So from top-down fundamentals, the Knives Out concept is A-grade, even if the execution in both movies has been more of a B. Anyway I should probably actually watch your review.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@Thefloristgang4pf I don't know if I would term Modi a fascist. He has been called a fascist for a long time by the press, because when he was a mayor, his town had some bad riots, but he seems more to me like a would-be Garibaldi, who wants to create a unitary Indian national identity - which is an ambitious goal, given people in the subcontinent traditionally see themselves as part of a specific subcaste first. For instance, Modi did not respond with the instincts of an authoritarian to the farm protests. He met with the demonstrators repeatedly, and conceded to several of their demands in way of compromise. Naturally some aspects of this are not intended for consumption by outsiders - all nationalist historiography is a bit nonsensical, and given India's records were so bad Guha and Spivak had to invent subalternism in order to do social history, it may be an extreme case - but if India is not headed to a system of "all for the state, all within the state, none against the state" then one can not really call Modi a fascist. I doubt he will fully succeed, but given the alternative to nationalism is internationalism, as an antiinternationalist, I can not be fully opposed to a nationbuilder Prime Minister. I don't have a granular understanding of Kashmir - I have a vague sense of the aesthetics and equipment of the First Kashmir War, and I understand it's a contentious issue between India and Pakistan, but I would not be able to say who is right and who is wrong, nor am I up on the ins and outs of Pakistan's internal conversation.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
That is what one gets out of a BA in the humanities with a GPA that falls just shy of that magical gray zone between a B+ and an A-.
At best, you're qualified to have an internet argument and know whichever set of obscure arguments necessary.
Not that I regret it, I love my old college major, but...the guy who runs this channel gets to work in the field for which I studied much more than I ever will.
The trick is, if you're actually in college or thinking of it, if you like a period and are obsessed with it to the point of wanting to give decades of your life to advancing the understanding of minor details of it, DON'T study it at the undergraduate level.
History departments spread their undergrads thin on a variety of different stuff. You'll have some background general knowledge, but, so does everybody else, and knowing what to do in a college library legit does not matter.
Instead, pick up languages, and try to bum time off researchers in the field to ask what software competencies they would want in an assistant, then go for classes which teach those.
1
-
Religious studies and classics departments are a bit more clear cut in terms of a direction for grad school. If you're in classics, you're learning Latin and ancient Greek, you're learning the tip of the canon, you get to grad school, you learn the rest of the canon, you learn the modern commentary on it, you're a classicist.
Religious studies varies, add Hebrew if you're doing Christianity, Buddhist studies, expect to be guided toward Sanskrit - though Sanskrit guys are going to be as good at or better than Buddhist studies guys at the nuts and bolts of Buddhist studies - as well as having to pick up a bit of Tibetan and Japanese.
It makes for a bit more of a culture with the TAs where the undergrads are thought of less as undergrads and more like grad students that have yet to hatch, because the material relates more to the fundamentals of the discipline. That bimodal thing in male humanities TAs, where half of them want to win a pedagogy award and the other half of them see their undergrads as a nuisance distracting them from research, it's still present, but its muted.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
If one takes an extended view of the breakup of the old empires of the east - Russia, Austria, Turkey - starting with the Greek Revolution - then Israel fits as the final result of this breakup, as a successor state for a group defined by blood and faith which administered its own laws to itself on that basis within the Ottoman system i. e. a dhimmi. I don't think criticizing these sorts of countries from the perspective of liberal democracy is really intellectually honest, because liberal democracy relies on relevant chance similarities with what had been the West prior to the War on Terror which are somewhat present with societies in many parts of Asia and Africa - Latin America and the Western Pacific might as well be regarded as the former extended West by this standard, if there is some new set of shorthands that replaces what was the West, it will be distinctly influenced by the Western Pacific and Latin America - but not so much the Middle East. Population exchange was always the norm. Putting the ethnic and religious group represented by the state first was always the norm. There's nothing exceptional about Israel with respect to its fundamentals as an Ottoman successor state, with the exception perhaps that the Ottomans made the Jewish dhimmi out of nothing, appointing a Grand Rabbi for the purposes of their administrative convenience, whereas the Armenian Orthodox Church had an Armenian Orthodox Patriarch over a defined hierarchy, ditto the Syrians, Greeks, Copts, Nestorians, etc., and that it took so long for this dhimmi to coalesce into a definite successor state.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
That's the system the frogs in frogistan have, though.
Granted, they seem to have adopted it precisely to make sure the open borders people were able to maintain control, which was in the 1980s if I am not mistaken, so it is not quite so hallowed a tradition as Japan's constitutionalism dating from when MacArthur wrote one for the country in the 1940s, or America's hard limits on state and central government authority from the set of debates in the 1780s or UK's bundle of mostly legal precedents providing a half measure of the American or Japanese kind of constitutionalism dating back to the middle ages, but in the same way as there are things a simple majority can't do in a country with a constitutional system set up for things that are recognizably worthy of conservation from a preObama liberal democratic definition perspective, whatever it is the 1980s frogs wanted to achieve by ensuring open borders would never be challenged in frogistan, well, that's their system.
If Mohammed bin Salman says "sorry guys, we aren't going to do local elections this year because I as your Crown Prince and the wahhabi msoque as your pretty-much-state-religion say so," that would just be seen as a thing that they were doing.
Bummer for the frogs who didn't want to be swamped by people who aren't frogs with whom their systems appears to struggle, of course, but that is the way their system is set up, and they're going to have to do another one of their shifts from republic to empire or empire to republic to deal with it.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
It's contextual.
Somebody wears a keffiyeh to a Palestinian festival, probably they're just expressing regional sentiment.
