I’ll go back to posting proper material soon enough, but in the interim, here’s another open thread.
Featured
- Glenn Greenwald: Trump DoJ prosecution of Assange is unprecedented threat to press freedoms but many vindictive Democrats support it
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Atlantic: Declining marginal returns to science? In past few decades importance of new discoveries fell even as research budgets soared. One more of many datapoints. I explained why we can expect to see this here.
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Campus Reform: American university to mandate all freshmen and sophomores take “diversity and include” classes. It is funny to note that three were similar requirements to graduate from Soviet universities (“Scientific Marxism” and “History of the CPSU”). You needed to do well in those two classes to get a prestigious “Red” certificate, as opposed to a “Blue” one. However, amongst serious people – e.g., other scientists – possession of a Red certificate conferred no benefits.
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Chipotle submits to online pressure and fires manager who refused to serve African-Americans with a Twitter record of dine and dashing. Chipotle’s is probably the most SWPL fast food chain in the US – i.e. “muh BML” millennial cucks are their core clientele, so I don’t see them hiring back the Hitlerite Hispanic manager who denied dine and dashing Somali thugs their rightful food. But in compensation, she has a good case for unfair dismissal.
Russia
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ZeroHedge: Nice survey of cooperation between Russia and China
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Bloomberg: E-commerce in Russia set to nearly treble in next five years and consolidate a fragmented market. One of the biggest inconveniences of online shopping in Russia – hard to find reviews of all but the most popular products, because its sales are evenly spread over a couple dozen shops. There is plenty of room for expansion – the current size of the Russian e-commerce market is around $30 billion, which is 10x less than the US and 20x less than China (!!). That should promote consolidation.
- Rootless Cosmopolitans. TASS: Russian millionaires keep 70% of savings in foreign banks
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vecs: Good Twitter thread on economic progress in the late Russian Empire [in Russian]
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WSJ: In Russia, McDonald’s Serves Local Fries and a Side of Realpolitik
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Kyiv Post: Ukrainians say bribe problem worse now than in 2015
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BBC: Ukraine activist Kateryna Handzyuk dies after acid attack. Obviously, this journalist murder got far less attention than a Russian one would have. And the fact that nationalist ATO veterans were responsible was hushed over in the Western press. Indeed, some hinted that Putler was to blame.
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Video: Russian nationalist Egor Prosvirnin debates multinational bureaucrat in charge of federation of labor migrants on Echo of Moscow [in Russian]
World
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NSFW: Alleged photos of Khashoggi’s murder leaked by Turkey. Saudi Arabia to seek death penalty against 5 members of 15 man Khashoggi assassination squad. If the latter is for real – MbS is really stupid.
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Barron’s: Italy is no Greece – its faceoff with EU over budget deficit could precipitate the death of the Euro (h/t reiner Tor)
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Leonid Bershidsky: Europe’s Losing Credibility on Iran Sanctions. Obviously it is rather difficult to sidestep Iran sanctions if you are a set of spineless vassal states whose central bankers are afraid of getting jailed the next time they travel to the US.
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Greg Hood: The Tragedy of Trump
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Audacious Epigone: 44% of 18-29 y/o Americans support secession (versus just 14% of over 60’s). As does 47% of the active military. (!!)
- Radio Poland: Poland to begin paying paying “maternal pensions” for retired women and single fathers with 4+ children next year
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Irish Examiner: Poland’s booming economy means workers stay at home
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BNE: Turkey inflation expected to approach 25% by year end. Inflation in Iran to approach 40% after activation of US sanctions with economy expected to contract 3.6% in 2019.
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Brazil’s based new Foreign Minister is saying very based things
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WSJ: Thousands of “disappeared” in Mexico every year due to drug cartels violence
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NBF: Venezuela is months from the end game of total chaos or a coup. 840,000% annual inflation rate as of this October!
Science & Culture
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Gwern: Embryo selection for intelligence. Major update to a 2016 text.
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Nick Bostrom: Longread: Danger of civilization-ending techs may make a case for strong surveillance and global governance [PDF]
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Robin Hanson: World government puts all the eggs in one basket
* SpaceX to accelerate super heavy BFR rocket development with test flights starting in late 2019
- Motherboard: Our closest planet in a single star system is a super-Earth with a surface temperature of -170C
Culture War
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Eric Weinstein: Hiding follower counts & likes on Twitter would be a “war on feedback” to establishment narratives
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The future that neoliberals want: All relationships in Walking Dead are now interracial or LGBT
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VoE: Far-left Greek PM to attempt to remove Christianity as State religion. Will take 10,000 Orthodox Church employees off public payroll. One supposes that appeasing refugees is more important.
Meanwhile, I will shamelessly task my powerful readers into helping out with the penultimate stages of my remont.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DsUWF4DWoAE6z8g.jpg
Where should I put the TV – at #1 (surrounded by bookshelves) or #2 (where the window used to be)?
Wall is the more conventional option.
But I still don’t have much of a clue as to what to do with the space where the window used to be.
PS. I haven’t watched had a TV in my place for more than a decade and don’t intend to start now. But its still useful to have for entertaining normies.
You left out the important Russian technology news that Russia has been working on a nuclear propulsion spaceship since 2008. It’s a good Russotriumph news.
I saw it (I follow NBF, the best tech blog? bryan wang is a one man content factory) but I didn’t think it was notable enough because I have noticed over the years a pattern of Russia making claims about various groundbreaking new technologies that are later quietly forgotten, revealed as fakes or “concepts”, or as problem-riddled prototypes at best.
I would support Italy causing the breakup of the EU, but this offering asylum to a Christian from Pakistan is stupid. There are a near endless amount of non Muslim third worlders that would want to enter Italy, they would end up destroying Italy no different to Muslim third worlders.
This is how science will die and we will become free once again.
Science began as a radical and subversive act of admitting we don’t know and then experimenting – of questioning established knowledge – and became just another form of established knowledge – of dogmatically claiming we know.
It ossified and crystallized. And thus it died.
The human spirit cannot be imprisoned. It dies. Christianity began as a radical overturning of established knowledge then became a prison for the human spirit with its dogmas and beliefs – then science came and freed the human spirit by boldly claiming we don’t know and must approach reality empirically.
Science was assisted by mysticism – another movement that rejected the dogmatic claims of the church and boldly stated we do not know, and favored an empirical approach to reality.
Science now with its dogmas and beliefs no longer frees the mind but imprisons it in so called established knowledge.
And so it inevitably dies. A new movement that liberates the spirit from dogmas will emerge and free us again – we cannot return to the dogmas of religion, as that is no better than science. Religion in its essence is freedom from dogmas.
American labor law is usually “work at will”, meaning that absent contracts, private companies can fire workers for no reason. But Chipotle should give the girl a bonus.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1064276099335667712
Amazing how all the people commenting on that mandatory leftist courses article simply say stuff like “Don’t send your kid to that school!”
Doesn’t the right ever think of solutions? Like how to stop schools from giving those courses? It’s all just running away for these people
Is the breeder reactor project dead?
Forwarded to my attention, the author I’m told isn’t related to Filaret:
https://www.wheeljournal.com/blog/2018/11/16/nicholas-denysenko-an-orthodox-graveyard-and-the-tomos-of-autocephaly-for-ukraine
Back in the early 1990s, some in the established UOC inquired about a complete separation from the MP. Was there a vote? If so, what was the result? Meantime the UOC in question runs its own affairs, while being loosely affiliated with the MP.
As for interference, Yushchenko and some others have sought to interfere with that church, favoring those who slant along the lines of Filaret and Poroshenko.
The UGCC isn’t an OC, yet seeks the Filaret/Poroshenko preference of one UOC separate from the MP. I’m sure the UGCC wouldn’t like it, if it were coerced into becoming part of a single UOC on the basis of the UGCC having ties to an imperial past of a foreign power. The very kind of imagery being negatively attributed to the UOC with loose MP ties.
He writes about resilience regarding Filaret and the UAOC. The more established UOC remains resilient to the ongoing efforts against it.
As for the last paragraph of the above linked essay:
From many on the pro-Kiev regime side, the matter of deafening silence can be said about the attacks on UOC-MP property by outside agitators. Has Bartholomew actually condemned the so-called “Russian aggression” in Donbass? The civil conflict in Donbass overwhelmingly involves people from that territory and other parts of the former Ukrainian SSR, as opposed to the claim of a majority rebel side coming from Russia.
Barbaric as it was (no fan of Stalin and the USSR without him), the Holodomor wasn’t an attempt to exterminate Ukrainians along the lines of a Nazi final solution. Propaganda aside, Crimea is virtually bloodless when compared to the situations in rebel held Donbass and Kiev regime controlled Ukraine. Much of the stuff written about Crimea and the Crimean Tatars is BS.
Concerning that last point:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/07092018-consistency-and-reality-lacking-on-crimea-analysis/
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2016/02/28/eurovision-crimean-tatars-and-some-digressions.html
https://www.eurasiareview.com/09062016-enhanced-russia-bashing-at-the-new-york-times-analysis/
At last notice, Jamala’s parents run a successful business in Crimea. As documented, Dzhemilev is on record for supporting the ethnic cleansing of Russians from Crimea – much the opposite from what Putin has said.
Finished The Wages of Destruction. Now onto The Sleepwalkers. I had been skeptical of such a modern WW1 book but it was recommended by William Lind.
Should be very nice for my Florida vacation next week.
Not sure, but wall mounted TV is too high anyway. You’ll want it at least 30cm lower. Everyone makes the mistake of putting a TV above the halfway height of the wall – which you should never do.
-source: part time journalist, part time novelist, part time interior decorator, full time Irish nationalist.
Also, house tour when?
If you ever feel the need to block every idiot who likes a given idiotic tweet before the Twitter likes are gone, here’s my userscript to do so:
https://enopoletus.github.io/recursiveblock.user.js
Download Tampermonkey before clicking on the link.
For the TV, I favor Position 2.
Obviously, correct answer for this question is two televisions 🙂
For example, if you wanted to play videos wirelessly from something like chromecast, just write different network name for each television.
Then you need to use two different browsers, and could cast different videos/films to each television from the same laptop at the same time.
Why don’t you use a PC-connected projector with a roll-up white screen? Larger, cheaper, no glare, great for company, space-saving and easy to transport. You can even set it up for vidya if that’s your thing.
The Hood piece is quite good. Trump looks extremely bedraggled since the November election loss. Now we learn his government is going after Assange, the man who was needed for Trump to win. clearly not “in power”.
Today I heard a country music radio host attack Trump for not going to some Kennedy center event. I realized at that moment just how saturating the media warscape is against Bad Orange Man. He will not win reelection.
The only question now is: which dem to start building a predictIt.com position in. My thinking at this point is to bet on Kamala Harris. She’s legitimately smart, and is a light skinned negress. Suburban whites will not feel authorized to not vote for her. She will run with perhaps Beto and annihilate Trump. Sad!
