It will be the centenary of the October Revolution in a couple of days – the original color revolution that finished off a great and rapidly modernizing empire and handed power to a gang of Russia-hating criminals.
To mark the occasion, the next two weeks I will be documenting the dismal failure of sovok across almost virtually all spheres of life. Obligatory trigger warning for commies.
Featured
- gwern’s October 2017 newsletter
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Not only a good intro to Bitcoin per se, but an original (so far as I know) way of thinking about it: https://blog.chain.com/a-letter-to-jamie-dimon-de89d417cb80
There’s a TL;DR version at the end.
Link to David Becker’s database: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3c4TxciNeJZWUx5bzBWZ1BuMUk
The discussion is also worth reading.
- Heiner Rindermann has what appears to be a rather interesting book coming out on January 1, 2018: Cognitive Capitalism: Human Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations
* PEW: Globally, Broad Support for Representative and Direct Democracy (PDF)
Many interesting tidbits there but one table I liked is support for military government by left/right.
Mostly as you’d expect (right more supportive), with the understandable exception of Venezuela – and the less understandable exception of Hungary (unless you read hbd*chick).
- Emil Kirkegaard: About that blog: Italian IQs, Lynn IQs, brain size and doctors
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/r/gorgich: Cultural macroregions of Russia
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Daniel Treisman – 2017 – Democracy by mistake
How does democracy emerge from authoritarian rule?… In about two thirds, democratization occurred not because incumbent elites chose it but because, in trying to prevent it, they made mistakes that weakened their hold on power. Common mistakes include: calling elections or starting military conflicts, only to lose them; ignoring popular unrest and being overthrown; initiating limited reforms that get out of hand; and selecting a covert democrat as leader. These mistakes reflect well-known cognitive biases such as overconfidence and the illusion of control.
Leonid Bershidsky writes about it.
- 39% of French citizens spoke Occitan in 1860.
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A beautiful @WrathOfGnon thread about the superiority of medieval urbanism:
https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/883181352933236736
Russia
- Lucy Komisar: The Man Behind the Magnitsky Act Did Bill Browder’s Tax Troubles in Russia Color Push for Sanctions?
Attack on RT
- RT: Revealed: How Twitter pushed RT to spend big on 2016 US election; Twitter’s multi-million dollar US election pitch to RT revealed in FULL
Even some Russian oppositioners like Alexey Kovalev think it is ridiculously selective.
- RT: NGO publishes names of 2,300+ RT guests, labels them ‘useful idiots who undermine Western democracy’
I was amused to see that Nina Khrushcheva was on there (not sure about the “useful” part, though).
Alexander Mercouris: Blackmail and the latest attack on RT
- Michael Tracey uncovers Twitter’s criteria for being a Russia troll:
We took a similarly expansive approach to defining what qualifies as a Russian-linked account. Because there is no single characteristic that reliably determines geographic origin or affiliation, we relied on a number of criteria, including whether the account was created in Russia, whether the user registered the account with a Russian phone carrier or a Russian email address, whether the user’s display name contains Cyrillic characters, whether the user frequently Tweets in Russian, and whether the user has logged in from any Russian IP address, even a single time. We considered an account to be Russian-linked if it had even one of the relevant criteria.
Beware of the Cyrillic autocracy!
Russiagate
- Alexander Mercouris: Robert Mueller should resign
In other words instead of arriving its suspicions of Russian meddling in the Presidential election on its own investigations the FBI chose to rely on the work of two private contractors – CrowdStrike and Christopher Steele – both of whom were found and paid for by the DNC, and one of whom – Christopher Steele – was then passed on by the DNC to the FBI so that he could be paid by them as well.
That makes the FBI look more like an accomplice of the Democrats and the DNC than an impartial and objective police agency.
- But perceptions are another matter.
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Some stuff comes out further proving that DNC colluded with Hillary to give her the nomination.
Real Democrats: Donna Brazile was duped by Russia. Putin is God, etc.
- Latest video from Kirill Nesterov, chief editor of ROGPR podcast.
(It’s in Russian, but mostly just consists of translations of the most “powerful” Russia takes from Anglo Twitter).
- The insanity is not contained to the Left:
Powerful Takes on Manhattan Terror Attack
Other
- Paul Robinson: Wall of Grief (Putin on Stalin)
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Patrick Armstrong: How I Became a Kremlin Troll
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Chechens organize a queue for the new iPhone in Moscow, selling the first position for R300,000 ($5,000). A few hundred Virgin Kreakls – their idea of “creativity” consisting of being the first person in their tusovka to get a new iPhone – wait in line for a several hours… only for a gang of Chechen Chads to push them aside at the last moment, snap up all the iPhones, and put them up for sale on Russia’s eBay within a few minutes.
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Daily Beast: She’s in Pussy Riot. He’s on the Far Right: How Maria Alyokhina and Dmitry Enteo Fell in Love
Still a better love story than Twilight.
