The Ukrainian elections are coming up in a couple of weeks, so there’ll be a number of related posts in the next few days.
@ak
More notable posts since the last Open Thread in case you missed any of them.
- Russia’s Uber Gets Better
- Tracking China’s Naval Power
- Mussolini Did Nothing Wrong
- The Terrorist Attack in New Zealand
- Dream of the Civic Chamber
- 7 Reasons Why #YangGang Is More Than Just A Meme
Featured
- Daniel Friedman: Why Elites Dislike Standardized Testing
- “Under pressure from both the academic left and wealthy parents, hundreds of colleges have become ‘test optional,’ allowing students to submit applications without test scores.“
- Ann Coulter: “Millionaires & celebrities “want to destroy the SAT because it is the only mechanism by which your kid can get into an elite college ahead of their kid.“
- AK: “Soviet Union abolished test scores for university admissions during the 1920s. With “former people” (Russian bourgeois, aristocrats) de facto barred, vast majority of students became Jews and prole activists.“
Russia
- Fred Weir: To make Russia great again, Putin is building roads and bridges
- How Russia sank billions of dollars into Venezuelan quicksand
- Insomniac Resurrected has been on a roll:
- “Putler Gained Crimea but lost Ukraine”
- “В Украине” Appears to be a Rather new Form (this would be the Russian language equivalent of the “Ukraine” vs. “the Ukraine” “debate”)
- Biletsky, the Leader of Azov, once said Ukraine Needs a Confederacy with Russia
World
- Guillaume Durocher: How to Win on Immigration: Italy’s Salvini Shows the Way
- Nancy Pelosi: “If America crumbled to the ground, the last thing that would remain is our support for #Israel.“
- CIA implicated in North Korea Embassy break-in in Madrid, Spain.
- RT: US announces more support for ‘heroic’ White Helmets in Syria
- It was nice for the ~one month that the freeze lasted.
- Why Brandon Adamson [altleft.com] supports Yang: “Since Amazon is banning books, and people are being banned from money making media platforms and payment processing services, I don’t really give a shit if these companies get forced to pay taxes and we get our money on the backend instead.“
Science & Culture
- Olalde, Iñigo, Swapan Mallick, Nick Patterson, Nadin Rohland, Vanessa Villalba-Mouco, Marina Silva, Katharina Dulias, et al. 2019. “The Genomic History of the Iberian Peninsula over the Past 8000 Years.” Science 363 (6432): 1230–34.
- Greg Cochran: “The chart above shows what happened when the Indo-Europeans show up. Autosomal steppe ancestry goes from zero to ~40%, but on the Y-chromosome, it goes from zero to 100% over a few hundred years. As quoted in the New York Times, archaeologists ruled out violence as a possible cause… They’re nuts. To those who like the notion that the Indo-Europeans triumphed because they carried in bubonic plague ( or some other pathogen) that blasted immunologically naive EEF farmers: find me a plague that only kills men – all of them.“
Humor & Powerful Takes
- *powerful comment* Beckow: “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.“
- Freek Vermeulen: Academics with lower research productivity (i.e. fewer publications and citations) are more likely to put “PhD”, “Dr.” or “Professor” in their e-mail signatures.
- Harmon-Jones, Cindy, Brandon J. Schmeichel, and Eddie Harmon-Jones. 2009. “Symbolic Self-Completion in Academia: Evidence from Department Web Pages and Email Signature Files.” European Journal of Social Psychology 39 (2): 311–16.
- Emil Kirkegaard: And all the women doctors we see here on Twitter. If you need to directly signal your credentials, it’s because you don’t have anything better.
- Josef Bosch: In 2015 @nytimes published his op-ed re: his stunning & brave decision to live as a woman. In 2019, now that he’s rightly determined that his transition was the result of untreated mental illness… surely they’ll publish a follow-up, right? Nope.
- Steve Stewart-Williams: When natural selection trumps sexual selection
- Scott Alexander: Gwern’s AI-Generated Poetry
- Powerful Website has promoted me to “Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (G.R.U.) contractor.”
Russian foreign minister convinced Venezuela to let German reporter Billy Six leave solitary confinement after the German foreign minister tried to ignore his citizen as much as possible.
https://twitter.com/PetrBystronAfD/status/1106950007964479490
Meanwhile, a former member of the German national football team invited “his” president to his wedding and be his best man.
https://twitter.com/Akparti/status/1106622638888226816
How much does citizenship matter nowadays?
The 737 MAX 8 fiasco is looking increasingly bad for Boeing–and the FAA (which was overruled by Trump to ground the aircraft). The fitting of the new extreme bypass CFM International LEAP turbofan engines necessitated awkward forward, elevated placement of the engines which altered the handling characteristics of the aircraft. This makes it likely to nose into a stall condition, which Boeing addressed with software called Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS).
The software is on when autopilot is off, has a single point of failure (angle of attack sensor vane), and can only be shut off by cutting electric power to the subsystem. The original 737 MAX manual left out this information. Boeing was deliberately vague about all of this in order to expedite type certification and reassure airlines that pilot retraining would be cheap since it’s another 737 (most produced airliner in history).
Boeing blamed Lion Air for the first crash, and after this second crash I see many commenters (mostly American I assume) elsewhere on this site blaming Air Ethiopia. No doubt Third World airlines have lower standards, but that’s insufficient to explain two hull loses in half a year on a new aircraft type. These Third Worlders aren’t constantly crashing 737NGs or, it should be pointed out, the competing Airbus A320 Neo which spurred the development of the 737 MAX in the first place. Hat tip Reiner Tor for this take.
In a way this was caused by the failure of the 787’s extreme outsourcing strategy. This delayed the introduction of that type and ran up tens of billions of costs. Boeing’s original plan had been to follow the 787 and 777X with a clean sheet single aisle design to completely replace the 737. It lacked the time and resources to do so after cleaning up the 787 outsourcing mess, and then the Airbus A320 Neo appeared and started racking up huge orders. Boeing was left with no choice but to make do with what is now a 50+ year old aircraft. New engines were awkwardly fitted and some minor aerodynamic improvements were made.
It’s worth pointing out just how old the 737 really is. The aircraft entered service at the height of the Vietnam War. Contemporary competitors, all long withdrawn from revenue services, included the BAC One-Eleven, the Sud Aviation Caravelle, the Douglas DC-9, the Fokker F28, and the Tupolev Tu-134. The 737 has changed so much over the years that it no longer serves in its original niche (short haul 100 seat or less) market which has been taken over by larger regional jets. The 737 was also not a fundamentally new design, but a derivative of the 707 which first flew in 1957 back when the only country which had successfully put a payload into orbit was the USSR and John Lennon was still an ugly loser playing for peanuts in Church gardens.
There’s also something very human about this debacle. Boeing was one of the best performing large cap stocks in recent times, and its 787 had conquered the skyways. The new 777X, free of the outsourcing debacles of the 787, racked up gigantic orders and forced the Airbus A380–the pride of Europe–into an early and unceremonious retirement. The new 737 MAX was holding its own against the A320 Neo and one of the fastest new sellers in history. Boeing was a darling of the new American President, and its CEO was routinely toasted by the Davos set. Like Icarus, Boeing flew too close to the sun.
Lastly, we all know this has been pushed off the front page by the terrorist attack in New Zealand. This is obviously the worst outcome of that incident, as the 737 MAX story is much more interesting in (and has a far higher body count). The timing is unfortunate…or perhaps very convenient. Was the NZ terrorist attack in fact a false flag incident staged by Boeing to escape the world’s gaze?
It’s your blog and you can do whatever you like AK, however, I don’t understand why you keep plugging IR’s blog? He’s totally unlike you in that he doesn’t appreciate any commentary that he might find inconveniently contradictory to the BS (not that you often post BS) that he’s trying to push. He had the gaul to ban me from his blog because of the awful sin of whataboutism. He posted a thread that tried to besmearch Ukraine for having an unreasonable language policy and compared it to that of fascist Italy (apparently he doesn’t share your views about Mussolini), whereas I tried to point out that Ukraine’s language policies are very similar to those in Russia (pointing out the recent curtailment of the Tatar language there). For my money, you’d even be doing your readers a favor by pushing Mike Averko’s blog, a guy with whom I seldom agree, who often posts interesting comments here, but is definitely a more balanced blogger and somebody who doesn’t exhibit these strange and out of date sovok tendencies. Seriously! 🙂
Should the 737 be the subject of a criminal investigation?
The info about Iberian ancestry is interesting. But, one question:
Was it even possible for ancient Indo-Europeans to commit a genocide so thoroughly? It’s pretty clear that ancient invading hordes were perfectly willing to do such things, but I would be shocked if they actually had the capability to systematically kill off the entire male half of a population, even over the course of several centuries.
Good question. Marauding ‘barbarian’ invaders like the Mongols, Goths and Huns would either decimate whole village populations or spare the women whom they’d make into concubines. If, the raid was not of a particular vindictive nature, the warrior men were drafted into the new military formation.
I know, which is why I’m unsurprised that they would do this. Kill all the men and rape all the women has been standard operating procedure for conquerors throughout much of human history. I’m just surprised that even the ancient Indo-Europeans had the same technical and organizational capacity as, say, the Mongols to wipe out entire male populations.
Also, as you point out, in later cases their were instances where the invading hordes would simply assimilate many of the males, rather than pursuing their utter destruction. In order for 100% of the male ancestry of pre-European populations to have been wiped out over the course of centuries, there must have been an organized campaign of some sort; I am surprised that they were able to carry this out.
In your opinion is the ‘software fix’ enough or is the real solution the rewriting of control laws of the FBW system because the change in the CG of the aircraft due to the new engines can’t be addressed by tweaking the existing FBW system.
i.e. even after the ‘fix’ more crashes will occur.
Is this also some sort of opportunity for COMAC as like the 737 their aircraft is also exclusively available with the LEAP engine but with a much newer airframe?
An invader doesn’t necessarily has to wipe out all the local males, they just need to make sure that their own male progeny had a substantial leg up with inherited higher status and polygyny. Keep the process for generations and the local male lines peter out.
Now, the archaeologists are likely lying. I don;t know about Bronze Age Spain but IE invasions are accompanied in other parts of Europe by the violent destruction of local neolithic farmer villages and their replacement in the landscape with IE pastoralist ones.
Another aspect is that at that low level of political organization slavery and serfdom were not feasible. We are probably talking about small, mobile groups, centered on a warlord, raiding for cattle and young women, but incapable of becoming stationary bandits and extracting an yearly tribute like the mongols or goths did. Being pastoralists they also had little need for slaves and there were no international routes of slave trade yet.
You don’t have to wipe out everyone. You continously murder them, rob them, and push to the territories whcih would support smaller populations, while taking the best areas for yourself. Repeat that over few centuries and you have a complete replacement.
The accepted males would have lower status plus might be less adapted to the style of IEs. For example, more susceptible for the diseases more common amongst IEs.
Boeing probably could design a good plane. They might have several bad years, though. It’s difficult to see how this could easily be fixed. It’s quite possible that a country like China would never lift the ban, even with whatever software patches will be issued, because they could legitimately argue that it doesn’t fully fix the fundamental flaw of the aircraft, and so it stays inherently unsafe even after the fix.
Actually, I’m not even sure the Europeans will lift the ban so easily. I personally wouldn’t, because I frequently fly, and this plane doesn’t feel like something that should be flying at all. I won’t board it, regardless of what fixes will be released.
Özil is very useful. Last year I was banned from a Hungarian liberal journalist’s Facebook page, after I mentioned that Özil and Gündogan both supported Erdogan, as well as two thirds of the Turks in Germany, so clearly oppression is not the only explanation for Erdogan’s success.
Before being deleted, I could still see a few liberal commenters mention how they really didn’t understand the two football players.
It would not be wise for China not to unban the new 737s eventually. The C-919 is not ready yet.
https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2018/08/07/boeing-zhoushan-china-737-max-factory-comac.html
You had been arguing here before that China needed to take the American threat more seriously and should be willing to take losses in the fight.
I think this is a case where arguably the plane won’t be up to 21st century safety standards even after the patch. Therefore, while it’d do enormous harm to America (and relatively smaller harm to China; arguably long term no harm at all), it would probably just be a case of letting the air safety authorities do their job.
Virginia city commemorates Imperial Russian sailors.
https://www.facebook.com/RusEmbUSA/posts/983077041902686?__tn__=K-R
A while back you posted some German video about this, which I actually bothered to watch. You might note that what changed in Tatarstan was that the requirement for everyone to study Tatar was lifted. You can still teach it and study it if you want to, and so far as I can tell, those activities are still funded by the government.
I’m not familiar with language policy in Ukraine, so will not comment on that.
It is mostly meaningless. US citizenship still maintains a special niche though, if you are kidnapped by terrorists for ransom – you might get shot in a crossfire with SEALs.
In sports, the idea of national teams is a total fraud within the West. You are rooting for laundry. Probably designed by a gay, and worn by, not simply random foreigners, but hostile, parasitic invaders who support the total destruction of your country.
I think of all the endless sports scandals to compare it to. The only thing that comes close is the trannies, which is funny because the East German doping scandal was actually a pretty big deal for decades and those people were still females, albeit with mustaches and other secondary sexual characteristics of men.
VeteransToday has just come out with several stories said to be backed by Russian military & intel, that the New Zealand shooter Brendon Tarrant, supposedly age 28, is actually an age 42 Jewish assassin trained in Israel, and that the mosque massacre is a giant scheme of Israel & Anglo intel, with complicity inside the NZ gov’t
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/03/16/intel-drop-shooting-real-shooter-fake-jewish-born-freemason-like-brevik/
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/03/17/new-zealand-the-unraveling-of-a-israeli-mass-murder/
Indeed lots is wrong with the official story, like the hard-if-not-impossible-to-obtain-in-NZ USA commando weapons & optics … Aangirfan on her site is running a major thread on all that’s wrong with the ‘official’ story, quite ‘false phlaggy’
http://aanirfan.blogspot.com/2019/03/new-zealand-mosque-attacks-false-flag.html
Veterans Today, to be sure, is a ‘self-discrediting’ source, on purpose say the site owners – they only get to print truth bombs & stay alive by adding 30% nonsense ‘poisoning the well’, so normies can dismiss them
But at times VT is spectacularly right very early
There is another YouTube rival claiming to have some ability to avoid the censors, D Tube
For those who might want to evaluate the New Zealand shooting helmet-cam mosque massacre livestream – Warning – Graphic Disturbing Content – Adults Only – here is the 17-minute video that Turkey’s President Erdogan is apparently showing the entire Muslim world, the sight of mosque attendees getting coldly shot to death, video-game-style, this vid having quite an impact amongst the Muslim ummah … not pleasant, but a look will help to understand the blowback – conflict dangers that are now becoming actualised in the aftermath
http://d.tube/#!/v/highimpactflix/l3p2l643
that venezuela russia article. does that essentially mean russia is the only thing keeping venezuela up at this point? if they hadn’t been in there spending 9 billion for the last 7 years, venezuela would already have gone down a few years ago?
Poll about attitude towards the Russian language in Ukraine:
http://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=eng&cat=reports&id=832&page=1
29% think Russian and Ukrainian should be equally taught in schools (most popular choice in South and East)
26% think Russian should be taught more than foreign languages but less than Ukrainian (most popular choice in the Center)
25% think Russian should be treated like English or German (most popular choice in the West)
8% think it shouldn’t be taught at all (almost all of these people are in western Ukraine – it gets 22% support there)
:::::::
Poll was last done in 1998. Since then, in territories currently under Kiev’s control (that is, not including Crimea and Donbas), support in equal Russian/Ukrainian language instruction has dropped from 40% to 27%. Most Ukrainians want the state language.
::::::::
There is also a question about the Donbas war – would you support autonomy for Donbas if it ends the war.
Strong support 28%
Weak support 23%
Weak opposition: 9%
Strong opposition: 15%
Hard to say: 23%
The only region that opposed more than supported it was the West. The Center had more support than opposition (though support was under 50%). Strong support in the South and East.
Expelling Donbas wasn’t an option in this poll, nor were details of the nature of the autonomy spelled out.
Would be in the single digits (I suspect low single digits). Most people have an instinctive reaction against giving away their territory, regardless of the benefits.
Upcoming Ukraine posts (mostly as a reminder/guide to myself):
Probably. But one can make all sort of interesting polls. If the autonomy is so broad that it means Donbas gets to veto any national policies as I believe the Minsk agreement stipulates (i.e, stop EU integration), do you prefer inclusion or expulsion? Or status quo?
So sharing the video could potentially get you more jail time than Brenton Tarrant will get for killing any single one of those Muslims.
https://twitter.com/ramzpaul/status/1107296109335068672
Weird target of inevitable witch-hunt but ok.
This is a very normal reaction.
Livestreaming terrorist attacks, is something new, and with unknown consequences (and obviously, it would not be good if this started a social media fashion with the violently insane demographic).
So obviously authorities will panic there, and announce such a strong punishment to try to prevent sharing. Later courts and judges will discuss, from actual cases, what is the real penalty for this (not what is randomly announced by police twitter).
New Zealand law though, has no application to Russian or American internet, where the video is popularly shared, and where it is (as far as my limited knowledge of law) legal to watch, to host and to share.
Songbird I logged here today to ask you if you saw this newly, strange article?
https://www.newsweek.com/ufo-2019-harry-reid-china-russia-senate-unexplained-aerial-phenomena-1349256
We were discussing Bigelow Aerospace a few weeks ago, and decided Robert Bigelow seems quite insane (which is the impression from seeing videos of him).
But what is reliability of Harry Reid? Harry Reid is also friends with Robert Bigelow, and partly responsible for government funding of Bigelow Aerospace, so there could be some corruption there.
In this story, Harry Reid “dropped major hints that he knows potential adversaries, Russia and China, have carried out their own military studies to figure out how UFOs work and how to build their own.”
Nothing in Russian media is reporting this.
In Russian media, position “UFOs are a hoax” and result of mental illness, seems like common consensus in the articles in mainstream media for the last few years. It’s strange to see American media going more in the “crazy direction” with this topic.
Here is video related to the Newsweek article:
At 2:37, lol involvement of John McCain
At 3:28 – about missiles and Russia, which I’m not sure this all could be cover for.
File under: Big Brother Knows Best:
https://theculturetrip.com/europe/russia/articles/will-the-tatar-language-become-extinct/
The decision came down from Moscow and not Kazan. What was wrong with the way things were? What precipitated the need to change things?
Your questions can be answered with another question: Why should the Russian government promote yet another national identity within its borders, unless it is for some reason absolutely necessary? As we have seen with Ukraine, promoting distinct languages is practically equivalent to promoting distinct national identities.
“One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland — and no other” – Emil Cioran
NZ ISPs were blocking 4chan and 8chan after the shooting as well. NZ posters on 4chan said the ban would be extended to all ISPs soon.
NZ police are also emailing message boards requesting IP addresses of anybody discussing the attack:
https://imgur.com/a/0M3KAZ3
Also Reddit has instituted a sitewide ban on both the video and the manifesto, including giving people directions on how to find them without directly linking, as well any discussion of the contents or posts that show support for the shooter (even if they are just ironic memes).
Unless it is mandatory, Tatar will die. Language campaigners know this. Treason is afoot in Tatarstan.
To my understanding, the NZ police state is far less developed than its other Anglo counterparts, as a consequence of NZ being rather boring and choosing to have Australia shoulder its defense burden. So this slapstick method shouldn’t be that surprising, they have nil experience in this behavior.
Now they are going to get the police state good and hard, and most of the population is going to cheer it on.
The consequences of this attack will be felt for years to come, especially if there are retalitory attacks.
Anglo far-right politics is particularly nihlistic, individualistic and useless. Practically no one is going to own up and apologize about fanning the flames against Islam, which hasn’t managed to deliver any cuts in immigration, but has led to counterproductive violent acts.
I was neither criticizing nor supporting the change, just pointing out that there is an obvious difference between banning the teaching of X and making the study of X non-compulsory.
The reason that compulsory courses in Tatar were unpopular is because something like half the residents of Tatarstan are native speakers of Russian. You can argue that these Russians are being petty, but learning a language is a major investment of time, and for anyone who is not a Tatar, this has a huge opportunity cost. Wouldn’t you rather have your kids learning English, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, or any other from a long list of languages? Presumably if Ukrainians living in the Hungarian-speaking part of Ukraine had to take mandatory courses in Hungarian, they’d be annoyed too.
Admittedly, the end result may very well be the death of the Tatar language, but ultimately that’s the responsibility of the Tatars themselves.
So now that I think of it, yes, it seems like a reasonable policy.
I was critical of IR’s insincere attempt to try and paint the Russian language issue in Ukraine as a unique problem, only to exist in Ukraine and nowhere else. His weak analysis of the situation could only point to the policies within fascist Italy as a comparison, whereas, I could point out a similar situation going on in neighboring Russia. I found one good article that goes into a bit more depth than others, and is worth reading if you’re really interested in the issues at hand complete with an ominous warning for Kremlin think tanks:
https://warontherocks.com/2018/01/moscows-fight-against-federalism-fear-and-loathing-in-russias-catalonia/
Mussolini post from a few days ago reminded me of this funny video:
Basically this black YouTube rapper guy Bello FiGo, who lives in Italy, releases these songs playing on right-wing tropes about immigrants, bragging about how he pays no rent, sleeps in 4-star hotels paid for by the government etc. Pure troll, even holds concerts where immigrants are charged a lower entrance fee than native Italians.
He is invited on this right-wing talk show to explain/defend himself, with Alessandra Mussolini (Il Duce’s granddaughter and a right-wing politician in Italy) as another guest. Mussolini doesn’t get the joke and goes into stereotypical “angry Italian woman” mode, to which the rapper responds with even more absurd trolling, saying that immigrants should be allowed to steal stuff from native Italians because they’re oppressed etc, which of course only makes Mussolini angrier. The rapper ends the interview by dabbing on her (then a novelty in Italy).
And that’s the story of how Benito Mussolini’s granddaughter got dabbed on by a black YouTube troll.
https://onlinguafranca.com/2017/03/10/a-whole-country-trolled-by-a-rapper/
Interesting trivia.
One can guess the origins of certain Ukrainians by surnames. The surname -enko is found in Kiev oblast and points east, -uk is found from Galicia and Volyn to Vynnytsia and Zhytomir, except for Transcarpathia:
https://pollotenchegg.livejournal.com/2019/03/06/
https://i.imgur.com/cKhJrdN.png
It seems to follow the post 1650 border – places that remained in Poland after 1650 have -uks, places that left have -enkos.
Lviv is an island of -enkos in the West. I suspect this is because a lot of people from central Ukraine settled the city when the Soviets took over.
interesting how many on both Left and Right have been Anglos: guy who shot up the GOPe congressmen, Paddock (if it was him who did it), bike lock antifa guy, redneck revolt antifa guy – probably means something, not sure what.
(even Brievik if you include Holland and south and west Scandi as Anglo)
Russian sailors have done some very good things for us.
I hold basically to the 19th century GOP platform, which means I’m a horrible racist in today’s media eyes. Anyway, I believe the Union cause was generally correct. And people who think that “Union cause” = “gay liberalism” are ignorant; the average Northern soldier hated slavery because he wanted America free for white people. And I’m happy to say that the Russian Navy played a brief, forgotten, but rather vital role in helping the Union win. The British and the French were close to intervening. More importantly, the British were about to send the Confederates some ironclads that could have been used to decisively break the Union blockade.
Well, the Russians, as part of their own conflict with the British and French, sent much of their navy to San Francisco and New York – partly as an official state visit, but mostly as a strategic ploy during a war scare between those 3 European powers.
The Russians could never have beaten the British in open naval combat, but the Russian plan was to use their ships as commerce raiders, based apparently out of America, in the event of war. Now THAT scared the British, who knew full well how devastating commerce raiding could be. The Russian presence in America served Russian interests just as it served the Union Navy’s interests, and, ultimately, the British plan for introducing strong ironclads into the war was broken.
So: thanks, Russia! Glad our interests could intersect.
But even in Civil War historiography, we cannot escape absurd Russophobia. I heard a historian (he’s otherwise pretty good) recently mention the presence of Russian ships in NY and SF then, and argue that it was indicative that the Russians too – like the British and French – were interested in intervening on behalf of the Confederates. This is a ridiculous statement, which any 5 minute study of 19th century Russian strategy would reveal, but this is the ignorance among even smart people.
Unreasonable means badly thought out and likely to cause more harm than good. It is easy to see that Kiev’s post-Maidan language policies have indeed been unreasonable : they have backfired.
Tatarstan is a different local issue, but in any case even if there would be similarities the test is whether Kiev’s language policy has made Ukraine better and stronger. I has not, it has made it weaker. To engage in self-defeating policies in many areas and claim that ‘others have also been doing it‘ is insane. Yes, France had a tough unifying language policy, but they didn’t introduce it in the middle of a civil war. There is a good time for everything, as it is, it looks to outside observers that Kiev is just twisting around in agony.
I don’t know if you saw it in the other open thread but I found an English-language lecture by Dmowski:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-70/#comment-3094084
Just how exactly has Kyiv’s language policy made Ukraine worse off and weaker? Many countries in the world give preference to the titular nation’s native tongue. In Ukraine’s case, it makes even more sense because Ukraine is trying to shed the ugly side of its imperial past, both during Czarist times and during Soviet times too. This past includesd a long history of policies that favored russification used to foster a sense of belonging to imperial states that no longer exist today.
If nobody is going to mention the recent Slovak presidential election (1st phase) then I will. Basically a contest between a eurocrat and a neoliberal candidate in the upcoming final phase. All nationalists got BTFO’d. Slovakia is not a big country, but they cannot afford to to slacken up. The issue of corruption is a real concern, and the right-wing is foolish to ignore it. Now they will end up with a liberal president who will not hesitate to interfere in other matters at will, such as vetoing laws that the parliament passes in order to be ‘pro-European’, which is code for being a toadie of Brussels.
The president of Slovakia is not powerless. He or she can veto laws and, much more importantly, has the power to appoint senior judges. Anyone who thinks the judiciary doesn’t matter should spend a few moments looking at how it thwarted Trump at every turn early on in his presidency before he completly folded and sold out.
Overall, a bad development for Slovakia and surprisingly so, given how they are usually portrayed as ‘based’. This election got them brutually exposed as much weaker and more pathetic than commonly believed. Perhaps they should be cut up among their neighbours, since they are the slavic version of Belgium anyway, given that they cannot be trusted to rule themselves and are clearly too incompetent to do so.
Boeing should have kept the 757 and 717. Those are still best sellers dispite being out of production for over 10 years now.
On 4chan somebody made the comparison between banning distribution of this video and banning the distribution of child porn, and I have to admit it gave me pause. Obviously it’s easy to make the case against producing child porn, but what about circulating stuff that already exists, much of which I understand was made in Scandinavia in the 1970s, when it was legal to do so? Almost everybody will support laws against the possession of child porn on the basis that it discourages the production of such materials and also that watching child porn would increase a person’s likelihood of molesting children in real life…so why not apply the same logic to the shooting video, and ban it on the basis that it encourages copycat behavior?
Of course this is a slippery slope (Do we ban ISIS videos? Cartel executions? 9/11 footage?), but it’s an interesting discussion. With the rise of social media, and everybody having a camera/video recorder with them at all times, I suspect there will be more laws against the distribution of videos of criminal/terrorist acts, even if done by third parties.
Roman Dmowski on The Ukraine Question
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/07/ukraine-question-1930-part.html
“Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid dropped major hints that he knows potential adversaries, Russia and China, have carried out their own military studies to figure out how UFOs work and how to build their own,””
Harry Reid once floated a multi-million dollar UFO study that benefited his own district, or one of his donors, IIRC. So, caution is advised here. Unfortunately, the UFO excuse is a sometimes effective way to get defense spending for a project or a district; the public is certainly dumb enough to buy it. Just last year the American media went AS over an IR camera defect supposedly proving the existence of alien spacecraft. Lost in the debate was the issue of the company contracted to provide expensive IR cameras for the navy and aiforce handing over defective equipment. How convenient.
You make a good point. If Russia wishes to become a unitary state, then indeed it need not encourage the development and usage of the Tartar language. But let me remind you that Russia, at least formally, defines itself as being a federative state where separate nationalities have constitutional rights enshrined to develop and protect minority language rights within its constituent republics, like the Republic of Tartastan. Ukraine, having even a more autonomous stature within the Soviet Union was a separate state and therefore never needed (at least theoretically) outside direction in setting its own internal state policies – certainly not after 1991 since it left the orbit of the Soviet Union. BTW, Ukraine has defined itself as a unitary state, not a federative one.
Careful AP, you’re giving Russophiles yet another reason to split Ukraine up into seprate pieces. I hope that Beckow doesn’t read your comment! 🙂
Anatoly, regarding “Do Crimeans Support Joining Russia?”, I recommend addressing this perhaps:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/05/06/russian-government-agency-reveals-fraudulent-nature-of-the-crimean-referendum-results/
That was recently thrown at me by someone who gets his views from the Western MSM in a debate on the matter.
