Open Thread 50

pluto

Good to find a place where Pluto is still a strong, independent planet.

Been a long time since we had a proper Open Thread. Reminder that all footballing discussions should go to the other Open Thread.

Future Meetups

Several people here have expressed an interest in an informal meetup [discussion: 1, 2]. I am open to this idea, and will make a note to start putting interested parties in touch with each other.

To everyone interested – please let me in this thread know if the emails you use to comment with are legitimate, or if you feel uncomfortable doing that, contact me directly using the contact email on my website: http://akarlin.com/ (don’t forget to mention your handle here!).

Administrivia

RO-Poast (Romania) has been delayed due to issues beyond my control. I’ll almost certainly write it (if not publish it) within the next week. There will also be another Kholmogorov translation.

Polish Perspective asked about making it possible to reply to several people at once. I am skeptical, but will make sure to ask Ron when we next exchange emails.


Featured News

* Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler, Toby Ord (2018): Dissolving the Fermi Paradox. Discussion on Scott Alexander’s blog.

  • Mark Feygin, one of Pussy Riot’s lawyers [from hell], had his family destroyed when he dated a lesbian activist. Why this random fact? She’s now a council member where one of my friends lives.

Russia

* R.O.G. Pogrom #6 — Categorizing Russophobic Myths [in Russian].


World

Trump Reverses Obama Guidance On Affirmative Action, As The White Supremacist Takeover Continues Apace. Good.


Science & Culture

  • Emil Kirkegaard:

* Enopoletus Harding: Understanding and reconciling the two real GDP series in Maddison Project 2018In short, as I suspected, the revision is worthless. E.g., “You can safely divide the Soviet Maddison 2018 real GDP #s by 2; its only evidence for having Soviet income that high pre-1955 is ONE dubious “historical income benchmark” from 1955. Literally, that’s how bad it is.”


Powerful Takes

  • NNT channels BAP:

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1015569992832700416

  • Twitter Traditionalists

twitter-traditionalists

I got 9/10 on the women, and 8/10 on the men. The Japs are really distinctive, they all have that distinct Abo tinge to them. The Chinese are daintier, have shiftier eyes – are easy to distinguish from Koreans – sturdier, steppe-ish, though it becomes trickier with Northern Chinese is trickier. All of my mistakes were confusing Koreans for Chinese (#3 with women; #5 and #9 with men), and vice versa.

  • When you try to make a song to mock the Alt Right but actually recruit for it:

  • Eliezer Yudkowsky reaching levels of autism previously though impossible:

Sovok myths, best TLDR version yet?

sovok-myths

Under Tsarism there would have been famines every five years until eternity, nobody would have even dreamed of free education and healthcare, and without industrialization, Hitler would have exterminated us all.

Jim Jatras’ RT of it provoked many:

take-sovok-nrx

take-sovoks-romanovs

More here, here, here.

  • Big if true!

take-big-if-true-ukraine


Comments

  1. German_reader says

    Tsipras signs deals to take back refugees from Germany.

    As I understand it, Germany will allow family reunification for “refugees” currently stuck in Greece who want to join their relatives in Germany in exchange for that, so it might well mean less “refugees” in Greece (and more in Germany). In reality nothing will change and Germany will continue to be flooded with “refugees”, since Merkel’s government obviously wants it that way.
    Newest gem from Germany: A known Islamist, supposedly a former bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, was deported to Tunisia. A court has now ruled that was against the law (he might be tortured in Tunisia!) and that this Sami A. ought to return to Germany (!). A SPD member of parliament has reported Seehofer to police for supposedly infringing the constitutional order in that case.

    I did that face recognition test for Asian women and scored 7/10…have never been in Asia, so it doesn’t seem to be that difficult.

    Since it’s probably getting buried in all the football discussion in the other thread, I’ll link to my question about Putin’s background there:
    https://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-49/#comment-2416298

    AK: Copying that comment over for easier access:

    Since Admiral Martyanov has been mentioned, I’d like to ask something. He recently made some interesting comments about Putin’s background (supposedly different to what has been believed) here:

    http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/07/thoughts-on-trump-11-july-2018.html#disqus_thread

    Evidently he was SVR all along his earlier career, that is until he got his civilian job in Leningrad in 1990. Considering his admission on camera, that would involve him being trained in KI (Krasnoznamennyi Institut imeni Andropova) at least. As it turned out he was a residentura Nelegaly handler and this is a completely different line of work. It is extremely dangerous and it is a very narrow field of elite professionals. That changes the angle on Putin as merely run-of-the-mill FSB field officer completely. Considering where he is today and who are behind him, it is not only irresistible but is highly warranted to start asking questions, or, for that matter, reassess his skills level which is on the order of magnitude more impressive than it was thought originally.

    Any thoughts on that?

  2. ImmortalRationalist says

    On the topic of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s autism, have you read his opinions on Naziism/Communism yet, and what if your opinion on the relation of Naziism and Communism to Transhumanism?

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aFtWRL3QihoF5uQd5/guardians-of-the-gene-pool

  3. This pertains to my point about Sovietism being a religion…

    All ‘ideology’ is a religion. Ideology is an extreme deductive thinking: you start out with a set of apriori ideas and then you fit the reality into it. Some reality fits, some doesn’t. If the ideology gets lucky and starts to dominate its surroundings, the devotees will start ‘fitting‘ any uncomfortable realities into the ideology framework. They do this as they frantically compete against the inevitable collapse of their ideology as it fails to adopt to the real world.

    In most historical cases, mankind was lucky that as an ideology entered its intolerant, murderous phase it was on its way out, when it was weak. Soviet citizens were not that lucky – Bolshies moved fast, consolidated, and pounced on the badly fitting parts of society within a generation. Thus the extreme tragedy. But most ideologies or religions if allowed to dominate will enter the murderous phase.