Somebody wears a keffiyeh while screeching about how they want to kill all the Jews, probably they're using it as a hate thing.
Same thing as a "confederate" flag, really - bunch of people drinking in a parking lot and watching a football game on a big screen, probably just regional sentiment, bunch of people burning a cross in a black guy's lawn, probably a hate symbol.
and as far as the trans thing goes, it would be nice if the guys in Israel who make the chemicals that get prescribed to people in these provinces would be content with slightly lower sales, in other words, switching off the kiddy slicer marketing machine that brainwashes and sterilizes children and hounds many of them to suicide.
I mean, I'm an Israel supporter and all, and I get that it is a one sided relationship, but that one's a bit worse than gang raping college aged female tourists in the near abroad, or spitting on and slapping southeast Asian shop keeps and hoteliers to attempt to negotiate for discounts, you know?
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
ah I think he's worse dude
Trudeau for the first six years was just the efficient minimum figurehead required for a party which had campaigned on loose fiscal policy and been handed the 2015 election in such a way as screamed, to anyone listening, that had there been a period in which Canada had been a nation, in the Benedict Anderson sense - a colony-nation served by an imperialist nationalism, usually only ever the best at anything by default, and a vast cultural appendix of New York State in many ways, perhaps a tailbone might be a better analogy, a residual element suggesting the less evolved form of actual America, but a nation nevertheless - that period was well and truly over.
Only in enabling the little Hitlers of public health during the Wuhan flu did Trudeau really show any enthusiasm for the authoritarianism which doubtless animates the tiny minority of actual partisan Liberals who supported him.
Even fairly straightforward and uncontroversial authoritarian policies which could have been pushed through by the Trudeau government without any pushback - i. e. the recruitment of a corps of censors to go after critics of Islam in the authoritarian heartland of Antisemite Island by way of compensation for the abandonment of the basic citizen rights of members of that minority religion to freedom of speech - have been approached sluggishly.
Most of what there is not to like about the Trudeau government is what there is not to like about the indifferently maintained remnants of MacDonald's original supercolony.
As much as the enthusiastic authoritarian minority within the Liberal Party very much are as hateful and tyrannical as any other kind of Nazi, beyond the dark shores of Antisemite Island, the actual support has been overwhelmingly from politically checked out people strictly motivated by fiscal math, and that actual support has melted away due to the monetary math, not any sudden ideological turn.
Trudeau is a LOT closer to Rudolph Hess than he is to Adolf Hitler.
more of a derp than an actual bad guy
Starmer, on the other hand...he's been in for what, six weeks? and all ready he has unleashed the sturm abteilung of diversity, covered by the uniformed woke schutz staffel,
I can not honestly say that I had the reincarnation of Oliver Cromwell causing the Second English Civil War on my 21st century bingo card, but.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
tangent
I forget the name of the Indian master Buddhist who came to China and was convinced by Huike of his devotion to Buddhism by Huike cutting off his own arm in front of him. edit - Bodhidharma, but I had to write out the rest of the story to make me remember
They always draw him as obviously foreign in the monastery frescoes - big bulging eyes, wild beard, crazed grimace.
I sort of imagine Bodhidharma looking at Huike and going "holy fuck, man, you just cut off your fucking arm! All right, all right, I'll stop trying to convince you I'm an impressive religious master and let you be my top disciple."
anyway legend goes Huike meditated in one of the caverns up in the mountains so long the force of his concentration burned an image of him into the cavern walls
then the other folk religion character that got picked up by the version of Buddhism that came to be associated with the better know schools of traditional Chinese martial arts was Vajrapani, where the theory is that Vajrapani was originally just Hercules, to whom Bactrians and other central Asian people had continued to pray to after the diadochii - the ancient Macedonian generals who divided up the empire of Alexander the Great - as a god of strength. Buddhism as it passed through central Asia from India, the argument goes, picked up basically any folk deity it could consider to be a supernatural entity inferior to Buddha himself who acted with the overall purpose of helping people to enlightenment, and Hercules became associated with one of the Buddhist analogies about how keeping yourself detached from worldly concerns was like wiping the dust off of a reflective surface, hence the character bearing a diamond that shot lightning - forget the language, might be Sanskrit, but Vajrapani the name means "lightning diamond." Five dollar word for the day is "eponymous." As schools of martial arts began to follow Vajrapani as their monastery sub-deity, eventually the diamond in his hand began to be replaced by a quarterstaff, since Buddhist monks to show what they were carried a staff with them with a ring in the top, so a stick was a weapon to which they always had access, and stick fighting became strongly associated with monasteries which focused on martial arts. Typing this out, I sort of wonder if maybe this might have been the result of a Buddhist having encountered a depiction of Hercules carrying the club of Hercules. This would be a twelve foot shaft usually of ash IIRC for monastery drills, but during the later medieval campaigns against pirates from Japan, the monks used eight foot iron staves which were more lethal. The stories related to the exceptions the martial arts monasteries made for meat, alcohol, and women are more along the lines of "well I had a dream that the Buddha told me that it was OK if we ate animal sinews to gain strength, so our abbey makes an exception to the Buddhist monastic code." When a tradition needs to come up with an excuse to say why it is OK for high T guys to act like high T guys, it comes up with an excuse. (I actually can cite my source on this one, everything here is in Meir Shahar's compilation of essays related to his translations of rubbings he took of inscriptions on stele erected around Shaolin Abbey in mainland China in the 1990s and 2000s.)
