Not a very eventful week. But I think the upcoming one will be more productive, and speaking of blogging in particular, with a couple of longreads.
TIL I learned am a US-based Orthodox zealot.
Moderation note: I am tired of Gerard2’s scatalogy-laced attacks on AP clogging up every second thread. AP, please stop replying to him. Gerard2, just ignore AP, since he “triggers” you so much. I don’t know if you realize it from the side, but it’s you comes off as a troglodyte in those “debates”, not AP or Mr. Hack. I have started deleting these comments and may move up to a ban if you don’t desist. Which would be a shame as some of your contributions are good.
@ak
Notable posts since the last Open Thread.
- Russia’s 13 Plans for 2019-2024
- Intellectual Production in the Byzantine Empire
- 96% of Kuril Islanders Oppose Joining Japan
- Human Capital in Early Modern Poland and Russia
Featured
- Scott Alexander does away with the Culture Wars threads
- So basically American SJWism is strong it can bully a liberal, bisexual Jew from hosting a politics forum just because he thinks Charles Murray might have something legitimate to say.
- *powerful comment* Thorfinnsson on US financial power
- Greg Cochran on why he was sure that Iraq wasn’t working towards an atomic bomb in 2002 (TLDR: not smart enough).
Russia
- Kenneth Rapoza: Could Russia Be Subject To Venezuela-Style Sanctions?
- Jon Hellevig on Russia’s roads
- Update on my post about Radio Liberty’s allegation Russian trolls are spreading measles in Europe… Paul Robinson points out that not only is anti-vax a Western phenomenon, but actual Russian bots have more pro-vax messages than anti-vax ones.
- Hungary offers Russian bank diplomatic status, complete with immunity. Ominous title, no? Except for the minor matter of all the context it fails to provide: “This Russian bank is neither Russian not a bank. IIB is not a bank (in the sense of holding a regulated banking licence) but an international development agency and receives exactly the same privileges as all others IDA in the EU. In addition, it has 9 members in it: Bulgaria, Cuba, Czech Rep, Hungary, Mongolia, Romania, Russia, Slovakia & Vietnam. One of these nine countries is Russia. The five EU member states hold 50.16% (i.e: the majority), Russia only holds 40.03%. Why is it described as “Russian” bank?“
- Russia’s Black Market Totaled 20% of GDP in 2018 – Reports. I.e., down from ~40% during the 2000s.
- Svidomy Ukrainian journalists experiences a quality zrada.
World
- *powerful comment* Polish Perspective on the Chinese economy
- Kenneth Rapoza: Dear China, Get Ready For 25% Tariffs
- Steve Sailer: Fake Noose!
- Guillaume Durocher: In Face of Yellow-Vest Critics, France Moves to Criminalize Anti-Zionism
Science & Culture
- Emil Kirkegaard: Paige-Harden, Turkheimer and the psychometric left
- Emil Kirkegaard posts a poll on whether embryo selection/genetic engineering for polygenic human traits would work (current results: 66% geneticists say yes, 86% of his followers say yes.
- Incidentally, the next edition of Rindermann/Becker/Coyle’s surveys of psychometrists will have a question just on this.
- AP on aristocratic vs. Communist elites.
Humor
- Neoreactionary Bruce Laliberte embraces “the trans vector” as it coincides with “the trend to greater autonomy of the individual and freedom from state forces.”
Moscow looks romantic at night–which is great given its already low and dropping homicide rate. Now, if only Muscovites will have more children so that the rest of Russia could become smarter!
Re: https://awfulavalanche.wordpress.com/2019/02/22/why-a-belorussian-jew-doesnt-want-you-to-see-t-34/ (JRL Promoted) &
https://www.rferl.org/a/moscow-fires-broadside-amid-ukrainian-campaign-against-russian-war-film-in-u-s-/29783479.html (Non-JRL Promoted)
Be interested to know of any inaccuracies regarding the two pieces.
Is Dmitry Smelansky a Belarusian Jew as stated by the JRL promoted anonymous Sovok (left of center and somewhat Soviet nostalgic) blogger “Yalensis” of “Awful Avalanche”? The RFE/RL piece notes Smelansky as being “Belarusian”. I understand his surname to be relatively common among Jews having a familial association with Belarus and its surrounding territories. Some surnames are known to to be utilized by more than one ethnic group. Besides being Jewish and/or Belarusian, is Dmitry Smelansky of any other background/backgrounds? Not that this matter should be so emphasized – noting that it’s “progressive” JRL promoted Yalensis who did just that.
Based on what Yalensis says, the RFE/RL piece overlooks Smelansky’s soft pedaling of anti-Jewish and other intolerant sentiment (anti-Russian included) in Kiev regime controlled Ukraine. If that’s true, then shame on Smelansky, along with his taking a censoring stand against the Russian film at issue, among other instances, involving Russia/Russians.
The above linked RFE/RL piece has a broken hyperlink to a Daily Beast article, which is critical of the Russian movie. A google search attempt to find that Daily Beast review was unsuccessful.
An additional note concerns the anti-Communist/pro-Russian Russians, as well as some others, who aren’t against the film in question. These individuals understand that during WW II, Russia was in a horrible position, seeing many good people fighting on the Soviet side, for reasons different from supporting Stalin and Marxist-Leninism.
Based on the two above linked pieces and what has been said of the movie at issue, Smelansky might not like the depiction of a multiethnic effort among Soviet citizens in combatting Nazi Germany.
I gather that the movie Defiance starring Daniel Craig, might very well be more in line with Smelansky’s mindset. In this particular movie, Belarusian collaborators and anti-Nazi forces are depicted as having an anti-Jewish strain.
Taras Kuzio seems to be a bit pissed with his follow-up at this Tweet:
https://twitter.com/TarasKuzio/status/1097839846066921473
Some academic! What a guy!
Related:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/19022019-putting-the-new-cold-war-and-russia-bashing-into-proper-perspective-oped/#comments
“Detective post” about Julia Ioffe’s surname from Sepharim, did not make sense. Obviously none of these are her relatives of the Julia Ioffe we know.
Ioffe is one of the most common Jewish surnames which would have tens of thousands of representatives in many countries.
Just type in VK or instagram. E.g. copypasta results page of instagram search –
https://www.instagram.com/li__ioffe
https://www.instagram.com/maryioffe
https://www.instagram.com/ioffe_am
https://www.instagram.com/megankoks
https://www.instagram.com/alena__ioffe
https://www.instagram.com/lena.ioffe2017
https://www.instagram.com/_ioffe
https://www.instagram.com/ioffealeksei
https://www.instagram.com/ioffe_style
https://www.instagram.com/ioffesergey
https://www.instagram.com/okeylik.ioffe
https://www.instagram.com/gabi_ioffe_
https://www.instagram.com/ioffeg
https://www.instagram.com/avital_ioffe
https://www.instagram.com/ioffe_irina
etc
Or Wikipedia
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%98%D0%BE%D1%84%D1%84%D0%B5
At that thread concerning the aforementioned Seraphim, you way overrated Ioffe’s influence. It’s peanuts in comparison to the likes of Adam Schiff and Rachel Maddow, whose motivation to bash Russia isn’t noticeably motivated by Ioffe’s input.
Ioffe might finally start to get deflated for the series of asinine remarks she has made over the course of time. Note her recent early departures from Politico and The Atlantic. Time will of course tell.
Sorry, this was the aforementioned recent follow-up from Kuzio, regarding some commentary that he obviously doesn’t agree with:
https://twitter.com/TarasKuzio/status/1098954895888207873
There’s about 20 different women called “Julia (Yulia, Yulya, Yulka, etc) Ioffe” in facebook and vk.
Famous one makes an account for vk, but never used it?
https://vk.com/id173130066
But her Facebook shows a bit about her history
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100138325536322&set=pb.1105068.-2207520000.1551059674.&type=3
Can find both Julia Ioffe’s parents’ facebook accounts. (Neither of her parents are famous people)
Julia Ioffe seems to be from “humble” (not rich) family and her friends do not seem many rich people.
Also Ioffe doesn’t seem so connected, or friends with very many rich people from Russia. Most of her friends see to be other journalists or academics.
Only interesting connection for 10 minutes detective work, was that one of Ioffe’s student friends hosted Khodorkovsky to the British university
https://www.facebook.com/julia.taranova
Thanks for doing the groundwork, I assumed he’d done some investigating himself instead of looking up Ioffe’s on Wiki.
Not a powerful comment, then.
She seems like the “public person” who manages Trump-Russia conspiracy theory in the American media. She’s the expert they talk to also on television.
However, what I find on social media, is that she has ordinary parents. Also she is almost not connected (at least on public social media) to rich or important people, just to journalists and NGO workers.
I would guess a lot of her motivation is actually jealously against Trump, oligarchs, etc. She was annoying oligarchs like Petr Aven with conspiracy theories.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/the-mystery-of-trumps-man-in-moscow-214283
HBD is a pretty good reason not to invade the Third World. I don’t know if universalists can really articulate a good reason.
That Scott Alexander Culture War RIP post was one of the saddest things I have seen on the internet of late. Not a great title though. Should be Culture War: I surrender unconditionally.
He claims he is not going to become illiberal because all of the dickheads are leftist. Give him time. If I was a conspiracy theorist zealot I would be suspicious that most of them are agent provocateurs.
From that slant, they (MSNBC, CNN, et al) talk to a numerous other folks besides her.
Like I said, the likes of Maddow and Schiff aren’t primarily motivated by her.
Natasha Bertrand has essentially replaced Ioffe at The Atlantic. They both leave something to be desired, with Ioffe making the more outrageously absurd comments, which (as I noted) might lead to her getting downplayed – something long overdue.
BTW, I can see Ioffe pulling a Jesse Smallett kind of stunt, directed against patriotically minded Russians and/or perhaps some others.
Ioffe’s mother is just a medical doctor.
“Dr. Ioffe is an expert in surgical pathology, specifically in breast and gynecologic pathology. ”
http://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/profiles/Ioffe-Olga/
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10158593844650032&set=a.10151024257595032&type=3&theater
The girl was one of Julia Ioffe’s friends.
So I was wondering if Ioffe might be secretly connected Khodorkovsky by 2 degrees of separation? But, no.
As she writes, this looks just like Khodorkovsky is visiting Russian students at Hill Foundation of Oxford University, which he funds.
http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/fees-and-funding/fees-funding-and-scholarship-search/hill-foundation-scholarships
Jewish surnames must be really interesting to study, on various levels. Like frequency, geographic spread, haplotype, history, meaning.
I recall hearing vaguely that most didn’t adopt surnames until ordered to by Christian kings, which seems kind of surprising. At least against the stereotype of Jews being traders or lenders in cities and having an international aspect to the trade. But perhaps most Jews were not really urban. I wonder when non-European Jews adopted surnames.
Macron must have a really interesting definition of treason.
This is an argument why Iraq couldn’t have built an atomic bomb, not that it wasn’t working toward it. There were also chemical weapons, which Iraq did manage to build.
To be fair, though, even some Third World countries have some room for improvement despite their low human capital. For instance, Iraq nowadays is better off than it was back in the days of Saddam Hussein.
Ioffe does have a certain slightly deranged quality that periodically declares itself in her writing and speaking and (most often) her Tweeting. It would be unfair to compare her to subhuman morons like Jessica Valenti and Jill Filipovic, but at her most coarse and lowbrow she can start to resemble them, a person so consumed by hate that every ugly thought she has perforce has to be unleashed upon the world, no matter how ill formed it may be.
I also noted her quiet departure from The Atlantic. Her Twitter says she is now at GQ, a fashion magazine whose journalism is mostly vulgar, tabloid stuff for upper-middle-class people with college degrees. As an American I can say that this is definitely a step (or two) down in prestige from The Atlantic. Maybe they pay more but given her tendency to bounce around I’ll venture that she’s not an easy person to work with.
Ioffe does her thing to stoke the Russiagate fires, but she’s not the prime architect. That would be the Clinton campaign and the Democratic party more generally:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/25/hillary-clinton-looks-back-in-anger
yeah i think the iraq thing was 2 parts. the other part was iraq really wasn’t bringing in the materials or equipment that they would have needed, so how could they have been working on such a device. too hard to get some of that stuff and no convincing evidence they could get a hold of it in the quantities needed. it’s not impossible to detect some of those things from far away. north korea is under observation and you can tell when they do something just from satellite and seismograph.
there were other situations like the gerald bull thing where israeli intelligence was pretty convinced iraq or iran would be able to build something that was genuinely dangerous to israel, given enough time and materials, so they just had him killed.
iraq happened because neocons wanted it to happen. they didn’t need any reason, and they definitely didn’t need any evidence. the idea that the case for invading ‘wasn’t convincing’ to a smart guy, is pretty irrelevant. i was only like 20 back then but it’s obvious random brown dirt people can’t really build any supertechnology, but when does that ever stop the CIA or US military. especially with their ludicrous ideas about rebuilding third world dirt countries up to first world standards. that’s just crazy, from the HBD perspective – the only perspective.
Yes, being choked by sanctions is worse for them than not being choked by sanctions. Who would have thought?
Not true. Gerard2 comes unhinged sometimes, but he’s a real human bean. AP and Mr. Hack are obviously paid shills, so lower than pond scum.
“To be fair, though, even some Third World countries have some room for improvement despite their low human capital. For instance, Iraq nowadays is better off than it was back in the days of Saddam Hussein.”
Iraq, bolstered by oil revenues, was a comparatively wealthy and growing economy until 1980. The generation of turmoil started by the ruinous war of attrition with Iran from 1980-88 followed by extensive sanctions from 1990 until the invasion in 2003 had a major downwards effect on Iraqi development.
Greg Cochran just missed the deadline for the new Karlin Open Thread with this one:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2019/02/24/good-excuse/
Was going to post that. It’s a plausible theory (if a bit trivial) but the data needs more parsing. What was the actual burden of the non-combat deaths from famine and persecution vs. combat? Why did Belarus, Poland and Ukraine have better ratios even by 1950, despite suffering more in the war (may have to do with the gender ratios of the dead)?
The modern male surpluses in many countries deserve a thread of their own. My guess would be they’re alternatively explained either by immigration of men (Germany, Sweden) or emigration of women (Latvia, Poland). But why so many women in Portugal and Ireland?
While people are on the topic of (((Ioffe))), does anyone know what Max Boot real jew name is? I have tried to find this but could not find anything online.
Seems pretty far fetched to ascribe the events of the late 1980s to the demographic catastrophe of the early 1940s.
That said, I agree with the idea that the USSR was much weaker than it looked in the decade after WW2. Most of the divisions that invaded Germany were severely undermanned, unlike their fresh and often replenished Western Allies counterparts. Combined with its atomic lead, this is why I argued that it was the one time in world history that a single power (the US) had the means to become a world-dominating singleton.
