So Time Magazine has announced that the fascist chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, is to be their person of the year.
Yes, Angela Merkel, the shrunken-apple head fuhrer whose unilateral and undemocratic decision to open up all of europe to unlimited third-world migration so that her wealthy patrons can have ever cheaper labor, has certainly made her a political leader with an impact. I note that not only does Ms. Merkel not intend to make any personal sacrifices herself to this end, she was previously just fine with the Greek people starving to death in order to placate the big central banks. So we can rule out compassion as any sort of motivator for the new German Iron Chancellor.
One notes that this opening up of borders has coincided with a plan by her to eliminate the minimum wage. The two go together: having enough surplus labor to drive wages down to 2 euros/hour won't make much profit if it is illegal to pay less than 10 euros/hour, will it?
Cheap labor über alles!
Fascist? The word is chronically over-used, but as she has asserted absolute authority over the demographics of europe - not just Germany - insisting that its population be massively increased and made wahhabist muslim, without any consultation with or concern for the people themselves, is surely dictatorial and yes I would think that fascist is an appropriate label.
It was in 1938 that Time Magazine named Adolph Hitler as the man of the year.
Karl Marx was wrong about many things, but he got one thing right. History does repeat, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
When politicians say that we must not give in to fear, be afraid. Be very afraid.
One of the most common rhetorical tricks of a corrupt politician is to say that 'we' (meaning you) should not 'give in to fear', or that 'fear is a poor guide to the future.'
Any politician making such a statement should be subject to extreme skepticism. It is likely that they are engaging in a policy that people should fear - the statement is designed to quash debate, by removing specifics from the conversation and making the object the alleged neurotic fearfulness of the public rather than the specific policy.
The same goes with change. Beware the politician who defends a policy by saying that 'we must embrace change', or 'we must change', or 'we must not be afraid of change.' These are all blatantly dishonest statements. The real issue is WHAT change, exactly, and will it be good or bad?
So Angela Merkel has opened the european union to potentially unlimited third-world immigration, and her response is simply 'fear is a poor guide'. That's because she is out of ammunition. To say that we should not fear a horde of people who have already so overpopulated their own lands that they find it intolerable to live there, is not something that can be defended - so take out the specifics and make a direct attack on the morals of the skeptics.
And of course, because there is essentially no vetting of these refugees, many of them are doubtless drug gang members, murderers, rapists, government thugs and torturers, etc. Should we fear an influx of rapists and murderers and drug gang members? I should hope so!
Now suppose someone said that we should not fear these third-world refugees because most of them are decent and hardworking. It's wrong, but at least it is a rational argument. It's wrong because who cares if MOST are decent and hardworking - when playing Russian Roulette, MOST cylinders are empty. Still want to play? Most of the time when you drive a car you won't need a seat belt - still want to buckle up, right? And in any event the real threat of all these third-world refugees is their numbers. They will swallow up all jobs, all resources, and all capital, turn the place into another Bangladesh, and still be hungry for more. Just consider the hellish lands these people are escaping from, and realize who made those lands so hellish. Yes corrupt politicians caused a lot of the misery - but even more yes, people having more children than they could afford to support.
This begs the question: why don't people like Merkel say that we should not fear all these third-world refugees BECAUSE of something (however dishonest or wrong)? Why only say that we should not fear, period? Again, it is because this is a rhetorical trick, that attempts to throw the onus on the skeptic.
I suggest that whenever someone says that you should not fear anything in general, that you don't defend yourself but only declare it to be a cheap rhetorical trick and that the person in question is not arguing in good faith. Throw it back at them.
So when you hear a politician say that you should not give in to fear, or some variation on that theme, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Any politician making such a statement should be subject to extreme skepticism. It is likely that they are engaging in a policy that people should fear - the statement is designed to quash debate, by removing specifics from the conversation and making the object the alleged neurotic fearfulness of the public rather than the specific policy.