- Affirmative action Kremlinologist Terell Starr: “Ukrainians and black folk share common bonds when it comes to resisting supremacy, whether it is from “white people” in the U.S. or Russia.” Memetic response.
Hell
Meanwhile, in the actual Putlerreich…
- Moscow authorities want to install a monument to Islam Karimov in the city center, a Central Asian tinpot dictator who removed all of his country’s WW2 monuments.
What makes this even “better” is that the Uzbeks themselves are slowly doing away with Karimov’s legacy, with their new President inching towards liberal reform and criticizing his predecessor for abuses. So it fails even as geopolitical bootlicking.
Almost certainly pointless petition against this: https://www.change.org/p/владимир-путин-против-установки-в-москве-памятника-президенту-узбекистана-исламу-каримову
- Leader of Tatarstan implicitly threatens Putin with low vote numbers if Tatar language instruction in schools is made non-obligatory (“We made it so that all the electoral processes are done by the directors of our schools“).
The problems of relying on ethnic minority states-within-states to give you a 10% point bump in elections…
- Meanwhile, the son of a Tatar director of a military academy (who is also a member of the pseudoscience organization RAEN) was arrested in Tajikistan for joining ISIS for 2 years. Previously, after completing his PhD under his dad at said military academy (nepotism), he was made responsible for ensuring the security of military R&D communications, and had the appropriate high level security clearance for it. Said military academy to KP journalists requesting comment: “We won’t say anything, the director isn’t here, and we don’t know when he will be.”
World
- @tcjfs: Huntington argues the Confederate monuments to “the Blue & the Gray” were built thru 1920 to foster united American national reconciliation
Seems to parallel Soviet celebration of Victory Day: First Moscow May 9 parade after 1945 was in 1965; then 1985, 1990, became yearly event in 1995.
* China unveils massive island-building vessel
Remarkable cultural continuity: Great Wall on land 2,000 years ago, now a Great Wall in cyberspace and on the high seas.
- So Osama bin Laden was a gamer, like all the other great men of the 20th century.
BTW, Navalny is a console peasant, while proves he is not destined for greatness.
Culture War
* Bread Pilled: Jordan Peterson turning young, Western men into Christians Again
Only heard of the guy thanks to spandrell. Sounds like a big phenomenon.
- #ItsOkayToBeWhite is a brilliant strategy. /pol/ continues to deliver.
* Frances Lee: Why I’ve Started to Fear My Fellow Social Justice Activists
- John Derbyshire: Geezers Don’t Care! Marc Faber Defies AntiRacist Moral Panic
* Feminist prof says ‘traditional science’ is rooted in racism
- Geoffrey Miller channels Taleb: To understand the present, read good books about our biological & cultural history, & sci fi about the future. ‘News’ is a distraction.
* Melissa Meszaros: Buzzfeed’s Male Writers Revealed to have Dangerously Low Testosterone
* Porn Addicted Bomb Nazi Mutilated Himself With An Axe. Exemplary commitment to nofap.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky’s struggle:
https://twitter.com/0xa59a2d/status/923236057734402048
.
It was probably not a good strategy “The Prosecutor’s office of Tatarstan has outlawed mandatory teaching of Tatar language,” https://vz.ru/society/2017/11/5/117372.html
According to the old story of Origen, at least as it’s been told, the bomb Nazi only had a lukewarm commitment to no fap.
Signed.
And if this fails, people should do what others did to the Mannerheim plaque in SPB.
A lot of information there, but surely the most important long term story here is the IQ of the word, this along with the “most important graph” surely will be what shapes future history. Many white nationalists will say how the jewish dominated over class will lord over the third world masses in the future, but this is not entirely certain, the Donna Brazile, Mugabe, Zuma, etc, types will likely want to take power for themselves if they can be kept in check by the Soros, Zuckerberg, Schumer types is not guaranteed.
Arnold on traditional urbanism. He suggests it’s for weak manlets:
Any insights on Maltsev? I’m gussing it is insignificant but there is no real information in MSM reports.
They removed a monument to Mannerheim in SPB a while back, after a petition. So maybe it isn’t futile.
EDIT:
Reading further, it seems the petition was less effective than some axes.
As a pro-Western, pro-Ukrainian nationalist, Maltsev & Co. break a whole bunch of the rules Russian nationalists (specifically, #2-4) need to follow to avoid getting knocked on the head.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/country-282/
And, needless to say, the Ukrainophilia and NATO worship doesn’t do him much good from a popularity standpoint. Attendance at this year’s Russian March was just 400 from what I’ve read. The old Russian Marches before they got suppressed by Putler/reformatted into “normie” patriotically themed rallies typically garnered 10,000 attendees.
Well this is encouraging.
Leader of Tartarstan tried to hard without being a Chad like Kadyrov.
