January 9, 2017 marks the day I began blogging a decade ago.
Donations
I suppose now’s as good a time as any to launch my second panhandling drive.
If you like the words that I write, and want me to write more of them, you can personally make that happen: http://akarlin.com/donations/
Looking Back
My first (non-intro) post: Reading Russia Right. On rereading it, I see that all of my main themes were already present. I might have perhaps been rather too pollyannaish about Russia’s prospects – after all, I did start off blogging as “Da Russophile” – but I don’t think anything there was actually cardinally wrong.
In contrast to the brief and more personalized account that follows, you can read a more detailed history of my blogging career here: http://akarlin.com/start/
The mid-2000s to the early 2010s were the golden age of blogging, and I hitched myself on about midway through the process.
There were considerable successes – although I never cared much for catering to popular trends, my blog(s) were getting around 750,000 annual pageviews by the early 2010s, despite a nasty pharma hack destroying my SEO ratings in early 2012. I also started openly incorporating HBD insights around mid-2012; just in time to scare off lefty Russophiles (majority in the West then), but too late to be one of its early adopters (I was writing about the importance of IQ from the very start in 2008, but had up till then been careful to maintain racial agnosticism, largely for education/work-related reasons).
But there were failures too. Part of this was due to blogging in general falling into a sort of dark age as social media ravaged community after community like an online venereal disease. But the main reason was that at the end of the day, blogging was a hobby for me. The disparate projects I had tried to launch in 2013 – most prominently, The Russian Spectrum translation portal and The Russia Debate forum – had all floundered, and I was increasingly busy with other things. I produced a total of about 5 posts in 2014. I did have some loose plans to resume serious blogging at that time, but to be fair, I am not 100% sure I would have ended up following through on them. Maybe in an alternate timeline, my blogging career would have ended around then.
But then Ron Unz wrote an email to me on Jan 2, 2015 offering me to resume blogging at The Unz Review, and the rest is history.
I more or less recovered my visitorship and pageview numbers in my first two years at The Unz Review, despite continued depreciation of my old websites, and blasted past them in last year, when I returned to Russia and began doing this and other related things more or less as a job instead of as just a hobby.
| Items | PWords | Comms | CWords | Visits | Views | |
| 2008 | 70 | 139,021 | 304 | 37,218 | ||
| 2009 | 72 | 254,052 | 867 | 152,868 | ||
| 2010 | 81 | 209,939 | 1,594 | 200,483 | ||
| 2011 | 75 | 152,706 | 3,159 | 406,353 | ||
| 2012 | 172 | 153,634 | 5,164 | 662,995 | ||
| 2013 | 167 | 132,173 | 1,986 | 259,421 | ||
| 2014 | 5 | 5,154 | 1,023 | 147,549 | ||
| 2015 | 130 | 156,592 | 5,504 | 664,553 | 128,326 | 382,574 |
| 2016 | 128 | 120,956 | 6,204 | 597,092 | 188,570 | 493,156 |
| 2017 | 262 | 190,137 | 17,326 | 1,808,417 | 237,477 | 791,675 |
That said, I still have some ways to go. For instance, Steve Sailer gets an order of magnitude more pageviews (c.11 million in 2017).
Looking Forwards
What next for the Russia blogosphere?
My impression is that things are becoming dumbed down, very r-selected. The Russia commentary now is dominated by folks who make La Russophobe (remember it?) look like the apex of nuance and reason. Which doesn’t stop the likes of Louise Mensch, Eric Garland, and Molly McKew from having a couple of orders of magnitude more Twitter followers than myself (or other minimally sane people, such as Bryan MacDonald, Ben Aris, or even Leonid Bershidsky).
It has to be admitted that grounding the Russia discourse in reality, a goal which I was seriously pursuing as late as 2013, has completely failed – and that the New Cold War is here to stay, even though it was a ridiculous prospect when Ed Lucas first wrote the eponymous Russia-baiting book. I do not care to participate in this information war on either side of the trenches, since I am not making money off it, and because my goals and values are orthogonal to those of the Kremlin elites and the globalist elites anyway.
