Great to see Daniel Chieh check in, however briefly.
RIP Guillaume Faye. I haven’t read any of his books, but I really dig the aesthetics associated with his work. FWIW, I think Solar Imperialist has the best archeofuturism imagery on Twitter today. ***
@ak
More notable posts since the last Open Thread in case you missed any of them.
- What the Pink Guards Think
- What Does Everyone Think About Andrew Yang?
- Rosstat: Politicization or Modernization?
- Western Media Reports Russia’s Imminent Islamization, Finds One Lunatic Russian Priest Who Agrees
- Chinese Diplomat Threatens Russian Journalist with Visa Cancellation, Disses Russian Economy
Featured
- Samuel Kronen: In Defense of Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend
- Guillaume Durocher: HBD in the Ancient World
- Growing signs of global recession incoming from China and Japan.
- So Venezuela didn’t even burn those food aid trucks (though they would have been well within their rights to do so given that an unknown group was aggressively using them to try to illegally cross its borders).
- Miguel Morel (Palladium): Report From Venezuela: An Inside Look At A Country In Free Fall
- Though as in my previous posts, this is not meant to be an endorsement of the Venezuelan system: “One night while driving home from work, he was ambushed by the local Chavista paramilitary. They dragged him out of the car and sawed off his leg. Left for dead, he crawled back into the car and stemmed the blood loss. Medical staff cleanly amputated his leg, gave him crutches, and sent him on his way. Two weeks later, he left for Colombia.“
- Andrew Yang currently has a 9% chance of clinching the Dem nomination on PredictIt.
- Found this map of number of Poles resettled from USSR to Poland!Germany after WW2.
- Doesn’t seem to have been that high (~1.5M). QUESTION: How many people were left there after Germans were evicted? This might explain those famous Poland maps correlating to the borders of the old empires. Perhaps the demographic inflow from Belarus just wasn’t anywhere near high enough to force a turnaround.
Russia
- Bryan MacDonald: No joke! Ukraine’s presidential choice: an oligarch, a gas princess or a comedian
- A Ukrainian Journalist Visited Russian Crimea and Struggled to Find “Repression”
- Leonid Bershidsky: Most New Russian Emigres Aren’t Fiery Dissidents. So, confirms what I said.
- Atlantic Council comes out against Poroshenko.
- Russian company MCST to start making 28nm microprocessors [in Russian].
- Russia orders all orcas and belugas kept in ‘whale prison’ be set free
- *powerful comment* AquariusAnon is what I call blackpilled
- Alexander Gabuev: “Story of Chinese diplomat threatening a Russian journalist is not about emerging hierarchy or rifts in Sino-Russian ties, but about clumsiness of much-hyped China’s official PR machine. It’s also shows how much Chinese diplomats are driven by politics at home, not diplomacy” / thread
- Amusing that in the wake of my China article certain crazy people are now calling me a Sinophobe.
- This week’s main Ukraine discussion here.
- Yasha Levine: “No wonder today’s OUN Ukraine is so Soviet. Stepan Bandera didn’t want to get rid of Soviet law…but simply replace “class” with “nation.”“
- Leonid Ragozin: “Back in the Soviet times or in the 1990s, it would be unthinkable to keep a fancy bike or a pram in public spaces of an apartment block in Moscow. My old house is now filled with them. Mutual trust is growing – a tectonic cultural shift invisible under the dirty film of politics.“
World
- Adrian Pecotic: Whoever Predicts the Future Will Win the AI Arms Race. Compares approaches of three leading Powers:
- China going for all out strategic level AI.
- Russia opting only for military AI, while decisions left to the generals; this is a function of its relative technological weakness.
- USA is in the middle, with generals to be advised by AI, but strategic level decisions left to politicians.
- Trump: “Wacky Nut Job @AnnCoulter, who still hasn’t figured out that, despite all odds and an entire Democrat Party of Far Left Radicals against me (not to mention certain Republicans who are sadly unwilling to fight), I am winning on the Border. Major sections of Wall are being built…“
- *powerful comment* Vishnugupta on what happened during the recent India vs. Pakistan skirmish
- *powerful comment* Jon0815 on why the US seems to be more comfortable threatening China with war wrt Russia
- Is Orban perhaps a bit too obsessed with Soros?
- Audacious Epigone: Millennial Dems likeliest to unfriend over political arguments
- Top Chinese officials plagiarised university theses.
- It will be interesting to observe China turn from anti-natalism to pro-natalism at stunning speeds.
- *powerful comment* Thorfinnsson on the US officer corps
- Carl Zha on the “most beautiful bookstore” in Chongqing
Science & Culture
- Ron Unz: American Pravda: Amazon Book Censorship
- More articles on the purge:
- Greg Johnson: Counter-Currents Bites Back Against Censorship
- Older… Roosh V: Amazon Has Banned 9 Of My Books Without Explanation (UPDATE)
- Crémieux: Is Eric Turkheimer a Scientist?
- Ancient polar trade routes in volcanic glass
- Carl Zha on the 50 year anniversary of the Sino-Soviet border war
- Psychometrist Edward Dutton has a YouTube channel.
- whyvert: At least 40% of people are eugenicists to some degree
- Why So Many of Your Favorite Beauty Personalities Are Mormon (via AP)
- Rob Henderson on altruistic monkeys
- Rosatom: “Germany’s CO2 emissions haven’t budged since 2009, despite a $580 billion investment in renewables and a 50% rise in electricity costs. Meanwhile, France produces 1/10 of the emissions Germany does and pays just over 50% of the bill. How? Nuclear power.”
- Velociraptors probably weren’t that bright… way above most other dinos, but encephalization index still only comparable to rabbits (though perhaps with higher neural density as avians are prone to be)
Powerful Takes
- Cohan, Deborah. 2019. “Racist Like Me – A Call to Self-Reflection and Action for White Physicians.” The New England Journal of Medicine 380 (9): 805–7.
- What is a racist like her doing in medicine? I think she needs to be fired.
- *powerful comment* Dmitry on Brodsky’s daughter
- Julia Ioffe vs. SJWs. Don’t you love it when the Coalition of the Fringes cannibalizes its own?
- Sorbonne prof Dominique Kalifa: “Le racisme expliqué en images aux faibles d’esprit”
- Well there’s substantial (2-3x) differences in vitamin density between different sorts of eggs.
Anyone sees any sign of the Yang boomlet existing outside of memechans? My prediction: Yang is going to get 0.6% in the first couple of primaries/caucuses and then no one will hear about him again.
In the 1990s, sure. In the Soviet times? Depends on time and place but mostly untrue. The Soviet society in many respects was what you might call high trust. I’ve seen bikes/prams in the common areas of buildings quite often. And if you are not convinced by my witness, here is unintentional documentary from a classic 1973 Soviet comedy (fast forward to 25:46.)
What did she expected to find? Maybe the oppressive atmosphere Maidanits imposed in Kiev controlled parts of Donbas, Odessa and Kharkov.
The problem of these regimes (Poroshenko’s, Maduro’s,…) is that, at some point, they start to believe the own propaganda.
resettled = deporting Poles like my great grandmother who had lived in Belarus for centuries, burning down their houses and stealing their land
I am going to put my foot in it again with the Poles, but whatever: There were people left in Silesia and Pomerania after the expulsion of Germans who claimed Polish, Silesian or other regional ethnicity (Donald Tusk’s family was among them, during WWII they were Danzig Germans, after they reverted to something like Kashubian, not sure the precise group). In Silesia it was huge: people switched from German to Silesian (in effect Polish), then in the 70’s and 80’s tried to emigrate to Germany after their new found German heritage. People’s identity is fluid and it is often also for sale, even in Poland.
The influx of Poles from the east dramatically strengthened the Polish nature of these regions, 1.5 million is a lot when the total population of Poland in 1945 was around 22 million. (It grew to 40 million of very Polish and quite well-off Poles under the unbearable Russian oppression in 40 years. after WWII.) The new arrivals were also younger and had families. They often walked into some really nice homes with furnishings, pianos, gardens, etc… for farmers it was especially good, a lot of very fertile land.
Something similar happened in Czecho-Slovakia with the Sudeten regions: over 3 million Germans expelled, and around 1.5 to 2 million Czechs and Slovaks moved in (around half a million were Czechs who were expelled from there after Munich in 1938). It is was a kind of a gold rush, even today those regions have the highest criminality and social dysfunction in Czechia. The new settlers also formed a very strong pro-communist block in Czecho-Slovakia – they wanted to keep what they got and any talk of friendship with Germany (and the West) could threaten it. I don’t know if the the same happened in Poland.
Don’t they have a lot of gypsies as well there (which can’t be good for crime statistics)?
I think that was kind of the point for Stalin (why else would he have given territory to Poland?).
The territorial annexations and expulsions were probably one of the few genuinely popular things the communists ever did in Poland.
Re-post from another thread:
Does anyone know of any books on Polish nationalist Roman Dmowski?
All of the references I could find are the usual, ‘Oh no he was anti-Semitic’ crap.
Resettled, deported, expelled, ethnically cleansed… whatever dude, just run it through a thesaurus if any of those terms offend you.
From what I very loosely remember of Guenter Grass’ autobiography (Peeling the Onion), his family (or relatives) fit that bill. The Poles didn’t really see them as Poles, while the Germans didn’t really see them as Germans (at least on an unofficial level). Which led to them getting the shortest end of the stick all round.
This is what I’m interested. How many Poles/Germans passing off as Poles/semi-Poles like Kashubians were there in this region c.1945?
https://assets.rbl.ms/18578489/980x.png
Because the way the Polish political map hews to the old imperial borders (progressive in Poland!Germany, conservative in Poland!Russia) is a frequent “gotcha” argument against HBD; after all, by this logic, it is the west that should be the most reactionary, having been settled by Poles from Belorussia. But if there were already 5 million people there, or whatever, then it’s not such a big mystery at all.
Fascinating. Sounds similar to Donbass/Kaliningrad, Northern Ireland, etc.
Though I think many of those had been recent arrivals, like officials, policemen, etc.
HBD doesn’t explain everything to the last minute details. It’s perhaps enough if the population is rootless. Also, weren’t people from other parts of Poland resettled there?
But yes, if many people had stayed after 1945, then that’s a good explanation. Especially since those stay-behind neither-Germans-nor-Poles had already been pretty deracinated to begin with. So probably the least “based” part of the original population.
Poland was in the Soviet sphere of influence and was going to stay there.
The situation in Germany was more complicated and withdrawing from the Soviet zone for the sake of establishing a neutral Germany not out of question.
Richard J. Evans mentions how the “local Poles” – contrary to expectations – were not much motivated by revenge and actually tried to prevent bad treatment of local German forced laborers and expellees. (The expellees were often worked without pay for a few years before being deported to Germany.)
I now started wondering about the identity of these “local Poles.” It’d explain a lot.
Yes, but there still was a need to cultivate support for communism (which had been very weak before the war in Poland), linking communism with a popular nationalist project was one way of doing that.
Diminishing the potential for a recrudescence of German aggression was probably another reason for Stalin though.
There weren’t many repatriants (Poles expelled or escaping from the USSR) in the “recovered” Polish territories, but there was a lot of immigration from the so-called Central Poland (areas both part of inter-war and post-war Polish state). IIRC in 1950 every Western region was 75% these people, with possible exception of Upper Silesia. The ‘ethnically transient’ grups were present in meaningful numbers only in Masuria and Upper Silesia, but were gradually swamped by immigrants and -after 1956 – further diminished emigration to Germany. So basically natives are a minority or non-existent in the anti-PiS areas. I guess the differences (which aren’t just down to political ideology – also church attendance, strength of family ties, corruption etc.) are mostly result of selection – people who moved to ex-German areas were the ones less keen on maintaining family ties, more open to experience, more risk-taking etc.
If anyone is interested I can dig actual stats on this out, just not until Friday and I’m done wagecucking for this week.
Native Silesians are actually more conservative than Polish average, it just doesn’t show in voting record due to right-wingers being nationalistic and thus rather hostile to us. I suspect same is true with Cashubians and other Pomeranians “locals” since they’re mostly rural – urbanites there were fully assimilated to Polish or German identity by 1939.
Suddenly everyone (well, Karlin and Julia Ioffe) all started quoting Leonid Ragozin in the last week.
I never knew who he was, so look on his Twitter.
He has a good writing style, but he is a bit too much of a conspiracy theorist? ..
https://twitter.com/leonidragozin/status/1097621962816393216
https://twitter.com/leonidragozin/status/1095302808243486720
https://twitter.com/leonidragozin/status/1093448755813277697
https://twitter.com/leonidragozin/status/1070216818218991616
I read Faye’s La Colonisation de L’Europe (I think there’s an English version available also).
The title is a bit misleading because while some of it is about European nationalist co-operation most of it is specifically about the colonisation of France.
But in this regard it contains a wealth of statistics regarding the culpable figures for multiculturalism, the state of schools, criminality, etc in France.
I guess he is a bit in the category of “secret fans of Putin” – overestimating Putin as an evil multiway chess genius.
https://twitter.com/leonidragozin/status/1063753653343924224
https://twitter.com/leonidragozin/status/1063894503638077442
https://twitter.com/leonidragozin/status/876013530016882688
https://twitter.com/leonidragozin/status/731782672465444864
But then – consistent application of the conspiracy theory – J.K. Rowling and Radio Liberty is also the Kremlin stooge?
https://twitter.com/leonidragozin/status/681070917976485889
Western Poland is more deracinated and has higher social dysfunction (I think, it would be nice to have specific statistics) but is also richer and lower unemployment rate (with the exception of Warsaw in the east) as well as having markedly more railway lines (for obvious reasons).
The difference between former German parts and Hapsburg+Russian Poland in elections seem to have grown over time, (Does anyone have any more recent comparisons?):
https://g8fip1kplyr33r3krz5b97d1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Poland_elections_compared-1024×585.jpg
I tried to look for Dmowski at some point as well, I think there are some French translations. I don’t know if you read French?
How long before Medium deletes that hit piece on Turkheimer?
TBH, I wonder if it was a mistake for Germany not to go down this path. I mean, as an American, I’m glad that West Germany remained a US ally for decades, but was this actually in the best interests of the German people themselves?
Same here- I didn’t know this idiot until recently…he’s your standard Russian liberast, who like the moron Bershidsky ends up inadvertantly supporting the Russia that he doesn’t want to be a part of.
What is actually shocking is not this guy occasionally noticing the million improvements in Russia…..its the uber-liberast, Khodorkovsky-loving, Maria Baronova, who , of course, is now an editor at RT
It was one of the biggest WTF moments I had when I was watching 60 minutes (Rossiya) last week. She was on, and it flashed up with her as an editor at RT…….and of course she was talking some deranged nonsense at the same time.
She’s had some big disagreements with other liberast oppositionists..but so what? Liberasts have always argued amongst eachother…that is no reason for RT to give her a job…and a big one !
It would be like Zakhar Prilepin having a job with VoA /N.Vremya
Stalin might have also wanted to make the Germans really pissed off so that the Poles would continuously be in need of Soviet assistance against the threat of German revanchism. After all, losing that much territory takes a long time to forget.
Also, I do wonder–had Germany been reunified in the early 1950s based on the terms of the Stalin Note, and had Germany (purely hypothetically) proceeded to invade Poland at some future point in time in order to recover its lost territories, would the West have also militarily intervened in this war on the Polish side or would the Soviet Union have been the only Great Power to intervene in this war?
Nope, although I have a friend who does. Maybe I can convince him to spend his very limited free time translating for me. 😉
I figured this would be the case, though. Like I said, the only English language sources I could find were a bunch of people whining about his opinions on Jews.
What’s up with the Bialystok region?
I don’t know about you all, but I have officially decided that Trump is worse than useless. He has energized the Left, and is now refusing to take any action to protect his supporters from their retaliation. Amazon has banned KMac’s books. We would have been better off with Hillary.
Yes, they were a part of the resettlement. But even among the Czechs and Slovaks there was and is the highest level of family dysfunction and crime in Czechia; something about a massive dislocation and mixing lots of new people seems to encourage crime.
It was mostly accepted already by the early to mid-1960s at the latest (e.g. both the Catholic and the Protestant churches made official statements where they interpreted the expulsions as punishment for German crimes, even as a sort of judgement by God). The expellee organizations of course made some noise and got occasional rhetorical concessions from the Christian Democrats, but their real power was very limited, and they didn’t get much sympathy from the rest of (West) German society anyway (the expellees had never been popular with large parts of the public in West Germany; my great-grandparents had to house some of them on their property in the mid- to late 1940s, and the dominant memory of my grandfather 50 years later was that one of them – iirc from Silesia – had threatened to get a rifle and shoot them; also my grandfather thought they whined too much and exaggerated the size of their lost properties, when they had in reality probably just owned a Scheißhäusel, a shithouse).
Today the lost eastern territories have been almost completely erased from German memory, the only ones who still think about them are people on the right-wing fringe.
