- MUSTREAD. @pseudoerasmus thread on the history of the Taliban.
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Steve Sailer on Pashtun proverbs.
* Erik D’Amato: 20 Hungarian Lessons the West Is Still Missing
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Noah Carl: Observations on Afghanistan
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Lyman Key thread on Chinese TFR. We still don’t really know what’s going on there.
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MUSTREAD. Philip Lemoine: Why COVID-19 Is Here to Stay, and Why You Shouldn’t Worry About It
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SCMP: China’s military nuclear orders rise fourfold in push to catch up with US
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Unsurprising, but yes, Corona mortality in Belarus was much higher than officially stated.
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@saucerused asks, did Trotsky have second thoughts by 1939?
This is the current Open Thread, where anything goes – within reason.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Commenting rules. Please note that anonymous comments are not allowed.
Ignore the man let.
https://youtu.be/6Mic0DsZgYk
https://youtu.be/LndoG1dFQqc
https://mobile.twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1144009116614086658
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
What is the next bitcoin, i.e investment everyone is going to be kicking themselves over for having missed out? Though it is expensive to buy, farmland seems like the next big thing. Airline stock seems like an obvious one, air travel will eventually return to normal and grow from there.
Replies that shill specific crypto coins and precious metals in general ought to be banned from future participation in open threads.
Also when the fuck is the real estate boom ever going to end? It has to eventually, just because Blackrock is buying homes does not mean housing prices will not crater, it might just be a way to push expensive mortgages while avoiding the pricing crater. Imagine buying a product people need, driving up the price, selling the product for a higher price you paid and interest, and when that is said and done, the buyer is stuck with house that can decline in value and you are owed the original inflated price the house sold and interest.
Most interesting thing right now is that we’re probably on the cusp of bear market thesis in crypto being invalidated (or not). If Bitcoin breaks $50k, super-cycle theory gets new legs and my $100k $BTC/$10k $ETH prediction for this cycle might come true after all.
I suspect Corona hysteria will keep airline stocks suppressed for a long time yet.
More generally, everything is overbought right now. “You’ve been priced out.” Main suggestions at this point (but not financial advice) is to keep some dry powder.
Did Larry Niven base Puppeteers on Indians?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson's_Puppeteers
Interesting news in stem cell research.
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-used-stem-cells-to-make-mini-brains-they-grew-rudimentary-eyes/amp
This is encouraging development because growing mini brains from adult stem cells is a relatively mature technology – I have done so myself about 15 years ago. All you need is a few hairs, doesn’t even need to be from the head, I plucked the forearm, it works. It’s pretty neat watching your own brains in a petry dish. 🙂
But functionalizing the mini brains is the next important step in pursuit of Zerg Overmind type superstructure. Those superbrains can be developed and optimized at rather large sizes in a controlled gravity environment such as a rotating space station.
And speaking of Space Zergs, Everyday Astronaut has a tour of Starbase, guided by Elon Musk. Very interesting interview, recommended to people interested in Starship and general going ons in Boca Chica.
Oh good grief Trotsky is such a second rate mind to, say, Dostoevsky. That same jewish tendancy to see everything in terms of some simplistic mathematic model. History as a mechanical progression from state A to state B.
Perhaps people think these people are so smart because, in their own mediocrity, they understand the simplistic stupid models.
Then you have Dostoevsky with his development of the forces of history as the follies and foibles of people and their existential struggles.
Trotsky is like a 0.1%.
Do enjoy his writing tho-he was a very talented journalist.
Two underlying causes of real estate price rises are:
1) population increase. Obviously, the more people on earth, the more demand there is for each unit of surface area (with enormous local variation—open borders drive higher demand in victim states, for example). Until world population plateaus, we can expect general demand pressure to increase.
2) currency debasement. Part of land price rises are apparent rather than real. It is not necessarily the land getting more valuable; it is the currency getting less valuable. Since pretty much all central banks are incontinently printing currency, all currencies are devaluing versus real goods, such as real estate. So just by land staying the same, real estate prices rise as measured by steadily inflating currency.
TL;DR Euskaldunak onenak dira
On his Twitter feed, Anatoly mentioned that Moscow has two of the world’s top 50 restaurants, and that Saint Petersburg has one of the world’s top 50 bars, making Russia a good place for foodies. I took a look at the full top 120 restaurants list and the full top 100 bars list to construct a crude “Wine & Dine Index” of the best countries for restaurants and bars:
Wine & Dine Index (world’s top 120 restaurants + world’s top 100 bars)
25 USA
19 UK
17 Spain
13 Japan
12 France
11 Singapore
10 Italy
9 Hong Kong
9 Australia
7 Germany
7 Mexico
7 Thailand
6 Brazil
6 Russia
6 Denmark
5 Argentina
5 South Africa
5 Taiwan
4 Peru
3 Belgium
3 China
3 Sweden
2 Canada
2 Chile
2 Colombia
2 Greece
2 India
2 Norway
2 South Korea
2 Turkey
2 UAE
1 Austria
1 Cyprus
1 Lebanon
1 Macao
1 Malaysia
1 Netherlands
1 Portugal
1 Puerto Rico
1 Slovenia
1 Switzerland
I would say that this ranking is reasonably accurate, although it should be noted that Singapore’s position above Italy is due to Singapore having a large number of top bars. In general, scoring highly on the Wine & Dine Index requires a high average IQ: all of the top 9 countries are in the West or East Asia, suggesting that the culinary arts and interior design are g-loaded. Geography/climate is also an important factor: Germanic countries score poorly, while Latin American countries score very well – Mexico and Peru have restaurants in the global top 10. Communism is also a factor: countries with a communist history do poorly, hence mainland China performing worse than tiny Hong Kong, and the eastern EU (exception: high-IQ Slovenia) not represented at all. However, Russia does fairly well, which suggests that Russia is beginning to overcome the effects of communism: Anatoly previously wrote about how he found an excellent restaurant in Veliky Novgorod, and an Italian restaurant in tiny Volokolamsk. South Africa and Thailand also do well, the former for obvious reasons, the latter because of geography/climate (and decent average IQ). London has a huge number of quality American-style bars, despite being the home of the pub.
World-class dining, and world-class drinking in particular, are metropolitan phenomena: all except 1 of Britain’s bars and restaurants are in London, all except 1 of France’s are in Paris, all except 1 of Japan’s are in Tokyo, and 88% of America’s are in three cities (New York, San Francisco, Chicago). The big exception to this is Spain, which has many of its top restaurants in nondescript towns such as Denia and El Puerto de Santa María (the top bars are all in Madrid and Barcelona though). In general I would say that in southern Europe, top-quality food is not solely an elite phenomenon, while in Russia it seems to me that it still remains largely limited to the Muscovite/Petersburger upper middle classes. In the USA it’s somewhere in the middle, with plenty of great food outside major metropolises but also many low-quality unhealthy options; in addition, the cream of the crop are usually in major metropolises, and cater to the economic elites. In Japan it’s also somewhere in the middle, but low-quality unhealthy options do not exist.
Spain is also interesting in that 7 of its 13 top restaurants are in the Basque Country, a small (albeit culturally rich) region of just over 2 million people. The Basque Country has less than 5% of Spain’s population but 54% of its top restaurants according to this index. Not only do the Basque regions have the highest IQ in Spain, they benefit from ideal geography/climate and strong local traditions, leading to culinary phenomena such as sagardotegi (cider houses), txoko (men’s gastronomic societies) and txikiteo (tapas bar crawl) encompassing the whole of society. Like in other regions, the culinary phenomenon extends to small towns and villages like Larrabetzu (near Bilbao) and Getaria (near Zarautz), although it’s apparently centered in the Donostia area.
Top 120 restaurants
13 Spain
13 USA
9 France
8 Japan
6 Denmark
6 Italy
6 UK
5 Brazil
5 Germany
5 Hong Kong
5 Russia
4 Mexico
4 Thailand
3 Belgium
3 Peru
2 Argentina
2 Australia
2 Singapore
2 South Africa
2 Sweden
2 Turkey
1 Austria
1 Canada
1 Chile
1 China
1 Colombia
1 India
1 South Korea
1 Macao
1 Netherlands
1 Norway
1 Portugal
1 Slovenia
1 Switzerland
Top 100 bars
13 UK
12 USA
9 Singapore
7 Australia
5 Japan
5 Taiwan
4 Hong Kong
4 Italy
4 Spain
3 Argentina
3 France
3 Mexico
3 South Africa
3 Thailand
2 China
2 Germany
2 Greece
2 UAE
1 Brazil
1 Canada
1 Chile
1 Colombia
1 Cyprus
1 India
1 South Korea
1 Lebanon
1 Malaysia
1 Norway
1 Peru
1 Puerto Rico
1 Russia
1 Sweden
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.
Great post, though I think that restaurants, excluding bars, may be the better focus. Judging the quality of a bar can be very faddish, but judging the best food, while still affected by fashion, is much more substantial. The restaurants which I have been to on that list I would have known were on that list, but not the bars.
Haha. Good to see my post inspired you to this analysis. Here it is for reference:
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1423393995275767808
Was in response to this cringefest from Matt Yglesias:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210805125210/https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1423262973850701836
https://i.imgur.com/twzJ3zT.jpg
In 2021 Trotsky would weaponize anti-vaxxers. This is what I wrote under another Ron Unz’s thread for anti-vaxxers:
The US State Department has banned (permanently) the importation of ammunition from Russia, in retaliation for Herr Navalny.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2021/08/20/russian-ammo-ban/
Summer holidays
https://c.radikal.ru/c11/2108/67/c3b19a754c0a.jpg
https://c.radikal.ru/c24/2107/26/d72bf905781c.jpg
https://b.radikal.ru/b15/2108/b9/3639cf88f0b7.jpg
https://b.radikal.ru/b36/2108/c0/5fa699a144bb.jpg
https://sun9-31.userapi.com/impg/rOSPqigMfCNgvg47hZUrG-HlnHtZz6KCCkGhzQ/CST4quJl308.jpg?size=810×1080&quality=96&sign=d05c149a215c904b2b35d0146b601c1e&type=album
Those are supposed to be tacos? “Soyjaks” will appreciate any rubbish as long as there is a political sweetener to scam them into thinking they are getting something good.
Trotsky bet on a growing class of people. Anti-vaxxers are a shrinking class.
I hope you are correct.
People burning their vaccination cards besides…
BTW, rolling lockdowns can achieve what happened to the Eastern European culinary scene in a few years, most importantly by substituting a home cook culture for a dining one.
Those look like retard rotis..
https://i.extraimages.net/images/2021/08/11/Shershaa.jpg
Shershaah is reportedly good, might be 1st good Indian war film since Lakshya (04) & LOC Kargil (03).
Other decent one was Border (1997). All 3 coincide with incumbent BJP gov about to lose power..
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
I’ve lived in Hong Kong, and now live in Prague. Czechia is on none of those lists, and Hong Kong is probably at the top on a per capita basis — but I’d swear on whatever you like that Prague has far better bars, and far better restaurants, than anything you’d find in Hong Kong. I’ve been to some of those “world’s best” places, and was not overwhelmed, to say the least.
What’s more, the average quality of food here — say, for instance, the average $20/person dinner — is far higher than what you’d get in Hong Kong for anything approaching the same price.
I don’t think that central Europe is inferior to Basque Country, either. Unless you really like eating very tiny sandwiches all day, every day. (I actually hated all of the food everywhere in Spain. Even the stuff that was “good” got tiresome very quickly.)
In short, the list is horribly skewed by globohomo journalists who are undoubtedly overlooking central and eastern Europe. This sharpens Karlin’s point: Russia is probably far better than the list would indicate.
Taliban dipshits didn’t orchestrate this themselves.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/08/21/taliban-in-u-s-military-gear-mocks-iconic-wwii-photo-of-marines-raising-the-flag-on-iwo-jima/
nvm it’s gay||
You might be interested in this: Delhi + Sirhind Suba from Mughal era|| Singhs razed Sirhind||
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Capital_Region_(India)
It’s now extending from Patiala in Punjab over to Agra in UP so the old Mughal core area||
45mil 60% rural, 10k PPP income|| Brownpundits had article on Metros driving growth or something
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
I enjoyed Lemoine’s Corona-chan article, even if it suffered somewhat from complicated examples and odd figures. Basically a big everybody calm down and here’s why.
However, since we after all are on Unz and that article didn’t even mention it, I think we could now once again spare some moments to ponder terms such as ‘gain of function’ and ‘lab leak’ and perhaps even ‘bio warfare’.
Definitely, and 80%+ of people anywhere (whether lower middle class, poor or very rich) aren’t massively affected while the entire sector goes broke. Their main diner base was the upper middle class with their ideological vanguad (and now in woke territory).
Looks very similar to Northern Arizona. We do have some lakes up north, with large rocky shorelines.
I did not like his article on lockdowns. He failed very badly. He had a thesis he wanted to push so he was selective on data by excluding NZ, Taiwan, China and Australia. i.e., countries that wanted and did pursue the strategy of virus elimination. The title of his paper should have been “Half ass lockdowns do not work in long term” which in fact was what the proponents of the curve flattening strategy were promising form the very beginning: we won’t reduce the death rate but spread it over a longer time period so we won’t clog the medical system and won’t incur unnecessary deaths due to medical service shortages.
It has always been a trade-off betwewn economic destruction and the prospect of death. By locking down hard until you achieve 0 COVID you increase deaths from everything else to possibly 1990s Russian levels, because the economy is leveled and massive social changes from the struggles between antivaxxers & provaxxers + institutions are here. If you keep on pushing virus elimination when many experts forecast COVID to become endemic, you will appear to be condoning the agenda of using public health as a pretext of total control, just like how the “terrorist” threat was used to instrumentalize heightened surveillance.
You need to live with COVID whether you are vaccinated or not.
“I actually hated all of the food everywhere in Spain.” – I would not go that far but when I lived in Spain I was not impressed and always wondered, wtf, they had everything what Italians had and even more because Spaniards got access to vegetables and plants of the New World first while they produce significantly less interesting dishes than Italians.
Czech peasant food is not very imaginative though I like it but Prague is different and nowadays 30 year after communism with Czech hipsters you can get there anything. Try wagyu burgers and steak tartare at Naše maso.
There was time for virus elimination with full knowledge that in long term it would be impossible when many countries were recalcitrant. But harsh and swift lockdown in the very beginning in combination with effective contact tracing afterwards and closed borders all the time was the way to go and countries that did that like NZ, Taiwan and Australia on average had less shut downs and more periods of normal life than countries that went for half-ass measures like UK or France. But now is now and we are harvesting what have been sown chiefly by libertarians and rightoid nut jobs who on top of refusing countermeasure and having mental breakdowns on the account of masks now refuse vaccinations. When you have to deal with infantile tantrum prone people you have to use a stick. In the end what the rightoids fear the most is what they are going to evoke: they will get the stick and I hope it will be sooner than later.
Don’t know if someone has brought this up already, but the Turks are making a new film about Manzikert. Turkish pop culture and cinema are huge in the Islamic World, as far as Malaysia and Indonesia, so if the movie is a hit, it’ll be a hit across the continent. The Turkish government isn’t big into architectural digs and whatnot to uncover the Byzantine past, so this is an alternative, roundabout way of bringing Byzantium into public consciousness.
For my part, I’m glad Byzantium is going to feature in a film, even if they are the bad guys/losers. Now, a film about Heraclius’ final epic campaign against Sassanid Persia and Greek tragedy-esque defeat at the Yarmouk: THAT would be a show.
Is there a good counterfactual history article/thread/blog post about how China’s demographics would look like without the implementation of the one child policy?
They already had a movie about the conquest of Constantinople back in 2012 (note how that movie starts in Medina at the time of Mohammed, shows the ideological character):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetih_1453
I wouldn’t get excited, movies made in Turkey are likely to be vehicles for Turkish chauvinism and/or Islamic supremacism.
Well, they’re bound to eventually catch Corona, and at least some of them are going to die from it, so much of that problem should be resolved next winter. Given that in much of Europe you can easily get vaccinated if you want to (I had my 2nd shot last Friday), imo Karlin’s right and further lockdowns can’t be justified (at least unless some horror variant emerges that ignores existing immunities).
That they are. I don’t care. Anything that keeps Byzantium in the public consciousness.
Re, Fetih: like all hadiths, it was written centuries after Muhammad died and relies off oral tradition, so you have to take it with a grain of salt. But this one does point to a kernel of historical truth in what Constantinople meant symbolically for the initial wave of Arab invaders. The early wave of Islamic conquerors did have significant ties to the Eastern Roman world, economic and psychological. They probably took some of their religious elements from that world: say, Syrian aesthetics bowing to God.
Constantinople was the epitome of civilization for the early caliphates: apocalyptic prophecies abounded in early Islam on how the capture of the city would represent the conversion of the world to the new religion and/or the end of the world.. It was only after the Umayyads fell that this permanently changed.
“Food is always fashionable.” – my elementary school geography teacher.
Depends on how long you’re looking at. I say – invest in Alaska, Siberia and inner Canada. Somewhere in the latter half of the century you can rake insane cash.
https://nypost.com/2021/08/20/taliban-fighters-dressed-as-us-troops-to-mock-america-in-propaganda-videos/
We’ll have a few options in the future.
One is a Zerg-style overmind. A general dearth in organic matter on other worlds might make this difficult – and require finding ways to feed this Space Zerg army from space rocks and such. Pure “biopunk” isn’t going to cut it, so if we had to compare this to a fictional faction, I’d say this would end up resembling the Combine, except on a local level. Or the Borg. Very grabby, assimilates everything, and so on and so forth.
The other solution – an AI operating a lot of self-replicating automated exploration, expansion and exploitation drones. This requires very compact computers, but allows us far greater control – because perhaps instead of an AI, we ourselves will probably digitize our consciousnesses into these host bodies to basically become immortal. This will probably resemble, may God punish me for uttering the name of the biggest disappointment in animation, the Gems of Steven Universe. Perhaps even grabbier than above, unconstrained by any biological needs such as food or shelter.
Probably a combination, really.
Another comparison, maybe even a better one, for the latter option: the Necrons.
One difference is that the alien Puppeteers have great grip-strength (with their two biting mouth-hands*), but I assume this was a classic inversion to muddy the waters, in case Niven was asked. Just like Roddenberry made Ferengi have big ears and Lucas, while being more direct with his version of Jews, made his alien version of blacks aquatic.
*mouth-hands, I perceive as a commentary on India’s then long-standing dependency on food aid. (No longer the case)
In the Known Space universe, there are a trillion Puppeteers, far more than the number of humans. And they are obligate vegetarians, in addition to being famous cowards. The only brave Puppeteers are the insane ones.
Floomers will argue none of these are necessary. But in the end radical and restrictive measures are normalized chiefly not for public health, but control.
Haven’t you heard in all the pronouncements from places that we are heading towards a New Normal and there “is no going back”.
They haven’t done anything wrong outside of criticizing COVID policies and making health decisions contrary to what the medical establishment says. If you hit them with a stick they will either use their guns or accept their outcast status by practicing self-sufficiency or agorism.
You have the kind of crimethink-dodging ability typical of true believers.
It’ll be 50-100 million higher at most since China already had sharp falls in population growth in the 1970s. The trend was already on the track of Sri Lanka and Thailand instead of Vietnam or Myanmar.
I’m reading books edited by Karl-Heinz Ohlig which provide the fringe theory that much of what we know of Early Islamic theory is ahistorical. They claim there were no Arab conquest but nativized, established Arabs filling in the void left by the withdrawal of Byzantine and the collapse of Sassanisns. Early Muslims up to the end of the Umayyads saw themselves as sectarian Christians while slowly drifting away from Christianity and ending up inventing a new past for their new faith in late 8th & 9th centuries. Muhammad and his exploits are largely legendary, and his name used to be a title given to Jesus by early Muslims.
The contributors threw out all the historiography and relied almost exclusively on archaeological finds and inscriptions. As expected all the contributors are German and none of them is a Turk.
