Thomas Stephens

@seanmdav Finally! An end can be put to something that should never have been started. The GOP should now focus on challenging every part of the so-called Civil Rights Act of 1964 that violates fundamental human rights protected by the US Constitution.

BREAKING: In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court rules that racial gerrymandering, which has been used to create majority black congressional districts for decades, is unconstitutional. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion for the majority.

@Charl3sZ @m3ntat_ @esrtweet Your comment may make sense to historically illiterate Marxists who believe in a fantasy version of the past and the present, but given that it’s completely detached from reality, it’s complete nonsense to anyone else.

@t_a_stephens @m3ntat_ @esrtweet Why white nationalists aren't proud of the US' white nationalism is strange since the US has been genocidal & pro slavery for its entire history. It also inspired the laws of & played nice with the nazis during & after ww2. So it's the most like NS Germany out of all nations.

Tom didn't explain his second assertion, but it's important so I'm going to do it. China is in the worst strategic position of any great power in history because it is critically dependent on resources it has to import, and it doesn't have control of the sea lanes over which it imports them. China is neither food nor energy self-sufficient. It needs to import pork from the United States, grain from Africa, coal from Australia, and oil from the Middle East to keep its population fed and its factories running. Naval blockades at about three critical chokepoints (Hormuz, Malacca, Sunda) would cripple the Chinese economy within months, possibly within weeks. China does not have the blue-water navy required to contrast control of those chokepoints. The moment any first-rate naval power or even a second-rate like India decides China needs to be stopped, it's pretty much game over. As a completely separate issue thanks to the one-child policy, Chinese population probably peaked in 2006 and has been declining ever since. Every year in the foreseeable future they will have fewer military-age males than they do now. Most of those males are only sons; their deaths would wipe out entire family lines, giving the Chinese people an extremely low tolerance for war casualties. Then there's the glass jaw. The Three Gorges Dam. Which is already in some peril even without a war - you can compare photographs over time and see that it's sagging. If anyone gets annoyed enough to pop that dam thing with a bunker-buster or a pony nuke, the resulting floods will kill millions and wipe out the strip of central China that is by far the country's most industrially and agriculturally productive region. The Chinese haven't fought a war since 1971. They lost. Against Vietnam. The institutional knowledge that could potentially fit their army for doing anything more ambitious than suppressing regional warlordism does not exist. I could go on. But I think I've made Tom's statements sufficiently understandable already.

@Nemtastic1 @ArtemisConsort Ultimately, it’s just a poor way of selecting representatives. Proportional systems are generally better, but they have their own issues.

I think that's heading toward an ad infinitum argument, though it's not necessarily wrong. More fundamentally, any justification of race-based gerrymandering is also a justification of party-based gerrymandering, because they are not different things, but the same thing. No one actually believes in racial gerrymandering as a matter of principle. No one believes that Barack Obama would be defending it if over the past decade, black districts had swung R+40. But I see essentially no one with the intellectual consistency to say "yes, I think every interest group should gerrymander every district as much as they can get away with."

There is no argument for racial voting districts that isn’t an argument for ethno-nationalism. “Black voters have concerns and interests so totally distinct from those of White voters that if they can’t have special racial districts, they’re basically unrepresented.” On that account, we have nothing in common at best and at worst have mutually hostile interests. So we shouldn’t live under the same government.

@ArtemisConsort Yes, it’s basically an argument that ‘colonisation’, i.e., resettling freed American slaves in Liberia, would have been the correct approach after the American Civil War.

@pbar92 @fhelling @simongerman600 You’re probably projecting. The rights’s tolerance, which has allowed the intolerant left to concentrate power and impose censorship, perfectly demonstrates Popper’s paradox. The ironic part is that the intolerant left claims to be tolerant, but Marxists lie about everything.

@t_a_stephens @fhelling @simongerman600 Yo you forgot to read the article dude. Or you're braindead, both options would make sense.

If you want to elect pro-Kremlin, anti-democratic parties into your European democratic government, there are plenty of options available!

@arcticinstincts They aren’t really allowed to consider innate population differences, so they try to explain everything through institutions. The PRC may be the worst-performing Han economy, but it’s still Han. Hong Kong, however, did take a turn for the worse as the handover approached.