Medieval/traditional urbanism is an expression of Neolithic manlet culture and civilization. Small, compact, dense settlements built around cathedrals and churches – communal worship sites devoted to Neolithic solar, grain, fertility cults. Cathedrals and churches resemble the older Neolithic structures like Newgrange, whose cross section resembles cathedral cross sections and which aligns with the sun on the winter solstice around the Christmas season.
I think it’s pretty obvious to anybody that the Jewish elite that has and has had so much influence in 20th century America is on it’s way out. Personally, I think that the power of that elite has been overestimated, but it did exist and still does, even though it is now in terminal decline.
I can understand why somebody would dislike American Jews, but they won’t even exist in 50 years so they aren’t worth getting upset about.
That said, it seems impossible that any type of mud elite would take their place. Rather it will still be whites just like it is in Latin America with Asians and high caste muds being absorbed into the power structure.
…
Donna Brazile is one of the few liberals I have always liked. I don’t agree with her politics but she seems cool.
…
I don’t get the comment at the top, is the guy saying that Anatoly is Jewish because Anatoly is pro white? Or was the comment talking about somebody else? I’m not following.
Western Russophiles are really into the whole Eurasian thing. They are tied with Paleocons for the most disgusting people on earth.
“It will be the centenary of the October Revolution in a couple of days – the original color revolution that finished off a great and rapidly modernizing empire and handed power to a gang of Russia-hating criminals.”
Actually, the Bolshevik Revolution finished off the Russian Provisional Government. Indeed, the Tsarist Russian regime fell in February 1917–as in, over half a year earlier.
As for Tsarist Russia, I really don’t know if I would consider it to be great. After all, based on your data (from a post several years ago), Tsarist Russia appears to have been doing worse in terms of its per capita GDP than Portugal was doing. In other words, Tsarist Russia had potential, but its trajectory wasn’t too different from that of Southern European countries. (However, its trajectory was much better than that of Bolshevik Russia.)
Also, in regards to Tsarist Russia, as an American, I mostly remember it for selling us Alaska and for foolishly mistreating its own Jewish population and thus causing many of them to come over here. Indeed, Tsarist Russia certainly helped strengthen the U.S.! 🙂
doh – whenever someone calls me a Russian bot i reply with a random sentence translated into Russian with google translate – gonna be renditioned to gitmo 🙁
The shooting in Texas today was another Antifa op, just like the one in Las Vegas. The media and the FBI are covering it up.
Oh yeah, another (((Russian nationalist))) that has no clue about Russian history.
The original color revolution that handed power to a gang of criminals was the February Revolution.
The October Revolution was a neocon counter-insurgency. Still shit, but a lot less stinky compared to the absolute shitshow of being ruled by the February gang of homosexual deviants.
But anyways, back to the topic: anytime a (((Russian nationalist))) speaks about ‘HBD’ and ‘muh white race’ it’s always a dogwhistle about contracting Russia until it’s a small European country occupying a strip of land between Moscow and St.Pete. The idea is that Russia needs to somehow become a nice, comfortably-sized laid-back irrelevant urbanist place, a slightly more eastern Czechia.
Needless to say, despite ‘muh white race’ this is completely antithetical to Russian interests.
Russia needs to expand, not contract.
Ok, now that I’m black where do I get my forty acres and my mule?
they aren’t disliked because they won’t FOAD, they’re disliked because they’re still in that paranoid Tevye the Dairyman mode [hoof sounds intensify] and have no “noblesse oblige” wrt the ruled.
why, what would happen to them?
can’t Russia expand (or not-contract) and be doing something about her human capital?
An interesting piece of urbanism demonstrated in Yoshkar-Ola (provincial town in Russia, on the border of Europe and Siberia), local crazy Governor Leonid il Magnifico
http://www.uhta24.com/foto/_original_/29541.jpg
http://cs617317.vk.me/v617317965/c44c/ZYP3TycTwRo.jpg
http://img-2008-05.photosight.ru/30/2697599.jpg
http://visitola.ru/img/7.jpg
https://img.lookmytrips.com/images/look7chc/image-585b9dafff936701c8028d8c-585cf1855b66f-1c5psc5.jpg
They built a copy of Bruges there???
Is that a recent project?
Who says she isn’t? As a person who actually lives in Russia and has a child in elementary school, let me tell you that the difference w.r.t “human capital” between now and Soviet times is striking. (The comparison is not in favor for the Soviet system.)
How did you manage to reply at 5.14 am GMT to a comment posted at 5.51 am GMT?
AK: The timestamp/timezone system is messed up. I have made Ron Unz aware.
Yes, I’m aware of that – I said “an” empire, not “The” Empire. There was a high degree of continuity between the Empire and the period of the Provisional Government.
