Transylvanian Morning.
I have been unable to follow most of the last week’s comments, and probably won’t catch up. But FWIW, I enjoyed the gearhead debates at Thorfinnsson’s Take on Tesla, the Dmitry vs. Polish Perspective debate on who was or was not in Israel, and reiner Tor’s instructions on cold showers.
Now that I am in Bucharest and have a good, reliable Internet connection, I will put up another Kholmogorov translation tomorrow. Hopefully this will suffice until regular poasting can resume on June 12.
Featured News
* Long awaited BAPbook is out!: Bronze Age Mindset is now a bestseller in Ancient Greek history.
Some say that this book, found in a safebox in the port area of Kowloon, was dictated, because Bronze Age Pervert refuses to learn what he calls “the low and plebeian art of writing.” It isn’t known how this book was transcribed. The contents are pure dynamite. He explains that you live in ant farm. That you are observed by the lords of lies, ritually probed. Ancient man had something you have lost: confidence in his instincts and strength, knowledge in his blood. BAP shows how the Bronze Age mindset can set you free from this Iron Prison and help you embark on the path of power. He talks about life, biology, hormones. He gives many examples from history, both ancient and modern. He shows the secrets of the detrimental robots, how they hide and fabricate. He helps you escape gynocracy and ascend to fresh mountain air.
- Julien Dehlez: Reflections on the London Conference on Intelligence (see also James Thompson’s take)
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Ron Unz: American Pravda: When Stalin Almost Conquered Europe.
Suffice to say I disagree with Rezun’s theory, and can also commend the comments by Thorfinnsson, Ivan K., and most of the ones by Arioch. Perhaps I will do a post on this eventually (Ron has urged me to in the past), but it would mostly just be a restatement of the “WHO PLANNED TO ATTACK WHOM, AND HOW?” chapter of Absolute War by Chris Bellamy.
Russia
- Moon of Alabama: The Babchenko Hoax Was Part Of A Corporate Raid. I had speculated this might be the case a day earlier, and I think MoA has basically proven this.
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Putin mumbled some things on the national Q&A. I didn’t even notice it was on until after the fact.
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The Ukraine is trying to appropriate Igor Sikorsky for its own. He actually identified as Russian, and indeed was a monarchist and a nationalist.
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Like meets like:
World
- Audacious Epigone
- White births as a percentage of total births by state (2017)… continue to go down
- Racial preferences are unpopular; Or why the Sailer Strategy is an electoral winner. Even a modest majority of Negroes opposite it… so why does it go on?
- Fred Reed takes exception to a comment I made on one of his posts. My reply here.
Science & Culture
* Heiner Rindermann, David Becker (2018) – FLynn-effect and economic growth: Do national increases in intelligence lead to increases in GDP?
• National historical changes in IQ were related to changes in GDP per capita.
• IQ growth is positively correlated to economic growth.
• The correlations are the largest for a 5 to 15 years time lag (r = .25 to .77).
• Preceding intelligence increases lead to later production and income increases.
• Control for wealth show catch-up and robust cognitive effects.
- Emil Kirkegaard: Nobel prize winners are very unlikely to be religious
- Portuguese regional politics & culture.
Southern Portugal much more commie than the North.
Saw plenty of hammer/sickle ads in the Algarve, much fewer in Lisbon, I assume none in Porto.
Also Salazar was much more popular (less unpopular, towards the end) in the north. https://t.co/n3EU08JwZO pic.twitter.com/rsfovynGVs— Anatoly Karlin (@powerfultakes) June 7, 2018
Powerful Takes
- [non-ironic] This comment by Kratos the Gluemaker is interesting, and appreciated. Also this one by ImmortalRationalist on why primitivism is a dead end.
I bet my man pulled that old “yeah, I’m actually Putin’s top advisor, Crimea was my idea” game on Southern and got her back to the khrushchovka quicker than you can say Dasein.
http://thenews.pl/1/12/Artykul/367323,Sweden-approves-contested-gas-pipeline-report
I am not surprised, nor am I particularly worried. I am probably in the minority of people who don’t care too much about NS2. Germany is the paymaster of Europe. It was obvious that it was going to get approved. It simply makes economic sense to Germany. Poland will likely stop using Russian gas by the early 2020s anyway, which isn’t exactly all that wise either, since Russian gas is quite cheap and Russia has been a reliable partner for us. But hey, gotta ramp up that red scare!
http://thenews.pl/1/12/Artykul/367146,Polish-unemployment-hits-28year-low
Meanwhile, our economy is continuing to do quite well. According to the eurostat figures, we now have one of the lowest unemployment rates:
https://i.imgur.com/N5ASlKj.jpg
But this map is deceiving. What actually matters is employment rates. This is how it looks like:
https://i.imgur.com/8LR9bYC.jpg
We’re in the bottom half for that one, though better than France for instance. We are improving rapidly and should probably reach the EU-28 median this year or next. Southern Spain, Southern Italy and much of Greece continues to be an absolute disaster. Portugal is doing quite well. If you look at the previous unemployment map, they also have better-than-EU average rates. What accounts for this Portuguese overperformance compared to the rest of the south?
http://thenews.pl/1/10/Artykul/367215,EU-officials-in-dispute-over-punitive-procedure-against-Poland-MEP
I haven’t seen this in other articles, but it sounds plausible. Selmayr is a close confidant to Juncker and Juncker himself has been very moderate in his statements compared to Timmermans, who seems to have an obsession with us. Selmayr is also German, and will take Merkel’s more nuanced stance into account. It has been Macron, out of the major European leaders, who has been most alarmist about us. But despite fawning media glory, Macron’s real influence in Europe – outside of his natural Southern European constituency – is limited. Even a weakened Merkel is stronger.
Overall, the entire process has been a protracted clownshow. Now we not only have Hungary’s promise to veto but we have the Baltic 3 as well. Juncker knows this, and given the Italian populist developments, he understands spending a lot of political captial in a fight where he won’t get anywhere is pointless.
The only thing left he needs is VIA Gra.
No excitement about the World Cup?
We’re guessing the team is too shit and after group stage, will be defeated in 1/8 stage by Portugal/Spain?
Canada is thisclose to legalising marijuana. I don’t see the problem. Alcohol is a deadlier drug. Banning alcohol didn’t work – though Counter-Currents disagrees – so why would weed continually being banned work better compared to its legalisation?
http://nationalpost.com/news/world/miss-america-eliminates-swimsuits-and-wont-judge-on-looks
What’s the point of beauty contests if you can’t judge the contestants on, well, their beauty?
Regarding AA – I don’t believe that most blacks don’t support it. I think they are just saying that. They used to vote for Republicans because Republicans were their patrons, giving them government jobs, etc. After the welfare state, Democrats became their patrons, and it was impossible to outbid them; since then, blacks have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats.
Blacks have even developed an almost instinctual dislike of Republicans, which is quite remarkable in its vehemence at an early age, in individuals who are, in general, otherwise very ignorant.
Another thing – it is quite difficult to understand how it is possible they got rid of civil service exams, unless blacks supported it.
Southern Portugal was the land of latifundias, and as a result, was always commie, especially the Alentejo region.
The population density is low and it does not have the demographic weight to move the country.
The northern peasants tended to own their own land and were more right wing even if poor.
Setubal was a bastion of communism – I don’t know why.
After the fall of Salazar, the communists tried to take over Portugal and it looked like the north (especially Viseu) would rise in armed rebellion.
Portugal also went through a massive trauma in the African wars of the 1960s and 1970s. One million white Portugese were expelled and Portugal had to find homes for them. Think of the trauma America suffered in Vietnam and multiply it by 100.
Incidentally, the USA played a not inconsiderable role in stirring up trouble in Angola making them de facto allies of Castro’s Cuba which committed tens of thousands of men to supporting Black Liberation movements like FRELIMO.
Didn’t realize Gretchen Carlson was a former winner – probably because she is old.
Always thought Miss America and Miss World were pretty boring. Except for the small variations in hair and skin color – the woman look exactly the same, and wear pretty much the same clothes. Meanwhile, personality doesn’t show on TV. The questions are stupid and the results seem arbitrary.
Maybe, the idea of a beauty contest works a lot better on a local level, but it just becomes globalized and tepid, on the level of the whole US or greater.
Perhaps the problem lies in the way it is phrased? Like the way some Americans have this talking-point about ‘equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome’ when really both sides end up having similar policy proposals.
Here is the plan of the Soviet General staff for the construction of a line of fortifications near Moscow (for defense against German troops). The plan was signed on may 17, 41. Мore details in Russian here https://gistory.livejournal.com/4280.html
https://c.radikal.ru/c37/1806/47/50c4acf2a046.jpg
https://a.radikal.ru/a25/1806/70/61388bbff82f.jpg
https://d.radikal.ru/d13/1806/87/815a1095a2b4.jpg
These lines of fortifications did not have time to build – the Germans invaded. But as you can see the USSR was preparing for a defensive war.
I’m curious what people make of Unz’s article about David Irving, or about David Irving himself.
Sorry to AK if this attracts his one banned group of commenters. There are a bunch of them over at Unz’s thread, but I’d like to hear the opinions of the more reasonable people from AK’s readers, particularly German_reader and Reiner Tor.
I’ve only skimmed through the article about David Irving (same for the one about Suvorov’s thesis, that kind of WW2 revisionism doesn’t interest me much). Have never read something by David Irving and Unz’s article hasn’t persuaded me to do so. My impression of him is the “standard” one, that is someone whose historical writing is influenced to such a degree by a specific agenda that there’s probably not much point in engaging with it.
In short yes.
They are no longer banned, I have dropped all bans nearly a year ago. Low quality comments are now just hidden under the MORE tag. Funnily enough, nobody seems to complain about that, probably because they subconsciously agree that my assessment is correct.
Marijuana is fine but unfortunately leads to leftism so all users and distributors need to be executed.
Alcoholics tend to become melancholic artists or wife beaters in grease-stained wifebeaters. This promotes culture and patriarchy, respectively, so alcohol’s cool.
Cocaine is based as fuck and needs to be legalized ASAP.
Dugin’s body looks far too small for his head. Truly big-brained.
The world cup is starting soon, in your own land. Even if you are completed jaded with such things, you still need to pretend to show some form of excitement and interest in it.
It is just football.
Expensive football.
https://imgur.com/38FMU5V.jpg
Lauren Southern is doing God’s work.
https://i.imgur.com/GeammBz.jpg
There is more than enough endless arguing back and forth about WW2. You are hardcore gamer, why not review this game
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1662858658/barbarossa-anime-card-game-from-japan/description
for.. ehmm… historical accuracy?
More likely they couldn’t give too much of a ****.
Cyrillic is not my strong point, is that supposed to be all the military that is going to guard the world cup?
Why don’t you say it straight what you are trying to say, discussing jews is not allowed and anyone who does is considered “unreasonable”.
Military protection for Stadium “Fisht” in Sochi.
Frankly I think the money would be better spent buying capital equipment or trying to prevent Russian satellites from crashing all the time.
Just the ones who guard Sochi and its stadion.
There are more units elsewhere.
Zenit Stadion
https://abload.de/img/34535204_200965256262dfu70.jpg
Black Sea Fleet was reinforced by 3 small missile ships with cruise missiles recently in order to deter Ukrops.
To be honest, I still haven’t figured out the meaning of the title. The closest I got was Transylvanian + Siberian (?).
Dude, relax. We discuss Jews here all the time.
“My impression of him is the “standard” one.”
Mine as well, which is why I was surprised that Unz takes an interest him.
“that kind of WW2 revisionism doesn’t interest me much”
Let me pose the problem differently:
Do you think the standard story about WW2 is more or less correct, or are there
some important and non-standard points that should be made?
You can criticise Jews without thinking that the Nazis did nothing wrong with relation to any population
Hitler vs Stalin
I think Hitler was a Napoleon type so any logical need to attack the Bolsheviks before they attacked first would be a rationalization for what he wanted ot do anyway rather than a reason for doing it however…
despite that i think the internal logic is correct, if the Germans hadn’t started it then the Soviets would have done so eventually (especially if Germany hadn’t re-armed).
The tragedy from my point of view is if Hitler had been more anti-Bolshevik than Napoleonic he might have won imo i.e. by (genuinely) treating the invasion as a liberation and recruiting more soldiers along the way from Poland, Ukraine, Russia etc instead of creating hostile partisans.
(Although even better would have been the western powers taking out the Bolsheviks during the civil war.)
Despite it all I do wonder if, had the Germans not attacked and Stalin hadn’t needed to re-Russify the soviet union to get people to fight, would the Russian people still exist as a people or would they have been bred with central Asians (as the early Bolsheviks seem to have had the same multicult ideals as modern PC).
There are several standard WWII histories. The standard history of the WWII in Russia is different from the standard history of the WWII in the US.
Counter-Currents has some articles arguing for that, which I think shows some maturity given how easy it is to slip Hitler Did Nothing Wrong mode for White Nationalists (I would link it but I think their website dislikes my VPN).
I suspect that the long-term implementation of multicultural ideology without even the moderate de-korenization and defenestration of people like Sultan-Galiev that occurred later on would rather have led to massive ethnic tensions within the Soviet Union and more acrimony between Slavs and Central Asians (as well as everyone else).
You are probably quite right. In advertisements, they never use AA, but always “equal opportunity.”
A lot of companies are probably motivated by lawfare, but that still needs a certain level of political approval.
Why? Unz is clearly some sort of contrarian who thinks non-mainstream positions worthy of special attention. He also seems to have some sort of issue with America’s Jewish population (a “self-hating Jew” professional anti-antisemites would claim), so issues that are especially offensive to Jewish sensibilities seem to be of special interest to him. So I don’t think his positive evaluation of David Irving is that surprising.
The fundamental points of the established narrative are all basically correct imo (e.g. Nazi Germany started an aggressive, unjustified war in 1939, the war against the Soviet Union wasn’t merely a preemptive strike, but a racial war of conquest and extermination, the Holocaust did happen). I don’t see much point in revisionism which tries to claim this is all just lies, propaganda etc.
That being said, there may be grounds for revisionism in some specific questions (at the risk of offending our esteemed host AK: there are elements of the “27 million Soviet dead” figure that at first glance seem dubious me; if I understand correctly, it is claimed that 2 million Soviet forced labourers died in Germany. I find that number very difficult to believe).
More generally, I do have very serious issues with the politics of remembrance as they are today, especially in Germany itself. I don’t think though revisionism of the David Irving kind can play any constructive role here.
Btw, I found it quite funny how you classified reiner tor and me as belonging to the “more reasonable” commenters here…sounded a bit like “You guys are still extremist nutcases, but you’re sort of the moderate Nazis around here” 🙂
The true victims of Naziphobia are always the moderate Nazis just trying to live their lives.
More seriously, while I would agree that the fundamental points so to say are correct, there seems to be a lack of context regarding a lot of things about the war.
Examples?
It begins…
“Austria is closing seven mosques and could expel dozens of imams from the country, the government has announced.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2018/06/austria-shut-7-mosques-expel-dozens-imams-180608074940766.html
And I’ll take my responses off the air…
Peace.
Is Ramadan over? If it is, I suppose I should say welcome back Talha.
More realistic number-20 million (according to new estimates). But in “standard story about WW2 “, it doesn’t change anything.
Yes, that’s true, it doesn’t change really anything about the fundamental issues.
I know there is such a domestic audience and a foreign one, but Turkey should really steer clear of even hinting at Nazism. It doesn’t reflect well on them at all, to conjure up old history about ethnic cleansing, esp. to have it as a knee-jerk reaction and to even call the Dutch “Nazis.”
Ditto, for “Anti-Islam.” How many Christians are there in Turkey now? Not including tourists, is it more than I can count on my hand? And what happened to them? No, it does not reflect well on them at all – and they should steer clear.
Their strategy of conquest should have instead been about the make-believe benefits of an economic union with Turkey, but it is probably too late for that now. People are wise to their plans.
Like the fact that I tend to hear the Holocaust referred to as the genocide committed by the Nazis, singular tense primarily used. While tragic, no part of Jewish suffering was unique.
From the point of their national interest Britain and France probably shouldn’t have declared war on Germany in 1939.
Roosevelt was trying to provoke America into war and, at least with Japan, was not necessary for the US.
The difficult situation that the Vichy government was put in.
The Eastern Front, while the most bloody part, was not some zerg-rush by asiatic Russians.
The lack of mention of what exactly would have happened to most of the slavic population of Europe if Germany had won.
These are the one from the top of my head.
Admittedly, some/mainly parts of this is just frustration at clueless normies.
Putler selling out the country.
https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1005027324851453952
“Why? Unz is clearly some sort of contrarian who thinks non-mainstream positions worthy of special attention.”
He compared David Irving to E.O. Wilson. The latter is a serious scientist who has been cruelly attacked by left-wing nutjobs, while the former appears to be a right-wing nutjob. To me, it shows very
poor judgement to paint the two with the same brush just to score some points against your outgroup.
“More generally, I do have very serious issues with the politics of remembrance as they are today, especially in Germany itself.”
Agreed.
“You guys are still extremist nutcases, but you’re sort of the moderate Nazis around here”
Well, I could have asked for the opinion of our very own future POTUS concerning the H-man.
Seriously, though, I think you and reiner tor are both well read and have a respect for the facts. I even share some of your concerns (for example about immigration of unassimilable groups and the madness of the poz). But I can’t manage to muster the same kind of outrage over it all. Probably because I’m happily busy raising my own family in a nice little town full of other nice happy families, so I don’t feel it personally.
I guess that makes me the moderate hippie around here.
Nope, just popping in; I thought that article would be an interesting topic regarding limits of religious/political speech in a modern secular state and how cost/benefits are taken into consideration.
I might pop in again, but probably not until next weekend.
Peace.
I don’t know, Jews did occupy a special place in the Nazi world view, as absolutely evil archenemy. What other group was to be completely physically destroyed? A Nazi victory would obviously have been pretty bad for Slavs, but Nazi views about them seem more fluid and pragmatic to me (e.g. at least some part of Poles and Czechs were considered as suitable for Germanization), whereas policies towards Jews remained set on total extermination right until the end.
The US had been a Pacific power since at least the Spanish-American war, so preventing the creation of an autarkic Japanese empire there could be seen as a legitimate American national interest.
Is that really still a common view? I can’t recall ever having encountered it quite like that (at least most people seem to be somewhat aware of the quality of Soviet weapons and Soviet industrial output).
Trump proposed Russia be readmitted to G7 (G8).
Unz’ judgement could be faulted on many issues, imo he does take his contrarianism too far at times. The establishment is rotten to the core, but that doesn’t mean every anti-establishment view is correct or worthy of serious consideration.
That being said, I’m grateful that he’s provided this fantastic site with its great commenting system for us.
The only complete book I have read by Irving was his account of the Nuremberg trials, which seemed to me to be extraordinarily well researched and not unduly affected by his biases. I learned a lot from it that wasn’t to be found in more conventional accounts.
http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Nuremberg/
I wonder if reiner Tor has read his book on the Hungarian uprising, and if so would be interested in his observations.
http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Uprising/index.html
You do not know much about David Irving and his work, do you? He is a very good historian. He got to sources and archives before anybody. He was respected na reviewed in MSM by all major historians. His books were selling well also because we writes very well. And he was first to show more German point of view and go away from the cartoonish history based on WWII propaganda and tabloid press. Mostly he stayed away from Holocaust issues. He was making a lot of money. This made him cocky. He was well respected until the point when it was decided that he had to be brought down. This point possibly was his participation in Zundel trial which was a severe defat for the official version of Holocaust. He could have lasted longer on diminished earnings as publishers began to refuse to publish him but he was pushed and pushed until he decided to sue Deborah Lipstadt. This was his greatest mistake, I think. Huge resources were made available to Lipstadt defense team. He lost and he was ruined.
We all should be grateful that David Irving decided to become a historian.
I happened to be in Lisbon on the day of Alvaro Cunhal’s funeral.
There must have been, at least, a few hundred thousand people lining the route. The city was covered in red flags.
I eagerly await Ron Unz’s next essay: The Employment of Prussic Acid in Delousing Chambers. 🙂
Big Red Scary is unduly harsh on Irving, but he’s right that Irving shouldn’t be compared to E.O. Wilson.
Irving is undoubtedly a serious historian though, and everyone thought so until he started writing things they didn’t like about the Holocaust. I don’t know enough about WWII history to give a good assesment of his work, but many of the things identified by Richard Evans, the most hostile possible critic, seem to be minor, certainly I didn’t notice anything strikingly crazy or dishonest. It sounds to me like you’ve just swallowed the smears against him unthinkingly, like someone who hadn’t read up on it might do on any of the race realists who were respectable academics right up until they said something that Jews didn’t like. But by all means correct me if you have a good reason to think that he’s not a serious historian.
Fine by me either way, Mike.
I’ll throw one out: Hitler’s military competence is seriously underrated.
It was certainly higher than Stalin’s (contra Kholmogorov and established opinion). Fortunately, Stalin started intervening a lot less after the first half-year.
I also consider that the USSR only very narrowly escaped defeat in 1941-42. This is not an uncommon view in the West (e.g. Mark Harrison, also Overy IIRC), but it is near heretical in Russia.
Where did you get this information? Historians (known to me ) claim is quite different (Stalin directed the war from 41 to 45). And Stalin proved to be a competent military leader.
Ukrainian nationalists should probably be financing Dugin – no greater Russophobia than the dream of integrating us into some Asian, socialist, Christian-Islamic-Mongol amalgamation horror.
But the joke is on them – since the entire man is a form of ‘standup comedy’.
“But by all means correct me if you have a good reason to think that he’s not a serious historian.”
I was referring to his activism rather than to his books. I asked for the opinions of others in good faith, and am willing to update my own opinion as I gather further information. But I don’t care much either way.
Stalin was forever demanding the Red Army snap up more than it could handle, which time and time again led to encirclements.
This was absolutely catastrophic in 1941.
Fortunately, it became less of an issue later on, as (1) Stalin easened up on his demands to push further than Soviet logistics could handle, and (2) the Red Army itself improved.
Even so, this was still an issue even in 1943, e.g. the premature capture of Kharkov right after Stalingrad, which led to yet another envelopment and bad defeat.
Hitler pushed for the correct plan against France in 1940, avoiding a war of attrition that Germany was not well-placed to win. He also insisted against a retreat after the Battle of Moscow in late 1941, which was also the correct decision and one that avoided the possible collapse of Army Group Center. In fairness, the quality of his decisions declined afterwards, but having failed to win in 1941-42, Germany was not going to win period, so this was perhaps irrelevant anyway.
I think the professional historians understand most things in this are. Where he makes mistakes, where he is totally suicidal, but where also his intuition is accurate, and where he is impressive – with obsessional knowledge of every tank, etc.
The problem is it’s also a lot like going to the casino and having thousands of spins on wheel.
99.999 +% of us are never ordering armies from our desks (never even having a single spin on the wheel), so it’s quite difficult to judge whether he was just the lunatic/audacious/reckless idiot who is sometimes lucky, or whether this game he was playing was actually a difficult one and his moves were following some subtle but accurate intuition. I hypothesize a lot of his advantage was that military technology and format of this historical era was one which rewards particularly lunatic/audacious/reckless behaviour, and which punished cautious/indecisive/non-audacious and slowness above everything.
It’s clearly a fantasy. If you mean the German encirclement of Kiev in 41, then to keep Kiev – it was the requirement of Marshal Shaposhnikov (who was a professional military of the tsarist era). But here Budenny (it became known recently) offered to withdraw troops from Kiev. Similarly, Kharkiv 43-the offensive was the initiative of General Vatutin (and the General staff objected to this). Similarly, Stalingrad-many Generals categorically opposed the offensive (the plan of offensive was proposed by other generals), arguing that it is push further than Soviet logistics could handle and will end in a disaster for the red army. But here Stalin pushed for the correct plan (against these Generals who opposed the offensive). That is the story about bad Stalin/good generals is complete, absolute nonsense.
Obviously behind the marijuana legalization push is profit and states are seduced into legalization by prospects of large revenues. But one should not overlook the fact that Israel marijuana industry plays a significant role in this process and one should not discount a possibility that lobbing by The Lobby is behind successes of changing attitudes in media coverage and the subsequent legalizations. The foot in the door was the medical cannabis. On the Right as usual libertarians were assignee duo play the role of the useful idiots.
If we scrutinized the gambling industry we would find similar connections to Israel via South Africa where the beta version of Casinos on Indian Reservation was invented and tested. It was done on Bantustans. You know Sun City. Anybody remember Jack Abramoff:
I connect gambling and marijuana here because they both have negative impact on the health of society.
Then obviously there is a vast Security and Surveillance Industry where Israel is a real superpower. An hour of googling would show you amazing world network. At some point I was hoping that somebody like James Bamford who exposed Israeli firms connection to NSA data collection in telecommunication would write a book showing the true size of Israeli security industry.
I quibble with this. People have a tendency to view World War 2 in naturalistic terms in which the “tide” inevitably “turned” with Stalingrad and El Alamein.
In light of continually increasing output of German armaments after Stalingrad, this seems unlikely.
Some better decision making and good luck and perhaps the Germans could’ve stalemated the war.
A series of critical errors were made by the Germans in 1943:
• Throwing away the Eastern Front’s mobile reserves on Kursk
• Sacrificing Army Group Africa (loss was as disastrous as Stalingrad, but gained nothing unlike the sacrifice of the Sixth Army)
• Inadequate response to the Combined Bombing Offensive
Errors continued into 1944, but by that point in time it seems like the H-man was actually crazy.
I have less of a problem with viewing the Pacific War in naturalistic terms owing to Japan’s gross deficiencies in everything other than courage.
I agree that Germany might have still been able to stalemate in 1943.
However, it is worth noting that Germany would now be in an unenviable position – no strategic depth due to the failure to conquer the USSR, naval constriction as in WW1 with associated food/hunger problems, and the Manhattan Project was not going to just go away.
