David Rozado has created the website Media Analytics where you can track the frequency of various words in the New York Times from 1970-2017. This would appear to be a very useful tool for tracking the Zeitgeist. You can do something similar in Google Books, but it only runs to 2000.

Anyhow, here is his keynote graph tracking the rise of various SJWisms:

You can also track Great Power dynamics and international crises using this tool. For instance, “Russia” was getting much fewer mentions by the late 1990s than “Soviet” during the late 1980s, though it spiked upwards since 2014. But China has been growing steadily and has long overtaken Russia.

This article is written by Anna Nemtsova, an ex-Soviet Jewess whose main journalistic preoccupation is hating on Russia’s “useless bachelors” and trying to convince their women to miscegenate with swarthy lotharios from the Global South instead.

The emerging notion that genetic security is part of national security is still unclear to most Russian citizens, but already it receives lavish funding. In late April, Russian authorities approved a budget of 220 billion rubles ($3.3 billion) in order to develop new genetic technologies over the next eight years. The document published on the government’s website says that the main purpose of the program is “to decrease critical dependence of Russian science on foreign genetic and biological databases” and on foreign specialized software and other technologies.

Russia does indeed ban the export of “biomaterial”, which is the reason why 23andme tests are inaccessible here. It would at least be good if there were to be Russian equivalents.

“I have never heard Putin or anybody else in the Kremlin mention the word ‘race,’” Svetlana Gannushkina, a senior human rights defender helping migrants told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “But once Putin said to me: ‘I agree we need migrants, but preferably well-educated Slavs of a fertile age.’”

Good to see that PUTLER is listening to me, as opposed to liberal normie soyboys and BASED EURASIANISTS (but not redpilled) who share a common goal in turning Russia into Greater Turkestan.

However, Putin still needs to formally disavow his prior comments that people who believe that “Russia is for Russians” (i.e. ~50% of the Russian population) are idiots or provocateurs before I will be ready to acknowledge him as PUTLER.

There is even a group suggesting the Constitution of the Russian Federation be edited to help build a new ideology around the nation’s genes.

A member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Taliya Khabriyeva, suggested that a new ideology should embrace “values genetically typical of Russians,” constitutionally defined. Khabriyeva’s idea provoked a wide discussion in academic circles.

PUTLER is reading not just me, but spandrell too: “Yes, it would be much better if we had solid measures of not only intelligence, but creativity, integrity, decisiveness, leadership abilities, and whatnot. If we had, we’d surely find out that different ethnic groups have different distributions of every trait. We could even use them to define the national character of many countries, and perhaps plausibly use that definition to set a psychological legal standard for the demographics a country wants to maintain. Perhaps we’ll get there some day. But we’re not there yet.” I recall that Greg Cochran had similar ideas.

“There is a huge hype about genetic editing in Russia, mostly among billionaires,” pro-Kremlin political analyst Yuriy Krupnov told The Daily Beast earlier this month. “One procedure costs around $1 million abroad, so it sounds like a good business, but even if Russia develops its own technology, biological big data would require much bigger investments.”

I suppose it is better that they spend money on this than the typical money Russian oligarchs spend their money on.

This interest is not too surprising. Elisabeth Schimpfössl in her recent book Rich Russians note that Russian oligarchs have an inordinate interest in their family histories, especially as it relates to aristocratic pedigrees.

The nationalist tone of this talk about “Russian genes” is raising alarms. Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the SOVA Center, monitoring Russian far-right groups and hate crimes, was stunned to hear Putin’s statement in 2017. “Putin’s words came out of the blue, without any introductions or explanations, as if there was a moment of insanity,” Verkhovsky, who was present at the meeting, told The Daily Beast. From Putin, he said, “We often hear conspiracy ideas but until recently his nationalist political statements have mostly focused on empowerment and reconstruction of the Russian empire rather than white supremacists’ ideas about the biology of ethnicity or race.” …

When I spoke of the PUTLERREICH I did so in jest.

