Women, for their part, are always complaining that we raise them only to be vain and coquettish, that we keep them amused with trifles so that we may more easily remain their masters; they blame us for the faults we attribute to them. What stupidity! And since when is it men who concern themselves with the education of girls? Who is preventing the mothers from raising them as they please? There are no schools for girls—what a tragedy! Would God, there were none for boys! They would be raised more sensibly and more straightforwardly. Is anyone forcing your daughters to waste their time on foolish trifles? Are they forced against their will to spend half their lives on their appearance, following your example? Are you prevented from instructing them, or having them instructed according to your wishes? Is it our fault if they please us when they are beautiful, if their airs and graces seduce us, if the art they learn from you attracts and flatters us, if we like to see them tastefully attired, if we let them display at leisure the weapons with which they subjugate us? Well then, decide to raise them like men; the men will gladly agree; the more women want to resemble them, the less women will govern them, and then men will truly be the masters. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Woman cannot be superior except as woman, but from the moment in which she desires to emulate man she is nothing but a monkey. —Julius Evola, quoting Joseph de Maistre
Feminism has become part of the new western religion, the new paradigm for explaining reality, especially on the political and cultural left. In the modern west we started with Christianity as our official explanation for What’s What, then moved on to science and scientism; and now we appear to be in danger of moving away from empiricism, let alone traditional morality and values, and towards what is essentially ideological neo-Marxism. Feminism, especially in its latest manifestations, has become part of the cultural Marxist and neo-Marxist New World Order, despite the fact that most people are too indoctrinated, ignorant, or block-headedly conformist to notice it. So people in the west, especially leftist people in the west, are more and more seeing doctrines of radical feminism as a simple aspect of reality, and do not see that it is to some degree a fashion trend and also a tool exploited by socialists to gain control of western civilization without having to rely on the working class rising up in a glorious people’s revolution. Thus people on the left especially may be oblivious to some harsh truths about feminism, and about women in general. What follows, with all due respects to femininity, are a few of these harsh truths.
Women have privilege, and get away with bad behavior, because men are instinctively addicted to them and, more specifically, to pussy. As I say again and again, human beings are a species of animal, and we are veritably loaded down with animal instincts, also known as “human nature.” And one of those instincts is that men tend to feel protective towards women in general, and let them pull stunts that they wouldn’t accept coming from other men, largely because men instinctively want to mate with women and therefore want to keep them in good humor. So women in the west are “empowered” largely because men indulgently allow them to be empowered, not because women could simply take their rights and empowerment on their own regardless of how men felt about it all. This is a point to which I’ll return before I’m done.
The primary social power of a woman is her power over men. As just stated above, men are instinctively more indulgent towards females than they are towards fellow males; and it is also true that, on average, men are bigger, stronger, more aggressive, and more assertive than women, thereby giving them greater individual power within society. Women are not completely powerless in these respects of course, and there are unusually big, strong, aggressive, and assertive females; but their main power is their power to get their way with indulgent men. A beautiful woman in particular can have any number of hormone-laden males wrapped around her little finger. I’m reminded of a scene in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot in which a young woman sees a picture of a magnificently gorgeous female (Nastasya Filippovna) and exclaims, “What power!” then, a little later, “Beauty like that is power. With beauty like that one could turn the world upside down!” But even ugly women have some of that power. The power of a man includes a great deal of power over his environment, including women and other men, with that power conditioned and enhanced by testosterone; whereas the primary power of a woman is the power to influence the power of men in her favor.
