Trump has fulfilled the prophesies of Kek.
That was clear pretty early on, as soon as it became clear he was winning Florida and the markets started tumbling as they realized the false song of globalism was about to end.
That is because Trump and his protectionist platform was almost certainly going to perform much better, relatively speaking, in the rustbelt than it would in the less industrial South and West – and that is indeed exactly what happened.
I did think there was a shy Trumpist effect that would make the election very close, much closer than the polls were letting on – I very much doubted there would be a 300+ HRC landslide, unlike mainstream opinion – but I did underestimate its magnitude, just like I did with Brexit; I thought Florida and most of the rustbelt would both be extremely close, but overall for HRC by the smallest of margins.
Of the closest swing states only North Carolina did I consider safe for Trump.
Instead, he has confidently smashed his way through almost the entire Midwest and seems to be on track to end up with 300+ electoral college votes.
I spent the election roundup drinking at a London School of Economics student common room. I am pretty sure that I and the Russian student who invited me were the only Trump supporters there out of 30 or 40 people. This is not that surprising when one considers that Trump Derangement Syndrome is universal throughout Yurop and Britbongistan, and furthermore, that this was: (a) London; (b) millennials; (c) students; (d) at a pretty elite institution, which made for a quadruple whammy. It was all good though since I got to feel like the physical embodiment of trollface.jpg.
Though I do regret not sticking to my guns and continuing to insist on a Trump victory as I had been doing a couple of months previously, I am nonetheless very happy to have been wrong. The bankers might not be so happy, but who cares.
Just woke up in London.
I really didn’t think it would happen. To the Americans here – well done guys!
To paraphrase Bjørge Lillelien – Hillary, he gave your boys a helluva beating!
In elections this year:
Putin 3 Soros 0
I have to hand it to you, Anatoly, you hopped on board the Trump train very early. It was specifically your observations that got me to start taking him seriously and drown out the absurd MSM cacophony. Congratulations to us all, we may yet live to see another day.
You are really in love with Pepe/Kek, Karlin.
How good it will be if Russophobia, and FED-ocracy, were softened/halted.
Britbongistan
Bongistan meaning Bangladesh don’t know if you meant that but how right you are.
http://www.radixjournal.com/blog/2016/11/8/make-persia-great-again
There’s also this, A Persia restored to the Aryan faith will pave the way for Russia.
Hind, Rus & Parsis. What an Alliance to fight with।।
I’m happy to have been wrong. I’m the opposite of a wishful thinker – I always expect disasters instead. Now I’ll be worried for Trump’s safety every day. Pence is terrible on foreign policy.
You could buy Trump win Predictit shares for less than 20 yesterday. I wasn’t even tempted.
Anatoly, I don’t know how much time you can devote to blogging, but there are so many interesting topics. What will be the impact on the Ukraine? Syria? Which promises will Trump find it easier to keep?
Marine Le Pen is at about 30% in the polls, and she’ll need 50% next year. But we’ve already seen miracles, so who knows?
Praise be to kek
It seems like the left’s hatred of white males caused them to forget that a good portion of their base was union working class white males.
Now they’re all screeching about how Sanders would have appealed to them more. Some are even repeating Alex Jone’s accusations of corruption against Hillary as a weak candidate. It is glorious.
On Twitter Scott Alexander offered to bet me money on the election a few weeks ago. He was of course going to bet on a Hillary win. I was too stupid to accept, thought she’s win too, and just argued with him over Trump’s foreign policy instead.
I’m similar.
I’d also very much like Marine to pull this off. Or even better her niece, Marion.
I’d be happy with a couple of women to lead the two major EU powers. Le Pen in France and Frauke Petry in Germany.
I don’t think there’s any chance of the AfD being part of a government, even as a junior partner, in 2017, unfortunately.
But Trump’s election has given me new hope it might still be possible to salvage something from the wreckage of the last 25 years. Will be interesting to see what happens in the elections in Austria, France and the Netherlands.
Congratulations to the Americans reading here, well done!
Ah, 3rd Stage Guild Navigator. But, consider the other upside of all this–US has now a 1st Lady who is beautiful and feminine.
I was at half-joking. But only half, and not fully. Because, I think, political realities could change quickly. In the second half of the 1940s France and Italy had huge communist parties, that were part of the governing coalitions. They were inconvenient to the US, so it changed the political landscape a bit.
What would happen if President Trump suddenly criticized the one-sided German and French media, and the US State Department issued yearly reports about how Germany and France were now only “partially free” because some major opposition parties were denied access from the state media, or the state (and uniform private) media reported unfairly on them? I don’t know if that was possible, nor if The Donald would even care, but maybe he would. POTUS could put enormous pressures on his allies to “do the right thing”, if he wishes to do so.
Do you support populist islamist uprisings also? Or only populist white uprisings?
Your scenario might not be totally impossible, German politicians have been extraordinarily foolish in their statements about Trump; foreign secretary Steinmeier has called him a “Hassprediger” (a preacher of hate, a term usually applied to extremist Islamic imams or other extremists), and even today (!) Sigmar Gabriel, leader of the Social Democrats and minister of economic affairs, has said that Trump is leading a chauvinistic and authoritarian Internationale that wants to put women back in the kitchen, jail homosexuals and that stokes hatred against refugees. Merkel congratulated Trump, in lukewarm terms that could be interpreted as a warning that Trump should respect democratic values (!). Such conduct can’t endear them to TheDonald. I’d actually be thrilled if Trump took his revenge and humiliated them (yeah, things really are that bad in Germany that I’m actively hoping for the humiliation of my own government).
