Good to find you writing on here, Andrew! Your mention of Sweden and the helicopters reminds me of a half-formed thought I come back to now and then, about how Sweden in its era as "världens modernaste land" (and even from rather further back, thinking of the role of church-state fusion in laying the ground for Swedish modernity) can look like an early, analogue prototype for various digitally enabled projects of our own century. (Perhaps more so than the more infamous examples of earlier surveillance states, etc.)
Yes. I often think of the Sweden of the Thirty Years' War as the prototypical modern state, whose army and bureaucracy gave it a huge advantage relative to its population and natural poverty. I don't know enough about the *economic* history of the Swedish empire to know why it fell: I just have the sense that it was the loss of the economic stranglehold on Russian trade which control of the Baltics gave that must have been crucial. When I was in Karlskoga last summer I picked up a book on the de la Gardie who sacked Moscow in the sixteenth century, and thought that if a Swedish mercenary could get that far, why didn't the Swedes completely conquer Russia as the Brits did India? There are answers to this question, obviously, but it's an interesting perspective.
High tech surveillance is China’s substitute for ‘impersonal prosociality’ (see _The WEIRDest People in the World), the trust of non-kin that made the West great. China, though technologically advanced is a ‘traditional society’—like poor third world countries and to a great extent lower class Americans—the 2/3 on the other side of the Diploma Divide. Low levels of social capital, no trust outside of kinship groups and little within, endemic corruption, deep cynicism, conspiracy theories, and the common view that formal institutions are fakes, official stories are false, and official regulations aren’t to be taken seriously. In traditional societies women breed, men fight, and Big Men, who provide and protect, rule. In third-world shithole countries without technology this system makes it impossible to advance economically. China, also a traditional culture has substituted technological surveillance for impersonal prosociality. I’ve been there twice—hell on earth. The people are worker ants with no individuality who work until their brains run out of their ears and are completely materialistic—work, work, work, spend, spend, spend. Their only value is glitz. This is also what the lower classes in the US want, which is why they voted for Trump—who will not deliver.
Good to find you writing on here, Andrew! Your mention of Sweden and the helicopters reminds me of a half-formed thought I come back to now and then, about how Sweden in its era as "världens modernaste land" (and even from rather further back, thinking of the role of church-state fusion in laying the ground for Swedish modernity) can look like an early, analogue prototype for various digitally enabled projects of our own century. (Perhaps more so than the more infamous examples of earlier surveillance states, etc.)
Yes. I often think of the Sweden of the Thirty Years' War as the prototypical modern state, whose army and bureaucracy gave it a huge advantage relative to its population and natural poverty. I don't know enough about the *economic* history of the Swedish empire to know why it fell: I just have the sense that it was the loss of the economic stranglehold on Russian trade which control of the Baltics gave that must have been crucial. When I was in Karlskoga last summer I picked up a book on the de la Gardie who sacked Moscow in the sixteenth century, and thought that if a Swedish mercenary could get that far, why didn't the Swedes completely conquer Russia as the Brits did India? There are answers to this question, obviously, but it's an interesting perspective.
High tech surveillance is China’s substitute for ‘impersonal prosociality’ (see _The WEIRDest People in the World), the trust of non-kin that made the West great. China, though technologically advanced is a ‘traditional society’—like poor third world countries and to a great extent lower class Americans—the 2/3 on the other side of the Diploma Divide. Low levels of social capital, no trust outside of kinship groups and little within, endemic corruption, deep cynicism, conspiracy theories, and the common view that formal institutions are fakes, official stories are false, and official regulations aren’t to be taken seriously. In traditional societies women breed, men fight, and Big Men, who provide and protect, rule. In third-world shithole countries without technology this system makes it impossible to advance economically. China, also a traditional culture has substituted technological surveillance for impersonal prosociality. I’ve been there twice—hell on earth. The people are worker ants with no individuality who work until their brains run out of their ears and are completely materialistic—work, work, work, spend, spend, spend. Their only value is glitz. This is also what the lower classes in the US want, which is why they voted for Trump—who will not deliver.
Do you read David McGrogan - interesting reading this after reading his latest piece ( https://newsfromuncibal.substack.com/p/carl-schmitt-ate-my-law-school )