Collapse or Indefinite Serfdom?

[Marek]

Borrowed from Jesse: http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot...ed-vendor.html

“They don’t want to kill us [the Greek people] but keep us down on our knees so we can keep paying them indefinitely.”

Eva Kyriadou

What if that is the future? Many here have accepted the idea that the current system will gradually unravel through repeated cycles of crisis. But what if this is not an unraveling system? What if it is a new system capable of continuously extracting wealth and power from society through repeated cycles of crisis and manipulations of politics? What if the big banks are just clever enough to walk the line between self-destructive greed and sustainable business practices? To most it might look the same as a long decline; but instead of reaching some point in 8 or 10 or 15 years where a healthy economy begins to rebuild we are in for a generation or more of grinding economic exploitation?

Aside from the economic implications, a sustained destructive stress on society over decades is far more devastating than ones that comes and goes within the span of a single childhood or adolescence. The shorter duration affects a generation. The longer one rewrites the mores and expectation of a generation and those after it.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Collapse or Indefinite Serfdom?

Borrowed from Jesse: http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot...ed-vendor.html

“They don’t want to kill us [the Greek people] but keep us down on our knees so we can keep paying them indefinitely.”

Eva Kyriadou

What if that is the future? Many here have accepted the idea that the current system will gradually unravel through repeated cycles of crisis. But what if this is not an unraveling system? What if it is a new system capable of continuously extracting wealth and power from society through repeated cycles of crisis and manipulations of politics? What if the big banks are just clever enough to walk the line between self-destructive greed and sustainable business practices? To most it might look the same as a long decline; but instead of reaching some point in 8 or 10 or 15 years where a healthy economy begins to rebuild we are in for a generation or more of grinding economic exploitation?

Aside from the economic implications, a sustained destructive stress on society over decades is far more devastating than ones that comes and goes within the span of a single childhood or adolescence. The shorter duration affects a generation. The longer one rewrites the mores and expectation of a generation and those after it.

This is how Žižek sees it. He sees the installation of Monti and Papademos as banker-control. He sees the whole concept of post-partisan politics as banker control across a number of countries. Hudson has seen Latvia as a testing ground and Greece as the next step in the experiment. It is often interesting to look at the world from a neo-marixist point of view. Even if one doesn't agree with it.

Regardless of whether this is true, partially true, or a completely incorrect assessment, it makes for a powerful narrative.

And one cannot escape the conclusion that somehow, and in this very decade, debt default became a non-option for nations, federal subdivisions, and private citizens. Bankruptcy is a tool almost exclusively to be used by corporations now. This is something new. I can foresee it continuing to the point where all forms of personal and governmental debt become non-dischargeable. They are training the youth for this in the USA now. States are beginning to pass "bondholder first" laws. That way there, they'll have to fire the legislature and sell the state house before a banker loses a dime. And more municipalities are falling under "financial receivers," who are often bankers, never elected, and rule as Mayor, City Council, and Judge all in one.

And nobody can doubt that central bankers and the Goldman crew have indeed ended up unelected Prime Ministers in Europe. And nobody can doubt that this happened in Greece because Papandreou wanted to give the people a vote. And nobody can doubt that they wag the dog in the U.S. between bailouts, complete lack of criminal and civil liability, revolving door to the Treasury Department, and our new unlimited money in politics laws. And then there's the Irish issue. Vote down the EU Constitution. No problem. Vote again until you get the answer they want. This certainly looks to be poor form for nations that profess democratic philosophies.

And so goes Greece. It looks to be followed not far behind by more European countries. But the real prize here is Italy, if the Marxist interpretations are followed to their logical conclusions. Roll Italy's middle class as hard as Greece and there will be big money and power to follow.

Personally, I'm no Marxist. I am a fan of Democracy. I believe that public discourse is the best way we've figured yet to deal with essentially contested concepts. I do get worried when public discourse is stifled. I worry a bit when unelected leaders are installed for years on end, even at a town level. And I fear for the middle class. Without it, democracy is lost.

