Introduction to Open Threads
Hopefully these open threads will turn into a permanent feature. I intend to post one every Friday, then take the sabbath off secure in the knowledge that my readers will have something to discuss in the meantime. Seems to work pretty well for Razib and Scott Alexander.
I have finished reading Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge, which is a sort of “reboot manual” for civilization in case of an apocalypse. Main two things I took away: (1) I never quite realized how absolutely central just a few chemical compounds like sodium carbonate and sodium hydroxide are to industrial society, from soap to cement, from glass to fertilizer; (2) Counter-intuitively, post-apocalyptic life will likely be much more comfortable than analogous historical periods, despite the drawdown of easily accessible oil, gas, and mineral reserves. For instance, I was impressed to discover that you don’t actually need electricity to build a functional refrigerator (though in retrospect that should have been obvious from first physics principles).
Sometime soon I hope to write a review. Writing regular book reviews is a new goal I’ve set for this year.
I have finally committed to reading Garett Jones’ Hive Mind and am now 25% of the way through it. Having been immersed in its subject literature for years I have yet to encounter anything particularly new or counterintuitive in it. It would certainly be an excellent book to recommend for openminded laypersons to get up to speed on the existing research on the intersections of psychometrics and development economics, especially since Jones keeps things simple and avoids overly specialized jargon. But for 224 pages, it’s hard to justify its $15 price tag.
I am on the third book (Dust) of the Silo trilogy by self-publishing prodigy Hugh Howey. My 140 character characterization of Howey is as of a sci-fi version of Brandon Sanderson who preferred Fallout to Magicka. Speaking of Brandon Sanderson, he has two books coming out very soon: The Bands of Mourning on January 26 will cap the Alloy of Law trilogy, while Calamity on February 26 will put the wraps on the Reckoners series.
The film Ex Machina is now available (and prominently featured) on Amazon Prime. In my opinion this was easily the best movie of 2015, though admittedly I am not a huge fan of the medium – I only watch maybe a dozen films each year – and so my opinion probably doesn’t count for much. I hope to write a (belated) review sometime soon.
The original Deus Ex, easily one of my top 10 video games of all time, was released a couple of months ago with fixed bugs and updated graphics as Deus Ex: Revision. I snapped it up during the winter Steam sale and am looking forwards to reliving some memories augmented by 10 years’ worth of Moore’s Law in GPUs. The Russian cult classic survival horror Pathologic – here is an excellent set of reviews – has been remastered and released as Pathologic Classic HD (even as the original team continues working on a new version). Highly recommended if you like your FPS/RPGs bleak, cerebral, and unforgivingly realistic.
Interesting Links & Quick Takes
(1) An absolutely fascinating interview with Russian military sci-fi writer Fyodor Berezin with the New Yorker, who in 2014 abandoned writing books about war to become Defense Minister of the DNR and participate in an actual war.
There was a conflict with some neighboring troops, a territorial quarrel, and they showered me with a box of bullets from a machine gun. I was covered in dirt from the dust kicked up by the shells, but not one bullet touched me. And then, one week later, the general in charge of this unit and I were drinking cognac.
Also features the most succinct explanation ever of why Russia “lost” in Donbass:
A Ukrainian soldier was asked, “Why are you fighting in Donbass?” And he says, “Because there are Russians there.” The soldier says, “And why are you not fighting in the Crimea?” And he says, “Because there are Russians there.”
(2) German newspaper Bild interviews Putin, translated by Business Insider (part 1, part 2).
You will get at least as much and probably more value from reading Alexander Mercouris’s analysis of it.
As is well-known, the Russians have an established grievance that following the fall of the Berlin Wall NATO was expanded eastward in contradiction to promises given to Russia. There has in recent years been a sustained attempt by some academic historians in the US to deny this. Supposedly no promise not to extend NATO eastward was ever given, and the well-known statements – some of them public – made by various Western officials over the course of 1990 that appear to make that promise supposedly only referred to eastward deployment of NATO military installations in the former East Germany and were only intended to apply whilst the USSR was still in existence.
