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Its only correspondence with reality is the statement that everything wrong with Latin America is the US's fault. While this is true, everything else is a lie

Its only correspondence with reality is the statement that everything wrong with Latin America is the US's fault. While this is true, everything else is a lie Was this a...typo or something? Do you actually think that?

winestock 14y ago
This is the reason why I down-voted you: You made a point-and-sputter non-reply that added noise and no signal. Mencius Moldbug is not the first person to make those claims. It used to be a staple of conservative Catholic observers of Latin America, whether from the United States or elsewhere. For example, look up the works of William Thomas Walsh or Francis Clement Kelley. http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Drenched-Altars-Francis-Clement-Kelley/dp/0895553198?tag=duckduckgo-d-20 http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Drenched-Altars-Francis-Clement-... Of course, those regimes which the US government liked were almost always viciously anti-clerical so this may not be much of a surprise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Pro http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Pro
jacobolus 14y ago
His claim seems to be (it’s not especially coherent, so I might be missing something) that the “everything wrong” here is the influence of Enlightenment Anglo/American “revolutionary ideology”, rather than any specific U.S. action. I must say, both the claim that things were lovely before the 19th century (i.e. massive die-off to disease, followed by centuries of military conquest and destruction, forced labor in mines & plantations, horrifically violent suppression of any resistance, relocation away from desirable land, controlled access to credit and trade, complete political control, constant suppression of cultural and religious practice, racial segregation and discrimination, and so forth), and the claim that “revolutionary ideology” is the primary driver of Latin American history for 200 years (rather than, say, changing relationships between colonial élites and Spain, changes in the world economy, shifting power bases within Latin America as it industrializes, conflicts between élites and governments in neighboring countries, two world wars, quite a bit of technological change, and of course the growing world power of the U.S., &c. &c.) are rather extraordinary, and making a case for either one is going to take a rather more solidly grounded and carefully elaborated argument than was provided.
- moldbug 14y ago
  I'm not defending the Spanish conquest - it would definitely be cool if the Incas and Aztecs had been left alone. Not that the Incas and Aztecs were exactly paragons of respect for human rights, you know. (Or do you know?) I'm simply observing that the quality of government by the late pre-revolutionary period, ie, the 18th century, is a lot higher than the quality of government in the 19th and 20th centuries - by almost any sane metric. For instance, it's my belief (maybe not yours) that the main purpose of government is suppression of civil violence. If your government fails at this, nothing it succeeds at much matters. Now, imagine the progress of Mexico over the last two centuries, absent pervasive political and civil violence. Don't forget - the first university in the Americas was founded in Mexico City in 1551, almost 100 years before Harvard. You appear to have been inculcated with a lot of very complex explanations of the tragedy of post-colonial Latin America, whereas my views, obviously, are quite simple. This is no accident. I'm a big believer in Occam's razor. I don't feel it's necessary to construct any intricate explanations of why the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't exist. It's not at all unusual for people living in a historical period to misunderstand it completely, generally as a consequence of political corruption. This is as true of the late Roman Empire as of the late Soviet Union. My feeling is that historians of later eras will understand our world much better, and much more simply, than we understand it ourselves. I'd strongly recommend reading at least one anti-liberal history of this period into which you've put so much study. It'd be a shame to come away with such strong conclusions when you've only heard from the prosecution. Elsewhere on the thread I've recommended Waugh's Robbery Under Law (1939) - not hard to find and very easy to read.
  - jacobolus 14y ago
    Okay. I don’t claim to know what the proper “purpose” of civil government is, or to have visions of a perfectly just society, but in practice government is a set of systems set up by people living near each-other for mediating disputes, defending the group from common threats, and regulating behavior in a formal way (that is, there is some explicit process involved, unlike with informal norms). Citizens seem to be generally happier when their basic physiological needs are met, when they feel valued and respected by the community, when they aren’t treated violently for their thoughts and private practices and associations, when they have meaningful work to do, and meaningful goals and aspirations and especially some common purposes with others in the society with whom they can cooperate, when their frustrations and desires are considered & acted upon by their fellow citizens. When they can provide some feedback to the system itself, and thereby improve both it and their own lives and the lives of their neighbors and children. Now of course, there’s all manner of difficulty with this, because different people have different ideas of what the society should look like and what their roles should be in it, because human societies are very complex games which involve competitive as well as cooperative aspects, and because frequently military, economic, technological, social shocks lead some groups to starvation, disempowerment, etc., in which position they become either depressed or pissed off. Prevention of civil violence is certainly crucial to government (Hobbes’s Leviathan). But that government isn’t working when its information-sharing systems are broken and it fails to respond to citizens’ grievances, to the extent that they are willing to take up arms against it. Civil wars are horrible and destructive and terrible, and often fail to fix anything, or even make matters worse. On the other hand, colonial society in places like Honduras (or Chiapas, where I spent half my childhood) was terribly oppressive and violent. It was mostly a kind of constant low-level violence of forced labor, routine rape and torture and murder, political and economic disempowerment through control of every local institution, theft or destruction of any capital accumulation and suppression or subversion of any attempts to form independent institutions. Occasionally dissatisfaction flared up into larger-scale violence, always brutally suppressed. I don’t know whether this was “higher [...] quality [...] by any sane metric” than the 19th and 20th century governments. I didn’t personally live through it. I do know that nearly the whole history makes me cry to think about.

