What strikes me is how close the correlation is. Above a “safe point” of 70% pro-refugee sentiment, everyone is a globalist. Below a “critical point” of 60% pro-refugee sentiment, everyone is some sort of nationalist-populist.
* In Europe, all the usual suspects – Sweden Yes and his pals – are highly pro-refugee. In the safely globalist group, only the UK marginally surprised anyone with a “populist” result in the form of Brexit.
Greece’s relatively high pro-refugee sentiment is rather surprising to me, since I have heard that refugees have made a real mess of Athens. But I suppose it explains why there’s no strong far right movement in Greece. (Golden Dawn are electorally unfeasible Neo-Nazis; if they haven’t managed to make hay out of a decade’s worth of recession, they’re not going to achieve anything).
Visegrad is stronk, though Hungary is a lot more based than Poland (we know that). Italy under Caesar Salvini has just joined this august group. I wonder what the figures for Austria would be.
* USA is in the intermediate zone, which – apart from the incompetence of its promulgators – explains why Trumpism has had an extremely hard time getting anything done after its narrow electoral victory in 2016.
And it also explains why Trumpism seems so extremely fragile. I am now rather pessimistic about its prospects after 2020, if not after a couple of months.
* Everyone less pro-refugee than the US is run by some kind of national-populist. This of course includes NAC-ruled South Africa, which pursue nationalist (or rather racialist) goals under the cover of SJW rhetoric beloved of by Western IYIs.
Russia isn’t quite as based as Hungary, but is more based than Poland. Consequently, it is firmly in the Visegrad grouping so far as domestic sentiment goes. This is confirmed by many other polls:
I hate to keep piling on him, but Polish Perspective really was wrong when he claimed that Russians were much more cucked on immigration than Poland. It’s sooner the opposite. Though Poland is nonetheless very based by Western standards, if not Visegrad ones.
This also provides further support for my theory that post-Putinism will not see single digit approval liberals or ageing sovoks coming to power, but populist nationalists of the kind who already rule the roost in Hungary, Poland, and Israel.
In other words, Russia will likely be getting more of the “national” Putin (standing up for Russian national interests) and less of the “sovok” Putin (Article 282, huge labor flows from Central Asia).
“London is always a good idea.” Observed recently in a furniture shop.
Presumably for those Russians who are not in the 600 or so who are both rich and Anglophile enough to send their children off to Hogwarts every year.
Anyhow, Anglophilia is extremely prevalent in Russia.
What’s interesting is that it is if anything more acute amongst the middle-aged “Soviet” generations, who are familiar with English literature. They expect to walk into a Jane Austen novel or something upon disembarking at Heathrow.
Though these days it’s perhaps more humane to let them continue living under those delusions.
I have heard that in China it is the United States that tends to be idolized. This at least makes sense. While there are plenty of admirable things worthy of emulation in America, I can think of almost none as regards the UK. If I was supreme dictator I’d even copy more things from Germany (e.g. their healthcare system).
Well, except perhaps making the idea of Moscow into a center for Western offshore money. With the appropriate policies and PR, Madoff could have made off to Russia instead of jail (and more importantly, his $$$).
The Chinese noted with surprise and disgust the ability of the Mongol warriors to survive on little food and water for long periods; according to one, the entire army could camp without a single puff of smoke since they needed no fires to cook. Compared to the Jurched soldiers, the Mongols were much healthier and stronger. The Mongols consumed a steady diet of meat, milk, yogurt, and other dairy products, and they fought men who lived on gruel made from various grains. The grain diet of the peasant warriors stunted their bones, rotted their teeth, and left them weak and prone to disease. In contrast, the poorest Mongol soldier ate mostly protein, thereby giving him strong teeth and bones. Unlike the Jurched soldiers, who were dependent on a heavy carbohydrate diet, the Mongols could more easily go a day or two without food.
From Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford.
I am certainly not claiming that the ketogenic diet explained Mongol military success. But this would have given them a plain physical advantage over the rice-eating bugman conscript peasants.
In addition to their other advantages, both physical (e.g. probably greater genotypic strength, a life spent hunting) and organizational (e.g. strategic depth, mobile logistics base, massive mobilization capacity).
It appears evident that it was the Syrians who took down the Russian Il-20 surveillance plane. Russian MoD claims that Israelis misinformed Russia about the target of their strikes, whose fighters used the hapless Il-20 for cover.