The same goes with change. Beware the politician who defends a policy by saying that 'we must embrace change', or 'we must change', or 'we must not be afraid of change.' These are all blatantly dishonest statements. The real issue is WHAT change, exactly, and will it be good or bad?
So Angela Merkel has opened the european union to potentially unlimited third-world immigration, and her response is simply 'fear is a poor guide'. That's because she is out of ammunition. To say that we should not fear a horde of people who have already so overpopulated their own lands that they find it intolerable to live there, is not something that can be defended - so take out the specifics and make a direct attack on the morals of the skeptics.
And of course, because there is essentially no vetting of these refugees, many of them are doubtless drug gang members, murderers, rapists, government thugs and torturers, etc. Should we fear an influx of rapists and murderers and drug gang members? I should hope so!
Now suppose someone said that we should not fear these third-world refugees because most of them are decent and hardworking. It's wrong, but at least it is a rational argument. It's wrong because who cares if MOST are decent and hardworking - when playing Russian Roulette, MOST cylinders are empty. Still want to play? Most of the time when you drive a car you won't need a seat belt - still want to buckle up, right? And in any event the real threat of all these third-world refugees is their numbers. They will swallow up all jobs, all resources, and all capital, turn the place into another Bangladesh, and still be hungry for more. Just consider the hellish lands these people are escaping from, and realize who made those lands so hellish. Yes corrupt politicians caused a lot of the misery - but even more yes, people having more children than they could afford to support.
This begs the question: why don't people like Merkel say that we should not fear all these third-world refugees BECAUSE of something (however dishonest or wrong)? Why only say that we should not fear, period? Again, it is because this is a rhetorical trick, that attempts to throw the onus on the skeptic.
I suggest that whenever someone says that you should not fear anything in general, that you don't defend yourself but only declare it to be a cheap rhetorical trick and that the person in question is not arguing in good faith. Throw it back at them.
So when you hear a politician say that you should not give in to fear, or some variation on that theme, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Thursday, November 26, 2015
Better the Devil You Don’t Know than Certain Doom
Imagine you are in an airplane, and the pilot is
deliberately flying towards a mountain.
The mountain is still a long ways off, but it is coming, and if the
plane flies into it it’s all over.
The passengers vote on a new pilot who swears that he won’t
fly into the mountain, but as soon as he is elected he continues on towards the
mountain.
A calm and rational person with a long track record of
trustworthiness presents themselves as a candidate for pilot who definitely will not fly
the plane into the mountain. However,
this person is barred from using the public address system, so most people
never hear what she has to say. The
people that want the plane to fly into the mountain scream that this person is
a racist, that she is unbalanced, that she is not experienced enough to fly the
plane. Every time this person picks her
nose it is publicly reported, her every possible mis-statement is blown out of
proportion, vague allegations that she is a child abuser are made – and of
course, her proposal to not fly into a mountain is never mentioned. Towards the end of the election most people
are embarrassed even to mention this person’s name in public, and the
establishment pilot wins the election. And
the plane continues to fly towards the mountain.
Then along comes a maniac.
He’s big, he has weird hair. He
is an arrogant loudmouth, a clown, who routinely makes outrageous
statements. He also states, very
clearly, that if he is elected pilot he will definitely not fly into a
mountain, and it’s going to be great, and he’s going to redecorate the
washrooms in the style of Louis XIV. The
establishment tries to ignore him, but he’s too loud. They try to get him fired from his job, but he's independently wealthy and they have no leverage. They try to embarrass him, but his ego is so
colossal that he’s beyond embarrassment.
The mountain grows ever nearer. The establishment candidate is cool and
collected, he is supported by all the official announcements on the PA system, and
his past record has made it clear that he is going to fly the plane into the
mountain (though he often says differently in public pronouncements). The maniac says that flying planes into
mountains is really really dumb, and that a famous supermodel is no longer a
“10.”
