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 Russian Reaction BlogTeasers

PAPER REVIEW

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partridge-artificial-wombs

Abstract:

Here we report the development of a system that incorporates a pumpless oxygenator circuit connected to the fetus of a lamb via an umbilical cord interface that is maintained within a closed ‘amniotic fluid’ circuit that closely reproduces the environment of the womb. We show that fetal lambs that are developmentally equivalent to the extreme premature human infant can be physiologically supported in this extra-uterine device for up to 4 weeks. Lambs on support maintain stable haemodynamics, have normal blood gas and oxygenation parameters and maintain patency of the fetal circulation. With appropriate nutritional support, lambs on the system demonstrate normal somatic growth, lung maturation and brain growth and myelination.

This is really cool.

twitter-artificial-wombs I have been advocating this technology since I started blogging in 2008.

The immediate benefits, which the authors cite, are a reduction in infant mortality caused by extreme prematurity. This is good, though not that big of a deal, since it is very low in First World countries anyway, while poorer countries will probably not be able to afford the technology anyway.

The real promise is in its eugenic potential.

It is common knowledge that the well-educated reproduce less than the poorly educated, and that has resulted in decades of dysgenic decline throughout the developed world. This dysgenic effect has overtaken the Flynn effect. One of the reasons the well-educated, and especially well-educated women, have few or zero children is because it is bad for their career prospects. There are also some women who are just uncomfortable with the idea of pregnancy and childbirth.

There are essentially just a few solutions to this problem:

(1) Do nothing, deny heritability of IQ. Import Afro-Muslims to breed the next generation of doctors and engineers.

(2) Do nothing, hope for a literal deus ex machina solution, such as Musk’s neural lace or superintelligence.

(3) The Alt Right solution: Send the women back to the kitchen.

Ethical considerations aside, there’s also the matter of practicality – you’d have to be really hardcore at enforcing your “White Sharia” to make any substantive difference. Even most conservative Muslim societies, where female labor participation is very low, have seen plummeting fertility rates. And, needless to say, it does nothing about the dysgenic aspect of modern fertility patterns, which are a significantly bigger problem than falling fertility rates anyway.

(4) Develop artificial wombs.

This is a good idea from all sorts of ideological perspectives.

Everyone: Immediate higher fertility rates in the countries that develop them, especially amongst well-educated women. This might cancel out dysgenic decline at a single stroke.

Liberals: Alternate option for women who don’t want to undergo pregnancy/childbirth for whatever reason. No more market for surrogate mothers – an end to a particularly icky form of Third World exploitation.

Libertarians: People with the means to pay – that is, millionaires and especially billionaires – will no longer be bounded in their reproductive capacity by the biology of their female partner or by the culture of their society (generally, no polygamy). Since wealth is moderately correlated with IQ, this will be eugenic. That said, this might strike some as dystopian. Maybe one could start taxing additional artificial womb-grown offspring past the first five or ten? Then you’d get “offshore hatcheries.” Okay, I suppose that’s even more dystopian.

Zensunnis: I suppose cultures that really dislike women can just gradually start making do without them by replacing them with the equivalent of Axlotl tanks. Conversely, (almost) all female “Amazonian” societies will also become possible. Let’s make sci-fi tropes real.

Futurists: Combining artificial wombs with CRISPR gene-editing for IQ on a mass scale pretty much directly leads to a biosingularity.

As I pointed out, a biosingularity may be preferable to one born of machine superintelligence because it bypasses the AI alignment problem and doesn’t risk the end of conscious experience.

 
• Category: Science • Tags: Fertility, Paper Review, Transhumanism 

Should the government try to limit the inflow of immigrants, or should it not place any administrative barriers and try to use it for the benefit of Russia?

levada-russia-opinion-about-immigrations

 

Red = Restrict immigration; Blue = Don’t place barriers; Green = N/A.

russian-emigration-immigration-1997-2015

This makes sense. The early 2000s saw an all time low in immigration to Russia – the influx of ethnic Russians from the Near Abroad had abated by that period, while the economy was not yet strong enough to attract masses of Central Asian labor.

From the mid-2000s, large numbers of Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Kyrgyz have been rotating in and out, with the occassional dip during recessions.

If there is one thing that Navalny can capitalize on, it is this graph. Still, there’s no need to overstress its significance. After all, discotent with immigration was similarly high by 2011-12, and Navalny’s nativist credentials then were far stronger, but he was unable to turn it into any significant political success.

 
• Category: Race/Ethnicity • Tags: Immigration, Opinion Poll, Russia 

Here is a graph of monthly births in Russia since 2006 through to March 2017:

russia-births-2006-2017

It is pointless to make sweeping conclusions based on demographic data from the past one or two months.

That said, the three month moving average has been down relative to the same period in the previous year since the middle of 2016, and as of this year, has widened to 10%, an unprecedented figure in the past decade.

russia-births-change-2006-2017

Now to be sure, birth rates should – all else equal – be falling, because the diminished generation of the 1990s is now moving into its peak childbearing years. It shouldn’t be falling by 10% in any one year, however. If this new trend continues, Russia’s TFR for 2017 should fall to about 1.65 children per woman from the 1.76 in 2016.

OTOH mortality continued improving, falling by 1% in the first three months of 2017 relative to same period last year, which translates into a correspondingly greater improvement in life expectancy because of Russia’s ageing population (i.e. for the same reason that Russia’s fertility rate would increase if the number of births was to stay the same).

So I don’t want to imply all is doom and gloom after having covered Russia’s demographic turnaround for almost a decade.

However, it does perhaps warrant a reassessment of the weight we attach to different demographic projections.

For instance, the “Medium” scenario in my Russian demographic model – also the one which I long thought likeliest – involves the assumption that the TFR would converge to about 1.75 (where it has generally been since 2012), with steady convergence in life expectancy to developed world levels, and annual (official) immigrant inflows of 300,000. In this scenario, Russia’s population would actually increase to about 150 million in 2025 and 158 million by 2050 (that’s including Crimea, aka +2 million).

However, if the recent fertility decline is not a one-year blip, and were to instead to continue falling to about 1.50, then Russia’s population would stagnate (this is from before Crimea):

Low (TFR=1.5 from 2010)Population growth starts from 2011, going from 142mn to 143mn by 2023. Then it falls slowly to 138mn by 2050. The birth rate peaks at 12.5 in 2013, falls sharply to 7.8 by 2032, and then remains in the 8-9 range. The death rate troughs at 11.4 in 2032, then rises to 12.9 by 2050. Positive natural increase is never attained.

Not really the demographic apocalypse long promised by the Western media either, but a disappointing outcome nonetheless.

It’s also possible that this will further encourage the kremlins to intensify immigration from Central Asia.

 
• Category: Economics • Tags: Demographics, Russia 

About time to update my sidebar (current one dates from November 2015).

Blogroll: Added a few sites, removed a few. Version with slightly more links here: http://akarlin.com/links/

My linking policy is that if your blog is at least somewhat active and interesting, and if you link to me, or if you make a… contribution (just make sure to let me know), then I will reciprocate with a link under the Friends/Allies section.

Removed the Quotes section at the bottom, since it was taking up too much space. I now have a dedicated quotes page at my website: http://akarlin.com/quotes/

Thank to everyone who responded to my first donations drive! (esp. Bruno and Ben via Paypal, my seven patrons on Patreon, and whoever sent the 4.31979mBTC). As I said, while I’m under no imminent danger of immiseration, if you think that what I do is positive value added, well – money is always good for greasing the wheels of productivity.

***

ANATOLY KARLIN joined the Unz Review in January 2015 to blog about Russia, geopolitics, HBD/IQ, and futurism.

Here is a guide to my various websites and projects.

***

Panhandling

karlin-cliodynamicsThe more help I get from my readers, especially of the pecuaniary kind, the more time I can devote to my blogging and original research.

You can donate to me via one of the following methods:

(1) Sponsor me on Patreon
(2) Payment to my email address with Google Wallet
(3) Paypal donation
(4) If you bank with Wells Fargo, you can use Surepay (go to “Transfer and Pay,” “Send Money”) to send money to my email address
(5) Bitcoin: 17tDufZUEK3DvQh3rY75F3xtVgxj4TzdtB

***

Blogroll

This is not so much meant to be comprehensive as to illustrate the themes and individual thinkers whom I follow and am inspired by.

I do not bother including any MSM outlets, since I’m sure they can do just fine without my publicity.

Blogs which I consider to be particularly good and/or prominent are highlighted in bold, and blogs that appear to have gone dormant appear at the end in italics. While I try to keep these things objective, if you include me in your blogroll that does vastly increase the chances that I’ll reciprocate.

/pol/, HBD, H+

Journals/Websites

Politics & Geopolitics

HBD & Psychometrics

History, Economics, Futurism

Russosphere

Alt Media (Russia)

Russosphere

Friends & Allies

Friends/Allies (Politics)

Friends & Allies (HBD, Futurism)

Friends/Allies (Russia)

.

 
• Category: Miscellaneous • Tags: Administration, Blogging, Open Thread 

One of the reasons that I consider the results of these elections to have been strongly disappointing for the Front National is that it represents not just a stunting but a reversal of their upwards trend since the late 2000s.

For instance, back in December 2015, the Front National almost doubled their share of the vote in the regional elections relative to 2012 (and a tripling relative to 2010). Even though they failed to win a single region, it represented a strong surge that seemed to augur very well for the future.

But whereas their results at the local and regional party level surged upwards up until 2015, Le Pen’s result this time represents at best a stagnation or possibly an outright regress in the light of the halcyon days of 2014-2015. This becomes especially clear when you extend the graph I compiled in 2015 to the current day:

france-elections-2017-historical-context

What happened?

france-support-fn-by-age-group One encouraging thing from 2015 was that support for the FN was highest amongst the young age groups: 35% amongst the 18-24 years olds, versus ~30% amongst the 25-60′s and 20% amongst the over 60s.

This seemed to represent a general trend across many European nations where “conservatism” amongst the older generations (which is “Communism” in Russia’s case) transmutated into nationalism amongst the younger generations.

Now, this trend has come to an end in France, and has even begun to reverse.

france-elections-2017-age-group-vote

In 2017, the most avid supporters of Le Pen are the 35-49 year olds, falling to 24% amongst the 25-34′s and to 21% amongst the 18-24′s.