TL; DR, we have the same thing to thank for how we know the Indian caste system is relatively "modern" as we do for the existence of kung fu
1
-
and to anybody who reads this and decides they want to get into it, learn Sanskrit, try to get a hold of a copy of the Buddhist monastic code, the vinaya, and learn it cover to cover, try to pick up some Japanese, and keep your day job
At that point, you've got the skill set East Asian studies Ph Ds with funding for a grad student want to see to begin to vouch for why your slave wage labour for them ought to be worth a college saying you have a Master's degree, and beginning to point you at stuff in the vinaya and interpretations of it that other people have not studied recently, which is how you're going to get a dissertation out of it.
Don't take courses not related to Sanskrit or the vinaya until you've got that shit down like the back of your hand.
Japanese because the best archives in the world for the Eastern Tradition are in Japan.
Japan only started keeping its own set of records in the 5th century after Christ, but they're the one place where the wars didn't burn them to the ground or the weather didn't turn them to soil or the scholars didn't turn to apathy and cynicism, so they have the most complete set of records related to the Eastern Tradition.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@lolno3906 TBH, I have personally been sold by the moronic mess in The Ukraine on most of the points the establishment must have wanted to make with it.
Periodic wars for profit in one shit hole on the other side of the world or another are an inevitable, and perhaps a desirable, feature of the way the hybrid regime is set up.
We should get over our squeamishness about these wars-for-profit being conducted west of the Dardanelles.
Regardless of what the narrative toward whichever foreign dictatorship has been up to a certain point, we ought to accept that when a place is chosen to be destroyed in the name of defense contracts, it will be destroyed.
I have contempt for Ukraine supporters, in particular those of Polish extraction, and instinctively react to the two stripe pride flag as that of an enemy entity.
However, the next time this sort of thing seems likely to happen, I think I will be able to set aside any compulsions, tune out the taunts and the bullshit from the cut rate propagandists, get along with the right people, and fill up my cup with the blood of the innocent.
At the end of the day, you people will have succeeded at stealing tens of billions of dollars with absolute impunity, and your perennial moments of effecting these scams ought to be accepted in the same manner as one accepts winter
Just to bat ideas around, I have a four word idea for the next one, for you to pass on to your supervisor:
Islamist insurgency in France
(The West will of course support the freedom fighters against the fascist French central government, in the same way as it supported the Bosniaks in Yugoslavia, and it will have a wonderful effect on the inflation-adjusted stock prices of all manner of large corporations with good relationships with the establishment.)
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@epicphailure88 All the more reason not to expect the new hate law to be challenged either.
The best case scenario is at least to achieve clear lines of what can and can not legally publicly be discussed in which provinces or which parts of which provinces.
If a particular historical event has such firm support that any debate or questioning of it needs to be criminalized, well, I can content myself with keeping mention of that event out of my mouth.
To steelman the side which argues, in effect, that the Holocaust is sufficiently irrelevant to modern times for reference to it to serve any useful purpose - which is the sufficiently plain subtext of creating a chilling effect through legislation, and one which has indeed succeeded, given polls of young people show most of them have either never heard of the Holocaust or think it would be a good idea - why would a public school teacher be so stupid as to invite even the level of negative attention on to him or her self which Holocaust educators are capable of generating for getting so much as one detail wrong? Better to avoid the entire topic - when the Holocaust was seen as relevant to modern times to the point of being a licit point of discussion, this did not prevent any other ethnically motivated mass murder by a state which occurred during that period. Open discussion of historical evidence did not prove to be sufficient to prevent the Rwandan genocide or the mass killings of Bosniaks by Croats. That we have seen seething hordes screeching for the blood of Jews in the streets is in many ways a tremendous success to be attributed to the only goals one could possibly infer to Holocaust education, given the way in which Holocaust educators have gone about plying their trades.
I feel bad for anybody who might understandably feel somewhat unsafe listening to a possibly armed mob chanting for them to be killed due to their ethnicity, of course, but I'm not about to stick my neck out for my head to get cut off for so much as venturing a solution to that one.
Similarly I would not expect the hundred meter protest ban for abortion clinics to be removed.
One does not support women's rights in these provinces if one is not for it to be a legal act for a woman to have her daughter stabbed in the head as she is crowning.
This entire situation disgusts me, however, there is quite simply nothing to be done about it, given the situation as it actually exists.
Japanese or American style hard protections for the rights of the individual simply are not supported by a plurality distributed through these provinces in a manner which would allow them to be imposed.
Support for minority rights beyond synthetic individual rights outside of ones actual region where a plurality in fact supports individual rights in the American or Japanese sense similarly is a losing position, regardless of the minority, regardless of the philosophy which says how they ought to have their rights violated.
Minority language rights, in particular, are an absurd anachronism with no place in the 21st century.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
Part of me thinks that the way this is going to get set up is the same way Iraq was.
Iraq was a solid American ally for decades under Saddam Hussein, and fought Iran after Iran's Revolution in the years in which the mullahs were experimenting with their then-allies' ideas about a socialized economy.
(so, in the context of the end of Detente, and that the Iranian Revolution could reasonably have been inferred to have appeared to enough analysts in the American apparatus adjacent to its foreign service to be more communist nonsense, there is a case to be made, setting aside the brutality of that conventional war, for the legitimacy of the Iran-Iraq War as an American proxy war. This is not a legitimacy I am convinced can be extended, in an intellectually honest fashion, to the current nonsense in The Ukraine.)
Iraq under Saddam successfully controlled the information available to its public to the point that it was able to function as a minority majoritarian country, with the Shi'ite majority sincerely believing themselves to be outnumbered by the Sunni Arabs who filled the military, civil service, and Ba'ath Party.
This in and of itself created a significant obstacle to the westward projection of Iranian influence.
