Theatre of the Absurd: The Empty Palace in the Desert

Posted by Dan Dare on August 17, 2010, 02:03 PM | #

The scenes of Ordos are eerily reminiscent of the North First Street/Tasman area of San Jose. There too are vistas of gleaming new buildings surrounded by empty parking lots, created to profit from a dot.com bubble that was expected to last for ever.

But that aside, I think the premise of the article is seriously flawed. The Chinese government is not simply directing investment into building offices and housing that nobody wants or can afford, but also into impressive infrastructure projects like the high-speed railway system touched upon in the report. According to the Economist, around a million people are at work on that project which will provide China with the world’s most extensive high-speed rail system.

In the meantime, the start of similar investment in the US is on hold pending official investigation into the roles that SNCF and other potential consortium members may have had in transporting Jews
to Auschwitz.

Posted by Angry Beard on August 17, 2010, 02:12 PM | #

What China is essentially practising is National Socialism - you know just like those horrid old Nazis did back in the ‘30s, the same horrid people who got the collapsed and discredited Weimar Republic back on its feet in a few short years, and awed the World with the rapidity and robustness of their industrial revival.
Anyhow ‘smart’ western economists have been predicting the ‘collapse’ of China every year now for as far back as I can remember.
They are wrong in this just like they arew rong in everyhing else.
Expect China to go onwards and upwards.
HINT: It’s the size of the national IQ and diligence and discipline of the workforce that count - not discredied shit abstuse economic theorzing by second rate academics in the USA.

Posted by Notus Wind on August 17, 2010, 02:25 PM | #

Dan,

But that aside, I think the premise of the article is seriously flawed. The Chinese government is not simply directing investment into building offices and housing that nobody wants or can afford, but also into impressive infrastructure projects like the high-speed railway system touched upon in the report. According to the Economist, around a million people are at work on that project which will provide China with the world’s most extensive high-speed rail system.

Yes, but as I said in the entry, “whether the decisions needed to achieve this growth make any kind of economic sense is another matter entirely.”  I would expect some of these projects to make more sense than others and I didn’t mean to give the impression that they are all completely ridiculous boondoggles (i.e. houses and offices that nobody wants or can afford).  Nevertheless, I am quite confident that the amount of unnecessary construction going on in China right now must be of an incredibly vast scale given the size of the country, provided that Faber is correct about the percentage of China’s GDP that can be attributed to construction.

In any event, the main premise of the entry is that all this construction is primarily motivated by a desire to grow GDP almost for its own sake, which was verified in the video report and has been frequently stated elsewhere as well.

Posted by Randy Garver on August 17, 2010, 02:27 PM | #

Jim Chanos made an excellent video discussing China’s overinvestment in real estate, and the potential for global economic turmoil, found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99HNFCn5RP8

Posted by Notus Wind on August 17, 2010, 02:33 PM | #

Angry Beard,

What China is essentially practising is National Socialism
...
Expect China to go onwards and upwards.

I take it the spectacle of Ordos is lost on you then.  Don’t worry, I’ll have much more to say about China in future entries.  I guarantee that you won’t view it as a National Socialist model of the future by the time I’m done with it.

In brief, my view is that the image of economic success that China is projecting is very much an illusion that will end in tragedy.  Both for its people and its government.

Posted by Dan Dare on August 17, 2010, 02:50 PM | #

Notus Wind:

The comparison to be made is not between China and present-day developed economies in the west, but between China and those same economies when they were in their formative phase. I don’t know whether comparative statistics are available for the US in the last quarter of the 19C, but they might prove instructive.

As for China, my own view is that its future prospects are bounded by ecological and global resource constraints, and that the biggest risk for its government will lie in its inability to provide the population with the level of material benefits to which they have been encouraged to aspire.

Incidentally, this earlier article might be of some interest.

Posted by Notus Wind on August 17, 2010, 03:05 PM | #

Dan,

The comparison to be made is not between China and present-day developed economies in the west, but between China and those same economies when they were in their formative phase. I don’t know whether comparative statistics are available for the US in the last quarter of the 19C, but they might prove instructive.

True but there is just no analogy that can make sense of the incredible change that a country as large as China has gone through in just three decades - from being economically backward and rural to being a pretender to the throne.  There is no precedent for this.

I only mentioned the recent percentage of American GDP due to construction for the purposes of context and not to setup a direct analogy, which would be inappropriate for the reasons you mention.  For what it’s worth, I’ve heard that for a country along China’s development cycle that it would make sense for construction as a percentage of GDP to be somewhere in the range of 10-25% and that anything above this range is almost certainly too high except in the rarest of circumstances.

As for China, my own view is that its future prospects are bounded by ecological and global resource constraints, and that the biggest risk for its government will lie in its inability to provide the population with the level of material benefits to which they have been encouraged to aspire.

I completely agree with this, the ecological constraints loom larger in my mind than anything else though.

Incidentally, this earlier article might be of some interest.

Thank you for the link.  I will be sure to read it carefully.

Posted by Dan Dare on August 17, 2010, 03:18 PM | #

... there is just no analogy that can make sense of the incredible change that a country as large as China has gone through in just three decades - from being economically backward and rural to being a pretender to the throne.  There is no precedent for this. - Notus Wind

I wouldn’t claim that the US was economically backward by contemporary standards, but there is no doubt that it accomplished the feat of transforming itself from an overwhelmingly agrarian economy into the leading industrial power in only 30 years or so.

The principal difference between the USA then and China now is that the former based its industrial growth on immigration, while China has not had had to do that and never will, having as it does a practically inexhaustible supply of cheap and pliant domestic labour to call upon.

Posted by Notus Wind on August 17, 2010, 03:27 PM | #

Angry: Anyhow ‘smart’ western economists have been predicting the ‘collapse’ of China every year now for as far back as I can remember.

I can’t speak for the past but I knew for sure that there was something wrong with the Chinese model once I saw that it was receiving plaudits from the American-Progressive-Jewish pundit class (e.g. Thomas Friedman, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, etc).

Posted by BGD on August 17, 2010, 04:25 PM | #

Posted by Randy Garver on August 17, 2010, 06:27 PM | #

Jim Chanos made an excellent video discussing China’s overinvestment in real estate, and the potential for global economic turmoil

Chanos himself has been covered in a negative light quite a few times on Deep Capture.

Posted by Dasein on August 17, 2010, 05:12 PM | #

The Chinese government is not simply directing investment into building offices and housing that nobody wants or can afford, but also into impressive infrastructure projects like the high-speed railway system touched upon in the report.—DD

I remember reading a story a while back about some subcontractors who were arrested in a scam where they would use poor quality concrete instead of what they were required to use based on terms of their tender. 

There was also the case of Beijing West Rail Station:

One example of poor quality is the Beijing West Rail Station. Platforms were built on mud rather than concrete. They sank and had to be rebuilt. Floors cracked, tiles warped, walls were damaged by water. Travelers found shattered glass panes and light fixtures, missing or misshapen ceiling panels. Elevators didn’t work and fire-alarm systems were out of order. A Chinese investigation disclosed that bribes and other forms of corruption were the reasons that construction firms did not adhere to the specified contracts. source

It reminds me of the scenes in Atlas Shrugged where rail bridges were collapsing across the country.  There, it was mostly because of incompetence due to socialism.  We’ll see in the next years how rotten the fruits of corrupt Chinese capitalism are.

Posted by Dasein on August 17, 2010, 05:26 PM | #

Here’s a story on the crap concrete in the high-speed railway system: 

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/article768996.ece

An investigation by the newspaper found that large quantities of bogus material had been used in several hundred kilometres of a $12-billion (U.S.) high-speed railway between the cities of Wuhan and Guangzhou.

