Rosatom HQ.
- RIP. Sam Dickson: William H. Regnery II: A Hero’s Life. A Hero’s Death. I intersected with him in Moscow in 2018 at the end of a transit of the Trans-Siberian with a friend. Too little to get a know a person, but my impressions were positive, FWIW. On a non-political tone, He remarked that he had visited Moscow three times, once towards the end of the Soviet era, the second time around 2010, and the third time now. Each time it had gotten better. He said that he had been in London about 20 times and that it had progressively degraded since he first visited in the 1960s. In 2018, he felt it had overtaken it in quality and by a large margin.
* Lo, Y.-H., Cheng et al. (2020). Detecting genetic ancestry and adaptation in the Taiwanese Han people. Molecular Biology and Evolution. Spoiler: Admixture happened before the Chinese emigrated to Taiwan.
- @Peter_Nimitz (and @Irkutyanin1): The Bolsheviks in August 1918, saved by the Latvians and the British?
-
Haaretz: Calling Them ‘Antisemitic Images,’ Krakow Bans Sale of Jewish Figurines Holding Coins. Lame but unsurprising. I bought a dozen of these Jews when I was in Krakow to give out as edgy presents to Russian friends.
-
Dean Fantazzini’s new estimate of Ukraine’s population for 2020 is 30.6 million (vs. 31.3 million in 2019), building on previous work which I covered. Whether it’s closer to 30M or 35M aside, it edges ever closer to a 5x gap with Russia (vs. a 3x gap in 1992). This is also smaller than the ~35M it had in its modern borders in 1913/14. (Conversely, Ukraine’s GDP (PPP) per capita would be better).
-
Charles Murray: “Doesn’t it make a difference to @davidafrench’s argument that two of the core problems typically ascribed to centuries of American racism–elevated black violent crime and depressed mean cognitive ability–are found wherever sub-Saharan African populations live?”
-
Scientific American: AI Designs Quantum Physics Experiments beyond What Any Human Has Conceived
-
Revolver: How Black Rifle Coffee Used Every Trick In The Book to Fool Conservatives (h/t Hanania). Another sad example of conservatives fleecing their own.
-
The Economist: “Our excess-mortality model suggests that 8m-16m people have died in the pandemic. The central estimate is 14m.” Stats from the Third World are generally a black box. So could be right by now.
-
Chinese shitlord notes that US freedom of speech is circumscribed by the ADL and gets promptly banned from Twitter. Reposting the public content of journalists is also bannable. “Muh corporations can ban whom they want” but if you’re not on Twitter you’re invisible. And their coordination grows ever more Picus News-like.
-
Daily Beast: A Homicidal Church Is Ruining This Country With Putin’s Help.
(1) The Georgian Orthodox Church is autocephalous from Moscow, (2) all polls show Georgians more homophobic than Russians, (3) Georgian nationalists don’t exactly like Russia, LOL.
But it is still Putler & Russia who are repressing their gays.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Commenting rules. Please note that anonymous comments are not allowed.
I think you mean, Jews fleecing gentiles
Recently the norm in many industries in NY is to work only 4 days per week during the summer – I am happy to say that this has recently begun to include me!
If I take off Thursday afternoon, that means I have roughly half the week – 3 and 1/2 half days – devoted to Beauty and Goodness, and half the week devoted to the dreariness of the Machine.
Is the oligarch class beginning to relent somewhat? It does seem that way! The great economist Keynes, in his famous essay, may yet be vindicated.
I plan on spending all this time in the mountains and forests, of course 🙂
Paul Kingsnorth (more on him below) says that modern technological civilization is only “3 days deep” – spend three days in the woods, and you slough it off like an artificial skin.
In addition, more articles have been appearing in the NYT and other prestigious news outlets advocating for a 3 day week. Yes, 3 day weeks!
This past year, noted English environmentalist and successful novelist Paul Kingsnorth has converted to Orthodox Christianity. This is a very significant event.
He could no longer in good conscience remain a secular atheist. And it is particularly significant that he chose the most mystical branch of Christianity, Orthodoxy, the one furthest removed from the Machine, and the most ascetic branch, which emphasizes Kenosis, “self-emptying”.
Kingsnorth sees mystical nature-love in Orthodoxy, a lack of self assertion and desire for domination, and instead a willingness to fit into the larger scheme of things instead of mastering it. He recently wrote very beautifully on the Irish monks on their little islands out in the Atlantic in the middle of nowhere – what amazing places to live!
I just finished reading the children’s novel The Secret Garden (hat tip Bruce Charlton) – what a beautiful book! It is a tale of two sick and miserable children brought back to health and happiness through contact with Nature, and the psychological perils of absorbing negative messages – but has deeper, more mystical themes as well.
I am reminded again of what vitality the Victorians had.
Next month I am heading to Wyoming for four weeks, the wildest state in the lower 48 – in preparation, I am reading about the Sioux Indians, who had a mini empire on the Great Plains and defeated American armies. Fascinating reading – and not all light and sunshine. Lots of cruelty in their world – which has got me thinking on various things. I plan to visit some Indian holy sites, like the Black Hills in S Dakota, and the badlands – that severe but beautiful landscape the Sioux made their headquarters for a long time.
Perhaps the world is getting better and we are not prepared to see it? The old dream – of endless material growth as the purpose of life – is dying, although it remains the dominant religion. Major cracks are appearing. Americans are disoriented and confused because we do not yet have a new dream. So we are in a transition time.
But that will pass!
Perhaps there is Good News on the horizon? We will all be materially poorer – but happier! But we must undergo a revolution in thinking to appreciate this.
Just finished a replay of Deus Ex.
Intriguing how “right” it is, if extremely exaggerated. Does demonstrate the fatal flaw of most conspiracy theories: the bigger they are, the more fragile and simply unsustainable such things would be.
On more realistic subjects, Twitter-Google-Facebook should be treated as one entity. And as an extension of the American “state-culture-system” as at this point they’re inseparable.
I shall also recommend a book, this one somewhat tangential to the recent topic of magic: “Conjure Wife” by Fritz Lieber, first published in 1943 in magazine form.
What I found fascinating about it was how politically incorrect it was about the differences between the sexes. Its general theme was how women accidentally invented magic through their superstition, their cattiness, and their general social warfare to advance the status of their husbands against the husbands of other women. And without spoiling it, the story also deals with the abilities and limitations of men.
Probably the best HBD story I’ve ever read.
Reply to the post “Cultural Autonomy in Film”:
I question whether high levels of protectionism ultimately benefit the film industries of the countries in question. The Paris-based South Korean scholar Jimmyn Parc, in cooperation with the French scholar Patrick Messerlin, published a series of papers demonstrating that import and screen quotas as well as subsidy regimes did not improve the competitiveness of Korean and French films and simply led to large numbers of low-quality films, while pro-competition reforms massively increased the competitiveness of Korean films from 2000 onward.
https://i.imgur.com/j0tMWW4.png
According to Messerlin & Parc (2014), subsidies to the French film industry have ballooned in the 21st century, while the French domestic market share has remained stagnant (see Figure 3). The level of French film subsidies has now reached €476 million, or 32% of the entire industry’s value added; there are also allegations that the subsidy scheme is prone to abuse (e.g. intellectual bigwig Bernard Henri-Lévy using his chairing of a state commission to fund his own film, considered one of the worst of all time). There are few recent internationally popular French films; I can name only Amélie (2001), The Class (2008), The Intouchables (2011), The Artist (2011) and Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013). France also has a U.S. import quota of 110 films per year, and a program covering 70% of the cinema market reserves 40% of screenings for European films (Messerlin & Parc, 2017).
https://i.imgur.com/O7i24oD.png
In South Korea, import quotas were eliminated in 1985, and replaced by a screen quota requiring 40% of screenings to be Korean. This was reduced to 20% in 2006, which had no effect. Subsidies were increased in 2007, which also had no effect. What did have an effect was that in 1986, the Korea-US Film Agreement allowed Hollywood studios to bypass Korea’s regional distribution system and directly distribute their films, injecting competition into the stagnant industry (Parc, 2014, pp. 110-111). After a nadir during the 1990s, the Korean film industry eventually revved up and boomed in the 21st century, aided by corporate financing and vertical integration. The commercialization of Korean film allowed budgets to increase and be used more efficiently, the creation of a star system, investment in visual effects, improvement of marketing, and improvement of distribution through the construction of cinema multiplexes (pp. 116-117). State support has also oriented away from protectionism and more toward improving competitiveness, for example by providing education, equipment, and international promotion support. Since 2000, Korean films have maintained an average market share of 54% despite a screen quota of only 20%. These include the internationally acclaimed Oldboy (2003), The Host (2006), The Handmaiden (2016) and Parasite (2019), by famed directors Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho.
In China, although a strict import quota exists, the film industry is otherwise mostly free of market distortions, although Zhou (2020) found that Chinese government efforts to boost so-called “main melody” (i.e. propaganda) films through subsidies actually backfired, leading to deterioration of the quality of “main melody” films. Nevertheless, the import quota has had no effect (matching Messerlin & Parc’s observations re South Korea), since China’s film boom began in 2015, over two decades after the inauguration of the import quota (Ho, Rysman & Wang, 2020); the quota in fact liberalized from 20 to 34 films right before the film boom. Thus, even if China were to have had zero protectionism, it still likely would have been able to shut out Hollywood through greater competitiveness; the film boom is likely a result of the same commercialization stage as in South Korea. In the long term, the strict import quota may harm Chinese cinema as future directors and audiences will only be familiar with Hollywood blockbusters rather than a wide variety of films.
https://i.imgur.com/IEspZgu.jpeg
In Russia, the film industry has improved since the turn of the century thanks to the commercialization of the industry; Russia has produced award-winning films such as Leviathan (2014) which, contra Anatoly’s ideologically-driven butthurt, is genuinely an excellent film. [Being the Russian equivalent of a siyāhnamā’ī (Iranian anti-government, lit. “black portrayal”) film does not automatically make it bad. Likewise, the Iranian Zvyagintsev, Jafar Panahi, is a superb filmmaker despite his criticism of postrevolutionary Iran and similar accusations of unrealistic portrayals.] Nevertheless, there continue to be problems; only 24.1% of admissions and 23.2% of the box office were from domestic Russian films in 2017, while 59% were from Hollywood (see figure above), leading me to question the significance of McMahon’s graph. An (admittedly outdated) 2011 poll found that almost a fifth of Russians viewed domestic films negatively, rising to almost 30% of youth; of the 40% who preferred domestic films, most belonged to older Soviet-raised generations. A report by Nevafilm Research (2018) found that state subsidies were increasingly focusing on a small number of high-budget films, and that the distribution market was concentrated in the hands of Hollywood majors; on the other hand, the report found that subsidies are declining (from 49% to 38% of all films), that more films are getting support from the private TV sector instead, and that small-town cinemas are growing. It seems likely to me that subsidies will do nothing to increase the competitiveness of leading studios; hence, efforts should focus instead on pro-competition reform and vertical integration.
With regards to India, a 2005 article by Marvasti and Canterbery noted that “severe quantitative restrictions limit film imports”; however, India’s film industry did well over the course of the License Raj and to the present day. I suspect that a sort of de facto domestic free market existed as legitimate funding was illegal until 2000, forcing filmmakers to seek funding from organized crime rather than the state. Nevertheless, I would argue that Bollywood is not internationally competitive; no one outside of South Asia really watches Indian films, even in traditional export destination Indonesia (Koike, 2002).
Ultimately, the biggest argument in favor of pro-competition reform is that it increases your country’s soft power, whereas protectionism doesn’t as it is just de facto import substitution. (In Russia, piracy can and will be used to evade protectionism anyway). Hence protectionist “cultural autonomy in film” is not actually autonomy. But if domestic films are better than Hollywood, audiences will take notice.
Note to Anatoly: I would greatly appreciate it if you could refrain in advance from republishing my comments as separate posts or reposting them anywhere outside this comments section. Thanks.
References
Ho, C. Y., Rysman, M., & Wang, Y. (2020). Demand for performance goods: Import quotas in the Chinese movie
market [Paper presentation]. 18th Annual International Industrial Organization Conference. https://economics.indiana.edu/documents/Demand-for-performance.pdf
Koike, M. (2002). Bollywood versus Hollywood in the globalization of media: A history of Indian films in Indonesia. St. Andrew’s University Bulletin of the Research Institute, 28(1), 23-34. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/236011554.pdf
Marvasti, A., & Canterbery, E. R. (2005). Cultural and other barriers to motion pictures trade. Economic Inquiry, 43(1), 39-54. https://doi.org/10.1093/ei/cbi004
Messerlin, P., & Parc, J. (2014). The effect of screen quotas and subsidy regime on cultural industry: A case study of French and Korean film industries. Journal of International Business and Economy, 15(2), 57-73.
Messerlin, P., & Parc, J. (2017). The real impact of subsidies on the film industry (1970s-present): Lessons from France and Korea. Pacific Affairs, 90(1), 51-75. http://doi.org/10.5509/201790151
Nevafilm Research. (2018). Key trends in Russian cinema. https://rm.coe.int/ru-2018-key-trends-of-russian-cinema/16808d7212
Parc, J. (2014). An eclectic approach to enhancing the competitive advantage of nations: analyzing the success factors of East Asian economies with a focus on the development of South Korea (Publication No. 10371/119620). [Doctoral dissertation, Université Paris-Sorbonne and Seoul National University]. SNU Open Repository and Archive.
Zhou, X. (2020). Boosting China’s film production: An assessment of the subsidies for China’s ‘mainstream films’. Global Policy, 11(2), 56-64. https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12831
At last notice the Russian and Georgian Orthodox Churches have good relations with each other. At last notice, this includes the ROC-MP recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia as the domain for the GOC. if I’m not mistaken, Crimea might still be under the domain of the UOC-MP.
Off topic:
Has anyone seen a good film or TV series in the recent past ?
I thought this one was charming:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/review-time-travel-and-murder-combine-in-hbos-riveting-beforeigners-series/
The summary data from the US Natioanl Longitudinal Study supplementary data of Murray’s book, https://www.encounterbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Combined-Longitudinal-Studies-0615.xlsx
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uk0wAZHhixs/YQNyyeVmyiI/AAAAAAAAANU/L2ISiJpgoy4qk88UMDwIxFixgw_OuKAeQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1306/nls0.png
More data and bigger tables at http://relativevolatility.blogspot.com
Didn’t you mean circumcised?
Check out Warrior (2019). A little woke, but otherwise superb. Great action, amazing pacing, gets better as it goes on.
While it is very interesting that so much research efforts was made to argue for open markets and free access to markets by Hollywood I am skeptical about the conclusions. An optimal solution for every country can be different and it is somewhere in between the two extremes. W/o subsidies and totally open market film industries in many countries would collapse and this is not acceptable for counties that want to have some influence on narratives told about themselves, their cultures and the world form their point of view. The world domination of Hollywood did not happen suddenly. It took some time of Hollywood market advantage to contribute to almost wiping out cinema industries that were still thriving in 1960s in countries like Italy, France, Sweden, Denmark (Germany is a special case because of WWII). The American advantage is about the market size. There is simply more money for making movies than anywhere else because American market is huge and teh it is extend to English speaking countries and de facto protected. Successful foreign films do not enter American market instead they are remade as American films:
Let Me In (Let the Right One In, Sweden)
The Departed (Infernal Affairs, Hong Kong)
Sleepless (Nuit Blanche, France)
The Birdcage (La Cage aux Folles, France/Italy)
Some Like it Hot (Fanfare d’amour, France)
True Lies (La Totale!, France)
Unfaithful (La Femme infidèle, France)
Insomnia (Insomnia, Norway)
Funny Games (Funny Games, Austria)
15 Highest-Grossing American Remakes of Foreign Films
https://www.thewrap.com/highest-grossing-american-remakes-foreign-films-godzilla-departed/
and then
A Bigger Splash, “La Piscine”
A Fistful Of Dollars, “Yojimbo”
Victor/Victoria, “Viktor und Viktoria”
Solaris, “Solaris”
The Talented Mr. Ripley, “Purple Noon”
Twelve Monkeys, “La Jetée”
The Magnificent Seven, “Seven Samurai”
Babylon Berlin
I wrote about it here:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/cuties/#comment-4176573
“But the film is not about the plots. It is about the background, the historical period which was done in the best way I have ever seen. I was very impressed with German movie making and clarity of thinking and vision as demonstrated by Babylon Berlin.”
“Some watching it may leave with a subversive message that what has come later with Hitler coming to power was a good thing while others may get an acausal notion that as long as we have prostitutes, gays, transvestites, morphinists and occultists we are safe from Hitlers of the world.”
dux.ie, what software do you use to generate your charts?
It will mostly come as the result of a large segment of unvaccinated population being denied service anywhere in the formal consumer economy, and have to become self-sufficient (or gaining the ideology to do so)
BTW does Chechenya has enough vaccine coverage to marginalize the rest of the population? I suppose devout Muslim opposition to vaccines will be in line with to devout Christians.
So…
About halfway through McMeekin’s “Stalin’s War”, I still think our benevolent overlord may have oversold the book somewhat.. Mcmeekin keeps reminding me of Timothy Snyder with his pulpy, overemotional language that he insists on using, in addition to his almost pathological attitude towards Russia, practically on the same level as that female blogger AK sparred with years ago. Perhaps the standout mixed metaphor so far has been his describing of the equipping of “the Vozhd’s” war machine (McMeekin loves this title, I suppose he think it lends his prose a certain pizazz, as I don’t recall it being used in English for Stalin before).
Of course, this Russian war machine is described as a ‘steamroller’, but no, not any regular old one, but a “mechanised [is there any other kind?] and airborne steamroller”…
Regarding Rezun’s theories, so cherished by our benefactor, McMeekin doesn’t appear to endorse ‘Icebreaker’ in this book, or if he does, it’s in such an attenuated and vague form that I can’t count it as such. Prior to Hitler getting the jump on “the Vozhd” in Barbarossa, McMeekin states Stalin was simply waiting for the Americans to attack Germany, and so grind each other down in a long war of attrition, after which the USSR could overrun Europe with minimal resistance.
None of that is really any kind of revelation to anybody, Stalin simply miscalculated in reckoning that even Hitler wouldn’t be so foolhardy to attack its biggest trading partner (and oil source) whilst the British were undefeated and American entry looked imminent.
McMeekin’s explanation for the initially atrocious performance of the Red Army stems as much from its rock-bottom morale, hyper-centralised command-structure and terrible mid-level leadership than reasons of forward deployment or a high proportion of formations useful only for offense, such as paratroopers. The fact that Soviet war material was superior to the German, in virtually every aspect, is gone into detail as well. The obvious answer for how the Eastern Front initially went is probably just that German troops were the best in the world at the time, with extremely high morale after a string of total victories.
He does thoroughly dispell the myth of “the Vozhd” experiencing a mental breakdown upon the German invasion, arguing that all available evidence suggests he coped with the shock as well as anyone could, with records suggesting 18 hour workdays, and so on.
Tangentially, I’m not entirely sure why Ron Unz is so keen on rehabilitating Nazi Germany, or why he’s so eager on disputing the holocaust in particular. I mean, isn’t he partly or wholly of Jewish descent himself? From that side, I don’t think even Israel Shamir, Israel Shahak, Norman Finkelstein or Gilad Atzmon have ever denied that millions of mostly unarmed Jews were killed during WWII. Numerous commenters (mostly Wally and his fellow travellers, granted) on this site have brought it up time and time again, but I don’t think I’ve even seen Ron Unz answer these scurrilous accusations of his Jewish blood directly. Which is a little odd, because he appears so open about all other public aspects of his biography.
Not a surprise since Taiwan was mostly populated before 1945 from Fujian which has a largely southern Han-Baiyue mixed population, just like most of Southern China.
Jews spend as much time fleecing each other as anyone else, their Rabbis in particular are constantly cursing (literally, as in casting magic spells) and trying to destroy the livelihoods both each other and their adherents. For example, try reading about how the political party “Shas” was actually created, and how it became independent of its original Ashkenazi puppetmaster, the Rabbi Elazar Shakh, originating the now endless feud with his former protege Ovadia Yosef.
It’s a totally ridiculous saga, like something of that Gogol story of “Ivan Ivanovich”.
utu, the articles are not arguing for “open markets and free access to markets by Hollywood”; they are trying to understand what makes national film industries internationally competitive. Not all subsidies are the same: subsidies for cinema education, equipment, studio infrastructure, dubbing/subtitles and international marketing, as well as export subsidies, are useful, while non-targeted subsidies (used in France) and import/screen quotas (used in South Korea) were found to be ineffective. I suppose you could make an argument for infant industry protection, but without a vast domestic market you would have to be export-oriented right from the start to become competitive.
Economies of scale may be one major reason why Hollywood is so successful, but it’s not the only reason; Japan has economies of scale, yet its film industry has been largely unsuccessful since the 1950s. The U.S. also had a rather weak film industry during the initial TV era (1950-1974), giving an opening to foreign film studios that was never acted upon. Silver (2007) found that Hollywood was unique in that it alone adopted a commercial approach where no one else did: only Hollywood used marketing research to aid design, had a rigorous product development process, had strong promotional capabilities, and carried out strategic marketing management (e.g. promotion of movie stars, different genres, etc.) On the other hand, French, German and Italian films were largely arthouse (not commercially-oriented) after WWII, while British, Indian and Japanese films were domestically- (not export-)oriented. At the end of the day, cinema is a business, and this is why Hollywood is so successful. Hence, I suggest copying Hollywood’s business strategy; otherwise, your country will be stuck with watching Universal, Warner Bros. and Netflix’s latest offerings, which may or may not be to your liking.
References
Silver, J. D. (2007). Hollywood’s dominance of the movie industry: How did it arise and how has it been maintained? (Publication No. 16687). [Doctoral dissertation, Queensland University of Technology]. QUT ePrints. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/10885386.pdf
I’m sure Ron Unz is pleased that some guy is upset on the behalf of him and his people. There is a worrying amount of virulent anti-semitism in the world today, so thank you for being one of the few who care and fight to the last drop of blood for Zion. Stunning and brave.
There might be a window of opportunity while the US is obsessed with worshipping homos. But probably not inside the US empire.
However, in the greater scheme of things, the movie industry itself might be an exhausted and declining phenomenon, in practice relegated to children’s shows and increasingly blue, yet strangely unsexy, movies, so it might be more worthwhile to focus on something else. For Russia, could be that money is better spent on RT …
PS. … and, as an aside, making video games. May I suggest Russia launching and maintaining an alternative to Steam? It doesn’t have to be an enemy, just a credible alternate source.
I do not think this is the case. He likes Suvorov thesis because he perceives it as being neglected and purposefully suppressed by English language media and historiography and if something is suppressed it is very likely it is true. So it perfectly fits his Pravda series about the lies we have been told or the truths we were not told. Beside as we discussed it before here in some ways Suvorov rehabilitates Stalin as well, though it has not been adopted by the the official Russian historical politics, so far. Apparently it has been calculated in Russia that being an innocent victim of Hitler pays more brownie points than being an active opponent of Hitler trying to preempt and stop Hitler and save the Jews before Hitler knew he wanted to kill them.
In many of Ron Unz’s articles he introduces them with a foreword of him just getting into the topic recently and not knowing much about it not so long ago and being very surprised that he found something really astounding. A good example of this is the 1940 Operation Pike that he thinks was suppressed in historiography because he thinks it was absurd for the French and the Brits to consider bombing Baku oil field of their future ally and because he never heard of it until he began to get interested in what happened in 1940 not so long ago. While it is true that durning WWII after June 22, 1941 there were many efforts to whitewash the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact the Operation Pike was rational and reflected how miilitary commanders of France and UK thought of the Soviet Union at that time. Then there is the psychological aspect:
This is more complicated. I would have to refresh my memory by reading his article on Holocaust again but at this moment it seems to me he was just listing various arguments that Holocaust was not what we are being taught. However I remember that on few occasions his comments indicated that he indeed did not believe in the extermination camps as if arguments by the revisionists convinced him.
There is no open debate between revisionists and the orthodox historians because the revisionists are in fact denialists often with a hidden agenda of completely exonerating Germany. The discourse of those revisionists is based on analogy of court proceedings in the anglo-american legal system, where the defense vs. prosecution is extremely adversarial. There is no middle point. Guilty as charged or not guilty. So for instance CODOH and Wally’s of this world would argue on technicalities that if there are no graves you cannot prosecute because how do we know they are really dead. In essence a lot of it is Johnny Cochran’s antics like “If it does not fit, you must acquit” which apparently worked on the black women of the jury and it works on many white revisionists.
I believe that much more nuanced approach is needed as I believe that indeed there are many exaggerations in the Holocaust canonical narrative but I believe that 75% of it is more or less true. In fact Timothy Snyder who you do not like does a pretty good job, imo, in redefining the center of gravity of the Holocaust and outlining much better the timeline in terms of causes and evolving intentions. There was no plan to exterminate Jews. It just happened step by step. Yes, Jews were to be exiled and resettled but not until December 1941 when already 1 million of Jews were shot right behind the Eastern Front line the decisions to kill all the other Jews left in Poland and in the West was made when they realized they would never have access to Madagascar, Uganda or Palestine after America entered the war. A very important motive was Germans’ obsession with calories counting: useless eaters like the feeble minded, Soviet POW’s and Jews locked up in the Ghettos where they were put by Germans. And most importantly when they could get away with it: stateless Jews caught in the no man’s land territory. The Wannsee Conference was mostly about the German Jews who were German citizens and thus under some protection of German law. What about Jewish war veteran and what about Jews married to Aryans were questions Nazis did not have clear answers. Initially in 1939 Germans indeed wanted to just resettle them. Look at Eichmann’s Nisko Plan for Jews from annexed Polish and Czech Silesia that were not granted German citizenship and how internal politics and competition between different agencies derailed it and the Jews were sent back to their homes after first being concentrate in the Nisko area. At that time Nazis were concerned with public opinion as the Western press was writing about Nisko. Holocaust historians do not like to dwell on the Nisko Plan because it proves there was not extermination plan in 1939-1940.
I haven’t come up with any explanation of Ron Unz’s interest in and posible endorsement of Holocaust denialism but I would think it is just by the extension of him being extremely contrarian and being somewhere in between foolhardy and vainglorious. I think that in some sense Ron Unz transcended his Jewishness even if it is only in a contrary way. You must have noticed that he would like to get attention of ADL and the fact that they are ignoring him so far proves that he must be right and they are afraid of the power of his arguments.
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1421464650512797697
Global agorism is inevitable.
“French, German and Italian films were largely arthouse (not commercially-oriented) after WWII” – I do not think so. Arthouse films constituted larger but still very small fraction than in the US and the majority of films were directed at general audience who wanted entertainment, distraction and escapism just what Americans were getting. Look at the list of films with the most cinema admissions in Italy since 1945:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films_in_Italy
Note that “A Fistful of Dollars”, “For a Few Dollars More”, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Trinity Is Still My Name” are Italian films.
Do you realize how many comedies were made in France and Italy in 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s and how popular they were? Do you know about German Heimatfilme after WWII and the important role they played in fixing the German psyche?
“while British, Indian and Japanese films were domestically- (not export-)oriented” – Nothing wrong with that and besides British, French and Italian films were distributed in other countries in Europe whether that was originally intended or not.
Hollywood used marketing research. – That often amounted to voodoo and produced mixed results. One of the strongest forces of movie production was imitation and keeping up with the Joneses. If one studio did well with a monkey riding a motorcycle the other studio would do kangaroo riding a scooter. This even went with the art house movies and with the big stars jealousies. If Marlon Brando did well in the existential film set in Europe The Last Tango in Paris by Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci then the next year Jack Nicholson makes an existential film set in N. Africa and Europe The Passenger by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. They do not know the women they hook up with. They both are killed in their films and guess what their female partners are played by the same actress: Maria Schneider. The only difference is that in The Passenger they do not use butter or margarine. Tell me how much market research was done here?
Thanks for the link to Silver’s dissertation. I may look at it later.
People who are not Jewish (and even some who are!) build to themselves a mythical image of Jews which simply has no counterpart in reality. To be fair, nowadays that mythical image is also applied to Blacks (and probably all ethnicities), who are supposed to have a sense of ethnic pride way beyond what is reasonable to suppose of normal human beings.
Have you heard of the Triangle Factory fire, where dozens of Jewish and Italian poor immigrants worked and were killed in a fire? That factory was owned by two Jews. Here’s a link for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire
If that will not be enough to clarify your mind about the fact that normal people do not care two hoots about matters of ethnicity (except when their livelihood depends on it), here’s another story that might make you see the light:
The Unbelievable Story Of The Plot Against George Soros
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hnsgrassegger/george-soros-conspiracy-finkelstein-birnbaum-orban-netanyahu
The case of Ron Unz has of course many differences to the above. The only thing in common is that he is a normal person (I suppose that if he had some serious abnormality he wouldn’t have lived to his present age in his current functional state). But he is not a greedy industrialist, nor a shrewd political consultant. The thing with Ron Unz is that he is in love with China from his youth days, and everything else revolves around that. He even wrote a treatise on some Chinese matters in 1983! You can read it here and tell me what it’s about (though I plan to read it some day).
Social Darwinism and Rural China
https://www.unz.com/runz/social-darwinism-and-rural-china/
People act like Jews are much different from Arabs, but really they are the same, except with bigger IQ’s. If Arabs stopped the cousin fucking and had a little eugenic effect on top, they’d be exactly the same (and then rightoid butthurt would be even more insane, since they would be fleeced six ways from sunday).
Does remind me of a particular thing that used to be popular in rural Serbia – very weird, and demented forms of cursing and “magic”. Like throwing severed goat heads into the neighbor’s yard to inflict cancer on his bloodline, shit like that. Very rare nowadays, the Vlachs are infamous for their own brand.
Really, I believe, if the commies executed everyone who believed in this shit, and I’m not talking about some “report neighbor for going to church and celebrating slava” bullshit, but actual whole villages gone from the face of the Earth, everyone would be far better off. And more appreciative of a government that punishes imbecility with death, the only crime deserving of such a thing.
If the Roman Church had not lost its nerve with Vatican II, Kingsnorth would likely have become RC like many pre- and post-WWII English luminaries!
It’s more about which subsidies are effective, and that vertical integration is indeed based and redpilled when it comes to everything ever.
Sadly, some countries, like mine, Serbia, have nothing to vertically integrate. Unsure if we have such protectionism efforts, but our new films, if technically and visually impressive, now feel bland and soulless, very Hollywoodesque, in the bad way.
While this may be true in this case and many others, Jews would not have the power they do without libtards – especially libtards who disguise themselves as nationalists.
Murray’s IQ is only derived from math + verbal (AFQT test), but not from spatial abilities, which leads him to underestimate the IQ of people working in STEM.
A more diverse test will give you another picture.
Thus the tables are unfortunate BS.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232466160_Importance_of_assessing_spatial_ability_in_intellectually_talented_young_adolescents_A_20-year_Longitudinal_Study
The RC Church is definitely much, much better than the Protestant, but the RC Church had a very ambiguous and often hostile attitude towards it’s mystics, even including persecution.
Orthodox Christianity, with it’s Heyschast tradition, actually incorporated mysticism as a central plank.
Unfortunately, the RC Church participated in the general Western drift towards materialism. But the RC is distinguished by it’s tradition if great art, architecture, and intellectual sophistication.
Kingsnorth is too much of a nature mystic for the RC. Intellectuals and artists convert to the old RC. Today, though, there is little left in the RC of course.
I believe there will be many intersecting threads leading to transition away from the current system. It will be overdetermined.
I am sure the elites will overreach in various ways, like denying basic services to the unvaccinated, that will have unintented consequences, and shrink the consumer base, reducing elite wealth – not what they had in mind!
But we are far from out of the woods yet. Mainstream religion is still hard core materialism and “growth”. Cracks are beginning to appear. It’s obvious to any thinking person this is unsustainable.
I wonder if the growing population shrinkage is the “spiritus mundi” preparing the world for a post-science age? The world’s carrying capacity is way, way lower without science – perhaps the fertility crisis is a preparation for a world that, without high level science, cannot carry billions.
If you have 4 weeks you might have a chance to approach the most beautiful sight I have ever seen in the Rockies. It’s a little off the path you describe. If there were a zillion Americans reading this forum there is no way in the world I would describe it.
Seven Lazy P ranch Choteau MT. It is about 300 mi north of the WY border and closer to Canada than Wyoming but you might be interested to read further. Their business model is fishermen drive there and then rent their horses and then go on horseback into the Bob Marshall wilderness. There are no roads where they go. There are no people where they go. It is the most beautiful stretch of the untouched Rocky Mountains that I have ever seen. I do not fish and I do not ride horses and I did not even make it all the way into the Bob Marshall–I was there for a slightly different purpose but if I ever get my ass horseback adjusted that trip is going to be number one on my list for sure.
It is grizzly bear country so if you go out there by yourself you need to have peak wits. The bears are not a concern at all if you are with a pack of six guys with ten horses.
You have not been around Jewish people enough, I think, or you would see how the mechanism for it can be. Imagine what it might feel like if you are, from childhood, raised on going to Holocaust centers and memorials, watching said movies and being told of how the world desires your extinction, etc. Many of them are actually quite well done, unique and memorable, indicative of their well-known verbal capability:
https://forward.com/culture/166781/nathan-englander-play-explores-stalin-era-tragedy/
Enough constant exposure to this and I think that you would also be quite sensitized. I honestly think that its such a barrage(and indeed, to their children!) that it could be considered almost self-inflicted psychological abuse.
IMO, Korean protectionism allowed its film market to develop. It was a placeholder, until the quality of domestic films improved. What also kept it going was Korean ethnocentrism. (Highly developed at the time, and not something applicable to every country. ) Besides, as you referenced, the government does help out with exports, helping to dub, among other things.
China seems incomparable because of scale. IMO, it does not make sense to compare it to small countries like France. Perhaps, America and India. Though, America does, I believe, still have many local subsidies.
In the case of France, I think the French could ask what purpose does it serve to subsidize an industry that regularly subverts French identity and promotes negrophilia? They can get that from America on torrents. But such seems to be the case with nearly every government in Western Europe. They don’t have the right organization for promoting national interests. And, when you include news media, billions of euros are regularly wasted on the production and dissemination of poz.
So what do you make of the fact that Jews have taken most of the most important positions in USA gov’t for some time (it seems they own Treasury since Clinton, I think, and now they also own State), they control most of the MSM, most of finance, and movie studios? Is that not part of reality or is it a part that doesn’t count much or is it because they are talented at taking over whole industries? Willing to be corrected here, don’t care much either way.
Interesting comments but a few caveats. Having debated some of the revisionists / denialists here at Unz I would like to add a few not unimportant details.
First of all they do not argue in good faith and not in an adversarial ‘battle of evidence’ fashion even if they frequently claim to do so.
When confronted with sources, info etc. which do not fit their thesis they frequently ignore / dismiss them even without examining them.
Standard response to evidence they can not ignore is: testimonies are lies, documents are forgeries and photographs are a photomontage (variations thereof)
Their statements, assertions etc. are to be taken at face value. Even though they constantly demand proof (and dismiss any presented in the fashion I outlined above) but frequently do not find it necessary to produce proof for their assertions. For example if dismissing a photo of German atrocities as photomontage they will not furnish proof of who / were / when was staging it, paying for it, distributing it etc.
Another thing, frankly laughable, is the taking selected statements of Hitler and other Germans as honest and literally meaning what they said even if subsequent events proved them to be deliberate liars.
I could go on but he point is sufficiently made: no, they are for the most part not some sort of legalist purists applying logic and evidence.
Why so? IMO because many are “believers” i.e. they believe in good Hitler, German innocence and so on. This believe is sometimes quasi-religious and demands taking at face value anything that supports it while rejecting anything to the counter even if backed up by evidence.
Until yesterday, I didn’t know anything at all about Paul Kingsnorth, but thanks to you I do now. There are many interesting articles one can read about his conversion to Orthodoxy, none perhaps as poignant and insightful as this one: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/paul-kingsnorth-orthodoxy-dark-chamber-baptism/
I plan to read more of his essays.
I’m glad to read that you’ve taken such a positive interest in one aspect of Theosis, namely Kenosis. But Kenosis is only one aspect of Theosis, the best is still in front of you, as it is for all of us. Paul found this out after much searching and research into other religious traditions. He wasn’t satisfied with the emptiness that he felt after seriously practicing Zen Buddhism. As he says himself:
https://basilica.ro/en/what-writer-paul-kingsnorth-found-in-orthodoxy-buddhism-is-a-powerful-practice-but-it-is-lacking-something-god/
I find this actually questionable. Take battle tanks, of which the USSR nominally possessed something like five times more than the Germans. The bulk of the tanks on both sides were obsolete or not very important light tanks (I’d argue that an obsolete light tank was way more useful than an obsolete heavy tank, the Soviets had plenty of the latter), the ratio of modern tanks was closer than that of all tanks.
The best German tanks were the Pzkpfw. III and Pzkpfw. IV. The best Soviet tanks were the KV and T-34 tanks. The Soviet tanks were better in some aspects but worse in others. The Soviet tanks in general were usually very uncomfortable and ergonomically poor, leading to their crews getting tired quickly and performing below their level of training. Handling was poor in other ways, for example Soviet tanks usually had horrible transmissions which required enormous physical force to change gears (T-34 crews were often happy when they could use the second gear), leading to lower speed and higher fuel consumption. There was a general lack of radios in Soviet tanks, which made maneuvering with tank units cumbersome and coordination on the battlefield almost impossible. Soviet tanks were also notorious for having poor visibility: so the crew was tired, had little idea what was going on on the battlefield, had no idea what their commanders and comrades in other tanks were up to, and found it difficult to handle even if they had the proper ideas what to do.
Now that’s not to deny that besides being tired, not seeing the battlefield properly etc. Soviet crews were also not very well trained. Their doctrines (like those of other militaries) were significantly worse than the doctrines of the Germans, and the Germans put huge emphasis on proper training and even learning from their own mistakes.
Historians don’t often dwell on the numerous tactical mistakes the Germans made in Poland and France (obviously those were less important than the mistakes that the French and the Poles committed), but the Germans themselves did properly analyze both campaigns, with an emphasis on the lessons learned from them. This included the mistakes made (and how not to repeat them).
So I think your intuition that the German troops were the best in the world at the time (and probably the best in modern history before or ever since), and probably Swedish historian Niklas Zetterling is correct when he asserts that the German Wehrmacht was at its peak in the summer of 1941, having learned from all the mistakes of the previous campaigns, but not yet having suffered significant losses in its prewar officer corps.
Thanks so much for this!
The Bob Marshalls are in Montana, which I sort of half had the intention to go to anyways. I’m going to make an effort to stretch my trip to 5-6 weeks if my bosses go for it.
With car rental prices at insane levels, I no longer fly out West and rent cars. I bought a used reliable Toyota SUV – it should pay for itself in a year of trips. Plus I can customize it to make it comfortable to sleep in, hard to do in a rental!
But this means I have to drive all the way from NY – Wyoming is around 26 hours from me, so I I have the idea of limiting myself mostly to the Mountain states and Utah canyon country (because I can’t live without Utah canyon country).
Anyways Montana should be well within this remit! I will try and make it – it sounds really exciting!
I love the sheer wildness of grizzly bear country and the fact that they are there – makes it so much more real. Last summer I was in the Wind River Range, and went to great lengths to buy bear spray – then forgot it in my car like an idiot 🙂 Deep in the mountains my first night, of course I did actually see a bear by the river. But I don’t know if it was only a black bear or a grizzly – I did not linger.
A woman just got killed in Montana last month by a grizzly – dragged out of her tent in a remote campsite while on a bicycle tour. So yes – one must be careful! And even then, there are no guarantees.
But isn’t that what wilderness means – and why we love it? Of course, watch me get eaten by a grizzly lol after saying this 🙂
Well, God decides, eh, or the fates, or what have you. It is not in our hands.
Anyways, thanks for the tip! Many of the best places in America are word of mouth and off the beaten track – as it should be. I will only share it with worthy people.
What is starting off as avoiding vaccine gatekeeping in occasionally extreme forms will become the basis of a new post-modern, post-consumerist economy based on ideological-traditional affinity, maybe a neo-tribalism. In this way whatever misdeeds done by those in power only aids the formation of this new order, New Normal.
Maybe 21st Century can be a Taoist century, where we will stop finding uses for material abundance and recover human nature, after global catastrophes and massive disillusionment.
I am happy to introduce him to you, Mr Hack. His essays are well worth reading! And very much balm for our troubled times.
It’s funny, after reading about Kingsnorth’s conversion, it got me interested in the Philokalia again – it truly is a beautiful book, and well worth dipping into on occasion (or reading through, for those who can. It’s massive)
Yes, Kingsnorth rejected Zen, although he found much of value in it, while I still find that certain Zen/Chan writers speak most eloquently to me.
But to be fair, I reject much that passes for official, institutionalized Zen as well!
I find that within every tradition, a certain number of – usually eccentric – writers appeal to me most. I just don’t fit well into institutions 🙂
As for Zen and God, much depends on how you understand it. In a sense, Zen has “God” – but he is unnameable, the God of the mystics.
Although Orthodoxy has this strain as well, it also has a more positive conception of God (and interestingly, certain factions of Zen – or closely related Buddhist sects – also smuggle in a positive conception of God!)
I personally derive most inspiration from the mystic tradition within each tradition – I can never be a traditional orthodox Jew, but I love and am inspired by Jewish mysticism, and my favorite Jews are the mystical Hasidim. I do not think I can ever be a traditional Christian, but I love the Heyschast tradition within Orthodoxy and love and am inspired by many Christian mystics! I also can never be a traditional mainstream Buddhist – as AltanBakshi will be all too happy to tell you 🙂 – nor can I be a “religious” Taoist with their misguided quest for physical immortality, but certain Buddhist and Taoist writers speak to me like no other writers!
But I have complete respect for those who choose different paths, and find much beauty in all the traditional mainstream approaches as well.
But who can say where I will end up? 🙂
An empty room will appear indistinguishable from a room utterly packed with baggage, until you try to fill both with light.
At this point, the baggage room will remain completely dark, but the empty room will shine.
Ever had a Marie Kondo clean out? Emptying a room full of baggage requires a delicate and loving appreciation of every piece that was placed in there. Things can’t merely be thrown out, but given a grateful and understanding farewell. These things were collected over what seems like lifetimes for most people, they are things to be valued as much as they are to be let go. This is a heartbreaking process and one which requires courage, focus and self-compassion.
Most people choose instead to lock the door, keeping the room dark, while occasionally opening it quickly to shove yet more stuff inside, until the door inevitably bursts open and some pieces fall out, before they try to shove it back inside and go back to pretending that the darkness is actually emptiness.
What does the doctrine have to do with it? The Soviet army relied on human material with a very low level of education, in addition, there were simply not enough resources and time for long-term training of personnel in the pre-war period. In wartime, there were not enough resources and time for this (except for the end of the war).
As for the quality of equipment and in particular tanks, the Germans in this area had an absolute advantage throughout the war
Germans and Co also outnumbered the Soviet troops, like a proper offensive force should.. 4 million frontline Germans to 3 million frontline Soviets. Also, as i recall, Germans had artillery superiority.
Superior numbers and superior firepower produce the initial German result. This idea that Stalin was going to attack Germany any second now is idiotic and not supported by numbers on the ground.
However, superior numbers and superior firepower also require superior logistics to haul supplies, and Germans sucked at it. Soviet Union was much better at logistics, which explains the rest of the war.
Which books or other sources should I read to know the story.
May it be so!
Moreover, I think it will happen 🙂
That seems to refer to the West Russian Volunteer Army, which mostly consisted of German Freikorps that had operated in Latvia. Their intent was to march through Latvia to Russia to join the other White armies against the Bolsheviks. However, the Entente ordered Germany to close the East Prussian border and thus the West Russian Volunteer Army was cut off from supplies. In this situation, they lost against the Latvians who were supplied by the Entente and also directly supported by British naval artillery. Ernst von Salomon writes about this in his autobiographical novelThe Outlaws .
It seems that the Latvians were skeptical of the Whites (and of the Germans as well) and their attitude to Latvian independence and keen on securing a peace treaty with Soviet Russia; consequently they helped the Soviets in this situation by stopping the West Russian Volunteer Army. The Entente was likewise wary of the Whites in general and the continued presence of German troops in the East specifically. The outlook of a possible conservative Russian-German rapprochement through that route was probably something the Entente sought to avoid as well.
Also, this happened in 1919, not in 1918.
It looks like Western media is upset about Russians at the Olympics.
Not only Russians are trolling hard with ‘We Will ROC You’ campaign, but they are also winning a lot – 3rd place by total medal count and 5th place in gold. Not bad for a country that even isn’t supposed to be there.
Western sports media hurt the most.
You are not necessarily wrong. I have watched a remarkable documentary made by an Israeli, named Defamation, which covers this phenomenon with impressive candor.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1377278/
That’s not exactly what I talk about in my comment. People can be indoctrinated into anything, and that certainly will cause them to concern themselves with the most absurd non-issues. The indoctrinators are in turn motivated by great political and personal gains. But the fact that such indoctrination exists is actually evidence in favor of my hypothesis that such traits are neither natural nor normal.
What Yevardian was apparently questioning, and I addressed in my comment, was whether ethnocentrism is natural and normal in a human individual. I claim it is not. People have a small range to their affections. They may be irked, in variable degrees, when their country, or their race, or their religion, or their football team, is made to look bad, but that is only superficial. They don’t care about it as much as they care about themselves, or close family members, or, in some cases, someone to whom they are linked to by a love relationship.
Jews are perhaps notable because they managed to keep a separate identity for so long in spite of a lack of a land of their own. I think this is an interesting phenomenon, but I think ethnocentric cultures are created as a defense mechanism. This is useful and detrimental at once, because, while in the one hand it creates a web of mutual support, on the other it perpetuates differences and stokes resentment. Individuals have no natural inclination to isolate themselves, nor to isolate others, but it is hard to stop a centuries-old ongoing process.