    It is part of the setup for ideologues – do you think if the increasingly unhinged modern globalist ‘liberals’ would get full power, they wouldn’t start dealing with critics with more extra-judicial methods? After all what can one do with ‘fascists’, or when ‘Hitler meets Hitler in Helsinki for additional instructions’? We might get lucky, because their power base is at the same time collapsing, so my guess is that soon the globo-liberals will be more of a joke. But I am not sure.

    1. That Putin worked on industrial espionage during his Dresden stay is pretty much the consensus view.
    2. The SVR appeared in December 1991. Putin was KGB. Don’t know what Martyanov is on about here.
    3. Industrial espionage obviously requires some intelligence, and it’s evident that Putin is capable at the least: IQ at least 120, maybe 130, though probably not much higher. I do not see how it was to any significant extent dangerous. There were some fears expressed by Putin and his colleagues when the German mobs started to get restive when the GDR was collapsing, when there were some fears that they’d get lynched, that that seems to have been the high point so far as “danger” was concerned.
    4. Since Putin is to some extent a blank canvass, his patchily documented early life is amply exploited by PDS sufferers and Putler cultists alike.
      The PDS sufferers portray him as a lowly penpusher who failed to achieve greater things (e.g. was not sent to West Germany – which was considered more prestigious), that he beat his wife, that he had some sort of skeletons that prevented him from advancing higher.
      Putler cultists… well, so far as they’re concerned, he was the Soviet equivalent of a Double O superspy.
      Reality is somewhere in the middle.
    5. The part of Putin’s life that is almost a full blank is the 1975-85 period, which was after he joined the KGB and before Dresden. The standard narrative is that he monitored foreigners. The less savory rumors say that he monitored university students and dissidents. Who knows. There’s not much more to go on than a couple of sentences he himself has said on the matter.
  4. German_reader says

    The SVR appeared in December 1991. Putin was KGB. Don’t know what Martyanov is on about here.

    If I understand Martyanov correctly, he means that Putin was in the part of the KGB that was the predecessor of the SVR (that would have been the first main directorate of the KGB?), not the part that later became the FSB.
    Thanks for your answer!

  5. Rattus Norwegius says

    When i read about the old belivers, it came up that during the latter part of the 20th century isolated old believer populations were being discovered occasionally. One example was of the Lykov family. Are there still isolated old believer populations in Russia? Additionally, are there any uncontacted peoples in Russia ala the Amazon?

  6. E. Harding says

    I’m still having some trouble understanding just what the Maddison Project did to the socialist countries. It’s clear they’re not just fitting within-country real GDP data to international benchmarks (e.g., no 1990 international benchmark is mentioned in the Maddison data, but that is a very big turning point for its cgdppc series relative to its rgdpnapc series); they’re also using some other real GDP series than PWT’s RGDPNA (the purely within-country series) to create their cgdppc. I’ll find out soon enough.

    https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/productivity/pwt/

    The entire justification for their cgdppc series having much faster growth between 1955 and 1990 than their rgdpnapc series is due to some weird shit with one of the GDP series from the PWT (not yet sure which one), which, for the USSR starts in 1990 and continues every year thereafter (for other socialist countries, it starts much earlier).

  7. Mitleser says

    Qing China knew the truth about Swedish women.

    Their women do not respect chastity; they reveal their breasts and lewdly tie their skirts over their clothing.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/7wl6lp/18thcentury_chinese_drawing_of_a_swiss_mercenary/du185su/
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huang_Qing_Zhigong_Tu

    https://twitter.com/rooshv/status/1018238978489712640

  8. Thorfinnsson says

    * Leonid Bershidsky: Open-Plan Offices Are Making Us Less Social. Quelle surprise. Open borders a disaster for social cohesion, community in offices; walls encourage personal dialogue.

    Steve Sailer has a good schtick about how nobody remembers anything.

    Open plan offices were the default before the cubicle was invented.

    Reams of research demonstrated they were less productive than cubicles (let alone private offices).

    The most malignant variant of open plan office eliminated the permanent space of employees. You simply bring in your laptop and find whatever space is available. Like your workplace is a coffeeshop…or bus stop.

    I work hard to get anyone who needs a permanent space a…permanent space. My factory is groaning at capacity right now (we’ll be quadrupling in size next year), but I do what I can. People take so much pride in having their own scrap of territory to make home.

    Optimizing your own office for productivity is something of an art as well. It took me four years to nail my office. Or perhaps it’s not nailed yet.

    I have a circa 400 square foot (40 square meters for you Euros) office with one large exterior window (north facing). My work area is made up of standing ESD butcher block tables which form a large U in the back northeast of the office. The southeast has two couches (mid-century modern of course) and a butcher block coffee table, and then the south has chairs for visiting blue collar employees. My monitors are on a large arm so I can swivel them out of the way. On the west wall I have a four by six foot glass white board (with Pilot V-Board markers, of course), whereas the other three walls have 4k displays four presentation purposes.

    Walls are white and there’s a hideous drop ceiling. Not doing anything about it as both will be removed next year.