Anyhow, for what it's worth, here's what Žižek had to say this week:

Save us from the saviours

Slavoj Žižek on Europe and the Greeks

Imagine a scene from a dystopian movie that depicts our society in the near future. Uniformed guards patrol half-empty downtown streets at night, on the prowl for immigrants, criminals and vagrants. Those they find are brutalised. What seems like a fanciful Hollywood image is a reality in today’s Greece. At night, black-shirted vigilantes from the Holocaust-denying ne0-fascist Golden Dawn movement – which won 7 per cent of the vote in the last round of elections, and had the support, it’s said, of 50 per cent of the Athenian police – have been patrolling the street and beating up all the immigrants they can find: Afghans, Pakistanis, Algerians. So this is how Europe is defended in the spring of 2012.The trouble with defending European civilisation against the immigrant threat is that the ferocity of the defence is more of a threat to ‘civilisation’ than any number of Muslims. With friendly defenders like this, Europe needs no enemies. A hundred years ago, G.K. Chesterton articulated the deadlock in which critics of religion find themselves: ‘Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church … The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them.’ Many liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism that they end up dispensing with freedom and democracy if only they may fight terror. If the ‘terrorists’ are ready to wreck this world for love of another, our warriors against terror are ready to wreck democracy out of hatred for the Muslim other. Some of them love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalise torture to defend it. It’s an inversion of the process by which fanatical defenders of religion start out by attacking contemporary secular culture and end up sacrificing their own religious credentials in their eagerness to eradicate the aspects of secularism they hate.

But Greece’s anti-immigrant defenders aren’t the principal danger: they are just a by-product of the true threat, the politics of austerity that have caused Greece’s predicament. The next round of Greek elections will be held on 17 June. The European establishment warns us that these elections are crucial: not only the fate of Greece, but maybe the fate of the whole of Europe is in the balance. One outcome – the right one, they argue – would allow the painful but necessary process of recovery through austerity to continue. The alternative – if the ‘extreme leftist’ Syriza party wins – would be a vote for chaos, the end of the (European) world as we know it.

The prophets of doom are right, but not in the way they intend. Critics of our current democratic arrangements complain that elections don’t offer a true choice: what we get instead is the choice between a centre-right and a centre-left party whose programmes are almost indistinguishable. On 17 June, there will be a real choice: the establishment (New Democracy and Pasok) on one side, Syriza on the other. And, as is usually the case when a real choice is on offer, the establishment is in a panic: chaos, poverty and violence will follow, they say, if the wrong choice is made. The mere possibility of a Syriza victory is said to have sent ripples of fear through global markets. Ideological prosopopoeia has its day: markets talk as if they were persons, expressing their ‘worry’ at what will happen if the elections fail to produce a government with a mandate to persist with the EU-IMF programme of fiscal austerity and structural reform. The citizens of Greece have no time to worry about these prospects: they have enough to worry about in their everyday lives, which are becoming miserable to a degree unseen in Europe for decades.

Such predictions are self-fulfilling, causing panic and thus bringing about the very eventualities they warn against. If Syriza wins, the European establishment will hope that we learn the hard way what happens when an attempt is made to interrupt the vicious cycle of mutual complicity between Brussels’s technocracy and anti-immigrant populism. This is why Alexis Tsipras, Syriza’s leader, made clear in a recent interview that his first priority, should Syriza win, will be to counteract panic: ‘People will conquer fear. They will not succumb; they will not be blackmailed.’ Syriza have an almost impossible task. Theirs is not the voice of extreme left ‘madness’, but of reason speaking out against the madness of market ideology. In their readiness to take over, they have banished the left’s fear of taking power; they have the courage to clear up the mess created by others. They will need to exercise a formidable combination of principle and pragmatism, of democratic commitment and a readiness to act quickly and decisively where needed. If they are to have even a minimal chance of success, they will need an all-European display of solidarity: not only decent treatment on the part of every other European country, but also more creative ideas, like the promotion of solidarity tourism this summer.

