***
AFGHANISTAN
- The terrorist attacks today. The Taliban did free all those Islamist militants, not all of them would have been strictly suborned to the Taliban themselves. What’s so surprising?
-
Notable foreign relations developments. Tajikistan has adopted a cold tone to the Taliban, accusing them of gong and has reportedly supplied the NRF holed up in Panjshir.
-
Opinion polls from Russia and anecdotal evidence from China confirms that the Taliban is not popular there.
-
Dan Hardie with survey of Afghan Central Bank history. Last time the Taliban ran a Central Bank, they canceled the issue of new notes and its governor spent more time on the battlefield than in his office. Certainly very Bronze Age.
-
Peter Turchin cliodynamics-centered explanation of Taliban takeover.
* Why Do Afghan Men Wear “Eyeliner”?
* Taliban finds ever more diverse fans expanding to Chechen Islamists (Kavkaz Center) & Ukrainian Neo-Nazis (Azov).
- After having closed down strana.ua, Ukraine now blocks websites of 12 Russian newspapers (a few of them liberal/semi-opposition ones).
-
South Koreans now dislike China more than Japan. Arguably a more significant development than anything to do with Afghanistan. South Korean GDP is 80x higher than Afghanistan’s. Looks like it’s not going to dally with the Sinosphere after all.
-
Jessica Stewart: 3,500-Year-Old Stone Carving Discovery May Change Art History as We Know It. Realistic art didn’t necessarily begin with the Ancient Greeks. Multiple cycles of Farewell to Alms/Idiocracy in history?
-
Moscow Metro expansion plans through to 2030.
-
CRYPTO. Binance reportedly planning to list at valuation of $200B in Singapore. This February, I speculated CZ is the “dark horse” candidate to become the world’s first trillionaire. (Still highly unlikely).
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.
This is very interesting. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
This thing looks very “Greek”. I now believe that it’s quite probable that the Greeks used older, now lost, art as the models for their own. Just as the Romans modeling their art after Greek examples and later Renaissance artists copying the Romans.
And what’s with details visible only under a microscope? How?
How popular is transhumanism in RusFed?
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/leo1s-russian-military-news-pictures-thread.243988/post-78351468
https://tass.ru/interviews/12167495
From Turchin’s Taliban piece:
What is “elite overproduction” even supposed to mean in a country like Afghanistan? I thought it referred to an excess of university graduates, especially with degrees in “useless” subjects like humanities, who feel entitled to privileged status, but can’t achieve it, therefore become the intellectual leaders of radical movements (fascist, left-wing revolutionary etc.). Afghanistan’s problem seems to be more an excess of young men per se (“youth bulge”).
I don’t follow Turchin closely, but I’m beginning to wonder if he isn’t just a bullshitter who’s using a few concepts he’s grown fond of as explanation for everything.
I don’t think it fits either, hence lack of endorsement. Another prediction he makes is that there will now be peace because everyone is tired of fighting. But it is already being invalidated. That said, I don’t consider Turchin a BS’er, he’s one of my favorite intellectuals, but he did overreach here IMO.
Number of universities in Afghanistan did significantly increase during the US occupation.
The first “private” one was the American University of Afghanistan.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1428190504575856646
It’s a marginal movement as in any country. You have a small community of high IQ people interested in it (in Russia though it is unusually tilted towards Radical Life Extension relative to the US), you have a small group of low IQ obsessed with it as a Satanist/globalist/etc. plot, you have the vast majority of normies who don’t know or care.
Afghanistan’s tertiary enrollment is 10% (same as Yemen and Nigeria) and that figure is recent. It’s fair to say that “elite overproduction” is probably the least of its problems.
I agree that Turchin is a BS-er, like anyone else who tries to fit history into some sort of grand pattern. But elite does not necessarily imply university education. A backward society may have the warrior elite, and when it overproduces they start fighting each other (unless the excess can be sent off to a crusade somewhere.)
“Realistic art didn’t necessarily begin with the Ancient Greeks. Multiple cycles of Farewell to Alms/Idiocracy in history?”
The Mycenaeans were Greek-speaking. There are hundreds of Linear B tablets that attest to the language they used which is an early form of Greek.
That sounds pretty much like the standard situation for pre-modern nobles, who constantly fought each other about status. I don’t think that’s what usually meant by “elite overproduction” (which is rather about a state creating institutions of higher education, leading to an excess of graduates whose expectations can’t be fulfilled and therefore become a factor of instability, providing intellectual leadership for other dissatisfied groups).
I’m also skeptical about Turchin’s claims for a grand theory of history, but I haven’t read enough of it to judge it. I did think once before that he was bullshitting, about the rise of Christianity to dominance in late antiquity (according to one of Turchin’s graphs – based on highly speculative “data” – it would have happened anyway, so Constantine’s conversion and imperial patronage played no role, which is nonsensical imo). But maybe I’m being unfair; don’t have time right now to look closer into his ideas.
Officers trained and indoctrinated by the Soviets helped to destabilize the country. I guess it would not be a stretch to believe that people trained and indoctrinated by the US could help to destabilize the country, in the future, especially as subsidies collapse, and there is only so much money to be had.
Guessing the threshold for elite overproduction falls with GDP. In the US, it might be colleges and universities, in Afghanistan, it might be public schools, where people are taught to read. Or the US-financed bureaucracy, where so many people gained temporary status, through absurdly artificial subsidies.
That said, the only book of his I tried to read Figuring Out the Past was awful (not one of his better reviewed ones.) I won’t say it was a cash grab, but I felt like it was something that should not have even been published. But history can be a little like that sometimes, not enough surviving sources, for anyone to make a meaningful analysis.
I only have a middling understanding of Turchin, so I’ll apologize if I get this wrong, but “elite overproduction” is meant to be a more general concept that applies across space and time. If Europe at some stage of the Middle Ages had too many sons of knights and petty nobles aspiring to their own fiefdoms and not enough fiefdoms for all of them, that’s elite overproduction. Those sons either go conquering abroad, or they endlessly agitate for internal wars, scheming for some way to become landed. They don’t all gently accept status as peasants. Turchin’s case is that most or all periods of national dissension are kind of like this.
So I think Turchin is basically arguing that you had too many people aspiring to power and influence in Afghanistan. The Taliban leadership class, and the (larger) Western-backed leadership class. Now the latter set is being eliminated, translating to a smaller leadership class, possibly greater internal harmony.
This is just sort of a funny way of saying “ideological purges work”. I wouldn’t call Turchin a BS artist (he does have some interesting insights), but it does feel like trying to overfit his model.
Aubrey de Grey got fired from the SENS Research Foundation because of “sexual harassment”. So much for immortality.
https://twitter.com/senstweet/status/1429276575195860997
I remember some months ago AK saying that Biden’s senility was just rightist cope or some such. At the time I wondered if I was missing something because some of the videos I had watched of him during the campaign clearly showed a very deteriorated man, even from some months earlier, during the Democratic candidate campaign (although the didn’t do so bad in his debates with Trump). However, watching him answering questions from reporters today was really sad. He is definitely losing it. I’m not sure how he is going to make it until 2024 or even if his mental decline may have anything to do with this botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The Taliban got the US by the balls at the airport, so it folded and it will have to leave by August 31, over the objections of its allies. It will also have to swallow whatever terrorist attacks happen.
That means leaving stranded several thousand westerners in Kabul. There are also about 1000 americans that are still not “in direct contact” with US authorities.
So Taliban got some hostages by not agreeing to extend the evacuation deadline.
https://twitter.com/SlangeVarDave/status/1431018870832259074
Interesting piece by Anatol Lieven about Islamic state in Afghanistan:
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/08/26/who-are-the-islamic-state-in-afghanistan/
I think the conventional view is that Greek realism spread outward to the Middle East, so if they were making large, realistic bronze statues in Mycenaean times, with contrapposto, it perhaps seems a bit surprising that their influence wasn’t perpetuated in Egypt, during the interim of the dark ages.
Unless, there is some potential explanation for why it would not have been? Maybe, it spread only through conquest? But that seems hard to believe. My theory would be that miniatures, while often artistically quite impressive, require less state complexity than statues, so it was easier for masterworks to be made small than large.
I quite like old miniatures. Many impressive examples from different parts of the world can be seen on the website of the Louvre.
They should see if it is encoded with digital information that can be read by a violet laser. The total state of their knowledge and history up till then, perhaps, including legends of past greatness, followed by a dark age, and their pessimistic, cliodymanic theories about a future return to dark ages.
Initially the ratio of nobles to peasants is low so there is plenty of land, labor, and government rents to go around. Nobles make more babies than peasants so their number increases. Also, worthy peasants begin ascending to noble rank faster than nobles lose their rank. The society becomes noble top-heavy. Land and labor are scarcer and most importantly government rents can only support so many parasites. Noble squabbling intensifies to the point it becomes war.
In our modern societies the nobles don’t make babies so all the growth in nobles come from the peasants ascending. An aspirational couple makes a couple of mil and their children inherit it and want more. The education craze fuels status-seeking and false self-perception of nobility.
“Elite overproduction” is a confused concept in general. The implication of the idea is that all these excess university graduates wouldn’t be a potential source of instability if they simply were denied education and were forced to work crummy jobs instead. Does anybody seriously believe this?
Not one of AK’s smarter takes.
Drumpf was stupid enough to drag himself down, even if ‘The Thing’ Joe Biden was losing his mind.
They should change the name to Affaghistan:
People mock tweets like this, but of course Starnes is right here. Rules of engagement holding US forces and power back is what turns these wars into interminable conflicts and money pits and “losses” for the US.
https://twitter.com/CityBureaucrat/status/1430943311473389569/photo/1
Many revolutionaries were educated overseas. There are enough examples to suggest foreign outreach is dangerous, not even considering its obvious negative effects on the host country. (for ex: Obama and Kamala, or Tienanmen)
Of course, Pol Pot dropped out, and Ho Chi Minh was not accepted, though he applied. But these things are always about more than one man.
Is the house economics/finance expert THORFINNSSON here? I recently read an interesting article, “Japan, Refutation of Neoliberalism” by Robert Locke, published in the heterodox economics journal Post-Autistic Economics Review (now called Real-World Economics Review) in 2005.
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue23/Locke23.htm
According to Locke, Japan’s centrally-planned capitalist model proves that neoliberalism is not the only path to prosperity; in particular, the bank-based (rather than stock exchange-based) provision of cheap capital allowed Japan to create a competitive advantage in advanced manufacturing. Locke also argues that Japan’s Ministry of Finance bureaucrats are better than investment bankers, since they effectively do the same job but are not paid so much, being motivated by high job status and nationalism instead. Locke also argues in favor of regulated cartels, keiretsu business groups and that Japan is a fake democracy (IMHO Japan is more like Sweden under social democratic rule since both countries are very conformist).
I’d thus like to ask Thorfinnsson what his opinion is on bank- versus stock exchange-based capital, as well as whether investment banking is an efficient form of helping companies raise large amounts of capital. More broadly, which aspects of the American financial system are ineffective compared to foreign systems such as Japan’s?
Also cf. The New Yorker article “What Good is Wall Street?” from 2010 criticizing much of investment banking as useless
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/11/29/what-good-is-wall-street
Your theory about idiocy cycles is interesting – my own explanation for European and East Asian intelligence is that it’s a result of the fact that we had the highest amount of “idiocy cycles”
Tropical locations weren’t conductive to this due to ludicrous disease load, garbage tier soil and such. Therefore Africans and Australian aboriginals went through the least idiocy cycles (but if, let’s say, we were to cut ’em off right now, the “overshoot” is so gargantuan it will to them be worth at least 2 cycles in the end)
I believe the article implied that the carving was Minoan, not Mycenaean. The more I learn about the Minoan culture the more impressed I am. I wish they left behind some understandable texts.
Surely Biden would not write the withdrawal plan, but rather just signs it. So the incompetence of the details in this plan (i.e. to not use Bagram airport) was still written by professionals in the US military.
But his only justification for the incompetent plan, is to focus on overall need for withdrawing from Afghanistan
Since the early 20th century, America oscillates between a trend towards either isolationism or interventionalism, and populist leaders like Obama, Biden or Trump only care about their votes, and so simply follow whatever is the trend of the time (which is currently towards isolationism).
A more successful external policy, would try to avoid oscillation, and follow a constant and more median line between isolationism and interventionalism, and without abrupt movements that cause a loss of previous (even if they were unwise) investments during the isolationism phase, or which promote interventions that won’t be sustained across multiple generations during the interventionalism phase.
Metternich or Bismarck could build an external policy across generations. But the democracy in America seem to create an undulating movement. Interventionalist Kennedy-Johnson, were followed by relatively isolationist Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan, were followed by the interventionalist Bush-Clinton-Bush, and the now followed by isolationist Obama-Trump-Biden. Needless to say, it would be more effective if there was a constant, straight median line followed rather than these undulating trends.
RE: South Korea
The US certainly has a long list of foreign policy blunders in pursuit of a globe-spanning network of alliances for its military and economic interests…but one thing it has over China is just sheer cultural dominance. Despite resentment at US governmental policy, many people the world over enjoy American-produced entertainment, fashion, cars, etc. and this is something I don’t think China could replicate anytime soon, if ever. Obviously China will assert itself more in Asia in the decades ahead and has plenty of economic leverage, but lacks the cultural cachet that greased the skids for American interests in the 20th century and early 21st. Might let the US retain more strength against China than would otherwise be the case.
Anyway, that’s what I am telling myself living through the last days of the American empire.
No immortality with immorality.
Perhaps, it is not too late for the Japanification of Korea.
Anyway, I have been advocating that the two countries cooperate on space, and on attacking Hollywood.
That is quite a powerful take.
They quite dislike each other, to put it lightly. There used to be a poll of “would South Korea accept Japanese assistance in the event of North Korean invasion ” and the answer was “both sides would cease hostilities immediately to kill the Japanese.”
And to the Japanese, the very landmass of Korea is speaks of a blade pointed at its heart.
https://twitter.com/xnoybis999/status/1430184525493981184?s=20
https://twitter.com/blog_supplement/status/1430002959711182856
I guess. :shrug:
Is ADA a scam? I want to hold some like maybe 5-10% along with KCS staking. Rest ETH/BTC
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
I wouldn’t listen to Thorfinnsson’s opinions on money I lost my entire life savings on his Tesla advice.
In this article, Turchin explains why his idiotic pseudoscience “cliodynamics” does not work (in the case of Afghanistan). Astrologers work in the same way
This is not exactly news
https://normpost.ru/uploads/images/00/01/06/2020/11/07/0u79792005-1894d059-6f1a2caf.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/Goldbecher_von_Vafio.JPG/1024px-Goldbecher_von_Vafio.JPG
The leader of the Yaroslavl communists, antivaxer Alexander Vorobyov, died of COVID-19
https://preview.redd.it/i6ozca3ibnj71.jpg?width=1024&auto=webp&s=4055b8f4f7e2d1181febaef498a0999c349d79bc
The only thing that matters is that a transhumanist faction is currently dominant in elite circles (say WEF), and the “low IQ” faction is swelling to include “reactionary” normies.
