Just one and a half years ago, I was heralding the end of the blogosphere and its replacement by the vlogosphere. But last year, along came Substack – a modest newsletter service that doubles as a blogging platform with inbuilt RSS, analytics, and monetization infrastructure. Seemingly exploding out of the blue, before long a rafter of prominent pundits such as Matt Yglesias, Noah Smith, Glenn Greenwald, and – most recently – Scott Alexander have migrated to that platform. And so this year ushers in what may soon become a Silver Age of blogging.
In the old days, many blogs had what we’d call a blogroll – a list of people/accounts that the blogger reads, is influenced by, or at least sufficiently respects to “follow back”. It’s high time to update it.
Note that this is not, by any means, meant to be comprehensive a tally of blogs/websites in each of their respective domains. They are limited to people and sites that I like and follow, or at least occasionally visit to keep tabs on.
MSM, Forums & Social Media
MSM: Following the news as such is mostly a waste of time – for deeper understanding, you’re inevitably better off with books; for the news element, once everybody knows about something – you can’t make money of it as you no longer have an informational advantage (Taleb makes this point very well in his books). Nonetheless, keeping a finger on the “pulse” of the “discourse” is still part of the job of a “pundit”, even if I mainly accomplish that goal through social media and aggregators.
There is a Chrome extension called Bypass Paywalls that frees you from the rigmarole of finding custom solutions to paywalls on the great bulk of walled websites.
Reddit: Reddit has no intrusive ads like most news websites, and most often the comments adequately summarize articles. Now make fun of Le Reddit/plebbit all you want, but the basic fact is that it is by far the largest Anglophone forum in the world (the website has almost 2B visits per month – for comparison, 4chan has 50M). This is the mainstream midwit view in the world and it pays to be familiar with it. I usually scan it to get a sense of the headlines, the talking points (manipulated or not as they might be), the “Zeitgeist” of 110 IQ normie/yuppy American opinion.
- /r/worldnews – the most popular “political” sub with 26M users
- Regional subs: /r/europe (normies), /r/russia (lefty/vatnik, I once did an AMA with them), /r/sino (Chinese nationalists; many of them SJWs with a chip on their shoulder, but much better than the “English language teachers” who populate /r/china)
- /r/geopolitics is pretty good/attempts to be objective though I don’t check it often
- /r/MapPorn
- On a related note, I also really love the “day by day”/”year by year” mapping part of YouTube, e.g. EmperorTigerstar, Ollie Bye
- Rationality: /r/slatestarcodex, /r/TheMotte (see also LessWrong)
- /r/PoliticalCompassMemes – at this point by far the funniest meme sub. VirginVsChad is also good.
The Reddit Enhancement Suite plugin drastically improves the user experience.
I still occasionally idly browse 4chan, in particular /pol/, /biz/, /fit/ – The autistic antidote to Reddit normie fags. On the other end of the scale, I enjoy chapo.chat, the new home of /r/ChapoTrapHouse, which was banned on Reddit (neolib censorship doesn’t discriminate between left and right, and in fact I predict that censorship of leftists will get more severe later in the Biden term, as passions over Trump and the Capitol storming fade away). Since the Alt Right and various permutations thereof are totally broken and defanged, I expect that the relative profile of Antifa, chapos/”dirtbag left”, and their various allies will increase as the Biden administration repeatedly stabs them in the back). However, I hardly ever contribute personally on these forums. 2ch.hk is Russia’s /pol/ (but less fashy) and is mildly useful for surveying what zoomers and millennials are thinking of.
One side effect of Big Tech censorship is that many of the most interesting discussions have retreated to closed or semi-closed spaces on platforms such Telegram, closed forums, Discord and Slack groups, and more esoteric options such as urbit planets. It’s interesting to think that this is recreating the “secret societies” of Enlightenment Europe and Qing China online.
Twitter: This is my main tool for “monitoring the discourse”. As with Reddit, although one might whine about “censorship”, the fact remains that network effects are key and most everyone who is anyone is on Twitter (6B views), not Gab (10M) or Parler (20M, with the minor inconvenience that it’s been down for weeks). Yes, sure, it’s full of vacuous hacks and celebrities – but nowhere else are you also going to get “takes” from Grandpa Elon (I am now a hardline Musk fan after he helped me make tons of money on the doge run), established historian-intellectuals like Peter Turchin and Adam Tooze, anonymous historian-intellectuals like @Nemets and @Irkutyanin, the unbanned half of the HBDsphere, Tsarist-themed publishing houses, the Sputnik V vaccine, and meme accounts like Hakan (since reincarnated as Zolbar Sakusan) in one place.
I am not much present on other social media. I quit posting to my Facebook page when they blanket banned unz.com links (even in private messages), up to the point of deleting all prior posts that had that URL. It is still useful for following some people (unfortunately, Russian boomers have taken to it a couple of years ago), and there are some highly useful groups (e.g. probably the biggest Moscow expat community, some COVID-19 and transhumanist groups, etc.) but I don’t generally spend much time there. This also applies to VK and Telegram, where I also have a minimal presence.