This denial is scarcely credible, and has been flatly contradicted by some Western officials who were actually involved in the talks. Putin claims he recently ordered research of the Russian archives and that further confirmation the promise was given has been found there. Putin refers to talks between Valentin Falin – the then head of the Soviet Communist Party’s International Department – and various German politicians, which he claims have never been made public up to now. Since Valentin Falin was a Communist Party official records of his meetings would have been kept by the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee rather than by the Foreign Ministry, which may be why they have been overlooked up to now. Putin claims these records not only provide further proof the promise was given, but show that one of Falin’s most important interlocutors – the prominent SPD politician Egon Bahr – even suggested recasting the entire European alliance system to include Russia, and warned of future dangers if this were not done.
Bahr has just died, and it may be the true reason the Russians are only disclosing what he told them now was to spare him embarrassment. If so then Putin’s disclosure of his conversation in 1990 with Falin may have been intended as much as a reminder to contemporary German politicians – Merkel, Gabriel and Steinmeier – that the Russians keep a complete record of what they tell them, as it was to cast light on the question of what promises were given in 1990 on the question of NATO expansion.
There’s more about the Minsk Accords, Crimea, and the Middle East.
And Putin’s dog Koni.
BILD: When the Chancellor visited you here in Sochi in 2007, you brought your dog Koni to the meeting. Did you know that the Chancellor is a bit frightened of dogs, so that this would be quite unpleasant for her?
Putin: No, I did not know that. I wanted to make her happy. When I learned that she does not like dogs, I apologized, of course.
(3) Spiegel interview with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The general comes off really well, as an intelligent and humble man, despite the best efforts of his rude and boorish interlocutor. A couple of highlights:
SPIEGEL: Instead of preventing a civil war through Morsi’s dismissal, you provoked it. Hundreds died and many more were arrested.
Sisi: No. And no, hundreds of people did not have to die. I am saddened by even the loss of a single life. However, let me put this in a different context. Just look at the magnitude of the loss of life over the past 10 years in Iraq, in Syria, Libya and Yemen. Egypt’s population is almost equal to that of all of these countries combined. If you look at the number of people who died, you will realize the army protected the Egyptian people.
An Egyptian civil war would be a horror far beyond what an exuberance of Western democraschizia has led to in Syria, Iraq, and Libya.
SPIEGEL: Our police would not fire live ammunition. If possible they would use tear gas or water cannons. And in our country, the interior minister would have to resign after a massacre like that.
Sisi: I am not ashamed to admit that there is a civilizational gap between us and you. The police and people in Germany are civilized and have a sense of responsibility. German police are equipped with the latest capabilities and get the best training. And in your country, protesters would not use weapons in the middle of the demonstrations to target police.
SPIEGEL: Are you suggesting that those protesters did so without any reason?
Sisi: You have to link these demonstrations by the Muslim Brotherhood with the terrorism that we are currently facing, which is guided by fundamentalist ideas. These people believe they are martyrs who will go to paradise when they die.
This is pretty much an Egyptian equivalent of: “Thank God for the prisons and bayonets, which protect us from the people’s fury!” (a quote from the Vekhi, a 1909 compendium of Russian conservative thought).
SPIEGEL: Do you feel misunderstood by the West?
Sisi: I am trying to tell you the reality. You will always look at what happened in Egypt from the vantage point of a foreigner. You will never be burned by what happens here. If things get rough, you will simply pack your bags and leave.
Skin in the game. Egyptians have it. Europeans don’t. To Americans separated by the great ocean they might as well be lab rats.
(4) On the Russian economy: Russia’s Economy in 2015 Rolled With the Punches by Alexander Mercouris. For the pessimistic version, see Inozemtsev in WaPo. Guess who relies more on verifiable numbers and who relies more on statistical skullduggery and banal anti-Putin rhetoric.
(5) How Russian Engineering Made the Current Operation in Syria Possible by The Saker. I am not the biggest fan of his digressions into the supposed civilizational brotherhood between Islam and Europe but this is a really useful datapoint on Russia’s military modernization (and how it manages to conduct such an effective air campaign in Syria on a shoestring budget). Unfortunately his actually good, value adding article got just a couple of comments compared to the 200+ on his more “problematic” writings.
(6) Turkey is moving in to establish a buffer zone in northern Syria, recently seizing the border town of Jarablus. According to Stratfor, Russia has agreed not to intervene.
(7) If you like videos, Graham Phillips is back in the Donbass and has a whole bunch of interviews with its longsuffering residents.