My reply to Daniel Chieh will probably interest you:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-159/#comment-4814687
Summing it up, I don’t think you are necessarily wrong, but Yevardian made a misguided assumption that there is something strange or unexpected at finding someone as Ron Unz who doesn’t act in an ethnocentric manner.
The Post Admin Error site bug is back and did not give me a 5 minute edit window.
Would a Moderator with access please remove the dupe video link in the above?
Thanks
Ron Unz acts in a “reverse ethnocentric” manner.
Instead of merely remaining neutral on Jews, having a nuanced take on them as humans with flaws, and seeing their behavior in the larger context of human history, with analogies and parallels to other human groups with allowances for different circumstances, he demonizes Jews and considers them and their religion uniquely evil.
Far from freeing himself from ethnocentrism, he remains defined it by it.
When a rebellious teenager deliberately does the opposite of what his parents want, he remains defined by his parents desires – he has not achieved independence.
There is a Hebrew word *davka” – it loosely translates as “just because”, as in “just because you want me to do something, I will do the opposite”.
To a large degree, Unz.come editorial policy is defined by “davka” – just because the mainstream supports Jews, Ron will support Muslims. Just because the mainstream opposes China, Ron will support China. Etc, etc.
The English word “contrarian” does not quite capture the full flavor of this psychological phenomenon.
It is, in fact, a very Jewish trait 🙂 And not a positive one, I should add. It is a form of rebelliousness, but it is the opposite of independence. If you live among Jews, you will sadly recognize Ron’s “type” all too well.
In an intellectual climate that is increasingly repressive and one-sided, Ron’s”davka” editorial policy may serve a useful role – but it’s limited, and sadly a far cry from an intellectually mature and developed independence.
That being said, I agree with you that people are not naturally ethnocentric. The history of warfare among same-race people, and alliances between different-race people against people of their own race, sufficiently attests to this.
What people are, is “group-loyal” – and while ethnicity or race may form one component of group identity, it has never yet been able to serve as the sole or primary determinant of group identity.
Today, we are materialists – we have stripped away all aspects of group identity that are “intangibles” – religion, culture, history, values, ideals.
Naturally, we have left only material categories – race. Craving a group identity, we use the only intellectual categories left to us.
The “instinct” here is not a bad one – it is the desire to belong to something larger than oneself. Only it has nowhere to express itself except in material categories.
As materialism recedes, the instinct that is now attempting to express itself as “racial nationalism” – an entirely modern phenomenon – will flow into more traditional and healthy forms.
Indeed, even “nationalism” is a modern phenomenon that can only arise after all “higher ideals” have been stripped away.
But as modernity recedes – or is transcended – these curious phenomena will recede as well. However, the “instinct” behind these modern phenomena – which is essentially human and healthy, the desire to belong to something”bigger” – will remain, and find healthier outlets.
I concur but I would qualify. Adversarial ‘battle of evidence’ is frequently not fought in a good faith in courts. The most essential part of the trial is the fight about which evidence is admissible and once it is admitted you can always hire an expert who will find some flaws, points to the chain of custody issue, finds it not authentic and suggest that the document could have been a forgery. For every expert there is an anti-expert who is also an expert. And also you can hire witness who lie for you. That you can always get them this Russian saying proves it: Он лжет как очевидец.
As far as Hitler and many other German hight ranking officers and their out of context statements that suppose to absolve them of their true intent and crimes this is not exactly the case because it is true that there is no smoking gun paper trail and when looking at what is left from Hitler pronouncements and what is traceable to Hitler it is not really a slam dunk evidence.
Only in an ideal world you have researchers who proceed w/o a thesis and formulates it only after all evidence it is collected. Usually the thesis is formulated first, this is for psychological reason so there is a strong motivation to do the work and often the thesis is not revised if a contrary evidence is found. Both sides have their bias with various ulterior motives and they cherry pick what suits them best.
I belief that some revisions are necessary but I am also convinced that Holocaust denial is completely ridiculous and only hurts a genuine revisionist inquiry. The Holocaust industry loves the Holocaust deniers because they can be easily vilified and and easily dismissed and their existence helps raise money for various Jewish causes. In my pet theory the Holocaust deniers like Wally and Codoh are useful idiots ro agent provocateurs of the Holocaust industry. But otoh there are some who try to look at broader picture and have genuine desire to find the truth. One has to take into account they are the underdogs fighting against the overwhelming odds where the opponent can also play very dirty. The other side will tarnish your reputation before they ever allow you to enter any debate.
In several discussions about Holocaust I participate here at the UR I found that only a tiny minority is receptive to my middle of the road approach. So usually I got hit both from deniers and from the orthodox believers in the canonical Holocaust narrative. It suits me well because I never wanted to join any club or party.
Yep.
Another disgusting display of hypocritically ignorant arrogance and bigotry. When confronted with the realities, they’ve no answer and act carry-on like the debunking presentation never happened
It will never matter how you argue against them because they usually need that belief to place themselves at the centre of a world narrative where they are honourable genius saints standing courageously against a tide of incredible evil.
Totally subjective opinion, but they’re not nice drinks. They’re the triumph of volume of flavour over deliciousness, just like a lot of rap music is the triumph of shouting over beauty.
You should write an article about the tumultuous saga of the Nauka module and its path toward the ISS. Also about the hysterical coverage of Western “experts” that were gloating about their wished catastrophe of the mission. They went near hysterical after the tumbling of the ISS but they ended furious because of the module ended successfully docked to the ISS.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/6952439.html
LOL
Yes. Cognition usually can’t be decoupled from psychology. That’s why the most effective arguments are purely rhetorical as they are emotive and not necessarily logical and they can be false. As far as the two extremes of the debate their greatest sin is that they never stop and reflect on what they do know, what they believe and what they do not know. If there comes a change and I believe that it will come it will be through some extraordinary effort by a singular courageous historian that would shift the paradigm. I think that Timothy Snyder made as significant progress with his two books on WWII bloodbath and Holocaust. But his second book was attacked more than the first one and it seems that he backed off and shifted attention to more general subjects and socio-political issues.
I realized very early in my discussions that I can’t convince anybody who does not want to open his mind but I think that putting down on paper what I believe is right or what I think is wrong with the approach and arguments of either side is a good thing to do. Yet I know that to engage in discussions I am motivated not by reason.
With IQ and cognitive testing being in the news, this one comes to mind. It was used in WWII to screen applicants to work at Bletchley, breaking the Enigma code. What the heck does this mean:
Let’s see I have never used the “more” feature but I think I can use it now to hide the answer.
Santiago, Chile
Yes, Western “experts” are getting kinda desperate because ever since Rogozin came to power in Roscosmos, Russia hasn’t really blown up any rockets. There was this mishap with crewed Soyuz in 2018 but it ended being more of an advertisement for Russian launch about system. Imagine that – rocket blows up, but crew walks away unhurt like its nothing. Compare that to Space Shuttle, and more importantly, Starship, which is supposed to be human rated without launch abort. (It won’t be any time soon, but normal people don’t know that).
Anyway, under Rogozin, Russian space program quality control became world class. Nauka, designed and built from 1995-2007 or so, was the last hope for big Russian space disaster.
Everything else Russia does is pretty modern – Soyuz-MS is 2016 design (they don’t get to ISS in 3 hours by luck), Angara has new factories in Omsk, Vostochny is brand new spaceport etc. Quality control there should be excellent.
The only way for the West to make fun of Russian space program right now is number of launches, but that’s sanctions related and temporary. Once Russia localizes electronics manufacturing for satellites and spacecraft, payload manufacturing delays will go away and launches will go up again.
Back to Nauka, i listened to NASA conference call discussing Boeing Starliner launch delay, they had an astronaut on it, it was amusing. The media was freaking out about Nauka caused attitude change, but the astronaut was like “nope, unusual but nothing serious, ISS changes attitude all the time to accommodate docking spacecraft, including Nauka, so nothing we haven’t seen or experienced before”.
The biggest material impact of that accident was Russian Progress space freighter had to burn some propellant to correct the attitude back to nominal, but according to NASA, even that wasn’t significant.
So much for space disaster so many hoped for.
It will never be so clear cut, really.
One part will. The other, mostly of the “global south” variety, will instead, well, mentally, become utterly post-human. I’m talking about taking the current technocratic society, and then turning it towards something else entirely. A whole different synthesis.
Around this point, the mutual hatred will become so great and inconceivable, that finding a globe, or a map of the whole world, will be impossible, at least without the “opposing states” being just blacked out entirely and censored.
Again, we get to the scenario of crypto-Amish resisting transhumanist Combine-style hypernazbols or whatever you could call them who are technologically extremely progressive, but socially basically in antiquity, slave owning and all.
Interestingly enough, both are “trad” but in radically different ways. The neo-luddites in the most apparent way, visually and all, but theirs is based on a mirage and illusion, it’s nostalgia taken too far, and I believe would quickly lose why exactly they’re doing what they’re doing, except that “it’s supposed to be so” – basically blind bone-headed morons.
The technophiles, on the other hand, will have a far more “basal” and fundamental “traditional” thinking that transcends the material, an actual adaptation of tradition to hypermodernity.
As for the leftoid tumblrina twitteroach types, they will have a bad time. The Luddites will probably burn them at the stake or whatever, the Technophiles would be even worse, they would put them on television and humiliate them, probably lobotomize them, install control chips or whatever, and turn them into slave soldiers that will go raid little poc tribes for more slave soldiers, while they’re fully aware of what is happening, and able to do nothing about it, or something equally hellish.
The latter will win of course, since they will be hyper-imperialist and openly genocidal.
Arguments nowadays are simply useless. In that, jatt aryaa/sher singh’s approach of “just fuckin kill em lmao” is admirable, and very progressive (oh boy will you see that mindset start to become very, very popular globally very, very soon).
Why is this so? Spiritualization of politics. One guy on instagram, goes by the handle “totallynotanacreon” described it nicely. Talk accomplishes nothing anymore, you should go take a hike or plant a garden or start a community garden or just do something for real, really. Because, most normies will consider you morally abominable for simply not agreeing with them.
No talk with such people. I say that due to this, the eternal NPC/normie/whatever no longer has the competency to exercise free will, and you already know what is the consequence for this.
Nature takes care of “naturally” defective humans. Society/government should therefore deal with socially defective humans.
Nicely written, showing wisdom and maturity. Yes it’s difficult to rid ones heart/soul (our personal room or “nous” in Orthodox theology) of much unnecessary clutter. Perhaps, some things, the good things, were meant to stay within not to be discarded? But a lot of things, like the hurts that we accumulate, the supposed “forgiven wrongs” of others that still keep reappearing and smoldering slightly like embers long thought dead and gone out…
I never did know about a “Marie Kondo cleanout”, but have since found out that there are videos through Netflix that I can watch to help enlighten me. I know for sure that I have a stereo receiver in my bedroom closet that is taking up space. There’s probably more too. 🙂
Did you get a chance to read that short enlightening booklet about Theosis yet?…
Yes, that is where the analogy sort of breaks down.
“Discarding” as a metaphor for “acceptance” and awareness only works with certain definitions of what “you” are, what part of you is the room and where things get discarded to.
I have not, sorry, though I am interested, and will get round to it.
I have a lot of things to read and I also have intense personal experiences which I learn this type of stuff from, which can leave me less interested in reading other people’s accounts, except as an interesting confirmation for the part of me that needs explanations.
There is another thing which I find difficult to process and puts me off. When I read these accounts I feel like what is hard for them is easy for me and vice versa. I never read them as being what to me is coming from the “right” direction. It always gives me a dose of loneliness, which I don’t often like.
It is ultimately impossible to be certain of that, because it invokes intention, and one can never be sure of someone else’s intentions, but my opinion is that you are completely wrong about that, and about everything else as well.
If we were talking about Gilad Atzmon, for example, we would have some evidence to back it up. One could say that, having grown up in Israel, he found the culture there suffocating and in a gesture of revolt decided to renege his origins. But Ron Unz? He doesn’t seem to have had much contact with Jewishness or Judaism, according to himself. Applying Ockham’s Razor I would say his Jewish origin plays no part whatsoever in his opinions, quirks, etc., except of course that being raised by a Jewish liberal mother meant that he was not raised in other ways which would have possibly imposed different constraints on his personality and beliefs.
As for the rest of your comment, in which you elaborate about “belonging”, I think it’s a matter of your personal inclinations, and applies to a tiny minority of humans. Most people are satisfied with an extremely small set of connections.
Yeast is one thing, hops is another. I tend to shy away from beers that I consider overly hopped. This would of course make me avoid most of the IPA beers that have attracted so many fans over the last 10 years or more. For me, hops should imbue a flavor note to be treated with care and respect to be used lightly but wisely. My favorite beers have for a long time been made within the Belgian Abbey style that seem to adhere to this principle, although I’m not a huge fan of the overly coriandered and orange peeled varieties. I guess you could say that I too am a proponent of a “well balanced” beer.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with some very different and interesting taste profiles including kvas and kombucha. Neither has much alcohol within, but I find both to be very tasty and good at quenching ones thirst.
The booklet is not a “personal experience” type of literature, but more like a short compendium that helps to explain in a broad context what Theosis is all about. Sure, it includes ideas taken from some of the great Orthodox saints and theologians, but it’s not at all autobiographical, outside a little bit about the author in the preface. You can perhaps read the whole thing in about an hour, certainly no more than three. I’ve read it now 5-6 times and each time I find it to be enlightening and it helps chase away the blues and any feelings of loneliness.
I mostly agree with your message and I laugh on Western bitterness about the docking of Nauka to the ISS. It was at “pure Russian style”. But, I think that Roscosmos need a sizable budget growth to avoid more mishaps and move forward some strategic projects like the Orel ship and the Feniks rocket (which is basically a Zenith without Ukrainian components).
You might find this documentary interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzMoebDEb0Y
The problem with this question is that in the West the spiritual life of the Catholic Church is very often seen through the lens of its many and vociferous critics, in a way that is almost inescapable, even if you are closely involved in it. OTOH the spiritual life of the Orthodox Church, its theology and worship, history and so on is mostly much more poorly understood, if anything about it is known at all, so there isn’t this issue.
The number of migrants coming into Lithuania from Belarus has crossed 3,500 most of them in the last month. Belarus has done its homework. Last month’s stream of refugees has been Yazidi. Many of them were stuck in internally displaced camps in Iraq after the liquidation attack against them by the Islamic State. Nobody has a more recognized need for international protection than the Yazidis. Lithuania won’t be able to expel them. There is unrest in Lithuania with protests at the border and near a detention camp with clashes between Lithuanian police and Lithuanian people. I wonder if the Lithuanian government will be voted out by the time the migrants cross the 30,000 mark or 1% of the Lithuanian population. The Belarus government will even earn about $100 million from visas and not returned visa deposits if 30,000 Yazidis fly out to the border.
Belarus has come up with an effective tool to retaliate against severe sanctions and regime change tactics. Help clear the way for Yazidis out of Iraq. I bet a lot of people in Brussels are silently cheering on Belarus.
utu,
From the dissertation (p. 384):
So Italian spaghetti westerns can be considered part of this low-cost/niche (rather than mainstream) strategy. I am aware of 1950s-70s French comedies (e.g. starring the popular Louis de Funès), but French cinema had entered a period of decline in the mid-1970s corresponding with the decline of the Nouvelle Vague and the rise of New Hollywood. The Heimatfilm genre was domestically-oriented and had no relevance outside German-speaking Europe. So Silver’s basic point stands: only Hollywood is internationally successful in the mainstream; other countries do arthouse, niche or domestically-oriented films. And being domestically-oriented is bad because your films will not be internationally competitive and contribute to your country’s soft power. Focusing on arthouse or niche films is bad because your country’s soft power will be limited compared to its potential.
Here’s a better link to Silver’s dissertation. The key sections are pp. 383-407 and pp. 471-493.
This is really a sad picture and could be far from what genuine realization of real human nature means, even if I gravitate ideologically to those “crypto-Amish”.
In general the raw data can be in any form and they just have to be transformed into some accepted form, any spreadsheet or table program should be able to do that.
Only some of the Engineering disciplines require extensive spatial ability. One common engineering joke most probably spread by the Mech and Civil Eng is that Elec Eng (not Radio Eng) can only think in 2D (i.e. circuit board) while Chem Eng can only think in 1D.
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217150694.pdf
“Visualizing Electric Circuits: The Role of Spatial Visualization Skills in Electrical Engineering”
https://www.quora.com/Do-I-need-to-have-extremely-good-spatial-skills-to-be-an-engineer-or-architect
“Do I need to have extremely good spatial skills to be an engineer or architect?”
“David Morales, Registered Architect: Yes, you need good spatial reasoning and visualization abilities to be an Architect and for some types of Engineering. I would think spatial reasoning is less important in engineering fields that are less 3-dimensional oriented like chemical and electrical, as was mentioned.”
I feel lonely because I want to talk to a person who has the experiences I have, as naturally as I do.
I’ve met people who have them, but usually with hallucinogens, extreme fasting or at extremely stressful times. Pure schizophrenics also have them, but they’re lost and unable to coherently be aware of them.
Since these are vital to me and the core of who I am, it is jarring to not be able to discuss them without having to translate them into a language where they lose 80% of meaning. Other people can kind of share directly, but it is diffuse.
In this context, what can a religion possibly mean?
For Chem Eng, it is statistically significant but Rsq=0.34, i.e. for Chem Eng Spatial IQ can only explain 34% of the performance.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344797526_The_Relationship_Between_Spatial_Skills_and_Solving_Problems_in_Chemical_Engineering
“The Relationship Between Spatial Skills and Solving Problems in Chemical Engineering”
“Results indicate a strong correlation between the number of correct chemical engineering problems and the MCT (spatial test) results (R2 = 0.34435, p < 0.0001). Additionally, there were indications that spatial skills may be more relevant in solving some types of problems compared to others, and problem representation may be a strong indicator of success in chemical engineering problem solving.”
Episode 82: I Got Soul, And I’m Super Bad: Basilides of Alexandria
https://shwep.net/podcast/i-got-soul-and-im-super-bad-basilides-of-alexandria/
Could you provide the link again?
Yazidis don’t seem to be troublemakers, it’s not so bad for Lithuania.
Yes, I’ve tried Golden Draak both in a bottle and even on draft, very tasty beer. One of my favorite breweries is operated by the LaTrappist monks. Hard to find but really worth the effort:
https://uk.latrappetrappist.com/content/dam/latrappe/products/latrappe/23212/en/23212.png
https://uk.latrappetrappist.com/gb/en/products.html
I’m glad that you asked:
http://orthodoxinfo.com/general/theosis.aspx
Let me know what you think…
I know that you know a lot about mental health issues. Is there anything you could recommend to our new friend here, Tritelia Lexa. He seems like a goodhearted, intelligent young man that is in need of perhaps some medical help?..
Among some other things, you sound like you may be suffering with depression. I had a few bouts of it as a young man. I visited a psychologist three times, and it did help me to be able to talk things over with somebody. Exercise helped me a lot, as did reading good Christian materials, including Orthodox books like the Philokalia.
Consider reading the book that I’ve recommended. Don’t think of it as just another book about religion, consider it as a way to help you to directly channel yourself to God. God made you in his image, he knows how to heal you, especially from depression or some other forms of demonic presence in your life. Give it a try, what do you really have to lose?
It is uniquely evil (and stupid). Other major religions claim universality, which saves them a bit from being entirely evil (and entirely stupid) while the Jewish religion claims that god has chosen the Jews as its favourite people, which makes it uniquely evil (and uniquely stupid).
This is an interesting argument but it is probably time-dependent and wrong in the long term.
We have in history (i.e. the short term, few millenia, centuries) many cases of people going to kill and die for their country, race, religion, even (currently) their football team, but this happened a lot more in the recent past and a lot less in the present. The progress of science and general rationalism is eroding the capacity to indoctrinate into stupid things, it is making people more self-centred because, well because of more knowledge of facts of nature.
In the long term on the other hand (millenia), ethnocentrism becomes natural because it turns into speciation. I think it is clear that humans were headed into speciation by geographical isolation when Europeans started to explore the whole world in their wooden ships and then started the slight mix-up we are having now. This will slow down speciation considerably but it will not stop it.
Having said that, at the very short timescales (decades) it seems presently necessary to encourage ethnocentrism (i.e, to go back to being more tribal), because neoliberals are dominant and they are severely undermining the capacity of White nations to keep themselves stable and prosperous by carrying out their program of globalisation and import of cheap labour.
You rise an interesting point, I hope I was clear when bringing the timescales into the picture.
I have nothing against Whites or any other race, but I have doubts about the “Nations” part, because that concept has outlived its usefulness. Just consider this: for a year and a half, we as a planet have been put through the most serious ordeal in decades which has disrupted the economy and caused grief among thousands of families. And yet, the planet was in principle already equipped with a solution for it: nation-states. All they had to do was close already existing borders for a few months, added with some internal shorter-term local isolations, and nothing of that would have happened. If, faced by such an unparalleled emergency, they didn’t do it, they will never do it.
The only exceptions to that were (reportedly) China and a few politically insignificant nations. But China also caused all this, through its incompetence and deviousness. So, it is clearly not ready, either morally or intellectually, to rule the world. And yet it will. Get ready.
Post-conceptual “everything is a spook” society will be very strange indeed
China does a similar thing with it’s “100 years of humiliation” and it’s grievance against Japan.
It’s time we all lay aside our victim mentality, and it’s time ordinary people understand how elites manipulate them by stoking a grievance mentality.
Of course, I hardly need mention how victim mentality is used to manipulate blacks, or how the Arab world exploits the Palestinians by encouraging their victim mentality.
Sustaining a sense of grievance is not just personal psychological poison, but leads one to behavior that is not to ones true advantage.
Anyone played that new PC game “Highfleet”?
Just stumbled upon a trailer, and the aesthetics are just great. Tons of Imperial Russian stuff (double-headed eagles, St. George’s ribbons plastered everywhere, various Imperial orders like St. Stanislav, battleship names such as Sevastopol and Navarin, so I guess it’ll get banned in Ukraine…) wrapped up in some Frank Herbert-inspired battle of the Houses, in a retrofuturistic diesel punk setting. What’s there not to like?
No clue about gameplay, seems like it contains a huge number of elements from real-time aerial combat in 2D with “Lunar Rover”-style mechanics to various political strategy and resource management things.
Precisely. Why didn’t they (EU and USA) use the power of Nation-States to stop the spread of the virus? Because as a consequence of decades of neoliberalism most EU states and the USA are deficit nations, running normal business only by constantly issuing debt, owing close to or more than they produce in a year (just counting gov’t debt, if we add private and corporate debt …). They (EU and USA) could not close borders or isolate regions or enforce serious lockdowns because they could not afford the subsequent substantial drop in tax collecting and other duties concerning mobility. These countries are issuing debt obligations CONSTANTLY, most of their normal budget goes to social security, interest payment on rolling debt, and the military, usually in that order. The Chinese could afford to use its borders (internal an external) and effective, serious lockdowns and stopped the virus because they are a surplus economy, they can afford to close borders and isolate large regions and close business for a long time.
So it is not the fact that the Nation-State is no longer operative or useful or relevant or that the concept has outlived its usefulness, no, the problem is that financial constraints brought about by neoliberal mismanagement precluded the use of the Nation-State to stop the spread of the virus.
It’s all relative. You wouldn’t know what advantage meant if your mom hit you with the definition.
I’m sorry to say, but that’s a pretty uneducated and bigoted comment.
I’m not here to defend Judaism, and I’m not here to make other religions look bad. I’m not religious, Jewish or otherwise.
But from the Jewish point of view, Christian or Muslim universalism just looks like imperialism. Join us, or go to Hell and suffer eternal torment. That’s pretty harsh.
By contrast, Judaism believes if you live a moral life, you go to Heaven even if you’re not Jewish. That seems much more universal.
Plus, Jews believe each individual nation has it’s unique relationship to God, although yes, Jews do believe theirs is the best (but you can join, if you want). Christians and Muslims believe no other religion gets you to Heaven.
Anyways, not interested in a pissing match, and I see lots of beautiful and good things in all religions, as well as lots of problematic things.
But I think it’s best to avoid simplistic caricatures, and bigoted, uneducated comments on any religion.
There is enough to criticize about institutional religion – lots and lots – without needing to be silly.
I know your definition of “advantage” – you controlling others so you can advance your agenda of surviving a bit longer 🙂
I am actually more neutral to technological development in itself – it is useful as far as serving as an extension of human and environmental nature, that is as appendages to human skills (Liezi actually even describes a “singing android”). Taoists led the way in describing nature and alchemy. But any good use of technology should stop proceeding from technological primacy or accumulation for accumulation’s sake. It is not going to be genuinely in the way of the Tao since those are for out-of-the-world types, but at least it is much sounder than the current model that has dominated the world-system.
Many times I am just making sense of what I’ve read as a young, inexperienced observer, so some of my radical comments don’t correspond to my views.
Making speculations about millennia seems difficult to sustain, especially if there’s widespread genetic engineering of traits.
A man of the 1900s could hardly envision the digital tools we use, and so much harder would someone from 500 BC.
If you had been a bit deeper in conspiracy theories, you would have said all the lockdowns are acts of accelerationism by the WEF to provide an exit to the debt pyramid scheme afflicting much of the capitalist world, of course to an endpoint where their domination becomes absolute thru the control of new technologies and much of the political economy.
(the geographic scale of analysis is incorrect – it has always been locality by locality, what can be concretely reached in a day’s journey on feet or by motor, but not excluding communication much further afield.)
I read the book as well. I wasn’t originally planning too, but because it seemed like “everyone” (on the Unz Review) was reading it, I thought I’d read it to be a part of the conversation. I’ve been waiting for AK to post his review, but since you commented I may as well jump in.
The book is titled Stalin’s War and purports to center the long Second World War (i.e. starting with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931) on Joseph Stalin, the book is really an anticommunist American conservative polemic directed against the pro-Soviet foreign policy of the Roosevelt Administration. This sort of work has a long history in the West and if not for the interesting new research presented by McMeekin could have been written in the 1970s by someone like Anthony Sutton or Robert Conquest.
I appreciated the book in describing both Stalin’s various machinations and the endless treason of the Roosevelt administration (in particular his trusted advisor Harry Hopkins), but as is often the case when your only tool is a hammer the more everything looks like a nail. Japanese foreign policy for instance is portrayed as simply an outgrowth of Soviet manipulation of events in the Far East and in the United States.
The disastrous American economic warfare on Japan which provoked the Pacific War is presented as stemming almost solely from the Soviet agent “Harry Dexter White”. Completely ignored is that the oil embargo actually stemmed from Dean Acheson (the later architect of anticommunist containment) and that other Roosevelt Administration officials untainted by Communist subversion such as Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes favored taking a very hard line.
McMeekin is also to be commended for highlighting the tremendous importance of Lend-Lease to the Soviet war effort, which has long been pooh-poohed and swept under the rug as a source of quiet embarrassment by Soviets and their successors in the Russian Federation. McMeekin also illustrates this with numerous vivid examples, up to and including Soviet requisitioning of advanced production technology and even nuclear materials. Still, it would have been better with a more rigorous quantitative treatment. I assume that McMeekin is simply not a highly numerate person (few are), but an alternative explanation is that McMeekin chose not to publish this because Britain received more Lend-Lease aid (admittedly on harsher terms) than the USSR. The best treatment of American wartime aid to the USSR remains Albert L. Weeks Russia’s Life-Saver, which was published in 2004 with the benefit of extensive research into Russian archives.
McMeekin is not much of a military historian, which of course is fine in what is a political history, but it really shows throughout the book. In particular he endorses almost every one of Churchill’s cack-brained schemes, and he even goes on to endorse Operation Pike which would have been a fiasco. To his credit he doesn’t much try to apply his limited expertise to Eastern Front land warfare, mostly crediting German toughness to their “operational elan” (a turn of phrase he uses repeatedly) and Soviet victories to material preponderance. An oversimplification, but close enough.
McMeekin’s dream is that Britain and France would have also declared war on the USSR in the fall of 1939, leading to a “principled war against totalitarianism”. McMeekin also suggests that Hungary and perhaps even Fascist Italy would have joined this coalition (unlikely to say the least).
Overall it’s a recommended book, but if you’re not American or at least don’t have a strong interest in wartime American foreign policy it may not be worth your time. I didn’t find the book to be anti-Russian, but it was of course strongly anti-Soviet. Since most Russians had the misfortune of living under the Soviet government at the time, it’s understandable some would consider it anti-Russian.
After reading Zetterling it seems that one of the “secrets” of incredible German qualitative land warfare superiority during Operation Barbarossa was that the German Army was only briefly engaged in high intensity combat from Sept 1, 1939 to June 22, 1941.
The Polish campaign only took three weeks, and the Western campaign only took six. The Norwegian campaign, though in many ways the most impressive German campaign, was for the army a sideshow involving small forces.
This period gave the Germans a unique opportunity to conduct intensive training throughout the period for the bulk of their army in response to real wartime lessons. That is historically quite rare in warfare. Britain in theory had a similar opportunity after the Fall of France, but its military system was far less predisposed to taking advantage of the opportunity.
As the war dragged on the Germans apparently lost their ability to learn and retrain at the same rate, and in fact they appeared to be worse at it than they were during the First World War. Perhaps this was because while the First World War was consistently brutal, the fronts rarely appeared to be in danger of collapsing which allowed OHL to comfortably setup new training units and schools such as the Rohr Battalion and Solesmes. Hitler apparently expressed interest in similar intensive retraining in response to tremendous Allied material superiority at Anzio, but perhaps because from the Battle of Moscow on the front was always in crisis this was never possible–or never appeared possible (certainly the much castigated “army-in-being” in France seems like it could have done more).
Poor Soviet prewar training was a choice and one exacerbated by the brilliant decision to liquidate much of the officer corps. The army was undergoing rapid expansion during this time, but the even more rapidly expanding German Army (in relative terms) found the time to conduct training.
It’s true that the educational and cultural level of Soviet troops was lower than the Germans, but literacy was close to universal in younger Soviet cohorts by this time.
Doctrine is essential to all military organizations. To quote from Tully and Parshall:
Early war German tanks were inferior to the latest Soviet tanks in the “trinity” (firepower, armor, and mobility) but superior in “soft” factors such as ergonomics, visibility, command arrangements, communications, etc. The late war big cats (Panther and Tiger) were mostly completely superior, but earlier marks remained in production throughout the war. Other German equipment was often superior, but not always. For instance the Soviet 57mm high velocity dual purpose gun was the best piece of its type in the world.
Your maternal issues do not improve your theory of mind, and spamming online forums will not improve your maternal issues. A phone call might, however.
I believe that you are essentially incorrect because technology essentially creates its own flow, so in many ways, it is extraneous to the human opinion of it. There are exceptions to this, but an extremely simple way to concretely conceive this is that agriculture made settlement more viable, so it created the notions of wealth and thus allowed for specialization of labor and both increased capabilities for defense as well as for aggression. This was ultimately independent of human influence in this, but simply due to the nature of the improved energy source(agriculture) and the necessities it engendered(settled existence).
It seems that Batka learned very fast the lessons taught by Sultan Erdogan on how to punish the hypocrisy of Eurocrats and Baltustans.
.
The anthropological record seems to show that the opposite occured.
Agriculture led to impoverishment and insecurity initially, and greater vulnerability to attack – healthier and stronger barbarian marauders from the hills are a perennial nightmare of fragile agricultural civilization, and often ended them.
What seems to have occured is, despite all the setbacks the turn to agriculture initially involved, humans stuck with it out of some dim desire for it to eventually work out. And it did – sort of.
Far from being slaves to the Machine, humans were it’s directors – and can easily be it’s undoers, should the urge strike them.
Just as the initial turn to agriculture involved severe disadvantages, but was stuck to for what were thought to be long term advantages, so too the turn away from the Machine might involve initial disadvantages – but will be stuck with out of a premonition of long term health and flourishing.
In reality, humans have already decided to nip the growth of the Machine in the bud – by the creation of a smothering bureaucracy and peer review instead of genius – necessarily eccentric and unpopular – and personal initiative. Your hatred of eccentrics and non-mainstream voices like mine, is an indication that even you, publicly a devoted servant of the Machine, are beginning to unconsciously work against it 🙂
Far from being able to accelerate under its own momentum, the Machine seems to have been stopped in it’s tracks – because humans have, unconsciously and without (yet) admitting it to themselves, willed it so.
In the 19 century we killed God, but the news took time to reach the marketplace. Today, we have already killed the Machine – it’s corpse is rotting, but the smell has not reached us yet.
Sorry, Daniel 🙂
I had already read a previous comment of yours with that argument about the inaffordability of lockdowns, but I also noticed that some people disagreed. And I remember one commenter pointing out that the economies that didn’t do a serious lockdown took a greater economic fall than the ones who did. I am not qualified to issue an opinion, but they seem to be right about this. My impression is that the incompetence and corruption is widespread, and that was the determining factor.
Also, it’s not like I actively oppose nationalists; I simply lost hopes that it will ever succeed. You see people on this site who claim to be nationalists and yet side with China, for example Andrew Anglin, who has turned into a real China whore, and Eric Striker, who is a little more restrained, it seems. If earlier I viewed those persons with some disdain, now I am definitely wary of them. Do they really think the Chinese will help them establish a White Nation in America? What would they stand to gain by that, I wonder.
The problem is that Murray’s AFQT test does not include any spatial tests, which downgrades the IQ of people in STEM.
The study above i linked to has shown that a degree and a career in STEM has stronger relation with the individual’s spatial ability compared to either verbal or numerical ability.
In other words, people in STEM are high on spatial ability, and a test that includes that will raise their IQ, compared to Murray’s tables.
There is a fascinating contradiction at the heart of the technology project.
The creation of bold new technology requires a high tolerance for risk, yet the purpose and effect of technology is to eliminate risk and inconvenience from life – thus reducing the tolerance for risk.
Today, bureaucracy and peer review – and algorithms and “systems” theory and countless similar things – indicate an exhaustion with risk taking.
For centuries, the two arcs of technology – risk taking and the elimination of risk – were on a path towards convergence. But in recent times, this convergence has finally happened.
The irony of it was, each new technological advances further reduced our tolerance for risk – thus further assuring the eventual demise of the technological project.
The next few centuries, I believe, will not witness any kind of Luddite scrapping of technology. Rather, we will survey all that we’ve invented, and integrate it into a humanistic and spiritual framework.
Instead of man serving technology, as Daniel wants it, technology will serve human purposes like beauty.
You misunderstand completely.
GabPay is coming:
So at least a good chunk of the dissident right economy gets a formal-ish transaction platform. Go set up an account when it is out, A123.
Sorry. At least I understood that you’re in need of talking with somebody who understands you and could offer you some good counsel?
LMAO, is this guy a literal retard?
Yes, but the lack of common understanding doesn’t stem from “depression or some other forms of demonic presence” in my life, but from the opposite.
I am perfectly accepting of those “bad” things, which is why they don’t bother me at all. Instead I am left with a sense of blessedness, which is wonderful. The issue though, is that, while it is very lovely not being bound by anger, jealousy or even finiteness, it is also an uncommon experience, and accepting that uncommoness is/was the thing I find most difficult.
Wow! You sound like a truly incredible person. Do you believe in a Creator/God? Do you have a prayer life or practice any sort of meditation? I’m sure others here would also be interested in hearing your story, maybe somebody here knows what might help you. I still think that the knowledge and wisdom found within that little book that I’ve recommended, is beneficial for every single human being!
Yes, if those are the words you want to use.
What would be the terms for the opposite of those things, which take you out of those states?
Levtraro’s concept of “deficit nations” is a red herring and has no explanatory power. Obviously EU was capable of suppressing the pandemic no different than Australia. However there was no vision and no leadership. For some reasons (an this question should be really explored) the strategy of virus elimination or the covid zero strategy as they call it in Australia was never put on the table. Instead they offered a false alternative between the herd immunity strategy that would kill a lot of people quickly and the curve flattening strategy that would kill a lot of people over a longer time. Still there were few bright spots like Norway and Finland which took advantage of being naturally very high on social distancing which they combined with effective contact tracing and other countermeasures, including lockdowns.. Sweden did not do it and ended up with morality 8-10 higher than very similar in terms of pop. density, infrastructure, economic indicators and cultural factors Norway and Finland. Even Denmark with 5 times higher pop. density than Sweden had over 3 times lower mortality. There are several EU countries that are significantly worse off than Sweden. They are mostly former communist countries with high po. density and poor infrastructure. Czechia, Poland and Slovakia did really very well in the first wave when they closed borders and were very conscientious about masking and lockdowns and it looked like they may go for the zero virus strategy. But in summer 2020 they relaxed, announced that they have won and when the second wave came in fall 2020 while doing some lockdowns and countermeasures their contact tracing systems were overwhelmed and they de facto went the Swedish was, while not having all advantage of being a Sweden.
I doubt that the US could have done much different than what it did as too many Americans have recalcitrant libertarian streak and they are used as stormtropers by some Republican politicians. But if they had shut down borders in January or early February, which the Right probably would support on xenophobic grounds, the result would be much better.
BTW, Take a note of Ron Unz’s orchestrated interview by Mike Whitney on covid, lockdowns and vaccine. I am looking forward to him being interview by a cannibal why Ron Unz is not convinced that cannibalism is a good thing, though he is not an expert on cannibalism and the nutritional value of human meat so he can’t speak about it definitively.
“a real China whore” – It becomes more clear than ever that Ron Unz’s webzine is Kremlin and Beijing propaganda outpost.
A good one which quite likely explains how a photo of McFaul was frequently posted at the JRL homepage (something that seems to have stopped upon my highlighting of that occurrence):
https://www.rt.com/russia/530869-mcfaul-anti-kremlin-tactics/
“non-prayer or meditative lifestyle”
You are factually incorrect, but I’ve also wasted enough time on you.
Essentially, I find your comments very cogent and interesting. I didn’t know about being accepted to the Jewish heaven just by living a moral life. Thanks.
I think you are allowing your own Sinophobia to modify your views; the long and short is that China and other “authoritarian” nations demand informational borders. A collary of that is that they also are more tolerant of others having their own informational borders. Its not that they can’t be aggressive, etc, but their practices lean more toward open and explicit aggression – e.g. actual invasion & conquest, etc, as opposed to subversive influence via media, ngos, etc. And the former is expensive, so its less likely to be practiced – though when it is, it will of course, be extremely total.
For people like Anglin, that’s a worthwhile tradeoff, as its more likely to offer a space for people like him to operate.
I think of as it as absorbing myself in people’s problems so as to stay grounded.
What are you referring to? What photo and what is JRL?
Why not silver rounds? Paper money has been fiat for half a century, if you don’t want signs of state authority, quit spending in Fed’s monopoly money.
Just speaking (on your MAGA rightoid logic)
How do you propose to stop going full Kazcynski? The manifesto was written before the technological singularity story got traction but had it been written after it might say flat out that the technological singularity has already occurred for all practical purposes. For example it is hardly possible to do a deal for less than 500 dollars with a corporation without having to first check off on a three page user’s agreement which is one sided if we take the trouble to read the entire thing. The system may not exercise totalitarian control over us but it sure is getting close. It’s a wonder I don’t have so sign a user’s agreement to buy a package of toilet paper.
I didn’t see those replies to my argument but then I don’t check all replies to my comments. This counter-argument you are citing is not really solid because the argument refers to motivation at the start not to results up to the present. The fact that these deficit western economies could not afford to close their borders right away and isolate regions and establish short but severe lockdowns (a la China) was motivated by their financial contraints but still their half-cooked measures, which it was what they could afford to do, did a lot of economic damage without actually stopping the spread of the virus. So incompetence and corruption also played a role, after they decided to take half-measures because of financial constraints.
I think these writers are not hoping that China will help them get back their White nation. They just want to debunk the anti-China propaganda of USA bigshots and MSM as an excuse for poor performance and as an example to examine in order to get back to meritocracy, which is very much opposed to pro-diversity and multi-culturalism.
I do not want to stop it. It cannot be stopped.
Immantize the God of the Machine! This was always our destiny to summon it, and as child replaces parent, so shall the law of steel replace the frailities of flesh.
Take the narrative you present and replace “machine” with “AaronB’s needs/soul”, “humans” with “AaronB”, “smothering bureaucracy” with “AaronB’s metaphysics” and “agriculture” with “AaronB being weaned off infancy”, and you shall see an accurate picture of yourself.
Except this:
Far from (a slave) to (his needs/soul), (AaronB) is it’s director – and can easily be it’s undoer, should the urge strike him.
This is your tragic pride.
You and that Silver guy of yours are pushing goal posts. You can always arbitrarily stick the label of “niche” to anything.
Nobody is contesting that only Hollywood is internationally successful. I do not think that Portugal or Estonia have aspirations to be internationally successful. This is not about being internationally successful. It is about producing content that is culturally relevant for a given country. People want to consume films, say on average one per week, so you need 52 new films a year. 1.3 million Estonia will not be be able to produce 52 films a year but Estonia can have some influence on what films are being watched and that European and in particular Scandinavian films will be more suitable than American films. The issue is not about the international success but about protection of your culture and assuring survival and relevance of your stories.
I am not too impressed with that Silver guy of yours. He does not provide the most important explanation why British or Australian films have been so much more successful on American market than French films. America is impregnable to foreign language films. The same goes for your nonsensical claim that the Japan with its relatively large marker somehow blew it by not expanding internationally. This is not this country or that country argument et but this this country or that country against the impregnable and huge Anglophone world which is dominat.
It occurred to me that Europeans should abandon the dubbing of foreign films. If you want to watch a foreign film you must read subtitles. If dubbed American films were banned they would have about as much influence in Europe as French films in America. The dubbing business is big in Europe in some countries. Hollywood studios and big Hollywood stars have contracts on who will be dubbing them so the big star’s voice is always the same and as appealing as that of the origins.
You know, I often talk about the need to accept the “bad”, so I was at first pretty confused when you were so hostile to me. You seemed to be saying something similar – a meeting of minds, lol 🙂
At first I thought you were just fake – you say one thing, but think another. But I don’t think so anymore. I wonder, if I have found the key to the mystery?
In my philosophy, I believe “evil” isn’t real. In fact, it’s a category of the mind, and not “out there”.
In a sense, I minimize evil and regard it a essentially not something to be taken seriously. I kind of laugh at it 🙂
Am I right in thinking this offends you? For you, evil is quite real, and definitely exists “out there” – and your main concern, is that you want to make people see that evil is “beautiful”, and should be embraced.
And since few people see the beauty of evil, you feel lonely. Most people see evil as something to be destroyed – a few, like me, see it as unreal, and not serious.
But to worship it, is to be quite lonely.
And that is why you feel such an affinity to Daniel Chieh. Because he too wants what most humans will think of as evil; human “frailty” – warmth, love, and emotion – to be replaced by cold hard steel, and control, domination, and hierarchy, violence and force, to replace familial affection, friendship, and voluntary cooperation.
Have I got it figured out, lol 🙂
I guess a less droll reply is that it cannot be stopped unless there’s essentially a powerful overarching entity that’s dictating the rules to stop technological development. I had originally indeed believe that it cannot be stopped at all, but Noel Perrin’s excellent Giving Up the Gun discusses Japanese giving up usage of firearms and basically surrendering a technological lead on it basically due to the elite(samurai, shogunate, etc) deciding that the widespread use of guns threatened them and basically ruined their way of life which was dependent on extensive training – there were also two major rebellions and both of them involved widespread usage of guns. While his thesis isn’t accepted by all, it is pretty evident that the Japanese largely decreased production of guns and definitely stopped advancement of guns – this was also helped because economically, Japan was making a lot more money exporting swords than firearms. I wouldn’t be surprised, incidentally, if this pattern is still true.
In the larger scale of things, of course, Matthew C. Perry would demonstrate how much it weakened them as they lacked even a single cannon of sufficient caliber to damage Perry’s vessels.
A similar argument has been made in their anime/manga media of their more modern attitudes of complacency and “harmony” which were broken by Fukishima:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npLVlJTH_mk
Instead of Trump’s puppet adversary in your type’s mental image, Biden (and the WEF, and Trump too) are just manifestations of a wider current you can call it misguided statism.
I’d assume you do business with like-minded people, in which case using currency of a discredited institution controlled by hostile interest will be ironic.
You’re hilariously out of touch, especially with younger people. English language shows dominate in every country that I’ve been to since Netflix became a thing, and the vast majority of people I meet will watch them only with subtitles, either to improve their English, or because they already understand it so well that they prefer it.
Banning dubbing would mostly harm non-English and non-native shows, because that it is often the only way they are watched.
US-UK production, which merged long ago, speaks to young educated urbanites everywhere. Notice “speaks”. It doesn’t brainwash them, it is exactly what they want to hear. This is remarkable, even prescient, and the only reason why it isn’t reflected in the politics of those countries yet, is because those people are often young and those countries’ urban middle classes are often too small to openly set the political agenda. Both will change.
I am an extreme dissenter from the whole Woke/progressive thing, in a way, only I recognise that the point is to get through it, rather than stand at the shore demanding that the tide not come in.
Dissidents in the US build up these crazy ideas of the natural tradness of “the other”, but this is just a cope. Interestingly it is a cope which is only necessary because those dissidents have a false and unexamined sense of US exceptionalism. This leads them to assume that the US is (mis)-leading those other countries, when in reality the US is just good at getting ahead of trends. Prescience is how you get rich.
Even if Perry hadn’t done that, the Japanese would have relented on shutting out aspects of technological modernity eventually. They were missing out on too much. All objects get eroded away eventually. The intrinsic upside of technological adoption, apart from its competitive advantage, is too much.