Blogroll
This is the core of the blogroll – the list of bloggers/journalists whom I regularly read, or at least keep tabs on. I primarily do this via the Feedly blog readers. It served my well and I highly recommend it, though others prefer The Old Reader.
Bloggers whom I particular like/try not to miss are surrounded by asterixis. The tags at the end mean the following:
- /pol/ = politics, with ideological slant appended; /sci/, /econ/, /hist/, etc. should be self-explanatory.
- HBD-IQ = self-explanatory (note that most of the people in The Library – in particular, this includes most of the rationalists – are crypto-HBD); LW = rationality; H+ = transhumanism; PT = produces many “powerful takes”; BB = “Big Brain”, i.e. I suspect they have a very, very high IQ.
I do not list inactive bloggers/pundits here, even if I like them and they influenced me a great deal. Many former greaters are listed at the links page on my website, which I intend to update soon: https://akarlin.com/links/
The Library
Accounts that can broadly be categorized as intellectuals, scientists, historians, and insightful observers of the world around them.
This first section contains “top bloggers” whom I try to read more or less comprehensively:
- Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten) is back to blogging thanks to Substack. His old Slate Star Codex blog was the focal point of the global rationalist community, covering a wide range of topics including psychiatrics, nootropics, governance, technology, and machine intelligence. [/soc/-Center, LW, BB]
- Guillaume Durocher [@GuiDurocher] is a French identitarian (archived at CC, OO) with an exhaustive historical erudition who may well be called the French Kevin McDonald. [/pol/-Alt Right, HBD]
- gwern [@gwern] is a brilliant American polymath famous in narrow rationalist circles who has written extraordinary detailed, brilliant longreads on every from nootropics to the role of chip fabs in the future of civilization. You can follow monthly updates to his articles and links collections via his Substack newsletter. [/sci/-Center, LW/H+, BB]
- Robin Hanson [@robinhanson] is an immensely productive libertarian economist who came up with the Great Filter, futarchy (rule by prediction markets), and the Age of Em. His powerful takes on sexual market dynamics have resulted in him getting canceled by SJW EA’ers. [/econ/-Libertarian, LW/H+, BB]
- Anatoly Karlin (Russian Reaction) [@akarlin88] is yours truly, whom I read regularly by definition. Detailed information about all my websites/projects on the sidebar and at my site here: https://akarlin.com/ . [/pol/rus/-Alt Center&RuNat, HBD/IQ, H+]
- Emil Kirkegaard [@KirkegaardEmil/YouTube] is a Danish polymath and “troll science” champion – possibly the single best blog to follow on all matters QHBD. [/sci/-Alt Center, HBD/IQ, LW, PT]
- Roko Mijic* (Heretical Update) [@RokoMijicUK] is a “based” rationalist, inventor of the eponymous Basilisk (and unwitting godfather to Elon’s latest child). [/pol/-Alt Center (cons.), LW/H+]
- Moldbug (Gray Mirror) is back to blogging, thanks to Substack! The Father of Neoreaction hardly needs an introduction – just start reading [/pol/-NRx, BB/PT].
- spandrell (Bloody Shovel) [@thespandrell] is a European neoreactionary in China who invented IQ shredders and Bioleninism. [/pol/-Alt Right/NRx, PT]
- Adam Tooze (Chartbook) [@adam_tooze] is a historian whose book on the Nazi economy radically altered my understanding of WW2. He has written magisterial histories of past economic crises, and it was a real pleasure to discover he is also an active blogger and Twitterer. [/hist/econ/-Center]
- James Thompson [@JamesPsychol] is a British IQ researcher and blogger – the single best person to follow for developments in the field along with Emil Kirkegaard. [/sci/-Conservative, HBD/IQ]
- Ron Unz [@UnzReview] merits prominent mention not just for his own prodigious contributions, but for hosting this website and financially enabling the careers of a substantial number of people on this list. [/soc/-Alt Right, HBD/JQ, PT]
This next tier of bloggers includes those whom I also follow, but don’t typically read comprehensively:
- Audacious Epigone is the go to guy for American sociology/ethnic stats and analysis. [/sci/-Alt Right, HBD]
- Biohackinfo [@biohackinfo] is a Swedish-(Armenian?) “grinder” (aspiring cyborg), futurist, transhumanist, implacable foe of the NWO. [/sci/-Alt Center, H+, PT]
- Noah Carl [@NoahCarl90] is an English sociologist who famously had his postgrad position at Oxford University terminated for fleeting associations with the “wrong” people. Now also an occasional contributor to RT. [/soc/-Center, HBD]
- Greg Cochran (West Hunt) [@gcochran99] is an American HBD blogger who is a walking encapsulation of the saying that brevity is the soul of wit. [/sci/-Conservative, HBD, PT]