About a decade after that war, diplomatic communication suggests that Saddam had his foreign service reach out to his most important ally on the subject of an old ambition of his, bringing back into the fold what had been part of one of the old Ottoman provinces which had been joined together originally as a British protectorate after the collapse of the old empires of the east after WWI.
H. W. Bush was facing a slump in his poll numbers thanks to the early 1990s recession, and had experience as a diplomat and as an intelligence officer working with every single one of Iraq's Arabic-speaking neighbours.
The American foreign service just happened to send Saddam a note saying something along the lines of "as for your present dispute with Kuwait, we have no opinion."
We all know how Saddam went on to interpret that note.
It is a matter of conjecture as to what H. W. Bush may have intended.
I always mess up whether this was just before or just after H. W. Bush's "New World Order" speech.
Decades later, W. Bush's advisers - W. Bush most likely was sincere in his motivation to get back at Saddam for Saddam's failed assassination attempt on H. W. - overthrew Saddam in a nasty and violent conventional war, followed by a nasty and violent occupation punctuated by many nasty and violent insurgencies, which resulted in a tremendous amount of money flowing through to large equipment suppliers and defense contractors, multiple spikes in the price of energy, and the weakening of the country which prior to the First Iraq War had been the biggest problem faced by the Iranians.
As far as whether what is actually going on in the shit show that is The Ukraine is anything close to that, I don't have any secret or special information, and have not bothered to attempt to sift through the propaganda since Johnson went to Kiev.
However, as Mark Twain put it, history may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@da1vinci1edi so a country is invaded, two factions form, one side wants their country back for the people and its indigenous traditions, they had been in power prior to the invasion, known for swift justice to criminals, and for being somewhat less corrupt than their predecessors, this faction flees to a series of natural fortifications, from which they fight, for twenty years, a combination guerilla and trench war, until finally the invaders give up, and they retake their country for themselves.
The other faction are composed, at best, of indifferent takers of jobs program jobs and casual narcotics addicts, then kleptocrats, rapists, and child molesters at the less good end. They embrace, at least superficially, the ideology of the invader. When the invader retreats, this faction abandons the fight almost immediately.
The occupation has functioned, for all intents and purposes, as a moral sieve to separate those willing to do battle for their own land and traditions from those willing to take money to give up and be left alone.
Were this country any other than Afghanistan, these two factions would be referred to as the patriots and the collaborationists respectively.
"Taliban" is if anything a compliment at this point in time.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
Liberals on average I believe to be a mixture of ideological Stalinists who actually believe in the crap that came out of the mouth of that genocidal bastard Pierre Trudeau - I'd term them Hitlerists since Pierre Trudeau was as close as these provinces ever came to a Hitler, despite the more frequent attachment of that comparison to his son, Justin has never committed a genocide by United Nations definition, whereas Pierre when he was Indian Affairs Minister oversaw the Sixties Scoop, which fits the fifth clause of that definition, and it isn't really fair to compare somebody who has not committed a genocide to the man who is considered the embodiment of evil in casual contexts due to the genocide to which he is linked - except that Confederation really fits the Stalinist model better, since private investors are free to repatriate their profits, and this was not a freedom enjoyed even by domestic investors in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s - and pragmatists who are just after pork.
Stalinism has mostly won, so I can appreciate the pragmatists' perspective, they just always seem to pick some new low to demand of their adherents.
However, there could be a thing where bilingual Quebeckers actually do have much more authoritarian values and a more totalitarian perspective on economics and personal freedom than either unilingual francophone Quebeckers further east or Ontario people from west of the Ottawa suburbs.
In other words, it may well be the case that it is just impossible to coexist with you people for cultural reasons underlying your weird Nazi ideas.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@Sam97-oi4vc The first part of that is not true. All any given society with a sufficiently advanced case of feminism has to do is to sit down and say, "all right, fine, let it become a caliphate." Women aren't going to do shit when Achmed and Kumar thot patrol them. A couple of stonings later, every chick is going to be burquad up and terrified out of her mind at the idea of being adjacent to a strange man on the bus. Then enough of the chicks - the aspbergirls in particular - will cotton on to the new regime and begin to enforce for it.*
The second part of that is also not true. The state can always just remove the bottom 80% of men, therefore eliminating the ick. The top 20% of men together with women create a three fifths supermajority in support of policies which make life more of a grind for males. Evolutionarily, this would not be a bad thing. Men are meant to be cut down by tribal warfare or aggressive predators more often than they are in modernity. The Y chromosome is supposed to face a harsh grind to perpetuate itself. Where this function is not performed by mother nature, it can be performed by nanny state. In the event that there are dysgenic effects from this state of affairs as driven by social policy, the research engineering all ready exists for wombless reproduction. Stem cells could be conscripted from any male deemed by any given "central nursery" to possess Y chromosome traits worthy of conservation.
*Literal islamofasciscm, as in, the combination of a set of algorithmic resource allocation mechanisms which would short circuit the economic calculation argument which lolberts like to make against the Mussoliniist ideal of all within the state, all for the state, none against the state, with Salafism to provide for the spiritual needs of humans, would make for a tremendously stable social system.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
well I hope they are forced to take back the shop girls because that is intuitively unfair.
However, Lululemon more likely afford to eat the loss of some merchandise in the short run in a way that for instance Walmart in the long run can not. Walmart's margins are razor thin. That's how it delivers lower prices for customers. Chronic ongoing looting of Walmarts in specific areas inexorably drives affordable groceries and unskilled jobs out of an area as chronically looted stores become dead weight on all the other stores to keep them going. Lululemon in contrast has a huge markup on its products.
In terms of impact on the community on the ground, even if Lululemon does get driven out by the looting despite its better operating profitability, it removes a luxury from consumers, as opposed to a necessity. People can drive to a different one, or order online, or just wear cheaper leggings.
