Chuck is the latest proponent of neoclassical nonsense to grace our blog:
How much worse off would people in those countries be if their children couldn’t work? You can’t apply U.S. ideals to countries that aren’t as far along the economic life cycle as the U.S.
His first paragraph attempts to justify the total failure of the lack of minimum wage laws in the 3rd World to deal with the problems of unemployment or poor pay. He deals with this by not answering the question. Meanwhile, Cuba has a minimum wage law and has full employment. In the US, there are indeed states in the US South that have no minimum wage laws. I’m not sure what the means in terms of what employers can do, but those states have the worst pay and working conditions in the US. In fact, you will see an excellent correlation in the US and around the world: Everywhere there is no minimum wage law, you have terrible pay and working conditions, and in many places, you also have mass unemployment. The working man is getting fucked. Countries that have minimum wage laws, on average, tend to have better treatment of workers and better pay. Lack of minimum wage laws is bad for workers! Once again, we see the enemies of the workers, the neoclassicals, claiming that they are out to help their worker buddies. It’s a lie. Why would our enemies want to help us? The neoclassicals are the agents of Capital and the rich. They want to get rid of minimum wage laws because that’s good for capitalists. It’s good for capitalists and bad for workers. Workers in the developed world won’t work at a shit job that doesn’t even pay enough to survive. Indeed, the minimum wage itself is barely even enough to survive on. Some say it’s low that you can’t survive on it. I’m not sure if that’s true, but if you can barely survive on a minimum wage, how could you survive on a sub-minimum wage? Thomas Sowell, a Black neoclassical economist, says that we should get rid of minimum wage laws so ghetto Blacks could have jobs. But the jobs did not leave the ghettos because of minimum wage laws! They left because the ghetto Blacks destroyed the neighborhood, mostly through crime, and all of the businesses fled. There are jobs in those areas, but many young Blacks do not want to work for them. They barely want to work for minimum wage. They consider that chump change. They make a Hell of a lot more money selling dope, which is why they do it.
Tulio wonders what good the Latin American Left has done down there. How bout we shoot the question back at him and ask what good the Latin American Right did for 190 years for the majorities? Answer: Zero.
But what have the results been? Has there been any meaningful progress that’s happened because of the rise of the left in Latin America that can be solely attributed to leftist economics and politics? I’m not here to attack the Latin left per se. I don’t mind them much so long as they aren’t on this hate America tip and blaming the United States for all their home grown problems e.g. Chavez. I’ve never heard any anti-American hate speech from Brazil, Argentina or Chile under Bachelet.The bottom line though is what have these left wing leaders actually done? Everything is still horribly corrupt, there’s still massive inequality, still no universal health coverage, millions still live in favelas, there’s still lots of crime in a place like Venezuela. So what is so great about these left-wing leaders? Great, so we will live in a country like Cuba where there’s socialism yet everyone is still poor. Whoopie do. And that’s the best latin socialism has to offer.
Not really. Chile and Costa Rica both have socialism (social democracy) and they have some pretty good figures on life expectancy, infant mortality and whatnot. Comparable to the US or even better, with much lower per capita income too. All Latin America has national health care last time I checked. Public hospitals are free, assuming they exist. There’s a lack of hospitals, doctors, medicine, etc, but in some places like Chile, Costa Rica or Trinidad and Tobago, public health care is pretty good. I doubt there is one country in Latin America that lacks free public health care. The US is pretty bizarre on world scale in lacking this. As far as favelas, I know Chavez has been on massive spree building public housing and renovating other housing, fixing streets, wiring up areas for electricity and running plumbing lines. And he’s done a lot of land reforms, breaking up large estates and giving them to small farmers and co-ops. He has opened a tremendous number of new hospitals and clinics, often staffed with Cuban doctors. He’s opened up new state markets where the poor can buy subsidized food for affordable prices instead of practically starving like they were 20 years ago, when 8
Crime is a long-term problem in Venezuela and the region, and it’s not Chavez’ fault. Corruption is a long-term problem in the region, due to Latino culture, and it will be there no matter what kind of regime is in. Chavez has reduced income inequality and poverty more than anyone else in the region. It’s great what Chavez is doing down there! Incredible! We don’t need Cuban socialism. Canadian socialism would be fine. Correa in Ecuador has done well, but he’s hampered by the oligarchy in what he can do. He threw the US out of the their Manta Military Base, he wrote a new Constitution and doubled health care spending. Ortega just got in, and he’s not pushing a strong program, plus the oligarchy is against him. Honduras had a coup. The FMLN just got in in El Salvador and is unfortunately pursuing a moderate agenda. However, the Civil War Accords already broke up the big land estates and distributed land to small farmers and co-ops, similar to the Mexican Revolution. Whatever other problems you have down there, at least you can grow enough food to eat. Brazil’s Lula reduced poverty dramatically there. Morales has done some good things for Bolivia, for one thing nationalizing the gas and oil reserves. He also wrote a new Constitution. Kirchener did a good job in Argentina. She blew off the debt. Her efforts at further reform have been hampered by the oligarchy. Lately, she’s been trying to break up the media oligopoly, but she’s running into a lot of static on that. Bachelet in Chile did not do much. She was not pushing a very Left agenda. The guy in Uruguay just got in and he’s a moderate. Lugos in in Paraguay is new too, and he’s pushing a moderate line. People pushing a moderate line are not likely to get much done, and in most cases, really good reforms to benefit the people have been hampered by the oligarchs. But these are the best changes your average person in Latin America has ever seen. What’s failed has been more or less 180 years of rightwing authoritarian oligarchic rule in the vast majority of Latin America. That’s what in general has never done the slightest damned thing for the people from Day One. People have had it with it, so they are starting to vote in some pro-people governments, in many places for the first time in history.
Repost from the old site. In the comments section, Scott, who is a White nationalist, discusses the disconnect between multiculturalism and socialism or social democracy. Yes, we do allow White nationalists, even anti-Black ones, on the board, but every time a cute Black woman shows up on the board, we force them to kiss her. On the lips. On penalty of banning. None have left yet. Brown sugar, how come you taste so good? Scott says:
Look at the countries that have the highest index of egalitarianism in the West: Iceland, Norway, Sweden (used to have more). The inhabitants are all pretty closely related to one another. I’ll spot my sibling $100 cash. It’s basically the same thing but in a less dramatic way in such countries, but when other nationalities come in because of the aforementioned ethnostates’ welfare system, as seek to take advantage of it, the whole system gets messed up. Find me an ethnically diverse country with a social democracy.
I respond: Scott is right. Does the UK count as a multicultural country? If it does, it’s growing a nasty White racist – fascist party of reaction to the diversity in the BNP. Does Venezuela count? If Venezuela counts, I would say that Venezuela is a country riven with violence, tension and class war. There seems to be a racial angle, but in the upper class and upper middle class, it’s really more about class than race. Nevertheless, it’s clear that the oligarchy is much more light-skinned than the Underclass that supports Chavez. Is multicultural Russia a social democracy? Maybe so, but it’s riven from one end to the other with horrible racism. Do Communist states like China and Cuba count? Maybe so, but those countries, probably due to the class warfare (in the case of both) and combined class/race warfare (in the case of Cuba) inherent in their societies, needed full, bloody Communist revolutions to institute any kind of socialist system. Vietnam and Laos are multiethnic countries, but the Lao and the Vietnamese are the overwhelming majority. They also needed Communist revolutions to put in socialism. I would say Sri Lanka. They have a pretty good social democracy there, and the ruling party is a member of the Socialist International. There’s also a horribly vicious civil war going on, because that “socialist” party in power has never done much to help the Tamils. Socialist parties in Chile, Argentina and Brazil haven’t been able to get much done. In Chile and Argentina the problem is probably much more class than race. In Brazil, surely it’s both race and class together. The socialists in Ecuador and Bolivia are trying to get something done, but Bolivia is riven with a horrific class/race division and it’s almost civil war there. I don’t think that the socialist parties in Nicaragua and Guatemala will be able to get much done. Both nations had Leftist revolutions for decades, in the case of Nicaragua followed by a revolutionary government and more civil war, this time counterrevolutionary. Nicaragua was always more about class than race, but the oligarchy is light-skinned. In Guatemala, the situation is very much about both class and race riven together. One thing becomes clear in this analysis. The only way to peacefully vote in a socialist or social democratic government is to have a relatively homogeneous society. Typically a White society. As diversity and multiculturalism increases, even in White European countries, White racist/fascist groups rise up for various reasons and racial violence against minorities becomes common. In multiethnic or deeply class-riven nations (Note how often the two are conflated!), socialism, social democracy or movements towards them is typically accompanied by either outright civil war, de facto civil war, tremendous open class war in terms of coups, attempted coups, lockout strikes, riots, imperialist interventions, class-based separatist movements, and much violence. In other places, socialist governments are not able to get much done due to deep class and race-based conflicts and the threat of violence from dominant ethnics and/or classes. In other places, long civil wars eventually installed Communist regimes in multiethnic countries and ethnic conflict subsided or stopped. Short of installing a Communist regime, multiethnic countries moving towards socialism are likely to experience a lot of internal violence and chaos. If diversity is so bad for socialism, why do socialists in the West keep pushing it? Good question.
A very rightwing Russian in the comments suggests that Communism and socialism has failed everywhere:
Robert, as a “right wing Russian” Im very curious on your on the fall of the USSR. it was socialist to the bone (my birth certificate even has a nice little hammer and sickle on it, I’m sure you’d love it) yet it fell apart. Also, why do Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea suck? Shouldn’t they on your list?