With this in mind, I now feel more strongly than ever that I need to put a capstone to my Russia watching career in the form of a book: Dark Lord of the Kremlin.
Yes, yes, I know I have been promising it to my long-suffering readers for years now – but I really do think 2018 will be the year.
Could the increasing inanity/censorship of social media drive resurgence of a blogging?
I sure hope so, but there’s tentative signs that social media usage is falling off.
However, it seems many of them are migrating to other media formats, not back to bloggers.
Video seems like best way to reach the masses.
Our ROGPR YouTube channel (Alt Right politics and video gaming for Russians) now has 4,200 subscribers after half a year of intermittent new content.
People like RAMZPAUL have become media sensations, up to the point that Ron Unz has opened up a videos section on this journal.
This is certainly something I will delve into deeper, though not in 2018. Spreading oneself too thin is a mistake, and one that I have made more times than I should have.
Other potential projects
- Dark Equilibrium: Book length version/expansion of my essay on The Age of Malthusian Industrialism.
- A post-apocalyptic sci-fi book (if I manage to get DLK and DE done this year).
- Apollo’s Ascent: Book length version of this essay. Realistically speaking, not going to happen until 2021 at the earliest, since it’s a massive undertaking and I frankly don’t have the necessary background to adequately realize it yet.
What next for HBD, futurism?
Momentum is building up at a blistering pace, with new discoveries in the genomics of IQ made seemingly every week.
In the long-term, the political hysterias of today (Ukraine, Russiagate, Trump, etc.) will fade into irrelevance, but the future dynamics of genetic editing + IQ augmentation will pretty much determine who gets to rule the 21st century (unless machine intelligence cuts humanity out of the loop early). And I will gradually – especially after the publication of DLK – want to reorient more in that direction after 2018.
Definitely seems a good idea to get in on early on this for both publicistic and commercial reasons.
Yo yo yo, what do you think about the beyond (2017). Since you’re a transhumanabedinisist and such. Watching right now.
On another note, what are your thoughts, and the general receptions of Rezun’s writings on soviet military history and GRU?
From personal experience, and sailer’s lame articles on poland, I guess it takes a native to understand even the the most superficial truths about the internal politics of the countries of foreign soviet bloc.
Recently I happened to read an old interview you did with La Russophobe, and discovered that your views have evolved somewhat since 2011… it was strange to see you declaring that you couldn’t support Navalny until he firmly disavowed ethnic Russian chauvinism, and praising Putin for stressing the multiethnic nature of the Russian Federation!
Not seen it & probably not going to; no serious historian takes Rezun seriously (my old comment on him).
Sure, I was basically a vanilla Russian civic nationalist back then.
Then again, many things were very different back then, anyway. Russian ethno-nationalists were a sorry lot, and often pretty much treasonous to boot. And ethnic politics hadn’t yet devolved to the hellish state they are at today.
Even so, I was an immigration skeptic from the very beginning (2008): “As such, in my opinion the Japanese method of substituting capital for labor on the factory floor (it has more than a third of the world’s stock of industrial robots) is generally smarter than importing a diverse mob of car-burners (although perhaps I have an insufficient appreciation of the spiritual benefits of multiculturalism).“
You mean in Europe and the US? I don’t get the impression much has changed in Russia since 2011 in this regard, or has it?
What do you mean? Your fans want you to elaborate on this. Is America hating Andrei an ethno-nationalist?
Randal: I was re-reading some of our exchanges and I want to apologize to you for the nasty and immature personal attacks I have sent your way on multiple occasions. I shouldn’t have made things personal and I now feel pretty bad about it. In the future I will try to call out your love Iran without resorting to childish insults.
The operative word here is “try”, but, you know, baby steps.
@Anatoly Karlin: How long do you think it would take for us to figure out how to do CRISPR without provoking a negative immune reaction from many people’s bodies?
Ironically, your initially agnostic/neutral opinion on HBD, combined with the quality of your blog, is what convinced me to seriously consider it in the first place. I only found your blog by complete accident in 2013 whilst looking for Israel Shamir articles on Anatoly Chubais. Incidentally I’d never had any interest in the manosphere before finding it via your blog either.
