Open Thread 10: Week’s Links

christianity-middle-eastChristians, in an Epochal Shift, Are Leaving the Middle East

Eurabia is demographically implausible during this century. Greater Lebanon, however, is.

The curious rise of the ‘white left’ as a Chinese internet insult

Although the emphasis varies, baizuo is used generally to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.

Critical context from bloody shovel. Dynamics in Russia are remarkable analogous, though unlike the Chinese, I don’t think we’ve even progressed to the point of having our own term for SJWs.

About 27% of Americans might be considered transhumanists in the sense that they want radically increased healthy lifespans of 200+ years.

Curiously, there is a huge gender split: 36% of men want that, but only 18% of women.

  • His Kampf. Not a bad profile of Richard Spencer, though the journalist’s evident disdain for him does seep through somewhat.

One thing that goes unmentioned: Despite the repeat Nazi comparisons, Spencer himself doesn’t subscribe to one of their core beliefs, that of the hierarchy of races: “… There is no universal, cosmic criterion for determining when one individual is better than another.”

Anatoly Karlin is a transhumanist interested in psychometrics, life extension, UBI, crypto/network states, X risks, and ushering in the Biosingularity.

 

Inventor of Idiot’s Limbo, the Katechon Hypothesis, and Elite Human Capital.

 

Apart from writing booksreviewstravel writing, and sundry blogging, I Tweet at @powerfultakes and run a Substack newsletter.

Comments

  1. German_reader says

    Interesting that Chinese are turning against progressivism, I hope they crush anybody who wants to bring that crap to China. I don’t like the term “white left” though, “Anglo left” would have been better, since it would emphasize that much of this ideology is radiating outwards from the US and its Anglosphere satellites.
    That graph about the percentage of Christians in Mideast countries is quite striking. Probably still not enough to wake up stupid Christian Islamophiles though.

  2. Pseudonymic Handle says

    The disappearance of Middle Eastern christianity has been happening for more of a hundred years, since the turks massacred and expelled millions of armenians and greeks from Anatolia.
    Or maybe we should say it has been happening since the medieval islamic conquest as before that most of the Middle East and North Africa were 100% christian.

  3. ussr andy says

    I don’t think we’ve even progressed to the point of having our own term for SJWs.

    общечеловек comes close, but it’s more about someone who says liberal values are universal (which would include various demshiza and liberasts who aren’t, per se, SJWs.) I wish there was something more snappy, like the German “Gutmensch.”

    OT congrats on your RT Crosstalk appearance!

  4. Dynamics in Russia are remarkable analogous, though unlike the Chinese, I don’t think we’ve even progressed to the point of having our own term for SJWs.

    99% of the population of Russia knows nothing about the existence of SJW. PC-fans of all shades will be in Russian called “толераст” (this is probably the most accurate analogue of word “baizuo”)

  5. I just found this week-old article, and it’s a gem. (I also shared it on iSteve, if you don’t mind.) Perhaps I’m the only one who discovered it this week, and for everybody else it’s old news, but I think it’s worth having a look at for anyone here. (TL;DR: Islam is wonderfully feminist, in fact, more so than feminism. It just falls short of calling for mass conversion of all feminists to Islam, but I feel such calls will be coming soon enough.)

  6. I find it impossible to send a recurring donation through PayPal. Did anyone have a problem with that? Same thing with Greg Cochran. Before I could easily do that, but now, even if I tick in the “monthly” tickbox, it redirects me to the simple donation page with no reference to recurrence and no options to change it to recurring.

    I tried to google, I only found that other people have had similar problems in the past, and they proposed things like clearing the cache or doing it from another browser, but it didn’t help for me, unfortunately.

    In any event, I sent a single donation of $10, and will try again next month (unless I forget).

  7. This (Islam/feminism alliance) is actually a surprisingly common trope.

    For instance, here’s one “Salafi feminist”.

    One of the organizers of #WomensMarch is a sharia law supporter.