The list is of the top 13 richest countries on Earth. 12 of the 13 are socialist states (welfare states). The three countries you list are not in the top 13 wealthiest countries. Look at Russia now. A shithole or what? They were better off under Communism. The transition to capitalism killed a good 15 million people and life expectancy collapsed. I think it has just now recovered, 20 years later. I’m not wild about pure Communism. It’s got a ton of problems. But I think Russia has gone too far to the right now. Nevertheless, Russia is a still a socialist country. Russia has a gigantic state sector in the economy. It still has a very extensive safety net if I am not mistaken. Maternal mortality and infant mortality is very low in all of the CIS. If you compare the CIS to places with similar incomes, housing and health care is excellent. Moldavia is a very poor country, very poor. Yet their health figures are superb, there’s no hunger, the cities look nice and modern, education is first world. It’s similar in all of the former states of the USSR. All of the former USSR are still socialist states with a big state sector, vast safety nets, good housing and health care, excellent health and education figures. All of these great things are a legacy of the USSR. The Russian government is following a state capitalism similar to the Chinese. It’s not neoliberal capitalism at all. It’s a kind of socialism, certainly it’s socialism according to the Republican Party – Tea Party – Glen Beck sense of the word. The Russian state spends huge amounts of money on roads, broadband, all sorts of public works. Even cities spend lots of money on things like public baths. All of the former USSR rejects the neoliberal model if I’m not mistaken. Those who went for it the most have eaten shit the worst. Latvia went neoliberal-wild and their economy has been totally creamed, with a Depression as deep as the US Depression in the 1930’s. Venezuela is doing great! Compared to the rest of Latin America. Things have improved dramatically since Chavez took power. The people love him. That’s why he always wins. Cuba doesn’t suck either. Cubans have the best housing, health care and education in the region. There’s no unemployment. There are no homeless. If you go into the rural areas, you will see something you will not see in any other Latin American country, healthy, happy, clean, well-fed children wearing nice clean uniforms. There are no kids on the streets sniffing glue and dressed in rags, starving with no shoes. There are no shantytowns in Cuba. None, zero. Nearly all homes have electricity and plumbing. No other state in Latin America has achieved any of these things. Cubans are some of the best fed people in the region. The malnutrition rate is
North Korea sucks, but I doubt if it’s their fault. With the fall of the USSR, the price of oil went up 10X and everything collapsed. I’m convinced that they are trying to do everything they can to feed their people and get the country going again, but it’s an uphill battle, plus we threaten them. Before 1990, North Korea was doing great. I actually support a mixed economy versus pure Communism.
As you can see, the overwhelming majority of US voters are White. It is US White voters and only US White voters who have sent America down the conservative and reactionary sewer pipe in the last 30 years. An operation that is yet ongoing, and that seems to be gaining quite a bit of steam. In the 2006 election, it was even worse. 7
The voter pool is also overwhelmingly White. So the argument that Blacks and Hispanics don’t turn out to vote is washed up. Even if they all turned out to vote, it wouldn’t matter much. It would only shift the electorate maybe -
As long as America is overwhelmingly White, it will be a terrifyingly reactionary and backwards place, the laughingstock of the Western World. There is nothing inherently reactionary about White people. In Europe, they are reliably socialist. Someone show me a reactionary and non-socialist country in Europe please? In New Zealand and Australia, Whites are quite socialist, whatever their limitations in recent days with the horror specter of Mr. Howard.
In Latin America, it is true, Whites are reactionary, extremely so. Even in Uruguay and Argentina, they are reactionary. But these countries also have a revolutionary White Left that in the past has given the White elites the bullets and bombs they so richly deserve.
Argentina today, though a reactionary and Third World mess like the rest of the continent, at least has a Leftist President. A real Leftist, not an Obama rightwinger. The Argentine elite is alarmed about the Communist takeover of Argentina, Commies being coded as “fascists,” and are openly calling for the return of the fascist dictatorship. Fascist Argentines bashing Left opponents as fascists while calling for the return of Argentine fascism. Typical fascist obfuscation and mind-warping.
They claim that Kirchner had Commie “brownshirts” in the streets who have taken over entire zones. The Commie Kirchner is supposedly trying to “censor the media” by breaking up the reactionary media monopolies that own nearly the entire media of the land. But why should the Right own 9
Media should be delineated democratically according to predilection. If 3
Uruguay elected a former Left wing guerrilla, but I’m not sure how much will change, as he is dedicated to following the neoliberal suicide model. Is Uruguay a more socialist state than the USA? An interesting question.
Costa Rica is a pretty socialist place, which is interesting since anti-Communist fools and liars always uphold Costa Rica on their social figures, comparing it to Cuba on the grounds that Cuba is not so hot. What these congenital liars don’t realize (Or maybe they do!) is that all of Costa Rica’s great figures are attributable to Costa Rican social democracy.
Those are the countries in which Whites are a majority.
In the rest of Latin America, Whites are a minority, and they are frighteningly conservative to reactionary. They have generally stayed in power through repression, fraud, imprisoning, assaulting, kidnapping, torturing and murdering the opposition. White elites have done this in most countries in the region: Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Mexico.
The implication is that Whites will only support any kind of socialism where they are a good, solid majority. They are only 6
The entire rightwing movement in the US for the last 30 years has been coming from Whites. Has it been coming from Hispanics? Of course not. Has it been coming from Blacks? Please. Has it been coming from Jews? Pull the other one. Has it been coming from Asians? Forget it.
So when you read that “the voters” are furious with Obama and support all sorts of reactionary monstrosities in opposition to him, it’s US Whites, and only US Whites, who are leading this Tea Party opposition wave to Obama. And much of it is undoubtedly racist, no matter how much they scream that it’s not.
US Whites, as a
The other day, my mother (smartest women on Earth) told me that in the lifetime of my brother and I, we will live to see the US become a more progressive country. If all goes according to plan, I will take off around 2035 or so. The reason for this, she said, is the decline of Whites.
White nationalists have told me that a declining White America will lead to a more progressive place. Their reasoning for this is curious, and doesn’t make much sense. One guy told me that as Whites decline further and further, they will get more and more radical. As they dip below 4
Will Hispanics, Blacks, Jews and Asians continue to be reliably progressive into the future? It’s an interesting question. Majority-Indian, mulatto and mestizo places like Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Panama are quite backwards and rightwing. A White minority in all places continues to rule to the detriment of everyone else. Usually they enforce their rule at gunpoint and often with deadly force. But they get the votes of mestizos, Indians and mulattos to do this.
In the Caribbean, Black and mulatto elites have treated their own people horribly. This is particularly the case in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Most of the Black Caribbean is not very socialist, with the exception of Cuba. But Dominica is an equitable country, and Trinidad and Tobago has a decent amount of socialism. Socialism was arrested in Jamaica with the US assault on Manley, a White socialist.
The record in Black Africa is not good in terms of socialism. North African Arab states are much more socialist than Black Africa. True, there is not much to divide in the first place, but still. Even Black African countries that have fallen into some money are still horribly rightwing. Gabon, a wealthy African country, has nightmarish levels of poverty, malnutrition, maternal mortality, child and infant mortality. Apparently, as has always been the case in Africa, a tiny Black elite has grabbed control over the economy for themselves and possibly their tribe and is locking out everyone else.
Given that mestizos, mulattos and Blacks have a poor record of setting up socialist systems in their own lands, one wonders just how socialist they will be here in the US as they grow in numbers. So far, they have been realiably socialist, but what will the future bring.
The model in mulatto, mestizo and Black countries is typically astounding gaps between the rich and the poor, horrifying levels of poverty, and often an enraged, militant and sometimes armed but cash-starved Left minority battling the elite for power. In these countries, poverty is a big deal, the opposite of the US. So there, all parties, from Right to Left, run on reducing poverty and fighting for the poor, with a few overtly fascist exceptions in Guatemala, El Salvador, (Honduras?) and Colombia and a strange overtly rightwing government in Chile, increasingly a US model state in Latin America.
The Right has the entire media spectrum. In Honduras, a 9
The ignorant mestizo, mulatto and Black electorate tends to vote for parties that often have progressive sounding names. In many cases, these parties are said to be overtly socialist parties. This is especially the case in the Caribbean, where almost every party has a socialist-sounding name. So down there, the Right calls themselves socialists, progressives and populists fighting for the poor while they implement reaction.
A similar dynamic is seen in Africa, where most parties have socialist-sounding names.
In other words, the US model of reactionary parties having open reactionary images, programs and politics is nonexistent in most of Latin America and Africa. No one would vote for it. In fact, it’s anathema in most of the world! It’s nearly nonexistent also in Arabia, South Asia, Europe, SE Asia and NE Asia. Turkey does have an overtly rightwing government.
Other than Turkey, show me one overtly reactionary party along the lines of the US Republican Party in power in any of these places.
One wonders if the model of the US reactionaries will change in the future with White decline. Will we see the rise of a backwards mestizo, mulatto or Black elite looking for votes possibly on an ethnic basis. Will we see the rise of fake populism and fake socialism, where the Right will operate rightwing parties with socialist and progressive sounding names campaigning on poverty reduction and helping the have-nots, to get the non-White vote? Will the Republican Party model of an openly and brazenly reactionary party become nonviable as non-Whites refuse to support it, according the model in the rest of the world?
Climate change is killing 150,000 people a year now. That is the estimate of the World Health Organization for the year 2000, and now it is ten years out of date. So let us double that:
The once in a thousand year 2010 Moscow Heatwave caused an estimated 15,000 deaths.
For the “we have nothing to do with it” global warming deniers, here is a little primer on the current state of the science.
The science is already in.
There are metacommentaries on Russia’s heatwave here and here.
Climate records are being broken all over the world this year.
This is the actuality. It does matter. We can, all of us as individuals, do something.
Stopping global warming is actually a dream from which some of us still have to awake: it is more realistic to prepare ourselves and our society for the shocks that will inevitably come by practicing bioresilience. Our extraordinary adaptability as a species will be tested to the utmost in the next one hundred years. We have never had a challenge like it in the history of mankind.
Slowing the rate of growth of human carbon emissions (the global economic recession did so last year, although I see no real evidence at the level of political leaderships to cut carbon emissions) is one goal for the political elites, with eventual cuts at some unspecified date in the future, but a reduction of carbon emissions by 9
We shall still move to a hotter world, but one that we shall survive, with far more modest and local lifestyles. We/I will also make the spiritual shift in our/my consciousness, and create new ways for ourselves/myself and our/my children to connect with and appreciate the beauties of nature in our over-informatized and mediatized world. Spiritual shift has now become a categorical imperative. Be the change you want to see. May I be the change I want to see…in me and in my world.
We have the luxury, in the privileged West, of having a little bit of potential space in our lives to accomplish this. If you are starving, drowning (as in Bangladesh and Pakistan), living at the edge of subsistence (Mali, Niger and Southern Sudan) and walking 12 miles a day simply to fetch water, there is much less space.
And the very poor are not producing the carbon emissions. It is us, in the developed world. I am not asking for guilt or a hair shirt: I am asking for awareness. And action. From myself, and from you!
Too much information, especially about such an explosive topic, actually creates anxiety and depression: have you noticed? I did in 2006, when I studied global warming nonstop for months. Too much (usually poor quality) information is actually the curse of our world: paying it too much attention creates a state of no peace.
Therefore we/I need to learn new ways to care for ourselves/myself, as we/I reconnect with the warp and weft of our ineffably beautiful and breathtaking living planet.
In time, perhaps, too, biodiversity will start to return to a planet currently in the sixth great extinction crisis of its long geological history. We need not be a plague on the planet. It is not our purpose here.
Once we come from a place of deeper peace and connection in ourselves, we rule out fear and chase it from our bodily abode: we then inspire others to seek that as well. Our activism has a more transformational quality on all around us. I have much to learn, much to heal, and much to change in myself.
