Those who show up
Hi everyone, sorry for neglecting the blog. I blame glycine: I'm the descendant of a long line of night-owls, but I'm able to sleep early now for the first time ever. Alas I've always been a late-night writer, and my healthy lifestyle was getting in the way of my blogging. Trade-offs. I should think of something.
Also apologies to my commenters: the comment notification system was broken so I had a backlog of unapproved comments: they're all online now.
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Years ago, back in the times before Bioleninism and all that, I made a name for myself in the intellectual parts of the right-wing blogosphere (≈neoreaction) in a large part because I was the best at categorizing the different strands of dissident thought. Back then I said there was by and large three different factions, the religious, the nationalist and the technological, what then Nick Land rebranded as the trichotomy of theonomist, ethno-nationalist and techno-commercialist.
That was 2013 though, and a lot has happened since. Most of it bad. Some good things too: Russia grew a spine, annexed Crimea and kicked USG out of Syria. China grew two spines, destroyed their liberal fifth-column, is forcibly assimilating their native muslims and is fast approaching military parity with USG.
And yes, Trump happened. That was fun. It unleashed a renaissance of right-wing memery. But Trump also failed to get anything done, he's likely to lose the next election, and now not even the memes are safe, as the CIA has co-opted 4chan talent for export, as seen in Pepe frogs in Hong Kong and Joker thots in Lebanon. Not cool.
https://twitter.com/thespandrell/status/1188656046220267520
I won't say that Trump killed neoreaction. It wasn't him. It was just time. 12 years have passed since Moldbug started blogging. Hell, 8 years have passed since I started this blog. Have things got any better? No, they're getting steadily worse. Politics is getting more toxic, with the NYT feeling so cocky they outright admitted the Deep State rules and there's nothing mere electoral politics can do about it. The culture is getting ever more toxic, with now even (ostensibly) straight males declaring their pronouns before talking. And most importantly, Demographics are getting worse, both in macro-HBD (race replacement) and micro-HBD (dysgenics within each race) terms.
https://twitter.com/Cicerone973/status/1144622840584572929
Follow this guy, by the way. If you ever have a good mood and feel optimistic he'll solve that for you fast. All he does is show birth rate data across the world. And it's not looking good. Not good at all.
Yes, I'm a demographic pessimist. I see the above figures and see how the Western world is slowly becoming Brazil, half white, half black. But Brazil itself is not stable; white people are having less babies than black people there. Brazil is slowly becoming something like South Africa, 10% white, 90% black. But again, South Africa is not stable itself, is it? Birth rates are different, and if that didn't suffice, blacks there are outright murdering white people and chasing them off the land. The actual endgame is actually worse than South Africa, which still has (people tell me) some very fine spots, such as Cape Town.
The end game is Haiti. 100% black, and arguably the nastiest, poorest, worst shithole on the face of earth. That's what we're facing if demographic trends keep worsening as they are.
"Oh come on", you may say. It's never going to get that bad. At some point demographic trends self-correct, right? Evolution will run its course. Leftists aren't having children, eventually the differential fertility of conservative people will make sure everyone is based and redpilled.
If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that, I'd be the pope. Yes, Catholics love this argument. Christians, more widely. They have sacrificed a lot to have children and stable families in this society which does everything it can to promote unhappiness and dysfunctional lifestyles. If there is a God, surely at least their sacrifices will win them the future of the species? History will talk about them as ancestors of the next stage of humanity. Right??
Wrong. I'm sorry guys, but evolution doesn't work like that. Yes, sure, evolution is about differential reproduction. Whatever genes make you have more babies in a given environment, spread in the genepool. And whatever genes do the opposite, make it marginally harder for you to reproduce, disappear from the genepool. So yes, on the face of it, "genes that make you want children" are by definition being promoted by natural selection. The argument, as explained by promoters such as Anatoly Karlin, is that humans until now have been fruitful and multiplied perfectly well through a basic motivation: seeking sexual pleasure. But that motivation doesn't work anymore in an environment with easy contraception, so the future belongs to people with psychological traits that make them enjoy family life.
Does it work like that, though? Are there any genes that "make you want children"? Does the brain work like that? The human brain is complicated, you see, but it is also an evolution of the more basic mammal brain, and its circuitry must follow roughly the same pathways. And last time I checked all mammals reproduce exactly the same way. The male produce quadrillions of sperm every minute, and are at the hunt of every ovulating female. The moment they find one they jump onto her, copulate semi-forcibly, and babies ensue. Yeah, this pretty much includes humans.
The idea that humans are going to single-handedly evolve, over single-digit generations, a completely different pattern of reproduction to replace one which has been functional for 60 million years strikes me as pretty wild wishful thinking. Not that it's not an interesting thought. Karlin himself recently linked to a post by a guy called Alexander Turok. The post is titled "The Age of Malthusian Industrialism", and man, that was interesting. I'm a fan of this sort of down-to-earth sci-fi. And while Turok's Malthdustrial world isn't very exciting, it surely is a productive line of speculation.
So Turok's idea is that if this idea of natural selection fixing the demographic problem by itself ends up working, eventually birth rates will rise above replacement, and so we will hit the carrying capacity of the planet at some point. So, Malthusianism. Too many people, the same amount of land, so people keep getting poorer and poorer. Go read Turok's post, he makes some interesting claims about how the economy and society would evolve. He puts very well how this future society will be made of dumber people than today.
If the primary reason fertility is low despite an abundance of resources is because people are trying to climb the latter of social status, trying to get more money and live in a better neighborhood, trying to attract the highest quality of mate, (or quantity of mates) then natural selection will act against those who play this game, promoting the genes of those who do not care about it or those too incompetent to play it well. Though the particularities of “the game” differ by culture, it can be recognizably found in many different cultures, and accounts for the fact that the correlation between fertility and intelligence is negative everywhere.
Supposedly though, at some point of impoverishment, the downward drift of average IQ would stop, as intelligence would begin to pay again. Without welfare and Bioleninist political machines with an incentive to bring ever stupider people into a country in order to lower the cost of clientelism, at some point the drift into Global Haiti ceases to function, and you get some sort of stable equilibrium of, say, 90-95 IQ people. Living in more or less permanent starvation wages and some sort of low-level medieval warfare.
Quite depressing, huh? Well remember, that's a best-case scenario. That's what happens if that Conservatives-inherit-the-earth mantra actually succeeds. Remember the trichotomy I mentioned at the beginning? Well the above scenario is what theonomists are for. They won't say it, they probably never thought it through that much. But that's undoubtedly what a Theonomist Revolution against progressivism would entail.