Lululemon also trades heavily on its brand in a way that Walmart doesn't. If the Walmart brand evaporated and Walmart stores all of a sudden had the same supply chain engineers, cashiers, stockboys, and truckers under a big red sign that said "Cheap Stuff Here" in yellow Times New Roman font, the same managers of and shareholders in Cheap Stuff Here (NYSE: CSH) would be fine. If Lululemon loses its brand, its ability to market its products with Veblen pricing is merked. Nobody is paying that much for some weird leggings brand that might be from Wish.
Not to nit pick the framing of this one too much.
1
-
1
-
1
-
Connecting the threads in a mystery does sort of seem like a task for which an AI writing tool would be well suited. To run off on a tangent, I imagine romance novels, as of present day, could be written without any human involvement whatsoever. I know there was a window in there in which would-be romance novelists would read reams of classic Harlequins to try to work out the pattern of the story, what it is that draws in the reader, and then stumble through applying it. Had a buddy whose mom did it with a bit of a genre-bender thing - it would never just be sexy Viking or sexy plantation owner, it had to be sexy spy or sexy space alien - and I personally knew a dude who was clearly training himself to write romance novels who may have written the sexy MAGA supporter one that people were making fun of in memes last year. GPT could handle the romance novel learning process easily. Harlequin could then just have a free paperback club for what it estimated its sales demographic would be, take the most popular AI titles to a full run in convenience stores and pharmacies next to the newspapers and women's magazines - or those shops on the beach for people who don't like Kindles, for instance - then feed sales and extended focus group data back to the computer, and adjust the next iteration, in a similar manner to the cycle of client advice in money management. Frankly they could branch out into men's advice from then, with the AI basically stating what it believed to be the elements of an experience which women found romantic based on massed empirical evidence, and then attempting to apply it to a format men would be well suited, on average, to understand. Arguably of course this is a page straight out of a dystopia - in 1984, Winston's girlfriend's day job at the Ministry of Truth is to operate what Orwell describes as "kaleidoscopes" to write romance novels to distract ordinary people - but that just makes it more likely they will apply the technology which all ready exists this way.
1
-
@SpencerCJ The review seems a bit harsh, but that is sort of the point of this channel. Bad reviews ARE more fun to read or watch than good reviews, after all, and most of the shots this channel took were not as cheap as those of a typical episode of Colbert. Personally I think decent pacing and a strong cast can carry a movie especially one which hesitates between genres sufficiently to demur the expectations of the audience. The example for me is Suicide Squad I, which lagged, heavily, in the middle, and would have been unwatchable without both Will Smith and Margot Robbie. It was still watchable. Not everything is going to be an Oscar winner. We do have to remember that this is a commercial product - the big example of a creator who forgot that would be Don Bluth back in the late 1980s and early 1990s with The Cobbler And The Thief. Unfortunately we can't just throw a Peter the Great or an Alt Fritz out there to sponsor what he thinks is fun art, let the Mozarts and the Michaelangelos do their thing for as long as they need, and then let the peasants in to stare over the fence at it once a year. Well, we could, but our model of Stalinism would need to grow a Stalin at that point, and the accountability-fleeing feminized bureaucracy will not like that idea. This is an era similar to the periods of Chinese history in which power was monopolized by eunuchs. We're just waiting for the yellow turbans to swarm out of the mountains.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
The guy who edited Fortune Magazine, forget his name, read his book he wrote about firm behaviour during a recession that he wrote just after The Recession, he argued from a variety of anecdotal stories he had heard as editor of a business magazine that during a recession, the top and bottom both chase the middle. His main example was of couples emerging from budget hotels late in 2008 dressed in dinner jackets and contemporary designer gowns to go to swanky galas. McDonalds began to go through this change where I live around that time. I remember it because it was the example that caused the message of that book to click. That was when they introduced North American casual dining elements such as salads, vaguely Starbuckesque coffees, and leathery seats. I'll always miss the southwestern salad pack - I'd get that on a couple of side garden salads. Probably not authentic, but delicious for fast food, and because McDonalds was founded on being strong on logistics, they always had fresh vegetables - until The Pandemic, of course, when they stopped carrying the salads. The Recession to The Pandemic is sort of how I've mentally been framing the Long 2010s. It's horrible, I know that convention comes from the guy who wrote The Long 19th Century, not E P Thompson but of his generation. I guess one could argue that it is sort of time to be done with this sort of design given that we're now past The Pandemic. Hobsbawm, that's it. The name of the guy who wrote the book on firm behaviour during recessions was Geoff...Colvin.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
Khomeini's old stuff translates well into English. He just sounds like a law and order conservative with a bunch of logical arguments in each essay then he always does this non sequitur at the end and says that Islamic theocracy is the best way to run a society.
On paper, the Islamic Republic also does exactly what it says on the tin. The same way America is a system designed by 18th century deist and Calvinist libertarians to last and conserve their values, Iran is a system designed by 20th century Shi'ite conservatives to last and to conserve their values. The Ayatollah is a one-man Supreme Court with power of veto over everybody, then the College of Experts is elected by the people from a slate approved by the Ayatollah to stand ready at all times to choose his successor. The legislature and executive handle the day-to-day running of the country and legislation. They have the Shi'ite reading of the Hadith and Quran instead of the Constitution and the Amendments.
I also give the mullahs a certain amount of credit for having given up on the communist idea of a centrally managed economy having allowed nobody who was on the communist side of the revolution centrally to manage a single thing, and then having imprisoned, tortured, and/or shot most of the communists.
However, the biggest thing about Iran, and what one misses trying to understand it on paper, is that the practice of dissimulation or taqiyya, in the same way as many other cultural practices originating in a religious doctrine, leached out into the secular version of their society a long time ago.