Most campaigners, and part of the scientific community (James Hansen in particular), think that emissions cuts should begin at the latest by 2015. With the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition in power until then, we certainly have our work cut out.
“Business as usual” = civilizational collapse, sooner or later. And unimaginable human suffering. The suffering of Pakistan at the moment, but multiplied a million fold…
If you do not care, do not have children. They may not forgive you. Consciousness is rising about the scale of the challenge we face.
If you wish to be up to date on the subject of global warming, read the scientists! I suggest here and the NOAA, plus the climate progress website mentioned above.
I read them, and I am not a scientist.
The human race currently emits 29 billion tons (29 gigatons – more here) of carbon a year. And we do not do it by breathing or farting alone!
We have multiplied our biological carbon emissions as a species many fold through the development of technology, which required the burning of fossil fuels, the ancient sunlight of antiquity. Thus we become our own Nemesis.
It is difficult to point to any aspect of our current material lives that is not dependent on fossil fuels in some way, from plastic bags to cheap food.
We are changing the climate, and without global carbon emission reductions there is a point of no return, where positive feedbacks kick in and carbon emissions from natural processes such as the melting of the subarctic tundra, the loss of arctic sea ice in summer, and the burning of the world’s forests, start to render annual human emissions almost insignificant, kicking global warming into high gear.
We have – perhaps – a little window of opportunity now. It is human to hope. Nobody knows how long we have. It seems, from my many years of reading on the subject of global warming, that the window will certainly close by 2030.
And that date is based on the most optimistic of all projections.
When the climate “tipping points” are passed (the scientific consensus – but no one really knows – is that this starts to happen at 1.5 to 2 degrees centigrade above preindustrial global temperatures: we are currently 0.8 degrees Centigrade above), we are in for a very rough ride indeed.
That article is from yesterday’s UK newspaper, The Independent.
Given the current levels of urgency regarding this issue on the part of the global elites, runaway global warming is currently more likely than not.
Anthropogenic global warming has the potential to be the new global genocide. A genocide of the poor by the richest countries, with the highest per capita output of carbon emissions. Ask a Pakistani farmer in Sindh province how he is doing at the moment, and what his prospects are for 2011.
With runaway climate change, civilization will collapse, and there will – at some point after 2050 – be a catastrophic collapse in the global human population in the “business as usual” scenario (I do not like James Lovelock’s politics at all, but in that sense he is hard to contradict). For more on this, see Anatoly Karlin’s review of Six Degrees, by Mark Lynas.
It is a very graphic and a very detailed description, degree by degree of global warming above pre-industrial levels, of how human-induced global warming is changing the world we live in. And the précis saves you reading the book.
By 2020, at the current 0.2 degrees Centigrade of global warming per decade, we shall have passed the threshold of 1 degree of global warming globally since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Here is Anatoly Karlin’s summary of one degree of global warming.
One Degree
Though the Great Plains are one of the world’s great agricultural breadbaskets, a desert slumbers underneath. Increased dessication and pummeling storms will erode away the thin topsoil, recreating the Dust Bowl on a giant scale and re-awakening the sand dunes. More irrigation will only postpone the inevitable. There will be large-scale migration to the wetter Mid-West and Great Lakes regions. AK: actually called the Great American Desert during the 19th century!, and is now dependent on depleting Oglalla Aquifer.
Higher rainfall, glacial melt and strengthening Siberian rivers may interrupt the Gulf Stream (part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation system), drying western Europe and cooling it by as much as 2 C – recreating the conditions of the Little Ice Age during the worst winters. However, most models predict this will be a slow death. AK: If not, expect increased European dependency on Russian gas during the 2010′s and 2020′s.
In Africa, Kilimanjaro will lose its remaining ice by 2020 – causing wildfires, fish stock declines and problems with hydroelectricity production. Based on paleoclimate, in the long term, there will be a greening of the Sahara (into a savanna) and an enlarged Lake Chad…however, models say that there will only be a short interlude of heavier rains in the Sahel and on the West African coast, followed by even fiercer drought.
Coral reefs around the world will be increasingly bleached and taken over by seaweed; polar bears are pushed off the top of the world and creatures like pikas are shoved off the planet, accelerating the Anthropocene Mass Extinction event. Hurricanes will become stronger and more ubiquitous, spreading to the South Atlantic. More rockfalls in the Alps. Increased incidence of drought in the Amazon, pushing it to the brink. Atolls become doomed worlds, fated to submerge amidst the rising waves.
It will have taken around 250 years for a one degree rise in the mean global temperature to occur. However, climate dynamics are like a slumbering beast. There is a great deal of inertia locked into the system. First, there is very good evidence that the level of greenhouse gases being added to the atmosphere is itself rising. Secondly, the rate of global warming has been speeding up. Therefore we can, optimistically, expect the second degree of global warming after 2050, even with a concerted scaleback in emissions. That is within my children’s lifetime.
Now read Karlin’s summary of two degrees. Many of us will live to see this. At 0.3 degrees centigrade of increase in the global mean temperature per decade, two degrees arrives in 2053. A “climatic flip” is also possible: a sudden, dramatic acceleration, leading to climate collapse, from our perspective. The British Meteorological Office considers four degrees of global warming a possibility by 2060:
Now read Karlin on four degrees of global change. Are we not living through a planetary emergency?
Please read Anatoly Karlin’s review of Lynas if you read nothing else I reference. It is a glimpse into the uncertain future toward which we are headed, with no stars to steer by.
Global capitalism requires
Not sustainable, and not a good outlook for the species. “No future, no future, no future for me,” as the Sex Pistols once sang.
I suspect, therefore, that the answer to human survival in this century and the next, and a civilizational level higher than that described in the visionary and beautiful written novel of our potential future in a much warmer world, Far North by Marcel Theroux, lies in a re-visioning and implementation of communism.
Read it and see what you think; then comment.
Despite the 20th century deviation of Communism from its original envisioning by Marx and Engels and the ecological disasters of the Eastern Bloc, Mao’s China and the Soviet Union, Marx’s vision of post-scarcity communism was profoundly ecological.
I find it very heartening that there remains one country in the world that has, largely by default, found a sustainable way to live, and that it is, with all its human rights and politico-economic flaws, a non-capitalist country.
Cuba is a glimmer of hope in a world ruled by the mantras of greed and growth. But not the only one by any means. People are waking up all over the world. Morales’ Bolivia, one of poorest countries in the world, and heavily dependent on extractive mining, has produced one of the most visionary ecological statements of the last year (to find it go to the Climate and Capitalism website).
Hope was the last thing left in the Greek myth of Pandora’s box, which we have, in the course of industrial civilization, unknowingly thrown open wide.
May we not let hope fly away altogether: this is my prayer for my children and yours, their children and your grandchildren.
Belarus: Dictatorship or Democracy? A Review of Stewart Parker’s Book: The Last Soviet Republic. Originally Published on Globalresearch.ca
by Gearóid Ó Colmáin
August 24, 2010
Since the pronouncement of former US Secretary of State Condolezza Rice in 2008 calling the democratically elected president of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko “Europe’s last dictator”, the image and reputation of this noble country has been fanatically tarnished by the mainstream media.
The irony here is that Belarus is indeed deeply familiar with the iniquities of dictatorship. They, more than any other country, suffered the worst of Nazi atrocities during World War 11.
Belarus has always been a multicultural country with Jews, Christians and Muslims living side by side for centuries. This deep tolerance for cultural and religious differences is still celebrated in Belarus today. Yet the European Union, Israel and the United States, never cease from spreading atrocious lies and disinformation concerning the Republic of Belarus.
Belarus has generally received scant coverage from alternative and left-wing media, which is rather surprising considering the fact that Fidel Castro has awarded Alexander Lukashenko with the order of Jose Marti, the highest honour bestowed upon friends of the Cuban people. In a recent visit to Belarus, the president of Venezuela Hugo Chavez praised Belarus as a model of socialist development, one which Venezuela should emulate.
Yet there is a paucity of books and articles about this country and its “controversial” leader. One notable exception to this hiatus comes from Stewart Parker who published a clear and revealing book on Belarus and the policies of Alexander Lukashenko in particular.
For readers seeking an insight into this fascinating country, Parker’s The Last Soviet Republic: Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus (2007) is a brilliant exposé of the lies and distortions emanating from the European Union and the US concerning “human rights” violations in Belarus and the absence of “democracy.” What follows is an attempt to summarize and evaluate the findings of this valuable study.
Alexander Lukashenko came to power after a landslide victory in 1994. A former director in a collective farm during the USSR era, Lukashenko was one of the few Belarusian politicians to oppose the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1990. Although the Belarusian leader had always been an outspoken critic of the USSR’s corruption, he remained committed to Marxism-Leninism, and opposed the rampant privatization proposed by Boris Yeltsin and his followers.
In the final years of the Soviet regime, Lukashenko, then a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, formed a group called “Communists for Democracy.” Lukashenko argued that the real problem in the USSR was the decline in democratic participation and the parasitism and corruption of the ruling bureaucracy. He also advocated more autonomy for the USSR’s constituent Republics.
Belarus had always been the most advanced Soviet Republics, with high achievements in education and science. In spite of economic stagnation and increasing corruption in other republics of the USSR, Belarus’s state planning had continued to yield impressive results, with economic growth continuing throughout the Brezhnev era. In 1993 Lukashenko was appointed head of an “anti-corruption committee.”
One of the numerous myths repeatedly circulated since the fall of the USSR is that a majority of the Soviet people wanted free market capitalism. This was certainly not the case in Soviet Republic of Belarus. It was Alexander Lukashenko’s defence of Soviet values, together with his outspoken criticisms of the Communist Party of the USSR and the apparatchiks of the soviet regime that earned him the respect and confidence of the Belarusian people. In 1994 Lukashenko was elected President of Belarus with over 80 percent of the votes.
Finding a place for Belarus in the post-Soviet chaos was a difficult task for the young president. One of the first issues concerned the national flag. The BPF, a nationalist party, wanted to restore the white, red and white flag of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had been the national flag under the puppet regime of the German empire in 1918. It was also used by the collaborators with the Nazi Wehrmacht during World War II. The people finally settled for maintaining the Soviet flag minus the hammer and sickle. Radio Free Europe later lamented the dropping of the Nazi collaboration flag as a “heavy blow to democratic forces.”
In the intervening years since the fall of the USSR and the rise of Lukashenko, over 15 billion dollars had been siphoned out of the country. Privatization and the lifting of price controls had caused inflation to soar, with prices rising 432 times. The Soviet economy was being replaced by mafia gangsters. Western “freedom” and “democracy” was taking its toll!