This is probably the post in question: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/the-soviet-economy-charting-failure/
Imperial Russia tracked but did not lag Portugal, but this is unlikely to have continued, since the latter was much slower at accumulating human capital (Portugal was 68% illiterate in 1930 and still 40% illiterate in 1960, whereas the USSR passed the 50% point in 1925 (close to 60% amongst ethnic Russians) – this being just a few years after the end of the Civil War, this was almost entirely a function of Tsarist-era investments – and was nearly universal by 1959).
So actually, under normal conditions, it is very likely that Russia would have developed far faster than Portugal during the 1930-1970 period (instead of merely matching it), and would not have stagnated and even fallen behind Portugal during the 1970-1990 period.
It’s called a summary. Formally the Empire ended in February, but the real break was in November.
Speaking of “deviants.” Just a note that homosexuality was legalized in the early USSR. (Not that this vastly concerns me as it does you).
And then banned again by the Chad Stalin.
Since this is an open thread, does anyone have any thoughts about the Matilda controversy?
To judge by its dictionary definition, “human capital” seems to have remarkably little to do with the qualities one would look for in those who live alongside him.
Re: that image on top. You should’ve included your statement that prompted my question.
Western Russophiles are really into the whole Eurasian thing.
Anatoly’s blog is pretty much the only English language pro-Russian resource that isn’t infected by Eurasianism in any way so it’s not surprising.
I heard the figure 5 million employed as drivers or security guards. that’s what, every 10th-15th male of working age?
everything is better, ceteris paribus etc, with a high-IQ population, witness South Korea.
besides, a good system runs smoothly even with non-perfect people, who aren’t paragons of Aristotelian virtue, running it.
an impression I have from social media (not a font of wisdom to begin with, but still) is Russians are full of…. misconceptions about things, and they don’t really get along with each other.
socialism was more tolerant of human failings, like showing up drunk for work.
unless it’s a grandkid or you had it at like 50, – a reminder that “soviet times” were 27 years ago.
This is not a copy, but the styling. Built in 2000-2010.
According to urban legends, a Tibetan Lama told the local governors that he was the reincarnation of Lorenzo de ‘ Medici. Since then, the Governor has a crooked mind and began to build up the city so that’s quaint houses (until he was put in jail for embezzlement)
http://s008.radikal.ru/i304/1711/d5/4c8b2809f5d7.jpg
http://s019.radikal.ru/i616/1711/6c/b34470b833ac.jpg
I recently learned there is actually such a thing as Arab Communists.
That’s what Communism was – a worldwide civic society on top of existing societies, like the “ummah.”
A woman could walk with a pot of gold on her head all the way from Vladivostok to Prague, and everyone got along and had instant community and instant common ground based on shared hatred of the exploiters.
Yudkowski is an idiot.
Here he is bragging about how brilliant he is, essentially claiming to have independently discovered Bayesian statistics
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ul/my_bayesian_enlightenment/
He’s oblivious to the fact that what he actually did was this:
1. Got a simple math problem wrong
2. Refused to admit that he was wrong
3. Claimed that using Bayes’ Theorem would give a different, but even more correct answer (It doesn’t. Using the first method and using Bayes’ Theorem both give the same answer: 1/3)
4. Used the fact that he got a different (though actually wrong) answer as proof that he is better at statistics than pretty much everyone else on Earth.
Bayes’ Theorem is a big part of his philosophy. He can’t even use it properly in a very simple case. Essentially, he can’t even do middle school level algebra.
🙂 But at least it had some positive effect, it actually looks rather nice.
According to what’s on the net in English they still have a substantial number of indigenous pagans there…interesting.
the banking mafia have already begun their move to east Asia.
American Jewry is a walking corpse. Look at the all the prominent American Jews: they are all 60 or older. The next generation of American Jews consists of guys like Ezra Klein and Mathew Yglesias, hardly elite material. Pretty much every non religious Jews under 40 marries out.
I suspect that when American Jews finally do vanish, they will not be sorely missed.
It is also curious that the Communists accused the Governor that he disfigured the beautiful and harmonious image of the socialist Yoshkar-Ola. This socialist Yoshkar-Ola (the place where after 2000 was built palaces and castles)
http://photos.wikimapia.org/p/00/02/21/32/74_big.jpg
How’s his cult going?
I probably don’t know any more than you do about the status of his cult.
I don’t think that it has grown much over the past few years. The Alexa rank of LessWrong doesn’t seem to be improving. Unz.com gets about 15x as much traffic as LessWrong.
I can’t be bothered to read what Yudkowsky wrote, but the problem he is discussing there is an interesting problem of interpretation, different interpretations do give different correct answers, and ones personal epistemological preferences probably will influence which interpretation seems most natural.
It would be interesting to do a survey here. The classic version goes as follows:
Mr. Smith has two children. At least one of them is a boy. What is the probability that both children are boys?