I’m going to copy and paste part of an email I sent back. Feel free to reuse or repurpose if you like (attribution unnecessary):
The Washington Post article quotes a blog entry posted by Yevgeny Bobrov, a member of the President of Russia’s Council on Civil Society and Human Rights, who was part of a small group that visited Crimea for three days in April 2014 and interviewed various people. The original post is still up, I found it here: http://president-sovet.ru/members/blogs/bobrov_e_a/problemy-zhiteley-kryma-/
The English translation of the relevant section that the Washington Post gives is indeed accurate:
“In the opinion of virtually all the experts and citizens interviewed:
– The vast majority of the citizens of Sevastopol voted in favor of unification with Russia in the referendum (50-80%); in Crimea, various data show that 50-60% voted for unification with Russia, with a turnout of 30-50%.”
This is quite different from the official Crimean referendum numbers. Some Western sources have used the lower range of these estimates to claim that only 15% of Crimeans actually voted to join Russia.
My main problem is that all the “experts and citizens” are unnamed, so it’s impossible to check anything. I tried really hard to find more information about this expedition, and found this detailed account by another member, an oppositionist journalist who works for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper:
http://hro.rightsinrussia.info/archive/ukraine/crimea/gannushkina (English translation)
She mentions that they had 20 meetings in Crimea’s two biggest cities over the course of 3 days, mostly through her own connections.
She goes into quite a lot of detail about the bureaucratic chaos that was going on back then, and her reporting seems accurate on that (it really was bad at first, although it improved within a few months). Nowhere in her lengthy article, which contains numerous quotes from people they interviewed and a lot of criticism of the Russian authorities, does she say anything about the referendum estimates that Bobrov mentions in his report, which I find strange.
So, I have a few theories for what could have happened:
1. Bobrov really did interview people who gave him those estimates, but those people were wrong (maybe because they suffered from confirmation bias due to extrapolating from their own social circles, which opposed the referendum)
2. Bobrov simply made up that section of his report (would explain why his colleague didn’t mention something so significant), either because he himself was anti-referendum (like the other people in the expedition), or because he got paid by Ukraine (Ukraine has moles in the Russian bureaucracy just like Russia has in Ukraine’s, after all, and there was a heavy information war going on at the time – to this day, actually)
3. Those really were the true numbers, and then within a few months (when Gallop did their first survey https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimean_status_referendum#Post-referendum_polls ), Crimean approval of the referendum’s results rose to over 80%, where it has stayed since (perhaps helped along by Ukraine punitively blocking their water* and electricity** supplies, and the Crimean GDP growing 55% since 2014).
4. Those really were the true numbers, and Crimeans are consistently lying to the Western polling agencies because they’re terrified of making their true feelings known.
I also found Bobrov’s name on Myrotvorets/Peacemaker, the Ukrainian state-sponsored assassination website, which is probably entirely irrelevant but still kind of bizarre. Why would you punish someone who gave your own side such good “PR material”?
*See the last sentence here: https://www.stopfake.org/en/manipulation-ukraine-s-foreign-minister-advocates-depriving-crimea-of-water/amp/
**https://jamestown.org/program/ukraine-stops-power-supply-to-russian-annexed-crimea/
“In early December, no longer fearing retribution from Russian power suppliers, Kyiv restored the electricity flow to Crimea through only one of the four power lines that had been damaged in November.”
Says who? Your deranged lying self?
Usually with these things the biggest campaigners against minority languages are other (non-titular) minority ethnicities.
I am a free speech absolutist on these issues. I want to get rid of the Miller Test beccause I am afried it will one day be used to ban “hate speech”.
Will it, though? It’ll certainly decline, but if there’s enthusiasm for it to continue, it will. Dagestan has about 70 languages and only about six are compulsory, there are pockets of Greek speakers dotted around that still survive. Tatar isnt even that parochial as there’s at least some mutual intelligibility with turkish.
They have to learn Russian more or less as a foreign language, too. So they are forced to learn two languages (one of which is largely useless) before learning English.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/trump-right-on-crimea/
UFOs were a cover story for experimental aircraft, the Soviets always hinted they knew this anyway.
Still I met a Soviet cosmonaut who said he saw all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff when he went into space, the Soviet authorities told him to keep his mouth shut when he got back. Still I would expect there to be unusual phenomenon in space, not necessarily indicative of intelligent life.
Half of the population of Tatarstan is ethnically non-Tatars. But Russian is the “native” language for almost the entire population of Tatarstan-so it is the language of communication of the majority of Tatars
Actress Chulpan Khamatova (ethnically 100% Tatar from Kazan) in a recent interview described as a curiosity the Tatars from the village, who really know the Tatar language. Khamatova herself does not know Tatar. She remembers the teacher of the Tatar language at school as Hitler’s likeness.
The greatest strategic mistake in British history was not intervening on behalf of the Confederacy, welcoming the Southern states back in to the family would have made the Empire unstoppable. Ultimately Russian ships or not there wasn’t the popular support to intervene, and investments in Northern states as well as corn imports were too economically important.
Genuinely interesting question whether the North could have won with the Brits backing the Confederates.
It would have equalized naval and munitioning power, though the South would still be at a 2.5:1 manpower disadvantage. (Not like Britain was going to send masses of troops across the Atlantic).
How long would British public opinion have tolerated being on the side of a slaving Power? Or would Northern morale to prosecute the war have fallen first?
To my mind, this statement would need lots more qualification and support before I could ever agree to it. I’ve long thought that the entire history of the British alliance with France leading up to World War 1 was their greatest strategic mistake. I can’t bring myself to believe that the British really needed preventive war with Germany. And, yes, I like Pat Buchanan.
Here is a respectable read on the subject:
https://americancivilwar.com/tcwn/confederate_navy/confederate_navy_buildup.html
No mention of the Russians there
As for popular support, really, it all depends on what the general war situation was on the ground. If the Confederates, for example, had managed to make something more serious out of the 1862 Maryland campaign, I’m sure the powerful in England could have found some excuse to get involved. (Like the American media and many historians today, contemporary European observers seemed obsessed with the Virginia/Eastern campaign, even though the Union armies were dominant in the rest of the South almost from the war’s beginning). As for the French, they would have then done what they did with Mexican affairs, which was clumsily follow whatever the British did.
In contrast to the above article, Webster Tarpley here argues that the US-Russian “alliance” (I think this is a too strong word) saved the Union: https://www.voltairenet.org/article169488.html
Thanks!
The mere existence of a second front would tie up a lot of manpower of the North.
On the other hand, the North would be at a serious naval naval and munitioning power disadvantage.
Like I said, it depends on the general war situation. Gettysburg and Vicksburg did pretty much end any chance of British intervention.
Before that the diciest moment for the Union was in late 1862; although the Western (Trans-Appalachian) theater was going quite fine, there was a massive moral impact at Lee’s successes that August, and he went on the offensive into Maryland. I’m not much for alternative history, just not the mind for it, but I have a hard time seeing how the Antietam campaign goes any better for Lee, if one assumes that the Union manages to become aware of his whereabouts (Order 191)
In any case, there were something like 7 or 800,000 soldiers killed in our civil war, so anything Russia did to prevent it going on any longer is appreciated. No one needed to hear When This Cruel War Is Over any longer than 4 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBuUu_fwzuQ
Probably, especially if the Maryland campaign had been something other than a strategic Union victory.
It was not an alliance until the war.
The point of the Entente was to make their global Empire less costly by resolving conflicts with France, the other real global power.
Only if you consider the effect on the Donbas territories, which de facto are no longer in Ukraine. OTOH the policies have consolidated the rest of the country.
The United States c.1860 had a respectable 7.2% share of global manufacturing output – about equivalent to that of France – the great bulk of which it ofc retained in the Union.
Britain’s share was 20%. However, it would hardly have devoted an all out effort in favor of the Confederacy, so it wouldn’t mobilize to anywhere near the same extent as the Union. Munitioning potential would merely equalize. Which ofc would still be very bad for the Union, given the superior quality of the Confederacy’s soldiers and generals.
The Confederacy would get a massive boost from having its trade routes remain open, since it was far more dependent on international trade than the Union. So it could continue to import weapons and food. The Union would not be as hampered by a British blockade as the Confederacy was by the Union blockade, because it was both agriculturally and industrially basically self-sufficient. Having considerable naval capabilities of its own, the British blockade would also be relatively more porous.
If the Union continued the war regardless, I think it would have won eventually anyway. This still doesn’t solve the problem of the vast demographic disparity between the two sides: 2.5:1 in terms of total population, but 4:1 on the more relevant metric of free citizens. The Confederacy had too few people (~1 million free men of fighting age in 1861). Eventually, ~40% of them would die; a ratio comparable to the USSR’s military losses in WW2. Unclear how it could have kept going on for much longer after 1865, even if far better equipped.
Ending the alliance with Japan in 1921 (in exchange for basically nothing from America) was the greatest mistake
Rather insightful, though not as reflective of reality as it might seem. OTOH, Dmowski and his followers massively bungled things both internally and externally for interwar Poland so his insight did not translate into good policy.
Interesting. This explains the intensity in terms of honoring the sacrifices of their ancestors by American Southerners.
You are absolutely right Mr. Hack, I ban whataboutism on my blog. And I also ban personal attacks on yours truly, and other participants in the discussions.
Ukraine is a country which represses other languages and does not allow minorities the choice to receive education and services in their native language. Just look at the language law currently debated in the Rada.
You posted some American propaganda about Tatar classes in Tatarstan. The issue had to do with people being offered the choice not to do the Tatar language. This is fundamentally different from the Ukrainian situation. Crimean Tatars in Crimea have recently received textbooks in their native language, while Tatar classes may have closed in Tatarstan because locals don’t want to learn Tatar.
I did not want to have this discussion with you because we would spend dozens of comments trying to prove each other wrong. And since you broke the rules of my blog twice, your ass was blocked.
Sincerely, Insomniac Resurrected
Sounds about right, except your name should be updated to Stalin Resurrected, where everything you disagree with (an ‘inconvenient truth’) is labelled ‘American propaganda’ and then banned from public debate.
Another example of your lies, BS and deceit. Good luck Tovarish in building your Ruskij Mir, but you can count me out! 🙁
Makes me wonder what the problem of West Ukraine is. Why are the fascist raguli so intolerant?
Says every single article that I’ve read about the topic. Do you know otherwise, then prove it. Who’s really lying and who’s telling the truth, tovarishch?
29% think Russian and Ukrainian should be equally taught in schools (most popular choice in South and East)
The results at KIIS show that in the Donbass this is more than 70% of the population. And in the East and South the numbers reach over 50%.
With this much support of bilingualism, I wonder how much was the conflict the result of LARPer Strelkov taking over Slavyansk rather than Ukrnazis taking over the parliament and attacking supporters of pluralism in the East?
I am not aware what, if any, military plans had been drawn up but as you say the biggest effect would have been the RN and it would likely have been a largely naval intervention. Like Germany in WWI the Confederacy was really strangled to death and ending the naval blockade, as well as supplies of arms and ammunition would have perhaps been sufficient on their own. Otherwise I would have massively reinforced the garrison in Canada whilst refusing to intervene or invade with British troops. This would have forced the North to divert large number of troops away from the South. This analysis ignores what the French might have done.
Good reason foreign intervention was always seen as the number one threat by Lincoln and his government . Before the summer of 63 this threat had dissipated with Vicksburg and Gettysburg but I think even as late as the start of 64 intervention could have been successful. Rebellions are almost always successful when they have a foreign sponsor. Psychologically the chances of victory shift dramatically to the rebelling side.
Interesting, thanks for the link. I forgot about that article.
For me, the most interesting is the part Anatoly mentions at the end, the transcripts of the Ukrainian discussions on February 28, 2014.
http://www.rnbo.gov.ua/files/2016/stenogr.pdf
This is potentially the most convincing evidence for somebody who gets all their news from the Western media. Primary material of what the leaders of Ukraine were saying at the time. Although, what’s the proof that it’s a real document? How was it published?
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a fully transcribed version, much less a translation into English. I’m not great at reading Ukrainian myself. I did find that most (but not quite all) of the text in the PDF can be copied+pasted into Google Translate.
Anyway, here are some of my own translations of relevant sections concerning the Ukraine elite’s beliefs about public opinion in Crimea (I mostly translated the Ukrainian into Russian, then that into English, manually fixing any mistakes along the way):
The 2nd paragraph of pg. 6 is where Valentin Nalivaychenko admits that the idea of joining Russia enjoys mass support in Crimea:
2nd paragraph, pg. 8: Nalivaychenko:
p.9 paragraphs 2&3, Avakov (Minister of Internal Affairs):
p.12, Tenyukh (Ukraine’s Minister of Defense) replying to Turchinov (acting President of Ukraine), who is asking how many of Ukraine’s 15,000 nominal forces in the region would be willing to fight:
p. 16, Nalivaychenko:
p.16-17, Vitaliy Yarema (General Prosecutor of Ukraine):
(this suggestion was not discussed any further in the meeting, and no resolution was taken to implement it)
The only sort-of dissenting voice at the meeting was Acting President Turchinov (he also seems to admit that the Crimean public and elites are against Ukraine, but believes that their opinion is not very deeply-held and can be changed. He also, unlike the others, does not accept that the opinions of the Crimean “street” played a crucial role in the Maidan government’s quick loss of power in Crimea in the days preceding the referendum, believing that it was 100% due to the Russian troops. Turchinov’s view became the mainstream one among Western analysts), p.23-24:
I think this is the first time that any of this text has been translated into English… if anybody wants to use it, be my guest.
I don’t owe you a platform.
You have, only in the course of this discussion, called me a Sovok and a Stalinist. Neither of which is in any way correct. That’s a kind of behaviour you displayed on my blog.
You have been warned once. You have been given rules of my blog to read. I have given you a chance, and you blew it.
Hah, never mind. The host site of that document, rnbo.gov.ua, is the homepage of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, currently led by the same Turchinov who was Acting President of Ukraine back then. That’s pretty convincing as proof that it’s legitimate.
As long a your behavior closely resembles the thuggish behavior of an authoritarian figure like Stalin, you’ll continue to be compared to him. I’ve been writing commentary here at Karlin’s blog for over two years now, and he’s not even come close to banning me, even though I often post things that are inimical to his point of view. He’s a very different sort of Russophile than you, much more intelligent and open minded than you are.
You got that right, and nobody else in the world either from the look of things! Just look at the participation rate over at at your straitjacketed blog. You average about one comment per 10 threads, and even half of those are pingbacks that you’re responsible for! It’s really funny. And don’t bother telling me how successful you are over in tweetland – I’ve looked at that bizarre configuration of ‘dialogue’ too. Everybody there seems to be talking past the other guy. It’s sad really, you could have had an interesting blog, but you blew it. Now you’re reduced to nothing more than looking for handouts over at Karlin’s blog. Sad. 🙁
You can of course do whatever you want but not on my blog. I hope you are not a retard and understand this.
I am not certain if the first thing you wrote on Karlin’s blog was a personal insult. But you did that on my blog, and I don’t want my blog to be full of semi-retarded commentary by a butthurt Svidomite.
The fact that the discussions are not filled with your moronic comments does not bother me one bit. I’d rather get quality comments, which are on topic, than bother with you.
Like your own pingbacks! 🙂 🙂 🙂
Poroshenko has 15% approval. I believe that is less than Yanukovitch at the end. And the comedian is getting 30% – in effect, the vote for the comedian is for ‘none of the above’, against the system. Quite a consolidation.
If you think about “B-2 Spirit” and “F-117”.
Both these planes are tested in Nevada, from the early 1980s.
At the same time, it is a national priority for them to be secret to Soviet Union and spies (especially the B-2 was going to be key to American strategic bombing strategy against the USSR).
To inject UFO stories (and a mentally ill “UFO community” in the area) is a very useful cover to confuse Soviet intelligence in America, so we can assume the government might even invest a lot of funds in this.
It’s advantage to confuse the opponent, to have “UFO stories” in this area of America. It creates more deniability for testing experimental airplanes.
It can also frighten the opponent in the Cold War, to imagine that there may be experimental planes with the capacities reported by “UFO” sightings.
I believe that in back in USSR, “UFOs” were a publicly very suppressed topic.
In the 1990s, suddenly a lot of former military officials and pilots, reported about how they had seen UFOs or that these objects had been investigated with a large budget (such as at НИИ-22).
So it was privately, viewed as a serious topic in the USSR, with Brezhnev. But was not introduced in public discussion.
Only in 1990s, after they leave their jobs and change of government, then military officials start saying to the public about seeing objects in the sky they could not identity.
This is the difference to America, where the unidentified flying objects was a part of the public discussion (and the government used this public discussion for its personal advantage).
I read about a few stories. But it seems objects more commonly reported by pilots, but not by astronauts. And often it seems (from little I know about the topic), relating to objects on viewed by radar and by pilots at a relatively low altitude.
We have an easy test: let’s say the language policy stayed the same after Maidan, Russians were not attacked and demonised (e.g. Odessa), Bandera marches were discouraged: would Ukraine today be stronger or weaker? You tell me.
Many countries have minorities and ugly history: Irish with English, Hungarians in Romania-Slovakia, Turks in Bulgaria, Austrians in Italy, Basques, Swedes in Finland, Flemish in Belgium, and on and on. They have handled it differently, with a compromise and a mutual understanding. That is the European way that you yell about so much. Ukraine will never be in EU with an unresolved minority policies with its Russians, Hungarians etc… Kiev’s neo-con advisors don’t care, the Ukrainians should.
I care about quality, not the quantity of horse shit that you generate. I don’t care if I receive a comment once in a while. It is better than having shitstorms developing underneath every post, with you engaging in classic trolling tactics, and calling me Sovok and Stalinist.
You must be a fucking idiot if you don’t get this…
All that I get is that my style of bantering with commenters here does not provoke any great hostility at this blog, where freedom of expression is much greater respected than any project that you’re involved with. If you act like a fanatical censor, don’t be surprised if people label you a ‘Stalinist’ or a ‘sovok’. Karlin isn’t nearly as draconian as you are, therefore nobody has a need to label him with these unsavory epithets. Think about it, it does make sense.
Don’t pornographers do it to make money though? No one is gonna make money from going on a shooting spree and posting it.
To be fair, there are probably some who find it annoying that you often seem to go out of your way to pick a fight and consistently find the LEAST flattering way to interpret someone else’s words.
But oh well, if Karlin’s fine with it then so am I (though I wasn’t at first). You seem pretty okay if neither Ukraine nor Russia are the subject of the conversation, at least. Maybe there’s a productive way to discuss them too – more experimentation is needed.
On that note, I’m kind of curious what you think about the quotes I translated in comment 76. That was what Ukraine’s leadership at the time believed. Were their assessments correct? Was there anything surprising in there for you (either now, or would have been surprising back then if you’d known it)?
Can someone tell me how to embed tweets here so they have the proper (realistic, not just text) formatting?
Does anyone have any good sources to read on how strictly (or otherwise) ‘radical Islam’ actually is repressed in Western countries?
This is the first time that anybody has criticized me for not being solely interested in ‘all things Ukrainian’. Thorfinnsson has even coined a term that supposedly defines my narrow minded interest in all matters that pertain to Ukraine – “Hackism” I actually find it flattering that you’ve noticed that I do indeed comment on many other topics too.
I have no reason to doubt the veracity of most of the content of these observations. I’ve never promoted the belief that the Crimea was a hotbed of Ukrainian patriotism. It is, after all, the oblast that had an ethnic group other than Ukrainian being in the majority, Russian.
As for Karlin’s tolerance of my pro-Ukrainian views on his blog, he’s smart to realize, like Woody Allen did about atheists and God:
🙂
Thanks for the reply.
Actually, it’s possible that observing you flip out on Ukraine/Russia issues and being normal on others has improved my behaviour somewhat when discussing the former. I try to not use sarcasm or baiting now and just stick to primary sources presented in a neutral way. If the two are mixed together in a comment, you’ve tended to respond to the former and ignore the latter. I doubt you’re the only one who does that, so it’s probably a good rule of thumb in general.
I don’t care what you think. You broke my rules twice, and will not get a third chance.
Oh, Boo, hoo…I’m banned for life From ‘the Dumbest Blog about Ukraine You Never Read’ 🙂
“You have, only in the course of this discussion, called me a Sovok and a Stalinist. Neither of which is in any way correct. That’s a kind of behaviour you displayed on my blog.”
What would you describe yourself as?
What kind of relationship do you want between Ukraine and Russia?
Do you believe in the ‘All-Russian Nation’?
If you believe in the ‘ All-Russian Nation’, can it not exist multiple versions of Russian(i.e. Russian, Pomor, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Rusyn)?
Should Ukrainian be taught at all?
Are you content with the current Russian government? Could it be worse? Could it be better?
yes, i didn’t realize the percentage was so high – explains a lot
“That is the European way that you yell about so much. Ukraine will never be in EU with an unresolved minority policies with its Russians, Hungarians etc… Kiev’s neo-con advisors don’t care, the Ukrainians should.”
If those Russians either emigrate or re-identify as Ukrainian that minority problem will dissapear. It appears that Alsatian is going the way of the dodo. France is an EU member.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsatian_dialect#Status_of_Alsatian_in_France
You actually touched an interesting subject, right there.
High-budget porn and “premium” subscription websites are an enigma to me – literally every single video is pirated and available for free – where does their profit come from?
If the “product” you consume is free, perhaps you, the consumer, are the actual product of their enterprise?
You should tell that to the Ukrainian government lol. I wish they had your realism, as it stands they don’t even have the sense to recognize that Crimea is part of Russia.
Got about 2 hours of sleep today, so much as I’d like to start my Crimea series on its formal anniversary, better do it on a clear head tomorrow.
Of course, but so what? This system is a legacy of Soviet times, and is partially reflective of the heavy over-representation that national minorities had in the early Soviet government, which feared Russian nationalism as much as anything else. If some policies of the federal system (such as promoting languages other than Russian) have become obstacles to the overall goal of achieving national unity and stability, then they should be circumvented. With that in mind, this is actually a rather mild change in policy, as they have not banned the teaching of the Tatar language, nor even restricted it; they have merely made it non-obligatory.
Ukraine is a perfect example of the long-term negative consequences of promoting regional languages and cultures. If the Soviet government had taken early steps to mandate that all Ukrainians had at least some years of education completely in Russian, it is highly doubtful that Ukrainian national sentiment would be nearly as widespread as today. It is good that Russia is making moves to ensure that it does not inadvertently create any more Ukraines.
Thank you for your response! 🙂
That is an eye-opening number that I didn’t know. I don’t think outsiders can appreciate US history without understanding it. Something about civil wars is very deadly. In retrospect, it is never worth it, but I respect the sacrifices.
You can see why they are trying so very hard to not let anyone see it, as it might make people suspect its not real. At the beginning he walks along a busy street brandishing a shotgun and also has an assault rifle and no one notices? There is even someone getting out of a parked car that he walks right by.
Then on the way back out after firing off several magazines there is still traffic on the street.
Oh, and it looks like he changed his mind midway and didn’t use the gasoline cans he brought to start a fire. Don’t want to cause a lot of expensive property damage, LOL.
This is all just a stunt by T-Series to smear PewDiePie. And Indians hate Muslims, after all.
There are too many of them, millions and millions. It would take 1-2 full generations and Ukraine simply will not have the time. Once the de-nationalization of Russians started after Maidan, there was a natural and predictable counter-reaction. That means there can no longer be a quiet, over-time, assimilation. The mistakes Kiev elites made immediately post-Maidan will haunt them for a long time. In life, ideas only matter so much, at the end it is all in how you do it, in implementation.
It took 50-75 years in France to pacify the Alsatians, and it is still not completely done. French methods – in general, not just with the Alsatians – would not work today.
anal sex was mainstreamed through porn and they’re currently trying to do the same with incest
I can only guess that so many people watch it that even if only a tiny percentage of them are willing to pay actual money for it, it still makes it a huge market. Try some back-of-the-envelope estimates and see.
(Think about it, even webcam girls who do no more than get naked manage to make money.)
Friendship and cooperation on all levels.
Yes, provincial nationalism has been overall bad news for the region.
I believe that regional identities have a right to exist but we all know the Greater Russian culture is dominant and common to all. I have a friend I drink beer with from Transcarpathia, and he wouldn’t even speak Ukrainian.
I think Ukrainian is in demand in many parts of Ukraine, let them have their Ukrainian, unless they don’t discriminate against Russian, of course. By the way, it would be a shame if songs in mova disappeared.
It could be better. Russia is an underdeveloped country which badly needs to make a technological and social leap forward. Putin is old and this requires somebody more energetic.
The Confederacy had too few people (~1 million free men of fighting age in 1861). Eventually, ~40% of them would die
The most comprehensive review of Civil War casualties I have seen is “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead” (J. David Hacker, Civil War History, Volume 57, Number 4, December 2011, pp. 307-348). His conclusion (p. 316) was that:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/465917
Dafuq?
Mainstreaming incest? You sure about that?
I mean, I could see the globohomo-pederasty-pedophilia connection, but this…
I’m certainly no expert, so I’ll defer to that figure.
My back of the envelope logic that I used to generate the 40% estimate.
Free population of Confederacy: 5.6 million
~ Of which half men: 2.8 million
~ Of which 52% 15–59 years: 1.4-1.5 million
~ Of which fighting age: 1.0 million (?); typically considered to be those in the 18-45 y/o bracket
Conventional figure: 258,000 for the Confederacy.
Hacker’s figure: 20% higher (which I got from the NYT) –> 310,000
Due to poorer record keeping, I had subconsciously assumed that the extra deaths would likely be loaded against the Confederacy. I assume that was a wrong assumption.
And, in retrospect, I should also have borne in mind that the fertility rate back then (1840s cohort) was extremely high; probably something like 200,000-300,000 men must have entered military age between 1860 and 1865. This would have dampened the impact.
An RN blockade of the North would have been even more effective than the North’s blockade of the South. Smashing the Union navy, “The work of a few hours”, sniffed Palmerston. In 1861 the British had 63 ships-of-the-line (60 guns and above) to the American 0. The total count of all commissioned warships was 598 to 42. Bye-bye Anaconda plan! Pretty soon it would be the British doing an “Anaconda plan” on Union ports. The North had no ocean going ironclads unlike the RN which had several. Britain would also have acted in conjunction with France, which was more pro-South than Britain. In any scenario with British involvement, you’re also talking French involvement on the same side. This makes an already huge impact bigger: add 35 ships-of-the-line and 231 smaller ships to the totals above.
Also blockade runners in the South could run to Bermuda etc., whereas the North would have no nearby friendly ports. Blockade runners also relied on smokeless coal from Wales.
There are also specific issues the North would face with a blockade, gunpowder could not be produced and the North relied on iron imported from Britain.
http://67thtigers.blogspot.com/2010/06/royal-navy-force-designated-for-america.html
Having read up on this I under estimated how weak the North was.
Only if it has gang affiliation with Chicago blacks.
trojan horse is step parents / step children
Consolidated around the Ukrainian national idea, not around Poroshenko personally.
Also the 15% is with 40 candidates running. I’d give him a 40% chance of winning the election.
Because the mechanism of it becoming part of Russia was illegal and many unresolved issues remain (stolen property of Ukrainian citizens in Crimea, Russia took a bunch of gas wells in the Black Sea the Ukrainians had spent money developing, including one closer to the Ukrainian coast than to Crimea).
Until these issues are settled, and it may take decades, Ukraine nor noone else ought to formally recognize the annexation.
Thorfinnson had the right idea:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-69/#comment-3086340
You are exaggerating again.
With Donbas and Crimea gone there are probably around 5 million Russians left in Ukraine, vs. around 35 million Ukrainians. The Russians in western and central Ukraine are assimilating. The process is slower in the East and South but happening. Before the Maidan the Russian % was dropping faster than can be explained by death rate (Ukraine was 22% Russian in 1989, 17% Russian in 2001) – it was re-identification.
Here is a map of declared native Russian-speakers:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/UkraineNativeRussianLanguageCensus2001detailed.png/1280px-UkraineNativeRussianLanguageCensus2001detailed.png
The dense part that would have trouble assimilating has been conveniently removed.
To the extent that they convinced the dense Russian areas to leave, they have been good.
Dense Russian areas are gone. And Russians assimilate more easily to Ukrainians when surrounded by them (and vice versa) than Germans to French, the languages are more similar.
Who cares? Why should Russia even bother entering into negotiations with Ukraine about Crimea’s status? The only realistic, practical outcome of any discussion would be that Russia basically pays the Ukrainian government to grant official recognition to reality, thereby granting some legitimacy to Ukraine’s government and softening the sting to the nationalists’ pride. But why would Russia do this when Ukraine’s government has been so resolutely hostile since 2013? It doesn’t make any sense to for Russia to help the Ukrainian government save face when Russia already has what it wants. It’s much better to allow the issue to fester, so that the government is delegitmized over its outlandish claim on Crimea.
Good one, we will hold you to that :)…
Yanukovitch in 2014 was more popular than Poroshenko is today, why no Maidan X? Yushenko ended up with 5% in 2010. The numbers, my friend, don’t lie.