‘Woke’ corporate cravenness and fake support:
https://twitter.com/MattPalumbo12/status/1064310944082333696
https://twitter.com/separatefromyou/status/1064294122117189632
Lots of verbiage and all of it, unfortunately, completely misses the point.
The reason is simple enough: scientists aren’t paid for making discoveries. They’re paid for writing citable papers. You get what you pay for.
(You can trust me on this, I come from a family of actual world-class scientists.)
I see. I thought it was plausible, because
But yes, it’s likely nowhere near completion and not very likely to receive the necessary funds.
Oops! Did you mean ‘The Saker’?
Russia has the most experience with FBR of the conventional type i.e. Sodium Cooled fast breeder reactor and has more successful operational experience with this type of reactor than the rest of the world combined.
The problem with this and the broader nuclear industry in general is that this design is derived from military propulsion designs very unsuitable for civilian use.
Most conventional reactors i.e PWR are derived from Submarine power reactors with all its attendant problems.Very poor fuel utilization and geometric decrease in inherent safety as the power output increases due to thermal inertia problems among many other drawbacks Alvin Weinberg its inventor was completely opposed to it being modified for civilian power reactors.
Sodium Cooled reactors were originally envisaged for nuclear aircraft propulsion light weight and high power density.
Other than its light weight (which is necessary in case of aircraft) Sodium is a horrible coolant to use in a nuclear reactor it becomes extremely radioactive after converting to Na 21 and burns in contact with air and explodes in contact with water.
Though Russia is to be admired for getting it to work as a grid connected reactor it is still never going to be cost competitive with conventional power plants and will likely have other problems like neutron embrittlement of exposed alloys as time goes by.
Other designs like the Lead Bismuth eutectic cooled FBR (BREST) are very much at the conceptual stage.
Not sure about ‘where’ to put tv2, but ‘where not’ would certainly be in that position, blocking natural light from the main room.
You mean ‘triple’? In 5 years?
I find that hard to believe. Looking at this chart, Russia is already pretty big.
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/map-ecommerce-market.png
You mean the country, that invented E-commerce, and with GDP 12x bigger, than Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q42zbpovlCA
Reminder that ageing core historic Russia is still in the middle of complete demographic collapse (with birthrates mostly higher than in Finland or Germany). Negative population growth has renewed and is picking up steam.
Data Jan – Sept 2018 (births/deaths in Russian federal regions per 1000), source – GKS (Russian statistical service):
Pskov 9.3/17.4
Novgorod 9.8/16.8
Leningrad (not counting St. Petersburg) 7.7/13.4
Tula 8.4/16.2
Tver 9.2/17.2
Tambov 8.1/15.7
Yaroslav 9.8/15.1
Smolensk 8.4/15.7
Ryazan 9.4/15.6
Orlov 9.1/15.8
Lipetsk 9.5/14.4
Kursk 9.3/15.5
Ivanov 9.1/16.1
Vladimir 9.3/16.1
Big cities are not so bad:
Moscow 10.5/9.7
St. Petersburg 12.1/11.6
MEANWHILE:
Dagestan 15.9/5.0
Ingushetia 15.8/2.9
Chechnya 20.5/4.5
Population growth (first 9 months, 2017/2018):
-106.176/-173.355
By the way the al-Sura story about the leaked picture of the Khashoggi murder was redacted already yesterday shortly after you posted it. Maybe you could update the post.
Finished The Wages of Destruction. Now onto The Sleepwalkers.
Thanks for the recommendation for The Wages of Destruction, it is now on my list. Have you read Christopher Browning’s The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942? I believe it would provide an interesting counterpoint/complement for you to Tooze’s book on this issue. It seems to me to be by far the best overall, and most detailed, account of the decision-making process underlying the Endlösung der Judenfrage.
The Greg Hood article is great.
Both are good. Tooze probably exaggerated the impact of food production on Nazi actions, since it’s obvious that Nazi Jewish policy was set mostly by ideological considerations. One obvious objection is that food production could also have increased by utilizing extra workforce for it. Either the Jews themselves, or the Jews could have freed up some gentile workforce elsewhere who could then be directed to agriculture.
One good comprehensive work on Nazi Germany is the trilogy of Richard J. Evans. For the record, he was one of the witnesses for the defendants in the Irving case, about which he also wrote a book. It’s pretty unfortunate that he could present a very good case of Irving distorting important sources. Anyway, he then wrote another book, The Third Reich in History and Memory, which was to a large extent against leftist myths. He mentioned that the Irving case introduced him to a whole industry of leftists distorting the history of Nazism, including people like Daniel Goldhagen, and he also mentioned that these were far more influential than the Irvings of this world.
So…given the generous chance of Two Open threads, not even expecting an individual blog post about it..but not even one single mention of the extraordinary( but expected) gas crisis in Ukraine in the last 7 days. Millions affected throughout the country but not even a mention of this clusterfuck from Karlin?
It just goes to prove that Karlin-Soros is as anti-Russian as they come. If western media aren’t spinning this story, then Karlin isn’t interested. Amusingly enough if you google some of the main places affected…..not a single result of this weeks events appears under the news section of Google
And how much of those are Germans or Finns, and by that I mean real racial Germans or Finns.
Births over deaths is just boomers dying out. It has happened earlier in Russia, but will happen everywhere eventually too. They’re not gonna live forever. (Shocking as it may seem.)
Ukraine is so 2014, you should know by now how fickle US foreign policy and society in general is. Ukrainians sold their souls like cheap whores, selling out their countries future, I couldn’t care less what happens to those idiots.
Disagree. It would be the easiest thing to do….a token, but very high profile asylum case of this women being accepted into Italy would generate huge , good political PR for the Italian government from the EU, from domestic opponents and humanitarian minded people…….whilst at the same time not doing anything to solve the general problem or help the other numerous people affected by similar things in the developing world
Think Britain in World War 2, even though they controlled huge amounts of the world, they only let in relatively small/token amounts of jews ( you think in sparse Australia,Canada, places in Africa etc, that they could not have enabled hundreds of thousands to a couple of million jews to leave Europe before or during Nazi takeover?), but despite that they still self-congratulated themselves over the relatively modest numbers of Jews they did take in.
Think about how many anti-Vietnam war activists were remotely interested in the numerous other wars that they US participated in by proxy….none. Most of this supposedly left-wing activism was just a form of nationalism ( “our guys getting killed is bad, but different guys getting killed for the same “cause”..good! or who cares”)
In your defence you could say this was the same attitude the British had to the Romanovs, who they refused to let into Britain after the revolution, even though the Communists were desperate for them to do so and Nicholas and his wife were both closely related to the British Royal family. Apparently the British thought it dangerous to let in one Royal family, as with Europe at war at the time, allowing them in could mean having to allow a whole series of then monarch’s from other European states into the country
That’s the theory, but I suspect it’s just nonsense……..the British disposed of the Shah of Iran ( who supported the Nazi’s) but granted him a nice asylum in British-controlled South Africa,and just replaced him as Shah…..with his own son!
‘Far-left Greek PM to attempt to remove Christianity as State religion. Will take 10,000 Orthodox Church employees off public payroll. One supposes that appeasing refugees is more important.’
Actually that’s not true. The goal of the Syriza party is to remove the 10.000 priests from the civil service register but continue to pay them through a different government account.
That way they will not be counted in the civil service and Tsipras will be able to hire 10.000 Syriza voters without breaking EU rules about overspending. It’s a smart/crafty plan.
Anatoly used the word “treble” correctly.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/treble
Ultimately it’s TFR that matters, not crude birthrate. And it appears that after plunging from a post-Soviet peak of 1.78 children per woman in 2015, to 1.62 in 2017, Russia’s TFR has stabilized this year at around 1.6 (or 1.5 in core Russian regions).
Dagestan TFR fell from 2.02 in 2015, to 1.91 in 2017
Ingushetia TFR fell from 1.97 in 2015, to 1.77 in 2017
Chechnya TFR fell from 2.8 in 2015, to 2.73 in 2017
Also, Tatarstan fell from 1.86 in 2015. to 1.65 in 2017. And Bashkortostan fell from 1.94 in 2015, to 1.7 in 2017.
Priests being paid by the government is ridiculous and perverse.
No, unfortunately, Russia isn’t merely receding to a normal still-healthy fertility rate after a population boom. It is dying. Unlike some sick people, I am not rejoicing over this.
TFR staying under replacement level for twenty-five consecutive years, has nothing to do with some prior baby boom.
So, actual Russian regions of the Russia Federation may have stabilized at way below replacement level. Great.
Russians are, therefore, dying out. There’s no honest way to torture the data or reinterpret it to show otherwise. They are not even close to replacement level.
Depends on the view from your window. If view is ok then put the TV on the wall, if it is ghastly the put the TV over the window
With the mandatory leftist courses, your comparison with Soviet mandatory Marxism courses is apt. During soviet times people ticked the right boxes and the got on with their lives, chanting appropriate mantras when required but not believing them one jot. Follow these rules with diversity and you should be fine.
Lebanon should be the place designated for Arab Christians. India for Pakistani Christians. St. Thomas was in India a long time ago.
First digital church service in Hamburg with BlessU-2.
https://static4.evangelisch.de/get/?daid=00010001Oqe_X5al_WVKy8Hp135ClaPz5u_4PFFuhZOGhREVAyup000000187707&dfid=i-201
https://www.nordkirche.de/fileadmin/_processed_/2/2/csm_h_epd_00404456_40af398fba.jpg
Obviously it’s bad if their TFR remains at that level forever. But it’s good news if the post-2015 fertility collapse has stopped. Hopefully, as the Russian economy recovers, TFR will resume its 2000-2015 upward trend.
Except for Chechnya, the Muslim regions are all below replacement too.
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4603/39588669715_a40c635f36_o.png
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4654/40503699401_7caed8fb8a_o.png
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4715/25633117817_8761692cea_o.png
I’m surprised that some colleges don’t have a diversity requirement. Having a few required D’s really brings home how parasitized the whole economy is. You are paying for those classes, if you go to school there, both with money and time.
It would be interesting to map the chronology of diversity requirements geographically. I bet state schools are generally infiltrated first, but I wonder about the Ivies. They are probably also early adopters. Both types of institutions are really controlled by the political class.
That is even worse.
I didn’t say it did. I’m just pointing out that you’re using the wrong metric. Western Europe and USA will have negative population growth too once the boomers start dying.
Number of German citizens is constantly declining despite increasing number of naturalized citizens.
https://www.destatis.de/DE/PresseService/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2018/09/PD18_347_12411.html
Foreign population in Germany increased by 5% in the last year, number of German citizens in Germany decreased by 0,3%.
Share of foreign population increased from 11,2% to 11,7%.
Fair point!