It should have been ideologues outside of centers of power gaining adherents one by one, and seeing if the world at large is amenable to it (I don’t think it would be for a few centuries at least). Instead we have the WEF imposing their deathwish on the globe thru UN and major (coerced) world leaders.
What made Japan grow rich until the mid-70s, is also responsible for negligence in the bubble of late-80s and the stagnation up until now. Japan is basically like a much wealthier late Soviet Union in that instituional inertia led to a lack of structural reforms and stagnation. It will go down with the rest of the West.
“Realistic art didn’t necessarily begin with the Ancient Greeks. ”
Euro Cave Men Artists had superbly skillfully executed realistic paintings of animals 30 000 years ago, although the were not interested in depicting human anatomy beyond bipedal stick men
It is just centuries-old grudges and patrimony replaying under modern ideology and geopolitics.
I finally found someone in Crypto with rational, surefire predictions.
Sorry, not even Roko can come close. This is how you make money.
https://twitter.com/arisroussinos/status/1428271917262311424
Did Tajikistan conduct the flights or allow them? India has two facilities in Tajikistan at air bases (Farkhor/Ayni). India had supported the Northern Alliance in the 1990s and could have decided to start sponsoring the NRF. Russia and China should form a united front to put an end to that nonsense. An unstable Taliban-held Afghanistan mired in a civil war is bad for stemming the flow of terrorists to the NCFD and Xinjiang.
Should have denounced USSR as a pure entirely criminal regime too with its mandatory vaccinations from all the diseases at the time 😉
Imagine the burden of having to fit to a predetermined morality and live forever.
Can we talk about the Rumour that Russia has taken out an IMF loan for 15+ billion dollars ? This hasn’t made any sense and this hasn’t been done for decades . What’s up A K ?
Wtf I love the WEF now
Would begin with a propaganda campaign showing low-IQ English chavs and their Irish equivalent hating each other, while being invaded by the Third World, followed by a vision of the future, where their grandchildren, now surrounded by blacks and Pakis, and forced to put their backs against each other, ask why their grandparents did not cooperate to conquer space.
Libertarians hate any kind of mandatory vaccination because it is a mandate (that is exercise in inherently bad state power), not because of how effective, necessary or safe a type of vaccine is. They will oppose even a smallpox vaccine mandate.
Communists should rightly reject Western Big Pharma (which is capitalist) vaccine production and support Sputnik V (being state R&D and production).
Ahem, divide and conquer.
Say what you will about India, but they are top-notch revanchists.
Makes one wonder, if Greeks could govern Afghanistan again, or if the Bactrians were just super-Greeks who had average IQ of 130, but whose descendants have been laid low by dysgenics and intermarriage.
Have you been under a rock for the past 3 decades or something? I don’t think there’s a single example anywhere of any country growing its economy in following ‘neo-liberal’ policies or ‘free-market’ dogma in general. South Korea, China, Germany, Britain and of course, the United States itself all first developed their economies with extremely heavy state-involvement in business, strict bank regulation and protectionism. Read Michael Hudson, or hell, read Adam Smith.
Anyway, totally off-topic from this thread, but that line of thinking is just so stupid, has caused so much destruction, and so many people still believe in it, that I couldn’t commenting on it.
A reasonable number of Korean would opt for planetary destruction so as long as it got the Japs too. Your scenario would not bother them as much as you think.
Imagine if every rhyming post had to meme, would there be a famine of striking boasts of extremes?
Those ideal libertarians should join BLM’ists in toppling of Washington statues all over US:
https://eu.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2021/08/02/did-george-washington-mandate-vaccines-smallpox-continental-army-during-revolutionary-war/5456106001/
Also, if I’m not mistaken, none of the Western vaccines are officially available in RF, so whatever those modern day commies are protesting against in context of domestic matters, it’s certainly not against invasion of Big Pharma production.
Dude was just tryin’ to grab him some young stem cells, you know, for advanced research. This #metoo sh*t’s gonna cause the end of immortality. Like in Genesis. What’s old is what’s new.
Many parts of Central Asia received heavy Greek immigration but Bactria was definitely Hellenized Iranians.
Tajiks and most Central Asian Turks have 87 IQ while Iran and Afghanistan have 84 IQ. (For comparison modern Greeks and Turks have 90-92 IQ). So there were never 130 IQ Greeks (and as I said anything that far back isn’t relevant to what exists now). So there is a shortfall of 3 IQ from modern education and another 3-5 from dysgenics.
A man is only as old as the woman he feels up.
Woke rendition: a man is only as old as the woman he feels he truly is.
They will say, that wasn’t conscription, those unwilling to vaccinate could stay out of the way. (Smallpox inoculation was equally experimental then)
I am half-libertarian and floomer myself and I’d say you don’t have annual flu vaccine mandates. But if you need that to get by, go SCK WEF’S DCK. I don’t care, it’s your own risk.
We have a difficult time governing ourselves. Forget about Afghanistan.
Edward Dutton had his monologue about how video games are destroying young men.
This is the perfect example of an old-geezer fuck who thinks he understands technology and its social impacts when in reality he doesn’t understand piss and shit.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-m4KKuPjkJtc/YSjlYhV73mI/AAAAAAAAHZ4/uexlSRLv52c1rjevMoXGpms7LQzQuKvXQCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h360/jjjj.png
Owns a playstation hat, confirmed for gay.
Dutton is probably the type of pleb who started using a computer in 2016 and thus thinks online gaming surfaced in 2017.
His half-retarded thesis is games today are “so realistic” and “so in depth” that young boys use it to gain substitute status (what was once called an ‘e-Penis’ before being a man was a crime against humanity. Pro tip: if someone asks how big your e-penis is you better say ‘this big!’ and spread your arms open).
He forgets that it’s not the GAMES that has turned boys to girls but the overprotective nature of media who ban, suspend, or block people like me from turning boys to men (and that’s without the ‘bad touch’ the Catholic church is known for).
In my day we used to tell gamers about the “Alt-F4” aim hack/map hack and you’d watch cocksuckers disconnect as they foolishly tried it out.
We used to trick them into clicking links that would lead them to horrific pictures (goatse <3) or lock up their system as their browser opens up a million pop ups.
We used to hide trojans and scripts in various files in an effort to brick peoples BIOS on their motherboards (back in the day you either prayed a computer shop had the original firmware to reflash it or you had to send it to the manufacturer; in the 90s companies usually didn't have a website up with the drivers for on-demand download, if you lost the floppy that came with your motherboard you were fucked basically).
We used to ridicule people until they did us all a favour and 'did the right thing' (and if they managed to 'do the right thing' with their entire family, bonus points). Sometimes your genetic line isn't worth a squirrels fart, take initiative and remove this blemish from the world. "If you're shit in life and shit in games you're probably not worth anything, therefore…."
The internet was filled with hate, rage and discontent. Boys who dared venture online were exposed to that vileness in their daily Doom matches and their Ultima Online grinds as their 33.6k modems whined to keep them connected while their parents complained they couldn't make any calls.
Now even the TIME HONOURED tradition of trolling has been castrated because fags and queers (the masses that turned the internet into the social media gaysphere) can't handle a bit of text and a picture of a guy spreading his asshole 12 inches apart. So instead of taking their Growacet the solution is to ban the legacy elements of the internet that churned out men like John Romero and John Carmack.
And to put the cherry on top I have to endure illiteracy from geezers who didn't even know computers existed until a smartphone landed in their hands (through contract from a mobile provider, no less).
As someone who has worked on Wall Street:
Investment bankers probably aren’t the relevant class to compare to Japan’s MITI, but venture capitalists. That New Yorker article, meanwhile, is mostly not about investment banking or venture capital, but trading.
The US system of launching start-ups is best in the world, I don’t think anyone can argue with this point, and I can’t imagine the US government doing the job even 1% as well. In every major US metro area, you have these startup incubators (which are basically a sort of VC operation). Everyone knows about the famous ones in Silicon Valley (e.g. Y Combinator), but I’ll share that I’m personally familiar with the main incubator in a very middling Southern US city, and even there they have some very smart people and have helped a number of start-ups grow to successful businesses.
As for traders, functioning, liquid secondary markets are a good thing, but I have little doubt that too much trading happens on the US stock exchanges. You need a certain amount of trading to provide liquidity to legitimate investors, but the only reason these algorithmic traders exist is to take money from legitimate investors by trying to predict their trading behavior and get ahead of them.
Investment bankers are basically overpaid middlemen in large capital-raising or M&A transactions. They serve an essential function, and they generally do it well enough (better than government would), they’re just overpaid. IB peaked in either the Clinton or W. Bush years though, it’s not as profitable or highly-paid as it once was (but still a very good starting place for college grads). The best i-bankers have learned from experience of seeing lots of transactions and are able to provide actual good advice (technically they are described as “advisors”, but 99% of what they do is to just go through the motions of helping make a transaction happen while providing little value-add).
https://katehon.com/en/article/macrons-health-dictatorship
Both the elites and populists want the existing consumer economy be liquidated and replaced, the first one with a tightly controlled one and the 2nd with agorism and self-sufficiency.
My forecast will be 10-20% drop per capita (best case) or 30-50% (worst case) until 2022-23 at least. Much of Europe will follow.
Not like massive economic disruption hasn’t occured before (WWI, Great Depression, WWII) and previous things recover in a few years, but this time faith in institutions and capitalism itself are shaken to the core, enough to replace the social ethos with libertarian Neo-Luddism and start lasting alternative institutions. This is why Martin Armstrong says the 300-years long Capitalist cycle is coming to an end and an entirely new one (either WEF’s segregated goverance or demodernization) will take its place.
I’d be glad to see global capitalism, with its myth of infinite accumulation, fail. Whatever useful thing left will be scavenged by both elites (new and old) and populists.
Seems to be true of nearly everyone these days.
Francis Galton thought that ancient Greeks were the smartest people who ever lived, though I did exaggerate a bit when I said 130.
Personally, I think the Victorians were quite impressive, and believe it is possible that British mean IQ has dropped more than 5 points, perhaps as much as 10, or a little more, since then.
Michael Woodley found that Bronze Age Minoans and Mycenaeans had higher POLY_EDU than today’s Greeks. But I’m not sure whether the skeletons that survived would have been of mostly average people. Not sure if he ever followed it up with Classical Greeks.
https://twitter.com/tom_nuttall/status/1431146038686060544
I’m sort of lukewarm on Turchin, but if I were to steelman him (as I understand him):
“Elite overproduction” isn’t an easy a problem to solve, it’s meant to be more predictive and descriptive than prescriptive.
The “overproduction” is really the gap between expectation and reality, and both are a problem: first, you have a dominant cultural narrative teaching that an elite career is the key to life satisfaction, that a college degree puts you solidly on the path to such a career and accompanying upward class mobility, that you should “follow your dreams” and “reach for the stars” rather than worry about the risk-reward of different career paths, and that as a result of your education, you are flat-out “owed” some of these things (reinforced by the fact that you likely accumulated debts to fund your education). And second, you have a growing societal failure to fulfill this narrative that it has pounded into young people’s heads. The result is widespread dissatisfaction, and a zero-sum downward spiral of intense competition over limited positions in “self-actualizing” career paths.
If you were to pound into everyone’s head that a college degree is the key to happiness and lifelong fulfillment, and then say, “Sorry, we’re restricting the number of college degrees by 95% going forward,” then no, that would not make things better. But if you were to modify the dominant cultural narrative to something like, “Work is not a primary source of life satisfaction but something usually unpleasant that you have to do to pay the bills, here are some in-demand trades that have the best chance of helping you do that — ignore these suggestions at your peril, but know that real life satisfaction comes from family and community relationships,” you might be living in a less troubled society.
Actually, governance has been quite good in the last two years and I do not consider myself a natural New Democracy voter. We need 10 years of this to fundamentally change the Greek character and wipe away 40 years of inept mostly socialist rule.
That’s wrong, the US has never been isolationist since WW2, it’s just a scare term used by people who want to agitate for specific interventions (just like the ever present ghost of “Munich” and “appeasement”). Biden doesn’t advocate dissolving the existing US alliance structure either, he just doesn’t think keeping troops in Afghanistan is worth the cost (probably correctly imo).
And even during the alleged heyday of isolationism in the 1920s and 1930s the US actually was involved in international affairs (iirc observer status at the League of Nations, also through negotiations about German reparations and the payment of British/French war debts; and of course Roosevelt’s administration did progressively take a more assertive role even before the formal US entry into WW2).
Not really surprising, Greens have been transformed into an interventionist party (for “human rights”, of course their bourgeois voters don’t serve in the army themselves, they just expect proles to fight and die for their stupid “values”), almost necon-tier at times, e.g. look at this interview with one of their members of parliament (who thinks there should have been a Western military intervention in Syria to topple Assad’s government):
https://www.zeit.de/politik/2021-03/usa-transatlantic-relations-franziska-brantner-stephen-wertheim-english?utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
Just one more reason to hate them.
Reminds me that I need to try to watch that movie about Admiral Yi.
I grew up with all this (born early 80s). I do miss the 90s and early 00s Internet and gaming culture. I was suspended from Ultima Online for a particular act of “anti-social behavior” — best moment of my gaming career.
But my friend who was biggest into that era of online gaming, Quake and Counterstrike and all that, is nowadays one of the most cucked guys I know. He’s into every trendy leftist BLM/LGBT topic, lives childless with an ugly wife with a nose ring who kept her last name and their two little yappy dogs (“fur babies”).
One other friend who was big into online gaming and especially big into Internet trolling culture in his teens (linked more people to goatse than I can count), was still living with his parents last time I checked in with him around age 30, still a virgin at that time, didn’t even have his driver’s license, probably watched porn 2 hours a day. Now 10ish years later, wouldn’t be surprised if he was still a virgin. And yeah, also a leftist.
I’m inclined to think, as gaming culture and Internet shifted leftward and gayward, these guys just followed it. Instead of Quake, they started playing Overwatch, with its wacky cast of diverse gay characters. But I also think their heads were just too occupied by fantasy, not involved enough in the real world.
Better, I think, if your sons take up hunting, fishing, and martial arts, and game in moderation, if at all. I’d still make this recommendation even if I knew the 90s Internet culture was going to survive forever.
The only thing I can tell is lockdowns which is an Europe-wide phenomenon.