Actually, there are two possible correct answers, depending on whether you think the question is “How likely is a two-child family with at least one boy to be a two-boy family?” or whether you think the question is “Now that I know a particular two-child family has at least one boy, what kind of odds would I be willing to give that this is a two-boy family?” If you are of a frequentist persuasion, then the first interpretation might occur to you more naturally, while if you are of a Bayesian persuasion, then the second interpretation might come more easily. But so long as you are clear about how you interpret the question, the answer should be independent of your persuasion.
When I first encountered the question, I much prefered the second interpretation and so found 1/3 a rather bizarre answer until I realized others were favoring the first interpretation.
For those interested, the Wikipedia article has an extensive discussion:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_or_Girl_paradox
when American Jews finally do vanish, they will not be sorely missed.
With no Jews around, how will the anti-Semites waste their time?
“…for you might just get it.”
it wasn’t all bad.
Basically, it’s collective Carl Sagan vs collective Deepak Chopra now.
They might concentrate on genealogical studies to find out who’s got Jewish ancestors and/or is supposedly a crypto-Jew…somewhat like in early modern Spain/Portugal, or today among Turkish antisemites with their theories about the Dönmeh.
“To mark the occasion, the next two weeks I will be documenting the dismal failure of sovok across almost virtually all spheres of life. Obligatory trigger warning for commies.”
Glossy’s lucky he hasn’t been here in months.
You are under the impression that white nationalists are anti jew as if it is some kind of hobby.
Glossy had a meltdown around July and presumably isn’t returning anytime soon.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/881660958019604481
(Personally I found the passive-aggressive Likes from Nina Byzantina the most amusing part).
Anyhow, in a way it’s also rather liberating, fewer incentives to pretend to like the USSR. Probably wasn’t sustainable, either. Ironically I’ve grown (even more) disillusioned with the USSR and socialist ideas in general since returning to Russia.
Math isn’t a popularity contest.
I’ll show how Bayes’ Theorem also gives 1/3:
We want to find
P(Both are boys|at least 1 twin is a boy)
(1 x 1/4) / (3/4) = 1/3
go back to fun stuff like looking at boobs and playing vidya games
Suppose I move to a new neighborhood, and I know that the neighbor has two children. While moving in, I see one boy playing in the neighbor’s yard (and have good reason to believe that the boy belongs to the neighbors).
P(there are two boys)=1/4
P(seen one boy)=1/2
P(seen one boy|there are two boys)=1
P(there are two boys|seen one boy)=1*((1/4)/(1/2))=1/2.
Arithmetic isn’t a popularity contest. Interpretation of an ambiguous statement is. Depending on what information you are trying to obtain, one or the other interpretation is more relevant.
Yes, I’m old enough to have attended elementary school in Soviet times myself.
Learning about Russia from social media is like learning about the USA from its university professors.
Not ironic or surprising, this is the standard experience for almost anybody who has lived in modern post-Soviet Russia.
That would actually be rather comparable. The current rabidly pro-German right-wing government of Finland is trying to erase Mannerheim and other Russian aristocrats from our history so it would be ironically typical of the Kremlin diplomatic geniuses if they now tried to approach Finland by re-visioning and complimenting Mannerheim.
An ironic casualty of the demise of the USSR is that our political class no longer needs anti-communists in our history and Mannerheim with his anti-German opinions, russophile cultural orientation, scheming with Churchill and Russian exiles and borderline traitorous decisions during World War II is not a fit with Finland’s newly invented eurofederalist (pro-German) history.
We have a 100th anniversary coming and I’m not seeing Mannerheim anywhere in the material our right-wing government is promoting.
Arabs are Semites too and Gulf Arabs are as dangerous as rich Jews.
Call Manneheim “Russian aristocrat” or “russophile” is a heavy insult to Russia. In 1918, the Finnish nationalists under the command of Mannerheim’s massacred the Russian population in Vyborg. Killed without distinction of age and sex, killed children (among those killed who are known by name, the youngest was 9 years old). These Russian inhabitants of Vyborg were driven to the wall and shot with machine guns. The wounded were finished off with revolvers
And this was not a fight against the “red threat” – exterminated Russians were “white” (i.e. anti-Communist). Mannerheim same Russian aristocrat and “russophile” as Alfred Rosenberg
It does not seem to be backed by the Russian people and for the Russian people, therefore just a waste.
Jaakko had a great alternate perspective here.
Re-Vyborg massacre: Wikipedia gives a different version. Not all the Russians in Vyborg were killed, but 10% (~400/4,000) of them; it may have been provoked by drunken Red Guards who had previously murdered 30 POWs; not only Russians were amongst those killed, but also included Poles and other ethnic minorities; finally, Mannerheim himself had nothing to do with it and demanded an investigation and punishment (it was actually a German-affiliated unit who carried out the massacre, and Mannerheim was the opposite of pro-German).