30% say they will vote for a comedian – that says it all about the ‘consolidation’ of the national idea. Maybe they plan to start a circus.
It is probably more, but even 5 million is still ‘millions‘, exactly as I said. Are you aware that 5 million is the same as ‘millions’? Have you ever done math?
You have a childish tendency to always use the same moronic argument: ‘everyone exaggerates‘. Really? You are not very good with numbers (I am betting US education). And almost any statement can be described as ‘exaggerated’, so it is rather meaningless. Now if people multiply things by 10 or 20, now that is an exaggeration. Remember your ‘100,000 dead’ that turned out to be 550? Other than variances that big, screaming ‘exaggeration’ as you do is a waste of time, it means almost nothing. Learn some math, it is online these days.
That is funny. I appreciate you bringing it to my attention, for I had not seen it.
I was scratching my head for a moment: where had I heard UFOs in politics before? Hillary Clinton when she was the Democratic front-runner in 2016 brought up the idea that she would do an investigation into what UFO secrets the government was hiding, if elected. The idea came originally from her campaign manager Podesta who has made many previous remarks about including when he was an advisor for the Obama Administration.
Podesta apparently wrote the forward to some fringe book in 2011 by Leslie Kean, called “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record.” I feel like I must find it now, to see if it touches on this triple race to develop UFO tech. In 2015 or so, Bill Clinton actually made remarks about trying to find out what happened in Roswell, when he was president.
With Hillary, I can’t help but think that there was there weird drive, not just specifically because of Podesta, but because it presented a facade of radical transparency, when it was for instance widely known she had been using her own email system, against regulations.
In the case of Harry Reid, it is impossible to ignore that Bigelow was a donor to him. $22 million may not seem like a lot to award a billionaire like Bigelow, but it was at least indulging him in his insanity at taxpayer expense. The other senators involved, Ted Stevens and Inouye don’t have a good record. Stevens wanted to build “a bridge to nowhere” in Alaska for $398 million.
BTW, that UFO author I mentioned, Leslie Kean, was apparently involved in the NYT UFO research story, along with two other authors. NYT has published a few such stories. She seems like a genuine crazy person.
if you’re correct then it was indeed the greatest misjudgement Brits made in history; and, I have a hard time believing slavery was the root cause. I remarked before they had zero compunction about supporting the slaving Ottomans, with their infamous white harems, at the same time. Therefore, economic motivations must have had taken precedence- it’s an innately mediocre worldview: yes business is flourishing but how can you not try and reclaim what was formerly yours? when the window of opportunity is wide open before you, and soon to be shut forever? A classic case of selling the rope to hang you
I’m of two minds about the origin of this idea that the U.S. is falling behind on UFO research:
One is that is a rhetorical ploy for legitimacy.
The other is that it just a natural result of the culture and the craziness that it spawns. Like the 2008 movie “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull” where the Soviets invade Area-51. The idealized setting for aliens in America really is the 1950s. I wonder if this common movie aesthetic could help influence the subconscious brain of susceptible individuals into forming the idea that America is behind.
when you think about it, interesting lesson here re: the US kickstarting and being essential to China’s rise by allowing massive economic interpenetration- was rational to spur the sino-soviet split, certainly not afterward. Same pattern as their Brits forefathers it seems, profits make blind.
Anatoly was on to something when he wrote that Maidanites are the true Sovoks — ironically enough, as is nearly everything about Ukraine. This heavy-handedness is part of that. They just can’t help themselves. Same with the Bandera worship. Not for them an adult, integrated sense of self; everything is black and white. Who was a saint? Who was a sinner? Who-Whom?
As for the language question. What I feel is sometimes missing from these discussions is what a mortal threat Russian poses to Ukrainian. There is no way Ukrainian would survive in a free and open market, with Russian having 200+ million speakers and history on its side, and especially not given Ukrainian’s status as a farmyard dialect (not a good sell in the Instagram age).
Language laws are in order, then. But how strict? My offhand answer is that quotas and the like are fair up to a point, but if you have to near ban the other language, something is wrong with your carrot. Will they work? It would be odd if they didn’t — these are some seriously draconian laws — but I somehow doubt their effectiveness now that ever more young people get everything they need from the internet. Even banning all Russian state television, let’s say, isn’t very helpful when it’s already all over YouTube (and let’s not forget that most media consumption is far more homely, things like following some dance instructor, or a food blogger, or a Russian trophy wife in LA). There is also, as ever, geography and history working against them. The place is pretty well boxed in by Russian speakers, and I expect cross-border travel to go up as Ukrainians grow less poor. The Crimea will also be a huge draw once things calm down a little. Many Kievans have fond memories of going there for youth camps or hikes in the mountains. The historical argument needs no explanation. I would merely stress that the personal always trumps the general. It matters that your great-grandma wrote her diary in Russian as it doesn’t matter that some state functionary used it for writing out his arrest orders.
Really?
https://img.theculturetrip.com/375x/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/shutterstock_1090091555.jpg
https://img.theculturetrip.com/375x/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/shutterstock_1051041908.jpg
Because Poroshenko is more popular today than Yanikiviuch was in 2014. You simply don’t know what polls mean (or pretend not to).
Poroshenko is polling at 15% because there are about 40 candidates running.
Americans elected a reality TV star. And this was the best option. And the American national idea is strong.
It was traditional status of most languages, including Russian.
Ukrainian language is the first language of Lviv, a city of 800,000 people, larger than the largest Slovak, Lithuanian etc. cities.
You wrote “millions and millions”, implying some huge number. They are outnumbered 6 to 1 in Ukraine. That can be assimilated.
You can’t tell the difference between many hours and 1.5 hours. you claim Yanukovich won in Transcarepathia, he lost by 6%. I am betting Slovak education -)
Check out PISA scores for American whites. They are higher than for any European country other than Finland.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/2015-pisa-mean-scores-in-perspective/
Slovaks worse than Mexican Americans 🙂
This seems a bit of a dubious endorsement.
The election of the Caudillo vs. Evita occurred precisely because American national idea is weakening, and it has weakened even more in the years following.
A more positive example might be Reagan, a controversial former film star prone to appearing foolish, who reigned a more united country (but who also contributed to the current situation).
Americans elected a guy with a nationalist image and message. Compare to western Europe.
They are something, all right. They have a desperate need to paint the reality as positively as they can, no doubts. The past must be validated – if it requires mindless optimism bordering on dementia, so be it. This is an interesting dynamic because it inadvertently means that they will not adjust their behaviour to better suit the circumstances. The Maidanistas are going down marching in torch parades and singing victory songs. It is actually better that way, who needs weepy regretful dreamers who suddenly want to make good and be friends? As I often say, this will be a lot of fun, farm dialects, rusty pipelines, wild escapes, and at the end that sullen look on empty faces as they realise that the gig is up. Priceless.
But I wouldn’t dump on the Ukrainian language because of the politics surrounding it. I like regional and smaller languages, and a ‘farm dialect‘ suits me fine, if cattle understands what I am saying, that’s good…
To summarise your post: the funny-boy Zelinsky is about as rich as Trump (good one), you doubled down on Porky’s win (I suspect on 4/1 you will be nowhere to be seen), and you read some PISA stuff for enlightment.
I can guess what the other 3/4 of you are and you can keep it. We are not interested. Our girls don’t date Poles, too poor and usually too scummy. We mostly see Poles coming in dusty 1950’s buses trying to sell some stuff at village markets. So the 5-footers with a life-size Jesus hanging from their neck is all you get. Enjoy, maybe you can do some calculus together.
No need for desperation. In the western and central Ukrainian lands life is as good as ever. Or better than ever. And those are the people celebrating. The ones in places where life has gotten worse, such as Kharkiv, are not celebrating.
This is rich, coming form someone who foolishly insists that the end of the Hapsburg monarchy was good for the peoples of central Europe.
You are afraid to post facts, because they are never on your side. But unlike you, I do post facts. Here is what you lost:
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.
::::::::::::::
In 2017 Ukraine’s GDP PPP per capita was 34% that of Russia. In 2013 it was 33% that of Russia. So slight improvement, no real change. In 2017 Ukrane’s per capita GDP PPP was 46% that of Belarus. In 2013 it was 47% that of Belarus. Slightly worse, no real change four years after Maidan. In contrast, it took your people about 100 years to crawl back to where they were in 1913 relative to Austria.
But sneer at the Ukrainians. Projection is strong in you.
You got Beckov going. I haven’t seen him that active before. Keep it up so we learn even more about him, “for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”
I never claimed that but perhaps reading is as difficult as math for you 🙂
As for “poor” – you are bad at math again. Average wage in Poland in 873 Euros and in Slovakia it’s 877 Euros. Not a significant difference.
Adjusted for cost of living, however, and Poles are a lot wealthier than Slovaks. Average wage in Poland with adjustment for cost of living is $2,140, in Slovakia only $1,573
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_average_wage
So another case of you “exaggerating.”
You implied I was Polish? I have basically zero Polish ethnic descent (one person who died in the early 1800s), at least going back to the 17th century from where I have records. They are all Rus people, except for a Sudeten German officer who settled in Galicia in the 1840s with his Tyrolean wife.
I watched some videos of Bratislava. Here is one:
Looks like a smaller, wealthier version of Lviv. Girls are bigger, more poorly dressed, and simpler looking than Polish, Ukrainian or Russian girls. Still pretty, of course.
My opinion on this crucial issue: if you said ‘millions’ once, then that would imply a figure of up to or around about 5 million. ‘Millions and millions’ to me suggests something like 10-20 million; over 10 anyway.
Did you hear about this fuck up by the Slovak nationalists?
Kotlebovci si chceli uctiť národovcov výstupom na Kriváň, vyliezli však na nesprávny vrch
http://www.tvnoviny.sk/domace/1876546_kotlebovci-si-chceli-uctit-narodovcov-vystupom-na-krivan-vyliezli-vsak-na-nespravny-vrch
The cultural level of all European cultures declined sharply after the 1st and especially 2nd world war. This is a product of civilizational trends, not rulers (communists being an obvious exception). The only nations whose greatest works are from the last 100 years are countries like Albania or Latvia who had no culture to begin with. Scandinavian countries still have monarchies and the cultural decline relative to where they were in 1910 is absolutely astounding.
Austria-Hungary would not likely offer much more resistance to the Germans or Soviets than Poland, i.e none at all. Moreover, Germany could easily exploit ethnic tensions to undermine the state. Do you think Croats, Hungarians, or Romanians would seriously fight a hopeless war when Hitler would offer them independent states?
Austria did not fall under communism and the other nations did. That’s the only relevant factor here. A Hasburg empire that made it to WWII would probably get conquered by Stalin too anyway.
Says the Ukrainian who called a Slovaks ignorant peasants. I hope you were being ironic.
You are really scraping the bottom ‘
‘ What is that? And you watch random tourist videos to actually form opinions? Pathetic. It is like me driving around some random square in Paris for 4 minutes and then trying to claim that I know Parisians. Stick with the chicas and their algorithmic prowess, they might even seem taller than the usual 5 feet if you twist you neck enough.
Look, nobody from Czecho-Slovakia is trying to migrate to Lviv, or Ukraine, absolutely nobody. On the other hand our service jobs are overrun by migrants from Ukraine, they wash our dishes, dig our ditches, paint our signs, and provide just about any service that can be monetised. None that I have talked to has any desire to go back to Lviv, Kiev, Odessa, wherever in Ukraine. My views faithfully reflect what we hear from these Ukrainian migrants. They don’t like Porky, most prefer to speak Russian, think that Maidan was stolen by the oligarchs, and the war is pointless.
Maybe they are opportunistic and not representative – and back home in Ukraine there is this solid block of prosperous, nationalistic, well-dressed proud Ukrainians. But is it really there? Isn’t your endlessly positive description just a desperate attempt not to be found wrong? I believe what I see and what people tell us. In Prague hotels ladies with PhDs from Ukraine work as ‘dezhurneie’, quite often surrounded by well-off tourists from Russia who awkwardly try to pretend not to see them. Because it is sad – the human collapse for so many from Ukraine – east and west – that we observe is very sad.
Regarding your ‘Rus’ ancestry. What is it exactly, are you what we call a ‘Rusin’?
Once you are 10 to 20 million, proper usage would be to say ‘tens of millions’. To bring it down to earth – anyone thinking that a sizeable group belonging to a large nations can be easily assimilated is fooling himself. Russians in Ukraine are still by any standards ‘sizeable’, there are millions left. They also have a very large nation right across the border in Russia – it is simply not a setup for mass assimilation.
That leaves aside the crucial point that desiring mass assimilation (in effect cultural extinction) of a minority is quite sick. And not very European. These guys like AP are weird and confused.
His average approval ratings are fluctuating between 35-45% (for comparison he won 46.1% votes in the 2016 presidential election) and among Republicans his approval rates are generally in the high 80s.
As of March 2019 they are 90% among Republicans, 1 point higher than when he started in January 2017.
Is there a difference between “MAGA” and “MIGA”?
And if there isn’t, what does this say about American “capitalist state patriotism”?
So, yes, you may, in a matter of interpretation, be correct when you state that the “American national idea is strong”, but then I wouldn’t consider it a complementary statement.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx
America is a marketplace, a military, and a legal sytstem – not a nation. Anyone who still has loyalty to this system beyond their immediate self interest is a fool.
That’s a pretty strong endorsement AP. I’m no expert about Slovak women, but Ukrainian women have been celebrated as some of the most beautiful on the planet since time immemorial. You must not have been to Kyiv or Lviv lately AP, ones head just keeps rotating from left to right:
https://ukrainiandatingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/russian-vs-ukrainian-women.jpg
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*Idx-aGnzJO6_FVes8934Ng.jpeg
Learn to read, boomer. He was talking about Mexicans.
Ukrainians have been quite adept at learning the Russian language since Czarist times and most Ukrainians are fluent in it. Many Ukrainians, especially in the South and East are more comfortable communicating in Russian, however, this doesn’t diminish their pro-Ukrainian political views.
Sorry Chief, but Ukrainian women are hotter than Mexican women too! 🙂
Your Ukrainaphobic venom is clouding your thinking, tovarishch – the video clip that AP presented of Bratislava is quite complementary. Your shift must soon be over, have a cold one and call it a day.
He’s an interesting ‘Slovakian’ commenter. Ukrainian issues seem to be at the top of the list for this ‘Slovak’ and don’t seem to afford him any peace. If he’s not careful, he might find a Banderite camped out right underneath his bed. I mean they’re everywhere in Slovakia and might soon take over the country! 🙂
Nothing outlasts Beckow, he just keeps on going!
https://youtu.be/C2LfH7hG5UE
I hope they are as strict as possible. It will make Ukraine look bad internationally and invite massive corruption.
I think he is an unreformed commie who is still grieving the death of the USSR. He hates Ukies and Polacks whom he blames for the lack of reverence for the USSR his object of undying love and its subsequent demise. Perhaps he was running a business making the banners “Se Sovětským svazem na věčné časy a nikdy jinak!” in Czechoslovakia (after 1968 they wre omnipresent).
What sort of exception? The level of culture in the Soviet Union stayed consistently high up to the end (I’d say the high point was just before the collapse, even, which is a common trend in societal collapses), then declined to lows never seen before in the 1990s, as most of the talented old masters couldn’t adapt and the newly-rich financed degenerate cheap trash.
The level of culture in the West declined because the CIA covertly funded Modern Art as a weapon against the more traditional art of the Eastern Bloc:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html
It’s mostly better now than it was back then (the revival of Russian folklore is especially promising, even though it now often has more a martial and religious bent than it did before), but in some cases it has gotten worse. In some cases, the talented old artists kept making great art funded by miserly government programs that didn’t get removed due to simple inertia, and only in the recent decade have they finally died out, the programs ended, and “patriotic on the outside and American on the inside” artistic garbage crept in (like those big budget special effects-heavy war films the state keeps funding).
He is making a distinction between present-day Russians and medieval Russians, to whom he claims descent.
Even though ever since the Mongol invasion and devastation of Rus’/Rusia/Russia/Rhos/Rossiya the population fled and moved to Muscovy, from serfs and peasants to Church hieararchs, townsfolk and nobility.
Significant areas of present-day Ukraine were practically uninhabited by Slavs, being relegated to Wild Fields and threatened by hordes and slavers. Similarily, people fled persecution by Jesuits/Catholic rulers of Commonwealth, and abuse by magnates.
In short, he is spreading the myth of Tatar and Mongol admixture in Russians of Russian Federation.
2016 Miss Ukraine pageant really had a thing for non-Slavic phenotype. Higher-class Turkish women of Istanbul was my first thought – nothing like Ukrainians I have met.
I think utu is just sad that his ancestors were kicked out of the Sudetenland which explains all the unironic Naziphilia and obsessive desire to have Russia sacrifice itself to fight global Zionism.
For a collective evaluation by our board:
https://karavan.ua/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/11-9.jpg
https://karavan.ua/krasota/miss-ukraina-2016-vse-chto-nuzhno-znat-o-gla/
Not even close.
So, once again no data from you – when you try to mention numbers you can’t help but exaggerate, even others notice. Only personal anecdotes. America is full of workers from Poland (they do my home reno, high skilled and honest workers) but so what? Polish economy is doing great, and as we have seen wages are much higher in Poland than in Slovakia when adjusted for cost of living.
Now you exaggerate again. I do not write “endlessly positive” things. I only write realistic things, supported by evidence. You write fake things and exaggerations. Ukraine is indeed poorer than all of its neighbors other than Moldova. But it has recovered from 2014 and the western and central parts are doing better than in 2014. Ukraine is actually doing marginally better relative to Russia than it was in 2013 (from 33% of Russia’s per capita GDP PPP in 2013 to 34% in 2017). But despite its recovery people will naturally take the opportunity to work in some place where waged are 3x higher.
You, OTOH, lie about some sort of ongoing collapse.
If the people you meet speak mostly Russian it means they are probably not from western Ukraine but form the east where the economy is worse.
Western Rus from Ukraine and Belarus were not “medieval Russians,” no more than Julius Caesar was an “ancient Romanian.”
LOL. Yeah, they mass fled in the direction of the invasion.
Research on remains in Kiev indicate that modern people in Kiev are related to the pre-Mongol population and are different from ones in central and northern Russia.
They mass fled westward away from the Mongols, to lands less affected by them such as Galicia and Volhynia, and returned to resettle during the times of the Poles and Lithuanians.
\
The magnate and Rus prince Yarema Vyshyovetsky settled his vast estates in Ukraine by offering light serf duties. Under him the population on his estates increased from 4,500 to 230,000 in under 20 years.
It collapsed suddenly, after the Revolution, which killed the Silver Age.
This is also my impression.
I wouldn’t call them ‘non-slavic’ phenotypes, because all of the girls that took part in the program were Ukrainian. As Ukraine has a long history of being a melting pot of different ethnicities that have passed through this ‘border’ area, there are traces of many types, mingling with a strong Slavic undertone. In Central Ukraine, around Kyiv, there’s what I like to categorize as the’classic’ Ukrainian look. These are classic Caucasian beauties, tall with fair skin. They could easily be mistaken for the most beautiful French or English lovelies. Perhaps, a Circassian element is present there, such as was heavily present in Hetman Mazepa’s lineage. Circassian women’s beauty was the stuff of legend in ancient times. Scandinavian elements can be found throughout Ukraine, as the Vikings and later Charles XII left their DNA imprint. All of this, over a base of at least 80% pure Slavic beauty, no wonder men all over the world are drawn towards Ukraine and its bounty!
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/e2/ce/53/e2ce53355dbc34faf4329ab691a9dc1a.jpg
Which would be over 50% among America’s titular “nationality.”
This is much better performance than any nationalists do in Western Europe.
America is all Americans have. It is correct for them to be patriots.
I was writing about the winner and the two runner-ups, contrasting their appearance with, in my opinion, more appealing and aesthetic classic Ukrainian look.
Honestly, I would never proclaim those 3 the prettiest in that 2016 contest.
Also, I have noticed a not-so-recent trend – the best looking girls are staying away from those Miss Universe and similar contests; this has been going on for at least a decade. In the Balkans, the ‘90s and early 00s had impressive winners and competitors; nowadays – not even close – a mulatto Tim Duncan-look alike won in Croatia, and she was the best looking!
They would have fled northward, to swampier and forested lands after the initial Mongol/Tatar onslaught – not move to Polish-ruled lands lying on the Mongol warpath.
Territory of present-day Ukraine under Lithunian rule was depopulated to an extreme degree.
I would be very interested in your population estimates of various Rus’ principalities and regions from 1235 to 1350.
Not my point. Do you consider the current Trump to be governing as a nationalist? Either they are following a personality cult or their “nationalism” is really state patriotism.
Would you say the same to a Soviet citizen?
All of Europe lost its monarchies (real ones, who wielded real power and set the societal tone) after World War I. Czechs overthrew the monarchy, and their culture declined.
Who knows if they would have invaded such a large state, rather than cut a deal with it. It may have played a role for Germany that Italy did. Italy’s fate was much kinder in World War II than was that of the little useless statelets. The little states were helpless before the onslaught. Nazis and Soviets did with them what they wished.
See above. Falling under communism was another result of the breakup of A-H.
They are a peasant nation, like Ukrainians- more so, even. Lviv is about twice the size of their capital, despite the overall Galician population being smaller than that of Slovakia. Historically, Lviv (population 230,000 in 1910) was always about 18% Ukrainian. Bratislava (population 78,000 in 1910) was about 15% Slovak.
I never called them ignorant. But they are deluded if they celebrate the end of the Hapsburgs. It was a catastrophe for the peoples of central Europe. Much more catastrophic than Maidan was for Ukraine. This is where Beckow’s projection comes in. His own people engaged in an emotional hysterical nationalist overthrow whose negative effects lasted for about a century. He is proud of it. He insists it wasn’t a mistake. But western and central Ukrainian nationalists took the reigns of their country from the neo-Sovoks and he became quite bitter, considers it a mistake, hysteria, etc. Yet in 4 short years the western and central Ukrainians have recovered and the country as a whole is set to be back to where it has been in 2013, sometime in 2019. In contrast Czech republic recovered its position vis a vis Austria in the 21st century, and Hungary never came close (in 1913 it had 85% if Austria’s GDP PPP per capita, today it is 56%).
He projects in other ways. As we have seen, he has a pattern of exaggeration and dishonesty, yet accuses others of these things. But his fixation on the “mistake” of Maidan is the most funny one.
Yes, this is technically correct.
Regardless, when the effect of Franco-British policy was to entangle Britain in the worst conflict yet seen, I feel okay about calling it an alliance in effect.
Yes, foreign monarchy really turned out great for Sorbs, Wends and Carinthians, not to mention Baltic tribes that were in the end left alone in Lithuania and Latvia only through a freak accident of history, and might be only temporary.
You are literally calling out Czechs and Slovaks for resisting foreign monarchs and nobility.
Now be constistent and proclaim that the experiment of Ukrainian independence and anti-Russianess has been a disaster compared to the hypothetical Rus’ federation/All-Russian nation.
Out of curiosity, when will Ukraine reach the GDP PPP % of Galicia filled with Poles and Jews, relative to Austrian one?
There is an old book called ‘Civil War Regimental Losses’ or something like that, by a former Union Army colonel named Fox.
It is a very good book.
At one point, he scrupulously examined combat casualties of various wars of the 19th century and found that no European war equaled the intensity of the American Civil War. Only Waterloo came close, and it was surpassed by Gettysburg.
On the Union side alone, Fox said there were over 110,000 KIA, but Confederate casualty percentages were higher.
Fox writes:
As for Borodino, the total number of killed and wounded – and men engaged – there exceeded Gettysburg, but the percentages at Gettysburg were higher.
Of course Gettysburg lasted 3 days, in the middle of a longer, grueling campaign that summer. Antietam and Shiloh day one were more concentrated, so many Union veterans who survived both the former and Gettysburg claimed that Antietam was worse.
I agree with something the “War Nerd” once wrote, namely that the armies of the American Civil War (both sides) were, more or less, as good as anyone who wants to claim “best army ever” tag. Put the Union Iron Brigade and the rebel Texas Brigade together in a division with some Wisconsin boys* from Sherman’s army and I would take them over any European force.
So they would have fled to inhospitable lands devastated by the Mongols and owned by them, rather than to lands touched less by them. Makes sense. Cities in Russia (other than Novgorod sand Pskov) were devastated by the Mongols. Lviv was not. It was too far, the local kings paid a ransom and were mostly left alone.
And science proves you wrong. If there was mass population transfer to the North, one would expect that Russians in Moscow, Suzdal etc. would be just like ancient Kievans. But they are not. Modern Ukrainians are like ancient Kievans.
This article about demographics of Galicia-Volynia indicates settlers fleeing there from thje Mongols, even from what are now Russian lands:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070930155007/http://litopys.org.ua/krypgvol/krypgv03.htm
There were refugees from Chernihiv, Kursk.
Galicia-Volhynia wasn’t ruled by Poles until 100 years after the Mongol invasion.
And massively repopulated by people coming back from Volhynia and Galicia.
I was discussing Hapsburgs specifically, not other monarchies.
They resisted the monarchy under whom Prague switched from a German to a Czech-speaking city and mass literacy was achieved in that native language.
Ukraine has recovered from Maidan, so no disaster there.
Ukraine slipped from having 44% of Russia’s per capita GDP PPP in 1992 to 34% in 2017. Significant decline (though not as bad as what happened to Hungarians). OTOH, no mass killings and no loss of culture so overall not as bad as what happened to central Europeans after Hapsburgs.
Are in Ukraine now an implicit “politically correct law” forcing to choose girls from ethnic minorities in beauty contests? I also would have bet the dark haired girls were Aegean Turks, Greeks or Sicilians (i.e. east Mediterranean phenotype). They are not representative of the Slavic phenotype at all.
Since I was a little kid, and I would watch the Ms. Universe contest along with my mother and older sister (there were no Ukrainian women involved at that time) our favorites usually included tall beautiful women from Venezuela. God was good, he scattered beautiful women around the whole planet! BTW, my sister was a local beauty in Minnesota who won several beauty contests and worked her way through college modeling high end clothing in the best local department stores. If I can locate a photo of hers, I’ll try to post it.
They are drawn to Ukraine because there are many cheap whores there, that is normally something one should not be bragging about.
This is Miss Finland:
http://www.returnofkings.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/amissh2-574×323.jpg
I have zero doubts that the Cuckraine will have a black miss Ukraine within 10 years, the whole US cargo cultism thing is strong in that place.
“It” looks like a man.
There are ‘cheap whores’ to be found in every country – where do you procure your own misshapened tragedies? 🙂
They are just Ukrainian girls, covered with some fake tan or bronze makeup.
Some cities historically were very multinational. So perhaps it is influenced because of absorbing more blood from darker nationalities like Romanians, Jews, Hungarians, Gypsies, Greeks, etc. And perhaps also Ukrainian nationality itself always includes a wide variety of people of different colours. (Or more likely, a combination of both).
For example, here is a Church Youth Choir in Chernovtsy.
It’s more an embarrassing result of a weak economy.
Unattractive Western men, are attracted to women from Ukraine (and even Russia, Thailand, Brazil, Colombia, etc), because they believe they can “upgrade” to younger and more beautiful compared women than they date in their home country. (In addition, there are more liberal prostitution laws in these countries, compared to in Western countries like America).
Ordinary income Americans, are upper-middle class economically compared to Ukrainians – so the dating options increase for less attractive Western men who cannot date in their home country, to go to Ukraine and suddenly upgrade their options.
Of course, a weird dichotomy in the interaction, because Russians and Ukrainians studying or living in the West are usually richer than most Westerners. Westerners seem to associate you that – you’re either rich or poor (without space for those of us in the middle).
With all due respect you literally know almost nothing about the Habsburg Empire. The far eastern and backward Galicia was only marginally linked to the Habsburgs, only for a relatively short time. Out of your sense of inferiority you are latching to something ‘Western’, something that would accept you, so you choose the Habsburgs and start mindlessly worshipping them. A frustrated cargo cultist and colonial wannabe is just screaming from your writing.
Habsburg Empire collapsed for a reason, it was a dysfunctional melange of feuding nationalities and there was no way to hold them together. It s culture was ok, but also not as great as you make it out to be – most of our culture was explicitly non-Habsburg, anti-Habsburg, and post-Habsburg. I am not going to argue names with someone who thinks that Hasek was ‘Habsburg culture’ and volunteered to fight in WWI – your level of ignorance is simply astounding.
Your loud anti-peasant posturing betrays an insecure person who is trying to make himself feel better by ‘blue blood’ allusions, or the Sudeten German links, or ‘Rus’, or whatever. Get over it, nobody gives a sh.t about your geneological fantasies. We are all mostly descended from peasants.
Maidan clearly made mistakes and that means there will be some unpleasant consequences. I suggested before that instead of arguing, we just wait. If in a few years Ukraine is a prosperous, united country in EU, with stable population and living standards close to its neighbours – you will turn out to be right and we will accept it.
