Some excerpts from Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (Pipes). Key difference between Russia, where the Bolsheviks succeeded, and the rest of Europe, where they failed, is that the masses of the rest of Europe were at least a little bit patriotic.

Of the big Euro socialist parties, the Italians PSI joined the Comintern, but was expelled for not expelling the minority who didn't want to. The German and British Communists were unable to take over SPD/Labour, respectively. Only in France did the major socialist party join.

Quick thread on The Rise of Christianity (Rodney Stark, 1996). Stark estimates that Christianity grew ~40% per decade until it made up half the Roman Empire, comparable to Mormonism (up until the 90s, I don't know about today). Stark observes that contemporary cults (as distinguished from sects, which split off from conventional religion) overwhelmingly recruit from the religiously-unattached upper stratum of society, and infers that Christianity probably did too.

Thread with excerpts from "South Africa's Brave New World." The white establishment gave up gracefully, despite having the military power to fight. The author himself fought apartheid and doesn't regret it, despite his findings.

Immediate capital flight amid massive corruption from the ANC. Chief ambition of much of the new elite: opening casinos, assumed to be a license to print money. Shades of US states doing the same for tax revenue.

"It is every migrant’s dream to see the tables turned, to see long lines of Americans and Britons in front of the Bangladeshi or Mexican or Nigerian Embassy, begging for a residence visa." - Suketu Mehta, India-born NYU professor. This in an argument *for* immigration.
From "This Land is Their Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto". Mehta is a professor at New York University. America gave him a far better life than he could have had in India, plus a taxpayer-funded ticket into our cultural elite. And he despises us for it.

Some excerpts from the white flight chapter of Jeremy Carl's "The Unprotected Class": The "racial transformation" of urban neighborhoods in the 50s-80s was incredibly rapid, South Shore going from 96% white to 94% black in 30 years. I did not know Rosa Parks was attacked in her own home in Detroit (by a black man).

2024 Dutch version of the famous Danish "It's Complicated" graph. First generation immigrants are net fiscal negatives at all ages - entirely because of "non-western" immigrants. But at least the Netherlands benefits from... there must be something. (new study, short thread) This is a very familiar map. Bet you could predict almost all of this with national IQ + selection + obvious adjustment for Afrikaners.

This dumb meme needs to die. The effects of immigration on population aging are very small, because immigrants age too. China would need literally billions to put a dent in population aging. There are not billions of people as productive as the avg Chinese angling to move there.

https://twitter.com/StatisticUrban/status/1874354385855406489

South Korea keeping dependency ratios constant would require about a hundred million immigrants... PER YEAR.

Not surprising to those familiar with US immigrant achievement, but about 80% of 21st century Chemistry/Physics/Medicine US immigrant Nobelists are from Europe or the Anglosphere. Of the 10 Asians, 5 are Japanese and 2 are Israeli. As far as national origins: UK dominates.
Source: nfap.com/wp-content/upl…

Wrong as applies to newspapers and television. There's strong evidence media radicalization (Great Awokening) caused the attitude shift in white liberals, not the other way around. From "Explaining Shifts in White Racial Liberalism".
Newspapers that optimize for audience engagement look like the NYPost or the Daily Mail. Think prominent pictures of scary black criminals, rather than burying nonwhite murderer's race like most papers.

Thread on the difference between the history of pre- and post-tax and transfer income inequality in the US. The well-known story is the left earned one, with a U-shaped curve. The right is what it looks like after taxes and transfers - there's no increase post-1970.
So what happened? Short answer is the things described in @charlesmurray's Coming Apart. First, Great Society welfare programs disincentived work among the left half of the productivity Bell Curve - you need to be above average to make real income gains from working harder.

It's common knowledge that Asian science is full of fraud. Less common knowledge is that Asian scientists in the US also commit a lot of fraud vs their white peers. For instance, as of 2022 19/29 researchers sanctioned by the ORI are of Asian origin.
This reflects poorly on university plans to attract Asian STEM talent to replace their white faculty. Ability isn't enough - you also need honesty.