Now yes, to be sure, there is a Muslim/immigrant demographic effect here, which does somewhat dampen the nationalist vote amongst the younger generations (though this makes it no less electorally real). This is because of the well known fact that Muslims are much younger on average than France as a whole.

france-elections-2017-vote-by-religion According to a recent IFOP poll (see right), the far left Melenchon enjoys almost twice as much support from Muslims as he does from the country as a whole; another 17% of them support the socialist Hamon, three times as much as his all-country average. Conversely, only 5% of them vote for Le Pen, versus 21.3% overall.

And indeed, it is perhaps a telling coincidence that whereas Le Pen’s support falls by 8% points from the 35-49 age group to the 18-24 age group, conversely, Melenchon’s support increases by the same amount.

Still, even the youngest voting generations outside the Île-de-France are still solidly majority French, so the Muslim factor can only account for a minor part of the difference. The logical conclusion, then, is that Le Pen has simply stopped growing on the youngest generations of ethnic Frenchmen, if not gone into outright reverse.

For any French or European nationalist, this is doubleplusungood no matter how you spin it.

What makes this even worse is that I don’t think this is explainable on account of Marine Le Pen’s antipathy towards the EU or her statist economic program (as argued by the Russian liberal nationalist Egor Prosvirnin, who has mocking called her Marine Ivanovna Kurginyana).

Again, as with Russia, the trick is to look at the opinion polls.

france-support-for-eu-by-age-group According to this IFOP poll from April 2017 (see right), there is hardly any significant difference in support for the EU (specifically, agreement that France is stronger by dint of its membership of the EU) across different age groups: 69% for the 18-24′s, ~60% for the 24-65′s, and 68% for the 65+s. However, there is a clear separation across party lines: Whereas 80% of the mainstream political forces support the EU, and 60% of Melenchon’s leftists, for the FN/Le Pen this figure is just above 20%. She is not going to get trainloads of Parisian hipsters hopping aboard by reversing her policies on the EU.

economist-support-for-free-markets-france As regards economic policy, consider the basic fact of the election itself: The “neoliberal” candidates, Macron and Fillon, got 67% amongst the oldest age group, versus 27% amongst the young; in contrast, the basic income supporter Hamon and the commie Melenchon got 40%.

In tandem with the observation that the French have always been one of the most anti-capitalist nations, more so than even Russians, and considering who forms the core of the Front National’s support – blue-collar workers in the depressed post-industrial towns of the North-East rustbelt – it is absolutely clear that any significant shift towards a more neoliberal economic platform would be a disaster.

Note that all this is quite independent from any discussion about the purely economic merits of this or that economic platform. I would only make one last point that Le Pen’s economic platform is actually quite moderate in comparison with both that of Melenchon and Hamon.

Ultimately, I think Le Pen is just playing a bad hand just about as well as she could. Its just not enough to win this year, and I am now skeptical about 2022 as well.

Because in the end, a 2-7 offsuit will lose against any other hand.

That losing hand is the mentality of the French themselves, who have decided that one dead immigrant child washed up on their beaches through the neglect of his own parents is worse than having dozens of their own children blown up in the theaters of Paris or mowed down on the streets of Nice.

There are only one or two more decades left in which the French could continue indulging their ethnomasochism. After that, the preservation of the traditional French way of life – at least through democratic and constitutional means – will become permanently untenable.

 
• Category: Ideology • Tags: Elections, European Right, France, Opinion Poll 

Marine Le Pen got just 4.0% of the vote in the 11th arrondissement of Paris in the first round of the French Presidential elections.

Emmanuel Macron, who said that terrorism will be part of our daily lives for years to come (echoing London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s sentiment that this is just “part and parcel of” life in a major city), got a stunning 34.8%.

It is an elite central district, where the average house costs about 10,000 Euros per square meter, and hosts relatively few Arab-African immigrants.

It also hosts the Bataclan theater, the site of the worst terrorist attack in Western Europe in the past decade.

And Le Pen here got 1% point lower than the 5.0% she got in Paris as a whole, and the 4.9% she got in the previous Presidential election in 2012.

It’s time to take the #blackpill on France. Le Pen isn’t going to win, or even come close.

Not unless there’s a dirty nuke attack in the center of Paris, and as per above, I’m not even sure that would do the trick!

There was a hope, one which I subscribed to, that the polls were understating her support, due to the Front National’s lack of respectability and the hostile media climate. We saw it with Brexit. We saw it with Trump. But France refused to complete the trifecta.

The French pollsters, apparently, were better than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts (or luckier), and if anything, somewhat overestimated Le Pen’s popularity.

Overall first round election results:

Liste des candidats Voix % Inscrits % Exprimés
M. Emmanuel MACRON 8 657 326 18,19 24,01
Mme Marine LE PEN 7 679 493 16,14 21,30
M. François FILLON 7 213 797 15,16 20,01
M. Jean-Luc MÉLENCHON 7 060 885 14,84 19,58
M. Benoît HAMON 2 291 565 4,82 6,36
M. Nicolas DUPONT-AIGNAN 1 695 186 3,56 4,70
M. Jean LASSALLE 435 365 0,91 1,21
M. Philippe POUTOU 394 582 0,83 1,09
M. François ASSELINEAU 332 588 0,70 0,92
Mme Nathalie ARTHAUD 232 428 0,49 0,64
M. Jacques CHEMINADE 65 598 0,14 0,18

Her final result of 21.3% was considerably below the ~24% average of the nearly one hundred polls one month prior to the election.

As such, we cannot hope for the polls to be cardinally wrong, and there are looking very, very bad for /ourgal/.

Direct polls of her performanc e against Macron show a consistent lead for him of 20% points.

france-elections-2017-2-opinion-poll

Likewise, simple arithmetic models of second-choice preferences applied to the electorates of the knocked out candidates also suggest that she will lose by at least 20% points.

france-election-2017-2-voting-intentions-2Even most of Fillon’s voters will go with Macron, especially after his endorsemenet of the Establishment candidate. Melenchon refused to endorse either, but the polls suggest his voters will overwhelmingly go with Macron as well.

There’s no much hope from other quarters, either. Dupont-Aignan is a solid Gaullist, but even his base are split on Le Pen. Most of the rest are Communists and anarchists of various hues who are going to vote for Macron the Outsider.

Turnout was already high, at 78%, and cannot be increased much further.

france-election-2017-2-voting-intentions-1

My back of the envelope – well, jotted down on Excel – calculations suggest that if the electorate voters as in the first chart above and the rest splits 50/50 between Macron and Le Pen – the latter, an assumption highly favorable to Le Pen – Macron will still win by 63% to 37%.

This ENEF poll (via Philippe Lemoine, see chart right) confirms the dismal outlook for Le Pen.

This is due to the fundamental differences between the French and American political systems.

If the US was a multiparty democracy, then somebody like Trump representing the nationalist part of the political spectrum would also have gotten 25% of the vote, with the constitunet elements of the Republican party splintering between religious conservatives like Cruz (Fillon) and financiers (Jeb!/Rubio), and with Hillary Clinton proceeding to wreck him in the runoffs. It was ironically by dint of its electoral system, long considered by observers as being very much resistant to populists from one extreme of the political spectrum or another, that someone like Trump could come to power by dint of Republican party loyalty. (Of course, Trump’s subsequent moderation/neoconization – cross out as per your own ideological preferences – might yet prove that said observers were right after all).

macdonald-german-political-interference In France, it is basically Gallic Jeb! – successfully portrayed by the “free and impartial Western press” as an outsider, despite him having served as a Minister in Hollande’s government, worked at a Rothschild bank, and attended Bilderberger conferences – with the support of both Hillary Clinton, Cruz, many of Bernie’s voters (if not the man himself), and the entirety of the international globalist cabal against the true political outsider, Le Pen.

As regardless the future of nationalism in France, and indeed of the French nation, I suppose the only realistic way forwards is to focus on widening the Front National’s reach so as to prepare the way for a more effective challenge in 2022. For the first time, nationalist forces are now outright winning many regions, and ironically, the Bilderbergers’ anointment of Macron as their representative in France has redefined the political struggle to be more in line with Marine Le Pen’s own formulation: “There is no left or right, only nationalists and globalists.

Though in net terms, this is still a disaster. Especially jarring is the apparent obliviousness of both the affluent, well-educated French elites in places like Paris, and the as yet non-enriched majority French areas in places like Britanny, that overwhelmingly vote against Le Pen and their own demographic dispossession.

As always, the race is between uncuckening and demographics; between White-World Supremacy Conservation…

marion-le-pen

… and the Rising Tide of Color.

vibrant-diversity-paris

France might only have a couple more electoral cycles to start reversing things before its submersion into Sub-Saharan Africa becomes irreversible.

 
• Category: Ideology • Tags: European Right, France, Nationalism 

François Hollande, widely considered to be a failure with single digit approval ratings, has – unusually for French politics – decided not to run for a second term.

The polls are now split almost evenly between four canditates: The neoliberal Emmanuel Macron; the hard left Jean-Luc Mélenchon; the conservative François Fillon; and the nationalist Marine Le Pen.

The Socialist candidate, Benoît Hamon, a representative of the Globalist Left who advocates for greater social spending, a universal basic income, and is on record complaining about there being “too many white people” in his hometown of Brest, is trailing badly in the polls.

The two frontrunners will face off in a second round on May 7.

***

french-election-2017-candidate-positions

Source: Data Debunk.

Who’s Who?

One of the very best summaries I’ve seen on this is from this podcast between Amren’s Jared Taylor and the French identitarian thinker Guillaume Durocher.

The power summary below is mostly based on that conversation.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon

  • Ideology: Populist Left.
  • Wikipedia: “Domestic policies proposed by Mélenchon include a 100 per cent income tax on all French nationals earning over 360,000 Euros a year, full state reimbursement for healthcare costs, a reduction in presidential powers in favour of the legislature, and the easing of immigration laws.
  • That said, the Guardian’s neoliberal warmonger Natalie Nougayrède really dislikes him for his populism and relatively Russophile positions, so he can’t be all that bad.

Emmanuel Macron

  • Ideology: Globalist Center.
  • Former banker for Rothschild & Cie Banque; Minister of Economy under Hollande, but refrained from becoming a member of the Socialist Party, and has disassociated himself from Hollande’s government; pushed for reforms to make the labor market more flexible; used that as springboard to market himself as independent candidate.
  • No such thing as French culture, there is only culture in France and it is diverse.
  • Obama at least waited until he became President to start his apology tour. Called French colonialism a crime against humanity while in Algiers.
  • Russophobe – promises he will force Putin to “respect” France.
  • According to Durocher, “a very strange dude.” Married his HS teacher at the age of 18, even though she was 24 years his senior and had three children from a previous marriage. Unusually for a French politician, he has refrained from having affairs with younger women.
  • Is seen as the favorite of the Establishment liberal elites, and usually leads in the polls.
  • Durocher: Is getting the HRC treatment – journalists love him, oligarchs love him, he is on all the trendy magazine covers! But as with HRC, this implies that there might also be an artificial character to his poll numbers.