So who do you vote for?
Me, I’ll take my chances with the maniac. He might be a disaster – heck, he might
change his mind and decide to fly the plane into the mountain just like all the other
establishment hacks. But he might
not. And the other one will.
Let’s go back to the real world, and consider the
establishment candidates. What are they
going to do?
- Open the borders to the overpopulated third world, let in
anyone who wants to come: MS13 drug gang members, Islamic terrorists, people
with exotic diseases, anyone at all, as long as the population can be driven up
and wages can be driven down.
- Attack countries that do not threaten us, destroy moderate
secular governments and replace them with post-apocalyptic wastelands, ally
with Islamic jihadists like ISIS and Al Qaeda, and run up trillions of dollars
in debts.
- Give trillions of dollars to corrupt and incompetent
bankers, starving main street of capital and boosting parasitic financial
engineering.
- Slash social security, because you know we spent all that
money on stupid wars and bailing out Wall Street, and deficits are bad, right?
- Sign trade agreements that will tear up the constitution
and bring in rule by unaccountable foreign corporate lawyers meeting in secret
whose decisions can be neither appealed nor over-ruled by democratic statute, that have full plenary legislative power, and whose
authority has no limit.
The establishment candidates may be saying something
different about some of the above lately, but a quick look at their track
record proves convincingly that they are lying.
Donald Trump says many crazy things, but he clearly states his opposition to all of
the above, and there is no evidence that he is lying. There are more moderate and
soft-spoken politicians who are also actually opposed to the above – and you
don’t even know who they are, do you?
Let’s go back a bit – under Hillary Clinton the United
States became a de-facto ally of ISIS and Al Qaeda. You know, Al Qaeda, the crazy guys that flew
airliners into the World Trade Center towers and killed a few thousand
Americans? Yes really. Now Donald Trump says many silly things, but he
doesn’t say that we should ally with ISIS and Al Qaeda to attack secular Arab
governments. Hillary Clinton doesn’t say
this either – instead, she has actually
done it. How is Trump the crazy one
and Hillary Clinton respectable?
Objectively? Really? The power of the monolithic corporate press
to take the most corrupt blood soaked monster and hammer home that they are
‘respectable’ is astonishing.
The future comes apace.
The United States does not have a vast excess of resources like it used
to. Open-borders immigration is building
up a demographic momentum that will soon lock the nation into permanent
third-world poverty. A foolish
politeness as you are being led to the slaughter is the hobgoblin of sheep and
other domestic animals.
Trump 2016. Because
in a corrupt politics only the maniac can give you a chance.
Saturday, November 14, 2015
The Vile Scourge of Naziphobia
1941
It has come to my attention that a surprisingly large number
of people are expressing an unreasoning and racist hatred of Nazis. This ‘Naziphobia’ is unworthy of an
enlightened western society, and I call on all those of good spirit to help
stamp it out.
Some complain about the Nazis executing large numbers of
Jews by throwing them into gas chambers.
But really, there are today many millions of Nazis in Europe. At any one time only a tiny fraction of these
Nazis are throwing Jews into gas chambers – the vast majority are driving
trucks and going to school and playing with their families, even as are
we. It hardly seems fair to condemn an
entire culture because of a few bad apples.
Besides, western so-called ‘civilization’ has had it’s own extremists:
Torquemada, Caligula, Vlad the Impaler, Justin Bieber, and so on. We are hardly in a position to pass judgment
upon the Nazis.
If in fact a few Nazis are acting badly, I blame the
campaign of vilification, which has been waged upon them. I mean, imagine some young Nazi, who only
wants to do his job and settle down and raise a family. Every day this poor Nazi encounters hostile
microaggressions from Jews and Poles and even Frenchmen, and he must listen on
the radio to that horrible xenophobic racist Winston Churchill and other
far-right politicians comparing them to wild beasts. Is it any wonder that sometimes the Nazis
lash out? I blame those intolerant
haters for inflaming the situation.
