I will admit that due to personal and work related reasons I got much less done this month than I hoped to. However, on the plus side, I have pretty much finished with furnishing my new apartment, and have largely ditched one commitment that was generally more trouble than it was worth. Along with an imminent reconsideration of posting strategy, I am sure that January and henceforth will be more productive than ever.
It is very good to see the legendary HBD blogger Audacious Epigone join the UR. Along with the recent acquisition of Guillaume Durocher, the site is going from strength to strength.
Featured
- TRUMP: Syria/Afghanistan withdrawals obviously good for the US. Turkey letting up on Khashoggi was obvious quid pro quo; Israel reportedly also reacquired rights to bomb Iranians in Syria from Russia.
Obviously something instigated by the Turks, and which mostly benefits Israel and Turkey, was yet another case of Putler manipulating Drumpf.
Afghanistan fundamentally represents vast opportunity costs regardless of ideology. What trillion dollars over 18 years can buy:
– Greening the economy, energy independence.
– 355 ship navy
– Building a Mars base
– Order of magnitude more foreign aid. https://t.co/HhaGm4KwXV— Anatoly Karlin (@powerfultakes) December 21, 2018
PS. Neocon Michael D. Weiss is really sad:
Michael Weiss is having a multi-hour meltdown about the U.S. withdrawing from Syria. He started 9 hours ago and he’s still going. pic.twitter.com/HZqnrsLwqq
— sam (@halaljew) December 22, 2018
- Someone whose style you should recognize: A Week In Xinjiang’s Absolute Surveillance State. Must read!
*Ron Unz: Averting World Conflict with China
- Guillaume Durocher: The Economics of the Great Replacement
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TNSR: Xi’s Vision for Transforming Global Governance: A Strategic Challenge for Washington and Its Allies
Russia
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Leonid Bershidsky: The Maria Butina Case Is Not About Spying
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Russia demshiza has yet another irrelevant get-together in Vilnius
* Flagship journal of the Dork Web Quillette has Soviet immigrant Cathy Young do a hit job on Solzhenitsyn to mark his anniversary (RussoShoe Theory: “Stalinism is not true Marxism, and that’s terrible.”)
World
- Graham Allison: China and Russia: A Strategic Alliance in the Making
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Kenneth Rapoza: Don’t Believe Beijing: China Really Does Rival The U.S.
* China’s Social Ranking System Will Now Target Rule-Breaking Scientists. Likelihood of a Chinese biosingularity has been downgraded.
- Future commissar? Revealed: Antifa Leader Relied On Anonymity To Push Radical, Violent Communist Agenda
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Emil Kirkegaard: Fertility of immigrant groups in Denmark by generation. There is actually broad convergence to native norms. This suggests immigrant population % will stabilize after a few decades if immigration was to be halted.
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Demographic update for the year 2018 via Cicerone.
Science & Culture
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Shizuyu Sutou: Low-dose radiation from A-bombs elongated lifespan and reduced cancer mortality relative to un-irradiated individuals. One more for atomic trumphalism!
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Kirkegaard: Who wants to live forever?
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Twitter spat on validity of IQ between N.N. Taleb and real psychometrists:
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1076845397795065856
Almost as bad as people who have never extracted a g factor from mental test data pontificating on IQ research…
Or people who have never calculated a heritability from twin data pontificating on behavior genetics… https://t.co/NA7O24tMAx— Geoffrey Miller (@primalpoly) December 23, 2018
Humor
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Insomniac: European Values Chief Did Gay Porn. How appropriate.
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Daily Stormer reviews new Chinese battle royale game Ring of Elysium. I notice that Anglin has been getting very Sinophile of late.
AK, I have a bit of appreciation for your analyses and writing on the handicaps imposed by the commies on Russia and other countries. Confusing to me is the fact that the Cultural Revolution doesn’t seem to have had any long term bad effects on China. Could this mean that the current preoccupation in the US with feminist gravity and transgenderqueer chemistry will not be all that bad?
That one trillion dollars is probably missing from the US military R&D budget. It helped Russia and China to catch up, at least to an extent.
Let me kick off discussion on some organizational issues. Not including this in the main post since it’s all exploratory at this stage.
First off, I intend to set up a mailing list by the New Year or soon after. With more and more cases of Shut It Down, that seems overdue. Any tips? My last experience with mailing lists was MailChimp, but that was more than half a decade ago, technology I assume has moved on since then.
Second, many users have expressed a preference for one or all of the following:
1) Ability to contact other commenters
2) A forum
3) Meetup in meatspace
About (1) – I assume Ron isn’t planning to introduce that functionality anytime soon, not even so much because its technically difficult (WordPress has native capabilities for it) but because it would require registration and have a knock on effect on privacy, which the website takes very seriously.
I have over the years introduced certain individuals to each other over email, but it’s highly ineffective for me to manually serve as a conduit for all interested parties.
Meanwhile, any IRL activities will require some degree of acquaintance between participants before it can happen.
The natural connecting mechanism for that is a forum or discussion group.
Issues:
* Technically, it would also be trivial. WordPress has forum plugins such as bbPress that allow simple forums to be set up (we don’t need anything complicated).
* Not sure that Ron would be interested in it, and it’s easy to see why – moderation will be a huge burden – and for limited gains.
* Theoretically, I can create something myself at my website or another url.
* Unfortunately, I don’t have much time for moderation either, so at most it will have to be a small, hand-selected group that can be relied upon to police itself.
* One technical solution would be to buy DigitalOcean hosting and create a droplet running a Discourse forum (my favorite forum software atm). This is the current solution of what is probably Russia’s current biggest closed nationalist forum.
* Running Discourse from their end is not an option due to it being prohibitively expensive ($100 per month).
* One secret forum I was invited to uses https://www.proboards.com/ which is a remotely hosted blog.
* App like alternatives: Slack, Discord, Telegram, Facebook groups (urgh), etc.
Keybase might be interesting but I know too little about it and I assume it’s too esoteric for us to adopt it.
* Risk of remotely hosted boards is that they can wipe us (or even dox us) for political reasons, though risk will probably remain low since I don’t intend for any discussions to be public. Risk of self-hosting it is that I might get hacked.
Taleb’s posturing is insufferable
The Cultural Revolution was not so bad because it was so destructive. No one was very happy during it, everyone was afraid, everyone knew deep down how insane all this was, and it didn’t leave any lasting structures in its wake, in fact, it destroyed the communist bureaucracy which had been functioning there before. It made economic reform actually easier. It would have been way worse if Mao had opted for a saner policy, for example conventional Stalinism.
Also, the Cultural Revolution was relatively short. The whole madness took three decades, tops. The USSR was way longer, over seven decades of communism, of which the first two and a half decades were absolutely insane, but insane with a method, so that it created lasting structures. It was still insane afterwards, until the very end (and beyond), but just sane enough to last long. Maoism was something for which no one had any appetite to repeat, not the party leadership, nor the little people, nor the party rank and file. While late Stalinism and especially Brezhnevism still elicits nostalgia on many levels.
Similarly, in Hungary it was not the hard Stalinist Rákosi dictatorship which was the most destructive (in 1956 it turned out that no one really liked it), but the “goulash communism” of Kádár, which corrupted everyone to an extent and which was good enough that many people actually liked it, even if they understood that it could have been better.
I’m member of a totally un-PC Google mail group, but it’s in Hungarian. Google is also reading our mail, so maybe something else?
But will they really read a mail-list with a few dozen members?
My question was based upon the fact that for 20-30 years they replaced scholarship with right think with no apparent long term harm.
1) Ability to contact other commenters Why?
2) A forum Yes!
3) Meetup in meatspace Why?
I want to keep mailing list and forum separate.
Mailing list – to inform people of my own plans, projects, articles, etc. once every few months (e.g. like Razib’s newsletter).
Forum – to build a community that can do things like organize meetups.
Assuming you’re speaking of Google Groups, I suppose that’s one possibility.
1 – many people have expressed an interest in contacting each other over the years. This involves:
I’d rather not deal with that tbh.
3 – topic of active discussion over the past few months.
Really, TBH, it’s the forum that’s the least necessary component, because individual posts (especially open threads) are basically forums anyway.
But a dedicated forum is also the crispest way of achieving both 1 and 3
Agree. If IQ weren’t important, he’d probably be living in Lebanon because it would be a more functional society than it is.
Re the Shuttening, I have been relying on Jazzhands McFeels’ twitter for news updates. He’s been shoah’d. Anyone know of a good substitute?
To add to reiner’s point, Maoism did set China back by 1-2 decades economically. Its economic system made the USSR’s seem rational and effective.
(Greater chance of dying on the job than getting fired. In contrast, about 15% of the Soviet workforce switched jobs in any one year).
No, I don’t think SJWism will affect the US seriously, except in particular edge cases (e.g. a fullbore white genocide post-Trump President triggering Red state secession, or the new Lysenkoism criminalizing gene editing for IQ (if/when that becomes feasible).
I just think of it like who could we have bribed to move back. Would be a pretty big bribe divided among Somalis, even all over the West. Would be a diplomatic coup – Australia, the good ol’ USA has paid your Somalis to move back! But I suppose Somalis are crazy enough to demand more.
https://twitter.com/dprk_news
https://twitter.com/DPRK_News/status/1076565277683404803
To add to reiner’s point, Maoism did set China back by 1-2 decades economically. Its economic system made the USSR’s seem rational and effective.
Understood, but within the total Maoist period they did full frontal Lysenkoism, and more, for 20 years. Yet, many of our products, technology, etc. can only be had from there.
No, I don’t think SJWism will affect the US seriously,
So you won’t mind being on the Mars explorer built by the mandated 50% female, 10% abcxyzlgbyt community and 20% assorted others rocket scientists?
Define “US”:
Now, if you’re talking about Washington as an agent of international politics, “abandoning” Syria is a geopolitical disaster for America, comparable to Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. It sends unmistakable message of weakness. US political class is in meltdown, and justifiably so.
Given the circumstances, it makes no sense for Russia to allow Israel bomb Syria again. They should compensate us for the loss of Il-20 instead.
How does use of Belarusian language in Belarus compare to use of Ukrainian in that country?
Lebanon’s isn’t functional for a very simple reason: palestinians.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53787
Take the numbers with a grain of salt, but essentially the CBO projected a cumulative increase of the federal deficit in the next decade by $1.3 trillion ($130 billion per year–average). And that’s for a $20 trillion economy.
And then there’s the fact that a government liability is a private sector asset. A larger deficit increases private sector income and net worth. The total net worth of the nation doesn’t change. The government, like any borrower, does ultimately face certain fiscal constraints (interest rates, inflation). But inflation and interest rates remain low.
Bottom line–there is no solvency issue.
Leaving Syria represents and opportunity to begin abandoning other idiotic imperial commitments which do nothing to enhance America’s security or power. I will, of course, not hold my breath.
“War should only be conducted for a policy.” -Otto von Bismarck
What was American policy in Syria exactly?
For that matter, what did withdrawing from Afghanistan do to the USSR? It was embarrassing…but not as embarrassing as spending 17 years and counting in Afghanistan.
I think you’re right on this.
All I want for Christmas is one serious comment reply from Thorfinnsson.
Isn’t the main effect Afghanistan has now on opium production?
So will opium production and export abroad increase, with continued withdrawal of NATO?
Is there also a positive side to that – perhaps opium provides some economic development in Afghanistan, making it slightly less dysfunctional internally.
Is there anything important in Syria? And anything there that is relevant to American power?
(There is no substantial oil in Syria, no compatible people, and it is 9000 kilometers from their coast).
The Taliban came close to eradicating opium poppy production.
Under American occupation, production has skyrocketed. So much so that it makes you suspect that elements of the Dweeb State are involving in it.
No. Nothing. The closest thing I can come up with is it’s near the Suez Canal, but that’s hardly relevant since:
1 – Britain has sovereign territory on Cyprus
2 – USN 6th fleet is anchored Naples, Italy
3 – Suez Canal really isn’t that important for America
Justifications given to us for fighting in Syria usually involve ISIS, “humanitarian” concerns (ie remove the Assman b/c reasons), and of course the dark specter of the Persian menace which is of course a tremendous danger to America. Oh and of course–credibility. Whatever the hell that means.
The Iraq War was a disaster, but Dick Cheney did make an argument which was that by 2020 America would be forced to import 90% of its oil. Today that sounds ridiculous, but in 2002 it sounded credible.
What happened was that the No Fly Zones and UN Inspections that were imposed on Iraq in the aftermath of the Gulf War slowly normalized the concept of always being at war in the Middle East. And needless to say, a certain well-networked group of people have taken advantage of this to push a variety of idiotic wars.
Which should be a lesson to us all.
Still, I wonder if they would have been better of with a smaller country. The Mount Lebanon Governorate. The Druze probably wouldn’t have been as keen as other Muslims in welcoming them. Or else, there should have been population movements Middle East Christians into Lebanon.
Isn’t opium their main industry.
You know before 1979, the Afghanistan economy was massively funded by the USSR (e.g. building all their infrastructure for free).
This economic assistance continued during the war. But as Soviet Union began to retreat from occupying rural areas of Afghanistan from the mid-1980s, their opium production skyrocketed, and the income could replace foreign aid.
I generally like NN Taleb, but when it comes to race and IQ, he’s an IYI. Maybe it’s an Arab (ha!) thing.
The single greatest interest in Syria is the Israeli interest. The masks fell off when the MSM reacted (in horror) to Trump’s announcement. Many leading commentators, especially neocons, immediatedly brought up Israel’s worsening position as a justification for the freakout.
That’s basically the reason. Over the last 15 years, US middle eastern policy has largely been about pleasing Israeli interests which in turn is a reflection that Jewish influence in the US – while not absolute – is nevertheless extremely pervasive. This is especially true in the mainstream media, which allows Jewish interests to filter/shape public discourse. The same was true in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Afghanistan is a harder nut to crack. There aren’t any obvious Jewish interests there such as in Syria. The poppy production question in interesting. I’ve heard conspiracy theories claim that the CIA is involved in the poppy trade as a way to illicitly finance untracable activities/slushfund stuff. There could also be the usual MIC interests in having a live battleground to test new weapons/tactics.
One thing’s for sure, the “muh humanitarian” bullshit is always, well, bullshit. If they cared about that then they wouldn’t have allowed Saudi Arabia a free hand in Yemen for well over a year now.
Libya is an interesting case study as well. They were silent about the slave markets for a long time. Now they are starting to pick up the story. As always: they never mention that Western interventionism caused this. But you can see the beginning of a “we must take them in to stop slavery” narrative taking shape.
As Sailer says: invade the world, invite the world.
Taleb is just biased against the normal distribution. If you were to reanalyze the data and found a fat tail, he’d change his tune.
Some tentative theses on armed conflict, geopolitics and history I’d be curious to hear people’s thoughts on. These apply to conflict from the point of a view of a state post-1648 and 1789; the dynamics of pre-state warfare and pre-modern imperialism are very different.
1) Defense has remained consistently more cost-effective than offense. (Speaking here in a more tactical sense, but I will argue that this is true in terms of diplomacy/geopolitics as well.) Notably evident in the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, World War 1, the Winter War, World War 2 and the Korean War. For whatever combination of factors like supply lines, fortification and a status quo bias favoring the defender, armed forces seem to be multiplied in effectiveness ceteris paribus when fighting on defense instead of offense. A particularly extreme, but I think still illustrative, example of this would be the Winter War, in which Finland, despite its much, much smaller population and industrial capacity, was able to inflict highly disproportionate casualties and fluster Soviet forces for several months. It takes a significant preponderance in terms of quality and/or quantity to be confident that an offensive operation will succeed.
2) Wars often turn out to be more costly and less successful than their proponents predict they will be. Napoleon’s invasions of Spain and Russia, the US’s attempt to prevent CS succession (to some extent on both sides), Britain’s suppression of the Boer Rebellion, French, German, British and Russian plans in World War 1, Japan’s attack on the US, Hitler’s invasion of Russia, North Korea’s invasion of South Korea, the Vietnam War, the invasion of Canada in the War of 1812, Saddam’s invasion of Iran, the Iraq War, etc.. As Scott Alexander has noted, it seems like almost necessarily at least one side in a conflict has to be miscalculating. (You can probably challenge that in terms of game theory, but I feel like it’s still probably basically true.)
3) Wars aimed at profoundly changing the balance of power often fail because the conflict draws in other parties who tend to favor the status quo antebellum. In the War of Spanish Succession and the Napoleonic Wars, French attempts to establish a hegemonic position on the continent failed because non-French powers formed coalitions against France. Saddam Hussein didn’t get much if any foreign support for his invasion of Iran, but once the tide turned and an Iranian takeover of Iraq seemed plausible, Iraq began receiving a lot more aid from foreign powers, including the US. However, this aid was conditional on seeking a stalemate, not accomplishment of Iraq’s initial objectives. The North Korean invasion of South Korea failed after a US led coalition turned back communist forces…and then the US invasion of the north to reunify Korea failed because it provoked Chinese intervention. The perception in both 1914 and 1939 that Germany was in a position to become a continental hegemon incited the intervention of the Anglo-Saxon powers, in various degrees, in favor of the French and Russian side. (Oversimplifying the details here, but I think the core geopolitical conflict is as I described.)
4) Wars against foreign insurgents/guerillas—what Martin van Creveld calls “low intensity conflicts” in the Transformation of War— have a not great track record of succeeding, despite the many advantages that counter-insurgent forces would seem to have. If they do succeed, at least in the short term, like the British in the Boer War, it tends to be much, much more difficult than anyone would expect given the balance of forces. Like democratic peace theory, I don’t think the important thing is to say “this has literally never happened ever,” but rather that it seems like a true and important fact that this quite rarely ever happens. The French in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars, the British in the US during the American Revolution, the Germans in Eastern and Southeastern Europe during World War 2, the French in Vietnam, the French in Algeria, the US in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan, the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are a lot of cases like the Syrian government’s crushing of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982 where I’m not sure how the conflict should be classified, though.
5) The “positive” benefits of victory in war, particularly from the perspective of ordinary citizens, are often hard to identify. (This is in contrast to “negative” benefits that come from not losing the war, if that makes sense.) Consider, for instance, the Spanish-American War. Did American rule in the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and various smaller islands really profoundly improve America’s geopolitical position or economy the way that hawks like Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge thought it would? An important corollary here is my view that empire is a source of weakness, not a source of strength. There is no reason, as far as I can tell based on the evidence of economic history, to suppose that empire makes a modern nation wealthier than it could be without empire. Britain had a gigantic global empire in 1914, yet its per capita GDP was pretty comparable to those of small, non-imperial nations like Switzerland and Sweden. In my view, the key source of geopolitical power in the modern world is having a homeland of loyal citizens that are numerous, high-IQ and genuinely committed to some sort of nation/tribe/project. Empire does NOT contribute to this. Strip away the empire but leave that, as with Germany after WW1, and you don’t really reduce a nation’s fundamental power.
6) To expand on empire being a source of weakness: It’s often easier to undermine an empire through Lawrence of Arabia style shenanigans than it is to defend one. Don’t underestimate the power both in terms of rhetoric/ideology and in terms of military pragmatism of being on the anti-imperial side. Try to stick your enemy with the burden of empire, rather than carrying it yourself. Look at, for instance, how much more successful supporting anti-Soviet rebels in Afghanistan was for the US than fighting anti-American rebels in Vietnam. The US should have simply supported free elections and decolonization in Vietnam after WW2—even if the communists were to take power and overthrow democracy. If authoritarian rule and the various miseries of the common people could not possibly be blamed on the US/capitalism, but instead had to be laid at the feet of the Vietnamese government/communism, it would inevitably generate popular opposition to communism and the ruling government. It’s so much easier to condemn and support opposition to an authoritarian/foreign government than it is to actually rule. Thus, I think, somewhat paradoxically, that the more foreign territory that a nation has to hold on to, the weaker a position it’s in. As Professor Erica Chenoweth’s research has shown, violent regime change has a poor track record in terms of stability and democratization. Non-violent resistance has been the source of the vast majority of democratic transitions across the globe.
Here is the significance that I think this has for US foreign policy/grand strategy. The US should generally try to avoid fighting wars. It should especially try to avoid fighting wars of aggression, anti-guerrilla wars, wars with other major powers “on their turf” in terms of supply lines and wars aimed at fundamentally changing the geopolitical status quo in some way. While I certainly would be willing to challenge these as well, these are to be distinguished from defensive wars, conventional wars, wars where the supply lines of the US and its allies are shorter than those of the enemy and wars with the aim of restoring the status quo antebellum. Wars meeting these latter conditions, like the Gulf War and the Korean War (excluding the invasion of the north), are I think considerably more likely to be successful than the former ones. Insofar as the US supports promoting democracy internationally, this is most likely going to happen through economic development, education and mass non-violent protests, not military regime change. Humanitarian intervention is more complicated—I think there are cases where it can work, like fighting ISIS, but it ought to be in response to an ongoing atrocity and aimed at defensively creating safe zones rather than overthrowing governments. It’s really, really difficult to build an effective and legitimate state out of nothing, especially when there is ethno-religious conflict, as we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But most of those conflicts were decided by fighting between conventional forces, with irregular warfare being only a sideshow that may have drained resources, but would never have proven decisive on its own; e.g. the British lost in America because of defeats in battles like Yorktown and the intervention of France and Spain, the French were defeated in a genuine field battle at Dien Bien Phu, the Vietnam war featured strong participation by regular North Vietnamese units in its later stages.
Irregular warfare on its own is only really effective against forces that are constrained in what they can do by humanitarian or democratic principles. If Germany hadn’t been defeated by the Red army in WW2, there wouldn’t have been much of a problem with eventually crushing the partisan movements, by destroying the villages aiding the partisans, deporting civilian populations to concentration camps etc. The Soviets also managed to suppress the resistance movements in Ukraine and the Baltics when they reconquered those areas. This is only an ethical question of what kind of methods one is willing to adopt to fight insurgencies, not of any inherent advantage of insurgents that couldn’t be overcome by greater levels of violence.
Rapidly dying and looked down upon. It doesn’t have the musicality of Ukrainian, nor any native literature comparable to that language.
This language is practically dead.
This. He has made a career out of explaining the assumptions and conditions of the Central Limit Theorem. Now, normally this is a couple weeks, tops, for slow sophomores in a decent degree program, but America is a land of opportunity where you can make a lifelong career out of explaining two paragraphs of text, lol.
It’s not a ‘language’ at all. It’s less different from Russian than Scouse is from English.
The reasons why it’s labeled as a ‘language’ in the first place are political, and predictably braindead in the typical Soviet fashion:
a) The Soviets broke up Russia proper into several pieces, to make the CPSU stronger than the CPRF. Belarus was one of those arbitrary pieces, and they got granted a ‘nation’ status by Soviet diktat.
b) Stalin fancied himself as some sort of scientific authority on linguistic matters, and one of his “theories” was the idea that every nation must have its own language. So, a Belarusian “language” was invented for the new “nation”, ASAP.
But, as is Soviet tradition, they did the typical Soviet hack job. 90% of “Belarusian” iz jus speling werdz in a fonetik fashin.
[Israel reportedly also reacquired rights to bomb Iranians in Syria from Russia.
Obviously something instigated by the Turks, and which mostly benefits Israel]
There is no evidence whatsoever for this, but within 20 words it has become established fact for AK.
Taleb’s arguments in that thread are absolutely terrible, and yet he’s half right.
The number of people in the world with ‘significant Jewish roots’, is now argued to be at about 200 million, approaching 3% of the world’s population, about 10x the 20 million or so ‘fully Jewish’ self-recognised Jews
Israel has a Diaspora Affairs ministry, and one advisor to the ministry, Ashley Perry, is leading an initiative to ‘re-connect’ with the wider pool of Jewish descendants, called ‘Reconnectar’
The largest number of Jewish-descended people may be in Latin America, having some share of ancestry in the Jews expelled from the Iberian peninsula, per a recent study in ‘Nature’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07748-z
article on the above –
‘New Genetic Study: 150 Million People of Spanish Ancestry With Possible Jewish Roots’
By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz
https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/119147/new-genetic-study-150-million-people-of-spanish-ancestry-with-possible-jewish-roots/
Being that this is an open thread, what Trump might be thinking of Macron:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W51jjuLq8s
Sometimes the reverse is true, albeit probably less often. US victory in the 1991 Gulf War was far easier than expected. And nobody, including the Russians themselves, expected their intervention in Syria to be as successful as it was in reversing Assad’s fortunes.
I believe that historically the large majority of insurgencies against occupying foreign forces have failed.
The American Revolution was almost entirely a conventional war.
The Germans were doing a good job suppressing the Eastern and Southeastern European guerillas, despite having their hands rather full elsewhere at the time, and would likely have completely crushed them had they won WWII.
In Vietnam the guerillas were actually defeated: Tet was a disaster for the Viet Cong from which they never recovered, when South Vietnam fell it wasn’t to guerillas but to a conventional cross-border invasion from the North.
The mujahideen victory in Afghanistan comes with an asterisk, in that after the pullout of Soviet troops, the Soviet-backed Afghan government actually outlasted the Soviet Union itself, and might have survived had Russian military aid continued after 1991.
Insurgents have clearly not defeated the US in Iraq, although they did come close in 2006-2007.
LMFAO. So much of “testing” and “study” of human genetics has always been downright fraud.