But hey, since Western libs believe you’re the “godfather of extreme nationalism” anyway, why not do the crime if you’re doing the time.

Looks like I made the right call to stop worrying and learn to love Putin again. How could I possibly stay mad at one of my biggest fans?

More recently, architects of the well-funded Russian biodefense program have been reading a book called The Genetic Bomb that openly discusses eugenics and what the author, Yuriy Bobylov, calls the risks to the white race, according to one of those involved. “The creation of a ‘super-human,’ a ‘hero,’ is possible, in principle,” Bobylov wrote, “but that is a very difficult social task.”

The theory that genomics companies cooperate with Western intelligence services to compile databases that could be used to create ethnic bioweapons is not a fringe one in Russia. It is rumored to have been the primary motivation for the ban on the export of human biomaterial in 2007.

I am pretty skeptical about the possibility of ethnic bioweapons, at least while our knowledge of genetics remains pretty primitive. Races are not separated by single genes, but by many genes that occur in varying frequencies across populations, so any ethnic bioweapon would rebound on its creators. Unless you preemptively innoculate your own population… but in that case, wouldn’t just taking smallpox out of the freezer be much easier and more effective anyway? Moreover, a bioweapon designed to be used against Russians would also wipe out most Slavs, including Poles.

That said, I am not going to be criticizing the security people with thinking about all kinds of possible threats. That’s their job, after all.

Last year, the government ordered Russian scientists and bureaucrats to develop a large-scale study of the so-called “Russian genome.” …

“We hear too much nonsense about ‘Russian genes’ in our multi-ethnic country,” Pavel Lobkov, a biologist who is currently a presenter on independent Rain TV, told The Daily Beast.

Nevertheless, Putin has ordered the government to provide Russians with passports by 2025 that include their genetic identification.

I called the coming bifurcation of the world economy last November. Could this also extend to science?

IEEE, a major science publisher, bans Huawei scientists from reviewing papers:

A major scientific society has banned employees of Huawei, the Chinese communications giant, from reviewing submissions to its journals because of U.S. government sanctions against the company.

The New York City–based Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) told editors of its roughly 200 journals yesterday that it feared “severe legal implications” from continuing to use Huawei scientists as reviewers in vetting technical papers. They can continue to serve on IEEE editorial boards, according to the memo, but “cannot handle any papers” until the sanctions are lifted. …

What they can’t do as an employee of a company on the BIS entity list is be given access to the type of technical information that would be part of a research article. Specifically, IEEE says they “cannot receive or access materials submitted by other persons until after IEE has accepted the material for publication.” At that point, Huawei scientists “may act as editor or peer reviewer for that material.”

During the Cold War, there developed essentially two different scientific systems (citations databases, journals, language) in the West (dominated by English by the 1970s) and the socialist bloc (Russian).

Would be interesting to see that repeat for the Blue Empire and the Sinosphere. Which of them would come out on top? Which will be the lingua franca of the scientific community by the 22nd century?

Chinese state is pushing for the Sinosphere actively. The recent slogan is to "speed up the construction of academic, disciplinary and discursive systems with Chinese characteristics for philosophy and social sciences" in China, as a response to Xi's tone-setting speech in 2016 https://t.co/aFqKhZGXOo

— ZHANG Xin 张 昕 (@zx999) May 30, 2019

Blue Empire – Currently dominant, benefits from global brain drain; though increasingly hobbled by wokeness, the diversity cult, etc. In the longer-time, dysgenic fertility (immigration doesn’t play such a big role as has no effect on absolute number of smart fractions).

Sinosphere – Many more high-IQ people, less ideological inanity (though who knows with commies long-term). But also has dysgenic fertility. Plus East Asian conformism constrains potential (e.g. 8 million Swiss produce as much elite science as 52 million Koreans).

It will very likely be a disaster for scientific progress at a global level.

While predicting recessions might be a fool’s errand, a generally reliable rule of thumb is that they come and go once a decade, and unlike in 2016, I do think right about now (next 12 months) is the time.

