Higher School of Economics, Moscow.
Kicking Off a New Era of Powerful Takes
As announced this Friday, I am leaving The Unz Review.
Nothing is set in stone. I am considering various alternatives, from resurrecting my website as an active blog, to more exotic Web 3.0 options, such as urbit, where a WordPress clone might be ready as early as EOY. However, I suspect that most of my future writings, at least in the medium-term, will be on this Substack.
As such, if you’re interested in following my work, I would suggest you:
The frequency of new posts will drop, as befits what will now be more of a “newsletter” than a “blogging” format, though I will continue posting weekly Open Threads (henceforth, Open Takes) to serve as a focal point for the community that has aggregated around my scribblings. Going forwards, I will also be privileging “effortposts” such as longreads and book reviews, while shorter content will henceforth be relegated to Twitter.
Paying subscribers will receive additional benefits. I will work out the details in 2-3 weeks’ time.
Meanwhile, welcome to the first Open Takes on Powerful Takes
***
Featured
* WAGMI. I think the logistical kerfuffles that are afflicting much of the world – cargo ship congestion off California, spiking natural gas prices in Europe, the blackouts in China – are sooner bullish than bearish. One and a half years’ worth of pent up consumer demand, fueled by the money printers of the world’s central banks, is coming back online (IRL-line?) with such fury and vengeance that the world’s physical infrastructure of c.2019 is breaking apart at the seams. And you think this is bearish!?
There are no certainties, and this “everything bubble” probably won’t pop quietly come the end. (Although who knows? Noah Smith has made some interesting arguments that the 2020s will be the decade in which accumulated technological breakthroughs will finally begin to turbocharge productivity growth). In the meantime, George Soros is buying Bitcoin. “When I see a bubble forming, I rush to buy, adding fuel to the fire.” Probably best not to fade the capo di tutti capi of speculation.
* IDIOCRACY UPDATE. Basic idea: Scientific fields so much bigger now that “deluge of papers” leads not to new breakthroughs, but “ossification of canon”:
Chu, J. S. G., & Evans, J. A. (2021). Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(41).
Basically yet another symptom of what I noted is the tendency for problems to become harder over time in Apollo’s Ascent.
Russia
* PANDORA & PDS. As Paul Robinson notes, the actual leaks – all 12 million pages of them – mention Putin zero times. But The Guardian’s story about the Pandora Papers by Luke Harding mentions Putin no fewer than 50 times. Now, there is nothing surprising about this… it’s not that Putin’s circles aren’t corrupt – they obviously are – but that it would be really stupid of them to relocate their wealth to offshore locations in the post-2014 age of intense frictions with the West. Hence why the Russian names that do pop up now are only tangentially connected to Putin, and typically concern deals made more than a decade ago; quite a change from the era of the Panama Papers, which showed $100M in assets linked to Sergey Roldugin, an old celloist friend of Putin’s and the godfather of one of his daughters. The collapse of relations with the West, coupled with Putin’s policies of “nationalizing the elites”, have clearly stemmed capital flight from within the ranks of the Inner Party (if not from the less well-connected). Meanwhile, as regards Russia’s plucky democratic neighbor, just as the Panama Papers revealed Poroshenko’s offshore accounts, so Pandora revealed Zelensky’s. In this sense, the Ukraine has remained true to form, a country where the bandits remain “roving” while in Russia they have transitioned to a “stationary” existence; a suboptimal state of affairs to be sure, but at least one that offers up the possibility of long-term development.
* KAZAKHS. Russian data blogger acer120 has produced an extremely detailed ethnic map of Kazakhstan based on 2021 data. The most important take is that the ethnic Russians of North Kazakhstan (once “South Siberia”) are not so much getting “replaced” by Kazakhs, as declining in absolute numbers through emigration to Russia. Even so, despite fertility differentials, the lack of substantial Kazakh inflows means that the region remains predominantly Russian.
* STRANGE PRIZE. Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize was not Navalny… not even Tsikhanovskaya… but Dmitry Muratov, the chief editor of oppositionist newspaper Novaya Gazeta and a guy who is otherwise largely unknown amongst Russians. Navalny, to be sure, is “problematic” given his past (if fleeting) associations with Russian nationalism and racist comments, but why not the female Guaidó of Belarus? As @RWApodcast speculates, it’s almost as if the West, across a broad panoply of fronts, is dialing down the conflict with Russia.