Well, if one’s worldview is identity or even interest based, it would be entirely consistent to support one but not the other, and for members of the Islamic world to take the opposite view.
But if a universalist answer is required, for my part, sure. Keep it confined to the existing Islamic countries and I’m probably OK with it and would endorse that policy. I don’t need American plutocrats to have unfair terms for the oil. I’d be happy to see the west do business on open financial terms with a caliphate, even.
That might just be me, though.
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The first ever head of a government or head of state to endorse the Donald was Orbán in Hungary. I’m not sure the Donald is aware of this, but I think he will soon be made aware by Orbán. And I think the Donald will have ears for people who supported him when his chips were were down, or at least not up by much. Now, it’s also well-known that Orbán was sharply critical of Merkel’s refugee policy, as was the Donald himself.
So, I don’t know. But actually, that is part of the reason I’m putting so much hope into a Trump administration, that it might change the political climate in Europe, too. This would be good because demographic change is not yet so pronounced in much of Europe, and resistance to it (and the will to even reverse it) might become way stronger in Europe than in the US.
“But actually, that is part of the reason I’m putting so much hope into a Trump administration, that it might change the political climate in Europe, too.”
That’s also one of the reasons I’m happy about Trump’s success (the other is that armed conflict with Russia now seems much less likely). I’m fairly pessimistic about my own country though; due to Merkel’s lunacy we’re running out of time fast. Yesterday I read about a prognosis by the university of Tübingen that Germany will have about 7 million Muslims in 2030, most of them of course in the former West Germany in whose cities Germans will be a minority. It will be very hard to stop or reverse this process. But yes, Trump’s campaign does offer at least a glimmer of hope that not all might be lost.
Stay strong brother, we in Turkey must also fight against the kurds and armenians. The globalists are using them as a two-pronged fork against us.
I think you’re exaggerating about Armenians (there really aren’t that many of them in Turkey anymore, are there?), but you might have a point about Kurds – aren’t they set to become a majority some time in the 2040s or so? I can see how that might disturb nationally minded Turks, but unless you’re getting rid of the southeast and build a border wall, you’ll probably have to accept it, I suppose.
Oh, as long as they have no citizenship, you can easily get rid of them, if there’s a will. Actually, once the situation gets sufficiently bad, there might be a will to get rid of them regardless of citizenship status. I really don’t wish some Nazi (or Lebanon or whatever) style ethnic cleansing, but it could happen nevertheless.
Globalism truly led to some unimaginable evil, it could even lead to the mass murder and mass expulsions of these “refugees”: in which case they might have been better off if they never came to the West. (And if there’s no expulsion of them, we might find ourselves in a Lebanon situation anyway.) So globalism might cause a lot of evil to us and to the “refugees” and immigrants themselves, and might even end disastrously for the globalists themselves. It truly is an evil ideology, if not in intent (I’m not sure), then in consequences.
Totally agree with you, it has created horrible situations where the choice might eventually be between accepting something like Lebanon or even national exstinction and trying to reverse the situation with rather extreme methods (as Jean Raspail has put it, someone who wants to save the nation might well put his own soul in danger…I’m not religious, but I sort of agree). It’s a tragic situation. And the worst thing is, it was totally avoidable and there were plenty of people (like Enoch Powell in Britain, but also many lesser-known ones) that warned against it.
If you remove kebab can I remove some bacon?
You’ve already removed or murdered most of your Christians, who have inhabited the land for millennia (the Greeks for maybe three thousand years), who else do you want to remove?
I wondered about that as well but I think he’s just trolling, so I didn’t bother with a reply. Probably just the usual insinuations of “racism” by Turks who are comically lacking in awareness of their own country’s history (and present, Turkey’s treatment of the few Christians remaining, be they Greeks, Armenians or Aramaeans, is still pretty appalling).
I mostly agree with (your?) thesis that Islamism is in some ways the Muslim world’s version of the Alt Right, although with the rather big difference that they are racial egalitarians. I do think it is a dead end because fundamentalist religion’s innate obscurantism makes scientific and technological progress very hard and drives away the brighter people, but if you want to have an Islamic State within your exclusive territory, then I suppose I don’t have any cardinal issues with that.
But peaceful co-existence is made untenable by Islamic expansionism. For instance, what is possibly Russia’s premier Islamist journal Orda1313 considers all of Eurasia to be core Islamic territory on the basis that the Golden Horde became Muslim in 1313. But remember that White nationalists are not Trudeau (if you kill your enemies you lose); what is good for the goose is good for the gander, and the military potential of even relatively small subsets of the European world are far in excess of anything that Islam can muster. So in your place, I would be very wary of White nationalists who claim to support radical Islamists. In all likelihood, just like the Germans who smuggled Lenin into Russia, they are thinking not of doing your a favor but of preparing the groundwork for deus vult.
I have already contacted you on facebook.