This would make it a combination of Arab incompetence and Jewish mendacity. A most stereotypical combination.
Now Russia has done its part to meet Israel halfway during this conflict:
Things Russia did for Israel, while Russia got F A in return
1. Evict Iran/Hezbollah from the Golan 2. Search for the remains of IDF soldiers behind enemy lines, directly endangering the lives of Russian soldiers 3. Israel could bomb Syria/Hezbollah/Iran at will
That said, delivering the S-300PMU to the Syrians isn’t without its risks. Israel is not going to be very happy about it, and at the end of the day, Israel >> Khmeimim AFB in terms of military power (unless the most enthusiastic fanboys of Russian military hardware are right after all).
Not to mention that Israel has the world’s premier superpower at least half in tow.
It may well even launch a strike on the S-300 before it’s even set up, which would be $1 billion down the drain at best, a few more dead Russians at worst.
So my two major questions at this point are:
1. Who’s paying for this? One certainly hopes Syria (read: Iran).
2. What is Russia going to do if/when Israel attempts to take it out? $1 billion is not entirely negligible – for comparison, it’s the annual cost of Russia’s military operations in Syria, or its aid to the Donbass.
Even if no Russian uniformed personnel are hurt, this would demand a hard reaction to save face. Essentially Russia would need to adopt BDS as state policy. Western journalists will talk of a resurgence of Russian anti-Semitism. Perhaps more Western sanctions.
Anyhow, I do hope the kremlins know what they are doing.
Where do you most often get your news about Russia and the world?
.
2009
2013
2018
TV
94%
88%
73%
Internet (journals, websites, etc)
9%
21%
37%
Friends
26%
24%
18%
Social networks
6%
14%
28%
Radio
41%
16%
15%
Newspapers
37%
20%
13%
Journals
8%
4%
3%
Other
0%
1%
0%
Not interested
0%
1%
2%
N/A
0%
1%
0%
This trend is accompanied by an even greater loss of trust in TV; while 79% cited it as one of their most trusted news sources in 2009, since 2013 that figure has hovered around 50%.
Meanwhile, both the popularity and trust towards Internet portals and social media has basically quadrupled.
This is strongly concordant with what my own personal observations. The TV continues to blast out noise and light amongst provincial boomers. But as you head into the bigger cities, including Moscow, and go down the generations to the yuppies, more and more people getting information from online websites, social media (in terms of audience sophistication, Facebook > VK > odnoklassniki), and YouTube personalities such as Yury Dud’.
This may well form part of the explanation behind the recent spate of United Russia losses in the September gubernatorial elections:
UR candidate Andrey Tarasenko beat KPRF candidate Andrey Ishchenko, but only thanks to the last minute fraud that was so blatant that, in an unprecedented step, the results have since been annulled, and a new election scheduled for December.
UR candidate Svetlana Orlova lost to LDPR candidate Vladimir Sipyagin 37% to 57% in Vladimir oblast.
UR candidate Vyacheslav Shport lost to LDPR candidate Sergey Furgal 28% to 70% in Khabarovsk krai.
These are the sorts of people who may well be running Russia in another 10-15 years, as the trends that are getting established now set the stage for politics after Putin.
1. SWPL is winning out over sovok, and the idiot box is going out with them.
It is going to become progressively harder for the kremlins to push empty suits on the regions. They have (wisely) decided not to try to power through with massive fraud. So they are going to have to up their game instead and actually field competitive candidates. The kremlins would also do well to get a better grip on how those intertubes work; Putin’s low level of Internet literacy is a widespread rumor, and I can confirm with high confidence that it is correct.
Furthermore, we can be confident in expecting the Internet to make deep further inroads into TV, eventually displacing it as the premier information source.
2. Reanimation of opposition politics. It’s not really a secret that both the KPRF and the LDPR is “nominal” opposition, with elections constituting a sort of referendum on the regime as opposed to a genuine political competition. But as the boost from Crimea wears out, and Putin edges closer to retirement, we can expect this “systemic” opposition to become more serious. As the (liberal) journalist Leonid Ragozin recently noted: “It’s only a matter of time before it switches to real, or as the Kremlin likes to dub it – “non-systemic” opposition. It also emboldens the systemic opposition by reminding both the Communists and LDPR that they control powerful mobilization machines capable of operating independently from the Kremlin.”