Through a series of referenda Lukashenko was able to set in motion a democratic social program which has made Belarus one of the most prosperous and least corrupt countries in Eastern Europe. Just like Venezuela, a clause in the constitution decided by a referendum permits the indefinite re-election of the president should the Belarusian people wish to do so.
Over 80 percent of industry in Belarus remains in public ownership. In 1996 the unemployment figure in the country amounted to 4 percent. Lukashenko’s administration has since reduced this figure to little over 1 percent, one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world. Industrial output rose by 9.7 percent in 2004. Wages have been increasing significantly every year since Lukashenko’s accession to power.
Economic growth in Socialist Belarus has been so impressive that even the World Bank and the IMF have had to acknowledge this incontrovertible fact. In June 2005, the World Bank published a report titled Belarus: Window of Opportunity, which admitted that the Belarusian economy was growing steadily, while the IMF admitted that Belarus had significant wage increases coupled with low government debt. Good news for Belarus, bad news for the World Bank and IMF, whom Lukashenko, speaking before the Russian Duma in 1999, had called “a pack of swindlers.”
In a world where the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, Belarus offers real hope that economics does not have to function that way.
According to the system developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini, known as the Gini coefficient, Belarus ranks as the most equal country on earth. The Gini coefficient for Belarus in 2005 was 0.217, the lowest out of 113 countries. In Belarus, the lowest income is only five times lower than the highest income. This means that the notion of “corporate greed” one hears about in the United States and Europe is virtually nonexistent in the Republic of Belarus.
Belarus also comes out on top in education. Adult literacy in Belarus is the highest in the CIS nations at 99.
In contrast to Western “democracies” where social security is being systematically destroyed to sustain the financial oligarchies, male workers in Belarus retire at 60, while women retire at 55 with full pension entitlements.
Needless to say, the attitude of the EU and the United States nomenclatura, that is to say, the self-proclaimed “international community,” is that Belarus is not a “democracy.” Media disinformation has backed this hostility of European and US elites to Belarus by publishing an impressive quantity of lies. At the 60th session of the United Nations General Assembly in 2005, President Lukashenko put the US “human rights” obsession thus:
If there are no pretexts for intervention – imaginary ones are created. To this end a very convenient banner was chosen, democracy and human rights, and not in the original sense of the rule of people and personal dignity, but solely and exclusively in the interpretation of the US leadership.
In order to promote the US “interpretation” of human rights, President Clinton sent Michael Kozak to Belarus in 2000. Kozak distinguished himself during the 1970s in the Iran/contra scandal where he was instrumental in organising the sale of arms to the contra terrorists in Nicaragua in exchange for cocaine, which the CIA sold to poor Americans on the streets of Los Angeles, the same poor people who would subsequently be incarcerated for “possession of narcotics.”
While poor people were forced to make military uniforms in US prisons for their drug convictions, Kozak was one of Washington’s key handlers of Daniel Noriega, a CIA narcotrafficker and dictator of Panama. Clinton had deep confidence in Kozak’s democratic credentials, as he himself was governor of Arkansas, where the CIA operation was conducted from. The US-funded terrorist campaign in Nicaragua cost the lives of over 30,000 people, most of them civilians. Kozak had the perfect credentials for spreading “democracy” American style in socialist Belarus.
Upon his arrival in Minsk, US ambassador Micheal Kozak, Clinton’s former CIA gun-for-drugs terrorist handler, now US “pro-democracy” diplomat, was quick to make contact with his European counterparts. Representing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was Hans Georg Wieck. Wieck worked closely with Kozak to groom “opposition” candidates in Belarus suitable to Washington and Brussels.
When Lukashenko won another landslide victory in the presidential elections of 2001, the OSCE condemned the elections as unfair without producing a shred of evidence to corroborate their claims.
After the 9-11 attacks in New York, the US showed the real motives behind the “global war on terror” when Senator John McCain declared:
Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus cannot long survive in a world where the United States and Russia enjoy a strategic partnership and the United States is serious about its commitment to end outlaw regimes whose conduct threatens us…September 11th opened our eyes to the status of Belarus as a national security threat.
McCain was referring to the sale of arms by Belarus to the CIA’s disobedient puppet dictator Saddam Hussein, a claim denied by President Lukashenko. Here we see the US accusing other countries of crimes which it itself committed for years when it sold arms to the Iraqi dictator. But the real crime committed by Lukashenko was his progressive social policies, which were setting a bad example for other countries strangled by the financial interests of the US global oligarchy; US “national security” meaning the security of the financial elite, and “global war on terror” meaning global war on freedom.
But the US was determined to launch its global terror campaign against any state that dared to resist casino capitalism. Belarus and Lukashenko himself would pay a heavy price for standing up to the IMF and the World Bank. In 2004 the United States proceeded to take action with the passing of the Belarus Democracy Act, calling for sanctions against Belarus and funding for “pro-democracy” groups.
Most opposition groups in Belarus today receive funding from the United States government, paid for by cash-strapped US tax payers. This funding almost culminated in the so-called “Denim Revolution” in 2006, a CIA-funded attempt to arouse popular opposition to the Lukashenko government in order to replace it with a pro-US regime. However, unlike their neighbours in other Eastern European countries, the Belarusians did not take the US bait, and Lukashenko stayed in power.
After the failure of the “Denim Revolution,” the EU imposed a travel ban on Lukashenko and 30 ministers, preventing them from traveling to any part of the EU. This shows the extent of the anxiety among the EU elite in the face of Belarus’s popular democracy.
Stewart Parker sites a number of poignant examples in his book which reveal the extent of systematic anti-democratic interference in Belarusian affairs by the United States and their vassal states in Europe. What is particularly “totalitarian” about socialist Belarus is not the Belarusian state, but rather the way in which that state is portrayed by the so-called democratic authorities of the EU and the US.
The absurdities promoted by the mainstream media come from all sides. Lukashenko has been accused of anti-Semitism, in spite of the fact that the thriving Jewish community in the country seem to be unaware of this fact. In fact, the chief Rabbi of Belarus has praised the Belarussian president for his support of the Jewish community, yet the EU, the US and Israel insist that Lukashenko is “anti-Semitic” and also opposes “free media.”
The Belarus government has been accused of internet censorship and media control. More lies! The Open Net Initiative carried out a study after the “disputed” elections of 2006 to see if the claims about Internet censorship were true. They “found no evidence of systematic and comprehensive interference with the Net. Any regime-directed tampering that may have taken place was fairly subtle, causing disruptions to access, but never turning off the alternative information tap.”
Another slander against the Belarusian president came from Russia’s “free media.” In 1995, Dr. Marcus Zeiner interviewed Lukashenko for the German newspaper Handelsblatt. The interview with Dr. Martin Zeiner was cleverly mistranslated to include positive references to Hitler. This was confirmed by the interviewer himself who subsequently said “a tape of the interview had been quoted out of context and with the sequence of comments altered.”
The BBC continues to propagate this lie about Lukashenko, which only serves to prove the desperation of the corporate media in the face of popular leaders whose policies threaten their empire of lies.
Stewart Parker’s book The Last Soviet Republic is an indispensable guide to a country and leader the bourgeois media does not want you to know about. It is, to my knowledge, the only comprehensive study of a country that only receives attention when vicious opportunities for anti-socialist propaganda present themselves.
We have much to learn from this brave little country that sacrificed so much to defeat the forces of fascism of Europe’s past and is now menaced by those same fascist forces which have resurfaced today in the name of “human rights,” “democracy” and “freedom.” In a world dominated by the ideology of the financial elite, those who stand for the common man and woman are beaten down ruthlessly. Alexander Lukashenko stands for democracy, human rights and freedom, which is why the corporate media call him a “dictator.”
Iceland is bankrupt. Moral to the story: the more a nation swallowed the neoliberal poison, the more fucked the are. The more sensible and socialist they were, the safer they are.
As I said before, if anything comes out of this world economic collapse we are presently experiencing, it is that neoliberalism should be buried for once and forever with a stake through its heart. That’s not going to happen, but it should.
Since 1980, the entire world has been a swoon with something called neoliberalism. Started by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, it quickly become championed by both US political parties, almost the entire US corporate media – newspapers, magazines, TV and radio – and almost every single economics department at every US university. An entire generation of economists was graduated with a sole idea in his head.
Neoliberalism was tried for decades in Latin America. Or, actually, it was forced down their throats at gunpoint. It failed in Latin America as it failed everywhere. Death rates went up, life expectancy went down, infant mortality went up, access to medical care went down, wages went down, unemployment went up, schooling figures declined.
There was economic growth, but almost everywhere on Earth, it went only to the top 2
For over a decade now, I have been reading increasingly shrill and paranoid screeching in The Nation, Counterpunch and other sane places that the march to neoliberalism could lead to economic catastrophes, recessions, depressions, market crashes.
The folks saying this are called Leftists. In the modern Zeitgeist, Leftists are insane people, losers promoting a failed ideology, persons to be mocked who lack a single coherent idea.
Who tells the truth? Why, the entire politico-media world blaring FREE MARKET in my head day and night. I, the cynic, wondered dubiously if this Chicken Little stuff would come true.
Sadly, the Leftists, intellectual losers on the wrong side of history, were right all along. They predicted this whole damn mess. As I said, neoliberalism is predictable. The entire media-political intellectual class, the entirety of US thinking, wisdom and expertise, was wrong, wrong, wrong, a million times wrong.
Shitheads.
Now the shitstorm is slamming into their faces, and yours and mine, with hurricane gale force.
Iceland, otherwise sensible Nordics, become the worst neoliberal crackheads in Europe. No one deregulated their financial sector like the Icelandics. They were Milton’s test-tube baby. They’re now his Frankenstein.
The same way Friedmanites blew up Chile and raped Russia, leaving her beaten and bloodied, they have left a scorched Earth in frozen Iceland. The most free market in Europe has been wrecked worst of all.
Other states in Europe, accustomed to heavy state intervention in economic affairs, are probably going to ride this out a lot easier. Their financial sectors were already pretty well-regulated, and they are nationalizing like mad.
Interestingly, in Africa, the financial sector is still heavily under state control and there has been almost no financial deregulation. Africa, along with Cuba and some other places, is expected to be able to ride out this crisis quite well.
I never thought in my lifetime I would see socialism vindicated like this. Here in America, we nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the world’s largest insurance company. Now we are on our way to nationalizing the banks.
Would ever thought that George Bush was a secret Marxist-Leninist?
Climate change is killing 150,000 people a year NOW. That is the 2000 estimate of the World Health Organization, so it is ten years out of date. The once in a thousand year 2010 Moscow heatwave has caused an estimated 15,000 deaths.