- John Derbyshire is a British-American mathematician and paleocon pundit. [/pol/-Alt Right]
- Linh Dinh is a Vietnamese-American repatriate, poet, and travel writer; second to none on this website as a chronicler of “lived experience.” [/soc/-Alt Right]
- Peter Frost is a Canadian evopsych professor. [/sci/-Alt Right, HBD]
- Glenn Greenwald [@ggreenwald] needs no introduction: Cypherpunk activist, critic of American imperialism and double standards. [/soc/-Libertarian-Alt Left]
- Richard Hanania [@RichardHanania] is an emerging American political scientist who champions anti-interventionism and wants no truck with either the Woke Left (SJWs) or the Woke Right (MAGA). [/int/-Center]
- Greg Hood has long been my favorite American Alt Right intellectual. [/pol-Alt Right]
- Steve Hsu (Information Processing) [@hsu_steve] is an American physicist who has since gone into psychometrics and human enhancement (e.g. idea of genetic spellchecks). Recently deplatformed by his university. [/sci/-Alt Center, HBD-IQ, H+, BB]
- The Inductivist [@Inductivist] is a good HBD blogger. [/sci/-Alt Right, HBD]
- Alex Kaschuta (Garden of Earthly Delights) [@kaschuta] is an emerging Romanian evopsych journalist – serious content underneath the blonde tradgirl aesthetics. [/soc/-Alt Right, HBD]
- Razib Khan (GNXP) [@razibkhan] is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and former Unz Review contributor who blogs on a wide variety of topics on woke politics, religion, population genetics, and various intersections thereof. He recently set up a SubStack newsletter called Unsupervised Learning. [hist/sci/-Conservative, HBD]
- Sean Last (Ideas & Data) [@Sean__Last] is a data-heavy HBD blogger. [/sci/-Alt Center, HBD/IQ]
- Fred Reed is IMO the single funniest columnist on The Unz Review, he can make a 4,400 word essay on medical malpractice engrossing. Trigger warning for Alt Righters: Castizo nationalism. [/soc-Center, humor]
- José Luis Ricón (Nintil) is a polymath blogger known in particular for his studies of the Soviet economy. [/econ-Center]
- Aris Roussinos [@arisroussinos] writes for Unherd magazine about international relations through a civilizational lens. [/int/-Center]
- Steve Sailer [@Steve_Sailer] hardly needs an introduction on this site; he accounts for a third of The Unz Review’s traffic, and also writes a weekly column for Taki’s Mag. The Father of HBD, inventor of the Sailer Strategy, the World’s Most Important Graph, Invade/Invite the World, World War Hair, and a bunch of other, less well known aphorisms. That said, the sheer, machine-like pace at which Steve writes poasts makes it hard to impossible to follow everything. [/soc/-Conservative, HBD/IQ]
- Noah Smith (Noahpinion) [@noahpinion] … having some ideological diversity is important. [/econ/-Neolib]
- Erik Striker [@Striker05381540] is probably the single best Alt Right journalist writing today, both here and at National-Justice (Hood takes the crown for best opinion columnist). [/pol/-Alt Right]
- Peter Turchin [@Peter_Turchin] is a Russian-American biologist turned historian/cliodynamicist. [/hist/sci/-Alt Center, cliodynamics]
- Alexander Turok is an underlooked but very good rationalist/futurist blogger. [/pol/-Alt Center, LW/H+]
- Brian Wang (NextBigFuture) is a one man writing machine on all aspects of technology. Although some dismissed him as an Elon fanboy, he did successfully predict him becoming the world’s richest man. [/tech/-Libertarian?, H+]
Russosphere
Russia watchers. Additional tags: /rus/+ denotes they are marked Russophiles, whereas /rus/ denotes a more objective/middle of the way position. The Western MSM is systemically anti-Russian, so I don’t follow any specific Russophobes. (Life is short).
- Patrick Armstrong is a retired Canadian diplomat who has been tireless at identifying Western hypocrisy. [/rus/+]
- John Helmer is a Moscow expat with many interesting takes. [/rus/]
- Insomniac Resurrected [YouTube] is a Czech Russophile and Ukraine expert. [/rus/+]
- Bryan MacDonald [@27khv] is an RT journalist who provides a useful corrective to the inaccurate Western journalistic mainstream. (Unfortunately, RT does not provide RSS). [/rus/+]
- Paul Robinson is a Canadian professor, Russia expert, and perhaps the single best Russia blogger writing today. I strongly recommend his history of Russian Conservatism (which I will review one day). He has recently started contributing to RT. [/rus/-Conservative]
There are also some Russian language bloggers that I wish to briefly highlight for those who read (or are learning?) Russian.
- Liberal data/elections bloggers: Dmitry Kobak [@hippopedoid]; Alexander Kireev; pollotenchegg [website: datatowel]; Seva Bashirov
- Demographers: denalt; Alexey Raksha; stranger233.
- Patriotic (Russotriumph) stats/data bloggers: acer120; genby; zemfort1983 [@Ivanjv_I].
- Don’t usually follow him (posts too much), but I do check up on Colonel Cassad during active conflicts.