Men and women are not only physically different, they are also psychologically different. As I’ve already suggested, male animal instincts and female animal instincts are not exactly the same, though there is plenty of overlap; and this difference is emphatically not just cultural conditioning. Probably even most of the psychological differences between men and women are conditioned by sex hormones, including the aforementioned testosterone. And even hormone injections administered to transsexuals in childhood or adulthood cannot undo this difference, since a significant cause of psychological sexual dimorphism in humans results from prenatal hormones, especially a dose of prenatal testosterone received by unborn males throughout the class Mammalia. I’ve written about this plenty elsewhere, so I won’t belabor the point here, but nevertheless this is a crucial point to understand because of course it debunks much of the nonsense promulgated by feminists and neo-Marxists about “victim groups” (including women) being discriminated against as an excuse for their inability to compete with white males in certain respects. Women are less self-confident on average, less aggressive, less inclined to obsess on a career at the expense of all else, less willing to work long hours, less willing to work at dangerous occupations like oil-drilling or crab fishing…and, significantly, less objective and technically oriented on average, which helps to explain why fewer women work as surgeons, engineers, mechanics, and computer programmers. James Damore wrote a very mild, sane, and factual article on this subject back in July of 2017, and he was promptly attacked and expelled by radical feminized leftists. In fact, the very fact that feminism has become as hysterical and intolerant as it has is indicative of another aspect of sexual dimorphism in our species: females are also less rational than men, and more identified with their feelings. Which may as well fall under its own heading.
Men are more inclined to identify with their thoughts, and women are more inclined to identify with their feelings—which is resulting in feminism degenerating into a kind of hysterical cult. I remember being somewhat mystified by Eckhart Tolle’s claim that men identify with their thoughts, whereas women identify with their “pain body.” I’d never heard of a pain body before, so how could half the world’s population identify with it? But seeing the direction the feminized left has taken over the past several years, and the complaint, protest, raging unhappiness, and overall negativity that characterize it, it is more understandable now. The female-dominated political and cultural left have taken identification with feelings to such an extreme that now it’s the left who are rejecting empirical reality in favor of their unrealistic ideological ideals. (Science denial used to be associated primarily with conservative Christians railing against evolution, plus some mercenary conservative capitalists denying the harmful effects of overpopulation, pollution, deforestation, etc., but now it has become a leftist phenomenon also.) The trouble is that any society that flatly rejects empirical reality, especially fundamental aspects of it, is simply not going to survive, especially if it has to compete against people who are actually relatively still sane. A classic example of the feminine mind rejecting objectivity and demanding the reign of feelings is the new idea that maleness and femaleness are arbitrary and interchangeable. It used to be that males and females had different genitalia and different sex chromosomes, but now it’s a matter of, that’s right, feelings. And as I’ve said before, any civilization in which even medical professionals can’t tell the difference between boys and girls is just not going to survive for very long. It just isn’t. Also as I’ve said before, the rise of eunuchs into social prominence is historically a telltale sign that a civilization is in serious decline; though now the eunuchs are called trans. So an emphatically feminine national ideology is doomed, and the question is whether it will be allowed to take western civilization down with it when it falls.
The female psyche is evolved, designed by nature, to raise children, after first attracting and “hooking” a man. Over the course of the existence of the human race, extending way back into the Stone Age, women traditionally have also participated in such behavior as tending the sick, picking berries, catching frogs, and occasional peacemaking between hyperaggressive males; and of course everybody is born with instincts for simple survival—liking good food, seeking comfort, fearing death, etc. But nevertheless, for literally millions of years our ancestors were evolved in such a way that a primary duty of females has been to raise children and rely on adult males to protect the family and tribe, and that is built right into human nature. So it’s no wonder that women are more feelings-oriented than men are, less violent, more fearful, and more compassionate, on average. Also it’s no wonder that women are more attracted to babies and small children, and more concerned with their own sexual attractiveness (skin, hair, fingernails, clothes, etc.), especially when young and single, and also slaves to fashion chronically concerned with what their social peers (and the neighbors) think. Men on the other hand are evolved in large part to be fighters, hunters, and protectors; and to pit nurturing berry-pickers against aggressive hunters is a fight the outcome of which is easy to predict. The primary reason why feminists have progressed as far as they have in their fight against men, and have (I almost said “enjoy”) the privileges they have is, again, the male addiction to female flesh and men’s natural instinctive urge to tolerate or even indulge feminine irrationality, because it’s feminine.