For the “we have nothing to do with it” global warming deniers, here is a little primer on the current state of the science:
The science is already in.
One can find a metacommentary on Russia’s heatwave here:
Climate records are being broken all over the world this year:
This is actuality. It does matter. And it cannot be stopped, but it can (I hope) be moderated to a level where we can survive global warming, by cutting carbon emissions drastically.
“Business as usual” = civilizational collapse.
If you do not care, do not have children. They will not forgive you.
If you wish to be up to date on the subject global warming, read the scientists! I suggest here and the NOAA, plus the climate progress website mentioned above.
I read them, and I am not a scientist.
The human race currently emits 45 billion tons of carbon a year. And we do not do it by breathing or farting alone!
We have multiplied our biological carbon emissions as a species many fold through the development of technology, which required the burning of fossil fuels, the ancient sunlight of antiquity. Thus we become our own Nemesis.
It is difficult to point to any aspect of our current material lives that is not dependent on fossil fuels in some way, from plastic bags to cheap food.
We are changing the climate, and without global carbon emission reductions there is point of no return, where positive feedbacks kick in and carbon emissions from natural processes such as the melting of the subarctic tundra and the burning of the world’s forests, start to exceed annual human emissions, and kick global warming into high gear.
We have a little window of opportunity now. No-one knows how long it is. It seems, from my years of reading on the subject of global warming, that it will certainly be closed by 2030.
And that date is based on the most optimistic of all projections.
When the climate “tipping points” are passed (the scientific consensus – but NO-ONE REALLY KNOWS – is that this starts to happen at 1.5 to 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial global temperatures: we are currently 0.8 degrees Centigrade above), we are in for a very rough ride indeed.
That article is from yesterday’s UK newspaper, The Independent.
Given the current levels of urgency regarding this issue on the part of the global elites, runaway global warming is currently more likely than not.
Anthropogenic global warming has the potential to be the new global genocide. A genocide of the poor by the richest countries, with the highest per capita output of carbon emissions. Ask a Pakistani farmer in Sindh province how he is doing at the moment, and what his prospects are for 2011.
With runaway climate change, civilization will collapse, and there will – at some point after 2050 – be a catastrophic collapse in global human population in the “business as usual” scenario (I do not like James Lovelock’s politics at all, but in that sense he is hard to contradict). For more on this, see Anatoly Karlin’s review of Six Degrees, by Mark Lynas
It is a very graphic and a very detailed description, degree by degree of global warming above pre-industrial levels, of how human induced global warming is changing the world we live in. And the précis saves you reading the book.
It’s fun to read! Apocalypse Now!
Please read Anatoly Karlin’s review of Lynas if you read nothing else I reference. It is a glimpse into the uncertain future toward which we are headed, with no stars to steer by.
Global capitalism requires
Not sustainable, not a good outlook for the species. “No future, no future, no future for me,” as the Sex Pistols once sang.
I suspect, therefore, that the answer to human survival in this century and the next, and a civilizational level higher than that described in the visionary dystopian novel of global warming, Far North by Marcel Theroux, lies in a revisioning and implementation of communism.
Read it and see what you think; then comment.
Despite the 20th century deviation of Communism from its original envisioning by Marx and Engels, and the ecological disasters of the Eastern Bloc, Mao’s China and the Soviet Union, Marx’s vision of post scarcity communism was profoundly ecological.
I find it very heartening that there remains one country in the world that has, largely by default, found a sustainable way to live, and that it is, with all its human rights and politico-economic flaws, a non-capitalist country.
Cuba is a glimmer of hope in a world ruled by the mantras of greed and growth. But not the only one by any means.
Hacienda, a supporter of neoliberal capitalism, says worker run companies could not survive the competition against capitalist firms in Silicon Valley:
There are no worker run firms in Silicon Valley.There aren’t any, because they couldn’t survive the competition. That’s seems to be the flaw of worker run firms. They can’t compete.
There’s no reason why a worker run could not survive against capitalist firms. I’m having a hard time imagining why they could not.
The cooperative sector in the US, the rest of the West, Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, China and lots of places, does just fine. Most of China’s firms that are kicking the world’s ass are actually publically owned firms, often run by labor collectives or small municipalities. And co-ops have been going like gangbusters in Western Europe for ages. Don’t sell it short. It’s run just like any other firm, accept that the workers get the profits as owners instead of management.
Tito’s worker run firms did very well for a long time, but there was a flaw. Given the choice of reinvesting in the firm or taking the profits home in their pockets, workers usually decided to take them home, thinking short-term. Eventually, the plants collapsed through lack of upkeep.
The Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque Region have been running great for years.
Mondragon has gotten away from the Yugoslavian problem in that large banks actually own the plants and run them. They make the decisions about how much to reinvest and how much to pay out to workers. In Mondragon, workers hire and fire their own managers. You would think they would fire anyone who made them work and only hire those who let them slack off, but it has not worked that way at all.
A little debate here. The first quote is me defending secularism, the second one is Abiezer Coppe defending the Western Left against my charges. I reiterate after the blockquote with evidence from around the world.
It is sickening the way that the Left is sucking up to Islam. Stop it right now! It’s all because Muslims are fighting European Judeo-Christian “colonizer-imperialist” types in Israel and now in Iraq, Afghanistan and even in Europe. To the Left, European Judeo-Christian civilization is evil, and hence so are all Whites. Jews are considered White. We are all racist colonizer/imperialist slavers.
The dark Muslim noble savages are fighting evil White Euros, and the Left cheers.
The Left hates:
1. Euro Whites 2. Euro Christians 3. Euro Jews 4. The West
The dark Third Worldist oppressed darkies are fighting a holy war against all four, the West can’t get enough of it. I’m not sure if the Zionists ever mention this, but I think they are right. The Left even dislikes the Jews because now they are the ultimate expression of the White Judeo-Christian Western Euro colonizer.
No Robert, stop spreading lies about the Left. The Left aren’t that racial. You’re just spouting.
A sane Left will support Christian values as highly progressive. See Slavoj Zizek on Christianity.
Support for Islamism. The Maoists and Trots do it, and that’s about it. It’s third Worldist Idiotism…if you convert to Islam YOU CANNOT LEAVE. The penalty for leaving the Islamic religion in Pakistan is six months in prison, according to a commentator on Radio 4. Is this true?
Of course it is true. That’s if they don’t kill you.
I am talking about the Western Left.
The real existing Left, the one that matters, is not anti-West or anti-Christian.
The Latin American Left is pro-West and pro-Christian. Many of them are Christians. Even the leadership of Sendero Luminoso were Christians, including Abimael Guzman, who is still a Catholic! The Filipino Left is pro-West and pro-Christian.
This is the Liberation Theology Left, and I love it. Jesus was a Commie! In those countries, priests pray alongside the rebels and in some cases even serve in rebel armies. The Sandinistas had priests in their cabinet. Hugo Chavez is very much a Liberation Theologian; this is the best way to describe him. There is a lot of good theory coming out of Cuba nowadays since believers can join the party. They are calling themselves Christian Marxists. Even Fidel says Christianity is compatible with socialism and Communism.
The Indian and Nepalese Maoists don’t mind the West or Christianity. If there is a beef with anything, it’s Hinduism.
The real existing Left in all Muslim states is not too wild about Islam! The Left in the rest of the world cares nothing at all about Western culture or Christianity.
This anti-West, anti-European, anti-Judeo-Christian, anti-White shit is mostly just rebellion on the part of Western Leftists against their own eeeeeeevil religions and cultures.
Maoists in general are not too wild about Islam. The Iranian and Afghan Maoists are some of the most Islam-hostile groups in the Islamic world. They’ve basically had it up to here with Islam.
The Filipino Left has made alliance with Muslim separatists on a strategic basis and gets along with them well. The Indian Maoists support separatists in Kashmir.
Trots are always pro-Islam anymore, but they are irrelevant outside the West, which means they are irrelevant in the Real World.
Ridiculous. We ban lobbyists for Cuba and Syria? LOL, how many are there? How many would there be, even if it were legal?
How about banning the lobbyists for Israel? They do far more harm to US interests in a day than lobbyists for Iran, Sudan, Cuba and Syria could in five years.
The capitalist West’s war against Communism has been pretty vicious. There are few lies that they have not bothered to toss about. Most here in the West simply uncritically swallowed all of this stuff no questions asked.
I would like to take to task at least bit one anti-Communist dogma: That Communism (and by analogy socialism) has failed, and one of the reasons for that failure was that people hate it.
We really need to ask, “Failed how, and in what way?” If you ask your average person how it is that it failed, you won’t get much of an answer.
One of the ways we can determine if a system failed or not is if the people themselves accepted it or enjoyed. Anti-Communist dogma long held that the people living under Communism were miserable. But this is now coming under question. An earlier post laid out well that after 20 years, large sectors of Eastern Europe, in some cases a majority, prefer Communism to the capitalism that replaced it. Keep in mind that these are folks who experienced both.
More evidence is forthcoming from a new poll from Tajikistan, indicating that 7
A White nationalist commenter comments on the Neandertal thread:
Robert, I don’t get your strange form of ethnocentrism. You claim to think “we’re the best,” as a sort of superstition, while knowing that we’re not really the best; while in many respects “we’re the best,” is obviously true. You can’t compare Black supremacist ideology with White supremacist. The former may take things a bit too far and sometimes be a bit off the facts, but the latter is simply laughable.
Whites may not be perfect, but they do have a fairly high IQ and the most impressive track record in terms of scientific progress and high culture.
As far as the West not always being dominant– the Chinese had not discovered that the Earth was a sphere or that the sun was larger than the Earth by 1600 AD. We beat them to it by more than a millennium.
They were also amazed by Euclid as they had nothing comparable in mathematics; they had no system of formal logic or precise scientific method; excluding the Great Wall, no ancient architecture to compare with our great Cathedrals and monuments etc. you could go on and on. The Asians today have more great pianists to play Chopin, but where is the Asian Chopin? They are impressive people, but clearly less innovative.
The Arabs had a bit of a renaissance partly due to having better access to ancient Greek manuscripts; but it was short lived. Who’s following in the tradition of Classical Civilization today?
This whole “the West has only been ahead for a few hundred years,” line is silly. We really are in a different league than everyone else.
I get your point about it being in ill taste to constantly harp on and on about your own group’s superiority. But when we’re under attack – being flooded with nonwhites and told that Western Civilization really isn’t anything to be proud of, and even if it is, nonwhites will do just fine preserving the West despite having historically shown little to no ability to do so – well then we need to start making the case for being able to do something they can’t. The facts are on our side, we just need to have the nerve to use them.
If we want to preserve the civilization we love we’re going to have to accept that we can’t avoid hurting nonwhites’ feelings by telling them that they’re unable to maintain Western Civilization on their own.