If Germany had been reunified then, I suppose limited re-militarization at most would have been allowed. Rearmament was quite controversial within West German society anyway. After the war had ended in such an unprecedented disaster, there wasn’t that much enthusiasm for martial exploits anymore.
That was a smaller group, maybe 10-20% of the half million that Germans expelled when they took over Sudetenland in 1938.
Sudetenland is not well defined and it has been a mixed region for hundreds of years, Czech villages among German majority areas, and there were always Czechs living in the cities. 5-10% of people were mixed, including for example Konrad Henlein, the leader of German separatist party. So the ethnicity changed with the political situation, often 2-3 times back and forward.
(Off topic: Kurt Waldheim, the illustrious UN General Secretary was also from an Austrian Czech family, originally Vaclavik.)
Orban has to be obsessed about Soros, because otherwise there is nothing he can speak to Hungarians about. This phrase which Orban uses about Christian culture doesn’t resonate with Hungarians, because Hungarians are as secularized as Russians or Belarussians, more than the Irish or Italians. So the only way with which Orban can legitimize his power is through a boring and tiring Soros/migrant scare. The only other thing left with which Orban can legitimize his power is good governance and providing welfare.
this map is a bit outdated
http://www.wyborynamapie.pl/sejm2015/mapa%20gminy%20sejm2015.png
Even on this map the old 1914 German eastern borders can be seen, though.
It states here that almost three million Poles (some of whom were undoubtedly heavily Germanized Poles) out of the pre-war population of the Recovered Territories were not expelled:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered_Territories#Polonization_of_the_Recovered_Territories
Of course, it is worth noting that a large number of these could have voluntarily moved to (West) Germany later on due to the better life in (West) Germany. For instance, I seem to recall previously reading about how a lot of (perhaps most) Masurians emigrated from Poland starting from 1956 once they actually got the opportunity to do this.
Also, to my knowledge, a significant number of Poles from central Poland moved to the Recovered Territories after the end of WWII as well in the hopes of moving to a Polish El Dorado. I believe that the 1950 Polish census recorded the parts of Poland that people living in the Recovered Territories were originally from.
For the record, my own hypothesis is that it was the more liberal Poles who moved from central Poland to the Recovered Territories after the end of WWII. Thus, it’s possible that this helps explain the liberalism of the Recovered Territories even today. In other words, self-selection–similar as to why, say, US Muslims are more liberal than Muslims in the Muslim world.
The most conservative part of Poland is the former Poland!Austria in the south-east, that undermines the German-Russian dichotomy argument. I suspect that proximity to Germany and Baltic see, together with higher prosperity explains most of the current liberal-conservative split.
There is also a general east-west political division in the other countries in that region. More eastern regions tend to be poorer and vote more nationalist or traditional left, that’s even true about Germany.
He’s just a plant. Something to rev up unenthusiastic asian and young voters. He will probably re-appear to endorse the eventual Democrat nominee.
You are barking at a wrong tree. You are blinded by your HBDism. Not every color map can be explained with genes. Ethnic Germans are not responsible for the color change from blue to red on Poland’s voting map.
The issue of the geographic voting pattern in Poland was discussed here before. Why do Poles on former German territories tend to vote more progressive, less traditional, pro EU and so on. I stick to my original explanation that it is all about the uprooting, breaking community and family structure which all voluntary and involuntary immigrants including the repatriated Poles form the former Polish territories in the USSR have experienced. A ‘modern’ man is an uprooted man. He is not connected to soil. His possessions are different from that of a land owning peasant. He probably is more anxious and more fearful than a peasant. He is more susceptible to abstract ideological arguments and thus succumbs more easily to propaganda. He parses reality not by what he sees but more by what he is supposed to see. He likely scores higher on an IQ test than his peasant ancestors but he is more of sheeple than they were. The trauma of social upheavals was used by the great social engineers in history from Danton and Robespierre when they decided to destroy the aquaculture in France and got pretty obsessive about it to Stalin with his anti-kulak campaign, starvation and deportations. It was all in the name of modernization, of engineering a new man that would be easier to manage by the central authority. It worked.
As far the demographics in former German territories I was able to find the following numbers.
1 million people who had German citizenship before 1945 were granted Polish citizenship. Out of which 851k in Upper Silesia including the Oppeln region. Upper Silesia does not vote uniformly ‘red’ while there are no Silesians in Western Pomerania that votes red. In Lower Silesia only 15k German citizens were granted Polish citizenship. In 1950 only 106k Germans w/o Polish citizenship remained in Poland out of which 76k in Silesia (Upper and Lower). There were German miners in Waldenburg (25k) and Hirschberg (12k) who did not get permission to repatriate to Germany until 1956.
The former German territories were settled by 1.8m people from central Poland and by 1.4m repatriated from the USSR. There were also Ukrainians (>100k) after the Operation Vistula and Jews (>100k). 500k settlers were former soldiers. The latter emigrated from Poland in 1940-1950s. Poland was not able to fill up the space with people. After things stabilized in 1950s still there was 2m people less living in the former German territories than before the war.
That’s very interesting. As a kid I saw it from the other side: the official communist government attitude was somewhere in the middle: the movies made had a certain German human factor (maybe because of the alliance with East Germany), the history taught was relatively neutral and talked about the expulsion openly, even politically it was mostly dismissed as a ‘settled issue’. Among people there were often more radical attitudes on both sides. I knew older people who would say that all Sudeten Germans should had been shot, they were bitter that not enough revenge took place. And there was also another extreme of people who would openly denounce it as shame for a ‘socialist country’ to do collective punishment. It was there as a yawning issue that nobody quite knew how to handle.
I have often thought that Hitler was a strange psycho character who was out of place in his time. He was a vegetarian, fanatically committed to recycling, with an ambiguous gender identity, no kids, and he really hated Russia. Today he would fit right in with the liberal progressives marching around and yelling about the coming end of the world and how Russia has to be destroyed. Timing in life is everything, today’s Hitler might chain himself to a power plant to stop global warming, storm a farm that ‘abuses’ animals, change his gender at will, and – of course – start a war with Russia.
Contra AquariusAnon, I think concerns over apocalyptic US-Russia relations in the future are overblown. Americans have short memories, which makes it hard to hold grudges. Things feel tense now, but imo most of the “Russia hatred” is really Trump hatred. The left hate Trump, but more than that, they refuse to accept that their own ideological extremism might have turned a lot of swing voters to Trump; they simply cannot admit their own flaws. So they’ve crafted a narrative where Trump only won because he cheated. They hate Putin, because Putin and Trump are in cahoots on business deals…or maybe it’s that Putin is blackmailing Trump with piss videos, or something. They hate Mark Zuckerberg, because he didn’t do enough to “crack down” on a few dozen bogus accounts spamming lame videos (soiling the otherwise sober and level-headed community that is Facebook!). On and on it goes; remember that chart which implicated Fedor Emelianenko in the Trump-Putin conspiracy? The point is that this is a cottage industry, with hack journalists pumping out dumb clickbait articles that woke people on Twitter retweet (but don’t read).
Some day Trump will leave the White House, and on that day, especially if he is succeeded by some diversity cartoon character like Kamala Harris, all the paranoid conspiracies will suddenly seem that much less important. Why would a new President risk a major destabilizing incident just to settle an old score on behalf of some old white crone (viz. Hillary) that is broadly disliked by large segments of her own party?*
Or to put it another way: remember the “Lock Her Up” chants, and how ominous that all seemed when Trump was still the insurgent candidate? Somehow Trump seemed less interested in that noble cause when he realized he’d actually won, and his supporters haven’t exactly held his feet to the fire over it either.
*This is assuming no major provocations (significant territorial incursions, assassinations) on Russia’s part
You underestimate that once ideological manias are unleashed they have a life of their own. This is going place that nobody necessaryly wants. You cannot compare Trump’s light-hearted and inconsequential ‘lock her up‘, to the deep hostility to Russia, and not just among the left – most Republicans are also on board. How could a future Dem president ignore it? We are still in the acceleration phase, more is coming from both sides.
Ending the ever-escalating sanctions is almost impossible – there is no conceivable mechanism that would allow for it. Negotiations cannot be held because talking to the devil (Russia) is by definition a treason. And Washington wouldn’t and couldn’t abide by any agreement – even a tiny minority screaming ‘treason’ could stop anyone from daring to try it.
We might get lucky and no unbecoming incident happens long enough for the passions to subside – 5-10 years minimum. But if something destabilising happens – any random event that can be seen as simply unacceptable – we might be doomed. My bet is still that we will get lucky, (otherwise I would obviously change everything and not write here), but I am a poor prophet. Americans might have short memories but this could also be a very short war. We are one stupid accident away, one broken submarine in the wrong place, random assassination, or – god forbid – a really biting post ridiculing Kamasutra Harris on Facebook that just might be from Russia. That couldn’t stand.
OT, but could Reiner Tor give me a rundown of the Őszöd speech? I’ve been on a Magyar-related binge the past few weeks with films, novels and Hungarian language autism. (I’d actually started with just learning a few Magyar phrases to use with my Romanian friend’s kid to trigger him but got really into the language by accident).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%90sz%C3%B6d_speech
Pretty stunning political honesty if I may say so myself.
I find the whole “Christian culture” and “islamification” stuff I hear from Orban’s camp to be ridiculous. The problem with muslim immigration into Europe is not that it will turn Europe into Arabia… it’s that it will turn Europe into America. It’s ironization and not islamification that is the problem.
Yeah, locking up the wrinkled face of corruption seemed really ominous. Imagine if the intelligence apparatus, internal control forces and legal system had somehow been deployed against political opponents. We are so lucky that never happened.
Former Austria is also the most conservative part of Ukraine. Long live Hapsburgs!
After 1918 roughly half a million Hungarians fled from the neighboring countries (formerly Hungarian areas), and a majority or at least a very large portion of them were government employees who didn’t want to take an oath of loyalty to the respective new countries, which they viewed as illegitimate occupying powers.
This included members of small groups like university professors, but there were many members of very large groups like school teachers, railway employees, postmen, policemen, etc., of course they only constituted a majority if family members are included. So it means maybe 300,000-350,000 government employees and families from an area of 10,000,000, even though the new countries weren’t Nazis. The Nazis were probably much worse for Czechs in the Sudetenland than Czechoslovakia or Romania for Hungarians, so I’d guess a higher portion of government employees (again, remember, this probably included railway employees and the like) left the Sudetenland, so from a population a third of that, the government employees might have been as high as 100,000 or even 150,000. Though your number (10-20%) means 50,000-100,000, so our estimates are not very much different.
I mean the number includes both government employees and their family members.
Excellent analysis.
At the lack of posting: a significant part of me wanted to do more effortposts with content, but in doing so staggered myself with internal debates on the exactness and correctness of information until some mental process stalled. So without further ado and less editing, some rambles:
1) On Andrew Yang: amusing memes, UBI is an interesting idea that I’ve supported on and off after I began to see the results of automation. Although it wasn’t my primary job, as part of any inevitable effort to maximize efficiency, I created automation programs and directly saw them cost jobs. At the same time, I’ve seen welfare programs in other countries and my feeling is that it doesn’t really solve the real issues of lack of meaning, but rather creates expectations of paternalism from the government.
I’ve debated whether this is, in fact, a bad thing. In truth, as the incredibly unproductive yet remarkably profitable “diversity industry” in academia has showed, modern life might already be just a struggle for gibs from the government and in which case, let’s just be honest about it and jump into the colosseum.
I’ll have to read more into his programs to comment beyond that. But the troll in me is fond of him, to be honest.
2)On animal protein and the ever expanding circle of empathy: I confess that I haven’t read my Steven Pinker yet, and so I am at a loss to intelligently contradict him, but it would seem peaceful and socially empathetic bonobos are much less successful than the violent chimpanzees. One could argue that this is due to resource scarcity and we as a species might be argued to be proceeding to a post-scarcity state – but I would still argue that abstract concepts such as a status will yet remain scarce. Wants are infinite, after all.
On the specific issue of animal protien, it probably depends ultimately on the acceptance, quality and price of cultured meat, also known as lab-grown meat.
3)On personal life: being in management increasingly seems to need me to pick up these various pieces of credentialism, often expensive. Its a game of sorts but it can feel increasingly frustrating and I sometimes wonder about Peter Frost’s comments about phenotype of personality. I do think that my soul, such as it is, is someone who is most happy just obsessing over details and analysis, but instead find myself having to bend it to accommodate the silly games that seem to make up what is corporate life.
4)On interesting things that I’ve collected:
A pretty good overall description of digestion:
https://ketoschool.com/the-science-behind-fat-metabolism-60f7a3f678d0
Sex differences in adult human brain:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2017/04/04/123729.full.pdf
Epigenetics of physical exercise:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics_of_physical_exercise
The Lenovo ThinkPad EDGE E480 I got about a year ago has turned out to be the biggest POS notebook I have ever had the misfortune of using, which is all the more remarkable since it cost me $1,000.
Crashes resulting in drastic slowdowns happening about once a month, which typically take half a day of Googling solutions to fix (e.g. right now, when I could be blogging instead).
The Crimson device driver is a real beauty, constantly pinging me for updates even when it is up to date; when I do update it, it sometimes outright causes the above crashes/slowdowns. Have probably DDU’d/reinstalled it about a couple of dozen times now. Constant incompatibilities with Windows updates.
The hilarious thing is that the AMD Radeon RX 550 it runs is actually almost entirely useless. It was causing severe heat issues thanks to the E480’s poor design, so Lenovo throttled it and it is now barely more powerful than the internal graphics chip. While I certainly didn’t get it for gaming, it can’t even run old, graphically primitive games such as Mount & Blade: Warband (!) with a stable, decent FPS.
http://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/an-absolute-unit.jpg
The setup now sort of works ok, though some other “minor” ones (relative to the above at least) remain, such as the laptop sometimes not charging from the docking station.
Lessons:
1) Never buy from Lenovo. Two products, two pieces of shit.
2) Never buy AMD. (I have had nothing but good experiences with Nvidia).
Fortunately, I should have a proper PC [Intel Core i7-3770; 16GB RAM] that a friend “salvaged” for me (his company is upgrading and discarding its old hardware) again in a couple of months’ time. Though I will need to buy my own storage and GPU.
They left the same way they arrived.
Violently.
Do you need a short history lesson on how Uniatism, Catholicism and Polish rule, Polonization arrived to Rus’/Ruthenia?
what does akarlin and his readers think about unbroken celibacy (no sex, porn or masturbation) for a decade or two in order to be a billionaire, tech entrepreneur, businessman, industrialist or your general financial empire?
So, when will the western Ukrainians begin to recognize the legacy of their fancy Hapsburg patriarch, Archduke Wilhelm? 🙂
I would love for you to share this lesson. That sounds interesting and controversial.
It’s an open thread, after all.
The Thinkpad E series ought not to exist. Or rather, it ought not to be called a Thinkpad. It’s a “budget” product with all that that entails. In the budget category the best systems tend to be from Taiwanese OEMs like Acer, Asus, Gigabyte, etc.
I have recently purchased for myself or others a Thinkpad P51, a Thinkpad X1 Yoga, a Thinkpad P1, and a Thinkpad P72. All excellent, but not budget systems. I’ve also purchased several used Thinkpad W540s, a Thinkpad T460, and a Thinkpad X230. No issues though screens on older Thinkpads are mostly mediocre.
The Thinkpad USB-C dock is decent, but all docks are finicky. And you can use docks from other vendors, especially since Lenovo has finally abandoned the famous mechanically locking docking stations that the Thinkpad was famous for. I will say that Dell’s USB-C docks are superior.
Actual lessons:
1) Do your homework. For laptops, the best review site is Notebook Check. Here is their review for your product: https://www.notebookcheck.net/ThinkPad-E480-i5-8250U-RX-550-Laptop-Review.280524.0.html
2) Cables are generally a problem, and this becomes more of an issue with those intended to carry a lot of data (USB-C, HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4, etc.). It should be assumed that bundled cables are not good. Thunderbolt 3 rated USB-C cables are inherently expensive and short since they’re designed to carry 100 watts of power and 40gbps of data simultaneously. See here: https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/08/15/psa-thunderbolt-3-cables-longer-than-05m-generally-dont-support-usb-31-speeds
Apple sells a 2.6 foot Thunderbolt 3 cable which does support the maximum data transfer rate.
3) Don’t purchase AMD equipped laptops. There’s nothing inherently wrong with AMD products, but AMD-equipped laptops are nearly always “budget” models which cut many corners. The OEMs are to blame for this rather than AMD.
4) If you use your PC for work, always have a spare PC or the ability to get one the same day (say a used PC shop down the street). Anything with a Core 2 Duo or better is fine for basic work provided you have 16GB of RAM and an SSD. This is dirt cheap. Literally PCs you find in the garbage are fine for word processing, web browsing, etc. with the RAM and SSD upgrade. This becomes even more true if you use Linux.