In his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is between heresy and non-belief – i.e., when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split. This is the position in Europe today. Only a new ‘heresy’ – represented at this moment by Syriza – can save what is worth saving of the European legacy: democracy, trust in people, egalitarian solidarity etc. The Europe we will end up with if Syriza is outmanoeuvred is a ‘Europe with Asian values’ – which, of course, has nothing to do with Asia, but everything to do with the tendency of contemporary capitalism to suspend democracy.

Here is the paradox that sustains the ‘free vote’ in democratic societies: one is free to choose on condition that one makes the right choice. This is why, when the wrong choice is made (as it was when Ireland rejected the EU constitution), the choice is treated as a mistake, and the establishment immediately demands that the ‘democratic’ process be repeated in order that the mistake may be corrected. When George Papandreou, then Greek prime minister, proposed a referendum on the eurozone bailout deal at the end of last year, the referendum itself was rejected as a false choice.

There are two main stories about the Greek crisis in the media: the German-European story (the Greeks are irresponsible, lazy, free-spending, tax-dodging etc, and have to be brought under control and taught financial discipline) and the Greek story (our national sovereignty is threatened by the neoliberal technocracy imposed by Brussels). When it became impossible to ignore the plight of the Greek people, a third story emerged: the Greeks are now presented as humanitarian victims in need of help, as if a war or natural catastrophe had hit the country. While all three stories are false, the third is arguably the most disgusting. The Greeks are not passive victims: they are at war with the European economic establishment, and what they need is solidarity in their struggle, because it is our struggle too.

Greece is not an exception. It is one of the main testing grounds for a new socio-economic model of potentially unlimited application: a depoliticised technocracy in which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy. By saving Greece from its so-called saviours, we also save Europe itself.

25 May

[flintlock]

Re: Collapse or Indefinite Serfdom?

Both. First collapse, followed by serfdom of a grateful population glad just to have that.

[don]

Re: Collapse or Indefinite Serfdom?

a note on how the Greek 'bailout' funds are being used . . .

Most Aid to Athens Circles Back to Europe

By LIZ ALDERMAN and JACK EWING

PARIS — Its membership in the euro currency union hanging in the balance, Greece continues to receive billions of euros in emergency assistance from a so-called troika of lenders overseeing its bailout.

But almost none of the money is going to the Greek government to pay for vital public services. Instead, it is flowing directly back into the troika’s pockets.

The European bailout of 130 billion euros ($163.4 billion) that was supposed to buy time for Greece is mainly servicing only the interest on the country’s debt — while the Greek economy continues to struggle.

As they pay themselves, though, the troika members are also withholding other funds intended to keep the Greek government in operation.

Last week, the Athens office that tracks revenue said Greece could run out of money by July. If so, Greece could default on its debts — except those due to the central bank, the monetary fund and the European Union.

“Greece will not default on the troika because the troika is paying themselves,” said Thomas Mayer, a senior adviser at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/bu...1&ref=business

[Mn_Mark]

Re: Collapse or Indefinite Serfdom?

“They don’t want to kill us [the Greek people] but keep us down on our knees so we can keep paying them indefinitely.”

Eva Kyriadou

What if that is the future? Many here have accepted the idea that the current system will gradually unravel through repeated cycles of crisis. But what if this is not an unraveling system? What if it is a new system capable of continuously extracting wealth and power from society through repeated cycles of crisis and manipulations of politics? What if the big banks are just clever enough to walk the line between self-destructive greed and sustainable business practices? To most it might look the same as a long decline; but instead of reaching some point in 8 or 10 or 15 years where a healthy economy begins to rebuild we are in for a generation or more of grinding economic exploitation?

The bankers have saved themselves by convincing the government to take on their bad debt. That was to be expected since there are always ambitious, powerful men who will use whatever resources are at hand to benefit themselves. And since we've allowed the scope and power of the federal government to grow way beyond what the Founders envisioned -to the point where there is almost nothing outside its grasp - the government provided a handy way for the bankers to foist the cost of the banks' risk-taking off on someone else, the taxpayer. This was guaranteed to happen sooner or later once so much power was handed to the government by well-intentioned progressives like Wilson and FDR who thought government could be grown large enough to fix big social problems without making it also available to ambitious men to use for their own purposes. The problem is not a problem of capitalism, but a problem of too-large, too-powerful government.