I am going to do eugenics in my country immediately to raise IQ to match the white one. Bring on the deus vult, in 100 years.
Note: btw, I am just trolling, I have no desire to harm any Westerners. You are good people. Congratulations on your global chimpout, impressive.
In case you haven’t seen this yet, I’m not a Putin fanboy, but still great to see
http://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/world/2016/11/09/93534066/
that is a suitable question for a columnist who writes about Islamism. Karlin writes about Russian-ism
A more valid question for Karlin is…. why does the Prime Minister of Russia want to directly, himself, deal with the Hebrew Agricultural Research Station?
By the way, Anatoly, please do visit Afula. Two Russian Orthodox churches, and Russia’s greatest (in my opinion) outpost in the Russian-style Ballroom Dancing-o-sphere
Nowadays, you can get here by fast train from Haifa
I’ve seen people on facebook sharing the Merkel congratulations as a “warning to Trump”. These people think that the president of the USA needs to be afraid of Merkel, an unpopular german leader ? Bizarre.
I just don’t understand why the Afd is still doing so poorly, given that Germany has being outright invaded.
I’m guessing that the mind control apparatus is doing its job very well.
I met last month with some friends (married couple) in Germany. The woman is a very high IQ person whom I know is capable of thinking things through. She’s genuinely a smart person. Yet, because of the academic milieu in which she evolves, she had been brainwashed into not even knowing anymore what a “black person” and a “white person” is. I’m a (black) guy from North-America so she asked me about the Rachel Dolezal controversy of 2 years ago. She was having a hard time understanding the controversy because “how do you determine what a black person is ?”. From a few things she said I figured that she had heard that “race has nothing whatsoever to do with dna and biology” and had not thought of thinking past that! I was shocked. Shocked because I know for sure that a few years ago she would have of course understood what one meant by “black person” and yet they had managed to “problematize” that notion in her mind.
Paging Ron Unz, the reply (agree, etc.) buttons on the bottom of comments seem to often not to be there for the lowermost comments.
Ps.
I still can’t reply to Ogunsiron’s comment:
I’d think Trump even has some tools to influence German elections, like criticizing German media of anti-AfD bias, meeting with AfD leaders and being friendly to them while on official visits (meanwhile being unfriendly to Merkel), leaking dirt he has on Merkel, giving advice to AfD leaders, outing Verfassungschutz moles in AfD, publicly questioning the German policy of putting moles into right-wing parties (but usually not in left-wing parties), and probably there are many more I didn’t think of. Some of them might be more difficult for him to do (he doesn’t want to out his intelligence services’ methods), and all would have some costs, but Trump is not a guy with whom you’d like to have feuds.
I think Merkel is increasingly losing touch with reality. She’s been in power for far too long and is surrounded by spineless sycophants who just tell her what she wants to hear…a syndrome usually associated with dictators. Some of her statements are really bizarre (e.g. recently she stated people who are afraid of Islam’s increasing influence should cultivate Christian traditions and sing Christmas carols…the woman is pretty stupid in many ways).
That’s a pretty common attitude in Germany, “Rasse” (race) is hardly used as a term, people use terms like “Hautfarbe” (skin color) instead, with the clear implication that race is completely superficial. To some degree that’s probably even understandable, given the history of Nazi racism (and to be honest, there certainly is at least casual racism against black people in Germany even today). However, there are a lot of attitudes that are just demented…e.g. many on the German left (or even “conservatives”) regard Muslims as a kind of “new Jews” that have to be constantly protected against the genocidal urges of mainstream German society. I can’t say I really understand all of this myself, frankly the last few years have been something of a shock and a revelation to me, I hadn’t realized the extent of those attitudes before.
I don’t think Trump meddling to such an extent in Germany’s internal affairs is a realistic prospect…nor would it even be desirable (it might even have the bizarre effect of causing Merkel to be seen as a patriotic figure). The AfD also has a non-trivial anti-American strain so it’s not a given Trump would even feel any sympathy for them.
But Trump could have an indirect positive effect by widening the terms of debate…that is if he follows through on his promises (I really hope he doesn’t f**k up things too badly, I’m already somewhat concerned about his foreign policy, given John Bolton is discussed as his secretary of state; I also don’t like Trump’s stance on climate change…but then I guess one has to take what one gets).
This is very unlikely. More likely is a Trump administration is going to harm the cause of ethnic nationalists in Europe, because he doesn’t really know what he will be doing and will f*** up the country so badly. Parties like the FPO, Fico’s party in Slovakia, Fidesz and Jobbik, the Danish people’s party, Law and Justice, and even the National Front actually know what they’re doing and have serious ideas about public policy. So do the nationalists in Russia and elsewhere. Trump has no serious ideas, he changes his mind all the time, and he seems to neither have the discipline nor the interest nor the conviction to run a successful administration. And the ideas he’s talking about now (tax cuts, ending Obamacare) will make things worse for the working class including many of his own supporters. For what it’s worth, I voted neither for her nor Clinton, and I’m sympathetic towards many of the European nationalists but not to Trump.
I still think that many of the ethnic nationalists in Europe will win (I’d bet strongly on Hofer in Austria, largely because he will be elected before Trump has the chance to f**** things up, and on Jobbik in Hungary because of the long term demographics: I’d also bet on ethnonationalism in Slovakia since even the social democrats there have bought into it). But they will win in spite of Trump, not because of him.
