* Asabiya will be low if the people had civilization/strong states earlier. Imagine people living under strong states for 5000 years. (Iraq for example) You lived/reproduced more if you bowed down to authority. You and your relatives reproduced more if you spent most of your energy on your close relatives, family, tribe etc. instead of whole population. You and your relatives reproduced more if you were nepotistic. Strong states killed all the rebels during those 5000 years. You reproduced more if you were ok with the dictator. Today this creates a corrupt, authoritarian, tribalistic/sectarian, cousin-marriage society with dysfunctional army. (still i’d say without the Islamic Golden Age iq decline (probably around 15 points) Iraq would be something like more authoritarian Singapore)
Similar pattern is there in Europe too. Two most corrupt countries in Europe are the earliest civilized/state ones, Greece and Italy. Least corrupt ones are later state ones like Finland, Sweden.
* Ariel Sharon, and the Saudis opposed removing Saddam, who was a thorn in their side but useful against the Iranians who they rightly regarded as the real, major threat to their regimes.
However, it was proposed that removing Saddam, and allowing Western investment in Iraq’s oil fields, would do the following:
A. Make America feared again by removing a convenient example of defiance, repeatedly, of American demands.
B. Be accomplished relatively quickly as armies and air forces could be supplied by the sea, instead of a land-locked region in Central Asia that required iffy Russian cooperation (Afghanistan).
C. Re-inforce the Carter Doctrine guaranteeing US Military dominance of the Gulf.
D. Give the US a convenient client state with lots and lots of oil that could prevent the Saudis from EVER jacking up the price of oil.
E. Give every Iraqi a share of oil receipts and produce a Gulf-like moderation based on keeping the peace and dialing down Jihad to keep the money flowing.
This failed obviously because the policy was oversold to the American people, done on the dirt cheap, and Bush was passive in not explaining what it was all about: OIL OIL OIL. Like oil was some original sin.
America runs on cheap oil. Examine your bank account when gas is $4 or above, and when its closer to $2. The cheapest oil is in the ME, and to guarantee its flow the US needs to dominate and have client states, ideally a few to play off each other.
This is the reality of your air conditioning, your computer, your car, your jet travel, your Amazon orders, pretty much everything in your life. It runs on OIL, not Unicorn Farts and Rainbows.
Since the Dems, Code Pink, and the rest got their way, we have Iraq controlled by Iran, a hostile power aiming at expensive oil, being fought by ISIS, also wanting expensive oil and world-wide Jihad, with the Saudis being our only alternative; the Iranians are not going to flood the market with cheap oil but demand the Saudis cut production as part of the nuclear deal. With nukes to back up their demands.
Americans deserved a vote on this: do we back off the ME, leave Iraq and the Gulf to their own devices, live in Pat Buchanon isolationism and moral splendor? And have gas at say, $8-9-10 a gallon or more? With everyone but the very rich living essentially like Depression Era poor? Or do a lot of Americans die in agony and we kill a LOT more people to keep gas at a reasonable price of $3 a gallon?
* Part of the problem with successful civilizations is that they allow EVERYBODY a greater chance for survival. “It’s better to be poor in a rich country than poor in a poor country,” is a well-known concept. If you want to see a population explosion among the ungifted, parasitic, and dumb, civilization enables them to start reproducing in Malthusian numbers. They’d win a Darwin award if they had to survive in a state of raw and unforgiving nature.
Eventually, the losers will overwhelm the original population because they breed earlier and more often than the responsible people. If you want to know what happened to the ancient Greeks and why their brilliance declined, there’s your answer.
The US and Europe, by making it so easy for losers to thrive, are eventually going to be overwhelmed by people with lousy genes because the liberal saps who run their governments refuse to cull them or keep them out. You have to cut off their ability to breed if they refuse to raise their own offspring. No welfare, period, and sterilization if they insist on dumping their kids on the state.
The death penalty should be for all felonies of every kind, and juries should be able to hear about your criminal past and take that into account before making their final decision. There’s no reason why we should endanger the welfare of everyone in a community just so we can coddle repeat offenders who are incurable sociopaths. That’s utter insanity.
Criminal justice is still stuck in the Victorian era when it comes to psychology. These days we know sociopaths are hard-wired, and once they go bad, it’s futile to attempt to rehabilitate them. The ridiculous thing is that liberals keep trying to rehabilitate and excuse sociopaths due to a type of religious thinking that comes from religions that liberals themselves don’t even believe in anymore.
* The vice known as gambling is also huge among Asians. The Asian people I have been friends with in my life, they have all admitted they have at least 1 family member who is a serious gambling addict. And Asians usually suck at gambling as the vast majority of them lose way more than they win. The vast majority of Asian gambling addicts always end up in the financial red.
And gambling addiction is even higher depending on which Asian group you are talking about. Filipinos are the worst even by Asian standards and that says a lot. I remember going to a casino just a few miles outside of the Sacramento city limits and it looked a like a freaking Little Quezon City/Little Manila in there even though Filipinos are a small Minority of the Sacramento metropolitan area.