I have to say I think much of your best content was written on Sublime Oblivion, you haven’t done many “big-picture” analyses or more philosophical articles in a while.
A book is long overdue. If a meme-writer like The Saker can sell a book of randomly selected articles you certainly can.
German-Reader: You mean in Europe and the US? I don’t get the impression much has changed in Russia since 2011 in this regard, or has it?
Yeah I wondered about that line too. Have things deteriorated in the Caucasus since then, or you just weren’t aware of how bad mass stan-immigration to Russia was then?
The funny thing is I also found Unz.com through Israel Shamir. It was back when MSM was running articles about how Julian Assange was crazy because he read Israel Shamir’s writings. Up until August 2016 I had no idea this site even existed until I googled Israel Shamir.
Since then it’s been a real treat to read all of the excellent bloggers featured here. Cheers to Anatoly for the great blog and to Ron Unz for creating this excellent site!
P.S. I beleive this was the article that started it all:
https://forward.com/news/national/347546/why-does-wikileaks-have-a-reputation-for-anti-semitism/
The Ukraine issue will remain relevant decades and centuries after IQ augmentation will join personal rocketship cars, nuclear-powered household appliances, and other hilariously optimistic tech predictions of the past.
http://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/pictofact/3/0/3/237303_v1.jpg
Were? Not anymore?
Didn’t you call Navalny an Ukrainian nationalist not long ago?
I remember that a number of Russian ethno-nationalists fought for the Ukrainian side during the war.
Obviously things have deteriorated most visible in the West, especially in Western Europe, while in Russia things have even improved in some respects (for instance, there was an artificial drop in Gastarbeiters during the post-2014 recession, though this is going to reverse in the next few years as the economy booms again).
Still, I have a friend here who made the observation that for all the current differences in perception – Merkel as a globalist stooge, Putin as an icon of the Alt Right – historians in fifty years might regard both of them in similar terms: As politicians who helped enable the Islamization of their respective countries. I am not sure that he is entirely wrong.
However, another major change is the exponential rise in prosecutions under 282, about which I have blogged a great deal. (Note that outright Neo-Nazis with swastika flags were free to (and did) march under Putin’s reign up until the early 2010s or so, so explaining this as a measure to protect the feelings of WW2 veterans – as the kremlins often do – is cynical hogwash). Those observations are increasingly risky to make from a legal viewpoint, so society is much worse positioned to respond to the next wave of mass immigration.
Russian nationalism half a decade ago was represented by people like Belov/Potkin, Maltsev, Demyushkin, etc. with their completely toxic mix of advocating Russia’s disintegration (that is, things like independent Ingria, not just throwing out DICh), fullbore Putin Derangement Syndrome, Naziphilia, Westophilia (!), and alliances of convenience with Jewish Echo of Moscow liberals (!!!). Moreover, unlike the liberals, who at least were (and are) highly intelligent and produce lots of interesting content, their culture was dumb as a pile of rocks. The main intellectual was the overly esoteric (and today increasingly unhinged) Konstantin Krylov and the obscurantist Galkovsky, whose bizarre historical conspiracy theories (e.g. that the USSR was a colony of London) enjoyed a central position due to the lack of intelligence in that culture.
One of the good things about the Ukrainian conflict is that it smoked those people (Belov/Maltsev/Demyushkin) out for good – and conveniently also showed that they were a small minority within the nationalist sphere. The old intellectual crazies have also been sidelined. Now Russian nationalism is associated more with Donbass veterans on the streets, and intellectuals like the Sputnik and Pogrom circle and Egor Kholmogorov in the “coffee salons.” This is a great change, and is making nationalism much more palatable for normies.
That Britain was first to the Industrial Revolution – a development substantially enabled by its very early entry into mass literacy, which you could look at as intelligence expansion – counted for far more than who controlled Wallachia or Wallonia at any particular point in time.
Anyhow, the entire point is moot, since Putin’s clique lost it anyway.