You are right, but the fact remains that sanctions are in place against Russia, supposedly because of Ukraine..and that the boring, stupid, fake , gay and irrelevant “hacking” story for the US Presidential elections are an ever running story, that could eventually overthrow Trump, but more importantly is most likely hugely influencing Trumps policy to Russia in the last 2 years ( assuming he was saying what he thinks about Russia in the lead-up to the 2016 election)
I mention the hacking/interference, because we inhabit a bizarre, moronic political world where Ukraine openly disclosed private documents that resulted in Trump having to fire his Campaign Chief ( who is now in jail because of it)…but these fake stories against Russia are somehow treated as if a major crime
In this context I think it’s important to point out every few months what a POS state Ukraine is.
In fairness to Karlin, the liberastic cretinous RT are too lazy to do a report on this major problem in Ukraine also
I linked to a very good summary of this book (which is also one of my favorites on Nazi Germany) a few open threads ago:
https://twitter.com/PlanMaestro/status/1004200428530225152
You’ll get no argument from me on that front.
Thanks.
One possible component of the decline in science production is the shift of the super-smart fraction from research and real engineering, into finance and “tech”.
How many smart people are working on trading algorithms or other financial quant tools rather than doing research in some worth field in the physical sciences? Some of the best minds are designing the proverbial “dick pic apps”. Science needs state subvention, the free market equilibrium isn’t pretty.
I would not say that. Some kind of Russians is dying out. The TFR collapse does not hit every population equally. I presume resistance to factors limiting fertility at least in some part would have to be heritable. That means we have environmental pressure which seems to be deadly to some genotypes, but some genotypes will be more resistant and over time, those people will inherit the earth. I’ve seen only the jayman’s data on differential fertility in USA (with conservatives having definetely more babies) but the anecdotal evidence points to the same direction also in Poland: I know many single women without children, and vast majority of them is liberal/progressive. I bet the same process is in Russia.
Meaning that given enough time, Russia’s population would start to rise again. The problem, of course, is that Russian population does not exist in vacuum.
Most people think the decline of science is a management problem, and in general our culture promotes management-think.
We can fix everything with the right management technique and there are no problems resistant to technique.
In an effort to understand the appeal of such a simple way of thinking I allowed myself to briefly accept this premise – and a curious feeling of relaxation came over me that was quite pleasant.
There were no longer any thorny or knotty problems and I didn’t have to exert effort to think or understand. The world was lucid and simple.
And then it struck me – this is exactly the feeling so much sought after by religion, freedom from seeing life as a thorny problem needing deep intellectual understanding to solve! A kind of peace of mind and faith in the world.
And that struck me as one of the most delicious examples of world-historical irony that this crazy existence is constantly throwing at us if we know how to see – modern science has liberated us from thinking and restored us to an attitude of faith and acceptance!
And now it seems to me that renewal will not come by rejecting current cultural forms but by those forms developing into the ones we have lost.
We cannot return to old forms but current forms can – and are – developing into those old forms through a natural cyclical process.
It’s awesome, and hilarious – and justifies my faith that the world, at bottom, is fine.
Smaller families is also whenever, worldwide, a population is becoming more middle class.
And there is a “positive” feedback cycle, as ageing (and now slightly falling) population, increases GDP per capita, reduces crime, increases societal and political stability, increases employment rates, increases attention children receive from parents (as more single children), and increases competency of government to manage within a stable population.
A lot of situation of improvement of the last fifteen years in Russia, is a result of population ageing. For country with such vast and huge population as Russia (unlike any other European country) distributed widely, I’m not sure at all the government would be able to manage a growing population.
A real danger now of ageing population, is on the fiscal side with an increasing dependency ratio.
Schools still full of kids.
750,000 still passing the state exams each year.
This concept of “dying out” is nonsense, even conceptually.
If a country’s population is lower than it’s peak, it is not dying out. And if we are talking about numbers of people now who are almost impossible to imagine (Russia’s population now is larger than Europe’s total population 250 years ago).
Well perhaps for micro countries like Latvia, these concepts can begin to make sense (even then they will not die out, just fade to even less significance).
I have been thinking quite a bit about this since writing about The Age of Malthusian Industrialism.
One advantage that the developed West – most of all France, with the Anglos following close behind – is that their fertility transition happened up to a century earlier than in Eastern Europe. Consequently, breeders must already be a larger proportion of their population, and perhaps some of those countries might already be on the cusp of a long-term acceleration of fertility trends upwards. While we might still have to wait 50-100 years for that to happen.
One speculates about a return to the demographics of 18th century Europe, when France and Russia had equal populations (if not the medieval world, when France had 4x the population of Rus).
Bloomberg: Putler should just surrender
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-16/here-s-one-measure-that-shows-sanctions-on-russia-are-working
https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iMPBphgzSVa4/v1/775x-1.png
This study seems quite questionable to me (and I can’t even access it). Those charts are not convincing. Karlin has also downplayed the impact of the sanctions several times.
I guess it’s possible that with Western (European) credit, there would have been no recession after the collapse in oil prices? Even that seems like a stretch, though I’m obviously not an expert. But the impact should certainly be minimal after 2020.
Is there any sentence which can’t be improved by adding world-historical to it?
At the beginning of the 14th century, France had about 20 million population-it is probably 20 (and maybe 40) times more than the population of Rus land of that age
Correct about France before the Black Death. Rus is estimated to have had 6 million people before the Mongol invasions, up from 4 million during the age of Yaroslav the Wise. Obviously there’s a lot of uncertainty and these could have been anywhere from 4 million to 8 million (highest estimates), but certainly not 20-40x less than in France.
There’s a number of assumptions in the article, but the sanctions are going to be a headwind, especially since they are going to get ever tougher.
The population of Russia in 1676 – 8.6 million people (an approximate estimate of the population according to the census of households). The population of Russia in 1725 – about 15 million people. Russia in 1676 was many times larger than the area of the Russian principalities of the 13th century . Population density also undoubtedly increased (probably several times). Therefore 6 million “Russian” in 1337, is an obvious fiction. 1 million population is a much more likely estimate.
Is this creepy or what?
Too long and in Russian, give us a summary.
How does the bureaucrat’s job relate to the new migration policy adopted by Putin recently?
Don’t fuck with Big Pharma.
on current extrapolation i think the future is either corporate globalist (Bladerunner) or technocrat globalist (1984)
and i’m not sure which would be worse.
if rooskia uses the free protectionism provided by sanctions for import substitution they should come out ahead imo.
Correct. At worst these areas will have populations as they did in the 1950s by the time we are old. Eastern Europe was not underpopulated, empty lands in the 1950s.
This would be a problem if there was a surging neighboring population. But only the small caucuses has such high fertility, and Africa is far away.
The type of women, who used to be THAT strict school-teacher, are now THAT kind of lawyer. You know the ones, who are “power-couples” (hubby & wife both are mid-level manager in MNCs) or single ladies with 0.6 TFR.
The type of women, who replaced them in the school, are the ones, who used to be those cute office-assistents and were active with the local church.
The black guy, who once run a small successful company in the ghetto’s better part, is now some diversity-officer with six-figure paycheck.
It’s not just the smart-fraction but all the other groups as well.
It’s also a mixture of positive and negative.
Ageing population contributes to lower crime, higher GDP per capita, higher employment rates among working age population, high political and social stability, and easier government management.
On the other hand, negatives – are possible fiscal problems, with increasing pensioners. Russia has an advantage of no mass emigration of young people to other countries (unlike EU countries), but there is also a problem of internal migration of too many young people to certain cities.
Metaphor of “dying out” is such hyperbole.
Number of people today are beyond our imagination, which evolved for a lot longer when the world population was around 1 million people, of whom we would have only encounter a tiniest fraction.
–
Russian Federation population – 146,000,000 people. (over 115,000,000 Russians).
This is a number of people which is simply, impossibly vast to conceive.
If you understand numbers, it should you a feeling of vertigo.
–
Latvia’s population 1,900,000 people.
Still an inconceivable number of people.
–
Population of Khanty people in Western Siberia – 30,000.
This number of people you can almost conceive, if you imagine a large football stadium.
But when you see 30,000 walk past you after a football match, it’s still a vast number whose faces will be simply a blurred memory.
–
World population of Cheetahs – about 7000. Cheetahs are still not endangered.
–
World population of Tigers – 3,900. Maybe Tigers can begin to worry about “dying out”, and are listed as endangered, with some sub-species (like Siberian) having less than 300.
–
World population of Samaritan people – 796. These are the kind of people who are actually dying out.
Recession of 2015-2016, was caused by the fall in oil prices.
However, economic growth was already slow in 2013 and early 2014 (a lot before serious sanctions and before the fall in oil prices, which began in late 2014).
I remember a lot of analysis at the time (in 2013 and early 2014), was talking about “middle income trap”.
Whether latter is true explanation or not, there has been growth below expectations, before fall in oil prices and sanctions. So if growth has been slower than just oil price alone would indicate for them since the introduction of sanctions, this does not mean it is automatically a result of the sanctions (as the same phenomenon was happening before sanctions).
Brilliant. Can one come up with an origin thought when his point of departure is “what survives survives” tautology?
The Russia that produced Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy had fewer than 70 million people.
France in the time of Napoleon had fewer than 30 million people. Of course they were almost all French people. If French decline to such a number now it will be a real problem for them. Russia, OTOH, is keeping pace with most of its non-Russians.
And then you have Intermarium. Almost totally free of any Muslims. It can afford to become less crowded in its purity:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/Islam_in_Europe-2010.svg/841px-Islam_in_Europe-2010.svg.png
This blog has died.
What happened to those interesting 1,000 plus comment threads with all kinds of viewpoints and ideas being thrown around. Even the tone has changed here. Its become about dry discussions of arcane historical trivia that puts people to sleep.
A few months ago everyone disagreed with everyone else but there was a general level of receptivity which created an exciting and fertile environment.
Then there was this subtle shift where certain people started getting really furious and incensed if you challenged their paradigm and started angrily wishing those they disagreed with disappeared and the general mood became unfavorable to novel and interesting ideas. You felt you had to walk on eggshells maybe.
What was so fascinating was that I remember a while back Anatoly was dissatisfied with the low number of comments he was getting and decided to make his blog more exciting and generate more comments – and it worked!
That was really impressive.
But I guess you can’t maintain a personality shift if that really isn’t who you are, and you revert to normal. Reversion to the mean, I suppose.
It’s unfortunate because I notice this trend across the internet recently. People have this hunkering down mentality where they get infuriated at anything that challenges their paradigm and take it quite personally and seriously, and unusual perspectives that stray too far from the normal are not appreciated on an intellectual level even if disagreed with, but seen as personally offensive.
It seems to be a sign of the times, a real clipping of the our intellectual wings and trimming of our intellectual sails, a turtle like withdrawal into our shells.
Oh well, nothing stays the same.
This was within living memory of the demographic disasters of the early 17th century; it was at the height of the Little Ice Age, which suppressed agricultural productivity; it was before the introduction of the potato to Russia. Russia was bigger on paper but most of its geographic gains were in marginal, very low density areas, mostly in Siberia for that matter; meanwhile, it was still missing large chunks of the core Rus territories, which were much more densely populated. So estimates of around 5 million for medieval Rus are entirely credible.