PS. While I am 95% a material so far as history is concerned, if I had to add a one-line “spiritual” reason to why the USSR collapsed – Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader to not have been born in the Russian Empire. Kholmogorov had a cool article on that recently.
They were occupied for 2-3 years, hence no conscription (affects males), but more forced labor, anti-partisan reprisal actions, starvation, etc. (which affects both sexes).
von Neumann felt similarly (in 1945):
Other way round – they get their information from crap like Ioffe and Elder
I recall hearing vaguely that most didn’t adopt surnames until ordered to by Christian kings
Incidentally, while I can’t be described as a fan of Stalinism, I have never encountered any hard evidence for the mass deportation of cripples from Moscow. Has anyone? Seems like an urban legend to me.
I would guess though that the mother is a virulently rabid feminist and both parents anti-Russian
But normal? Yes, probably – unlike the nutjob witch excrement freak mother of Miriam Elder – a real lunatic
I think it was Ioffe who wrote that her Russian grandmother was pro-Putin
….then there is the bizarre thing of her and Richard Spencer allegedly hitting it off …which is almost as bizarre and disappointingly discrediting as the Richard Spencer/Nina Byzantina thing
Jews had surnames before the nineteenth century, just like with their gentile counterparts, it is merely that these were patronymic names and not necessarily fixed surnames.
I found a source which states this:
https://www.oldgermantranslations.com/translations/page4/page4.html
However, the purpose of the author is trace family trees and thus simply uses official administrative family registers and does not account for the unregistered private names in use among Jews themselves.
While I do believe a sizable portion of the Jewish population, especially in the East, resided in the countryside or shtetls, it is interesting that many territorial names denote an urban character – from Berlin, Prague, Danzig, Kalish, Minsk, Pinsk, etc.
Don’t know about that…many filth but also many great patriots of Russia are/were jewish ( Primakov being one of many examples) …..but does anyone know the origins of the “wolf” in jewish surnames? I can understand variations of “Gold” “Silver” “Diamond” as there were historic reasons Jews were almost forced into becoming experts and acquiring and trading in them…and hence all these surnames of jews in England ,US or of Russian,German ,French descent….but where does the “wolf” come from?
I don’t believe so. Elder and Ioffe play on Schiff’s and Maddow’s anti-Trump agenda. Russia is the punching bag for Elder, Ioffe, Schiff and Maddow.
Concerning Trump-Russia, note that the Steele dossier has been more of a focal point than what Ioffe and Elder have said.
For that matter, there’s also the academic TV talking head JRL promoted politico Michael McFaul, who has shamefully and uncritically praised Ioffe as noted:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2016/12/21/parting-shots-from-obama-and-clinton.html
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/07/12/more-mumbo-jumbo-on-russia.html
Not to be overlooked are the likes of Malcolm Nance, James Clapper, John Brennan and Frank Figliuzzi, who like McFaul have government employed experience.
IMO, these individuals have an anti-Russian bias, that hasn’t been so greatly influenced by what Elder and Ioffe have said. Elder and Ioffe serve as additions for a pile on effect.
Names like Silberstein, Rubinstein, Bernstein, Edelstein were adopted due to Romanticist notions and not related to their occupations, presumably ‘Wolf’ shares the same origin.
Or a liberal, homosexual Jew didn’t like the direction things were going on and decided to shut it down
But he endorses the continuation of the thread, just not under his name:
Is Putin in charge?
When it comes to Private Equity investment from private sector sources, Baring Vostok accounts for about half of the remaining foreign investment in Russia. Baring Vostok did Russia a favour by propping up one of Russia’s failing banks (most banks have failed and been merged or closed). The reward is for the executives to be jailed at the request of some of the fraudsters involved in the rescued bank, now being prosecuted for fraud by B-V in other administrations. The fraudsters are of course connected to Putin. Putin has nevertheless spoken against the use of the criminal justice system for business disputes. (He and Medvedev promised to clean this up in 2011 – there are sometimes large gaps between Putin’s words and deeds).
Is this a powerful faction that Putin doesn’t really control? The government could not stop TNK from attacking BP until Putin replaced Medvedev/Gazprom as the lead agents with Sechin/Rosneft. The Litvenyenko killing and the invasion of the Donbass appear to have been adventures not approved by Putin although not stopped either. Deripaska and the Rothenbergs appear to loot the state without restraint whatever the formal tender procedures might be. Is this intended or merely allowed because the power balance in the Kremlin is too delicate to stop them?
If the power balance is delicate why aren’t NATO security agencies trying to tip it rather than indulging in full spectrum Russophobia? Maybe Putin is very useful to the security business? A useful enemy.
fyi: Populism and the Future of White Majorities
Python Bio-Diversity?
“A selective python breeder spent 8 years making an Emoji snake”
Just a few short years back, it wan’t uncommon to hear Putin rant about creating a monetary denomination to rival the US dollar (along with Brazil and China too be included in this scheme). With the Russian banking system having such serious endemic problems as you point out, it’s no surprise that you don’t hear anything more about this in the press. I guess having the US reemerge at the top of the energy producing pyramid again doesn’t help Russia out much either in this attempt to even out the financial system.
The main blogging online about Russia in English, is really just Ioffe and Karlin (and Karlin is censored from the mainstream publications).
Those are the only two that I have read anyway.
But Ioffe is just an open falsifier/propagandist.
If you remember this… In reality, this was not her view, but a quote from a teenager she interviewed in a poor town.
https://i.imgur.com/ziKpMEj.png
There is nothing necessarily that unusual or rude if this is in Russian language. It’s only the way she is translating it without explanation to a different English idiom.
The teenager she interviews, is obviously from a poor family and does not have a computer or access to the internet in 2011, and maybe goes to some village school without broadband then. (Even today, there exist families like this). His questions are not that stupid if you don’t have a computer or the internet, but only remember some things from entertainment television.
The only really stupid question for a person without regular access to computer/internet, is about not sleeping because it’s always light. And she probably misreports this as well.
https://i.imgur.com/mhGopEM.jpg
Street interviews are the worst kind of propaganda always.
But here she found a friendly provincial teenager without internet access in 2011, translates him to English without explanation, and uses him to propagandize about stupid people of mordor.
I mean “ordinary” that they don’t look like important or famous people.
Nothing uncommon for grandmothers.
Lol maybe it’s not surprising they sometimes talk one to another when they go to submit their payment invoice at the office of the CIA.
Boot just seems an ordinary (not special) family name, which is also common with Jews.
Maybe the richer ones in Moscow or New York are transliterating it to English to create phonetic vowels.
E.g.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1345456478885852&set=piaarp.100002645393726&type=3&theater
And poor ones in Israel don’t know how to transliterate the vowel.
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100006963916191
The domestic configuration of the Russian banking system is only the beginning of the issues with attempting to replace the Dollar as a reserve currency.
The number one problem is that no financial market comparable to the United States exists in terms of size, liquidity, and safety. When a seller accepts payment in Dollars, he knows that he can at extremely low cost park it in a very high quality asset (or basket of assets) which can be easily sold at any time. If he purchases cash equivalents (Treasury Bills), the transaction is almost risk-free. Further strengthening the Dollar’s appeal is that since the Great Financial Crisis the American stock market has outperformed most other developed country stock markets.
This is now out of date, but the ratios haven’t changed much: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-stock-exchanges-by-size/
America’s stock exchanges have a total value nearly as large as those of…all of Eurasia.
The daily volume in the Treasury market is $500 billion. Thanks to America’s reckless fiscal policies, there is now a gigantic pool of safe assets available which quixotically strengthens the Dollar’s appeal as a reserve currency (at least in the medium term). In the 2000s people were turning to asset backed commercial paper as a cash equivalent and GSE agency MBSes as Treasury equivalents. Whoops. Now there’s no shortage of top quality debt from the US government itself.
Japan and the Eurozone in theory have what it takes to offer useful reserve currencies.
The Europeans, despite a lot of talk about reducing the role of the Dollar, have taken themselves out of the game by being extraordinarily feckless.
Japan is the only global producer of safe assets to rival America, but Japan is not interested in the role. This would threaten the Japanese economy by making its exports less competitive. Japan always intervenes to reduce the value of the Yen when it strengthens, and there is no reason to expect this will change.
Even if Russia weren’t a middle income country with a dubious reputation and under American sanctions, the country is too small and has few safe financial assets available for global investors. Russia and China will struggle even to de-Dollarize their bilateral trade.
In theory Russia could do much on its own to conduct its trade in Euros, but I suspect that this would invite an aggressive American response and that the Europeans would meekly submit.
China has the sheer scale to rival America, but its domestic capital markets are a fiasco and the country doesn’t allow the free movement of capital.
Probably the Dollar will lose its role as a global reserve currency as a result of something stupid America itself does, but when and how that will happen no one has a clue. The escalating sanctions regime, growing lawlessness, structural fiscal deterioration, and increasing political polarization.
A lot of people like to toss around the idea of using the SDR as a reserve currency or reviving Keynes’ bancor, but other than removing the Dollar from the equation I don’t see the appeal. What can you do with an SDR? Not much. The only way it would be useful is if major trading nations around the world fixed their exchange rates to the SDR itself. Doesn’t strike me as likely to happen.
Kaufmann doesn’t seem that bad in the sense that he concedes the moral legitimacy of white people looking out for their group interests (which, once conceded, basically means white nationalism has already won) but on the other hand, the bit about mixed race people identifying as white is very suspicious since saying that is exactly the suggestion that was made by the academic paper published a few months ago about how to get white people not to be afraid of a declining white majority.
Imagine what would happen if major Russian newspapers paid a reporter to walk around black parts of America interviewing people to try and tweeting out the stupidest things they said
It’s likely better medicine and safer life. Portugal and Ireland used to be poor for longer than other Western countries, so they had higher male mortality for longer (but now their younger generations also skew male).
I think adding up the costs – about a trillion dollars for the US, the priceless artifacts and ancient monuments destroyed, the near total destruction of minority religious communities, the immigration to the West of many refugees, the terrible price in blood and guts and brain injuries – it was not worth it.
ISIL’s rapid progress until foreign intervention shows that the Iraqi state is very unstable. A very large portion of the middle class fled and probably will never return.
Iraq took a hit during the war with Iran, but if Desert Storm had never happened, I think they would have had a similar baseline to Saudi Arabia. They would have had about as much oil with Kuwait. The sanctions hurt them. They may have even been better than Saudi Arabia, being more Westernized.
Just an addition on China. Even aside capital controls, in a fiat monetary system, the reserve currency issuer has to run large and persistent CADs (current account deficits). That’s not a choice you make, it’s how these exchanges work. A mercantilist China will be ideologically unwilling to do this. If you strip out their non-oil goods trade balance, it basically has not changed much that much since 2013, still at around 3% surplus.
The only way to avoid this is using non-fiat money, such as the gold standard. That obviously is not going to happen. Neither is the Banco – which frankly was a farsighted idea of Keynes – because the US has the power of the dollar and they are not going to give that up any time soon.
I doubt this will ever come to pass due to US domestic developments. The only possibility would only be if China suddenly changed their stance. I’m a skeptic on Indian long-term development so they are out on the game, too. The less said about the dysfunctional Euro, the better.
Net US debt is what, 77% or so? It has its own central bank, which as any MMTer worth his salt will tell you, is crucial for debt flexibility. There are a range of options to use if you wanted to both reduce debt and increase employment. One such option would be the government doing huge fiscal deficits and then having the central bank monetising all of it, thereby creating inflation and simply inflating the debt away slowly, even as the government can aim for full employment through huge infrastructure and investment programs.
With the looming Californication of US politics, a key critique of MMT (namely that you need tight co-ordination between government and central bank) will fall away and stimulus-happy congressmen will increasingly dominate the US legislative branches of government.
Furthermore, as the eminent Adair Turner has pointed out in his seminal “Between Debt and the Devil” book (read it!), while we don’t talk about debt jubilee’s anymore, they have happened with regular frequencies historically in large empires. A large-scale one on a global scale is surely in the offing considering how crazily indebted much of the world currently is. This just goes to show that whatever problems the US has, surely it still much less weighed down than most of its rivals, and will remain so for decades. It will simply not be as dominant as it historically was, but that should not be mistaken as the same as the US playing on the same level as others. It won’t for a very long time.
Totally unrelated but am I the only one who has seen a sharp deterioration in Bershidsky’s writings of late? While he was always a liberal, I enjoyed reading him because he had an earthy Eastern European realism about things and there was an undercurrent of mild cynicism about all the grand neoliberal pronouncements. He was, in short, often willing to inject some much-needed realpolitik into the conversation, especially when things got hysterical on Russia. He even spoke about Russophobia on Twitter IIRC a few years ago. Now that seems like a world gone by.
These days, he has seemingly gone straight into the crapper and been fully assimilated into the GloboHomo Borg. One of his latest articles whine about how Russia forfeited its chance to re-unite with the West and instead went for military adventures. The West is uncritically portrayed as a peaceful bastion of democracy; the inescapable implication that Russia is an irrationally irredentist power simply going on a power trip because it is too brutish and thuggish not to. I was half-seriously awaiting some ‘Asiatic’ slur to appear.
I’m reading this and thinking, did this asshole fall asleep the last 15 years? What was Iraq, Libya or the ongoing disaster in Syria where US/UK/Israel were funding the worst Jihadist elements to the hilt? What’s so peaceful about these supposed ‘democracies’? It’s nauseating that he is slowly morphing into another indistinguishable neoliberal NPC pundit. You can still tell he has a higher IQ than most of his contemporaries but in terms of original opinion the space in his columns has radically narrowed and conformed to the status quo. SAD!
He sort of always had that to him: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/debate-with-bershidsky/
Like, even back during the immigration crisis, I distinctly recall him defend Israel (every time!) and Saudi Arabia (more puzzling) restricting immigration while calling for Germany and Europe to do more.
I haven’t been following him much the past couple of months, so I don’t know if he’s particularly deteriorated in recent days, but he was always somewhat GloboHomo.
That is curious: patrynomics and matrilineal descent.
Seems as though many non-Ashkenazi adopted surnames earlier. I wonder if this is an indication that they were more urbanized. If so, it may have something to do with the disparity in numbers, cities being population sinks.
The Triffen Dilemma, which is why the Yen won’t displace the Dollar either.
This is also why I favor ending the Dollar’s role as a global reserve currency. The power to cut off Iran from…whatever…is much less useful than a robust manufacturing sector in the long run.
Worth noting that the original impetus for the Marshall plan was a persistent Dollar shortage in Europe. American rearmament after 1950 then ended America’s era of large surpluses (~1915 – 1949), solving the problem.
The recurring fights in America over the “debt ceiling” and funding the government strike me as something that could jeopardize the Dollar’s reserve role in a hurry. Markets have discounted this as political theater, but retired Congressman Jason Chaffetz has stated on the record that the Tea Party was quite willing to send America into default in 2011. There was an effort to pass a law which would prioritize paying the US government’s creditors in the event of Congress failing to appropriate money to fully fund the budget, but this was voted down (as a “Pay China First” act).