Social Media (incomplete)
Although listing everybody I follow on Twitter (or, very occasionally, other sites) is a task beyond reason (or meaning), here is a sample of the more prominent ones by category:
- “Celebrities“: Elon Musk, jack, Nick Szabo
- Intellectuals: Peter Turchin
- Intellectuals – HBD/IQ: Claire Lehmann (website)
- Data/Demographers: BirthGauge
- Alt Left/Anti-Imperialism: Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, Alex Rubinstein, Matt Taibbi, Matt Tracey. (I would also follow Mark Ames, but he Blocked me years ago).
- Alt Right/NRx: Indian Bronson, quackocracy, Wyvern of Herzegovina,
- Alt Right/NRx (Russia Focus): PraetorPeregrinus, TsarPress
- HBD: HateGraphs
- Russia Watchers: Ben Aris (website), Sean Guillory, Alexandre Latsa, Mark Sleboda
- Sino Watchers:
Notable Russian language accounts:
- Russians (in Russian!):
Podcasts
I am not big into podcasts, but there’s a few of them that I occasionally listen to while walking or commuting.
- *** The Duran *** [Alexander Mercouris & Alex Christoforou] have highly detailed politics/geopolitics discussions about European politics and Russia. In particular, Mercouris was IMO one of the best Russia bloggers back during his writing days, before he transitioned to podcasting. [/int/-Conservative]
- *** Edward Dutton*** (Jolly Heretic), now at Bitchute having been driven away from YouTube, is an HBD popularizer most famous for the “spiteful mutant” hypothesis. [/sci/-Alt Right, HBD/IQ, PT]
- Red Scare [Dasha Nekrasova & Anna Khachiyan] is a fun listen. I discovered it recently and have only listened to a couple of episodes, would characterize them as non-Woke dirtbag left. See Anna’s interview with Niccolo Soldo. [/pol/-Alt Left]
- *** Russians With Attitude *** [@diogen_tv & @Noetic_Pirate] is an excellent English-language podcast by two actual Russians from a sort of relaxed vibe nationalist perspective. (One of the co-hosts previously @pigdog, and was one of the three co-hosts – along with Kirill Nesterov and myself – of the erstwhile ROGPR podcast, which launched the era of Russian political podcasting in 2017). As a starter, check out their launch interview with Bronze Age Pervert, my own discussion with them about Russian demographics, Russian tourism, known Twitter anthropologist/Udmurtology expert @Nemets interview, and their translation of Galkovsky’s classic text on Soviet “noviops” (pro tip: any English language writeup of Russian nationalism that includes Dugin and doesn’t mention Galkovsky isn’t worth the paper it’s written one). [/pol/-RuNat(Alt Right), PT]
- *** The Stark Truth *** [@StarkTruthRadio] is hosted by Robert Stark, a Bay Area-based blogger and podcaster who interviews various “oddballs” from across the ideological spectrum, with a pronounced interest in Alt Left-Alt Right intersections (e.g. on UBI) and in California politics and demographics. I am on The Stark Truth a few times a year. He has also interviewed Ron Unz, and pens an occasional column for this webzine. [/pol/-Alt Center.]
Finally, some of the more notable Russian language podcasts that I occasionally tune into:
- Egor Prosvirnin (editor of the old Sputnik & Pogrom) [@czartube] now specializes in podcasting and streaming at CzarStream and CzarTalks.
- Russian Highlights [@FunnyDog1552] maintains a very helpful archive of old Russian nationalist podcasts/lore.
- Other podcasts/projects: Nikolay Kolosov; Rozanov Club; Robert Wright; Sergey Zadumov
Websites
Stats: Although I don’t typically visit “news”/”journal” websites as such (see reasons above), I do occasionally browse through statistics websites to update my mental world-state. This is by no means supposed to be exhaustive.
- Politics & Elections
- Main US elections sites: 270 to Win, 538, Electing Betting Odds. As readers will have gathered, I lean heavily on opinion polls as well as predictions markets
- Alexander Kireev maintains Electoral Geography 2.0, an exhaustive database of historical election results across the world
- Economic History
- Our World in Data (Max Roser)
- Cliometrics: Clio-Infra, Maddison/Groningen, Seshat
- Economics
- The main ones: IMF, inc. World Outlook, World Bank, OECD, Trading Economics… Wikipedia also very good on this.
- Living standards: Numbeo, Big Mac Index
- Institutions: Doing Business index, various other measures
- Manufacturing: Observatory of Economic Complexity, OICA (vehicles)
- Finance I try to keep an occasional eye on various metrics indicating recession likelihood, stock market overheating, cryptos
- Demographics:
- For detailed numbers: Human Mortality Database, Human Life Table Database, The Human Fertility Database
- Wikipedia is really good for this: wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_[insert country]
- The big international organizations, e.g. the UN is best for future national/global demographic projections
- National statistics websites (obv. not listing all of them)
- As concerns coronavirus mortality, I have separately collated links here: https://akarlin.com/corona-resources/
- HBD/IQ
- Four year PISA and TIMSS/PIRLS tests are the big ones
- David Becker maintains most comprehensive national IQ datasets in View on IQ
- Scientometrics
- Nature Index of quality-adjusted scientific production
- Articles published
- Top500 supercomputers
- Russia Resources
- Rosstat main site (supplementary)
- MVD migration stats
- Open Data Russia
- Not listing various local sites and ex-USSR national stats offices
- Our Country in Data (clearly inspired by Max Roser’s project)
Opinion Polls: I would like to emphasize that just familiarizing oneself with polling data is often a lot more useful than reading lengthy journalistic or even academic analyses. For instance, if the ruling President has a 65% approval rating, there is not going to be a color revolution against him in any halfway serious country – no matter how much the “international community”, the “CIA”, etc. does or does not support it.