BTW I’m saying this because the fundaments of capitalism is being undone.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/08/16/a-long-hot-angry-summer/
It would likely be impossible to recover from this level of demoralization in the short time span of years and decades, even centuries. The last 2 times this happened, it took a millennium for post-Roman Europe to “recover”, and Islamic society has never regained its posture 800 years after the Mongol invasion. And so the quickest path to recover and rebuild (“Build Back Better” the non-elitist way) is Distributism, or Islamic economic, and Buddhist/Taoist economics, all of them reinserting moralism and ethics and making it the prime concern in a reduced, post-capitalist economy. Anything else will be worse, and the current system will be ripped apart before anyone can reform it, so we can only work with the outcomes of the upheaval at its end.
I’m starting to look into Schumacher Center for a New Economics’ theories (of Buddhist Economics) fame. I think what is outlined in the famous essay can be adapted for Taoism.
The Taliban have killed rather than released ISIS terrorists known to them. In at least one case, an imprisoned leader and 8 of his followers. If others escaped either Taliban intelligence was lacking or their manpower was insufficient to deal with low grade ISIS prisoners.
There is also a literature comparing stock market funded UK industry versus bank funded German industry. The basic conclusion being that for middle sized firms the German system provides patient money compared to prematurely, by German standards, floated UK firms. The German system includes technology (but not business) incubators like Max Planck Societies, Fraunhofer Institutes and Leibnitz Institutes, etc.. The results of these spin off into industry but as additions to existing businesses rather than stand alone start ups. This system creates excellent incremental improvement and perfection of the existing product base but is less good at destructive (of existing products and businesses) breakthroughs even compared to UK advanced technology (Pharmaceuticals, jet engines, wireless electronics, lots of small engineering firms you never heard of) never mind the US.
In principle the German approach produces a more stable society. The Japan variant perhaps even more so. Germany was saved by having to absorb the East and there is still the rest of Eastern Europe to upgrade without needing a lot of new technology to create growth.
Not using Bagram was right. 30 miles of exposed road to defend. Instantly clogged with traffic driven by the Kabul Skydiving Club with cars breaking down and otherwise blocking the road all the way. As we now know, ISIS was already expected. The big failure was keeping the civilian side of the airport open as a confidence measure. Neither NATO nor the Taliban was equipped to deal with civilian crowds. the police could have done it but the collapse of the police was not expected any more than the Afghan army which was expected to last for months.
With hindsight, evacuating the Embassies as processing centres was wrong but again was that because of ISIS. Russia packed its bags once ISIS became public knowledge.
It seems as though the Turks have been asked to put the civilian side of the airport back in order. If I was in the Indian Government I would be volunteering a lot of short term support too.
Taliban entered Kabul Airport
https://twitter.com/RisboLensky/status/1431287851027730435
https://twitter.com/RisboLensky/status/1431295500330967047
I agree that the US has and had a cultural cachet that it will be hard for China to reproduce.
OTOH, the US’s global cultural influence was and is arguably more baleful than its global political influence.
So while I agree that that this cultural dominance will persist, I’m not sure I can agree that is a good thing.
Nope, the Russian Embassy and the Consulate in Mazar will stay.
It’s not a real foreign policy crisis, and the entire media simply wants to prolong the mission in Afghanistan.
Whether or not Biden is with it he’s doing the right thing.
Japan probably also got a boost in the 1970s and 1980s by the fact that a chunk of the war generation who would have been retiring and weighing on the dependency ratio simply didn’t exist, having been killed 30-40 years earlier by the war.
Simultaneously Japan’s post-war baby boom population was entering its most productive years, and doing so without the solipsism, self-absorption, and hedonism of the US boomers.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.1ahUIYDoR2BeA1xZp9gJnwHaHe%26pid%3DApi&f=1
No, it looks like the US withdrawal has accelerated after the attack, so they are moving in.
Yes, let’s hope so. But it must have taken quite a determined stance from Biden to have the withdrawal carried out at such a speed. Trump didn’t even get to withdraw from Syria in the two attempts he made and a military commander openly admitted after his electoral defeat that they sabotaged his efforts. This is Ann Coulter’s take as well, that it’s Biden’s senile obstinacy what must have made this happen finally. She normally seems to have rather good information about Washington matters.
If Biden’s conversations with military leaders are similar to his conversation with White House reporters yesterday, it’s not difficult to imagine how chaos may have ensued. He totally lost the plot in his answer to the latest reporter from Fox News and before that he had already declared that the US military may be handing over lists of Americans and their Afghan allies to the Taliban, seemingly not realizing what that entailed.
Another part of this chaos may be what A123 said the other day about the Pentagon purposefully undermining Biden. I generally disagree with A123’s opinions but I found this idea quite plausible. During the Trump impeachment clown show we saw how even mid-level bureaucrats of the permanent administration, some of them not even American by birth, felt entitled to have their views passed into US foreign policy.
At any rate, I’m glad that the US is finally leaving Afghanistan and, whatever its causes, this chaotic retreat may have good long-term effects by making the American and Western public weary of future invasions. The comments I’m reading to the latest news in various Western countries show quite a lot of disapproval of foreign wars right now.
Looks like the US realised how vulnerable it is there and is running away as fast as possible.
https://twitter.com/RisboLensky/status/1431309056816435200
https://twitter.com/RisboLensky/status/1431321776072630280
Hard agree. That Tom “Economist Berlin Bureau Chief” Nuttall is oblivious to this means that he, and by extension The Economist, has been totally out to lunch for the past decade and half.
The 2001 Afghan intervention was logistically minor compared to what came later. Through the Bush years, Afghanistan was basically in a state benign neglect (a best case scenario for them) with a few troops and a CIA black site at Bagram. Obama-Biden re-launched that minor intervention as the fully blown Afghan War in 2009 after talking up “human rights” and “empowering women” as what NATO should be shedding blood for. Most of Afghanistan’s killing and dying occurred in the thirteen year missionary war that followed.
It is a foolish omission that conservatives, nationalists and rightwingers continue to let the Obamunist globohomo leftwingers off the hook for the bloody catastrophe they have wrought in Afghanistan.
American hostages= money in the bank……with a heaping helping of humiliation.
Indeed, his surprise shows how worthless journalists usually are. Greens haven’t been a “pacifist” party since at least the Kosovo war over 20 years ago.
Agreed about Afghanistan, imo the original mission was necessary and justified as a reaction to 9/11, the mistake was embarking on a nation-building project (which now is used to justify the insane idea that Western states have some kind of responsibility towards Afghans).
At least you know how our approaches to politics differ, which is a good thing. There isn’t a center in populism and it doesn’t have to be the explicitly American one you believe in.
“self sufficiency” isn’t mythical, even tho so many haven’t seen it. Just look at Cuba’s organoponics, or all those family farms popping out around you. It simply means planting your garden, or more complexly using your 3 acres and your cow.
I’m no longer a fully committed libertarian since their worldview is still fundamentally capitalistic, albeit an individualist one. But agorism and self-sufficiency aren’t exclusively libertarian, it is a strategy of survival that can be used by former normies when they are excluded from formal institutions (in the cases of vaccine gatekeeping).
Economic defense is a necessity, but what is more important is to negate their influence and to remove the institutions that enables them, which requires a paradigmatic shift. I am not a Christian (an apostate even), so I won’t comment on your crusader mentality. I tend to respect everyone’s faith and convictions, and I hold a lot of Taoist beliefs myself. (Trump is a buffoon who has recently endorsed the vaccine – mind you Operation Warpspeed started under his administration, and this fact of his opportunism alone should discredit him in your mind)
I know things will improve tremendously if the provisions and spirit of the American constitution is applied, especially if the “American spirit” matches it. But you should understand what political divides underlying the constitutional process exists that is surfacing again, between Hamiltonians who want to industrialize with a more centralist, rigid state and Jeffersonians protecting agrarianism and the yeoman ideal. The Hamiltonian vision has run its course and ultimately led to Biden and his handlers, even Trump, and you are still defending the overly complex economy produced by it, down to its recent application of digital communication (which is controlled by the same economic elites you aim to oppose). I’m not American and maybe I’ll be better not to mess with real localists.
I wish your kin good luck in fulfilling your goals.
From the Saigon evacuation to the Kuwait invasion was ~ 16 years. Sixteen years of sanity is probably too much to ask for. How about 7 or 8?
The Embassy has already been evacuated.
There’s a similar development happening with a lot of “green parties”—going from an oppositionist/outsider position to being another establishment party.
Historically many green parties have been pretty loony. A decade or so ago the picture that came to mind of a green party voter was a middle aged woman which is big into new age activities. That, and anti-nuclear activists.
One thing many green parties have in common is that they see themselves as the most moral party—they always need to be the most idealistic and righteous. So it’s not too unexpected that they become cheerleaders for interventionism to kill “bad” people.
Nope, Rus Embassy stays. Read again whatever you were reading on it, because i suspect you were sleepy. Thank you.
He wanted to talk about happy things, not such a mess.
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1410981518701477899
Maybe the office will kill him. Unlike Obama, he does not have that much time left.
https://publicradio1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/newscut/files/2017/01/aging_obama.jpg
More signs that the 2020s will be an exciting decade for Taiwan.
https://www.thechicagocouncil.org/research/public-opinion-survey/first-time-half-americans-favor-defending-taiwan-if-china-invades
https://i.ibb.co/Cssm5QJ/sand-table.jpg
Perhaps the CIA supported Joschka Fischer to weaken the SDP, and use Chernobyl to turn the German left against the USSR.
He might die of old age in his second term, and get a massive state funeral that will make Trump apoplectic.
It’s because their rhetoric has been co-opted by the establishment (see the Green New Deal).
You are correct in identifying the aim for reduced dependency. Even Medieval subsistence farmers procured everything other than the food the household needed with their little surplus. Total self-sufficiency is an aspiration.
I don’t think you get what I mean as to the right-sizing of the economy. You can get a decent level of living without needing to pay for meaningless mortgages or broadband, and the right economic size is one that can just support it, depending on the changing needs. Obviously bigger economies are often good, but not really optimal, and one built with incentives to accumulate indefinitely will hit its limits with disastrous consequences.
Anyway, I have an essay every Christian populist should read: https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/modern-industry-in-the-light-of-the-gospel/
Regular reminder that Irish IQ jumped from the low 80s to 100 in a few decades. Quibbling about a couple of points in this manner is autistic and retarded, although I should expect nothing better from this site.
The only ‘psychometric’ data that’s easily replicated everywhere is that black people are unusually gregarious and violent compared to other groups, whereever they are, whatever their social circumstances. But you didn’t need decades of genetic research and IQism to know that.
Not even that, what total nonsense. Didn’t nearly all the alleged hijackers come from Saudi Arabia? Wasn’t there already a large anti-Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan’s north?
If the Taliban itself was such an existential threat, why did the US reject both Russian and Iranian assistance in overthrowing them? Of course the question answers itself.
Disagree, the Taliban provided training camps for al-Qaida, they had to be punished after the extreme provocation of 9/11. Obviously I’m not a fan of most US/Western foreign policy regarding the Islamic world though (was always opposed to the Iraq war, don’t agree with the sanctions policy against Iran and Syria either).
Do you really believe that al-Qaida was responsible for 9/11? Besides it seems that Taliban was willing to round up Osama bin Laden and hand him over. But I would agree with you about the punishing part. Afghanistan was convenient target that could be punished quickly to keep the momentum going that put America on warpath for future targets: Iraq => Syria or Iran.
Yeah, pretty much, I don’t believe in the false flag theories. Only thing that imo might be possible is that Israeli intelligence services or some other interested party knew about the plot (or elements of it) in advace and chose not to pass the information on, because they thought a massive terror attack on US soil would redound to their advantage. But I have no doubt that the attacks themselves were planned and carried out by Bin Laden’s Islamic terrorists.
It’s ancient history now though, my impression is even Americans don’t care much about 9/11 anymore.
I’m sure much of the contribution to IQ (when genetics is conductive) would be explained by access to education. It would come down to each ethnicity’s propensity to a fast or slow Flynn effect, and how much of such an effect their genetic allow (Black people being a consistent laggard that is)
They surely care about what the Patriot Act has done even if the memories of 9/11 faded.
I don’t think it actually mattered if 9/11 was done by American assets as a false flag or actual terrorists that were groomed by America under the table. It was needed as the pretext for the Patriot Act and the forever wars against Afghanistan & Iraq, and later Libya & Syria. The first two were hatched months before the attack.
I hope that those who you want to impress can hear it and believe that you are sincere. But I can’t.
Looks like US soldiers opened fire on the crowd in the panic after the airport bombing, hence the large death toll..
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/08/the-never-ending-lies-about-the-war-on-afghanistan.html
Isn’t it damning enough, if Islamists attacked the US because the US is the running dog to Zionists?
I actually read Locke’s article many years ago when I was recovering from Austrian economics and binging on heterodox economics. At the time I found it more impressive than I do now. Locke and similar writers present themselves as possessing special gnostic wisdom about Asian economic planning, while also darkly hinting that the roots of this success is to be found in the plans of the Axis Powers.
Now, I wonder whether Locke even knows Japanese. I don’t either, but I’m not an economist specializing on the Japanese political economy.
The article is a bit of a time capsule in that it was written at a time that it was fashionable to claim that the once world-beating Japanese economy was in the throes of a multi-decade slump. It is true that this story was mostly false, and it may further be true that the Japanese themselves quietly encouraged this view in order to forestall Western demands to reform the Japanese economy and stop intervening in the currency markets to depress the Yen.
The Irish journalist Eamonn Fingleton has long been an exponent of this view, and while he’s another writer who believes in Japanese planning to his credit he also called the Japanese bubble in the ’80s as well as the very shaky condition of the Japanese banks in that era: http://www.fingleton.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/euromoney-0987a.pdf
Locke claims as an example of Japanese success that net exports in the 1990s rose 240%. I am not sure this is true, but it is true that exports rose robustly. However, this took place against a backdrop of rapidly accelerating globalization in which trade increased much faster than global economic output.
Here are four charts demonstrating this:
https://i.imgur.com/rK76Gfa.png
https://i.imgur.com/SkrQtpP.png
https://i.imgur.com/ut1a30d.png
https://i.imgur.com/QiPcZ9N.png
As we can see, there was nothing exceptional about Japanese export growth in the 1990s.
Locke mostly didn’t quantify his other chosen metrics, though some could be. He is correct in pointing out that Japan’s public debt burden is less of a problem than it appears however. Much of Japan’s public debt is owned by state agencies and the BoJ, and of the debt truly owned by the public there is no problem because Japan runs chronic current account surpluses and has long enjoyed the world’s lowest interest rates.
The claim that Japan is a centrally planned economy with widespread private ownership but capital allocation effectively dominated by central planning is something that I feel does not stand up to scrutiny, especially today. Japan lacks powerful coordinating mechanisms like the PRC such as major SOEs and state-controlled banks, and because of the country’s open capital account MITI can no longer control the distribution of foreign exchange to make companies comply. And even during the golden age of the Japanese miracle, while MITI did have many successes, companies could and did defy them. We would not have Honda and Sony without defiance of MITI.