Funny how 57 Nobel Econ prizes were awarded yet the “top” Econ thinkers failed to predict illiberal China’s growth/rise, & democratic India & Africa’s persistent lag regardless of institutional type. At least Nobels in Medicine require discoveries proven to cure some illness

@dormolina1 @AppyOrtho True, but not to the same degree. Northwest Europeans are very closely related.

@t_a_stephens @AppyOrtho I know but practically the all of Europe has important Germanic components. In Italy the Lombards, in France the Franks, in Holland the Batavians, in Spain the Goths and Visigoths and so on

Notes on Trump’s speech with King Charles today… Our values are British. Our blood is British. Our veins run with Anglo-Saxon courage. The cause of freedom isn’t just an idea, it’s the culmination of the British code. We sing liberty only because our ancestors first sang “God save the king!” Nations must be anchored by deep roots. We share a root with the British.

@dormolina1 @AppyOrtho Thanks to the French, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ commonly refers to the UK and its offshoots, including the US, so it depends on which definition you’re using. At any rate, Americans in general have a lot of English ancestry.

@t_a_stephens @AppyOrtho My point was both leaders aren't so much Anglo Saxons precisely especially the POTUS since he's mostly German and Scottish

@aidannonx British culture, including the American Wasp branch, tends towards modesty, like Scandinavian cultures. That makes it easier for internal enemies to attack.

You don’t see a lot of proud Anglos, that’s not a big larp on the RW. You’re more likely to see the German larp, the Spanish empire, or the Roman Empire larp The Anglo aesthetic and pride is non existent, which is weird because recently Germans had more to feel bad for It’s also weird because England was the dominant power and heart of America, but that’s part of the destruction of American heritage

@AnEmergentI @mattwridley It’s probably partly a result of the customary modesty, which also exists in the old Wasp culture in the US (and in Scandinavia). Trump has a different cultural background, at least on his father’s side.

I've not heard a British Prime Minister articulate the UK's historic positive contribution to the world and spirit this well in my adult life. Perhaps it's best left for others, not us, to say it. But I can't help but feel our UK consciousness has essentially forgotten it.

@hulk_smmaassh @Bashprofitsug @PapiTrumpo Amusing. Probably a Third Worlder, at any rate.

@t_a_stephens @Bashprofitsug @PapiTrumpo The account is based in West Asia.

WHO DID THIS???🤣🤣🤣

@dormolina1 @AppyOrtho The Anglo-Saxons were of German origin too, but mixed with the Britons. Trump is half German and half Scottish, so English-like. Charles is probably a bit over half German, with English and Scottish from his maternal grandmother and some Danish, Russian, etc. from his father.

@AppyOrtho Trump and King Charles are Germans in origin 🤷

@jopandorf @wsliger @DragonFairyX1 @pureMetatron Without immigrants, the GOP would have won every single presidential election since 1980.

More nonsense, I’m afraid. You’re either uninformed or you tried to mislead about ‘the politicians’, i.e., Southern Democrats in Congress, switching to the GOP because of the CRA, when in fact, only 2 of the 116 Southern Democrats who were in Congress in 1964 switched. Conflating presidential election results with members of Congress switching parties – the latter a rare event – to keep their chairmanships, after 40 years of solid Democrat control of the House, demonstrates either very poor comprehension skills or a severely deficient knowledge. White Southern Democrats were part of the Nixon and Reagan coalitions, especially in their 49-state landslides in 1972 and 1984, because they supported their foreign and economic policies, but they often continued to vote Democrat at the state level and for Congress. Apart from Florida, which achieved its first GOP trifecta since Reconstruction in 1999, the states of the former Solid South saw their first post-Reconstruction GOP trifectas in the 2000s or 2010s. Suggesting that voters were responding to something that happened 40-50 years earlier is simply laughable. Many of them hadn’t even been in 1964, and had never known segregation. Moreover, voting patterns by ancestry clearly show that descendants of early Americans remain the most Republican-leaning voters in the US, underlining the reality that the growth of the Democrat Party in the North has been driven primarily by immigration, from the 19th century to today, and especially by post-Hart-Celler immigration. The major long-term voting changes that actually happened, ignoring short-term shifts like the rise and fall of the New Deal, Nixon and Reagan coalitions, were: (a) most black American voters switched to the Democrat Party in the mid-20th century, because of its welfare-state and Affirmative Action policies; (b) younger generations of white Southerners who became voters tended to prefer Republican policies to Democrat policies, and older white Southerners who voted Democrat gradually passed away. Absent immigration, and especially post-Hart-Celler immigration, the South would have become Republican and the North would have remained Republican. The GOP would be winning landslides, but not only at the presidential level like in 1972 and 1984.