* SKYRIM FOR THE RUSSIANS! Rubtcova et al. (2017). The Political Dimension of Skyrim’s Civil War: A Study of Russian Gamers Community. Most Russian gamers apparently side with the Stormcloak rebels against the Empire in TES V: Skyrim. If you’ve played this game, you know the story: Nationalist uprising against a corrupt and decadent occupying Power that has repressed Skyrim’s native religion (i.e., nationalists vs. globalist stooges). Or in the pro-Imperial reading, racist bigots and dupes of Elven supremacists who exploit them as useful idiots to undermine the one human polity that has some chance of resisting them (the comparisons to the Azov Battalion beg themselves). It would be an interesting project in comparative sociology to see what percentage of gamers of different nationalities side with which faction and the political allusions that inform their choices.
* SOVOK SOAP OPERA. Mikheil Saakashvili returns to Georgia, soon after declaring his love for a Ukrainian chick (leaving his Dutch wife in a funk), where he is promptly arrested for abuse of power during his Presidency. At that point, mutual accusations of “acting in the interests of Russia” are exchanged by both sides. On his part, he says that he is a “personal prisoner of Putin.”
* MOSCOW. World’s Best Cities ranking puts Moscow in 4th place. I am not familiar with the organization or its methodology, but I don’t view it as bizarre; Moscow really is a very pleasant place to live in these days. Saint-Petersburg is 17th. Prestigious London is ranked 1st.
* PRESS X FOR DOUBT. Some “Global Organized Crime Index 2021” claims that Kosovo has the best Criminality Scores Ranking in the Western Balkans, while Serbia has the worst. (Korenchkin helpfully notes, “funding provided by the United States Government”).
Science & Culture
* J*URNOS. Emil Kirkegaard and his friends have published a new meta-analysis of journalist voting patterns across Western countries:
Kirkegaard, E. O. W., Pallesen, J., Elgaard, E., & Carl, N. (2021). The Left-liberal Skew of Western Media. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice: The Official Journal of Division 49, Group Psychology and Group Psychotherapy of the American Psychological Association, 3(3).
TL;DR: The charts (displayed here) say it all. Journalists vote systemically more leftist (environmentalism, feminism, social liberalism, EUphilia) than the general population. Quelle surprise.
The most interesting, because novel, aspect to me personally was the ratings of journalistic (pro-leftist) bias per country. It was especially high in France and the Scandinavian countries, but (surprisingly?) modest in the United States, as well as Germany, and lowest of all in Slovenia (based and Žižekpilled).
* WOMEN. Cory Clark & Bo Winegard in The Myth of Pervasive Misogyny point out a recent study showing that people react better to investigations of sex differences that indicate a female advantage in a given positive character trait, and that this also applies to professional psychologists. Hard to say if this bias is positive or negative overall – this is, after all, a result that one might expect from basic evopsych – but certainly worth confirming it exists (and conversely, that claims of “structural patriarchy” and the like are dubious, at least so far as mainstream topics are concerned).
* WOKEISM. Black employee at Tesla rewarded $130M (sic!) because people were allegedly (no evidence) racist to him. “Elon has not called me, sent me a letter, a text, sky writing, or sent up one of them spaceships to say I’m sorry.” Hopefully those $130M will assuage his anguish. :clown-world: Hire Blacks meritocratically? Get sued on disparate impact grounds. Hire Blacks to tick the diversity boxes? Get repaid with absurd lawsuits. I have often noted that it seems that a disproportionate percentage of the world’s most interesting developments in technology accrue to the American commercial sector, which is notably much more competent than its government. IMO, America’s single biggest advantage is that it retains a “can do” spirit that it is thoroughly lacking in modern Europe (China does have it, but it is more constrained by conformism). And yet, there’s probably limits to how much Woke abuse even the vigorous US private sector can withstand before collapsing into mediocrity. We’ll see.
* RATIONALITY. Steve Sailer reviews Steven Pinker’s latest book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. He has an introduction to it at Quillette, and has discussed it with Richard Hanania. I think Pinker is generally 80% of things, most counter-arguments being nitpicks, not hard refutations. Still, from the sounds of it, I’m not sure it’s worth the time invested for people who already have some degree of exposure to Pinker’s prior work on adjacent topics (Better Angels, Enlightenment Now, etc.), the LessWrong subculture, the replication crisis, superforecasting, Radical Centrism, and related concepts (i.e., most readers of my blog). My current reading list is jam-packed as it is.