Yes, no question that Syria has been a humiliation for the US, the first time it has suffered a defeat in a great power proxy war since Vietnam.
Other than Ho Chi Minh and maybe Castro, I can’t think of any post-WWII leader of a non-great power, who has frustrated US foreign policy goals more than Assad.
I actually met some Belarusin-speaking people in the USA. They emigrated from a village in the western part of the country and actually speak it as a first language. It sounds like an amalgamation of Russian, Ukrainian and Polish, but closer to Ukrainian than to the other two. It would be sad for a Slavic speech to disappear.
Here are examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8v7VyClEG0
Belarusian is a dialect and dialects tend to disappear over time. The soviets put a halt to Russian nation building by elevating dialects to the status of language and creating “nations” out of regional identities. Now that the SU is toast and the CPSU no more, Russian nation building can move forward. The death of Belarusian is a fortuitous event to come .
Thats silly. The US hasn’t been serious in either place for years. Casualties are low The political class is noisy because they have no arguments for staying. Plus they can rant about Trump. Hence the db level.
If there is any damage, did it happen when they gave up or when the modest troop contingent is shipped home?
What should be on their minds is the collapse of the anti Assad narrative. Move on before the public is further red pilled.
Isn’t opium their main industry.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Afghanistan_opium_poppy_cultivation_1994-2007b.PNG/400px-Afghanistan_opium_poppy_cultivation_1994-2007b.PNG
I’d say defense isn’t always cheaper because you can hit someone’s planes on the ground, like the Japanese did in the Philippines. Or their fuel. Although one can make the argument that the planes wouldn’t have been clustered, if it was actual home soil.
With Vietnam, it strikes me that the outcome was more purely based on geography and geopolitics (not angering China by invading the North) than the idea of empire. Taiwan was an island – we supported them easily – although China did get involved in distractions. South Korea was a penisula. Both were easier to defend and control than South Vietnam. Nor is it clear to me that the South Vietnamese would have lost, if their financial support hadn’t been withdrawn.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was probably trying to think of a way that Russia can be seen as a growing threat to the US. Yet the Poles and Germans are going to be sad: free ride is over
Allison:
The fateful error was Russia/ Soviet Union’s. It never explicitly raised the question of NATO enlargement, merely asking there should be no Nato forces in the former German Democratic Republic, and all they got was a verbal assurance by James Baker against that happening. Even if the West had explicitly and formally promised to never enlarge Nato eastward, how could that have been taken at face value and valid for decades in the future? By creating a vacuum the Soviet Union made it inevitable that Nato would be drawn right up to the borders of Russia proper in a strategic nightmare for the country.
The big winner from Nato expansion was Germany’s export-orientated, manufacturing economy cocooned in friendly states on its borders. Germany has been defended by America at the expense of American taxpayers, but Russia is not the Cold War Soviet Union and Germany could cope with it very easily, if it wanted to spend the money on tanks ect. Germany counts on its helpless kitten act continuing to work because having to put up with Germany as a mercantile predator and defence free-rider is America’s permanent fate. Unfortunately Russia is really not the old Soviet Union, and while it might be tempted into doing something with an insurgency in the Baltic it does not have the tanks to roll across the North European plain (too built up now anyway). Germany can defend itself against Russia. It chooses not to
*Germany has less than a hundred Leopard 2 battle tanks fit for action. The EC has four times the population and wealth of Russia, it can defend itself without the US. Meanwhile Merkel is so scared she is getting a massive pipe laid from Putinland.
Russia’s relative economic and conventional military weakness is fatal to the successful continuation of Germany’s helpless kitten act, which has included getting rid of even civil nuclear power. The Baghdad to Berlin Refugee Express is not defence spending, it a source of cheap lablour and German unions are in on the low wage cost export strategy of business. The pivot to the East which was underway in American foreign policy long before Trump is going to mean that American strength will be sent East to face China. One might wonder why Russia would ally with China; this could only refocus America on Russia as part of a multi-headed Dragon, and lead to America getting cold feet about withdrawing its forces from Europe as it is going to, slow but sure, because China will become too big for a major US effort against Russia as well.
There is only one way to go for counterfeit counts (Poles) the Fokkers, and above all China: try to keep America perceiving Russia as the main threat. If they could do that it would continue benefit from continuation of the Carter era official US policy of building up China. Just as he has over North Korea Xi could play the role of intermediary cum arbiter and get use that as a wedge to concessions over trade. However, if America acted this weakly, like Russia was under Gorby, China would push its advantage to the limit and beyond, like America did with the Nato expansion blitz that ended up in Russia feeling compelled to use military force. America treating China as anything less than a dangerous rival getting more powerful by the year is a recipe for China and America ending up getting into a proxy shooting war and maybe more.
Allison :-
The best place for Russia would be in the middle of the see saw, but you can bet Xi covets that place for his country.
Yes, if it allows itself to be influenced by a Chinese analysis, America will be vigilant about the threat from Russia. Meanwhile Russia’s resources and America’s technological lead will be drained away. The multinational corporations will have unimpeded access to the massive Chinese market dangled in front of them, and the foreign policy establishment does not need much convincing to articulate business’s view (the Marshal Plan worked as a subsidy to American exporters)
In his recent book (page 52) Robert Plomin says that IQ is an “outdated concept”. Taleb is agitated about yet another and even worse disaster caused by excessive leveraging by the financial masterminds who caused the last one. The people making the decisions that build pressure for more leveraging are incentivised to do so by their firms which are too big to fail and know it. Sounds like a moral hazard problem to me.
MailChimp is well known for no platforming, having no platformed Alex Jones for instance. It’s also overpriced–among other things charging for duplicate e-mail addresses.
There are a lot of alternatives: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-cheaper-better-alternatives-to-MailChimp
I’ve used MailerLite. There are probably some Eastern European options, which I suspect are cheaper and will not no platform anyone (unless they’re Polish and you claim Poles did the Holocaust). MailerLite appears to be based in Vilnius, which admittedly might not be the best location for you.
Free Web 1.0 era messageboard platforms are more than adequate for discussion needs, provided you accept from the beginning the likelihood that messageboard will one day disappear since there’s no money to be made from hosting web 1.0 messageboards. A more serious solution is to do what you suggested of course, though using DigitalOcean doesn’t seem like a good idea at all. They’re based in America and you need basic sysadmin skills to use it.
Slack is pretty good, but unless you pay them (and pricing is quite high for what amounts to glorified IRC) you get no access to your old messages. They also seem extremely likely to no platform people to me, though so far the only victims of Slack purges appear to be hapless Iranians targeted by American sanctions.
Discord and especially Facebook are completely out of the question. Telegram is quite good and while perhaps it’s a 4D chess masterstroke by ZOG in reality it seems like Pavel Durov has succeeded in making enemies of both the Russian and American dweeb states and is paying the price for it.
Doxing, incidentally, should be taken as a serious risk from the beginning. Especially if you live in a ZOG Heartland country like the USA or the UK (probably the Visegrad commenters are safe). Fortunately the Unz Review is too apparently challenging for professional SJWs to actually read, but I wouldn’t preclude it becoming a subject of interest for intelligence agencies (e.g. Roosh was questioned by DHS about his work).
Even for those of us who are antifragile and can’t be cut off from our income easily, there’s a lot that can be done to make life difficult for us. It’s not hard to imagine someone like Talha being considered an Islamist connected to the Islamic State and also financed by Putin. I’ve had people try to report me to the police in the past, and two years ago some idiot homo-sexual with a lover who was a federal prosecutor made a lot of noise about getting me on the American No Fly List (of course nothing happened).
Incidentally, there’s currently a plot afoot to make registering domains require the use of a verified identity. While as usual I expect lawyers to find a way out of this (using lawyers as registered agents for anonymity purposes is common in American corporate law for instance), if any of you wish to own domains you might want to buy one for the next decade soon.
We did have a visit from the oddball British NEET, Atlantis enthusiast and former British-Israelite who wrote most of Rational wiki (including AK’s entry)
Taleb to his credit didn’t fall into the trap of permabear doomerism like other GFC “prophets” like Nouriel Roubini, Ron Paul, Peter Schiff, or Jim Rogers.
But like a lot of other people (and this isn’t just the prophets or the permabears), the experience of the GFC primes him to expect another financial crisis or “Black Swan”. Taleb likes to complain that the problem of systemic risk wasn’t solved–merely transferred to the state.
Well, maybe. But the state can afford a hell of a lot more systemic risk than the banks. Especially outside of the Eurozone (which is in any case a phony problem created by irrational German-Lutheran moral views).
I suppose America’s descent into banana republic status isn’t reassuring. The US federal government is once again shut down, and come March 15 of next year there will be another fight over the idiotic Debt Ceiling issue. I’d say the USA is at fairly considerable risk of an at least technical fault on its financial obligations simply owing to government dysfunction.
Then there’s China, which nobody appears to understand including the Chinese themselves. Defaults on bonds are skyrocketing in China at the moment. What does it mean? Who knows. That said China doesn’t originate (much) credit for the rest of the world, so a Chinese financial crisis probably wouldn’t spread outside of China (though it would almost certainly spark a global recession).
Some professional Jewish activists occasionally turn up to attack Ron Unz as well. There’s even some wacko who has made it his life’s mission to oppose Wally. Some retard turned up after Ron Unz started writing about David Irving announcing he had proof that David Irving is an antisemite. The same bozo goes around trying to find proof that Leuther (the execution technician who claimed the Auschwitz gas chambers are bogus) has told people he’s an engineer, which is apparently prohibited by court order. Really weird people.
Linh Dinh is currently being attacked by…poets? He has also been deplatformed from the American “creative writing” and poetry communities, which in their organized formats only exist in the universities.
Good point. I think there is also something to be said about technology being a force multiplier. The invention of the AK. The stuff that goes into bombs and IEDs. It tends to soften people too, make them less ruthless. Maybe that is only in a consumer society. I did hear stories (how to know if their true?) of Soviet soldiers pushing Afghanis out of helicopters for their boomboxes.
Of course, the Soviets conquered over 100 million people in Eastern Europe for a time – fairly into the modern era. The Chinese seem to be doing well in their outer provinces. Communism probably has an edge because it is atheistic, but Islam has its own edge since Muhammad massacred people in revolt.
I’m skeptical of immigrant groups not being a problem in Europe. Firstly, there is not one that doesn’t agitate to bring in his cousins or against nationalism. I’ve even seen whites in China talk about how Chinese nationalism worries them.
Why are there so many Gypsies, if the fertility of all groups is doomed to collapse? And Gypsies are part of the Out of Africa group. They are not sub-Saharans. The less fertile portion of these groups is probably just boiling off, leaving the more tribalistic, more fertile portion to breed among itself, until it will explode.
Best force multiplier is weapons which are not only cheap, but relatively easy to drill men to use. Therefore it’s not surprising that the Atlantic Revolutions occurred in the 18th century, when the dominant weapon in land warfare was the bayonet-equipped musket.
Any group of men could become a formidable fighting force after two months of drilling. Heavy weaponry existed (muzzle loaded artillery firing primitive munitions and cavalry), but wasn’t nearly as powerful as it would later become.
An AK doesn’t really multiply the power of an insurgent much more than a bolt action rifle. If you take terrain and training into account, it can even be less useful (bolt action rifle can engage from a much longer range). I’ll grant that high explosives offer guerrillas new capabilities that gun powder didn’t, but high explosives require sophisticated industry–thus guerrillas never have much.
Compare this to the previous era of warfare in which mastery in warfare took years of training. Other than spears, a lot of effective weaponry was also quite expensive. In the entire Middle Ages, not a single peasant revolt in Europe was ever successful.
Now look at what happened in the 19th and 20th centuries. High explosives, modern metallurgy, and hydraulics/pneumatics resulted in the development of quick-firing heavy artillery with the capability of indirect fire. Warfare went from a situation in which most casualties were inflicted by gunfire in the field to one in which two-thirds were inflicted by artillery. To survive the battlefield dominated by artillery (and suppressed by machine guns and breech-loading rifles with smokeless gunpowder), infantry required much more training than it did in the 18th century. The problems of this battlefield later led to tanks and combat aircraft as well.
So within the space of a century we went from a situation in which guerrillas could quickly and inexpensively raise forces that could credibly challenge state armies to one in which the notion is completely laughable. A good example is the Germans using superheavy siege artillery to destroy Warsaw and squash the Polish Home Army like a bug. And the Poles had carefully husbanded heavy weaponry, received some state support, and were led by professional soldiers.
What German_reader says is therefore completely true. There is a moral dimension however which is important. At the moral level, weakness is powerful. A good example of this is the collapse of apartheid South Africa. Presently Israel is suffering from the same problem, and who knows where that will end. If your atrocities sufficiently anger other states, you have a problem.
Good post.
Seconded.
I would add that a VPS (whether from DigitalOcean or elsewhere) seems completely unnecessary, and not only because of the price. Considering the number of regular commenters in these threads and the volume of comments, shared hosting should be more than enough to handle such a forum, even a free hosting plan will probably be enough (I happen to know a few excellent options for that) and if not, it can be upgraded easily.
Also with shared hosting you don’t have to worry about server side management or security (as long as the company you choose is competent), you just need to keep the forum software updated and that’s it. maybe check ModSecurity logs occasionally.
Finally modern sharing hosting that is using “cloud” infrastructure often has actually more resources than a lower tier VPS and is much cheaper too.
Do you have any links or could you otherwise elaborate? I don’t want to dox myself too much but the company I work for is an ICANN accredited registrar and I haven’t heard about such developments.
Even immigrant groups of objectively good quality and totally lacking in nefarious designs are a problem, simply because they have a different identity. This causes them to make certain political demands which weaken the nation’s unity and the integrity of the state.
German immigrants opposed the goals of indigenous Americans to pursue alcohol Prohibition, imperialism, and war against Germany. They setup newspapers and schools in their own language. They also had a particularly nasty habit of supporting socialist candidates. Eventually the Americans found it necessary to squash them like a bug.
Scandinavian immigrants were on board with alcohol prohibition, but otherwise had similar political goals as the Germans. A lot of Danish immigrants also become Mormons for some odd reason, though I suppose we can write that off as a fluke.
Finnish immigrants became America’s most prominent supporters of communism other than the Jews.
Immigrants from the Visegrad area were partly responsible for poisoning America’s diplomatic relations with Austria-Hungary, and without them it’s not certain that Secretary of State Robert Lansing would’ve demanded the dissolution of Austria-Hungary.
Korean immigrants are presently ruining America’s geography textbooks by insisting on improper names for the Sea of Japan.
It was the descendants of Ellis Island Papist immigrants (who were not without problems, but had ceased causing problems by that time) who supplied the cheap labor Republicans with sufficient muscle to stop the immigration reform efforts of the ’90s. They didn’t do this for nefarious reasons like the Jews. They were simply motivated by sentimental pablum (even though current immigration laws wouldn’t let their parents in) and took the efforts of Brimelow, Buchanan, Jordan, etc. as a personal attack on themselves.
Taking efforts at immigration control as a personal insult against one’s own ethnic identity is a particular problem which appears to be universal.
Taking efforts at immigration control as a personal insult against one’s own ethnic identity is a particular problem which appears to be universal.
It’s not just immigration control. I’ve noticed that many people view selective actions against one’s group as an action against the individual.
A bank can borrow money much cheaper than anyone else only because a government stands behind them when and if the bank fails. Which is also the reason that bank can borrow money at a far higher ratio to its assets than any other business. Known risk is fine, but banks’ supposedly prudent calculations contain real uncertainty. If people are paid higher bonuses for investing more leveraged money, then the pressure to loosen the regulatory limits is predictable.
It is really Germany that stands behind French banks’ loans to Italy. Germany can afford it because the Eurozone works as export promotion for German manufactured goods. But then, almost everything in Germany seems to work to that same end. For instance, German unions agree to keep wages low, the county imports a million non-European paupers and top companies can’t wait to employ them ect ect.
There is also a problem in that the world has become more multipolar. It was bad for the Portuguese Empire, when the British one fell apart. Not to mention the profusion of oil states – hell, we propped some up militarily – there are more than would naturally exist otherwise. Any of them can write a check for groups in other countries to buy mortars, etc. Send advisors.
Another point is the economy is no longer almost fully directed toward war, like in WW2. That changes the incentives for people, where they want to get away from the war economy by defeating their enemy. War economy gives people a homefront, adding to the domestic morale and unity of purpose. Would Germany have been willing to hold Western Europe in peacetime, if it had won? Probably not. What we saw with regard to Germany was like a 6 year war, not a 20 year one.
Atrocities are easier to document and broadcast now, so it may be easier to stir moral outrage. Hard to be an occupying power with collapsing fertility. Too much morale outrage at the death of troops.
Banks are not able to borrow much more cheaply than anyone else. There are plenty of nonfinancial corporate debt issuers who can borrow at rates lower than the LIBOR (or what the banks themselves get on the regular bond market). Toyota has even issued 30 year bonds with a coupon of…zero.
Latest LIBOR: https://www.bankrate.com/rates/interest-rates/libor.aspx
And here you can search for current bonds: https://markets.businessinsider.com/bonds
Banks can borrow quite cheaply from depositors, but depositors have very good legal guarantees (the government stands behind the deposits, not the banks) and a hell of a lot of flexibility (pretty nice to be able to draw funds from an interest-bearing account on demand!) and thus good reason to lend to banks.
The government’s guarantee of the bank is also only implicit, and not always granted. Bear Stearns was allowed to go to the wolves, and while Lehman Bros was technically rescued the stockholders were basically wiped out. In Germany the Bundesbank’s charter does not even authorize it to act as a lender of last resort (unsure about the ECB’s charter, but it certainly acts like it’s allowed to be a lender of last resort).
German banks, incidentally, also made plenty of bad loans to the Greeks (and others–I recall various landesbanks getting hosed in the American mortgage backed security markets).
Germany and France can afford it because it’s really not that much money, it’s just politically unpopular. The price of bailing out German and French banks (who did take haircuts) was to destroy Greece. No big deal since the Greeks, apparently, deserve it. Or so German voters believe. And it means policymakers never had to admit to being wrong. Everyone wins (other than Greeks)!
Pressure to loosen regulatory limits (or simply to make imprudent decisions within existing legal limits) is inevitable regardless of the incentive structure for the simple reason that stability by itself breeds risk-taking. The longer an expansion goes on, the more risk-taking there will be as well. Of course incentives can worsen the problem.
A lot of people think there was some kind of golden era of stability after the Great Depression but before the institution of “neoliberalism”…whatever that is. But this simply isn’t true. Financial markets were in fact much more volatile and recessions both more frequent and deeper. There wasn’t an event like 07-08, but then that was the first “big one” since 1929-1933.
Since it is Christmastime, as well as saying “Merry Christmas to all!” I’ll take this opportunity to satisfy my curiosity on one thing: what is the Christmas situation in Europe?
In America, it has clearly been under attack for a long time. That is any public aknowledgement. You hear things like “Winter Carnival.” People wish you the insipid “Happy Holidays!”. The TV specials they put out now seem obviously worse. There was one based on “Frozen” a while back and in a very Nordic setting, I believe it had someone with a Menorah.
One thing I’m wondering about is the Christmas fairs that go back hundreds of years. Have any had their name changed to take out Christmas? What do they say in stores? Merry Christmas?
German media sometimes run stories about how multiculti fanatics have supposedly renamed Christmas into Lichterfest (festival of lights), but tbh that seems exaggerated to me and I can’t confirm it from own experience.
People in general do refer to Christmas openly; went to the baker today, and overheard even the Turkish shop assistant wishing a customer Frohe Weihnachten.
Our asshole president also talks explicitly about Christmas in his Christmas speech:
http://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Reden/DE/Frank-Walter-Steinmeier/Reden/2017/12/171225-Weihnachtsansprache-2017.html
So no, I don’t think there can be any talk of a “war on Christmas” in Germany. Of course it has lost much of its religous significance though, with the increasing de-Christianization of German society.
Having done business in China (and knowing lots of other people having done the same), I can tell you there is a huge culture of corruption in China. This corruption is everywhere, from high rise towers built with improper foundations (with concrete made from sea sand), papers based on fake scientific research, to shoddy goods made in every industry (bad vaccines, contaminated food ingredients, it goes on and one).
Is it possible that Xi’s “social credit” system may be an attempt to eliminate this culture of corruption? Instead of viewing the social credit system as techno-Maoism (even though there is some of this in it), perhaps it should be viewed as the techno-version of the many laws and actions in Singapore under Lee Kwan Yew. I consider the culture of corruption the single biggest impediment to China’s technological and economic development. It is a far greater problem than the usual problems trotted out by the western MSM such as pollution, demographics, etc. It is reasonable that the Chinese leadership would want to tackle this problem. I cannot think of any other way to deal with it that could work on a time scale less than, say, a century or two.
Any Chinese people reading this want to comment on this?
I can report that in Sweden no one ever stopped saying God Jul (literally Good Yule), and it’s prominently displayed in commercial advertising and on property owned by the state.
People also say God Helg (literally Good Holiday), but this has always been said and isn’t equivalent to the American expression Happy Holidays.
Lately there have been some attacks on Saint Lucy’s Day, the festival of light (an important holiday in Scandinavia). This doesn’t have much to do with antipathy to the Christian religion (which is practically extinct in Sweden anyway), but rather the fact that the holiday reminds Mohammedans that they’re physically quite ugly compared to Scandinavians. The ritual involves selecting a teenage girl to play the role of St. Lucy by wearing a crown of candles on her head. Traditionally, the prettiest girl is picked. Obviously not fun for Mohammedan girls who are after all very unattractive.
Lack of hostility to Christmas in Europe comes down to that fact that there is a lot less Jewish influence in Europe, particularly outside of Britain and France. Mohammedans consider us to be quasi-pagans, but they still consider Jesus Christ to be a prophet. And in any case Mohammedans have close to zero actual influence in Europe other than about making people afraid to draw cartoons of Mohammed.
The Jews, on the other hand, genuinely hate Jesus Christ, Christmas, and Christianity. Some of them are so demented they refuse to even say the word Christmas.
The 1st amendment of the US Constitution also offered them a useful bludgeon with which to attack Christmas which doesn’t exist in any European country other than France. Though as far as I know in France everyone still says Joyeux Noel. They also don’t control the media as much in Europe (or department store retailing).
That is not true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Remences
Also several militia armies with pikes were able to defeat armies of professional, armoured knights (Flemish and Swiss). Failure of peasant uprisings specifically probably has just as much to do with poor organisation and leadership.
Touche, though Golden Spurs hardly counts as a peasant revolt. The Flemish militia was well armed, armored, and drilled. They may even have been better equipped than the French. The same was of course even more true of the Swiss halberdiers and pikemen.
I just checked and you are right about the Flems, I did not realise their militia was so professional, but the Swiss at Morgarten were not well trained or equipped
In Russia, the situation is the opposite-the authorities аre introducing the celebration of Christmas, but most people do not understand what kind of holiday Christmas is.
On the other hand, some Communist attributes are tolerated among some influential elements in the West. Note the level of uncritical support for Ukraine’s Communist drawn boundaries and RFE/RL’s suggestively positive accounts of Tito unlike (as a comparison) Mihailovic.
Peasants don’t have halberds, which are fairly expensive for pole-arms. Peasants were lucky to even have metal tools beyond small knives in those days. Pitchforks for instance were made of wood–deep into the 20th century even in many places. I suppose scythes and sickles had metal blades.
The Hapsburg forces were defeated by a political confederacy commanded by a magistrate who surely came from a wealthy and possibly even literate family (details lost to time). I assume some of the Swiss soldiers were peasants, but they weren’t led or equipped by peasants. No idea what sort of training they had, but their leaders at least had enough military sense to pick an ideal site for an ambush and to construct field fortifications.
Obviously absurd – we know America is the country in the world which is most obsessed with Christmas, much more than any country in Europe.
It’s evident from watching any American media, Christmas films and television shows.
So many people (in Europe) even go to New York for Christmas shopping.
I’m in Western Europe, Christmas obsession is not American levels, and most people were still buying Christmas gifts this evening – shops just closed a few hours ago (I bought alcohol for my housemates).
People also buy gifts more modestly than in America (in the extreme case, Americans are buying their children cars for Christmas).
In Russia, the situation is a little confusing – equivalent traditions of Christmas as you would understand it, were transferred to New Year’s.
In Western Europe where I live, Christmas is the same as in America (but not exactly to the same amazing level as the American Christmas, as the scale is more modest).
In Russia, what Americans mainly do as Christmas – it is New Year.
Lol christcucks, Yule is a Pagan festival & decorating trees is banned in the bible
No-one actually believes in Paganism.
They are not tolerated because of communism per se but because they serve to undermine Russia/ promote multiculturalism /poz /globo homo ideology.
That’s true, but not many people in Western Europe today really believe in Christianity either.
And those who believe in your combination of white nationalism and Catholicism must be a very tiny sect.
I’ve heard St. Lucy’s Day mentioned before, but you put it in an interesting context. When I went to high school, they had this thing – it was kind of like a beauty contest for guys. There were “talents” on display, and it was for charity – though it did have a prize. Guess based on demo, it was primarily a feminist PC thing, though there were blacks bused in, so that couldn’t have helped. I guess even if the Nordic girls predominated, they would not have liked that outcome.