1. You have the trade war with China, which is going from bad to worse now that the US has set to forcibly dismantle Huawei, a national champion of its hi-tech sector.

China is also now at basically the same the point as at which Japan and Korea experienced shocks during their equivalent stage of economic development.

1. Stock market valuations, especially in the US, are near record highs. Now would probably be the least ideal time to go in.

In particular, while I am not one of those people who claims that search engines and social networks have no value. But I really don’t think Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft are worth in the $1 trillion range – well beyond the likes of Exxon or Boeing. Soaring valuations + near stagnant technology = tech bubble as in late 1990s.

1. Other possible danger points: Chinese deleveraging; Europe’s PIGS, Turkey, Ukraine; shale oil bubble?; US student debt.

2. Trump is toast if recession starts within the next year. He doesn’t fare well against Biden (rising in the polls) as is, will be unsalvageable if a recession comes down on top as well. If no recession, might be able to scrape out a win against Biden, and has a good chance against someone like Kamala Harris.

3. I am bullish on crypto (note the date: 1BTC = $5,030 then, now north of $8,000):

https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1117689645666533377

China – US trade war makes this particularly attractive. In London, I met a BTC trader who thinks it will hit $20k in 1-2 years, and a major US-based BTC miner who estimates $100k within 5 years.

1. Bearish on oil/resource prices. China is going to be slowing down as it readjusts to the trade war, and we’re approaching the point at which new inductions of electric vehicles are starting to have a noticeable impact on demand.

2. Russia. On the one hand, having already spent 2014-16 in recession implementing reforms and rationalizing its banking system, it’s well prepared for another one. OTOH, it is a “high beta” economy that is especially sensitive to trends in the global economy. I am not particularly glum, but not particularly positive, either.

3. However, there’s no big mania like you had in the mid-2000s, so I think this recession will be pretty mild.

I do think crypto is the best deal atm, even if one missed the ramp up from $5,000 to $8,000. Bearish on pretty much everything else: Stocks, oil, China, Moscow property, etc.

Dollar should be safe, as everyone flees to US Treasury bonds in a storm (assuming the eternal prophets of petrodollar collapse finally get it right).

*** Usual disclaimer that I am not qualified to give financial advice, that this is written for entertainment purposes, etc., etc. ***

Steve Sailer has just posted Michael Woodley of Menie’s lecture (hosted on Edward Dutton’s YouTube) on the cognitive archeogenetics of ancient and modern Greeks at this year’s Psychology Conference.

Explaining the cultural/intellectual decline of Classical Greece is one of the major puzzles of history. One HBD-realistic approach is to approach it from the point of view of historical IQ, which is what Woodley et al. do in this paper.

They acquired polygenic scores for general cognitive ability (POLY_COG) for a sample of 29 Greek genomes spanning the Neolithic, Minoan, Mycenaean, and modern periods. You can see the resultant graph at 25:07. The general trend is an increase in POLY_COG from 8,000 years ago to some 3,000 years ago, followed by a prepitious collapse through to the modern day.

This initial research suggests that genotypic Greek IQ was substantially higher during the flowing of Greek civilization during the Classical era, and would seem to lend credence to Francis Galton’s suggestion that the Athenians had an IQ of perhaps 120 relative to a Victorian British mean of 100. For the record, this is a thesis that I have myself expressed some skepticism towards, arguing that Classical Greece’s unprecedented levels of literacy – around 10% of the population (“craftsman literacy”), up from the maximum 1-2% (“priestly literacy”) that had been observed in previous civilizations – was by itself sufficient to explain Greek dominance in world intellectual output from 500BC to the era of Christ. These literacy rates were enabled by Greece’s early adoption of the alphabet, and Greek intellectual potential was further turbocharged by its IQ advantage over the civilization in Mesopotamia and Sumer that exists, and can be observed, to this day (e.g. Celts and Germans may have been brighter even then, but they weren’t going to do anything interesting as small illiterate forest tribes). Basically, Classical Greece was the first civilization to obtain an unprecedented number of literate, relatively (not absolutely) high IQ, and non-conformist people. This allowed them to wrack up a vast number of intellectual accomplishments in record time.