As far as my form of ethnocentrism, well, it’s completely normal. Most ethnicities do think that their people are better or the best. It’s normal thinking. Many of these folks are also often non-racist to anti-racist. The two things are quite compatible. I don’t want to get into scientifically proving that we Whites are superior. What for? It’s a disgusting enterprise, and probably won’t be fruitful anyway.
I have some extremely serious problems with this line of thinking. For starters, its presumptions.
I do not think that NE Asian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Siberian, Taiwanese, Singaporean, or Vietnamese people lack the ability to produce a great modern civilization. They can clearly do so. I see them as continuing to be able to produce great and modern civilizations into the future. I don’t even have a problem with the civilizations produced by SE Asians in general.
I doubt if the problems of Indians, South Asians, Central Asians and Arabs are due to their genes. After all, the UAE right now is one of the most spectacularly modern places on Earth. Saudi Arabian cities look like Tuscon suburbs. Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait are quite similar. What’s so inferior about that? Sure, Islam is fucked, but there’s nothing in these folks’ genes that keeps them from producing great modern societies.
The North Africans should do pretty well too. Last I heard Libya is quite a modern country.
The Turks and the people of the Caucasus can produce modern societies, as can the Iranians. Iranian weaponry now is considered to be dangerously lethal by both the US and the Israelis. Recall the Iranian anti-ship missile that destroyed the Israeli warship off of Lebanon in the last war. Kickass product.
The Pakistanis and Indians produced nuclear weapons. No small feat that.
I do have a lot of worries about the abilities of Africans to produce great societies, but it’s basically their problem, not mine. We are not going to let Africans flood in here anyway.
Furthermore, looking at history is not too relevant. Sure, Africa did not produce much in the past, on their own. But Africa is no longer isolated from all outside influences. The great leaps of knowledge, science and innovation that occur in the rest of the world are readily available to educated and skilled Africans soon after they are invented or thought up. Therefore, Africa has a much better chance to become successfully modern than in the past.
Caribbeans, I don’t know. Trinidad and Tobago has a PCI of $20,000/year with totally free health care for all and 10
As suggested in the African example above, the modern world is changing so much that it can hardly be compared to older worlds. Technology is global, and it reverberates around the globe like lightning, as does knowledge in all forms. The smart people anywhere produce innovation and knowledge, and then these facts and things move around the planet faster than you can blink your eyes.
They are made available from more skilled societies to societies that are not as skilled. Therefore, the differential IQ factors are somewhat modulated as knowledge and innovation produced in high-IQ societies flows to lower IQ societies for free.
The Hispanics are flooding in, it is true. Their societies seem to be rather chaotic and violent, but if you go to their capital cities in the wealthier districts, you will think you were in any large US city. There’s no real observable difference. Their problems are mostly due to issues of wealth distribution.
It’s hard to use national IQ’s to calculate national potentials. For instance, Cuba has
Medical discoveries and breakthroughs occur regularly in Cuba and are published in scientific journals. Cuban biotechnology, a high-IQ industry, competes effectively with biotech from huge Western corporations and sells its excellent competitive products the world over.
All of these achievements have been done with a Cuban IQ of 85, lower than that of US Blacks, who White Supremacists consider to be a failed people, mostly due to an IQ of 86.8 or so. If Cubans can do so well with an IQ lower than US Blacks, how can US Blacks be a failed people due to IQ?
I don’t really believe that other societies produce inferior musicians or music, but maybe my tastes are different from yours.
What I would like to do is to eliminate illegal immigration and reduce legal immigration. I don’t care what race or ethnicity comes here, as I don’t buy your arguments that they are genetically inferior per se.
I would say that the combined average IQ of the immigrants we let in cannot be lower than the US average (either 98 or 100 right now, depending on scale used). So if 100 immigrants of whatever constellation of groups is let in, let their combined average IQ be 98-100. If the Jamaicans, Nigerians, Filipinos, Mexicans, Palestinians, Indians, Thais and Algerians we let in all average 98-100 IQ, what’s the worry? I don’t buy your argument that a 98-100 IQ person from one of these ethnicities is still somehow genetically inferior to a 98-100 IQ White American.
You say that Whites are going extinct and we are being flooded with non-Whites, but how are you going to save the White West? Even if you cut off all non-White immigration, you will still be only 6
Not to mention cutting off non-White immigration will be politically impossible. All the non-Whites will oppose it. Now you need to get 7
Do you honestly think that you can pull that off? It sounds impossible. Both political parties, the entire MSN media, etc will be deadset against it and will flood society with propaganda against it calling those who support it KKK, White Supremacists, Nazis, racists, etc.
I should point out that death squads are back in El Salvador. They are not killing many, but they are killing a few.
And they are back in a big way in Honduras ever since the US-sponsored and promoted coup that removed the democratically elected President for the crime of raising the minimum wage. Death squads are killing people just about every day in Honduras lately. I wonder how much longer this can last before the Left takes up guns again.
And Haiti has always been run by death squads. After the US-sponsored coup which removed President Aristide (US mercenaries and Marines appeared at his mansion and ordered him to leave the country), death squads have rampaged through Haiti. At least 3,000 people have been killed. Those targeted were the supporters of Aristide. The US supports the death squads in Haiti and Honduras to the hilt, and probably supports them in Guatemala and El Salvador too (they always did in the past).
On this question, Obama is no socialist or Communist. He’s just another far rightwing US imperialist running interference for the reactionary cliques down South. There’s barely any light between Obama and Bush on Latin American policy. Democrats or Republicans, it’s always the Monroe Doctrine down there.
Anti-Communists like to say that no one ever flees to a Communist regime, but the eastern part of Cuba is full of Haitians and Jamaicans who have fled their countries. Cuba took them in, and they like it a Hell of a lot better in Cuba. Everything is relative, you know.
That sounds like Castro propaganda. There are no strict meritocracies anywhere on earth. I have no reason to think one exists in Cuba, especially in was is still by western standards a corrupt Latin American nation. Things like bribing officials are still standard fare as is common the Latin countries.
You don’t see so many Blacks and mulattos in the top positions probably because their IQ’s are lower and they can’t cut the tests, etc. Cuban education is extremely competitive and if you can’t cut it, you’re gone. Cuba has no US style affirmative action.
There’s discrimination across the board, even lucrative jobs like tourist service and driving cabs. They don’t take high IQ and these jobs mostly go to white Cubans. So I don’t thing it’s just a matter of IQ. I don’t know what the average IQ of black vs. white Cubans is anyway.
Well, whether it’s a meritocracy or not, that’s what the WN’s on American Renaissance say it is. They all hate Communism and Castro, and they hate Blacks. If there was discrimination, they would openly admit it.
But as I can see in the article, there is indeed still racism and discrimination in Cuba. But it’s not true that if you bring it up, you go to jail. Lots of Black revolutionary Cubans have been talking about this for a long time. For the tourist industry, I guess they figure that the tourists would rather deal with a White person than a Black person. Cynical thinking there.
Cuba has the lowest poverty rate in Latin America at
As far as jobs requiring a good education, it’s well known that the Blacks and mulattos do poorly in school, get poor grades, etc. Further, they commit a wildly disproportionate amount of street crime, so that’s why the cops harass them. Black Cubans work in the worst jobs because they have the least education.
There is also a certain amount of ghetto type behaviors that started in the Special Period. The government would build brand new housing for Cubans, a bunch of Blacks would move in and in a few months, it would be ruined as they took apart everything they could unscrew to sell it on the Black market. It’s widely acknowledged that Cuban Whites would not have fouled their own nests like that.
Contrary to this lying article, there has been a huge debate in Cuba for many years about the Blacks and their elevated rates of various pathologies. Cuba has many sociologists, and they debate this all the time in their journals and publications. The current fashionable theory is Oscar Lewis’ “The Culture of Poverty” theory. So it’s not true that the regime doesn’t care about race or never talks about it.
The educational system is a meritocracy. There’s no affirmative action in the schools. The Blacks and mulattos do poorly in the schools and on tests. The Cubans test you all the time, and the educational system is very competitive. There’s no passing people along. A lot of the Blacks just can’t cut it academically, and Cuba doesn’t have educational affirmative action to inflate their numbers at the colleges.
However, I think that Raul should take an anti-racist stand and encourage the Blacks to form civil rights organizations. I don’t think he should worry it’s going to bring down the state.
That article seems wrong about other stuff. I’m not aware that Internet is illegal in Cuba. I thought it was legal. There are lots of Cuban bloggers, some anti-government, openly blogging and no one does anything.
I’m also not aware that satellite TV is illegal. If you go to the richer parts of Havana, you will see those dishes everywhere. If they’re illegal, no one is doing anything about it.
The Cuban dissidents, unlike the dissidents in Eastern Europe, simply have no support. Or very little support. That’s why they’re not popular.
There are ~2,500 dissident organizations on the island and ~500 political prisoners. You do the math. Most of dissidents, the government just leaves alone and ignores them.
But some of the dissidents are working with the US government and the CIA to bring down the government. They are working hand in hand with the US Interests Section (We have no Embassy). They go there, get money, advice, plans, etc. That’s illegal in Cuba. That’s what most of those arrests are for.
Robert, how do you square being ultra-left in the USA with being anti-cultural-Marxism? I mean, as a white male, don’t you sometimes feel like a 1940s-era Jewish Nazi?I mean, I understand your views on policy, and I agree with them to an extent, but how do you handle the fact that most of your political allies are destructive and antithetical to your professed worldview?