But again, this is a somewhat depressing but still acceptable scenario. This assumes most populations in the First World remain a less intelligent but still recognizable version of what they are today. History will go on, and perhaps with a downward IQ correction men will be men, women will be women, children will be children, and if you're into that, people will be more religious than today. Global Mexico, in a way. Well, what Mexico was before the Narcos took over. Theonomists would enjoy that world. Eth-nats... hey, they can secure a future for white children.
But again, I just don't see it. The Kuwaitis aren't very smart; their birth rate is in 1.6. The Arabs across Europe aren't replacing themselves. The Mexicans in the US are also below replacement! Even if, and this is a big if, there was some easily assemblable collection of genes by which people would love having children far above their love for playing status games in a modern society with Tinder and cheap contraception, odds are by the time those genes have starting to spread, in a few generations time, 90% of humanity is already African. And so, again, Global Haiti.
"But wait", you may also say. "Africans in the US aren't having that many babies either. Maybe the high-speed train of African fertility is stopped during this century, and after that evolution does have enough time, even if it takes thousands of years, for Malthdustrianism to happen". Well sure, that's a possibility. But why are so sure that those Malthdustrian genes will evolve at the same speed among all human populations? What if it's Africans the first to evolve the pattern of "reproducing by liking babies"? Which by the way sounds perfectly likely, if the arrow of natural selection is towards promoting "people too incompetent to play status games".
So that's it? Either Global Haiti or Global Mexico?
Well not quite. Tech-comms have something to say too. Humans aren't all dumb, not yet. What if there's a technological way out of the demographic crisis? Well, there kinda is. And it's a year old actually. Has everyone forgot about He Jiankui?
He’s still missing, by the way. Not arrested. Not detained. Not on trail. Just… disappeared. Somehow I don’t think he’s sitting idle in a room. China is not known for wasting scientific talent.
Genetic sequencing is advancing fast these years. Perhaps the only thing which is still progressing fast after computing’s Moore’s Law stopped working 10 years ago. We already know dozens of genes involved in increasing IQ, and we’ll sure know of hundreds, maybe thousands. It seems likely that within our lifetimes we’ll have the capability of safely increasing the IQ of IVF embryos by 10-20 points. Would you take that? Perhaps not. Would that Chinese Tiger Mom-in-becoming living across the street take the chance? Of course she will. Do you want your own kids to be the dumbest at class? I thought so.
The bottleneck here would be IVF, which is still a rather slow and ineffective process, although perhaps with some room for improvement. That bottleneck could be solved, though, with a technology which is still quite far away. Strangely so, given the obvious incentives to develop it in what is effectively a feminist world. Ectogenesis, i.e. artificial wombs. Don’t women complain about how unfair it is they get pregnant and lose all that time to build their careers, while men only bust a nut and keep climbing that dear corporate ladder? Fear no more, ladies. Just put your eggs in this machine, and 9 months later you’ll get your baby delivered to your home. Free delivery if you sign up for Amazon Prime.
If this is sounds like Brave New World, well yes, that’s pretty much what that was about. Aldous Huxley came from a long line of distinguished biologists and couldn’t see things like TV and computers coming. Eventually he got into drugs, but I’m sure he died still puzzled by why ectogenesis didn’t become a thing during his lifetime. It stands to reason that eventually it will. And once artificial wombs are reliable and affordable, in a world with CRISPR, you don’t really need families anymore. Anybody can ‘produce’ children, raise them in ‘villages’ (because it takes a village!) and just be done with the whole problem. Progressivism taken to its logical conclusion. It’s better conclusion, the way that progressives of the 1900s saw it, the production of a race of ever more rational and free humans. Yes, it's kinda messed up, but it has its logic. The twisted mechanics that led to our present Biological Leninist politics were, in the end, just the result of a lack of state authority. That may resolve itself quite soon. Again, with modern technology.
So yep, let me offer you a new Trichotomy. Global Haiti. Global Mexico. Or Brave New World. Pick your poison. I know mine.
108 comments
"Your know yours"? Naughty, naughty, Spandrell.
> if the arrow of natural selection is towards promoting “people too incompetent to play status games” That is not necessarily incompetence. I can imagine two alternatives 1) Selecting for people who are not really that interested in status games. Highly functioning autists. But, empirically, there is absolutely no evidence of HFAs having more kids than the average and my guesstimate is that they are probably having much fewer. So scratch this. 2) The status ladder of a community could be based on pretty much anything. You are making the classic mistake of equating it with economic class, or at least Turok is. It does not have to be more money and better neighborhood. It could be anything. And one of those anything could be linking status to the number of children. Once any group evolves that they win. This does not have to be a stupid group. It could be religious people. It could be people who see many kids as a sign of masculinity, big dick energy. It could be people who see many kids as a sign of being a superior mom. And so on. We need a new religion that assigns high status to smart people having a lot of smart kids. One that tells people to respect women not for their achievements but for the achievements of their sons. We could start with a conspiracy, that recruits high-status high-IQ men from large-ish (3-4 kids) families and explains them that they need to go to the media, present their mothers to the public and heap praise on them for despite having been straight-A smart students, they still decided to stay at home and raise a family. Basically start a cult lionizing the mothers of successful smart sons. Status can be hacked. Whatever already high status people praise becomes high status.
I'm the guy who said we need a new religion, remember. But re:
. I don't believe this is true. I can't be anything. Money is not 'anything'. Money is 'everything'. A society long term can't avoid valuing wealth. Not a functional one.
A functional society also can't avoid valuing having kids, and valuing instilling some amount of warrior-masculine values in men and some amount of sexual repression in women and some sense of loyalty to homeland and a bunch of other things either. Okay, not anything. But a lot of things. And having kids, and ideally smart people, elites having kids is something functional socities do value and it does not sound impossible to engineer it. Spartans and some Roman poets hated the idea of valuing wealth because they figured it undermines valuing the warrior ethos. And they had a point. Money isn't everything in the sense that it can buy everything. You said that you see status as the thing you can get other things you want with. I.e. a parallel currency. Or more properly The Currency, with money, currency being a subset of it. The point is it is entirely possible and in fact historically normal that some things cannot be had for money, but only for (other kinds of) status. Does the idea of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venal\_office weird you out, that you could just purchase the position of being a judge in France or a military officer commission in Britain? I.e. power? Interestingly, the idea that it is a bad thing and power should be purchased by merit which boils down to status as status is pretty much the public perception of merit coincided with the rise of the industrial revolution and the modern form of capitalism, while private business became more narrowly profit-oriented, public life less. But a feudal knight or a Roman patrician would also have had a dim view on purchasing offices of power. So offices of power are example that a lot of societies thought should be purchased by status i.e. perceived merit, not money. This is why money isn't everything. The more a society resembles a military or a church, the less money matters. Which is not saying it would be a good thing if it resembled either of them very much. But it should probably resemble both a bit.