François Fillon

  • Ideology: Globalist Right.
  • Catholic; married to Englishwoman, has 4 children; PM under Sarkozy; not radical, but went off the reservation when he said France should help Putin against ISIS – in French politics, you have to be anti-Assad (and de facto pro-Islamist).
  • Moderately Russophile: Has acknowledged Crimea is Russian in “terms of history, culture and language,” and stresses the right of national self-determination, recalling Kosovo. But is this a genuine position, or a marketing ploy to gain the support of French farmers hoping for a repeal of Russian food sanctions?
  • Started off strong, but has since become embroiled in corruption scandals – usually this happens to politicians after their Presidency, not before. He has lost the support of the UDI party, and his spokesman has resigned. Durocher notes that he has never seen this amount of pressure against a mainstream candidate. This is suspicious, because many French politicians practice petty nepotism.

Marine Le Pen

  • Ideology: Populist/Nationalist Right.
  • Not as hardcore as her father, but still the best from an HBD/IQ-realistic perspective: Wants to shut down immigration, make naturalization virtually impossible, no birthright citizenship. If she can fulfill her promises, she will at least put a tourniquet on the demographic replacement.
  • Durocher: While the National Assembly may be uncooperative, she can put some items of her program to the referendum, such as #Frexit.
  • Strongly Russophile: Has stated that Crimea is Russian, that Russia is as European a country as any, has personally met with Putin (if she is going to be accused of being a Russian shill, one supposes she might as well reap the benefits of it by posing for a photo opp with a major world leader).

Who Will Win?

france-elections-2017-media-coverage As Durocher said, the media absolutely loves Macron; according to a study by Harris Interactive, he gets more than twice as much positive as negative coverage (46% to 19%).

The numbers are almost inverse for Melenchon (20% to 35%), and unrelentingly negative for both Fillon (11% to 57%) and Le Pen (15% to 55%).

(Free Western media, folks! Not biased Kremlin TV.)

Le Pen suffers from the classic problem of all nationalists in multiparty systems – there is a hard ceiling to their support, beyond which all other forces – liberals, socialists, conservatives, maybe Islamists at some point in the future – set aside their differences to shove Hitler back into the closet.

For instance, in a Macron vs. Le Pen second round, /ourgal/ is pretty much bounded at 40%.

A vast improvement over her father, to be sure – his ceiling was around 20% – but still apparently hopeless.

In line with this, the Depuis 1958 Monte Carlo simulations model predicts the following chances of ultimate victory: Macron 91%; Melenchon 5%; Fillon 4%; Le Pen 0%.

On the other hand, if Brexit and Trump have demonstrated anything, it’s that opinion polls can be wrong – especially regarding unrespectable, or as we Russians ironically say, “unhandshakeworthy,” questions.

As Durocher points out, there is this dominant ideology in France – the only respectable and “handshakeworthy” one – that stands for globalism, for open borders, for devolution of sovereignty to the EU, for dependence on financial markets, for demographic replacement with an “endless tide of Africans and Muslims.” If you are don’t like it, then too bad, you are a fascist. Just as a Silicon Valley office drone would be well advised to keep his pro-Trump opinions to himself, so as a Le Pen supporter you will be ostracized from many French social circles.

france-elections-2002-opinion-poll And there is good evidence that there is a “Shy Tory” effect in France. In the famous 2002 elections, for instance, opinion polls had Jean-Marie Le Pen at 8%, hopelessly behind favorites Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin.

In the event, Le Pen stormed in to a second place finish with 16.9%, just above Jospin with 16.2%, though the forces of the Republic rallied in the second round to deny the fascist victory.

france-elections-2017-predictit More importantly, the gamblers – the people with #skininthegame, the people who put their money where their mouths are – consider that Marine Le Pen has a ~30% chance of eventual victory (Oddschecker, PredictIt).

The gamblers were more correct than the pollsters and experts on Brexit. The gamblers were more correct than the pollsters and experts on Trump. Now we are are about to see if we can complete the trifecta.

Betting against the gamblers is… a gamble.

Feel free to place your predictions in the comments.

EDIT: Rather belated, but here’s a Vote Compass for this election: https://votecompass.france24.com/president/home

france-elections-2017-preferences

 

 
• Category: Ideology • Tags: Elections, European Right, France, Nationalism 

hi-reddit-russia

It’s live here: https://www.reddit.com/r/russia/comments/66q52x/hi_rrussia_anatoly_karlin_writer_for_the_unz/

/r/russia is one of the best forums on the Internet for people interested in Russia.

You can reply in either English or Russian.

Most of the people there are basically Russian patriots, though considerably more socially liberal and better acquainted with the West than the Russian average. However, there are plenty of Communists, nationalists, and liberals there as well.

 
• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: Interviews, The AK 

Probably unintentionally, but still.

The video, subtly titled “Hitler 1945/Navalny 2018,” basically argues that if you oppose Medvedev’s corruption and the importation of infinity Moslems into Russia then you are Hitler.

Its current Dislikes to Likes ratio is at around 10.

According to Navalny himself, the man behind the video is Sergey Kiriyenko, the First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration.

The kremlin connection is probably true.

First, it obviously has a high production value, and has many of the stylistic features of the My Duck’s Vision studio, known for its goofy hyperbolic rhetoric and CGI overkill, which nobody really uses nowadays apart from the kremlins.

Second, the video has been shown to [edit 4/20: as has just been brought to my attention by Alexey Kovalev, they were actually shown another video, about Navalny's involvement in the Kirovles affair (an alleged corruption scandal for which Navalny had been convicted), not the one about how he is Hitler; in his post on the matter, Navalny had implied otherwise, which serves as a good reminder that what Navalny says should be fact checked as well] students of Vladimir State University, some of whom had allegedly been forced to go there as punishment for participating in the protests against corruption on March 26.

After the video, the head of the regional law school’s department for counter extremism outreach amongst youth, one vibrantly named Alla Byba lectures the disgruntled students for their temerity in asking her that she also show some of Navalny’s videos – for example, on how Dmitry Peskov wears watches worth three times his annual salary – in the interests of academic neutrality.

“You all know there that is an information war against the Russian Federation,” she informs the students, “No wonder that terrorist organizations are intensively recruiting across the Internet.”

So the basic takeaway is that as we well know actual terrorists have no religion or nationality, discussing Medvedev’s corruption and opposing infinity Moslems in Moscow makes you an extremist, a supporter of Adolf Hitler, and a member of the sixth-column ala Dugin.

You can hardly find a better way to inflate Navalny’s otherwise very modest approval ratings and smother away his real failings, such as a lack of knowledge about policy.

Indeed, as Egor Prosvirnin argues, calling Navalny a Russian fascist is perhaps the one thing that can save him – because it is evidently false to just about everyone who is not in the over 50, no Internet connection, sub-90 IQ demographic. But by attacking him on the basis of his supposed nationalism, the kremlins may well actually end up forcing Navalny to (re)adopt Russian nationalism. In the current climate, that could well increase Navalny’s popularity by a factor of of two or three, making him a real political threat to the kremlins.

All of which begs Milyukov’s classic question: Is this treason, or stupidity?

Well, judge for yourselves.

Some biographic data on Kiriyenko from the English Wikipedia (no mention of this in the Russian version, incidentally):

Sergei Kiriyenko’s grandfather, Yakov Israitel, made his name as a devoted communist and member of the Cheka, and Vladimir Lenin awarded him with an inscribed pistol for his good service to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Sergei Kiriyenko, son of a Jewish father, was born in Sukhumi, the capital of the Abkhazian ASSR, and grew up in Sochi, in southern Russia. He adopted Ukrainian surname of his mother.

He was also one of the Gaidar’s “young reformers” responsible for the theft-ridden privatizations of the 1990s, and was Prime Minister during the 1998 default. After that, he spent the next seven years in inconsequential posts, until Putin plucked him out of obscurity to head Rosatom, the state nuclear power behemoth.

There have also been rumors in the press (which he denied) that he attended Scientology seminars in his hometown of Nizhny Novgorod.

Speaking of weird quasi-Masonic associations… Kirienko’s direct boss now is Anton Vaino, a descendant of Estonian communists. On becoming head of the Presidential Administration, the Internet quickly discovered his dissertation about the “nooscope,” a theoretical device that tracks “the collective conscience of mankind” thought a system of “spatial scanners” that monitor “changes in the biosphere.”

Many Russians expressed the hope that Vaino had paid someone to write it, because having an academic fraud in a position of power is par for the course in Russia, and far preferable to him being the deranged madman who wrote many dozens of pages about this pseudoscientific nonsense.

Apart from “treason” and “stupidity,” I suppose there is also a 666D chess explanation, a “mnogokhodovka” so to speak. If the kremlins could get nationalists to hop back aboard the Navalny bandwagon – meme Navalny into becoming a Russian Richard Spencer, as one Twitter user just suggested to me – then perhaps the kremlins could use the opportunity to shut down Russian nationalists along with Navalny himself in a future crackdown (for instance, if it coincides with the surrender of Donbass).

However, I don’t think that’s true, because I don’t think the kremlins are any smarter than Trump.

 
• Category: Ideology • Tags: Alexei Navalny, Politics, Russia 

The results are in and YES has won a narrow 51.4% victory in the Turkish referendum on making the country into a Presidential republic.

This map I found (via Turkish Wikipedia) is the only one to show regional gradations. It shows the percentage of people voting NO.

map-turkey-referendum-2017

It is electorally very typical for Turkey, which consists of three main regional patterns: The rich, cosmopolitan, higher-IQ liberal elites on the western coast and around Ankara, who vote for the Kemalist CHP; the poorer, more religious Turkish conservatives in the Anatolian heartlands, who vote for Erdogan’s AKP and the nationalist MHP; and the impoverished, low-IQ Kurdish minorities in the south-east, who vote for their ethnic minority interest group party, the HDP.

The story of this referendum is that the liberal cosmopolitans and the Kurds joined forces, but failed to stymie Erdogan’s conservative Turkish majority.

Here is a map of the vote from overseas polling stations (via /u/nine6s):

map-turkey-referendum-2017-nine6s

Looks like German “magic dirt” did nothing to make Anatolian Gastarbeiters more liberal. They voted just like their cousins back home.