If on the other hand, Ukraine is outside of EU, internally feuding, with declining population (since 1991 down already by 5-7 million or more), and living standards that are 1/3 or 1/4 of its neighbours (Poland, Russia, Hungary, … – not ‘Moldova’) then I would expect an admission that maybe Maidan made some mistakes. As of today, March 2019 – 5 years after Maidan – we are a lot closer to the second failing scenario. Let’s give it a few more years and see. But you don’t have ‘100 years’ – that’s irrational.
Western men who are hostile to Ukraine such as the majority of alt right should never be allowed access to any Ukrainian women.
Btw, quite a few Ukrainian men are nice, too. 🙂
Most of the alt right loves Ukraine. They see some chicks in wheatfields and some bumpkins giving Nazi salutes and they can’t help themselves.
Ukrainians would wise to keep those weirdos away from their women, as would Russians with western Russophiles.
“And science proves you wrong. If there was mass population transfer to the North, one would expect that Russians in Moscow, Suzdal etc. would be just like ancient Kievans. But they are not. Modern Ukrainians are like ancient Kievans.”
Those Rus who fleed north may not have been numerous. Even if the migrants were numerous, those Kievans would not be the only people in those areas. Intermarriage between northward moving Rus, local Rus and local non-Rus would create a new genotype. For the genotype of Russia to have been identical to that of medieval Kiev would require a total population replacement.
Intermarriage is a polite way to state it, it was probably more brutal. The usual pattern is that the incoming group quickly monopolises mating with local women; not only through violence, but with economic and social pressures to keep them from mating. There is always a rapid female betrayal – women have a low in-group loyalty and their main instinct is to seek security for their offspring. Nobody mates with rebels in the woods, that’s a Hollywood myth.
The R1a1 male DNA dominance – even in Northern Russia – suggests that the usual settler pattern occurred. The lack of R1b, I1 or Q haplogroups in the east go strongly against the ‘Viking’ and ‘Mongol’ narratives. R1a1, I2 and N male DNA there point to a Scythian-Sarmatian mixing with autochthonous populations, exactly as Herodotus wrote. The morphology of people there is distinctly local and I do agree that (our) women are stunning. It is pointless to compare their beauty, they are the best ones left in the world, sorry Venezuela.
AP accuses me of everything under the sun because he has thin skin and doesn’t understand that all feedback is a gift, he should cherish it. I will leave him with his Cholita algebra fantasies – Mexicanas with their superior PISA scores. I never thought I would see that thought expressed. Well, live and learn…
I see. Why would an ‘admixture’ be so bad? I am sure there is a lot of Euro-Asian admixture in Russians. People are what they are, admixtures are a big part of us. I am very nationalist by any standard, I like my people, I like others who are like us, I even sometimes embrace the ‘xenophobe‘ term. Why wouldn’t I like my own people better than foreigners? Anyone who doesn’t is soft in the head – all normal people are xenophobic, it is in our genes.
But my nationalism is based on the present – we, as we are today. Digging through history is interesting and amusing but there is no ‘purity’, and why would it even be desirable? The likes of AP should understand that the historical grievances and fantasies are self-defeating. But they won’t, and that’s how outsiders take over our societies.
Not really
http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/russians.html
Now, technically she was only Miss Helsinki, which is at least semi-plausible since it is now filled with Africans and Arabs and some have no doubt had acid thrown in their faces.
Although, to be fair, Miss Finland seems to have been won by mulatto with a Yoruba name and a hapa in previous years. Though, I believe a mulatto Hapa won in Japan once.
The whole idea of these globalist beauty contests is absurd though. They are clearly favoring race-mixing and women who look like each other. Don’t expect a redheaded woman to ever win. Possibly a dark-haired white, but increasingly, light-skinned blacks and other Kalergi types.
My point was not about the quantities of admixture, my point was that it doesn’t matter that much, people are what they are.
I also included the Euro in the Euro-Asian, mostly referring to the Uralic N haplotype that is indeed much stronger in Northern Russia than in Ukraine. N is remotely related to Asian groups and the ethno-genesis of N (Ugro-Finns) was somewhere in the Ural-Western Siberia. But today nobody really thinks of Finns, Estonians or Mordvins, etc…as being primarily Asian. (Well, maybe our resident aspiring blue blood, AP, looks down on them.)
Ethnic Russians, on average, have ~1% Asiatic DNA, no higher than in western Europe. Northern Russians are an exception in that they, like Finns and Estonians, have ~5% Siberian DNA.
Claims of Asiatic descent have been used to dehumanize Russians and exclude them from European civilization. It’s also one of the primary principles of Ukrainian nationalism that Russians have been tainted by Finnic and Turkic admixture and are not a Slavic people or descendants of Rus.
The truth doesn’t matter anyway, only myths. The idea that Russians are Asiatic has been a part of western discourse on Russians for centuries and will never go away, even if it’s not quite acceptable to mention race in polite company anymore. If Russians are going to be treated like Mongols they ought to use Mongol tactics in dealing with their enemies.
LOL. She’s not only a “black Finn”. She’s also ugly. It seems that there is a mandate to select ugly women now. I still remember the loud campaign against “racists claims” when a black girl was selected as Miss Italy. She was not representative of Italian women but, at least, she was beautiful.
Well, that’s the whole point. The Principality of Suzdal and its later creation Moscow were the areas most in cahoots with their Mongol suzerains, until they stealthily were able to slowly shake off their yoke. No other part of the Rus Empire was known for its cruelty and barabrism as were the scions of this area. The total devestation of Kyiv and later Greater Novogorod are two classic examples of this. Most Eurasianists feel that Muscovy was itself just a continuation of the Golden Horde, therefore its domination of cultural and economic processes in the East is still considered par for the course.
AFAIK, Russian have a slightly more Finnic input, Belarussian a slight more Baltid input and Ukrainians are a bit more mixed but they are by far the same people.
She is not even attractive by the standards of black women.
Ukrainians massacred Russian civilians when they invaded on behalf of their Polish masters, a fact AP gloats about. Ukrainians are a weak people but give them a bit of power and their true nature comes out. Russians don’t run out on the street and scream “hohols to the knife”.
Russia was never anymore cruel than the European norm. Some leaders were. As AK has pointed out, the Russian Empire was too nice for its own good. If they sent out death squads and killed 100,000, millions would be saved -including millions of your own people.
If Russia was like the Mongols they would have annexed half of Ukraine, plundered the rest, and executed the maidanist and nationalist leadership. Though that’s extreme for my tastes.
With Eurovision song contest, it almost seems like gays have started trolling Muslims.
France has selected for Eurovision song contest, a gay transgender Muslim..
At the same time, they are sending the gay Arab to perform in Tel Aviv.
Some Muslim in France are protesting about this.
But Israelis then responded by creating a television program about a gay French Muslim terrorist who enters the Eurovision song contest to perform an ISIS attack against Israel.
So now France is saying they will boycott Israel’s Eurovision song contest, if Israel does not cancel the television program which says their gay Muslim contestant is a terrorist.
You think I am joking and have some crazy imagination, but this is real life.
No, those are the identitarians and they’re not the majority, they’re ok.
They are also preferring certain races, more Sub-something, more preferred they are. Kalergi was a moron who dreamt about race-mixing extraordinaire. But he wasn’t anti-white European per se – we were still in his vision as part of the mix. The current Kalergi enthusiasts are going much further, dilution to the point of disappearance. And once a Yoruba takes over Helsinki pageants, they are not allowed to go back, would be racist.
Something similar has happened with Hollywood: once they go African or Mestizo, the pressure is to just stay there, look at this year’s Oscars. Going back would be racist backsliding. The people of color are not good with numbers, they don’t understand their share of population, so they want it all. (Of course, other than the Chicana PISA champions who are math geniuses, or so we are told.)
Some of that stems from the habit of calling people such as Dima Bilan Russian. Nice fellow, no doubt, just not Russian.
Don’t forget about the resounding thrashing the Muscovites faired at the battle of Konotop:
Indeed, the Ukrainians could be a formidable foe if driven to it. A lesson that hopefully the current leaders within the Kremlin don’t forget.
You know that AP is a fully assimilated American with deep, slightly eccentric monarchist tendencies and that real Ukes in Ukraine couldn’t care less about the Habsburgs. But this theater is very entertaining, thanks.
Slave morality victimhood when it suits you, triumphant cruelty when it doesn’t. Thank you for proving my point.
Blah, blah, blah. 🙂
But isn’t this “beauty” competition owned by Trump…
It’s why Trump was in Russia some years ago – he only visited because the Miss World competition was in Moscow then.
Later all “Trump Russia” conspiracy theories were based on this visit (and that he supposedly hired prostitutes to piss on him, and Putin has a tape of this, and uses it to control Trump).
But if Trump really had connections in Russia, he would have visited Russia a bit regularly, and not just once, and when he was busy because his beauty competition was there.
Keep the cossack spirit alive in American suburbia, boomer.
Agreed.
Best Actor winner: Rami Malek (an Egyptian performing a gay Parsi)
Best Actor loser: Viggo Mortensen (a Danish-American performing an Italo-American)
Best Supporting Actor: Mahershala Ali (a Black Muslim)
Any similitude with Kalergi guidelines is just mere concidence.
Why don’t any of the Ukrainian nationalists live in Ukraine?
I can’t read all these posts, but Beckow is not happy about AP’s unusual combination of Polish nationalism and pro-Habsburg sympathies.
But AP only became a Polish nationalist a few months ago.
Before that, he was not writing anything about Poland. His Polish nationalism is some recent phenomenon, and I’m not clear yet it will coherently match famous preexisting views of AP, such as the support for Spanish conquistadors* and of Nicholas II.
–
*In case of AP’s monarchist views, anyway, shouldn’t Cortes’ torture and regicide of Emperor Cuauhtemoc, be one of the worst possible sins?
That wasn’t a pious Catholic monarch, but merely some tyrant presiding over a creepy death cult where they fattened weeping children in cages for sacrifice and consumption.
AP’s pro-Polish views are consistent though (also in matters like Poland’s post-1945 borders) and have been noticeable much longer than just the last few months. I just wonder how common such views actually are in Poland and Ukraine, given the history of quite bloody Polish-Ukrainian ethnic conflict in the mid-20th century.
I have always believed that any coincidence traced far enough back becomes inevitable. (That kind of defeats the whole free will doctrine, but St. Augustine was a drunk and debaucher in his youth, so what did he know?) We seem to be f..ed, let’s fight some more among ourselves…
It’s a very small and trivial translation issue, which somehow results in a lot of confusions.
In America, you can often see a similar distinction, just more confusingly writing. Americans often use a hyphen instead e.g. Italian-American, African-American, but then WASPs (sort of titular nationality of all America), are always called American (without a hyphen). You don’t see “English-Americans”.
The funny thing is that I am not usually that anti-Habsburg (and I really like Vienna). They were ok, mostly incompetents handed some really bad cards at the end. It is the combination of the parochial and provincial Galician-Polish nationalism with uninformed Habsburg worship that bothers me. They know nothing. They yearn for acceptance, one of the things that I find most disgusting among all of our central-eastern nations.
It is also a strong part of our identity: to be told that we were ‘better off‘ cleaning Habsburg stables because we were also allowed to listen to the waltzes! And by misguided American suburban dwellers with no concept of history – a bit too much. But AP will probably start again with his retarded comparisons to Spain or Mexican chicas, or tell us that we were ‘murdered in mass‘, so I am letting it go.
btw, I hope my post above isn’t open to misinterpretation…I actually agree that Christian-inspired kingship can’t be compared to the grotesquely violent culture of the Aztecs.
Of course, it’s not at all common in Ukraine (Ukrainian immigrants complain about how foreign they feel in Poland).
And extremist Polish nationalists are organizing anti-Ukrainian protests and beating Ukrainian immigrants, calling them “Ukrainian cattle”. (Although extreme Polish nationalists are angry with most of their neighbours, so Ukraine is nothing special).
But in Ukrainian media, you can see sometimes admiration of Poland’s ability to join NATO and receive money from Germany, within the EU common market, and now to become a relatively high income country where Ukrainians are going to work in the summer as fruit collectors.
I live in the Big City. How about you Millennial? Are you a samovar polisher for boomer Putler? 🙂
Is that really happening or is it made up/exaggerated by Russian media?
I do kind of wonder though whether most people in Poland are that enthusiastic about Ukraine, most Polish commenters here don’t seem to think that much about it (but then they’re probably not a representative sample, like with probably all commenters on Unz review and their respective countries).
Yes I love Vienna, and Salzburg as well.
I remember I had a favourite tea cup with a picture of one of their emperors, bought in a tourist shop near the Prater. So I could almost become “pro-Habsburg” too.
I’m not even sure AP is wrong here, if he says Mexicans are not always less civilized than Americans.
Mexicans I met personally, are very charming and civilized (and I had a better impression from them, than from Americans I’ve met). In the media, our view about Mexicans is mainly through American cultural domination, and Americans might seem to perceive only the illegal Mexican peasants which clean their toilets, and not the more adequate representatives.
In America of course, you see mainly small, poor Mexicans working quietly like slaves, in the lowest jobs, and it creates a natural sense of contempt for them in the Americans.
We’re you able to see the Museum Anthropologia in Mexico City? What a monument to the great civilizations that graced the Mexican landscape in the past.
Trump sold it in 2015 after NBC pulled their support based on his comments on illegal aliens. Not that it didn’t have the same flavor before then – it did. Trump himself didn’t create it, just bought it.
It is one thing when a country with nothing much else like Venezuela or Columbia wins, but it is another thing when you realize they won because the system really likes mestizos and mulattoes, and those are the people increasingly winning in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.
It’s not Russian media, but Ukrainian media.
And you can verify a little of the issues, from finding various idiotic looking protests online
There’s only Szopen I think? Funny thing I’m living this year, now, with some Polish housemates. I don’t talk politics in real life. But I heard so far, nonprovoked, “I hate Putin, but not Russians”.
Lol Gerard is the most normal person of all on Unz.
Only gays care about and watch Eurovision anyway.
What’s going on in the second video…are the people there Polish right-wingers singing an anti-Ukrainian song (I unfortunately don’t know any Slavic languages, so the only thing I could make out were the references to Stepan Bandera, who obviously can’t be a popular figure in Poland)?
I think there are a few others on Unz review who don’t write that often. And Polish Perspective of course (though his views probably are atypical in Poland).
Yes, but this is just the correct, English perspective to the competition.
Fixed that for you.
There are people on Saker’s blog who make Gerard look like a Boy Scout.
I would say women over 50 too.
Yes they say “Poland – anti Banderites”.
And then they’re singing that Bandera is a prostitute of Hitler.
Sure, but there is a here and now. I have seen myself a Russian girl with zero interest in Ukraine (or Russia) break out laughing when asked to read out a text in Ukrainian. This matters.
For the record, this is not at all my impression. From watching the odd Ukrainian TV show, it seems to me that the true divide is between “educated” and “prole” speech, just as in Russian. I sometimes find it easier to understand someone speaking “educated” Ukrainian than someone speaking “prole” Russian with a Ukrainian accent.
There was an amusing episode a couple of years ago in which a Ukrainian graffiti artist in Poland was chained up next to his “art” and forced to clean it off for nine hours.
The police refused to launch a criminal investigation against the Poles who did that.
I am not sure there is such a thing when people engage on Unz level (relatively intelligent discourse). I think ideas should speak for themselves; associating ideas with different ethnic groups and evaluating them based on that is a slippery slope. All of us do it to some extent. When I discuss things with Polish people, I am often struck by their emotionalism and anger lurking right under the surface. It doesn’t fit the Baltic region much.
Interesting, sounds like a good idea to deal with such vandalism, should become a general law (I also like the idea of caning though, like happened with a fat American teenager in Singapore about 20 years ago).
I wonder though if there are any serious surveys what Poles and Ukrainians think about each other and their common history.
I’m not sure I’d agree with that positive assessment tbh. Sure, dialogue here on Karlin’s blog is mostly quite civil and often includes interesting discussions about history, culture, politics etc. (even if many of us probably are “extremists” of one kind or another). But much of the rest of the site is simply a sewer of worthless content, overrun by total crazies. imo Unz review is primarily an antisemitic website, directed at a certain American fringe audience (one could indeed wonder whether it isn’t some kind of honeypot operation to provide data for FBI watchlists, lol), which inherently limits its quality.
National generalizations are of course always somewhat problematical, all the more so since many Western societies are increasingly polarized and divided into mutually hostile sections whose perceptions differ radically.
But still, it must be possible to come to some conclusion about the actual state of Polish-Ukrainian relations, which seems like a potentially very important issue for the future of Eastern Europe.
You are being sarcastic, right? To call a bunch of murderous protein-craving savages who used to kill everything in sight (other humans) a civilization is a stretch. Let’s see: no writing, no metallurgy, wheels without axles – not a civilization. Their gods were symbolized by thick, curling stone snakes – looking exactly like… (well you finish the thought).
We make a mistake when we equalise things that are inherently unequal.
My thoughts exactly – would be interesting to hear from our Polish members on this subject.
https://twitter.com/fireboy01111/status/1108135888947740677
How dare you? You…Monster! Poland is Central Europe!
I take things at their face value. Unz doesn’t censor and exchange of views – any views – is way preferable to not talking. Also more interesting.
With that I agree. Given their central location, mutual history, and population size – it is the core issue. There has been an elite effort to make them into allies, and the recent mass migration from Ukraine to Poland might help. But unlike Poland, Ukraine is not unified. And the part of Ukraine closest to Poland is also the part with Bandera, history of massacres, etc… Then religion and writing – very different. There are also Poles who would like to get Lviv back.
Don’t be too hard on Amerindians. They had significantly less time to develop, no invaders to learn from and transfer ideas (look up how bronze working, chariot, iron working and horseback riding spread), far worse natural conditions compared to Europe and Middle East and particularly crippling – no horses, cattle, sheep, goats; no native copper and iron deposits, no tin. Imagine living on corn, some veggies, some frogs and axoatls and occassional chunk of human flesh.
That’s indeed a very important argument in favour of this site (as is the wonderful commenting system), I know of few other places on the net where something like this is still possible. I certainly wouldn’t want to exchange the freedom here for heavy-handed moderating to enforce some arbitrary standards of politeness or non-extremism.
They were developing their civilization in a complete isolation. They could not draw on anything from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, India, China, Rome and no Christianity. And then they were destroyed. How would they progress if they had another 500 years of isolation? Would have Slovaks created any civilization if they were completely isolated? Perhaps they would produce a sublime pictographic text of Sheep Kamasutra.
As a Russian, Putin is, by statistical definition, not a Baby Boomer.
Indian tribes varied rather impressively in civilized quality anyway, from the Iroquois and the Five Civilized Tribes on the one hand, to the Indians of California (probably the most primitive) on the other hand.
And yet you failed to dispute any of the facts I presented, and resort to cheap insults.
LOL, I wrote nothing bad about peasants. I am 1/4 peasant.
But you are lying/exaggerating as always. Or perhaps projecting. You were fond of writing about backward rural Ukrainians.
Not everyone is a peasant you know. Unz is not Slovakia.
LOL. The picture of my grandfather’s brother with Karl I is not a fantasy. Grandfather and his wife had zero peasant ancestors.
You forgot Belarus – Ukraine is a little less than 1/2 of its GDP PPP.
Ukraine had those living standards before Maidan so if the ratio is the same one can conclude that nothing changed economically but one can look at other changes.
I’m sure a small number fled north. The Church moved there because it was a more powerful center. But the idea that mass numbers of settlers did is fantasy. Russian nationalists once claimed this – everyone from Kiev moved to Suzdal so Kiev is really ours, the current inhabitants are not natives.
Complete isolation? They had a large continent all to themselves, resources, oceans, all you need to develop.
I don’t know, maybe they would discover better ways to cook human flesh. Or figure out how to make a functioning wheel. Don’t patronize them, they had all the time in the world to develop – as much as any other part of the world.
Done. When I have some time I will post the music video. And mind you nobody helped us.
It’s not gloating, it’s pointing out the lack of brotherly feelings by these people.
Well, they aren’t the historical victims of Kiev’s rule.
As colonials they were less cruel than the European norm.
Until AK moved to Moscow most Russian nationalists weren’t from Russia (Martyanov, Saker). The nature of the English internet.
You made a stupid comment about my math ability because of American education.
I responded by posting data showing that Slovakia has worth PISA scores than even Hispanic Americans. (white Americans – better than all European countries other than Finland)
This drove you crazy and for some reason you started mentioning Mexican women.
Translation: Beckow is an unpleasant person IRL and pisses people off.
It’s also a part where Poles often visit and generally feel very good about the way they are treated.
About as common as Germans who want Danzig back.
“When I have some time I will post the music video.” – Sheep porn?
I have to admit, I didn’t catch it. It is not only the Poles, all of V4 is obsessed with ‘we are not Eastern Europe‘. Different podunk localities have lame signs ‘Geographic Center of Europe‘, there are at least a dozen in Slovakia alone. Some even have festivals.
The fact that nobody west of Vienna would ever think of Visegrad countries as anything but ‘the east’ upsets some people incredibly. And that points to the real weakness of the region: anybody willing to jump through hoops to pretend that they actually live somewhere north-west of Iceland probably lacks a few core values. That’s how we get these NGO quasi-maidans whenever anybody in the West needs one.
Did I? It is not really stupid if it is true. And US education – not that good. Let’s leave it there.
Yes I did, I never miss a chance to mess with the senoritas, some history there. And PISA scores? Too tempting, but you don’t seem to see the humor. Peace.
Yeah, we eat them, we milk them, we shear them…you get the idea.
White Americans – best PISA scores than any European country other than Finland. Asian Americans – beat all Asian countries other than Singapore. Hispanic Americans – beat all Latin American countries. And Slovakia.
Top universities n the world – mostly American.
Look at you – from Slovakia, and naively believe nonsense you were taught about Hapsburg rule.
Fuzzy at that.
What is and isn’t a blog is subject to some debate. Eurasia Review (ER) is where all of my articles over the past few years can be accessed. Through my effort, ER gets picked up by News Now.
I’m not planning to to get too much into your squabble with IR. I’ve no control over the posted comments at ER. I readily welcome disagreement:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/19022019-putting-the-new-cold-war-and-russia-bashing-into-proper-perspective-oped/#comments
https://www.eurasiareview.com/23032017-reexamining-russias-past-analysis/#comments
http://www.eurasiareview.com/07032017-obsessing-over-russia-comparing-diplomats-and-historical-narratives-analysis/#comment-641140
http://www.eurasiareview.com/29022016-eurovision-crimean-tatars-and-some-digressions-analysis/#comment-574063
On the matter of what does and doesn’t get pushed, there’s a good deal of phony, crony, baloney, cronyism out there. I’m not the grovelling type.
So there’s no misunderstanding, are you saying that there’re more Russian nationalists outside of Russian than in it?
No writing? The Mayan writing system is considered by archaeologists to be the most sophisticated system ever developed in Mesoamerica.
No metallurgy? ‘Metal items crafted throughout Mesoamerica may be broken into three classes: utilitarian objects, objects used for individual ornamentation, and ceremonial/ritual objects.[3] The latter two categories comprise the bulk of distinctly Mesoamerican artifacts, with metals playing a particularly important role in the sacred and symbolic cultural realms.’
No wheels? Artifacts point to the fact that the Mayan most definitely knew about wheels,
and used wheels for making childrens’ toys, however, because there were no animals in the area that could be used for draft animals, and the terrain was not suitable for this develpment, they used other sorts of carrier mechanisms.
You fail to mention their highly developed use of mathematics, calendars and their great buildings including pyramids? I looked on the internet to see what sorts of anthropological museums one might find in Slovakia (quaint, yes, but WORLD CLASS: NO!). Check out this review of only one room out of seven similar ones showcased within this splendid collection:
https://youtu.be/OOYOaVTPkjs
BTW, some of the most influential European artists of the 20th century, like Picasso, found a lot of inspiration for their artwork in Meso America.
For what it’s worth Mickey, I find your opinions regarding Ukraine to be on a higher moral plane than IR’s. Whereas I would never label you a Ukrainaphobe, I would have absolutely no qualms in doing so regarding IR. I’m glad to see that you’re no longer IR’s patsy (surrogate) and have found better things to do with your time than to come to his rescue and fight his battles.
US Foreign Policy Establishment
Re: https://irrussianality.wordpress.com/2019/03/16/out-of-the-blue/
Excerpt –
The same can be said of Fareed Zakaria’s GPS show on CNN. They (Foreign Policy and GPS) periodically have decent enough features, which in overall terms aren’t as often as what they push.
The National Interest is the best of them, albeit with some legit qualms – some of which are detailed:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/07112016-realists-on-russia-analysis/
https://www.eurasiareview.com/08042016-fuzzy-history-how-poland-saved-the-world-from-russia-analysis/
https://www.academia.edu/37358188/Michael_Averko_Consistency_and_Reality_Lacking_on_Crimea
Back to Foreignpolicy.com, Susan Glasser’s piece on Sergey Lavrov is an example of hypocritically applied hack journalism:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/russias-role-in-the-world-gauging-moscows-active-foreign-policy/5361015
Excerpt
So there’s no misunderstanding, I’m not opposing him. Rather, I prefer to not get involved with your specific beef with him. Reminded of the third man in a fight penalty, regarding ice hockey. He’s perfectly able to fend for himself. I was never his or anyone’s patsy (surrogate) as you put it. I follow his venue because IMO it often enough provides some interesting insight on matter that’s of interest to me.
Wooden toy circles are not wheels. Golden tchachki as decorations are not metallurgy – think iron or bronze and weapons and tools. Pictograms are not a writing system. You try too hard, there is not much there. And Mayans were the best there was in the pre-Columbus America, the rest, e.g. the cannibal Aztecs, were substantially worse.
I don’t know what is this obsession to compare anything and anywhere to Slovakia. Slovakia is a very advanced country, but we share it with our neighbours and our civilization is of a different kind: tools, technology, culture, etc… we don’t do big ugly stone heads. You are kind of babbling nonsense when you do these far-fetched comparisons. The whole point is that we are civilized, and they are not.
Picasso was a mostly hack: a skilled artist who succumbed to fashion and lazyness, not much there given his potential. Why would it matter where his inspiration came from? Some people look into the stars, others find chunky Mayan women interesting and draw them, that says nothing about the Mayans or Aztec civilization. But to each his own.
I find the Slovakia part hard to believe. I would think that Greece would be a better comparison–though even Greece might be slightly above Hispanic Americans.
You are very much correct that US education and US living standards are excellent when they are broken down by race, though. When other countries have demographics similar to those of the US and perform much better than the US does, then I’ll certainly take notice of this.
Also, as a side note, it’s possible that the smartest Asians were the ones who moved to the US. The US does have an extremely selective immigration policy and thus it’s certainly plausible that a large part of the Asian-American population consists of the cream of the crop from various Asian countries.
Hitler really, really hated the Hapsburgs. For instance, he wrote positively about Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Mein Kampf–writing that he initially believed that it was the work of German nationalists who disliked FF’s anti-German and pro-Slavic attitudes. Thus, I really, really don’t see Hitler cutting a deal with a surviving Austria-Hungary. Heck, if Austria-Hungary survives as a result of getting out of World War I earlier, then Hitler might hold the Hapsburgs as responsible for Germany’s WWI defeat as he did the Jews–and look at what ultimately happened to them!
Hitler was willing to make deals with Mussolini because he admired Mussolini’s Fascist style of government. What exactly was Hitler going to admire about the Hapsburgs–a royal family that abandoned their German roots and intermarried with Czechs?
Do you think that Cambodia should have stayed a French protectorate? After all, there would have been no Khmer Rouge in Cambodia had the French remained there.
Austria-Hungary was probably more industrialized than Poland was, so it would have been a harder fight. However, ultimately you are probably correct that a surviving Austria-Hungary would have had no chance against an alliance of Germany, Poland, the Soviet Union, Romania, Serbia, and possibly Italy as well. This would be especially true if Britain and France would sit on their butts and not do anything while Austria-Hungary was being dismembered.
Whether you have the honesty to admit it, and just because the communist schools that you most likely attended didn’t attest to it, Picasso is considered to be one of the greatest European artists of the 20th century. The same Europe that you pay homage to in your comment, linking Slovakia to its greatness. His influence on modern art was perhaps only rivaled by Marcel DuChamp, another visionary whose genius was beyond reproach. You might label me a ‘hack’ because I waste my time discussing art and politics with an abject nobody like you, but trying to put in question Picasso’s genius? Give me a break! You’re way out of your league Beckow to try and pass your dilettante opinions as being authoritative so cavalierly and try to get away with it.
http://www.artversed.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IMG_10851-1-1024×638.jpg
When I read such pretentious nonsense it is difficult to resist the desire to make fun of
“The Kiev necropolis gives extensive craniological material, there are burials in wooden coffins, underground graves and log tombs. All this suggests a mixed ethnic composition of the population of ancient Kiev. Assessment of the total craniological series from Kiev against the background of variability of the features of the German groups showed a striking difference between the ancient people of Kiev from the Germans (Scandinavians). Apparently, the number of Normans in the army of the Prince of Kiev was very small, as long as they not left an imprint on the anthropological appearance of the city’s population. At the same time, the features of the steppe nomadic population characterized by weakened Mongoloid features are clearly traced in the appearance of the ancient Kievans. Steppe dwellers known from the cemeteries in Zlivko and Kanevka. The rural population of Kievan Rus is anthropologically close to the urban one, but it is more homogeneous in its physiological appearance. There is no Germanic traits”
(Т. И. Алексеева. Славяне и германцы в свете антропологических данных. // Вопросы истории, 1974, № 3.)