Spartan and Roman elites were also (eventually) famously infertile. Bad example. Our world today evolved out of the world of yesterday. There were peoples who didn't value money as much. They were all destroyed by the Anglo merchant war machine. You may think that's contingent. I don't think it was.
Agree, I think looking at status and money, or even saying money can "buy" you status is missing something. Money can buy you things and service, it is trivially a measure of value, and that's how most think of it. But I think it is also a form of status, abstracted and anonymised so it can be transferred, both between individuals, but also for a single person when moving to a new social circle where the history of this person is unknown and where the status may depend on very different things. Think of earning money in an "immoral" way (for your current social circle), then moving away, starting afresh with default respectability but a nice bucket of cash. It can be a valid strategy... The more mobile, atomized, people are, the more your social circles are fluid and your history lost or hazy. Traditional status is more and more lost in this context, but anonymized transferable status (money) is not. That's why you will find less moral standards and more greed in cities than small town (or at least people will not attempt much to hide amorality), and I see the chinese social credit as a way to re-establish a non-local, government controlled, status that can compete with money even for atomized, mobile, people. Traditional status can not do that, not anymore.
"...Spartan and Roman elites were also (eventually) famously infertile. Bad example..." Not necessarily. You may have missed something. Why did they not have children? I assume that it was their Women that screwed things up and refused to have enough children but we are on the verge, only need a little cash and some ruthless experimentation, of having artificial wombs and Japanese have already proven Female skin cells can be turned into eggs that can be fertilized with Male sperm to...make kids. Many Men would love to have kids and are fed up with the trajectory of Women's behavior. Very soon they could have total control and how many Women would turn down a few thousand bucks for a few skin cell scrapes??? Not many I bet. Especially if Men decided to cease being donkeys for them and turning over all control of their lives if they have kids with them. Baby mice created from sperm, without an egg http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/mouse-sperm-no-egg/ Mice embryos from skin cells and by 2037 human embryos from skin cells http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/05/mice-embryos-from-skin-cells-and-by-2037-human-embryos-from-skin-cells.html Baby mice made from skin cells and the eggs were made entirely outside body in a dish and procedure should work for humans too http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/10/baby-mice-created-from-skin-cells-and.htmlhttp://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/15421734/artificial-womb-fetus-biobag-uterus-lamb-sheep-birth-premie-preterm-infant I think Men could fairly easily be converted to the idea that having a decent number of kids is high status.
Worth testing.
> They were all destroyed by the Anglo merchant war machine. Have you read "God and Gold" by Walter Russell Mead? That's one of the primary theses of the book.
The most interesting question of all this what He Jiankui is doing now? And I really like your blog, maybe this one mentioned before but. What about Chinese century? Yes whites are dying out and becoming dumb. But can China takes the estafette? why Haiti and Mexico, when it can be China? I think they are the people who actually will bring techno solution of our problem. Or I am wrong?
China's birth rate problems are worse than ours, and has shown no indication of knowing how to solve them.
Well, at least they start CRISPR experiments. Maybe social credit score will introduce positive eugenics, i think that general social credit score will correlate with IQ
Why? Their case seems to be different than ours: they have created the problem AFAIK via the One Child Policy working a bit too well, so they just need to do the opposite of that.
No, Taiwan, Korea or Singapore have the same problem with very different governments. It's just Chinese culture in a modern urban environment. Doesn't work.
Pandas don't reproduce in captivity.
Restore patriarchy, Make Women Property Again, fertility rises, reproduction becomes net eugenic. Why indulge fantasies of artificial wombs when it's as simple as this? https://blog.jim.com/economics/patriarchy-and-fertility/
Simple? You think that's simple? Why isn't everyone doing it then.
To restore the greatness of western civilization, create Adamic man, conquer space and so on, we will need a new religion. To roll back women's rights, all we need is for the religion we have to die. Patriarchy is what men naturally do. Political collapse and/or civil war will cure the women problem, though it will introduce the warlord problem, and will postpone biological ascension for a long time. Global Haiti requires continued total and global leftist dominance for a few centuries. Does American empire look that durable to you? All it takes is one white group to successfully break away, and that group's descendants will come to rule the planet.
Because there's a big gay empire with big gay missiles that will drone-strike your patriarchal weddings in the name of human rights. US military intervention slots strikingly well onto a global fertility map. The homo religion demands the destruction of evil, and fertile patriarchy is evil. When the empire is weak, and people no longer fear its guns, we will see patriarchy start to crop back up on the fringes.
Because if they tried, USG would carpet bomb them. Remember USG invaded Afghanistan because Afghanis oppressed the rights of 9 year old girls to learn how to put a condom on a banana. Second reason is that we need a new religion. Jim has one, one that not only is firm but also easily adaptable. The world today is Leftist, but doesn't have to be. If all the men in society decided to institute patriarchy, it would happen. No matter the technology, men still have the edge when it comes to violence. Take the white pill
Make Women Property Again Who told you they aren't currently, by the way? It's their new proprietors (the State, let's say. Who controls it, actually) that have waged a relentless war on their former proprietors (men in their birth, or marriage-acquired, family). Do you think the outcome of that struggle for property can be reversed, the Cathedral outwitted? Well, good luck: a lot of it.
"...Why indulge fantasies of artificial wombs when it’s as simple as this?..." It's much easier to use technology to CHANGE society than it is to change society itself. I read a set of books by James Dale Davidson and Sir Rees-Mogg that had a profound effect on my thinking about this. A simple example is how gunpowder blew away the Feudal State. It wasn't that Knights didn't want to keep Knighting and running down the peasants they couldn't because they, and their castles, were blasted away by gunpowder. Technology CREATES society. They call this meta-politics. The idea being that technology determines violence and the power of individuals vs. the State and this determines the state of society. VERY powerful books. Very powerful ideas. Women now control society by controlling breeding. What happens when they lose that power???? What hold will they have??? They could protest until they were blue in the face and everyone would just ignore them. Women would be married into an already formed Male run family and to stick around would HAVE to be good Mothers and not be such a pain in the ass. At first there would be great resistance but Woman would come around because...they would have to. There would be no choice if they wanted to be a part of a family. Even those that did not use the tech would benefit because... they would know it's there if they became too troublesome. Eventually being seen as a good Mother would be THE thing to be. All others would be considered outcast. This is an extremely powerful idea that is coming soon. How many young Men are just completely fed up with Western Women and their unending petty harassments and foibles??? It's a LOT. What if a "fund me" started up to make artificial wombs and eggs from skin cells came into being? What if it only cost a dollar to get in line for lower prices later? How many Men would pay a dollar to control their destiny, forever??? A lot of what Jim says is nonsense. Beat Women or spend all your time trying to dominate them. What a waste of time. Better to just go around the whole problem and solve it for good. Make it in THEIR interest to cooperate. Waning there's a lot of financial advice in these books that didn't pan out but I think their basic idea about technology and society have proven to be sound. If you wish to understand BIG long term events these books are well worth reading. They are also big on cycles like the 4th turning fellows. James Dale Davidson and Sir Rees-Mogg "Blood in the Streets: Investment Profits in a World Gone Mad" (1987) The Great Reckoning: How the World Will Change in the Depression of the 1990's (1994) The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age (1999)
Correct.