The last point is I think important. The US would have had hundreds of bombs by the late 1940s – thousands by the early 1950s – and massive bomber forces to deliver them (one B-29 was getting produced every 90 minutes by 1944). It would have been able to start a democidal attrition campaign against Germany. Germany was years behind in developing nukes, it had no heavy bomber, and V2 rockets would have been unable to deliver such a heavy payload anyway.
Ok, I’m guessing a guy with the last name Mueller going after Israel ain’t gonna go over well.
The English Channel to the Donets Basin is a considerable amount of depth.
The Germans suffered no hunger problems during WW2, that was a problem for their unfortunate conquests (whom they even guilted the Allies into feeding, as in Greece).
Can’t argue on the Manhattan Project, however. Even if the Germans had somehow overrun Britain this would’ve been a serious problem as the B-36 (or, hypothetically, the XB-35) could reach Berlin from the United States.
This, however, was a problem from the very day America entered the war. Or perhaps even earlier.
V-2s couldn’t reach America to begin with, but the A9/A10 America Rocket could. First flight was scheduled for 1946, the same year the B-36 first flew. Unsure what the planned payload was, obviously an issue with early a-bombs (that the Germans didn’t even have to begin with).
There were also long-range bomber designs on the drawing board. The prop-driven America Bomber designs were nothing much to write home about, but the turbojet flying wing proposals from Horten and Arado were impressive.
Interesting alternate delivery proposal for hypothetical Nazi bomb: u-boat comparable to Russia’s alleged news tsunami doomsday drone. I don’t know that the Germans ever considered this, but there were discussions about launching V weapons from u-boats.
Well, I’ve always said that I enjoy Dugin as a character. I like seeing him pop up in unexpected places or paired off with other big names, like his Infowars appearances. The problem is the people who take it all seriously, and there are a lot of otherwise intelligent people who unfortunately do. The idea that Eurasianism is the Russian conservative tradition is pretty much ubiquitous in right-wing circles these days. I’ve even met American-born Orthodox who seemed to be under the delusion he’s a theologian. To go from being a marginal figure in your own country to getting this kind of reputation internationally in a few years without actually doing anything is the sort of luck you only hear about in old stories.
#1 and #2 – good points.
Though yes, nuclear issue seems intractable.
PS. I have speculated that Status-6’s purpose – if it’s more than just fluff – may not be what it is stated to be:
This is partly why I don’t understand missile-phobia. There is so much talk about NK missiles being able to reach California or Hawaii or some such, but it is pretty idiotic – bombers and missiles are not needed. All you need is the warhead, and a small ship or midget submarine to slip into the harbor. Probably not the best delivery mechanism possible, but it would still cause sufficient chaos in any number of places – if one had the (crazy) mind to do it.
Müller may regret that.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DfF7_tFWkAMYlfA.jpg
Common luck of fraudsters, tricksters, ponzi scheme creators, etc.
It’s already a miracle he could get a top job as a lecturer, considering his low education level (e.g. claiming he speaks all these foreign languages, which he can hardly speak a word of).
Yeah, that’s about as “conclusive” as all Rezun’s evidence to the contrary.
Which is to say, not all that much.
His interest re-interested me in the topic of Irving and Rezun, I would trust Unz’s judgement more than most columnists here (admittedly a mostly low bar, but still). Irving himself seems a somewhat dubious figure, but I feel this way more because of his hyperbolic Cold War red-baiting in the style of Yuri Bezmenov than anything else.
But there are other things too make me doubt the standard narrative, for instance R.J.P Taylor historiography of WWII has been almost completely forgotten since the Holocaust became a secular religion. My gut feeling is that the 6 million number is at least greatly exaggerated, seeing as how even Armenians have pulled ridiculous figures as high as 2.5 million in our own genocide. The problem is the association ‘denial’ has with other positions, I doubt the holocaust happened but I don’t particularly care about Israel or Jews either.
I expected better of you than to pre-judge someone before reading their work. I was once so milquetoast that I dismissed Norman Finkelstein without actually reading him, to my later regret. Likewise I had mildly positive opinion of Solzhenitsyn until I actually took time to read his books.
I’ve never been exactly sure of his backround. I’ve heard claims that he’s a Sephardi Jew of some sort, but I’ve never see any evidence of statement of his own to corroborate it. The only common theme I see is that Jews in general tend to exaggerate the impact of their race on history, whether positive or negative.
groan
This idea of Stalin as a ‘grey smear’, a dull and incompetent bureaucrat who rose through stealth is a smear by Trotsky that has been Western canon ever since. Butthurt Trotskyites and liberasts still push this narrative in spite of the obvious facts about his life since childhood. He was always an exceptional talent, was greatly feared by Lenin in private, and would have played a significant role in history whether Nicholas II ran Russia into a ditch or not.
I think even mainstream historians nowadays cite somewhat lower numbers of over 5 million, but significantly below 6 million. But I don’t see how one can doubt that several millions of Jews were killed by the Nazis.
I don’t. More to the point, my grandfather who was with a Luftwaffe logistics unit or something of the sort in Belarus during the war didn’t have any doubts. He had seen and heard enough there to think that the extermination camps and all that were real. And he was hardly exceptional in that. So I don’t really understand Holocaust revisionists.
While I can’t speak with absolute certainty I suspect gypsies would also have been completely eradicated.
There is also the case that many part-Jews (or fake part-Jews) managed to get a pass from the German authorities (some even serving in the Wehrmacht), which I think is somewhat comparable to the plans for Germanised Slavs (which was often based on real or false ideas of ‘Aryan’ ancestry).
Alright, that might be a fair point, but I don’t like this American victim attitude where Japan attacked Pearl Harbour for no reason (although Japan was partly to blame as well).
I don’t know much about their opinions about Soviet weapons or industrial output but generally people I have talked to have a skewed view of the death ratios of the German and Soviet soldiers.
Granted I don’t really talk about WWII to the depth that we do here that often so my sample rate is not that large, perhaps if I talked to more people I would hear a different view, but the ones I have talked to were quite mainstream in their political views.
Maybe. But Nazi policy towards gypsies seems to be somewhat of a controversial subject; gypsy lobbyists and their academic allies have an obvious interest in claiming that the Nazis were just as genocidal towards gypsies as towards Jews, whereas some Jews and their gentile allies claim this detracts from the “uniqueness” of the Jewish Holocaust. Even the numbers of gypsies killed seem to be uncertain (it was certainly quite a lot, but there doesn’t seem to be a universal consensus for the 500 000 often claimed). Tbh I don’t care enough about the issue to find out more about it.
Well, there was the American oil embargo, but I don’t think Americans should be faulted for disapproving of Japan’s war in China.
Is Pearl Harbor really that important in the US today? My superficial impression is that the Pacific war isn’t emphasized much today in US views of WW2, since it’s seen as somewhat politically incorrect.
So it’s true, he’s just a Russian pawn. Stinking commies.
(2) the Red Army itself improved.
Thank the Good Lord for Trotsky!
So I don’t really understand Holocaust revisionists.
And I don’t understand how you can write this.
The Jooz got to him.
Leaving aside the issue of the ABCD line, I think the Hull Note (https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Hull_note) is too vague in how it defines Chinese territory. If Manchuria is not considered Chinese then the Hull Note might have been acceptable, but if Manchuria is considered Chinese then I can understand why Japan would consider that a hostile declaration.
From reading American history books, articles and newspapers which talk about the Pacific War I get a very schizophrenic impression:
On one hand the Japanese Empire is portrayed very negatively. On the other hand there is a significant emotional investment in the issue of the internment of Japanese emigrants.*
I don’t know how much the Pacific War is emphasised by ordinary Americans but it is definitely brought up by newspapers during anniversaries of Pearl Harbour.
*I wonder a bit what was going on in the minds of the American authorities who made the decision. Why intern only half of the Japanese resident population? And why the people living on the West Coast and not the people living in Hawaii instead, which was much more a frontline state?
The Japanese in Hawaii were considered so essential to the operation of the Hawaiian economy that internment was impractical. Hawaii was however under martial law for the entire war.
I didn’t know that, that makes more sense.
Don’t you live in Japan as an Evil Kremlin Agent? You’re fairly well insulated from basically any aspect of the insanity.
Russia’s reaction to Trump wanting them back in the G8 was ill thought out IMO… a thanks but no thanks would have been better. Overly blustering about how you don’t want back in embarrasses Trump which will make him angry.
On the other hand, haven’t American siloviki been able to manipulate Trump into ordering anti-Russian actions (harsher sanctions, Syria, etc.) even at times when both Trump and the Russian government had expressed desires for better relations – so how much does Trump’s desires actually determine the US’ policy towards Russia?
Don’t worry dear tovarishch, our cherished rainbow-coloured American chekists will ensure that the fight for progress and the dawn of a new day will forever continue, no matter how long the march, no matter how arduous.
Don’t worry dear tovarishch, our brave American chekists will forever stay vigilant and protect our tolerant and progressive people’s democracy against the unceasing deprivations and assaults by the reactionary prison of nations whose long hand seeks relentlessly to spread its cancer across the vast oceans.
Don’t worry dear tovarishch, our fraternity of peoples, our ever-stalwart and ever-watching people joined together in an evermore perfect union will not give in to the provocations of the foreign regressive autocratic imperialist forces which threaten our liberal democratic society.
Don’t worry dear tovarishch, soon our enemies shall be thrown into the ashheap of history and all the peoples of the world shall be liberated under one flag in all fraternity after our victory over history itself.
They are just being consistent.
https://twitter.com/LudWitt/status/1005228458069364736
Central Bucharest is not, of course, the most representative sample, but there were at least 2,000 people here.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1005493720215584769
The club hasn’t been useful since it was the G6.
I don’t understand why Canada is allowed to participate, let alone host the event. Indeed, I don’t understand why Canada is allowed to exist at all.
And yes, now with the rise of China it has become a complete farce.
Eh, whatever.
Russia showing any signs of interest at this stage would be a slap in the face to China, the closest thing we have to an ally.
I don’t trust Mr. Unz’s judgment on Rezun. Rezun is very persuasive but when I looked at the arguments Mr. Unz recapitulated they didn’t seem all that impressive; in fact they looked like something someone reaching for specious evidence would come up with.
And my greater problem is that I don’t doubt that Stalin was at least considering the notion of offensive war against Germany, but to launch it just then (summer 1941) would have been crazy.
Irving seems interesting. His work is clearly biased, but the best historians have a bias. It gives them an edge to bite into the subject with. What I’ve read of him is good, but that is only a few chapters at random.
I trust Mr. Unz’s judgment at least enough to think seriously about stuff he recommends rather than dismissing it out of hand.
GAY-cuckserative American meddling in Germany
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/angela-merkel-is-no-longer-the-queen-of-europe-a-1211950.html
Homintern.
Of course someone like Spahn would be great for American interests, safely Atlanticist.
As much as I hate Merkel and the Social Democrats, I actually would welcome it if this Grenell character was declared persona non grata and kicked out of Germany.
Confirms me in my view that Trump and his people are just Bush 2.0, and that AfD is the only way to go.
Charming.
PP, do you have any thoughts on this:
Poland 600%
Latvia 100%
France 85%
Netherlands 85%
Norway 81%
Denmark 77%
Romania 75%
Turkey 68%
Bulgaria 58%
Finland 53%
Greece 51%
Belgium 50%
Russia 44%
Slovakia 43%
Croatia 43%
Hungary 40%
Germany 38%
It’s a ranking of women’s “far-right” vote as a percentage of men’s. Poland is a clear outlier. I assumed it was because of religious/cultural conservatism among Polish women. Another commenter said it’s just “noise.” What say you?
Here’s a link to the thread.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/latest-party-to-go-far-right-on-immigration-denmarks-social-democrats/
America must deal with Canada and end the America’s Canadian annoyance once and for all!
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1005586152076689408
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1005586562959093760
I’m an American living in Russia, which is a surprisingly sane place given its history and the residual тараканы. We’ll see how long it lasts.
Although a good Orthodox Christian and traditional family man, I am also an old school liberal: I can tolerate all kinds of madness so long as I can live my own life free of persecution. What worries me is how illiberal the madness has become.
Man, what I’d give to see this headline:
US sanctions Canada, explains ‘We can’t trade with faggy nations.’
Fuck. Has it really gotten to this point? When I left gays couldn’t walk on the streets.
Jewish groups back calls for Tory Islamophobia inquiry in solidarity with Muslim leaders
https://www.rt.com/uk/429002-jewish-groups-tory-islamophobia/
Gratefulness is an emotion only fit for mere mortals.
I think I spent a lot of my life trying to just avoid the crazy and figuring that sanity would just naturally prevail in the end. Talk about being wrong. Although its not directly related to me, I think Gamersgate was very much a watershed moment in that it was no longer even possible just to do fun things without the nutcases invading.
Russian schools should discourage chess clubs and promote weight lifting clubs. The Bronze Age will rise again!
That’s very interesting, Rosie, I skimmed through the comment thread you posted. Some initial thoughts.
The party selected. I see now that the party was League of Polish Families, which is not one of the main far-right groupings. You can think of it as a nationalist version of Christian Democrats(CDU in Germany). Parties which are pro-family tend to have very strong policies for women, given that women are seen as the primary party in child-bearing and raising the kids. So my guess is that while Polish women overall are underrepresented than Polish men, they are probably disproportionately supporting parties like that.
That said, there are more and more women joining, especially younger women. One of the main organisers of last year’s independence march (100K people in Warsaw) was a women in her late 20s. Women are held in high esteem in Poland, and have traditionally had a very strong say in the household. I read somewhere that we have the highest amount of women as a share of senior executives (which is more important than just being a board member, since senior execs have real power) in all of the OECD. Curiously, Russia also ranked quite high. I can’t compare with how it was 10-15 years ago as I was just a child then, but people who are older in the movement tell me there’s been a strong rebalancing of the genders, which is ultimately a good thing. I don’t buy the white sharia nonsense.
P.S.
That comment was written by snorlax and I can already shoot it down. PO, the main opposition party and often cast as “center-right” are in fact neoliberals and they have openly stated they want a multicultural Poland. PiS is not a nationalist party in a true sense either, since they still buy the civic nationalist framework. PSL, the farmer’s party, are just useful idiots to the neoliberals. And then we have SLD (social democrats) which were voted out in the last election but will almost certainly be making a comeback in the next parliament. You can already guess their position. Poland isn’t in such a good position as people claim, and that is true for all V4 countries.
It’s true that Poland’s immigration position as of now is close to that of FN in France, but FN is a civic nationalist party, too. That’s why I am not supporting PiS. It’s also why I am discouraging support for parties like AfD, FN, SD etc whenever I meet nationalists abroad. It’s a false opposition, since they just want to slow things down, but not fundamentally change anything of importance.
P.P.S.
Some of the parties in the list cannot be compared. For instance, the party they chose for Norway is the “Progress Party”, or Fremskrittspartiet(abbreviated as ‘FrP’ in Norway). It is a very mild party whose immigration minister resigned a few months ago after she said she didn’t want Norway to be turned into Sweden. The firestorm that ensued ended her career in large part because nobody in the leadership cadre had the guts and the spine to stand by her, so she was abandoned. Very based party.
By contrast, League of Polish families is a far more radical party, but as I noted, it is also a very religious/pro-family one, which would explain why many women support it. I’d still take the League of Polish families as a political model over FrP and similar parties.
Ukraine comes dead last out of eight in Strong Europe Tank Challenge 2018.
http://www.mil.gov.ua/news/2018/06/09/strong-europe-tank-challenge-2018-final/
Germanics dominate as usual: Germany #1, Austria #3. Sweden is #2.
I wonder how Russia would do in this competition. Ukraine’s performance is a data point, but they really are probably much worse trained than the others. This is encouraging, in that Ukraine’s military recuperation after 2014 may be more modest than I generally assume.
Interesting that the overall results cannot be found anywhere, only the top three.
How did you try to avoid it in the first place? You live in the US, right? Although I fortunately no longer have to suffer the inanities of ultra-liberals, when I lived in the more pozzed parts of Western Europe it constantly felt like being a fish surrounded by polluted water for me.
According to this (I don’t know how reliable), Israeli F-35s flew above Iran and the S-300 didn’t notice them. Iran suspects (or not – might be a lie) that Russia cooperated with Israel and gave away information about the radar. The latter doesn’t sound very plausible to me.
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/middle-east/iran-news/khamenei-fires-air-force-chief-over-israeli-f-35-deep-penetration-of-irans-sky/2018/06/09/
The Hull Note is too vague in how it defines Chinese territory. If Manchuria is not considered Chinese then the Hull Note might have been acceptable, but if Manchuria is considered Chinese then I can understand why Japan would consider that a hostile declaration.
As you say, Hull’s “ultimatum” of 26 November was poorly worded: he insisted on a withdrawal from “China”, which for him did not include Manchuria; the Japanese understood it to require withdrawal from Manchuria, which was a total nonstarter for them.
John Toland (Rising Sun) interviewed various high-ranking Japanese involved in the final war deliberations, and when they learned of this misunderstanding their reaction, while not completely uniform, strongly suggests that war with the US could well have been avoided.
From last year
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GWAjb3lB9kU/WRcRcBom4eI/AAAAAAAAAuM/9xfEnto_Dcsg45o1gjNVmH5T9l06oj3pwCLcB/s1600/nJ24AjhnV-8.jpg
It is not encouraging to be one of the last.
The first two years (2016 and 2017) can be found on Wikipedia. It’s 2018 which is missing except for the first three.
“I think Gamersgate was very much a watershed moment.”
I had already moved to Russia before Gamergate and probably wouldn’t have payed attention anyway.
But since part of this thread is about historical revisionism, let me give me my completely uninformed version of Gamergate for people to revise:
Dudes are pissed that some video game magazines have gotten to PC. Some chick develops a game, and her former lover write an article claiming she gets good reviews from her new lover. This chick gets death and rape threats from crazy dudes and her address is made public, so she actually has legitimate reason to worry. Media blames all white men, not just the crazy dudes.
Conclusion: Twitter is even more damaging to the social fabric than drugs, sex, and rock and roll.
I think up until 2010 or so, one could still say something like “I’m old-fashioned” and pass inspection. There was some sort of watershed moment after that – either same sex marriage or world war T with Bruce Jenner – after which conservative opinions moved from being unfashionable to being seen as actually evil. “Convergence”, basically, happened then and it was no longer possible to hold the line on anything.
Not only was it now everywhere, as you noted, but you would directly suffer the consequences of your opinions; for me, I clearly remember when I disagreed that Bruce Jenner was a “woman” and immediately was warned by someone that he would find out where I worked and let them know that someone “so ignorant and hateful existed” so I’d get fired.
The analogy to polluted waters is accurate. I’m planning my exit as well.
Haha. I’ll say its something akin to this, though I’m actually from the NRX pipeline:
Some chick writes a terrible game. Guys review it and mock it as a terrible game, but is given good reviews due to sympathetic lover. Gamers, already annoyed at earlier abuses, turn heavily on the woman and magazines in general for this form of abuse; they all get bashed by professional feminist agitators who disliked nerds as icky anyway.
Unlike before, though, the nerds fight back both by licit and less licit means. Realizing that they may have actually found opposition, the feminists throw everything at them and proceed to recruit intersectionalists allies. Media runs with it and finds white knights, and a convenient excuse to further converge everything.
At the end of the day, the gamers get pissed but the companies have mostly been bashed into submission. The rest is a spoils fight between feminists and their insectionalists allies. Subsequent games are pretty terrible.
Japan continues to make games with goth lolitas with lacy panties.
Glory to the Rising Sun.
IIRC it didn’t have a racial component, though gamers are overwhelmingly white or East Asian and male. KotakuInAction, basically the GamersGate hub, wasn’t even that “male” in attitude; like they never seemed to voice an opinion on female enfranchisement or anything like that. They just wanted to continue to play video games, or have feminine girls in video games; all they wanted to do was escape. They got instead turned into lambs for a political spoils fight, only they weren’t so lamb-like in response.
Yeah I saw this. There is 0% chance this actually happened.
Israel is a snakelike, unreliable ally, but it still knows that it can’t push the US too far. The US would lose it’s shit if Israel did something like that and we would start seeing mysterious “delays” in future Israeli weapons orders.
When Israel really did use it’s F-35s over Lebanon, the US demanded that they be deployed only with their radar reflectors on and Israel complied.
The only David Irving book I read (though perhaps it’s the most important one) is Hitler’s War and the War Path. (So basically two books in one.)
It appears to me that he is interesting to read if you are well versed in the topic in question, but be prepared that he occasionally puts forward theories which make little sense, and often distorts the evidence. His refusal to quote secondary sources means that he doesn’t believe in cumulative knowledge. His findings are often very insightful, but sometimes he arrives at extremely implausible conclusions.
While he never specifically researched the holocaust, his thesis (that Hitler knew nothing about it until maybe 1943 and that it was the initiative of his security apparatus) is contradicted by all the available evidence. He’s misleading the readers and fails to engage the literature. By not citing secondary sources, it’s quite easy for him, all he needs to do is cherry-pick from the documents. A good corrective could be Richard J. Evans and his Telling Lies about Hitler. (The book is written about the lawsuit where Evans was a witness of the defendant.)
He also distorts things about the conduct of the war. For example he exaggerates Hitler’s military genius in the case of the Battle of France. Hitler actually didn’t understand Manstein’s plan at all. A good corrective might be The Blitzkrieg Legend by Karl-Heinz Frieser.
Then there’s the case of treason. Irving hints at certain operations’ failure being caused by sabotage, like I think in the case of the Falaise Pocket he mentions how it turned out that Kluge had some loose connection to the July 20 conspirators. Technically it’s true, but it’s of course not like any evidence has ever surfaced to suggest that he deliberately sabotaged the war effort.
There’s a number of similar examples. The real strength of his work is that at least there’s a pro-Hitler viewpoint now.
That said, I think what he got after the publication of Hitler’s War was unjustified, and helped him becoming something of a crank.
The Holocaust is basically not very interesting (and many of its victims extremely unsympathetic) unless you’re from one of the victim groups (one victim group in particular), and its elevation to a major secular religion has seriously distorted World War 2 scholarship for the past 30-40 years. More than just scholarship in fact. Early histories, while less accurate for many reasons, are generally much more enjoyable to read since they largely ignore the matter.
Irving’s reassessment of the H-man as a skilled military leader is also a welcome corrective to the nonsense turned out about the alleged “genius” German generals after the war. This extends well beyond smears against the H-man to protect their own reputations as well. Heinz Guderian resorted to lying about the conveniently dead Ludwig Beck as well.
The man is clearly some sort of a neo-nazi (I don’t mean that as a slur) and thus biased, but his enemies are much less sympathetic and far more dishonest.
John Keegan still makes a point of defending Hitler’s War.
John Keegan died in 2012, so that should be past tense.
I had no idea. Rest in peace.
“Japan continues to make games with goth lolitas with lacy panties.
Glory to the Rising Sun.”
At least your version has a happy ending.
“I clearly remember when I disagreed that Bruce Jenner was a “woman” and immediately was warned by someone that he would find out where I worked and let them know that someone “so ignorant and hateful existed” so I’d get fired.”
This is what I mean by illiberal. And it’s terrifying. It’s one thing to control people’s actions (“you can’t beat up trannies”), and quite another to control their words. But to me, this is just another face of totalitarianism. Do NRX have something practical and non-totalitarian to offer?
Personally, I like Scott Alexander’s idea of the “archipelago”:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/
NRX promotes technofeudalism, so it is authoritarian by nature.
It offers two solutions from what I can tell:
1) Secure power. The idea is that virtue signaling is unnecessary if there is secure power in an elite, so if someone still wants to hurt you for being offensive to him and of course, its going to happen, then he is going to appeal to an elite that does have the ability to actually harm you. No need to engage in spiraling insanity to get a mob.
In that case, at least you know where the shiv is coming from. You need to make nice with the local mob/nobility/etc. and so does your enemy. Its all very human, and its not ideal, but at least its better than having to be subject to a constant jury of invisible commissars.
2)Exit. NRX often promotes the idea of many independent, small fiefdoms of balkanized power. So while you might not be able to do anything about your local patchlord’s goal to castrate all men and turn all women into nuns for the greater glory of the Sun God, anyone should be able to leave and find someone saner to serve.
Ideally, it should gradually exhaust the population of the insane ones, and reinforce the population of patches with secure, sane leaders.
What’s the proposed explanation for what went wrong with liberalism? Arguably it worked fairly well for a while, at least among homogeneous and relatively intelligent populations.
I’m rather wary of authoritarianism, particularly with respect to family and religious life, as well as with respect to access to information. I don’t know of a single example in history of a government that didn’t make a bloody mess when trying to regulate such things.
The argument is that it never really worked, and indeed democracy really hasn’t been true for a long time: Andrew Jackson’s capture of the presidency being the last time and instead power has always been centralized instead to gradually shift power from the unstable elected portions of the government to the unelected portions of the government as pretty much an inevitable part of increasing bureaucracy. The elections largely are just smoke and mirrors, horse races that have become so effective that they fool even the actual mass of powerbrokers into thinking that they do anything.
This keeps things running by preventing democracy from doing its much more natural job of just letting the voters get bribed by benefits and then voting themselves more gimmedats and exploding, but this lack of secure power means that the bureaucracy must constantly build coalitions to maximize political power and has little to do with public welfare. As leftism optimizes for politics, this means that all “democratic” countries ultimately become subject to the Second Law of Conquest and must become leftist.
Last year Ukraine beat Poland.
Ukraine’s problem this year may have been technical:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UkrainianConflict/comments/8ptnr6/ukrainian_tankers_took_the_last_place_in_strong/
I’m not an expert in this field, but this was the reason given:
Ukrainian tanks have lower height than Abrams, so in one important exercise (defense) they lost all points, because their tanks can’t be used as a height for observing surroundings(nonsense in 21 century). Explanation:
By the rules participants should drive up a higher artificial ground level, fire two rounds, then drive back to a lower ground level and observe.