A lot of what looks like “planning” can also be understood instead as “special interest lobbying”, and planning also fails at times. Japan’s effort to dominate the global computer industry through its Fifth Generation Computer project a generation ago failed. In more recent times the Mitsubishi Regional Jet project is a multi-decade fiasco which may never fly commercial routes. Is it wise planning when Japan protects its inefficient domestic agricultural sector which prevents those factors of production from being allocated to sectors with far higher productivity?
Now, to Locke’s central claim, that Japan has falsified the hypothesis that only “neoliberalism” offers a path to prosperity, that is largely true. And there have been many Japanese successes, particularly in its postwar golden age. But ultimately I would say this case is stretched far beyond acceptable conclusions by people who have an axe to grind with the ideological consensus in the economics profession. A lot of the success simply flows from HBD, and of the mechanisms actually employed by far the most useful was forced saving.
More on the forced saving point–for most of the 20th century capital was scarce relative to today or the pre-WW1 era. Increasing the rate of savings while preventing foreign investment allowed countries like Japan to forcibly increase the rate of domestic investment and grow faster. There were also some synergies with planning, as they were able to target industrial sectors with very high fixed costs that private entrepreneurs would have been unlikely to finance on their own. The fact that South Korea, once a poor country without coal or iron ore, developed the world’s largest steel mill (with Japanese assistance) owes to this.
As for the supposed advantage of debt finance to equity finance, I’m even more skeptical. The claim usually made is that bank capital is more patient than equity capital. If you believe this I suggest you try not paying your mortgage or credit card bill. Most debt finance requires routine service, and if your underlying collateral deteriorates you will not receive more credit. Banks in Germany and Japan were somewhat more patient because they often owned significant blocks of shares in the companies they lent to, or (in Japan) were actually part of the same corporate syndicate. This was outlawed in the USA for most of the 20th century.
Equity finance requires no periodic repayments of any kind, which makes it inherently more suitable for risky ventures as well as long time horizons. The only debt with long time horizons are residential mortgages, sovereign issues, and bonds from the highest quality corporate issuers which may as well be states. Venture capital is a form of equity finance and may be the most patient and aggressive capital in existence. It has long been routine to claim that Wall Street is obsessed with quarterly performance, but the rise of Amazon shows this is not always true.
Tldr: there are some interesting and useful features of the East Asian model, but this is oversold
How come there’s never a poll question asking “Will you give YOUR OWN SON’s life to prevent China from taking ofer Taiwan?” That question might clarify the mind for many of our warmongers.
As if money lenders are ever likely to care as much about the long-term prospects of a business as its part owners.
People can use their ideology to convince themselves of just about anything.
As you later point out, VC is usually extremely patient and tolerant of risk. The only way to get a bank to treat you like that, as happened with Greensill and their Indian entrepreneur customer, is to represent the majority of their balance sheet. Otherwise, they may not even take your phone call. They have little incentive.
My experience with people in Western volunteer militaries is that they are enthusiastic to be deployed, even if they don’t agree with the particular war. This seems very understandable to me, given their professionalism.
If the “systemic understatement of Japanese economic growth” thesis is true, can you explain the stagnation of many economic metrics e.g. GDP, average household income, average wage, household consumption? Can the hypothesis of high real growth be matched with things on the ground, where suburban decay, labor precarity and demographic collapse fitting of the 2nd world is clearly visible?
Japan was far from the Soviet model, as everyone knows, but it is a transition economy (a term no one else will use because Japan still appears to be relatively richer than the 2nd world) where dirigisme collapsed in the way some socialist states’ central planning collapsed. Japan’s growth rate shouldn’t be compared to her neighbors or Western Europe, but to the Baltics and the wealthier parts of former Yugoslavia.
But I would agree with the role of HBD (“human resources/education”) and forced saving (a brutal form of accumulation) in promoting capitalistic growth. But those can be easily wiped out in say, Russia and Ukraine in the 90s when the mechanisms for forced saving collapsed, capital devalorized en masse, and even the education system was disrupted. I’m afraid denying people participation in economy or society for say, being unvaccinated or pulling out from CBDC/social credit systems, will have broadly the same effects in the coming years.
(the banking sector’s structure and role to industrial credit is also interesting)
Low intensity wars probably beat the boredom of peacetime life, in which drills and hierarchy figure more prominently. Also combat pay.
One thing I would be interested in seeing is how the major Japanese manufacturers have offshored their assets and profits. Case automobiles.
The biggest market is the United States and a huge share is in Toyota and Honda. When the Japanese economy was supposedly stagnating these huge businesses did spectacularly well. In several American cities the biggest economic force is the local Toyota or Honda plant. How does this show up on the Japanese books?
I don’t agree with the idea that the Japanese are systematically understating their economic growth in order to bolster their bargaining position. Such a strategy is obviously unsustainable since eventually reported figures differ dramatically from other metrics as well as what people can see with their own eyes. This is just the reverse of people who claim that American economic figures are systematically biased to report higher growth and lower inflation.
Locke refers to special Japanese national accounting practices, but he does not describe them. I’m inclined to believe these special practices don’t really exist, or he’s attributing specialness to Japanese practices which are employed elsewhere (for instance revising national accounting figures in the future when better data come in).
Japan is certainly undergoing demographic collapse, but this is hardly unique to Japan or related to its economic model. The vast majority of non-African countries report plummeting fertility. Japan is actually in better shape on this front than ostensibly more dynamic neighbors such as South Korea and Taiwan.
I haven’t been to Japan, but in terms of reported figures I don’t see much evidence of Japanese economic decay except in a relative sense. Per capita GDP has continued to rise in Japan, and it should also be pointed out that other metrics of consumption such as the physical living space per person have also continued to rise. The Shinkansen network has continued to expand and will soon feature a route to Hokkaido and possibly magnetic levitation (there are various issues with political delays).
Relative decline is a real issue, and stems mainly from intensifying competition from previously less developed Asian countries. Japan also scored an own goal by tolerating large capital inflows during the Great Financial Crisis, which put strong upwards pressure on the Yen and undermined the competitiveness of Japanese exporters relative to firms in Korea and Taiwan.
I found Dmitry’s confusion about this video that Sher Singh posted quite strange.
It actually makes perfect sense.
The theme of the video is about a Sikh hero who executes his unfaithful woman and her Muslim lover (indicated by clothes) and then goes on to majestically save Buddhists from arbitrary harassment by the Muslims, by well, killing more Muslims. The Sikh hero is then executed by the eternal Anglo (plot based around British rule time), seemingly in collusion with the brown Muslims.
This is actually a very based video.
It shows a healthy and normal attitude by Sikh men to adultery/cheating by unfaithful women and the problem of Muslims. The Sikh-Buddhist friendship and solidarity against Muslims present in the video (also illustrated by AltanBakshi and Sher Singh in some of Karlin’s past Open Threads), that’s clearly deeply rooted is impressive and interesting.
It’s overall just quite a glorious, heroic and authentic music video, although admittedly a bit goofy in terms of some mannerisms as is typical for most Indian/subcontinental movies/music videos (including Bollywood).
The theme of Chad Sikh men executing unfaithful wives/girlfriends clearly seems to be quite a common theme in Sikh music videos, and perhaps Sikh culture more broadly (I decided I may as well watch a few other Sikh music videos, but fortunately managed to stop myself from getting carried away and letting them completely pollute my YouTube feed lol).
https://twitter.com/ejmalrai/status/1431663957660499970
Early Showa Era it was only 60 mln and it was high enough to be cited as a motivation for territorial expansion. Japan is same land area as Germany and 50% more pop., in addition to less habitable terrain, making it further dense around urban megapolises.
Same deal for SK and Taiwan, who can continue to shrink in pop. and still be denser than Belgium (densest in Europe).
This is why TFR is so low in E. Asia, big brains all gather to (Spandrell’s coinage) IQ shredders, and compete in near zero-sum games of who-can-put-in-the-most-overtime. In the meantime drive housing and child-rearing costs through the roof.
Concrete jungles even if shiny and modern gets old after awhile. The best standards of living is perhaps South Germany/Switzerland with clusters of medium/small cities. “Demographic collapse” is just Economist bait for Japs to take up immivasion.
The Ambassador and 4 or 5 others are around but functionally the Embassy was evacuated. The handful that remain are notin the Embassy. ISIS wants them too!
No one intends to close the Embassy, Russia is interested in staying in Afghanistan, together with China and Iran.
Whether there are too few people or not, it is already engaged in the internal political situation in Afghanistan.
https://twitter.com/BhadraPunchline/status/1429411859707228164
It does not matter. Sometimes one needs to take risks. For regional countries, the Afganistan situation matters more than for far away USA.
Exactly.
Japan as a matter of fact has way too much population, East Asia in general, and therefore should donate at least 20% to intellectually challenged regions such as Africa
Seeing how the average rightoid jacks off to the thought of slaughtering Chinese, the answers would overwhelmingly be “yes”
Once again you are hyperbolizing and simplifying C/J/K enmity, and for what? cheap laughs?
The slur for Koreans in Chinese is 棒子 Clubs, for their collaborators’ brutish behavior with clubs during Japanese occupation. The yakuza is disproportionately Zainichi Korean. There’s a 20 page long jp wiki page 韓国起源説の一覧 on Chinese and Japanese cultural artifacts claimed by Koreans from Confucius to katana, chopsticks (imagine arguing over who invented seppuku).
They are resentful for Japanese annexation even though their industrial base was entirely built by them and their elites having family connection to that regime.
They have some complexes based on being smaller and less accomplished than C and J. There’s even an anxiety disorder, Hwabyeong, specifically attributed to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_(cultural)
But their problem was never human capital but internal division. In comparison with China, Korea has been politically divided proportionally longer.
Check out War of the Arrows about Manchu Invasion of Joseon
The Joseon had Ming’s back during the Manchu-Ming Wars. But current PRC is claiming Manchu Qing boundaries so you can see where tensions rise.
Koreans when unified are anything but weak, this was Goguryeo
https://imgur.com/a/woGxn21#thJT1JM
Holmes trying out her defense on her elite WASP social circle:
“You know, that Asian American dot Indian whom you said was ‘inappropriate’ for me? Well, you know how the savages of his country are snake charmers? He pulled out his flute, and his wish was my command.”
I wonder if it will work on a jury. It depends on the jury, I guess.
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/28/1031961327/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-trial-boyfriend-balwani-emotional-sexual-abuse
In fact, murder rate in some Western African countries is fairly low. E.g. Benin 1.10 per 100k, Guinea-Bissau 1.10, Burkina-Faso 1.30, Sierra Leone 1.71; compare Europe: Sweden 1.08, Finland 1.63, Europe on average 3.00… oops.
Ok, I did a bit of cherry-picking. But purely coincidentally, the African countries mentioned above occupy territories that historically have been heavily involved in the slave trade.
Perhaps they didn’t sell their best.
Brother wars are a norm, not an exception, regardless of the validity of common or hypothetical cultural artifacts and the Korean attitudes toward Japanese are well known. “Complexes” or not, their feelings are valid to them and impact their political decisions.
You appear to have hopes for pan-Asian unity or something. Its not going to happen.
It may be even less likely, but I kind of like the idea of Japan, Korea, and Mongolia uniting in order to create a sort of second China.
About 206 million or so – I think it would be a pretty fair competitor to the US. Make lots of big projects possible. And having a second China would sort of cut through the way that the first can be marginalized by propaganda. I don’t think attention spans in the West would allow for two propaganda efforts against Asians.
I kind of feel the same way about Germans and Poles uniting to create a sort of second Russia, but unfortunately, I think Germany is too far gone to make such a project worthwhile.
East Asian unity cannot happen because China would dominate too easily. The EU is awkward with Germany being so big, but Germany is only a small proportion of the total population. Koreas, Japan etc. don’t want to become mere provinces of China. The idea is absurd even without the history.
The distance between Wu, Fujianese, and Cantonese are easily comparable to that of Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian. That’s just the southern dialects. Yet the Sinitic peoples are able to form one state. Compare that to any other macro-ethnicity.
In addition, East Asian peoples don’t have monotheistic religions, and castes, which tends to be the most divisive.
I don’t know what you are talking about. There is already RCEP centered around C/J/K. Both J and K’s biggest trade partners are China. This is fait accompli, not my hope.
This is just BS. We’ve already went over this. This is the full list of wars between China and Japan pre-modern Era. That’s it. China’s perpetual enemy were the Inner Asian peoples, not K and J.
1. Toi Invasion – aggressor China
2. Yuan Invasion of Japan – aggressor China
3. Imjin War – aggressor Japan
I don’t have a problem with this. Imperial Japan promoted the notions of 日鮮同祖論 Theory of Common Ancestor of Japan and Korea, 满鲜一体 Manchuria and Korea as One Historical Entity. The latter is anathema to PRC historians since it offends their legitimacy over Manchuria, but I see its merits.
More realistic is a Crescent Moon of Japan, Philippines and Vietnam as counterweight to PRC. I don’t have a problem this either, that’s just geopolitics. My hopes are for the cultural cohesion of C/J/K.
https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1431306168270528517
Yeah, Qin used only the kindest and most carbon-neutral of methods to create an unified China. They didn’t punish entire populations into fatal slave labor, they didn’t kill rival intellectuals(even the skeptical schools agree that scholars were killed, note), and they didn’t have to unify the language or if they did, it was only through gentle encouragement and soft caresses.
Are you suggesting a future Pax Sinica along similar lines of motivation? Most of the dialects in China are decreasing in use and the Party certainly doesn’t mind.
Ancient Japan’s greatest trading partner was probably China too, which did not prevent the Imjin War.
And I refuted that, despite your opinion of “well, that doesn’t matter.”
Anyway, good luck with your Bromance of Asia coming about by convincing everyone to agree that chopsticks originate from China or something. Our alphabet is Roman, and Italy hasn’t yet managed to convince everyone to have “cultural cohesion” with them, but perhaps the Ghost of Mussolini is about to return yet.
The US Coast Guard is preparing for hurricane Ida rescues and relief. During hurricane Katrina, USCG rescuers would sometimes be punched in the face by their victims. I hope this does not repeat. A punch in the face is of course a small thing compared to the lives lost by troops in Kabul, but it should not happen, and it bespeaks something very wrong in society.
I knew a guy who was in Clinton’s peacetime US army, did his stint over some period like 1994-1997 IIRC. I’ve never heard anyone complain more about military service than that guy, talking to him roughly 10 years after his service ended. I recall him saying that he felt that the military was built, psychologically, to keep you pissed off at the “enemy”, except there wasn’t really an enemy, so everyone was just sort of pissed off at life.
That said, I think those who served in the 1980s, technically peacetime, mostly had a better experience. Because people loved to hate Communism. Absence of enemy might make service unpleasant more than absence of war.
No, it’s literally a Jatt killing his best friend who goes after his sister in law & then saving Brahmins..
Imagine being proud of keeping gay porn, with the express purpose of sharing with minors.