These same German-sponsored “nationalists” attempted to kill Mannerheim several times during the Civil War, took over the country with German support in 1918 and immediately exiled Mannerheim who could only return after Germany withdrew. Mannerheim and the Tsarist aristocrats that he led during the Civil War were their biggest political opponents which is why our regime wants to forget them now that Finland wants to align with Germany and take a culturally anti-Russian stance.
It’s a grave insult to call the Vyborg criminals “Finnish nationalists” as they were not even Finnish; they were Germanic and many of them were not even Finnish citizens but Swedish and German far right volunteers (some of them later made careers as Nazis) and they also massacred non-Red ethnic Finns for purely racial reasons. Mannerheim was the one who shut down their involvement after the scandalous massacres; he was a very much needed opponent of Germanic ethnic chauvinism to protect ethnic Russians and ethnic Finns in a country with heavily Germanic elites.
Russia already debased ethnic Russian history in Finland after World War II when it allowed political pro-Nazis to get away with their crimes just as long as they agreed to chase Mannerheim and the other remnants of the imperial regime out of Finland. The debasement reached full extent under the Khrushchev era when the Soviet Union essentially installed the “reformed” pro-Nazi Urho Kekkonen as the President of Finland for two decades. This man who started his political career in Nazi Germany as a lobbyist trying to get ethnic Finns accepted in Nazi ideology and negotiated with Germans about clearing Slavs out of whatever territory pro-German Greater Finland conquers was glorified by the Soviet Union just because he agreed to lick Khrushchev’s boots.
I do know what happened here and it’s that the old Bolsheviks viewed Mannerheim and his team of aristocrats as potential competitors as originally they were: Mannerheim’s original plan in 1917 was to raise an army to support his friend Kornilov and then it became about taking Finland to the Russian Civil War on the White side, a quest in which he failed because he was ousted by the pro-German “nationalists” and could only return to Finland after Germany surrendered – by then Lenin had the forces to protect Petrograd.
This is why they tried to tarnish his reputation by attributing the crimes of political factions that were not under Mannerheim’s control to his faction. Meanwhile these few pro-Nazis in Finland were of no strategic importance to the Soviet government after Germany had been defeated so they decided to use the ones who agreed to turn coats. Thus, people who were actually responsible for events like the Vyborg massacre were not only pardoned but praised by Soviet propaganda while blame was put to the aristocrats who were mutual enemies of pro-German nationalists and communists.
I understand that Finland is a small country and few people outside of it understand the various factions at play. However in recent years we’ve been approached by various Russian ideologues (someone has been funding translations of Starikov, Dugin etc) and you must understand how weird it is for me to listen to some Russian patriot come here and explain to me how some pro-Nazi russophobe is a good guy of history while our history’s main russophile opponent of pro-Nazi nationalists and Germanists is a pro-Nazi nationalist Germanist bad guy.
This is my major gripe with Russia right now, it seems like a broken record where they just repeat old propaganda so now the propaganda doesn’t even have an aim. When Khrushchev and his propaganda team were inventing these Finlandization era myths that praised “reformed” pro-Nazis and blamed the evils of history on aristocrats they had a purpose in mind which was getting these people to work for them and purging Finland of the last bits of influence of imperial aristocracy. But now I meet these Russians who repeat the script with no awareness of why the script was written.
These arguments closely resembles leftist story that Lenin and Stalin were opposed to terror, but there was nothing they could do. Mannerheim may not have been the initiator of the murders, but beyond the slightest doubt he covered the killers, so that none of the killers has been punished ( http://mitra-books.com/uploads/attachments/lars-vesterlund-431.pdf ). This is sufficient for evaluation of the “Russophilia” of Mannerheim.
Propaganda nonsense , that the murder of children (children of “white” Russian) by troops of Mannerheim, “have been provoked by drunken Red Guards” I’m not going to comment. This is an exact replica of the leftist justification of the red terror
Huntsman carrying out murders considered themselves Finnish nationalists. And among those who was murdered were ethnic Germans.
It is rather strange to count Mannerheim “anti-German” politician:
“In 1934, in Berlin Mannerheim pretty close friends with Goering, a close ally of Hitler. These relations, he maintained a very long time. Went to East Prussia to hunt in the grounds of Goering. Goering during his long stay in Sweden, struck up acquaintance in the higher circles of the country, and in the castle of count von of Rosina found his sweetheart and future wife. This von Rosen (in 1918) gave the white army, Mannerheim first plane with a swastika on Board. This emblem by the order of Mannerheim entered the symbols and badges of the young Republic. Mannerheim and Goering was a common Swedish friends and acquaintances, their relationship cannot be called superficial and formal.”
Meri V. C. G. Mannerheim
Very interesting. Reminds me of of the Soviet story of Petliura as a raging antisemite (though to be fair, Petliura’s relationship to the troops who massacred Jews was not nearly as antagonistic as those of Mannerheim to the troops who massacred Russians).