That would leave the idea of the $1 trillion platinum coin as the remaining way to fund the government’s obligations. This would presumably attract a lawsuit, which in turn might result in an injunction.
The demographic transformation of the US electorate is much remarked upon, but the declining white electorate is structurally advantaged in the Congress owing to our dominance of numerous small states.
Worth thinking about great power politics as they were before America played a prominent role. Britain in the 18th century for instance had an economy half the size of France and a population one-third of the size. Didn’t prevent it from being what is now called a “peer competitor”.
What about Guriev? Did you blog about his papers?
He’s the most famous and influential “anti-authoritarian” Putin critic, now living in the West.
Any kind of “anti-authoritarian” people are always sympathetic people. But he creates this concept of “soft autocracy” which can almost widen the definition to include Orban, Lee Kuan Yew, etc – it seems to make the concept too diluted if you include behaviour of normal effective leadership within democracies.
https://extranet.sioe.org/uploads/isnie2015/guriev_treisman.pdf
http://econ.sciences-po.fr/sites/default/files/file/guriev/Guriev_2009_Journal-of-Public-Economics.pdf
https://www.nber.org/papers/w21136.pdf
killing that many guys probably had some minor effect. men between 20 and 40 are the most important resource in any nation. and stalin was wasting tons of them on random stuff too.
but germans have 10 times the human capability of russians, and that’s not an exaggeration or hyperbole. that’s a serious number, and it might be higher. so it’s no surprise germans did what they did after 1950 and russians did barely anything outside of defense industry engineering.
the marshall plan had almost nothing to do with it. it has to be one of the most over quoted and incorrect explanations in history. before 1940, germany was…the most advanced country in the world. after 1950 germany was…one of the most advanced countries in the world. big surprise. other nations received more money from the marshall plan per capita, and in total. and they did…not as much with it. look it up.
russians still do almost nothing, in any field, today, outside of sports science, and again defense. where they do a good amount of important and valuable engineering. so, strike the idea that the soviets trying to build a world dominating military had anything to do with their lack of output anywhere else. probably the only explanation that makes some sense is anatoly pointing out that science pays nothing in russia. so any guy smart enough to do science, doesn’t. what they have been able to do is curse the US with crossfit, which is just old russian track & field and olympic lifting workouts.
here is how the marshall plan actually worked:
https://imgur.com/a/aM2Q0qr
out of 15 nations or so, you can see germany didn’t get that much, but grew the most by far out of all the recipients. that’s brainpower and mechanical aptitude and work ethic. nothing else really. they simply were just smarter and more industrious.
now if something like the morgenthau plan had gone into effect instead, that’s an entirely different ballgame.
West Germany also had a more depressed GDP relative to its potential output than most of the other recipients and was only permitted to begin economic recovery in the period covered by your table.
JCS 1067 was the basis of American occupation policy until the middle of 1947 and was explicitly aimed at preventing economic recovery. Some of the Morgenthau Plan efforts continued past that–various efforts to dismantle the German shipbuilding industry persisted into 1953.
West Germany was permitted to reform its currency in 1948 as well.
She’s an expert in both languages.
So she knows she can falsify without lying – in order to produce clickbait propaganda for the other journalists in America.
https://i.imgur.com/ziKpMEj.png
Accurate to meaning translation was obviously something like “are there actualy white people in America, or is everyone negros?”
Obviously, interviewee is not a “high iq” – rather an idiot. But it’s a question which is making sense.
It’s popular as clickbait videos on YouTube
There’s another video somewhere in YouTube, where a lot of Americans think Arnold Schwarzenegger is from Russia.
What strikes me is the viciousness of it all. He takes a really dumb guy, is friendly with him (and no doubt he’s also friendly to her), and takes what he says and uses is to show to her audience: “look how dumb he is!” It’s much worse than the clickbait YouTube videos, because it’s not merely used for entertainment, but as propaganda against his whole country.
Of course there’s a good chance these things were never said by anyone, she just made it up.
It’s interesting that the Soviet Union still found enough troops to spare to advance up to Berlin and also to occupy Eastern Europe for almost half a century afterwards, though.
One would have thought that the Soviets would have conscripted all of the healthy men that they could find in Ukraine and Belarus after these territories were liberated, though. After all, the Soviets needed all of the men that they could get, no?
Also, as a side note, I’m surprised that sperm donation didn’t become more popular in the Soviet Union in the post-WWII years. This would have allowed a lot of single Soviet women to have children. Heck, if the USSR wasn’t so homophobic, it could have even allowed single women to raise their children together with other single women.
Patrick Armstrong still blogs. He’s lost his edge, haven’t we all but he is still very good.
Germany did not overtake the UK in productivity per person until after the economic reforms of 1947. Basically, the cartels reduced competition. Market reforms allowed Germany’s better training for lower and middle skilled people to finally matter.
Single mother’s in the SU had a relatively good deal. Certainly they had a bad deal after liberation in 1991.
If they are just tweets, I doubt they are real. Having said that, if it were true, asking if there are any real Americans is certainly one of the most important geopolitical questions one could ask. Quite ingenious really for a country bumpkin.
I wonder if Russian and Chinese intelligence services are able to ask such an important question.
I remember once seeing polls regarding Americans’ estimates of what the black population in America was. If I remember correctly, the average estimate was one-third of the population (some individual answers would have been even higher).
So even Americans believe blacks compose 20% more of the population than in reality, and American media fosters this impression quite well.
Both Parties Defend Israel. What About Defending America?: https://www.amren.com/commentary/2019/02/both-parties-defend-israel-what-about-defending-america/
The problem is in that very sentence. The US is NOT DEFENDING Israel. If anything, Israel has long been the aggressor. Israel came into existence through Nakba pogroms that ethncially cleansed 700,000 Palestinians. Israel is occupying the remaining Palestinian territory in West Bank. Israel sends illegal settlers into West Bank to steal more land and build more Jewish towns. If you think brown caravans moving to US border are bad, just consider the Zionist caravans moving to West Bank. They come with guns and are backed up by the IDF. Worse, the US is totally complicit in this grave crime against Palestinians.
US doesn’t defend Israel. US indulges the worst behaviors of Zionists. Besides, Israel is not endangered by neighboring nations. Jordan is essentially a US puppet. Egypt is a client state of the US and ally of Israel. Syria has been smashed and is still under Israeli attack. It will take forever for Iraq to get back on its feet. Israel has 300 nukes. Iran has ZERO.
There is no need to defend Israel, the #1 power in the Middle East. The US has indulged and enabled Jewish supremacism and Zionist imperialism. Jews, having been spoiled and indulged so thoroughly, feel that they should have everything under the sun. “My wish is your command, goy!” Having been indulged and enabled by the West to act as aggressor but play the eternal victim, Jewish Power has come to feel that the world is its oyster. They see every people, every land, and every nation in terms of “Is it good for the Jews?” The sad truth is that the US and EU indulged such obnoxiousness among Jews by unconditionally supporting every foul thing Israel has pulled off in the Middle East. Even after attack on USS Liberty, the US defended Israel and made up lies.
When a child is spoiled, he just acts worse. He can’t be improved with more appeasement. When an entire people are spoiled, they act like spoiled children except on a much grander scale. When Nazi Germany was allowed to get away with its early aggression, it grew ever bolder and more arrogant. When the world didn’t check Japanese imperial ambition, Japan grew increasingly reckless and unhinged. Same goes for Jews. The US, in having indulged Jews and Israel for so long, are now confronted with Jewish Power that acts like the man-eating plant in LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. It wants more and more sacrifice.
When Jews were occupying West Bank and stealing more land, the US didn’t stand up and say NO. To be sure, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush tried to halt illegal Jewish encroachments into West Bank, but Jewish power did everything to unseat them. Since then, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama have given Jews everything they demanded.
Even though illegal Jewish settlers are stealing Palestinian land in West Bank, the US position has been, “We stand with Israel”, as if Israel is the poor beleaguered party. Once Jewish power was thus indulged, flattered, and praised, Jews got to thinking that the world if their oyster and they can get away with just about anything. If they want ‘gay marriage’, they get it. If they want Wars for Israel, they get it. If they want more billions for Israel, a nation with 300 illegal nukes, they get it. If they want sanctions on Iran, a nation with no nukes, they get it. It’s long been said that Hitler shouldn’t have been appeased at Munich, but US politics has been about little more than appeasing Jewish Power to the point where it became the new Nazi-like power in the world.
Once the spoiled, bratty, and vain Jewish Power became high on megalomania, it began to eye the US and EU as the bigger prize. The Jewish Plan for US and EU is the same as for West Bank except on a much larger scale. The only real difference is that W. Bank is to fill up with Jewish invaders whereas US and EU are to fill up with non-white immigrant-invaders. Both outcomes are good for Jewish supremacist power. More Jews in West Bank means Israel can annex it one day. More non-whites in white nations means Jewish elites can play divide-and-rule among the fractured goy masses no longer bound by common race and culture.
Now, maybe white people thought, “If we support Jews in their endeavors, however nefarious as they may be, then they will support us whites in what we want.” But if Jews were indulged in bad behavior against Palestinians, what made whites think Jews would treat them any better? If you help someone steal something, do you think he will show gratitude toward you and not touch your property? Chances are he will next try to steal your stuff as well.
White people made a huge mistake in supporting Jewish crimes against Palestinians. White people aided in the Nakba. White people aided in the Occupation. White people looked the other way and aided in the Jewish theft of remaining Palestinian land. From this, Jews got greedy and arrogant. Did Jews feel gratitude toward whites? No, they just saw whites as weak, wussy, easily purchased with shekels and intimidated with moral blackmail about ‘slavery’ and ‘holocaust’.
If white people wanted Jews to act honorably, they should have supported Jews-acting-good and opposed Jews-acting-bad. But whites indulged Jews when Jews acted most foul against Palestinians. It only emboldened Jews to act in similar ways toward other peoples. Jews didn’t regard whites as honorary fellow Jews thanks to white support of Zionism. Rather, Jews bid their time and targeted whites as the Next Palestinians to tame, humiliate, and control. Since Jews themselves didn’t have the numbers to take over white nations, they chose Diversity as the trick to bring about their dream of World Control. Bring in tons of non-whites into the West, indoctrinate them with PC hatred against ‘white privilege'(not least to distract goyim from the fact of Jewish power & privilege), and also divide the whites by turning them into self-loathing cucks.
The fact is Jews are no longer focused on survival. They are addicted to globalist supremacism. When Jews complain about ‘antisemitism’ today, they don’t mean someone who is out to harm Jews for no good reason. They mean anyone who stands in the way of Jewish supremacism worldwide. If you oppose Wars for Israel, you are an ‘anti-semite’. If you oppose the Jewish hatred against Russia and Iran, you are an ‘anti-semite’. If you call for end to immigration-invasion & preservation of the West, you are a ‘nazi’ for standing in the way of the Jewish agenda.
White people need to ask themselves, “Do we have more in common with Jews or with Palestinians?” Jews in Israel can have secure borders. They decide who gets to immigrate to Israel: Mostly Jews. In contrast, Palestinians in West Bank have no border security. Just like the US can’t stop the illegal invasion, Palestinians in West Bank cannot stem the tide of Jewish illegal caravans who come to steal yet more land and water from Palestinians.
Now, are whites in the US and EU more like Jews or Palestinians? Do they have the power to secure borders and control immigration? Or do whites in US and EU feel like an occupied people idehumanized by anti-white propaganda, invaded by hordes of foreigners, and ‘led’ by worthless cuck politicians who serve some nefarious power than represent the people who elected them to office?
It seems most white patriots in US and EU feel like more like Palestinians in West Bank than Jews in Israel. Jews feel in command of their own nation. Palestinians feel helpless in West Bank. Now, why do whites in the West feel much like Palestinians in West Bank? Could it be because both groups are under the occupation of the same force: Jewish Globalist Supremacism? Do white people still hope that Jews will regard whites as equal allies or partners? Really? Judging reality by hard evidence than by childlike hope, it seems Jews regard whites as Other Palestinians than Other Jews. A people to control, manipulate, tame, and exploit than a people to embrace as fellow humans of equal worth.
Consider Trump himself. Most of the anti-Trump vitriol has come from Jews who command the media, academia, and entertainment. And even much of anti-Trump hatred among gentiles was instilled by the Jewish-controlled media that ran endless stories about ‘Trump is literally Hitler’. (If so, does it mean Israel is literally Fascist Italy and Iran is literally Poland?) And yet, Trump is overflowing with cucky schmucky praise for the very people who have done him most harm.
It’s the rule of power. If you indulge and reward a scoundrel, he will do the same to you. Don’t think that the scoundrel will treat you any better because you helped him do evil.
All in all, this is how Jews think. “We are superior, Palestinians are inferior. We want lebensraum to take their land, be masters over them who shall serve us. As we are superior, we want permanent supremacy over the West as well. We must suppress any possibility of goy national solidarity. Nationalism is only for us Jews, not for dirty goyim. We shall use mass immigration-invasion to increase diversity in goy nations to ply out trade of divide and rule.”
It’s about time white people stopped thinking in terms of “We defended Israel, so will Jews help us whites defend the West?” They need to start thinking, “Because we enabled the Jewish supremacist agenda of destroying Palestinian nationhood and people, the arrogant Jews(now filled with megalomania, greed, and confidence) are coming after us to do the same thing to us.” Indeed, what Jews are doing in West Bank is mere dress rehearsal for what they have planned for all the West: Mess up goy power so that Jewish Power shall control all the world. White people need to start asking, “Why did we indulge bad Jewish behavior for so long? What made us think that if we encourage Jewish greed, mendacity, and megalomania, Jews will be so kind, generous, and friendly with us?”
my posts about germany after 1950 were with respect to greg cochran’s argument that russia was hollowed out by 1945 and this caused them to suck all the way until 1989 when they gave up in the cold war. but germany which was just as hollowed out was whaddya whaddya hand waving let’s not talk about that.
my posts weren’t really about germany compared to other nations in europe during this time period, although they touch on such topics peripherally i suppose if you want them too.
germany was ahead of russia in 1940, got just as hollowed out, was ahead of russia in 1950, ahead of russia in 1990, and is ahead of russia today. it’s all congruous with basic long term observations about how the various people of europe are different from each other, and there’s little or no support for the hypothesis that the soviet union was gutted by 1945 and this put them at some huge demographic disadvantage long term against the US, causing them to suck and ultimately contributing to them barely being able to do anything for 50 years.
lots of things about the soviet union sucked, and this might have had a minor negative effect on how effective the soviets were, but it’s simply not a big factor in how the cold war went. all the nations that were hollowed out by 1945 have normal GDP today and normal man woman demographics today – except russia. the issue is russia itself, not some kind of handicap at the start of the race 70 years ago.
kinda weird greg would post truisms about the folly of ‘bringing freedom!’ to third world dirt nations where HBD would suggest it’s obviously a waste of time, but misses the big HBD issue here – germans are vastly more capable than russians. there’s a HUGE difference between them – almost as big as the difference between russians and third worlders.