The newspaper, China Economic Times, said the scam by unscrupulous suppliers could lead to cracking in the railway’s concrete supports, creating a “great danger” to the railway.

[...]

In the railway scam, the China Economic Times reported that the railway’s contractors had been tricked into buying large quantities of fake or deficient coal fly ash, a common ingredient in concrete.

The newspaper described the suppliers as “profiteers blinded by greed.” It published several photos of trucks loaded with fake fly ash and factories where the material is produced.

It said the bogus material was discovered in March by a construction engineer, who noticed a blockage in a pipe where concrete was being poured. Such blockages are uncommon, and he suspected it was caused by phony fly ash. The fake material looks identical to the genuine material, and only laboratory testing can tell them apart.

The high-speed railway, designed to carry trains at speeds up to 350 kilometres an hour between two of China’s biggest cities, is currently under construction. It is described as the longest and most technologically advanced high-speed railway in China, and it has been praised lavishly by the Chinese news media.

Faced with mounting evidence of hazardous goods, the Chinese authorities have reacted ambivalently. They have announced crackdowns and safety campaigns, but they have also reacted with denials and censorship.

Posted by Dan Dare on August 17, 2010, 06:28 PM | #

It seems curious that there could be much profit in manufacturing fake fly ash, since the real thing is an unwanted by-product of coal-fired power stations, and can hardly be given away in the west. In the US most it ends up in landfill. It seems hard to believe that there could be a shortage of it in China.

Posted by danielj on August 17, 2010, 08:18 PM | #

How on earth has their communist government been able to sustain a double digit GDP growth rate for roughly three decades such that their GDP is now exceeding that of Japan?

They are lying.

They blew an even bigger bubble in China than they did in the good ol’ US of A.

Posted by Con Rail on August 17, 2010, 11:42 PM | #

High speed rail plans in the US are nothing but Fed circle jerks.

Posted by Dirty Bull on August 18, 2010, 03:15 AM | #

Dasein,
        I had a higher opinion of you.Anyone who takes shit like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ (written by the Russian Jewess - the German’s hereditary enemy- Ayn Rand) seriously is a jerk.

Posted by Dasein on August 18, 2010, 04:14 AM | #

Dan,

I suspect the article’s inaccurate in describing it as ‘fake’.  I think it was a problem with the grade of fly ash used (e.g. too fine or too coarse).

Dirty Bull,

I don’t like Rand or libertarianism.  Atlas Shrugged itself was well enough written and funny in parts (e.g. Kip and Ma Chalmers and the soybean plantation).  But, overall, it showcased the diseased thinking of Rosenbaum (e.g. the ‘what can you do for me’ attitude towards family- I’m sure I’ve written about this before).

Posted by Dirty Bull on August 18, 2010, 05:20 AM | #

Dasein,
        I’m very glad that’s cleared up and I most humbly apologise to you for any offence I might have caused - only I cannot stand Ayn Rand’s philosophy or the people (who happen to be mostly Americans), who take that trash seriously.
To me Rand is one of ‘The universal enemies of mankind, a poisoner’ whom a certain 20th century leader in his very last message to humanity, emphasised he made no apology in challenging.

Posted by Leon Haller on August 18, 2010, 07:29 AM | #

Notus,

Before I respond to your article, I can’t help wondering: how the hell do you find the time to keep finding new material to post? Your commitment, as measured by your productivity, is most impressive!

Just in the last few years, I have noticed a substantial rise in the intellectual quality of nationalists. Have others found this to be the case, too? I hope I’m not the only one old enough to remember the depressing 80s, no Internet, Reagan/Thatcher defining the “Right”, and feeling like I and a few “hardcore” friends were the last self-consciously white men (beyond a few idiot skins) in the world.

Amidst all the gloom of our shrinking camp of the saints, I’m yet strangely heartened ...

Posted by Wolf on August 18, 2010, 08:21 AM | #

http://citywire.co.uk/new-model-adviser/krugman-calls-for-us-sanctions-to-tackle-undervalued-chinese-currency/a424379

A component in their growth you didn’t cover but significant.

Krugman is 15 years too late and an overrated wind-bag.

Posted by Wolf on August 18, 2010, 08:24 AM | #

More technical detail here :

http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/pm164/

Posted by Notus Wind on August 18, 2010, 10:12 AM | #

Leon,

Before I respond to your article, I can’t help wondering: how the hell do you find the time to keep finding new material to post?

Academics get most of the summer off, as the semester slowly kicks in I’ll have to spend more of my free time preparing lectures for different groups of people.  Enjoy a well-rested and relatively unstressed Notus Wind while you can.

Your commitment, as measured by your productivity, is most impressive!

You are far too kind.  I honestly feel like my writing and commenting comes from a compulsion, whenever I’ve figured something out to my own satisfaction then I have to share it with others.  Those are the rules that have been programmed into me.

Just in the last few years, I have noticed a substantial rise in the intellectual quality of nationalists. Have others found this to be the case, too?

I think the closer we get to the big moment (in whatever form that takes) more people will be sucked into the Far Right’s vortex whether they like it or not.

Posted by Leon Haller on August 18, 2010, 11:21 AM | #

Notus,

A few observations, following your own (in italics).

the manufacturing jobs that have left the West for China have been gone for some time so how has China been able to sustain such an incredible level of economic growth for as long as it has? 

This is an over-generalization. The West has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for two generations, at least since the Sixties. But this is, obviously, an ongoing process, though one proceeding, I believe (this is not my specialty, but I do keep slightly abreast of international business news, through the WSJ and Barron’s), not in a linear fashion, but with certain more accelerated periods. For example, there was tremendous American investment in China in the most recent decade, especially in the earlier part of it.

Moreover, China’s rabid recent growth could involve economies of scale resulting from earlier infrastructure development. One doesn’t just decide to move a factory from America to China overnight, and without a great deal of prior (Chinese) domestic activity. China in the 70s, when Mao died and Deng came to power, and began his “revolution within the form” (you know the lingo, Notus - I suspect you and I have been reading and reflecting upon many of the same sources, perhaps even somewhat concurrently ... indeed, I have this curious sense that we might have met at a conference; otherwise you certainly remind me of someone ...), was piss-poor, still recently traumatized, and very underdeveloped. It was also determined to develop from within (though it sent a lot of foreign exchange students to the idiotic West, which gleefully accepted them, and taught them our science, commercial principles, etc - a nationalist twist on Lenin’s “selling the rope”), in no small part to keep out threatening foreign influences during a dangerous (to the ruling Party) transitional period. Thus it took time (basically from 1978-1992) for the ever-patient Chinese to reach an internal economic level that could actually produce quality products for export, as well as legitimately attract foreign investment seeking cheap labor (that is, which could beat Western manufacturers, or persuade them to outsource to China).   

The answer is a form of central planning.  The government in Beijing overseas the allocation of capital in such a way that a predetermined national growth rate is achieved, whether the decisions needed to achieve this growth make any kind of economic sense is another matter entirely.  Hence the economic formula for calculating GDP becomes something to be gamed, where the number that Beijing wants is produced by playing with the levers of government that control the variables in the GDP equation.

Oh, please. These are nothing more than clever, unproven, and unlikely assertions. What evidence do you have suggesting that the CCP ‘games’ its GDP in this manner? Now, in one sense, students of the late Austro-libertarian Murray Rothbard know that nearly every (at least interpretive) government economic statistic is inaccurate (by ‘interpretive’ I mean requiring economic judgments; if the National Farm Bureau says x-billion bushels of wheat were produced last year, that’s probably fairly accurate), because they are compiled on the basis of flawed economic methodology (CPI is just the worst, though GNP is awful, too). In that sense, China’s are flawed, too (which in no way should be taken to mean that China’s economic growth has been anything other than very, very real).