White men created western civilization, and it stands to reason that they would be best at maintaining it and running it. Feminists do not hesitate to blame white men for most of the badness to be found in human society, as though no social evils ever existed independent of western civilization. It is true that the civilization invented by European men is not perfect, and has its shortcomings—just as every other civilization is imperfect, because every civilization is composed of imperfect people—but the opposite side of the same coin is that white men are responsible also for practically all of the good stuff too. Just look around you, and unless you’re in a wilderness or maybe in a rural non-western bamboo hut, pretty much everything you see around you has been invented by western men, aside from potted plants and other people. Hell, even the domesticated animals look the way they do because of white men selectively breeding them. Women (and brown people) are less competent to keep this invention of white males going, and are very likely to run it into the ground, as they’ve already managed to do in parts of Europe on the part of women, and in any number of third world former colonies on the part of brown men. One peculiar aspect of women is that for most of human existence they have been required to live up to a higher moral standard than men, especially with regard to sensual indulgence; and one upshot of that is that women have a less “robust” conscience, and less skill at navigating moral freedom. To some degree women with socially acceptable immorality or “empowerment” are like native Americans with tuberculosis or alcoholism—they have little evolved tolerance, and thus we see women going full-blast slutty in mainstream western culture and doing much to destroy the moral fiber of society. Hell, feminized leftists have even had to redefine morality so that debauchery and sexual irresponsibility are dissociated from the very idea of morals. The result is that “empowered” women are less happy, on average, than their grandmothers were (because, as Buddhism asserts, morality is directly related to happiness), and feminist-run societies like Sweden are degenerating into the ironic predicament of women being afraid to go outdoors for fear of being raped or murdered by the nice migrants who are viewed as morally superior to liberal, indulgent, relatively nonviolent European men. Sweden, the first feminist nation in modern times, is now the rape capital of the western world…with silly feminists trying to conceal the fact that brown men are perpetrating most of the rapes, because that goes against the feminist dogma of White Man Bad.
Males have a wider statistical distribution with regard to physical and mental traits, which results in most or even all super geniuses in the world being male. The wider variability of males over females is common throughout much of the animal kingdom, and it is related to evolutionary biology and our species’ primordial mating strategy of males competing for females (though females often do compete for males also). In species in which males may be polygamous, which has been common in non-western societies, the very best males get to mate more, whereas most females will find a mate even if they are part of a harem. So it is advantageous to a species that males who are outstanding in some way get to propagate their genes more efficiently, with less competitive “incels” or members of bachelor herds not mating at all, or very little. Thus the wider spread of the curve for males. Anyway, the result of this documented greater variability is that the most outstanding leaders of society—politicians, scientists, inventors, artists, writers, generals, whatever—are going to be mostly or entirely male. The fact that feminists can easily and smugly accept the flip side of this variability, i.e. the idea that most dysfunctional street people and imbeciles are male, while suddenly getting upset when the other end of the bell-shaped curve is mentioned, is simply another morsel of evidence that women are also less rationally inclined than their male peers, on average.
Women lack the power, physical and emotional, to take their rights and equalities against the will of masculine men. The only way women will gain social equality, assuming that they don’t have it already and then some, is if 1) men voluntarily let them have it, or 2) men are caused, or allowed, to degenerate into effete social eunuchs; and in this latter case, which obviously is happening to some extent, such a civilization is simply screwed. A feminized society in which masculinity is vilified and essentially abolished, is a doomed society, if only because some non-emasculated patriarchal society nearby will overpower and conquer it, socially and economically if not militarily. For various reasons, a feminist society will not be as strong as a more traditional one that accepts masculinity and femininity, regardless of all the hysterical propaganda and indoctrination generated by feminist activists and cultural Marxists. In fact the new feminists seem intent upon abolishing actual femininity also, producing a race of androgynous shemales, largely because they are too simple-minded to acknowledge that equality does not necessitate uniformity—though maybe deep down they realize that women can’t really compete against uncastrated males in many if not most fields of endeavor. So what will likely happen to a feminized society, if history is any indicator, is that the feminists, after vilifying and culturally castrating their own men, will willingly flop onto their back and spread their legs for the first wave of aggressive alpha males who decide to take over the civilization. Deep down, women, and even most feminists, have an intuitive, instinctive respect for men who have not renounced their own testicles and spine.