Now many populist demagogues in countries like Poland and
France want to close the door on the Nazis, and prevent them from
entering. Some of the more extreme compare
the immigration of Nazis to an ‘invasion,’ a ludicrous and hateful charge. These
young and hard-working Nazis only want to make a better life for themselves and
their children, and by increasing the labor supply their entry will be good for
the economy. Only those consumed by fear
and hatred of other people wish to barricade themselves in their countries, but
of course that cannot work – not only is it morally wrong to prevent people
from moving where they will, it is impossible.
Barriers and armies never work, and fear is a poor guide to the future.
I also hear complaints that when the Nazis move into another
country, that they do not assimilate but rather set up their own laws. Well I can only say that how can we judge our
laws to be better than theirs? The Nazis
feel very strongly about their culture and we must respect that. Perhaps we can
learn from them. Certainly adding Nazis
to our nation will enrich that multiculturalism which is so vital to human
progress. In any event the notion that
the Nazis have set up ‘no go’ areas
where Jews and homosexuals fear to go, is an urban myth with no substance to it
at all.
It is said that the Nazis should be condemned because they
routinely preach hatred of Jews and Gypsies and Slavs. I note that the great philosopher, Karl
Popper, has commented on the ‘paradox of tolerance,’ noting that a tolerant
society must actually be intolerant towards those expressing intolerance. Therefore we must be intolerant of those
expressing hatred towards the Nazis, and do everything in our power to suppress
their vile maxims. Saying that you hate
the Nazis because they hate the Jews is hatred, pure and simple, and I for one
will not put up with it.
Recently there was a report of some Nazis killing a few gypsies in a theater in Paris. Now as regrettable as this isolated action was, the real threat is of an anti-Nazi backlash. Doubtless this is the plan of the extremist elements within the Nazi party: to fuel the fires of hatred, thus creating a war between the Nazis and everyone else. We must not allow these sorts of things to poison the well of friendship: we must use this as a spur to redouble our efforts at creating a world free of bigotry ad intolerance.
Recently there was a report of some Nazis killing a few gypsies in a theater in Paris. Now as regrettable as this isolated action was, the real threat is of an anti-Nazi backlash. Doubtless this is the plan of the extremist elements within the Nazi party: to fuel the fires of hatred, thus creating a war between the Nazis and everyone else. We must not allow these sorts of things to poison the well of friendship: we must use this as a spur to redouble our efforts at creating a world free of bigotry ad intolerance.
We must build bridges to the Nazis, and welcome them with
open arms. I call upon all media outlets
to join me in banning any and all ‘hate speech’ that aims to inflame tensions
with the Nazis, and the laws against anyone slandering the Nazis must be
rigorously enforced.
Nazism is a philosophy of peace – the leader of the Nazi
party, Adolph Hitler, has often said this, and so it must be true.
On another note I have recently heard of something called
“Godwin’s Law,” but I refuse to give it any credence. I stand by “Jerner’s Law,” which says that
there is no work of fiction that cannot be improved by adding Nazis – and that
many works of nonfiction can be so improved, as well.
And after we have rid the world of the scourge of Naziphopia, we must then work even harder to fight against cancer phobia, rabid-dog phobia, falling-down-stairs phobia, rape phobia, arsenic-phobia, and all those other irrational phobias that so bedevil us all.
Thursday, October 15, 2015
The Truth About Education: It Mostly Doesn’t Matter
Most jobs only require a basic solid
high-school level education, and a lot of people are simply unsuited to the
academic life.
If we could train everyone to be a PhD
computer programmer (and we can’t, not if standards are to be maintained),
there would be a lot of un- and under-employed PhD computer programmers. Having truck drivers with PhDs in truck
driving won’t make the trucks go any faster or carry more freight. ‘Educating’ everyone is not a panacea.