But I have encountered no China expert who has argued that the CCP either directs the majority of capital allocations (“overseas” is the better word to describe what actually goes on, but not as you are using it above), or that China ‘predetermines’ its rate of economic growth - or that it would be stupid enough deliberately to misallocate capital (ie, put it to less than economically optimum uses, according to best estimates of optimality) in pursuit of phantom GDP statistics. 

This is important. Let us learn. China has had genuinely phenomenal growth of late because it was kept artificially economically undeveloped for so long due to the vagaries of an unfortunate recent history, stemming first from its decrepit, autocratic and anti-innovative, internal-imperial past; second, from its devastation by Japan and the war; third, from its further devastation by its civil war and revolution; and fourth, by the unbelievable and continuous (and over time, intensifying) economic lunacy of Mao and the CCP under his control, and concomitant self-enforced isolation from international commerce, and the global postwar economic boom.

The Chinese are not African savages. They possess (I think) the oldest continuous civilization. At times in the past, they have surpassed the West in development and achievements. As we all know, they have a collective IQ that is substantially higher than the white American median, and about equal to the highest white national IQs (Germans, Danes, Dutch). They are especially adept in quantitative reasoning. They also possess a set of pre-Communist (Confucian) values which are remarkably adaptive for modern commerce, as proven by the widely recognized commercial success of the so-called “overseas Chinese” (IQ doubtless plays a large role, too). And there are enormous numbers of them, over 90% of whom are of the same Han ethnicity (though their numbers are falling, especially relative to China’s more fecund non-Han peoples). 

Given these factors alone, why would you or anyone not expect China to roar ahead, once the catastrophe of Maoist central planning were removed, a sufficient physical infrastructure built up, and its people told (by Deng) that “to get rich is glorious”?

But there is one additional factor, especially relevant to the manufacturing issue. The Chinese have astutely developed a “calculational” market economy, but not a true free market. OK, I know you will think I’m a full of shit “back-self-patter”, talking loud but without proof, but I swear, I predicted this and expressed my fear of this to some famous libertarian intellectuals back at the beginning of the 90s (‘90 and ‘91 to be exact), who of course merely scoffed at (the youthful) me. I warned people (as I also did in the 80s viz the coming disaster of immigration - conservatives scoffed at me on that one, too)!! I argued that the fallacy of Soviet central planning (the calculational chaos ensuing from a non-market, or as was actually the real case, less than fully market, price system) did not necessitate an absolutely free market - a mistake still widely made everywhere across the American Right. It is possible, that is, to possess rational market prices, while still developing national investment models, say, as in the case of the various Asian economies (not only China). And, this type of system presents a profound economic and especially, ultimately, military threat to societies like ours devoted to maximizing consumer preferences uber alles (I hope some commenters recognize the salience of these points I am making).

This is what China has done wrt manufacturing. The CCP basically decided that people could now “get rich”, but mostly in those areas, namely industrial manufacturing, which China also felt would most enhance ultimate Chinese power. America and Europe allow for the maximizing of consumer desires (well, along with enormous amounts of government caused capital misallocation, some being direct, in the cases of economically destructive regulations, as well as straight transfer payments, others indirect, such as the proliferation of economically useless lawyers, especially in the US, inspired by all those regulations, or finance personnel, mostly resulting from excessive monetary creation by central banks, as well as various tax and securities laws favoring, when you get to the root of it, the over-financialization of the US economy, or, “money shuffling”). The Chinese have put a lid on consumer desires, the better to generate large savings, which the state then allows to be lent, but only for anticipatorily highly “value-added” projects.

The bottom line: the Chinese people are less well-off than they should be based on their productivity, but the state-favored industrial base is getting ever more powerful (and government foreign exchange reserves ever larger, at least pre-global recession). This is not phantom growth, I regret to say. 

As was well-known even by the old Soviet Union, one way of achieving a certain GDP target was to increase the number of construction projects.  So long as enough capital exists it is an easy matter for even a quazi centrally planned economy, such as China, to force local officials to propose a sufficient level of construction growth and then allocate the capital accordingly.  And as we all know China has more than enough capital to play this game.

China today is not “quasi-centrally planned” in its economy, at least not in the way of the Soviets. In the USSR there was no private ownership of the means of production. China is essentially a “national(ist) market economy”. It allows for rational pricing, but if the most effective use of a certain quantum of capital, in terms of Chinese individual preferences, would be to build an amusement park outside of Chungking, but the CCP would prefer another export oriented steel mill, guess what they are getting? But that steel mill, unlike its Soviet counterparts, would be fully integrated into the global capitalist economy. But what most increases not consumer satisfaction, but national power - amusement park or steel mill?

Here’s an easy way to think about this very profound point. You are my 17 year old son. You go out and earn a thousand dollars. What would maximize your use of that money would be to spend it on really good hash. That would make you happier than any other expenditure (hash maximizes your “marginal happiness”).

As your dad, however, I don’t care about maximizing your present happiness, or maybe your happiness at all. So I order you to spend the money on an SAT prep course, in order to boost your test scores so as to gain admission to a more elite college. Or maybe I just command you to buy a new .357, with a lot of ammo.

You will be happier with the hash. But you will be stronger either with the SAT course, or the gun. Telling my son how he can spend or invest his money is not “central economic planing”. It is authoritarian economics, not socialism.

In America, we think maximizing national happiness involves letting everybody do their own thing (have maximum ‘autonomy’), as long as they aren’t aggressing against others. The Chinese don’t care about maximizing individual preferences (though these might not remain bottled up forever). They are basically forcing their people to be over-workers and over-savers in pursuit of national industrial development. And it’s working (again, for now; maybe not forever). 

Now for some perspective, one of the reasons trotted out for the Asian financial crisis in the 90s is that the so-called Asian Tigers that were driving regional growth became “overheated” - whatever the hell that means - due to unsustainable levels of economic growth.  It is reported that at the time of this “overheating” the percentage of GDP due to construction was somewhere in the vicinity of 30%.  In contrast, the percentage of America’s GDP due to construction has been something like 5% over the past decade.  Hold these facts in your mind as you read the following words of Marc Faber:

Wow!  What does 60% look like?  The mind boggles…

Yes, this could be a problem, but these statistics don’t confirm that. Why? The Chinese and American markets for housing are not remotely the same. The housing problems in the US were due, in a nutshell, to govt strongarm tactics (through FANNIE MAE and FREDDIE MAC, but also more directly) against lenders, coercing them to lower home-mortgage requirements in order to make “subprime” mortgage loans to otherwise unqualified, mostly minority, borrowers. This massive and classic misallocation of capital was immeasurably helped along by the horrible lax monetary policies (“quantitative easing”) of (Jew) Alan Greenspan, especially in the immediate post 9/11 period (in a sense, the whole global meltdown is a further consequence of al-Qaeda), to avoid what was assumed would be an imminent recession. This combination of Fed money expansion with govt ‘incentives’ (positive as well as negative) to increase minority homeownership triggered the boom in housing construction, and subsequent bust, when a huge number of these shitbags started failing to make their mortgages. Everything since has been political gimmicks to delay or, for some, partially avoid, facing economic reality.

China I suggest is different. There may well be a housing bubble, but there is also tremendous and genuine demand, as tens of millions of migrant workers have flocked from the countryside, where they lived in communal mud huts, as it were, or very shoddy housing, to the newly industrializing cities. In these cities, these workers are earning real money, doing real work, but living in appallingly crowded conditions. Essentially, they are living below their real means. There is thus a genuine need for a lot of housing construction (there is evidence that the Chinese have overinvested in office building construction, but some of that empty space is simply a function of the widely unpredicted general global downturn; it might not be deemed “overinvestment” forever).