In other words, when dealing with Iranians, one waits for the cheque to clear.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
well the CPTPP is a thing.
In direct, formal terms, I don't think CANZUK-style integration will be a thing to which domestic populations will consent.
UK might slow mass migration, especially if Reform displays an absolutely meteoric ground game over the next four weeks and Farage finds himself leader of the party with the most seats, but this is not a guaranteed thing.
Canada will not significantly reduce mass migration..
New Zealand has become more skeptical about mass migration over the past decade.
Australia has been skeptical of mas migration for decades.
The mobility provisions necessary for CANZUK-style integration would just not make any sense under those circumstances.
There might be an increase in an extremely indirect form of involvement of the traditional First World part of the Commonwealth in smaller Third World Commonwealth countries and Commonwealth middle income nations.
There would not be any supercolonies or attempts at pushing for anything beside property rights and development, in per capita real GDP terms, and in the reduction of transaction costs.
Possibly a very light form of international sentiment for the purposes of creating a common sense of buy-in for projects which cross jurisdictional boundaries would be desirable.
People from quite heterogeneous groups would have to see one another as possessing a common stake in projects from which they all drew custom or salary.
Protection for hard assets backing equity trading on the LSE, TSX, TSX-V, ASX, and NZX would be in local hands.
The most likely model for on-the-ground developments would be along the lines of the 15% local silent equity stake from which local power structures would be expected to feed and water themselves, with foreign aid flowing from the share of corporate tax paid by these corporations to jurisdictions within which they conduct operations, further to smooth over rough edges with local special interest groups not included within the local power structure, but whose pride would need to be mollified and who would need to feel an alignment of self-interest with whichever project they saw making very many people within the power structure of their jurisdiction very rich.
This would be done on a proportional basis for projects which crossed jurisdictional boundaries.
There would be no involvement in pushing for more personal privileges for local populations - mobility "rights" for instance have proven to be a right cock up for the First World, why should one expect them to do the Third World any good? - other than that property rights insofar as they impacted projects whose equity traded on a metropolitan exchange were extremely clearly defined, and courts enforcing those rights did so according to an interpretation of the law intelligible to the average investor.
The traditional developed world's benefit from this would be an increase in GNP corresponding to the increase in GDP in traditional middle income nations and the traditional Third World.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
2015 was a case of the previous PM nuking the guy who had the temperament to replace him but whose party had taken fewer donations from the Canadian business oligarchy.
2019 was a case of the previous PM's party going berzerk on one breakaway group whose leader had the temerity to suggest reducing mass migration levels to where they had been during the Brent spike. (early 2010s for people who don't think about enough of the 21st century in terms of the price of oil)
2021 was a case of the previous PM's party picking a guy who was actually really good at leading a party, had a spotless personal record, and unfortunately fell for the hallucination that moderates are a thing that exist in western Quebec.
(If you look up the Canadian polling site 338, Erin O'Toole's numbers had him at a minority that could pass budgets with help from the Bloc - think the SNP or Plaid Cymru if you're a Limey, or like if the Dixiecrats were the third party instead of the Libertarians if you're a Yank - then right after that peak came a question during a debate about semiautomatic rifles, and it nuked him, because the media had been sandbagging a misinformation that it had deliberately created, that a famous mass shooting in the late 1980s in western Quebec had been committed with a select fire rifle and that this had lead to the passage of the Canadian version of the Machine Gun Act, when in fact, the Canadian version of the Machine Gun Act had been passed by the father of the current divisive figurehead occupying the Prime Minister's office - himself a right sack of shite in his own right - and had done nothing to prevent that mass shooting, which had been committed with a semiautomatic carbine, a kind of firearm which had remained legal - but they did an excellent job at this misinformation campaign, almost as good a job as they did in blaming the 2008-2009 crash on a lack of regulation, rather than the Community Reinvestment Act as passed by the Clinton Administration, and it because the guy they chose was pursuing these nonexistent moderates in western Quebec that his projections collapsed.)
2025 will have been a case of Trudeau's lot having given up on the idea of forming government earlier this year, when they increased the carbon tax, knowing damned well their path to victory lay through the apathetic and unideological Toronto suburbs, where people still need to drive cars and eat food.
1
-
1
-
1
-
Canada is not going to last in its current form longer than a couple of decades.
(the rest is long, mostly pulled out of my ass, and I am too lazy to edit)
Path one, the Liberals either fix housing or fix the election, and get back in in 2025.
Country won't be fucked, but it will be on a constant downward trajectory to the bottom of the First World if that happens.
I say "to the bottom of the First World" because Canadian real GDP per capita would have to fall by more than a factor of three before Canada fell below the standard set by Greece and Chile as First World countries.
It might fall out of the First World in HDI terms as standard of living collapses, and could be overtaken by Mexico as Mexico most likely breaks out of the middle income trap due to the surge of industrialization it is experiencing, but I don't realistically see Canada becoming a true shit hole, strictly because it has resources, is next door to America, and Canadians are functionally the same thing as Americans from their adjacent states in the same way as Bahamians are basically central Florida people with a monarchy and there isn't a giant difference between a lot of people who live permanently next to either side of the Texas-Mexico border. Alberta is basically a more cucked Montana. British Columbia is basically a less insane Washington State. Ontario might as well be where upstate of upstate touches the easternmost suburbs of Detroit. Yukon is a more boring Alaska. Nova Scotia is a rural New England with the bad manners surgically removed. etc. The cultural similarities will contribute to keeping a floor under how far it can drift below America.