Easy! As far as economics and a general view of society, I’m a socialist, a Communist, a Marxist, etc. No, I do not believe that the rich get everything, the poor get nothing and everyone else, not to mention society, the environment and every non-domesticated non-human living creature gets screwed. I hate capitalism, and I use a Marxist analysis in evaluating many of the things that are happening in society. Marx did not have much to say about race. In a few places, he can be found quoted as an out and out racist, typical of the times. Lenin hadn’t much to say about it either. Even Stalin didn’t say much about it, other than condemning anti-Semitism. Mao talked a bit about race, but if he had 100 million Africans living in the Middle Kingdom, maybe he would not have been so PC. Under socialism, race usually doesn’t matter all that much for some reason. I’m not sure why that is, but that’s just how it goes. Some ethnic groups are incorrigible. The Hungarian Communists forced assimilation on the Hungarian Gypsies, and even outrageously forced sterilization on some of them. No one ever said they were bad Commies for doing so. The USSR and Mao’s China were quite brutal with minorities who acted up. Neither tolerated any amount of street crime. Cuba has the 6th highest incarceration rate in the world, and almost all of it is street crime, not political crime, often theft. The more you look at the history of the Eastern Bloc and China, the more you see what the disconnect really is, between the Cultural Marxism of the West, which has never ruled any state on Earth and between actually existing socialist societies, which were often quite different. However, Marxism *is* a science, or at least it is supposed to be. I would love if the Left and the liberals were right on race. I spent years believing that and more years desperately trying to prove them right. They are just wrong. The Left and the liberals are wrong on race. They are telling lies. The problem is that all race realism plays directly into the hands of the Right for the time being. So I can see why the Right opposes it. But as a science, we should be able to figure out a race-realist Marxism. Hell, we can come up with a theory for anything. My colleagues are just wrong on race in the West. But over in India, Nepal, the Philippines, Peru, Colombia, Palestine, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, where the real struggles are taking place, there is no discussion of race realism or Cultural Marxism. It’s just a matter of justice. The USSR and China had no need for Cultural Marxism. It’s a fetish of the West. The ultra-Left in the West is insane on race, but I don’t support their Western project anyway (revolution in the West). What am I supposed to do, man? I mean, I’m a Commie. I’m supposed to turn into a rightwing jerk just because the Left is nuts on race? Forget it. What can the Right offer me? I don’t agree with them on one single thing. Race is only a small part of things. Economics is much larger.
Fascinating article, A Visit To Raul Castro’s Cuba, on Cuba today written by a Marxist, which does not at all deny the serious shortcomings of the system. While it seems tempting to blame Communism for all of these problems, the truth is that Communism is probably responsible for only some of the problems. First of all, the rations book only covers 4
The sidewalks are falling apart, but sidewalks generally were nice and clean in the East Bloc and China. Public facilities in general are not kept up well, but I don’t believe that was a problem in the East Bloc or China, where things were generally neat and clean. Cuba is an extremely hot and humid place, like the rest of the Caribbean, so that may enter into the lack of upkeep aspect. The problems with the ration books, deteriorating housing and sidewalks, however, is probably due to the US Embargo that costs Cuba $4 billion/year. What is very interesting is a section towards the end of the article under the heading, “Race and Marginality — The Sleeping Giants?” Though couched in the usual Leftist “see no evil” mindset of a baffled person who can’t explain anything racially other than by resorting to accusations of White racism, there is some blockbuster race realist stuff in this section. First of all, the Cuban Revolution was great for the Blacks and mixed race Cubans. In the great Batista Cuba of which the overwhelmingly White Cuban exile “gusanos” (or worms as I refer to them) dream and pine, there was an overt Jim Crow system, that, while not as bad as in the US, was still pretty bad. The Cuban exiles all lie about this and say that there was little racism in pre-Castro Cuba. Darker Cubans were out and out barred from most beaches in Cuba. In provincial towns, public parks were segregated into White and non-White sections. Non-White Cubans were pretty much barred from most professional positions, especially in the private sector. The Revolution got rid of all that and dramatically improved things for non-White Cubans. Nevertheless, the upper ranks of the Party and professional classes were mostly White. A new and refreshing pro-Black movement has emerged in the form of non-White hip hop music with an emphasis on police brutality themes. The suggestion is that as in much of the West, non-Whites in Cuba commit a vastly disproportionate amount of the crime, and are consequently profiled and then harassed by police and possibly beaten and manhandled when arrested. So in that sense Blacks and mulattos in Cuba behave much as those in the West do. One huge difference is that there is little violent crime in Cuba. There is quite a bit of theft though, in particular petty thievery. In addition, as in the rest of Latin America, most faces on Cuban TV are White. A protest movement has also emerged against this tendency. After the collapse of the USSR in 1990, Cuba went into a long phase called “The Special Period.” In a nutshell, Cuba lost 9
One result of this Period was social chaos and an increase in something called “marginalization.” As in the West and in Latin America, wherever you find good numbers of Blacks in a mixed-race society, the Blacks mysteriously tend to be overwhelmingly more likely to be marginalized in various respects. This was even true in Communist Cuba. “Marginalization” became a codeword, for poor, uneducated non-White Cubans. A number of theories developed to try to explain the behavior of the marginalized non-Whites. During the Period, non-White dishonesty, lack of upkeep and out and theft increased dramatically. Most of the people complaining about the “marginalization” theme were Whites. Whites were associated with a “rich culture” in which, no matter how much money they had, they were relatively honest, hardworking, tidy and non-thieving. Non-Whites were associated with a “culture of poverty” borrowed from Oscar Lewis’ seminal work that was associated with lack of upkeep and subsequent disrepair and dilapidation, a less vigourous work ethic, greatly increased dishonesty and tremendous thievery, usually of the petty variety. One episode that particularly outraged Cuban Whites was one in which poor non-Whites in Havana were given brand new state of the art housing in the city complete with a variety of new and working fixtures, hookups and whatnot. Quickly after they moved in, the non-Whites basically dismantled the brand-new complex of its hookups and everything that wasn’t nailed down, which they promptly sold on the Black Market for hard currency. Afterward, they were back living in a slum again. Cuban Whites were completely outraged and offended by this behavior. It was not stated in the article, but the suggestion was that as much as Cuban Whites struggle, they won’t dismantle the equivalent of a Cuban mansion and turn it into the equivalent of a Cuban hovel. What is fascinating about this is that this is exactly what Blacks did in Africa. In Zimbabwe, when Blacks took over the farms of the Whites, idiot Blacks dismantled and tore out everything not nailed down and sold it, or, if it was wooden, burned it as firewood. Working orchards and vineyards were destroyed in days or weeks, chopped up for firewood and sent up in smoke. Similar things occur in South Africa. Similarly, in the New South Africa, upkeep has gone down the tubes. Sure, the Blacks fix stuff when it falls apart, but often by the tried and true “n-word rigging” familiar to White Americans. That’s basically a half-assed, quick and dirty, off the cuff, makeshift fix of a broken thing that will work for a while but won’t last long. Crucially, routine maintenance that would keep things running much longer is simply put off for later which usually means never. This same dynamic seems to be operating in mostly non-White Cuba, while in the Communist East Bloc and China, things were at least kept tidy and neat looking. The Cuban experience of problems in upkeep suggests not so much a problem of Communism as a basic difference in temperament between Blacks and Whites. The dismantling of working apparatuses in favor of the quick fix of firewood or cash, leaving one with a hovel or ruined farm, reflected from Cuba to Zimbabwe, once again suggests not so much a problem of Cuban Communism as once a basic temperamental difference between major human races. Another problem in Cuba has been poor scores by the “marginalized” non-Whites of Cuba. Whites tend to dramatically outscore non-Whites in Cuban schools, particularly in the professional schools which are extremely competitive and held to high standards. A culture of poverty explanation has been advanced to try to explain why White Cubans are doing so much better in school than non-White Cubans. Yet we see this discrepancy everywhere on Earth where there are Blacks and Whites together. It is interesting the Cuba chooses a “culture of poverty” explanation. In the West, radical PC anti-racism is all the rage and these same things are blamed on omnipresent White racism, which seems even more dubious than the culture of poverty stuff. It’s even more fascinating, and actually disturbing for me as a Leftist, that Black and White behaviors show remarkable continuity with their racial cogeners around the world, under capitalism, socialism or Communism. * I am not trying to imply that Black temperament is inferior to White temperament. If it is in part genetic (though adjustable via culture) then it is simply the way that they have evolved. I’m sure many to most Blacks are perfectly ok with a lot of these behaviors. However, they are so opposite to standard White behaviors that these Black behaviors drive Whites up the wall and cause endless friction in multiracial societies. I also did not mean to imply that lack of upkeep or maintenance was in inferior trait. I practically wrote the book on Lazy myself. However, modern industrial societies do not seem to work very well when maintenance or upkeep is neglected.