So there’s only 5,000 large stadiums worth of Russians. The US has about 5,000 nuclear warheads. Russia needs at least another order of magnitude more people to ensure that Russian civilization won’t come to an end if all Russians were to one day congregate in football stadiums and the US chose that day to launch a countervalue first strike.
You need many more people to generate eminent figures these days because the thresholds for achieving such are now far higher.
The Jewish Origins of Islam
http://www.culturewars.com/2018/Gardinerreview.htm
Though some less fortunate countries like Japan, actually have realistic things to worry about.
https://ig.ft.com/sites/japan-tsunami/
Japan is having some growing cultural domination in the last years, so I believe it is currently second position in the world (in popular culture influence) after America. Then UK would be now only in third position.
Japan have a large population (120 million), but significantly less than us, and with far less language compatibility than us with the main countries of the world (excluding China).
Their success is an argument for nationalism. It requires a lot of nationalism to create the world’s most weird culture, and then even more nationalist confidence to export it across the world until all other countries’ youth becomes as weird as your’s.
I think it is not a matter of thresholds and numbers but of something more mysterious and difficult to capture. After all, classical Greece had a very tiny population. And all of these billions today have not produced someone on the level of an Einstein, or Kant, Mozart, or Dostoyevsky. And if one considers illiteracy in those times the pool from which these people emerged becomes much smaller.
So I doubt it matters much if you have 200 million or 80 million.
You’re thinking too hard. Its just numbers.
Too much thinking.
It’s true, if you think about Classical Athens – it was around 100,000 people, yet they had far more geniuses than Europe today, and highly unique culture even to their neighbouring cities.
But do you need so many geniuses, to have a good or unique civilization? Look at how successful Japan is just in their popular and mass culture, which is usually not requiring genius.
–
I don’t believe most popular cultural output in Japan now like anime, is usually at a genius level. But it is still a flourishing cultural output, because it is so original, confident, and reflects their unique traditions.
In terms of genius level of anime (I’m not an expert), but it sounds like maybe there are just a couple of geniuses like Makoto Shinkai who are lifting the whole technical level:
https://youtu.be/QFtOhSY4J3I?t=229
I do wonder if countries such as Poland are going to see an increase in their Muslim populations if Western Europe will become too much of a dump due to too much Muslim and African immigration.
Seen a fair number of the ‘New French’ move to London, so only a matter of time.
I see a lot of old natives working at the local supermarket, probably preferable to certain ‘youths’. With the right working arrangements or tax/pension policies no reason people couldn’t work longer.
Sorry, I’m probably 10 years too old to appreciate anime.
They will see more Western European refugees than they will Muslims:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2690347/Revealed-Where-5million-Brits-live-abroad-1-3million-Australia-four-emigrated-San-Marino.html
There are now about 40,000 Brits living in Poland and 6,000 in Hungary.
Eastern Europe doesn’t hand out financial help to Muslim migrants, doesn’t have an established community to welcome them, offers lower salaries for those who do want to work, and has a hostile population. So it won’t happen.
There are currently more British people settled in Poland (40,000) than Muslims in Poland (35,000).
This is what the tiny Muslim community in Poland puts up with:
http://www.islamophobiaeurope.com/reports/2015/en/EIR_2015_POLAND.pdf
Agreed.
Russia is still in the “austerity”/import substitution/building up reserves mode, which will last until 2021. You can also speculate whether that was mainly due to sanctions or not. In any case, it made Russia’s economy more resilient in the long run.
Didn’t they start the whole inflation targeting and high interest rates policy around 2013? I honestly don’t know, because I didn’t follow Russia’s economy back then, but it really seems that Russia has not prioritized short-term growth since 2013 (and that will last until 2020-21). So indeed, there were no sanctions, and the oil prices were very high, but Russia’s economy still grew only by 1.3% that year.
The overall conclusion is somewhat misleading as well. The study covers five years, I think? From 2014 to 2018? And in their view sanctions have taken away 6% of the growth in total? So even if we assume that the assessment is fully accurate, that is still only 1.2% per annum (and looking at the chart… around 2.5% in 2014 and at probably slightly less than 1% this year). But even that’s a huge if, which even they admit: “They admit that part of the 6 percent gap could be attributed to other shocks, such as the introduction of inflation targeting and a sell-off in emerging markets.”
The Greek world’s total population was around 8-10 million, which was of a similar order of magnitude to the population of contemporary China.
Add to that unprecedented (until then) literacy rates of ~10%, enabled by them being the second civilization to go over to an alphabetic script (the Phoenicians were first), and the Greek oikoumene may well have hosted something like half of the world’s literate people in its classical period.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/ancient-greeks-not-geniuses/
So that’s more than sufficient to explain its intellectual achievements considering that they were also easier to make than later ones.
Stupid, stupider, stupidest, Ivanka. (Also Jared.)
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-20/ivanka-trump-s-private-email-scandal-has-a-familiar-moral
800,000 literate people producing what they did is astounding.
Were they? I’m not sure that made their discoveries easier. They were starting from zero, had much more primitive technology to work with, whereas later peoples had a head start and the aid of various instruments.
I have not read it.
I’m not actually interested in the Holocaust. I brought it up wrt Tooze because he places it in economic context, which is interesting.
When your material interests appear to line up with your religious-ideological convictions, the suggested actions become very appealing indeed and will seem most “rational” to you.
Certainly there were plenty of irrational aspects to the Holocaust and German occupation policy generally. With respect to the Jews, it’s certainly hard to justify successful Jewish ghetto factories.
Moving beyond the Jews, German policy in the Warthegau resulted in falling farm output because Polish peasants felt planting was pointless since they were unsure if they’d even have their farms the next year.
Incidentally the Germans did start recruiting Polish agricultural labor (which in any case had a long tradition in Germany, at least in the East) almost immediately, but this was unsuccessful owing to the many ideological restrictions imposed by the SS. Finally the General Government started press ganging Poles into service, and later on Sauckel was able to “recruit” seemingly limitless foreign labor for the Reich.
My take so far, having read 13% of the book:
The Serbs are a barbaric race of criminal assassins. Conrad von Hotzendorf was 100% right about these terroristic savages.
While Poland seems to be somewhat judicious about giving refugee visas it is totally open for working visas. Last year it gave close to 250,000. The visas can be easily arranged and bought. Businesses have leverages and various mafias are into it.
In this 250k group there are all kinds of people from very exotic countries including Muslim ones.
The talk about refugees in Poland is a similar diversion tactic as the talk about illegals for Americans. Trump is talking about the wall while the problem are the ones who get here legally. It is similar in Poland.
One has to be an idiot to think that a million or two or three of Ukrainians will not be a problem for Poles in the long run. Poland’s only benefits of the WWII from the point of view of the ethnic Poles was the ethnic cleansing of Jews, Germans and Ukrainians. Now Poles are wiling to forfeit it? Anybody really asked them? Operation Vistula was a good thing after the WWII and now they are bringing in all kinds of Bandera sympathizers and apologists.
Brother of Russia’s candidate for Interpol chief represents Ukraine at OSCE – media
Read more on UNIAN: https://www.unian.info/politics/10344363-brother-of-russia-s-candidate-for-interpol-chief-represents-ukraine-at-osce-media.html
The Ukraine is a renegade province of Russia – confirmed!
You know, from a Ukrainian point of view, the same sorts of things could be said about Poles and the ‘cleansing’ of them in Volhynia and Galicia in the 1930’s. But why keep up this mutual animosity society built upon old and outdated stereotypes? Both Poles and Ukrainians are of the Slavic race and this is borne out very clearly through DNA profiles of both groups. If Germans and the French can get along today (and their relations are similarly checkered in the past), why can’t Ukrainians and Poles?
Hopefully this will finally get the bint out of the white house. I saw a NYT headline a few days ago ‘Are Jared and Ivanka good for the Jews?.
lol……….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7660nnAGgnw
brother in the ukrop foreign ministry….you couldn’t make this shit up.
One one level it’s completely normal- at any high level of policing, military, bank, intelligence, government, academic for Ukraine and Russia familial ties because they are the same people/culture or however you want to phrase it…on the other hand it shows how pitiful it is to think of this parasite nation as an individual state
Worth to note is that even “Ukrainians” mostly reject Galician fucktards…there must have been far more Russian-born “Ukrainians” in high positions in government in Ukraine since 1991 …Kravchuk,Poroshenko,Yushchenko admins and the rest, than Galicians or even all western Ukraine (excluding Zakarpattia). Even now in the top positions of President,Defence Minister,Health Minister, PM, Foreign Minister, Finance Galicians aren’t anywhere to be seen…probably more in power in high positions in Russian than in Ukraine.
A farce…but great if this guy becomes head of Interpol
You’re confusing Russia and France i.e actual longstanding, secure proper nations and cultures..in the age of pre-mass innoculations and industrialisation (i.e the cause of mass population growth you thick prick) 200 years ago….with modern era dying/mass emmigration/non-secure in their culture they have to impose all sorts of measures on broadcasting,books,language, politics etc., nor-longstanding, fake states like Ukraine , Latvia and to a lesser extent Poland you prick.
It’s such a dumb, fake and moronic argument that an imbecile as yourself is making.
I’m sure if I looked up my great-great-great-grandparents then I would be very proud of how they got on through life and so on…..it doesn’t mean I would want to superimpose the set of conditions they lived in , onto the modern era you stupid id**t.
That is correct..for sane countries. Hungary,Czech,Slovakia have all had relatively stable populations from the end of the Warsaw Pact to now..and are successful countries.
Even if they had a significant population decrease , as Bulgaria ( problems but a stable country and culture with post-Communism successes), then the fundamentals would still not change because not only are they successful countries…they have very secure culture, language, national identity and so on ( yes including Czechs and Slovaks in that)
But the facts remain that those countries as Estonia,Latvia Ukraine and even Poland don’t have that quality and deserve to be ridiculed as such….particularly for the next time the Poles self-implode
Are you a kind of Rodney King getting along guy? I did not say anything about getting along. Good fences make good neighbors. Poles are bending over backwards to get along with Ukrainians. That Ukrainians are Slavic is really of secondary import to the Poles. Polish ethos based on Catholicism’s is universalist and certainly not biological. Ukrainians culture is mostly toxic not their genes. The Slavic crap is a part of Russian imperialist policy and Poles are quite immune to this BS. The song Hey Slavs and it various versions including Yugoslavia’s anthem even though based on Dabrowski Mazurka was virtually unknown by Poles. Poles do not know the concept of Slavic solidarity. Actually Poles like Hungarians a lot who are not Slavic, mostly because they do not share border with them and tend to idealize some historical events. Poles like Czechs but not because they are Slavic. This is however not reciprocated by Czechs which is not a big deal because Czechs do not like anybody too much. Czechs at some point for political reasons played the game of Russian panslavic crap. They know how to play games when it serves them. Poles do not unfortunately for them. Opening up to Ukrainians is a grave mistake they will pay dearly for it in the future.
