I was mostly traveling the past ten days, including another stay in Saint-Petersburg (where I made a speech on IQ & Dysgenics and attended a national conference, as well as participated in a couple of Russian podcasts), as well as Tver and Torzhok.
Regular posting will resume imminently.
@ak
More notable posts since the last Open Thread in case you missed any of them.
Featured
- Arpad Virag: Eastern Europe pt. 2
- Michael Johnson: Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything
- Mencius Moldbugman: Human Capital: A Horror Story
- Benjamin Bidder: Questions Cloud Story Behind U.S. Sanctions
Russia
- *tropical hyperborea* Haaretz: Climate Change Could Make Russia Great Again
- Reuters: Russian parliament backs law to label individuals foreign agents
- Clint Watts: Russia’s Media Mentions of 2020 Democratic Candidates
- Paul Robinson: Book Review: Soviet Russians under Nazi Occupation
- Vestige (Twitter thread): “Very long but very worthwhile report regarding the values and beliefs of Russia’s future foreign policy elite.”
- Artyom Lukin: “Studying Asia is becoming a predominantly female domain in Russia. At my university in Vladivostok, nearly 90% of undergraduates majoring in China, Japan, Korea studies are girls. At schools in Moscow, the gender ratio is similar. Is it the same in Europe and US?…“
World
- *sinotriumph*
- RT: Russia & China complete their first cross-border mega highway bridge
- Bryan McDonald: “Vladimir Putin & Xi Jinping, will jointly open the 4,000km “Power of Siberia” gas pipeline on December 2nd.“
- Trump signs bills backing Hong Kong protesters into law, in spite of Beijing’s objections
- ADL Global Survey of 18 Countries Finds Hardcore Anti-Semitic Attitudes Remain Pervasive
Coffee Salon
- Biohack Info: The most dangerous list in gene editing
- Emil Kirkegaard: Race Differences: A Very Brief Review
- video
- Kirkegaard, Emil O. W. 2019. “Race Differences: A Very Brief Review.” The Mankind Quarterly 60 (2): 142–73.
- PyotrNemets: “Spengler’s endorsement of Cold Winter Theory.“
- Inductivist: How much dumber are big families?
- Science Alert: Physicists Claim They’ve Found Even More Evidence of a New Force of Nature
- g-loaded: New survey of the experts of intelligence research
- Antonio, Margaret L., Ziyue Gao, Hannah M. Moots, Michaela Lucci, Francesca Candilio, Susanna Sawyer, Victoria Oberreiter, et al. 2019. “Ancient Rome: A Genetic Crossroads of Europe and the Mediterranean.” Science 366 (6466): 708–14.
- Herbalis: “I’m making a thread of good pubs in London. It’s not in any particular order and I’ll be adding to it sporadically.“
- Frith, Emily, Daniel Elbich, Alexander P. Christensen, Monica D. Rosenberg, Qunlin Chen, Paul Silvia, Paul Seli, and Roger Beaty. 2019. “Intelligence and Creativity Share a Common Cognitive and Neural Basis.”
- Platt, Jonathan M., Katherine M. Keyes, Katie A. McLaughlin, and Alan S. Kaufman. 2019. “The Flynn Effect for Fluid IQ May Not Generalize to All Ages or Ability Levels: A Population-Based Study of 10,000 US Adolescents.” Intelligence 77 (November): 101385.
- David A. Sinclair and Matthew D. LaPlante: We May Not Have to Age So Fast
Culture War
- Guillaume Durocher: Fincel Rebellion: Some Career Advice for Young Men
- *LOL* “Author of Russia and the Western Far Right” Anton Shekhovtsov was a Duginist in his youth.
- Edweek: “The Seattle school district is planning to infuse all K-12 math classes with ethnic-studies questions that encourage students to explore how math has been “appropriated” by Western culture and used in systems of power and oppression.“
Powerful Takes
- ANTI-White People Aktion:
- “Declare a state of war with Russia. Turn ICE against the fascists. Arrest anyone who refuses orders.“
- “You can either go to war against Russia and conduct mass arrests and repression against the US fascist movement under wartime measures or wait until they do it to you.“
- Thorne Melcher: “The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the Russian reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn’t. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people…“
- Дупа Джуліані #NotOurTsar: “Ukraine has a working domestic violence law, combat posts in the East open for women, a Muslim woman Eurovision winner, annual LGBT+ marches in multiple cities etc. Russia has none of that, so indeed, why shouldn’t Tucker Carlson (and, by extension, Donald Trump) root for Russia?“
- Tom Nichols: “Indian food is terrible and we pretend it isn’t.”
- Russophobe ideologue and Never Trumper neocon has worthless opinions across the board. What a surprise.
This is the current Open Thread, where anything goes – within reason.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Indian food is probably #2 after Italian. Disagreement will warrant expulsion from the coming Indo-Aryan culinary hyperstate.
I never understood why someone like AK has such a pedestrian taste in US politics. Mostly just quoting oldfags and cowards in the NRx movement. People who capitalise The Left and talk as if The Cathedral is anything that even that matters. Goldbug even tried to convince people the JQ wasn’t a real issue and it was… drumroll protestantism that was the fault.
It’s basically Glenn Beck with a slightly higher IQ. His Russian politics is much more radical than this tripe, so it can’t be a personality issue of timidity.
Nothing on this: Hungary withdraws from ‘homosexual flotilla’ Eurovision Song Contest?
If this were 1980, I suppose they would allow the boycott, but, it being the current year, I wonder if outside forces will select some homo or tranny to represent Hungary, regardless.
BTW, I think there may be a market for non-woke, nationalistic contests: sports, music, movies.
Indian food is simplistic precisely because of its overreliance on spices, in the same way that blacks are simplistic in their overreliance of bling. More sophisticated cultures understand the necessity of subtlety, whether in food, art or fashion. Who here would argue that ballet is of a lesser artistic and cultural quality than twerking? Indian food is the culinary equivalent of twerking.
Now a minority of the smart male fraction enjoy twerking, probably more than who would admit so publicly, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to be nice to those who have simplistic tastes, whether in food or dance.
It seems that Russia is on the verge of being banned from the 2020 Olympics and indeed all “global sporting events” for the next 4 years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/sports/russia-wada-olympics.html
This is not because of the “original” (2016) alleged doping violations, but because of more recent revelations, by the head of Russia’s doping agency no less, concerning database manipulation of drug-testing results.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/sports/olympics/russia-doping-rusada.html
So what’s going on? Were the Russians (or those responsible) really so naive as to believe that they could continue to manipulate results when they were under a (hostile) microscope?
https://twitter.com/iEatOrganMeat/status/1200526276076941313
I’ve seen it argued that “Indian food”, or rather what is considered “Indian” food in Britain and most Western countries is actually an invention of British colonials and doesn’t have much in common with what actual Indians eat.
Spices were introduced to India by the British, so arguably the whole cooking with spices thing is not actually authentically Indian. The closest equivalent I can think of is that “Indian food” in Britain, etc is to real Indian food what “Tex-Mex” is to real Mexican food.
Doping seems like a lesser sin than being a non-African country fielding Africans, or allowing trannies to play in women’s sports.
Doping seems like a lesser sin than being a non-African country fielding Africans …
I don’t disagree with you, my point was that it is simply stupid (if these stories are true) to provide such ammunition to your opponents, and to ruin the careers of a generation of Russian athletes.
Is that a “piggy bank” on the shelve second from the top, at the very end? At first I thought it was some kind of space age helmet. How about on the floor? Looks like a small plate sitting atop a bed of white rice? 🙂
You look in good form!
English food is always considered objectively the worst, no matter what national cuisine it is compared against. The mush low IQ Africans eat with their hands is considered more sophisticated than English food.
Suppose it is old news, but the upcoming, rumored wokest James Bond is an interesting topic, in my view. As a boy, I was semi-indifferent to Bond because I thought it was decadent. “Pussy Galore” and Grace Jones. They made fun of white Southerners in one movie, then they made M a women, and Felix black, etc.
It is interesting looking back on the history of Bond, though. Connery was the first Bond and could best be described as “hyper-masculine.” He was cast when Britain and the West had the least non-white immigrants. Since then, it seems as though there have been increasing attempts at emasculating Bond. Perhaps, culminating in the next movie, where, at the end, they are rumored to replace him with a black woman – though not call her 007, since it did not test well.
There have been 24 EON films, over decades, all with Bond being a higher-than-average masculine figure, so I guess it is understandable why he is such a high priority target to race or gender-swap, to attempt to redefine what is British.
Of course, a black Bond is silly on the face because a black could not blend into the crowds of important countries, or even into crowds of business travelers to important countries.
The neural annealing link has been one of the most interesting reads this week for me! (One thing I find somewhat weird about QRI though is that their posts give off a mixed vibe of 90% grounded, well-informed intelligence plus 10% “author is microdosing on LSD right now” esotericism, at least to me.)
Anyway, makes me want to read up more to properly understand the Friston free energy paradigm, as the closest ‘mainstream’ scientific concept, so I can see if all the parts they add to that make sense…
Concerning American post-WWII lit, I’m a Tom Wolfe guy.
Tom Wolfe tried to pull off 19th century novels about his then contemporary America, with some electrifying 1960’s gonzo thrown in. Didn’t quite work out, not “out of body stuff” like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky at their best, but it was a noble effort.
Much more satisfying read than the “hihi I have a penis, oh no I’ll die someday” gibberish of the navelgazers that were Wolfe’s alleged peers.
Many of whom were Jewish, so the extended version was “hihi I have a penis, oh no I’ll die someday, oh the Jewishness of my Jewishness is so Jewish.”
While this “my Jewishness” was happing within a larger society, a sort of “cultural identity and inner sovereignty” thing, we’ve also got, for example, the tradition of European fiction that deals either with newly achieved sovereignty, or a recently experienced apocalypse of some sort.
And of course, intercontinental post-colonial fiction such as the Tanzianism of my Tanzanianism, etc.
But back to Europe. All of it east of Vienna—and that’s more than half of the continent—used to be divided between three empires: Russia, Austrian, and Turk. And in between the 19th century and the very early 20th century (especially the aftermath of WWI) most of them became independent, with some becoming independent as late as the 1990’s.
Thus, some of the greatest novels and cultural treasures of these places also deal with newly embraced identity, “the Greekness of my Greekness is so incredibly Greek”, and “the Slovakness of my Slovakness is astoundibly Slovak”.
Germany and Italy also became consolidated countries only in the 19th century. So “The Germanness of my Germanness” has also produced some super important literature, especially when combined with the shock, pain, and shame connected to the world wars.
And most newly independent and consolidated nations completely overcompensated. Completely and utterly overcompensated. Germany and Italy threw themselves into empire building and their own superhuman supremacy. Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Romania, and Turkey, spent every waking moment waging war against each in constantly shifting configurations.
Up north, with the various Polands and Hungaries it was the same. Thirty second after achieving independence, everyone is suddenly a superhuman imperial avatar of Atlantean demigods and starts attacking and oppressing everyone else.
A couple of centuries prior to that, the Dutch, once they managed to throw off the Spanish yoke, also instantly went into “world domination because we’re special” mode.
In fact, the whole Western European colonialism thing was also to a great extent an overcompensation, after feeling dwarfed and humiliated for so long by the extinct Greco-Roman world, Egypt, and Mesopotamia; by Eastern Rome while it lasted; by the Ottoman Empire; by the North African Caliphate, by India; by China; by everyone who came before, and especially those who were already impressive and strong and rich, while the Franks and Goths and Anglos and Saxons were just trying to reach the level of technology and science and military skill that would allow them to survive.
And yes, after the geographic discoveries, the renaissance and age of enlightenment, the industrial revolution—there also came a manic wave of self-aggrandizement and overcompensation. China was unimaginably rich and sophisticated compared to us just 50 years ago? But who’s superhuman now, bitches? Who’s the Aryan demigod that fate has decreed should have dominion over the whole globe, you subhuman savages?
And here we are, in the 21st century.
Keeping in mind all of the above, the relevant context as it seems to me, I get it with all the “gayness of my gayness” stuff. The “blackness of my blackness”, the “pakistanity of my pakistanity”, “the femininity of my femininity” and so on. I get it.
I also get the overcompensation, and the ease with which “we just want tolerance and equality” mutates into “I’ll tell you how live and if you don’t just shut up and obey I will destroy you, you subhuman fascist scum”.
Everyone went through this in one way or another.
But it’s still nauseating and it’s still pathetic.
Russophobe ideologue and Never Trumper neocon has worthless opinions across the board.
But he’s right on this occasion. Indian food is filth. Come the ethnostate it will either be banned or you will lose social credit points for consuming it. (It will be easy to find those who’ve been eating it due to their stench). It’s funny though that Expert Tom has been wrong about everything all his life yet has prospered. The one time he’s right he receives all kinds of accusations and grief.
English food is always considered objectively the worst
Only because Ireland isn’t considered a real enough country to be considered in these national cuisine comparisons.
What passes for ‘Indian food’ in the west is basically 10 basic dishes chicken tikka,butter chicken etc prepared by minimum wage Bangladeshi/Paki illegal immigrants.
The real high end Indian food is actually a very complex affair with subtle flavours from rare spices like saffron being transferred via oils to various dishes.
I prefer Italian food myself but all ancient formerly wealthy civilizations have elaborate and sophisticated culinary traditions,India being no exception.
Theory sounds superficially plausible, because it sometimes match our current stereotypes.
E.g.