Who else is allowed to leverage on their assets the way banks sometimes have done? Some banks before 2008 were doing so at fifty to one. Macron is there as the French banks’ man to organise Eurozone debt mutualisation (ie Germany pays) of toxic loans that greedy (often French) bankers gave to the Italians, who have no intention of fulfilling their obligations, which is why the interest on their bonds has doubled. Italy never intended to fulfill their undertaking of financial disciple that they gave Germany to be allowed in the euro, Andreotti simply fooled them. And Italy is probably too big to bail out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Andreotti#European_Union_negotiations
https://www.cfr.org/article/does-italy-threaten-new-european-debt-crisis
I don’t have a lot of firsthand knowledge – but I sometimes think the approach is a bit different in Europe because it is more embedded in the culture. Seems to me they are trying to deconstruct it there – to fill it full of Muslims, queer couples, Hindus, and racially-mixed couples.
I don’t know maybe it is just their impulse to virtue signal and be inclusive, or a globalist push to commercialize it everywhere. Sell greetings cards in India and plastic snowmen.
It is a police state. Compared to Russia, I don’t know.
Most European countries basically have state churches, that’s a rather different situation from the US with its separation of state and church.
It’s not necessarily positive from my point of view (churches in Germany are among the main supporters of the Merkel regime), but it makes a “war on Christmas” somewhat harder.
Maybe things will change…recently there was some outcry over a CDU politician responsible for migration and refugees, a Catholic CDU woman…who went out of her way not to mention Christmas in her Christmas greetings (“Whatever you believe in, we’re wishing you happy holidays”). That was perceived as bowing to Islam by many, with even normally cucky CDU people protesting.
But on the whole, I don’t see much conscious animosity towards Christmas.
Merry Christmas everyone!
There is a strange duality in America. Hard to expain.
On the one hand, Christmas is very profitable. Old Christmas TV specials are ratings hits – they don’t have to pay money to produce them, just dust them off. Department stores make virtually all their profit from Christmas shoppers. They sell Christmas decorations way too early and play the music on a continuous loop, so any sane person avoids the stores. Some radio stations play the music continuously too. Lots of places, towns or colleges, put up lights, or trees. Many workplaces have some sort of party.
But there is something else. The anti-establishment clause has been seized as a weapon, in a way it was never intended to try to push any genuine feeling out of it. To make it insipid and entirely commercial. Real traditions, like having a manger scene in public squares have been destroyed. Even in places, where they wouldn’t want to take it down, they are afraid of being sued, so they do.
It’s been pushed out of schools where people used to celebrate it. Some places they will sing Kwanzaa (made up holiday) songs or Hanukkah songs. I did spin a dreidle in elementary school. We had only one half-Jew. Break is called “winter break.”
There’s a tradition between Boston and Halifax, Nova Scotia. The people of Nova Scotia donate a tree to commemorate their aid, after the 1917 explosion in Halifax. One year it was called a “winter tree.”. The reaction was too strong though . They had the guy who donated it, speaking on camera saying he was angry, so they had to change the name back.
Nonfinancial businesses have considerably more freedom to take on leverage than banks do, other than a few regulated sectors like North American electric utilities (which are still under far less scrutiny than banks in this department). An ordinary corporation is free to take on as much debt as it likes, whereas banks must meet strict capital requirements.
What’s unique about banks is that they can create money. However, the catch is that they only create money when they extend credit, and the money is destroyed when a loan is repaid.
Italy’s fiscal deficit is no worse than that of France. The Stability and Growth Pact has always been a sham and is only enforced when countries engage in the sin of “populism”.
Latest yield on Italian 10 year bonds is 2.83%: https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/GBTPGR10:IND
Clearly the market doesn’t believe the sky is falling.
IMO, the Boers’ real mistake was that they started with a paternalistic attitude toward blacks. There was therefore a moral dimension implicit in their attitude, even under Apartheid, when they had huge hospitals for blacks. The result was that the black population exploded. This made the situation untenable.
They had a good military. They could have withdrawn to a defensible border, along the Western Cape, where blacks don’t even have much of a rational claim, since the land is arid. But that was impossible because they hadn’t gone to egalitarianism from scratch, but from paternalism to egalitarianism. Of course, there were many cucked whites who probably would have foiled any such attempt anyway.
Capital requirements are just cash though. Whereas nonfinancial businesses typically have to put up its real assets as collateral to leverage.
Keep in mind the number of anti-Russian leaning politically left of center folks.
Their blacks weren’t wards of the state–they were employed and paid taxes. The unemployment under apartheid was quite low, especially before 1985:
https://i2.wp.com/www.rollingalpha.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/southafrica-unemployment.gif
Restricting black population growth would’ve required excluding them from the economy or undertaking specific measures to reduce their population growth (the Botha government studied this option, but never did anything about it).
The security situation was manageable and could be compared to the two Intifadas or the Troubles.
What was harder to manage was the deteriorating economic and diplomatic situation, though it wasn’t impossible.
You don’t think cash is a real asset?
And in any case that simply isn’t true.
Most bond issues aren’t covered (secured) at all. Bond holders who suffer default can of course sue, and they are senior to equity owners in bankruptcy. But there’s usually no underlying asset tied to the bond at all. Covered bonds do exist of course, and are more commonly issued by junk borrowers.
Businesses typically also maintain unsecured lines of credit with banks, although those with greater financing needs will mortgage assets to gain access to a larger secured line of credit (e.g. Tesla has floated the possibility of mortgaging its Fremont assembly plant).
That is interesting. I wonder what the source of the difference is. Soviet legacy, or was it the case in the days of the czars?
North America is highly religious (compared to Europe).
Probably, Christmas has much more religious significance in America (as well as the capitalist significance). It’s possible it became less religious in the last years, but it still has a religious sentiment (including in the films and television).
In West Europe, it is generally more secular by comparison to America, so Christmas is a religious festival for only a minority.
In Russia, the whole situation is different again. Most traditions which you think as being “like Christmas”, it’s still here – but they are for New Year.
For example, in America and Western Europe, “Santa Claus” gives gifts to children overnight on Christmas evening (he is flying in the air tonight).
But in Russia, grandfather frost is giving gifts – for New Year’s.
Cash is obviously a real asset. My point was that nonfinancial businesses have less liquid capital assets that can be quite specialized and heterogeneous and thus difficult to value and worth much less outside the firm.
Lol it’s almost how you would say it in Russian – “New Year fir-tree”.
Anyway the important thing is to buy a live tree, or at least if artificial, then not one which is pink.
US is already doing that. What sort of liberation are the morons of Maidan looking for? No, they are merely fighting a proxy war against Russia, for the benefit of Russia’s most significant enemy. On the other front, Americans are getting Vietnam and Korea to stave China’s march to their East. Even the morons living in Taiwan are ready to die for what is essentially America’s strategic interest.
This is quite sound up until points five and six, even if I agree with German_reader’s point that insurgencies can be crushed by a sufficiently ruthless occupier.
After that it runs off the rails.
American rule over Cuba (strictly speaking Cuba was only a protectorate), Porto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands (acquired from Denmark in 1917) improved America’s geopolitical position by protecting the Atlantic approaches to the Panama Canal.
The Panama Canal was important to American security in the prewar period, as in that era the US didn’t having overwhelming naval dominance. Thus it was essential to have the capability to rapidly move fleets between the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Even today geography is vitally important in naval affairs, but consider the state of technology from 1898-1917. Aircraft a novelty lacking range and payload, radar not yet invented, and certainly there were no satellites. In this period Britain and Germany had the capability to attack the Panama Canal, yet America had no basing in the Atlantic approaches to the Canal.
And yes, I realize the Panama Canal did not open until 1914, but the USA was already planning a canal even before the Spanish-American War.
As for the Philippines, probably it weakened America’s strategic position by drawing it into conflict with Japan. But on the other hand you can argue this was a success, since Japan was destroyed and eliminated as a strategic competitor. The US thus gained complete dominance over the entire Pacific Ocean.
There’s three problems with this.
1 – It’s actually an untrue statement, see below:
https://i.imgur.com/sptAGGl.png
Britain had a higher per capita GDP than every other country in Europe and was second in the world.
2 – Per capita GDP is a misleading guide to the benefits of empire. You’d be better off with per capita GNI, because profits which flow to the metropole from the empire are not part of the metropole’s domestic production.
3 – While the per capita GDP of the United Kingdom may not have improved as a result of the British Empire, the total economic output controlled by Britain certainly did. In fact the rest of the British Empire at the time had roughly the same economic output as the UK itself did.
And bear in mind that owing to Britain’s idiotic liberalism, those small countries in Europe could freely access the British empire on equal commercial terms as Britain itself could. Britain could’ve excluded them from imperial markets, which would’ve boosted its own output and reduced theirs. An indictment of liberalism rather than imperialism in other words.
In the case of Britain empire provided several new homelands of loyal, numerous, high IQ, and genuinely committed citizens in the form of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Obviously this sort of thinking is presently obsolete with sub-replacement fertility everywhere, but then fertility rates were still high.
The rest of the empire obviously wasn’t as useful, but Britain was able to field fairly large numbers of soldiers from India in both world wars.
Germany lost some sparsely populated African colonies, Qingdao, Papua, some islands in the Pacific, Elsass-Lothringen, Schleswig-Holstein, Danzig, and parts of Poland. Minor losses.
Compare instead to, say, the losses suffered by Russia in 1991. The rump Russian Federation is a dramatically weaker state with much reduced security compared to the Soviet Union.
This kind of depends on the nature of your empire. You’re operating under the assumption all empires are burdens. Not true. We gave the Soviets hell in Afghanistan…but not anywhere within the Soviet Union itself. Even in communist Eastern Europe we weren’t able to give them much trouble.
This history of communism doesn’t lend itself to your conclusion at all. Especially indigenous communist revolutions.
Though it was still a bad idea to go into Vietnam (and an even worse idea to fight it the way we did).
These minor disagreements aside, I can disagree neither with your observations on warfare in general nor with your recommended grand strategy for America.
There’s some truth to this, but I’d have to fundamentally disagree with your characterization of those conflicts and the relationship between conventional and irregular warfare in them. Firstly, as I think Mao argued, guerrilla warfare serves to draw out and exhaust superior conventional forces until they can be isolated and forced to take a massively unfavorable engagement with easy to cut off supply lines. The conventional victories you cite in the American Revolution and in Vietnam would not have possible without an extensive guerrilla campaign beforehand. (If you aren’t already familiar with him, look up Nathanael Greene, who is sadly largely forgotten by Americans today despite the crucial role he played in the revolution.)
Secondly, I don’t think that major conventional victories were necessary for the American or Vietnamese insurgents to achieve their objectives. Consider, among various other examples the success of the Algerians against the French in 1954-62, the Afghans against the Soviets in the 1980s and the Shia Lebanese against the Israelis in 2006. In none of these cases did the occupying force suffer a major conventional defeat like Dien Bien Phu or Yorktown; irregular forces, which the occupiers could not definitively defeat, just kept harassing them until they got fed up and left.
Neither Yorktown nor Dien Bien Phu was such an overwhelming defeat, in the sense of, say, Stalingrad or Midway, that it irreparably reduced the potential of the imperial power to raise forces to fight in the conflict. The significance of these battles was rather that they graphically demonstrated how totally ineffective imperial forces had been at accomplishing their objective of destroying the insurgency, and motivated political leaders to seek some sort of withdrawal/peace.
Consider that the Tet Offensive had a very similar effect, despite being an overwhelming conventional victory for US forces. People like to say that Well, Ackshually those dumb civilians were brainwashed by TV news and didn’t realize that Tet was a #hugewin for America, but I think anti-war civilians were actually quite correct in perceiving that Tet demonstrated how totally ineffective massive deployments of US troops had been at defeating the insurgents, given what a total surprise it was. If the US had decided to continue occupying Vietnam, the VC would eventually have been rebuilt and proven just as impossible to deal with.
There’s quite a bit of truth to this, but there are some nuances I want to explicate:
Firstly, we need to define what “victory” against an insurgency means, because I think that counter-insurgent forces often have a flawed understanding of this. I think in practice the objective of most counter-insurgencies has been to establish a client state to an imperial power that most of the population is willing to just shrug their shoulders and accept the sovereignty of in perpetuity.
I won’t make a categorical statement that this is impossible, but it seems like this has been very, very difficult to do in the modern world. The example of post-WW2 Soviet rule in Ukraine and the Baltic states is a good one for your case, but consider that, in less than a healthy man’s lifetime, the Soviets decided not to contest the local populations’ rejection of their sovereignty. I think the (non-Russian, at least) populations of those countries never accepted Soviet rule as a permanent and desirable fact of life the way that Soviet leaders would have preferred.
By contrast, you could define “victory” as “there are no insurgents in the area because there are no people in left in the area.” Conventional forces can certainly achieve this by exterminating/expelling the entire civilian population, “dissolving the people and electing another” as it were, as for instance US forces did against Amerindians who used irregular tactics.
However, I don’t think that there’s a middle-ground between the options of “complete withdrawal” and “complete destruction” in terms of permanently defeating an insurgency in a foreign country against imperial rule. I think that many academics, statesmen and generals have failed to perceive this essential dichotomy, which has led to disastrous, hopelessly confused wars, and bad ideas about how to win them.
There are counter-insurgency “liberals” who think that the problem is insufficient economic aid and overly loose rules of engagement against enemy forces, and that “counter-insurgency with a human face” would work. What they fail to perceive is that 1) The motivation for resistance is political/tribal support for independence, not pecuniary; if economic development was enough to mollify the resisting population, the US’s actual tactics in e.g. Vietnam and Afghanistan would be more than enough to easily win and 2) There is no level of violence so minimal necessary to maintain an imperial occupation and fight insurgents that it will not deeply anger the civilian population.
Then there are the counter-insurgency “conservatives” who think that all we need to do to win is “take the gloves off” and “get rid of political meddling” so that soldiers have all the tactics, no matter how brutal, necessary to catch and kill insurgents—torture, summary execution, loose rules of engagement, indifference to type I errors in identifying insurgents, hostage taking, etc. This is fundamentally mistaken because it fails to understand that insurgencies cannot be ended through killing insurgents, who will regenerate like the Lernaean Hydra as long as there is a sympathetic civilian population supporting them, and there is no tactic to help catch insurgents that will obviate this problem. Furthermore, this point of view misunderstands that, as many guerrillas have themselves admitted, brutal and repressive tactics fundamentally benefit insurgencies by widening the popular support that they subsist on. If sheer brutality was all that was necessary to keep a population quiet, the Nazis would have had no problems in Yugoslavia, Greece, Poland, Russia, and so on.
So, I agree with your assertion that the Nazis could have eventually eradicated insurgents, but I think that it is very important to note that they would have done this through wholesale slaughter/expulsion of the civilian population, not by catching and killing enough insurgents to get the locals to accept their rule in perpetuity. I actually have some more thoughts in response to your comment, I’ll maybe explicate them later.
In the old days, Christmas was the main holiday of the year with fist fights, massive drinking , caroling children (as in America on Halloween), etc., etc., In Soviet times, the main celebration was attended the New Year and Christmas traditions have been forgotten. And the Church’s attempt to revive Christmas as a boring religious holiday (in an absolutely non-religious country) naturally did not have much success.
Didn’t one of the Orthodox patriarchs warn a few years ago about rising Paganism within the Russian armed forces?
Speaking of Paganism: https://twitter.com/DouthatNYT/status/1072857777138266112
The Romans destroyed the insurgencies and then assimilated the populations, who thus became loyal. But the Romans had to keep the implicit threat of genocidal violence until the assimilation happened.
The prerequisites were military dominance, a willingness to commit genocidal level violence, a perception that such dominance and political will would persist indefinitely in the future, and a superior, more civilized culture, which was attractive enough for the locals to join, at least once they realized they couldn’t defeat it.
The Orthodox Christmas is in early January anyway due to the Julian calendar.
Julia Ioffe is telling us that she is offended when we wish her a merry Christmas. So just don’t do it!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/12/21/please-dont-wish-me-merry-christmas/
Hindus have wished me a happy Diwali and somehow I didn’t get offended, despite not being Hindu nor having the foggiest idea what Diwali was about. A Jew once wished me a happy [whichever Jewish holiday was taking place at the time] and I didn’t get offended. A Muslim once wished me happy Eid Mubarak (did I write it correctly?) and I didn’t get offended in any of these instances. Because these were obviously well-meaning wishes. Arguably they were more offensive than the people wishing merry Christmas to Julia Ioffe, because these people were aware that I was not a member of their religious traditions. But they meant it well. So I just said “thank you.”
Julia Ioffe could also just say a thanks without explaining that she really doesn’t celebrate it. She could just move on with her life without destroying everyone else’s good mood and nice habits of wishing each other something good.
So now Dmitry might understand what it is about.
I don’t follow these people, but I can imagine three different positions that this could describe:
While much of economic growth is real and would be likely to continue, reckless market manipulation exacerbated by the moral hazard of potential bailouts will lead to such a severe crisis that real economic growth could be completely undermined.
While much of economic growth is real and is likely to continue, up to and after an economic crisis, all of the data show that the financial markets are becoming increasingly volatile and that frequency of market moves as a function of magnitude follow a power law (like earthquakes), so it is not unreasonable to make some preparations for an enormous economic crisis in the same way that the Japanese prepare for enormous earthquakes.
I imagine that if Taleb were to take some testosterone blockers and then make his point in a more level-headed way, his position would sound something like 3. I recommend Mark Buchanan’s “Forecast” as a popular introduction to how these problems are approached in “econophysics”.
Yeah, even Alexander Cockburn had this to say:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/25/to-hell-with-happy-holidays/
Tell that to the Rodnovor who will shoot you in your face you fat cuck lol
Christian women would be lured away by Viking men combing their long hair.
Your christian women are getting fucked by & breeding for everyone and everything but you LOL
No one gives a fuck about Grey and old western Europe lol the only decent young women there have moved far beyond the bastard son of Mariam & Panthera.
How do weak christcucks balance pretending to be scientific whilst ignoring the existence of Panthera & the mentally ill whoring of Mariam.
Something which btw, is still common among Jewish women who are the most mentally ill group in America today.
How could anyone not take seriously literal talmudry made up hundreds of years later?
Absolute, 100%, unadulterated bullshit. Are you Jewish? Only a Jew or a Muslim could be so ignorant about Russian culture.
The most important Christian holiday is Easter, vastly more important than the other 12 Christian holidays put together.
Celebrating Christmas is a Western import. It was never popular, and true Christians look down on the imported “Christmas” (but really Yuletide, i.e., pagan) celebrations.
For modern Christians Christmas is a time of fasting and reflection.
There are only two requirements for being Jewish:
a) Hating Jesus Christ.
b) A belief in Jewish racial supremacy.
So, nothing remarkable or strange in Ioffe’s behavior. She’s just being a Jew and doing the traditional Jewish things.
I guess melanf was not raised in a religious family. Besides, he might be correct in some sense: people already had lots of work to do by Easter (though perhaps not yet in Russia?), and food was running scarce (though, again, maybe not in Russia? where peasants had to store lots of grain for the frequent droughts), while due to the short days even non-agricultural work was difficult or impossible to perform in late December. Therefore, Christmas was a good time for feasting and drinking, so for simple people it might have been in some sense bigger than the religiously more significant Easter.
Though Easter also followed the lengthiest fast, so it was also very significant even for simple hedonists.
Better yet, that most coddled and overrated brat should be ideally ignored as much as possible. That she continues to get propped by the NPR, CNN, MSNBC establishment likes, is part of a negative issue concerning mass media.
Another Jewish perspective indicating that Ioffe isn’t representative of all Jews:
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/21/18151903/history-jews-chinese-food-christmas-kosher-american
Excerpt –
This and some other pertinent comments have been put on hold (as in not posted) below Steve Sailor’s article on the Ioffe piece.
With Russia especially (though not exclusively) in mind, Easter came around the time that the weather was changing from colder to more pleasant conditions – something that (IMO and that of some others) added onto the feeling of celebrating this holiday.
You don’t have to be raised in a religious family to know the most basic things about Russia. (Knowing the biggest holiday in Russia is one of those things.)
No, false. Easter is followed by 40 days of feasting and celebration. In contrast, Christmastime is a time of fasting.
That said, let me expound a bit.
Russia before the Soviet times had considerable religious diversity. Some people celebrated Yule right around Christmastime. Yule is a pagan holiday, celebrated in a typical pagan fashion: wearing costumes, getting drunk, summoning “spirits”, maybe having sex. Celebrating Yule wasn’t universal or mainstream, though. The Soviets only made it look like it was universal in the media, but this was just lousy anti-Christian propaganda. Easter remained the #2 most important holiday in the USSR even despite the religious persecution. (Yule, a.k.a. New Year, was #1, but New Year celebrations are quickly losing social approval and importance in modern Russia.)
The hypothesis that in pre-revolutionary Russia Pascha was a holiday more important than Christmas
seems to be supported by the fact that some form of its celebration was not uncommon even in the Soviet Union, while that of Christmas wasn’t. (My wife was born on Pascha, in her home village in Ukraine. The birth was difficult and they needed to be transferred to a birth house some kilometers away, but found it very difficult to find anyone sober enough to help with the transfer.)
As for “pagan yuletide”, I’ve read that it was the Germanic Romanov’s who introduced the Christmas
tree to Russia, but by that point the tree had been Christianized in symbolism (as a type of the cross). Similarly, in Orthodox iconography, the manger represents the tomb of Christ and the swaddling clothes his shroud.
Wth are you talking about faggot?
Celcus and others contemporary to the time also speak of it.
They’ve found his grave as well lol
Otherwise yes Jesus Aladin flew away on his magic carpet & the white race was saved.
Easter is the name of a German Goddess..
Christian holidays are today just an excuse for inter racial sex
So the evidence is that someone who hated Christ said it and that a random tombstone with a common name on it was found?
The dweebs at Marginal Revolution would like to celebrate Christmas, but are apparently too afraid to post something relevant to Christmas as such.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/12/merry-christmas-12.html
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/12/merry-christmas-11.html
The market thinks that Germany cannot afford to have Italian banks collapse and bring the European system of Germany down.
https://www.businessinsider.com/european-bank-runs-and-failure-of-credit-anstalt-in-1931-2012-5?r=US&IR=T
A recession turned into the Great Depression when France refused to help Germany over the Credit Anstalt bank failure. The international relations context is the key.
Puritans didn’t celebrate Christmas as much as others, that is why Thanksgiving is so big for them. I would say Christmas is a much bigger event in England, the Americans don’t even have Boxing Day.
Most people still believe in God and the church in my upper middle class suburb is packed for all the Christmas services.
Good news! Russia just expanded its sanctions against the Ukraine:
https://twitter.com/MedvedevRussia/status/1077528876929167360
The original Russian list, published in early November, included 300 Ukrainian individuals and entities. Apparently, it was expanded by another 200.
The Ukraine is dying. It is Russia’s job to push it over the cliff.
Let’s not talk about evidence when it comes to believing Aladin mom didn’t fuck half the town, the reason she got married to an old man or that Aladin Kike died & then went to circumcised heaven.
Are you gonna run around brandishing a holy foreskin christcuck?
Not just any random tombstone but a Lebanese Centurion.
I know as much about Julia Ioffe, as I know about why her non-evil twin Karlin has recently stopped talking to us.
So for Ioffe’s behaviour I guess early-onset menopause; while for Karlin – that he has got a girlfriend?
China is crushing the Uighur insurgency not through ruthlessness but advanced surveillance, an interesting new model.
The emerging conflict between Russia and Belarus deserves more attention:
Lukashenka will no longer call Russia a “brotherly state”.
https://www.rbc.ru/politics/24/12/2018/5c2103ad9a7947dbc752268a
Russian finance minister says that Russia will no longer subsidize Belarus in exchange for nothing.
https://www.rbc.ru/economics/25/12/2018/5c22072f9a794722a5cbbb3c
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophasia
Stay safe, bro.
Re: the Boers. What I meant to say was that the trend was untenable. At the pop ratio of Rhodesia in its final days is about when you need complete ruthlessness to continue with whites in power. And I think in South Africa a lot of whites wanted to give up when they were in power, to generate goodwill. It seems it was the wrong strategy.
You make a good argument about strategic interests and the Panama Canal, but, I think, in hindsight, annexing Puerto Rico was one of the all-time bonehead political moves of all history. The direct costs, as well as the costs of immivasion have been very high. Almost incalculable if you add in the political dimension.
The most parsimonious explanation is that Ioffe is AK’s girlfriend
It does have a kind of soft ruthlessness to it, like megaphones blaring constantly on public streets. Officials basically demolishing their culture and then constructing a phony one for Chinese tourists. There are also re-education camps. Many are banned from travelling to Han areas.
I also wonder about the rumors of organ harvesting, but as a foreignor, it would be hard to tell if something like that is true.
I used to like real trees, but have you have thrown a pine branch into a campfire? They say if a Christmas tree catches fire, you don’t have a chance. Being in a confined space, the heat instantly cooks you. I don’t know if it is an urban legend. What would it take – the much vaunted and somewhat rare thunder snow (lightning in a winterstorm)? And how likely is it with a waterbowl?
If I lived out in the country, I’d probably set one up outside and see how easy it would be to light on fire with a waterbowl.
