More excerpts on Colonial Mexico from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood" (1973). Fehrenbach saw the discovery of silver in Mexico, mostly in the arid north, as a disaster, as it led to Spain administering Mexico as a loot box rather than developing the productive economy.
The thinly-populated, but silver-rich North became a military frontier.

Thread with excerpts from the colonial Mexico portion of "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1973). The Catholic Monarchs who united Spain reined in the aristocracy, abolished serfdom, disempowered the Castilian parliaments, and ended all noble presumptions to royal powers and revenues, creating a new bureaucracy (with a new army) to run the state loyal to themselves.

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.

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.

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)...

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.

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.

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.

The Bancroft Prize (one of the most prestigious history awards, given by a panel of historians for works on diplomacy or the history of the Americas) was given in 2000 to someone claiming guns were really rare in colonial America (he committed fraud by changing quotes). historynewsnetwork.org/article/what-c…

I very strongly appreciate this essay and wish there were a hundred more like it for other orgs. The SPLC is one of the biggest and most important nodes in the closure of the Internet, coordinating debanking and censorship outside the formal state.

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/2050269202657808749

Amazon, for example, incorporated SPLC judgements into their pipeline automatically, and this is the norm in the financial industry.

A common normie folk belief is that AIDS was ignored by The Establishment out of homophobia. The opposite is true; AIDS became the most researched disease in human history within a few years, and gay orgs strenuously fought measures that might have stopped it. The attitude of gay orgs during the peak of AIDS was:
1) The REAL epidemic is stigma (it was not, it was HIV)
2) You (meaning mainstream society) must do absolutely everything in your power to save us without us having to change our own behavior in any way at all

My view: the Great Awokening is over, but, by default, will be back even worse in 20 years. This cycle has already happened twice, with the 60s/70s New Left and 90s PC. Each time, some of the worst excesses are undone but nowhere near enough to reverse the previous wave.

https://twitter.com/CEBKCEBKCEBK/status/2050763406743912717

What I think causes the ~20 year cycle is the education system; the natural result of paying attention in school is to be an insane leftist.

Because there's an obvious answer that will get you fired (and sometimes beaten in the streets) for saying: Koreans are (for genetic reasons) a lot smarter than Bolivians.

https://twitter.com/JesusFerna7026/status/2050593429072028014

Why did Koreans being smarter than Bolivians let them became a frontier economy? Should be obvious: far more people with the ability to become engineers, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs, and even manual factory workers and janitors and farmers are much more competent.

Rule of law, European Court of Human Rights: the ECHR decided in 2024 that Article 8 (right to privacy and family life) implied a right to protection from climate change and Switzerland was violating human rights by not having sufficiently-strong climate policies. You might recognize Article 8 from all of those stories of MENA or African rapists and murderers being undeportable (it would violate their right to family life).

Brazil is Woke Utopia. Racism is illegal (unbailable, worse than homicide), so is transphobia and damaging a woman's feelings. Everyone is mixed and the country is heavily black, but also there's extremely strong (50%+ quotas) affirmative action, and a judge rules by decree. Extremely strong gun control laws, which are not enforced against actual criminals.

This is a conceptual error. The whole reason Orban became enemy #1 for European libs was refusing "Syrian refugees" in 2015. It has nothing to do with "vulgarity" or foreign associations (which came later as an attempt to survive EU hostility). Those are just excuses.

https://twitter.com/truejuicepapi/status/2045091150642507860

You can't actually trick libs into being OK with "no Africans and Middle Easterners" by being polite about it.

This is even more true in Britain. The non-US Anglosphere is incredibly illiberal (not just in commerce, but also in freedom of speech and group-rights frameworks) even by the standards of an already long-post-liberal West.

https://twitter.com/CJHandmer/status/2044829722342010941

My view is that major Western countries transitioned from broadly liberal to broadly socialist/social-democratic around the Great Depression, and then from there to New Left (with more continuity, but still big changes around things like technology) in the 1960s.

Thread with excerpts from "The Information State" by Jacob Siegel (2026). Thesis: The Information State is a new form of political regime that "governs by controlling the codes and protocols of the digital public arena, which it uses to engineer the public’s compliance." Siegel traces what he calls the information state to the GWOT, when the 1990s libertarian ethos and hostility to the state of tech was replaced with a public-private infrastructure for, initially, mass surveillance and debanking of potential terrorists.

Master thread on the 2015-2022 closure of the Internet, the process by which every major Internet platform went from broadly open with a few basic guidelines to strict narrative enforcement, often with the collaboration of govts and outsourcing moderation power to NGOs. YouTube was the most important platform for reaching The Youth and also uniquely compatible with monetization, allowing independent political/intellectual entrepreneurs to make a career. Closed 2015-2019.

https://x.com/arctotherium42/status/2028271179291574365

To make fact-checking work during the closure of the Internet, social media platforms had to know the ground truth of claims. Since this is not precisely knowable, they outsourced determining the truth to a web of news organizations and NGOs. Thread on these. Most official fact-checking organizations were certified by other the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) or the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN), which created a chokepoint in the ecosystem.

Canada provides several privileges for officially-recognized media organizations, such as tax refunds up to 35% of labor costs and huge transfers directly from platforms where their content is posted. Australia, UK, South Africa, Brazil, and NZ have similar programs.
France subsidizes officially-recognized journalists to the tune of a billion pounds a year. The Nordics have a similar program. France and Italy also provide recognized journalists with tax credits.