In the religions of the Bible, men own property. Women don't. When England was having its high fertility, it followed that form of Christianity. When it kicked that form of Christianity out, fertility immediately started to decline. By property, I mean land. Current governments have limited fertility by limiting land ownership in the first place, and secondarily making it insecure by means of endorsing divorce rape, by enclosing the common lands (which was real property under a shares or corporate type of arrangement) Land taxes divorced from production, and civil forfeiture have also made land ownership less desirable. Opening land ownership to foreigners has put excessive competition in play, making it unavailable to many natives who would like to breed. The Bible also covers this. No ownership of land unless you are a citizen. Foreigners are renters only. It is as simple as going back to land ownership being limited to males. The Muslims didn't do this, and that is a major cause of volatility among them, not the polygamy thing people keep harping on. Jim of Jim's blog has many good ideas, but he wants to have his cake and eat it too. Theonomy doesn't end up in Global Mexico. Theonomy can be as high tech as the host population IQ can support. The Amish are no dummies. They may look low tech, but they aren't. They have their own alternative technologies they've been developing.
Freeze-dried families are an interesting alternative, but men still want sex. Until androids are indistinguishable from the real thing, women will still carry some power.
We are glad you are back! I have some comments in my clumsy non-native English. Well, firstly, glycine is most probably a placebo. It seems like a very small amount of it actually passes the blood-brain barrier. So perhaps it is not the biochemistry that has helped you, but the pure faith. (Btw is it a some Chinese custom to consume glycine that you've borrowed? I've lived with the Chinese students in a dorm, they've devoured much of it.) Secondly. Do you think it is productive to see the NRx as a Trichotomy rather than a Trinity? The most concerning problem is a rapid degradation of HBD. Generally, I believe that if the quality of humans is high (and they are based), they'll guess how to tune their society in an acceptable way. Therefore due to the critical situation we live in, we don't have to waste much time on arguing how exactly they will live. We have to do all the best to secure the production of new intelligent humans (better if also redpilled). The Entho-Nationalists and the Theonomists do this. Surely not enough, but they do. If all neoreactionaries studenly become TechComm, what are they supposed to do? Most of people do not work with CRISPR-Cas. But their children maybe will. And the total desperation you promote doesn't help to have children, you know. And yes — we still understand very little about the psychogenetics. As you write, many things are to be discovered. It demands time — and the new generations. But the most problematic part of this Brave New World scenario is the fact that it is bad for children to raise them without true families. Being a good mother is not just bearing a baby. I'm not sure those baby-buyers will be good parents. And the orphanages will be a disaster. Even having good genetics, the GM-children still might develope to barely functioning unhappy creatures because of lack of real family. See the Romanian orphans. So if your techocratic plan of 'CRISPReaction' succeed, the other brunches of the based Trinity might save at least some of these children embracing the traditions that have been proven by time to be functional. (But yes I do see a fundamental problem the Theonomists might have with the ectogenesis. But I don't think they'll ever seize enough power to totally ban it)
Chinese students devour glycine? First time I hear it. I got the idea from a white friend. I don't "promote" desperation. I just write about things as I see them. If you think I'm wrong, that's what comments are for. I have kids myself, and they're not CRISPR super humans. Wouldn't mind having CRISPR grandkids down the line, though. If Theonomists jump on the CRISPR wagon but make a point of raising kids in loving families, great for them. I'm sure quite a lot of people won't do that though. Most people these days don't seem to get any enjoyment from raising kids. They drop them on daycare at a few months old, barely see them at all once the kids go to school. I'm pretty sure that absent social shaming about being bad parents, if people had the choice to have their kids interned in (classy) institutions and took them home only on weekends, a whole lot of people would do exactly that. You may think that's evil; but that's humanity for you. If we want to change that, well... I'm sure there's a CRISPR formula for domesticity too.
You say that the traditional way of having children is barely changeable in the reasonable timescale. So the solution is the artificial wombs plus gene editing. I say that the traditional way of being raised as a child is barely changeable too. And the tech-com alone doesn't provide the good parenting, which is necessary. I was incorrect saying about some "promoting". But the call for picking a single one 'poison' is prescriptive, not descriptive, and too strict in my mind.
Theonomists will waste brain cells on ectogenesis when it becomes an actual reality. Until then, it seems like a waste of resources when the theonomist way has been time tested and is fairly easy. Why bother banning it? The rules in the theonomist system already prevent ectogenesis and any new technology from being abused.
Blacks in America are having kids though. Despite millions of abortion the black to white ratio is now 4 to 1 from a meagre 10 to 1 in the 50s.
No it's not.
Blacks are 13% when Whites are about 65% ish so close enough to 4 to 1. Weren't they 10% of a 90% white america post ww2??
Out of curiousity, I've checked out Haiti's women fertility rate. It's 2.9 babies per woman in 2016, and it indeed used to be well above 4 in the nineties. It's going down; slowly. but surely. And it's going down in every part of undeveloped world, and it seems the spread of modern entertainment (primarily TV) is the main factor. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/13/why-are-birthrates-falling-around-the-world-in-a-word-television/ Speculations what will happen are unreliable, and I think there are many more possible scenarios.
Lol. Give the women (especially the women. Even the snake in the Bible knew they are the best targets) tablets to take selfies of themselves which a large-enough cohort of "sisters" will compliment and up-thumb, give them some money (you can print as much of it as you want, after all), and they stop wanting children. Equate men wanting children with rape, which of course is the worst of the worst of crimes even when it's falsely alleged. Childbirth problem solved for the élite.
To be honest, the hypothetical argument I hear most isn't that conservatives will out breed degenerates. It is that at some point the number of liberals/retards in society will reach a critical point and we will then have a "collapse" in the style of the Late Bronze Age or the Western Roman Empire, which will then allow right-wing values to be in power again. Is that wishful thinking? Probably, but at the same time, every decaying/degenerate state in the past has fallen in due time. Why the hell wouldn't ours as well?
Because there are no barbarians at the gates anymore. Who would conquer us?