The CRAIC CR929 may turn out to be a white elephant–for purely commercial reasons.
http://aviationweek.com/commercial-aviation/opinion-why-widebody-market-mired-misery (registration required, but free)
The same forces that killed the jumbo jet exert the same pressure on the entire twin aisle market. And within the twin aisle market, the 787 sucks up much of the available oxygen.
Just as the A380 depends almost entirely on the Gulf carriers, so apparently does the 777X (77% of orders from the Gulf thus far).
New single aisle aircraft like the 737max and A320neo are again flying transatlantic routes successfully.
With the Airbus A330neo refresh looking to be a disappointment, how will the similarly sized CRAIC CR929 fare (regardless of how good the plane ends up being)?
The virgin Saudis paying for their weapons, yet getting sanctions for their murders abroad.
Vs.
The chad Israelis letting Uncle Sam paying for their weapons, yet they get no sanctions whatever they do.
Only Chinese and Russian carriers are going to buy it, though they won’t buy anything else in that market segment. Then countries sanctioned by the US, and countries wanting to get chummy with China and/or Russia.
I don’t know if that’s going to be enough to survive, but with enough political will it should be.
We shared some medieval and early modern monarchs, but those weren’t particularly popular or successful kings. The friendship is really quite modern in origin, though a similarity in culture and situation (oppressed by the despotic monarch of a more powerful neighbor) certainly helped, too.
I know that during the 1848-49 revolution and unsuccessful war for independence a lot of Poles came to Hungary to help us against the Austrians and later the Russians. While some of the Polish commanders like Dembinski were both unpopular and unsuccessful, one of the most popular and successful generals, Józef Bem, was also Polish, and the Hungarian national poet served under him and wrote a number of poems about him (and about the connection between the Polish and Hungarian struggle for independence), which helped to form the idea of friendship.
Then there were at least two episodes which cemented the friendship. During ww2 Hungary was allied to Nazi Germany, but it didn’t stop the Hungarian government from allowing free passage to Polish soldiers, or treating them as guests in Hungary. Hungarian troops were also sent to occupation duty to Poland, but unlike the way they behaved in Ukraine or Belarus (where they were cruel and unnecessarily brutal) they behaved in a humane way and even gave weapons and ammunition to the Polish AK. On some occasions they had to be removed from the area because they shot at the Germans to protect the Poles. Then in 1956 the anti-communist riots started in Hungary shortly after the Polish ones, and there was a mutual expression of friendship.
I probably left out a number of episodes, and certainly there were some earlier events (though they seem to have been later romanticized), but I think these were the main reasons for the friendship.
There’s usually cooperation between our nationalists and football hooligans on the grassroots level.
CR-929 does not lack a market.
https://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpost.php?p=153980924&postcount=19
That’s what I suspected above.
American Shoah NOW
https://twitter.com/lichtmesz/status/1064687664451002368
I guess the Poles think the trade-off will be the wild-ass prosperity they’ll get from being the West’s bitch. So Polish airlines won’t have to hit up passengers for money to make repairs to get the plane up in the air.
.
In 1237 the territory of all Russian principalities 1.2 million square kilometers. In 1676 the Russian Tsardom (without Siberia) more than 4 million sq .km. The area of arable land has increased even more – thanks to the conquest of the Tatar khanates and the construction of fortified “limes”- засечных черт (against nomads)
https://www.memotest.ru//ImageUpload/b021092b-5382-4a59-bc6d-054806979ba9/i_066.jpg
https://cont.ws/uploads/pic/2018/8/hello_html_48f78c44.jpg
huge fertile land in the Volga valley and the “wild field” were colonized. By the end of the 17th century these lands became the demographic core of Russia. On the ” old ” lands for centuries of internal colonization population density undoubtedly increased. Therefore, in 1237 the population had to be at least 4 times less than in 1676. And more likely 8 times less. 6 million of the population of Russia in 1237, is obvious nonsense. Realistic estimate of 0.5-1.5 million.
According to all available estimates, the population of Russia in 1676 surpassed the population of Russia in the 16th century
I brought up Hungarians and the soft spot Poles have for them to illustrate that sympatie and antipathies are not defined by blood by deeds in the Western civilization. Poland and Hungary are part of the Western civilization. From this position the Panslavism is consider a drivel and correctly seen as a cynical political project by Poles.
There are more episodes. (1) Hungary sent weapon and ammo to Poland during Polish-Bolshevik war in 1920 when Poland was blockaded by trade unions and dock workers form receiving weapons via Czechoslovakia, Germany and Baltic Sea. Supposedly the ammo form Hungary was critical in winning the Warsaw battle. (2) The 1956 Uprising was always considered as a joint affair in Poland. It started with June 1956 events in Poland and then there was a manifestation in Budapest in solidarity at Bem’s monument and then it snowballed (or somebody helped it?). Poles like to remember their massive blood drive donation for Hungarians later in October and November. This was a grass root spontaneous movement but Polish communist freshly reformed government which at that times was dissolving Stalinism and was in conflict of sort with the USSR supported it and made available planes, trains and trucks to make deliveries to Hungary.
But in older times I do not think there was anything special between the two kingdoms. Yes, there were kings and queens. Poland could have done much more to help Hungary but it did not. Hapsburgs were much more skillful players. This writer sees the destruction of Kingdom of Hungary as one of the most significant events in the history of Central Europe.
Sanctum regnum (” historical drama about the fall of Hungary”)
https://coryllus.pl/products-page/comics/sanctum-regnum/
Then one of the Rakoczys during the Swedish invasions in 17 century invaded Poland, iirc. But it is forgotten just like Slovak invasion in 1939. Poles do not have good historical memories and they are selective in their resentments though they like to think of themselves they are more forgiving which however serves as an alibi for their not infrequent ineptitude in taking advantage of political situations. After all what are historical memories? It is whatever is being whipped up for political expediency.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2GHGZeCqEk
Should I log your opinion in the column of “butthurt Sovoks” or “butthurt Banderites”?
The whole categorisation is stupid anyway since Poles/Hungarians/Czechs are all much more similar to each other genetically than they are to Russians. I believe that the original Magyars off the steppes left a negligible genetic impact. Turanism is probably one of the stupidest ideologies ever devised.
Though I think Russians are not terribly different either.
Some offshoots of it are extremely retarded. The idea that all steppe nomads were Hungarians is a moderately stupid one, but some assert that the Sumerians were also Hungarians, and that we are related to the Japanese. But then comes an even stupider theory and tells these to hold his beer: Hungarians descended from the star system Syrius. We are aliens!
“The Slavic crap is a part of Russian imperialist policy and Poles are quite immune to this BS. The song Hey Slavs and it various versions including Yugoslavia’s anthem even though based on Dabrowski Mazurka was virtually unknown by Poles. Poles do not know the concept of Slavic solidarity” etc.
It sure sounds like you know what you are talking about.
Actually, Pan Slavic ideas were borne at the Slavic fringes exposed to western, primarily German assimilation, pressures.
What you are saying should be interpreted as being part of the eternal effort by the West to “pry out” catholic Slavs.
Comes as no great surprise:
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/how-the-kremlin-can-win-ukraine-s-elections
Thanks for pointing this out.
It explains Ukraine’s pathetic post 1991 economic performance.
Very few Muslims (mostly Bangladeshis IIRC). Among non-Europeans, mostly Hindus and Vietnamese. Total Muslim population in Poland is estimated to be less than 40,000.
Different dynamic. Poland was occupying Ukrainian-inhabited native territory. So natives had a bloody and cruel rebellion against oppressors and slaughtered the “colonists.” Now you have people coming to Poland to work. They have no claims on the territory they are working in, and most go home anyways.* When they come back they use Poland as a model of what a country should be like. The ones that stay in Poland often intermarry with Poles.
It is like Belarussians and Russians, or Czechs and Slovaks nowadays – of one people in large numbers moved to the other’s territory there would be little friction.
Naturally Russians to promote focus on Banderism (Ukrainians celebrating it doesn’t help of course, even though today’s Banderism is almost exclusively anti-Russian and harbors no anti-Polish sentiment).
*There are some hard feelings in the border region where Ukrainians were ethnically cleansed but this isn’t where most Ukrainians move when they go to Poland. I suppose if millions moved to this region it might be a problem for Poland, but they do not.
The issue had some importance in 19c when nationalistic awakening was taking place. Among Czechs whose elites barely spoke Czech it was important to have sense of connection to something bigger when opposing Germanization. Perhaps in Yugoslavia it made sense in the process of unification. But now in 21 century after what we know what happened in Yugoslavia and what is happening on Ukraine-Russia line the Panslavism does not make any sense. For nations like Ukraine or Belarus Panslavism is actually a very dangerous idea if they want to continue on the path of ethnogenesis and national development. Slavic countries in Europe want to be free of Panslavism just like Austria, Netherland nad some Swiss cantons want to be free of Pangermanism. Polish early diagnosis of Panslavism turned out to be correct that in the end it is a tool of Russia’s imperial power.
Now about this “pry out” of catholic Slavs by the West is a misconception that can only be born in the mind of somebody who is Eastern Orthodox. Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovens and Croats do not have a sense of being snatched or kidnapped by the West. Their identity is Western because they are Catholic and for Catholics being Slavic is secondary.
Ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians generally get along well in Crimea and other parts of Russia. Many of the Donbass rebels qualify as ethnic Ukrainians.
Poland at large isn’t pleased with the pro-Bandera sentiment exhibited within Kiev regime controlled Ukraine.
Alright, I’m almost certain at this point Utu is Czech.
Mostly when the Ukrainians are deracinated and placed among Russians.
Most Poles don’t care, the minority descended from refugees from western Ukraine are triggered.
Russians claiming to be outraged on behalf of Poles by what Bandera’s people did in Western Ukraine are ridiculous. Bandera was simply a 20th century Khmelnytsky, and Russian nationalists loved Khmelnytsky. They had no problem with what he did to Poles. The problem for Russians is that Bandera allied with Germans rather than with Russians.
I suspect, a Silesian.
The cultural differences between Eastern Ukrainians and Russians are fairly trivial. It’s more a question of how you understand your place in history and in the world than in everyday ethnic differences. As such, there aren’t many inherent barriers to Eastern Ukrainians and Russians peacefully coexisting other than politics.
I don’t care about Poles and I think Russians should stop pretending to. That said, the incredibly shrill and genocidal rhetoric of Ukrainian nationalists leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Russians who praise Stalin deny his crimes, Ukrainians who praise Bandera embrace them and wish to recreate them.
As in not subscribing to svido hardcore and svido soft preferences.
Russians and some others recognize the heavy anti-Russian factor among those prone to liking Bandera. Khmelnytsky was a prominent Cossack, with Bandera being a small potato comparison.