However, the Turks from the Anglosphere and Asia – most of whom are students, businessmen, etc. – mostly voted NO.

turkey-referendum-2017-observers Was there fraud? Plenty of videos that suggest it (e.g. 1, 2, 3). More suspeciously, the Supreme Elections Board decided to consider unstamped ballots valid, which is against the law. There may about 2.5 million of them, which would easily be enough to tip the election if they are significantly biased towards YES. EU observers were not happy (see their statement on the right). The CHP and HDP say they will be mounting a legal challenge, but with Erdogan having declared victory, it is unlikely anuthing will come out of it.

Brief geopolitical comment: I would note that Trump has rushed to congratulate Erdogan, whereas Putin has been conspicuous in his silence.

This supports the intuition I expressed a couple of days ago that this, in conjunction with Trump’s about-turn on Syria, presages nothing good for Russia.

 
• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: Elections, Turkey 

karlin-cliodynamicsThis appears to be my 1,000th post at The Unz Review (including the archives from my old blogs).

Coincidentally, it will also be my 100th post this year, which would represent an almost threefold increase in intensity relative to 2015-2016.

So I guess now is as good a time as any to launch my first ever fundraising drive.

Back when I was in California I didn’t feel too comfortable asking for gibs, since I spent most of my working time on unrelated freelance jobs and my volume of blogging didn’t merit much in the way of donations. Since then, though, I’ve moved back to Russia, and started doing all this effectively full-time.

Now please don’t feel obligated. Only give if you like what I do, if you can afford to, and if a much more deserving charity or cause doesn’t come to mind. I am not going to starve anytime soon, and my long-term financial plans still revolve around writing books.

That said, if you like what I do, want to see more of it and sooner, and are not yourself impoverished, I could certainly do with your alms.

(1) Sponsor me on Patreon
(2) Payment to my email address with Google Wallet
(3) Paypal donation
(4) If you bank with Wells Fargo, you can use Surepay (go to “Transfer and Pay,” “Send Money”) to send money to my email address (advantage: No extra fees)
(5) Bitcoin: 17tDufZUEK3DvQh3rY75F3xtVgxj4TzdtB

This is my first time panhandling, and I haven’t thoroughly tested all of these methods, so please let me know if anything goes wrong. I would also very much like to know if there are any good alternatives to the above methods.

Thanks in advance for your generosity!

***

Moving on, a few administrative announcements.

Following my blog

Back in the “golden age” of blogging a decade ago, feeds and feed readers were all the rage. Then along came Twitter and Facebook, Google Reader closed down, and the golden age was over. However, with Twitter’s problems, I suspect we might soon see a resurgence of the old ways.

So why not get ahead of the curve if you haven’t already. If you’re the sort of person who likes keeping up with many different blogs and columnists, I suggest getting a feed reader such as Feedly, or The Old Reader (which reproduce much of the functionality of the much missed Google Reader). To follow my blog in particular, just insert one of the following feeds:

A few months ago, I also set up a Twitter bot that automatically reposts everything I write here and at my other blogs – follow https://twitter.com/KarlinBot.

Last but not least, you can also keep tabs on my recent posts not just from The Unz Review’s interface, but also from my main website at http://akarlin.com/.

***

Blogging Plans

Almost a year ago, I carried out a large survey on what I could do to improve my product.

The one thing for which there was overwhelming demand for was more in the way of reviews. Unfortunately, I singularly failed at that. The pace of history has picked up radically of late, and commenting on breaking news stories has been trumping other considerations.

Still, the publicity (and monetary) success of Gregory Cochran’s recent review of Testosterone Rex by Cordelia Fine does demonstrate there is a demand for good reviews, so I’ll commit to filling in this lacuna.

I wouldn’t want to fail my 2017 predictions, after all.

  • I will write 30+ book reviews: 50%.
  • I will write 5+ game reviews: 50%.
  • I will write fewer than 5 movie reviews: 80%.

***

New and Ongoing Projects

Some other stuff I’m doing at the moment:

ROGPR

Weekly podcast on the Russian Occupation Government with Kirill Nesterov and @smug_vatnik on Russian realities from an IQ/HBD-realistic perspective.

We are the official podcast of United Russia and the Republican Party. /s

If you speak Russian, or are learning it, you can follow it at ROGPR.com or directly at SoundCloud.

Note that I also have a Russian language blog at http://akarlin.ru/, though I don’t update it all that regularly.

Books

ami-book-name As I mentioned above, now that I have more free time (no longer have to do freelance work), I can finally get on with my book plans.

While I’m still very serious about getting Dark Lord of the Kremlin and Apollo’s Ascent written, I am taking a small break to write a shorter book on my Age of Malthusian Industrialism concept.

Incidentally, I need a name for it. Looking for something that crisply conveys at least some of the following ideas/themes/feelings:

(1) Far from the best possible outcome, though not catastrophic either
(2) Industrial economy
(3) Idiocracy
(4) Overpopulation – due to selection for higher fertility preferences reversing the demographic transition. my estimate is that our current technological level translates to a theoretical global carrying capacity of approximately 100 billion people.
(5) Possible the “Clarkian selection” that will follow afterwards.
(6) The idea of the millennial delay/opportunity cost it would impose.

Current preference is “Dark Equilibrium,” but its not optimal.

Papers

In the meantime, I’m also currently involved in writing two papers, which I hope will be ready to be published sometime by the summer.

***

Updated Blogroll

I also have a new blogroll and quotes page, which I will soon integrate with my column’s sidebar at Unz.

 
• Category: Miscellaneous • Tags: Admin, Blogging, Open Thread, Panhandling 

berkeley-riots-good-night-left-side

berkeley-riots-mensch-russian

berkeley-riots-mensch-rog-controls-blm

berkeley-riots-laufer-rog-control

berkeley-riots-caroline-provokatsiya

ovenkin-tell-me-more-about-komninatsiya

 

I once wrote a long article about a Korean War II.

But this one chart tells essentually the same tale.

korean-military-balance

I suspect it will be a harder nut to crack than Iraq in 2003, or even 1991. It is an ultranationalist (not a Communist) regime with a formidable secret police, so you’re not going to be buying any generals off. North Koreans have higher IQs than Iraqis (so more competent), do not practice inbreeding (so more cohesive), and a have a lot more hills, mountains, and tunnels (which partially negate South Korean/American technological predominance).

Still, the gap is too vast for the ultimate result to be in doubt. (Unless China gets involved. Then things get complicated.)

And this is why it’s isn’t going to happen.

I do think that Kim Jong Un enjoys the good life, as do the elites he’s fostered in Pyongyang the past decade – according to Andrey Lankov, one of the foremost experts on North Korea, living standards are now far higher than during the grim 1980s or the dismal 1990s – and would prefer to keep things that way. If there is a limited strike on Nork nuclear facilities in the coming days, I doubt we will see anything more substantial than outraged rhetoric.

China will probably be just fine with that. There is very little love lost between Kim Jong Un and the current Chinese leadership. Xi Jinping recently noted that whereas his father had visited China four times, the son had yet to do so, which is a rather open criticism by demure Chinese standards. This was understandable, since Kim Jong Un has spent the last few years suppressing pro-Chinese factions in his country, including members of his own family (executed uncle, assassinated half brother). I suspect the Chinese are fine with Kim Jong Un receiving a demonstrative slapdown, and wouldn’t mind seeing his nuclear program set back a few years. After all, Beijing is considerably closer to Pyongyang than is Tokyo, to say nothing of Honolulu, and there is no telling what North Korea would do in a truly serious future crisis.

Why not get Donald “I Make the Best Deals” Trump to give Kim Jong Un a good beating, especially when he’s also offering to throw in some excellent trade deals for free. It’s a bargain!

 

I realize everyone is obsessed with North Kora right now, but the Turkish referendum that is set for April 16 may turn out to be even more significant.

Erdogan’s AKP and the MHP nationalists have proposed a set of amendments to the Turkish constitution that would remove the office of the Prime Minister, annul a ban on the President retaining membership of his political party, and vastly increase the Presidency’s power over the legislature and the judiciary. If these proposals are confirmed by the electorate, Turkey becomes an executive Presidency.

In the past week, “Yes” has assumed a lead, though that shouldn’t be weighed too heavily since these polls have been fluctuating widely. However, PredictIt currently gives a 68% chance of “Yes.” This tallies exactly with the odds given by major betting sites.

One curious aspect of Turkish politics is that the AKP is far friendlier towards Turkey’s 3 million Syrian immigrants than the Kemalist CHP, and Erdogan has even gone so far as to moot giving them citizenship – a suggestion that was not well received by most Turks. Another interesting thing I noted is that whereas the constitutional amendment is supported by the MHP leadership, some 65% of its rank and file are prepared to vote “No.”

This might hint at some very curious parallels with Russia. There, for instance, Zhirinovsky’s LDPR slavishly supports the Kremlin, and by extension its Eurasianist (read: Greater Turkestanization) project, even though its base are nationalist xenophobes who refuse to rent out their apartments to people from Central Asia and the Caucasus. I wonder if there is a similar dynamic at play in Turkey, with nationalist MHP voters being mostly opposed to Erdogan’s Ottomanist (read: Islamist-Arabization) project, but nonetheless feeling dutybound to support the Leader out of their authoritarian and neo-imperialist instincts, and hatred of the liberal elites in the cosmopolitan areas.

Anyhow, I suspect that “Yes” will be bad for Syria, and by extension, Russia’s goals in Syria (assuming there’s no convoluted 3D chess involved). Erdogan tilts towards the invade/invite end of the spectrum, and with his power becoming absolute in Turkey, he will have space to resume the “invade” part in Syria with greater vigor. Considering the sharp reversal in US-Russian relations over Syria in the past ten days, and Erdogan’s own unlimited propensity for treachery, I have dark forebodings that Putin might soon come to regret helping him survive the 2016 coup attempt.

 
• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: Elections, Syrian Civil War, Turkey 

So it’s been a few days since the Syria Strikes, everyone and his dog have thrown in their two cents, and there has been a set of confusing and contradictory reactions from US officials and pretty much everyone else involved in this saga.

The more the contradictions pile on, the less clear the picture becomes.

Is it a “zrada”/betrayal? Is it 666D chess/clever plan? Or is everyone involved just a bunch of opportunists and/or bumbling morons?

And what is this all going to lead to?

podcast-3d-chess Let’s try to consider all these issues one by one. But first, for those of you who like podcasts, I have already participated in two where I go indepth into these issues

***

What Happened?