German Reader,
She visited Niger and the Nigerois president apparently told her “if you want to stop African migration to Europe, you need to invest heavily in family planning and economic development so people have jobs at home. We need a Marshall Plan for Africa.” For the record, I entirely agree with that and thought it was the smartest thing a president has said about mass migration in the last year. Merkel, of course, politely declined, saying “our priority is on welcoming migrants.” In other words, she’d rather invite West Africans to Europe and provide services to them there, rather than provide opportunities and services for them in Africa, where it could be done much more cheaply and effectively and without the cost to Europe’s social fabric.
Climate change is a really big deal, and in itself contributes to the mass migration crisis. That Trump is apparently a climate change denier is not something to be shrugged off. Aside from not wanting confrontation against Russia, I don’t know if there’s a single policy stance of Trump’s that outweighs this really, really bad one.
Don’t know how genuine Trump’s rejection of AGW is. There’s that infamous Twitter comment of his saying it’s a Chinese conspiracy but that might just have been him shitposting before it became cool.
I don’t know if it’s really that big of a deal. The really big effects are still decades away, solar is becoming competitive with coal, and even if things do go south much faster than expected, there is always geoengineering, which we haven’t even begun researching in any systemic fashion yet.
Agreed. Helping Africans in Africa is the far more effectively altruistic thing to do. (Assuming of course that we have to do anything at all).
You may well be right; I have to admit I find it very difficult to come to a conclusion what to think about Trump. Maybe he really is a fraud and con man who cynically played populist. It certainly looks like the Republicans could seize this chance to continue with their horrible policies (that is harming American workers and causing all manner of international trouble). Still, Clinton was a terrible candidate and her bellicose attitude towards Russia really scared me, war looked like a real possibility with her proposal of a no-fly zone, and I’m glad that this at least is probably not going to happen.
I guess we’ll have to see how it all turns out.
I agree. As someone with right-wing, even nationalist inclinations I find it pretty depressing how much global warming denialism there is on the right…it’s pretty stupid in my opinion. Problem is, the people who think global warming is a serious issue often are the same people who are for other policies like Muslim mass immigration that are pretty terrible and which I simply can’t accept. It’s an unfortunate situation, to say the least.
The same was true with refugees from Syria/Iraq…it would have been much cheaper and more efficient (and probably more humane as well) to support the humanitarian effort in the region than to throw Germany open to everybody claiming to be a Syrian. But Merkel didn’t really show much initiative in that regard…so I have my doubts whether she really is primarily motivated by humanitarian concerns. Part of the reason for her demented open borders policy may well have been power politics; her dream obviously is a coalition with the Green party in 2017. The Greens are multiculturalist fanatics for whom the right to asylum and “antiracism” are sacred, Merkel’s policy was probably at least in part intended to appeal to them. Fortunately it seems to have backfired for the Christian Democrats.
That comment of Merkel is insane.
Her confusion was especially puzzling to me because I’ve known her for a very long time (pretty much lifelong friendship) and there is no way that she was this confused at, say, age 25.
I don’t think that she was just trying to be polite, because if that was the case she would not have brought up the racial topic at all. I didn’t have time to probe deeper but my guess is that she’s actually had common sense about race (and I mean just plain common sense, nothing alt-rightish) washed out of her consciousness.
I recently discovered on facebook that a friend of mine who used to be alt-rightish when we met is now spouting SJW nonsense. It’s so strange. He used to be my sulfurous far rightwing friend and now he’s having a meltdown because of Trump. Frustrating.
You think Fidesz is not nationalist enough and that eventually Jobbik will win ?
Hungarian here.
I think Fidesz is not nationalistic enough (and they have many flaws), but Jobbik has little if any chance of ever becoming a governing party. They also have little idea about what to do, their ideology is crazy (it seems to be their official belief that Hungarians are descended from the Huns, who were – according to them – descended from Sumerians), so I don’t think I’d even support them over Fidesz.
Are you the black guy who’s also a black metal fan? Good to see you here.
Jobbik seems to be pretty extreme, almost like they want to be seen as descendants of the arrow cross movement (just my outsider’s impression, may be wrong, can’t read Hungarian of course so I’m limited to the reports of Western media). I don’t think that’s really the way forward, a modern nationalism has to avoid anything that could be linked to WW2-era fascism.
I’m not sure what Jobbik offers that Orban’s party hasn’t offered already, with a militarized fence being built, he’s named ‘(((them)))’ in public speeches, and he only seems to be staying in the EU for gibs.
Anatoly: How can justify yourself in being so optimistic, especially in light past articles like “simmered to the edge of world”? I’ve followed you since the Russophile days, but your blind faith in technology being the answer to every ill gets grating.
Geo-engineering is surely masturbation, once the water-table falls below a certain level and food scarcity spreads, governments will have so much terrorism and mass-migration/invasions to deal with global sci-fi projects of that scale will be forgotten.
It’s fun to imagine but that article was in relation not even to 2100 to 2200.
I have been pretty consistent on the idea that geoengineering has been very underexplored relative to its potential importance. And some of its ideas (e.g. iron seeding) are pretty cheap and only need around 20 big ships.
