Wednesday, May 22, 2019
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Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate: modus vivendi in the American idiom
nokangaroos says:
May 16, 2019 at 12:07 pm GMT • 600 Words
@TG
Close but no cigar (I mean, of COURSE Malthus was right 🙂 )
Marx already noted the higher living standard of the American worker but could not for the life of him see the obvious: The American worker, if miserable enough, could always opt for eating paleo, wearing expensive fur and knocking up Injun princesses while the European could not.
– All your shining examples are of this (highly non-stationary!) kind of what I might call “adiabatic” expansion – no resistance translates to no friction and selection is by external influences.
Both emigration and expansion select for the assertive and continue to do so as long as the expansion lasts.
As a result the quintessential American is the robber baron.
(“What isn´t nailed down is mine. What I can pry loose isn´t nailed down.” – ascribed to J. P. Morgan)
Hence the hystero-epileptic American reaction to any check on expansion – they actually believe it is blasphemy(!).
Thanks to this mechanism the US is neither a “nation” nor a “society” but a bubble without internal structure that will inevitably go the way of Little Britain – collapse unto itself, saddled with a shitload of useless eaters and bar anything anyone would want to buy.
It has begun – the American Dream is no longer “keeping up with the Joneses” but “getting away from the Kundelungus”, ever more dependent on their (imported) cars … just raise gas prices to European levels and see what happens.
Having agreed (in a way) it is about population pressure and established (I hope) that running away, though natural, is not a long-term solution, I think the problem is twofold.
The “diminishing returns” curve is not new but still impressive. Really, how much do you need?
I think this is what M. Durocher meant – the ability to recognize what is enough or, in blunt terms,
the Kynic quality of being content.
Take the Affirmative Action Americans: Their living standard overtook the Swedish one around 1985. Are they content?(trick question)
– Diogenes may be elegant, but unfortunately as un-Darwinian as a twat hatter.
Second, once you can no longer expand, there are altogether three ways:
1) WAR
2) generalized Malthusian misery, famine and pestilence (food production is not usually the limiting factor in developed countries; humans react to the breakdown of their personal perimeter with aimless violence, substance abuse and a host of other things; rats eat their young)
3) a modus vivendi
IOW, how have peoples that could or would not expand dealt with this problem?
(a question everybody thinking about “peace”, “sustainability” or anything “social” bumps into)
– The German model: State-as-religion, work ethic (non-Calvinist), obedience and, above all, discipline. You are free to find that blah, but it undoubtedly works.
– The Japanese model: Similar to the German, but older and more refined; art from the Edo period is unsurpassed, as was repression complete with secret police and sword control. Far less agreeable for the average peon than the German.
– The Chinese model: Fascinating aspects … ever since Ch´in Shi-Huang Ti unified the Empire under Heaven and instated the Public Service Exam – 2500 years! – they have selected for intelligence, industry and conformity, so self-centered they abdicated dominion of the IndoPacific
when it was theirs to take under Zheng He; what becomes of their “social credit” system remains to be seen but their rise is inevitable – as is the US war on them.
(in all these cases the coevolution of religion and society is interesting)
To sum up, you need a reasonably intelligent, domesticated, homogeneous, no-too-high-testosterone populace with a pillar-of-the-state religion stressing complacency.
Lasciate ogni speranza, America 😀
Actually, I think this relates to whether or not a country is ruled by an insular extractive elite.
Suppose you double the population of a country but everyone is 30% poorer than before. Obviously, that’s very bad for the people given the huge rise in poverty.
However, from the perspective of a ruling extractive elite, the total wealth of the country is (0.7 * 2.0 = 1.4) 40% greater than before. So if a fixed-size elite is just skimming off a big chunk of everything from the top, they’re 40% wealthier. Sounds great to them! (This simple incentive structure may obviously also be enhanced by all sorts of political or military/strategic objectives.)
So whereas the ruling elite in China for various reasons, both positive and negative, seems to focus on keeping the population roughly stable and raising per capita income as rapidly as possible, the American ruling elite is more concerned with raising the total wealth of the country even if the per capita income of most ordinary individuals is stagnant or even declining.
This is not an encouraging situation.
Meanwhile, no one should be surprised that the perspective of economists is closely associated with who pays their salaries and controls their grants. After all, isn’t personal economic self-interest the fundamental assumption of modern economics?
Well, maybe all is not lost.
DNA Watson – always good for a soundbyte – dropped a little heresy the other day to the effect that maybe – just maybe – the entire bell curve is necessary for society to function because
“the smart do not an army make” ;b
IIRC Aristoteles held that states, “like tools and animals”, had a “natural size” above and below which they lost their functional qualities.
A few years later Peter Prince Kropotkin (Tsar´s butler and aristo-anarchist) took up the idea and refined it … anything bigger than the polis (or duchy, in more Germanic terms) is of inner necessity unfree because accountability is lost (It seems to be a biological threshold like the maximum number of 12 for informal hierarchies – Otto Koenig).
