I will be in Polska on Dec 17-30 (itinerary: three days Krakow; pass through Oswiecim, Katowice, Wroclaw; the rest in Warsaw). Will be happy to meet up with Poland based readers. szopen? Polish Perspective?
I will need to get myself this powerful Jew talisman.
It is ironic how I planned to do the Habsburg Reunion, but that fell through due to lodging/scheduling issues. So I am instead going to Poland in my second foreign trip this year because some HBD people are getting together there. Should be interesting to compare it to Romania and my travels in Russia: https://akarlin.com/travel/
There won’t be much posting up until the New Year in connection with the above, though I have some additional travel posts lined up to fill in the next two weeks.
Minor announcement. This will be the last Open Thread of this format. Tracking and compiling these links is, unexpectedly, more work than it’s worth… very boring… doesn’t even fulfill an effective reference function… and largely replicates what you can find on my Twitter anyway. So I will be doing away with these links roundups in favor of original posts. The Open Threads will remain but will be much more limited henceforth, featuring my photos and a few comments on topical issues that I can’t be bothered blogging about separately.
Reminder that you can also sign up to my newsletter, and donations are always appreciated: https://akarlin.com/donations/
@ak
More notable posts since the last Open Thread in case you missed any of them.
Stunning win for Conservatives in the UK. FTR, I have always maintained that Brexit will happen, e.g. see here in October 19. Good to be vindicated.
My opinion on Russia’s Olympics ban. Sole interesting observation: If US also boycotts China in 2022, then we might see the Great Bifurcation extending to the sports world.
I have finished Paul Robinson’s book on Russian Conservatism, couple of particularly interesting highlights here, here. Will do a review in January.
Featured
- Gregoire Canlorbe: A conversation with Heiner Rindermann, for Man and the Economy
- @PyotrNemets thread with excerpts from Vitaly “Afrika” Fedorov’s account of the Donbass War
- Gary Saul Morson: Leninthink
- Steve Sailer: Random 2018 PISA Findings
- *sad pikachu face* Nature: Russia’s stance on human genome editing. Rules out Rebrikov’s ambitions?
- Meanwhile some interesting news coming from George Church
Russia
- Paul Robinson: No Such Thing as Russophobia
- *Blue Check* Jeff Seldin: NEW signs #Russia’s relentless info ops targeting US troops are paying off-almost half (46%) of armed services households now say they see #Moscow as an ally
- Insomniac Resurrected: Egor Zhukov’s Attorney says he Will Donate Money Collected for Egor’s Defense to The Ukrainian Armed Forces
- Bryan MacDonald: Why are there so many snowflakes on the Western media Russia beat?
- Ben Aris: What will Belarus gain from the proposed merger with Russia? & Putin, Lukashenko fail to secure ‘integration’ deal amid anti-Russia protests in Belarus
- AK thread on why women more prevalent in Russian nationalism than in the US Alt Right
- Moscow would have come 5th in PISA 2018 if it had been a country (PISA-equivalent IQ = 104.8).
- This is in response to Thulean Friend’s claims…
World
- SCMP: Xi Jinping: The United States and some other Western countries have increased their interference in the internal affairs of China and Russia, threatened the sovereign security of the two countries, and impeded their economic and social development…
- Artyom Lukin: Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the Russian government’s official newspaper, praises “vocational centers” in China’s Xinjiang for helping bring stability and prosperity to the previously troubled region. “Xinjiang is experiencing the best time in its history.”
- Insomniac Resurrected: Ukrainian Neonazis Help out at Hong Kong Riots
- WaPo: The Arctic may have crossed key threshold, emitting billions of tons of carbon into the air, in a long-dreaded climate feedback
- *31 steps* 3,000 Taiwanese Chip Engineers Flee To Mainland For “Made in China 2025”
Coffee Salon
- Inquisitive Bird: Waist-to-hip ratios of Playboy models and Miss pageant winners.
- Steve Sailer: Little-mentioned finding of latest international PISA exam of the school achievement of 15-year-olds: U.S. white students outscored Japan and South Korea.
- Robin Hanson: Unending Winter Is Coming
- Guillaume Durocher: Try, and Then Try Again: Lessons from the Career of Charles de Gaulle
- gwern has updated his magisterial survey of the replication crisis
- Sceptre Mag: Of Swines and Squirrels
- *soft power* Simon Kuestenmacher: Which countries dominate the world’s dinner tables? Whose cuisine is being exported into the world?
- AK: 31% of @futurepundit’s (mostly US?) followers think US will be #1 economy by 2050, vs 18% of my (mostly Russian, as I asked in Russian) respondents. (USA already distant #2 in PPP GDP to China). Otherwise, similar opinions; plurality of both samples concur with USA = #2 estimate.
Culture War
- Tucker Carlson: ‘For All His Faults’ Putin Doesn’t Hate America as Much as Chuck Todd Does
- Zach Goldberg: The American Panel Survey had panelists a rate a list of different obscenities in terms of how offended they’d be in witnessing them. Below is a graph comparing the responses of white libs, blacks, and white conservatives.
- British expat Craig Ashton’s hilarious jokes on learning the Russian language exploded Runet a few months ago. Must read for Russian speakers.
- Eric Striker: The Skeletons in Katie McHugh’s Closet
- AK: So remember Roman Yushkov, the Perm professor who was prosecuted – and found not guilty by a based jury – of Holocaust denial? He is now suing the Russian state for SIX MILLION rubles for the moral suffering inflicted upon him.
Powerful Takes
- Letter to Nature: Supremacy is for racists — use ‘quantum advantage’
This is the current Open Thread, where anything goes – within reason.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Noticed some unsettling moments of Ukrainian Westernization and occupation by globohomo recently in fields closer to home for me, which is solidifying my originally soft pro Russian stance very fast.
I used to enjoy Ukrainian rapper “Yarmak”, who did a sort of folksy play on rap, being a village hopnik and all that. He had a great song “Pidarasiya” about hating gays and beating the shit out of them.
Now? He has a song dedicated to some Afro Ukrainian sportsball player and his struggles featuring him getting a pretty quasi Nordic looking Slav gf and beating all the raycis people. Not too long after, he posted a translation of some nogs making one of their unoriginal “reaction videos” in booting response and approval.
On a plus side he released a song in Ukrainian language song about faith, which is very based… Until I scrolled down to find an unironic libtard message in a comment from him about something something all faiths equal and all that bullshit. I also now chronologically notice a lot of these things that can contextually be considered based are timed perfectly with some geopolitical relevance of their topic which further shows he sold out.
Whereas Ukraine used to be the most respectable of the East Slavic countries what with the great homophobia, racism and other such stuff I predict it will become the worst of the three “Rus” countries within two decades. Very disappointing. I hope this doesn’t mean I have to cuck to Yegor Pogrom tier Russian Nationalists once Putin croaks.
Lol people are either very polite (which would be cool), or just somehow beautifully non-observant when commentators are changing names.
It includes a ban against Russia as presenting a proposal as host of the Olympics of 2032.
So there is a large financial saving, as in the news sites in recent months, they were saying that Moscow, Saint Peterburg or even Vladivostok, were going to propose themselves as host of those Olympics. The cost of preparing nomination proposal for a city to enter the competition to be Olympic host can be $100 million. Obviously, this involve a lot of opportunities for people to take various cuts.
Oh great. Feed the “Russians are coming” hysteria why doncha.
The history of Olympic bans is interesting. Germany was banned in 1920 Antwerp/1924 Paris/1948 London. Was that nationalism, or anti-nationalism?
In particular, I think it is telling that South Africa and Rhodesia were banned from participating, but now Africans represent European countries.
Like in most things, Ukraine is too poor to “succeed” there.
Liberal virtue-signalling, only develops real demand (as opposed to fake window decoration from the US state department) when you have bourgeois standards of living.
Outside some young hipsters that work for startups in Kiev, Ukraine’s economy won’t produce enough bourgeoisie to demand for any liberal virtue-signalling.
Actually if you watch any videos of bourgeois things like “Women’s March” in Kiev, there are far larger counter-protests of nationalists and religious activists.
–
And for London style of “Refugees welcome” – I think you need GDP per capita of $40,000 (aside from not having “luck” to attract welfare “refugees” without it).
https://i.imgur.com/eHAt6V1.mp4
Just a few feminists to march – probably with the US embassy – on International Women’s Day in Kiev so they can pretend they are in Europe -, and they need this kind of police operation to arrest counter-protesters (I guess some nationalists came, not those peaceful traditionalists).
I take it this trendline is supposed show that exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics now have a higher market price, demonstrating a coincidence with the 1920s right before the big crash of the Great Depression.
If so, it is an interesting theory – perhaps correct. But something makes me want to throw out the whole Playboy dataset, after they have had one or two trannies. Maybe, they’ve been removed as datapoints, but it still violates my purity instincts.
You’re underestimating the power of TV, and other media of indoctrination way too much. A decade of little Pavlos and Danylos being told fucking nogs and other men before cutting off your cock is the way to go will have fast, noticeable effects. Yarmak who I brought up as example had very little in the way of audience change, mostly the same lower/middle class central Ukrainians. But the comments he has on YouTube change to mirror the things he sings.
Anatoly, when do you think that India’s economy is going to surpass the US’s economy in PPP and nominal terms?
I mean, this should happen eventually since India has more than three times the US’s total population and thus even if India’s GDP per capita full potential was only about half that of the US, India should still eventually overtake the US since 3+ > 2.
https://i.imgur.com/6kk5XhS.jpg
Actually, India has more like four times the population of the USA.
I see a vagabond traveling through Europe on board overcrowded trains.
Count me in the imperceptive camp. (PP never commented that much anyway, and a long time ago.) What is his new moniker?
There’s some similarity in style and outlook between him and Thulean, which I’ve remarked on idly, but am sure they’re different people.
I wonder if Dmitry had the same thing in mind.
Based Japan:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/12/12/national/crime-legal/kawasaki-first-japan-bill-punishing-hate-speech/
I hope so. It would make me an Indian-Swedish-Polish mutt. I would only add a Chinese part then I am set!
DB treated her shabbily for exposing their poor service.
He is a jew, he knows precisely (((who))) controls TV and how is really does massive social engineering.
Kiev will be non white majority by 2050, this is inevitable, there will be a mass migration of Africans and mass miscegenation, those dumb people wanted this with that stupid Maidan cuckery.
From a British children’s encylopedia on the Irish. The 1950s.
https://i.imgur.com/PBfLqiV.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/PItGX2l.jpg
My favourite part:
The progenitor of the Irish writer has thus been found.
Is PP a vegetarian?
Why would an African go to Ukraine when France, Germany and Sweden are right next to it
https://twitter.com/calvertjournal/status/1205563308138487808
Two reasons.
1) The Ukrainian cargo cult that wishes to emulate their American masters in all things, they already had gay pride parades under heavy military protection, they will worship blacks as gods no different to how they do it in America. Miscegenation propaganda has probably started, state media, and other mass media outlets will no doubt be pushing this ever harder. They will actively push to import Africans, no different to the rest of the EU.
2) Blacks go where white people are, the increasing browning of Western Europe will mean more of them will seek better places in Eastern Europe.
Sinotriumph
https://twitter.com/EmptyMake/status/1206486124404674560?s=20
Yugoslavia then consisting of Serbia and Montenegro was also banned.
Leonid Brezhnev & Nikita Khrushchev apparently both spoke pointedly on some Unz Review themes, according to the diaries of the famous USA foreign policy figure, George Kennan (1904-2005).
Despite fathering the ‘containment of Russia’ theme for US government in the late 1940s, Kennan was a major advocate of détente, in part because of a strong sense of the distinctiveness of euro-white culture, whether communist or not, and of the need to preserve that culture, which led Kennan to be a strong anti-immigrationist.
Kennan saw developing world peoples as prone to view gibs-granting whites as “stupid, uncertain, weak, and obviously on the skids of history”, ripe for demographic conquest. The below is from
https://www.amren.com/features/2014/06/the-george-kennan-diaries/
Being a client state is not free.
https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/bfm1808.jpg
An example of how things can kind of even out:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/12/14/czech-russian-relations-and-the-roa-conflicting-historical-narratives/
In Soviet times, recognition of the ROA’s role in liberating Prague wasn’t permitted in Czechoslovakia.
Very politically incorrect by today’s standards, but it sounds like an honest and accurate assessment of the situation to me.
Neutral has a very active imagination.
Ukraine and Belarus are the most European places on Earth and will stay that way. He wishes his personal misery onto others.
Non-white immigrants go where the money is best and that’s still Western Europe by a wide margin. Non-white immigrants aren’t going to go to Eastern Europe when the rate of emigration from most of those countries is much higher than the rate of immigration.
The original statement was about Kiev, i.e. the city of the Ukraine where “the money is best”.
The Ukraine may stay “white”, but that may not apply to its capital in the future.
You are just suffering from pathological denial. You have an explosion of sub Saharans, you have dumb cuck Ukranians and you have ultra hard left US and EU regimes that want endless non white immigration. Yet for some unexplained reason Ukraine is immune from this, is there some magic dirt in Ukraine I am not aware you idiot.
George Kennan was no friend of Russia’s.
‘X’ Marks The Spot: Vladimir Putin As Explained By George Kennan
https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2014/03/07/ukraine-russia-thomas-j-whalen
Neither was Margaret Thatcher.
Neither was Charles de Gaulle
And Ukraine has much better prospects in this regard. If nothing changes-Ukraine has a strong protection against migration
https://i.redd.it/s0s4vn5cb1441.png
First cultural observation – all the Uber drivers here are Ukrainians.
I couldn’t agree more. That’s a wonderfully detailed map of European Russia. Thank you so much for posting it. It will come in handy for later reference. Would you happen to have one for the entire Russian Federation ? Thank you in advance melanf.
http://www.us.boell.org/en/2019/10/04/ukrainians-poland-jobs-no-security
Just as pathological as the denial of the risk posed by a leprechaun invasion.
Review AK’s previous post:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EL2-tckXUAI9zCT?format=jpg&name=small
Clearly you are not aware. But this was just a very funny thing you wrote:
Blacks go where white people are, the increasing browning of Western Europe will mean more of them will seek better places in Eastern Europe.
That’s right. It’s why blacks stopped going to London or New York, right? LOL.
My friend’s realtor in Warsaw is a Ukrainian. There are even Ukrainian cops in Poland nowadays.
Broadly speaking the wealthier the country, the more accepting of left wing agendas such as mass immigration and race mixing. This is true even on a regional level, for example the wealthier the Eastern European country the more accepting of leftist agendas, likewise Portugal is less accepting of it than Spain and the only real difference between those countries is wealth.
\
Young Ukrainian women protesting against feminism on TV (what is shown within Dmitry’s video) in favor of Orthodox Christian family values is somehow going to increase the appetite of little Ukrainian boys to undergo circumcision? Please tell more prey tell?…
I agree Ukraine’s current views are indeed very likely close to those of Russia or Belarus, but note that that particular map is “fake news.” (The one I posted is genuine).
Comparing nonexistent fantasy creatures to real world things happening right now, makes sense.
only 2016
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_subjects_of_Russia_by_Human_Development_Index#/media/File:Federal_subjects_of_Russia_by_HDI_(2016).svg
Prices
15 zlotys for 30 gb of mobile data…. Is that remarkably good, or typical these days?
140 zlotys for a 2.5 hour train to Kraków. Cheaper than UK, more expensive than Russia, though quality remains to be seen.
Big Mac is 30% more expensive in Poland in Russia (135 vs 175 rubles equivalent), even bigger ratio for the meal (185 rubles vs 285 rubles). I was expecting them to be similar. (Big Mac is alwaya what I strive to look at first since its the keystone comparator product).
Ukraine getting flooded with Africans “right now” or ever is as realistic as it being overrun by Leprechauns.
IIRC you had claimed in 2014 that Ukraine would soon be flooded by Muslims and Africans. LOL.
Now your outlandish predictions are placed 30 years in the future. So you are capable of some learning, at least.
Kharkiv is right next tot he Russian border but he came to Poland. This supports what I had been saying for awhile – Ukrainians have changed from Russia to Poland as their go-to place to make money abroad. And the East has it the worst economically so nowadays Easterners are highly represented.
Belarusian Dude:
I’m a “troll” because I’m requesting that you explain yourself? How dumb is that?
I was sent that this morning by multiple people, my view on it as follows:
‘There’s certainly an element of accuracy in that assessment. The people on the West coast have an almost identical genetic identity to the 5000 year old bog bodies we dig up. And they do tend to be a bit darker of skin, hair, and eyes than the rest of the country. (Though obviously not even Mediterranean dark since it is Ireland we’re talking about).
Really it goes back to the arrivals of the different groups that settled Ireland according to our ancient chronicles. The most important of which being the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha de Danann, and the Milesians. The degree to which it is myth or history is contentious, but the arrivals identified in the Book of Invasions correspond suspiciously with the infusion of new genes into Ireland as identified from sequencing ancient corpses.
We know roughly that the Tuatha, which are described as being descended from old pagan gods, were noted as being taller, fairer, and wiser than the others. The Milesians on the other hand are more closely related to Spanish Celts in Galicia and were the later arrivals, settling the South and West coasts. The Fir Bolg and other smaller groups are harder to identify as they have been diffused and assimilated over many millennia.’
Demographics wise, whiter than Moscow obviously, though would be comparable if you equate Ukrainians with Tajiks and Kyrgyz.
The stories are true, tons of subcons now. I’m an indophile so OK with that but AquariusAnon would be triggered living here.
My assessment is that there are more Negroes than in Moscow, Moscow being the most Negrified Russian city. Though tiny in both absolute and relative terms nonetheless, ofc. For now
Spent just an hour in center, so assessment is preliminary. Infrastructure is functional, comparable to Moscow, though ofc on much smaller scale, it being a smaller city. I would guess QoL in Moscow and Warszawa is comparable. My expectation (backed by stats) is that top tier Russian and Polish cities are comparable, but gulf appears amongst smaller cities and towns.
Ukraine is a hell-hole. Truly one of the most cursed nations. Nuke it.
Germany was banned from those Olympic games in the 1920s because the British and French were trying to punish them for supposedly starting the First World War.
This is one of many examples of the Orwellian nature of Franco-British elites. As an American, in a sense of pure self-interest, I could care less who started World War One: We, the Americans, had nothing to gain from involvement in that war. One of my ancestral relatives, a farmhand, died in France in 1918, and for what? But the Allies had their own agendas.
By World War Two, they had wised up a bit. They waged a comprehensive total war against the Germans; hideous fire-bombing of harmless large cities, like Darmstadt and Dresden, were combined with small bombings of innocuous rural villages (for example: the tiny but historic Bavarian town of Ellingen was bombed by the USAAF despite having absolutely no military importance whatever) specifically to terrorize the German people and kill as many of them as possible. In the aftermath, the occupation governments simply did what the Allies had tried to do after World War 1: create a nation of self-loathing Germans. But the Allies were smarter this time; they did allow the new German state the outlet of sports. So Germany was never banned from any athletic competitions.
None of is this conditional on a defense of the Nazi German leadership, of course. One does not have to defend Hitler to realize that the goal of the Allies – particularly the British – was to kill as many Germans as possible, destroy as much of their (pre-Nazi!) culture as possible (they even burned much the works of Richard Strauss, although apparently by accident), and permanently reduce the heart and soul of the German nation.
There is simply no better way to interpret the co-existence of massive anti-civilian bombing with a sophisticated post-war “re-education” effort. The goal was not just to defeat Nazi Germany, but to subjugate Germany, period. This sort of thing is not unique; human history is obviously full of wars of conquest. What makes World War Two unique is the massive scale and sophistication combined with the “Christian crusade” pretense, an example of which would be how the British and Americans often sought to deceive their pilots and their populations that bombing refugees was necessary to end the war. Absurd! As Orwell said, such deceit is necessary to convince “highly civilized men” to fire-bomb whole cities.
This is all important for us to learn, though, because it is very similar to the globalist plan for our western countries. They have simply relied less on the heavy steel bludgeon of war and more on the captivating trap of profitable materialism.
Gosh, there’s just nothing more insufferable and bitterly sardonic than when members of the English establishment lecture others on success in “human terms.” Except for the possible desire to deceive nominally Christian subjects, and soothe their own consciences, I cannot comprehend why the English elites traditionally insisted on cloaking selfishness and power with high-falutin’ moral indignation. Sadly, they passed this on to their American relatives, so that debacles like the Waco massacre of 1993 are given the shiny pretense of “protecting children” or similar nonsense.
Take the Irish famine, for one of a hundred or two examples.
I am really not much of a radical on that subject. I think much of the death toll was, if not “accidental,” certainly not “intentional” either. I’m not a proponent of the traditional Irish nationalist position – most passionately espoused by John Mitchel – but, still, even a cursory reading of English newspapers from the 1840s and ’50s will reveal their outright happiness at the emptying of Ireland (Now it’s free for the magic balm of CAPITAL! Thank God!), and their total lack of concern for gigantic and appalling human suffering.
I’m Irish, I don’t notice any big regional variations between Irish people, for example my father is from the west coast, Kerry to be exact, he and all my Kerry cousins have blonde hair and blue eyes, very few people in that region look anything other than Northern European
The views of Keenan and de Gaulle had evolved into something less confrontatinal.
Thatcher said some loony things in the 1990s about former Yugo.
Prague has Polish tour guides and cab drivers.
White people who even entertain the idea that rap “music” is something of artistic merit are not at all “based” in my opinion. Enjoying and emulating Negro rap “music” is the first step on the road to glorifying Negroes.
For some reason rap “music” seems to be extremely popular in Eastern Europe, significantly more so than it is with Western whites I would say. Black ghetto thug “culture” seems to appeal to a lot of Slavic men, they seem to see black ghetto thugs as the pinnacle of masculinity and toughness.
On why Russia should appeal the hokey WADA decision:
https://tass.com/sport/1100149
Other non-Russians have expressed similarly. WADA and World Athletics are heavily influenced by Anglo-Americans and other NATO member countries, who come across as pious, blowhard chauvinists. Not everyone is like them.
So basically only Anglos do things by the book and expect adherence to standards and a sense of “fair play”? Russians and everyone else are inherently dishonest and corrupt and see things like adherence to rules and “fair play” as a weakness not a virtue?
Jonathan Taylor, a lead WADA hack said that Russia shouldn’t drag out the appeal process which could allow Russia to compete as Russia at the next Summer Olympics.
He said that Russia would then be excluded in 2024.
The pious bleep doesn’t consider that his faulty advocacy might get overruled. For Russia, it’d be best to have such a lengthy appeal process. As time goes by, it stands to reason that there will be a growing momentum in Russia’s favor.
I agree with your statement. What I disagree with is the people who believe that the Individuals mentioned above, deep deep down in their hearts had nothing but love and goodwill towards Mother Russia. If the Russians simply caste away their bias and ignorance they would see it too. Judge these characters not by what they say but rather by how they have behaved towards Russia. Classic example of this is the sale of the Mistral-class amphibious assault ships from France to Russia alot sizzle no steak. I was always amazed that anybody in the Kremlin would trust Nicolas Sarkozy. But trust him they did !! Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
I would like to remind you Alexander III once said that Russia has just two allies, the armed forces and the navy.
Motifs are never possible to ascertain. That is true for individuals and nations. How would we know? By asking? Or looking at results and assuming that they were intended? Or, the latest fad in the West, simply assigning motifs based on who you are? (That’s actually a rediscovered ancient tribal custom.) None of it works, motivations are a mystery better left to the divine.
Dzingischan, Attila, Ceasar, Charlemagne and similar historical mass murderers were proud of their motivations. But that is rare these days. “Cloaking selfishness and power with high-falutin’ moral indignation” is the norm, maybe it has something to do with the ever-metastizing Christian ideas, or possibly with enlightenment. Or women.
Anglos bombed Germany into a fire-ball because they could. I am sure many among them also enjoyed it. As many Anglos in the 19th century enjoyed ‘emptying of Ireland‘ and today would enjoy ‘emptying of the vast Eurasian space‘, while simultaneously crying about how much they ‘respect’ or ‘admire’ the people or culture there. They do it because they can, and because it is good for them materially. They get very angry when realities on the ground keep them from doing it – that’s when ‘moral indignation‘ really kicks into high gear. We live through one of those times.
Because you clearly didn’t read my post, I never questioned the ability of some paid for thots to go out on a march I discussed the power of television and other media influencing people. Besides, when Dumenka talks about tolerating gays and has talks with globohomo papists to own the moskals epic style your already off-topic point is even more nonsensical.
Hopniks beat the shit out of niggers and faggots, people unironically writing “Europa” with their sabaton music and die wacht am rhein (10 hour bass boosted epic version!!) cuck and spend their days playing HoI4 instead of actually protecting their country.
It is because of high quality comments like these why I mainly like the Open Threads the most on this site. Thanks.
As am I. I’m not saying there is a radical difference, or that there is a strict boundary in terms of appearance – obviously all groups have mixed greatly over the many thousands of years we’ve been on this island.
However, I certainly do notice than some regions of the country seem to produce stockier and more sallow people as a greater portion of the population than other regions. And yes they do still look Northern European – but compare differences even among Northern Europeans; Danes are shorter and more tanned than Norwegians. In fact our own historical accounts of the Vikings referred to the Danes as ‘dark foreigners’ and the Swedes/Norwegians as the ‘pale foreigners.’
If the rulebook allows trannies to compete, and leads to endlessly expanding cases of our Africans vs. yours, then I think it is natural to have contempt for it.
Even if you take those things away, the Olympics are essentially mutant games. It is not practice that is being rewarded or even raw psychological talent, but often non-standard body dimensions.
In this light, the idea of modifying people to be better athletes might actually be considered to be a noble endeavor. It might be seen to actually advance something – technology. If one was a transhumanist, it would be natural to cheer it.
I don’t really even consider myself one, but I can see the positive aspects of it. Hacking the body might lead to cures for diseases. And it might be absolutely necessary, if we are to colonize space.
Kennan saw the Russian state as a geopolitical rival but there is no evidence he harbored any disdain towards the Russian people.
I think you misunderstood the original article on Kennan’s diaries on Amren. It contrasted his and many Russian contemporaries’ racialist views with Thatcher’s univeralism. Whereas we were often taught the FSU was an “evil empire”, it was led by a man who at that time had a clear racial understanding (or perhaps more cynically, pretended to have it in a desperate ploy to gain some leeway).
Whatever one’s views on Brezhnev, he was at least willing to pay lip service to the idea of European solidarity whereas even the mere thought of it made Thatcher storm out of the room. And this was 1979, not 2019. It shows you how deep the rot was, even back then.
Fuck, I am becoming Beckow 🙁
You’re possibly correct, that I did misread you. I probably inferred that you were addressing the bulk of Dmitry’s comment (how silly of me?). Anyway, to make sure that I don’t possibly misinterpret another one of your comments (or ideas), please explain to me in greater detail what you mean when you state:
Firstly, I don’t know who “Dumenka” is and secondly I don’t have a clue as to what you mean when you go on about some sort of conspiracy theory involving “globohomo papists” and the “epic style of moskals”, but it does sound interesting, nevertheless. 🙂
https://i.imgur.com/esZDPzE.jpg
One of these guys is a murderer(Oscar Pistorius), but putting that fact aside, you can already see this being advanced in the paralympics. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got to a place where people with “disabilities” were running faster than normal people because technology advanced so quickly.
This is perhaps even more tantalising in mental sports like chess where neurological technologies have huge scope for improvements, past even human peak levels.
I was at the Nobel lectures the other week, and this year’s physics winners were basically ruling out human space colonisation completely. To get to the closest planet with similar conditions like ours would take several millions of years according to them and as such it would mostly be a waste of time. Then there’s the more philosophical view that if Nicklas Boström is correct about his artificial reality hypothesis, then it would make sense to invest into life-like VR and just explore the universe that way because what we see around us isn’t “real” anyway.
I liked PP. I wish he would come back, but I will quibble with him on two points:
1.) he once used the word “Eurocentric.” A truly awful word. His use of it was non-political. And, perhaps, it has a certain value in the context he was using it, but I really hate the word.
2.) I think he gave too much credence to political “scientists.” Perhaps, this is just my American bias, but most political “scientists” in the US seem like worthless, partisan hacks.
Anatoly,
I’m glad you’re in Poland!
Poland is riding high right now:
Nobel Prize in Literature (Tokarczuk)
Poland won the Junior Eurovision song contest two years
in a row. Viki Gabor, this year’s winner, is only 12, and already has incredible
control over her voice. What I find amazing is that most of those Polish
contestants speak English with no accent. Mass emigration to Britain is paying
off although many Polonians also have tons of relatives in the U.S.
Poland has outperformed just about everybody in Europe on the 2018
PISA exams, incl Germany, France, U.K., and fellow Visegrad members.
Counting only cities over 1 million Poland placed No.1 in the world.
Welcome to Poland!
Putting aside the idea of societal decay – if we take as our standard the level of human capital that existed at the beginning of the space race – I think it would be possible and worthwhile to colonize Mars.
Of course, this would be a very difficult endeavor, and it is entirely dependent on one completely untested factor: whether Martian gravity is sufficient for healthful human development. It might not be. Of course, there might be ways around it – gene mod or else centripetal trains to add the necessary component of gravity, only for pregnant women and people under 18 or so. But, I think if either of those things are necessary, it becomes more pie in the sky.
There is also the possibility of building space habitats that spin to 1 G, but I consider that much more difficult.
Some might find my vision of Mars depressing. No terraforming, just underground spaces – though some would be quite large, and there would be a public-spirited focus on gardens, parks, art, and recreation. Conservatively, I think several hundred million people could live on Mars. And they would be high IQ, so this might change what is possible for humans, regarding extra-solar colonization.
Even if generation ships are impossible, there’s still an old idea – spread the genes, by sending embryos and robots to look after them.
I suppose with the ’48 games, they were really the ’44 games delayed. So, I guess the ban of German/Japan might have a certain logic.
But, it becomes kind of bizarre, if you consider that German forced labor was used to help build the facilities, and that Germany and Japan were brought to their knees and occupied. And also, that the Olympics are ostensibly about promoting peace and good relations between nations.
I am not really a fan of these political machinations, including boycotts. Though, IMO, the biggest insult is when the athletes are allowed to compete without the flag. I have to also say that I don’t like how countries march separately at the opening, and then mixed at the close. Today, when so many masks have dropped, it seems like a globalist ritual about symbolically dissolving nations.
But wait, there’s a twist!
https://nypost.com/2019/12/15/german-railway-claims-greta-thunberg-lied-about-taking-first-class/
Gravity is a big issue, everything I have seen about this is that humans are long term very inadaptable to changes in gravity. Mars is too small and doesn’t have enough mass.
The other problems with Mars are, obviously, the lack of an atmosphere, and the lack of a magnetosphere which, besides being necessary to keep any atmosphere it had, is also necessary to protect the planet from deadly solar and space radiation.
Mars lacks a magnetosphere because it’s core is not molten, it’s too cooled off.
All 3 of these problems could be fixed by the same method. Start flinging asteroids (including ice asteroids) into Mars. Besides increasing it’s mass until it is closer to earth’s mass, the multitude of thermo-nuclear like asteroid impacts would basically make the whole planet molten. It will have earth like gravity, earth like magnetosphere and an earth like atmosphere. Then all we have to do is wait for the surface to cool down to habitable levels, maybe a few thousand or hundred of thousands of years.
But the best time to plant a tree was 15 years ago, and the 2nd best time is today.
In the mean time we get a pretty cool new star. And we get to fling asteroids at Mars.
“Nodwink’s” idea of a hellhole:
Not diverse enough?
Wait until you see her car 😉
To be fair to her, DB is only partially correct here. She was booked in first class and was seated, but only after Göttingen. Before Göttingen, she was indeed on the floor, something DB tried to obfuscate by shifting the blame.
HOW DARE YOU, DB?
https://i.imgur.com/ZfFwFnB.jpg
Which regions of Ireland do their descendants live?
Interesting stuff, I concur with Thulean friend that one comes across neat info in the open thread comments.
Alternatively, store them on earth in a safe containment. Norwegians are already seeding many plants in Svalbard. There’s a cool mini-documentary about it here:
As Lars has already indicated, it probably is not, though I would never rule out human ingenuity to fix what may seem to be an insurmountable problem. I think Mars is more likely to be a big mining colony with plenty of space to do crazy and fun experiments, like gigantic hyperloop race-tracks and cool stuff like that.
For the record, I don’t buy the theory that planet Earth is “unique”. Even a very cursory look at amount of planets in the universe would disabuse anyone of that illusion. The question is how long the distances are to the nearest one and the technology we have, and that’s the depressing part, hence these Nobel winners’ skepticism. OTOH, one should not be blinded by medals and awards. Even very smart people can be wrong – and frequently are.
Yuri Milner, one of the earliest investors in Facebook, has backed a fascinating project aiming to tackle this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
I personally think we’d need to travel through black holes to make any serious interstellar travel feasible, so substantially faster than even Milner’s initiative.
Terraforming Mars OTOH so it sustains Earth life outdoors might not take longer than few 100,000s years which is a blip of time (sustainable colonies could be placed there much sooner of course, easily within our lifetimes).
This point I most definitely agree with.
I think you and many others misunderstand why Thatcher behaved as she did. Here is a hint.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-22089460/margaret-thatcher-racist-australian-minister-bob-carr
https://cloudinary.cagle.com/image/upload/w_600/cartoons/111033.png
As I mentioned above in another comment, there’s no distinct boundaries, and you’ll find all types everywhere. The Tuatha are thought to have arrived, probably from the Eastern Pontic Steppe (we wuz Aryans), around 4000 or so years ago at the start of the Bronze Age. They fought bloody wars to subdue the older possibly north-Iberian and neolithic near-Eastern descended peoples and settled all over the country as a new class of local rulers. They probably account for a majority of the modern Irish genetic identity, and are diffuse across the country but obviously weaker along West and Southern coasts. Probably strongest on the East Coast and the non-Anglo North of the country. Of course there’s also other groups to consider like the later Norman and Viking infusions.
Their name Tuatha De Danann roughly translates into God-Clan and they are attributed supernatural powers, immortality, and supremacy in mythology. The Tuatha largely make up the ancient Gaelic polytheistic pantheon.
On a sidenote, I’m convinced the names of Irish High Kings in our semi-mythic history inspired Tolkien’s Elvish and Numenorean names: Ethriel, Erimon, Muinemon, Eber Finn, Giallchad, Dui Finn, Cimbaeth, Adamir, Caelbad.
Thanks.
The wiki page for Tuatha De Danann reminded me of Tolkien.
When I speak of sufficient gravity, I am really talking about human anatomy and physiology. And, of course, plant biology.
When it comes to orbit, we know micro gravity is not enough for humans. At a bare minimum there is muscle and bone loss – if you extrapolate the trend lines, this would be fatal. Perhaps there are ways to address these problems – I think bone loss is approachable – but then you get to the problem of plumbing.
Potentially, Martian gravity would be enough to solve these problems, or make them solvable with slight tweaks – drugs or gene editing. But is it enough for normal cellular communication and development? For sperm to fertilize egg, for stem cells to differentiate and organize properly into different tissues and organs? For healthy babies to be born? For normal adolescence? For normal development of the brain?
A magnetosphere is actually unnecessary, unless you are terraforming, or want to walk the surface. A few inches of dirt are sufficient to block harmful radiation. An atmosphere is likewise unnecessary, as you can pressurize underground spaces, with a certain a mount of gravity, a leak isn’t catastrophic. Food would be grown underground, in my view.
I know giving up the sky doesn’t sound pleasant, but I think of cathedral-like spaces, art museums, botanical gardens, zoos. Bicycle paths that are kilometers long. Skating rinks and indoor ski slopes – though I don’t know if these would work. Best of all, I think of hundreds of millions of Europeans free from the menace of rubber dinghies.
So that’s where the Tuatha’an – the Traveling People – came from.
Ironic how Robert Jordan made them gypsy like pacifists instead.
Speaking of diversity, there really are a lot of subcons in Poland. Or in Warsaw and Kraków, at any rate.
I notice even the small grocery shops stock things like Jalfrezi Chicken in the ready meals section.
According to tradition, modern-day Irish are Milesians – descendants of the sons of Miles, who was a king in Spain (though not a Spanish king.) There is some tradition about where different landings were made, and even a related tradition of which families are descended from which sons of Miles. And I believe there are pedigrees connecting to them, off the top of my head, I will say back around about 1000 BC (and before).
The Milesians defeated the Tuatha Dé Danann. IIRC, there are three poetic names of Ireland which come from three queens of the Tuatha, who when meeting the Milesians, each promised that they would have good luck, if they named the land after them. But the Tuatha, magical beings, were supposedly banished underground to become fairies, living under old hill forts.
There are lots of stories about the Tuatha, after they were banished underground. One of these, who is still associated with a hill today, Aillen the Burner, would lull the men of Tara to sleep with his music before burning the palace to the ground, every Samhain before he was defeated by Finn McCool, who managed to stay awake by breathing-in the fumes of poison on his spear-tip.
The whole mythic cycle of invasion is interesting on some levels, but I dislike the biblical parallels. If you ask me, it shows too much influence of Christianity: the Irish were supposedly in Egypt at one point, and these pedigrees eventually hit biblical figures. This is probably also true to a lesser extent of Ireland’s other surviving myths – the actual pagan gods seem close to erased.
Thanks for the observation. I haven’t been to Poland since the mid 2000s and didn’t notice them then.
Are there as many subcons (plus Vietnamese and Filipinos) in Warsaw and Krakow as there are Caucasians + Central Asians in Moscow?
I was recently in Moscow for a few days. I didn’t stay on Tverskaya like I always do but at a different flat owned by my in-laws, on Taganskaya (which is the edge of central Moscow not the very center). Much more Central Asians there than I recall seeing in the more central neighborhood, like 4 of the 5 people working at Dodo Pizza next to the metro station, our “doorman” and his wife, several families we see around.
Has there been some sort of recent influx since spring 2018 when I was last there, or is it just a neighborhood effect?
Sorry but that sounds retarded
Yes, though probably not as large as this article makes it out to be
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/07/23/russias-migrant-numbers-surge-to-highest-levels-in-a-decade-study-says-a66535
When did young women in Russia become pagan (or theosophist) vegetarian animal welfarists? I think it was 2012 and it happened almost overnight. Are such attitudes a reflection of economic security (they continue to exist despite 2014) or income/wealth? Will it happen in China. They appear to be correlated with delayed marriage. Some threshold of urgency (no longer urgent) being reached. Is it better birth control?
It doesn’t seem to have happened to the Poles as much. Christianity is stronger there?
The Milesians are the most recent arrivals if I recall correctly, but genealogically their impact was not as great as the earlier mass migrations.
The lords of Munster specifically used the Milesian connection to claim refuge in Spain under Philip II, arguing that they were basically Spaniards. However this right was not afforded as extensively to the less Iberia-connected Leinster and Ulster families, most of which went to Catholic Austria instead.
I agree on the biblical connections, that was the addition of later monks, particularly after the Norman arrivals who felt a need to connect Irish beliefs and culture with the continent. Our Christianity was as much Pagan as Christian and wanted to civilise it. However the semi-mythic invasion cycle comes from oral and ogham tradition thousands of years old.
The children of Don (light) and the children of Llyr (darkness) are featured in the surviving elements of the Mabinogion, a Welsh cycle of legends about ancient gods, downgraded to heroes by the Christian lawyer who recorded it. Writing it down at all was too problematic for the monks. Chunks turn up in Saint’s lives but the hero has usually been replaced by a (mostly) Christian Arthur.
Light/Darkness is a rather elemental story. The migration of the Milesians is likely to have been attached to this rather than reflect the various sides of an invasion. – Pity, good story.
Shakespeare’s King Lear uses elements from the children of Llyr not all of which survive in other versions. MacBeth is about the last but two kings of Strathclyde (Welsh speaking Scotland). It also mixes up history and myth.
Atlantic Celts are now considered to have arisen along the Atlantic trade routes, particularly in Port-u-gal (the port of the Gauls). The language would originally have been a trading Creole. Nevertheless, the highest %age of R1b genes is found in Wales, especially rural Wales so Celtic formed after the R1b group arrived (and they may have arrived by ship along the Mediterranean not overland by chariot – Sea People’s and all that aiming to seize Pretanic (to soothe Irish sensibilities) copper and tin. There is a view that Eiru meant copper and Pretan meant tin, at least in Phonecian if not earlier.
So the Milesians are likely to have been the R1b carriers.
Polish Perspective had a number of good takes on that if you search his comments history for Indians in Poland. It’s overwhelmingly happened in the past decade.