Japanese – refined, minimalist, aristocrats, who worship unflavoured white rice and matcha tea.
They eat sashimi, because cooking, damages the subtlety of flavour, or Platonic essence, – the gods had intended when they created fish. Or they consume fugu, because eating should be a question of life or death, depending on the knife skill of a sashimi master (who has trained since childhood).
vs.
Chinese – noisy, peasants. Cover their food with artificial spices, sometimes eating dogs and insects.
Indian recipes use a lot of spices, because Indians have historical access to spices.
Where English people encountered Indian food, they decided they love curry and established it as official food of their naval forces. When Japanese encountered the English naval forces, they love curry, and decided it could be one of their most popular foods for commuters in train stations.*
So Japanese and English have not less “innate preference” to curry as Indians – they simply did not historically access those ingredients and recipes until the 19th/20th century.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJeRHHSm1x0
Disagree here. Europeans simply did not have a sense of inferiority back then because it hadn’t been implanted into them. And even now, such attempts are essentially laughable, show me a similar climate that had high civilization. Show me a place with a head start that used it to good effect.
Or let us pretend that Northern Euros desired to build gigantic limestone or sandstone structures 4500 years ago. Would it have been a good idea – what would be left of them today, after 4500 winters? There are numberless castles and stone buildings mentioned less than 400 years ago, of which one cannot find a trace today. Heck, many pyramids in the desert just look like piles of rubble today, and that is without any frost cycles.
Are you sure Indian culinary traditions is related to former economic development, rather than just a natural ecological variety of India?
From YouTube, it seems like poor Indian villagers have access to amazingly various ingredients, including many which in Northern Europe are always a luxury.
If these fellows could transport their ingredients to sell at “Harrod’s Food hall”, – they would be wealthy (well more than their YouTube income).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EMghNiPpZk
Regarding gene-modification, it is an interesting question if it is even possible to modify genes for health in low gravity environments.
Also, if it would be necessary on places like Mars – spending all your developmental years, and women spending their birthing years, on centripetal trains doesn’t sound too practical, IMO. And I otherwise consider myself an enthusiast of settling Mars.
http://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/peak-optics.jpg
A nice picture of a Nazi. And a slideshow of Adolf Hitler.
Which one of them invented the medium rare ribeye steak? That’s a not unimportant contribution to world gastronomy.
They could be playing with fire. Fidesz just suffered a backlash in the local elections, apparently rooted in corruption scandals and a failed bid to bring the Olympics to Budapest.
The eurovision boycott induces “cultural cringe” among certain metropolitans, and looks like Swine Right pandering.
Culture wars are not fought best at the periphery, they can only be fought at the source: The US Ivy League.
The Resistance lives on.
This is like saying all Swedish food is meatballs and cooked potatoes
He’s talking about restaurants, not Paki street vendors
He lived in California, right?
Kali is something of a political dead zone, where one-party rule has been the norm since 1998. Democrats don’t really need to be innovative when they rely on anti-white racism to win (steal) election after election.
NRx is a copeservatism rooted in an inability to use electoral politics to get what you want. So instead you wistfully imagine that Silicon Dons are latter-day feudal lords in shining armor.
By comparison, Florida is widely considered a cultural dead zone in the US, with its residents the subject of mockery. Otoh, it is highly competitive politically, creating a more insecure class of politicians that punch above their weight.
The university-overrun Northeast is also more competitive than Kali, but diminished due to recent GOP weakness in the tri-state area. Geographically and sociologically, they are arguably less insulated than the West Coast. IIRC, it was a Maine GOP candidate that was the first to use “replacement”.
Very poor validity. The questions don’t address actual antisemitism, which is defined as “hostility to or prejudice against Jews..”
For example:
“Stereotypes about Jewish control of business and the financial markets are among the most pernicious and enduring anti-Semitic beliefs. These are especially widespread in the Central and Eastern European countries surveyed. Asked whether they agreed with the statement that “Jews have too much power in the business world,” a staggering 72 percent of Ukrainians agreed, as did 71 percent of Hungarians, 56 percent of Poles, and 50 percent of Russians.”
Bolded statement isn’t antisemitic. One can like Jews and support them while recognizing an imbalance. I think many Jews agree with this, also, particularly in countries where Jews are over-represented among oligarchs. Interesting how Russian rate is so much lower, despite Jews being about as represented among oligarchs in that country as in Ukraine. Does the media does a better job in Russia, of teaching Russians what not to see? It’s funny when some Russians claim Ukrainians are brainwashed.
For some reason, AK has decided to darken the background around the TV screen and the slideshow of Adolph? When I viewed the photo earlier, one could clearly see the books and other accouterments on the bookshelves. Perhaps, AK doesn’t want to dox himself – but wait, we already know who he is? 🙂
The survey itself is a validation of Jewish stereotypes.
American understanding of Russian politics is similarly superficial for the most part, so maybe it’s simply a cultural gap.
There’s a minor difference in that the Ukraine actually is occupied by ZOG.
https://twitter.com/Mortis_Banned/status/1199177212429295616
I’ll give the Ukrainians that they’re more woke on the JQ than Americans.
Eh, I disagree on Virag’s findings on local culture. Perhaps in Croatia that happens, but that’s a country being suicided by mass emigration
Things here function as a gerontocracy (except the ones in charge don’t have to be old) – everyone in a managerial position thinks he’s God, and they have a ton of sycophants to follow them. Progtards are just one of those who follow the academia udbash scum that Slobo should have purged the second he got to power
Recently, the police busted a nascent “Italian National Socialist Party of Workers” (that sort of thing is illegal in Italy; I don’t think blanket bans on party names are a good idea but then it’s an internal affair of Italians).
Guess where they got their inspiration from?
https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/italian%20nazis.jpg
Agreed. In general most Eastern European countries are quite different, and it’s pretty misleading to try and generalize about all of eastern europe from the experiences of one croat.
Matra:
Irish food isn’t all that bad as long as it’s kept simple. Unfortunately the temptation is to unsimplification, especially in the more high-octane (and of course more expensive) venues!
I’ve had excellent Irish food in Ontario – filling “simple” stuff like very flaky pot pie.
A touch of still-living, real Europe survives in London (alas, due to immigration):
https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/hero-polish-chef-tackles-london-bridge-terrorist-with-15-metre-narwhal-tusk-8998?fbclid=IwAR3euoiuKnYyn22q9QZZA3bizGBS6aosAOdTIDH2JXtn-HN9XSsb65J8FcQ
HERO! Polish chef tackles London Bridge terrorist with 1.5-metre narwhal tusk
https://images.thefirstnews.com/1000×667/88lq7wcoq1flqpe87ewjc.jpeg
A Polish chef who tackled crazed London Bridge terrorist Usman Khan with a 1.5-metre-long narwhal tusk has been hailed a hero.
The man identified only as Łukasz was seen grabbing the tusk from a wall in Fishmongers’ Hall where he was working before running outside to confront the attacker.
The kitchen worker then tried to pin Khan down with the tusk as the attacker stabbed at his hand.
A colleague of Łukasz told The Times newspaper: “Łukasz grabbed a nearby pole and ran at him, getting stabbed in the hand in the process but continued to pin him down.
“Being stabbed didn’t stop him giving him a beating. Łukasz is a hero.”
Łukasz is thought to have suffered from cuts but is not critically injured.
:::::::::::::::::::
It’s like in France – some American guys stopped the terrorist on the train. Western Europeans are rather useless.
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/e3volg/london_bridge_hero_is_actually_a_murderer_on_day/
This is, of course, utter and abject nonsense. Indian cuisine has a unique approach to food pairings unseen in any other major world cuisine.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0139539
No wonder that it is most appreciated by the more intelligent.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/indian-cuisine-is-g-loaded/
Also there are approximately 8-10 major regional Indian cuisines and the well-known curries (not that there’s anything wrong with them) only predominantly characterize about a couple of them.
AFAIK, Swedes were eating meat, potatoes, and kelp until 2000 or so when they decided to invent “Nordic cuisine” and start charging $250 for small pieces of that same kelp wrapped around artisanal bread (or whatever).
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/371/808/7ca.jpg
Not that I am criticizing, it was an impressive rebranding.
Hopefully, an army of Slavs bearing narwhal tusks will one day invade westwards.
BTW, did they ever identify the ethnicity of the victims? I can guess their race fairly confidently, but ethnicity is where the sport lies.
I confess I don’t know much about Indian cuisine because I can’t handle spices, even in many Italian dishes that use a lot of rosemary or whatever (either they are too “sharp” or they make me itch – by northern European genes can’t handle them). The most I can handle is a little pepper, which goes well with perfectly-made from scratch Ural-style pelmeny that my mother-in-law makes.
But it seems to be logical that emphasis on spices can mask inferior preparation of the meat. In contrast, without spices, one can instantly tell how well-prepared a dish really is because there is nothing to hide the quality of the meat, duck, etc.
A lot of spices on food seem to be analogous to excessive sugar on desserts and may serve a similar function.
I don’t understand the strong and extreme opinions people have about food. A lot of the food “debates” seem to be mainly about something else, namely virtue signalling: leftists virtue signalling about their interest in exotic cultures, white nationalist types virtue signalling about their racialist bona fides.
I don’t think I really dislike any of the major cuisines. They all have popular dishes that are pretty good. Pretty much all of them have popular dishes that combine starch and protein. Starch and protein have universal appeal, and taste good almost any way you prepare them.
Both British and Indian food are good. British cuisine has very good, hearty starch and protein combos: Full English breakfast, bangers and mash, fish and chips, Shepherd’s pie, etc. Indian cuisine has good starch and protein combos like rice/nan bread with chicken tikka, chicken karahi, chicken biryani, etc.
George Church ideas are as useful as the eternal debate about who would win if Vikings would fight the Samurai. It’s pure bullshit without any relevance to real life. The fewer the genes his lab edits, the longer the list of genes he’d modify.
But this Hurlbut guy is even worse. He has no hard science qualifications, but he has a Stanford dad propping him up. Even the picture you are linking to shows him making up a bland quote. Why would the “prominent scientist” who said “soon, gene editing will do more than it does today” remain nameless?
If you want to see what gene editing is good at, see what insurance is paying for. No insurance coverage means a guarantee of money being wasted. Nothing George Church “discovered” has been used in covered healthcare. His kind is more useless than acupuncture, chiropractics or homeopathy.
Jews (or people with Jewish roots) are disproportionately overrepresented relative to their small population, in the elite in Russia/Ukraine/Belarus.
There is nothing antisemitic to say this – it is just a reality, and overrepresentation level of Jews (or Jewish roots people) is surprising (something like x 10-20 or more), as there are only a few hundred thousand Jews in all combined Russia/Ukraine/Belarus – while the non-Jewish population is around 197 million.
There are 5-6 million Jews in America, mainly part of a bourgeoisie, with a large proportion located in New York area or Los Angeles area.
New York City is 18% Jewish, so the bourgeoisie of New York City might be 30-40% Jewish? New York City is the centre of (non-cinema) cultural production of America, so it’s not surprising there could be 30-40% Jewish flavour in the products of the cultural capital of America.
Los Angeles is around 15% Jewish, so it is a similar situation – I assume Jews could be similarly (like in New York City) around 1/3 of the total bourgeoisie of Los Angeles?
People are sensitive to trends and trajectories.
But it seems like sometimes trajectories (for example, that UK will become the brown Muslim country in 2100), are confused with present realities, in peoples’ minds.
For example: UK citizens are 87,17% white (European), 6.92% Asian (i.e. brown), 3.01% black.
Including European non-citizen residents in the UK, a proportion of white people living in the country is perhaps higher than in the above figure. (Although how much higher, depends if you include in the category “white people”- all the nationalities like Spanish and Greeks, etc, which are living in UK in very large numbers, but can be quite distant from anglosaxons).
For example, there are around 1 million non-citizen Poles living in the UK, which is almost equal to a population of 1,1 million Pakistani English citizens.
–
Brown people are not evenly distributed though, and as a result there are large brown areas in cities like London – with the brown people often concentrated near train stations, airports, etc, where tourists and journalists then receive an impression that UK is already a majority Muslim brown country. (Because if you fly to Luton airport, it is like you are in a brown third world Muslim country)
Demographic profile of the bourgeoisie of the UK, will likely higher than 90% white – just they overpromote their few brown members as the kind of moral signalling, and this is also in their media.
Scandinavians are generally talented in self-branding for export, especially to Russia. Somehow the fashionable thing for apartment adverts now, are promoting about their “Scandinavian interior” (which, I assume, means lampshades were bought in IKEA?).
Also have you ever seen a nice thing of clothing in H&M? (it’s one of the most useless clothes shop in the world in my opinion), but somehow it spreads to every city.
Is that Irish or English? I’ve lived in both Ireland and Ontario (and have English relatives) and this is the first I’ve ever heard of pot pies being Irish. There is so much cross-over between England and Ireland that’s it is difficult to make distinctions between the respective cuisines of the two places. For instance everyone on earth connects Guinness or ‘Irish stout’ with Ireland but the style of beer originated in England and it was produced almost exclusively in Ireland by Anglo-Irish Protestants for centuries.
