There's an old saying, that Paris would be lovely without the Parisians. I don't actually agree with that. They can be a bit arrogant, sure, but on the whole I find Parisian men quite civil and Parisian women classy and sexy. So I hope they stay.

There is one place though where that saying absolutely fits. Hong Kong. HK is a very cool city. It is a first world city built on a landscape of high tropical mountains, and you can see how the force of modern industry has made humans conquer the environment, fitting skyscrapers into the mountain bedrock and open-air escalators to reach them with ease.

https://twitter.com/CarlZha/status/1165490546883715074

Hong Kong also produced Hong Kong cinema, one

of the few non Anglo film industries with a distinctive style and which aims to

entertain and not preach to the viewers. There's also Hong Kong music, which...

well, no, that's pretty bad. On the other hand Hong Kong has, in my view, one

the best food industries in the world, or at least had until 5 years ago when

mainland China started to up its game. All in all, Hong Kong is a great place.

I used to go often and enjoy every visit

But that doesn't mean it has a great people. Oh no. Hong Kong is indeed a cool city, but it would be much cooler if you just replaced its population wholesale. Hong Kongers are, generally speaking, a bunch of rude, uncultured, materialistic, annoying, semi-glossic, entitled twats with a chip on their shoulder, who think they're hot shit because they were lucky enough to be licking British ass while their fellow Chinese fell under the boot of Communism for 3 decades. Their average looks, famously the ugliest in China, don’t add to their appeal.

https://twitter.com/_cyphe/status/1165291966202044417

So what's going on in Hong Kong? A massive

riot sponsored and organized by the United States Government, that’s what’s

happening. What we call a “color revolution”. Funds by USG’s National Endowment

for Democracy have been revealed, US diplomatic staff have been found

organizing the rioters, and the whole mass of Western journalists (i.e. half

the Cathedral) have been pushing the most egregious propaganda for weeks.

There’s nothing special, nothing unique about this. Color revolutions aren’t

new. This isn’t the first one, and won’t be the last one. The day Germany grows

a pair and starts to push back against US meddling in European politics, rest

assured that Berlin will burn for weeks under a massive Antifa riot lionized by

the US press.

That said, the US isn’t that powerful. Not that generous; the money USG is sending around isn't enough to motivate every single rioter to get out of home. USG isn't stupid and it only pulls the trigger in places where the powder is already plentiful and ready to burn. It needs a fifth column of people willing to burn it all, a place where people hate the status quo so much they’d rather sell their country to USG. Hong Kong is indeed such a place.

https://twitter.com/Gerrrty/status/1163136288792481793

How did that happen? To put it briefly, Hong

Kongers think they are a superior people to the rest of China, and to the

bottom of their hearts hate being ruled by Beijing. This isn’t about Communism

or muh Freedom or muh Human Rights. This is a basic, deep problem of

self-perceived social status. As I’ve said again and again, 90% of human

concerns are about social status. Hong Kongers think China is low-status and

hate every association with it. On the flip side, Hong Kongers think that Japan

is high status. Also England. Well, the Anglosphere as a whole. So they revel

in associating with it. Hong Kongers will spend 2,000 dollars to get on a plane

on a Friday evening to fly 5 hours to Japan and spend the weekend there eating

lame high-carb food and buying cosmetics that don’t really work just to be able

to go back and say they've been to Japan again. That’s on Hong Kong where work

hours are long and leisure time very precious. But that’s just part of the

culture.

Why do HK people think China is so low status? Well because for a long time, and for a critical time period in Hong Kong history, the time period where Hong Kong’s population stabilised and its culture took form, China was indeed a poor shithole of peasants who shat in the street and were ruled by a bunch of retarded communists. Societies are just an aggregation of people, and people are dumb and stubborn. Memories taken as a child get fixed as culture, and are almost impossible to update after adulthood. Hong Kong collectively grew up being somewhat understandably disgusted by China's backwardness. That all that is 40 years in the past and Chinese living standards in most cities are by now higher than in Hong Kong just doesn’t register to them. They just won’t admit it, the same way old men never admit their experiences just aren’t relevant anymore. Things never change if that change results in lower status to oneself. That’s how human brains operate. Scale that to a whole society and it can be brutal.

https://twitter.com/spt1171/status/1161595680193839107

When shown that salaries in Shanghai are

higher, the food is better, apartments are incomparably bigger and better

designed, internet services are an order of magnitude better; Hong Kongers just

double down and talk about Human Rights and Internet Freedom not because they

actually care; but because that’s all they have left to justify their

culturally engrained sense of superiority. Even if you get a HKer to admit that

Human Rights is all bullshit he’ll just come and say that Cantonese is a

superior language and Mandarin just isn’t as expressive. Which is rich, as

Cantonese, which has for decades had a workable writing system, is almost never

written in practice, because the local intellectuals never bothered to learn

and spread it. All literature in Hong Kong is written in 1920 style Mandarin

prose, read out loud in Cantonese but with Mandarin grammar. It’s as if all

books in Italy were written in 19th century-style French but read

out in Italian pronunciation, and all Italian kids learned to write in French

at school, with Italian writing being an extremely low-class affair left for

tabloids and shady internet forums.