This particular little utopia is charming and engaging on many levels …
Growth by mitosis, making big wars and borders pointless (sure there would be wars but really surgical ones for a change, local and without undue waste of potences and resources).
Ostrakismos (lest the wokies get funny ideas, this is a conditio sine qua non; Solon´s – not Drakon´s – law included the death penalty for joblessness (i.e. lack of provable income) and was renewed thrice explicitly because it was “very good”)
GREATLY sped up evolution of thought, science, technology, economics and politics.
Problems of currency, language and measurements can be overcome as we have seen.
(except for the metric system, Roman Law and a few other window dressings)
Speaking of currency, the hard one was a check.
Philipp II still had France prostrate before him “si no falta el dinero”.
Since then, things have gotten a little out of hand. Easy credit has given us gratuitous wars, debt servitude and unchecked YKW power as well as the reintroduction of “salting the earth”.
Small may be beautiful, but the fiscally, socially and environmentally responsible (“sustainable” in Newspeak) have ALWAYS been punished by the irresponsible, desperate grasshoppers
(teste Paul Ehrlich and Hulagu Khan ;b)
And I will not deny economics of size in science and tech.
Still … 🙂
In the bad old days when forced bussing was the rage, Wilmington School District estimated that a semblance of civilisation (in class) could, with effort, be upheld up to roughly 10%.
From there it was consistently downward til 40%, above which there was no discernible difference to 100% black.
The numbers seem more or less to hold, though the Obongo Effeck, Ferguson Effeck, Dissperate Impeck, General Disspeck and maybe other ecks have lowered the thresholds.
(e.g. a “free range” one of not having a teacher look over your shoulder at all times)
The consequence is clear:
Whatever you do, do NOT disperse but QUARANTINE them!
– This runs counter to the prevailing orthodoxy the reason the Sons of O´Bummer are so stupid and violent is they are traumatized by the presence of other SOBs.
(the actual reasoning in Brown vs Education – I shit you not)
But no improvement has ever been shown from integration – not in detail (to the groids themselves) nor to the system (educational outcomes, violent crime, corruption and other expressions of culture) – quite the contrary.
(I will not ride the Reverse Midas Touch Theory down to total segregation; universities should be open, just subject to a uniform lower cutoff IQ of 115 – meaning Greater Cuckamonga Community College if White male – translating to black enrollment of 2 or 3 per mil. I think we could all live with that. O´Bummer would have just made it, BTW 😉 )
May 16, 2019 at 12:07 pm GMT • 600 Words
@TG
Close but no cigar (I mean, of COURSE Malthus was right 🙂 )
Marx already noted the higher living standard of the American worker but could not for the life of him see the obvious: The American worker, if miserable enough, could always opt for eating paleo, wearing expensive fur and knocking up Injun princesses while the European could not.
– All your shining examples are of this (highly non-stationary!) kind of what I might call “adiabatic” expansion – no resistance translates to no friction and selection is by external influences.
Both emigration and expansion select for the assertive and continue to do so as long as the expansion lasts.
As a result the quintessential American is the robber baron.
(“What isn´t nailed down is mine. What I can pry loose isn´t nailed down.” – ascribed to J. P. Morgan)
Hence the hystero-epileptic American reaction to any check on expansion – they actually believe it is blasphemy(!).
Thanks to this mechanism the US is neither a “nation” nor a “society” but a bubble without internal structure that will inevitably go the way of Little Britain – collapse unto itself, saddled with a shitload of useless eaters and bar anything anyone would want to buy.
It has begun – the American Dream is no longer “keeping up with the Joneses” but “getting away from the Kundelungus”, ever more dependent on their (imported) cars … just raise gas prices to European levels and see what happens.
Having agreed (in a way) it is about population pressure and established (I hope) that running away, though natural, is not a long-term solution, I think the problem is twofold.
The “diminishing returns” curve is not new but still impressive. Really, how much do you need?
I think this is what M. Durocher meant – the ability to recognize what is enough or, in blunt terms,
the Kynic quality of being content.
Take the Affirmative Action Americans: Their living standard overtook the Swedish one around 1985. Are they content?(trick question)
– Diogenes may be elegant, but unfortunately as un-Darwinian as a twat hatter.
Second, once you can no longer expand, there are altogether three ways:
1) WAR
2) generalized Malthusian misery, famine and pestilence (food production is not usually the limiting factor in developed countries; humans react to the breakdown of their personal perimeter with aimless violence, substance abuse and a host of other things; rats eat their young)
3) a modus vivendi
IOW, how have peoples that could or would not expand dealt with this problem?
(a question everybody thinking about “peace”, “sustainability” or anything “social” bumps into)
– The German model: State-as-religion, work ethic (non-Calvinist), obedience and, above all, discipline. You are free to find that blah, but it undoubtedly works.