Does my explanation then fall by the wayside? Was Greek success – and consequent decline – the result of an anomalously high IQ 2,500 years ago, and subsequent dysgenic decline?

Possibly. But it’s worth noting that this study is hardly the last word on the matter.

1. n=25 for a period spanning the first 7,000 years is very low. The n=4 (!) for the modern era, I daresay, is almost useless. This needs to be repeated with much larger samples.

2. What were the causal mechanisms?

One explanation that Woodley favors is the theory of population replacement, in which higher IQ groups conquered lower IQ ones. AFAIK this is generally not supported by the archaeological record, at least so far as the transition from Classical Greece to the Byzantine Empire is concerned. Sure, there was some Slavic introgression, especially in Thrace and Greek Macedonia, but it’s unclear how that would have caused IQ decline.

Another explanation is that the Greeks and Romans experienced dysgenic reproduction patterns, with very low birth rates amongst the elites (e.g. what began happening in the French aristocracy from the 18th century). But why did this happen there – and not in, say, England, which did experience a “farewell to alms” eugenic effect? And would this elite fertility collapse have affected higher IQ successful merchants? It didn’t affect the Christian Copts – strongly overrepresented in commerce – in Islamic Egypt, who actually had higher fertility rates than their Muslim neighbors during most of history.

Climate scientists and IQ researchers are both (largely) correct. Both of the sciences that they represent are hugely important for understanding the future, while both also have tribal ideological detractors on the right and left, respectively. Though this wasn’t always so. For instance, Svante Arrhenius, the man who constructed the world’s first climate model back in the 1890s – the projections it spat out are perfectly tallied with modern models powered by supercomputers – was also a Social Democratic eugenicist who looked forwards to Sweden becoming Tropical Hyperborea. If climate change is a NWO conspiracy, it goes back more than a century.

But the main difference is that only one of those groups have managed to inspire a secular religion (Greenism) that has become politically dominant amongst European yuppies. The other group, at best, has a few political mavericks (mainstream conservatives and even large sections of the Far Right are militantly blank slatist). On worse days, they are pseudoscientists and social outcasts who can barely hold a conference without a pack of SJWs baying for their blood outside.

I have recently been mulling over why things turned out this way.

My answer may surprise you, as my Marxist credentials are hardly stellar. I believe the most parsimonious explanation is class war. Greenism allows middle class to virtue signal, while the economic costs of highly regressive carbon taxes mainly affect rural & blue collar workers. It also appears to demand global solutions. Like it or not, all science and technology comes with “ideological load.” Stirrups promoted feudalism. Climate science promotes globalism.

In contrast, IQ realism promotes meritocracy, and perhaps a generous dose of paternalism towards the genetically less privileged (before you raise that issue: the Nazis were militantly anti-IQ). No surprise, then, that it was the British middle class that drove the campaign against Cyril Burt and (selective) public grammar schools. Even more hilariously, it is the Far Left that is most stringently opposed to IQ research (modern SJWs harass, assault, and deplatform IQists; under Stalin, some were outright executed). In effect, they act as the hirelings of capital. “False consciousness” much? Then again, that would be assuming that Marxists are out to do social good, as opposed to personal status maximization. I am not sure that assumption is justified.