A final point. Be wary of Faber. I like his free market, private property approach to macroeconomics, but he is prone to wild overstatements, especially of a gloomy nature. I have noticed that he is more circumspect when participating in Barron’s symposia, with high level fund managers, than when he is being interviewed by gold ‘bugs’ or other ‘survivalists’.

Posted by Dan Dare on August 18, 2010, 01:13 PM | #

Leon’s response is excellent, but I believe he has discounted the importance of two ‘windfall’ benefits that have propelled China along its current economic trajectory.

The first is the astonishing readiness of western countries to allow Chinese manufactured goods open access to their domestic markets, and the second is the enthusiasm that western companies have shown for entering into ‘joint-venture’ operations which ostensibly facilitate market entry into China, but in reality function as a conduit for the transfer of technology, process know-how and other intellectual property.

In the absence of either or both these factors, China would have no chance of attaining economic superpower status.

Posted by Wandrin on August 18, 2010, 01:16 PM | #

The biggest advantage the Chinese have is the rulers of their main competitors are in the process of looting hundreds of years of accumulated capital from the west and transferring the loot through a process of rebuilding that capital in SE Asia in a gigantic factory-laundering scheme.

It’s a huge robbery in progress, even bigger than the giant bank robbery disguised as bank bailouts.

The west is being looted. When the process is complete they’ll swarm.

Posted by Wandrin on August 18, 2010, 01:17 PM | #

Dan,

Snap

Posted by Notus Wind on August 18, 2010, 01:39 PM | #

Whoa there Leon!  You threw so much in my direction that I am left reeling a little bit, it’s an unusual feeling.

Please note that you said a great many interesting things that I will not be responding to largely because I feel like I have nothing to add to them.  This should always be taken as a compliment to you.

Leon: and began his “revolution within the form” (you know the lingo, Notus - I suspect you and I have been reading and reflecting upon many of the same sources, perhaps even somewhat concurrently ... indeed, I have this curious sense that we might have met at a conference; otherwise you certainly remind me of someone ...)

Unlikely, the only economic and/or financial conferences that I was supposed to attend I skipped out on.

Leon: This is an over-generalization. The West has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for two generations, at least since the Sixties.

That is an unfair criticism as almost everything that I’ve written in the entry is an overgeneralization!  My goal was to capture the truth in broad outline as I believe that anything more specific is close to impossible.

Leon: Oh, please. These are nothing more than clever, unproven, and unlikely assertions.  What evidence do you have suggesting that the CCP ‘games’ its GDP in this manner?

Perhaps clever and unproven but methinks you were piling on with unlikely.  Here are some of my reasons for entertaining this idea.

(1) Theoretical:

To the extent that an economy is centrally planned at all it’s GDP can be at least partially determined as a function of that planning.  GDP is not something that belongs to the natural state of human affairs but is the result of an arithmetic equation with certain inputs that can be manipulated by a central government.

Furthermore, it stands to reason that a central government wanting to “plan” for growth might develop its strategy around just such a concept that already has currency in the developed world.

(2) Historical Precedent:

We know that communist governments in the past have done this sort of thing.

(3) Empirical:

Compare GDP growth rates in the range of 1982-2008 for the following Asian economies: Indonesia, South Korea, Singapore, and China.

While none of these economies are identical you can still notice certain features in the time series for Indonesia, South Korea, and Singapore that the unusually stable time series for China doesn’t share (for the range of 1982-2008).  One natural explanation for this phenomenon is that communist China manages it’s GDP growth rate to a degree that the other [non-communist] economies do not.

(4) Authority:

Not only does it look like a duck [theoretical] and sound like a duck [empirical] but at least a few people who study birds for a living say it’s a duck (e.g. Chanos and Faber).

So it’s not as if I am basing this idea on nothing.

Leon: But I have encountered no China expert who has argued that the CCP either directs the majority of capital allocations

What can I say, there are some ideas that you can only get at MR as I am certainly no China expert and am only a cog in the “free floating brain” that is our movement (to borrow from HW).

Leon: or that China ‘predetermines’ its rate of economic growth - or that it would be stupid enough deliberately to misallocate capital (ie, put it to less than economically optimum uses, according to best estimates of optimality) in pursuit of phantom GDP statistics.
...
China today is not “quasi-centrally planned” in its economy, at least not in the way of the Soviets.

Just to be clear, I think that the central government in Beijing has a measure of control only over certain macroeconomic factors and even then it’s a matter of degree.  It does not manage its economy in the same way as the Soviet Union (as you noted) but it still fundamentally manages its economy nonetheless.  And although I cannot commune directly with the rulers of China these convictions of faith that I gathered from staring at the colored bits on my LCD screen strike me as being both modest and reasonable.  So there!

Furthermore, we already know that China’s rulers are capable of doing things far more stupid than misallocating capital in the pursuit of phantom statistics (nice turn of phrase on your part), which I will be writing about in future entries.

Leon: A final point. Be wary of Faber. I like his free market, private property approach to macroeconomics, but he is prone to wild overstatements, especially of a gloomy nature.

Thank you for the heads up but I tend to follow stories that I can put in a theoretical framework and not specific people.

Posted by PF on August 18, 2010, 04:20 PM | #

Dan Dare,

Interesting perspective on Chinese development. Is there any place I can read up on what you’ve said?

I’ve usually heard the outsourcing discussed in terms of ‘its all good with the invisible hand of the free market’ etc. etc.

Posted by Dan Dare on August 18, 2010, 04:43 PM | #

PF the article cited above (originally from Der Spiegel) gives a pretty comprehensive overview of the developing relationship between China and the West, and particularly its essentially adversarial character (a perspective I’ve come to share).

As noted in the commentary, the Spiegel piece is valuable for its continental European perspective.

Unfortunately around half the comments veer off onto the traditional MR tangent and add little to the discussion, but I’m sure you’ll be able to overlook that.

Posted by Dan Dare on August 18, 2010, 04:58 PM | #

http://citywire.co.uk/new-model-adviser/krugman-calls-for-us-sanctions-to-tackle-undervalued-chinese-currency/a424379

A component in their growth you didn’t cover but significant.

Krugman is 15 years too late and an overrated wind-bag.

The easiest way to smoke out which countries are ‘cheating’ wrt the value of their currency is to compare their GDP at PPP and at nominal (ie market) exchange rate.

All countries in the west are at par, or their nominal GDP is above the GDP calculated at the PPP rate. Some European countries are considerably above par meaning their currency is strongly over-valued which will tend to stimulate imports and retard exports, all else being equal.

China, in comparison, has a nominal GDP barely half of the PPP level, indicating that its currency is being maintained artificially low, presumably to stimulate export trade. India is even worse, with nominal GDP less than a third of PPP. South Korea is another ‘cheater’ whose currency is severely undervalued by this metric; Japan otoh is well above par at 119%.

There is also the matter of customs tariffs which is a whole other can of worms.

Free trade, my arse.

Posted by Guessedworker on August 18, 2010, 05:09 PM | #

Dan:

The first is the astonishing readiness of western countries to allow Chinese manufactured goods open access to their domestic markets, and the second is the enthusiasm that western companies have shown for entering into ‘joint-venture’ operations which ostensibly facilitate market entry into China, but in reality function as a conduit for the transfer of technology, process know-how and other intellectual property.

While Western importers of goods and exporters of jobs and technology are motivated by the ever-present bottom line, the real reason this has happened is because the Western elites, whose job should be the protection and advancement of the interests of their respective populations, get a good return on bringing China into the international fold.  They advance their own internationalist interests.

Internationalism for its own sake is the alter on which the working man in the West has been sacrificed.  Everything that is done internationally is for the international project, be it economic, demographic or political.