Nowhere close. Caucasians/Central Asians = 10-15% of Moscow’s (real) population, while my casual one hour’s worth of observation suggests subcons/etc. constitute 1-2% of Warsaw’s. (I will have more accurate takes when I spend more time in Warsaw, I’ll be there on Dec 24/25-30). As I pointed out above, the function of Central Asian Gastarbeiters in Poland is performed by Ukrainians. I can well imagine that they constitute a similar share of Warsaw’s population, though this is of course just a guess – after all, it’s not like they stand out.
The general pattern, as I see it, is that the flux waxes and wanes in tandem with the economy. Lots of Gastarbeiters left after the 2014 oil crash. Now they are beginning to come back, as the Russian economy becomes more competitive in terms of salaries. They will then retreat again in the next recession. And so on and on, until China becomes rich and open to start sucking them in from c.2030-40, at which point I believe this issue will more or less vanish for Russia.
I agree with your timeline Anatoly but not your source populations. The Chinese are far more racialist than the Russians. The Burmese, Lao, Khmer, Vietnamese, Pinoys, North Koreans, Nepalese, Mongolians and Chinese Diaspora will all come before the Central Asian Muslims are allowed in, if ever !!
Heck I expect to see Buryats walking the streets of Beijing before I see Bukharans.
How many Poles are of Ukrainian descent / have the characteristic -uk, -ukov, -ko surnames?
Any rough estimates? It has caught my attention recently, due to more frequent contacts with Poles and Polish companies.
2/10 wnb
So while Moscow with its 15 million people is the world’s largest and only mostly (over 85%) European-populated Megalopolis, Warsaw, Kiev and St. Petersburg are the world’s largest over 95% European-populated cities.
Ukrainians do that too, but they also perform skilled work. As I mentioned, my friend who owns high-end property in Warsaw has a Ukrainian realtor who manages/finds tenants. There are also Ukrainian engineers, nurses, etc. – my friend even heard of Ukrainian cops. But you would be more likely to come across the Uber drivers and the construction workers on the streets.
This is stupid.
2050 is only 31 years away.
The Ukrainian economy would need to improve at a rate of 4% per capita per year over the next three decades simply to reach the same GDP PPP per capita as Russia and Poland have right now.
To reach the same level as Western Europe today it will need to grow at a blistering 6% per capita for three decades.
Russia is of course outside the Western orbit (though hardly based and redpilled), but Warsaw certainly isn’t majority non-white. And most Western European capital cities aren’t even majority non-white yet. As far as I know it’s only London and Paris.
What exactly are you trying to demonstrate with this chart?
The ending -enko is typically Ukrainian but -ko is not necessarily so. The surname -ukov is not typical Ukrainian. Ukrainians sometimes Russified their -uk endings by adding the Russian -ov.
This list indicates such endings are uncommon in Poland:
https://www.polishancestors.com/untitled
Maybe the people whose names you see are actually Ukrainians in Poland rather than natives?
Ukraine will probably have a cuh-rayzee growth spurt for a year or two when the war ends as the economy reassembles
You’re projecting too much of the postwar settlement onto the wartime allied bombing campaign. And actually it should be noted that the “re-education” effort didn’t go into overdrive until the 68ers arrived on the scene. De-nazification was handed over to the Germans themselves in 1946 and over by 1950. The early federal republic was a conservative society in which many officials from the Third Reich served in high government positions.
As for the bombing campaign specifically, the British quickly discovered that they sustained unsustainable attrition in daylight raids. This prompted a shift to night time bombing, which with the technology of the time precluded accurate bombing. Based on studies of British civilian morale during the Blitz, the British concluded that the most devastating impact to civilian morale came from destroying people’s homes. This led to “dehousing” being adopted by the British cabinet in 1942.
The USAAF for its part maintained a focus on daylight raids on strategic industries. The 500 pound bombs dropped by American bombers had been specifically designed to destroy mechanical factory power transmission systems (the geniuses in the air corps failed to notice the electrification of industry). This began inauspiciously with the failed effort to knock out ball bearing production but ended triumphantly with the successful destruction of Germany’s oil industry.
Late war bombing of peripheral areas was simply due to the Law of the Hammer and was probably also done to intimidate the USSR.
Nah, Russia needs it – it needs to stop being Ukropland and become core Russia again, then be settled by surplus Siberians. Economic growth +100
Poking around wiki, I see that Rome is actually only about 5% non-European. Though I wonder if these are merely official figures.
So among large cities with metro areas over 3 million that have overwhelmingly, 95% or more, European populations (including non-Muslim and non-gypsy) you’ve got in order of population: St. Petersburg, Rome, Kiev, Warsaw.
Prague and Minsk almost make it, each has a metro area population of 2.6 million.
There are still a bunch of large cities in the world that are like Moscow – about 85% European-populated.
Women project their maternal instincts elsewhere when they are secure and do not have children.
Mammals are cute.
I think his point is that the uptick of Japanese holdings of Treasuries is something that was apparently demanded by Washington. He should clarify.
Why should we focus on other planets?
https://twitter.com/mr_scientism/status/1126966828461379584
As they say, it’s difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future. But it seems likely that the Ukraine will enjoy an above average growth rate for the next three decades.
But 4% per capita, let alone 6%?
I’m not so sure.
There haven’t been any East Asia style growth stories in Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Have a look at the star pupil, the Czech Republic:
http://mecometer.com/image/linechart-country-historic/czech-republic/gdp-growth-rate.png
The Ukraine has the “advantage” that it’s much poorer relative to Western Europe today than the Czech Republic was in 1990, but also many disadvantages that I don’t need to point out.
4% over the next three decades is probably the upper end of what’s realistic.
In other words the country is going to be relatively poor for a very long time, and thus it’s not likely to attract many immigrants of any race regardless of how globohomozogged its government allegedly is.
I hate to endorse the claim that the Ukraine is comparable to an African state, but in money terms it’s not so different from several African states. A quick look at the tables shows that presently GDP PPP per capita is near the level of Namibia. No doubt actual living standards in the Ukraine are much better for many reasons, but then footloose Namibians don’t face a binary choice between going to the Ukraine or staying home.
I think (hope) the growth spur will be crazy, since it’s coming from a very low base, like African countries which have 10%+ growth due to economies rapidly leaping forward due to very low starting points
Maybe the EU or Russia finally fully take over and dump some cash to renovate the place, Poland/Crimea style
Ukraine has a lot of potential, a lot
I mean it’s currently below Kosovo (if you count it as a state) and Moldova, it simply can’t stay that way
Poland?
https://jakubmarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/poland-gdp-constant-2010.png
Way of the Dragon (1972) had Bruce Lee as a restauranteur in Rome.
This past year, I saw an Indian tourist commercial that I thought was pretty offensive. It centered around an Indian bookseller in Rome, magically enchanting two European kids to go to India as tourists to see the wildlife. Not to settle some ancient city that was central to their civilization, and become a bridgehead for infinite invasion.
Of course, both those things are fiction. But I doubt the numbers.
Russians are refreshingly not politically correct.
I’ve seen this post recently, both phrases were accompanied by pictures.
Thunberg: “My generations will decide…”
Response: “Your generation can’t even decide whether they are boys or girls”.
Response from another blogger to this comment: “Usually oligophrens are kindly, but there is so much malice on her face”.
It’s not below Moldova.
In 2018 Ukraine’s per capita GDP PPP was $9,283 and Moldova’s was $7,305. It’s a big difference.
In terms of nominal GDP per capita Moldova was at $3,218 and Ukraine at $2,963. This was because of the currency collapse. Russia also had a currency collapse and its nominal GDP per capita is lower than that of Argentina and Romania, and only slightly better than half that of Greece (in PPP terms Russia easily surpasses Argentina, surpasses Romania and is about even with Greece).
However 2019 was a good year for Ukraine and its currency has strengthened, so on that measure it should surpass Moldova.
Due to strengthening of hryvnia, average monthly wage in Ukraine was $456 per month in October 2019:
https://tradingeconomics.com/ukraine/wages
In July 2019 (latest figure) it was $430 in Moldova:
https://tradingeconomics.com/moldova/wages
:::::::::::::::::::::
In comparison it is $534 in Belarus in October 2019:
https://tradingeconomics.com/belarus/wages
And $729 in Russia:
https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/wages
And $1290 in Poland:
https://tradingeconomics.com/poland/wages
You can see why Ukrainians go to Poland rather than to Russia for work nowadays.
I recommend a technical book by the Polish economist Marcin Piatkowski,
called “Europe’s Growth Champion – Poland.” It also delves into the economic
history of Poland, starting in the Middle Ages. Poland has not had a recession
in almost 30 years, not even in 2008.
My favorite single Irish story is the Táin Bó Cúailnge. Particularly, the tragic version, where Cú Chulainn dies, at the end. The image of him tied to the standing stone, with the raven perched above him is the greatest national iconography of which I can think.
There is something timeless about the fight for cattle. A bit over 500 years ago, one crafty fellow, who I believe was one of my ancestors made such a raid. Being pursued, he turned on his pursuers and killed about 20 of them. I imagine it wasn’t him alone, but also his sons and retainers. Of course, I connect to him in rather a zig zag way, and there are countless such references in the annals of Ireland.
I’m not convinced the Chinese are really all that racialist, they don’t like the Uyghurs but that’s more because they mostly want their own state and resent being ruled by China, not really because they are Central Asians or even because they are Muslim.
In fact, the Chinese are actively trying to encourage race mixing to dilute Uyghur identity which doesn’t sound like the mentality of a particularly racialist people to me. The Chinese attitude to race doesn’t seem fundamentally much different to the Russian attitude in my opinion, as long as their non-Chinese minorities are loyal to the state and speak Mandarin I don’t think they care that much about race.
From what I watch, Ukraine television channels are usually more “racist, sexist, vulgar”, less objective (generally stupid as well), compared to television in Russia, let alone to North Western Europe (where television can even be “high IQ”).
Ukraine’s media is matching the demand of the audience, which at a proletarian yellow press.
And since 2014, it seems like Ukraine’s politics is moving further from a “high IQ Western European country”, rather than becoming more Western.
But probably what will happen, is (hopefully) Ukraine’s economy will develop, its politics will stabilize, and the people will become more moderate and balanced. In terms of internal politics, if Ukraine’s economy develops and they have some decades of political stability – people achieve a moderate politics as in Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, etc (but with a 20 year development delay).
This is my optimistic projection. (We can easily predict Ukraine’s politics will not become like Sweden anytime soon, any more than will their standard of living).
Artists, musicians, creative professionals, usually have their “idealistic” views, but does that mean you match their politics when you are older? I remember when I was 15 years old, I already knew most celebrities are simplistic, or – emotional rather than analytical people.
It’s a common misconception to claim that Poland and Russia have
the same GDP(PPP) per capita. As of 2019, the figure for Poland
at $33,891 is about 14.3% higher than $29,642 – Russia’s GDP
per capita. In fact, partly due to Russia’s sluggish economy and
relatively low oil prices, Central Europe (i.e., Visegrad 4 plus the
Baltics) has been pulling away from Russia economically in recent
years.
“More than three times” is perfectly compatible with “four times”.
Do you think London is majority non-white people?
I think London is majority non-white people in any poor areas of London which have a lot of public housing.
It’s majority not anglosaxon definitely. But think it is still majority white (North European), if you include all the Dutch, Scandinavians, Russians, Polish, Germans, Romanians, French, etc, living in London.
Also remember around half of people you see in streets in London, are foreign tourists.
With the tourists, I think it’s above 60% European people in central London.
In Napoli, for example – there is an area (near where we stayed) with African/Arabs immigrants. But the rest of this city is almost all Italian people (besides that Chinese people who own the small shops).
What happens is the foreign immigrants go to the part of the country where the economy is more “booming”. I guess somewhere like Milan or Turin.
Immigrants can choose any city they want at first (they have no prior commitment to a location, unlike local people), so as a trend all go very quickly as a herd to the part of the country where there are more jobs, welfare spending and money.
It is a funny effect of having a completely open borders policy – immigrants run away vast large mass, when the economic situation declines. Because there is such an open borders regime, Immigrants come, but they also leave, as they can move in and out of Russia, without more than the cost of a plane ticket.
Whereas Western Europe’s relation to Africa/Middle East, there are more obstacles to immigrants (even deadly journeys in the boat) – so they would be stupid to voluntarily leave after they managed to get inside, and the difference of standard of living is more significant for them as well.
Two questions regarding Russia; probably had been raised here before:
1)Was Rasputin a victim of anglo/anti-semite warmongers ??!!
The most important fact is the anglos wanted the Tzar Nick2 to keep fighting on their side in WW1 regardless how horrendous the casualties and damage done to Russia. Rasputin wanted peace but failed to persuade Nick2 and was hated by the anglo warring party. His murder was facilitated by the limey secret service. He was shot by the anglo secret agent Oswald Rayner and the russian homo prince Yusupov(who hosted Rasputin’s Last Supper and was educated b4 WW1 in england.) Yusupov died peacefully in Paree at the ripe old age of 80 in 1967, 50 yrs after the russian commie revolution.
https://youtu.be/bZObqTuk_Hs
Rasputin was very sympathetic to the persecuted russian jewry
http://www.jewishmag.com/160mag/grigory_rasputin/grigory_rasputin.htm
According to Rasputin’s daughter Maria, Yusupov made homosexual advances to Rasputin his father
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Rasputin
2)How gay was Tchaikovsky?
I read he once attempted suicide because he couldn’t handle the mental trauma. And he was onced married trying to cover it up.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/08/sorry-russia-tchaikovsky-was-definitely-gay/311805/
…
But did he get regular queer partners or just his life style experimentation? My impression if he was a ‘top’, he probably did not get the longer lasting addictive prostate stimuli(Yes, I call it the ‘Lawrence of Arabia syndrome’ )
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/sep/18/tchaikovsky-not-gay-russian-minister.
Seems he did mention in his diary he would shut people’s mouth by getting married
You stupid, niggling pedant
https://dailystormer.name/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/akshually-jew-kike-geek-618×618.png
I hope you are dragged behind a truck, beaten with bats, and shot
Same here. To live on Mars would be an eternal fight against your own biology to a much greater extent than on Earth in far harsher climate. That’s why I am amused by people saying they would live on Mars. Going there for short visits or using it as a mining colony, sure. Actually living there? Our species evolved on planet Earth for a reason. In fact, unless there is an attraction on Mars which would be physically impossible to do on Earth and insanely cool, I would have no interest in visiting Mars (though I would want to go out in outer space when costs fall sufficiently to the level of an airline ticket).
It would be more efficient to upload our conscousness to a machine instead and skip the half-hearted gene-editing step. Our bodies are just repositories of our minds anyway. We still do not understand the brain very well. Let’s say we could copy our consciousness, would we be able to have two bodies (one physical and one machine) at once? And if so, would it cause any complications (such as shizophrenia)?
These pictures don’t do the scenes justice, since taking low-light photography is notoriously difficult (especially with cheap mobile cameras) but the city truly does shine in dusk and darkness.
https://i.imgur.com/oZDqbCs.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/uGKigTB.jpg
Two julbord done, one to go. And speaking of jul:
http://www.nordicestonia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/9ONcd3Y.jpg
I don’t know if, with sufficient technology, life on Mars would be worse than life on Earth in harsh environments is for people without technology such as those in the Sahara or Arctic. A large semi- underground colony with enormous windows overlooking spectacular landscapes, roof hundreds of feet high, and packed with amenities would actually be a lot more comfortable than the way Bedouin or Inuit traditionally live. It would not be good for me, but good enough for many people.
In the long term it would be a good idea for humans to colonize Mars and to terraform it. Colonizing other solar systems is for science fiction, but transforming Mars would actually be doable.
There is a lot of stupid TV in Russia though; they had a Russian version of 16 and pregnant recently. Although the people they showed were mostly from places in eastern Ukraine like Donetsk.
Also a lot of shouting at each other to the point of making points hard to understand, even on political shows with seemingly civilized guests.
Even if that were to happen, it is fair to ask what would make us stop from destroying yet another planet like we are destroying Earth. Will we keep going from host to host as we destroy planets in our wake? Sounds like humanity fits the classic definition of a virus if that were the case.
It is the same reason why I am not terribly concerned about AI wiping out humanity. What we’re essentially saying is that we fear AI being as cruel as we were to those before us. Alternatively, that one group of humans will use a narrower AI against another group, but that would not be an AI problem. It is a problem with violent impulses of our own species. So much of this technological angst really misses the point that most of these problems revolve around human behaviour.
E. Michael Jones take on Greta Thunberg on Tim Kelly’s podcast is the funniest thing on the internet all year.
https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/tkelly6785757/episodes/2019-11-12T05_44_02-08_00
He takes 17 min and 36 seconds to get around to Greta Thunberg and that can be skipped if you are in a hurry.
This is the most stern language that I have heard of coming from Russia, reported by Sputnik today. The U.S. would be collosally stupid to ignore this sudden and significant change in tone!
below:
“In our opinion, there are currently no prerequisites for a large-scale war. At the same time, the situation in the world remains unstable, and its development is becoming more and more dynamic. Unprecedented political, economic and information pressure is exerted on states trying to pursue an independent policy, including Russia,” he said as quoted by the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper.
“We must be prepared for any scenario of the development of the situation. Therefore, the defence potential of Russia will now and in the future be maintained at a level required to repel any-scale aggression against our state from any environment,” Gerasimov said.”
https://sputniknews.com/russia/201912181077602072-nato-drill-scenarios-point-to-preparation-for-large-scale-conflict—russian-general-staff/
Are we “destroying” Earth? We are changing it, making some parts more livable and others less so. We are harming some species and helping others. And we are very much as part of the Earth.
Even if something we do happens to be harmful or a mistake, given that since we are the only part of our planet that is conscious of the planet and capable of making decisions concerning it and capable of changing it (our planet’s brain, so to speak) it is very weird to refer to ourselves as a virus. If someone chooses to do something harmful like smoke or drink excessively too regularly, one wouldn’t think of his brain as some sort of harmful virus in the body, with the implication that it should be removed or shut down in order to help the body.
Mars has no life and no intrinsic meaning to it other than what we give it. How can we possible “destroy” it if we change it so that it becomes capable of sustaining human life?
Why does that make it less concerning?
Since AI is not conscious but merely mimics consciousness an AI replacement/destruction of humanity would be the end of planetary consciousness – as far as we know the only such thing in the universe – and a regression to a dumb, unreflective, world (albeit one that would involve processes not seen in the pre-human world, though no one would be around to appreciate that, or indeed anything else). This would be tragic.
What is your evidence for this?
They both seem pretty accepting, if you ask me. Portugal has a mixed PM and Vox, Spain’s “far right” party, promotes Latin American immigration.
Indeed. Vlasov and Vlasovites are now suddenly back in the breaking news.
What happened?
Small Czech village near Prague decided to build memorial honoring soldiers of Vlasov army. When Russian media protested, mayor declared war against Russia and threatened to hang Russian foreign minister.
https://twitter.com/AmbRusCz/status/1204744026903199746
https://twitter.com/A_Gasparyan/status/1204732527300300802
https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/pavel-novotny-starosta-reporyje-rusko-reporteri-sergej-lavrov-zive-vysilani.A191216_125326_domaci_chtl
(use google translate)
Any comments?
AK is not fan of Vlasov, to put it mildly, but Czechs have his sympathy.
General Vlasov, Soviet Patriot
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/soviet-vlasov/
Is Czechia the World’s Best Country?
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/czechia-best-country/
WNs have a long history of overpredicting catastrophe. I once read that George Lincoln Rockwell was predicting economic collapse by 1970, for instance. Whites have been demographically pummeled since 1970, but the economy only went from strength to strength.
That said, I don’t believe Ukraine to be nearly as immune to negrification as you assert. Africans would prefer to go to western Europe, of course, but that’s not always available to them, so they’ll take whatever they can get. Some of them would presumably attempt to use Ukraine as a foot in the door, hoping to move farther west later on (not an unrealistic hope), and some portion of those will find it to their liking and stay put. Slow as it is, drip by drip, the bath tub still fills up.
What, as in British levels? I have to doubt it. Where I live, I can go three blocks and see nothing but subcons, and I bet in Britain’s it’s worse still.
Motives. Motifs are not at all impossible to ascertain.
What types of subcons?
Poles may not hate them because of common experience in UK but everyone knows Muslim are fucked.
https://youtu.be/ae7Pvno2DD8
And also if anybody in the world thinks that the kid is any kind of a voice of people here is a youtube of her mom from 2009 when she was in the eurovision tv show:
What we fear is AI being cruel to us to any degree. Twenty years from now, if AI’s got me cooped up in solitary, I’m not going to comfort myself with the thought that at least this isn’t as cruel as humans at their worst.
Cannabis better than tea coffee
https://twitter.com/JungNihang/status/1206777543921152000?s=20
Fake news. The athmosphere of Venus is a thousand times more hospitable and accessible to man than Mars.
The facts that we’re talking about colonizing Mars instead of Venus means the whole ‘colonization’ thing is a charade to dupe dumb plebs into spending time on bullshit, the elites obviously have no plan to colonize anything whatsoever.
Mathematically yes, but in colloquial language, “3+ times” means something like “3-3.75 times.” If it were, say, 3.8 times or more (there is no exact boundary, but it’s roughly there), you would say that it was “almost 4 times” larger, unless you really didn’t know that it not only exceeded 3, but nearly reached 4. (Or, in the case of India’s population relative to the USA, actually exceeded 4, which is definitely over the point where “3+ times” is still used.)
You can leave it without a reaction, or you can say a thank you there, but insisting you were correct just elicited this response from me, an autist.
China commissioned its first fully domestically built aircraft carrier. It’s slightly larger than the Liaoning, the Kuznetsov-class first Chinese carrier. The Chinese are expected to build two more carriers, each successive one better and more developed than the previous. The next one (Type 002) will feature a CATOBAR system (probably already an electromagnetic one), while the one after that (Type 003) will probably already be nuclear propelled.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1173837.shtml
I don’t understand why they are speculating that China “might have” “5 or 6” carriers in the future. It’s pretty obvious that eventually they will try to match or exceed the US Navy.
Your mind is pretty difficult to extract from your body. For example, being a coward means that the hormones rushing to your blood and brain change your consciousness in a way to compel you to do something else than you’d do in the absence of those hormones. Courage is, when either those hormones are not strong enough, or countermanded by some other hormones (like testosterone), or when your fear of something else (social death, death of a child, etc.) strengthens your resolve. Hormones also change your brain structure (for example by lifting weights, thus increasing testosterone levels in your blood, you’ll permanently alter your brain structure, so even if your testosterone levels fall back, you will still be more courageous, both physically and socially), how can you simulate such a thing? There are many other things, for example your positive and negative carnal experience (hunger, pain, cold, heat, orgasm, sweating, etc.) strongly influencing your behavior. The negative experience might affect you in a positive way, like overcoming pain or hunger can strengthen your resolve the next time.
The “uploaded” versions of our minds will therefore be fundamentally different from our bodily selves, and thus they won’t be us in any meaningful sense of the word.
It’s a pretty simplistic and incorrect description to say that our bodies are mere “repositories of our minds.”
You poor fool, using reason to battle mental faggotry.
Humans behave like any other living organisms. I resent the fact that cool animals (like the blue whale or the rhino) are disappearing, but let’s face it: invasive species have never shown the slightest concern for the local species they displaced or drove to extinction. It’s just life. Even if, of course, it’s far from inevitable that the blue whale should go extinct: we can probably prevent it.
As to “destroying” Mars, it’s unclear what you mean by that. There’s nothing to be destroyed there, it’s just a piece of rock.
What began as a nearly imperceptible shift after the re-election in May has now slowly progressed into a hurricane.
https://i.imgur.com/PfbvEE8.jpg
I hope Amit Shah does not back down. CAB+NRC is of essential importance.
I am not a white nationalist.
Technically speaking, this might be true, but often we can still prove intentions with a very high probability. We know that Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews as late as October 1941, because his policy was still facilitating their emigration from Europe. Certainly, if you want to kill someone, you are not going to compel him to move somewhere where you cannot kill him.
Regarding the Irish, the British government did provide some relief to the starving people, but the response was slow and inadequate. We also have access to private papers like letters and journals, and there’s simply no evidence of any intent. It’s highly unlikely that there would be no evidence of it if they really had intent. It’s not so easy to simulate.
Just as I’m sure that you really are a Slovak from Western Slovakia: theoretically, you could be a South Korean teenage girl whose hobby is to impersonate Slovak men online, but it’s just unlikely. You might distort some information, but not something like this.
Never said you were. I wasn’t replying to anything you said.
He’s an environmentalist. Even if there was no such thing as pollution or carbon-based warming, I have no doubt I could find an environmentalist who’d claim burning fossil fuels is still somehow “hurting” the planet – like you were cutting the pinky toe off a human or something. FFS, greenies squeal to high heaven and chain themselves to trees, even though trees can easily be replanted. It’s a totally different mindset.
Imagine we were so advanced we had some way to “harness the energy of” supernovae. (Don’t ask me how or what that means, just play along.) And then imagine we developed a way to cause supernovae so that we could harness their energy. Isn’t it a sure bet environmentalists would start bellowing that we’re “destroying the galaxy”?
In Britain it was reported yesterday that unemployment is at the lowest rate for over 40 years, and predictably pro-Brexit supporters and “right wingers” were celebrating this as a “victory” for Brexit.
Yet if that is true, surely doesn’t that mean decades of mass immigration have actually had no adverse affect on the economy? Celebrating that news shows how fickle many on the “right” are, because it might be good news for their new hero Boris, but it actually makes the idea that mass immigration is a bad thing look rather stupid if it’s true.
Any recent figures for how many are in Poland and Russia? (including illegal immigration estimate, if possible)
We must achieve supernova parity, we cannot allow for a solar gap!
Or of Belarusian or Russian origin. Slavic surnames ending in ko aren’t necessarily Ukrainian in origin.
I once corrected a Polish friend on Natalie Wood’s background.
It seems the best musicians are either severely mentally ill or sexual deviants, sometimes both
I’m not a naval strategist but first of all, isn’t the carrier a dead concept in a real war?
It’s basically a platform for bullying distant third world countries, but the owners have to rely on promising nuclear strikes if anyone hits back. Which the larger players can, at least to the point of disabling the ship.
Second, perhaps carriers in peace time simply neutralize each other, in the sense that a Chinese carrier turning up near a US bullying point will make the air sorties and no fly zones and what not a lot harder to implement. But you don’t need a one-for-one fleet to do that.
Elysium was one of the best movies of recent years.
I for one no longer buy into the notion of the Ruling Class being a bunch of bumbling, inept buffoons. I think they have a decent idea of what they are doing, most of the time.
Vlasov did not want to help the Czechs, his subordinates did.
Either it is, or it isn’t. There’s no way to know, because such a war hasn’t been tried for three quarters of a century. Carriers move, and their exact location is hard to find. Even the fastest missiles launched from nearby need maybe ten minutes of flight (and it’s not like their launchers are not in danger at that distance from a carrier), and it’s enough for a moving and maneuvering carrier to change its location enough that the missile cannot find or at least hit it.
The most likely outcome is that the carriers will sustain losses (some of them will be destroyed or incapacitated), but they will keep being dangerous beasts and inflict heavy losses on the opponents. There will also be theaters where their presence will be more threatening than elsewhere, much like how a couple of German battleships were still dangerous for British shipping in the North Sea (close to land-based air power), while battleships played a more subordinate role in the Pacific.
But carriers might be way less obsolete than battleships were in the early 1940s. It’s possible that they will still be the backbone of the strongest fleets in a real big naval war, and that without them any fleet is still half useless and condemned to operations close to the shore.
What’s clear is that they can see way farther than other ships and less reliant on satellites (which may be less reliable in a war than is often believed), and they are obviously nearly as very vulnerable to enemy air power as other ships are.
The lower members of the elite with whom I have contact have certainly not thought much about politics. They have a combination of their hard (very short term) interests (like lower taxes and regulations), some vague idea of an ideology (“racism is bad”) and occasionally a strong sense of ethnic interests (for Jews and similar people) in mind when thinking about politics. Pretty murky, and then they also have a herd instinct, except their reference herd is other millionaires. All this pushes them into some vaguely center-left or center-right positions, depending on certain personal circumstances, inclinations and quirks. They certainly didn’t seem smarter in politics than the upper middle class, which in turn doesn’t seem smarter than the lower rungs of the middle class or the working class.
The Brexit drama seems to encourage emigration.
https://twitter.com/__amadis/status/1206535125103763457
Amusing. Never noticed that connection. He must have lifted the name and little else.
Upon being captured by the Nazis, Vlasov and his overall core supporters didn’t espouse a “Soviet patriot” position.
The Czech politician Novotny and some others are using the ROA to tweak the present Russian government. Were they around today, I don’t believe that Vlasov and his core support would side with the likes of Novotny against the current Russian government, while disagreeing with the Sovok view of Vlasov.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/12/14/czech-russian-relations-and-the-roa-conflicting-historical-narratives/
https://www.eurasiareview.com/16122019-czech-russian-relations-and-the-roa-conflicting-historical-narratives-analysis/
https://orientalreview.org/2019/12/16/czech-russian-relations-and-the-roa-conflicting-historical-narratives/
As noted, the ROCR and the late Solzhenitsyn haven’t been especially hostile towards post-Soviet Russia. The ROCOR and Solzh have also been sympathetic towards the ROA.
As accounted, Vlasov was at first hesitate, only to then agree.
Indeed, the imagery is fantastic. In general a lot of out ancient stories seem to be very vivid and often carry a melancholic theme. Just think of Oisin and Niamh in Tir na nOg, or the Children of Lir.
You probably know this but there’s a large bronze statue of the dying Cu Chulainn with the raven perched on him in the GPO. Oddly enough this pagan iconography was commissioned by De Valera who was a devout Catholic. One of the few things he did right.
https://twitter.com/handle_anonymus/status/846774016069124098
https://twitter.com/handle_anonymus/status/841897452986867713
Tldr Carriers increase the strike distance of a fleet by being able to fly aircraft out 100s of kms from the position of ships.
They are still very relevant and the USA as a war time economy would be v formidable.
As we enter a new cold war and see increased MIC autarky you’ll see carriers around for awhile.
War on the rocks has a couple articles on the utility of drones for resupply & ordanance ops vs F-35
Also on the concept of a Drone carrier or sub deployed to sea.
Basically, if the only job of a ship is to deliver ordnance (missiles) then obviously the air-wing of a carrier could carry many more, and much further.
Yeah they have slightly higher avg competency & time preference so they get ahead a little bit more.
They may also have less members who ‘drop out’ of society due to impulse control issues like jail time or drug use.
Exceptional individuals rising out of these classes have a much deeper net of social capital to draw upon to go somewhere.
Beyond that, yeah they’re just normies and more likely to be ‘convinced’ of the prevailing ideology because the herd is putting them in a frontal top tier position.
There are about 2 million Ukrainians in Poland at any given time (over 5% of Poland’s population); about 200,000 have permanent status, the rest come and go. Not including Donbas refugees estimates of Ukrainians in Russia are in the mid 100,000s recently, a big drop.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/turning-muslims-away-poland-welcomes-ukrainians-11553598000
Turning Muslims Away, Poland Welcomes Ukrainians
WARSAW—Four and a half years ago, Maryna Karalop packed up and moved from Ukraine to Poland. Since then, so did some two million other Ukrainians—the biggest wave of migration into the European Union in recent times.
Poland’s government has resisted EU quotas to take in asylum-seekers from Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea whose arrival has reshaped European politics, fueling populist parties across the continent. At the same time, Warsaw rolled out the welcome mat for Ukrainians who sought a better life after the Russian invasion of 2014 precipitated an economic crisis.
“I see my future here. It’s quiet, it’s comfortable, I like everything,” said Ms. Karalop, 40 years old, who with her husband now runs an employment agency in Warsaw that mostly caters to fellow Ukrainians. Her daughter, who is 14, has learned to speak fluent Polish and is enrolled in a local school.
“The biggest reason we’re here is the future of our child,” Ms. Karalop said. “In Poland, all roads would be opened for her.”
Poland issued more first-time residence permits to non-EU citizens than any other EU nation in 2017, with 86% of them going to Ukrainians, in the latest available European migration statistics. Those Ukrainians accounted for 18.7% of all newcomers to the entire EU.
The influx, which continues unabated, is bringing a demographic transformation with long-term implications for Poland. The country of 38 million had virtually no ethnic minorities since World War II, when its huge Jewish community was largely wiped out by the Nazis and its borders were shifted westward, leaving ethnically mixed eastern regions in Soviet Ukraine and Belarus.
The exodus also poses challenges for Ukraine, where mass emigration has become a campaign issue ahead of March 31 presidential elections. Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister challenging President Petro Poroshenko, named this outflow as the second biggest danger facing Ukraine after the Russian military onslaught.
“How much time do we have to close our eyes to the fact that a million Ukrainians leave the country each year? Three, two, five years? How much creative class do we still have left before we allow them all to leave?” she said at a security conference in Munich in February.
Most other candidates agree on the need to bring Ukrainian workers back home—something that won’t happen until the country’s economy starts to recover.
Poland faces a shortage of labor—and the country’s conservative government has favored Ukrainians because most are Christian, unlike Muslim immigrants from Syria or Afghanistan.
“In Poland, there is a general consensus that we don’t want the kind of postcolonial Western style of immigration,” said Radoslaw Sikorski, a former parliament speaker and foreign minister who backs the more liberal opposition. “People think Christians are all right, and non-Christians are not all right, Christians will assimilate and the non-Christians won’t. It’s that simple.”
Poland’s booming economy needs these workers because millions of working-age Poles—like millions of other Eastern Europeans—have taken advantage of EU freedom-of-movement rules over the past decade to seek better-paying jobs in the U.K., Germany and other Western European nations. The Ukrainians are coming to fill the resulting void, part of tectonic shifts in Europe’s demographic makeup.
“In Poland, you don’t look for work, work looks for you,” said Artem Zozulia, head of the Ukraine Foundation, an organization that helps Ukrainian migrants integrate, in the southwestern city of Wroclaw. “In Ukraine, finding work is a job.”
In Wroclaw, a city of 630,000 that Poland gained from Germany after World War II, some 90,000 Ukrainians arrived in recent years, local officials said, taking jobs that range from Uber drivers and construction workers to software developers.
Ukrainians make up one-tenth of employees in the city’s 200 information-technology companies, said Ewa Kaucz, president of the Wroclaw Agglomeration Development Agency. “Without the Ukrainians, the situation on the labor market in Wroclaw would be dramatically worse,” she said.
Ukrainian officials highlight the contribution that their citizens make to Poland’s growth, one of Europe’s fastest at 5.1% last year. “It is a large-scale phenomenon because the Polish economy now in many respects doesn’t just function, but also develops precisely because of the Ukrainians,” said Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin.
While the shared history of Ukraine and Poland had many dark pages, so far the influx has been remarkably uncontroversial in Poland, with only a few fringe groups protesting.
Polish government officials said there hasn’t been any significant increase in crime due to Ukrainian immigration, and few incidents of hate crimes. According to an opinion poll released this month, 52% of Poles have favorable feelings toward Ukrainian migrants, 36% are neutral and 12% are hostile.
“I don’t have anything against the Ukrainians coming here—we are doing the same, going to other countries,” said Krzysztof Lematowicz, a logistics specialist from the Wroclaw area who was strolling through the city’s medieval main square on a break from his current job in the Netherlands. “In the Netherlands, I can see the difference between the Poles and the Dutch. But here, I can’t even spot who is a Ukrainian until they start talking.”
Many Polish politicians and officials like to highlight common history and the close relationships between the two countries’ cultures, languages and cuisines. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth encompassed much of Ukraine and Belarus until the late 18th century, and the interwar Polish Republic included today’s western Ukraine.
“There is a tradition in Poland of living together with Ukrainians and Belarusians,” said Slawomir Debski, director of the Polish Institute of International Affairs. “The tradition of a mono-ethnic Poland is relatively new, and it has two main contributors—Hitler and Stalin. People in Poland understand instinctively that these cultures can live peacefully together without upheavals.”
Polish lawmaker Tomasz Rzymkowski agreed: “Our cultural differences are very small, and the roots of our nations are intertwined.”
That history also had its share of bloodshed. Uprisings against Polish feudals feature prominently in Ukrainian literature. Ukrainian nationalists assassinated Poland’s interior minister in 1934. The worst came during World War II, when anti-Communist Ukrainian nationalists and Polish resistance fighters fought each other, and massacres abounded.
Former Polish lawmaker Krzysztof Bosak, who is now vice president of the National Movement, a far-right anti-immigrant party, says that legacy is one reason why Ukrainian immigration should be curtailed.
“It is a historical fact that we had a big Ukrainian minority, and even a majority in some regions. But there was no common tradition, and the tensions were very big. This is why we have two separate nations,” Mr. Bosak said.
Though ties between the two governments are generally good today, the different interpretations of this painful past can still poison the relationship. That is especially so as Kiev and Warsaw are promoting historical narratives that whitewash inconvenient facts—and as Russia seeks to drive a wedge between its two neighbors.
“The number of people in Poland with positive feelings about Ukraine has fallen in recent years,” cautioned historian Piotr Tyma, who heads the Union of Ukrainians in Poland, an association that represents the country’s Ukrainian minority. “It can very well turn out that this acceptance of the Ukrainian influx is temporary. If Poland’s economic conjuncture changes, the anti-Ukrainian voices will become louder.”
Slavic surnames ending in -enko are of central or eastern Ukrainian origin. The reason many Russians have this surname is because Ukrainians have been moving to Russia for 250 years. It just means that the particular Russian has some Ukrainian ancestor.
Within Ukraine, there is a split in terms of frequency of the surname ending in -uk vs. -enko.
In the parts of Ukraine that after 1650 remained part of Poland -uk is the most popular surname ending; in the the central and eastern parts that left Poland -enko is the most popular:
-uk vs. -enko:
https://i.imgur.com/cKhJrdN.png
Map of Europe, 1700:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f9/6b/83/f96b83b99d322dc57e3130e6a5d96248.png
I largely agree with it, but I think he might overstate his case. While finding a carrier might be difficult, its approximate location can probably be discovered, after which there are certain methods to target it. (More specifically there are low orbit short-lived satellites, which could be launched quickly on short notice.) I’m not claiming such methods will invariably work, but we cannot dismiss them with any certainty either.
Yes, because a war major war would involve nuclear weapons. Would anyone be concerned about whether some carriers are sunk or not if major cities are destroyed and a big percentage of the population has died?
Decades of immigration have not resulted in a (large) secular increase in unemployment because of Say’s Law–supply creates its own demand.
And where immigrants are not in the workforce (a common complaint among us), the benefits they receive are spent and stimulate aggregate demand.
But this does not eliminate that immigration has an impact on the distribution of income, wealth, and public finances.
Of course ultimately the most important arguments against immigration have nothing to do at all with money.
Yes.
We are the pathogen responsible for the vast majority of environmental degradation and its acceleration. Microplastics is for instance almost entirely due to human pollution and the problem is just increasing. You are giving humanity enormous amounts of slack.
I was responding to your terraforming hypothetical. If we make Earth harder and harder to inhabit and simply escape to Mars without fixing the root causes what makes you think we won’t repeat the same mistakes on Mars and then try to find a new planet, and then a new one, and then a one, and so on. Perhaps virus was the wrong word for such behaviour and parasite would be more fitting.
For now. The fear is about AI is really about AGI.
To be clear, I do not share this selfish fear even if it were to occur. Not even one iota. There’s no moral reason to be concerned about the survival of humanity other than for narrow selfish ones.
Furthermore, given the strong likelihood of the simulation hypothesis being true, even being concerned at all could be spectacularly and comically irrational.
Marin floats idea of a four-day, 24-hour work week
We need more women in politics. Sanna Marin is already delivering fresh thinking. I happen to very satisfied with what I do, so doing it for 70 or even 80 hours is not a major isssue, but I am also privileged in a way that most people are not.
Most people do not enjoy their work and it is drudgery for them. There is no reason to take away their free time unnecessarily. Space and time is happiness in of itself. Anyone who has ever talked to, or befriended, blue-collar workers will know that many of them don’t have energy for anything at the end of the day. They are like automotons.
The main problem is that tax evasion is reaching record highs. People are productive enough, the issue is an increasing share of their wealth is siphoned off to tax havens.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23805
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/09/tackling-global-tax-havens-shaxon.htm
Piketty makes the point that most episodes of global inequality levelling off has been in the wake of wars, revolution and slaughter in general. It’s time for another bloodletting of the oligarchical class.