I do think the Right gets this connection, but only on a hazy, subconscious level. They associate climate science with a globalist Green agenda, and many of them react by denying reality as opposed to framing their arguments around it (e.g. immigration will increase global warming; citing the possible benefits of global warming; pointing out that many Green policies, such as their opposition to nuclear power, are going to worsen the climate crisis). This is perhaps not that surprising, since they aren’t that bright. So they rant about Mann’s hockey stick, Al Gore inventing the Internet, and other inanities, marginalizing themselves and allowing the Left to monopolize the agenda. Meanwhile, in the long-term, it is the more intelligent who tend to status maximize most successfully – the son also rises and all that – and the optimal path towards that goal involves promoting neoliberal globalism, which is the system that they can best thrive in. Realism on AGW coupled with blank slatism (or rather, selective blank slatism – we all know what people mean when they ask which area of town has the “best schools”, and can cite many other petty hypocrisies) is the belief space that is best synchronized with status maximization goals.

This is how Bioleninism operates in the 21st century.

The most notable developments in the 2019 European elections have been:

1. The continued collapse of the center-left (Social Democrats) and center-right (Christian Democrats), the traditional lynchpins of postwar European politics. The Left is also in stagnation, with Corbyn’s Labour, Greece’s Syriza, Spain’s Podemos, and France’s Melenchon all having done poorly.

2. The continued rise of nationalists and the Greens, even as the overall left/right balance remains steady. The nationalists win over support both from the center-right (as they turn into just another variety of milquetoast social liberalism) as well as blue-collars disillusioned by the center-left’s turn away from working class concerns to open borders and religious progressivism. The Greens attract more highly educated, cosmopolitan, and younger voters (spiritual figurehead: Greta Thunberg), siphoning even more voters away from the center-left.

Back in 2011, I had only been blogging for three years. However, I think this particular prediction has stood the test of time remarkably well (even if I do say so myself):

Furthermore, I do not think it is an impossible endeavor. While forecasting specifics such as Stalinist central planning or the mystical millenarianism of Nazism would have been impossible for an observer in 1911, entertaining the possibility of the emergence of such regimes was entirely possible by drawing on the main strands of contemporary intellectual thought on new types of politics and society, which at the time resolved around Marxism, utopian socialism, Social Darwinism, and futurism.

What trends would a similar exercise reveal for today? I would argue that the equivalent themes, largely marginalized now but with the potential for explosive growth under the right conditions of socio-political stress, include: the Green movement (ranging the gamut from local sustainability activists to authoritarian ecosocialists); the technoutopians (include the open-source movement, Pirates, technological singularitarians, Wikileaks activists); and a revival of fascist, far-right thought in the guise of ethnic chauvinism and various Third Position ideologies.

The “technoutopians” remain in the electoral gutter, and I suppose will likely remain there (though who knows?).

But the Greens and Far Right are now doubtless the most exciting political movements, with tremendous institutional and memetic energies behind them, respectively.

Like Communism and fascism in the interwar period, they are the “waves of the future.”

There is also a broad geographic pattern.

The Greens are disproportionately powerful in most of “core Europe” – the Greens are the party of German youth – while the Far Right is powerful, especially in Eastern Europe (it is outright dominant in Hungary, where Fidesz + Jobbik got 60%).

I don’t foresee any major change coming from these elections for reasons that Guillaume Durocher expounds upon (“EPP/S&D/ALDE/Green mainstream still enjoy a majority of some 67%, so a continued globalist “grand coalition” appears quite viable”). However, they are certainly revealing as a bellweather of trends.

This is a brief update to take pressure off the last Open Thread since its at 700 comments now.

I am still in London. Will be flying back to Moscow on Sunday and resuming regular blogging from Tuesday.

I was very happy to attend the Psychology Conference. Met many people whom I have long admired for their work on IQ research, ancient DNA,  etc. Three people (including myself) are writers for the Unz Review. Bad news – this event is a bit “controversial”, as you may have gathered. James Thompson and I decided that it would for the best if he was the one to write about the event, with due scrupulous attention to privacy. I am mentioning this as explanation for why I will be unable to keep my promise to provide a personal report of the proceedings. While I would love to do that, the risks are too high to justify it at this time. Hopefully the current SJW hysteria passes in another 1-2 years.