* ROMANS. Cool @StilichoReads thread about the late Roman military. TL;DR, the problem wasn’t that the Germanics undermined fighting cohesion, but that the enemies the Romans had to face banally became much better over the centuries (better organized barbarians, as well as other Roman armies).
* FILM REVIEW. Commenter “melanf” has a visually detailed review of Dune (2021) back at the penultimate Open Thread on Russian Reaction. I haven’t watched it yet. The book itself didn’t leave a big impression on me; the world-building was top-tier, but as often happens in sci-fi, the characters were not memorable (in fiction, characters > plot > world-building in importance). Still, perhaps that had something to do with me reading it as an adult, not a teenager, and many of its most distinctive motifs were already somewhat familiar from other works (e.g. the Fremen as Aiel, “swords in spaceships” an already well-established trope, etc.). Perhaps it would have left a deeper imprint had I read it at a younger age.
I’m getting a dead link to your post about leaving Unz. Curious to see why you’re leaving.
It’s online now. https://www.unz.com/akarlin/last-reaction/
testing
nothing much to say, just testing, should be deleted if it violates some uselessnes rule 🙂
Testing. Will you still start open threads back in unz.com?
No, I’m not planning on doing that. All subsequent OT’s will be here.
Won’t think most of your Unz commenters will come over if they don’t already have a Substack account…
That would be their loss.
I deal with these Chinese and Korean ship yards and module yards as part of my current day job.
My experiences with the Scots are from working on the mega LNG & Iron ore/coal jobs in Australia, while I also worked in the US, Canada & Japan so I am also familiar with American and Japanese engineers/mod yard workers. My experiences are at a project manager/construction manager/engineering manager level so I think my views/insights are pretty unique and realistic, especially as there isn’t many Chinese speaking expats at my level in this industry at this scale (20mil+ man hours, 100,000 ton+ steel, 3+years from FEED to handover).
I am fortunate enough to work around the time when China started to evolve into this industrial behemoth that she is now, here is how I saw its yard capability and capacity grow over my career so far. When this whole modularization thing started in the early/mid 2000s, the industry was still like the good old days where we stick built everything. The most we would do previously was pre fabricate steel sections or get pipes spooled and get them blasted and primed and then sent to site for erection. In Australia, lots of small pre fab shops were thriving at this time due to the resources boom, and attracted a lot of UK talents down under. Lots of these Scottish engineers and welders were from the naval yards, or the north sea and yeah their standards were pretty high on the higher end stuff like bisalloy or HY80 etc. The Chinese at that time were pretty ordinary, I would say inferior to other Asian yards such as Philippines or Indonesia/Thailand, let alone South Korea. The first big modules I could remember of were from South Korea, 2000 ton pieces going to Gove for the Alcan Alumina refinery in Northern Territory in around 2005/2006.
Around 2007/2008, we started exploring using China as a low cost center for steel fabrication. We didn’t even consider modularization because the infrastructure just wasn’t there at the time. We started off in Qingdao, Dalian, Tianjin and Guangzhou cause that were the only ones that ticked the boxes. The Chinese yards were also importing other Western know how at around that time, such as Conoco Philips etc to set up module yards to service the offshore rigs in Bohai bay (Tianjin) and South China Sea (Shekou). Pretty much at the start we were using the Chinese as purely labor, and staffed every supervision/management position with expats, especially QA/QC. Funny how even running it that way we still managed to keep costs to less than 50% of doing that in Australia. When we received the steel at the other end, we usually have to spend another 30% extra to fix the defects from China, so the overall savings were around 20%, but 20% of a $300mil package was still a lot of money!
By 2011/2012, we started rolling bigger modules out of China, and had more locations to operate out of, significantly increasing capacity. We got to couple thousand tons modules/ bins for WICET in Gladstone and the BHP jobs in the Pilbara, and the defects were beginning to reduce to around 20% of their package cost. Kind of around this time, local fab shops in the western world started dying due to being uncompetitive cost wise. Only a few niche ones or ones dedicated to maintenance/ preassembly survived (plus subsidized ones).