“…colonization’ thing is a charade to dupe dumb plebs into spending time on bullshit, the elites obviously have no plan to colonize anything whatsoever.” – The part of the project of filling up and clogging the limited mental space with garbage. For some the Odyssey of Kardashians and for other the Colonization of Mars. Kardashians are more real.
I’m a carrier skeptic. Admittedly, they are cool hardware, but so were battleships.
Two battleships were used in Desert Storm. They could fire 16-inch shells at least 20 miles. Drones assisted with targeting. They had tomahawk cruise missiles for more distant targets. They hosted helicopters, as well as other ordinance. The Iraqis fired an anti-ship missile at one, and due to countermeasures, it missed the mark. Some Iraqis even surrendered to one via the drone.
Those were old WW2-era battleships retro-fitted in the early 1980s, and they used WW2-era shells. If you designed one from the ground up today, I’ll bet you could make one far superior. I even think battleships might be inherently superior to carriers. Plenty of power to atomize Somali pirates, and make the seas safe, but without the intoxicating capability to encourage nation-building in darkest Africa.
That said, battleships are a joke because they aren’t the status symbol that carriers are. A lot of nations had battleships. Relatively few ever had carriers, and none ever had so many as the US. They symbolize wealth, and the ability of the US to keep the sea lanes open. Most nuclear powers probably couldn’t manage that as separate entities, and that is a big part of the reason so many countries kowtow to the US.
China wants to be the top of its own hierarchy. Not to mention, the US is becoming a banana-republic, and its future peacekeeping abilities are unclear, so there are rational reasons for wanting carriers, even if they are essentially white elephants when it comes to conflict between real powers.
You are privileging things other than humanity. Pagan, animistic nature worship.
Environmental degradation is bad because we live here. Microplastics, for instance, are endrocrine disruptors. Even if we were able to avoid consuming them directly (which we’re not) we end up exposed owing to bioaccumulation.
If we do not exist, the Earth is irrelevant.
Looks like I was right all along. You should be shot. After all, there’s no moral reason for you to care about your own survival other than narrow selfish ones.
Any country or bloc of countries adopting a 24 hour workweek would see its economic output and thus power decline relative to competitors. To be workable it thus requires global adoption, which is unlikely to say the least.
I’m agnostic on the merits of the proposal. Most people do nothing valuable with their free time, but that’s not to say their work provides much meaning for them either. There’s no reason to be exhausted from a forty hour workweek and said exhaustion is the product of poor sleep, diet, fitness, and excessive commuting which ought to be addressed directly.
And then we return to the typical bizarre Nordic attitude that tax evasion is some sort of massive problem. The OECD countries have government spending between one-third and three-fifths of economic output–a massive amount.
That’s not to say that today’s oligarchical class merits defending, of course.
I believe you’ve criticized Karlin before as a “racist libertarian”. It appears you’re just a racist social democrat who wants a cucked and gay society, just without the mud monsters.
I don’t believe it is possible to transmigrate the consciousness. The absolute best you could do on a theoretical level is create a carbon copy the consciousness. Without getting involved in ethical weeds, there might be good reasons for doing so. For companionship, for continued creative potential.
Still, I think it would be a real technical challenge. I think of the banal subject of video game emulation. General rule is you need new hardware several times as capable as the old, to emulate old stuff. Wouldn’t that be true of the brain as well? Then emulated games are often quite playable, but they are seldom exactly the same.
Beyond that there are certain philosophical questions in play. Let’s say you are emulated on more capable hardware. Maybe, your consciousness wouldn’t want to be limited by the same constraints. Maybe, it wouldn’t want its memory to be a bunch of melting clocks, but rather never to forget anything. Maybe, it would want Isaac Newton-level IQ, or something even higher than humans ever had. Wouldn’t that make it very alien, and not a copy of you?
It is easier to get to Venus. That’s why the Soviets did Venera. You could live on a giant zeppelin in Venus’s atmosphere, fairly protected from space debris and some level of radiation, and close to Earth’s gravity. But what would be the point? Venus’s natural resources are virtually impossible to harvest. It has no water, unlike Mars. Maybe, these things can be fixed, but it is more pie in the sky, and would take a staggeringly enormous amount of energy. And, in principle, it is is better to live on a planet that is hard to get to.
BTW, I’m not actually saying it is possible to colonize Mars now. I think we would need 1960s-level human capital, and all this parasitism (both resource and social parasitism) would need to be ended. So, in a sense, I do think Musk is laughable because he doesn’t acknowledge these problems.
Sure, talking about Mars is a distraction, but who claims to be so ascetic, as to live without distractions? (Being on Unz is a distraction.) Besides which, even in a political sense of basedness, one needs inspiring dreams. Maybe, you don’t think a billion Europeans on Mars is inspiring, but I do.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3018487/does-russia-hold-key-chinas-first-nuclear-powered-aircraft
Not a reliable source but interesting none the less.
https://i.imgur.com/4GPrxeU.jpg
Productivity gains have gone to trivial and frivolous top 1% consumption, not any productive investment or technological gains. Everyone is worse off except those who sell yells or own high-end casinos.
Furthermore, the 24 hour work week would be a baseline. I’d most heavily target it to people who do not have meaningful jobs they enjoy (which admittedly, is most people). Some people enjoy working many hours and these people should be freed, even encouraged, to do so. It is not about forcing everyone to a same level, but liberating those at the lower ends of society from drudgery.
Even the racism is wearing off, though I still have a strong aesthetic preference for the Nordic race. I like seeing myself in others. It’s a primitive instinct but it is one I cannot shake out, sadly.
I am slowly gravitating away from social democracy, which I view as a weak and insufficient attempt at a compromise which ended in historical failure. Though any other alternatives (such as communism) do not necessarily appeal to me either.
Pakistanis are a warrior race moron, those grip strength reports are dumb, bengalis have more grip strength than south africans on those reports. It still doesn’t change the fact that Pakistanis dismantled the British empire, mongols, greeks, and your trash soviet union too in the 1980s. The moron doesn’t understand that south asian isnt a race. Pakistan has more pashtuns than Afghanistan. Same Pashtuns who put 50,000 of your cowardly russian whites in bodybags. 2 of the 3 anglo afghan wars were fought on Pakistani soil. Even your Alexander was killed by Pakistanis of Jhelum. In britain, they are sexually pimping out 100,000 white females a year. The english defense league gets their skulls handed to them even when their numbers are more. Your queen diana was killed for shagging Pakistanis. Soom the Pakistani flag will be planted right above New York City and they will rule your white scum weak pot belly world. Ive seen whites fight,they’re weak cowardly scum which is why even with technology they lose wars against Pakistanis.
😉
Notice to the sick, sadistic loser that has been torturing and terrorizing me with mind polluting chants with DEWs and the monster that illegally implanted sensors, RFIDs, or nicro chips in me while unconscious in a hospital in 2014:
If doing this to people seems like a good idea to you, do the world a favor and make your last act on earth a good one! Commit suicide!
If what you are doing is legal, which it is not, then why are you doing this anonymously and why does every government employee refuse to tell me and admit what is being done to me, as well as hospital staff?
Call me on my land line and leave a voice mail with your name, phone number and business, if what you are doing is legal, there is no reason to deny that you are doing it! You will have to call information because the internet is posting old phone numbers that I no longer use!
Andrea Iravani
Your white women are being pimped by Pakistani men, your queen diana was killed for shagging Pakistanis.
Tommy Robinson started the edl because his sister ran away with a Pakistani.
98% of race riots in britain you lose against Pakistani fist fighters. Just go to YouTube and type in 2 Pakistanis vs 60 EDL members
50,000 soviet whites were buried under afghanistan by the populations of Pashtuns in Pakistan.
The British Empire and Greeks fell on their backs against todays people of Pakistan. Winston Churchill and the homo Alexander ran for their lives against Pakistanis of today
Soon Pakistanis will conquer the United States, plant the Pakistani flag in New York City and make you white people their slaves.
The Greatest warrior race of the world are Pakistanis but they are now organized and will spread like wildfire in all white countries around the world from america to russia and britain and finally stampeding israeli white neanderthals out of Israel too.
Pakistanis are an Indo Aryan race of Israelites and no fake grip strength report is going to change your future of being slaves to Pakistanis.
New York, London, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Berlin are all going to be Pakistani territory soon and then we will have brothels full of your white females like they’re doing in britain already.
Baseless envirofag scaremongering. I greatly enjoyed reading Bjorn Lomborg’s “The Skeptical Environmentalist.” Naturally, envirofags had a fit when it came out and they resorted to their usual character assassination tactics, but Lomborg’s expose of ludicrous envirofag catastrophizing – none of which, needless to say, ever panned out – alerted me to what shameless lying sacks of shit envirofags are. I have passionately loathed them ever since. I pay zero attention to anything they’re bellyaching about. They are the boy who cried wolf on steroids.
I don’t understand how extending one’s consciousness would have implications for companionship. Do you mean that the two parts would communicate autonomously with each other, as seperate parts? I had in mind a continous stream traversing multiple bodies (some biological, some robotic) but still being part of the same whole.
That is true, but consider that Rindermann has shown in his research that people with greater intellect have greater space for moral considerations. It is a problem for right-wingers that liberalism with its emphasis on individual rights won over more brutish competitors. If one believes in natural selection, surely that would also hold for ideas?
Far from only a revolution in intellectual capability as in your example, we might get a moral one to boot. The industrial revolution was made possible by a series of intellectual advances during the enlightenment, with its heavy emphasis on abolition of slavery, emancipation of women, fair labour conditions and universal literacy. This is what I define as human progress.
Human progress has increased concomitant with greater and greater human capital. If we witness another revolution in cognitive ability, as in your example, why would that not spill over into moral and spiritual realms? It already has in the past. Furthermore, given the dysgenic fertility trends which is affecting most countries, it might even be a moral imperative.
That is true, however they will still have nuclear weapons I assume. So some time in the future the challenge would be to remove these weapons from what I can only guess would be a deranged, fanatical, third world sjw state, which means they must be dismantled at all costs.
Yes, the language is harsher than usual, but this message had been repeated by Putin many times, starting with 2007 Munich speech. Basically, if the US elites had even a modicum of reason left, they should have gotten the message long before now. As they appear to be hopelessly insane, this harsh language wouldn’t have any effect, either.
Not at all surprising. You’re all ticking time bombs. It’s an inherent part of the leftard mentality so seize upon any half-baked pretext to cuck, just that some manage it sooner than others. Give it a few more years and I’d say it’s an even money bet you’ll be “experimenting” with black cock anally.
This is not a rebuttal to my point, but a different argument entirely. One that I will engage with, as it has merit, but back to my original point.
I believe it was Lenin who stated that power is mass multiplied by cohesion. In the contest between states, a significant aspect of power is economic output. Both overall, hence why the two most powerful countries are the USA and China, and per capita. Countries with a high income per capita have greater surpluses available to invest in power and gain prestige.
Thus any country which limits its working hours is also choosing to limit its power. It has been observed that the USA for instance is not actually much more productive than the major economies of Western Europe, but per capita GDP is higher owing to Americans working more hours per year.
The distribution of income and wealth within countries is a mostly separate issue. I say mostly since there can be an impact on stability and cohesion.
As to your new point, strictly speaking all most consumption is “frivolous”. The 1% dedicate a greater overall share of their consumption to frivolous trivialities as they’re able to meet their basic needs with a lower share of their income, though not as low as most people might suppose as there’s a requirement to spend a certain amount to maintain an appropriate social status.
Is this a reason to dramatically compress the distribution of income in favor of a more egalitarian one? Not necessarily, though as I said previously I take a dim view of the current oligarchy and can think of other valid reasons to do so.
Lastly, and this is niggling, but obviously there has been productive investment. Looking at the USA today (and most other places) there is more capital per worker than there was in 1972, though not as much as there could be had better policy choices been made.
Drudgery isn’t just experienced by people at the lower end. A lot of 90% centile workers have salaried jobs that they don’t perceive as meaningful. I’m not particularly motivated to increase free time since I don’t see streaming entertainment and social media as all that meaningful either.
More interesting would be providing more avenues of reduced-hours employment for married mothers (to spend more time being mothers and wives) and elderly workers (to stay engaged but on their own terms).
There’s nothing sad about this. Birds of a feather flock together. Living among different kinds is deeply alienating and a daily hell for many in my country.
Indeed, there’s the rub! What would be the point of living on Mars?
Mars has no natural resources either. (Unless you count rocks as a natural resource.)
Maybe Europeans should try colonizing New York before setting their sights on Mars.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oAKG-kbKeIo
You do have the advantage of beef-consumption, but it may not avail you sufficiently against the BASED SIHKS!!!
Black guys are small sizes
If you look at actual medical reports from the national library of medicine and not surveys you will see they are 4.8 to 5.3 inches on average from Tanzania to Nigeria in actual measurments.
Request for subject change –
Open Thread 98: Extra Strength Powerful Comments
Here is a relevant joke.
The average size of the dick of males of Shitville was found to be twice the size of the dick of males in the nearby Dungville. The former dataset was obtained via a survey using questionnaire, whereas the latter by actual measurements.
“Moral consideration” means just that–consideration. It doesn’t mean that the liberal conception of morality is correct, either today or two hundred years ago.
You seem to be suggesting that liberalism won out among the smart fraction in the West in a Darwinistic competition of ideas, but that’s dubious to say the least. One might as well state that Marxism-Leninism did the same in the Soviet Union or that fascism did so in interwar Germany and Italy.
In reality liberalism was established by armed revolution, and those who fought against it and lost were in many cases expropriated, driven into exile, or even killed. Since that time liberalism has been the organizing ideology of many of the world’s most powerful states, which in addition to deliberately exporting the ideology exert a powerful gravitational pull by virtue of superior social status.
As for the four points you identified as human progress, I’d say one of those is regressive (emancipation of women) and another decidedly mixed or even irrelevant (abolition).
Could Pakistan hold off India? Modi seems like he’s getting ready to maul the Pak. It’s easy to laugh at Indians, but their war machine is starting to look pretty impressive. If they stomped Pakistan back when the two sides were more balanced, it’s hard to see how Pakistan could survive the onslaught now that India is so much stronger.
tons of subcons now
These may just be Gypsies who’ve moved from neighbouring Slovakia or Czechia. I encountered a couple of these doing restaurant/hotel grunt work during my first visit to Krakow in 2007. I’ve been to Krakow the last two years in a row, staying in different parts of the city both times, without noticing subcons or any non-whites but I was only there for two nights on each occasion.
In the case of Warsaw there were more visible blacks in 2012 than when I was last there in 2018, though there still are some about. There used to be a fair number of them hanging round the train station and at some of the hotel & Irish-type bars. My guess is they get their foot in the EU door, get some documentation then head off to Britain, Germany or Sweden. In 2018 Warsaw did have however a noticeable number of people who looked like they were from the Caucasus, always in groups of fairly young men – could’ve just been tourists or sports fans over for a match, I suppose.
Indians with 5x more of a population and 15× more in funding should be able to easily handle Pakistan with ease
They didnt win kargil because more indian soldiers died than Pakistanis
They didn’t win the 1965 war either
What was the point of settling America? That too was a costly, uncertain venture. Worked out rather well in the long run, of course.
It has plenty of resources. Not particularly valuable ones, but that’s not the issue.
This thread reminded me of Robert Zubrin’s “The Case for Mars,” written over twenty years ago. In it he laid out a colonization plan that relied solely on existing 1990s technology, which could be implemented right now and promised vast cost savings over alternative approaches. It was a very exciting read and seemed perfectly feasible to me, but I lack anything like the necessary technical knowledge to judge for sure. So I just did a bit of googling around to see why nothing seems to have come of his ideas, and although I read a couple of favorable reviews by people who appear to know what they’re talking about, I more importantly learned he has a new book out, “The Case for Space.” I can’t wait to check it out.
You’re pretty big on space colonization, so you should too Coward. 🙂
Ha, what a joke, pakis are brown third worlders, any trace of Aryan heritage has been severely diminished over centuries of race mixing. As for them being warriors, you somehow must not be aware that they were subjects of the British empire, and before that conquered by Muslims.
Slavery was arguably an immense advancement in human potential as it was only possible through the establishment of an economic ecosystem that took on basically unselected and obviously hostile elements and employed them in a manner such that the benefits(in say, food production) exceeded the costs. Mere acquisition of labor was not previously of such great value, as can be seen by the massacres committed by near-human primates and even stone age populations which execute captives (often horrifically) as a form of community bounding and spiritual uplift.
Human capital may continue to advance but I think it is dubious if that has much to do with the liberal view of it, which if anything, actually promotes significant tensions by increasing overlapping realms of influence, thus increasing the friction in society; insofar as modern problems have modern solutions, it is probable this is where thought policing and essentially technological brainwashing serves to overcome, but one would adequate see this as less of the abolishing of slavery but the version that essentially expands to the entire community, herding their mentally fettered humanity into inoffensive domestic animals.
A kind of fairness, I suppose.
Interesting idea. Guess it would require cybernetic implants, and I wasn’t thinking of that.
Mainly, I was thinking of scenarios such as someone’s elderly spouse died, or someone exploring a distant and dangerous place with limited supplies (but perhaps intelligent machines would obviate the need for this). A lot of identical twins are best friends, so I guess it might work with copies too.
Even if the technical hurdles were too high, and the result was just an insentient simulacrum, it may still have a certain value. Imagine a grandfather AI that would be capable of low-level household tasks, and which might occasionally pester their descendants to get married, or offer banal but useful advice, or recommend books or movies he enjoyed.
I am a general advocate of IQ, believing that the useful aspects of the concept are severely under-utilized. And I do believe smarter people are generally more moral, as a whole.
But I don’t think increasing IQ would mean automatic progress, especially, if we are talking about transhuman levels. It could even potentially cause more problems than it solves. One problem is that IQ is often used to rationalize instincts. Another is that IQ leads to introspection, and there may be such a thing as too much. There are components of the brain that just aren’t measured by IQ, and they may not play nice with high IQ. What would happen if you elevated the mind of some criminal? Would the emulation keep the bad parts for fidelity, while making the whole much smarter and more dangerous?
Pakistanis were always Aryans you’re a neanderthal
Pakistan was Afghanistan in the past
They’re more pashtuns in pakistan than afghanistan
The British never officially conquered the whole western and northern parts of Pakistan
It was under the durrani empire
https://warontherocks.com/2019/12/why-russian-military-expenditure-is-much-higher-than-commonly-understood-as-is-chinas/
It was neither costly nor uncertain. It paid for itself and generated immense profits within one voyage.
No offense, but we can tell, no need to remind us.
‘Space exploration’ is a) technically impossible b) pointless because it could never turn a profit even theoretically c) way too premature, when even places like e.g. Wyoming aren’t even colonized yet. (Not to mention Antarctica, the sea bed, etc.)
“Maybe Europeans should try colonizing New York before setting their sights on Mars.” – Funny and a very good point. There were several colonizations of New York. Henry James when returned to New York from Europe in 1904 was taken aback with what he saw. New York became Jewish:
Using more natural resources than are replaced in the year is not destruction, though it may be unwise if continued until the resources actually run out. Your source is questionable, however.
So if a brain makes decisions (such as to smoke, or to eat bad foods) would you consider it a pathogen upon the body that it harms, with the implied remedy of brain removal or something similar?
That is the essential silliness of your point.
Concepts such as “environmental degradation” are human-created.
Nothing wrong with that until the issue of trashing planets is solved. Every new colonized planet is a win so if messing up the environment inspires exploration and expansion of humanity, well then it is a good thing emerging from a bad one.
Would you consider the brain to be a parasite upon the body? Using up so much energy thinking and stuff? Often making decisions that harm the body?
Perhaps you think that removal of the cortex is the moral thing to do, for the body?
So why have you not removed yourself?
Your proposal is eminently sensible, except, for the fact that we are talking about sovereignty here: a new nation. Not renting a U-Haul and changing your address, or building some new condos.
You want to move to Wyoming and stop paying the diversity tax? I’d advise you not to try it. There’s a treaty about development in Antarctica. Want to build on the seafloor? Well, you better not be within 200 nautical miles of Micronesia. Or, in the case of China’s Nine-Dash Line, closer to 1000 miles.
Find a place outside that, if you can. You will have to deal with the costs of seasteading and the costs of military defense of Nazi Germany because that is what you will be likened to, if you want an ethno-state. Going to Mars probably is cheaper.
What to make of this pact signed by mayors of Budapest, Bratislava, Prague and Warsaw?
Idea I had:
Given the current demographic trends in the US, and the current resistance of both the left and the right to deport the most dangerous of immigrant groups, can immigration restriction still lead to a good equilibrium?
For instance in the UK, even if they halted all immigration, the Pakistani and Bangladeshian comunities still have trouble with assimilation, and their higher fertility rates make it that the UK will still have considerable trouble in the future.
I have been thinking about this issue as of late, and have become convinced that the best way to reverse the demographic issues is use tax and fiscal incentives to halt birthrates. We know that it is difficult to increase birthrates via this type of policy, but surely it will be easy to decrease birthrates using this type of policy. For instance, you could tax Pakistani mothers who attempt to have a child 15-20 more percentage points on their income. Implementation isn’t exact, but I think this is in the right direction. Of course, this could differ depending on the circumstance of the individual discussed, etc.
I actually, paradoxically, it will be easier than deportation as a means of removing unwanted, and socioeconomically unsuccessful groups. They may not be able to have kids, but at least they won’t be viewed in the public as being sent back to their death(which is true for many cases), and it is a more circumstantial policy.
E.X If an immigrant group does bad and has a tax placed on people who attempt to have children, then perhaps in the future if crime and socioeconomic trends improve, the tax could be removed. And, it makes the public accustomed to viewing demographics not as uncontrollable trends, but something that they have influence over.
I dunno, maybe it is all silly, but I feel like it is a more exact science, and less hurtful than wonton deportation.
Another mirpuri drowning in Afghan dick while fucking his first cousin.
Interestingly enough, this map appears to be a good approximation of where the front lines might have ultimately ended up in Ukraine had Yanukovych managed to crush the Maidan in 2013-2014 and western Ukraine would have subsequently decided to rebel by arguing that Yanukovych has lost his legitimacy to rule Ukraine. In such a scenario, Vinnytsia and Zhytomyr might be the equivalents of Sloviansk and Mariupol in real life. In such a scenario, Kiev would likely be on tight lock-down by the pro-Yanukovych forces after the Maidan in this scenario gets crushed.
William Lind on Global Crisis.
https://www.traditionalright.com/the-view-from-olympus-spreading-disorder-and-4gw/
You’re overdose a bit on cynicism – next you will be saying “your family are just carbon, hydrogen and oxygen”, “love is just release of dopamine and serotonin”, “music is just some vibrations of air” etc.
There is not yet an atmosphere and ecosystem there to damage on Mars. But it is already undoubtedly something beautiful – a virgin and desolate world.
Perhaps in some future centuries, some people will fuck it with badly designed terraforming, or military conflict, building nuclear power stations there (not really likely as that is already obsolete on earth, but perhaps something similar will emerge). Not that we will still be alive to see anything so exciting.
There was no chance of that, considering the magnitude of stealing and money laundering Maidan made possible. According to documents and testimony acquired by Giuliani (https://yandex.ru/video/preview?filmId=15205935945776245932&noreask=1&parent-reqid=1576723402623977-1283815857502492924800122-sas1-5652&path=wizard&text=juliani+investigation+corruption)
at least $5 billion of US taxpayer money and more than $7 billion of Ukrainian money was stolen via various schemes by high- and medium-ranking Dems. Turns out that Biden corruption was peanuts in the grand scheme of things. For this kind of money the thieves would shoot down the Moon.
And a century ago, people like you would be saying no differently about travelling to the moon.
Goethe says you do not know your native language, until you have lived in another. Similarly, you don’t see your own country, until you have been outside it. And we never even realize where we live – except in a hypothetical, textbook way – without leaving the planet.
Even seeing videos on YouTube are impossible to believe, to judge by the comments … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrFFbyuQqt4.
Realizing the interconnection between all things is the essence of the Pagan religions you deride.
Sources are ex-Yanukovich allies, neck-deep in corruption themselves. Hardly credible.
Well, this “rap” is not too bad:
I thought you follow traditional religion. But now you propose this modern, Nietzschean,”Man creates meaning”.
There is a romantic, or bit hubristic, version of this modern view in Jung’s autobiography
But later – after he has a near-death – he writes more modestly.
https://archive.org/stream/MemoriesDreamsReflectionsCarlJung/Memories,%20Dreams,%20Reflections%20-%20Carl%20Jung_djvu.txt
In meditation, you can experience a still consciousness that is separate from your body’s situation.
The problem with this discussion about “uploading” your personality, or even recreating yourself biologically, is that it has no effect on you after your brain death.
The fact some facsimile of yourself can continue to have an influence after you die, can have no effect on your life, which will no longer be there to know about it.
People have been “uploading” their mind to an extent, for centuries already – by writing books that continue to be read by other minds after they die.
For example, Sartre has “uploaded” much of his mind into books, and he writes in his autobiography that this was his dream as a child – to literally become a bookshelf . You can open a book of Sartre, and most of his views and personality is there “uploaded” in the text. But from his perspective it is irrelevant, as he is not even able to know that his “uploaded mind” will survive him (someone could have burned all his books the day after he had died, and it would make no difference for him).
Sources are not just former attorney general Shokin, but Porky’s attorney general Lutsenko (who Yanuk actually imprisoned). It turns out that the latter tried to trace Ukrainian >$7 billion invested into Templeton, where it “disappeared”. The big shot there is – guess who? The major voice for impeachment Adam Schiff. Trump disturbed a serious money stealing and laundering mafia. Thieves of that caliber killed for far less.
Interesting stuff. Can you provide any citations?
It might be that Giuliani recently went to Ukraine to find more citations of this sort?…
I was thinking of Derkach:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrii_Derkach
It’s all very murky.
No, I do not. I was contrasting man with nature.
“I don’t believe it is possible to transmigrate the consciousness. The absolute best you could do on a theoretical level is create a carbon copy the consciousness.”
Well… perhaps not exactly.
I’ve uploaded a paper that I’m sure you’ll find interesting: https://docdro.id/SjLeYml
If things are taken one step at a time, the transmigration of consciousness is likely somehow possible — though this sort of scenario is, of course, entirely theoretical.
Ultimately, you are your brain, but your brain is, in principle, very malleable.
…The mere cloning or copying of one’s state of mind is an almost infinitely simpler matter. And even that ain’t easy.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/604856403332562955/657058011101003811/15728654821447802514209287757236.jpg
🙂 xD
Which mirpuri? White people are weak
Even Mirpuri guys in britain are not to be messed with either
Never ceases to amaze me how many on the right have very graphic – and often helpfully precise! – fantasies about being raped by feral africans which are then projected onto others.
Reminds me of research findings showing that interracial porn was most commonly viewed in the more racist southern states and less so in more liberal northern states in the US.
Seems like the first thing my post reminded you of is your fantasies. So which one of us is actually projecting here?
What makes you so sure those viewers are white? (Your subconscious expectation that other whites share your fantasies?)
You’re obviously a Mirpuri.
Only they play up Af-Pak identity.
Most Pakjabis are gay cucks who will go Hindu after Lahore falls.
Sindhis too, about the only people who actually believe in Islam are identity-less cretins like
Mirpuris who are neither Kashmir nor Panjabi or Potohari. LOL
Pakistan wasn’t Afghanistan, both were Endia.
Today Indian Rapeublic is a gay blot on the land same with those other 2. (3 if u incl Bangla cucks)
Anyway, no more hate on S Indians after this:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/653857894483361792/657118449385865216/holocaust_is_a_lie_srilanka.webm
Wrong on all three counts.
I think you must like making yourself a laughing stock.
“Lika barn leka bäst” as we say here. This is a fascinating idea. Would potentially solve the loneliness epidemic for many people, especially older men (who are often the most affected from my understanding of the research). I think the idea that “opposites attract” that was popular some time ago is one of the worst memes in social science which is thankfully phasing out.
OTOH, if we are at such an advanced technological stage it would perhaps be more resource efficient to simply gene edit out our need for companionship which is genetically hardwired into us. Humans are social animals after all, but that is also evolutionarily driven. This is what ethicists mean when they are talking about “playing god”, and warn against it. Though I do not have any moral quibbles about it, though perhaps I should.
Would you enjoy this or even find it useful? I get annoyed even by reading this 🙂 Then again, I place extremely high value on freedom of action and thought. I may be an outlier here.
But many of our instincts are passed down precisely because of rational reasons. It makes sense to have them from birth rather than relearning all the basic stuff. How would this be qualitivately different?
I dislike the term ’emotional IQ’, but there’s something to be said for what it aims to capture. Shockingly, we still dont have a proper measurement for creativity! Worse, there doesn’t seem to be much interest in these matters either among the general public.
This is a valid concern but humanity’s worst elements did not do better in the human capital shock that we’ve seen over the past few hundred years if you look at murder rate, wars, longevivity, gender equity and so on. Why would there be such a radical change now from the previous pattern?
Wow, you sure convinced me with your stunning dialectic. Please continue to produce such, uh, nuggets of wisdom, o sage!
P.S. “Your wrong, retard” is not an argument. Also, it is an emotional reaction that demonstrates that you have deep-seated issues tying your identity to ideological mind viruses.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1199794
Na, even Rural Pakistan is against it.
You’re right. But see how you’re trying to solve a legal issue with technological solutions? It doesn’t work like that. (See the history of the Internet if you still have any doubts.)
The legal and social problems will have to be solved here on Earth, shipping them to Mars won’t magically make them go away.
They had a point. Regardless of whether or not you’re stupid enough to think that American astronauts actually walked on the moon, the point is that we’re no closer to ‘traveling to the moon’ than we were in the 15th century.
Moon bases or moon shuttles will not happen in this millennium, if ever.
http://humanphenotypes.net/PaleoAtlantid.html
http://humanphenotypes.net/NorthAtlantid.html
Types 1 and 2-3 respectively.
MILLENNIYULE 2019: BLACK PIGEON SPEAKS
https://www.bitchute.com/video/-69QNTUrv5s/
I’ll look it up later, but the Budapest mayor is a despicable liberal, so adjust your expectations accordingly. I think they are trying to circumvent their own national governments when dealing with Brussels and maybe trying to get the funds directly from there.
It won’t be implemented either, though, and it’s much slower, giving ample time to reverse it, should your government fail for other reasons.
And you me with your argument by assertion.
Says the moon hoaxer.
Ironically this might not be bad for the country. People ineffectual on a national level, still get a lot of money from Brussels that otherwise would not give it due to the national governments. As long as the money is spent on useful stuff like infrastructure rather than on “cultural” propaganda.
Why do Americans always refer to Christmas as “the holidays”? It seems like extreme political correctness to me, even in countries like Britain and Sweden people say “Christmas”. The standard phrase there is “Happy Holidays”, it’s rare to see or hear the word “Christmas” actually used.
Why do they persist with such stupid and weak political correctness when not even the most left wing countries in Europe do? I’ve noticed that Americans are often surprised that Europeans still say “Christmas” by default, I guess because they assume Europe is more politically correct than them so they can’t imagine Europeans being able to say “Christmas”.
FYI: Your techniques of shouting down and disqualifying on technicalities are exactly the same as those used by wreckers to destroy the lives of ‘racists, sexists and homophobes’.
Enjoy being the one eaten last. (I hope the pleasure lasts, lol.)
Also, ‘shabbos goyim’.
Hey believe what you want man. I wouldn’t dream of trying to get you fired for your moon hoax theories. Wouldn’t even bring it up if I knew you in real life.
But it’s pretty clear to me you have some mass psychological hang up about space, and my guess it’s related to your devout Christer beliefs, as though humans in space would disprove God or something.
https://youtu.be/gSiR_gCEvfA
LOL BRUAAAH WE GONNA RECK DA MUGHAL YEA!!
Finally, an Unz Review comment I can get 100% behind!
Also in Britain most people still refer to their ‘Christian name’ rather than the bland Americanism ‘first name’. I think that’s now changing as the British usually adopt the bad things, but never any of the good things, from America.
The Jews, what else?
The best link in English I found is this:
https://yandex.ru/video/preview?filmId=15205935945776245932&noreask=1&parent-reqid=1576723402623977-1283815857502492924800122-sas1-5652&path=wizard&text=juliani+investigation+corruption
There are lots of links in Russian, but Western MSM are deafeningly silent about this. The reason is obvious: you don‘t spread info damaging to your gang.
The more I look at DNC and MSM, the better Trump looks. If all this obvious scum is against him, I have no choice but to support him. Maybe I’d even vote for him next time (did not vote at all in 2016).
Not all of them! Ho, ho, ho! 🙂
https://youtu.be/WQt3Us0N9YU
He’s written about this too, Ben Stein seems to be quite rational and believable in his views about Christmas:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/merry-christmas-ben-stein_b_4474171
Makes me think of sanctuary cities and also London. Isn’t there some model of politics which says that most historical political conflict is really urban vs. rural? This might validate that.
The other question that it brings up is, what is the economic potential of pozzed countries to facilitate the spread of pozz into other nations by disbursing funds directly?
The US Federal Government does this to white states, funding the settlement of Somalis, etc. In the days of Apartheid, I believe the Swedish government and some others funded the ANC to kill whites in South Africa.
Common strategy in the past is to target smaller political units, to facilitate the spread of pozz. Want gay marriage? Throw money at a state legislature, rather than the federal level. It will create precedent which will spread.
The Ukraine may not be as safe as some people think. Kiev would be easy enough to target.
Isn’t this a pakistani dish though? It looks decent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihari
On this I can agree.
I actually kind of like the idea of the book/movie recommendations. Reason is that I enjoy older, narrow-interest stuff. And presumably when one shares a certain amount of genes, it is more likely that tastes coincide to a degree.
I wouldn’t want to talk to an imitation of my dead grandfather every day, but I think it would be useful for rare occasions. Help preserve family history, genealogy, traditions, maybe family recipes.
Mainly, I think of my disembodied voice haunting my descendants to have children and reproduce my genes. Maybe, it is an idea that would only appeal to Japanese. But I think we need to consider radical solutions to help turn around the fertility problem. I think we should try to culturally adopt some of the ideas of Asians, like respect for ones elders and ancestor worship. Of course, Asians don’t have good fertility, but I think some degree of it would go some distance to solving the free-rider problem, which impacts fertility.
This is true to an extent. For instance, I really hate the attempt to moralize and do away with the emotion of hate. In moderation, hate serves an essential purpose – it is a motivating force. Motivating forces are positive. The moral end of it is what you chose to do with it. And that is a different matter than saying hate is wrong.
But not everyone has the same instincts – there are also competing political instincts. These I would argue are evolutionary strategies related to resource acquisition. As Jonathon Haidt has said, we have are political instincts first and then rationalize them, and then make the mistake of thinking that they aren’t instincts but reasoned arguments.
I’m not sure that the reduction in violence is due to the Flynn Effect, but it is an interesting question. What I would propose that it is due to increased wealth – in the old days, someone might cut your throat to eat, now the government mails them a check, doing the stealing for them. Then there has been some level of genetic pacification, and law enforcement itself is a deterrent.
Is the Flynn Effect really something positive? I am not sure. It only improves the IQ scores of people at the bottom, not in the smart fraction. It is more an improvement in test-taking ability, isn’t it? I’ve wondered even if it might be a minor corollary to pozz.
I don’t really have faith in legal or political solutions. There is an old expression “In the Halls of Justice, the only justice is in the halls.”
The secret sauce to Mars colonization is that it is soft eugenics – you merely only allow people above some threshold of intelligence to go. And it is self-association, you only go with people with whom you share a culture. Of course, that wouldn’t solve all problems, but it would go a long way to solving many.
Of course, we are speaking in the language of dreams here. As I said, I am not sure that it is even possible to go anymore. And anyway there is a fatal flaw: you kind of need a nation on Earth to get your nation on Mars.
I didn’t vote for him either in 2016, but wrote in Rob Portman senator from Ohio. I’ll have to take a closer look at Trump this time around, the Dems really seem evil. wicked, mean and nasty, more than ever. Thanks for the link. I’ll read it when I have a chance (working right now).
A hero on climate change.
https://i.imgur.com/Nv0J2wb.jpg
Car cucks need to be phased out from cities completely and while I appreciate him making a point taking his bicycle to work, he ought to be much more radical. Unfortunately, the reactionary electorate (even among supposed ‘liberals’) would probably not let happen fast enough. The ideal should be Copenhagen or Amsterdam but preferably even more radical.
You really should since the democrats have by default become the party of demons. Possibly literal.
I used the agree button not just to signal my approval of its quality but really the chain of comments that you’ve contributed to this thread. You’ve been an example to follow in how you’ve engaged in civility but also your seriousness in ideas.
Just one final note of mine then I consider this exchange largely complete.
My humble suggestion would be to say that wealth has followed ideas, not the other way around. It is true all ruling dispensions seek moral justification of their primacy, but that does not make the West unique. The West did not become rich because it exploited or colonised the world. Those things have been attempted by everyone in all of human history. Nor was the West more ruthless or brutal than its peer competitors in moral terms. Quite the contrary.
The primary difference lay in a self-made liberal intellectual revolution. This intellectual revolution advocated greater equality, tolerance and compassion. These are values the modern right claims are weakness, but they created greater internal solidarity and fairness (however piecemeal and staggered) compared to the feudal systems of the past where peasants were little better off than slaves. By freeing up huge amounts of previously unused human capital, the innovative capacities of the West exploded.
These moral ideas are therefore inextricably linked to the rise of the West, which is why it is amusing to me why so many on the right suffer from historical amnesia. Their intellectual forefathers largely lost the debate the in West (unlikely in virutally every other region with their emphasis on hierarchy and traditional feudal structures), and the West rose to greatness as a consequence and dragged the rest of the world into the future as a result, on its own terms.
Owner-driven automobiles should certainly not be the dominant mode of transport in cities. Or even a plurality.
But your big-brained take is just alienating and dare I say gay.
The mayor of a country’s capital city, even a small and unimportant country like Hungary, should not be riding a bicycle to work. He should be chauffeured as is befitting his position.
And cars should not be completely phased out from cities. Those prepared to pay the true costs should be have access to direct, personal transportation on demand from point A to point B. That means a car. Those who can’t pay for it (which ought to be most commoners) can use mass transit, bicycles (which need to be segregated), or Mk 1 feet.
Another important function of motorized transportation is delivery services. The more efficient delivery is, the less need for people to transport themselves (by whatever means) to retail distribution stores. Delivery in cities need not be by motorized transport either. Bicycle couriers are one option, and the old idea of pneumatic tube mail can be revived for small parcels. CBDs can also be networked by subterranean narrow-gauge railways, as Chicago’s Loop once was.
What needs to disappear from cities entirely is outdoor parking and traffic congestion. It needs to be mandated that parking is only lawful in enclosed areas (standing for loading and unloading would remain permissible–with well-enforced time limits of course), and traffic congestion needs to be priced out of existence. And simultaneously of course other modes of transport need to be substantially upgraded.
Even granting that you are correct, there’s the matter of diminishing returns and even negative returns.
It’s possible that increasing equality, tolerance and compassion created dramatic positive returns, then diminishing returns, and finally negative returns.
Take agriculture as an allegory. Maximizing plant growth is optimized by increasing inputs of solar radiation, carbon dioxide, and plant nutrients. But only up to a point. Too much and the plant will wither and die.
So for instance giving all adult males equal rights may have had positive returns. Does that mean extending equal rights to women also had positive returns? Would extending equal rights to children provide positive returns?
This does not, of course, invalidate your entire premise. The lesson to the alt-right is then do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Regarding Russia’s legit appeal to the CAS on being formally represented at the Olympics:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/12/19/dysfunction-in-the-olympic-movement/
You are slandering demons. Demons are supposed to be vile, cunning, generous with worldly possessions, and sane. Dems are vile, but the rest does not apply to them. They are incredibly venal, obscenely greedy, remarkably stupid, and certifiably insane.
You don’t need Mars for that, merely abolishing feminism will do. Again, a technological solution for what is a social problem.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-starship-is-a-very-big-deal/
You should have a read of that
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/starlink-is-a-very-big-deal/
And this too, in fact anyone with an interest in Space/Mars/the Moon ect should read both links
It is also easily measured.
A parasite’s behaviour, summed up. You’re proving my point. Most of humanity has no consideration for its surrounding and views everything else as expendable in its sole quest for survival. I will concede that this is a highly efficient pattern in the short run but it also makes me unsympathetic to humanity’s angst in existential question. It is like having mercy over a pathological serial killer.