((Groomer))
Japan had improved in the way Visegrad countries improved. But everyone is now heading to a cliff.
You seem to intent on supporting reforms of a system that is rotten to the core, and many others are already picking it apart for what useful parts are left for their own institutions.
You would have fitted well as a Perestroika supporter.
I guess I am too late to join in the C/J/K spat, but I wish the patchwork of petty states had worked out instead of a central, stupefying authority.
Simple solution.
Personality and intelligence tests to determine which sections, if any, of the internet you can access. Gene-lock the fucking internet.
This is also an excellent proxy for instituting a tier/class system. Those who aren’t qualified access to the whole internet aren’t qualified to administrate the state.
That’s even worse.
See: the Balkans
The only way would be ancient Greece style tiny city-states that are independent yet recognize each other as a part of a bigger whole.
Explain?
This is a strange comment.
The Visegrad countries were socialist countries which underwent radical economic reforms which laid the basis of decades of successful comprador development. The exported millions of laborers to Western Europe while importing massive FDI from Western Europe. In effect they became appendages of Western European capital.
The prototype for this Visegrad development was less Japan and more Spain and Greece.
Japan, while hungrily importing Western technology, carefully kept foreign control and direct investment at bay. Japanese emigration after the war was neglible. It built on successful development schemes from the Japanese Empire and after forty years of struggle scaled to the apex of technological development with its own people, companies, and brands.
The comment that everyone is headed off the cliff, at least in purely economic terms, is even stranger. Material progress continues.
You will learn to love the WEF’s proposal for a internet passport.
I was talking much less the political economic models that were adopted in each state, but the common decay induced by both models
Look at what schemes the WEF has proposed and world leaders are eagerly starting to implement, and what life-changing reactions the popular “resistance” have. As I said we are living in and acting out the bad karma of terminal global capitalism, and all the solutions (honest or not) point to more scarcity. You should dispose of the myth of indefinite progress, a myth that is built in capitalism.
(I know I am letting my ideological preoccupations go in the way of analysis but at least I believe I’m on a straighter path than yours.)
Probably not, because it will select for exactly the opposite of the type of person that I want on the internet
That’s fine, happens often enough to people in their early to mid 20s. I was a peak oil-obsessed doomer back then, Thorfinnsson was a hyperinflation-obsessed gold bug. It is probably a cognitive bias young men are particularly prone to, the idea that they live in a special time, at the tipping point of some great revolution or transformation, in which they will get to be the hero of their own story.
You’ll look back on this phase of your life with some degree of cringe, but it’s better (not self-harmful) than many other obsessions/fads prevalence amongst contemporary youth.
Thank you for knowing who I really am, someone who is talking things like, well above my age.
I don’t think digital segregation based on genetics is warranted especially since you already have ideological ones (and I heard ideological dispositions are partly influenced by genetics) and those are already nearly impenetrable with cancel culture/rightoid self-policing. Why do you need new genetic-based echo chambers when we have numerous ones already. Evolution does greater things than a sudden imposition…
The only thing that is needed is to build images of other parts of the web as undesirable and dangerous enough for the denizens of a part to not venture into another, and those arguably already exist in a rudimentary form, especially for sites, services and content with a strong ideological bias, including this place. Big Social Media set out to build a “common” platform and this is why they are co-opted by the establishment. Fragment the web into a thousand pieces according to the users’ dispositions, making them coherent units or biospheres which interact with each other, and that’s the ideal of the web!
The only countries which decreased their Human Development Index score in the last decade are East Timor, Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Syria and Libya.
Every single other country improved.
This might make the increase in development across countries the highest and most widely achieved in all of human history.
Syria, Yemen and Libya are explained by devastating civil wars. Many other countries had civil wars but improved.
Jordan and Lebanon are not only corrupt, but their biggest issue is that their populations were greatly increased by desperate refugees. This means that their slight fall is more of an artefact of shifting populations than anything else.
I bet that all of those countries greatly improve their score this decade, even Lebanon, though I know little of East Timor.
Everyone does get to be the hero of their own story. They just need to realise why their story, as it actually is, contains all of the arcs they needed and how beautiful this is. Who else could possibly be the protagonist?
It is fashionable to call the above “self love”, but I prefer the more neutral sounding “self understanding.”
The difficulty is that the challenges involved are never going to the ones which the individual has prepared for and predicted when younger. They wouldn’t be challenges otherwise.
People also have a tendency to see their personal challenges writ large over the global stage. Seeing them in this way, much removed from their individual circumstances, ironically makes them appear less fearsome. They can assume that everyone else’s narrative is their own, which handily places them at the centre of an objective uber reality.
This can be harmless, but it can also become an all-encompassing illusory distraction. The less someone understands their own perspective, the more that perspective will bias their perception of the world. An individual needs to pierce their own psychology before they will ever fully pierce the veil which distorts reality.
It is easy to find very extreme examples of people completely stuck within themselves, yet thinking they are discussing politics on the internet.
I imagine that peak oil doomerism would have been an apt metaphor for how you saw parts of your life and yourself, but took some time to realise it. Looking back at a period of your life before personal change can be extremely cringe, but what amazing things we all learn and, almost by definition, against all odds.
I wonder if religion used to serve the function which politics does now. Whether people used to engage in Manichaen or Millenarian self-subterfuges in order to begin to vaguely see what troubled themselves, before some graduated to authority and were able to perceive the world without a filter, or at least with little filter.
On the upside, you were kind enough to share all your thoughts during the period, so we can share in your journey from madness to basedness. I still like your exploration of Collapse of Complex Societies and it serves its part in my cognitive toolkit.
How many чиновник can a civilization support?
I don’t think it was a response to personal challenges as such, as finding the mathematics of Hubbert’s peak to be highly plausible. The Great Recession seemed to be confirmation of the thesis that many “peakists” had been predicting.
I massively underestimated the possibilities of technological progress to resolve it. When US oil production started spiking up sharply, I knew that it was falsified. If it could happen in the US, a country that had already heavily exploited its traditional oil reserves, then it would be trivial to repeat the process (if necessary) in the Middle East and many other areas much richer in oil.
You sincerely believed that stuff based on a good, worked out logic, but, of all the potentially reasonable arguments about the world and subjects which you could have reflected upon, why would that one have given you the sensation of internal fireworks and so strongly grabbed your intention?
Even had you been right, this question would still be valid.
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1431663216694730757
Hispanics going from being jailed 70% more than whites to being jailed less than whites in 15 years?
Open the Southern border now!
We need as many of these law-abiding proto-citizens as we can get.
New demand in the economy. Germany is poor at stimulating demand, thus those large trade surpluses.
I don’t mean to belittle you, well yes I do, but you previous comments contained so much sophistry that brings questions to your basic integrity.
https://imgur.com/a/TuH1Q7o
Oath of the Peach Garden of the Three Brothers, Sekkan Sakurai 櫻井雪館 (1715–1790) Master of Ukiyo-e and Shanshui style
Reference is the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms 三国演义, Luo Guanzhong 罗贯中. In China, Japan, and Korea its stature is equal to that of the Iliad.
Have you read the Romance of Three Kingdoms, Daniel-san?
The difference between Hispanics already established in the US and recent arrivals (aliens) are in the ability of earlier immigrants and their descendants to find a concord in the American society (or carve out a relatively safe space for their kin). But if you flood the place with illegal aliens, who are more likely poor, barely civilized Central Americans than decent Mexicans, you are going to mix up even the Hispanics and that is the recipe for trouble. This is why immigration quotas for New World countries made sense, and selective immigration for ethnically coherent states, e.g. Middle American and Hispanic ones, makes even more sense now. As I said, you can even do population exchanges between Hispanic-majority and White-majority states, and let the Hispanic states join Mexico if they want, reversing the “gains” of the Mexican-American war.
The Greens toe the Davos party line even stricter than the CDU in say, the Green New Deal in EU. Even if Macron, Merkel, Draghi are gone, the systemic rot exploited by Davos is still there and you’ll need a total change in society and economy to start fixing it. First off, instead of institutionalized “Greenness” in party politics, do things (whether black or green) on the local level.
I think I need to read Turchin and engage seriously with the mathematical basis of his theories some day.
But it comes down to whether any further material and technological progress in the current direction (instead of appropriate technological development and reappraisal of technological epistemology, the Schumacher style) is any good. It’s one way or the other, and the other way would mean catastrophe in the short term.
Punch the fucker back, then hold his head under the water until he will never throw another punch again. Then leave everyone in that house to fend for themselves and hopefully drown. Problem solved.
Weird, right? For one thing, “White” doesn’t mean generally European to the federal government anymore. The US Census Bureau misleadingly counts millions of Arabs, Persians, and North Africans as “White” nowadays:
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-census-middle-east-north-africa-race/
Would like to know the rates of murder, rape, and violent crime generally by actual nonHispanic white european-americans compared to self-identified white hispanics and compared to mestizo hispanics in the usa.
https://twitter.com/IndianHistory0/status/1431982640169558017
Cope. Middle Easterners has been counted as white in United States since 1943.
How many of those polled would have sons serving in the armed forces?
Nowadays, it would make more sense to ask whether they are willing to endure significantly increased prices and other economic consequences of an armed conflict between the top two economic powers.
If they can be talked into enduring a year or two of lockdowns, they can be convinced to be sent to the front as meatbag targets for the Chinese troops.
Yo, you’re a white guy in California right? How are the whites in California different than those in the Northeast, specifically New York? The gentiles, I mean.
I’ve lived in both places but have never really researched the topic. I can very easily detect that many of the whites I encountered in New York city are the Ellis Island crowd. With the exception of WASPs, of which there are almost none. But what about California? Are they more “heritage” whites? Something about it seems more Anglo to me.
No, they are mostly the woke types who are also establishment-friendly (thru Green politics and “socialism”). Most of the remaining Republicans are trying to flee.
An alternative theory as to why the Left continues to be obsessed with Nazis is that it is purely based on aesthetics or color signaling.
If black is the ultimate good, than what else could be the ultimate bad, but white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes? And it helps that the Swastika is such a simple symbol and the nickname “Nazi” so easy to say.
Supposedly, the idea behind using “Nazi” was so that it would not stigmatize normal Germans. But, by now, in practical use, it seems to have been designed to stigmatize all Europeans
It looks the the German catastrophe will continue.
Serves them right.
They have not been adequately punished for that Nazi mayhem.
sarcasm
[ˈsärˌkazəm]
NOUN
the use of irony to mock or convey contempt.
#1 the graph indicates white non-Hispanic and Hispanic, nothing about citizenship
#2 touted by an open borders enemy of America and running dog for global capital
#3 statistics provided by the U. S. government, an enemy of the American people, are suspect
“Nuff said.
Looks like Taliban hanged someone from a Black Hawk Helicopter
https://twitter.com/Holbornlolz/status/1432371405727977472
White population as share of the US population in 1997, 2010, 2020 and 2050 (predicted in the 1990s): 73%, 64%, 58% and 53%.
https://twitter.com/wyhz72/status/1432047690846806018
Plenty of California’s Cold War era white population is still there. Remember that CA provided more votes to Trump than TX did. Things don’t change overnight.
Why is Lavrov defending Stalin? The number of pensioners in Russia is falling very fast. They are not a voting block worth chasing. Those forced to work longer, thus no longer pensioners are the least Stalinist generation.
The two biggest cities of America experienced both an exodus of heritage Americans.
https://twitter.com/wyhz72/status/1432058666673446922
They are, especially with Newsom. Hundreds of thousands have already packed their things and left, and there is no sign of this ending.
What Mitleser is quoting is a long-term trend which merits the label of population replacement. Only on the local level does this makes sense.
Stalin was extremely short-sighted in Holodomor and WWII, he has killed much of a generation that could have been a sizable labor pool for industrialization.
China has a new law on underage gaming that limits weekly gaming time to 3 hours, and it is oddly specific: the only windows open to them are Fridays and weekends, 8-9pm Beijing Standard Time. It’s definitely a follow-up to the break-up of the private tuition industry, and has the same intention as that, pulling children from indulging into a world of study or Matrix of play back into the real world. I would have preferred their previous regime, where children are assigned 1.5 hours every weekday and 3 hours every weekend, over this.
I would actually suspect the conventional rationales for “parental control” isn’t sufficient to explain such a strict protocol – it could be either limiting cultural influence of online gaming (mobile gaming included) on children, or simply a campaign to disinvest from consumer IT services.
I don’t game myself apart from one or two mobile idle games that only require a few minutes every few hours. I guess I have a vastly different kind of addiction from what those kinds of law aim to mitigate.
I was reading/playing the recently translated Full Metal Daemon Muramasa. If japs are reading this, they gonna be fine.
https://i.imgur.com/D3Gno4l.png
Beyond his usual schedule of incredibly based governance (bringing loud billionaires to heel, slapping down parasitic financial companies, world-leading covid response etc). Xi has banned the following things in recent times:
– Gaming
– Exams for young kids
– The educational rat race
– Simping
Most of my friends are classic normie western libs, but the pure sanity of Xi’s recent policymaking has even caught their eye, forcing some obligate sinophobes to acknowledge that maybe this guy knows a thing or two about what it takes to run a nation.
Incredible stuff, and a glimmer of hope that perhaps the world’s elites may eventually notice that you can have a prosperous nation without bending over backwards to preserve the right of companies to expose society to the most harmful capitalist externalities.
A summary of these trends would make a good article for Karlin iyam.
Honestly I’m inclined to think you can take the PRC at its word here. “Spiritual opium.” They might be easing their way towards a total ban. Thinking like a state, I can see the case that video games are bad for economic productivity, family formation, and military effectiveness.
Video games are fun, but if I lived in a world where they were never invented, I’m sure I’d be no worse for it. But as things stand today I don’t quite feel right depriving my boys of them entirely, though they’re not old enough to play them much quite yet. But as long as possible want to maintain the notion that gaming is a social, family activity for us — not something we hole up and do on our own (or online).
You seem to be right that this is happening, I think it works by making Nazi another synonym for ‘white’ and Nazism another term for ‘whiteness’. The same thing could be said of imperialist, colonialist, conquistador, Fascist etc. Here you are possibly seeing the connection with historical Nazism in Europe fading away, and it being adopted as another typical case of white evil. This is probably because the term still has legacy cultural relevance and impact, more due to the Holocaust/Schindler’s List era in the 1980s-2000s than memories of WW2 now.
I remember my parents and grandparents teaching me that idea about Nazis being different to Germans when I was young, in the 1980s… seems like a long time since I have heard it since.
Historical Nazism probably even poses some problems for identitarian leftists who like to fixate on ideas like whiteness; the Nazis’ victims were nearly wholly white, which undermines the plausibility of a grand systemic conspiracy of white Europeans to keep the black man down and also threatens the historical uniqueness of the black victimhood narrative. The structure of Nazi racial ideas is not entirely different to their own, which is strongly influenced by German philosophy on multiple levels as well.
Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is seeming prescient again here. Ever since I read it, I’ve been thinking about how unfathomable restrictions on technology are to the liberal West. The West carries an implicit confidence that all problems caused by technology will be solved inevitably (perhaps with more technology), or else they’re not actually problems, you dinosaur.
I would guess that future societies will one day look at that mentality the same way people today look at the notion of opium being available at every pharmacy and Coca-Cola containing cocaine.
Moderation is the key, which is why I prefer daily quotas (what is already in place in China for underaged people) than what they are imposing now. It’s just like alcohol and smoking.
But whoever trying to impose a digital cornucopia in the West, also wants you to indulge or even fully immerse into the digital world.
Well, what you describe is ideological segregation.
Ideologies – irrelevant. I don’t care about them. Agree or disagree, your thing.
No, what I don’t like, is certain kinds of people/characters/personalities, on all ideological sides and all sides in general, ruining discourse.
I think your are having a too rosy view of Xi’s policies, like on COVID and technological control. The measures he has aren’t the best and already lots of side-effects are surfacing (e.g. killing technological champions, micromanagement)
But to his credit, by removing many corrupting liberal influences (that won’t be long in the world in their countries of origin, e.g. Japan & America, because of sheer economic hardship), he wants the next generation of Chinese to be saner than the Japanese Hikikomoris and self-hating woke Americans
Then the discourse has never been set right, it’s crooked when seen from one side or the other, and no amount of digital segregation by genetics can fix it.
All the mess in this world is caused by ideologues of one flavor imposing their visions on others by force. Remove this and we will have peace, but that is nearly impossible – we haven’t evolved from narrow self-interest or clannishness!
It’s because they have the reverse of the “if villain bad, then why drip” approach. Too many shitty rebel movies rotted their brain eternally and heritably (mental pollution is irreversible and spreads so easily it can be considered both heritable and contagious). Hence they think “Nazi” and imagine dudes in cool uniforms and this reminds them of the weekly dumbshit franchise villain
Yes. A competent and effective response to major issues like addiction, obesity etc (classic vices) is literally not on the table as a option in the west.
On the other hand, the CPC’s approach reminds me of what Peter Thiel would call ‘definite optimism’. That is what is so refreshing about these reforms, seeing a major government that appears actually willing to do something to solve societal problems. Even the hard ones.
I’m going by the libertarian route for every vice and ideological insanity to freely boil for the moment, letting social Darwinist pressure select the moral and sane while the afflicted perish from the poison, and have a more upright generation after that.
But Xi’s policies aren’t bad, and maybe future generations can remember him for keeping them from the demographic hole and total rot in Japan or America. My biggest issue with this kind of laws is that they tend to shove the problems under the carpet instead of confronting it (e.g. Children binging on Japanese mobile games’ Japanese servers on VPN). Just look at what happened when the Prohibition was lifted, or post-socialist Eastern Europe.
The first line of Romance of Three Kingdoms:
The original consolidation of petty states in the Yellow River drainage was coordinate efforts against floods like the one just took place. At the time of the Wuhan outbreak, 70% of doctors in PRC headed to Hubei (while EU member states closed their borders). Centralized states can be dictatorial but for large part it emerged as a reaction to natural disasters.
You are sounding like a SJW princess, but I’ll humor you. For its draconian Legalist methods, Qin lasted only 15 years, and Qin Shihuang consigned by Confucian scholars as villainous bogeyman for all eternity (He of course has admirers like Mao, but the point still stands)
The overthrow of Qin was at the hands of Chu peasants, then reunified under the Han, hence the proverb:
Barely a few decades into the Han dynasty, war broke out again in Rebellion of the Seven States (154 BC). This cycle repeats itself over and over again in the Three Kingdoms, North and South dynasties, Five dynasties and Ten Kingdoms eras.
This cycle will never end and neither will regional identities.
Please don’t quote GloboHomo shills, https://www.mironline.ca/why-china-should-open-its-borders-to-the-world/
You may be right. And Britain/Germany were close trade partners on 1914.
But CJK integrated economic trade triads are rare. For example, Britain’s closest trade partner is America, France’s is Germany, Germany’s is China. I’m keen to believe that it serves a stabilizing factor. The only comparable free trade zones to RCEP are EU and NAFTA.
What did you refute? You use wokou as evidence of Sino-Japanese enmity. I retorted that wokous are 70% ethnic Chinese.
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/afghanistan-finale/#comment-4846588
Come on, you can do better than this. Even when Britain/France/Germany’s relationships were at their most acrimonious, scholarly exchange did not discontinue and inventions were self-reenforcing. There’s a Blue Banana region in Europe from Edinburgh to Paris and Rome that dominated intellectual accomplishments and fed-off each other.
Hegel interpreted the triad as England (utilitarian pragmatism), France (revolutionary haste) and Germany (thoughtful thoroughness).
Antiquity
Xia 夏 dynasty (2070 – 1600 BC)
Shang 商 dynasty (1600 – 1046 BC)
Zhou 周 dynasty (1046 – 256 BC)
Spring and Autumn 春秋 period (722 – 476 BC)
Warring States 战国 period (476 – 221 BC)
1st Reich
Qin 秦 dynasty (221 – 206 BC)
Han 汉 dynasty (206 BC – AD 220)
Three Kingdoms 三国 (AD 220 – 280)
Jin 晋 dynasty (AD 266 – 420)
Northern and Southern dynasties 南北朝 (AD 420 – 589)
2nd Reich
Sui 隋 dynasty (AD 581 – 618)
Tang 唐 dynasty (AD 618 – 907)
Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms 五代十国 (AD 907 – 960)
Song, Liao, Jin, and Western Xia dynasties 宋辽金夏 (AD 960 – 1279)
3rd Reich
Yuan 元 dynasty (AD 1271 – 1368)
Ming 明 dynasty (AD 1368 – 1644)
Qing 清 dynasty (AD 1644 – 1912)
Modern
Republic of China (AD 1912 – present)
CCP Commies (AD 1949 – present)
Daniel Chieh posits this will have good effects thanks to more energy being spent on single player non-mobile peasant games.
Not so sure. While Japanese anticolonial rhetoric in WW2 was obviously self-serving and hypocritical – perhaps also their efforts to fund black radicals in America – they have flirted with racial egalitarianism for quite a long time. At least since their embassy to the US in the 1870s, when they were probably taken in hand by some worshippers of John Brown.
Japan knew that they were backwards compared to Euros. IMO, this caused them to have feelings of inadequacy. They were not pleased by efforts to stop Japanese immigration. This and other things caused them to lobby for a declaration of universal human rights. By some accounts, they were really the people who spearheaded it.
Looking at video games from the 1990s would make one suppose that the future of America was based. Unfortunately, Japan has already passed many negative markers: first black Olympian. First black Miss Japan. Man-on-the-street interviews of students about race are very disturbing. Often they have black-hapa classmates.
I continue to maintain that no passive defense is sufficient in a wealthy country. If Japan cannot articulate what is happening in the West (a few instances aside) than that is a serious problem. At a minimum, I think Japan needs to tell US troops to get out.
The number of Holocaust movies really is staggering. If one were to compare it to movies where nationalism is portrayed in a positive light, or where there is a real cultural identity, the ratio wouldn’t even come close.
Take the more nationalist movies, in relative terms. How many are movies about WW2 or WW1 that reinforce this idea that Germans are bad (ex: 1917)? Or are about other wars, which seem like mistakes in hindsight? How many are about America (like the Apollo 13 or Johhny Tremain), where identity is easily subverted? Or contain ahistorical blacks?
If you tried to pair these things away and add the world war movies to the Holocaust ones. Then, I think the ratio would be greater than 10,000:1, in favor of the abnegation of national identity.
I looked up a list. Most are not American, they’ve more often been German, and most are very minor. The only one I’d heard of since 2008 is JoJo Rabbit. It is a very charming film with a funny rendition of Hitler. I’m not sure it should even count as a “Holocaust movie.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Holocaust_films
During this time there has been an avalanche of famous films actually co-written by the US Department of Defence and plenty more with nationalist themes.
A vastly overdue initiative which should be rolled out world wide.
It will probably teach a fraction of those boys who love the games to distrust the authorities.
I am all for this!
Definitely, not even close to a comprehensive list. Not even of German-language movies.
Movies where the Holocaust is the main theme tend to be minor, since they are not audience-friendly. But as a generality most films are minor, even cultural ones.
The biggest thrust is usually from a more oblique angle. Indiana Jones is basically a revenge fantasy about killing Germans. Jews are not deeply discussed. There’s a lot of punching, evil Nazis themes in movies and TV. (Ex: The Sum of All Fears, The Boys from Brazil, Apt Pupil) The number of comic book movies that reference Nazis is so high, that the recent Wonder Women movie had to he set in WWI.
And there are boatloads of mainstream movies which are thematically influenced by the Holocaust. Star Wars: the Force Awakens tried to copy the aesthetics of the Nazis, substituting a red-haired man for a blond one.
War movies are primarily psuedo-nationalism, about enlistment. Or “Germans are bad.” Many outright denounce nationalism.
I’m puzzled by your reference to many movies with nationalist themes. Off the top of my head, only one I can think of is the Chinese film Wolf Warrior. And the sequel was so pozzed, I feel the first film should not count.
I have said on the newest COVID thread that “mild” woke values, e.g. multiculturalism and feminism/LGBTQ+ are better naturalized into thought patterns in the Americanized parts of East Asia (HK/Taiwan/Japan/S Korea). Just look at what animes (or its NSFW counterpart) have, and those aren’t exactly marginal.
Without an effort on the UN level gamers will just flee to servers without restrictions (with VPN as needed).
I weep for Arknights even as a non-player.
Japan’s love of Kaiju movies is often attributed to atomophobia, but I do not think this is true. The Lucky Dragon incident was just a coincidence. The antinuclear theme of Godzilla was more or less copied from Hollywood, where it can be seen in films like Them! (1954) or The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953.)
I think Kaiju movies resonate in Japan because of urban overcrowding that harms the Japanese psychology. In the postwar years, things probably got pretty bad, with the destroyed housing stock, and countless refugees causing Japan to build high rises.
CCP doesn’t have that much sway in America, they are just junior partners to the whole globalist business and one constantly using globalist means for mostly national or party-centered purposes.
But you know the drill, when a leading globalist says what will happen, it will happen sooner or later.
That’s great! GloboHomo needs to be replaced by a more based ideology worldwide, and Wahhabi Islamism (that is behind all the bad name Islam has) should have been replaced by a more humanistic one. (Instead of whining about Islam’s increasing dominance, as Christians, look at why Christian culture is retreating and why Christians are falling behind in both fertility and proselytization.)
I would support this too, but not a total one. Recalibrate instead of embargoing. Self-sufficiency (what liberals deride as “autarky”) should be the goal of every country or region, and both China and America have the means to do that – any mutually beneficial trade relationships should be started after that.
I suspect that there is an increasing amount of money from Hollywood entering into anime and that there are an increasing number of black characters appearing. But I don’t follow trends closely enough to attempt to quantify these changes.
Almost have a hard time believing it, but I have heard that back in the ’70s, it was typical for Japanese companies operating in America to fire women, if they found out that they were single mothers.
Probably, the practice could not survive blacks, even had it been able to survive feminism.
You think every film is about the Holocaust and you think no film is nationalistic simply because that is what you want to see. If you don’t realise the absurdity of calling Star Wars a Holocaust film then there is no point talking to you on this subject.
You would enjoy life a lot more if you could find a way to drop this ideological filter of everything media being against you.
It’s mostly the jap ruling class that pushes that because they want to be America. These black olympanians get pushed aside as soon as they get no medals.
Anyway, Japan won’t be free until they kick out the americans and the corrupted ruling class, this is just their intellectual class and commercial class (who still rather love Asia) holding out.
That is still a minimal trend for now, and generic dark-skinned girls and boys without explicitly African traits are still in the majority.
So the chinese are now cooperating with japanese to make cool swordfighting anime:
About time, hope they follow this trend and make it like japanese samurai anime (Rurouni Kenshin, Kimetsu no Yaiba) and less gayboy cultivation shit.
I’m really sick of the gayboy shit. Imagine having all the history and making anime about fucking magical gayboys hiding the mountain.
https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1432884413235347462
I’ll be amused if AK does a post surveying the HBD/woke/cultural war elements hidden in:
1) Animes and mangas
2) Online and mobile games, especially Japan-style
3) Vtubers and SIMPing
It’s even better when AK does it as a “normie” and not a weeb.
The original Star Wars series was kind of subtle. The third series and related movies are not subtle at all. It is a case of good, rebellious diversity (including aliens), against evil whiteness. Guessing you didn’t see The Force Awakens (a terrible movie, to be fair), if you think there is no Nazi allegory – they really hit you over the head with it, which is just the result of dysgenics. Though, it is difficult to see the original movies in the same way, afterward.
You may have an ideological filter yourself, if you don’t think the media is against me and everyone like me. They have well-understood biases. Visions of neutrality are wishful thinking. What do the political donations look like?
If I watch the news (And I don’t, but I do unavoidably catch snatches of it), everything is a deconstruction. If it is Alamo Day, they are talking about how the battle didn’t matter, and how ho whites are evil besides. They are promoting open borders.
If I watch an advertisement (and I try to avoid them), odds are very high it is about miscegenation. You think there is no hostility, when they show ten grandparent-age people and one mulatto granddaughter, with a blonde mother? You are delusional, if so.
Still waiting on your list of ethnat movies that provide balanced counterweight. I suppose there is Black Panther?
Well, the good thing about Japan is that they are more assertive about their identity on the level of cultural production (quite in contrast to Euros who hail Hollywood and diversity and don’t notice Jews.) Hopefully, that will give them the tools to avert a catastrophe.
The world doesn’t split into “ethnat” and “non-ethnat.” Even if your world does. “Non-ethnat” represents 99% of ideas out there. No wonder you see everything as a nail. You expect 1% to be as common as 99%. This also leads you to the perverse conclusion that any film that is not “white ethnat” is, at least, a subtle parable for a Holocaust film!
When you have such a limited definition of what is valid, you will see what you define as evil everywhere and your good almost nowhere.
A related question: what personal virtues and qualities do you associate with “ethnat” and which with “Holocaust”?
Recently watched the Soviet comedy “Gentlemen of Fortune.” (1971)
Was surprised by the scenes in drag. Thought that was more of a Hollywood thing, and Soviet censors would be wiser.
Also, felt like they were trying to make the character from Central Asia the most sympathetic of the criminals, in parallel to Hollywood’s gentle treatment of blacks. But what is the comparitive crime rate of Central Asians? I don’t know…
Men in drag are used to play as jokes and in serious plays.
In Asia, some men used to play women in plays because women actresses can’t act so well.
It’s only modern times that men in drag decide to be taken seriously.