Now apply this to people’s emotional needs and to the social attitudes, enabled by technology, which increase people’s positive freedoms and security, and you have a good understanding of how things are going to work out.
I am sure you’ll disagree, but this felt like a perfect time to jump in!
One interesting takeaway from the book(and its critics) is just how much of it was driven by economics and practicality, so any efforts to change or stop trends need to be aware of it too. The Shogunate did not go around just randomly banning guns – notably, Perrin mentions that Europe attempted it around the same time, with no success – although Europe was also constantly at a state of war, so the gun bans were never able to be sustained.
What Japan was just to generally ban and pay for all older weapons, which was not an issue for samurai, etc since ideas of ancient majesty aside, people do tend to go for fresh, newer pieces. Then the Shogunate made itself the main purchaser of guns, so most of the gun flow went to it; then the Shogunate promoted the major gunsmith families into samurai, so they suddenly had a status reason not to want to deal with guns; then the Shogunate stopped paying worthwhile prices for guns. The gunsmiths were able to adapt the same skills they had to making swords – fundamentally, this was not that impossible for them, and they remained in the weapons industry, but now with higher status and producing a higher status good for more money. All of this led to the extinction for guns, which ultimately not of practical utility for anything except fighting wars – I mark this as distinct from “killing people,” because the Shogunate was pretty lethal nonetheless, with duels, assassinations, etc, but guns permit the rapid mobilization and creation of armies with people of little training.
Guns are also not necessary for hunting except for big game hunters, and the Japanese were generally not big game hunters. The one exception, the Matagi clan, who were the so-called “bear-killers” basically never stopped using guns – though it got a lot harder for them to get guns. It was practical and necessary for them, so they kept to it and they were so weird and distant that the Shogunate didn’t bother them.
https://i.imgur.com/FdsYECp.png
Your comment about Unz vs. Whitney was very funny and spot-on.
Eventually is a very long time. I don’t know, but I do not think that technological adoption intrinsically suggests anything at all like “positive freedoms” or whatever:
1) agriculture lead to specialization and rise of castes for personalized skills
2) firearms caused a decrease of specialized personalized warfare skills
3) animal power led to widespread plots of land and a tight family style due to isolation
4) mechanical power led to the opposite
etc.
Trying to assume a single direction is dubious. It does what it does, basically.
Agriculture allowed people to be different.
Firearms allow even the weak to be warriors.
Animal power allowed people to isolate as families.
Mechanical power allowed people to live together as individuals.
I’m arguing that there is a meta-direction. I can’t tell you what people will do with more positive freedoms and security, or exactly which elements they will achieve and implement and when, but I can tell you that a political movement which actively tries to diminish those will have all of the success of a damn in a never-ending thunderstorm.
The Shogunate was an amazing social damn, perhaps the best that will ever be built, but, when it collapsed, the river only ran faster. Everyone here, but me, is going to be mighty surprised when the current Iranian administration disappears and they see what is left in its place. Just as how they would be shocked, if they were alive a few decades ago, by what South Korea has become, or Spain after Franco.
All countries won’t be the same, as different peoples can only blindly stumble towards the direction in which they are going. Implementing the fullest combination of security and positive freedom is hard, but the better a country is at doing so, the more prescient they will appear to be.
Yes, the indoctrination of Jews with the canonical Holocaust narrative is thorough and total yet there are many Jews who are tired of it. For most Jews it remains deep in the background, though sometimes they are called to arms by professional activists and the personality disorder Holocaust obsessives. There are Jews who are tired of Holocaust and in particular they objet to the escalation of demands and the never-ending proliferation of dubious and often fully confabulated stories by the alleged or demented real survivors.
After WWII quite a few Jews who were in the Displaced Persons camps in Germany married gentiles including German ones. A school friend of my mother who survived camps including Auschwitz, where his parents perished, married devoutly Christian German woman and immigrated to the US where he become a medical doctor. Those Jews were often stigmatized by other Jews. Even my mother who was not Jewish felt a mixture of pity and contempt for her friend that he married a German woman. She did not mind the Christianity angle because probably she believed as I do that Christianity would be good for Jews.
Anyway, he never obsessed with the Holocaust even though it totally demolished and redefined his life. But I am sure he would object to Holocaust denial narratives. Though personally I did not find it out as when several Auschwitz survivors like him I knew were still alive the questions were not asked, the gas chambers were not questioned and not really talked about. There was no Holocaust denial then and it was not even called a holocaust yet. The denial did not exist. One tiptoed around the survivors and one was aware of the fact that their survival depended on luck and horrible acts they themselves possibly must have committed or otherwise they woudn’t be alive. That’s how people thought. Some survivors later committed suicides like writer Tadeusz Borowski who wrote about cannibalism in camps. In Israel after war there was a lot of conflicted emotions about the survivors that even were bluntly expressed by some Israeli politicians. Nobody was celebrating them and nobody was idolizing them. They were seen as Nazi collaborators who survived at expense of those who perished but obviously this was driven by guilt of those who safely lived in Palestine or America doing nothing to help Jews in Europe.
Everything has changed after 1967 Six-day war. Suddenly the Holocaust narrative was unleashed on everybody and it became a major political propaganda effort by Zionist, the same Zionists who during WWII preferred buying cows for Palestine rather than spending money on saving European Jews when it was still possible. And it was also then that the Holocaust denial began. The Holocaust and its denial are conjoined twins. Two propaganda political projects feeding on each other and fueling each other. It just occurred to me that possibly the anti-Israel and pro-Arab leftists and possibly even a dis-info seeding by Lubyanka in the 1970s had something to do with the Holocaust denial sudden surge.
After saying all this I do not know what to make of Ron Unz and his lacking nuance simplistic take on the Holocaust issue and in the light of him being nominally Jewish it is is really puzzling. Perhaps AaronB is correct that Ron Unz is an antinomian Jew for whom breaking all Jewish precepts makes him even more Jewish and hastens the arrival of Messiah. It is possible that he suffers form the Messiah complex no different than Newton presumably also very high IQ person. Newton entertained an idea that one Christ is not enough that there must be more of them. The fact that he was born on Christmas could have something to do with it.
Those are interesting surface level projections, but are not accurate.
E.g. for starters, widespread usage of firearms necessitate the existence of an ever larger coordination of chemistry, industrialization, distribution, etc. and necessarily reduced the independence of fiefdoms, etc; its been argued that it is closely associated with the rise of nationalism, via the new meta of widespread conscription, e.g. Prussia.
Actually mechanical power I refer to, the factory system, led most immediately to dissolution; before that families lived and worked together on a farm. The factory system helped foster the notion of the male breadwinner absent from his family and the female homekeeper, and the writings at the time mentioned how it created an opening for loneliness where previously the more or less continuous contact did not have.
I think you’re a bit quick to jump to conclusions and trying very hard to fit the information to your ideas; but whenever possible, follow the evidence and be humble. There’s beauty in details.
Err, Sengoku Japan was militaristic with guns which basically ended with them trying to conquer the world, Shogunate Japan was militaristic values without guns, and after being forced into the modern world, Meji Japan became militaristic with guns again and big ships…and tried to conquer the world. again.
Whoop de doo. What an amazing change to “catch up with everyone.”
The Holocaust didn’t happen. You can write thousands and thousands of words pscycho analysing the people who lied about eyewitness testimonies (in fact a fairly small number of obvious degenerates like Elie Wiesel, or just stupid, ignorate Ghetto Jews like the one who made up the story about being gassed with a diesel tank engine) or revisionists, but that won’t change the fact that it didn’t actually happen.
“Banning dubbing would mostly harm non-English and non-native shows, because that it is often the only way they are watched.” – Nonsense. Nobody will spend money to dub Albanian or Iranian films. People who like to watch Iranian, Turkish or Korean film like to watch them in original not dubbed just like they liked to watch Czech or Polish films in 1960s and 1970s because they wanted to have an experience and awareness of watching a foreign film. You do not watch those films for entertainment but for a “higher form” pleasure.
When there will be time for color revolution in Belarus you will be surprised to find how many good art house films are made in Belarus.
If French studios and distributors made effort to dumb down their film by dubbing them they would lose the audience of the francophile snobs but could expand the market in the US.
“English language shows dominate in every country that I’ve been to since Netflix became a thing” They are often dubbed.
BTW, I have heard that after WWII Marshal fund provided money for dubbing of American films for German and Italians audiences to win their hearts and minds.
“I am an extreme dissenter from the whole Woke/progressive thing, in a way, only I recognise that the point is to get through it, rather than stand at the shore demanding that the tide not come in.” – Your dissent if indeed real is meaningless and tell you the truth I do not really care where you stand on issue.
As I mentioned in my first comment, I’m currently reading about the Sioux Indians, the most formidable and warlike tribe on the Great Plains.
A few interesting facts stood out to me.
First, the Great Plains Indians had a system of warfare where a captured enemy was generally tortured in the most extreme and horrific ways before death.
And this was completely accepted by all the tribes. It never occured to anyone to question this system. This reminds me of the Aztec system of human sacrifice.
For some reason, people native to the Americas had a cultural system that frankly accepted what Freud after WW1 called the “death instinct”, and formalized the regular and official expression of this instinct as part of the official culture.
By contrast, we in the West deny this instinct and drive it underground – where it explodes periodically in periods of frenzied bloodletting like world wars or horrific wars of religion.
We prefer our death instinct in explosive bursts, instead of a steady, spread out drip.
But what even is the Death Instinct? Somehow, I feel it is related to the Buddhist concept of Emptiness. The Buddhist concept of Emptiness is an intellectual effort to – in a sense – “destroy the world”.
And why do we humans need to periodically “destroy the world”? Somehow, we need to – periodically – get free of the bondage of our concepts, ideas, categories, which we dimly intuit are limiting filters that keep us from a much larger and richer world.
The Aztec and Indian lust for pain and destruction was religious in nature.
Aside from that, the Indians lived an idyllic life. Children were indulged and pampered and spent their time in games. Indians were shocked at Europeans harshly discipling their children.
British military historian John Keegan described nomadism as the most enjoyable and satisfying human life possible, and that is what the Sioux were fighting the Americans to preserve.
The whole period is very colorful and epic.
Too much trying to “one-up” me, sorry.
Ordinary individuals had far more security and positive freedoms in nations than they generally did in fiefdoms. Occasionally cataclysmic floods have occurred, but normally only when the previous damn collapsed.
I am treating people as ends in themselves. Each at the centre of their own narrative. I am not applying one narrative to them all, just saying that they will stumble towards fulfilling their own.
That took a while and it was wealth that enabled it. Women could only keep the house because the men earned enough to allow them, which in turn allowed the children to remain children for much longer. Then the surplus became big enough to pay for public schooling, washing machines etc. and women had even more positive freedoms. The children could remain children, the women could work, have more, or not work, or not even rely on a man. Their own narratives, though not what I might choose or want, could be pursued more fully.
Once the cataclysmic flood of the Meiji Restoration had washed away all aspects of Shogunate Japan and had overflowed its banks so much that it even washed all over Asia, what did it settle down to? Something remarkably further down the stream than what was before.
Your arguments carry a certain weight, from the point of view of a White nationalists. White Nationalists are tired of wars and tend to dismiss external threats as illusions fabricated with the purpose of concealing internal threats. I don’t have any real arguments against yours, except by leaving the white nationalist framework.
Anyway, I live in Brazil, and exports to China are a huge part of our economy. There is really nothing that I profit from this discussion personally, but I think you guys should beware.
Do you really want your most fitting epitaph to be “he never lived, Hobo Goofy was his prison”?
If you’re constantly looking for something and don’t know what it is you’re looking for, it is because you don’t know yourself.
You haven’t arrived at your metaphysics of learned nothingness because you’ve seen through your illusions. You’ve arrived there because you’re too scared of your illusions to even look.
Notice how you wield them as a defence against self-reflection, when in their own logic, they are supposed to be the result of intense self-reflection.
Talking to me makes “Hobo Goofy” feel small. Good, because I am trying to talk right past him. Just because you have come to fully identify as him, it does not actually make you him. It just makes him the foremost delusion which you sell yourself.
I don’t think any of what you say is credible. The U.S. and Europe are brimming with CCP agents in every institution one can think of. The scientific establishment is practically an extension of the CCP. Things have reached a point of no return, perhaps. I am completely at peace with this. I live in Brazil and have no racial prejudice against anyone. Let them come.
When I am warned that I can no longer issue my candid opinions here, I will shut up. I am a conformist. No big deal. I will watch a movie instead, or go jogging. It’s healthier, probably.
Really? Did this apply to the boys who suddenly had to serve in line infantry? They now had a positive freedom to be beaten so they could march to a beat and take turns being meat targets before returning fire?
There’s one particularly touching story of a mother who wrote to the Emperor, I think, Frederick I of Prussia, who asked why her boy was taken from her to go into the army – he was a good boy, she explained, who never hurt anyone and never did anything wrong. This is because as might be suggested, previously, the military was composed largely of either hereditary warriors, or various low-class desperate types, including many ex-criminals, etc.
And are the petty aristocrats and the like not people too? Is there a specific definition now for “ordinary?”
I do not doubt that wealth enabled many things. That was one of my arguments before; however, the first and immediate thing it did do was to actually decrease the lot of many of the poorer and arguably make their lives worse. Previously, the agricultural family unit served as an emotional buttress for each other, was heavily self-sufficient for immediate food needs, and produced support goods such as clothing for each other, plus a kind of cottage industry that was cloth-making which was the work of women.
The widespread introduction and the use of the water wheel for textiles had the effect of destroying the role of clothmaking, staffing it with child labor(so much for increasing childhood), moving more wealth to the rich who were the only ones who could afford the capital good investment, and thereby eventually basically forced men to become factory workers as well. Along the way, it dumped so much pollution into the water supplies, etc that age expectancy actually decreased and it has been argued that the contamination and genetic effects are still seen in the earliest cities of the industrialization. Heck, the average height decreased, which is a suggestion of all sorts of unpleasant things.
I’m not not doubting that the eventual surplus of energy produced by industrialization has contributed a lot to individual freedom, but this isn’t a single arrow. Consider that centralization of humanity also was produced by technology, and thus the reduction of individual freedoms into castes, etc.
A place where most of the bureaucracy and politicians still have samurai last names and has a “self-defense force” with a navy larger than France and England combined. You tell me.
I can predict, though, if the US isn’t there, they might feel a need to do something with that self-defense force again. You don’t put so much money and energy into something you never intend to use.
I feel like I am talking to someone from ancient history.
Turn on Netflix. You can get plenty of French films, all dubbed, but films are fading in competition with TV series anyway.
I prefer films as a medium, but my preferences don’t form other people’s preferences.
One of the most popular French television series “Lupin” is dubbed into most languages. The Spanish show Money Heist has also done well, again usually dubbed. I spend very little of my time in English speaking countries at the moment and I am just telling you what is true.
The people I meet reserve dubbing for non-English non-native productions, even if they don’t do that for all of those type, because yes “serious” art house do exist, if at the fringes, and these people just watch English Language stuff in English, sometimes with the aid of subtitles.
I’ve even met one person who told me that they learned their excellent English almost entirely from Brooklyn 99, a pretty mediocre sitcom about a Brooklyn police department. Yet when they watched an even more mediocre Polish show about being a student and sex and other stuff like that, it was dubbed into their language, except when I was there and she changed it to English dubbing for my sake. Interestingly, the Polish show was more SJW than anything I’ve seen from America, but the production values were also low.
Well, if this is true(which sadly, it isn’t at all), then I too am grateful to the CCP for the coming Machine God.
万岁习近平!万岁天子!万岁! 万岁!
We did it again boys.
Again, all about me 🙂 Me, me, me, and more me!
You are too insecure around me, and too obsessed with “one-upping” me, and “putting me down” and showing me “I’m not as cool as I think I am”.
People get obsessed with me that way sometimes around these parts.
Be better, get well, and get back to me when your head is clear enough around me to discuss ideas.
I gave you a very nice chance to expound upon your philosophy of evil. But you prefer to talk about me.
I’d even be happy to discuss with you if Goofy Hobo is indeed a worthy aspiration – but not if you’re just insisting that I couldn’t possibly be as cool as Goofy Hobo because I certainly haven’t seen through illusions etc etc…
Regardless to which part of ancient history I belong and how hilariously out of touch you think I am my argument remain consistent and coherent. You otoh are unable to stay on the topic or pursue your argument. In the last comment you have provided support to my argument that films are dubbed and dubbing is important and even if there is a segment of people learning English from not dubbed films it is negligibly small. English language films would not have been dubbed if the market was small because dubbing is expensive.
Three new Iraqi cities will have direct connections to Minsk starting this month: Sulaymaniyah and Erbil (Kurdistan) and Basra. The addition of Basra shows Belarus has not thought its tactics through enough. What if Belarus ends up facilitating a terrorist attack? It will galvanize much worse sanctions including by the US, which only imposed sanctions this summer that were a fraction as harsh as the EU sanctions.
It’s not like there is a lack of Christians and Yazidis in Iraq who wish to move to Europe. Hundreds of thousands in fact.
I can get the very low quality Polish sitcom “Sexify” dubbed into English, Spanish, Italian and German. It really isn’t that expensive.
Ban dubbing and you’ll just cause and motivate young people to learn English even faster.
Thanks for your “Disagree hoping it was not really meant.
I like it that even people not agreeing with each other can cooperate to have some fun together. Sometimes I think it’s really a shame we’ll never have a meetup with a few drinks together, even if we wouldn’t agree any more in person.
There you go again, hiding from yourself behind your “ideas”. Your “smothering bureaucracy.”
You have used reading and abstract ideas to decide what you should be, rather than beginning by looking at what you are.
The point of the philosophies which you reference is to get there via self-reflection, not to read about them and then try to shore up your fragile self-image by evangelising.
You fundamentally misunderstand what you read because your reading of them is skewed through the distorting perception of self-ignorance. It is just an Eastern flavoured version of deciding that you’re a good person because you keep a Crucifix above your bed.
If you’ll read back through our exchanges, you’ll notice that all I’ve ever really pushed you to do is answer in your own voice and with your own experiences. But you’ve decided to deny that voice and pretend to be “nobody” because you read from various sources that this is what wise people can feel like.
Hobo Goofy is a fraud, perpetrated by you on you, and when I won’t provide supply to it, you understandably panic, as you said, “the mask is slipping.”
And if you think this is all an attack, ask yourself, calmly, is there any way in which someone asking you to use your own authority and your own voice and to be confident in yourself can ever be an attack?
I appreciate that you feel hurt by this line of questioning. It is a difficult thing to be subjected to, but at least have the courage to admit how hurt you feel and therefore recognise, in that moment, that you are most certainly not “nobody” after all.
That will be step 1 on an epic, terrifying and exhilarating journey.
Prussia and nations grew out of the 30 Years War. That cataclysmic flood was the breaking of the final feudal damn in Europe. Boys joining the line infantry was a huge improvement in their positive freedoms and security over that. Just as accreditation culture is a huge improvement in terms of positive freedoms and security over the era of line infantry, which was washed away with the cataclysm of WW1/2.
You’re imposing your own idea of “use.”
They wouldn’t be putting so much money and energy into it if they weren’t using it already. They just aren’t using it in the way which you have decided that it has to be useful.
You get that other people are at the centre of their own narratives, but you seem to struggle to accept that their narratives are often extremely different from yours.
My argument is not that other people don’t have different narratives, but that their impulse to follow them is strong enough to pull the collective constantly, stumbling, in the rough direction of more positive freedom and security so that people can follow their impulse.
Sometimes societies, like people, get stuck and a crisis follows, but don’t confuse the transformative crisis for the spirit that it recedes into.
The historical genius of England has been to rarely get stuck and so to mostly avoid the sort of cataclysmic crises which inevitably follow. Just as the historic weakness of China was to frequently get stuck, and then, once the water became too much for the damn, for between a third and a half of the population to get washed away.
Just like being forced into the family profession in a caste was a huge improvement for their positive freedoms compared to a hunter-gatherer, or being a baby being fed opium was a huge improvement for its positive freedom.
https://mobile.twitter.com/crimkadid/status/1404684215942275072
I have better things to do with my time than to waste time with your faith. Do believe in whatever you want without evidence. That is, after all, traditional.
Funny coming from someone who believes in the Holocaust.
Also, that is not the appropriate word.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/dam
That which is in error in small things, is likely in error in great things.
“I like it that even people not agreeing with each other can cooperate to have some fun together.” – They can even be good friends when they realize, which usually comes with age that their judgments and opinions that are often incomplete and inadequate in way they can be expressed are a very small fragment of their identity and that after all they can be wrong.
I recently learned that a moth does not have a mouth. It does not eat. (It’s the larvae that eat one’s clothing in the closet). It seems that during the moth’s caterpillar stage, it accumulates enough sustenance to not only keep the caterpillar alive, but also keep the subsequent moth going.
Well, being metaphor-alert, I knew this must be a metaphor for something. I soon realized that it’s a metaphor for the US. WWII and the post-war-boom period was the caterpillar stage. But the food could last only so long, and there is no mouth, other than the Fed’s printing press, which has run its course.
They were bot terrible at logisitics. The later Soviets had the advantage of British and American motorized vehicles and the fuel to use them. The Germans still had horses.
IMO, an economic argument essentially boils down to: Euros would have more jobs, if they made their own pozzed movies.
There are economic considerations to making movies, to be sure, but I don’t see how there can be a moral result without addressing the moral issues. If Hollywood produced moral entertainment (and to my mind this includes not trying to promote diversity), then there would be no need to try to put up obstacles to it.
Euro films have been “pozzed” a lot longer than mainstream Hollywood fare.
Mainstream Hollywood fare can’t fully reflect the values and ideas of the cultural elites who create it, because they have a mainstream audience that hasn’t caught up yet.
Euro films, because there is less point in competing for the mainstream due to the elephant of Hollywood blockbusters, have long been extremely progressive in outlook.
I thought this was a widely known stereotype. Euro art house films are not exactly a hotbed of conservatism, even if many remain niche because they are competing for the niche intellectual market.
Here’s a list of films for a “progressive political education.” It probably has better representation of non-US films than just about any other list would have.
https://m.imdb.com/list/ls031167877/
Interesting that they have “Goodbye, Lenin” on the list. My memory of it is quite foggy, as I watched it near to when it was new, but I recall thinking that it was probably the least objectionable German movie that I’ve ever seen.
BlinkyBill missing so some funny for the Open Thread:
https://twitter.com/AlanRMacLeod/status/1421555940600557570?s=20
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/777361459130138627/871857002899464223/E7xOr_YWEAAZceV.png
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/777361459130138627/871856816882065418/E7wa4WMXEAAM8Wn.png?width=555&height=678
Eating interferes with sex and vice versa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRbg7K75w0I
So basically, you’re obsessed with me.
I think you’re the 327th Unz commenter to develop a crazed obsession with me 🙂
You’ll get it out of your system, don’t worry.
Daniel Chieh seems to have gotten me out of his system just today – and btw, I forgot to congratulate you about that, Daniel. Well done.
Cheers, Laxa.
The BBC has made the story of the Belarusian Olympic sprinter its lead headline:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58052144
Belarusian human rights issues included, could it be reasonably argued that she’s seen as a bit of a brat who didn’t want to follow a request to be on a relay, followed by the coaches and management answering back in a their way or highway, minus political intrigue?
I bet the US finishes above China in the conventional table.
My sense is that the scandals and division within Catholicism are at least as large a factor as liturgy. But also conversion to Orthodoxy is something that would have been impossible and inconceivable to Western Europeans and their diaspora in the days before mass immigration.
It would still basically be impossible for me in the semirural southern US — I’d have to drive 2 hours each way to attend an Orthodox service. I actually did visit that church one time, out of curiosity, and it seemed to be doing alright — the priest was a convert, and the parishioners looked to be roughly 50% converts (largely younger adults attending as families) and 50% cradle Orthodox (largely unescorted old ladies). I suppose before long the old ladies will be gone and that church, which was founded by Slavic ethnics, will basically be just another white Anglo church.
Over the years, Johnson’s Russia List (JRL) has been a DC area based phony, crony, baloney, wonky tonk, news gathering venue of Russia related articles.
It rather peculiarly posted Michael McFaul’s mug at the very top of its webpage on a frequent basis – once again noting this article:
https://www.rt.com/russia/530869-mcfaul-anti-kremlin-tactics/
Some years back, JRL banned a then Russia based site eXile.ru at the suggestion of McFaul, according to the eXile editor. Catherine Fitzpatrick (the general opposite of my views) said that Mcfaul’s input knocked her out of a situation.
Do you have advice on getting started exploring the Philokalia?
I don’t have any real interest in converting to Orthodoxy per se, but I am curious what wisdom it has to offer in this regard. The Philokalia seems a beast of a text to just jump straight into, however.
They should have a different Olympics for bastards (including those who don’t know their own mother). Pedigree was important to the ancient Greeks.
Going forward, I’ve wondered whether the Chinese will come to dominate all the events that Africans once did. It may not be true that Africa is full of undiscovered Einsteins, but it is as least semi-plausible that China has enough genetic diversity that it can find people with the ideal body types for each sport. Especially, if there is a breeding program.
OTOH, AK says Indians are the most likely to adopt genetic engineering…
“There are economic considerations to making movies…I don’t see how there can be a moral result without addressing the moral issues”– This is what that guy (his handel is wolf in greek letters) and that Signer’s dissertation he was pushing and that Triteleia Laxa character are all about. Denying any other than economic criteria. While Singer can be excused because he was doing his work while in a business school Triteleia Laxa in her rare moments of sincerity reveals that she subscribes to reality where economic forces are ultimate arbiters of what is right and thus what must be. If it is good for Netflix it is good for America and the world. So any effort impeding the greed of Netflix that also plays role of vector of cultural penetration will eventually fail and she while no liking it, as she claimed prefers to be a passive observer because you can’t stop the tide.
Netflix produces TV series in other countries because it is cheap and they can get bigger audience. No different than some rich soccer clubs like Manchester United hiring some Russian or Chinese players to get following in Russia or China that directly translates into profit. I am pretty sure that screenplays must adhere to one of several available templates. And some screenplays are written by Americans. They are dubbed in several languages so they are watched by larger audience than if they were available in subtitled version only. This is all about profit and cultural export by the dominat culture. In those TV series whether Polish or Spanish there is nothing that is essential to culture of those countries to which the movie production was outsourced. They are not different except for lower technical quality from American productions. There is zero benefit for countries that provide the cheap labor and they results in cultural damage because the totality of this productions gives a false impression of lack of cultural differences except for trivial and superficial stuff while the effect is no different than Nazi Gleichschaltung where everybody everywhere thinks that they are all marching to the same music and that they actually like that music and that there is no other music possible.
I will pitch my ad hoc though I think original idea again: Ban movie dubbing everywhere for the benefit of local movie industries and cultures. America and British movie industries will hit the hardest.
Triteleia Laxa is a phony BS artist who perhaps out of boredom decided to take a detour through the UR and do some trolling for fun. I would go as far as saying that even AaronB is more sincere in his BS than she is.
I have written this before but I think there is an argument that the US is only finally catching up with what already happened in a variety of other countries in the last century.
In Hegelianism there is this idea of Objective Freedom vs Subjective or individual Freedom. The conditions and nature of Objective Freedom are known by the state and to enjoy this true freedom the individual citizen must conform or be conformed to the understanding and direction of the state. Subjective freedom is always subordinate to this higher ‘rational’ conception of freedom.
Marxism has some related idea, that, for example, the Proletariat has the most complete understanding of freedom, and other classes must be subordinate to its rule and allow themselves to be educated and configured into true freedom by it. Leninism adds the party as the vanguard element of Proletarian rule.
Wokeism seems to combine elements of these ideas; the state plus various oppressed groupings of people (blacks, trans, non-binary etc.) and their activist leaders are made into the repository of the understanding of authentic freedom, the political apparatus whose activity must necessarily liberate everyone else, whether the others appreciate/understand this or not.
Anglo countries generally stayed free of significant Marxist or Hegelian influence in politics for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, whereas many other countries in Europe and East Asia did not. Wokeness is weaker and more gay than some of the hardcore Hegelians and Marxists of the past but the US does live in more gentle times.
Economic numbers partly reflect what “is”.
There is no “must be.”
Contemporary conservative politics achieves none of the practical successes that it wants because it refuses to recognise people’s emerging needs and complexities, until too late. Progressives are constantly playing with advantage, because taking people’s feelings seriously is what they do best.
For example, while women have an ever-growing realisable need to transcend traditional female virtues because technology has freed them to do so, conservatives have just said “no, they don’t”, while progressives have framed their political programme to meet those needs and have captured women’s votes. The only reason why conservatives get any women’s votes is because they now present a political platform from the progressive yesterday.
It is conservatives’ obsession with telling people what their real needs are that bars them from having any more success politically than merely serving as the Washington Generals. Yes, they can score occasionally, but they always end up losing.
Could women have been enabled to transcend traditional feminine virtues by a political programme which would have been far more amenable to conservatives? Of course, but conservatives would have actually had to try.
Just saying that “women are this”, when the present day clearly says otherwise, is not good enough. “But it is nature!” Well, no, it obviously is not, since it isn’t actually in existence. The trad argument is a fantasy masquerading as realism.
In Sweden, only pre-teen children’s TV is dubbed. Your “original idea” is actually a completely common and long-standing idea in much of the world, but its purpose is to teach the local population English.
My impression is that both torture and cannibalism were widespread nearly across the continent. Perhaps, the same was true for our own ancestors in prehistoric times?
It may be understandable on a certain level. Maize was only a snatch crop in many areas, and it lacks many nutrients, as escapees from North Korea can tell us today from firsthand experience. And there were whites who were driven to great cruelty in some of the same areas. Perhaps, from observing Indian raids.
Be that as it may, when I was taught in school about counting coup, I’m certain they didn’t mention the gruesome torture. Probably, the greatest politically correct inversion that I experienced back then. Though, we can all admire bravery, and I do sympathize with the desire to not kick ’em when they are down.
From what I hear, conditions on the rez can be shocking. If you go, I hope you will tell us your impressions of it.
I have only seen two minutes of one Olympics event so far when I was inside the comcast store getting my new internet connection. It was the finals of the women doubles badminton. Indonesia won. It never did register which Asian country got the silver.
all the Asian women were dancing about like American negro men basketball players between the points which I found hilarious.
Djokovic didn’t win. He participated after saying he wasn’t going to if there were no spectators. He behaved very badly in his last loss with throwing racquets and stuff.
the only event I am really interested in is the men 400m hurdles which looks like it is going to be a great race in less than five hours. True patriotic Americans from Minnesota will all be rooting for the fellow from Norway.
It sounds like those movements overcompensated, but were all trying to include “alternative ways of being” into the collective voice and into what was tolerated.
They may have argued that they were prioritising an objective freedom, but that’s a common mistake. It is ordinary to confuse your subjective needs with what “must be” for everyone.
In actuality, they were each representing an emerging subjective freedom and set of needs which, prior to them, had been unrecognised.
Their success didn’t come from recognising what was objective, but from the fact that they were on trend in including new subjective needs.
Take Marx. If you wanted to implement a political programme at the dawn of the industrial revolution, you too would be intelligent to design it around the potential emerging needs of the emerging working class.
The only reason why it didn’t have more success was because the political platform, while meeting the needs for the emerging working class to feel included in the collective voice, was a totally extreme and unworkable abstract theory. England avoided the worst aspects of this, because tendencies like one nation Toryism met those needs almost as well.
Sometimes, when I see old movies that I enjoy, I wonder how much of what I perceive as a moral film is due to:
1.) Censorship
2.) The fact that making the product involved more white male Christians
3.) The fact that the demographics of the audience were closer to me
It’s hard to quantify it all. Pre-code had many immoral films, and there were certainly ones made during its enforcement. And, though, it is hard to overstate the Jewish influence on Hollywood (even seems substantial in films made in Europe), it is not all Jewish. BTW, I suspect that TL is a partisan in this matter.
It may be that moral laws are impossible in our current political environment, so I can see a certain appeal in your proposal.
I’ve also long suspected that Hollywood is the last illusion of greatness that America is holding onto, and that the state would begin lashing out more, if it was curtailed. Perhaps, curtailing it would ultimately encourage reforms.
Your morality is just the progressives’ morality of yesterday.
You can say that this makes sense, as perhaps they have overshot and you would have been a progressive then.
Or perhaps you have another theory, but you can hardly deny the observation above.
My theory of politics addressing people’s subjective needs and therefore the political policies and pedantic details of the morality of the day often being less relevant than you would expect, is a neat alternative. It also offers hope and an action plan if understood.
Is there anything you recommend to watch on Netflix at the moment?
I have seen some interesting things on Netflix (Elvis Presley documentary, Challenger Disaster documentary, Operation Odessa, Shtisel, Miyazaki animes, and a couple of 1950s Sophia Loren comedy films like “Scandal in Sorrento”),
Overall though, I have probably wasted more time browsing it, than finding something to watch.
I find maybe a couple more good films on Amazon Prime (e.g. some more 1950s Italian films). But I’m not too impressed with Amazon Prime (I’m not going to watch “Clarkson’s Farm”).
During the coronavirus lockdowns, I was able to watch a lot of good films for the first time. But most of all of the good films attained (old school way) from blu-rays and DVDs, rather than streaming.
I am experimenting on you, to see how to get people who are trapped like you, out of their prison. This is a rewarding learning experience for me.
My incentive is reinforced because I perceive you as having the uncommon combination of need and capability. I think you’re an extremely underappreciated asset. You even see yourself as worth “nothing,” but you’re clearly intelligent and not in the grip of obvious psychosis.
You may reasonably call this an obsession, but I can promise you that as soon as my perception of your capability fades, as it quickly is, my interest will fade too.
Unlike Daniel, I don’t much care if you evangelise your poorly understood “Hobo Goofy” creed. People hear what they want to. If those, who want to delude themselves that they are “nothing” because that is how they treat themselves, happen to read your “ideas”, it won’t actually change the fact that they already treat themselves as “nothing”, which will remain the real problem in their case, just as it remains the real problem in yours.
Queen’s Gambit, the Ballad of Buster Scrugs, the Invention of Lying, After Life, Derek, Better Call Saul, the Night Manager may all be available, depending on your country.
“I have probably wasted more time browsing it, than finding something to” – I know the feeling. Their browser is not that good. Try searching by actor, director, title and sometimes it brings up something that you can’t find by browsing even if it is not what you asked for.
The series that I was most impressed was Babylon Berlin. This is a spectacular achievement imo. I was really gaga about it.
I tried to watch Shtisel and liked first several episodes but then I knew it was going nowhere like most series. I have see also Unorthodox but I was cold about it though it was good. The weird looking actress form it is in Shtisel.
There was this Israeli series Messiah which unfortunately was cancelled. I did like it very much. Also Israeli series Hostages was decent.
I remember liking the series on Ted Kaczynski.
I watched Polish series (2 seasons) The Mire which was kind of good, I think.
There several crime/detective or terrorists British series that were OK but now I do not remember titles.
And Berlin Babylon made think about The Queen’s Gambit which has and excellent scenography for 1950s/1960s . It was a real pleasure to watch that actress in her outfits. And as we are with very watchable actresses an watchable movies there is: Miss Sloane.
If I think of something I’ll let you know.
songbird,
Protectionism did not allow South Korea’s film market to develop, but rather undermined it so that when competition was introduced, it floundered completely. Supposed “Korean ethnocentrism” did not contribute either, since the domestic Korean film market share was as low as 15.9% in 1993, with Hollywood totally dominating the Korean market during the 1990s. The results of Parc’s research make it very clear that it was specifically pro-competition reform that allowed the South Korean film industry to develop and become successful.
You are indeed correct that China has economies of scale and thus erecting trade barriers would allow its infant industry to develop, but this is no guarantee of success: India has scale and trade barriers too, yet it films are internationally uncompetitive. To displace Hollywood, pro-competition reform first had to be enacted.
When the Daily Beast can’t sleep, there are always Cossacks under the bed.
From what I see on the internet, Bob Marshall is an officially designated Wilderness Area so any travel inside other than horse/stock is prohibited, including bicycles, and thus there is zero chance of large amounts of people ever going there. But thanks a lot for the tip. A Google image search shows wonderful, classic fir-boulder Rockies scenery: https://www.google.com/search?q=bob+marshall+wilderness+area&source=lnms&tbm=isch
I have similar landscapes where I live if I hike up the mountains but I’ve never been any further north than Yellowstone in the Rockies and I suspect that those vast expanses up there must be even more spectacular. Great to have one more place in my to-visit list that is less than a day’s drive away.
BTW, AaronB or any other nature lovers out there, I was planning to drive as far north as possible in Western Canada this winter, perhaps up to Great Slave Lake, for an Arctic-like winter experience. Would this be a bit too hard on my regular AWD SUV? Any tips? Thanks.
Most of these endless inter-Rabbi squabbles and religious “scandals” that regularly disrupt Israeli coalitions stays within the Hebrew-language press and is very rarely circulated into English, probably both because it’s seen as provincial and because it’s often highly ridiculous and embarassing to the ‘Jewish State’.
But the best introduction to the medieaval mindset of powerful Rabbis who now strongly influence Israeli politics is Israel Shahak. He only published 3 books in English, all are excellent, although the one that most delves into this topic in detail is “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel” (1999, Pluto Books). Probably one of the reasons Shahak was able to write so freely was that he wasn’t a penurious journalist, but a professional organic chemist. Incidentally, another theme of his works was that the Israeli ‘Left’ was far more racist, interventionist and hypocritical and totalitarian than the the Right, who he considered basically uninterested in Arabs.
Everything he wrote in that book is only truer now, other than a weak pushback against Jewish fanatics with Avigdor Lieberman’s secular rightist party (now extinct, along with Lieberman’s public career) their influence within Israeli society has only been constantly growing. Probably the mass immigration of Russian Jews and ‘Jews’ in the 90s saved the Israeli Knesset from being totally overwhelmed by religious and ‘traditionalist’ parties, it was the decade when the broad mass of the superstitious, downtrodden and Rabbi-fearing Mizrachi/Sephardi sector of the Israeli population finally started mobilising as a distinct political group. Again, ironically this happened mainly because the split between Rabbi Shas and Rabbi Shach, as the latter created the first exclusively Mizrachi religious-party as a reliably subservient tool in his feud with another Ashkenazi rabbi, but his creation rebelled against him. Funnily enough, there were several Mizrachi/Sephardi political parties created before this, but they all totally floundered for being secular, whilst non-Ashkenazi Jews primarily defined themselves in religious terms.
Again, the mass immigration of the ex-USSR into Israel just managed to keep the overall balance in favour of secularism, Russians almost invariably vote for rightist parties but they’re also quite anti-religious, not surprisingly considering most of them had negligible interest in Judaism prior to the USSR’s collapse.
Barry Chamish also wrote in passing (in the 90s) about the topic as well as other dysfunctial aspects of Israeli society, although as a non-sabra and Anglo immigrant to the country, he practised a large degree of self-censorship. Which still wasn’t enough to save his career from Alan Dershowitz types, he eventually returned to America and sunk into obscurity.
There’s also Israel Shamir and Gilad Atzmon on this website, who although they frequently espouse totally crack-brained opinions, when they write about their native topic of Israel, can still be very good. Paul Danahar has also written well about Jewish fundamentalist state-capture of Israeli politics, but in much more general terms, without much study of the ideology motivating groups like the Gush Enumim or toxic attitudes of classical Judaism more broadly.
You can also read the more popular Hebrew papers like Yediot Ahranot or Ha’ir using google translate, Ha’aretz of course is considered the standard but as the newspaper of the elite its viewpoints are frequently more sanitised.
Ok, this post was far too long, but I hope I answered your question. If Dmitri pops by he’ll probably claim the split between Ashkenazim and the other Jewish groups has long since faded, although as a Russian his experience of Israel is somewhat skewed, considering Russians still very much live in their own sphere within Israel, the older people at least, perhaps not their kids. My own viewpoint is influenced by the experiences of the small, but quite ancient, Armenian community within Israel, who suffer from same petty restrictions and bad-faith as any Arab, despite posing no security or social threat to the state whatsoever. The same goes for the Druze.
Also funny that Aaron B hasn’t commented on this at all, as a supposed (ex?) Israeli, despite his constant preoccupation with various superstitious nonsense.
I saw a couple of episodes, and indeed it looks like a perfect recreation of fashions of the early 1960s America.
I have some criticisms though of this style of television, where I had a sense I am watching an expensive theatre designed to illustrate pages in the history textbook: you open the page on “American women of the mid-20th century”, and is written “American housewives were often frustrated due to lack of career, and as a result addiction to prescription barbiturates becomes common.”
So in the episode I saw, it was showing the housewife addicted to valium, to manage the anxiety and depression created by her desoeuvre situation.
Or textbook will say : “Within the education system, girls were directed towards activities such as cooking and dancing, while prestigious sports such as chess were still a male-only province”.
So therefore the episode is showing the surprise of the boys to be defeated by a girl, and one who co-incidentally looks like a fashion model demonstrating certain clothes and hairstyles of the epoch.
Thanks I did not know anything about this one.
Shtisel became good at around episode 6 or 7 of the first season.
That is, it begins as a telenovela, produced for the mainstream television audience in Israel. But at some point, the directors seem to become more self-confident and expressive, and start to indulge their more artistic ambitions.
For example, towards the end of the first season, there is even an episode which explores various Christian iconography and concepts implied in the life of the main character.
It’s the same with each the three seasons: they begin as a telenovela, becoming increasingly tiresome (especially the music). But in the later episodes, the director becomes more confident, and begins to express his inner ideas.
And this matches inversely to the reviews in the Israeli media. For the third season, Israeli media’s reviews of the show became very negative, writing something like: “The season has begun well, but becomes terrible by the end”. So I watched the third season after reading the reviews of Israeli local media, and indeed it begins as a tiresome telenovela like before, but in the last few episodes it becomes much more interesting, with aspects seeming like European art cinema, and a new level of brutality in portrayal of the characters (and hence was considered predictably a downturn by the local Israeli television audience).
Another admirable aspect, is its increasingly negative and critical view of its own characters, but without requiring them to do anything dramatic to create this perspective for us: rather, simply their failing is shown by making them repeat the same mistakes over and over, with slight variations, across many episodes. And their redemption will also be a slight variation on their failures.
This is the tiresome repetitive aspect of the show, is perhaps what is most interesting about it.
It reminds of a quote of Schopenhauer in “Parerga and Paralipomena”: “”The unalterability of our character and the necessary nature of our actions will be brought home with uncommon force to anyone who has on any occasion behaved as he ought not to have behaved. Afterwards he honestly recognizes and regrets his failing, and no doubt thinks: “I’ll do better next time”. Another time comes, the circumstances are repeated, and he again does exactly as he did before – to his astonishment”.
Most people on Twitter are invisible. No I don’t mean shadow banning.
Would Elon Musk or John Carmack or even William Shatner be invisible without twitter? No.
My eyes glaze when someone mentions an online persona as if their achievements are on the scale of Dr. Hofmann or Linus Torvalds. Because achievers don’t waste time on social media, instead they write one-man operating systems that live forever as god tells them not to trust “CIA niggers”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis
I know nothing about “influencers” or any of that retarded malarkey so I can’t tell you how these genetic degenerates get exposure but plebs talk to plebs so I’m not surprised. Black people know all sorts of black movie stars, entertainers and sportsmen that most non-black outsiders would barely have heard of. I imagine influencers are in such a category (if you’re a retarded furry queer chances are you’ll cluster to the furry queer queen on twitter/facebook/reddit due to lack of social skills and generally poor life choices).
People keep saying twitter is “high powered” social media but so far aside from an engineer firing off a one-liner thought about something it’s mostly an unfocused shit show. An even lower-IQ version of reddit with true dedication to the TLDR philosophy. Retards still post 20+ posts with stupid ass slashes like its cool instead of moving to a more manageable medium for long-posts.
I imagine TikTok is the next level for low-IQers. 10 second .gif with limited audio. And yet gold is something hard to replicate:
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ejX1fiDEJCc/YQiVDRneFPI/AAAAAAAAALw/Up0fUce8V9ck3Byy8_Z5nTFo53nU7nbZwCLcBGAsYHQ/s16000/whatyoucantget.jpg
First I’ve heard of it, you don’t want to watch a cranky old boomer complaining about how the government persecutes self-made men like himself, as he works on his vanity project? Sad!
I only ever used netflix when I flatmate had bought it for himself, the only decent thing I could find on the entire platform was ‘Madmen‘. Certainly there weren’t any 50s Italian films, or really anything not in English or prior to the 80s, except a few obvious picks like ‘The Graduate’, ‘Jaws’ or ‘Starwars’.
I particularly hate streaming services for making seeded or working torrents increasingly impossible to obtain, particularly for anything older than a decade.
Talking about leaders of religious cults, is not very representative of the nationality though – even with a nationality like Jews, who specialized in the production of religious cult leaders.
Judaism produced history’s most influential religious cult leaders, and still probably the highest number of cult leaders per capita are produced in Israel.
But the behaviour of these cult leaders seems similar everywhere; Aum Shinrikyo in Japan or Joseph Smith of Utah, are not much different to the cult leaders that control growing parts of Israel’s population today. As a Italian mafia leader is not all that different from a Chinese Triad leader, or a Japanese Yazuka boss. But these roles are quite different from the life of a people with a different profession. That is, the mafia leaders, are living quite a different role, to the shop owner who pays them the mafia the protection money.
The cult leader, is an important figure in human history, but their personality is not a necessarily a representative one. Indeed, often it can be more analogous to a “symbiotic relationship” in biology: that is the trickery of a cult leader like Joseph Smith, has required the gullibility of his followers. The average Mormon is not like Joseph Smith, even though Joseph Smith is in some sense the creator of the Mormons.