They couldn’t see anything even standing on a tank’s tower, because their tanks have the lowest height – a real advantage in real combat.
So, it’s the lowest height tank in competition, which is a real advantage in real combat, and they lost points due to that feature.
Also some technical problems with some system on tanks in the beginning.
::::::::
In 2017 Ukrainian team lost some points because they weren’t trained in shooting with handguns (useless).
That time Poland was on the last place.(though only 6 teams last year)
Was the employment of tank periscopes not permitted?
In terms of being able to quote dates, it is probably the most remembered of the war, followed by a great distance by D-Day, and, I think, an even much greater distance by VE and VJ days. Many people go to Hawaii for vacation – making it the only prominent part of the US that was attacked. Many visit the Arizona memorial, which, I believe, is still releasing little globs of oil.
Strategically it was not as important as Clarke Air Base in the Philippines, an attack that happened the next day, but nobody remembers that attack, which seems to have been an example of startling incompetence on the part of MacArthur.
Having said that – it is really quite remarkable how Hollywood has influenced the culture. The Nazis are villains ad naseam. Meanwhile, the word “Jap” (just an abbreviation like “Brit”) is considered an ethnic slur.
I don’t know if you ever saw the 1984 movie The Karate Kid, but it is a pretty mainstream movie that builds the guilt narrative. I rewatched it a few years ago, and was surprised by how evil one scene struck me: Daniel and Miyagi are at the beach (represented on the movie poster) and two rednecks accost Miyagi for being Japanese in California. Whites are now a minority there. Contrast that, if you watch anything from the ’70s or ’80s taking place in California and practically everyone was white and it seemed so hopeful.
ambrazura is a… Ukrainian patriot, with no apparent military experience; 9A4172 is an officer in the Serbian Army who served during the Yugoslav wars.
So I would generally privilege the latter’s opinion:
If it’s not a secret, what does that consist of?
I believe that Twitter indeed has a negative influence, especially in the way it seems to create pressures on corporations, but, honestly, though some say otherwise, I think the internet in general has had a very negative effect on politics because it magnifies the power of virtue signaling and brings a lot of super-crazies together.
I remember once having watched American Graffiti by George Lucas which is set in early 1960s California, and iirc had a completely white cast. I found that rather disturbing when one knows what happened later, in a relatively short time.
Anti-Japanese racism has of course been long a prominent theme in US media, iirc there was even a Hollywood film already back in the 1950s which had evil rednecks murder a Japanese farmer shortly after Pearl Harbor. There was also a similar plotline in the horrible tv series Cold case a few years ago. That series was about unsolved old murder cases and was quite interesting in how it presented the American past: a very large proportion of the episodes dealt with murders out of racism, antisemitism, homophobia or misogyny. It was like seeing in a condensed form how liberals imagine the past.
Apparently this would have been insufficient..
Maybe. The same issue was brought up here:
https://aw.my.com/en/forum/showthread.php?199458-Strong-Europe-Tank-Challenge-2018/page2
Ukraine’s technical problems are allegedly that the shooting dugouts were made for taller tanks and their vision was impaired.
Hong Kong is looking better every day. Its also a lot more realistic for me to have a startup in Shenzhen than in the US, and I’m getting a little tired of being a boss but not getting the dividends for it.
It’s fine to admire America and American achievement (I’m a fan of America as well), but I don’t think we gullibly believe their self-ideology about how moral and justice they are (this is something Americans tell themselves for their internal consumption), and in particular in relation to Japan and the Japanese.
In relation to Japan – in particular we have a case where, objectively, the Americans were against a more intelligent, higher-IQ population and more civilized culture than the Americans themselves, and the situation was not one in which either side (either Americans or Japanese) had got completely ‘clean hands’. America has committed a few crimes within itself (internment camps of Japanese Americans), and in the nuclear bombing of population centres of an already defeated Japan.
For an American to believe it was perfect, it’s probably a sign of health. But non-Americans are not obligated to take a completely one-sided view on here.
–
Putin has shown a bit more realistic view on it – from 20:00 with the voiceover
I looked at 9A4172 ‘s posts – Serbian nationalist Russian cheerleader, probably not so credible either.
Supposedly the test settingwas the specific problem, however. Presumably the Serbian officer didn’t do that on the test grounds used in this competition.
According to wiki, the Ukrainian tank was 2.215 meters tall – the others ranged from 2.44 (Abrams) to 3 meters tall (the Leopards). So the course could have been designed in such a way that a particularly short tank would have a problem.
That having been said – it looks like Ukrainian tanks weren’t in working order initially, also, causing large loss of points on the first day, which speaks poorly:
https://www.facebook.com/bobovnikov/posts/1802333786472677
Guy was actually more positive on the last day:
https://www.facebook.com/bobovnikov/videos/1806624886043567/
Apparently Germany is still waiting for evidence in the Skripal case:
https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/skripal-159.html
One can only hope that in the case of starting WW3, they’d be a bit more cautious and acting first, asking questions later is only their approach when only diplomats expulsions or lower level sanctions are involved.
The US helped save the lives of 100,000s of its servicemen and millions of Japanese by nuking Japan.
It also saved the lives of 10,000’s Soviet servicemen and prevented the creation of the Hokkaido SSR, which would have gotten independent eventually anyway to zero benefit to Russia.
It absolutely baffles me why any let alone so many Russians criticize or condemn the US for its righteous atomic annihilations of the Japs.
spot on
The new Italian government is off to a flying start. Salvini, as interior minister, is already BTFO’ing the “human rights NGOs” a.k.a. people smugglers.
Aquarius, the ship belonging to a German – who else? – NGO which is specialising in bringing migrants to Italy was denied port access to Italy after it had picked up 620-odd migrants, most of whom are military-age men, and set sail for Napoli. For years we had heard this was impossible because ‘muh human rights’.
Now it is going around in circles in the Mediterranean last time I checked. We’ll see what happens. Some have raised the possibility of dumping the migrants on Malta, which would be hilarious, since Malta was virtue-signalling for years in the aftermath of the crisis, plus the fact that they have become another tax-haven á la Luxembourg, which gave them a snobby outlook vs those uncouth Italians.
Last week there was a meeting of interior ministers of the EU in Brussels and as usual we and the Hungarians voted against the quotas, but this time Salvini joined us. Italy had of course been the loudest voice in the room for “solidarity”. I hope Salvini destroys his competition and becomes the dominant new figure on the Italian political landscape.
Some enterprising soul over at /r/Europe had put together a map of real per capita GDP growth from 1989 until 2016, which matches the fall of the USSR perfectly. The database is the venerable Maddison 2018 version.
https://i.redd.it/puoyn3g0fb311.jpg
Two points. First, Ireland’s growth is overstated due to massive corporate inversions. Malta has, as I noted before, transformed itself to another tax haven. Just like the Irish. The real stand-out star among the developed Western (in reddish color) is arguably Sweden.
Among the EE countries (blueish color) it isn’t Poland but in fact Slovakia which has done the best. This is because they started richer than us by around 20% and have almost matched out growth speed, which is why they are significantly above us now, too.
Croatia is a dumpster fire, though war in the 1990s didn’t help. Hungary’s economic record is, as I have pointed out, quite poor in periods when Orban wasn’t ruling though he has done a lot of good work since he regained office in 2010. Italy remains an economic tragedy.
one of the things about having a country covertly ruled by the banking mafia is they like to have stupid politicians as their puppets – hence the UK govt being such a joke
When people are caught up in the midst of a war they get hard-minded so I don’t blame the people who did it but I think it would have been better if they’d nuked some little nearby island first as a warning shot.
they should requisition and then scuttle the ships
I don’t think it is fair to call Ireland a tax haven. It is not a collection of P.O. boxes paired with forwarding addresses. There are literally tens of thousands of jobs created by having lower tax rates. While it is true that the HQ of those companies are not there based strictly on the Irish domestic market, it’s not like that tax money would have been doing good in Germany or France or the UK. It would have been a warchest for migrants.
Year on year European growth is, particularly in West, anemic. I don’t think it is a healthy sign, at all, but, of course, there is more to society than just the economy. But I think it is one of the the pseudo justifications for importing migrants.
liberalism was initially anchored by science and it was blown off course by the triumph of the anti-science blank slate ideology.
i think there are two drivers of liberal egalitarianism:
1) tactical ideology i.e. ideology that suits a particular political faction so an industrial urban faction develops “all men are created equal” as a weapon in a conflict with the conservative ideology of hereditary aristocracy
and
2) multi-generational close cousin marriage (the human default) leads to instinctive familial type morality where what is morally “good” behavior is what benefits close kin only retrained by fear of reprisals from other kin groups if caught doing it.
i think the ban on close cousin marriage in Europe (h/t hbdchick) led slowly over many generations to the development of an alternative more guilt-based and more universalist instinctive morality and for people wired up that way egalitarianism isn’t about equality per se it’s about fairness (aka a form of utilitarianism which aims to minimize individual harm by sharing it out).
that desire for fairness-equality combined with science (aka the reality of genetic heredity) led to the only logical conclusion: pre-war liberals were the main supporters of eugenics.
in the same way that desire for fairness-equality when fed false data i.e. blank slate lysenkoism, led to the only logical conclusion: SJW insanity.
to my mind this the biggest problem with liberalism (there may be others but they’re dwarfed by this imo) – a fairness-equality mindset that’s been fed false data.
(also modern tech means eugenics doesn’t have to be blood-thirsty at all as long as people are prepared to be patient so the secondary liberal objection to abandoning the blank slate no longer applies)
Industry is also around one-third of Irish GDP, this in a country with no significant mining (which counts as industry). Low corporate taxes facilitated greenfield manufacturing investments by MNCs.
There’s no particular need to tax corporate income other than for pass-through entities, because you can simply tax wages and dividends instead (and consumption for that matter–which all EU countries do brutally). Share buybacks are a loophole here I suppose, but one easily closed.
Other countries are simply unwilling to adjust their tax structure as aggressively as the Irish did.
If one wants high taxes on corporate income for whatever reason then that requires a more closed economy (capital controls, tariffs) or an international treaty.
Liberalism was rotten from the very beginning. What exactly is scientific about The Rights of Man?
It only took a few decades after the American Revolution for the first forms of SJW insanity to appear (abolitionism, free love, feminism), and of course the French didn’t wait that long.
As soon as the term “equality” appears in any context other than being judged by God (and perhaps the law in a fair trial), you’re headed for trouble.
i’ll put it another way – whether or not equality as a principle is a good idea:
egalitarianism + blank slate -> sjw insanity
egalitarianism + heredity -> eugenics
as proved by pre-war liberals being the biggest proponents of eugenics.
so whether a person believes liberalism went from good to bad or from already bad to even worse it was blank slate ideology which drove that change.
WW2 Japanese weren’t especially civilized and committed plenty of atrocities. The war in the Pacific had elements of a race war not least because of the absolutely appalling behaviour of the Japanese towards prisoners and subjected populations.
American reactions can certainly be seen as rather excessive (as they often are), burning 100 000 civilians in Tokyo in a single night was pretty extreme. But the Japanese had given Americans plenty of reasons for hate with the Bataan death march and numerous other war crimes.
Don’t worry, Talha, as long as Austrians keep not having kids and Muslims there keep having several kids per woman, the country will turn Muslim anyway. Then they can reopen whatever mosques and hire whatever imams they want.
‘Liberalism’ is too vague to make a definitive statement on tbh.
http://www.moneta-coins.com/photopost/data/664/UK_USA_Paine.jpg
Conclusion: Twitter is even more damaging to the social fabric than drugs, sex, and rock and roll.
I have resisted getting a Twitter account, but since you put it this way …
Thanks a lot, Dan, for the encouraging words. I am having a hard enough time not becoming completely black-pilled on liberal democracy without reading comments like this.
Don’t resist, just let go. Once you acknowledge the despicableness of the curent system it is a lot easier to mentally accept the coming of the new system.
http://www.dw.com/en/spain-will-accept-migrant-ship-aquarius-after-italy-and-malta-refuse-entry/a-44150793
Damn, my favourite Southern European nation blinked and cucked themselves. Salvini had staked so much on the line that he couldn’t be seen as backing down, he had been tweeting about it relentlessly. If he had folded, his base would have concluded he was all talk and no action.
Best /r/Europe comment:
We will drown and no one will save us.
Ireland certainly has a decent economy, but the EU has an interesting alternative measurement of well-being called Actual Individual Consumption which aims to measure the individual material welfare as closely as possible. Ireland is at 96 (100 is the EU median). I haven’t been to Ireland but I know someone who lives in Finland and who has and he basically said there was no real tangible difference despite Ireland being significantly richer on paper.
Even the Irish themselves have understood the issue and they are now using a GNI* methodology, which stands for modified Gross National Income. It aims to remove some of the problems with the usual GDP methodology, though the jury is still out how well it will do. Even according to this measurement, they still grew close to 19% in 2015 when all the corporate inversions happened. For a developed economy, that is just implausible and bonkers.
Spoken like a true tax cheat 🙂
Incidientally, the Irish aren’t even the worst offenders. Juncker himself was knee-deep in tax avoidance schemes in his native Luxembourg. This is why I always roll my eyes when the EU is “going to get tough on the US internet companies”.
A good corrective could be Richard J. Evans and his Telling Lies about Hitler. (The book is written about the lawsuit where Evans was a witness of the defendant.)
The Holcaust on Trial by D. D. Guttenplan is good.
Yes, Irish national accounting is problematic which as you note the Irish themselves realize. Lots of Irish GDP is just revenue corporations manage to domicile in Ireland. Not only does this not accrue to the Irish themselves, but it’s generally immediately invested in Dollar or Euro bonds.
Still, I don’t think it can be disputed that Ireland’s low corporate tax rate has been successful for the country. Hardly the only factor of course. The English language, common law, low wages and land prices (when the Tiger got started anyway), and a time zone only four hours removed from the US East Coast were big factors.
Low corporate tax rates aren’t an “offense” against anything. There’s no treaty in existence (let alone one that Ireland or Luxembourg are party to) which obligates a country to have high statutory corporate tax rates. Perhaps France, Germany, etc. should reform their taxation systems instead of grousing about Ireland (and Switzerland).
Within the United States some states have eliminated their state corporate taxes. Naturally the incompetent states (and states with unreasonable government expenditures) grouse endlessly about this.
The tax abuses of American companies have to do with America’s bizarre extraterritorial taxation system (with high tax rates as well), which inevitably involve Ireland (and various other jurisdictions such as the Netherlands, Switzerland, Caribbean centers, etc.).
Fortunately the recent tax reform here solves many of those problems.
Abuses of European companies are lesser owing to saner corporate tax regimes, though they still exist as naturally one will manipulate supply chains and transfer pricing in order to avoid higher taxes where possible.
As for seriousness, many if not most actions taken by the European Commission appear to be a soft form of protectionism. Hence the endless sanctions on American IT companies.
We will drown and no one will save us.
Maybe they don’t know how to swim either.
The natives helped rescue American pilots that were shot down. They did not help rescue the Japanese because of their experiences with the Japanese – when possible, they usually killed them.
The Japanese interned more Dutch civilians than Americans interned Japanese.
iirc they even forced some Dutch women into sex slavery (which they of course did on a really large scale with Korean and other Asian women as well). They also treated Western pows quite horribly (almost a third died iirc), with a few unfortunate Americans even being vivisected alive and some pows killed even after the Japanese surrender.
I still think the American firebombings were rather extreme (and maybe unnecessary, given how American submarines destroyed much of Japan’s merchant fleet which would have meant certain economic strangulation for Japan), but the Japanese certainly did a lot to contribute to the transgressive nature of the war.
Despite the Blitz and so on, I have heard far more genuine hostility towards the Japanese from the generation that fought in the War than towards the Germans. Many people in Britain have a family member that disappeared in the Burma railway.
Classic essay by WW2 infantry veteran and postwar writer Bob Fussell on the subject: https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/undervisningsmateriale/Fussel%20-%20thank%20god%20for%20the%20atom%20bomb.pdf
” More to the point, my grandfather who was with a Luftwaffe logistics unit or something of the sort in Belarus during the war didn’t have any doubts. He had seen and heard enough there to think that the extermination camps and all that were real. And he was hardly exceptional in that. So I don’t really understand Holocaust revisionists.”
That’s pretty funny. Just what did your grandfather say he ‘heard & saw’ from an airplane in Belarus? Belarus? Seriously?
We’re talking about an alleged ‘6M Jews & 5M others’ … 11,000,000.
There is not a single verifiable excavated enormous mass grave with contents actually SHOWN, not just claimed, (recall the claim of 900,000 buried at Treblinka, 1,250,000 at Auschwitz, or 250,000 at Sobibor, 34,000 at Babi Yar) even though Jews claim they still exist to this day and claim to know exactly where these alleged enormous mass graves are.
The ‘holocaust’ storyline is one of the dumbest, most easily debunked narratives ever contrived. That is why those who question it are arrested and persecuted. That is why violent, racist, & privileged Jewish supremacists demand censorship. What sort of truth is it that denies free speech and the freedom to seek the truth? Truth needs no protection from scrutiny.Only liars demand censorship.
‘Germans killed 20,000 Jews with atomic bomb’ too.
https://i.imgur.com/IjXE7OI.jpg
The ‘6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’ are scientifically impossible frauds.
see the ‘holocaust’ scam debunked here:
http://codoh.com
No name calling, level playing field debate here:
http://forum.codoh.com
http://www.renegadetribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/25353850_1822213381122700_1280141591104706732_n-600×491.jpg
These will help you “understand”:
Holocaust Handbooks, Documentaries, & Videos
http://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?main_page=1
http://holocausthandbooks.com/img/HHS-300×127.jpg
and:
Chemistry of Auschwitz / Birkenau
https://youtu.be/SUc6Y_E5zb0
@107 Polish perspective:
My take on comparably high female representation in both Russia and Poland is the following one:
1: Neither Russian nor Polish have as many insults for being smart as English (to a lesser extent German) has. Being intelligent is, in either a Russian or a Polish high school, less of a social risk then in an American one. This is results in more rigorous and serious scientific schooling in the hard sciences for both sexes.
2: Gender simply isnt such a big deal in either country. You dont have this infantilizing “but muh patriarchical oppression” thing.
3: More legit female role models (f.e. Marie Curie in Poland, Lyudmilla Pavlichenko in Russia).
4: While their is a glass ceiling for women in both Poland and Russia, once a women has broken through by proving she has the chops she is basically through (until she tries to break the next ceiling that is). In the west, officially there arent any glass ceilings so you cant prove yourself by breaking them, as such, in the west the “proving” continues forever.
I think in both theaters of war there is the interesting question of what sort of peace deal might have been possible at any point in the war. Obviously, it would have been totally impossible to sue for peace right after Pearl Harbor. But could it have been possible after Midway?
The demand for total surrender does not seem to have led to much good on either side of the globe. Of course, such a deal may have made the prosecution of war criminals difficult, but relatively few were held responsible anyway, and if you have to bomb cities to get them, is it worth it?
In my view – in the light of how history unfolded – the idea of total surrender was almost as crazy as making war on the US in the first place. What seems so odd, is that, as far as I know, the Allies never even sent out feelers. Though Germany’s early proposals did not seem strategically acceptable, holding the Eastern front, made a lot of sense.
I suspect Midway was too soon. Even if the Japanese had agreed to talks, I doubt they would’ve accepted anything more than a white peace.
After the Battle of the Philippine Sea it would have been reasonable to approach the Japanese to discuss terms for their surrender. If they refused (quite possible in light of the fact they launched Operation Ichi Go) then a good time to revisit the matter would’ve been in the spring of 1945 after the Battle of Iwo Jima and Operation Meetinghouse.
Prosecuting war criminals doesn’t advance any war aims whatsoever, and the practice simply makes it less likely that states will sue for peace.
As for the European Theater of Operations, Britian could’ve gotten a white peace (for itself) at any time after hostilities began. The British repeatedly ignored German efforts to end the war in the west. It didn’t help that they refused to even meet agents and legations they sent, which would explain why Stafford Cripps told the Soviets that Britain couldn’t accept peace because Germany wanted Britain to surrender the Royal Navy (bizarre).
In substance, it is not much different from the Burqa ban. Anything that doesn’t acknowledge demographic trends and actually takes steps to change them is just a distraction.
I tend to agree, but it’s still useful in a way. Erdogan has already threatened holy war against “crusaders”, hopefully that will harden the Austrian’s resolve.
Meanwhile Merkel has asked German football fans to cheer Özil and Gündogan, the two players in Germany’s “national” team who recently met “their” president Erdogan. Pathetic, this evil old witch just needs to be removed.
which was actually quite successful, they conquered large territories previously held by the Kuomintang.
iirc they also had serious plans for an invasion of British India, but that failed of course and led to their major defeat at Imphal and Kohima and the loss of Burma. But in 1944 they still believed they could achieve some sort of victory.
Regarding unconditional surrender: I guess in Europe it was necessary to keep the alliance with the Soviet Union intact, though obviously from a German perspective that demand was hard to accept and made any plans for a coup against Hitler more difficult.
I agree that Midway was probably too early to spook Japan, but it may have supplied a psychological release for the American public to the point where they would have accepted a peace deal, such as status quo ante (or slightly modified): Japan keeps Korea and Manchuria, gets out of everywhere else, and sinks its carriers. Of course, the Japanese were ambitious and probably would not have accepted such a deal.
I think the main objection against the standard German offer was that they seemed to want to prevent any reconstitution of armies in Western Europe. Perhaps understandable, but not strictly practical considering how formidable gains in the East would make Germany.
The great thing about lack of assimilation of Turks is that it would potentially make it easier to return them to Turkey. This is why I think the satellite dishes aren’t inherently bad.
Were North Koreans 50x tougher than Japanese? During the Korean War, North Korea didn’t capitulate after losing 20% of its population to US conventional bombing, vs. Japan’s loss of less than 1% of its population to the atomic bombings (and Japan didn’t consider surrender after losing more people in the March 9 firebombing of Tokyo, than it did at Nagasaki).
Although at the time it was in the interests of both the USA and Japan to pretend otherwise, in reality the primary factor in Japan’s surrender was the Soviet declaration of war and swift victory in Manchuria (a side effect of the myth that the atom bomb deserves the credit, which I find particularly annoying, is the existence of all the silly alternate history stories where Hitler conquers the USA just by nuking New York and DC).
The primary obstacle to Japan’s surrender, seems to have been that the USA refused to explicitly promise to let the Japanese keep their Emperor. If so, then the atom bombings could have been avoided simply by the USA agreeing beforehand to do what it did afterwards anyway. And while the American position on the Emperor’s postwar status was publicly unstated, the Soviets would certainly have had him shot, so to the Japanese an American occupation was clearly preferable to a Soviet one.
Even if the Japanese had waited to surrender until the Soviets were actually landing on Hokkaido, that still would have happened before the end of 1945, and quite possibly before the US invasion of southern Japan began in November.
Maybe, assuming that during the months before the Hokkaido landings, the increasing imminence of a Soviet invasion did not cause the USA to drop its insistence on an unconditional surrender, or the Japanese did not to agree to surrender without a public US commitment to keep the Emperor.
But 10,000′s wouldn’t even be a rounding error in the context of overall Soviet WWII losses, and the existence of a Hokkaido SSR (or North Japan satellite state) would have so unpredictably scrambled post-WWII history, that it’s impossible to say whether Russia today would be significantly better or worse off as a result.
Anyway, it is still both morally correct and in the self-interest of Russian nationalists to condemn war atrocities committed by the USA, regardless of whether those atrocities were incidentally beneficial to Russia (which in this case is unclear).
I think it’s strange that a Russian nationalist thinks its a good idea for Russians to join neocons and ‘Murica types in being Hiroshima apologists, thereby relinquishing a good talking point with which to hit back at the USA for its hypocrisy, when it attacks Russia for civilian deaths in Aleppo or wherever.
I suppose the explanation is some combination of runaway atomophilia, and ideological tribalism (liberal cucks condemn the deliberate mass murder of 100,000s of Japanese women and children, therefore non-liberal cucks must embrace it).
This is the issue. It isn’t supported by historical detail (Japan was trying to surrender at the time, already defeated economically, bombs used on population centres, and the use of second plutonium weapon on Nagasaki three days later, before the impact of the first bomb was understood – simply a desperate American warcrime).
I would say a moral difference on issue of targeting specifically a civilian population with weapons of mass destruction (an action Russia has never taken/will never take).
I agree with your view if it that the ‘calling American hypocrisy’ game is tedious and can be boring. I also would agree that actions of 1940s (by a leadership which has died decades ago), are not some tool for criticizing current American actions. But the actual actions of August 1945, were – nonetheless- unacceptable actions.
It’s fair point, that the Japanese military has committed warcrimes against Chinese population during this era.
It is true, the fact of the civilization level of the country itself, is irrelevant to that (Germany is “the land of poets and thinkers” – but they had in the same era been sadly hijacked by the most evil government).
But there is also no justification to use weapons of mass destruction on unrelated civilian populations, who are innocent of the crimes committed by the military leadership.
Is there a connection to use a nuclear weapon on American city e.g. of Denver, – because of warcrimes of some soldiers in Mỹ Lai Massacre?
And there is no justification of imprisonment of Japanese Americans for crimes committed by the military leadership of a country they had emigrated from years earlier. The Japanese Americans were the most loyal and patriotic population group in America, if go by the most medals proportionally for bravery during WW2.
In this context, it is the same as the American rednecks had imprisoned the German Americans. Indeed, I believe there had been racism against German Americans during this period, but no imprisonment.
You can be an America fan, without supporting this most stupid, extremist or criminal aspects in their history.