  9. Thorfinnsson says

    copied and pasted from an instant messaging thread

    PM
    also irritating that Swedish women are even SLUTTIER than other scandinavians

    8:36 PM
    ffs
    8:37 PM
    does square with my experience though
    8:37 PM
    it’s not just liberalism either
    8:37 PM
    when your summers have sun until 11pm and everyone is incredibly good looking
    8:37 PM
    and the alcohol flows freely
    8:37 PM
    well what do you expect
    8:38 PM
    oh and there’s a national custom of nude co-ed sauna and swimming
    8:39 PM
    swedes also universally move out at age 18
    8:39 PM
    so many ingredients facilitating getting laid
    8:40 PM
    when i was 10 i went to a summer ice hockey camp in falun, sweden
    8:40 PM
    in the Swedish province of Dalecarlia
    8:41 PM
    which is like the Wisconsin of Sweden
    8:41 PM
    after hockey we boys went to the local pool and also local sauna
    8:41 PM
    which ofc was nude and co-ed
    8:41 PM
    this turbo hot 17 year old girl, totally stacked 10, frequently was there with us
    8:41 PM
    she bicycled there
    8:41 PM
    totally nude
    8:41 PM
    i mean there were towels but people got lazy about them
    8:42 PM
    this forty year old dude who owned a pool cleaning company kept trying to run game on her but not very successfully

  10. James Jatras and the Strategic Culture Foundation (where he frequently appears) rocks.

    So much for the DC area based over-funded person, who prefers the likes of “Awful Avalanche”, “Kremlin Stooge” and “Meduza” over the SCF – to go along with frequently posting McFaul’s mug at the JRL homepage .

    No small wonder why the coverage continues to lack.

    Regarding McFaul and what he prefers to actively promote:

    https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/07/12/more-mumbo-jumbo-on-russia.html

  11. * Sharp rise in Italians in favour of loosening gun control. Why are Italians becoming so damn based?

    Italy switches sides, it always has.

    Meanwhile, Tsipras signs deals to take back refugees from Germany. Lame.

    They don’t pay the piper, so don’t get to call the tune.

  12. Dan Hayes says

    Mitleser:

    So according to this map Italians and Sicilians are amongst the least promiscuous. But somewhat contrary to my own life experience.

  13. E. Harding says

    Apparently that real GDP series they’re using is the cgdpo series in the PWT, which is based on the rgdpo series in the PWT. The series are different in that cgdpo coerces the data to fit all ICP benchmarks, while the rgdpo series does not. Both the rgdpo and cgdpo series show a much more severe 1990s depression in Russia than the national accounts. The rgdpo series pre-2011 uses extrapolated PPPs based on relative inflation.

    As explained in Section V, PWT8 includes two types of observations: those based directly on ICP benchmark price survey results or interpolated between benchmarks; and those based on extrapolations from the oldest or most recent benchmarks using relative inflation rates from countries’ national accounts data. The benchmark observations (and in effect the interpolated observations) make no assumptions regarding the evolutions of PPPs over time; they are simply based on the observed benchmark survey.

    prices outside the benchmark years of the ICP can be interpolated or extrapolated using the time-series data on consumption, investment and government price indexes for each country from their national accounts, as described in Section V.

    in Section V:

    For each country, we keep track of which benchmarks were used; years in-between benchmarks will have the prices for final goods interpolated using the corresponding price trends from countries’ national accounts data; and for years before the first or after the last benchmark for each country the prices of final goods are extrapolated using national account data (see online Appendix B).

    in Appendix B:

    For a hypothetical country that participated only in the 1996 and 2005 benchmarks, we use interpolated price indexes for the 1997-2004 period, while the years up to 1995 and from 2006 onwards are based on extrapolated price indexes. Extrapolation to year t–1 if price index data for year t are available is done using the price deflators from the National Accounts: [equation]

    Interpolation takes the benchmark price indexes as given but uses the pattern of inflation in intervening years to determine how much of the overall change in price indexes between benchmarks should fall in any given year. So for the hypothetical country of Figure B1, this would be:

    So 1990 is a key year because of the Maddison/PWT people extrapolating the PPPs from relative inflation, and that’s when relative inflation data first becomes available. They explain the problems with this approach in Appendix D.

    https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/docs/the_next_generation_of_the_penn_world_table.pdf

    Still not entirely sure how that works.

  14. If he was involved in supressing dissidents back then he would have been linked to the KGB directorate that was having people diagnosed with ‘creeping schizophrenia’, committed to mental hospitals and given powerful anti-psychotic drugs.

    Putin seems to have risen because he was seen as a discreet subordinate, I doubt there was anything particularly good or bad in his record. One thing that may have paid off is he does not drink, after Yeltsin there was surely an especially strong yearning for a sober healthy person who would not embarrass the country.

  15. reiner Tor says

    I know a guy who played in a football (soccer) team full of Turks. He was the only non-Turk. He talked to the Turks a lot.

    They told him that in Turkey there are still girls who are not virgins before marriage, some of whom gets their hymens restored. But the good Muslimahs always keep their virginity up until marriage. They all take it through the back door. (Their definition of “sex” is pretty Clintonesque, if you know what I mean.)

    So I wonder how that was counted.

  16. Duke of Qin says

    That Asian face test is very badly designed. All of the women there are celebrities and they are using staged photographs. People aren’t actually vectoring in on physicals phenotypes to differentiate but rather cultural differences in makeup and fashion that are much clearer to differentiate, celebrities being emblematic of these trends make it easier still. There is a damn good reason all the faces were of women because women’s choices in this area are much broader than mens. Using photos of man on the street and it becomes much harder requiring very specific cultural knowledge.

    There was an experiment conducted using machine learning with hundreds of thousands of photos that managed to get pretty good accuracy. Turns out the AI figured nose bridge height and pupilary distance were low accuracy and instead vectored in on cultural factors like the length of a woman’s bangs.

  17. Wasn’t always like this though. This change in culture is relatively recent. I have a book on Swedish history I picked up from my visit there; full of illustrations and photos. Swedish women wore very modest clothing traditionally.

    The female staff still display this in the Skansen Historical Museum:
    https://i1.wp.com/rachelsruminations.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/P7201939-e1470912795308.jpg

    Peace.

  18. for-the-record says

    To everyone interested –please let me in this thread know if the emails you use to comment with are legitimate

    As far as I know, it is.

  19. LondonBob says

    Yes a common impression is that Moscow has really improved the urban environment with wider pavements etc.

    Sweden is funny, you have a full on commie establishment but most Swedes still live in small towns and villages, so are actually quite conservative. Add in the strong conformist streak and it is a riddle wrapped inside an enigma.