Most Hong Kongers can't even type Chinese characters phonetically, resulting in typing speeds several times slower than in China, or people just typing in English because it’s easier on the hands. These aren’t people who really care about their linguistic culture. They're just arrogant chauvinists. It’s ethnocentrism at its most retarded.

https://twitter.com/qin_duke/status/1161995495625113602

Hong Kong exists because the Hong Kong

economy exists, and that exists because as China went communist, Hong Kong was

the only sizeable place with a decent commercially-minded government and a land

border with China. Hong Kong was the middleman for making business in China,

and as China opened up and developed, the economic rationale for Hong Kong

slowly eroded. Again, starting salaries for college grads in Hong Kong are

already lower than in the richest cities in China. Hong Kongers aren't superior

anymore, by any metric. The city is decaying, little by little, and there's

nothing unnatural about that. Urban economies rise and fall, that’s just a

normal result of economic cycles. Happens all the time in every country.

In normal circumstances when a city's economy starts to falter, young people just pack up and leave for growing cities. But HKers won’t do that. They may leave the country, move to the Anglosphere if they have a chance (not to Japan, that’s only suitable for LARPing in the weekends, the language is too hard), but the vast majority of HKers would hang themselves in the nearest lamp post before considering the logical option of just packing up and moving to Dongguan. Why? Because China is low status, and they are high status. Why? Because it has always been like that, Mommy and Granny told them so. So they will stay, and complain endlessly about why HK isn't as rich as they believe they're entitled to be. A life is not worth living if you can't live in a 50sqm apartment and hire a Filipina to clean it because you're too busy commuting to your corporate lawyer secretary job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUXowE-Futo

It doesn’t help that there’s much fucked in

Hong Kong for it being a tax haven where all of China is parking their money in

real estate, and the government is captured by Lee Ka-shing and fellow

oligarchs. But hey, that's the whole point of Hong Kong. The day it stops being

a tax haven run by oligarchs is the day the economy actually collapses

completely. There’s just no other point to the place. People should stop

whining and just move where their productivity can actually afford them human

living standards.

But again, they won't move. Why? Because they think they're hot shit, they’re superior to those people living in places with lower rents. And why are they so fucking stubborn? Because Hong Kong is (or used to be) a city state, and it has its own culture. And culture is extremely hard to change. Basically impossible without organized, constant state intervention (i.e. violence) applied for decades.

https://twitter.com/thespandrell/status/1161398330079043585

This is the clusterfuck that is Hong Kong

today, where basically a majority of higher educated young people have

collectively become Antifa in a desperate attempt to retain a distinctive

culture which is just destined to die. But culture dies hard, and cultures

which give you a sense of status superiority are basically permanent. They

won’t die, you have to kill them. The culture, I mean.

I could go on on how annoying and duplicitous and violent-yet effeminate and just outright evil the Hong Kong protesters are being, beating people to a pulp, throwing bricks and fire bombs into people’s houses, vandalizing the whole city while jumping in the air crying bloody murder like soccer places every time a policeman just but looks at them. Violently preventing foreign families with small children from going reaching airplanes to go home, justifying openly the targeting of policemen’s families. See at how HK rioters operate and (if you still had any) you will lose all hope in the power of rationality and debate. If the motivation is strong enough, people will lie, steal, hit and steal like there’s no tomorrow. Sociopathy can be induced. Very easily.

https://twitter.com/mibuxiaode/status/1160436543204425729

It’s quite the sight to see to what insane

lengths Hong Kongers go to slander China and make it public that they just

won't be associated with it. This in a city where the majority of population

moved from China barely 50 years ago! See this Hong Kong “scholar” arguing that

China is a cannibalistic culture, where eating human meat was just part of the

usual savagery of life. Nothing to do with Hong Kong themselves, of course; the

light of British enlightenment and bastardized Christianity (you really gotta

check out local Christians for yourself, it’s hilarious) has purified them of

all that yellow savagery.