People who are talented and motivated
enough to excel at academics will find a way to do so (as long as they have a
solid base in high school, and as long as they aren’t living in a third-world
country and are too malnourished or forced to work in the fields etc). It was not that long ago that you didn’t need
a PhD to do research: just get the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree and find
someone doing interesting work in a lab or company and work with them (that’s
really all a PhD is, we’ve just formalized it).
As far as public education goes, the
major factors are:
1. The native ability of the student
2. The socioeconomic status of the
parents
3. The socioeconomic status of the
other children in the school
That’s it. Sure, you need the teachers to be basically
competent and professional, but they don’t need to be superhuman. Throwing money at administrators and fancy
buildings etc., having teachers with PhDs in educational pedagogy etc. does
basically nothing.
To the extent that private and charter
school have an advantage over public schools, it’s more because they have
better students than better teachers.
As far as our increasing fetish with
standardized testing, this is becoming a zero-sum game. Sure, if you train a child from birth to take
standardized tests, they will get better at taking standardized tests. And so will everyone else’s child, and the
net result will be zero, except that massive effort will be wasted.
Albert Einstein did not spend his
first 16 years being drilled in standardized test taking and I think he turned
out just fine. But today someone like
Einstein would first have to get perfect exam scores or they would be condemned
to working the fields. That’s not really
raising the intellectual level of a society.
The problem now is that, with the job
market so horrible, people are being forced into ever greater zero-sum
competition with their peers, hoping to be the one person to rise to the top as
the rest fail. It’s like if there are a
hundred people drowning in the middle of the ocean: perhaps one can survive by
clambering on top of everyone else, but that’s not a strategy that everyone can
succeed at simultaneously. It’s also not
a constructive strategy: it does not increase the overall level of the society.
The solution to a hundred people
drowning in the ocean is not, I think, to train people to better compete at
climbing on top of each other, but to provide lifeboats with enough seats. Or to not have them dumped into the ocean in
the first place.
If we had a better labor market,
people with less academic talent would not be under so much pressure to boost
their test scores or become what they are not: they could just make a decent
living driving trucks and filling out customs manifests. People with more academic talent would still
compete with each other, of course (as did Einstein), but they could be more
focused on things of true value and less on test taking per se.
This simple reality, however, has been
clouded by vested interests.
We are increasingly outsourcing jobs
to poor countries, and insourcing workers from poor countries, in order to
drive wages for the many down, and profits for the few up. Which is the major reason that wages are
falling. But that doesn’t sound very
good. So the rich blame the victims: oh
we have to import foreign workers, because American schools are so bad that
they are not producing enough skilled workers.
And wages aren’t falling because we have radically increased the labor
supply, no, it’s because American children aren’t getting a good enough
education to be competitive in the jobs of the future (like waiter or Starbucks
barista).
Of course this is rubbish. A truck driver in Japan makes a lot more
money than a computer programmer in India.
Education is fine, and for an industrial society it’s important that
everyone be numerate and literate.
However, other than meeting the basic standards, the overall standard of
living is not set by educational attainment.
If today everyone in India could magically be given a PhD in neuroscience,
there would be 500 million chronically malnourished PhDs in neuroscience.
Ah, but the educational bureaucracies
and unions have bought into this. They
like pushing the idea that schools are more important than they really
are. ‘Oh if the inner cities are
collapsing it’s not because there are no jobs and no money, no, it’s because we
haven’t thrown enough money at the schools!’
In the short run the educational
mafias made some bucks off of this fantasy of teacher as miracle worker. They got big raises, and lots of juicy
high-paying positions in administration (where you have the added advantage of
not having to do all that grubby work of actually lecturing and grading papers
etc).
But now the jig is up. The inner cities are still failing, real
wages are headed down, American corporations are still importing massive
numbers of foreign workers ‘because there just aren’t enough skilled Americans’
(hahaha), etc. The teachers are now being
blamed for what is not under their control, but they have so long pushed the
idea that it is under their control, that they are screwed. A backlash is coming, and teacher’s unions
are going to be broken, and public schools starved of funds in favor of
crony-capitalist ‘Charter’ schools, etc.
