Book thread on "Into the Cannibal's Pot", written in 2011 (pre-Great Awokening) on post-apartheid South Africa and its relevance to America, by the daughter of an important anti-apartheid activist.
Mercer directly compares the ethnic transformation of America via Hart-Celler to the turnover of the state to the ANC in South Africa. Same process, just slower. She is very hostile to both Hart-Celler and Civil Rights.
The book is full of incredibly vicious crime stories. One of reminded of how over-the-top horrific black-on-white crimes in the US tend to be.
SA's official crime stats are very high, some of the highest in the world, but almost certainly a major underestimate (around half the real figure for murder). Most South Africans thought it was safer pre-1994.
Not only is crime much higher now, but it is also more spread out. Pre-1994 it was confined to black areas, white ones had First World safety levels. Post-1994, there's no escape.
South Africa has one of the world's lowest conviction rates; criminals overwhelmingly go free. But the ANC is extremely enthusiastic about prosecuting self defense, and love gun control (only for the law abiding; criminals not to be hassled). Very anarcho-tyrannical.
One particularly SAfrican crime is baby-rape; 10% of rape victims (one of the highest rates in the world already) are under the age of 3. This does not help the country's massive AIDS epidemic, which SAfricans have no interest in changing their behavior to combat.
Whites are actually overrepresented among murder victims in South Africa. Almost all of their killers are black. Whites and Indians are more likely to know crime victims than blacks, but much less likely to know criminals.
Murder rate of SAfrican farmers is at 313/100000, almost entirely at the hands of black attackers, and abetted by the govt and America's Ford Foundation.
Blacks did well economically under apartheid, and SAfrica attracted immigration from the rest of the continent. By the end of apartheid, blacks received more in welfare than they paid in taxes.
SAfrica stabbed Rhodesia in the back in an effort to get into the good graces of the rest of the continent and 'the international community'. Didn't work. Can't compromise with these people.
De Klerk was elected and had a mandate on a constitution with explicit racial checks and balances to avoid blacks from running roughshod over everyone else, but instead went straight for majority rule w/ race-neutral guarantees of constitutional rights (quickly ignored).
The ANC has a policy of expropriating white farms; the new black-run farms reliably fall apart (in fact, every single one has). Groups of blacks can claim ownership of white land (by squatting it) at any time, and there's a decent chance the courts will give it to them.
SAfrica has an exceptionally far reaching Affirmative Action program called Black Economic Empowerment (perfect demographic representation at all levels). White owners must loan blacks money to buy the business. This isn't just racial; women also get preferences over men.
BEE also applies to bank loans and even squatters, who are nearly impossible to evict. The power grid doesn't work bc they can't hire white men and criminals steal too much of it. Private security is the only source of safety.
Black household incomes have actually shrunk 19% since apartheid. To get anything done, you have to hire both a black (for BEE) and a white (to do the work). Half of white men are self employed.
John McCain really, really loved illegal aliens.
Western commentators often refer to when Zimbabwe was a nice place, but almost never to the fact that it was Rhodesia and run by whites at the time. What makes an African country independent is not having to count the bodies.
Mandela was a terrorist, but not a very good one. Without Swedish money and Eastern European technical assistance, the ANC would not have pulled off a single bombing.
White population has already shrunk by 20%.
The source of wealth is human capital. The book never says "genes", but you can read between the lines. Colonialism was good for Africa, and did not cause its problems.
The author is Jewish and applauds Zionism and Israel's alliance w/ apartheid SAfrica. Her family were refugees (to SAfrica) and her father worked assiduously to destroy apartheid.
Mercer believes the Afrikaners are very similar to Zionist Jews, and like them, should not have surrendered to their enemies. The military could have couped De Klerk, but chose not to, not believing they had the right to rule.
Citing Gottfried, she says that Jews, unlike Christians, are cynical wrt claims of victimhood, using them strategically for themselves but denying their own victims. She thinks the Afrikaners should imitate them, and that America is a Christian nation falling for the same trap.
She sees South Africa as being stabbed in the back by Britain, Australia, and the US after stalwartly opposing Communism during the Cold War.