But the Hong Kong riots have a deeper lesson than just how evil people can become when they want to, how a basic sense of honesty and decency go down the drain when a movement is allowed to be captured by its left-wing of sociopathic status maximizers. The deeper lesson here is about the Patchwork, this old libertarian concept about competitive governance inherited by neoreaction. The idea that bad government is the result of a lack of competition, that countries today are overall too large, and an ideal world would have city-state sized countries experimenting with different types of government and culture, and having them compete to develop the most effective ways of managing human affairs.

https://twitter.com/thespandrell/status/1161396428310241280

The problem with that is provincialism, the

nativism of small places. Political units tend to develop particular cultures

among the population. Humans all want to be high status. Absent obvious signs

to the contrary, given enough time humans will convince themselves they are

indeed high status. Smaller political units will do it just the same as bigger

political units. Poor places will do it just the same as rich places. Hong

Kong, historically a malarial rock with at most a few dozen fishing huts, think

they are hot shit, a paradise of civility and hard work with the most moral

people and the wittiest language in human history. North Korea, a miserable half

of what already was a destitute slave nation of Chinese emperors for 2,000

years, a country which still struggles to feed its own population, thinks

they’re hot shit too, heroes of anti-imperialism and the birthplace of

everything worthwhile in Asian history.

A patchwork city who is underperforming economically compared to some neighbouring city isn’t just going to copy whatever government structures or cultural practices of a richer neighbour. Most likely it will just come up with some lame rationalization about how their backwardness is actually just a sign of their superior status, and before changing a iota of its own habits, will rather go to war with the richer city for having the audacity of not accepting the poor city’s cultural superiority. That’s just what humans do. That's exactly what all the Greek polis did until they were invaded and thrown to the dustbin of history by Macedon and Rome.

https://twitter.com/XinqiSu/status/1161233443809714176

Larger countries

indeed can become complacent; but the mechanisms that produce that aren’t just

about size, it’s just humans being humans and culture being stubborn. What a

bigger size gives you is more time to decay until the whole thing collapses;

while city states have less ability to be unproductive until they collapse or

get invaded. But that’s the thing: Science advances one funeral at a time. The

Invisible Hand of Capitalism works its magic through bankruptcies, redistributing

idle capital into productive purposes. Underperforming city states in a

patchwork must also be annihilated if the competitive principle is to work: but

unlike libertarians who assume that underperforming city states would just lose

their assets (its capital and population) and see it redistributed elsewhere, humans

don’t work like that. People will stay and deny the decline until the bitter

end. It will always end in violence, either through invasion and takeover by a

foreign power, or if that is not an option, through the violent rebellion of

the deracinate locals going full retard on nativism so they can assign status

on their own without looking out of their own borders into the real world.

This is Hong Kong we’re talking about, the textbook example of rampant free market capitalism, a monument to the power of impersonal Capital, the unlikeliest of global cities, with its skinny skyscrapers built on top of a typhoon-prone tropical rocky island. And yet this very monument to rootless capitalism has evolved one of the nastiest and dumbest forms of chauvinist culture you can encounter on earth, and that provincialism, ignited by USG’s agitation machine, is menacing to bring down the economy now too, undergoing now the closest thing to a Cultural Revolution the world has seen since Mao’s days. And that one was a top-down conspiracy orchestrated by Mao and his cronies! Hong Kong youngsters are destroying their own city this on their own.

https://twitter.com/Birdyword/status/1161299001414578177

After the

successful rebellion of the United States against Britain, there was this

debate about the powers of the Federal government. One of the best arguments of

the federalists, who won in the end, was the dangers of the dangers of local

tyranny. The fact that a state is small doesn’t necessarily mean it will be better

controlled by its citizens, it could very well be captured by a strong man or a

few families and run as an effectively feudal state forever. They should have

added the stultifying effects of local cultures without ease of movement of its

citizens. That’s not so much of a problem in the Anglosphere, with a common

language for 500 million people across 20 million square kilometres, but places

with a more distinctive culture, especially if they have their own small

language, can go full retard very easily. Even Scotland, which merely has a (admittedly

strange) dialect of English, is going full retard in their cultural

distinctiveness, again rationalizing its economic failure by reassigning status

locally to be whatever it is that can make them feel superior to their neighbors.

Ever since I started this blog I’ve felt ambivalent about nation-states. I will readily agree that globalism is a plague and that different forms of government are suitable for different peoples, diversity in government being generally a good thing. And yet the pursuit of diversity and distinctiveness for its own sake has also always striked me as a conspiracy of academic collectionists. One thousand languages are dying every year! Big fucking deal. As a linguist I do feel sorry I’ll lose some potential objects of study, but my entertainment isn’t a good enough reason to keep alive things that are meant to die. Should I care if some yellow frog in the Amazon is going extinct? Hell no. Unless it tastes good, but if it did we’d be farming it already. Is it a world priority the conservation of the Latvian national identity? Would it be a big deal if Denmark were to disappear as a distinct unit? What about Ireland? Doesn’t seem that they care themselves that much about their own culture.

https://twitter.com/SFkUSLyimKiCvnG/status/1163665657403023361

Do the nations of

the earth have a right to preserve their own culture? Many antiglobalists would

instinctually answer “yes”. But the proper answer to that question is that

there’s no such thing as “rights”. Some cultures are good, some cultures are

bad; some nations make sense, some nations just don’t have the means to

subsist, and so won’t, and should be allowed to dissolve, instead of insisting

on keeping everything alive artificially, making the world a ethnic group zoo

where every single distinct culture which existed at the end of World War 2

must be preserved as part of the American project to freeze everything at the

moment where its power was at its peak.