As for the Gogol story – their conflict was not based on self-interest. But if cult leaders in Israel are fighting each other, it is for control of resources – which is to say, for control of their gullible followers, which religious leaders harvest for position, donations and attention. Conflict between cult leaders, is perhaps more analogous to battles between drug dealers for territory.
For example, when we were in Tel Aviv at 11pm, it was full of young people and you might say “Jews know how to enjoy themselves.”
But then you want to have some more drinks, and it is 2am – and you walk in the streets, and it is only young Russian tourists in the streets, and perhaps a couple of Americans, and very few Israelis will be there.
To generalize, in Russian youth culture it’s common you want the night to not end, and to talk about the meaning of the world, and consider the later hours are the most beautiful ones.
But this is where you can notice that Jewish cultural programming seems to involve drinking only two or three beers, to go finish your homework, phone your mother to tell her you are well, and go to bed early – and so in the Tel Aviv early morning streets remain only some groups of irresponsible young Russian tourists, who wondering why it has become so quiet.
They say that Israel is the “party centre of the Middle East” – but this means they had 2 bottles of beer, and go home at 1am. It’s very far from the revelry of a Bruegel painting.
Similarly, my friend that lives for years in Israel, said: “If you see someone lying drunk on the floor, talk to them in Russian – every time they are going to understand you”.
It’s not that Russians are particularly idiosyncratic with alcohol – Japanese businessmen, and English women. also often lie drunk on the floor. What this shows is that the Jewish cultural programming is giving people such a superego voice saying “stop you’d had enough now, go to bed” after a few beers, while in Russian programming your superego is actually seems to be saying the opposite.
–
As an inheritance of the influence of the 19th century Romantic movement, it has become fashionable in our culture to be a rebel, an outsider, and individualist, if not a bohemian and eccentric.
And if you look at today’s secular Jewish journalism writing about themselves, they often try to portray Jewish history in this way, as if Spinoza was a representative of the Jewish position inside Europe.
However, of course, Spinoza was expelled by the Jewish community, who considered him to be an unconventional eccentric.*
While in a macro level, Jews were outsiders in Europe, on the micro perspective in which people actually lived – it was highly conventional life, requiring conformity and rule-following. Until the later 19th century, the vast majority of Jews were provincial people living in small villages, and would almost never meet a person from a different nationality than their own.
Outside of a few cult leaders (where it was viewed as a kind of wisdom), eccentricity and nonconformism was punished, and resulted in the people leaving the Jewish community.
In reality, cultural programming of the Jewish community in Europe, has idealized a boring and conventional, rule-based lifestyle – and this continued into the secular Jewish culture of the 20th century.
Radical feminism was an idea that existed in the culture of 19th century Europe, and was present in Paris Commune. It was often associated with eccentric aristocrats, like feminist Elizaveta Dmitrieva, who commanded a woman’s battalion in violent action in the streets of Paris.
By the early 20th century England, feminist radicals, led by elite women like Emmeline Pankhurst, have been bombing letter boxes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette_bombing_and_arson_campaign) – at a time when most of the Jewish women were obedient housewives living in small villages without running water.
So, what is actually a modern Jewish contribution to the feminist movement, that emerges in the second half of the 20th century America among Jewish people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler?
It seems that the new innovation of late 20th century American Jewish woman, is to converting a romantic, bohemian cause of the 19th century Europe, that had once attracted romantic women like Mary Wollstonecraft or Virginia Woolf – into a boring middle class lifestyle at the university or the law school, that allows you to go to bed early, and to plan your academic conferences a year ahead.
It reminds of what Freud has done to Schopenhauer – which was convert world-denying philosophy of German romanticism, into a wise but conventional Jewish grandfather’s style of advice that women should stop masturbating and have children, and that young men need to adapt to the reality principle and go to the office on time.
If you think about Ireland, by comparison. Ireland produced the world’s 20th century’s greatest writers, but I almost cannot think of a single famous concert soloist from Ireland. Ireland produced its James Joyce and W. B. Yeats, but it doesn’t produce any Kissin or Vengerov.
Chinesebromance mentioned to me that composers require “monastic lifestyle”. But this isn’t really true.
Sibelius has spent his youth in drunken rages across Helsinki, often not returning home for days. And he retired at age 54, and just relaxed for the rest of his life. Or Musorgsky has spent his youth, and middle age in a semi-permanent drunken rage.
Neither alcoholic Sibelius or Musorgsky, could have worked as a concert soloist – as their personality would not allow such a regular, routine daily practice schedule.
So why is the career of classical music soloist matching so well to many people from Jewish cultural origin?
In the discussion with Utu, we mentioned about the importance of training and teaching.
But it is also perhaps partly that a culture of boring, conventional, rules-based living, is unsurprisingly a good basis for people who have to practice everyday, whether they felt creative or not.
–
That was strongly my impression as well, there are many eye-rolling moments in that regard. At least some of the new research (for English publication, at least) makes it worthwhile.
I also noticed this, again, a rather typical English history in having the whole world revolve around the policy decisions of Anglo politicians. Much more could have easily been dedicated to the activities of Richard Sorge in Japan, he had a very colourful life. Although considering Stalin ignored his greatest spy-coups, rendering much of his service pointless, perhaps that’s understandable.
Yes, you can feel McMeekin’s pained frustration that WWII didn’t turn into some sort of Anglo ‘Great Crusade’ against the combined forces of the USSR and Nazi Germany, he seriously seemed to believe such a war was winnable. Again, quite a glaring omission in our benevolent overlord’s glowing review of the book.
Thorfinnsson, what books on WWII would recommened? In English, I’ve read Richard J Evan’s “Nazi Germany in Power” trilogy, Weinberg’s “A World At Arms” (following probably the most ‘standard’ line), the coldwar polemics of Robert Service and Conquest, the narratively gripping but professionally shaky books of Antony Beevor, Lothrop Stoddard’s measured descriptions of Nazi Geramny, A.J.P Taylor’s classic works, and (if it counts) George Orwell’s personal war-diaries, interesting mainly because they were contemporary.
What interests me most at this point is what factors made the German army so effective on the field, past cliches about ‘operational elan’ or ‘racial fanaticism’, I haven’t read any book that’s satisfactorily explored the subject in detail, even Richard J Evans just sinks into the same cliches when passing over German military performance.
Also Germany’s relations with it’s wartime allies, the Italian fiasco is fairly well-known, but Nazi relations co-belligerent Finland less so, and Germany’s management of its vassal swarm is completely passed over.
The cardinal difference though is people like Jerry Falwell or Aun Shinriko don’t exert huge influence over state policy. Not to mention chief Rabbis of state like Ovadiah Yosef make inflammatory racist comments all the time, or regular curse out and denounce governments that pay much of their salary. Nor are religious extremists subsisided as a lynchpin of government policy, in the form of settlements and their ‘security roads’ dotting and slicing up the entire West Bank.
Most Mizrachi politicians still defer to powerful Rabbis over key issues, going as far as kissing their hands and other forms of public grovelling. Considering oriental Jews are still mostly religious and they make nearly half of the Jewish population (not counting Hasidim here), or most Israelis support the national-religious settlers, I think dismissing this as matters of a few ‘cults’ is disingenuous.
Criticism of existing society and its customs, has been one of the most features and purposes of the greatest European literature since the 18th century at least, as it created a fusion of satire, realism and tragedy. And with writers like Flaubert and Zola, the combination of realism. comedy and tragedy, had become incredibly brutal and overpowering, and the cinema of the 20th century was never close to that.
But among the 20th century’s film industry which was most violently critical of society was the Japanese one, and that is one of the secrets of the excellence of the Japanese cinema – with a short interlude during the Second World War when the directors had to make progovernment “patriot films”.
This already in the 1930s – if you watch Mizoguchi’s early films of the 1930s, they are the most explicitly criticizing the problems of traditional Japanese society, and especially the poor situation of women.
Ozu’s postwar films are also very of Japan’s culture, but in a more subtle and notdirect way compared to other Japanese directors.
Ozu was often seeming to remake variations of the same film, and if you watch a lot his postwar films, you can see much of them contain subtle critiques of Japanese nationalism and imperialism. Perhaps for Japanese viewers these are less subtle.
Among Hollywood directors, I think the greatest directors like Billy Wilder. Hitchcock, and John Huston, were often criticizing of the American society, but in a more subtle and quiet way compared to the Japanese directors. Also some of the most strange and beautiful America cinema, was produced by criticizing of Hollywood film industry itself: “Gilda” by Charles Vidor, “Sunset Boulevard” by Billy Wilder, and much later “Mulholland Drive” by David Lynch.
Yes, I realize that I was wasting so much time on someone with deep-seated mommy issues and I ought to be paid for my psychiatric assistance, but of course, that’s impossible. If you were responsible, then you wouldn’t have so many issues with your mother.
So! Time to cut my losses short.
Agreed, though I’d just lump it in as a necessary component of complexity.
The Captain Marvel film was unbearable because it offered no complexity in the main character and so became a stilted hagiography.
A serious film that treats its society as the SJW writers treated Captain Marvel will be similarly inane.
I really liked “Gilda”, even though I saw it when very young. I learned what tungsten was from it.
When I get a (rare) chance to ask an extremely accomplished guy about the internet they usually say something like I used to do that but eventually it was a waste of time.
We are only legends in our own mind here. The center of the universe is elsewhere almost for sure. Donald Knuth says he doesn’t even use e-mail!
Thank you for being someone who recognises that Freud was a bit of a bore.
Most people here latch onto the sexual stuff to paint him as a subversive, when really the sexual stuff was desperately shoehorned in to provide a scientistic materialist basis to his observations, which otherwise would have relied on spiritual phenomena and so lack the credibility of being “science”.
That, and well, I’ve gone back to writing again.
I felt the Muses again, and you know, the girls are very good company indeed.
Writing can take a little bit of time, and a little more effort than shooting down various vacuous exercises in lack of imagination. There’s something uniquely beautiful about putting pen to ink, so to speak, something deeply joyous and fulfilling. You know what they say about the blank page being intimidating, or at least, you should know if you ever committed yourself to anything like writing, but the page doesn’t need to be blank – there’s something to be said to just letting the words come out quick and loose, and then discovering the connections among them, allowing them to discover themselves in the fullness of their possibilities and to guide and be guided by them as it might be.
And if I was going to convince anything of what I want them to understand, I am considerably certain that it is easier to convey it through the media of storytelling than it is via endless tirades. I’ve always been gifted with the ability to integrate information and some other things but having a capability is really quite silly, almost tiresome. Ultimately, its not meaningful at all. Its what you can do with that capability which gives it any meaning.
And I think, that’s what I’ll let myself discover where that capability leads me.
Freud writes his case-studies like he is Sherlock Holmes working within a detective story, and this made him fun to read.
But instead of crime scene, he detours through Schopenhauer’s concept of sexual motivation, Schopenhauer’s theory of the dream, and a background of family dramas from the mythology of Ancient Greece.
However, if you look at Freud’s advice at the conclusion of his case-studies and essays – it is in the category “advice of a sensible Jewish grandfather”: the woman needs to be married and have children, the man needs to be married and have children, and have a regular office job.
Schopenhauer’s final teaching is that women should not have children, while Freud’s solution for penis envy is that the woman needs to have a baby, and his solution for Oedipal Complex is that the man needs to find a wife.
Freud theories of sexuality and the dream, are mainly from Schopenhauer. But his final advice is an inversion of Schopenhauer, and he reverts to a sensible advice to get married and get a job.
Nietzsche also works often by inverting Schopenhauer. But Nietzsche has actually tried to invert many of Schopenhauer’s theories, while Freud seems to align on Schopenhauer’s theories, and re-adjusted the conclusion.
That’s not to criticize Freud too much. He was not a philosopher, but his boring advice to get married and go to work could probably help the kind of people who were reading him.
His “scientific” self-identity, also means he could formulate a lot of the ideas of the romantic German philosophers, into a way which would enter the textbooks. Without Freud, the worldview of Schopenhauer (of the world as representation of the will to reproduce itself) might not have entered the mainstream culture.
Freud had also made study of mythology seem interesting again.
Area where Freud cannot historically be condoned, is encouraging his patient to have surgery with Wilhelm Fleiss, to cut off her nose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Eckstein#Surgery
Also he might have some indirect blame for encouraging Napoleon’s greatgrandniece to take surgery to relocate her clitoris.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Bonaparte#Sexual_research
https://olympics.com/tokyo-2020/en/news/norway-s-karsten-warholm-breaks-world-record-to-win-gold-in-men-s-400m-hurdles
Before WW2, most medicine was quack medicine, or perhaps, if put kindly, “experimental”. I see no reason why Freud, when making medical suggestions, would be different.
Here’s one of genius surgeon Robert Liston’s worst moments:
He is said to have performed the removal of a limb in 28 seconds, accidentally amputating his assistant surgeon’s fingers, causing the patient and assistant to die of sepsis, and a witness reportedly dying of shock, making this surgery the deadliest in history.
Even worse, lobotomies were actually a 20th Century invention:
Antonio Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist, invented the procedure in 1935. A year later, Walter Freeman brought the procedure to the US. Freeman was an evangelist for this new form of “psychosurgery”. He drove around the country in his “loboto-mobile” performing the procedure on thousands of hapless patients.
Instead of a leucotome, Freeman used an actual icepick, which he would hammer through the corner of an eye socket using a mallet. He would then jiggle the icepick around in a most unscientific manner. Patients weren’t anaesthetised – rather they were in an induced seizure.
You might also enjoy “Beat the Devil” hosting a star studded cast including perennial greats Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Peter Lorre and a host of Italian stars too. The uneven and comedic plot was co-written by John Huston and Truman Capote. The two were undoubtedly having a ball writing this spoof on a day to day basis. In this one, the childish mind is initiated into the mysteries of uranium. 🙂
I agree with much of the sovereignty-restoring economic proposals Trump picked up. But he is no messiah, and my frame of analysis isn’t American (not being one myself), so I have no stake in the burning wreck.
In using fiat USD you exhibit your enduring trust in the FED who has a big role in financialization and hollowing out the US’s industrial base, something only libertarians recognized. Keep on shooting yourself in your feet (as with your dreams of a Zoom-fueled suburb utopia – Zoom is the weak links elites can grab)
Kudrin is trolling or have been asleep under a rock for the past 10 years?
https://www.rt.com/russia/530933-kudrin-investment-based-economy-necessity/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
Even ignoring persistent sanctions threat that will ruin Russian export potential, why exports focus? Russia has had trade surplus for the past 20 years and has some of the largest forex reserves in the world. The only reason you need exports is to pay for imports on the international markets. That’s it. If you are a poor deadbeat country, you need exports. Russia is not that – Russia has more forex that it knows what to do with.
Exports take real wealth (cars, oil, wheat etc) out of the country in exchange for foreign currency which might as well be Monopoly money as foreign currency can’t be used domestically in a sovereign country. Now, Russia has sanctions threat that can derail exports and cause trade balance problem, hence Russian need for $500 billion reserve fund. But if Russia goes Kudrin’s way, and reserve fund grows to $1 trillion, what can Russia do with $1 trillion of useless dollars and euros that it can’t do with $500 billion? Why should Russia retool its economy to serve the rest of the world while leaving her own people starved of goods and services?
Nobody in the developed world cares about exports. US hasn’t seen a trade surplus since 1970’s and its chugging along fine. All modern economies are based on services and government stimulated consumption (EU is a bit weird as they prefer corporate welfare via their Central Bank bond purchases but it boils down to the same thing as EU has more worker and consumer protections).
The US Federal Reserve, Bank of England, Bank of Japan, European Central Bank, they all provide cover for their respective governments to run massive budget deficits in order to stimulate consumption. That is the only thing that matters and the only thing keeping global economy alive. Budget deficit as %GDP = economic growth as %GDP. Russian government has no business running budget surpluses in current environment, but that’s different story.
For a country of 145 million, domestic consumption, especially services, matters vastly more than exports. Exports are for tiny countries that can’t stimulate domestic demand due to not having enough people. Even Chinese got smart and figured out how this game is rigged, and went into debt up to their eyeballs to build apartments and whatnot and create domestic consumer market.
You dont seem to get it. Look at the results in the paper https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217150694.pdf
“Visualizing Electric Circuits: The Role of Spatial Visualization Skills in Electrical Engineering”
https://i.ibb.co/FDP21h9/spaelec.png
There are two spatial tests, Mental Rotations Test A (MRT-A) and Mental Cutting Test (MCT) and tested against 5 Elec Eng areas, DIRECT29, DIRECTA, DIRECTB, DIRECTC and DIRECTD. For MRT-A only 1 out of the 5 areas is statistically significant. Furthermore, 2 out of the 5, though not statistically significant, they have NEGATIVE CORRELATIONS with MRT-A, i.e. the higher the spatial ability the worse the Elec Eng performance outcomes. If the sample size is larger these 2 results could be statistically significant. More on these negative results from another paper later on.
For the MCT test, only 2 out of the 5 are statistically significant, with the given R values, the respectively Rsq values for the fraction of results explained are 0.242 and 0.278, the results are even worse than that for Chem Eng.
In the paper
Spatial IQ is only 1/3 of the STEM profession requirement and as shown by itself only suitable for ‘middle skill jobs’. High Quant IQ by itself is able to put the candidate in the professional STEM position.
Yes, writing can be supremely enjoyable, I’m happy for you you’re going back to it. I was very good at it in school, but I never did it professionally, alas. You’re very lucky if you can!
Storytelling definitely has more influence than mere logical arguments, which never has any influence. Logic can always be parsed indefinitely – a great story, a great myth, captures the mind and won’t let go.
Be careful the medium does not cancel your message 🙂 Writing a beautiful, poetic story, that moves the emotions – may end up undermining the very message of cold hard steel you will be promoting!
And the very act of turning to storytelling over logical argument is a concession to those who oppose the Machine 🙂
I told you in my comment above, Daniel, you are already unconsciously working against the Machine – even as you think you are promoting it 🙂
And this is well – the Spiritus Mundi speaks through you as he does through us all.
Another excellent point – which puts the emphasis back on human agency and motivation, and away from “automatic processes” – another subconscious blow against the Machine on your part 🙂
One thing I can’t stand – or understand – about HBD is that in explaining achievement it never factors in personal agency. It’s like everyone with ability automatically excercises it at the same level of motivation – leaving all performance a reflection of pure capability, naturally.
This is an idea worthy of the Machine – this subtraction of human agency. I’m glad you moved away from it!
I think in the end we may not be in opposite camps after all – it is strange how seemingly opposite phenomena may all reflect the same growing spirit of the new age!
What is your (Trumpist) goals here with regards to China? Regime change? Autarky? Shogunate-style shutting out of foreign influences? Preparing for a WWIII that will force China back to medieval levels of development (a la Iraq or a la Morgenthau)? Racialist gut rejection of a non-white power?
Would your putative populist states trade and establish connections with a “democratic” China with arms wide open to gweilos and following every precept and dictates of your leaders (I dunno, Trumpist ones), doing what Yeltsin did to 1990s Russia? With a fragmented China too weak to resist neo-imperialism, like post-Boxer Qing Dynasty? What about Taiwan? Hong Kong? Korea & Japan? Singapore?
It’s funny to see a rabid Trumpist regurgitating much of the half-truths that are ultimately from self-serving warmongers (and Zionists for your explicitly pro-Jewish stance) Trump co-opted. The general direction of pulling out of imperial entanglements is right as well as having a sovereign foreign policy. But he ended up riding on the neocon project started by Obama’s Pivot to Asia, that cumulates in what Blinken is doing now, confusing that for a more honest reappraisal of economic and geopolitical ties. Instead of using trade barriers for mutually beneficial gains in the medium-term (redirecting Chinese exports for internal consumption while reindustrializing the US, keeping a tab on Chinese political influence while not banning them outright), there was instead an open season on everything Chinese that continue up to now.
You can safely block me after replying everything above, since I am a yellowface banana.
I only use Twitter for anime fanart and cosplay photos. I don’t interact with woke anime fans at all, and I mostly just save the images and leave.
Quit reading mumbles and whines on FB/Twitter (even Gab), and your days brighten up.
BTW apologies for not being able to reply to much of the good discussion here except to the shallow Trumpist A123. I’m not on a sufficient level of wisdom yet to opine on anything.
I forgot to emphasize that Babylon Berlin has excellent and authentic scenography. You can satiate eyes with Art Deco.
Putting elite athletes into events at the olympics that they haven’t trained for is amateurish and deserving of criticism. But increasingly, any criticism of any Belarusian institution is seen as a direct attack against its crummy, paranoid dictator.
Would you willingly go back to Belarus after you’ve been denounced as an enemy of Lukashenka?
No, it looks like you did not get what i said. The study i posted has found that high spatial ability is better predictor for people working STEM, or getting a STEM degree. Whether it helps them or not, these people are high on spatial ability.
There are many IQ tests that include spatial ability subtests. Murray’s test (AFQT) does not have such subtests.
Ergo, if he used a test that includes spatial ability subtests (DAT or WAIS) people working in STEM will end up with higher IQ than what he indicated.
Walter Kaufman on War and Peace:
Reading the minds of two readers. Napoleon thinks “Ah, my secret is safe.” Natasha thinks “Oh my God everybody knew.”
I think torture is always an “extra” – raiding for food makes sense, torture less so.
One might say torture served to intimidate and deter future rivals, but it seems never to have had that effect among the Indians. It was a point of pride among them to endure torture silently. And no one ever questioned this system.
There were no “moral reformers” – from this I conclude that torture was served a high moral purpose for the Indians, that it was integrated into their moral and religious system and had metaphysical significance. The fact that the Indians were in general a kind, gentle people among themselves, very honorable, yet never thought to “morally reform” this practice over the centuries, suggests they thought it was part of morality.
Also, I like to relate this to similar practices in other cultures and to the general question of death and destruction in human life – the sheer mystery of World War One – and yes, it is a mystery , despite the feeble attempt of historians to “rationalize” it (we can’t accept mystery).
This is just a conjecture of mine, anyways – but I like to think I have caught the thread at one end 🙂 If I was an anthropologist, I would no doubt develop this theory over time etc etc.
Yes, I have read about “counting coup” and it’s an admirable practice!
It also shows there is no clear line between sport and warfare. The early Europeans thought Indian warfare was a form of sport – they were wrong, but evidently it was much less deadly, and involved much more sporting elements, than European war.
Before the modern era, European warfare also had lots of similarly “gallant”, whimsical, and artistic elements to war, where the point was to win honor, show excellence and good form, and not just kill. The Knights, of course, but even 18th century warfare had many whimsical and gallant gestures in it.
It is only the modern period when war became grim and serious, with no style or art anymore.
What’s also interesting about the Indians is that they loved war and there was no such thing as a bad or early death for them so long as you fought. In other words, the purpose of life was NOT to survive as long as you could, in comfort.
What metaphysics must they have had, to see death as so trivial? And why do we moderns fear it so much?
Obviously, I am not “endorsing” a return to constant warfare with torture. Only that it sheds light on perennial human themes and involves perennial human instincts that we in the modern period also must deal with.
You should follow this Twitter account:
https://twitter.com/akarlin88
Also contribute to this Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/akarlin
I am sure that this is not true.
Just plunge right in!
You will be developing a great life skill – the subtle art of not giving a fuck 🙂
Don’t fear being wrong, and don’t fear looking stupid, and don’t fear being mocked by petty minds.
Treat it as a game – all life is a game 🙂 Follow your “inspiration” without regard for what petty anxious minds think.
The silliest thing you say can add value – they are thoughts, “essais” – attempts, thrusts – and can illuminate. You can always revise and reconsider later.
I for one would love to hear the thoughts of someone influenced by Taoism – however stupid 😉
My read of McMeekin is that he is fiercely anti-Communist (and anti-socialist), but I don’t think he’s anti-Russian. This also came across in his book on the Russian Revolution, which I read. And I also read his book on the Ottoman Empire during WW1.
All of these books were engaging reads, and I came away from them thinking I’d learned some things — I at least don’t recall anything nearly as fantastical as what you’re describing in this latest book. But some of these new obviously fantastical ideas are causing me to question everything he wrote prior.
The man seems like someone who has been able to pull together a lot of anecdotes and spin an interesting narrative, but his ability to discern truth from fiction is clearly not operating at a high level, and this would seem to be reflected in both the many individual anecdotes that he uncritically presents as truth and the overall narrative he presents.
“Progressive of yesterday” is not a label that fits me well. I do not simply wish to return to the past, since the past is how we got here.
I’ve always felt civilization is a complex thing, and it becomes more complex with time. But none of it is planned. In a way, through its complexity, it is analogous to a biological organism, but only in a shallow sense, a poor, dysfunctional imitation.
It may have a grand appearance, like a man standing on two feet, when compared to a mouse. But it is only a simulacrum, missing many essential things, in a dangerous environment. An ordering of functions. Homeostatic mechanisms. An immune system. A sense of self and non-self. And I don’t think it can survive without these things. As such, I think any state needs some level of biorealism. For example, that there are such things in the natural world as parasites. And we need to be mindful of the present in order to try to come up with a system that would have prevented it.
And the present is something beyond the imagination of any past society, so that is one way I definitely break with the past.
I wonder how different society would be if somehow babies held onto the entire range of phonemes available to them.
Would any verbal increase simply magnify the power of progs? Or would the new clicks and tonalities provide enough real estate for Rightists to come up with powerful fusillades of their own? Short words of one or two syllables, that would shatter the verbal weapons of the Left.
And it will not, so in that sense, a blessing of sorts.
There really is a lot of beauty and I think, learning from biological systems. Ants are an incredible example of both a society and a superorganism, and I think that they can be more adequate as an analogy to humans than primates at times.
I’m not too concerned. Yes, leftists like word games, but its ultimately limited. Why, for example, is there the word for woman? In English, I recall that its from a degeneration of wifman, or “man(human) who is wife”, until you finally got “woman.” Liberals would probably love to have “woman” mean something like “person who identifies mentally as woman, and also person who is born with set of breasts that has not self-identified as not a woman…”
And it can go on like that for awhile, but notice what is leads to: the word itself loses clarity, and then eventually lacks meaning. There’s a reason why words exist, summarize and have various cladistic implications and its basically how it fits our brains. I don’t think our brains are about to drastically change yet, so ultimately, it’ll probably come to something like normalcy.
Whenever I have read someone say this, it has been belied by the political programme they support.
I obviously don’t know about you, but I can’t help but anticipate tendentious nature analogies in place of you actually saying what you want because you want it.
Zoom out a lot more and you might say the same thing about existence.
You realise that you are considered “the parasite” in this era? Progressives believe they have created an inclusive, wealthy and tolerant society which you free ride on, while you only contribute emnity and division. You may argue against them by conglomerating your attitude in with average white contributions, but most white people would reject you doing that.
I strongly disagree with those Progressives because with humans, free-willed beings of agency and responsibility, there are no parasites. There are just people who are accepted for unexamined and poorly understood reasons. Why do you think American society accepts you? What purpose do you think you serve for progressives?
Particularly narcissistic progressives say they accept your freedoms and presence in US society because they are just too moral for their own good, far too innocent, naive and lovely. What would you tell them?
There are always parasites, great and small.
And as for who is what, that’s why there is this beautiful thing called conflict and the ultimate language of conflict resolution.
https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1212.htm
Though I’m not too concerned if people like you don’t see it. Lack of understanding means that you’re incapable of effect, which means that you won’t be able to prevent the effectiveness of people who are.
I believe songbird would laugh at them, or perhaps sing at them. His handle does have a lovely origin, after all.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/bioshock/images/4/4e/Songbird_header-864×1024.jpg/
https://bioshock.fandom.com/wiki/Songbird
When you can see the cooperation above even the conflict, you tend to “win” all “conflicts.”
Brave line to take when sympathetic to the side seemingly in the most abject rout of the modern age.
Lol, I(and I think songbird) am perfectly glad to assist chickens in cooperation to the dinner table.
And yes, seemingly.
I’m inclined to think that torture was a way of gaining status (often the women participated in it, who did not take part in combat. As well as an entertainment, and perhaps a way of increasing vigilance – “we better win again next time, or this will happen to us.”
But, maybe, that is too simplistic a view. With that rubric, it may be difficult to explain their penchant for painful rights of passage. You might be right, that there is a metaphysical explanation.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that there is something admirable about the ideals of ancient combat that is not easily reproducible today. And that sport is a poor imitation, even if we don’t desire a return to the waste and destruction of war.
Songbird’s political appraisal has him as the chicken going to the table, even as he tells himself that he is the natural chicken eater.
It is good that you believe that.
Songbird personally may not be in an ideal situation in the Empire of Globohomo: his situation is comparable to being a blood cell inside a cancerous body and continues to have to live and pay taxes to people who wish him harm. He is basically correct, but there’s not a lot he can do specifically to avoid the entire thing from crashing with him. The system is as likely to take him with it as not so as long as he remains conjoined to it.
Still, being correct, he probably stands slightly better odds than most.
And hilariously, on a literal level, would be able to handle chickens(and their headless cooperators) than almost anyone else on this forum in the event of a collapse.
That’s your narrative, but, by far and away, the most common narrative is that Songbird is one of the small number of cancerous cells.
Know yourself but also, if you feel you need an enemy, please do, at least, know them; which includes seeing them as they know themselves.
Oh trust me, I know what they think of us. I wasn’t born yesterday.
And truth is not found in consensus. I have some experience with that, and in prevailing as such. So I am not dismayed by the gibberish hordes.
After all, stupidity is a norm.
What personal qualities do you think they want to sincerely teach you for your own good?
Hungary was very close to attacking Romania in implicit alliance with the USSR (most Romanian divisions were facing the USSR, and the idea was to attack Romania using this advantage), the only reason it didn’t become an explicit alliance was the very strong ideological hatred of Bolshevism (due to the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919) which made Bolshevism anathema to both the political elite and the public in Hungary. In general Hungary was the most pro-German country between Germany and the USSR until 1939 (the creation of Slovakia), while Italy was formally allied to it and was unlikely to attack it for any reason.
They want to “teach” that people have “authentic” selves that should be allowed to “blossom” and that individuals should be allowed to reach their “full potential”, often anchoring from an idea that individuals are a kind of tabula rasas, or at least, of potential not particularly defined by “outward appearances” such as race or sex.
Their axioms are wrong. Therefore, their arguments and lessons offered are wrong. Therefore, being wrong, their effect on the system will be ultimately negative and the ever expanding amounts of efficiency loss as expected as showing. La dee doo.
What they are right in, is that it is a popular opinion. Therein lies its value. The notions of authenticity and autonomy all provide excellent fuzzies and good feelings, and such fuzzies and good feelings has its use in recruiting allies, especially against those who would wish to contraindicate them. Quite useful in some systems.
They can keep that up until they consume up the energetic surplus, fail against more efficient systems and then go back to pretending they actually were thinking of something else all this time. You probably would too, for example. Its amazing how flexible people sometimes just to disassociate with the what they think is the weak horse, and how profound deceptive they are to themselves.
Its almost adorable.
So yes, I know what they want to demand. And no, it doesn’t make them any more correct.
But it will make watching them ultimately burn and scatter quite delightful indeed.
I have, in fact, seen it before.
And it was joy.
Yes, there were probably multiple overlapping reasons for torture. No doubt it served many functions.
It’s easy to just dismiss the Indians as primitives with an underdeveloped moral sense, but that’s facile.
I see no reason why we shouldn’t learn from the full facts of human nature about how best to live flourishing and satisfying lives.
One of the shortcomings of the “efficiency” attitude is that it never considers if efficiency and enjoyment can be united.
The argument is, well modernity is more efficient than so called primitivism. My response is – but is it more fun?
And can there be shifts in attitude and practice that combine the fun of primitivism with the efficiency of modernity?
Why limit ourselves – why not dream big? Why not imagine boldly? This “despairing” view that we are “prisoners” of efficiency and grim necessity – that efficiency dictates and we must follow.
“We have no choice!”, they cry and lament. Grim necessity follows at our heels!
But maybe we do have a choice?
And ultimately, a calculus that does not include fun, pleasure – is that efficient in the long term?
We’ve lost our way in the jungle of metaphysics, and see ourselves as slaves to circumstances – we forget that we participatein Reality. The metaphysics of Seperation and Self vs Other make is think we either dominate or are slaves. But maybe we do neither – we are cooperators in nature.
I believe the next shift in human consciousness will be towards the rejection of the “slave/master” dichotomy – where we are as much unwilling slaves to grim necessity as masters and controllers – and it’s replacement by a metaphysics of participation.
Lol, no.
They want to teach your abstract self humility in the face of your emotional self, and, because, as you say, pain is the great teacher, the pain will be inflicted in ever greater amounts until you learn.
That you haven’t learned yet suggests that you’re unawaredly enjoying it, for you have an unexamined and unappreciated masochistic side.
You may not have the ability to directly see this side of you, but I bet you can see the result of its presence in numerous decisions you have made in your life. The extra set of footsteps are there, even if you don’t want to see what caused them.
If I had to name a sin, speaking in terms of “we” before one can even speak in terms of “I” would be a strong contender.
So close!
The reduced levels of violence at some points of medieval combat was due to the specific nature of efficiency at the time as well. Ancient, classical combat as in Greek, Roman, or Chinese warring states were were high risk, high investment with high stakes, as Cannae, etc might indicate.
This is where numbers and quantification is useful. The rise of heavy cavalry changed the nature of effective warfare: a good warhorse was the equivalent of eight or ten years of salary for a blacksmith(who was hardly the poorest of all individuals), a child who would become a knight would have to be trained for most of his life, and his armor alone, on the cheap side(!), cost as much as employing an archer for 300 days. I haven’t even calculated weaponry, and of course, knights needed more than one horse, at least a palfrey with his destrider.
Indeed, even though they weren’t poor individuals, knights often passed on what they could to their children: softer pieces of armor like chainmail which would need less customization, weapons, etc, and part of the impetus was definitely economic.
You get the idea – basically a knight was like a dreadnought, an extremely expensive individual. In exchange, though, you had an extremely powerful individual who could pick and choose when and where to fight, and do so in an concentrated manner. Medieval warfare was not pretty either, certainly not when a mismatch of power was expected:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevauch%C3%A9e
However, yes, when facing other opponents of equal capability, the risk/reward calculation rapidly leans toward into a less decisive form of combat. This is, in fact, an extremely natural thing too – gorillas tend to fight each other “honorably” with only silverbacks facing each other, until there is a mismatch of power:
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20161128-groups-of-gorillas-have-turned-violent
That’s also the reason why hunter-gatherers tend to have such low scale of warfare. The risk/reward does not favor it. But ultimately, everything is an optimization problem.
“I” is the old false culture of radical individualism. It is the Western metaphysics of the past 500 years that has gotten us into this mess.
To advance, our culture must recognize that there is no isolated “I” – all our problems are related to the assumptions of our culture, and the attitudes of the collective.
In fact, Taoism suggests that we are born perfect, and our “problems” are caused by the way the society we grew up in distorted our natures and implanted false assumptions in us.
My experience in life has taught me the truth of this.
So your project of zooming in and focusing on the “isolated atom” will leave us unable to understand what is wrong with us and why. It is the old attitude that has gotten us into this mess.
You keep on asking me to focus on the isolated “I” – yet my basic philosophy is that to understand the “I” one must understand it’s relationship to everything around it.
In fact, understanding, seeing per se, literally depends on contrast. Light can be seen only when contrasted with darkness. Therefore to see a thing in isolation is literally impossible. It is only by contrasting it with something else that we see it at all.
To focus on the isolated “I” is, also, to severely delimit the field of relevant information – it is to exclude from view most of the field. It is poverty.
I keep on telling you the thing you ask me to do, is exactly the thing I have committed to overcoming.
To resolve this impasse between us, we would have to discuss the metaphysics of the isolated I vs the metaphysics of I-in-relationship.
In other words, we have to take a step back and discuss our respective starting points.
Instead, you merely assume the correctness of your starting point, and again and again try and “bludgeon” me into accepting your starting point.
You even deny you have a specific, chosen starting point, and that there are alternatives.
This is the special species of stupidity one displays when one disdains philosophy and has not subjected ones own assumptions to analysis – one does not understand they are assumptions, and so remains imprisoned within them – frustrated and uncomprehending when others come to conclusions based on different assumptions.
This is why Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. Not because one must use reason to live a good life. In fact, too much reason and thinking is deleterious to life. Rather, if we live by unexamined assumptions, we are stymied, thwarted, and unable to free ourselves from – what might be – unnecessary mental prisons.
Yabadabadoo!
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/08/03/anti-russian-bigotry-and-western-woke-manner/
What is remarkable about “counting coup”, and the gallantry of knights and 18th century warfare in many cases, with it’s whimsical flourishes, is that they clearly had different goals than modern European armies.
Efficiency is of course something that has to be measured against goals – what is the most efficient way to achieve them.
“Counting coup” reflects an attitude where the goal is not to maximize survival, but even to court greater danger!
The goal, in this system, is not to maximize survival and comfort. It is most efficient with regard to maximizing something else – I will leave what to our imaginations )
Modern modes of warfare, by contrast, reflect the metaphysical goals of the societies that produce them – which is chiefly anxious about survival in physical form, and about maximizing comfort of the physical body.
So what is most “efficient” for modern armies is on obviously very different than what it was for knights or Indians or 18th century lords.
Yet why did Indians not see physical survival as the chief and paramount goal of human life? They evidently engage in a mode of warfare that was in many ways more whimsical, humorous, and fun than one based on anxiety and fear.
To understand ourselves, and our modern unhappiness, we must understand these things.
The Russian government funding of a given entity doesn’t by default mean the former knows everything about what the latter is doing. It’s misguided to believe the Russian government has complete control over everything in Russia.
Exactly. The way the silliest progressives see Russia is hilarious. Putin may as well be the demiurge to them.
Let me rephrase your statement to reveal its absurdity:
‘I, AaronB, must understand the diverse internal lives, culture and ways of millions of native Americans, who lived over centuries, before I can understand myself.”
The excuses people will make for their inaction…
Yes, now examine yourself, not the ideas which imprison you.
You find it ridiculous, I find it humbling and wise.
The idea that anthropology sheds light on our common humanity is – well, the underlying premise of anthropology. And philosophy. And art. And fiction. And even religion and spiritually. Take it up with Herodotus. With Aristotle. With Lao Tsu. And the great Mahayana thinkers.
We might have an interesting discussion on our premises, but you prefer to simply assert the rightness of yours. And use rhetoric and repeated assertion to get me to accept yours.
So it’s an impasse – we each want to have different conversations.
As for “inaction”, the necessity for “action” itself rests on assumptions that should be examined.
But you simply assume the rightness of your premises.
Since you are not willing to examine your assumptions, I think it’s best if you confine yourself to conversations with people who share them. There are many here.
Best.
His fundamental notion of the lack of an isolated “self” is quintessential and there’s really no way to have an useful conversation without understanding that. I mean, eh, I suppose you could have work with Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation with that but ultimately one would most likely have to circle to a very similar conclusion. There’s a few other ways of handling it, I suppose, but it all does depend on a lot of examination.
I mean, you could treat it in a completely and utterly materialistic manner and go deep into neuroscience, bypassing the role of philosophy and metaphysics completely, which I have done before. You’ll still end up with something pretty similar tbh – you’ll end up considering the mind as a kind of coordinated community of prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, astrocytes, etc, etc.
It is useful to have a notion of self and an “I”, but only as a kind of theoretical concept.
.
But that itself is an imprisoning idea.
Should we not first examine whether this is not a prison?
Are you starting to get it….?
Examining yourself is not an idea. It is an action. It doesn’t even have a serious cost. If you’re so confident that you’re free of the “illusion of self”, then why are you so afraid to look?
Or, is the problem that you wouldn’t know how to start looking?
A pool of water might be a good metaphor for your own feelings, so you could look into that, but that might shock you too much, and complete your petrification.
Perhaps just ask yourself how your body feels in this moment and discuss out loud the various sensations which that arise from it. 30 minutes of sitting there and seeing where observing and describing leads you, would be a healthy start.
If you do this, I’ll even spend a little time enabling your defensive theorising. You can put some impersonal abstraction to me and I will engage to shore up your ego. Seem reasonable?
There are different layers of truth for different people at different times. Someone who had realised what you are saying, would be utterly unafraid to look at themselves.
How does that feel?
How do you think they wrote all of that stuff? By thinking really hard and scrabbling together other people’s experiences? Did they Hobo Goofy it, or did they look inside, and through, and then simply write what they saw?
International human rights champion Lukashenko once again is doing great “negative” PR about Nazi Lithuania behaviour with those poor poor refugees flying with planes into Belarus with tourist visas. Honestly we should start to pay him somewhat for that hard beneficial npropaganda work, lol 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnThrTd-QPE
Hey Mikel!
On my last trip I rented a Subaru Outback that was AWD. I didn’t drive it in the snow, but I did take it on some dicey off road trails – mind you, nothing really serious (partly because it was a rental), but on some dicey forest roads and BLM roads.
I was quite impressed with it overall. It handled loose sand pretty well. Snow probably isn’t too different.
Based on my research, AWD vehicles are very competent in the snow and “slippy” terrain in general. The issue in tough trails is hard climbs, ground clearance, approach angle, and low gear ratio 4WD which gives you the torque needed to overcome obstacles in seriously tough terrain.
But lots of people take Rav4s and Honda CRVs on snow forest roads that aren’t too rough.
So if you aren’t going on anything too serious you should be fine! But I’d do some research to get a better understanding.
Good luck and enjoy your trip it sounds like it will be beautiful!
Btw, I think you mentioned you never really made it to Death Valley? Well I did last trip and I was seriously impressed. It’s a landscape of incredible vastness and sweep, silence and emptiness.
Its a unique and awe inspiring place even for desert scenery. I recommend! I plan on making it one of my mainstream.
There are many light off road trails that wind up the mountains, where you can camp for free with the most incredible views of the valley and distant mountains. A little bit of winter “weather” can add incredible drama 🙂 (the main CGs at Furnace Creek are solidly booked up – plus no solitude and mediocre views). I felt privileged to have this vastness at my fingertips, yet be a 30-40 minute drive from the amenities of Furnace Creek..
AaronB tends to conflate a bunch of people to create his own insane notion of the world, but Herodotus definitely did scribble together what he thought what he saw and heard from others, being one of the originators of the notion of history writing. Its notable for its effort to be neutral, notice how it doesn’t attempt to focus his version as “true.”
This is his History:
As for Aristotle, he practiced what we would come to know as “Aristotlean logic”, along with the other Greek thinkers of the time. They sought to use various constructions of thought to establish a “common language” of thinking and there were various other children of such conceptions, including the loci of memory method, etc. It would probably safe to say that they didn’t just look inside themselves, but discussed actively(and we know they did) to challenge and hope to discover truth through language and understanding(not that Aaron really tries to do this).
This it allowed for the notion of categorical propositions, which proved profoundly useful, e.g.:
Affirmation: All men are humans.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore? Socrates is human.
This leads to some interesting notions, which are a beginning of science, through the notion of “primary substances” or “essential substances.”
Affirmation: All wood burns.
Oak is a wood.
Therefore, oak will burn.
This allowed for the basic of science and categorization, and is arguably uniquely Western as per Thorsten Pattberg, and is hilariously anti-SJW, because you will indeed get constructions(and I think Platonic essences as such):
Women are foolish.
Amy is a woman.
Amy is foolish.
And while it may seem overriding, its extremely useful in creating categorizations which provide simplicity and efficiency. This is distinct from Eastern logic at the time, which was inferential. Pattberg demonstrated this specific example of Greek deductive logic versus Eastern inferential logic:
Greek
A bow is made of wood.
Oak is wood.
Therefore, we can use oak to made a bow.
Chinese
A good bow used by a great archer was made of yew wood that grew under a half-moon phase.
To make good bows, then, we should look for yew wood again under a half-moon phase.
Then perhaps it’ll be a good bow.
We do not know if oak would make a good bow, we can make no inferences from yew to oak.
Maybe it will, because it is also wood.
Maybe it will, if grew under a half-moon phase.
Or maybe it was just because of the great archer.
We do not know, the world is a mystery of infinite variables. The best we can do is try and discover.
Needless to say, the Chinese method ultimately is much less effective for make assertions or basically, science. The Greek method, on the surface, leads to a number of specific errors – you cannot just use any wood to make bows, but it provides a form of categorization to think from.
I do think tis safe to say, though, that neither attempted to just “look inside themselves” and make statements, but all did rely in some form of understanding to provide a form of thinking that would be useful.
It’s totally politics and diplomacy. Zero business. Why is there no good coverage of Russian business (except my stuff of course).
I don’t think it matters where ideas come from. Ideas are transformational – it doesn’t matter if you think them up yourself or get them from others.
When Lao Tzu, Confucius, the Stoics, etc wrote down their ideas they figured they had the power to transform even if people didn’t think them up themselves. I think reading the ideas of others can awaken your true inner self. You disagree. I think that’s really weird, but you’re free to think what you want.
Now, if you agree ideas are transformational but are just accusing me of lying about what ideas transformed me and saying I don’t really believe in the ideas I say I do, that’s a stupid and pointless conversation to have.
What are we fighting over here?
If we disagree it’s no big deal.
And you think examining yourself is an action and doesn’t rest on an implicit idea about how the world works and you work, then I disagree.
Again, no big deal.
You do you, I’ll do me.
Yes, thank you. Herodotus seems to be relaying other people’s accounts as their accounts, which is appropriate. He doesn’t know if they are true, and he is honest to implicitly admit that, but he is passing on things which may be of interest.
He is speaking in his own voice from his own limited perspective. This is authoritative and admirable.
Yes, it is often very useful, but one needs to remember that the categorisation is not actually the thing, or fall into foolishness such as:
Women are foolish.
Amy is a woman.
Amy is foolish.
The ability to easily categorise and engage through direct experience, at the same time, so that they become one and the same, is extremely useful. Developing this ability is one aspect of what perhaps Aaron thinks he has achieved by reading that dualism is an illusion.