Predictions Markets: These are highly useful as a corrective to excessive ideological tilt (though it won’t help really far out people). I also maintain a page of my own predictions here (yet to be filled out): https://akarlin.com/predictions/
- *** Metaculus *** hosts very high quality participants and discussants. I quietly participate there myself and certainly the questions generate many blog post ideas. As of Feb 2, 2021 I have a Brier score of 0.041 and a player score of 65.4 .
- PredictIt is pretty boring these days for reasons outlined by Scott Alexander – too much dumb money, but hard to profit from it due to fees and most of the questions being about boring political horseraces.
- Hypermind polls only superforecasters. Bad predictors get eliminated over time.
- There are various crypto markets at early stages of development: Augur; Catnip.Exchange; Gnosis. In my opinion, the most prospective of these is Polymarket.
Additional Russia Resources:
- *** Johnson’s Russia List *** (JRL) is a daily digest of Russia news from diverse sources. Highly recommended. [/rus/]
- Demoscope is popular demographics journal.
- Kremlin website features briefing and translations from the Russian Presidency, which we have to make do with as Putin doesn’t have social media accounts. One reason I love Mercouris’ work is his strong emphasis on this as a primary source.
- Salo Forum run by Niccolo Salo [@Progrockfarmer] is widely regarded as a major node for intellectual Alt Right-leaning discussion of Russia and Eastern Europe, though I don’t participate there myself.
This concludes the “blogroll” for the time being. I might update it a bit further in the next couple of days.
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So I’m curious, AK, how do you spend the last 35 minutes remaining in your day?
Tried to read Turchin’s latest book a little while back: Figuring Out the Past: The 3,495 Vital Statistics that Explain World History.
Honestly, I had a hard time with it. Not a standard book, by any means. More like a form comparison of different empires throughout history. Some of the specific points of comparison seem like eye spam: too little data, and ancient public healthcare seems to have been of questionable value, so perhaps, not worth the space.
I do not recommend it.
I would start off with War and Peace and War: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/review-war-peace-turchin/
Secular Cycles (coauthored by him and Sergey Nefedov) is a denser but even more satisfying read, probably my favorite work of his.
Ultrasociety is pretty good and reads and fast.
Ages of Discord is perhaps the most relevant to what he is most famous for – predicting a peak in instability in the US during the 2020s. But it’s very dense and quite dry.
I haven’t read Figuring Out the Past.
It’s not like I read everything, LOL. For instance, I only pick out the articles by Sailer and Wang that interest me, perhaps one out of 20. With the rare and most rarefied posters, though, I do try to read a majority of what they write. And I hardly ever read news articles.
That’s a good list for future reference. You should also check out Pedro Gonzalez, aka Based Brown Man, who is quickly becoming the go-to guy on the dissident right. https://twitter.com/emeriticus
Here’s some excerpts from his latest at American Greatness:
While the scale of all this is unprecedented, the fundamentals are not new. Corporations support and court social upheavals because that is a far more effective way than force to neutralize them. Agitators and their movements, as Canadian philosopher George Grant wrote in a critique of the Left, “are taken into the system and trivialized. They are made to serve the interest of the system they are supposed to be attacking, by showing that free speech is allowed.”
If so many leftists did not hate everyday Americans more than they hated that system, they would not be so often and easily appeased. Black Lives Matter ultimately strengthened the hand of the system tenfold, allowing it to rehabilitate its image while increasing its power and reach.
“Despite the third-wave feminist tendency to conflate the ephemeral patriarchy with capitalism, the two couldn’t be more incompatible,” writes conservative journalist Tiana Lowe in “Capitalism Crushed the Patriarchy.” Free markets, she concludes, “have revolutionized the quality of human life for everyone, but perhaps for none more than women.” In other words, she unwittingly agrees with Karl Marx that capitalism, not socialism, dissolved the bonds of tradition, of the family, and encouraged women to abandon the crib for the cubicle—it’s just that she insists this is a reason to celebrate.
“Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class,” Marx wrote in 1848 on the corrosive consequences of capitalism. “All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.” Contemporary conservatives make the same observations just as approvingly as Marx, they just aren’t honest or smart enough to realize that fact.
“Crony capitalism” is, therefore, a misnomer because it suggests what we are witnessing is an exception to an otherwise good rule when it is the rule itself—managerialism—that fuses industry and government. The active heads of government bureaus, wrote James Burnham, “are the managers-in-government, the same, or nearly the same, in training functions, skills, habits of thought as the managers-in-industry.”