If your intended laptop use is gaming (or other GPU intensive activity), then it’s advisable to purchase a T H I C C laptop advertised as a “mobile workstation”, “desktop replacement”, or “gaming laptop”. Being thicker these have fewer thermal issues, less throttling, and less fan noise & coil wine. Laptop cooling pads are available. I haven’t used them myself, but presumably they work. If the budget allows for it then an eGPU is advisable.
As for your unfortunate purchase, I would advise the following:
• Remove any mesh screen glued to the laptop’s air filter(s)
• Remove the heatsinks, lap them, and properly apply the best available thermal paste
• Revert to an earlier BIOS
• Undervolt the CPU and GPU
• Purchase a laptop cooling pad
• If budget allows, purchase an eGPU
Note that even people with very high-end laptops (Dell XPS 15, Macbook Pro, Thinkpad X1/P1, etc.) sometimes make these modifications in order to enjoy a silent computing experience with “thin and light” systems. So you shouldn’t feel particularly gypped beyond Lenovo’s dubious decision to dishonestly market a budget system as a Thinkpad.
There were two differences with post-Munich expulsion of Czechs from Sudetenland:
– it was in the middle of a war or right after it, with millions of angry soldiers coming back from WWI fronts; Munich was in 1938 before the war started, it was in times of peace
– the government officials had a choice to sign up with the new authorities; I am not familiar with the other regions that separated from the Habsburg Empire, but in Slovakia a lot of officials agreed to stay for a while, although most eventually left.
In Sudetenland it was explicitly ethnic: “are you a Czech? you must leave now“. Or go through the process of rediscovering your German ethnic roots. Post-WWI it was based on what you did, what your job was. Hungarians in private life were completely untouched, other than some riots. They were unhappy, but largely safe.
The 1918-20 period was very volatile. I recall that a bunch of Bolsheviks took over Budapest for a while and tried that end-of-history idea. I think that hurt the Hungarian cause dramatically, Bolshies were the ISIS of its day.
An interesting analogy to today is whether without a major upheaval and throwing out the rules, the migration can be controlled. We see that in a rules-based environment (esp. with Brussels rules) almost nothing can be done. The question is whether the mayhem that comes with suspending the rules is worth it.
They were an interesting bunch, I am starting to miss them…
More likely he is a more daring man. Futute and fortune favors the bold and not the meek. The stationary and the fearful are those who dare not go into the breach, and who are passively awaiting their fate whenever it comes from the outside, as it inevitably must when more dynamic outsiders encroach on your territory.
In general, I find your reactionary rant quite amusing given that you yourself is a diaspora larper. Your ancestors were unquestionably more daring than your average peasant pleb, otherwise they wouldn’t have made the journey across the ocean. Pity that their offspring degenerated and turned into a coward, fearful of his own shadow and the outside world.
Bloomberg published an op-ed skeptical of Sino-triumphalism last week: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-08/will-china-overtake-u-s-gdp-depends-how-you-count
It is, unsurprisingly, a bad article.
More interesting is that Eamonn Fingleton wrote in 1995 that he expected the Japanese economy to overtake the American one. I was unaware of that. While I agree with Fingleton on much, this certainly calls into question his judgement and writings subsequent to 1995.
Herman Kahn’s 1970 prediction can perhaps be forgiven. In 1970 Japanese fertility was considerably higher than American, and immigration in America was at a near all time low. His prediction that Japanese GDP per capita would pass America in 1990 may have come true for a few years (hard to find historical data).
That said, the article does make some relevant points about productivity (and demographics…sort of).
https://www.local-life.com/lviv/pages/m.1310_galicia.jpg
http://www.lvivtoday.com.ua/lviv-history/314
Ok, but let’s not idealise it too much. Habsburgs were towards the end quite a bumbling group, confused, stubborn, unable to make decisions or act. They also oversaw killing of a large number of people (it was a brutal era all around).
I came from a strong anti-Habsburg tradition. In 1918-20 there was a general revulsion against anything Habsburg (even in Austria), they had to know something. I think one of the best ways to understand our past is to look at what people living through it thought and did. They had a 360 view that nothing can recreate. I hesitate to second guess them.
The most recent poll shows that since December 2018, the % of Ukrainians with positive feeling toward Russia has suddenly increased from 48% to 57% (the low point was 30% in 2015).
Also, a year ago Ukrainians were evenly split at 44%, on whether they should have open (no visa or customs barriers) or closed borders with Russia. Whereas today they favor visa/customs union with Russia by 48% to 39% (and another 4% favor full political union with Russia, so a slight majority of Ukrainians actually favor some form of union with Russia).
https://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=eng&cat=reports&id=831&page=1
It seems obvious to me that the best arrangement for Ukraine, in terms of maximizing both its economic potential and geopolitical relevance, would be joining with Russia and Belarus to form an Eastern Slavic confederation, which would basically be a combination of the EU and NATO (and whose capital could be Kiev).
Since you’re familiar with this, would you happen to know anything about the regional distribution of support for the communist regime? I’m wondering if regional support for communism in times past has transmuted into anti-nationalist sentiment today, though obviously communism was extremely unpopular across the board by 1989.
I’m sure lots of us would be interested, if someone hasn’t posted the stuff by then. I’m interested, anyways.
https://twitter.com/dfl120/status/1105850506923175936
Lock him up.
Post 1989 development also played significant role. Northern Bohemia had lot of of heavy industry – notably chemical production. This industry was hit hard during the wild 1990’s. Politically connected crooks took over the factories and devastated them more thoroughly than a war would.
Not the best environment to bring the best out of the people.
Other places suffering economical catastrophe – Ostrava, Kladno – suffer the same problems.
So any reaction to the report today in El Pais linking the CIA to the break-in at the North Korean embassy in Madrid several days prior to the latest summit?
Shorter version in English:
I also find this a fascinating topic, especially since there is so much denial today. In Czecho-Slovakia communists won the 1946 elections (fairly), they got over 40% in Czechia, 30% in Slovakia. In addition at least another 15-20% of the other votes went to socialist parties who were allied with communists.
Regionally the communist strength was in Prague, Brno, Plzen, Ostrava – the big industrial centers with communist dominated working class suburbs. They also had very strong support in the resettled Sudetenland. The communist strength in the cities was not limited to workers, it was also among intellectual classes and students. They were weak in traditional more religous rural areas. (My grandma told me that in their village the local communist – there was only one – was running around telling people to vote communist and that all women will then be held in common, maybe an exciting prospect for him, but most girls just thought he was creepy. Let’s not lose sight of the entertainment value of communism.)
As communism progressed, there was an industrialization strategy that largely worked on its own terms. The newly industrialised areas with factories stayed loyal to communism until the generational change in the 70’s and 80’s (and of course 1968). The big cities flipped from being strongholds for the government to being almost completely anti-communist, and 1989 followed. Proximity to power is power.
In Poland the communist party had 3 million members. I can see a certain amount of opportunism, foreign oppression, etc… but how do you explain that around 15% of the adult Poles were active communists? Something doesn’t add up here.
True, although not all of Sudetenland is industrialised. Even in pre-1989 statistics there was more crime there in the 50’s to 80’s. I suspect the upheaval of massive moving has an impact on people’s mentality and risk taking (crime is risky), and on their sense of community. It lasts for generations. That is something Western European migrant enthusiasts don’t seem to understand.
I disagree. Lenovo products are awesome. Especially their Thinkpad X1 carbon. I liked it so much that I replaced my first generation X1 Carbon with a current generation one.
Only Sinophobes will diss Chinese products like that. I have had enough of this White Supremacism. I can’t believe its coming from our junior partners of all people.
I would like to kindly remind you of your position. Do not dare to talk about products made by people in positions of authority like that. Or else we’ll stop paying you One Belt One Road funding Mr. Karlin.
Your joke of a country has a smaller GDP than one of our provinces. Who is the boss here?
“Jason Liu” Comments:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/chinese-diplomat-threatens-russian-journalist-with-visa-cancellation-disses-russian-economy/#comment-3080600
China has a problem with criticism, it’s extremely thin-skinned and lashes out over the most minor things. This is why it has no soft power, alienates all its neighbors, and even a friendly state. Chinese hypersensitivity is a big geopolitical risk. Not to mention that a society without critics will progress slowly, create inferior products, and stubbornly repeat mistakes while competitors surpass them.
If you look at the poll furhter, you’ll see that the attitude towards the Russian government is only 13% positive. But it is 77% positive towards the Russian people. (“Russia” is in the middle, at 57% positive).
It just means anger at the Russian people, personally, has subsided but not anger at the Russian state. Russians can expect to be treated okay in Ukraine nowadays. But it doesn’t translate into wanting a union.
Interesting that you turn visaless travel and no customs into wish for a union of some sort. Americans have no visas to visit Europe and unless we import large amounts of something we don’t have customs, are we in union?
This poll doesn’t ask about attitude towards Europe/EU but other polls consistently give more than 48% favoring no visas with Europe.
So, you are rather optimistic.
Interestingly, you do not have the same attitude towards people in Ukraine in 2014, and Maidan. 🙂
“Se Sovětským svazem na věčné časy a nikdy jinak!”
Judging by such a comment:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-69/#comment-3086129
He will probably not be objective, but I will be happy to make corrections 🙂
Another reason why the summit had to fail.
I thought about that analogy when I wrote it – as a counter-example. It is partially because it has just happened and is freshly in our minds, so deferring to the locals in Kiev seems less needed.
But the main reason is that I actually had no problem with the popular forces behind Maidan, hundreds of thousands angry at the boss, what is there not to like? I am generally a rebel, so attacking insiders seldom bothers me. What I have an issue with is the post-Maidan idiotic moves and the way outside forces with their own agendas took advantage of Maidan.
Were the crowds on Maidan asking for NATO membership? Were they asking for breaking trade relations with Russia? Or banning Russian in official communication? Were they asking for another set of oligarchs to take over? They were not and that tells us that they were taken advantage of. When you allow others to take advantage of your anger, you have to live with the consequences.
What about the mass hysteria of World War I as a “counter-example?”
Perhaps the masses of those times were simply not looking out for their own interests? First hysteria for World War I, then hysteria to break up the Empire and create little statelets that would simply be gobbled up by Nazis and Bolsheviks. Thus populism.
Polls at the time said they wanted Yanukovich gone most of all, and after that they wanted an end to the corruption and closer ties to Europe.
So they got 2 out of the 3.
Given the poor rating of Russia they probably wouldn’t have minded a rupture in trade relations if that was the price to pay to get what they wanted.
The Maidan electorate remains overwhelmingly pro-Maidan so they do not regret what they did.
What’s the context?
I wrote:
You responded with WWI hysteria – it makes no sense, it was 100 years ago. I never said there was hysteria on Maidan, I said they were taken advantage of.
None of those states are either Nazi or Bolshevik today, they are some of the best run and happiest societies left in the world. It worked. Habsburgs were dull and unable to adapt to ethnic changes, so they lost their Empire. You only see the positives, people in 1918 had a better perspective, it was time to move on.
What is your speculation that ‘they wouldn’t mind rupture with Russia‘ based on? Was that one of the demands on Maidan?
You also skipped over the most important context point, the one that is driving the crisis: did the Maidan crowds ask for NATO membership? If not, why is it at the top of Kiev’s agenda, given that it undermines the other goals?
Give it some time, they will regret it. There is no way out of the collapsing situation.
I was referring to your earlier comment, contrasting post-World War I with Maidan. The crowds who cheerfully brought down Hapsburg also cheerfully brought in World War I, the monarchs were much more hesitant about that madness. So those crowds probably did not exercise good judgement.
They are relatively no better off than in 1914 but meanwhile collectively suffered millions of deaths and generations of misery. The people who cheered the end of Hapsburg didn’t live to see the 21st century, they lived to see Nazism, World WarII, Bolshevism and maybe the oldest of them were around for the miserable 90s.
LOL, situation certainly isn’t “collapsing” for the Maidan electorate. Even you, earlier, admitted that Ukraine wasn’t collapsing.
I usually have about 8 months before I break them around that price. But that one sounds quite shit even for a cheap notebook.
Classic Ivy Bridge people were hypebeasting about in 2012
I think the only interesting thing about Lenovo as a manufacturer, are their “Yoga” series, which can be tablets.
It’s almost half way between a laptop and iPad/tablet. Obviously not substitute for a real iPad – Windows 10 touchscreen software – but it’s still can be used somewhat as tablet
Lenovo Yoga C930 is cheap and positively reviewed recently. But at the moment, they still use old Kaby Lake-R processors from 2017. So maybe it would be a good idea to wait some months if they might upgrade those before buying one.
Gamers still like it in 2018 – it’s a classic.
Washington’s Venezuela policy undermines Washington’s Iran policy
https://twitter.com/haik_gugarats/status/1105822761656692736
Not exactly accurate, but whatever. It wasn’t the crowds who started WWI, it was the royals and the governments – the crowds came out after the war was declared and celebrated.
There are different version of a collapse, if we use that term (we don’t have to). The most likely scenario for Ukraine is a slow decline or stagnation, permanently stuck at 1/3 to 1/4 of living standards of its neighbours (incl. Russia and Poland), domestic instability, and eventually another Maidan-like revolution. Since the last one didn’t quite work out and the previous Orange one also fizzled out after 5 years. The oligarchs are staying for now.
What? We are a lot better off: own countries, own languages, own culture, prosperity and no monarchs to defer to. Are you really that crazy that you think any of the V4 countries (other than Poland) were better of in the rather oppressive Habsburg Empire? Worry about yourself, you are the one dreaming of Western goodies, we already have them.
And ‘millions of deaths’? Where, who, are you insane? The total deaths in Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary were in hundreds of thousands and most of those were the unfortunate minorities killed by Nazis. Unlike Poland we don’t prance around volunteering to be slaughtered for the sake of better epic poetry. You are really off with your understanding. We lost a lot more people killed in WWI than all other combined casualties in the 20th century. Habsburg’s stupidity was responsible for that one.
The debts will have to be paid back, the income from gas-oil transit will be foregone, there will not be a EU membership, and if Kiev tries joining NATO it could trigger a war (a very ugly war).
The NEMJ long ago published an editorial that stated “Race is a social construct, not a scientific classification.” It was by one of their deputy-editors called Robert S. Schwartz. It went on to say that race is “biologically meaningless.” It was the doxology of the social sciences creeping its way into medicine.
Monarchs opposed war – governments and political parties and people supported it.
An example of a treaty that would have prevented war, aged by monarchs, undone by governments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Bj%C3%B6rk%C3%B6
It was mass hysteria. Crowds would not have celebrated right after the declaration, had they not wanted war beforehand.
Since 2015 growth has consistently been 2% to 3.8% per year. So no decline, no stagnation. Just growth slower than most people would like.
After generations of misery, you have own countries, but you had own languages already (developed under the monarchy) and you had prosperity. Relatively speaking you were wealthier prior to 1914 than now.
Financially they were relatively better off than they are now. In 1913 Hungary had 85% of Austria’s GDP per capita PPP. Today it is 53%. In 1913 Czech and Slovak lands had 65% of Austria per capita GDP PPP. Today it is 67%. So Visegrad overall it is worse.
Culturally also much worse. Under what regimes did the best composers, artists and writers grow up?
Unlike you I don’t cherrypick and consider all the Visegrad countries.
So, “only” 100,000s deaths so you ended up poorer than before 1914 (Hungary) and about the same as before 1914 (Czech and Slovak lands) while a couple generations wasted their lives under Communists.
Brilliant result.
Your comments are particularly poignant given your criticism of Maidan, which had far lower cost.
Yes, you resist the decent rulers and collaborate with the indecent ones (Nazis and Bolsheviks). Something to be proud of.
Someone born in 1910 could have seen the 21st century. They would have only been in their 90s in the first decade of the 21st century and a few would have even lived into the 2010s–when they would have been 100+.
As for Nazism, that really was an avoidable mistake on Germany’s part. Had Germany’s conservatives (such as Hindenburg and von Papen) refrained from supporting Hitler, the ex-Hapsburg territories would have likely had a much more pleasant 20th century due to the fact that a non-Nazi Germany would have probably only been interested in using force against Poland–and even then, only if it was clear that Britain and France were not going to fight on Poland’s behalf. The ex-Hapsburg territories could have developed peacefully throughout the 20th century had they not had to deal with the threat of Nazism. In fact, a non-Nazi Germany would have likely protected these territories from Communism since it would have likely viewed these territories as being within Germany’s traditional sphere of influence.
Looking at the misery of the ex-Hapsburg territories after 1933 in real life and saying “Oh, these territories would have been much better off under the Hapsburgs!” is like saying “Oh, I wish that the French never left Cambodia. That way, Pol Pot’s reign of terror would have been prevented.” While true, it assumes that there was no alternative course of action that would have likewise prevented this.
The Hapsburgs were the ones who started WWI after getting a blank check from the Hohenzollerns, no? Of course, one could say that it was the Romanovs who turned a regional war into a World War by entering the war on Serbia’s side.
As for the Treaty of Bjorko, the problem with it was that Russia was already allied to France beforehand. Are you suggesting that Russia should have abandoned its alliance with France?