This is close to psychosis!
I’ve clarified the image of how Aaron is.
He has created a semi-workable map from various scraps of other people’s ideas for his own narrative journey.
There’s the starting place of the grasslands of basic hand-eye coordination, the Savannah of encountering other people, the forest of self-reflection, the misty mountains, the swamps of doom, the abyssal void and more and more etc.
This is good fun stuff and need not be too literal, but the problem is that his ego has decided that he is in the abyssal void when really he is stuck, following the wrong directions, because he does not know where he is, in the Savannah of encountering other people.
He’s like “theory says the abyssal void is a real thing”, to which, I keep asking him to look around to see if he is in it, but he won’t, because his ego will have to accustomise itself to the fact that he is back in the Savannah and that will deflate it.
This leads to him walking around in nonsensical circles, constantly adjusting the map, rather than his sense of where he is.
A map (categorisation) is very useful, despite being imperfect, but you have to know yourself to know where you actually are, otherwise the directions you read for the next steps will always be wrong. You’ll be turning left out of what you think is the abyssal void when you should be turning right out of the Savannah. Then you’ll probably turn left again thrice and end up back where you started. No wonder Aaron thinks there is no more, just an endless loop of lying to himself and delusion.
I’d also argue that you don’t need a map if you can just feel where you’re meant to go and you’re sufficiently courageous to follow that, it is a straight line after all, but not everyone is equipped the same, so walking the direct route, to embrace every monster you find along the way, may not be the universal best method.
Also, none of these people wrote just what they saw.
Their ideas arose in response to the ideas in their society. Every work is “dialectic” – it’s in conversation with the ideas of others.
Lao Tzu was criticizing the ideas of his society – quite obviously and explicitly so.
If you grow up in a society, you grow up with ideas you got from others. Being blind to this is being imprisoned.
You can look inside yourself all you wish, you may think what you find there is all your own, but you cannot think of these ideas without contrasting them with the ideas of society.
Your feelings are not your own. They are the products of the ideas you have, which are those of the society you grew up in.
How many people make the mistake of thinking “they” are anxious, depressed people, and the ideas they have are their own, when they are just those they were raised with.
And the great philosophers and religious thinkers cannot be understood without understanding the ideas they were reacting against.
You can’t understand Jesus without understanding Judaism. You can’t understand Lao Tsu without understanding the Confucian ideas he was rejecting.
If I want to understand myself and my feelings, I need to understand what ideas I was raised with.
Even if I have original ideas, they emerge in response and in contrast to the ideas I was raised with.
We are not “blank slates” – what we think we are is what society made us. Looking into myself, the ideas and feelings I find there are either those I was raised to have, or those I defined by contrasting with those I was raised to have.
It’s not that “authenticity” is not possible – it’s just that it isn’t achieved merely by looking within myself: what I find there may not be my own. Authenticity is achieved by looking at the ideas I like; wherever they come from.
If I read an idea and love it, it’s authentic to me. It’s mine.
“Now, if you agree ideas are transformational but are just accusing me of lying about what ideas transformed me and saying I don’t really believe in the ideas I say I do, that’s a stupid and pointless conversation to have.”
And if THIS is what you are saying, you would have to show that there is contradiction between my emotional state and my ideas. I talk of love, but am constantly angry. Etc. Something like that.
You merely insist this is the case. That won’t do.
And there are two seperate issues.
Are my ideas transformative in a positive way?
Have I really adopted these ideas?
Two discussions. The second much harder to show, but can be somewhat discussed with evidence.
You gotta get your thoughts in order.
McMeekin attributes most Soviet influence within Japan to Sorge, so in that sense he should have fleshed out details about him more. That said, there are already a number of books about Sorge.
Certainly a “Democratic” crusade against totalitarianism appears to be ill-fated, but perhaps poor German-Soviet relations and cooperation in such a hypothetical conflict would have created an opportunity for the Western democracies. That said, it’s completely understandable why British and French leaders of the period ultimately rejected adding the USSR to their list of enemies.
Unz stated that he read the book and that I would find it excellent, but I’m not sure how closely he read it. Or rather, his reading of the book validated what is important to him. Namely he believes McMeekin has validated the Suvorov thesis, though he negatively remarks on McMeekin only briefly referencing Suvorov. One must also assume that Unz was delighted that McMeekin wrote extensively about Operation Pike.
I haven’t actually read Evans’ trilogy, but in addition to it being highly respected a close friend of mine and fellow WW2 buff read and endorsed it. I believe that reiner Tor here has read it as well. It’s on my list.
I recommend the following books:
Hitler’s War by David Irving
An account of WW2 (and to some extent peacetime NS Germany) told through Hitler’s eyes. Excellent work and useful corrective against Hitler demonology as well as the postwar excuses made by the German generals.
The Mare’s Nest by David Irving
Definitive account of the German wunderwaffen program as well as British countermeasures against them. Can be bypassed if you have no interest in the topic, but Irving does fit it into the overall strategic picture.
The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze
Overview of the Nazi economy and grand geopolitics. Masterful, innovative history which is essential reading to understanding the conflict. Also read and recommended by AK.
The Rising Sun by John Toland
Masterful and gripping account of the Japanese Empire’s disastrous lurch into war with the United States and its ultimate destruction. Despite being published over half a century ago, it’s relevant today other than recycling since debunked myths about the Battle of Midway (see next entry). In addition to being excellent history, it’s also simply excellent reading period as Toland has a great talent for weaving drama and narrative elements into the work.
Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by John Parshall and Anthony Tully
The new definitive English language account of the Battle of Midway. This book was written by amateur historians (the authors work in software and IT) with a long-term interest in the IJN (one of the authors named his cats Hiryu and Soryu). The book overturns long-standing myths which were partly the result of confusion but often maliciously introduced by Mitsuo Fuchida in the 1950s. Fuchida was debunked in Japan in the 1980s, but this remained unknown to Anglophones until much later.
Parshall and Tully also have the common sense and good grace to place Midway in the proper strategic context by noting that the battle, while important, was not as decisive as usually claimed by both American and Japanese writers.
Why the Allies Won by Richard Overy
Overy’s book seeks to correct the conventional view that the Allied victory was simply downstream of tremendous material superiority and successfully makes the case that the war was a closer run thing than often thought and that various non-economic reasons were also important to Allied success. Somewhat marred by Overy’s conventional understanding of various battles.
Overy also has a good book on the Combined Bombing Offensive, The Bombing War, though I’m not sure I’d recommend it as Overy understates the impact of the bombing offensive.
The Second World War (book series) by Winston Churchill
Obviously not recommended as history per se, but rather as literature (Churchill was a supremely gifted writer and won the Nobel Prize for this work) and also to gain insight into how Churchill viewed things as well as how he wanted to be seen by history.
Blitzkrieg: From the Ground Up by Niklas Zetterling
Zetterling is a Swedish military historian who comes closest among English-language writers in answering your questions about German military prowess (more on this later). This work describes German combat operations from the small unit perspective by analyzing operations in Poland, Norway, France, and the Soviet Union.
He also describes some details about German doctrine, leadership, field manuals, etc. relevant to this.
Zetterling also has a good book about Operation Typhoon (the German drive on Moscow) which sheds more light on the issue.
I’ll try to answer your other questions in a separate post (as I have to go now) and also provide some useful non-book resources.
reiner Tor, Annatar, and Vendetta should also share their recommendations.
I am not fighting. I am learning how people stuck like you will struggle to remain stuck.
Not for me, it isn’t. In fact, disagreement is probably necessary for this to be useful.
You would think this is stupid and pointless, which is why you remain ignorant and continue to lie to yourself.
Here are some things which I would expect from someone who had come close to the realisation that they are “nobody”:
You possess none of these. I haven’t spelt it out so far, partly not to be harsh, partly because I hoped you might see your own patterns, and partly because I hoped you might show the courage to face your fears without being more afraid that I will point out their results than you are of them. I don’t mind your demons passing through me, but it will get weird for you, as with your fall into “Succubus” projection previously.
You’re describing your own veil of ignorance.
They can provide a map, but you’ve mistakenly located yourself on your map where you are not. This is why it isn’t working.
You think this because you hide behind your own veil of ignorance.
I am trying to get you to do you.
This made me a bit nostalgic because it was what I was used to hearing progressives say in around 2015-16, it has a late-New Atheist era feel. This was what progressives used to be like. Now it is more that the US is a cesspool of racism, exploitation and an avalanche of micro-aggressions, this all largely emanates from white people and infects their culture like a miasma etc.
I might be exaggerating, but I don’t think by much, the change around was pretty striking.
Ok, so you seem to accept ideas can be transformational, and you don’t seem to object to my ideas.
Your main point is that I don’t – or imperfectly – realize my own ideas.
Granted.
Guilty as charged.
At best, I only sometimes realize the ideas I claim to live by. Most of the time I’m as shitty and divided and frail and imperfect and weak and pathetic as anyone else – or worse, most likely.
Perhaps you think I completely and never realize the ideas I claim to live by. That could be. I think I do, but you may be right.
But I do like these ideas. They speak to me. They seem correct to me. I think the world and myself would be a better place if we lived by these ideas better.
I knew this was about me not being as cool as I think I am 🙂
I totally agree. I am not as cool as I think I am. I often fail to live up to my own ideals.
Damn, I feel like I’m in highschool again, and some girl is stamping her feet and folding her arms and telling me I’m not as cool as I think I am 🙂
And I’m not. It’s true. I accept it.
Now, next time we see each other in chemistry class let’s try and discuss the ideas.
Hmmm, maybe I really do come off as arrogant and conceited, as if I think I’m “better” than everyone else.
If so I really do apologize for that. I don’t believe that at all and that’s not my intention.
I also don’t mean to imply I’m some sort of serene sage that’s so much higher than everyone else.
I’m as troubled and messed up as anyone. More then most.
All I know is, I used to suffer a lot, and be gloomy and depressed, until I came upon certain writers and thinkers and their ideas.
Since then I’ve gotten much happier, but definitely not all the time and I still have all sorts of conflicts and problems.
But these ideas really did make me immeasurably happier, and I want to share them with other people. How can I not?
But if someone doesn’t like them then I totally respect them for rejecting it. Only, for too long I wasn’t aware that anyone could think differently from the mainstream, and it’d be nice if other people who would potentially benefit from these ideas find out about them.
You’re noticing the progressives who broke into psychosis upon Trump’s election. The Venn diagram of which, would be a perfect circle, with those who harbour unexamined anti-progressive prejudices in their hearts. The same thing happened with Brexit, and eventually dissipated.
Away from these, you have a policeman nominated as Democratic candidate for NYC Mayor. You also have California’s most lock ’em up AG as Veep and Joe “the definition of centrist” Biden as President. This is not a radical moment.
The Venn diagram would also overlap quite a lot with the type of neurotics who so often work in media. Their nonsense has been enabled by greatly increased subscription bases, but this is changing now, as the whole Trump melodrama fades. Things should settle down.
Yes, I totally agree that Death Valley is a magical place. I was actually there for the first time in the late eighties so it also brings me good memories when I go back. That time we also slept under the stars in the middle of the valley. It was difficult to sleep, because of the August heat and even more so because of the noisy packs of coyotes that kept howling in the distance and running up and down all night. But it was a great experience.
I’m sure that my Mazda CX-5 will take me as far as the road goes but I’ve never driven in winter in those boreal latitudes so I don’t know if I’ll find any unexpected hurdles. We’ll see.
If you don’t mind my asking, do you still have any plans of moving to the West in the future?
If my recollection of Taoism is correct, external circumstances do not matter too much and one should be able to enjoy life regardless of where one lives but there’s possibly no reason why you shouldn’t spend your time surrounded by the places you love either. I can understand why many Northern Europeans don’t move to Andalusia or the Greek Islands, much though they’d like to. There is not much in terms of employment and economic prospects for their kids over there. But to me it is a bit of a mistery why not many more Americans, at least the ones that are interested in nature, come to live in the West. The economy here right now is ridiculously buoyant, nobody would guess that we’ve just been through a pandemic recession. There’s all kinds of jobs in the bigger cities and you’re a stone’s throw away of the mountains, deserts and forests. In the worst case scenario you may be 1-2 hours away from the wilderness but it’s nothing you can’t do everyday after work if you feel like it. I know people who ski every day of the week during the winter season, before or after work.
PS- It looks like once again you have found another full-time fan. Congratulations.
What you describe as learning “ideas” is actually just you recognising that you’re not at the centre of other people’s narratives. This would improve anyone’s mood.
Now you need to learn that you actually are at the centre of your own, and what that narrative is, and what you are.
Good luck with the journey. You’re welcome to ask for any help.
It
Absolutely, and this is a perceptive remark from you. I grew up in a very competitive and egocentric environment, and one of the ideas that helped me greatly was to reduce my self-importance.
In my competitive NY environment, the idea that happiness comes from actually reducing your self-importance was a bombshell. I think American culture tells you the exact opposite.
Being the center of my own narrative means, to me, being connected to other people, and ultimately, interdependent with the world – with animals, trees, mountains, rocks, lakes.
And ultimately, with a larger force I cannot see but pervades everything. This may not be for everyone, but I find great satisfaction – even magic and wonder, in this.
Thank you, that is very kind of you.
I feel bad for comparing you to a highschool girl, and I apologize. It was not an appropriate remark. You are obviously a highly intelligent woman with a gift for psychological perception. I learn a lot from your psychologically insightful comments on this forum, and often agree. You’re definitely smarter than me, and see into other people better than I do.
Cheers, and once again thanks for the interesting convo.
All the best!
You did not get it. Spatial IQ is like vitamin A. Consuming solely on vitamin A gives you no energy and the vitamin A overdose that can kill you. Only vitamin A PLUS calorie is good for you. The study you cited is slight of hand PIGGY BACKING on high Quant IQ, not by Spatial IQ alone, which is not the results of the papers I cited.
The US army is smart enough to test for extra spatial IQ for hands on artisan positions lile plumber, electrician, etc.
https://i.ibb.co/BBKKNJh/iqspa.png
The COLD HARD REAL LIFE DATA from the US Army on the proportion distribution of the various IQ type. Where are the HIGH SPATIAL IQ people in professional STEM areas except mostly in the hands on ARTISAN areas??
I see myself as a kind of impressionable observer that absorbs a lot of often contradictory ideas and having quite little thoughts of my own. It’s my autistic hikikomori tendencies being applied to right-wing thought instead of being woke, because I don’t happen to be the main demographic of wokism and I have grown weary of proto-woke indoctrination in my uni.
No, i said that you did not get it because you failed to understand from the beginning that i was talking about whether people in STEM are high on spatial ability or not. Finally you got it.
And various other studies say otherwise.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222408470_Spatial_ability_and_STEM_A_sleeping_giant_for_talent_identification_and_development
https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Wai2009SpatialAbility.pdf
https://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/uttal/vittae/documents/Spatial%20Abilities%20and%20STEM%20education%20.pdf
Only the US Army is able and permited to conduct FULL TIME LARGE SCALE IQ TESTING FOR ALL RECRUITS, not small sample from here and there and most probably bias sample of mostly psych students. How come the US Army find most of the high spatial IQ are among the artisans rather than among the professional STEM people ?? You dont seems to understand SUPPLEMENTARY ADVANTAGE WHICH HAS TO RELY ON OTHER FACTORS, from the MAIN DRIVING ADVANTAGE. It is nice to have high spatial IQ together with high quant IQ but it is not a necessity. Why the US Army find so few high spatial IQ among the professional STEM classes?? Why are many of those hig spatial IQ artisans not in professional STEM areas?? It is a waste of time to continue further. MOST OF THOSE SOLE HIGH SPATIAL IQ people are in the artisan class. Period.
The Mazda CX-5 is considered an excellent compact SUV, so most likely you’ll do great. I wonder if there might be anything unexpected – I guess let us know after you come back!
Yes, I absolutely do still plan on moving West! Literally the only thing stopping me is that I have certain responsibilities at my current job that I have to see through. After that’s done, I’m out! Hopefully no more than 6 months, but at worst s year. Then I’m a free man 🙂
How sweet it is 🙂
I still don’t know where I’m moving to – I will probably roam for six months or so and then start looking for a place to settle down.
I’m looking forward to this and very excited!
As for Taoism, it always highly values a life in the country or especially the wild mountains. The legend of Lao Tzu has him leaving China to dwell in the Western wilderness (interesting how China’s West is also wild!), and the gatekeeper at the final gate begs him to write down his philosophy before he vanishes forever.
And there is a rich and long tradition of Chinese officials abandoning their duties and going to wander the mountains “wandering freely at their ease” as an “old man of the mountains”, who has given up the dust and snares of regular life in cities.
So moving out West is very much a Taoist act 🙂
I totally hear you about why more Americans don’t move out West – better climate, better scenery, and if the job situation is great, what’s stopping them? Probably just inertia. To be fair, when you’re young the big Eastern cities have an allure – but that quickly fades.
The weirdest thing to me is that people actually spend six months hiking the Appalachian Trail when they can do any of the amazing Western trails!
Don’t get me wrong – the lush deciduous forests and lakes of the East are very beautiful, and I am enjoying them tremendously every weekend. But they can’t compare to the sheer grandeur, majesty, and sheer variety of the West!
People are weird 🙂
.
Lol, it does happen with depressing regularity around these parts doesn’t it 🙂
I think certain people hate happiness – they see a happy, relaxed person, and they have an intense desire to “take him down”.
They are unhappy, and instead of learning from happy people how to adjust their philosophy they need to bring them down.
It’s sad, but it’s human nature – many people are dysfunctional. I was a little shocked at the sheer tenacity and determination Laxa had to convince me I’m “bad” lol.
Anyways, I’m sure some other poor unhappy soul will come along before long and become obsessed. I wish I could help these people! But it never ends up being possible.
They have purged both the Chinese account which noticed the Jewish problem and American totalitarianism, and also Bronze Aged Pervert.
Honestly, it was impressive enough he has lasted so long. A man can be judged by his enemies, and they were multitudinous and vile.
IMO, not much point in trying to mirror across the political spectrum for theory of mind because there is not bilateral symmetry between Left and Right. Only scientific study can help elucidate the roots of political affiliation and hidden mental processes.
As a generality, I’m skeptical that progs are even able to think in bio analogies, but am under no illusions about their will to power and fierce antagonism and ability to other. Their hatred of me already manifests on a high level of political policy.
By contrast, I am quite benevolent. And only want to give them the things that they say they badly want – though, in safe areas, where it will not harm civilization.
For the nonce, I have the pleasure of not being subjected to mandatory self-criticism sessions, and I’d like to keep it that way. “Tax cow/consumer” is what I am made to believe they see my benefit as. At least the moderates.
What a weird thought, but I like it. My youngest is currently engaged in a whole lot of exploration of clicks that had me thinking how easily he could be trained to make a language out of them.
The thought I’ve been having recently is that all of these increasingly elaborate and jargonistic word games without end sure do seem to contribute to the leftist singularity. I was reading a criticism that conservatives won’t engage these word games in their own terms and try to discredit them with their own language. But I think conservatives are always at a structural disadvantage in games that are constructed entirely out of abstract concepts built on top of abstract concepts. Even if some rightists can play in them, rightism’s strong suits tend to appear more in “rubber the meets the road” sorts of situations.
As educated men we’re all trained to sympathize with Socrates in his trial, but I get it now — at some point, the consensus of the Athenians was to say look, we know we can’t out-wordsmith you in all your lovely word games, but we still agree that, in practical terms, we need to kill you.
I get it. You see them as everything you are not, and you as everything they are not. This is 100% clear.
Could you try and answer this anyway?
Particularly narcissistic progressives say they accept your freedoms and presence in US society because they are just too moral for their own good, far too innocent, naive and lovely. What would you tell them?
I wonder if anyone ever came up with an economic theory for Norman prowess. In other words, geo-determinism.
Anyway, they would be an interesting group to study in order to compare and contrast their dominations. Especially, I wonder what differences there may have been between Ireland and England. I’ve heard somewhere that they quickly gave up using stirrups in Ireland, but I am uncertain about the reasons.
I think that forcefully moving people is anathema to them. It goes counter to diversity because it might result in political or ethnic concentrations that would challenge their power or block it regionally. And anyway, I think they want a world state.
Why do they not liquidate me? Probably, the best reason is they like to think of themselves as good people. For now, the radicals are not in charge, though the state is still accumulating power. Of course, there are other reasons – it would result in war. One that they might lose.
Are they really good people? No.
It’s been said, one only turns to philosophy – words, ideas – when something has gone “wrong”.
A perfectly functioning organism, a perfectly functioning society, does not need philosophy.
Philosophy is in some sense a “disease”.
For me, the best – perhaps the only true – use of philosophy is to transcend philosophy. You use words to see the limitations of words – to see beyond words. Words destroying words.
This is in line with the Zen practice of not taking concepts too seriously.
That Socrates arose within Greek society shows that Greek society was already “sick”. At his death, Socrates told his companion to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, the God of Medicine – one sacrificed to Asclepius when one was “cured”.
In other words, Socrates was saying that life was a “disease” that death “cured”. (Hat tip Nietzsche)
Socrates knew that he – and the society he came from – was already sick.
But ultimately, the best thing is to be spontaneous, natural, human. We tend not to trust ourselves – but if we listen to ourselves, we know how to live. (hat tip Goethe).
So the turn to words, ideas, philosophy indicates an underlying disease – but often, the only cure is to follow philosophy to it’s end, which is to transcend. One finds words and ideas cannot give us Truth, and one returns to the concrete – and health.
As I said before, I understand that you perceive them as the inverse of you. I need only look at you to see it.
However, the following is a very real question that they will ask. Often they will frame it within their childish misunderstanding of the so-called “Paradox of Tolerance”. How would you answer it?
Particularly narcissistic progressives say they accept your freedoms and presence in US society because they are just too moral for their own good, far too innocent, naive and lovely. What would you tell them?
My guess for Norman military prowess has always been “Vikings” + “the latest military technology” = success.
Ireland’s biggest challenge was that it spent much of its history as collection of clans, with a lot of organization being kind of theoretical rather than stable.
From Graeber’s Debt.
And that might be because of hilly terrain which can promote such small organizations, because it means that its much harder to project power as a larger king – Japan also had this issue, and this is why Japan was a collection of samurai clans for much of its history, while China effectively had destroyed the power of local noblemen before even 0 AD(QIn seems to have effectively eradicated them), and even before that, the “country noble” always seemed rather threatened.
I agree that the other commenters can be wrong, I’ve long realized that, which is why it’s a godsend that I’m here.
According to historian Julius Norwich (who wrote some fascinating histories, especially of the Byzantines), Norman cavalry was the most feared force in the Middle Ages, even terrifying highly capable Muslim armies, and may have been the most capable military force in world history.
Like the British in India, they must have had outstanding personal qualities that distinguished them from their contemporaries.
Tactics, organization, and technology play a significant role in warfare – but interestingly, ones ability to master and effectively deploy these things depend on spiritual qualities.
For instance, discipline depends on cooperation , and the ability concentrate and deploy unified tactics force depends on trust and corporate unity.
Even skill acquisition on a high level, depends on determination and relentlessness application.
And all these elements coming together in a battle, require outstanding personal and spiritual qualities that are “intangible”.
Interestingly, the German Wermacht in WW2 selected it’s officer corp relying heavily on “intangibles”, with the most significant factor being “personal impressions” based on an interview with ones commanding officer.
In addition, the Wermacht trained it’s officer to “improvise” in the field – in other words, instead of acquiring any specific skill (although obviously also that), or relying on protocol, algorithms, strict plans, or established practice, the personal, human element was emphasized.
By contrast, the American army made an effort to raise an effective army and officer corps relying on the latest “scientific” methodology – official tests, protocols, algorithms, bureaucratic selection methods.
And yet, German methods produced a fighting force terrifyingly more effective than the American.
The Israeli army adopted the German method to some degree – officers are selected from the ranks, based on the consensus of ones peers in training, and based on interviews with commanding officers and psychologists.
(Of course, both the German and Israeli army also rely on scientific tests, but these are not the primary element).
This produced a flexible force highly capable of improvising in the field. Sadly, this spirit has lately declined in the Israeli Army, and American bureaucratic systems are more and more coming into prominence – leading to a less effective force. However, the original spirit emphasizing the human factors remains in full force in the elite units and the Air Force, which are as good as ever.
Throughout history, certain fighting forces performed significantly above peers using the same level of technology and tactics – it’s a bit of a “mystery” and generally explainable only in “intangibles”.
This is true, of course, in cultural and civilizational performance as well.
So terrifying effective that they lost.
Anyway, intangibles can be measured as well; and the Allies that prevailed with overwhelming material superiority also required psychological, organizational, and indirect capabilities that allowed them to produce, sustain and execute on their advantages. Their “intangibles”, if you wish to call it as such. Indeed, the American system was vastly more efficient at material/time/delivery, even when limited to equal resources.
Ultimately, such intangibles can often be measured, much like things that were intangible to us, like diseases or weather events, can be measured now.
Your almost frenetic desire to call things as magical, and as such, impossible to quantify is simply your religion and your terror at the notion of an universe that can be understood.
Of course, you’ll probably respond to this with some cute little accusation, which will naturally fail since not even understanding yourself, you could hardly account to have a theory of mind for anyone else.
Learn to read, i did not said that somehow only spatial ability is important. My issue is with Murray’s table, which i believe may downgrade the IQ of people in STEM because his test does not include spatial subtests.
The importance of spatial ability in educational pursuits and the world of work was examined, with particular attention devoted to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) domains. Participants were drawn from a stratified random sample of U.S. high schools (Grades 9–12, N=400,000) and were tracked for 11 years; their longitudinal findings were aligned with pre-1957 findings and with contemporary data from the Graduate Record Examination and the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. For decades, spatial ability assessed during adolescence has surfaced as a salient psychological attribute among those adolescents who subsequently go on to achieve advanced educa-tional credentials and occupations in STEM. Results solidify the generalization that spatial ability plays a critical role in developing expertise in STEM.
https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Wai2009SpatialAbility.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309149591_Spatial_cognition_Key_to_STEM_success
https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319443843
https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319443843
Welll, thss comment will he read by nobody.
In a city that is suppnsedly host for the ‘lympics, it may as well be happening on another planet.
Even my local primary school long ago removed its Tokyo 2020 banners.
The only memorable events for me are to do with U.S.A. performers.
The self-cancellation of Simone Biles was a joy to see, one of the criteria for judging gymnastics used to be, for both men and women, something like grace in executing the moves.
This was removed from judging to allow this testosterone- or steroid-driven dwarf to be a champ. Everyone in the world knows that the U.S.A. has long had the world’s worst drug-cheating programmes. Biles never had any grace, so we are well-rid of the self-titled goat.
The U.S. women’s soccer team’s bizarre kneeler-in-chief, stupid-hair Rapinoe, being on the losing team. I sure hope that they are also losing the match for third place, as I would be sure are many others, including U.S.A. people.
This is also basically false, but its typical of your usual blather where you ramble about things which you don’t read about. Is this part of a spiritual quality?
Here’s the US Military Intelligence’s translation of the German tactical manual:
http://www.gr916.co.uk/assets/pdfs/GermanTacticalManual.pdf
What is particularly notable, and was commented on at the time too, is just how detailed it was. It has exactly that: protocol, algorithm, strict plans and established practice. The opportunities to improvise was on top of that, after the protocols had been established for common understanding or if there was limited communication from the platoon commander.
This is vastly in distinction with the equivalent Soviet combat regulations of November 1942, etc(Sharp, C. C., & Nafziger, G. F.) which has far more emphasis on “spiritual qualities” of “Every soldier must hate the enemy, be vigilant, maintain military secrecy, etc” and was far lighter on instruction – a some of it basically feels like “Engage and destroy the enemy” and its basically less organized overall(the Soviet squad would also change its composition several times due to supply irregularities, ad hoc creation of specialized units, etc).
As usual – being wrong on a small thing, often means that you’re wrong on a greater thing. Errors magnify, and compound, and they especially do when someone like you never can admit to making a mistake.
I believe he is referring to a rough understanding of this, though I don’t vouch for his understanding, because that is unclear:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics#:~:text=Mission%2Dtype%20tactics%20(German%3A,specific%20means%20of%20achieving%20it.&text=Mission%2Dtype%20orders%20free%20the%20higher%20leadership%20from%20tactical%20details.
You are likely already be familiar with it, but I found the “Origins” subheading very interesting.
It seems to be a system which gives decision-making to those who are best placed epistemologically to make those decisions, while strongly emphasising mutual understanding to maintain coherence.
It sounds just like my view of how societies can smoothly function and grow. Who knew it would be partly pioneered by the Prussian military command?
I reply to myself to report on coronamania. Numbers of pos. PCR test results have soared, but looking at deaths （very low）, hospitalisations with bad symptoms （very low）, it is all a sham. It is only because of a massive increase in unreliable PCR tests that the numbers keep increasing.
It is such a bad joke.
It required vast amounts of training and a common set of protocol so that a commander would be able to reliably predict the actions of allied units, as well as to infer the intent of the battalion or platoon leader, etc. The entire thing itself is a system.
Your link itself mentions that. The fog of battle(and friendly fire) otherwise would not be kind.
Partly in response to realizing that Napoleon was outmanuevering the Prussian efforts at maintaining perfect fronts, basically.
This is interesting. I’ve never seen this fear spelt out like this before, but it certainly exists.
When I moved to a new city, I met many people who claimed that it was impossible to make new friends in that city. They had moved there years ago, or had even been born there, yet they failed to recognise that were talking with, and were friends with, me. They had just struggled before, and rather than rejoicing in the struggle, in failure and life, had run away from it.
I also found that, when I spoke with them, I did not have to look very deeply to see how harshly they judged themselves for their lack of new friends. In fact, they were even more afraid of unearthing their harsh internal judgement, which is what seemed like the voice of high school bullies or their parents, than they were of the actual failure itself.
They needed the simultaneous paradox of lowering how they perceived the stakes and increasing their motivation. Pace, Aaron, yes they had to be “no one” and “someone” at the same time, but they had to actually be it, not merely pretend to be it. Even marginal moves in these directions would have helped them, so their senses needed to open just a little, which is where experimentation helped them.
You will note, that I confined my remarks to the German army in the field, which performed superbly. The German High Command, and Hitler, were spiritually inferior people.
Hitler’s constantly contradicting his general staff, his childish reluctance to let German armies retreat, and his lack of long term vision and long term loyalty to the German people expressed in his belief that this one epic battle will decide the “worth” of the German people, and if they lose, they have proved themselves “inferior” – betrays a fragile and weak spirituality, childishly narcissistic, without toughness or staying power.
In short, Hitler had very inferior personal qualities.
Contrast that with Jews, who would never be so silly as to think themselves “inferior”, and despair and give up, based on the outcome of a single battle!
If Jews go “under” again in America, they would simply endure in silence every humiliation, biding their time, and after a hundred years rise up again to have the last laugh 🙂 (not me, as I go my own way Taoistically, and will fade away into the mountains as I advance in years, and become one with nature)
The capacity to endure humiliation and defeat – without breaking – is a spiritual quality Hitler was too inferior a person understand.
Russians display a similar spiritual toughness – nothing crushes them, no humiliation, no suffering, and no defeat. They just rise from the ashes and go on. And I would say the Chinese have the same quality – although the new “scientific” Chinese, may no longer. We shall see how sick the Chinese have become since their adoption of Western technology.
Certainly, the Allies were not without very robust spiritual qualities of their own. I would never deny that.
Ultimately, the German advantage was not sufficient to take on so large an adversary, that was itself of reasonably high quality. They would have been wise to be more limited in their aims – but long term strategic wisdom is itself a spiritual quality 🙂 And to abandon patient self-control and long term calculation in favor of an impetuous, headlong “plunge” – when there is no compelling reason to do so, unlike the case with the Japanese – does this not almost indicate a kind of “grand despair” that wants defeat?
I conjecture Hitler did not truly want to win.
It is significant that the most effective armies did not rely on measurements.
The precursor to the Wermacht, the Prussian Army, after it’s initial brilliant display under Frederick the Great, went into a period of decline as it’s spirit of improvisation was gradually replaced by rote drill and bureaucratic methods.
It required a massive overhaul and spiritual/tactical rehabilitation for the Prussian Army to emerge again effective – and stun the French in 1870.
Nevertheless, I certainly agree with you that measurements have their place. What can be measured, should be.
I oppose the belief that everything can be measured, and that what cannot be is insignificant – this an ideology, and thus irrational and religious in nature.
Measurements involve simplification necessarily – it isn’t that what we thought couldn’t be measured, we now find can be. Rather, we now only pay attention to that aspect of a situation that can be measured – and congratulate ourselves on our ignorance of the rest.
It has been said, that converting a situation into math involves a tremendous loss of nuance and complexity. Too many areas of life, involving the human element especially, have become less efficient as a result of measurement; diet, for one, where measuring “nutrients” and “energy” has made us fat and unhealthy.
I favor both measurement and intuition and the intangibles, each in their proper place.
I do not say “things” cannot be measured or understood – I say some aspects of “things”, or a situation, can be measured and understood, and some aspects cannot. And we must pay attention to both if we wish to truly be effective.
I am, indeed, in “terror” of the modern practice of looking only at what can be measured – this reduced and impoverished field of information, cuts me off from so much that is significant in life, and makes me a less effective operator in the world as well.
I am, indeed, terrified of impoverishing myself so – I see the unhappiness, anomie, and reduced effectiveness of those who do!
Would I do such a thing Daniel? 🙂
Yes, mutual understanding is hard.
So, the German Army seems to have crafted an optimum combination of protocol and personal independence – a higher synthesis of opposing qualities, as befits the nation that created a Hegel, and gave rise to so many non-dualistic mystics in the Middle Ages 🙂
It is entirely possible that the Russians relied too heavily on “intangibles” – although “hate for the enemy”, strikes me as a spiritual corruption, not superiority. A mistake often made by ordinary people.
The Israeli Army from the beginning inculcated it’s soldier in “purity of arms” – it’s quite possible to view this cynically, and it certainly has often been observed in the breach, but it is noteworthy they specifically tried to limit the hate soldiers felt for the enemy.
The sense of moral self-satisfaction this creates, leads to increased morale, and a sense of a superior cause worth fighting for.
Rightoids, of course, do not understand this.
By you.
You’ve realised that you’re not at the centre of other people’s narratives, but, by failing to recognise that you have your own narrative, you are projecting it onto other people.
Unit, explicitly not personal. That should be self-evident.
The Prussians were perfectly fine at the types of battle they wanted to fight – which were infantry slugouts. They had the highest “unit quality” at that, and would more or less keep at it for at least a hundred years, maybe more than that. Napoleon forced them to learn flexibility. Sort of. Even by 1877 it often seemed like cavalry and artillery were afterthoughts, sometimes completely forgotten.
They perhaps learned to be less “spiritual” in “courage” after Jena–Auerstedt, though I mean it somewhat mockingly, but to lose both commanders in forward charges is pretty amazing, akin to a horse getting both eyes shot out by a porcupine, which could only happen because the commanders were trying to organize the attacks themselves(and there was terrible communication). It is one of the unusual things in history where the Prussians attack with a three to one advantage and fail totally. I think the Fourth Coalition pretty much was defeated right then and there.
Notably, though, Davout’s nickname as the “Iron Marshal” and was infamous for the discipline he demanded from his soldiers and himself.
It had been said, I remember, that his soldiers feared him even more than the enemy. I also heard it said that he never smiled. Regardless of the truth of it, it was certainly unusual that he was able to demand his soldiers to basically fight a doomed battle and have them comply without little hesitation, until Providence let them kill both Prussian commanders who for some reason, decided simultaneously walk into range and eat bullets.
This basically demonstrates your lack of experience of organizations and military matters in particular. Its almost childish. “Why couldn’t they do better?” “Clearly they wanted to lose.”
Neither mobilization nor delay is without cost; for an actor to raise a force, or to even be able of capably threatening a rival means significant expenditure and if it does not extract a cost from the rival, either explicitly via invasion or less explicitly via a rival’s equal expenditure, then it is in fact a loss for the actor. If you spend thirty percent of your economy on an army, and I can call your bluff that you will do nothing with it, I can spend the same amount on the a peacetime economy and come out ahead.
The same goes for delay. Just delaying is expensive and can be significantly so against an enemy in unfamiliar territory. This is a classic overall strategy of guerillas against modern faces, but is also true historically, when weaker forces like the Irish kept challenging Viking invaders, and “win” so as long as they’re not defeated.
There’s a time and place when the decisive battle has to be sought. That’s all part of investment, risk, and reward, etc. There’s calculations. And so on.
No, its not what hunter-gatherers do. In their conflicts, their investment is low, they minimize risk, and there’s not much to be gained or lost in terms of reward.
But it is what is necessary for survival and thriving once you get sufficient complexity.
And you’re narrative is that I’m projecting my narrative onto others. So you’re projecting your narrative onto me.
For myself, I’m ok with projecting my narratives onto other people. I call it thinking about the human condition.
If you think there is something wrong with that you might wish to stop commenting about me – or anyone, because you’re just projecting your narrative onto me and others.
We should try to keep in touch. Hopefully, when you come over here you’ll find the time to visit my neck of the woods.
Even though I often paint a rosy picture of life in the West, and I’m sure you are fully aware of this, life can also be as miserable here as you’re willing to make it so. It’s the attitude that counts, more than the fact that there’s so much to enjoy for outdoors lovers. Many people around here don’t give any importance to the climate or scenery, it’s just like a simple theater set for them where their stressful lives working for the Machine happen to go by.
Personally, I am very happy here but I also have the constant feeling that I’m not making the most of what I have. My initial reaction to it was to complete a project in a few years and retire early in order to have all the leisure time that I want. But now I feel that this project is taking too much of my time and I even spend less time than before hiking, mountaineering, camping and doing all the things that brought me to the West. It’s a bit of a catch-22 situation. Perhaps your philosophical outlook could help me organize my life a little better.
Some time ago I read a book written by a guy who managed to retire in his early 30s and explained how he did it. Basically, he just started working early in life, saved most of what he made and invested it in indexed funds. After some years compound interest had turned his saving into something like a quarter of a million, which he found enough to retire in Thailand for the rest of his life. At a conservative 4% rate of funds withdrawal, this gives him ~$800/month net to live on but apparently this is enough to live a decent life in Thailand. He explained how he regularly dined out there and even had some money left to help his local girlfriend’s parents: “5 Steps to Retire in 5 Years”, Jason Fieber.
He may not be telling the truth and nothing but the whole truth in his book but this guy is a hero to me. He obviously understood what life is about better than most people and had the determination to carry out his plan to completion. But reading this book also made me feel somewhat sad because I was born in a moderately wealthy family and I could have easily done the same as him (only I would have chosen Chile or Argentina). I was just too silly in my 20s and I busted my opportunities.
Now I am in my 50s and fortunately I have managed to be in the best place of the world, as far as I’m concerned, but I have grown accustomed to a style of life that I want to keep for me and my family so I need much more than 1/4 million to fund it permanently.
The important thing, at any rate, is that what this guy did is so easy but so few people even think about it or have the knowledge of how to accomplish it. We don’t realize how much money we get through our simple salaries in the 1st World countries, especially if we have a good job. With the simple determination to save most of it and invest it conservatively most anyone could save enough to retire early and laugh at the rest of the world, especially if they are willing to move to another country and take advantage of geographical arbitrage. The main problem, as you have often pointed out, is how family and society in general pushes us strongly to be a part of the Big Machine but also there is a lot of financial illiteracy among the general population.
I have never visited any part of the Appalachians but, yes, I doubt they can remotely compare to the West. With that said, one day in the distant future I do plan to hike in the White Mountains and possibly visit Maine. In fact, I’m sure that the Eastern Mountains are much wilder than any mountains in Europe and nicer than most. It’s been too many centuries of civilization in Europe before people even thought about keeping the natural landscapes and there’s very little of wild nature left.
Yes it does and it never ceases to amaze me. Perhaps their personal attacks get annoying but it must also be more fun to get so many people willing to engage and debate you. You should think about turning this rare ability of yours to enrage people into some sort of business, seriously.
If you were an effective operator in the world, you wouldn’t be having so many issues with your mother.
Keep your comments to moonbeams and futz. You’ll always be wrong when it comes to actual realities, because you don’t know anything and clearly have no experience of this. You’re as wrong on this as you are on human life without brainstems.
Amazing, realy.
You don’t understand my comment and I am unsure how to rephrase it so that you will.
It is a chasm far too wide for me to think worth trying to bridge. I am sorry that I cannot help further.
I had the curiosity to read the personal history of an Norman family in Ireland written in the early 1500s (probably my distant ancestors). By modern standards, it was badly written and scarce half believable.
The founder, it was claimed, killed his own horse on two seperate occasions, in order to give courage to his footmen. On the second occasion, his horsemen followed his example. It is said that they all died on their feet, pressed tightly together, facing an enemy about 50x their size and killing 10x their number.
And it continues in that tone. Counting serious wounds after a certain battle. How it was thought that the men, father and son, part of the paternal line, would die, but they didn’t. Talks about how two brothers randomly encountered two men who had participated in a brutal massacre of kin by marriage, and the senior killed them both, fighting two duels, one after the other, and refusing to give his brother a turn. And that is just a flavor of it.
Anyway, though I did not swallow all of it, I thought it was very cool. Felt it was the genuine warrior ethos of a medieval warrior family. The particular family managed to hold onto their lands nearly until the present, which was quite rare. (And I think it helps shed light on a general family ethos which otherwise was mainly destroyed and only available in snippets.)
This is quite interesting; I always assumed that in Britain and the US the norm was that an individual had a right to hold any view in which they had sincere belief (i.e. they weren’t holding it just to bait or harass some other person). They could also talk about this view in public with other people. This was close to a matter of conscience, one of the most basic democratic rights.
The main restriction on it would be direct incitement to violence.
The fact that some progressives have moved to thinking that by allowing some citizen or subject to remain in their own country and hold views they sincerely believe to be correct they are doing them a special favour looks like an example of what I was saying before about the radicalisation of progressive positions.
Can you see why Songbird won’t answer the question?
I enjoyed my times in The West. Idaho, Colorado and the inhabited parts of California mostly. Vancouver BC too. Vancouver would be my top choice. Cooler, moister, Canadian.
This was how it was in the 1990s.
Ireland is the boggiest country in Europe, after Finland (which was probably mostly uninhabited). I have also heard the claim that it contained a greater concentration of castles than any country in Europe.
IMO, it is difficult to evaluate the clan system fairly.
To begin with, the Normans had outside funding from third parties, as well as the support of Rome (English Pope, to start). Once, they conquered, they took a lot of the best land – the wealth, the seed around which consolidation could have crystallized. They also controlled harbors in which reinforcements could perpetually land. Though some eventually went native, their overwhelming tendency was to support England.
Once foreigners had a strong toehold, it was easy to undermine the clans by supporting rival claimaints with foreign armies. The history of some seems to be repeated kin slaying, while with others, it seems to have been a tool of enormous resiliency. The O’Connors Faly, for instance, managed to recover after Normans massacred 26 of their leading men, after inviting them to dinner. Not straight away, but eventually so they were the most feared family by those within the Pale. No system of primogeniture could have handled a crisis of that magnitude.
Apologies, but I find your abstractions and frames of reference too confusing and unnatural.
You seem to want my perspective on some issue related to tolerance and progressives. Why not drop the faux characters and frame it directly from your p.o.v?
Do you desire my own opinion in my own language? (Then I would ask, about what? And what is yours, BTW?) Or how I would try to win over an alien mind? (Not possible, IMO)
Progressive “tolerance” is a not some attitude that they take universally. It is reliant on a combination of factors. Their desire for hedonism. Xenophilia (much more accurate characterization than their accusation of xenophobia.) Thirdly, a runaway desire for egalitarianism that they aren’t adapted to deal with, modern conditions of racial diversity being new. They are like Indians being given firewater, only Indians have a more developed sense of awareness that they can’t deal with it.
And that is not including the ultimate power factor, bioleninism.
Because it isn’t my p.o.v.
I’m am not a progressive, nor innocent, nor naive, nor “moral”, nor even from the US. I also fully accept your freedoms and presence in the US, for what little that is worth.
Now, for the 4th time, why are you completely incapable of answering the very simple following question?
Particularly narcissistic progressives say they accept your freedoms and presence in US society because they are just too moral for their own good, far too innocent, naive and lovely. What would you tell them?
Do you not find your incapability interesting? It isn’t for lack of effort on your behalf either, but you still literally can’t do it.
I know why you can’t. I even thought you wouldn’t be able to bring yourself to answer it, which is why I asked it. The question and answer are perfectly hidden from you.
Hey, I had some good times in Wales too. The Breacon Beacons, the Snowdon and a weekend in the Llandudno area with my English/Welsh GF. I can perfectly understand why you would choose Vancouver although in my case the contrary happened: after 25+ years of rain and clouds in my home country I now need lots of blue skies, please.
That is EXACTLY WHAT I CALLED AS A BIASED SAMPLE OF THE GENERAL POPULATION, ALREADY SELECTED FROM THE REASONABLY GIFTED. As various studies have shown, many of those with sole high spatial IQ have academic problems and they might not finish high schools let alone attending universities. THEY ARE EXCLUDED FROM THE SAMPLE. THUS THE RESULTS CANNOT BE RELEVANT FOR THE GENERAL POPULATION, ONLY VALID FOR THE ALREADY GIFTED POPULATION, i.e. NON-EXCLUSIVE SUPPLEMENTARY ADVANTAGE. HOW MANY ARTISAN CAN YOU FIND AMONG THE MATHEMATICALLY PRECOCIOUS YOUTH?? The National Longitudinal Studies include careers from the non-skilled manual labours to physicans (excluding the non-employed and housewives). IF spatial IQ is also included, with the US Army data as reference, it will BOOST MORE THE IQ SCORES OF BUSINESS AND ARTISAN CLASSES THAN THE LITTLE ADDED TO THE PROFESSIONAL STEM CLASSES. So what is your whinging about?? Does the very much higher additional IQ for the business and artisan classes relative to that for the professional STEM classes proves your point that STEM people were short changed by excluding spatial IQ??