Maybe there is some way to do a calculation with cubic feet of air. But, then again, if you live in a wooden house, maybe there is not much point in that. I once heard someone make a funny stereotype about Germans: they are crazy about fire because so few have wooden houses.
Stolen Valor Detective (incidentally, I’ve always wanted to steal some valor–perhaps I can get into corporate valor theft and claim I was given national awards in accounting) qualified his position on guerrilla wars and empire by limiting it to the modern period.
That begs the question–what’s different about the modern period that changes things?
Seems like there are two major changes:
1 – Moral evolution has made such ruthlessness untenable
2 – Urbanization and literacy have increased the political power of common people, which makes them less willing to sustain casualties
A possible third problem is the modern fertility transition and improved hygiene, diet, medical care, etc. further making people more casualty averse.
This doesn’t change the definition or method of victory over the insurgents, but it does make it easier for the insurgents to defeat you politically. The recipe for victory is still the same as it always was, which the Jewish strategist and historian Edward Luttwak described as making the civilian population fear you more than they fear the insurgents.
The US Army General Ray Odierno is described as independently having come to this conclusion during the American occupation of Iraq. He started asking himself routinely, “What would Saddam do?”
Seems that these two problems can be overcome by implementing a totalitarian political system which holds that the expansion of its own power is the highest moral goal. That said the two such systems which came into being in the 20th century did not perpetuate themselves.
A modern guerrilla war which meets Stolen Valor Detective’s metric for COIN success would be the Philippine War. The insurgency was crushed, Filipinos passively accepted American domination, and in fact America won their hearts and minds to such an extent that Filipinos have excellent English language proficiency.
You’re giving these people far more credit than they deserve.
Some of them are simply hucksters who have found that doom sells. I believe Marc Faber is in this category. Nouriel Roubini may be as well.
Most of the others are simply Austro-libertarians, which means they’re religious fanatics who worship gold and consider debt (especially state debt) to be sinful and evil. There are always ready made arguments to discredit data undermining their positions as well (e.g. inflation statistics are phony and stocks only rise b/c central bank intervention).
Taleb to his credit is not like these people, and he’s generally making the second and third point. It’s certainly true that attempting to eliminate risk tends to increase systemic fragility, and this isn’t just the case in finance.
It’s certainly not unreasonable to make preparations for an economic crisis (or even simply a “normal” bear market or a “normal” recession), but following the advice of the permabears is unreasonable as it means you forego market gains. Unless, of course, gold goes to $50,000 per ounce Real Soon Now as they’ve been predicting for years.
How does it look like in the rest of the year?
There’s certainly still a lot of attachment to Christian traditions, and a vague belief in God may well be widespread (true atheism is a pretty bleak world view after all). But I think Christianity as a coherent belief system is pretty much dead in Western Europe.
Nice time capsule. A piece from 2012 about how everything was going to hell in Europe annnnnnny day now.
Italy isn’t Greece and has the resources to bail out its own banks, as it did with Monte dei Paschi in 2017.
While the policy response to the Great Financial Crisis and subsequent Euro Crisis hasn’t been optimal (especially in the case of the Euro), it has been much better than the Great Depression. And importantly today no one was on the gold standard to begin with, so outside of the Eurozone no one operated under gold standard constraints (in the Eurozone Germany insists on it for irrational reasons).
The fact that Rhodesia’s military efforts were relatively successful despite whites only being 4% of the population and laboring under enormous burdens is telling. Whites fell from one-fifth of the population in Verwoerd’s heyday to one-seventh by the time of the coup d’etat against Botha. Today they’re one-fifteenth of the population and dwindling. Note that about one-fifth of the white population has emigrated since 1990 and the ANC government has permitted more or less uncontrolled immigration from the rest of black Africa (a problem which contributes to the country’s sky high unemployment rate).
So yes, over a long enough timescale the differential rate of reproduction between blacks and whites in South Africa was not sustainable. South Africa made this problem worse by permitting black immigration for economic reasons.
I can Karlin taking a similar view with respect to Russia’s relations with Central Asia. In the Tsarist period, demographic momentum was on Russia’s side. Today it is just the opposite, which calls for a reappraisal of Russia’s traditional policy.
The Afrikaners were politically quite solid. They started majority voting for the KP even while Botha was still in power. If not for the Anglo voters the KP would’ve come to power and there would likely still be Apartheid today.
Hindsight is 20/20, but one can identify many other errors.
The first that comes to mind was the decision to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic. I’ve always described republicanism as a mental illness, and obviously this was done purely for egotistical reasons. This made it much easier for the UK to expel South Africa from the commonwealth, which in turn made it much easier for the UK to embargo arms just a few years later.
The country permitting itself to be dependent on foreign finance was indescribably foolish and resulted in severe problems after 1985.
While no level of internal reform was ever going to stop Western hostility, in a lot of ways apartheid did go too far. The denial of political rights to other civilized races such as subcontinentals and orientals until 1985 for instance. And while the ban on multiracial organizations was not unreasonable, extending this ban to foreign sports teams seems very dubious to me.
In some aspects perhaps South Africa should’ve been more ruthless however. Foreign countries providing support for the ANC should’ve been targeted with terrorist attacks, just as Israel does (it is possible the South Africans murdered the Swedish Prime Minister). Outright seizing the oilfields in Angola would’ve solved some economic problems in South Africa, while providing powerful political allies in America and Britain in the form of Big Oil.
As for Porto Rico the problem was the decision to grant them citizenship in 1917 in order to conscript them for military service (as if America with its 100 million people didn’t have enough manpower). America’s political system and ideology make imperialism a very bad choice for us. You could take this beyond America by noting that imperialism is always dangerous because there will always be a political faction which can profit from granting power to colonized peoples.
A couple of years ago the Belarusian entry in Eurovision was in Belarusian, a jaunty little folk ditty with a real charm to it (‘charm’ is certainly not anyone’s first thought when it comes to eastern slavs).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElqbLPcTHAI
In pre-Soviet times Belarusian was sometimes written in a Czech-style latin script (łacinka) and there used to be a site that automatically translated modern Belarusian pages into it and I read a few short stories in it (pretty accessible for me knowing Polish and a sliver of Russian).
OT but if you want to promote social conservatism in a population, is religious social conservatism more efficient as a method than secular arguments for conservatism? I mean the only two cases that I know of where populations became more conservative over the past 20 years are Malaysia and Indonesia, where the reason was the reemphasis of Islam in the public and private sphere, which would count as religious conservatism.
Well if you worry about fire, you could have a live tree without any kind of lighting, on it and it would still be nicer than the artificial tree.
My grandparents had even in the past candles near around a live tree (this is probably a bit dangerous).
You can thank American occupation of the Philippines for making Filipinos even more pozzed than Americans themselves.
Maybe Russia watchers belong to a guild, and each year they drunkenly meet each other at the annual Christmas Party (well, of course,- actually a secret Hanukkah party).
Yeah, really? So Gogol’s “Christmas Eve” is a slander on “Russian culture”? And Gogol himself was probably a secret Jew…
And the fact that serfs workers who worked at the Ural factories in the 18th century had on Christmas 14 days vacation – it is probably also the Jewish machinations
Are you retarded? Did you even read the story? Hint:
a) The story isn’t about Christmas or celebrating Christmas at all.
b) The story isn’t about “Russian culture”, it’s a fantasy story about demons and sex and other mystical shit.
c) It isn’t even about Russia at all, it’s an attempt to make Ukraine fantastical and exotic.
Goddamn, you are one stupid sonavabitch.
By strange coincidence, serfs today also have 14 days vacation around yuletide. This isn’t really connected with Christmas, it’s just a winter holiday.
Indeed. English source here:
https://belsat.eu/en/news/i-do-not-call-russia-brotherly-state-anymore-lukashenka/
I just bought a plastic tree, because I finally wanted to have a tree now that I couldn’t spend Christmas Eve at my parents. I’ve so far had two visitors, both asked if it was real. The trick is to buy a more expensive one, not a cheap and ugly plastic-looking plastic tree. There are many benefits. It’s going to last several years, so if you’re going to buy trees anyway, it’s a good investment. It’s cleaner. It doesn’t kill an actual innocent tree. (Okay, that last one is a bit bullshit.)
https://bookfrom.net/nikolai-gogol/41779-the_night_before_christmas.html
“THE DAY OF CHRISTMAS EVE ENDED, AND the night began, cold and clear. The stars and the crescent moon shone brightly upon the Christian world, helping all the good folks welcome the birth of our Savior. The cold grew sharper, yet the night was so quiet that one could hear the snow squeak under a traveler’s boots from half a mile away. Caroling hadn’t yet begun; village youths weren’t yet crowded outside the windows waiting for treats; the moon alone peeked through, as though inviting the girls to finish up their toilette and run out onto the clean, sparkling snow……
the moon slid out and rose slowly into the sky. The whole world changed. The blizzard died down, the ground lit up like a silvery desert, and even the cold seemed warmer. Bands of girls and boys carrying sacks with treats poured into the streets, and Christmas carols filled the air. What a gorgeous night! How can one describe the fun of mingling with the carolers? It’s nice and warm under the sheepskin, the cold paints the young cheeks brighter, and the devil himself goads youngsters into mischief. A group of laughing girls with full sacks ran into Oksana’s house and surrounded the beauty, deafening Vakula with laughter and chatter. Everyone wanted to report what happened during their caroling and to show her their booty…“”
As you can see, it was (in the past ) a normal fun holiday (like one modern American holiday with caroling), not religious boredom
which the Jewish strategist
Is Jewish strategy different from generic strategy? If so, do you think that there is also a transgenderqueer strategy that is different as well?
It’s almost like these Ukrainians and Belorussians, for some unknown reasons, don’t want your “help”.
Privately hosted forum/chan or perhaps mailing list is strongly preferable, I think. Running some app by a usual third party is a quick invitation to be deplatformed, doxed etc by some busybody SJW. I seem to recall that Discord, for example, has let law enforcement listen in on privately hosted instances. It’s probably the same for everything run in the US or the West.
It would be nice if posted messages also were scrubbed of identities like emails and other distinguishing marks to make malicious archiving more difficult. Perhaps a chan then?
Best if it’s also robust and needs a minimum of hand holding to run, including being reasonably secure to avoid too easy shenanigans.
Whatever the solution, the key is of course the data. Take a daily offsite backup of the membership so you can easily reconstruct it when deplatformed.
The most controversial part of some notes taken during an interview with polymath and supergenius Greg Cochran:
https://adarkwindhowls.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/conversation-with-a-scientist/
It’s probably especially devious.
On a serious note, Luttwak was one of the first, in 1975, to advocate for US military intervention in the Mideast.
From Andrew Bacevich’s America’s war for the greater Middle East:
From his own mouth:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/09/edward-luttwak-machiavelli-of-maryland
Maybe that’s just some special kind of “humour”. Though it certainly could be used as a piece of evidence for certain interpretations what exactly might be motivating people like Luttwak in their arguments for military interventions.
But at least Thorfinnson seems to have profited from one of his books. My impression is that ancient historians generally dismiss his work about the Romans’ alleged grand strategy, but maybe he does provide some useful insight.
Jews should always be publicly identified as Jewish.
From what I’ve heard, those Finns were the losers of the Red-White Finnish civil war. They were commies when they arrived.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWEYuRDTk8c
Everyone’s ethnicity should always be identified. I want to know when reading about, say, Croatia, if the author is Croat, Serb, Hungarian, Jewish, German, French, Hausa, Bushman, or Andamanese. It’s a useful information, similar to how, when reading stock market analysis, I need to know which stocks the author is invested in and which is he shorting.
I’d prefer a mailing list where each user would create a special email address for that purpose. Something like [email protected], [email protected], etc. (Maybe gmail is not the best, or we can leave the provider to the members.) That way we can be sure that the email was specifically registered for that purpose and nothing else. Maybe the monikers should be left out of the addresses. So someone seizing the mailing list addresses would get him no further than a list of unused email addresses.
The email is good because it makes it easy for users to contact each other.
I guess it’s a Christmas miracle!
Another take from someone who I generally agree with:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/12/25/belarusian-leader-lukashenko-has-misplaced-his-faith-in-compromise-with-west-again.html
The main problem with a live Christmas tree, IME, is that it drops its needles once it dries out. So when it’s time to throw the tree out, you also get to do a major cleanup operation.
Even so, I do by far prefer live trees to sensible plastic.
It’s probably especially devious.
Bad GR.
Interesting.
Do you suppose that he could have skewed his general military strategy with an eye upon its possible application in the ME?
Related observation.
Trump seems to be going rogue with regard to “Jewish influence” on ME policy.
Are dem Jews in control or not?
When you use “my community” do you mean Hungarian?
Well, register a fresh email on Yandex or Protonmail, if that seems more secure. Or maybe AK could run a private IMAP/POP server too. (I’m not sure I seriously recommend this. But then I’m not sure I disrecommend it either.)
NB: Either way, I do not recommend using Gmail, Hotmail, and all the rest.
What should be your public identification?
Depends. What context?
Giving to beggars.
He’s got an Israeli wife, his daughter has served in the Israeli army; I don’t think it would be unreasonable to suspect that this plays some role in his pronouncements about Mideast strategy (though I’m not sure how consistent he is, apparently he’s also written at times that the US should disengage from the Mideast, because those backwards countries only bring trouble; tbh he comes across somewhat like a self-promoting charlatan who likes to exaggerate his own importance, so I don’t care to find out more about him. Maybe Thorfinsson knows more about his views, he seems to have read him after all).
I was thinking about Hungary, the country. By far the most often I give to beggars (always homeless) in Budapest. I avoid any beggars who don’t seem homeless. But I often give to the homeless when they are not begging. (Actually, that’s very typical.) They are usually just older alcoholic dudes. Sometimes women.
You realized he was kidding, didn’t you?
Yes, apparently you didn’t recognize the same from me.
Registering a fresh email address not used (and not usable, hence the awkwardness) for anything else is safer in that the address itself will not be possible to be linked to anything. If you use your real email address, then some amateur hacker could dox you. The worst are email addresses which contain your name.
The biggest risk is not that Google or Facebook doxes you, the biggest danger is some amateur SJW or an organization like the SPLC.
Mideast strategy (though I’m not sure how consistent he is…. Maybe Thorfinsson knows more about his views, he seems to have read him after all).
I know zip.
I took from Thor’s comment that he was a military strategist, not necessarily a ME military strategist. Hence my question as to whether he could have skewed his “generic” strategy advice with an eye on the ME. The question really goes to the heart of the JQ.
Lukashenka is stubborn as fuck, the strategy of blackmailing Russia has always worked for him in the past – he won’t give an inch. But as a Russian, I’m pleased that our government is no longer willing to write him blank checks. They seem to be learning from Ukrainian experience.
I can’t really answer that, I don’t know much more about Luttwak’s general views about strategy than what’s in the quote by Bacevich above (seems like a precursor of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumsfeld_Doctrine ).
And I’m not really sure whether the question really should be if he deliberately skewed his advice, with intention to mislead and to advance Israeli interests (one also has to remember the Cold war background of his 1975 piece of course; arguably Israel was a much more useful ally to the US than it is today). I don’t think that’s really how those neoconnish foreign policy advisers operate mentally; they’re probably quite sincere in their beliefs.
The EU is dealing with a country that is not trying to find the correct policy, Italy is gaming the EU
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/12/the-next-italian-crisis/
From the very begining Italy has never obeyed the EU rules, and now they have elected a extreme-populist government with a mandate to openly defy the EU, which is what the Italian government are doing. Italy is betting that Germany, for its own selfish reasons, will be forced to keep the euro going and the freeloading Italian lifestyle with it.
But you say Germany is perfectly irrational and presumably it just happens to have a balance sheet compatible with it being run on mercantile lines. The great depression was not caused by French hatred of Austria and Germany, no it was plain lack of classical economic wisdom. Look, the Italians know what they are supposed to do they just are refusing to do it.
Germany is a military freeloader on the US, but unfortunately for Germany, it has no longer has a Soviet threat it needs America’s help with because Russia is so weak . America will haveleave Germany to go to contain China, and Germany will have to spend some money on defence. Russia is getting America out of Germany, Russia is not going to be so stupid as to make itself any kind of ally of China, because that would make America more interested in keeping forces in Western Europe
There’s nothing wrong with Italy’s fiscal policy. Perhaps suboptimal, but there’s nothing wrong with it. Italy poses no danger to the Eurozone whatsoever. Note that the article you linked says that Italy plans a fiscal deficit of…2.4% of GDP.
Inflation in Italy is 1.5% and the 10 year bond yield is 2.8%. And given that Italy has a 10.6% unemployment rate, traditionally one would expect expansive fiscal policy to reduce unemployment and shrink the output gap.
What exactly the problem here, other than the fact that the Eurozone has stupid rules brought about by cack-brained German ideas?
Italy does have an economic problem, but this isn’t it. Italy’s economic problem is that since joining the Euro its manufacturing sector has become uncompetitive thanks to German “wage restraint”. In the past Italy could always deal with this by devaluing the Lira.
And yes, Germany’s economic policy is irrational. The country has a ridiculous current account surplus of 8% of GDP. Even ignoring the unhealthy impact of Germany’s trade surpluses on its neighbors, the Germans are foregoing consumption and thus suffering from lower living standards than they can afford.
Great idea! I would also add sex, sexual orientation, religion, income level, exact skin shade, and more. Based on this information, you’ll be assigned a score. We can call it intersectionality.
Luttwak’s ideas in 1975 aren’t the worst. The fact that the West allowed a bunch of dune coons to set off a decade long economic and monetary crisis by denying us the energy that we discovered and developed is incredibly pathetic.
The USA was willing to put half a million men in Viet Nam and lose 50,000 dead for the most dubious reasons, but we meekly rolled over when the Arabalonians plunged a knife in the economic heart of the Western world.
His 2015 remarks strike me as a joke. I don’t recall what his views in 2002 were.
When I was employed, my Jewish boss and I were the only practicing “believers” (I’m Anglican 🙂 ) in a fairly big management team. He had absolutely no trouble with being wished Merry Christmas, neither did my son”s Muslim friend from Iraq who spent Christmas day with us. My Muslim sister in law has just cooked a large Christmas dinner for us. My wife’s Hindu in-laws relish Christmas.
The opposition to explicitly Christian imagery in the UK is from posturing Labour Party councillors.
I can understand the sentiment (have recently admitted to similar fantasies after all), but I doubt anything positive would have come out of such a project.
Can’t find anything about Luttwak’s views on Iraq in 2002/03…supposedly he later criticized the war (though I’m not sure whether in principle or just its management).
His positions on other issues are quite predictable though:
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/07/18/edward-n-luttwak/bombing-three-year-plan-iran
(from 2006, about the possibility of airstrikes on Iran; even worse, he strongly suggests there should be support for various separatist movements in Iran).
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/opinion/sunday/in-syria-america-loses-if-either-side-wins.html
Pretty cynical fellow. Maybe not quite as deranged as the worst neocons (at least he doesn’t call for direct intervention and regime change in Syria in his 2013 piece). But his general inclinations seem to be for maximum chaos in the Mideast.
There are a couple of million new style Pagans in Russia. Rodnveri. Most are some form of ariosophist straight out of the Thule Society. Demented hippies!
Invading Saudi Arabia with Israel as an ally seems like a very bad idea.
Threatening OPEC states with carpet bombing might have been fruitful.
That said, realistically probably the best course of action would have been the development of synthetic fuels based on the abundant coal resources available in North America, Western Europe, South Africa, and Australia.
In addition to eliminating dependence on OPEC (and likely driving most of those regimes into bankruptcy), it would’ve harmed the Soviet Union.
The possibility was discussed in West Germany and America, but never went anywhere it seems. One coal gasification plant in North Dakota was built. South Africa actually did develop a successful synthetic fuels program based on WW2 German technology, though they were never able to replace all imported oil.
As for the Mideast today, maintaining maximum chaos in Syria seems like a reasonable foreign policy goal…for Israel (and perhaps Turkey). I don’t believe that America in fact has any strategic interests in Syria, but Europe’s interests would best be served by Assad winning the Syria civil war and reestablishing a strong central government.
Wales was once renowned for Non Conformist chapels. As late as the 60’s the association was strong. They have now all but disappeared. Anglicans and Romans, once secondary are now the main denominations with Weleyans just about visible. From the most religious to the least part of the UK in 50 years. Economic stress played a large role. The ambitious and disciplined, overwhelmingly Chapel attenders, left. With the leaders removed the rest fell apart. But, as in the rest of the UK, the Anglican decline continues but at a slower and slower rate.
Of course, it would be the only chance to get rid of at least some of the Syrians now in Germany and other European countries. One would probably have to pay Assad a lot of money to take them back (and promise not to harm them…at least not immediately), but that would be much better than keeping them around and granting them citizenship.
I don’t see either how the average American is supposed to have any interests in indefinite civil war in Syria. The arguments of people like Luttwak seem just fundamentally disingenuous.
The Syrian government has already announced that it is ready for the refugees to return home.
Beyond the refugee issue (or terrorism for that matter), it’s obviously not in Europe’s interest to have a state with an extensive Mediterranean coast fall apart. It’s not implausible that pirates would turn such a location into a haven.
Europe could also use a pipeline route to the Persian Gulf (certainly this is more useful than LNG terminals). This is in fact frequently touted as the reason for the destabilization of Syria, as if Assad has some sort of pathological hatred of pipelines and only in the event of his removal can they be constructed…
I don’t see any reason for Europe to pay Assad money (except to the extent it’s needed to help him win the war, but it seems like Russia and Iran are enough there), but in the postwar reconstruction Europe should become the largest investor.
I have my doubts how sincere they are about that. I don’t have any data, but my impression is that a substantial number of the Syrian refugees in Europe are underclass Sunni trash, that is people whom Assad’s regime is probably glad to be rid of, because they’re the kind of Syrians that would back Islamist insurgencies against the regime. There are some reports about Assad’s forces having engaged in ethnic cleansing of such people, to secure Syrian cities against any repeat of what has happened in the last few years. That’s why I suppose one would have to pay Assad to take back Syrian nationals and make some guarantees for their safety.
Of course the bigger problem that the immigration lobby in Europe is doing everything in its power to turn Syrian refugees into permanent residents.
Ye virgin births & Mohammad unicorns while white women get fucked out by coloreds
Let’s celebrate the genocide of indigenous European culture
So they’ve made a movie about the Kursk disaster.
Looks like HATO propaganda to me, for domestic consumption.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xExzwSc4_eQ
Have any Russian bloggers/writers covered this story in a comprehensive way? I’ve only ever read sources from within the bubble. I’m sure the Russian Navy at the time was incompetent, but that this movie will use that era’s incompetence to paint a picture of Russia in general as full of abused common people at the mercy of big bad Putin.
Jewish boss, Muslim friend, Muslim sister in law, Hindu in law, you still missing the black and gay to complete your Pokemon diversity collection.
Okay.
It’s impractical to have it all, but it’s obvious that it’s multi-dimensional and so cannot be represented with just one number. At least it shouldn’t be a secret.
I saw the movie. Mediocre but better than i expected. No mention of Putin anywhere in the movie.
A lot of the putatively Syrian migrants who came to Sweden turned out to be Iraqis or Afghanis or other random muslim trash. There is apparently even a contigent of Moroccan ‘street kids’ (whatever that means) who can’t possibly be deported back to their peaceful home country.
(((Moldbug)))
Young families and old people, but that has always been the case. What is new is what Charles Murray has identified with the lower classes being cast adrift.
I read Faber’s Tommorow’s Gold in the early noughties at university. He advocated investing in gold, natural resources, Russia and Eastern Europe, I agreed and did. They were the best performing asset classes in that period. I also remember him going on CNBC when the S&P bottomed advocating you buy, the host jumped on him for being a bull. I always pay attention to his prognostications.
I don’t have a representative sample of Rodnoveri, but I think I do have a pretty good sample of Russian hippies, and indeed some of them are into resurrecting some kind of imagined Slavic folk culture. So far as I know, though, my hippies don’t sacrifice to Perun, and even some of the more Rodnoverish are also interested in the same kinds of things that typical hippies like (Indian clothes and incense, yoga, and so on).
Zambians mostly.
The connection is Theosophy. Invented in Russia and transferred to London, San Francisco and India. Also taken up in Germany. This was before WW1. It become the bedrock of hippy philosophy minus the anti-Semitism. That’s why you can see the connections. Wait for your next trip to Grand Tartary.
More one reads biographies of important an influential people from that period more learns about how Theosophy was influential. Some even allege that Ghandi learned Hinduism from Blavatsky. We already knew that he was greatly influenced by Tolstoy in his pacifism and passive resistance.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/russia-israel-s-syria-strike-directly-endangered-two-civilian-flights-1.6784562
Gotta say: Russia is an idiot! Nobody is going to pay attentions to Russian complaints and warnings. They will pay attention when Israeli pilots start dying. Or better yet, when one of them gets captured by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
What was the point of even bringing S300 to Syria if they are going to remain silent, fucking shithead Russia!
Shooting down Israeli jets is just plain not worth it. Would you sacrifice Russian servicemen’s lives for the sake of saving Arabs’/Iranians’ asses?