None of this can be said aloud, so a cosmopolitan myth of universalism is woven, with liberty, equality, and opportunity as its tenets. All the claims of particularism, such as family, sex, religion, human nature, and nation-state become artificial at best; oppressive if white, heterosexual, male, Christian, and Western.
Thus, the myth of democratic capitalism, in reality, is an expression of the personal and group interests of an oligarchy that casts itself and its actions as serving the public interest. But the mask slips every time not-so-thinly veiled force or fraud is employed to protect and consolidate its power, interests, and ideology—whether openly engaging in market manipulation to protect Wall Street or removing entire social media networks from the web to silence dissent.
The truth is that the political economy of the United States is no longer capitalism but managerialism, which slit capitalism’s throat sometime in the 20th century following the Great Depression and two world wars, replacing the bourgeois elite of yesteryear with managers presiding over a system that separates ownership and control.
Whatever its theoretical merits, to defend what people are pleased to call “American capitalism” today is to garland the ideological chains of a ruling class that is hostile to private property, genuine small business, and traditional institutions because all these are impediments to the growth and control of the managerial class.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/02/american-capitalism-is-the-enemy/
I was half-expecting to see skotobaza, which would also destroy both.
Nary a mention of books… truly sad!
I heard another view on it – that rising income inequality is negatively associated with gender equality, as it empowers a few billionares (almost all men) to rule society. And income inequality is ever growing under capitalism. As for socialism, it tried with feminism in its first years, but it later found that it weakens the country, so more conservative reforms followed. Still, the USSR was more gender equal than the US from the 50s.
Imo that is a retarded pseudo “conservative” female trying to sell “free markets” to women. Is she even aware that women favor big government in society? They are not into your free markets, darling: )
Perhaps AK should do an updated on the state of his bookshelf two years later:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/powerful-bookshelf/
You ever read the Iranian Supremacist Jason Reza Jorjani?
https://www.amazon.com/Iranian-Leviathan-Monumental-History-Mithras/dp/1912975408
He is a singularity partisan.
Where does it say bookroll?
Sailer is nowadays pretty boring. His last important idea was the the Sailer Strategy and the Graph. His posts are mostly midwit conservative quoting the NY times complaining about how awful the Liberals at the NY times are.
Что он имел в этим виду?
…what did he mean by this?
Looks like a very powerful book, as someone quite familiar (albeit 2nd-hand, diaspora networks and such) with the country it looks like an… interesting read. Kaveh Farrokh and Abbas Amanat are already pretty damn partisan, particularly regarding the Pahlavi era (it’s interesting to compare their retrospectives to contemporary books written about Iran at that time).
‘Superpower’ nonsense aside, it seems clear the Iran is simply the natural dominant power in it’s region, consider it’s influence and relative stability after after decades of crushing sanctions and very widespread hostility to it.
If nothing else, PredictIt is useful for quickly getting the most up-to-date information on those dumb political horseraces without having to sift through a lot of BS. On big election nights, I keep the PredictIt tab open. When it swings I go find out what is going on.
About Durocher, anyone who does not mention the Jewish issue is controlled opposition.
These two are not Russian patriots at all, but patients of a mental hospital.
…Or they’re just bored of repeating the same exact things a hundred times, or don’t want to attract a dozen commenters like ‘Wally’, ‘Blair Mountain’, or maybe even yourself?
The “Tempo-adjusted TFR” at https://www.humanfertility.org/cgi-bin/main.php is interesting.
aTFR is more than 0.25 higher than TFR in recent years(average over 2012-2017, data for some years missing for many countries) in the following countries:
US
England
South Korea
Portugal
Norway
Croatia
Lithuania
Estonia
Iceland
No aTFR data for France, Latvia among others.
Estonia and Lithuania only Eastern European countries at borderline replacement fertility, I assume they don’t have a huge amount of unregistered emigrants otherwise their true aTFR is even higher.