Maybe they were SJWs or maybe you just see nails everywhere?
Sympathetic treatments of minorities and/or the disempowered is similarly traditional.
What is different about the modern age is the way in which people have the luxury to use politics as a form of externalisation and attempted self-therapy. You couldn’t do that when it was about life and death, but now that most political conflict in the developed world seems to hinge on some sort of ego validation, people have gone wild. It even sort of makes sense for them to do so.
This change makes everything superficially turbulent and actually psychologically harmful to the participants. Competing over who can give the biggest psychological wound to the other is a lose/lose competition, even if, in the biggest picture, everyone learns what they need to and wins.
Culture therefore becomes the medium and culture becomes more politicised and often narrow, just as politicised people’s perceptions of it cause them to only narrowly perceive it. The veil shrouds both the creator and the audience and makes everything uglier.
Having said this, it does still represent progress. Politics may be less serious but that is because it has less serious conflicts. Meanwhile it is all better than seriously fighting over religion.
And there is a solution. One, to unveil your own perception. Two, to help other people to unveil theirs. The former requires courage, the latter requires patience and, possibly, ambition. The latter is also a challenge which needs to be met in as many ways as there are individuals under the sun. I like the idea of story-telling in which people can empathize with both sides and grow to appreciate the neglected parts of themselves, but I am unsure I have the talent to do it. I am sure whatever I should do will become clear over time. For the moment, there’s still, thankfully, plenty to learn.
Yes, men used to play women in theatre because they were better at acting as women than women were!!!
Where do you locate your truth? At the suck hole of a crack pipe?
Maybe Daniel needs to step in and make his case: is it that mobile games are sociologically bad, or just that it’s a dreadful aesthetic that a “hardcore” gamer might be playing only mobile games?
I do believe that local multiplayer is better for one’s soul than online multiplayer, but I don’t know if I can make that same case for single-player games, though I do enjoy them. At that point it probably also depends on what you’re playing.
In history books and old tales, actually.
Hell, nowadays it’s still a thing:
It seems this person is very ignorant of history and society.
Mobile games are bad because:
1. Small screen, hard to see, hurt your eyes more than playing on a big screen.
2. The way to control it is hard, you have to buy a controller frame or stick with the shitty touchscreen.
3. You have to recharge everyonce in a while, or playing wired ruins your phone.
4. Game is “free” but there are micro-transactions if you want to buy bigger stuff or better characters, which means you can possibly shelve more money than a full game, or encourage gambling (instead of buying a character, you buy a CHANCE to gamble a character).
In short, it’s full of cancerous models which take advantage of poor people who have nothing but a phone.
This is why I always doubt the Asian prosperity meme, if we are really prosperous, we wouldn’t play mobile games, we would play PC or console games.
Yeah, I mean, mobile games clearly and obviously suck except as a momentary diversion, that’s what I meant by “dreadful aesthetic”. But if people freely choose them, I don’t think the fact they suck is itself a social problem. Excessive smartphone use probably is a social problem, but are mobile games worse in that respect than social media?
No one can unveil anything but replace others’ own veils with one of the ideologue’s liking. It can be made of silk and translucent, but it is still a veil.
Intense gaming of any sort is the sign of spiritual poverty.
There is nothing aesthetics about touching your phone screen to play games.
And it is not freedom, I ask many kids and people who play mobile games, they say they have no other choices, they are too poor for a PC or consoles or simply don’t have enough times since they are in public all days.
It is truly dreadful.
But social media is way worse since it is way more social acceptable, and addictive than even games. Worse, it can influence people. Look at FB, Twitter and even Tiktok. Tiktok is a supposedly chinese app, yet now if you see it, it is all whitey or negros shaking ass, nothing chinese at all. The algorithm pushes for that.
A common smear today is to compare someone to the Nazis or Hitler. They did it to Pat Buchanan, who would have kept us out of the Middle East. These are implicitly references to the Holocaust, and would not otherwise be made.
Similarly, most references to Hitler and the Nazis in film are meant to evoke the evil of the Holocaust, and can be characterized as being derived from a culture of elevating the Holocaust. You will not see Hideki Tojo villainized, like Hitler is, even though his personal appearance is if anything more idiosyncratic. Meanwhile, Stalin gets brushed aside. No attempt to ethnically characterize the communist party of the ’30s. Only one to villainize Germans, which even gets reflected in the modern adaptation of Zorro. It is difficult to think of modern films where the hero is a blond male.
Anyway, WW2 is just the main language of anti nationalism nowadays. There are ancillary languages, and I do not think the whole thing was invented back then, and would not otherwise exist today. It is just made more effective by using the grammar of WW2.
What is an ethnat film? Well, I will throw you a loose definition for Euros, of a low standard: something that builds the idea of a nation or culture without multiracialism (which is obviously antinational.)
Do people want to see Africans in a King Arthur movie? Or in Robin Hood? Do they want Dev Patel to star in that ancient Celtic myth, the Green Knight? I think the answer is pretty clearly “no”, but these things are shoved down their throats anyway because of antinational ideology.
They really deconstructed the original characters too.
Even your cynicism is not yet earned.
The current “stranded” situation reminded me of when I was stranded in China around 20 years ago.
At the airport they brought me to a room full of army officers and told me that my papers were not in order and I could not catch my flight on the Chinese airline. Come back the next day, they said. So, I had to pay for a taxi, hotel, and dinner. The next day, they pointed to a sign on the wall written in Chinese, saying that payment of a $50 fine would furnish compensation for the paperwork problem. Now they tell me. So, I paid the $50, plus had to pay the high price of an immediate flight to get the heck out of there. My paperwork was fine. But I had to admire commercial efficiency the whole thing. Hotel, 2 taxis, dinner, $50 fine, plus they got to resell my China Airlines ticket. But I wasn’t beheaded. Stranded only 24 hours. Everyone polite and businesslike. A yellow card; no red card.
.
Brilliant write-up.
In defense of Japanese agricultural-protectionism (and in defense of Swiss, and really, global agricultural protectionism), while it may be “inefficient” in a modern, flat economic sense (cheaper to import corn and soybeans from X while exporting High-Value Goods to Y), there is a level of civilizational efficiency in having a distributed domestic food industry with clear lines of connection and local distribution on a regional and domestic market. Also dietary and quality considerations which Japanese production can better address rather than onerous evolutionary adaptation to generic foreign brands and making sure they match quality-control.
More importantly, if not most importantly, is food security. It is one thing to have a food-producing region within a united country. Breadbaskets exist and should be taken advantage of for freeing up marginal land for other purposes. The issue is when dealing with sovereign countries and hegemons, one is always, always, always at their mercy. Iowa cannot and will not hurt the supply of Maize to Washington, and similarly, Washington won’t hurt the supply of Salmon and Apples the other way. Cutting these domestic lines is also difficult. Internationally transported food, however, is always an item of risk, whether from disaster or geopolitics. In cases of catastrophe, it is much more difficult remaking an entire industry rather than scaling up pre-existing infrastructure (not to mention talent!) Ultimately, it is in any countries interest to maintain, at some expense, a core of domestic talent in critical industries that can be expanded in such times, or even developed into internationally competitive industries. Every country should hedge this bet to the degree they can, while still instituting future, modern and traditional “best practices” in regards to their agricultural industry.
Ironically for South Korea, of course, the whole region itself is a literal breadbasket, and following strict “economic efficiency” should have entirely devoted itself to better rice-harvesting while North Korea became the Industrial and Financial Heavy-Weight. Geopolitics stepped in, of course, but even so, SK was right to diversify into different economic branches for the sake of having economies and capabilities necessary for modern independence (ironic, being a US vassal, but you get the idea I hope.)
https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/australia-surveillance-bill/
I agree. It is a fundamentally neoliberal idea to believe that you can safely outsource food production, based on the recent past. No nationalist would ever believe such a thing.
And this idea has already been harmful because it is causing accelerated settlement of the UK with Third Worlders, where otherwise, they would have put the breaks on it, due to the over-development of farmland.
Representation in media matters to you just as a thing in itself. Having your ideas and the images you like made into high quality productions is something you wish happened more often. This is all completely valid and understandable
Well, I was talking about material poverty.
The mobile game gravy train won’t last long when currency resets wiping out much of free money spent on gacha whaling is coming. Good riddance.
The question of race in America has been asked and posited wrongly since the appearance of the very first racialist ideologies. The endpoint of this snowballing madness is racial wokeness, which is the spitting image of White supremacy in Black supremacy. It can only be fixed only if racial perceptions of society in America is replaced by an ethnic one, such as Middle Americans and Africans instead of “Whites” and “Black”. This very subtle difference might not change a lot (since ethnicity in America is heavily racialized), but at least you can move past emotional racism to more sober analyses of each ethnos’ positions, and instead of perpetuating cycles of race-on-race hate.
Well, not with that attitude ;^).
Cheers.
Is the target explicitly online games/MMOs? If so, I agree with Daniel Chieh that encouraging more offline, single-player, or even local multiplayer games would be a positive development.
I half-remember some news headlines, a few years ago, about some Chinese youngster who died after health complications due to him spending literally all day playing some MMO game. So I suppose the addiction problem is probably real.
But I do wonder: If the existing regulation attempting to curtail the time children spend on online games (already quite stringent by western standards, not less due to their absence) was unsuccessful, as implicitly admitted by the need for new regulations, why do authorities expect that more of the same will now work?
Looks, from afar, like typical politician ineptness. If the previous mitigations did not work, I tend to think it was probably because people just disregarded its application: parents not enforcing it, companies not enforcing it, children logging-in under different identities, VPNs, hacked binaries, etc.
I don’t really know what the new regulations propose in terms of enforcement, but I have heard non-expert chatter of face-recognition embedded in the game software (not for login, but in-band, while playing) and I couldn’t avoid a chuckle thinking of masks and other low-tech contraptions that children would probably put up with in order play (presumed addictive) vidya. It’s clear that without the parents’ (and greater social circle’s) active cooperation, a 3rd-party (like the government) could only hope to assume the enforcement itself if a full-blown digital panopticon society is established. Despite some steps taken in that direction, I don’t think China is at that stage (thankfully), so centralised government enforcement of such regulations is unlikely to work.
If the previous regulations did not work, and if the cause was lack of enforcement by parents, and if, as argued above, the government will not be able to assume enforcement itself, then it’s likely that the new regulations will also flounder. What is to be done, then? Well, an easy answer is to somehow enlist the cooperation of the parents/family and pay more attention to potential underlying causes driving youngsters to waste so much of their time on worthless entertainment, and their parents to abet it. Ok, easy answers are typically pretty useless.
Maybe the excessive vidya is related to that other phenomenon of apathy and disaffection with social life, supposedly due to a perception of excessive competitive pressure, that some have called “lying flat”, although I thought that phenomenon was centred on adult (if young) population, not minors. Maybe parents do not have the time (or space) to care for their children after ungluing them from the computer/phone screen. In relation to both of these topics, if one is feeling optimistic, maybe the authorities are not completely out of touch: there was also mention of another set of guidelines or regulations, termed “double reduction” if I remember, apparently intended to reduce the academic burden for children, and to increase extracurricular activities in school. XinHua mentioned things like: restricting private tutoring to weekends and holidays (IIRC), fewer exams throughout the year, shorter exams, less homework, starting school a bit later in the morning, and arranging for after-school extracurricular activities like sport, art, tutoring, or free time. The latter sounded a bit like the Japanese 部活/bukatsu but it was not clear to me to what age-groups the practice was meant to be applied nor whether it was to be nationally adopted or not (the article mainly mentioned Shanghai, Peking, and primary school).
I’m not, however, much given to optimism, so I’ll end on a more suspenseful note:
– Apparently, “priority” classes for gifted students were banned (?).
– I read that there’s a project to reform the scoring/grading system, and there was the following potentially worrisome quote: “In the future, grades will be a less dominant factor in evaluating a student’s ability. […]”
I did not look up the details.
I giggled at the title of Paul Kersey’s newest post here:
Apparently, both White American Derek Hook and White Afrikaner Terblanche Delport have suicidal urges, but can’t express it properly, and so they wrap it in some CRT nonsense and that way it comes out much worse in imposing their death wish onto others.
https://www.robertreeveslaw.com/blog/causing-suicide/
It is probably illegal to encourage suicide in most states even if it is “free speech”. I’ll only say, value your own life, those of your kin and co-ethnics, of all other ethnicities, and of sentient beings (as Buddhists call it) on Earth.
Yep, it’s mainly on online games both desktop and mobile.
Everything here you’ve mentioned are happening everywhere in China, except companies’ negligence (which will lead to their legal liability). But if those are suspected, their social credit score can be cut down, and given the same developments in surveillance tech as well as many global trends (think what Big Tech is doing in America) you can think of, I think the panoptic direction you’re looking at is probable.
(more insane things, like children calling hookers and stabbing their parents, are rumored to happen too)
If the state understood this, they wouldn’t pile their bets on a dead end, and if the root causes were addressed, much less treatment of symptoms (i.e. time regulations) would be needed.
The rest of your post is way better, even tho I’m not understanding your poor reception of these last 2 anti-benchmark reforms. I’m indeed taking online games at CCP propagandists’ word, “spiritual opium”, and that is simply the way children and young adults find achievement or illusion outside of the system grinding it down. It’s no wonder the West is promoting such ways to spend your time indirectly with COVID lockdowns and restrictions that also serves to break up genuine social bonds. Besides, in the last few years, stylistically native Chinese influence has been losing ground to Japanese or American influences (or games directly run by their companies), and such a blanket rule might be a last attempt to stem this, even at the cost of what remains of local cultural producers.
I’ll see this with a panglossian lens where all the excesses of online gaming can be curbed while the rest of moderate underage gamers can find a modus vivendi.
https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/fastest-ever-information-engine
Some kind of microscopic thingie.
I had a girlfriend once who enjoyed going to a book club with a pretty wide age range. And she told me there was a nasty old woman there who never enjoyed herself and her only contribution to the discussion was to say, “This club should just disband!” whenever she could work it in. It was her “Carthago delenda est.” Everyone else was too nice to disinvite her, and she never missed a meeting.
I have to think those proclaiming “We white people should just kill ourselves” are basically the same personality type.
I was thinking on this some more. The most soul-sucking games are those that are merely an endless grind, that involve tons of repetition and not much skill. They’re just spiritually numbing substitutes for real-world accomplishment into which you can pour any amount of time. Honestly, single-player games can sort of be this way too, but most such games are MMOs.
I think well, in the old days, you might have someone like my friend that spent an insane amount of time mastering Super Mario Bros., to the point that he basically never died. He would beat the game, which caused it to start over from the first level, and just keep playing and beating it until he got tired of doing so. Sometimes he would rope some unsuspecting person into playing 2-player with him, and that person never got to play, because the original SMB only alternated players upon death and my friend never died. Everyone had a good laugh when the other person figured it out.