London update. Distinctly less cargo cult #MeToo / BLM larping than a couple of years ago. You still see both, especially the former, but I get the impression it has more of a background feel now. These seem to have been at least partially replaced by a woke capital vegan drive (typical ad: “strong roots: your plant based friends” with photo of a couple of soggy overpriced pieces of breaded spinach or something like that). Since my last London post was from 2016, perhaps its time to do another one.

This has been another very bad month for the Alt Right (or what remains of it).

First, you had Katie McHugh prominently disavowing her former work at Breitbart (though it needs to be said that they did cuck and throw her overboard in their time – another splendid demonstration of right-wing solidarity), as well as former colleagues who had mentored and supported her (which is always inexcusable).

Quite a few people doxxed.

The rumor mill has it that the guy behind her “redemption” is PT Carlo, which was confirmed to me by one neoreactionary who used to work with him. I have been unable to contact PT Carlo myself. However, I do not think this would be an unsurprising development coming from a (self-described) Duginist who believes that the “crypto-eugenist IQ fetishists and “Socio-biologists”” are “enemies” who “must be destroyed.”

Second, you had Heartiste’s deplatforming from WordPress. I do not read him regularly because he writes too much (not a criticism) and his takes have become predictable. That said, I do consider Heartiste to be a brilliant writer – probably the single best polemicist in the Alt Right. Unfortunately,  his technical skills appear to fall short of his rhetorical ones. The site is still down. I hope he made backups. For now, you can follow him on Gab here.

Third, just a couple of days ago Roosh V took the “godpill” and banned all discussions of game and premarital sex from his forum, in effect cucking his thousands of younger followers (very convenient to disavow game when you approach 40).

https://twitter.com/Bernstein/status/1131610423386607617

This invalidates the entire point of the forum. Christian dating sites are a dime a dozen. He’d be better off archiving the entire thing – or deleting it. Anyhow, with Heartiste’s banning, this pretty much destroys the manosphere. I would also add that even wrt Christian values, a consistent injunctive is to be humble about the faith. Whereas Roosh is making a spectacle out of it. Like that American missionary who went to the Andaman, doing more harm than good to others as well as himself.

Assuming this is not a supreme troll job – and I do not think it is, Roosh has been tending that way ever since the tragic early death of his sister from cancer – this is quite a sad end to a career that, whatever one might think of it, has at the very least been highly interesting and idiosyncratic.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Bespoke,

Reading right-wing takes on Game of Thrones Season 8 (e.g. the replies to Gregory Hood‘s recently article) is rather bewildering. Justified disappointment with D&D’s mishandling of everything is interspersed with a certain glee that SJW-feminist white girl Daenerys got her well-deserved comeuppance for invading Westeros with hordes of raping swarthy foreigners, with the metaphor here being rather obvious. I wonder if they were watching the same serial that I was. Or perhaps all these obsessions with SJWs, womynz, and rapefugees have addled their brains to such an extent that they can’t help but see these phantasmagorias anywhere they look.

By GoT standards, Daenerys was not a bad ruler by any stretch of the imagination. To be sure, she was on that game’s Easy Mode after her dragon eggs hatched, at least so far as conquest was concerned. She did inspire love and admiration, at least in Essos, though she did fail to build good institutions in the places she conquered. But nor were there any major mistakes, at least before the IQ of everyone in Westeros took a two standard deviation hit when D&D ran out of book material during Season 5. Robb Stark inviting ruin on account of Muh Dick, Stannis rage quitting his own line thanks to a weird red woman and twenty good men, Cersei letting a sect of religious fanatics take over King’s Landing who then proceeded to imprison her – I don’t recall Daenerys doing anything nearly as stupid until the very end.