    Okay, can’t help trolling a bit. Here’s an amusing theory via Korotayev: It might be the case that the institution of FBD (fathers brothers daughters) cousin marriage, which is especially deleterious and largely specific to Islam, originated on account of… wait for it… feminism. Of a sort, anyway.

    You see, the Koran dictated that half of the family property should pass on to the daughter relative to that of the son, which might seem regressive to modern ears but was still an infinite improvement from zero, as had been the case before. Consequently, cousin marriage became much more prevalent within Dar al-Islam as a means of keeping property within the family.

    I suppose there’s some sliver of truth to every theory no matter how deranged. 🙂

    PS. Thanks for the donation! Much appreciated. The reason you can’t make a recurring donation on PayPal is because I formatted it as an order. I had problems changing it and decided to stick with the old method, which I at least know works. Patreon is a much better platform for recurring donations.

  8. ussr andy says

    толераст is very good!

  9. Philip Owen says

    Ah. I couldn’t understand why being called Tolerant was an insult. The person involved speaks no English and the remark was in passing. I had suggested that the government should allow homosexuality in private. (Actually, I am OK with Civil Partnership – it is the government’s job to be tolerant but when they call it marriage, I want to find a shotgun).

  10. Neither Podvig nor the links he offers present any actual arguments.

  11. Does anyone have anything to say about Ukraine’s banning of Russian social networks and Yandex? I don’t understand the logic at all, it seems like a huge own-goal to me. Vkontakte has to be a great aggression outlet for anti-Russian Ukrainian trolls. If they can’t vent at Russians, they might turn on themselves and each other.

  12. aceofspades says

    For sure I hope that the alliance with Salafi Islam would discredit feminism, but seeing how blind and fanatical a lot of the progressives are, I would doubt it.

  13. This relatively balanced article includes explanations for why:

    http://dailysignal.com/2017/05/16/as-russia-uses-cyberattacks-ukraine-bans-some-social-media-sites/

  14. Thorfinnsson says

    “Curiously, there is a huge gender split: 36% of men want that, but only 18% of women.”

    This is not curious at all and can be explained by two factors:

    1) Women are relationship oriented, and when presented with radical life extension they’ll invariably say they don’t want to live long since others will die.

    2) Women are idiots

  15. TelfoedJohn says

    Great analysis of academic baizuo here:

    http://jmrphy.net/blog/2017/05/15/psychology-of-prohibiting-outside-thinkers/

    “The psychology of prohibiting outside thinkers”

  16. There are some other words used by Chinese netizens describing similar situations:
    圣母 saint mother/holy mother (German women who were holding the welcome sign when refugee trains arrived is the perfect example).
    欧洲绿化 Europe’s greening/the greening of Europe (Green is the color of Islam).
    欧洲斯坦 Europistan.

    Muslims in China already launched Jihad for sevaral times.
    During 10th – 12th century, Turkic Uyghur people lived in today’s northern part of Xinjiang province launched Jihad against Buddists in southern part of Xinjiang who spoke Indo-European languages (basically they are white people, who were the TRUE residents from 3000 BC to 1000AD in today’s southern part of Xinjiang, one of the languages – Tocharian is much more closer to ancient Celtic than Persian). All the monks were killed during the Turkic conquest, the Buddism culture, sculptures, temples, books, even their languages and identities were completely destoryed. They were forced to converted to Islam and mix with Uyghurs. Uyghur today is about 30%-40% white.

    In 19th century, the Dungan Revolt/Tongzhi Hui Revolt was also essentially a Jihad, Hui minority people in northwest China wanted to build a Islam nation, so Hui’s rebel forces began with slaughtering non-muslims village by village, city by city. More than 15 million Han people and 5 million Hui people, or 80% of the population in Shaanxi province and Gansu province were killed or missing during the conflict.

  17. Also 3) Women are social conformists, and since radical life extension is still a decidedly weird position to argue, they steer clear of it.