Afghan Trump is totally based. (The first thing I do with my new PC is of course, commenting on Unz!)
The traditional, orthodox story of the Islamic conquests are based off oral tradition, with all the risks that implies. I do agree that “Islam” as we think of it was a result of the conquests, not the driving force behind them. (This is far from an original observation, as any frequenter of Razib Khan’s blog knows.)
I personally don’t belong to that camp. Occam’s razor would suggest that Muhammad was one of several monotheist prophet-leaders that were the result of the social breakdown in Arabia at the time. You can actually find a coin depicting Muhammad (not the caliph as commonly assumed) with a sword before Abd al-Malik’s Islamization program. It’s doubtful that a mythical figure would have loomed that large in the Arab consciousness only less than a century after the conquests. It’s not like the Iliad or the Old Testament where it propagated through hundreds of years in a time with zero literacy.
What is true is that Muhammad’s significance as the conclusive prophet rather than just another one came later. As late as Mu’awiyah, inscriptions of dam repairs with the caliph’s name on it give credit to God, but not his apostle, something unthinkable today.
German archaeologists probing the foundations of Islam has been a problem as early as 1972 with Puin and Yemen.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1429473639401938946
Lol there’s isn’t a shortage of organic material out there. Tholins (complex organics) are everywhere, Titan has methane lakes, comets are full of organic ices etc. And thats just in the Solar system.
My favorite place in the galaxy is Saggitarius B2 molecular cloud, not far from the center. It contains several cubic light years’ worth of ethanol (drinking alcohol) spiked with ethyl formate (raspberry flavoring), and it’s star forming regions have nice temperature of about 27 degrees Celsius, so can walk around in a t shirt.
It’s basically a space version of Miami Florida – lots of lights everywhere (from stars being born), nice warm weather, and fruity drinks going for light years out. Your biggest problem with Space Zerg army will be preventing them from getting too drunk. 🙂
Yes, there will be value in assimilating other life forms or at least cloning their genetic material and incorporating it in your own designs.
Electromechanical computers are too fragile and require complex supply chains, unlike organic life that’s self replicating and can exist in vast variety of environments. Which is why i bet on biology ultimately winning the colonization race. If you are on Jupiter orbit, you can’t run to Taiwan or South Korea for spare parts every time something breaks. You will need to replicate and grow the parts yourself.
http://pm1.narvii.com/6145/b2282c0061c863db48e2b990a6e2a61222f60f56_00.jpg
A balanced “combination” really of biopunks, the Combine, the Space Zerg army, the Gems of Steven Universe, the Borg (of course), Zerg Overmind Structures, etc. etc…..All hail Galactica!
Related to low fertility rates in China, recently with lightning speed the after-school tutoring industry in China is being regulated out of existence. A recent regulation went into effect that bans for-profit tutoring for kids in subjects taught in schools. Already training centers (schools) are being shut down including ones teaching English to kids. It’s a very good decision because after-school tutoring is a huge expense in raising children and most families spend on it, oftentimes excessively.
To give an example of how bad it has gotten. At a training center in Beijing, it can cost 50,000 RMB ($7,700) for one level of English classes. It takes less than a year to complete the level. Imagine paying that much as a Beijing family for an 11-year-old. It has a depressing effect on having a second kid. Plus, if the kid isn’t that bright, cramming doesn’t help that much. The kids should go outside and play more. Urban middle-class China has a serious problem with kids on the spectrum.
High finance is a big loser including Wall Street. The Chinese stock market has lost one trillion dollars in market cap recently (market also reacting to other regulatory moves against tech industry) and US-listed tutoring companies have seen shares plunge. It’s bad for maintaining the robust link between Wall Street and China, but also shows the impressive nature of the decision. There is a willingness to leave financial interests unhappy if it means bringing relief to the middle class.
“Cultural imperialism”. They are learning the buzzwords to manipulate American elites.
(Not that I’m complaining, good for them for fighting back. I personally am indifferent to homosexuality, but this kind of thing is deeply obnoxious. Naturally, the US has a tendency to do this kind of thing in small countries that can’t fight back and not, say, Saudi Arabia or China. IIRC, Bush II’s State Department was already pushing what is today’s “leftist agenda” in places like the Baltics.)
Your summation is hard to swallow. Certainly there are more reasonable financial explanations for the recent drops in the Chinese investment markets than some unforeseen and mysterious realignment of social altruism?
What is the meaning of this music video? Sikhs are killing the Buddhist monks and a Muslim (?) womanizer (Pimp?) and his beautiful girlfriend?
I guess the Buddhists were exploiting the labour of the cows for their surplus value, so it’s happy ending for these rescued cows.
BTW German Reader happy to see you are back again.
shtu up bean breath
Hipster fashions and critically acclaimed restaurants aside, I understand people would be laughing about Russian (and Northern European) food in general. It’s not Italy. Who cares about elite restaurants and hipster places? It’s the working class man’s average daily food that we should judge country’s food by; what level of food is in the factory canteen and the train station; what is the level of the food in the culture when people are not thinking about impressing anyone, and just typical daily nourishment.
But that Mexican patriot in your post said something about Hungary. Aside from physicists and Whizz Air, one of the only things that country is famous is their food, pastries, coffeehouse culture, and classical music. What do people expect, it is South-Central Europe. Former junior partner in the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire. who had a direct borders all along Italy, and included Trieste, until 1918.
I’d still assume Hungarians are the world’s masters of salami and luxury pastries. Even their processed food, like cheap supermarket biscuits you can buy from Hungarian shops in Western Europe, seemed to be really good.
You should actually read the books I mentioned which addresses all of your points. Those aren’t necessarily well-argued but it’s good for opening your mind and see if consensus or your views can still stand.
Yes! The UN is the tool of the Dajjal, and it makes sense to avoid international Riba while promoting a non-debt currency.
Islamism can find common ground with American Tradcons because both of them are struggling against modernity.
Are countries where capital punishment existed against sodomites for centuries less gay today than they would be otherwise? Less gay that other countries? Or too few executions?
It’s servicing the Gaokao system which is the descendant of the Imperial Examination. These institutions, emphasizing a relatively rigid syllabus and high-end functional competition, select for quasi-rote-learners who can think and perform according to pre-set logics under the duress of preparation. This explains much of the HBD peculiarities in the Sinosphere.
Even when the commercialized tutor industry goes under, a lot of cramming and intense training will go on, very often in broad daylight. Not that children will go out and play overnight when your culture wants them to sit down and hit the books.
thx, don’t know though if I’ll comment much again, am preoccupied with personal issues, also increasingly at a loss what to think about the world (too depressing).
(btw, iirc you mentioned you’d been reading Thucydides; did so myself earlier this year, there’s a really nice translation in Cambridge texts in the history of political thought with lots of helpful maps and appendices:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/thucydides/B3A64B95579E3B2E88C423168C17ED2F
Seems like an interesting series in general, and much of it can be pirated on LibGen).
Anatoly, it’s worth considering that re: Chinese TFR; a child born out of country and issued citizenship later is not counted in the census until they start attending school in China. There’s even a specific form of ID issued for such cases. I learned that data point from an Educrat here who works for the BoE. A lot of that is related to school funding calculations. A census is never just a census.
Whoa, hold on a minute there…
utu is recommending the consumption of raw animal flesh? How would you reconcile that with your well-known, oft-stated views concerining COVID?
For a while, I puzzled over why Niven gave the Puppeteers three legs and hoofs, but I think the answer is pretty clear, when you consider Indian streets. 3/3
I also miss Thulien Fiend – it is hard to get a rise out of other Indians without him around, shitting on the non-Hindus and helping to stir things up with his die-hard adherence to crypto-Indianism.
At first, I thought that you were writing about David Niven. 🙂
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a7/David_Niven_4_Allan_Warren.jpg/220px-David_Niven_4_Allan_Warren.jpg
Overall, a very competent actor!
I never got why people around here thought ThuleanFriend could be Indian, his earnest fanaticism, total lack of humour, moral crusading on ecological issues (“eat your bugs to save the climate”) and his absurd worship of women (“cull 80% of manoids”) were quite stereotypically Swedish.
Will Matty ever recover from this?
Aren’t they worried that this will encourage war against them in the next years?
https://twitter.com/chinahand/status/1428428996635631619
https://149512802.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/attack2Bsubmarines-768×425.png
Lol.
A correlation between countries’ “IQ scores” and good food, could sound plausible for Japan and Italy, which have the world’s best food, and some of the highest supposed “IQ scores” (not that I endorse those tests). But then how will we explain the lack of widespread or natural talent for cooking, across all of Northern Europe (except France and Belgium), and including in countries where the contemporary “IQ scores” will be the highest like Germany.
France and Belgium (and maybe Austria for pastries) seem like the only white people who have connoisseurship of cooking somehow “natively in their blood”, and widespread across a country.
Many countries have good restaurants, but the test for a country’s hospitality cuinsine is what will be like when visited a random cafe or canteen in an unfashionable area.
I don’t find myself reading a lot these days, but I do plan on revisiting the 7th Century sometime. It’s become one of my favorite historical periods. I don’t claim my views are anything other than an interested amateur. And I do agree that the orthodox “Friday school” presentation of the origins of Islam presents us the picture of a fully formed faith from the get-go, which isn’t supported by historical evidence. I just find the case for a historical Muhammad-or a figure like him-more convincing than an ahistorical one, and the basic core of his biography (trader turned monotheist prophet-leader) is plausible enough to not be dismissed. Not least because it jives with the Qu’ran, which actually does date from the 7th Century, unlike the hadiths.
Also, it’s hard for me to believe there wasn’t an actual Arab conquest, however mainstreamized the Arabs were in the Roman East by that point. The Byzantines would have never given up 75% of their wealth willingly, least of all after the cataclysmic war with Persia. It might not have taken much for the conquest to succeed, given how much of the region had just spent decades under foreign occupation, but there was one.
Agreed. Not only is it easier on your wallet and you get bigger portions, the food’s better. And you meet people.
Just be careful what you put in your mouth in some places in the developing world. Or, in the case of China, developed. (It’s not just health standards, Sichuanese and Hunanese food will use a lot more oil and/or chili than even other Chinese are used to.)
Thanks, well don’t let us keep you here. There are probably healthier and more optimistic hobbies than commenting in such a place lol.
I did not know that Cambridge had a version with maps. In the book shop, I’ve seen this translation, but only a different Cambridge version which doesn’t have maps or pictures. (I don’t know if you have the Cambridge history of philosophy and history of politics editions in Germany with the undecorated blue and green covers.)
For the Ancient Greek texts, any maps, timelines and pictures are very helpful. I saw in the bookshop the series of Greek texts in “Landmark” by Simon Shuster. That has pictures of the different ships, and diagrams of military tactics, etc.
Lol. Here I’m thinking, “Oh, Thorfinnsson knows econ, let’s see what he has to say…”
Turns out it’s his bender day.
It’s great, the maps are really helpful, also a glossary of the key terms, timeline, list of all the important persons etc.
They’ve also got translations of Platon’s Politeia and Aristotle’s Politics (plus the “Constitution of Athens”) in that series (also of Latin texts like Cicero’s De officiis), haven’t yet read those, but probably also of very high standard.
(didn’t get it in a bookshop, but pirated it on Library Genesis – thx to AK for bringing this wonderful site to my attention! – they don’t have everything from that series there, but quite a lot).
I thought he was culturally integrated into Sweden, having grown up there. Any theory about his obsession with India? And his partisanship against Sikhs and Muslims? He seemed to follow it quite closely, even on a political and military level, as well as perhaps having a slight antipathy to China and even Taiwan (though not Singapore). I almost felt like he was filling in an absentee ballot for Modi’s party.
I think he was trying to troll with the cull manoids stuff, seeing the forum as lacking women, and hoping to get a rise out the many male commentators, in a way he would be more reluctant to do with ethnicity.
BTW, I don’t know if you have ever heard this one – I expect it is mythical, invented just as a boilerplate made-up story about people being made uncomfortable from pretend racism – but supposedly Germans have a cultural obsession with Indians (feather) dating back to Karl May to the point where the men will leer at any swarthy , young female, even from MENA, who stirs up this deep desire for feather Indians. And Germans wear buckskin clothes. And it is tied to Hitler, who loved May.
Can’t remember where I first heard it.
There is something to that, it’s also linked to some extent to anti-Americanism (“look what those dastardly Americans did to the noble Indians – apparently in East Germany there was an entire genre of “anticolonial” movies about Indians:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFA-Indianerfilm ).
However, I think that has pretty much faded, nowadays there are so many real-life vibrant peoples with charming customs present in Germany that one doesn’t have to look to 19th century America to satisfy one’s desire for the exotic.
All humor was declared suspended this week after the event of Taliban COS playing Iwo Jima Marines.
How much of those are simply acknowledgements of inevitable and inexorable consequences of a pandemic such as COVID? Statements that are more descriptive than prescriptive?
How long can anyone remain self-sufficient? In today’s world?
Can any man be an island?
Unless/until it kills you. COVID, like all pathogens, doesn’t care what anyone thinks about it.
Young, Healthy, Unvaccinated:
https://news.google.com/stories/CAAqOQgKIjNDQklTSURvSmMzUnZjbmt0TXpZd1NoTUtFUWlMa1pqUWs0QU1FWVN5V0hXU3hGMmJLQUFQAQ?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen
Phil Valentine, a radio host who scoffed at Covid, then urged his followers to get vaccinated, dies.
Covid cases overwhelm the Gulf Coast, leaving region with no I.C.U. beds.
3 Alaska Airlines employees die of COVID in a month as leadership moves toward vaccination mandate
‘Moaning, crying, unable to move’: Photo shows Florida COVID-19 patient on floor of antibody treatment site
I once spent two weeks on a Norwegian research ship. They had boiled potatoes at lunch and dinner every single day. That was the blandest menu I had ever encountered since grade school cafeteria.
A friend of mine used to work on American submarines. One time their replacement duty vessel got held up in the dry dock and they were stuck out there for an extra month. At the end they were eating saltines and peanut butter 3X a day.
Roger Ebert reviewed, about 30 years ago, “The Vanishing.” Both the subtitled European production, and the US remake two years later. Ebert’s review of the latter tells you a lot about the US:
“What’s the story here? Do Sluizer and his American producers believe the American movie audience is so witless it will not accept uncompromising fidelity to a story idea? Are Europeans deserving of smart, cynical filmmaking, but Americans have to be approached on a more elementary level? I don’t know. I simply know that George Sluizer has directed two films named “The Vanishing,” and one is a masterpiece and the other is laughable, stupid and crude.”
Btw, I happened upon this because I recently viewed the European version. I recommend it. But I must warn that it is extremely unnerving. In fact the ending is so unnerving, that I wish I could unsee it. But so far I have not been able to unsee it.
OT & FYI: I was very very and very impressed with Babylon Berlin
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/cuties/#comment-4176573
so when recently I stumbled on Netflix on The Defeated I had an expectation of similar German quality portraying very interesting period of time in Germany history. In the mid of the first episode I knew it was a total crap. Then I fast forward through the rest of episodes to get an idea of the plot. The plot is totally holocaustianized. I do not know who wrote it. It is a total fantasy invented by people who have no knowledge nor feel for history but I am afraid that this is what is forming and will form young people image, idea and imagination of how the past looked like.
Fassbinder’s “The Marriage of Maria Braun” will remain for me the best German film that touches on the post war condition.
Tbh the Gungans are more Asian than African. They aren’t particularly primitive, especially underwater, just slightly less developed due to their own reclusiveness.
And, unlike Africans, but similarly to East Asians, crime and incompetence is treated equally and dealt with either being executed or exiled, something the Africans are yet to figure out to do efficiently.
That’s a big problem with all standardized tests. They select for educated people, not actually intelligent people. Basically bullshit recyclers. A layer of the population that we could very much get rid of along with the bottom tier scraps simply because of the inconvenience they cause for the species due to being confused with their more intelligent superiors.
Hopefully human quantification becomes possible soon so we can literally test for g-factor and select that way (basically indirectly creating eugenics instantly), but until then a testing system that tests both intelligence and personality is preferred.
What is there to reconcile? Do you think that my stand on covid stems from germaphobia. I do not have germophobia. As a child I always loved to play in dirt and still do. I grew up in medical doctors family who were trained before antibiotics so they were extra careful and ritualistic about boiling water, milk and thorough hands washing. To excess in my opinion but they taught me to eat steak tartare and mettwurst when I was still a child.
My stand about covid is about stupidity not germs. I do not fear germs but I feel great exasperation with stupid people like libertarians who undermine concerted efforts because of their egotism and stupidity. If I had to eat libertarians certainly I would not eat them raw but would cook them thoroughly first, preferably live and forced them to wearing masks so their screams would not expel too many germs into the environment shared by normal people.
Floomers and anti-vaxxers are idiots and no one should be concerned what they have to say. They should be treated as tantrum prone children and the feeble minded. A combination of anti-psychotics and tranquilizer would do a job.
I do think he owes you an explanation, in either case (bender or not). I don’t think that you were way off the mark…
Nords are simply a bland people.
Like, everything people accuse the East Asians of being can be said of the Scandinavians.
They’re an intelligent and even pleasant and friendly people (despite the very stoic façade), yet there’s this culture where the best thing in life is to pretend to be a mediocre fuck. All art and anything a culture of note creates originates from a need for extravagance and conspicuousness. 2 things that are basically death penalty tier crimes in the North.
Hence why “Scandinavian” when referring to style is now synonymous with “minimalistic and bland.”
Might be some selection for coping with the awful natural poverty of their land, or something – yet their old wooden stave churches and such very very old buildings are rather pleasant and very unique. And then at some point they decided to ditch this in order to become the most boring as fuck civilization in the history of boring as fuck civilizations.
Law of Jante is what the Danish call it.
Anglos have a similar problem but at least they actually do luxury right, or at least they used to.
Nihang Singh doing antique restores and new builds. Does Bowies and Longswords too I think, coool.
https://www.instagram.com/meet_arms/
Got few friends who bought pesh kabz, katar & few talwars off him|| I’m already equipped or I would 2
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
I have written some posts on my Substack (click my name); currently I am reading the Cambridge History of Latin America.
Apparently Zero COVID is only surviving in ethnically Chinese territories (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and mainland China). Australia and Brunei have fallen to Delta, and Israel’s cases are rapidly growing. Is there anything left to do except try to update the vaccines?
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1154525457909338112
Hardly an anomaly.
Just caught my attention via Google News:
The GOP waves white flag in the same-sex marriage wars
(Rather germane to Mr. Karlin’s recent post Rainbow Ascendant)
Selected Excerpts:
Sad!
https://www.businessinsider.com/florida-mom-loses-2-unvaccinated-sons-to-covid-19-in-less-than-a-day-2021-8
Curious, if I understand correctly, that was a number of years before the USSR made its first Western. Never attempted to watch a film from the DDR, but you got me a bit interested in it.
Been browsing the highest-grossing films in the DDR, and I am quite surprised: they all seem East German, unless I am mistaken. I thought that there would be at least a few Soviet or Hollywood films. The Soviet Union allowed a few Hollywood films and so did China (the first Rambo movie was popular there.)
Makes me wish I knew more about the Eastern Bloc. Because I am wondering what it signifies. The East German regime in particular (perhaps, concerned with flight). Or the fact that the bigger players were talking to each other, and making meaningless concessions, while ignoring the smaller players.
Anyway, it is fascinating even on an independent level that East Germany maintained its own culture, despite having a relatively small population and much fewer resources, compared with the pozzed Germany of today. I mentioned it quite a while ago, but Germany helped finance a Red Baron movie (2008) which was filmed entirely in English (and amusingly ahistorical.)
https://c7.alamy.com/comp/PRXDMY/altai-russia-august-5-2010-a-boy-sheep-shepherds-son-sits-on-rocks-in-mountains-PRXDMY.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/mR95pkX.jpg
Somehow I got the idea that the Trade Federation were supposed to be the Asians.