You could have easily have said your essential points in half as many words.
I will just note that, from my personal experience, Palestinians in Europe do not act any different from other Muslim Arabs and share the hubristic notion that Europe is their personal property. I believe that they are the same in America.
The enemy of my enemy can also my enemy (if you will pardon my incidental Rumsfeldianism). The misdemeanours of Israel do not make their sand rivals more virtuous.
You can see it’s real because the way she intentionally hasn’t really translated what he said. What he says is making sense when said to her originally.
He assumes America’s a multicultural country like the Russia Federation. So “real Americans” is just meaning “American white people”. But she translated him to “are there real Americans in America?” (it just sounds like total nonsense in English).
I guess she is from a high IQ and relatively wealthy (or above average income) area of America (Washington?).
So I expect people from a high IQ and above average income area of America, would go around in that kind of poor shithole area of provincial Russia, they’re going to feel like laughing at the place.
Still she knows the American audience will misread the way she translated him. She knows language differences. And a normal journalist would say the interviewee obviously doesn’t have internet at home.
She’s propagandist, not a journalist. So instead of explaining culture and language difference, she sees an opportunity to write propaganda which will influence the other journalists in America to support her prejudices.
It makes sense in English as well, especially considering that she added the “nigger” part.
Amusingly, in an ironic twist, Ioffe got in trouble for this tweet with the SJWs who, as customary, ignore context to stoke controversy. American blacks were compaining that Eastern Europeans in America rely too much on their immigrant status as a shield to enable them to say racist things.
Ioffe obviously sees a prevailing anti-Russian trend – only to then pile on, seeing that’s what gets greater payola. It’s not like many of these other US based mass media journos really need her input. She’s at an advantage at knowing Russia a bit better than say someone like Tom Rogan. That’s not saying much.
Perhaps (albeit with some doubt), Ioffe isn’t even really that anti-Russian – instead seizing the moment. Note that Ioffe has fairly regularly gone back there, where she has some family relations, according to multiple sources.
During a recent MSNBC telecast, Ioffe uncritically referenced the propaganda movie Icarus, explicitly adding that the entire Russian team doped at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics – which is a lie. In a not too distant article of hers, she lied when stating that Russia was stripped of its first place finish at Sochi. In point of fact, Russia successfully appealed to the CAS, the initial stripping and is now officially recognized for finishing first in that Olympiad. In these two lying instances, there was no penalty levied against Ioffe – as has been true with her other written missteps. (Getting fired by Politico and quickly hired by The Atlantic, is certainly no demotion.) All this coming from Ioffe, who has been direct when saying some others have lied.
With all this in mind, calling her a coddled brat isn’t so out of line.
Why is it interesting?
You don’t need anywhere near as big a force to occupy something as to fight a war, and in any case, for eighteen years after 1945, you’d still have an flow of cohorts (largely) unaffected by WW2.
They did. However, those men would have fought for just 1-2 years, not 4 years like the Russians.
No you can’t. I believe you it’s plausible in the sense that someone in the shittiest parts of Saratov might have said so, but did she actually go to the trouble of going there and finding a bumpkin like that and talking to him and waiting until he said enough dumb things? It’s possible that she’d have to talk to a number of bumpkins before one of them was willing to talk to her. Even then she might have embellished it.
But it’s entirely possible for Ioffe to just imagine what a truly dumb Russian might say. That’s like writing a parody. It’s way easier than actually going there and talking to a bumpkin.
You say it’s something a bumpkin might have said. This is true of good parodies: a very good parody is indistinguishable from the dumbest version of the real thing. So clearly she could have made this up. She’d also have a motive, to save her time and trouble. So it’s even likely she just made it up.
There’s a materialistic explanation for this: he was the first one who never saw a normal country and political and economic system around himself, and even his parents only had some childhood memories of normalcy, and didn’t have much time to observe even the partially normal NEP system as teenagers. So he grew up totally clueless, only being fed propaganda. An ideology so far removed from reality will produce such totally clueless people. (I don’t think Gorbachev was malicious, not even in the sense of wanting to end the empire – he probably didn’t think it was all bad and thought it could be reconciled with the wishes of its subject peoples.)
So basically Bolshevism required that people educated outside of Bolshevism lead it. By the time they died out, the system started to collapse. For example I suspect Stalin or even Khrushchev wouldn’t have asked how New York restaurants were supplied, probably even Brezhnev had a foggy idea how it worked, but Gorbachev was already totally clueless.
Interesting. The Kim dynasty sending their scions to study abroad and see the world make sense seen from that perspective
Some enemies are more dangerous than others, and jews are by far the greatest enemy. So if someone like Hamas or Hezbollah happened to get their hands on WMD and destroy Israel this would be something I would not be too upset about.
I’ve speculated before that the duration of time spent under communism partly explains the difficulty of transition back to capitalism in the former Soviet Union compared to occupied Eastern Europe. By 1992 almost no one was left alive in the FSU (outside of the Baltic States, only annexed in 1940) who had experience living in capitalism–especially at a high level.
That said, I think we’re actually selling communism short here. The fact that Gorbachev couldn’t imagine how New York supplied itself without food sounds ridiculous to us, but it is in fact a remarkable feat (which in fact involves government at many levels) that a city of eight million people feeds itself through market agents with supply chains reaching all over the world. The ancient Romans did not trust the city of Rome to feed itself solely through free markets. I’m reminded of the classical libertarian essay I, Pencil: https://fee.org/resources/i-pencil/
Ronald Reagan at the time period no doubt could have given a better explanation than Mikhail Gorbachev on how NYC fed itself, but hardly a complete one. And if you’d taken Reagan to Moscow and asked him how to describe how Moscow fed himself, he probably would’ve sounded as clueless as Gorbachev.
If presented as a dichotomy, the command economy is clearly inferior to the market economy. Other than “anti-revisionist” no hopers I don’t think anyone disputes that. But it is also true that the command economy did at least manage to function adequately, in particular for the purposes most emphasized by the state.
In particular I find it extremely implausible that Gorbachev’s failed reforms stemmed from the fact that he never lived in a capitalist country. At least not the way it is being implied. Perhaps someone who had lived under democratic capitalism would’ve been more skeptical about how market incentives function and particularly about the effects of open political debate.
I guess the only way this conversation will synthesize is on the Ioffe-Gorbachev relationship…
https://i.imgur.com/Z9sCAoO.jpg
Well, it couldn’t. Merchants weren’t going to conquer Egypt and send most of its grain surpluses to a city across the Mediterranean. 🙂
Would just need to emphasize that I don’t actually think Gorbachev’s knowledge or lack thereof about markets made much difference. It’s just a telling anecdote.
Otherwise, it happened due to a triple crisis consisting of a confluence of political crisis, economic crisis, and ethnonationalism. All three of these were central, and about equally important.
I think it’s not really a question of whether he understood how markets worked or not. It would’ve been enough if he could imagine (as a kind of black box) that it was possible and not even extremely remarkable, period. Soviet leaders couldn’t even imagine what was possible with markets, and what wasn’t. So when they tried to institute market reforms, they didn’t have an idea where it might be the most efficient, where it might make little difference, or where it might be the most harmful. They didn’t have a feeling for where incentives might lead human beings, having been raised with the axiom that the only ways to motivate humans were fear of punishment and stupid propaganda.
Basically commie propaganda did its best to erase the intuitive understanding of human motivation from them, and that’s what was missing. Now of course, modern “democratic” politicians often lack such understanding as well (or they don’t understand HBD or sex differences or why preference for one’s own race might be natural etc.), but at least with regards the USSR the leadership didn’t even have a language to talk about human motivations. (Similarly, modern multikulti politicians and intellectuals often don’t even have a language to discuss things like biological sex differences and HBD and their implications, leading to different types of policy failures.)
Theoretically, it’s possible for people brought up with the assumptions of blank slate ideology could just find the correct policy (like stopping third world immigration etc.), but it’s way less likely than with people who understand the implications (old school politicians brought up before the total dominance of PC). Similarly, it’s theoretically possible that some communist politicians brought up under communism would somehow find the correct policy, but it’s way less likely. I don’t think it’s an accident that the communist countries most successful in transitioning still had lots of people (even in leadership positions) who grew up before communism.
It’s obviously real because you can see how she translates the words but not the meaning, to make him appear more stupid.
So she is showing her propaganda method, as in the same sentence you can see how it was sensible in Russian. (It’s clearly something real, which she thought how it sounds stupid in English).
With her family, she translates similar sentences in a sympathetic (to English ears) way.
https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/257855553995411458
Her propaganda methodology is not to completely lie. But it is in unfair selection of facts, and interpretation/translation of those – all this is following her confirmation bias, to create desired final result.
She has the typical “technique” of any conspiracy theorists (and she is a manager of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory), who might partly believe their conspiracy theories, and are dominated by their own confirmation bias.
These “search” for facts to confirm their “theories” and ignore any facts which are not consistent to the theory.
She was in a poor place, exactly what Trump would call a “shithole”.
–
Victory Day there still looks beautiful.
But if you look at the drive around the center of the city from 6:40 -10:00 in the video, look at road and housing quality in the center of the city of 23,000 people.
She was just accurate to call it a shithole. But then for consistency and neutrality, this word (“shithole”) is a sign of racism according to liberal media, and for which she should be condemned.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/12/unkind-divisive-elitist-international-outcry-over-trumps-shithole-countries-remark
Some Facebook moderators become redpilled while reading content they are supposed to moderate.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona
Let me tell what likely happened. She imagined (in Russian) what a very stupid Russian bumpkin would say (in Russian) which would sound extremely stupid and/or racist in English, and then translated it to English.
This makes it all the more likely that she didn’t actually walk its streets going to the worst neighborhoods of that city to find her bumpkin. She probably just invented the whole story, similar to how parodies are invented.
But I concede (and I never said otherwise) that there’s a small possibility of some Russian guy actually saying (in Russian) what she translated (without cultural context) into English. It’s possible, but let’s face it, it’s not the likeliest explanation.
Had she shown a video of her talking to the Russian guy, I would believe it, just as I already believe that there are Russian gopniks who would ask such questions. I just find it unlikely that Julia Ioffe would spend the time and resources needed to meet such guys.
But in this case, she shows herself badly in the way she reports the questions without context. So it doesn’t seem like she invents the quote, but rather that she unintentionally shows her propaganda in her lack of giving readers the context for translation (or facts about the person she interviews – i.e. that he probably did not have internet in the home).
She has a view of herself as a “serious journalist”, who rejects the yellow press.
A lot of propagandists and conspiracy theorists are partly believing their own conspiracy theories and propaganda, and imagine themselves as “serious people” (look at the site owner).
They might be accurate in collecting the facts themselves, but all the inaccuracy and idiotic bias is in what facts they “look for” and how they interpret and then adulterate those facts, and how they ignore facts not consistent to the theories and propaganda.
In her case, the manner she interviews people seems to be very professional and dryly.
Her propaganda bias and conspiracies, is not in the interview itself. But in how she will select facts from the interview that match her theories, and then interpret it all for her articles in a wildly deranged, idiotic and exaggerated way.
In addition, writing about a foreign country for her readers, and being allowed to translate between languages herself, and present information without cultural context – are how she has so much extra “space” to create propaganda interpretations.
I always thought that the basic fear of a country like Iran getting nukes is that they would feel more secure in attempting external operations – everything from invasion, to terrorism, to fomenting revolution. And that there was a secondary fear about them not having adequate security and terrorist organizations stealing bombs.
I don’t know if the fear of them using nukes is really that rational. If MAD really works, it probably works better in the desert, since rain is needed to help clear radiation. Theoretically, one could make the Hajj impossible. Though it is conceivable terrorists would desire such a thing, since there are so many Muslims it would anger.
But I wonder if any of these terrorist groups have even articulated a nuclear strategy. Maybe their real goal would be to seize territory and to use it to defend the territory.
Wow, who would have guessed that Ioffe was so woke on the fact that slaves didn’t work very hard at all?
I know Krasnoarmeisk. I have friends there. It is derelict. It is the twin of Pugachev where there were race riots. I negotiated to set up a pig farm there but the councillors made it so obvious that they were planning extortion that we pulled out. Every house I have visited has been in disrepair. The villages are worse.
That was too negative.Krasnoarmeisk also has a very strong sense of community. People know each other as in British market towns until the 1970’s. As the picture shows community events are well supported. To the East in walking distance There’s rural woodland on the Volga terraces. The school has its share of educational successes. It is a town albeit small.
Before the fall of the Soviet Union there was one of the biggest milk production complexes in Russia based on an outlying village almost as big as Krasnoarmeisk. Similarly, a pig farm and the town had a track suit factory. None of these exist now. There is a Motor Tractor Station for a large grain farm.
Wow, what a great use of years of skill and effort. Good thing there’s nothing he could have done to actually conduct research to help, you know, people.
Agriculture had advanced too in multiple ways. Horse-drawn plows and the potato, which was a high caloric crop. British are probably more lactose tolerant than Romans.
He claims he can sell these emoji-snakes for 4 to 5 grand a pop, so it looks like he’s at least helping himself.
Superior agriculture is probably not relevant to the point however.
Namely that a large conurbation could feed itself exclusively through market mechanisms prior to modern technology.
If England in the 18th century had to make do with Roman agricultural technology, the change I see is that feeding London would probably require importing (more) grain. Given that the Romans themselves had no difficulty with long-range grain trade, obviously the English with their dramatically superior nautical technology would not have had a problem either.
The following explanation seems pretty straightforward:
Members of a third school, in contrast, focus on the negative output shock in
the final phases of the war and immediately following it. GDP in the three zones of
Allied occupation that became the Federal Republic was only 64 percent of 1938 lev-
els in 1948. In the UK, in contrast, output was already 13 percent higher in 1948 than
in the last pre-World War II year.7
Germany could grow quickly, it follows, because it
had been pushed off its long-term growth path, but only temporarily.
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6967594.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjU_-mwotrgAhX8URUIHXFECU0QFjAKegQIBRAB&usg=AOvVaw1mqMRTBqR8VdnMPpZoBkyJ
Which he’s entitled to do — I’m just being cranky as usual 🙂 But seriously, if he has that kind of talent and perseverance and focus, why not do more with it in some related field.
GAB Dissenter is now available.
https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1100490887325536257
I guess the real question is not if the grain was there, but if the people could have bought it. Since grain seems to have been subsidized, and since the population later collapsed, and Rome was supplanted by other cities, I’m inclined to think Rome was larger than market forces would have allowed, at that time.