Some sub-themes here … AK tho relatively young is yet showing himself as an ‘older generation’ guy versus the Generation Z crowd, who are riffing on memes and 4chan and quickly cycling thru a rapdily-shifting profile of social media platforms and tools
For some time now, I’ve felt that books are a bit of an old-fogey item, a way to bury any truth in them … Saw statistics where the average ‘book’ today sells something like 142 copies … hundreds of thousands of nearly-zero-sales books out there, given any idiot can ‘publish’ now, by posting a file to amazon which will be printed by a giant machine into a book if someone ‘orders’ it … Hardly anyone I know buys or reads ‘books’
Don’t quite get the YouTube craze for political discourse content … tho some such items indeed are clever and funny, especially when using visuals or sounds that require or leverage the video platform
But plain talking heads, ugh … A whole lot of YouTubing is really tedious just because of the format … taking 5 minutes to make a minor point that would just be a few seconds of reading text
Because of the slowness and time-consumption, video can rather be a burial of the truth, too, like a ‘book’ … I have wondered if that is why the Powers That Be allow and sponsor some expression on the CIA Google Tube, audience is intrinsically restricted due to time factor, truth is buried despite superficially being available
A rarely-done but helpful practice is dual-posting text along with video, as done by that eccentric Jewish convert to Orthodox Christianity, USA ‘street evangelist’, ‘Brother’ Nathaniel Kapner
No surprises here.
Please keep doing your essential work on Russia. Irreplaceable.
I am a CRISPR skeptic, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable that genetic engineering of humans is feasible.
Rocket-powered cars is a joke from cartoons as far as I know. The actual prediction was personal flying cars. General aviation has largely been destroyed by lawyers, so anything that flies is now too expensive.
Nuclear powered vacuum cleaners is a bit much, but it would be perfectly feasible to power trucks or aircraft with nuclear reactors. This prospect has been destroyed by hysterical, irrational fear of atomic energy. Nuclear power is a great argument against democracy.
Anatoly Karlin
I’ve been reading you from the beginning, and I believe that you know who I am. I hope that I influenced you, and regardless of whether or not that is true I am proud and impressed by your progress.
Your writing and content are excellent.
Even back when you were agnostic about HBD, your content was excellent and displayed many highly innovative ideas.
Your biggest area of wrongism is now totally forgotten–which was taking peak oil seriously as a problem. Not blaming you either, as I read The Oil Drum as well and thought it was a cause for real concern.
I hope I get the opportunity to meet you when I visit Moscow, which will perhaps be next year.
Thanks, much appreciated.
You did exert a huge influence on me, and you might be gratified to know on at least one other person from there, who I believe you know as well.
Looking forwards to meeting up!
Not to mention killing off our best realistic means of blasting large payloads into orbit, which is really rather indispensable if you’re serious about things like building a Mars base.
Fortunately Russia is slightly less demented in this department.
Wallonia?
That was one of the first industrialized regions of Europe.
Important enough for the British to keep it out of the control of other major powers.
France would have remained a greater power if they had retained it.
Who controls Wallonia is an important question for Wallonia and its neighbors. And twice in the 20th century, in 1914 and 1940, this question was of a paramount importance to the whole world. Ukrainian question exists at least since the 17th century and will continue to exist for a long time yet. And there is a fair chance that we may yet get a global conflagration out of it.
Industrial Revolution is fine but today’s technohype has nothing to do with it. I too used to be a techno optimist when I was younger but as time went by I started noticing that most of the wild promises were falling by wayside. This will happen to you too. In 25 years you’ll be like, where is muh IQ augmentation? Nowhere! It will either join AI, nuclear fusion, and cure for cancer as a things that are 25 years in the future and forever will be. Or else it will be totally forgotten amid the new hype of the time.
Anatoly: what do Russian liberals think of Trump? Are they as obsessed with him as western Euro liberals are?
It is not hard to imagine that those that are censoring Youtube, Facebook, Twitter or Google searches are not going to stop there. Their final goal is to censor everything, I already see the day where sites like this will be shut down, and it is not just like how they censor things for Germany or China locally, in the end I see a global censoring central authority that will increasingly shut down sites like they have already done with the Dailystormer.