The US Empire looks around it, and whenever its eyes meet a client state, the client state says "Look, liberal democracy, human rights, we are good little copies of America, no?" And the Empire gives a little nod and turns elsewhere. If you take the word of the subjects, the subjects are cucked, even their minds are owned. But it's curious to me that every country that can plausibly hide behind a gigantic pile of guns does not sing the Homo tune. Some think they have enough guns, like Ghaddafi, and the US knocks them over, some actually do have enough guns. Putin speaks openly of the death of the liberal idea and his cops beat up gays. China is, well, China. Every country that could theoretically resist US force has ended up with a very different style of government than the Empire. Once US force becomes weaker, the Empire's "liberal democracy" is going to disappear like smoke. Russia and China don't want to conquer us, but many places will end up with some very barbarian governments that do. They won't have gotten any better at fighting wars, but the Empire will have gotten a whole lot worse.
Well that doesn't mean that it won't collapse. All a lack of barbarians means is that there will be nothing to replace and rejuvenate the society when it does collapse. Which, as I think you are implying, would be a horrifying outcome. Your question is a good one, I can't think of too many civilizations off the top of my head that rejuvenated themselves without the interference of an outside force. Maybe Rome between the Republic and Empire? If trends continue I almost could see China being that force. Only problem is, China still has a low fertility elite. And that's not even getting into how modern weaponry makes collapse much more dangerous than it was in the past.
"We" could conquer "us". Or more precisely: regime change could be effected either democratically or via a coup of some sort. This is generally true. Currently there is regime change all the time in the third world, but due to the machinations of the "international community", it always fails. Either you get democracy, which collapses quickly when run on a substrate of clannish dumb people, or you get some sort of authoritarian regime, which is undermined by aforementioned State Department. Repeat. The only way out -- sort of -- is a leftwing authoritarian goverment like Cuba. But even that, while far more stable than the average third-world government, is probably not stable over the long term. (Perhaps they will go neocameral in time. The idea is out there, muchachos, if you want it.) But this whole cycle wouldn't happen without America, vampire of the world. So, hope? Well, sort of: the hope is that USG will degenerate substantially in power and influence, so that the "international community" can no longer veto right-wing governments. Then 1000 flowers can bloom, or at least one or two. All it takes is one if what we need is an example.
There weren't any barbarians at the gates at all, and they didn't conquer anything in any meaningful way, there were hostile entities willing to fill a power vacuum but incapable of usurping economic and political power without risking backlash (backlash that they could NOT handle); they moved in and integrated in some ways, and didn't in others. Most of France is, genetically, still Gallo-Roman (a three way mixture between Basque-likes, Celts, and Italians). Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul is a good book on this. You're making this out like there's only three races, Chinese, Whites, and Niggers, but that's simply not the case. A much more likely scenario for the US would be increasing Hispanic power, with Whites securing for themselves certain positions in the new society, a society that the newcomers fundamentally want to harness, not destroy. Even if Mexico and the US suddenly became one entity without significant barriers between them (ignore Canada for a minute), that's still not an end of the world scenario, especially because the current Mexico-US paradigm is one focused on the exploitation of Mexico for labor and drugs by the US rather than small polities (which in any scenario of significant Mexican influx is what would result). Blacks and full-blooded Indians are worth even less in Mexico than they are in the US, and neither form a large majority of the entirety of Mexico. "Global Mexico" is a misnomer, because Mexico isn't homogeneous. Much of the Mexican government wouldn't look out of place walking down a US street, let alone Germany. This doesn't account for the fact that the Mestizos themselves are the descendants of Europeans and Central American Natives, who were capable of very impressive feats despite stoneage technology. The only difference between a Mexican Drug Cartel and a Germanic Tribe (in the Late Roman Empire) is that the former have guns and drugs. The Roman consensus was that the Germanics were too stupid to learn to read and ate raw garlic and onions for every meal out of necessity because cooking was something they were simply incapable of. Assuming that things will continue the way they are now, just increasingly shitty, forever until China wipes out the rest of the planet to build Ghost Cities, is silly; eventually, peak shit will hit and the way things are now will collapse, and things will change at a fundamental level. Not recognizing this is why the Romans didn't see the Medieval period, because after all a bunch of dumb snowniggers can't make anything of value.
I literally said that one future scenario was "Global Mexico" man.
What I'm getting at is that "Global Mexico" implies Mexico NOW, forever. That's what I disagree on, what "Global Mexico" would imply; Mexico NOW won't last the slow collapse of American power. As the Mexican government recedes, Cartels will take over, and continuously move north. Eventually, you'll just get your car licensed at the official Los Zetas DMV, like how ISIS started taking up State activity.
Cartels exist because there's a high-income society just north of them buying those drugs. As US incomes decrease that will pass, and it will be like good old Mexico again.
Reminds me of the poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" by C. P. Cavafy. What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today. Why isn’t anything going on in the senate? Why are the senators sitting there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today. What’s the point of senators making laws now? Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating. Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate, in state, wearing the crown? Because the barbarians are coming today and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader. He’s even got a scroll to give him, loaded with titles, with imposing names. Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold? Because the barbarians are coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians. Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual to make their speeches, say what they have to say? Because the barbarians are coming today and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking. Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? (How serious people’s faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home lost in thought? Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come. And some of our men just in from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.
No, they are inside the gates, not at the gates. The problem is just that they are too low-IQ to make good overlords.
Who would conquer you? I could mention a few candidates out in the periphery. Did the Ming ever heard of the Jurchen? New religion? Why, we have inherited a perfectly good one. CRISP will increase birthrate? Technologies have been around for two generations and people are uninterested. Babies stink, nobody wants them even free. People is buying surgery to avoid having them. What's wrong with Brazil? Beautiful, happy country.
You should put Boomer in your username. Wait, I'll do it for you.
Let's take an extreme scenario: One World, open borders government. What happens by the end of the century? Africans constitute 35% of the world population. That's not even close to South Africa, let alone Haiti.
Pretty close to Brazil, isn't it.
One World, open borders government. That's Their Goal. Basically, there's only the Chinese between the present state of global things, and Their Goal. I don't see the Chinese élite submitting to the Program as abjectly as, for instance, the "European Union" (whose real name should be Occupied and Obedient Union) élite. I also guess they have the IQ and material resources needed to have enough weapons to be able to not submit; they are probably already there, or near to that point. A fatal confrontation might ensue from that, leading to the eclipse of human life in the world. This is a scenario #4 to be put beside Global Haiti and the other two.
If Progressives are in charge they will turn the entire world into Baizuo. It'll be an extinction level event for PoC.