BTW putting meat in pies is normal throughout the English-speaking world, except, apparently, the US. (I’d welcome a correction if untrue). When I lived in New Zealand meat pies were on every school lunch and served at sporting events much like hot dogs are in the US, and there was a McDonalds-ish chain called Georgie Pie. It was the same in Australia. French-Canada also has a meat-based pie tradition – ‘pate chinois’ is based on Britain’s Shepherd’s Pie which Anglo-Montrealers loved – but given that France & French-speaking Belgium also have chicken pies Quebec may have inherited this from the mother land rather than picking it up from Anglo settlers. I find it odd that Americans seem to be alone in the English-speaking world in associating pies almost exclusively with fruit and rarely with meat.
These days many countries have welcomed immigrants from diverse nations. Recently a driving-license clerk projected an eye chart onto the wall, and asked the applicant to read the eye-chart letters. The fellow replied, “READ them?? I KNOW the guy.”
That ADL survey on how many people hate jews is obviously a total fraud, first of all they left out the Muslim world. Secondly their results are always a perfect goldilocks number, not too high to make people unafraid to speak out against jews and not too low to stop their censorship and control of society. The amount of people that hate jews is very likely over half the worlds population and a lot of the people that are not anti jew are in places like India and China that don’t know much about them.
Yes natural ingredients readily available is one obvious aspect that shapes cuisine.
But the fact is Indian elite were the wealthiest in the world for many millennia and therefore had the money to drive innovation in the culinary arts.
As a corollary the French elites were as a class by far the richest in Europe for most of the past 500 years which is a major reason why French cuisine is so elaborate relative to say recently prosperous Scandinavian countries.
The Italians I guess were similarly the richest during the renaissance era and of course have the legacy of the Roman Empire.
This story is even funnier because it’s getting misreported. There was no attack on the bridge, there was an attack at Fishmonger’s Hall and the attacker ran out and was chased towards the bridge by this Polish guy and some criminals. (The tusk is decoration at the hall.)
Fishmonger’s Hall is not actually a fish market, it’s a conference center that was hosting a prisoner rehabilitation event by the university of Cambridge. The Muslim attacker is a convicted criminal who was at the event to share his prison past to a bunch of Cambridge social justice activists through creative writing. (You almost can’t blame him.) He instead decided that it was a perfect opportunity for a terrorist attack and it might have been except that there were several violent criminals at the event, plus this Polish chef who was part of the catering crew.
Everyone who died seems to have been a Cambridge academic and everyone who chased the terrorist was either a criminal or a working class catering guy. Here’s one of the victims…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7741575/London-Bridge-terror-attack-victim-named-ordinator-rehabilitation-conference.html
…whose father is of course already campaigning to remind us all that his son loved “underdogs” and wouldn’t have wanted us to make any political conclusions from his death.
The Russian point of the new crossing to China has an interesting history: (wiki)
Agree. “… overreliance on spices…” – This includes Mexican food which accounts for its popularity among lower classes. “…the necessity of subtlety…” – it is like Tantric or Taoist sex practice where you postpone and withhold physical orgasm and ejaculation; that’s why it is sophisticated. Unfortunately people who dull their taste buds with too much spices may never be able to achieve the higher level of subtlety. Probably the same goes with twerking. They will be lost for Balanchine and Béjart.
But my experience with Indian food was very good at first. When I was exposed to it first time in my twentieth it was a love from first bite. But then over the years I began to develop the grossing out feelings because my imagination was going where it never should go, i.e. Bismarck’s sausage – better not see how it is made. I would think about the quality of ingredients, hygiene, toilet habits of cooks, contamination of spices with heavy metals and so on.
That same victim wrote an interesting Master’s thesis.
Just came to say that Arpad Virag is a fucking moron.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roast_Beef_of_Old_England
When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman’s food,
It ennobled our veins and enriched our blood.
Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good
Oh! the Roast Beef of old England,
And old English Roast Beef!
But since we have learnt from all-vapouring France
To eat their ragouts as well as to dance,
We’re fed up with nothing but vain complaisance
Oh! the Roast Beef of Old England,
And old English Roast Beef!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/William_Hogarth_-_O_the_Roast_Beef_of_Old_England_%28%27The_Gate_of_Calais%27%29_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
The Roast Beef of Old England by William Hogarth
I was just used to having them in Irish pub-restaurants when I lived in Ontario for a couple of years.
Interesting comments. I did not know that.
They sell chicken pot pie occasionally. It is not unheard of, but it isn’t common. Pies with beef, OTOH, are very rare. You’d have to go to a British-themed restaurant to have one.
How the ‘anti-semitic index” is arrived at? My today’s comment on the other thread:
https://www.unz.com/gatzmon/british-historian-norman-davies-reveals-how-the-anti-polish-narrative-of-the-holocaust-began/#comment-3584584
Answer to questions (agree/disagree) that determine “anti-semitic index” or “wokeness index” by ADL.
Jews are more loyal to Israel than to [this country/to the countries they live in]
Jews have too much power in the business world
Jews have too much power in international financial markets
Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust
Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind
Jews have too much control over global affairs
Jews have too much control over the United States government
Jews think they are better than other people
Jews have too much control over the global media
Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars
People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave
https://global100.adl.org/map/eeurope
Re: Jews overrepresented in Russian, Ukrainian, etc. elites
So what? Even if they are overrepresented, they are still animals
(“smart chimps”), as Darwin wisely reminded us in 1859. You think
it matters to God if someone is a good little bourgeois? We’ve had
millions of people in bourgeois ranks, and that still didn’t prevent
colonialism, slave trade, and two World Wars. Plus the higher
a monkey climbs, the more its behind is showing, or alternatively,
flotsam and jetsam rise to the top (i.e., the worst people tend to
rise to the top).
We were created for higher things than merely aspiring to middle
class. Humanity has found it extremely difficult to rise above the
level of smart chimps but the question always remains: are we aspiring
to holiness/enlightenment because that’s the only thing that can cure
our ills?
I’ll have a longer post on this but I’m always amazed by people who
expect so little out of life that they think the rat race is the best we can do.
Even if you win, you are still a rat.
That’s pretty much true about Scandinavia (+ Finland + Estonia). Food traditions tended to be about preserving stuff for the winters and nobody wants to eat so much salted, fermented, dried etc stuff when you can get fresh ingredients year round now. The new “Scandinavian haute cuisine” is imitated French cuisine with some northern ingredients mixed in. But then, most cuisines are jsut imitated French cuisine.
Helsinki used to have a set of French+Russian restaurants from the pre-revolutionary era when everything high class was an imitation of St Petersburg, and also from the revolution when a lot of Russians decided to stay in Helsinki and started restaurants after the commies took whatever they used to own in Russia. They used to be the set of high class restaurants until recent years but now they’re suddenly all going bankrupt.
Customers who want to signal by overspending are going to the new “Finnish haute cuisine” places ie. French haute cuisine except instead of tiny portions of beef they have tiny portions of reindeer. It’s also fashionable to sample the variety of ethnic restaurants now and the novelty of the newest cheap ethnic restaurant being another way to signal status must be a huge relief to a lot of wallets.
Indian food is great and one reason why I hate our immigration policy is that somehow we’ve failed to import Indians and my restaurant options suck. We keep being told that immigration is great because of the food but the biggest immigrant group is Somalians and no one has ever heard of a Somalian restaurant…
English and Irish (which mostly is derived from English) food is much better than the bad rap it acquired which probably was amplified by the fact that the culinary English culture was the only area of British culture and accomplishments where one could demean the accomplishment of the Brits. I am sure French and Italians would push this meme but also Americans who always had an overt anti-British sentiment while at the same time not much better cuisine.
UK eating habits and practices were negatively affected by industrialization and modernization much more than that of France or Italy. Big agro-business, big food supermarkets, ready made food in tins, TV dinners were adopted in the UK at much wider scale with much less resistance form the population probably because the Brits are much more susceptible to the rational fallacy of progress and modernization while, say, French or Italian are much more attached to intangible values carried by tradition which might be related to Catholicism. The devastation of American eating habits in the post WWII period by food industrialization was probably even worse than in the UK.
The first sign of recovery began with yuppie culture in 1980 when good coffee, good beer, good bread and good chocolate became hip in America. Snobbishness is a driving force but also a vicious cycle for hipster who want to be hip but their hipness is proven and at the same destroyed only when they find imitators and followers. So they are in a constant search for imitators while at the same time running away from them.
Things are changing and the British food scene is very good now and they are working on restoring the old traditions which always were there in semi dormant state. There are excellent very British food products like hams, bacons, cured meats, cheeses…
But the most important issue is what average people eat at home and how they prepare it. How traditional it is and how does it reflect the new trends? I do not think there are objective studies that could determine it. While it is very likely that Italians cook similar things one can get in typical Italian restaurants in Italy (because Italians do not need to readjust that much) it probably is not the case with Germans, Brits or Poles where eating habits are probably lagging for better and worse behind the restaurant trend scene.
Yes, you can get chicken pot pie in the US. Some diners and chain restaurants will have it, and supermarkets will often have frozen packaged chicken pot pie.
But Shepherd’s pie or cottage pie, which have beef and lamb instead of chicken, are uncommon in the US. Usually you’ll only find it in Irish pubs. British themed restaurants and pubs will have it as well, but those are generally less common than Irish pubs, which are everywhere.
I noticed that in Ireland, even in random rural parts with no immigrants, pub menus would often have a curry dish alongside the usual fish and chips, Shepherd’s pie, bangers and mash, etc.
They have pigeon pie in England:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq8tj1uy1Gk
India was always poor bro.
Also y the fk using Majors to defuse IEDs by hand.
Or a Major cares about his men…
https://twitter.com/manhasvikas41/status/1200992848469884928
I’ve had some good burgers in my time. I love a good Swiss, melted Swiss cheese and roasted mushrooms, and caramelized onions on a burger. That is hot stuff. You can get that at a number of different places.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSAFE0rn6e4
You also like being burnt alive for beef eating||
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/650538464940392448/650585586025103360/D-Nb3wrWkAAH_VX.png
Yes, there’s 8-10 regional cuisines and besides one (Punjabi) the rest are just water + rice||
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwmoSzrJstM
PISA 2018 edition comes out this Tuesday. Ever since the 2015 edition, I’ve been skeptical of their methodology revision. They had changed it and introduced a new one starting with the 2015 report.
Bizarrely, US Asians were outscored by US Whites in PISA 2015, a complete reversal of previous PISA reports. Worse, it is also at complete odds with domestic US test data, GPA and a whole host of other metrics. This makes no sense since US Asians are the offspring of their countries’ respective cognitive elites by and large. Now AE has updated IQ on race based on NAEP:
http://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/demoiq.png
Thus 2015 PISA becomes even more of an outlier. A lot of strong countries (Finland, Korea) saw significant declines whereas much weaker ones (like Brazil, Israel and to some extent Sweden) saw strong upgrades. We may need a new test if they keep fucking up with what was a winning recipe before the 2015 revision. Their recent announcement that multi-culti programming will now (voluntarily) be part of the test is an indication of the decline of rigour.
Pity the Indians. They don’t have sour cabbage.
I wonder what Scorsese would make of this.
In Memoriam Alain Resnais by Stan Lee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXHezww-r-I
Sweden is a strange place culturally. On the one hand, traditions are not normally celebrated (or even noticed). On the other hand, the Christmas period is a huge deal here. Perhaps more so than in most other countries in Europe.
We have Julkalendern. People buy special calenders for the same occasion and in most schools, there are similar events. In my school, we had a new bible chapter read to us every day, though my teacher was pretty strongly Christian. Even in more relaxed settings, kids get to listen to Christmas stories and light a candle every Monday (because obviously they are not in school during Sunday). Parents buy special calenders for their kids. It’s all vowen together. There is an even a TV show to match, which is insanely popular. This year’s edition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKsh2woU30A
Then we have Lucia, which falls on the 13th of december. This tradition has pre-Christian origins but has in effect merged with the Christmas celebrations haphazardly in the latter part of the 1800s as Lucia was originally a saint from Siciliy who lived in 300 AD.
In every school, you select a girl who will be Lucia for this year. Even every major city select their own Lucia. This isn’t something done with a sigh. There is huge prestige at play. The girl selected undergo lots of preparations. After the walk, they sing various Christmas songs and the men sing along. Everyone is dressed up.
Again, how many traditions are taken seriously by most teenage girls? This is how it looks like. The girl in the front is the Lucia.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Lucia_2017_D81_4616_%2839002373982%29.jpg
On top of that you have Lussi, which also has pre-Christian roots but has merged with the Christmas festivities. We eat Lussibullar:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Lussebullar.jpg
This is often combined with Glögg, which is a warm alcoholic drink you eat with raisons and almonds, too.
https://cdn1.tasteline.com/klassisk-glogg-varm1-foto-kerstin-eriksson-mathem-360×360.jpg
Swedish food is fairly unremarkable – though Scandinavian food has witnessed a renaissance in recent years – but our sweets, bakeries pastries and confectionery are excellent. And this is the peak season. We even have a special drink called “julmust”, which is a very strange version of coca cola which you either love or hate. (I personally dislike it). During the christmas period, the normally fairly boring Swedish culinary offering suddenly jolts to life in the most remarkable way.
This is sharpened by the fact that almost every Swede eats something called julbord, literally translated to ‘Christmas table’. Despite its name, it is usually eaten before Christmas. And most people typically have multiple of these! You eat a huge selection of food, including types of food usually reserved for this period only. Most people have one for their work, one for their family and usually one for their friends. All this takes a huge amount of planning. We booked our table already 6 months ago and the restaurant we’re planning to go to was already nearly full already back then for the day we selected in december.