Posted by Ronery Asian Guy on August 18, 2010, 08:24 PM | #

While Western importers of goods and exporters of jobs and technology are motivated by the ever-present bottom line, the real reason this has happened is because the Western elites, whose job should be the protection and advancement of the interests of their respective populations, get a good return on bringing China into the international fold.  They advance their own internationalist interests.

Internationalism for its own sake is the alter on which the working man in the West has been sacrificed.  Everything that is done internationally is for the international project, be it economic, demographic or political.

Interesting point about internationalism. May I ask what the good people of MR think about the prospect of non-white elites, specifically those of China, India and the Middle East, in betraying their own people and begin sacrificing national interest in favor of the international agenda or at the very least, self-interest. After all, in order for internationalism to actually work it has to have the consent of all the major players and not just the West.

It’s worth pointing out for example that many of the elites in the Middle East are already traitors to their own people. So in my opinion it’s also possible that the leaders of most developing nations will adopt the same agendas as the leaders of the west have now.

Posted by Rollory on August 18, 2010, 08:55 PM | #

Any analysis of China that doesn’t take into account the demographic and economic consequences of the one-child policy is incomplete.

This might tie in with a discussion of the Chinese leadership betraying their people, too.

Posted by Wandrin on August 18, 2010, 09:01 PM | #

May I ask what the good people of MR think about the prospect of non-white elites, specifically those of China, India and the Middle East, in betraying their own people and begin sacrificing national interest in favor of the international agenda or at the very least, self-interest.

Million-dollar question. In the recent past while the US and the west in general was so militarily dominant there wasn’t a lot of point in anyone playing the old power-politics games. I assume this made it easier for the various elites to go along with the gradual increase in NWO type institutions. However if the western economies crumble and american military power crumbles with it then all bets are off. I don’t think the arab elites will go along with the NWO without US military power. I don’t see why India would want to if the western economies were crumbling. I’m not sure the Chinese would want to even without those conditions.

At the end of the day most of the global elites have wealth and power already. Only crazy people want to rule the entire planet and if you get into bed with crazy people like that then you’ll regret it.

The only way i could see it happening is if the Chinese decided they’d keep the US economy afloat out of fear of “instabilty” and that lasted long enough for the crazy people to push the rest into an unenthusiastic NWO which the Chinese then have to reluctantly join or be left out in the cold somehow.

I don’t think it’s unlikely because the non-white elites are any less treachorous than white elites. It’s that the white elites are dominated by crazy desert-nazis who want to rule the world.

Posted by Notus Wind on August 18, 2010, 09:05 PM | #

Rollory: Any analysis of China that doesn’t take into account the demographic and economic consequences of the one-child policy is incomplete.

Reread the notice at the beginning of the entry.  I was only trying to share a few insights and not present a comprehensive analysis of China.

Posted by Dan Dare on August 18, 2010, 09:42 PM | #

I think before we can proceed too much further along this particular track, we need to ask GW for a definition of ‘internationalism’ since this is a term that could cover a multitude of sins.

Also he seems to drawing a distinction between profit-seeking industrialists and capitalists, who it is implied are driven by simple greed, and the ‘elites’ who are motivated to facilitate China’s rise in the cause of internationalism ‘for its own sake’.

Just who are these elites, we might ask.

When considering the matter of foreign investment into China, which is second now only to the United States in scale, it is important to keep in mind that the two largest foreign investors are Japan and Taiwan closely followed by, curiously enough, the British Virgin and Cayman Islands. It is widely assumed that much the latter is ‘round-trip’ investment, that is undeclared and untaxed wealth originating in China itself being recycled to take advantage of the favourable returns, as well as funds originating in the overseas Chinese diaspora.

How does all this capital flow fit within the ‘internationalist’ template?

Posted by Dan Dare on August 18, 2010, 10:08 PM | #

Reread the notice at the beginning of the entry.  I was only trying to share a few insights and not present a comprehensive analysis of China. - Notus Wind

‘Topic creep’ is an unfortunate fact of life around these parts NW. We’ve already had a glancing incursion into the JQ and it won’t be very much longer before the black helicopters make their inevitable appearance.

Posted by Notus Wind on August 18, 2010, 10:40 PM | #

Rollory,

My mistake, I just now realized (thanks to Dan) that you were writing about the ongoing discussion in the comments and not necessarily the main entry.

Dan,

‘Topic creep’ is an unfortunate fact of life around these parts NW. We’ve already had a glancing incursion into the JQ and it won’t be very much longer before the black helicopters make their inevitable appearance.

Yeah.  On the whole I think topic creep is a good thing, discussions should be allowed to develop organically.  But there’s always the matter of those helicopters…

Posted by Wandrin on August 19, 2010, 03:51 AM | #

We’ve already had a glancing incursion into the JQ and it won’t be very much longer before the black helicopters make their inevitable appearance.

I wouldn’t like to disappoint…

What would the NWO be exactly?
- all the central banks turned into subsidiary branches of the word bank
- national economic policies set by the imf
- trade policies set by the WTO

that sort of stuff. i don’t think there would actually be much of a visible global government at all. it’d be similar to the EU but more invisible in that decisions would be made at the NWO level and then the national branch government would pretend it was their idea.

who would want that? seriously what would be the point from a Chinese perspective. they get to lose sovereign control over their economy in exchange for a share in control over Denmark and Fiji. why would the Chinese, Indians or Arabs want that? they wouldn’t. who would? the only people who’d see that as a step up are rootless cosmopolitans because they’re not attached to any particular country the control of which they particularly value.

(they’re not all neccesarily jews either. the existence of organisations like the EU or IMF automatically leads to the people who work there gradually becoming rootless. plus of course all the Bushs and McCains trapped in a word-cage built by high verbal IQ sociopaths.)

so rootless cosmopolitans want the nwo and the chinese say they don’t so the rootless cosmoplitans try and trade. we’ll give you something in return for you agreeing to Chimerica. what have the rootless cosmopolitans got? they’ve got america. so they give pieces of america to the chinese as a bribe. and the chinese say…

that’s nice, just a little bit more and we’ll think about it
that’s nice, just a little bit more and we’ll think about it
that’s nice, just a little bit more and we’ll think about it
etc

until the rootless cosmopolitans look behind them and realise they’ve given away most of their bargaining chip and what’s left is full of holes and falling to bits. now they have nothing to offer and the chinese get the nwo *they* want which is retaining complete control of china thank you very much as an unchallengable regional superpower with no american interference in their much enlarged sphere of influence.

the spiegel article mentioned upthread sounds to me like german frustration at the fact that the rulers of anglo-america are giving everything away and once the chinese have the western technology for everything *except* the capital goods that germany produces then germany’s manufacturing will be kaput next.

you could see it as an updated version of betraying Spain to the Moors in exchange for control of trade or betraying Byzantium to the Turks in exchange for control of trade or even an updated version of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan

either way it’s not free trade. it’s a robbery in progress.

Posted by Leon Haller on August 20, 2010, 06:59 AM | #

Posted by Notus Wind on August 18, 2010, 02:12 PM | #

Before I respond to your article, I can’t help wondering: how the hell do you find the time to keep finding new material to post?

Academics get most of the summer off, as the semester slowly kicks in I’ll have to spend more of my free time preparing lectures for different groups of people.

______________

What field do you teach? Is it at the college level? Grad school?

Don’t worry, I’m not an investigator of any kind. Just curious.

Posted by Leon Haller on August 20, 2010, 07:08 AM | #

Posted by Dan Dare on August 18, 2010, 05:13 PM | #

Leon’s response is excellent, but I believe he has discounted the importance of two ‘windfall’ benefits that have propelled China along its current economic trajectory.