Care to elaborate on why you think it's likely trump will lose the election? I don't even pay attention to it because i think it's a done deal, there is no way any of the democrat nominee losers has a shot. What does your seeing stone reveal?
I certainly agree that dysgenic breeding is a problem. But it is far from the most important problem. For example, Japan is declining, but there will still be a Japan in 100 years. It will have half its current population. Is this somehow intolerable? I can't see why. Well -- actually I can. They might copy us. The big problem is democracy, or more specifically, the leftism that democracy necessarily creates and institutionalizes. In democracy, the quality of the government is tied to the quality of the people. If they are smart and industrious, responsible and law-abiding, you get decent government. (Japan is here. For now.) This lasts until someone out-holies the field and institutes mass immigration of dumb, lazy, irresponsible and law-indifferent aliens. Eventually you get Mexico. Run it long enough and (at least looking at current fertility trends) you get Haiti. But even Haiti has hundreds of smart and industrious people, enough to form a decent government. True, most of them are in Miami. But still. Even Haiti would be fine with an effective and responsible government. The question is how to get it one. Obviously, not "democracy".
You need more than hundreds of smart people to run a govenment; and you need a few million smart people to run an industral economy where infrastructure doesn't collapse and power and water flow well. Speaking of Japan: a Japan with 30 million people would be plenty pleasant, assuming it was independent. But it won't be. Small is weak.
It is true that any modern government needs thousands of men, a lot of them fairly intelligent/hardworking/honest. But they don't need to be locals, unless it's democracy, which obviously is highly biased towards locals. Unclear to me that a government needs locals at all, although they may be in limited instances necessary to have local knowledge. How many smart Congolese were necessary to run the Belgian Congo? Very few, I'd guess. Almost all of it was Europeans.
Regarding Japan: it seems to me that it wasn't very pleasant when it was independent. It has not been since 1945 -- and presumably USG will continue as its sovereign, at least in terms of the nuclear umbrella if not the full Cathedral-compliant clown-world. If this does change, it will be China taking sovereignty. But so long as Japan can prevent any dysgenic-for-them immigration, they'll be fine.
Sovereign China won't be as forgiving.
You visualize a Japan of 30 million and you imagine 30 million young people and infrastructure fully maintained as of today. But most probably it will be a old age home of 5 million working people and 20 million pensioners. Children are happiness, and Japan will be a very sad place. However, it will not be weak, in that post-nuclear age it will be able to defend itself.
Not even that.
Most of the world is Asia, in terms of landmass and especially population. White conservatives are so fixated with Blacks that they always fail to include Asians in the picture. Since white countries are the only ones importing Blacks en masse, there will never be a global Haiti. Eventually Africa will grow to engulf Europe, and North America will become indistinguishable from South America; meanwhile in Asia it will be business as usual. China will return to be the world's foremost power, as it has been for much of human history, engaging in war and trade with its suzerain states. Arabs and Jews will still be Arabs and Jews, keeping alive their own cultures and religions. India will keep doing its own thing. But even if everyone on Earth becomes retarded because intelligent people stop reproducing, is it really such a big deal? Do we truly care? We'll all be dead by then. I don't know, maybe I'm a fatalist. But I just don't care anymore. Let it all burn to the ground. There are probably aliens out there (and I mean it in a Fermi Paradox way, not a tinfoil hat way) who are smarter than the smartest of humans. So who gives a shit! We are little more than apes. Enjoy your life, worry about putting food in your plate and nothing else. Move to another country if you have to, and get a fresh start. Nothing else matters.
I'd believe that if urban Asia didn't have a TFR of 0.8.
Fertility projections are mostly bunk but at current rates within a few centuries, the US will be majority or plurality Amish. This won't happen but at least one county, first time ever is majority Amish now Realistically all urban societies will have low fertility. Its simply too difficult to get and keep a spouse and expensive to raise children in one. There is no way to lower the expenses enough as city infrastructure is costly in itself even when the society is low corruption which is unlike the majority of human societies. A society that manages to make getting and keeping a spouse easier can get wages up a lot corruption low and can keep the West at bay will have increased fertility. Its not simple though for a ton of reasons and the natural cost of cities may make it a non starter or less than effective. It might not even be worth trying And note society is no longer entitled to free or cheap religious capital. To my non religious mindset this using religion to get people to behave in ways that harm themselves (i.e have kids they cannot afford) is malicious at best and simply wrong. You want kids? pay for them or do without . As to Africa it does have a slowly reducing fertility and once the rest of the world gets tired of feeding it or China decides that they don't need the Africans and thinks no one can do anything about they'll be gone or numbers will be greatly reduced. Fundamentally we need to embrace the idea of reaching a population cap and managed decline and make sure our leaders are focused away from growth, innovation and to social stability. As for people getting stupid. So what? Smart people will still get born and at least stupid people won't cause an accidental apocalypse (c.f 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident) or kill us all with CRISPR out of curiosity or just plain hubris. We were never going to colonize space anyway Star Trek is fantasy and so it doesn't matter.
JJ should read Gore Vidal's Kalki. The new Brahmans will be playing in the White House lawn.
🙄 I want to say, you've been blackpilled by twitter, but you've always been gloomy. It's fine, we'll be fine, we've always been fine. Mankind goes in conjectural cycles; just because we're currently in a cycle downwards, does not mean we'll ever be in a cycle upwards. Imagine a bronze age collapse version of yourself: 'humanity will never be able to use bronze again! the secrets will be lost forever!'
Where's the pre-1800 data? What little data he has shows that Westerners had around six kids in that era. That was the norm before progressivism kicked into high gear. So, we go back to that norm, update it with what we know. That's not catholic talk, cuz catholics talk the talk but don't walk the walk.
It won't be 90%. The Africans will eat each other before it gets that far. But OK, let's say 70%. In that case, by necessity, we will need moar walls. Big, beautiful walls. And perhaps a touch of genocide.
It reassures me to read that your gloominess undermines your accuracy. Wanna bet that Trump gets re-elected? If I win, you post a review of my book. If you win, I'll write a post acknowledging that while optimism is happier, Spandrellian pessimism is more accurate.
Deal. Blackpill gets people thinking. "It's all gonna be alright" doesn't get people thinking. Besides, BNW is pretty awesome.
Awesome. May the best man win.
Turkey niggas be extrapolating from current trends not bearing in mind black swans and nonlinear impact changes. Forgetting for a while that he tried to deal with wounded ethnic pride by denying IQ, it's good to bear in mind Nassim Taleb's ideas on uncertainty.
A note on the co-option of memes. Pepe was already a boomer meme by the time 2017 was over. That the CIA is using it tells us that the CIA is at least as cringe and bluepilled as the boomers typing PEPEKEK in all caps on facebook. The great thing about memes as shibboleths is that any fed, or boomer approaching us "fellow kids" is immediately outed by virtue of his ghey inauthenticity.