All in all, the Christmas period (1 dec-24 dec) is hugely intensive in Sweden in a way that I’ve found few other countries. I spent some time in both the UK and France during the Christmas period visiting friends and outside of commercialised christmas music in stores you didn’t feel it in the overall culture that much. In Sweden it is much more socially intensive, you cannot escape it even if you want to. Which is strange given how irrelegious we are in general.
I think it has to do with the fact that many of these traditions have pre-Christian roots and have been merged into the same canoply of traditions, which gives it that much punch. In the same vein, celebrating midsummer is also a hugely more important in Sweden than it is in most Western European countries for folkish reasons. For all the Christianity, it seems the deeper folk religions still pull people. The church was smart enough to understand that it had to adapt to these institutions if it wanted to spread. The Christmas tree itself is an example of that, but this gets multiplied by many other ‘christianised’ folk traditions in Sweden in a way that is not true for most other countries.
There was also rotten fish for special occasions.
English food is disgusting. Derb probably married his wife because Chinese eat gross stuff too, and her food reminded him of homecooking.
https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Britain/spotteddick.html
Anatoly, have you considered ever doing a tour and write-up of Central Asia? Kazakhstan might be especially worth visiting considering that it’s about as wealthy on a PPP GDP per capita basis as Russia is–though the other capital cities in Central Asia might also be worth visiting.
Women, women, muslims, women, LGBT; why indeed shouldn’t white males root for that? Though it is admittedly standard political ZOG feed.
As an aside, I’m pleased not to have heard the ululations of Ukraine’s Eurovision winner.
An interesting side story. Why do you bring up Scorsese?
https://www.rt.com/business/474652-moscow-worlds-top-leading-city/
I wonder if this has to do with the fact Chinese and other tourists are beginning to get the word that places like Paris are full of non whites now and expensive on top of that.
I guess it’d be something like Italian>Turkish/Greek>French>Japanese>Iranian for me.
Smothering everything in spices isn’t comparable to amount of time, effort and skill that goes into preparing many other national cuisines, particularly French, although it’s personally not my favourite. Interestingly Spain seems to have very little in the way of high-level cookery, despite it being surrounded by culinary giants.
Aren’t you Indian yourself? Does the cuisine actually very much between the various regions of India?
Being able to handle spices has probably very little to do with being Northern European or Southeast Asian. I personally know a Southeast Asian who cannot eat spicy stuff due to digestive issues. I myself usually don’t need chili, and I didn’t like it when younger, but now I sometimes eat a whole chili found in my food which native Southeast Asians tell me I shouldn’t, so maybe my ability to digest chili is not worse than theirs. (Utu said once that eating food with a lot of chili is okay, but it’s like blasting heavy metal loudly: you shouldn’t do it all the time. That’s my attitude, I like spicy food, but not always. Incidentally, I like heavy metal, but mostly listen to classical music.)
You must remember that chili is actually from the Americas. While some spices were native to the Old World, they work quite differently from chili, so I don’t think it’s possible for tropical peoples to be genetically adapted to eating chili. It’s simply that they are used to it.
And yes, some people cannot handle chili, though that’s either because they simply never tried to push their boundaries, or they are among the few people who biologically cannot handle it.
Akarlin is an American tho
Swiss cheese is un-Amwerican. Check with John Kerry.
Beef dishes have to be well done. Coming from a country that has given us beef goulash, you should stand up for well cooked meats…
Indian food uses low-quality meat and covers it up with spices. That’s not an ethnic observation, e.g. French have also been doing it for centuries. And a lot of fusion cousine does the same.
This is very easy to do by proper sampling. Which school subsets you are going to use. Ans most of participating countries with poor image and high insecurity index (like Russia or Brazil) will go along with aid and abet this corruption to boost their scores.
For once, I agree with you. The English culinary tradition is underappreciated.
This is cool to know.
This Thorne Melcher woman seems to be in Karlin’s camp that while the nuclear weapons look horrible they are very beneficial including their post explosion radiation side effects that may even prolong your life and possibly stimulate mutations towards better and brighter future of the human race.
The establishment is well aware that at an absolute minimum, there will always be about 25% of white men that will vote Democrat in the US.
The bigger gap is the “marriage gap”, especially with white women. Married Hispanic men are actually more aligned to the GOP than unmarried white women.
A lot of white men, particularly those that are single, are subject to a bimodal distribution of income, and hate social conservatism.
So the left can keep bashing white men, but there’s a sizeable lot of white men that will nod along.
I am almost certainly going skiing this January or February, which will allow me to cover Sochi and the ski resort.
I am also of half a mind to go to our latest (potential) acquisition, Belorussia, sometime soon. Moscow-Minsk platskart is 2,400 RUB.
India is the size of the EU with multiple climatic zones. Wtf do u think?
I think they have the highest density of Michelin Star restaurants in Europe, especially Basque Country. Almost all of them based on local culinary traditions.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BXJAP_Tj2f8/
“Low Quality”
I think people also overestimate the spices in Punjabi food.
I can barely taste it..
Salt is more a problem.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BynwD1BldJk/
“Low Quality”
I think people also overestimate the spices in Punjabi food.
I can barely taste it..
Salt is more a problem.
wtf it kept saying using post instead (admin error) & now I have 4 posts.
“For once, I agree with you.” – Wow. Am I slipping?
BTW who is this Árpád Virág? This is a Hungarian name. Comically, this name was used to depict a (presumably Jewish) high ranking communist in a movie made in the 1960s about the “personality cult” years of the early 1950s. (The family name Virág means flower and could easily be Jewish, while Árpád was the name of the prince of the conquering Magyars in the late 9th century.)
Both of them are good, but steaks should be medium rare. Beef stew is of course wonderful, too, besides various soups etc.
I guess I’m revealing my own ignorance then, I just see Spanish-themed restaurants very rarely in comparison to many others. I mean, I can’t immediately think of a internationally known Spanish dish even on the same level as say, Goulash or Borshch.
But I thought that it’s not the country itself which decides which schools are to be tested. Was I wrong?
“Beef dishes have to be well done.” – Yes, in poor countries were the only beef people ate was when the old cow stopped producing milk because of her advanced age. Peasants could not afford keeping bulls so they would be killed for veal for the rich or possible they were kept as oxen for work which were eaten once they reached the pre-agonal state meaning the old tough meat. This explains Beckow.
In Good Soldier Svejk there is this episode with ” the scraggiest, mangiest cow in history” sold by a Jew form Galicia to Svejk’s military unit that no amount of cooking could make tender.
Them on the other hand steak tartare or beef Carpaccio can be made from an older cow.
In principle that what was expected and intended but in implementation one can imagine all kinds of corruption shenanigans.
Let me add communism: the same kind of economizing was going on there, regardless of the wealth of the countries in question or economic necessities. They considered beefsteaks an unnecessary luxury. By the 1960s the party elite members haven’t seen anything better themselves, so didn’t understand what they were missing.
Why the hate? Much of liberalism IS the product of Protestant morality and universalism. Jews just take advantage of it. And NRx is no more cowardly than any other part of the right. At least they engage in serious thinking.
I don´t want to be impolite but when it comes to national cuisines I think we should not forget another country with food which could be described as bland at best: Russia.
I also only know paella. Maybe we can add tapas, provided it’s a dish rather than a variety of snacks. Spanish ham is traditionally as famous as Italian and maybe even better, though of course it’s not really a dish and other countries are now also producing nice ham varieties, for example Hungary.
The oldest english cookbook is from 1300’s and is called The Forme of Cury.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury
At that time european fine cuisine consisted of simple pottage dishes drenched in expensive spices.
Some say that brits took curry to India, others that it’s an english name for some indian dishes while most claim that both the name and the dishes are indian.
Regardless of which one is true, medieval and contemporary englishmen eat spicy stews and feel they are sophisticated cosmopolitans for that.
That being said the curry moment was something connected with Blair’s Cool Britannia in the forgotten 90’s. These days London has a vibrant Chinatown full of chinese restaurants between Trafalgar Square and the theater district and one rarely sees indian restaurants outside indian neighbourhoods (except their old East London hub of course) The most widely spread “ethnic” restaurants throughout Britain are sushi places.
I once ate in a Russian restaurant in Budapest (it’s one of the best restaurants in the city), operated by a half Russian chef, and it was great. I remember that a couple of dishes used lots of sour cream (also typical of Hungarian cuisine), and though I forgot most of it, I remember I liked it all very much.
I’ve been reading about the russo-japanese war and it struck me how many names for high ranking officers and bureaucrats are non-russian, and often german sounding. Are those baltic germans or Ashkenazi? Is there a statistic of what percentages of tsarist elites were non-russian?
Skimming through the menu, most dishes don’t look all that Russian much, the menu I ate was more Russian than that:
https://aranykaviar.hu/en/
Baltic Germans, definitely not Ashkenazim. Lots of them in the bureaucracy and the military.
The reason for the tiny dishes is that they serve many of them. You wouldn’t be able to eat that many dishes if they served so many of them.
The lower rungs of haute cuisine often only serve the normal number of dishes, and they are of normal size. Often Michelin Star restaurants have à la carte dishes which are normal sized, but then you cannot have so many of them. Which is fine, too.
Croatia is particularly toxic as it had the most dysgenic, anti-meritocratic power+wealth redistribution in the 1990s.
Bandits, sadists and war criminals given general rank en masse – in addition to pre-war proles becoming oligarchs/investors/generals; state and public companies arbitrarily given to “suitable” owners during Privatisation; the local administration inflating over time resulting in rural chieftains who have complete power and authority in their fiefs etc.
Another aspect of dysgenic/anti-meritocratic trends is the tourism aspect – Slavonia is a neglected, poor and depopulated shithole (not only due to war) while shitheads and certified subhumans on the Dalmatian coast and islands live a pleasant life in comparison.
When I was younger I did not like too much salt and so was very happy with Russian dishes which I found the least salty of all. Also I think Russians use vinegar more sparingly in marinated mushrooms of veggies comparing to German, Dutch or French.
It’s my dirty secret, first uncovered by utu.
In Central Europe in Middle Ages during lent fast oil from pressed hemp and poppy seeds was used for cooking so the food during fasts must have been much more fun than we were assuming regardless of other spices. Who needs spices when you have opiates and cannabinoids.
Our friendly Russian nationalist repat (no, not that one) gives a pithy summary for why Russia has been lagging behind historically.
https://twitter.com/vilevarangian/status/1200018150399582208
Heiner Rindermann strongly credited Protestantism for the superiority of Northern Europe and had very harsh things to say about Orthodox Christianity in his magisterial book Human Capital. I brushed it off as an relic of subconscious cultural chauvinism when I read it.
I used to be hesistant blaming Orthodox Christianity for Russia’s historical backwardness, but perhaps I have been too charitable if this is the kind of mentality it produces. Mr. Varangian is an atheist IIRC, but even atheists will be shaped by the dominant social mores.
https://twitter.com/westland_will/status/1201068803322347520
He’s right you know.
There was an Indian place where I used to live which had the most insanely good Mango Chicken. It wasn’t cheap (and you only got five small chunks of tandoor chicken), but the sauce was amazing. I’ve had the same dish from other places, but none have gone anywhere near it.
Indian food isn’t terrible but like all ethnic food it’s artless and incapable of properly handling meat.
Though I have admittedly seen fish properly handled in Kerala.
Ah, yes, the widely known individualism and consciousness of Swedes, Dutch, Germans and Swiss – or Japanese.
Do you have any idea how poor and backward was Russia and Orthodox Christian areas compared to European regions where Protestantism appeared and spread, before Protestantism was even a thing?
Baltic Germans, definitely not Ashkenazim. Lots of them in the bureaucracy and the military.
Maybe this explains some of the “inferiority complex” dogma of some Russian nationalists vis-a-vis Germans.
Russia isn’t exactly a culinary powerhouse, but it has had a culinary palace culture since 18C so it’s certainly considerably ahead of the Nordics in this sphere.
https://s.inyourpocket.com/gallery/201560.jpg
The fact that a preference for Indian cuisine is g-loaded does not recommend Indian cuisine. Intelligent people are more open to new experiences, and beyond that favoring an exotic cuisine is a class signaling device.
As for traditional Swedish food, it’s true there’s not much to recommend. Sweden was historically poor and not much blessed in produce. There are a few decent dishes prior to the invention of “New Nordic Cuisine”. Cured salmon is probably the best.
Prior to c. 1700, the part of Rus that was part of Poland was neither particularly poor nor backward:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/human-capital-in-early-modern-poland-and-russia/?highlight=early+modern
(the nice graphs are down)
AK: The website doesn’t render pictures when using the https extension
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/human-capital-in-early-modern-poland-and-russia/
Spaniards are a proud nation, who doesn’t leave for janitor jobs that easily. In their darkest times, they were a handful in UK/France, and almost none in US. (Of course, it also helps that these destroyed their empire, and brought them into their sorry state.) This means that, overseas, they Jew-ed very little, but it lifted everyone at home.
For example, Manhattan is filled with pastrami stores open by Bessarabian Jews, but it’s impossible to buy Spanish or at least Spanish-style jamon. Now, Moldovans eat pastrami once a year, but Spaniards eat jamon every week. For example, in Spain, pregnant women get tested for Toxoplasma, which could come from jamon, indicating everyone eats jamon, including people who shouldn’t.
Does this lack of boasting hurt the people of Spain? Does this benefit the people of Moldova? For example, Spain has more international tourists than Italy or Mongrelia, not to mention magnificent Gyppoland and its amazing diarrheas.