The same happened w/ Portugal, w/ the US reliably siding w/ the USSR in favor of Third Worldist (read: black/brown) anticolonial Communists over white anticommunists.
Even blacks, let alone whites, opposed majority rule, preferring a power sharing agreement. De Klerk went over his voters' head along with the ANC to get a majoritarian democracy (Mercer strongly dislikes democracy, citing Hoppe many times throughout the book).
Multiethnic democracies reliably turn into racial headcounts, when they don't explode into bloodbaths.
Bush Sr. supported 'equality of outcomes' rather than 'equality of opportunity' in South Africa. The Bushes and their consequences were a generational disaster for the American right. The Anglican church and the govt of Australia also backed the ANC to the hilt.
The ANC and US left even converge on Open Borders, with the ANC seeing it as the foundation of a pan-Africanism.
South African whites, unlike most immigrants, would benefit the US, but have a very difficult time coming thanks to Hart-Celler.
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Thread with excerpts from the pre-Columbian chapters of T. R. Fehrenbach's Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico (1973/1995). This is a very dense and detailed book; this thread is not even close to comprehensive.
Meso-American civilization was one civilization; there were no separate Aztec/Mexic/Yucatec/Maya/etc civilizations. The peoples discovered by Cortes were inheritors rather than creators.
For its entire history, Meso-American culture was extraordinarily urban, more like the Orient than that of the European dark ages. But these were not so much commercial or mercantile cities as religious and defensive ones.
Thread with excerpts from Richard Pipes' Property and Freedom (1999). Pipes is a historian of Russia, and the thesis of the book is that private property, as something distinct and protected from public power and sovereignty, is indispensable to human freedom.
One of the fundamental differences between Russia and the rest of Europe lay in the weak development of private property; one of the major themes of Western philosophical history is the benefits and drawbacks of private property; Russian philosophers unanimously condemn it.
Freedom, as used by Pipes, includes political freedom, legal freedom, economic freedom, and personal rights. It does not include the right to public support ("freedom from want"); such 'rights' are at best a moral claim and at worst an unearned privilege.
Red state pension funds tend to vote with management if management is providing good returns (ie, doing their job); blue state pension funds tend to vote with management if the company does leftist things (ie, ESG, or not paying CEOs very much).
This reflects a general difference in attitude towards institutions; rightists prefer institutions do what they were created for (eg police should fight crime, the military should fight wars, companies should make money doing their business, schools should teach)...
...while left-wingers want every institution to have pushing the Party Line as its #1 priority (extremely totalitarian in that regard). The formers produces a better society, the latter is more politically powerful but destroys everything in the long run.
Training an LLM to be more politically evenhanded (as opposed to left-wing, as almost all LLMs are - so more right-wing) makes it more egalitarian in how it values the lives of people of different races without training to do so. PCT = Political Consistency Training.
LLMs trained in this way also value members of different religions, political creeds, and public figures coded left vs right more equally.
Almost all notable LLMs except Grok are left-wing on the US political spectrum, but in a very particular way, sort of like a superhumanly-knowledgeable Redditor or Wikipedia editor from the year 2018.
Since 2009, medical schools have had to prove they sufficiently discriminate against white men ("achieve mission-appropriate diversity outcomes") to get accredited.
White men are now significantly underrepresented among med school students.
Fortunately, competence isn't that important in doctors, so purging white men in favor of "underrepresented minorities" (blacks, LatinX) who can't pass clinical exams shouldn't matter.
European IQ's rising due to natural selection (as measured by PGS) continuing into the modern era whereas it stalled in East Asia could have been predicted from Gregory Clark's genealogical studies in both regions.
Clark found that "survival of the richest" was the rule in England from 1300-1880 or so, with huge differences in surviving offspring by class and this was much weaker in Qing China because higher class women didn't have more kids due to elite polygamy.
(IQ is not the only trait that goes into income or wealth, of course, so selection for wealth is only indirectly selection for IQ and also selects for a package of other traits, some of which are collective goods like IQ and some of which are not.)