There's an emerging "Why the Republic" blogging trend. Now the bulk of English language Trilema consists of material to this end, but it is pointedly not enough for the words to be published once. Everyone has to engage them. As spyked offered:
It occurs to me, after circa three years of following the unfolding history of The Most Serene Republic, and about a year and a half of just beginning to participate, that this is by far the most interesting, intellectually challenging (and demanding), fun, promising, etc. project one could think of, or in any case, the only (as far as I know) serious thing happening while the world's busy derping about. So since it's finally occured to me, it's high time I set a (realistic, I hope) schedule for my short-term work, also taking into account saecular matters. Furthermore, I will have a glance into other future work and invite members of the Lordship to comment on priorities.
I came to what would become the Republic because after being broken by 8 years of US "Higher Education", the up and coming Bitcoin thing I'd heard of and failed to properly engage when I first heard of it was growing. By the time I'd started dipping my toes in, a large group of dominant and sophisticated in their estimation folks had just been humiliated. It took me still more months of reading and passive engagement before cautiously approaching #bitcoin-assets when I clearly understood that's where Bitcoin was happening. Over the next several years the number of people who came by and just didn't get it puzzled me.
Coming into the Bitcoin space it was pretty clear early on that much of the space was filled with marginal folks causing problems, and the efforts to properly marginalize the marginal were coming out of MPEx. As time went on part of me kept thinking humanity, could be lifted if only people stopped being stupid. During my last two years in the US I was heavily involved in a self help movement that offered people afflicted by a problem a solution. Some took well to it, but many came and went still suffering.
Some died suffering. People with a mortal problem from which they have to save themselves encountering a solution and then either rejecting it or delaying acceptance until the problem solves them first. Ok, so not everyone is going to lift themself up out of stupid, but a part of me, deep down, thought the capacity of people to lift themself was still there. The idea that the offensively stupid could be something else would not die so long as I remained in the US, in spite of reading Trilema and participating in the Republic's growth there was this filter. Being submerged in the US culture bubble reinforced the filter whether it was being fed by Rush Limbaugh or those 8 years of higher education that in the end left me in a worse position and generally less capable than I was the day I left high school by just about every metric.1
And Then I Moved
I used to think the merits of Uruguay and the Southern Cone were in how backwards this place is. It has taken me a lot of time to internalize how much further forward everything is here compared to the US. I read and re-read on Trilema how Argentina is the future of the US, but living here. Being here and not there, the point grows through lived experience. Unlike Argentina, the Uruguayos will readily and enthusiastically admit they have problems and live in a poor country. The culture in the city is refereshingly rural. This is not an easy country, but I am enjoying the resistance of the medium more than last year.
The minimum wage is roughly 500 present USD and a good local wage is roughly twice that. Independent living in a place with a kitchen requires nearly twice that so intergenerational households are the norm. Agricultural outputs are high in volume and of high quality which means that thanks to holy economy Asia gets to eat much of Uruguay's beef. Contrast to the US where agricultural outputs are high in volume and of low quality where estadounidenses and chinese pork get fattened on the US's agricultural output. Throw in the US deindustrializing while Uruguay never quite industrialized... Contrast the US being big while Uruguay is small... Those are big picture things.
Let's revisit the digging at the deflation thing:
These days the difficulty of feeding yourself in Albany has nothing to do with you being able to kill a turkey with a gun and a limited supply of bullets, nor is it you being able to find dry wood or start a fire because there's no turkey, there's no dry wood and it's not even legal for you to try and live off the land in Albany. These days the difficulty of feeding yourself has everything to do with you finding a restaurant and then finding a seat and then their having some food to serve you. The resources are so scarce that you need to have everything imported from miles and miles away. The burden you've put on your immediate environment is so great that there's not even a shadow of a hope of survival on your own. Should these supply lines fail for as much as a couple of days you are doomed.
Back when North America was the land of opportunity, one could live off the fat of the land in a very literal sense. The land held a bunch of fat critters and all you had to do was bag and butcher one. The ecosystem that made that possible was done in. It does not persist in the lower 48, even in the rural areas. Is it any coincidence the vegan/vegetarian trend in the US is getting pushed harder and deeper now that it ever has before? Nevermind that animal proteins offer a lot of what the body wants in a way the body can use. Great Inca in New York and DC has decided the US must move forward to a more historically congruent slave diet for New Inca's slave population.
While old country had a lot of plasticrap and shiny trinkets imported to separate consumers from the money passing through them and old country has less, there are still chump siphons as evidenced by ham, bacon, and other fiambres existing as luxury goods instead of ways to stretch the life of cheap pork.
The Movement Up North
One of the bigger, younger, more energetic populist blocks supporting Trump has renounced him. They renounced him for a Pantsuitist named Yang promising a 1000 USD income if he gets elected. Their though is if their world is going to shit they should at least embrace they guy offering them money while things go to shit. Their socialist resignation, however nationalist they may profess to be, is now driving their memes. Never mind dollars and pesos were once coins of standard composition and weight. That the Latin Monetary Union was once a thing and foreign exchange not a particular problem in the civilized world of the time. Or that in today's fiat system "Which Peso?" is a thing that needs to be specified. How are they to know that things happened to create the present environment where dollars and pesos are no longer materially similar things?
Labor activists in this part of the world will tell stories about how they heroically shuttered a factory with their demands. That jobs here were lost in favor of jobs in Mexico or Paraguay does not much matter to them. Plenty of valuables in the dumpsters to recollect. What, someone else had to make the judgment the item in question is trash before discarding it? Surely the kids up north will manage to reinvent this on their own.
- Other than getting a couple sheets of paper which I had spent my entire childhood being told were the most valuable things I should pursue early in life. [↩]