Oops I can see and want to correct all the grammatical mistakes in this post – apologies if this is annoying to read. Can we add an edit function that lasts more than five minutes?
San Francisco is da shit.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/De_1oiSWAAAhFpe.jpg
I’ve seen some of this myself. Of course, nowhere near as bad because the mild climate of CA attracts vagrants from across the country.
Well, back then it was more the Land der Richter und Henker (“the land of judges and executioners”).
I tend to agree, but it’s a difficult question and as you write yourself there’s not that much point to moralizing about those issues after so much time. Focus should be on ensuring that something like this doesn’t happen again.
Heroin should be legalized in my opinion. Legalize all drugs and let Darwin take over.
If you unironically want to execute all weed smokers, it would make far more sense to somehow genetically engineer new strains of marijuana that contain chemicals that reduce fertility. Leftists already have lower fertility rates than right wingers, and this would accelerate the process.
Thoughts On The Holocaust™ by Dr. William Luther Pierce
They feared Japanese would create sabotage units that would effectively hide and operate in the wilderness of the underpopulated West. The Nihau Incident provided ample evidence to question Japanese-American loyalties.
Was it strategically useful? The right thing to do? Probably not, but let’s not elevate it to the status of a war crime, and use racial politics to make the US the secondary evil, after Nazi Germany. It leaves a bad taste, esp. when the US and Europe are being dismembered by said racial politics. You want us to feel sorry for the Japanese, with their ethnically homogeneous, first-world, non-PC society? Well, I don’t.
As I said before – the Japanese imprisoned more Dutch. People whose home country was occupied, and who posed zero threat to them, and actually gave them the resources they required. Many of them died. You never hear it mentioned because it doesn’t fit into the racial politics narrative, where Japanese only committed sins against nonwhites.
Japanese-Americans had free reign in most of America, during the war. Are you really comparing the exclusion zone to the Japanese treatment of civilians? A case can even be made that the US treated Germans worse. Many German immigrants to South America were deported back to Germany, under US influence, some of them were Jews.
As far as I know, there wasn’t a major power that did not intern civilians. The British even interned Austrians like Heinrich Harrier in India. The internment and bombing scorecard contest is pretty moot because the same belligerents are not likely to fight again and most of the people involved are dead.
I would not say that Japanese society was more advanced, smarter, or inherently better than American. When Perry’s fleet steamed into Japan, the Japanese thought their ships were on fire because steam power was beyond their conception. Japan is largely non-interventionist now because that is what the US imposed on them. America helped create modern Japan in more ways than one.
I would say a moral difference on issue of targeting specifically a civilian population with weapons of mass destruction (an action Russia has never taken/will never take).
LOL
But the actual actions of August 1945, were – nonetheless- unacceptable actions.
Bullshit!
Apology to GR, it’s really hard not to eat the marshmallow.
It wasn’t until 1898 that jus soli became the basis for natural born citizenship, and non-whites were ineligible for naturalization until 1952. Thus much of the Japanese population in America in 1941 were not in fact citizens and thus cannot be called Japanese-Americans.
Another commenter explained the rationale for internment, and here’s the specific incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident
The blanket West Coast internment was likely excessive, and America’s chief of counterintelligence at the time (J. Edgar Hoover) believed it would be sufficient to simply evacuate Japanese from the vicinity of ports, bases, factories, etc. That said it’s nothing to shed any tears over, as the internment was quite humane.
The 442nd Regimental Combat Team did indeed have a sterling record, but was wisely employed in the European theater.
Lol this is not really helping the argument that American behaviour was faultless.
Because the Americans imported steamboat technology from the English, who invented it. Meanwhile Japan was closed to foreigners for 220 years.
Which is not to say America didn’t go on to create some of history’s most amazing achievements on the technological, if not moral level – Manhattan Project being the ultimate example of this.
Eh? Not entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fulton
Japan maintained some limited contacts with the outside world.
A small amount of trade was conducted with China, Korea, and the Dutch.
Through the Dutch, the Japanese even monitored foreign technological and scientific developments. This was known as “Rangaku”, meaning Dutch learning.
Almost certainly the Japanese already knew about steam power at the time Perry arrived, but the men at the harbor did not.
There was also interesting indigenous Japanese innovation during the Tokugawa Shogunate. They invented sports statistics for instance, and Japanese carpentry became more advanced than Western carpentry. Japan also independently invented silviculture and forestry, though admittedly after Germans did.
Not that these interesting facts make your overall point incorrect, as obviously access to the outside world facilitates modernization.
I think that America challenged Japan in a way that Portugal and Holland could not. The result was that they formed a resolve to progress faster than they would have otherwise.
The Netherlands had gone into decline and weren’t the serious naval power they were when they earned the name “Dutch” as a distinction from their non-power German brethren. Portugal was even more minor. The US was already beginning to show its potentiality as a serious power in the Pacific.
There were a number of incidents prior to Perry’s arrival, including half a century before a British warship essentially threatening to blow up Nagasaki harbor if it didn’t get provisions.
Perry’s arrival effectively catalyzed the pro-Western modernizers into launching a civil war.
Makes you wonder.
America is far from faultless. But its industrial and technical mights (the only distinction when it came to the bombings) weren’t moral failings in themselves. As to the ethics of actual bombings, I’d rather emulate the Japanese, who you favor for their intelligence, and not abase my country before a sea of rabid, civilization-destroying SJWs as the Germans have.
Yes it’s admirable Japan could so well protect their culture in the post-war, even while being almost as much defeated and occupied as Germany.
But I think they may have the ‘unfair’ intrinsic advantages compared to Germany, of greater geographical and linguist isolation from other countries.
They have better cultural insulation than countries even that are unaligned politically with the West by comparison, like Russia.
In Japan’s case, the American post-war occupation indeed seems humane and constructive, in opposition to what came before it.
Indeed. Europe’s geography may have been its blessing at one point, as differing kingdoms competed with each other spurring technical innovations, but in modern times, these small but peaceful variegated countries so close to each other may be a curse, in that the meeting of closely related peoples from different countries inspires a false sense of universality, which inevitably becomes overextended.
.
What do you mean “imagine the past”? That’s the growing reality of the present as well, much to the glee of your ilk.
Isn’t that what “red pilling” is all about?
Growing reality of the present, at least in Europe, are rather the many horrible crimes committed by non-European immigrants and the intimidation and terror directed against patriots by the state and brutal left-wing thugs.
And even most people of my ilk don’t want to bring back slavery or colonialism, so by historical standards we’re fairly progressive.
No wonder their biggest fans are the guys who are always fantasizing about race wars: Stormfronters and their ilk.
However, the biggest victims of Japanese atrocities were other asians, especially the Chinese. So, not really a race war in the broad meaning of the word. Though it had elements of it.
So E3 is happening. There are only two games I am interested in out of all the trailers released thus far.
Release date is now Feb 2019. I’m quite stoked about this game. Though it has a dedicated fanbase, it does feel like it could be a sleeper hit and truly hit the mainstream like Dead Souls did, despite also having a more unforgiving reputation, it became quite popular with the normies. The same thing could happen here and that’d be great, given that there are few truly great story-driven games done these days.
And then there’s this. CP2077 is so massively hyped now, it is hard not to be disappointed given the huge expectations. I saw that the original creator of the CP2077 series slammed the trailer, but then again, Sapkowski himself had sour grapes over the Witcher series. Part of the reason could be that both were dumb enough to accept a single lumpsum instead of a percentage of gross income over time and are now smarting over it.
Release is not yet confirmed, which is a bad sign. CDPR got hacked some years back which probably set back production. Now I am only waiting for M&B: Bannerlord to show some signs of life.
is retro gaming popular at all in Poland?
What’s retro gaming? Playing games from 30 years ago?
yeah.
For me I love what I call “Nintendo” games. I don’t how old you are or what games were like in Germany when you were growing up, but when I was kid there was only one home gaming system, the “Nintendo”.
Actually, it was the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES and today it is always referred to either as “the nes (pronounced ‘nez’) or “the N.E.S.”. If you were to say “Nintendo” today, people would think you were talking about whatever their latest piece of shit system was.
The first ultra successful home console was the Atari 2600, but by the time I was old enough to be interested in video games, that system was already an afterthought. To this day I have never seen an Atari 2600 in person.
The NES did, in fact, have competitors in the same gaming generation: The Sega Master System and the Atari 7800. Not only have I never seen one of those systems in person but I didn’t even become aware of their existence until 3 years ago. Surprisingly, both the Master System and the 7800 were commercially successful, as in, they turned a profit. But they didn’t bring in the ridiculous amounts of cash that the NES did.
So anyway, since the NES was my first system I think a lot of people would say, “oh, your just nostalgic for it so that is why you like it’s games the best”. But I don’t think that’s it at all. After all, I had a Sega Genesis, and then a Sega Saturn and then a Sega Dreamcast and while I do feel nostalgic for those years sometimes, I never have any inclination to go back and play those games again.
To me, the side scrolling, NES platformers and beat em ups are the pinnacle of gaming. I absolutely hate the first person shooters that dominate gaming now. I was at my friend’s apartment about 8 years ago and they were playing Call of Duty and when I tried I couldn’t even get past the practice level. I remember thinking that that actually doing the obstacle course in real life would have been easier then trying to get through the level, but supposedly most people don’t find it difficult at all.
When I was a senior in high school, emulators were becoming a thing. I was rarely going to class by then so I spent a lot of the year playing games that I got stuck on as a small child. Here are some of the NES games I ended up beating: Robocop, Batman (generally regarded as one of the greatest games of all time), Megaman and Megaman II. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure that I beat any games besides those so I don’t really know what I did the rest of the year. I remember playing old NES games on my computer and watching a lot of Blind Date but the rest of the year is kinda a blur. In hindsight, I’m not sure I was particularly sober for much of the time in those days.
::weeps for lost youth::
I don’t really know much about console games tbh, saw them as a child at a friend’s home, but never had a console myself. I always was more into pc gaming (adventures, rpgs, occasional strategy games even though I was bad at those).
Apart from a few exceptions (e.g. the first Half-Life) they never did much for me either. I’ve never gotten the people who play such games in quasi-competitive settings and who memorize map layouts and the like for that. Seems overly stressful for a game.
Don’t worry, you’re not the only one 🙁
wasn’t half life an RPG?
There was this summer when my brother was playing Half Life for 6 or 7 hours a day, and one night we were in this ice cream store and he said something that I ignored and then just started staring at me. So I was like, “what are you doing?” And then he seemed to snap out of it and he said, “oh sorry. I’ve been playing so much Half Life that I was thinking that now it was your ‘turn’.” I guess Half Life is turn based or something, I dunno, I never played it.
There was one PC game I played as a kid called Quest for Glory: So You Want to be a Hero. Maybe you’ve heard of it. That game was awesome. I think it is regarded as one of the best RPG’s ever.
You know, the weird thing about the magic of youth is that very little of it has to do with anything physical. Let’s say you were able to go back now and be 17 again. You’d be miserable because you really wouldn’t be 17 at all. You would just be whatever age you are now except in a 17 year old body. So even if there was a literal fountain of youth, there would be no way to truly stay young forever.
The real magic of youth comes from a combination of novelty with a sense of timelessness. And once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. I remember when I entered college thinking that graduation would never come, it was 4 years a way which to my 18 year old mind might as well have been 40 years. Now if you told me that something was coming up in 10 years I’d be thinking “shit, I guess I better start getting ready”.
No, it was a first-person shooter. Its story (if one can call it that) was the usual gaming nonsense, something about an alien invasion at a secret research facility, but the way it was told was quite immersive and innovative for the time. Crazy to realize that this was already 20 years ago.
Heard of it, but never played it. If I understand correctly, it was kind of a hybrid between adventure and rpg, which does sound like a fun concept.
Perception of time definitely changes with age, it seems to pass faster and faster (at least that’s the case for me). You also become more aware of your own mortality when you realize how much of your life has already passed. I can’t say I’m fond of the change.
Trump has managed to get NK to give up its nukes???
How did that happen?
Don’t believe the hype.
It’s a very vague, agreement in principle. If you compare it to the 1993 and 2005 agreements, both of those were more comprehensive and as we know, they didn’t work out (although it is unclear if the 1993 agreement was ruined by Kim Sr. or the W. Bush administration).
As of now, Kim got a summit without giving up anything or even meaningfully committing to giving up anything. I’m somewhat optimistic but literally nothing has happened yet and I have no trust in Kim at all.
I can’t see this changing anybody’s vote either in November or in 2020 no matter what happens so I don’t see this having any impact on American domestic politics. Internationally, however, if a deal is made maybe Iran, Saudi Arabia and the US can work out an agreement to get the US back in the nuclear accord.
Internationally, the most important thing has be resolving the standoff with Russia over Ukraine. Europe can be bulldozed but I don’t see Republicans in Congress ever going along with a Russia accord. I would even go as far as to say that congressional Republicans are more hostile to Russia than congressional Democrats, as hard as that may be to believe.
Yes, would probably have been too good to be true, one has to be skeptical.
I don’t really see how anything could change for the better on the Iran and Ukraine issues either tbh.
Iran, maybe. Ukraine, not for at least 10 years. This current crop of Republicans has it out for Russia in the extreme. It is not going to be easy to change such attitudes. Even the Gen X Republicans like Rubio and Cotton are anti Russia zealots.
Frozen conflict is probably all one can hope for at this point. I’m not even sure what could be a solution tbh…a guarantee that Ukraine will never enter NATO (which would be madness anyway imo) and recognition of the annexation of Crimea, with wide-reaching autonomy for the east? All very unlikely right now.
Regarding the Iran issue, I don’t see how there can be any improvement on the nuclear deal. Frankly, I think a war is quite likely, and it will end badly for everyone involved imo.
http://www.tank-net.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=43305&page=2#entry1372477
http://www.tank-net.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=43305#entry1372060
Ukrops complain too much. Should ditch their tanks for superior Leo 2.
http://www.tank-net.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=43305#entry1372237
“Stridsvagn 122” is a Leopard 2 license-built in Sweden.
The reason this was acquired over the M1 Abrams was that the Americans refused to install a toilet in the tank.
I got one when it was brand new. Still have it, in mint condition. I wonder how much it is worth?
Thanks for this post.
Those two problems were worth about 150 lost points, which would place Ukraine where it was last year – about the same as Poland (a little worse this year, while it actually beat Poland last year). Ukraine would have been ahead of the UK and the US.
There’s a photo of results for the first 2 of 13 parts (the ones where Ukraine was affected by technical problems and too-deep dugout, respectively) here:
https://aw.my.com/en/forum/showthread.php?199458-Strong-Europe-Tank-Challenge-2018
like 5 bucks, probably. You can get a new NES for about 15.
Just came across this interesting nugget: by 2100, Lagos, Nigeria is projected to have a population of 88 million people.
I assume that is the metropolitan area and not the city limits, still I can’t even begin to conceive how it could be possible.
Better revoke the Ottawa Treaty, and soon.
Basically the same for me. After being introduced to the genre with Half Life and Deus Ex, I was then disappointed to find just about all the other shooters to be pretty generic and boring in comparison.
Greasy never even played Half Life?? How young is he?
Very true. Probably the best thing Greasy has ever written here. I’m afraid I’ll never regain the sense of wonder I once had for everything new, which I seemed to lose at about 21-22 in retrospect.
Of course I’ve heard of Half Life. And I’m not young at all. I never played it though. I remember my brother playing a game called Half Life 2 or something that was an RPG, definitely not an FPS.
…
On the Left wing boards I read I am seeing a total split between the reaction of the America and Canadian posters and the Euro posters. The American and Canadian liberals are enraged and stomping their feet calling this a proto deal a criminal act whereas the Euros are cautiously optimistic and even saying that they hope Trump pulls it off.
This gets to one of the fundamental differences between Euro liberals and US/Canadian liberals: Euro liberals are MUCH more anti war than US liberals are. US liberals are anti war but it is really more of a side issue. The reason that US liberals were so opposed to the 2nd Gulf War was because a Republican was waging it.
For European liberals, in contrast, being anti war is a supreme value. Now I suspect that the leaders of of western Europe are all pro war on a personal level, but their publics are not and the western Euro leaders know it.
tl;dr: American/Canadian liberals: war bad but not so important. Must stop Trump!
Euro liberals: Trump bad but not so important. Must stop US wars.
The magic of youth is just being around a bunch of other young people who also have nothing to do.
That and quick recovery from hangovers.
There’s a physical aspect as well, but the physical aspect can be mitigated with proper techniques. I’m well into my 30s but still get carded when buying liquor and can plausibly claim to be under 25 when using “dating” apps like Tinder and Bumble. Genetics help but mainly lifestyle (LCHF, weight training, skincare).
There’s also the fact that as we get older we get less interested in new cultural production, so we remember what was noteworthy when we were young and bond with other people our age about it. I remember watching the film Patton with my father (which he had never seen, as it came out before he moved to North America), and he was excited to see Karl Malden in it (whom I only know of through the film). Probably thirty or forty years from now I’d be excited to see Freddie Prinze Jr. or something.
You can still have a lot of fun and make new friends as you get older by getting into organized hobbies.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R games are great, good game mechanics and very atmospheric. I’ve never really liked shooters (because they’re usually even dumber than games are anyway), but those games are very enjoyable (probably even more if one knows Russian).
Its call overrepresentation. The vast majority of crimes committed then, due to majority white population, were whites against whites. And it also basically fails in giving an accurate portrayal of the past by underrepresenting the importance of class, which was pretty paramount at the time.
Metro’s looking really good. I’m assuming that more of it takes place on the surface now?
Oh well, looks like I need to start preparing up for a GPU upgrade. Hope there isn’t another BTC spike in the next year.
Half-Life 2, like the first one, was an FPS with innovative concepts and scale for the time. We would call such games as overengineered and overdesigned these days(and arguably it is, thus the lack of Half-Life 3). Fallout 1-2 were similar, and Fallout: New Vegas(Feargus’ baby).
Nonetheless, its one of the reasons why old games often are much more pieces of art than the much more mechanical production line these days – especially the Ubisoft games made by committee, and therefore lack much of even of the single design voice.
Yes, I assume so as well.
Though Metro 2035 (the novel) was almost entirely underground as well. And unlike the previous two, it was much more of a political polemic.
Quite recoverable through meditation and other religious techniques.
Also travel and other activities that disrupt mundane ordinary life. The loss you are talking about is the disenchantment that happens in Western societies as you get older and increasingly have to deal with mechanistic tasks and are increasingly conditioned into a materialistic and mechanistic world view.
It isn’t a natural process, and not primarily about age.
Its interesting that some of STALKER’s concepts remain novel to this day: testing for anomalies, mutant messing with your vision, and the general feel of powerlessness early on. Its unusual in a field where pretty much every concept gets copied/stolen right away.
I think part of the issue is that when you are young, you are able to find meaning in hedonistic materialism. That becomes impossible once the novelty wears off, even if you have access to an unlimited supply of Emily Ratajkowski clones.
Or maybe it is better to say that the younger you are, the less need for meaning there is. When your 5 watching Star Trek with your father is all you need. When your 10 you can watch after school cartoons with your friends and that is good (although not as great things were when you were 5). Then in adolescence you go onto a new stage in life and drinking, fighting, getting with girls and competing for totally meaningless high school social status becomes something new and fulfilling.
By the time your 25, you’re jaded. Then you either have kids and start the cycle anew or you post comments on Unz about killing Lebanese people.
Only sells in Eastern Europe, not North America (a 10x bigger market).
While we’re talking about games and before Dmitri finds a reason to post women, I think I can beat him to the punch and mention Bioshock Infinite, in my opinion one of the best and last art games from the US:
A little known fact: the main heroine, Elisabeth, was cosplayed so well by a Russian cosplayer Anna Moleva that she was hired to be the official face of Elisabeth.
http://geekshizzle.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Capture-480×181.jpg
And this is probably the most well known image of her:
http://geekshizzle.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/elizabeth_by_ormeli-d46ljuj.jpg
Because all things good must die, Bioshock did not sell well compared to say, Kandy Krush and the studio went out of business.
Interesting, one of the few “new” games I’ve played in recent years (because my laptop can actually run it) is Age of decadence, which is a pretty hardcore rpg with difficult combat, set in a depressing post-apocalyptic world. It seems to have a disproportionately large and active fan base in Russia, which would support the idea that tastes are different.
Well, the game Metro very much captured a lot of what I’d consider as modern sacralization of objects, and part of it has to be intentional, given the fact that while a sci-fi postapoc game, ghosts exist in it. But two parts stand out to me hugely:
1) Early on, you’re just a piddling guy among many and especially as its built up that you’re going into a very hostile surface, there’s a genuine sense of “hello conscript, time to die now.” And then, abruptly as the sound of monsters surround you, the very air lights up around you and the monsters hiss in display as an armored light tank rolls up to take up position besides you.
You see tanks in games all the time, but the overall setup really makes it feel like something like an ancient champion, an equalizer that makes the impossible happen.
2) Its not until mid-game that you get an AK-47, very much an iconic weapon. You manage on and off for a long time and basically scrimp and save, but when you finally get the AK-47, its basically through the death of a friend that you’ve been travelling with and you get it right so you can avenge him with it, granting it meaning to the player on top of its iconic status. Watch the bandits scurry in terror at the sound of a real gun is pretty fun too.
How popular is Dwarf Fortress in Russia, I wonder?
Clarke Air Base in the Philippines, an attack that happened the next day
Techically you’re right because of the International Date Line. But in “real” US time both attacks occurred on December 7 (1248 for Pearl Harbor and 2335 for Clark Field in terms of EST, or 0748 and 1835, respectively, Hawaiian time — assuming I’ve done the calculations right, that is).
Were these technical problems due to chance? To me this doesn’t seem to reflect well on the Ukrainian military.
The dugout thing is strange and reflects badly on the test as an aid to eventual combat operations; something should be done about that.
Seems I posted the Metro trailer twice. Here’s the E3 trailer for CP2077 that Gibson (the original creator of the series) slammed:
Also, speaking of GamerGate and even games suffering from the same disease as Hollywood entertainment.
https://i.imgur.com/hLsJ773.png
The game in question is Last of Us 2 and the background story to the trailer that was shown at E3.
That’s good. The story was a shit-tier “le ebil white man, le ebil Comstock” and a thinly veiled morality play on how America is the cradle of evil and all white people who tried to keep it white were monsters for doing so. I was utterly shocked to find out that the main writer was a jew. Good riddance.
time zone only four hours removed from the US East Coast were big factors.
That will be news to the Irish, I think I can confidently say (being one of them myself).
You’re right, the dateline reduced the time they had to respond, and would make it the same day EST – but they still had plenty of warning.
It seems to me that McArthur, who gained so much later fame, was at fault, both for the poor prep and also for the late response. The few aircraft on Wake Island were probably of more use.
Yes, there’s a lot if truth in what you say.
But at the same time I think industrial societies force people to change their relationship to the world as they grow up.
When you’re young you see the world as animated and alive, and yourself as more at one with it, while to function in an industrial society you must learn to see the world as inert, dead, and manipulable, and as outside of yourself and as other.
So many things are just fun as a kid because you live in an enchanted forest. Just hanging with friends seems exciting and rife with possibility.
Hunter gatherers maintain this attitude till their death and don’t experience this devastating loss of dimension as they grow older.
I started becoming interested in religion when I made the connection between religion and restoring an enchanted view of the world. In my youth religion was just a set of stifling rules and joy killing regulation – and its part of the reason religion died in the modern world, because it lost its mystical soul. I became an atheist early because I experienced religion as hostile to a sense of magic and enchantment.
Sounds very cool – you know, in principle there need not be this radical divide between technology and religion, and since it’s unlikely technology will disappear and its equally unlikely atheism will last, it seems most likely technology will mesh with myth and legend in an interesting new synthesis.
In fact, I even suspect major scientific advance depends on maintaining a psychological connection to the Unconscious, and we’ve recently lost our ability to innovate because the balance between rationality and inspiration has tipped too far in the direction of dry analysis.
The idea of a tank as a mythic champion against supernatural monsters is a fascinating reversal of accepted norms and suggests that technology is already being absorbed into a mythic world view.
Interesting times ahead.
I don’t know how many of you are christcucks (hopefully none), but now is as good time as any to reflect over becoming an atheist.
https://i.imgur.com/NUKUdMD.png
h/t to Niccolo Saldo’s (excellent) twitter feed.
Seems to me there were a lot of Leftist themes in Bioshock Infinite.
What I thought was so funny was how forced they all felt. Exploited black and Irish workers? LMAO – they had antigrav and automation so good that they could build robot soldiers. They didn’t like blacks and Jews being around? Well, antigrav cities = freedom of association. And if you floated an American city in 1893 or thereabouts, there wouldn’t have been many blacks to start with. The whole racial/exploitation angle just makes me want to puke.
Another game from a few years back I’d criticize is Deus Ex: HR. They had a China that was filled with blacks, among a few other things.
Thus much of the Japanese population in America in 1941 were not in fact citizens and thus cannot be called Japanese-Americans.
If by “much”, you mean 38%, you’re correct.
You are correct, it is indeed scandalous that the soldiers were given tanks that couldn’t shoot at at the beginning, costing a lot of points. The Ukrainian soldiers were really outraged by that. It doesn’t reflect badly on the troops, at least.
But the bottom line, if not for those two problems it looks like Ukrainians would have outperformed the Brits and the Americans, and come close to the Poles whom they beat last year when they didn’t have that problem.
Speaking of trailers,…
It seems to me that McArthur, who gained so much later fame, was at fault, both for the poor prep and also for the late response
It’s even worse.
This is nothing to do with me.
I just posted music videos from youtube.
The posting of women pictures is always from the user melanf.
Probably he is busy in the office or his boss is over his shoulder. He has not done this for some weeks. “Look at this blonde girl. Imagine I am going to marry her, but I am confused – she is 1/4 Kalmyk, 1/4 Ossetian 1/2 Somali. Will they say on the American Nazi internet forum?”