I had a huge argument with an IT friend who should know better about this, but in the end its pointless arguing with people who don’t read or care about real culture. It’s a sad world when the only universal cultural references are trashy American dramas and 3rd-rate video games.
Even if you look at British TV from 30 years ago it was assumed the average person had some familiarity with history and literature.
Incidentally, what’s your beef with Nikolai Starikov? He might be a political prostitute, but in the end so is Zhirinovsky, and they’re the only moderately sane Russians in their field with any mass-following. I recall he wrote sensibly enough on Ukraine and the migrant-crisis.
OT
I’ve long searched for a text of it, but now I just realized here someone might be able to help me. I used to listen to martial industrial music a lot (it’s basically similar to a kind of war movie soundtrack, using sound samples from movies, documentaries, original historical recordings, classical music, etc.), and some of them uses Russian original sound samples. I always wanted to have the text written down, but I couldn’t find them anywhere, and unlike with for example French, I couldn’t find anyone who could do that for me. I don’t much listen to it anymore (OK, occasionally I still do), but I still want the text. (I guess I have OCD?)
So, any native Russian speaker willing to help me, could you please write down the text of the second track of this album? (I think it’s a speech by Marshal Zhukov, at least that’s what the guy behind March of Heroes emailed me, but he didn’t know anything further.) It starts around the 7:50 mark. (The link should take you automatically there.) It’s a 3:24 long track, but the sample from the speech repeats several times, I think it’s maybe half a minute long. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to write down for a native speaker.
(I don’t think March of Heroes is that left wing as claimed on Youtube, by the way. Their next album uses a Hitler speech as well. The guy himself insisted to me that he was nonpolitical, and that seemed quite reasonable. Most martial industrial projects are nonpolitical, though some are explicitly right wing.)
The other thing I wanted to is the Russian text from this scene of the movie Downfall/Der Untergang.
I need the Russian Cyrillic text (as a positive contribution of communism, I can still read Cyrillic), not some translations. (Weirdly, I have found dozens of translations for the Downfall scene, but no original text. Maybe it could easily be found by searching the Russian web.)
” I want to apologize to you for the nasty and immature personal attacks I have sent your way on multiple occasions. I shouldn’t have made things personal and I now feel pretty bad about it.”
This is encouraging. I thought I had detected a softening in your tone over time. Congratulations from the peanut gallery!
the speech (fragment) is:
I don’t know if it’s genuine (if Zhukov said that) nor if it’s actually Zhukov’s voice in the song. About The only place it occurs on the internet is here: http://www.sovmusic.ru/text.php?fname=otrivok3
One would’ve thought all speeches by people like Zhukov are transcribed and put on the internet. Perhaps someone with access to historic literature can verify.
the movie is:
Thanks! Unfortunately there’s no “thank you” button (paging Ron Unz, maybe it wouldn’t take a lot of effort to introduce one?), but I really appreciate it. Back then I searched for both these for a long time, but I couldn’t transcribe properly even a small portion and so my effort was fruitless.
I have no idea if the speech is genuine, but at least two sources seem to confirm that, Sovmusic and the guy who created the martial industrial track. I will listen to a few Zhukov speeches to check if it’s even possible. I guess it doesn’t have an audible foreign accent or else you’d have mentioned it, so at least it’s not someone like Mikoyan or Beria but someone whose mother tongue was Russian.
I just listened to another SovMusic recording of Zhukov in 1955, and at least it’s probably the same person. Come to think of it, the French guy probably also got the recording from SovMusic, I don’t think he had any other source. In other words, we just have to believe SovMusic, but I think it’s reliable enough.
That’s what I thought, too. Sovmusic, doing the jerbs libraries won’t do. : )
here’s someone in the comment section saying the recording most probably dates from May 7, 1940. http://www.sovmusic.ru/forum/c_read.php?fname=otrivok3
here’s someone indicating the speech (and presumably the footage, because they talk about video re-compression so it fits on a standard DVD blank) is on the “Great Cyril and Method Encyclopedia 2006” DVD: http://fenixclub.com/index.php?showtopic=5417