Perhaps, a multitude of reforms, such as abolishing slavery, and rewarding patents or prizes for innovation would have changed that. But there is the question if regular people were smart enough for that sort of system at the time, or whether they needed to face a longer period of selection. 18th century London was possibly smarter than ancient Rome. One day, we may know the answer definitively.
Single Soviet women desiring children became mistresses and left the father’s name blank on the birth certificate giving child her father’s name & patronymic. Plenty of men willing to provide this service so no need of a sperm bank and state helped care for child.
Karlin’s latest tweet on Poland:
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1100452315100835840
Let me add that not only Poland will be homo around 2030, but fully globo too. I’m expecting to see no go zones pop up in swaths of the commie block suburbs of major Polish cities, rampant violent immigrant crime, African drug gangs, Pakistani grooming gangs, etc. in my lifetimes.
For a more specific time frame, I’d guess Poland will fully swing open its doors to nonwhites, and give them welfare, right around 2025-2030. By 2050, it will be 10% nonwhite. Essentially expect 2050 Poland to be 2020 Germany in demographics, safety, and social/cultural attitudes.
And as the Solidarity generation of Poles die, they won’t lift a finger. In fact, I expect the average Pole will rejoice seeing that finally they have dark skinned people on their streets along with their authentic falafel. It pains me to say this, but I feel like the anti-immigrant Polish millennials are either a small but vocal minority, or will simply be hushed via threats to their livelihoods.
You are assuming that trends continue indefinitely. But no trend continues indefinitely.
30 years is a long time. I expect the trends we see today to begin reversing during this time.
If trends continued indefinitely, then logically the world would have reached an end state long ago. Either it would be permanently corrupted or permanently healthy, depending on which trend you took as your starting point. This has not happened.
What we see instead is that the world is a dynamic system where trends alternate.
I have no real idea why societies become corrupted, and how to reverse it, try as I might. All I know is that no trend lasts indefinitely. Maybe people have to experience trends to their absolute limit before a new trend sets in.
Russia and China were on a downward trajectory for a few decades, now they are on the upswing. This will happen in the West as well.
Because that’s how it is the gay-friendly Czech Republic?
Ask again in 50 years. Nobody would believe that London or Paris would become what they are in 1960 but here we are.
I do not ‘overate’ the influence of a light weight like Joffe on the real heavy weights Shiff and Maddow. On the contrary, I rather suggest that the likes of Schiff and Maddow influence her. The point is the ease with which young “fleeing anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union”, Julia Joffe slid right into the cesspool of the most rabid anti-Putinists who happen to be Jews as her.
Maddow whose “paternal grandfather was from a family of Eastern European Jews (the original family surname being “Medwedof”) who self-identified as Polish and Russian at the time of their arrival in the United States” (any relation with Bernie Madoff?-from Poland as well).
Speaking about Schiff, would someone do a detective work to see whether he has any relation with the rabid anti-Tsarist Jacob Schiff, the bankroller of Trotsky, Lenin &Co (Adolf Joffe?).
And now eastern Europeans know what Brits and French didn’t in 1960.
Keep in mind the majority of young Poles, especially in the major cities are neoliberalism.txt and speak fluent English
Yes, Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Sweden already have 1980s America demographics, with Germany rapidly closing the gap. They already know just how bad it is to go from 99% white to 85% white. They already know what they used to take for granted can no longer be done so.
By AP’s logic, Western Europe should’ve halted immigration by now since they already saw the negative effects. In fact, Merkel declared in 2010 that “multiculturalism is a failure”. But guess what? Immigration and crime is only going up, and up, in Western Europe. Eventually, due both to Polish neoliberalism.txt cargo culting and being in the same political/economic union as 15% nonwhite Western Europe, we have to expect that Poland will latch onto these Western European trends.
And regarding the Czech Republic, Prague is so touristy nowadays that tourists from Western Europe, the US, and China completely outnumber the Czechs. And yes, African drug/prostitution gangs operate in Prague, brazenly so at night, and Vietnamese operate most of the convenience stores.
Like Poland, Czech Republic is kept “based” via its older generation. Once they die off, all bets are off the table.
Societies need to utterly collapse, and start afresh, before they go up on an upward trajectory.
Europe and North America are far from utterly collapsing.
Before Russia’s upward trend, it underwent 15 years of collapse (circa 1985 to 2000). During this period, not only it lost its empire, even if it was Sovok, and underwent multiple coups, both successful and failed ones, but economically it was no different from what Venezuela is going through right now.
Likewise, China had 2 disasters back to back from 1949 to 1976 (Cultural Revolution followed by the Great Leap Forward), that was a mixture of Communist SJW-style thuggery and economic collapse. All of this was followed by 50 years of a mixture of civil war and repelling foreign invasions with the entire coastal region de facto colonized.
Neoliberalism.txt and SJWism simply haven’t run its course yet. The odious ideology currently peaking is radical Islam, which will indeed start mellowing out very soon. It will definitely have a somewhat positive effect though: Eventually the long beards and hijabs will go away, and for European no-go zones in particular, I expect them to have the culture, safety, and social dynamics of current day Black America.
No – the situation in Europe is different from in the USA (newcomers from Muslim lands vs. former slaves) so they did not repeat America’s situation but tried something new and different.
They did not, see above. They created a new situation which turns out to have been bad.
So Poland is holding strong on this issue. It is trying something different instead – letting in practically no Muslims, but small numbers of Catholic Philipinos and Hindu Nepalis (and very large numbers of Ukrainians). Maybe it will be a new problem in the future, but it won’t be the same problem that western Europe has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague#Population
Prague has 14,000 Vietnamese (its has about three times more Ukrainians), the largest non-European population. Out of a total of 1.8 million or so this is basically zero but is enough to be noticeable if a bunch of them are running cheap convenience stores. No African nation has more than 1,000 people in Prague.
In Poland young people are more likely to vote for far-right parties than are old people.
Technically speaking, though, hereditarians in 1960 would have probably predicted what large-scale immigration from the Third World to the First World without selecting for intelligence was going to result in.
That’s certainly not very uplifting!
Trust me, you rather want to have black American ghettos than Muslim no go zones. Blacks in America are a serious net drag in society, but I’d rather have Pakistanis, Middle Easterners, and Somalis in Europe shoot at each other over Nikes or weed instead of doing truck attacks in white-majority upper middle class city centers.
Likewise, I’d rather have their women promiscuous instead of in burkhas so that most of the Muslim guys will be content with their own women instead of going sexual assault rampages of white girls.
Violent crime will probably be an even bigger issue in these no go zones, but post-secularization of the Muslims, white Europeans will actually be safer if they avoid these ghettos.
As radical Islam collapses, European no go zones will morph into crime-ridden but self-contained hiphop culture ghettos. And when the European economic and political system utterly collapses, only then will there be no more nonwhite ghettos of any kind in Europe.
By 1980s America, I mean the racial demographics. This was when America was around 80% white. This is what Britain, France, Netherlands, and Sweden are demographically nowadays.
There’s many, many young people, especially young men, voting far-right parties in Poland, as evident by the nationalist marches. But keep in mind that there is an equal amount, if not more, of Euro-Atlanticist globohomo neoliberalism.txt young people, especially in the major cities.
And guess who have the better education, better jobs, and better political connections? The globohomo set. They are in a much stronger position to be chosen to run Poland by the EU elites than the far-right voters.
Filipinos and Nepalis will eventually become minorities in Poland, on the order of say, a few hundred thousand each. They’ll still lower social cohesiveness and IQ levels, even if they aren’t Muslim. The second generation might start forming crime gangs, like what many under-performing minority groups do.
African drug gangs in Prague are likely not even legal anyways.
Well, they might just decide that they know that advanced wealthy Western countries have half black and brown capital cities while poor backwards Eastern countries are all white. Therefore Poland needs more brown people to join the club of advanced Western countries.
That’s what happened to Finland. Our politicians started just talking about how embarrassing it is to visit London or Paris and come back to Helsinki and see no dark faces. Our politicians saw what had happened to Western cities and decided that we want exactly the same thing here.
It’s not a given but merely expecting Eastern European elites to look at the demographics of Western Europe and draw the same conclusions as ordinary people leads to what we got.
The key institution holding the Islamic communities of Western Europe together and apart from wider society, it seems to me, is consanguineous marriage.
And I haven’t seen any evidence that it is in decline.
Without Islam, European Muslims would probably be closer to US Hispanics than to Negroes, i.e. an ethnocultural group that will steadily dissipate into the white population (primarily its prole parts – as we discussed, this is already happening in places like Texas and California). Moreover, unlike whites, Latinos marry Negroes too, thus making “La Raza Cosmica” into a real possibility for the US.
Consanguineous marriage means that nothing of the sort is happening wrt Europe’s Muslims.
The “redneckification” of Mexicans seems to be actually quite far along in the Southwest, especially Bakersfield and Albuquerque on the top of my head. However, I’m not seeing much of that in other areas of the US, where Mexicans are just as secluded as blacks from the whites.
Hopefully, Mexicans mixing with the whites stay in the Southwest and don’t expand to other areas of the US. If the US is stuck with them being 25% of the population, I’d rather have Mexicans in Spanish speaking ghettos than blasting country music from pickup trucks and making moonshine with their white friends.
What I’m saying is not what if MENA people came to Europe without Islam, but how would Europe adjust to them once radical Islam gets phased out as an ideology. The past 3 decades of radical Islam, no go zones, and Allahu Akbaring will leave a permanent mark on their relationships with the indigenous Europeans. This is an experience much more similar to blacks in America, than Mexicans in America, who have largely not separated themselves seriously (or been separated seriously by whites) besides some comical antics here or there.
I disagree here, it’s Islam. Though I’ve only seen it anecdotally, I’m convinced that British Pakistanis are starting to see themselves less as “Pakistanis” and more as simply as “Muslims”, who go on western style dates, leading to marriage, but strictly (and very strictly in the female case) with other Muslims. Their parents might grumble a bit, if a Pakistani man marries an Algerian girl but won’t kick up a huge fuss. You can see this kind of thing in their respective areas, years ago the cafes and shops would be exclusively Pakistani, Arab, turkish etc now there’s restaurants serving halal versions of every kind of popular cuisine. I suspect they’ll evolve a parallel culture which wil become more and more westernised, but, when push comes to shove, will still be totally seperate.
before 1940, germany was one of the most advanced country in the world. Аfter 1950 germany was…one of the most advanced countries in the world the economy and technology, a second-grade countries in science, third grade countries in art
We agree. An addendum asks why some others (who loathe her journalism), soothe Ioffe’s ego by saying she’s a primary mastermind?
One of the commenters at this thread (who has made some spot on observations) acknowledged to having a limited exposure to the English language commentariat on Russia related matters. Therein lies his ignorance (not mine) on that particular matter.
Ioffe’s screeds are indicative of a Judeocentric xenophobe, in contradiction to a truly progressive mind. Note her comments about Christmas in the US, Congresswoman Omar, in addition to what she has said about Poland and Russia/Russians.
Touching on another matter that you mention, I’ll refrain from being too general about Jews having negative attributes. I don’t like it when such is collectively done to Russians. I know Jews who prefer Russia over Poland, Germany, Austria and most, if not all Arab countries.
Best to judge folks on an individual basis. Besides, why give someone like Ioffe fodder to tap dance on.
if you want radical islam to be phased out, while it seems a tall order and and a very remote prospect right now, it all suddenly possible if you cut three states down to size: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. Other proponents are either too weak/can be easily coerced to amend their ways, or not really problematic (Iran). Sub-state and clandestine networks are hopeless without state power/oil finances.
Who blow in the sails of these three particular states? That’s right. Suddenly things look quite attainable, or not really when you think about it.
The “redneckification” of Mexicans
You write this like it is a bad thing.
Virtually everyone in Britain opposed mass immigration when it started. About three quarters of people supported Enoch Powell and wanted immigrants repatriated.
Mexicans often marry white proles in Chicago. It’s probably more common outside the SW than in the SW due to a smaller population.
I do know Poles from elite families and their opinions are very anti-migrant. Perhaps because they or their relatives have lived in the West.
Sure, but the groups are very different and so are the circumstances.
From what I know of Polish elites, they are much more anti-migrant than are western ones. Perhaps not majority so, but at least with a solid minority harboring such ideas, enough that the anti-migrant people from lower classes are not shut out of the discussion. So in a struggle within elites, the anti-migrant elites will draw upon the masses for support.
Theses peoples don’t have histories of violence and Philipinos have very high intermarriage rates with Westerners. Also they seem to be screened in some way, it’s not the poorest wandering in or coming in boats, it’s probably people like nurses or nurses’ aides rather than illiterate laborers. Mass numbers will just mix with working class natives and make them a little darker.
Did they have to make new laws allowing them in, or was it a matter of not making new laws keeping them out?
It is very safe to assume that by 2040 Poland will have majority non white cities and that somewhere around 2070 it will be a majority non white country. It is also safe to assume that Ukraine will become majority non white by that time as well, in fact it can go even faster than Poland as Ukrainians are even bigger cucks.
My housemates are ordinary (middle class gasterbeiter) Poles – so maybe I need to ask them.
But I’ve never seen or met “rich Poles”, so there can not be large numbers. I guess they live in Germany or Switzerland?
Generally, children have access to all the international institutions and areas where there is the most multinational harmony. So on average, they will more friendly with other nationalities than normal.
Immigration is a different topic, because even anti-racist people can see that Paris is a disaster from their immigration policy.
But what about London? In the expensive part of London, it’s completely multinational, but everything still functions fine.
It’s just in the poor area of London you feel there are too many immigrants and you are in the third world country – at the same time, in reality it’s still very safe for an ordinary tourist, and the black and brown people are not going to care about you. (The average income of the black and brown people in places like London, will be similar to young gasterbeiters from Poland and Spain.)
You were copy pasting randomly Ioffes from Wikipedia, and saying they were related to “our” Julia Ioffe.
Lol, you didn’t even find the ones with the same first and family name as her (it’s such a common name, there are even many of these) – like Yuliy Ioffe, the corrupt “permanent Deputy” in the Party of Regions
Immigration (and multinational relations in general) is a problem particularly for poorer areas within a country.
But in the richest areas and institutions, it is quite harmonized by absence of scarcity of resources or competition.
A rational person, in a rich country, would support for highly selective filters for immigration. However, in politics relies more on emotional support and rhetoric than rational analysis, and emotional support for those policies is far more from people who live in poor areas, while people in rich areas can often be very safe from the negative sides.
Thanks.
The income and infrastructure level will be far more poor, than an equivalent “poor area” of England or America.
In 2011, still many families would likely still not have a computer or smartphone.
Ioffe is from a middle class family in America (both her parents medical doctors in America), and she was then in Princeton University.
So you can imagine she had a shock when she explored provincial areas. But Reiner is still right, that from her position just absurd to be laughing and semi-translating without context poor teenager there, to use that to produce anti-Russia propaganda.