Come 2013/2014, with LNG all the rage, yard capacity around Asia got stretched, and around this time the Chinese yard got a go. The likes of Bomesc and COOEC yards in Tianjin and Qingdao got a piece of the pie on the Wheatstone and Ichthys LNG, with the rest going to Philippines / Thailand and Indonesia. I think this really spurt the Chinese ship yard competency. With these megaprojects, there is no way you could staff them all with expats, and so you ended up hiring some of the local engineers and supervisors at the front line level, overseen by expats. Also, with the contract model, its no longer foreign companies hiring the Chinese yards space and labor, but contracting to these yards directly, hence training the front line and middle management of these Chinese yard. You also have these global QA/QC firms that started growing in scale in China, like BV/Caltrop etc, and hiring/developing/training local inspectors. All these enabled massive improvements in quality and management of projects within China, and significantly increased the talent pool.
All the while at the same time, the power plant and chemical plant boom is also happening within China in those inland coal provinces, so you now have a huge talent pool of ASME/API/AWE coded welders with an essentially non stop conveyor of projects to hone their skills on. Especially these power projects ones, the exotics welding on the HP steam and the HRSG lines are all transferable back to marine ship/off shore rig construction. Those HUGE pressure vessels in the chemical plants also helps. (submarine hulls) With so much work, lots of mini yards also popped up all over the place. They could be building plate girders one month, or wind turbine towers the next, further developing the supplier network.
The likes of Sany and Xugong also took advantage of these market space and expanded/developed in the space normally occupied by Liebherr or Manitowoc, offering far cheaper domestic crane and construction equipment.
Chinese SPMT were especially cool, terminating Mammoet’s dominance in this space. So by the time these LNG module projects ended, circa 2016, I would say Chinese yard have progressed beyond the other South East Asian yards in terms of quality, and absolutely kills them in price. Still not up to Korean standards in terms of quality and efficiency though. Safety aspects has also improved in these times, due to the type of clients they have. Back in the likes of Australia, US, the labor quality started to deteriorate (old hands retiring, militant unionism), project management competencies/culture became more accounting/contractual rather than building the work on time/budget, to the detriment of most of the project, as we can see in those project cost overruns everywhere.
The next wave kind of hit with the rise of private module yards in China. (2016-) They been around a while before, but with the order books increasing, the scraps started to fall out of the likes of COOEC and CSSC’s mouth and into these private firms, and these guys with their new operating models really started hitting it out of the park. The operational management in these yards are more efficient, and innovations aren’t stifled as these guys tend to bend over backwards for their client and accepts using client systems. They usually end up adopting what works for the next projects. It is kind of scary what can be achieved with competent, hard working Chinese craft workers, being managed under contemporary western management org structures (i.e. not rigid top down hierarchal, nor siloed like the Japanese), and with the QA/QC and logistics being managed by the latest systems. My last couple in China has been absolutely textbook success especially when compared with its contemporary. (Italian/ Mexican/South Korean). The rework was minimal, (0.1%!). No one will ever be competitive against the Chinese unless the tariffs goes up.
Traditional bottlenecks such as labor or material shortages can be resolved much much quicker than in any other country. I can bring on thousands of qualified welders within months just by tapping other labor pools from the neighboring city, or province if need be. If I have enough tonnages, I can even get the mill to do a batch just for my project if its super urgent and I have the $, that is of course after exhausting my existing supply network! Of course there are still bottle necks in some specialist areas but those are becoming far and few between. Also, just like in other countries, there are lots of useless people in management positions, so there are many poor ship yards/ module yards. Just that China is so huge that when you put the cream of the crops together, there is still more of them than the rest of the world combined…..
When dealing with Chinese ship yard construction competency, the changes are just so rapid. From mediocre to what we have now kind of happened only in the last decade, and it happened due to a combination of factors that probably won’t happen in any other country again. Its kind of hard to get used to and will take a while for the perception to change. The fact that there are so many potential locations to build all the sub modules, the supply network, the logistics and hardware for bigger modules, the huge modern yard facilities and spaces and the surge capability for both labor and plant, there is just no competition.
Do Asian companies enjoy an advantage in shipbuilding compared to other manufacturing industries? I ask because it seems like China, Korea, and Japan enjoy 90%+ of the worldwide market share.