Incidentally, latest rumors are that Trump is bringing Peter Thiel on as technology adviser. We now have a trifecta of NRx + existential risk + life extension – that 100% trumps any concerns over his (decidedly uncommitted) AGW denialism.
Have you seen this piece by lefty academic Wolfgang Streeck in the LRB (Sailer wrote a post about months ago. First line: Europe is falling apart, destroyed by its most devoted fans, the Germans.)? He posits Markel’s refugee policy is aimed mainly for silence criticism of German economic and monetary overlordship over Europe, as well as potential cheap labour source for her industrial backers, evading that troublesome minimum wage the SDP had forced her to adopt as the price of coalition. He also posits that Merkel would make a U-turn if/when said policy ever became a liability to her.
(I vaguely recall a book arguing that US civil rights movement got support from the establishment as way to convince the Third World of America’s moral leadership and bring them to the Western camp. Unfortunately, I didn’t read the book so I can’t comment on it. I don’t even remember the name.)
It sounds reasonable to me, but I’m not German. I like to know what somebody who knows the country thinks. Certainly, her comment to the Niger president seems to falsify his prediction.
I’ve seen some people on Twitter calling her the leader of the free world with Trump’s ascent. Given what a heckuva job she done leading the EU, that would not be a good thing.
An interesting question to pose to the Greens and their supporters: how can the Germany accept any and all asylum seekers AND cut greenhouse emissions and protect the environment? It doesn’t matter how many wind towers and solar farms you build or how many nuclear and coal plants you shut down, a larger population will consume more resources. Either Germany aims for net migration at around 0 (which, given Germany’s low birth rates, means a stagnant or decreasing population) or they would allow the refugees and asylum seekers to lead a poor but resource-light lifestyle. I doubt the Greens would want either.
I wouldn’t ask, because I think they would either given unhelpful answers at best, or haul me to court for “hate speech” at worse.
That is me.
I went to a black metal show in Germany! It felt a bit intimidating because it wasn’t in my local scene. I judged most of the attendees to be alright people and I did attend. No incidents at all. There were a few NS people there, for sure. One of the bands has nazi rumours surrounding them but another band had a black member in it (south-americans) so things couldn’t be that bad 🙂
They’re also into that goofy pan-turanic thing, I think.
Yes. I’m not aware of the details, but these loons think something like Sumerians were related to the ancestors of Turks etc. and at some point in their history decided to become horseriding nomads, conquered half of Europe as Huns, and then later came back as Magyars. So now Turks are our relatives which is somehow better than having the Finns & Estonians as our relatives, but there’s been a giant secret conspiracy including the Habsburgs, the Vatican & the Jews to deprive us of our glorious true history and instead promote the false theory that Hungarian language is (distantly) related to Finnish and Estonian, and that our ancestors had little if anything to do with the Huns and nothing to do with the Sumerians.
That’s totally false.
Sure some of their members are 1488 type Hitler-worshippers, and I think even some in their leadership tend in that direction (secretly, openly all of them are more moderate), but it’s a rather small minority. Their party president is apparently an Evola fan, whatever that means.
They have some Gypsy members, too, thry even made a point of it.
They are not Nazis, nor the Arrow Cross Party, but they definitely loons.
Orbán has never “named (((them))) in public speeches.” He has named Soros and some others of his prominent Jewish opponents, but it’s deranged. Jews tend to be prominent among his most rabid attackers, so when naming his most rabid opponents, he’ll end up with naming Jews. He’s as anti-Semitic as Trump (except he doesn’t have Jewish relatives), in other words, not much. There are prominent Jewish members in his party.
AGW and simply GW are not the same phenomena. Humanity’s role in Climate Change, which is real, is minimal. AGW is a political and ideological concept, Climate Change is a scientific one. But then again, number of leading Russian scientists predict cooling similar to 18th Century’s mini-Ice Age and most of those scientists are not “right-wing”. And then, of course, there is an issue of “models”, most of which are nothing more than vehicles for obtaining scientific (political) grants and for doctorate theses. BTW, I do trust PH.Ds from Russia’s Academy Of Science and its numerous research institutes which deal with climate and atmospheric issues on several orders of magnitude more than I trust some Nobel Prize winner journo by “education” who promoted this fraud. Climate is changing, it always was and will continue to do so.
Interesting, thanks for that information. Given how unreliable Western media in general is, I probably shouldn’t have based my impression on their reporting.
The Greens are self-righteous idiots, they probably don’t see any contradiction. But I suppose they don’t really get that many “refugees” have very materialist concerns and dream of driving large BMWs…doesn’t register (Germany btw now intends to ban the sale of new cars with internal combustion engines by 2030, which seems pretty deluded to me).
I’ve yet to read that piece by Streeck. I don’t really know what motivates Merkel, her policy doesn’t make any economic sense (many of the refugees are pretty much unemployable), but maybe she thought it would; the level of delusion among German politicians and business leaders seems to be pretty high, there was a lot of talk last year how there were many skilled workers among the refugees (which predictably enough has turned out not to be the case). I also do think that Merkel really is genuinely religious, in a sanctimonious, self-righteous way – somewhat like Tony Blair -, that may play a role as well. But yes, above all she’s probably an opportunist, clinging to power by any means.