Given how little democracy there is in Sweden (even relative to Russia), I would be more circumspect in my criticism of Russians relative to Scandinavians, at least on the muh democracy muh freedom front.
Caring about food is gay
Reminds me of the Millwall fan from the last London Bridge terrorist attack who had a conviction for a (much more minor) crime
You sure don’t seem hesitant on blaming anything for Russia’s backwardness
It seems every single trait of Russians is causing their present and past economic trouble
And in case Russia overcomes this hurdle then it will probably be “they only did it because of their 5% Germanic admixture”
It’s all so tiresome
Since it was both part of Poland (Renaissance + window to West) and spared of Mongol-Tatar devastation, in addition to having nicer climate and higher population density compared to Muscovy.
My parents made friends with another Swedish family in the New World.
As a child every Christmas was spent with this family, and the traditional Swedish Christmas table including a proper Swedish Christmas ham (not that good imo) was lovingly prepared by the women every single Christmas.
As you well know we also open our gifts on Christmas Eve, which as a boy always made my friends jealous.
Now that I am older and our extended family has been destroyed this tradition has ended.
Very sad.
There are excellent very British food products like hams, bacons, cured meats, cheeses…
True. Having spent much of my life around British/Irish people abroad I can state with great confidence that the food virtually all people no matter their class or regional origins miss most from Britain/Ireland is the bacon. It’s a regular topic of conversation among British/Irish immigrants as to why when one can get so much from the homeland we cannot get ‘proper bacon’.
When returning to the British Isles – ‘these isles’ as the Irish prefer to say – one of the first things I always notice is just how much salt the locals put on their food. Not only do they shake it on their food for longer than do most non-British, the holes in the salt shakers are wider than abroad so even more salt lands on the food. Not a good sign. I suspect though that this is a mostly working class thing.
The superiority of Northern Europe is based on the metric that shows the superiority of Northern Europe. There are other metrics related to the quality of life and the depth of human experience which are beyond Northern European appreciation or even comprehension. This Rindermann of yours does not belong in a polite society anyway.
Your comments may suggest that Karlin or some other Russian stepped on your toes recently.
Obviously Russia is behind in many areas and in a small part the adherence to Orthodox Church might be responsible for it but only in a small part. It is very likely that the adherence to Orthodox Church had played a dominat role in the survival of Russia and preservation of its geographic integrity. In other words w/o the Church Russia would be only slightly more developed except that there would be no Russia as we know it. Otoh your Sweden may become Muslim and will cease to be Sweden partly because of the Protestantism that was bound to go where it ended up now.
Protestantism had a strong and independent effect on raising literacy rates, which was a very important factor in subsequent economic progress. However, there are no major human capital-promoting differences between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy (as in fact Rindermann himself says in Cognitive Capitalism). The theological gulf between them are far smaller than between them and Protestantism, and there are aspects in which Orthodoxy is superior (e.g. no bans on priestly marriage).
Proposing sociological theories based on a couple of Tweets from one (quarter-German) Russian nationalist repat is a bit of a powerful take.
This is quite obvious – unlike Catholicism and Protestantism, Orthodoxy has done almost nothing for the development of education (and at the same time did everything to achieve maximum isolation of the country). This applies to any historical time – in the time of St. Vladimir, Orthodoxy has not sought to isolate the country, but even then, for the spread of education, it was much much worse than Catholicism. In the future, the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy has increased even more. In this regard, there is no doubt – if Russia was Catholic (ie, if Vladimir was baptized from Rome and not from Constantinople) Russia would be much more developed. But it is unclear whether in this case Russia could survive among predatory neighbors?
There has always been a colossal difference between Catholicism, which everywhere created schools and universities, attached entire Nations to the heritage of classical antiquity, had entire monastic orders devoted themselves to education and Orthodoxy, which for the development of education did almost nothing. Of the three branches of Christianity, Orthodoxy is the worst for any intellectual/technical / economic development.
As for traditional Swedish food, it’s true there’s not much to recommend.
What exactly is wrong with Swedish meatballs? Too proletarian?
Yet until the sack of Constantinople, this Roman Catholic pro-intellectualism/technical aptitude gave us – what exactly? Dark ages? Investiture?
Are you sure you’re not conflating Orthodoxy with the harsh reality of medieval Russian Orthodoxy – sparsely populated frontier lands at the edge of civilised world with no prior organized state/empire whose traditions could be inherited?
“Of the three branches of Christianity, Orthodoxy is the worst for any intellectual/technical / economic development.”
Last time I checked there are only three countries on this planet that can produce anything they set their mind on to (and I am not talking about i-phones or other mass produced consumer goods). They are, in no particular order, China, United States and Russia.
So if it weren’t the Orthodoxy that brought RF to this level of technological development, then it must be the “bloody communists”.
In fact, I would say that technological and economic progress happened in spite of, and not due to Roman Catholic hiearchy decisions and positions.
The societies were exposed to long lost knowledge, new discoveries, inventions which spread through trade – in parallel with the rise of a large burgher and mercantile class in the safety of Low Countries, Burgundy/Lotharingia, Lombardy.
The country which continued following Catholic dogma and doctrine was Spain – and it went into decline rather soon.
Far removed from harsh life in cold forests, wastelands, steppes and regions open to either nomadic and Turkish invasions and slave raids, or ambitious neighbours looking for conquest (North Crusades, Poles, Lithuanians, Swedes).
Dude, you’re retarded.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Can you grasp the meaning of the above phrase ?
Sure. The point is that Orthodoxy itself was not to blame. Orthodox in PLC were not particularly backward or poor. Nor was, of course, the eastern Roman Empire.
If you weren’t an autistic Scandicuck (but I repeat myself) you’d be able the grasp the bigger point behind those tweets.
As already said, it’s just as easy to blame Protestantism for Sweden turning into Northern Somalia.
What is surprising that Scandinavian cuisine which is very strong and creative on wild herbs and wild berries does not utilize wild mushrooms. They, like Anglo-Saxons, seem to be mycophobic. Their cuisine would be much richer if they did not suffer from mycophobia.
So it was not Protestantism or alleged higher scientific education. Or despite of their alleged higher scientific education and literacy they were more superstitious than illiterate Russian peasants. Protestntism has its own irrational superstitions.
This is fine with me because when in Sweden I can pick mushrooms with virtually no competition. At least last time I was there in summer it was a mushroom paradise.
As Epigon points out, Roman Catholicism grew on the ruins of ancient civilizations – and in a geographical space that had permitted large-scale urbanization for millennia.
Russian Orthodoxy grew in a climatically challenging (no large-scale urbanization as in the Mediterranean basin) and geopolitically hostile area (there was nothing in Western Europe on the scale of the Mongol destruction of most of Russia’s cities).
Sweden and eventually Finland advanced ahead relative to Russia, and in general Protestant areas had greater success in imparting literacy sooner than Catholic areas even within one country, so we can argue for an independent human capital-raising effect of Protestantism. However, there were areas of Catholic Europe that were no more developed (Portugal) than Russia c.1900, despite their pre-existing advantages.
Orthodoxy also grew on the ruins of ancient civilization, the center of Orthodoxy was located in the Balkans / Asia Minor – in a geographic space that had allowed large-scale urbanization for millennia.
Before Luther and Zwingli.
As an illustration of the difference between medieval Orthodoxy and medieval Catholicism: Dmitry Gerasimov who was a diplomat of Ivan III, can probably be considered the first Russian scientist. But he studied (in 15 century) in school that created byTeutonic knights in Livonia. In Russia (due to the peculiarities of Orthodoxy) there were no schools where taught Latin or Greek. Strictly speaking, in Russia there were no schools at all (a few literate priests taught privately a few children). If schools were in Livonia and Iceland, but they were absent in Russia-the climate can not be the decisive reason.
And how does this explain the extreme backwardness of the Balkans before the Turkish conquest? The cold climate ?
Why “cold forests, wastelands, steppes” did not prevent Catholic peasants settled in Russia in the 18th century to work and teach children, despite the fact that the Russian Orthodox peasants who lived nearby categorically did not want to work or teach children to read and write (with the full approval of the Orthodox Church) ?
Then you haven’t read the book carefully. Rindermann makes quite a distinction between all three, though he groups Catholicism and Protestantism closer than he does Orthodox Christianity, which he treats with palpalable disdain. Your Russian nationalist identity prevents you from viewing Orthodox Christianity with the scrutiny it deserves, it becomes tied up with your emotions.
And prior to sack of Constantinople, western, Catholic Europe was a shithole in comparison.
Feudal, agrarian societies who went through Dark Ages while there was no such thing in (Eastern) Roman Empire – there was no loss of civilisation and knowledge level.
Paris was inferior to Kiev in splendour. Think about that.
Russia and Belarus to create joint Parliament and Government
This is a pretty big deal. Belarus being slow-motion annexed will mean very bad things for Ukraine’s already precarious security. It would also be a crowning achievement of Putin’s long reign if he can pull it off without firing a shot.
Which extreme backwardness?
The Balkans were ahead of Scandinavia, Scotland, Ireland in 14th and 15th century – at least Serbian part.
Developed mining, craftsmanship, trade – many walled burghs, impressive fortresses, lavish churches and monasteries (many preserved to this day), foreign settlers (Saxon miners) and mercenaries ranging from German knights and hospites to Catalans.
You are obviously unaware of the fact that 3 most lucrative Ottoman mines were located on the territory of Serbian Kingdom.
What held Serbia back was low total population, hence the need to hire foreigners to counter Bulgarians, but even the Despotate was filthy rich, in European terms.
In parallel, a blend of Italian Renaissance and Byzantine architecture flourished, poetry (women poets as well) and legal works – countless charters, donations, licences were preserved, not to mention manuscripts and illuminated books.
There’s nothing wrong with them, they’re just not particularly remarkable.
In that genre of food Veal Wallenberg is quite good.
Table 10.11/12 – correlations between religion and cognitive ability, books owned, enlightenment (Mokyr), and trust (WVS) all show a much larger Orthodox-Catholic vs. Protestant difference relative to an Orthodox vs. Catholic-Protestant difference.
Also:
Of course another issue is that the Communist legacy is a major confound for Orthodoxy, that would reflect negatively on it.
You’re mistaken.
Not only are wild mushrooms prevalent in Scandinavian cuisine, but it’s a popular hobby to gather them. When driving in rural Sweden it’s not an uncommon site to see people suddenly emerging from the forest with the basket packed with foraged mushrooms.
My father, who didn’t emigrate until he was 24, is an enthusiastic mushroom harvester. So was his late father (RIP).
He’s some croat nationalist, and like many of his ilk, he’s surprised by how quickly his country went down the drain after they grabbed their ankles for the west.
University of Alberta students call on school to fire assistant lecturer who denies the Holodomor:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/alberta/article-university-of-alberta-students-call-on-school-to-fire-assistant/
There they go again, those damn “Nazis” spreading the truth once again!
Really?
1194-1220
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/EsHK_gAz3-E/maxresdefault.jpg
This statement is just absolute nonsense.
https://parkkyivrus.com/images/sampledata/map.jpg
In addition to being an avid hunter and fisherman, my father too loved to forage for wild mushrooms. I have fond memories of him coming home in the evening with shopping bags full of “pidpenky” and then my mother and grandmother joining in with the cleanup ritual that went on into the wee hours of the morning. Later in life, Newbie Ukrainians that I got to know broadened my horizons by showing me new variety of mushrooms to collect, including birch boletus and the prized white boletus. After we’d gather up a few good sized baskets, we’d proceed with barbecuing pork fillet shashlyk with all of the requisite fixins. Once we got home, we’d continue the merriment by cleaning the mushrooms and then frying them up with potatoes. Lot’s of great memories associated with mushroom hunting.
Although I think it’s mistaken to blame Protestantism for the west’s decline, as Mencius Moldbugman and some Orthodox and Catholic nationalists do, this doesn’t mean that taking the same position wrt Russia is correct. In fact, following Peter the Great’s reforms, the Orthodox Church in Russia resembled the state-controlled Churches in the Protestant world quite a bit in its structure. With this in mind, if Protestant Churches were the source of Northern Euro success, then one could argue that the Russian church was the source of Russia’s successes.
But really, drawing a neat line between Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant and trying to find the source of the varying ills of these respective countries in this division is pretty sloppy and simplistic.
Given that Russia, as well as most other Orthodox countries, was ruled by an officially atheist state for much of the past century, attributing modern attitudes to the Orthodox Church is of questionable validity.
And then where in the Balkans the Gothic cathedrals (or any other cathedrals of the same scale), palaces, castles, universities? Show me a work of art equal to this, from the Orthodox world?
http://www.muddycolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/f106c-berntnotke28148929stokholm.jpg
And out of whole Catholic Europe, you pick one building as representative of the average civilisational, economic and cultural level – with the construction ending in 1220 – AFTER the sack? Moreover, the modern look is definitely not how it looked in 1220, you can rest assured.
Medieval Europe prior to sacking of Constantinople – 476-1204 – Roman Catholic.
I inquired about the intellectual, scientific and economic supremacy of Roman/Latin Catholic Europe compared to Orthodox/Greek Europe during this period.
Regarding Paris and Kiev, I studied Ana Yaroslavovna’s words.
I compare to everything Catholic outside of Blue Banana/Lotharingia/richest part of Europe,
you go back to it.
You have a thing for Gothic cathedrals – I don’t.
I specified pre-1204, you extend past it.
Serbia had tiny population compared to either France or HRE, and is not really comparable. However, it simply outclassed all Catholic countries of similar population.