As for the Visegard countries, they should keep on converging to Western European levels of prosperity. At least, that’s what their average IQs would indicate. Hungary and Slovakia should converge to Italy’s level while Poland and Czechia should converge to France’s level.
To me the Russia hysteria has more in common with a moral panic than some kind of blood feud. We see moral panics often in the US: in the 1980s we had Satanic day-care abuse (a total fabrication), in the 90s there was black church arsons (in reality black pastors burning down their own churches for the insurance money). Now we have #MeToo; I am old enough (and I am not that old) to remember seeing Roman Polanski receive a standing ovation at the Academy Awards, hearing Harvey Weinstien thanked more often than God in acceptance speeches at the same, watching the breathless eulogies for Michael Jackson when he died. Now all these people are being publicly crucified for allegations that have been out there for decades! I mention this to point out just how fickle and arbitrary the American public can be, and how people’s opinions can turn on a dime without any change in the underlying facts.
The Russia bugaboo is kept alive in the first place by establishment sensationalism (Butina being one of the more egregious examples) and in the other case, it must be said, by Russia’s actions (the Skripal absurdity in particular was an insult to thinking people everywhere). If the Democrats do get power Russia will not be high on their priority list because they don’t really care that much about Russia except as a way to stoke resentment against Trump (you correctly point out that Republicans in general are fairly anti-Russian, so the Dems figure if they can somehow associate Trump with Russia in the public mind it will cost him support). They will be busy undoing Trump’s social policy–strengthening Title IX, getting transsexuals back into the military, reversing the travel ban and such–because their real enemy is not Russia but the average American, and they will never miss a chance to piss on his values.
One salient quality of moral panics is that, on a practical level, nobody really believes them to be true. Nobody stopped sending their children to daycare out of fear of supposed Satanic sex cults and nobody ever declined to attend university because 40% of all female students are alleged to experience rape while on campus. So it is with Russia I think. Of course misunderstandings can always happen but the good thing about nuclear weapons (maybe the only good thing) is that the people who make the decision to launch know that there are an equal number of missiles pointed at them; this puts a check on cowboy attitudes.
If so, then this is pertinent regarding Poland. My guess is the same as what Anatoly implied earlier with his comparison to North Ireland, i.e. the new colonists became more supportive of communism due to the association of their new homes with the communist government. Following the collapse of communism, they transferred their support onto the relatively more left leaning parties, despite the rather great differences between their platforms.
Haha, some things never change
No, you are making stuff up, the monarchs approved of the war, Habsburgs very much wanted a war, they just didn’t want to lose. And who do you mean by the ‘people’? I don’t care about Vienna, people in what was to become Czecho-Slovakia absolutely opposed the war and we had no celebrating crowds, other than some local Germans. The Czech leadership – members of Parliament – was promptly arrested and sentenced to death for treason – by the Habsburgs. They spent the rest of WWI in prison waiting to be killed, only because of a fear of retribution by the Allies they survived. You really talk total nonsense that has nothing to do with the way it was. I am starting to think that you had an American education.
Only a small part of Poland was in the Habsburg Empire, it would be like Italy claiming to be a part of Habsburg heritage because a small part of Italy. You cannot add Poland and whatever happened to it just to add some numbers. We didn’t suffer much, we had a relatively good 20th century, and our losses under Habsburgs in WWI were 4 times higher than all the combined losses for the rest of the 20th century. And Habsburgs were largely responsible.
Not true at all. Most people in the Habsburg Empire lived miserable lives, millions emigrated, the poverty was very deep. Your crazy dreaming about prosperity that didn’t exist for common people is offensive – they didn’t all live like the royal family. The living standards in Czecho-Slovakia more than tripled in real terms between 1918 and 1989 – those are our official statistics for consumption. Our population went up by 50%, we lived better, healthier and longer lives. To have ignorant morons from some shit hole tell us that we lived better under the semi-feudal Habsburgs is bizarre. We know how we lived, not 1 in 100 would ever want to go back to live like we lived under the Habsburgs. Look up some statistics and stop embarrassing yourself.
If you say so. But who the hell are you to tell us what is ‘decent’? You would first have to understand the region, not just throw around shallow slogans.
That is both comforting and little scary. If creating virtual make-believe panics has become so inconsequential, one can ask: what kind of people behave that way? It almost makes one nostalgic for the real witch-hunt manias of the past, they were tangible, ugly and real. What we see today are cheap fluff imitations that nobody really takes seriously.
I agree that the real target are the regular, normal people in America and Europe. It could be self-defeating to attack them directly. But how smart is it to use an external nuclear power as a tool to keep one’s population in line? There is no way for outsiders to truly understand the nuances of American (or European) domestic power struggle. And as I said earlier, what are we to do if some punk in St. Petersburg insults Ms Harris on Facebook?
One issue is that Russia is far from being some angelic state, so there is a lot of possible demonisation material. Any large country with a lot of stuff going on will almost by definition do some creepy stuff, certainly US does. It might not even be a misunderstanding, it could be something real.
I think that ideology an greed always combine, it is one of the constants of human history. What too many in the West don’t want to see is that there were real, material and lasting benefits for many people in communism. And not only the party elite.
My grandma told me another thing that I never forget. I was mocking the party idiots and she said ‘I had never gone to a dentist until the communists took over, there were no dentists for us before’. We can quibble about the precise context of that statement. But what mattered was that for millions of regular people that was a strongly felt reality of their lives. That also gets written out of history, we are all somehow now the descendants of the aristocracy, we didn’t need no stinking revolution. Until next time.
I suppose I would say that when you have childish morality and childish discourse you also get other childish traits, such as indecisiveness, disorganization, distractability and cowardice. Sunt pueri pueri, pueri puerilia tractant.
Roman Dmowski on The Ukraine Question
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/07/ukraine-question-1930-part.html
@AP
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsrat_vom_8._Dezember_1912
Give the Germans some credit. Both in WW1 and WW2 they were trying to launch a pre-emptive strike before Russia/USSR was fully ready and prepared (Russian military reforms of 1913-1917, Soviet expansion and modernisation destined to end in Spring 1942 – T-34 was supposed to be a limited (600 pieces), stopgap model – July 1941 would have seen A43/T-34M enter production with lessons of examined Panzer III (Germans delivered it as part of cooperation agreement with Soviets) applied – torsion bar suspension, three-man turret, commander cupola).
They were facing a choice of certain defeat later on, or an improbable victory now. In addition, in WW1 they were obviously denied any chance to catch up with Britain fleet-wise- for each German BB and BC, the British laid down two of their own in shipyards, as a policy.
Austro-Hungary was planning a punitive campaign against Serbia since 1905-1906 Customs war, in reality after 1903 May coup (guess who was behind it) brought down pro-Austrian dynasty and placed a French Foreign Legion officer (1870 war medal) on throne. Interestingly, the same fellow published Serbian translation of John Stuart Mill’s “On liberty” and adopted it as his political programme.
von Hötzendorf was only briefly replaced as Chief of staff in that 1905-1914 period, and he was the most hawkish there was. Obviously, they saw the writing on the wall, and with Balkan Alliance threatening to undermine their influence in the Balkans, it was time to strike.
You can do even better, and write your own narrative first.
Centuries of persecution and assimilation were only partially reversed, as the example of “Greek” “Catholics” still lingering on in Ukraine demonstrates – Peremyshl, a historic Ruthenian settlement is in Poland.
The gotcha moment would be posting of contemporary maps from 14th to 17th century naming Rusia, Russia, Russia Rubra, Rusia Minoris and other terms for your “Ukraine” that no one used back then – no one identified as Ukrainian until early modern period; I suspect most would have been insulted to be called that way.
The meme factories have sided with Yang over loser Drumpf. He’ll dominate the debates. He has it in the bag so long as the DNC doesn’t steal his nomination.
I don’t get why people – especially crimethinkers – patronize Medium at all. Not only does it have a crap interface, but it is censorious even by woke capital standards.
I mean if you need an easy platform just get off your asses and register at WordPress.com, you’ll only need to make a couple more clicks than at Medium. And they haven’t even banned Heartiste yet.
Agreed except the better off with Hillary part.
According to Mr. XYZ, there were 3 million people remaining (albeit many of whom emigrated voluntarily) vs. 1.5 million immigrants: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-70/#comment-3089491
White Pessimist says otherwise: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-70/#comment-3088977
No, not what I ever claimed. However, the Poles who had spent well more than a century under Prussian rule would have been culturally and to some extent genetically (what were intermarriage rates like? I assume low, but not negligible) imbibed with Germanicness.
Powerful comment!
I don’t think that attitudes toward the “Russian government” are very meaningful: That essentially just means attitudes toward Putin, who isn’t going to be President much longer.
“Form of union” wasn’t a good word choice, replace it with “integration.”
According to the poll, 48% want Ukraine’s relationship with Russia to be “open borders, without visas and customs.” America doesn’t have “open borders” with Europe.
True, but irrelevant because the EU doesn’t want greater integration with Ukraine- it was reluctant to even follow through on the promised association agreement.
Well, despite relentless efforts by the Ukrainian state to whip up hostility towards Russia, Ukrainians’ positive feelings toward Russia have nearly doubled from their low point, and opposition to greater integration with Russia has fallen from 50% to 39%. That’s not a good trend for Maidanism.
Japanese GDP per capita was higher than US during 1987-2000, with a one year break in 1988. World Bank stats, you can easily get them just by typing “japan gdp per capita” into Google and it generates you a graph.
Nominal, of course. Japan never came near the US in PPP/inflation-adjusted dollars.
Incidentally, how does one go about getting Chinese funding?
I wouldn’t mind ritualistically shilling OBOR once a month the low low rate of $1,000 a month.
WTF? I consider $1,000 rather expensive for a laptop. And how on Earth do you break them once every 8 months?!?!?
I should have never deserted the PC master race.
With that $1,000 + $300 docking station, I might as well have upgraded my old gaming rig (which I gave away to a relative) and gotten some cheapass notebook for bringing to work.
These travails were God punishing me for my treason.
Thanks for those tips. Especially these:
I don’t have any experience with laptop tinkering, and as it’s my only computing platform atm, I’ll wait on that until I have a PC again in a couple of months.
PS. I did revert (and stay) at an earlier BIOS because one particular update totally broke my system.
Not going to do anything with those cooling pads or eGPUs as I’ll soon have a PC anyway.
Also I just checked and this model doesn’t support eGPUs anyway.
PPS. I never buy laptops for gaming, one can get a spiffed out gaming rig for almost the same price, which is much more capable and upgradable. However, being unable to smoothly run Mount & Blade: Warband (2010 game with mid-2000s graphics) is still extreme(ly WTF).
In Czechoslovakia communist party had 1.5 million members (plus candidates) at the end of 1980’s. I dare to guess that most of them were simply opportunists. Almost no one believed The Ideology, not even the communists themselves. The discrepancy between noble goals and promises, and the reality was way too large.
However, it doesn’t mean people wished to go back to dog-eats-dog capitalism. Hardly anybody complained about full employment, low criminality or grave shortage of homeless and oligarchs.
They did some secret polls during late 1980’s, and found that plurality would still prefer “communism without the communists”, a variant of socialist society without the idiotic propaganda, everyday petty annoyances, lack of consumer goods, visibly senile geronts at the top, etc. (New Left craziness completely was unknown.)
“Hipster Hitler” is an old meme: http://hipsterhitler.com/
Names are magical, aren’t they?
In 16th century people in Ukraine called themselves Rus but called people in Russia not Rus, but Moskals, and alongside their Polish brothers went to war against them rather often. And so the Rus Prince and sponsor of Orthodoxy prince Ostrogsky was the supreme commander of Polish-Lithuanian-Rus allied forced against Moscow:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstanty_Ostrogski
They would not have been insulted to have been called something they never thought about. But they probably would have been insulted to have been called Moskals, which is what they called the people whom we call Russians today.
Translated from Czech language: “With the Soviet Union forever, and never otherwise!”. This was one of most stupid slogans used by communist propaganda. Nothing useful for this discussion,
Repeating something doesn’t make it so.
You ignore the Treaty of Bjorko and this too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy%E2%80%93Nicky_correspondence
Clearly neither Russian nor German monarchs wanted the war – it was a populist thing supported by the masses and by the elected officials.
They wanted a limited war with Serbia which was completely legitimate given Serbian government’s support for regicidal terrorism. They were not enthusiastic about a war with Russia.
No resistance nor sabotage, and recruitment orders were smoothly obeyed. Czech artist Kokoschka volunteered for the military in the hysteria. Even Hasek enlisted.
Note that post-Hapsburg Czechs and Slovaks failed to produce culture comparable to that of the times of the monarchy.
The ones who did were amnestied by Karl I in 1917. You forgot that.
You are exaggerating as usual. While about 1/3 of Poland’s population lived under Hapsburgs, Krakow is Poland’s second city and historical cultural capital. It is not comparable to Hapsburg Italy which in 1914 was tiny.
I was careful to write relative terms. Everywhere in the world the standard of living has improved since 1910. Modern Africa may live better now than parts of Europe did in 1910. So what? But 2018 compared to 1914 has seen a steep drop in Hungary compared to Austria and no real difference in Czech and Slovak lands compared to Austria. Post-Hapsburg was an epic failure by Czechoslovaks and Hungarians.
In 1913 Czechoslovakia had 65% of Austria’s GDP PPP per capita. In 1995 it had only 47% of Austria’s GDP PPP per capita. All that Communist misery, 100,000s dead, and the reward was relative poverty. Only in the 21st century did these lands crawl back to where they had been in 1913.
Like the rest of the world it achieved electrification, vaccines etc. but it is stupid to credit communism with this stuff, that everyone else got too. As if they would not have occurred under the monarchy.
In defending the end of the monarchy in Czechoslovakia, you are repeating the same failed arguments that AK has debunked about Communism bringing prosperity and life improvement to Russia.
Optimal scenario going forward for the populist right is that RBG drops dead this year, then Trump loses to Harris.
Optimal scenario for Russia is that Trump loses to Sanders.
Some good points, however, I think that Europe’s feelings toward Ukraine are ticking upwards, at least trade seems to be increasing at a steady clip. Also, I don’t feel that wanting visa less travel to Russia translates to wanting ‘integration’ with Russia. Ukrainians basically want to get along, and unless their borders are not respected, prefer coexistence and not violence.
Rosski would probably closer to what they called themselves.
Would they have called Pskovians, Novgorodians, Smolenskians, Ryazanians, Tverans – Moskals as well?
Polish brothers? Are you for real? If they thought of them as brothers, why did (ironically) the Orthodox hieararchs in present-day eastern Poland and western Ukraine resist Uniatism until 1700-1705?
Why did they resist Jesuit inquistion, conversion efforts and occassionaly rebelled?
Speaking of Orthodoxy and PLC, do you know how many Rus(sian) Orthodox churches and monasteries operated on the territory of PLC in late 17th century?
Giving up pork during lent is having some magical effects upon your belief system? 🙂
Yet again you insist on the nonsensical notion of Serbian government’s support for Black Hand.
The ring-leader and his accomplices were executed for High treason in 1917. The accusation was assassination attempt on Serbian monarch, but it was phony. They wanted them dead for some other reason.
Interestingly, Montenegro and Italy (look up who the Italian Queen was) could be better connected to Sarajevo assassination than Serbian government. You are pushing a narrative, and you know it. The Young Bosnia was a Yugoslav ideology group composed of equal part of non-Serbs and Serbs. In practical terms, Serbia suffered horribly due to the assassination of a figurehead with no power, for no practical benefit. Furthermore, Serbs in Austro-Hungary (outnumbered Croats, Slovenians) were put under even worse pressure and persecution (which picked up in 1903. – guess why).
Actually, I am convinced that you always think of Cui bono, motivation and the profiting side when discussing and analysing events – but that doesn’t suit your current PR position here so you gave it up.
Serbia was in no position to wage war in 1914, especially not against Austro-Hungary, Germany while having the recently defeated Bulgaria behind its back. The 1912-1913 war had taken its toll, new areas weren’t properly integrated yet, not to mention the fact that not even Yearly budget had been approved due to ongoing political crisis when the assassination happened.
Yeah, I’ll have to agree with you here. “Polish brothers’ is going way over the top this time for AP. He seems to refuse to believe what a total failure the Treaty of Hadiach ended up becoming – a really positive historical attempt to reconcile Poles and Ukrainians together, but it never worked. (My Polish grandfather, whom I never really knew, is probably reeling in his grave right now). 🙁
By nominal GDP Japan actually reached 70% of US GDP in 1995, largely as a result of the Plaza Accord.
The Japanese successfully used the “Lost Decade” myth to reverse this, and the Dollar went on to strengthen dramatically at the end of the 20th century (and the US experienced a massive growth surge which the other advanced economies never matched).