The first is the astonishing readiness of western countries to allow Chinese manufactured goods open access to their domestic markets, and the second is the enthusiasm that western companies have shown for entering into ‘joint-venture’ operations which ostensibly facilitate market entry into China, but in reality function as a conduit for the transfer of technology, process know-how and other intellectual property.

In the absence of either or both these factors, China would have no chance of attaining economic superpower status.

————————————————————-

I agree, DD, though I thought I had made at least something like those points (at least the second one), when I quipped about us “selling the rope”. Yes, Western companies, with their characteristic lack of civilizational and racial loyalty, have certainly accelerated the rise of China - though that also applies to India, Brazil, before that to Japan, before that to the Middle East, etc. We built the modern global economy - though I know none of us here is holding his breath for any expressions of gratitude from anywhere.

Whites as a whole have arguably never thought in collective, racial-conflict terms - to our present and ultimate racial detriment.

Posted by Leon Haller on August 20, 2010, 07:41 AM | #

Inattention begets repetition ....

Notus

The government in Beijing overseas the allocation of capital in such a way that a predetermined national growth rate is achieved

Leon Haller

But I have encountered no China expert who has argued that the CCP either directs the majority of capital allocations (”overseas” is the better word to describe what actually goes on, but not as you are using it above)

Someone needs to ‘oversee’ the substandard English that occasionally crops up here. How did I repeat that error?!

Posted by Rollory on August 20, 2010, 08:40 AM | #

“not necessarily the main entry.”

Right.  I have nothing to add to the OP.  The idea that China is a successful National Socialist onward and upward bla bla bla however is going to be rather explosively disproven over the next decade or two.  An invasion of Taiwan (in the complete confidence that Mr. O will do nothing about it) might push the crisis back a little.

Posted by Leon Haller on August 20, 2010, 08:45 AM | #

Notus,

Thanks for your response, but I find that I have nothing to add to what I already stated above. We shall all be witnessing the growth and development of Chinese power in the coming decades. I for one hope they do have several mishaps and ‘bubbles’ along the way. Not for centuries have men lived in a world whose hegemonic power was not a white one. As a matter of simple statistics viewed in light of family history, I have four decades of life remaining, perhaps a bit more, if optimistic. I sincerely hope America is still #1 in 2050, that I may live long, yet still not live to see the torch irrevocably passed to the yellow man. My hope is unlikely, but not altogether improbable.

On that melancholy note, I think I shall limit my input to MR for a while. I look forward to GW’s extended discussion of racial ethics, or Christianity, or the intersection and confrontation of such, and to contributing to that anticipated thread. Beyond that, however, I need in my non-work/home/gym/finance/etc time to get back to researching, formulating and writing my book on racial ethics (and conservatism more broadly) from a Christian perspective. As a fellow American, perhaps you can appreciate that (or at a minimum, the reasonableness of my belief that) this is arguably the key issue for racial nationalists over here (as a matter of theory, of course, not what is finally the more important pragmatic activism).

The American Right is where racial sense is to be found (outside of a few white unionized workers and cops, who vote Democrat for venal reasons). That Right is heavily Christian, or influenced by conservative political Christianity, or deferential to it. If racialism, or Occidentalism as I call my version, that is, the militant assertion of white political, economic and cultural interests for the ultimate purpose of protecting whites and preserving their majoritarian status in America (whose purpose in turn is to preserve traditional America), is to grow into a force of genuine political consequence, it must be deemed acceptable to Christianity. If white ‘politicking’ is forever placed morally out of bounds by the totality of Christians, then, without thoughtful counter-argument, and absent unforeseen and unlikely national apocalyptic cataclysm, our movement will remain what it is today: at best, ‘subterranean’, more likely, merely ‘ghettoized’ (albeit a steadily growing ‘ghetto’).

But to make WN morally acceptable does not only require a book like Michael Levin’s brilliant Why Race Matters, one which merely (though devastatingly) provides the science and logic to debunk liberal racial platitudes about equality and white racism. We need to make the ethical case for white nationalism, but within Christian philosophy and theology. Working towards developing and finally publishing this theory, in a work of large scope, with appropriate scholarly apparatus (and resuscitating other elements in the traditional Far Right view of existence, especially pertaining to the philosophies of warfare and criminal punishment, and concurrently seeking to harmonize them with Christian moral thought, too) is, I realize, more rewarding to me, personally and finally (someday) professionally, than engaging in blog arguments or intragroup commentary. I want to produce something worthy of tangibility, of a value to last longer than thoughts rapidly lost I fear in the ether of cyberspace.

Posted by Notus Wind on August 20, 2010, 12:23 PM | #

Leon,

Someone needs to ‘oversee’ the substandard English that occasionally crops up here. How did I repeat that error?!

You can blame it on me as the error was originally mine.  Thank you for pointing this out as I did finally fix the main entry.

I thought there was a long and venerable tradition of good thinkers who are also bad writers, like Kant and Heidegger.  Whatever else could be said about my attempts to achieve something of the former I am almost certain that I belong to the latter, sometimes I imagine myself feeling Mr. Twain’s disapproving gaze over my shoulder as I crank out one voluptuous adverb after the next.  Oh well.

Thanks for your response, but I find that I have nothing to add to what I already stated above.

You could have continued to dispute my thesis that China is to some degree managing its economy around the phantom statistics of GDP.  It is through this thesis that I am trying to explain the absurdity of building an empty palace near the Gobi desert.

On that melancholy note, I think I shall limit my input to MR for a while.

I am sorry to read this, I sincerely hope that exchanging words with me wasn’t the catalyst for this change in attitude as I always look forward to reading your commentary (but you already know this).

Beyond that, however, I need in my non-work/home/gym/finance/etc time to get back to researching, formulating and writing my book on racial ethics…from a Christian perspective.  As a fellow American, perhaps you can appreciate that…this is arguably the key issue for racial nationalists over here

As a fellow American who understands the unique religious temperament of some of our people, at least from a Protestant perspective, I appreciate what you’re trying to do with such a book more than you realize.

But I must be honest in saying that I don’t think such an effort is necessary.  From a nationalist perspective, I find that there’s surprisingly little in the Christian Bible that either works with us or against us - while there’s certainly nothing there that can be used to elevate the European genome there is also nothing there that directly affirms the false morality of socialism.  I think Alex Zeka was right when he opined that much of Christianity is orthogonal to what we discuss around here.  Hence my expectation is that however the winds of change blow you can expect Christianity to adjust accordingly so long as what it’s adjusting to is essentially orthogonal.

If white ‘politicking’ is forever placed morally out of bounds by the totality of Christians

But it wasn’t “placed morally out of bounds” just a few generations ago.  Post-reconstruction White Southerners were probably more devout than their cousins in the North and were still capable of rallying around their identity for the purposes of recapturing their local governments through force of arms and from the hands of racial aliens.  Their Christianity didn’t prevent them from establishing the infamous Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws, and I have no doubt that they would have gladly begun the process of recolonizing their slave population if the means were available.

I want to produce something worthy of tangibility, of a value to last longer than thoughts rapidly lost I fear in the ether of cyberspace.

I lecture on math to a broad range of people - undergraduates, graduates, researchers - and was always attracted to the subject because of its permanence.  The truths that our investigations reveal will never be dislodged and they will continue to build on each other so long as there are humans around with a mind to do the building.  Even in such a degraded age as our own the world of math still stands coldly impervious to the excesses of liberalism and the idiocies of socialism.

But even in such a unique field as this whatever you write will be lost in the sands of time never to be read by future generations.  Of course, it will not be totally forgotten as people will find new and better proofs for the things that you discover - assuming that they are worth thinking about - but almost no one will read the original books and articles that you write.  It’s a body of knowledge that is continuously rewritten and lovingly cared for by those attuned to its music.