Anyway, the mathematics of the situation (the federal debt, the size of the needed bailouts, etc) means that without our (the U.S.') own "austerity" plan (which will not happen because the electorate doesn't want it), we will get a currency collapse and people will simply, whether Weimar-style or just Argentina-style, stop accepting the government's money. Then the bailout games will be over, but by then many of the smart, ambitious, well-placed men will have figured out how to leverage that situation to protect their wealth and power. The Rothschilds have been doing that for a long time. There will always be men like that. As I see it, there's no way around it, you have to just accept it - and perhaps even realize that it is smart to be at least a little like that yourself, because at root this is a predator world. You can try to expand the reach of government even more in the name of giving it power to control the rich, but they will simply use that power for their own benefit. I think the best you can do is keep government very small and have a strong cultural ethic of non-corruption so that at least the rich can't use government against us.

What concerns me more than the usual cycle of boom and bust and ambitious rich men working the "serfs" for their own benefit is the "enstupidation" of the U.S. society. I appreciate Flintlock's avatar - President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, from the movie "Idiocracy" - because I love that movie and think its message (that the stupid people are having a lot of children and the smart people are having few, leading to a stupider and stupider population) has a lot of truth to it. I expect we will have very harsh economic times and that can sometimes clean out stupidity in a Darwinian process of attrition. But if our populace is literally becoming stupider because we are allowing millions of low-IQ immigrants to flock here and we subsidize their reproduction, as well as the reproduction of the stupid who are already here, and give them votes to vote themselves more subsidies paid for by the traditional American middle class, I fear there may be no coming back from that.

North Korea concerns me, not because I think they're a threat to us but because such a totalitarian system has been able to survive for so long among a population of Asians that are not stupid. It is chillingly like '1984' and it goes on and on. The North Koreans are getting smaller and weaker from malnutrition and one wonders how many generations will have to pass after they are finally free before they begin to get back to where they would have been without the communists. And one wonders how many more generations of dictatorship they will have to suffer. I would have thought they'd have thrown the Kim dictatorship off by now. That they haven't makes me think that perhaps such horrors, once established, might be able to go on for hundreds of years. The technology of "1984" - telescreens, omnipresent government spying - exists now. If the North Korean tyrants have held on this long without that "1984" technology, how much worse might it be with it?

I fear that that could happen here...because in very hard times a stupid population that is inferior to the Founders' generation and the generations of Americans who built the country in IQ and moral character could likely embrace a Marxist "solution" to the problems, identifying the cause of the problem as "rich bankers" or "unfettered capitalism" when the real problem was growing the government too large and making it a juicy target for takeover by the smart, ambitious men who always have and always will exist. And then it could be many, many generations, maybe even forever (look at Greece and Rome, they've never come back from their glory days) of North Korean/"1984"-style tyranny before we have a country again of hard-working, liberty-loving, self-reliant, prosperous people.

The only solution I can see on a personal level is to keep my powder dry and be ready to move...the problem is there is no obvious place that would be better.

[don]

Re: Collapse or Indefinite Serfdom?

happy to be there?

Save us from the saviours

Slavoj Žižek on Europe and the Greeks

Imagine a scene from a dystopian movie that depicts our society in the near future. Uniformed guards patrol half-empty downtown streets at night, on the prowl for immigrants, criminals and vagrants. Those they find are brutalised. What seems like a fanciful Hollywood image is a reality in today’s Greece. At night, black-shirted vigilantes from the Holocaust-denying ne0-fascist Golden Dawn movement – which won 7 per cent of the vote in the last round of elections, and had the support, it’s said, of 50 per cent of the Athenian police – have been patrolling the street and beating up all the immigrants they can find: Afghans, Pakistanis, Algerians. So this is how Europe is defended in the spring of 2012.