I thought it was ironic her friends are only American WASPs/Jews, Moscow liberals, and Mikhail Gorbachev.
Appears to be very little interaction or friendship with African American, or even people from outside her little circle.
–
Something needs to be highlighted here
https://twitter.com/jenlouisewilson/status/997303411132465152
Far-right? The “far right” are political plankton. Young people are more likely to vote for normal right-wing parties (like Wolność or Kukiz’15).
OTOH, about 20% declares support for nationalist parties, but the only openly nationalist parties taken together have below 5%.
I would love to see higher support, I would be ecstatic to see young Poles really voting for nationalist, but currently the declared support transfers into voting for socially conservative Law and Justice (with great potential of becoming cuckservative party in the future) and Kukiz, which definetely is not far-right and in any normal times would be declared boring, traditional rightwing party.
But it’s hard to say if the West is experiencing a mini-collapse or a Deep Collapse.
Civilizations typically have many setbacks and small periods of decline, which they pull out of, often to rise to even greater heights, before they experience a catastrophic, transformative collapse.
Britain experienced a mini-collapse after the Elizabethan period that observers at the time thought was a Deep Collapse. She was losing in every way to the Dutch, who were having a Golden Age, and everyone thought the Dutch were the next great power and Britain was a spent force.
So I am not sure. My personal feeling, having just travelled, is that the West, at least America, is in far better relative shape than I thought. But I could be wrong. And your point that frequently, the only thing leading to a change in course is catastrophic collapse, is valid.
Immigration creates problems for rich areas/people as well.
Poorly paid service workers that you interact with on a daily basis ultimately become completely foreign. They don’t understand the native language well, are often stupid, and dealing with them is depressing and upsetting.
Nightlife and prestigious shopping districts can become physically dangerous without warning.
The state’s welfare budget expands, which in turn ultimately increases the net tax burden that of course falls predominantly upon the wealthy.
Then there are the political consequences–the immigrants and their descendants primarily vote for left-wing political parties.
Marxist (i.e. materialist) explanations for mass immigration are insufficient, especially in places like Sweden where the immigrants rarely even work. Also worth pointing out that a majority of immigration that has taken place was unplanned and often unexpected as well.
In America there are dangerous places.
In most of Western Europe, it is safe, – even where there are immigrants – and safe to an almost comical level.
I remember Karlin was saying the black and brown parts of London are dangerous. But actually I’ve visited all these areas, and there is nothing scary at all. The streets there are very safe places where you could have a family picnic in the summer and the locals would not steal your food. (Maybe the Mosques in London produce Islamic terrorists, but daily streets are safe there for an ordinary tourist – who is not part of the interblack drug-deal conflict which is an underground phenomenon in those areas).
It’s not that there are dangerous places (there are), because these are well known and avoided.
It’s that ordinarily safe, prosperous neighborhoods can suddenly become dangerous because of mass transit connections to unsafe neighborhoods.
In Chicago for instance the famous “Magnificent Mile” shopping district is in warmer months often targeted by “flash mobs” who simply use the elevated rail system to travel there and attack people and shops. Of course these attackers are indigenous negroes rather than immigrants, but tolerance of negro pandemonium stems from the same social disease that permits mass immigration.
Western Europe is indeed very safe by global standards still, though it is getting progressively less safe. London for instance is now less safe than New York City, which is a shocking development (or ought to be).
That said the dangerous areas, or simply blighted areas, themselves are a problem for the rich. Imagine the vast amount of real estate wealth that would be unleashed if global cities like London and Paris could rid themselves of pestilential populations.
I don’t recall saying that (about the brown parts).
I did blog about London’s homicide rate overtaking NY. This is AMAZING, given their demographics and differences in access to guns. You can take it up with the respective statistics collection agencies.
What I can say FTR:
Brown areas of London are entirely safe – if somewhat dirty and dysfunctional.
Black areas of London are not safe. Obviously safer than US ghettos, since there are no guns, but I would not advise anybody to loiter about there.
Lol Chicago is Chicago.
I’d be disappointed as a tourist, if it wasn’t dangerous in Chicago.
In the sense they are wise to the streets, urban Americans are more like Russians, than Western Europeans – who can seem very naive people.
I would not believe at all.
London is extremely safe for normal people, and probably more safe overall each year.
Some black youth are killing each other with knives. But this is not something effecting much a typical resident.
The main cost for the normal people, is they need to send their children to private schools to avoid the poor black and brown youth. (And they have some terrorist attacks from the radical Muslims).
The area has a large amount of Arab, Russian and even some African immigration.
However, the immigrants are wealthy Saudis, Russians, and Africans like Nigerian elites. The effect for the locals – very good increase in property value (which translates to millions of dollars when they sell their home) and maybe the negative is that there is a large Saudi Mosque.
In London now, it is famous that middle class hipsters are invading some black and brown areas.
So area poor black like Hackney became fashionable with middle class hipsters.
So historically most dangerous, poor and black part of London is now – with cafes costing £5 for pancakes.
I haven’t experienced dangers walking in black areas of London. And people I know who live in London (although in nice areas), have not said anything about crime problems for themselves.
That’s not to deny that poor parts of London are negatively affected by immigration. It’s obviously a negative effect that the places are populated by blacks and browns.
But for rich people in London, there is far less of a cost, especially as the children are in a private school anyway, and the brown and black children in those schools will be civilized representatives.
There is not the same emotional motivation for rich people to care about immigration filters, as for poor people. There is a rational reason, but politics is motivated from the emotions.
As for AP’s view about children of the Polish elite in the West. I only know Polish gastarbeiters. But children of Russian richer people in the West, usually just match the fashionable view where they are – the “when in Rome do as Romans do” is the dominant attitude for people abroad.
It seemed to be a misreporting in the newspapers? The murder rate in London is 1.48 per 100,000 people.
According to this article, just in one month, there were more total murders than New York
https://fournews-assets-prod-s3-ew1-nmprod.s3.amazonaws.com/media/2018/04/0.3-Original-NY-London-figures.png
https://fournews-assets-prod-s3-ew1-nmprod.s3.amazonaws.com/media/2018/04/0.1-London-murder-rate-long-term.jpg
And New York is almost the safest large city in America.
https://fournews-assets-prod-s3-ew1-nmprod.s3.amazonaws.com/media/2018/04/0.1-US-cities-by-murder-rate.jpg
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-is-london-really-deadlier-than-new-york
The murder rate in London is 1.48 per 100,000 people.
The eventual figures for those months – it’s just one month London was higher, if we believe that article?
https://fournews-assets-prod-s3-ew1-nmprod.s3.amazonaws.com/media/2018/04/0.4-Revised-NY-London-figures.png
And before the recent increase, the murder rate in London was even falling below 1 per 100,000 in the early 2010s.
iirc Commonwealth immigration was quite unrestricted in the 1950s. This already led to noticeable tensions by the late 1950s (e.g. Notting Hill race riot; it also became a political issue, with one Conservative candidate supposedly using the slogan “If you want a nigger for your neighbour, vote for Labour” in the 1964 election), and from 1962 onwards there was a progressive tightening of the immigration system:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Immigrants_Act_1962
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Immigrants_Act_1968
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_1971
Of course there were other highly negative developments during the 1960s and 1970s, e.g. the race relations acts which laid the ground for later “antiracist” legislation, and there was still far too much immigration through family reunification and misguided generosity (like taking in the Asians fleeing Idi Amin’s rule).
But Britain was really only set on a probably irreversible course to national destruction by the policies of Blair’s government from 1997 onwards (and the failure of successive Conservative governments to undo that damage).
Similarly for many other parts of Western Europe, if other choices had been taken in the 1990s, things would be different now. So this happened very quickly in a historical perspective. There’s no reason for Poles and other East Europeans to be complacent.
Seeing through Putin!
Vladimir Putin Transparency Act (introduced in US Congress this week):
Are you kidding me? Redneck Mexicans mean that they are actually becoming like redneck whites (which is a good thing). That is actually the elite’s worst fear – the proles of all races getting along and overturning neo-liberalism.
I’d so much rather rednecks than ghettoes full of Mexicans still speaking Spanish.
if they don’t work or barely then the concept of “reserve army of labour” still applies, unions are undercut, native proles have a harder time to negotiate better wages, working conditions etc
But indeed that would not be enough to explain their presence, it has to be political ie building a coalition of the fringes where there were barely any
Why do you say that?
The only thing that gives me hope is I see so many solid, young, Canadian (white) men around, aware of the issues and growing stronger by the day. I would say that conservative, Christian whites in Canada are almost at the verge of an ethno-cultural revolution. Despite the hatred from non-whites, despite feminism, we “rednecks” keep doing our own thing (which only other whites participate in). This also drives non-whites mental.
It’s to the point where you can just pass people on the street and feel a connection to them. Don’t even need to stop and talk, we old-stock Canadians just quietly take pleasure in our resurgent ethnic identity.
In the long term? I think things are pretty bleak.
Rather determines the result beforehand doesn’t it. Browder says £400m.
Exactly. That’s why we have Sailers and Derbyshires doing what they can to prevent this from happening.
Its really just a feeling, and I can’t defend it with figures and stats or anything. But stats only represent trends up to that point in time, and can’t tell us anything meaningful about the underlying factors driving those trends.
I just returned from Asia and 1) I found the moral and social level to be significantly below that of Europe and America, with the exception of Japan. Cheating, hostility, cruelty, unhappiness, etc, were quite high, suggesting a high level of underlying social dysfunction and low trust societies kept in check uneasily by economic growth 2) Intellectually, I found Asia to suffer from certain serious limitations. Highly stereotyped thinking and behavior. Lack of curiosity. Pretty much the cliches. 3) Highly subjective impression, but NYC has more impressive and dynamic people than Asian cities.
Of course, there are many awesome and excellent things about Asia as well, and I am generally a fan of the place.
My conclusion is, the whole world is in bad shape, and the West isn’t as bad in relative terms as I had thought.
We are in a global shitty period now. However, trends reverse themselves, which is why the world never reaches an “end state”. Current trends have been ongoing for some time, and are reaching their peak.
Again, I realize this is hardly a good explanation, but perhaps irrationally, I returned to America more upbeat and optimistic. Who knows, the subconscious mind picks up on a thousand things the conscious mind does not.
lol, you told us exactly the opposite for months on end, how Asia was superior because Asians hadn’t embraced materialist and rationalist thinking or whatever.
No reason to believe that, some conditions are terminal, in individuals and in societies.
So you reverse the opinion from your last holiday?
A lot of people’s complaining here about the West Europe, is reflective of the fact they are poor and/or live in the shit part of their country (or if they are old men like on Sailer’s blog, with a lot of depression inducing estrogen – they would benefit from “testosterone therapy”) .
In reality, life of bourgeois in West Europe has never been as high as it is now, in terms of “opportunities for good life” available to them.
People are healthier than ever, girls more beautiful than ever, and streets more peaceful – yet reading comments here you would think people are living in some black banlieue outside Paris, or surrounded by Arabs in Malmö, or with Pakistanis in the Rotherham of England.
I want to agree with pessimistic comments of people like German Reader. But the problem is I live in a rich part of a nice town in West Europe, and every day in the streets most people look healthy, rich and happy, and it confounds the negative views I read on the internet.
When I go to write comment on the internet, I always have to shift the conversation to a more Panglossian view, because that is what I see everyday with my eyes.
Of course, my rosy glasses create another distortion – just in the opposite direction from the people who are poor and live in the shit part of a country.
Karlin for example is in Moscow, so he develops (to some extent correct) very optimistic views of economy and governance in Russia. If he has to live for a few years in a more average city like Chelyabinsk – then he will be soon writing posts about Rashka and how lucky people are who live in Western Europe.
I think two things happened, one, social trends in Asia have gotten significantly worse over the past decade and a half (I spent lots of time there earlier, so its not exactly new to me. And back then, I perhaps turned a blind eye to many things in the expectation that social trends would get better, which hasn’t happened), and secondly, I think I realized that what I actually like is not mainstream modern Asian culture, but its elite bohemian/rebel side as expressed in things like Taoism, which may be the world’s premier expression of this attitude precisely because mainstream Asian culture is so lame.
I still think the West can learn from this tradition, and I still think the modern, decadent West can learn from the pragmatic Asian approach to hard work (although it’s not like this didn’t exist in the West in earlier periods). And certain other things about Asia hold good lessons, like its attitude to food and street life.
In the end, I realized how much of a Westerners I am. Although ironically, I may end up living in Asia lol for various reasons.
I agree, there is no hard reason to believe things will get better. Its just a feeling I returned from Asia with.
Surface impressions are important. I think maybe one of the reasons I’m more optimistic about the West now is because there are so many good looking, overly healthy, self-confident, wealthy and intelligent looking Westerners running around, even in Asia. It’s impossible not to think Westerners are an elite people (or at least, its elites are elite :))
I remember a decade or so ago reading in the American press about how “cucked” the Dutch were (although no used that phrase back then), then going to Amsterdam and seeing all these incredibly good looking, well dressed, thin and athletic, tall and intelligent looking people, exuding an aura of supreme self-confidence, and realizing that something is not quite right with the “official” picture.
This is is partly why I think just below the surface, there is incredible vitality left in Europe and America, that will eventually come out.
Yes, where one lives and the sorts of people one sees every day shapes our impressions. Its like the RooshV crowd going on about how terrible American women are – in NYC, they’re good looking and pretty friendly nice.
Yes, a nation is composed of both its upper and lower segments – but we’ve been hearing too much lately about the decline of the lower segments of the West to get a fair opinion about just how much the West is declining as a whole. As you note, life in elite cities has never been better. NYC is ten times better today than when I was growing up. And this doesn’t mean I’m unsympathetic to the plight of the lower social elements. I think policies that benefit them should be adopted. But that’s another topic.
And I know most people here won’t like this, but I kind of enjoy the multi-culti lifestyle in big rich cities – American whites, Europeans, Asians, Jews, with some browns and blacks thrown in. Everyone seems to get along and be having fun. Its weird but interesting and fun.
Objectively untrue
The Dalai Lama weighs in on the Ukrainian question, mediating between a European orientation and one tilted towards Russia:
https://life.pravda.com.ua/society/2019/02/28/235798/
A lot more to be found here, incluidng some interesting analogies comparing Ukraine/Russia to Germany/France and China/India.
https://life.pravda.com.ua/images/doc/e/f/ef70705-dalay-lama–26-.jpg
You think it is deliberate?
But I agree with the guy you responded to.
What is true in comments here, is that “gay and non-binary” really is the new religious fashion in the West.
I visit my acquaintance in their college bar, and the toilets are not labelled now “men” and “women” – but as “gender neutral” cubicles or cubicles with urinals.
You see girls walking with LGBT rainbow flag badges decorating their rucksacks.