Nevertheless, it’s hard to feel any
sympathy for the teachers. They should
have realized what a toxic bargain it was to join forces with big business in
blaming so many of the ills of society on the quality of the schools. They should have realized that ultimately it
would turn around and bite them.
They also should have realized what it
meant to join with big business in favor of cheap-labor immigration
policies. In the short run a massive
boost in school-age children would increase the demand for teachers, and the
size of the base of the pyramid upon which the educational administrators can
build their bureaucracies. However, this forced population growth also impoverishes the society at large upon which the teacher’s salaries
ultimately depend. You can’t get blood
from a stone. As lower wages drive down
per-capita state and local tax revenues, there will be less and less for the
teachers – and as wages and benefits for non-teachers keep falling, it will be
so easy to attack the educational unions as being overpaid (when the reality is
that everyone else is underpaid, but that’s a hard argument to make nowadays).
Look at what teachers make in places
like Guatemala and Haiti and Pakistan.
Slowly but surely, American teachers are going to learn what that feels
like.
Friday, September 11, 2015
Amateurs Talk Strategy, Professionals Talk Demographics
As of this writing Europe is in danger
of being over-run by hordes of people nominally fleeing the bloody civil war in
Syria (although likely most of these people are not Syrian, but just your typical
random grab-bag of people fleeing the overpopulated third world and only
claiming to be Syrian to get sympathy).
Many pundits claim that this is
blowback for American and European meddling in the middle east. It is indeed true that much of recent Western
policy in that part of the world has been almost unbelievably stupid/evil. Iraq, Afghanistan… Whatever the West touches, breaks. Attacking Syria’s secular government and
arming Islamic militants was surely atrocious, but the ultimate has to be Hillary
Clinton’s Libya policy. Muammar Gaddafi
was no saint, but lately he had made nice with the United States, cooperating
on issues of international terrorism, and his people had the highest standard
of living in Africa. Not a paradise but
you can do a lot worse, today.
So for reasons that still don’t seem
to make sense – and perhaps simply do not make sense – Hillary decided that
Gaddafi had to go, we bombed his forces and armed Islamic militants, and turned
Libya in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that is now a hotbed of ISIS and a
gateway for all those desperate refugees streaming into Europe. Heckuva job, Hillary.
So yes, it might seem that is the
Western powers that are responsible for this.
And there is no denying how utterly disgusting the actions of the
Western powers have been. Nevertheless,
what’s going on in the places like Syria and Libya etc. is not primarily due to
Western misadventures – it’s due to government policies aimed at creating
massive population growth, which as always created horrible poverty, and large
numbers of angry young men who were hungry and unemployed and looking for an
outlet for their frustrations. When
there are large numbers of hungry and unemployed and angry young men looking
for an outlet for their frustrations, bad things happen.
The Western misadventures are not the
main problem here. It is a deliberately
created population explosion. The
Syrians are not, primarily, fleeing violence.
They are fleeing the inevitable consequences of people having more children
than they can support, generation after generation.
Imagine that one has a rock in a
hydraulic press which is steadily increasing the pressure, with no upper
limit. No matter how strong the rock, at
some level it will break. Now suppose
one taps on a rock that has not yet broken, and suddenly it shatters. Certainly this may have been a trigger – but
the rock would have broken eventually, with or without the trigger. To focus only on the tap, and not at all on
the hydraulic press, is mindless.
When water cools, it eventually turns
into ice. There is always some microscopic
seed that initiates this process. But if
not this seed, it will be some other.
When water turns to ice, does one blame the specific seed crystal? But if not that seed, there would have been
another. The bottom line is that if you
cool water enough it WILL turn into ice. The specific seed crystal is
irrelevant.