(8) The Ukrainians starting a new life – in Russia by Shaun Walker. Why on earth would anyone leave that new democracy of hope and human rights?
She decided to leave Komsomolsk in August 2014, after her brother was kidnapped by the far-right Azov volunteer battalion. Although he was later released, the experience had shaken up the family and made them unwilling to stay.
Oh.
(9) On the Polish Question, I liked: Poland and the ‘Empire of Brussels’ by Alexander Mercouris, and Poland Rearms in the Demographic & Cultural War by Guillaume Durocher. Mercouris is a centrist with old school Leftist sympathies. Durocher is a rising star on the Alt Right scene, if a tad too obsessed with bagel. But their key points are the same. This makes for yet another case of Alt Right/Alt Left convergence.
(10) How an obscure adviser to Pat Buchanan predicted the wild Trump campaign in 1996 by Michael Brendan Dougherty. If there is a better article that explains the Trump phenomenon in fewer words, I have yet to find it.
TL;DR – Fishtown is revolting.
(11) As I once noted, Palin is a distillation of the will of the American people. It is therefore of no surprise that she would come out in favor of Trump.
Much like Putin and Russians, Palin is a distillation of the will of the American people. That's why I like her and her folksy charm. #fb
— Anatoly Karlin (@powerfultakes) September 24, 2013
(12) Is the Chinese Economy Really in Trouble? by Eamonn Fingleton. Pass on the trademark paranoia about China and stay for the invaluable deconstruction of the China permabears who have predicted a dozen of its past zero recessions. These people make Kremlinologists look competent and unbiased.
(13) Meritocracy: Will Harvard Become Free and Fair? by Ron Unz. Here is the NYT piece. Come to think of it, university in the US is essentially a tax on the middle class. You can’t do without a higher education certification if you want to work in any halfway respectable profession. I never really got the American antipathy towards free college education. It is standard throughout Europe, and nobody is going bankrupt on account of it. Which stands to reason because higher education is actually pretty low cost in the overall scheme of things (relative to medicine, social welfare, etc).
If this is successful, it could potentially unleash a chain reaction across the bloated US higher education system. If Harvard becomes free then the other Ivies will find it much harder to justify their own tuition fees. Lower ranked universities don’t have the funds to afford this, but the resulting pressure on them may open up the political space to push through universal free higher education at the state or federal level.
Ralph Nader is officially on board and it also syncs very well with Bernie Sanders’ platform.
(14) Garett Jones gets interviewed at AEI. An unremarkable if useful summary of the thesis of Hive Mind. What made it notable is that it contains the single best definition of intelligence I’ve ever come across to date: “Intelligence is what you need when you don’t know what to do” – Carl Bereiter (via James Thompson).
(15) Azerbaijan resorts to capital controls as oil crunch worsens from The Financial Times. Its foreign reserves have plummeted to just $6 billion, which is less than 3 months’ worth of imports. It has belatedly devalued its currency and imposed currency controls. This goes to show there are plenty of heavily oil-dependent countries beyond Russia which are far worse straits, even if it is predictably Russia that is dominating the headlines.
(16) Fred Reed on The Inevitability of Eugenics. My opinion on this has always been quite banal:
When you marry your college sweetheart instead of the crackwhore by the club dumpster, you are practicing EUGENICS. #ReactionaryTweets #fb
— Anatoly Karlin (@powerfultakes) November 11, 2013
(17) In 2015, The Dark Forces Of The Internet Became A Counterculture by Joseph (((Bernstein))). Not a bad introduction to chan culture which might be of use to older, less otaku Unz Review readers.
(18) Your weekly dose of Sweden Yes!: Swedish police banned from describing criminals anymore in case they sound racist, Leading Daily Dagens Nyheter Refused to Write About Cologne-like Sex Crimes in Central Stockholm, Sweden: State-funded Muslim “Sniper” Training.
Sweden to give sex ed to immigrants: This is the official paid-for-by-taxpayers course material (BONUS = female genital mutilation) – via /r/european.
Here is the German bonus edition. So far as I can tell that is not a joke but an actual, existing, published textbook.
Though I appreciate that many feel that the term is becoming overused, what else can one do when our cultural elites are so blatant about shoving cuck down our throats?