Frankly I’m just sick of that woman, it’s a horrible prospect she might stay chancellor even beyond 2020.
Trump is not antisemitic. I don’t know if he’s a philosemite, but at the very least he expects to be respected by Jews and that’s enough to bother some members of the tribe.
There are few genuine ecology parties in the West. The canadian green party is still mostly about evology, but who knows for how long. In France, even in the 90s they still had green parties that were about the environment rather than the promotion of the interest of every micro minority but at this point the french greens care about migrants/lgbtbbq and that’s it. The usa greens are a marxist micro-party. They did play a helpful role in the recent usa election though.
“The usa greens are a marxist micro-party.”
Same is somewhat true for the German Greens (though unfortunately not the “micro” part), for a long time a large part of their leadership were people who had been in various Maoist groups or other far left political cults during the 1970s (including really extreme cases like Joscha Schmierer who had been leader of the “Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschland” and had led a delegation to the Pol Pot regime in 1978; during Joschka Fischer’s tenure as German foreign secretary he held office in the ministry of foreign affairs and probably gets a nice pension for that now). I don’t believe those people were really interested in ecology, it was just a vehicle for their far left visions after ofter ways had failed. Main motivation of the Greens is simply hatred of Germany in my opinion.
My point was, neither is Orbán. But he’s also less afraid than most to call out his Jewish opponents by name, and that makes him “anti-Semitic” in some eyes.
Actually, the technology is already mostly there, while cities stink from the previous “environmentalist”-car lobbyist failure of promoting Diesel engines in Europe. I’d be happy to get rid of them, and electric cars are already capable of at least 95% of what I use cars for (essentially, shopping and commuting with occasional longer trips for over 150 kilometers), and would be capable of more if multi-storey car parks and gas stations were all equipped with charging stations.
It’s only a question of some further improvement in technology and economies of scale. I’d think even without further government push they’d be half of all vehicles by 2030, with the other half being plug-in hybrids for longer trips. I was already considering buying one as a second car this year, but decided to wait for the next one in about four-five years.
The only inconvenience would be long term trips, but I rarely go there anyway, and I’m not sure being forced to stop for half an hour would be such a bad thing, after all.
[a modern nationalism has to avoid anything that could be linked to WW2-era fascism]
Those taboos are on the way out.
Besides, those taboos are dumb as a rock, they make no sense whatsoever. They were specifically designed to forestall the reemergence of European/white ethnic consciousness and nationalism, no wonder we find it so difficult to build a nationalism that avoids “anything that could be linked to WW2-era fascism”, it’s a design feature of those dumb taboos.
Depends what you’re talking about, I think real fascism is still pretty taboo (and probably should be given its poor record historically).
But nationalism/identity politics for white Europeans and European-descended peoples is definitely a thing now, rightly so. The “antiracists” just went too far, it’s time for a counter-movement.
Regarding climate change, I think it doesn’t really matter what Trump thinks himself: the GOP is a climate denying party funded by Fossil Fuel interests. So I don’t see much progress on that front.
Of course, would a pro-anti-climate change party (!) do any better? The Liberal Party of Canada talked a big game when it signed the Kyoto Accord. But nothing much happened afterwards; it was mostly a show to “shame” the Americans and show how much better Canada was. More recently, they’ve criticised the Tories’ targets as too weak. Which is why, when they returned to power, they eventually adopted them. But at least they set a price on carbon … when it’s 2021. I’ve read that Germany has “meet” its greenhouse gas cuts through some clever accounting: while the targets were originally for West Germany, today includes united Germany. So it meet those goals by just dismantling East Germany’s industries.
With friends like these, who need enemies?
The Energiewende looks crazy to me. I get why people would want to get rid of fossil fuel and nuclear plants and replace them with wind and solar plants. The problem is that trying to do all three, while trying to keep a working grid is not feasible. While wind and especially solar power has gone down in price, it still doesn’t solve the intermittency problem or how peeks in wind and solar power don’t correspond usage hikes. So you get periodic mass dumping of electric power on other countries, while coal power plants have been increasing, using either domestic or US coal. So the carbon emissions have not fallen at all; in fact, they may have slightly increased! So what that point then?
On electric cars: has anybody read Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil by Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl? They argue that while future cars will need to run on electric power, no battery can replace gasoline’s high energy density. Thus, they argue that for intercity travel, cars would be replaced by vehicles directly connected to the gird, like trams/streetcars or trolleybuses (for intracity travel, they propose would be done by high speed rail. Air travel would sadly decline except for certain intercontinental routes). Does this sound plausible?
Glossy,
If I remember right you’re an economic left-winger and cultural conservative, right? (E.g. I remember you saying favourable things about the late Soviet Union).
I share most of your views, but the thing is, Donald Trump is not going to be good from the point of view of a more economically leftist society, and with a Republican Congress and Senate that’s the element of his agenda which is going to come most to the fore. He wants to install tax cuts twice as big as the Bush tax cuts, abolish the inheritance / estate tax, and dismantle some elements of the welfare state like Obamacare.
