The literary genius Eric S. Raymond (the progenitor of the “open source” movement) wrote today something about this decadence of the West which I think is so eloquently direct to the point of what I’ve been writing about a potential Civil War coming to the USA that I decided to copy it here to make sure it is read (rather than just linking to it given many readers ignore the plethora of links I put in my writings).
The relevance to the blog is outcomes of current reoccurrence of the decadence of ideological suicide: “elevating betas en masse to fake alphas” as was Spain pissing away it’s productivity before it collapsed to a third world shithole after the 16th century.
Before I share that, I want to insert a refutation I posted today, refuting the claim that there couldn’t be any Civil War in the USA because there’s not enough teenagers.
I wrote:
Eric S. Raymond who respects you, thinks your assumptions are incorrect:
If you blow up the Constitution, you'll regret it
I’m noting you correlated violence levels to an excess ratio of teenagers relative to more mature adults. But Nazi Germany is a prime counter example:
Millions of people killed in WW2 is a high level of violence. I suspect there’s some truth to the correlation you discovered w.r.t. to disenfranchised youth in underdeveloped nations. Yet it seems ideological suicide (aka Communism) is another cause of widespread violence:
Is Egalitarianism Unconstitutional?
Speaking of devolution into the insanity of ideological extremism:
And here is Eric’s blog post:
If you blow up the Constitution, you’ll regret it
Posted on 2018-02-21 by Eric Raymond
Predictably, the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting has triggered some talk on the left – and in the mainstream media, but I repeat myself – of repealing the Second Amendment.
I am therefore resharing a blog post I wrote some time back on why repealing 2A would not abolish the right to bear arms, only open the way to the U.S. government massively violating that right. Rights are not granted by the Constitution, they are recognized by it. This is black-letter law.
Thus, repeal of any right enumerated in the Constitution is not possible without abrogating the Constitutional covenant – destroying the legal and moral foundations of our system. The ten in the Bill of Rights are especially tripwires on an explosive that would bring the whole thing down. And of all these, the First and Second are especially sensitive. Approach them at your peril.
I will now add a very sober and practical warning: If the Constitution is abrogated by a “repeal” of 2A, it will be revolution time – millions of armed Americans will regard it as their moral duty to rise up and kill those who threw it in the trash. I will be one of them.
Left-liberals, you do not want this. I’m a tolerant libertarian, but many of the revolutionaries I’d be fighting alongside would be simpler and harder men, full of faith and hatred. If that revolution comes, you will lose and the political aftermath is likely to be dominated by people so right-wing that I myself would fear for the outcome.
You should fear it much more than I. Back away from those tripwires; you are risking doom. Ethnic cleansing? Theocracy? Anti-LGBT pogroms? Systematic extermination of cultural Marxists? In a peaceful, Constitutional America these horrors will not be. If you blow up the Constitution, they might.
There’s many insightful comments at the above quoted blog.
I also contributed a comment to Eric’s blog quoted as follows, but since he’s banned me, I had to post it from a (Japanese) VPN with a different browser fingerprint under a pseudonym (Satoshi Nakamoto):
Eric S. Raymond wrote:
The oversupply of unskilled labor is [...] not so great if you’re the unskilled labor. Blacks are especially hard hit.
[...] but I think it does mean only letting in immigrants who actually can compete economically with people like you and me.
A more free market driven justification is the Tragedy of the Commons driven by lowering our own competitiveness through the rewarding of those abroad who haven't strived to be economically viable as humanity transitions away from the agrarian and industrial ages. We should motivate those abroad to seek high-tech skills and push their own societies up the food chain rather than reward those who seek to reproduce in their agrarian oriented culture within our borders.
The argument that we lower our costs via increased competition on the low-end of the labor spectrum is as nonsensical as arguing that hiring more low-cost programmers is a better solution to the communication overload problem in the Mythical Man Month than hiring fewer, smarter, more autonomously productive programmers. And there’s no reciprocal free market for us to go run businesses in their countries, so opening ours to game-ship of the Coasian transaction costs is a Tragedy of the Commons on humanity overall. Whereas, with limited immigration we seed the world with our values without corrupting those values from the inside.
How does the Schelling point come about if they instead continue to break us down with ever increasing regulation, taxation, expropriation, etc. until we’re so impoverished that we have to choose between buying beans or bullets? Without a unified cause, wouldn’t we splinter into groups of differing views and politics per the bad scenario in Eric’s closing paragraph? Why are presuming the elite are so dumb that they wouldn’t instead wisely choose to divide-and-conquer us? Basically I’m trying to wrap my mind around this Schelling point and determine how it will work in reality without disintegrating into power struggles, warlords, and rebels killing rebels? The whole Schelling point thing seems way too oversimplified. Are we rebels even organized enough to run a country?
I’m going to guess that James A. Donald wrote the following linked blog after reading my comment above because he was reading ESR’s blog given he had posted a comment there and his use of the term ‘fissiparous’ relates precisely to my above questions that brought silence to ESR’s blog. I can verify from the time of the first comment on Jim’s blog that he published it some 12+ hours after my quoted comment.