On Unz, and English-language website, obviously not in reality.
Beckow isn’t actually dumb, just naive and parochial (yet another thing he projects onto others). I’m surprised he didn’t figure that out.
True, but Asian Americans lumps together Koreans, Japanese (people from high IQ countries) with Vietnamese, Filipinos etc. And this total still beats Japan itself, which is impressive.
Why would everyone attack it though? Who knows if there would even have been a World War II had A-H existed. If there was one, most likely scenario would have been A-H being like an enormous Hungary or another Italy for Germany. As AK showed, Italy’s population (including its Jews) was spared most of its hardships.
But the scenario that did exist – the little statelets were helpless and gobbled up by the Nazis and Soviets,with 100,000s dead.
Probably. I’m not an expert on SE Asian history.
Maybe. I was thinking this too. OTOH he hated Slavic states more and was willing to cut a deal with Poland in exchange for the German corridor. So Russia was his main “prize.” German nationalists had a nationalistic myth about some Hapsburgs (such as Joseph II) so they could have been redeemed. FF might not have been around in the late 1930s.
Gobbling up Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary (forced alliance) one at a time is a lot easier than fighting them all at once. And western allies might be more inclined to defend this larger entity than a small one that has zero chance, given potential viability plus the stakes involved. Giving up the Czechs at Munich was one thing, simply handing over all of central Europe is another. While Germany would have defeated A-H + France + UK, it might not have tried and might have looked for other victims.
Beckow is indeed pretty ignorant about ancient Meso-Americans who have been remarkable in their achievements, given not only their isolation but also the late start due to having to get to where they settled.
OTOH he is correct in that their culture was evil and its destruction at the hands of the Spaniards was a good thing. Meso-Americans practiced industrial-scale human sacrifice to gods who can accurately be described as demons. Spaniards transformed those evil temples into delightful baroque cathedrals, taught the people how to read and write literature, etc. etc. Spanish excesses paled in comparison to the pure evil that they removed from the world.
Utu posted some nice videos of Indians (in South America) and their baroque music.
Extremely unlikely; 1940 was flukey enough as it was. (And this supports your wider point).
The interesting thing about sacrificial murder is that it was practiced around the world by most all peoples at one time or another. What sets the practice apart in Meso America of course is the scope of the practice. One incident that I read about lists over 80,000 sacrificed over a 4 day period. But how many people were murdered in the name of other ‘noble’ reasons by carriers of a higher culture in Europe like the Germans during WWII (millions)? Aryans and Jews together in the gulag systems in Russia’s Far East? Christ was sent to this sinful planet to be the last human sacrifice needed to appease the highest deity, yet people are still killing people all over the planet every day?
When I visit museums like the one in Mexico City, of course, I dwell upon the art and science of the ancient Meso American peoples. Their large and intricate carvings in stone that represent calendars is a testament to their profound knowledge of math and astronomy. Their ability to convert wetlands and lakes into agricultural lands around Mexico city was indeed great and fantastic. The irrigation systems around Machu Pichu raised on a mountainside that was able to bring water to sustain agriculture, plumbing and communal baths rivaled anything the Romans created. We shouldn’t condemn a civilization for a primitive practice that was inherent to all of humanity.
I don’t know enough about criminal law in this area to say.
Seems like that would be unusual.
Change of Cg is hardly unprecedented. I don’t actually see anything wrong in principle with using MCAS to deal with the problem, though probably aviation certification authorities should take a stricter view with an eye to requiring a permanent fix (moving the Cg or changing the aerodynamic center of lift).
COMAC C919 is obsolete, so outside of China (and Russia) this is just an opportunity for Airbus.
In principle what Boeing did with the 737 MAX isn’t anything different than what the airliner industry has been doing since the Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation arrived in 1951.
Using a software fix instead of an aerodynamic (or ballast) fix might be new, but I kind of doubt it. I suspect the issue is rather that this was rushed into production and inadequate documentation and training was provided.
Boeing obviously will solve the problem, so the Europeans will obviously lift the ban. How long this will take of course I have no idea.
The 717 competed in the 100 seat market, which the 737 hasn’t since the 1970s. Boeing and Airbus chose not to compete in this market, though Boeing’s effort to strangle Bombardier has resulted in Airbus’ return through its purchase of the C-Series program from Bombardier (now the Airbus A220).
Had the 757 stayed in production perhaps Boeing wouldn’t be in this mess. The unproduced 757-100 variant had seating capacity comparable to the larger 737 MAX variants but flew with larger, heavier engines and an appropriate landing gear to deal with large diameter turbofan engines.
Obvious solution would’ve been a 757 with LEAP-1A and PW-1000G engines, a shorter fuselage, and various weight-saving technologies where feasible (control surfaces, APU, FCS, avionics, etc.).
As it is the 757-200 (remember, there was a smaller variant that was not ordered) is not much larger than the 737 MAX 10.
In fact the Airbus A320 originally emerged out of the Joint European Transport (JET) study to challenge the emerging 757, NOT the 737. At the time the 737 was a smaller aircraft and there were a number of competing airliners in the same market already made in Europe.
This is somewhat complicated by the fact that there is a 737 production line in China and that Chinese airlines are the largest customers of the 737 MAX. Obviously these things did not happen without the awareness of the CCP.
There is 737 MAX work in China as well. Presently interior finishing and soon paint.
As the commenter Dmitri likes to remind us, import substitution has opportunity costs. Banning Western aircraft in the single aisle market would increase operating costs for Chinese airlines, and these new 737 MAX crashes aside I suspect the COMAC C919 will be inherently less safe than Western aircraft. Even if that is not the case people, including Chinese people, would probably believe that to be true and shift their consumption patterns as a result.
Look at how people think Russian airliners are unsafe, even though recent ones have a decent safety record (zero hull losses for Il-96 and Tu-204, one for the SSJ which was caused by pilot error).
China also has a large current account surplus and is currently involved in delicate trade negotiations with America. America’s explicit objective in this is to prevent China from climbing the technological ladder, which China is trying to avoid by fobbing off America with promises of larger imports. These imports are mainly to be commodities, but airliners and even cars (mainly SUVs) are also under consideration by the Chinese to buy off America.
This was also done in Scandinavia after those two retarded girls went hiking in Morocco and got raped and murdered on camera. Not that this stopped The Independent from recently recommending Morocco as a great destination for solo female travelers.
In fairness to the authorities something should be done to discourage copycat criminals, but unsurprisingly they’re going about it in the most irretrievably gay way possible.
Presumably the same reason Ron Unz campaigned for monolingual English-language instruction in the California public school system.
Tatarstan and neighboring Bashkortostan also flirt with separatism on occasion. Around the turn of the century for instance Bashkortostan announced that it would stop remitting taxes to the federation.
A central thread of Putin’s regime has been opposition to separatism, so it’s not surprising Russia chose to squash linguistic separatism in Tatarstan.
New Zealand is effectively defenseless. The country doesn’t even have an air force, as an Australian commenter on another forum once pointed out. He was very confused as to why Australia didn’t immediately invade in light of this, which resulted in much flustered huffing and puffing from the pozzed Australians on the board.
The US suspended its defense treaty obligations (ANZUS Treaty) to New Zealand in the 1980s as a result of New Zealand’s exceptionally gay law forbidding nuclear-powered ships from entering NZ waters or ports.
I don’t understand why the US, or the world, allows such wrongism. We should take a page from the French, who in a particularly glorious episode of their history used secret agents to destroy the Greenpeace protest vessel Rainbow Warrior and then threatened to destroy the New Zealand economy when they had the temerity to complain (unfortunately France did later apologize to NZ).
All of the countries operating nuclear vessels (US, Russia, UK, France, and China to my knowledge) should put together a joint taskforce of nuclear ships laden with nuclear waste (also forbidden by NZ law) into New Zealand waters and immediately commence dumping the waste overboard. The waste to be sealed in safe casks of course. If New Zealand complains the taskforce should bomb Wellington and Auckland. The taskforce should only depart when New Zealand apologizes for being wrong and repeals its disgusting law.
On the return trip the taskforce can bomb Berlin.
…to each his own. Art is a subjective taste: you like something, others don’t. The stocky, ugly stones don’t appeal to me. The color combinations are not pleasant. More civilized people prefer subdued colors, the Mestizos need to work on it.
Wasn’t Picasso himself a communist, or at least a sympathizer? I only caught the very tail-end of commie education, we didn’t get to Picasso, but one gets the impressions that leftists rather like Picasso. So do you, what does it tell us? I prefer Rembrandt.
A substantial fraction of Northerners at the time hated slavery because they believed it was evil. Some even believed blacks were equal to whites. This is gay liberalism.
Ending slavery also caused a major collapse of Southern agricultural productivity (cotton yields only recovered to the 1860 level in 1890), which in turn meant a relative decrease in American exports. Cotton was the largest American export until 1937. Freeing the slaves also entailed the effective destruction of a vast amount of capital (slaves being the largest stock of capital in America in 1860–worth more than all factories, banks, and railroads combined) and thus ruined the capital stock, credit, and prosperity of the South until WW2.
Destroying the Slave Power was necessary. Eliminating slavery itself within the South was 19th century SJW bullshit. The victorious North could’ve easily passed Constitutional amendments prohibiting the expansion of slavery, promoting the gradual deportation of negroes, and mandating protectionism.
Instead they passed Constitutional amendments ending slavery and giving negroes citizenship.
Gay liberalism.
That is all hideous. Being responsible for the creation of modern art (starting with Impressionism at the latest) should be a stain on a nation’s history. DuChamp was a childish provocateur.
Didn’t Britain get the Washington Naval Treaty as a result?
The French were interested in intervention, but were unwilling to do so alone. Britain was unwilling to go against public opinion, which had unfortunately been brainwashed by abolitionist lunatics despite the demonstrable failure of abolition in the British West Indies.
Had I been a British statesman at the time I would’ve preferred a maximalist objective of conquering the North and returning the entire United States to the British Empire. No sense leaving a resentful, sullen rump America in place with its rapidly growing population and dangerous industrial capability.
In this sense British policymakers perhaps picked the second best option–good relations with America. The best option being eliminating America, and the worst option an extremely hostile America far away from Britain’s center of gravity.
Are you a Kindergarden child: ‘you are stupid’, ‘no, you are‘. Is that the best you can do?
When someone describes your attitudes as ‘parochial‘ – as I did about your provincial Galician Habsburg-worship obsession – and then all you manage to write is ‘…you are parochial’; it is very weak. It is an admission that your arguing skills are poor.
Or when you respond to being mocked for your genealogy obsession with blue blood with actually writing that you have your ‘grandfather picture with (some) Karl I‘. That is so tone-deaf, you really don’t see how silly and pathetic that is? You seem very insecure.
At least you and I agree that cannibalism is bad, and that the Spanish made Mesoamerica much better – they have the senoritas now, what’s there not to like?
The hapless Mr. Hack seems to think that cannibalism is just a part of growing up. I am quoting: ‘everybody did it‘. Then I guess it’s ok, murder brutally millions of women and children, carve them up and eat them – in the 15th century no less – put up a few stone blocks so you can enjoy the blood flowing down, and voila, Mr. Hack will march to your museums to admire your semi-retarded art and pictograms that he will declare ‘some of the most advanced in Mesoamerica’ (what is that, like the smartest guy in Galicia? 🙂 – just kidding, don’t take everything so seriously).
I am aware of some educated white enclaves still surviving in US., most are busily trying to tear down what was so great about America in the past. But the run-of-the-mill white population left in the flyover country has it quite bad, most will not be doing calculus. (Asians really don’t count as part of this, but let’s put that aside.)
Between two of you, the poor Galicians have no chance here. West Ukrainians have a much better case than your constant fake-snobbish and deny-the-obvious arguments. I think, the Galicians need better support on this site, I am considering taking it on.
Slavery was absolutely the root cause. A letter by Abraham Lincoln to unemployed textile workers of Lancashire:
19th century Anglos (outside of the American South) had been by 1860 brainwashed into believing that slavery was somehow evil, and this view was even supported by the literally starving unemployed workers of the English Midlands who acted directly against their material interests in opposing the recognition of the Confederacy.
The abolition of slavery in the British West Indies was known as “the Great Experiment” because economists predicted it would increase productivity. Instead productivity collapsed and the center of Caribbean plantation agriculture shifted to Cuba. Despite clearly being incorrect, the British did not reverse themselves and reinstate slavery.
European powers pressured the Ottoman Empire to end slavery, and white slaves were freed by 1830. Supporting the Ottoman Empire was also not without controversy in Britain. Gladstone hated the Turks and considered them to be cruel barbarians. Remember also the tendency for Westerners to judge other white countries more harshly. No one gives a shit about the fact that homo-sexuals are executed in many Mohammedan countries, whereas Homintern is outraged about Russia’s law against propagandizing homo-sexuality to minors.
As for economic motivations, Britain’s failure to intervene resulted in the “cotton famine” in the Midlands, and this at a time when textiles were the world’s largest manufacturing industry and one in which Britain was globally dominant. Britain’s economy suffered as a result of its baffling worship of negroes and ahistorical view of slavery.
In fairness to Beckow #3 is down to communism, not some inevitable consequence of the collapse of Austria-Hungary. Small countries in Europe that did not fall to communism all experienced a prosperous 20th century. Even Greece and Portugal (both some of the fastest growing countries in the world in the postwar era).
I realize your counterpoint to that is that the collapse of Austria-Hungary resulted in a series of statelets unable to resist foreign aggression, but let’s say the whites had won the Russian Civil War or the Nazis had won WW2. Prosperity could’ve reigned in the various Hapsburg successor nation-states (at least the ones not Germanized or Russified) which fell to communism in OTL.
The US population (31 million) had already overtaken that of the United Kingdom (29 million, which included a sullen Ireland) by 1860.
Not sure how that is at all feasible.
I don’t think Southerners would have agreed to being Britain’s lackeys/enforcers on the ground either – they did, after all, enthusiastically participate in the Revolution.
I was not aware that British naval supremacy was so total over the US at that time. LondonBob’s suggestion to navally and logistically support the Confederacy, while threatening the Union from Canada, seems like a smarter idea.
Most of the time, I am below my fellow posters on this site in terms of intelligence, but the Civil War happens to be a lifelong passion. I respectfully disagree with your phraseology here.
First of all, brainwashed is obviously an absurd term to use, since 1800s Northerners said things about blacks that no one could dare utter now. I can’t say if it’s the right term to use as regards the English textile workers; I know very little of the conditions of what made public opinion in that period in England.
Second of all, slavery, as practiced in the American South, was evil in the eyes of virtually all Americans. In fact, for a long time, most Southerners agreed, until the cotton gin created a new demand for labor. Everything south and west of Tennessee and North Carolina then gradually came to be more outright positive towards black slavery. But upper Southerners (including most famous Virginia generals) never lost their belief that slavery was less than ideal. Nothing else could explain why East Tennessee went for the Union, or why a number of Virginians, even, fought for the Union. In fact, a more or less hushed up reason for Confederate defeat was the fact that such a large number of Southerners refused to fight for slavery-based secession. No one considers this today because the liberals assaulted Confederate monuments, in an effort preparatory to assaulting ALL white American monuments, so identifying with the cause of the 1860s federal government makes no sense to right wing folks who correctly view the modern federal government as evil.
But Americans disagreed on what made slavery evil. Needless to say, today’s reasons would be found only among the fringe abolitionists. The abolitionist conception – that it was evil to enslave one’s fellow man – was, so to speak, a kind of gut feeling among most Northerners and many upper Southerners, obviously including Jefferson, Washington, and others who voted in favor of the Northwest Ordinance. But the radical egalitarianism of the abolitionists never caught on. The Republican Party’s “anti-slavery” platform was, in the constantly-repeated refrain of their politicians, one that would restore the original view of the framers, which was that black slavery was first and foremost a threat to the American republic and to the responsible free white men upon whom it rested. Plain and simple. That is the essence of every Republican argument against the expansion of slavery into the rich river valleys of Kansas, Nebraska, etc. That is why Jefferson had qualms about slavery; that is why Jackson opposed South Carolina nullifiers. But slavery was so deeply embedded economically in the more tropical parts of the country, that it gave Jefferson cause to issue his famous saying, “As it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”
But at least you agree that slavery was the root cause. People who argue otherwise frequently have to perform truly appalling feats of historical tripe-making. These are the kind of people who try to blame Union soldiers for a decline that more properly belongs mostly to people of the Wilson and Roosevelt periods.
Even Pat Buchanan, a hero of mine, did this sort of thing when he stated that the tariff signed into law immediately by Lincoln was why the first 7 Southern states seceded. This was dreadful history by the normally sound Buchanan; the tariff would not have passed Congress if 14 senators and God knows how many Congressmen had not just left Washington. DUH! Off the top of my head, the best, most honest deeply Southern historian about the war’s cause was quite probably the famous Shelby Foote. But the compromise of which he spoke is totally dead now, deader than he is.
Oh, Okay, I get it. Our resident Mr. Know It All from Podunk Slovakia, doesn’t appreciate Picasso, therefore his importance for European art in the 20th century is negligible. It’s all a mater of taste, Beckow’s taste and opinion that counts. He prefers Rembrandt (a great naturalist whom I respect as well) a 17th century artist. To hell with the opinions of dozens of well respected Art Historians and collectors – Beckow the Great has spoken! 🙂
There’s a distinction between the American nation and the US Empire.
Americans basically being most or nearly all white Christians born within the United States. Or more restrictively those with substantive roots in the country as of 1776 (which would be half the white population).
The US Empire was created by Americans but they are now one of many factions who compete for its control. And Americans are themselves disorganized and splintered into smaller factions as a result of effective propaganda that denies them their identity and birthright.
Quite similar to the Soviet Union in many respects, though the USSR was less a Russian creation than the US Empire was an American one. No clean break with America’s national past either.
That’s sounds like you are folding notwithstanding your baroque elaborations and compliments.
I will take it as winning on points…:). As a penalty, Galicia has to move 100 km to the east and Mestizo artists get their pick of Lviv women (that is already happening as we speak).
The British often tout their anti-slavery credentials, but the invasive, shameless blacks who are descended from slave-owning chiefs do not care. It means nothing to them. They do not even understand how it has facilitated their invasion.
As far as I am concerned it was a mistake. This push for anti slavery was just a universalist delusion which led to increased feelings of one-worldism. Turks should not have been discouraged from slavery and sent into the Bundestag. Turkey should have been dismembered, and the Turks sent back to Turkmenistan, and then eugenically replaced with Russians.
It’s true that the CIA funded abstract “art”, but this was in development prior to the agency’s creation and was taking off before the Nazis made a determined effort to strangle it with some success.
I have a different take. Sculpture and especially painting collapsed because of technology. Photography made realistic painting obsolete–a mere technical curiosity. Sculpture was not made fundamentally obsolete (since it has a three-dimensional form), but it was deprecated.
This inevitably led to experimentation with unrealistic representation. This unrealistic representation simply took a wrong turn with absolute garbage like Jackson Pollack or various degenerate trash “artists” the Nazis suppressed like Otto Dix. It could’ve gone the way of van Gogh (19th century but clearly Impressionism was not realistic), Dali, Hopper, etc.
Today people use computers to produce interesting art which fuses realism with fantasy. Take a look at the attractive below piece of Cyberpunk art by a German Turk:
https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/011/942/198/large/burak-yorur-ferrari-testarossa.jpg
If we look at architecture, while a lot of modern architecture is hideous, there’s something to be said for some of it. Many of the classic works of Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, and the Bauhaus school were very attractive. The Art Deco style is delightful, and a lot of Midcentury Modernism (including interior design) is wonderful. The new TWA Hotel is a wonderful temple of Midcentury Modernism and a great homage to the Jet Age: https://www.twahotel.com
Music likewise changed because of technology (and economics). Electric instruments, amplified microphones & speakers, and multi-track recording made possible the production of catchy music from very small groups of musicians for the first time. There was also an effort to produce fundamentally ugly “music” (atonal music), but this failed since it’s a lot harder to listen to hideous sounds than it is to look at hideous things.
The magnificent artistic efflorescence of the Belle Époque occurred under a republican government.
Many of the artistic wonders of Classical Antiquity also took place under republican governments. Venice was The Most Serene Republic, and its buildings are certainly serene.
Kneejerk republicanism and opposition to all monarchy is a mental illness, but republicanism isn’t fundamentally unsound either.
Had Franz Ferdinand lived and the tragedy of WWI been avoided, the Hapsburg Empire may have persisted and evolved into something like what the founders of the European Union wanted their project to turn into (before the Germans destroyed the dream).
Franz Ferdinand’s dream was for all his peoples to be able to fulfill their national aspirations within the empire.
And why not?
If anything the strongest obstacle to this wouldn’t have been the Czechs, but rather the Hungarian government (and German civil servants in Bohemia).
Probably the largest source of traffic here is Steve Sailer.
There’s content here that isn’t my cup of tea, in particular the boomertard Vietnam-era liberalism of the Tom Dispatch, but is any content published here really worthless?
If you mean the commenters there are a number of obsessed antisemitic commenters (e.g. Wally) but I don’t see the big deal about that. Just keep scrolling.
Picasso isn’t good. There’s much worse modern “art”, but he is simply not good. Opinions to the contrary are purely the result of what lefties call “hegemonic discourse” and the usual status signaling by NPC strivers.
He did actually have real talent and technical skill, which is readily discernible in most of his work, and his early work (e.g. from his “Blue Period”) is actually good. But in keeping with the zeitgeist of the times, and perhaps his own narcissistic inclinations, his work ultimately deteriorated into trash not fit to display in even a public sch0ol cafeteria.
I think he himself was cognizant of this and highly amused as evidenced by his habit of attempting to pay for things with napkin scribblings. His real genius was in marketing himself and his so-called “art”.
http://e-cours-arts-plastiques.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/guernica-Picasso.jpg
This is Guernica, Picasso’s most famous piece of “art”. It’s absolutely awful.
Frankly the Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion did a better job with their Guernica masterpiece than Picasso did:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-H25224%2C_Guernica%2C_Ruinen.jpg
I’d rather hang that on my wall than Picasso trash.
As our expert on cultural matters Beckow has declared:
I like Picasso, you like the Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion (that looks like a photograph to me). Start using the photo button on your smart phone Thorfy, and you too can become a great artist (in your own mind). 🙂
Taste is somewhat subjective, but not entirely. Some things are objectively bad and people who like them are bad. Picasso for instance.
I assume there’s a section of the brain that lights up on a CT scan when humans look at beautiful visual content.
No way in hell this lights up when looking at Picasso’s excretory content fraudulently labeled as “art”.
You know a painting is a fraud when you’re presented with the idea of finding the meaning of it. Strangely this never seems to come up when the the old masters are discussed.
You are wrong to like Picasso and you should feel bad for being wrong.
And yes, that’s a photograph of the art in question rather than the work itself. The Luftwaffe’s preferred medium was high-explosive and incendiary bombs.
Personally I think American and British aerial artists of the period did better work, but this can be explained by their wealthier patrons. Russians of the period did an interesting land-based version of the same art form.
Is there really any merit to the writings of Nation of Islam freaks? Or to the garbage Ron Unz allowed someone like Jonathan Revusky (“Muslims never have done anything wrong at all, they were set up by the Jews, 9/11 was fake and used crisis actors”) to publish here?
I’m not a fan of the various WW2 “revisionist” articles here either. And that’s although I personally do believe to some extent in the need for revisionism (or rather contextualizing). But as has been pointed out by others, there’s a reason why these articles only seem convincing to a certain kind of American.
Guernica actually really was mostly propaganda, even mainstream historians (e.g. Richard Overy) accept nowadays that it wasn’t intended as a terror attack, but as tactical strike targeting the bridge and other militarily relevant infrastructure.
iirc the Italians did some actual terror bombing in Barcelona (Franco was pissed about it, because they hadn’t asked him for permission), though obviously that isn’t remembered much today.
So much for all that “Visegrad stronk” crap you were preaching in previous open threads. All it takes is one commentator (Beckow) who disagrees with you and you go from dreaming about a glorious new Ukrainian-Czech-Hungarian-Polish-Slovakian alliance to shitting on his country and insisting that his people are stupid for not wanting to be ruled by a foreign empire 100 years ago lol.
“I’m AP, and the Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians all need to repent for not giving enough support to the Hapsburg empire a century ago, this was really inconvenient for me because now it’s made it even more difficult for me to advocate my bizarre strain of Ukrainian nationalism on the internet.”
Watch out Poles! If you don’t mourn the Hapsburgs enough, AP will get you, too! Then you’ll see!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/20/driver-arrested-in-milan-after-allegedly-setting-school-bus-on-fire
In Germany they’re now training “refugees” as train drivers.
Bad idea in light of such incidents as above.
I don’t read the NoI articles since I’m not interested in the pleadings of blacks, so I can’t say. I’m guessing there is not much merit, though I do sometimes like what Louis Farrakhan has to say.
The latest NoI piece published here appears to be this one: http://www.unz.com/article/amazon-bans-the-secret-relationship-between-blacks-jews/
I only skimmed this but it doesn’t strike me as objectionable. Maybe it ought to note that there was a major difference between Northern and Southern Jews on racial questions in pre-Civil Rights America.
Haven’t read Revusky’s stuff but obviously I don’t have much time for Mohammedan apologism. On the other hand the official 9-11 story is dubious.
I will say that I feel a bit more sympathy for blacks, Mohammedans, and other such troublesome low-ability groups than I did a few years ago as I’ve noticed how they’re also being subverted and pozzed by our enemies. Nike’s “Performance Hijab” being an amusing recent example. Another one is how hip hop and rap “music” in recent times overtly promotes homosexuality to try to get the blacks onboard with the Homintern agenda. The same can be seen in “news” organizations geared toward blacks such as “The Root”.
There are blacks in America pushing back against this agenda such as Tariq Nasheed. One of their new efforts to distinguish between American blacks (whom they called American Descendants of Slavery or ADOS) and various foreign interlopers like Barack Obama and Kamala Harris.
Example: https://twitter.com/TheEmperorYasir/status/1108229926543593473
No guilt about my preference. And you prefer photos of real life bombing scenes…you must be in DuChamp’s corner, he liked ‘Ready Mades’ too. Much less effort than the meticulous brushstrokes of Beckow’s favorite. Rembrandt? 🙁
The Picasso piece I posted was also a photograph of the work. Unsure of how it was photographed, but the Luftwaffe would’ve used Leica cameras with Zeiss lenses and Agfa film.
The Luftwaffe’s Guernica isn’t my favorite artwork; I was merely noting that they did a better job with it than Picasso did. No different than remarking how Christian Bale played a better Batman than Adam West.
As far as painting goes Rembrandt is very good, though his palette is too dark. That’s really more suitable for thematically dark work like much of Hieronymus Bosch. Though Bosch is really too early to be top tier (technical perfection had not yet been attained).
Currently I quite like the aviation painter Nicolas Trudgian. Below is his rendition of the Battle of Kursk:
http://www.aviationartgallery.co.uk/Images/Large-Images/Battle-of-kursk.jpg
Easily better than the collected works of Picasso combined (including the napkin scribblings used to pay for food & wine), yet few have ever heard of him.
This is true injustice–far more unjust than The Six Million.
Precisely. Another usual sign that art is not good is if it cannot be sold without authenticating it with a famous name. If we are buying it, watching it, reading it, because it was done by this-or-that designated genius it means we are simply being manipulated – art needs to stand on its own.
Mona Lisa could be done by an unknown Renaissance artist and would still be great. I am not so sure about most Picasso art. Mr. Hack likes to be told what is great and what to like by his betters. I don’t mind if he does that, but his prescribed taste is not my taste. And some of that stuff is objectively hideous.
I once watched a debate between that guy and Jared Taylor. Can’t remember the details, but it was really embarrassing, with Nasheed making some truly bizarre claims about history; Taylor was respectful, but obviously had difficulty not bursting into laughter (I would have if I had been in his place). Was a disturbing illustration of the absurd nonsense many American blacks apparently believe.
Personally I don’t care that much about homo and gender stuff (even though much of it is obviously extremely decadent and should be strongly rejected), and I’m very wary of the kind of social conservatives who want to enter into alliances with Muslims or religious Africans against homos and trannies (e.g. a good example for this is the appalling Rod Dreher over at American conservative, who recently lauded anti-homo Pakistanis in England).
Early and decisive intervention in concert with the South.
Stonewall Jackson’s opposed Lee’s mostly defensive strategy and after 1st Bull Run suggested an immediate invasion of the North with the objective of cutting the rail communications between New York and Baltimore.
