http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/size-nations#.ULb5_zTaR9Y.facebookGREAT READS : SMALL HOMOGENOUS STATES ARE BEST FOR ALL
A large state does nothing but allow greater debt, and greater debt both warfare, bad policy, corruption, and bad norms. Now, if we could just get it across that monarchy is superior to democracy.
Break Up The United States.
Source date (UTC): 2012-11-29 01:03:00 UTC
I LOVE RUSSIANS.
The more macho the better.
Someone has to set a standard 🙂
I need to get a decent camera and let the pictures speak for themselves.
I also have begun to understand that my circle consists of nationalists. And that was what formed my earlier perceptions of conflict.
Source date (UTC): 2012-11-25 05:42:00 UTC
POLITICAL TRIBALISM IN THE US VS UKRAINE
Even in the UK, where I feel more at home than in the states, I don’t feel about the people the same way I do here. I literally want to hug them at random while walking down the street. THey are beautiful, sweet and wonderful. Partly because metaphysically speaking, they naturally think about government the way that we libertarians do: it’s a corrupt enterprise. And given that it’s a corrupt enterprise we must rely upon personal relationships. Personal relationships then, rather than abstract principles, determine the nature and content of communication between people. The degree to which americans are essentially ‘religious’ about social order is only evident to me in this dramatic contrast, where people have zero faith at all in such abstractions. For all american talk about freedom and liberty, we willfully oppress ourselves from both right and left. And while the political class here is openly predatory and self interested in paternal familialism, the american political class is just as predatory and self interested in ideological tribalism. It’s just the same instinct and process devoid of genetic preference, and obscured by ideological abstraction.
Source date (UTC): 2012-10-31 07:38:00 UTC
WHY UKRAINIANS DISLIKE RUSSIANS
You know, over the past month, I’ve seen about a dozen incidents so far of some drunk Russian male douchebag looking for a fight. Last night was typical. The guy tried to leave the restaurant without paying his bill. He had to send a friend to get money for him from an ATM. When he counted out the money on the table, he distracted the waitress and then deftly pocketed some of it again. Then he accused the waitress of stealing from him, when she counted the money and came up short. He claimed injustice and called on his friends. I think three or four of them came as supporters.
Things are odd here: in the states if anything like this happened, the staff would quickly call the police or bouncers and move the scene out of view. THe police would document the facts that they could collect, force the idiots to leave the premises and let the courts resolve the conflict. But here, I don’t know why, the argument went on for more than an hour in the restaurant, while patient customers ignored it. The security guards were as patient as saints. The managers were overly deliberative. The Bartender would have happily gotten into a brawl. The waitresses formed a female mob around them (women do everything here.)
So, aside from being invaded by these people, conquered by them, forced to learn their language – they still have to put up with fight-seeking drunken scumbags on a daily basis. And it’s sad. The people here are so sweet, patient and gentle.
Source date (UTC): 2012-10-27 06:23:00 UTC
UKRAINE
I feel like a cultural anthropologist studying white people in their natural habitat.
Most of us understand that this is the cauldron in which the west was cooked.
As student of mankind, being here with these wonderful people is a spiritual as much as intellectual experience.
All this talk of corruption is nonsense. The west is at least as corrupt. All the talk of the underground economy is true. But what other choice do they have? The black market and religion are the best means of peaceful rebellion available to a poor people.
I suspect that they are our future more than we are theirs.
Source date (UTC): 2012-10-12 09:17:00 UTC
GERMANS AND RUSSIANS
Are the only people on the planet who make sense to me. As far as I can tell, everyone else has gone nuts. (That’s a technical term. Look it up.)
Source date (UTC): 2012-10-04 04:12:00 UTC
TURKS
I had forgotten how pleasant, intelligent and entrepreneurial these people are. Perhaps it is just this segment of the population, but they have honor. It’s beautiful.
Source date (UTC): 2012-09-29 06:23:00 UTC
FROM A POST ON QUORA – THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF MAJORITY RULE OVER HETEROGENEOUS VALUE SYSTEMS
Small homogenous cultures tend to be redistributive. One of the sillly myths, is that 350M americans of various value systems can be governed as are 10M northern european protestant germanics. Majority rule assists us in selecting fiscal priorities when our interests and values are the same. But as the values of a country become heterogeneous through immigration, or the breakdown of the nuclear family that allows women to return to their communal state of bearing children but asking others to pay for them, we render majority rule impossible. Because now we are not selecting priorities for the use of scarce resources, and generating laws to prevent privatization of those investment ‘commons’, but we are instead, generating laws to advance one system of moral codes at the expense of another, and using money from one group to achieve what is amoral to them. This is why democratic government is limited to homogenous cultural entities. And why the market serves us across heterogeneous entities. Our institutions of majority rule are not competent to solve this problem of heterogeneous values.
Source date (UTC): 2012-09-22 13:11:00 UTC
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/09/europes-crisisIS ANYONE ELSE TIRED OF EURO-BLOWHARDS
restating the patently obvious? The northern and southern cultures are incompatible. Or better stated, the Protestant german speaking cultures are incompatible with the catholic countries. Is that difficult to understand?
The euro was doomed from the start. Either the germanic peoples leave and save the south, or the south leaves and dies by suicide. Although some of our south american friends have proven even that is survivable if you have a parent currency to leverage.
The Economist for some reason feels the need to print toilet tissue on the subject. But this is not a question of economic efficiency. It’s a question of cultures.
Source date (UTC): 2012-09-21 00:01:00 UTC
http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/the-return-of-the-return-of-chinese-clans/CHINESE CLANS AND WESTERN UNIVERSALISM
HBD_Chick finds yet another exceptional paper on the impact of different cultural institutions:
“The Return Of The Return of Chinese Clans”
“In a clan, moral obligations are stronger but are limited in scope, as they apply only toward kin. In a city, moral obligations are generalized towards all citizens irrespective of lineage, but they are weaker, as identication is more difficult in a larger and more heterogeneous group. We refer to this distinction as limited vs generalized morality.“
“Institutional mechanisms also differ between the clan and the city: clan enforcement mainly relies on informal institutions, whereas the city relies more on formal enforcement procedures. In terms of economic effciency, these two arrangements have clear trade-offs. The clan economizes on enforcement costs, whereas the city exploits economies of scale because it sustains cooperation in a larger and more heterogeneous community.”
Source date (UTC): 2012-09-01 01:24:00 UTC