On April 4, a toxic gas engulfed the town of Khan Shaykhun, which is occupied by Tahrir al-Sham, an Al-Nusra offshoot (which in turn stems from Al Qaeda). There are many reasons to doubt that Assad was responsible, as I argued from the outset. Since then, the reasons for skepticism have only increased in number. For instance, see this Duran summary of a 14 page report by MIT Professor Theodore Postol on the Syria chemical attacks (full document also attached).

In response, without any sort of investigation, UN mandate, or even Congressional approval, Trump ordered a 59 Tomahawk missile strike on Shayrat Airbase, though not before warning Russia. This happened while having a chocolate cake dessert with Xi Jinping.

Opinions vary on the success of the missile strikes. At first, there were claims that 23 of the 59 missiles hadn’t even hit anything, which led to theories that either the failure had been intentional on Trump’s part, or that they have been partially intercepted by Syrian air defences. (Technical failure was very unlikely, since even in the early 1990′s Tomahawks had a failure rate of 5%, whereas here it was allegedly closer to 40%). I do not buy the first theory that it was an intentional failure. I can hardly even see how you could communicate an order like that to the military, expect it to be carried out, and not have it be leaked.

Incoming Tomahawks fly close to the ground, making them mostly invisible to ground based radar, and to my knowledge Russia does not have a continuous AWACS presence over the Syrian skies which conventional air defense systems need to take the Tomahawks out. As such, if the claims are true, I believe the likeliest explanation is the presence of a Russian EW weapon within the vicinity of Shayrat Airbase. This would be consistent with the fact that even the missiles that did get through failed to do damage; i.e., their flight path had still been affected to some extent, making them deviate from their planned course and as a result less effective.

On the other hand, more recent analyses from the past few days by ISI and War is Boring (h/t Reiner Tor) indicate a 58/59 success rate, with flights from Shayrat being sharply curtailed in the aftermath.

Reactions

syria-strike-response

politicians-behind-syria-strikes US Domestic: Defense Secretary James Mattis has raised the possibility of establishing a NFZ in Syria, and WH spokesman Sean Spicer bracketed Russia in with the Axis of Evil (2017 edition) – Syria, Iran, and the DPRK – which opposed its actions in Syria. Steve Bannon and the “nationalist” wing of Trump’s administration opposed the strike on Syria, but he has been gradually losing influence to Jared Kushner and the “neocon” wing. For instance, Katie McFarland, a Michael Flynn protege, was fired from the NSC just a few days ago and demoted to being the Ambassador to Singapore. There has even been talk of a 150,000 troop US ground intervention in Syria pushed by new NSC head Herbert McMaster and David Petraeus, though this extreme variant was apparently opposed by both Bannon and Kushner, and has already been shot down by Trump.

US International: The US and UK led the vanguard in condemning Assad’s gassing of his own people and in affirming Russian culpability in it. Nikki Haley has been busy waving photos of gassed children in the UN. Rex Tillerson and British FM were pushing for new sanctions against Syria and Russia at a meeting of the G7 before the latter’s flight to Moscow. At the G7 meeting, there was talk that Tillerson would present a carrot and stick ultimatum to Moscow: Drop support for Assad, and get reinvited back into the G8; or face newer sanctions (as it was, they failed to get European and Japanese support for the latter). The summit between Rex Tillerson and Russian FM Sergey Lavrov has just ended on an ambiguous note. Tillerson is ambivalent on Ukranie, even going so far as to describe the Russia’s incorporation of Crimea as “certain moves by Russia”, which segues with his skepticism at the G7 meeting where he asked his European counterparts why American taxpayers should care about Ukraine. On the other hand, he continued to insist that Assad should step down, and that Russia should pressure him to do that.

Russia: Russia has opposed the strikes, with Putin saying that the US-Russian relationship has deteriorated – no mean achievement, considering where it was at under Obama. More to the point, Russia shut down the military communication channel in Syria with the US, which has already resulted in a reduction in US military overflights above Syria. Just recently, Russia blocked a Western-sponsored resolution on Syria in the UN Security Council; Bolivia voted with Russia, while China and two other countries abstained because of its reference to Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which had previously been used by the West to carry through regime change in Libya in 2011 despite having reassured Russia it would do no such thing.

China: Chinese state media started attacking the strikes as soon as Xi Jinping returned from the US. However, in tandem with the US rerouting the USS Carl Vinson carrier strike group towards North Korea, it has expressed a willingness to also strike against the DPRK if it crossed China’s “bottom line”, and has moved 150,000 troops to its border with the hermit kingdom [fake news]. In his turn, Trump has also adopted a more positive line on China, retreating from his prior threats to label it a currency manipulator and praising Xi Jinping for what at least what Trump saw as his cooperative spirit.

666D Chess

clever-planm

So you have a bewildering range of factors to consider when trying to fit all these events into any sort of internationally consistent framework:

(1) A domestic power struggle in the US between Bannonite nativists and Kushnerite globalists, which the latter faction is winning. Indeed, there is good evidence to believe that it is not long before Bannon is dismissed entirely, with Trump now claiming that he wasn’t that critical to his victory in the 2016 elections anyway.

msm-on-syria-strikes(2) The strikes enjoy bipartisan support, the support of the Mainstream Media, and the support of a majority of Americans (~50-55% support, 35-40% oppose).

(3) What at a minimum appears to be a serious disagreement between the US and Russia on Syria, with the former insisting that Assad has to go, and mooting the possibility of no fly zones – a prospect that many thought had fallen by the wayside with Hillary Clinton’s defeat.

(4) A surprisingly more accomodating US position on Ukraine – more so than that of the Europeans – though Tillerson has taken care to explicitly rule out any quid pro quo deals with Russia that tie Ukraine to Syria.

trump-norks(5) Though Chinese state media have reacted negatively to the US strike on Syria, they have been – at least rhetorically – a lot more cooperative on another brewing flashpoint, that of North Korea (see above). The Chinese have no great love for Kim Jong Un, who is rumored to be a Sinophobe and who had his uncle executed for trying to create a pro-Chinese political/economic faction within the DPRK.

On the other hand, the DPRK is a vital security concern for China – not so much perhaps the oft stated issue of the refugee flood should the regime fall (population of North Korea: 25 million; population of just the two regions adjoining it: 70 million), but because it could do without American military bases peppering the Korean peninsula all the way up to its border. More to the point, China has a mutual defense treaty with the DPRK from 1961 that it has continued to renew, despite festering disagreements between the two countries. Could China be… too accomodating of Trump? Is the US walking into some kind of trap?

So, so many things to consider.

***

Donald’s Game

It seems to me that the Trump administrations actions in recent days fall into three major narrative bins:

  • Zrada: Trump has subscribed to the neocon agenda, on account of deep state blackmail, political convenience, or perhaps because he never had a strong commitment to “America First” anyway;
  • 4 Chess: Trump is playing 666D interuniversal Teichmuller chess (or “clever plan”/chess combination, as we say in Russian) to win over his skeptics with a “short victorious war” and return to MAGA;
  • Drumpf: Trump is an inexperienced politician, or just a moron, and is making impulsive decisions on the fly.

Let’s consider the evidence for and against each of these in turn:

Zrada (Betrayal)

Trump has subscribed to the neocon agenda, on account of deep state blackmail, political convenience, or perhaps because he never had a strong commitment to “America First” anyway.

kushner-trump-meme This is the main reaction to Donald Trump on both the anti-imperialist Left and the Alt Right.

Points For

One Breitbart-endorsed version of this was that Trump was driven to fling his Tomahawks on account of Ivanka’s tears on account of the poor Syrian babies and children. While this might have been a factor – after all, Trump is known to be very close to his daughter – the idea that important decisions are made in such soap opera fashion still beggar belief, even adjusting for the continuing Latinization of American politics.

Perhaps closer to the truth is the observation in a recent WaPo article that Bannonism isn’t any good for the Trump brand, quoting one Republican operative as saying, “The fundamental assessment is that if they want to win the White House in 2020, they’re not going to do it the way they did in 2016, because the family brand would not sustain the collateral damage… It would be so protectionist, nationalist and backward-looking that they’d only be able to build in Oklahoma City or the Ozarks.” If you elect a merchant, I suppose you will get a merchant.

Another major consideration is the changes in cadres, which indicate a gradual purge of Bannonists from the government (Lewandowski, Manafort, Flynn, McFarland – with Gorka and Bannon himself now coming under the crosshairs), in favor of various neocons, Goldman Sachs globalists, and members of the Kushner clan.

cohen-israel-syria

Alongside the rehabilitation of the neocons, it has also been acquiring a much more explicitly Zionist administration. It is worth bearing in mind that Kushner himself is a Zionist, and that Trump has always been very forthright about his support for Israel – much more so than Obama. The Israelis have been returning the favor – Trump was always very popular in Israel, and Israeli politicians have expressed strong support for the Syria strikes. This is not surprising, since Israelis see a united Syria as a greater threat to them to a Balkanized Syria swarming with Islamists and ethnic militias.

Perhaps there were always plans to move ahead with removing Assad as soon as a convenient opportunity popped up, or maybe the percentage of neocons and Zionists reached a critical mass that tilted things in this direction. I don’t suppose it matters all that much.

Another version of this narrative is that the deep state has finally acquired some nuclear level “kompromat” on Trump, which it is using to blackmail him – for instance, one commenter here has suggested pedophilia, or an expensive drug habit. Or maybe there really is damning evidence of collusion with the Russian Occupation Government. Alternatively, maybe his family is being credibly threatened in some way. I suppose this is all possible, but I don’t think it’s all too likely, considering the diversity of other, more natural explanations.

Points Against

As early as a week ago, the Trump administration was open to Assad staying on as President of Syria. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat on good terms with Trump, paid a visit to Syria several weeks ago where she called on the US to stop arming terrorists, and just a week ago Rex Tillerson was saying that the “longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people.” Nikki Haley went even further, noting that “our priority is no longer to sit and focus on getting Assad out.” The sheer suddenness of this 180 turn might hint at its artificiality (666D Chess Theory).

It’s worth noting that even as of today the administration still hasn’t gone full neocon. James Mattis has recently affirmed that the defeat of Islamic State remains the first priority, and Trump clarified that the US will not be entering the Syrian Civil War. Note that Thomas L. Friedman, the globalist par excellence, is currently arguing for the US to let the Islamic State be to fight against the Syrian government on the pages of the New York Times. Anti-imperialists might bewail the neocon hijacking of the White House, but frankly, there’s still some ways to go before it plummets to the level of NYT-reading “educated mainstream.” It’s pretty depressing to think about, but in the postmodernist exhibition that is current American politics, where Antifa assaults Alt Right anti-war protests, a move to the “moderate center” implicitly involves adopting the language of interventionism.