The trouble with defending European civilisation against the immigrant threat is that the ferocity of the defence is more of a threat to ‘civilisation’ than any number of Muslims. With friendly defenders like this, Europe needs no enemies. A hundred years ago, G.K. Chesterton articulated the deadlock in which critics of religion find themselves: ‘Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church … The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them.’ Many liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism that they end up dispensing with freedom and democracy if only they may fight terror. If the ‘terrorists’ are ready to wreck this world for love of another, our warriors against terror are ready to wreck democracy out of hatred for the Muslim other. Some of them love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalise torture to defend it. It’s an inversion of the process by which fanatical defenders of religion start out by attacking contemporary secular culture and end up sacrificing their own religious credentials in their eagerness to eradicate the aspects of secularism they hate.

But Greece’s anti-immigrant defenders aren’t the principal danger: they are just a by-product of the true threat, the politics of austerity that have caused Greece’s predicament. The next round of Greek elections will be held on 17 June. The European establishment warns us that these elections are crucial: not only the fate of Greece, but maybe the fate of the whole of Europe is in the balance. One outcome – the right one, they argue – would allow the painful but necessary process of recovery through austerity to continue. The alternative – if the ‘extreme leftist’ Syriza party wins – would be a vote for chaos, the end of the (European) world as we know it.

The prophets of doom are right, but not in the way they intend. Critics of our current democratic arrangements complain that elections don’t offer a true choice: what we get instead is the choice between a centre-right and a centre-left party whose programmes are almost indistinguishable. On 17 June, there will be a real choice: the establishment (New Democracy and Pasok) on one side, Syriza on the other. And, as is usually the case when a real choice is on offer, the establishment is in a panic: chaos, poverty and violence will follow, they say, if the wrong choice is made. The mere possibility of a Syriza victory is said to have sent ripples of fear through global markets. Ideological prosopopoeia has its day: markets talk as if they were persons, expressing their ‘worry’ at what will happen if the elections fail to produce a government with a mandate to persist with the EU-IMF programme of fiscal austerity and structural reform. The citizens of Greece have no time to worry about these prospects: they have enough to worry about in their everyday lives, which are becoming miserable to a degree unseen in Europe for decades.

Such predictions are self-fulfilling, causing panic and thus bringing about the very eventualities they warn against. If Syriza wins, the European establishment will hope that we learn the hard way what happens when an attempt is made to interrupt the vicious cycle of mutual complicity between Brussels’s technocracy and anti-immigrant populism. This is why Alexis Tsipras, Syriza’s leader, made clear in a recent interview that his first priority, should Syriza win, will be to counteract panic: ‘People will conquer fear. They will not succumb; they will not be blackmailed.’ Syriza have an almost impossible task. Theirs is not the voice of extreme left ‘madness’, but of reason speaking out against the madness of market ideology. In their readiness to take over, they have banished the left’s fear of taking power; they have the courage to clear up the mess created by others. They will need to exercise a formidable combination of principle and pragmatism, of democratic commitment and a readiness to act quickly and decisively where needed. If they are to have even a minimal chance of success, they will need an all-European display of solidarity: not only decent treatment on the part of every other European country, but also more creative ideas, like the promotion of solidarity tourism this summer.

In his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is between heresy and non-belief – i.e., when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split. This is the position in Europe today. Only a new ‘heresy’ – represented at this moment by Syriza – can save what is worth saving of the European legacy: democracy, trust in people, egalitarian solidarity etc. The Europe we will end up with if Syriza is outmanoeuvred is a ‘Europe with Asian values’ – which, of course, has nothing to do with Asia, but everything to do with the tendency of contemporary capitalism to suspend democracy.

Here is the paradox that sustains the ‘free vote’ in democratic societies: one is free to choose on condition that one makes the right choice. This is why, when the wrong choice is made (as it was when Ireland rejected the EU constitution), the choice is treated as a mistake, and the establishment immediately demands that the ‘democratic’ process be repeated in order that the mistake may be corrected. When George Papandreou, then Greek prime minister, proposed a referendum on the eurozone bailout deal at the end of last year, the referendum itself was rejected as a false choice.