3. The most competitive factions are Communists and nationalists. As opposed to the single digit percentage approval liberals that the Western media fawns attention over (which only enjoys considerable support in the yuppiest, SWPList quarters).
4. And of the two, I submit that the nationalists have the better prospects. Long-time readers will know that I have long been bearish on the KPRF’s long-term prospects due to demographics. Its current, somewhat Marxist, somewhat traditionalist base is dying out, and frankly I suspect its long term fate is to be commandeered by marginal SJWs, as has been the fate of most Western Communist parties. A sad but appropriate fate.
But we can add another reason to that: There is no real class struggle in modern Russia. The raising of the retirement age, which has temporarily decimated United Russia’s ratings, should have been a boon to the KPRF. Instead, it has passed without effect: The party’s electoral rating was 9% in August 2018, exactly the same as in December 2017 – and down two percentage points from 2016. In contrast, the LDPR has risen by a couple of percentage points since 2016. Even though Zhirinovsky unequivocally declared that he supports the pension reform, e.g. during the LDPR gathering that I recently attended in Moscow.
The selling points are abundant farmland, relative safety and a country that holds tight to traditional Christian values.
What is not said — but clearly understood — is how this fits neatly into the identity politics of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
… Yet inside Russia, much of his support grows from the idea of Russia as the caretaker for a white, Christian and old-style order — rejecting “so-called tolerance, genderless and infertile,” in Putin’s own words in 2013.
Such comments have helped elevate Putin’s stature among populists and nativist-driven political movements in the West.
Certainly, as I keep pointing out, this would come as a great surprise to Russian nationalists themselves.
Add to that the unease among some white South African farmers as the country debates possible land redistribution to redress racial imbalances during apartheid.
As one wit on Le Reddit put it: “Add to that the unease among some white South African Russian farmers as the country the Bolshevik government debates possible land redistribution to redress racial class imbalances during apartheid the Czarist times.”
South Africa’s land expropriation debate and the myth of “white genocide” have been a rallying cry for white nationalists around the world for years.
Your elites want you dead.
Whites still own the majority of land in South Africa, despite making up less than 10 percent of the population of 56 million.
Jews constitute more than a third of American billionaires, despite making up about 2% of the American population.
But somehow I don’t see WaPo ever making this point.
The purported plight of white South Africans — long a rallying cry of global far-right movements — caught the attention of President Trump last month. After watching a segment about the issue on Fox News, he asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to study the “large-scale killing” of white farmers and the government’s land expropriation issue.
The tweet was the president’s first, at least while in office, to contain the word “Africa.” South Africa’s government denounced Trump’s remarks.
Can’t do without the mandatory Drumpf dig.
Anyhow, what this demonstrates is that Russia is angering all the correct people. So far as the Boers are concerned it should keep on doing the same thing.
Emil suggests that the discrepancy is so absurd that perhaps some profs avoid registering as Republicans to avoid their colleagues finding out, causing them to be uncounted.
Engineers are the least leftist; economists are the least leftist in the social sciences. Anthropologists, no surprise, are the most leftist.
This tallies with my impressions.
Regional patterns are perhaps the most interesting:
Samuel J. Abrams has pointed out that colleges in New England tend to lean further to the left than other colleges.16 Figure 5 shows the D:R ratios for the non-military colleges in five sets of states: New England and New York (NE); Pennsylvania and Maryland; California and Colorado; Kentucky and North Carolina; and Ohio and Iowa. As Abrams predicts, the ratio is highest in New York and New England
Opinion polls, elections, etc. all suggest that California is about as liberal as the North-East.
However, from my personal observations over a decade in the US, California is far less PC-totalitarian than the old Puritan heartlands.
The reaction to saying something unhandshakeworthy in California is, like, whatever man. The reaction to that in New England is moralistic outrage and tittle-tattling.
My remont is approaching its long-awaited end – and its most intensive and costly period. To compound matters, I have also been rather under the weather these past few days. Nothing serious, but in between that and shopping all day, that has left little energy for blogging.
This will soon pass, but for now, here’s a fresh new open thread.