If this were supported by the Royal Navy and a British Expeditionary Force it would’ve been decisive.
The trouble with the limited intervention is that it leaves a hostile, resentful United States with most of its power in tact. Kind of like Weimar Germany across the Atlantic. Perhaps this was a calculus of British policymakers at the time. I know Prince Albert personally intervened in the Trent Affair to provide Lincoln with a face-saving means of backing down.
That was probably true of the Mona Lisa at the time it was made.
Today there are so many people capable of superb technical execution of art that no new painting is impressive. You can just do an image search for whatever catches your fancy and find limitless amounts of art which is better than the entirety of humanity ever produced up until the Renaissance or so. And a lot of stuff produced by anonymous graphic designers is arguably better than Rembrandt.
Probably the last impressive painter was Norman Rockwell, and this was less due to his technical skill (which was considerable) and more due to his brilliant themes.
Impressive art today is film–and video games. Worth noting that Rockwell staged his paintings a bit like a film director stages his scenes. Artistic inspiration and technical execution are still essential, but the true skill now is the genius for organization and command.
So the both of you must be totally enamored with comic book art? It’s ussally quite easy to understand, there’s even associated dialogue to help if you somehow get lost?
Now, that can’t possibly be true, because I find your ‘wisdom’ when it come to understanding artwork to be total BS. 🙂
The homo, and to a lesser extent gender, stuff is tolerable to the extent the following is true:
• Homosexuality and now “gender identity” are completely genetic (Mendel be damned)
• Queers are simply seeking respectful tolerance
• They’re no different from you or I other than the minor detail of “sexual preference”
• Minors are not targeted
None of these things are true at all.
I wouldn’t have any sort of problem with a hypothetical international understanding with Islamic and African states against the poz of the sort The Saker and Alexander Dugin like to fantasize about.
In our world this is of course nonsense since socially conservative Western states do not exist, Islamic states are expansionist and export terror, and African states are assistance addicted basketcases mainly interested in exporting their surplus population.
None the less I can’t help but notice that they have in mind for them the same things they have done to us, and they appear to be succeeding.
Like I tried to convey earlier to you, photography seems to be the medium most suited for your precise temperament. It’s hard to beat if your only criteria is a realistic representation of the subject matter. BTW, I’ve owned four Licas in my lifetime. an M-2 and M-3 that I used to shoot with as kid and got pretty good at it, not even needing to use light meters, etc; Later in lif,e I owned two M-6’s that never even made it out of the box, as I had to sell them due to a stretch of ‘resource depletion’. But that’s another story…
Comic book art is frequently excellent.
Example:
https://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3rp5cCjok1qamhyd.gif
Here’s Gohan right after going SSJ 2, about to obliterate Perfect Cell.
Akira Toriyama is a far better artist than Picasso. Not only that, but he has had much more cultural impact as well.
It’s not about alliances with other states, but with immigrant communities in Western countries. There’s even a certain kind of Christian conservative (probably more common in the US than in Europe) who gets enthusiastic about Christian African, or even about Muslim, immigration, because those immigrants will supposedly be a force against Western decadence. Obviously I can’t agree with that.
I mostly agree with you about the homo stuff, though I’m personally in favour of limited tolerance for homos.
Transgenders should be burned at the stake though.
I agree with this, though I’m now opposed to any tolerance for homos purely out of spite.
Rod Dreher is of course a well known cuck, and most public Christian intellectuals and pundits in the West are also cucks. So for them allying with Africans and Mohammedans is another exciting example to demonstrate their virtue to the leftist masters they serve, as they clearly hold them in higher regard than Jesus Christ.
The conflict between Western Mohammedans (and Christian Africans) and LGBTQIX☭$ people is to me just an amusing fissure within the bizarre leftist coalition. For us to ally with them makes about as much sense for the Polish Colonels’ Regime to support Hitler and Stalin because at least they weren’t trying to force decadent democracy on Poland.
New Zealand is effectively defenseless. The country doesn’t even have an air force
The NZ air force is just like the symbol of the nation, the Kiwi bird: wingless, toothless, and useless. (Old Brit/Aussie expat joke)
Vietnamese are also pretty smart if their PISA scores (for Vietnam) are any indication. Plus, it’s not even clear that Vietnam has actually reached its genetic ceiling in regards to its average IQ yet.
As for Filipinos, Yes, I do suspect that they are less bright on average than East Asians plus Vietnamese are, but even for them, it’s possible that their cognitive elites are the ones who are primarily moving over to the US. This certainly appears to be the case for India. I’ve read that the average Indian-American IQ is around 112 whereas the average IQ for Indians in India would probably be at best a standard deviation below that even at its genetic ceiling (Anatoly Karlin previously estimated a genotypic IQ of 95 for Indians in India). For that matter, the Indians in Britain also appear to be much duller than the Indians in the US–with an average IQ of around 99 for British Indians (which really isn’t very bad at all–it just pales in comparison to the likely average IQ of US Indians).
Also, it’s entirely possible that even among the high-achieving Asian groups, there was positive selection for immigration to the US. I’ve read that Chinese in Singapore are more intelligent on average than Chinese in China, and I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if the same was true for Chinese in the US. Ditto for Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese in the US.
It’s not necessarily about precision and realism. The best photographs typically are not realistic and deliberately exaggerate certain details.
Rather, visual art requires some sort of order which is universally recognizable as visually pleasing. Technical skill should also be required for its execution but is merely a necessary and not sufficient condition (Picasso was very skilled).
Picasso, unlike Pollock, always has some kind of order to his credit. But it’s not visually pleasing at all.
Taste (rather than mere wrongism and brainwashing) comes into play when evaluating the merits of, say, Pointillism. It’s not really my thing, but it’s not bad and I can appreciate what was done.
Meanwhile, below is the centerpiece from Wikipedia’s article on abstract art:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Robert_Delaunay%2C_1913%2C_Premier_Disque%2C_134_cm%2C_52.7_inches%2C_Private_collection.jpg
Now this at least is ordered and represents something.
Unfortunately, it’s also something that a five-year old child could easily produce.
It’s not art, and anyone who says it’s art should be sent to a concentration camp.
But the article also has this piece:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/Carlsund_Rapid_(1930).jpg
A very interesting piece and a good example of a positive direction modern painting could’ve gone in.
That attitude is disgusting as fuck! I mean, for goodness sake, transgender people aren’t harming anyone (well, perhaps besides themselves, but there appears to be no successful treatment for gender dysphoria other than transitioning)!
As for the bathrooms, IMHO, bathrooms should be unisex everywhere. The view that women need more privacy from men than from other women might itself be based on sexist stereotypes that views women as delicate little flowers who are incapable of taking care of themselves.
It simply didn’t fit the era: early 20th century. The national self-realization impulses were too young and too strong. There were also the following realities:
Habsburgs were also a lot more brutal than their benign and made-up reputation among the likes of AP. They executed and imprisoned a lot more people than anyone other than Nazis later on. Nazism was in a way Habsburg worst tendencies on steroids. Hitler cut his teeth not just hating the Jews of Vienna, but also absolutely hating the Czechs – he attended endless German nationalist rallies that were essentially against the Czechs (as a place holder for all Slavs).
What happened to Habsburgs was inevitable. And they deserved it.
That would have been against Britain’s moral conscience due to the Confederacy being very pro-slavery, no?
Also, as a side note, had the Confederacy actually successfully seceded, the rest of the US would have essentially become a White ethno-state. I mean, most of the Blacks in the US lived in the Confederacy and the rest of the US was extremely White. Heck, even with the Confederacy inside of the Union, the US was still something like 85% White back then.
It’s not that women are delicate little flowers incapable of taking care of themselves (though this is true).
It’s that we don’t want to share public lavatories with disgusting animals who piss all over the seat and frequently jam toilets with “feminine sanitary” products. Or spend forever waiting in line.
Frankly, it depends. If France, the UK, and Austria-Hungary would have launched joint offensives against Nazi Germany in 1939, then they might have succeeded. If, on the other hand, France and the UK would have sat on their butts while Germany, the Soviet Union, Romania, and other countries would have dismembered Austria-Hungary, then Germany’s odds of subsequently defeating France would have probably been much higher.
AFAIK, France had an extremely powerful military–though it also suffered from being much, much less industrialized than Germany was in a total sense (which is unsurprising given that Germany had two times as many people as France had back then).
They’re actively trying to spread their madness, there are more and more cases of minors (who usually just are temporarily confused and might turn out ok otherwise) being given hormones, puberty blockers, prepared for surgery etc., all due to the lobbying efforts of those transgender freaks.
Also, I’m convinced that many male-female transgenders are just autogynephile perverts who are dangerous to women.
Transgenderism is also inherently subversive since it seeks to destroy the most fundamental natural categories.
So no, transgenders (at least the vocal activists) aren’t harmless at all.
AFAIK, Hitler didn’t hate Poles like he did with the Jews and, to a lesser extent, Czechs. Hitler actually admired the Poles for being a bulwark against Communism. I’ve heard a theory that Hitler’s relative friendliness towards Poles (before they rejected his overtures for an alliance, that is) might have been due to the fact that there were no large-scale tensions between Germans and Poles in Austria (Hitler’s birthplace) like there apparently was between Germans and Czechs.
True, Hitler’s main prize was Russia. However, Hitler also appears to have placed an extremely high premium on unifying all Germans into one country. In Mein Kampf, he expressed unhappiness at the fact that not every German was blessed to be born inside of Bismarck’s Reich. This doesn’t suggest someone who would be very eager to maintain an independent Austria-Hungary. Interestingly enough, I suspect that smaller, less powerful allies might have made more sense for Hitler since they would have been less inclined to double-cross Germany later on (and easier to subdue in the event that they would have double-crossed Germany).
As for Franz Ferdinand, yeah, a lot depends on whether or not he’s still assassinated in 1914. If FF is still assassinated and Kaiser Karl takes A-H out of the war early enough to prevent A-H’s breakup, then Hitler is likely to hate Kaiser Karl just as much as he would hate Franz Ferdinand–if not even more so. Just like Hitler believed that the Jews were incapable of redemption, had the Hapsburgs stabbed Germany in the back during WWI and made a separate peace, Hitler might have likewise believed that the Hapsburgs were incapable of redemption and that thus they and their state (A-H) should be destroyed.
You are correct that gobbling up small states is easier than gobbling up large states. Still, a surviving A-H would have had no choice if Germany would have recruited neighboring countries such as the Soviet Union to help it dismember it. The odds of Britain and France being willing to simultaneously fight against both Germany and the Soviet Union would have been less–perhaps much less–than the odds of them being willing to fight against Germany alone.
Surely German Reader is correct the level of Unz website (writers and commentators) is unusually low.
For educated people like German Reader, it must be a culture shock. It’s here mostly a mix of very low intelligence, lack of elementary classroom knowledge, angry people and mental illness.
So usually with this site, you can see angry people, conspiracy theories and writers who cannot understand simple topics which I knew when I was 10 years old. And then there is common failure to distinguish reality from personal fantasies. There is also a lot of hysteria (every few months someone believing there will be World War 3).
On the other hand, in Karlin’s forum – it’s a small number of people so all knows each other, half of people are friendly and not angry (although some unfriendly characters here), and there’s almost no censorship (unless for Gerard).
There are also some people who are likely experts in real life, like Gerard , Melanf (who is obviously a real university professor?) and Philip Owen.
And then Karlin is interesting and has a good sense of humour. In addition, Karlin interacts with us in a fair way, which is not true for any other kind of journalist (where can you discuss article they write with the author? I never had this experience until I commented here.).
It’s funny though. It’s like being lost in the worse part of the city, where only failures, mentally ill and drunks which do not wash themselves live. But then somehow walked into a secret cafe, and find clean tables, and mostly civilized people discussing topics like Greek philosophy.
Everyone would attack it because they would want Austro-Hungarian territory for themselves. Germany would want Austria and Czechia, Poland would want at least western Galicia but possibly all of Galicia, the Soviet Union would want eastern Galicia and northern Bukovina, Romania would want Transylvania and at least southern Bukovina but ideally northern Bukovina as well, Serbia would want Vojvodina, Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia, and Italy would want Trentino, South Tyrol, Trieste, Istria, and Dalmatia. A lot of neighboring countries had claims on Austro-Hungarian territory and even if A-H would have given up some of these territories as the price of getting out of WWI earlier, it might have still had some territories that its neighbors would have coveted.
Fascist Italy didn’t have a coalition of neighbors who had territorial claims against it. Nazi Germany didn’t claim South Tyrol and the only other country to my knowledge that had territorial claims against Fascist Italy was Yugoslavia–and it could have done nothing without the assistance of Nazi Germany. Thus, Fascist Italy was more capable of surviving in a Nazi-dominated Europe than a surviving A-H would have been.
Is there really any merit to the writings of Nation of Islam freaks?
For me one of the good things about this site is that even in “worthless” articles (to you) one can find very interesting references that one would probably otherwise never be introduced to. In the case of the Nation of Islam freaks, I have read most of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume 1
https://noirg.org/store/#!/The-Secret-Relationship-Between-Blacks-and-Jews-Volume-1/p/56188772/category=15023911
which consists almost exclusively of excerpts taken from Jewish historians about the historical role of Jews in the slave trade and in slave-holding countries (e.g., Brazil, Surinam, Barbados, US). Obviously its presentation is “biased” but it is nonetheless a valuable contribution, in my humble opinion.
Other educational references, at least for me, in the “anti-semitic” articles have included Jewish History, Jewish Religion by Israel Shahak, who is unfortunately far less well known than his fraudulent “doppelgänger” Elie Wiesel; and Pasque di Sangue by Ariel Toaff (which is a truly fascinating book that deals with far more than the “alleged” ritual murder of Simon of Trent).
http://elibrary.bsu.az/books_400/N_240.pdf [not 100% sure this is complete version]
http://holywar.org/txt/BloodPassover/index1.htm
Again, I would probably never have come across any of these books were it not for “worthless” articles on this site.
OK.
Also, do you think that the Western Allies made a mistake in refusing to compromise on unconditional surrender in WWII? I mean, had the Western Allies been more receptive to a compromise peace, it’s possible that more German generals would have signed up for an anti-Nazi coup–thus increasing its odds of success. A separate peace with Germany would have also likely resulted in Eastern Europe escaping Communism and thus being much wealthier (and possibly less nationalistic as well) today–though the downside of this would have been that Germany would have been allowed to keep some of its World War II territorial gains.
Interestingly enough, had FF lived, it’s possible that A-H could have descended into civil war in 1917 as a result of the Hungarians refusing to renew their union with Austria. Such a scenario could have triggered an alt-WWI if Russia would have decided to militarily intervene to help the Hungarians. True, the Hungarians were anti-Slav, but then again politics can result in strange bedfellows–for instance, look at the alliance between absolutist Tsarist Russia and republican France, at the pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, or at the alliance between the Anglo-Americans and the Soviet Union. If Russia would have perceived it to be in its best interests to support Hungarian independence (which would have ended Austrian meddling in the Balkans and thus made that region decisively a part of Russia’s sphere of influence), then it could have certainly done so. Of course, a lot might have depended on whether France would have been willing to support such a Russian move–especially if it would have triggered an alt-WWI.
Of course, the interesting thing is that if Britain would have remained neutral in this alt-WWI as a result of the lack of German invasion of Belgium (the Schlieffen Plan was projected to become obsolete by 1917, thus likely necessitating a change in German military strategy to an East-first strategy), then Germany and Austria might have actually had an excellent chance of winning this alt-WWI in spite of them having to fight a stronger Russia (in comparison to 1914 Russia in real life).
Are you calling women disgusting animals here?
So whom do you prefer as a painter, Picasso or Hitler?
There was an interesting film some years ago (2002) called “Max” about Hitler as an artist and his relationship with a (Jewish) art dealer and teacher, exploring “what might have been” had Hitler found success in art. And from your viewpoint (and mine, I have to admit) I can rather easily understand his frustration at not finding success while “modern” artists thrived.
The effects of puberty blockers can be ended by stopping them, correct?
As for the other stuff, yeah, it might be more prudent to wait until adulthood for that–at least short of a major crisis.
So, are many gay trans men just autoandrophile perverts?
Also, the interesting thing is that I’ve occasionally had autogynephile fantasies myself–but I’ve had much more fantasies imaging myself as a feminine guy than imagining myself as a girl. I honestly think that one’s fantasies in regards to this are simply the rest of one finding one’s ideal body image to be sexy.
What are the most fundamental natural categories? Male and female?
They’re actively trying to spread their madness, there are more and more cases of minors (who usually just are temporarily confused and might turn out ok otherwise) being given hormones, puberty blockers, prepared for surgery etc., all due to the lobbying efforts of those transgender freaks.
Here’s a good example of what this can lead to:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6817935/Autistic-boy-taken-care-school-reports-parents-refusing-allow-sex-change-treatment.html
Dreher is right in one respect, unfortunately it seems that only Muslims have the balls to protest things like this and teaching the “normality” of gay and trans to 4-year olds.
Your idea of ‘ordered’ indicates that you’re in need of some sort of a safety net. Other fans of art may be more daring and ready to have their senses transported to areas of the sub conscious (dream world, etc;) that aren’t easily depicted using conventional or algebraic formulations. I get it, and am not personally a big fan of Pollak’s in painting nor Sun Ra’s in jazz music. Are you familiar with the work of Chuck Close and his ‘super-realism’ style where photographic techniques are incorporated into his portraiture? I believe he also is known for using an airbrush.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/8a/Chuck_Close_1.jpg/350px-Chuck_Close_1.jpg
I agree with you strongly. In fact, I have been ruminating on leaving the site. I joined to follow Anatoly. I disagree with James Thompson but he is arguing from data and might be right. Other than that the only blog I visit with any frequency is Saker. That is to observe depravity rather than to be informed or debate with reasonable people.
If you only read with people who agree with you, you won’t learn much. If you engage with them, reasonable people will modify their views, althoug not much. The trouble is lending a presence regularly can be a form of endorsement. If I was in electoral politics (I haven’t been for decades), just having a username on this site would be poison.
The climate became warmer at about the time of the move – the Medieval Warm Period. There may have been a movement of settlers.
The American Revolutionary War was more like a civil war – something that the Brits are prone to underscore by noting that most of the actual fighting was between anti and pro-independence colonists.
If I’m not offhand mistaken (could be wrong) the future southern states of the US tended to be more pro-Brit during the American Revolutionary War than the colonists up north. If so, this could partially explain British sympathy for the Confederacy.
Upon a quick perusal, I came across this:
https://www.nps.gov/cowp/learn/historyculture/southerncampaign.htm
You choose your gurus carefully. But you do follow gurus in art, I don’t.
The Brits are known for having a noticeable Machiavellian element, as evidenced by their stances taken during the Russian Civil War and elsewhere.
A victorious Brit supported and heavily influenced Confederacy might’ve been permitted to have slavery for an extended period. Regardless, there’s also the view that this hypothetically victorious Confederacy would at some point agreeably end slavery – somewhat questionable in terms of when such might actually happen – seeing how long apartheid lasted in South Africa.
All trains should be automated, particularly those in Metro systems. They are too prone to hire idiots and crazies. All the people who shouldn’t be drivers, like trannies, are pushed to the front of the line.
Order is required in the sense that to create art, or anything, from raw materials you have to order them in some way.
You can take a pile of bricks and a hopper full of mortar and produce a pile of crap worth less than the material inputs by arbitrarily mixing them together. Or you can hire a skilled bricklayer to produce a wall, an arch, a building, etc.
Likewise with paint and canvas you must order the painting in some way in order to create art. That doesn’t mean it needs to be a realistic representation, but it can’t just be cobbled together shit. Like Picasso (and a few others) you can also produce anti-art by ordering it in a deliberately ugly fashion. There are some brick buildings like that too unfortunately (a lot of hospitals, schools, and jails).
Chuck Close’s work is incredibly creepy, but the man is talented.
Creepy? How so? (I confess I’m no expert with his catalog of work, so please feel free to express yourself). Also, I actually am a big fan of comic book art having developed my sense of aesthetics with silver age Marvel luminaries like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Jim Steranko.
Cotton plantation slavery would’ve become obsolete in the 1930s with the invention of the mechanical cotton picker.
I suppose in theory slavery could’ve been usefully employed in manufacturing and services. Trouble with slaves here is the same as the trouble with machines–you can’t fire them.
Not directly comparable to Apartheid in that Apartheid was economically more efficient than its replacement, whereas there are a lot of arguments about the economic efficiency of slavery.
The general problem with the Confederacy ending slavery on its own is that by the 1850s Southerners had come to see slavery as a positive moral good, a very different view than that held by their grandfathers (as noted by John Burns, Gettysburg Partisan).
Perhaps they would’ve been brought to heel by the same sort of global “human rights” boycott which destroyed Rhodesia and South Africa. They had better ideological defenses however as they fundamentally rejected the concept of equality.
imo the problem with Dreher’s criticism of the LBGTQ movement is that it’s so strongly religion-based (and the same applies even more to Muslims) and therefore unconvincing in increasingly secular societies, even though transgenderism clearly has the potential to cause significant harm to vulnerable and easily influenced people.
Dreher in general imo is just a mediocre hack who’s writing mostly about his feelz and always tries to stay on good terms with the establishment.
What are the most fundamental natural categories? Male and female?
Is this a joke, or are you serious?
Slaves were employed in the Tredegar Iron works in Richmond, so this doesn’t seem to be totally far-fetched.
The big trouble I see with this is that factories already have substantial costs of capital and depreciation which plantations do not (especially before tractors, hybridized seeds, chemical fertilizer, pesticides, etc.). Just the cost of land which is a one-time expense. Turning the workforce into another capital cost seems quite precarious, especially in the context of the 19th century when the business cycle was much more volatile.
Another problem is that it wasn’t until the 20th century that a majority of manufacturing work became unskilled and semi-skilled. While textile manufacturing was famously THE industry of the industrial revolution and is seen as low skilled today, it was actually fairly skilled work (especially the Lancashire variety which used spinning mules instead of jennies). Other big manufacturing industries of the time like iron, brass, boiler-making, engine-building, furniture, etc. involved a lot of skill.
How useful would black workers (whether free or enslaved) have been in 19th century manufacturing? I suppose there was always leather tanning.
The South did not have much in the way of manufacturing (hence why the Army of Northern Virginia expended so much effort on defending Richmond), but it did have railroads. How much slave labor was employed in the Southern rail industry?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_railroads_in_the_American_Civil_War
Ctrl + F in this Wikipedia article for “slave” brings zero results.
They were correct; forcing white people to live around blacks is evil.
E Michael Jones’ criticism of homosexuals is popular even with non-Catholic nationalists
Low compared to what? High table at All-Souls? It is vastly better in terms of content and more interesting (original) than most other comments sections on the internet.
IIRC FF had carefully set things up (placing appropriate, loyal military units inthe right places) so that if the Hungarians revolted in response to his granting autonomy to the Slavs unde their control, he would have crushed them swiftly.
Also, it was not as if some other power were poised and waiting to pounce on A-H if Hungary caused problems. If Russia would have wanted ot get involved it would have had to mobilize the troops, bring them to A-H. The revolt wouldhave been over by then.
You’re right I forgot about that. It was pointless though given that any advantage in relative tonnage was massively offset by the need to split the fleet between Europe and the Pacific.
In our scenario (post Versailles) A-H loses, so Poland takes Galicia and Romania is given Transylvania, Italy is given Trentino. The little nations are smart enough to stick together rather to form useless little statelets. So with territorial losses, A-H consists of Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Slovenia and Croatia. Possibly eastern Galicia too. Therefore no one claims A-H territory, other than potentially Germany.
Here there would be many possibilities. A-H would want lands back (Transylvania) and could become a German ally. A-H forms an alliance with Poland and Italy (Catholic powers). A-H, France and Britain join forces to contain Germany. In all these conditions the little nations are better off.
Stating that his people made a bad mistake is not “shitting on his country.” And obviously it was not a “foreign empire.” And I am not a Ukrainian nationalist.
So you are wrong so many times in such a short post.
I always wonder how you can reconcile statements like that with your Catholicism. It seems rather incongruous.
Britain was permitted to fortify Singapore (which was done at great expense) whereas Japan and America were prohibited from new Pacific fortifications.
America also had to split its navy between two oceans, and unlike Britain lacked an ally (France, which was permitted 35% of Britain’s capital ship tonnage).
Because Japan was purely a Pacific power, she was only allowed 60% of the tonnage permitted to America and Britain.
It should also be pointed out that the context of the time was that a gigantic three-way naval arms race was underway between the three powers. The new ships under construction dwarfed anything built during the Anglo-German naval arms race and were thus much more expensive. Britain’s fiscal position was very poor as a result of the war, whereas not only was America’s strong but America’s industrial and in particular shipbuilding capacity increased greatly during the war.
So I don’t think it can be said Britain got nothing out of it.
Additionally, I’m not sure that Britain would’ve viewed an allied Japan trying to gobble up China favorably either. Britain had long supported the Open Door Policy.
I suppose that perhaps a British alliance could’ve strengthened Japan’s “Strike North” faction, which presumably would not have upset British policymakers.
Another hypothetical could be the continued arms race bankrupting Japan to the benefit of America and Britain (and China, the USSR, France, and Holland), which in those days was economically much weaker than Britain and a debtor nation.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/03/20/bus-full-children-set-alight-angry-driver-retaliation-migrant/
Apparently the African bus driver in Italy intended to burn the children he had kidnapped alive.
Wonderful people.
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3026.htm#article7
I’ve heard someone else (on another website) suggest that the poor military performance of Austria-Hungary during WWI gave him doubts that the Austrians would be able to successfully execute a plan to quickly reconquer Hungary in the event of a Hungarian secession. If this assumption is actually correct, then Russia might have very well had the necessary time to militarily intervene in Hungary. Also, please keep in mind that this crisis could have escalated for a month or two or even more before the decisive action would have been taken. This would have also given Russia the necessary time to prepare itself and be ready to intervene if the Hungarians request it.
I do agree that if the Hungarian revolt would have been over quickly, then Russia would have probably declined to intervene. If, on the other hand, this revolt would not have been crushed quickly, then the possibility of Russian intervention becomes much more real. Of course, a huge question would be whether France would be prepared to militarily support Russia in such a move as well as whether France and Russia would be prepared to act without the support of Great Britain (support which might very well not be forthcoming if Germany doesn’t invade Belgium).
iirc the catechism of the Catholic church has a section about the duty (!) of developed countries to accept immigrants, including those who come for purely economic reasons.
And most of the hierarchy is militantly pro-open borders today, and would strongly denounce you for your views.
I was thinking of Austria-Hungary twisting some hands and demanding more lenient peace terms in exchange for a separate peace. After all, A-H was not necessarily simply going to roll over.
Of course, it is very possible that Poland would acquire Galicia (either only western Galicia or all of Galicia), but I’m not as sure about Romania acquiring Transylvania. Parts of Transylvania would likely be annexed by Romania, but very possibly not all of Transylvania due to the fact that some parts of Transylvania have large Hungarian populations. In exchange for making a separate peace, A-H could demand to keep northern Transylvania. If so, Romania could want to capture northern Transylvania from A-H in a future war. (Indeed, please keep in mind that Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points don’t say anything at all about readjusting the border between A-H and Hungary. They talk about other things–such as readjusting the border between A-H and Italy and giving both Serbia and Poland sea access–but there is no mention of giving Romania any Austro-Hungarian territories. One would wonder whether this omission was accidental or whether Woodrow Wilson was genuinely willing to let A-H keep Transylvania if it would have agreed to make a separate peace early enough.) As for Slovenia and Croatia, Serbia could want both of these territories and Italy could want Dalmatia. (Indeed, even after getting Trentino, South Tyrol, Trieste, and Fiume, Italy was dissatisfied that it didn’t get Dalmatia after the end of WWI!) Thus, you could potentially see a coalition of Germany, Romania, Serbia, and Italy try taking A-H down. If A-H keeps eastern Galicia, then the Soviet Union is likely to join this coalition as well. If Poland gets eastern Galicia, though, then the Soviet Union is likely to invade Poland while leaving A-H alone. Anyway, though, I’d expect the odds to be in favor of this coalition regardless of whether the Soviet Union would have joined it (though obviously Soviet entry into this coalition would guarantee victory) unless Britain and France would have been willing to launch an immediate offensive into Germany as opposed to sitting on their butts while A-H would have gotten dismembered.
The one thing that could have made a difference in regards to this is if an A-H withdrawal from WWI would have prevented the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. This might actually be possible if this withdrawal is done early enough–though it is worth noting that, had there been no Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and A-H would have still broken up and gotten dismembered afterwards–then the odds of a Nazi rampage throughout Europe would have still been greatly diminished even if the Nazis would have still eventually come to power in Germany.
Also, Yes, A-H could want to reacquire some or all of Transylvania (depending on how much of Transylvania it would have lost) as well as Galicia, Vojvodina, Bosnia, South Tyrol, and even Trentino, Fiume, Istria, and Trieste. Of course, whether Nazi Germany would have actually been willing to accept help from A-H in exchange for an alliance is an open question. One might think that this would be the sensible thing to do, but the Nazis weren’t always sensible–for instance, alienating potential Jewish supporters by their rabid anti-Semitism and alienating the peoples of the Soviet Union after liberating them from Soviet rule during Operation Barbarossa.