No offence if he reads this. Sure everyone – probably even Kalin – is feeling sad he is not doing this anymore
I didn’t feel like they made the multiracial Vox Populi, which were enemies of Comstock, much better. I felt that black Daisy Fitzroy came off as even worse than Comstock – an actual child killer toward the end. At any rate, they accomplish nothing but destruction – they never had a solution or an idea on how to rule, organize, or do anything except to destroy everything around them.
None of this matters because your focus is on Elizabeth, but the Vox Populi seemed like they doomed everyone, including themselves.
Cornelio would disagree and explain that it is Man’s fate to suffer.
The Salo crew are quite fun.
http://i.imgur.com/TVLXO30.gif
It’s strange that you’re using a negative term like “christcucks” when referring to Niccolo’s twitter account, since he’s a strongly Catholic guy.
Personally I have at best ambivalent feelings towards Christianity. I don’t think one should adopt an anti-Christian stance though, even though the temptation certainly exists given the behaviour of much of the church hierarchy on immigration matters.
People make jokes, one shouldn’t expect a German to understand that.
(/s)
That’s true, it was kind of muddled morally, but I think the implication was that he created them – so everything has its roots in the racism of religious whites.
I don’t think PolishPerspective was joking with his use of the term “christcucks”, a negative view of Christianity is widespread among the nationalist right. To some extent I share it myself, even though I don’t think one should abandon Christian morality completely.
There is a sort of tragic comedy about it, how he later came to rule over Japan. Just as with the losers, many were not held responsible, so it was with the victors.
The term combined with the reference is clearly a joke in context, though; we can’t use (/s) tags all the time.
Here’s a woman unsure if she should abandon PC and become part of the nationalist right: https://78.media.tumblr.com/21e91ec2b17debdd2445ee9f04b4fa6e/tumblr_o1fa94vrWb1qe14euo1_640.jpg
The ZTE deal might fall apart, after all, due to Congress.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-12/senate-adds-amendment-would-kill-trumps-zte-deal-must-pass-defense-bill
Although I want to post photos of Nyusha.
Is it possible for awoman to wear too much fake tan, that she suddenly becomes unattractive to nationalists?
Because I thought she was just wearing fake tan to become brown.
http://assets1.protv.md/articles/files/thumbs/700x/2335831.jpg
http://assets.protv.md/articles/files/thumbs/650x/2335771.jpg
http://news.rambler.ru/img/2017/08/20175601.802649.7493.jpeg
Then I saw the old pictures of her as a teenager before she was famous, and realize she is actually brown.
Is losing attractiveness when you realize she is naturally this brown colour?
http://300experts.ru/upload/img/57ee28df6b1d2.jpg
Well, that was a justification of sorts, but I thought it was supposed to ring hollow, like all of the usual complaints of “I’m only a criminal because society made me this way.”
It doesn’t really matter, that’s already sunk cost: the fact that Daisy might have had a hard life really doesn’t justify murdering children, and reducing the entire world to savagery and flames. The last we see of Colombia is that is collapsing, and the population screaming from all of the various radios as everything is reduced to chaos.
To me, it had an allegory of “Be careful of what you wish for. Maybe the evil you know is better than unleashing the evils you don’t. People aren’t angels just because they’ve been oppressed.”
Note that Comstock himself didn’t try to destroy the world; it was the future of broken, insane Elizabeth who “surpassed him in all things” if you failed to save her. It didn’t seem like that is what he wanted himself.
And ironically, of course, he was right. He is Elizabeth’s father. He really is, despite her denials.
The more important question in the context of this blog is whether Greasy would bang her.
https://www.thelocal.fr/20180612/france-defends-not-taking-in-aquarius-migrant-boat
French demand from proud Italians that they allow migrants to abuse “international law”.
Well I don’t think Nyusha is going to bang Greasy, sadly for Greasy.
But her aging process is something terrifying.
8 years ago she was the perfect dream girl.
In 2010 – beauty
And now she’s like – just normal (well still a nice woman):
How does someone stop being Taylor Swift after 8 years, though?
Karlin has to send him some kind of award (i.e. pair of new spectacles) for trolling with Taylor Swift shop girl 🙂
She doesn’t age but she’s just staying the same
Taylor Swift in 2010
http://cdn01.cdn.justjared.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/swift-peoples/taylor-swift-peoples-choice-2010-13.jpg
Taylor Swift 2018
https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/gettyimages-884889960.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=618&h=410&crop=1
Young Nyusha
https://pp.userapi.com/c4139/u85373281/122591924/x_ad1a3313.jpg
Ok even ugly Taylor Swift is singing better than beautiful Nyusha – it is true.
Yeah, but melanf is also an important contributor.
That’s true, I appreciate his posts. I just hope he doesn’t collect all those women he posts pictures of in some kind of dungeon like this guy in Austria.
Treating Kim and his state as rational rather than demons certainly helps.
As, oddly, does the existence of retired basketball star Dennis Rodman and his friendship with both leaders.
This is something everyone should remember the next time some Very Serious Person says that an unorthodox politician is not acceptable because he isn’t boring and doesn’t agree with the op-eds printed in The Ecommunist.
Of course Greasy is right that Kim hasn’t given up his nukes yet (he has only agreed in principle), and no doubt the American Dweeb State will do everything in its power to sabotage relations with North Korea.
I am optimistic on the Ukraine, but not on Iran. Unless maybe Trump replaces Fox Bolton and/or Mike Pompeo with Tulsi Gabbard or Dana Rohrabacher (who should’ve been Secretary of State to begin with).
The fact that we can have comments like this as part of normal conversation here is why this is the best community on the Internet.
Probably a gypsy. Lots of them in Slavic lands.
Btw, how do you reconcile your disgust for swarthy girls with your love for Israel?
What color are the inbred Samaritans who, according to you, are the purest living examples of the original Jewish look?
Methinks this nordicist hebrew doth suffereth from much cognitive dissonance….
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/12/angela-merkel-faces-power-struggle-moves-block-policy-close/
Interesting developments of late.
Why not? I happen to view it as one of the primary obstacles to a renaissance. The de-christianisation of Europe was not concomitant with a purging of Christian morals. Instead many of these morals (“turn the other cheek”) were re-packaged in secular forms and we’re suffering the consequences ’til this day.
P.S. About Saldo, I’m aware of his ideological background. He is also a civcuck who has praised le based black hungarian MP because “he culturally assimilates”. All of these things don’t prevent him from having a good Twitter feed, which he undoubtedly does. I think there is a fine line between having strong core principles and being an autist purity spiraller who can’t ever read people you disagree with. I go out of my way to read leftists, including the far-left, simply because I believe it’s necessary to read those you completely disagree with with regular frequency. It both helps you sharpen your own positions as well as making fighting the enemy easier.
By contrast, the distance to someone like Saldo is far smaller, by comparison, who I don’t even view as an adversery as much as someone who is a bit too mild for my liking. So, I don’t know why you’d be surprised.
Or at least, in case he does, he’d invite us all to share the girls with us.
That’s an interesting perspective.
I must admit that I viewed it through a simplistic lens of him being the cause of it all – the Vox Populi, the crazy Elizabeth. That’s why the baptism and the sea of doors – everything hinged around his choices. Since you are him, I thought of it as being kind of didactic.
My thoughts are often colored by the general entertainment culture, which I believe has obvious in-built political biases, probably inherently so, from the psychological tendencies of those attracted to the arts.
Curiously, there have been movies where I take up this position, and others hold diametrically opposite views of the moral of the story. The movie Snowpiercer seemed classic class-warfare to me; the director seems to be a Leftist. Someone else argued with me that that the message was really about anti-communism.
What are you guys talking about..?
A video game that came out a few years ago – Bioshock Infinite.
If Poland and Russia ranked higher than Sweden, then I think the high level of female executives is not due to progressive gender equality climate of either country (although that doesn’t mean the climate is negative) but something low quality about the men in Russia and Poland. Slavic men tend to not be good at communication and lack soft skills compared to Western European men. Slavic women and Western European women are equal in capability in those traits. This allows Slavic women to take on leadership roles in the business world in Russia and Poland because the male competition does not produce enough skilled individuals to completely shut out the playing field.
I don’t think that Snowpiercer’s message could be anything but leftist: all white people are dead.
Probably everyone is dead soon.
Lol yes, you have found yourself on a Neo-Nazi forum – you are obviously very observant person.
Roma people are not very common, and, moreover, are known for musical abilities, which (/s/) eliminates Nyusha.
She has probably some unusual nationality on the mother’s side.
Her Olympic gold medal-winning half-sister (half-sister through her father), is completely different and not beautiful.
http://mariashur.ru/upload/mariashur.jpg
–
Nyusha – what a toned-deaf beauty
Your nom de plume slaughters quite a few Vox Populi airships in the ending, it occurs to me.
Do you think he is a scientist, like botanist or something? Maybe he is not wasting time in the office.
He’s an expert in some various areas: geography, architectural studies, the 20th century history, and a leading authority on identification of the true nationalities of beautiful women from their photographs…
Russians have only the purest of love for Hitler.
True – you have caught me out.
I also agree: Snowpiercer was leftist.
Or at least, in case he does, he’d invite us all to share the girls with us.
I thought you were married [“handcuffed”, as the Spanish would say, as esposado (“espoused”) has a double meaning.]
There’s nothing wrong with the sister.
I don’t know, some of my classmates at school who were ethnically completely German as far as I know had a similar skin tone, I’d say it’s well within the usual European range.
Well, yes, that’s really a big practical obstacle for me to bang the slave-girls in melanf’s cellar.
Hard to tell imo if this isn’t just for show, Seehofer isn’t trustworthy.
But Merkel really seems to be kind of fanatic on the open borders issue, even though public opinion has turned somewhat against her position. There were some recent horror crimes by “refugees” (e.g. rape and murder of a 14-year old Jewish girl by an Iraqi, also other incidents like a knife attack on a policewoman by an Eritrean) which could no longer be swept under the carpet. AfD is now at 16% in some polls.
If CSU leaves the coalition (which I think is quite unlikely), Merkel might just take the Greens into government which has been her goal for years anyway.
When that Houllebecq novel becomes reality and we all convert to Islam, you can have multiple wives.
I tend to agree with you insofar as “Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe” right-wingers get on my nerves, in their own way they’re no less larping imo than people who are into Norse paganism as part of their politics. I also have a lot of issues with Christianity and can’t regard its influence, especially today, as completely positive. That being said, if one wants to construct a new kind of ethics one would have to take great care not to just descend into nihilistic power worship.
Video games and pictures of women. Sad.
Well she has all the talent in the family – but I do not consider any hotness.
The family is like some study in how successfully a woman can achieve in life with either talent or hotness, but not having both at the same time
https://vistanews.ru/uploads/posts/2016-08/1472137089_cdab228f82997a05fe13766357d70b28__1440x.jpg
http://n1s1.starhit.ru/7f/51/3a/7f513a7c9498f87cbb7a9c40d177224a/480x497_1_52a52377eb28[email protected]_0xc0a8399a_3538363661472214147.jpeg
Allen Edmunds is having a Father’s Day sale right now.
The Lake Bluff and Sarasota loafers are on sale. These are generally never on sale.
https://www.allenedmonds.com/shoes/mens-shoes/loafers-slip-ons/lake-bluff-weave-dress-loafer/SF1087.html?dwvar_SF1087_color=1089
https://www.allenedmonds.com/shoes/mens-shoes/loafers-slip-ons/sarasota-weave-slip-on-penny-loafer/SF1070.html?dwvar_SF1070_color=1070
For the uninitiated Allen Edmonds is the finest American shoemaker (along with Alden). Its shoes are made in Port Washington, Wisconsin.
If you’re a first time customer, sign up for their e-mails to get 15% off your first order (you can always unsubscribe afterwards).
There’ll be more than enough days when we can talk about Russian-Western tensions, Mideast wars and the approaching end of our civilization, so cut us some slack.
Why? They are correct. Europe’s greatness cannot be separated from its faith. And all of its problems stem from the erosion of this faith. I don’t think that one needs to be a believer to recognize this.
If this is correct: end of our civilization, then this is incorrect: There’ll be more than enough days.
Maybe if it was fake tanning. But I’m sure it was some partly non-Russian nationality in the family ancestry.
https://cloudstatic.eva.ru/eva/530000-540000/531785/channel/9QWPcJz4stg_47337985997126198.jpg?V
https://ss.metronews.ru/userfiles/materials/104/1045047/858×540.jpg
Allen Edmunds – it’s for people who cannot afford English shoes?
all of its problems stem from the erosion of this faith.
99.9% pure bullshit
On some level you’re right, but the kind of society some Christian right-wingers long for (everybody believes, and it’s completely uncontroversial that everything is ordered according to Christian morality) is impossible imo under modern conditions. It’s no less a fantasy than the ideas of people who think one could just go back to paganism. And I very much doubt Christian belief would be a magical solution to all of Europe’s problems either.
‘Tis interesting how the materialist sees the world…a few brothers and I were recently reflecting how God ennobled the Son of Adam by allowing him to partake of the blessing of water while standing or sitting. A blessing so tremendous, the vast majority of the animal world must bow or prostrate while partaking of the same.
Peace.
It wouldn’t, and I take issue with AP’s phraseology, but the religious tendencies that attack the faith are problems and the source of hydra-headed new problems.
What tendencies? You mean neo-pagans, or what do you have in mind?
holy shit. Who is that girl?
The cachet of Allen Edmonds and Alden in America is the same as high-end shoes from English, French, and Italian shoemakers.
Allen Edmonds and Alden are mostly conservative in their styles however, whereas some of the European shoemakers offer designs suited to wilder tastes.
I am partial to bold styles myself and especially like the classic Gucci horsebit loafer. That said one thousand dollars for shoes really is dear, and Gucci doesn’t bother to offer recrafting services.
It’s more like the majority of the animal world (if they could think) would see man as cursed, that they to awkwardly bend to get water.
Besides, animals have all kinds of abilities that are not present in humans, such as flying or changing colour. If god were so nice, he would have given some of these things to humans. Really – the only special advantage of humans is being more intelligent and social. In other areas (speed, swimming, jumping, fighting) – humans are far from the top of the animal world.
I think that if you follow G-d’s laws that your people will ultimately thrive and if you disregard G-d’s laws then your people are fucked.
The problem is that this is very hard to prove and it’s hard to convince non believers of the importance of loyalty to G-d while their countries are being invaded by shitskins. The natural reaction is always going to be to deal with the shitskin invasion first and anybody preaching faith as a solution is going to appear hopelessly out of touch, even to believers.
This is made even worse by the fact that the universalist message of Christianity, vis-a-vis the subject of salvation, has been twisted to support immigration. Further, it is likely that the ingraining of Christian universalism into the very fabric of Western culture is what made Leftism possible in the first place. Notice how Leftism is basically non existent in countries that were not historically Christian.
This statement is too bizarre to even respond to. It’s not even offensive, it’s just weird.
Well, if I understand correctly, childbirth is far more problematic and painful in humans than most animals.
Of course there’s an explanation for that in Genesis.
Why? Really Christian areas such as Poland and Utah (okay Mormonism is a rather wild heresy but still..) are doing fine in the modern world. And there are still plenty of real practicing Christians in fallen places too.
Completely different, because paganism has not existed for 1000-1600 years. So the modern version is total fake reconstruction. Also paganism was a failure, prior to Christianity northern Europeans were rather useless savages.
As I stated, and as your statement reinforces, the outlook is quite interesting…
“…but a few of My servants are grateful.” (34:13)
Peace.
Poland still has a birthrate well below replacement, and Mormons in Utah aren’t real Christians, but weirdo cultists with beliefs that are absolutely heretical from a Christian perspective.
True, but you’d have a much harder case arguing that for some of the Greco-Roman pagans of late antiquity like the emperor Julian (influenced by Christianity insofar as he wanted to reform paganism to take greater care of the poor). Christianity didn’t win because everybody suddenly found it absolutely convincing, but because its adherents managed to control key positions of the state and to discriminate all other beliefs, apart from the Jews, out of existence. That’s not an especially edifying story imo.
Leftism is Christian principles applied to this world rather than the world to come.
When Christian countries went secular, Leftism was inevitable – and will continue to be unstoppable until they stop being secular.
But its beyond Christianity – Leftism is Prophetic Judaism applied to this world, and Buddhism, etc, all of them.
Non-Christian countries are less leftist because they are less secular – even Japan which Westerners mistakenly believe is secular is in fact a deeply superstitious and religious culture, as anyone who engages with Japanese culture will find out, to their surprise as the image we get in the West is so different – and so false.
And as our good Daniel Chieh will attest, China retains much of its non-secular past in its current modes of thinking and even in its language.
Talha, are you back?
You were missed! Your spiritual force is sorely needed in these parts – our Mission To The Heathens must continue.
It’s hard and lonely work, being the only idiot coming from a spiritual perspective in these hostile and inhospitable jungles.
The great Italian thinker and poet Leopardi thought the Ancient World died because the rationalism of the Greeks led to a loss of what he called illusions – i.e perceptions unsupported by mere logic applied to sense data.
Did Christianity win because it restored enthusiasm in a world grown gray with apathy?
Not quite, friend. Ramadan ends this weekend, so I’ll be a little more active – though the less time on forums has been liberating so I will not be as active as before. Also, my spiritual teacher just gave me the heads up; I’m going to be very busy on multiple projects he has lined up for me for the community and mosque…sami’na wa ata’na…
Plus – perhaps a specifically Russian-nationalist blog that is uber-interested in technology is not the best ground to be digging one’s well, eh?
Peace.
iirc the standard view is that late antique culture actually became more irrational. I guess the negative view of the Neoplatonists you’ll find in Gibbon etc. is exaggerated, but some of them definitely believed in very strange things (e.g. one of their sages was supposedly able to levitate).
And those were the intellectuals. Someone like Diocletian may really have believed that Jupiter actually existed and that he had a personal relationship with him.
But you’d have to ask an ancient historian since I’m semi-educated at best.
No, it won because every emperor after Constantine, apart from Julian’s short reign, was a Christian and it became useful for personal advancement to join the new religion. And from the end of the 4th century the old cults were prohibited. By the time of Justinian it had become dangerous for one’s life to believe in the old gods.
It’s really simple, a combination of material benefits and discrimination as inducement to conversion, same principle as later with Islam. Admittedly the Christians did some good things like caring for the poor and sick though which certainly also won them converts.
You are right, as usual. But despite the indifference and hostility I encounter here I find myself strangely drawn for the moment – perhaps it’s an impulse I should respect as coming not entirely from myself. I suspect I will lose interest at some point and be released from from this compulsion.
That’s great that you have worthwhile projects lined up – I wish you luck, do good work, and I hope to still see you around every now and then.
Not really.
Talha says that men are especially blessed by god, because they are one of the only animals that can drink water without bending down (not actually true, unless you thank the people who installed the pipes in your house and had to bend down – but anyway)..
Well I would prefer to be able to fly or change colours or swim to the bottom of the ocean, than to drink some water standing up. It’s not very high on the list of priorities of the blessing a god could give you, and would not even be considered a blessing by most animals.
You’ve threatened to leave us before. I think one of the first comments of mine to you was to the effect that you said you were leaving and you didn’t.
Why would someone be grateful for something which is not a blessing, and which most animals would feel is inconvenience.
It is more a form of human chauvinism, pride and arrogance (pretending your way of drinking water is better than the cat’s way, and then arrogantly interpreting that it means you are ‘special’ and ‘above animals’, and due to a god not less – as if a god would not laugh at this idea).
In addition, it’s not true, unless you ignore the people who had to install the pipes in your house, or to fabricate the glass you’re drinking from.
Stoics and Epicureans dominated the late Hellenistic world – the pre-Socratics were more shamanistic.
And stoics etc were were basically religion without the supernatural and without enthusiasm. Our world today is like theirs. Every culture that adopts Greek rationalism ends up apathetic and gets swept away by some great movement that restores “illusions”.
Your explanations are good as foreground mechanical explanations but they don’t address the ultimate reasons which are always a matter of emotion and principles. It’s like saying Jews dominate today – yes, but why!
Hey iffen,
I said I’m going to be easing back, not leaving.
Peace.
The real question:
Pilot or Uniball?
I thought he was on hiatus because of Ramadan? Ramadan is over now, right?
I once tried to go on an extended fast and I broke down at around the 40 hour mark. In the next 2 hours I proceeded to consume 4500 calories. I got so sick that I ended up fasting for the next 24 hours without even trying.
I really think that I could do sunup to sundown for a month very easily. I know it’s easier to say than do but I just don’t think I’d have a hard time with it.
The people that are thriving the most today don’t believe in your G-d or his laws. Explain that.
Btw, how do you whackjobs pronounce “G-d” in your minds?
And didn’t you know that the word you are so stupidly afraid to spell in full comes from the pagan Germanic “gott”?
Well, yes, that’s really a big practical obstacle for me to bang the slave-girls in melanf’s cellar.
Well in that case I guess you’ll just have to console yourself with Hungarian football exploits at the international level:
But our Ukrainian friends will probably not be too happy with this.
What’s wrong with Nyusha’s songs? I quite like them.
The people during the time of the flood were flaunting G-d’s laws and doing great until the rains started.
If there is no Creator, there is no such thing as a blessing; it is axiomatic. Unless you mean “blessing” in some abstract sense of the word.
I’m not arguing with you – your conclusions are exactly what I expect; I just expressed that it’s interesting to see that perspective.
Of course, if there is a Creator; His incredible forbearance in light of His creation expressing such views is absolutely majestic and beyond description.
Peace.
What exactly are G-d’s laws for you and how should a society implement them?
His incredible forbearance in light of His creation expressing such views
This presupposes that “you” know what “he” wants. You can’t be certain, he might love all these crazies.
Are you a kike or something?!
“G-d” is something only the Hebrews do.
Dimitry, you are a good commenter, but honestly I think you are too stringent when evaluating women’s looks.
Lol. You flatter yourself too much, too often. Frankly, you come across as a confused narcissist nutjob with a messianic complex.
You have learned some eastern spirituality but you have not really understood it. You keep yakking about bringing back irrational, illogical illusions to the world (including the most barbaric, inhumane ones) even after learning from Buddhism and Vedanta that the world itself is an illusion.
Then there is your pandering to racist right wingers, which is further proof that your spirituality is nothing but fakery.
They also did in it medieval manuscripts, e.g. “Dns” for “Dominus” and “Ds” for “Deus”, that kind of sacred abbreviation was taken from the Hebrew.
I normally write “God” in English, partly for the reasons you mentioned, but I wanted to be respectful in my inquiry towards Greasy 🙂
Or He may not, guess we’ll see; Pascal’s Wager…House always wins…
Last post until Shawwal, take care…
Peace.
I wouldn’t like to do it this time of year in this hemisphere. More so because it would mess up my sleep than anything else. That is the food part – eating a meal before going to bed would keep me up.
The water part, I’m pretty sure would kill me. Maybe, one cloudy, cool day I could do.
.
Sadly only too true 🙂
I pander to everyone, because Truth is larger than these petty divisions.
People generally think I belong to their faction, then turn against me as they realize I belong to no faction. Not belonging to a faction is the one thing people can’t forgive.
I think the greatest gift mankind has is the ability to create complex structures – technology allows us to create things that reach beyond the physical limitations of animals.
I think dolphins and whales are intelligent – but they are still limited to a great extent by their physical characteristics.
Do not our planes pierce the sky at speeds unrivalled by any bird? Do not our submarines sink deep below the ocean? Do not our satellites cross the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere? What other creature is able to do all this?
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1006690543403855872
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1006694541083021312
Surely even German_Reader must have some kind words for #MyPresident now. 🙂
I admit it does sound good, very surprising development (at least for me).
Well that is obviously something of much dispute, that’s why we have different religions.
I try to focus on the things that everybody can agree on:
So in some ways we are doing pretty good, murder, incest and bestiality are largely absent from the West although they are certainly making comebacks in some parts, particularly in the increasingly totalitarian UK. In other ways we are doing really bad. A show like Family Guy where blasphemy is often the punchline would have been unthinkable as recently as the 1990s. Idolatry is coming back and as for Monotheism, there is ever less interest in worship of the Judeo Christian G-d (I know that people hate that term, and understandably so, but I still think it is useful and I use it for lack of a better one).
Honor for the elderly is lacking and in Western Europe we are seeing governments beginning to regard their elderly populations as a strain on their healthcare systems, especially now as more resources are needed to care for migrants.
But we always start with faith in, and worship of G-d. When Abraham came to Canaan and didn’t feel safe, it wasn’t because the Canaanites were bad people, it was because, in his words, “There is no fear of G-d in this place.” A society that isn’t centered on worship of G-d will always ultimately descend into barbarism.
Now that hasn’t happened in the West… yet. But it’s getting there. And I would submit that it did happen in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Soviet Russia, Communist China and Vietnam and Khmer Rouge Cambodia. And if you want to go back in time, look at the total moral rot in the Roman Empire before Christianity. The Byzantine Empire was hardly paradise but it was infinitely morally superior to it’s pagan predecessor.
I don’t know if the European commenters fully understand what the media is like in the US with regard to Trump.
I think you understand that if Obama had made this bid to engage N. Korea the SJWs would have panties so wet it would have soaked through the seat cushions.
the blonde guy looks like Carter Page.
The Samaritans are some of the whitest people you will ever see. They look like an inbred version of the Assad family.
You’ve created a mental model for yourself of Trump as W 2.0, and admittedly after Trump appointed Fox Bolton it was easy to think that.
Trump is of course disappointing in many ways and certainly not a non-interventionist, but there’s something about that man. 🙂
Now let’s see if he can wrestle the Dweeb State on RUSSIA.
You’re right of course to expect no progress on Iran, but I don’t believe he’ll attack Iran. He’ll claim (truthfully) that it’s Israel’s problem.
the Roman Empire before Christianity.