I would not sacrifice Russian lifes, just kill Jews. In case you’re too dim to notice, Israeli airstikes is a direct threat to Russian assets and personnel in Syria. They are responsible for the loss of Russian plane in September.
downing Israeli planes could lead to Israeli retaliating against Russian assets in the region. For the time being the Il 38 downing was an isolated incident. Israel is the dominant military power in the Middle East and due to the Jewish Lobby in Congress has total US support. Israeli forces (without potential US backing) already outnumber the Russian contingent at Hmeimimm airbase. You only pick the fights that you can win and Putin knows that. Throwing a wrench in Russia’s entire middle east strategy due to Israel’s recklessness is out of the window.
The Northern League used to talk about the north of Italy breaking away and joining in effect, with Germany. Then, the League made electoral gains by talking about Italy leaving the EU. Now that they are in power the League are being placatory, while ignoring the responsibilities Italy signed up to in the EU. It seems to me that Italians vote for whoever will try and game the German system so that Italians can continue with their luxury lifestyle.
That is another way of saying that Italy cannot compete on equal terms with Germany. Well no-one can! Britain always makes a mistake when it wagers everything on the outcome of a Continental battle. A single currency will deindustrialise the noncompetitive rest of Europe and make Germany a world economic power. British productive capacity stared eroding almost as soon as it joined the what was then called the European Economic Community. Lord Weinstock, Britain’s most successful postwar industrialist predicted the EU single trading and currency area would make a clean sweep of Britain. And that was exactly what was happening and Britain had Dunkirk it out the EU, and suffer the vindictive retaliation of Germany as implemented by their French girlfriend. Once the Continentals had taken out Britain’s productive capacity, they would have come for the City of London banks. with regulation that would have handicapped them against German and French competition. Britain was always intended to be the EU’s milch cow, there to be beaten, starved, and whipped.
Apples apples and oranges; specifically, the difference between having a primary objective of making a country strong (Germany) and the goal of having the people in it happy (Italy). A government that wants to put making the country strong before anything else has to have people who are obedient, which Germans are. Germany tries to argue its integration of a million refugees should be accounted part of its spending on defence. Well it should! Germany intends to make its taxpayers fund the euro as an export promotion scheme for German industry. Slavish German unions agree to keep wages from rising, and the immigrants will be grist to the mill of business’s class war against wages.
It could also lead to Russia nuking Tel-Aviv…
I’m not afraid of a potential Israeli retaliation. At the end of the day Russia is a military superpower. It should not be bullied by a pipsqueak Israel. Putin is making Russia look weak.
Israel has hundreds of warheads on Jericho missiles that can reach European Russia .Russia could raze the entirety of Israel, but Israel could also nuke Krasnodar and Kerch in Return. I’d like to know what leads you to believe that risking a war, whether conventional or nuclear for the sake of some middle eastern shit hole is worth it.
Israel will lose a nuclear war with Russia. Also, Jews are not suicidal people. They are afraid of a real war, and will crawl into a corner the moment Russia begins to bleed them.
What is required of Putin is to convey in no uncertain terms that Russia will use force against Israel. It will be the end of Israeli airstrikes.
Israel Jericho 3 ICBM can hit Moscow and every major Russian city..so the mutually assured destruction situation exists also courtesy of US they have superior missile tracking capability and they would have Arrow 3 and USN based SM 3 cover as well..
Israel enjoys full spectrum dominance within 300 km of its borders with only the Turks theoretically capable of inflicting significant damage but the Turks are not going to risk liquidation of their economy and civil war..
Israeli F 16 Sufa and F 15 E squadrons are more than a match for the roughly 50 Russian Air Force planes in Syria out of which only about 20 are Su 30 SM or Su 35 capable of putting up something resembling a fight the rest are ground attack aircraft..even these are armed with upgraded cold war weapons R 77 and R 73 outclassed by Aim 120 c7 amraam and Python 5..
Nuclear wars are unwinnable for all parties involved, which is why the US didn’t raze the USSR to the ground during the 1960s when it had a clear advantage over the Soviets in terms of AD, missiles and bombers.
Despite, its traditional political instability, its disparate ethnic components, its short history as a nation, and somewhat stodgy historical military record – Italy may be the most successful country in Western Europe (if we call it in Western Europe.)
Why? Because it seems to be the only one bucking globohomo. What is secret sauce? Perhaps, its long North-South axis. It has its “toe” dipped firmly in clannishness. Maybe, that is what is needed for the rest of Europe, more familiarity with Southern Europeans, in some sort of balance, where each side helps the other from going bonkers.
My approach to Israel problem is informed by a belief that eradicating 7 million of Israel’s Jews will do humanity a great favor.
Gandhi was a pacifist because he did not have good access to weapons.
Israeli missile defences have a whopping 25% rate of success against the home-made Palestinian rockets, launched from Gaza strip. Also, Jews want to live, so don’t make laugh, dude.
The R-77 is better than the AMRAAM. The problem is that Russia doesn’t have enough of them. Due to the lack of R-77s, many Russian jets still carry the R-27, which is pretty outdated and doesn’t have a fire and forget mode.
“If Iran attacks Israel, Russia will stand alongside the US to defend Israel,” The Russian ambassador gave Israel that assurance at the Munich security conference earlier this year.
Israel has very quiet German made Dolphin subs with nuclear missiles, they have the capacity to destroy more crucial targets than a couple of provincial Russian cities.
If Russia was seriously nuked by anyone, it would attack the US and China.
I got very lucky with these people myself. I became a convinced Austro-libertarian in high school and read Jim Rogers’ investment books. As a result I bought gold, which performed spectacularly in the naughties. And Rogers had a reasonable thesis outside of Austro-libertarianism: the rise of China meant high demand for commodities.
Of course, as we learned later this century, commodities are cyclical. Something an older generation of investors could’ve told us (take a look at the ’70s).
If I were a decade younger and followed the same advice, I would’ve lost money and missed out on a spectacular bull run.
You can make money in any asset class if you know what you’re doing–or, more realistically, simply get lucky–but that doesn’t mean it’s a good choice for most investors. In particular, as the legendary John Templeton said, it’s when your investing decisions worked out well for you that you really need to scrutinize them.
I have no doubt that the doomerists are sincere (particularly Schiff, whose father died in federal prison for his libertarian convictions), but that doesn’t mean they’re correct.
At the end of the day commodities are physical inputs into the capital structure whose prices vary based on market conditions. They do not produce cashflow, they don’t have a moat, and they never improve.
Gold is something of a special case in that’s a pseudo form of money. As a result it conserves its purchasing power on a very long timescale, but unfortunately with a lot of volatility.
I particularly like Warren Buffet’s take on gold from his 2011 annual shareholder letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, reproduced here: http://fortune.com/2012/02/09/warren-buffett-why-stocks-beat-gold-and-bonds/
I’ve long thought, there is a kind of absurdity, where we can read all the ingredients on a candy bar, but not the human aspects of a newspaper, NGO, bureaucratic body, or the makers of a TV show. For me, the most obvious and simple question is, how do they vote? But it would be useful to know much more. Like do they have trust funds? How many gays?
Of course, there would be a great many difficulties in labelling, so it is probably impractical, but a newspaper could at least attempt to have some integrity by having a semi-anonymous survey.
No wonder Russia is not taken seriously by Israel! Now, imagine if Russia said “we will bury you” instead.
Italy has had net zero economic growth for this entire century.
Their unemployment rate is 10%.
What luxury lifestyle?
No wonder Lega and 5 Star are doing well.
The “responsibilities” of the SGP, which are crankery to begin with, have practically never been honored by France and were initially not honored by Germany either.
Germany peaked as a share of world GDP something like a century ago. And the other Germanic countries plus Finland do compete successfully with Germany within the Euro.
France and Italy competed successfully with Germany on European and world markets prior to the introduction of the Euro. Frenchmen and Italians, being Latins, are too hotheaded to adopt “wage restraint” even if the end result is exactly the same as devaluation. Thus the single currency has been a disaster for them.
And now we’re talking about Britain rather than Italy.
Lord Weinstock was correct, but the damage was done decades before the implementation of the Euro, something which the UK never signed up for in any case.
Before the war Britain had no trouble competing with Germany in world markets. There were some sectors in which Germany was more successful, such as chemicals, but the reverse is true as well (textiles and ships for Britain).
I’m of the distinct impression that the reason British industry lost competitiveness was because they were nationalized. Obviously, Lord Weinstock (along with much of the Labour Party of the time) was right to think that joining the Common Market was hardly the solution.
The French and the Italians it should be noted were never competitive with the Germans before the Common Market, because they were too underdeveloped before the war. Within the Common Market they successfully developed.
And calling France Germany’s girlfriend is silly. It’s always German politicians talking about the Franco-German motor and speaking worshipfully about the French. The French just expect the Germans to get along with the program. The Euro was France’s idea and Mitterand demanded the Germans embrace the Euro in order to agree to German reunification. The big idea in France was that signing up for the Euro would give France the power of the Deutsche Mark. Whoops.
Most Italians would tell you their government doesn’t make them very happy.
Functionally there is no difference between wage restraint and devaluation.
Merkel’s millions are nearly all unemployable so not seeing how they help Germany’s employers. It’s rather the Visegrad group that has assisted Germany’s employers.
There’s also Austria and Denmark (if we restrict it to globo and leave the Danes their beloved homo). Denmark was actually the first country in Europe to take serious measures against immigration and Islamification.
The Netherlands is quite close.
Other than cultural factors and the fact that Italians were never subjected to anything like denazification, a lot of the secret sauce might just be Salvini himself.
Exactly the same in Germany. There was a group of a few dozen highly criminal “minors”, mostly from Morocco, in my city (I think they’ve been now shipped off to somewhere else in Germany, because the mayor wanted to get rid of them). The police eventually managed to uncover the real identities and real age of some of them by taking fingerprints and checking with Moroccan authorities…turns out not a single one was actually really under 18 years of age, e.g. two who claimed to be 11 and 13 years old were actually 18 and 20, and one was as old as 28. It’s a grotesque situation.
For now that is true but even if the US got an advantage that made it easy to disarm Russia it would not try and do it. After WW2 the US never seriously considered a nuclear Sunday punch although Russia did not have nuclear weapons then, and it was predictable they would develop them soon. The logical anti-nuclear war thing for America to do would have been to use the treat of a nuking to demand Russia give up all its weapons research and crush it with nukes if it refused. Bertrand Russell and John Von Neunamm both advocated that course of action. When it comes to war, elites are playing a role in the movie inside their own heads, not thinking rationally.
https://youtu.be/e8sRVGGlY3c?t=38
https://www.ozy.com/acumen/why-italians-are-literally-stuffing-money-in-their-mattresses/74615
More or less what Thilo Sarrazin says .
Doesn’t make sense, though, if most of the immivaders (far more than one million in Germany alone in the past three years) are unemployed and subsidized by the government, which will cause taxes to increase.
That’s true, but business lobbyists still have come out strongly in favour of Merkel’s open borders policy. Just recently Ingo Kramer, head of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations (umbrelly organization of employer’s organizations, so very important) has stated that the “integration” of Merkel refugees into the labor market is proceeding wonderfully and that the only problems are due to nasty xenophobes.
I don’t know what motivates these people either, if they’re really that deluded or just want to curry favour with the government, but there have been quite a lot of such statements by prominent managers.
There was a convo about charity or aid to Africa in a previous post, so I thought I’d chime in here, with a few thoughts.
Social media has been a benefit, IMO, because of all the transparent virtue signaling that takes place there. It makes independent-minded people more critical about the venture, when one sees posts that are obviously bragging and self-congratulatory about mundane (and frankly small) acts of charity. What is the motivation? To do good, or to feel good?
One reason some people have a hard time being critical about it is that so much of it is abstract. It is not easily relatable to modern life in the first world. Wells? We have tap. Netting? We have screens on our windows and no malaria. Goats? The last people who owned goats in my family were born in the 1820s. It makes it harder to make comparisons, to question why they could possibly be in need of so much.
Actually, the goat thing (along with reading books like “Dead Aid” ) helped me question it. Where would I be if someone had given free goats to my ancestors 1000 years ago? Maybe, my dumber ancestors would have had more children and I’d be missing 10 IQ points.
I think we need something like Star Trek’s Prime Directive, for Africa. If not Warp Drive, what should be the threshold for contact? I don’t know – how much of technology is copying? But there were parts that didn’t have the wheel – and they probably saw the Chinese or Arabs with it.
Something like 5 of 6 migrants who claimed to be minors turned out to be adults when medically measured by government physicians using standard approaches.
Shortly after this was revealed there was a lot of legal judeo-howling and we haven’t heard much about it since. What a surprise.
The Danes are doing good things, but as an isolate, they don’t imbue me with much optimism because of the smallness of their country in relation to their pozzed neighbors. Germany is the strategic heart of Europe, after all.
Don’t get me wrong, I think an army of motivated Europeans could trounce almost anyone else -Africans at a ratio of 10:1 or more. But if their opponents were Germano-Arab mischlings, numbers would probably tell. That is why Visegrad is so important, but they need to be explicitly racist, for me to feel confidence in them.
How exactly? Aerodynamics wise it uses draggy potato masher type control surfaces due to lack of reliable actuators. It’s X band radar developed by AGAT is 2 generations behind c7 models..it uses a radar fuse as opposed to a laser fuse and Russian electronics lag behind the US by 2 generations..
I wish I knew. It might be just their opportunism and sense that whatever negative it will not apply to them but it also can be something deeper that they know something what you refuse to even think about.
Yeah and Russians don’t? Israel has something like 100 IRBM/ICBMs that can hit Russia and destroy every major Russian city it doesn’t matter that Russia can destroy Israel 1000+ times over..mutually assured destruction 101. The other points stand Israel has qualitative and quantitative superiority to Russian AF deployments in THEIR region and this is a fact on the ground that can’t be wished away..
Like you, I’m definitely encouraged by any sign of european people waking up and deciding not to surrender their countries to African violence and Turkish, Arab, and/or Muslim subjugation.
But truly serious measures against Islamification would have to include the Dutch, Danes, and Austrians having children, I.e. their own, nonMuslim children.
Until and unless the nonMuslim people in those countries start having children at above replacement rate again, each of those countries will be at least slightly more Muslim with each passing year.
Whatever protective measures are enacted and enforced now, will be repealed or ignored by the new Muslim plurality within two generations, perhaps sooner. Enact and enforce them, by all means, but the end result is the same, in a fairly short timeframe, without nonMuslims being born and raised and equipped to survive.
It takes more one nuke to destroy major city, Israel has limited number of nukes that can be deployed, some will miss their targets, many more will be intercepted – unlike Israel, Russia has missile defences that actually work.
Bottomline: Israel will lose a nuclear clash with Russia, MAD does not apply. Israelis know it. I see no good reason why Russia must show this deferrence to Israel. It’s about time we put Israel in its place.
My mistake. I looked at range numbers and assumed that Russian missiles were better. Could you please link material on the subject for further reading?
Weinstock, at me time my employer, made his money by pressuring MPs with GEC factories to lobby for him to win public sector contracts. GEC was an outstanding example of what needed to be removed from the British economy. Open tendering and lack of investment in new technology swept away GEC, STC, Plessey, NEI and so forth.
Mid tech UK industry lost out to the oil curse. Anmelevatex exchange rate overpricing our production and high interest rates to control the consequent money supply issues.
Your best bet is spending time on good defence forums after reading the basics on Wikipedia.key publishing forum,secret projects.Co.UK etc.
Missiles you should read about..
Radar guided:
Meteor( Read about the unique boron propelled ramjet)
AMRAAM(NATO standard )
MICA radar variant
R 77 and it’s modernized variants
Japanese AAM 4 missile(aesa radar on a missile)
IR
Russian Vympel R 73 Archer (Grand daddy of all off boresight missiles)
Python 4/5
Iris t(gimballed seeker)/asraam/aim 9X (focal plane array seeker)
Btw fire and forget is another hype as far as air to air radar guided missiles are concerned the British skyflash /Italian Aspide(AIM 7 sparrow variants) had a much superior performance to AMRAAM when used solely in fire and forget mode in NATO exercises. It is ideal for shooting down aircraft of primitive Air Forces but any airforce with good ECM will be able to jam the tiny X band Radar of an AAM..
Israeli Rafael’s Indian promo
“I believe in you, you believe in me”
“I promise to defend you…”
“Dinga Dinga Dee”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktQOLO4U5iQ
Thanks. Why are Russian electronics still two generations behind? What about thePAK FA? Apparently it has a new on board computer (https://redsamovar.com/2018/02/16/dossier-sukhoi-su-57-pak-fa-la-releve-de-la-garde/) . Will it be enough to catch up to the F-35/ F-22?
It also seems that Russia is still ahead in the missile game.Both Avangard (https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1077985002812555264) and Tsirkon (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/20/russia-tests-hypersonic-missile-that-could-be-ready-for-war-by-2022.html) have been successfully tested and will soon enter service.
The US machine tool industry was decimated around the same time for similar reasons.
Between 1980 – 1985 the value of the Dollar doubled in relation to the next four largest currencies (Yen, D Mark, Sterling, Franc).
In the same time period, the price of Japanese machine tools had dropped considerably in Yen prices, let alone in Dollar prices.
The results were catastrophic. The New England machine tool industry, the birth place of replaceable metal parts, never recovered. Stalwarts like Bryant Chucking Grinder, without which the Soviet Union would not have been able to MIRV its ICBMs, collapsed in a few years.
The sector limped along for the rest of the century, but by the late ’90s the USA was overtaken as the world’s largest producer of machine tools. Today we’re only #6. Haas is the only really notable American firm in the industry. US firms have more or less no presence in laser cutting tools or industrial robots, even though both were invented in America.
A lot of other manufacturing survived Ronald Reagan and Paul Volcker fortunately. Partly because of the larger American market, but also because by the middle of the decade the government decided to save the manufacturing sector. Some industries were outright protected, but perhaps more importantly the Plaza Accord engineered a 51% devaluation of the Dollar over two years.
The next round of damage took place after China’s accession to the WTO, though this time the damage was global and mostly at the low end.
Great examples of why while a lot of small-l libertarian ideas are good, it’s foolish to apply libertarian principles to foreign trade and investment.
Depends on your definition of destroyed city a standard MIRV nuke warhead is 100 kt (5 times Hiroshima).Jericho 3 ICBM has 3 such warheads(W76 derived).Israel has 50 Jericho 3s that is 150 warheads capable of reaching Russia..assuming 50 warheads get through and for redundancy reasons they aim 10(i.e they fire 30 but 20 are intercepted or malfunction(most optimistic scenario)) of these at Moscow and SPG each and 3 each at the next 10 largest cities. Are you seriously suggesting Russian decision makers will be willing to take this sort of punishment(WW 1&2+Bolshevik revolution death toll in 1 day) in exchange for destroying Israel? This according to you is not mutually assured destruction?
You are African right..
Have negroes made anything better than bows and arrows yet?
Under Weinstock, GEC actually had a huge cash mountain for which the City berated him.
Leaner and fitter business perhaps, but real loss of productive capacity that is virtually unique among advanced countries. A Pyrrhic victory.
Russia is a world leader in hypersonic missiles,ICBMs and SAM’s(from hand held verba to S 500) and LOX Kerosene rocket engines.
It is unique in developing storable liquid fuel technology for ICBMs and things like super cavitation torpedoes
It has competitive offerings in Nuclear submarines..
It is badly slipping in most other areas from near parity with the West overall(and superiority in several areas) in the USSR era to an also ran..it at the end of the day has an economy half the size of India it only has so much funds to spend and unlike the USSR era the very brightest don’t opt for careers in the military industrial complex..
Interesting.
Also, my understanding is that the still-living 23 (or so) Russian sailors died within 6 hours of the accident. If that’s true, not like there was much the inept Russian fleet could do even with Scandinavian-British help.
I don’t see why you compare Russia to India. India’s economy is twice as large due to the fact that india has 8 times the population of Russia. While the Russian MIC seems to have faced several difficulties in acquiring certain technologies (optics, semi conductors) the Indian defense industry has an abysmal record . Most of its indigenous development projects seem to be complete failure despite drawing heavily on foreign help and parts. The Arjun tanks has been 40 years in the making and still isn’t working despite lots of design help from Krauss Maffei. HAL still doesn’t know how to manufacture planes (let alone design them) . The only major success of the Indian MIC seems to be rockets. India has a surprisingly good space program and has been making progress in the ICBM domain.
I think your calculations are way off both in terms of total number of Israeli nukes and capabilities of their missiles. Israel discloses no information about its nuclear weapons program, but it is doubtful that a small country with limited means could develop a large arcenal. It is unlikely that any Israeli missile will be able to reach Central Russia, let alone hit Moscow.
Also, you seem to think that one warhead equals one destroyed city, regardless of the city, which is pretty daft, and exposes you as an amateur. Why do you insist on wading into technical details, since you’re obviously illiterate?
Indians appear to be too low-IQ to develop competitive indigenous military technology. And not just the military technology. Entire country is decidedly third world – they still shit in the streets in India.
Since the year is almost over, I’ve decided to post a list of the books I’ve read in 2018, with short comments about the content and whether I’d recommend them. Maybe other commenters will feel inspired to do the same.
– Odd Arne Westad, The Cold war. A world history: Like the title says, a global history of the Cold war; it covers the deep ideological background of the Cold war by starting in the 1890s, with the crisis of global capitalism and the rise of terroristic anarchist/socialist movements. Focus is of course on the conflict between the US-led West and the Soviet Union from the late 1940s to the late 1980s. Coverage is global, with regions like the Mideast, Latin America and India getting their own chapters. Generally it seems to be written from a somewhat left of center perspective and is quite critical of the US; e.g. it’s argued that the Eisenhower administration could have done more to try ending the Cold War after Stalin’s death, but instead turned it into a global struggle through misguided interventions in the decolonized world (it surprised me how interventionist Eisenhower’s administration actually was, e.g. I hadn’t known about the CIA’s activities in Indonesia in 1958 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Indonesia#CIA_failed_coup_attempt_of_1958 ). Communist crimes and the general sordidness of the communist system aren’t glossed over though, so unreconstructed commies won’t be happy either with the book. Most of the content will probably be familiar, at least in outline, to most commenters here, but I’d still recommend it.
Rating: 4/5.
– Anatol Lieven, America right or wrong. An anatomy of American nationalism: Good book about US nationalism (as it it actually is, not as Unz commenters would like it); deals not only with the standard issues like American exceptionalism, but to its credit also doesn’t shy away from explosive subjects like the American right’s weird love affair with Israel. Published more than a decade ago, during the Bush era, but imo still illuminating and relevant.
Rating: 4/5.
– Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah. A short history: An informative, short book about the Lebanese Shia organization. One should try to get the latest edition, since that contains an appendix taking the narrative to the early/mid-2010s. Deals with Hezbollah not just as a military and terrorist organization, but also as a social and political force, with special attention to the religious background. Seemed quite balanced to me, neither demonizing nor glorifying the organization.
Rating: 4/5.
– Azar Gat, Nations. The long history and deep roots of political ethnicity and nationalism: Good book about nationalism by an Israeli scholar. Argues for the pre-modern roots of nationalism and tries to explain its origins with reference to evolutionary theory; also contains a useful section about the role of ethnicity in the constitutions and political systems of many present-day states. Definitely recommended.
Rating: 5/5.
– Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s war for the greater Middle East. A military history: Deals with the history of American interventions in the Islamic world since the 1970s. Could be deeper in its analysis, but as a narrative this is probably the best on offer.
Rating 4/5.
– David van Reybrouck: Congo. The epic history of a people: Interesting and entertaining book about the history of Congo from the late 19th century to about 2010. Contains some barely credible elements (van Reybrouck claims to have encountered a super-old Congolese man of about 120 years who told him from his own experience about the 1880s/1890s), but on the whole a good book imo. Generally sympathetic to the Congolese and un-racist, but still contains quite a few un-pc judgements; e.g. van Reybrouck denies that one can call the atrocities in King Leopold’s free state genocide, and Patrica Lumumba comes across like an irresponsible demagogue.
Rating: 4/5.
Eric Christiansen, The northern crusades. Excellent book about the conflicts between Latin Christendom and pagans and Orthodox in the Baltic area, from roughly the mid-12 century (the Wendish crusade) to the end of the Middle ages. Obviously there is strong focus on the Teutonic knights, their conquests, the internal organization of their state and their wars with Prussians and Lithuanians, but other issues like the conflicts between Swedes and Russians are also dealt with. Highly recommended for anybody interested in the subject.
Rating: 5/5.
– Holger Afflerbach, Auf Messers Schneide. Wie das Deutsche Reich den Ersten Weltkrieg verlor. A new, somewhat revisionist book about WW1 from a German perspective. I’ve already written more about it in the recent WW1 thread, so will keep it short here. Its basic argument is that the outcome of WW1 wasn’t inevitable for a long time; the decision for unrestricted submarine warfare (which caused the US to enter the war) in early 1917 was a crucial mistake, but in Afflerbach’s opinion Germay might still have managed to win a draw and peace negotiations by remaining on the defensive in 1918 instead of the Ludendorff offensives which broke the German army. Strong emphasis is laid on the responsibility of the Entente powers for prolonging the war by rejecting all German offers for peace negotations. Gripping book, I hope there’ll be an English translation eventually.
Rating 5/5.
– Robert Gerwarth, The vanquished: Why the first world war failed to end, 1917-1923. Like the title indicates, a book about the various post-WW1 conflicts. Parts of it are interesting (e.g. the section about the Greco-Turkish war), but imo Gerwarth tries to deal with too many issues in too short a book, so on the whole it’s quite superficial.