Truthfully I might agree with you about Marine Le Pen being better for France than the center-left Socialists or the center right, but Trump is not Le Pen, he’s a standard plutocratic hyper-capitalist Republican who makes some gestures in the direction of social and cultural conservatism. I understand why some people of good conscience voted for him, but I think it was a terrible mistake. (I voted for Jill Stein, FTR).
I mean for that matter, Krisztina Morvai is married to a Jew, isn’t she? Her comments about “playing with their tiny circumcised *****s notwithstanding”.
When I say ‘demographics favours Jobbik’ I didn’t mean that Fidesz is ‘not nationalistic enough’: I think Fidesz is plenty nationalistic enough for my taste, and Jobbik does go much farther than I would be comfortable with. For reasons that are unclear to me though Jobbik (unlike Trump) is overwhelmingly favoured by young people. An absolute majority of 15-35 years olds favours Jobbik, compared to 17% for Orban, 6% for the socialists, 12% for the greens. I don’t know why this is, but as ethnicity becomes a bigger political issue in eastern Europe, Jobbik would be the party I would bet on. Maybe the youth of Hungary like their ethnonationalism seasoned with some anticapitalism.
For the record the party I like in the Hungarian spectrum is the small rump communist party, Munkaspart (they are actually legitimate communists, with around 1% of the vote, not to be confused with the majority faction of the old communist party which embraced neoliberalism and is now a social democrat / neoliberal / SJW party). Munkaspart believes in communist economics but also agrees with Orban on the migration issue and on the problematic nature in general of multicultural societies, citing Hungary’s problems historically integrating the Roma. They’re one of a number of left-wing parties in eastern Europe (Fico’s Social Democrats in Slovakia are another one, and I guess to an increasing extent the KPRF) embracing some degree of cultural conservatism.
Yes, I think Merkel genuinely believes in her multicultural utopianism: she’s truly swallowed the Kool-Aid. I don’t know for sure though: I try not to read more about her than I can help, since she gives me a headache.
For the record, Anatoly, I’m a big advocate of geoengineering as well. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m in lock-step agreement with the standard ‘consensus’ regarding climate change. I think global warming is absolutely real, that it’s caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas production, and the consequences will be horrific, but I also think it could successfully be dealt with via geoengineering. I have heard talks at scientific meetings on solutions to global warming involving e.g. sprinkling the tropics with limestone. I rather like the stratospheric sulfur aerosols idea myself. As a biologist who studies plants I’m aware that C3 plants generally benefit from high [CO2] at the same time that they suffer from high temperature, so if we could somehow achieve a high-CO2, low temperature equilibrium it would be good for a lot of plant growth, and the SSA solution would allow us to get there.
The problem is though, any solution to AGW, whether via emissions reductions or via geoengineering, necessitates that you believe there’s a problem there to begin with, and there’s no evidence that Trump does. I hope to be surprised though.
If you think it’s so easy to deal with, why would you care when that happened? Not for the first time, you are making no sense.
I didn’t say it could be dealt with easily, I said it could be dealt with successfully.
And the longer we wait, the more drastic any solution will need to be.
I thought plankton seeding was super promising when I first heard about it, but so far results have been pretty mixed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization#Sequestration_efficiency
Historical records are pretty poor for any form of government. For example if there wasn’t a huge empty continent in Northern America in the early 17th century, fascism would’ve easily defeated liberal democracy in Europe. Man for man, fascism was more efficient in war, and managed to induce far greater enthusiasm in its population. (And both were probably true even of Italy, where the enthusiasm for war was never high, and the armed forces unprepared for war, but their performance was still probably better than in ww1, where they barely managed to hold the line against the much weaker Austria-Hungary, propped up by a weak Germany, both fighting multiple fronts, with A-H being hated by the majority of its soldiers.)
In any event, the weakness of fascism was the fact that it overly relied on one person’s judgement, and there were no checks in place when that one person tried to pursue unrealistic utopian goals or start large-scale and ultimately counter-productive genocidal policies. Besides, I value freedom of expression.
But it’s easy to see that liberal democracy in its present form is a total failure and absolutely unsustainable except in a couple of places like Japan (where arguably it’s nor very democratic), or South Korea (where the jury is still out, but looks like they’ll slowly adopt multi-kulti, so maybe won’t be sustainable either). Pretty bad track record.
I’m not really sure Italian performance in WW2 was superior to that in WW1…it really was pretty bad (e.g. I recently read Richard Overy’s book about bombing in WW2, it has an interesting chapter about Italy whose main conclusion is that the Fascist state and party apparatus failed utterly at creating an efficient defense system, keeping up morale, providing assistance to the population in areas affected by bombing etc., which was a factor in the regime’s eventual collapse).
Fascist movements also were generally unsuccessful, they only came to power by their own effort in Italy and Germany (and only because the old elites there tried to coopt them, instead of persecuting and crushing them as many authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe did).
And of course Nazism was a horrible and fundamentally evil system, there’s no denying that even if one is pretty far to the right as I am.
But in a way, all of this is purely academic…fascism was a phenomenon in a distinct historical era, I don’t see it coming back (except in the left’s fevered imagination).
I’m not sure I’m totally in agreement with you about liberal democracy (is the present system really liberal in the classical sense? I doubt it), but no doubt, at least the last 25 years have been a disaster in Western nations, we urgently need to change direction.