The education system and media will succeed in demoralizing people absolutely and eventually the foreign democracy ratings people will have to admit that it is a hybrid regime, similar to mainland China from Deng to Jiang, but without the economic freedom, or the sense of hope in its future.
This will coincide with mass migration, but mass migration will if anything be a way the government is able to continue to borrow favourably, and to maintain the illusion of being in the First World longer. Canada drifting toward the Third World under the "natural governing party" will not be a function of "importing the Third World."
Possibly it might lead to a caliphate, as a nonnational state entity which does not really stand for anything other than spreading out the pork, which all ready accepts the basic principle of collective "rights" which historical caliphates have used to govern minorities, and whose elites do not believe in individual rights offers very little to distinguish itself from a caliphate, let alone for which anybody would be willing to risk their safety to prevent from being turned into a caliphate, and the only group who would be able to keep up its head of steam in the organizing department would be the Sunnis. The Caliphate of Canada would also be moot in foreign policy terms, as America has many Muslim-majority allies who govern themselves according to shariah law.
Path two, the Liberals don't get back in, the Conservative insiders - the Conservatives in Canada have secret superdelegates, they are not a party where the members really vote for the leader, and were caught in shenanigans in 2018 - are not keen to make any significant changes beyond rolling back the most insane of the most insane of the Liberal policies and enacting moderate fiscal restraint, cutting off excessively partisan donors.
That path is a detour before getting back on the first path when Liberal gibs look more appetizing to the right mix of constituencies, especially corporations.
It is also the path which to me seems most likely.
Conservative insiders are not spicy people.
Path three, Conservative majority, Conservative insiders feel very spicy, and seven out of ten Premiers agree to radical decentralization.
That's the good guy path, but who knows if it will be the one chosen.
The end of it is Canada looks radically different as a country.
If the provinces do not become effectively sovereign entities cooperating on a small number of things that make actual sense - international trade deals, sometimes actually doing something for the American alliance structure - the occasional frigate or rifle battalion or a literal handful of ground attack aircraft, you need one officer to lead the auxilia, not a committee - and keeping the passport and, in a different capacity, the Canadian dollar, but that should be it - then this is a path that leads in that direction, and which permanently reduces the future influence of the federal government of Canada.
Most likely this means real GDP per capita in each province continues to stagnate, in effect, only really gaining back losses they incurred under the Trudeau Government, and standard of living recovers at least close to where it was during The Great Recession. Some provinces opt for a path which abandons America-lite soft protections for individual rights in favour of an Erdogan or Orban style illiberal democracy - Quebec for instance does not believe in individual rights, and would probably just ban the English language outright, along with taking a harder line on various speech-based offenses - while others will most likely style themselves as shotglass-sized Americas, retaining the monarchy on paper due to the wording of the agreements with Native Canadians - Canadian history is low on Indian Wars for a reason - and possibly reverting to the Unwritten Constitution as outlined in Blackstone's Commentaries rather than adopting a close imitation of the American Constitution, but introducing separation of powers - electing a President as acting head of state and executive instead of leaving those two functions with the Governor General and Prime Minister, for instance, splitting some representation from the lower house to form an upper house with teeth - Canadian provinces are effectively unicameral at the moment - and otherwise eliminating the vestiges of the Westminster system. British Columbia might declare itself an indigenous republic, since it was technically accidentally seized by the British Empire and just sort of never given back to the Native Canadians by Canada.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@LeoBaker-ir3vo Nigeria was a case of the British Empire centralizing control away from colonial-level bureaucrats who had to have some understanding of the actual local culture toward Whitehall as more telegraph wire was laid, then when decolonization hit, having handed off to people who had different languages, cultures, means of subsistence, faiths, and inhabited different climatic belts this colony that had been stapled together for the administrative convenience of people in a different hemisphere.
The Southern Protectorate if I am not mistaken was during and prior to colonization majority Christian and animist, whereas the Northern Protectorate was the result of the war between the British and the Sokoto Caliphate, who were persuaded to go along with the Empire mostly because the second thing the British did after accepting their surrender was to put the old shariah law judiciary - I don't know their specific school of Islamic jurisprudence - including the family of the old caliph in charge as local level officials and judiciary, and leaving the Northern Protectorate, for the purposes of local government, under shariah law.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
I still nurture a conspiracy theory that the Inflation Reduction Act indeed was intended to function as the label said on the tin, that advancements in materials engineering by the late 2010s had resulted in the ability to build a space elevator extending from the Moon to the upper atmosphere of the Earth, that Trump dropping out of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and establishing the Space Force were intended to create the diplomatic and bureaucratic conditions necessary covertly to supply a small unit of maintenance and security men on the surface of the Moon, resupplied by the space elevator, the distance up through Earth's atmosphere covered by balloons - so, less Arthur C. Clark's beanstalk, this would be more of a catcher's mitt - and that the objective of this was very simply to plunder the asteroid belt, blasting holes in ones with reasonably high grades of gold ore in particular, then sending them down to Earth, I would guess aimed at central Manitoba, where any increase in shooting stars could be dismissed as the locals having had a bit of bad firewater - Canadian First Nations are all ready quite fond of section 100 of the Dewey decimal system - with the object of adding gold to secret reserves held by the Federal Reserve, and of selling gold in American dollars. To be fair, I have not recently checked the price of gold, and events have transpired on Earth which might also explain the slow reaction of the price of gold to the epic moneyprinting under Biden - ordinary price stickiness, I spoke with one fellow who ventured a theory that massive manipulative trading on commodities might be engaged in to depress the price of gold, and another who suggested perhaps lower grades of Earth ore from extant mines might have become exploitable by better refining techniques, further Rwanda has fairly openly been, ah, availing itself of eastern Congo's resources, and Tanzania and Uganda, right next door, recently - about three years ago IIRC - completed a railroad, plus at the beginning of pandemic, the Indian retail gold market apparently sold quite a bit of gold, and it is plausible that when sanctions hit Russia at the beginning of the Ukraineschcina, that the Russian state might have sold many of its gold reserves. I'm just biased to think that it is plausible that the United States might well approach the Moon in much the same way as the Spanish Empire approached the island of Hispaniola, as a convenient staging point, given natural geography, for fleets to be sent back and forth to bring back to the metropole the mineral wealth of a New World.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