All of which suggests a second possibility…

666D Interuniversal Teichmuller Chess

Trump is playing 666D interuniversal Teichmuller chess (or “clever plan”/chess combination, as we say in Russian) to win over his skeptics with a “short victorious war” and return to MAGA;

Points For

Let’s make one thing clear. Even if it turns out we were all ultimately cucked, there were many very good reasons why we were fans of the God-Emperor for so long. One of them was his consistency. Trump was advocating protectionism back in 1988. He condemned the bombing of Serbia back in 1999. Infamously now, he was a vociferous critic of intervention in Syria in 2013.

So it is wrong to say his opposition to invade/invite the world owes itself to “President Bannon.” He was America First for decades.

Moreover, Trump’s overtly Russophile sympathies during the campaign were completely unbecoming of a US politician, and while the gesture was appreciated by some, this stance almost certainly hindered him more than helped him. He was factually correct on Putin being popular and there being no evidence of him killing journalists, and he was right that the people of Crimea supported reunification with Russia (though since becoming President, he has demanded Russia return Crimea to Ukraine). He had no apparent reasons to do this from an electoral perspective, and yet he did it anyway.

Furthermore, the US military did warn the Russians they were about to strike Shayrat, though this shouldn’t be weighed too heavily as any Russian military casualties would have risked an outright escalation, which pretty much everyone but the very craziest neocons wants to avoid.

According to the 666D Chess theory, Trump struck Syria to win some support from the MSM and the Establishment at a time of sinking approval ratings, failures in healthcare and immigration policy, and the slow-burning scandal over his purported ties to Russia.

A good example is Mike Cernovich’s take:

cernovich-syria-4d-chess

Moreover, this would not be the first time Trump has… trumped his critics.

He mentioned he’d ban the burning of the American flag – the media rushed to show Leftists burning the American flag. He promoted the observation that many hate crimes were hoaxes – soon after, it emerged that the author of the threats against Jewish centers was a Black social justice writer for The Intercept who had been fired for making up sources. He claimed you wouldn’t believe what had happened in Sweden yesterday – we couldn’t believe what happened to Sweden tomorrow.

Perhaps what we are seeing this past week is just his most formidable “chess combination” yet, which will end in the most epic pwning of the media, the neocons, the bugmen in the moden history of the United States and the final draining of the Swamp in Washington D.C.

I suppose hope dies last.

Points Against

The first is the sheer scale of the changes in cadres (see Theory #1), and the broad range of campaign promises that Trump is going back on. For instance, just these past couple of days, he has reversed his positions on labeling China as a currency manipular (perhaps in exchange for its consent to a “short victorious war” missile salvo against the norks?), on Yellen’s future, on the Export-Import Bank, and on NATO, which he has suddenly decided is not “obsolete” after all.

Moreover, its worth noting that for the most part only two major groups of people still take this theory seriously:

(1) ROG conspiracy theoricists, such as Louise Mensch, in the style of “Putin’s puppet bombed Putin’s ally to deny that he is Putin’s puppet on Putin’s orders”:

mensch-rog-is-everywhere

(2) Trump cultists, such as Bill Mitchell:

mitchell-trump-clever-plan

mensch-war-with-russia The problem with the Louise Mensches is: At which point does this sort of argumentation invalidate itself? What can Trump do to conclusively demonstrate he is not Putin’s puppet? Firebombing Khmeimim Airbase? Dropping a nuke on Moscow? Not that she will be against any of that, mind… but presumably many of the Americans who would subsequently have to live in the Fallout universe might beg to differ.

The second group are basically unironic Trump cultists, like what /r/The_Donald has now become.

When the only people to believe in a hypothesis are Trump Nashists and Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers, I will probably bet against the theory.

Moreover, as a Russian, I have good reason to be especially skeptical about “666D Chess” because we have had our version of it for the past three years, namely, Putin’s clever plan/mnogokhodovka (lit. “chess combination), a term used by state propagandists to explain and rationalize Kremlin decisions of dubious wisdom, such as the Minsk agreements with Ukraine and the intervention in Syria. At one point they were seriously arguing that Syria could be used as a lever to end Western sanctions, whereas if anything it resulted in pressure for more sanctions.

In real life, clever plans/mnogokhodovkas/666D chess in geopolitics simply never exists, at least in the ever more incredible and complex forms that would be needed to explain this past week.

That is because, in practice, a lot of politicians are not the wily grandmasters of their supporters’ imagination. They are just retards.

Which brings us to Theory #3:

Donald Drumpf

Trump is an inexperienced politician, or just a moron, and is making impulsive decisions on the fly.

The major piece of evidence in favor of this particular interpretation is that the Syria strikes were worse than a crime – they were a blunder.

Let’s compile a balance sheet.

Advantages:

  • Demonstrate US resolve, credibility; enforce the red line, unlike Obama.
  • Kill the Putin collusion theory – and in fairness, people outside the dickpix/Menschosphere have started talking less about it.
  • Increased support, at least for the time being, from neocons
  • … from the MSM (17/20 of the top outlets support the strikes).
  • … and from a modest majority of Americans, including Republicans.

Disadvantages:

  • Neocon support is temporary – you just know they’re slavering to backstab Trump if he ever again fails to be sufficiently hard on Russia.
  • The media has a momentum of its own and now that the first cracks have appeared in the administration’s stance against intervention, they will just keep piling on, no matter that Trump and Mattis have since clarified that they are not committed to pursuing regime change in Syria.
  • Adding fuel to the fire, as Putin himself has pointed out, the Syrian rebels now have a perverse incentive to stage further false flag attacks, in the sure knowledge that Trump will definitely no longer have any option but to respond with massive force.
  • Moreover, this will also now be used by the globalist wing of the war party as a sledgehammer to batter down what remains of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda. As Hillary Clinton now asks, if you’re going to bomb Syrians – and you certainly should – how could you justify not taking in their refugees? Bizarrely, the American Federation of Teachers has also seen it fit to make a political stand, supporting the missile strikes on Syria but also calling for Trump to open up the borders.
  • He has already soured his relationships with Europe (too reactionary), the Muslim world in general (too Islamophobic), Latin America (position on immigration, “bad hombres”), Iran (too neocon), and China (trade policy, up to the point of claiming they invented global warming to acquire a competitive advantage). Now he apparently also wants to add Russia, one of his few remaining fans other than Israel, to this list.
  • Moreover, adding Russia to his shit-list won’t exactly improve European or Chinese attitudes towards him; the Europeans will now just think he’s G.W. Bush II, while the Chinese will be looking to get him bogged down in some quagmire to free their own hands in the South China Sea. Pretty much the only country of any note that this will make happy is the Poroshenko regime in Ukraine, which had ironically done its best to help Trump lose the elections.
  • It will directly increase the likelihood of a serious military clash with Russia in the skies over Syria, which can go in all sorts of unexpected directions. The military hotline between the two countries in Syria has been turned off, and the Russians are beefing up Syria’s air defenses even further.
  • It has moved Iran and Russia closer together, with Russian FM Sergey Lavrov inviting his Syrian and Iranian counterparts to Moscow. There are also several summits planned between Putin and Xi Jinping; though they long predate the Syria strikes, it is likely that relations between the two countries will now move forwards at a faster rate.
  • While Trump did demonstrate “resolve,” of a sort, as Alexander Mercouris points out, it also exacted a cost in credibility – the ease and suddenness with which Trump has reversed course from accepting that Assad would remain Syria’s President one week and then attacking him the next is going to be making not just the Russians, but also the Europeans and Chinese, asking to what extent he can be trusted.
  • Trump’s enemies will continue to hate him, and to work towards his undermining through the #Russiagate scandal. Don’t respond – evidence he is in league with Putin. Respond – evidence that it’s to draw attention away from his ties with Putin.
  • Conversely, he has thrown many of his most principled and fervent supporters overboard. Greg Johnson puts it best in his essay for The Unz Review: “Never betray your friends to court the favor of your enemies. If you betray your friends, the most principled and perceptive among them will drop you, leaving only the delusional and venal. That is not a good trade, given that the approval you gain is bound to be fleeting and contingent, whereas the contempt and distrust you create will be permanent. The people you betrayed may come back to you out of sentimentality or self-interest, but their trust and respect will never return. They will always regard you as a traitor.
  • To be sure, this probably isn’t going to massively impact on Trump’s poll ratings anytime soon. However, while the people most disillusioned with him – committed anti-imperialists and Alt Righters – might not be numerically large, but they did a disproportionate amount of the gruntwork for his campaign, making memes real while Hillary Clinton banked on and failed with traditional tools like big sponsors and TV. There will be a lot less “high energy” come the 2020 elections, assuming that he even makes it that long.

As we can see, there are several times more negatives than positives to this decision. It was disastrous by any objecture measure

But for this very reason there is reason to believe that it was something born out of stupidy instead of mendacity (Theory #1) or questionable genius (Theory #2).

I have long been skeptical about liberal arguments as to Trump’s lack of intelligence. They seemed to be all to reminscent of liberals’ Dubya obsessions in the 2000s; though I was never a fan of G.W. Bush – my first “political” experience in life was marching against the Iraq War – the psychometric evidence seemed pretty clear that it wasn’t that he wasn’t so much stupid as a bad public speaker. So I pattern matched this experience to Trump.

It also didn’t tally with Trump’s achievement in increasing his wealth by two orders of magnitude, which – contrary to media tropes – he could not have done by simply “investing in the stockmarket” or some nonsense like that. Though Trump did have a head start thanks to daddy’s money, multiplying the fortune one hundred times over does usually require brains.

However, I will now admit that I might have… “misoverestimated” Trump.

Maybe he has started to suffer from dementia, or something, but just read his latest interview, where he was describing how he informed Xi Jinping of his attack on Syria while eating “the most beautiful” piece of chocolate cake. So cringeworthy:

TRUMP: But I will tell you, only because you’ve treated me so good for so long, I have to (INAUDIBLE) right?
I was sitting at the table. We had finished dinner. We’re now having dessert. And we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen and President Xi was enjoying it.

And I was given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded, what do you do?

And we made a determination to do it, so the missiles were on the way. And I said, Mr. President, let me explain something to you. This was during dessert.

We’ve just fired 59 missiles, all of which hit, by the way, unbelievable, from, you know, hundreds of miles away, all of which hit, amazing.

BARTIROMO: Unmanned?

Brilliant.

TRUMP: It’s so incredible. It’s brilliant. It’s genius. Our technology, our equipment, is better than anybody by a factor of five. I mean look, we have, in terms of technology, nobody can even come close to competing.