College isn’t the only avenue to a respectable job. This ridiculous notion is the result of decades of workplace aptitude testing being severely restricted; because in the 1960s it was deemed racist. Modern employers (especially younger employers) prefer to see relevant work experience and accomplishments in a résumé to a degree. Recall, as well, that in European nations with low-cost or free college, technical education is not stigmatized as heavily and the proportion of the population attending four-year university is consequently lower.
A few recent studies have concluded that college education has, on average, become uneconomical in the US, based on the fact that 1) the employment rate of persons with four-year degrees is now higher than that of adults with no college degree (55% vs 65%), and 2) 40% of employed college undergrads or better are mis-employed (which is to say, they’re employed in work that doesn’t require their degree). Which means, that only 1/3 of college graduates are employed at a level commensurate to their education.
Making college “free” would not eradicate this fact, it would just camouflage it by socializing the costs — at a time when the US economy can least afford it.
even after the whole Syria disaster, the western mainstream still does not get this, like the “Spiegel”.
Anatoly, when did you become such a raging, mighty, white cuck-slayer?
You were basically doing just stats and basic Vatnik shit until 2010.
Is that when you were radicalized in /pol/ ?
AK: Believe it or not but I don’t nor have I ever had a chan account.
I fucking hate the white race.
I can’t wait to start a eugenics program in my country to raise the IQ from 89 to 140, I would slaughter every single white man, woman and child for their power.
Fucking bastards.
AK: You are getting boring. Consider finding a new schtick.
I meant the employment rate for college graduates is lower, not higher (sorry).
Anyway, the debate on IQ variation and economic development is interesting. More interesting still is the wide dispersion from the norm seen in the sample regarding IQ levels, which may be explicable by a variety of other factors; among them political (economic freedom being the single most powerful political factor I’ve been able to find), cultural, and geographic.
You do know Anatoly is white, da?
I thought he was a shitskin wog until now. He is really Russian?
Did you mean medium? As in you don’t appreciate films to be as worthwhile as books and consequently mostly abstain from them?
Or that only a dozen or so of the films you watch in a year could be classified as sci-fi?
AK: Yes I meant medium. Thanks. In my rankings, books > games > movies.
Treaties are made in written after painstaking negotiations about the significance of every word and after that are ratified by parliaments and heads of states.
Conversations and verbal promises, even in an official setting, are just empty words. Russians look stupid claiming that some discussions are binding treaties. A handshake may work in a schoolyard, but not in diplomacy.
Verba volant, scripta manent.
Unfortunately his actually good, value adding article got just a couple of comments compared to the 200+ on his more “problematic” writings.
This is no problem for someone such as yourself that is independently informed on the subject. For me, when a writer makes their way into an area where I can see that what they are writing is “problematic” (one person’s problematic is another person’s nonsense) that puts their other writing (where I have little knowledge) into my questionable and skeptical Q.
Writing regular book reviews is a new goal I’ve set for this year.
Excellent, stick to this. Copy Razib and create a book list, but don’t do away with inspiring quotes.
I was pleased to find, checking on the spelling of her name, that Putin’s dog has her own rather detailed Wikipedia page. RIP!
Konni (Russian: Ко́нни, 1999–2014), full name Connie Paulgrave[2] (Ко́нни По́лгрейв), also known as Connie:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konni_(dog)#Russian_foreign_affairs
And Washington looks dishonorable, telling the world, in effect, that their promises mean nothing.
Moreover, those who don’t keep verbal promises aren’t very likely to keep written ones either. Remember how the ABM treaty was unilaterally scrapped by Bush in 2002? Well, that was written down… and approved by the Senate too. Fat lot of good all that did the Russians!
But we are not “white”.
Get a better term for us before you kill us all.
Excellent news. An Azerbaijan that is running out of money won’t start a new war.
Karlin is a Jewish name (eastern Ashkenazic; Belorussian). Some Russian Jews who immigrated to the U.S. changed the spelling to Carlin. Interestingly, there were seven soldiers in the U.S. Civil War with the surname of Karlin (all Union side).
Ah yes, Putin’s dog Koni…wasn’t it some totally harmless Labrador or something similiar? Merkel’s reaction just showed what a flawed character she is.
Who are you calling not white?
Of course if the “whites” get lined up, I am sure that I can find a non-cau in the woodpile somewhere for myself.
You know, I’m all for dogs, and for dissing chancellors, but it’s possible to be afraid of dogs without having a flawed character. If you did not grow up with a dog, or were bit by one, for example.