Everything valuable, made of precious metals and decorated with jewels was looted by Ottomans, Hungarians, Austrians/Germans, Albanians and Croats. Including royal and imperial crowns, church and monastery ornaments, Nomokanon (Croats donated it to Vatican) between 15th and 20th century. What survived the conquerors and occupiers was ransacked by Yugoscum (for example, the jewel-decorated icon in Montenegro had its jewels pulled out).
Regarding castles and fortresses – Ottomans besieged and destroyed many, but the Smederevo city walls and Fortress on banks of Danube and Golubac Fortress on Danube ( I prefered the non-renovated look ) are most impressive left standing to this day.
Not cooking your own holiday food is simply disgusting and degenerate.
Yes, so-called ‘Christmas’ is a pagan holiday. (Replace ‘baby Jesus’ with ‘baby Krishna’ and literally nothing would change about the holiday.)
The Christian holiday is Easter.
Anne of Kiev, iirc she described Paris as being incredibly unclean and noted that Frenchmen in the nobility were quite filthy unlike the Rus who had regular visits to bathhouses
And unlike her husband, Henry I, who was illiterate she could read and write in Old Slavonic, Greek and Latin, not unusual for the Rus court
https://destinations.com.ua/storage/images/Articles18/March18/AnnaYaroslavna/anna_3.jpg
Kiev got pretty wealthy by connecting Northern European, East Roman and even Silk Road trade routes (Rus traders would go as far as Baghdad)
However, being a rich trading hub while having a very exposed geography usually attracts trouble, and it eventually came
Hang on, you can’t be serious about this whole Orthodox Byzantium was a shithole thing bc Orthodox, can you?
The Byzantine Empire was ruled at various points by the Orthodox, the Iconoclasts, the Catholics (Latin Empire), and the wife of Justinian, Theodora, was a Miaphysite who wielded great power, with Justinian himself becoming sympathetic to the Miaphysites later in life. Attributing its success or decline to its ruling religious denomination is nonsensical, given that every denomination held power at one point or another.
Later on, the Islamic Ottoman empire, ruling a corresponding stretch of territory, experienced a similar collapse. Clearly, attributing the decline of Byzantium relative to the west to its religious doctrines is hardly a complete explanation.
Several old manuscripts were also torched during World War 2 by the Luftwaffe when they bombed Belgrade
A book collection of 500 000 volumes, 1424 Cyrillic manuscripts and charters, a collection of 1500 old maps and prints
It turns out, besides magic dirt theory, there is also magical Christian denomination theory.
Russians don’t use vinegar in cooking at all, putting that stuff into food is as outrageous to Russians as flavoring it with bleach.
Russians don’t “marinate” stuff, we brine it in salt solutions.
before sack
http://www.viceversa-addevisser.nl/wp-content/gallery/hoofdstuk-ii/ii.61.jpg
https://www.ljplus.ru/img4/d/i/dima75/Picture-426s.jpg
economically-Italian cities have been masters of the waters of the Mediterranean since the beginning of the 11th century. Intellectually, a network of Catholic schools (where Latin was taught) reached Iceland. Orthodox schools outside of the Byzantine Empire was a bad joke. Science in both parts of Christendom was near zero in 1204. But then the differences became huge and not in favor of Orthodoxy.
Which brazen fake
funny joke. About “маринованные грибы” you naturally do not know
Are those 2 supposed to be particularly impressive buildings?
They are nothing compared to monuments of Classical Antiquity – your conclusion would be that Christianity is to be blamed for that? Presenting them as magnificent while ignoring Eastern Roman architectural wonders is puzzling.
Regarding Church Latin schools – this is a necessity when your clergy uses a foreign, alien language in liturgy – which the supposed worshippers do not understand. Those “schools” taught nothing else.
Medieval Catholic universities are vastly overblown in terms of intellectual output and significance.
Regarding Italian cities – it is to be expected from Genoa and Venice, two cities placed perfectly and very close to demographically and economically most important parts of Europe.
I have a distinct impression you are missing the numbers, total population discrepancy between Roman/Latin and Orthodox Church at the time, and the threats and troubles besetting them. Basically, you are claiming that a Roman Catholic Russia would fare much better than Orthodox Rus’
Blaming Orthodoxy for backwardness of Russia compared to Francia/France and German Imperial cities/Lombard League is simply on another level.
Which is the name of a German Goddess..
Interesting. Please let us know how this will go!
What exactly is the incentive for Lukashenko to become a small guppy in someone else’s pond? After all, one would think that being a large guppy in his own pond would be more appealing to him. I know that he wanted a union with Russia in the 1990s but that was when it looked like there was actually a realistic chance for him to win power in Russia after Yeltsin would have left office; of course, Putin’s rise eliminated any chance for Lukashenko to come to power in Russia after Yeltsin. Is Lukashenko looking to succeed Putin in 2024, or what? I just see little benefit for Lukashenko personally in joining Russia.
“I have a distinct impression you are missing the numbers, total population discrepancy between Roman/Latin and Orthodox Church at the time, and the threats and troubles besetting them. Basically, you are claiming that a Roman Catholic Russia would fare much better than Orthodox Rus’”
And I’d like to add, if I may, that the poster also completely disregards Russia’s geography, when geography is probably the single most important factor in shaping the destiny of a country.
For instance, due to its geography, a Catholic Russia would most likely be subject to Mongol invasion and subjugation, just like in real history, with very similar repercussions.
Anyway, I fail to see how all of this is relevant now, 11 centuries (give or take) later. As I said earlier, weather one likes it or not, Russia is one of the pillars of present world order, by virtue of, among other things, its technological capabilities, acquired one way or another.
Naturally. In this Catholicism, with its Latin language gave a great advantage in comparison with Orthodoxy.
Where I make this ridiculous comparison? But the fact that Finland and Livonia by 1500 far ahead of Russia in terms of education-is the result of the peculiarities of Orthodoxy
And the fact that Serbia and Bulgaria with their warm climate, sea coast, and lack of nomads in the immediate neighborhood to 1400 so much different from Italy or Spain or southern France-this is also a clear influence of Byzantine Orthodoxy.
All this is just a brazen fake of the 20th century.
Were Finland and Livonia ahead of Muscovy/Russia, or were Swedish and German ruling classes of Finland and Livonia ahead of Muscovy/Russia?
A very important distinction, in my opinion.
Believe it or not, Adriatic coast of medieval Serbia and especially its tributary, Ragusan Republic were not really different than contemporary southern Italy on the opposite coast. Post-Ottoman invasion, Venetians took control of the area quite effortlessly.
I didn’t write anything like that. I only pointed out the obvious thing-if the adoption of Catholicism meant access to the achievements of ancient civilization, the creation of a system of schools (and later universities). The Orthodox Church did not give such advantages. So the States that adopted Catholicism had huge advantages over the States that chose Orthodoxy.
Is not “Bistro” of French origin?
Ragusa is a Catholic Republic.
Orthodox Serbia or Bulgaria – where cathedrals, palaces, painting, sculpture, universities at the level of Spain or southern France 14-15 centuries?
The most representative cathedral was torn down by Ottomans and the stone used to built a mosque.
Palaces were thoroughly looted and burned.
Sculptures were not a thing (everywhere except in Italy during that period – name English, Scandi, Polish sculptors?) so Italians were commissioned to do ornaments sculpting, painting mostly limited to frescoes and icons – both Italian and Byzantine painters were commissioned.
Which universities of southern Spain?
In Serbia, there were no Universities, law was well developed and studied – building upon Justinian and Byzantine legal system as well as Italian mercantile practices; monasteries had schools, nobility was well educated as evidenced by their high literacy and even noble women writing lyrics and poems.
Resava School was the most prominent center of illumination, but the tradition went far earlier, as evidenced by Miroslav Gospel from 12th century.
Again, you are comparing Spain and France to minor Serbia. There are far better matches (population wise) in Catholic Europe of the time, who were simply crappier, poorer and left nothing comparable to Serbian heritage from 12th to 15th century.
Have you looked up the two fortresses I have mentioned?
Wouldn’t have happened without Russian soldiers!
I’ve heard Ukrainians claim that these were Ukrainians troops in France. I don’t necessarily believe that, and don’t have time to look it up, but it is possible. “Bistro” means “quickly” in both Ukrainian and Russian. Supposedly the soldiers were telling the restaurant staff to hurry up with their meal preparation.
Your father must belong to the enlighten class who acquired mycophilia in last 100 years or and overcame the mycophobic superstitions of Swedes. The spread of this recent mychophilia was not broad enough to reflect it in popular cuisine as wild mushrooms do not figure on any list of 10 or 15 traditionally Swedish dishes. Neophites like your father may deny the fact that they are newbies.
And this is still taught in Chinese schools. When Xi (increasingly less frequently) mentions Unequal Treaties, he does not have Hong Kong in mind.
I eat real Punjabi food with my wife’s brother’s in-laws. It is mildly spiced and mostly vegetarian. Some chicken now and then. Only the nan bread is in common with commercial Indian restaurants in the UK. I find the mildest curry served in curry houses far too hot. Nepalese manage to serve something acceptable.
General standard of food is quite high in Northern Spain, and cheap.
You can buy randomly a stuffed croissant in a train station there, and expect it should be good.
However, I think Michelin Star restaurant stuff is not such a relevant indicator, at least for most of us who are not mainly eating in the Michelin Star restaurants.
For example, English food can be one of the best in the world, if you go to relatively expensive restaurants in London (there are some amazing restaurants in London, where incredibly delicious meals,from around $50+ for each person).
However, the problem of English food is that the croissant you buy in a train station will not be good.
I wouldn’t eat non homemade Indian food or let a female marry out of caste||
:shrug:
Very cool.
Thank you for sharing.
Get lost you cucked Croat cuck.
Don’t forget everything of value the DOS scum sold out almost for free from the Belgrade library post-2000 …
There was no such class in Catholic Finland. As much as a bureaucracy and government existed, it was the church so effectively the language of government in Finland was Latin. At that point Sweden was more of a tribal confederacy that elected a warlord as monarch than what we would now consider a state.
The Catholic clerical class was actually first largely made up of Englishmen (who were fed up with vikings and promoted conversion in Scandinavia). After that people were sent to train in what’s now England, Germany, Czech Republic etc and this gave ethnic Swedes an obvious advantage (since they could almost understand old English and German) but there was a number of ethnic Finnish scholars fluent in classical languages.
The Latin speaking elite became very multinational and appointments to high positions were controlled from Rome. That’s one motive for the Reformation – building a national state where the King is actually in control of the government. However even this wasn’t initially a Swedish attempt to dominate as they immediately produced a Bible translation in Finnish, trained more priests in Finnish to be the new government etc so the King’s intention was to take power from the “internationalist” clique led from Rome to create a “binationalist” country. We had a civil war over that where the multiethnic Latin speaking elite led by a presumed Flemish man wanted to align Finland with Catholic Poland-Lithuania while ethnic Finns supported a Protestant for King of Sweden.
Finnish was eventually neglected, no more works were translated after the initial burst of the Bible and some Lutheran texts and as Sweden started building its own schools etc Finnish was ignored. Sweden also turned to nationalist zealotry after they started losing to Russia, started assimilationist projects and use of Finnish language collapsed. But it’s a mistake to project that to the Catholic era.
If Russia had adopted Catholicism, it would have had intellectual integration with Western Europe. On the other hand it would have also had an aristocracy that would more easily intermarry with Westerners and Rome would issue orders all the time which would make it harder to develop a distinct Russian identity capable of maintaining coherence over such a large area. Rome is far away and it would have no idea how to deal with steppe peoples and far northern conditions so Russia would be one of the countries most likely to go with the Reformation.
It would also have been harder to assimilate non-Slavic peoples if the religion had created a purely Latin speaking scholarly class as then Slavic wouldn’t have seemed prestigious in comparison. This is what happened in Sweden and Finnish was never replaced by Swedish because Latin became the most prestigious elite language and even the late intentional effort to promote Swedish never really succeeded.
Regarding the more pleasant topic of national cuisines, the most underrated cuisines are by far Chinese and Serbian.
Of course, much of the Chinese cuisine sold in Western restaurants is not authentic. Things like beef belly and tongue are actually extremely tasty even though they may appear undesirable at first. Same for dirt egg (“century egg”).
As for Serbian cuisine, there’s Cevapi, Pljeskavice and meat or cheese pies (“burek”, if one uses the Muslim name).
Since both these cuisines are so underrated, yet so rich and sophisticated with many more dishes, there’s probably a few I’ve forgotten from writing this off the top of my head.
get bent you smelly brown piece of shit
i eat one thousand pounds of BEEF every year
Didn’t the Serbian mining city of Novo Brdo have more people than Paris in the 13th and early 14th centuries?
Same for Raska as well?
I don’t understand why you berated me so hard a few threads back for going on about the greatness of Medieval Serbia (relative to its size and population, of course) when you’re ranting on about it now?
Your Swedish relatives take 1000 brown dicks every year..
:shrug:
The Norse believe in a Primordial Cow as the source of the Universe.
All Norse were against killing female cows as were Greco-Romans.
You’re just a kike and watching your beef eating white race go down in flames is great entertainment.
well played
still having two ribeye steaks tomorrow you mud-blooded muddle-headed monster
Byzantine temples (converted into mosques) have survived, and even ancient temples have survived
https://marcusspeh.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/screen-shot-2014-06-11-at-20-07-13.png
the Catholic painting gave rise to the Renaissance, but Orthodox painting only a lifeless icon
The Balkans was a region about the size of France or Spain
Powerful take:
https://twitter.com/mschwirtz/status/1193867229814808578
Russia is so ebil that they made a cult in Madagascar.