Silly retort. 80% or more of humanity deserves to be liquidated. Only a small minority of humans are considerate enough of their surroundings – social, environmental and ethical – to be worth saving. If whittled down to this last 20%, I would suddenly take matters of human survival very seriously, because these people are actually worth saving. Otherwise you’d save a minority of decent people at the cost of letting a much greater share of douchebags live. Clearly inefficient.
However given that this would never happen and we are stuck with a large majority of parasitical and immoral humans, questions of human survival does not interest me much. I take no active interest in killing – which raises serious ethical questions – I am simply unmoved by the suffering of people who do not care about the harm they inflict on others (not just other humans but plants, animals and the planet itself). Why should I?
Who cares? It is also correct.
He should be reminded on a daily basis that he is not more special than any of the other inhabitants. No special rules. Being a mayor is a privilege but also a service. If he suddenly feels too important and too big for his shoes there are tons who can and will gladly replace him – and ought to. Your argumentation is a bizarre form of slave morality.
There is no rational reason why death machines weighing several tons of kilos are allowed, especially given that humans are terrible drivers.
Drones. Another and much neglected idea is underground transportation. There could be small tubes going up from a large network of pipes transportating various goods from the underground to the surface level, even into buildings.
This is smol-brained incrementalism. Cut the problem off at the root.
How does it feel to be wrong?
I disagree.
A mayor is in fact more special than ordinary inhabitants, as is any other executive indirectly in charge of two million people and directly in charge of however many employees the municipal administration of Budapest has.
This entitles him to superior social status and a higher standard of living that includes, but is not limited to, superior transportation services.
You are correct that serving as a mayor is indeed a service, and thus nonperforming mayors should be removed.
And if you’re really bent on destroying cars, I can think of alternatives. Helicopters and private rail cars come to mind. But I’m not sure Budapest is important enough to merit that level of extravagance. A limousine is fine.
The rational reason is that they provide superior speed, comfort, and privacy compared to alternative forms of transportation.
One of the costs you’ve highlighted is that people are routinely maimed and killed by cars. True enough, but most vehicular fatalities occur on two-lane highways and not in cities. Decongesting cities and properly segregating incompatible modes of transportation will further reduce urban carnage.
Agreed, and this has been done before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#In_postal_service
It appears that Prague’s system operated as late as 2002.
The root is the systematic under-pricing of motorized surface transportation, not the existence of cars. This is why I was pleased when the City of Chicago auctioned off the city’s parking to a private operator, even if the deal was corrupt and harmful to the city’s future finances. A private operator can appropriately price parking in a manner that the municipal administration cannot, because voters irrationally demand “free” parking everywhere.
Even granting for the sake of argument that ending feminism would have a eugenic effect, who’s to say that’s necessarily easier? You can’t just compare feminism and Mars on paper; you have to consider the real world context.
You said Mars has no meaning, than what humans decide – and presumably the same will be with earth. You’re presenting this post-modern view, or let’s say “Protagorean” (as Plato will reports on Protagoras) view. Also you said that the only consciousness is human – so presumably do not believe in consciousness of god, angels, non-human animals, etc.
I’m not criticizing. To an extent, this modern view matches current evidence, although personally I think it will be a little vain and immodest.
And often we can’t. And ‘prove‘ is way too strong term what you get when trying to assign motives in most historical circumstances.
You blase dismissal of British responsibility for Irish famine seems to be based on not finding in ‘letters and journals’ someone saying ‘let’s starve the damn Fenians’. They forgot to put it in writing. Some Brits welcomed the famine, some only welcomed the results of the famine, some were compassionate, some were both. My point is that normal elites are accountable for what happens – their motives or bad luck are secondary.
Hitler probably himself couldn’t coherently describe his motives, in the morning he looked for ships to facilitate emigration, in the afternoon full of rage yelled ‘killed them all‘. People are like that, that’s why motives are hard to ascertain. I am not only technically right, chasing motives is entertaining but a pointless exercise. It is about what actually happens, why is not for us to divine.
There is a problem of politicians trying to counter-signal that they are “one of the ordinary cattle”, when they go on bicycle, or public transport. It’s a cheap way for them to pretend they are modest and responsible people.
In principle, this is desirable, however. And when politicians counter-signal like this, at least it shows a society with civilized aspirations – even if somewhat gullible voters. It’s step above when officials brazenly view themselves as so above the cattle, that they cannot sit in a trolleybus with them. The next stage, officials’ children cannot go to a school with cattle’s children – they have to be in England or Switzerland. And they cannot fly in lowcost airlines, and they need to buy a yacht for their mistress, etc.
Bicycle does not create traffic, it does not cause air pollution, it does not create noise pollution, and it encourages residents to lose weight .
It’s not surprising, the predominance of bicycles with the most rational and well behaved English demographic. Recall how people travel in Oxford University
http://smapse.ru/storage/2018/07/converted/885_0_obuchenie-v-kembridzhe-dlya-russkih.jpg
Measurements are human ideas and what is measured is a human concept.
You refused to answer my question – do you consider the brain (or perhaps cortex) to be a parasite upon the human body?
As a pagan you ought to believe that everything is interconnected, part of a gestalt, yet your comments suggest that you view humans as some sort of alien intruder upon the Earth, rather than a part of the Earth (the part of the Earth that is most sentient, and the only part of the Earth that is conscious). Just as brains cause bodies to drink or do other unhealthy things in order to please themselves or accomplish some brain-related goal, humans aren’t always the most gentle to the Earth they are a part of on account of their wishes and pleasures. So?
Humanity is the only thing on this Earth capable of consideration for its surroundings.
Projection. You are in favor of genocide for 80% of the world’s population.
So you are a coward who makes excuses for not following through on his beliefs. That is a very good thing, of course, given your beliefs.
Apparently you think it good for humanity to die for the sake not only of animals and trees but also of rocks and water.
Yes.
Of the Earth and of the natural world, yes.
I did not discuss God. Animals are not self-conscious and cannot appreciate, judge or consider the natural world as we, made in God’s image, do.
Without people, the Earth is nonreflective, unconscious, among higher animals there is sentience but it is purely emotional (rage, fear, love), physical (suffering, pleasure) but unthinking in a significant sense. On Mars there is not even that.
First all Sindh was always different from Hind even before Arabs
Second there is no map in existence that shows India going over Pakistan
Third Sindhis/Pashtuns/Balochis/Kalash/Paharis are already proven they are genetically different from Indians as harappa and gedmatch reveals.
4th Mirpuris are a tough race in britain, they pimp your jatt women out with the white women in britain and even your white master cant stop them
5th sindh/pashtun/balochi/paharis were buddhist before Islam not hindu
Some minority hindus lived in Lahore no where else
Sindhis were buddhist before bin qasim arrived
He is jealous Pakistanis are a thousand times better than Indians in looks and hygiene.
There is only one solution for Thulean Friend:
Pakistan was never india to begin with
[Img]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/Ancient_Khorasan_highlighted.jpg/300px-Ancient_Khorasan_highlighted.jpg[/img]
Punjabi Jatts are filthy hindus with turbans
Anybody can tell a Azad Kashmiri from a Punjabi from miles away in terms of looks and attitude in britain
Azad Kashmiris are buddhist before Islam
This is why AJK and Pathans live in Bradford without issues while Punjabi jatts live in Southall and are also cowardly in nature.
Sikhs and Hindus are slaves to white people, always have been and always will be
Mirpuris and Pathans are warriors and fight them
Thanks for your kind words.
I’ve wondered whether the Enlightenment might just act to obscure some lower reason for the radical economic changes to the West. I can think of a few possibilities.
The New World. Just to pick one, the potato dramatically increased the population of peasants, increasing their power. One reason was that you could leave the potatoes in the field for a while, unlike wheat, so they were a bit harder for the military class to confiscate or destroy.
Another explanation might be guns. Feudalism ended about when guns became more common. There were legal changes that helped end it, no doubt the result of increases in the power of the state.
J. K. Rowling is on twitter being a transphobe.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/19/jk-rowling-trans-row-court-ruling-twitter-maya-forstater
You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts!
Note to self: never use twitter.
Don’t expect anything to improve with Jay Clayton as SEC Chair, and his wife,Gretchen Butler Clayton and her father, who was CEO of CSC and mysterious WMB Holdings which share the same address in addition to many Goldman Sachs divisions. Gretchen was employed by Goldman Sachs as an attorney from 1999-2017. Many companies affiliated with the Panama Papers share the same address as well.
Secrecy has expanded under Clayton.
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2018/01/wall-streets-top-cop-cant-shake-money-ties-to-mysterious-firm/
Do you think that it is more likely that of the approximately 300,000 names in the Panama Papers that only 36 were Americans, or that many Americans stole foreign identities, or some group did on their behalf, to hide the investments from authorities, and planned on living a double life with more than one identity?
New Year Prediction
They thought that they were living the American Dream, and then they woke up in 2020 after they realized that it’s all been a pack of lies.
Hind sight is 2020! Woke!
If man is in God’s image – God would have a mouth, presumably because he needs to eat things. Similarly God must have legs, so he can walk around. I wonder if God has to cut his nails?
It’s also quite strange that God would have to resemble one of the great apes in morphology or mind. Great ape is far from the most beautiful animal category even from our own (belonging to great ape’s) perception.
Of course, it’s also immodesty and hubris, to imagine God or gods, has anything in common with us (humans), beyond the possibly that perhaps all minds have to recognize the same universals – such as logic or the laws of nature (if a god or gods would not be somehow “outside” such laws of nature).
The important thing is consciousness. Non-human animals are stupider than humans, and less complex in behaviour – above all, not able to construct much culture (although different orca pods, for example, have developed different cultures and languages to a limited extent, and even things like music had a basis in our non-human ancestors).
But animals have consciousness, and therefore perceive and appreciate world, sometimes more accurately than we.
Consciousness would be a far more essential breakthrough in the universe, than the particular gradation of complexity of thoughts which might go through our mind (in addition humans have more complex thought than an Orca, but probably less detailed perceptions).
As for the type of animals’ consciousness, it’s not difficult to assume that an animal like a chimpanzee will have almost the same first personal experience as our own, considering similarity of the brain – with even the folding the tissue in the brain in the same patterns.
https://i.imgur.com/dVdFwLu.jpg
Gravity on Earth doesn’t stop being true if we are suddenly made unaware of it.
You’re exposing your callous and unethical mentality. Such a incomplete moral understanding, as a self-identifying Christian, surely that should bother you.
I don’t believe in violence. There is nothing inconsistent with what I said. Most of humanity does deserve to be wiped out, but that doesn’t mean it would be moral to do so. Solving problems by violence is not ethical. Doesn’t stop me from making the obvious observation that if humanity was wiped out by AI, I wouldn’t mourn much because most of those people have very low and in many cases non-existent ethical and moral convictions.
Humanity is also by far the smartest species. When viewed this way, the only thing that is surprising is how primitive most of our moral understanding still is.
A mayor is more like a figurehead for a well-oiled bureaucracy who is sent to do the bidding of his or her voters. That is a service role and the moment he or she forgets that and starts thinking more about titles is the time they should get booted. One way to remind them of this is to make sure they get no special privileges.
Slave morality.
Justice requires giving people what they deserve. So if most of humanity deserves to be wiped out, refusing to wipe them out would be unjust.
How’s the view from the corner you’ve painted yourself into?
Re: Thorfinnsson’s conniption
It’s 2019 – they have pills for that now.
He just demonstrated my point for everyone to see – Germanics are a failed
civilization. Lack of Buddhist/Aristotelian moderation will do it every time.
“In God’s image” means that man is a supernatural being with free will.
Consciousness is irrelevant; my phone is ‘conscious’, for certain values of ‘consciousness’.
What’s important is free will, free will being the singularity of information complexity. (Or information entropy, if you will, which is the same thing.)
Your shitty link doesn’t even mention the problem of uplink connectivity, which is the real problem in satellite Internet. (Not the rest of the irrelevant verbal diarrhea in your link.)
One of life’s sweet memories was coming to Oxford for the first time as a young man, turning onto just such an alley, and seeing a lovely young Oxford maiden riding her bicycle, her gown and auburn hair flowing in the wind.
It’s almost enough to make me approve of admitting women to Oxford.
Re: Minorities in Poland
I visit Poland regularly although I’m by no means an expert. Last time
I was there in 2018. A few general observations:
to have had many Gypsies. Nevertheless, 10-15 years ago, one would
sometimes see Gypsies panhandling near large restaurants, and even sending
their kids inside to bother the diners wanting to eat in peace. By contrast, more
recently, I haven’t seen any Gypsies, at least not in large cities. They must’ve moved
to Western Europe;
Last time I was staying at a mid-price hotel in central Warsaw. After arriving I
decided to have dinner at a nearby outdoor restaurant. I was surrounded there
mostly by young people speaking English (with no accents) or occasionally breaking
into Polish or Polglish (mixture of Polish and English). English is ubiquitous in
Poland’s major cities to a much greater extent than in Germany, and, of course,
there is no comparison to France, which I also visit fairly often;
In the last 3-5 years Poland has been inundated by Jewish tourists and pilgrims.
Of course, this is partly connected to the fact that for centuries Poland was hosting
the world’s largest Jewish population, approaching 10% of the general population
at times. E.g., in 1939 Poland was 15% Ukrainian and 10% Jewish. Still, this
sudden Jewish influx is interesting, and I’ll devote a separate post to it;
Ukrainians at roughly 2 million (i.e., 5% of the population) have by now become
part of the scenery. I hardly even notice them anymore. At my hotel there was
at least one Ukrainian girl working at the reception desk (and one fellow who
spoke fluent Persian). The cultural differences are minor, and as someone here
noted, Ukrainian is basically a heavily polonized Russian or Ruthenian (AP might
question that). I personally like eastern (“kresowe”) accents, like the type of
accents spoken in prewar Lvov. I even went to a Ukrainian restaurant to try their
specialties, esp. kvas which I read about but never tried before;
The Vietnamese have now been part of the scenery for decades, and being Catholic,
they have assimilated well. There are actually very few of them, perhaps 70,000.
In Warsaw you mostly see them in the subterranean commercial passages near
the Central station. Poland, living up to its reputation as Holy Poland, is perfectly safe –
it has lower murder rates than Germany, France or Britain;
Lipka Tatars. mostly found in northeastern Poland, are few in number, and except
for colorful costumes, have been totally assimilated for centuries:
I personally in Warsaw saw very few subcons or blacks. Once in a long while
you will run into a lone black at crowded shopping centers but that’s about it in
my experience. At clothing stores, however, you will occasionally see big ads
featuring black fellows. That’s in a country which is 99% white. In general, it’s
a wonderful experience to visit a country that is so beautifully white, while
realizing that whites, at perhaps 1 billion, have basically become an endangered
species and need to be protected.
There is no place like Central Europe! Poland is my home but I also love to visit
Czechia, and still hope to visit Hungary. As to Slovakia, Poland and Slovakia
share the magnificent Alpine scenery of the Tatra mountains where I spent many
happy hours mountain-climbing as a youth. Zakopane is perhaps the only place
left in Europe where the highlanders will break into a song at a moment’s notice
to the astonishment of the tourists.
This is pure fantasy.
The rest I like very much but we must realise there always will be rubber dinghies. The need for them comes from the inside not outside. So there will be rubber dinghies on Mars or their equivalent even if their occupants have to be mass cloned.
You are being deliberately daft.
But no animal is really as beautiful and inspiring as the good human form. It would be silly if someone like Michelangelo devoted his sculptures to cats.
We view other apes as ugly because they are closer to us and thus imperfect or grotesque versions of us. Presumably if we had arisen from tigers we would view leopards as similarly ugly and apes as majestic.
He came to Earth as one of us; that’s simply reality, and is no more a prideful statement that the claim that we are more intelligent etc. than anything else known in the natural universe.
The important thing is self-consciousness. Animals can perceive (often better than we can) but cannot appreciate, contemplate, have opinions of, reflect upon, the world. They only operate on instinct and physical sensations (pain, pleasure) in the case of lower animals such as insects, plus emotions in the case of higher animals (in accordance with bran structure, emotions limited to fear and rage in reptiles, love appears in mammals and birds). They can be conditioned through trial and error and sometimes observation but cannot reflect on what they have learned. There is no moral consideration.
Orca or chimpanzee “culture” is limited to patterns of learned tool use or communication by groups that is passed on through observation. It is silly to compare this to human culture.
The “spark” that enables true consciousness may depend on slight differences but the effects enormous. The parts of the brain responsible for emotions are mostly identical for all mammals, so one can infer that raw unthinking emotional sensations are comparable (as I mentioned, reptiles are more primitive and only have the structures associated with the emotions of rage and fear – a miserable existence, if they were conscious). Overall a chimpanzee brain is similar to ours but the cerebral cortex is very much simpler than ours – already when people are born their cerebral cortex is twice the size of the chimpanzee’s. And consciousness may not correspond exactly to cortical size but the effects may be exponential.
Gravity as a concept would not exist if people did not conceptualize it.
LOL, you once again dodged the question: do yo consider the brain to be a parasite upon the body?
A person’s cortex decides to go skiing because this is a pleasing activity to it. Skiing is risky, the person falls, breaks his arm and kills tens of millions of cells in his body.
In your opinion, is his cortex unethical and callous? Would you be happy if he suffered brain death and was in a vegetative state, unable to further harm the body? Would this be an example of the body being rid of a callous, unethical parasite? Your ideal?
This seems to be your morality and your wish for the Earth in the face of callous humanity.
Projection. You have shown us how low your moral convictions are.
A welcome rationalization for your cowardice and complicity (silviosurfer’s comment is accurate).
A convicted child rapist deserves to be executed, but still shouldn’t because capital punishment is morally wrong. The ideal of non-violence is sacrosanct and supercedes all others.
That’s why I would never harm another person even when they deserve it – and I haven’t made it a secret that I think most do. None of that matters because it is superceded by a higher principle that I adhere to.
The difference between a civilised society and a brutish one is that the former can tame passions, even when those passions are justified, in favor of a higher principle.
Something which you obviously cannot grasp.
This is a legitimately crazy/hilarious quote. Are you a creationist?
He’s a shitty human bean, but people who pride themselves on believing the most anti-scientific ideology imaginable – that something came from nothing in direct violation of all known laws of statistics – are even worse.
Why is capital punishment morally wrong?
You are a peculiar case – I can see the foundations of radical conservationist/econazism in you.
It would not be too bad a thing, except for the 3-4 billion of those deemed unworthy of consumption, oxygen and carbon footprint.
Greenpeace meets Green Necrons.
If you want to breed a tamer species killing off the more aggressive members is effective.
Capital punishment is morally right. Allowing undesirables to survive and reproduce is the greatest of all evils. This is why eugenics is morally correct. Wanting to leave the world a better place is a higher principle than wanting to be pleasant.
Civilization would be impossible without force. All forms of order, all societies, all organization, only exists because it has superseded other forms.
You seem to want to worship nature but not to learn from it. This seems to me a contradictory view. Not that the views being argued by others here are any better.
Sindh and Hind are the same word..
Americans are less likely to hide investments offshore for several major reasons:
1 – The USA taxes worldwide income, making such vehicles pointless unless they’re criminal
2 – FATCA means that criminal investment vehicles abroad (or even legal foreign bank accounts) for US citizens are increasingly rare
3 – Relative to most other advanced economies top tax brackets in the USA are modest, especially for capital gains
Thank God you and those who think like you are pussies
Do you believe that, for example, snails have a concept of gravity?
Your failure to respond to other points is noticed.
Your ”morality” points to the rottenness and sinister nature underlying Buddhist and Hindu ethical systems. Favoring non-human nature over humanity is very much like favoring muscle or blood cells over cortical neurons. In both cases it is a preference for unconsciousness over will and consciousness, which seems to match the ideal of Nirvana – nihilism, emptiness. You are of course too cowardly to give it to yourself and thank God too much of a coward to give this to others.
Is that really so? Some photographic evidence definitely will help.
On a strictly practical level, though, by preventing their reproduction one can accomplish the same thing of effective germline elimination without executing the specific vector for it. This consumes more resources, of course; all of Thulean’s ideas assume a nigh infinite supply of energy and resources stretching into infinity, supported and supplied by the virtue of moral ideas, which is really rather questionable.
It is, though, a form of faith. One can find some reason to admire all such strong faiths.
I don’t think it shows a civilized aspiration. It shows that the envy of commoners has become an important political factor.
That’s not to say that it’s desirable to have extreme hierarchy or, worse, corrupt hierarchy in which elites transfer their children and assets abroad.
As with many other things, a happy medium is best.
Bicycle transport has many advantages, and when the weather is decent I ride my bicycle as well.
It does not encourage residents to lose weight, however–unless you mean that outdoor physical activity makes people think about it. Increased energy expenditure (and bicycle commuting does not really involve much increase to begin with–even running a marathon costs only 2,000 calories) simply increases hunger.
To lose weight, it’s necessary to reduce energy intake beneath energy expenditure. Since even a sedentary human body consumes a large amount of energy to maintain itself, increasing energetic expenditure is irrelevant. The goals should instead be to optimize the body’s fat burning processes, to limit hunger, and to activate physiological insulin resistance (as opposed to chronic). The best strategy for this is a LCHF diet in which the ratio of saturated fat to other fats consumed exceeds 1.
Of course, cycling has other physiological and mental benefits unrelated to weight loss.
If the mayor is a mere figurehead, then it ought to be an honorific position. One could have a powerless but prestigious hereditary lord mayor, or another possibility is that distinguished citizens at the conclusion of a long career are appointed to the position.
If it’s an active executive position, then you want to recruit talented people for the position. Talented people have better options other than a political office in which you’re expected to ride a bicycle like an ordinary person to work.
Or perhaps not, since I enjoy superior social status compared to ordinary people.
But the concept itself is troublesome. It was created by a mentally unstable man filled with hatred for his own countrymen and for Christianity. When this man’s King and Emperor triumphantly entered Jerusalem at the close of the 19th century, he gave a speech in which he noted that the great German people that Nietzche so despised became great under the cross.
My understanding is that you are a pagan, at least in outlook, and this has led you to a Linkola mindset in which you wish for the vast majority of humans to die because we intrude on the tranquility of lesser animals. I don’t spend too much time on philosophy, but from a consequentialist standpoint this certainly doesn’t do your own kind many favors.
In addition, infrastructure of roads and minimum safety made feudal priviledges redundant. Feudals had a role as local protectors, all else followed from that. Once safety was centralised by strong states, the point of exchange food for security was gone. In effect feudals’ original role was to protect crops. You are right, potatoes need a lot less protection.
It would be tempting to assign guns a role, but that was probably only the case in a few wilder, remote places like America, Highlands, steppes… Guns make fights less equal, not more, so they increase the ability to control settled peasants.
Early feudal ‘protectors‘ were a lot more vulnerable. That’s why most of them didn’t survive – almost all of us are mainly descendants of peasants. Early feudals were basically sitting ducks, living short, violent lives of plunder and racketeering (‘protection’). They built castles for a reason – they were scared: riding a horse through the countryside at that time was like putting a sign on one’s back ‘kill me, and my horse‘ (very easy by the way). They were dead-enders.
Most mayors of notable cities are douchebags. It is very rare these days even to have a likable scoundrel. Therefore I support this expectation that they must cycle to work or else take the cattle cars.
I would liken the phenomenon to Mao wearing his Mao-suite, or the Stalin-tunic prevalent in the USSR. Or Castro’s suite. It is an empty display.
The uniform of Globohomo seems to be a man in a business suite, riding a bicycle, and saluting the rainbow flag with his constipated, low-T face.
Why is non-violence sacrosanct?
Selection problem.
An incredibly big brain take.
Half of Western European men are descended from one Bronze Age ‘king’
@Thorfinnsson
Thorfinnsson,
That is exactly why I believe that many Americans stole foreign identities.
What’s wrong with you people ?
First off, if a first-class cuck like Thulean Friend would start praising me, I’d take a good hard look in the mirror.
Second of all, the source of welfare is intelligence.
Intelligence in humans gets selected for mainly in cold periods.
And if you look at climate records, you find just that – the Medieval Ice Age.
No need to posit pozzed crap like “muh Enlightenment”
Good point about the protective role of feudal lords being made unnecessary.
My argument for guns would partly be that they were good at destroying castles. Of course, this gave more power to the state, but of necessity, peasants were the allies of the central state to a degree, so they benefited more than they lost.
But there were losses. For one thing, in the past, the elites were local. Take the case of Ireland. Feudal lords were often buried within the local parish church. When Cromwell came to Ireland, many castles and churches were destroyed. The new elites, with a more distant hierarchy, had a different religion, which made them more distant from the peasants.
Another factor I think is that the state changed the economic model, somewhat akin to modern Sweden, realizing it could extract more wealth, if it allowed wealth to grow.
All in all, I think it is a blank-slatist intellectual conceit that the Enlightenment is the ultimate source of our wealth. Rather, I believe it was facilitated by an increase in wealth.
Lol, come on. 🙂
A black upscale Audi fits an EE mayor well.
I want to thank AaronB for his endless crowing about the Enlightenment. Through careful repetition, earning every 10 agorot coin of his Hasbara paycheck, he helped wake me up to the worm-ridden core of this idea.
A lot of otherwise based people like to trumpet the Enlightenment. Probably because they see it as uniquely European, so they take pride in it. But, this causes them to overlook the fact that it is essentially blank-slatist, at its core. Really, man totally remade himself with the aid of a new, egalitarian philosophy? Sounds a bit like Marxism.
Right…To start with, Bronze Age kings were not a part of feudalism. We are also descendants of about a million other people who lived at that time. Let’s do the math: 4,000 years ago, let’s say 200 generations, and Y-chromosome…a fairly infinitesimal share of actual DNA that we carry.
But if you like to feel noble, enjoy. Get a horse, having a vulnerable animal in an all-out fight is a real doozy…look up what actually happened and how long most of these knights survived.
Firearms were great equalizers.
A man raised from infancy to excel in melée or as shock cavalry was no match for pike-and-shot, not to mention mass musket formations.
In addition, while longbow required years of training and practice, rank fire and reloading drill could be taught to anyone.
Very expensive war horses, barding and even full plate were very vulnerable to rapidly evolving firearms, not to mention cannon.
This became extremely evident in 16th century Europe and Sengoku Jidai period Japan.
Army sizes grew accordingly – Henry V campaign was tiny compared to 16th and early 17th century ones.
The enlightenment was mostly verbose nonsense, and probably caused more harm by creating absurd mental ideologies (e.g. “we are all equal“, holy-sh..t, what does that even mean?). It has definitely brought us to this point in history when nonsense by ‘enlightened‘ parasitic morons is spread so widely that normal lives are often only available on the margins.
I do give the early 18th century Enlightenment credit for stopping the bloody latter-feudal madness with religious fanatics killing each other, witches, scholastic education, etc… It was a natural reaction against the bloody 17th century – self-protection by elites who experienced too much killing and discomfort.
The elites’ change in Ireland – from local and protective to remote, quasi-foreign and parasitic – seems to be a common process in all elites’ evolution. We are seeing it today around the world.
What triggered economic growth in the early modern era was peace. Peace creates prosperity, people have children, they live, fields become more fertile, animal herds grow, spare time leads to inventions and ‘entrepreneurship’, people travel, wealth is accumulated, assets are protected, etc… This is so basic that we have to look long and hard not to see it, but our ancestors always understood it – have peace and keep parasitic outsiders out (those two are often in conflict with each other), and you will do well. Until some moron progressives tell you that it is all wrong, that we are all ‘equal’ somehow, that there is some ‘self-realization’ impulse more important than anything else, that ‘freedom’ means one doesn’t have to have any structured thoughts or natural constraints, etc…
Hardly anyone can grasp feeding and caring for someone who has done inexcusable wrong and will never EVER be of use to your society again, all on taxpayer dime
The Nordic moral supremacy circle jerk is driving them to extinction
The fact that some Y-Chromosomes have high frequency might suggest that they have some adaptive value. That they are useful to the men with them. That they confer or encourage some trait, like the ability to cooperate with other men. Since the Y-chromosome is involved in male characteristics, it has an outsized importance.
Horses are actually similar. They don’t have many Y-chromosomes. Probably certain Y-chromosomes facilitated the domestication process.
Those guilty of the most heinous crimes which merit execution could usefully have their lives spared for the benefit of medical research which would be unethical to carry out on patients and volunteers.
Your every whim is my command.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Peasants%27_War
https://imgur.com/3Iooq69
Ignoring nobility for a moment, the entire notion is pretty silly. It assumes, effectively, that investment in equipment and training for a specialized soldier class was essentially not worth the return in effectiveness. And this was far from the case, as the classic specializations of labor of soldier, trader and worker would keep reappearing whenever societal wealth increased.
The entire notion is so silly that its refutation basically comes down to: well, no – for a long time, specializing people into violence had great dividends, and that specialization requires capital and time.
In feudalism proper, this profession is heavily associated with kinship, etc, and the acquisition of said capital centers around a family which naturally had an inclination to continue to benefit their descendants. This specific form of nepotistic source funding is not necessary, of course; there are ancient examples of statehoods and mercenary bands, all quite effective – but the essential concept is the same: heavy investment into a group of people who do very little except break heads, and they do it very effectively. Horses are part of that, and in fact, an extreme amount of investment in cost so the fact that they were so widely utilized shows that they were obviously worthwhile.
Along the way, they(or at least their bosses) get a lot of status and have a lot of kids.
Polish Perspective, if memory serves, dreamt of living out his days in a dacha by the White Sea, which is about the least Swedish dream I’ve ever heard of.
Fled — Think about that wording for a second. (Unless you don’t know, Kharkov is a perfectly nice city in eastern Ukraine.)
Hussite Wars are a much better representation of peasant vs. knight armies.
People here have bandied about theories for the UK’s sorry state today. I got a big kick out of someone’s rather avant-garde idea that it was Irish laborers, who by delaying the importation of massive amounts of Nigerians and subcons, evidently caused the UK’s demise.
So, for the purposes of entertainment, I thought I would offer up something I heard Dutton say the other day, which made a lot of sense to me because it has a clear analogue in US politics, at least on the regional level.
According to Dutton, one of the main causes of the UK’s demise was that MPs were given salaries. Formally, MPs came from two groups. People with familial wealth, who wanted to preserve their family legacies. And the relatively poor class of trade-unionists, whose salaries were paid by organizations of working class people, who wanted to preserve opportunities for poor people.
The analogue in the US is the state of New Hampshire. New Hampshire was traditionally seen as one of the saner states. One of the reasons for this is that state legislators there are not paid a salary, so they pretty much all need to have full-time jobs.
You answered a question nobody asked, punitive raids against peasants are not really wars, no matter what our betters in Wiki say.
I ride horses, they are fun, they are great for mobility. I wouldn’t fight on one, it is only a so-so advantage against disorganised enemy, but basically a suicide mission against anyone with a sharp object. The stylized war games and riding around were not – in general – how wars were fought. But if you prefer the pageantry, I won’t take it away.
You are mixing up Bronze Age with feudalism, Y-chromosme with our full genetic ancestry, and lifestyle of professional warriors with what their role was. But your writing is erudite, so I enjoy it. It is just that we are arguing about different things. That happens. For now I am sticking with my peasant mentality, horses and all…
Our Indian friend disagrees. Being from the Subcontinent – or the global sh..hole as we it is also known – he almost has to, he has a self-interest in the Enlightened liberal fight for the borderless equality of all…
They are beautiful creatures, aren’t they? It seems tragic that anyone would put such sensitive and surprisingly intelligent beings into danger, but yet it is what happened. I live in cattle country, in actual “cowboy” lands, where fighting on horseback continued to happen even less than a full century ago.
And mobility is of central importance in warfare. The pitched battle is usually a forced resolution rather than a choice by both war leaders; overwhelming force against an lightly or undefended foe is always preferable if it can compromise the enemy’s resources and sense of security.
One could mention other advantages, such as the improvement in baggage train due to effectively higher weight capacity, the height advantage provided, or even the psychological impact of the charge, but the mobility advantage alone is enough to have given them huge value.
This is incredibly well represented in the long, difficult and endless campaigns of the Chinese against the steppe nomads, who were classically light cavalry of no particular pageantry while the Chinese forces often consisted not only of heavy infantry, but an heavy core of crossbows that gave them huge direct ranged superiority. On occasion, such as in battles with the Xiongnu, it made mock of any advantage of cavalry as anything but larger targets. Such results with light cavalry charging against prepared positions usually ended poorly for the horsemen.
But the Mongols proceeded to trump Chinese forces, and for that matter, almost any number of infantry-heavy foes. Mobility lets the possessor of it have the initiative; to pick targets that he wishes, to avoid battles he does not, and to engage in ones with local supremacy as desired.
Perhaps another example of how effective they were was how swiftly Native American tribes would employ them for warfare – if they had no advantage, they would not bother.
The essential problem of the Han was that they didn’t have much pasture, and it was difficult to hold the pasture of nomads, when they took it.
The cost asymmetry of sending into “pacification armies” to chase around yurts versus nomads just existing off the soil and raiding whenever it pleased them really did add up.
Didn’t work, all three are back with a vengeance. Especially witches; see ‘feminism’.
Witches always existed, but it’s only in modern times that they became a powerful political force.
Amazon is too big to succeed! What was Jeff Bezos thinking?! I have purchased a faulty procuct from Amazon, and am just out of the money. Luckily, nobody died from the dehumidifier that did not work!
Amazon is a logistical nightmare. It is the most poorly managed company in the entire world! The bigger it gets, the worse that it gets! Bezos appears to suufer from mania. His dreams get bigger and bigger and more unattainable with each passing year.
Jeff Bezos is now claiming that the Communications Decency Act Section 230 exhonerates him from any and all liability for selling faulty life threatenning products, including killer car seats, killer strollers, and killer putty magnets.
Jeff Bezos believes that he is entitled to hundreds of millions of dollars, and is totally free from any responsibility and accountability.
Amazon has also been responible for the retail apocalypse, after WalMart. This is not working!
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/20/tech/amazon-fake-kids-products/index.html
Reports are coming about the looming Ukrotriumph in natural gas talks:
The volumes are unclear yet, but so far it looks like Ukrainian regime and its Western backers got most of what they wanted from Gazprom. Fuck Putin.
If the rest of your post is true and there is nothing else in the agreement, I can only agree with your last two words.
Zizka was an aristocrat with prior experience in warfare.
Putin has said that Ukraine owes Russia about as much as Gazprom owes Ukraine. Might mutual debt payment have been part of the deal?
The Ukrostate owes Russia actual money that it received and spent. Gazprom’s “debt” is a product of a politicized decision by a Swedish court. It would be a grave mistake by Russia to make this exchange, as there is nothing to stop Ukrostate from suing Gazprom again. As a matter of fact the new transit agreement provides a foundation for future lawsuits.
This is not to say that Putin won’t pay. The man has a habit of disappointing me.
We’ll wait and see. Unlike Felix Keverich, I don’t like jumping to conclusions. But when my conclusions are based on solid evidence, I don’t need to change them.
B-but human rights!
We agree on mobility, horses were all about mobility. But fighting on horses, other than a few special cases where the other side was clueless, outnumbered, or unprepared, never made sense. Nomads used horses to be able to get close enough to shoot and quickly move away. It was in effect again the mobility that gave them the advantage and that only worked in certain geographies.
I come from mountains and valleys, horses never dominated in those regions. Their mobility was impaired and their vulnerability was enhanced. In Central Europe there is almost zero genetic leftover from the endless horse-riding nomadic raiders so prominently mentioned in history. They were killed off. If they managed some offspring, that offspring was often also killed off. History losers. But they made a lot of noise on their way out.
Only to swiftly lose.
My conclusions are usually right though. You will see it when everyone else has moved on. 😉
Horses require fodder, water, farriers, and veterinary care. And the mounted men in question had all the same supply requirements that infantry did. With the exception of steppe herder cultures, they thus generally only provided tactical mobility (and limited operational mobility for armed reconnaissance, raiding, etc.). Horses were also useful in the transportation of supplies and siege trains.
Steppe herder cultures were unique in that they didn’t have what we understand as supply requirements. Their hardy horses needed only pasture and water, and there were multiple horses per man which also satisfied their dietary requirements. But their strategic mobility was limited to the steppe and other areas with good pastureland.
Zizka was a low-level ‘zeman’ with no property. He was a soldier. Hussites beat noble cavalry again and again by simply sticking sharpened sticks against horses from peasant wagons. Swiss pikemen did the same thing.
I’m sure your commie teachers told you fairytales about how much of a commoner he was.
Meanwhile wiki says:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_%C5%BDi%C5%BEka
He was born in the small village of Trocnov (now part of Borovany) in the Kingdom of Bohemia into an aristocratic family. He was nicknamed “One-eyed Žižka”. From his youth, he was attached to the royal court and held the office of Chamberlain to Queen Sofia of Bavaria.
Britannica:
Žižka grew up at the court of the German king Wenceslas (King Wenceslas IV of Bohemia). He early lost an eye. After spending most of his life as a mercenary for the Poles and fighting with them at the Battle of Grunwald (Tannenberg; 1410)
::::::::::::::
So a nobleman and seasoned soldier.
In Ukraine in the 16th and early 17th centuries there were many unsuccessful peasant revolts against the magnates. Only when the nobility joined en masse in 1648 did a rebellion succeed.
No. They depended on artillery and also used cavalry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussite_Wars#Wagenburg_tactics
Depending on the terrain, Hussites prepared carts for the battle, forming them into squares or circles. The carts were joined wheel to wheel by chains and positioned aslant, with their corners attached to each other, so that horses could be harnessed to them quickly, if necessary. In front of this wall of carts a ditch was dug by camp followers. The crew of each cart consisted of 16-22 soldiers: 4-8 crossbowmen, 2 handgunners, 6-8 soldiers equipped with pikes or flails (the flail was the Hussite signature weapon), 2 shield carriers and 2 drivers.
The Hussites’ battle consisted of two stages, the first defensive, the second an offensive counterattack. In the first stage the army placed the carts near the enemy army and by means of artillery fire provoked the enemy into battle. The artillery would usually inflict heavy casualties at close range.
In order to avoid more losses, the enemy knights finally attacked. Then the infantry hidden behind the carts used firearms and crossbows to ward off the attack, weakening the enemy. The shooters aimed first at the horses, depriving the cavalry of its main advantage. Many of the knights died as their horses were shot and they fell.
As soon as the enemy’s morale was lowered, the second stage, an offensive counterattack, began. The infantry and the cavalry burst out from behind the carts striking violently at the enemy – mostly from the flanks. While fighting on the flanks and being shot at from the carts the enemy was not able to put up much resistance. They were forced to withdraw, leaving behind dismounted knights in heavy armor who were unable to escape the battlefield. The enemy armies suffered heavy losses and the Hussites soon had the reputation of not taking captives.
Heavy cavalry was widely effective well into the 17th century, and played a limited but critical role during the Napoleonic wars:
https://www.napoleon.org/en/magazine/publications/napoleonic-heavy-cavalry-and-dragoon-tactics/
(Let me re-post..)
ALL YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT PROJECT ADAM (and a glimpse into the nature of God)
Part 0:NATURE OF YAHWEH:
Yahweh is the ‘Holy Father’ in heaven and Satan is the ‘Lord of the air’ (Ephesians 2:1-3).
Yahweh is technically a superpowerful Extra-Terrestrial entity with ability we mortals can’t fathom. I’ve no intention to paint Yahweh as a green skin creature descended from a flying saucer. But sure ‘He’ is not of this world. If Yahweh is a biologist, then Earth is a petri dish and human are the micro-organism inside the petri dish sustained by the all powerful Yahweh. Praised be Yahweh
Yahweh is omnipotent and can pick on multiple gender combos and its blasphemy to say He is ‘male’ only . He is technically(as well as political correctly) a multi-gender/hermaphrodite extra-terrestrial entity with ability beyond human reach. (Early semite chieftains were so patriachal that they could only relate powerful entities to males)
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2008-08-15/news/0808141093_1_god-yahweh-backward.
Part 1: PROJECT ADAM –Something went wrong…
When Yahweh created non-human higher animals or mammals, both male and female genders were created; but when it came to creating human, Yahweh had a different scheme.
Genesis 1:26-27–And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness… So the original plan is making a hermaphrodite human species capable of self-fertilisation or same gender sex.
Genesis 2:7–And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
When Yahweh created human, Eve OBVIOUSLY was NOT part of the original plan.