Though, I am being a little tongue-in-cheek, as I think Tolkien was the only one to acknowledge basing his races off of his ideas regarding different ethnicities in the real world, and obviously Lucas married a black.
Oh well at least you are not giving your money to Cambridge (they have too much). I will buy their edition of Thucydides anyway, just to see how it is in comparison to the other one I have.
Also some of the compilation texts of this series look like they would be enjoyable (for an untrained, nonexpert dilettante as myself, who hasn’t already read all texts they extract from). But these compilation editions are definitely not being printed anymore.
https://www.amazon.com/Greek-Aesthetics-Cambridge-History-Philosophy-dp-052154792X/dp/052154792X
https://www.amazon.com/Early-Political-Thought-Cambridge-History/dp/0521437687/
I read most of the volume on “Early Greek political thought”, can also be pirated on Library Genesis. Its definition of “political” is pretty wide, lots of short excerpts about the nature of justice etc., didn’t enjoy those that much, because imo it’s a bit meaningless when you strip texts of their contexts so much; also many texts from sophists (or attributed to them, via Plato’s dialogues) which are really just fragments imo. There are also some pretty interesting longer pieces in it though (e.g. “the Old Oligarch” about Athenian democracy and imperialism, also some pieces about despotism in Asia, explained by a kind of climate theory iirc), so I’d still recommend it (at least getting it for free from LibGen, lol).
Not so fast. Brilliant minds are usually also strong-rote-learners.
Imperial Exams was not the worst filtering system. For among others, it produced Wang Yangming and Zhang Juzheng.
Trump is second generation, upper class person in New York, and his children third generation of the New York elite. The fact they have socially liberal views – they would quite unusual and unlikely not to have them.
Before loyalty to their father’s political campaign has damaged their reputation, his children had seemed like normally socialized people, rather than eccentric friendless outcasts. It would be unlikely to expect their views will be diametrically opposite those of all their socialite peers and school friends.
–
Note that before Trump’s narcissism saw the opportunity of a presidential campaign via exploitation of redneck discontent, the Trump family were standard New York celebrities, just with a kitsch taste of interior design (but New York elite had kitsch taste since before even the Art Deco times). His media fans were Democrats like Oprah.
Only really strange and asynchronous thing I heard of Trump’s children, is as late as early 2000s they thought it was cool to poach at endangered African animals.
Maybe because they were born in the 1970s, and had some elite elderly man’s contacts in their golf club, whose business was selling vacations to old wealthy Americans where you pretend to be a character from Karen Blixen’s memoirs.
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/09/02/01/37D08D9A00000578-3770040-image-a-28_1472774430956.jpg
I can imagine the extracts can lose meaning in those compilations, especially when they are stripping extracts from Plato’s dialogues.
There is one Plato compilation I have enjoyed to read, which extracts the different myths from his dialogues. At least. Plato’s myths can have an almost independent existence from the rest of the text, although reading the myths without the rest of the dialogue still felt like “picking raisins out of a roll” (if this metaphor exists in English). A beauty of Plato’s dialogues is often how it surprises you with sudden expansions from a dry, pedantic discussion. into wildly imaginative mythology for an interlude.
Frankly, I actually like traditional Russian food (I mean actual pre-Soviet fare).
I also, though, have a thing for pickled herring and rye bread.
Anything from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire is bound to be delicious, especially in the Metropoles, and especially if it has paprika.
China has really been working hard to institute Confucian and (actual, traditional, implied) socialist values. It’s really a beautiful thing.
America has a lot of death and suffering to go through before it begins to tread the path of righteousness. Though, in some small ways, it seems to be learning (proto-UBI, etc.)
We really need that push for abolishing property taxes on primary residencies, while making affordable housing in sensibly redesigned and walkable cities.
I.e. pre-laid towns with max populations. Not finding ways to dump more housing units in megacities, etc. I suppose, if course, that might be a necessary temporary step.
Coffin Apartments should absolutely be thing, short term.
That is like the least consideration for the Chinese government.
This a$$ used to be with the BBC:
https://twitter.com/antelava/status/1429035605707661313
Art in Sweden is about very important political posturing and nothing much else. In earlier decades, it was about praising communism and denouncing capitalism, and nowadays it’s about praising migrants and denouncing capitalism.
Anecdotes are interesting. But please see this detailed, regularly updated assessment of the virus’s lethality rate: https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/
It wouldn’t be worth giving up our freedom if the virus were as lethal as the power-grabbing, dissent-suppressing authorities” and profiteering Pharma corporations allege … and it’s not that lethal anyway.
Yes. This one is sad too:
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2021/07/06/distraught-father-warns-17-yr-old-son-now-has-ongoing-heart-condition-after-receiving-covid-shot-1099752/
And this one:
https://stuartbramhall.wordpress.com/2021/08/11/mom-whose-14-year-old-son-developed-myocarditis-after-pfizer-vaccine-no-longer-trusts-cdc-public-health-officials/
And this one:
https://www.ibtimes.com/teen-suffers-heart-attack-days-after-receiving-pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-3275705
Oh man up. You should try some Growacet, it helped me punch covid in the vagina without a vaccine:
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6tiB4dtaDV4/YSNOFZNnGfI/AAAAAAAAHZo/SRDpLb2Mbx4qM5yg0V10Yifya-SlBksyQCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h464/growacet-UCEM-TTFU.jpg
FYI to all the people hiding their comment history, a simple use of Googles advance search pretty much reveals it all so I don’t understand what everyone is doing…..
“INSERT USER” site:unz.com
It’s almost as if people here are 80 IQ white-collar retirees…. I refused to believe it for so long but it just might be the case.
I don’t judge, I just feel bad for Karlin having to waste 15 seconds adding a user to a “hide” list that does literally nothing.
I’m looking at you sher singh.
TO ALL THE INDIANS ON THIS FORUM:
STOP PUTTING INDIAN VIDEOS HERE. I know the Russians here made it acceptable to put non-English content but vodka has a power of its own which one has to forgive. Indians however understand English better than the English themselves so there is no excuse for me to be exposed to a backwards useless language or for my eyeballs to even witness the turban dancing you consider a civilization.
TO RON UNZ
I support the motion by Thorfinsson to replace the ‘Troll’ button with the ‘Faggot’ button. It’s more appropriate and would bring a true 90s authenticity to this website. It’s also more accurate.
TO KARLIN:
You see what happens when you waste time on twitter? You drag this type of shit in here. Thanks bro. Really. I don’t pee in your pool, don’t shit on my porch.
Fucking assholes…..
I did not know that the Russian made Westerns. They did make some very good ‘Easterns’ back in the day with Turkmen taking the role of Red Indians. White Sun of the Desert is an awesome move. It is available on Youtube.
The Western has been adopted by the most unlikely countries as a movie genre. There is even a Kiwi Western, aptly titled “Good for Nothing”.
Shut up Canadian.
I think that while “accuse” is too strong a term for what is being said in hbd circles, the data points to more creativity among Scandinavians than among East Asians. Like music (Sibelius is the only real first rate composer, but a number of second rate ones, but also a number of Scandinavian styles of metal music, or pop music like ABBA), scientists, explorers (and actually the Vikings were some kind of explorers), and all that with a fraction of the population of Japan (let alone East Asia).
I think that this kind of profanity should be banned. I’m all for free speech, and I even accept milder insults like “faggot” or calling each other pedophiles, but calling another commenter a Canadian is taking it too far, in my opinion. Please retract and apologize.
It’s almost as if people here are 80 IQ white-collar retirees
What do you have against retirees?
saw the opportunity of a presidential campaign via exploitation of redneck discontent,
Actually, rednecks saw the advantage in exploiting Trump.
He’s back? And I’m in the middle of a European road trip. Greetings from Switzerland.
Thanks, I felt sure that the USSR must have made films about Russia’s frontier days, since there was an implicit idea among both Soviets and Americans that each country was a mirror image of the other. Wild West vs. Wild East. But I had not previously heard of any.
In 1961, The Magnificent Seven (Hollywood import) was the highest-grossing film in the USSR. (Incidentally, in total, the Soviets imported over 7x the number of films from India, as from the US, 300 vs. 41).
I guess it was technically an Ostern (that is, thematically deconstructive of America’s idea of the West), but in 1972, Russia co-produced with Cuba a movie called The Headless-Horseman. Most popular film of that year. It was set in Texas. Haven’t watched it yet.
Some say that the Western genre represents America’s soul. It’s an interesting premise. Undeniably, there is an early idealization of rugged masculine individualism and rootlessness, without perhaps considering the negative consequences of such individualism. Soon followed by various muddying strains, like the idealization of Indians, to the point where they were never the villains in the Lone Ranger, or, how half-bloods spoke with refined accents in Daniel Boone. It continued with the idealization of crooks and prostitutes, as well as the insertion of tough women. Finally, I think the movie Django Unchained , brutal as it, perfectly represents America’s modern psychosis.
Also sad are risk assessment abilities of too many people when dealing with overall data about negative Covid outcomes vs. negative vax outcomes:
https://www.foxla.com/news/unvaccinated-adults-50-are-17x-more-likely-to-die-than-vaxxed-counterparts
I don’t agree with getting rid of anyone, but this kind of test would be useful for some.
I thought the Finns, not Scandis, were the only Northern European people so accused. In theory, due to their harsher climate, which selected them to be less willing to stand out, or else for for moderately higher intelligence, but for less geniuses. Sibelius was an ethnic Swede.
Though, I’m not so sure how accurate such a stereotype is. Finland was less economically developed for most of modern history, and class and capital plays a lot into these things. Not to mention, historically, it only broke a million in about 1820 and two million in about 1880. And doesn’t have a large population today, either.
On a related note, sometimes, I think that Italy really put the rest of Europeans to shame. I mean, Germans can claim Mozart and Bach, but what compares with inventing the piano, or the violin? But then I remember that they were at the center of trade routes and had a relatively large population and more benign climate compared to some other areas. (Though perhaps, still a small pop, if you take only the North) But, maybe, higher density in cities?
COVID was of course going endemic all along. Public health policy can change and it is never a predetermined matter.
You are going to see people burning their vaccination cards, plant gardens, work in their workshops and avoid buying from or paying places held hostage by vaccine gatekeeping.
But the elites do.
Also utu:
Do it and you will become a Nazi. HoloCOVID won’t come as the virus or the vaccine, but plain old prosecution.
Fuck Zero COVID, it is an excuse for indefinite, normalized restrictions. (I am living in one of those places where the authorities have sound (to themselves) security reasons to normalize restrictions)
Go the UK or Florida route, except the vaccine passport system is made optional or abolished. Let provaxxers, antivaxxers and anti-institutional types think for themselves.
sudden death:
Sure. But not all vaccines are created equal, there are conventional and experimental vaccine tech, and we can’t say the experimental vaccine tech is sufficiently safe until 5-10 years of evaluation.
I am not the type who suspect the COVID virus is entirely fictional. In fact I don’t hate provaxxers until they force (instead of urging) others to vaccinate. But the COVID that matters isn’t a virus or a disease, it is a phantom hanging over everyone’s head first conjured by the elites, then used by populists and the discontented who see thru the actions of states, possibilities of change. It’s the karma of a suicidal civilization.
The violin family of instruments basically developed from lutes/lyres played with a bow, that is an Italian adaptation of Byzantine-Islamic types.
But piano is genuinely Italian.
Aubrey de Grey has apparently been ousted from the SENS Research Foundation.
https://twitter.com/senstweet/status/1429276575195860997
IMO, it can take genius to iterate too. The cello, the viola – both from Italy.
Perhaps, it would be better characterized as Persian? I am not sure.
For the most part, I try to stay away from global music, but from what I heard of Islamic music, I suggest that they be banned from civilization (even from visiting) along with the people who like rap (I make an exception for parody). Though some here seem to really like Islamic music.
It is a shame that practically nothing musical survives from the Roman Empire. I suspect that they must have achieved a certain level of sophistication, and it would be interesting to compare to later Italian music.
In the event of serious global warming, the continental interior of Canada and the Northernmost US would become more desirable for farmland, but they’d still be remote and the summers would still be hot without an ocean nearby. So I wonder if places with a pleasant summer would come at more of a premium.
One thought is the Maritime provinces of Canada. I’ve never looked into real estate there, but currently these places are losing population which makes me think some bargains could be found, and I’ve never in my life heard anyone in the US talk about them, even as bordering Maine is overcrowded with vacationers in the summer. Could that ever reverse? And would global warming be expected to make Nor’easters worse, or milder?
The Maritimes’ prospects would probably be a lot better if they were part of the US though. I’ve also heard the argument that if Quebec ever split from Canada, the Maritimes (cut off from English Canada) would join the US. In which case I’d be very bullish on real estate there.
Oh that’s cool. Is it something like driving south towards Sicily, or west to Basque Country?
It’s lucky also I guess with coronavirus reduced tourists, it’s still one of the better summers to get to Rome or Florence with less tourist crowds there.
The troll button should stay, but the “faggot” button should be added.
The usage for “troll” would be sort of like a spicier LOL, it should be the highest privilege a commenter could receive on this site
This issue is dependent on what time is the development level in the field of art, when the nationality enters it with adequate training and resources. It’s interesting that Scandinavia/Finland’s (latter in the Russian Empire sphere at times) most famous artists were often in the late stage of the art form (e.g. Munch, Sibelius), and they didn’t have much virgin territory to contribute to.
For example, if China entered into the classical music training from the early 19th century (rather than the end of the 20th century), then they would have produced a lot of composers.
I wrote a post about it last week, which has some mistakes. But I’ll repost it anyway.
Renaissance began in Italy, and awakening of modern man after his historical siesta filters early North through France, Low Countries and to England and Scotland.
In Germany, by the time of Weimar Classicism, in the literary discussions, there was a sense of being far behind the civilized world, and a choice is presented between imitation and originality (between “Zivilisation vs Kultur”). This debate was later transposed to Russia, where it still remains with the debate about the “Russian soul”, “Russian soil”, “Russian spirituality”, in rebellion to the need to import culture from that West, that is ironically all an imported debate from Germany.
In the 19th century, there was this question of being an imitative society in Germany, in Russia, in the USA, and by the end of the century in Japan as well.
In some fields of art, Russia manages to wake up in time to combine its imitative imports, with innovation on the last stage of European cultural fertility, contributing original things to late romantic music, early modernism in music and painting, and the later developments of the novel and stages of verse like the symbolist movement in poetry.
USA’s development is mostly too late to contribute originally in the main European cultural fertility movements, and their original contribution is more minimally to late modernism in painting that can be seen as terminus, where the possibility of mimetic painting was closed by the invention of photography.
However, technological developments that allow the creation of the moving image by the 20th century, allow America to become an innovator in the new field of cinema. There is also a virgin territory for America in the cultural fusions that results in jazz and pop music.
Similarly, in virgin territories created by technology of the late 20th century, Japan could become the most innovative nation in video games.
These most “slow waking” culturally regions of the modern world are Latin America, China, South East Asia, India and Africa.
Latin America provided the “boom” of later 20th century literature (so that much of the interesting postmodernist literature is Latin American). For China, India and Africa, the question will be what fields are left (or will be newly created) to innovate in the 21st/22nd or late 22nd century (Africa?) centuries. It’s difficult to envisage where the next art fields will be (e.g. virtual reality games, etc).
Given that scientific advances are overwhelmingly dominated by men, and that many male geniuses fail to reproduce, it seems obvious that current harassment levels are sub-optimal.
It might make sense to try to artificially scale up the sexual harassment in labs, at least for those who reach above a certain threshold of contribution.
For example, all good-looking, intelligent, female undergrads accepted as assistants. Must wear schoolgirl uniforms with the hems made higher and regularly laundered in libido-enhancing pheromones (while male clothing is laundered in testosterone.) And while they work, they are possibly shot with some sort of ray that blocks inhibitions and makes people hornier. And, naturally, birth control, and teratogens banned.
My struggle with the “Mohammed didn’t exist” camp (which seems to overlap a fair amount with the “Jesus didn’t exist” camp) is that it doesn’t seem to align with anything else in human experience.
To me it’s rather plain that Mohammed and Joseph Smith were similar figures — heretics during a time of religious experimentation. Both insisted that they were given a new holy scripture by angels. Mohammed, however, was born at a time and place where ground was more fertile for his heresy, and he probably also got luckier. Why is it unimaginable that a man that seems an awful lot like Joseph Smith actually was like Joseph Smith? Why the need to insist that he was instead more like Hercules?
One thing Joseph Smith never tried to do was insist that actually his religion was founded by some other guy. Why would he? The benefits of being the founder of a new religion are immense, and both Smith and Mohammed were able to score a bunch of wives for themselves, along with great personal power within a community.
For example, my grandparents are quite interesting people in terms of their mental life (more interesting than most young people).
But their cooking skills are somehow totally incompetent. They can have the world’s best mushroom, and convert it into overcooked cream soup with chewy mushrooms whose flavour was lost.
So I’m not inclined to necessarily align boring food, with uninteresting people, and vice versa.
Another thing is that being “innovative in cooking” is not necessarily a good thing, at least among nonprofessionals. If your girlfriend says she has “invented a new recipe”, it usually something like cooking a packet of edamame beans with spaghetti.
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Isn’t one of the secrets of why Mediterranean people are so good with food, because of their sense of tradionalism and conservatism – and this is partly because of the locality of their ingredients?
For example, one of the conflicts of Arab-Israeli is in the cooking sphere, where Arabs complain that Israel is using traditional Arab recipes in “blasphemous” ways – e.g. sushi with hummus. Here is Israel’s blasphemy is to apply innovation, against a local Middle Eastern extreme conservatism. But if you choosing restaurants blindly, then probably better to go with the one with a conservative looking menu.
The absence of my country from the list is comforting. We do have nice bars and restaurants, but also more than enough foreigners as is. Every time I go to Bucharest’s Old Downtown, I get physically sick from the number of Brits. There’s also a few other invaders and foreign parasites.
Except aren’t most scientific advances made by young men? And most sexual harassment seems to involve old, or at least middle-aged men.
My sense is that a top-tier scientist usually completes his most important work somewhere between age 25-35, and then he coasts on those accomplishments the rest of his life. At some point he’s often given management responsibility, which is usually the “Peter Principle” in action. Put a socially-awkward dork with a big ego whose work revolves around studying microscopic particles in charge of an organization of human beings. Be surprised when he tries to leverage his “boss status” to make awkward passes at the limited number of attractive women who come into contact with him. Destroy him, then blame the problem on the fact that STEM is overpopulated by the sorts of personalities that are good at STEM, and we need more people who are bad at STEM in STEM.
You’ll have more young scientists if the old ones reproduce frequently though.
I don’t think that the Italians can lay claim to having invented the keyboard instrument. Harpsichords, clavicords, and pipe organs all have very long histories — to such an extent that I don’t think that anybody knows exactly where they were invented. (The pipe organ is often attributed to Ancient Greece, though doubtless in some sort of unrecognizable form.)
The piano is merely the natural evolution of something like the harpsichord. Northern Italy was an important proto-industrial center that was well positioned to develop and manufacture such things; Milan, in particular, was a powerhouse with a huge export economy which specialized in complex goods.
In contrast to Milan, it’s interesting that Southern Italy was considered somewhat backwards and “exotic” by most civilized Europeans of the 17th centuries onwards.
As for the Germans, their cultural contributions have been tremendous. Schopenhauer’s works alone are worth more than everything ever written in Italian — and it’s difficult to see how Italy could have produced a man like Schopenhauer, because the business of philosophy was an important one in 19th century Germany, but has never been important in Italy.
Hard to tell exactly nowadays, since everything seems to be big teams. But I suspect that the sharp minds of grad students are being exploited by senescent people. Though, I would probably still put the cutoff higher for the sake of safety, say, under 40.
Possibly, but “The looking good, Susan.” meme undoubtedly applies to age too. Though women don’t have the same age bias as men, they do have a strong preference for younger sperm.