Poles are genetically much closer to “southern” Russians than to Czechs or Hungarians (picture a)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DfGqP_8WAAAsoqf.jpg
Democracy always wins! According to Bloomberg.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-20/america-s-secret-weapon-against-china-democracy
They don’t consider the America factor. The US was always by far the biggest economy in the world, and so it tended to win conflicts it found important enough to follow through. Its size also helped it to gain friends. (The author fails to notice that if anything, American foreign policy has been less predictable than most authoritarian regimes.)
In conflicts between countries of similar size, democracies didn’t fare so well. India seems to be lagging China (of course largely due to HBD, but still), and in both world wars Germany performed better than France and the UK combined (and would have defeated them if their coalition didn’t include authoritarian/communist Russia and the huge US).
So now that the biggest economy will be an authoritarian regime, the US is not very likely to stay on top.
Pictures b and c are quite different, though. That’s two data points out of three.
Every comments thread is about gays or ukranians
Holy shit,
We’ve already conclusively established that a month ago.
Possible, but unsure. He could be “not exactly Czech” in many ways, one obvious way is simply being a member of the urban educated classes, but with some unconventional views. Maybe he’s simply living abroad. Maybe he has some non-Czech ancestors. Or a combination of these.
But I’m not even fully sure he’s “not exactly Czech,” though I also proposed something like that a month ago. Some people have unconventional views despite a conventional background.
lands of Hungarian crown – 52% Hungarians
Germans, Jews, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs got assimilated – much more recent answer to Hungarian relation to neighbouring people – Magyarization policies.
In addition to centralised and state efforts, people assimilated willingly and the Hungarian national-romantic movement had people of obvious foreign descent who were happy to be Hungarians.
Globo Homo for the Ukraine.
https://twitter.com/V4Analysis/status/1064225604558569473
That’s not exactly so. It was 52% (or 51%?) Hungarian excluding Croatia. Croatia also belonged to the Holy Crown, though it was theoretically a different country. Hungary proper was smaller than the lands of the Hungarian crown.
Most of the assimilation happened naturally. Properly speaking, there was no deliberate Magyarization policy until 1844 (until that year, the official language had been Latin), though other than changing the official language nothing much happened. It was changed to German in 1849, so not much Magyarization could have happened until the Compromise of 1867. But even then, Hungary quickly made a nationalities law in 1868, which guaranteed a lot of language rights (theoretically way more than in any other country in Europe at the time), though by the 1880s it was increasingly broken by the government. By the 1890s you can speak of proper Magyarization. It all ended by 1918. It could not have had a lot of effect.
Most assimilation happened in big cities (e.g. a lot of Slovaks moved to Budapest where they assimilated) and among socially striving people (e.g. people studying law), though even the latter got more problematic over time as national (and nationalistic) elites emerged. I think it’s safe to say that the biggest effect of Magyarization policies was the growing resentment of the ethnic minorities.
Another point – some “Magyarization” was actually differential fertility, since the ethnically Hungarian population lived in the areas which were the most heavily depopulated during the Ottoman occupation. So the ethnically Hungarian population was hit the hardest (and lost some of its core areas due to settlement by ethnic minorities), but then it was partially reversed during the following two centuries.
That was the assumption until fairly recently. However, recent genetic studies show that early cemeteries from the 10th century are already fairly different genetically from 13th (and I think already 12th) century cemeteries. The population (including the elite) was already predominantly (Central) European by the 13th century. However, obviously another push came with the modern mass assimilation, so it must be a part of the explanation. I myself have 50% German (including Austrian) and significant other (Croat, Serb, Slovak) ancestry.
Don’t equate WW1 and WW2 Germany.
WW1 Germany wasn’t as democratic as Britain but it wasn’t far off either.
Our “secret” weapon against China isn’t democracy (lol) but rather the fact that the Chinese are humorless dweebs.
The dualism adopted by the Hapsburgs always struck me as ridiculous. I don’t mean to insult your nation here, but any policy which results in people learning Hungarian sounds dubious. Obviously learning German (especially in the period we’re talking about) is better.
I suppose it wasn’t obvious in the 1860s or whatever, but the Hapsburgs should’ve given all the nations in the empire their national rights while making German the language of command.
I would be interested if someone who knew more about it could tell me how much Dualism owed to the practical factors of Hungarian relative to Slav/Romanian power, and how much it had to do with the fact that the Hungarians, unlike the others, were a historic nation
This cannot be explaination, since the Romans (who had roughly the same level of literacy and lived in similar conditions) were almost completely devoid of creativity. As the Babylonians and the Phoenicians had the literacy rate is not worse than the Greeks (in Babylon there were findings written contracts which were concluded between local gangster – i.e. even the criminals were literate)
Read this monograph if you have time-here the question of “Greek miracle” is studied in detail
http://www.sno.pro1.ru/lib/zaitsev/index.htm
This is due to various genetic markers (here article source pictures http://antropogenez.ru/single-news/article/507/). the General conclusion is that the poles are genetically closer to southern Russian than to the Czechs
I deliberately make a distinction between “lands of Hungarian crown” and Hungarian portion of Austro-Hungary precisely to avoid the confusion.
It wasn’t my intention to portray the national romantic movement or Magyarization policies as negative at all, rather to present an interesting fact about the reality of ethnic backgrounds in modern Europe. Another interesting info is the frequency of surname Horvat/Horvath in Slovakia and Hungary today.
I remember stumbling upon claims of Hungarians, especially Protestant ones, adopting Islam in rather significant numbers during Ottoman rule over Hungary. After Habsburgs defeated them, they thoroughly cleansed any mosques and muslim population, which fled to Bosnia and other Ottoman lands in the Balkans.
Can you shed any light on the veracity of those claims?
The Catholic-Protestant dynamic among Hungarians interests me, as well.
Romanian power was not significant in Habsburg Empire of 19th century.
Serbs in Austrian Empire of 19th century were intimate Habsburg allies – practically all descended from Grenzers and military nobility, and a minority in Croatia and Hungary so relying on Emperor. The Military Frontier/Grenze was until late 19th century governed directly from Vienna.
Habsburg survival in 1848-1849 was entirely due to Slavs – Grenzer Army + Croatian Army under Ban Jelačić crushing Vienna rebellion and proceeding to fight against Hungarians, while Russian Empire intervened with a large army against Hungarians.
This actually made South Slavs and Russians the most despised people in works of Engels, Marx, Liebknecht and other assorted scum, because they crushed the 1848 “civil revolution”.
Austro-Hungary was not a good solution – Hungary effected a similar treaty with Croatia following year. The armed forces were not united, the laws and language differed across various regions and both Austrians and Hungarians sought to maximise their power at the expense of others in their respective parts of Monarchy, leading to resentment among minorities.
I think there are multiple explanations.
1) 1867 wasn’t yet modern enough, and Franz Joseph wasn’t the kind of guy to foresee trends. In 1867 the uneducated unwashed masses didn’t amount to much (yet…), and the educated classes in the Hungarian half of the empire were predominantly Hungarian. The Slovaks, for example, didn’t yet have a nationalistic elite (okay, they did, but it was very small), so no one considered their wishes. Long term, it was unlikely that the Slovaks would be happy with the arrangement (and the Hungarian elite did nothing to alleviate the issue), but in 1867 the world was still full of premodern empires, and even the most modern states (France and the UK) contained significant ethnic minorities with practically no minority rights. The Hungarian elite believed that just as the French population (which spoke languages other then French, including Breton and Occitanian etc.) was to be absorbed into the great French nation, so would it happen to the population of Hungary.
2) Hungarians (Hungarian noblemen) fought hard against the Habsburgs whenever they seemed to take away their liberties and rights – in 1606, some smaller rebellions later in the 17th century including that of Thököly, 1703-11, 1848-49. Other nationalities’ elites weren’t as notorious for their rebelliousness – which meant that their loyalty (or at least docility) could be taken for granted. Whereas the Hungarian elites, though militarily defeated, largely refused to cooperate with the Habsburgs. The Habsburgs could’ve confiscated the wealth of the nobility and aristocracy on a large scale or engaged in similar practices, but the Austrian Empire wasn’t a totalitarian dictatorship, and despite Franz Joseph being relatively bloodthirsty (by traditional monarchist standards), it was unconceivable to him. So the only seeming solution to ensure the loyalty of the largest single elite group within the empire was the Compromise of 1867.
3) Yes, Hungary was a historical nation, with the Hungarian constitution being one of the oldest in the world. (I think the Golden Bull was just eight years younger than the Magna Carta.) Franz Joseph came to power in an unconstitutional coup and then engaged in a rule of terror for a few years, but eventually he was still deeply conservative, and so devising a totally new system was alien to his thinking. It must’ve bothered him that he wasn’t legally crowned King of Hungary with the Holy Crown (despite the King of Hungary being his most prestigious title), and so it probably helped the position of the Hungarian nobility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Bull_of_1222
At least in Hungary the general usage is that the “lands of the Hungarian crown” (more precisely “the lands of the Holy Crown”) included Croatia (and Slavonia or Slavonland, which was part of Croatia but is often mentioned as if it was a separate country), but Croatia was not Hungary.
I don’t have much time, but I’ll try.
At one point in the 16th century it is believed that some 90% of the Hungarian population converted to Protestantism. I think it is generally believed that some 10% of the population converted to Islam, but I’m unsure if it means the population of the Ottoman occupied parts (roughly a third of the country), or the whole population (which would mean maybe 25% in the Ottoman occupied parts).
But the formerly Ottoman occupied parts became thoroughly depopulated during the War of Liberation regardless of religion – it was just how wars were waged, and it didn’t help that the Turks managed a counteroffensive a few years after losing the area, which destroyed most of the remnants of the population.
As I wrote, some 90% of the population were Protestant by the late 16th century. It dropped to a third of the population by the late 18th century (with most of the reversal happening in the 17th century – for example the Ottoman occupied parts were fully Protestant, but they got depopulated), but it probably weakened religiosity in general. Which is why we’re no Poles. Protestants were usually more nationalistic (anti-Habsburg), but it changed later in the 19th century. The longest serving prime minister after the Compromise, Count Kálmán Tisza, and his son, Count István Tisza were Protestants, and Habsburg loyalists. Horthy was also a Protestant, and also a Habsburg loyalist. There were a number of Catholic anti-Habsburg leaders (Ferenc Rákóczi being the most famous example). So it’s not clear-cut.
@ all:
Enough talk of this D&C about different flavors of European blood!
The question at hand is how to deal with the non-European portion of Europe. If we couldn’t bring Sinti & Romanis into the fold after a thousand years, how the f* are going to asorb Muslims, Africans and Asians?
The other urgent issue, is to prevent Anatoly from wasting money on a TV this year and convince him to sit out until next year when HDMI (Version 2.1) TVs will be more affordable.
@ AK: Dolby Vision is a must for your TV!