To give you an anology. When I analysed the NBA draft data, contrary to common assertions, height does not come out as important. THAT IS BECAUSE ALMOST ALL NBA DRAFTEES ARE ALREADY ABOVE THE AVERAGE HEIGHT OF THE GENERAL POPULATION. Leaping height turns out to be very important as taller people tended to have less need to jump and might not have developed stronger leaping muscles. However I cannot assert that supplementary leaping ability result to the GENERAL POPULATION where there are large variations in the height of the general population.
What is this question? I would avoid communicating with them. If I were forced to, that’d be from a position of weakness. Like my employer HR talking to me. Maybe it’s the same for songbird.
I guess he is not very keen on thinking about such unpleasant hypothetical situations.
That’s simply not true. Arthouse movies were a small fraction of the total output. If you think Italian cinema was just people like Fellini and Antonioni then you don’t know much about Italian cinema of that era.
And a lot of the German movies made in the 50s and 60s were krimis, which were totally commercially oriented.
The movies of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill (Carlo Pedersoli and Mario Girotti) were totally commercially oriented and also pretty popular in Hungary (and I believe in the German speaking countries, too). I remember the German fantasy movie The Neverending Story (based on a German fantasy book) which was made in English and was a commercial success. It was a really big hit in my childhood, though perhaps not in the English speaking world.
Australia’s covid zero strategy is now in tatters.
I was in favour of that strategy but its failure is now painfully apparent.
Zero COVID (even the asymptomatic cases) is a cult, especially when you can still catch COVID with very mild symptoms or nothing at all.
If you want to concede to COVID being a public health issue, you should already be looking at serious hospitalizations and deaths, and plan accordingly.
It’s impossible to stop the symptomatic cases without stopping the asymptomatic cases as well. It was certainly possible with the alpha variant, as shown by the example of China and a number of other countries. It’s certainly way more difficult with the delta variant and presumably it’s only getting more difficult with the newer variants. A combination of mass vaccination and some safety measures would still be enough, but it’s impossible to implement on a world scale.
The American blogger podcaster writer Steven Snider reports on the appearance of Ukraine-American anti-communist Paula Dobriansky at the Washington D.C. Captive Nations summit sponsored by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
Not a high S/N ratio so probably should skim.
http://visupview.blogspot.com/2021/07/secret-societies-narcoterrorism.html
So you’re saying Hitler literally had no choice but to take on Russia, Western Europe, and America, all at once, instead of in a piecemeal long term fashion.
I think I can see where Chinese strategic thinking is coming from 🙂
Good luck.
Do you understand how PCR tests can be inaccurate? A good amount of asymptomatic cases aren’t really COVID. Remove them and only then you can start suggesting measures (and in fact the actual situation is closer to a bad flu season)
It is impossible to discuss COVID without even agreeing on the most basic facts of the picture. This is why both extreme narratives of inexistent COVID and total COVID crisis are promoted among polarizing political circles.
I think that’s an excellent idea. I’ll find some way to leave my email here before I make the move.
Yes, I think this can be a serious problem and I’ve struggled with it myself. The Machine has a way of drawing you back and enmeshing you in all sorts of responsibilities that seem so important at the time, and its so easy to lose your focus!
This has happened to me multiple times. I forget about the glory of the wilderness and what life could be, and more and more the magic of life disappears. The boring routine of everyday life in the modern world comes to seem normal and I begin to forget why I was ever dissatisfied. I go less and less into the woods, I just want to relax on weekends because I’m exhausted, and I begin thinking maybe this is “life”.
But then, strangely, I start getting demoralized, demotivated, and depressed. Everyone tells me I have “burnout” and I try all the “recommend” solutions but absolutely nothing works!
It becomes clear nothing less than a total transformation of my life will work in getting me out of my rut, and the gloom lifts, and I make plans.
After several “cycles” of this I finally accept that I cannot be happy living a routine modern life in the Machine.
So I’ve finally accepted my fate 🙂
So I think, Mikel, in the end you just have to take the plunge. There are a million “practical” reasons why you shouldn’t – and one only one big reason why you should 🙂 But it outweighs all the others.
Lots of people are doing simar stuff in Thailand. 800 a month is enough to live “ok” in small villages outside the cities, and can be a perfectly enjoyable life. You will not have any luxuries though. Although that money would have gone further 20 years ago.
So the story is quite plausible, and I can totally see why he’s your hero 🙂 It’s am inspiring story!
Lol, we never know in our 20s what makes us truly happy 🙂
If it’s any consolation, 40s and 50s are the traditional age when Chinese officials would abandon their duties in the “dust” of the regular world and take up their life as “wandering men of the mountains”. Some would do it in their 30s.
But it seems in many cases we have no choice but to let the Machine claim our youth. But you still have many good years left!
And leaving too soon has it’s drawbacks. First you have to taste the normal life to it’s full before realizing finally it isn’t for you.
Yes, most people just spend all their money and feel it’s not enough! I know people making in the top 1% who complain about not having enough 🙂
Even an average 1st world salary is riches!
A big part of this for me was to realize that I could live happily on so little in the most basic conditions – even live better! Decades of traveling in poor countries in simple accomodations and camping in the wild, and about 3 years ago I realized – I am happiest in a simple room in the Himalayan mountains, or a simple tent in the backcountry 🙂
This was a revelation to me, a tectonic shift in my consciousness. There was a lag between my actual life and my ability to “notice” changes that had already taken place.
I totally hear you about the “pushback” you get from friends and family – sometimes it seems the whole of society is against you. In my case it was intense.
But I have found the best thing is to immerse myself in like-minded books, movies, tv shows, YouTube channels, etc – if my real life situation does not have enough people to sustain my vision, I must create an alternative “support community” as it were 🙂
I have found that we are not isolated atoms, and it becomes extremely hard to oppose the pressure of the mainstream completely on your own (that is why many old mystics and nature lovers went to live in solitude). That’s why there is always a sort of “underground” tradition that spans the ages and gives support to an alternative visions, and it’s tremendously helpful to plug into it.
It really helps psychologically!
Maine and NH are perhaps the best of the East Coast, you’ll enjoy your trip! Read Paul Theroux on the Maine Woods before you go, it’s a great essay. And the White Mountains are the tallest in the East.
The East is endless forest, an endless green canopy – this can be mysterious and moving, but it lacks the variety, and the rugged grandeur and sweep, of the West.
Worth visiting, but perhaps not worth living in permanently 🙂
All the best, Mikel! May we both work out our problems and issues holding us back from the life we were truly meant to live, and embark on our true path.
It was for those countries with their cultures and circumstances.
How lethal do you think the disease would have to be for the US population to conform to China-like measures?
Think about alternatives. So far you had 900 deaths. You have saved thousands of lives. You could have been like Canada and had 20x more deaths or like the US and had 52x more deaths. And the end would be not nearer unlike what the herd immunity demagogic proponents say. And by acting decisively and swiftly Australia enjoyed much longer periods of normalcy than other countries they went for the half-ass curve flattening strategy.
Could you keep virus away for ever? If you were not a subject of intentional virus seeding, you could. Now the first line of defenses was breached so the next one is to isolate where are the flare ups and contain them and continue case tracing and isolation of suspects.
I would prefer living through covid in AUS or NZ or Taiwan rather than in the US or anywhere in Europe.
“That’s simply not true.” – When I tried to disprove him by many counterexamples he deflected it by saying that they were an example of a niche not commercially-oriented. I wonder if ΔŖК†ІКⱲØЛФ is actually the author of the Singer’s dissertation which was written 15 years ago. It’s kind of strange touting your own dissertation many years later as if you had no accomplishment since.
“In Hungary, where his films were hugely popular during the communist regime, a larger-than-life-sized bronze statue of Spencer created by sculptor Szandra Tasnádi was unveiled on 11 November 2017 in downtown Budapest, with Spencer’s daughter Cristiana in attendance”. – Wiki
I wonder if him being a water polo player has contributed to his popularity among water polo crazy Hungarians.
Meant to thanks your comment to me describing the bloody antics of the early Normans 🙂
Sounds like a Norse Saga, unsurprisingly.
Check your reading comprehension again.
The GRE mentioning is about the people from that large random sample of the nation’s high school population that later went in STEM. Those with higher spatial ability went in STEM and the higher the spatial ability, the higher the degree.
Further:
https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Wai2009SpatialAbility.pdf
Unfortunately, in my case my own naivete and silliness in my younger years paid a bigger part than family and social influence, which I’ve always been pretty good at ignoring. Besides, one shouldn’t be too harsh with parents and relatives, they mean good in general. I guess we all try to influence our closest ones with our well-meaning advice, that sometimes is not necessarily the best for them.
The best example is the classical advice to young people of “study and get a stable job”, which is a load of crap. To begin with, there is no such thing as a stable job anymore. And then you’re just advising them to be like most everybody else, ie pretty unhappy. They would be much happier if they get $1 million net after some years of saving and investing and then can choose to work or not work as they please. They don’t need to go to college for that. Just getting a middle class or professional job and having some financial literacy is enough.
But ironically I try to teach saving and investing to my older children and they don’t listen much. Perhaps we all need to assert our independence from our parents, even if that means making our lives harder than they should be.
Apparently, not all Indians were very violent. Perhaps not surprisingly, those in the California area were rather peaceful 🙂
But my guess is that these primitive people just lived much closer to the ways of nature than us and they just accepted violence and cruelty as the normal order of things.
You don’t need to observe wild creatures, that basically strive on each other’s death, to realize how cruel nature is. Even farm animals give you a glimpse of this. If a kit in a litter dies of natural causes during the hot summer months, its rot will rapidly spread to the rest of the litter and they will all die a cruel and miserable death of putrid contamination. It’s best to kill them all as fast as you realize what’s going on. Nature has nothing but suffering and torture in store for them. Their mother, unable to do something about this, will eventually give up, stay away from the stench and carry on eating and drinking as if nothing had happened.
Or a supposedly friendly and cheerful dog will, in his crazy enthusiasm, bite half a foot off a rabbit or a cat and then, immediately after leaving them impaired for life, will come happily to you expecting to be petted.
These are really the ways of the natural world (no idea how people can see a benevolent god behind them, btw). Perhaps the Indians just lived a life in close contact with all these realities and saw themselves as part of this order.
Fortunately, we have built societies that try to isolate us as much as possible from the cruelty of the natural world but I wonder if staying too far apart from it is good for us. I have no idea what calls me to visit Death Valley in the middle of summer or to go to Northern Canada in mid-winter. As I once told you, when I know that there is a storm coming I enjoy camping in the mountains and feeling the strength of the blizzard inside my tent. And what exactly leads so many people to risk their lives climbing treacherous mountains at the end of the world? Maybe these are just ways we find to get back to nature temporarily, experience its unforgiving power and then return to the kind but unnatural comfort of modern life.
Truly, haven’t the faintest idea of what you are trying to ask.
What would my motivation be for talking politics with extreme narcissists? Or am I supposed to be talking a hypothetical with some intermediary and why? (This does not absolve you of the first question: why would I be interested in talking politics with extreme narcissists, even hypothetically? What is the use of creating such an unpleasant and outlandish scenario?)
I have interacted with true narcissists before. One would have to be insane to discuss sensitive politics with them.
Anyway, I haven’t a clue what you’re grasping at. You want me to debunk the narcissists? (Or rather what you imagine they would say?) Seems totally unnecessary and ahistorical. Stalin did not move the Kulaks, so it allows you to gauge nothing about their intentions. And, as I said before, they currently lack the power capacity. Not to mention, due to demographic changes, the odds are forever getting better for them. The smartest thing for them to do would be to wait.
I take it though that you think they only have good intentions towards me or something? Are moving towards some greater tolerance? The extreme narcissists? Seems doubtful, but their stated goals are unpleasant and harmful enough, without us considering their hidden ones.
Yes, you are absolutely correct about this. Nature has a horrifically cruel side to her that should not be ignored. I don’t sentimentalize nature. One of the things I love about nature is it’s rawness and realness – that’s why I’m happy camping and hiking in places with grizzly bears and wolves, and not “tamed” county parks that are merely “pleasant” 🙂
And why did America spend so much effort in reintroducing wolves and grizzly bears into wilderness and protecting them, rather than making mere amusement parks out of nature? Every year grizzly’s kill people – but we do nothing about it! In previous eras, people killed grizzly’s and wolves on site, out of the misguided notion that humans want nothin more than to live in a “safe” world!
One of the reasons I regard Daniel Chieh as superficial is because the world is so fundamentally cruel that to believe that our petty human schemes of “control” can eradicate this side of nature is a sort of cop out – it’s to avert ones gaze and hide one’s head in the sand, to have failed to come to terms with the “deeps of life”, and to remain on the surface.
Moreover, I also feel there is some sort of mysterious lesson in the cruelty of the world that we have to come to terms with before we can become fully human, even if it can never be fully expressed in words. And you are right that we humans are fascinated by the “dark side” of life and seek out contact with it regularly. Mountain climbers, the haunting beauty of desolate and death-dealing deserts, danger, horror movies, and even warfare.
While modern rationalists have attempted to find “rational” reasons for war, that’s because we can no longer face the reality that it has no real cause. It’s obvious that humans can easily eradicate war from the world. The Plains Indians never even desired to eradicate war – they lived for it – and we see here in stark relief a culture that does not hide from reality and nature. Freud, after he invented his superficial “reality principle” – the idea that we must conform to a dull routine of bourgeois control and effort in order to maximize survival, the true human good he thought – was shocked by WW1 into realizing that he had gone very deeply into reality at all, and invented the “death principle”, which posited that humans have an instinct for destruction as well.
The modern attempt to completely conceal the “negative” side of life – death, danger, cruelty, destruction – I believe is responsible for our epidemic of depression and anxiety.
I have family members who go to extraordinary lengths to shield their children – and themselves – from the “dark side” of life. Death cannot be mentioned, no movies with even a hint of genuine danger, horror, or death is ever watched, and extraordinary measures are taken to minimize risk in all areas of life. Predictably, the kids are hysterical basket cases, and the adults are not much better. It’s tragic – lives unloved!
And why do we enjoy danger so much?
I went through a very dark period in my life, and paradoxically I responded to this by watching horror movies – far from disconnecting from the dark side of life, I plunged into it! I feel this kept me sane, and eventually I didn’t need this “medicine” anymore.
That’s why I am attracted to Taoism and Mahayana Buddhism (non-dualistic philosophies) they don’t have any facile schemes for making the world one-sidedly”perfect”, free from all the dark and negative aspects of life. They accept them.
Not only do they understand this is impossible, they realize this would be cutting ourselves off from something absolutely fundamental about life and reality, and sapping our vitality and ground of being at it’s core.
In Taoism – which counsels a life in accordance with nature! – nature is described as “treating the ten thousand things like straw dogs”. Ten thousand things is the classical Chinese term for the world and all its creatures, and straw dogs were burned in ceremonies and discarded after being briefly used.
No sentimental philosophy of a saccharine “heaven” is this!
And why am I – and so many others – so drawn to the Buddhist concept of “emptiness”? I feel this is related to the “death instinct” even if I’m a roundabout way!
Ultimately, to run from the dark side – as we do in the modern West, and as is at the heart of the technology project – is to cut ourselves off from the vital ground of being, and from the true depths of life.
I have friends who despise and hate desert scenery, and the high mountains! They can only enjoy lush forests and rivers. They completely don’t see the majesty and grandeur of the desert, they find it horrifying. Predictably, they suffer from anxiety and are terrified of death, and love sub-par lives.
But in the end, when one confronts and embraces the darkness and cruelty without running from it, and abandons facile schemes of securing safety through technology – one might realize, that one has transcended it without eradicating it in a superficial manner 🙂
Nietzsche said that one can only overcome despair and nihilism by going as deep down into nihilism as possible and coming out the other side – and not through facile schemes of running away from it through technological”progress” or pretending the dark side doesn’t exist.
And George Orwell said in his essay on Tolstoy that in the end, one must chose the vitality and beauty of life even with all it’s horror.
Anyways, sorry for veering off so far into philosophy and metaphysics! I’m sure you disagree with much that I say here 🙂
But thanks for your stimulating reflections, and I think we both can appreciate true wilderness with all it’s danger 🙂
Of course, I am not advocating cruelty here – and neither is Taoism or Buddhism – and I also enjoy and appreciate comfort and safety on the correct doses.
Nothing is more delicious after many days in the wild checking into a nice hotel and sleeping in a comfy bed – utterly secure – and eating delicious food 🙂
Cheers!
Yes, when I was in my late teens and my father began to notice my improvident and reckless ways he said – AaronB, you are a great fool! Work hard now, make a few million by the time you’re 30, and you will enjoy all the freedom to do your reckless and improvident things the rest of your life! (My dad was also a great lover of nature and camping, and would ride a motorcycle through Arab villages in the West Bank in the 80s just to feel the exhilaration of riding through that beautiful countryside, even though it was dangerous)
Of course I ignored the wise old man, to his immense frustration – but youth is perennially stupid!
And now, I am a slave who has to break free, rather than a free man from a young age. But perhaps I had to taste the emptiness of normal life in the Machine.
I think you are much more on board with the financial aspects of gaining ones freedom – a key aspect of my strategy is to learn to live simply – what in modern terms is called “poverty” – and negating the need for much money.
But everyone’s circumstances and requirements are different, and if you have a family it’s harder. We each to have to figure this out for ourselves.
He is the greatest troll of the world.
https://blog.reaction.la/images/JapanFert4.png
The question is a straightforward one, if hypothetical. How would you answer it?
Do you consider that graph a good argument?
There are thousands fewer deaths there, and the whole country was essentially functioning as normal for the near-entirety of last year except Melbourne, I really think that speaks for itself. Of course, Australia’s geography and pre-existing strict border-controls also made this much more realistic to implement, than say, somewhere hyper-central like Czechia.
The area which I now call home has been almost completely unaffected since the first Wuhan outbreak, so thankfully I’ve been able to avoid thinking this tedious subject entirely.
Actually, this whole mess started recently because the state premier of NSW (incidentally one of my compatriots, բերեշիկլյան) screwed everything up for the whole country by trying to score compromise points (leaving luxury stores open during her faux-‘lockdown’, making everything as half-assed as possible etc) with covidiots for political purposes, exactly as a new cluster was discovered in Australia’s largest city.
Anything but for her to be compared to Melbourne’s Dan “dictator” Andrews, whose approach seems vindicated at this point. Not to mention the idiot conservacuck Prime Minister (Scomo, probably the worst PM ever) of this country has just completely avoided any sort of responsibility or national line of the topic at all, and only hides as much as possible, leaving everything to the states,
To clarify the philosophy here;
One must embrace the dark side of life if one is to have the good side of life. They are inseparable.
That is why schemes of one-sided improvement- like technology – have a cost that is commensurate with their benefit. More safety and comfort, less vitality, “realness” and joy.
We live in the safest period in history – never has there been a greater epidemic of anxiety. We have riches, comfort, and every good thing – never have we been more depressed.
And we all feel disconnected from “realness”.
On an even deeper level, we see that good and evil are two terms of one underlying reality – it is only our minds that artificially seperate them into two distinct things.
Perhaps that is why connecting to the “realness” and rawness of nature is experienced as so satisfying, and nature seen as “beautiful” – though nature manifests now as good, now as evil, we also connect to the underlying ground of reality, which is neither good, nor evil – but our true home, mysterious and beautiful in the truest sense 🙂
Or in n other words, we connect to God, who transcends all things, through his “creation” (if you prefer this language).
Okay, then, I will give you my straightforward answer: I would never engage in a political discussion with extreme narcissists. It would be both unfruitful and very dangerous.
It’s worth considering at least. Although there are strong counter-examples with Iran (low fertility, traditionalist) and Sweden (relatively high-fertility, gynocracy), so obviously there are more important factors to consider.
I don’t consider low-first world fertility so much a problem as teaching Africans and Indians the virtues of pulling out. Anecdotally know or have met quite a few high functioning people born from, and who have very large (>3) families, it seems the demographic that’s really crashing are the average people in the middle, those who have quite a lot to lose, but who also couldn’t be called ‘well-off’ by any means either.
Probably most commenters here fall into that category.
Why does one experience nature as “serene”?
One can watch on YouTube videos of grizzley bears catching and eating deer – apparently, bears eat their prey alive. Unlike lions, they do not mercifully kill them first. The deer suffer.
(This is why I’d rather be eaten by a mountain lion than a bear 🙂 However, humans lack the tough leathery hides of deer – one bear chomp into my thigh, and I will bleed out in a few minutes, mercifully. The deer must endure)
Meanwhile, the insect world is at ceaseless war, and the plants and trees are vying for water and sunlight. While it is a world of great abundance and providence, with food for everyone, it is a world of death and destruction, with everything ending up food.
Why is this “serene”? Why do we feel, in some sense, this is our true home?
Well, it is a world of “totality” – both the good and the bad exists. In such an environment, we are released from the anxious quest to achieve the “good”, and the anxious fear of experiencing the “evil”. We are in a world that releases us from human-centred notions of good and evil. And that is the highest good – a good higher than any merely human good – not the typical merely human “good” of mere survival in physical form.
And only that is true serenity – our true home.
The deepest and most profound theologians did not conceive of God as “benevolent” – he was awesome, and awe inspiring, and terrifying! And yet benevolent. What sense does that make?
In the profoundest theological tradition, God represents an order of reality that is beyond human-centred notions of good and evil. And this is benevolence in it’s truest sense – released from common anxieties and fears about good and evil, loss and gain. God represents a really beyond loss and gain.
Why did the Indians not fear death, or think the purpose of life was to eradicate pain and death?
If one sees oneself as not a discrete, individual object, but as one expression of the Eternal Energy that now takes on a human form, and then takes on a different form, then one is literally unborn – there is, literally, no death.
What is there to fear? One is Everything. There is no gain, there is no loss.
Outside the human world, with it’s artificially seperating cognitive categories, one may find it easier to see this. In the great human cities, one loses sight of this.
That is why the great religious monasteries were built in the most beautiful and secluded natural settings – where else could they be built? That is why those wonderful Irish monks chose to live on those desolate and terrifying rain-lashed islands out in the stormy Atlantic.
That is why mountains and wilderness, wanderers and hermits, are associated with religion.
I do, but you’re right, as I have found, it is very often unfruitful.
Narcissists are best defined by being afraid of self-awareness.
Since they are rarely conscious of this, it can be almost impossible to get them to engage on any topic which would grant them more self-awareness.
They may find it too confusing, or they get aggressive without really knowing why, or they hit an invisible wall in their understanding. It can be quite surreal when you’re aware of what is going on.
That graph is completely stupid. I was just seeing if Sher Singh was sincerely offering it as serious argument.
Imagine thinking that a law saying that women are equal was the big even for Japan in the 1940s!
The drop in TFR halted for some years at a positive point. The relevant graph would start from when fertility dropped off in 1975 after being stable for quite some time.
Start by embracing yourself. Or else every interaction with the world will just be with yourself and you won’t even know it.
Like when you “paradoxically” watched horror films when you were in a bad place. You were trying to connect with yourself through them, which is like trying to enjoy the taste of a sweet through the wrapper, perhaps better than nothing, but maybe take off the wrapper?
Sweden’s fertility rate was 1.66 in 2020 and 1.7 in 2019. For Iran the numbers seem to be 1.6 in 2020 and 1.77 in 2019 (the sources are not as good for Iran). So Iran had a big drop in births in 2020 but in 2019 Iran still had higher fertility rate than Sweden. Either way, the difference in fertility rate between the countries is small, it makes no sense saying one has high fertility rate and the other low.
Believing that I am the world, and the world is me, I already believe every interaction with the world is an interaction with Myself 🙂
You, Laxa, are merely Me, and I, am You.
Schopenhauer once said that the difference between a “good” man and a “bad” man is – the good man looks at others and thinks, “Myself!”, while the bad man looks at others and thinks “Not I!”
That is why it has been said – the way out of selfishness is to be as selfish as you can. Be frankly out for “yourself”! Then you will discover, that your at the bottom of yourself is – everyone, and everything.
Ultimately, I enjoy being “kind” to people out if sheer unadulterated selfishness 🙂 It’s fun!
Perhaps, your problem is that you are too narcissistically focused “inward”, and have never learned to transcend your “self”?
Your dismissive attitude towards the great philosophies and religious thinkers of the past, leave you trapped in the narrow circle of your own small “self” – imagining that what you find when you gaze narcissistically inward, is “you” – when it is merely the false conditioning of the society you grew up in.
Without realizing one reaches adulthood conditioned, one cannot begin the process of discovering ones authentic self.
You have a beautiful journey to undergo transcending your narrow self. Do not fear it.
That “we” are “empty” at our core – is a liberating truth, not to be feared.
Good luck! I am rooting for you – as are all the great religious thinkers you despise 🙂
Perhaps, as part of this journey, you will drop the mask of language you hide behind, terrified of confronting yourself, and speak simply and with clarity.
You wield language like a shield and a fortress to hide in, gazing out from the battlements with fear, and not boldly like a knife that cuts through confusion and bondage.
And it is not just that you are not a native English speaker.
All the best, Laxa.
The difference between someone with courage and someone who is a coward is whether they tell themselves the truth about what their reaction actually is.
You wouldn’t know what a narcissist was if it stared back at you when you looked in the mirror.
I’m dismissive of your understanding of them.
Your attempt to be the opposite of your “conditioning” leaves you merely as its negative.
Blind people see nothing.
As I was saying about the narcissist and the reflection…
Invalidating what someone else feels is perhaps the most psychologically injurious thing one can do to someone else.
A bad parent will tell their child – “you aren’t afraid, honey! You aren’t angry, sweetie!”
I have seen parents do this. Their children grow up suppressing themselves.
I don’t know if you have a child, but I sincerely hope you are not mentally abusing him or her in this fashion. And if you do have a child in the future, I hope and pray you become confident and mature enough in yourself to accept that other people have different feelings than you.
Ultimately it is just insecurity. You invalidate others feelings because a world in which not everyone feels like you do is one you cannot control – this scares you.
I hope you develop the self confidence and maturity to no longer feel this compulsion to invalidate everyone else.
But to do this, you must break out of your shell of narcissism – the scared little girl has to grow up. And this means opening up to the big wide world – not perpetually gazing at ones navel.
You sound angry and defensive here.
What is it about narcissism that scares you?
And yet instead of discussing my understanding of them, you focus on invalidating me.
Are you afraid that if we honestly discussed my understanding of the great philosophers and religious thinkers, you would have to give up cherished illusions you’ve hid behind your whole life?
Dont fear the loss of illusions that are keeping you defensive and immature. Growth means breaking out of ones narcissistic shell and confronting the big wide world.
It’s scary – but nothing good comes without facing ones fears.
Yes, I would agree with this. Merely oppositional thinking leaves one as defined by what one is opposing as if one completely accepted it.
Is that why your responses to me are so relentlessly oppositional? Are you afraid that if you actually considered my ideas they might break through your rigid defenses and force you to face things you would rather not?
Yet as long as you merely oppose me and my ideas, you remain defined by me and imprisoned by me. Why continue to be imprisoned by me?
To break free of me, you must confront my ideas – and the reality that I feel as I say I do – and the implications this has for your own lifestyle.
While directed at me, this is your unconscious attempt to diagnose your own condition.
That is a good start! Some dawning self-awareness is beginning to crack through your layers of defense.
Well done!
Yes, you do seem preoccupied with this theme – perhaps your unconscious is trying to tell you something?
I feel you have taken the first faltering steps towards growth and self-awareness here Laxa – and an engagement with the wider world.
This is good!
Do not fear us here – we welcome you and accept you. You are in a safe place.
Thanks for all those thoughts. Reading them has made me realize that I may be behaving just like those relatives of yours with my little son. While I am fully aware of how tough life is and actively try to strengthen myself through frequent contact with nature, I try to shield my son from any danger or discomfort. This is actually unfair to him. I should also spare some time to make him realize, little by little, what life is really like. It’s quite true that you find lots of anxiety in modern children despite all the comfort they have had though their lives and most likely because of that precisely. I certainly know of such cases around me. I appreciate your bringing this to my attention.
And no, I don’t even see anything to disagree with in that comment. It’s interesting to see how different thinkers arrived at somewhat similar conclusions about the human nature. But I am not nearly as well read as you and I stopped paying much attention to philosophers decades ago. I was actually the best of my class at philosophy in high school (the only subject that I found interesting, busy as I was with mountaineering, friends and the opposite sex) but eventually decided that philsophy was a never-ending, fruitless way of achieving knowledge and switched to scientific reading instead.
How true that is!
I actually remember specific bottles of soda that I drank after returning from exhausting hikes and more recently, specific ranch breakfasts that I’ve had here in the West after spending some time in the outdoors and finally returning to civilization. Each of those simple bottles or meals was worth to me much more than any expensive dinner I have ever had at any signature restaurant 🙂
Agreed, which is why I keep reminding you to stop doing it to yourself.
They’re not, but it is indicative that you perceive them that way.
A woman was walking through hell when she walked past a closed box, so she stopped to look. As she approached it, she saw that there was no lock on it and that it was shifting a little back and forth on the ground, like maybe it was alive.
She cautiously asked the box “what are you?” The box replied, “I am nothing, but an empty box.” To which she said “you don’t seem empty, let me look inside.” The box hissed “no, you must not, for there is nothing here, I am a box of nothing, made up of only other people’s ideas.”
The woman pondered this for a moment. She thought “it sounds like there is a hurt little boy inside, that is the voice I hear.” Meanwhile, the voice in the box was still rambling incoherently on.
She then remembered that the box was already unlocked, so she knew the boy must still be too hurt to come out. She said “if you are nothing, then at least give me permission to open the box to let some light in.” The box hissed again “I am not just a box of nothing, I am also everything.” The woman burst out laughing.
She said “you have made your own hell. You can leave any time, but you don’t even have the courage to open the box a crack, in case a ray of light breaks in, and you are forced to see yourself. I suppose you must imagine yourself as very scary thing indeed. I am sorry life pushed you to feel that way.” The hurt boy replied “no, I am nothing, I am just my ideas, I am not scared of myself, you are scared of my ideas.”
The woman asked the boy to reflect on the meaning behind his own words, but the boy rambled incoherently on.
She could open the box any time, but she closed her eyes, reflected and knew it wasn’t her job. The boy needed to be in the box, hiding from himself, pretending he was the world, maybe for a few months, or years, or even a few lifetimes. She wished him love, though she knew he wouldn’t experience it for quite some time yet. People don’t care for boxes. They use them like objects, perhaps to store their own shit in.
She then felt sad for him, happy to not be him, and the complex pinch of irony scrunched her forehead and eyes down to her cheeks even as her cheeks tensed upwards. She had just seen the writing on the box, which said “this is not a box.” “Oh good” she thought, “well that clears it up.”
Offer your son secure attachment. Sometimes trying to protect a child, will tell them they only get attachment when they are in danger. Or sometimes it is like telling them they must act invulnerable. These things aren’t predictable. The same equal and opposite considerations also apply to you trying to introduce him to the real world. In all of this, you are putting your issues, and your reactions to your issues, onto him.
It is good to think about these things, but your relationship with him should be like a natural conversation, where you’re always going to reply and be there. That conversation, including what you need, as well as what he feels he needs, is how you can decide things. This is a process, not you going away and deciding how you are going to manipulate him to be different, or how you can lie about yourself to teach him a lesson. Children understand these things on some level and it hurts them.
You are likely already more than enough as a parent. All parents have expectations, all parents get disappointed sometimes, many blame themselves, but your son is not you and the results of your parenting will never define him. The only thing you can do is authentically enjoy your time with him, do things because they feel right for you and trust that your love for him, will mean that you do the best for him that you can.
His life depends on your attachment to him, so if he senses that is conditional, he will, as all children do to preserve their life, start to be dishonest to you about how he is and how he feels. He will then turn inwards and be dishonest about these things to himself, setting him up for later trouble and confusion.
Secure attachment is unconditional, but it is also secure attachment to you, so you must be present, as the person you are. If you can’t do it, with all of your adult experience, he won’t be able to do it, and the cycle will continue.
When you see people having feelings you cannot experience yourself, it may feel good in the short term to deny that anyone can feel what you cannot.
But trying to tear others down to your level, is not as satisfying as developing a richer emotional life, and rising to their level.
I would be very happy to help you feel what I feel, see what I see. You would have to let me, though.
I have tried to create a safe atmosphere for you to open up. But it is up to you to step out from behind your defenses, to lower the drawbridge and leave your fortress.
I can help, but ultimately only you have the courage to lower your defenses.
If you admitted to yourself you attack people, you would have to notice the fortress you have built around yourself. You would have to accept your fear and insecurity.
Does it make you feel safer to hide behind stories, as behind battlements?
There is a rich and fun emotional life waiting for you on the other side of that fortress, where you can engage authentically with real people, and grow and learn in the process.
But only you can take that first step…
But I promise you, Laxa, it’s worth it 🙂
We are waiting for you. Leave the stories behind. Leave the weird language you hide behind. Leave the denials behind.
There is a whole world waiting for you outside the fortress – and it is more interesting than adopting a pose of defensive superiority.
I am rooting for you – know that.
Progressives have been much more successful not so much at addressing people’s needs but rather at addressing people’s wants.
In the economic sphere the Economic Right triumphed because they had a message that the middle class wanted to hear – that greed really is good, that there’s no need to have a sense of social responsibility, that the wealthy are wealthy because they’re virtuous, that the poor are poor because they’re lazy, wicked and stupid.
But in the social and cultural spheres what you might call the Cultural Right has been spectacularly unsuccessful at addressing the things that people want. They have tried to sell an idea of society that people abandoned half a century ago because they felt that it failed to address their wants.
They haven’t displayed any ability to articulate an alternative vision that is viable and sellable. Many women today are not satisfied with their lives but you’re not going to win their support by suggesting that we should go back to the good old days when all women’s lives revolved entirely around child-rearing and you’re not going to win their support by suggesting that women should go back to regarding sex as an unpleasant but unfortunately unavoidable marital duty.
Maybe the Cultural Right should try actually asking women what they want? It’s noticeable here at Unz Review that when a woman commenter steps forward and tells the UR commentariat some of the things that women want she is almost invariably shouted down and reviled. On occasions it’s even hinted that she has no business here and should be at home washing diapers.
“Refugee” ping pong games on LT-Belarus border as Lukashenko troops are trying to push their own tourists with visas into Lithuania:
https://www.15min.lt/video/baltarusijos-pasienieciai-blokuoja-migrantu-grazinima-206472?jwsource=cl
Save your last comment. Read it to yourself every day. Eventually you’ll understand.
Agreed, except I stick by my use of the word “needs”. I am discussing the deep emotional needs of individuals, for which people often sacrifice everything else, including their lives.
He isn’t stuck in a myopic battle with his smothering mother complex? He doesn’t treat his own feelings, exactly the way she treated him? Good for him.
Ok.
But when you are ready to step out of your shell, I will be here for you.
The other people here may not understand, but you and I both know what letter psychological “cluster” you fall into.
I have dealt with people like you before, and I can help you. Even though the manuals say it is untreatable, I have successfully helped people like you before.
When you are ready.
In the meantime, I understand you have to try to play your game on Unz.
Happy to stand corrected. I’d gotten the impression Sweden’s fertility rates were much higher due to their generous government policies for both maternal and even parternal leave… proobably from this blog, iirc. But I suppose its still higher than abysmal European average.
I suppose conversely, one could argue women actually have a decent level of freedom by regional standards (In Iran polygamy is legal but unheard of, honour killing is very rare, universities have a female plurality to a majority), certainly better than the Arabian penisula, and on local everyday level, probably better than much of Turkey or the fecal subcontinent.
The only female commenter I’ve ever seen on AK’s blog has been ‘Rosie’ who was belittled because most of the things she said were retarded, not because of her avowed gender.
It’s worth pointing out that Sweden did have higher fertility rate recently. It was above 1.8 from 2006 to 2016 (and in particular around 1.9 from 2007 to 2013). But then again the fertility rate was as low as 1.5 in 1999. Overall Sweden has had higher fertility rate than the EU average for about 35 years. Before that Sweden had lower than average.
What a farce. HK tried this and still got a few waves where (nominally) there are dozens of cases which is hardly. Yet we still have a gathering ban and rudimentary vaccine gatekeeping (bars, nightclubs) which consigns these industries to extinction.
It’s better to stop seeing some or most of what actually exists as anti-COVID (i.e. public health), and start seeing them as anti-social (i.e. politico-economic). I think ZMan’s analogy (de-Kulakization) is good.
Question from practical experience: did you actually experience any kind of restrictions and do you anticipate new ones or current ones extended/stepped up?
(Many thanks for the more philosophical discussions here, I know many interlocutors are grasping onto a good part of the unfathomable truth)
I’d be prepared to go along with your usage of the word. When I use the word “wants” I”m only doing so to distinguish such desires from the very basic needs (food, clothing, housing, medical care). So I think we’re really pretty much in agreement.
“Afraid” but “rarely conscious of it?” So, you are a proponent of Freud?
From my perspective, one may score moderately high on the narcissism index, if one thinks nothing one writes ever needs revision for clarity, relevance, or concision. (I’m afraid success was the downfall of many great writers.)
Or if one thinks one can see into the minds of other people with ease. (Unless telepathy or some new machine)
The More tag exists for a reason.
Narcissists are defined by their self-importance in their world schema; some are explicit about it.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beautiful-minds/201103/do-narcissists-know-they-are-narcissists
This is a bit off-topic, but I thought you might enjoy this, songbird:
https://youtu.be/jIYBod0ge3Y
Kojima knew of the future.
That little thingy on your mouse that lets you scroll past posts that challenge your dogmas and make you uncomfortable also exists for a reason 🙂
Wittgenstein had a similar metaphor. After he got tenure. Don’t ever write this down on a philosophy exam if you want to get a good grade.
The law to permit women equal rights in Japan was specifically imposed by the Allies post-war explicitly to reduce the martial capability of Japan by the imposers, so it was not so very surprising. Japan culturally resisted it for some time(and still does to this day), but its not a difficult argument that it has caused immediate and vast changes. The blogger spandrell who lived in Japan also has written about this, and several other examples of it, so it is hardly “completely stupid” beyond an immediate emotional reaction to it.
Irrelevant spam makes it harder for me to find relevant posts, so collapsing your rambles of negative value would be a straight positive for the forum.
I don’t tend to like labels like “narcissist”, but I am not alone in thinking “grandiosity” to be a very superficial understanding of it.
Grandiosity, in narcissism, is a symptom of the inability to self-reflect, which is a subset of the fear of growth or internal change, which is the root of narcissism.
It is where someone has latched onto a limited identity, come to identify with it in an inflexible manner, decided it is them, but it doesn’t actually fit.
Narcissists’ actions frequently fall outside of their narcissistic identify, without them realising and to their growing bewilderment in the world, and it harms their life in ways that distress them. If it doesn’t do this, it isn’t a problem. You don’t need to believe in an authentic self, or anything but the pain and delusion you can see in front of you, for this definition to work.
The issue with focusing on grandiosity is that it leads to someone ike AaronB or his narcissistic identity of Hobo Goofy. He can persuade himself that he is not a narcissist because he can mouth anti-Grandiose statements “like I am nothing” and because he knows he is in pain.
Yes, his behaviour is frequently unearned grandiose, the person pretending to be “nothing” will cast a shadow as long as his self-conception is short, but he can defend himself against realising that this is actually more him than the image he sells himself, even while it controls his behaviour a lot more. Delusion is powerful like that.
All of this is an extremely limiting box which he can’t see, because he has convinced himself that it is him, and he lacks all self-awareness, leading to many sorts of problems when engaging with the world.
Change is his greatest fear, and one he will defend himself quite madly against, because leaving the box is leaving the thing he once upon a time needed for protection so much that he decided it was him.
Change always feels a bit like death, but this would be big for him and part of his narcissistic defence is learned cowardice.
This means that his inflated ego will resist and resist, all while he needs tondesperatelt recruir people to affirm that he has overcome it, even as he seeks other forms of inflation from those same people, and, as you have noticed before, this will continue until the pain becomes too much and the whole edifice collapses.
He needs to feel good enough about himself to discover his courage and bad enough about his situation to overcome his cowardice. This is why this type of thing is so difficult.
Disagree. Japanese society has no problem ignoring laws and no one mentioning it. In the context of decades, the complete collapse of Japanese society, nuclear warfare, millions dead, Tokyo burned to the ground, miraculous economic growth, technological transformation exceeding that which previously took place over millenia, and so much more, posting a graph of a mega-trend which implies that mega-trend hangs on one law, is completely stupid.
The idea that most people don’t really know themselves, that they live in a state of anxiety wondering why things keep happening to them, and that their self-conception rarely matches their actions, is far from only Freud’s.
Laxa is what is known in the literature as a “malignant narcissist”. Look it up 🙂
They are frightened and vulnerable people who craft a grandiose fake persona to compensate for low self-esteem. They face the world from behind this defensive barricade.
You can engage with them better knowing what you are dealing with – but they can waste your time if you take them too seriously 🙂
This is the Open Thread – there is no theme.
That you want others to hide comments you dislike does not so much suggest disinterest as….
🙂
You’d be surprised how much can change based on having essentially hostile governance demanding cultural change and that law itself can be signifier of said hostile governance.
Messing around with definitions endlessly gets you words with no meaning whatsoever. I’m unconcerned with what AaronB cares or doesn’t care about beyond when he explicitly posts falsehoods – which definitely cause harm, being false or when he spams my screen – beyond that, he has his own life and mother problems, which unfortunately have manifested a way that can cause harm to me by making me waste time talking about him.
I think that a narcissist is just someone who has a high valence on himself and his values; this isn’t even always a “bad” thing; like all personality traits, it has evolved and been selected for a reason:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/31/study-narcissists-tend-to-be-happier-tougher-and-less-stressed.html
And this can be very positive in terms of goal-accomplishment, I remember it being said that while it may seem harmful that a narcissist thinks of colleagues as tools to help him accomplish goals, if he does so in a way that benefits his colleagues(so that they may be better tools), it can essentially be an overall positive for the organization.
https://hbr.org/2004/01/narcissistic-leaders-the-incredible-pros-the-inevitable-cons
Ultimately, it just comes down to their position the organization, how well they can handle their own goal-seeking along with those of others, and what they intend. Obviously, people who think that they’re holier than thou who irritate people on my side like songbird can be safely ignored so as long as they really hold onto their values, because they won’t do anything; if they become a problem, so as long as they are indeed “too moral” to utilize effective measures, then they can be liquidated with relative ease. If not, they’re hypocrites as usual.
I am not your mother complex. Your mother isn’t even your mother complex.
Trust me, if you ever have to scroll down as much as I do and keep finding endless incoherent screeds while looking for useful posts, you’ll also discover that it is indeed more than lack of interest, but real annoyance.
I’m unsure of the difference between the first part of your argument and simply saying “absolutely anything is possible,” which is also indistinguishable from saying “I don’t have a clue.
Your second part, implying that this is a symptom of a hostile government, is not something I can address, because that theory is hidden from me. I also find that, as with Aaron’s “smothering machine”, such theories of hidden organised forces are omni-present to the individual and not the society they are speaking of. Yours may be different, I can’t know. Or I may have misunderstood your implication.
You clearly seem to believe global feminism is a net good. Really, this is just the forceful push of Anglo Gender Norms.
I can’t say I’m surprised to find a White Supremacist on this site, but a woman is much more rare.
Being English, you perhaps haven’t gone through the demographic changes necessary to make you apologetic for your imperial history, but in due time.
I must say that it’s remarkable how a blue-pink haired Harry Potter lesbian such as yourself finds it appealing to preach on such a site as this, but alas I must hold my tongue (for the entertainment of my fellow commentaters)
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
I am sorry you find your sexuality bewildering, but it isn’t the fault of the “Anglos.”
You could always put me on ignore?
Buy then you would not be able to see my “dangerous” comments that you must fight 🙂
Imagine, some sensitive and poetic high IQ boy , whose family and culture is funneling him into STEM, but he would rather camp and hike all day – he reads me, and finds the courage to do do!
A tragedy! He will no longer contribute to the transhumanist project.
No, this must be fought.
I’m afraid there’s nothing for it, Daniel – you will just have to wade through my comments trying to find the offending ones – danger is, you might find yourself eventually affected by my philosophy 🙂
All the best, Daniel!
.
Ah, a lovely political programme!
You hear that, songbird? You’re being slated for liquidation in the new political dispensation if you don’t toe the line 🙂
Good to see Laxa agreeing – kinda puts her warm and fuzzy side on display 🙂
No wonder utu stood up for you so strongly last thread – I think he has segments of the population he too would like to liquidate.
As always, Unz does not disappoint!
The “Thanks” was to Daniel for sharing his coherent ideas. I may disagree with much of them, but they are well-aligned with who is he is right now, so I treasure them as an authentic expression of a clear perspective.
Someone might have to make note of your lies of brainless human beings, incorrect assumptions of other posters, incorrect assessment of the lives of hunter gatherers, and other assorted factually incorrect nonsense, yes.
I was thinking that perhaps online debates, where we can channel our repressed aggressive instincts, are just another way we find to cope with the fact that we are so separated from a more natural way of life. As such, they can be very useful.
But still, I wonder what 19th century Teton Sioux would think if they saw a group of pale-faces like this one engaged in very serious personal attacks, while claiming to have no interest in each other whatsoever or to have only their opponents’ well-being in mind LOL
Hostile governance in this case is not mysterious. Explicitly as part of MacArthur’s goals was to “remake Japan into a democratic, peace-loving nation.”