But, anyway, I think it still makes sense to encourage smart, old men to reproduce, even with their increased mutational load — that is the kind of desperate situation we are in, with smart fraction falling. Instead of depersoning James Watson (for comments about race), the UK should have bought him whores and given him free viagra, and paid the whores, if they conceived of Watson.
Though, admittedly, I may be something of a radical.
Even if we know nothing concrete about their lives outside of religious texts, I’d argue that the big difference between the likes of Jesus, Mani, and Muhammad and the likes of Moses, Achilles, and Arjuna is that the former didn’t live in a time period almost wholly inaccessible to us, outside those texts themselves.
This is reinforced by the fact that the accounts about them were within solid historical memory by the time that accounts about them were being written down. There’s a real difference between stories being written down 30, 60, or even 100 years later in an age where literacy and education isn’t nonexistent and stories being passed down orally for 400 years before literacy was (re)-discovered. The longer the time scale, the most the stories diverge and the figures in the stories change to reflect contemporary preoccupations: the discrepancies between the Qu’ran and the hadiths are proof of that.
I avoided the heat wave by stopping at the Italian lakes for a few days , then moving north. I swam in an Italian lake in the morning and hiked in the Swiss Alps in the afternoon.
Milan observation for readers here: most non-Europeans there are Indians, with small amounts of Africans and small amounts of Muslims.
Though the history may be nebulous, making a hammer mechanism is a significant innovation surely. Personally, I think we put too much importance on total originality. Most great things come from people inspired by other things. It is even true of fiction and poetry.
I recall some German writer claiming that all Germans are philosophers.
As for me, give me the The Aeneid. It is admittedly unfinished, and lacks polish in certain areas, but it seems a greater antidote to the modern problem of poz than anything I recall reading by Germans. (though admittedly my interest in philosophy is minimal.)
l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
Dante Alighieri, Paradiso XXXIII:145
[“The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”]
You may have read somewhere about the Italian Renaissance. Never is a really long time! All the Roman stars were technically Italian except we call them something else.
I have never been to Italy, but looking at other people’s pictures, gives me this impression: you can go to off the beaten path attractions, things that are historical and which would probably be very interesting to the average American but in relative terms, compared to the more famous stuff, are third or fourth rate. Things like may have made it into the GoT television series. And you will inescapably see MENA people squatting and smiling at you, even at these third rate places that the locals would not look twice at.
Personally, I find it highly disturbing. Not the least reason being because it is obvious that they are jobless parasites.
I reached a similar point in episode one of The Defeated before I had to turn it off.
Before the Covid thing I remember there was a Romanian low cost airline, Blue Air, making a lot of flights from different British regional airports to Bucharest. This might explain the Brits, but these flights only exist because of the number of Romanians living in the UK.
All the bars on that list are terrible, full of wankers drinking cocktails, if I went into one of them I’d be like the dude in the video below. PONCE !!!!
As Adept points out, Prague is not on the list, IMO Prague is the best drinking town in Europe, the beer is great and its a bargain, anybody who loves booze will love Prague
Who gets into Schopenhauer? People prone to exaggeration and tunnel blindness? Some sort of artists whose alcohol and drug saturated minds can respond only to shouts and screams. He is for angry people. Schopenhauer was angry with the world all his life. A pathetic loser who lucked out in the end. Schopenhauer is for infantile and immature.
Perhaps Dmitri could tell as more about it.
I saw only a few MENA people in northern Italy. No more than in the USA. The most common non-Europeans were Indians and Bangladeshis; the latter looked dirty and poor and would wander around parks and restaurants and try to sell roses to men who are in the company of women. This was pretty common. It reminded me of kids trying to sell chiclets in Tijuana excerpt these Bangladeshis were middle aged men.
Indians, OTOH, were of every class and I saw quite a few richly dressed ones in places where wealthy people go.
Maybe Rome is different?
Imagine being Anatoliy Karlin and thinking that because Ballot boxes weren’t stuffed (which is in itself a debatable proposition but we will accept it for the sake of argument), that having US advisors, strategists and money won’t change the election results in your favor. Which the ‘data’ (if Clinton archives are to be believed) shows – around the time when Clinton started helping Yeltsin, there was a turnaround of Yeltsin’s fortunes, compared to the KPRF which for all intents and purposes did no campaigning lol
and both Smith and Mohammed were able to score a bunch of wives for themselves, along with great personal power within a community.
Badda Bing, Badda Boom
Sibelius was a Finland-Swede which means his ancestors were quite heavily Finnish ethnically. The Swedish-speaking population there assimilated most everyone seeking social advancement between the 14th and 19th centuries. His paternal great-grandfather Juho Matinpoika was a peasant farmer in southern Finland (several generations before him had held the Pekkala farm) who married the daughter of Sibbe family and became the heir to their farm that way. One of his kids, Jean’s grandfather, took the last name Sibelius in place of his peasant’s patronym after moving to town and becoming an accountant in the early 1800’s. Swedish was the language of official business and the merchant townsfolk in Finland at that point so that’s what he spoke too.
if it’s so happy there why is there a word in Swedish Gråtrunka for crying while masturbating
Because you are unable to get someone else to do this for you. Sad. Cry.
I do value Schopenhauer and a number of other German authors, and I don’t even read many Italian authors, but this is just silly.
I didn’t want to overstate the point. Simply I wanted to say that the Scandinavians are different from East Asians, contrary to the claim made by the commenter I was responding to.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Thank you. Much appreciated.
Things are deteriorating in the bigger cities such as Donostia though. Many tourists are going there for the culinary experience and this has attracted unscrupulous entrepreneurs (outsiders, I was told last time I was there and it seemed to be true) who buy the best locations in town to open bars and restaurants with poor quality food.
There are still plenty of good places left in Donostia but only locals know which they are. For someone who takes the time to travel to the Basque Country to enjoy good pintxos (tapas), I think it is best to go to any small town out of the beaten track. Nobody would serve bad quality food there, they would be out of business soon.
What experts consider one of the best beef steaks in the world is actually served in a very modest restaurant of a small town in Gipuzkoa: https://www.forbes.com/sites/larryolmsted/2013/09/18/great-steak-spains-temple-of-beef/?sh=3c7e3a3b6a21 Aged beef from mature oxen, although most likely nowadays it will be cow, as oxen are pretty much disappearing.
People familiar with Basques here in the US tipically assume that Basque restaurants are good for lamb because Basques came here as sheepherders but there is much more of a beef tradition in the Basque Country. I ate my first 1-kilo (2 lb+) chuleton in a restaurant when I was about 11 years old. Lamb is actually better in the dry Castillian lands to the South.
So Turks will make a movie about how some Asian invaders conquered and subjugated their ancestors and forced an alien faith and language upon them?
Mestizos have much more Spanish ancestry than Turks have Turkic ancestry. And the Spanish did much more good in the Americas then the Turks did in Anatolia. But I somehow can’t imagine Guatemalans or Mexicans making movies glorifying the exploits of the Conquistadors.
I think he took after Grieg
Felicitous for our times
Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, The World as Will and Representation
Yes, I guess I mischaracterized Sibelius – the Finland-Swedes are some sort of hybrids, though with their own somewhat unique stereotypes vs. regular Finns. Then there are the Eastern Finns, who descend from pioneers, also with their own unique stereotypes.
People living in Europe will probably flame me for saying this, but I think Finland might be the most interesting country in Europe demographically-speaking, discounting non-Euro groups, like the Gypsies. Maybe, followed by Ireland, because of the (native) Travelers?
Though, I have wondered how much of the differences attributed to Finland-Swedes is pure geography – them tending to live on the coast.
I guess Eastern Finns have older surnames from moving around, but regular Finns have very new ones (helping to show their lack of development.) Strange to me, as my surname is based on a guy who lived in the 900s AD.
I’m not a proponent of the theory that porn lowers TFR, but I’m not sure that SK (which bans porn) is a good refutation of the theory. Has anyone scientifically tested its availability in SK? Then I understand that they have a lot of Skin-amax type movies there, which might be just as bad, or worse, because they appeal to women.
Incidentally, unless I am mistaken, Eastern Finland is the part of Finland more like Ireland, meaning more bogs. I wonder if there is something about bogs that encourages surname formation.
You make a good point, but yet it’s hard to deny that modern Turks have taken to their “Turkish” roots with sincerity. In addition to the film “Malazgirt 1071, Turkish television is broadcasting various historical dramas of the same sort, that can be seen on Netflix. Modern Turkish popular music has also been slanted towards glorifying the coming of the Ottomans to Anatolia. Can Atilla’s music is a good example of modern Turkish sensibilities on diplay vis a vis their Ottoman past. (He’s even written music dedicated to the empress from Galicia, Roxalana). You might find this music to be quite exciting:
https://open.spotify.com/album/4yRgssQ30UwEINUJ3ozd7F?si=X8hUTQV8SrWN3MlS392pvA&dl_branch=1
One unscientific idea I had is that surname generation in some regions of Christianized Europe also had a function like that famous Icelandic dating app in olden times – when the founding population was small they helped prevent cousin marriages.
I know it’s sincere, it just strikes me as being very weird. They live amongst the glorious monuments and ruins of their ancestors, yet LARP as the crude barbarians who conquered them. Even in the modern age – Greece may be poor and bad by Western Euro standards, but is far superior to Turkey. That could have been them.
Stabby durka durka is a symptom of the disease of government lunatics defecting from the high trust (for what reason? the approval of some discreetly jewish globohomo shithead in an expensive suit in Washingtoon?), and Breivik was a suitable immune reaction to that.
To be precise, it would translate as masturbating while crying. But to address your question, are we not better known for being dismal, depressive and suicidal rather than happy? Though I know that some gallows humor does actually raise my spirits.
Serb Talibans 🙂
https://twitter.com/admirim/status/1427178321104842752
https://twitter.com/ljubofil/status/1429369834865823745
https://twitter.com/ljubofil/status/1428279117477261319
https://twitter.com/SillySrpski/status/1426727902507323392
On a more serious note, I’ve been increasingly becoming cautiously optimistic about Serbia’s future, to the point that its almost not cautiously anymore, but cautious optimism is still appropriate regarding Serbia’s future for now.
Part 1:
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/washington%E2%80%99s-fundamentally-flawed-approach-balkans-187403
Part 2:
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/washington%E2%80%99s-fundamentally-flawed-approach-balkans-187403?page=0%2C1
The most important part of the article in part 2:
While scenes “out of Kabul” are not about to happen in the near future (next few years) in Pristina, Sarajevo, Podgorica and etc, its clear that no amount of genocide denial bans against Serbs in Bosnia, USA giving 500,000 Pfizer vaccines for Kosovo Albanians, NATO heavy weaponry for Kosovo Albanians, trying to steal the property of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro, and so on, will be successful in changing the objective political and strategic reality of the situation in the Balkans.
Vucic’s current strategy of sticking towards the territorial status quo temporarily in order to focus on Serbia’s economic growth and trying to revive Serbia’s demographics, culture, society, morality, religion and etc. is smart, but not without serious difficulty. The rumors about Russian S-400’s being secretly present in Serbia and undeclared since 2019 are interesting, although the test of their truth will immediately come out at the moment of any future crisis or war involving Serbia. Also to look out for will be Xi Jinping’s visit to Serbia by this year’s end where he might even deliver Chinese FK-3/KS-1 to Serbia, which will be yet another step in making Serbia practically unbombable by NATO.
At any rate, the USA is still busy with its Afghanistan fiasco, Iran-Israel nukes drama (Biden and Benett to meet before this weeks end), Russia, China, and so on, meaning Serbia will be mostly fine before the end of 2021 at least. In 2022 its possible that Daniel Serwer and Janusz Bugajski may get their way with their lobbying efforts to push for a US military abolition of Republika Srpska, but we’ll have to see. In 2021 USA has already had major prestige blows/geopolitical failures starting in January 6th, then in Ukraine (pressing Ukraine to back down in the face of Russia despite pumping Ukraine up for an assault on the east) and now Afghanistan. Its possible before 2021 even ends, there may be more geopolitical failures may be in with US military withdrawals from Iraq (this one’s already a failure really) and the Gulf States. All this possibly means Serbia may even be fine beyond 2021, but we’ll see.
Seems like it would be quite difficult to remember the forbidden degrees (up to 3rd cousins) of consanguinity for Catholics in the past (though they ditched 2nd and 3rd cousins by now), without surnames. Maybe, less difficult for Orthodox.
To a certain extent, I think patronymics were meant to be a defense against bastardy – helping to give it social stigma. So, in many cases, they still persisted among peasants even with surnames.
But it is interesting to consider if surnames may have somehow changed DNA. Maybe, counter-intuitively increased bastardy? Or else had some other effect, like decreasing inbreeding.
IIRC, Ed Dutton is skeptical of the whole guilt/shame dichotomy, and calls it “word fetishization.”
Have you heard classical Turkish music, which is inherits almost everything from late Byzantine music as well as Persian & Arab influences?
Not many Russians in Europe now, except for in Baden Baden. Is there a large permanent settlement here?
New travel blog soon?
https://youtu.be/AIWx-B0gRi8
All we have to do is keep our neighbors butthurt to the point everyone sees them as retards, and then we have not only the permission, but open support to eliminate and integrate.
People like winners. And they very much like to be the winners.
If they got destroyed by such inferior barbarians, they didn’t deserve to exist in the first place.
If I am honest, I don’t like it, though it is not as bad as what I have heard of Arab music. Maybe, Roman music was like that… But, perhaps, it is something you need to be weaned on.
Thinking about it, I wonder if music is analogous to accent. Some believe that we are genetically programmed to develop accents, to warn of foreigners. I guess the music we hear growing up might be programmed as a template into our brains, of what is normal and what is foreign. Maybe, pitch is even tied to the differing sounds of different languages.
Naive take.
You’re underestimating the extent to which Serbs are utterly loathed in the Western mainstream (why do you think all the fake trash and scum like Albanians, Bosniaks, Croats, Montenegrins, Slovenians, etc. have been able to get away with everything for so long?) and the much more problematic prospect of Turkey’s return as a top 10 great power. The Turkey issue is a greater problem in the long term actually.
Even though Turkey is currently fighting 3 wars simultaneously in Libya, Syria and against PKK/Kurds, and it has significant economic issues with the value of its currency, it’s still a formidable future opponent as Albania getting TB-2s and Albanian Kosovo buying Turkish military equipment proves.
Once Camp Bondsteel is withdrawn, a future Battle of Kosovo between Serbia (backed by Russia, of course) and Turkey, especially in the air with at least hundreds of drones, fighter jets and SAM/AA weapon systems is really not far-fetched at all …
1) Well, what did you expect? It’s a Turkish film, not a Western one. Unlike the Spaniards in Mexico, most Turks identify with them, and it’s not hard to see why: “mestizo” identity is the big thing in Mexico, and that’s due to the non-fungible political history of Mexico.
So, naturally, it’s going to focus on the Turks as the protagonists. The nuances of who your ancestors actually were tend not to be on the minds of your average movie viewer.
2) The Byzantines would recover much of Anantolia (all the rich parts) under the Komnenoi, and as far as I can tell, the inhabitants remained Romans. I suspect their plan was to slowly grind them down and Romanize them as they did the invaders in the Balkans, and had smarter decisions been made, that’s probably exactly what would have happened. Turkification only came centuries later.
Even if we speak of the initial settlement of the nomads in Anatolia: Manzikert was not a military calamity in the same way Adrianople or the Yarmouk were. Most of the Byzantine army survived. It was the fallout from the battle that proved deadly.
I don’t see how anyone can visit modern Shenzhen and think this is true.
I do think East Asian cultures tend to strongly encourage conformity to a degree that non-East Asians can find difficult to appreciate, but that’s not the same thing.
That’s exactly the parallel between Asians and Nordics.
They’re not innately uncreative or boring, but there’s instead a cultural insistence on hyperconformity.
Yes, I am aware. I propagandize and evangelize this to the most extreme extent, by saying that all westerners have a superfetish on Serbocide. Untrue, and the average inhabitant of those countries either doesn’t know or doesn’t care, but it’s more of an internal control mechanism to keep our xenophobia levels above the minimal threshold.
Either way, however, there is a rather potent pro-Serbian camp in the west that can be used – especially in the anti-globohomo opposition.
As for Turkey – we’ll see. The Kurd problem will only become bigger as time goes on – the smart Turks are also having breeding issues.
As for the Albanians – their animosity to us is relatively recent, historically speaking – only from the past 150 years or so, prior to that they were perhaps the only people in the Balkans that had an amicable relationship with us (see: Dositej’s journeys into Albania). We’ll see if this new paradigm of hostility sticks into the future – if we play our cards wisely, it won’t, at the cost of the Albanians basically disappearing due to assimilation.
In order, however, to impose such a system that would allow a state powerful enough to basically dissolve these “problematic” neighbors, we need the Final Solution to the Westerner Problem. And this is where Montenegro comes in.
We need to turn Montenegro into a figurative geopolitical fifth-columnist. Use their NATOid status to our advantage to basically demolish Europe (the Americans are doing fine in killing themselves). This will be accomplished by taking Montenegrin ships, and rerouting them from smuggling cocaine to smuggling the worst quality third worlders we can find. Literally by the millions, and just straight up dumping them in enemy ports.
This will end predictably with ludicrous tensions and just a general rot. With the Westerners busy dealing with the invaders, we can get rid of their puppet governments, institute a form of governance I predict will put our economic and general development on super steroids, and then basically buy our enemies until they want to become full Serbs by basically offering them to either integrate, or they won’t get automated murder drones to defend them from the neo-caliphates to the west.
Outjew the Jews, and all that.
https://twitter.com/SamtoshiAlamedo/status/1430115570393964544
I think the statistics quite bear it out.
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/salon-demographics/
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/ceo-demographics-mirror-coffee-salons/
https://twitter.com/SpargelHelmut/status/1420467883797274624
https://twitter.com/SpargelHelmut/status/1420467893423194115
I think that we (U. S.) should take a closer look at selling guns to both sides.
Again with the naivety.
The last nominally “pro-Serb” leader in the West was Trump and gave us that weird September 2020 Washington Agreement (not that its completely terrible, imo). If you’re referring to the “far right”, “alt-right”, and so on, those guys are currently irrelevant and are getting completely wrecked in lots of different ways. Those guys can only become relevant when the USA completely crashes and burns as a hegemonic superpower due to a geopolitical crisis (most likely successful Chinese liberation of Taiwan and US military failure to stop it).
They would then have to be willing to fight and go into coups, civil wars or even armed and violent secessions against their governments in Western countries. Majority of the “potent pro-Serbian camp in the west” has until the Jan 6th coup in the USA been completely and utterly unready for any act of public violence and rebellion, let alone civil war, secession and everything else that involves. Even now, they’re mostly disoriented, losing fast, and running out of time with only now the numbers maybe willing to truly be “extreme” or “radical” increasing despite lots of delusions and general confusion, chaos and disarray.
It shouldn’t be necessary to add that at least some Western and Anglo-American “far-right” types acutely hate Serbs because of Western supremacist notions, butthurt about WW1 and muh Habscucks, Roman Catholic supremacism, traditional Germanic-Mitteleuropean animosity, but especially anti-Russian hatred that is easily proxied onto Serbs as “notorious” pro-Russians.
More wishful thinking.
The fantasy that Kurds will somehow overthrow Turkey and dismember it is similar to the anti-Russian copes about Chechnya, or even anti-China fantasies about independent Xinjiang/Uyghurstan/West Turkestan. In the 1980’s and 1990’s successfully independent Kurdistan (from Turkey) and Chechnya actually were quite realistic scenarios, but it’s clear that both have failed and the objective military and other strength of the Turkish and Russian states (and nations/ethnos) has increased considerably, respectively.