OT: https://www.romaniajournal.ro/psds-dragnea-pm-dancila-delimit-themselves-from-ilan-laufers-statements/ American-Israeli-Romanian Ilan Laufer claims that his nomination for vice prime minster of Romania has been denied by the president, due to antisemitism. He has trouble speaking Romanian, he studied body building, he is 35.
His own party disowns him.
Loud Oy Vey ensues.
Not entirely so. As far as I know, after the Vienna rebellion was crushed, it was mostly Austrian peasants who provided the backbone of the armies of Prince Windisch-Grätz and Haynau.
But it foolishly didn’t provide enough autonomy to the Croats. In retrospect, it’s obvious that Croatia should’ve received full autonomy, basically total independence from Hungary, except for imperial affairs where Hungary could’ve kept all its rights. It was idiotic not to secure at least the loyalty of the Croats, where Hungary didn’t really have lots of nationalistic aspirations.
“the Romans (who had roughly the same level of literacy and lived in similar conditions) were almost completely devoid of creativity”
LOL. We converted Christianity from a niche Jewish cult to the most important force on the planet for millennia. Greeks had no Pontifex maximus / Pope, nor Vesta / Virgin Mary. Even the confusion between Messiah / Son of God and a Living God is likely due to Julius Caesar’s cult.
Everything you wrote is pure ahistorical bullshit. Like the kids say on the intertubes, “read a book, nigger”.
“Polish early diagnosis of Panslavism turned out to be correct that in the end it is a tool of Russia’s imperial power.”
I think Poles would gladly spread Pan Slavic ideas themselves as long as they are recognized as leaders in lieu of Russians.
“For nations like Ukraine or Belarus Panslavism is actually a very dangerous idea if they want to continue on the path of ethnogenesis and national development.”
This is decided not by pompous theories but by ancient facts of life, like food and safe future for ones family and kids. If ordinary Ukrainians or Belorussians see that union with their Russian kin provides safer future, they will merge and make one nation no matter what.
“Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovens and Croats do not have a sense of being snatched or kidnapped by the West. Their identity is Western because they are Catholic and for Catholics being Slavic is secondary.”
You sure make bold generalizations.
I’d suggest discussing this with, say, Milos Zeman, the Czech president.
I don’t think his rather warm attitude towards Russia is based solely on his communist past.
Incorrect, they deny that Bandera’s people slaughtered all of those Poles.
According to my theory that is mainly on account of the Ancient Greeks already having picked the low-hanging fruit.
Babylonians certainly didn’t have a Greek or Roman like literacy rate. Cuneiform would have precluded that.
The Phoenicians may have had a similar literacy rate to Classical Greece (that is, substantially above 1-2%) due to their alphabetic innovations and mercantile culture. However, there were much fewer of them.
When Poland was a major power it wasn’t interested in Panslavism. It was rather about Sarmatism which was certainly not a Slavicist idea.
This seems to have been where Austria was headed. The murdered Franz Ferdinand wanted to adopt this strategy and made preparations to crush the Hungarians if they resisted; Karl had been forced to promise to leave the Hungarians alone (he came to power during the war and had to give them what they wanted) but was set to do this in the Austrian parts.
I think it is only low-hanging in retrospect.
This theory is interesting.
But I believe it was originally from Nietzsche who has written this theory very early, and which is not discussed at all in the monograph.
Lol, how do these people even attain such high positions.
It reminds me more, of Austria’s Sebastian Kurz – who became Foreign Minister at age 27, and Chancellor at age 31, even though he has never had a job or profession.
The most eternal thing about Greece, and particularly Classical Athens, is their art/literature, and even the overall “beauty of their culture” (if this is not just a matter of our taste).
I’m not sure artistic contribution is “low hanging fruit”, as it not something which is “discovered” by someone first, and then unattainable.
But they were liberated perhaps, by not having antecedents. And perhaps, our standards of evaluation are higher for contemporary work.
If you read Aristophanes’ “Women at the National Assembly” – this is a brilliant parody or exploration of feminism. Perhaps, it can be “low hanging fruit”, to the extent we perceive it now as the first comedy about feminism, and give it a higher position than we would if it was produced in 2018. So a writer who would write it today, would be less highly accoladed (in this sense, our standards of judgement are higher for contemporary work).
For those who might be interested, if you drill down the numbers and use deductive reasoning, more than half of younger millenials and generation z in the Philippine capital region, Metro Manila, support gay marriage according to surveys, and Metro Manila basically sets the tone for the rest of the country, and the Philippine is one of the countries in the developing world most exposed to western and English language pop culture, since almost the entire population can speak and understand some level of passable English.
We know almost nothing about their culture. What we ‘know’ is mostly romanticized fantasy invented by Enlightenment-era Western Europeans.
The real Greeks were barbarians who worshiped dick statues and beat people up for fun.
As far as I know the Greek “agon” first began to study the historian Jacob Buchardt. He was a friend of Nietzsche, but (unlike Nietzsche) a conservative Christian. Later these ideas were developed by german historian Victor Ehrenberg
That doesn’t explain anything. If the Greeks went the easy way-why were they the first?
The beginning of the Greek miracle in the science of the 7th century BC (Thales of Miletus). In this era, the Greeks were a relatively small ethnic group, with a low (in comparison with the subsequent era) level of literacy. The end of the Greek miracle (about 1 century BC) – the number of the Greek-speaking world has increased by orders of magnitude, the literacy rate has increased very much. But the development stopped (in almost all areas) and was replaced by regression. In the 1st century BC the Greek philosophers were discussing the shortest route to the mainland on the other side of the Atlantic ocean (the continent had the name of Ogygia). Greek philosophers discussed the possibility of printing books in movable type. But the Greeks were no longer able to eat the low-hanging fruit (with the maximum number of Greek – speaking population and the highest level of literacy) – because the Greek miracle ended.
In Japan in 1848, about half of the population was literate – using writing much more complex than Babylonian. On this there is no reason to doubt the claims of experts on high literacy in Babylon.
In 7th century BC ? It is a controversial statement. But in any case, there are still Romans and other numerous peoples of Italy. How do you explain the complete lack of creativity among these peoples?
This theory has another drawback-in the beginning the Greeks solved mathematical and astronomical problems, which were previously solved in Babylon. But the Greeks solved these problems in a fundamentally different way. This difference cannot be explained by the number / level of literacy. With the art of a similar situation
Gazprom is spending absurd amount of money on its new projects, more than any other energy company in the world.
http://client.globaldata.com/static/PR2490.png
If there’s any societal benefit to democracy it would be in being better at managing conflict between different interest groups and as a result increasing cooperation and group synergy.
The USA isn’t a democracy by that metric as it is completely dominated by the banking mafia and their media.
America is as much a uniparty state as China.
the nations of the world are dominated by the poisonous US media in proportion to how much of their population understands English.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I realize most of you are foreigners, but none the less Happy Thanksgiving. I love you all.
I am here in sunny, warm Florida spending Thanksgiving with my dear mother. I hit on my Puerto Rican waitress last night (to the irritation of my mother) by telling her she looks like Ocasio-Cortez (well received).
We have much to be thankful for. Let us give thanks for:
• Karlin’s increasing, yet still high quality, output
• Excellent commenters such as Reiner Tor (the Magyar Miracle), Polish Perspective, Guillaume Tell, German_reader, AP, Felix Keverich, Dmitry, DFH, AaronB, Gerard2, and even our dear mommythot Rosie (if I left you out it was not intentional)
• A genuinely stimulating discussion forum which is now fostering feelings of comradeship and perhaps even brotherhood
• Despite international tension, no world war nor another US attack on a new country
Please take a moment today to pause and give thanks to God for all of the good in your life and this world.
Have you ever read Moravia’s novel La Noia?
No, I had to look it up.
There will be no such obsession with this young lady, and I have no idea whom she is sharing her favors with (nor do I want to know).
Seeing her tomorrow night (again to my mother’s irritation).
While Greek literature and philosophy were very influential in Western culture, it is mostly of historical interest. In fact, Aristotle arguably had a disastrous impact on posterity. The mathematics however has lasting value, and perhaps there were some technological advances of which I am unaware.
https://youtu.be/-LshS8OaqLc
Aristophanes is mind-blowing. Thanks for reminding me. If our culture was immersed more in classics perhaps we would avoid a lot of silliness. If people were made laugh by Aristophanes perhaps they would be less likely to be seduced by communism or feminism.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours also!
We can know quite a lot, because of the great writers like Aristophanes, who tried to describe aspects of ordinary life (the sense of comedy transmitted very well).
Even Plato is also describing quite a lot of daily life mixed into the philosophical discussion (although life only for a very elite section of society).
We can also easily visit now surviving Ancient Greek sites, or at least locations, in Mediterranean, which allows you to develop more accurate “mental pictures”.
This is true. Historic view of Ancient Greece, in European imagination, has been largely an idealistic fantasy.
This is also uncontroversial as a statement. Already in the 19th century, there are writers like Nietzsche, who say “reality of Ancient Greece was nothing like our culture’s fantasy image of the Greeks”.
Modern culture that has the most similar, spiritual aspects to Ancient Greece, is Japan.
Now reconstruction Ancient Greek music, even has a similarity and sense of foreign to modern ears.
You can describe Shintoism as barbarism where they worship dick statues. But this is a matter of taste.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNTMMrEbet4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkPlNQ4ap1o
We know a gigantic amount about their culture. Worshipping dick statues is the sort of stupidity typical of all paganism, but their intellectuals at least did not take it seriously. People in almost all cultures and times have enjoyed watching/participating in fighting.
Thank you Andreas Umland:
http://www.academia.edu/37358188/Michael_Averko_Consistency_and_Reality_Lacking_on_Crimea
No follow-up on the (dare I say) cogent points raised, that are typically not addressed in Western based mass media, body politic and a good portion of academia.
Thank you!
And yes indeed, let us pause and render graces.
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
I didn’t see that. Thank you.
Just confirms Alex Fak’s point:
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/05/23/1527097234000/No-Faks-checked-approach-costs-Sberbank-analyst-his-job/
The high position of PDVSA is also telling. Though at this rate, I have no idea where their money is coming from.
https://tradingeconomics.com/venezuela/crude-oil-production
There was a Financial Times story about a deepwater drilling, where Rosneft was drilling in the arctic despite the sanctions. I was wondering then if it made economic sense in itself – is it worth developing a new technology just for the sake of one project? Was it not too expensive? Probably it only made sense in a larger context, building a technologically independent Russian oil industry, at the expense of Rosneft shareholders. (And if it was Hungary, then stealing some cash on the side, but maybe Corporal Keverich will inform me that Russia is not that corrupt.) Is it not possible that something like that is going on here with Gazprom?
The title of the referenced FT story (only way to bypass the paywall is through Google) was “Russian oil groups brave cold of western sanctions to explore Arctic,” written by Henry Foy in Moscow, on April 19, 2017.