After these many years, still unequaled.
no progress on Iran
Care to define progress? I think we still owe them for taking our diplomats hostage.
I think Imperial Japan was rather religious, certainly no less than the other great powers of the era (except for the USSR, and even then there were still a lot of ordinary religious people).
I think Imperial Japan was rather religious, certainly no less than the other great powers of the era (except for the USSR, and even then there were still a lot of ordinary religious people).
And National Socialist Era Germans were also quite religious, in their various guises.
Progress would be Iran and America having normal relations and there being no endless threats to attack and destroy Iran.
The storming of our embassy was appalling, but occurred almost 40 years ago and should’ve been dealt with at that time. And since then we for instance shot down and Iranian civil airliner if you want to keep score.
Her career was from having such a beautiful face, but not talent in singing.
In most performances, she is performing to the phonogram
The real voice (when she is really singing) is like:
Nothing will happen of it. All the right proper individuals in the DC nomenklatura group-think tank orbit are already drowning any potential peace with negativity, they are rightful to do so but for all the wrong reasons. As Anatoly has pointed out previous, the United States is beginning to resemble something akin to a failed state in that it’s government is no longer really “agreement capable” in that it no party has any sufficient sovereignty to guarantee binding agreements. The US congress, filled with nothing more than shameless lickspittle careerists and opportunistic charlatans is actually not so much interested in power but rather the semblances of power. See such owned rent boy creatures such as Marco Rubio. Exercising actual power means accountability and responsibility for the consequences. Dodging responsibility while feathering their nests during their tenures in office is pretty much all American congressman are useful for. When presented with the opportunity to actually seize power, they have always chosen not to and instead defaulted to buck passing. What this means is that the true power in the US government is that of the permanent bureaucracy which is simply not interested in any sort of Korean peace. The logic of empire demands perpetual expansion, a strategic retreat meaning death. Like a shark must keep swimming or it dies, Amerizog must keep warring or otherwise its hold over it’s various satrapies and vassal states will disintegrate. It has been more 70 years since the end of the second world war and all America’s vanquished foes of the era are still under military occupation, 60 years for the Korean war, closing in on 20 in Afghanistan. The US is not capable of any compromise on this front, every so-called olive branch is mere artifice. America demands concrete irrevocable concessions for temporary “non concessions” that can and will be overturned on a dime because the Pozz must grow larger.
I can agree with some of that, though obviously not that much on the core religious issue. What do you mean by “Idolatry is coming back”? I don’t see people worshipping pagan cultic statues, so what do you regard as idolatry?
Confused much? Or willfully misleading?
Both Jews and Muslims have historically accused Christians of polytheism and idolatry. For obvious reasons: the Trinity and the use of icons in worship. You have more in common with muslims than with christians.
Nazi Germany was far more theistic than today’s Germany which is far more prosperous. Japan may have lost its Empire but it too is far more prosperous now and it still doesn’t believe in your God. Ditto for China. So your argument is ridiculous.
Btw, how does the Holocaust fit into your narrative?
I’m honestly pretty apathetic about it. I don’t fear a nuclear-armed NK, nor do I expect the status quo on the Korean peninsula to change. I expect US troops will remain, and NK not to reform. I never expected war, despite the saber-rattling.
I hope I’m wrong – I’d like to see the bases close, but I think it is too much to hope for.
Worse things could be happening, but it is kind of a downer that nothing is being done on the immigration front.
You lie again. Here are some Samaritans, they look like what you just called “shitskins” a couple posts back:
https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.5648252.1515406452!/image/1018316866.jpg_gen/derivatives/size_1104x828/1018316866.jpg
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/140421114549-01-passover-0420-horizontal-large-gallery.jpg
https://www.israelite-samaritans.com/shomron-direct/uploads/Pesach-web-54.jpg
https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2018/04/IMG_5271.jpg
Lol I’m not stringent in real life – the opposite.
It is coming back, IMO.
My airport has a gay flag flying next to the US and state flags. I drove by a really old private school in a rural part of NH the other day – it had the gay flag flying from one building.
It is pride month or something, but I got to ask, how the fuck did this happen? How did the gay flag get next to the stars and stripes – a flag people died for? Is there any sane person who would have imagined this before it happened? No – you land in that airport you are landing in Sodom and Gommorah. You take off from it and fly in any direction (international airport) and odds are you are also landing in Sodom and Gommorah, whether it is the West Coast or Western Europe.
The Taoiseach of Ireland is a gay Indian. Of Ireland! Formerly, a very religious country.
Atheism is a type of idolatry. As is the current nature worship that the Left engages in.
Today, “science” really is a religion. Technically science is just a method of observation and experimentation, but in practice it is really a set of beliefs based on a materialistic worldview. And where you really see this is in regards to any criticism of evolution or global warming.
Now don’t get me wrong, evolution and man made climate change absolutely could be true. They are the scientific consensus of hundreds of thousands of brilliant and committed scientists, many of whom have otherwise right wing or religious beliefs. That’s not the issue. The issue is the reaction to those who dissent from scientific orthodoxy on those two topics. Those who dissent truly are actively silenced and they are silenced because their views are seen as heretical. I can think of one case where a scientist criticizing another scientist who had suggested a paranormal theory to explain certain animal behaviors as being guilty of “heresy”. He unironically used the actual word.
So while the Nazis may ostensibly have been Christians, really there religion was science in the same way that today’s Richard Dawkins types is science. Before his execution, Eichmann (who really wasn’t particularly anti Semitic and was known to have regarded the things printed in Der Stuemer as disgusting) even reacted with confusion to a priests suggestion he repent. Eichmann basically responded, “Repent for what? All I did was follow the evolutionary directive.”
…
Bliss: I think the overwhelming majority of Torah True Jews would regard Islam as closer to Judaism than Christianity is. That isn’t the way I personally see it, but I speak only for myself. I’m certainly not going to apologize for what other Torah True Jews think and I understand where they are coming from.
As for the Holocaust, I would view it is the final stage of the exile. Unfortunately, there was nothing unique about the suffering of the Holocaust’s victims. They didn’t suffer anything that other humans and animals have been suffering for thousands of years. What was different about the Holocaust was the scale. Certainly it shows just what people are capable of doing if they turn away from G-d.
most Samaritans I have seen are much paler than that, and even those Samaritans aren’t shitskins. They look more like Greeks. Shitskins is generally only applicable to Latinos, blacks (not that I support anti black racism) and some of the more obnoxious Muslims. Even Indians wouldn’t really classify as shitskins. Although I will admit the term is a bit amorphous.
It doesn’t really matter anyway. Skin color means nothing whatsoever to me.
The guy holding the goat reminds me of someone. I want to say a younger Sarkozy, but I’m not sure.
You to should be “narcissistic” – you are a child of God, and of infinite value. Respect yourself, and try and uplift others.
Why engage in these petty divisions? You have no enemies in an ultimate sense – why not rise above this world and see things from the perspective of eternity?
One could just interpret that as a secularized form of the traditional enforcing of orthodoxy in Christianity though. The left with its intolerant conviction that false belief (not actions, just belief) is a crime (or rather a sin) to be punished and its quasi-eschatological view of history (“right side of history” and all that) feels very Christian to me in some ways.
I think that’s wrong, Eichmann was a fanatical antisemite who was was proud of what he had done. His self-representation during his trial as a bureaucrat without firm convictions seems to merely have been an unsuccesful tactic to save his own skin. There’s a book from a few years ago by Bettina Stangneth (Eichmann before Jerusalem) that advances this thesis and seems quite interesting. I haven’t yet read it in full, only skimmed through it once, but it contains some quite bizarre scenes from Eichmann’s exile in Argentina in the late 1950s: at one point he was apparently asked by other Nazi exiles and sympathizers about the Holocaust…they expected him to deny it and say it was all lies. Instead he boasted of his own role in it and told them how his only regret was he hadn’t been able to get even more enemies of the Reich.
Anyway, I can’t agree about the religious issue, claims that lack of religion leads to adoption of anti-human ideologies of hatred and mass murder don’t convince me (I guess I’m not the best counter-example though, lol). Thanks for your sharing your views though, that was interesting.
Actually, Hitler claimed that he was doing God’s work. And Nazi Germany was one of the most church-going nations of it’s time. According to your own narrative God must have punished the Jews for not obeying his laws. If you deny that you must reject your narrative. Capische?
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” (Adolf Hitler)
I’ve said before that I think that Europeans have a hard time understanding how deep the Russia stuff goes in American politics. But this one surprises even me. Please note: this is NOT a parody
http://i.magaimg.net/img/3iny.png
German_reader: I believe that Eichmann wanted a Jew free Europe but I think he also would have been happy to send them to Palestine or Madagascar had that option been available. Jews who dealt with him before the war described him as polite and friendly in their interactions with him. His Israeli interrogators seemed to like him.
If he really hated Jews, he would have said something in his last words about Jews. Instead he just expressed his love for Germany and Argentina (although it is really weird that he didn’t choose to say anything about his wife and children).
…
Bliss: I don’t think anybody seriously thinks that Hitler believed in G-d, regardless of anything Hitler may have said. The dude had a screw loose.
Anyway, it’s not just believing in G-d, it has to be the true G-d. If Hitler believed in G-d, which I doubt, then he was talking about something more like Baal (translates into “Lord”), not Yahweh.
And before you accuse me of being self serving in saying this, this has nothing to do with the Jews. Martin Luther hated Jews intensely but nobody would dispute that Luther worshiped the G-d of the Bible.
I’ve wondered if Eichmann was really just an ambitious man. Antisemitism was part of the rhetoric, after all.
Hello, Talha, good to see you. But that’s not how the materialist sees the world, it’s how Christians joke about the world … ( 🙂 )
Very good point– you will find this in Gideon (Judges 7).
You might appreciate my upcoming comment about Hema Malini if Karlin lets it through.
Why was my comment about the One True Dream Girl not published? I mean, there was a song and everything, with actual, you know, dreams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okQ-hUubqJU
Just don’t tell anyone I know in real life I said that. Silliness kills.
Don’t make things up. Hitler was a baptized Catholic and he was never excommunicated. He was talking about the God of the New Testament, not “Baal”:
My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter…….In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)
You believe politicians are sincere when they give public speeches. Very cute.
I don’t mean neo-pagans, they aren’t really serious, or at least not simultaneously serious and sane.
It would be difficult to briefly explain what I mean and it’s too late here to lengthily explain, so I would refer to the warning encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius X, such as Pascendi dominici.
Voegelin’s conception of gnosticism is interesting and not unrelated.
Don’t be silly, that was for public consumption, also very early in Hitler’s political career. Of course Hitler used references to Christianity in his rhetoric, and in a really weird way he may even have retained some respect for elements of Christianity (iirc he liked the gospel of John because it is so anti-Jewish, supposedly he also made remarks that Christ had been an Aryan and Christianity been corrupted by the “commissar” – that is like a Cheka commissar – Paul). But his world view wasn’t Christian in any meaningful way at all, but all about racial struggle, and couldn’t really tolerate any competing beliefs. There can be little doubt that he intended some kind of reckoning with the churches after a German victory in the war.
That’s guy’s videos are propaganda.
But Samaritans look the same as e.g. Cypriots, with going brown in the sunshine.
Samaritans are famous for having a very high rate of red-hair, which is how Bliss was confused when we were talking about King David and the fact the bible describes him as having red-hair (Bliss didn’t understand that red-hair is native to this region of the Middle East).
See red-hair kid at 1:30.
And red-hair guy at 2:37.
And red-hair boy at 3:22
Partially because a lot of young people are abroad and raising the birth rate there. IIRC Poles in Britain have replacement birth rate (or close to it).
They are heretics but sort of a weird offshoot of Protestantism. Very nice people, btw, your views of them my change if you ever have the chance to spend some time in Utah. Well-run, prosperous, civilized place full of conservatively attractive, friendly and hardworking people. I imagine the 1950s in America was similar.
As for why the Greco-Roman world was eclipsed, I highly recommend the Eastern Orthodox scholar Hart’s book : Atheist Delusions. Don’t be put off by its title, it’s not some ranting polemic but contains a thoughtful, well-written description of that process:
https://www.amazon.com/Atheist-Delusions-Christian-Revolution-Fashionable/dp/0300164297/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1528859579&sr=1-1&keywords=atheist+delusions
I wouldn’t do it justice by summarizing it here, but I highly recommend it.
Then she will fail for the same reason she did the first time around. Migration is not the only issue in coalition talks. I’ve been following the Italian situation quite closely, and I’m not talking about the migrant invasion now. The economic proposals of the new Italian government is a suicide pact. They cannot, ever, afford it and they will be bailed out if they actually do what they say they want to do.
That means, in short, that EU must become a transfer union and the German taxpayers know it. I’ve posted the chart where private flows from East to West easily dwarf the public flows many times. The German elite knows this full well. But there is no such massive discrepancy with regards to Italy. And they are net contributors (barely) to the budget. This means that there is no upside to the transfer, and Italy has the biggest amount of debt of them all. The ECB has no powers to bail them out.
This at the backdrop of Merkel basically giving Macron the finger on his EU-wide ‘reforms’ which are seen as very pro-Southern. Merkel is ultimately tied by her own party. The CSU is much closer to the CDU on these fiscal matters. The Greens are in their own universe.
One also has to give AfD some credit here. Seehofer is spineless – as I discovered during 2015-16 – but AfD, for all their flaws, have helped in keeping the pressure on. What they offer is not nearly enough, but I’ll take it as a first step. One has to be pragmatic.
Republic of Northern Macedonia: Decision finally made on new name after decades of debate
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-13/macedonia-changes-name-to-republic-of-northern-macedonia/9862810?pfmredir=sm
Although it’s not final yet since it still needs to be approved in both countries.
In the end it seems inevitable that the Leviathan will end up absorbing the Western Balkans sooner or later.
Ethnic Russians as a percentage of the population in the former USSR – then and now.
https://i.redd.it/mi48yq52tk311.jpg
Did many of these people simply migrate out of the Russian sphere not to come back? I’m aware that many people who get citizenship from Kazakhstan today are ethnic Russians, but I wonder to what extent the same is true for the others. Nevertheless, if most had migrated to Russia, I would have expected the ethnic Russian share to be higher. Also, the ethnic Russian share in 1989 seems higher than I thought it was. I had read somewhere that it was only 50-60% during the USSR. The sources used are the national censuses, as can be seen in the bottom left.
That would have been of the entire USSR, not the Russian SSR.
Atheists don’t reproduce. I think that’s enough.
Still lame. The people who live in today’s “Macedonia’ have nothing to do with the Greek province. They are basically bulgarians who are We Wuzzing as the descendants of Alexander the Great.
Johannes Hahn, the EU enlargement commissioner, has said that Serbia will likely be the first country let in. Serbia now has a PM who is a literal childless dyke SJW. I’m not even kidding. B&H will likely follow shortly after that. The schedule is the mid-2020s, though given recent eurosceptic trends, it seems to me to be quite optimistic.
I actually was once approached by a Mormon missionary on public transport in my city. Very polite guy, and certainly there’s a lot to be said in favour of the Mormon lifestyle. I still think their beliefs are bizarre though, since Joseph Smith was quite obviously a con man. Much better than Islam though, I guess.
I may look into it, though frankly it sounds a bit too much like Christian apologetics for my taste. I don’t doubt that Christianity in some ways brought changes that could be seen as a moral advance, like greater concern for the poor or a moderation (and in the longer term abolition) of slavery, or the end of the gladiatorial games. I just think Christians ignore the more dubious sides rather too much, and talk too much about things like Christians rescuing exposed infants (which is impossible to quantify), while downplaying issues like religious violence and the increasingly harsh legislation of the Christian emperors against other beliefs.
But thanks for the recommendation, always welcome.
Poland and Italy and Greece are the three most religious countries in Europe and all three have some of the lowest TFR in the world. INB4 “muh poverty”. Plenty of Arab and Sub-African countries are poor, and even modestly well-off countries like Indonesia have respectable TFR. Iran is an outlier in this regard. Islam is more pro-natality, but it is also anti-science and anti-progress.
But beyond whether which religion is more or less pro-natality is whether it is indigenous to Europe or not. Neither Christianity nor Islam is, which is problematic itself. But Christianity’s slave morality holds it back even more.
So, it seems like you agree with me on the key issue, then I do not understand what the problem is. I agree with you on being cautious on what to replace Christianity (and more importantly for us, its moral system which is still with us in the background) with, but that isn’t an argument in favour of Christianity. It’s just a favour of being methodological and considerate. I certainly agree with that.
I guess I’m saying I was expecting a more vigorous attempt at Christian apologia á la AP for someone who protested. Whereas in reality, it appears you simply are skeptical of the alternatives you’ve seen so far (fair enough) but don’t actually mind seeing Christianity – and its moral system, whether in secular or religious garb – being replaced.
Imagine a state of such people, built in one of the most naturally beautiful places on Earth. I would also say that the girls there are among the nicest in North America. Healthy and in good shape (all those outdoors activities) but also traditionally feminine, who know how to use makeup well, etc.
I just googled this and it’s very true:
https://www.mormonwiki.com/Those_Beautiful_Mormon_Girls
There is indeed a Mormon “glow.”
Men are tall and healthy too but I wasn’t looking at them so much.
The people are quite religious and conversion and marriage is probably the only way to be with one of them. But they are outgoing and friendly with visitors.
That he was. Perhaps God works in mysterious ways.
The book begins by skewering the New Atheists and the false stories they peddle but them moves on the describe the fundamental way that Christianity changed how people view the world and their place in it. It isn’t simply a catalog of great things Christians have done, but much more interesting than that.
She looks fine. I’d probably even prefer her to the talentless singer, even for banging purposes.
I agree, it is quite ridiculous. It would be better if Bulgaria just annexed them.
I’d say that becoming nihilistic atheists and purposeless hedonists obviously did us a lot of harm, but Europe was not exactly at its most religious when it ruled the world. So maybe not much correlation.
As a German who studied history there is no excuse for your ignorance of the fact that Hitler talked about God and Christianity till the very end:
https://www.nobeliefs.com/speeches.htm
If positive Christianity means love of one’s neighbour, i.e. the tending of the sick, the clothing of the poor, the feeding of the hungry, the giving of drink to those who are thirsty, then it is we who are the more positive Christians. For in these spheres the community of the people of National Socialist Germany has accomplished a prodigious work.
-Adolf Hitler, in his speech to the “Old Guard” at Munich on 24 Feb. 1939
Only when the entire German people become a single community of sacrifice can we expect and hope that Almighty God will help us…..help yourselves and Almighty God will not deny you his assistance.
-Adolf Hitler, in a broadcast from Berlin, 03 Oct.1941
God the Almighty has made our nation. By defending its existence we are defending His work….Only He can relieve me of this duty Who called me to it.
-Adolf Hitler, in a radio address, 30 Jan. 1945
It must have been very meaningful to his German christian audiences who were in raptures listening to his speeches. You can’t be so naive and ignorant as to think that Hitler’s anti-semitism arose in a vacuum:
https://www.nobeliefs.com/hitler.htm
Jewish hatred did not spring from Hitler, it came from the preaching of Catholic priests and Protestant ministers throughout Germany for hundreds of years. The Protestant leader, Martin Luther, himself, held a livid hatred for Jews and their Jewish religion. In his book, “On the Jews and their Lies,” Luther set the standard for Jewish hatred in Protestant Germany up until World War II. Hitler expressed a great admiration for Martin Luther.
The civilization will end with a long, drawn-out whimper. Lasting several decades, perhaps even a century.
She’s hot either way.
Humans are very good ultra-runners. Very few other animals are even capable of running for 12 hours with little interruptions, even running a marathon in under 4 hours is a difficulty for most animals. I’m not saying humans are the very best long distance runners, but we’re close enough to the top.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon?wprov=sfti1
Two pieces of news that can be used to confirm one’s bias on Tesla either direction.
Tesla is laying off about 9% of its workforce as it restructures the company
Some context: after the aquistion of SolarCity, their employee count surged bigly. They also made clear that they are not firing anyone involved in production and most of the cuts will be in middle management. Still, if you’re a Tesla bear you will only interpret this as doom and gloom.
Speaking of Tesla bears…
Tesla short sellers $2 billion in the red for June as shares soar
The Christian background of German society did play a role of course, since there was a very long tradition of negative views of Jews (“Christ-killers” and all that), but I think most scholars would still regard the racialised antisemitism that arose in the 19th century as a new and somewhat different phenomenon.
And Nazism did have significant anti-Christian strains, with the most extreme views regarding Christianity as a Jewish plot to weaken the Aryan race. Now that wasn’t the only view, and there were of course attempts to coopt Christianity with the movement of the “German Christians”, but Hitler definitely wasn’t a Christian in the sense that he believed in central Christian doctrines. It’s no accident that the quotes you’ve brought up are so vague and don’t reference any specific Christian content. Hitler may (or may not) have believed in some kind of God, or in “providence”, but I don’t think you’ll find any quotes by him about his belief in Christ’s resurrection or salvation through belief in Christ or something of the sort. Hitler’s fundamental belief was in the laws of nature, understood as a permanent racial struggle.
I don’t think that’s even a controversial view, but since this discussion is likely to be unproductive and I’m not inclined to spend time on looking for sources, I’ll leave it at that.
It is amusing, usually the (real or imagined) threat of a foreign adversary is supposed to create a ‘rally around the flag’ effect, yet it seems that Americans are only hating each other more and more the longer this ‘konspiratsiya’ affair goes on.
It was still rather religious in the 19th century. Spain peaked in the 16th century. The Spain of that time was the only place in history to totally de-Islamify a place. Not even the tsars like Ivan the Terrible nor Bolsheviks had the will to do that.
France was the first to go secular and unsurprisingly the first to fall.
David Sloan Wilson proposed another reason: Christians were outbreeding the rest. Pagan elites were hardly reproducing, and even the pagan masses’ behavior was bad for survival. For example they often left their sick to their fates during epidemics (for fear of getting infected), their dead were also often left unburied. Whereas for Christians it was a religious duty to endanger themselves by burying the dead. Incidentally, by everyone exposing themselves to danger, their rates of survival during epidemics were higher (less dead bodies unburied in Christian quarters of cities, so less flies, less further infections; the sick were hydrated, so higher chance of survival; resorting to prayer instead of doctors for healing: doctors at the time were all quacks), their children had lower mortality (community support was not forthcoming for pagans when they were down on their luck; yearly variations in income could mean starvation in many years, for which gluttony in some other years was not a good compensation), the restrictions on sexuality meant that those energies were channeled into reproduction, etc.
Have you read Darwin’s Cathedral?
Buddhists are heathens.
Another random article about Mormons and beauty:
https://www.allure.com/story/why-so-many-beauty-bloggers-are-mormon
I remember in some diner in Utah my wife observed that every one of the waitresses looked like a contestant in a beauty pageant, as one would imagine from the early 60s.
The Greeks were rationalists, but Romans, not so much. Over time they became ever less rationalistic. Then they became Christian. Then they fell.
They mostly tended to the poor and sick within their own communities. They also had standards for who they accepted. This meant that individuals within the Christian community were better off than those outside. This led to the situation after a few centuries that a wannabe emperor decided that it was beneficial for him to pander to them. This accelerated the spread of the religion. It’s difficult to maintain a religion which has lower fertility rates and higher mortality.
There are less than a thousand Samaritans alive and anyone can see pictures of probably all of them on the internet and see how you are lying about their “very high rate of red hair”. Instead we can see that they have a very high rate of brown skin. Which is understandable for that climate zone. In the Bible white skin is associated with leprosy:
Then the LORD said, “Put your hand inside your cloak.” So Moses put his hand into his cloak, and when he took it out, the skin was leprous –it had become as white as snow. “Now put it back into your cloak,” he said. So Moses put his hand back into his cloak, and when he took it out, it was restored, like the rest of his flesh. (Exodus 4:6-7)
Actually I made you look like a fool for claiming that King David was a red head:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/sweden-no/#comment-2353704
If red hair was native to Israel why does the Bible mention only black hair as being normal? The only time red is mentioned along with hair in the Bible (Old & New) is in the case of the evil Esau. Perhaps that is the source of prejudice against gingers?
No, but I think it’s on my list of books I intend to read. Along with dozens of others, so it might take a while…
I’ve heard of the argument summarized in your post above. Maybe possible…but I have to wonder, on what kind of evidence it’s based. The reality just is that there are many fundamental issues about which we don’t really know that much, because the sources are few and problematic. Much of Christianity’s history in the first three centuries is very obscure. The sources for the empire’s history in the mid-3rd century are very dubious, and those for the time of the tetrarchs and of Constantine not much better, really just fragments. Nobody has any clear idea how many Christians there were in the Roman empire in the early 4th century or what percentage of the population they were. You sometimes read a number like 10%, but in the end that’s just speculation. It does seem certain though that they were still a relatively small, if locally numerous minority. Constantine’s conversion was really essential imo, that changed everything.
So I’m somewhat skeptical of such grand evolutionary theories for Christianity’s success, but I will (eventually) look into it.
One can only hope so. Talha does believe in something. You don’t. He’s premodern. You’re postmodern. He never told you to develop your Buddhism, because he considers it a false religion. He does care somewhat about the demise of Christianity, in part because he doesn’t consider it entirely a false religion, in part because of the rot that the post-Christian world is spreading among Muslims, in part as a cautionary tale. You, on the other hand, have that fake postmodernist “spirituality” which is just a symptom of the rot.
But why would it have been? A late Roman emperor had to care mostly about the army, and while there certainly were a few Christian soldiers (if hardly an entire legion of them as in the legend of the Thebean legion), on the whole there is nothing to indicate that Christians were really a numerically important element there. Or actually in other groups important to the running of the empire. And Constantine started his career in the west which was certainly one of the less Christianized parts of the Roman empire. Rational calculations of power can’t really explain it, imo Constantine must have had some kind of genuine religious experience.