Rating 3/5.
– Robert Gerwarth, Hitler’s hangman. The life of Heydrich: By contrast, Gerwarth’s biography of Reinhard Heydrich is excellent. Unlike earlier interpretations which considered Heydrich to have been a cynical careerist without strong convictions, Gerwarth paints the picture of a highly ideological National Socialist who was a close friend and collaborator of Himmler and sincerely believed in Nazism. Heydrich’s career and increasing radicalization (with the Polish campaign being a crucial watershed for the turn to mass murder) are traced in detail; there’s also much information about his family background and personal life. Definitely recommended.
Rating: 5/5.
– Stanley Payne, A history of fascism, 1914-1945: A history of the fascist movements, though it actually also deals with possible antecedents of fascism in the late 19th century like Boulangism, and also has long sections on various authoritarian movements and governments in interwar Europe, to distinguish them from fascism and show the defining characteristics of fascism more clearly. Generally written from the perspective of an American conservative with Christian sympathies. The sections about Nazi Germany didn’t tell me anything new, though the parts about Hungary and Romania were more interesting. A bit dry, and many of the movements and parties mentioned in the end just weren’t that significant (one of the central points of the book is that fascists in general were notably unsuccesful and only came to power in exceptional circumstances)…it’s a bit tiresome to read long discussions of marginal groups. But still a useful book, not least for its attempt to define what fascism actually was.
Rating: 3/5.
James McPherson, Battle cry of freedom. The civil war era: Volume in the Oxford history of the United States about the civil war era (roughly 1850-1865). Deals in detail with the prelude of the war (including such phenomena of the 1850s as the Know-Nothings and filibustering), and then provides a detailed narrative, both military (with descriptions of the important battles) and political, of the civil war. Written from a pro-Union perspective, but not overly polemical.
Rating: 5/5.
– Richard White, The republic for which it stands. The United states during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896: The succeeding volume in the Oxford history of the United States. Written from a somewhat left-wing perspective, though it’s not annoying enough to make the book totally useless. The biggest problem of the book imo is its sitze which is due to the general format of the series…at about 870 pages, it eventually becomes a bit boring and repetitive to read again and again about racial violence and labor disputes, especially since there is no central drama like in the previous volume about the civil war. Due to the structure of the book, it’s also impossible to just skip some sections, one has to read it whole. Still pretty decent.
Rating 3/5.
– Ernst Nolte, Späte Reflexionen. Über den Weltbürgerkrieg des 20. Jahrhunderts: The last work of controversial German historian Ernst Nolte (of Historikerstreit fame), this is a truly weird book, both in form and content. It consists of a series of loosely connected short thoughs, mostly dealing with the subjects of Nolte’s previous works, Communism, National Socialism, Zionism etc. (though there are also sections about transhumanism and radical life extension – Nolte regarded them as possibly some of the greatest crimes ever). A central idea is Nolte’s interpretation of National Socialism as an extreme reaction to the universalizing tendencies of both liberal globalization and Soviet communism, with Jews being regarded (falsely in Nolte’s view) not just as disproportionately prominent exponents of those trends, but as their originators. An interesting (if at times somewhat bizarre) book.
Rating: 3/5.
– J.H.Burns (Ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval political thought ca. 350-c. 1450: I actually haven’t read the last few chapters of this yet, but enough to say that this is a generally excellent collection of essays on the development of “political” thought in medieval Europe (e.g. conceptions of kingship, relations between papacy and empire). Focus is almost completely on Latin Christendom (and here mostly on France, Germany, England and Italy), though there’s a single chapter on Byzantium (also some introductory chapters about the political thought of ancient pagans, the Church fathers, and about Roman law). Definitely not casual reading, but strongly recommended if one is interested in medieval political developments.
Rating: 5/5.
here the beginning of the book online free
https://full-english-books.net/english-books/full-book-the-northern-crusades-read-online
If there was a competition – which historical figure did the most evil for Germany, Ludendorff will be one of the main contenders (along with Hitler)
Well,Indians from the upper castes are relatively smart so they do have some world class scientists. However it is true that most Indians seem to be morons.
Here is an example of successful Indian engineering enabled by Brahmans:http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2017/03/why_india_is_investing_in_space.html?via=gdpr-consent
That was my reaction to “Fooled By Randomness.” An entire book to make such a simple point? No wonder he larded it up with tedious anecdotes and digressions.
Still, from the point of view of influencing society, certain simple points can’t be repeated often enough. I would just prefer that the people doing the repeating weren’t as insufferable as Taleb.
Hussites in Bohemia managed to defeat several crusades sent against them, starting from 1419. In the beginning they were mostly untrained peasants, fanatical in their chiliastic belief.
The actual combat (beyond just anti-clerical riots) was always lead by lords
There seems to be a lot of Methuselah-type claims that come out of Africa. Probably should be attributed to illiteracy. A few years ago, I heard of one Ethiopian guy who said he remembered the Italian soldiers. Not from the 1930s, but from the 1890s!
I agree. Maximum feasible public identification.
Not a peasant revolt and not led by peasants. Zizka was a nobleman and experienced soldier.
That said, impressive and with very interesting tactical innovations.
FEMALE EDUCATION IS THE GREATEST PREDICTOR OF FERTILITY EVEN IN AFRICA!
http://blogs.worldbank.org/health/female-education-and-childbearing-closer-look-data
In Ghana, women with a high school education have a TFR between 2 and 3, whereas those with no education have a TFR of about 6, even as recently as 2008. Similarly, women with a high school education in Ethiopia have a TFR of 1.3.
A huge contributor in the UK was privatization in the 1980’s. The new firms stopped capital spending so the suppliers who had never really exported went bust before orders resumed again. The US was different but Russia had this problem ten times over in the 1990’s.
I was a shareholder for a while. He never invested it in anything speculative. It represented lost productivity improvement and new products that never happened. At GEC Large Machines in Rugby the tailstock a on our lathes were 1912 in 1977. They never see upgraded.
What British manufacturing industry business didn’t not invest?The shares Weinstock retired with were worth something like £400 million. From his own poingt of view he should have reinvested the cash mountain because successor got very speculative and blew the lot, and then some.
Russia aims to develop teleportation in 20 years
What is obvious is that you have demonstrated no technical knowledge on any weapon Russian or Israeli whatsoever.
That makes you the Russian equivalent of the Tech illiterate chest thumping nationalist.
250-300 nukes and 50 ICBMs and other IRBMs is not a very large arsenal compared to Russia or US and is consistent with what the a Dimona size nuclear plant would have produced by now. To say nothing of the virtually unlimited access to US Tech and material Israel has.
I have taken a very conservative number and even based Israeli warheads on 1970s W76 Tech not W88 oblate primary( know what it means?) Tech which Israel is likely to have acquired by now..
Anyway people who run Russia are a lot smarter than you and understand these basic facts which is why they haven’t tried anything reckless with Israel not because they love Jews or are cowards..
I think it is very obvious that Russia has much superior military technology than India.
I brought in India to compare the amount of funds available to the Russian state. It is commendable that Russia is still a world leader in many areas of military Tech but it cannot compete across the board with the US/West due to relative lack of funds and if you notice most of their weapons are either upgraded USSR era weapons or stuff like hyper sonic cruise missiles for which the basic research was done in the USSR era(Gela program).
Things that are by and large clean sheet post cold war like the PAK FA have encountered severe technical challenges..
As for Indian MIC capabilities we have relatively good capabilities in space launch,ballistic missiles,naval surface ships and helicopters but have been decidedly unsuccessful in most other endeavors for a variety of reasons…which is surprising and points to organizational corruption in the Indian Army a country that can build space launch vehicles and aircraft carriers should be able to build it’s own tank but we are still reliant on license produced Russian T 90s etc.
(((Who))) controls the “women’s movement”?
https://therightscoop.com/womens-march-in-chicago-cancelled-after-their-anti-semitism-is-reported/
Probably because the women who are bright enough to graduate from high school are also intelligent and conscientious enough to figure out how to use birth control and do so consistently.
Or they are able to understand & copy retarded christcuck bitches like you into the dumpster of history.
Educating women just makes them more efficient at being retards
Your Comment:
“It is unlikely that any Israeli missile will be able to reach Central Russia, let alone hit Moscow.”
Jericoh 3 IRBM/ICBM has a range of 4800 kms to 6500 kms (depending on the payload and ballistic trajectory to target chosen).
https://missilethreat.csis.org/missile/jericho-3/
Distance between Jerusalam and Moscow is 2672 Kms..
You just proudly asserted your weapons tech illiteracy on a public forum.
Either way, don’t confuse correlation with causation.
https://i.imgur.com/zshMhVa.png
Britain’s poor productivity has deep roots. It is certainly not the 1980s privatisations – though they were flawed – which caused it.
Orange/Maidan Advances
https://economics.unian.info/10390590-ukrainian-gas-stocks-shrink-by-over-16-to-almost-14-4-bcm-since-nov-7.html
Keep those IMF loans coming. Somewhat related:
https://tradingeconomics.com/ukraine/population
Female education leading to higher mate selection among other things + this education thing holds true in many countries.
You’re just a retarded bitch..
Women do not deserve right of movement or mate selection.
The only men retarded enough to insist upon these two things as a political religious idea were christian white men specifically protestants.
I don’t think they’ll be around as a race for much longer..
The flood of cheap machine tools from China no doubt also did a lot of good.
Giving rights to women certainly doesn’t help Tfr.
Japan Tfr famously crashed after emancipation.
Either way, women are property.
You lose the argument because you’re one, in fact you have no place speaking against a man.
I’d tell you to have more kids but I’ve come to realize that without white genocide we cannot stop the African plague.
here the beginning of the book online free [Eric Christiansen, The northern crusades]
You can read the whole book for free (legally) on the “Internet Archive” (although currently you’ll have to put yourself on a waiting list):
https://archive.org/search.php?query=title%3A%28northern%20crusades%29
You can also “borrow” a number of the other books mentioned by G_R from the same source, notably those of Lieven, Norton, Payne, and McPherson.
lol Are you from India by any chance?
Lol great guess..
Can you explain why you Hindus adore Israel? This isn’t the first time I notice this fanboyish attitude from Hindus on the internet. I find it most strange.
Common enemy..what they do to Muslims.
We like Russia too and are very grateful for all the help during USSR days..
Just look up any random India Russia video on YouTube and read the comments section to get some idea of the goodwill Russia has here..
Israel appears to have more goodwill with Indians these days. There is this perception of Israel as a mighty superpower as well some great alliance between Israel and India.
It isn’t true, of course, but many Indians believe it, and this is very odd.
You woman-haters always show your true anti-White colors sooner or later. If you hate women, of course it stands to reason that you hate the race of men that has done most to advance our status and well-being.
I’ve got news for you, little boy. I have six children, and several Protestant Christian friends with even more. If anyone’s genes are going down the toilet, it’s yours MGtard. You go ahead and stew in your own miserable hatred while the rest of us get on with the business of life.
You’re probably too stupid to understand this, but chronology doesn’t prove causation any more than correlation does. Otherwise, I’d have to demand that you explain to me how women’s suffrage isn’t responsible for space travel.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5A7hSaoRv0g
Israelis share our ‘cultural appreciation’ of Muslims to a much greater extent so there is that..
They do punch seriously above their weight in their region..and they make Muslim’s go ape the world over. Nothing pleases a middle class Hindu more..
I don’t think anyone expects Israel to work miracles for India..
Russia & Israel are basically the two most liked countries for what it is worth and the source of most of our critical arms and military tech imports..
There are no permanent friends only permanent interests a powerful Russia benefits India and vice versa we are by far your biggest weapons and high tech export market..you sell us tech the west will not like hyper sonic cruise missiles (Brahmos 2 is basically Zircon),cryogenic rocket engine (though we have developed our own as well) and nuclear submarines which gives your arms industry economies of scale..
Lawcuck.
Most new titles are available for free on Library Genesis illegally.
Nine times out of time this is also a virtuous act, as you deprive money from an evil SJW publisher and from an author who is affiliated with a university.
Where the author is on our side he can and should be patronized. Ideally he self publishes or through an alternative house like Castalia, but if not you can pirate the book while making a direct contribution to him.
I believe Israel is becoming popular for China and India, because it has a mostly brown (traditional third world) population. Yet it has (maybe as one of the first quite brown countries) transformed from third world to a first world country in last 20 years.
As for your weird dream of nuclear apocalypse with Israel. It would not even be excitement of real apocalypse, as the other countries of the world will be eating popcorn, and perhaps Estonia could be planning division of radioactive territories, as Israel and Russia are destroyed as modern nationalities.
Nothing can intercept ICBMs. As most nuclear countries, Israel puts its nuclear warheads on ICBMs.
http://www.military-today.com/missiles/jericho_3.htm
Any modern nuclear ICBM would usually have at least 20 times Hiroshima.
During the 1980s, American army expended billions of dollars building Israel’s bases underground.
In the 1980s, America even used the engineer who designed Cheyenne Mountain Complex, to send him to work in Israel with budget of billions of dollars, to build Israel’s airbases underground.
https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a271594.pdf
As for Syria topic overall. Advantage of Trump compared to Putin cannot be clearer. Trump recognized there is nothing valuable in Syria for America after ISIS is defeated (besides some small quantity of oil). While probably Putin simply does not understand fallacy of sunk costs, (sunk costs of the Soviet Cold War policy) in the region.
I’m pretty sure that India used to be more sceptical of the Zionist regime, recognising its colonial origins. Imagine if your former British overlords sponsored a Jewish state in your own country, complete with ethnic cleansing, desecration of your holy sites etc. You would probably “go ape” about it.
Offtopic, does anyone have an Aeropress?
I have received this for Christmas… trying it this morning the coffee was a little weak though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ-mcVzZEr8
Oh, reeeally? S300 can.
It will be apocalipse for the Jewry to be sure, but Israel’s rudimentary nuclear arsenal is of little threat to us.
I doubt Indians know much about Israeli history (they don’t seem to know anything about the outside world), but if they did they’d be very skeptical of this narrative.
Britain repeatedly limited Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine, and after the war the Jews unleashed a wave of terrorism against the British (and everyone else) including bombing the King David Hotel.
Do the words “Balfour declaration” mean anything to you? British government made a deal with international Jewry, offering them Palestine in exchange for sabotaging Germany, bringning US into WW1. British complicity in establishing Zionist regime is not in doubt.
I understand that Indians are low-IQ people, who don’t know much about history, but that doesn’t explain why Israel is adored there. Most countries hate Israel.
Britain tried to prevent Jewish immigration to Israel though. Anti-Anglo myth #4987
A lot of things happened between 1917 and 1948
Nations make all sorts of declarations, especially in wartime. The Germans variously flirted with both Zionism and Arab Nationalism at the same time. If the Balfour Declaration were truly serious a Jewish state (or perhaps Dominion) would’ve been established after the WW1.
Jewish immigration to Palestine began in the 19th century in Ottoman times.
Later, during the 1930s, Nazi Germany was responsible for more support of Zionism than Britain was (as has been documented by Ron Unz).
Did you know that during the Falklands War that Israel provided assistance to Argentina? This was because their Prime Minister at the time, Menachem Begin, was previously an anti-British terrorist (member of the Stern Gang).
S-300 does not intercept ICBM (and is not designed for anything like ICBM trajectory). Future Arrow 3 and S-500 neither will likely be very successful with ICBMs (which travel above 8000 kilometers an hour).
Trajectory and speed of ICBMs cannot be intercepted with any currently system which is deployed, except by claims of A-135 (which relies on using an aerial detonation of a nuclear warhead for interception). And I read that nobody believes A-135 would really work against an ICBM.
Modern ICBM has MIRV so each one will release multiple warheads.
Obsession with Jews in this childish discussion about nuclear bombs is also strange. There are more Russians in Moscow agglomeration than number of Jews that in the world. All human bodies would be quite equal and trivial, if nuclear fusion explosion is “tested” above populated areas. Personally I will prefer not to see this.
MAD is an obsolete doctrine, at least for globalists because it was predicated on nationalism. The fear of a large-scale exchange was that it would destroy one’s people. Nowadays the elites have a demonstrated apathy or even antipathy towards their people. What matters is CAD – if the cosmopolitan centers in which they live are hit.
For the US, the prospect of a bomb falling on NYC, LA, or Washington would be enough. Russia, though not a globalist regime is still driven by its elites, who live primarily in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The fear of them being hit is enough.
That is why I think it would be a waste for China to vastly expand its arsenal. Rather, they should invest in lowering, their kg to orbit cost, or in groundbased energy beams for defence.
Family members, including children of important people, in the Kremlin will be very often living in London, and even there’s quite a few children who are reported living in France, New York.
I was joking earlier this year that the most dangerous place in the future nuclear war will be the unfashionable cities like Denver.
Both India and China oppose Israel in foreign policy – they vote against Israel at UN (as does even most of Western Europe, Russia, etc).
India and China are non-aligned countries in foreign policy. However, they are more focused on internal development currently.
So they don’t like Israel in foreign policy.
In economic policy, Israel is an important investment destination for both those countries.
Israel is also one of the few countries which transitions from third world to first world in recent years, so a miniature model for these two. Unlike Russia and Gulf countries, where recent economic development was a result of oil/commodity exports – India and China will be more interested in development path of countries like Israel and Korea where the development path was not through oil/commodity exports (which India/China don’t have as an option).
The ratio of conventional to nuclear weapons is very high in all countries. If the threat of a nuclear strike was believable and could actually deter conventional attack it is very difficult to understand why all this money is being spent (and why the virtually front line small nuclear weapons such as the Davy Crockett bazooka were phased out).
The US now has tanks in the Baltic, which is very much more expensive that a few battlefield nukes. No one really believes in nuclear first use any more. The weapons are there to deter nuclear attack and for no other reason. Once anyone goes nuclear it would initiate an esculating tit for tat, and everyone knows it. It is wrong to think that MAD follows from a conventional war.
This is a very dangerous gamble.
China in any case may already have nuclear forces as large as Russia and America, though it is weaker in delivery (few boomers, no long-range bombers).
The best choice would be modernizing START and bringing China into it, but unfortunately US policy since circa 1999 has made that impossible (Obama made some effort to reverse this to his credit, but gave up after 2014).
Israel does not possess modern ICBMs. And yes, S-300 was designed to deal with the type of limited ballistic threat that Israel represents.
You chose to engage me in this discussion, and we both know why…How many relatives do you have in Israel exactly?
I don’t think Ron Unz should be taken as an authority on those matters. It’s true that there were contacts between the Nazis and Zionists about the matter of Jewish emigration (iirc Eichmann traveled to the Palestine mandate in 1937), and some Zionists (Jabotinsky iirc) would have liked to get German support against the British empire (didn’t get it though), but the Nazis never really sponsored or supported Zionism.
I read about that a few years ago in British newspapers, has it ever been securely established? If true, it just shows once again how completely untrustworthy Israel is.
The British allowed Jews to operate militias in the country as well as a shadow government. They allowed large amount of Jewish immigration from Europe that in a short time transformed demographics of the region. And just when the Jews were ready to take over, the Brits took off. Israel is on them.
Why do you regard Israel as emerging from the third world in recent years? Do you think the Israel of 1990 was third world?
What makes you think that the S-300 (which version?) could intercept an ICBM? It’s not even claimed by the manufacturer or any of the operators, so where does this idea come from?
The S-500 is designed to be able to do that, but it’s far from clear how effective it will be. Anyway, the S-500 is not yet operational, so it’s fruitless to discuss its abilities.
Even during the height of the Cold War NATO’s nuclear deterrent was not sufficient on its own to prevent Soviet forces from reaching the Rhine, and then there’s the fact that the USSR had its own nuclear weapons.
In the absence of strong conventional forces there was the possibility of a “strategic exchange”, leaving both sides devastated (but still in existence), but Warsaw Pact forces having “won” the war.
Prior to the USSR achieving strategic parity with America, NATO actually did rely on nuclear weapons as its prime deterrent. President Eisenhower’s “New Look” defense strategy deemphasized conventional forces while building up overwhelming nuclear superiority (which his airmen would use to propose a preemptive strike called Operation Reaper in 1954).
After the USSR closed and then eliminated the gap, NATO responded by improving its conventional forces. Hence all those fancy heavy Western tanks that emerged in the ’70s and ’80s like the Leopard 2, Chieftain, LeClerc, Abrams, etc.
Another rationale for conventional forces was provided by President Kennedy’s “Flexible Response” doctrine. There were some foreign policy crises in the ’50s (particularly with China) where the US resorted to threatening nuclear strikes. The idea behind “Flexible Response” was to have credible non-nuclear options in order to be able to respond militarily without threatening nuclear war.
The Davy Crockett was phased out because it was a danger to its users. Atomic Annie was retired because it was too immobile. But other tactical nuclear weapons such as nuclear artillery shells (W48 155mm and W33 203mm), free fall bombs (B61 bomb), torpedoes (Mark 45), etc. remained in service and main are still in depots today.
Tactical nuclear weapons began to be deemphasized in the 1970s because PGMs have many similar tactical effects with less risk to friendly forces and civilians.
I brought up Ron Unz because he is our benevolent overlord, not because he’s the last word.
It’s a matter of historical record that the German government overtly supported Zionism in the 1930s, which no other state in the world did at that time (unless you want to count the USSR’s ridiculous rival Jewish state in Siberia).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement
There were also Zionist organizations in Germany at that time. This would not seem remarkable except for the fact that all other non-Nazi organizations were prohibited as a result of Gleichschaltung.
Now that’s not to say that Nazi Germany was the sugar daddy of Zionism in the 1930s the way the USA has been in recent times. But Nazi Germany did provide more support to Zionism in the ’30s than Great Britain did.
So did the Ottomans
They also let the Arabs
???? ‘Just when the Taliban were ready to take over, the Soviets took off’
There’s a political cost to using nukes – regularly demonstrated by the phobias regarding nuclear power – which would threaten the powerbase of world leaders, who rely on a cadre who strongly believe in a powerful government, but who simultaneously have a great fear of anything nuclear.
Still, I think armies are maintained for other reasons. To prevent revolution, for embargo/to prevent embargo. To threaten non-state actors, like pirates and terrorists. For adventurism. For profit of the arms industry. For the joy of having toys. As a status symbol. The spectre of direct conflict is mainly maintained to justify the vast expenditure, as well as from paranoia.
The British allowed the Arabs to operate similar organizations.
Jewish immigration began in 1882.
Britain later formally restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine in order to placate Arab opinion.
The British did come up with the partition idea, but this was their pragmatic reaction to the facts on the ground. Israel is on…the Jews.
Britain crushed the Arab rising in the late 1930s though (iirc many of the methods used by the Israelis today, like destruction of the houses of the relatives of dead terrorists, were established by the British back then), nothing of the same kind was ever done against the Zionists who were always treated much more leniently.
Of course most of the British soldiers who were in Palestine during the late mandate eventually came to hate the Zionists, but without British rule over the mandate Israel would never have come into existence. That’s not even an “anti-Anglo” statement imo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement
Yes, the Nazis had contacts with Zionists, as a way to facilitate the emigration of German Jews which they wanted to get rid of. But imo that’s rather different from positive support for the Zionist project (establishing a Jewish national state in the Palestine mandate). It’s not like the Nazis ever provided Zionists with funds or weapons.
Not that it matters much, it’s just that I find the spin Ron Unz puts on those issues rather strange.
I don’t see why Israel couldn’t have come into existence within the framework of the Ottoman Empire.
Imagine an alternate reality in which Germany won WWI.
Jewish immigration to Palestine would continue. In fact it might accelerate massively from the defeated Russian Empire.
German Jews, some of whom were actually quite helpful to the war effort (Haber, Rathenau), would no doubt be supportive of Zionism and try to influence the Reich government to support it. Hypothetical, but plausible.
Wealthy diaspora Jews would’ve continued their financial support of the project in any case.
Of course, we can’t put it past the Ottoman Turks the possibility of a general massacre, but that too is hypothetical.
Basically people think the British are “guilty” of the fact that Israel exists, which implies that they think it should have been official British government policy to crush Zionism and perhaps even to deport Jews from Mandatory Palestine. Or the British should’ve established a unitary Arab state for all of Palestine in 1948.
It doesn’t really make much sense.
Why? It’s not like they hadn’t amply proven that they were capable of mass murder against non-Islamic minorities. In fact they may have planned some deportations of Jewish settlers from the cities of Palestine in 1917 (which didn’t happen due to intervention by Erich von Falkenhayn):
https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/.premium-how-germany-helped-save-palestines-jews-1.5257621
How things would have turned out, if the central powers hadn’t been defeated, is of course impossible to know…but can we really believe that a Muslim power would have been just fine with turning over Jerusalem to a Jewish state? And with the marginalization of Palestine’s Muslim inhabitants?
And it’s not a matter of Britain’s “guilt”, such moralistic judgements seem misguided to me, especially given the high price (hundreds of British soldiers killed) Britain eventually paid for this project. I just don’t see how Israel as an independent Jewish national state could have come into existence without the Balfour declaration and the mandate.
The main reason was because it was a revolt against Mandate rule, rather than to protect Jews. In earlier anti-Jewish riots, not much military force had been used and the response was in fact to appease the Arabs. The Jews did not start terrorism against Britain until after the war, when British resources and will to maintain useless territories was much more limited, although I believe that thousands of Jews were arrested and dozens killed.