  20. Hyperborean says

    They told him that in Turkey there are still girls who are not virgins before marriage, some of whom gets their hymens restored.

    Apparently some Georgian women do that as well.

    But the good Muslimahs always keep their virginity up until marriage. They all take it through the back door. (Their definition of “sex” is pretty Clintonesque, if you know what I mean.)

    A lot of this ”virtuous traditionalism” boasting ends up looking empty when one realises that many of them follow the letter of the rules but not the spirit.

  21. Zrada for AP.

  22. Mitleser says
  23. Thulean Friend says

    most Swedes still live in small towns and villages, so are actually quite conservative.

    Sweden has an urbanisation rate of 85%. The Greater Stockholm metropolitan area houses something like 25% of Sweden’s population. You add the metropolitian areas of Göteborg, Malmö and bigger cities like Linköping, Luleå etc and the vast majority of the population would live in fairly decent-sized urban agglomerations.

    Sweden isn’t conservative at all in a cultural sense, but it is very health conscious (but only selectively and irrationally). For instance, Sweden has a strong resistance to legalisation of cannabis, not on the basis of traditionalism but rather on health aspects.

    https://i.redd.it/iwfpbqmhaz911.png

    On the other hand, Sweden recently made it legal to have sex with someone without informing them that you have HIV. At the same time, a new law was passed which stated that unless you have a woman saying explicitly that she wants to have sex with you, it is rape. So theoretically, a woman can flirt with you, kiss you and undress herself and then have sex with you but later claim it was rape because she never actively said “let’s have sex”. Of course, there is even a new app for smartphones which let people use their BankID(our national ID system) to fix this. Sweden’s technological prowess and insane feminism all in one.

    It is also true that Sweden has never had a female PM, which surprises many people, but this is of symbolic importance given that feminism is basically the state religion at this point.

  24. LondonBob says

    It is funny how so few make the connection between current day Mexican violence and Aztec behaviour.

  25. Guillaume Tell says

    @AK

    Anatoly: thank you for having revived the discussion about a meeting in wet space.

    I just sent you an email from a valid address.

    GT

  26. Thorfinnsson says

    Half-truth.

    In pre-Christian Scandinavia there was a custom of “betrothal”. Engaged couples would sleep together before getting married, generally though a winter because what else was there to do? If they didn’t like eachother the engagement was broken.

    Obviously Christianity improved sexual morality, and I assume both my grandmothers were virgins when they were married.

  27. Yes, I was only talking about the Christian culture. Even the pagan Arabs had a thing where ten men would visit the same woman in one night; if she got pregnant, she would call for all of them and pick the father. This was not soytgat women of noble birth did though.

    Also, speaking of chastity – I assume you came through unscathed through the July 4th week in isolation at the office with the brunette. If so conglaturations are in order…
    https://static2.thegamerimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/conglaturation-e1500905823533.jpg

    Peace.

  28. AP must have finally figured out that you and Keverich are one and the same? I tried to explain this to him recently, and I must have shattered any illusions he had of your charm and omniscience. If anybody deserves a yellow card for ‘zrada’ it would be me, not AP. 🙂

  29. not something women of noble birth

  30. The Big Red Scary says

    I also sent Anatoly an email saying that I would go to a meeting in Moscow (but not further).

  31. The Big Red Scary says

    BankID

    Does it involve a public-private key pair? Is key signing part of the wedding ceremony?

  32. Thorfinnsson says

    I did emerge unscathed, but I had an unexpected assist. On Monday an old friend of mine living in upstate New York informed me he was starting a new job in Montana after the holiday. He chose to visit with me during that time as I am on the route.

    She did join us for grilling one afternoon which was to her benefit since he is a highly trained medical professional and didn’t mind some pro bono chatting.

  33. Thorfinnsson says

    You guys should do a charity ping pong match for homeless families of the Donets Basin. AK & FK on one side vs. AP & Hack on the other.

  34. The reason women can dress immodestly, is because Sweden has (or had) high social capital.

    Countries where women are dressing modestly, are correlating generally with those that have lowest social capital.

    It’s exactly the same dressing expensively. Areas and countries with low social capital, it’s not a good idea to wear expensive clothes either.

  35. Daniel Chieh says

    Been playing a lot of Total War: Warhammer 2 as the Lizardmen. It amuses me that unlike the actual Aztecs, Lizardmen do not cannibalize their own: you’re not allowed to “Kill & Eat” other Lizardmen factions in defeats(you can eat humans…and Scavan, for reasons that quite foolish). Amused me.

    Great game, disappointing Cold Ones, though. Far as I can tell, Dark Elves have better Cold Ones that we do, and that seems wrong.

  36. Daniel Chieh says

    AP must have finally figured out that you and Keverich are one and the same?

    This is only partially correct. In fact, all Russian posters are the same, they are all bots of Syrian Girl.

  37. Daniel Chieh says

    Sweden isn’t conservative at all in a cultural sense, but it is very health conscious (but only selectively and irrationally).

    Well, in terms of selective and irrational health concerns, what are the attitudes toward GMO foods, antibiotic use in livestock, cloned livestock, and so on?

  38. Regarding Sweden, it all seems to have started in the 1950s with various edgy movies, which in the 70s became simply porn. The population duly followed.

    I recall once while abroad meeting a Chinese man who, when he learned my nationality, asked me about ‘Swedish movies’ and blushed deeply. This was a couple of decades ago.

  39. Duke of Qin says

    No the Lizardmen cold one spears are superior to the dark elf cold one Knights. While they do have marginally lower attack and defense stats, their key advantage as shock cavalry is that they lack the primal instinct attribute which forces them to rampage once reduced to 50% which happens very easily considering their low unit count and thus lack of staying power. This isn’t so much a problem for infantry but you want your cavalry to cycle charge by pulling out of melee and engaging other targets of opportunity rather than losing control and having them needlessly chase down stragglers or even worse get stuck in melee and then get flanked.