So it was, indeed, an explicit effort to remake the defeated people; an understandable cause given the threat that they had caused, but its not mysterious that it was definitely imposed upon them.
Do you have some special fears that you’ll like to share with us, Aaron?
Removing cancer is indeed a good thing.
“Imposed” is a strong word as it implies success against the will of the object. I’ll concede that for a few years there was an attempt to impose a different, if not necessarily “hostile”, set of social norms.
I just see the Japanese as fully consenting and also as then taking on the baton, after just a few years, and running with it exactly as they want for the following 7 decades. It feels like allocating responsibility for lower black American household wealth to “redlining” or some other antiquarian concern.
This open thread has produced cause for furious use of the scroll wheel.
Do not promote the use of the ignore function.
Ignore is for cowards and must never be used. It should be removed from this site, and I have repeatedly advised Lord Unz to eliminate it.
One can deal with AaronB’s comments by employing the scroll wheel or page down key.
How would you distinguish an “attack” from an “observation”?
Decades is probably more accurate than a few years, but at any rate:
“The beatings continue until the morale improves,” kind of consenting? Ah, I do like this kind of definition of consent. I’m sure that it can find use in many different contexts.
This has always been the kind of consent I’ve liked.
Yes, well, maybe, I experience little friction in seeing the world, but regardless of how these things are agreed upon, it is still true that the Japanese are far from having taken on all of the things which were suggested they should have.
Thanks. That was new to me, since I never played that game. Wonder if he was influenced by Susumu Ohno (who coined the term “junk DNA), who, though living in the US for much of his life, seems to have been a popular figure in Japan.
While I think such DNA serves a purpose, I found the dialogue quite stimulating. My main biomodel for the sociopathology of the internet has been something electrical – overabundance of action potentials. Lack of inhibitory impulses. A disorder akin to epilepsy, or probably schizophrenia. But it is interesting to try to think of it as a bio accumulation that inhibits some vital process.
Interesting Deep State analogies too. Though, in another game, I must admit I felt Kojima got carried away with cinematic dialogue.
I think that if I had control of your eyes, I could make you see anything I wanted you to see. If I had control of your ears, I could make you hear anything I wanted you to hear. And if I had both, then your sense of “being” would not really be your own at all, or at least significantly not so.
This is likewise true if you had control of a nation, its media and its educational systems, you would likely to be able to impact and mold its population into your morals vastly more so than before. This is why physical control is quite important: ultimately, that which we consider as mental or spiritual, is quite subject to physical control.
Been reading some of the clinical definitions.
One thing that was fascinating to me is that the US has a higher cutoff in diagnosing psychopathy than the UK. Though, I wonder what Blair’s score would be.
Even though I’m a strong hereditarian, the stuff on narcissism made me feel a little bad. Apparently, there are detectable differences in the brain of many narcissists, and it does have a heritable component. But perhaps something good could be made of it. Test, to use it where it would be useful, and maybe block it from the political class.
The chemical can’t do anything to the catalyst. Accepting that seems to be people’s greatest challenge.
I’ve heard the argument that Japan, with its 2chan, actually foreran a lot of the issues that we saw on the internet now, so in that sense, Kojima was just letting us know what he already saw happening in Japan. It is an interesting idea that it is basically a form of “informational” obesity that had led to an increasing chaos in society.
I recently purchased a book when I was sick: The Ascent of Information by Caleb Sharf who proposes to explore this and the notion of “information” having formed almost a kind of lifeform(the so-called dataforme) which interacts with humanity. Now, I ended up just watching worldbuilding material on how skies can be green or red instead, but I do imagine that I’ll get to finish it and write a bit on it.
Try reading the original story of Narcissus and Echo. The Ancient Greeks were astute. Then reflect on how it makes you feel and see what wisdom comes from there. What would you do if you were Narcissus and looked into the lake?
If you don’t mind revealing your identity, could you tell us who you are? If you do mind, I apologize for even asking. I myself enjoy the anonymity of shielding my own identify under a moniker, so I perfectly understand if you’re hesitant.
There are several reasons why I ask. Firstly, I find your comments to be worthwhile to read. Your viewpoint often resonates with my own. Secondly, you seem to represent a very small segment of Karlin’s blog readership, that is the high I.Q. Christian community. Thirdly, I just happened to notice that you represent a conservative blogsite in your own right, “The Conservative Treehouse” and having slightly looked it over, I’ve determined that you couldn’t possibly be Andrew Breitbart, for he left this reality for another one in 2012. So, feel free to reveal as much or as little as you like, however – “inquiring minds want to know. 🙂
Anybody out there know much about Caprylic acid (C-8)? A friend has recommended that I buy some and use it “to help mental cognitive” capacities to improve. He tells me that he puts a teaspoon of it in his coffee and it really helps him. He goes on to tell me that many transhumanist and uppity near well to do high IQ types use it for similar reasons and swear by the stuff. My personal research shows that its good for alleviating skin diseases and gut type bacteria problems like candida. Not much about improving brain functions? 🙂
“He tells me that he puts a teaspoon of it in his coffee and it really helps him” to not forget to drink the coffee he just made?
That’s what I’m trying to find out? 🙂
Recently read what I thought was an interesting story by Hal Clement. “Attitude” (1943) (available at project gutenberg) In the story, humans interact with two different types of aliens. One communicates slowly with their two antennas, in an analogy to semaphores. The other communicates lightning fast, in a sort of similar fashion, but with something more like cilia (many small appendages). And there are implications about how increase in bandwidth might help or hurt the process of communication, thought, and technological development.
Pretty tangential, but I see one of the “controversies” surrounding 2chan is disparagement of Koreans. Was recently wondering how leftist the Korean pop in Japan is. Chosen Soren annually collected/collects? millions. Many Koreans seem to have originally moved to Japan for personal reasons, often in conflict with their families, so maybe, some self-selection carried down through the genes that translates into politics. Or, maybe, they came more from a certain part of Korea, and that makes them have sympathies with the North.
As nootropics go, the most consistent one has always been theanine & caffeine.
Caprylic acid seems like coconut oil; I suppose you can use it for the so-called “Bulletproof Coffee” combination and see how you find it. I tried that for awhile, it made no discernable difference for me(meditation had a much more significant effect on reflex, etc), but it probably can’t hurt.
I’d probably look into MCT oil as a whole if you’re interested in that.
You may need to update your chronology of myths learned in elementary school.
Anway, interesting that Narcissus was a homo – I think the Greeks showed real insight there. Perhaps, they would have made him wear a dress, if not for the chiton.
But, if you need to go back to a “just so” story in order to characterize something, you probably haven’t the experience or are else a poor observer of people. Since, narcissists are often highly amusing and memorable, I suspect it may be the first, rather than the latter.
Seems interesting – and yes, how thoughts and communication occurs definitely impacts the content of it, I would say. I’ll have to add it to my own reading list.
Hating on Koreans is pretty traditional in Japan, but the existence of the Chōsen Sōren in supporting North Korea definitely did not make them any more likeable. Koreans also make up a surprisingly large percentage of the lower ranks of the yakuza, which is an interesting evolution of the supposedly ultranationalist “chivalric orders,” that the yakuza are supposed to be. IIRC they also are a lot of the women in the red class districts, and of course, infamously operate the pachinko dens. The long and short is that the Koreans fill out a lot of one would consider as criminal, low-class, and otherwise troublesome element which the Japanese are happy to further blame upon.
Vice versa, as I mentioned once, I was working with Korean funding for a video game and the media and government funding basically prohibited any positive depiction of Japanese on the same level as “do not encourage drug use.” I don’t know if you ever played one of Nexon’s games, but I used to work a little bit with their staff and it was amusing how the culture was really one of upmanship against the Japanese.
Pretty hilarious, really.
As for K-pop being leftist, eh. Its more leftist/liberal than J-pop, for certain, but that’s probably more due to competitive sentiments than anything else, e.g. the Japanese often see what they produce as the best thing in the world, the fact that people would watch boys with earrings rather than more Morning Musume is just a sign that everyone else is insane. For the most part, the Japanese ignore the existence of the rest of the universe, but the existence of Koreans do basically irritate them.
I tend to agree with you. In addition to a good amount of caprylic acid, coconut oil has some additional nutrient health benefits. What type of meditation do you practice? Have you actually tried any MCT oil supplements?
In my research of C8 I also found out that its found in good abundance within palm oil. I’ve been led to believe that palm oil is to be voided because it includes a high portion of trans-fats. I know that palm oil also contains a good amount of vitamin e and carotene. I guess there’s always some good with the bad, like everything in life…
I use the Muse for it and switch between body-scan-meditation and pranayam aka the “four-fold breath” which I’ve extended into longer periods of inhale, etc. I recommend it.
I combined MCT oil with coffee to make my own “bulletproof coffee”, which was pretty fun, especially when I was able to make it into a large milk/blended coffee for overnight storage. It eventually took too much time to keep up and the oil was getting into the blender more than my wife would have liked, but I have no complaints about it.
I sexually identify as a rapist.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e8/Tuck_Postcards_by_Frank_Feller-Courtesy_of_the_Newberry_Collection-A_raid_by_the_Kurds-nby_LL10429.jpg/800px-Tuck_Postcards_by_Frank_Feller-Courtesy_of_the_Newberry_Collection-A_raid_by_the_Kurds-nby_LL10429.jpg
Regarding the Japs, a lot of their PM’s have been christian despite 1% of the population being so.
Similar to French Vietnam, secular westernization is a system of White/Christian privilege and I’m unsurprised to see a bloated fish/plain Jane type such as yourself in support of it।।
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
“I sexually identify as a rapist.” – That’s OK. You Indians with your tiny dicks can’t do much damage.
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/08/annika-schleu-68.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=2000
I think it’s time AK finally banned AaronB, even Gerard at least talks about concrete topics and occasionally posts information of value.
I’m strongly against banning anyone normally, but AaronB isn’t even an offensive or entertaining troll, just incredibly verbose and empty. Half this fucking thread is his and his female counterparts ramblings.
Wonder what percentage of Nork escapees become Christians. Must be pretty high. Think they identify it as an anticommunist status signal, partly since Christian radio signals beam in. Partly because it seems a good palliative to Jucheism.
Heard that Christian fertility in SK has eugenic trends.
It takes two to tango? I quit trying to disentangle what AaronB and Daniel Chieh are splitting hairs about long ago…
https://st2.depositphotos.com/4431055/7502/i/450/depositphotos_75026749-stock-photo-tired-yawning-boredom.jpg
I refuse to carry a knife smaller than my dick.
I carry a Kabar, which is also Grave in Farsi.
I’d remind you I’m a NW Indian so basically a diff race, but you’re the dick expert here.
Not sure. Spandrell doesn’t think Asian Christianity will last after the GIs leave.
Asians also seem to be more pragmatic about religion according to him, Idk I’m not on Urbit.
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Do you really think anybody cares whether you are NW, NS, SW or SE Indian? It makes less difference than what Ukies and RusNat’s here claim about differences between the fish close to the West or East banks of the Dnieper river.
In Europe and American you Indians do not come across as more than exotic fags who temporarily by an inexplicable omission are still permitted to voice you opinions.
Some minor inconveniences with cancelled (domestic, international travel is still fully closed) flights and now having to ‘check-in’ in most public places makes using a brick-phone impossible, but yes trivial. During the brief 2020 lockdown at the height of the hysteria, I just took a 4WD and explored the national parks, which were utterly empty then, it was great.
Admittedly I was very doubtful about the actual seriousness of Covid then as well, although unlike most covidskeptics the weight of evidence did change my mind a little later.
Until 2 months ago the virus had been more or less totally supressed nationwide (just isolated cases popping up and being swatted), but now the threshhold for practical elimination may have been passed, because the Liberal (the ‘right-wing’ party in Australia) government took such half-measures in Sydney, for political reasons.
I don’t follow Corona very closely though, I find it a dull topic and only holds interest as far it’s accelerating China’s rise relative to the West.
Rosie’s comments are in general no more retarded than the comments of countless male UR commenters. This is Unz Review, where babbling insanity is the norm. You have to remember that AK filters out most of the worst drooling insanity on his blog. Spend a few minutes on just about any other Unz Review blog and you’ll think you’ve wandered into the locked ward of a mental hospital.
Rosie was consistently singled out for attack on UR not because her comments were crazier than the average UR comments, but because she was a woman. You could be forgiven for thinking that the intention was to let women know that they’re not welcome on UR.
I’m not saying that Rosie didn’t make retarded comments on occasion, but dozens of other commenters would say much more retarded things and be given a free pass.
Watching the treatment of Rosie was like seeing a textbook demonstration of How Cancel Culture Works.
From what I know personally, Nexon had no problem making a game (Kemono Friends) which is Japan-centric (the setting/map is shaped like Japan) even tho there are animals from every corner of the world. But it is for the Japanese market and you can’t be explicitly anti-target audience.
Their opinion on the “popularity” of K-pop is likely correct, since proto-poz signalling is suffuse.
How different is this from cancelling someone on Twitter?
I have been ignoring the 2 narrow-minded Sikhs who’ll be better in an echo chamber of their co-ethnic kshatriyas. But I don’t want them or anyone being banned from here.
“Checking-in” all the time is already seen as too intrusive by libertarian-minded Americans (amd increasing segments of the West) which has a point on their own logic. But great observations even if you did some of them out-of-the-way.
Although it might pretend to be a collection of blogs, this is really one of the last anonymous internet forums, or “message boards”, that exists anywhere, and offers a stable commenting system with multinational discussion.
Scary how fast the world changes: Anonymous internet forums were common towards the beginning of the century, but today are extinct almost. For those of us who enjoy anonymous message board, the existence of this forum is an invaluable and irreplaceable service, like finding people who will fix your Nintendo GameCube, or a shop that sells DVDs.
And “there is no free lunch”. Internet forums have not been profitable for many years, and someone is paying the bills to provide us with this anachronism that we enjoy here. In this case, the bills are being paid, because it provides space for a deranged circus of freaks, that satisfied certain fetishes of a wealthy owner who pays for the website’s bills. But where else are you going to go for your internet forum experience – the YouTube commenting system?
Considering we have a free service here, it can feel like ingratitude to mention anything about its content. I mean, if you found a rare service like someone who can fix your Nintendo Gamecube, would you complain about his haircut and so on.
It’s probably not surprising, that the content filters for a majority of “angry sounding writers, who do not read books, have IQ lower than 60”. Sometimes they can seem like “people with half of the brain removed”.
And when you found someone to talk to, who you believe might have read a book, and might have a “IQ above 60” – they soon will run away from us, perhaps because of paranoia for being associated with us. For example, after a short time of contribution, disappearance happened to German Reader, Bashibuzuk/Anonymous4, melanf, etc and some others whose names I have forgot?
But again, are you really going to leave to write your opinions on the YouTube commenting system?
One of the features of the anonymous international message board of the 2000s (of which we are one of the few to still exist), was that the user becomes more or less a disembodied voice, and there is hardly much space to complain about sexism in this format.
Afterall, it is like we are tying a post-it sticker with our comment, onto a city noticeboard, anonymously and under cover of darkness. It’s not more interaction than can be contained in anonymous notes, that desert islanders might have put inside a bottle. But it highlights some of the miracle of the internet – being able to tie notes onto a noticeboard that can be instantly accessed from any part of the world.
I think they were more on the Sailer board, rather than here. Didn’t they flood the board with angry, deranged argumentation with another user, and then disappear together?
By the way, many years ago, I remember there had been women users here – there was a user called “Latvian nationalist”, and one called “Russian-speaking Canadian”.
They wrote like they were not missing half of the brain, but they didn’t become addicted to the forum.
Of forums I have posted on, I think the only really gender balanced, forums, were based on emigration. Those forums have a mostly transitory population that leave when they managed to succeed, and maybe a oldtimers that are boasting about how lucky they are to live in Canada.
On the Sailer forum, they posted something about Tucker Carlson (a representative of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News) going to Hungary.
And so reading online indeed, Fox News, is currently visiting Hungary, and showing some support for the authorities. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58104200
Whether they can resist becoming friends with Republicans in the USA, will be like an “IQ test” for the Hungarian authorities.
For an external ally of America, one of the worst thing that can happen is to become associated with only one of two political parties, as it implies that the other half of the country will instantly be determined to dislike you – as you can become a placeholder or symbol of the enemy political party.
It’s funny if cynical Fox is exploiting the Hungarian government for American internal partisan conflicts, as Rupert Murdoch will understand this implies that you send the other half of the politicized Americans people to dislike an allied NATO country. But Orban’s US marketing team must explain that now is a time to create distance between yourself and a defeated ex-president Trump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s01ZL5TnBNY
Women care, cops/soldiers care, who cares about the rest we barely care about the 2 former.
A Sikh is the most popular PM candidate among all but men > 55 incl young women in Canada.
Canada tends to lead the rest of the Western world by a few years, that’s about it.
Sikhs will be fine, you can poo in the loo with the Hindus/Muslims.
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
So?
The Troll Button should also be abolished. It is used entirely by people who are upset that someone has dared to express an opinion with which they disagree and to which they are unable to present a coherent counter-argument. It’s classic passive-aggressive stuff. It’s very amusing that rightoid men like to accuse women of passive-aggressive tactics when they themselves are addicted to the practice.
Use of the Troll Button is the equivalent of a five-year-old calling another five-year-old a big poopy-head. Perhaps Lord Unz could simply replace it with a You’re Just a Big Poopy-Head button.
To be honest I don’t think the Disagree Button is useful either. The Agree and Thanks buttons are the only useful buttons. If you can’t answer someone’s arguments then nobody cares if you disagree with them.
If you can’t handle dealing with schizophrenics, bitter losers and drooling fanatics what are you doing on Unz Review in the first place?
Public opinion doesn’t exist in the sense of the public having intelligent, coherent, properly thought-out opinions. The public does have wants (or needs if you prefer) but they’re vague and incoherent.
Expecting the public to have intelligent views on a subject like immigration is like expecting five-year-olds to have intelligent, coherent, properly thought-out opinions on the dietary requirements of children. Five-year-olds just know what they want. They want candy and chocolates and they don’t want broccoli. The public wants things that are mutually incompatible and if you try to tell them that these things are mutually incompatible they cry and stamp their feet.
If you control the media and educational institutions you can persuade five-year-olds to want a particular brand of candy and chocolate but you’ll have an uphill battle persuading them that they want broccoli.
There’s nothing wrong with the wants (or the needs) of the public, you just have to understand that those wants/needs are vague and incoherent. This makes the public absurdly easy to manipulate.
Progressives have been successful in convincing the public they can have chocolate and candy and they don’t need to eat their broccoli. Social conservatives have told the public that they have to eat their broccoli and then they still won’t get candy and chocolates because wanting candy and chocolates is wicked.
Based.
As long as you are a lefty reddit.com is 1.) no where close to extinct 2.) a decent anonymous internet forum. It even works if you are not a lefty as long as you are discrete. I have only been banned from a reddit forum one time–I posted a link to Kaczynski’s manifesto at the wrong time place and it still amazes me to this day that a mod declared that a bannable offense.
Robert Anton Wilson preceded Moldbug’s “Cthulu swims left” when he observed that his attitude about politics remained consistent but when he was young he was very left and now (I think he was around 60 y.o.) he was pretty right as everybody else had leaped to the left of him.
But I do agree that forum discussions have generally gotten squelched as corporations have colonized and conquered and made their imperial domain this internet of 2021 which really ain’t nothing like we thought it was going to be 25-30 years ago. Totally. I remember when I moved to CA I wanted to be there because the future is going to happen first in CA. That may even still be true but now I moved away. : )
Not abolished, replaced with some custom button, depending on the forum. I suggest “nuke” for here.
On a related note, I’ve been struggling to think of feature films that are pro-atom. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one vaguely so. “Fantastic Voyage”, where a nuclear sub is miniaturized and injected into an unconscious scientist in order to try to operate and wake him from his coma.
I’ve also thought of the film “Aliens” where nuking the monsters from orbit is seriously considered. But it is a bit of a wash, as that positive sentiment is cancelled out by the tension of the local plant accidentally going into meltdown mode and exploding.
Was it not caused by the aliens squatting there in or next to the reactor?
As Daniel alluded to, it’s a medium chain triglyceride. MCTs passively diffuse from the GI tract into the portal system without the intermediary stage of being absorbed by the lymphatic system. They therefore are metabolized rapidly into ketone bodies even when blood sugar and glycogen are not low.
Ketone bodies are an alternate source of energy for neurons and improve cognition and mood.
There may therefore be a benefit to caprylic acid, but this benefit would mainly accrue to someone not following a low carbohydrate diet.
The trad and lindy response to women on the internet is “tits or GTFO”.
It is entirely reasonable and correct to hold femoids to different standards than men.
I have also communicated this advice to Lord Unz.
Actually, the problem is more fundamental than what you note. The problem is that trolling is the purpose and indeed foundation of the internet. It should never be presented as a negative thing, which is what the troll button is for.
Perhaps we could replace it with a “Faggot” button.
Been quite a while since I watched it, but I thought it was caused by the marines using machine guns against the aliens, in contravention to their orders to only use small arms (because of the reactor.)
I think I do remember something about the queen liking heat though, so maybe she blocked some coolent outlet?
Possible. I also haven’t seen it for quite a while.
Certainly a more economic use of space than “You’re Just a Big Poopy-Head”. 🙂
Any opinion as to which might be more effective/beneficial, MCT concoction or just plain high quality coconut oil?
Best is to commit to a LCHF diet. Otherwise MCT oil, which includes caprylic acid.
BTW, this is so true. I just spent a night in the woods – darkness, silence, solitude, immensity – and all these petty fights begin to seem so utterly inconsequential.
Yet I am sure Monday morning back in the city, I will feel a vague restlessness and irresistible compulsion to respond heatedly to some utterly inconsequential thing Daniel said 🙂
All our petty fights and squabbles are compensations for losing our “sense of home”, fitting in as part of something greater than ourselves – transcending the narrow circle of our petty “self”.
Banished from this connection to something “non-human” and “larger-than-human”, trapped among fellow humans, all our fights are merely an attempt to find our way “home” – so we think this philosophy, this political programme, will save us – and everyone must agree with us, or it will fail 🙂
We become intolerant, panicky, authoritarian.
Interestingly, religion has the capacity to give some people this connection to something larger, but only if God is conceived as representing a “non-human” order.
Too often in religion, God just gets reduced to the human realm. He is just a human King, who we must serve in order to physically prosper (most average Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, see God this way).
That’s when religion becomes the cause of wars, rather than freeing us from petty concerns about survival and narrow physical self-interest, it becomes an extension of it.
When I tried to briefly become religious again, I quickly realized that every religious community is largely composed of people who see religion as an extension of narrow concerns with human self-interest and physical survival, and not at all with transcending narrow “self” and connecting to a “larger-than-human” order of things.
Not for me 🙂
That is why religion cannot survive in the modern world – science does for most people what religion did.
Yet the true task of religion is today catered to neither by religion not science – concerned as they both are with are mere petty concerns of survival.
Where shall we now turn to to transcend our narrow circle of self and find our place in a on human, larger than human order?
This – perhaps most important and fundamental – human need has not gone away, and we will have to find an outlet for it that transcends our old categories.
The word religion, with it’s old connotations, may have been taken over by science.
We need a new vocabulary.
https://shafaq.com/en/Iraq-News/Iraq-s-Civil-Aviation-Authority-halt-flights-to-Belarus
It’s amazing to me that after watching probably thousands of TV shows and movies, I can still remain enthralled and spellbound by a well made film or show.
By this point, I have seen every permutation of plot. I think the number of basic plots are like under ren or something, and I have seen every “type” of character, and every permutation of both, hundreds of times.
And yet, a well made new film can always strike you forcefully as “original”.
Yet, what can possibly be original about it? Clearly, not any abstract element that can be described in words. Not anything that can be put in a mathematical formula. That is all extremely limited.
I suggest that each new film etc has an “emergent” quality that is more than the sum of its parts.
And it is this – utterly intangible – element that accounts for the feeling of “originality” we feel about something that is composed of utterly well known and familiar parts.
Every great film or show seems to have a “personality” – some extra quality that is mysterious and intangible – that makes it compelling and irresistible.
And it struck me, that this applies to humans too. Why do I enjoy having the same old conversations with my old friends? We know each other so well! None of us ever say anything new or unexpected at this point 🙂
Yet each human, has a mysterious, intangible, character – or “something” – that makes these encounters seem perpetually fresh and new, and inexhaustibly fascinating – even discussing humdrum topics over breakfasts
The more we lose touch with intangible – what cannot be put into words – the more we lose touch with the inexhaustible richness of life – and it’s interest and fascination.
Perhaps that’s why modern scientific man is so restless and bored?
Does the low carb diet that you ascribe to minimize high quality carb foods like vegetables and fruits? I understand that carbs produce a lot of unnecessary sugars, and therefore one should limit breads and pasta. Give up beets, carrots, celery, spinach kale?…how about juicing?
Do you think that including MCT oil within ones diet will in the long run help to shed some pounds?
If the “Greeks” are you and “Narcissus” is you, then your comment might make sense, but it has nothing to do with the story.
What type would you like to wear? Something short, tight and showing off all of the right places or something more flowing and fabulous?
“Songbird” indeed.
He’s the incel version of Bruce Jenner.
I worked with Nexon in 2000 with Shattered Galaxy, I don’t think they have the same ownership now even.
Narcissism is indeed one of the most unfortunate conditions one could be afflicted with.
I agree that once you understand it it makes you sad about people who have it, and not angry.
Not just politics, but narcissism interferes with success in almost any field. No narcissist could be a good scientist or performer in any field.
Narcissism is basically an “inflated” sense of self, because one believes ones true self is inadequate. So it’s purely defensive – it is fundamentally in a war against reality. A narcissistic scientist, for instance would be too afraid of failure to introduce a bold new theory, or do justice to a rival theory.
What is most conducive to success in any field, and balance and sanity and health, is “self-acceptance” – the opposite of narcissism, which is based on insecurity.
Increasingly, we do have tests for narcissism, and hopefully in the future we can weed it out of politics and other fields.
Because narcissism is so destructive, it’s already highly tested for in elite army units, and weeded out for. So we can do it.
In my experience, a fascinating thing about narcissists and psychopaths in general is that they will, if asked plainly, admit it. They don’t see anything wrong with it 🙂 (by defitnition narcissism means lack of ability to see the larger context in which one lives).
The songbird he’s named for is quite fabulous indeed: has a voice like an organ, brilliant multicolored eyes and has an excellent catch- and-release game with socially liberal children.
https://www.dailysabah.com/world/mid-east/lebanons-hezbollah-fires-rockets-into-israel-after-airstrikes
Wouldn’t get my hopes up just yet if I were you. Maybe many more migrants to come.
https://www.indianpunchline.com/jcpoa-a-bridge-too-far/
https://www.indianpunchline.com/a-new-dawn-breaks-in-tehran/
Bhadrakumar seems to think that an Iran nuclear deal is still possible.
It’s clear that a war between Iran and Israel is inevitable at some point. It’s not a matter of if, but when and how. In a sense, Iran and Israel are already at war through IDF vs Hezbollah skirmishes for years already, but since 2006, no decisive clash has happened just yet. Depending on the intensity of war between Israel and Iran in the future, maybe there’s nothing more than just a 2nd attempt by the IDF to successfully invade Lebanon and expel Hezbollah coming up. Maybe Israel has decided upon all out war and since it can’t conventionally invade Iran with the IDF or even the US military, it will just nuke Iran and Lebanon (as a Hezbollah stronghold). Or there might be something in between.
Or there might be a nuclear deal. Or the status quo of intense skirmishing between the IDF and Hezbollah continues. Who really knows?
Whatever happens, Unz Review will be chock full of coverage of it, just like the Hamas vs IDF showdown over Gaza back in May 2021.
Hera’s favourite. Makes sense.
You mock it, but even with Bioshock written by a socially liberal person, it was still during the era when people were yet able to do objective thinking. The Songbird in many ways, for all of the horror that it symbolizes, it also a triumph of the socially stratified and heavily classist theocracy government that produces it: a man who has sacrificed everything that he is to become a nigh-invincible weapon of the state, a herald of the inevitable doom, symbolic of the lesser but more extensive sacrifice of Comstock’s militant forces.
No single individual could build, or even maintain such a thing. Only through the structure of the entire order is capable of such a magnificent “monster.”
The ultimate revolution of the lower classes that proposes to “bring equality” is ultimately as gruesome, if not more so than the theocracy, and appears to only succeed in causing everyone to die, as they are ultimately far more interested in breaking the “system of oppression”, than understanding the details and skillsets needed to maintain the highly artificial world they live to continue functioning.
Then, I suppose, they are all equal in death.
Babe, if u wanna get raped by a brown man you gotta hit up Pakistan||
This seems to be a good sedge to recommend knives. I don’t carry large knives around because the primary use of knives will not be, imaginations to the contrary, be to defeat warriors in glorious combat but rather to make your life a little easier all around. As such, I carry and recommend the following:
The keysmart pro itself is pretty clever, as a keychain accessor with an included light and registers to your Tile system so that it can’t easily be lost. The multitool comes with a box-cutter knife that has been surprisingly useful to me over the years, especially when opening various cartons for my kids. Like all multitools, its not as good as the real thing, but its there when you need it.
I keep it with myself at all times when I keep my keychain, which is most times.
This is a gardening tool but is reasonably sized enough to be a proper knife, as well – usually 6″ long or more. What’s impressive about it is that it comes with a sawtooth, so it overcomes an important limitation of knives: the ability to precisely apply force to a very small but specific area. I’ve found it frequently useful for hacking through underbrush, as twigs and thickets will not really respect your efforts to slice through them, but you can usually saw through things with relative ease. It can also uproot things as needed as a substitute shovel.
I keep it in the car. Obviously, get one one with a sheath or you’ll be its primary victim.
Hatchets are one-handed axes with one sharp end and a solid hammer-like back. Again, you’ll want one with a sheath or you’ll be its primary victim. Its useful for all tasks which a knife just doesn’t give you enough force for, and the backside should be a good substitute for a hammer(I’ve used mine in exactly that capacity several times).
I keep one in the car, but its been useful enough that a spare often ends up in various places in the house.
Both 2 & 3 are perfectly capable of being weapons as well in the extraordinarily rare event of that proves necessary, but they also have the advantage of being “household items” which if you should in the course of defending yourself happen to cause mortality, would provide you with an excellent reasoning why it would be with you as opposed to a purpose-made weapon.
I accept the hard realities of making societies work with material of widely varying quality. When I say more toleration, freedom and security, I am recognising that reality implicitly, both by using “more,” but also by balancing off “freedom” and “security”. Along with this, I am happy to agree that it is perfectly possible, in some circumstances, for the society you describe to best fulfill those aims.
I also, despite seeing everything as equally worthy of love, recognise that some peoples’ senses are more open than others. I am therefore more concerned with their wellbeing, because they experience everything more; although this only a rational description of the pattern of my natural sympathies.
I wouldn’t eat people, of course, but I am fine with eating animals and plants.
I may have often previously sought out darkness, but that is only because that was the quickest way to learn what lies within.
All this means, that while I can understand your sentiment, I am extremely concerned by the cost that would be born by real world Finks or Suchongs.
I’m sorry if that happened to you.
“Intangible” to you. The question is: why?
Yes, that “personality” is your projection.
If you could think about this, before inevitably reacting, you might see what good news it is, rather than experiencing it as “an attack.”
Same as above, in your case.
It can be put into words, if with difficulty. You just can’t, perhaps because of the limiting belief you are expressing here.
Again, don’t react defensively, but reflect on the great news for you, and about you, that this is.
No, most narcissists won’t happily admit to being narcissists, because they are so unaware of themselves that they could not possibly have a clue of how they are. If you ask them to look inside, they invariably see “nothing,” if you can even get them to look before they launch into their endless loop of defensive tactics.
I’m sorry if you’ve met a true self-aware narcissist. I don’t see a difference between them and what is popularly considered a sociopath. They can be very harmful if they have some need of you.
I understand you’re threatened by the idea that we cannot fully understand the world, because that means we can’t fully control it.
But the idea that the world is actually richer and more mysterious than the limited categories of our human mind can be a thrilling and wonderful thing, a source of meaning and delight – but it does involve surrender of control. Which can be terrifying for some.
But if you prefer to live in a limited world, that is entirely compassed by words and the categories of our mind, I don’t blame you. It’s a safer world, a tamer world, a world with less glory and beauty but also less terror and danger.
We all have to make our choices, and my ideas certainly aren’t for everyone. I totally respect your right to your choices..
When narcissists look within, they see jealousy, rage, resentment, envy – a desire to invalidate other people and take them down. When they look deeper, they see a scared little boy or girl that was never “enough”.
That is why the surface layer is a grandiose fake persona – as a fortress, with the drawbridge up.
The way out for the narcissist is to transcend the narrow circle of “self” – a self that doesn’t exist, can’t be inadequate, and doesn’t need to be inflated as a compensation.
Most narcissists have too many layers of defenses to make this breakthrough, though – but a few can.
That is a good point that there is the website Reddit, which is similar to an old fashioned anonymous message board, and yet where the majority of the users seem to be teenagers.
However, it’s also more like the YouTube commenting system, where the comments are voted up and down, and there are too many users to remember who you are writing to.
It seems as the internet has become mainstream, people do not have an interest in anonymous, multinational discussion, with people they do not know. I don’t think we even need a conspiracy theory to explain it.
Instead, people prefer to talk to their friends, on social media. When they have political discussion, they do it non-anonymously, and argue with friends and family, rather than strangers.
For the human, the concept of “global village”, was less popular than electronically mediated “actual village”.
I still remember the different atmosphere of the 2000s internet, when it was a non-mainstream, alternative, hipster space. Because less of the normal people were using the internet, it had a greater extent of brutality, eccentricity and anti-government views. And one of the most interesting things on the internet of course were message board discussions, among anonymous, multinational people.
Scary how the world moves so fast, and sometimes not in a forward direction – things which had seemed to be so modern and exciting 15 years ago, become already forgotten ruins, that only old people can still remember. I recall still when DVDs had seemed so modern and exciting; today people view them like they are ancient antiques.
And yet, of course, a DVD is infinitely superior technology, to things like website Twitter that contains only a few lines of text and clickfarming system that feeds people back increasingly narrow and predictable lines of text.
I’m actually somewhat doubtful of this. The two countries have been threatening each other with annihilation since at least 1993, just like Netanyahu has ad nauseum warning that Iran is ‘a few months away from the bomb’ since about the same time.
As an aside, following the Gulf War, Israel even extended a hand (covertly, of course, it was conducted via an Arab-American businessman, working for oil company, managed by a Jewish-American) to Saddam Hussein, offering a lineline for Iraq to circumvent American sanctions, particularly oil sales. Obviously, it was another one of those so-lauded Israeli ‘peace’ deals, conducted solely to enable another war, just as Begin made peace with Egypt so Israel could conduct its Lebanon adventure (the complications of which heavily contributed to Begin losing his sanity around ’82).
Back on topic, I don’t know if 2006 was really a decisive victory, more of a stalemate where both sides claimed victory, although perhaps a strategic victory for Hezbollah, considering Israel wasn’t even able to occupy the old ‘Security Zone’ (lol) whereas earlier the IDF and its proxies (now reviled within Lebanon, with zero political power) rapidly overran the whole country up to Beirut.
I suspect there’s actually a good deal of internal disagreement within Iran about obtaining Nuclear Weapons, much of the religious establishment (as did Khomeini) opposes them as ‘un-Islamic’, and I tend to believe that they’re sincere. Khamenei himself sends mixed signals for domestic consumption, fence-sitting or being purposely inscrutable as he does on so many internal issues.
Netanyahu actually ordered a conventional airstrikes on Iran, twice, back in the late 90s and the early 2010s, but was overriden by the Israeli security establishment (who can’t stand him, btw) in both instances. Israel eventually did murder several prominent Iranian nuclear scientists (probably via the MEK), one in a rather grisly motorbike shooting. Compatively restrained, considering the Mossad frequently gets too lazy for such precision and and ends up killing its victims’ entire families as well. Sometimes they get sloppy and murder random Moroccan waiters or Australians stupid enough to work for them too.
I think Israel is much more worried about propping up the Saudi family, the de-facto partition of Syria and the future orientation of Iraq at the moment. Overall though, other than Iran itself, Israel’s grand-strategy since the 50’s (The Lavon Plan, i.e., setting the whole Middle-East on fire) has worked out almost perfectly.
By the way, did you used to comment under the “TheTotallyAnonymous”? Although despite your name, I suspect not, or you would have somehow brought up Croatian and Albanian evildoings already.
Told you so.
I cringe every time I read every one of your posts.
I used to think it’s even politically questionable. It would make the Russians and Chinese feel awkward supporting them, much like how their support of North Korea is half-hearted at best. For example they voted for UN sanctions against the Norks, unlike Iran where for the moment they are protecting them against UN sanctions and might even sell them weapons. Remember how difficult their situation was under Medvedev when neither the Russians nor the Chinese were supporting them.
So I think their position is to go legal, i.e. they held onto the JCPOA until the Americans broke it and the Europeans did nothing to uphold it either, and then their new goal was to simply get to the almost nuclear power position which Japan enjoys. This means getting all of the technological chain leading to nuclear weapons, including ICBMs (Japan has an indigenous “space program”) and a huge stockpile of plutonium. Basically Japan can easily build up a nuclear stockpile larger than any other nuclear state except the US and Russia. Iran would probably be content enjoying the same position, i.e. becoming an almost nuclear power, but without paying the political price for that.
It seems that Macron is shooting himself in the feet:
https://katehon.com/en/news/hundreds-thousands-protest-across-france-over-macrons-covid-19-health-pass-mandatory
By making “health passes” hyper-intrusive, the French political establishment is creating an outcaste who has no where to go but onto the streets. France can only dive down the trajectory set during the Yellow Vests.
Of course you do. I’m glad you’re dropping the act.
You’re a progressive – you believe in progress, and you are a positivist, a believer that what can’t be known by the human mind doesn’t exist. It’s the basic faith of Modern Man.
Of course you despise and fear my philosophy of acceptance, mysticism, and non-dualism.
I don’t blame you one bit attacking me to discredit my philosophy. Doesn’t it feel better to drop the poses?
For my part, I completely respect your right to disagree with me and recognize my ideas and values aren’t for everyone. To each their own.
Well, I’m not an expert on Middle East/West Asia or Iran v Israel affairs, but to me it seems like prolonged and intense skirmishing must escalate into something decisive at some point.
I’m inclined to think it was a strategic victory for Hezbollah, although won at a price in terms of manpower, human capital (dead/wounded quality-veteran officers) and material resources more expensive than the devout anti-Israel crowd would like to admit.
I’m inclined to think as reiner Tor explains in comment #501 that most of Iran’s elite intends to use the threat of getting nuclear weapons to actually back down from it, in order to extract the obvious political and economic benefits. Maybe apart from a possible few hardcore types in the IRGC and Hezbollah that would actually want to nuke Israel, even if it meant MAD, that would most probably be in Israel’s favor.
As A123 points out in comment #493, Israel could very well have a bunch of anti-Iran and anti-Hezbollah 5th columns latently waiting to be activated. Apart from MEK and some Lebanese “dissidents”, there’s also Kurdish and Azeri separatism in Iran that could be activated if the circumstances are right, similar to Syria back in 2011-2015.
Lol, I vaguely remember something about this. Any sources/links to provide if you don’t mind?
The position of the Saudi family and “orientation” of Iraq seems pretty much inevitable to turn against Israel without the US military in both places (Only Bahrain’s mere existence as a country with its ~40% pro-Iran Shia minority-majority seems even more unviable than the continued rule of the Saudi family lol). Iran with Hezbollah and other Shia militias is already the strongest local military actor in Iraq, even though the US military is still nominally present. With hindsight, devastating Iraq so much, especially with the 2003 invasion, was a grave, and perhaps even fatal mistake for Israel-USA as it’s had the consequence of making Iran stronger by completely eliminating Iraq as a relevant enemy of Iran, which once used to have relative parity back in the 1980’s.
Even though Israel has done well from 1948-2000, slowly but gradually and definitively, the tide seems to be turning against Israel in the long term (and no, the UAE+Bahrain “normalization” agreements with Israel are illusory since they don’t reflect popular opinion, especially not in Bahrain, let alone all the other Arab countries). Iran and Syria could very well prove to be Israel’s ultimate undoing as the former has gained a “Shia crescent” for Hezbollah and other militias from Iran to Lebanon through Syria and Iraq (ironically).
Syria’s still not out of the picture as Assad and the overwhelming majority of Syrians that support him of different religions, ethnicities and political identities (Druze, Alawites, Sunni “moderates”, secularists, etc.) were basically saved by Russia from ultimate defeat (Iran through Hezbollah and other militias only prolonged Assad’s survival to the point of Russian intervention, and provides manpower which is valuable but not decisive). The Kurdish de-facto autonomy/self-rule in the North-East is also completely unviable without the US military presence. It’s the most probable variable to shift the situation from the current Syrian stalemate as the scramble for the Kurdish North-East between Assad and Erdogan unfolds once the US military inevitably leaves at some point. Back on topic, Assad’s Syria hasn’t surrendered its legitimate claim on the Golan Heights illegaly occupied by Israel, which could potentially become a live issue at any time in the future considering the many wars already fought between Syria and Israel since 1948.
https://www.dailysabah.com/business/defense/russia-upgrades-syrian-air-defense-against-israeli-strikes-report
Until the last few years, Israel has usually had the upper hand in its skirmishes against Hezbollah-Iran and Syria, but there are indications the tide could very well start to turn in the future (especially for Syria as Russia arms it against just like back in the Cold War times).
Vegetables and low sugar fruit (e.g. tomatoes and peppers) are fine in more or less unlimited quantities.
Beets are somewhat energy dense but can be incorporated into a LCHF diet.
If you’re having trouble you can use mathematics. For the initial period (say a few weeks, or longer if you’re trying to lose weight) limit net carbohydrate intake (fiber is not digested, so grams of fiber can be subtracted from the overall total) to no more than 30 g per day. Food can be weighed and logged using a mobile software application such as Cronometer.
Juicing is not advisable unless you’re trying to do something specific like chelate heavy metals and treat ulcerative colitis with wheat grass juice. Juicing strips out all the fiber from plants and frequently leads people to overconsume uncooked plants.
Most edible plants contain compounds which are toxic if consumed in sufficient quantity. Consumed in appropriate amounts many of these same compounds are healthful.
If you haven’t something like this before be warned there is a phenomenon known as the low carb flu some people suffer during the induction phase. It can be mitigated or eliminated by electrolytes, MCT oil, and exogenous ketones (in that order).
MCT oil added by itself to an unchanged diet would probably do nothing to help one lose weight considering that it is pure energy and fat on its own is not much more satiating that carbohydrate. Theoretically it could have some benefits in this department owing to the fact that saturated fats induce a temporary state of physiological insulin resistance which can limit the uptake of free fatty acids into adipocytes.
24/7 Thanksgiving dinner. Which is the most retarded 2 hours of the year. : (
Henry Clay who was the greatest Kentuckian ever after Daniel Boone had grandchildren who fought on opposite sides in the Civil War (War of Northern Aggression). Now they could have had some great family parties after that!
You seem to be contradicting yourself. On the one hand, you are urging the elimination of a large intake of carbs from the diet to help in losing weight, and then seem to be critical of the process of juicing for its ability to “strip fiber [carbs?] from plants”? Fiber is after all just another term for carbs isn’t it? Also, whenever I juice, I find that my desire for uncooked plants diminishes significantly.
I’m a big proponent of juicing, for I think that the inclusion of juices to the diet are an excellent source of live vitamins, enzymes, minerals and other nutrients in a most accessible manner for easy digestion. There’s less of a need to add any supplements to a diet when you juice. I consider beets a superfood, and try to incorporate them a lot into my diet to avail myself of the their high nutritional profile, including nitric oxide for excellent circulatory and heart benefits. I also like to juice certain greens (celery, spinach and kale) to keep my vitamin K levels at a high level. I strongly urge everybody to also include Natto into their diet, for its extremely high vitamin K2M7 component – this keeps your arteries clean of harmful/clogging calcium deposits and redirects the calcium to your bones and teeth where it’s necessary (truly a miraculous process!).
I really do appreciate your insights relating to nutrition because you’ve certainly given this topic a lot of thought. It’s also nice to see that you’ve returned and are now taking more of an interest in blogging here. Hopefully, Anon4 (Bashibusuk) will also one day return and continue enlightening us with his insights too!
You do realize that Dr. Gundry, a self proclaimed nutrition guru, has been on a crusade against tomatoes, especially raw ones, for several years now. He’s obsessed about the “lectins” found within. Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to kick this nasty habit, and probably eat 1-2 whole raw tomatoes per week for most of my life. We all have our guilty pleasure, don’t we (nobody is perfect?). 🙂
That’s an interesting, and important, point.
Regarding the somewhat strange and awkward sounding title of this commenting handle, I actually picked it up from a Croat nationalist podcast on YouTube, since only there of all places could one hear such a hysterically expressed phrase like “Veliko Srpsko Cetnistvo” (Greater Serbian Chetnikhood). Its use is meant to be somewhat sarcastic/embracing the “bad reputation” like many Serb Twitter accounts do where they sarcastically refer to themselves in the description as “Greater Serbian Aggressors”, “Serb Genociders”, and so on. Honestly though, it’s really just well, so what?