The dog looks adorable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konni_(dog)
You’d think bringing a nice dog like Konni to summits would instantly bring about world peace, but apparently diplomacy is more complex than that. It’s a pity.
From the Wikipedia: “There are rumours, although they are unconfirmed, that Konni was named after Condoleezza Rice.”
Konni is a black… uh… female dog. I’m not usually a fan of that kind of humor, and these rumors are probably wrong anyway, but it SHOULD be remembered that in her official capacity Condi was responsible for a fair amount of death and destruction.
A soecial shoutout to anyone who immediately thought of Waugh’s Black Mischief.
From the Wikipedia: “There are rumours, although they are unconfirmed, that Konni was named after Condoleezza Rice.”
Konni is a black… uh… female dog. I’m not usually a fan of that kind of humor, and these rumors are probably wrong anyway, but it SHOULD be remembered that in her official capacity Condi was responsible for a fair amount of death and destruction.
A special shoutout to anyone who immediately thought of Waugh’s Black Mischief.
You do not have the skin colour of pure snow.
Agreed with your proposal, Kamran (for Turkey). Or maybe lower it to that of Arabs, so that they can do less harm.
Yup, not a joke. The illustration is defended rather sweetly and creatively, but very ingenuously, by Mr. smarterGerman himself, a German language teacher from Neukölln, in a 15-minute video answering his hatemail:
“Lovestorm-Love to all Haters”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3XND9r-wi0
Apparently, a few years ago he posted the illustration in A0 format all over Berlin and everybody liked it. Ah Berlin…
[Seems to work pretty well for Razib and Scott Alexander.]
Great role models. A lifelong graduate student Babu with delusions of grandeur and a tranny-fucking psychiatrist.
“Great role models. A lifelong graduate student Babu with delusions of grandeur and a tranny-fucking psychiatrist.”
Why wouldn’t they work for an unemployed conspiracy theorist?
You’d think bringing a nice dog like Konni to summits would instantly bring about world peace, but apparently diplomacy is more complex than that.
I have to take points away from Putin for this. I am annoyed by all these yuppie/metro/swpls that live in the cities and take their dogs out into public spaces to defecate everywhere. They are one notch below the audio jerks. (The people, not the dogs.)
Exactly. Also, how exactly does Anatoly know that free education is NOT bankrupting Europe? For sure, runaway public spending comes in many forms and no single item can be considered the sole culprit. But I actually find the arguments for free education particularly weak, even though classical liberals more often than not consider it more of a public good than healthcare. The government can’t know what the market’s educational needs are better than the market, so let the market provide education. But at the very least, let public education be a state matter, not a federal one, and so subject to the requirement for states to balance their budgets.
I think there should be much less higher education than now, it should be free, and admissions should only be based on tests.
In my mind the ideal model is the government finding the most talented kids through tests and giving them a free opportunity to study real (i.e. hard, useful) subjects. This model would cost many times less than the current one because it would involve many times fewer students. In the current model most students are wasting time.
The free market will always generate waste and fluff. Business and communications degrees are like TV advertising and Internet spam.
Yes I agree with that.
Also: Perhaps degrees in Marketing take the cake so far as that particular type of cancer is concerned.
I had a more detailed writeup of my “optimal” vision of HE here: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/rationalizing-university-education/
The education-industrial complex is way too powerful. And the same forces empowering it are the same liberal social engineers who would never stand for any non-egalitarian admissions test.
I’ve always thought there should be some accommodation to autodidacts and other intelligent people who can’t learn in a classroom setting (e.g., agoraphobics, etc.). Maybe a comprehensive test in certain fields (statistics, applied math, pure math, etc.) where you could get a degree (designated through exam). A lot of people would opt for this and probably learn subjects more throughly on their own for obvious reasons. And it would cost as much as a library card. There could even be other fields included (physics, chemistry, engineering) which would require/allow additional hands-on lab work if you pass the comprehensive exam.
The length of an average college degree completion is way too long and inefficient.
Yes. People should be able to get degrees in most disciplines by simply passing the appropriate tests. Some fields can’t work that way (medicine immediately comes to mind), but most fields could.