    Cold ones are the best T2 cavalry out of all factions because they work so well in fighting off other cavalry and heavy infantry because they possess both armor piercing and anti large attributes. A combination which the only other cavalry posses are the royal demigryphs. Reiksguard/silver Helms/Knights of the realm are better at running down skirmishes and in prolonged melee against lower tier infantry but their lack of any bonuses makes them useless against anything truly dangerous.

  40. BankID(our national ID system)

    I’m just waiting for someone to crack BankID … I’m not aware of the protocol being published and vetted, and I have seen some indications that it can be abused. Probably not a technology to rely on in the long run.

    I wasn’t aware of the HIV insanity, which certainly is a flip from back in the 90s, when the propaganda was hot and heavy. Donating HIV+ blood (anonymously, of course) will surely follow.

    I seem to recall a recent law where female transsexuals now can bear children and also be registered as ‘fathers’. If nothing else, it proves that claiming to be ‘male on the inside’ or whatever is a hollow lie. It’s just mental illness and enablers all the way.

    The judicial system on consideration seems fairly captured by the usual suspects. Many odd laws introduced without much public discussion. (Did you know that a recent quirk has made Christian and Islamic schools illegal while Jewish schools are still allowed?)

  41. Hyperborean says

    Genial Hosts: S Korean Protesters Up in Arms Against Yemeni Refugees

    https://sputniknews.com/asia/201807121066300875-south-korea-migrants-reaction/

    According to AFP, one of the top comments on the matter posted on the Naver web portal, and liked by thousands of users, was: “Is the government crazy? These are Muslims who will rape our daughters!”

    Roof Korea has not yet perished.

  42. Young Putin was always Putin (obviously ambitious, very intelligent, etc). Even school teachers remember that he was a good student of German.

    But career in KGB was boring and meaningless, mainly office work collecting useless, trivial information (including in your country). The career was not matching his expectations, and the main bonus was when in his 30s he could go to Germany, live in another language, and have a kind of tranquil German lifestyle for his family.

    His career during this era, was not James Bond or anything exciting. Probably, the preparatory training he had with KGB was the most interesting aspect- but the actual job he was given, was not interesting.

    By 1990s, his views were sounding as a committed liberal.* (In Peter, he works as the favourite protegee of Anatoly Sobchak).

    Obviously 1990s are the “golden age” for him, when he demonstrates his career abilities and becoming an important person from the beginning.

    His PhD in economics of 1996 is a little “mysterious” – and you can see no-one views him as a professional economist (which this title would usually imply). He does not publish any work in economics, or even have very strong ideas in this field of policy (the area of policy where is mostly influenced by advisors).

    • cite

  43. Sweden has an urbanisation rate of 85%. The Greater Stockholm metropolitan area houses something like 25% of Sweden’s population. You add the metropolitian areas of Göteborg, Malmö and bigger cities like Linköping, Luleå etc and the vast majority of the population would live in fairly decent-sized urban agglomerations.

    Stockholm is about 2m including suburbs, Göteborg 500k, Malmö 250k, the rest of the top 10 are roughly 100k inhabitants. Sizes fall pretty quickly after 10th place. Well, all this as a rough estimate from memory.

    I’m currently staying in one of these top 10, in a droning, dozing, sunny summertime, and I can say it’s not very ‘urban’ to someone used to, say, the US. Except maybe for the no-go zones?

  44. *note

  45. Why? Donbas would push Ukraine’s overall average up.

  46. LondonBob says

    Only Stockholm can be considered a city.

  47. Hat tip…and advice for emperors in training :

    Family life of the Royal Creche is difficult for many people to understand, but I shall try to give you a capsule view of it. My father had only one real friend, I think. That was Count Hasimir Fenring, the genetic-eunuch and one of the deadliest fighters in the Imperium. The Count, a dapper and ugly little man, brought a new slave-concubine to my father one day and I was dispatched by my mother to spy on the proceedings. All of us spied on my father as a manner of self-protection. One of the slave-concubines permitted my father under the Bene Gesserit—Guild agreement could not, of course, bear a Royal Successor, but the intrigues were constant and oppressive in their similarity. We became adept, my mother and sisters and I, at avoiding subtle instruments of death. It may seem a dreadful thing to say, but I’m not at all sure my father was innocent in these attempts. A Royal Family is not like other families. Here was a new slave-concubine, then, red-haired like my father, willowy and graceful. She had a dancer’s muscles, and her training obviously had included neuro-enticement. My father looked at her for a long time as she postured unclothed before him. Finally he said: “She is too beautiful. We will save her as a gift.” You have no idea how much consternation this restraint created in the Royal Creche. Subtlety and self-control were, after all, the most deadly threats to us all.

    —“In my Father’s House” by the Princess Irulan

    Peace.

  48. LondonBob says

    Sure the Swedish government does all kinds of crazy stuff, but it rarely filters down to those dull suburban Swedish towns and villages, with their ICA and a substandard Pizzeria. The Swedish government could legalise Cannabis but it wouldn’t have much effect, people wouldn’t start smoking it en masse, and it would be regulated and taxed like alcohol is with the Systembolaget.

    The Swedish Democrats are now popular because immigration has been so high it is affecting these places. The crazy Yes Sweden stuff is just hot air otherwise.

  49. Twitter Traditionalists

    they’re missing out the ex-liberals – when you look at things from an evolutionary perspective a lot of trad stuff was simply the result of trial and error adaptation.

    (not necessarily adaptive now)

    Tsar

    the interesting thing about that is how them being such a good looking family effects people

  50. Just some light-hearted ribbing.

    Anyhow, Donbass surely would explain some of it, but certainly not all of it (being <20% of the population).