What I can say for that is, yeah he wasted a lot of time playing SMB, but it’s at least sort of a stupid party trick, like being able to keep a hacky-sack going forever. It’s not a practical skill, but at least it’s a skill, and one you can show off in front of people and perhaps amuse them for a moment. And a lot of people in our age bracket played SMB and can at least sort of recognize insane skill at it and take a little interest.
Whereas you spend 1000 hours grinding on something like WoW, and you have all the best gear ever, but you really don’t have anything, literally no one cares. Matthew 6:19-21 seems relevant here — you’re not putting treasures in Heaven, you’re not even putting them on Earth, but on the damned WoW servers. And then the next expansion comes out and, reliably, your gear is worthless again.
I have a mix of feelings, when I hear about people beating Super Mario Bros in record time by exploiting input bugs, or beating Mike Tyson’s Punchout while blindfolded, or achieving some record high score on an old arcade game.
In a way, there’s the competitive one-upmanship, the impressive dexterity and methodical approach. Unavoidably, it is inspiring in a way, if simultaneously silly.
But on the other hand, superficially, it seems like a very white or Euro thing. There are some who say Euro males have a special power of autism – that it was shown in the past in crazy scientists and artists. And, if so, there seems something undeniably tragic about it.
IMO, the more diverse a society, the more secular and soulless the categorizations become. That is why “white” is increasingly used in Western Europe and “Asian” is claimed as a catch-all term in America.
I don’t believe that blacks are much interested in adopting the “African” label. Their political thrust has been about materialism, which makes “black” the most effective terminology. And in addition, they see themselves as a separate people.
Meanwhile, “white” is a very bad word for Euros, IMO, as it lacks a spiritual dimension (which is the severe lack of Euros today.) “White” is pure, superficial materialism, and discourages people from thinking about blood and soil. But, they would have to demand a different label, as the regime would not willingly promote something more meaningful.
Derek Hook is a from South Africa. Apparently he was afraid to get killed in his own country but supports suicide.
Did he mean literal suicide or metaphorical suicide (kill the “whiteness” within yourself or something like that).
So is the number of PRC movies about fake battle victories of CCP over IJA. Thomas Kretschmann is a blond German actor who’s donned Wehrmacht or SS uniforms in like a dozen movies (The Pianist, Stalingrad, Der Untergang). There’s the analogous in PRC cinema where there’s a number Japanese actors who are “professional Japanese devils”.
They can’t be compared. Tojo doesn’t even amount to a Göring or Himmler. And rather like a Wilhelm Keitel (highest ranking Wehrmacht officer executed at Nuremberg). As military bureaucrat he strongly punished rape and looting (there were obviously violations, but that’s exactly the point, they were violations of military law, and thereafter reprimanded such in the case of Matsui Iwane, IJA commander at the Battle of Nanjing).
He was wholely unremarkable in lacking charisma, obsequiousness, ideology, and cruelty.
Not entirely, as Mishima would insist, and that’s the whole problem with CJK relationship.
That’s good to hear. Online games are a malaise within the GAMING COMMUNITY.
Currency resets will at worst put many forms of “entertainment” or luxury spending on hold until people save enough in the new currencies, and at best change people’s priorities indefinitely. So your “gaming community” won’t survive unscathed.
Economic modernism (whether capitalist, socialist or fascist) is at the root of materialism and secular spiritual poverty (why build wealth in Heaven or spiritually when you can build it on Earth and let your heirs have it ?) as well as “diversity” (telling the slave market it’s economic and profitable to send slaves to New World plantations, and creating the entire category of international “economic” migration).
You need the right economic structure (local self-sufficiency) before you can mind your blood and soil, and start ethnic renaissances anywhere. No amount of Nazi economic planning can do that.
Martin Armstrong’s models is something I come back to from time to time after getting the inflection point of capitalism (that is 2020) right. From his models he derives a 314-year paradigm-changing cycle that started early in the 18th century, which means industrial capitalism of this cycle is ending soon, and irreversibly. In the much shorter term, he divides it into 4 parts covering these 2 or 3 decades:
2020-2024 The WEF trying to implement the Great Reset, causing massive economic and social dislocations. “Crack-up” boom based on material shortages (if you have read Mises it means global hyperinflation).
2025-2028 High level of civil unrest and international conflicts, WWIII likely. Probably the WEF is going away from the picture at this stage.
2028-2032 (or ’37) societal collapse (a lot of this is implied, e.g. massive famines and depopulation. To the extent it is possible, I can only say WWIII has to happen in the 2025-28 timeframe and severe enough to merit Einstein’s comment on it.)
2032 (’37)- Slow recovery under a new economic paradigm. Since capitalism is gone the most likely form of recovery will be localized or regional sufficiency based on primitive technologies, and a lower, relatively static level of accumulation. As a financially-minded man trained as a trader and investment advisor Armstrong sees it as the “downfall” of Western civilization.
So survival and locality will be forced on you by global events, like it or not, if Martin Armstrong’s predictions come to pass. I’m really apocalyptic about his predictions.
Don’t worry, gaming community will live on regardless of currency.
We have decades of old DRM-free games ready for apocalyptic warfare.
God, the manga this chinese anime is based on, Blades of the Guardians, is actually incredibly.
I’ve been reading the past few days and I’m hooked. It covers the late Sui-early Tang era, which remains kinda obscure to me, and it kinda explains why the Tang dynasty remains so connected to the western horse nomads to the point of employing them in crucial posts. Now I get to know some legendary chinese generals such as Qin Shu Han.
It actually reminds me the most of manga format instead of chinese webtoon since it’s actually in black & white, in fact, it reminds me of Kingdom, a jap manga covering the rise of Qin Shi Huang.
Agree with this, ‘white’ increasingly carries extra ideological meaning and significance that has been injected into the term by CRT and Post-Colonialism. Using the term in Europe seems linked to the idea that the various white peoples of the continent require decolonising by mass immigration and enforced adoption of a Marxian reformulation of various ‘immigrant cultures’ under the label of ‘diversity’.
I feel this is weird and questionable even in relation to former imperial countries, but for other European nations it is more obviously cynical and evil. There are some signs of a stronger reaction against it outside the Anglosphere, in France the nature of it seems to have been grasped more readily and there are more challenges to it within the mainstream.
No right wing movement has really had any success without some spiritual and anti-materialist dimension, I think progressives scored a big victory in the early 2000s when they successfully identified religion with Islam and started making a more aggressive secularism and commitment to essentially left wing Enlightenment ideals the definition of ‘Western Values’. I’ve also been thinking for a while that ethno-nationalists only have a chance of holding out if they turn to the spiritual side of things, the current establishment is too attuned to deconstructing the secular manifestations of European nationalism.
Not a perfect comparison by any means, but people sometimes bring up how Jews in Israel successfully revived Hebrew because it was the language of their faith, whereas, for the Irish the language at Mass was Latin, so a lot of people made their children switch to English for the economic possibilities.
Of course, there were many other factors such as Jews not all speaking one language and also hating Germans.
I consider the CCP’s obsession with WW2 to be a pathology, but perhaps every regime (including modern West) needs its foundational myth. Anyway, I don’t think it is quite as bad, as there seem to be comedic cycles, unlike the West, where WW2 has been sacrelized.
I’m not actually a believer in the big man theory of history and agree Tojo was not important. The one era I flirt with it a bit though, is the fall of the Soviet Union. Not because I want to, but the personal appearance of Soviet leaders is too idiosyncratic. He who avoids getting ensnared by Brezhnev’s eyebrows, will almost inevitably get lost in the map on Gorbi’s head.
https://akarlin.com/2009/09/struggle-europe-mankind/
European Cosmopolitanism as Romano-Germanic Chauvinism
Great way to put it, regarding the all religions = Islam thing; which isn’t an insult, lol.
https://twitter.com/mr_scientism/status/1118556641824268289?s=20
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫ਼ਤਿਹ
http://journal.telospress.com/content/2014/167/162.extract
https://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/2004/07/02/islamism-and-the-west/
https://www.indianlink.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/sikh-war-memorial-blacktown-nsw.png
https://www.indianlink.com.au/india-in-australia/sydney/sikh-soldiers-war-memorial-in-blacktown-nsw/
A war memorial to Indian soldiers already exists in Sydney, unveiled on the eve of Armistice Day in 2018 at Cherrybrook. A project of the Hindu Council of Australia, it has been criticised by Kenna and Jordan for including only Sikhs and Hindu names, not Muslims, Anglo-Saxons or other people of Indian origin who were Anzacs, who served in the Australian Imperial Force and fought for Australia.
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
They didn’t fight for Australia. They were mercenaries.
If Japan had had recruiters in India and offered higher pay, they probably would have gotten more Indians to fight for their side.
Used to be pretty common to fight for money. Plenty of Euros did it in Africa, before it became un-PC. Of course, Euros don’t want to immigrate to Africa, so nobody says that they fought for Sierra Leone, Angola, DRC, etc.
Sad to say, but I think France is mainly a case of bureaucratic inertia.
They’ve had a stronger form of blank-slatism there, where racial statistics are forbidden. So, there’s a regime-provided niche for being against the label “white.” Though “French”, I believe, is used as a blank-slatist, cultural label.
I don’t mean that there aren’t people in government who understand that adopting “white” would be a bad idea. But I don’t see it as a real backlash, in the sense it doesn’t in anyway challenge the historical process of migration into France or address the real problems it has caused.
I think there are plenty of places, where the regime wishes it could drop statistical labels. Many have supposed that there won’t be another UK census. But there must be a lot of inertia. Think of how many NGOs and government organizations rely on racial statistics to try to justify themselves.
Well, it’s just that I like excellence pursuit and I favour meritocracy, and, though an outsider, I strongly prefer that the Chinese “global pole” continues to pursue excellence and remains meritocratic. Those two policy items, which I stated just as vaguely as I currently understand them, seemed to hint toward potential compromises in those two areas, respectively. But, as I readily admitted, I don’t know the details. Are my reservations unwarranted? Maybe I misunderstood? I’m always glad to up-correct overly negative prognostics.
It is romantic that you infer they would otherwise be crazy scientists or artists, but I suspect that they would instead have become great at “horseshoes” or some other idle behaviour.
Focus and drive to go out of your comfort zone are what is needed for great achievement, not focus and drive to hold yourself tight within it.
I am not judging them either. If they’re having fun, they’re having fun. Having an internal voice constantly and loudly asking you “why aren’t you great” when you have a different life to live would be exhausting, and it is sad and poisonous when parents who have never confronted that voice instead turn it on their children.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202109/1233146.shtml
Comrade Xi Jinping answered my call.
Hopefully this kills all the gay xianxia magic cultivation novels (and their adaptations) so we can get back to manly wuxia swordfighting.
It’s the mistake of imposing “New World” racial categories onto “Old World” cultures and ethnicities many American ethno-nationalists always make, and I made that in my earlier too.
But what started as imperial importation of colonial subject for their acculturation (that was first seen in England & France) becomes wokist population replacement we have now, as demographic balance decisively shift against early industrializers (mainly European).
The set of “Western values” they spouse have shifted off its base (and their ranks have changed a lot too following their rhetoric). But the spiritual direction is definitely suitable when you look at the ideological strength of Islamism against the weakness of “woke” secularism. I have no part in your cultural welfare, being part of Sinosphere, but I’ll be delighted if Christian Europe and the Sinosphere have our own Hassan al-Bannas (https://www.e-ir.info/2016/02/02/hasan-al-banna-and-the-political-ideologisation-of-islam-in-the-20th-century/) who can coherently synthesize tradition-based alternatives to modernist society, ideology and economics.
AP’s marginal, AIDS-ridden, commie-infiltrated Odessans organize march for traditional family values:
https://eparhiya.od.ua/my-za-semyumarsh-za-nashi-semejnye-czennosti-proshyol-v-odesse/
It will supercharge demand for them.
I suspect that the only reason you can talk favourably about the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder is because you have such low expectations of Arabs. You think northern peoples, if they adopted something in the same vein, would propagate something better just by virtue of being northern peoples. This brings out a contradiction. Do you not suppose that we have done something better already?
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they would be geniuses of high accomplishment without video games. Genius is rare and getting rarer. Nor would I assert that video games negatively impacted their lives either. For all I know, some of them might be happy or moderately successful.
But I do think they have a rare capacity for methodically trying to understand rules and for trying to push the envelope of what can be done with them, even though it involves a lot of gruntwork and failure. It is easy to feel such a talent is wasted by playing games. IMO, society should screen for such people and set them to more productive tasks, for its own benefit.
Even if they were cogs in a machine – working in some team, with others over them – such cogs are rare and valuable, IMO.
Yes, though perhaps computer game grinding is trauma therapy for being pushed too hard to grind in the rest of their lives. Like how physical abuse victims often later cut themselves.
Just a power play. Immigration isn’t affected by war memorials.
Beyond cow slaughter & inter caste ban Idc about politics.
Since both are core to the Abrahamics,the path ahead is clear.
[blockquote] ਏਕਓਰਭਯੋਖਾਲਸਾਏੇਕਓਰਸੰਸਾਰ।। [/blockquote]
The Khalsa stands on one side, the world on the other।।
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Just a power play. Immigration isn’t affected by war memorials.
Beyond cow slaughter & inter caste ban Idc about politics.
Since both are core to the Abrahamics, the path ahead is clear.
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Yes, exactly. While it’s understandable when China supplements an already well developed agricultural system with food imports, they didn’t drop agriculture entirely to focus on becoming the world’s factory. Even having multiple trade partners isn’t safe if war threatens the sealanes.
Ah, interesting point there. Are you saying the immigrant population to the UK has put an unnatural pressure on British agriculture? Ah, another thought that interests me is that allowing those immigrants also hurts their own countries’ agricultural and economic reform. Basically being able to offlload excess population and skilled groups retards local reform that would happen if they were suffering the full weight of their consequences.
Yes, good detail you noticed. It’s hard not to see why Apartheid South Africa failed when such people like him constitute the Afrikaner population, even in part.
When it comes down to it, is there much of a spiritual difference?
Though having listened to his video, he seemed to be saying “literally kill oneself to end whiteness” thus, the act of killing oneself as a White is what ends Whiteness, rather than the act of killing one’s whiteness.
My Father, a very productive who still enjoys video games (his work involves the former) movies, refers to them, as well as most…addictive modern instruments, as “Daemon Engines.” The reason being, while they are entirely enjoyable and can be healthy as a means of rewarding work and relaxation, ultimately they act more as a distraction and means of keeping the soul and self from progress (hence, the Daemonic attribute).
It’s certainly tough. Without the opium, people would be less tempted, but the opium exists in the first place because people enjoyed its effects on themselves and their children. Hopefully everyone can learn some damn moderation and alternatives.
However, the high IQ people in the US (is not marginal movement) make mockery of “of the people , by the people, for the people” motto. They completely hijacked the interpretation of the constitution – what a democracy.