Some impressive aTFR over the years:
Iceland:
1991 2.9
1992 2.4
1993 2.4
1994 2.5
1995 2.4
1996 2.3
1997 2.2
1998 2.2
1999 2.4
2000 2.7
2001 2.5
2002 2.3
2003 2.3
2004 2.1
2005 2.2
2006 2.3
2007 2.3
2008 2.5
2009 2.4
2010 2.4
2011 2.2
2012 2.4
2013 2.1
2014 2.0
2015 2.1
2016 2.1
2017 2.1
Northern Ireland:
1998 2.0
1999 2.0
2000 2.1
2001 2.2
2002 2.1
2003 2.2
2004 2.2
2005 2.0
2006 2.1
2007 2.2
2008 2.1
2009 2.2
2010 2.2
2011 2.2
2012 2.3
2013 2.1
2014 2.2
2015 2.2
2016 2.2
2017 2.0
And just for Anatoly, Russia TFR(left) compared to aTFR(right):
2.6 1960 2.3
2.5 1961 2.3
2.3 1962 2.3
2.3 1963 2.2
2.2 1964 2.2
2.1 1965 2.1
2.1 1966 2.1
2.0 1967 2.0
2.0 1968 1.9
2.0 1969 1.9
2.0 1970 1.9
2.0 1971 1.9
2.0 1972 1.9
2.0 1973 1.8
2.0 1974 1.8
2.0 1975 1.8
2.0 1976 1.8
1.9 1977 1.8
1.9 1978 1.8
1.9 1979 1.7
1.9 1980 1.8
1.9 1981 1.9
2.0 1982 1.9
2.1 1983 2.0
2.1 1984 2.0
2.1 1985 2.1
2.2 1986 2.3
2.2 1987 2.2
2.1 1988 2.0
2.0 1989 1.8
1.9 1990 1.7
1.7 1991 1.6
1.5 1992 1.5
1.4 1993 1.4
1.4 1994 1.5
1.3 1995 1.6
1.3 1996 1.5
1.2 1997 1.4
1.2 1998 1.5
1.2 1999 1.4
1.2 2000 1.5
1.2 2001 1.5
1.3 2002 1.5
1.3 2003 1.5
1.3 2004 1.6
1.3 2005 1.5
1.3 2006 1.5
1.4 2007 1.6
1.5 2008 1.8
1.5 2009 1.9
1.6 2010 1.7
1.6 2011 1.6
1.7 2012 1.8
1.7 2013 1.8
1.8 2014 1.9
1.8 2015 2.0
1.8 2016 1.9
1.6 2017 1.7
Found a sortable aTFR list for 2016: http://www.populationeurope.org/en/index.php?page=datatable
Iranian Supremacist/Satanist
12 points too high for reddit (I’d dig up the threads of plebs lamenting how their low IQ prevents them a career in STEM for LOLs but and so on).
I like how one financial success in a pool of retardation somehow redeems reddits.
Shit even a broke ass clock is right twice a day. Don’t mean no thang.
Anyway a link to hacker news, its like reddit but ACTUALLY for 110 IQ yuppies:
https://news.ycombinator.com/
Eradica & Jim’s blog.
Also don’t squat after deadlift, before is fine.
Is there a good aggregator for feeds?
There’s also a map of European aTFR:
http://www.populationeurope.org/en/files/maps/EDS2020_maps_11-TFRadj.png
Sino Watchers: Carl Zha
He follows you and most likely comments here?
The Saker?
BAP?
Theres nothing more anti-Iranian than a serpent or dragon, in ancient Iranian legends, therefore serpents or lizards eye is a pretty stupid idea for a book that tries to defend ideals and culture of the classical Irano-Aryan nation.
But you are right, Iran is the natural and rightful power centre of its region, and Afghanistan is a an artificial buffer state, which should not exist independently, only as an indivisible part of Iran.
Robert Lindsay is a good HBD blogger too.
My favourite for sure.
https://beyondhighbrow.com/
I am curious to know what did you do to annoy Mark Ames ? And what did you make of the exile ? Were they accurate about western expats in Russia in the 90s ? As a westerner I would like to think that they were exaggerating a bit.
Hadn’t heard of “Bypass Paywalls” add-on, there is also a Firefox version that works for me.
TYVM!
You know you’re living in cuckworld when a 2.2 fertility rate is considered “impressive”.
A family with 2 kids would have been considered abnormal in 1960s USA, and the male of the household would be suspected of closeted homosexuality/impotence.
And the 1960s USA was a modernist hell hole. In the 1600s it would be considered amoral to have just two kids and you might even be killed swiftly with a wooden stake to the sigmoid, on suspicion of witchcraft.
You’re supposed to be aiming for a TFR of 10, babycuck. That’s what’s going to be necessary to make up for the 40 years of rot. Do you think you have what it takes to beat the odds, or will you recede to the shadows and leave the heavy lifting up to stronger men?
Twitter section is incomplete, will probably finish it up today.
Has any country ever had 10 TFR?
Yemen 1980s and early Colonial North America.
A Canadian demographer was able to calculate that women from New France who married before 1700 had the following number of children according to their age at the time of marriage:
married before 15 years old 12,3 children
married between 20-25 years old 9,2 children
married after 30 years old 4,9 children
There is some idea that colonial Quebecois were breeders, but I don’t think there is much evidence for modern French-Canadians being so today.
Though, I guess it is also true that modern breeders would require a different set of traits than colonial ones. Still, I wonder if it means that one would expect them to appear earlier in Quebec than in other places, that being colonial breeders helps one to become modern breeders.
How can you tell when a Manhattan cosmopolite ain’t a Satanist?
The town of Waltham, Massachusetts in the 1730s reached 9.7 children according to David Fischer Hackard in Albion’s Seed.
Probably a few “breeder cults” reached similar numbers.
I doubt it was ever seen in a nation-state of any substantial extent, these tend to cap out at 7-8 children (e.g. colonial era America; Niger today).
I think Sailer is aiming for more popular appeal, ie reaching people in ways that they can understand and thus making a political difference, rather than showing off his smarts to a bunch of nerdy nobodies with genes and g-loadings and other HBD geek talk. He tried that intellectual approach – remember that HBD discusion group thingy he had going on with some reasonably prominent pundits some twenty years back – and it didn’t really go anywhere. I say good on him.