Yes, there is tremendous waste in the business of American education. New textbooks every year packed with way more pictures, visuals, diagrams, etc than necessary. Excessive use of computers and Powerpoint presentations which often just waste time and end up being distractions. With intelligent, motivated students, you just need paper and pencil, old textbooks that are the size of normal books and not gigantic, graphic filled monstrosities, and a professor who can verbally present the material and is available for questions and discussion of the material.
The University of London at least used to grant degrees by examination. It is an excellent idea, but alas, one that runs counter to the economic interest of the educational industry.
Well, I would say that the free market by definition can’t generate waste or fluff, since the market generates exactly what consumers want (which may not be what YOU want, but the market isn’t there to serve you alone). Of course, this only applies if the market is truly free, which it is not.
A highly selective, publicly funded education system certainly sounds more rational than trying to give everyone a college degree, but it still suffers from the idea that government somehow knows what society needs better than the marketplace, or that resources should be forcibly directed towards education by the government, when the rationality of the market would otherwise direct those resources to more productive ends.
Education is currently provided by the government and as even you concede, it is a failure. Maybe instead of trying to do the same thing again and expect a different result, we stop entrusting the government with the task of engineering society through education.
“We love Volkstod.” There are germans actually supporting such nonsense.
I don’t share your assumptions about the market, meaning that I’m not a libertarian. I think that everyone who is not a libertarian ideologue, including statist and other kinds of ideologues, and what’s more important, apolitical people, in other words, the vast majority of humanity, can agree that direct mail and e-mail spam, for example, are waste and fluff. Those are inevitable under the free market.
The vast majority of the population could also agree that fundamental scientific research is good and necessary. The market is incapable of funding it. Space flight, atomic energy, first computers, jet engines, the Internet, etc. were and could have only been developed by governments. If the private sector could have developed them first, it would have. And I don’t believe that governments crowded out private innivation in all of those cases – that’s a cheap cop-out. No one banned private companies from going into those areas.
If fusion reactors or artificial intelligence or functional immortality (transferring the mind’s contents to an imperishable medium) are ever developed, it would be by governments, as all the most important technological breakthroughs of the past were. The most ambitious goals don’t bring in profit for decades.
So I do think that the free market is capable of producing waste and fluff, as defined by any common-sensical observer. Actually, I think that it produces huge quantities of it. And that a perfectly free market would do that too. I also think that the market is incapable of doing some fundamentally important things.
I think that there is such a thing as common sense, and that the vast majority of people can agree on large chunks of it. For example, you will never win a referendum anywhere on the legalization of hard drugs. If libertarian ideologues ever push through such a legalization, it would be through coercion, against the wishes of the majority.
Where common sense, as understood by the mass of apolitical, non-ideological people (simple things like drugs are bad, science is good, crooks should be in jail, etc.) differs from libertarian ideology, I root for common sense.
Civilized societies are capable of maintaining order, uncivilized ones aren’t. If the tools through which order is maintained (collectively we call these government) are artificially taken away from a civilized society, the people develop a yearning for someone to reestablish order, to reestablish a functioning state. Napoleon did that after the French Revolution, Putin did that after the chaos of the 1990s in Russia, lots of other leaders and governments have done it.
What I’m trying to say here is that outside of the jungle states are the natural state. When someone destroys them through violence, they come back. There’s a need and a yearning for them among the basic elements of a civilized society, namely civilized and civilizable people.
Some states are more corrupt than others, but it’s very difficult to imagine a state that’s worse than total anarchy would be in the same society. I’m not sure that there have ever been any. I’ve seen the early 1990s in Russia. That wasn’t even total anarchy, but it was still infernal.
In the absence of government even civilized people scam, rob and kill each other. And quickly develop a yearning for order. What makes them civilized is that they’re calable of reestablishing this order. Through a reborn state of course. An uncivilized people also have that yearning for order, but they can’t create it.
Anatoly. Please answer this question!
There is much discussion on the Internet on what would win. F-35 or S400. Sure they are not necessarily going to go head to head mono y mono and the geography and circumstance matters too.
But there are lots of Americans who say that the F-35 cannot be detected by the S400 in time for the S400 to fire it’s missles. And there is a whole other camp that says S400 and or other Russian righted planes would shoot down every F35 in the sky because the F35 is an albatros.
Can you offer an opinion from the Russian side or maybe do a long article that explores this? I feel this is a big issue that is a not being answered truthfully by anyone. Just propoganda and more propoganda.