I have previously detailed what
happened in Syria.
In summary: the Syrian government
pushed for ever more population growth, outlawing contraceptives and
propagandizing about how women all needed to have six kids each. The result was an extremely rapid rate of
population growth, and increasing poverty.
Around 2012 food started to run short, and there were some nasty riots. Now the Syrian government was especially
brutal in putting down some of these riots – but do you really think that
everything would have been sunshine and rainbows if it hadn’t? The core problems tearing the society apart
would not have gone away. The Syrian
government’s brutality – and the misguided western reactions against this
brutality – were a symptom, not a main cause.
As Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Malthus,
David Riccardo, John Stuart Mills, John Maynard Keynes and Ma Yinchu pointed out, it’s
not the number of people per se that is important, it’s the rate of
growth. And more than the rate of
growth, it’s whether people have more children than they can support given
current circumstances – and government’s role in pushing to make this come
about (what is traditionally called "forcing" population growth).
Imagine a poor person in rural Syria
who, with a little luck, could maybe have supported two children. Instead this person has six. How exactly does this create wealth? (Even the most abusive society can’t get much
work out of a child until they are at least 12 if not older, and even then only
if they have tools and resources to work with.)
‘People are the ultimate resource’ – yeah, if you want them to be a
cheap disposable commodity like cattle or fill dirt. (If only a few people have too-large families
then they can get direct and indirect subsidies from everyone else – that can’t
happen when everyone is doing it).
When people have more children than
they can support, the possibility that these children will be productive
in the future after they grow up, does not change the fact that they must first
grow up and they are creating poverty now.
And for them to be productive after they grow up, first there must be
investments in new tools and developed resources – which requires not just
labor, but existing tools and resources, which can only be created using spare
production not needed for today’s survival, which does not exist because people
are using all they have now to survive today….
The reason that third-world countries are inevitably capital-starved is
not hard to fathom. Finance be damned:
with too-rapid population growth you physically can’t get ahead of the game.
When it is physically impossible for
something to happen, it won’t. Changing
the marginal rate of taxation on capital gains does not help.
Do you really think that the optimal
strategy for human beings is for everyone to have as many children as soon as
they can without any regard to their job situation etc? Do you really think that this will automatically create more wealth?
Should human beings breed like rodents?
Or do you think that people should exercise their own judgment, having
more children at earlier ages when times are good, and maybe having fewer later
in life when times are bad?
Or do you think that the people
themselves should not be trusted to make this decision, and the ‘correct’
number of children that people should have should be determined by government
‘experts’? I note that, essentially
without exception, whenever governments take it upon themselves to make people
have the ‘correct’ number of children, or to over-rule this decision via mass immigration, it is a disaster.
It is said that the definition of a
domestic animal is that the owner controls its breeding. For people?
Really?
No society in all of recorded history has industrialized
faster than Japan. However, even the best that flesh-and-blood human beings
have ever achieved was not enough to keep up with rapid exponential population
growth, and by the eve of WWII Japan was on the brink of collapse and
chaos. The Japanese militarists had no
illusions about their chances of defeating the United States. It’s just that they had no alternative:
without invading and colonizing other lands their own exploding population
would soon have destroyed their society (Read John Toland’s wonderful book “The
Rising Sun”). As you might expect, that
exploding population was not the “inevitable” consequence of industrialization,
it was the result of a deliberate Japanese government policy to maximize
population (Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics, Vol.6,
pp158-9, 1996).
Now fast-forward to Iraq.
Like the pre-WWII Japanese government, Saddam pushed for more population
growth and ignited a population explosion (see “Sanctioning Saddam: The
Politics of Intervention in Iraq”, by Sarah Graham Brown). As expected, this created great poverty, and
a lot of angry young men. One wonders:
why did Saddam Hussein attack first Iran, and then Kuwait? Was he stupid? Perhaps.