Given the correlation between IQ and development, and the average Chinese IQ, the interesting question about China is not why are they succeeding, but why have they taken so long to even get to middle income status?
In some English schools, they test you, and if your IQ is exceptional, they berate you for not doing exceptionally. This is my attitude towards China.
Good luck, Anatoly!
These powerful takes better include the Great Bifurcation article…
Some of those surveys of journalists may have been from before the great awokening when the gap between them and the public presumably became larger, so not sure how comparable the data is between countries.
Anticipations and expectations are diverging for much of the 2020s. Just look at the Great Awakening. People are looking back instead of forward.
Interesting to make my first comment here. I’m not sure how quality or awkward this open thread (presumably that’s what’s meant by Open Takes) commenting format will be, but let’s see.
Wanted to upload an image about how Albanian violent crime against Serbs (in Kosovo-Metohija, of course) has spiked considerably since Kurti came to power in Kosovo, but doesn’t seem like an option for some reason.
The lack of markdown code is annoying. I think that the best which can be done at the moment is to take your image and hyperlink it, which will allow it to be accessible(though there’s no embed, etc).
Would be nice if attachments are permitted.
Thanks for the explanation. Unfortunately it’s downloaded as a .jfif image, so not only hyperlinking it, but converting it to .jpeg is probably just too much effort.
The spike in Albanian violent crime against Serbs on Kosovo-Metohija has only also just been getting started anyway (meaning there is much more if yet to come and be chronicled).
This commenting format also seems to be more awkward in that it doesn’t allow immediate edits/corrections after posts, not even with any sort of time limit.
Might be good in the sense it will cause many commenters to think and write more carefully before posting casually.
You can delete your post after posting, so it’s functionally the same.
It seemingly leaves a permanent “deleted” signature.
Come back to the Unz Review AK, I even have a triumphant return article idea, calculated to yours and your estranged benevolent overlord’s sympathies:
“Hitler’s Lost Victory = A Missed Final Solution to the Sovok Question?”
Alas, the victory cult lives on…
Aside from that, I found an article about how Singapore’s military is considerably modelled on the IDF (not just weaponry, but instruction, training, etc.). Makes for a very interesting read putting aside any opinions about Israel-Palestine, Zionism etc.
https://cs.uwec.edu/~tan/saf_israel.htm
The difference between a man who consistently tries to think rationally and a “rationalist” is that the latter is probably an angry atheist. I used to think angry atheists were just shallow and inconsistent, but I recently learned that they are in fact a species of retard, Richard Dawkins being the type specimen:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/godonbrain.shtml
Pinker is less angry than Dawkins, and he’s mostly right only because he discusses banalities that are controversial solely insofar as they undermine the reigning ideology. Where he’s wrong, though, he may very well be catastrophically wrong, concerning for example war. What matters is not the probability of your predictions being correct, but the long-term expected value.
What could be interesting in Pinker’s book, if he bothers, is to give a more up-to-date review of the cognitive bias literature (what replicates, what doesn’t?) and of recent work on the adaptivity of “irrational” behavior. If millions of years of evolution are not enough to make us rational, then probably being “rational” is not all it’s cracked up to be.
When I read « The better angels of our Nature » and the arguments by Pinker regarding the end of war, I was reminded about the argument about « The Great Moderation » in the early 2000s and the claim that economic cycles had been more or less abolished. Quasi-universal belief that war has been abolished will lead to complacency and unseriousness. In January and early February 2020, public health authorities and experts in the US and Europe repeatedly declared that Covid19 was very unlikely to spread in their countries because Ebola and SARS didn’t,
I can announce that at least one Noldor exile has made it across the wastes of the unz review to the land of Valinor.
Regarding the politics of Skyrim, it is interesting how closely they paralleled political developments in the developed west from the early 2010’s onwards, establishment right, dissident right, shadowy outside organisations relying on finance to corrupt local elites. The only thing missing is young leftist radicals and soyboys, Skyrim’s college graduation rate is to low to produce such specimens of degeneracy.
A soylent and degenerate comment.
If you’re going to make vidya analogies, at least refrain from mentioning cliched, ‘open-world’, bethesda TRASH.
It’s a dislike from me!