The project you linked to appears to be some sort of leftist anti-Finnish one, created by a controversial guy whose ancestors had been persecuted by the Whites:
https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heikki_Ylikangas
You are Finnish? Is the wage structure any less broken there these days?
This is a powerful argument/s
It suggests his motives are personal rather than to pursue objective truth about events. Of course, this can be true of anybody.
The most important thing seems to be that his ideas are viewed as controversial and that he has academic detractors. His bio suggests that he is a leftist type, focused on trying to dirty the reputation of past heroes. The type that, if he were an American, he would be focused on documenting Washington’s or Jefferson cruelty towards slaves to the extent that his objectivity becomes questionable. His academic specialty is actually not in the topic we are discussing but in the law and legal history – another warning sign.
I’m not a Finn, Jaakko knows far more about this than I do, but wiki tends to provide a “standard” view of issues.
Thanks.
Now I see why you got the wrong answer.
P(there is one boy) = 1/2
But that is irrelevant.
P(there is at least 1 boy) = 3/4
The denominator to use in Bayes’ Theorem is 3/4, not 1/2.
The issue isn’t your “interpretation”. You made a mistake.
Mannerheim wasn’t a “Russian aristocrat”. He was an ethnic Swede of Swedish and German ancestry.
About the friendship of Mannerheim and Goering write and other historians
Mannerheim was also friends with many socialists, yet acted as an anti-socialist in politics. He even tried to contact Trotsky and to strike up a friendship with him with the ambition of creating a grand anti-Stalinist coalition of all ideologies. Trotsky rejected the idea rather rudely.
He had a lot of famous and controversial friends, for example Winston Churchill who declared war on Finland and then immediately sent Mannerheim a personal letter of apology; they remained in touch during the war which was scandalous in Finland. There’s not much evidence of his beliefs in his friends considering the extremely diverse set that he had.
There’s not much mystery about his feelings over the Nazi regime (or anything else) given that there are rather many Mannerheim biographers in Finland who have dug up his private letters to relatives and such. His initial response to Hitler’s rise was mixed: he didn’t like the ethnic chauvinism, he still mistrusted Germany as a power (given his experiences in 1917-1918) but he was elated that a Great Power was finally taking a strong anti-communist stance. His trip to Germany in 1934 turned his impressions much more negative and by then his letters to his relatives talk about how the national socialists have adopted all the terrible methods of communists.
This is a famous problem about which statisticians have written many papers. Ultimately, natural language, like English, is ambiguous, and there can be more than one reasonable way to translate it into a mathematical problem. I’m sorry if I am not explaining the issue clearly. You might try the Wikipedia article
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_or_Girl_paradox
Also, I like Peter Shor’s explanation here
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/15055/in-a-family-with-two-children-what-are-the-chances-if-one-of-the-children-is-a
which I copy:
“I think this question confuses a lot of people because there’s a lack of intuitive context — I’ll try to supply that.
Suppose there is a birthday party to which all of the girls (and none of the boys) in a small town are invited. If you run into a mother who has dropped off a kid at this birthday party and who has two children, the chance that she has two girls is 1/3. Why? 3/4 of the mothers with two children will have a daughter at the birthday party, the ones with two girls (1/4 of the total mothers with two children) and the ones with one girl and one boy (1/2 of the total mothers with two children). Out of these 3/4 of the mothers, 1/3 have two girls.
On the other hand, if the birthday party is only for fifth-grade girls, you get a different answer. Assuming there are no siblings who are both in the fifth grade, the answer in this case is 1/2. The child in fifth grade is a girl, but the other child has probability 1/2 of being a girl. Situations of this kind arise in real life much more commonly than situations of the other kind, so the answer of 1/3 is quite nonintuitive.”
The situation that I described above, in which you sample not from all families that have two children, but rather fix a given family with two children (for example, your neighbors), and then choose one of the two children randomly to determine “at least one is a boy” or “at least one is a girl” also gives the answer 1/2. Given that the problem is stated about “Mr. Smith”, you might think that Mr. Smith is meant to be an actual person with an actual family, for example your neighbor, and then you might reasonably interpret the statement this way.
Generally about political figures of the past there are different opinions. But there were two policies in respect of which in Russia there is complete unanimity. Hitler and Trotsky perceived as the akme of absolute evil (in this regard, in Russia the right unanimous with the left). Mannerheim is probably the only person who tried to make friends with both of them.
Trotsky, the master of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.
Stalin and Lenin still have supporters, but the man who won the Russian Civil War gets no respect. Maybe if he had had better people skills, he would have more admirers today. Maybe he would even have won his power struggle with Stalin.
These “Finnish nationalists” were not Finnish, did not speak Finnish, committed massacres of Finns and Slavs where they asked someone questions in Swedish and if they could not reply in Swedish they shot him/her and a lot of these people were volunteers from Sweden who had never even visited Finland before the Civil War.