Now we’re going to start getting it, because, you know, the military has been cut back and depleted so badly by the past administration and by the war in Iraq, which was another disaster.

So what happens is I said we’ve just launched 59 missiles heading to Iraq and I wanted you to know this. And he was eating his cake. And he was silent.

BARTIROMO: (INAUDIBLE) to Syria?

TRUMP: Yes. Heading toward Syria. In other words, we’ve just launched 59 missiles heading toward Syria. And I want you to know that, because I didn’t want him to go home. We were almost finished. It was a full day in Palm Beach. We’re almost finished and I — what does he do, finish his dessert and go home and then they say, you know, the guy you just had dinner with just attacked a country?

BARTIROMO: How did he react?

TRUMP: So he paused for 10 seconds and then he asked the interpreter to please say it again. I didn’t think that was a good sign.

And he said to me, anybody that uses gases — you could almost say or anything else — but anybody that was so brutal and uses gases to do that young children and babies, it’s OK.

I don’t know, I just don’t know.

Maybe the guy’s a retard after all, and the more intelligent Trump supporters were just too proficient at coming up with “clever plans” to explain and rationalize his statements to notice the awning cognitive black hole in front of them.

I do realize this reflects very badly on them, and for that matter on me, but this interpretation is less pessimistic than Theory #1 and more credible than Theory #2.

There have been persistent comments throughout the past year to the effect that Trump is just the average of the last six people he has spoken to, and that as his crowd of nativist nationalists has been replaced with neocon bugmen these past few months, so he has started adopting many of the latter’s beliefs and talking points.

Maybe, as Audacious Epigone suggests, Trump should just spend more time retweeting Twitter shitlords again – just like he did in the golden days of the Trump Train in 2016.

What is to be Done?

If Theory #1 or Theory #3 are correct, then I am afraid we are going to see the formalization of neoconservatism as the guiding light of the Trump administration, alongside its globalist accoutrements.

Invade/invite to the max.

The dismissal of Steve Bannon, which is now widely discussed in the media, will be the final confirmation that there is no 666D Chess combination after all.

In foreign policy, this will predictably be a failure. Instead of halting the process, as a wise US foreign policy would aim for, it will instead put the current trend towards a Russo-Chinese alliance into overdrive. There is also a very small but non-negligible chance of a serious escalation in Syria that could flare into a wider conflict between the US and Russia/Iran. I will explore this possibility in a later post.

Here’s the problem. Neoconservatism wasn’t cool by 2007. The Current Year is 2017. While the last ‘Murica! boomers might cheer and clap for it, those folks are not getting any younger, nor are they gaining converts; to the contrary, even many conservative warmongers of yesteryear are now opposed to further misadventures in the Middle East, such as the courageous Ann Coulter.

Meanwhile, the young MAGA nationalists, who have never cared for the more regressive elements of the traditional Republican agenda – promoting corporate interests and the 1%, hardcore social conservatism, and above all interventionism and wars for oil/Israel (cross out as per your ideological preferences) – and who are, incidentally, also the most Russophile demographic of the American population – will be utterly demoralized and repelled.

He will be left only with the bootlickers, the bankers, and the most retrograde boomers. Maybe a few token #NeverTrumpers will crawl back to him, confident now that he firmly under the thumb of the deep state, though they will still continue to despite him. That’s all!

The result of that will be a landslide victory for the Democratic candidate in 2020, which in all likelihood lead to a new sort of hell.

I’m afraid these comments by Scott Alexander from September 2016 may well prove to be prophetic:

One more warning for conservatives who still aren’t convinced. If the next generation is radicalized by Trump being a bad president, they’re not just going to lean left. They’re going to lean regressive, totalitarian, super-social-justice left.

Everyone has already constructed the narrative: Trump is the anti-PC, anti-social-justice candidate. If he wins, he’s going to be the anti-PC, anti-social-justice President. And he will fail. First of all, because he doesn’t really show much sign of knowing what he’s doing. Second of all, because all presidents fail in a sense – 80% of Americans consistently believe the country is headed the wrong direction and the president is the natural fall guy for this trend. And third of all, because even if by some miracle Trump avoids the first two failure modes, the media will say he failed and people will believe them. And when the anti-PC, anti-social-justice President fails, the reaction will be a giant “we told you so” from the social justice movement, and a giant shift of all the disillusioned young people right into their fold.

Trump is all set to be the biggest gift to the social justice movement in history. They thrive on claims of persecution, claims that they’re the ones fighting a stupid hateful regressive culture that controls everything. And people think that bringing their straw man to life and putting him in the Oval Office is going to help?

I still don’t think voting for Trump over Clinton was a mistake.

At the least, Trump’s brand of neoconservatism is going to be implemented in a cack-handed, incompetent way, as opposed to a competent and calculating one. This is good for the non-Americans who will have to deal with it.

Still, its very sad that it has come to this. I believe that Trump still has the time and opportunity to reverse his ill-starred course, but the clock is ticking down.

 

In light of recent news, now is perhaps a good time to remind ourselves of perhaps the most succinct and information dense explanation of why Assad is less bad than the “moderate rebels.”

Via Nicholas Nassim Taleb:

nntaleb-assad-vs-moderate-rebels

 
• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: Syrian Civil War, Western Hypocrisy 

There is a huge amount of misinformation and disinformation about what is and what is not Russian nationalism.

As a ROG agent and evil Russian oppressor, it’s incumbent on me to set the record straight.

sputnik-i-pogrom-big-russia

Sputnik and Pogrom’s vision of “Russia for Russians.”

***

Platform: The 3 Principles

Western commentators love to designate every single frothing at the mouth bearded Russian maniac into the ranks of “Russian nationalists.” Even many Russians whose only sin is to oppose replacing ICBM parades with LGBT parades in Moscow qualify.

In their world of the ROG conspiracy, Putler is the “godfather of extreme nationalism.”

In the world of reality, however, the term “Russian nationalist” has much more precise boundaries and connotations, at least within Russia itself. It can be narrowed down to loyalty to a set of common principles, of which perhaps the three most critical ones are:

  1. The cessation of political prosecutions for “hate speech” under Article 282.
  2. An end to mass immigration from Central Asia.
  3. The regathering of the Russian lands, including Belorussia, North Kazakhstan, Novorossiya, and Malorossiya.

To be sure, just like the Alt Right in the West, we do have our own internal debates and disagreements on all sorts of issues – on Putin, on Navalny, on the Syria adventure, on whether Orthodoxy is part of implicit Russian identity, on whether Pussy Riot should be locked up, on the optimal levels of gun freedoms, even on whether or not some aspects of SJW culture should be accomodated for. It is a wide tent that is open to people from a wide variety of ideological and religious backgrounds, and you do not have to be an ethnic Russian to join in.

But we do not waver on those three big principles. Those who do, such as Anatoly Nesmiyan (El Murid), who in recent months started writing positively of a united Ukraine, get excommunicated.

What Russian nationalism is not about is dismembering Russia, transforming it into “Little Russia” around its old Novgorod heartlands, etc. This misconception centers around the frequently repeated propaganda trope that Russia is a multi-ethnic empire, which Russian ethnic nationalism will break apart. Only political prosecutions of nationalists and infinity Moslems from Central Asia can avert that.

Reality: 81% of the Russian population are ethnic Great Russians, and 83% are Slavs. This is far higher than the percentage of White Americans in the US, but for some reason the US survives just fine without any ethnic minority republics with special privileges. It is also hard to square with the very hardline positions of Russian nationalists on the Ukraine question, which match word for word the publicly stated positions of traditional Russian conservatives such as the anti-Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the political philosopher Ivan Ilyin.

Incidentally, the reincorporation of the lost territories of the triune Russian nation will raise the percentage of Slavs in Russia to close to 90%, making problems with Muslims even less of a consideration.

***

People: Who’s In? Who’s Out?

Russian nationalists do include the following:

  • The “Committee of January 25″ (K25) movement under Igor Strelkov and many of the people who were or are at associated with it, such as Konstantin Krylov and Eduard Limonov. Its US equivalent might be something like Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute.
  • The flagship magazine of Russian nationalism, Egor Prosvirnin’s Sputnik and Pogrom. Its Western equivalents would be higher tier Alt Right publications such as Radix Journal, Counter Currents, and Occidental Observer
  • Possibly Konstantin Malofeev’s Tsargrad TV, especially after Dugin’s recent ouster and replacement with Egor Kholmogorov. That said, it is more conservative than nationalist, with more than a passing resemblance to Breitbart.

Russian nationalists do not include the following:

  • Eurasianists, such as Alexander Dugin, a Warhammer 40k cosplayer who wants to replace Russia with Greater Turkestan.
  • Soviet nationalists, such as Alexander Prokhanov and Sergey Kurginyan, who want to resurrect the Soviet Union and its suppression of Russian identity.
  • Liberal nationalists, such as Alexey Navalny, who want to make Russia into a ZOG colony.
  • Ukrainian nationalists, which is what most liberal nationalists and Neo-Nazis functionally are.
  • Putin personality cultists, such as Nikolay Starikov and the (now defunct) Nashi youth movement.
  • Orthodox fundamentalist nutjobs such as Vsevolod Chaplin, who wants to legalize FGM and to replace Russia with Central Africa.

***

Putin: Putler or Putlet?

Attitudes towards Putin amongst Russian nationalists range from moderate support to outright hatred.

The more conservative and Orthodox elements of Russian nationalism tend to support him, while the more socially liberal, atheist, and/or racialist ones tend to oppose him. The most fervent Putin fans tend to be “patriots” (“putzriots“), they are not Russian nationalists, except in the loosest sense of the word. Their foreign equivalents would be the personality cults that have formed around “strong” charismatic leaders such as Trump and Erdogan.

Realistically speaking, Putin deserves neither the uncritical adulation nor the frothing condemnation of Russian nationalism. As I pointed out in my earlier article on whether or not Putin is “the godfather of extreme nationalism,” Putin is neither /ourguy/ nor (((theirguy))); he is a politician who needs to carry out a complex balancing act between various political-economic blocs and ideological strands in Russian society.

Let’s just briefly consider how Putin stacks up against Navalny and some Western politicians on the Three Principles:

(1) Russian nationalists do get imprisoned for hate speech, sometimes on remarkably spurious and illegitimate grounds. On the other hand, 282 is also wielded against Russophobes and Islamic extremists, which has made the Council of Europe very sad, so the situation here is perhaps not quite as bad as in the more “cucked” European countries. Still, its worth noting that Richard Spencer himself managed to get deported from Orban’s Hungary of all places, so there are few true nirvanas in this respect. Navalny would probably be an improvement on Putin here, assuming he does move to repeal Article 282; many of the Echo of Moscow liberals, who form part of his constituency, are big fans of it, and were instrumental in legislating it in the first place. On the plus side, there is far less political correctness in Russia than in Europe or the US, though this has little-to-nothing to do with Putin per se.