What is a “nation” anyway? What is a “people”? The usual attributes are easy to spot: common language and folklore, self-perceived status as a unit distinct to its neighbors. But all those attributes didn’t come out of thin air. They evolved over time, and they evolved because they worked in their particular historical environment. If perceiving yourself as a distinct nation implied your annihilation after a few weeks, like, say, in the case of a Mongol subtribe under the rule of the Khans, or a small fief close to the Kingdom of France, well odds are you aren’t going to perceive yourself as a distinct nation, because the moment you do you get invaded and destroyed. If national status gets you money, women, and lionized in the international press as a Champion of Liberty, well odds are that the among the most impressionable people on earth, i.e. young men and women, who the West has the retarded habit of assembling daily in these places we call Universities, are going to feel like a nation very very fast.

https://twitter.com/CarlZha/status/1165416559122141185

In other words, ethnocentrism

only exists when it pays. While many in the far right talk about pathological altruism

and a lack of ethnocentrism dooming many white nations, it is important to

understand under which conditions does ethnocentrism actually work to produce a

powerful nation. Not always. Not at all.

Is China going to

destroy Hong Kong the way France destroyed all its regional cultures? Not

outright, that’s not how the Communist Party of China does things. The CPC are

real believers in materialism. They really think that Uyghurs for example go

into Islamism because their poor, and the day they’re lifted out of poverty

(through education, of course. The blind belief in Education is the one thing

that the West learned from Confucians and then re-exported as one of the main

tenets of Progressivism) they’ll just become deracinated hedonists like

everyone else. The propaganda line about Hong Kong right now is that a lack of economic

opportunity for young Hong Kongese, in addition to outright mobilization by the

United States of the worst thugs and lowlifes in the city, is behind the riots.

Which is completely missing the point. No amount of money is going to change the

deeply engrained feeling of status superiority of the HKese towards China. It

would only make it worse. The same way that more money would make Muslims even

more arrogant and violent towards outsiders. The comparison with Muslims really

is apt. Two million Hong Kong citizens demonstrated against the extradition

bill. It doesn’t mean that two million people participated in the violent

riots, the beatings of police and dissenting citizens, the physical wrecking of

roads, the blockage of the airport. But they won’t condemn it either. “These

kids are just too hot headed but their heart is in the right place”. The sort of

thing that your average Muslim says about Al Qaeda.

The only effective answer to make Hong Kong a loyal city for China is one that nobody wants to hear: cultural genocide. It would basically take that to make a majority of Hong Kong residents stand up and sing the Chinese anthem with enthusiasm. But that takes decades of very unpleasant effort, especially in a time, as ours, where the prevalent ideology of the Anglo-Jewish elite ruling the American empire and its vassals is committed to the preservation of ethnic identity across the world as a supreme moral mission. A very crafty version of classical divide and conquer, but based on the Holocaust story. Discouraging Cantonese in schools would be tantamount to Auschwitz, HKers will tell you with a straight face.

https://twitter.com/OedoSoldier/status/1165202605640835072

Right now China’s

propaganda department is putting videos of HK protesters with American flags

shitting on China and beating up Chinese citizens 24/7, proving to mainlanders

what a bunch of despicable traitors the HKese are. The victimist narrative is

working wonders and a pretty massive boycott on everything Hong Kong has

already started. China is gearing up to play the long game, as it can’t afford

to get sanctioned by USG and its allies on trumped charges of “massacring

students” as happened after June 1989 in Tian’anmen. Hong Kong isn’t that important.

It’s funny that Progressivism holds racism as the supreme evil, and yet spares no effort in supporting provincialism and ethnic chauvinism, which are basically the same primal xenophobic instinct, but applied in a narrower and much more irrational way. Races after all do differ in behavior in much larger ways than neighboring ethnic groups. But that’s how Bioleninism works: you’re allowed, even encouraged to hate your family, especially your smarter and more productive relations. What you’re not allowed is to hate complete strangers, especially the nastiest and most hostile ones.

https://mobile.twitter.com/EconGeopolTech/status/1165419636763938817