I don’t have the requisite expertise, and in any case I think such platform vs platform debates are mostly a waste of time.
This is especially true here because S-300/S-400’s are intended to be part of a layered IADS.
Nonsense. Consumers do not want shoddy goods that do not last long yet the free market generates tons of that. The freer the market the more worthless and even dangerous garbage that it will produce. If the market generates exactly what consumers want there would be no need for false advertising and no unsold merchandise.
Actually, the first thing I thought of was the dog ‘Nigger’ in the old movie The Dam Busters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dam_Busters_%28film%29#Remake
Libertarians are nothing but Bourbons with a democratic sheen.
http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=2054&artikel=4313890
Sam Francis also had a prescient article in 2004 http://www.vdare.com/articles/what-kind-of-people-are-people-like-obama
He blames the Kollontai school of thought, Kollontai was the only one of the early central committee left alive by Stalin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_women_in_World_War_II
I think Mearsheimer’s precedence over Ukraine and the worthlessness of the apparent Western security guarantees for Ukraine has been too little recognised. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mearsheimer#Nuclear_weapons_and_Ukraine
Re ” Turkey is moving in to establish a buffer zone in northern Syria, recently seizing the border town of Jarablus. According to Stratfor, Russia has agreed not to intervene.” According to McMeekin, after WW1 Russia tried to claim the Kurdish area of what is now Syria.
Merkel’s endgame is to bring Turkey into the EU. It is an old strategy in new form:
Free enterprises has maximum incentive to not generate waste or “fluff”, because waste and fluff costs them money. Large organizations ALWAYS generate waste, because the personal goals of each member is not aligned to (and in fact may be at odds) with the efficiency goals of the organization, but unlike government bureaucracies, private businesses have to crack down on that or else they don’t exist for very long.
Empirical evidence supports this. Jurisdictions with fewer business regulations consistently outperform jurisdictions with more business regulations in socioeconomic indicators such as cost of living, median income, unemployment, and poverty/lack thereof.
This effect exists completely independently of other confounding developmental variables such as IQ. While IQ is by far the strongest causative factor for economic development (having a correlation of 56% with median household income per capita), economic freedom has a correlation of 25% with the same metric — but only 15% with IQ. In fact, the overlap is so low, that the two factors explain differentiation in development almost completely independently of each other. Combining the metrics, I found that between them they have a correlation with income of 50%.
Re: Fyodor Berezin.
Back in 2014 I read that a prominent Russian (technically Ukrainian) sci-fi writer had turned a rebel commander. How prominent was he really, though? I never heard of him, so I looked him up. Turned out, he was prominent enough to rate his own Wikipedia page in English (created long before he got into politics.)
His Wikipedia page had ( confusing) summaries of some of his books. I noticed an interesting thing there. An earlier series had American and Russian intelligence services cooperating to investigate (and fight?) military incursions by an alternate reality USSR. By contrast, a later series describes an outright global Soviet-American war where America is the bad guy. Notice the progression? This must reflect a certain shift in opinions in the wider society.
“Because there are Russians there.” This joke will go over the heads of 95% of the Western readers.
Something extremely hilarious is happening at The Guardian. Natalie Nougayrède, columnist and leader writer at The Guardian, the former executive editor of the French daily Le Monde, writes:
As always, the comments are far more interesting. Here is a listing of the five most upvoted comments order by popularity.
Yes Patrick Armstrong has a great writeup on that:
http://patrickarmstrong.ca/2016/01/23/the-yawning-heights-of-new-ibansk/
Putin: … Capital outflow has […]significantly dropped.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/50971
….. the volume of capital flight has decreased by half.
http://russialist.org/transcript-medvedev-at-the-7th-gaidar-forum-excerpts/
I wonder what are the reasons for this decrease in capital flight.
A-ha, there is Mercouris talking about this! 🙂 But his tone of “nothing terrible, move on” leaves me less than satisfied.
For the banal reason that the deadlines on a lot of Russian corporate debt repayments have now passed.
That was by far the biggest component of the so-called “capital flight” in the first place.
I thought The Guardian (along with most news-sites) banned comments a long while ago.
Westerners need to be reminded what total devastation 90’s Russia went through. I’d rather see a retrospect on that than another Vatnik article.