Repost from the old site.Note: This post has been accused of racism. See here for my position statement on racism. Black crime is a real thing; let’s not gloss it over, and the Black crime wave is a relatively recent occurrence, mostly since about 1960 or so, which just so happens to coincide with sky-high rates of Black illegitimacy, Black males being raised without fathers, etc. Around this time many Blacks moved from the South to the North. But many more Black females moved north than Black males. So there were more females than males. In such a situation, many males will tend not to marry and instead will just play the various women, father children, not support them, etc. In the opposite situation, more males than females, males will compete aggressively for females, quickly marry any available females and tend not to leave them. Since the 1960’s, there has been a massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the North. All of this has pretty much wreaked havoc on the Black family. It’s clear that those Black males frequently being raised by poorly socialized Black females, without fathers, have a higher rate of sociopathy. In fact, this formula may produce sociopathy in any race. Much of the analysis in the preceding three paragraphs comes from The Antisocial Personalities by David Lykken. While heavy on the psychological jargon, I found it a great read. It’s one of the best books ever written on sociopathy. Robert Hare, one of the world’s top experts on psychopaths, also has a great book on sociopathy, Without Conscience, The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. Hare’s book is much easier to read and is a must for anyone interested in the subject. The recent explosion of Black crime shows that it is not just Black genes that cause Black crime, which itself is real: Blacks have a 9 times higher crime rate than Whites. I admit that the town I just moved to has a reputation for a fairly low crime rate. The reason given to me in whispers is that, while heavily Hispanic, the town also has few Blacks. Hence less crime. Demographics trumps all for many Americans when deciding on a place to live, or especially to buy a house. For decades now, Whites have been fleeing areas, particularly inner cities and exurbs, as they turned Black. Now they are fleeing Hispanics, and in towns in the South San Fransisco Bay Area, namely Cupertino, they are even fleeing Asians! There, White parents complain about heavily Asian schools where the Asians out-compete their kids, where sports, arts and music and either poorly funded or simply not supported at all, where all the emphasis is on math and science. For their part, Asian parents have decried the over 9
The Whites flee and flee and run and run. One gets the impression that at some point there will be nowhere left to run. Yet we now have something called “Black Flight.” To understand this, first realize that Black society has become two-tiered with the liberation Blacks experienced since the 1960’s. Increasingly, a Black professional, middle and upper class reaps the fruits of American society, while a Black underclass continues to fester in the worst pathology. In places like northeastern New Orleans, middle and upper middle class Blacks are fleeing the pathology of the Black Inner City in New Orleans to create a relatively upscale Black neighborhood, which undoubtedly has less pathology than the danger zone they are fleeing. Labeling middle class Blacks with the problems of the Black underclass is immoral, irrational, rude and just stupid. Yet this is what the Hal Turners do. Nor should we decry all “flight” from blighted neighborhoods as “racist,” as the Left is wont to do. Since Blacks themselves are engaging in “flight” from blighted Black neighborhoods, it seems silly to regard flight from blight as a racist move. Even with that reality of high Black crime, why be racist? Any given individual Black person may quite possibly, and often does, possess the moral character and decency that one wants in a friend or acquaintance. Therefore, Blacks in general should be treated respectfully as individuals as long as one feels they are good people and lacks evidence that they are not. The White racists also say that Blacks are stupid. There is a White-Black variance in IQ that has lasted for some time now. I will not go into the debate around that variance except to say that I think it is real. But it is not so devastating as one thinks. First of all, we are not taking into account the Flynn Effect, whereby the IQ’s of all people in the Western World have been rising for decades now. A couple of recent studies have also found the Flynn Effect in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and rural Kenya, of all places. There is much debate about the cause of the rise, but it is real, although there is evidence that it is petering out. Flynn is also the author a study showing young Blacks reducing the Black-White IQ gap in the US by about 5-6 points since 1970. Since IQ is always renormed around an average of 100 for Whites, the rise is not noticeable. That is, a 100 nowadays is a considerably higher score than a 100 a few decades ago, since IQ’s continue to climb while the scale is constantly renormed to mask the changes. So, Blacks have been getting smarter for decades now in America (and in Brazil and Kenya at least, also) along with other races. At some point, if the trend continues, we can hope for various groups in (at least) the West: brightest, brighter and bright. If different races compare differently along that scale, it should not be a tremendous matter. Further, as Black IQ continues to rise with every decade, it becomes more and more difficult to call Blacks “dumb” in the face of rising Black IQ. Nutrition is the main reason given for the Flynn Effect; technology, video games and an increasingly intellectually stimulating modern environment are others. Blacks probably still do not eat as good a diet in the West as Whites, so there is probably room for more improvement here. If Blacks follow Whites in enthusiasm for video games and personal computers, there is probably room for further improvement. As is, video games are probably played by Whites more than Blacks and many poorer Blacks still do not own a PC or have internet access. Furthermore, as IQ’s have risen for decades now, the rationale for setting mental retardation at 70 IQ becomes harder to sustain. After all, an 85 IQ today is higher than an 85 IQ 30 years ago. Racists conflate Black IQ with Black crime, and do the same with Hispanics. This argument is interesting and not entirely without merit. However, there are some problems with the analysis, yet, at the same time, if true, it offers some hope. First of all, as noted, Black IQ, along with all other IQ’s in the West, has been rising for decades. The low IQ-crime link is especially seen at the lower end of the IQ range, which is where the Flynn Effect is having its greatest effect. I.e., the average rise noted by Flynn is mainly accounted for by reduced numbers of scores in the lowest range of IQ’s. As the number of persons scoring at the lowest end of the scale becomes fewer and fewer, if there is a good IQ-crime link, then we would expect crime to fall in tandem. Looking at average crime rates between Blacks, Hispanics and Whites, we can see that more than IQ is accounting for the differences. Hispanics have a crime rate three times that of Whites, and Blacks, as noted, have a crime rate nine times as high. Average Black IQ is about 89.8, Hispanic IQ is about 92 and White IQ is 103. The IQ-crime link is quite imperfect. If IQ alone accounted for the differences (going by the White-Black spread), Hispanic crime would be 6-7 times the White rate, not 3 times higher. So Hispanics are committing crimes at a much lower rate than would be expected by IQ – 5
If we take the White-Hispanic IQ spread instead, the Black crime rate would be about 4-5 times the White rate, not 9 times higher. So Blacks are committing crimes at double the rate expected by IQ. Something about Blacks besides IQ, possibly Black culture, is inflating the Black crime rate. Clearly, while there is some IQ-crime correlation among groups, there is a heck of a lot more going on with crime than merely IQ. It is here that we probably enter into the wilds of a place called culture. Racists like to say that Black pathology is due to Black genes, and as such is hopeless. Blacks are stupid and crime-prone, it is in their genes, and nothing can be done about it. It is important to take this on in a logical manner instead of just hurling the racist moniker at those voicing this argument. Let us look at Cuba for instance. Cuba is a state that is about 6
A fascinating look at the variety of lineages visible in the Cuban people is here – it seems they have every possible mixture you could think of. Considering the 6
What do we see instead? In Latin America, Cubans have the second longest life expectancy, are the best educated, have the lowest infant mortality, and have the highest standardized test scores in the region. Cuba, with
They have the highest percentage of agronomists per capita of any country on Earth and the highest doctor-patient ratio (1 doctor for every 169 patients). Cubans, far from starving as capitalist propaganda says, are among the top 5 nations in Latin America in terms of caloric and protein intake. The rate of malnutrition is so low –
Further, the rate of street crime, especially violent crime, is quite low. Opponents of the regime quickly retort that “there is nothing to steal in Cuba.” Surely there is plenty to steal, and if not, there are always other humans to commit violent crimes against. Haiti is vastly poorer than Cuba, surely has much less in the way of stuff to steal, and has an out of control crime rate. Racists quickly point out that Haiti is all Black, hence ridden with crime. Yet Cuba is also majority Black and mulatto. Havana is often regarded as the safest large city in the Western Hemisphere, and Cuba is regarded by many travelers as one of the safest countries in Latin America. A majority-black and mulatto country and big city the safest in an entire hemisphere – imagine that! A typical rejoinder is that Cuba is a dictatorship and therefore there is little crime. Hey, if it takes a cop on every corner to control crime, I say go for it. Furthermore, the penalties for breaking the law are really far worse in other Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Peru, Brazil and Colombia, where the prisons are utterly Hellish and where police death squads roam the streets slaughtering petty criminals and street kids at an astonishing rate. Where there are a lot of Blacks, there is often quite a bit of social pathology, low educational achievement, crime, especially violent crime, etc. Some racists have also implied an association between Blacks and rape. The more Blacks, the more rape. All of these statistics are interesting, but taken to their racist logic, lead to discrimination. For instance, many Blacks are upstanding folks who play no role in any of this pathology or crime. By associating them with their brethren who do, and discriminating against them, you commit an immoral act. Further, as the Cuban example shows, majority-Black and mulatto nations are capable of amazing achievements, in the Cuban case beating many majority Mestizo and even some majority White nations on a variety of metrics. One way of ameliorating of the problems of Black pathology laid out above could involve looking at those nations and locales that seem to have the highest rates of Black achievement and the lowest rates of Black pathology. This could be seen as an environment to “bring out the best in Blacks”. The Cuban example shows that Black genes are not destiny and there is a way forward, out of the cave of genetic determinism.
A commenter notes that genes provide a range of behaviors, and culture may not be able to move group performance much outside of that range. The suggestion by that commenter was that genes will predispose some populations to relatively high crime, and culture can only make it lower or higher, but it’s never going to be all that low. Allow me to differ on that for a moment. Check out my post on the Moriori. In a nutshell, the Polynesians are widely regarded as extremely violent people. They were violent as Hell on contact, and their oral histories indicated a culture of extreme violence dating back as far as we can tell. They seem to have been some of the most violent folks on Earth. The Maori were some of the most violent of all of the Polynesians. To this day, they have very high rates of general instability, drug abuse, domestic violence, and all sorts of crime, including violent crime. They are are regarded as having hair trigger tempers and for being highly aggressive. They have all of the social pathologies of US Blacks, though their IQ’s seem to be higher. (IQ = 91). The Moriori were a Maori subgroup that colonized the Chatham Islands in the 1600’s. They started out being typically maniacal Maoris, but after a while of that, it become clear that they were going to massacre each other. A leader came unto them and saw God. He became a religious leader, and all of the people followed him. He ordered them to renounce all violence. For the next 300 years, they were possibly one of the least violent people on Earth. Homicide was basically unheard of, and so was rape. Conflict was settled by a twig as wide as your index finger. At the first blood it was over and done with, and the conflict was buried. Around the 1830’s, the Maori came to the Chatham Islands. They attacked the Moriori and the Moriori were so pacifist they would not even fight back. They were quickly massacred, enslaved and cannibalized. Few survived. Now, how does the most violent tribe on Earth become the most pacifist tribe on Earth? It’s clear to me that Polynesians are genetically primed for violence and aggression, but it’s also clear that a strong culture can completely overcome that. Genes provide the clay, culture is the sculptor. Now, the question is, how can these profound gene-warping cultures work? Sadly, I think they work best in small tribes and villages. In large cities and big societies, I don’t think these super-cultures can take hold. They just get washed out by the genes. So in large cities and with huge populations, genes will predominate, and maybe culture has limited effects. In very small populations, culture can be a super-warper. There is also the possibility that some races are more “plastic” than other races. Polynesians may be a “plastic race” that is highly susceptible to cultural effects. Amerindians may be another one. There are Amazonian tribes right near the “most violent people on Earth”, the Yanomamo, that, like the Moriori, are some of the pacifist people on Earth. A problem with Blacks is that they seem to commit lots of crime just about everywhere. I am willing to entertain the possibility that Blacks may not be as “plastic” or as effected by super-culture, as, say, Polynesians and Amerindians are. The Dyula are an exception, and they are Blacker than people Author Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Aborigines, Africa, Amerindians, Anthropology, Arabs, Blacks, Capitalism, Caribbean, Crime, Criminology, Cuba, Cultural, Dominica, Dyala, East Indians, Economics, Hispanics, Intelligence, Inuit, Islam, Left, Maori, Marxism, Melanesians, Moriori, Mozambique, New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, Polynesians, Psychology, Race Realism, Race/Ethnicity, Roma, Russia, Socialism, Sociology, South Africa, Whites33 Comments on Race, Crime, Genes, Culture, Capitalism, Urbanization: Some Puzzles
Idiot. That’s because, as the Republicans, White nationalists and Far Right insist, the guy’s a fucking Communist! No, wait, a socialist. No, wait, any socialist worth his salt would have chucked this BS long ago. I’m having a hard time figuring what the game plan is here. The Embargo has always been about US politics. Do the Dems really still need Florida to win the Presidency? What happens if they lose Florida? Do they lose? The Cuban Lobby is one kickass ethnic lobby, kind of like the Jewish Lobby. As Cuban policy has been always held hostage to this fanatics, so US Middle East policy has always been held hostage the Jewish fanatics. With the Cubans, it’s always been about electoral votes. They have said that if we don’t back their nonsense, they have enough power in Florida to throw the vote to the other candidate. Americans are more sensible, but not by much. I haven’t read any recent figures, but polls taken in the past decade showed that 5
This is very much a White thing. The Cuban exiles are Whites, and it’s Whites who always backed the stupid embargo. Blacks and non-Cuban Hispanics are generally hostile to it, and your average Mexican is pro-Cuban. The Mexican and Cuban governments have had a long alliance, based on the fact that Mexico’s PRI was originally a revolutionary party. On similar grounds, the PRI was allied with the Salvadoran revolutionaries, the FMLN.