What was the alternative? I don’t know why the French would have acted differently if they had been given the Mandate. The US and USSR were more pro-Israel than Britain in 1948.
Anyway, Felix’s claim that Britain ‘sponsored’ the creation of a Jewish state is absurd since Britain took many steps to hinder it.
While China did have more orbital launches this year, their wet weight was only about half the US total. Because of the impetus of commercialization and the unique aerospace background of the US, they are in danger of falling behind. This is exactly as the military potential of space is increasing through miniaturization, ie. smallsats, nanosats and picosats.
Space is the ultimate highground, unless you have ground-based lasers. But they create a lot of difficulties like superheating particles in the air and may not be easily mastered.
The main reason for the revolt had been heavy Jewish immigration though which the British had allowed (it’s of course true that as a consequence of the revolt they then restricted it).
Probably mostly true, though it already began in the closing stages of WW2:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Guinness,_1st_Baron_Moyne
The alternative after WW1 would have been to allow self-government for the inhabitants of Palestine, instead of embarking on an especially idiotic imperialist project (establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine…supposedly without infringing on the rights of the existing population, which always was impossible if anybody had thought about it) that was bound to cause severe conflict.
Not much point in moralizing about it after a hundred years though.
British policy was contradictory, but without the mandate Israel wouldn’t have come into existence. That’s just a fact imo, no matter whether one regards that as a good or bad thing.
It’s common among dissidents to treat obscure historical knowledge as more profound and important than it is.
For instance during the Cold War there was a British-American historian named Anthony Sutton who did a lot of research on the commercial links between American business and both the Nazi and Soviet regimes.
Sutton treated this as evidence that American business (or, more commonly, “Wall Street”) directly supported both Nazism and Communism. The truth, of course, was more mundane (it’s business).
With respect to the Nazis, while I wouldn’t call this profound, it is interesting. We’re always shown a picture in which Hitler and the Nazis were cartoonish supervillains hell bent on exterminating the Jews from day one.
And if you’re an antisemite, then Zionism is the most pragmatic way (and perhaps even ethical, though the Arabs beg to differ) to mitigate the Jewish Question. I’m a Zionist for that reason.
I just said it’s hypothetical.
Reasons why they wouldn’t do it could include that it wouldn’t be wartime and the German government would oppose it. The Jews might also simply pay them.
It seems to me the most important preconditions for the establishment of Israel were plenty of Jews on the ground in Palestine and plenty of support from diaspora Jews for the project.
Everything else was about exploiting the global situation as opportunities presented themselves.
S-300V4 and Fort-M can both intercept ballistic missiles in terminal approach. Moscow is also protected by A-135 interceptors and soon A-235 will enter service. Still i disagree with Felix.
Bear in mind that until 1905 the entire British Empire had no formal immigration controls (the white dominions were permitted to skirt around this with their language tests). And the three acts passed (1905, 1914, 1919) weren’t particularly strong. There wasn’t any serious restriction until at least 1948 with the passing of the British Nationality Act. So Britain restricting immigration in a colony (or rather mandate) was actually unprecedented.
DFH probably knows more.
Liberalism at work again in other words.
Well, the popular image of Nazism is pretty false in many ways anyway and ignores many facts (e.g. that until September 1939 the Nazis had killed maybe a few thousand people…whereas Bolsheviks had already caused the deaths of millions). I have my doubts though whether Ron Unz’s approach will be successful in countering the established myth.
In reality it works out rather differently though. There are many, many “friends of Israel” who are also fanatical “antiracists” on other matters.
I don’t think it was just liberalism where Jewish immigration to Palestine somehow just happened, at least some members of Britain’s elite (including Churchill iirc) were actually deluded enough to believe that Zionism could advance British imperial interests in the region…the Jewish settlers were expected to be loyal and grateful (lol) to the British empire.
But anyway, you and DFH may have gotten a wrong impression…I certainly don’t “blame” Britain for the Palestine issue, and don’t really have strong feelings about it anyway.
The “friends of Israel” to which you refer are mostly diaspora Jews themselves. White antiracists, especially outside of the USA, are usually against Israel as well using the same logic. Look at Jeremy Corbyn for instance.
I’d say most white “friends of Israel” in the West are just ordinary conservatives and civic nationalists who wrongly perceive Israel as being an aggrieved ally struggling against the same foes.
Some are more clever than that of course. I doubt that Orban and Salvini are that naive for instance.
Thank you very much, I’ll take your advice
Jewish immigration had been ongoing since 1882. Nothing changed or “just happened”.
Churchill laid out his views on the Jews in 1920. He believed that there was a struggle for the soul of Jewry between Zionism and Bolshevism, and he believed that Zionism winning that struggle was most beneficial to Britain (and Europe generally).
Of course as it turns out Jews embraced both Zionism and Bolshevism (in much modified form of course) in a way whites never could.
Churchill also had disastrous personal finances which did not go unnoticed by wealthy Jews in Britain. Thus his motivations were almost certainly self-interested as well.
Range of Jericho III means it is ICBM (or following equivalent trajectory).
E.g. you can see notes on range on page 5.
https://www.defense.gouv.fr/content/download/261157/3195265/file/NRS%207%20Pens%C3%A9e%20strat%C3%A9gique%20isra%C3%A9lienne.pdf
Even old Jericho II of the 1980s, should have the same performance as the Minuteman II missile, considering it is just the Shavit rocket.
http://faculty.publicpolicy.umd.edu/sites/default/files/fetter/files/1990-MissilePrimer.pdf
So there is some open secret out there, even if it is tactfully avoided by American publications or not discussed by Colin Powell at the UN.
The trajectory would be sub-orbital spaceflight (i.e. same threat for missile defense as any ICBM).
There is not even secret what the missile trajectory would be like, as it the old versions were derivative of .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavit
Of course, S-300 is not designed for ICBM (sub-orbital spaceflight) missile trajectory.
I cannot resist correcting the false sentences.
0 relatives, although it is indeed my secondary plan to go to work/live there one day.
The thing is, if your comments were about harmlessness of nuclear war with America or the UK, I would even more surprised.
At least in Germany there are still tons of establishment figures who in every other context are strongly anti-national…but really love Israel (an especially repellent example is Volker Beck, who for decades was the chief Sodomite of the Greens and actually was in favour of decriminalizing pedophilia in the 1980s…in 2016 he was caught by police with Crystal meth, in the company of a young male prostitute and with an “unusual sex toy”; which tempoarily suspended his political career – prominent Jews spoke out in favour of him, because he was such a good friend of Israel and Jews, and he’s also gotten numerous prizes for “fighting against antisemitism”).
Such sentiments are also not totally uncommon among more ordinary people…a few years ago I had some discussions on the net with a CDU cuck…a member of the German-Israeli society, always insistent on Israel’s right to defend itself. At the height of the “refugee” crisis in 2015 he told me how he thought he’d seen people spreading lies about refugees on Facebook, and that he wanted to report them to police…I guess for him, supporting Israel was part of his antiracism.
The ethnocentric “antiracist” Jewish activist exists as well of course (the founder of Germany’s premier “antiracist” foundation, Anetta Kahane, from a family of communists and former Stasti informer, is a good example…she’s always on the lookout for antisemites bashing Israel).
Now maybe Germany is somewhat special, because of Holocaust guilt. But I don’t think it’s true that left-wingers and “antiracists” in Europe are anti-Zionist in general, at most they seem divided on the issue.
The Turks economic powerbase was where the Greeks lived – and the area of Constantinople still is overwhelmingly. Of course, it was also strategic. The other strategic bookend was where the Armenians lived. It controls the approaches into Asia Minor as well as most of the water in the Middle East. Essentially, the two conflicts revolved around control of what the Turks saw as their own country.
Palestine was more like a colony – a place where other people (Arabs) lived. Turks deceived themselves into thinking Jews would be good for their control of it.
My impression of the deportations in Palestine was that it was more superficial – mostly about immediate control of the coast – a few miles. So that landings would be opposed as to unopposed. It is hard to believe Jews were under real immediate threat there because they (the Zionists) lied about being killed there, as well as easily deceived the Turks, putting forth the possibility that they would advance their economic interests in the region.
Well technically it would not be “third world” as it was part of Western Bloc (first world). Likewise, in health, life expectancy, military technology, or higher education level, it would have been comparable with first world bloc countries.
But with Israel’s defense expenditure climbing to up to 30% of GDP, hyperinflation, and appearance of almost all buildings of 1980s Israel – it would be much more like in third world countries.
Population would also be primarily brown in 1980s and much of the public would be first or second generation immigrants from third world countries (like Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, etc).
In the architecture there, you can see the buildings constructed from 1990s onwards have the appearance of first world countries (buildings constructed before 1990s, have third world appearance).
Officially, Israel was upgraded from “emerging market” to “developed market” in 2010. And obviously currently the upward economic trajectory is quite fast.
Even one battlefield nuclear weapon (or even mine) would destoy or block a conventional attack, halt all conventional operations by both sides dead in their tracks, and start a series of nuclear tit for tat strikes going all the way up to strategic destruction of cities and finally capital cities. A strategic exchange would destroy both participants.
Threat of an incredible action is not a credible deterrent. It is not credible that the US would be the one to first use nukes to save Europe. America would not blow its own brains out for anyone. A global conventional war is one that the US would win in the end, so what would America’s motive be to give an opponent nuclear Stale Mate ? The Davy Crockett was phased out because it was too small. Both sides want nukes to be a class of weapons apart, because that way there is far less chance of anyone in the middle of a conventional war thinking a small battle field nuclear weapon could be used without going irrecoverably nuclear with attendant incalculable consequences.
Germany, like America, is probably a special case and for similar reasons. Jewish power in America, war guilt in Germany.
In Sweden all of the mainstream parties harshly criticize Israel and have done so for many years. I think SD and AfS (inspired by AfD) claim to support Israel. Most countries in Western Europe also routinely vote against Israel in the UN.
There’s growing tension in America on this. A lot of younger, and especially non-white, left-wingers in America no longer support Israel. In response the Jews here are getting laws passed making it illegal to boycott Israel. Some Mohammedan (though a US citizen) schoolteacher in Texas was fired for refusing to sign an oath of loyalty to Israel.
A fiasco ensued, leading the Governor of Texas to issue a bizarre statement announcing that if someone opposes Israel he also opposes Texas.
It’s quite likely that these laws the Jews are pushing will get thrown out by the Supreme Court since they blatantly violate our 1st Amendment. Of course as we know the 1st Amendment is antisemitic and must go.
It is too bad the Stasi burned a lot of their papers. I’m sure they had some very interesting info on German politicians, both past and present.
Certainly possible, I don’t really believe either that they regarded the Zionist settlers the same way they regarded Armenians in Asia minor.
Still, I don’t think they would have allowed an independent Jewish state in Palestine, if the Ottoman empire had continued to exist. Maybe some form of autonomy. But the area settled by Jews would probably have been smaller. And I don’t think the Turks would have ever allowed Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem, which has religious significance for Muslims as well after all.
Stasi files: scanner struggles to stitch together surveillance state scraps
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/03/stasi-files-east-germany-archivists-losing-hope-solving-worlds-biggest-puzzle
“In Sweden all of the mainstream parties harshly criticize Israel ” – There might connection why they are getting all those Muslims that will teach them to change their attitude with respect to Israel.
Countries like Poland and Hungary with unconditional support for Israel has been spared so far.
This isn’t correct at all. Many studies were done in the ’50s and ’60s on this. A dozen tactical nuclear weapons were found necessary just to halt an armored battalion for instance.
Both sides adapted their organizations to deal with the nuclear battlefield. The US for instance experimented with James Gavin’s “pentomic” divisions and drastically increased air mobility. The Soviet Union reduced logistical sustainment capability in favor of increasing striking power (on the theory that it was necessary to reach the Rhine as fast as possible rather than sustain extended combat).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/The_Pentomic_Division.jpg
The design of weapons themselves were all adapted to the nuclear battlefield as well. Electronics were rad hardened. Vehicles, aircraft, and ships were all furnished with “NBC” (nuclear-biological-chemical) protection systems. Special radiation decontamination equipment was furnished to combat engineers. Troops at the front were issued potassium iodide pills and ponchos. Even the design of infantry rifles was changed. One reason for the shift from wood stocks to synthetic stocks on rifles is that wood stocks are much harder to decontaminate.
A strategic exchange would not destroy both participants. US war planners found that something like one-quarter of America’s industry and population would survive a successful Soviet first strike.
In general people have a distorted, exaggerated idea about the power and effects of nuclear weapons.
Which is just as well since that by itself reduces the risk of nuclear war.
Tactical and perhaps intermediate range ballistic missiles are not the same as ICBMs, for example they usually have a much lower terminal velocity. Some IRBMs have ICBM level terminal velocity, and it’s dubious if the S-300V4 could effectively engage those.
I don’t think most countries would ever recover from destruction of even one important city, with current finances and demographics.
In the post-Soviet world, it’s not even completely clear that recovery is possible for some countries from the 1990s (just a spiritual/economic/alcoholic crisis, with no mass destruction of cities of millions of people).
Japanese observers are worried the “big earthquake/tsunami” will “take Japan down” permanently, and this is with highest estimates of only 323,000 casualties from a country of 120 million people.
https://ig.ft.com/sites/japan-tsunami/
Well It could try, at least theoretically. Overall ABM systems tend to be worthless and a huge money sink so there’s no real point to this discussion. Their only truly useful application is to down satellites in war time.
you can pirate the book while making a direct contribution to him.
Still waiting to receive the direct contributions from those who have pirated my books!
Real men pour over.
However, I noticed in online discussions that people are arguing that there is no risk of a nuclear response from Russia in case of some military action by the “Free World” (e.g. in Syria), so that “we” (most people making the argument were Atlanticist Hungarians, which made the argument pretty bizarre) should go on and destroy Putin’s small force in Syria.
The exaggerated view may actually encourage a war, because people wouldn’t believe that the enemy will unleash the “apocalypse.”
I think this has more to do with time than anything else.
Increasingly few people remember how scary the Cold War often was.
To have a good memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis for instance you would need to have been born by the late ’40s at the latest.
Stuff like this has been memory holed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrHoMSRZOS4
But part of it is that people believe it’s impossible for anyone to survive and so no one would under any circumstances push the red button. And it’s not an irrational belief. If launching a nuclear war means the total and absolutely certain destruction of the whole of mankind, then who but a suicidal maniac would start it?
Of course people could be made to reappraise the probability of a suicidal maniac being at the helm of Russia, or just any country in general, for example by showing them movies like that (I’ve never seen it, but this short clip already looks better than The Day After), but another argument would be that the war is actually not totally suicidal and therefore it’s conceivable. So you better fear it.
One problem is that many people hearing the argument think that this means the nuclear war would be not very horrible. Untrue. It would be several times more horrible than the two world wars put together. And it might not be over in a few days or weeks, but might go on for years.
Anyway, I don’t think it’s very stable that we haven’t had a nuclear war since 1945. I hope I won’t have to experience it, but its probability seems to be growing.
There’s a very good German milblogger who has suggested the possibility of a major conventional war without nuclear weapons because they have become taboo/scary. He cites as an example WW2’s absence of chemical warfare.
https://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com
Unfortunately he is a leftist and a censorious coward, so don’t waste your time commenting there–just read the posts if military matters interest you.
And yes, nuclear war would be much more horrible than the world wars. When I say most people exaggerate the power of nuclear weapons, I don’t mean nuclear weapons are NBD. Just that like all other weapons they have their own limitations.
Consider Clausewitz’s distiction between real war and ideal war, which is ‘a philosophical abstraction—a “logical fantasy”—that is impossible in practice because it is not directed or constrained by political motives or concerns, nor limited by the practical constraints of time, space, and human nature’. I speak of warfare constrained by certain real-world influences . There is a tendency make plans for the liberal use of nuclear weapons as if war can be fought with them much as with conventional weapons, but such is not the case and the preparation you describe for one sided nuking of a Soviet conventional attack being pressed home regardless would have been exposed as a bluff on der tag.
However let us assume the Soviets attacked. First of all it is ridiculous to think that Nato needed strong conventional forces to stop Soviet tanks on account of lack of nuclear weapons, because conventional weapons like tanks are far more expensive that nuclear weapons . A nuclear explosion would destroy the landscape a tank spearhead were going across by blocking roads with wrecked tanks and support vehicles, rubble and fallen trees, and creating huge craters, thus making it impassible for the follow up wave. The West was very built up even by the seventies and ever without nukes there would have probablybeen a series of traffic jams among advancing Soviet units . There were nuclear mines that could have created impassible craters at choke points between forests and urban area before the tanks get anywhere near.
Second a single detonation of a nuclear weapon on an attacking unit would not exactly go unnoticed by the neighbouring units, and they would know they were next, with human nature screaming at them to stop. There would be abundant good reasons including communication breakdowns (always a concern of Soviet training) and damage and obstacles in their path from the detonation to justify them stopping . The tank assault commander would have the immediate priority and responsibility of reporting to headquarters that nuclear weapon had been used, and waiting for instruction while keeping his unit intact not rolling into the lion’s den all bunched up to be destroyed.
So yes, one battlefield nuke would stop an attack right across that sector. Even it some did not get the halt order due to EMF damage ect the aforementioned difficulties of crossing a landscape after a nuclear explosion on it would be extreme. Nato nuking Soviet tanks with a single weapon would have immediately halted all conventional operations by the Soviets, who would certainly have retaliated with a specimen strike of their own. Then it would be tit for tat with ever larger nukes, not anything that could be called war, which is why Nato would not have used Nukes aganst a conventional attack.
All Nato had to do was have a series of nuclear mines and tactical weapons ready and they could have obliterated any number of tanks. The key reason they had a lot of conventional forces was lack of conventional forces meant going nuclear, which meant the end of the conventional war and the begining of something very different with incalculable probability of progression to cities then the capital city’s being nuked. Henry Kissinger was brought in to educate Reagan on war and advised him to never use nuclear weapons unless the other side had first. The US has the worlds most powerful economy and conventional war fought across the globe is one the US would win. The conventional weapons of America in West Germany under Nato were the only ones that would have been used against a Soviet attack
Anybody who thinks risking a war with Russia over Syria (or nonsense like “Russia stole the American election with Facebook ads”) is worth it, is a cretin anyway. One doesn’t even need to think of the worst case scenario of a full-scale nuclear war to realize what a stupid idea this is. Russia could react in other ways (and Putin would have to react if Russian forces were directly attacked), e.g. by invading the Baltic states. And what then?
Are such ideas common among liberals in Hungary?
You’re right. I’ve been a fool.
There is only one possible explanation then.
Brabantian is correct. Nuclear weapons are a hoax.
Even if it is probably correct that Israel is ‘mostly brown’, people do not see it that way. To most people Israel is the settler colony/ancient homeland of European Jews.
To the extent that Israel is popular in Asia it is because people sees themselves as fighting a common backwards Saracen enemy.
OT:
Does AK have any comments about the changes to 282? I know he’s talked about it a lot in the past.
I think that would be a perspective for North-Western Europeans. But not for India or China.
I believe Indian and Chinese government and investors – see Israel as one of the”third world” populations which has recently developed to a “first world” country.
In addition, it’s interesting for them, as industrialization process is quite rapid (country established independently 1948), and occurs while in military/religious conflict with enemies.
Israel is full of groups of Indian and Chinese businessmen, so these guys walking around there would see quite a lot of the brown people in the population and yet a fast development process which does not match usual behaviour or brown countries.
Other hot countries with a lot of brown people (e.g. Latin America, parts of Europe like Spain/Greece, or non oil exporting parts of Middle East and North Africa), usually exhibit quite a slow development/industrialization process.
To India – latitude of Israel is the same as Delhi. Situation now in Israel, is probably not too dissimilar to how India will look in 2050s or 2060s (i.e. with some more rapid economic development).
But if you pour the water slowly enough over the coffee filter, so the coffee tastes good, then (aside from waiting a lot), it is usually not hot after you add milk.
Peasants were the early Hussite movement. They burned down their villages and moved in packs to places believed to be safe during the coming Armageddon. There they tried to set up utopian communities. When attacked, they fought back, even the women fought.
Higher nobility with their trained troops initially played small role – most pro-Hussite noblemen were at the best neutral, when the conflict started, and only later joined the winning side. Žižka, one of the early warlords, was papeurized minor nobleman, who turned to banditry and mercenary service. Želivský, another important warlord, was fiery preacher.
Peasants themselves could initiate fighting. I have a local story: nearby village was decimated to the last man by people from another village, because of a rumor that the first village was robbing passing-by merchants.
Contrary to the common wisdom, Hussites were not the inventors of wagon fortification – royal army had such an unit before the wars – and neither were the first to employ field guns. They also weren’t led by unquestionably genious leaders. Žižka was competent guerilla commander and tactician, but lacklustre as strategist. He was the first one to start internal fighting among the Hussites, for example. Želivský was incompetent.
14th century Bohemia was spared wars for several generations and also escaped the first wave of the Black Death. Dense population provided manpower for large peasant bands and then armies. Religious frenzy turned them into fanatical soldiers who vowed personal poverty, didn’t take captives and didn’t expect mercy, and were willing to submit to the very harsh military code. Not being tied to the land anymore allowed high troops mobility.
In later phases of the war things did change: God’s soldiers transformed into professional looters, warlords into rich magnates.
Israel in 1990 had a gdp per capita of 50% of the US so not quite third world. It has substantially improved to 66% now. Maybe Israel has transitioned from barely first world to solidly first world is a better way of putting it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_and_projected_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita#IMF_estimates_between_1990_and_1999
But as you mentioned:
So this would be more comparable to as if Britain remained in its post-war dreary situation at the same time as they were in a constant state of potential war.
70 years is not that rapid, especially not for a minor region.
Maybe Indians are like that, I don’t know enough to dispute it. But I doubt Chinese would be interested in Israeli development to any special level considering all the developed and developing ‘yellow’ Asia-Pacific countries that exist.
I think you also perceive this through your materialist economy-focused POV too much.
Most Chinese and Indians aren’t international businessmen or government officials, and are mostly just ordinary people who receive most of their information about Israel from news and the internet.
The normal people who like Israel are probably more likely to be like this.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/india-s-internet-hindus-are-in-love-with-israel-1.5730730
https://qz.com/1290584/israels-very-popular-on-weibo-thanks-to-chinas-online-islamophobia/
The picture will not be complete without
The Adamites: Hippie Heretics of the Middle Ages
http://www.medievalists.net/2014/08/adamites-hippy-heretics-middle-ages/
They indulged in promiscuous intercourse, but no one might take a lover without the consent of Adam, their chief elder. When one of these brethren ardently desired a sister, he took her by the hand, and, going with her to the chief elder, said, ” My soul is afire with love of this woman.” Whereupon the elder would reply, ” Go, be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.”
Also one should remember the 180° change of attitude towards Jews by Hussites. This is appreciated by Jews till now that when Jewish encyclopedia writes about 1422 Prague “pogrom” it says the attacks were incidental to attacks on Catholics. In other words, never mind, no hard feelings as long as you intended to kill Catholics.
And then after Hussites lost some of the Brethren preferred to convert to Judaism than Catholicism.
It was a mere trickle until the 1930s. More Jews arrived from 1929-39 than in the entire period from 1882-1929.
They shut the barn door after the horse had bolted. (And even this wasn’t particularly successful.)
It’s rather doubtful an Israel would have been birthed if it weren’t for the British incubation period.
The Brits didn’t have any particularly good reason for being in Palestine. It’s hard to see how British interests would have been harmed – even from the point of the 1920s – if Arabs rather than Brits ruled the territories of Mandate Palestine.
The big difference between Jews and everybody else is that Jews are past masters at sucking up to, rather than antagonizing, the ruling power. If Armenians had played it like Jews in the same situation would have – making a huge show of supporting the sultan, all the way while doing their damndest to undermine him – there probably wouldn’t have been a massacre. But Armenians didn’t play it like Jews, they played it like Balkanoids. Unfortunately for them, they were spread throughout the Turkish heartland instead of concentrated in a non-Turkish fringe, so largely the same scenario that led to the liberation of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia – ethnic agitation combined with a Russo-Turkish war – resulted in a very different outcome.
I found both of them about as good as each other. The only reason to watch either of them is to get a feel for how a nuclear war scenario would play out among the people, and both films’ portrayal of this is instructive.
Personally, I wonder whether I would even bother trying to survive a nuclear attack. Depending on how bad it got locally, I might well prefer to off myself. After all, even if I avoided the original blast or the subsequent radiation sickness, there still wouldn’t be much left to live for. Prospering in a post-nuclear scenarios would likely favor people who are good with their hands, and I’m useless with mine; I’m really only suited to living in a civilized environment.
And those 6 children will no doubt be loyal to the jew run order and thus the bloodline ultimately all end up miscegenating with non whites. You serve the anti whites, you support white genocide – regardless how many white children you have.
Out of curiosity, what would be your estimates of effective range vs. kiloton range when employing nuclear weapons against Soviet and WP T-55/64/72 columns advancing to the Atlantic.
I mean, it strikes me as odd that both sides in Cold War invested heavily into mechanized, NBC protected infantry in APCs and IFVs if they are still vulnerable to N.