Lots of different measurements of impersonal honesty: a thread. The precise rank-ordering of these different measures varies, but the general picture is clear. First one is how many people claim to complete an impossible 5-minute task in 5 minutes. .

https://x.com/ThomasTalhelm/status/1794407065278148963

This one is the fraction of people who report a lost wallet, with or without money. A consistent pattern of China doing much worse than other high-IQ countries is clear across these.

Very strongly disagree. I don't think class is a very important point of conflict today (race >> sex/age >> class), but to the extent it is, the upper-middle class (say 80th-99th percentile) has a lot to benefit from RW politics. First, Affirmative Action screws this group.

https://twitter.com/codex_americana/status/1809883451912249705

Second, Asian immigration. Asian immigrants mostly compete with this group, and have driven an extreme (and much lamented) intensification of the education rat race in the 21st century. Restricting it (needed for political reasons anyways) would greatly benefit the UMC.

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.

Book thread on "The Billionaire's Apprentice," by Anita Raghavan, an Indian-American journalist. It chronicles the rise and fall of three-time McKinsey director and Goldman-Sachs board member Rajat Gupta and billionaire hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam. (1/n) Raghavan refers to Rajat's generation as the "twice-blessed," benefitting from both the end of the Raj and the passing of the Hart-Celler act of 1965, which allowed them to escape their newly independent homeland and come to the US instead, where they quickly rose to the top.

Book thread on @peterbrimelow's Alien Nation. This book was published in 1995, but unfortunately it is still relevant almost 30 years later. If anything, it was too optimistic. It is not just illegal immigration that is out of control; legal immigration is too. Immigration is in effect an imitation civil right, extended indefinitely to a group of foreigners selected arbitrarily and without regard to American interests.

Sean Last has correctly pointed out that Ellis Islander assimilation is mostly a myth, at least politically. When looking at white ethnic groups, generally only the traditionally Protestant ones are majority (R). But was a simple partisanship analysis misses is that this is basically a consequence of the Mean Voter Theorem. Whites are still a supermajority of US voters, so the dividing line between parties is among generally leftish white ethnic groups.

Murder rates are often used as proxies for crime rates in international and cross-temporal comparisons because murder definition/reporting is consistent. Other crimes like rape (definition creep) or theft (goes unreported if not likely to be punished) don't have this property. However, medical advances (both in terms of technique and access) have a massive effect on murder rate. Injuries that would kill someone in 1950 are usually treatable today, with huge improvement since the Vietnam war. The gap with pre ~WW2 (before antibiotics!) is even larger.

The idea that Europeans are generally politically to the left of Americans because of American occupation seems quite wrong. The most infamously leftist country in the world is Sweden, never occupied.

https://twitter.com/CovfefeAnon/status/1607605000397819905

The actual occupation governments, set up shortly after WW2 by the Americans, tended to be quite right-wing, conservative, and anticommunist (without much in the way of "social liberalism" either).

Just read "A Bitter Harvest," Ian Smith's memoir. In a lot of ways, it's like the inverse of Lee Kuan Yew's similar "from Third World to First." Rather than Yew defeating the Communists and successfully navigating a difficult foreign environment to build a great nation... Smith aims to defend his nation against Communists acting with the aid of virtually the entire world, including Britain (played a major role w/ Singapore as well, if course), the United States, and eventually even South Africa.

Obvious question is if Haredi life expectancy is because they're actually healthier then otherwise similar, but less religious Jews, or if it's that they're underperforming their intelligence/"genetic quality" (low levels of genetic load) in terms of SES. Could be a mix of both.

https://twitter.com/DemographicR/status/1585760167509254144

Still, something you notice in US data is that *controlling for intelligence* (or its various proxies such as race, SES, or education) the religious do better on a whole host of outcomes then the secular.