And in the road near me, the students (probably not even gays) are now decorating their window:
https://i.imgur.com/uUDS8rS.jpg?1
I didn’t see this when I moved here a year and a half ago. The fashion seems to be increasing in the town just in the last year.
I don’t know how you got that impression. I’ve admitted to being kind of a loser in past comments (and it’s possible my personal situation does influence my negative view of the world), but most commenters here at least give the impression that they’re quite succesful in their personal lives, certainly well above average.
imo you’re wrong though about “never had it so good before”, even though it’s understandable that a Russian would see things that way (the Russian middle class probably does have it as good as never before today, given the Soviet background and the disasters of the 1990s). I think there’s a lot of pessimism among younger people in Western Europe, and at least the perception (well-founded imo) that they have it a lot worse than the boomer generation which had much better opportunities, regarding secure and well-paid jobs etc., which leads to an undercurrent of inter-generational resentment; anybody who thinks about the issue must also fear that pensions systems aren’t sustainable, and that productive younger age cohorts will be crushed by having to provide both for boomer retirees and parasitic immigrants.
Redneck Mexicans will intermarry with Redneck whites and the end result of this is white genocide, as white European genes get admixed with Mexican ones.
A prole class that’s partly white, partly Mexican that are socially segregated means that the white proles remain whites and retain their culture, while the Mexicans can be dealt with properly once circumstances allow.
A prole class that’s mixed? There goes the white race. Do you want a large, castizo prole class in America? In this case, what makes America, America, gets thrown out the window. That would be a different country.
Youth pessimism not exclusive to Western Europe.
Polling shows that American millennials by and large believe they will not be as well off as their parents were.
http://fortune.com/2016/03/01/millennials-worse-parents-retirement/
Life expectancy in America is also declining for the first time ever, a shocking development.
As far as Western Europe goes, I’ve been regularly visiting Western Europe for my entire life. Unlike Dmitry, I’m not traveling there from a poorer country either and thus not amazed by the prosperity. The decline is extremely obvious to my eyes. It wasn’t all that long ago when a majority of taxi drivers in Scandinavian capitals were natives.
This decline isn’t something you have to be alt-right to witness either (though it helps). An older Jewish attorney I know (early Boomer or late Silent) has regularly vacationed in Italy for the past 20 years. He is a dyed in the wool liberal who speaks openly of how amazing and wonderful immigrants allegedly are. This doesn’t stop him from commenting on the shocking deterioration of Italy he’s witnessed in this century.
I don’t refer to your comments – although pessimistic, your comments generally much more balanced and sanely written than most of us.
It’s actually in the other forum on this site, that the comments become more crazy
My impression is they live in areas with a lot of immigration of blacks, Arabs, Muslims, etc.
I only read Karlin’s blog everyday. But if you compare with Russian social media. In polluted cities, people are complaining about pollution and tap water. In low income, about income. Etc. Complaining usually reflects very much the local situation of the area they live.
This is also reflected in politics – and it’s one of the reasons people in rich areas will not on average be emotionally caring as much about problems of antisocial blacks and brown immigration – who do not live near them.
And politics is motivated more from emotion, than rational study of the correct policy decision.
Young people in Russia generally seem very pessimistic now – although objectively, Russia has never lived as well as it does today, in terms of economy, social mobility and political order.
That’s why you need to look at the actual data. For example, there is a liberal, urbanist blogger called Varlamov, and he was campaigning all last year about automobile accidents and how terrible the situation in Russia.
But no-one was actually posting the data that shows automobile accidents have fallen greatly in the last decade, even as percentage of people owning cars is constantly increasing.
So the automobile is bad (true), but falling (this is not discussed).
–
Likewise, people write about the dangers of the black streets of London. But the murder rate of London is 1,48 per 100,000 people (and a several years ago it had for one year, even fallen below 1 per 100,000 people).
So by comparison, Thorfinssen was talking about Chicago. In Chicago, the murder rate was 34 per per 100,000 people in 1992. It had fallen to around 16 murders 100,000 people in the early 2000s. And now, it is around 24 murders per 100,000 people.
But even with the recent increase in murders in Chicago, the long-term trend is at least a bit downwards. (And obviously Chicago having murder rate more than 16 times higher than London, can show how the media reports about murders in London are exaggerated).
Gay flags are everywhere in Oxford (or any university town I expect); you can literally pass a dozen on a short walk around. People hang them out of their windows, hang them up in their windows, many colleges and other buildings, even neutral businesses, have them up. I used to think about Marine Le Pen’s comment about foreign occupation all the time.
Wadham had gender-neutral toilets forever (also bins for female sanitary products in the men’s bathroom iirc), although it is only in the last couple of years that other colleges started to have them.
Most frequent commenters here seem like underachievers; might be my own projection
You don’t need to live directly next to concentrations of immigrants to feel deep unease about the cultural change which has become very noticeable just over the last 20 years (e.g. why the hell are we constantly having to talk about Islam and the problems caused by Muslims in our countries? There was a time in the not too distant past when the thought of that would have seemed utterly bizarre), and which feels like dispossession to many native Europeans (myself included).
Why are they pessimistic?
I’ve been “regularly visiting Western Europe for my entire life”.
It’s definitely richer than before. Where I am working, there is a constantly growing hi-tech industry.
And in cities like London, floods of wealthy people have been coming from the around the world for perhaps 10 years or more. Where do you think the money of Russia is going for the last decade? Or even from China now?
I will agree with all your comments about how Paris is surrounded by people of a third-world shithole. Or that Arab taxi drivers are invading Sweden. (I haven’t been to Sweden, but I read the news about there).
But it’s just a fact that bourgeois people in Western Europe, have never lived as well as now. I see it everytime I go in the streets.
I don’t remember this when I had visited Wadham.
But what I remember about Wadham, are the architectural crimes.
If I remember, on one side of the lawn, there are beautiful old buildings. And on the other side, they build the ugliest new student accommodation.
I thought modern library there is kind of cool though (even it was funded by Iran?).
Chinese money is a drop in the bucket in London, but definitely on the rise. Most of it is in, and will be unless Chinese get tussled out of these countries, Canada, Australia, and California.
Chinese money has spectacularly, and single handedly, built up Vancouver’s skyline into something more fitting of a world class city twice its population. Same with Toronto, and now increasingly, Montreal. They have also transformed city centers in Sydney and Melbourne.
This is an open thread so I guess we can ramble, but who else here sees a EU-US split that will be similar to the Sino-Soviet split looming on the horizon?
In fact, Brexit seems to be paving the way for this. The EU will become some geopolitical bloc independent from, and possibly even hostile to, the Five Eyes, even though both blocs will continue to pursue neoliberalism.txt, albeit different interpretations of which.
What would that “geopolitical bloc” consist of? France and Germany (both with huge unresolved problems which are likely to get worse, and in Germany’s case with a completely rotten military)? Relations between Germany and both the Visegrad countries and the Southern Europeans aren’t positive. The whole Euro issue might also still blow up.
imo there’s very little prospect of a EU “geopolitical bloc” emerging that would be capable of projecting power beyond its borders; tensions and contradictions within the EU are too great.
There are even tensions in the relationship between Britain and the US though, so far at least Britain has adhered mostly to the European position on the issue of the Iran nuclear deal (and I doubt there would be much enthusiasm for war with Iran in Britain).
I did not say that your Julia was related to the particular Joffes copy pasted from Wikipedia. I just suggested that your Julia sprung from the ‘culture medium’ represented by the bolshevik Joffes who ‘participated’ in the ‘russian’ revolution. Culture medium which generated the ‘neo-con’ clique, ‘incidentally’ originating from the same geographical areas. It is hard not to see a pattern emerging. I understand that it is a minefield that should be treaded carefully.
Agree, but used up my button
It would be pretty shocking if the murder rate hadn’t fallen. This is the age of prolefeed. Netflix. The internet – free porn. Cell phones. Video games – there are crime simulators like “Grand Theft Auto.”. And so many blacks are in lock-up at tremendous expense.
“You think it is deliberate?” – They are not stupid. The HBDism and IQism serves the power. The ruling class has no ideology for themselves. They do not need to. They have power. In order to rule they provide an ideology for the classes they rule to help them maintain their power. Sailers and Derbyshires are dispensers of this ideology. It goes back to Socrates in Republic and his dialog with Glaucon.
So, what is HBDism and IQism? They are what Condorcet meant by saying that (biological) determinism “make nature herself an accomplice in the crime of political inequality.”
I think seeing the ruling class as a monolithic entity is a mistake.
There are amoral apparatchiks, true believers, fellow travellers, allies of convenience, etc. and people who comprise more than one of the groups at the same moment. In addition, these is also turnover, currently often at the expense of those amoralists who have “problematic” pasts or positions.
There is also no guarantee that the elites are not foolish, even those among them who are intelligent. The past is replete with rulers who pursued what we can now see were follies.
The ruling class in many European and Anglosphere countries is doubling down on several of their unpopular policies and accelerating the permanent revolution in response to pressure from young wolves.
In other countries the (somewhat wiser) elites are adopting a more gradualist approach as a concession to objectors.
I think the Socrates example is flawed. It fits well for the aristocratic elite of the past, but it is clear that the current ruling class base their legitimacy not on heredity, but rather on being crusaders for liberty and equality and the eradication of everything which is immanent.
And quoting Condorcet, who well encapsulates the reigning ideology, is not really helping disprove reiner Tor’s assertion that you are “punching to the right”.
Finally, I am generally sceptical of conspiracy theories which claim that the rulers are secretly trying to bring to the fore X thing or idea that they spend vast amounts of energy suppressing and denouncing in public.
Plus medicine had not stopped advancing. Stabbings which would end in death of the victim three decades ago and would qualify as murder, now would be just stabbings.
What was ‘too general’?
The so-called “Dalai Lama” is the shittiest religious ‘leader’ of all time.
It’s not new. Androgyny, non-procreative “sex” and self-castration are extreme manifestations of Gnosticism, and they’re old as fuck in Europe. Gnosticism is as old and as entrenched as Christianity in euro culture. Maybe even older.
As stated:
Perhaps related, you said this afterwards in reply to Dmitry regarding Ioffe:
Hoping there’s agreement. There’s a saying Jews on the brain, which in some (not all) instances has a mocking merit.
Oh yes, “Prudence is the mother of all virtues”. Let’s talk about animal rights.
About “our” Ioffe, the only interesting thing is that she is 100% propaganda against Russia. I.e. criticism of Russia is fine, but she just produces deranged propaganda.
Everything else (e.g. she hates Trump), not very interesting from our perspective.
Ioffe itself is one of the most common Jewish family names. Whether you think there is any politics consistent traits across Ioffes? Not really among the famous ones – Yuliy Ioffe is Party of Regions, while Julia Ioffe Democrat (US).
I used instagram and search the non-famous Ioffe – I found some appear rich, and some are gopniks.
This is partly just distortion that instagram has higher representation of rich girls, than other social media.
Some Ioffes are Russia Patriots.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BJcf3mFDLMx/
–
On contradiction to all discussion I read on this site, I find generally on social media brown Jewish girls which place Star of David in their user name are the Jews who are Russia patriots.
Here the explanation is simple psychology, people are either attached to national symbols in general, or opposed to them in general. (Personally, I have natural reaction against such collectivist symbols)
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bku_Hv5gzqg/
But kind of blonde rich Jews which no-one would think in the street are not Russian, are often ones which signalling more for Israel than for country of habitation Russia.
https://www.instagram.com/p/qkfbxBn0qm/
I investigate a while looking at our Ioffe on social media.
Her parents are both standard, beaten by society, non-glamorous, doctors from the late stagnation era of the Soviet history.
However, after this family arrive in America around 1990, their household income as two medical doctors in America would be immediately above $200,000 a year, and they join the American middle class living in the suburbs of Washington DC.
So an attitude to America vs Russia, with hostility to the depressing Russia of their youth, is quite predictable. Their standard of living immediately skyrockets after arrival in America and they can probably afford the American dream, with children going to Princeton (even if one daughter is subsequently disappointing, and became a propaganda journalist instead of a doctor).
Culture will not be similar to famous Ioffes of a century ago, as Jews from Moscow were converted into very standardized, “Soviet” people by the 1980s, who can only speak Russian and know nothing of their historical traditions and roots.
For example Karlin wants to ban about Victory Day (because not nationalist enough?)
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/no-victory/
And Ioffe wants to ban Olympics in similar way (but because too nationalist?)
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/ban-the-olympics/553250/
But murder rate in Chicago fell to 16 per 100,000 people in the early 2000s, when there was no netflix. And now it back higher to 24 per 100,000 people.
So it might not be so simple, as steadily falling murder rates with technological distractions.
You can see how safe it really is in London – even for all media hysteria and drug dealing teenagers killing each other, it is still so low.
I have not done survey. It’s my impression in reading social media.
Objectively, things in many large cities, are improving slightly all the time. However, subjectively, teenagers of ordinary background now have access to all the social media, and can see how much better materially Westerners live than most of themselves, as well as how differently live wealthy young people from Russia.
And aside from social media, youth in Russia are watching American TV shows. Even in the popular ones about middle class small city Americans like Riverdale – you see the vast economic gap between America and most of Russia.
So all this is elevating material expectations, which will be disappointed by life (even though life of the current cohort of teenagers will probably be easier than for people born before about 1995, as a small cohort).
–
E.g.
The most famous YouTube star for teenage girls in Russia, are people like “Sasha Spilberg”, whose father was a banker who artificially created her career, so she could make videos complaining about her time in the English boarding school.
Much of her child audience will be lucky for their parents to take them to an annual holiday in Turkey. But she advertises to buy Mercedes for these teenage girls.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BuD9FcRFK1H/
Unlike in a country with widespread wealth like America, it’s only a minority of teenagers in Russia who will be able to live the material (if shallow) aspects of the lifestyle social media is promoting to them. So it’s even more causing unrealistic views and standards for the next generation of teenagers.
But it’s fashionable now because it appears like something new and revolutionary.
It also is on the side of “good” for the students in the West, because they feel they supporting oppressed minorities and bullied people.
After this becomes too mainstream, they will move to another topic – perhaps animal rights will become the main cause for them eventually (in about 30 years).
I think that’s true. There’s a vast amount of Russian-speaking people owning property in London. But of Chinese, it is not heard.
Moreover, in areas of London like Hampstead, you see sometimes wealthy Nigerian families walking into their houses, but not any families of Chinese.
However, in the case of racially Chinese people – you now see a lot of Chinese faces in the nice areas of England, and they seem to be mainly Chinese students. So at some point, some of these students will grow up and surely want to buy property where they studied.
There is a documentary on YouTube about this story. This kind of one-direction investment does not seem to be good new for China’s economy. How much of the money will return to China?
Nah, Jorge Bergoglio takes that prize.
Spilberg? How surprising that they would be a corrupting and obnoxious influence. They should not be welcome in Russia. Take everything they own, use it to help poor and elderly Russians, and expel the Spilbergs and their ilk.