You have a very curious idea of “Finnish nationalists”. I think, by the way, that inviting Swedish volunteers for the Civil War was a serious mistake as the kind of a person who actually volunteers to fight in a foreign Civil War is generally a dangerous political radical of some type. Mannerheim did correct that mistake and sent most of the Swedish volunteers home but not before the damage was done. However you are completely incorrect to portray ethnic Russians as unique victims here as these Germanic chauvinists were just as anti-Finnish as they were anti-Slavic.
These murderers passed through my hometown as well, left behind Finnish bodies and no one was ever punished. This is painful but it’s hardly Mannerheim’s fault – the country was in chaos with multiple militaries and paramilitaries operating on their own. It took years for the government to re-assert full control over the country as paramilitaries were still running around disregarding orders and doing whatever they pleased despite orders to stand down. Even lots of Red murderers escaped justice because there was no functioning local government to pursue them (which is one reason why White vigilante terror kept going).
Obviously, if you ask a different question, you might get a different answer.
The original question in Yudkowski’s post specified twins, at least one of which is a boy. Whether the oldest, or the youngest, or both are boys is not specified. The answer to the original question is 1/3.
I’m starting to suspect that Yudkowski is aware of this forum.
If even allying with this devil against the USSR was an option for them, Soviet opposition against Mannerheim and his Finland seems quite justified.
Here’s a great “sign of the times” piece from DW. When I was growing up in C20th Cold War Britain, the encouragement of children to snitch on family and friends for political crimes, and their exhortation to do so by propaganda news stories idolising the activities of the snitches and the rewards given to them, was widely portrayed as one of the more shocking facets of totalitarian societies – the unfree Nazi and Soviet societies from which we supposedly were fundamentally different.
Yet here it is in today’s Germany:
Germany: Anti-Semitism in classroom prompts student to report classmates
Doubtless openly declared enemies of free political speech such as iffen at this site will find such stories exciting and promising signs for the future in their own countries.
(I don’t present this as evidence of a uniquely German degradation, by the way. I have no illusions that this could not happen in today’s Britain, mutatis mutandis.)
I’m not on Twitter, and cannot see who liked what. I can see 1-1 likes for many Glossy tweets. Did Nina like those?
What’s missing from the piece is whether the thought criminals were shot outright, or if the authorities magnanimously granted them clemency and merely sent them to re-education camps..?
Doesn’t surprise me at all…I recently had a discussion with German lefties on an online forum (mostly not related to politics) in which I outed myself as an AfD sympathizer. I didn’t make any extreme statements imo (actually much more moderate than what I write here)…but the discussion ended with one of the lefties (a voter of DIE LINKE) replying with statements like “YOU DUMB NAZI AND CRIMINAL SHUT UP!”. More shocking than this childish outburst however was that several of the lefties apparently contacted a moderator and asked him to report me to police. He declined and just closed the thread…but that’s how it is in Germany today. Absolutely no concept of free speech among many, many people, and an expectation that the state should crack down hard on the “wrong” kind of speech, even if it doesn’t contain any incitement to violence or something of the sort. Germans have drawn completely the wrong lessons from their dictatorship experience in the 20th century and are as authoritarian and conformist as ever, and this mindset is actively encouraged by the establishment.
But as you wrote yourself, Britain is hardly any better (maybe even worse), despite its tradition of liberty. My father has been living in Germany for 40 years, but still goes to Britain for a few weeks every year; and even back in the early 2000s he had an altercation in his hometown (Preston in Lancashire) with some social worker type…ended with that woman shouting “I’ll report you!” (for wrong thought). Disgusting mindset, and it really does seem to have increased in recent decades. Dialoge is impossible with those zealous Pawlik Morozov-types.
Doubtless openly declared enemies of free political speech such as iffen
As you well know, I am not an enemy of free speech. My enemies are the ones who use “my” free speech in order to destroy it.
one of the more shocking facets of totalitarian societies – the unfree Nazi and Soviet societies from which we supposedly were fundamentally different.
Yet here it is in today’s Germany:
If you haven’t read it yet:
Ryszard Legutko’s The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies
a great read and apropos.
Won’t intense censorship potentially curb German leadership in innovation and research? Stress is documented to have negative correlation with creativity.
I doubt that such leadership even exists, Germany is basically still reaping the fruits of the innovation and development that happened in imperial Germany more than a century ago…no new industries have been established since then. And given the grotesque political mismanagement which is eroding Germany’s strengths on every level (lefties busily wrecking the school system, Merkel’s idiotic Energiewende driving up energy costs, importation of unassimilable aliens etc.), its future looks bleak anyway.
Mannerheim was merely allying with one demon against another. He clearly chose the lesser of two evils. By staying out of the Soviet Union, he spared Finland the decades of economic stagnation and political persecution and slaughter imposed upon the Baltic States by the Soviet system.