– The Japanese model: Similar to the German, but older and more refined; art from the Edo period is unsurpassed, as was repression complete with secret police and sword control. Far less agreeable for the average peon than the German.
– The Chinese model: Fascinating aspects … ever since Ch´in Shi-Huang Ti unified the Empire under Heaven and instated the Public Service Exam – 2500 years! – they have selected for intelligence, industry and conformity, so self-centered they abdicated dominion of the IndoPacific
when it was theirs to take under Zheng He; what becomes of their “social credit” system remains to be seen but their rise is inevitable – as is the US war on them.
(in all these cases the coevolution of religion and society is interesting)
To sum up, you need a reasonably intelligent, domesticated, homogeneous, no-too-high-testosterone populace with a pillar-of-the-state religion stressing complacency.
Lasciate ogni speranza, America 😀
Actually, I think this relates to whether or not a country is ruled by an insular extractive elite.
Suppose you double the population of a country but everyone is 30% poorer than before. Obviously, that’s very bad for the people given the huge rise in poverty.
However, from the perspective of a ruling extractive elite, the total wealth of the country is (0.7 * 2.0 = 1.4) 40% greater than before. So if a fixed-size elite is just skimming off a big chunk of everything from the top, they’re 40% wealthier. Sounds great to them! (This simple incentive structure may obviously also be enhanced by all sorts of political or military/strategic objectives.)
So whereas the ruling elite in China for various reasons, both positive and negative, seems to focus on keeping the population roughly stable and raising per capita income as rapidly as possible, the American ruling elite is more concerned with raising the total wealth of the country even if the per capita income of most ordinary individuals is stagnant or even declining.
This is not an encouraging situation.
Meanwhile, no one should be surprised that the perspective of economists is closely associated with who pays their salaries and controls their grants. After all, isn’t personal economic self-interest the fundamental assumption of modern economics?
Well, maybe all is not lost.
DNA Watson – always good for a soundbyte – dropped a little heresy the other day to the effect that maybe – just maybe – the entire bell curve is necessary for society to function because
“the smart do not an army make” ;b
IIRC Aristoteles held that states, “like tools and animals”, had a “natural size” above and below which they lost their functional qualities.
A few years later Peter Prince Kropotkin (Tsar´s butler and aristo-anarchist) took up the idea and refined it … anything bigger than the polis (or duchy, in more Germanic terms) is of inner necessity unfree because accountability is lost (It seems to be a biological threshold like the maximum number of 12 for informal hierarchies – Otto Koenig).
This particular little utopia is charming and engaging on many levels …
Growth by mitosis, making big wars and borders pointless (sure there would be wars but really surgical ones for a change, local and without undue waste of potences and resources).
Ostrakismos (lest the wokies get funny ideas, this is a conditio sine qua non; Solon´s – not Drakon´s – law included the death penalty for joblessness (i.e. lack of provable income) and was renewed thrice explicitly because it was “very good”)
GREATLY sped up evolution of thought, science, technology, economics and politics.
Problems of currency, language and measurements can be overcome as we have seen.
(except for the metric system, Roman Law and a few other window dressings)
Speaking of currency, the hard one was a check.
Philipp II still had France prostrate before him “si no falta el dinero”.
Since then, things have gotten a little out of hand. Easy credit has given us gratuitous wars, debt servitude and unchecked YKW power as well as the reintroduction of “salting the earth”.
Small may be beautiful, but the fiscally, socially and environmentally responsible (“sustainable” in Newspeak) have ALWAYS been punished by the irresponsible, desperate grasshoppers
(teste Paul Ehrlich and Hulagu Khan ;b)
And I will not deny economics of size in science and tech.
Still … 🙂
In the bad old days when forced bussing was the rage, Wilmington School District estimated that a semblance of civilisation (in class) could, with effort, be upheld up to roughly 10%.
From there it was consistently downward til 40%, above which there was no discernible difference to 100% black.
The numbers seem more or less to hold, though the Obongo Effeck, Ferguson Effeck, Dissperate Impeck, General Disspeck and maybe other ecks have lowered the thresholds.
(e.g. a “free range” one of not having a teacher look over your shoulder at all times)
The consequence is clear:
Whatever you do, do NOT disperse but QUARANTINE them!
– This runs counter to the prevailing orthodoxy the reason the Sons of O´Bummer are so stupid and violent is they are traumatized by the presence of other SOBs.
(the actual reasoning in Brown vs Education – I shit you not)
But no improvement has ever been shown from integration – not in detail (to the groids themselves) nor to the system (educational outcomes, violent crime, corruption and other expressions of culture) – quite the contrary.
(I will not ride the Reverse Midas Touch Theory down to total segregation; universities should be open, just subject to a uniform lower cutoff IQ of 115 – meaning Greater Cuckamonga Community College if White male – translating to black enrollment of 2 or 3 per mil. I think we could all live with that. O´Bummer would have just made it, BTW 😉 )
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