These Ukrainians are really insecure. Hungary has no army to speak of. No plans to develop that army. It has a quarter of the population of Ukraine. The Hungarian minority is only 150,000 people (and probably less) in a country of 40 million. Any separatism or border changing military action could easily be dealt with by sending in a platoon of Ukrainian riot police. But they have to be assholes with the Hungarian minority.
I agree, that is a rotten thing to do. Reaction to Hungary making a big deal out of the school language reforms?
Please show us where and when Hitler denigrated Christianity as a “Jewish plot”. Instead in his own recorded words he was invariably pro-Christian:
We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity… in fact our movement is Christian. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Passau, 27 October 1928, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich]
We are determined, as leaders of the nation, to fulfill as a national government the task which has been given to us, swearing fidelity only to God, our conscience, and our Volk…. This the national government will regard its first and foremost duty to restore the unity of spirit and purpose of our Volk. It will preserve and defend the foundations upon which the power of our nation rests. It will take Christianity, as the basis of our collective morality, and the family as the nucleus of our Volk and state, under its firm protection….May God Almighty take our work into his grace, give true form to our will, bless our insight, and endow us with the trust of our Volk.
-Adolf Hitler, on 1 Feb. 1933, addressing the German nation as Chancellor for the first time, Volkischer Beobachter, 5 Aug. 1935, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich]
We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 Oct. 1933
We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else– in any case something which has nothing to do with us.
-Adolf Hitler, in Nuremberg on 6 Sept. 1938.
So all public speeches.
You really are gullible, aren’t you?
One clear line of evidence is that he shows how all established religions seem intent on maximizing reproduction, unlike short-lived cults. There’s a lot of variety in the latter, but those which don’t encourage reproduction will disappear.
Basically Wilson shows that just a relatively small fertility and mortality advantage could lead to Christians becoming 10% of the population by the time of Constantine.
But he only converted on his deathbed. He ruled as a (nominally, at least) pagan. It seems likely that Christians were numerous already at the time he came to power.
Maybe it was the eastern armies (who needed to be defeated) which contained many Christians? And his armies only indifferent secular nominal pagans. Fighting with the sign of the cross made significant parts of the enemy troops desert or at least demoralized them having to fight against a “Christian” army, while his own troops just didn’t care that much.
The fact that he didn’t convert until on his deathbed makes one doubt about how genuinely Christian he became by the time of his victory. Which leaves us with the explanation that it was politically beneficial for him, or at least he perceived so.
19th century Britain at least was a highly religious society and evangelicalism was extremely politically important. Not that I think that it was necessarily good for the British empire.
The anti-slavery movement is an early example. The first evangelical prime minister, Spencer Perceval, wrote a pamphlet (which he sincerely believed in) arguing that Napoleon was the prophesied ‘King of the South’ from the book of Daniel.
Iirc, deathbed conversion was quite common then to wipe away as many sins as possible (which Constantine certainly needed). If anything, surely it would indicate he was sincere, since its political consequences wouldn’t matter after he was dead.
It contributes, but Ukrainian nationalists have repeatedly damaged the monument to the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian basin long before that, it needed to be repaired in 2008, for example. What I don’t get is that they won: there’s little chance of a border change in Hungary’s favor. So why can’t they be a little magnanimous?
He said less nice things about Christianity in his Table Talk.
The deathbed conversion certainly means that by the time of his death he was a sincere believer. I doubt it would mean that he had been sincere already decades earlier, when he started to use it politically.
Slavery was bad except for the small slaveholding elite. Though I agree that it might be unwise to wage wars to enforce its ban.
Do not our planes pierce the sky at speeds unrivalled by any bird? Do not our submarines sink deep below the ocean? Do not our satellites cross the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere? What other creature is able to do all this?
Canines?
Sorry that the way I wrote the comment was accidentally misleading, I meant anti-slavery just as an example of evangelicalism’s importance, rather than how it harmed the empire. Spencer Perceval is also one of my favourite prime ministers.
The harm claim later on through ideas like the civilising mission to try and improve native peoples.
Eichmann was a fanatical antisemite who was was proud of what he had done
The situation continues to get worse for the Houthis in Yemen. Pro Russian media has gone completely dark on the subject. Total Houthi defeat possible within a year or less.
Iran just keeps racking up the losses. They have proven themselves completely impotent against Israel in Syria, they can’t control their clients Hamas or Hezbollah, they have done nothing in retaliation for Trump pulling out of the JCPOA and now they are losing in Yemen to frickin’ Saudia Arabia.
Russia has realized that the Iranians are losers and has abandoned them. Even Assad is showing some signs of splitting from Iran.
The Iranian government’s problem is that they lead a population of stupid subhumans. I feel sorry for Iran’s leaders, being saddled with such a worthless and inferior people.
Now onward to Lebanon!
Thanks, I feel much better now.
Progress would be Iran and America having normal relations and there being no endless threats to attack and destroy Iran.
How about if Iran goes first and stops the endless threats to attack and destroy Israel.
The storming of our embassy was appalling, but occurred almost 40 years ago and should’ve been dealt with at that time. And since then we for instance shot down and Iranian civil airliner if you want to keep score.
Don’t you distinguish between willful and intentional actions and mistakes?
I haven’t been to Iran, but my impression from their history and interacting with their diaspora is that they’re most definitely not stupid subhumans.
They do like to lie, but so does everyone else from that cursed part of the world.
America isn’t Israel, and someone should inform our leaders of that.
The destruction of Israel is completely irrelevant to American national interests.
The only concern would be not to take in any Jewish refugees to avoid increasing our already excessively high Jewish population.
Now onward to Lebanon!
Weren’t your peeps relieved to have gotten out of Lebanon the last time they were there?
Even assuming that the shooting down Iran Air Flight 655 was unintentional, what kind of signal does it send to Iran when the people responsible for it are rewarded and given medals?
Exactly what signs has the US given to make Iran trust them? Even when Teheran agrees to come to a dialogue Washington will just rebuff them, like the abrogation of the nuclear agreement has recently shown.
This video is well worth watching: an African hunter from a very primitive tribe hunting as was done prior to the invention of bows and arrows. Essentially he spends hours and hours tracking and chasing the prey until it finally collapses from exhaustion and he walks up to it and kills it:
Was the monument to the conquest n 1939? If so I can understand it. Hungarians shot a bunch of Ukrainians back then. It would be like Hungarians tolerating a monument to the Soviet invaders of 1956 in Hungary.
Nevermind, I looked it up. Yeah, vandalizing it is simply wrong.
Buddhist countries did quite well and today are healthier than the West – I would hardly call Buddhism another symptom of the rot.
You’re supposed to have no attachments to beliefs, and to reach for a state that is grander and vaster than mere thought.
I rather think Buddhism is quite a respectable pre-modern religion, having existed for 2,500 years 🙂
But perhaps the Buddha was a postmodernist avant la lettre – oh how the head spins when one can’t think about the world in neat essentialist little categories with clear boundaries 🙂
https://i.redditmedia.com/32CKncLiuKVBQl7lS4kOoTCuRO-uVspY-PoFUoTNUKE.jpg?s=a08c338d140570e0da7ea1cacfa220f3
Or –
The Greeks were rationalists in their period of decline.
The Romans were rationalists in their period if decline.
Then they became Christian, and the decaying empire got another lease on life and survived another 1,000 years as the magnificent Byzantine empire and the Christian successor states of Western Europe had a rather good showing as well.
Until today, when they stopped being Christian and became Hellenistic Greek rationalists.
Its almost like there’s a pattern here somewhere ….don’t they have history books on your side of the cordon sanitaire 🙂
Its quite obvious our current age is a parallel of the Hellenistic Age – and will suffer the same fate.
You know this as well as I. You even refer to modern times as “rot”. You are simply unwilling to take the cure, which simply means the disease is too advanced in you.
Only materialists are heathens, you heathen!
Why don’t you practise Judaism?
Ironically it is the type of rhetoric that, if used very widespread, would in fact lessen the chance of the prediction actually occurring.
The San are an interesting people who were almost wiped out by the Bantu. Their original break was about 300,000 years ago, with some admixture since then. That means that language is at least 300,000 years old.
I am more inspired by other religions. It is too materialistic and not spiritual enough for me.
Lately I’ve come to appreciate it more, the more I compare it with the modern rationalistic materialistic white/European mentality.
There are blacks that are moving into Yemen, despite the war, and despite it being a hell-hole to start with. Along with the most important graph in the world, I think that should be a wake-up call to anyone, who thinks you can have open borders, or even some schizophrenic policy, where you allow people to come ashore with the hope that they will be deported later.
RT, H. Arendt in Eichmann says:
… “Charitable Foundations for Institutional Care” that the experts in mercy death called them. Moreover, from January, 1942, on, there were euthanasia teams operating in the East to “help the wounded in ice and snow,” and though this killing of wounded soldiers was also “top secret,” it was known to many, certainly to the executors of the Final Solution.
Have you read about this in any other source?
Or it could be that women in countries with less wealth and SJWism have more incentives to pursue productive careers.
That is why it should be spread. 😉
Well, there were two separate monuments, both commemorating the Hungarian conquest in the late 9th century. The Verecke Pass was where the nomads came in, so that’s where the monuments were placed.
The first monument was put there in the late 19th century, but it was destroyed by the Soviets in the late 1940s. Another monument was put in place (still there) commemorating the Ukrainians (members of the Carpathian Sich) shot by Hungarians in 1939. By the way the Hungarian Wikipedia claims (I didn’t check) that actually it’s a myth created by the Soviets. The Hungarian version of events is that no prisoners were shot, all who were killed were killed in action, and there were Hungarian casualties, too. It’d be interesting to find out the facts, especially Hungarian historians should look into this deeper. In any event, the leaders and members of the Carpathian Sich were amnestied in Hungary, even those who fled to Poland were allowed to return, but then the Soviets searched for them and sent to the Gulag anyone they could find. (It didn’t prevent them from erecting the monument to the Sich members ostensibly killed by Hungary, whether true or not.)
Then in the 1990s a new monument was erected a few kilometers from the original (as part of the Ukrainian-Hungarian friendship treaty back in the early 1990s, paid for by Hungary), but it was regularly vandalized, probably by Ukrainian nationalists.
I don’t think any monument is needed for the 1939 “conquest,” especially since it was so short-lived, nothing good came out of it for Hungary or anyone else.
This isn’t true.
The Romans were much less rational during their period of decline. Late Antiquity was known for the declining relevance of knowledge and expertise. Mystical thinking and revelations became more important.
As for the Greeks, I don’t think there’s much difference between classical and hellenistic Greece on this score. The Greeks didn’t really go into decline so much as they were overwhelmed by the Romans.
You’re looking for nails again.
Correct.
The 1990s saw a massive Russian migration back to the RF. This is one the main reasons that the % of Russians has remained more or less stable in the RF.
One of the commenters in /r/Europe where this graph posted suggested this gives the lie to Russian claims that the Balts are Russophobic – just look at Kazakhstan/Kyrgyzstan! The reality, of course, is that the Kazakh and Kyrgyz population itself has been growing explosively (plus Kyrgyzstan remains very poor), whereas the ethnic Balts have been in stagnation/slow decline, so the Russians haven’t declined as sharply relative to them.
Another interesting thing about Mormons is that they are highly technophilic and indeed have an outsized presence in transhumanism.
Robin Hanson wrote about it here: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/04/mormon-transhumanists.html
My comment there:
Stupid beliefs… but good aesthetics, healthy lifestyle, high fertility, and not too much progress-stifling religious obscurantism. A seemingly adaptive combination.
“Literacy and mathematical training apparently declined during the third century… The major emphasis of what education remained was rhetoric, and that was not really relevant to the needs of the government. There was at the same time an increase in mysticism, and knowledge by revelation. The external threats brought increased propaganda about patriotism, ancient Roman values, and superiority over the barbarians.” – Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies.
The arc of development in the Greek world went from tragedy and epic, Homer and Aeschylus, to Stoics and Epicureans preaching apathy and refined hedonism.
It was a radical shift in perspective.
Saying the Greeks did not become decadent but were simply overwhelmed by the Romans not only contradicts Roman accounts of Greeks as having become effete but is the kind of mechanical explanation that stays on the surface and is really a mere description of events masquerading as an explanation.
Its like saying modern Europeans didn’t so much become decadent but were simply overwhelmed by superior Jews – there are many people who do say this. Are you prepared to?
Such explanations stay on the surface. Clearly one group triumphed because it was in some sense stronger at that time. The question is always what physical or moral or intellectual factors made one group stronger.
Physical factors are rarely ultimate causes. For instance, one country may have mobilized its resources and manpower better. But what moral qualities enabled it to do so. And why wasn’t it able to do so 100 years ago. What changed? Tiny Greece staged off gargantuan Persia. Etc, etc.
One may explain everything through genes, but then we see nations flip their character almost on a dime, far too short for natural selection to do anything.
I don’t want to get into this kind of logical trivia here because I used to do it all the time and I’m done with it – if you really logically examine all your rational/materialist assumptions you’ll discover none of them make sense. Few people are willing to subject themselves to so unsparing a self analysis, which is why they never get beyond rationalism.
As for the late Roman period, the immediate pre-Christian period saw the emergence of all sorts of mystical and Gnostic sects, you are quite correct. Eventually Christianity won. But this period was the beginning of the break down of the period of rationalism.
Again the parallels to today are striking as we are seeing all sorts of weird quasi religious sects like transhumanism and transgender philosophy etc proliferate.
We are obviously going through a breakdown of rationalism today as well. Ten years ago I was an atheist rationalist myself – a young idiot.
We are in our Hellenistic period. Eventually some great compelling movement will arise that is better at lifting people up to the divine than the little feminisms or transgender sects and will sweep all before its path, like Christianity did, and the great gloom will have lifted.
Israel is 74% Jewish religion origin people – with multiple of visibly different/opposing looking races or nationalities contained within that. Very many brown and dark people.
While he’s correct about some aspects of the religion (the Jewish religion is growing in Israel, so the grandchildren will be more religious than the grandparents), the ethnicity situation in Israel comparable to Brazil or US.
Also Israel is full of every kind of illegal or undocumented immigrants (even lots of Chinese people are walking around).
The Israeli role-model is how to make a small version of a multi-racial (like Brazil) and multi-religious (like Lebanon) country , while in a situation of permanent war between the two main religions.
Most nationalists want ethnicially and religiously homogeneous nation i.e. one which is like Poland or Japan. (I.e. total opposite of the Israeli condition).
What a striking parallel to today!
We are now undergoing our period of breakdown of rationalism.
When will we have our Christianity ?
Well, on a practical level, the Romans might just have been a more capable adversary even if the Greeks had not declined at all(though I agree that they had). Warfare is more than men and material; the Romans effectively struck up alliances, maintain consistent pressure, and were able to win wars when challenged.
Such a full spectrum challenge over centuries, while less epic than massed Persian troops, is likely much harder to fight against.
Everyone here is equally ‘modern’ in the sense of being exposed to modern viewpoints and knowledge.
The only people who escape this are undiscovered living in a jungle, or illiterate – maybe some simple peasants.
There is a distinction in terms of how healthily people adapt to current knowledge, and how high is their tolerance for uncertainty (probably a correlate with strength).
Users like Aaronb, Talha and AP are sounding quite ‘post-modern’ above when they justify religion instrumentally or as politically/economically useful (this is not saintly or godfearing motivation).
As for the idea of justifying religion in terms of ‘impact on political or economic life’, etc, to me this sounds like something that would laughed at by god, would not match with godfearing people, but which can seem very sensible to more cynically adapted people (e.g. the way Putin will see religion).
I’m communicating with non-believers on terms they can probably appreciate, and what I write is correct, what does it have to do with post-modernism?
The Romans were able to mobilize much higher levels of manpower due to their fairly large citizen body and the system of political-military alliances with their Italian socii. No Greek polis and no Hellenistic kingdom (which often were riven by ethnic conflict between the Hellenic elite and the non-Greek population, there was a huge native revolt lasting for decades in Ptolemaic Egypt, and the story of the Maccabees rising against the Seleucids is of course well known) could even remotely match that manpower. Maybe there were also cultural factors involved, the Romans were aggressive not least due to the constant competition between different noble clans (winning glory and booty in war was an important way to play out that competition), they never forgave their enemies, and after the experience of the Punic wars they were also quite paranoid about neutralizing any potential threats. But in the end it was an issue of scale and superior military-political organization.
The “apathy” AaronB claims to discern imo was mainly the result of the political emasculation of classical polis society first by the large Hellenistic kingdoms, later by the Romans.
With English brands, you can find ‘bargains’.
I found a standard black pair of Cheaney Shoes for half price (reduced from $300 original price) . Wearing it every day at work, and they still are in very good condition after a year. They seem almost the same as the more expensive Church’s equivalent.
@Daniel Chieh
Of course, that too is a possibility in any single instance. I think that was the case between America and Japan for instance. Japan’s edge in morale was not enough to cancel out America’s advantage in materiel, espc since America was still quite religious and had quite good morale also.
Its certainly possible the Romans developed multiple skill sets that allowed them to assert full spectrum dominance that crushed all adversaries in their path – but I like to think “why” did this people decide to develop this skill set, why now, or how were they able to do so without being markedly more clever than others – and they certainly weren’t smarter than the Greeks! So it seems to me behind each and every material “fact” there stands a “moral” fact – if you push back far enough from the foreground. The final redoubt of materialist explanations is genes – but that falls by the fact of sudden and dramatic change in national character. But Thor may think I am looking for nails 🙂 Perhaps…
But it is a striking fact that when one nation decisively overruns another the national psyche of the overrun nation is nearly always what we’d call “decadent” – with national intellectuals bemoaning the loss of traditional ways and the break down of the old non-rational principles of life – and the national psyche of the conquering nation is always that of a highly motivated and enthusiastic people with a strong connection to some non rational principle of life.
Didn’t you write something about the “magnificent Byzantine empire” above? You do know what happened to that, don’t you?
Implying a concept of adopting ‘pick and choose’ religions, with factors including the healthy appearance of the women within the religion, or the desirable geography of the town.
I’m not criticizing this perspective, or saying that the facts are uninteresting. Please post more information about Mormons, it was interesting.
But for religious issues, it makes even me feel an old-minded person (to be concerned in either believing a religion or not – and if the religion is actually true, all other factors – political impact, etc, – should be irrelevant).
Everything decays over time. Change and impermanence are the Law of this world.
If you think “essentialistically” you will not be able to appreciate this.
The Byzantine empire is not “one” essential thing – it begins grandly, and then decays.
Also, look who defeated them – not apathetic materialists, were they!
Don’t you distinguish between willful and intentional actions and mistakes?
So was the US-orchestrated overthrow of the Mossadegh goverment in 1953 “willful and intentional” or a simple “mistake”?
Please refresh my memory as to how long it took for the US to apologize for this?
It’s a serious mistake to disconnect material life from spiritual life, one I used to make also so I understand where you’re coming from.
The purpose of physical life is to develop ourselves spiritually – which is seen as an intensely important task. The most important task. In Buddhism.it’s considered very fortunate to be born human.
Therefore, we must guard and protect our physical life and the physical life of the community because we are engaged in an incredibly important task. Of course we don’t protect physical life for its own sake and we often sacrifice ourselves for others and God.
A community engaged on this important task will see its life as worth preserving and defending and will not meekly surrender as an apathetic atheist with nothing to live for would.
Such a community has the emotional and psychological will to do everything needed to survive – so for this reason spiritual health is s necessary pre-condition for a society to “flourish”.
Of course, physical flourishing is NOT a goal for its own sake, and that only becomes the goal in the stages of religious decline when the religious impulse gets corrupted into a purely physical matter.
Empire and expansion in the physical realm is a corrupted spiritual impulse – which is infinite expansion in the spiritual realm.
I support “empire” attitudes in guys like Thor and Anatoly because it partakes of the religious impulse in however corrupted a form and is at least not apathetic atheism, which is the final triumph of entropy.
It suffered massive losses in territory already in the 7th century, and one reason for that (apart from the exhaustion after 20 years of war against the Persians) was that many in the provinces conquered by the Arabs felt oppressed by the religious policy of the emperor and rejected his brand of Christianity. Doesn’t really fit with your general thesis.
But then you’d probably tell us that all those Christological debates they had in late antiquity, with endless schisms as a result, were another manifestation of corrupt Greek rationalism and not true “faith in God”, lol.
Dmitry accusing someone of engaging in Israeli propaganda was not something I expected to ever see.
The US also aided Iraq in the later stages of the Iran-Iraq war and sank a significant part of the Iranian fleet in 1987/88, with dozens (or hundreds?) of Iranians killed.
Iffen’s idea that the US hasn’t gotten enough revenge for that hostage crisis which nobody under the age of at least 45 can remember anyway is rather strange imo.
GR, why do you suppose religions are not subject to the Law of decay. Of course they decay. They go wrong in many ways. And of course nominally religious periods may be quite corrupt – like the Church towards the end of the Middle Ages.
I think we’ve had this discussion before. Religion is not a panacea and will not suddenly create eternal utopia on earth.
It is merely that with religion you have many great periods and a shot at the good life – with apathetic atheism you have mere entropy.
Religion (at least of the kind familiar to us in the West, Christianity, and now unfortunately Islam) isn’t supposed to be about “great periods” and “a shot at the good life”. It’s supposed to be about divinely revealed truth, which would remain true even if the adherents of that truth were a despised and occasionally persecuted minority like the early Christians. The Christian’s true reward isn’t on this earth, but in the celestial city.
I find your entire outlook confused, imo it’s you who doesn’t take religion seriously with your undifferentiated spirituality babble.
Weren’t the Greeks pretty riven by the Peloponnesian War and never really recovered from it? Once so divided, Rome could simply wait and garner Greek allies opportunistically; any effort by the Hellenistic empires to reunify was considered as “aggression against Roman allies” which at least to the Roman mind, gave them plenty of moral justification.
Greece lingered on for quite some time afterward, but they really did seem like a shattered people who were repeatedly conquered until Rome got around to finishing them off on civilizational level, though their philosophy, fortunately, survived the final extinguishment of their political independence. The Achaean War was a final death cry.
Yes, the “good life” is one where you get closer and closer to God! And ultimately life is only perfect in Heaven. The good life is one of hardship and struggle and asceticism and simplicity.
You know we that in my mouth the phrase good life means something quite different than what it does in Dmitry’s!
I am not selling an atheist materialist utopia.
I admit: I will not sacrifice my life for sneakers, even high quality sneakers.
Boots are much cooler.
sure, iirc the Greek cities in Asia Minor even had to submit to Persian suzerainty again at the close of the war, and the Spartans accepted Persian subsidies. But I suppose the entire polis system was inherently unstable anyway, it would have either led to one city dominating all others (maybe by turning one of those city leagues into a true kind of state) or an external power playing off the individual cities against each other and dominating them (which is what actually happened).
I don’t think it can be said though that Rome “finished off” Greek civilization which in its pagan form flourished in many ways right until late antiquity, even if mainland Greece had become a backwater.
The terminal point for the Golden Age should probably be marked with Alexander’s destruction of Thebes and subjugation of the other city states.
Ah, that is because you are basically a religious person 🙂
The sacred scriptures have long taught that the boot is holy and the sneaker profane.
Well, on a political level, the massacre of Corinth seemed particularly harsh. For putting up a desperate resistance just to maintain the notion that they could have some political independence, the Romans slaughtered the entire male population and enslaved all women and children. It wasn’t like the Romans were angry about losses as often precludes such slaughter; their victory was easy. It was simply punishment.
That seems unusually brutal, even for the ancient world.
Cool story bro.
Your original comment was about rationalism, not any of this.
Lol, I see that now. Sometimes I assume others share my background info, but that’s unfair.
Stoicism and Epicureanism were based on rational analysis and rational principles, and although they retained traces of the supernatural they were largely anti supernatural in effect.
You might want to check out Nietzsche and Leopardi and the European historical tradition on this subject. The consensus is that Hellenistic Greece was highly rationalistic and so was the late Roman empire until the period tight before Christianity, when the great ferment began.
But would it really convince you if I demonstrated beyond all doubt this historical pattern? Youd just decide that it’s time for something new now or you’d use your brain to come up with some reason for why what you want is right.
That’s why I try not to get involved in logical or historical debates – they settle nothing. They are armchair pastimes engaged in by people who have already lost the will to accomplish anything great. Its a mistake.
What is needed is bold ideas that strike right at the heart – not a minute analysis of history.
History contains no lessons capable of reaching the human heart – one can just invent a philosophy that says we are entering a new stage of history and the past is no guide to the future. Or that this generation can overcome the past. Or this situation is unprecedented.
That is why analysis and examining history are parlor games. One must strike right at the human heart.
If you’re allowed to post some other blogs onto the Karlin blog.
Yesterday was Russia Day, and lots of football fans already flooded the center of Moscow.
https://macos.livejournal.com/1738424.html
So was the US-orchestrated overthrow of the Mossadegh goverment in 1953 “willful and intentional” or a simple “mistake”?
Perhaps it was both.
Please refresh my memory as to how long it took for the US to apologize for this?
I don’t think we need to get into the business of apologizing for exercising great power politics.
Make the world safe for BP?
I wish you would stop referring to my comments as strange and bizarre.
I am not suggesting that we need to launch a war of revenge against Iran. I simply mean that if they want to be enemies of the Great Satan and burn our flags they should go for it.
It is true that Christianity brought some changes that were a big improvement over paganism. The greatest one was forbidding human sacrifice wherever Christianity had the power: the Crucifixion of Christ being the finality of that ancient ritual.
It is wrong to give Christianity the credit for the abolition of slavery. The credit goes to the secular Enlightenment for it’s principle of egalitarianism. Slavery survived for well over a millennium in Christendom, but it couldn’t survive even a century after the Enlightenment.