Now something went very WRONG:
Genesis 2:20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.
Apparently Adam was looking for a sex mate/’helper’ among the animals(male or female).
The Original Sin of Man had nothing to do with that piece of apple(from the tree of knowing good and evil). Obviously the Original Sin WAS bestial lust if not the actual act of bestiality. What your pastors told you about the original sin is WRONG !!
Part 2: RESCUE PLAN B or the cloning of Eve
Genesis 2:21 And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
Genesis 2:22 And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
Genesis 2:23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
Genesis 2:24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
….
Because the bio-engineering experiment of Yahweh the powerful extra-terrestrial went terribly wrong and Eve was created to salvage the project. The creation of Eve was likely delegated to Lucifer, an obvious female member of Yahweh’s pantheon. An alternative possibility was that Yahweh’s grand hermaphrodite plan(like Adam with bulging breasts capable of milking, phallus plus a posterior cavity doubled as both digestive exit and birth canal) was sabotaged by Lucifer the radical feminist.
Project ADAM part C—JESUS the ‘Son’ of God
Jesus, the Son of God and was obviously a result of cloning(or self-splitting from the entity of Yahweh)and growth inside the womb chamber of Virgin Mary without hetero interaction with the latter. There’s no confirmed heterosexual record of Jesus. Jesus was finally the ‘successful’ conclusion of Project ADAM
Other evidences regarding the original intended biological attributes of man:
— Males also have nipples(like all other mammals), ie according to Yahweh’s original grand plan, males should also be able to breast feed new borns
— Male prostate glands enable male to male sex (otherwise why can’t the prostate gland be placed away from the rectum ?)
— Roman Catholic priests are forbidden to engage in heterosex but a significant % are homos. Those priests are servant of Yahweh and thus act the way Yahweh intends for them.
— There’s no anti-queer 11th Commandment that goes “Thou shalt not comfort thy staff with thy rod ”
Final Conclusion:
1)Homos are true (but unconscious) followers of Yahweh
2)Heteros and (anti-trans)feminists are (unconscious) followers of Lucifer.
(Lucifer is not an ugly male with horns as Christian preachers want you to believe; rather most likely a winged naked humanoid seductress belle )
…………..
If God has a mouth, then he would have to eat. If God has legs, then he would have to walk. Also, if this is not some coincidence of convergent evolution, he would not have this form, if he has not followed same evolutionary path as humans – so in the past he would have been a single-cell organism, then something like a sea cucumber, then a tetrapod, then early monkey.
As our current form is not a co-incidence, but contains history of many of our earlier non-human ancestors. Moreover, with e.g. probable symbiogenesis of mitochondria – our form is a result even of very specific historical events like incorporation of other organisms.
Human form is not the most beautiful animal according to our own eyes, and basic aesthetic principles like symmetry.
If you think human form is especially beautiful, you can volunteer to join the nudist camp. The fact humans – living in warm countries – still invented clothes, and look better in clothes, is evidence of the general opinion.
In the case of artists, it’s actually easier (needs less talent) to portray a beautiful animal, than the human nude. You only have to look at Franz Marc. On the other hand, the beautiful nude – I don’t think some artists like Titian has achieved this even when the subjects are all young women (sexually attractive perhaps, but not objective beauty).
Michelangelo sculpture can express heroic figures, emotions, culture, history and stories, which is only possible when you portray humans.
If we were not great apes, but a race of intelligent cats, in feline society, then our sculptures would include heroic cats, mythical cats, etc.
If you are going to tell me something about Indra or Zeus.
Important and mysterious thing is consciousness.
Having opinions, or reflecting about things, is more content than form – and it can be more like mental clutter or distraction, which we experience like a voice in our mind. You can quiet the voice in your mind, and experience consciousness without this layer, and you are still just as conscious and appreciative, sometimes more.
When you are not having opinions and thoughts about what you are doing, you are sometimes more in the flow and appreciating the world.
As for animals – they can sometimes appreciate better than humans, depending on the situation. For example, you might have so many worries, you do see it is a sunny day. Meanwhile, your cat might next to the window, appreciating every moment.
As we have little knowledge how consciousness is generated, this could be possible, if evidence was only limited to looking at similarity of the brains (although the similarity of other mammals’ brains and human brains, would be evidence that they are probably having a very similar experience).
But we also have holistic experience of animals – even just your cat or dog – and from that you know they have the “spark” of consciousness, and a lot of similar emotions. Any cat owners, know how they experience being curious, bored, annoyed, etc.
This might be useful in well organized societies like America (or Switzerland, Germany, etc), where there is possibly some correspondence of peoples’ talent and their career position, including with public servants.
But in a lot of countries, you can have a lot of very bad people in high positions, especially government positions which attracts a particular kind of trash to enter.
In this case, a negative public perception of their limousines, is one of the ways you might try to reduce an amount of money they will waste and steal. And when such officials start counter-signalling about going to work in the trolleybus, you know at least their public persona has some aspirations to civilized behaviour (even though it is probably because only their wife has the Porsche Cayenne for a shopping trip).
Does that invalidate the point?
He showed the way for future. Talented, often noble men leading soldiers of peasant background. Peasants under the command of Zizka thrashed feudal, knight-heavy opponents.
Heavy cavalry is a military concept, a battlefield role.
Knight is a social class. Men-at-arms would actually be a more precise designation for the plate armoured, barded horse-riding cavarly designed to frontally engage the opposing army in high/late Medieval/early Modern period.
Also, Polish hussars were heavy cavalry in their period – but would be light cavalry, equipment-wise in 14th, 15th, early 16th century.
English Heavy Horse were unarmoured during Napoleonic wars. Most of heavy cavalry was unarmoured for a long time by then. Napoleon actually reintroduced cuirasses and helmets for distinguished regiments.
They were part of his combined arms army model, but artillery was even then the most important. Cavalry, dominated by men-at-arms of knightly class dominated medieval warfare until they were proven to be inferior to mass infantry, pikes and field fortifications, not to mention not cost-effective.
Most government employees of the surveillance state and most judges, lawyers, university law professors, and all elected officials have proven to be functionally illiterate.
The law is abundandtly clear. The constitution and its amendments are the supreme law of the land. Any act signed which violates any article of the constitution, including its amendments, is an act of treason for causing injury to the sovereign, We The People.
Even in the 1986 Electronic Surveillance act, it clearly states that the surveillance must be in accordance with the law. It also specifically prohibits anyone from using surveillance for financial or personal gain for their own advancement.
John Kirakou recently stated that at that time, in 1986, that individuals in the intelligence community construed it to limit the surveillance to individuals with green cards,( provided that there was in fact a valid case for the FISA warrant to begin with, I would hope.)
Personally speaking, if someone is here on a green card, they know many people, work for citizens and with citizens, may be in romantic relationships with citizens, and have citizens as customers that could all be swept up into a giant surveillance net, all who would be totally innocemt of any wrong doing, and subjected to years, decades, or lifetimes of illegal surveillance, snooping, and black bag jobs.
Was this to obtain knowledge of foreign countries? It seems to be the case. It is just snooping, a witch hunt, and it is in clear violation of all civil liberties in America, which have been spelled out in the amendments, and is also in total violation of anti-stalking laws, and in violation of harrassment laws, and in violation of sex offender laws, and in violation of intellectual property theft laws, and in violation of Federal RICO Laws, and in violation of intimidation laws.
Government agents conducting illegal surveillance are not entitled to the protections of sworn secrecy of their illegal investigations. These are illegal investigations, and the criminals must be exposed to the public for posing a grave, clear, and present danger to Americans.
Most government employees of the surveillance state and most judges, lawyers, university law professors, and all elected officials have proven to be functionally illiterate.
The law is abundandtly clear. The constitution and its amendments are the supreme law of the land. Any act signed which violates any article of the constitution, including its amendments, is an act of treason for causing injury to the sovereign, We The People.
Even in the 1986 Electronic Surveillance act, it clearly states that the surveillance must be in accordance with the law. It also specifically prohibits anyone from using surveillance for financial or personal gain for their own advancement.
John Kirakou recently stated that at that time, in 1986, that individuals in the intelligence community construed it to limit the surveillance to individuals with green cards,( provided that there was in fact a valid case for the FISA warrant to begin with, I would hope.)
Personally speaking, if someone is here on a green card, they know many people, work for citizens and with citizens, may be in romantic relationships with citizens, and have citizens as customers that could all be swept up into a giant surveillance net, all who would be totally innocemt of any wrong doing, and subjected to years, decades, or lifetimes of illegal surveillance, snooping, and black bag jobs.
Was this to obtain knowledge of foreign countries? It seems to be the case. It is just snooping, a witch hunt, and it is in clear violation of all civil liberties in America, which have been spelled out in the amendments, and is also in total violation of anti-stalking laws, and in violation of harrassment laws, and in violation of sex offender laws, and in violation of intellectual property theft laws, and in violation of Federal RICO Laws, and in violation of intimidation laws.
Government agents conducting illegal surveillance are not entitled to the protections of sworn secrecy of their illegal investigations. These are illegal investigations, and the criminals must be exposed to the public for posing a grave, clear, and present danger to Americans.
Let me repeat: Zizka was a low-level ‘zeman‘ – zeman for your information is the lowest level of nobility – you don’t seem to know that, thus your silly diatribe arguing with yourself. He was also a soldier, but he was not what most people would call an aristocracy. But neither did anyone claim that he was a ‘commoner’. He was a ‘zeman’, look it up.
Zizka’s effective fighting technique against charging knights on horses was based on a simple insight: horses are more vulnerable than people. The same insight Swiss peasants had, and disciplined infantry everywhere. My point stands, cavalry was mostly useless, and mostly for show, other than mobility. With a determined enemy they had no chance.
As so often, you again stepped in it…
I agree, but I would add that based on historical data, the steppe nomads had one advantage over their enemies – willingness to die. They were in a way already dead when on these long plundering raids – they left their tribes, their society. Almost none ever returned. And almost none among the rank and file left any descendants.
What is missing is the extent to which these were basically forced suicide missions, they caused enormous damage to the attacked civilised lands, but there was almost no benefit for the raiders. Other than for some of their elite leadership who took care of themselves.
For your information he also grew up at the court of the German king Wenceslas and held the office of Chamberlain to Queen Sofia of Bavaria.
So in your world a nobleman who grew up in the king’s court and served as Chamberlain was not an “aristocracy.”
You described him simply as: “Zizka was a low-level ‘zeman’ with no property.”
Growing up in the king’s court and serving as Chamberlain is not “low level.”
You lied when you claimed that “Hussites beat noble cavalry again and again by simply sticking sharpened sticks against horses from peasant wagons.”
When in reality, the Hussite leader Zizka, a nobleman, designed a sophisticated system in which artillery (and cavalry) played a central role.
Britannica:
“Žižka revolutionized warfare through the introduction of cannon mounted on mobile, armoured farm wagons. He was one of the first commanders to handle infantry, cavalry, and artillery as one tactical body.”
So no, Hussites did not “beat noble cavalry again and again by simply sticking sharpened sticks against horses from peasant wagons.”
Projection.
His point, yes.
Wiki conveniently lists the Hussite commanders and links to their bios. I looked up the first ones:
Jan Žižka
Prokop the Great †
Prokop the Lesser †
Jan Želivský
Jan Čapek of Sány
Diviš Bořek of Miletínek (1420–23)
Hynek Krušina of Lichtenburg
Jakoubek of Vřesovice
Jan Roháč of Dubá
Bohuslav von Schwanberg (1422–25) †
Čeněk of Wartenberg
Sigismund Korybut
Two were priests, all the rest were noblemen (a third priest was from a prominent family). Some were of modest noble background, others were not (Korybut was a Duke). But not a single commoner amongst them.
Furthermore, it appears that many of the Hussite troops were city-dwellers.
So Hussite rebellion was not a peasant uprising. It was mostly nobles, a few priests, organizing and leading a mix of city-dwellers and peasants.
You are a smart person pretending to be dumb to make a joke.
http://www.sourozh.org/orthodox-faith-texts/image-and-likeness.html
The theme of image and likeness is central to Christian anthropology: to a greater or lesser extent it was addressed by nearly all early church writers. The Fathers of the Church usually equated ‘the image of God’ to the rational and spiritual nature of the human person. ‘What is after the image if not our intellect?’ asks St John of Damascus. ‘We are created in the image of the Maker, we possess reason and the faculty of speech, which comprise the perfection of our nature’, writes St Basil the Great.
‘The image of God’ has been understood by some Fathers as our free will and self-determination. ‘When God in His supernal goodness creates each soul in His own image, He brings it into being endowed with self-determination’, says St Maximus the Confessor. God created the person absolutely free: in His love He wishes to force him neither into good nor evil. In return, He does not expect from us blind obedience but love. It is only in our being free that we can be assimilated to God through love for Him.
Other Fathers identified as ‘the image of God’ the human person’s immortality, his dominant position in the world and his striving towards good.
We do not conceal ourselves in order to hide ugliness but out of modesty.
The New Testament is practically unique in that it is a collection of eyewitness accounts. Stories about Zeus, or from Old Testament, are not.
Mindfulness (what you describe in humans) is not mindlessness (animal flow).
If the voice in your mind is not quieted, but rather never existed in the first place, and will never come back (because there is nothing to come back), you are not a conscious being.
Other mammals have nearly identical limbic system (where emotions come from) but radically different, smaller cortex (associated with consciousness). So we can infer that mammals experience love, rage, fear but are incapable of thinking, reflecting, morality, etc.
To talk about more “serious” American politics – I just read… https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7412675/Donald-Trump-fired-personal-assistant-said-thinks-Tiffany-OVERWEIGHT.html
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/08/30/04/17859508-7409637-image-a-2_1567135109173.jpg
“Donald Trump fired personal assistant Madeleine Westerhout (right) because she told reporters he thinks his daughter Tiffany is overweight and does not want to be photographed with her”
“Trump thinks his daughter is overweight and he does not want to be in photos with her”
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/11/26/22/21505498-7728695-image-a-84_1574805618407.jpg
Putin defended Iran’s right to defend itself, and has stated that Iran’s de-escalation of the JCPOA agreement are in accordance with the agreement, and are not a violation of international law. Most countries are siding with Iran on this issue. E.U. countries are considering taking actions against Iran for de-escalating the JCPOA, precipitated by the illegal U.S. withdrawl of the JCPOA, and the illegal actions taken against Iran by E.U. countries.
China and Russia may end up exercisng veto power at the U.N. if E.U. countries attempt to sanction Iran.
The United States and E.U. countries want Iran to live up to its side of the agreement, while the United States and E.U. countries do not live up to their side of the agreement.
Iran is in accordance with international law and has been notifying the IAEA of all changes and has been cooperating with the IAEA.
https://en.mehrnews.com/news/153528/Russia-backs-Iran-for-responding-to-US-JCPOA-withdrawal
Reports are coming that Gazprom’s European contractors suspended their work on Nord Stream 2. All it took one strongly worded statement from US treasury. Russian state media claim that Gazprom can finish pipeline without European contractors. Supposedly, it has a Chinese-build vessel that can do the job. I hope they’re right. But I marvel at the idiocy of this situation. A year ago US sanctions on NS2 would definitely kill it. With so much money at stake, you would expect both US and Russian officials to take their jobs more seriously.
The Y chromosome has roughly one bit of information: whether to execute the male or female “program,” both stored in the other chromosomes. Besides that one bit, the Y chromosome stores basically no information, except a few unimportant things like the hairiness of the inside of your ears (or lack thereof).
They employed field artillery (small cannons) and primitive muskets, attached to armored wagons, which was one of the most innovative tactic (or technology) in the history of warfare, and also a portent of things to come. The difference being that in the early 15th century it took a military genius to achieve this, whereas in later centuries everyone started employing such methods, gradually eroding the advantages well-trained heavy cavalry enjoyed over masses of untrained infantry. What Zizkra did would’ve been impossible before the advent of firearms. Which was the original point. But we can also infer that jacqueries were militarily impotent well into early modernity. In fact, the last such jacquerie in Romania, was put down by better trained soldiers (with a few months of training each) with relative ease as late as the early 20th century. Untrained peasants didn’t make formidable enemies, though with the advent of firearms relatively short periods of training made them effective soldiers. Of course, in the High Middle Ages and earlier there were no firearms. That was when being a trained cavalryman provided one with enormous military advantages.
Effective soldiers needed years of training prior to mass usage of firearms. And as you note, even then they needed effective leadership from better trained officers.
That was not a big advantage, as they were also pretty unwilling to die, and their opponents were no cowards either.
It’s still your brain which feels so. These special states of mind might be easiest to simulate, though. But they are just a very small part of the human experience.
I was not cynical at all.
I was responding to an insane commenter who literally proposed that humanity deserves to be exterminated for behaving like the rest of life (i.e. killing other life forms when it suits it) – but then why is it bad to kill other life forms, which are similarly motivated, as humans, albeit way less successful in it? Not that there’s any logic to such insanity.
And Mars is just a piece of rock, there’s nothing to destroy. If there were regularly tourists visiting it, then perhaps you could say that the beautiful scenery was destroyed by humans terraforming it or building industrial outposts etc., but that’s not the case. Right now the choice is between no-one ever seeing that scenery, or humans going there and perhaps eliminating it entirely. I fail to see why the latter is worse than the former.
Unfortunately, the previous mayor, István Tarlós, was a car person. He only drove his own car, and kept complaining about changes to traffic lights which gave preference to trams over cars on one of the main boulevards of the city. (Trams there, of course, transport something like ten times the people cars do, and I’d say that unless you have a really compelling reason to go there by car, or you are lost, you must be truly an idiot if you drive there.) He then went on to sack the highly competent chief of public transportation (earlier appointed by himself despite his own personal distaste for him – the public transport chief was related to the in-laws of Orbán), after which all development in the public transit system (many of them costing no money, just a bit of effort) ground to a halt. This was probably a major reason for Tarlós losing the election and this despicable liberal being elected.
So it seems that someone who drives (or is being driven) is not going to be very good at leading the city. We need to find based right-wing SWPLs to run a big city, or else it will be a very badly run city (and it will quickly fall to despicable liberals).
Do you not know, Felix, with how little wisdom the world is governed?
Anyone supporting mass immigration is not and cannot be a “hero on climate change.” But your takes have grown increasingly insane in the most literal sense of the word, so, whatever.
I’ve read that cities like Budapest and Prague are ethnically far more Germanic than the majority of those countries as a whole, which makes me think maybe there is an ethnic reason to those cities being more left wing?
Perhaps on an ethnic level Germanics simply have a greater tendency to be left wingers than Slavs and Hungarians do?
Christmas is around the corner so it’s time to elevate the spiritual tenor
of this thread. People here seem to be primarily cynical materialists (or even
nihilists) with a small minority of religious traditionalists. This is neither.
I don’t care, I don’t post here to please anyone.
The spiritual model I’m about to present was developed by a group of people
in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1980s. The model has become popular
in the spiritual circles in the U.S. in the last few decades. Much more
sophisticated models of the evolution of consciousness were developed
by transpersonal thinkers such as Ken Wilber (forget your Hegel and your
Schopenhauer, read Wilber – America’s most translated philosopher) and
Michael Washburn but that’s a topic for another post. The present model
is relatively painless to learn and has profound political implications.
About 25% of the people in North America and Europe believe in reincarnation,
more Catholics than Protestants. Lithuania holds the record in Europe – 44%.
There is no agreement as to the number of lives a typical soul living today
has gone through but it’s usually described as thousands. This is an optimistic
model – spiritual progress is very slow but eventually everyone becomes
enlightened. In fact, the fact that the human life is too short to elevate
ourselves spiritually is a strong argument in favor of reincarnation, assuming
that the Universe is a spiritual school – in each life we are supposed to
complete certain lessons until we finally graduate. Many people believe
in that now. That’s why “A Course in Miracles” is called a course – because
we are in school here (to be continued)
In the case of Budapest, it was more German than the rest of the country in the 19th century, but I’m not sure if it’s still true. The majority of Germans in Hungary were rural, and those areas are usually Fidesz strongholds. Though it might be a retarded legacy of the Second World War, at the end of which the majority of the Germans were deported by the government installed by the Soviets.
Anyway, if there’s an ethnic component, it must be the presence of large numbers of Jews. Some part of it is structural, though: big cities attract homosexuals and other other degenerates, younger people, who tend to vote left, or simply more educated or higher IQ people, who also tend to vote left.
Just thought about it. Both Buda and Pest were fully German in the early 19th century, but as its population exploded something like twentyfold by the early decades of the 20th century, it cannot have much of an effect in the present. But Germans being more educated (even in the countryside) might mean a higher percentage among the influx of rural people, so yes, it might be somewhat more German than the rest of the country.
But it’s also way more Jewish than the rest of the country, so it’s likely way more important.
(cont.)
Soul Ages:
Infant souls
They usually choose lives in primitive conditions or cultures that stress
basic survival, often in equatorial regions. They experience lives as physically
intense, chaotic, primitive as opposed to refined. As ego defenses are weak
at this stage, they are often strongly psychic. They share this with animals.
It is well known that elephants can sense the coming of a tsunami, and survive
by moving to a higher elevation while “civilized” people perish.
The focus is on the body: how to use it, how to care for it, how to find food, etc.
They don’t open themselves emotionally because their emotional natures are
not yet fully developed.
Baby souls
They develop and maintain the basic structures and order of society: government,
law, organized religions, etc. They like their lives to be structured and look to
authority to tell them what is right and what is wrong. They tend to be obsessive
about order and cleanliness. Society at this stage is rigid and has strict hierarchies
of authority, incl. castes. Non-conformists are punished or ostracized. This is the stage
of ancient empires like the Roman Empire. Organized religions like Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam were founded during this era. Controlling one’s instinctual
behavior, such as eating, bathing, sleeping, aggression, and sexuality become of utmost
importance. Unlike in the infant stage, the emphasis is on group survival rather
than individual survival.
Young souls
They are the ones most highly motivated toward individual success, money,
power, fame, and status, and will put in 60-70 hour weeks for years to
achieve it. There is an acknowledgement of the other person, yet it is competitive
in nature: they are often ruthless in seeking power and dominance in
relationships. They can be good at what they do but they tend to pursue fame,
wealth or power at any price. They are heavily identified with their bodies and
their egos. In matters of sex they often subscribe to “love ‘em and leave ‘em”
philosophy. They are also the most skeptical when confronted with any experience
beyond what has been subjected to “scientific” proof. Young souls usually do not
concern themselves with mystical or religious experience. Their motto is
“what you own is what you are,” – they worship Moloch. On the positive
side, they are productive, industrious, and innovative. As followers of secular
Calvinism, they often feel blessed and favored by God because of their material
success. The United States and many countries in Europe are currently in the
late Young stage, and are experiencing a lot of turmoil as they refuse to transition
to the Mature stage, falsely believing that material success is all there is to life
whereas in fact this is still a very elementary stage in our evolution.
(to be continued)
That is untrue. Y-chromosome has fewer protein-coding genes than others, but it houses 50-60 genes, many of which are biologically important. You can look it up here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC79676/
Or here with further references: https://www.genome.gov/27557513/the-y-chromosome-beyond-gender-determination
Very disappointing move by Russia.
What is the Kremlin thinking? Do they just accept a defeat like this? So easily?
Full details of new transit agreement have been made public, and it looks like utter rout of Russia and Gazprom:
1. Gazprom will pay its “debt” in cash before Dec. 29 in exchange for Ukrainians promising not to sue it again
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-ukraine-gas-details-idUSKBN1YP081?
This is just feminist propaganda. It is one step away from trans propaganda.
This is what happens when you behave like a gas station, and not a real country. Conflict with the Ukraine was going to disrupt Gazprom’s export plans. In some alternative universe where Russian policy was governed by national interest, transit would cease back in 2014.
(cont.)
Mature souls
They have learned how to handle issues of success and authority, and now are
reaching the point where they begin to open themselves to emotional issues. They
are less egocentric and orient themselves toward others. They feel that their
relationships with others are more important than personal success or career,
although this can be a stage of great creativity in art, literature, and science.
However, at this juncture there is also growing disillusionment with science
and technology as they are seen to be associated with environmental degradation,
extinction of the species, and war. Germanic countries which are widely perceived
as having worshipped science and technology too much now go into relative decline.
Slavic countries, widely seen as the most spiritual of European countries, now
come into their own.
At the Mature stage the boundaries that separate people begin to break down and
they start to see others as themselves. Often, however, Mature souls will give
themselves lives of emotional turmoil and drama in order to open up emotionally.
At this stage one finds the worst incidents of drug abuse, alcoholism, suicide, and
chronic illness. One reason is that they experience life more acutely; hence, alcohol
and drugs are used as an anesthetic, effectively to blunt their emotional sensitivity.
This is also the stage that is devoted to the full development of conscience, compassion,
and the ability to be emotionally connected, fulfilled, and to give and receive love.
Peaks of romantic love are reached at this stage, including unrequited love, often
resulting in misery. Women finally come into their own and begin to eclipse men
in many endeavors. Mature souls tend to be more introverted and more self-aware.
They enlarge their circle of concern in that friendships become as important as
family ties.
(to be continued)
Does fat-shaming have a point if someone is of childbearing-age and married? I mean the evolutionary thing you would want to be doing is popping out children, one after another.
And does it really mesh with human psychology? When I was a teenage boy, we used to bandy about a theory that every thin girl had a fat friend, to make herself prettier by comparison. But perhaps, there would be an elite of women, who scorn this strategy and want to show that they are elite by only having thin friends.
https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1207738431062892546
He’s right you know.
“Civil society” in the West will embrace surveillance to protect them from Russian meddling.
Earth deserts at least tend to have some life, even if it is very sparse. But when you get to Mars, the dirt literally is toxic, and that is before you add in other negative factors. It seems so bizarre an idea to be against altering Mars – consider that there billions of planets like Mars in the galaxy that will forever remain uninhabited. And that is just in the galaxy, not in the universe.
Even if we dug deep on Mars and found some unicellular organism, or worm, I would still say colonize it.
(cont.)
Early- to mid-Old souls
They try to integrate and balance all the lessons learned in the previous
lifetimes. They tend to be multi-talented and creative, and are attracted to
teaching, often simply by being an example to others. This partly elucidates
the decline of genius we are experiencing now – genius level minds, rather
than being multi-talented, are typically obsessively focused on one narrow discipline.
This is the stage devoted to spiritual development and an investigation of
various spiritual teachings rather than a commitment to a traditional
religion. On deep inner levels Old souls perceive the interrelatedness existing
among all people – in fact they perceive everything as interconnected. As a result,
they begin to have many synchronistic (i.e., involving meaningful coincidences,
as defined by Carl Jung) and mystical experiences. They also often have a deep
sense of being guided and protected. Old souls tend to be open-minded and
non-judgmental, but at the same time intensely perceptive. They have well-
rounded personalities: men tend to have well-developed feminine sides and
women masculine sides. They tend to flow with life as it happens, as opposed
to resisting it and fighting it. They may have problems with self-esteem,
especially when surrounded by a materialistic culture, as they often take a long
time to decide what they really want to do with their lives, and hence sometimes
remain poor by choice.
They are more sensuous than sexual, and may spend some time celibate and
unattached. For Old souls, learning agape (i.e., universal, unconditional love)
becomes a higher priority than romantic love. As they generally drop ego
defenses, they begin to experience deep joy, peace, inner strength, and love
arising from within. Advanced Old souls often exhibit great creativity,
prophetic vision, saintly compassion, and mystical illumination. The further
reaches of human nature, or what amounts to spiritual transhumanism,
deserve a separate post and will be addressed later.
(to be continued)
What would you rather look at, a perfectly-groomed sheepdog, or a beautiful college girl?
This is a good point, it probably has something to do with the uncanny valley. We are probably better evolved to judge the symmetry of other humans. I know two women “artists” who create very creepy portraits, and everyone is too nice to tell them.
Of course, mammals are covered in fur so that helps. Another thing is that a lot of animals we interact with, whether wild or domestic, just aren’t that old. I know two 11 y.o. dogs, and they have all sorts of asymmetries from being old.
Have you ever seen pictures of “Oliver, the humanzee?” “Humanzee” comes from the false idea that he was a human-chimp hybrid. Anyway, to my eye, he was very ugly. I am not sure, if it is because a chimp face is near enough to a human one – or because chimps have a lot of genetic diversity.
The Eastern Church instructs people to get started on the road to deification. The end goal is to unite with God’s energies and become a “god” and live eternally in a state of bliss and complete fulfillment. Deification has this to say about our likeness to God’s image:
http://orthodoxinfo.com/general/theosis.aspx
I don’t think that anybody can find a higher anthropological basis for human existence in any other earthly philosophy that offers more than this?…
Huh, it is for me. Bestiality much?
If I could pick the people surrounding me based on their aesthetics and personality…
Tropical tribals are… a different (sub)species.
Most people are prettier in clothes because clothes are designed in a way to cover defects, flaws. In case of physically attractive and genetically fortunate, toned people, clothes need not to serve that purpose.
Why? Why should much information be on the Y chromosome?
Or deeply religious, which is surely the commonest way.
Humans have something like over 20,000 genes, for 23 pairs of chromosomes. The X chromosome contains some 10% of it (so, something like 2,000 genes), but the typical chromosome will contain something like 800-1,000 genes.
Compare that to the less than 100 genes for the Y chromosome: less than 10% of a “normal” chromosome. By far the most important of those is the 1 bit of information whether to implement the “male” or the “female” program (and only one of them), which are basically 100% stored on those other chromosomes. (Including probably the X chromosome, I guess.)
But yeah, you are correct that there is some information other than the 1 bit information about maleness and the gene about the hairiness of the inside of the ears.
Wouldn’t this hurt the Eastern Ukrainians more then the Western ones?
Do Autists Dream of Electric Sheepdogs?
This debt amounts to a year’s worth of transit fees. A good deal, indeed.
Somewhere Beckow is crying right now.
Any destabilization of Eastern Ukraine would hurt the regime’s hold over this territory.
Donbass in particular would benefit from not having to fight Ukrainian army, as there would be no money to finance Ukrainian army.
There are next to no reliable surveys on this question, and I very much doubt the countries of Tanzania and Nigeria are at the forefront of modern science.
All modern evidence is that national differences in “endowment” are very slight. Unlike with intelligence, the interest here is not the tail effects, but the differences between average men, which must be very modest.
It’s an extremely generous giveaway. If I didn’t know better I would call it a bribe to president Zelensky. (there is probably no ХПП here, and it’s just a giveaway)
Tiffany Trump is overweight. She needs to move away from the carbs.
Or just because they eventually come around to put up with everything.
We have no reason to think that those differences are slight. We have some reasons to suspect the opposite. There are significant differences between any two races in a whole host of physical and psychological parameters, why would penis size be an exception? There are also stereotypes, which everyone knows are wrong, because stereotypes are always, invariably wrong, and only bad people like racists have ever believed in any stereotype whatsoever, but now that I said it, there are some reasons to think of stereotypes which might just prove to be true. Perhaps white people are really uniquely prone to evil and racism?
(cont.)
Geographic distribution of soul ages
Many people will find this controversial. Countries differ in their GDP
per capita, so there is no economic equality. It turns out there is no spiritual
equality either, at least in the level of awareness. But that’s like saying that
there is no equality between parents and children. Therefore, should the
parents feel superior to their children? Of course not. Some souls prefer
to take the scenic route, and move more slowly through the stages, etc.
But we all eventually reach Nirvana (or deification if you prefer the Christian
language).
Currently about 10% of souls are still traversing the Infant stage, 11% are Old,
and 32% (the largest number) are Young, according to the authors.
Europe:
Some of the world’s most advanced souls are born in the strip containing
Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Belarus, and covering mid- to northern section
of European Russia. They are late Mature with pockets of early Old souls. In other
words, I am speaking of northern Slavs. Some of the largest pockets of Old
souls are in Czechia.
Bulgaria – Baby; Romania – Baby; Ukraine – Baby and early Mature, few Young.
Albania – Baby. Greece – Baby and early Mature. Former Yugoslavia – generally
mid-Mature; Sweden – mid- Mature.
Britain – early Mature; France – late Young, early Mature; Germany – late Young,
early Mature. Thus Britain, France, and Germany are not as advanced as the
northern Slavs, which has created a lot of problems in the past.
Holland is a small pocket of early Old souls.
Ireland – late Baby, early Young.
Spain – Young; Portugal – late Baby; Italy – late Mature.
North America
United States – late Young, early Mature; Canada – mid-Young;
Mexico – Baby and early Mature with pockets of Old souls.
Middle East:
Israel – mid-Young. Thus spiritually Israel is not as advanced as
Europe or the U.S. Israel is mostly surrounded by Baby soul countries,
except Saudi Arabia which is late Young, and Egypt – Baby and early
Mature.
Africa:
Nigeria and most countries in central Africa – Baby
Asia:
India – late Baby, early Young (with pockets of Old souls)
China – late Young, early Mature
Japan- mid-Young (with pockets of late Baby souls in some urban areas). Japan
is surprisingly not particularly advanced but mid-Young is the most competitive
stage which fits Japan’s image.
A few individuals:
Hitler – late Baby; Mussolini – mid Baby. Baby souls are so immature for our era
that in order to thrive (at least for awhile), they have to become sociopaths, and
in this role they can do a lot of damage.
George Washington – mid-Old; Carl Jung – late Old; Mother Theresa – late Old.
Naftohaz is saying that this agreement does not cover loss of assets in Crimea for which it is preparing a lawsuit. It only covers the 7.4 billion Ukraine had been asking for.
If it were just a one-bit male program, there probably would not be such a large difference between the y-chromosome of men and other mammals. The Y in humans is 30% different from the Y in chimps. I believe this makes it more differentiated than other chromosomes, although chimps have 24 pairs, compared to our 23.
Current estimate I think is around 200 genes. Now men compete a lot with each other, and genes on the Y-Chromosome are always expressed, so it stands to reason that they are important.
But my main point is that the Y-chromosome is often spoken of in mocking, evidently politically-motivated language within an academic setting. To answer the question of how important it is, one need only ask: how important is man? Why are most of our geniuses men? Why are most inventions created by men? These are questions never asked in Biology 101 because they are un-PC.
It’s gonna be hard to make Gazprom liable for it as those assets are controlled by a local Crimean company. But this just shows complete lack of goodwill on the side of Ukrainian regime, and makes Putin’s behavior even harder to understand.
No. To answer that question, you need to know how many genes there are. The number is relatively small. The biggest thing is whether to execute the male or the female program.
Yes, it’s impossible to make a final agreement, because Ukraine has never accepted the annexation of Crimea, nor are they ever going to. So what’s the point? As long as they don’t accept it, they can always just pull yet another lawsuit out of their sleeves.
A stick of dynamite is relatively small, but it should not be called “puny” or “shriveled-up.” These are words I heard in college.
One wonders, was it all part of some mnemonic, to help remember that it was small? Or was it said as display? To mock men? Well, the college environment toady is pretty well-known. Though, I grant it might be somewhat different in EE.
Since you got me thinking, I will make another point about dogs:
Once I was walking with a dog in the woods and playing fetch with him, with a big, thick stick, such as many dogs prefer. In the process of my throw, the dog moved into my swing and I accidentally gave him a very powerful wack on the skull.
I was much amazed at the dog’s response to this: he didn’t jump back and cower or show anger or anything. Rather, I noticed that he glanced very quickly at my face, to I think read the symmetry there, to see if I were angry or not. But I emphasize it was a very quick glance.
This supports a theory that dogs are evolved to read human faces. IIRC, they are known to glance a little more to the rightside, were there is the stronger expression.
You are correct. Naftohaz may not sue Gazprom for this but will instead sue the Russian state.
This agreement may end claims upon Gazprom but not claims upon Russia.
It really doesn’t matter what they think: Ukrainian regime lacks freedom to reconcile with Russia. They’ve got US “envoys” like Kurt Volker warning them against any progress on Minsk agreements. This regime is simply a tool.
The Crimean claims are rather specific and independent of the issue of annexation itself; IIRC Naftohaz had nvested a lot in exploration for gas off the Crimean coast which is now lost; Russia also seized a bunch of Nafthaz oil rigs off the coast (some of which are not even that close to Crimea). Naftohaz feels that it is owed the cost of those facilities and the gas/oil that was pumped out of them. Altogether it’s about $5.2 billion dollars.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C9-EdZVWsAIDFKy.jpg
I think it’s like people getting offended at the term “quantum supremacy,” because “supremacy is evil” or something.
The people who think that it’s a big deal probably don’t understand it much. It doesn’t matter, the Y chromosome could be huge, or it could be small. Either way, the difference between males and females is huge, and humans are predominantly binary, that is to say, over 99.9% of cases, either male or female, with a few genetic conditions outside it (intersex people like Caster Semenya), who are obviously suffering from a genetic condition (and it’s a lie to call them “perfectly normal”).
So, now it turns out that I was partially wrong (the number of genes on the Y chromosome is higher, some of them important), but in terms of number of genes it’s still the smallest chromosome by far, and most of the male program is stored on the other chromosomes (probably including the X chromosome), except they only get expressed in the presence of the Y chromosome.
Nature is usually quite messy, I’d like a cleaner thing, like only 1 bit on the Y chromosome. But probably nature is better than my imagined clean version.
The Y chromosome controls the size of your dick. The size of the Y chromosome and the size of the dick are inversely proportional. Less you you have it more you have it.
There is something about the teenage girl sarc felietonism of Steve Sailer. Would you care to speculate about Steve Sailer dick size?
Another point I’d make about the Y-chromosome is that it is thought that we don’t have any Neanderthal Y-chromosomes today, which most likely means that human Ys were functionally better, more adapted to human physiology. So, the idea that is sometimes pushed in an academic setting, that the Y is like a fossil vestige seems obviously debunked.
My contention is not so much about the size. I acknowledge that it is relatively small. My contention is that there are alleles for at least some of these genes, and they might have behavioral implications, which are hard to understand, and this might be partly overlooked because of political considerations.
The way I view the “quantum supremacy” thing: these particular women genuinely have nothing to contribute to physics, so they are searching to make a splash with emotions. It is hard for me to believe that they are even actually offended, though my theory of mind for lesbians is pretty weak. Anyway, they stand no chance in changing the language. BTW, Nature is pretty pozzed these days, but I wonder if these three ever had their names in it before. I’d guess not.
That’s playing with fire, a massive conflict in the whole of Eastern Ukraine could easily spiral out into something larger
Kremlin boomers would never support such a plan
It’s unlikely the US will back regimes in Ukraine forever though
You don’t seem to realize what it means. It means very little. Male reproductive success varies enormously, and did so especially since the advent of agriculture. This means that Y chromosome variants in a given population tend to get wiped out and only a few of the lineages will dominate. By the way the same thing happens to mitochondrial DNA, albeit much slower. Again, it doesn’t have to be a particularly important part of our DNA (it isn’t), and most of the variation in the spread of certain lineages is either entirely random or simply due to other parts of the DNA.
The fact that given long enough time eventually in any given population all but one lineages will disappear for both the Y and mtDNA is simply an inevitable consequence of each human having exactly one mother and one father, but an enormous variation in the number of both male and female descendants, with many people having zero of one or the other (or both, but that’s not really necessary). I personally know a few families with three or more sons but no daughters, and I know at least one family with three daughters but no sons. Given long enough time, eventually all lineages but one would disappear.
Though the process with Y chromosomes often happened more quickly than that: the conquerors mated with the local women, but prevented the local men from reproduction. Such patterns are easy to observe, and naturally have nothing to do with the few genes on the Y chromosome.
Such is the nature of conquest. Hungary invested a lot into areas lost, for example the railway system was built up with several big railroads into the big cities and then a big circular railroad connecting the bigger cities. (Most of them with a Hungarian majority or plurality.) We lost all those cities and with them the railroad running usually a few tens of kilometers or less from the border, thus even today if you want to travel by train from one big city to another, you have to go through Budapest. (Railroad construction was also restricted in the peace treaty.)
Yes, now the greatest powers (the big winners of the previous wars, often started by themselves) have created an international system where borders cannot change (they won the tournament and now want to abolish future tournaments to keep the trophy forever), except if you are Serbia because then it just sucks. Overall, this is not a very bad system (there were worse ones in history), but it probably won’t last forever, not least because these winners are bending their own rules when they would be bad for them. It’s not possible to expect others to voluntarily stay in such a one-sided system, and so those strong enough to do so will break the rules, too. As the Russians have done.
It doesn’t change the fact that for Russia it makes little sense to cut any deals with Ukraine, because Ukraine will remain implacably hostile anyway. Though maybe in the specific cases there are some compelling reasons for the entities in question.
