The idea of “Just War” is neither a hallmark of Christianity or actually designed to prevent civilian casualties. Rather “Just War” is the logical outcome of the Whig/Liberal dialectic and by innate design, if not intent, encourages totalizing wars of annihilation.
Total war isn’t actually a modern concept, it is actually an ancient and primitive one. The complete destruction of an opposing group was the de-facto way of war since man was using wood clubs and flint spears. Even with the arrival of Christianity, this didn’t change much since
the default method of warfare in Europe up into the late middle ages from the collapse of the Roman Empire was the Chevauchee, i.e. the civilian massacre. The big break actually came following the bloodletting of the Thirty Years War and the new European balance of power that
lasted up until the beginning of the 20th century. The general trend of European warfare from the late 17th century onwards were characterized by frequency but remarkably few casualties both military and civilian given the number of combatants involved.
What generally happened was when once side was losing, they would surrender en mass or retreat and the other side would accept it and not murder all the captives as generally tended to happen before. The reason why wars became less bloody at this time was not because of morals
but rather because war became legitimized for all parties involved. That is to say following Westphalia, notions of justice were simply irrelevant and wars became more like sporting contests. Sure you lost round one, but there is always next season and when all parties accepted
the legitimacy of state aggression, the costs of losing wars became less onerous for the participants and thus the incentive to completely annihilate the others in an all or nothing gambit disappears. “Just War” on the other hand returns us back to the earlier era where
the legitimacy of all parties involved is not de facto acknowledged. Instead of recognizing winners and losers of political contests, it sees only the “Righteous” and the “Criminal”. Upholders of the so-called International Order and breakers of the Peace.
Paradoxically, “Just War” theory rather than preventing conflicts which arises from differences in interests, serves to maximize grudges and encourage escalation. When all parties see one another as illegitimate enemies instead of competing agents the stakes become all the higher
and chancy wars of annihilation and the resultant civilian massacres become all the more certain. This line of reasoning is simply alien to neocons and liberal interventionists not simply because they are over credentialed halfwits but also because they are dishonest about goals.
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Some people were interested in a more thorough exegesis of my thoughts India, so here it is. The utility and limitations of caste. One of the biggest mental roadblocks that limits the Chinese understanding of India
or indeed pretty much any Marxist/Materialist conceptualization of Indian society is it's misunderstanding of the caste system. In the orthodox interpretation, it is a feudal relic
a reactionary social institution that limits the national consciousness of the Indian proletariat and bourgeoisie that stunts the potential of the Indian people by enshrining unearned and unwarranted privileges and advantages in social custom as strong as any state law.
Unrepresentative sampling and how Westerners get Chinese so wrong. One of my biggest pet peeves is when Westerners think the Chinese are similar to the Jews. It's a surprisingly common boomer trope that is as usual the inverse of reality. The Chinese are more like the anti-Jew,
with nearly the almost exact opposite social traits. The Jew is an endogamous extrovert used to living in multicultural societies with himself as the minority with strong taboos. The Chinese is exogamous introvert formed in a nearly homogeneous society with zero taboos. The only
reason anyone could possibly conflate the two is because most early interaction between Chinese and Westerners was through Southeast Asian diaspora Chinese who were not only unrepresentative by virtue of being a diaspora but more critically they originated mostly from coastal
Trump's actions are not so much norm disrupting, but rather pretense stripping. Liberals like to speak of the "West" as a unified entity just as Athenians and their Delian lackeys spoke of the "Greeks". It wasn't a Greek Empire at heart but an Athenian one just as the Western
Empire is at its root an American one. The ideology of Liberal imperialism and its purported universality is ultimately a palliative for former nations, including some former imperialists, that their subjugation by America is some kind of natural course of history and the end
state of all mankind. That their slavery is a historic inevitability that they are now equal co-authors of by virtue of their acquiescence. Trump doesn't so much as betray Liberalism as open up the curtains as to the nakedness of Western viceroys. That their sovereignty that they
Patronage, kin, and risk mitigation. This is a very interesting tweet in that it applauds a phenomenon for all the wrong reasons and likewise it's critics also quite clearly don't understand the precise mechanism at play. The Indian takeover of the US motel industry isn't just a
a lesson in hard working Indian business acumen or ethnic nepotism but rather how communities dilineate their own boundaries in order to control risk and foster trust. The cause of Indian success in this field aren't easily replicable by Americans because few American domestic
groups have the genetic closeness of an Indian jati due to not practicing endogamous mating for the past two millennia. At this point the primary remaining groups that can be approximate substitutes are the Amish and the neo stetle Jews in New York. The genetic closeness is in
Canada is an objective lesson in being careful what you wish for. In pre-Covid Canada, the usual complaint about immigration was that Chinese were buying up Canadian real estate and leaving it empty and Chinese kids were zipping around in expensive cars with N stickers. Canada's
most illustrious government in its infinite wisdom decided as in all things to do as America says actually believed that India was the future and a great "counter-weight" to China and opened the flood gates wide open to Indian immigrants instead. This surge, along with a decline
in Chinese migration and students has resulted in a huge shift in the modal immigrant on a now much larger base than ever before. Instead of an empty house growing weeds, Canadian homeowners now enjoy the company of 12 Indians living in a single family home next door and instead
Globalization as it was meant to happen was supposed to be Western firms exporting production to less developed countries but keeping ownership and knowledge so that it retained 95% of the profits while cutting costs in half, while simultaneously importing their best workers.
Fair enough trade for the very poor locations where production was relocated where even 5% was a very good deal and losing their brightest wasn't so much of a loss as their economies couldn't make productive use of them. Ridiculously good deal for the West though on paper. What
ended up happening in practice was something else entirely. Western firms did retain the lion's share of the profits in virtually every country they set up shop and didn't face any real competition except in one gigantic exception. Production in China resulted in the creation of