A US president has much more free rein in foreign than in domestic policy, and Trump seems to be a non-interventionist. I root for peace.
He took the side of law and order against BLM. He wants to reindustrialize America through some form of protectionism. All good. I described my reasons for voting for him in more detail here:
http://lazyglossophiliac.blogspot.com/2016/10/thoughts-on-election.html
Jill Stein would have been more preferable to me than Hillary, Jeb or Rubio. I would have voted for Bernie if he faced Jeb in the general.
There’s nobody in the world with whom I agree on 100% of the issues. On balance I preferred Trump in this election.
I know that a state-run economy can work because I’ve seen it work. But that’s not what the world at large believes, and there are many other issues in politics.
There were much bigger mistakes made by Benito M. than that silly stuff from Overy, first and foremost going to war in the beginning out of pure greed and the fear of missing the bandwagon, without even checking up on the whereabouts of his merchant fleet.
Still, at least in WW2 the Italians did not shoot thousands of their own soldiers and countrymen (“subhumans” from the south) for lacking moral fibre as they did in WW1. It didn’t even work.
On the Abyssinian front the explorer Wilfred Thesiger replicated Rommel’s feat from WW1 of forcing the surrender of a division with a company. But the circumstances were not as impressive. Those troops in Abyssinia were a long way from home and the colony was clearly already lost. Rommel’s captives had been on their own national territory in a war they eventually won.
Have to disagree about Overy’s book about bombing, I found it very interesting and quite evenhanded. Mostly agree with the rest of your comment, Mussolini’s decision to enter the war looks pretty foolish in retrospect.
In ww1, they nearly collapsed against much weaker opponents than in ww2, and needed the help of French and British troops to prop them up. In ww2, only much stronger opponents managed get a foothold on the peninsula (actually, in Sicily only), and they needed the Germans to prop them up, but they weren’t knocked out until the Italian government (which came to power as a result of a coup) decided to make a separate peace. If the general situation had been different (i.e. if the Germans looked to be winning), Italy could easily have stayed in the war in 1943.
It must be noted that Italian performance is usually getting a worse rep than it deserves, in large part because Rommel (who was in my opinion the most overvalued German general of the whole war – a superb, if occasionally reckless, divisional commander, a competent corps commander, and an incompetent army group commander). Rommel trashed the Italian troops, even though they fought well when given realistic orders, and he also gave the Italian infantry the unenviable task of covering his back while on retreat. He basically sacrificed the Italian infantry divisions to save his Panzers, understandable, but it was tasteless to unfairly criticize them afterwards. Obviously the Italians lacked armored divisions, so they couldn’t execute large-scale offensive operations (as Mussolini required them to do), and their logistics also lacked something to be desired (besides Africa, this was also a major problem in Greece), but when given sensible orders, they fought at least OK. Their air force (while lacking in equipment) and fleet (outnumbered, but still) was rarely criticized the way their army was.
Italian fascism had the same basic problem the German version had: one person’s erratic decisions pushed the whole country into an unwinnable war. When at war, it performed better than a liberal democracy. If liberal democracies (at least, one of them) weren’t so much larger (what Azar Gat calls “the US effect”), fascist systems with their more daring leaderships would’ve easily wiped out the rest.
Are you actually alleging that some meaningful proportion of the Muslim / African migrants left their countries for a Europe because of GLOBAL WARMING rather than war and poverty?
Why is it in americans’ interest to have some “confrontation” with Russia?
I think you’ve misunderstood Hector, he’s AGAINST confrontation with Russia.
Don’t know if war and poverty can meaningfully be disentangled from global warming, there have been claims that the civil war in Syria might be partly due to a severe drought that might already have been an effect of global warming (coupled with a large young population without economic prospects and the sectarian fault lines).
Great news! Or not so great news.
https://twitter.com/speakerryan/status/798635889836564481
To what degree is this anti-American strain a reaction to the globalist, invade-the-world invite the world policies pursued by the U.S. for the past three presidential administrations? Were it clear that the current administration supported national independence parties like the FN in France, AfD in Germany, etc., and planned to abandon past policies, would this anti-Americanism persist?
Hard to tell, some strains of German anti-americanism probably go pretty deep. In East Germany there is some obvious continuity from GDR propaganda (the US as the great imperialist power), and of course there are some nationalists who simply regard the US an an occupier (at its extreme fringe this goes off into antisemitic or even explicitly Nazist territory). Some of that will always exist, and a certain level of German resentment against the US may be inevitable given the asymmetrical nature of US-German relations. But yes, if the US became more like a “normal” country, stopped spreading its diversity ideology and tried not to start any more unwinnable and unneccessary wars, it would probably improve its image among right-wingers and conservatives (real ones, not Merkel’s fake “conservatives”) in Germany.
It has however to be said that a large part of Germany’s population is pretty stupid and uninformed about the US. German media is incredibly biased (they were close to 100% in favour of Clinton and got totally hysterical about Trump’s election), and unfortunately a lot of Germans who don’t read any foreign media believe all of that. They’re not against the US per se, just against the “bad” America (the “good” America being the civil rights movement, the Democrats etc.) and believe America really is full of gun-toting racist rednecks who regularly kill innocent blacks just for fun. Such people of course see their worst fears confirmed by Trump’s success.