Regarding Kurds specifically, sure they have very high birth rates, but that’s not enough for them to truly overthrow the Turkish state or even free themselves from the draconian and assimilationist anti-Kurdish policies by Turkey against them. After all, Whites in South Africa were relatively successful with Apartheid for quite some time, and Turks are far from being in a seriously demographically disadvantageous position vis-à-vis Kurds. Also, many Kurds in Turkey (even Iraq as well) are de-facto collaborators/loyalists of the Turkish state (see: Kurdish village guards against PKK) and the PKK has been losing against Turkey, with the tide seemingly definitively turning against Kurds ever since the 1990’s, especially after Abdullah Ocalan’s capture and imprisonment. In the Kurdish autonomy in Iraq, Turkey is openly hunting down the PKK with enthusiastic help from the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga willing to engage in an inter-Kurdish tribal civil-war to defeat the PKK, as Iraqi Kurds are mostly more hostile to the Iraqi state than Turkey.
Lol, why so much naivety?
Citing Dositej travelling finely in Albania in the late 18th century doesn’t change the fact of relentless Albanian terror against Serbs, as voluntary and enthusiastic collaborators of the Ottoman Empire, especially against Serbs in Kosovo-Metohija since the mid-15th century onwards. There’s also the demographic invasion and theft of current-day Albania, which is really ancient Serb land (apart from the Greek majority south), from Serbs since the 13th century at earliest, the tragedy of everything that’s happened to Skadar ever since being an especially infamous example of this.
The narrative of “modern” and “new” Serb-Albanian “hostility” and “conflict” is anti-Serb bullshit since it easily excuses unhinged nonsense like “the evil Servs came to Nis and genocid the inocent Albanians in 1878” (never mind everything Albanians were doing to Serbs until 1878 across the Balkans). Since then it is supposedly the “fault” of Serb nationalism, the Serbian Orthodox Church and other bullshit. In reality, even before the majority of Albanians converted to Islam, Serbs had tense relations with them because of their primitive Thracian tribalism above all (although yes, Islam plays an important part, of course). Catholic Albanians are also hostile to Serbs, while even many Orthodox Albanians are hostile to Serbs because the West has artificially consolidated their nationhood in the last 150 years.
http://www.rastko.rs/kosovo/istorija/kosovo_chronicles/index.html
Read about some of the Albanian terror and crimes against Serbs that has been relatively well recorded (pre-19th century records about Albanian crimes and terror against Serbs has less surviving records and many have vanished unfortunately) only in the past 200 years alone …
Vucic’s comment that Serbs and Albanians will be the most numerous nations in the “Western Balkans” in 100 years, and even 200-300 years in the future, is very strange and interesting to say the least.
Maybe not everything is up to Serbs, and the Albanians bear responsibility for their savagery and barbarism, along with all the great powers that relentlessly back them against Serbs?
The “Final solution to the Westerner Problem” cannot be “given” by Serbs, since Serbs as a nation do not number more than ~15 million, with Serbia and Republika Srpska as Serb states/entities struggling to merely preserve and improve themselves as is.
The fundamental problem is the completely unhinged and evil elites of the USA Empire which needs to, and basically inevitably will crash and burn (Trump was the last chance for any meaningful structural reform that clearly flopped). The US Empire is obviously the greatest problem since without it Serbs themselves can mostly reshape the Balkans to their liking. In some sense, since 1878 Germany has been a greater long-term enemy of Serbs than the USA, even to this day, due to its unrelenting anti-Serb geopolitics, although it too is currently declining, but not as much as the USA.
Sure, just like Lukashenko’s current migration flood against Lithuania and demographic warfare is super successful compared to Erdogan’s against Greece. It should be implicitly clear that the interest of Serbs is not in doing absolutely everything they can to destroy the West (it’s doing a good enough job of that itself with Jews, Muslims and Africans doing much of the work), but to revive and recover Serbs to above 2.1 birthrates, their nation and society from all the disasters of the past ~120 years. Revenge against all the fake trash and scum in “the region” as well, of course.
How about Americans buy guns from Serbian arms companies in preparation for their upcoming and seemingly inevitable civil war?
https://zastavaarmsusa.com/
I also lament the great possibility of having a large swath of Anatolia reflect an Orthodox cultural orientation, lost. I suspect that Svevlad’s sentiments expressed in comment #174 to be close to the truth. I think that an analogy could be made between Turkey and Hungary as regards their respective ethnogenesis. The original Magyar tribes that came into the Pannonian Plain similarly found themselves surrounded by a sea of Slavs, both South Slavs and East Slavs (Ruthenians) too. Currently, these autochthonic Slavs are thoroughly Magyarized and content with their national orientation. Today, the average Hungarian has less than a few percentages of original Magyar genes running through his ethnic makeup. Interestingly enough, some specialists consider the original Magyars to be a subset of the larger Turkish ethnic world.
Just like white American kids LARPing as rappers.
If Turks had continued to think of themselves as Greeks, and somehow stayed Christian, then I suspect that Turkey would by now have been part of the EU, and I’m not sure that that would have been a good thing.
BTW, it’s underappreciated, but I think the most significant battle in Byzantine history was the Battle of Akroinon, 740 AD. According to tradition, that is about when Gypsies settled in Anatolia, later, I believe using it as a stepping stone into Europe.
If the Byzantines/Greece had kept owning much of Anatolia, things in Europe and around the world would have been totally different, and you can’t speak of an European Union in that timeline.
But Mr. Hack isn’t exactly correct, you can see the occasional East Asian/Turanid face among the sea of Mediterranean people in Anatolia. There is as much as 1/4 Central-East Asian genes in the modern Turk. BTW how much of Anatolia was Roman/Greek (as opposed to genuinely Turkish or assimilated Turkish) in 1500?
Exciting news from the financial Wizard Land.
Looks like we have arrived at an important point – US Treasury has finished spending the Trump $Bux ($1.8 trillion in money raised but not spent by the Trump administration, its like he wanted to lose the elections on purpose).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WTREGEN#
Zero Hedge has a good article on Treasury balances and what that means, and they talk about the desire to increase the balance to $750 billion. My FRED source lists current balance at $338 billion, Zero Hedge is more current i think and they say its $309 billion now.
Also, Ceiling Cat is watching Congress masturbate about the debt ceiling – of course they will raise it. But i think balance will drop to around $250 billion before they turn around.
What this means? In any major developed economy, government spending is the only thing driving GDP growth by supporting demand. There will be a flood of debt sales but half $trillion will not make it into a general economy, it will remain stuck in the Treasury account.
There will be sharp slowdown in economic growth, and what do our Free Market Financial Wizards do when there’s slowdown in economic growth? They buy government debt of course.
Yields are likely heading even lower than they are currently (at 1.3% on a 10 year bond), despite massive increase in US debt sales. Inflation shamflation. There is only one thing Free Market loves and that’s Government debt. And there will be lots of it to gorge on. Love is in the air.
https://tomluongo.me/2021/08/20/the-fed-says-let-me-squeeze-your-dollars-5-basis-points-at-a-time/
I’ve read somewhere, that it was basically only due to the Germans, that the Hungarians didn’t undergo the Bulgarian (or rather, Avar) scenario and became Slavs. Something about Christianization and being allowed some privileges other Catholics weren’t given.
Of course, we need more procreative sex.
Point of interest: a R*ddit poll took place today – sample size as of time of viewing – 1.7k. Results are as follows, for the time being (the poll ends in 2 days, by then I’ll probably forget):
1 child – 128/7.5%
2 children – 572/33.6%
3 children – 457/27.4%
4 children – 97/5.7%
5 or more children – 127/7.4%
none – 317/18.6%
I’m currently a bit busy studying something else, so someone should try to analyze these results further. Maybe try to extrapolate the average desired TFR, even if Reddit isn’t really a worthy collection of people.
How do you see things unfolding differently in that scenario?
Considerably, OT: But I noticed that the French (Sephardic) negrophilia movie The Intouchables is ranked #25 in all-time admissions for movies shown in the Federal Republic of Germany. 9,162,715. Close to Jurassic Park 9,395,450 and Independence Day (admittedly also negrophilia) 9,272,424, and above the Star Wars reboots.
And someone was saying Germany could get by without subsidizing a hardcore nationalist culture? Though, I guess Utu would have at least limited how long it could be shown or the number of screens.
Though, I suppose it would be lower, if not for partition. Cinema in Germany must be really dead by now. Probably the theaters are filled with Arabs and blacks. I have said it before, but I wish that there were 5x as many Japanese, and they invaded it with intent to rehabilitate their old friend.
Thus the world turns.
Many Turks larped as the Persians who had enslaved them for a time, as well.
Eventually the larp becomes life.
Commonalities I would say are,
1. Ping-pong, best all time non-Chinese player is a Swede
Outside of what Sailer coins the “Jealousy Belt”, or rather “Men-with-Gold-Chains Belt”
Generally secular and receptive to Enlightenment values.
The Japanese elites just again paid homage to Yasukuni Shrine, just to rub it in to Chinese and Koreans that they don’t feel guilty about nuffin and despite being a US lackey is well vaccinated from being guilt-tripped into immivasion.
That’s a bit extreme example but you get my point.
Not at all in my experience! That especially goes for your kinfolk in the US Upper Midwest.
As you would know, Shenzhen is the first SAR (S stands for Special) so siphons big brains from all over south/central China. The question is can that be extrapolated to Henan and Gansu.
My contention is innovation per capita does not correlate with population size. So I have little concern regarding PRC’s so-called demographics problem. Song was the most innovative dynasty in history when the population was just 100 mln.
Yellowface Anon and I have a discussion here about whether innovation itself is necessarily a virtue.
And I will get back to about Sui Justinian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes
IIRC it’s more like 10%.
The Old Downtown of Bucharest has fewer than 10 streets and includes the National Bank. The English people I find annoying in that place are not the backpacker or the drunk chav kind, but the 50 year-old Eurocrat. They would eat any crap sold as “traditional Romanian” and would pay three-digit dishes, since they are not really working for that money.
The German king (Holy Roman Emperor) wanted Hungary as a vassal. But the first Hungarian king managed to receive a crown directly from the Pope. It wasn’t really a privilege, Croatia and Poland received the same. Czechia didn’t, but then Czechia became one of the strongest and most important principalities within the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Emperors led a number of campaigns into Hungary, but almost always lost, and even when they won, couldn’t consolidate their rule over the unruly Magyar lords. Hungarian dynasties also freely intermarried with German princely dynasties, but the same was true of other European dynasties.
I would say Hungary retained its independence due to size and geography, not some special privilege. The Habsburgs eventually added Hungary to their empire after the Ottomans fatally wounded the medieval Hungarian state.
As to the language, I guess it’s difficult to tell why in that case the peasants learned the language of the lords and not the other way around.
I think we have had this conversation before. A significant proportion of modern Turkish genetics may reflect ancient Anatolia but they generally adhere to the culture of the invaders. Culture trumps genetics. Why is this so hard to accept? Similarly, if an average person grew up in Germany, and they assumed they were 100% culturally and genetically German, but then discovered using a DNA test, that their genetics were more reflective of Russian DNA, would it really change anything? Very unlikely. They would carry on being German.
The theories of Karl-Heinz Ohlig and his cohorts are not fringe theories but a taken very seriously in some form by most academics.
in preparation for their upcoming and seemingly inevitable civil war?
Been there, done that. Ain’t gonna happen agin.
Last night Tucker alluded to the exuberant dentition of NZ’s president, which struck me as not polite. Tucker and his writers are pretty smart, so I am thinking that it was not just a haphazard Don Rickles-ism. Rather, this: A common idea on this website is that the main reason western civilization will fall is that it is too nice; and so Tucker has decided that it’s time to be less nice. OK, I can see that, but a snide remark about a physical feature is not a good way to do that.
All of Western Finland was pure flat bog land, Eastern Finland is anything less so since it has big lakes and some rugged hilly parts.
I have no idea why you think surnames have anything to do with development. Eastern Finland was (and in some ways is) one of the poorest and least developed parts of the continent, yet they are one of the oldest users of surnames among the common folk. And unusually enough it’s a region with pretty much only common folk (it was too cold for European style farming and traditional slash and burn farming could not support the kind of a feudal landowner caste seen elsewhere).
Ethnic Swedes in Finland were the last people to adopt modern last names. The peasants kept the the son-of-such names (and most Swedish names are basically just this eg. Svensson = son of Sven but at some point they just kept it as a permanent name). Aristocratic names were often tied to title and property so they were not the same as modern last names.
“Sibelius” is an attempt at faking an ancient aristocrat name. The Catholic aristocracy used Latin names but those medieval families are pretty much extinct now so if you ever see a Finland-Swedish pseudo-Latin name they probably have some 19th century ancestor who wanted to fake aristocrat roots.
My last name has a typical Western Finnish landowner story. Landowners used the name of the property and not a fixed inherited family name. My great-great-great-grandfather bought a big property about 200 years ago and started using the name. But Finland had been taken over by Russia and the new authorities preferred inherited family names so it was converted into an inherited surname. Traditions run deep though and my grandfather moved to another property and often used its name instead. People from the city were confused when my dad always answered the phone with the name of the property instead of our legal name.
Western Finns of my region have a really weird history as well. We could be really wealthy and still with zero political or cultural rights. My 19th century ancestors kept buying mansions from Swedish aristocrats to give a mansion to each of their sons but those Swedish aristocrats could send their sons to university while my ancestors could not.
Thanks, A123. Those are low approval numbers, but I am left wondering what the baseline is for someone who really really really messed-up. On the radio, some wag commented that cold sores would garner 20 percent approval. Is human sympathy such, as to establish an approval floor of some sort? Or maybe it’s avoidance of cognitive dissonance that creates a floor.
It seems that “marginal” zones encourage surname formation. Not sure why.
In the Balkans, especially the Serbian ethnic space, everyone mostly has patronym-derived surnames. We don’t have seem to have ever used actual patronymics, more like that everyone just picked some notable ancestor and turned it into a surname.
But Bosnia, Herzegovina and Krajina, have far more interesting ones. A lot of them seem to be derived from occupations, or the stuff they would make but in a different way from the rest. Like, imagine an Anglo whose last name is Horseshoe, that sort of thing. Some of them are pretty ridiculous.
This is nowadays blamed on the Austro-Hungarians and some bureaucracy bullshit (basically Serbs gave them fake surnames out of spite, but then had to keep using them for basically everything) which is pretty much cope, because if those spiteful, prideful mountain people wouldn’t have changed them back to the original the instant those lands were annexed to Serbia, well fuck me sideways.
When he published “World as Will and Representation”, Schopenhauer was one of the most talented and interesting authors of the century – at age 30. And the second volume is not terrible. But the first volume is a wonderful text.
The problem is that many people still seem to suffer from celebrity worship,* mainly since the 19th century, and this is especially inappropriate for writers, as the best writers were often some of the worst personalities.
Most of the great writers of the 19th century were worse than average people. Few great 19th century writers, have been mature and nonpathetic people. Greatest books in recent European history, have been mainly produced by relatively grotesque and mad characters.
Leo Tolstoy had narcissistic personality disorder to a more deranged extent than Trump. Biographies of Pushkin, Engels and Lermontov, would be rejected as bad fiction, being “cliche filled descriptions of the life of a decadent playboy”. Victor Hugo was some kind of bipolar rapist. Flaubert was paragon of OCD (including in relation to topics like masturbation). Marx, was ironically – a snob. Etc.
In addition, the higher the achievement in the brilliant works produced by their career, the more idiotic opinions all these people seemed to believe. The question is to what extent their bad personalities, has contaminated their products. And with these fellows, often their works are extremely unaffected, or even in a contrary direction, than the person’s life. In some cases, it depends on the stage of the career.
With Schopenhauer’s later, popularist essays (i.e. “Parerga and Paralipomena”) – his writing indeed often poisoned by his bad personality, and he should have had self-discipline not to write certain texts.
Some of his most popular texts can be seem to be very stupid and unpleasant, although they are still valuable as historical insights into the time (who knows horse whips were so noisy on the roads in those days).
There is also a problem of the impolite, dictatorial and authoritarian writing style in 19th century Germany, that contrasts negatively with the English and American authors of that time. (It is a culture shock to compare the writing style of the German writers, to the civilized and polite essays of English speaking writers like John Stuart Mill or William James.)
Literary persona of Nietzsche, is an example of this German rhetorical style having negative effects on later culture; i.e. Marinetti is what happened when stupid and evil people read Nietzsche. Although in his non-literary life, Nietzsche was an unusually gentle and kind soul, and his philosophy has a systemic intelligence and logical coherence underneath the noisy rhetoric (but the idiots like Marinetti only absorb the stupider parts of his rhetoric, and there was no doubt a negative influence).
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*In the culture of the classical music fans, at least there is less of this idea that we should hero worship of the great composers. Great composer were usually far more normal and likeable people, than great writers were. But everyone knows that Wagner was a demented personality, but few worry about this before listening – music fans can usually judge these excellent products independently.
Art fans also seem able to avoid hero worship or rejection by personality, in relation to the product created. Gauguin’s later works could often be submitted “crime scene evidence” if he was trialled for his rape of Polynesian children. But most of the art fans are still able to enjoy the quality of those painting independently from the ugly reality of their creator.
Oh and as for Sibelius and the cultural productivity of Finland-Swedes, one should note that their period of extreme productivity started with the 19th century rise of Germany and ended with Operation Barbarossa. It was to a significant extent created with outside resources.
Sibelius was for sure a gifted man but he still owes most of his fame to finding the right political sponsors at a time when Russias enemies were pouring propaganda money into borderlands like Finland. Eg. when Sibelius made works to glorify the future Greater Finland the territorial gains that he wanted were the same ones that German strategic thinkers envisioned for Finland as a German puppet state. It’s not a coincidence.
The real interesting question is why did 19th century Germany manage to sponsor competent cultural figures when it was laying the groundwork for future wars. The West today pours billions into artists to promote its geopolitics but somehow they manage to create Pussy Riots and never any new Sibelius. (Hollywood still works as propaganda but that’s America’s home field.)
Well, guess I am wrong on the geography, but basically what I meant to say was more isolated, remote, or divided with barriers. Theoretically, preventing inbreeding would be more difficult in such places.
In the case of Ireland, (and Scotland and Japan) I think it was not about inbreeding so much as the clans where helped to perpetuate themselves by geography. Many armies were killed against the edge of a bog or on a causeway. So, probably not a case of development, so much as barriers.
It is commonly averred that they are usually related to taxation and bureaucracy. (Obviously, Eastern Finland is one of the exceptions, but that does not except regular Finns). But anyway, in many instances, primitive people adopted them at the behest of Europeans, while advanced people like the Chinese, already had them. There is undoubtedly a significant, though imperfect correlation.
I already explained that East Asian nationalities are not “less creative” – read the post above.
Japan is the most creative nationality in the most recent cultural field that has been created since the late 20th century: video games. And of the last few decades, it’s difficult to think of a less creative field than video games.
Your confusion is from not considering the timing of entry of a nationality into the cultural field, and from looking at China, which while it might have recently become economically second world in the last couple of years – has been third world for the last couple centuries, and is currently an authoritarian dictatorship.
Even then I assume, that if e.g. China was training people in classical music in the 19th century (instead of the late 20th century, when the creative possibilities of the field has been exhausted), then there would have been plenty of good Chinese composers to rival some 19th century European composers. But China is training in classical music in a time, when even Europe is mostly only producing performers.
These people are immigrants from the third world, arriving in an wealthy country with an alien culture. The first stage of the immigration process is for a family to climb into the middle class.
The typical behaviour is to encourage of immigrants, is to encourage their children to enter risk averse professions like medicine or engineering. In the first generation or two, they are also not living in a culture which is native to them, and of course this limits creativity. (Hokusai or Picasso were products of a multigeneration of tradition, not of Chinese convenience store owners who want pressure their children to study medicine, and to use that stable profession to pay for the parents to move out of some dangerous area of Los Angeles).
Pussy Riots was a breakthrough: their unbound absurdity was a precursor of what the West is now experiencing at home.