They can’t keep getting away with it
Swede-jew you’re part Finnish and it shows in your autism.
How did a Sami like you get to the States anyway?
Lol du kommer att bli dödad av ditt eget folk för att äta nötkött du “svenska” samiska avskum
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EKwUN7MWwAE5IiR?format=jpg&name=large Detta är den hedniska sanna svensken som kommer att döda dig
It’s actually “Bystro” (or, alternatively, “Buistro”) rather than “Bistro”.
I wouldn’t call Pljeskavice “sophisticated”
It is delicious tho
The “sophisticated” part refers much more to Chinese cuisine than Serbian, obviously. Still, Pljeskavice are actually somewhat complicated to make, meaning there is at least some level of sophistication in them. Certainly more so than “Bangers and mash”, or Murican burgers, and etc.
The most sophisticated cuisine would by far have to be French-Austrian pastries, sweets, cakes and etc.
None of this detracts from my original point that Chinese and Serbian cuisines are seriously underrated, anyway.
Dr. E. Michael Jones – Libido Dominandi speech in Warsaw, Poland – English cut
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkMOFdEMaio
A Tanú? Great film that one.
Uh… but Bulgaria was founded by steppe-nomads, with waves of new invaders coming to Balkans until the Middle-Ages, then followed by the Turks. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but comparing the Balkans in pure geographic terms to Southwestern Europe is a stretch.
Yes, you are right. The name is from that movie, a favorite of mine.
I’m a Croat, currently working in the West.
Did ALL Byzantine temples survive? What logic is this? Many Serbian churches and monasteries did, but also many were destroyed – their ruins and foundations left to this day.
Italians were most renowned sculptors of the period. The reason you ommited the rest of my post and the inquiry about Catholic sculptors in the rest of Europe.
Have you heard of Paleologian Renaissance? Building on that, Italian painters were commissioned, as well as Latin coin designers etc.
Medieval Serbia had strong Catholic influences and connections – in fact, the first crown was sent by the Pope. The foreigners, miners, mercenaries and craftsmen had Catholic churches built for them as well.
No, Serbia was definitely not size of France or Spain – more importantly, the Serb population was a tiny fraction of either France’s or Spain’s (union of several Iberian Kingdoms at the time). This repeated insistence on comparing with France or Spain is getting tedious. The 14th century expansion was into non-Serb areas, where Byzantine pronoiars, burghers and administration were mostly left intact, in addition to Arnaut clan areas and depopulated Epirus and Aetolia.
No, not even close. It was a mining town and trading hub, not a large population centre – hence scattered fortresses protecting the region. The whole area had low total population – compare the total force count available to Serbian rulers over time and how Bulgaria even in its waning days could raise significantly larger armies than Serbs (Velbazhd battle neccessitated a large foreign mercenary component)
I am not ranting at all, I simply reacted to (in my opinion) incorrect and unfair comparison and claims. Serbia was a minor, local entity between Hungary, Bulgaria and Byzantines for most of the period, significantly inferior to all three until after the 4th crusade. And here we are comparing it to France, Spain and HRE, or Italian cities as proof of Orthodox inferiority.
PS: I accidentaly replied to @melanf, instead of @reiner tor in my previous post. Fucking mobile pleb.
Melanf is highly intelligent and knowledgeable about Russia. This serves to mask ignorance about areas on themes and countries where reality is opposed to Soviet ideology (presumably he has been trained by Soviet-era experts) such as Orthodoxy, Finland, Ukraine, Poland, peasants/collectivizaton/”progress”, etc.
Ukrainian Azov battalion taking part in HK riots.
https://i.redd.it/a5islyp5r3241.png
Thanks!
Than you for mentioning your “enthusiastic mushroom hunting” father. 🙂
He is definitely both a knowledgeable and interesting member/contributor – I certainly wouldn’t call it ignorance, but disagreements in opinion and interpretation – similar to differences between your and my take on certain topics.
An outsider’s/foreigner’s interpretation could be useful to break the tunnel vision / entrenched narrative. However, I wouldn’t want to lecture people on their own country and history – so I would definitely listen closely to him on Rus’ and Russia and not contradict him.
Thank you for the detailed reply, I have only a superticial knowledge of the region not extending past the wars and territorial changes.
If you had to summarise the periods by year, how would you split them?
Sweden’s peculiar culture, as I already outlined before, is highly folkish and only has a very thin lacquer of Christianity on top. Thinking about this in Christian terms is deeply misleading.
For example: one tradition that we observed as kids, which once again was dressed up as ‘christianity’ was the habit of making porridge with cinnamon and then put it outside your door during the winter night. This is to feed the trolls (in order to keep the bad trolls away and make them content).
We have näcken:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Nokken_av_Theodor_Kittelsen.png
Another folkish lore, a naked man (“näck” is shorthand for naked in Swedish: naken) luring in the waters, ready to pull down any careless visitor to the deep depths of the Swedish forest’s many small rivers and lakes. Many of these myths were created in part to respond to very real problems: common folk getting drunk on homebrew alcohol and tripping in the night into one of the lakes and drowning. So you add superstition to fix a health hazard. A pragmatic Nordic tradition if there ever was one.
More generally, many Swedish traditions are deeply entwined with the forest. Trolls, strange beasts, all kinds of creatures. It all comes from the dark forest. I think this is a deeply Germanic undercurrent more broadly. The brothers’ Grimm were also collecting various Germanic folk tales when they wrote their books and even today there is a deep and enduring romantic sentiment towards nature and the forest in particular in German high culture. This came out spectacularly in the high romantic period during the 1800s. This is why LARPing as a desert tribe from palestine is an especially bad fit for Northern Europeans.
Yeah, no doubt about it, ribeyes taste great and provide one with a lot of protein. Say, I’ve been meaning to ask you about some interesting supplement preparations that are based on meat products: Carnitine; L-Carnitine and COQ10 (Ubiquinol). They say that by combining the two different forms of carnitine with COQ10 you can improve your brain and heart health. Truth or fiction?
About Russia I can say the same thing
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/e0/0b/7e/e00b7e310d3d09509025d253678417a8.jpg
https://images.aif.ru/012/475/bb4525c97680ed49b888b8526f7a27c6.jpg
I don’t think your previous comment had anything to do with my previous comments. Are you sure?
Rare 19th century map of Europe here – is this Mr. Karlin’s great-great grandpa? 😉
https://twitter.com/onlmaps/status/1201207220332974081
https://twitter.com/nickm4rro/status/1201151537877155840
I wonder what the real TFR of China is.
Stockholm is even more fantastic this time of year than usual. I am truly blessed to experience winter in a climate made for it. My favourite season of the year.
https://i.imgur.com/gnPImFi.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/76XYhW9.jpg
Expect the eradication of all of the it’s remaining population control policies within a year. But will it make any difference ? Will the Chinese respond more positively to incentives than Westerners have ? What about coercion ? Next population census in 2020 will be pivotal for future population policy in PRC. Hard decision will need to be made soon !!
Yes, in St. Petersburg exactly the same. But this beauty is fleeting (because of the very short daylight hours and the rapid change of weather)
http://www.sumcoco.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/magazine-unlock-01-2.3.1228-_375E8A372080216FBEAEDA36062FD7CC.jpg
Harbin is also very nice during this time of the year, but I must admit nowhere near as picturesque as St. Petersburg or Stockholm.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/images/attachement/jpg/site1/20171110/b083fe96fac21b6f2d4d01.jpg
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/images/attachement/jpg/site1/20171107/7427ea21079d1b6b2d4808.jpg
“It would also have been harder to assimilate non-Slavic peoples if the religion had created a purely Latin speaking scholarly class as then Slavic wouldn’t have seemed prestigious in comparison.”
This is the key advantage that Orthodoxy offered to Slavic speaking people, Eastern Slavs in particular.
Constantinople allowed, in fact facilitated, the use of “popular” native Church Slavonic in church service. This had to do a lot with geopolitics of the time vis-a-vis Papacy but the end result was consolidation of Slavic identity over the vast geographic area between the White Sea to the North and the Black Sea to the South.
This was very well understood by Russian national figures of the time like Alexander Nevsky.
Similar processes took place on the Balkans.
So, to cut long story short: no Orthodoxy probably means no Russian Empire and no Russia in present day shape and form.
beautiful photo
If about picturesque snowfalls-Kamchatka is the world champion
after snowfall:
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/sakuryan/6964360/147656/147656_original.jpg
https://ants-in-pants.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/9_DSC_3532.jpg
SPB in winter must be such a privilege to live in. I am legitimately jealous. One of the many crimes of climate change is that it will make such seasons shorter and less intensive.
Beautiful. I assume you live in Harbin? Are you ethnically Chinese or if not, how did you come to live there (if you don’t mind me asking)?
My (vague) guess is that Northern Russia would go Protestant, while Central and Southern Russia would remain Catholic.
So the main locus of division within the Russian world would not be between Russia and the Ukraine, but between Russia/Ukraine and Novgorod. Indeed, there’s even a chance that the former would have formed a superstate with Poland, at least until the Age of Nationalism.
I don’t want to dox myself. But I will answer with a name Yul Brynner. I hope you understand. A man of your intellect should easily be able to decipher that.
Hungarotriumph
An article on CNN describing the emerging fine dining scene in Budapest:
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/fine-dining-budapest/index.html
Another article about a possible major discovery by Hungarian physicists:
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/22/world/fifth-force-of-nature-scn-trnd/index.html
A couple weeks ago I attended a football (soccer) match in Cardiff (unfortunately but predictably lost by the much weaker Hungarian side), which afforded me an opportunity to connect with real grassroots Hungarian nationalists in the form of football hooligans, or at least observe them closely.
They were mostly drunk, but not extremely so, rather just tipsy. They started chanting nationalist rhymes. They didn’t concern themselves much for the low TFR or dysgenic breeding patterns (except Gypsies, who were occasionally mentioned by them), and neither was immigration at the top of their agenda (though I overheard several critical remarks about the presence of filthy Pakis and Negroes and similar subhumans in such an old European country – it was hard not to notice their presence in great numbers in Cardiff), the nationalist rhymes mostly concerned themselves with issues easily understandable to nationalists a century ago:
“Transylvania will once again belong to Hungary” – okay, I can support it, though perhaps not the most pressing issue.
“We hate you, shit Slovakia” – I’m a bit ambivalent about hating Beckow, but altogether it’s not impossible to support.
“Babies! Babies! We will grind all Romanian babies!” – at this point I thought it was a good thing that our patriotic subhumans were unarmed and there was a heavy Welsh police presence.
Later, already in the stadium, a couple idiots almost attacked my buddies (all the more idiotic, since they weren’t exactly small, the idiots didn’t seem to have either a numerical or a qualitative advantage), which would have been a nice experience, a fistfight in the middle of the Hungarian sector.
So guys, what is your experience with connecting to real grassroots nationalists? I’m curious how Serb nationalists received Epigon’s proposal to promote reading books, or what was the reaction of Russian football hooligans to Karlin’s ideas on transhumanism. I personally avoided promoting my ideas to the Hungarian fans.
A great film indeed. It’s one example of a movie which was banned immediately after being made, something you were skeptical of in the case of a recent Chinese movie. The reason for this was that the comrade responsible for culture just died shortly before the movie was to be released, and the new comrade decided that it should be banned.
Most of my nationalist friends/acquaintances are right-wing intellectuals or effete homosexual types, not the brutal skinhead types.
I think they have mostly been killed off by alcohol and krokodil by now.
Nationalists, especially convinced nationalists are a small minority over here. Even among the football fans and hooligans.
As a point of distinction and personal pride, they are genuinely interested in history and books on Serb history.
The subversion ran so deep in Yugocommieslavia, that football fans were non-nationalist, and actually were an important instrument of coup/colour revolution in 2000. Among Croats, football fans were disproportionately volunteers in 1991-1995 war; in Serbia – not even close.
This is the result of Yugocommie Secret Police controlling both major football fan groups who cheered for two Yugocommunist-founded clubs.
They survive to this day, are club sectarian to the extreme (Divide et Impera in Belgrade) and are drug dealers and grunts of organised crime.
Interesting. Oddly enough, Kharkiv was a rather Sovietized place but the Azov movement grew out of the football club, it wasn’t pro-Donbas/pro-neo-Soviet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion
Yeah, UDBA, other state agencies and Arkan, as their proxy, controlled all the football teams and fans in Serbia. They only cared about looting, committing war crimes (in some cases even against other Serbs!) and smuggling (even co-operating with enemies in this!) that aren’t actually in Serb national interests. They only pretended to be nationalist so they could get away with their thuggish, corrupt and corrosive behavior that only eroded the morale of local Serb forces in Krajina and Bosnia.
At one point, Mladic and Arkan where on the verge of a shootout and even an inter-Serb civil war between each other, although Mladic fortunately won out. Arkan’s grouping were unfortunately much more dominant in Krajina, which partly explains the disastrous outcome there.