Looking at the World Bank it seems you’re right for 1990: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?year_low_desc=true
$1,000 is simply not expensive for a laptop. Laptops are considerably more expensive than desktops for the following reasons:
• Component miniaturization
• Complex cooling assemblies
• Integral screens with bespoke connectors
• Increased R&D costs
• Shorter production runs of subassemblies (since these are bespoke for every laptop and OEM)
• Higher labor costs
If purchasing new the best way to save money on an acceptable system is to pick a well-reviewed, high-end laptop and procure it with the minimum available RAM and storage configuation. Then upgrade the RAM and storage yourself. This is especially effective today as DRAM prices are in the tank. Note that this precludes the purchase of a Macbook Pro for obvious reasons (namely Apple’s deep criminality and hatred of its customers). You will still pay more than $1,000 unfortunately.
A good system for $1,000 is obtainable if you purchase a used “business-class” system (and, again, are prepared to upgrade memory and storage yourself). A lot of Skylake generation laptops can be found on ebay for reasonable prices. Performance improvement in CPUs since Skylake has been minimal, and most “business-class” Skylake systems support Thunderbolt.
High-end business class laptops available in large numbers thanks to corporate IT departments include the Lenovo Thinkpad (W, X, T, and P series), HP ProBook and zBook, and Dell Precision series. In Europe there is also the Fujitsu Celsius line (all of which are made in Germany or Japan).
Be warned that business-class laptops are available with very bad displays including 1366 x 768 TN panels thanks to corporate purchasing departments thinking that nice screens are goldbricking.
I certainly would not remove the heatsink(s) on your sole system, particularly if you have no experience with this. That said removing the mesh is something you can attempt now.
The mysterious BSODs and crashes you experience could be resolved with a clean installation of Windows if you haven’t already attempted that.
The Thinkpad X1 Yoga is using Coffee Lake processors.
A similar system is available from Dell called the XPS 13 2-in-1.
And yes, for ultrabook-class systems upgrading from Kaby Lake to Coffee Lake is a good idea. This is because the Coffee Lake ultrabook class “U” core processors are now available with four cores.
For desktop replacement systems hexacore processors are now available, but the earlier quad-core processors are still very powerful (all the way back to the Haswell generation and perhaps even earlier in fact).
So you admit that Beckow is right and you are wrong?
Yes, because by 1914 the Italians had conquered most of their land back, unlike the Poles. At their height, the Hapsburgs controlled much more of Italy than they ever did of Poland:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Habsburg#/media/File:Habsburg_dominions_1700.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Habsburg
Indeed, at one point or another, they controlled almost every part of Italy. It makes no sense whatsoever to include Poland as a former Hapsburg land but not Italy. You’re not a very good Hapsburg larper, you should stick to Commonwealth larping.
Yeah except you’re not challenging anything that he said here, he’s talking about the Hapsburg empire not modern Austria, and the Hapsburg empire absolutely was an impoverished feudal shithole.
Also, just because an entire nation of people doesn’t want to live in poverty under foreign oppression doesn’t mean that they would accept the foreign oppression in exchange for some money. The Czechs have been a cohesive nation for over a thousand years, their first kingdom was founded 400 years before anyone even used the word “Ukraine” to refer to the modern country. It’s extremely hypocritical of you to go on waxing lyrical about the uniqueness of Ukrainian culture relative to that of Russia, while basically arguing that Czechs should have allowed themselves to slowly be Germanized (which is what was happening) in exchange for some money.
What did they call Moskals who lived inside the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth?
Meme factories had little to do with Trumps’s presidential win. They had even less to do with his early victories in the fight for the nomination.
If you are a non-establishment candidate and you want to do well in early primaries, you must excite a significant portion of your party’s grassroots activists. I see no sign of that for Yang.
I suppose it’s possible he wows everyone in the first debate. But I highly doubt it. He is not diverse enough, doesn’t provide nearly enough anti-Drumpf red meat, and whatever he is going to prattle about will sail right over people’s heads.
There were attempts to avoid being recruited on individual level – usually by mutilating oneself. But few people had stomach for this. Hašek was called up, and he really had no other option. At this time he was insignificant local humorist, sickly, living from hand to mouth.
Yes, there was no organized resistance or sabotage movements. Czechs are not really into it.
What’s so difficult to understand about this?
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/mobile/000/005/574/takemymoney.jpg
$1000 + X > X has been the best logic of any candidate so far.
This is a bit exaggerated. Repression against the Czechs during WWI was relatively mild, comparing to fate of Galicians, Serbs, Italians and Romanians. Here whole villages were sent to concentration camps and there were mass executions.
Several top Czech politicians were sentenced to death, because of their contacts with pro-Allied emigration and for spying. However, the new Emperor let them free, as gesture of goodwill.
Already in May 1917 two hundreds of Czech writers petitioned Czech MPs to put interest of the nation above all. Weakened monarchy ignored it. During 1918 there were open demands for autonomy or independence, meetings and proclamations. Austria-Hungary was in such misery that they didn’t dare to react.
Part of a certain talking points propaganda trend. When some people refer to themselves as a New Yorker, they aren’t (in most instances) denying a US identity.
I’m no expert like Thorfinnsson, but under $1000 is considered by manufacturers as something like a “budget laptop”.
So I guess $1000 is probably the boundary where you should expect functional notebook for normal purposes. So overall you were unlucky.
Below $1000, they usually mix “budget components”, and you have to hope you are lucky with it.
If you want high quality keyboards, high quality screens, etc, the manufacturer is usually putting in notebooks from around $1500 and higher prices.
And if you want top tier mobile Coffee Lake processor (i9-8950HK), which is a year old now, they install it in notebooks from price of around $2500 and higher.
–
It is wildly cheap in terms of value for money – you can pay $2500 for a notebook, and will have access to leading edge technology, and in a package containing mostly higher quality components.
People pay $500 for a King Crab. Leather sofas in Ikea, can be $2000.
So piece of shit leather divan from Ikea (which is just unengineering pieces of wood with a cover), costs almost as much as a good notebook – which is the summit of human technology, intelligence and engineering.
Like Kenny in south park, laptops seem to be killed in different ways every time – breaking screen from falls, coffee falling on keyboard, bios problems from ubuntu updates, breaking power socket (and then destroying a motherboard with incompetent soldering when trying to repair it).
A decade ago, a Toshiba Qosmio laptop, bought in Japan, was destroyed by viruses after installing fake Japanese drivers (and inability to understand Japanese to order replacement mobile harddisk).
All I learn is that notebooks are easily and rapidly destroyed, and you need a Buddhist attitude of non attachment to them, or maybe to get a Panasonic Toughbook – or just buy cheaper laptops (I always buy cheaper laptops now).
Some very recently released videos on the upcoming Ukrainian presidential election:
https://therealnews.com/stories/as-ukraines-presidential-race-heats-up-politics-shift-to-the-right
http://theduran.com/protests-in-kiev-as-extreme-nationalists-turn-against-poroshenko-video/
A bit ominous?
https://therealnews.com/stories/guaido-claims-he-can-authorize-foreign-military-intervention-in-venezuela
A hokey matter that’s evident in some other parts of the world:
http://theduran.com/college-entrance-exam-cheating-scandal-exposes-corrupt-aristocracy-video/
http://theduran.com/lori-loughlins-daughter-was-aboard-usc-officials-yacht-in-bahamas-when-mom-was-charged/
Guess I will talk about dumb Hollywood culture:
Many people who saw the movie “Jurassic World” laughed at the idea that the US military would be interested in velociraptors. Not to defend a dumb movie, but the idea actually seemed somewhat more plausible to me than the idea of “Aliens”, that in a world with advanced androids, people would be interested in Aliens as a potential weapon, though obviously “Aliens” is a better movie.
I wonder what the encephalization quotient of the movie dinosaurs would be, as it seemed to me that they had big heads, in addition to being much bigger than actual velociraptors. EQ is actually an idea that touches on another Crichton property “Congo”. Of course, that had some far out, impossible ideas in it, like gorilla-chimp-human hybrids (though chimp-human might be possible, and there are rumors that it was done), but the idea that gorillas could use complicated sign language was pretty mainstream for a while. Of course, it was really dubious based on EQ and has since been thoroughly debunked.
Fair point about becoming like the USA in a negative way: the massive immigration of very different peoples causing atomization, Balkanization, lowering of social trust and cohesion, confusion of young people’s cultural and religious identity, increased political and economic competition based on tribal affiliation.
But it’s hard to understand how islamification is not also a grave problem on its own. That is, if you don’t want Europeans to be forced or pressured to convert to Islam, which is exactly what we would expect in the not-too-distant future.
I find AP’s arguments amusing. He demonstrates the ignorance, half-truths, unconscious bias and also an annoying marketing sales technique. He will make a statement about Habsburgs, the opposite is true, then he tries to wiggle out – as a car salesman or a lawyer would – by throwing in unrelated facts from some other area. AP might as well claim that the Swedish king was against the WWI, so he was right because ‘monarchs were against the war,’ blabla… He is driven by narratives.
This belated love affair for Habsburgs shows people who don’t get anything about that region’s history. They might as well start telling us how wonderful the Ottomans were. It comes out watching Hollywood movies about knights and princesses – they actually end up believing that’s the way it was, and identify with the aristocracy. Right, AP and Mr. Hack would be at the royal court, and not cleaning stables as most peasants did. They project even into the past. As I said very amusing people.
From a point of view of value for money, what you get from a $2500 laptop, is wildly cheap.
Equivalent of working one month in MacDonald’s (in America), you have the highest technology, and in form of relatively good quality components.
But even if you have to work as a design engineer on aircraft, for 5 months, to buy a $2500 laptop – it still seems extremely good value of money (in what other historical era, could you buy the summit of technology of that era, for some few month’s working?).
It is always a matter of degree. Hundreds of Czechs and Slovaks were shot for very minor offenses, thousands were in jail, including most of the national leadership and sometimes their families (Masaryk’s daughter). In 1917 when Habsburgs knew that they were likely to lose – and a new Emperor took over – they amnesties the leadership, but some repression continued even after that. It wasn’t on the same level is in Galicia, but this relativism is tricky – repression is repressive, calling it ‘mild’ is subjective. Tens of thousands of Czechs and Slovaks literally crossed on the front to join the Allied side and form Czech-Slovak legions that fought against the Habsburgs. AP lives in a lala land of some Habsburg-loving fantasy.
AP blatantly claimed that there was some ‘enthusiasm’ among people for WWI, that it was the benevolent Habsburgs who wanted peace, etc… That is simply not true, Czechs were anti-Habsburg, anti-war, and were very happy in 1918 to get rid of Habsburgs (so were Slovaks). The real celebrations were in late October 1918 when the monarchy fell. AP’s narrative was literally upside down.
Well, at least he hasn’t invaded anybody, yet.
I’m sure pictures of anime girls and pepes will have a huge influence on the sort of people who vote in Democratic primaries
If I just use a laptop for Internet and Microsoft Office will I notice the difference between a $500 v. $1200 laptop?
Although looking at images of Thinkpad X1 Yoga – it seems to follow another problem of Lenovo, which is inconvenience of disassembly.
E.g. It seems quite common for Lenovos, that to replace a keyboard, you have to unscrew:
Your inabiity to understand a nuanced approach to certain topics is becoming quite apparent. That certain Ukrainian Galicians think fondly (and always did) of Habsburg dominion within their lands is pretty much a forgone conclusion. Franz Joseph and Maria Theresa actually did a lot to help the Ukrainians in the Hapburg lands (Galicia, Bukovina and Zakrapattya), in the cultural realm and perhaps in other areas as well. Having said this, I want to make it clear that I in no way envision a restoration of the Hapsburg project. ‘It is, what it was’. The Hapsburgs were if anything astute at playing the political game and knew full well how to use the balancing of one ethnic group off of the other, to their own advantage. Nobody would deny that they used this device in dealing with the Poles and the Ukrainians in Galicia to a tee. They were of course trying to curb the aspirationa of their Polish citizens who had a well developed sense of their own statehood.
When reading Timothy Snyder’s interesting book about ‘The Red Prince’ Vasyl Vyshivanyj, one often gets the impression of what I’m trying to convey. Vyshivanyj, a junior Hapsburg prince had a profound love and respect for his Ukrainian supporters (as they did him), but was treated often with kid gloves by his more senior Hapsburg kin in Vienna. He seems to have been a convenient asset of theirs ‘in the far East’ and they used him as much as they could. Were his aspirations of an independent Ukrainian state, albeit within Hapsburg auspices ever really fully supported? It doesn’t appear to be the case, as Vienna was always more willing to bow to their more powerful German neighbors when formulating their own policies. He did spend the latter part of his life in a state of ‘bohemian rapture’ ostracized by the main portion of the family whiling away his time in exotic ports of call within the Mediterranean, Paris and even Spain, living off of the largess of those willing to support him.
Yes, though this is mainly due to the fact that the $1200 laptop is likely to have an acceptable amount of RAM and a solid state drive.
Provided the $500 laptop allows you to upgrade those components, the $500 laptop is fine. Especially if you are okay with a mediocre display and modest battery life.
If you use a Chromium-based browser (Google Chrome, Chromium, Vivaldi, Brave, etc.) and are the type to leave lots of tabs open then the processor and even GPU make a difference as well.
If you’re willing to use another office suite besides Microsoft Office, then you have the option of Linux (Libre Office–be warned, it is inferior) or a Chromebook (G Suite, easy to use but limited functionality and online only). Your Dollar goes much further then.
I can’t speak to the non-Thinkpad Lenovos, but other than the X1 Carbon and X1 Yoga Thinkpads are extremely easy to disassemble. This is in fact one of the main selling points of Thinkpads.
The design of the X1 Carbon and especially the X1 Yoga preclude easy disassembly.
How’s your view updated of whether Tesla will be successful?
I often walk past their shop, but it only has space for two cars there, and not even the more recent model.
However, Elon Musk will premier already another new car tonight.
Let your fantasy of the anti-war Habsburg monarchs go. It is upside down.
They were drafted, you really don’t know that? Hasek switched to the Russian side as soon as he was on the eastern front – he deserted and joined the army against the Habsburgs, how much more ‘resistance‘ you want?
Czechoslovak Legion had 100,000 soldiers – people drafted to the Habsburg army who switched sides and formed an army to fight on the side of the Allies, at enormous personal risk to themselves and their families. You are really clueless.
You mean like looking at your neighbour’s cow and envying that it is fatter? For most people, living better is just better, the fact that someone else might live even better is not relevant. Austria has done extremely well in the last 100 years (post-Habsburgs), to compare to Austria is raising the bar very high. For example, in the mid-19th century Switzerland, Sweden and Norway were poorer than Germany, today they are richer. Does it mean that Germany has done badly? Or Netherlands?
What matters to most people is their own living standards. By that benchmark the living standards in Czecho-Slovakia more than tripled between 1918-89. In addition the population grew, became homogeneous, infrastructure was built, and we have a lot better culture.
Your whole narrative is way off. You don’t understand the region and you project fantasies that you picked up in the popular culture: the gentle monarch image or the post-WWI suffering that wasn’t.
How about the Czechoslovak legion fighting for the Allies?
As silly as it seems, I’ve encountered several people saying precisely that irl.
Maybe it’s that, but I think it’s also just easier to ignore the ugly side of governments and eras that are long gone, even for someone who’s smart enough to realize that they would have probably been cleaning up horse crap for a career if they had been born in the past century. The “enemies” of today are simply more present, and the realities of yesteryear are so easy to forget, if one ever learns about them in the first place.
“Who cares about those guys who we all hated 100 years ago? At least they’re not the same as the guys we hate now! Yeah, maybe those old backwards empires really weren’t that bad! Everything probably would have been better for us now if they had won”
How about the Romanovs? I could point out someone on this site who is a bit too starry eyed about them.
You realize that all major Democratic constituencies already get free government gibs in one form or the other? Will they want to share them with young white and Asian NEETs? I doubt it. Do young white and Asian NEETs have enough pull in the Democratic party to overcome other factions and the DNC establishment, too? I highly doubt it. Apparently, they think they can do it with memes.
I am disgusted at having masterpiece comment after masterpiece comment not allowed to be posted here this week. Karlin is a disgrace. All the time, spamtroll paedophiles are allowed to clog up here with easily disprovable BS.
At least give me a warning if there is something not allowed in my comments. Then give me a second warning, then a third…give me 7 warnings in total THEN start you can start to censor my raconteur comments you plain thug.
All this disrespect for the soviets, but Karlin is the biggest censor of them all.
Karlin is your typical bad guy – worse even then Mickey from the Rocky films- who is perhaps the biggest disgusting lowlife and sinister guy in film history – and who did far more than Goebbels ever could to cultivate anti-semitism.
All topics should be more nuanced, that’s a truism. As I said before, this forum by necessity uses a shorthand, nuances often get lost. Mine, yours, AP’s, etc…
My discussion w AP was not focused on Galicia and Ukrainians. With all due respect, they were marginal and impoverished eastern regions. My points were about the core Habsburg Empire that consisted of Austria, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia and a few pieces of other countries.
AP lies about a peaceful monarch forced into WWI by his people’s demands. That’s simply not true. If in Lviv you have fond memories of the Habsburgs, good for you. I am sure there are many Austrian and Czech aristocrats who else have fond memories – Herr Lichtenstein comes to mind. But that is not our history.
