Excerpts from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1973). The Porfiriato gave Mexico a generation of stability and development for the first time since independence. This left Mexico overdue for another civil war: the Mexican Revolution. One problem was that the Porfirian school system had created a large, literate middle structure (not class). These educated mestizos became dissatisfied due to lack of opportunity; growth was rapid but not rapid enough to absorb them all.

Thread with excerpts from the 'Porfiriato' section of TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1973). This was the first era of stability and economic growth in post-independence Mexico, summed up with the slogan "Order and Progress." Independent Mexico's problem was that Mexicans were incapable of setting aside personalisms for truly national institutions; congress, for example, was a joke.

Thread with excerpts from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1973), late 19th century. Like before the war, Mexico after the Mex/Am War was a mess, with many regions sinking into barbarism. Yucatan was the worst, with half the population dying in a race war. Every Mexican president was a Freemason, but Catholicism was still universal and the position of the Church, which retained its royal privileges even in republican Mexico, was a flashpoint.

Thread with excerpts from the Mexican-American War section of TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1973). Since independence, Mexico had seemingly gone backwards in all respects; in 1840 Mexico was less civilized than it had been. An incident where French warships blockaded Veracruz over nonpayment of debts from unstable and perpetually-bankrupt Mexican governments. The Mexican response: show "Death to the Anglo-Saxons and Jews" and bring back Santa Anna.

Thread with excerpts from the 'Pretorians' section of TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1973). In 1821, postcolonial nation-building seemed easy; the only example was the USA. But the US was homogenous, well-led, free, and already had an identity. Mexico was the reverse, with no history of self-rule, the criollo/casta/indio split, and no great leadership. The two major factions were the 'continuistas' (conservatives) and the 'reformistas' (liberals).

Excerpts from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1973) on the Mexican War of Independence. The Mexican criollos were far less impressive than their South American counterparts, and produced no leaders equal to Bolivar or San Martin. Where the South American criollos quickly declared independence upon the French conquest of Spain, the Mexican ones dithered. Acting quickly, the local peninsulares coup'd the government and the criollos accepted it.

Thread with excerpts from the Colonial New Spain portion of TR Fehrenbach's 'Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico' (1973). His view is that New Spain would have remained permanent divided and stagnant if not for the northern frontier. The true frontier of New Spain was not the thinly-populated and stagnant (almost identical when the Anglos showed up as in the 17th century) New Mexico, but much further to the south, in the arid regions only a little north of the Valley of Mexico.

A few excerpts from "Years of Peril and Ambition: US Foreign Relations 1776-1921." Several terms from the Treaty of Paris, especially that Britain would abandon its Great Lakes forts and the US would have the right to navigate the Mississippi, were not upheld.
Americans who moved into Spanish Louisiana retained "allegiance to the United States and displayed open contempt for their nominal rulers." Imagine that.

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 Spanish Conquest section of T. R. Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1973). According to the Mexic accounts, the years leading up to the arrival of Cortes were full of terrible omens. To avert the prophesized disaster, Montezuma (disastrously) greatly increased tribute from subject cities and even replaced the govt of his (now former) ally Texcoco.

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.