Ideally, Russia would make a move regarding Belarus and Ukraine (also, Balts) when USA and UK are unable or unwilling to react, and the Germans and French are placated in some way. Poles not being a nuclear and/or major economic power would not be relevant.
In my opinion, time is working in Russian favour at the moment. The West is getting weaker in global terms (China) and relative to Russia – primarily due to demography and loss of homogenity in NATO bloc.
In addition, the current government in Ukraine could and would make sure that any Russian hostile acts and blocades of Ukraine (gas, oil, trade) impact Russian and pro-Russian population segments the most.
So, stop your inner Ukrainian (Rus’) before you start screaming Zrada.
Talking about beauty, not sexual attractiveness. I.e. “Venice has more beautiful buildings than in Bratsk” – doesn’t mean you should be attracted sexually (unless perhaps under some strange drug or mental illness) to Doge’s Palace.
Emerald butterfly is more beautiful than a moth, but it would require incredible brain injury for anyone to be sexually attracted by such beauty.
–
If man is formed in the image of god, it is strange that a god should be so morphically ugly that it resembles one of the less beautiful order of mammals – primates.
Perhaps “God created man in his image”, has a less literal interpretation, referring to human consciousness or intelligence?
But there is just embarrassing hubris, in a directly Greek sense of this word – why would God’s mind resemble a clever ape, and not be vastly higher of qualitative type.
Alternatively, it could be like a non-exclusionary claim which refers to all consciousness. This is how I would interpret it, if I believed sentences of Bible are literally true, rather than what they are -poetry and mythology. But then in this interpretation is also a little too vacuous and “newage” (the idea that God is consciousness).
Reality is that people who wrote paragraph in the Genesis were likely trying to imply that god has a human image.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+1%3A26-28&version=NIV
Genesis is an Iron Age text, which was written up 1000 BC, so earlier than Hesiod’s Theogony, in which Gods are a crazy version of a human family, constantly killing their parents.
I doubt they had such a radically different idea than the Greeks when they wrote this paragraph in a slightly further East part of the Mediterranean coast. This concept of god and gods with human form is a common feature of Iron Age civilization even as far East as Ancient India.
Sure, but even those of us who attractive and genetically fortunate – it’s only for a small minority of life, 1/4 of your life if you are lucky.
Ancient Greeks were culturally distinctive in their nudity (and self-concious that public nudity was a special Greek thing, which barbarians did not like), they even they only focused on nudity of young and ideal athletes.
And when you contemplate at least something like Elgin Marbles, my impression is this was also highly martial idealization of nude body. In an epoch of phalanx war, physical fitness of men in your city, is also partly equivalent to looking at a air force or tank parade in this century.
Aside from only a minority of the population become more attractive without clothes than with clothes (most of the people living your city will look bad without clothes – go to a nudist village), the attraction is more sexual than aesthetic (i.e. based on universals ratios, or symmetries).
Most attractive thing of women’s body, are dimorphic traits: natural breasts, wide hips. Similarly for a female elephant seal, the most attractive thing of a male elephant seal is its dimorphic trait: size.
Fact we are sexually attracted to breasts and wide hips (and a female elephant seal is sexually attracted to size), does not mean dimorphic traits are beautiful in an artistic or disinterested aesthetic sense. Breasts and wide hips are attractive just for practical reasons, because it indicates ability to raise children – and wide hips are especially necessary for childbirth in our species; babies have the largest heads of all mammals, and human birth is extremely delicate.
https://i.imgur.com/E1Ks0z2.jpg
It’s a possible explanation, but it is more the body which is difficult to portray in an attractive way, in two-dimensions, than the face.
Titian’s women – for example (obviously his models were attractive, but the end result is not beautiful in a non-sexual sense):
https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/437826/796447/main-image
When nude body is presented less sexually, it becomes more difficult: for example, in genre of Adam and Eve in European art.
Rubens
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Peter_Paul_Rubens_004.jpg
Durer
http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/Images/110images/sl10images/Hugo_Fall.jpg
Cranach
https://previews.magnoliabox.com/corbis/mb_hero/42-28945693/MUS-FAPC1114_850.jpg
Even Michelangelo (Sistine Chapel)
https://assets.atlasobscura.com/article_images/60523/image.jpg
It’s only when there is a very sexual interpretation (for example, by 19th pre-Raphaelite artists) that Eve starts to look good.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a0/b6/da/a0b6da4f812c9c21560138292f9eeafa.jpg
Another thing, although it’s the opposite for dogs (which are uglier than wolves) – we have eugenically bred certain animals for beauty.
So the modern horse, is far more beautiful than the ape riding on it (fortunately with clothes)
https://i.imgur.com/BGRMkgN.jpg
But the wild horse ancestors, were not so beautiful.
https://i.imgur.com/UKzO5Hr.jpg
It allows you to see the similar of humans to chimpanzees, which we usually are too inhibited even to think about.
Have you ever smoked a lot of cannabis and viewed television?
You can have a similar effect watching a trashy show (the kind of show when people are shouting at each other in a studio), you might occasionally be able to perceive it as a crowd of apes. It’s similar to the shift of perspective in an optical illusion. Fortunately for our sanity, we usually can’t perceive ourselves as similar to apes.
Yes, you were generally right. The agreement has quite a few points, but basically it appears to be driven exclusively by money. It appears that Gasprom calculated what it would pay in breach of contract fines to various European countries and decided that this agreement is cheaper. As if Russia is a corporation with characteristic myopic corporate outlook: next quarter share price passes for long-term planning.
If even I feel that Putin conceded too much, I am sure many people living in Russia will be furious. I guess for the first time since 2014 Putin’s approval rating will drop below 50%, closer to the range normal for “democratic” leaders. It is beginning to look like it’s high time for him to retire. I wonder what will happen in Russia when he loses the support he had. Every alternative politician has significantly lower approval. But someone must be president or wield real power, no matter under which title. Who do you think is capable?
Most. So, what you are saying is that the contribution of the Y-chromosome to sex selection and male mating success is non-zero, ie. that it is important – I guess that we are in agreement here. That is my main point.
The source of our disagreement seems to be that you are using “small” as a synonym with “unimportant.” I grant that it may be possible to do this within some contexts, but it does not lend itself well to genetics.
For a gene, the test of importance is, can you do without it? If the mitochondrial genome were unimportant, there would not be so many copies of it within a cell – it would not be the forensic goto.
Mitochondria is a very good example because it is so small, but mitochondrial haplotypes are actually quite important. They relate to metabolism, to body-heat production, to disease load. And all that is in a small space – there are actually relatively few mitochondrial haplotypes, compared to Y ones, (at least when you do precise sequencing). Reason is there is only so much space for functional mutations, but you still get all these functional differences – different phenotypes.
Just to give one example, I’m sure that the mitochondria you’d find in Eskimos isn’t random. And I wouldn’t be surprised if HIV is changing mitochondrial frequencies in Africa – at least in the absence of intervention.
Disagree. When the Ukrainian state has money, it gets stolen by Ukrainian officials and their American superiors. There would be no money for the army, no matter what. Even if the army gets new toys, officers and privates would sell them to the highest bidder, rather than use in combat. That’s what happened so far to all American “aid”, and there is no reason to believe that the pattern will change.
The mitochondria in neanderthals seems to have been replaced by human mitochondria. That is to say, it worked better in neanderthals, than what they had.
This proves the point that some haplotypes are more successful than others.
Well, it’s not very important. We simply cannot know if Spanish YDNA was of higher quality than Amerindian YDNA, because we know that even if it was of lower quality, it would still predominate in Mexico.
By that metric, most of our genes are important. Change randomly any one of them, and you are probably going to get a reduction in fitness. My point was that whatever is found on a certain YDNA haplotype, its spread will most likely depend on other factors than its own qualities. This is way less true of autosomal DNA.
Hard to say what parts of a woman are sexual or non-sexual. For instance, let us say you can only see the back of a woman’s head. If you admire it, is it for its own sake, or is it really because you link it to other parts of her, as a reminder?
Peter Frost had a funny post a while back, where he speculated that foot fetishes are hard-wired into the male brain because for generations it was the only part of females that was uncovered. So, it was an important clue to their fitness.
Horses are a really interesting example to think about because they were a marker of high status. Maybe, this led them to be especially selected for looks? But I wonder if part of their beauty might come from their facial features being so far apart that it is impossible to compute their relative distances. We might also be admiring their strength, as little girls are said to do. I wonder if this could be related to seeing all the edible protein on them, as our ancient ancestors might consider them as food.
I guess I’m pretty straight-laced. The only recreational drug I have partaken of is alcohol. Interesting experience how it effects the mind – when I was drunk in college, I once breezed through a really difficult physics problem that had stumped me for a long time. I have often wondered how much the success of famous authors is drugs or alcohol.
But I can’t abide trash TV – partly because it is like seeing civilization decay – it cuts too close to home. TV should be an escape, IMO.
Look, time is working in Russia’s favor under one condition: if Russia refuses to reacquire parasites that in had in the USSR. This includes Ukraine and Belarus. Before making any moves in that direction, Russia needs to learn one critical lesson from the Empire: it makes sense to have vassals when you rob them, not when you feed them.
You are truly an ignoramus with no understanding of any of this. To claim that Hussite rebellion was ‘not a peasant rebellion’ is so stupid, that I won’t bother to dissuade you. Around 90% of Hussite soldiers were peasants. The city population at that time was an estimated 3% of overall population. Around 7-10% of population were also ‘zemans’ – low level nobility based on ‘zem’ that means ‘land’, as in: they owned some land. These were by no stretch of imagination ‘nobility’, they worked the land, and they served as mercenaries – which is what most of the leaders were as one would expect.
Jan Zizka, was no ‘castellan’, he was a mercenary for different kings and worked as a castle guard for a few years, the silly stories that you peddle here are based on nothing. Translate for yourself the following:
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_%C5%BDi%C5%BEka
It is in Czech and it states what we all know: foreign fabulists have written made-up stories about Zizka to justify being defeated by him. So they threw in a few vignettes, none of them supported by historical record. He was a mercenary soldier, a hired hand, until he found religion, Hussite Protestant faith. His military innovations were rather obvious and were based on his understanding that cavalry, or silly knights on horses charging, are the easiest thing to massacre if one is ruthless and organised. So he did. By the way, Swiss pikemen (peasants) did the same thing around the same time. Sharp stick disables a horse, a heavy knight without a horse is defenseless.
Finally to claim that King Venceslas (Vaclav) was a ‘German King’ takes some gall. Sure he was, they were all ‘German’, named Vaclav, why not, right? Have you cleaned the German toilets today?
Mating success effects kin size. Small effects, add up over generations. Generally kin size is an important factor in successful conquest. I believe Columbus actually had two brothers that were important to his voyage, although of course, he wasn’t Spanish, and some claim he was a crypto-Jew.
I’d put my money on Spanish YDNA. Amerindians went through greater bottlenecks, so you can say R1B, for instance, was competing in a bigger field. There is at least a possibility that it had something to do with the technological explosion – say the domestication of the horse, if you are only thinking of barbarians. But all that is just speculation, I cannot find fault with your logic here: we cannot know.
I would go further and make a point that I never heard anyone else make, but might not be original. I think that some of the mitochondrial die-off that happened among Amerinds during the Columbian exchange wasn’t random, but was due directly to varying metabolic processes, under the influence of disease.
But, of course, when you get down to it, HBD is mostly speculation. It is a politically sensitive topic, and besides it is constitutionally difficult to test most premises because genes often have multiple effects and are themselves influenced by other genes.
Says someone who didn’t even know that the artillery played the main role in Zizka’s approach to warfare. Reiner Tor and I had to teach you basic facts about your own country’s history. 🙂
Given your pattern of lies and lack of knowledge, without a reference your claim is suspect.
Even if true, so were probably 90% of, say, Russia’s soldiers. Peasant wars?
Reality is that none of the Hussite leaders were peasants (one was even a Duke), and many of the soldiers were city-dwellers. Hussite wars began in the city of Prague. It was thus not a peasant revolt.
Did your Sovok teachers present it that way?
They were by definition nobility. Many Polish szlachta are the same. They seem to have been analogous to Spanish Hidalgos:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidalgo_(nobility)
To interact with Beckow is to provide him with basic lessons. About Hussite rebellion, about nobility, even about how long it takes to drive around his own country to the Ukrainian border. 🙂
That’s what Britannica says, because it is true.
There is no end to what you are learning.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wenceslas
Wenceslas, (born Feb. 26, 1361, Nürnberg—died Aug. 16, 1419, Prague), German king and, as Wenceslas IV, king of Bohemia, whose weak and tempestuous, though eventful, reign was continually plagued by wars and princely rivalries that he was unable to control, plunging his territories into a state of virtual anarchy until he was stripped of his powers altogether by a rebellious nobility.
I hate to say it, but I smell a new turn to pro-Western liberalism in this country. Historically in Russia, strong and patriotic Tsars were succeeded by lame, reformist Tsars. And since Putin has been a “patriot”, it’s time for another bout of “reform”. That means aping the West domestically and unilateral concessions internationally in a futile attempt to earn sympathy.
Don’t worry, Russia is going to survive it, it’s just valuable time will be lost.
Cowardice masquerading as morality.
Pacifism is powerless to defend civilization against barbarity; it invites it and virtually guarantees it.
The only reason you’re able to hold to your pacifist ideals and imagine yourself my moral superior is because most people reject your morality and are willing to suppress violence with violence.
And to dread them, too.
It is very easy to understand Beckow. In the Sovok historiography Hussites are proto-Bolsheviks so they are very dear to all kinds of Beckows in the Sovok Slovak Land. If it was not for the reactionary forces of Catholic Church and the incestuous Catholic Habsburg degenerates the Sovok Slovak Land could have been established in Czechoslovakia already in 15 century. Beckovs would be living in proto-communist Shangri-La of Adamites running naked and mingling with their sheep in Tatra Mountains and the Beckows great-great-grand mothers would have had their dentures already then but unfortunately because of the Catholic reactionary forces the Beckow family had to wait for its first dentures until they were brought on the tanks of glorious Red Army in 1945.
It depends how much say the people will have. Russian public opinion is pretty nationalist and not necessarily pro-Western. I expect Putin’s successor to be on his right in many questions, not more liberal.
I don’t believe in proactive violence, but I do believe in self-defence. If you look at the long arc of history, the barbarians have lost out to the more civilised cultures. Rome won most of its conflicts even in the last few centuries. It disintegrated mostly because of corruption and internal decay. The outsiders merely filled the void. Even then, Europe’s “dark ages” last for a few centuries before larger states were able to fill the void. Mongols invaded China many times but were absorbed into its culture and today Mongolia is an irrelevent speck of dirt compared to its southern giant.
Western-oriented liberalism never existed outside the elite circles anyway. Russian populace is traditionally apathetic and passive, which allows the elite to take the country in any direction. Now this might be changing…
*80% of humanity.
Given that humans are far more intelligent, it stands to reason that we should be judged by a much higher standard, otherwise we’re making it easy for ourselves.
Let’s hope so. The arguments against democracy never made much sense anyway. The main problem with what passes for “democracy” in the West is that it is a neoliberal oligarchy which masquerades as a democracy. Genuine democracy is a very rare commodity. If Russia’s political system became more reflective of the people’s will rather than the narrow interests of a coterie of insiders, then it would be more democratic and thus better.
Yeah, and as the old Soviet joke goes, we all know what these (((people))) are.
The correct word for Land is Zameen from Persian/Panjabi u fkn mountain peasent.
The US elite really hate Putin and Russia. Now they’re engaged in the high risk strategy of sanctioning corporations involved in the construction of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline project (Russian gas to Germany) with US visas and American properties revoked and frozen.
Initiated by the Congressional puppets and signed off by Trump.
It’s high risk and stupid for the US NWO POV to provoke a German split with the US. The Nordstream 2 makes economic sense (in contrast to buying US LNG) and it’s impossible for the Germans to back down (the project is almost finished). The German public understand the interference, and it comes on top of Udo Ulfkotte’s widely read, “Bought Journalists: How Politicians, Intelligence Agencies and High Finance Control Germany’s Mass Media” (English edition: “Prestitutes”).
https://www.rt.com/news/476549-germany-responds-nordstream-sanctions/
Belarus was not a parasite
It was the only SSR other then RSFSR that gave more then it recieved
Proofs:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/who-fed-who-in-the-ussr/
Why go medieval on their ass when you have more modern methods, V4 countries are essentially Vassals of the EU but they don’t complain (not enough to change anything anyway)
The EU still sends subsidies to Poland but German corporations extract a higher value then what Germany sens, making them a net positive for Berlin
Russia ought to set up some Yandex taxis and Teremoks in Minsk instead of just Gazprom offices, incorporate Belarus fully into their internet infrastructure (this has the added bonus of promoting the Russian language)
Have SWPL be associated with Moscows influence instead of Washingtons or Berlins, and suddenly you have the young people on your side too, especially with Ukraine to point to as a negative example of going pro-West
All the while extracting a profit from it
Don’t be a dope and fall for the repo con! yes, they will soon be reposing whatever it was! The Fed and banks create money out of thin air, simply by issuing a loan! The readon that they are short on cash is bacause they are not lending money!
The Fed is full of economic hitmen! The economy is regularly suffering BY DESIGN for the purpose of a transfer of assets! Robinhood in reverse!
No! Do not nationalize the Federal Reserve, where the Federal Governmemt would suddenly take on whatever the hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivatives, that the high rolling hedonists on Wall Street gambled!
The Fed already dumped TARP, QE, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and student loan debt onto the Federal Government!
The Federal government should just abolish the Fed and create its own currency, an interest free government greenback, simlar to the Pennsylvania Pound.
Let the damn psychos pay their own debts! F the Fed! Don’t bail out the treasonous psychopathic, hedonistic, high rolling, economic hitmen! Off with their heads!
When the government, media, and schools and universities have had a repeated history of lying about everything, it is understandable why people are questioning everything that they have ever been told!
If all of those institutions had a history of always tellng the truth, and if someone were to just question the holocaust, but nothing else, that would appear to be a very strange obsession.
The holocaust happened. It was not limited to Jews. It has been exagerated and used as propaganda. Even holocaust deniers that have produced an 8 hour documentary on Adolf Hitler, romanticizing Hitler, inadvertently proved that it did take place, in his attempts to prove that it did not take place, by saying, of course there were piles of hair and shoes, their heads were shaved and they were given uniforms in the camps! Zyclon B was commonly used as a delousing agent at the time. The concentration camp people were not gassed with Zyclon B to kill them. It was to delouse them. Starving emaciated workers were seen in video because typhus had that effect on people.
What were they doing in the camps in the first place? The Pritikin diet spa?
As Reiner tor has pointed out with respect to EE, a lot of the “subsidies” involved paying for military bases of occupying forces and in the case of Soviet republics paying for Russian colonists (housing them etc.). This is not really a subsidy and the victims can hardly be considered “parasites.”
Continuing in the Christmas spirit,
Re: How to recognize spiritually advanced persons
As you advance spiritually, you begin to acquire certain superpowers (spiritual
transhumanism). You will be able to do things that few people can. Superpowers
are the fun of enlightenment! In this limited space I can only mention a few.
to heal by touch. Your very presence has a healing effect on the people around you.
As the world is consumed by fear, as shown by trillions spent on armaments,
police, and personal guards, the world needs peacemakers more than
scientists and engineers. In the U.S. alone, guards and personal care assistants
are two professions with the highest rate of growth. Neither requires a college degree;
You have access to Kundalini energy. Thousands of Americans had their Kundalini
awakened by Swami Muktananda (active in the late ‘60s through the early ‘80s)
and his successors, typically by touch. Like a candle lighting another, the guru’s
energy awakens the disciple’s Kundalini (i.e., inner energy) that is said to lie
coiled at the bottom of the spine, in the process known as shaktipat. The disciple
needs to help the process through meditation, subvocally repeating the mantra
‘so-ham’ synchronized with breath. As your Kundalini rises, it feels like a rivulet
of hot lava passing through the spine until it stops as it encounters a chakra.
Then it makes repeated attempts to penetrate the blocked chakra. Hence it is
said that to God we are all female – we need to stop resisting the divine radiance
as it attempts to penetrate our ego defenses. In perfect analogy to sex, these
repeated attempts at penetration are accompanied by ecstasy. Hence to mystics,
both male and female, God is experienced as a Divine Lover, and Kundalini is
sometimes described as the Divine Phallus;
The chakras are said to reside in the subtle body, not the physical one. They act as
energy transducers that convert the energy from the subtle plane of reality into
the energy we can use in the physical realm. There are 7 main chakras: root, sex,
power, heart, throat, 3rd eye, and crown. Humanity is still in a very primitive,
animalistic state – only the lowest 3 chakras – root, sex, and power – are partly
open. The rest are blocked. Once the chakras open, we acquire all sorts of
abilities, incl. extrasensory perception. Addictions to alcohol and drugs mysteriously
fall away. As Muktananda famously said, “Who needs alcohol? I’m already
intoxicated.” Kundalini is said to rewire the nervous system to facilitate the
reception of signals from higher planes of reality
(to be continued)
I looked up the data on Tanzania and Nigeria, and it’s surprisingly solid. My apologies to Russiantroll!
It also lines up well with the one decent study I have seen of white-American sex organs, which gave an average length of ~15 cm (with a self-selected sample, so it’s a safe guess that the real figure is lower).
That wouldn’t be my first guess either, but hard data is hard data.
The stereotypes could come from tail effects, or from visual distortions (a schlong of average length looks bigger on a short man than a tall).
(cont.)
Superpowers
presented with haloes around their heads. Probably the most famous recent examples
of this phenomenon are Padre Pio in Catholicism (who is said to have told the visiting
Karol Wojtyła around 1948 that he would become a pope – John Paul II) and Frederick
(“Rama”) Lenz. The latter was an American Buddhist guru, active mostly in the 1980s.
People frequently saw golden light around Lenz’s body during his public lectures.
He could fill the whole lecture room with light so intense that many
individuals preferred to sit in the back of the room to avoid energy burn. He formed
his own band, Zazen, and recorded a number of compositions which are said to
help you quiet the monkey mind chatter during meditation. They are available
on YouTube.
The experience of inner light during prayer or meditation (with your eyes closed)
is a sure sign of progress on the way toward holiness/enlightenment. Gradually
you will also learn to perceive the ecstatic energy fields around individuals,
incl. yourself. ‘Ecstatic’ because they cause you to go into ecstasy when you
contemplate them. This is the simplest way to convince someone that we are
all divine beings, even if our level of awareness is currently low. I’m not
referring to the human aura here. The latter is a low-level phenomenon which
is interesting but not worthy of dedicated study. I am speaking of the subtle
and causal “bodies” of Light that surround our transient physical body. At the
point of death we lay aside our physical body, a product of evolution, and
continue our journey in our subtle and causal bodies. What God creates is divine
and therefore cannot cease to exist. To think that God created our physical
bodies is one of the great delusions of our time;
the model I present here, known as panentheism (“all in God”). The physical
Universe is inside God (or divinity if you prefer), and therefore the Laws of God
can trump the Laws of Physics, thus producing miracles. In the Catholic tradition many
saints were described as capable of levitation. However, the most recent example
that I am aware of is again the Buddhist guru Frederick Lenz, Ph.D., usually known
as Rama. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people witnessed his levitation at his
public lectures in the ‘80s. Sitting cross-legged, without moving a muscle, he would
rise gently several feet into the air, hover there in space above the desk for a few
seconds, and then just as gently he would float back down to the desk, with his
eyes closed throughout. In retrospect, I wish I had attended his lectures but I did
not so I was not a witness to these phenomena.
(to be continued)
An intoxication (a substitute for drug like experiences) that ultimately leads to what? Emptiness, nihilism, nothingness, loss of self? Kundalini is derived from shamanistic practices that evolved into Hindu philopsophies. I you’re seeking emptiness, why not just put a gun to your head and pull the trigger? A lot less work that leads to the same conclusion. Who knows what demons you may find on the other side? 🙁
Very true. Hedi Slimane — the former head designer at Dior Homme — once said that beanpoles are fashion and beefcakes are sex. He is gay and was thinking of male models, but the same is true of female models.
To your eyes and mine, sure, but erotic paintings go back at last another century. Bizarre as it seems to us, Boucher’s Odalisque, in its day, was the height of sexy.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Odalisque_brune_Boucher.jpeg/1280px-Odalisque_brune_Boucher.jpeg
Odalisque (François Boucher, c. 1745)
What’s so interesting is that there were clearly pretty women around even back then, but we can’t know if they were seen this way by their contemporaries. I find Madame Grand, in this painting by Vigée Le Brun, far prettier than Boucher’s sitter, but would her countrymen at the time agree? We can’t know.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Madame_Grand_%28No%C3%ABl_Catherine_Vorl%C3%A9e%2C_1761%E2%80%931835%29_MET_DP320094.jpg/800px-Madame_Grand_%28No%C3%ABl_Catherine_Vorl%C3%A9e%2C_1761%E2%80%931835%29_MET_DP320094.jpg
Madame Grand (Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, 1783)
This uncertainty grows stronger the further back one goes. Today, Uta of Naumburg is an iconic beauty, but what did the Naumburg Master really think of his sitter at the time? We can only guess.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/Naumburg-Uta.JPG/800px-Naumburg-Uta.JPG
Uta of Naumburg (The Naumburg Master, c. 1210-1257)
Stop trying to appropriate my culture you literal cretin.
Your whole spiritually enlightened people automatically peaceful shamans is just the same as you taking acid & visiting blacked.com
SPIRITUAL TRUTHS ARE FOUND ON THE BATTLEFIELD
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/657564645439307787/658352942558085133/D-NbtKLXoAEdVWs.png
Lets see, another untouchable from the sh..thole subcontinent with bitter dreams. Come to think of it, most of you desperate migrants strike me as untouchables …
white women are just cancerous upholders of feminist liberalism.
Idk how you niggas put up..
Re: Kundalini
If you read the biographies of those who experienced Kundalini
awakening, you’ll know it doesn’t lead to emptiness at all. The process is
complicated though, and is best undertaken under the guidance
of a qualified yoga master. If you don’t have access to a yoga master,
I would discourage you from trying to undertake Kundalini awakening
on your own. The energies you might liberate are so powerful they
can obliterate our puny ego in a matter of minutes. This is very advanced
stuff. I recommend Gopi Krishna’s autobiography as a cautionary tale.
In general, I also don’t recommend shamanic paths or psychedelics.
For a Christian there are safer paths to follow. With my students I generally
advise them to work on their moral growth first, and only then on their
spiritual growth. In Catholicism you won’t be admitted to a monastery unless
you can demonstrate you are a person of high moral character.
However, if everything goes right, the rewards are worth it. At the highest levels
of attainment the infusion of the egoic sphere by spirit brings into being
the charismatic personality. One becomes a person whose very presence has
a magnetic quality, which fascinates people and sometimes binds them in spells.
Profound presence and joy vibrate at immense vibratory rates, entrancing those
around and accelerating their spiritual growth.
That’s based on the assumption that Putin is patriotic w/o being “reformist”. In fact, while being patriotic in the foreign policy, internally he promotes the same money-bag oligarchy that is firmly in power in the US and Europe. He even chose as the fig leaf for it the same lie used in the West: “democracy”. That’s aping, pure and simple.
Besides, the geopolitical situation has changed a lot: anyone except paid trolls sees the decline of the Empire and knows that as far as its death is concerned, it is not a question of “if”, it’s only a question of “when”, and whether the rest of humanity would survive its crash.
Only the name is Sanskrit. Otherwise there is nothing Hindu about
Kundalini, it’s the inner energy we all possess. In Christianity, it’s
said to be equivalent to the descent of the Holy Spirit. Feel perfectly
free to “appropriate” Christianity, as tens of millions of the Chinese and
Koreans have done.
You need more neoreaction in your life. Start with An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.
Very stupid fight to pick, agreed. There is no way the Germans can back down this late in the project. Nor should they — if frivolous and sweeping American sanctions are the new normal, that basically means the end of the postwar world order.
https://twitter.com/karunanundy/status/1208680929348075520
56″ chest turned out to be a 0.56 cm dick. Modi’s re-election was centered on Hindutva and now he’s selling out his own electorate because some moslems are rioting and ZOG media is turning up the heat.
Pathetic.
It is symbolic theatrics. The company that was laying the gas pipelines on the sea floor was Swiss-Dutch and they’ve now stopped working. Gazprom has confirmed that Russia have the inhouse skills to complete the work, it will just take a bit longer. I doubt the US is unaware of this. It is just political posturing.
Olaf Scholz’s statement was disappointing. He meekly protested but ruled out any counter-actions. He is likely terrified of a tit-for-tat sanction war which could hit the struggling German auto industry.
I personally welcome a full trade war between the US and the EU. We need to get rid of toxic US influence given that most of Europe is just a collection of puppet states for the most part. China is no different either. The Chinese ambassador to Germany bluntly threatened his hosts the other day if they refused to accept Huawei as their 5G partner, saying that German cars will all of a sudden be found a safety hazard in the Chinese market.
Europe should hunker down and push both the US and China out. Ericsson should get all the 5G contracts.
Washington abandoned the postwar world order once they realized that they can no longer control it. In the last few years they have consciously worked on ending it. That’s why we have the chaos today. These are not mistakes, the strategy is to blow-it up and benefit from being the safety haven in a chaotic world. Of course, that doesn’t help Germany.
The NS-2 delay and the Ukraine deal are skirmishes by unipolar dead-enders as things inevitably change: Ukraine will not be a key energy transit country and Western Europe will buy most of its gas from Russia – because it is much cheaper. Ukraine signed a deal for less than half the current volume and will become irrelevant after 2024. This is like yelling into a hurricane, the noisier the Western-Atlantic supremacists get, more desperate they are…
Joseph Manus Frangipani, a onetime serious practitioner of yoga who had direct knowledge and experience of kundalini gives a rather negative picture of his travels abroad to India to live and take part in the Eastern religious traditions. He sums up his experiences as one who ‘ate the food of pigs in a far off country’:
(cont.)
controversial superpower. I mentioned A Course in Miracles (1976) in my
posts before. It is widely acclaimed as a spiritual masterpiece, much of
its 1350 pages written in beautiful Shakespearean iambic pentameter. Some
people call it the Third Testament or Christianity 2.0. It appears to present
a new corrected version of Christianity. 2000 years ago people would lack
the intellectual tools to understand a text of that level of sophistication.
One of the most prominent teachers of the Course today is a fellow in his
60s named Gary Renard. Here’s where the story gets hard to believe.
He was a successful musician in his younger years, then suffered a
spiritual crisis. He claims that in 1992 in New England he was sitting
in his house when suddenly and out of nowhere a youngish couple,
a man and a woman, materialized on his couch and after a conversation
just as suddenly de-materialized. He was visited like this a number
of times, and the fruit of these visits is a book called The Disappearance of
the Universe, a wonderful commentary on the Course. The couple’s names
are Artem and Pursah, and they claim to be ascended masters who in
the time of Jesus were the apostles Thomas and Thaddeus. The visits
are still continuing, and resulted in more spiritual commentaries penned
by Renard.
These materializations, if true, gave some people an idea that perhaps
great beings, like say Jesus, could suddenly appear in our world of
spacetime by descending from higher realities, and while here they could exist
in what came to be known as the glorified body. Resurrection then would be
as easy as the sudden disappearance of Artem and Pursah from
Gary Renard’s couch.
A Course of Love (2001), a 750 page sequel to A Course in Miracles,
presents an even more tantalizing possibility. It seems to say that
if you like the physical reality a lot, then you don’t have to die but
first you need to advance to a very high spiritual level so your body is
transformed into what the Course calls the “elevated Self of form,”
which is immortal and has all sorts of superpowers.
Let me close by expressing my skepticism about the possibility of
downloading our mind into a computer. Our auric fields, and our
ecstatic subtle and causal energy fields (that appear to surround us
to the enlightened eye) are an integral part of who we are as
multidimensional beings. How can you “flatten” a multidimensional
being to just one dimension – physical?
Yes, I am quite aware that traditional Christians often refer to Kundalini
as demonic. It is a path fraught with danger simply because we have very
little experience with advanced states of consciousness. We’ll gain more
experience in the next few hundred years. Humanity, as I keep pointing
out, still functions at a very low animalistic level. As the continuing wars, continuing
crime, and continuing environmental degradation demonstrate, we are
having extreme difficulty rising above the level of smart chimps.
As I already mentioned, I would discourage a beginner from trying
Kundalini yoga. There are safer paths, but all attempts to transcend the ego
amount to a hero’s journey. Undoing the ego can potentially produce
a great deal of suffering, and is not for ordinary people. But then even getting
a Ph.D. in STEM is not for ordinary people.
Merry Christmas!
Interesting interpretation. Maybe it was given in your shithole, I don’t know. In schools in the USSR the whole thing was presented pretty much as it was, as a Protestant movement mixed with Czechia attempt to de-Germanize itself, w/o any particular sympathy to Hussites, let alone presenting them as proto-Bolsheviks. Whatever your personal psychosis is, you have to remember that Bolsheviks and their descendants Soviet communists guarded their “uniqueness” pretty much as vehemently and unreasonably as Jews guard the “uniqueness” of their Holocaust. Likely spewing and enforcing just as many lies in the process.
Frangipini begins his essay by quoting Holy scripture:
Towards the end he reminds his readers of the Truth by stating:
Indeed…
I’m a Jatt, a Scythian. U larp as us 24/7 while claiming to be sons of the holy bastard jew..
Why would we become christcucks when the Guru has free’d us of all world worries & made us kings?
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/653857894483361792/658419470833942559/unknown.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/653857894483361792/658419535866626068/unknown.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/653857894483361792/658419735020568577/unknown.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/653857894483361792/658419786086350879/unknown.png
Sat Sri Akaalll
Basically, I don’t know the methods calculating the thing, so I just asked questions. Building an apartment block for Russian engineers in Uzbekistan, paid for by RSFSR taxpayers – is it a subsidy to Uzbekistan? Building an apartment block for Russian workers in Estonia, paid for by RSFSR taxpayers – is it a subsidy to Estonia? Building and maintaining a military base in Latvia, paid for by RSFSR taxpayers – is it a subsidy to Latvia? Sending money to support the regime in North Korea, paid for by RSFSR taxpayers – is it calculated anywhere, like, is it assumed that the other republics should’ve paid a “fair share” of such an expense? (Obviously Lithuanians cannot be expected to be enthusiastic about this expense of an empire whose official language is Russian and whose top leadership consists mainly of ethnic Russians and maybe a few other ethnicities like Ukrainians and maybe even Georgians and Armenians, but not Lithuanians.)
I’m still waiting for the answer to those questions. Without knowing how it was calculated, I’m pretty skeptical. But I can believe that the bulk of the costs of the empire fell on the RSFSR, and the other republics shirked their “responsibilities” to pay for their “fair share” of the expense of running a superpower.
It must be noted that there is a lot of noise about the USSR subsidizing its Warsaw Pact satellites by sending cheap natural gas and oil. I looked into the matter in the case of Hungary (where it was easier for me to find some articles etc. dealing with the topic). Hungary made a long term contract with the USSR, and part of the package was that Hungary had to build a substantial portion of the pipelines on Soviet territory. (The pipelines were used to export oil and natural gas to Western Europe, earning hard currency to the Soviet economy.) In exchange, Hungary was to receive cheap oil and natural gas. However, Hungary (or the Eastern Bloc as a whole) didn’t have the necessary technologies, which either had to be developed (at enormous expense) or (as happened) had to be bought from Western Europe for hard currency. So we had to invest in hard currency into the pipelines (without which the USSR couldn’t have exported the natural gas anyway), and then received natural gas cheaper.
However, in the late 1970s, the USSR started increasing the price of natural gas anyway. (The agreement didn’t protect us against this, but they obviously couldn’t demand hard currency for it.) Yes, we still didn’t have to pay in hard currency, we had to deliver products like buses (which by the 1980s were getting obsolete), but it shouldn’t obscure the fact that some of the inputs for those products needed to be imported from the West (so part of it was hard currency anyway), because the Hungarian economy was always partly dependent on “capitalist” imports, and that those (by the 1980s largely obsolete) products could still be exported to “capitalist” markets, for example some of those buses were even sold to the US. (A whole company, NABI or North American Bus Industries, was set up later in the 1990s to produce buses based on Hungarian designs in the US.) You can argue how much those buses were worth (Hungary also sent other things like agricultural produce, which could also be sold to places like West Germany), but they certainly were worth something, even outside the Eastern Bloc. The Hungarian top leadership in the early 1980s (when the initial hard currency loans took to finance the building of the Soviet pipeline started to snowball) certainly considered that they shouldn’t have concluded the agreement with the USSR, and that simply paying market prices for oil and natural gas (or not switching so much of the economy to natural gas as a result of the cheap natural gas) would’ve been a preferable option. Natural gas is less polluting than coal, so considering air quality in the cities, it might still have been a good deal, overall, but it’s very hard to know, and it’s certainly not a clear-cut case of “Soviet subsidy to Warsaw Pact satellites.”
Then there was the issue that Eastern Bloc countries were pressured into buying Soviet military equipment (of which always the “export versions” were sold, i.e. versions which were much better than the ones used by the Soviet military), and some of it weren’t even needed. Hungary (probably a shirker in the arms race) had to maintain a so-called “rocket brigade,” which operated ballistic missiles. Hungary bought the missiles and other equipment from the USSR, maintained them, trained the personnel, etc. – but they were to deliver Soviet nuclear warheads against targets given by the Soviet military. I would consider it a subsidy to the Soviet nuclear forces, which somewhere needs to enter the equation. Hungary for sure couldn’t use this ballistic missile brigade for anything else but to support the USSR in the Third World War, or at least to help underpin the Soviet nuclear deterrent.
And finally, Hungary was expected to subsidize “brotherly” communist nations like Vietnam or Cuba. Famously, while Hungary produced lots of sugar from locally grown sugar beets, we imported lots of sugar from Cuba at vastly inflated prices, and sent there all kinds of industrial products.
Given the difficulties of accounting in a Soviet type system (which was introduced in Hungary by the Soviets themselves), it’s very difficult to say who benefited from these transactions. Most likely the average Russian taxpayer/citizen didn’t. Simply the costs of maintaining a superpower empire were overwhelming, and the majority of it was paid for by the RSFSR, and possibly some Soviet republics or satellites didn’t pay much into it (depending on the time period in question, like Poland probably didn’t pay in the early 1980s while they had economic difficulties themselves, or Hungary after 1956 for a couple years, maybe Tajikistan never contributed, etc.), but I’d guess that most Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact satellites did pay something into it.
At least that’s my guess, but it’s very difficult to find reliable data on it.
(Export versions of Soviet weapons were inferior, not better, that’s a typo.)
I would consider that the biggest cost paid by Warsaw Pact satellites was that we had to maintain an inefficient command economy with very little possibility of a reform (the Soviets blocked the Hungarian reform attempts in the early 1970s), but this was also the biggest cost for the Soviet economy. Basically, commies defeated themselves with their idiotic economic model.
I thought genuine spirituality wasn’t concerned with gaining “powers”….
Nord Stream 2 is in bigger trouble, than I thought:
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/natural-gas/122119-nord-stream-2-pipelayer-allseas-suspends-operations-on-us-sanctions
I’m at a loss for words…The only vessel that can complete NS2 is currently stationed at Vladivostok.
We will know by this time next year if you’re right or wrong
That’s a delay, so maybe it takes another year to finish. But I don’t think it’s fatal for the project, nor could it be.
But this potentially means even bigger transit volumes for the Ukraine! Going back to the subject of moronic leaders, I’m shocked that Gazprom did not prepare for this contingency.
Both guys are missing the point.
It really comes down to Jungle Fever. Porn is crude and corrupting, but the main danger to the West is that Jews use porn to promote Jungle Fever, ACOWW(Afro-Colonization of White Wombs), and Cucky-wuckery. If white guys were most muscular and had biggest dongs, porn would be far less damaging to the West. Porn would advertise white manhood. But because black guys got more muscle and bigger dongs, porn promotes black manhood over white boyhood. Jews know this. This is why porn is far more restricted in Israel than in the West. Now, imagine if white gentiles controlled porn in Israel and spread the lusty ideal of Jewish women going with Arab/Palestinian/Muslim men and having their kids. Jews would call it Pornocaust or Sexocaust, but that is what Jews are doing to the West. Of course, even without porn, white men have been plenty cucky-wucked by sports and pop music.
https://youtu.be/DBjzyEckTVE
These things are hard to calculate with command economies that were intertwined, but weren’t they extracting oil for decades in Azerbaijan? I’m a little skeptical that they were a net drain. Would the USSR have even existed without the Baku oil fields? I doubt it.