Pedro’s pretty good, I agree. I’m often impressed by how far he’s willing to go. If demographics is destiny – and it obviously is – it would sure come in handy if latinos were to start producing more Pedro Gonzalez’s. (Anyone know his ethnic background, Cuban, Mexican?)
OK I have to add one more thing. His novel Faustian Futurist is a really quick read. If you begin to skim at every instance of cringe you may be able to finish it in 80 minutes. Major plot point (SPOILER and also I could never think to make this up it is so damn twisted) is the protagonist gets it on with his dead mother’s identical twin sister.
Why?
Iirc 7 tfr was not uncommon for Quebec, but I have to find source. Even in the 70s, before the Quiet Revolution, having 4 or so children was common.
Is Discord still viable? It banned the server r/WallStreetBets was on for hate speech.
Because ‘bro science’ bullshit would be my guess.
Sure, it’s good for him. He gets far more page views than Karlin, Kirkegaard, Gregory Cochran, or any other of those guys. But his “posts” are mostly a Ben Shapiro Twitter feed with some HBD mixed in…his obsession with Kamala Harris. It’s unbearable for non-neurotic people with an IQ>120. I miss the old Sailer.
It’s interesting to compare France and Quebec, and to try to predict which society would develop breeders first. Would it be the one that had more land availability in colonial times (Quebec), or the one that adopted secularism first (France)?
But secularism has fuzzy borders. French in the Old Country may have been more religious than their government. And women were only given the vote there in 1945. Legalization of abortion I think had a similar time frame – I suppose I’d be forced to guess Quebec. I know quite a few high fertility French-Canadians, but I’d guess it is only incident, and Quebec would look different, if it were true as a generality.
Interesting to try to play the game country by country.
Just listened to The Duran for a bit, for the first time.
Thought it was quite refreshing. All the other geopolitical podcasts that I’ve ever tried to listen to were woke and therefore semi-comedic.
The infant mortality rate of the 1600s might have had a little something to do with that.
@Anatoly Karlin I think you missed out a good
geo-politics pundit: Gary Brecher on Facebook and his podcast aka the War Nerd
BTW, I recommend the Indian revanchist podcast TFIGlobal. It is quite amusing. Think China Uncensored but narrated and produced by Indians.
I only wish that the Chinese had a similar podcast about India.
It had absolitely nothing to do with it. Reproduction for reproduction’s sake was considered a moral duty and an obligation to God.
GENESIS, 1:28
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
We should still be having a +10 TFR even with our low mortality rates. It’s never been a better time to have sky high fertility, if you’re a practicing Christian.
PSALM 127:3-5
Children are a heritage from the Lord,
offspring a reward from him.
4 Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
are children born in one’s youth.
5 Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them.
They will not be put to shame
when they contend with their opponents in court.
Do you think you stand a chance with me in court, devil worshipper?
What exactly is “doge run”?
Doge is a crypto currency with a funny-looking dog icon. The run, I believe is after Elon promoted it with a tweet.
Here’s another:
France 24’s The Debate and Al Jazeera’s Inside Story can be good when they put on people like Sleboda and Babich. Aaron Mate’s Gray Zone is pretty good.
My boss has eight kids from two wives but that’s nothing compared to his Chad Dad who had 27 from 3 wives.
Whenever I stay at a hotel, I get out the Gideon Bible, turn to the last page, and write TL;DR on it.
Ron Unz, Greg Cochran, and Peter Turchin deserve Big Brain. They’re surely higher IQ than Scott Alexander.
How about Kierkegaard? Heard there was one HBD research with an measured IQ in the 170s.
You should add “Government of Russia” to the Kremlin website to monitor new initiatives in Russia. The Carnegie Institute in Moscow is also quite good. As think tanks go, it might even be reagraded as very good. The Gaidar Institute occassionally comes up with something original. Catchy titles like “CITIZENS OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION ARE LESS DEPENDANT ON THEIR SUBSIDIARY FARMING” are their strength but can also reveal important issues overlooked in the MSM discourse.
The failure of the Russian Academy of Sciences to provide an English language RSS/Twitter feed of Russian scientific accomplishments and standards is one underlying factor is the less than keen reception of the Gamelaya Vaccine. Outrageous really.
Feedly.
It also has an AI to sift through the feeds for you as well as Key Word seeking or blocking. I monitor Russian sites about business and regulation that generate about 1500 stories a day. The AI has learnt my preferences so the actual task becomes skimming 70 or 80 headlines and selecting 30 stories to read and post to my readers (as headlines in English linking to a Russian language story). 15-20 survive the sifting which is still about twice as many as there should be. On The Other Hand the main purpose is to feed Google keywords to attract searches by potential clients so more is better.
Writers of fantasy IMHO
Adam Smith documents immensely high mortality rates in poorer classes and widely advocated for reduced conception for that reason; although he probably exaggerated it, he mentioned almost 50 percent mortality before the age of one for Highlanders, and further emphasized the indolence of the men in such families. His advocacy of specialization is closely involved with high productivity and the industrial revolution.
I’m one of five, my wife one of eight. My generation has not replaced itself.