When considering Catholic strategy, perhaps it would be better to think less in terms of population dynamics and more in terms of the divine intervention e.g Constantine. Could you recommend any Chinese films or TV series?
The Chinese will figure out massive embryo selection (biopsy an ovary and develop dozens of follices in vitro to have plenty of embryos for selection) and multi-edit CRISPR (for the health related genes that also push IQ up a few points along the way). Those alone will allow an easy 1-2 SD gain in IQ/health, worth a few surgeries and tests that cost less than a year of private school tuition. Russia seems fond of doing the same. The US is already in a resentful-underclass and demographic death spiral. Some parts of Europe still have the ability to notice the rapid change in their societies and show some will to live. Australia survives thanks to its geographic isolation and merit-immigration policy (mostly white, and letting in smart Asians only). -- All one can do when the living is easy and the future is unpredictable is adopt a very fast life history. Spread your genes widely and do what you can to prevent civilizational collapse (and/or relocate to the Singapores and Australians of the world that will maintain first-world living standards rather than demographic collapse.) Men: sperm donation, direct for high quality, or anonymous for sheer quantity, or both, is your ticket here. (Bonus: the women who use sperm donors tend to have the "really want a baby" gene, way more than the accidental pregnancy or married types, plus your sons may also be more likely to follow in your footsteps and be fruitful and multiply.) Unfortunately, not a lot can reverse the US demographic collapse, all you can do is plan ahead to make the best of your life elsewhere and/or pass on your genes widely since it's so easy.
Australia does import lots of smart Asians, but that's necessary because of the dysgenic nature of Australian white fertility. If Australia's mean IQ is still ~100 after importing a million Chinese, what does that say about how white Australian IQ has changed over the period?
Elsewhere? There remain few places untouched by the infertility epidemy. You have little time to keep planning. I share Spandrell's pessimism aka realism.
You left out a possible repeat of the younger-dryas. A sufficient wipe out and a stone-age reset would re-institute stone age selection pressures, which could be expected to be substantially more eugenic. Of course, a catastrophe of that level is probably worse than the three you propose.
Remember that once we lose modern industry then it's gone forever. There's not enough coal in the easily accessible surface to Jumpstart a new industrial revolution. It's the middle ages forever.
Plausible. Do you know of data or sound analysis to support the middle-ages-forever conjecture, or is this just your sense of it? To ask a related question: do competent engineers believe that, as the price of coal rose, alternate energy sources would fail to step forward to take coal's place? Insofar as future actors remain aware that an internal combustion engine is possible, practical, useful and mass-producible, what is to stop future ethanol production and the like? Hydroelectricity might decline if the great dams are lost but hydroelectricity on a small scale is pretty low-tech. The Romans lacked both internal combustion and hydroelectricity, but they did not know that either was possible, whereas one assumes that our surviving descendants will at least know this much. I will not speak casually of how many billions might die upon de-industrialization. I do not know how many. The prospect sounds bad, but what interests me today is the forecast that, even after a de-industrialized population collapse, energy to drive rebuilt industry would long remain unavailable. This is why I ask. Incidentally, I hope that you are wrong. About everything. However, still reading your blog, I apparently suspect that you might be right.
Assuming a big collapse event after most of the population is just too dumb to avoid it. In a collapse scenario, the highest density fuel available for 90-IQ humans is charcoal. That does get you steel forges and what not, but the availability of charcoal is not nothing as big as coal in 1750. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/05/17/one-more-time/
@Spandrell Indeed. Although given the much larger population even when the majority evaporates. The Eugenics will be more effective. As a greater gene pool ensures more variety to select from. Perhaps we will find something else even better to replace coal. Maybe Medieval Age will end up able to utilize Thorium which is still plentiful.
Global Haiti will be unable to feed itself. I don't see how it'd be possible. If we posit steadily decreasing high IQ population, at some point the food aid will stop coming, and things will get gloomy. Said gloom will not include the emergence of a Global Haiti though.
Once everyone is African, world population would collapse to 18th century African density. But only once that happens.
Literal black pill. Even 18th century Africa density would be unsustainable in general, but the global transportation networks will collapse long before everyone is African. I suppose the worst case scenario is rest of the world turns African faster than America does, so the world keeps running, more or less, and nobody is allowed to deal with the problem.
Would non-Africans start breeding after a collapse scenario? At some point, I guess, but surely not immediately, and on the time white people realize that they're back in the middle ages Africans would keep pumping out them babies.
I admit I do not understand the arguments, mostly from liberals or optimistic people, that we have somehow escaped the logic or abstracts of Malthus' arguments.
Neither do I. Ironically, during the 1970s and 1980s in my country, the United States, the arguments to which you refer came chiefly from conservatives or optimistic people. I still do not understand that switch.
I suspect it will be a lot easier to edit sperm stem cells and produce lots of lab grown sperm for turkey basting, than it will be to use IVF. You only get half the benefit, but it should be more scalable, and after a few generations there won't be much difference. How many men would take up a combined vasectomy banked enhanced sperm offer?
Yep, but feminism is a problem. This gives women too much choice.
We have had condoms and sponges since the Bronze age. The pill does not make a big difference - Japan banned the pill for a long time, did not move the needle. Nothing has an effect on fertility higher than random background noise, not even war and famine, except whether men have the opportunity to be patriarchs. There are third world societies with high fertility, such as Afghanistan and Timor Leste, third world societies with low fertility, and third world societies where one part of the population - usually a group that refuses to send its children to the government schools, has high fertility and one part does not. Both Timor Leste and Afghanistan have strikingly low female status and high status for patriarchs. Public schooling is part of the brownist-puritan-evangelical- progressive memeplex, and everywhere teaches their doctrines - therefore what is depressing fertility is memes and laws that result in defect/defect between men and women. Within America there are two white groups with very high fertility - FLDS and Amish, neither of which ban contraception, both of which refuse to send their children to government schools, and both of which provide social support for the authority of fathers and husbands. So, the solution to the problem is absolutely obvious: Amend the state religion, abolish the anti heterosexual sex laws, unemancipate women, and back the authority of property owning husbands and fathers. If we selectively back the authority of property owning tax paying husbands and fathers, if becoming a patriarch requires at a minimum reasonable income, and property is strongly preferred, bingo, we get eugenic fertility. The current system hurts people. Nobody likes it. Women like it least of all. When unemancipated by a man capable of doing so by personal charisma and personal violence, they blossom like roses.
I guess because of the long-lived pill ban, but condom usage among Japanese married couples (!) is rampant. Again, nobody forces the males to do it.