If A-H would have actually been capable of forming an alliance with Italy, Poland, Britain, and France, though, then Yes, Nazi Germany would have very likely been kaput. Of course, one could have said the same thing had an Anglo-Franco-Russian/Soviet alliance been successfully formed to contain Nazi Germany back in 1939.
I know what the two sexes are, but I want to know if GR is referring to this or to something else here.
Yes but it was made up in 1992 on the basis of no previous tradition. Sometimes people cite the anti-Nazi encyclical from 1937 as being anti-racist, but if you read it it’s really just against racial idolatry or claiming that Catholicism is limited to a certain race.
Sometimes real morons will cite Galatians 3:28, but by that logic St. Paul didn’t believe that there were differences between men and women.
Yes but then they would probably denounce Christ and St. Paul also for what they said about Jews and (in St. Paul’s case) homosexuals.
Thanks for the name çheck. I agree. Anatoly and one or two others deserve a saner set of companions. I suspect that the extremists bring traffic to the site.
Over a couple of hundred years seems slow for simple killing of men. It could it be a Farewell To Alms type decline under conditions of extreme poverty. The Anglo Saxons are believed to have done something very similar to Celtic men in England. The non Yamnaya husband and wife couples could just have been dying off and disappeared. There would have to be some distinguishing status or helot class that native Basque Y chromosomes could not escape from though. Maybe the Basque terrain meant the Yamnaya had a use for the males they had conquered for a number of generation.
It probably depends what one understands by “racist”.
I suppose Catholics might accept that blacks are on average less intelligent than whites or East Asians. However, that might just be interpreted as even more reason for devoting resources to blacks, letting them immigrate etc. Aren’t you obliged to share with your unfortunate black brethren, who, through no fault of their own, are cognitively underprivileged?
(of course from a genuinely Christian perspective blacks would have obligations towards whites as well…but somehow that tends to be forgotten nowadays).
Paul also warned gentile Christians against arrogance towards Jews in Romans 11. That would seem incompatible with at least the more extreme antisemitic views.
Yes, I was referring to male-female division, I can’t think of a much more fundamental one.
Regarding puberty blockers, as far as I know, they do lasting damage, seems very questionable to me.
Yes but there’s nothing obliging you to treat everyone equally and Aquinas directly says that charity can involve loving those related to you by blood more than others. It is amazing when you read through these anti-racist documents produced since the 1960s and they have no relevant references to the Bible or the Church Fathers at all.
Yes but he’s only talking about ethnically Jewish converts to Christianity and arrogance in a spiritual sense. But that doesn’t contradict thinking they should be like every other nation in living in their own state. For obvious reasons you couldn’t be a Christian and think that ethnic Jews couldn’t be Christians without holding strange beliefs on who the Jews of Biblical times and their descendants were.
So I guess your position is that you’re against African mass immigration and the current “antiracist” programme (which increasingly doesn’t seem to be about colorblindness or whatever it was once supposed to be about, but rather about demonizing whites), but would support other forms of support and aid for Africans (at least Christian ones)?
I agree that the current position of the Catholic church on immigration is motivated by a “modernizing” attempt to stay relevant in today’s world (maybe in line with the aggiornamento of the 2nd Vaticanum); but it’s far from clear to me either that there’s anything in Christianity about an inherent positive value of nations.
I was just wondering, because your negative views of Jews sometimes sound racial in nature, and the more extreme versions of racial antisemitism often are anti-Christian as well (“Christianity as a Jewish plot to weaken the Aryans”, which is of course absurd historically).
But your explanation makes sense, thanks for answering my questions.
EDIT: Yes but he’s only talking about ethnically Jewish converts to Christianity
I’m not sure about that though, to me it sounds as if Paul warns against Christian arrogance towards unconverted Jews (the branches which have been broken away from the tree, Romans 11,18), because such arrogance could hinder the conversion of Jews to Christianity. But I admit I’m not the most knowledgeable about scripture.
My general take is that nothing in the Bible whatsoever endorses pozzed SJW liberalism (although SJW liberalism is fundamentally a Christian heresy as is Communism). The Bible does oppose National Socialism…because the Bible opposes murder and robbery.
Nominally Christian leaders who brandish the cross while preaching “progressive” doctrines take their moral leadership from the left rather than the Bible and are better called “Churchians” to use Dalrock’s term.
One could make a plausible argument that they’re Satanists considering that the primary axiom of Satanism is “Do as Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law” which is essentially the only justification offered by these so-called Christians for worshipping sodomy (many American Methodist churches are currently outraged that the UMC once again reaffirmed basic Christian doctrine on homo-sexuality).
The Metro in Copenhagen is automated. Mildly amusing to sit at the front window watching straightforward at the stops that above ground (most are underground but some are high above).
The Metro in China is automated, at least in the Bohai Bay Area.
I remember in a Cathedral in Madrid, I was surprised how the decoration was with pictures of African migrants, and text about how to help them, and felt this was a little “political”.
On a Sunday, I later visited another Cathedral in Madrid (in bourgeois area Salamanca in Madrid), and I could hear the priest who was giving a lecture actually about “inmigrantes”.
But how is this surprising? In Christian ontology, these migrants are “souls” which can be saved. The body of the person is not important – what is important is its soul, and its acts of charity, kindness, etc.
There is nowhere says in Bible about giving charity only to “European demographics with high average human capital”.
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At the same time, in Europe and North America, the population has been secularizing as a result of economic development. Particularly, in traditional Catholic countries like Spain and Ireland, the young people are not interested in going to church.
But in Africa, Latin America, Philippines – there’s still a lot more serious Catholics.
Most congregants of Catholic Church, live in developing countries, not in developed countries. So it would be unusual if the Church suddenly were supporting developed countries against developing ones.
Between Catholic Mexico and mainly non-Catholic USA ruled by Trump, why would the Catholic Church support Trump?
The thing where current leadership of Catholic Church is not quite logical, is not opposing more Islamic immigration. Larger Islamic demographics, could further weaken its situation.
This is a good thing. I dislike the sight of “conservatives” or “reactionaries” (on this site and elsewhere) who hold some strange belief that the great replacement will lead to the abolition of social liberalism, the more they are disillusioned the better.
Catholic church is losing ground in many of those regions to Pentecostalists and other weird Protestant sects.
But you’re right, the church clearly does seem to regard the global south as its future (also evidenced by the absurd number of new saints canonized in recent decades, clearly an attempt at moving beyond the too Eurocentric established saints), this also has political implications.
Another factor is that Blacks seem to be more receptive to Islam in general.
Is there any concrete data on racial conversion rates to Islam?
Anyhow, it would be funny if these Churchians’ attempts to bolster Christian demographics in their countries though African immigration instead result in an Afro-Islamic merger. I hear that is happening in cities like Bradford.
Apparently the African bus driver in Italy intended to burn the children he had kidnapped alive.
I watched the Spanish news tonight, there was a short item on this. It was reported (only) that the driver was “an Italian” who was “known to the police”.
Sure, in the Karlin forum, the standard can be good .
But if you sometimes click on an article outside the Karlin forum, both the articles and the comments are usually like a combination of various scenes from “Idiocracy” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.
It’s a big story in Italy though, will predictably (and rightly) help Salvini. The lack of reporting in other Western countries will also strengthen Italian resentment against the EU.
tbh, the events of the last few days have convinced me that it really will come to serious violence over the immigration issue, neither this incident in Italy nor the shooting in New Zealand will be the last of their kind.
These were in Europe’s periphery and thus safer. The ones sandwiched between Germany and Russia needed to stick together.
In that case there would have been some pan-Slavism used to seek to take in those lands. Pre-commie Russia was a generally decent and humane power, but it was expansionist. I suspect Czechs would have missed the Hapsburgs, in whose empire they were sort of junior partners, if they became part of the Russian Empire.
That would have been disaster for the Czechs and Slovaks (and Poles) in the end. Though Hungarians would have been okay.
If somehow Commies left Eastern Europe alone then sure.
Probably Islam designed more for lower IQ populations?
And that would be a design limitation for Islam as well, which has become a religion aggregating low human capital across the world. More intelligent blacks would then be less likely to convert to Islam, and would go to more cognitive religions like Catholicism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints_membership_statistics#Asia
Blacks in the US appear to be more receptive to Islam than US Whites–at least as far as I can tell. However, is the same also true for European Blacks versus European Whites? I seem to recall previously reading about some affluent and middle-class White women in Europe converting to Islam. For instance, Christiane Backer, Lauren Booth, and Yvonne Ridley.
If Islam genuinely is more attractive to Blacks than to Whites, though, then that might be due to Islam possibly being viewed as a more anti-imperialist religion than Christianity is. Of course, this isn’t necessarily historically accurate–Muslims were also great at creating empires. Still, perceptions matter more than reality.
By that logic, had Poland managed to eventually break away from Russia in the absence of WWI, it should have joined Austria-Hungary immediately afterwards.
Also, by that logic, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania, Albania, and Bulgaria all likewise needed to join Austria-Hungary.
The interesting fact that is in spite of being even more fragmented right now than it was in the interwar era (Yugoslavia broke up into seven countries and Czechoslovakia broke up into two countries), Eastern Europe (including the Balkans) appears to be doing pretty well nowadays in spite of the fact that it is sandwiched between Germany and Russia. It’s as if a US alliance could keep the peace in Eastern Europe even without the creation of any kind of mega-state in between Germany and Russia. If only the US had been aware of this right after WWI.
Incorporating Czechia into the Russian Empire would have probably been unrealistic unless Silesia and the Sudetenland would have also been annexed by Russia.
As for the Russian Whites, I don’t even see them conquering Poland west of the Curzon Line–let alone conquering Czechoslovakia.
I’m not sure that the Slovaks would have been that bad off in such a scenario–other than their Jews and Gypsies, of course (who would have been either deported out of Europe or outright murdered).
Hungary (other than its Jews and Gypsies) would have been pretty well off in a Nazi victory scenario–though not as good as it would have been had it avoided losing WWI in the first place.
That was actually very, very doable. All you need to do is to prevent Hitler’s and the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany in the first place. A non-Nazi Germany would probably only have territorial claims against Poland (at the very least, it would probably be willing to compromise elsewhere if necessary) and would also likely be willing to form an alliance with Britain and France (and also possibly Italy as well) to protect Eastern Europe (with the possible exception of eastern Poland) from the threat of Communism. If the Soviets know that they are going to face an Anglo-Franco-German-Italian coalition if they attempt to export Communism to other countries, then they are likely going to refrain from engaging in any provocative moves. The best that the Soviet Union could hope for in such a scenario is to get German agreement to a Soviet annexation of eastern Poland. Of course, the only reason that Germany might have agreed to this is because it would have wanted Soviet help in a war against Poland in which Germany would recapture Danzig and the Polish Corridor. Beyond that, I really don’t think that a non-Nazi Germany would be very eager to see any Soviet expansion due to the natural fear of Communism that a non-Nazi Germany would have had (even among its Social Democrats, who cooperated with the Freikorps in order to crush the Spartacists back in 1918-1919).
Heck, even avoiding the Fall of France in 1940 and having the Nazis be overthrown and having Britain and France agree to a compromise peace shortly afterwards might very well prevent Eastern Europe (with the exception of the Baltic countries and a few other territories such as eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and Bukovina) from falling under Communist rule due to the fact that neither Britain nor France nor Italy nor a post-Nazi Germany is actually likely to tolerate any Soviet attempts to further spread Communism. Indeed, it is the Fall of France that eliminated the last democratic bulwark in continental Europe and that eventually paved the way for the spread of Communism into Eastern Europe. (Heck, even after the Fall of France, had Britain and the US actually been receptive to the idea of a negotiated peace with a post-Nazi Germany, perhaps an anti-Nazi coup in Germany would have actually succeeded and Britain, the US, and Germany could have cooperated in keeping the Soviet Union out of Eastern Europe.)
I think it would be hilarious if Unz revealed the whole site was an elaborate trolljob: getting “race realist” people like Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire, “Audacious Epigone” and Paul Kersey to share space with the Nation of Islam is actually pretty funny when you think about it. Also reveals how desperate these “alt-right luminaries” are for money, and the moral and intellectual bankruptcy that follows from that.
My view is 180 degree opposite of Thorfinnsson view here.
If Muslims become secularized and socially liberal by modernization, I think most of world problems with Muslim countries would be not there.
In the secularized and modernized Muslim country, where Azerbaijani girls who care more for Armani than Koran – it looks not so bad:
If you have to choose from Islam, and consumerist secular culture – latter will surely create a far more civilized country (with a more human and happy population).
Pilsudski had the wisdom to try to create an Intermarium, but stupid petty nationalisms (including within Poland itself) got in the way . The story was the same as in the former Hapsburg lands – catastrophe for the statelets.
They might have wanted to create some Slavic realm, perhaps eventually dividing these lands with Germany as the Soviet did. Russia was expanding where it could and before the Commies killed it, it could have gone very far. And the statelets wouldn’t have put up much resistance. Russia would have expanded into the Balkans first but the center would not have been safe.
Projection is a strong pattern in you. You tend to accuse others of what is true of yourself. This is conclusively proven when you accused me of exaggeration. while claiming it takes many hours to drive form one place to another (googlemap showed 1.5 hours), Yanukovich won the election in Trancarpathia in 2010 (he lost by 6%), poor Poles have to come to Slovakia (average wage in Poland is only 7 Euros a month lower than in Slovakia) etc. etc. So when you habitually accuse others of having your traits, pointing it out is simply reality. There is nothing “immature” about it, although I will remind you that projection is the most primitive of the defense mechanisms.
Your view of the Meso-American cultures is indeed parochial and ignorant though to your credit it is at least moral, which is more important.
I will not doxx myself by posting surnames of close relatives so I resort to vague statements. I will be visiting a cousin on his summer estate this summer who is a count (his family on the correct side of the Iron Curtain were fortunate because communists didn’t steal everything as they did from my grandparents). So another vague statement.
White overall average has higher PISA score than that of every European country other than Finland. US education is fine, mediocre overall results are simply because America is also educating a lot of third worlders. Even lower educated whites in places like Appalachia do better than, for example, the Balkans. IIRC whites in Massachusetts even beat Finns.
And then universities – most of the best in the world are in the USA.
If you weren’t so parochial and better aware of the world you would understand that.
Zionists, neocons… did everything they could for this secularization not to happen. Egypt was being secularized and modernized so Muslim Brotherhood was used against it in 1950s. Afghanistan was being secularized and modernized so the religious mujahideen were used against it. PLO was secular so Israel helped to create Hamas. And then came Iraq, Libya and Syria which were pretty secular and modern states by Muslim standards.
And there still is the case of Iran which, in my opinion, was pushed into the hands of Islamists in 1979 with the help of Western and Israel’s shenanigans.
Yes, it would be better than what we see in the Muslim world now but Azeris are neither Arab nor Sunni. Azerbaijan is also a resource rich country with a small population that was part of a secular USSR for most of a century. I’m not sure it’s reported success can be replicated in the overpopulated Arab Sunni world.
And, incredibly, he doubles down on the blue blood sh..t…
What is Intermarium? Is it what you call it when you marry that cousin this summer? Or is it some ritual on the wedding night? And how is it related to the ‘PISA scores’ and Finland? My guess is that it involves flowing water and a ‘count’. Tell us more…
So coming over to my POV?
This seems to bother you in particular. You had accused me of insecurity, but given your pattern of projection it seems another projection by our peasant friend, who should not be ashamed of being a peasant.
BTW your accounts of Czech mass desertions during World War I were a particularly funny exaggeration, because most of them were invented by German nationalists (who wanted to blame the Czechs for the military defeats), denied by Czechs during the war, but then afterwards adopted by Czech nationalists as proof of their alleged opposition to the monarchy all along, and believed as gospel by naive people such as you.
That doesn’t really imply anything about status, it is very frequent for related languages to sound accidentally hilarious to each other. Eg…
https://naamapalmu.com/file/72162
Another thing is that the meaning of words is constantly shifting and if you start from the same meaning two different languages can end up with something totally different. So a “pole” in one language might end up with the predictable slang meaning of benis :D:D:D and eventually get so fixed in that meaning that they end up inventing another word for “pole”. If another language doesn’t go through the same shift in meaning and keeps using the word in the original meaning, then any discussion about hoisting flags is going sound ridiculous to speakers of the other language.
Finnish and Estonian were both countryside languages historically but Estonian sounds like absolutely hilarious gibberish to Finnish ears because so many words have changed meaning so you keep getting funny or naughty false matches.
Did the Hungarian troops perform a lot better than the non-Hungarian ones? Also presumably the Slavs under Hungarian control would have enthusiastically fought for their newly-gained rights.
FFs plan was not to be crowned in Budapest (which would have required promising the status quo to the Hungarians) and to immediately declare his intention to separate the Slavs from Hungary’s control. He had loyal troops placed in Budapest who would crush any potential uprising. Under such circumstances it is doubtful the Hungarians (who would have only lost territories not populated by Hungarians) would have even rebelled.
Also, it would have been odd for pan-Slavist Russia to intervene in order to help keep Slavs under Hungarian control.
Christian anti-Judaism was theological not racial. This remained so in teachings and actions of the Church. Jews were special (just like in Romans 11) and never viewed as heretics or pagans. Jews were protected and the Church often implored local communities not to harm or persecute Jews. Even in early centuries of Christianity when Jews were reformulating and reconsolidating their Judaism Christians left them to themselves:
I found these charts are interesting:
http://www.pewforum.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2018/05/PF_05.29.18_religion.western.europe-00-08-.png
http://www.pewforum.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2018/05/PF_05.29.18_religion.western.europe-00-09-.png
http://www.pewforum.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2018/05/PF_05.29.18_religion.western.europe-00-12-.png
https://www.pewforum.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2018/05/PF_05.29.18_religion.western.europe-00-00-.png
http://www.pewforum.org/2018/05/29/being-christian-in-western-europe/
British War planners were very interested in Oregon and Washington State, at that point undetermined who controlled the Pacific North West and the British presence was strongest there. Maine was also viewed as a potential target for annexation.
A rump US would have been a threat to even a greater Canada and a greater Confederacy, but this would have just solidified loyalty to the Empire, as it did for Canada.
Special in the sense of being especially bad.
Sometimes the church prevented them from being massacred, but this is no different to what previous and contemporary secular governments did. However in general the Church was responsible for putting all sorts of restrictions on Jews that had never existed under the secular Roman government.
For instance, Jews were limited in their ability to keep Christian slaves, forbidden from celebrating certain festivals etc., forbidden from occupying offices in government or the military (contrast this with pagan Rome where a Jew was prefect of Egypt) as well as many other further restrictions at different times or places. For instance, in Visigothic Spain there was an increasing series of restrictions imposed by the Council of Toledo culminating in a general expulsion. They were also segregated from mainstream society, which never happened in Rome or the Hellenistic world (outside of Egypt).
In fact synagogue construction was banned by the Theodosian code and Justinian ordered that some existing synagogues be converted into churches, so any building of new synagogues took place because of governmental impotence rather than permission.
Fidesz was suspended from (and will likely be kicked out of) the EPP with a near unanimous majority. Another possibility is that Orbán will have to reverse course on the CEU and a number of other issues. Currently three EPP elders are investigating the state of Hungarian democracy.
Perhaps unrelated, but perhaps not.
Hungary opened a commercial representative office in Jerusalem. While the EU prevents Hungary from moving the embassy there (this was explicitly mentioned by the Hungarian foreign minister), this seems to be a de facto recognition of the annexation of Jerusalem (and perhaps even Jerusalem as the capital city of Israel).
I suspect Orbán is trying to maneuver this way, finding support among the deplorable Jews and the deplorable American leadership against the EU cuckservatives and socialists.
I believe you are mistaken in the zero hull losses for the Tu-204, Red Wings flight 9268 crashed onto the highway where I, incidentally, do most of my driving, killing its cabin crew. A quick search will produce some dramatic dash cam footage of a hapless driver swerving in an attempt to avoid colliding with a giant wheel from the landing gear. There have been a lot of reports of other problems with it, as well, I would never fly on one.
I’ve flown on the SSJ-100, it seems like a fairly ordinary, if mundane, modern airplane. That being said, Aeroflot, off the record, complains bitterly about the unreliability of these planes and the cost and inconvenience of maintenance. They are currently in negotiations with Sukhoi and the Russian government about concessions on maintenance contracts. They’re pretty much the only buyer of these things, so they probably have at least some leverage. There was a report in the Russian media recently, which was quickly scrubbed, about a SSJ-100 that returned to SVO with hydraulics failure (!). I think I may be avoiding these planes in the future, also, though I do hope the problems are ironed out and the program is eventually successful.
Russians are good at design, but they are not good at production.
* Why Belorussia is Not the Ukraine
Among other things, I’d like to understand how can Education be the Elixir of Growth, and yet the fairly well educated Ukraine ended up in this current situation.
Jews had privileges. It was a common belief that Jews engaged in persecution of Christians. Theodosian code was a move in a right direction. For instance forbidding stoning of Jewish converts to Christianity.
What privileges did Jews have because of Christianity?
The level of education in Ukraine is quite low, at least in comparison with Russia (Russia more urbanized and less religious)
The usual shoehorn: Ukraine more religious and it’s horrible! Versus. Ukraine more religious and it’s awesome!
Before Christianity.
It is no lower (probably better) than in Belarus and yet Ukraine has about half (44%) of Belarus’ per capita GDP PPP.
Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland each had about the same GDP PPP in 1991; all three had roughly 60% of the GDP PPP of Russia.
Today Poland has a higher GDP PPP per capita than Russia is over 3 x higher than Ukraine.
Today Belarus has a GDP PPP per capita that is about 2x higher than Ukraine’s and 70% that of Russia.
Which country had a better approach starting from 1991?
It could easily have been channeled within a federation of more or less equals.
When World War I began there was no problem with enlistment in Slavic lands for A-H and no mass draft dodging nor desertions by Slavs. The alleged mass desertions by some Czech units n the Russian front was a myth* that began with malevolent German nationalists seeking to blame the Czechs for the losses. Czechs initially protested against these lies, but when the war ended they adopted them for themselves and they became a stable of Czech mythology after the war. There were mass desertions towards the end of the war when the loss was imminent but using these as evidence for the inevitability A-H falling apart is as stupid as using mutinies in German shipyards towards the end of the war as proof that the German monarchy was inherently unstable and that it would never have lasted.
I am well aware of mass executions of Russian activists in Galicia (the prosecutors, btw, were frequently local Ukrainian nationalist Austrian loyalists – one of them became president of the western Ukrainian republic). My own great-grandparents were slated for execution but were spared because a brother-in-law was chief physician in the main nearby military hospital and interceded on their behalf (their oldest sons fled to St. Petersburg, while the younger kids were ironically Ukrainian nationalists).
Then how can you connect their privileges to Christian beliefs
Based on this data, perhaps Belarus.
(1) The Polish and Soviet economies even in 1991 were fundamentally incomparable. The Polish economy was far less distorted, had already undergone painful reform, and could draw on living memories of capitalism as well as a patriotic diaspora.
(2) Russia benefited from oil, so not directly comparable either.
(3) The Ukraine and Belarus were, however, quite comparable. And the latter did a lot better, despite having even less resources and heavy industry per capita.
In Hungary there’s a myth of Hungarian units fighting better than other A-H units. That was recently disproved by military historians. The problem is, all A-H units fought badly, either with little enthusiasm, or little professionalism, or both. It’s hardly surprising, ethnically mixed mass armies tend to not do well in modern warfare. Soldiers don’t trust the officers (who were of a different ethnicity), the language of the units was a foreign language to them (in A-H, it was German for all except maybe the Hungarian Home Defense Forces units, which were a small minority of even units from the Hungarian part, and in turn these were still ethnically mixed, so it’s not like all soldiers there were enthusiastic to speak the official language of the unit…), and of course it’s always difficult to teach anyone anything in a language which he doesn’t speak well. (Though in fairness, the officers were required to learn the language of the rank and file of the unit, the units were always drawn from the same province and even same county, so they were ethnically more or less homogeneous. Still, the very high trust between officers and rank and file seen in the German army was probably lacking.)
Were units really ethnically mixed?
They were locally raised, centered on a specific area, military administrative region.
Also, officers were versed in German (Latin, previously) since 16th century – demonstrated by Serb Grenze officers correspondence and attendance of Austrian academies. The 1878 AH invasion of Bosnia&Herzegovina was commanded by 3 generals of Serb descent.
The reasons of Austro-Hungarian lacklustre performance lay somewhere else – one should keep the experiences of Napoleonic, Italian, Austro-Prussian war in mind as well.
There were 100,000 Czechs and Slovaks in the Czechoslovak Legion by 2017, with generals, officers, etc… There were strikes, rebellions, draft dodging, desertions, government in exile allied with the Allies, domestic Czech leadership in prison, brutal Habsburg censorship, Czechoslovaks had a seat at Versailles among the winners of WWI, etc… When Habsburgs capitulated there were millions celebrating the victory in the streets, the Habsburgs leftovers were cleared out in a few weeks – you can watch the videos. You know nothing about that era, you seem to be just a misguided poseur.
I explained in detail why after 75 years of trying that was simply not possible. Can you read or comprehend? And what do you mean by ‘more or less equals‘, who would be less equal? Czechs? Hungarians? Serbs? Even your mythology is incoherent and doesn’t make sense.
Stop pretending that you know something about it. You have a completely upside-down view of the Habsburg past based on silly self-serving cherry-picked biased memories. Your misplaced attachment to Habsburgs is also embarrassing: Habsburgs were incompetent and brutal losers. Others created some good music during their reign, so?
Units themselves weren’t, but the officers could be drawn from anywhere. Also, different units were drawn from different parts of the country/empire, so their cooperation and trust in each other must have been lower than in ethnically homogeneous armies.
One Hungarian national hero, János Damjanich, one of the Arad Thirteen hanged by Franz Josef on October 6, 1849, was an ethnic Serb.
Some of the problems of the Austro-Hungarian Army can’t be blamed on the empire’s diversity either, except indirectly.
Austria-Hungary consistently spent less, both as a share of GDP and in absolute terms, on defense than all the other European great powers. The prewar conscription rate was also lower than all other powers (besides Britain for obvious reasons).
Prewar Russian intelligence substantially overestimated the combat effectiveness of the Austro-Hungarian Army, apparently due to the Russian view that it was a fundamentally German empire and that Germans are skilled at warfare.
The empire actually had surprisingly few ethnic problems during the war. The Austro-Hungarian Navy was substantially crewed by Italians, yet loyally fought against the Regia Marina.
I don’t comment on anything else except two things: first, this one sentence: this combination is not actually that uncommon in Poland.
Second, AFAIK AP always was moderately pro-Polish, not Polish nationalist (neither he seems to eb Polish nationalist now). Just as many Polish nationalist are moderately pro-Ukrainian (not Ukrainian nationalists).
If “most Polish commenters” means “szopen” then, of course, most Polish commenters are rather pro-Ukrainian 😀
Personally I think that independent Ukraine is a good thing. There are however nationalists who think that Ukraine will be naturally allied with Germany against Poland, especially sicne Germany can offer Ukraine much more. Moreover, many nationalists I know, I read and watch indeed ARE rather anti-Ukrainian, which I consider rather a sad thing. Poland and Ukraine are natural allies, with similarly sized-populations, meaning we can actually be partners, without danger of dominating one another. Moreover, I think that any “intermarrium” coalition would be fantasy without Ukraine. Czech+Slovak+Hungary+Croatia+Slovenia still does not equalize Ukrainian population. Ukraine has a good potential, which is not realised right now, but under good government it can quickly develop.
I am not happy about Volhynia and UPA glorification; in fact, since times immemorial in all discussions I suggested Poland should instead found Polish equivalent of “righteous between the nations” given to those many brave Ukrainians who were risking their lifes warning or saving Polish neighbours. Plus we could encourage the shifting to the first UPA (under they guy the name’s I forgot right now).
Given Polish economy, size and geopolitical situation, we must either accept being second-rate partner, or try to ally with Ukraine. Any other option is unrealistic and, in my opinion, is a daydreaming.
As for “I hate Putin, not Russia” is quite common sentiment in Poland. Though I admit we have a really large contigent of real russophobes.
Surely though this is not a third world issue because they are likely to have shown the same competence as western guys following their training……….the main issue being the lack of light-aircraft experience or military experience – i.e their country has no air force to speak of…and these guys are likely to have been trained on computers/simulators and with next to zero light aircraft experience making them less alert to spot any BS from Boeing’s systems.
All the major western airlines (and Warsaw pact) are piloted by masses of ex-air force pilots, many of them spend their spare time enjoying themselves at airfields using light aircraft/gliders and doing plenty of (unpaid) teaching themselves. This obviously isn’t the case in places like Ethiopia ( though I was under the impression that Boeing do plenty of their tests flights over there and would have used Ethiopians training to be pilots as observers , but not as the actual test pilots of course)
I reckon on unaturally trained ( all simulators/not ex-military/ not light aircraft user) western and third-world country pilots…this issue remains the same.