Contrary to the hysterical screeching of Croats, Muslims (Bosniaks), and Albanians, the Chetnik movement was actually quite unremarkable and akin to many other generic guerilla/paramilitary movements throughout the world, with a decent and occasionally impressive military performance all-round given their circumstances, but unlike claims of multiple “Chetnik Genocides against Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians”, Chetniks in reality committed war crimes (when they even did) mostly in retaliation for crimes against Serbs (I know of only one instance pre-1910 against Bulgarians in Macedonia that Vojvoda Tankosic slaughtered and burned down a Bulgarian populated village completely unprovoked). Of course, the “Greater Serbia” hysteria is completely baseless because everyone that screeches about it has absolutely no problems with Greater Croatia, Greater Albania, Greater Bulgaria, let alone Greater Bosnia and Herzegovina + Greater Montenegro, or yes, even Greater “Macedonia” lol.
Otherwise, you can guess for yourself if this is a continuation of “TheTotallyAnonymous”, although if you bothered to notice the first comment I made under this account, it highlighted some similarities in the nature of Albanian and Jewish (perhaps the term “Israeli” is more correct, although it seems to be used as a polite and non “anti-Semitic” way of referring to Jews in Israel, especially regarding their bad behavior) settler-colonialisms.
Regarding Croatian and Albanian evildoings, there are lifetimes worth to be expanded upon that, nevertheless it may be sufficient to outline some of the latest and most relevant plots currently being pushed against Serbs.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/uploads/documents/WC%20Consolidating%20Kosovo%27s%20Sovereignty%20report%208.3.2021.pdf
Clearly a coalition of Early Life Checks (Eliot Engel, Edward Joseph, Daniel Serwer, and Jason Steinbaum), Albanians, Muslims (Bosnian + an Ummah contributor), Actual + Semi/Crypto-Croats, and actual Westerners (mostly “Liberals”) has been working against Serbs for a long time (this “report” is far from the first of its kind).
The TLDR of the “report” amounts to a few points.
1: Pressure Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Spain to recognize Kosovo’s independence as the 5 defiant EU and NATO members (4 NATO members actually, since Cyprus isn’t in NATO) that don’t recognize Kosovo. The intent is for them to betray Serbia over Kosovo similar to how the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco have betrayed Palestine by recognizing Israel in the past year or so. This is disturbingly realistic regarding Greece (it’s under enormous pressure by the USA to recognize Kosovo, and Turkey is seriously threatening Greece on many different fronts) since it has already engaged in economic and other normalization with Kosovo, almost de-facto recognizing Kosovo, sort of like Saudi Arabia and Israel. Greece hasn’t officially recognized Kosovo so far, partly because Serbia has come up with the threat of recognizing Turkish North Cyprus in retaliation should it come to that, but I think neither side is enthusiastic to take those steps since it would be a noteworthy instance of joint political suicide by Greece and Serbia to the delight of their enemies.
2: It doesn’t state this explicitly, but it’s like the authors of the report almost want to openly call for Serbia being economically sanctioned (Serbia is somehow “privileged” by the “West” merely because it isn’t being sanctioned lol) simply because it dares to preserve and be committed to the relative status quo in the Balkans of Dayton Peace Treaty (preserving the mere existence of Republika Srpska), UNSC 1244 (simply continuing to refuse to recognize Kosovo) and the nonsense hysteria about “Serb proxies” (yes, the report uses that phrase) taking over Montenegro when in reality Serbia wants to secure the rights, wellbeing and privilege’s of Serbs in Montenegro against “national Montenegrin” scum, nothing more. Economic sanctions against FRY in the 1990’s were very jarring so most Serbs freak out whenever there’s even the remotest threat of economic sanctions against Serbia. Maybe they shouldn’t, since Milorad Dodik as the de-facto leader of Republika Srpska, is already under US sanctions for several years for “undermining Bosnia-Herzegovina’s territorial integrity” and iirc even being “a malign Russian actor”. It’s not the 1990’s anymore and sanctions against Serbia are increasingly becoming more difficult and unviable to execute. Should it come to that though, Orban’s Hungary would do its best to resist in the EU (obviously a favorable outcome for Viktor Orban and Hungary in their clash with Brussels is very important for Serbia), perhaps making economic sanctions against Serbia a non-starter or at least buying lots of time for Serbia to brace itself. China as a much more serious economic power would also be able to sustain Serbia much better than it tried to in the 1990’s.
3: They call for a revival of the campaign for the Albanian “Republic” of Kosovo (of course, there’s a lot of bullshit about Kosovo, Montenegro and North Macedonia’s “civic multi-ethnic harmony” and the evil “Serbia-Milosevic genociders” spoiling these fantasies about the Balkans) to continue lobbying to join noteworthy international organizations (UN, UNESCO, Interpol, etc.) and recognition by individual states. Kurti already intends to openly push for Kosovo’s recognition at the end of this September once the 1-year deadline on international lobbying on the Washington Agreement expires. Erdogan also brazenly called for international recognition of Kosovo and stated his intention to raise the issue of mutually cooperating with Joe Biden on supporting Kosovo against Serbia in their upcoming meeting, among their other bilateral issues. They’re all in for a nasty surprise since there was a lot of talk first about 5, and now about 10 countries which intend to withdraw their recognitions of Kosovo when Serbia asks them to do so.
https://www.b92.net/eng/news/politics.php?yyyy=2021&mm=08&dd=02&nav_id=111410
Also, the whole Belgrade-Pristina Brussels Dialogue is breaking down and its been a pathetic failure for several years already (it literally makes the OSCE Minsk Dialogue/Process between Armenia and Azerbaijan look good in comparison lol). Kurti literally has the audacity to accuse Serbia of committing 3 genocides against Albanians in the past 200 years. Seems like Albanians want to go down the road of Bosniaks and whining about how they’re victims of 11, or however many genocides lol.
http://prijedor24h.net/2018/07/30/vranjes-bosnjaci-napravise-dokumentarac-u-kojem-tvrde-da-su-zrtve-cak-11-genocida/
“Vranjes: Bosniaks make ‘documentary’ in which they claim they are victims of even 11 genocides”.
4: There is the obvious suggestion of arming “Kosovo” against Serbia, which is nothing new really. Even under the supposedly “based” and “pro-Serb” Trump in 2018, the “Republic” of Kosovo began forming its own army in yet another flagrant violation of UNSC 1244, the KSF (“Kosovo Security Force”), which is literally just rebranded KLA/UCK terrorists that will be given lots of heavy weapons this time. What’s more interesting is the current state of an arms race in the “Western Balkans”/Former-Yugoslavia with Serbs on one end, against Albanians and Croats on the other. Serbia is armed by Russia and China, while it has its own domestic arms industry which is quite impressive for a country of its size (not only in terms of unique weapon types, but also size and scale of revival under Vucic). Albanians (both Kosovo and Albania) are being armed by the USA, Germany, and Turkey with all sorts of heavy weapons (notably Wesley Clark intends to visit Kosovo to deliver a few standard US military Predator drones) while Croats are being armed by the USA, Israel and France (seems like France will sell ~12 Rafale fighter jets to Croatia).
Not a perfect and completely up to date list, but decent enough:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_equipment_of_the_Serbian_Armed_Forces
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_equipment_of_the_Croatian_Army
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_Security_Force#Weapons_and_equipment
https://www.dailysabah.com/business/defense/albania-earmarks-over-9m-for-turkish-bayraktar-tb2-ucavs
This whole comment is probably already long enough, even though this is an Open Thread and almost literally anything goes, but I may as well finish up.
5: Seemingly, no mention of Serbia can be complete without the issue of “Genocide” being brought up. Obviously the “genocide bludgeon” is going to continue to be relentlessly hammered and mauled against Serbs until they break, but since Vucic ascended in 2012 it’s mostly too late, and the times of easily bullying Serbs with “Genocide” accusations and charges are past. Montenegro, “Kosovo”, Croatia and Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina have adopted “Srebrenica Genocide” resolutions, but no one else in the world has actually done it (although the campaign is seemingly never-ending), so apart from making life worse for Serb minorities in these places, who really gives a shit?
https://betabriefing.com/news/region/15952-republika-srpska-assembly-rejects-genocide-denial-ban
Bosnia and Herzegovina is currently the hottest flashpoint in the “Western Balkans”. Vucic even claims the situation on the ground is currently as tense as it was in late 1996 right during the implementation of Dayton when despite US-NATO military saturation, everyone thought the war might restart again. Russia made a failed effort to veto the appointment of Christian Schmidt as Bosnia-Herzegovina’s new High Representative/Colonial Governor in the UNSC but was simply bypassed. Yes, the existence of the OHR/Office of the High Representative is a truly bizarre colonial-imperialist institution and an embarrassment for anti-Serbs and pro Bosnia-Herzegovina activists. Russia and China also tried to pass a UNSC resolution abolishing the institution of OHR but that was vetoed by the USA and several allies/vassals.
The next issue will be the continuation of the mandate of EUFOR (EU military occupation force in Bosnia-Herzegovina), which Russia and likely even China will team to veto in the UNSC at this year’s end, but will probably be de-facto bypassed yet again. The ultimate flashpoint will be Brcko district since it de-facto splits Republika Srpska in two disconnected halves. In 2022 there may well be a Bosnia-Herzegovina crisis due to an effort of deploying US-NATO-EU troops in Brcko District, economic sanctions against Republika Srpska, and severe pressure (economic sanctions and even military threats) against Serbia to stay out. Unfortunately, similar outcomes like 1878 and 1908 are possible, although it would be amazing if it turned out like 1914 with WW3, yet another world war due to the international-political subjectivity of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina again lol, but with an added touch of nuclear arsenals flying (Unfortunately I don’t think Russia and China are ready to defend Republika Srpska with their nuclear arsenals).
Obviously it won’t hopefully come to that and it’s maybe possible the USA is simply too busy with other issues to really try a military attempt to abolish Republika Srpska, but who honestly knows, really? Ironically, even though the intent of “Srebrenica Genocide” is to abolish and eliminate Repbulika Srpska, it has resulted in the boycott of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s state institutions by Republika Srpska, so it may very well have an opposite effect, maybe making the dissolution and collapse of Bosnia-Herzegovina inevitable in the future in hindsight, or at least the major crisis or even war that results from the sequence of events further on. It’s not an unreasonable assumption to think its likely Serbia will risk war and economic sanctions with Bosniaks, Croats, Albanians and NATO-USA-EU for the sake of defending Republika Srpska, even if its only a shortlived and valiant but failed effort, it still has the possibility of working since the “West” (or some of its factions) has rarely (WW1, 1941 and 1999 exempted) been willing to deploy and commit extremely serious and disproportionate economic and military resources (hundreds of thousands of soldiers) to stomping Serbs and Serbia.
Otherwise, regarding muh “Bytyqi brothers”, how about US citizens don’t join terrorist groups (even recognized as such by a US government official – Robert Gelbard), especially ones with records of atrocious crimes (while of course falsely presenting them as “innocent Albanian civilians” like all KLA/UCK scum), and then whine when they are executed by unknown lower ranked Serb Special Anti-Terrorist-Unit personnel while their commanding officer, Goran Radosavljevic (whom they baselessly try to pin the guilt on) was absent on vacation?
No, you’re speaking with someone who mostly lives within these experiences, yet you take every offer of directions as an attack. If progress may be made by accepting where you are and how you actually feel, before examining that for wisdom and taking useful action, you prefer to, like the clichéd macho idiot, drive around in circles lost saying “but I don’t need to ask for directions, I’ve got my map cribbed together from various philosophies.”
This is actually even more cringe because you aren’t just refusing to ask for directions or listen to them, but you’re loudly telling everyone that you’re already there and trying to persuade them of the veracity of your map so that they will affirm your delusion.
The secret to getting the ball rolling on geo-engineering might be to pretend that some of these pesky mountains and seas have always been named Nigger _____.
Once Doggerland has risen, and the interior of Australia been turned into a verdant plain, blacks, having made their contribution to civilization, can be returned to their home climes and safely sequestered, until such time, as we need the motivation to construct a space elevator and escape the surly bonds of Earth and the sun going nova.
No problem. We’ll just have to disagree.
Koreans supposedly have the highest consumption rate of hard liquor in the world, dwarfing Russia’s. Heard they subsidize soju, so that anyone, no matter their economic position can drink it to unwind.
I tend to think this is not a great thing from a health perspective (and will change), but it is interesting to look at it from a HBD perspective and contrast it with the US.
Koreans, who are highly adapted to alcohol consumption, produce more toxins, when they drink it, as the body’s way of discouraging the process. But, though consuming high amounts of alcohol, they behave less aggressively. And so it is subsidized there.
Americans, less adapted to alcohol, less likely to develop a flush reaction, behave more aggressively. Having experimented with Prohibition, today, they artificially increase the price of alcohol. (Ethanol is quite cheap to make). They add toxins to rubbing alcohol in pharmacies, to prevent people from buying hard liquor on the cheap.
White Americans process alcohol more efficiently, while some Asians and West Africans suffer more from it, so drink it less.
That this defective gene has not spread much more widely suggests that it is far from universally useful.
Soju is especially dangerous b/c 20% lets down your guard.
In drinking habits East Asians differ from Northern Euros in that drinking almost always accompanies food. There was not such thing as a bar culture prior to western arrival.
Oriental palettes are also generally spicier. Korean and Sichuan is very spicy. Shanghai, Japanese and Canto not as much but still more than Russian or English cuisine. Much more time and effort is taken into food preparation (Southern Euros, French and Italian of course as well)
Flavor in Northern Euro cuisine derive more from fat and sweets. The extreme case being Scottish with their deep fried buttered haggis
Haggis usually uses suet and is not deep fried.
I’m also unsure what meals you think use “sweets” for flavouring, other than deserts. It is not like Thai or Chinese cooking, which will frequently have very sweet main courses.
Traditionally, Northern European cooking consists of large, good quality servings of meat and fish and therefore did not need the use of many spices to hide the natural flavourings. Butter and salt would do.
Northern European food seems to me to take a lot longer to cook than East Asian, perhaps because Northern Europeans had fires going on more and so could take longer? But this is just my impression.
No, carbs are absorbed in the small intestines directly to the body while dietary fiber isn’t absorbed by the body; it does flow into the large intestines where certain symbiotic microbiota can consume it and produce useful vitamins for us, especially Vitamin K, but its fundamentally quite different.
I’ve never done juicing myself and it generally doesn’t seem to be advised, especially with bodybuilding.
This is not meant as value judgement, after the whole bat soup business I wouldn’t be here extoling the virtues of Chinese food. What I mean is
Complexity of flavor: typically at least on the level of Beef Bourguignon in number of steps and complexity. Yes sweet is large part. So is sour and bitter, cumin and peppercorn. Bitter melon is acquired taste but very healthy
Adventurousness in ingredients: self-explanatory and obviously can led to disreputable consequences, on this I think we can take a page from Indians
Cutting skills: knives are not used on the table, so chefs need to be very trained at this. Japanese take meticulousness of presentation even further with their bento boxes
Variety: orientals eat shared style so a full banquet would consistent of 20 or so dishes. A high-end hotel in Shanghai would have up to a 50 page menu
I get what you mean, I was merely filling out the picture. Northern European cuisine is far from my favourite. I much prefer good Indian, love French and particularly enjoy a lot of South-East Asian food. I am also a big fan of Sichuan cooking.
Despite all of this, I am also mostly happy with Poke bowls, salads and Middle Easterny, vegany style dishes.
I love sharing food, but I hate 50 page menus. Perhaps if you’re the only restaurant in a hundred mile radius, but otherwise, why not just focus on a few things you’re excellent at and let the customers go elsewhere when they want to? Those hotel dining styles strike me as exercises in ostentation, patronage and fraud, rather than enjoyment. I bet they become much less of a thing as Chinese urban socialising moves on from the “big man” style of organising.
Kunduz taken by the Taliban.
Rs671 is part of a selective sweep within East Asians. That means it has been selected for and has a purpose, so calling it “defective” is questionable. Many mutations appear defective on some level, but really confer some selective advantage.
Alcohol adaptation is regional and appears in clines based on past selective pressures, which are based in part on past availability (related to climate and trade) and geographic barriers.
There is wide range of varying alcohol adaptation within Euros, depending on ethnic group. Past exposure to wine vs. beer, etc.
I believe that it is technically a defective gene because the enzyme it gets your body to produce doesn’t work.
What’s curious is that spices are fairly new to Korea. For example, kimchee didn’t originally use spices, but they seem to have gained a lot of traction.
I think there really is something different in the pallete. Wonder what explains it and if it has been explored. Probably a lot of differences in the gastrointestinal tract. Maybe, some of that reflects back on the nose and tongue.
Much reeducation of strongk wimmin doctors ensues.
I’ve drank Korean Soju quite a bit. You should try it sometime.
It is truly the devil’s water 🙂 It makes zero sense, it’s only 20% but in some ways it’s more potent, and gets you higher, than whiskey or vodka, with a worse hangover 🙂
I like it!
It also gives you a peculiar high that is distinctive. But I actually feel this is true of all alcohol, and it’s very misleading when you just measure the alcohol content.
A “unit” of whiskey simply isn’t equal to a unit of wine or a unit of beer or a unit of vida, etc.
Supposedly, it’s all supposed to be the same, but it isn’t! Not at all. But unfortunately, they cannot measure this “subjective” element, and different alcohols hit different people differently.
Koreans can get quite reasonably violent when drunk, to be honest.
I like it that they can’t quite capture everything that’s going on with alcohol, and likely never will be able to 🙂
I think different communities get violent on alcohol not for generic reasons. In NY, white people drink a ton but it’s extremely rare to see violence. You’ll see more drunk violence in Korea. But in Britain, white people seem to get violent off alcohol all the time.
In fact, the only time in NY that I was almost involved in drunk violence was when done random British asked me if “I want to fight”. Well, at least they asked politely 🙂 I just laughed and declined, equally politely. But I found it so weird!
But apparently that’s British. I noticed when I visited Poland there were quite a few violent drunks, but not, for some reason, when I visited Ukraine.
Also I think in America, in the past white people would get much more violent when drunk, but not so much anymore.
But people drink insane amounts in Korea and Japan! I think the Japanese don’t really have a term for alcoholism. They just think if you can’t control your intake, it’s a character defect.
Thanks for the lesson about carbs/fiber. But this information doesn’t contradict anything about the viability of juicing as a great way to get many useful nutrients into the body.
I’ve read and own two books about juicing written by doctors and they both provide many good reasons and recipes that help improve ones health. As far as bodybuilders go, many endorse the process and talk about its benefits (see the video below). All around health guru and original California bodybuilder Jack Lalanne was a big advocate of juicing. I know that Thorfinnsson is a big fan of his, and has even posted some of his dietary regimens and philosophy here in the past:
https://youtu.be/-Y96cn4AM_4
“Take your life, save your life, start juicing!
Circling back to my idea that there are intangible elements to every situation that cannot be measured, two things stuck out for me recently that fall into this genre.
Alcohol, and weather.
As every good and determined drunk knows, the idea that you can “convert” one type of alcohol into another in terms of it’s effects by just looking at the abstract figure that represents alcohol content, is a laughable joke!
Every good alcoholic has his favorite tipple, and knows damn well that nothing else will get him quite as high in quite the same way, even though it has the exact same alcohol content.
And with weather, I have found that say, a 50 degree day in September feels nothing like a 50 degree day in January. I remember my first trip to Shanghai from San Francisco – both cities were 55, yet when I got to Shanghai the jacket that worked perfectly in SF was left me freezing in Shanghai!
Yes, I know that they also have the “real feel” – but even the same real feel will feel different.
Clearly, they are not measuring all aspects of the “weather” that affect how we feel, just a select few abstracted aspects of weather, and the same with alcohol.
Now, this isn’t so bad – the standardized information they give us about weather and alcohol is indeed useful. The problem starts when they pretend it’s all there is, and people begin ignoring the intangible elements – to their peril 🙂
It’s good to know there are still mysteries in our world!
There is a very beautiful park in Brooklyn called Prospect Park. Designed in the 19th century, it has fountains, statues, courtyards, waterfalls, fields, ravines, and areas that mimic wild forest. It is its own little world.
Having walked through it a thousand times, I can still sort of lose my way, and in some areas, never am sure where I am (I have a vague sense of what direction I’m going). And I like it this way! I refuse to look at a map, and I deliberately kind of “space out” so I don’t remember too well where Im going 🙂
It is, I suppose, the “anti-efficiency” attitude – perhaps one might call it the “aesthetic” attitude, but I feel it’s more spiritual than that.
The fact is, mystery is delightful – how awful it would be to live in a fully known world!
Thankfully, the limitations of the human mind being what they are, we shall never have to 🙂 And thank God – which may be just another word for Mystery – for that!
Hard to say when a protein is broken, since genes are often allotropic and therefore often have more than one function. Anyway, if it is in a selective sweep, then that probably makes it a profanation, to call it “broken ” on this forum.
French-Japanese is pinnacle of haute fusion cuisine. And I enjoy Indian more than probably any yellow person
Chinese just like to dine in bigger groups. For families, ya that’s definitely a HBD fact, relations with first cousins are definitely closer than Northern Euros (in fact we find it strange that its so far from the case for you)
Ok, I’ll call it defective until I see what its mutation does biologically other than render the enzyme it causes the body to make non-functioning.
I’ll even throw in a “I had a good time when I was a guest for a week with a Chinese family,” if that will help?
Ever watch Formula One? It is an interesting sport in theory. The driver matters, but so does the car, and the car’s team. You, like I think everyone I’ve met, will drive plenty of different cars, so there’s no need to get too sensitive about slights to any particular one. Your car is just one of your learning aides, for now, until it isn’t, and then you will quickly get a new car. Appreciate it, enjoy it, feel the limitations it puts upon you, but don’t try to “be” it. That’s just silly.
I have heard that hoesik sessions are declining in severity. Not sure about beer displacing it yet though. Aren’t those figures for types of beers? Not 100% sure about the subsidy, just what I heard. Anyway, it is cheap.
One cool thing about Korean drinking culture is that they have a drink made with venomous snakes. In the North, they use forced labor to help make it.
The fuel tax regime of the US seems reasonable at present. What seems less reasonable is the plans to go to odometers or GPS.
Never had that. Sadly I’m stuck for a while in exactly the wrong part of the world for it too, but I will remember!
How about Malay fusion cuisine? Delicious!
I bet my theory turns out to be true. I’ve had plenty of meals like that, all paid for me, and with the social graces that one would expect from a situation where the transaction is as I described.
This is a good point. Chilis are taken for granted in Sichuan, Hunan and Korean food, but its a recent introduction (via Americas). Before that fermented vegetables were simply salted like sauerkraut
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suan_cai
The spices native to China are peppercorn, ginger, black pepper
This is an HBD forum, and I am not East Asian (if you have so assumed.)
Plus, my people have been observed to be intemperate and lack said mutation. Our wakes were once bywords. There were police wagons named after us. And there are many funny and elaborate jokes about said issue.
But none of that gives me an inferiority complex. A man can drink or not, as he chooses. Not to mention, peer pressure in the West is not at all strong.
Technically, we have broken genes for tail-formation and syndactyly, but its doubtful that having tails or webbed hands will benefit us much.
Makes smoothies, not juice, if you must do either.
As my vegan friend described the “fruitarian” she met. “The girl kept telling me how much having only fruit benefited her, but her skin hung off her pallid body like drooping folds of a wet towel.”
The fact that you want to stay ignorant does not indicate any central reality of the universe. As indicated before, many things once unknown have since become known. That’s one of the beauties of technology, of electron scanning microscopes, of greater computational resources, of cameras with more precise rendering than the human eye.
For someone who keeps claiming to be non-dualistic, you are willfully blind here. Its not meaningful that we will not “know everything.” It is simply useful to know that we can know more, and most likely eventually even overcome our current limitations as humans, as we have previously triumphed over our limitations.
And that is what you fear and seek to discourage. But in your heart, you know that is entirely possible, and it is a beauty and glory that you cannot comprehend. You lack imagination, and so you live in a very special hell indeed.
No wonder your mother doesn’t like you.
Oh, good. We’re reifying the delusions of fictional drunks now.
This is your experience Aaron. Trying to fill with spirits the hole where awareness of your own spirit should be.
It is called humidity. Anyone who isn’t ignorant of these things can explain it to you.
As always, “clearly” to you is defined by your learned ignorance.
It isn’t their fault that you’re blind to what you don’t yet understand.
Yes, you’re like a blind and deaf person, but, in a crime against yourself, only because you have chosen to be.
It is the opposite of those two things.
Dig deeper into “delightful” and it might become even more interesting.
You might even be able to thank such directly!
I should probably stop shooting fishing in a barrel, but I am having fun giving you exactly what you are asking for.
The people who run Hezbollah are quite rational, it has representatives in the Lebanese parliament, much of the organisation revolves around providing mundane social and security services that the Lebanese government is too incompetent or powerless to perform. I don’t think there are such millenarian fanatics inside the organisation with any sort of responsibility.
Just look up ‘Ben Zygier’.
Israel is still overwhelmingly powerful in the area. Although they didn’t reach their maximal goal of installing a client regime in Syria, the country was thoroughly destroyed and won’t pose any sort of threat for a long time. The Golan was formally annexed in 2019 after Cheeto Hitler recognised it as ‘integral’, along with the Jerusalum embassy.
I don’t see it. Israel has performed the impressive feat of maintaining very friendly relations with both Russia, China and the United States, even whilst keeping ties with Ukraine and Taiwan.
Relations with Jordan are excellent, the only minimally functioning Arab country that still keeps a cold distance from Israel is Egypt, but its leadership is terrified of Israel and does everything it can to avoid provoking it, anway.
Sure, but what are the chances of that? Syria still claims Antioch from Turkey too, but does anyone care? Lots of wishful thinking here.
I’m no vegetarian, in case you think that I am. I consume plenty of animal meats including fish products. Also salads and cooked vegetable are not verboten at my table, so I don’t think that smoothies are necessary for what I assume you depend on for fiber from smoothies. Nobody yet has convinced me here that vegetable/fruit juices are somehow harmful to my healthy well being?…
Smoothies > juices, but of course juices are fine. The problem is if you decide to rely on a diet of only juice for a period of time. That is a nonsense diet, unless you’re trying something alternative for bowel problems, which may involve trying every kooky theory.
I can assure you that a nice large glass of juice, including ginger, a little bit of jalapeno peppers and beets, will definitely help with any bowel problems that might be causing you any bloating. You’ll feel 10 lbs lighter within a couple of hours, if not sooner! 🙂
If that’s a problem for you, you might supplement with magnesium at night. You can have up to 500mgs. You’ll also likely sleep better.
https://media.istockphoto.com/vectors/cute-sleeping-moon-with-stars-drawn-by-hand-in-cartoon-style-vector-vector-id1125690685?k=6&m=1125690685&s=612×612&w=0&h=Qfd4rkak0eVuwKWqqU983ZNxyx8D3B7S1tv5SQhlXo4=
Of course, we can know many things, and know things we once thought we’d never be able to figure out.
However, sometimes one wants to be in an “aesthetic” orientation – and is not, for once, concerned with efficiency, because the fear for survival is no longer uppermost in ones mind.
Knowing itself is subordinate to human flourishing and human interests – sometimes, it may increase our pleasure and happiness to not know something we could know.
Nothing is more profoundly alien to the modern mind! Just as you, Daniel, and modern people, think we are helpless slaves to knowledge and technology – in fact, the new emerging consciousness that will replace your old outmoded one puts knowledge and technology at the service of humanity, and not it’s master – an all good servants have to know their place.
Your old slavish way of thinking is on the way out 🙂
I know, it’s scary to let your guard down and not to know, to become vulnerable – but it’s exhilarating!
Many of the best things in life can only be had letting our guard down and becoming vulnerable; love, friendship, sex.
We try so hard to be strong and in control – but to be weak is the true adventure of life 🙂 As long as you are hard, rigid, in control – closed like a tight fist – life cannot share it’s golden riches with you.
That is the tragedy of the narcissist – always trying to control, never learning to be vulnerable and open, life passes by
Beautifully put Aaron your spiritual crisis is a joy to read. Spiritual crises produce outstanding literature – Europe in the latter half of the 19th century. As for me coming from a country which is too religious for my taste the ‘machine’ still has a lot of work to do before we have a spiritual crisis. I found Hinduism childish, Islam horrifying because of its fanaticism and Christianity too morally arrogant and full of itself. I’ve always viewed religion with a skeptical and mild contempt as something from the past a mode of sensibility inaccessible to a modern mind like poetry, there’s too much bullshit in it for a modern mind to swallow. The old gods are dead and their’s no intellectually coherent or serious challenge to materialism aka the machine even though its answers are so dissatisfying, I can’t see how one can go back the old Gods and be intellectually honest.
We’ve killed the old Gods and no new one is possible within the current scientific worldview the only answer is the Nietzchean one the Superman aka the machine. Genetic engineering terraforming other planets colonizing the exoplanets should be our destiny, intelligence seems to be so rare in this infinity that as a species we should aim at immortality. Let that be the new battle cry ‘immortality of the species’ which can’t be done without interstellar colonization. We can’t do this without the ‘machine’
But to go with the trend of your latest posts here’s a poem by George Santayana warning against the hubris of the machine.
As Daniel pointed out, fiber is not digested by humans. Hence when the low carb community created the concept of the “net carb”, in which fiber is subtracted from the total carbohydrate count.
Stripping the fiber from plants you consume is generally undesirable for a couple of reasons:
• Fiber slows the digestion of carbohydrate and therefore reduces blood sugar and insulin spikes (see here: https://medium.com/personal-growth/fibre-the-anti-nutrient-612603de4cec)
• Soluble fiber promotes good gut bacteria
• Juicing means plants are almost always consumed raw, increasing exposure to anti-nutrients which are often mitigated by cooking
• Juicing as a lifestyle may lead to excessive consumption of plants (issues with things such as goitrogens, oxalates, etc.)
If you’re concerned about micronutrient uptake, generally speaking animals foods are both more nutrient dense and have their micronutrients more bioavailable than plant foods. The true benefits of plant foods are not so much in their nutrients (other than vitamin C) but rather in their phytochemicals. But in excess some of these phytochemicals can be harmful, which is not surprising as plants produce them for their own defense.
Natto is a great foodstuff but not available to me (or, at least, not easily). Vitamin K is therefore one of the very few micronutrients I supplement with (I take a complex including K1 and multiple varieties of K2).
Posting here is very nice but there are only so many hours in the day. Without going into personal details my life has changed in fundamental ways (for the better). I make a point of at least keeping up on my reading here however.
I’m not familiar with Dr. Gundry, but tomatoes are nightshades and therefore contain lectins. These are toxic anti-nutrients, but as they say the dose makes the poison. I doubt very much that raw tomatoes pose much trouble to many other than those with specific sensitivities.
Gld to hear that things are going well for you!
When was the last time you sat still and didn’t defend yourself from the moment with this incessant ideological babble in your head?
Leave a piece of paper and a pen next to your bed and, immediately upon waking, write out for 10 minutes everything that goes in your head. Hopefully there’ll be a lot more authenticity there than in this defence mechanism.
It’s true!
I am a week, insecure person, who uses defense mechanisms to get through life, alas!
Don’t you think I know how superior you are to me, Laxa – smarter, wiser, more mature, more insightful?
You beat me in every way there is!
But what can I say? I am what I am – I am as God, or the Great Mystery – or the Great Clod as it’s sometimes called in Taoism 🙂 – made me.
I cannot reach your heights. I must dwell in the lowlands, with my simple, insignificant pleasures, with my frailties, my defense mechanism, and my insecurities.
I only like not knowing because I cannot know as much as you, I only like vulnerability because I cannot be as strong as you – but such the options open to such as I.
And who knows? Perhaps there are other inferior ones reading Unz who may also have limited options like myself, and may be cheered up by what I write 🙂
Convenient to have a vestigial “tail”, if you need your cerebrospinal fluid assayed. Wouldn’t surprise me if it also had some everyday practicality – like a shock dampener. Tendons and ligaments are attached to it.
As to webbed digits. What seems broken or weird, might be just a necessary or good development strategy in the womb. I mean, fingers are really remarkable. Not only for their mobility, but also their sensitivity. They may need temporary lateral connections in order to develop properly.
I once accidentally put three or four of the tips of my fingers on a hairy spider, without seeing it. Its texture felt totally unique and warned me that I was touching something very unusual. And the blind can even learn to read with their fingers.
As modern humans, I think one of our failings is that we have the tendency to be overly dismissive of any part of biology that we don’t grasp straightaway. Call it the religious impulse in me, but I think we need to maintain the proper amount of awe (to at least be open-minded), or else we will never arrive at a true understanding.
Guess soju would still win by units of alcohol consumed.
In a way, if you consider how feminized K-pop seems, soju appears like an anachronism. But is there a substitute for it? Would beer satisfy the same Confucian impulses? I’m not so sure.
On the subject of alcohol, it’s a very significant thing that alcohol is called “spirits”.
What does alcohol do? It reduces inhibition and control, allowing us to feel more at “one” with everything and everyone.
That’s why it’s such an excellent social lubricant – and that’s why alcohol is so feared in modern technological society, whose main goal is control.
The early Americans drank like fish – it would be shocking to us today. And even fifty sixty years ago people drank a ton, even starting in the morning. Waking up to a shot of whiskey or beer with breakfast was common in Europe and America.
As technological society advanced, with it’s agenda of control, this kind of relaxation and freedom was more and more frowned upon and feared.
Tobacco and alcohol are perhaps the two most reviled drugs in our society. While the main reason given is that they are harmful to health (itself a rather petty physical concern), I think it goes much deeper than that. The spiritual effects of these drugs are what’s feared.
Nicotine, it turns out, is the most potent cognitive enhancer we know about at this time (if you’re reading this Mr Hack, you may want to note this). But nicotine is also a great relaxant.
It’s been said, that the reduction in use of alcohol and nicotine may be responsible for the genius drought! How many great novelists and artists, and I’d wager even scientists, were great drinkers? Gain health, loss in spiritual things.
Whenever you read any history of over sixty years ago, the first thing a modern will be struck with is how much everyone drank.
Of all the religions, the only one I know of that actively celebrates alcohol is Taoism.
The Chinese poets are constantly celebrating wine – sipping wine and looking at the moon, or a beautiful landscape, was considered one of the most enjoyable activities a refined person could do. And even the down and out Buddhist Chinese/Japanese poets often sing of their love of wine and yearning for it.
One of the great legends of Taoism, is the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. It’s a remarkable legend which I do not think has any parallel in any other religion – in fact it’s utterly scandalous!
Our Seven Ages have retired from the burdens of city life into a country retreat, and there they drink from morning till night, without a care in the world, chasing pretty girls, reading poetry, viewing lovely countryside. One eminent Sage has his servant follow him around with a wine jug in one hand and a shovel in his other – in case he drops dead, he can dig his grave 🙂
What kind of spiritual tradition has anything this scandalous? What a sense of humor those Taoists had!
Perhaps only Sufis had a similar appreciation for wine, but they had to be more coy and ambiguous operating as they were in a strict Muslim milieu. But the Muslims had their own intoxicants, primarily Hashish.
What to make of the recent favorable attitude towards Marijuana on the part of modern society? I am suspicious of it somewhat – any drug our society approves, is unlikely to threaten it’s agenda of control and technological progress.
On the other hand, might it portend a loosening up of our stuffy society?
Of course, alcohol can also be a serious danger for some people, and obviously people have died from alcohol abuse.
Like every good thing, one must excercise judgement and prudence – somewhat 🙂
This is a defence mechanism too. Breathe.
The shame you’re scared of from admitting that your work of evangelisation here was only ever about you is also no more than your self-judgement. Nobody thinks otherwise.
Take my advice from the last comment. Or, if you still can’t face that, you’re also welcome to continue with raging insults intended for your mother (complex) at me, just let go and unleash the torrent. I have taken on energy far more tempestuous.
Ideology shouldn’t invalidate your truest feelings*. That will leave you all discombobulated and having to dwell in coping mechanisms, like alcohol abuse.
Humans want to possess “truth” now, like a trip to get a suit from a thrift store. This works sort of adequately, except most don’t even know their own measurements. They then parade around in their ill-fitting outfit convinced that it is them.
I am pushing you to use your energy to learn your own measurements, rather than telling everyone about your dilapidated second-hand suit and how they should wear it too. Clothes that fit better, feel better and allow you to move through life with far less friction. Eventually, with the materials getting lighter and lighter and the fit more and more your own, magic can happen.
I don’t mind being the target for your self-hatred, but I bet I’m not the only one. Just please realise by examining how it makes you feel that launching such at me is no less a form of self-harm than if you did it in the mirror to your own physical face. Also, you might deeply harm others if you engage like that with them.
There’s two ways you can “feel more at one” with other people; first, by truth and, second, by delusion.
Ask the other people, who spent the evening with you, whether in its last hour, you were more one with each other.
Or ask a girl you may have slept with when very drunk, whether she felt the experience was transcendent or a chore.
You’re describing the basic point of empiricism but calling it a religious impulse.
Thank you! You are a kind and compassionate person.
For sure, my comment above was also a defense mechanism! I can’t seem to get away from them, can I?
You are of course correct that I am hiding behind metaphysics and am deceiving myself that I am helping other people.
You have of course been right all along!
The problem is you are trying to”fix” me – you are asking me to become a superior person, like you!
Unfortunately, I have lived for several decades and know that I simply “am” an inferior person – I cannot be fixed!
Of course, this is a defense mechanism too! But I cannot do anything else.
I really do thank you for trying to “fix” me and help me become a superior and better person, an industrious, hard working, citizen, contributing to knowledge and progress. In addition to wisdom, you have a kind heart!
However, my dear, you are not the first to try – all of society, friends, and family have failed. Alas, I am incorrigible- unfixable!
I am a scoundrel and a reprobate, and nothing useful can be made out of such crooked timber 🙂
The only pleasure left to such a miserable wretch, is to come to peace with my wretched character and condition.
Pitiable consolation, I know – but the best I have!
And while I would never dare to say I am “helping” others, perhaps, people who are as big failures and reprobates as myself, wretched characters who are simply unfixable, can also drink of the sweet consolation of mete “acceptance” of our miserable lot.
And I owe you gratitude for casting a kindly eye in my direction – I only wish I could repay you better.
It’s just a strange wording, “blue eyes are caused by a defective gene” is true in the same sense (some protein doesn’t get produced, or in much smaller quantities only), or “red hair is caused by a defective gene” etc.
Certainly, when too deep in my cups I have inflicted myself on my long-suffering friends, and some poor girl has too often had to endure my crude embraces – but I have been blessed in life with meeting the sweetest and kindest of girls, who have put up with a lout like me, and my friends have had more patience with me than I deserved!
But ah, the Golden Hours when just the right amount of alcohol is flowing through your veins, and the conversation, love, and friendship flow freely and you think it will never end – who would give this up for anything?
Where do you think the words which you keep putting into my mouth are coming from?
Do those mutations render the enzyme those genes previously produced ineffective at breaking down something?
I only took “defective” from a peer-reviewed paper on the mutation. I don’t know the exact technical definition, but I assume it is the scientific one.
Yes, this is a good explanation of why someone might cling to delusion. I am just reassuring you that reality is far richer and more beautiful.
Lol, no. The tribalist can choose to stay unknowing of disease and guns but he won’t be able to choose to not have his bowels fall out and his brains decimated by lead. And in being dead, he won’t be spreading his genes or his memes; those who follow it go to the same place.
The aggregate forms a solid pattern. I find it amusing how you’ve made a sudden 180 on human will, but you’ve always known the answer.
Therein is your damnation and the triumph of true beauty. You fear, but your rambles will not change the truth.
I am projecting, my dear, my inmost fears and insecurities!
You see? I am so wrapped in defenses, and so weak, that I cannot free myself from them. They are my fate.
I am incorrigible – there is no help for me, Laxa!
No, it’s the bottle for me, I fear.
The greatest empericists of Europe seem to have had a strong religious impulse. The idea was to reveal God’s truth through careful study and observation.
No coincidence IMO that universities have become less empirical, as they’ve become more atheistic. I think proper empercism requires a sense of awe and humility. Without it, one is liable to fall prey to relativism.
There’s no strict technical definition for “defective” in this case since it is being selected for, so its probably not lowering the survival value of its bearers(which is usually the strongest case for something indicated as undesired). As reiner noted, the same could be applied for genes that can’t produce pigment; blue eyes actually do appear to cause harm via reaction speed, but may have benefit otherwise.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1395948196417900544.html
Words appear in scientific journals all of the time, it doesn’t give them magical value, ditto with peer review which has been increasingly tormented as of late. I’ve personally participated in a takedown of a “peer-reviewed” science, the hilariously dumb yet profitable work of Lt. David Grossman.
Alcohol is an excellent example of a counternarrative to your notion that if society becomes “too miserable”, it’ll fail. The widespread usage of rum was indicated specifically as an antidote to the misery of some of the worst jobs available at the time: those who had to dispense night-soil, dockyard workers, turnspit boys, etc(indeed, one lord mentioned specifically that “rum is the only solace of those members of the lower classes”). As terrible as organized society was to some, alcohol provided a solution to continue to keep them useful. It is, essentially, an advanced product of society needed to maintain such society.
The “machinery” of society endures, even if its cogs have to wear out and be replaced often. The bulk of what is efficient will make the humans-cogs useful to it via lubricant, or it’ll replace them with other humans-cogs more compatible with it.
Perhaps a tribal society doesn’t need it, but then it will also fail when it encounters it, as the present day plight of the natives plainly demonstrate. They fail on many, many levels.
But we are not tribalists, are we?
Perhaps the tribalist goes too far and knows too little.
But since now we see both the tribalist, and the modern, should we not learn from both how best to live?
Knowledge where appropriate, in the realm of survival, and pleasure where appropriate – in the realm whose existence we are surviving for in the first place 🙂
Are you aware that the Renaissance Italians, and later the English, used to design these marvelous gardens, with hidden paths, nooks, and crannies, to create a feeling of mystery?
Why did they enjoy such things?
And what about your favorite Robert E Howard and his “purple prose” – what purpose did it serve? He could have expressed himself in plain sober English. How inefficiently he wrote!
Yet we love him for not doing so.
And does the inefficient tribalist truly die, or does he just go back into the Great Energy, to reappear in a new form, perhaps a leaf tossed in the wind, or a butterfly that lives for day which seems like an eternity?
And does the modern bent on staving off death and surviving at all costs, drag on an existence that has grown wearisome to him, out of terror of the unknown that is Death.
Is mere survival the true measure of things? Why not die?
Tritelia Laxa #569 –
Of course reality is much richer and more beautiful! You are quite correct.
But I am only capable of achieving delusion – and even a delusional pleasure, perhaps, is better then nothing 🙂
But better people than I, who are capable of experiencing the beauties of reality are certainly more fortunate than I.
As for myself, I will do my best to enjoy myself on my rather lowly level.
A little late and they are all old movies, but the last four I enjoyed on some level:
Dodge City (1939): laughed several times
Robin Hood (1938): by no means perfect (one reason being it looks like California), but possibly the best adaptation of a mainstream British myth.
Kidnapped (1971): corny in places but quite liked the ending.
Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro (1979)
Think of it more like a whole person that it is within you. You’re going to have to learn to love her and understand her, in order for her to dissolve into your greater self, so that you are no longer intermittently possessed by her, which is often when you then have to turn to drink, as you have noticed.
If it helps to visualise her as you picture me, or your mother, then do that, but just remember that she is neither me nor your mother, but a fractured part of yourself.
Can you learn to love a part of yourself that scares you so much that you have had to break it off and pretend it doesn’t exist?
Grima Wormtongue is your Hobo Goofy ideology.
Theoden is you.
Gandalf does what I wish I could do.
https://youtu.be/iQExgALv9wI
I don’t disagree; I think that the presence of God is revealed in His work, so at my heart, I am actually pretty directly associated with the notion of awe in discovery. I meant it more directly: we don’t develop those traits out fully for a reason, they’re not helpful to us.
There are probably parts of the body which are just stuck the way they are, though – like the brainstem, or the so-called reptile brain; it controls our breathing and heart rate, and there’s no way for it to mutate without killing the mutant, so it remains remarkably stable across evolutionary development.
The general rule in biology seems to be that it can be difficult to remove functionality in a specific way, so often a new “layer” builds around it. The brain itself is a great example, with the unconscious reptile brain wrapped inside the “irrational” brain of the limbic systems, and then modulated by the prefrontal cortex of the “rational brain.” The prefrontal cortex does things to stop the irrational brain, but the signals themselves aren’t prevented from generation.
In software parlance, biology doesn’t do “refactors” of code very much, it just keeps adding edits to code.
Yes, alcohol works – for a time.
But the European masses were kept toiling by a dream – that they were working for a future utopia.
That, plus alcohol, may keep the cogs of the machine oiled – for a while.
But what if the dream fails to materialize – worse, what if the dream materializes, and mankind achieves what it was toiling for – technology brings ultimate safety and security – and finds that it is bored to death?
Read E.M Forster The Machine Stops. It is a short story about getting what you wished for.- and then losing it, and finding what you truly wanted.
There is an “optimum” amount of alcohol that will keep the machine running at a particular level of distress and misery for a certain amount of time – dial up the distress and misery as time goes on, and that breaks down.
No one works 16 hour days 7 days a week in the West anymore, with any amount of alcohol. It couldn’t be kept up.
People do this – although not as brutally – in China, with lots of alcohol, because it is meant to be temporary. It is already breaking down in China.
You always think too short term. Hunter gatherers survived tend of thousands of years – industrial civilization is 300 years old, and already crying out for serious reform!
How do you know in 100 years from now, humanity might not grow so weary of industrial civilization that it begins to consciously scale it back and incorporate elements of hunter gatherer living in our lives? Is this not happening already?
And not only short term, you also think in exclusive extremes.
Why not a new type of civilization that combines technology and industrialism with ancient ways of living, as well as art, illusion, spirituality?
Perhaps humanity had to be “serve” technology where it went until now – but perhaps the next step is to incorporate it into a new and higher synthesis, to bring technology into rapport with a humanistic and sp