@Spandrell Japan with 127 million is already overcrowded. Even at 30 million it was overpopulation.
Wtf no.
Japan is mostly mountains land is scarce. How do you think Japan will fare. Come the end of Industrial Civilization? At current 127 Million population level.
The male produce quadrillions of sperm every minute, and are at the hunt of every ovulating female. The moment they find one they jump onto her, copulate semi-forcibly, and babies ensue. Yeah, this pretty much includes humans. It won't be long before you may be accused of rape, and tried in a Western court if you set your foot in the West, for just writing that. LOL. why ectogenesis didn’t become a thing during his lifetime. It stands to reason that eventually it will. Will that mean the end of what we see everywhere today, men's abject prostration before Poon? (Rationalised as many moral virtues -- but then, when isn't abject voluntary prostration rationalised that way? It always is, of course).
I'm sure Spandrell is on some EU blacklist. Good thing I live in China.
Spandrell said, "Money is not ‘anything’. Money is ‘everything’. A society long term can’t avoid valuing wealth. Not a functional one." I'm uncomfortable with that (I know: "big deal" and "deal with it"). What about great men in the past who had little or no regard for money but made BIG differences in the world. What did they think of the notion of "money is everything"? Buddha. Jesus. Galileo. Luther. Shakespeare. Einstein. Et al. Sure, money is an important tool, and you need some level of "wealth" to survive as a biological entity. Yet..."everything"?
That's cheap virtue signaling. Think harder about what I meant.
Sorry, it wasn't meant to be virtue signaling (much less cheap), but rather an indication of concern (perhaps caused by not fully understanding your full meaning) and suggesting more discussion and elucidation. No disrespect intended!
A key part of understanding how modernity came to be is that the societies which allowed greed, which allowed money to become the measure of everything, were by far the strongest and most successful. We can find it distasteful but the fact is British opium merchants conquered half the world.
Opium merchants conquered nothing. The Royal Navy did it.
Spandrell, do you think rich criminals in third-world countries will pull an Esteban Vihaio? Children can be made into your biologically loyal army, and in a world where trust and traditional communities have collapsed, loyalty is priceless.
From my vantage point of suburban America, whites are havings families and a still substantial number of children, average 2.5. To be sure, it's more athletic/corporate types and less intellectual/creative types, who perhaps subconsciously see the coming disaster and are hesitant to brings more of their kind into it. Also, continued stream of immigrants without end. They all want the suburban dream, they are not interested in progressive cities or culture. Trump is a wash. Basically, you are looking at the Latin America scenario but with a United States twist. Lots of colored people, ruled over by a white caste that is not that great, but still better than the colored. I'd say, if you want to be part of civilization, escape to Europe or Asia, or even, ironically enough, Latin America. The United States is going to combine all of the worst elements of its present culture, and continue them on steroids, without end. Think 400, 500 million "rich barbarians" in slowly decaying houses and cars, watching recycled entertainment and sports, and having no knowledge of anything else, or any world outside them, and that's the future of the United States.
A bit conditional on population stabilisation being in the farish future, if you ask me. Thats a coin toss at the very worst right now.
Your pessimism assumes human evolution is driven by steady eugenic sexual selection in fixed nations. I dont see any evidence this has ever happened. Every civilisation in hisotry has spent most of its existence degrading or collapsing, because by definition powerful civilisations have inward facing power struggles, and yet civilisation complexity and accomplishment has steadily gone up. What can explain this? The small number of Y haplogroups. Human evolution is driven by rare but sudden and complete population replacements by small groups. Generally superior groups. Australia may be dumber in 2050 than it was in 1950 but it will still be smarter than it was in 1750. In 2150, most people may be Japanese. The Japanese may be dumber then than now of course, but the world as a whole will be smarter than it is now. And so it goes. If anything stops this it will be the finite size of the earth giving way to final and total replacement by one group. No more diversity, not enough time and separation to grow more superior groups.
Spandrell, why don't you show up here? It appears that the Hong Kong separatism is dying off, and the Uyghur rebellion has been suffocated. Do you think that TFR of 0.7 in Northern China is real? It would be catastrophic.
The world isn't a bronze-age massed infantry battle. There are many important ways in which numbers don't matter. Sure, you don't get to call the political shots (directly) in a democracy, but having a few resourceful well-equipped children can be a surer thing than dozens of poorly raised cannon-fodder. If the world really goes to shit, riflemen beat numbers, machine guns beat numbers. Artillery beats numbers. Planes beat numbers. Pretty much every damn thing invented beats a zombie charge of the unorganized and unequipped. If the world really goes to shit, being able to build things matters. Being useful matters. Being the last guy who knows how to disinfect the water supply, or build rifles means you're now the kings best friend.
Spandrell has abandoned blogging. Now he is in the business of waking up early or something.
It is a great tragedy, I miss his contributions here. At least we have his twitter - and it is glorious.
Modernity doesn't work and probably can't work no matter what Brave New World shenanigans we try. Sure I suppose gene modification is a thing, the first group that gets good at this will murder every other group as soon as they feel its safe and can manage it Its the only logical action in a world where a few guys with a nasty flu strain can shut down the entire global economy. The other option is no one gets to leave home or at least their own nation lest some foreigner or hell some script kiddy decides to unleash Captain Trips. In any case modernity ends. On a more cheerful note , well sort of is that the Amish who are White, decently smart and industrious within their own limits have an exponential population growth curve. https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-long-until-were-all-amish-268e3d0de87 The growth rate is so fast they have gone from being a tiny splinter group to the majority or nearly so in at least one Pennsylvania county. They have a sustainable future and in theory in roughly the time from say the end of the Victorian Age to now will be the vastly majority US group with the rest being highly observant Christians of various sects and a few Orthodox Jews and others. And note the welfare state that props up TFR won't last that long and when it goes support for African nations will go and the Africans who have probably overshot carrying capacity will probably starve till they can reach carrying capacity. While I'm no fan of the culture Amish America is far better than the other alternatives and given its clear modern tech is a threat to human well being, well good riddance to it. Not that I or any descendants of mine will live there mind, no kids thank goodness.
If Amish get too inconvenient to the progressives they'll slaughter them. The Amish don't have advanced weaponry.
I agree but I suspect the progs ability to do anything is decaying rather rapidly. The US won't be an empire for that much longer, our nukes are probably going to be non viable in 15-20 years from lack of tritium and components and our next best throng, the F35 will probably no longer have significant super sonic interceptor capability. It will get worse from there. Now if the Amish get pushy, they could be crushed but these people come off shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves. My opinion is the future belongs to the barbarians and the highly religious not city folk without children or families. I say good, let nature take its course and future humanity might die from natural causes but it won't be self inflicted.