The provocation to a China-Taiwan war is here:
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/firstnews/202110090099.aspx
I have manifested in this new commenting dimension without markdown.
WAGMI(especially if substack supports markdown code).
Seeming lack of any (or almost any?) formatting options is just weird. But I like the option of sorting by New First, Top First, and chronology.
Would be ideal if they could add that, hyperlinks (just testing) plus image embeds (or at least one image per comment in the 4chan style).
It feels like there’s an entire range of opportunity for improved style sheets and plugins like WordPress. Perhaps that’s yet to come.
I’m happy with this change. Even if the volume of comments / commenters may be smaller, I think we will probably all feel more comfortable posting here in a somewhat more private community than on UR. Looking forward to all that is to come.
Less schizo posters hopefully.
Posters are a countable entity. So I assume that you mean fewer schizo posters?
And as you discovered, there are still grammar nazis here 😉
Schizo posters are part of UR’s special charm.
A test post.
Congrats on the new forum! Looking forward to following this adventure.
A surplus of 150cal over 18 months in 25lb.
Corona NEET lowers NEAT (Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis)
Weight gain isn’t a personal failing||
Prolonged lack of weight loss is.
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
“Cool @StilichoReads thread about the late Roman military. TL;DR, the problem wasn’t that the Germanics undermined fighting cohesion, but that the enemies the Romans had to face banally became much better over the centuries (better organized barbarians”
This debate has been going on for centuries. The decline in the discipline of the Roman troops is an undoubted factor – it is easy to confirm this simply by plotting the frequency of soldiers’ mutinies from time to time. The absolutely prevailing opinion among scholars is that the decisive factor was precisely the catastrophic weakening of Rome. For the empire of Augustus, both the Goths and Huns of 4-5 centuries could not pose any serious danger.
https://i.redd.it/m4woj6fq19261.jpg
Эта дисскуссия
Something like this? https://warontherocks.com/2018/02/shock-of-the-mundane-the-dangerous-diffusion-of-basic-infantry-tactics/
“I don’t know, last year I read the first two books of Tacitus’ histories (about the year of four emperors) and one of its main themes was the unpredictable and violent behaviour of the common soldiers”
Of course Tacitus wrote a lot about military rebellions, but everything is learned in comparison. With relative stabilization after the catastrophe of the 3rd century, in the 4th and 5th centuries, the leapfrog of emperors and internecine wars continued on a scale far exceeding the 1-2 century
“iirc the late antique Roman army was massively increased in size by the tetrarchs”
At Andrianopolis there were 20-30 thousand Goth warriors. Approximately the same army was led by Alaric when he took Rome.
Can you imagine that Arminius with 20 thousand Cheruscs defeated and killed Augustus and captured Rome?
Sad about your leaving Unz Review. But hope you won’t disappear behind a paywall.
This commenting software SUX
Just copy paste your text, edit, then repost, and delete your original post. Easier than in Unz in this way, with its authoritarianism of 5 minute time limit. But I think we can’t embed videos or pictures? I hope there is some way we can find a way around this – imagine no more photos of beautiful women from melanf, no more American houses from AP, no more Jewish music videos from Mr Hack?
Yes images are hosted by them (via their Amazon cdn account) and seem to be only enabled in the blogger’s text.
Enthusiasm for this platform is falling on our first day.
YouTube videos seem to be embedded in a pretty normal way, but I think it is only enabled in the blogger text.
Other issue is while I like grouped threads, it takes away the trolly community feel of scrolling past all comments.
Also,
N
I never found much value in embedding, any positives of it are more than outweighed by attracting truly abominable trashposters like ‘A123′.
I think I’d prefer to have a functional commenting system with nutjobs and their Goebels’ shrines in the background, than this mess.
I just realise now much I value simple features like hour of commenting, user comment history, or clean, sequential, number comments.
Trash posters like who?
Embeds can be fun in providing additional information. but overall, the lack of markup on substack is annoying
Everyone should request markdown tags. One of my major complaints is that it doesn’t really seem to allow for long conversations.
I’ve been feeling (inspired by the horseshoe woke/WN posts) that there exists a bipartisan consensus in the US to:
1) Consolidate the dominance, up to quasi-one-party rule, of their own party
2) Elimination of oppositional groups with possible violent means (e.g. threats of deportation or detention)
Only that everyone see things in the exclusive benefit of their own party.