    Also I am not even one of the people who strongly cares about this.

  51. Sounds right, when I met my wife’s late grandparents in Ulricehamn, they seemed to be not much different in their outlook than One would expect from that generation (born around WW1) in the US. The one thing I noticed was they didn’t care much for religion.

    I have enjoyed some Ingbar Bergman films though, but I don’t think someone like him contributed much to the moral decline…but I’m not an expert in Swedish film history.

    Peace.

  52. The reason women can dress immodestly, is because Sweden has (or had) high social capital.

    Agreed – though is that what they are calling lack of gheerah these days?

    Peace.

  53. 2 items –

    (1) Italy’s Salvini says ‘it may take 50 years’ to send back half a million African migrants, i.e., maybe never … so we need to consider whether all these ‘anti-immigration populists’ getting elected are really fakers

    (2) There is tension in Israel over Netanyahu’s increased bonding with the European ‘ethno-nationalist’ governments in Poland and elsewhere, Uri Avnery reporting that Poland is actually hated in Israel much more than Germany, and that Israelis are feeling the ‘Nazi associations’ of the European ‘right wing’

    There has been much joy over the election of Trump, Italy’s Salvini, Austria’s Kurz etc … but let’s take a serious look at the possibility the ‘alt-right’ is experiencing a mirror of the fake ‘socialists’ who have been governing much of Europe for decades

    Oligarch rulers of the world have long known that political deception works repeatedly over generations, with ‘socialist’ politicians always finding reasons to support big banks and corporations

    Now that people are in revolt against migrant waves, it is logical for oligarchs to serve up a buffet of ‘anti-migration’ politicians … nearly all having worn kippah skullcaps at Israel’s wailing wall, of course … politicians who will ‘talk right’ just like the old socialists ‘talked left’ … politicians who will talk about ‘building a wall’ or ‘sending migrants back to Africa’ but then, when elected … as Salvini seems to be saying now, ‘there’s not much I can really do’.

    Isn’t it possible that all these ‘anti-migrant’ friends of Israel, Trump, Salvini etc, are just talking the talk and deceiving the proles just like the left has long done?

    Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery talks about the Netanyahu ties in Europe that are now the most vibrant with the ‘anti-migrant’ and ‘ethno-nationalist’ governments, including Poland, which, historically speaking, not only had the largest population of European Jews before World War II, but also was known for much deeper and broader anti-semitism than in pre-war Germany. The Israeli feeling about ‘Nazis’ is not so narrowly ‘anti-German’ as it is a sentiment about Europeans in general.

    Avnery mentions how when Israelis are reminded that as many as 3 million Poles were killed by Germans in the war, some Israelis will comment ‘that wasn’t enough’. And that despite the ‘pro-Israel’, Jerusalem-visiting nature of European ‘anti-migrant’ politicians, Israelis feel the continuum of ‘right-wing’ Europeans with Nazi ideals, and are not comfortable with Netanyahu’s recent ‘deal’ he signed with Poland acknowledging the tragedies of Poles in the war.

  54. Guillaume Tell says

    That is certainly a place I would gladly consider.

    However — how about article 242? Wouldn’t Putler put us all in jail as a result of our unbearably waciss’ takes on things?

  55. Negligible risk of that if we all speak English. The nationalism thing is ok if manufactured for export.

    http://www.unz.com/akarlin/country-282/

  56. Italy switches sides, it always has.

    If you go back far enough, it was the side.

  57. in Turkey there are still girls who are not virgins before marriage,

    I knew a Catholic girl who loved her boyfriend (60’s). She wouldn’t fuck him but gave him a blow job every night.

  58. Thorfinnsson says

    Just pre-ordered the Blackberry Key Two.

    Can’t wait to assert physical keyboard DOMINANCE.

    Very powerful move.

  59. Daniel Chieh says

    Well, they still have tiny unit sizes, but I’m going to see if they will work better as specialized anti-elite units as you suggested. I’ve been hoping they would give me more flexibility and serve as a capable hammer and anvil unit, but it does seem that they’re far too overkitted for taking down line units.

  60. Dan Hayes says

    Mitleser:

    I’d like to amend my doubts about the dearth of Italian promiscuity. On reflection I remember that the Italian-Americans of my acquiescence wanted/demanded virginal brides. Of course what these men did outside of marriage was a completely different matter.

  61. Why do people here regard authoritarianism and censorship as something that is bad on itself, rather than a tool that can be good or bad depending on who wields it? Like would China be better of now if it was run by liberals that allowed NGOs full freedom to operate like Taiwan or South Korea?

  62. Toronto Russian says

    How Moscow changed in the past 10 years is truly amazing. Most of all that they buried wires in the ground. In Toronto area, all the wires hang in the air because it’s cheaper. It’s a stupid decision because wires won’t be damaged in the ground (no earthquakes) but inevitably get damaged by extreme weather that is common here. Now that plastic toilets disappeared in the Moscow centre, where do people go? Is it allowed to use bathrooms in cafés without ordering something? When I was in Moscow, McDonalds was known as the free bathroom chain.