If women aren’t equal now, they never will be. Feminists and neo-Marxists in general may be able to engineer society enough that men are emasculated enough that women can actually compete with them in traditionally male fields of endeavor, but as I’ve said, this destruction of the natural balance will destabilize and wreck the civilization before long. The fact is, though, that women have always been the equals of men, though not following the same societal niches as men. True, men traditionally have had most of the political power, but they used that power largely for the sake of protecting the women. It has been men who have worked, fought, and died so that women and children could live safely and in relative prosperity. Feminists, going with the empirically false dogma that women and men are essentially identical in every way, mentally if not physically, may be able to bring about absolute equality of outcome, in accordance with socialist utopianism and social engineering, but doing so would require repressing men, or else indulging in such foolishness as requiring 50% of firefighters, police officers, and soldiers, for example, to be female—despite the plain fact that they aren’t as strong as, or run as fast as, or fight as well as males. If the most qualified person were always to get the job, or the position in school, then women simply won’t wind up exactly the same as men, nor will non-whites wind up the same as whites. There are inherent, genetically conditioned differences. But the point is that men and women have had a symbiosis going from the beginning, and both genders have their strengths and weaknesses, and their natural place in the family and in society. Women, for instance, have had the duty of raising the children, especially when they are small, helpless, and in their formative years. So women have had the huge responsibility of producing the next generation of people, and being their first and perhaps most important role models, and that is extremely important—certainly more important than rejecting family life for the sake of imitating men. Thus men and women have always had a natural balance, in accordance with male and female nature, and both are necessary for human existence. But if women want equality by becoming identical to men, then they will fail miserably, because they aren’t identical. And if they can’t be equal unless men allow them to be, then of course they will never be really equal because men are stronger and still in control, if only potentially. But I say women are already equal and always have been, especially in egalitarian societies like the western world. If feminists want to complain, they should perhaps complain about traditional Islamic culture—but of course they generally don’t because they’ve established the least misogynistic race of males on the planet to be the primary enemy.
There are plenty more points I could make, but this is enough for now, if not more than enough. If any women read this and are offended by it, I would simply observe, again, that women really are equal to men, in my opinion, despite the plain fact that they are not the same as men, and not as good at all the same things, though better at some. Both sexes have their strengths and weaknesses, which is why the primordial male/female symbiosis has worked out as well as it has. Nature has designed our species in such a way that males and females are built differently and perceive the world somewhat differently, with males being the aggressive protectors and providers, and females being the nurturing emotional center of the family unit. There will always be individual variations, which is fine; but the traditional way is pretty much the natural way, and deviations from that are bound to be inferior as well as unnatural. Nature designed males and females to be different, and we reject that at our peril.
To pervert the perennial male/female difference in temperament into a war in which men are viewed as an enemy to be defeated, which is what neo-Marxist radical feminism has degenerated into, is freakishly, grotesquely stupid, as well as an attempt at civilizational suicide. There should always be a symbiotic balance between masculine and feminine, just as ideally there should always be a symbiotic balance in society between conservatives and liberals. One side trying to defeat or destroy the other i
Harold MacMillan
Comments
“Failed states, tribalism and extremely difficult demographic transitions”
What a fucking asshole. Old military colonization has been replaced by economic colonization and exploitation as it ever was. Resources.
That idiot is too stupid or too young to see that ALL presidents of francophone Africa from Senghor to Eyadema to Nguesso to Compaore to Biya are and were French bought puppet regimes.
I don’t even discuss that shit anymore.
Ask IMF/World Bank and WEF about the practices on how they plunder the continent. In Africa, every country is in fact 2 countries: Customs and government are one, the people are the other.
has restated France’s commitment to military intervention in the Sahel region
What did I say before ? The French are the same as the US or the Brits. Desperately trying to preserve power over regions they don’t have ANYTHING to do.