It shows us one of the ways a bipartisan republican political system can devolve into disequilibrium, both parties being the spitting image of each other. This would appear to be a perfect explanation of the American political impasse if the UN & WEF didn’t exist.
This Open Thread is now dedicated to the restoration of Greater (Tigranes-borders) Armenia
[[[[[—– :clown-world: Hire Blacks meritocratically? Get sued on disparate impact grounds. Hire Blacks to tick the diversity boxes? Get repaid with absurd lawsuits. I have often noted that it seems that a disproportionate percentage of the world’s most interesting developments in technology accrue to the American commercial sector, which is notably much more competent than its government —–]]]]]
State and local lawsuits will be defanged by company relocation. Look at fire arms manufacturers departing anti-2nd Amendment locations. The regulatory burden & taxes are so high in California, even Tesla is jumping ship.
The only solution to Federal Civil Court abuse is multiple terms of electing MAGA federal officials (President, Senator, and Representative). That leads to repeal of crazy laws, elimination of absurd regulation, and appointment of better judges.
It took decades to dig this hole. It will take decades to fill it back up, assuming that the entire system does not fail first.
PEACE
PBUYT
Seems like your Trumpists types would prefer calling a new, exclusively Trumpist Constitutional Convention to replace the Constitution your type claims to uphold.
MAGA is a much better term than Trumpism.
MAGA will last a century or more, which is much longer than Trump.
If SJW/DNC Fascists end the current Constitution by trying to steal another election. What are MAGA Americans supposed to do?
Creating a Constitution 2.0 where only Qualified Patriotic Americans can vote is the least problematic solution available. There are no viable borders for a Blue/Red breakup of the U.S. If you do not like the peaceful MAGA solution, “disempowering the dangerous without harming them”…
— What is your proposal to stop SJW/DNC Fascism? —
PEACE
PBUYT
Which looks like the scenario I said. Disenfranchisement of your political rivals and remaking the place into a dominant-party system. Works OK in societies with a consistent political center of authority (Russia/Soviet Union and China), but not in places with multiple contending centers like America.
Test post.
Man… this is so clean and nice, I can see why you moved to substack. I know a place of value and this is a place of value.
Well I promised myself I’d behave (and reduce the rage I output) so I’ll only add relevant links of potential value
The Soviet equivalent to NATO military symbology:
http://army.armor.kiev.ua/hist/takznaki.shtml
http://army.armor.kiev.ua/hist/takznaki-2.shtml
Weekly Open thread Humor…
As substack does not support inline graphics, the best I can do is send you you to a place with cool embedded GIF’s.
#4 — Using electricity to forge a sword is interesting.
https://ogdaa.blogspot.com/2021/10/tuesday-gifdump_0865004937.html
AK,
Would you like to comment on the squid game crypto currency?
It appears to be a complete scam:
https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/squid-game-cryptocurrency-soars-40000-week
#LetsGoBrandon
AK,
Is RUSSIA changing its Middle East strategy?
[[[[[—–Tension in the Fatah Camp: Russia Received Mahmoud Abbas’ Greatest Foe, Mohammed Dahlan
In a surprising development, Mohammed Dahlan, the opposition leader of the Palestinian “Democratic Reform Movement,” met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow on November 2, 2021. Dahlan, a former Fatah official who now resides in the United Arab Emirates, is a bitter foe of the Palestinian Authority Chairman, Mahmoud Abbas. There are some in the PA who accuse Dahlan of facilitating the Abraham Accords. —–]]]]]
PEACE
https://jcpa.org/tension-in-the-fatah-camp-russia-received-mahmoud-abbas-greatest-foe-mohammed-dahlan/
Was initially pissed at the move to substack,
Seeing the # of neet faggots & conspiritards infesting the comments;
Was the right decision, best of luck Karlin.
The Rehit forbids friendship with haram khor (bastard ie beef-eater) so :shrug:
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
You want a really hot take–and a highly offensive one at that? The Balts should be eternally grateful to the Soviet Union for ensuring that their countries would be flooded with Slavs (mostly Russians) rather than with Muslims and Africans like Scandinavia was. Would an Estonian blonde prefer a Russian man looking at her funny on the subway, or an Arab or Pakistani or Somali outright groping and raping her? Serious question, BTW.