It’s a stage name. It’s not her real name. Her real name Balkovskaya.
Her career is created by her father (who obviously wants to imply he is Steven Spielberg). It’s not because they are Jewish.
If you assume, she is a Jewess? – it’s not because of a stage name, but I guess it’s quite likely she has Jewish roots because of behaviour of her father and the fact she says Diary of Anne Frank is her favourite book.
On the other hand, – if she has some such roots – it’s obviously not a relevant part of her identity.
Yes, but not because she is from a rich family or has potentially “Jewish behaving” parents.
One problem is because she is integrated with the government. Liberals hate her anyway because she called Ruslan Sokolovsky (who played Pokemon Go in a church) an idiot in the Duma.
And she promotes Medinsky (this is an idiocratic Minister of Culture it’s impossible to condone)
Her the connections to the government are a problem.
On the other hand, she has promoted teenagers to read books.
Quite a high proportion of rich people, and the business class, have indeed Jewish roots.
The question if you think the government should expropriate the property of entrepreneurial Jews and the business people, and redistribute it to pensioners?
I guess a few thousand pensioners could be rehoused to drive Bentleys and Aston Martins, and live in mansions of those expropriated Jewish families.
On the other hand, private property rights will have become a joke.
The result would be that all rich and talented people of the country (whether Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Jews, etc) will move even more of their money and business to safe places like Switzerland and Cayman Islands.
What’s happened after Putin, at least initially was more like an opposite.
It’s not uncommon for rich Russians and Jews to have repatriated to Russia from London, (reflecting the standard of living improvement in Russia).
For example, on instagram above, posted the blonde Jewish-nationalist socialite.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bubx9gnnmSd/
According to YouTube, she says in English her family was in London and then repatriated to Russia. This is when quite a lot of rich people repatriated to Russia in the 2000s, and they returned some of the money from London back to Russia.
A successful national economic policy, is one which attracts the rich people to return to the country. And the children of the rich people returned to the country, will then use the money – even if it’s mainly buying foreign products to be a socialite- to feed partly back into the local economy, rather than the London economy.
Over the years, I’ve interacted with a Soviet Jewish expat with the Ioffe surname, who is a pro-Russian Sovok, who tends to agree more with me than Julia Ioffe.
A couple of family members of mine taught a few years at a Queens NY tech school, which has a good sized former Soviet (typically Jewish) student body, as well as faculty and admin.
One had some Ukrainian nationalist sympathies, while others were pro-Russian leaning.
On a NY talk radio show some years back, a US Zionist zealot said that former Soviet Jews were generally not (in his view) good because they weren’t Zionist enough, with some of them not really being so Jewish in their background – a point having merit in a number of instances.
Some years back, ABC News had a segment of former Soviet Jews who left Israel for Germany. Economic reasons with an acceptance that contemporary Germany isn’t Nazi were the core reasons given. In addition, one of the featured former Soviets added, besides I (him) don’t like the way the Palestinians are treated.
Excellent post, thank you. But the fact that these ideas conveniently serve the elites does not necessarily mean that they are completely wrong.
Nobody denies that they could have been Russian patriots.
E.g.(gleaned from Wikipedia)
“Abram Fedorovich Ioffe, prominent Russian/Soviet physicist. He received the Stalin Prize (1942), the Lenin Prize (1960) (posthumously), and the Hero of Socialist Labor (1955). Serious scientific contributions.
In 1918 he became a head of Physics and Technology division in State Institute of Roentgenology and Radiology. This division became the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute (LPTI) in 1917.
In the early 1930s, there was a critical need in the Air Defense Forces of the Red Army for means of detecting invading aircraft. A number of research institutes were involved with radiolokatory (radio-location) techniques. The Russian Academy of Sciences called a conference in January 1934 to assess this technology. Ioffe organized this conference, then published a journal report, disclosing to researchers throughout the world the science and technology that would ultimately be called radar. Ioffe asked Ernest Rutherford to accept Peter Kapitza to Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.
When the Soviet atomic bomb project began in 1942, Ioffe was asked to lead the technical effort, but refused the job on the grounds that he was too old. He saw great promise in the young Igor Kurchatov, and placed him in charge of the first nuclear laboratory. During Joseph Stalin’s campaign against the so-called “rootless cosmopolitans” (Jews), in 1950 Ioffe was made redundant from his position of the Director of LPTI and from the Board of Directors. In 1952–1954 he headed the Laboratory of Semiconductors of Academy of Sciences of the USSR, which in 1954 was reorganized into Institute of Semiconductors. Following Ioffe’s death, in 1960 the LPTI was renamed the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute and remains one of Russia’s leading research centers..
The crater Ioffe on the Moon is named after him.
Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute carries his name
The Russian oceanographic and Polar research vessel Academic Ioffe is named after him.. ”
Surely he was speaking Russian and probably knew little of his ‘historical traditions and roots’. Strange is the mention of his demotion from the position he detained since 1918 for “rootless cosmopolitanism”.
You have an incredible knowledge of instathot culture!
Lol Facebook is my main source of knowledge of the world.
She was on the friends list of a friend of a man I know who has studied in Israel in a university for rich people called IDC Herzliya.
I was looking at his friends list from IDC Herzliya, to see how rich the Jews who study in that college can be, or if there are any children of famous people or oligarchs.
It’s not clear how rich she is, but she has to be the most Jewish nationalist socialite of Russia.
By the way, reminded me of the comical trolling comments of Melanf a few month ago, where he was posting photos of a synagogue and mocking their colouration and implying they are some kind of LARPers
https://i.imgur.com/6iABzmN.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/l68OLlZ.jpg
‘
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/soviet-freezer/#comment-2609371
And Melanf was posting photos of her synagogue
https://www.instagram.com/p/hqcPSan0nk/
Culture medium is very different for people (not just Jews) born in late 19th century Russian Empire, and for people who are from the 1980s USSR.
But in the case of Jews, of course they were completely Sovietized and “deracinated” of their original culture.
By the way, on topic of instathots and Jewish names.
There are millions of Brodskayas on Instagram.
But this idiot drug addict – daughter of actual Brodsky you read at school on the 10th grade .
https://www.instagram.com/p/pPEAXVr0Tn/
Evidence against heredity of genius and IQ?
https://www.instagram.com/p/qMMZQJr0XI/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BI7YHH2D6ZB/
This is daughter of the Nobel prize winner.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BMlb7SejSK3/
Of course. The question is how some became ‘rootless cosmopolitans’.
Interesting to compare the career paths, number of honors and awards conferred upon and public acclaim, of two Russian recipients of the Nobel Price, Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky, after their expulsion from USSR and settlement in the USA, both for writing ‘anti-Soviet’ literature.
About ‘heredity and genius’ it is interesting also that Brodsky was accused of writing ‘pornographic and anti-Soviet’ poetry.
Brodsky is beloved in Russia (for his poetry among literary circles). About his life probably romanticized and not really relevant.
Poetry does not translate, so in the West nobody reads Brodsky and I can’t see him in Western bookshops.
Solzhenitsyn is popular in the West for his novels and sold in all the Western bookshops. On the other hand, in Russia, few people read his books, partly because his writing style. However, his politics is promoted in some circles.
And his popularity is powered from people younger than 40.
It’s understandable because of poets on the school curriculum, he is one of the most accessible to teenagers, writes about love and breakups- and witty.
This then increases with the internet, because he is suitable for copy and pasting quotes of his onto social media.
At the same time, outside Russia (in the West), I cannot see even translations of his poems in the bookshops (while in contrast to the poet, the prose Russian writers like Nabokov are very popular in the West).
But, if in the West nobody reads Brodsky and you can’t see him in Western bookshops, how come that he was “United States Poet Laureate”?
And Solzhenitsyn practically banned?
It’s interesting – Solzhenitsyn is very popular in the West. I have not read Solzhenitsyn so I cannot say why. Maybe you know more than I? (Maybe Western readers have better attention spans).
You can see new editions of Solzhenitsyn’s novels if you are in the Western bookshops (he’s much more popular in bookshops in England, than in Russia).
I assume, this is partly because prose fiction has more ability to travel to the West. But he is also a particularly fashionable novelist with Western readers (far more popular 20th century Russian writers are not sold in Western bookshops). But in Russia, Solzhenitsyn has not any organic popularity and only curious people read it because he is promoted in the media.
As for Brodsky, He was a poet, and poetry does not seem to travel to the West. I cannot see his work in the bookshops in the West.
On the other hand, Brodsky is the most popular modern (born in 20th century) poet in Russia, and this is powered mainly by younger people. And of course he is hated by Ukrainians, because of a particularly poem.
Brodsky’s popularity in Russia and with young people, is because his poetry is the most accessible we had read at school – conversational, and about relationships and breaking with your girlfriend, etc. His rebellious life is also very romanticized. Probably, Brodsky is overrated.
E.g. a Brodsky group has over 400,000 friends on Vk
https://vk.com/josephbrodsky
People write songs from him
While Solzhenitsyn is not popular in Russia. He is only promoted by some old officials and politicians in the media:
But organically only a few groups of old people with small numbers.
E.g. more anti groups than pro.
https://vk.com/club4078131
https://vk.com/no_solzhenitsyn
https://vk.com/antisolj
And on Facebook, it’s only young Westerners following him:
https://www.facebook.com/aleksandr.solzhenitsyn/
Organic popularity of Solzhenitsyn is only in the West (including young Western readers), while for Russians reading him are smaller numbers of curious people, and promotion by older people for political reasons. And for that reason, he will have a successful legacy (but outside Russian readers).
On the other hand, Brodsky is a already forgotten in the West. However, in Russia he has organic popularity and powered by the young (while old people say he is superficial).
So between the two there is almost a parallel legacy. Solzhenitsyn will stay alive in Western readers, and Brodsky in Russian readers.
The real cross-country 20th century writer is Nabokov. Here Nabokov like Solzhenitsyn has wild popularity in the West. But unlike Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov is actually a bit fashionable with young readers in Russia also.
You are pulling my leg.
We know that “Iuda Solzhenitsyn” is not ‘popular’ with die-hard sovok ‘revolutionary komsomolists’ and anti-Putinists, and we know why.
Solzhenitsyn has been promoted by Putin as a political figure. For current United Russia government, he is state promoted promoted figure.
However, as a writer he is not very commonly read by people, mainly just by cognoscenti and literature fans.
Curiously, on the other hand, Solzhenitsyn is an extremely popular writer in the West, where he has mass popularity.
So Westerners read his novels in mass numbers.
I noticed this first on Good Reads, where the reviewers were 95% Westerners and over 80,000 ratings.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15764794
Whereas equivalent translation of Brodsky exists, but it does not attain 1000 ratings in Good Reads.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/320598.Collected_Poems_in_English?
You are beating around the bush.
You know that the ‘popularity’ or ‘unpopularity’ of Solzhenitsyn both in the West and in Russia has little to do with his novels and literary style, but with his political thinking expressed in his ‘Harvard Speech’, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’, ‘The Red Wheel’, ‘Two Hundred Years Together’ (especially!).
That’s not true. His novels are extremely popular in the West, because Western readers like his novels (you don’t read books this long and difficult, if you don’t like it).
And likewise, they are not popular in Russia – I assume (not having read it), because it doesn’t connect with local readers in the same. Reason for this I do not know, although I could speculate if I read his novels.
As I see, generally his novels are well reviewed by literature experts.
Of these books, only Gulag Archipelago is read in Russia, and this is only because of government promotion. The other books are not read at all.
The reason Putin is promoting Solzhenitsyn is very simple, and a little cynical. Solzhenitsyn was the most famous and CIA/Western supported dissident against the USSR.
However, in his final stage of life, he came back to Russia and endorsed the current authorities.
So to promote Solzhenitsyn is extremely good to Putin’s personal image, politically, and supports the narrative of how Russia has transformed successfully with the current government.
“Two Hundred Years Together” itself was an important test of free-speech in the new Russian Federation, although it simply repackaged anti-Jewish attitudes that had been officially promoted in the USSR in a different way.
However, natural fans of Solzhenitsyn in Russia are more often liberal literary people, and they evidently try to ignore this book about Jews, as can be seen by the lack of online reviews of it even relative to of all his other works (which themselves have not so many reviewers).
So, are you suggesting that Putin is somehow supported by the CIA/Western…?
No the opposite.
Putin was KGB information officer at the same time Solzhenitsyn was promoted across America as America’s most valuable trophy (cover of Time magazine, etc), .
The fact the most famous dissident of the USSR, then returned to new Russia in 1994, and later supported Putin’s government – is symbolically very complimentary for Putin and new Russia, and for this reason Putin is now possessor of this political trophy, and promotes it for his political advantage.
At the same time, Solzhenitsyn books are massively popular in the West, but in Russia only read some literature cognoscenti, who will be politically liberal. So in Russia, it’s difficult for the government to contextualize him. The patriots hate him for his politics (and natural fans of Solzhenitsyn are liberals).
You can see how unpopular the video is with the “vatnik” (like “patriotard”) subscribers of the government channel above.
I guess the government has now asked some “soft nationalists” (some of which Karlin translate) to try to reposition his reputation with a more non-liberal or “politically correct (pro-Kremlin) “”nationalist” audience”.
But politics are not the reason his novels are not popularity in Russia. It’s more just writing has some mass popularity in the West, which seems organic and sells his books in the most popular bookshops.
https://twitter.com/Waterstones/status/940125283742572544
But we are talking why Solzhenitsyn is NOT so popular in the West. He did disappoint the West because he did not do what the ‘Office of Policy Coordination’ of the CIA (the state sponsored arm of the ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’ – itself a reincarnation of the Society of ‘Friends of Russian Freedom from before the Revolution-, whose mission was to promote ‘dissident’ literature in USSR as part of the Cold War) was expecting from him, condemning ‘Stalinism’ and ‘Russian nationalism’, but not the ‘Revolution’.
I understand why you constantly dodge this question. His “200 years…” is BANNED in USA (and in all the Anglosphere). Why is Solzhenitsyn “under fire for new book on the role of Jews in Soviet-era repression”? Because “Jewish leaders and some historians have reacted furiously to the book, and questioned Solzhenitsyn’s motives in writing it, accusing him of factual inaccuracies and of fanning the flames of anti-semitism in Russia”.
Don’t think it is not obvious why (and I am sure you know as well). This is a taboo subject in the lands of the brave and the free. Why would the press there write things like that: “Solzhenitsyn breaks last taboo of the revolution?” , “In one remark which infuriated Russian Jews, he wrote…”, “Solzhenitsyn’s book has caused controversy in Russia, where one Jewish leader said it was “not of any merit”, “If Solzhenitsyn writes that there were many Jews in the NKVD, it will increase the passions of anti-semitism, which has deep roots in Russian history. I think it is better not to discuss such a question now.”
All quotations are from “The Guardian”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/25/russia.books