well the strategy in Iraq IIRC was to co-opt and work with the local self defense militia or fedayeen in creating an expanding grid of secured areas. So if the goal is indeed to secure access to basic necessities such as energy in order to moderate the push factors for irregular migration, then the way to go about it would be to put a few dirty tricks guys on the job and tell them to get busy with the diplomacy at the gang level - firm norms in terms of turf boundaries, replacement of kidnapping by a fixed percentage for protection, etc. As far as how long an informally brokered gang truce would last, who knows. The way to keep the port open with plausible deniability would be with PMCs, which would also be how you'd get security and support for the dirty tricks squad to talk to the gangs. If one of these gang leaders goes bad faith on the truce, you put an informal bounty on his head, start scanning his turf with drones and satellites, and eventually he suffers a little depressive episode in the trunk of his car. To establish dominance, this organization would, instead of paying the gangs, demand a cut of their extortion and other illegal activities. Another idea to use in tandem could be to copy the German initiative in Libya to fund specifically the coast guard to intercept and turn back small boats. Make sure the officers and men know where their funding originates. Give them bonuses based on reducing crossings or maintaining a crossings goal of zero. Allow the families of officers conditional access to the Witness Protection Program on a special visa. The issue with either of these ideas is that either they become an indefinite commitment for everybody associated with them, or they cause Haiti to become a puppet state of America run behind the scenes as thought it were the mafia - which is how this would become self-funding, the foreign overgang would eventually have the pull to nudge out Haitian elites in order to run its own "legitimate" industries in order to go self-funding - with the only honest institution in the country being the coast guard. This entire scenario sets aside the question of whether the current US administration even wants to do anything to prevent a potential small boats crisis.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
The Zulu colonel at Rorke's Drift had a rear echelon regiment whose men had never been allowed to marry, since Zulus were supposed to show valour in battle before being assigned a wife and being allowed to wear the iron headband, and by chance they had simply never been required to move up from reserve in any of the engagements in which they had participated to that point.
They were in their 30s and 40s and had just realized that they had missed out on the action, again, at Isandlwana. That was why they kept coming for that many waves despite not having slept or eaten for a couple of days - they wanted to move on with life - and that was also the reason why their colonel had broken their king's standing order to stay on the Zulu side of the river in order not to provoke a response.
The main inaccuracy of the movie - though it is about as authentic as it gets, every Zulu extra is an actual Zulu whose training had been to watch a couple of John Wayne movies, their wardrobe and props are stuff they brought from home or the home of a friend, and the speaking role of Ceteswayo went to the then Zulu crown prince, Ceteswayo's grandson - is that it depicts the regiment attacking Rorke's Drift as a mixed regiment of married and unmarried warriors.
At a more macro level, Bartleby-Frere was the one who had invaded Zululand in the first place. Gladstone had wanted to keep the 2BE out of colonial wars, which is ironic given the better known colonial wars of the middle 2BE were fought on his watch. Rogue administrators and swashbuckling mercenaries were almost more of a feature than a bug of mid Victorian times in the colonies.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
Foreigner opinion. The way this works out according to the Euros' rules is if ROI invites in the UN to send half a division* of border police as peacekeepers to secure the 300 crossing points at the ROI side of the border and train their replacements at what would add up in the end to half a billion dollars a year, going off the midpoint of average ROI police salaries and assuming support would cost as much as salaries. If 7 border police can train 1 replacement on the job in 3 years then it can be an all ROI staffed border police force in 8 years, assuming burnout is equal to pre-trained contributions from within the existing ROI border police's capacity to train new officers. This assumes 16 border police is enough for each crossing on average. Unless EU collapses first, they won't accept any alternative to checks being done on trucks and travelers before they come from outside of EU into inside of EU. The Good Friday Agreement shouldn't come into it - UK agreed not to have border checks according to what I can see, not ROI, and the problem is checks on goods and travelers entering ROI, not goods and travelers passing from ROI into UK. The rhetoric framing the issue as a "threat to the peace process" places it squarely within the UN's remit and because nothing has so far actually exploded, there actually is a peace to keep, and therefore good odds of success in the deployment. In order to keep things neutral, primarily nonEU nonCommonwealth countries could be preferred for their contributions to the mission, with just enough EU officers to fine tune training on EU requirements for border checks, perhaps 1 in 32. *The arithmetic when one takes into account a 12.5% starting contribution of untrained volunteers from within ROI is actually 500 short of half a division i. e. 4 500 officers at an initial price of €78m for the peacekeepers and €15m for the volunteers on the salary side plus possibly more than that for support - say €200-250m for 2023. The cost once ongoing is a bit over half a billion, it's more like €256m for salaries of the officers themselves once the whole force were ROI citizens. ROI takes in plenty of corporation tax and would be able to afford it in the medium term once indigenization of the force were complete, as in the end, it would be ROI jobs for ROI citizens - who would then come to constitute an influence on at least a million votes, given the usual ratio at which friends and family tend to support people who work state jobs which cluster in specific electoral districts. Were Martin to come out early very much in favour of these voters and their interests, Fianna Fail would be assured of a significant bloc of support in future elections.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1