There are two main stories about the Greek crisis in the media: the German-European story (the Greeks are irresponsible, lazy, free-spending, tax-dodging etc, and have to be brought under control and taught financial discipline) and the Greek story (our national sovereignty is threatened by the neoliberal technocracy imposed by Brussels). When it became impossible to ignore the plight of the Greek people, a third story emerged: the Greeks are now presented as humanitarian victims in need of help, as if a war or natural catastrophe had hit the country. While all three stories are false, the third is arguably the most disgusting. The Greeks are not passive victims: they are at war with the European economic establishment, and what they need is solidarity in their struggle, because it is our struggle too.

Greece is not an exception. It is one of the main testing grounds for a new socio-economic model of potentially unlimited application: a depoliticised technocracy in which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy. By saving Greece from its so-called saviours, we also save Europe itself.

25 May

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n11/slavoj-zizek/save-us-from-the-saviours

(tip of the hat to Jesse)

[charliebrown]

Re: Collapse or Indefinite Serfdom?

I have been lucky enough to be born of old parents, who lived through the depression and hated debt, and instilled the notion of hating debt in me too. I am debt free. The only money I ever borrrowed was for my house, and only 2x my salary. I paid that off during cut intrest rates version #1 after the dot com crash. If we in the U.S. would stop borrowing to buy crap, and not buy new fancy cars, and big fancy houses, can we defeat the bankers? I agree that the bankers have control of the gvt. How do we get it back? If we would collectively reduce our private debt burden, would banking whither? Will public spending just put us in hock anyhow, and we will pay for it through inflation, higher interest rates or taxes??? Are we too far gone to reduce debt? As over inflated housing, education and medicine
will sap most of any middle class income.

Also, some people are in debt over the heads through unfortunate circumstance. Death of bread winner, medical bills, long term loss of jobs, etc. If you have been frugal and trying to pay down debts, I see no moral objection to going B.K. that is what it is there for.

[cjppjc]

Re: Collapse or Indefinite Serfdom?

I have been lucky enough to be born of old parents, who lived through the depression and hated debt, and instilled the notion of hating debt in me too. I am debt free. The only money I ever borrrowed was for my house, and only 2x my salary. I paid that off during cut intrest rates version #1 after the dot com crash. If we in the U.S. would stop borrowing to buy crap, and not buy new fancy cars, and big fancy houses, can we defeat the bankers? I agree that the bankers have control of the gvt. How do we get it back? If we would collectively reduce our private debt burden, would banking whither? Will public spending just put us in hock anyhow, and we will pay for it through inflation, higher interest rates or taxes??? Are we too far gone to reduce debt? As over inflated housing, education and medicine
will sap most of any middle class income.

Also, some people are in debt over the heads through unfortunate circumstance. Death of bread winner, medical bills, long term loss of jobs, etc. If you have been frugal and trying to pay down debts, I see no moral objection to going B.K. that is what it is there for.

Yes. I need to come to a new understanding about money, and how it affects my life.

[vinoveri]

Re: Collapse or Indefinite Serfdom?

, from the movie "Idiocracy" - because I love that movie and think its message (that the stupid people are having a lot of children and the smart people are having few, leading to a stupider and stupider population) has a lot of truth to it. I expect we will have very harsh economic times and that can sometimes clean out stupidity in a Darwinian process of attrition. But if our populace is literally becoming stupider because we are allowing millions of low-IQ immigrants to flock here and we subsidize their reproduction, as well as the reproduction of the stupid who are already here, and give them votes to vote themselves more subsidies paid for by the traditional American middle class, I fear there may be no coming back from that.

How many children do you have? Are you one of the "smart" people?

People and persons are not the problem. The destruction and marginalation of the family is.

We must remember that the object of liberty of life, and procreation and profundity together with raising and loving one's progeny, teaching them truth and how to live, is integral to living (at least it always has been).

[c1ue]

Re: Collapse or Indefinite Serfdom?

How many children do you have? Are you one of the "smart" people?

People and persons are not the problem. The destruction and marginalation of the family is.

We must remember that the object of liberty of life, and procreation and profundity together with raising and loving one's progeny, teaching them truth and how to live, is integral to living (at least it always has been).

I'm glad you called out Mn_Mark on his blatant anti-immigrant, racist rant.

His understanding of human genetics is as poor as his understanding of the role education and wealth play in intelligence.