I'm really confused. Abe Lincoln was a Republican. How is this not common knowledge?

@m3ntat_ @esrtweet I agree that the PRC isn’t socialist/communist. National Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, however, is still a young ideology.

@t_a_stephens @esrtweet I'm glad you agree with me 🤗

Trump makes a very true point: Anglo-Saxon culture was a gift to the world & former colonies should be grateful for it

The PRC probably resembles NS Germany more than anything else. Before embarking on a world war to destroy its rivals and settle their lands with Han colonists, the CCP first aims to reunite the fatherland, bring all Han into it and build up its military capabilities. In many ways, Taiwan is a truer successor to prior Chinese empires, even if it lost most of the Qing Empire’s territory to the CCP.

The 3k vs 5k debate is a distraction — I’ll leave that to historians. My point is simpler: current China is not a modern construct. They ran a communist experiment, it failed, and they reverted to what they always were. Confucianism never really left — social order, filial piety, which by the way has been extended to the relationship between the state and the individual. In exchange for prosperity I receive obedience. This is not a new idea: substitute Emperor with CCP. It's a bargain that both sides understand and accept. The imperial examination system that selected bureaucrats based on merit is now the CCP apparatus. Yes, the CCP is a merit based system. Look at their leadership, they are all engineers with substantial and verifiable accomplishments. They are not wordcels (lawyers) that you typically find in the West. On warfare — in modern times, show me China’s equivalent of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Vietnam, or Korea. The modern record speaks for itself. On Tibet — that history is genuinely complicated. Tibet itself was a feudal theocracy with its own brutal history of serfdom (slavery). Westerners who visited Tibet in the late 30s would notice Tibetans missing limbs, noses, eyes; because in Buddhism you are not allowed to kill anyone, but nobody said anything about blinding! They have museums about this. You just never hear about this narrative in the West. Also the Dalai Lama is a pedo. Tell me how it is possibly normal for a grown man to stick his tongue out at a little boy and ask him if he would like to suck on his tongue (this actually happened). In Tibet if you weren't part of the ruling class (the monks) you were a serf and like most human institutions it was rife with abuse. Look at Tibet today: it is filled with Tibetans, Tibetan language, temples, and prosperity as far as the eye can see. Yes, this must be genocide: Chinese Buddhists persecuting their fellow Buddhists (smh). My core point stands: if your entire strategic calculus about China is built on the assumption they are Soviet-style communists, your conclusions are already wrong before you even start.

Not entirely, because some Americans are descended from Dutch and Scandinavian colonists, as well as from German immigrants to colonial America. Those early Americans quite possibly would be speaking French, as would later immigrants and their descendants – assuming they had migrated to New France or its successor, as they migrated to the US. It’s a joke, of course, so not meant to be taken seriously.

Yes but that’s a whole seperate theoretical argument of “what if England never colonized” as opposed to the very real world event of the United States defeating the Nazis and liberating Europe. I don’t disagree about French colonization, however then they’d have been competing much more with the Spanish Empire as well.

🚨 LMAO! KING CHARLES playing his hand at dropping zingers! “You recently commented, Mr. President, that if it were not for the United States, European countries would be speaking German. Dare I say that if it wasn't for us, you'd be speaking FRENCH!” 😂

@keye_duncan @EricLDaugh You could argue that, but to be strict about it, there wouldn’t have been any British colonists in North America without Britain. Colonists who were in what became the Thirteen Colonies, e.g., in Dutch and Scandinavian colonies, would probably have ended up under French rule.

I understand that, but in reality the wars (French Indian) were mainly fought over old world grievances (100 years war) that spilled into America. In reality the 10,000 French soldiers had no realistic ability to conquer the colonies, as they relied on the natives force of 15,000 warriors to do most of the fighting.