In the past Western aspirations were to build and strengthen a civilization – of course in their own image, today their goal is to change the existing civilization and restart it with new precepts. That makes it into an inevitable failure as the Pussy Riot-like idiocy has demonstrated. They have turned onto themselves…
Of course, there are always lots of permanent Russians in Europe. There are many Russian community shops across Europe – these have names like “Chanel”, “Gucci” and “Dior”.
It’s not limited to some Baden-Baden. Much of the best property of Europe is owned by the Russian community in many different countries. If you are driving from Switzerland to Rome at the moment, it might be curious to drive through Forte dei Marmi, and make a report for us. This is a city of Tuscany which was suddenly fashionable and more than 50% of its houses have been bought by Russians. Apparently the local landowners couldn’t understand that all money was thrown at them from Singapore, Jersey, Cyprus, and Cayman Islands, and before they understood it had become a majority Russian owned city.
But excluding the tourists which you can sense from the other side of a road, there isn’t much of externally visible Russian community in Europe. Even in Cyprus, the young people are trying integrate with the other nationalities. The wealthy class are nowadays trying to be discreet, and the golden youth have become multilinguistic social chameleons. They are the “cool” ones who have their community, but this is likely only existing inside their houses in Marbella, Monaco, Saint-Tropez etc.
On the other hand, among pale middle class losers, there are really so many people in the hi-tech industry (although distributed in a light way across different startups and corporations), and even there are many Russians in Europe working in professions like medicine, marketing and architecture, esthetician, etc . But unlike golden youth, middle class losers have to work full time, and after being inside in the office all day with exhausting hours, doesn’t have time to create cool parties and so on. When there sometimes sufficiently unfashionable unhipster events like the regular Noize MC or Basta concert in Europe, then hundreds or thousands of these uncool middle class pale, nerdy 30 year old professionals might suddenly emerge.
Great goings on Today in Ukraine, especially in the capital, Kyiv. Looked to me like the recent words of historian Putin fell on deaf ears in Ukraine, nobody is singing the praises of Triunism? Where’s the brotherly Russian support of Ukraine too? Somebody has got their wires crossed. 🙂
https://youtu.be/iwO_GgtD7IQ
Happy 30th Anniversary of Independent Ukraine!
If you read the thread I made the clear distinction between should and could.
If you make the statement Whites are greater explorers than Chinese, well Zheng He’s voyages clearly predates Vasco de Gama’s by almost a century and were more extensive. But they were pulled back partly due to ethical concerns. So certainly in that case its not a question of could, or sour grapes.
The caveat is that there are salons that take place with topics ranging from DeepMind to Michelangelo (and oh yes pozz’ed topics like feminism and BLM).
But Westernized PRC Chinese tend to insular and communicate with each other in Mandarin (or to be precise Mandarin verbs and prepositions with English nouns). So still it feels kind of lame and low-T
Ofc Triunism is fake and gay
I think you and AP are still living in somewhat fantasy land being always too friendly to Russians
why cant all these Russian parasites just fuck off for once…and they actually did out of West Ukraine when OUN went medieval on all kinds of the demon spawn, and it was cleaned out during WW2 and now its the most stable region (and now Anglos want to fuck that up and finish what Communism and Russians didnt or couldn’t)
just like how Americans seek to import their favorite pets(read-Bantus) all around the world, Russians are importing their Chechens everywhere. Its literally same analogy to US – it was fucked when they did slavery and Russia was fucked with their Islam and Muslims(and yes that includes Tatars, not jus DiCHs, they fucked up by either not removing them completely and assimilating them or going the Xinjang solution on them.(and ofc the solution is actually incredibly simple)
Russians have much more in common and more Triunism with Chechens and Turks and Tatars. The actual true Triunism.
Although the Hungarians admired proto-Ukrainian Kyivan culture, and indeed included young members of their own dynastic family within the court of notable Rurik princes like Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise (King Andrew 1 spent several years of his youth living within the Kyivan court and ended up marrying Princess Anna, the daughter of the Grand Prince), actual “slavicisation” was never really in the cards. The original Magyar core from the East was a very proud and militaristic clan. As Reiner Tor points out, there was a great deal of intermarriage with German dynastic families, but there were also much intermarriage with the Ruthenian nobility too.
Did either of you know that the spread of Christianity into Hungary had an Eastern Slavic influence in the very beginning. When Cyril and Methodius were spreading their missionary voice, they passed through the Pannonian plain and made it as far as Zakarpattya. It is thought that the strange and rapid death of prince Emerick “Prince of the Rusyns” and son of King Stephen, 6 days before his coronation as the King of of Hungary was the result of a German/Catholic inspired plot to keep him and his Slavic sympathies in check. King Stephen’s second wife Gisela II (the German) has been implicated in the plot etc…..
I wrote ” nobody is singing the praises of Triunism?”
Did I forget to include a half dozen F’n expletives to pass your admiration test? Get some good mashljanka or some kefir and go sleep it off. 🙂
As people on the AH forum say, you have a load of butterflies.
You need to get rid of the 4th Crusade at least and that means no early capitalism or Renaissance in the 14-15th centuries, in Italy (which was the beneficiary of looting Byzantine).
And what are you happy about? On this very day, Deputy Foreign Minister of Ukraine Yevgenii Enin said that last week a Ukrainian military transport plane (which was supposed to evacuate Ukrainians from Afghanistan) was seized by unknown people who used the plane to take passengers (not Ukrainians) to Iran.
https://ria.ru/20210824/samolet-1746968862.html
Then it turned out that everything was fine and there was no hijacking of the plane: “The Ukrainian plane, which was allegedly seized in Afghanistan, was bought by rich Afghan businessmen for currency, gold and precious stones. Local businessmen and their families went to Iran on a Ukrainian plane, paying for the board. “That is, there was no abduction, but, in fact, a Ukrainian military aircraft was simply bought out.”
https://strana.news/news/350114-zakhvat-samoleta-ukrainy-v-kabule-v-teheran-poleteli-bohatye-biznesmeny.html
Ukraine needs to solve real problems, and not waste time on tribal “patriotic” dances around the totem pole
https://ukranews.com/upload/media/2021/08/22/6121ea733b8d6-evakuatsiya_768.jpg
Secession (dissolution of the US) and Partition into 2-3 states are more likely. But staying in the same shape is close to impossible because of fundamental cultural shifts invalidating the existence of imperialism, like Rome.
It’s not merely a significant portion involving native genetics, as in the case of Mestizos, but about 90%. These people are mostly natives. And the invaders were not culturally superior (as in Spaniards) or equal (as in the case of Magyars and primitive Slavs) but clearly inferior. So the adoption of Turkic culture and culture identity is as odd as it is sad. It seems like a unique case. In a nearby situation, Persia adopted the crude invaders’ religion but modified it and did not become Arab nor Turkic speaking.
Btw, I don’t rule out mutual exterminations whenever someone from a Balkanized American successor state cross into another with the opposite ideology or one state raids another.
We can already see a good level of dehumanization with the name of “sheeple” or the talk of excluding “extremism”. Whoever not adhering to ideological purity of their own beliefs (either total struggle against institutions or wokism) are seen to be subhuman and not demanding respect as fellow humans. It’s a specifically American trait of justifying disagreeability promoted by extreme individualism, that is close to destroying any fiction of a common American identity (not that it shouldn’t be gotten rid of).
It just needs a spark of further radicalization on both sides (e.g. atrocities by elites or populists) to start prosecutions on the scale of India-Pakistan or Greece-Turkey partition, or the many genocides we had. And often fraticidial conflicts like those are the most bloody.
I just dont like how America is slowly descending into Negrolatry and NeoBolshevism. It will probably take turns for the worse in about 5 years and get more ideological
They’re probably hatching something incredibly evil like a plan on how to import 100 million people into Ukraine because it will raise the GDP.
Or maybe im overreacting and this is possibly a side effect of being on twitter too much
It’s obvious, the thievish no-goodniks need to be found and brought to justice.
As to what I’m happy about, it’s related to Ukraine’s ability to maintain its own separate course, to have its decisions made at the ground level, not in some dank corner within the Kremlin. It’s good to celebrate your independence at least once a year, like the 4th of July in the US, and celebrate the Ukrainians did – the parades and concerts were really well done – Slava Ukraini!
And then you got Russians on the other side sharpening knives
Because the civilization itself has changed.
It’s now a literal cancer. They simply can’t stop themselves from trying to subvert and rot a society from within. Their derangement is so great that if you tell them not to they start having rage seizures and aneurysms and you generally have to break their ribs to make them shut up.
The method used to be – beat your enemy by being better.
Now it is – beat your enemy by making them worse than you.
Nothing good can come out of this, but at this point I am so disgusted with the global state of affairs that I won’t even bat an eye when it boils and we’re all sent back to stone-age-but-with-rifles tier for a 1000 years.
It is odd but it is clearly a question for modern Turks. However, one is for certain, they are not going to wake up one day, realise they are not genetically Turkish, and become Greeks and Armenians or Assyrians or even more ridiculous, Hittites despite what some Greek nationalist fantasists believe. They are simply, Turks.
They were obviously not inferior then.
Similar how the Illyrians got Slavicized. The invasions completely broke down the Illyrian way of life – and the Slavic one became superior at that point.
And, people like to be winners. Can’t stay a Greek Orthodox farmer when the Chad Turk comes and burns your fields and family to death for not paying the jizya. There was probably far more outright assimilationist policies.
But, I like decadent and failing civilizations getting genocidal ass-whoopings.
You will get your death-wish especially when a lot of people (elites and populists) alike have variations of the same, whether masqueraded as accelerationism, reaction or just an urge to leave the old normal behind, wherever the end-point will be.
The only thing we should do is dropping any dogma about this world and the next, and survive until then and beyond.
Secession (dissolution of the US) and Partition into 2-3 states are more likely.
No, this is a political fight that will play out and the nation will still be here. The elites believe that the surest route to maintaining control in the future will be to incite racial hatred and rule in a totalitarian method, but it will fail. They have made a major miscalculation which is something that they hardly ever do, but when they do, it opens up hitherto impossible developments.
Btw, I don’t rule out mutual exterminations
My evil twin wrote that comment. I actually don’t enjoy seeing people killing each other.
invalidating the existence of imperialism, like Rome.
We’ll see. Inertia is a powerful force and it has pushed us to to intervene around the world when people are killing each other without our okay. The world’s policeman needs to have a monopoly on violence. If anyone needs killing we need to be making the decision as to which group that is.
We never intervened when Tutsis and Hutus were killing each other because we do not have a history of intervening in Africa like we do in Europe and Asia. That was because of inertia. Maybe with this latest defeat in Afghanistan, the force will be with us to overturn that inertia in the future.
The real and single most important cause of TFR and low Birth Rates is the behavior of women. In other words, women’s freedom, female empowerment and other garbage. A society will completely breakdown (like the current West) without men functionally controlling the behavior of women in all relevant matters. Proper control of female behavior by men, society, the state, elders, church and etc. is the true solution to the problem of low TFRs and Birth Rates.
Anyway, Vucic’s pro-natalist policy of immediate one-time cash handouts for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd child is a good effort, but not the best policy. The Hungarian TFR/Birth Rate boosting policy of forgiving loans and taxes for families and married couples is superior and has given concrete results, but its still not at 2.1 or above TFR just yet.
The problem with Vucic’s current policy is that Gypsies and Muslims (Albanians and Bosniaks) will take advantage of it most and there’ll be even more undesirable elements in Serbia (already saturated with treacherous 5th columnists and worthless degenerates as is). There are more than enough of these as is, especially considering how a big part of the Albanian problem in Kosovo becoming so bad was because of Serb gibs, and gibs in general by SFR Yugoslavia that encouraged them to breed aggressively (no, its not a “Serb conspiracy theory”, Albanian Mullahs and Hoxha’s deliberately told their tribal flocks and communities to breed aggressively to wage demographic warfare, down to taking over the local hillside or mountainside).
Getting rid of shit like Parovi and Zadruge would go a long way. If only …
Perhaps, North Africans would have come to think of themselves as Greeks or something weird like that.
Nope. To be serious, the last chance to keep North Africa in the Southern Europe cultural sphere was during the Arab conquests.
Pretry amusing to see how Montenegro & Albania+Kosovo’s demographics diverged, being tribal regions with differing religions.
Personally, I would rather larp as a Greek than an Arab. Plus, Egypt had Greek-speaking elites for several hundred years… Not that I think keeping North Africa in the same cultural sphere would be a good thing, if it happened.
OT: I wonder how much Afghanistan was subsidized in the ’60s compared to other countries in the Middle East. Back when the USSR and US were both in it building roads at the same time.
Maybe, all the hippies, etc. who fell in love with it, were really loving the subsidies.
Yes, it’s much better to have your decisions made in some dank corner (getting danker by the minute!) of Foggy Bottom. And organizing the Crimean Platform was truly a great way to celebrate Ukrainian independence. Nothing screams “independence” like devoting some of the country’s bountiful resources on the eminently achievable goal of returning a recently seized territory back to the, uh, motherland from a weakened and downtrodden neighbor. I really do understand why you’re just gushing with pride.
More interesting is that the Kosovo Serbs decided to increase their hardcore and are now breeding like rabbits…
My proposal would be massive tax cuts + 10k euros per month for every high IQ family with 3 or more children.
Some folks stay happy at the prospect of following rules and having order, others at “seizing territory”.
Soon, it’ll be up to the new lords in the Crimea to come-up with drinking water. Apparently these dark lords never thought about this while making their plans for seizing Ukrainian territory when meeting in “dark & dank” corners of the Kremlin? Wasn’t Karlin going to write a book about the “Dark Lord of the Kremlin”? I sometimes wonder how all of these ill thought out projects are coming along?
https://akarlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/putin-riding-bird-300×222.jpg
You also have to incrementally increase taxes and slash benefits for young people who choose not to get married and have children. If you are 35 and married but no children then life should become very difficult, just short of being incarcerated in a labour camp.
I think an underestimated impact on TFR are large sections of the university education sector. Simply slash funding for all of the humanities by around 80%, just leaving certain subjects like literature and philosophy. That way you remove a major refuge for mostly women who do not want to raise families. Once these women realise they have to actually work for a living then they will happily live at home to raise 4-5 children. It will also reduce the cultivation and spread of anti-heterosexual anti-male anti-patriotic ideas.
Listening to this music also makes me happy:
https://open.spotify.com/album/1GK7OpHxpyL9grOjPM6oRT?si=X6EDUsfUSkevUpw98daglw&dl_branch=1
Well, Kosovo Serbs, especially south of the River Ibar, are in a very similar position to West-Bank Palestinians and Whites/Afrikaners in South Africa (especially rural groups). The latter 2 groups are also known to have very high birth rates, like Kosovo Serbs.
The paradigms are similar because only Blacks, Jews, and specifically Albanian-Moslems are believed to have legitimate rights in “the West”, and are even considered “human”, unlike their sworn enemies, so it’s considered acceptable for them to do almost anything they like to White-Afrikaners, Palestinians and Kosovo Serbs …
Perhaps the high birth rates of the latter 3 groups has to do with being exposed to extreme, constant, daily, relentless, and brutal persecution and terror, making their lives literally unlivable at the daily level, even from moment to moment, without a serious commitment to maintaining traditional, communal, collective, national, racial, ethnic and religious bonds on a literally personal level?
Additionally, men in such communities would naturally control the behavior of their women to a much greater extent than otherwise, as the women would otherwise be raped, kidnapped, murdered and so on, meaning the women will also naturally stick close to their men, birth and raise more children, instead of pursuing careers, choosing “empowering” women’s university education, etc.?
It seems that Porky was painted, Navalny style.
https://www.rt.com/russia/533038-poroshenko-green-liquid-prank/
Paraphrasing Pyrrha after his famous victory over Rome: “another 30 glorious years like this and there will be no Ukraine.”
That may be on overstatement, but unless things turn around soon it will be true. Think for once: there is only winning or losing, there is no in-between. Ukraine has been losing: in economy, in population, in energy (NS2), in war. How are you going to turn it around? When?
Mauretania (Morocco & Algeria), Africa (Tunisia) and Tripoli was under the Roman orbit while Cyrenaica was under the Greek orbit.
You can also deny basic services to these groups, if the unvaccinated are in some places right now, or set up concentration camps for the childless. Human rights be damned if you go by utilitarian concerns.
In fact, let everyone have children according to their own preferences, no matter how eugenic or dysgenic it may be. What ethnicity needs to be liquidated, will eliminate itself. I am just taking your types’ logic to the furthest.)
I assume Western North Africans would choose to larp as Carthaginians.
Of course, I don’t advocate concentration camps, but it may be supposed that transit camps would become a logistical necessity, at some point.
https://www.rt.com/russia/533050-kaljulaid-dont-invest-ukraine/
Organization exists for a reason or we might as well be animals. Organization helps provide incentives or disincentives to guide socially useful behavior.
Transit camps for what? Eugenics (that is what I aimed for by suggesting the extreme measure)? Antivaxxers? The FEMA type (features in some conspiracies)
Don´t worry about Crimean people. They are far happier now than under Ukrainian yoke.
The cost of mining (complexity of algorithim) determines the price of bitcoin. It slumped and the algorithim got easier to solve when China banned mining. Algorithim complexity and thus mining time is again rising. All else is fluff. Bitcoin is fluff.
What about curing glaucome instead?
Somali expats, Afghani expats, Nigerians expats, Pakistani expats, etc. I don’t think it is working out, as is, and I think expulsion is the solution of maximum moral utility. And, in the West, possibly a necessary first step in order to address the problem of TFR, on an intelligent level.
Of course, I don’t limit myself to repatriating alien and hostile ethnies. Some small categories of native political agitators and criminals should also be exiled, to areas where they can do a minimum of damage. In particular, I think trannies and ultra-gays, people who try to undermine borders, neocons, and the really obnoxious, blank-slatist grifters and diversity officers. Depending on the offenses, the places they would be exiled to would not necessarily be bad, just isolated. On some level, it might be a paradise to them.
I’m live and let live when it comes to antivaxxers. Anyway, I think it should be obvious that when the elite are ideologically committed to open borders, corona is not something that will be eliminated by mandatory vaccinations or mask-wearing.
I’ve watched Kasera (300 on steroids for those who want a short summary). Only Bollywood can insert comedy dance routines in the middle of a film about a massacre in which all the heroes die (makes The Alamo defenders look like a bunch of pussies).
Very contemporary. 12,000 mad mullahs attack 21 Sikhs and regret it.
We sacrificed our heads on the Talwar
Soaked our bodies in fire
May your Rose-colour never falter,
The blood gushing from our chest
Makes that statement||
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
You’ve been singing this same song for 30 years now. Has Ukraine grown any closer to it colonial master? When do you foreseen it doing so? If things are so bad there as you say, it has no other place to go than up, no matter what. 🙂
Oh, the native traitors are to be sent along with the “expats”
See, those places lack in IQ, and the traitors might improve the situation there. Say, deport all libtards to Somalia. Win-win I say.
On the Silkroad and Afghanistan.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7009640.html
That’s nonsense, 30 years?, I barely paid attention to Ukraine until 2014. Then we suddenly got bombarded with a bunch of pleading Ukrainians trying to “move to EU“, and the war started. You are a simpleton who still thinks in terms of “colonial” – an outdated concept that doesn’t apply in this situation.
Ukraine could have played its cards better. They could be a prosperous decentralised or federal state like Germany, Belgium or Spain. They chose to go radically the other way and it is not working. No “master” wants them – that is the problem, they will not be in EU, and any reconciliation with Russia is highly problematic. A semi-abandoned large territory with declining population and persistent poverty. What is there to celebrate?
Somalia is certainly a hellscape par excellence.
But I just really like the way “the Congo” sounds. I understand parts of it are quite pretty, putting aside the horrible tropical diseases, and semi-regular intertribal warfare. And it would be fun to give people a choice: You are going to the Congo, do you choose DRC or Republic of Congo? (No info provided.) Perhaps, Ditto for “Sudan.”