[Mn_Mark]

Re: Collapse or Indefinite Serfdom?

How many children do you have? Are you one of the "smart" people?

People and persons are not the problem. The destruction and marginalation of the family is.

We must remember that the object of liberty of life, and procreation and profundity together with raising and loving one's progeny, teaching them truth and how to live, is integral to living (at least it always has been).

It's irrelevant how many children I have. The truth of my argument does not depend on how many children I have.

I honestly do not understand what your last sentence meant or how it is supposed to refute the common-sense point I was making that when you allow significant numbers of low-IQ people into your country, who also have more children than you do, that you get a stupider country that is less capable of maintaining the kind of society the Founding generations created.

When you allow Europeans to emigrate here you get a more European society.
When you allow Africans to emigrate here you get a more African society.
When you allow Muslims to emigrate here you get a more Muslim society.
When you allow Mexicans to emigrate here you get a more Mexican society.

This is not difficult to understand. I don't care to live in a more African, Muslim, or Mexican society.

[Mn_Mark]

Re: Collapse or Indefinite Serfdom?

I'm glad you called out Mn_Mark on his blatant anti-immigrant, racist rant.

His understanding of human genetics is as poor as his understanding of the role education and wealth play in intelligence.

I guess you think that calling someone "anti-immigrant" and a "racist" are arguments instead of empty insults. I am well-acquainted with the liberal norms that say that a white man is forbidden to have a "people" or to identify with his race or to want his people's society to remain his people's society. I reject that. Liberals are so bereft of actual arguments on these matters and so accustomed to having their way that they lazily assume all they have to do is call someone a racist and the argument is over. It's like medieval church leaders calling someone a witch or a heretic. The "racist" label, in a liberal's mind, ends the discussion. No need to actually refute arguments! Just call 'em "racists".

Your lazy response about the "role education and wealth play in intelligence" says nothing. I will have to read between the lines and assume you are arguing that high-IQ people have high IQs because they come from wealth and have good education, and that people with low IQs just needed more wealth and education and they too would have had high IQs. This begs the question of how the people with wealth got that in the first place.

The wealth comes from the high IQ, not the other way around. IQ is significantly inherited (http://the-scientist.com/2011/08/09/...-intelligence/) and IQ predicts educational attainment, and educational attainment predicts wealth ( http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/04/the_correlation.html).

[c1ue]

Re: Collapse or Indefinite Serfdom?

I guess you think that calling someone "anti-immigrant" and a "racist" are arguments instead of empty insults.

No, I think that in your case, these terms are descriptive.

Do you disagree?

Your lazy response about the "role education and wealth play in intelligence" says nothing.

...

The wealth comes from the high IQ, not the other way around. IQ is significantly inherited (http://the-scientist.com/2011/08/09/...-intelligence/) and IQ predicts educational attainment, and educational attainment predicts wealth ( http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/04/the_correlation.html).

I won't even bother with pointing out the idiocy of your 'wealth springing from intelligence' part. No doubt others can skewer your sacred cows with bankster examples.

Referring to your studies in question - the problem with both of them is that they do not control for the factors I noted above.

If you cannot show that there is a clear, non-wealth, non-social standing, but racial component to intelligence, then your argument boils down to correlation of causation.

Correlation of causation means nothing, especially since human genetics does not function in such a simplistic manner of x + y = z.

But then, you knew that (?)

[llanlad2]

Re: Collapse or Indefinite Serfdom?

I find it hilarious when Americans have a go at immigrants. There couldn't be anything more dumbass, ignorant and hypocritical.

Complaints about immigration policy - fair enough.

Against immigrants-you're the idiot.

[Mn_Mark]

Re: Collapse or Indefinite Serfdom?

Complaints about immigration policy - fair enough.

Against immigrants-you're the idiot.

A distinction without a difference.

But if it makes a difference to you, then: I object to the POLICY that allows immigrants from low-IQ, incompatible populations to emigrate here.

There, is that better?

Heck, I don't think we need any immigrants at all. If they want a "better life" then they are exactly the people who should stay in their own homelands and change them for the better.