But the Japanese militarists did not attack the United States because
they were under any illusions about their chances of winning, rather they attacked
because at that point they were desperate: without stealing the resources of
other lands their own exploding population would have caused their own society
to collapse. One wonders if Saddam
Hussein was following the same pattern, and tried to invade other lands because
he realized that, left to its own devices, Iraq would have self-destructed.
Then the United States invaded, and much blame for Iraq’s
current misery is placed upon the astonishing levels of incompetence and
corruption of the occupying US authorities.
For example, Paul Bremer, the US acting governor of Iraq, disbanded the
Iraqi army, and sent all those angry young men back home to be unemployed and
heavily armed and gee that did not turn out well.
Nevertheless, I propose that for all the undeniable
mis-steps that the United States made in Iraq, this is not the real issue. It’s the massive population explosion created
by Saddam Hussein, which continues on long after his death (look up
‘demographic momentum’ in Wikipedia).
The bottom line is this: no society without an open frontier has ever
become stable or prosperous with the kind of population growth rates that we
see in Iraq. That’s the root
problem. American intervention was
largely irrelevant: without it, Iraq would inevitably be about the same as it is
today.
Intervening in a society like Iraq or Afghanistan is pointless. Unless one addresses the demographics factors, there is NOTHING that an occupying force can do to improve things. It's like building a sand castle and the tide comes in: no amount of architectural finesse will prevent it from being washed away by the larger currents.
I blame not so much the people of these lands, as their
governments. But more, I blame those
western intellectuals who allowed this to happen. Where were the economists and political
scientists when Saddam and Assad etc. were outlawing contraceptives and
demanding that women turn themselves into little more than breeding stock? They were sitting in their nice comfy offices
collecting checks for going along to get along, and burbling happy nonsense
about more people always being a better thing regardless of circumstance, and
viciously attacking any dissenters as racist.
For shame.
If you encounter a bunch of hungry rats, and you feed them,
in the long run you don’t get a bunch of well-fed rats: you get an even larger
number of hungry rats. It may seem
impolite to compare people to rats, but when people are compelled or tricked
into breeding like rats, the same brute physical laws apply, and they will live
and die like rats.
And this where the world is today. For 50 years the Western world has given
enormous boons of resources and technology to the third world – more than
enough to have transformed these nations into rich countries themselves. Instead we denied the obvious power of
exponential population growth to suck up any amount of economic progress, and
these resources were used to feed a population explosion.
So now the Western world has no more gifts of technology,
and increasingly little of resources, to give, and the third world is as poor
as it ever was, but now numbers in the billions, with demographic momentum
meaning that there will be many more billions in the years to come. If the West allows all these refugees to
invade, this won’t help: the West will itself be dragged down to the level of
the third world, and every refugee that makes it to the West will simply make
room for one more person to survive back home, and the third world will remain
dirt poor. If we give boons of food to
the third world, the people will simply multiply and consume it all and then
come back, even hungrier and more numerous than before.
If we had addressed these issues honestly just two or three
decades ago, much of this could have been avoided. Instead the West refused to address this:
partly out of political correctness, but mostly because the rich want cheap
labor and any honest talk might have resulted in rising wages which would have come out of
their profits. And now the chance is
nearly over, and the world begins to slide into a new dark age. The only serious question is whether any
parts of the world will manage to avoid being dragged down.
If a person is drowning in the middle of a lake, it would be
moral for a person to jump in and attempt to save them. However, if a person is drowning in the
middle of a lake and they have a ton of concrete chained to their ankles,
trying to save them would be pointless, they would only drag you down with
them. The moral thing would be to dissuade
a person from chaining a ton of concrete to their ankles and jumping into a
lake before it’s too late, but this simple logic is apparently beyond the
brainwashed West.
If there is to be any hope for the future, it will come not
from pointless masochistic sacrifices, but from an intelligent and honest
appreciation of reality.
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