All the “moral” arguments are so contrived and ridiculous. There are strong taboos against slavery in Westeros, and it seems the sentiment is shared by most people in Essos as well. Slave masters who crucified slaves for sport got crucified in turn – what a tragedy. What should she have done, anyway? Left them alive and plotting against her? Inviting foreign armies to Westeros? The only people complaining about it are those without the gold or charisma to do likewise. At this point, I would remind agitated Alt Righters that the Unsullied are eunuchs, so not much risk of race miscegenation there. Burning the Tarlys? Reminder that they were traitors to their liege lords, the Tyrrells, whom they had just helped to snuff out as a House. They then refused to bend the knee when Daenerys magnanimously gave them the chance to do so. Both essentially volunteered to die for dubious and frankly implausible reasons, and Daenerys is supposed to be bad for granting them their Darwin Award. Burning Varys? Lifelong spymaster who runs a network of mutilated child killers who had no apparent qualms about serving all sorts of tyrants who had a change of heart that was very believable and started openly plotting a coup against her. The people who had enabled that treason – Sansa, Jon, and Tyrion – did not even experience any significant repercussions. Reminder that Robb Stark used to execute his vassals for a tenth as much treason. Reminder that Arya Stark, who is supposed to be “good”, basically exterminated an entire House to punish the treason of its patriarch.

Come to think of it, even larping as Nuclear Gandhi towards the end was somewhat defensible. Varys had ensured that news of Jon’s true parentage and greater legitimacy spread. This was enabled by Jon, who told his sister Sansa about it, who in turn wanted to use that to assert the North’s independence – even though there would be no North at all had it not been for Daenerys and her dragons and dragonglass. Consider the actions of the “honorable” (if rather thick) Jon. He absolutely had to tell Sansa about his parentage, despite her pronounced disloyalty towards her Queen (also contrast that with his “father” Ned Stark, who had the discipline and self-sacrifice to carry Jon’s secret to his grave). Moreover, he had to tell Sansa all about it right there and then, instead of waiting a couple of months until the war was over and Daenerys had been formally crowned. Even towards the end, he could still have probably salvaged the situation by giving Dany a convincing physical demonstration that he still loved her, but apparently getting his dick wet was too much of a sacrifice.

Meanwhile, consider things from Daenerys’ perspective. Over the course of the past two Seasons, she had lost all her most trusted advisors and companions, and two of her three war-winning dragons – in large part thanks to people who had outright betrayed her like Varys, undermined her with their idiocy like Jon, or a combination of both like Tyrion (whose divided loyalties were always self-evident). Her own legitimacy was under question thanks to her supposed friends and allies. At that point, imposing her rule through a demonstration of terror may very well have been the only avenue left to her. In the end, her terminal mistake was not to have had Jon arrested as well.

And so instead of spreading Westerosi Supremacy to the ends of the end, the continent is now ruled by an all-seeing derp state that worships trees and everyday affairs of state are managed by an illiterate bandit whose priority is to rebuild all the brothels. Based AF! /s

Here’s an even more powerful take. In reality, the real lesson of Game of Thrones – taking the show at face value – is that it is the northerners who are subhuman scum. Think about it. Everybody who has ever tried to help that flyspeck backwater out of the goodness of their hearts ended up getting a knife in their back for their troubles. They failed to rally to Stannis, the rightful King of the Seven Kingdoms, to save their own hides from a psychotic despot. In gratitude for rallying the Vale to their aid against Ramsay Bolton, the Starks imposed a show trial on Littlefinger that  did not even have the appearance of due process (unlike the cases against Tyrion in both the Vale and King’s Landing). While we the audience knew Littlefinger pretty much deserved to die, this would not have been at all obvious to the assembled at Winterfell. So far as they were concerned, it was more of a “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” situation. Finally, they repaid Daenerys for provisioning dragonglass, the life of one of her dragons, and thousands of her soldiers by plotting against her and eventually murdering her.

Woke.

The Night King was the only guy who was truly woke to the NQ. Even his world of eternal darkness and undeath would have been objectively far superior to the clown world w actually got. The one thing we can take consolation from is that there is still a chance that the Three Eyed Raven becomes wise to northern duplicity, wargs into Drogon, and gives Winterfell the deep frying that it deserves.

(Literally) Broke.