Two other key figures: poet Sandor Petofi was born as Alex Petrovic, I believe also a Serb. And Ladislav Kosut, also known as Lajos Kossuth, was a Slovak, from a Slovak family deep in the northern mountains. His uncles and cousins couldn’t understand Magyar language, so his revolutionary activity was lost on them. This is a bit of joke on our common past, we still have a lot Kosut family descendants…
In Polish, there are. In 2018 CBOS 24% declared sympathy, 40% declares antipathy (for comparison: 18% sympathy for Russians, 49% antipathy). Just a year ago 36% declared sympathy to Ukrainians, though (and 31% to Russians). In general, the declared sympathy to all foreigners nosedived in 2018 (even for Hungarians: fall from 54% to 42% sympathy).
See Rys.2 (page 7 in pdf, though marked as page 5) and Rys 3 (page 9 in pdf)
https://www.cbos.pl/SPISKOM.POL/2018/K_037_18.PDF
Christianity was originally a Jewish sect. Every word of New Testament, including Luke, was written by Jews. (Of course these Jews themselves were very Hellenized by the time of Jesus and influenced by Greek philosophy).
As a result, the rejection of Christianity by most Jews, and persistence of the previous Jewish religion from which Christianity was originally radical sect, created fundamental instability or design flaw when Christianity became the consensus world view of Europe.
This is related to both metaphysics, and the psychological fact that intelligent adults never completely believe religious texts.
If there is certainty about the truth of the text, then persistent rejection of it would not undermine stability of the religious consensus.
However, even Medieval people were not so much stupider than we are today. They would privately know that Bible is mostly absurdity and nonsense, that has no relation to what anything they experience in their normal life (when was the last time you saw someone fighting with an angel?).
They can compare real life and the text, and even children over about 8 years old, know the text is full of nonsense that never actually happens in real life that we can experience.
At the same time, they also know this private scepticism is irrelevant, if and only if everyone publicly pretends religion is true. If everyone pretends it is true, then external effect is same as if it was actually true. So by pretending it is true, you can actually make it true – not objectively, but at least intersubjectively.
The sense that you can “make the religion true” by “making everyone say they believe it”, relates to intersubjective truth. This can create an intersubjective reality, which is unfortunately also very unstable and easily threatened.
In this case, belief – or public expression of belief- can substitute for truth; and the belief – on which we can create an intersubjective reality – becomes the most important thing, not whether it matches any external, non-human reality.
In this situation, we know we can never be certain about its truth (for any people above moderate scepticism or intelligence level will not be certain Harry Potter is a true description of reality). However, the second best option is available – which is for everyone to publicly act as if it was true.
If everyone acts as if Harry Potter is true, this “makes it true”, in an intersubjective world – and will be stable enough you can safely build society on the text.
But also imagine J. K. Rowling or her heirs, reject the text, say it is fiction, or reject the second half, or even (blasphemy) say that “Tolkien” is the only real prophet, and “Lord of the Rings” is the only non-fictional text, and actually a better piece of writing than “Harry Potter”.
Then there will be a fundamental system vulnerability for Harry Potter. And “patching” this will be an existential project, required to establish enough intersubjective stability to construct a society on its claims.
European man discovered too much practical knowledge from systemic study of reality, and when he began publicly stating the principles by which practical knowledge could be attained, he was soon directly contradicting a lot of the intersubjective religious consensus.
“God is dead and we killed him” is already part of the history books of the 19th century.
So the fact modern Christianity is not concerned with patching against the Jews, is not surprising.
When science has contradicted many of the parts of the old intersubjective consensus, and when most people do not believe in it. Then Jewish rejection is no longer a fundamental vulnerability of that intersubjective consensus, as the consensus was destroyed a long time in the past.
Christianity has not been consensus reality for generations, and so there is no consensus that can be threatened by rejection by the heirs of its authors.
I think position for religion today, will be something more like Jung (and German romantic views in general). For Jung, religion can be justified by its contribution to psychological health, not its matching or substituting for an external world.
Sándor Petőfi was a thoroughly Magyarized Slovak. His mother was Mária Hrúz, a Slovak woman who already talked to her son in Hungarian. His father was István Petrovics, who was long thought to be Serb, but in fact he was Slovak, too.
Poland is irrelevant comparison point for Ukraine – it is on the border and integrating with the German economy, it is part of the EU, and was never part of USSR.
Relevant comparisons for Ukraine – are non-oil/gas exporting, non-EU, former parts of the USSR.
So Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, etc.
Here Ukraine is economic “worse than expected”, but not to such large extent that would be believed by irrelevant comparison to EU countries or oil/gas exporting countries.
In GDP per capita PPP, they are ordered:
1. Belarus (by far most successful)
2. Georgia
3. Armenia
4. Ukraine
5. Moldova
China’s New Silk Road To Extend To Russia’s Crimea
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-18/chinas-new-silk-road-extend-russias-crimea-private-investors-eye-peninsula
You are the one just making things up.
The reason for restricting Jews was obviously not because their religion challenged the consensus of Christianity, because if anything their hatred of Christ only verified what was written in the New Testament, they did not really have any theology of their own and any of their religious ideas were only kept among themselves and not proselytised among Christians. The expressions of hostility to Christianity recorded are not reasoned arguments or denial of Christianity’s truth but just juvenile provocations like attempting to desecrate crosses.
Νο Yang posts?
Is Yang a NYC evil genius? Just when the $%#%%^s figured out that section 8 was a scheme to dump them in poor Appalachian towns Yang comes up with a new trick. Give every $%#%%^ in San Fransisco $1000 a month to do what they want, but net it against any other government benefits. I bet what they want is to move out of Frisco to who cares where. Any thoughts on the unintended or maybe intended consequences of Yang Bux.
I wonder if he should propose eliminating federal student loans and guarantees and restore bankruptcy protection to student borrowers. Basically, a student would be getting $12k a year and they could probably do another $10k a year easily enough by working. If they need more then they should get a private loan, or the university they attend should loan them the money.
Can you collect Yang Bux if you don’t live in the US of A? Paying poor people to go to Honduras might be the ultimate dream of NYC Chinese sharps. A huge portion of Jewish Israelis are actually US citizens, will they get Yang Bux. How about US citizens who have never been to the US?
Note, Yang is basically saying he will have a VAT tax system and will net the $1000 against current benefits.
Andrew proposes funding UBI by implementing a Value-Added Tax a choice between their current benefits or $1,000 cash unconditionally
https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-ubi/
Well, he was Hungarian, of Slovak descent. He never considered himself anything else but Hungarian, more precisely a Hungarian nobleman, though perhaps later, as a revolutionary, the nobleman part might have become of little importance to him. In fact, he kept arguing that Slovak was not a proper ethnicity, and that Slovaks were Slav-speaking Hungarians. Given the similarity of cultures, that wasn’t entirely wrong, except that having a different language meant that they were of a different ethnicity, too.
I also think he was not nearly of fully Slovak descent, he had many Hungarian and perhaps German ancestors, too. By the way he was born in present-day Hungary in the village of Monok.
But one leader of the budding Slovak nationalist movement was his uncle. He had his own uncle arrested for that.
If I understand that survey data correctly, Ukrainians (and Belarussians as well) are even more unpopular than Germans in Poland, which doesn’t seem that positive at all.
I suppose the negative view of Serbia is due to Serbia’s pro-Russian leanings.
Very interesting, thanks for the link!
Any adult knows, even if they pretend not to, that Bible stories about “resurrections”, “virgin birth”, “splitting seas”, have the same relationship to reality as Harry Potter stories about a magic wand (they originated in the imagination of the person who wrote the text, or of those who inspired them to write the text if it’s collective folk story).
Even superstitious old women know this. Of course, you know this yourself, so there is no reason for me to write this. The beliefs, when examined out of context, or as if they were factual statements, are embarrassing for any adult.
The difference is it that it is socially acceptable to “pretend” Bible stories are real (just as in Scientology church, it is socially acceptable to pretend Hubbard’s stories are true), and not so long ago, it was socially unacceptable not to pretend they are real.
This is because pretending they are real, allows the basis for a whole intersubjective reality (and formerly society) we have created, and which has all kinds of amazing art, and emotional value to us.
If everyone can pretend then the story becomes a social reality, and can be basis for intersubjective consensus. Over centuries, whole, beautiful civilization can be built in this intersubjective reality.
We’re evolved to be able to prioritize social realities, over physical realities. Intersubjective consensus can be more important, than the content of the consensus or its origin.
As a child, we know how this operates – someone says “I am a tiger”, and everyone runs around room pretending to be escaping from a tiger. The absurdity of the statement “I am a tiger”, is unimportant – what is important is the value of the game that it is the basis for.
And you can at times, make the content of belief more ridiculous, to test the strength of the consensus (or in the Stalinist way, you can make a more boring speech, and test it by watching people clap for longer than for the interesting speech).
In religious history, there are times when , the more absurd religions were adopted, when the power of social reality was higher, and the society was stronger. And in weaker societies, only less absurb religion was possible to force.
You can also see this in small scale, with any minority cults. With cults, there is usually a positive relationship between how absurd the content of cult’s belief system, and the level of commitment of cult’s members. Within Judaism, for Haredi Jews. Within Islam, for Wahabi Muslims. Within Japanese Buddhism, for Aum Shinrikyo.
There are two things: “average feeling”, which for Germans is higher; and “sympathy” “antipathy”(rys 1, page 4 in pdf, and tables in two following pages showing changes over the years -note the collapse of positive feelings towards everyone). In that characteristics, Germans are, for example more disliked than Belarussians (36% vs 32) but also far more liked (30% vs 21%).
From what Karlin wrote about the Ukrainian and Belarusian IQ-education in Ukraine is much worse than in Belarus. Perhaps because Belarusian do not try to teach “Patriotic” mathematics by examining embroidery on “folk costumes”.
At least in the case of Poland, these are obviously fictitious figures
It was a small world. Kossuth and the Slovak national leader Ludovit Stur were arguing in the Hungarian parliament in Bratislava (or Pressburg, Possony) in early 1848 and going out for drinks afterwards. Our mythology is that they spoke Slovak to each other and were kind of friends, but nobody really knows. By the summer 1848 they were on opposite sides militarily: Kossuth was a Magyar rebel leader, Stur fought for the Habsburg side. Of course, Habsburgs promptly betrayed Slovaks after they defeated Magyars and made a deal with Budapest. The creation of Czechoslovakia was a natural consequence of that betrayal and so was the end of Habsburgs. How do Hungarians feel about Habsburgs now?
Kosut family was minor nobility from a village Kosuty in Slovak north. He may have had other origins – nobles intermarried a lot unlike peasants – but his family descendants are thoroughly Slovak and actually were quite active in the national movement.
I don’t understand that, since it’s like that even for Czechs, Slovaks and Lithuanians (though from a fairly positive level).
Gypsies and Arabs really don’t seem to be popular in Poland 🙂
Well, in case of Poland, GDP per capita in 1991:
2235/3485 = 0.64 (i.e. roughly 64% of Russian GDP per capita)
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?contextual=default&locations=RU-EE-LT-LV-PL-KZ&year_low_desc=false
I have no doubt that these are” official ” figures, but the Russian GDP of 1991 in them is obviously greatly overstated (perhaps due to the inflated Soviet military complex)
OTOH I’ve just noticed AP was saying PPP, while this data is nominal GDP, so… I would go easy on AP, this is understandable mistake – and go easy on me for confusing two too, this is, ekhm, understandable mistake 😀
Ukraine’s university rankings match Poland’s (slightly better, actually). Belarus is smaller so I wouldn’t compare.
According to English-language wikipedia the strength was 40,000 by 1918.
Czech radio says in 1918 it was 70,000 Czechs and 30,000 Russians:
https://www.radio.cz/en/section/czechs/the-czechoslovak-legions-myth-reality-gold-and-glory
This part is funny, given your belief in fairytales:
The uncomfortable fact though is that far more Czechs and Slovaks died during World War I in the Austro-Hungarian army fighting the Allies than in the small military units that fought alongside them.
“There is little comparison: about 5,000 legionnaires were killed in the war. But on the Austro-Hungarian side during the war there were 110-150,000 killed or even more. In fact, the Czechs did not fight as one man against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was just part of the nation.”
So you are exaggerating as usual.
Again, no problem with finding soldiers, no mass desertions until the end of the war, no mass draft dodging.
Yet more projection by the naive one who believes what his schoolmasters told him.
Says someone who thinks there were 100,000 Czechs and Slovaks in the Czechoslovak legion by 2017.
And still – it took 100 years for your people to get back to where they had been during the Empire’s existence.
I would hope so. But why would it be only Soviet Jews or atheist?
In their soul, every adult, atheist and theist, knows “miracle resurrection”, “virgin birth”, “splitting of the sea”, are fantasy stories, and even superstitious old women know that.
When adults, particularly men, pretend they don’t know this in private conversation, there is something undignified, like seeing teenagers who still suck their thumb or want to play with children’s toys.
As for atheistic Soviet Jews in Israel, I would imagine a special amusement with the idea their Mizrahi Jewish neighbours who are cooking spicy food and leaving trash in their apartment building in Haifa or Ashdod, were supposedly resurrecting themselves and having virgin births in the same places 2000 years before.
Although there is a real miracle, that fantasy stories of overimaginative Middle Easterners, would later become the source material for great civilizations, works of art, the Sistine Chapel and the musical compositions of Bach.
Dealing with a person who gets his information from wiki and then manipulates it is impossible, so I will leave you to your Habsburg fantasy. Last points about the Legion:
Anyone who really believes that Czechs and Slovaks stagnated for ‘100 years’ after 1918 is too disconnected from reality to understand any of this. As I pointed out to you the official (democratic) statistics show a 3 times increase in living standards, consumption and GNP/capita between 1918-1989. Three times better life in 60 years after we dumped the Habsburgs. And please, don’t tell us that we ‘could have done even better‘, that’s meaningless drivel.
You are also associating yourself with the losers, Habsburgs lost and they are permanently gone.
So it says nothing about desertions.
Yes, and a poor person today lives better than a rich person did 200 years ago. But compared to its analogue Austria, Czechoslovak lands fell behind and only crawled back to where they were in 1913 in the 21st century. They fell behind Spain and still never caught up. Sad.
Splitting of the sea, sure. The rest, no. Not everyone was poisoned by Sovok.
If you wish to define words “poisoned by Sovok”, to refer to people who are not incomprehensibly, retarded (or more accurately, lying to pretend to be incomprehensibly retarded in order to support a particular social posing).
There is no “virgin birth”, “resurrection”, “splitting of sea”, “magical elves”, etc. Anyone who denies that privately,is clowning, like someone who would say that Harry Potter is a magical wizard.
Middle Eastern cult members had a strong fantasy life and histrionic personality, and enjoyed adding fantasy stories in their texts, in the same way we all were inventing imaginary stories about dragons and unicorns as children.
You know this, and your brain is understanding the words – so it’s amusing to see people pretending not to understand the difference between fiction and documentary literature, even on anonymous internet forums.
Which, of course and unfortunately, was less uncommon, less unnecessary behaviour in the USSR, than in more politically honest societies.
Dostoyevsky, incomprehensibly retarded. LOL.
You don’t believe in the possibility of miracles because you believe that reality is limited to what evolved apes can perceive with their ape senses (enhanced with tools built by their ape brains). There is nothing beyond that. And you are the smart one.
There were multiple witnesses to the resurrection and the miracles (New Testament is a unique religious document, it consists of eyewitness accounts), who were martyred in gruesome ways because they would not deny what they saw.
So much misplaced pride.
Well, I am impressed that you talk about Dostoevsky.
He of course, – famously – had a very painful relation to this topic
https://i.imgur.com/kBEaJWb.jpg
But that lost of faith should not be the correct attitude.
Actually existing Jesus who has really died, is much more interesting, than imaginary “sky fairy” deity Jesus who never risked anything and had “no skin in the game”.
Jesus as a deity, with “no skin in the game” – would have been sacrificing less than the average person on this planet and risking nothing with his teaching and actions. Jesus as an ordinary man like any other – this is an example with potentially spiritual value.
Some evolved apes wrote on sheets of paper, with no evidence other than those words on paper, that another evolved ape has surpassed the laws of nature, just like Hercules before him, and Māui after him.
We know that evolved apes are often writing these stories, and that imagination is one of our most natural characteristics, and that such texts are produced in all times and places, and we ourselves have all created such stories, often much more elaborately, and do not need to confuse dragons and unicorns with real animals..
On the other hand, we know there no evidence has ever been presented of evolved apes surpassing laws of nature, being resurrected, being virgin births, etc.
A woman does not have children, unless there is a sperm cell to meet the egg cell. Jesus had both sets of genes, like everyone else.
Jesus had a father and a mother. He was a real person with his own spiritual teaching. After he had been killed – probably unjustly – his followers suffered a lot of grief, and various additional imaginative fantasies stories were added to the text to improve his significance, as they have been to all figures in the mythical past. (For example, Jesus was from Nazareth, but his birth place was moved to Bethlehem to match older Jewish prophecies).
Herodotus was the “father of history” – but even Herodotus includes mythical elements. The first real historian is Thucydides, and it is part of the miracle of the Greeks, that they could produce such a sober man who eliminated fantasy elements from their texts. Such men did not exist among Jewish religious people. All Jewish religious texts of the Ancient World, include a lot of fantasy elements. And New Testament was not free from this as we all know.
The very idea that a mentally sick bum as yourself ..a heretic, a satanist..a Nazi-supporting lowlife of sinister ( but dumb and timewasting ) intentions on here, that pleasures itself over massacring of civilians ……is religious and a believer in God on an way – is nauseous in the extreme
the Soviet Union was a vastly superior form of living for “Ukrainians”…nobody is disputing this. The braindead use of “Sovok” is amusing because of not only the fact that one can assume this is some insecure reaction to your relatives being some of the biggest losers, murderers and swine to have walked the planet – obviously in failed oppostion to the Soviets – but that in verminous, witless thugs like Avakov (Interior Minister – you know the nationalist retard who has never spoken a word of “Ukrainian” in his life but still has all his announements on facebook in Ukrainian), Valtsman/Poroshenko, Klimkin, Yarosh, Tymoshenko, Gerashenko, , ‘Yats”, the guy who carried “Yats” like a bunch of flowers and many more people…you have the archetype of “Sovok” there you dimwit.
On the assumption that “Sovok” refers to some sort of stereotype about a backwards looking, clumsy oaf , indifferent to coruption and so on from the former Soviet Union – the the Banderatard authoritiesin it’s current form are easily the most extreme form of them you thick idiot….and this is before I get on to American nutjob Suprun
You should read Dostoyevsky’s brief discussion of miracles which I do not have time to find and post now (was it n Brothers Karamazov? I haven’t read it in years). I am having having guests over this weekend so may not post for a couple of days.
He suffered immensely and thus had a lot of “skin in the game.”
What about other eyewitness accounts, about mundane matters? Accounts of boats or people who no longer exist. Did not happen?
Miracles by definition do not follow the rules. They cannot be reproduced in a laboratory or observed regularly. You pretend that only that which ape-brains can process systematically (observations, and laws based on those observations) can exist in the universe. The idea that the universe is limited in its complexity to that which ape brains can process is far more fantastic and unlikely, than is the idea of God or miracles that we do not understand and that do not fit into the systems and tools we use to manipulate the physical world.
The New Testament was a series of eyewitness accounts of what people saw. They were as surprised at what they saw as anyone else would be and recorded it. And they were so sure of what they saw that they often suffered horrible methods of martyrdom.
On topic of Jesus and resurrection, it was quite clear Dostoevsky knows he was a mortal man, who had died, and that this fact was an important artistic inspiration for Dostoevsky himself, who saw Jesus as more beautiful and tragic precisely for that reason.
Dostoevsky’s wife says even Myshkin’s reaction actually what Dostoevsky’s reaction was in real life – and he gives the words to Myshkin, who in the story, is a modern Jesus, who will be killed without resurrection.
In real life, where he was a normal person like you or I, who was killed for his ideas – he had skin in the game, much like Socrates before him (although Socrates with a more stoical Greek attitude).
But in the mythological text, where Jesus was God, and where this image will be venerated for a couple thousand years, – then he would have vastly far less “skin in the game”, than all of us, who might actually die for our decisions, and without any particular glory unlike Jesus who has attained posthumous veneration.*
So adding the “Hollywood special effect”, of the miracle of resurrection, by later writers after Jesus had died, removes some of the depth of the real story, where the teachings of Jesus had real, human consequences.
If there is evidence or at least normal probably that it happens, then it probably happens. If there is not, for example, then unicorns, dragons, etc.
Of course. And will all be far more fantastic, complex and bizarre reality, than narrow understanding written in some single (randomly selected – because there are many religions you could choose) slightly mythological text of 2000 years ago.
That isn’t to say the text isn’t interesting or inspiring. The Bible is interesting and important for mankind, story. (Although I see no reason to place it higher, than many other writings in the Ancient world, and the real story of Jesus would be more profound, than the “Hollywood version” with “supernatural special effects” we have inherited in the text).
It is not Thucydides, it is not even Herodotus. It is part of the genre “Ancient Jewish Religious texts”, written or inspired by desert mystics – and which most of them, contain some supernatural elements.
Inclusion of supernatural elements was an important part of these texts, and was even expected, like you expect special effects in an action film.
Most prophets of the Bible are decorated with miracles. Status of Jesus even as another prophet (let alone as the messiah), would require that miracles were attributed to him by his followers after he died.
Testimony, by itself, of course – does not imply literal truth (although it can often give psychological/spiritual truth of the person):
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*Borges has written about this paradox – that the real sacrificial son of God, would have to sacrifice their memory too (it’s less painful to die a hero), and that it would therefore be Judas who has sacrificed his own memory.
Precisely because He was God, He could experience the totality of the human condition, including fear of death, hopelessness, etc. That’s the point of the biblical story. He even asks His Father why He has Forsaken Him. Previously Satan tempted Him by telling Him that He should just use His divine power to rule the world.
I’m not well versed in theology, nor am I a believer, but it’s obvious that the biblical story is deeper than merely a human teaching esoteric (and often false) things (e.g. implying that he is somehow a deity), because in it you have an omnipotent god who could just rule the world by fiat, but instead He follows a more dangerous (for Him) path, which could go wrong in many ways, where – despite being God – He has to struggle exactly like a human would have to, basically renouncing the omnipotent powers (and the omniscience, too: during His ordeal on the Golgotha, He didn’t know that he would easily just resurrect Himself). So the struggle is self chosen (not forced from the outside, like most human struggles are), and it’s also the most difficult struggle possible (including the horrors any human would feel while being abandoned by all friends and overcome and killed by enemies). And because of His omniscience, He exactly knew how horrible it would be. And because it’s a miracle, it’s possible for Him to feel the totality of the human experience.
It wouldn’t be horrible like normal death, is for any real, mortal person, because under this dogma Jesus/God would be interacting with the world as a character in a virtual reality simulator, with no skin in the game.
And this is clear in the text- if it is read with this later dogmatic view, then we would feel no dramatic tension and no sense of tragedy or loss.
It’s impossible to really read Gospels with this view in front of your mind – as it contradicts the whole spirit of the body of text.
Jesus is not God in the important parts of the text, although (as likely in real life) he is relatively fearless and acts like he has less skin in the game than a normal, non-fanatical person, as he believes he is following God’s true teachings and the religion.
In Mark, for example, the resurrection ends with Jesus carried to Heaven and sitting on God’s right hand. As in waking up from a bad dream, without ill effects. The text becomes lifeless at this point and it’s like a formality Mark added at the end, which diminishes the significance of what you read earlier.
If you are re-reading the text with the dogmatic claims in your mind, then the story loses all depth of a tragedy and emotional impact.
In John, after resurrection, Jesus then goes and happily catches some fish for his disciples, without any sense of tragedy or pain from his experience, or even the sense something interesting occurred. This detached and chilled postresurrection behaviour of Jesus in John, almost undermines any significance of the story before it.
(Absurdly, Luke writes the same miracle happens early in his life, not after the resurrection).
These parts were added to the end of the story, arbitrarily, to try to impress people who weren’t there, that he was authentically divine. The exaggerations were a result of the fact Jesus wasn’t accepted by the mainstream while we he was alive.
But when you make those additions central dogmas, you sacrifice a lot of the emotional impact of the tragic story.
The assumption in most of the text is that Jesus knows God supports him, because Jesus is following and teaching the correct interpretation of the religion. Socrates was similarly fearless, as he knew truth was on his side (but fortunately Plato, was writing for higher class people and didn’t add some magic tricks to impress peasants on the end of the text)
If you know the Bible,there is a narrative arc, that God is generally becoming more conscious and articulate after interacting with man.
In the earlier texts, he is more like a nature deity, like Zeus – and there is a greater sense of authenticity in the text from this, as God is arbitrary like nature.
But with New Testament, it’s clear that this was not intended in the main text (which was based in historical events) that Jesus is God, and that this has been added as an afterthought.
In most of the texts, Jesus is clearly not God, but he has some sense of fearlessness and impersonality, because he knows God is supporting him and on his side.
He is fearless and acts very calmly – not because he is God – but because he believes God is on his side and he is righteous holy man.
The reason God is on Jesus’s side, is that Jesus follows the correct teachings of the religion much more radically and assuredly than anyone else.
The main impression reading the texts, is how generally very calm and doesn’t struggle like an ordinary person Jesus is, because he knows God is on his side and his religious teachings are the correct ones.
The idea of a God playing a character in the world he has created, like a video game designer testing his game, is an interesting one. But it implies something more like a Demiurge, than a monotheistic god. And certainly nothing like the historical Jesus, who was impressive precisely because of his commitment to his beliefs meant he would sacrifice his ordinary, physical life for those.
It’s a miracle. He lives the experience of a mortal man, losing (voluntarily giving up) all his supernatural clutches. That is the main point. Without it, the whole thing would be worthless, because then, he’d only be sacrificing his weekend. But that’s not what happens: Jesus dies the most horrible death, including the spiritual suffering of losing the support of all of his followers etc. He cries out to God in pain (as any human would do): “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
In the meantime, of course, Jesus is God, and he also knows it. He knows it and not knows it at the same time. He’s God and yet suffering like a man at the same time.
Depth of a story means you can spend years thinking about the story and always new and more meaningful interpretations keep coming to mind. By that metric, I don’t think there’s a deeper text than the Scripture in the whole of history. It’s not enough to read it just once at age 23 and then immediately figure it out for the rest of your (and other people’s) lives. Though I guess Crime and Punishment could also be read as a very badly written and boring crime story.
Personally, I’d be wary of placing too much faith in a document from 2,000 years ago. I’m generally skeptical of the idea of miracles. Heck, even in 1917, many Portuguese claimed that they saw a miracle, but I’m a bit more skeptical:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun
I know that many Haitians believe in zombies and claim to have seen them, but in reality, these “zombies” are merely people who have suffered from the effects of oxygen deprivation:
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2012/10/zombies-voodoo-and-pufferfish.html
Thus, in the grand scheme of things, I am agnostic but skeptical on the idea of things such as Jesus’s resurrection. As for a virgin birth, that’s very possible right now through IVF. 🙂
Amazing that someone who spends such an incredible amount of time roleplaying as an intellectual on someone else’s blog is also willing to go so balls-deep in destroying his own credibility through this juvenile display of reddit-atheist tier snark and crass ignorance of what he’s criticizing. It’s not just that you’re an obnoxious buffoon, but that you also blatantly don’t understand Christian theology or what even mildly serious everyday Christians believe. Other than the fact that your critique of Christianity is stale trash that has been phrased more persuasively a thousand times over the past 2000 odd years, you’re also far more guilty of what you’re projecting onto Christians; you’re just living in a total fantasy land if you seriously think that Christianity (or other religions that dominated large societies for that matter) is just a utilitarian scheme put on for the benefit of society, despite everyone knowing it’s not true. If that’s seriously your contention then you’re a joke. It’s not even a self-consistent theory, how could a “noble lie” religion possibly serve it’s function as social bedrock if everyone knew that it wasn’t true? You’re a moron.
But your own example undermines your argument, those Haitians DID see what they perceived to be zombies, they just didn’t know the cause. Also there is a slight difference between being kidnapped/poisoned by a witch-doctor under unknown circumstances and being crucified and your side pierced with a spear in public. That he was stabbed to ensure he was dead makes it pretty much impossible that it was just a drug-induced false death or ruse by the apostles (and if it were, why then would they not admit it under torture and threat of death?). To put it in the same realm as modern mediocre false “miracles” like doped out Haitians wandering around, you either have to declare Christ and his apostles to be conspirators in an immensely impressive hoax (as well as being incredibly committed hoaxers, since a lot of them died rather than admit what they did), or else throw out a great majority of the Historiography on the subject over the past 2000 odd years.
Show me one transgender that isn’t a Communist.