I also like the idea of picking a really diverse country, like DRC (already mentioned), Papa New Guinea (could bring out Jared Diamond’s line about them being mentally superior), South Africa (“the Rainbow Nation”), and Nigeria (we are sending you to Lagos, which is predicted to be the greatest metropolis of the next century – and you will help build the necessary sewer system.)
There’s a lot of fun that one could have with it “We are sending you to Singapore. Well, not that Singapore but what the economists have called the Singapore of Africa: Dbjibouti.”
And I also have softer versions of it, which I think would appeal to at least some progressives and some Africans – at least, if they could see it demonstrated.
Indeed that’s the primary use of those stem cells – medical research for various neural diseases.
However, when we were growing those out of our own hair, we would pattern them on etched glass, and they would grow in channels on glass, sort of like transistor patterns in microchips. And neurons would grow and connect.
Of course, it was a very primitive pattern (like square grid or something), but then the question is, how complicated can you make it? And if you can fabricate a very light and porous support structure on a 3D printer or whatever, can you increase neuron density and connectivity above that of a biological human? Can you still keep it live and not contaminated? Can you increase the size of the structure beyond human brain size? And if support needs to be too fragile and weight limited, can you deal with that by controlling gravitational environment? (Less gravity lower weight and stress etc).
“Floomers and anti-vaxxers are idiots and no one should be concerned what they have to say.”
Go get your third and fourth Pricks and strap on your bacteria- and mold-infested facediaper. Forever. That’s a good doggy!
If this is so, why do you spend such an inordinate amount of time trying to denigrate Ukraine and its system? You really resemble one of those trolls that they manufacture in St Petersburg. Your role is perhaps limited to watching Karlin’s blog and painting all of the big bad boogeyman tales about Ukraine. If you’re not being paid for this incessant rant against Ukraine, what else could possibly motivate you to do this? Saving civilized Europe from the Hunnic Ukrainians? 🙂
Brown and Black people should be repatriated to their ancestral place of origin, outside of the smart faction if we (Whites and East Asians) can figure out uses for them. No exclusion for those who have “established” anywhere (like Turks in Turkey), because liberalism since 19th century made it possible to migrate over a long distance and that should drop across the board. Set up an entire commission to deal with the legacy of slavery, which includes deporting the entire Black and Indian population in the South and West Indies. Set an annual immigration quota exclusive to Whites and East Asians for the New World (This time marginally White people like the Turks should be allowed in), and totally abolish European cross-border migration.
What should be done by these are basically solving the brain drain problem for emigrant countries and the diversity problem for immigrant countries, as well as rectifying cases where ancestors were unwilling to move but forced to (descendants of slaves). It may or may not be a boon for their countries of origin, but at least we will have ethnically homogeneous entities that can deal with each other on their respective standings. Alternatively you can have a hyper-restrictive condition of staying, I’d say Gulf States-level restrictive to their Indian laborers with absolutely no prospect of neutralizing.
Neocons should be executed outright for Crimes against Humanity. But I don’t think anyone else need to be deported far away or at all since most of them are in it for money or feel-good peer recognition, instead of any real conviction, and whoever really believing in those ideologies will be mistreated when the backlash comes. Just send the worst and most diehard of them, the true believers, say about 30%, to internal exile settlements where they can live somewhat normally among the like-minded, and integrate the rest who can, without giving up normal morality. Tho I won’t object if they can be “convinced” of deportation to Africa being a decent option (but that is just moving the problem to Africa where they’d mostly be seen as the new Boers). You should define “who try to undermine borders” too.
In my experience a tendency to conformity is more a Germanic trait in general, you see the same social phenomena as ‘jante law’ (look it up) in Germany, Switzerland or the Netherlands as well. There’s also the tendency towards extremes, I swear every German I’ve ever met was a sincere anti-racist who regretted Germany’s existence (albeit whilst still implying they despised eastern-Euros more, so some things never change) or was some kind of closet quasi-Nazi.
I would presume the same thing doesn’t exist in the UK because genetically it’s still mostly Celtic, with a very strong French cultural influence. I think one can justifiably accuse meds of being disorganised, but definitely not conformist.
I suppose it’s mostly pop-psychology, but there’s perhaps something in turn of the century writers like Lothrop Stoddard, H.G. Wells, Kipling or E.R. Dodds claiming the English took the best traits of both groups, the ‘Nordics’ and the ‘Mediterraneans’.
I suppose you could add Northern France and Italy and West Germany with the same reasoning to that group too, neatly encompassing the old ‘banana’ of ‘core-Europe’.
Japan has been more creative “per capita” than Europe in the cultural fields created by the late 20th century, like video games.
Across all the 19th century France was the world’s centre of cultural creativity and achievement, and yet in one of the main new cultural fields that emerged since the late 20th century as video games – I believe there is not that much more than Ubisoft.
And vice-versa.
It depends on the historical development of the cultural field, and what nationalities have entered it with sufficient training and resources.
In 1900, Russia was one of the most creative nationalities in the world, in many areas. In 2021, it’s not a very creative country, as in 1721. What has changed?
–
For example, if you look at the European tradition of mimetic painting. By 1900, its raison d’être had already been displaced by the invention of photography.
There are now limited possibilities of creativity or innovation within the painting field. And “Black Square” of Malevich was indeed one of the logical endpoints.
For nationalities which hadn’t entered the genre, there is only a limited time before its main possibilities will be exhausted. However, by the early 20th century there is the field opened by the invention of the moving image. With cinema, there is a renewed youthful territory for cultural experimentation, and USA, USSR and Japan become some of the leading innovators.
With relative exhaustion of cinema and collapse of funding after the end of USSR, there hasn’t been much entry into the new fields of culture, like video games, or complex television series for the new streaming services. Even the Soviet Union’s most original game Tetris was carried away from the country by Nintendo. So there had been a failed opportunity to enter some of these new cultural fields with adequate resources.
But in the late 20th century, China has started training in classical music (the largest market for buying pianos is China).
However, in early 21st century, the possibilities of symphonic composition, have seemed to be mostly exhausted in Europe for a century. And the focus of the classical music world is (for good or bad) mostly on performance.
If China had entered into European classical music in 19th century, to same extent Russia had – then there would have been Chinese composers within the same tradition.
Whether there would have been a very talented composer, that could create a sense of original national contribution (as Tchaikovsky was in the Russian Empire), is not too easy to predict. But you could expect China would have produced its own Balakirev.
This may be, but this is not an important part of my comment – as they would still have to climb into the middle class when they immigrated, and encourage their children to enter risk-averse professions. Such an immigrant community, that pressures their children to enter stable professions, is not exactly the most likely soil to produce the next Hayao Miyazaki or Alfred Hitchcock. .
Even in the case of Amy Tan, you can see her mother wanted her to be a medic, and she was able to rebel because her father had died early.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/03/fiction.features Moreover, she entered American literature, that in the 20th century has been strongly focused on a genre of immigrant experiences. So she was in the correct position to enter an already established tradition.
–
If I had children and immigrated to China (i.e. a very alien culture and language) without much resources, then at school the children will probably be best in maths, because this is the only subject where they can compete on an almost equal basis, and where there are true and false answers.
They will likely not be good at Chinese poetry or writing Chinese historical essays. But with maths, they would find it as the only area where they can compete, and it would comparatively seem to be extremely easy to them.
That is, they would have a strong handicap on the other subjects, so maths will be the easiest subject for them to compete in (as it is the only one without handicap).
I also doubt they would become award-winning writers of Chinese comedy series, or writers of patriotic Chinese literature, and so on. Even if they learn to write Chinese poetry, they might always have a sense of imitation, rather than natural fluency. Although perhaps like Amy Tan, they could write some stories about their immigration experiences.
Lol are you gullible Maybe it could be useful as a counter-indicator (i.e. says it is raining – carry an umbrella).
Because it was a separate religious community, like Brigham Young University for Mormons. Irish and Italians entered into Catholic universities, like University of Notre Dame. Almost all Chinese Americans are non-affiliated to a religious community, so there is likely much less demand for separate universities.
I don’t have any comment on national preeminence in cultural creativity, except a lot of (pop) cultural creations represent simulacra of genuine culture which much be rooted in tradition.
BTW China (Shanghai in particular) is moving away from the overemphasis on English by cancelling primary school English exams, which is an imperialist legacy.
(If there are Chinese speakers around I’m willing to talk with them in Chinese)
I’m modifying some of my suggestions above:
1) Some places in the West Indies had their Amerindian population nearly annihilated and repopulated with Black slaves and Indian indentured laborers. Since the original owner of the land is gone, the Black and Indians can claim the land, and in fact can be set up as destinations for Blacks deported from the mainland. You might even set up a few mainland states as American Bantustans and do population exchanges. As far as you can find mainly regions with 90%+ dominant ethnicity, then I’d be glad.
2) Convince immigrants to move on their own terms and reason based on their beliefs, e.g. to East Europeans and East Asians, Western Europe or the West in general opening their borders is an act of vassalizing their motherlands and to control and exploit their labor; for Muslims, fleeing proper Islamic authority and embracing territories where Jahiliyah is dominant is a grave sin; for Blacks, play into BLM narratives and tell them as long as you stay in America, systemic racism will continue even when White institutions are eclipsed, since individual and communal White aggression will persist, and the only solution is Black nationalism or repatriation. (I have no idea for Indians) Convey the collective empowering aspect of repatriation. I believe a lot will agree with the deal.
I respect everyone and wish them the best on their own soil.
No one has commented on Chinese census results so I’ll hazard a guess.
All these divergences in the size of age cohort can stem from underreporting due to the fear of being penalized by the one/two-child birth control system, or overcounting to partly cover up the dysgenic effects of the same. Which case you should take depends on your trust in the integrity in Chinese statistics, the worst case beinf the existence of systemic fraud at a low level. I have no idea, I’m not a demographer.
He wishes the USSR had not ended and has a strong antipathy for nations that resisted it and it’s legacy, such as Poland and Ukraine.
Was just told by an Iranian Uber driver in Germany how great Trump was because he put America first and how the post-Revolutionary Iranian government has been the opposite. He totally did not blame the US for preventing him from visiting his sister in the US.
Re: Living with SARS-2. It will be easier for the supertaster genotypes.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8043766/
See also Barham et al.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2780134
Lots of implications for these findings. Individuals can determine their probable genotype and add that information to their personal risk assessment. At the population level, supertasters may be the worst spreaders, i.e., asymptomatic ones. For treatment, non-tasters should be given aggressive early treatment.
“As to the language, I guess it’s difficult to tell why in that case the peasants learned the language of the lords and not the other way around.”
Because it didn’t happen that way. Obviously there wasn’t any large slavic or romanian speaking settled agriculturalist population in the Carpathian Basin at the time of the Honfoglalás. There are some theories that they were the population who was speaking Hungarian (equating the Hungarians with the Pannonian Avars), not the invaders, or that both were speaking a form of Hungarian.
Even taking into account all of the lies (half truths?) that you’ve exposed him producing, he’s really not very bad at what he does. I still think he should try and secure some sort of a contract in St. Petersburg and get paid for what he’s doing.
Oh, Iran’s expensive support of various Arab causes (Hezbollah, but especially the Palestinians) is a common cause for complaint there, even amongst the religious. Persians still generally dislike or feel distant from Arabs, definitely they feel more affinity on average with Turks or even Christian neighbors like Georgians or Armenians. Armenia and Azerbaijan are (uh.. were) a popular budget holiday destinations in particular, people can openly (homemade wine is quite easy to illictly get in Iran though, you don’t have to resort to absolutely disgusting moonshine shit gulfies drink like Sadiki or ‘aragh’, no relation to Lebanese spirit) enjoy a drink there but the overall culture is still quite conservative.
But overall the post-79 Iranian government has done a decent job regarding education and infrastructure given the pressures and limitations the country has dealt with since then. Ironically the Persian national curriculum is still much less distorted by Islamic retardation than its much richer neighbours Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
What makes me sad is when you write (at least in your own opinion) a pretty good comment, one that took a little bit of thinking and time to write, like #223, and you don’t even get a nibble. I thought that at least reiner Tor would have chimed in. Did anybody at least get a smile from listening to Pink Martini’s “Get Happy” album? I’m beginning to think that this blogging stuff is a big waste of time. Does anybody know where Bashibusuk (Anon4) retired too? Are the pastures really greener on the other side? 🙂
Pink Martini is well known as a gay group. Their band leader is gay and they were early LGBTQI activists. Putting that aside the music is asinine cocktail music. However, I used to have their first CD back in the day and would sometimes play it to impress the young women visiting my apartment to signal hipness and open-mindedness despite personally thinking the music was quite lame even then.
Most of the arts are totally infiltrated with gays, watcha gonna do? Even a lot of the overly uber mensch sounds put out by heavy metal groups are probably gay too. Well at least Pink Martini helped you create the atmosphere to help fuel your “chick magnet” appeal, way back in the day. 🙂
https://youtu.be/Nn3mHG1fArE
Guess that’s what it takes to get some semblance of united bipartisan foreign policy in USA these days, anticommunist platform is nothing new, but still fashionable and easy to do 😉
https://www.cruz.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=6019
Discussing motivation here is beyond silly :). What can possibly be yours? In general, I seek to understand the real world. Ukraine suddenly burst into my reality around 2014 (neighbours). I have had the privilege of meeting a lot of Ukrainians, many work for me. None – I stress: none – are today happy about what is happening. Most feel betrayed and the general attitude is that it went from one set of thieves to another set of thieves. And that it got much worse. None display your hatred for anything Russian – or more precisely the deep pathological hatred shown by the Kiev-Lviv rulers. Language is a non-issue and nobody cares. Celebrating Bandera and Nazis is definitely not something they share, at most it is harmless jokey folklore (as we all have in our past.) They think of Russians the same as they think of Czechs, Slovaks or Hungarians, neighbours with some quirks, complex intertwined history, but basically very similar people.
Kiev is making mistakes: like the militant language laws against Russians, or their desperate unrequited devotion to Washington, their self-defeating centralism (bad for most countries). You avoid addressing it. It doesn’t belong in EU, everybody knows it, so why do you ignore it? Saying that “ok, Kiev has made some mistakes” is not good enough – it is way beyond that point now. We all should try to avoid the coming catastrophe. EU cannot afford it and it would devastate the central and eastern Europe for a generation – I care about that.
Iran is Turkey-tier sane in the broad strokes, neither feminist nor misogynic, liberal nor reactionary, capitalist nor communist, unlike the appearance of “Mullahs’ dictatorship”.
Everyone knows central Arabia has always been more primitive than even Yemen, not to mention Mesopotamia and Syria. Islamic learning happened in Baghdad, not Mecca.
Pakistan is so demented because an Islamic identity had to be developed since Zia-ul-Haq. But everyone tend to be half-fanatical in South Asia, no matter what religion they have, which is degeneration from Mughal, Buddhist or Vedic/Indus Valley times. Why?
I looked at very fine structures printed by 3D lasers as scaffolds myself. That group thought they might be able to grow structures in place.
People who have chosen to permanently settle abroad, like this Uber driver or the Ukrainians that Beckow claims work for him, tend to have a negative skew in their impressions that is not fully realistic.
But you captured his complaints: he contrasted Trump who in his view placed America first, with his country’s leadership whom he accused of putting Arab terrorists and Islam ahead of the needs of the Iranian people. He said he had worked for a factory that was closed due to Iran’s botched relationships with the West, complained about how the currency had collapsed, how all the educated people were moving West so the country had no future, etc. It was an interesting discussion.
Bashibusuk seemed to be a partisan of the Moors in Spain, and a fan of the theory that aliens in prehistory larped as gods. It would have been interesting to hear his views on the historicity of Muhammad (assuming that he did not previously mention them.)
I am a big believer in the idea that the threat of expulsion would radically improve the behavior of some people.
With blacks, it seems like there is a pretty big seed fund for resettling them, when you consider everyday expenditures and lifetime costs. Make an offer for resettling felons or young men and there are instant payoffs, with decrease in policing and jail costs and increase in real estate values.
And I think many would take it, if you could guarantee them some basic services in Africa, such services as would cost much less than they are using now.
The real problem might be integrating them with the natives. But there may even be ways of handling that – imagine an intermarriage subsidy and a subsidy for cultural production with a heavy dose of propaganda.
Though, perhaps, mulattoes would need to be settled separately.
It looks like Scotland will be the first European country to import the US BLM/CRT narrative wholesale into its education system:
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/white-privilege-test-for-scottish-teachers/ar-AANMBZS?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531
Maybe some other European country has tried this but I doubt it.
It will be interesting to see how this goes as much of it sounds more strange in a European context, even in countries with imperial histories.
“Scottish teachers have been urged to take a “white privilege test” and to teach their pupils that the concept of race was deliberately invented by Europeans to justify “crimes against humanity”.
e.g. being born a white Scottish person in Scotland now seems to confer a type of illegitimate privilege. Crimes against humanity was a legal concept created by white Europeans within a European legal tradition; propagation of this concept was in itself dependent on European imperialism etc.
I just started reading Carl Schmitt’s book on the Nomos of the Earth so that latter one struck me.
Yes, it would have. He had a great appetite for studying many religions and philosophies, as did his friend and fellow commentator, AltanBakshi. Altan seems to have stopped commenting here around 07/02, and Bashi seems to have followed him into an abyss about a week and a half later. I hope that they’re both doing well. If Karlin knows anything about either one, it would be nice if he shared this information with us…Both were regular voices here and added good quality comments.
I like to think that people turn off a bit during the warmer weather, though I ended up doing it more last year than this year.
Hopefully, they and others will be back.
Two guys from Bratislava. Relatives of Beckov?
Since the 1970s, Iran’s government is a disaster compared to even those aristocratic Arab tribal monarchies of the other wealthy Gulf countries. Iran has used their oil wealth to de-evolve culturally, and by comparison now even the Arab monarchies have appeared to competent and civilized.
In the 1970s, most Gulf countries were still very undeveloped, and Iran was the one of more advanced parts of the region. In 1970s, they had opera and ballet there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_National_Ballet_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vahdat_Hall
And now the situation has changed.
Oman promotes classical music, opera and ballet. So what has happened after the last 40 years? In the Gulf, even recently Bedouin tribal leaders are promoting elite products of civilization and education in European culture.
In the late 20th century. Persian people considered themselves as more advanced and civilized than the Arab tribes on the other side of the Gulf. But by the early 21st century, these Arab aristocracies are expending money to build things like opera houses.
Even Saudi Arabia is allowing the first opera.
If he was promoting Trump, he is probably not the most observant commentator.
But surely Iran is one of the more sad stories of the Middle East. Life for the ordinary man there seems like it would be better than Venezuela, but possibly it is worse to live there than Cuba.
In the 1970s, they had an incompetent monarchy, but not so dissimilar to the Arab Gulf countries that have successfully developed in subsequent years under the aristocratic families. These incompetent monarchies are not necessarily fatal, but Iran shows how the collapse of the incompetent monarchy can result in a worst case scenario, as the most extreme elements can win revolutions.
Iran was also a kind of forward base of the USA against the USSR in the region, and would attract American investments. Economically and socially the country was unstable, but the cultural level was like a Western island in the Middle East.
Even with the incompetent monarchy, the country would likely have developed strongly in the last 40 years, especially after the end of the Cold War.
It would likely have become the most popular tourist country in the Middle East, from Europe and Russia, and demographically it would have avoided having almost the worst emigration its secular upper and middle class.
Probably even with the monarchy, there would have been a significant braindrain of middle class professionals to the West, but it wouldn’t have the incentive to emigrate that is created with a theocracy.
Without wanting to feed more views to YouTube attentionwhores, it’s sad to see these tourist videos from a few months ago in Afghanistan before the Taliban closed the airport. Apparently we missed this year’s coolest hipster travel destination
Dont you get it? The original Bolsheviks came to us from Russia. Lenin can say many things like “freedom for Ukraine” and so forth and yet he still invaded.
Our nationalists(ill have to dig up who it was, i forget off the top of my head) correctly identified Bolshevism as Russian imperialism albeit in its perverted form, just like Nazism was Judaism but also twisted and for German goys.