But Hungary would probably be thoroughly pozzed were it not for the fact that it became a puppet state of the USSR. That, is unless the Nazis won.
Re: Superpowers
True. I sexed it up a bit to make it more interesting to the commenters on this blog
who appear to have zero interest in spiritual growth. Nevertheless the cases I
discussed, like Frederick Lenz, Swami Muktananda or Gary Renard, are real.
‘utu’ personal psychosis is that he is a Sudeten re-tread, forever crying over what happened to his Nazi-allied relatives after WWII. They were properly held accountable by the Czechs.
It is a sign of mental confusion to conflate all things that he hates together: Bolsheviks, Hussites, Russians, peasants, even goats sometimes. There is no way one can have a discussion with people who are so bitter.
What are you trying to say?
What happened here is a very hard-nosed negotiation using Denmark to delay NS-2 long enough so 2021 contracts to the West were in danger. (It is interesting how Scandinavians are always available to be used, e.g. Sweden with Assange).
But how is any of this significant in the long run? Germany will not buy large quantities of US LNG – it would cost them tens of billions extra, only Poles are stupid enough to sign up for it. Ukraine will not be a transit country, they will make diminishing amounts and eventually completely disappear. The key players are Germany and Russia and they have complementary economies – unless Washington or Kiev figure out how to change that, they will inevitable lose in the long run. Water flows downstream.
Azeri oil was critical during WWII. That’s why Hitler tried to get to it, or at least cut it off from the USSR. He was unsuccessful in both. The importance of Azeri oil faded in the 1960s, and in later decades USSR mostly had oil from the same fields Russia uses today: Northern part of the European Russia and Western Siberia.
As to Hungary, I don’t know the balance back then, but I know that now it’s a relatively poor country. A few years ago I was in Budapest and some small cities near Balaton, and the picture was the same everywhere. The prices in touristy areas were several times higher than where locals live: a sure sign of the third world. We lived in small hotels where locals live (as we always try to learn how locals live in every country we visit), and the small local food stores we visited always had a little peace of good sausage (apparently too expensive for locals), the rest being cheap crap. In fact, Budapest today looks and behaves much poorer than provincial Russian cities, not to mention Moscow. From the people who traveled to Hungary in the USSR times I got the impression that it was more prosperous than Russia. As the folk wisdom puts it, “be careful what you wish for, it might just come true”.
Putin always overestimates the sanity of the US elites. They created a hiccup for Russian gas exports at the long-term price they can’t even contemplate. Only people who don’t give a damn about their country can do that. Putin always thinks that the US elites, however misguided, have the US interests in mind. He should have learned by now that they don’t give a hoot about the US.
I feel that I must add a cheerful note. Hungarian operetta is great. We tried to buy tickets online from the US (like we do for opera houses all over the world) and found that their online system does not work. But we bought tickets in Budapest, and they were amazingly cheap. The theater was full. Most people apparently knew the words and sang along. A word of caution, though: the singing is in Hungarian, and the only translation is into German. I don’t speak either of these languages, but I didn’t need to: all Hungarian operettas were translated into Russian in Soviet times and I heard them all, so I did not need the translation. For those who do: get acquainted with the libretto (or at least the plot) in a language you know, unless you speak Hungarian or German.
The now outdated expression, buxom wench, tells you what you need to know. Those Eve’s are showing their fertility. Thin women find it harder to conceive.
Thanks! “Buxom wench” sounds so unmistakably British. I miss full-blooded English in the States.
What’s the price? Don’t tell me this will cause Germany to turn its back on NWO. People always say it when US abuses its power, but Europeans always fall in line in the end.
I am not talking about governments: European governments are mostly nonentities that aren’t even worth considering. A lot of companies, including non-Russian, will always keep in mind the possibility that the US will go bananas. That will have a lot of unpleasant ramifications for the US and US-based companies. Only an idiot ruins the order where he is on the top perch. The US is doing exactly that.
Never even been to EE, unless you count East Berlin, when they were rebuilding it. There were cranes and men tamping-in cobblestones everywhere. Of course, the government was dumping money into it.
Know it’s archaic, but I rather like the classification Second World, for European countries that aren’t quite First World. If there is anything wrong with the classification, it is that there isn’t something under it that is above Africa.
I’ve heard that prior to WW2, Budapest was comparable to many Western European cities. As a possible marker of this, there is the fact that it is the setting of the 1940 picture The Shop Around the Corner starring Jimmy Stewart. But that case might just be the result of Jewish influence.
And just a few months ago you were bragging:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/ukraine-elections-2019-second/#comment-3167441
“We don’t know the precise timing, or the amounts – I suspect it will be phased in slowly. But the strategic reality starting in 2020 will be different: Ukraine will have very little power to negotiate, they will have to pay back all their old debts to Gazprom, they will lose all (or most) transit fees, and if they don’t pay (up front and in cash) there will be no gas.”
Ukraine pays nothing to Russia, Russia pays Ukraine 2.9 billion dollars.
Gas volume decreases, from 80 billion cubic meters in 2019 to 65 in 2020 and then 40 each year until 2024 (at least), but transit fees for Ukraine increase so Ukraine will be getting more than half at least until the end of 2024. The 2.9 billion Russia pays Ukraine covers the losses for 2020 and 2021 relative to 2019 (at least).
Ukraine’s GDP increased from $91 billion in 2015 to $130.8 billion in 2018 (expect over $135 billion for 2019) and continues grow so by 2025 when this contract expires the loss of transit income will hardly be crippling.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=UA
I was in Budapest last summer. Sorry Reiner, it had beautiful architecture and we met some nice people, but the city seemed rather seedy and run down other than the castle district. Can’t compare to Moscow which is thoroughly First World. Or Krakow (which I visited 15 years ago but even then felt very First World). TBH, although Lviv is obviously much poorer it did not feel any more “second world” than Budapest (indeed, probably less so).
Poll this year about life satisfaction among Ukrainians:
http://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=882&page=1&t=7
It was last conducted in 2017, and there has been modest but solid improvement:
http://www.kiis.com.ua/materials/pr/20192507_satisf/3ukr.jpg
In 2019, 15% were very satisfied, 32% somewhat satisfied, 27% were neutral, 13% somewhat unsatisfied, 7% very unsatisfied.
In 2017, 9% were very satisfied, 31% somewhat satisfied, 42% were neutral, 12% somewhat unsatisfied, 5% very unsatisfied.
I just made Beckow cry a little.
About this whole Ukraine-Russia gas transit thing that Felix is panicking about. It seems Germany had a key role in facilitating the deal.
Why would Germany spend all this time and resources to construct these pipelines and then suddenly pressure Russia to maintain the transit fees? That makes zero sense unless you believe that Germany was acting as a proxy on behalf of a greater power. My pet theory: Germany most likely caved to US pressure and tried to triangulate at the last minute in a bid to stave off a larger German-US conflict.
A good question. I just don’t know if the answer is complete?
Ukraine and Russia are surprisingly close in life satisfaction despite Russia being much richer.
https://i.imgur.com/xsbmLUY.png
https://i.imgur.com/GbTDRxJ.jpg
I do not have any working theory for why this is. It seems like a puzzle to me.
While it is true that you are descended from Scythians, your Scythian ancestry is heavily diluted. Scythians spoke an Irannic language and were described as red or blonde-haired and blue or green-eyed people. Such people can be found in Persia, for example this Iranian politician:
https://i0.wp.com/www.allempires.com/forum/uploads/Others/Ramin.jpg
Jatts, OTOH, look like this:
https://peoplegroupsindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/jat.jpg
https://punjabikhurki.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/caste.jpg
Scythian artwork:
http://www.renegadetribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Gold-plaque-of-a-mounted-Scythian.jpg
My speculation – although Ukrainians are much poorer, they have been seeing tangible improvement in the last few years and expect it to be ongoing, while Russians have remained more in place and expect the same?
GDP growth per capita:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG?end=2018&locations=UA-RU&start=2018&view=bar
This seems to have really happened. The charitable interpretation would be that the bishops of the PTsU don’t know they are being infiltrated by Homintern:
https://orthochristian.com/126558.html
Mr. A. Karlin,
Did China surrender to the United States in the latest
trade agreement? Is this the first “unequal treaty” of the
21st century?
An essay on this topic from you would be very helpful.
The only good thing in Warsaw is a train to Poznań, where I’m based. I’d be happy to meet, but this is Holliday season and I can’t leave my family, travel few hours to another city just to meet, no matter how great the guy is 😀
I hope you will enjoy the visit.
Is the text even public?
It’s probably all subjective, and I’m not a big traveler, so I don’t really have much to compare to. All I can say is that there are nice neighborhoods and ugly concrete housing in abundance. One thing you need to remember is that in 1944-45 it was more thoroughly destroyed than any capital city in Europe, except for Warsaw and Berlin. Then it suffered major damage once more in 1956. So it used to be horrible even twenty years ago. From my childhood and even the 1990s I remember it being full of buildings with hundreds bullet holes in the wall each. The Castle district you praised was full of actual ruins, it being the part of the city where the Germans held out the longest. Here you can see the Sándor Palace (currently the presidential palace) in the Castle in 1945 and at present. (I couldn’t find a decent picture from the 1980s or 1990s, but until the late 1990s only the roof was rebuilt as a temporary solution to protect the walls from the weather, but no windows or really anything, it was an actual ruin.) It was only renovated in the early 2000s.
https://mult-kor.hu/image/article/index/20.%20szazad/sandorpalace1.jpg
http://www.kitervezte.hu/images/epuletek/sandor-palota-budapest/sandor-palota-budapest.jpg
In the 1990s they didn’t renovate many old buildings, instead built some glass and steel office buildings amidst the run down older ones, even occasionally demolishing nice buildings. So the improvement only really started under the first Orbán government around 1999. Then came another ex-commie/liberal coalition 2002-10, and the economy was way worse than in other ex-communist countries. (This period of incompetent leftist government is the reason for Orbán’s supermajority since 2010.) Budapest’s mayor in particular was an incompetent liberal until 2010, when he was replaced by a somewhat competent conservative (nominally outside Fidesz) administrator, who nevertheless didn’t really have a vision of a modern SWPL city, for example he preferred cars over public transport. But in 2010 he appointed a really competent transportation chief, who moved quickly in the right direction, which finally improved public transport 2010-15, when he was removed by the car-supporter mayor.
Despite all this, the city is incomparably better than in 1988 or even 1998, and I would say much better than even in 2010. What’s very good is the abundance of quality restaurants and cafes, admittedly catering at least 50% to tourists.
Hungary is already pretty pozzed as it is. Orbán’s rule is more of a fluke, a result of the left being especially incompetent 2002-10, and even so, for example in the early 2000s there were constant protests at the Budapest Pride, whereas these days even the far right more or less accepts that such events in the future are going to take place, like, forever. Should Orbán lose just one election, homosexual marriage will quickly become the law of the land, and we will accept refugees. (Except they will still not want to come.) We already have an increasing number of Arabs and similar peoples in Budapest.
Given how Azerbaijan is still an oil exporter (and probably was in the 1970s and 1980s as well), it’s still hard to believe that it was a net drain on Soviet resources even after the 1960s. Also, the USSR used up the only natural resource Azerbaijan had, and would then like to just dump it after it was mostly used up..?
Some Central Asian republics were also major oil and natural gas producers with very low population densities, like Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan (the former also being a major grain producer, which otherwise the USSR often had to import for hard currency). Living standards were also relatively lower there, so I’m not entirely convinced they were a net drain on resources. Uzbekistan might be a different case (the population there was higher relative to resources)
What makes you think the locals didn’t buy the sausages?
As to Budapest, see my answer to AP. The commies didn’t even fully renovate the most important historical buildings (and even demolished some which could have been saved…) in the Buda Castle district.
I have never been to Russia, but from what I gather from friends who were there over the past few years, they thought Moscow and Saint Petersburg to be magnificent (they were impressed by both), but with the rest they weren’t impressed, to say the least. (It might be changing quickly, though, as per Karlin’s travel posts.) Though each of them was there in around 2015-17, so before the World Cup.
Yes, China has surrendered. This was the intelligent choice. China is still growing fast. If China has room to continue to grow fast then the balance of power will dramatically change within a short time. China needs to focus on getting as close as possible to Robert Fogel’s prediction in 2010 of an economy worth $123 trillion by 2040: https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/01/04/123000000000000/
A wise plan would involve these elements
(1) fight just enough to surrender without complete humiliation in the trade war; US can be satisfied by result and return to Middle East priorities
(2) curtail current turbo charged pace of naval ship building documented by Karlin; investments in defense should focus on defense as Thorf recommends (e.g. beefing up air defense) or else Washington, Tokyo, and Canberra will muster the will to spend a trillion dollars over the next 10 years to regain the military balance
(3) spend less on the military budget and more on accelerating electric vehicle adoption; subsidies were cut this year and the very promising skyrocketing EV sales trend has crashed
(4) concentrate the Belt and Road Initiative on building a super-continent of Eurasia aligned with Chinese interests; it started out as a 3-continent initiative (including East Africa) and is now officially a global initiative (including Latin America and the rest of Africa), diluting its economic impact on core countries (Central Asia, India, Pakistan and peninsular and maritime Southeast Asia) as resources are spread more thing and becoming less effective as a means of deriving geopolitical dividends
(5) step up and fund Syrian reconstruction; all the heavy lifting is left to Russia right now including bailing out Iran
I seriously, seriously doubt that Italy, the UK or especially France are happier today on average than in 1991. Sounds like BS data to me.
Never trust a Kazakh.
https://twitter.com/BetteMidler/status/1208220525954314240?s=20
I have no idea how accurate this is, but Ukrainians claim the Soviets used up a lot of the gas deposits they got in Western Ukraine (which still produces gas, enough for western Ukraine to be self-sufficient if it were an independent country, but much less than it did in the 1970s).
More Ukro-triumph: Ukraine’s IT sector keeps expanding:
https://www.kyivpost.com/technology/ukrainian-it-rides-global-wave-needs-better-dialogue-with-government.html
average salary $2,175 (so, not another India)
Ukraine’s new government is packed with IT people so this industry will be well-supported by the state.
We got to become followers of Guru Gobind Singh so all good.
https://twitter.com/sxngh96/status/1207633802018770945?s=20
Just conquer those lands again & the Jatts there will look same.
Better to turn brown than be a Christian/Islamic clown. :joy:
Oh, I don’t know. Ukrainians follow a regal looking bearded fellow:
https://suburbangrandma.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Sviatey-Mykolay-2012-St.-Nicholas-Ukrainian-Church-for-web.jpg
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/570365207491117076/658684413680287795/unknown.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/570365207491117076/658684433942970378/unknown.png
Exactly my point. Others are all half-men or less..
No wonder you are all in the throes of trans-genderism||
Suit yourself. That’s the matter of semantics. I am pretty sure Hungary is way ahead of Africa (must confess: I’ve never been there), it is certainly ahead of Malaysia, Indonesia, and most of Latin America (although my experience there is limited: Budapest feels at the level of Mexico City downtown, Buenos Aires, and Miraflores district in Lima, but ahead of Cusco and way ahead of Iquitos, Peru).
I was in Hungary in 2014, so that’s my reference point. I am actually comparing to Russia in 2015 and 2018, so it’s not quite the same year. However, Russia stopped charging foreigners and locals differently at museums, etc., somewhere about 2005. In my experience, in 2018 Russian provincial cities felt a lot more prosperous than Budapest in 2014. That was after the World Cup, though, but some of provincial cities I visited did not host World Cup.
I don’t know about before WWII. In WWII Hungary allied with Hitler, and in Russia Hungarian troops had a reputation of being more ruthless than German. In terms of atrocities they were somewhere at the level of Banderites. The people who were in the Red Army at the time say that, in contrast to how they treated surrendering German troops, they did not take Hungarians prisoner. However, Hungarians were shot, whereas Banderites were mostly hanged: Soviet military people of the time said that Banderites did not deserve a bullet.
trans-genderism?
Although fierce warriors, wasn’t the Golden Horde finally rebuffed first in Ukraine at Blue Waters and later in the north at Kulikovo? The Rus always fought under the Cross. Their priests wore beautiful silken robes that rivaled even those of the Han at the Imperial city.
As far as I remember the stats, Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan were net contributors, whereas the other 12 republics were the net recipients. In terms of living standards, all three Baltics, Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan lived better than Russia proper, while the -stans had lower living standards.
In my last visit to Russia in 2018 I was very much impressed by Moscow (in terms of magnificence it beats London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Berlin, Vienna, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, LA, and any other city I’ve ever visited). I did not visit St Petersburg since Soviet times, so don’t know. Provincial cities I saw were less impressive than Moscow, but appeared better kept and more prosperous than Budapest. Prague in 2013 looked more prosperous than Russian provincial cities, but less prosperous than Moscow in 2018. It looked and felt way above Budapest. But take heart: Budapest is way ahead of Zagreb. What’s more, the cable car to the Castle district in Budapest works (it was built by Franz Josef, though), whereas much shorter cable car in Zagreb does not.
Azerbaijan must be doing OK: it exports oil and natural gas, and pays for Russian weapons in hard cash (in sharp contrast to Armenia, which buys these weapons on credit). Kazakhstan is still doing fine, whereas the rest of the -stans went about a century back since the dissolution of the USSR. That includes oil/gas rich Turkmenistan: their elites are stealing the revenues, whereas the people are dirt-poor.
See, Russian oppressors forced them all to wash and brush their teeth. Now they are back to their traditional unwashed values.
Couldn’t agree more. An irony with Trump’s reckless “America Firstism” is that few countries stand to lose more than the US from the breakdown of the postwar order.
Americans often fail to understand what enormous, and often unfair, advantages it grants them. And this isn’t even getting into the shady stuff they must be doing beneath the surface. We know already that they listened in on Merkel’s personal cell phone and spied on Australian officials* ahead of trade negotiations, so we must assume that this is business as usual.
I’m not so sure. It still had some mileage left in it, and I don’t get the impression that the Deep State was ever happy with Trump’s present course (outside his tougher stance on China and a few other things).
I don’t know if it was positive or not that a lot of Hungarian elites went to the US, after the collapse of communism, stayed a few years, and then went back. But I know some of these folks, and their children who were sent to US public schools now seem very pozzed. Though, maybe, the EU makes it all redundant.
I’d like to think that in Western Europe, politicians had a thought something like, “Oh, shit! We made a horrendous mistake, but it is too late for us cowards to stop it.” And ones in the East, Left and Right, thought something like, “Well, there can be no illusions now. Fortunately, we can avoid this fate.”
But I think your model of the whims of politicians, economic incentives, and the inherent flaws of democracy is probably correct. EE is not safe. Already, EE is comparably more attractive to some small class of brown adventurers, as it has more white women to goggle at.
It is also a mistake to bring up NYC as some people do, saying it is brown but brown people still go to it. NYC is just an appendage of the US – it would not exist without the US. IMO, most of its capital would flee. It would no longer be a destination. London is probably similar. Singapore has a Han majority – that makes it constitutionally different from London or NYC.
Looks like China has surrendered in trade talks. In the US it’s called “money talks”. Still, I would like someone to present an objective analysis of what the tariffs were in both China and the US before trade war and what they are now, as well as compare trade volumes before and after.
I have decided to create a new Israel lobby.
Christians Against Policies of Israel in America = CAPIA, which is the reverse of AIPAC.
.
That could well be. I also suspect that the conflict over Nordstream 2, the Ukrainian transit fees, and the Russian debts (or non-debts) must be understood in light of the Normandy talks.
What Germany wants, it seems to me, is (1) cheap energy for German industry, (2) a maximally weak Russian hand visavi Ukraine (which is now in effect a NATO/EU dependency), and (3) good enough relations with the Kremlin for Russia not to go rogue. Goals (1) and (3) obviously sit uneasily with goal (2), which is why we see so much back and forth.
Probably a 5-tier system would be best because even Africa has places like Liberia and Somalia, but we would have to consult with rootless adventurers who have thoroughly traveled the world, to figure out if more steps were needed.
Then there is always the difficult question of what you call a mixed country, like Israel or South Africa during Apartheid. Or places like Detroit, which have gone to rot, but still receive infrastructure subsidies and some level of legal oversight.
Agreed, and I think the answer lies in the oddly-worded question, which is more about perceived relative* welfare than “life satisfaction” (whatever that is).
Hungary’s behaviour in WWII is almost impossible to understand. They were hyper-aggressive attacking almost all of their neighbours and grabbing lands from them (Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Ukraine), and Hungary sent one of the largest armies to attack Russia in 1941. Yet they were only mildly fascist at home, not particularly anti-Semitic till 1944, and internally divided. More similar to Italy than to the Nazis.
Reiner Tor complains about the destruction of Budapest during the 1956 uprising. Two facts are missing from the story as told in the West:
– In 1955 Hungarian WWII POW’s were finally released by Soviet Union – same time as many German POW’s. Tens of thousand of them returned to Hungary and were the core group that staged the uprising and fought in the street – or were perceived by paranoid Soviets as being the bulk of the fighters, basically the same thing.
– The uprising was incredibly bloody – it started by armed crowds lynching policemen or people associated with the communist government – literally burning them in the street. The rhetoric was even more blood-thirsty about killing and revenge, and getting back at Russia for the WWII loss.
They lost, they were brutally suppressed and as Reiner says, there was destruction all over Budapest. The context here is that it was 10 years after WWII in which Hungary attacked Russia and fought against it till the end with extreme brutality. The idea that you get to refight it at no cost 10 years later is accepted in the West as perfectly normal, although historically it makes no sense and West would never put up with similar ‘counter-revolutions’ by losers. And they never did, when Germany tried to question WWI result in 1923, France took over Rhineland and shot any resistors. That’s the way the cookie crumbles. It is almost amusing to see the double standards gleefully repeated with no regard for one’s own behaviour.
There were of course younger Hungarians who had nothing to do with WWII (maybe their parents) and there was also the internal ‘reform communist‘ group around Imre Nagy. They were bumped together by Russians with the WWII POWs and revanchists who by the way did most of the hard fighting. It was a sad story all around, but to only mention one side, and to ignore the historical context is deceptive. Why do it after 65 years? Why not admit that losing a war – as Hungary did in WWII – has consequences? Would British tolerate a quasi-Nazi uprising in Hamburg in 1956 trying to kick them out? Would Americans or French?
This I would do. Only I would make her communications public.
This is shady.
There is kind of a catch-22 here. Obviously, I don’t want to see my savings become totally worthless, but King Dollar is one of the main poisons that destroyed the US, IMO.
If the US genuinely falls, I think a lot of countries will be screwed more than the US, at least in the short term. The US still has providential geography. Though possibly, China can quickly fill the freedom of the seas gap, or at least kill chicken to scare a monkey.
I think it is a really interesting question what will happen to the US Navy, and on what timeframe. Though, I really don’t anticipate war with China.
Agree. Two tiers are inadequate. There are many shades of gray between countries, as well as within a single country. Say, Miraflores in Lima and Iquitos are both in Peru, but they are worlds apart. One approaches normal first world, whereas the other feels less civilized than quite a few places in Malaysia or Indonesia.
I was in 40+ states in the US, including Michigan, but I never visited Detroit and plan to keep it that way. Although I know people who worked at Wayne State and say that Detroit is not as bad as most people think.
But I was right. I said that Ukraine will slowly lose its role as a transit country. That’s exactly what is happening and if it took a $3 billion bribe to get out of it, why is that significant? UK is asked to pay a $60 billion bribe to leave EU. Gazprom makes $13 billion a year and its profits are rising (one of the best investments around), why not pay an exit fee?
Regarding GNP and IT that you push here: Ukraine GNP is $130 billion with all the aid in billions a part of it – Czechia is $212 billion, Hungary $150 billion, each is about 1/4 of Ukraine’s size. There are 5 million Ukrainians who left, and Ukraine is literally the poorest country in Europe (ok, Moldova :). IT growth is a replacement for disappearing industries and accounts for 3% of the economy. We are 5 years after the glorious Maidan and the results are not much to boast about.
Is it going to get better? Based on the gas deal, the slow decline will continue, people will continue leaving. And what will happen when an economic downturn really hits EU and the billions stop being sent in aid? This is not a good picture – cutting economic links with Russia was inevitably going to be costly.
Soviets were never good at separating grain from chaff. But just 11 years after WWII, that Hungary lost along with their friend Hitler, it would be hard to expect niceties.
Soviet propaganda was also quite silly on many points. Say, it never mentioned the atrocities committed by Hungarians or Romanians (“brotherly” countries, my foot!), it even deemphasized the atrocities committed by Banderites: their role in mass murder of civilians in Belarus, Ukraine, and Slovakia came to light only in 1990s. Germans knew that the scum is useless in real fight with organized troops, so they mostly used them to “pacify” (meaning murder – dead people don’t fight any more) civilians in occupied territories.
Hey, follow the wisdom “when you see your enemy committing suicide, do not interfere”. That appears to be what Putin is doing regarding Ukraine and even the Empire. The more illusions they have, the better for their enemies.
There was a Russian joke about Maidan.
– What did Maidan give you?
– Maidan gave me freedom. I used to work at a factory that closed after Maidan. Then I started my own sex service company. We charge 200 hryvnas for oral and 400 hryvnas for anal sex.
– How much do you charge for the classical?
– The company is still small, I am the only one working, so we don’t have that service yet.
Judaism is a religion. It is not a race, or a nationality. Individuals who have become agnostic or aetheist may refer to the fact that their ancestors were of those particular faiths-religions, who may have been persecuted for religious beliefs, or a lack of relogious beliefs, as in the case of Jews, for usuary, which Christians did not participate in for religious reasons, however, under Judaism, Jews are forgiven their debts, and non-Jews are not, which is a discriminatory policy, particularly if the lenders are not doing it for religious reasons, which would be the case if they were agnostic or atheist.It would be discriminating against religions other than Judaism. Israel has a debt free monetary system, created by Lord Rothschild, who created debt based monetary systems for nations other than Israel, and the Israel lobby in America has encouraged America to go to war against nations that decided to create their own debt free monetary systems, including Venezuela, Iran, Syria and Libya.
Collecting interest is not a religion!
I am starting a new Israel lobby members of Christians Against Policies of Israel in America – CAPIA, which is the opposite of AIPAC, will refer to themselves plurally as CAPIAS= a judicial writ for an arrest by an officer.
True, but nobody is good at separating grain from chaff. Look at the convulsions the West is going through to separate ‘democratic opposition‘ from ISIS.
If it wasn’t for the insane commie brotherhood propaganda the losers in WWII would end up a lot worse – after all they literally attempted a genocide in Eastern Europe, they were all ‘chaff’ by historical standards. They wouldn’t be around inventing absurd narratives. But communists were soft in the head and possessed an ideological ‘humanity‘ bug that was almost feminine in its un-realness. My most vivid recollections of actual communists were elderly teachers preaching about how to ‘be nice‘ to the weak, and how we are all ‘the same on the inside‘, blabla…maybe there is something to the Cultural Marxism meme.
West has somehow sold the story that ‘yeah, we through our more unhinged allies allies can exterminate you, but then when they lose, you must be nice to them‘. Romanians, who acted dreadfully and brutally in WWII, at least had the cleverness to switch sides in August 1944. But Hungarians actually doubled-down and fought even more fanatically at the end. The ever hapless Poles literally attempted to ‘liberate themselves‘ in 1944 (Warsaw uprising) and when they were massacred by Germans, they decided that it was all ‘Russia’s fault’. Just because. I guess Canadians were just about to liberate Poland, any day, so why not put up monuments to them and sh.t on the actual liberators.
These kinds of infantile ideologies used to be dealt with non-verbally.
You mean the guy, who went to Nazi concert, a fake doctorate, peasant hipster?
Because it didn’t have to (I can think of a 1000 better ways to spend $3 billion). And because doing so meant prolonging the existence of a militantly anti-Russian regime.
Saying that Ukraine is going to lose in the long-run doesn’t cut it, because half of that country is actually Russian, and it’s being actively wasted by the manic regime.
Sure there is an internal struggle about how to scale it back, and Trump only represents a small, marginal group. There is an alternative and stronger force that believes that a combination of ‘reform’ and suppression of dissent can keep it going as is. Their standard bearers are everywhere, Brussels byrocracy, most of the media, ‘new faces’ like Macron or the gay guy running in US. And of course, Justin Trudeau.
Abandoning a systematic policy is not an event, it is a process. In the last few years, almost every step in the process, every choice made, has moved the world away from the postwar institutional order. The Deep State is really just a collections of institutions, and people working there, both public and private, who have benefitted from the post-WWII global world order. They don’t want to let it go because it is who they are, what they have been doing, and they have no comparable place to go.
What undermines the order, and what has accelerated the dismantling process are the stubborn self-serving actions by the institutional insiders (Deep Staters) trying to show that they still have the ultimate power. Yes they do for now, but that power rests on the general acceptance of the system, and by doing in-your-face ‘we can get away with it‘ things, the trust in the system goes down and once the good-will is gone any system becomes extremely vulnerable. Ask the WWI royals, or communists, how quickly power slipped out of their hands at the end. So more sanctions, more restrictions, more internet censorship, more misuse of institutions, more we are getting to the point when there is no core to the system and it becomes everyone for themselves. And then something happens that pushes the system over the edge.
Either that, or Macron and Buttigieg are declared saviours, we all shut up, and the system is deified as an unquestionable good. Could happen that way too.
You are right, they didn’t have to. There is an element of jiu-jitsu in this and to me it also doesn’t make sense. But I don’t think it changes the trajectory, it delays it, but even by how much is not clear – there are too many other moving parts.
My reading of Kremlin is that they want the pipelines in place (NS-2, Turkey, China) before they make their move. Washington knows it, so they escalated in an almost absurd way – controlling foreign trade between two large nominally independent countries like Germany and Russia is a bold step. It helps Kremlin to keep Berlin on its side when they are nicer to Kiev and it might had been a condition by Merkel. And Kiev wouldn’t sign for a bad deal – 50% drop in volume and end in 2024 – without a bribe. $3 billion is a lot, but in the big picture it amounts to nothing, 2 months of funding for Kiev.
Short of triggering the coming confrontation right now, Russia had no better choices. It still will get ugly and NS-2 might literally be sabotaged. In the long run, the energy will be redirected east, mostly China, and Europe and Ukraine will be much worse off for playing these games. But Kiev can party with their $3 billion loot. I would.
Cossacks were shouting Slava Perun till a few C ago.
Christians always claiming barely converted stuff or outright Pagang stuff like Plato.
Wearing “beautiful robes” doesn’t exactly disprove my point..
My reading is that Putin grew old and forgot what his job is supposed to be. He thinks he presides over a natural gas business. Giving billions of $$$ to the regime, that’s effectively at war with us, refuses to make peace, and trains Nazi militias is not just stupid, it’s immoral and treasonous.
https://twitter.com/Parikramah/status/625069774641336320?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E625069774641336320&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fs9e.github.io%2Fiframe%2Ftwitter.min.html%23625069774641336320
Muslims are massive fags.
Half of Babur’s autobio is about his boy toy.
Some Orthodox king had a Turkish boy toy which caused a war.
Yall niggas gay,
Fk lol.
Vedics don’t do incest or faggotry.
No wonder everyone feels inferior/jealous & spiteful LOL
You characterise things without addressing the situation. If the choices were no deal, or pay $3 billion to get this deal (rather good overall), what would be your alternative solution? I am assuming that Merkel insisted that a deal with Kiev be made as a condition for NS-2.
It is possible that Merkel might not deliver on her side of the deal to complete NS-2, but that would make all of this irrelevant anyway. Washington certainly wasn’t willing to go along with this, that’s why they went with the sanctions that they could had done at any point in the last year. The fact that it all happened in the last few days suggests that Washington refused to sign on and decided to go for the jugular. It is either desperation or they know that they have the Germans by their balls. But if that is the case, nothing Russia does would make any difference anyway.
None of this changes the long-term strategic situation. But give us an alternative if you think you could do better.
Well, in Syria it’s mostly pretense, there is virtually no grain there. Simple rules of thumb: 1) anyone funded by the Saudis and/or other Gulf satrapies is a bandit with a probability of 99.9%; 2) anyone armed and trained by the US and/or Israel is a bandit with a probability of at least 95%.
In contrast, in Hungary in 1956 there was some grain. But the Soviets weren’t interested in separating it from Nazified chaff. Yet after 1956 they allowed Kadar to maintain the softest version of socialism in Eastern Europe.
Commies are, indeed, weird. If you take their ideology at face value, it is as self-defeating as the original Christianity (the other cheek thing). I remember classical commie propaganda thing “Hitlers come and go, but the German people remain”. As if Hitler struck Germany out of the blue, like a natural calamity. BTW, that’s current attitude in Germany: years 1933-1945 are presented like some kind of natural disaster. It would have been funny if it weren’t so sad. Not to mention that it would be good for Germans to remember that German troops were in the Baltics and Ukraine in 1941-44. Did not end well for Germany.
Poles conveniently forget that Yugoslavia, that actually liberated itself, had a chance to refuse entry to Stalin’s troops. Stalin was furious, labeled Tito all sorts of bad things, but couldn’t do anything. Poles resisted in 1939, more than French in 1940, but they lost because, as many times before, they alienated both its neighbors, Germany and Russia. But Poles would likely never learn. In terms of loserdom, they take the third place in the world (after Ukrainians and Kurds).
Anyway, fk all the fighting.
Brrruah
U khohol ukr niggas wear Shrovery or w/e like ppl wear Salwar
“Slava Perun”…”Cossacks” ???
Pure nonsense. I am sure, however, that there was a three pronged test that every able bodied man had to pass in order to become member of the Zaporozhian Hoste, all related to his Christian faith:
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Zaporozhian_Cossacks
Who will come after Putin?
That post about Rus alternating between a Patriotic & Reformist Tsar has me concerned.
India seems to have the same thing..
https://defenceforumindia.com/forum/threads/uk-and-the-rise-of-radical-islam.69422/page-55#post-1614060
You said Ukraine would “they will have to pay back all their old debts to Gazprom, they will lose all (or most) transit fees, and if they don’t pay (up front and in cash) there will be no gas.”
Ukraine had to pay back no debts, but got $2.9 billion, the equivalent of a yea’rs worth of transit fees at peak.
It will still have over 50% transit fees in 2024 (volume will be half of today’s but fee rate will be increased).
Noone said transit would disappear after 2024. There’s a clause for a ten year extension.
The only part you got right was the slow part. So you are remarkably consistent in being wrong about 60% to 75% of the time.
Ukraine was poor before, it is poor now. But after Maidan for the first time it has started catching up to Russia. Ukraine’s per capita GDP PPP as % of Russia’s had been declining since independence, now matter who ruled Ukraine, until Maidan. It now how it was before Yanukovich came to power. And this despite the loss of the wealthiest provinces.
Why Putin didnt just take Kiev & crown himself King? In 2014 I mean like Karlin suggests.
Holocaust denial should be punishable by death because wishing it didn’t happen is downright evil.
I disagree.
The postwar order has not been good to us. In fact, it has been a strategic disaster.
In the prewar world America was richer than every country in Europe. Today we’re still mostly richer, but not very much, and productivity is not better. And both Norway and Switzerland are richer than us, which was not the case before the war.
Thulean Friend brought up Germany’s car industry. Before the war Germany barely had a car industry, and the USA made more cars than the rest of the world combined.
US elites promoted international trade and European integration after the war in order to cement the US empire. As a result European countries and Japan were able to achieve the economies of scale needed to match America in productivity and living standards.
Of course now the horse has left the barn.
Are you brain damaged?
On your bit about “Pavlo’s and Danylo’s”….it is important and very funny to note that the most popular newborn names for boys and girls in Kiev are practically identical for the top 5 places
Russia’s natural gas share of EU market has actually increased since 2014 by about 3-4%. Volume provided gas increased by about 20%+.
Obviously I hate the fact that Ukrop parasites are getting money for nothing….but Turk Stream and SS2 were never going to be able to deliver at full capacity for much of the year anyway (hence why 1 year extension was best offer for Russia). After a year ukrops get only half the volumes of gas transit in a period when gas prices are quite low. Even the 3 billion “fine” they can get neutralised if the Court case in London keeps to their original verdict on a different matter of the precoup loan to Yanukovich .
Summary? Russia does not lose out financially ( except from the general issue of low gas prices), Ukropia gets a win in avoiding going into recession, but still gets a loss in further cementing it’s whores status as umbilically linked to Russia and a prostitute of the west that has somehow sacrificed billions earned in exports to Russia, but shown willing to earn merely a few billion just to do a lapdog job for the west.
1% + of its GDP down from 2021 onwards
Keep going. So, do you think that our elites missed the boat by trying to create this world wide empire, or not? I think that part of the motivation to do so was in creating new, more prosperous markets. Another reason was to try and be the power at the top of the pyramid directing the course of international relations. Trump is correct in demanding that these countries pay more for their own defense, especially those that are NATO members…
Yay! Receive 3 billion dollars …..but lose 30 billion dollars a year , for the last 5 years ,in lost exports to Russia, lost investment from Russia (still, predictably and embassingly the top FDI investor in Banderastan), lost agricultural exports if Russia had not become a competitor in thus industry, instead of biggest client).
That is typical spasticated khokhol logic! Hilarious…although of course you aren’t even ukrainian anyway
As for the 3 billion – that is not in one go, almost certainly “paid” in transit fee increase and NOT in addition to it ,and 100% likely to be cancelled out by British court ruling over a similar amount regarding the loan to Yanukovich.
As for the transit fees into the GDP…..you are too thick to understand the difference between ukrops fake GDP (a mere currency manipulation) and government budget. The 3 billion is a huge, precious amount into the account and spending of this already dying and parasitic state
That being halved (maybe less if gas price continues to decline ) after 2021 is also hugely bad news
As for the excellent Beckow (LOL- how typical sad loser to actually look up his comments from months ago) he is nearly always correct…and probably counted on European courts not being totally corrupt and American vassals. His logic is 100% impeccable -it is more than likely Russia saw this as a big opportunity to get closer Germany so they can get angry with hyperactive attempts by Americans to stop it….and RF prioritised that over an initial desire to
punish Kiev .
Sorry….for Kiev AND Moscow that should say. .or else the comment has no meaning
Empire without territorial acquisition is rarely good for the average citizen esp a country the size of USA.
Paradoxically, Trump’s America first has been a boon for dissidents everywhere. All he has done by demanding more NATO contribution is give another kick to the EU force & encouraged EU states to try their hand at building economies of scale in defense.
Developing new markets to then sell products to was part of the motivation and in a competitive world someone would probably have done, so first mover advantage.
On another note, I am disgusted to my core that both you and Swede Jew refer to America as “We”
That this conglomeration of 56% Euromutts hell bent on mixing African blood with everyone + gifting all with HIV garners a “We” from otherwise staunch white nationalists proves to me that the only way to save Europe is by another Steppe invasion.
I am soooooooooo glad I will never fit into the mainstream western culture by being
ie a Jatt 😀
Id rather burn alive than identify with the trans-gender jewish parasite called the USA.
Are there any “Katyn Deniers” here? Or in real life?
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-katyn-massacre-rewriting-history-removal-plaques/30338487.html
Without checking your numbers, most exports to Russia came from eastern Ukraine. Yay for your gloating over misery of Russian-speaking Easterners.
Wrong as usual. According to the deal it will be paid by December 29:
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/12/22/russia-ukraine-outline-terms-for-five-year-gas-transit-deal-to-end-row-a68712
Not a bad deal, bad deal would have been 80% drop as was technically possible.
Agree.
I visited Baku in 2017. It was much nicer than Budapest. The city is swimming in oil money. The perekhods under the streets were made of marble or some fancy stone and had escalators, the police cars were BMWs. People there hated Russia, they compared Crimea to Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan is officially friendly towards Russia; as one of Aliyev’s close relatives told me, we prefer America but Russia and Iran are a lot closer.
I agree with (1) and (3) but I’d disagree over (2). I am not convinced Germany cares much about Ukraine’s well-being. It is a very small economy (barely over 100 billion USD) and Germany’s trade exposure to Ukraine is minimal. It isn’t part of NATO, EU or any other major Western framework.