What can an American do when he has an intruder on his property by law ? Shoot him…
Dino
Good ideas, but Africans can NOT decide. As Europe can not decide as well. It’s the US who decides, because the US$ is still world currency and linked to oil. That’s what the intention of BRICS is: To break the $ hegemony. Before, nothing will change.
Simple as that.
HL
it looks like you own IT firms in Africa
LOL Not quite, My IT “firm” is actually an NGO, and the new company SW@XE is a consulting firm. We connect businesses from Europe to businesses in Africa. The goal is not exploitation but actively trying to help developing the local job market. But we just started really.
And I have and am living with the people not in a white luxury slum. I don’t have more money than the people I work with.
Believe it or not.
BTW: Instead of lamenting about economic refugees in Europe people should better start doing such stuff. After all, WE are responsible for that situation by simply exploiting Africa and not giving a shit about their development.
I don’t know ONE African who has left his family for other reasons than finding work in Europe and supporting his family from there.
Family and clan are holy in Africa. Nobody leaves if not absolutely neccessary.
John
Right on.
Anybody with a many brain cells as they have tits or testicles would understand the ability of a nation to support a growing population is not dependent on physical space but having the economy and infrastructure to support its population. Only somebody who has been completely brainwashed by left wing propaganda would put forward the “there’s plenty of room” argument, and as for you “economic colonialism” argument, the African tribal leaders who sold out their people for corporate money are as much to blame as any western interests.
Ian
the African tribal leaders who sold out their people for corporate money are as much to blame as any western interests.
Admitted, true. Keeps being forgotten here, or PC forbids it. On the contrary, in Africa people point that out too. They’re a lot more rational than our “free press”.
BTW: The birth rate is alarming. Why ? Because the more kids a family has the better the chance that one or two of them find a job, and in certain countries the governments pay a very modest sum for each kid. When you have 10 kids in Mali, that’s the equivalent of a monthly workers’ salary……
It’s not about religion. It’s about economy, stupid LOL
JOBS. When there would be enough, most problems would be solved.
African leaders, with very few exceptions, are not puppets, they are bought and paid for assets who don’t give a flying fuck about the people they govern because they are only interested in lining their own pockets and looking after their friends and the military they rely on to keep them in power.
And you of all people should know that because Swiss banks facilitate the corrupt deals between corporate pirates and African tyrants.
I do feel for the people of Africa who are abused and exploited by both their own leaders and the west, but a few years ago I read an essay by Dambesa Moyo, an academic from Zambia I think. She argued that before African can begin to solve its problems the addiction to western aid must be broken because ‘dead aid‘ as she called it simply does not work.
Recall how left wing activists in the west idolised Winnie Mandela in the 1980s, before it emerged that Mrs. Mandela was running organised crime networks in the townships and had known of executions by various tortures including necklacing.
Ian
African leaders, with very few exceptions, are not puppets, they are bought and paid for assets who don’t give a flying fuck about the people they govern because they are only interested in lining their own pockets and looking after their friends and the military they rely on to keep them in power.
I know. Fact. But when the West would stop to employ them…….the problem is that these countries are too poor, too little educated and too little organized to enable an effective change by people pressure.
And the well-meaning ones are killed or imprisoned. Take Sankara, Nkrumah, …. Kennedy LOL
Yeah but you’d already mentioned them 🙂
And then there are suspicions that he’d followed Saddam Hussein in accepting payment for oil in currencies other than the petrodollar.
And then there are suspicions that he’d followed Saddam Hussein in accepting payment for oil in currencies other than the petrodollar.
That’s the point, really. And it was one of the triggers for the creation of BRICS.
John
Hmm…….I missed that 😉 True, the same actually, is it not, Ian ?
Saddam and Gadhafi were killed because they wanted to sell their oil independently of the $ binding. Easy as that. And every African leader who doesn’t follow orders of their old colonial powers (NATO -> US) is potentially dead. As are European leaders as well. But here in Europe they aren’t killed, but disposed of. See Yanukovich in Ukraine as the latest example.