Some more news from Central Europe:
Think US politics are bad? The Czech PM allegedly kidnapped his own son in a fraud scandal
https://qz.com/1462606/czech-prime-minister-andrej-babis-allegedly-kidnapped-his-own-son-in-a-fraud-scandal/
Thousands demand resignation of Czech PM over fraud scandal
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/thousands-demand-resignation-of-czech-pm-over-fraud-scandal/2018/11/15/e973a33e-e90b-11e8-8449-1ff263609a31_story.html
What is going on? Another color revolution incoming, or just post-soviet Games of Oligarchs going as usual? Do any of our Mitteleuropean commenters know what it is all about?
We need utu. It’s the Jews.
Should white South Africans have voted to continue apartheid in 1991, with the reward of being turned into a North Korea, or worse getting the Serbian treatment?
On a more serious note, I suspect there’s two sides of a very bad dynamic at work here.
On one hand, the establishment is scrutinizing anti-Atlanticist or anti-Narrative politicians way more thoroughly than any others, so it’s very risky to be anti-establishment. Due to the ubiquitous propaganda, it’s also way likelier for family members to turn on the anti-establishment politicians. Babis might not have had this scandal if he were pro-Narrative, either because the media would turn a blind eye, or because he wouldn’t have needed the scheme at all.
The other side of the same dynamic is that those politicians who, despite all this, do become anti-establishment, will be natural risk-takers, which makes them more likely to commit crimes and so fodder for the establishment media to take them down.
It’s not just with politicians, but with anti-establishment people in general. Highest quality people find it easier to follow the rules and so they stay normies.
They should have partitioned the country when they had the chance. It would have been the fairest and common-sense action.
Difficult to say. However it is, they didn’t really vote for anything. They voted for a start of negotiations, but then they weren’t asked about the results of those negotiations.
The Afrikaners were mostly opposed to the settlement to the point that they probably would’ve supported a coup. But the prospective leaders of the coup gave up grabbing power in exchange for empty promises from Mandela.
The issue was that there was no guarantee that the smaller white only state would escape sanctions for whatever bogus reasons (like shooting at illegal immigrants on the border), while it would have been much less able to survive the sanctions with a much smaller territory and much less natural resources. And of course it’d have been overrun by immigrants from the neighboring failed states, since the fully black countries would have become failed states much faster.
This Fak guy sounds like a liberast to me. If building NS2 and Turkstream is what it takes to finally end the Ukrainian transit, I’m willing to support NS2 and Turkstream. Power of Siberia will provide Gazprom a foothold in the growing Chinese market, and improve its bargaining position vis-a-vis the EU.
But it really looks like Gazprom is wasting a ton of money. Russian economy would get a boost and probably enjoy lower gas prices, if Gazprom was partitioned and partially privatized.
Why do white Americans like I Steve commenters still want to preserve what is essentially an anti white imperium at this point? I mean maybe even hypothetically, coming under some form alien domination would be a better situation, if perhaps the aliens see white people as interesting pets, similar to how people see white tigers, bottlenose dolphins, and pandas as interesting animals, and the aliens grant the white people their own nature reserve to preserve their biological uniqueness or something, similar to a Siberian tiger reserve.
Say what you want about Russian oil industry, but you cannot agrue with their production figures. Russian oil output is at post-Soviet high.
Rosneft shareholders are in no position to complain, they are enjoying massive dividend – frankly, it would be the first thing I would get rid of, if I was running Rosneft.
Is that supposed to be bad for Russia?
https://adamtooze.com/2017/03/30/notes-global-condition-americanization-global-capital/
Actually, something like that was my point. The capex spending might actually make sense for Russia as a whole.
Contemporary version of “If I were Rothschild”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlOgsgs7EAs
Certainly these investments should not be seen just as business, but as a national and strategic priority (i.e. Power of Siberia).
I view china uncensored to get a good look at the reality in China,
any Russian counterpart?
There’s certainly geopolitical aspects to what Gazprom does but Fak’s work was specifically proving multiple explicit cases in which pipelines were built for no geopolitical benefit, and where the only other reasonable explanation was that they benefitted connected contractors.
Can you provide specific examples of this? I only heard about him attacking European pipelines. Fak somehow estimated that Turkstream would take 50 years to make its money back.
For the record, Turkstream cost $7 billion to build, has a capacity of 31 bcm per year. The Ukraine earned $3 billion by piping 93 bcm in 2017.
Did you know that Fak used to work for Ben Aris, your favourite Russophobe economic commentator?
utterly ridiculous way of looking at it, a typical liberast way of distorting the argument. It’s the European/US who use malignant geopolitics ( with no environmental or economic benefit) over this
Why are there no “geopolitical” aspects over oil supply ( oil pipelines go from Russia to Europe) then?
and Ukraine being desperate /the EU and US forcing it to be a gas transit country (i.e get more billions paid to it each year by Russia) despite doing their best to destroy every other economic and cultural relation between Russia & Ukraine……WTF is that?
No, Americans do not own 36% of Gazprom. Just a moment or two of rational thought should reveal that Gazprom is not only owned by Russians (64%?) and Americans. I can’t understand where he came up with this calculation, unless he just decided that all of Gazprom’s American Depository Receipts (~25%) are owned by Americans, in addition to local shares held nominally and directly.
Who does own that the half of Gazprom that is not owned by the Russian government?
This is hillarious stuff! Venezuela openly shits on Russia and Rosneft:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-venezuela-exclusive-idUSKCN1NT0TJ
LOL, it was Sechin’s idea to get involved with Venezuela in the first place. Sechin reportedly speaks Spanish and is a personal fan of Chavez, Che Guevara and other Latin American “revolutionaries”.
Sechin should be executed for squandering billions on such an idiotic regime.
At the very least he and his cronies should be forced to drive cars designed and built in these socialist workers’ paradises instead of filthy capitalist German or British or Italian luxury cars. Not even Volvos should be allowed.
Sadly, in Russia we have plenty of idiots who think that socialism is a legitimate economic system, that Venezuela and North Korea are examples to be emulated, and good things will happen to Russia from allying with these regimes. Seemingly intelligent and well-educated people hold such views – you probably encountered them on this website, it’s a cultural problem for the Russian people.
Sechin shows what happens when one of such idiots rises to a position of influence. Russian government simply cannot afford too many Sechins.
Other peoples (like many Hungarians or Americans) often have similar ideas. Anyway, Best Korea is not that bad since it started to embrace a market economy.
There’s a conflict near Kerch on the Black Sea. Apparently Russia is about to seize a few Ukrainian vessels by force.
https://defence-blog.com/news/russian-special-troops-prepares-for-storm-ukrainian-warships.html
Russia won’t cut production, because Sechin wants to increase it (I don’t understand why; if by cutting production 5% prices would increase 10%, then that’d be a no-brainer, wouldn’t it?), and also because the government wants to decrease domestic fuel prices. In other words, for dumb reasons. Couldn’t this Sechin be hanged? Or at least shot.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/russia-oil-output-1542987852
Should have asked for permission.
https://youtu.be/b9ArKyYZANw
Here’s a video of the ramming.
I don’t think translation is necessary 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcTSDaCg5xA
Russia captured the Ukrainian boats:
https://defence-blog.com/news/russia-captured-ukrainian-naval-vessels.html
And apparently Ukraine is about to declare martial law.
But I need more information to make sense of it.
So it’s the Russian ship, and the small Ukrainian ship just stopped in front of it? Or was it because the other Russian ship was coming from the left?
They were pursuing the boat, the captain says “squeeze him from the right” in the beginning.
After that, what the Russian captain is shouting besides the obvious “Davai suka blyad” is simply instructions like go left, stop, reverse (the last one probably so that they slow down and don’t ram the ukie boat too hard) and he also tells everybody to hold on for the impact.
The Ukrainian vessel probably stopped once they realized the game is over.
Anyway I just posted it because I think it’s funny. It’s like watching a video of someone who’s being teased finally snapping.
Looks either like Russian heavy-handed aggression (Ukraine’s claims) or Ukraine being provocative (Russia’s claims) and Russia taking the bait. Either way sanctions escalation is likely, chance of more military aid to Ukraine also. Comment sections in Ukraine are more anti-Russian than they have been in a long time, and outraged.
It’s not obvious to me. My Russian knowledge consists of “zdravstvuytye ribyata” and “uchityelnitsa Irena, nikto ne atvsuvstvuet.” I think davai means hurry up or go or something like that (Russian soldiers said it to prisoners as they were hurrying them), but I don’t know anything else.
If the Ukrainian vessel just stopped, then it looks like a good provocation. I can also believe that the Ukrainian vessels tried to enter Crimean waters, so that Russia cannot really claim international law to be on its side.
In any event only the Ukrainian leadership has a motivation to escalate the conflict. So that’s my working hypothesis.
Likely. Both sides have been annoying each other. Russia has been detaining ships going to Ukrainian ports through there. Shooting at and injuring sailors, and taking the boats is a major escalation on Russia’s part however.
OTOH there isn’t much room and it is possible the incursion wasn’t intentional.
Likely, but I wouldn’t rule out a Russian miscalculation either, that Ukraine will use to its advantage. Russia is prone to making mistakes.
Is it true that Ukraine detained dozens of Russian ships with their crews in Ukrainian ports? I read it in a highly unreliable source.
Official Russian media suggests Ukrainians have detained one Russian fishing boat and Russians took two Ukrainian boats in retaliation:
http://tass.com/world/1028569
OTOH Russians have been detaining hundreds of boats going to/from Ukraine’s port on the Azov Sea, costing a lot of money to the merchants operating those boats.
But shooting at a naval vessel, injuring sailors, and capturing the naval boats is a major escalation.
Quick primer on Russian “mat” (swearing): The above three words would be translated as “C’mon bitch whore”, with “bitch”, but especially “whore”, being the most ubiquitously used swear words. People who speak like that will pepper a sentence with that word repeatedly. You can hear something like the following: “Vasya (whore) told me (whore) to go to the store (whore) to buy vodka (whore).”
Igor Sechin is fluent in Portuguese, he was stationed in Mozambique for a long stint under the employ of the KGB. It’s interesting to hear about his socialist ideology and admiration for Latin American revolutionaries. What’s your source for that information?
Geographical cross holdings of capital are very convoluted, so it is often difficult to identify the final beneficiaries of equity owners. For example, Cyprus is perennially Russia’s largest foreign investor, even though that money in no realistic terms could be considered Cypriot, or even really foreign. That being said, I believe Gazprom’s investor base consists of a mix of Russian private pension funds, Russian investment funds, several European strategic investors, European, American and Asian investment and pension funds.
Gazprom’s management and their affiliated structures are also big players in its stock. Most American and European investors will hold Gazprom passively, through ETFs and the like. Gazprom is a large part of any index, so it will inevitably be owned by someone looking for broad Russia exposure. Of course, most of these people don’t realize they are shareholders in a company that is used as a geopolitical tool, often in direct competition with, or against the interests of, the US.