The case with football teams in Bosnia, and also Republika Srpska was different. In fact, I came across this just the other day:
https://www.standard.rs/2019/12/01/zaboravljeni-heroji-kako-je-celi-fudbalski-tim-polozio-zivot-za-republiku-srpsku/?ns_abc=latin
Basically, the whole Serbian football team in the town of Doboj in Bosnia had all its players die fighting (mostly against Muslims) for Republika Srpska (some of them were even married and with children, anywhere between 1-3 children each), besides the coach. Unfortunately, this case of the Doboj football team is little known among Serbs, even in Srpska.
Of course, this again only confirms that Srpska is more nationalist than Serbia.
If you don’t mind, there are a few thing i’d like to ask you about in this vein.
1: Do you have any good books or other reading content to recommend about Medieval Serbia?
It’s obvious that my knowledge of the period is quite weak and from the few things I did read, it seems I have an almost completely wrong impression compared to yours. I do have one book about the Nemanjic dynasty I’ve yet to read (by Dusko Lopandic). Still, any suggestion would be greatly appreciated (especially pre-Nemanjic, since I know almost nothing about that).
2: To what extent has the Vatican falsified Medieval Serb history?
I’ve come across claims that the Vatican deliberately falsified world maps of Serbia under the Nemanjic dynasty in order to pretend that they never ruled over Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that Bosnia was completely separate from Serbia, which is obviously wrong. The whole “Slavs came out of nowhere to the Balkans in 7th century AD” theory strongly stinks as well. I think some Serbs have a slightly excessive paranoia about the matter, but there certainly was a lot of falsification and fudging of Serb history of that time (just like almost every other period, really).
3: Have you read Milisav Sekulic’s Knin Fell in Belgrade (Knin je Pao u Beogradu, KJPUB, free online PDF copy available)? If so, what is your opinion on the book and subject matter?
Even though I’m a complete amateur at military history, I think it’s still quite a good, clear, honest and easy to understand book about the failure of RSK in those painful and disgraceful circumstances. There’s also a 3 hour interview with Milisav Sekulic on Serb YouTube (Balkan Info, of course).
I understand that 1990-2012 are the lowest years of Serb history, but it is still important for Serbs to absorb the full truth about the period despite all of the pain and shame of that time. Of course, I mean confronting the full extent of inter-Serb disgraces, and not foreign “acknowledge your aggression and etc” bullshit peddling. Sooner or later, Serbs are going to have to thoroughly and comprehensively present the facts and reality of the 1990’s to the world in order to debunk all the slander and falsehoods that are spread by international media about those events (Serb-Cyrillic language Wikipedia is a pleasantly refreshing source about the truth of those events).
4: Shouldn’t Serb nationalists be at least a bit cautious about Vucic?
Like, what’s up with people protesting about migrants coming into and even staying in Serbia? Did Vucic really sign an agreement for Serbia to take in migrants from the EU in exchange for being paid 20,000 Euros per migrant? For that matter, what’s going on with migrant and gypsy crimes against ethnic Serbs in Serbia that the government isn’t doing anything about?
http://m.soinfo.org/vesti/vest/22274/1/Protest-protiv-migranata-u-Somboru-/
That really doesn’t fit the “based Serb nationalist Vucic” image you’re eager to display. As an important side-note on this matter, Srpska completely blocks and expels migrants (in Herzegovina, some Serb liquidated a migrant trespassing in his backyard using his personal gun, so migrants keep away from Herzegovina now). Serbs in Bosnia are also confronted with migrants being used by the SDA against them:
http://thesrpskatimes.com/sarajevo-using-migrants-to-change-ethnic-structure/
Also, what’s up with the whole scam with trash dams that would ruin Serbia’s eco-system, waterways and economy?
My impression is that Vucic is more like a Serb version of Putler. They are both made out to be ultra-nationalist villains by their enemies, but the reality is that they’re both crypto-civic nationalists that only have an interest in their own personal power and some other genuine interests for their country that overlap with their own. Vucic cucking on migrants seems similar to Putin and the whole Caucus problem. Of course, it’s not like there are better alternatives than Vucic (Seselj isn’t geopolitically viable), but I don’t think Serbs should be blind Vucic worshipers.
5: Finally, I’ve done a bit of searching for some of your previous recommended reading for the 20th century, but it’s hard to come across things like the memoirs of (from searching internet, at least), say, Milan Stojadinovic (btw, I’ve come across claims that he collaborated with Ante Pavelic in Buenos Aires post-1945, is this true, or just Yugo-Communist crap?), so I’ll save this for later.
A very welcome development indeed, but not much of a surprise to anyone who has been listening to Lukashenko’s ever meeker statements about what sets Belarus apart from Russia. (He is not far wrong: Belarus’ claim to statehood is even weaker than Ukraine’s.)
If the Kremlin plays this right, it just might pull off a reunion within the decade. High up on its integration list should be a common university admissions system. The more Belarusians study at Russian universities, the lesser the risk of serious opposition from the youth demographic.
Territorially, Ukraine should not have much to worry about outside a hot war between NATO and the Sinosphere, but 11 million more Russians (plus another possible 3.5 million from Donbass) will of course make Russia even less avoidable politically, economically and culturally.
You are right, mushroom dishes are surprisingly rare in Swedish homecooking. I can think only of renskavsgryta (a reindeer casserole), some game casseroles, fish gratins, and morsel sauce — all of which are rather fancy.
But we do like picking mushrooms. It’s just that they haven’t found their way into the commonest dishes. In my family, most end up dried (for Mediterranean cooking) or turned into a simple mushroom stew (chanterelles + butter + heavy cream + s&p + fresh thyme) served on butter-fried sandwich bread.
Sweden does have some mushroom soups, but these are very generic, just like our fish soups (and just like the Russian shroom and fish soups I have had).
On the whole, Swedish food is very like Russian. The main differences are that Swedes don’t use much sour cream (smetana) and that our ancestors somehow never took to garlic (Ukrainians like it so much they sprinkle it over the dish as topping). There are further very slight differences (e.g. Russians seem to prefer cranberries where Swedes would use lingonberries), but these strike me as the major ones.
And how is Swedish cuisine on using marjoram which is big in Polish-Ukrainian-Russian cooking? Swedes and Northern Slavs both are big onfresh dill, parsley and horseradish. What about lovage?
Then in traditional cuisine Northern Slav cooking there was no use of oregano but quite a lot of caraway seeds and some thyme but no cumin. And obviously now it all is changing by being enriched by the Mediterranean influence which is the case for mushrooms in Scandinavia which traditionally were not used because of cultural mycophobia.
Few decades ago Switzerland and Germany were swept with craziness about bear garlic (Allium ursinum). I knew it since childhood as my grandmother grew it but it was not commonly known. Some people picked it in forests.
When cooked there is not that much difference between cranberries and lingonberries. And the wild varieties are somehow different from what is commercially cultivated. Sometimes I buy Swedish lingonberry preserves.
What is however much different are blueberries and bilberries. The latter is what was used in Central Europe (wild variety not cultivated) while the former came form America. They have similar flavor but bilberries are sharper and most importantly they are dark inside not white. However cultivation of blueberries is more successful so it is likely that bilberry dishes (Czech kolace, Polish pierogies or bilberry soup) are made with blueberries.
First time I became aware of this Swedish folkish culture was when I read Axel Munthe’s The Story of San Michele which was a European bestseller. Gabriel García Márquez mentions it in his Love in the Time of Cholera.
those who live in places where there are no real forests (and this is the majority of countries with warm climates), are unlikely to appreciate the pleasure of picking mushrooms
https://d.radikal.ru/d07/1908/b6/5bdfe4006d6b.jpg
https://d.radikal.ru/d33/1908/de/d7381fa636b6.jpg
https://c.radikal.ru/c28/1908/45/39476e7e29a4.jpg
I can not say for the Scandinavian countries, but for example the aristocracy in Russia in the past had an extremely diverse and complex cuisine that is almost completely disappeared today. This happened because the basis of the ancient feudal cuisine were forest animals/birds and rare breeds of river fish. For example normal dish (for feasts of the nobles) was the meat of bears or bobcats baked in honey of wild bees.
https://www.stihi.ru/pics/2017/10/15/11398.jpg
I think a similar situation was in Scandinavia-the complex cuisine of the aristocrats disappeared, and survived only a simple cuisine of the common people
Nemanjic weren’t the only Serbs in the Balkans
And there’s little need to outright falsify our history, just cherrypicking is enough to paint a negative picture (Maritsa, Niccopolis, etc.)
On the internet it’s usually Croats and fellow Serbs(tm) who do it
Mi Crbi cmo dno dna!
I’m pretty sure that the Nemanjic dynasty ruled over parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina at some point. Anyway, I’m aware of the evidence that the Kotromanovic dynasty of “medieval Bosnia” was ethnically Serb.
Cherrypicking isn’t enough by itself. In many cases it is necessary to distort and even directly lie about certain other things.
As for “fellow Serb” trash, I feel glad I’m not one of those “concerned diaspora” garbage. I probably easily could be for a few hundred euros a month or something though. Internet Croats are underhanded and cunning scum. Still, internet Albanians and “Bosniaks” are even worse imo (in the sense that they’re more aggressive and primitive). It’s actually sort of hilarious to see handles like “Balija Novi Pazar” and “Kosova Dardania Ilyria” spam things like “Serbs r Turk bitches”, “haHaha Serbitch Orthodogs” and etc. on say YouTube (other social media is little better in many cases) comment sections or whatever. Of course, internet Croats are more dangerous in that many bother to pretend to be more civil and people are more likely to fall for their bullshit peddling.
Anyway, I was hoping Epigon would dignify me with a somewhat detailed response, but I can understand him not trusting diaspora people or simply being busy with other things in his life.
A friend of mine, a research scientist, has spent a good amount of time in both Norway and Sweden. She’s learned to make a great gravelox! The very best liquer that I’ve ever tasted was from Scandinavia. It’s primary taste sensation was from the ubiquitous (there anyway) lingonberry, although the bottle claimed that other wild berries were included in the concoction. It was truly a heavenly experience for the tastebuds. It was quite expensive and I’ve been told that it’s extremely difficult to come bye these days? Any ideas what it might have been (the guy who turned me on to it is no longer with us)? 🙁
If you have any opinions on what I wrote to you in #226, please let me know. If you don’t, just let me know that too.
Fresh marjoram is rare outside its use with Swedish pea soup (truly a match made in heaven!) and some sausages. This is a pity, for I find it among the great herbs of the world. With tomato sauce, I like it even better than basil. Try it with pizza or spaghetti bolognese and you will see what I mean.
Part of the reason, I think, why it’s not used more is that it wilts so easily. Half the time when I want to buy it, it looks wilted already on the store shelf, which is not reassuring.
I have never seen fresh lovage being used in Swedish cooking. I only know it as an ingredient in some store-brand stock. How is it used in central and eastern Europe?
Same in Swedish cooking. Plenty of caraway but no cumin that I can think of. Oregano (both fresh and dried) is seen as a Mediterranean (i.e. non-traditional) herb.
Mostly a novelty herb in Sweden. I seem to remember having come across “bear garlic” pesto once, but the experience didn’t make a lasting impression.
Lovage is used in soups and stews. It give an interesting flavor to chicken broth that is similar to that of Maggi seasoning so in Germany it is even called Maggikraut which is funny because the herb was known and used traditionally before Julius Maggi began producing his soup seasoning.
Yes, but this complex cuisine of yours — I think I prefer the term show-off cuisine — wasn’t much good to begin with. There’s great truth, I think, to Anthony Bourdain’s observation in the introduction to his Les Halles Cookbook that nearly all of the world’s truly great dishes have humble origins:
One could add many non-French dishes to prove the point (caesar dressing, most American fast food, most pasta dishes), but you get the idea.
You are right to say, however, that Swedish and Russian cooking both went, as the 20th century dawned, from highly elaborate aristocratic cooking to more subdued, folksy cooking. Elena Molokhovets’ A Gift to Young Housewives, the standard Russian cookbook until the revolution, is rather like Sweden’s counterpart, Hagdahl’s Kokkonsten som vetenskap och konst, in that most recipe’s are lavish to the point of parody.
But no rule without exception, and remnants of aristocratic dishes do still linger in Swedish cooking. These include at least three, perhaps four or five, of Russian origin:
Biff a la Lindström
“Although the name Lindström sounds Swedish, the inclusion of beets and capers makes it likely that the dish originates in Russia. A common story is that the dish was invented by Henrik Lindström (1831–1910), who was born and raised in Saint Petersburg. He supposedly visited Hotel Witt in Kalmar on May 4, 1862, where he wanted to treat his friends to a meal he used to eat in Russia. He ordered the ingredients needed from the kitchen, and the guests were instructed by Lindström on how to make the patties. The patties were then brought back to the kitchen, where they were fried, and then served. The dish was promptly added to the hotel’s menu. The dish remains on the hotel’s menu.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biff_%C3%A0_la_Lindstr%C3%B6m)
Wallenbergare
Tore Wretman, who was something like Sweden’s Escoffier of the 20th century, in his memoirs — sorry, I don’t have them at hand — makes a strong case that these are basically a Swedified take on Pozharsky cutlets, only replacing the butter with heavy cream.
There are also Korv stroganoff, Kåldolmar (from Ottoman cuisine, but equifinal with Ukrainian golubtsi) and, obviously, Swedish panncakes, but let’s leave these for another time.
Aha. Makes sense that I know it only from industrial stock, then — it’s basically natural glutamate.
Still, I’m not a fan. If you make chicken stock from scratch, the umami tends to feel very “natural” and balanced, but if you replace it with industrial stock, I find that the lovage takes on a very oppressive quality where basically the whole dish starts tasting of it.