***
Thankfully there’s not much in the way of Big News. These Syria events are going to happen from time to time anyway, so I don’t know if it’s worth getting too worked up over them. Putin sure isn’t. In any case, I have said more or less all that I have to say about the Syrian conflict. I lukewarmly support Russia’s intervention there, but this is tempered by my perception that Russia is ultimately only there at the sufferance of Israel, Turkey, and the US. They set the ultimate rules of the game there. There is only so much (which is not a lot) that Russia can do to push them around. And Syria’s 85 average national IQ isn’t going anywhere. Fuck ups every now and then are inevitable. Some of them will kill Russians. But that’s the price of placing your training arena in the middle of a real conflict. Russia would be stupid to forget that Syria is anything more than a training arena. Fortunately, Putin is a bit smarter than certain commenters.
I’ll admit when I first heard of early Chinese “social credit” c.2014 I thought it was just another Sinophobic fantasy. The initial scheme by Sesame Credit seemed in line with what American banks practiced as a matter of course.
But now it really does seem like it was the prelude to a hitherto unseen kind of digital totalitarianism.
You have some Chinese people saying that this will be good at tackling the problems of low trust in Chinese society, but it strikes me as a sovok maozuo solution to maozuo problems.
Anyhow, their country – their choice… at least for now. Something that you can’t say about the US, which wants to shove neoliberalism.txt down the throats of everyone in the world.
***
In lighter, spicier news, we chopped up the peppers with garlic and tomatoes, blended them, added salt and vinegar, boiled and stirred the mixture, and bottled it up.
I am doing my patriotic duty to radically hotten up Russian food ways in preparation for runaway global warming and the immanentization of Tropical Hyperborea. You may not like it, but this is what peak cuisine looks like.
I found an ostrich egg at a provincial shop. Apparently there is now an ostrich farm in Lipetsk oblast. Isn’t capitalism great? We need ostriches for the coming deserts. Very scenic.
In unrelated news, I discovered Portuguese green wine at a Metro store. Also quite by accident. Kuban steak is equal to any American steak. I am not into cheeses, but from what I’ve seen, there are fully serviceable Russian equivalents to all the major French sorts (there’s a great selection at Danilovsky Market).
Anyhow, I really am amused by /r/politics-level discourse that Russians are eating tree bark. But some people really seem to believe it.
***
I am glad that German_reader has rejoined us. Thorfinnsson is an on/off sort of guy. I hope Randal and Guillaume Tell are ok.
The Russian MOD seems to have agreed with the Americans that it was Syrian friendly fire. Probably this wouldn’t have happened but for the recent Israeli bombings of Syria.
Elijah Magnier says it was to Syria’s and Iran’s advantage. Glad to hear that! /s
What has happened yesterday (shooting down a #Russia/n surveillance plane with 15 members of the armed forces) is in #Syria and #Iran's advantage and to #Israel full disadvantage.
I'll explain more in my article this evening on @AlraiMediaGroup
PS. In other news, the long-assault on Idlib has been indefinitely postponed. Following talks between Putin and Erdogan, there will instead be a DMZ separating Syria proper from Idlib, jointly patrolled by Turkish and Russian troops. The Turks have also reinforced their presence within Idlib itself.
Electoral fraud in Russia exists, and is quite prevalent, tilting Putin’s and United Russia’s results upwards of where “they should up” by up to 10% points since the mid-2000s.
That said, Russian electoral fraud has generally not been banana republic tier for a couple of reasons:
Electoral fraud usually happens in the counting stages, instead of the naked ballot stuffing that is often associated with fraud in the popular imagination (indeed, the latter is rather hard to do these, with cameras in the vast majority of voting stations). This fraud can generally only be detected through complicated statistical methods involving Gaussian curves and “nice fractions” that are rather beyond the comprehension of average laypersons.
Electoral fraud generally happens at the local level, as opposed to being ordered from “on high”, as suggested by the fact that there are good correlations between electoral fraud and the level of corruption within the Russian regions). Although the incentives in play – lack of punishment for electoral fraud, rewards for regional bigwigs where United Russia and Putin get good results – strongly favor it. Nonetheless, this still distinguishes Russia from Belorussia and Central Asia, where elections the results really are written out in advance.
At one point, the KPRF candidate Andrey Ishchenko was leading the Putin-endorsed United Russia candidate Andrey Tarasenko by 245,095 (49.9%) votes to 233,801 (47.6%), with victory assured. But when turnout reached 99.03, Tarasenko had surged to 247,396 (49.0) to the hapless Ishchenko’s 245,090 (48.6). Then one more voting station reported its results, and Tarasenko jumped up to 253,082 votes to Ishchenko’s 245,438 – even though no known electoral station in Russia has more than one thousand registered voters.