If Ukraine collapsed it would create significant refugee streams but Ukrainians are very easily assimilated into Western European countries, unlike Syrians or Turks, so even in a worse-case scenario the fallout would not be a major problem. If Croats or Serbs can mix into Germany easily, I don’t see why Ukrainians would be a problem. Germany’s shrinking work force would in fact even need such an influx. The only kink would be Russia’s expanding borders if both Belarus+Ukraine was swallowed up but Germany probably would calculate that Russia wouldn’t attack a NATO ally (and they wouldn’t be wrong). I’m not saying Germany would want such an outcome, only that the worst-case scenario wouldn’t be a big problem for them.
I think this has the fingerprints of the US all over it. Trump personally hates Ukraine, which has been documented in leaked documents during the impeachment process and major personalities of the Trumpist movement like Tucker Carlson openly cheers for Russia. So it wasn’t Trump or his people who pushed for this but rather the permanent national-security state that was behind it and they are obsessed with keeping Russia down, or inventing fake Russiagate hoaxes to justify their paranoia. Germany made a 180 and suddenly pressured Russia to do something which Germany itself had no interest in keeping for the longest time. That suggests Germany caved to US pressure and tried to do a compromise. The US interest would be for NS2 to be scrapped completely. This was a German attempt at triangulating.
Either way, Ukraine got a big win purely because of Great Power politics over which they had no direct control.
I still don’t get how Ukraine is a real country.
Panjab only really has a separate identity cuz of Sikhi.
Hindus are the bitch of Magadh & Muslims of Kabul-Tehran.
Ethno-nationalism w/o a religious-cultural ID doesnt work.
Most of Ukraine is budget Russians esp S Russians. Ik that lot of Russia is Ugric-Slav Mutts.
Galicians are retarded Pole-Austrian larpers who are basically white suicide bombers.
Life’s hard for you niggas.
Russia is basically a Happa country, poland is basically potato midgets, Germans are robots & the Balkans are nogs.
Meanwhile life for us is simple, Expand West into Tajik, Afghan, Iran ie where da white wimmin at.
:shrug:
GL Bro.
I support Armenian genocide cuz Kardashians burn coal||
They encourage both brown & white girls to do it cuz they’re mid point,
They’re the OG white Hindus.
—
Blacks are a martially incapable race, and cowardly in battle.
From a warriorship pov they’re a net loss and since slavery is wrong, there’ only one other solution.
Europe and Japan are not independent but are still essentially slaves to US dictates. Trump’s noises do not change this. The moment a democrat comes back into office, the old servitude will return. As Swedish Family pointed out, the most powerful politican in Europe (Merkel) spied on other Europeans on behalf of the US. It is hard to summarise the pathetic state of Europe more apt than that.
The richness of the US after WWII would not last, it was merely a temporary and unique artefact of the wartime devastation. US elites would have had to strangle the nascent recoveries of Europe and Japan to maintain that dominance, which would have bred massive hostility and wouldn’t have succeeded anyway. You should be glad US elites were wiser than you. That allowed the 21st century to become the American century.
Your point about manufacturing is well-taken, but financial power is even more powerful for international control. The dominance of the greenback gives the US undue power as Swedish Family pointed out, or “exorbitant privilege”.
The big losers in the US have been the middle classes, which have not seen their wages rise substantially, but for the US elite that tradeoff came with much more international influence. A trade-off they would happily do again. Their only regret is likely allowing China advance as much as it did, believing in their own snake oil pitch about capitalism breeding democracy. In reality, capitalism is amoral and functions perfectly well under autocracy, fascism or any other authoritarian system. The Chinese were smart enough to take advantage of these self-deluded fantasies about the magic of capitalism that so many Americans suffered from – many still do.
All three had in 1991: A) lower life expenctacy and less healthy lives B) lower income by non-trivial margins and C) significant unemployment problems. This has not materially changed for Italy or France but has come down drastically for the UK
Given this, I am not surprised at all that life satisfaction increases when all of them are richer and healthier. It in fact makes eminent sense. It would have been strange if they were less satisfied despite their lives improving of this time period.
Now, if you had asked them the question about optimism for the future, then I would have expected all three to do poorly given the stagnation of the past decade.
If Christians can steal Germanic pagan traditions and shamefully claim it as a “Christmas tree” then surely we can claim their iconography as well? 🙂
https://i.imgur.com/OBUa46i.png
This is not really accurate; average wage is stagnant because many more lower income people have entered the workforce. :
https://www.aier.org/article/the-myth-of-american-middle-class-stagnation/
The average wage can remain unchanged or even fall even though each individual’s wage rises. As women and immigrants have entered the workforce in greater numbers over the past several decades, their doing so pulled down the average wage because the wages of a disproportionately large number of these workers are below the average.
It’s as if you calculate the average height of your children each January 1st and discover, when you include in this year’s calculation the height of your bouncing baby girl born on December 31st, that your children’s average height is lower than it was on January 1st of last year. You obviously don’t call the pediatrician in a panic to report that your children are shrinking. You understand that the average height is pulled down by the addition of a new, below-average-height child to the population for which the average is calculated.
Also:
Michael Cox and Richard Alm, in their still-relevant 1999 book, Myths of Rich & Poor, reasoned that a good measure of changes in real wages is the amount of time a person must work to earn the income necessary to buy goods and services. If the amount of work time required to earn the income necessary to buy a representative bundle of household goods and services is today the same as it was decades ago, then the stagnationist tale is true. But if the amount of work time required has fallen, then there is very good reason to doubt claims of economic stagnation.
And so Cox and Alm went to work. They, for example, divided the nominal price of a pair of jeans in 1973 by the nominal wage earned by an ordinary worker in 1973 to determine how much time that worker had to toil back then to earn enough money to buy a pair of jeans. Then making the same calculation for a pair of jeans today, Cox and Alm determined if jeans became more expensive or less expensive when measured by the amount of work time a typical worker must work in order to acquire a pair of jeans.
Doing this calculation for a number of ordinary consumer goods and services, Cox and Alm found that the typical American worker in 1999 earned real wages much higher than were earned by his or her counterpart a quarter-century earlier.
Impressed by this simple but brilliant method of measuring changes in real wages, a few years ago I purchased – using eBay – a Fall/Winter 1975 Sears catalog. (Readers who, like me, were born before the mid-1970s will remember that Sears back then was the great retailer to middle America. Its motto was “Sears has everything!” which wasn’t much of an exaggeration.) Using the nominal average hourly wage of production and nonsupervisory workers in 1975 – $4.73 – I divided the price of each of hundreds of the products offered for sale in the 1975 Sears catalog by this wage.
While I didn’t perform this calculation for all of the thousands of goods listed in the catalog, I did do so for a sample of over 400 goods. In my large sample I found only one good that costs more work time today than in 1975: men’s work boots. For all of the other goods in my sample – including, but not limited to, clothing, household appliances and furniture, recreational equipment, and auto supplies – the amount of time that a typical American worker today must work to earn enough income to buy those goods is less than in 1975, and in most cases it is much less.
Here’s a small sampling of my findings done a few years ago (which you can explore in more detail here). I have since updated these findings to 2019; the trend of falling work-time costs continues.
– In 1975 a ten-cup drip coffee maker cost the ordinary American worker almost 8 hours of work time; today it costs that worker only 45 minutes.
– In 1975 a pair of all-cotton jeans cost 1.5 hours of work time; today it costs 20 minutes.
– In 1975 a car battery cost 9 hours of work time; today it costs 3.6 hours.
– In 1975 a microwave oven cost 93 hours of work time; today a microwave oven of similar size and power costs 6 hours.
– In 1975 an automatic dishwasher cost nearly 50 hours of work time; today a dishwasher costs 12 hours.
– In 1975 an exercise bike cost 16 hours; today it costs 5 hours.
– In 1975 a low-priced standard-size electric washer-dryer combo cost 70 hours of work time; today this combo costs about half that, at 36 hours.
What’s even more revealing about browsing today the 1975 Sears catalog is what is not in it – such as, for example, a television with a remote control. In my next column I’ll draw some lessons from what that catalog from middle-class Americans’ alleged golden age does not contain.
On a semi-related note, I did not myself watch the recent Chernobyl miniseries on HBO, but I have heard that they mentioned the Holodomor.
This is quite interesting, but I am not sure how to interpret it. In my view, the Holodomor is kind of a competing narrative to the Holocaust. German_R used to say that he thought that promoting the idea was going nowhere, but here is this fairly mainstream reference. Though, Ukraine is not really a popular setting, so one cannot probably expect too many more.
I thought he had one eye.
I made an offhand remark while writing in detail about the possible reasons for Budapest looking perhaps shabbier now than Cracow fifteen years ago. The starting point is that Budapest was more destroyed than any other European capital (except Warsaw and Berlin) in 1945, and then there was another round of serious fighting in 1956. I don’t think I wrote anything about the reasons or context of this destruction, nor should I, since it was not the topic of my comment.
The rest of your comment contains lots of factual inaccuracies and a seriously flawed analysis.
Indeed, and he is not blind as some seem to think. The picture is obviously a deliberate mongrel mix of pagan traditions and Christmas, which is how the holidays are in Sweden. To be 100% representative, you would ideally have included Hugin and Munin on his shoulders, the two ravens who inform/spy on on his behalf as well as exchanging the gay reindeer for the badass Sleipnir 🙂
As I wrote to you on another occasion, the excessive brutality was true of the occupation troops (mostly in Ukraine, where you are from, IIRC), who were poorly armed and trained (certainly worse than the Germans), but not true of the frontline units and their area behind the front. (Since in 1941 Hungary sent one corps, then didn’t have frontline units from early spring 1943 until early summer 1944, that mostly covers the Second Army in 1942 around Voronezh.) The Second Army put emphasis on maintaining as cordial relations with the locals as was possible under the circumstances, which was not very much, but certainly way better than in Ukraine.
Regarding the “worse than Germans” narrative. (I have read the same thing about the Romanians and some others, and I think it applies for those cases as well..) I believe it’s either pure hyperbole, only true locally, or only true regarding efficiency and sanitary conditions.
I cannot be accused of actually liking Romanians, so I will use them to explain it. In 1941 the Romanians killed lots of Jews, and often let the corpses rot on the streets (leading to the excessive risk of an epidemic). They also sometimes tortured their victims beforehand, and the murders were often messier and worse organized than with the Germans. Some German officers complained about these things (with the attitude of traveling aristocrats writing about the barbarian lands they passed through), which led some historians to declare that “the Romanians were worse than the Germans.” Now the Germans were way more organized and systematic: eventually, something like half the Jews under Romanian rule survived, while probably something like 90% of Jews under German rule perished. (I didn’t look it up, but probably my numbers are not off by orders of magnitude.) So in what sense were the Romanians “worse than the Germans?” And it’s not like their atrocities weren’t encouraged and inspired by the Germans. But yes, they often didn’t organize proper mass graves for the victims.
The same is true of Hungarian occupying troops. They were poorly led, poorly trained (Hungary had a very small army until 1938, so it didn’t have a vast well-trained reserve, nor adequate number of officers), and frightened for their lives in a vast and relatively sparsely inhabited foreign land, where partisans were seemingly hiding in every bush (or so the soldiers imagined). Meanwhile, cruelty was not punished and even encouraged. Often by some of the Germans, while most Germans were just shaking their heads at the amateurish and ineffective brutality of Hungarians, which only alienated the population while not restoring the order.
Very interesting research. Your grab bag of goods might even be more accurate than what professional economists use today, CPI (Consumer Price Index), for similar comparison purposes. Although you included the average wage of $4.73 back in 1975, I’m curious to know what exact year you used to simulate today’s costs and its corresponding wage? It always disappoints me to realize that the CPI does not include food and energy costs, things that usually take up a large chunk of anybody’s budget.
Totally false. The vast majority of the POWs were released earlier, and the emaciated (and by that time old) men returning were happy to be alive, not fighting another war. This is the first time I read about it, nowhere before have I read such an interpretation.
The fighters were mostly working class teenagers, and the original protest was started by university students. Some of the revolutionaries (especially im the beginning) actually demanded “real socialism,” whatever that means, and workers’ councils in the factories sprang up and were the last holdouts until December.
Again, totally false. There were some lynchings, altogether maybe twenty-something people were murdered, mostly soldiers belonging to the State Protection Authority (the secret police, but some of the people lynched were actually border guards sent to the capital). The lynchings resulted in a public outrage and condemnation. “Getting back at Russia” was not what they demanded. The demand was simply that the Soviet troops should leave the country, in accordance with the peace treaty.
No, the hard fighting was done by working class teenagers.
Quasi-Nazi, my ass. And everyone understood that Hungary’s role in the war was limited, so not even comparable to Germany.
I’m not sure what you are proposing here. The Soviets should’ve exterminated the losers in ww2? A rather strange wish for a Slovak.
I don’t see anybody stopping you? 🙂
Regarding the context of the lynchings. On October 25, 1956, there was a huge massacre of unarmed protesters in front of the Parliament building. It was committed by Soviet troops and tanks and probably a border guard unit of the State Protection Authority. It was probably caused by a Soviet general, who was alarmed by the fact that (contrary to your assertions) the Soviet soldiers and the protesters were overtly friendly to each other, and ordered warning shots to be fired. This created confusion, and the soldiers (probably both Hungarian and Soviet soldiers) thought they were being shot at.
Interestingly the persistent (to this day) rumors immediately spreading afterwards were about hidden (Hungarian communist) State Protection Authority sharpshooters on top of a nearby building. This led to the lynching of a communist party secretary and some members of the State Protection Authority. (Usually innocents. There were also probably false rumors that the lynchings were also organized by diabolical State Protection Authority provocateurs. As you can imagine, it was not a very popular organization.)
Now, this guy declared war on China too.
https://twitter.com/PavelNovotnak/status/1208750193094643713
https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/pavel-novotny-starosta-reporyje-vlajka-hongkong-cina-protesty-podpora.A191223_181911_domaci_pmk
Řeporyje über alles!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Praha-%C5%98eporyje_znak.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%98eporyje
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMPugEgWoAA2QEP.jpg
Oh and obviously the Soviets did take Hungarian prisoners, lots of them. I also never heard they were treated any worse than Germans, which probably means they weren’t.
The Germans arrested two Hungarian prime ministers (Kállay and then Lakatos), the second time together with Regent Horthy, and installed new governments each time (Sztójay and then finally Szálasi). After the removal of Horthy the Hungarian troops were only employed in piecemeal fashion, preferably no larger than battalion size. This meant their morale and combat effectiveness were very low, they were all playing for survival.
Unlike Romania, which only had German air defense troops and the troops at the front, Hungary had two heavy Panzer battalions and a number of other elite troops (both from the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht) in and around Budapest.
One must also note that while Slovaks were offered the chance to finish the war as if they had fought on the winning side, and both Romanians and Slovaks were offered to get back all the areas they lost to Hungary, Hungary was offered a much worse deal by the Soviets and the Allies: to get back to the Trianon borders.
No, they actually treat it like some kind of personal guilt on the part of each of them. But it’s very skewed towards holocaust guilt, and it’s used to keep them within NATO and the US sphere.
Yugoslavia didn’t “actually liberate itself.” It needed Soviet troops to liberate Belgrade, and the liberation of the rest of the country owed most to the Germans withdrawing themselves. Stalin didn’t bother to actually occupy the country because its leadership was considered reliably communist, and contrary to some myths, Stalin didn’t actually have unlimited manpower reserves. Meanwhile in Poland they simply arrested the Polish resistance fighters who occupied cities (mostly, as in the Yugoslav case, after the Germans had left). They would have done the same in Warsaw, but there they were at the end of a very long offensive, with overly long supply lines and exhausted tank armies. This is the source of the idea that they deliberately stopped to let the Germans do the dirty work for them.
Me, this morning:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VcrNn8AiWMc/Tq2CavD4Y1I/AAAAAAAABCs/iv07lVmamsE/s1600/Someone+is+wrong+on+internet.png
The first Su-57 to be delivered to the Russian Air Force just crashed. Elsewhere someone wrote it was a technical problem with the flight control system.
https://www.rt.com/russia/476709-russia-su-57-fighter-jet-crash/
Better to burn alive cow killers.
“Arby’s roast beef sandwich in hand is worth two tofu wimpies in the tree.” Right Thorfinnsson? 🙂
https://youtu.be/ErSihCeVuJE
Herding cattle, a “real man’s’ job.
It looks like your mention of Hungarian suffering triggered the Slovak Sovok into spewing his usual Soviet-taught fairytales.
It’s very funny that his “grasp” of history is no better and no more objective than that of some Banderist activist (they claim stuff like Banderists never killed civilians, the killers were NKVD in disguise, etc.). The good thing about his posts is that it reveals the flaws of Slovakia’s education system and the specific nature of the nonsense being fed its citizens.
Good job with your detailed debunking. Pearls before swine in Beckow’s case, but useful for others reading here.
Thew world’s longest-held POW was a Hungarian prisoner taken by Soviets:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1352615/Russia-releases-prisoner-of-war-after-53-years.html
Russia releases prisoner of war after 53 years
By Philip Sherwell12:00AM BST 13 Aug 2000
THE world’s longest-serving prisoner-of-war, a Hungarian who sat forgotten for more than half a century in a Russian mental hospital, had only one thing on his mind yesterday as he spent his first day back in his homeland: when could doctors fit him with an artificial leg.
Wearing a large grey cap, grey tank top, shirt and tie, Andras Tamas, aged about 75, looked dazed as he arrived at Budapest airport gripping the arms of his wheelchair and surrounded by a crowd of doctors, journalists and well-wishers. Nor did he show any sign of recognising the eight people claiming to be relatives who had thought he was long dead.
It was the first time he had seen Hungary since the mid-Forties, but all he wanted to know was when he would get a prosthetic right leg to replace one amputated three years ago because of circulatory problems, according to a Hungarian psychiatrist who accompanied him from Moscow.
Mr Tamas’s arrival in Budapest marked the end of a saga that spans more than 50 years, most of it spent in virtual isolation among people with whom he was unable to communicate. He has no idea that communism has come and gone in his homeland in his absence.
Until he was taken by bus to Moscow’s airport on Friday, he had not set foot outside the hospital in the Russian town of Kotelnich since Soviet secret police took him there as a young man in 1947. He never learnt to speak Russian and the staff dismissed his few remarks in Hungarian as gibberish.
Doctors took little notice of the quiet self-absorbed man who spent most of his time sitting on a bench in the yard and occasionally carved wood in the hospital workshop.
Then, in the early Nineties, a doctor of Slovak origin recognised that he was speaking Hungarian. His remarkable case was brought to the attention of Hungarian authorities two years ago and they gave him a passport and organised his return even though they can find no record of his birth or nationality.
Despite his 53 years in a psychiatric clinic, Hungarian doctors believe that he can be rehabilitated within a couple of months. “He is not psychiatrically ill, he has a hospitalisation syndrome,” said Gabor Horvath, a foreign ministry spokesman. “Treatment in a Hungarian language environment by Hungarian medical experts could help to bring back his memories.”
Mr Tamas read Hungarian newspapers until dawn during his first night back in his homeland as a patient at Budapest’s National Institute for Psychiatry and Neurology.
Isolated from fellow Hungarians for a half century, Mr Tamas has forgotten most details of his early life, including his mother’s name. Some are slowly returning: he has mentioned a Hungarian town, a bakery, a basement and a four-storey building near a church. His speech is rusty, but his visitors say it is coming back.
Mr Tamas is believed to have been among the 150,000 Hungarian troops who fought under Nazi command at the Don River in 1944. According to Russian records, he was sent by train from western Russia to a prison camp in Siberia. He seemed to be suffering from psychological problems, so guards took him off the train near Kotelnich and left him at the hospital, where he was forgotten and his documents lost.
The support for the Yugoslav resistance (both Royalist and Communist) was mostly coming from Britain
Churchill and Stalin later agreed to hand Yugoslavia over to the Western Sphere, Stalin probably expected Tito (being a Communist after all) to later switch over to the Soviets, but that never happened
Had the British not decided to abandon Mihailovic in favor of Tito then Yugoslavia would’ve likely not gone Red
The Red Army came and went, the Bulgarian army was mobilized and sent to Yugoslavia to help the Soviets aswell
Very cynical way of looking it at it, but it makes sense
Either way there would’ve been no happy ending for the Warsaw Poles
The story of how Odin plucked out his eye in return for wisdom is pretty badass. Of course, these days we’d think of a man with an eyepatch as being an odd character, but it was probably pretty common in medieval times.
Always wanted to see a living raven (seen a stuffed one once – it was impressive), but I think I have only ever seen large crows.
I’ll note that had this happened to some new Ukrainian equipment the Russian nationalists here would be bragging about the collapse of Ukraine post-Maidan or something.
Lots of ravens out West
Ukrainian officials are saying that according to the terms of the agreement transit revenue will continue to be $3 billion annually through 2024. If true, this means that the increase in transit fees will be substantial and will compensate for the loss in volume.
Nonsense from top to bottom. Contrary to what you say, the only competitor the U.S. has ever had was the British Empire. Continental Europe and Japan were and are irrelevant. They were never anything more than money losing regional powers squabbling with each other, with no potential to dominate world trade. Even without WW2 the British Empire was already headed towards decline(though not necessarily as steep a decline as actually occurred), which left the U.S. as the only game in town.
Economic dominance by the U.S. was close to inevitable. WW2 only sped things up slightly. No other country has the population, the natural resources, or the geographic isolation to match the U.S. This is why the U.S. dollar is dominant.
Financial power does not come about magically. The U.S. dollar is the center of world trade because other countries want to trade with the U.S. Not the other way around. What you are suggesting is equivalent to arguing the industrial revolution and naval ascendancy of the British is a result of the dominance of the pound sterling in international trade 2 centuries earlier. The causation is backwards, and the chronology isn’t even right.
“Exorbitant privilege” only refers to the supposed inability of a world reserve currency nation to suffer a balance of payments crisis. This point actually strengthens the argument that the U.S. does not need to be the world reserve currency(one could make the case that many other countries need the U.S. empire, but I won’t make that case). The U.S. is not reliant upon international trade, and never has been. There are enough natural resources and economy of scale inside of the U.S. that we could ignore the rest of the world if we wanted to(Thorfinnsson’s point about the U.S. making more cars than the rest of the world combined is a good example here).
Even today, while having the international reserve currency, the U.S. has one of the lowest trade to GDP ratios in the world(and much of that is actually trade with Canada and Mexico). In the past, that rate was even smaller. Since we have established that the U.S. does not need the world’s trade, we can conclude that exorbitant privilege is irrelevant. This conclusion would not have applied to the British incidentally.
One could also argue that the unique position of the U.S. as both a country that does not need international trade while being a major market for the rest of the world(because of the size of the market and the fact that it has large populations on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts) makes the dollar inherently more desirable for other countries.
People have a tendecy to be wise with 20/20 hindsight. De Gaulle’s vision of a united Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok would definitely have been more than a match to the US. AK’s point about how WWI broke a potential half-billion Russian Imperial giant certainly rings true.
History only becomes inevitable after it has happened but it was never fate before it did. I’d agree that the US had the best likelihood of becoming the sole superpower but disagree that was the only candidate capable of making it.
That’s true, but it doesn’t adress my argument about world domination. In order to bring others along, you need to offer them something, such as access to your market and military protection (the East Asian “tiger economies” sold their allegiance to the US system in exchange to be placed under the US security umbrella).
The US could – and still can – ignore the world, but the price for that would be loss of influence, something which US policymakers decided against in favor of maximum political and economic reach. There’s no free lunch in this world.
P.S. Kalle Anka delenda est. D.S.
Amusing headline making the rounds yesterday:
In the past, she actually donated money against SNP. She must not understand how pozzed they are.
I’m not sure walking around a centre of a city is necessarily so accurate for this “first/second/third world” categorization, at least since the 20th century. It’s possible Budapest could be combining a developed economy with lack of investment in its piazzas, due to their not prioritizing that. (I do not know anything about Budapest – but we can see there is some international investment there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_based_in_Budapest )
Of course, in previous centuries, you would probably know a city’s wealth, just by walking around it. For example, 16th century wealth of Venice or Seville is still in the streets and squares. But what about 21st century Los Angeles?
When I walked around Los Angeles, I felt like I was not always in the first world, and some streets would be low second world: cheap 20th century architecture, lack of public investment, poor transport infrastructure and internal migration of homeless people to city. On the other hand, Los Angeles has a GDP per capita twice higher than most First World countries, and is world leader in many industries.
Perception of Los Angeles as a not rich city is misleading – is not lack of economic development, but a local culture of “private wealth, public poverty”; its expenditure is inside peoples’ houses or companies’ banks, rather than ornaments in the city piazzas.
So, Azeri politicians are a lot more reasonable and savvier than some people we know. I had a different impression in the USSR. Apparently, I was wrong.
I am pretty sure both Hungarian and Romanian troops were not as well trained as German. But the same is true for the Italian troops. Yet on the USSR territory the Italians had a reputation of being the most benign occupiers. They demanded food and drink (including alcohol) from the locals, but never committed any atrocities. In fact, areas occupied by Italians considered themselves lucky. So, it is a lot more than just poor training.
Romanians occupied Odessa and nearby territories. First, they were afraid to enter Odessa for a few days after the Red Army left. Shows their bravery. Then they entered and proceeded to exterminate civilians, Jews and non-Jews, in the most brutal manner. The residents of the areas where Romanians were the occupiers hated and despised them.
There must have been Hungarian prisoners of war, as they were released later. The only relevant piece of info would be what fraction of surrendering Hungarians were taken prisoner and what fraction was shot, and how these fractions compare to those of German troops. I don’t think anyone has that info.
She would be viewed as beautiful, because she is – at least in painting – just healthy looking.
Compared to today, most women (and men) would be much uglier in the past.
I was reading journals written by Dostoevsky about his visit to London in 1862. Dostoevsky writes that he is amazed about how beautiful English women are.
In different places, he is multiple times writing about beautiful English women, he sees walking in streets in London, in casinos in London, etc.
Reason average English women were more beautiful than Russian women in the 19th century, will be surely the comparative wealth of England, which means at least a much larger proportion of the population living with hygienic conditions .
Many people would have had bad skin problems, before it was possible to wash easily in winter. That’s aside from most women would have no makeup at all, and dental decay was almost universal by the 19th century.
This is also partly why our culture becomes more physically oriented in the 20th century (including in literature) – because when people are able to finally wash more than once a week, and brush their teeth, the physical side of life is no longer such a negative association that audience wants to escape from.
Norms of beauty changed more than we expect.
For example, in Italian Renaissance art – although there are always a lot of exceptions (e.g. Botticelli Venus), many of the women painted even as ideal figures are not very beautiful. In portrayal of virgin Mary, there are usually about 5 ugly Maries for each cute one.
https://i.imgur.com/Jdi7CjU.jpg
It as recently as late 19th century painting, that (at least erotic) art portraying women is the same aesthetics as Hollywood today.
John William Waterhouse aesthetic is just like modern perfume advertisement.
https://i.imgur.com/bf6hoSi.jpg
Waterhouse interpretation of legend – looks like scenes from glamorous/eroticized films of historical themes filmed in 2005 or something (like Troy or Kingdom of Heaven, etc).
https://i.imgur.com/HRtVlz4.jpg
And his more pornographic painting, looks like covers used for selling erotic literature still today.
https://i.imgur.com/L6AVVts.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/3iZPe44.jpg
Yes, Germans were forced to accept collective guilt for the “Holocaust” (we know by whom and on whose behalf), but if you read labels in their museums, they treat 1933-45 like a period of a devastating hurricane or flood, the emergence of which has nothing to do with Germans, who are just victims of that disaster.
Yugoslavia mostly liberated itself. Soviet troops were withdrawn at the insistence of Tito, not because Stalin trusted him. Later Stalin’s propaganda labeled Tito all sorts of things, even called him “fascist”. Only Khrushchev initiated the warming of the USSR-Yugoslavia relations.
You are right about Warsaw uprising, though. Soviet army stopped for its own reasons, although I think Stalin watched with glee when the Germans exterminated Polish nationalists who tried to “liberate” their country on the cheap.
Here’s that Ukrainian gomosexual activist who likes to hang out with PTsU bishops.
https://pravoslavie.ru/sas/image/103322/332259.b.jpg?mtime=1576845172
I suppose some of this goes back a long time – might have something to do with streetcars. But I imagine that Mexicanization and the the newly arrived homeless going to bathroom everywhere, don’t add to public-spiritedness.
My belief is that males who travel generally find females more attractive at their destination. I formed this opinion, by asking foreign students what they thought of the girls at my school and then going to their school. My speculations are that familiarity breeds contempt.
This is very true. Say, in Peru in Cusco or Lima, when you are in the most touristy parts (looks like the central square is called Plaza De Armas in every Peruvian city), things look very decent and first-worldly. But when you venture farther afield, you see roads full of bumps and potholes, scattered litter everywhere, half built (or half demolished, it’s impossible to judge by their appearance) houses, etc. Most importantly, people behave as if their surroundings are perfectly normal. So, I can post pretty pics of Peru (like AP posts pretty pics of Ukraine) and claim that it’s doing great. Yet in reality most of the country is a third-world shithole.
In much of the USA, especially larger or coastal cities, housing and medical care and taxes are all more expensive now, relative to average or mean incomes, than in the era you’re talking about. We live in Los Angeles and you’re not convincing us that the essentials of Life require less work to afford. By no means.
What are “gomosexual” and PTSU? Disgusting and shameful photo, in any event.
What do we mean by happy? On a personal level? On a material level? Or national success?
In terms of material conditions, obviously most countries have improved since 1991. In terms of national success, it will depend on timescale.
UK today looks like it will have a strong upward trajectory, compared to 1991. UK has currently a good situation of development of future industries, successful country and even ordinary people live in wealthy conditions. But compared to how far ahead UK was in terms of national power 1891 – UK today seems a very terrifying stagnation and mediocre level. In terms of national success, UK’s 20th century is a story of decline.
In Russia, compared to 1999, there is upward trajectory in living conditions, and even in world power. But compared 1979 – terrifying collapse of power, although even then improvement in material living conditions.
Italy, was growing well until 2007, and then after then has almost returned to 1998 income level.
https://miro.medium.com/max/2642/1*p9SuLo4szp057nLCqn3KdQ.png
There is no comparison between these paintings and the rape porn, revenge porn, homosexuality, bestiality, and other perverse, unhygienic, unhealthy, and DEGRADING practices that pervade the internet and our culture. There is still beauty, natural and human, as well as some degree of modesty in these paintings.
What erotic literature are you talking about? Fewer and fewer people buy and read books as time goes by, whether erotic or not. Other than “bodice-ripper” romance novels, which I doubt younger women are reading, what erotic “literature” is there exactly?
Too few people get this, as seen by all the naive gushing over China’s gleaming new infrastructure by so many on this site.
If you judged NYC by its crumbling infrastructure you’d have a very misleading picture of its wealth and status.
Conversely, if you judged Bangkok by its public infrastructure you’d have a similarly misleading idea in the opposite direction.
I don’t know why, but across many fields, people just have a hard time understanding that there can be vast differences in priorities. I guess it’s a natural human tendency to simply assume everyone shares your values and then rank them accordingly.
A kind of natural human solipsism and inherent narcissism.
This is why ranking abilities across populations is so hard.
P-Ts-U is the acronym for the schismatic Ukrainian church, U-P-Ts being the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
Gomosexualist is Russian for homosexual.
Extremely STRANGE! I just had a phone call which I did not answer from the Chinese Embassy in D.C.! They did not leave a voice mail. Why would the Chinese embassy be calling me? The Chinese Embassy is apparently stalking and spying on me, for criticizing Xi and China! The number was
202-337-1956.
Azerbaijan is in a very different place than Ukraine, in terms of geography and relative position. But it’s leaders have been more savvy than have Georgia’s, whose position is similar to that of Azerbaijan.
OCU is recognized by Constantinople, Greece, and Alexandria. Who is schismatic?
I rented a car in Lviv’s airport. The area around it was first world in appearance, as is the city’s center. I haven’t explored every corner of Lviv but overall it’s mostly 1st world looking for a 20 km radius around the center.
In contrast, driving into Budapest from the airport was like driving through the outskirts of Zhytomir or perhaps Moscow oblast in the mid 2000s- newer and better cars in Budapest of course but still overall 2 nd world appearance.
Do you find it scandalous that Christ spent time in the company of whores?
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church and Russian Orthodox Church had excommunicated the two schismatic groups many years ago, and the other national churches accepted that. The only canonical resolution to this problem would be for the schismatic groups to repent and return to the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. As communion is in principle a transitive relation, now Constantinople, Greece, and Alexandria have de facto become schismatic. Those are the tragic facts.
Putting aside geopolitical stances, it’s probably not that difficult to use oil to put a shine on a city. I mean, I understand Luanda has some parts.
No, since the whores repented.
I bear no ill will to individual homosexuals, but I would be very distressed if my bishops were collaborating with unrepentant homosexual activists.
Personally, I couldn’t care less about churches, schismatic or otherwise. But if you really want to determine who is schismatic, compare the number of Orthodox churches that recognized OCU and the number of their followers with the number that recognize Russian orthodox church (which includes autonomous Ukrainian orthodox church) and the number of their followers. BTW, the flock of retired captain of Turkish army Bart (patriarch of non-existent Constantinople) is smaller than the flock of many village priests.
I understand AP’s general view – he is really a fan of elegant city centres, luxurious old architecture, shiny clean streets.
Lvov has inherited beautiful architecture from the 18th and 19th century, when it was a wealthy and booming city. Its luxurious architecture is not a useful indication of its present economy, but of investment in the city of a bourgeoisie that had once lived there, one century and two centuries past. Economic significance of Lvov’s pretty streets, is only that it should become more a tourist attraction in the future, and can probably become the next fashionable city for EU tourists.
Lvov’s relation to its buildings reminds a bit of Buenos Aires, which is famous for its beautiful, luxurious architecture. In the 19th century, Buenos Aires was one of the most economically booming cities in the world. But this past luxury in its city architecture, has no relation to present below mediocre economic conditions of 21st century Argentina after a century of economic decline.
It can be a sign of successful tourism. Today’s municipalities are so cynical, they usually prioritize good urbanism, clean streets, architectural preservation, only when they want to develop tourism. And then tourism carries a lot of revenue to further increase urban improvements (which are viewed as an investment for attracting even more tourism) in a virtuous circle.
Beyond a sign of tourism success, shiny streets are not necessarily indicating a very diverse economy.
For example, Sorrento is all nice architecture, clean and shiny streets. If this was indication of economic development level, then Sorrento should be some kind of Silicon Valley. But I don’t think they have any economy in Sorrento apart from expensive cafes and hotels, to overbill naive tourists. (I don’t recommend Sorrento, even if you are in Napoli; – but, Napoli is a very cool city despite shabby streets). Maybe the only other industry of Sorrento is to grow some oranges and sell them to hotels.
Too shiny and neat streets, can be even sometimes counter-indicator to a booming economy. In the economic boom, the city might usually become quite chaotic and messy, as it is cut up to build new things, and flooded with internal migration. For example, imagine how chaotic and messy was in Tokyo construction, when the Japanese economy was “hot” (around 1960-1990).
Although you hopefully didn’t visit Peru expecting smooth asphalt? If I visit South America, I will be sad if I don’t enjoy cliches of riding in bumpy roads alongside simple peasants, alpacas, etc.
Should read “some nice parts.”
The Habsburgs really did a wonderful job building Lemberg.
To be honest, this is a bit of a question of priorities, though. There has been bickering about how to improve airport transit and who should pay for that. Obviously it’s far from the city center (and better off people avoid living nearby), but the road could’ve been improved for the price of a small fraction of the highways built over the past twenty years. For example driving to the city from the West (from Austria or Lake Balaton) is a better experience.
But the most important issue is the lack of a civilized public transport option: the train only goes to Terminal 1 (which is currently closed anyway), and even that only happened like a decade ago, with no extension to the way more important Terminal 2 in sight. (There is also the issue of how to operate them. The state railway company is a horrible relic of communism. The local public transport company is somewhat better, but then they don’t have ownership over the relevant sections of the railway.) The buses are now better, but still slow.
I said in my original post that Hungary was divided in WWII, and the more fanatical group with German help took over in 1944. That partially explains the dead-ender stand that destroyed parts of Budapest in 1945.
The other reason you give, that Hungary was offered a bad deal of returning to the Trianon borders – by Stalin according to you, although it was the Allies who demanded it – is a lot more tricky. We had a discussion about the impossibility to establish a truly fair border between Hungary and its neighbours – we see it differently. Hungarians think that Trianon was a bad deal because it included Magyar speaking or mixed regions in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia. We think that after the official policy of magyarization in 1900-1914, it was the best available solution. In any case why would reversing the result of WWI be offered to Hungary at the end of WWII as a gift? That’s not how it works.
You are wrong when downplaying the role of Hungary in Russia in WWII and about the role of Hungarian POWs and former soldiers in the 1956 uprising. Hungary sent a relatively large army to attack Russia, and fought there for years, the 2nd Army story says it all – we all know the tragedy. I agree that Romanians were by far the most enthusiastic, and I said so before. Finns were different, they only fought on their own border and refused to go further. Slovakia sent a division for guard duties, around 12,000 soldiers, less than 5% of what Hungary sent with almost no casualties while just Hungarian 2nd army lost 100k dead. An order of magnitude different, and it was wrong.
All 1956 uprising histories mention the former soldiers and officers leading the fighting. The idea that ‘working class teenagers’ were in charge is quite absurd – I am sure they were there, they always are, but the fighting was more professional. I also said that it was the perception by the Soviets, and that they were rather unsophisticated and often paranoid – and I said that this perception was as important as reality. Some thought it was a re-fight of WWII.
The lynching was very brutal by 1956 standard – can you think of any other place in Europe after WWII where it happened? (Well, Odessa 2014.) Burning 20 people and chasing hundreds more, is not something that happens just like that and can be dismissed. Especially since the perception was that this was just the beginning, that scores will be settled and it is kill or be killed. If you read what I said – and what you said – we are describing events similarly, it is the emphasis and interpretation that vary. Be open to another perspective (that’s why we are here).
In any case, Merry Christmas, I am heading to have bryndza in Komarno, and kerem szepen some friends over there…
Latest regarding Crimea:
https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2019/12/vladimir-putin-creating-reality-ground-crimea-191223202610520.html
The aforementioned reality has already been quite appropriately evident.
Who said they were collaborating?
I see Churches literally led by KGB snitches who collaborated with atheistic regimes to persecute Orthodox Christians vs. those that are not led by such people.
If your theology leads you to support the former and condemn the latter you might want to rethink assumptions.
I don’t put a lot of weight on what Ukrainian officials say, they are trying to make themselves feel better. If you say that the drop could have been 80% and not 50% – and thus it is not a defeat – you sound like you have already accepted that you lost and just want to negotiate the best terms of surrender. 50% is huge by any standards, and EU wanted to keep it as is. And that’s assuming Russia doesn’t find an excuse to change it once they have NS-2 running.
One more time: Ukraine has just de facto agreed to a cessation of transit through its territory. Yes, in 5 years and gradually, and Russia will pay an exit fee of $3 billion – but those are details, Ukraine is done as a gas transit country, any extension after 2024 is purely voluntary. Russia needs NS-2 to do this – it will depend on what happens to NS-2 and for that Russia needs Germany to stay on-board. Will they? That’s the $100 billion question and we will find out next year.
In your original post you also talked about Russia selling gas to Ukraine and none of that has been negotiated, so when you mix it up with the transit deal, you are of focus. Russia has demanded that Ukraine pays for any gas upfront and in cash, that’s still the case. Don’t mix it up with the transit just to confuse the issues.
The big picture is that Russia is reorienting commercially on Asia. And that its European dealings will be focused on where it makes most money: Germany, Austria, maybe France. That cannot be good for anybody in eastern Europe. If you don’t see it, well, you don’t see forest for the trees…
Merry Christmas, and spend less time in an autistic, cherry-picking rage and finger-pointing and more time thinking stuff through, and maybe we will have a higher quality discussion…
And because some of New York’s infrastructure is around 100 years old (e.g. metro). And things like bridges are designed with lifespan of around 70 years, while many are now more than 100 years old.
But the level of investment is also falling?
That is true, that there is different prioritization, and this can be understood as subjective choice – with no way to objectively arbitrate different values.
However, aside from different prioritization (which could be something subjective) of values in city building, there is also a question of how well different values are harmonized, or whether someone has managed to achieve two values at the same time, or not.
Part of the “style” of Los Angeles city building is extreme prioritization of “private wealth; public poverty”. Los Angeles is economically one of the most successful cities, with many world leading industries, – and yet in its public spaces, you can walk along shabby pavements with holes. This might be a subjective choice, in a city culture which prefers to maximize enjoyment of priv