You can’t make up things about other people’s history because you feel like doing some brown-nosing to Habsburgs. Ukraine has had such miserable past that maybe the Habsburgs seem good in comparison. For us that’s not the case, no matter how many ‘relative’ prosperity examples AP comes up with. Czecho-Slovakia was a core region of the Habsburg Empire, economically Czechia had over 50% of its industrial production. We are the core of V4, and I am increasingly thinking that we should not go anywhere close to Ukraine, or even Poland – the ahistorical attitudes there are simply too much. We don’t plan to go down with you, and you are prone to making mistakes, so maybe we would be better off replacing Poland with Slovenia in V4 and letting you stew in your emotions.
Most Czech politicians were careful enough not to show any sign of disloyalty. For example agrarian MP František Udržal, prewar lackey of A-H military. By mid 1918 he sensed changed wind and became one of those organizing independence..
Or Bohumír Šmeral, influential social democrat who later became communist. He was praising the monarchy until almost the very end.
What destroyed A-H monarchy from the inside was regime incompetence. Managing total war was beyond their abilities. During the month between Sarajevo shooting and WWI prices of basic foods shot up several times. It got only worse during the war. People were starving, burghers were selling pricey furniture for few eggs, women prostituted themselves to get something to eat. Gendarmes raided villages and took away everything they found. There were food riots and soldiers machine gunned the rioters.
During WWII Germans managed the situation much better.
In the beginning these were small groups with no political oversight. Only later national politicians managed to take control over them.
Early attempts to make connection with homeland, and perhaps even start some organized resistance, failed.
Spying Maffia could exist only because of A-H Schlamperei.
I read you on a previous thread, that I can’t be bothered to get back to, about the wealth of Mormons/Church of Latter Day Saints.
From what I have seen, Pentacostal,7th Day Adventists, Jehovahs’ witnesses (i.e other eccentric branches of the Church) have above average numbers of wealthy people , just like the Mormons. From my experience – Big houses, no more than 3 children in their families and with demands in practising their religion that many of us may consider extreme.
My own view is that all those branches of Christianity, except on food issues, are completely faking the so-called extremities – as befits plenty of other American-originated activities. It’s the same with jews and the Sabbath. I am fairly sure that on Friday and Saturday nights in Tel Aviv – things aren’t exactly quiet. Maybe about 2% of jews observe the Sabbath in the correct way?
Credit to those in Utah though – that was a complete wasteland 100 years ago – there is a theory that the barren environment just forced them into naturally good business acumen as opposed to their religion
No, I don’t think so. Which is exactly why I think Commissar Kamila will win. Though I’m not ruling Trump out either, the boomers are retarded enough to believe in MIGA.
True, but I would never myself want to step into a time machine and go back to live in the Soviet Union in the 30s, or even in an Eastern European Warsaw Pact state. And that’s not just because of any affection for modern technology, or the quality of life I have, I probably wouldn’t miss either of those things too much. I tend to be vocal about my opinions, and it’s just not my nature to go along with whatever is popular; I would probably be one of the people who got axed, or at least subjected to some kind of reeducation.
But, if I was a one of the peasants or workers who suddenly saw their quality of life improve in ways they had never thought possible, I would definitely be one of those who mourned the fall of communism when it came.
You are downplaying the importance of the Czechoslovak Legion, that’s odd. Yes, at the beginning it was small, everything is small at the beginning. I was reacting to the comments claiming that there was no resistance. The fact that there are always opportunistic politicians who side with the powers-in-charge is not unique to Czechia, that’s just the way it is. My point is that in 1918 Czechs and Slovaks were extremely happy, celebrated massively, and never looked back. That there were nuances is a given, but to create an upside-down narrative based on those nuanced is either ignorant or dishonest.
I agree that Habsburgs were very sloppy and couldn’t manage it. But they were also strategically clueless and could be very brutal. To blame the massive brutality of WWI on everybody else, except the people actually in charge is insane.
My view is unchanged.
I will however throw our Polish friend a bone by noting that I’m amused by $TSLAQ baggies who insist on fighting the tape.
Was there a difference in communist saturation between Slovak and Czech parts?
Statistically you would be most likely one of the peasants or workers, they were a huge majority. People who like to express their opinions and value it over other things are rare. There is an evolutionary reason for it.
The one-sided demonization of what it was like is also not good. It devalues the region – people don’t understand that they all lose because of this hyper self-criticism. Others around the world who are less inclined to be self-critical simply rank them lower and that has consequences.
I dislike communitarian or authoritarian systems. They don’t fit my personality and I don’t need them. But the reality in Czecho-Slovakia and Hungary in the 70’s and 80’s was not what most people on the outside are told. (I will leave out the poor Poles, they were starving and millions were shot by the Russians, I think about 3 million in 5 years, the rest mostly rotated in and out of the communist labor camps – or so they all tell us today.)
By any objective standard, Czecho-Slovakia and Hungary were prosperous, peaceful, growing societies with good infrastructure, relatively high standard of living, decent culture, great education, very low crime, no oligarchs or homeless, and they even allowed limited travel to the West. They were not closed societies and the public discussion was quite open about most things – challenging communist monopoly on power or the results of WWII were of course forbidden. Communists were corrupt and old, and incompetent. But the technocrats who run most things were both capable and mostly honest – things worked.
It got much better after 1989 and nobody would ever go back. But most of our current prosperity and growth is based on the 40-years of infrastructure building and education in the demonised communist era. Get real, most of our ancestors benefitted. When people claim that it would happen anyway, my response is: so after hundreds of years of not giving a shit about the bottom 80% of the society, the elites were just about to change it all, and the damn commies beat them to it? By the way, the very positive changes in Western Europe – some of the identical policies – were largely done because of the threat fro communism and radicals. We are all better off today.
This sounds similar to Polish Perspective’s thesis that the first ten years of Communism were good for Poland in that they wiped away the old, “regressive” elites (but then they overstayed their welcome for another thirty years).
You’d have to be a millionaire to (responsibly) buy $500 King Crabs, $2000 leather couches from IKEA (though why would you anyway), or for that matter $2500 laptops.
Unfortunately, I write articles with titles like “Mussolini Did Nothing Wrong”, which rather crimps my money making capabilities.
Also I am sure that all of those people, probably even the design engineer, have 5 year old budget laptops, some probably refurbished. I imagine the main class of Russians with business class laptops are Muscovites who make 200-250k rubles.
I am getting a PC for free, getting a GTX 1070, and doubling my RAM to 16GB, all to be accomplished for <$500.
Let consider alternative history with no Legion, or nothing of its final size. Would it change the history? I don’t think so. A-H monarchy was completely rotten and would fall down no matter what. Czechoslovakia would be created anyway, and most likely with similar borders.
There were much stronger forces playing.
There’s some idealizing of A-H among contemporary Czechs too. They admire chic uniforms, or are impressed by K.u.K dreadnoughts. Franz Joseph I had superb memory.
They do not know nasty details of the era, and are not really interested to hear about them.
I agree with that, but in different countries the breakdown would vary in length. In Czechoslovakia the benefits might have lasted until the 60’s. Even after the 1968 reset, the country did quite well until around 1975-80 when the commies simply run out of steam, they also got incredibly old (I think the last commie in charge was like 95 or something.)
Many of the things the communists did had to be done, and we benefit from them today. The fact that the previous elites chose not to do it was their fatal failure. (This goes back to my favourite example from Germany: how bad do you have to be to lose an election to Hitler? Nobody likes to ask that question, why?)
I’m a fan of Elon Musk, obviously. But Tesla’s business plan, is surely very eccentric. Forexample, the Tesla shops do not display the new model of Tesla (released in 2017).
Here (walking past Tesla shop this week) I see the car in the back of their shop is Model X (you can see vertical doors) which was released in 2015. The car in front is Model S which was released in 2012.
They don’t even have Model 3 (which was released in 2017) in the Tesla shop in 2019. (And there won’t even be space there when it comes – who planned this stupid shop?).
https://i.imgur.com/ogADu2u.jpg?1
Not according to the recent polling.
I found that Slovak communist party had ~450 k members before 1990. So no, there were no big regional differences. This was also strategy of the party, to cover all regions, all social classes and age groups.
Especially Salt Lake City seems pretty cool and ideal from what I have read.
I haven’t visited though, so I’m not the right person talk about Utah.
In Israel, a lot of the Jews go out on Friday night. The problem is public transport does not function on Friday – due to religious laws. So Friday is a “party night”, but only for people with cars.
You can see stupidity of a country which follows nationalwide religious laws. (You can drive, but you can’t go on the train – because of arbitrary determination by clergymen).
Polling is worthless at this point in the game.
Or Rusnaks.
The local Chronicles referred to them all as Moskals. This was after Moscow controlled their territories. So Chronicles would write – Rus and Lithuanians went to war against Moskals. The feelings were mutual – the Rus in Moscow referred to Rus from PLC as Lithuanians or Poles, even if they were Orthodox and called Ivan.
Two peoples, who recognized each other as different peoples, but called themselves the same name after a defunct state that had disappeared centuries earlier. Like Romanians vs. Romans vs. Romansch (in Switzerland) vs. Rum (Greeks).
They fought and died together in many wars, up to the mid 17th century – wars against Moscow, wars against the Turks. Brothers can have different faiths.
See above.
After the rebels were burning down Catholic churches and slaughtering Catholics and Uniates there was some reciprocal persecution, though scale was not as severe.
BTW the main enemy of Khmelnytsky was a Rus prince.
You had discussed this previously, I believe with reiner tor or Thorfinnson.
Black Hand was led by the head of Serbia’s intelligence.
But when the war was declared he was a member of the state. The demand upon Serbia was no less reasonable than American demands against Afghanistan after 9-11. It was not analogous to the Iraq war.
No people are flawed, including those in power.
Correct. I don’t think the murderers cared about people’s well being.
Affordable or not – $2500 laptops are incredibly cheap, in terms of value for money. Research, engineering, and human genius that was invested over decades to create this product – as well as its practicality – is many orders of magnitude more than $2500 paid by customer.
On the other hand, Ikea sofa and crabs (the latter at least in terms of its nutritional, rather than inherent spiritual, value) – I’m not so sure.
And a problem with our import substitution policy (and if not import substitution itself, then the way it is being organized in reality). Skillful people building actual planes will have difficulty to buy more than old, budget notebooks, if their corporation won’t buy them one.
On another hand, a girl, who does not build planes, but was appointed director of contracts as a result of the official position of her father – if her handbags and Moet Chandon is indication, would not have problems buying a business class laptop.
https://www.instagram.com/baynetova/
…and there goes the civilization.
Since I was discussing the world war you are wrong.
Sure, but not by 1914 which is what we were discussing. They lost most of Italy after the Napoleonic Wars. Hapsburgs once controlled Spain too, so what?
A naive and gullible statement, probably product of Soviet or nationalist miseducation.
In 1913 Austria had a higher per capita GDP PPP than France. Hungary was a little lower but close. The Czech and Slovak lands had higher per capita GDP PPP than Spain, Portugal and Finland. Today they are a lot poorer than Finland and a little poorer than Spain.
In 1890 (I don’t have data for other years) the poorest part of Austria, Galicia, was wealthier than Portugal, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Russia.
People in general were much poorer in 1900 than they are today. But people under Hapsburgs were not poor by European standards of the day, and there is no reason to give credit to things such as electricity,m improved living standards etc. that were universal in Europe to the end of the monarchy.
However we can compare relative standings to see if the break-up was good or bad. We see that Hungary and Czechoslovakia fell behind the rest of Europe after 1918. Czechoslovakia crawled back to where it had been in 1913, Hungary still has not. After 100,000s dead, generations under Communism this is a very sad and pathetic result.
See above, they were not living in poverty relative to other European nations.
Under Hapsburgs the Czech language was standardized and literacy in that language achieved mass status. Under Hapsburgs Czechs achieved the highest point of their cultural development. Their greatest composers, artists and writers were developed under Hapsburgs.
It’s very funny when someone complaining about the relatively minor post-Maidan hiccup in Ukraine defends the utter disaster of breaking up the Hapsburg state for the people of his own region.
I believe that after 1968, Slovaks were over-represented in the party and its leadership. Before 1968 they were under-represented. Some of it was the demographic shift (there were more younger Slovaks because we are more traditional). 1968 was also not as traumatic for Slovakia – it was the year Slovakia got official federation and ‘equality’. And Husak was a nationalist Slovak (in his youth) for whatever that’s worth.
Your arguments are debunked and you were caught lying:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-69/#comment-3086984
so all you have left is personal attacks.
One of my grandparents was of peasant stock. There is no shame in that. None of the others were.
Here is one of my relatives:
http://sembratovych.com/en/person.html?id=42
Close to royal court 🙂
No, they lost most of it when Italy unified (1860’s?).
But not by the Habsburgs, it was done against the Habsburgs by the Czech national movement that was mostly in violent opposition to the Habsburgs. The Czechs have reached a much higher level of culture starting in the 1920’s. It looks like you are just randomly making up stuff that suits your stubborn pro-Habsburg bias. This is embarrassing for anyone who knows that region.
You are simply wrong. Nobody in Central Europe sees it that way, definitely not Czechs and Slovaks. You are living in some fantasy land where you invent what others should think. Getting rid of Habsburgs was the best thing that happened to us and nobody has ever seriously suggested that we go back – in 100 years there has been zero desire to bring back the Habsburgs, no political movement, no books, nothing. Why do you think that is?
I have a Lenovo for roughly the equivalent of $500. I put JRPGs on medium graphics to make it run a bit smoother, but otherwise it works decently for reading, watching videos, gaming, etc. (granted battery life is poor).
Maybe this is like sneakers though.
Because this never would have happened if not for Communists? This is like the silly argument that Russia would still be an illiterate peasant nation if not for the Communists.
Between 1850 and 1913 per capita GDP PPP in Czechoslovak lands nearly doubled. In 1913 Czechoslovak and Hungarian lands were wealthier than Spain. In 1995 they were only 60% of Spain’s. Now they still are poorer than Spain.
It happened everywhere else in Europe. Do you think Czechs and Slovaks are uniquely incapable of this that they need commies to do it for them?
Bismarck was pre-Communist.
Another one of your factually challenged cherry picks. So-called local Chronicles, as in not how the folks in Moscow administered areas saw themselves. On a somewhat related matter, in US history text books, the Confederate side is typically not called American. Yet, the Confederates considered themselves as such:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_of_America
It was the subjugating Polish Catholics who suppressed the Orthodox Church, while promoting the Uniate denomination. If anything, the reciprocal persecution (as you term it) came from the resistance. Polish nationalist/some non-Polish, but pro-Polish sources and those subconsciously influenced by that slant downplay the brutal aspects of Polish rule over Rus territory.
True enough, while believing that Harris will not prevail. Time will tell who is right.
Only Milan and Venice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_unification#/media/File:Italian-unification.gif
Obviously not too violent, given the spectacular achievements.
You believe Soviet-era schoolbooks too much.
Who were the greatest Czech cultural figures and from what era were they? Dvorak, Mucha, Kafka, hasek etc. come to mind.
It’s hard to admit your generations of your history were an epic failure.
Facts are stubborn, though.
As evidenced by fall relative financial circumstances, 100,000s dead, generations under Communists, cultural stagnation.
So, if you’re not just blowing smoke yourself, Mickey, what ‘so called local Chronicle’ are you citing as evidence that AP is wrong in his observation? Otherwise you’re clouding the air with your own smoke, Churchhill!
https://www.coronacigar.com/blog/winston_churchill.jpg
No idea how you come up with this number. Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia was bloodless, number of executions during whole 40 years of their rule was in in low hundreds, and that included murderous criminals.
There were no anti-communist partisan groups or violent uprisings or internal armed conflicts.
If you’re lucky, then $500 laptop can be fine for your purposes. (Especially now SSD prices have fallen so much over the last 2 years, and especially last year.)
But they’re going to mix in “budget” components inside the machine, so it’s also possible to be unlucky (e.g. Karlin).
Companies like Lenovo are not an Italian clothes company, which arbitrarily multiplies the price for their customers’ self image. Price of the notebook will generally be representative of value of component parts they place inside it.
I break laptops a lot around $1000 price.
You seem to be a hopeless ideologue. Almost none of the stuff you claim is true, but you are unable to think about it objectively and keep on substituting slogans and emotions for reality.
It is not my generation, it is our fathers and grandfathers and they don’t think of any of it as ‘epic failure’, and they are plenty critical. I really cannot help you if your upbringing convinced you that white is black. US schools seldom teach real history about other parts of the world, and for the regions that were or are deemed to be an ‘enemy’, the distance from reality is massive. Most of the time it doesn’t matter – far away, not important.
I think what really bothers you is that we – the normal V4 countries – have done better in the last 100 years than Poland or Galicia. We didn’t lose millions of dead, we didn’t fight hopeless wars, we are a lot richer than you, our countries are better in infrastructure, culture, etc…That seems to drive you nuts, so you project your own misery on us. It is quite sad.