(2) Putin is very weak on immigration, though at least there are considerably fewer Third World immigrants per capita than in the UK, Germany, or Sweden; not exactly a high bar to clear, of course, but it’s still worth keeping in perspective. Navalny would almost certainly be an improvement, at least if he follows through on his platform. Putin is somewhat like American Republicans theorizing that socially conservative Latinos would be a solid support base for conservative politics, except that in Russia, this theory actually “works” – ethnic minority republics and Central Asians vote 90% for United Russia. Putin is also no match for Trump (2016 edition) on this question, though as we have recently seen, the Current Year has brought many unwelcome surprises on the God-Emperor’s true agenda.

(3) While Putin did not realize Russian nationalist aspirations to the extent that many hoped he would in the spring of 2014, it is difficult to imagine any other (viable) politician going as far as he did by bringing back Crimea and helping the LDNR survive. With Navalny, the Donbass will be left to the tender mercies of a vengeful and very Russophobic regime in Kiev, and even the long-term status of the Crimea will be put under question. On the other hand, Putin’s growing fondness for adventures in the Arab world – first Syria; soon, perhaps, Libya – is also a source of concern in some quarters of the Russian nationalist movement, who view it as a way of deflecting attention from the plight of Russia’s co-ethnics in the Donbass.

***

What is to be Done?

The only major political force in Russia that, at least on paper, satisfies all Three Principles is Zhirinovsky’s LDPR. It is against Article 282, against Central Asian immigration, and has a very strong line on Ukraine. However, there are many questions over both its competence and its independence from the Kremlin, so most Russian nationalists vote for it not so much out of ideological considerations as to move the Overton window in the right direction.

Russian nationalism as a political force is in a somewhat ironic situation. Theoretically, a good 80% or so of Russians are “vatniks” (whereas only perhaps 40% of Americans are “deplorables”), and more than half agree to some extent with the implicitly ethnonationalist slogan “Russia for Russians” (which makes half the Russian population either idiots or provocateurs, according to Putin himself). On the other hand, the main demands of Russian nationalism are either accomodated for or subverted by the Kremlin just enough to prevent a strong independent nationalist movement from emerging. For instance, Igor Strelkov, a potential figurehead for such a movement, was blacklisted by the MSM soon after his return from Ukraine.

There is currently no unity on strategy. The bulk of K25 advocates cautious cooperation with the Kremlin. Sputnik and Pogrom is more overtly oppositional. Tsargrad TV are basically regime loyalists who want it to take a harder line on the pursuit of Russian national interests, like America’s Breitbart or China’s Global Times.

My own modest aims are twofold. First, I want to help introduce the Alt Right to Russian nationalists, and vice versa. Second, I am trying to place Russian nationalism on a firmer, more scientific ideological footing, by importing useful concepts developed primarily in the West and applying them to Russian realities, such as IQ/HBD-realism.

Russian nationalism is extremely underdeveloped on these issues, thanks in part to the Soviet “blank slate” legacy, as well as to Eurasianism’s destructive promotion of “traditionalist” obscurantism (Dugin in particular denies the concept of race, period, which perhaps explains why he is so open to Central Asian population replacement). Moreover, to the extent that race is discussed at all amongst Russian nationalists, most of it happens amongst Neo-Nazis who unironically subscribe to Nazi era pseudoscience on the matter. (That said, it’s worth pointing out that European nationalisms aren’t much better. This is not surprising, since something like 80% of psychometrics and evopsych research takes place in the US, while European nationalists obssess over the intellectual miasma that is continental philosophy/Heideggerism).

This is a very sad and very stupid state of affairs – but it also represents some very low-hanging fruit. To this end, I and a couple of my friends here, Kirill Nesterov and @pigdog, have recently started up a podcast to discuss Russian politics from an Alt Right and HBD/IQ-realistic perspective in /pol/’s irreverent and semi-ironic style.

If you understand Russian, or are learning the language, you can check it out at ROGPR.com.

 

Ernst & Young regularly carries out large-scale surveys of corporate employees across a range of countries on issues such as ethics and corruption in the workplace.

In the latest Global Fraud Survey (PDF), which took place at the end of 2016, 88% of Ukrainian employees thought that bribery and corrupt practices are widespread in business in this country.

Incidentally, this figure was 85% in the 2013 survey, the last year of “normalcy” before the Maidan. It was also at 80% in 2015. In short, overthrow of the “kleptocratic” Yanukovych made no difference to these figures. Zilch.

Now to be sure, the E&Y survey is more a measure of corruption perceptions than a measure of corruption itself, and the two are not necessarily the same. Still, there is definitely a correlation – according to Transparency International’s direct surveys of bribery incidence, the Ukraine consistently competes with Moldova for the status of Europe’s most corrupt nation, while the country with the lowest (best) ranking on the E&Y survey, Denmark, had 0% of respondents saying they had to pay a bribe in the past year when they were queried about it.

Overall, this is just one more piece of evidence to the effect that the Maidan has failed to solve the main problem that it set for itself.

In other news, Central Bank head Valeria Gontareva has offered up her resignation (after having disappeared from the limelight several weeks ago). In her three years of office under Poroshenko, she and her relatives appear to have done well for thmselves, like many bureaucrats throughout the post-Soviet world. Still, but many accounts, she has done a pretty good job; some 40% of financial institutions have been closed, including many offshoring funnels and pocket banks, while most of the rest have been forced to clarify their ownership structures. But with mounting uncertainties over the future of IMF credits piling up and an emerging crisis over fraud at Kolomoysky’s Privatbank before its nationalization, I suppose now is as good a time as any to part ways.

***

E&Y: Corruption perception by country

  • Question: Can you indicate whether you think it applies, or does not apply, to your country/industry or whether you don’t know?
  • Answer: Bribery/corrupt practices happen widely in business in this country.
Rank Country %
1 Ukraine 88
2 Cyprus 82
3 Greece 81
4 Slovakia 81
5 Croatia 79
6 Kenya 79
7 South Africa 79
8 Hungary 78
9 India 78
10 Egypt 75
11 Slovenia 74
12 Nigeria 73
13 Italy 71
14 Bulgaria 68
15 Turkey 67
16 Russia 66
17 Spain 64
18 Czech Republic 63
19 Portugal 60
20 Serbia 57
21 Jordan 53
. Average of all participants 51
22 Latvia 51
23 Ireland 47
24 Lithuania 47
25 Germany 43
26 Saudi Arabia 43
27 Poland 38
28 Belgium 36
29 Austria 32
30 Estonia 32
31 Romania 31
32 France 28
33 UAE 27
34 UK 25
35 Netherlands 23
36 Oman 19
37 Sweden 18
38 Switzerland 18
39 Finland 16
40 Norway 10
41 Denmark 6

.

 
• Category: Economics • Tags: Corruption, Ukraine 

Funny thing is, just the other day I was on a podcast where I joked/predicted that Antifa would try to beat up Richard Spencer’s merry band of Alt Right anti-war protesters.

Buzzfeed:

Spencer has long been an outspoken supporter of Trump and his policies, including building a wall on the southern border and banning refugees form entering the country. But his decision to lead a handful of protesters to speak out against the strike has been emblematic of the split between Trump and some of his most ardent and far-right supporters.

“We want walls, not war!” chanted some of the protesters accompanying Spencer in front of the White House. …

At one point, Spencer called the counter-protesters, “storm troopers of the establishment.”

“Commies go home,” Spencer and his supporters chanted while opponents yelled, “Nazis go home.”

As AltLeft noted today, “I never anticipated that we would be organizing and participating in actual anti-war demonstrations, but here we are.”

What a timeline!

 
• Category: Foreign Policy • Tags: Antifa, Syrian Civil War, United States 

Time to fess up: I have been cucked by The Donald.

I outline many of my longer articles on Evernote. I don’t suppose this one is going to be written anytime soon, so I’m just reprinting the notes in almost unredacted form. Public humiliation is part of the cuckoldry fetish, after all.

I suppose the very last point still stands, at least.

I suppose there’s also some probability that I have finally succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome and that the last few days were just The Donald playing 666D interuniversal Teichmuller chess.

***

10 Reasons To Support the Trumpenreich

Yes I realize this cuts against most educated opinions, even inc. conservative. But!
  • The alternatives are shit.
  • We Good guys now! (Bill Kristol sad)
    • Few neocons
  • /ourguys/
    • Can’t Cannon the Bannon
    • Flynn
    • Rex Tillerson
    • NRxer (Thiel, Anton, etc)
  • Search “Trumpenreich” tag for more e.g.’s
  • No risk of war with Russia
    • Liberals are dem real Russophobes (see polls)
    • HRC NFZ support
    • Young Trumpists (/pol/, Twitter, The_Donald) anti-intervention, Russophile if by low US standards, so won’t risk alienating them.
  • Triggers SJWs. They need to be! Or we face another dark age.
  • Not actually a fundie
    • Pence is an insurance policy. And frankly, if antifa do assassinate Trump, I hope Pence goes all mullah omar on their asses. They’d deserve it.
  • Keep America (somewhat) white.
    • Pro-natality
    • Blue Lives Matter (antagonized by the media). Against the fraud that is BLM.
  • Deregulation.
  • Transhumanism. Peter Thiel!
    • Support for life extension, other cool stuff
    • “anti-intellectual” Gelernter
  • No obvious zradas so far, plenty of peremogas.
  • Even if he does go crazy, better Trump than HRC
    • She enjoys wide support in Europe, China (while Bannon, Flynn, etc anti-China, anti-Iran).
    • So Trump will be less dangerous anyway.

***

Anyhow, that’s the #blackpill out of my system. I’ll have something more analytical in a few hours.

 
• Category: Humor • Tags: Cuckoldry, Humor, Trump Derangement Syndrome 
Anatoly Karlin
About Anatoly Karlin

I am a blogger, thinker, and businessman in the SF Bay Area. I’m originally from Russia, spent many years in Britain, and studied at U.C. Berkeley.

One of my tenets is that ideologies tend to suck. As such, I hesitate about attaching labels to myself. That said, if it’s really necessary, I suppose “liberal-conservative neoreactionary” would be close enough.

Though I consider myself part of the Orthodox Church, my philosophy and spiritual views are more influenced by digital physics, Gnosticism, and Russian cosmism than anything specifically Judeo-Christian.