The great thing about blogs like MR is that we have the opportunity to communicate with other human beings in complete honesty.  And there are very few places where this can be done in an era where propaganda has achieved an unprecedented level of effectiveness and refinement.  I am confident that you will find yourself continuously drawn back here in much the same way as I was.

Posted by Jimmy Marr on August 20, 2010, 12:29 PM | #

If, like me, others are gobsmacked by the prosaic arrogance of Judeo-Christian verbosity, I advise vigilant awareness of its memetic cornerstone:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Wordism is racial blasphemy.

Judeo-Christianity is National sacrilege.

Posted by Notus Wind on August 20, 2010, 01:22 PM | #

Jimmy,

Wordism is racial blasphemy

I hope the irony on display here isn’t lost on you.

Posted by Jimmy Marr on August 20, 2010, 01:51 PM | #

Notus,

I confess, any irony on display is, in fact, lost on me.

Blasphemy is as contingent on race, as the word is on the tongue.

If you disagree, refute these assertions with your keyboard, but not your hands.

Posted by Notus Wind on August 20, 2010, 02:54 PM | #

Jimmy

I confess, any irony on display is, in fact, lost on me.

Your sentence, “Wordism is racial blasphemy!” shows how someone can totally reject religious doctrine while demonstrating one of the most unappealing (and characteristically American) aspects of religious behavior - a puritanical impulse to accuse others of blasphemy.  If that isn’t ironic I am not sure what is.

You can see the same phenomenon with what happened to James Watson, I just can’t imagine the kind of professional excommunication that he faced happening to a man of similar stature in Europe.  That Richard Lynn is still able to publish the things he does without having his emeritus status revoked from the University of Ulster is a small wonder to me.

For the purposes of comparison, I would say that one of the most irreligious people at MR is probably GW; his perspective on Christianity is institutional; his views are cool and distant.  To the extent that his blood is ever stirred by these considerations it is never revealed in his prose.  His attitude couldn’t be more starkly contrasted than by the bevy of Americans around here who like to rant and rave; one gets the sense that they’re just a step away from donning pagan robes and riding through countryside while preaching the gospel of blood and soil without any sense of irony in much the same way as their ancestors did.  Sometimes I wonder if the European readers don’t shake their heads in befuddlement at these American passions.

Posted by Wandrin on August 20, 2010, 03:55 PM | #

@Leon Haller

I want to produce something worthy of tangibility, of a value to last longer than thoughts rapidly lost I fear in the ether of cyberspace.

The way to use the net imo is as a sounding board to test and refine ideas and then you take that back into the offline world.

@Notus Wind

It is through this thesis that I am trying to explain the absurdity of building an empty palace near the Gobi desert

I think you’re right that statistics about Chinese growth and GDP are heavily distorted and the truth about the growth of Chinese power is that a great deal of it will simply be relative to a US decline.

while there’s certainly nothing there that can be used to elevate the European genome

Only relevant to the type of person who is naturally inclined to unleashing hellfire and brimstone upon the unrighteous but “what you do unto the least of my brothers you do unto me” could be made to include ignoring anti-white bullying in schools or a plague of gang-rape going unreported because the victims are white.

Posted by Jimmy Marr on August 20, 2010, 03:57 PM | #

Notus,

I get your point, but I suspect that you used your hands in making it.

I share your admiration for Guessedworker’s dispassion. I flatter myself by imagining I share his eloquently stated views, while humbly offering myself as his keisaku. I can only use such vehicle as I embody.

While I am inimical to Judeo-Christian thought, I am not irreligious. I worship the Blood, and would do so just as ardently on the wordless soil of Timbuktu.

Posted by Gorboduc on August 20, 2010, 04:12 PM | #

Notus Wind:
Look, I’m sorry that I allowed my unhealthy bad temper to get the better of me a couple of weeks ago to the extent that I wrote patronisingly of you.

Your postings recently have pleased me immensely: I see, with you, that once the scientific atheists here have thrown over Christianity with their warmed-over Victorian worthy Mechanics’ Institute diatribes they won’t have ANY European tradition to turn to, except the tradition of anti-traditional barbarism absurdly suggested by Nietszche and Evola.
This possibly accounts for the frequent appearance here of political inapplicable stuff like John de Nugent’s Solutreans and other racially homogeneous but perhaps unself-aware ancient folks.

All they’ll be able to do is to put up nonsensical rants about how they wil all become godlets, and members of a new self-chosen elite (in my book, elites are chosen by grateful OTHER people, unless we’re going back to fragile Victorian ideas about squirearchies.)

GW is most accurately described: my gratitude for this and for other accurate delineations partly explains why my comments here have recently become desultory and apathetic: youi’re doing it better than I can!

GW is GREAT -  pungently indignant and memorably epigrammatic in the description of certain injustices and abuses, but he is too given to climb up into his lofty throne and hand down cloudy and ponderous diffidences at other times.

The problem is, he can’t commit himself to a description of the culture that he wishes to defend: and he can’t yet find a working definition of the people, the WE that he claims to represent.

The apodictic references to a faith gene render his religious musings nugatory.

Posted by Gorboduc on August 20, 2010, 04:14 PM | #

Oh, and by the way, blood and soil are a fine combination, but only when enlivened by SPIRIT.

Posted by Gorboduc on August 20, 2010, 04:29 PM | #

Oh, and for the anti-Christians round here, you wouldn’t be able to use words like blasphemy and sacrilege if it weren’t for Christian writings and the system of moral theology they inculcate.

But then the moral indignation of the promulgators of the New Morality is wondefrul to behold.

Have a little read of some old-fashioned ideas on sacrilege:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13321a.htm

Of course, I’m not claiming that the concept of sacrilege didn’t exist OUTSIDE Christianity: otherwise we wouldn’t have this stirring bit of Edwardian parlour poetry,

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-green-eye-of-the-little-yellow-god/

known to at least three older members of my family who would recite it at parties at the drop of a hat, and follow it up resoundingly with “Curfew shall not ring tonight!”

Posted by Wandrin on August 20, 2010, 04:41 PM | #

Sometimes I wonder if the European readers don’t shake their heads in befuddlement at these American passions.

I think Europeans are just as religious as Americans it’s just they’ve become religious about different things.

Posted by Notus Wind on August 20, 2010, 04:49 PM | #

Jimmy,

I get your point, but I suspect that you used your hands in making it.

Heh.

Words are just words.  It is the passions behind the words that matter.  If you get rid of the words but the passions remain then what have you really accomplished?  I am being a little abstract here but I think you get the point.

I share your admiration for Guessedworker’s dispassion. I flatter myself by imagining I share his eloquently stated views, while humbly offering myself as his keisaku.

Good, we have at least that much in common.

I can only use such vehicle as I embody.

While I am inimical to Judeo-Christian thought, I am not irreligious. I worship the Blood, and would do so just as ardently on the wordless soil of Timbuktu.

It’s understandable, we can only be who we are.

Posted by Notus Wind on August 20, 2010, 04:52 PM | #

Gorboduc,

Look, I’m sorry that I allowed my unhealthy bad temper to get the better of me a couple of weeks ago to the extent that I wrote patronisingly of you.

No worries, there is nothing to forgive.  Somehow I knew you’d come around.

Posted by Gudmund on August 20, 2010, 05:31 PM | #

except the tradition of anti-traditional barbarism absurdly suggested by Nietszche and Evola.
>Gorboduc

While I know little of Evola, what I’ve read of Nietzsche did not suggest barbarism at all; his philosophy concerned a rejection of the extreme rationalism of his age which he saw as inimical to life itself and return to the aristocratic (i.e., authoritarian) tradition of Europe.  NeoNietzsche provides a good introduction to the political philosophy of Nietzsche in the early entries to his blog, easily accessible via his site’s archive.  I think your disagreement with Nietzsche is mostly motivated by his position on Christianity, that hardly warrants misrepresentation of his philosophy.