I wish Poland and the poor Galicians had not suffered so much in the 20th century. And not all of it was self-inflicted, some of it was just bad luck and geography. The lesson is to learn and maybe do more of what we do, but that requires rationality, as long as bitter emotional wrecks set your policy you might get more suffering in the future. We plan to stay out of it.
Probably, but my father had a $1000 laptop some time ago he was complaining about (not Lenovo, some other brand). So for general purposes, I feel like the quality difference is not so large compared to usability for general purposes.
Empty insult.
You are afraid to mention what, because you are wrong.
Czechoslovak lands wealthier than Spain in 1913 – true. Poorer than Spain today – true.
Achievement of mass literacy in Czechlands under Hapsburgs – true.
Greatest Czech writers and artists under Hapsburgs – true.
I suspect that for generations your people were taught nasty semi-truths about pre-1918 Czech lands and you believe them. There was similar nonsense written and believed about Russia under the Romanovs.
In terms of GDP PPP Poland has improved its position relative to Czech and Slovak lands and has dramatically surpassed Hungary.
Galicia, of course, has not. Direct annexation by USSR was a disaster for it.
Poland now has a higher GDP PPP per capita than Hungary.
I’m sure you are happy about what your ancestors did. Many Russians think the Russian Revolution was a good thing, too, and this even more ridiculous than your position.
I do find it funny that you talk about the mistakes of Maidan when your own people have made a far worse one.
The totality of civilian deaths after the Hapsburgs were overthrown and Czechoslovakia was at the mercy of Nazis and Communists. It was Beckow’s estimate and for the sake of argument I just went with it.
He just made it up for the 1945-89 period. Before that, it was almost all Nazis.
After an exhausting research the number of victims in Czech-Slovakia (1945-89) was established by the current government as around 550 people. That includes:
– WWII Nazi collaborators – around 40% of the total
– religious figures, monks, priests, who were incorrectly associated with the collaboration in WWII mainly in Slovakia
– around 100 communists who were killed in internal party purges in the 50’s (mostly Jewish)
– 80 people who lost their lives in the Soviet invasion in 1968 (many in traffic accidents trying to manuever around tanks on narrow country roads, others shot in demonstrations)
– 4 people who burnt themselves to death after Soviet invasion – most famously, Jan Palach
And a few dozen democratic opposition figures in 1948-53 who were accused of treason, organizing ‘conspiracies’, storing guns, etc… Those were the real miscarriage of justice. Almost all above victims were in 1945-53 period, other than 1968.
Compared to that Habsburgs just in WW1 executed over a thousand Czechs and Slovaks for made-up reason, mostly ‘treason’. And Nazis killed close to 250-300,000 people (mostly Roma and Jews), among them an estimated 12,000 resistance people.
But ‘100,000′ under communists? AP just makes up stuff.
You made it up for the post-Hapsburg period.
I never claimed 100,000s under Communists. Beckow just makes up stuff.
Remember when you made up how in 2010 Yanukovich won Transcarpathia? 🙂
Or when you made up that it takes hours to drive from Kosice to the Ukrainian border? 1 hour 28 minutes now 🙂
Unfair comment. Pretty sure that there was the same of even less amount of “freedom” in South Korea for several decades after the Korean war than in any Warsaw pact state. You are also confusing genuine serious security issues in the epicentre of WW2, and the most destroyed cities…with the Soviet Union/Warsaw pact/communism in general.
True- Czechs/Slovakia deserve great sympathy, but nobody else non-USSR in the Warsaw pact does.
You’re the one blowing smoke, as you fail to successfully refute what I said..
No surprise that they’re not emphasizing a model that they’re building at a loss, in hopes that they’ll figure out volume manufacturing and start breaking even or better. And the longer term hope is that Model 3 buyers will eventually move up to their profitable models.
House voted on a nonbinding resolution on recognizing Krim as Ukraine; only Thomas Massie voted against.
House also voted on a stupid resolution re: Nemtsov; again, only Massie voted against.
Massie>Amash>Gosar>Biggs>[everyone else]
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/116-2019/h122
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/116-2019/h121
Unless he is replaced by a Ukrainophile (Navalny) which is extremely unlikely, there is little chance of this rating changing. Ukrainians don’t hate Russia anymore as a country and like its people, but still hate it’s government.
Visaless travel and no customs is, precise.
The same organization released another poll:
http://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=827&page=1
If there were a referendum on joining EU, it would win 70% to 30%.
If there were a referendum on joining the Customs Union with Russia, it would lose 64% to 36%.
In terms of what direction Ukraine should take with respect to foreign policy –
45% towards EU
25% middle path, neither EU nor Russia
14%, orient towards Russia
Eastern Ukraine prefers Russia, all three other regions (West, Center, and even South) prefer further European orientation over Russian orientation.
This shows rather well that turning towards the West has not been bad for most of Ukraine – they want to continue this orientation. Contrary to claims of those who have probably never been there recently, like Beckow.
Look at Sahaidachny’s career. Joined the Poles in the rampage through Moscow (his troops were infamous for impaling Russian boyars), and together with the Poles defeated the Turks at Khotyn during an epic battle in which he and the Polish commander each lost their lives :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khotyn_(1621)
Polish king Jan Sobieski, himself of partial Rus descent, praised Sahaidachny’s heroism. If this was not brotherhood, what was?
One of your patented cherry picks running counter to the general trend to the contrary.
Here is exactly what you said: “All that Communist misery, 100,000s dead, and the reward was relative poverty.”
That is word for word what you said. Then you repeated the 100,000 number in your next 2 posts. Are you now arguing that the ‘100,000 dead’ didn’t refer to the ‘Communist misery’? How would it not refer to it, it is in one sentence. Unless you are very inarticulate, or made a stylistic mistake the meaning is clear – under Communists 100,000 were killed. Well, it is not true; communists had a lot of issues, but the number of actual victims in Czechoslovakia was around 550. A huge difference from your ‘100,000’.
About your endless prosperity examples: Czechia has a substantially higher living standards than Spain, Italy or Portugal. In most ways Czechs also live better than the French. Slovakia is slightly behind Czechia, but it is substantially richer than Poland. We have Polish peddlers trying to sell crap at our markets. I go to Poland, it is ok and getting better, but in terms of living standards, infrastructure, architecture, etc… it is very visibly poorer and more backward than Czecho-Slovakia.
Yanukovitch and the Party of Regions won in the first round in 2010 elections in Transcarpathia. It was the only region west of Dnieper where that happened. They still got 45% in the 2nd round – a remarkable strength.
To drive a truck from Kosice to Ukraine takes hours – I conclusively showed it to you, you are wilfully ignoring the compulsory 2-3 hours in the customs. Why such petty lies? It diminishes your arguments.
You are wrong – or lying – in all 3 examples.
It was the bane of the Ukrainian cossacks that they were always caught right in the middle of very powerful neighboring powers vying for control of Ukraine. To try and survive in these extremely violent times they were often seeking outside alliances to help them thwart the enemy at hand. I wouldn’t categorize Sahaidachny’s alliance with the Poles as an act of ‘brotherhood’ any more than I would characterize the alliance that Khmelnicky made in 1654 with the Russians at Pereieslav as an act of brotherhood either. I know that you wouldn’t, yet you somehow allow your own personal preferences to persuade you that such temporary alliances with the Poles were somehow of a closer personal nature. Khmelnicky was looking for an alliance with Moldovia too, and other hetmans with the Turkish Porte. I’m all for Polish/Ukrainian rapprochement, especially in the current situation, but I think that a less emotional, perhaps reorientation of the past is not warranted. If Hadiach had been implemented (in a revised form too), your arguments would make more sense.
A-H would fall regardless, but how it played out had a lot to do with the Legion: it was the only Czecho-Slovak armed force, it was immediately used to clear out Habsburg and Hungarian structures, it fought a war against Hungarian Bolsheviks, it was the core of the new army. It had a major role in the Russian civil war (mostly against the Bolsheviks) and that strengthened Czechoslovakia’s position at Versailles. There is also the emotional and symbolic value.
I haven’t seen much idealising of A-H, there is a lot more idealising of the first republic (1918-38). I am trying to be accurate, and one can find ad hoc examples for almost anything from our past, but the general attitude towards the Habsburgs has been very consistent for 100 years: ‘good riddance’.
Same here.
My Lenovo did not disappoint me, unlike its HP predecessor.
Donald Tusk’s speech at the Ukrainian Supreme Council:
https://eeas.europa.eu/delegations/russia/58440/speech-president-donald-tusk-ukrainian-parliament-kyiv_en
I looked around and I found a lecture Poland, Old and New given by Dmowski in English in the anthology of lectures (Russian Realities and Problems) given in 1916 at Trinity College.
https://ia801408.us.archive.org/30/items/cu31924028376014/cu31924028376014.pdf
None of these are Christians. There’s a strict requirement, and a loose requirement for being Christian:
a) Strict: belong to a Church founded by Christ. (That leaves the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics.)
b) Loose: follow the Nicene Creed of 381. (Which includes some Protestants.)
the attack in Christchurch will have a lot of repercussions in France, because its author dwells heavily on the French situation in his manifesto.
on French nationalists boards common sarcastic lines like “well we condemn this just as firmly as muslims condemned Bataclan and Nice” or “Keep in mind not all islamophobes are violent!”
I expect French authorities to use this to crack down harder on the “ultra droite” even perhaps try to suppress completely the phrase “grand remplacement” (title of the manifesto) from public discourse. Long denied either with laughter or consternation, the concept is becoming mainstream, at last, as you just have to walk outside with your lying eyes open.
another note is that this gets a lot more coverage than during the massacre of Christians in, say, Egypt. which is too bad because I strongly expect jihadists will attack Christians in places s.a Egypt, Pakistan, and will call that “revenge”.
Note the comma after Communist misery. It means “and”.
I can see how you misinterpreted it, however.
Portugal – yes. Spain, and Italy have higher per capita GDP PP than Czechia.
Average wage in Czechia – 1,000 Euros.
Average wage in Spain – 1,700 Euros.
Average wage in Italy – 1,800 Euros.
Adjusted for cost of living narrows the gap but Czechia still a lot lower.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_average_wage
So you lied again. You can’t help it, I suppose.
Remember that in 1913 Czechia was wealthier than Spain.
So all the communist misery, plus 100,000s dead, and you end up poorer relative to some other European countries at the end of it all. Overthrowing the monarch was a brilliant move.
Talk about cherry-picking.
He got more votes in the first round but he lost the election. In the first round the pro-Russian parties were split by 3 candidates, the pro-Western by 4. This allowed Yanukovich to get about 3% more votes than did the next-highest candidate in the first round. Still the 3 pro-Russian parties’ combined vote was lower than that of the 4 pro-Western/nationalist parties combined vote in the first round.
Who won Transcarpathia? Tymoshenko by 6%. What did you write? “In 2010, when they were allowed, Sub-Carpathia was the only region in the West that voted for Yanukovitch and the Party of Regions.”
You said a trucker friend told you. Googlemap over many days says 1.5 hours to the border.
Given your proven record of lying and exaggeration, googlemap is more credible than your claims about what a trucker supposedly told you.
When I write drive I mean drive. I stated that you were probably correct about customs.
We see above who has been lying. It has been you.
Khmelnytsky was already negotiating with Sweden after Pereyaslav, and he had clashed with the Russians over Belarus. Sahaidachny’s pro-Polish orientation was consistent across his entire career. He was a sincere and consistent loyalist, and ultimately gave his life for the PLC.
This is where 100,000 appeared in our discussion:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-70/#comment-3091653
You wrote: “The total deaths in Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary were in hundreds of thousands and most of those were the unfortunate minorities killed by Nazis”
I replied “So, “only” 100,000s deaths so you ended up poorer than before 1914 (Hungary) and about the same as before 1914 (Czech and Slovak lands) while a couple generations wasted their lives under Communists.”
While my later statements were unclear and someone unfamiliar with the conversation would have been confused (note that I immediately clarified when LH asked about it), you were involved in this discussion from the beginning and should have known what I was referring to. 50/50 chance that you were just pretending not to understand.
And Poland’s pro-Polish orientation was consistent throughout its dealings with its Ukrainian subjects for centuries. A denigration of its language, religion and people. Looking at it as a whole, it was very similar to the way Ukrainian lands fared under Russian domination. Too many Polish and Russian apologists have been taking turns tooting that very same horn (of ‘brotherhood’).
Seems natural that there would be less hostility to future Russian leaders who inherited Crimea, than there would be to the leader who is seen by Ukrainians as having stolen it.
A referendum on EU membership would be meaningless: The reality is that the only options for Ukraine are a customs union with Russia, or with no one.
And this poll also shows a significant pro-Russian trend.
In Sept 2017, only 15% of Ukrainians favored joining Russia’s Customs Union, vs. 55% opposed.
In Feb 2019, 23% favored joining the CU, vs. 43% opposed.
That’s not how human nature works- the fact that people want to continue doing something does not mean that it has not been bad for them.
Ok, go and build your Intermarium, or whatever it is that’s driving you so crazy, but leave us normal Europeans out of it. All the points you are desperately making – missing commas, including this-but not that, your omissions and manipulations, your outright false narrative about the good peaceful Habsburg kings – suggests that you are not interested in a rational exchange of ideas. I am, so we can hardly discuss anything.
Let experience show you what reality is, as has unfortunately happened so many times to your Polish ancestors. Maybe we now have a better understanding of why it happens to them again and again.
I agree with this general point but choose to nitpick since this is an autistic blog (hat tip Nina Busted-tina).
First, a millionaire is a fairly low threshold. The maximum low risk income from one million Dollars in assets is around $50,000 (portfolio of REITs, utility & short-line railroad stocks, oil trusts, etc.). Enough for a single male with NEET life preference admittedly.
The three goods in question are quite different. King crab leg is a luxury food and good immediately after consumption, a decent couch can last decades<, and while a $2,500 laptop is pricey and generally not needed it is something which can be used to produce income.
$500 of king crab legs will get you about five kilos or so. Enough for a good-sized fancy dinner party. Perhaps if Putin ever annexes Belarus or the Donets Basin you can celebrate with fellow Muscovite nationalists by dinning on king crab legs.
Depending on the size of the couch a $2,000 couch is a middle high end couch. If you shop properly the couch will last fifty years. Downside: moving couches sucks. IKEA was also kind of an odd vendor to name given they sell budget furniture.
$2,500 on a laptop is justifiable if you’re a “digital nomad”. Paying top Dollar means you can actually use your laptop outside in full sunlight and get respectable battery life while doing so. Those who travel a lot can also justify expensive laptops. Otherwise it’s a luxury purchase, though less of one than king crab kegs.
I’m trying to catch up to you with the modern lingo and acronyms (I hope that you don’t mind?):
?
?
BTW, I’ve been charged with helping a client transfer a REIT (‘alternative investment’ indeed) to another custodian, and what a nightmare. During the process, that started a few months back, the ‘REIT’ split somehow, with about half remaining under the same name and status, and the other half morphing into a new differently named invetsment(?). I wont bore you with all of the minutiae, but what a pain in the ass!!! 🙁
Nina Kouprianova/Byzantina denounced HBD (and maybe Karlin as well) as useless autistic drivel.
Thorfinnsson’s nickname for her is a reference to her ah… impressive tits.
Not in Education, Employment or Training. Originally a UK term, but later became popular in Japan.
Basically, a nerdy, autistic-to-varying-levels young man or woman.
Oh, by the way, remember when you praised Kehinde Wiley as a talented artist?
What do you think about this picture?:
http://www.informationliberation.com/files/obama-portrait_1470.jpg
Do you think if you ask nicely Ukrainians can apply for Honorary Non-White Status? After all, they should be close enough to Russians, no?
HBD Happy Birthday
HBD Here Be Dragons
HBD Has Been Drinking (police communications)
HBD Honored By Death (gaming clan)
HBD Honored By Death (gaming clan, Battlefield 2)
HBD Haters Better Duck (band)
HBD Here by Demand (various organizations)
HBD Hot Bus Driver
? 🙂
I clicked on the ‘picture’ and was sent to a website “Information Liberation’ – no Kehinde Wiley, at least on the front page?…
Human Biodiversity, a term I think was coined by Sailer.
In general, the study of various differences that exist among human sub-species.
More, specifically in “these” blogging circles, usually it is focused on IQ tests and other psychometric measurements like reaction speeds.
I think Kouprianova was mocking the importance placed on IQ tests used to estimate the capabilities of various nationalities/ethnicities specifically.
I’ll try a different source:
https://redice.tv/a/i/n/18/02130311-wileycover.jpg
The sad thing is, he is unable to draw proper depth, so he has to resort to drawing context-less flower wallpaper in place of a proper background. This also means that his paintings will inevitably be limited in in vividicy (yes, I am aware -icy is not a proper ending for vivid, but it should be) they can create.