  63. Duke of Qin says

    Lizardmen don’t play like Empire and similar factions, you really cant go hammer and anvil because your cavalry is too specialized and fragile and your line infantry is too offensively geared and too expensive to be used as cannon fodder. Saurans will shred equivalent low tier infantry like empire spears, but they aren’t cost effective to use as a blunting force to buy time and allow your cavalry to flank like how the Empire / Bretonnia / or Vampire Counts play. Lizardmen strengths are more geared like Greenskins (who I forgot also have a cheap anti-large armor piercing cavalry unit) and Norsca, in that they shouldn’t really go for any kind of balanced army composition and you should go full yolo on the offense

    Lizardmen are the answer to the question of whether or not this game needs more dinosaur, and the answer is yes it does. The core of your Lizardmen stacks revolves around the Stegadon. Really half your army should be dinos and the other half cheap units to cost effectively support your dinos. The carnosaur is really suboptimal and you should only bring 1 if even that and only if you are expecting the opposing force to deploy a big monstrous unit of their own. Otherwise more Stegadons, which just excel in pulping infantry. Your roster is really similar to Norsca which also abuses the hell out of the war mammoth backed up by armoured skin wolves to take out enemy cavalry. Even better is that the Stegadon’s ranged artillery is actually useful and not just vestigial like on the mammoths which mostly just waste vigor. Basically use your Stegadon’s artillery to force his army to bum rush you and otherwise clear out dangerous skirmishing units, cold ones to screen and engage cavalry that try to interrupt your charge and just hulk smash his lines with a bunch of dinos until his army mass routes. This isn’t a fool proof play and falls to specialized armies with tons of ranged armor piercing units, like an army entirely of shades in online play, but it works great against most balanced armies on the campaign.

  64. Yes it’s funny how, putting wires underground makes such an aesthetic improvement, but is not in all areas of the city yet – and they do it the most in the last 5 years.

    It’s amazingly expensive though to put them underground (billions of dollars).

  65. I assume all you white people here must have that sore feeling from being cuckolded after the World Cup win of the African team Vs. The Aryan race?

  66. Duke of Qin says

    Let us assume you stop there before making yourself look like a bigger idiot.

  67. I believe Da Duke be Chinese – right Duke?

    Also, Croats are Slavs…so I believe they were considered untermensch by the Aryan master Race folks (volks).

    Peace.

  68. The Nazis had their contradictions, as evidenced by how they treated Bulgaria, Croatia and Slovakia during WW II as recognized nations – much unlike the other predominately Slav countries.

  69. Useful untermensch…?

    Can any bonafide Nazis, that may be observing, please settle this? Are Slavs in or out? Any exceptions?

    Peace.

  70. Daniel Chieh says

    Thread 49 for football discussion.

  71. Pericles says

    Early Ingmar Bergman contributed some to the moral dissolution, I’d say (e.g., Summer with Monica, 1953) but there were many others too. Perhaps Arne Mattson got it all rolling downhill with One Summer of Happiness (1951), which I believe was the first to show actress tits.

    In roughly the same era, philosophers, literally nihilists, successfully attacked Christianity and I don’t think it’s recovered since. Key names Axel Hägerström and, probably foremost, Ingemar Hedenius. It seems this quickly spread to the rest of society and might have contributed to what you saw with your in-laws.

    (For instance, Bergman grew up as upper middle class in Uppsala, the university town that housed and gave name to the key nihilist school. Hardly unlikely that it influenced him.)

  72. BTW, what’s Total War: Warhammer 2?

    Is it like a video game version of the tabletop game?

  73. The Big Red Scary says

    the first to show actress tits.

    Tits are significant mostly as a Schelling point, but once you abandon one Schelling point, it is hard to credibly establish another, which leaves us stuck with those we have (or had).

  74. Alliumnsk says

    What was the most recent GWAS IQ study?
    Does it attempt to factor possible degree of inbreeding and rare mutations (new, untested by selection, probably lower IQ)?

  75. reiner Tor says

    My email address exists, too.

    First create a mail list with anonymity kept, just in case this site gets shut down.

  76. Hyperborean says

    I think modern neo-nazis accept most Slavs, although I think opinions about whether Russians and Balkan people are in or not are more divided.

    Although some of them incorporate racial themes in their denouncements of their enemy-neighbours.

  77. n 1990 Andreotti was involved in getting all parties to agree to a binding timetable for the Maastricht Treaty. The deep Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union favoured by Italy was opposed by Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, who wanted a system of competition between currencies. Germany had doubts about committing to the project without requiring economic reforms from Italy, which was seen as having various imbalances. As President of the European Council, Andreotti co-opted Germany by making admittance to the single market automatic once the criteria had been met, and committing to a rigorous overhaul of Italian public finances. Critics later questioned Andreotti’s understanding of the obligation, or whether he had ever intended to fulfill it.[50][51]

    A couple of months ago:

    https://www.politico.eu/article/isabel-schnabel-germany-eurozone-banking-emu-economic-adviser-italy-is-another-argument-for-reforming-now/
    .. the policy brief put forward by French and German economists in January, which suggested capping the amount of their own government’s debt that banks would be allowed to hold. Is that in your view a reform that should be enacted together with EDIS?

    The two must go together because if banks take on too much exposure to their own governments — in Italy or elsewhere — the risk of sovereign default could partly be shifted to the European level through joint deposit insurance.

    Italy never fulfills its obligations, they are too big an economy to let fail without bringing the EU single currency (ie an export promotion program for German industry) down. Italian banks leverage accordingly.

  78. Imagine being as naive as to believe polling data, especially ones that are self-reporting.

  79. the West is in its current poisoned state cos media/academia filtered information to manipulate people

    free battle of ideas -> optimal solution (eventually)

    if it was possible and up to me i’d make the internet impossible to censor and let Darwin sort it out

  80. 1) more brawn than brains
    2) just right
    3) more brains than brawn

  81. Ok – well, as I said I wasn’t an expert and never came across those two.

    successfully attacked Christianity and I don’t think it’s recovered since

    Yeah, it’s been a complete rout – sad. In my wife’s extended family, a couple of her female cousins have a kid or two from one or another guy, but the concept of the nuclear family is now fairly – ahem – flexible. Not sustainable as far as I can see though.

    Though I think the Swedish royals still marry normally. I think that institution will completely collapse once one of the royals becomes the first to marry their gay boyfriend or lesbian girlfriend. Has that happened yet in one of the remaining European royal lines?

    Peace.