Human sacrifice wasn’t really practiced in the Roman empire anymore though when Christianity arose (at least not openly), and parallels in other societes like ancient Egypt and ancient China would suggest that it’s something typical of a certain stage of development, but abandoned when a civilization reaches a higher stage of development and complexity.
The abolitionist movement in Britain and the US was of strongly Christian (evangelical) character.
Admittedly more secular strains of anti-slavery sentiment existed as well, e.g. in revolutionary France, but I don’t see why they should be privileged over the religious ones.
Operation Ajax was a great deal.
BP was forced to surrender half of its ownership in the Iranian national oil company to American firms.
You have it ass-backwards as usual. The West entered the Dark Ages soon after it abandoned Rationalism and embraced Superstition. It started reviving when it started becoming rational again (Renaissance), and really took off when it fully embraced Rationalism (Enlightenment).
What nonsense. The Enlightenment didn’t happen today.
I agree with you, we are writing from a material perspective and so I followed the discussion on that level. I would seem profane to try to describe the “religious experience” here. Of course Christianity is true and will be true even if its adherents are poor and weak.
Empirically speaking, Europe was at it height when it was devoutly Christian. This is true of every country in Europe. At best, countries may have continued being great for a few decades after losing their faith, running on fumes. When was Russia expanding and producing the greatest literature in the world? When was Spain spreading its culture throughout the world? When did Britain rule the waves? Under what faith did peoples living like jungle savages rise to rule the world in only about 1,000 years, while other savages stayed in their forests and jungles, and older civilizations just existed in their somnolence?
I’m not an expert on them, I’ve merely visited Utah a few times (I love hiking in deserts). You should visit.
I see Bliss’s point. Christianity was okay with slavery for almost two thousand years. To give it credit for the abolition of slavery is ludicrous. The fact that the early abolitionists in England were Christians is of no value. What were they going to be, left-handed Buddhists?
What? Kabbalah is not spiritual/irrational enough for you? Are the Hasidic Jews not communal enough for you? Are they not ethno-chauvinist enough for you? Are they not literally stuck in the pre-Enlightenment era, like the Amish?
They check all the boxes that are your talking points. Why don’t you have the courage of your convictions and admit your religious preference?
Bliss discussions based on logic and evidence never convince. Well just go on and on.
If I demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that rationalism coincided with decadence you’d just say something like “it’ll be different this time”. And that would be a position which I could not refute logically.
Materialism has been shown to be an incoherent and illogical belief system for a long time now. Its still the reigning metaphysic of our time in defiance of all logic.
Quantum mechanics has shown the law of non contradiction does not apply absolutely – it is still believed in. Logic itself shows it – it doesn’t matter.
People believe what they want. It is a matter of the heart. Your belief in rationalism and the Enlightenment is a matter of the heart.
You haven’t been argued into it – you won’t be argued out of it.
These gladiator fights can be amusing for a while but they are ultimately parlor games.
Serious people simply get down to the business of acting on their metsphysic in the real world. That’s what the Chinese are doing.
The only discussions worth having are between like minded people on how to realize a shared vision, or if you’re so minded, rhetoric to undermine your opponents self confidence so he cannot realize his vision (perhaps 99% of the motivation for everyone writing on this site )
Indeed, I am more appreciative of Judaism when I contrast it with the entropy of modern white atheism.
Judaism shares many concepts with Buddhism and orthodox Christianity but the divergences are enough to make me look elsewhere for my spiritual needs.
Not really. Slavery ended in the Roman Empire due to Christianity (it had been a staple of pre-Christian Europe). Some high % of Rome and Greece were slaves. The Rus used to sell Slavs as slaves to the Arabs in huge numbers, until they converted to Christianity. Slavery was common in non-Christian Islamic societies, as well as in sub-Saharan Africa.
Christians picked it up again when they left Europe and conquered the world, taking it from other peoples they encountered along the way, before eventually abolishing it everywhere. It still exists in pockets isolated from Christians.
Do you think there would be no slavery in the world if Christianity had not existed, or if it had disappeared due to a successful Muslim conquest of Europe in the middle ages?
Christianity certainly gets credit for abolishing slavery in Europe. In terms of globally abolishing slavery – the Abolitionists were Christian religious fanatics.
Why? Christian belief explicitly guided their abolitionism.
taking it from other peoples they encountered along the way
Bullshit!
European Christians brought chattel slavery to the New World. Those “Padres” in New Spain tried to make do with Indians as slaves and it didn’t work out so Africans were imported by the millions by Christians and worked to their death by Christians.
Abolitionists were Christian religious fanatics.
No less than the Christian slave owners and defenders.
It is far more coherent and logical than your idea of the metaphysical.
You can’t fight atheism-materialism with any and all kinds of indefensible metaphysical superstitions. So why do you bother? And why do you keep yakking about Buddhism? Don’t you know that it appeals to Reason and Logic?
So what the hell are you doing here? Go back to your Hasidic cult and get down to business.
Btw, you know that Kabbalah was concocted in Spain in imitation of Sufism, right?
It might help if you saw Christianity more as a “process” rather than an “essence” – instead of springing fully formed into the world like Athena from Zeus’s head, it gradually unfolded through time.
It did not fully realize its ideals right away, but gradually, over time, as they seeped in, and people realized conditions weren’t in accord with Christian ideals.
Secular doesn’t mean non-religious. The Christian abolitionists of the 19th century were inspired by the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment deserves the credit for ending slavery because the sentiment for abolitionism arises directly from it’s core principle of Egalitarianism.
Christianity doesn’t deserve any credit for ending slavery because the Christian Holy Scripture condones slavery, and because slavery (and serfdom) thrived in Christendom for many centuries. With slavers using the Bible as justification.
I am trying to realize my ideals – I am single-handedly trying to roll back the Enlightenment 🙂
Ambitious, I know, but I believe we are all sparks of the divine flame and should strive for nothing less grand than trying to live up to that exalted pedigree.
I also like to spread love by refusing see anyone as an enemy in the ultimate sense – even such truculent and ornery fellows such as yourself 🙂
Kabalah is basically Indian wisdom reworked with a Jewish ethnic chauvinist angle, so I’m not crazy about it. I’d rather go straight to the source.
Ok, if you put it like that I can actually agree to a large extent.
Slavery existed in the New World before the Christian got there.
Wiki:
“Initially, forced labor represented a means by which the conquistadores mobilized native labor and met production quotas, with disastrous effects on the population. Unlike the Portuguese Crown’s support for the slave trade, los Reyes Católicos (English: Catholic Monarchs) at first opposed the introduction of slavery in the newly conquered lands on religious grounds. When Columbus returned with indigenous slaves, they ordered many of the survivors to be returned to their homelands. The papal bull Sublimus Dei of 1537, to which Spain was committed, also officially banned enslavement of indigenous people, but it was rescinded a year after its promulgation. The other major form of coerced labor in their colonies, the encomienda system, was also abolished, despite the considerable anger this caused in local criollo elites. It was replaced by the repartimiento system.[15][16][17]
After passage of the 1542 New Laws, the Spanish greatly restricted the power of the encomienda system. The statutes of 1573, within the “Ordinances Concerning Discoveries,” forbade certain kinds of coerced labor and regulated treatment of the local population. It required appointment of a “protector de indios”, an ecclesiastical representative who acted as the protector of the Indians and represented them in formal litigation.[18][19][19] Later in the 16th century, in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, thousands of indigenous people were forced to hard work as underground miners in the mines of Potosi, Guanajuato, and Zacatecas, in Peru, by means of the continuation of the pre-Hispanic Inca mita tradition.
The New Laws of 1542 abolished the slavery of Indigenous people from then.”
Slavery was, of course, well-established in Africa before the European Christians got there. They simply expanded African slavery across the ocean due to their technology.
So Christians, having banned slavery in their home countries, used it when they found it in non-Christian lands they conquered and came in contact with, and weren’t fast about abolishing it, although they eventually got around to doing so. And because Christians ruled the world, this meant slavery was done in the world.*
So? Second sentence doesn’t nullify the first. Slavery, which existed for thousands of years throughout the world across various civilizations, was ultimately abolished from the world* by Christian fanatics motivated by their Christian faith and doctrines.
*Yes, I know – it still exists in isolated pockets the Christians did not get to
Cult leader is after all a worthwhile pursuit, I would say, no?
And I mean that seriously. Something which functions on the small level is possibly the first step to demonstrating that it can scale to a societal level.
And when slavery is reintroduced by our benevolent new overlords, will it take another thousand years to eliminate it?
I think so 🙂 A cult is merely a charismatic movement that hasn’t gone mainstream.
But I don’t really want to be a leader – its tedious and burdensome, although I respect those who can handle it. I merely want to “push” things in the desired direction, then retire to my mountain hut and gaze at the stars.
I don’t know where you’re getting this. Indian mysticism has its flaws but it’s not so ridiculously absurd.
Kabalah is basically about reuniting with the One, who is beyond conception and thought and without qualities perceivable by the human mind, as well as the mysterious source of all value and goodness. This is an Indian conception.
The elaborate framework erected around this basic concept draws from a hodgepodge of sources – Egyptian, Greek, Chaldean, Babylonian, Gnostic, and Indian once again.
All wisdom traditions are strikingly similar, diverging in maybe 10% of their content – although the divergences are often dramatic. The basic ideas have been most clearly expressed in Indian thought.
Kabalah makes Jews central in this scheme, and is extremely nasty to gentiles – aside from that its just gnosticism.
Is it considered a heresy within Judaism, out of curiousity? Would creating the Golem be seen as evil now, assuming that it was possible?
I always said that I never wanted to be a leader, only an assistant to one.
Looking at the hundreds of emails I have to deal with as upper management now, I still have the same opinion.
That’s a lot more than 10% different from other wisdom traditions. There is no wisdom in such narrow mindedness.
Why did you neglect to mention the direct source: the Sufism of Ibn Arabi?
http://www.tomblock.com/shalom_sofia
as they seeped in
It’s been seeping for a long time and still is.
Some Wiki tidbits:
Notice I used the term “chattel.” Chattel slavery was different in form and operation from the slavery practiced by the Indians. As a matter of fact, proto Americans in North America induced (by creating a market where there was none) some tribes into becoming slave capturing and supplying tribes as their main economic activity.
The fact that the enslavement of the American Indians was not profitable and was replaced by the extremely profitable importation of Africans should not be profaned and twisted into some kind of obscene plaudit for “better” European “treatment” of the Indians.
Exactly how many people have the Popes sent to hell for owning slaves?
Your justification of African slavery in the New World by the fact that Africans practiced slavery themselves is sad indeed.
If you want to take Christian credit for Christian fanatics abolishing slavery then you have to take credit for everything Christians fanatics have done over the two millennia, and that is a very long list.
Your Ukrainian project is in a hell of a mess if you don’t have a better grip on reality than this nonsense indicates.
You seem to desperately grasp at trees in order to ignore the forest.
The bottom line is that Christianity led to a dramatic decrease and virtual disappearance in slavery in Christian areas, that it persisted primarily in the context of interactions with non-Christians who practiced it widely, such as sub-Saharan Africans and Muslims (you mention isolated cases of slavery in Malta and Rome, generally linked to interactions with the Muslim world – care to compare extent of slavery in 16th century Italy vs. 2nd century pre-Christian Italy?), and that ultimately it was Christians who had it abolished globally.
So it says that they were killing wounded German soldiers in the East?
No, I haven’t heard about it, and I doubt if it’s true.
Or is it about Soviet wounded POWs? Then I can easily imagine it.
Yes, she was saying it was an established policy by the Germans to kill their seriously wounded rather than making resources available for their treatment. And she wasn’t talking about a mercy killing by soldiers to ease the suffering of a dying comrade which I assume happens in all armies and wars.
I had never heard anything like this before and I know that you have an extensive reading of WWII and thought that you might have heard of it before.
IIRC his familial background involves a lot of Southern Baptist who were very, very Christian in speech, mannerism, and declaration who then proceeded to do absolutely nothing to help them survive the many downturns in the US economy(as well as post-Civil War misery).
His bitterness is understandable.
I would disagree– the concept of God is vastly better developed in Christianity or Islam. Hindu mysticism varies a lot, but when it does have the conception of the Ultimate (which I would argue is at its most effective an early medieval development) that is better realized than in cabbalistic approaches.
There is no “Egyptian” contribution to Cabbala as far as I can tell except very indirectly through Neoplatonism.
Precisely– which owes much to Persia and not all that much to India. It has been argued that some influence exists from Mahayana Buddhism but the connection is tenuous at best.
The bottom line is that Christianity led to a dramatic decrease and virtual disappearance in slavery in Christian areas,
I believe the nearly can be said of Islam: Islam led to a dramatic decrease and virtual disappearance in slavery in Islamicized populations.
Kabalah is widely appreciated among Jews but its not the main focus of study and its not very central. But it’s definitely there in the background and any wide ranging lecture or discussion on Judaism will mention Kabalistic ideas at least a few times.
Number mysticism is particularly popular among Jews.
Creating the Golem, lol. I don’t think it would be viewed as evil but as something that should be attempted only by the greatest of holy men, with the greatest of caution, and in the most extreme crisis. The idea is these awesome powers are not lightly to be tampered with.
I think most Jews would say in these degraded times there is no one who could safely do so.
I agree there is little wisdom in such narrow mindedness.
Well, I believe Sufism also drew on more ancient sources, although I’m sure it was a vector of transmission.
Okay, makes sense.
Protestantism in general seems to have been the path to atheism (and thus self-destruction) in Europe.
The mainstream concept of God is better developed in Christianity and Islam but the esoteric conception of God in all traditions is similar to Indian ideas.
A useful way of seeing religious differences east and west is that in the East, esoteric ideas occupy the foreground and more concrete ideas are allowed as concessions –
Buddhism and Hinduism allow Gods as aids to people who need them and even as real in a sense but not as representing highest reality, while in the West, concrete ideas occupy the foreground and esoteric ideas are tolerated but relegated to the background.
Islam was the place for mass slave markets, with vast numbers of slaves coming form the Balkans, sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, India, etc. Muslim Mauritania is one of the few places where slavery is still practiced.
From wiki:
The Arab slave trade was most active in West Asia, North Africa, and Southeast Africa. In the early 20th century (post World War I), slavery was gradually outlawed and suppressed in Muslim lands, largely due to pressure exerted by Western nations such as Britain and France.[5] For example, Saudi Arabia and Yemen only abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from Britain; Oman followed suit in 1970, and Mauritania in 1905, 1981, and again in August 2007.[12] However, slavery claiming the sanction of Islam is documented presently in the predominantly Islamic countries of Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Mali, and Sudan.
I thought iffen waa Jewish?
“Indian ideas” does not denote any consistent approach. “Esoteric ideas” is a catch-all category common to everybody.
Which is, if we postulate it for the sake of argument as being a meaningful statement to some extent, only true of Cabbalism to the extent that it uses its esoteric mythology as a means to power– hardly its most positive aspect. Cabbala is very Jewish or at any rate Jewish-Persian-Gnostic (the mashup which produced modern Judaism) in its approach to textualism.
I don’t know the details, only that he had extremely dim views of Tidewater aristocracy: looked down by slaveholders, but expected to die for them.
He has identified himself as Scotch-Irish and iirc a former “Evangelical”, which gels with that sentiment.
who then proceeded to do absolutely nothing to help them survive the many downturns in the US economy(as well as post-Civil War misery).
What?
looked down by slaveholders,
What?
Exoteric ideas are those easily grasped by our minds. Esoteric ideas exist on the fuzzy edges of consciousness – they are less ideas than techniques to come into contact with something beyond the power of our minds to grasp.
So esoteric ideas are grouped around a single theme. Indian ideas also cluster around a single theme – gaining access to a level of reality that is beyond concepts.
If you’re trained to think in Western categories, none of this makes sense.
Kabalah is quite sincere in its own way – reuniting with the One entails gaining a certain amount of magical power on the way, but only insofar as one loses interest in personal power and works for the benefit of the world. This is true in all mystical traditions.
Ah, my apologies, I must have conflated you with a different poster with a similar name.
I’m willing to grant this, with reservations that don’t bear discussing here. But it makes your original comment silly– like you don’t want to read Anna Karenina because you’ve read Madame Bovary and Russian literature is a mirror of French literature.
Oh, and all literature is really French au fond.
I doubt that. You got details correct I just can’t understand the two quoted statements.
It was someone who had an ancestor which served in the Civil War on the southern side and who was disabled afterward, requiring his wife to survive. This seemed to be a common theme in his family history(the woman having to take care of the family), so he indicated that he was not against the traditional definition of feminism – indeed, he would not exist without it.
I got the sense from that that he would be very cynical of Christianity(well, basically evangelical Baptist which was dominant) and expressly against veneration of the upper slaveholding class, because it never seemed to imply any actual community help or noblesse oblige.
Ironically, he would be bashed as someone with “white privilege now.” So from a generation perspective, his family really did seem like it was just constantly on the short end of the stick, no matter who got to be the zeitgeist in control.
No, for sure it makes some difference what tradition one engages with – but much of it is personal temperament and how much concrete imagery one needs.
The French and English Romantic were quite different despite having similar aims and outlooks.
And the Jewish tradition smuggles in some pernicious ethnic ideas which are harmful.
But a person would be healthier engaging with the Jewish wisdom tradition rather than materialism and atheism.
not against the traditional definition of feminism – indeed, he would not exist without it.
This would be me.
I had a paternal 2nd great-grandmother who raised 7 children in the subsistence farming niche after the 2nd great-grandfather died not long after the War, having had two fingers and a thumb shot off in the War. Also a maternal 2nd great-grandmother who raised 4 children after the war in which that 2nd great-grandfather died in an epidemic and was buried in a mass grave in the run-up to the Atlanta campaign.
This is somewhat balanced by the fact that I have a wealthy and literate slave-holding line. My 2nd great-grandfather in that line lost his slaves without due process of law, unless you consider executive wartime decrees as due process. His uncle lost over 300 hundred slaves.
I got the sense from that that he would be very cynical of Christianity
Absolutely not. It just does not make sense to credit Christianity with the abolition of slavery.
any actual community help or noblesse oblige.
Definitely deficient in the way the community was defined.
his family really did seem like it was just constantly on the short end of the stick
No, my family rode the post WWII prosperity wave all the way to lower middle class.
🙂
All that said, I do have a visceral distrust of and disdain for the ruling class, but it’s under control.
Two greatest pleasures: George Costanza combining food with sex
Thinking about it, I doubt it happened.
First, there were no ideological reasons to kill wounded soldiers. Unlike the mentally ill (whose mental illness was considered to be the probable result of a genetic defect) or Jews (who were considered impossible to assimilate and with harmful Jewish genes), wounded soldiers were considered to be of superior racial stock (ethnic Germans who risked their lives for the Fatherland and got wounded while doing so). Assuming they were still capable of reproduction, their reproduction would be encouraged by the Nazis rather than made impossible by killing them. They were also considered to be a loyal member of the “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) who fulfilled their duty, and as such, worthy of protection.
Second, the Nazis were mindful of the mood of both the soldiers and the German population. That’s the main reason they didn’t outright murder half-Jews or Jews with Aryan spouses or half-Aryan children, because it was assumed that their murder would create resentment among their Aryan relatives. Similarly, the mass murder of the mentally ill was halted (or made more covert, it’s unclear) after there were some protests against it: the Nazi regime realized that it would’ve affected the morale of the population negatively.
Deliberately killing seriously wounded soldiers was something which, if it ever got out (and the Nazis were not very good at keeping secrets, there were persistent rumors both about the holocaust and about the euthanasia murders), would’ve devastated the morale of both the armed forces and the population at large, and would’ve probably turned even many fanatical Nazis against the regime.
Third, not even Stalin’s USSR did anything like that. Wounded soldiers were treated well in the USSR, even if they were crippled and thus useless, they gave them and their families benefits. They couldn’t give much, but murdering them outright to save hospital or pension costs was a thought which didn’t even occur to Stalin.
Overall, I highly doubt the thought even occurred to anyone in the Nazi regime. I wonder where Arendt got it.
Thinking about it, I doubt it happened.
Thanks for taking the time to consider the question. It does seem unlikely to me as well, but she does use quotes: “help the wounded in ice and snow,” but there is no footnote. The next paragraph is about the Aktion T4 program, although she doesn’t use that program name.
This is the only book of hers that I have read and I didn’t get the impression that she would be the type to make up something like this.
Third, not even Stalin’s USSR did anything like that.
LOL, not even Stalin, some subjects are eternal here at the Unz Enquirer.
It depends on the milieu. Bentham was, relatively speaking, a spiritually healthy guy despite being a bit of a nut. The Jewish tradition is a breeding ground for all sorts of spiritual ills, including materialism and atheism, but there’s some real wisdom there, overlaid with muck in many places.
Ah, so my memory did not fail me totally, though some of my speculation did. Thank you for the clarification. You have to admit, comments such as “dig up the Confederate ‘heros’, hang them again and bury them” does suggest an unusually specific disdain.
Unlike Hitler, Stalin considered even his most loyal servants to be disposable, so such an idea was more likely to occur to him than to Hitler. To my knowledge, there’s not the slightest evidence that such a thought ever occurred to either of them. Definitely not to Hitler, who himself was once a German soldier, and strongly identified with German soldiers. Arguably Hitler never felt bad about anyone killed by his henchmen if it was a non-German or a political enemy or a defective (a mentally ill person) to be culled from the gene pool, but he felt serious responsibility for Germans – for example when the husband of her secretary (an SS soldier) was killed, he felt really bad about having to tell her. His subordinates wanted to relieve him of it, sending another SS officer to tell her, but he insisted that he had to tell her personally. He well understood that he was personally responsible for the death of the guy.
Stalin considered even his most loyal servants to be disposable
I go with this position. The greatest leaders have to be able to cut anyone lose if it is in the best interest of his people or nation. Of course you have to deal with question of whether it is best for the nation or the leader, and that leads straight to the question of whether the leader has merged the well-being of the nation with his survival.
I basically agree.
But the first stages of atheism always aren’t so bad because there is still the memory of religion.
comments such as “dig up the Confederate ‘heros’,
That should have been fire-eaters instead of Confederate heroes if it wasn’t in the original comment. I make a distinction between the rigid, uncompromising warmongers and the ones that didn’t want war, but who served honorably after the die was cast.
“In real combat, the Russians used this tactic when they were kicking the shit out of the Ukrainian army. They call it the carousel: One tank pops up and shoots, drives back, eventually changes position. When it’s going back, another pops up to shoot. It’s usually done on a platoon level.” Seems the ‘kicking the sh-t out of the Ukrainian Army’ had more to do with beyond visual range massed fires than anything else (and the cognitive dissonance between Kiev’s propaganda about a supposedly massive Russian Army intervention alongside laughably small UkroWehrmacht KIA/WIA as a result is why I have so much contempt for the Ukrainian agitprop, along with their Maidan snipers all easily slipping away like OJ’s real killers).
A great deal of what the Potomac Foundation’s Dr. Phil Karber presentation to West Point cadets from earlier this year is a Ukro-fanfic version of the war. Karber tells a tall tale from his favorite UAF general describing a night march with their T64 armor into the massive breach that had opened in Ukrainian lines in the panic of mid to late August 2014. That was when the heroic Maidan warriors were suddenly whining on Facebook about being abandoned by the high command, as it turned out real war involving getting hit with mortar and artillery/GRAD fire at Ilovaisk was a lot worse than burning some Berkut riot policemen with Molotovs who didn’t even have firearms on the Maidan, or slowly surrounding wildly outnumbered adversaries armed almost entirely with small arms and snipers aka Strelkov’s merry men with their one self-propelled mortar in Slavyansk (another glorious UAF achievement of arms, along with suicidally holding out day after day in the cellars of the Donetsk Airport as it was shelled and blasted to bits).
Nonetheless, the parts about Russian electronic warfare and drones dominating the battlefield, at least around Donetsk and Lugansk cities where the GRU ‘vacationers’ and Zoopark counterbattery radars are more active, seems true.
Perhaps. But how often did Hitler do that to his loyal subordinates, and how often did Stalin.
An example.
Stalin had a villa in Sukhumi, in Abkhazia. (Currently unrecognized quasi-Russian protectorate, internationally recognized as part of Russia.) In the 1930s he often spent his summers there. He was always given a nice reception by the Abkhazian first secretary, who was also his neighbor in Sukhumi with a villa next to his. The Abkhazian first secretary often visited him during his stays there, and they often drank together local wines well into the night.
It all went well, until one day, during the winter or fall (when Stalin was not there), he was arrested and, despite his many letters to Stalin protesting his innocence, he was shot. Stalin did receive his letters, but didn’t answer them, and personally approved his execution.
This is characteristic of Stalin, but Hitler rarely killed or even allowed the execution of old comrades.
In this Stalin is behaving like a traditional absolute monarch. Normally the benefit of this is that the murderous impulse of power spends itself on those nearest the top, but unfortunately at that time there was more than enough to go around.
This is characteristic of Stalin, but Hitler rarely killed or even allowed the execution of old comrades.
I will defer to your more extensive erudition on the subject. I do know that it took H. several days to finally order the execution of E. Rohm. He purged him once and then brought him back. Maybe H. was smarter and didn’t kill anyone he didn’t have to because they might be of some use in the future.
I think the difference might be accounted for by the extensive history of ideological purges by the Bolsheviks. There was no Marx, Engels and Lenin for the Nazis. Their ideology was rather shallow and sparse so they didn’t have a history of killing ideological opponents. They just went after the other like Jews and commies, and then H. eliminated political threats to his power.
If I understand correctly, the Bolsheviks believed in and exercised terror and killing at the group level as a means of control and power assertion so why wouldn’t they believe in it at the individual level?
It’s okay, you can say his name, he won’t appear.
Proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyLFqz-Buwc
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