I doubt that very much, where did you come up with this ‘insight”? That he is talented is beyond doubt, whether or not his aesthetic oeuvre matches your own personal tastes is another totally different question. BTW, I do not idolize the man nor his creations. It’s obvious, that he’s a surrealistic artist to some degree, an art form that was first propagated by white European artists like Magritte and Dali – are you sure that your temperament is equally suited to point out their bizarre and at times macabre portraiture?
It’s a reference to her busted face, not her impressive bosom.
https://uploads5.wikiart.org/images/salvador-dali/autumnal-cannibalism.jpg
Rather simple perspective shown, I would say?
BS! For all the anti-Russian svido propaganda being bandied about, as well as the fringe Poland is good for Ukraine unlike Russia mantra, pro-Russian sentiment among Ukrainians has been greater than pro-Polish feelings.
-Russia, Ukraine and Belarus have the common history of Rus, much unlike the imperial outsider Poland.
Serfs in the Russian Empire part of Ukraine generally had it better over those in Russia proper.
The ancestors of modern day Ukrainians didn’t flock to Napoleon to fight Russia, unlike the tens of thousands of Poles.
While en route to Hungary in the late 1840s (for a misguided intervention in support of the Habsburgs), Russian forces were warmly greeted by the ancestors of modern day Ukrainians in the Austrian Empire.
During the Russian Civil War, the Galician Ukrainian Army en masse chose the Russian Whites over the Pilsudski allied Petliura, whose alliance with the former was primarily based on the lack of support he had in the former Russian Empire part of Ukraine.
When Soviet troops entered Polish held territory in 1939, the Ukrainians and Belarusians there showed little if any opposition, on account of their not liking Polish rule. Soviet heavy handedness in turn served to nurture an anti-Soviet backlash, as well as the faulty notion of Soviet equaling Russian.
Hopefully, they wont have to cede any more territory to Russia to get a full understanding of just how good they had it?……………….
If anything, territory from Russia was ceded to Ukraine. In any event, the majority of Crimea’s ethnic Ukrainians support their area’s reunification with Russia.
On the matter of Ukraine’s boundaries, Soviet evils aside, the USSR was responsible for Ukraine having its largest land mass – NOT POLAND.
Along with the greatest depopulation of ethnic Ukrainians. Of course, the amounts of ethnic Russians increased during the whole soviet period – what a deal!
I am no less of a European than you are. And Poland and Ukraine have a higher % of Europeans than does your Slovakia which is about 5% gypsy.
You are projecting again. As we have seen, omissions and lies have only been yours.
I will make a summary but unlike you will support my statements with facts.
To summarize, about the enormous mistake of overthrowing the monarchy and disbanding Austria-Hungary, for the Visegrad peoples:
Loss of culture. Greatest cultural achievements occurred under Hapsburgs. Dvorak, Mucha, Kafka, Hasek – all creatures of the Hapsburg Empire, even if some of them may have not liked it. Post-1918 people did not produce as much culture. And there had been no real cultural repression under Hapsburgs, proven by the fact that mass literacy and schooling were obtained in native language in Czechia. Prague switched from German to Czech speaking city under Hapsburgs.
Loss of life. After 1918 these lands became helpless before the Nazi and Soviet invaders. 100,000s were killed.
Loss of prosperity. In 1913 Hungary has 85% of Austria’s GDP per capita PPP and had a higher GDP PPP per capita than Italy, Spain, and Finland. Czechoslovak lands had 65% of Austria’s wealth and were wealthier than Spain and Finland. In 1995 Czechoslovakia had only 50% of Austria’s per capita GDP PPP and Hungary was even worse. Italy had left Hungary far behind and Spain and surpassed both countries. In 2016 Czechoslovak lands had finally gotten back to their relative position vis a vis Austria in 1913. But were still behind Spain and Finland. Hungary meanwhile was much worse – in 2016 only 56% of Austria’s per capita GDP PPP, had fallen behind Finland, Italy and Spain and even Portugal. A disaster.
Like Crimea’s incorporation into the Ukrainian SSR. Have a thing against ethnic Russians eh? Plenty of ethnic Ukrainians in Russia, with the overwhelming majority of them being good people.
Your some deal version of Frank Pantangeli:
And this option loses 64% to 36%. Which is a landslide. It loses in 3 of Ukraine’s 4 regions.
Correct. OTOH, when presented in either/or format joining CU is down at 14%, not much higher than 11% in September 2017 and lower than 17% in December 2016. Since joining CU cuts Ukraine off from EU this poll is the more realistic one.
It’s pretty suggestive that people living there and living with the consequences (vs. those who have never been there, and rely on information about those consequences through unfriendly media) want to continue to pursue this orientation. And indeed this tracks with the actual economic data. Western parts are doing great relative to before. Central and southern parts are doing okay relative to before. And Eastern parts are doing worse relative to before. And the support tracks these differences.
PLC was not a Polish national state in modern terms.
In PLC it was basically nobles and peasants. About 10% of the population were nobles, a ratio similar to that of citizens and helots in ancient Athens. So Rus princes and lesser Rus nobles such as Sahaidachny were just like their Polish and Lithuanian peers. Until the Counter-reformation and anti-Orthodox restrictions, Rus nobles were in all ways just as privileged as Polish ones and more privileged than were Polish peasants.
After the Counter-reformation, Rus princes who were Catholics were the most powerful people in the PLC, on account of having more land, wealth and larger private armies than did their Polish peers. Yarema Vyshnyvetsky made himself a larger throne in the Sejm than the King had, and his son became king. He and other Rus princes grabbed more and more power at the expense of the lesser Rus nobility (the 1% acting against the 10%). This turned out to have been very bad for the PLC state because it led to the revolt.
So from a modern Polish perspective, Rus princes took over the initiative of the PLC, created instability and ran the whole country into the ground by provoking the lesser Rus nobles to revolt, thereby splitting Ukraine from Poland and terminally weakening it, ultimately leading to Poland disappearing from the map.
As for peasants – Rus peasants actually had better lives than Polish ones due to serfdom being not as bad in Ukraine as in Poland (the land was sparsely settled and obligations were lower in order to encourage settlement). This made them feistier.
You’re talking about it in terms of “market value” and “practical value”, which I don’t think is the most objective evaluation.
In terms of the laptop, the level of intelligence and technology, in the product -as well as actual financial investment required to originally develop the technology – far exceeds the price you actually pay.
In the case of King Crab- its inherent spiritual value to itself, or to God, may be infinite. But it’s nutritional value to us does not merit its price. Perhaps its market value for creating Mukbang videos on YouTube is something else though.
And finally, a $2000 sofa, is not even an expensive sofa. This is normal to pay for a sofa. However, that is a reflection that sofas are vastly bad value for money today (how does wood covered with leather cost the same as laptops, containing – among other things – semiconductor devices manufactured with 14 nanometer lithography?).
It looks like inspired by early 1970s “Blaxploitation” aesthetics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaxploitation
Aesthetics is inspired by American in the 1970s, including the use of flowers in the background.
Especially you can see in the image Hypoborean added, the “Blaxploitation” aesthetics.
This combination of “Black power” politics and feminism of the early 1970s era.
Type in the search engine “Blaxploitation” aesthetics. Lol you and Hypoborean are American, how do you not know this part of your country’s aesthetic history?
https://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/FoxyBrownPoster.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6d04eyS2QXI/TbiaNxoT9mI/AAAAAAAAAEk/jQdc9bVU4jE/s1600/9152.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/dHhX72N.jpg
From the official portrait, and the pictures I linked above:
https://grazia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Barack-Obama-by-Kehinde-Wiley.jpg?fit=1280%2C1877
? Where did you get the impression that I’m American?
Wjhere did I contradict (or endorse) anything that you’ve written about black aesthetics that was popular in 1970 US fimography? The only point that I was trying to make is that perhaps the ‘aesthetic oeuvre’ that Kinde is presenting of the world doesn’t align with Hyperborean’s own self developed tastes. I don’t see too many ‘flowers in the background’ that you’re alluding to in the film posters? None here either, the height of 1970’s Black Power cinema erxtravaganza:
https://youtu.be/NiCB2isZcRM
‘Hotter than Bond, Cooler than Bullet’
So, he likes to use flowers for background subject matter? How does this prove that he’s not able to ‘draw proper depth’ (problems with drawing perspective)? That’s like saying that because an artist who specializes in drawing landscapes is ipso facto unable to accurately portray the human body. Ridiculous. 🙂
The Austrian painter tends to avoid drawing people, but when he does, it is with a lack of distinct features.
I suppose for Avantgarde art that is not necessarily a drawback, but I can see why the traditional Academy would find it lacking:
https://s.blogcdn.com/slideshows/images/slides/313/717/6/S3137176/slug/l/a-detail-from-one-of-the-two-water-color-paintings-1.jpg
https://i019.radikal.ru/1106/fa/c392fdd4035a.jpg
In terms of buildings, it seems he tried a bit varying focus at times:
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/stevekyiv/29332183/1267245/1267245_original.jpg
https://s.ecrater.com/stores/427618/5b6b0f06553dc_427618b.jpg
https://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/fashion/daily/2015/02/04/magazine/06-kehinde.w245.h368.jpg
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/150604120743-restricted-aman-kehinde-wiley-01-super-169.png
http://www.kehindewiley.com/images/misc2010/Equestrian_Portrait_of_King_Philip_II_after_Rubens_(Michael-Jackson).jpg
There is an easy way to solve this. Simply find a picture or two that he drew with depth.
Solved!
Congratulations. Now all that is left is the malshaped hand.
https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/barack_obama_portrait-e1518558601335.jpg
Look, if you don’t like his style don’t buy his work. Believe me, a lot of people do – his stuff is hanging in art museums all over the world. Me, I find his output interesting but to be honest,a little bit boring. He seems to have found a ‘style’ or a formula that includes portraiture along with a pop art flowery background (for the most part) that he seems uncomfortable in leaving. He doesn’t seem to be evolving and is rather stagnant in what he does. But he does have a lot of ‘raw talent’.
So the PLC was good for a few Rus princes, not too many lesser Rus nobles and not exactly a paradise for the peasants either. Not exactly something to reminisce about in glowing terms nor to try to emulate in the modern world? It certainly had more to offer, in the final analysis, for the building of the future Polish state than it did for any Ukrainian one.
With all due respect Mickey, I don’t really understand what you’re trying to get at here with your reply? I think that you’re trying to point out some sort of an analogy by displaying the clip? It’s not an Averkoism either, it’s something brand new in your writing style?…Come again?
It was relatively good for everyone until the mid 17th century whjen the Rus princes started to monopolize power. But here most of the blame is not on “Poles” but on the Rus princes.
By the standards of the 17th century, of course, it was not too bad for anyone. The rebels wanted more and fought against the erosion of their rights, but ultimately got a worse deal in Russia; in the long-term the rebellion was bad for everyone. It should be noted that in other states there was also a trend towards the erosion of individual noble rights at the expense of the center – typically it was a national center but in PLC it was the magnates, Rus princes on Ukrainian lands (which from a Rus POV is better than Warsaw, right?). What would have become of France ifthousands of individual nobles prevented the kings from consolidating their rule?
The heartland for Ukrainian national development and identity was ironically on the lands that had been owned by the Rus prince, Vyshnyvetsky. The intellectual center of western Rus lands, the Kiev Mohyla Academy, was sponsored by him and developed during the times of PLC. There are some parallels here and with A-H, and with how later myth-makers justify rebellion.
‘Ironically’ is an accurate way to describe this seeming dichotomy. Vyshnyvetsky was not know as a fierce defender of Ruthenian language policies within the PLC, and didn’t seem to question the ‘superiority’ of the Polish language and culture within his court over the indigenous Ruthenian one that had been active for centuries before his appearance, but did generously support Orthodox church structures, as you’ve pointed out numerous times here before. Perhaps, he did harbor some guilt feelings after all regarding his abandonment of his Rus patrimony, including the memory of his famous Cossack grandfather who became the subject matter of local peasant folk songs, of course sung in the old Ukrainian language? These are interesting questions that perhaps will never be answered.
In his time the Orthodox nobles were as Polish-speaking as the Catholic ones. So this didn’t really differentiate him. According to Snyder, Polish was the administrative language and language of command in the Hetmanate (later these people switched from Polish to Russian). Polish and Latin were the main languages of instruction in the Kiev Mohyla academy. The situation was analogous to the use of French in England for 200 years or so after the Norman invasion. It’s why so many Polish, and a few Latin, words trickled down into the speech of commoners, that later served as the basis of the Ukrainian literary language (just as English is full of French words).
So the rebellion featured Orthodox Polish-speaking Rus nobles and Rus-speaking peasants vs. a mix of Catholic Polish-speaking Rus magnates and some Orthodox Polish-speaking Rus nobles.
As for religion, it wasn’t so simple. In the 16th and 17th centuries Catholicism was associated with higher culture, modernization and civilization; Orthodoxy was objectively more backward (Karlin posted abut this). 100 years later a more secular, Enlightened brand of modernization independent of Catholicism was possible. I suspect that if Peter the Great in Russia had existed 50 years earlier he might have converted Russia to Catholicism or Protestantism as part of his radical modernization project
So converting to Catholicism just meant becoming modern, and didn’t necessarily mean denying one’s identity as a Rus person. Indeed, Vyshnevetsky always called himself a Rus, and forced the Polish state to recognize the old Rus princely titles.
I found an article about his old family seat:
https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/time-out/vyshnivets
And protected them from raids. They were his people, after all. He also generously funded the Kiev Mohyla Academy, supporting Rus culture, and in several battles crushed Tatar raiders, keeping Ukrainian lands and their people safe from harm. The territories he owned and cultivated (in red) formed the nucleas of the modern Ukrainian identity:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/IRPmagnates.PNG
Thanks for the citation to the interesting article. Was the map from Snyder”s book? Is there a citation that allows one to see the text? Certainly the times were complex and its various players not easily discernible into black and white personages.
Was replying to your some deal comment, as well as some other points of yours – all a matter of record at this this thread.
No, Polish wiki about the family. It just shows where Magnates’ lands were. Vyshnevetsky lands are in red, Ostrogsky in purple. Both were Rus princes.
The wiki page states that genetic research in 2013 confirms they are Rurikids, not descendants of Lithuanians as had been claimed.
Agreed. Yarema’s wiki page is rather balanced:
https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AF%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%B0_%D0%92%D0%B8%D1%88%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%86%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9
It describes him as a nation-builder who crushed Tatars and kept them at bay, permitting massive settlement on the Left Bank territory he controlled enabled by lighter duties upon his peasants (population on his lands increased from 4,500 to 230,000 under his stewardship), built up towns with artisanship and culture in his territories. Under him, Lubny and Poltava achieved city status and were granted Magdeburg law. Notwithstanding his personal Catholicism massively donated to the Orthodox Church, sponsored a new Orthodox Church brotherhood, schools and hospitals. He may have been building a foundation for an eventual Kiev patriarchate.
He also ruthlessly increased his personal power, and would not abide challenges to it, neither from Poles nor from lesser Rus nobles. He forced PLC to accept Rus princely titles, and managed to take lands from Polish nobles such as Samuel Łaszcz (he took all his lands and ran him off his estate). And he really hated the Cossack rebels who allied with the Tatars and brought them into Ukraine, and who from his POV were stealing his lands – brutally executing any that he could get his hands on.
He died in 1651 at age 39; it would have been interesting to see what would have become of him and of Ukraine had he lived longer.
He is demonized in traditional Ukrainian historiography because it emphasized the “cult of Khmelnytsky” in which Yarema was naturally the antagonist. But in many ways Khmelnytsky (who had legitimate gripes of his own) was more of a destroyer than a builder like Vishnevetsky. This contradicts the myths about the two men, shared by Russians and Ukrainians. In some respects those myths remind me of the ones pushed about the Hapsburgs.
If you haven’t already, you might enjoy reading Ivan Nechui-Levitzkys’ novel ‘Князь Єремія Вишневецький’ that is a short novel reviewing the period and gives an interesting look of the man and his deeds. Overall, you’d have to categorize it as being within the ‘cult of Khmelnitsky’ oeuvre, however after reading the wiki page about it Jarema is afforded some balance as a great builder and military commander. It certainly provides some elements of the fantastic, bringing to mind one scene where Jarema is trying to impress some of his magnate friends and has a whole mountain covered in salt in order to simulate a winter scene in the summertime. I read it over 20 years ago and wouldn’t at all hesitate to read it again, especially after our fruitful dialogue concerning the man and his times:
https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BD%D1%8F%D0%B7%D1%8C_%D0%84%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BC%D1%96%D1%8F_%D0%92%D0%B8%D1%88%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%86%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_(%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%BD)
He doesn’t actually paint anything though, he outsources the painting to Chinese drones while he puts his face/name/hilarious black triumphalism on top
Thank you!
This was also noted by Anal Cunt in the late 90s.
hitler was a sensitive man
hitler was a sensitive man
hitler was a sensitive man
hitler was a sensitive man
he hired gay and handicapped officers
he was concerned about overpopulation
if hitler was alive today
he’d listened to the cure, the smiths, and depeche
mode