  82. Hyperborean says

    It just came to my mind that it would have been more fitting given Kholmogorov’s symbolism if the translation of the Kholmogorov article about Emperor Nikolai II had been published today, exactly 100 years later.

  83. Thorfinnsson says

    Slavs are in.

    The H-man changed his mind at the end of his life as a result of getting licked by the Red Army.

    We admire the courage of the Slavs.

  84. Thorfinnsson says

    They’re not even Swedish. The current royal house was founded by…one of Napoleon’s marshals.

    Plenty of disgrace in current European royalty. Prince Harry married a divorced mulatto who is older than he. The Crown Prince of Norway married a single mom. The King of Spain married a divorced lawyer cunt.

    Time to sweep the table.

  85. Mr. Hack says

    So, who are you going to marry? 🙂

  86. Didn’t know H-man had changed his mind, but his reasons make sense though.

    Peace.

  87. They’re not even Swedish.

    Good point and successive kings seem to always marry non-Swedes from all over Europe so I’m not sure they could ever be considered to have “gone local”.

    Plenty of disgrace in current European royalty.

    Chicken and egg scenario; as these things become common in society, you cannot really expect elites to act much differently.

    But, none of them has done a same sex marriage so be happy for that, right?

    Peace.

  88. Thorfinnsson says

    Chicken and egg scenario; as theses things become common in society, you cannot really expect elites to act much differently.

    Which is exactly why we’re going to replace them.

    But, none of them has done a same sex marriage so be happy for that, right?

    I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

  89. for-the-record says

    The King of Spain married a divorced lawyer cunt.

    Not to sure about the lawyer part, as far as I know she was a TV journalist.

  90. Daniel Chieh says

    The closest thing to one at the moment.

    It features regiment-level combat(around 2000 or so troops on each side) organized in squads and the engine was considered naturalistic enough that it was used for several historical documentaries. At one point, the physics effectively modeled ranked combat so that spearmen could fight in ranks up to two, phalanx in ranks up to three, etc. Ranged units had a fairly complicated firing arc and physics, so the habitual “shoot at enemies into h2h” will often end up feathering a lot of your own guys in the back(“The deep questions on when its okay to shoot your own men in the back of their heads…” as one youtube guide guy discussed).

    There’s also a significant leadership model, and routing/morale is a central part of the game. A lot of it has been simplified in the Warhammer version of Total War(its typically a historical game engine, not fantasy) but its still essential, adds magic and monsters and its pretty fun all in all. The central campaign mode is very Risk-like, and you get to see all of the landmarks of Warhammer in your cities: e.g. Lustria has the Fallen Gates, where you can as Lizardmen restore to get upgraded Temple Guards, and or as Chaos, taking special landmarks unlocked special buildings as well.

  91. The UK is leading the way, I believe.

    https://eu.usatoday.com/story/life/2018/06/18/queens-cousin-first-royal-same-sex-marriage-ex-wife-giving-him-away/710986002/

    Of course Europe already has at least two openly homo prime ministers. (Luxemburg and Ireland.) Yay for modern democracy.

  92. All in parliamentary order old chap.

    Following the conclusion of Finnish War in 1809, Sweden lost possession of Finland, which had constituted roughly the eastern half of the Swedish realm for centuries. Resentment towards King Gustav IV Adolf precipitated an abrupt coup d’état. Gustav Adolf (and his son Gustav) was deposed and his uncle Charles XIII was elected King in his place. However, Charles XIII was 61 years old and prematurely senile. He was also childless; one child had been stillborn and another died after less than a week. It was apparent almost as soon as Charles XIII ascended the throne that the Swedish branch of the House of Holstein-Gottorp would die with him. In 1810 the Riksdag of the Estates, the Swedish parliament, elected a Danish prince, Prince Christian August of Augustenborg, as heir-presumptive to the throne. He took the name Charles August, but died later that same year.

    The Riksdag [next] decided to choose a king of whom Napoleon would approve. On 21 August 1810, the Riksdag elected Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, a Marshal of France, as heir presumptive to the Swedish throne.

    PS. As we all know, the British royal family are Germans. It’s how these things work.

  93. Duke of Qin says

    It’s a hybrid turn-based real time strategy franchise, it plays very differently than table top because the tactical aspect is real time while the strategic level is turn based. Creative Assembly usually did historical games and the Warhammer version of their franchise is superb. The only downside is that Sega, following the example of Games Workshop has been nickel and diming it’s customers on DLC. Still cheaper than spending hundreds of dollars collecting actual miniatures though. Total War: Rome 2 is great to pick up on the cheap with some (but not all) bundled DLC now for like $15 when its on sale on steam, I think Russian steam prices are even cheaper at a $4. To be Honest, Total War: Atilla is the superior game but if you like the antiquity period and want to play with Hellenistic successor state factions stick with Rome. Atilla is an interesting period because it kicks off in the late Imperial period and you can play the migration era barbarians overrunning the empire.

    Recording of a multiplayer battle.

  94. Mitleser says

    Good news for Rosneft/Sechin. They may not lose all of their Venezuela money.

    https://twitter.com/ChrisSabatini/status/1018893112104636417

  95. Daniel Chieh says

    The only downside is that Sega, following the example of Games Workshop has been nickel and diming it’s customers on DLC.

    Even Total War Warhammer and Total War 2 Warhammer: two separate games to buy, just so you can play the races w/ Mortal Empires. Easily one of the most greed-driven franchises out there, I swear.

    I was surprised/disappointed in the lack of fluff among the provinces as well. You’d think they would at least allow a bit of writing for Lustria, etc. In terms of feel, I think its inferior to the Warhammer 40k offerings such as Battleship Gothic.

  96. Pumblechook says

    I’m an infrequent commenter but would be interested in attending any planned meet-ups.

    I’ve done so before and had a very positive experience – no reason to assume the same wouldn’t be true of unz

    I’m based in London and the email used is valid..