Do you see how Jews recoil at Nazism? You have various “Nazi Hunters”, Holocaust centers, auschwitz field trips, mandatory school readings, whatever, etc. I dont see why cant we recoil like that at Communism. For us Communism(or Bolshevism or whatever you want to call it) is worse than Nazism, Communists managed to do more damage in Ukraine than Nazis.(now that doesnt excuse Nazis)
Imagine if there was a somehow still existing Nazi Germany right next to Israel and it constantly threatened to invade , that “Israel” had a population of 17%” Nazi Germans” living in it and those “Nazis” would still demand rights, stage rebellions and all kinds of agitprop.
You guys dont really visit all kinds of obscure Russian nationalist and other forums or hear Russian in your everyday speech where you have Russians casually going like:
“need another Stalin and USSR“, “Hoholdomor never happened” and in the next sentence going like “we need a Hoholcaust” (LITERALLY like Turks where they go it never happened, and then next sentence they say Armenians deserved it), ” based NKVD and SMERSH getting these Bandera NazEES!!!”
no im no Jew im not going to try to imprison you for denial or whatever(LOL) of Holodomor in your own homeland
But this isnt like 1 million nations like Balts who dont actually have a choice, yet Balts still agitate (have u seen Balt twitter?), we are 35+million. Big difference. If we let Russians take an inch, they’re going to completely destroy and dilute us. Russians want it because that means roughly 35+ mil expendable “settlers” that will dillute the problems in Russia.
because Russians still have their problems with Dich Churkas being completely uncooperatable and uncontrollable, Tatars will also forever still remain a problem, then there are the issues of far East(not Chinese but other ethnicities) and all those guest workers from the “Stans”. Ive posted before but check Oldfisher, there is almost everday a murderer or a rapist or pedophile getting caught from Dich or Stans
this is nothing like Taiwan and China or 2 Koreas where it is the same people and they speak the same language. Ukrainian and Russian is less similar than Norwegian and Danish for example , and yet you dont see them trying to annex each other besides a few deranged imperialists.
Tbh Russians actually had a good chance of completely submersing us in the 20th century right before WW1, and if it wasnt for Lenin they may have succeeded
Those countries are all still extremely unstable, with all kinds of horrible things (widespread slavery, torture, mass unemployment, religious persecution) swept under the rug.
Still, unlike Iran, those (almost all British installed) monarchies rule over passive, illiterate, primitive populations with no prior history of civil society. Iran had two natively inspired constitutional revolutions (the first in 1911, the second in 1952), both which were thwarted by British-backed military coups that installed pliant Monarchs.
Iran’s political development has been constantly retarded by Western interference, it owes nothing to the Pahlavis. Attempted top-down reforms like the ‘White Revolution’ would have happened organically, much more effectively, and with far more popular support, either under the first Majiles, or even Mossadegh (who was actually quite reactionary and conservative, but he wasn’t owned and put his country’s interests first, and thus couldn’t be tolerated).
Under the Shah nearly all the technical and high-skilled professions were occupied by fly-in/fly-out foreigners, earning enormous salaries, living in private complexes, whilst dominating the commercial centres of the major cities. It was similar to the gulf monarchies nowadays, with massive graft, lack of native employment, and a resentful population kept passive through absence of taxation… the government demanded nothing of the population and nothing was given, civil society did not exist. Things are (were?) actually better now in that regard, at least until the 2010s, when sanctions, economic hardshid, associated drug-problems and a hardline political reaction all affected Iran for the worse.
That was mostly superficial, although most of the population never wanted an actual Islamic Theocracy, it’s a mistake to think the West was a source of popular emulation during the 70s. The Shah and his regime was overwhelmingly despised by the time he was overthrown, the main reason Iranians still support the government against Israel isn’t because of the Palestinians (many don’t give a shit about them), but because everyone knows how SAVAK’s torturers were all trained and equipped by Mossad.
Although it’s hard to say, Iran ultimately has been better off since the 1979 Revolution than before it. It’s definitely worth remembering that the country was also absolutely devastated by the Iran-Iraq war, with both superpowers supporting Saddam against them.
Khomeini (and his millennarian vision) has been dead a long time. No other Iranian cleric since has had the authority or charisma to institute the extremely harsh domestic punishments that he dead (many of which were only justified by the war anyway).
If you want a good idea of how broken Iran was under the Pahlavi’s, one of the best books easily available (it’s a Pelican book) in English is Fred Halliday’s “Iran: Dictatorship & Development”, it actually was written in 1979, right before the Revolution (one of the most popularly supported revolutions in history, I might add), so there’s no benefit of hindsight in it.
tl;dr: its complicated, and I despise Islam, but Iran would not have been better without the 1979 Revolution. Older Iranians who remember, non-religious ones, still argue about whether it was a good thing, the issue isn’t black and white.
It’s not like the Bolshevik Revolution, which was unambiguously a disaster for Russia until Stalin reversed most of it’s worst aspects in practice, although I despise hardcore anti-Communists who then decide to throw the entirety of Soviet history and its real later achievements down the toilet.
So your primary marker of an advanced culture is frivolous spending on European cultural products.
You’re a white supremacist, and calling another tribe’s women beautiful is an aggression, Jew.
Warring states period.
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Iran continued to produce world-renowned (at least within the ‘art-house’ circuit, a term I reject) cinema for decades after the revolution, only the crushing sanctions since Obama and the associated hardline reaction stopped it. Name a single Arab film that made an impression anywhere.
Yes Iran had opera under the Shah, it was staffed (and watched) almost exclusively by the horde of foreigners in the country, and a few of the elite that aped them in everything. Iran has its own native classic music tradition that continues to be supported, and holds high prestige in neighboring Turkey, Armenia and Pakistan.
Your comment is on the tier of Trump’s advisors showing old photos of Afghan women in miniskirts when they tried to recommit him there. Stick to discussing places like Israel that you know well instead of making sweeping innacurate statements of places you haven’t visited and have no personal connections to.
Oman’s Qaboos was a uniquely enlightened and cultured ruler, you can’t compare Oman to a cultural desert like the UAE or Saudi Arabia (the latter of which continues to aggressively destroy it’s own history).
But I suppose since Saudi Arabia now hosts drug-fueled raves promoted by famous instagram prostitutes and worthless big-name rappers, it can be considered an ‘advanced’ country.
Gogol chose to write in Russian. Case closed!
Dmitry is making me agree with an Indian, he should apologise to me, personally, for this.
Conrad wrote in English, Nabakov switched to English (though at a later age than Gogol switching to Russian). These are the effects of negative historical circumstances.
man if Russians want to act like retards again idc(which they will eventually do, its only a matter of time) if they want to resurrect their Lenin and Stalin and fuse them together with Putin but we’re staying out of this, period. Usually blood is thicker than water and its another outgroup or ethnic group that will have beef with each other like say Finno Ugrics get along fine, Turkics get along with each other fine, Slavs can get along fine too tbh, but with Russians its an exception, they’re just retarded like that.
Balkanoids are an exception but that is widely known that they dont get along too(but they’re not even full Slav)
I do not know if it was done inadvertently or not, but what I do know is there were millions of dead Ukrainians and the the most important part is what that blood was on Russians’ hands.
Lemme tell you, my family from one side survived dekulakization(the one during the civil war in 1918+) and having land and home taken away, survived getting sent to Siberia, Survived the German occupation, WW2(the members who fought in it) but could not survive Holodomor.
there was a good quote by a (now banned Ukrainian) on twitter.
“US may be the Great Satan
Israel may be the Little Satan
But Russia is my personal Satan”
we all have our personal Satans just like you guys have Turks.(and Turks are personal Satans to many in the Balkans as well for very good reasons)
But this still has to be played very carefully, we dont have a lot of cards on the table and Anglos aren’t completely on our side since Anglos are anti-European at their core and only serve Israel(since Disraeli or possibly even before that)
And despite all that Anti Europeanness, Poland has managed to coast by well so far(aside from heirless property screeching and only now has State Department set sights on Poland/Hungary on LGBT issues).
Although Gogol wrote in the imperial language of the time, he often portrayed his own “Little Russians” in a much more palatable light than the untrustworthy and rapacious Moskali of the north. He found little analogous harmony in the songs and folklore of his southern Ukrainian lands with those of the Russian north.
I don’t think so. These two Czechs seem to be in awe of the decadent West, whereas comrade Beckow still gets his jollies thinking about the collective farm system and Uncle Joe. 🙁
Yes, Russian critics in Gogol’s time also noticed how Gogol portrayed “Little Russians”sympathetically while making fun of Great Russians.
Thank you for your collective comments. They highlight, for me, a kind of parallel (imperfect, of course) between the attitude of my Western-dwelling anti-Revolutionary Uber driver from Iran, and disgruntled anti-Maidanists from Ukraine and people from outside the country who believe them.
Of course European visegradism > Islamic theocracy, and Ukraine overall has not experienced longstanding economic decline post-Maidan as Iran seems to have.
Well, it’s stating the obvious, but Ukraine also hasn’t experienced a full-scale invasion or decades of crippling international sanctions.
Iran also stood completely and utterly alone after the revolution, it was supported by no state anywhere in the world, the entire Arab world, the USSR and the USA were banking on its downfall.
Contrast to the post-maiden Ukraine, which at least has received constant American and EU support, however token. Iran’s government has been much, much more competent than the Ukraine’s given their international isolation, decades of mismanagement under the Pahlavis, and the hobbling of Islamic ideology.
The Ukraine is a naturally rich country. If it had a canny leader like Lukashenko who knew how to leverage its borderland position, instead of being plagued by bunch of squabbling oligarchs who doggedly pick sides, tearing the country apart, I’m sure it could be quite prosperous.
One thing I’m sure of though – both Russians and Europeans simply see Ukrainians as Russians. For that reason alone, it will never join anything like visegrad, let alone the EU, so it’s delusional and self-destructive for them to keep trying.
International isolation and Islamic ideology’s impact on governance are functions of government. Ukraine’s Soviet legacy is more crippling than that of Pahlavis. Iran enjoys Russian and Chinese support. Europeans do not consider Ukrainians to be Russians. Otherwise, your post is accurate.
Personal bitterness leads nowhere. All I can advise you is that pissing into a hurricane has predictable results. We all know that Russia is not going anywhere, we know that they suffered at least as much as they inflicted on the others. Let it go.
Everybody has a family story, everybody has things to be bitter about – Germans do after WWII, Russians definitely do, even the Turks have some reasons for bitterness. It is insane – and unproductive – to constantly dredge it up and live like it was 1919 or 1848 or whatever year you choose to dwell on.
This is about whether it would be good to have a US naval base in Crimea – because that was the plan. Would it be better for central-eastern Europe to be a fragile battlefield? Who likes to invest in places like that? Would it better to risk being annihilated because there is no other place more exposed than the territory over which the big guys fight? We have little energy and a need to export to the east. How is this hostility helping us? How is it helping Ukraine?
This makes their achievements more impressive by comparison to Iran, rather than the opposite.
For example, in external policy (which is almost the most important function of the government) – all Arab monarchies have a good relationships with USA, Russia, China and India. Complicated diplomacy of Saudi Arabia can maintain a good relationship with the USA, despite its Islamic fundamentalism.
With coronavirus, all the Arab monarchies have been somewhat competent. Of the major countries of the Middle East region, only Iran’s government has this level of chaos. Look at the situation there:
https://twitter.com/aliostad/status/1425435729874898946.
This is not such a bad thing. Many countries that became important powers developed by importing professionals from the West, including Japan in the late 19th century.
Whereas contemporary Iran has one of the world’s more rapid braindrains, and its mismanaged external policy results in shooting planes containing of their young emigrant professionals.
https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/families-of-flight-ps752-victims-still-searching-for-answers-1.5258730
These are all a product of policy choices of the politicians. By comparison, the Arab monarchies have avoided sanctions, often with skilled diplomacy. For example, Saudi diplomats are generally admired
Monarchy in Iran was not a humanitarian, leadership, but even during 1978 never killed similar numbers of protesters as the government which replaced it.
Just in late 2019, they killed 1500 protesters according to Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-protests-specialreport/special-report-irans-leader-ordered-crackdown-on-unrest-do-whatever-it-takes-to-end-it-idUSKBN1YR0QR
So “Black Friday” in Iran was order of magnitude less violent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(1978)
Well this is a contradiction. Turning both superpowers is something only the new government could achieve. Recently, only ISIS and Gaddafi can attain this kind of “privileged” diplomatic position.
If monarchy had continued in Iran, then at worse Iran-Iraq war could have been a Cold War proxy conflict.
To go back to the original point – no Arab monarchies had diplomatic skills to have both superpowers against them in the 20th century.
Sanctions are one of the achievements of a government’s foreign policy choices.
External policy is one of the most skills of the government, and the reason taxpayers expend vast money renting the most beautiful buildings, inside the most expensive cities, for their diplomatic operations. Similarly, why diplomats have elite and expensive training, and cultivate refined etiquette, etc. The purpose is to avoid the costs of international exclusion.
That is true that e.g. Kiarostami is popular internationally (I haven’t seen his films to judge). But Kiarostami was already film director in the 1970s (Monarchist) Iran. This cinema artist is product of the monarchist time of Iran.
Having foreigners and elite who watch opera, is not a bad thing. It’s true that opera is usually limited for the elite.
But much Opera teaches humanistic values (although also things like Italian nationalism and German romanticism – which gives people historical knowledge), and requires long attention spans, to enjoy. It is not like Imelda Marcos shoe collection – some indication of cynical luxury. Promotion of opera in the country, is more like seeing literature enter the society.
Trump might be an idiot in terms of his cultural knowledge level, but his advisors were likely educated. Afghanistan had indeed a relative stable age until the 1970s, with miniskirts in Kabul. https://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/08/19/afghan.untold/index.html
We’re not discussing subtle social observations, or restaurants. Some things are quite obvious.
I have never visited Ancient Rome (and neither has anyone living for many centuries), but I can notice that Commodus was a bad leadership.
Similarly, you don’t need to be a Middle Eastern person, to read a graph.
When one of the most oil wealthy countries, manages to attain a GDP per capita (on the Atlas method) which is lower than Ukraine. This is not a good result from 42 years of leadership.
https://i.imgur.com/jJi1MHR.jpg
Despite being Islamic clerics, Iran’s leadership has also managed to push the country’s fertility rate below replacement level, from 6.5 in 1976 to 1.6 births per woman in 2012.
Overpopulation blogs are describing Iran’s policies as “The Iranian miracle: The most effective family planning program in history”. This is certainly good for the regime’s political stability.
But for the long-term national power , they have likely fallen too far now, and will have an aging population in a couple decades.
https://overpopulation-project.com/the-iranian-miracle-the-most-effective-family-planning-program-in-history/
“The Overpopulation Project Team examines the history of population policies in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran stands out for lowering its fertility in a very short time without coercion. The total fertility rate dropped from almost 6 in 1988 at the start of its more recent strong framily planning (FP) program, to around replacement level by 2000 and has remained below that level since. In rural areas it dropped from 8.1 to 2.1 in only one generation, which in comparison, took European countries 300 years.”
Dubai is also promoting opera now, so Oman has started a fashion which is trending in the region. Saudi Arabia is opening Italian operas.
Most of the aristocrat controlled Arab countries have been skilled in diplomacy, and have avoided things like sanctions from any of the superpowers (even Qatar who were sanctioned by their neighbours). And almost all the Arab monarchies have managed the coronavirus pandemic with a relative competence. There is a pattern that the Arab monarchies are not the worst performing governments in the region, from the perspective that would prioritize their people’s living standards.
One can quibble over Pahlavi’s imprint within Iranian history, but it’s hard to tarnish his reputation as a marketing genius. Seldom, if ever, has such a dazzling display of celebration been witnessed on the world’s stage as in 1971, when Pahlavi orchestrated three wonderous days of celebrations, where a good portion of the world’s hoi poloi gathered for a celebration of 2,500 years of Persian history:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1c/44/bd/1c44bdd8851e1f58b028cf1c2c779ded.jpg
Persopolis, 1971
https://static1.eghtesadnews.com/thumbnail/67YgISRiQ8T4/rygr_OlXE1SXyfNcng8g_k74A2NhtW9cik2q-fLsewggzjcLSMLkZabZHC3eiEK-/%D8%AC%D8%B4%D9%86+%D9%87%D8%A7%DB%8C+2500+%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%87+%D8%B4%D8%A7%D9%87%D9%86%D8%B4%D8%A7%D9%87%DB%8C.jpg
One of the main ballrooms.
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/BRGA8H/tent-city-lavish-gathering-of-many-heads-of-state-in-ruins-of-persepolis-BRGA8H.jpg
A few of the tents erected within “Tent City” for the guests.
because Russians still have their problems
And I’m pretty sure that that are not going to allow The Ukraine to add a huge NATO military facility on their border to this list of problems.
Pahlavi comes off well in his interviews with W*stoids.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1215323380578164737
He was also woke on Jews in the US media (the video has been censored from YouTube). Pretty funny how he was replaced by an Islamist who had previously lived in the West a few years later.
Chick dig guys who play video games.
But come on lol, is not ultimately the goal of all creative endeavors, to impress women?
This surprises me as well. All the Euros have their own national composer (Chopin, Dvorak, Bartok, Zweers), even in the New World (Villa-Lobos, Copland).
Japan has a long tradition of composers, if all somewhat obscure to the Anglo-sphere. Chinese are well represented in virtuosos like Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang but not composers.
But do you think we’ve reached a frontier innovations in classical music?
Really? for Das Judentum in der Muzik?
Agree.
East Asian (especially males) lack verbal and social-career ladder adeptness in the Anglosphere. But if anything this is a virtue. And can be largely attributed to language difference. The intrigue of Imperial times is in large part scholar-officials trading insults at each other so esoteric that each has to go home and research its meaning.
“Ukraine” has a President who wears a kosovorotka when he is trying to celebrate and National Vishivanka Day…… but a stupid retard as yourself is claiming a failure of triunism?
Go into any public place in Ukraine and talk to anybody – you will see triunism in even their most simple action you cretin. Look at any aerial view of Kiev and you will no only see total triunism, but a failure to even desovietise the city.
Poland (controlled by USSR and Russian empire for 220 out of the last 250 years), is now “resisting” the USSR in all this time where it was not only easily controlled by them…… but liberated and owes its entire existence to them you stupid imbecile?
Where Czechoslovakia had 1968 and Hungary 1956, the limpwristed poles had f**k all. “Solidarity” was a non event that would have been annihilated but for the fact that the US Secretary of State was a Pole – so sanctions threat the only reason it carried on. As for Ukraine resisting it…. I know you are a fantasist wackjob bimbo – but this is too ridiculous
LMAO- so the fantasist wackjob without an international passport is now making up a fake trip to Europe (that probably plaigirises my one of my own holidays if I have written about it on here)!!
Totally reckless to take a rented (fake) car trip that crosses multiple borders, with multiple PCR tests, when insurance and return journeys could be severely impacted by crossing multiple EU borders disproportionately- it smells of fantasist BS because it is fantasist BS, even for somebody as you who shows an extreme lack of knowledge on Europe, going there, and for a loser who copies pages of “history” on Wikipedia here….. an abnormal lack of knowledge on history of Italy or any EU state that the normal American traveller would know
Any sane person tell me how this wackjob is able to distinguish Bangladeshis from Indians on the street? LOL. Not likely the majority of Indian women will have the red dot on their head, not a certainty the majority of women will wear Muslim dress/head coveting or not dress western…. and if Indians/Bangladeshi do wear native dresses then they are regional not religiously different, and practically the same to any western eye. In this useless compulsive liar’s sick attention-seeking – WTF happened to Pakistanis in all this fantasist nonsense? LOL!
In the real world, Indians or South Asians are practically non-existant in Milan you cretin. Africans there are highly noticeable in their quantity, so are Gypsies/Romanians.