Some remarked that – and that was the birth of BRICS. But … I see no future for them as long as Uncle Sam is the master of Uncle Ben and Salam Aleikum.
John
You’re right, that’s only a part of it. He was forcing African unity, and his country was well organized. A brother of my wife worked in Tripoli for 2 years and he said it was a superb expericence, good pay and no problems.
On the way back to Bamako he was attacked and the robbers (probably Touaregs) took all what he had and wanted to bring back to Mali.
He died in 2007 in London of AIDS. I was with him those last weeks in Hammersmith hospital. It was cruel. He didn’t support the meds, and the skin just peeled off his whole body.
Life is shit.
Bruce Cockburn ??
I mean, sure, in the hot sun in Mali I could burn my cock easily…
BTW: Didn’t know he was so good. He should have played with Ali Farka Touré. He really can play the style.
Thanks a lot. A brother in mind.
Jeff
Fathering children earns males of Africa respect, but taking care of them is nothing they need be concerned about
It may vary in different countries, but in West Africa a woman gains status with the number of children she has. But ONLY when she’s married. When she’s got 2 kids and is not married she’ll have a hard time. But you’re right about the men not taking care of them. I can confirm that through my own adoptive family in Cameroon, where my dear friend raises 10 kids of which half of the fathers simply quit the mothers and abandoned them with the child.
Jeff
It also has an economic background. 10 kids give a better chance to have 2 kids working later than 1 or 2 kids. Education is expensive. And in some countries the government pays per child per month a very modest sum. So the calculation is:
10 kids is the equivalent of a worker’s salary for the father given he finds a job…
Yeah, starving kids is excellent socio-economic policy.
Keynes would have gladly approved . . . of course, only if the kids came from working class families. That’s why he was head of the Eugenics Society from 1937-1944 promoting the blessings of contraception as a way of keeping the numbers of the “drunken” working classes down.
Thanks for reminding the resident loony leftie of one of the left’s dirty little secrets.
I’ll try to preempt an outburst from any Trots still in the thread, by pointing out this does not exclude people on low to middle incomes from having five or six children. There are people who love family life and choose to go without a car, 60″ plasma TV, foreign holidays etc. to live a different kind of life.
There is a family in the town where my mother lives, Morecambe, where the Radford family consist of two parents and 16 (maybe 17 now) children. They’re not rich but the father runs a bakery business so they’re not dependent on benefits. And in a TV documentary (linked) featuring them, they appear very happy. The parents have made their choices for non economic reasons and that’s their right.
When people are having children for economic gain, that’s going to be a bad start for the children.
Anyone offering unmoderated comment threads is going to attract a number of bottom feeders of course, but tolerance of out and out insults, with no point relating to the thread being made, has attracted a even more unpleasant kind of vermin, those repulsive creatures that live up the bottom feeders’ bottoms. It only needs one or two of those to drive away good content and good readers.
Ian
That’s life. I don’t take that too seriously and usually comment to articles which I think have value, are personal and where I sense the person behind it. Not necessarily the subject.
Ian
I agree, although for me it’s entertainment also. No worse than watching TV. And at the same time, by being here, I could improve my English a hell of a lot in terms of “good” English but also in street “talk.” So in some ways, it has educational value for me LOL,
Jackson the racist doesn’t like the label. His comments betray him.
John G the communist hyper-inflationist doesn’t like the label. His comments betray him.
African woman generally have too many children
Women in all poor countries (that aren’t outright communist totalitarian) generally have many children. They always have fewer children as, and if, they become more affluent.
The way for Africa to quickly become more affluent is to abandon tribalism and nationalism and open its doors to foreign capital investments.
who wants to invest in an unstable economy?
Then maybe the west should help stabilize it.
I spent 2004 in East Africa as an activated Army Reservist as Part of Operation Enduring Freedom.