Posted by Jimmy Marr on August 20, 2010, 05:40 PM | #

Notus,

It’s understandable, we can only be who we are.

You make it sound so easy as to be inevitable, but isn’t this the “crux” of the European identity problem?

Posted by Jimmy Marr on August 20, 2010, 06:15 PM | #

As crazy as it seems, I think becoming who we are requires something akin to magic, and we don’t seem to be the only race that has encountered difficulties in the process. Despite their current tendency to build empty palaces, the Chinese have historically shown some insight into this dilemma, and it’s not impossible to learn a little from them without worshipping any green-eyed, yellow gods.

During the K’ai Yuan era (713 - 741) an ascetic named Ma Tzu was dwelling in the Ch’uan Fa Temple; all day he sat meditating. His teacher, Huai Jang, noticed this and went to question him:

“Great Worthy, what are you aiming at by sitting meditation?”

Jang said, “How can sitting meditation make a Buddha?”

Posted by Gorboduc on August 20, 2010, 06:21 PM | #

You’re right about my dislike of Friedrich’s rejection of Christianity.
Well, I didn’t mean by “barbarism” that N. went galumphing around, spilling wine, cramming great chunks of fatty pork into his mouth and after belching loudly wiping his greasy fingers indifferently on his fur jerkin or on the leaves of some old lady’s bible: he was too schoolmasterly for that: but the “transvaluation of values”, his attacks on reason, his preference for Dionysos over Apollo, and his fear of “the weak” are quite sufficient to brand him.
Of course, many MRers would like a return to an authoritarian [good meaning!] society.
Confusingly, though, we recently here had morality itself attacked as a form of authoritarianism, [bad meaning!], so it’s not all plain sailing!

Admittedly this is from a recent thread, PF’s MORALITY CRITIQUE of 16 Aug.

Social morality is the imposition of a ‘should’ without the understanding of an ‘is’ - one party telling another to do something on the basis of its own authority, not of any understanding. If you didn’t know what an electric socket was, and I told you not to stick a fork in there, but I’m not telling you why - that is what traditional morality has been. No explanation forthcoming, no free choice involved, authority cited as justification.

but it shows my point.

Posted by Notus Wind on August 21, 2010, 12:04 PM | #

Jimmy,

You make it sound so easy as to be inevitable, but isn’t this the “crux” of the European identity problem?

We cannot stop being who we are but we can be brainwashed into forgetting who we are.

Posted by Leon Haller on August 24, 2010, 10:57 AM | #

Notus:

On that melancholy note, I think I shall limit my input to MR for a while.

Who are you referring to? Or, what are you talking about? I’m not comparing myself to the Greats when I note that they are still read, and will be forever (and not just the literary persons; people will always read Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes ... and for their intrinsic value, not just out of antiquarianism). Works of scholarship have a shorter lifespan, but not necessarily original ones. Kirk’s The Conservative Mind will be read for centuries; I think The Dispossessed Majority has many more decades, too.

The great thing about blogs like MR is that we have the opportunity to communicate with other human beings in complete honesty.  And there are very few places where this can be done in an era where propaganda has achieved an unprecedented level of effectiveness and refinement.  I am confident that you will find yourself continuously drawn back here in much the same way as I was.

Right you are, alas.

Posted by Leon Haller on August 24, 2010, 11:00 AM | #

I screwed up the mixture of italics, underlines and bolds above, but it should be readable (my response-comments in bold).
LH

Posted by Lurker on August 24, 2010, 11:26 AM | #

an era where propaganda has achieved an unprecedented level of effectiveness and refinement

One of the greats achievements of that propaganda is to encourage the cynical, savvy ‘knowing’ types that they can see through propaganda, that they wont be fooled.

Posted by Notus Wind on August 24, 2010, 12:48 PM | #

Leon,

You are correct, but irrelevantly so. I have made your exact argument polemically many times. But that something was deemed acceptable in the past, does not make it so, today or ever.

Here’s a better analogy for our situation then.

If you read the Annals of America you will find that the early colonists, who were extremely pious, spent almost a century trying to make Protestant Christians out of the North American Indian tribes in their midst.  As you can imagine these overtures were met with poor results and intermittent acts of sheer brutality (on the part of the Indians).  Eventually, the colonists gave up on this idea just before the 18th century and collectively decided (very roughly speaking) that the only good Indian was a dead Indian.  Insofar as I am aware, their Christian beliefs didn’t undergo any kind of dramatic change throughout this process.

Of course, everything I just wrote in the previous paragraph is only true in the broadest sense as the real history of what happened is much more complicated, but there it is.

May we use the state to illegalize such a union?

Why not!  God made the nations separate, why aren’t we allowed to preserve ours?  The argument seems simple enough to me.

It means that not only legal immigrants, but those non-Europoids born on European soil…must be forcibly uprooted

I shouldn’t have to remind you that the idea of cleansing the land in the name of collective judgment isn’t without parallel in either the Bible or American history.

Come on Leon, this stuff is easy-peasy-pumpkin-squeazy.  Remove all the propaganda that distorts our people’s moral judgment and these things are not that hard to argue for under the right set of circumstances.

[Are you talking about math - or me?]

Sorry for the confusion, I was talking about math the whole time.

Posted by uh on August 24, 2010, 06:58 PM | #

It means that not only legal immigrants, but those non-Europoids born on European soil, many of whom only speak a European language, must be forcibly uprooted, handcuffed onto ocean liners, like the African slaves of old, and expelled to elsewhere. And when some resist their deportation?

Now it’s all well and good to talk about ‘ontology’, and ‘endogamy’, and the shit GOP or Tories, and the great Enoch Powell (who foresaw and sought to prevent this), and the BNP, and the Call of Blood, and the blood-Jew, and orthogonality, and homogeniety amongst bacteria, or whatever else catches our fancy ... but I’m a bottom line guy. And the bottom line is that coercive violence will be necessary to achieve our ultimate preservationist aim of restoring the racial apartheid status quo ex ante.

If only, brah.

Posted by Leon Haller on August 25, 2010, 10:12 AM | #

Notus,

I do not have the time (nor would it be ultimately efficacious) to offer a lesson in Christian moral philosophy. But you are arguing as a common-sense American (of the basically atheistic/Darwinian Far Right), not as a Christian. I have not argued (here) that Christianity is the Way, Truth, Light, etc, merely that 1) the contemporary state of theology is worlds away from what seems to be plain sense to you; 2) the vast majority of at least American conservatives (the class of persons most likely to be receptive to racial messages) are guided by Christian moral precepts (and most Americans not guided by those precepts are deranged leftists, or ethnocentric Jews, or Muslims); 3) that if there is a conflict within conservatism between race loyalty and Christ loyalty (the content of which is mostly determined by external, overwhelmingly race-liberal-to-leftist sources), the bulk will choose Christ, and simply hope for the best racially; and thus 4) if we WNs are serious about changing our world, our doctrines must be made morally acceptable to the Christian majority. Hence the necessity of my work (or of someone superior working along the same path).

Indeed, the very solemnity of ‘race’ (despite all the obvious hypocrisy and empirically disprovable assertions surrounding it) among whites, including conservatives, attests to the correctness of my argument. If Christianity cannot be made a theoretical ally of racial preservation, we are doomed, at least in America.

Posted by Notus Wind on August 25, 2010, 10:49 AM | #

Leon,

But you are arguing as a common-sense American (of the basically atheistic/Darwinian Far Right), not as a Christian

No, I am arguing in the same spirit as a conservative Protestant, which is why the current state of theology doesn’t particularly concern me.  I have no knowledge about how the Catholic mind works, so perhaps that is the real source of our difference.