winestock 14y ago

This is the reason why I down-voted you: You made a point-and-sputter non-reply that added noise and no signal. Mencius Moldbug is not the first person to make those claims. It used to be a staple of conservative Catholic observers of Latin America, whether from the United States or elsewhere. For example, look up the works of William Thomas Walsh or Francis Clement Kelley. http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Drenched-Altars-Francis-Clement-Kelley/dp/0895553198?tag=duckduckgo-d-20 http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Drenched-Altars-Francis-Clement-... Of course, those regimes which the US government liked were almost always viciously anti-clerical so this may not be much of a surprise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Pro http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Pro

jacobolus 14y ago

His claim seems to be (it’s not especially coherent, so I might be missing something) that the “everything wrong” here is the influence of Enlightenment Anglo/American “revolutionary ideology”, rather than any specific U.S. action. I must say, both the claim that things were lovely before the 19th century (i.e. massive die-off to disease, followed by centuries of military conquest and destruction, forced labor in mines & plantations, horrifically violent suppression of any resistance, relocation away from desirable land, controlled access to credit and trade, complete political control, constant suppression of cultural and religious practice, racial segregation and discrimination, and so forth), and the claim that “revolutionary ideology” is the primary driver of Latin American history for 200 years (rather than, say, changing relationships between colonial élites and Spain, changes in the world economy, shifting power bases within Latin America as it industrializes, conflicts between élites and governments in neighboring countries, two world wars, quite a bit of technological change, and of course the growing world power of the U.S., &c. &c.) are rather extraordinary, and making a case for either one is going to take a rather more solidly grounded and carefully elaborated argument than was provided.

moldbug 14y ago
I'm not defending the Spanish conquest - it would definitely be cool if the Incas and Aztecs had been left alone. Not that the Incas and Aztecs were exactly paragons of respect for human rights, you know. (Or do you know?) I'm simply observing that the quality of government by the late pre-revolutionary period, ie, the 18th century, is a lot higher than the quality of government in the 19th and 20th centuries - by almost any sane metric. For instance, it's my belief (maybe not yours) that the main purpose of government is suppression of civil violence. If your government fails at this, nothing it succeeds at much matters. Now, imagine the progress of Mexico over the last two centuries, absent pervasive political and civil violence. Don't forget - the first university in the Americas was founded in Mexico City in 1551, almost 100 years before Harvard. You appear to have been inculcated with a lot of very complex explanations of the tragedy of post-colonial Latin America, whereas my views, obviously, are quite simple. This is no accident. I'm a big believer in Occam's razor. I don't feel it's necessary to construct any intricate explanations of why the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't exist. It's not at all unusual for people living in a historical period to misunderstand it completely, generally as a consequence of political corruption. This is as true of the late Roman Empire as of the late Soviet Union. My feeling is that historians of later eras will understand our world much better, and much more simply, than we understand it ourselves. I'd strongly recommend reading at least one anti-liberal history of this period into which you've put so much study. It'd be a shame to come away with such strong conclusions when you've only heard from the prosecution. Elsewhere on the thread I've recommended Waugh's Robbery Under Law (1939) - not hard to find and very easy to read.
- jacobolus 14y ago
  Okay. I don’t claim to know what the proper “purpose” of civil government is, or to have visions of a perfectly just society, but in practice government is a set of systems set up by people living near each-other for mediating disputes, defending the group from common threats, and regulating behavior in a formal way (that is, there is some explicit process involved, unlike with informal norms). Citizens seem to be generally happier when their basic physiological needs are met, when they feel valued and respected by the community, when they aren’t treated violently for their thoughts and private practices and associations, when they have meaningful work to do, and meaningful goals and aspirations and especially some common purposes with others in the society with whom they can cooperate, when their frustrations and desires are considered & acted upon by their fellow citizens. When they can provide some feedback to the system itself, and thereby improve both it and their own lives and the lives of their neighbors and children. Now of course, there’s all manner of difficulty with this, because different people have different ideas of what the society should look like and what their roles should be in it, because human societies are very complex games which involve competitive as well as cooperative aspects, and because frequently military, economic, technological, social shocks lead some groups to starvation, disempowerment, etc., in which position they become either depressed or pissed off. Prevention of civil violence is certainly crucial to government (Hobbes’s Leviathan). But that government isn’t working when its information-sharing systems are broken and it fails to respond to citizens’ grievances, to the extent that they are willing to take up arms against it. Civil wars are horrible and destructive and terrible, and often fail to fix anything, or even make matters worse. On the other hand, colonial society in places like Honduras (or Chiapas, where I spent half my childhood) was terribly oppressive and violent. It was mostly a kind of constant low-level violence of forced labor, routine rape and torture and murder, political and economic disempowerment through control of every local institution, theft or destruction of any capital accumulation and suppression or subversion of any attempts to form independent institutions. Occasionally dissatisfaction flared up into larger-scale violence, always brutally suppressed. I don’t know whether this was “higher [...] quality [...] by any sane metric” than the 19th and 20th century governments. I didn’t personally live through it. I do know that nearly the whole history makes me cry to think about.