It is an incredibly rugged and an incredibly poor part of the World.
However, I have the strong impression that Africa will be the Asia of the 21st Century.
They have a large population that has next to nothing and needs almost everything. They are not tied to the past and not having land line phones, Cellphone use has exploded since 2000, for example, generally on a more advanced level than in the US.
There is a large population and little to employ them (yet). There are vast natural resources. the entrepreneurial potential of the Merchants can be see (albeit in a negative way) by the efforts of Nigerian scammers.
The PRC is there in a big way.
When you are in the boonies in Ethiopia, you see PRC companies employing Africans to build roads. Is it exploitation? Maybe. In Asia, the same kind of thing put the PRC & Japan & the “Dragons” at the center of world industrial production in 50 years.
There are vast problems . . . but there is also vast potential. I suspect it will be realized and I suspect that France (and the US) will be the ones left behind.
A century from now, if the PRC’s New Silk Road/One Belt-One Road idea works, I think the main beneficiary will be Africa.
“Saint George, the doors are open to foreign investments but who wants to invest in an unstable economy?”
So far, the PRC . . . .
“That idiot is too stupid or too young to see that ALL presidents of francophone Africa from Senghor to Eyadema to Nguesso to Compaore to Biya are and were French bought puppet regimes.”
The French are still there in a substantial way.
I remember seeing French junior soldiers (boule à zéro and being pushed around a bit, so I assume recruits) being sent further south in Dijbouti years ago.
“And I have and am living with the people not in a white luxury slum. I don’t have more money than the people I work with.”
Which seems in my limited experience, the only thing that really works there.
I still can’t get over the fact that people thought Macron was a left-winger and Le Pen a right-winger. Since when did immigration policy become the litmus test?
Macron is a business-friendly moderate who is capable of criticizing faulty cultures without hating people who look different. He’s a common sense guy.
Le Pen is a National Socialist. She’s an honest version of Bernie Sanders.
The Chinese are making capital investments with relatively fair terms.
The Chinese have done impressively stupid things like building “Mega Cities” that nobody wants to live in. Those are not “investments” but represent pure “consumption”. It’s no different in principle from building a million franchise restaurants that prepares food nobody wants to buy or eat. Pure consumption waste.
“The Chinese have done impressively stupid things like building “Mega Cities” that nobody wants to live in.”
I think John G is talking specifically of Africa. The PRC seems to have a longer time horizon than Western Companies, which makes it easier to invest in Africa, where everything is longer term due to the underdevelopment.
I have always wondered if those cities were pure pump-priming or if they also represent stockpiled resources that they thought might become unavailable.
AMERIKKKA FUCK YEAH!!!!!”Given the new PRC base in Djibouti and the PRC’s greater economic presence in Africa, I’m not sure AFRICOM, which is still in Europe will do much at all.
“The PRC seems to have a longer time horizon than Western Companies”
Correct, Chinese and other eastern businesses and governments appear to think generations ahead, western businesses don’t think beyond next year’s profit and loss account, governments don’t think beyond the next election cycle.
Ian
Exactly. I’ve been Swiss businesses for the last 20 years to invest in Africa, but they don’t listen. No risk, no gain – and after – complain…..
Chinese and other eastern businesses and governments appear to think generations ahead
They think one bribe ahead.
“Chinese companies in Africa are also able to offer the bribes that are usually crucial to securing large contracts in the region. By contrast, American companies are prohibited from engaging in these practices by the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”
Bingo.
British companies and businessmen have also faced prosecution for paying the bribes demanded in order to obtain orders / contracts, not just in Africa but throughout the third world.
How many bankers went to gaol over the GFC?””And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law! . . . . Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!” Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons
The question is not “How many bankers went to gaol over the GFC.” It is should any of them have gone based on the laws existing at the time.
That is the difference between a republic, “a government of laws and not of men” and something else.
“Margaret More: Father, that man’s bad.
Sir Thomas More: There’s no law against that.
William Roper: There is: God’s law.
Sir Thomas More: Then God can arrest him.” Id