Also, I remember reading a study (CIA or some other Western agency) that showed that WP+Soviet forces would reach the Atlantic in two weeks time even if nukes are used because they have vast reserves and staggered their troops in echelons, with numerous depots from GDR to present (especially) Ukraine and Belarus.
Had the Bolsheviks not taken power, Turkey would have been dismembered and there would have been Greater Armenia and Megale Greece.
A feature, not a bug.
Also, grind your own.
Some peasant broke his back so that you and I, essentially an aristocrat, can enjoy the subtle variation of flavors from the Ethiopian highlands. And you put milk in it?
Some peasant broke his back so that you and I, essentially an aristocrat
Many people, including most patricians, believe that they are born virtuous; most plebs know better. They also think that the definition of refined consumption, the crème de la crème, if you will, is: what aristocrats enjoy and appreciate.
They probably destroyed the most interesting files first. The FBI probably still have some interesting stuff locked up, but it is likely dated because the organization isn’t what it used to be.
UK – most powerful and richest country of the 19th century, and with around 1000 years of progressive political, social and economic development, as well as population of high quality North-Western European human capital.
British would build a few trains and some running water in Israel (as in India, Egypt, etc) – but overall habitability of Israel would be more similar to Somalia (just with more resistant locals), than anything like England, and the Israel’s population expanded mostly with brown people from third world countries.
You can see if you explore urban environment of many cities in Israel – they were really refugee camps of the 1950s, which have transformed into cities (but still feel half like a refugee camp).
Israel’s population has increased more than 1000% in 70 years.
The economy reaches official developed market status in 2010, with all Western concepts of free press, democracy, etc – yet most of its population were just two generations ago, peasants in brown third world countries, where they never had democracy, free press, literacy, etc.
Israel is a very accelerated industrialization, but also accelerated development in all other areas. (For example, the population doubled in one decade – the 1950s).
Now there are maybe a few other examples of this like South Africa. But in South Africa, the core was very high human capital, Northern-Western European people.
While in Israel the development is not with a core population of Northern-Western European people.
Here is a video is interviewing about music tastes of Jewish people in non-elite Tel Aviv in 1992. (count the number of white people in this part of town, on a single hand).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoM548piGB8
But those societies (China, India) are very “top down”. Elite of India and China are government officials and businessmen, and they appear to view Israel aspirationally as an example of accelerated development and industrialization.
They might look at Korea or Singapore in a similar way. I’m not sure there are many other examples of this process recently (when you exclude oil exporting economies, and North-West European settlement of South Africa).
Lol, and cows have evolved for millions of years so that I can enjoy – milk.
I tried Aeropress again today, and it made really good coffee (but you need to use a lot of coffee in it). If I knew you I would buy you one, because this could be better than pour over coffee.
No idea, but I think Nato using a single thermonuclear weapon would have halted everything conventional because it would signal the begining of a game with a radically different set of rules, which would be written as events unfolded.
Not a chance. The fighting in the Bocage of Normandy was closely studied because of how built up the north European plain had become by the latter cold war so there was a problem for the Soviets even with conventional warfare in funneling their armada through the available routes between forests and urban areas. A nuke would leave the terrain impassible for the following waves. If nukes were used at all, it would probably have been nuclear mines to create gigantic craters and thereby block the advance. But this is unlikely because the Soviets said mines were nukes. The Warsaw Pact and would have certainly not persisted with a conventional warfare advance once Nato had used a nuke.
Nukes use would start with a single specimen strike to demonstrate resolve, not Nato trying to annihilate every Soviet formation moving or halted (and laying waste to West Germany in the process). Given that a battlefield nuke did blow up an advancing Soviet formation the Soviets would have retaliated with a very limited battlefield nuking of their own against Nato, and thereafter it it would have unfolded into something that was not war, but rather retaliation in kind tit for thermonuclear tat-plus, with neither side willing to stop. That prospect is why any decision for nuke use is most improbable. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent to nuclear weapons, while continuation of a conventional warfare offensive is nonsensical after the first use of nuclear weapons– and I suppose that would include even mines that kill no one and just make an anti tank ditch hundreds of feet deep.
I do not accept that Nato had too few nukes to stop a Soviet conventional steamroller, but also think it is very unlikely that any type of nukes would in fact have been have been used to stop it. The Soviets would have steamrollered Nato, conventionally conquered Western Europe (as they probably always were capable of doing after 1945), and a conventional WW3 would have started. The Soviet Union never wanted to conquer Western Europe, too many people to integrate and anyway they could not have hoped to win a global war against the world’s most powerful economy. If West Germany had really believed the Soviets might attack, and that would mean nuclear weapons being used over much of West Germany then West Germany would have built its own massive array of armoured divisions to conventionally deter the Warsaw Pact conventional offensive. The Germans, then as now, prefer to freeload on Nato all the while de-industrialising the Nato countries that are stupid enough to put up with Germany.
Could one of you fine gentleman here on Mr. Karlin’s blog kindly explain to me what this deranged lunatic is talking about?
You just can’t win this game. Alt-rightists will never get over your sex no matter what you do. It’s a mix of boyish “girls have cooties” and the mirror image of man-hating SJW attitudes. Better drop Anglin reading and return to Normieland where civility and respect can be found, or at least people don’t throw “thot” around. The guy who’d had interviews or something with Karlin said this long ago.
https://altleft.com/2017/12/10/skirting-the-issue-with-tara-mccarthy/
https://altleftmag.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/lstm.jpg
My Latin master, then a Police Sargeant in Palestine arrested Begin more than once. Someone then made a phone call to London or New York and orders came to release him without charge. The Stern Gang were particularly nasty.
The Zionists were promised a National Home, not control of the country. In his opinion the aggressors were always the Israelis who abused the land laws in particular.
It wasn’t awful enough to discourage young Jewish Brits from emigrating there in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Synagogues closed due to the numbers.
I think he means that your children will be brainwashed by globohomo and will therefore miscegenate (a problem, but a problem greatly overestimated by my fellows on the alt right).
Not entirely clear on how you’re serving the anti-whites though.
And no one can accuse me of being soft on WQ.
The group you mention was a tiny sect broken off from a minor sect. Completely unimportant, except for the raunchy story.
Jews (and ethnic Germans too) suffered due to prevailing attitude of the era: “either you are with us, or you are against us”. Refusal to convert could mean death. The 1422 pogrom was consequence of execution of Želivský, Hussite dictator of Prague. His enraged supporters then murdered municipal councillors and many others suspected from disloyalty.
Conversion of some Protestant noblemen to Judaism occurred two centuries later, after 1648, and was small in numbers.
Rosie doesn’t understand that most, if not all, of her WN beaus share Stokely Carmichael’s opinion of the proper position for women in “the movement.”
It’s unclear to me what most WNs think of the “proper position of women,” whatever that should mean.
Anyway, this topic is not very fruitful to discuss here. While some laws obviously benefit women disproportionately and so need to change (divorce, or issues about nonpaternity, and a few similar), it’s not quite clear if the extreme positions by the online “thot patrols” are worth anything. They sound impracticable, which immediately disqualifies them, and also, how much would they solve the main issue (low and dysgenic fertility), when theoretically pretty patriarchal societies like Japan or Iran can have low and dysgenic fertility rates, too.
The whole issue is not very interesting due to a lack of both practicable solutions or even plausible explanations beyond a few things like women’s education destroys fertility. (But actually it’s well known that higher education and even most of secondary education is pretty useless for the vast majority of students, except a few specialists like doctors, engineers, scientists and similar, yet it seems near impossible to get rid of higher education even for most people irrespective of sex. But getting rid of most of higher education for both sexes would be both more useful and easier to implement than only doing so for women. People proposing to abolish higher education for women are not interested in the problem nor in a solution.)
It is an interesting question how susceptible the Left is to its own message. Some of the most rabid antiwhites in America who are white don’t even look like they have a drop of Italian blood. I don’t know know if that is circumstances, or not. Maybe, the message isn’t that old, so their parents were not programmed the same way.
I don’t know whether it is a vain hope or not that they are breeding themselves out of the genepool. At any rate, I think there will be some sort of genetic shift from differences in TFR, as well as assortative mating.
If that happens, it will be despite my best efforts and in defiance of my clear wishes.
This is why IQ is such an important concept. IQ tests are, by far, the best general replacement for college, since college degrees mainly function as ersatz IQ tests.
But, of course, a lot of people like Utu will dismiss them out of hand, and imply that there is nothing wrong with the college system which radicalizes susceptible individuals. Takes away many of the fertile years or smart women, and saddles the young with debt for practicallly useless paper degrees.
A lot of “WNs” are a lot more than WNs. If you’re strictly a WN and nothing else, then the WQ doesn’t exist. There are simply “white” issues that have to do with reproduction like miscegenation, birth rates, etc.
The modern alt-right is pro-white, but also rejects most social innovations of the past century (or a much longer time). We’re radical right wingers in the mold of fascism, the counter-enlightenment, the fire eaters, etc.
That said, obviously discussing the WQ at this time is not productive. I regard it as shit posting.
And even Rosie herself admits that women are natural conformists, so if we solve the problem then the WQ won’t exist (at least with respect to elections, family formation, etc.).
So yes, you’re quite right that rather than organizing to keep women out of college (lol) the goal should be eliminating higher education as a job requirement. Long-term I would like to see different types of education for men and women, but there are far bigger fish to fry today.
You mean in the immediate aftermath of WWI? Russia would have still been in a pretty bad state, even if there had been no civil war. So it’s unclear to me that Russia would have had the motivation, or perhaps even the means, to intervene in that conflict.
You sound normal. How did you get here?
At the time of the Revolution, Russia was sitting on about 10% of Turkey’s territory and expanding. It fared poorly against Germany but crushed both Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. I doubt Ataturk would have been able to defeat the Russians. It’s very likely that, had there been no Revolution, there would have been a very large Armenian state linked to Russia.
And Ashkenazim spent centuries incubated in those kind of countries.
Starting from basically nothing.
In South Africa Whites were 21% in 1911 and 16% in 1980.
Meanwhile Israel is still even now probably something like 45-50% Ashkenazim, and Mizrahim are better quality than Africans.
And Israel has fraternal American Jews to support them.
And you form this view because….there are a lot of businessmen visiting Israel?
Maybe Indians are like this, I don’t know. But I am doubtful this is the case for the PRC, who are basically following the East Asian model of industrialisation.
Some of the immigrants came there from Western Europe, some maybe not as refugees and therefore with some money from their family – but having a proportion of immigrants from rich countries arriving in a primitive desert country, is not making it comparable to the UK, which was dominant power of the 19th century, with ultra high development in all areas, beautiful houses, legendary universities, metro systems, famous corporations, etc.
Maybe 40% of Jews in Israel, so about 30% of the Israeli population.
South Africa was also a great model for rapid national development until the 1980s. But it has too many problems since the 1990s.
Moreover, South Africa had both very high human capital and the economy mainly developed from resource extraction industries (mining of natural resources). I would not find it so relevant if I was India or China.
Yes, and what do you think is the reason for that interest.
Israel possibly one of the most rapid developments of a country in a few different areas – cultural, military, political, economic.
And although a miniature model I would see it as somewhat replicable for India or China (maybe along with Korea, Singapore, Chile?), unlike economies which develop from exportation of commodities like oil, which India and China would not have.
Israel is kind of dysfunctional, but I would still find them as the best choice to write the book of “how to develop a country fast with brown people”. In the same way Ukraine can be commissioned to write the book “how to not develop a country despite being white people”.
That would have been quite wonderful, of course. Unfortunately, it didn’t pan out, and Armenians paid a hefty price.
It’s unclear to me what most WNs think of the “proper position of women,”
I take you and Rosie to be WNs of a sort so maybe y’all could fill us in.
how much would they solve the main issue (low and dysgenic fertility
I don’t accept that your stating that this is the “main” issue is a closed case.
The whole issue is not very interesting due to a lack of both practicable solutions
These issues are the most interesting. To the contrary, situations with cut and dried solutions are not interesting.
If that happens, it will be despite my best efforts and in defiance of my clear wishes.
Lots of evidence point to the conclusion that barring dropping them on their head or terrorizing them with hate what we do doesn’t amount to much.
I’m a White national socialist, though the socialist part is negotiable.
Israel is a tiny sliver (slightly more than half the size of Maine), it is not like they are trying to develop a country the size of Algeria.
And what matters is not so much their wealth as their intelligence and motivation.
Despite being a small portion of the population, American Jews rose rapidly in society.
”The size of the Jewish student body had quickly risen from 7% of freshmen in 1900 to 10% in 1909, 15% in 1915, 21.5% in 1922, and 27.6% in 1925.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-discriminating-against-jews-2014-12
And of course, finance and Hollywood were the same.
Because they surrendered power and administration to Africans.
Chinese industrialisation has much more in common with Japan and South Korea.
Which is your opinion, but I still don’t see any evidence that China and India see Israel that way.
I have quite a few thoughts in response to your comment, which I found very interesting. For the sake of readability, I’ll split them into multiple replies:
Sure; as is often the case, I imagine we agree on, say, 70-80% of the important issues, but it’s always more fun, maybe or maybe not more productive, to discuss areas of disagreement.
The Panama Canal was important to American security in the prewar period, as in that era the US didn’t having overwhelming naval dominance. Thus it was essential to have the capability to rapidly move fleets between the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Even today geography is vitally important in naval affairs, but consider the state of technology from 1898-1917. Aircraft a novelty lacking range and payload, radar not yet invented, and certainly there were no satellites. In this period Britain and Germany had the capability to attack the Panama Canal, yet America had no basing in the Atlantic approaches to the Canal.
That’s an interesting point, but I’d have to disagree quite strongly with this line of reasoning on several concentric grounds:
Firstly, I do not believe that, even if we were to grant the claims that the Panama Canal was necessary for American security and that the Spanish-American War was a good/necessary means of securing it, either Britain or Germany, or for that matter any other foreign power, posed a threat to the security of the American homeland in 1898. Britain’s only serious interest in the Western Hemisphere, if any, was preventing any other imperial powers from controlling it, hence the UK’s tacit acceptance of, even arguably support for, the Monroe Doctrine throughout the 19th century. The most relevant demonstration of this would be the resolution of the 1895 Venezuela crisis, in which Britain—wisely—decided not to match insane US belligerence over the trivial issue and allowed the matter to be resolved to American satisfaction. British diplomats and statesmen had their hands full trying to manage their concerns in Africa, India, East Asia and continental Europe; I find it exceedingly difficult to imagine a scenario by 1898 in which they choose to make an enemy of the US, rather than, for better or for worse, seeking to cultivate it as an ally/successor.
Then, as far as Germany goes, its foremost concern was its position on the European continent vis a vis France and Russia, followed by a desire to obtain colonial possessions in Africa and East Asia. Some German officials post-Bismarck liked to engage in a certain amount of bluster and swagger about Germany’s role on the world stage, occasionally including Latin America, but I do not see any even remotely plausible scenario in which Germany would initiate a naval war of aggression against the US to control the Western Hemisphere/attack the US homeland. (I would hope that it is obvious why this scenario is almost entirely different from the German submarine warfare campaign of WW1, but if it isn’t clear to anyone I will explicate the differences.) Consider, for instance, that Germany backed down in the 1903 Venezuela crisis in the face of Roosevelt’s USN-backed threats.
Then, as a corollary, I’m not sure that, even if Britain, Germany, or some other foreign power had wanted to attack the US/control the Caribbean, they would have had the capabilities necessary to successfully do so. (Once again granting for the sake of argument the contentions about the Panama Canal.) You are correct that the USN didn’t have “overwhelming” naval supremacy in this era, but it wouldn’t have needed supremacy, just parity, to make fighting a war of aggression far from the homeland prohibitively potentially expensive for a foreign power, and historical experience suggests that the US’s industrial capacity would have allowed it to rapidly expand if necessary. Additionally, Germany lacked a coaling station in the Caribbean, in spite of intermittent attempts to acquire one. Further consider that any foreign power attempting to attack the US would have had to worry about its rivals opportunistically joining the conflict on the US side. Given the intense anxiety in Britain at the time over maintaining the Royal Navy’s tradition of supremacy in the face of the naval arms race with Germany, I think that even, say, a presumed 20% chance of defeat/stalemate in a conflict with the US would have been enough to scare the British off.
Secondly, we can keep for the sake of argument the contention that the Panama Canal was necessary for US security but still put the contention that the Spanish-American War was necessary to defend Atlantic approaches to it up for debate. To me, it seems that, if the US only needed naval bases in the Caribbean to protect itself/the Panama Canal, this could probably have been easily done without fighting an imperial war of aggression. The US has quite frequently throughout its history made arrangements for the basing, supply and transit of its armed forces with other sovereign nations; consider for instance the leasing of bases in the Azores during WW2 for US/UK forces. If there was a genuine threat to the US homeland/the Panama Canal from a foreign power, I would think that some of the other imperial powers with holdings in the area/nearby independent nations would also view this as a threat and be willing to provide basing to US forces equivalent to whatever the US got from the Spanish-American War. If nothing else, wouldn’t Spain itself rather just sell some of its colonies/offer basing rights than lose all its possessions in a war anyway?
Thirdly, I don’t even see that the Panama Canal was necessary for US security in this period. Was there a real threat of an assault on the US homeland’s Pacific coast circa 1898? I find it hard to imagine that, even if we suppose that Britain or Germany did want to attack the US, they would have found it more convenient to attack through the Pacific rather than the Atlantic. It seems to me that a strong USN presence in the Atlantic and a smaller one in the Pacific, even without a canal, would have sufficed to defend the US homeland; European navies would have had to worry about US countermoves against their home waters if they tried any crazy trans-oceanic shenanigans.
TL;DR: The US homeland did not face any serious threats circa 1898; even if it did, bases to protect the Panama Canal could have been acquired without war; even if they couldn’t have been, strong USN presence in the Atlantic would have been enough for deterrence even without the canal. (All of this is in my opinion, of course; I always try to be open to having my mind changed by contrary evidence and reasoning.)
As before, you raise an interesting point, but I disagree strongly with it in multiple ways.
Firstly, aside from everything else, US victory over Japan in WW2 was a mixed bag strategically: It had obvious benefits, but it removed the major barrier to the influence of the USSR/Russia in East Asia and the communists in China. My understanding is that American imperialists circa the Spanish-American War were interested in the Philippines primarily as a gateway to influence over China, which a certain segment of the US elite saw as extremely critical to American interests. Mao’s victory in the civil war was the death knell for that line of thought.
Secondly, if all the US wanted to do was provoke a war with Japan, it only needed to enter a defensive alliance with Spain guaranteeing the security of the Philippines.
Thirdly, I do not believe that Imperial Japan posed any threat to the US homeland, and I think the FDR administration could have easily avoided war with Japan if it had so desired. I’ll remain genuinely agnostic on whether or not the war was still justified/a positive overall for this comment, but at least in terms of protecting US citizens/the American homeland I do not believe that it was necessary.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40056379?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Rapid economic growth in China began in the Republican era.
Paging Maozuo Godfree Roberts.
My high school examination was composed of an English language test and an IQ test.
My impression is that, beyond a certain cutoff point, IQ tests are rather good for assessing people’s ability for occupations that involve a lot of mathematics and pure science, but perhaps not quite as well for things outside those fields.
However, I do believe credential inflation is a serious problem and it would be better to replace the system of mass universities with a far more selective system.
For most people it might instead be better if they were assessed on a mixture of tiered secondary education, IQ tests, letters of recommendation and apprenticeships/internships.
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Maybe this, like with welfare systems, is easier to implement after the institutional collapse has happened and our countries have to be rebuilt from the bottom up.
I don’t hate women you weird Protestant bitch. I hate white libs & nigger loving Protestants like you
Idgaf what you have to say & would have slapped the taste out your mouth by now
But actually it’s well known that higher education and even most of secondary education is pretty useless for the vast majority of students
Salazar redux. He also believed that education was pointless, or even counterproductive, for the vast majority of the population. For people of my age, mandatory schooling ending at age 9, a fact I found out a few years ago when, living in Portugal, I was required to prove that I had the minimum required education for a person of my age, in order to take an exam for a maritime certificate. Unable to convince the authorities in question that I obviously had at least a 4th-grade education, I was forced to hire an official translator to translate my Ph.D. diploma in order to sit the exam.
Rosietriumph:
https://www.amren.com/news/2018/12/study-majority-of-parisians-reluctant-to-marry-africans/
I’m a White national socialist
In the US, WNs are: 1) mostly self-promoters fighting over a share of fanboys, 2) partially a creation of the MSM that is frequently manipulated by the totalitarian left e. g., Charlottesville, in order to scare moderates, 3) sincerely concerned individuals grasping at a straw in any port.
I’m not arguing that it is virtuous to drink fancy coffee, but rather that if you are going to drink it, you should show some respect for the peasants who produced it.
My sister gave me hers, and I didn’t like it any better than she did.
But I would not be averse to meeting at Даблби if you are ever in Moscow. Since unlike Thorfinnson I never intend to be POTUS, I’d even be willing to post a purpose made email address for contact rather than importune that jolly good fellow Anatoly.
Right. And perhaps peasants were bred to pick coffee beans.
More bad news for the Ukraine:
https://twitter.com/MedvedevRussiaE/status/1078960420436758531
I think it’s worth mentioning that despite 4+ years of “Russian invasion”, Russia remains the Ukraine’s biggest trading partner, so these new restrictions are going to hurt. You can find the full list of banned Ukrainian export items here (in Russian)
http://static.government.ru/media/files/0Co2s7zyjZX1o39jcSuzUca947G2wGdY.pdf
you should show some respect for the peasants who produced it.
Humbleness is not an aristocratic trait; it is alien to their nature and actively discouraged.
Link between land mass and development is not so clear.
Obviously Australia has a very large land mass, and develops successfully.
Bangladesh has a relatively small land mass, and doesn’t develop successfully.
Australia benefited from its landmass, as its economy relies a lot on natural resource extraction (and larger landmass, means higher probability of discovering natural resources).
However, then there is New Zealand , and even New Zealand developed successfully (without landmass or natural resources advantages of Australia).
So development is often independent of this variable.
Yet most of Israel is not now composed by the same people as them – culturally or even ethnically.
Israel is developing the country with most of a Middle Eastern population, which is part of why it is interesting (and the more difficult/ambitious development project than something like another New Zealand which was using a European population).
South Africa achieved rapid development, by 1970s. Looks like more like America than Africa in videos…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzteAu-8NbU
But political system was not functioning and I don’t think rising powers of today are interested about failed history.
And main industry of South African economy – mining. So that aspect is not replicable for countries with a different geology.
It’s not just random opinion.
Why was the first major foreign university they build in China, an Israeli engineering university.
And Chinese paid to build it, with hundreds of millions of dollars. (Although they are now doing the same to open a Moscow State University branch in China as well).
I cannot find much reporting on this story. But it looked like (at 1:10) they even teach engineering students Hebrew there (if anyone understands Chinese)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccrTIMVRZQo
Oh thanks, that is nice. Lol your refusal to add milk to coffee, use of pour over filter, and view of aeropress as being “too modern” – this is obviously a whole different level of connoisseurship.
I’m afraid letters of recommendation are mostly useless. As a generality, the point behind them seems to be to try to prove that someone isn’t an axe-murderer, but there are all sorts of psychopaths that can flatter and talk someone up, so I’m not sure it is very useful, even at that level.
In practice, I know someone who wrote one for an underling because he wanted to get rid of him because he thought he was incompetent. I also recall a high school teacher who said she wrote one for anyone who asked.
One of the essential oddities of the whole college system in the US is how it costs more than ever, an enormous sum above inflation, despite the fact that the nature of information is duplicative, even moreso now with the internet and video-on-demand than previously. But I think it is mostly harmful even in the places where the cost is still more reasonable.
In addition to IQ tests, the other change I would suggest is that there should be some period in which it is easier to fire newly hired people. Of course, there are vast hordes of people who are opposed to any meritocratic system, so you may be right about a collapse being necessary.
Not that it will make any difference for some people. It’s hard to convince a man of something when his ego depends on him not believing it.
First Israeli university in China opened in 2017.
http://int.technion.ac.il/first-israeli-university-inaugurated-in-china/
To pick the first example that comes to mind, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University with a focus on ‘science, technology, engineering, architecture and business with a secondary focus in English’ opened in 2006.
Liverpool University is part of UK’s Russell Group.
China is trying to entice Westerners and other advanced nationalities to develop the country, to extent they fail it is because not enough educated Dutchmen don’t want to live in China (to use a personal anecdote).
So, I am still not convinced of your thesis.
Ignore the double negative.
Good news! Russian economy shows impressive growth post-factum. GDP growth in 2016 revised from -0,2% to 0,3%.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dvmtl6lU0AI3ubz.jpg
But does it not mean that the 2017 growth was actually slower, given that the 2017 output was not revised upwards?
Growth rates for 2015, 2016 and 2017 were all revised upwards as new data was incorporated into Rosstat findings. This is Rosstat’s 5th estimate of 2016 GDP. They explain their methodology here (in Russian):
http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/vvp/letter_vvp.pdf
Okay.
There are reasons for scepticism as Trump seems to be backtracking on his Syria decision already. Apparently Lindsay Graham convinced him that this is bad for Israel. What a joke!
https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/1079514943152631808
There usually is at least a 90 day probationary period associated with most jobs. I don’t understand your concern here?