Consequences:
1. Although the magnitude of this fraud is not all that high in absolute terms, it did clearly subvert the will of the Primorye region, which voted against the UR candidate.
2. You need no fancy statistics, just arithmetic, to understand that this fraud was fraud. This is as blatant as the 146% turnout in Rostov oblast in the 2011 elections – except the latter genuinely was a technical mistake on the part of a single TV news channel.
3. The suddenness and last minute nature of the intervention suggests that it came from on high.
I have no idea why they did it. Irkutsk oblast has been ruled by non-United Russia governors for three terms, and nothing threatening has come out of it. Now, even assuming that protests remain lowkey – not something that can be guaranteed, since Primorye is a traditionally feisty region and gave Putin his third worst official results in the 2018 Presidential elections – United Russia will have a much harder time eking out a halfway respectable performance in that region come the 2021 Duma elections.
Well, come to think of it, I do have an idea as to why this happened, though it’s a banal and depressing one – that the worst kakistocratic impulses of the Putin regime are coming out into the open with increasing regularity.
Together with Head of the National Guard Viktor Zolotov’s bizarre rant on YouTube where he challenges Navalny to a duel in response to Navalny’s corruption allegations, and the clusterfuck of an interview with the alleged Skripal assassins, having all happened in just the past week, there is no escaping from this impression.
The previous post featured a map of Russian IQ based on an online survey (n=238,619) for Russian men interested in serving as contract soldiers run by the Ministry of Defense.
The data has recently been released by Konstantin Sugonyaev (see PDF).
However, as was suggested by Sugonyaev at the start, it is also possible to calculate a proxy of “patriotism” based on the percentage of each region’s population that took the test during the 2012-2017 period that his paper covers.
Results
Along with the Altai Republic, the city of Sevastopol (5.4/1,000 took the test) is Russia’s most patriotic region; Crimea as a whole (2.2/1,000) is also well above the Russian average of 1.6/1,000.
This is bearing in mind that they only joined the “experiment” midway through. Adjust for that, and Crimea as a whole becomes one of Russia’s top 5 most patriotic regions at the very least.
So much for muh Russian occupation. (Isn’t it cool how entirely unrelated research demolishes Western propaganda?).
The more patriotic regions tend to be frontier areas with a heavy military presence (e.g. Kaliningrad, Primorye, Murmansk) and the Far Eastern region (e.g. Zabaikalye, Amur). The latter regions also vote relatively more for the LDPR.
Amongst Russia’s ethnic minorities, the Tuvans and Buryats stand out in particular for their patriotism.
Saint-Petersburg (1.8/1,000) is more patriotic than the Russian average, while Moscow (1.2/1,000) is considerably less patriotic.
The least patriotic Russian regions tend to be regions with large oil and extraction industries, such as Khanty-Mansiysk, the Yamalo-Nenets AO, the Sakha Republic, and Tyumen oblast. I assume this is because the men have much better financial prospects working in the local economy.
The least patriotic regions are Ingushetia (0.3/1,000) and Chechnya (0.2/1,000).
As I pointed out, when you adjust for near endemic electoral fraud, Chechnya becomes Russia’s most oppositionist province. At one point, a disturbingly large percentage of Chechnya’s population were subscribed to an extremist Islamist social media group. This would be one more data point than Kadyrov is merely keeping a lid on things.
Anyhow, broader observation. Buryats – Russia’s most patriotic ethnic minority; Chechens and Ingush – the least.
Just like with Yaroslavl’s high IQ, there is what we might call deep history here. More Buryats died as soldiers in World War II as a percentage of their population than any other ethnicity bar Russians – around 5.8% in both cases. In contrast, only 0.5% of Chechens and Ingush died as Red Army soldiers – an order of magnitude lower than for the USSR as a whole.
This is by far the largest survey of Russian IQ ever undertaken (n=238,619). The test was designed by the Ministry of Defense and is aimed at aspiring contract soldiers, consisting of 30 questions testing verbal, numerical, and logical skills. The data used in the paper (and in my map) was based on results from September 2012-December 2017.
I blogged about Sugonyev’s work about a year ago, when he presented the preliminary results at the Institute of Psychology Russian Academy of Sciences.
A recap of some highlights:
1. Geography of Russian IQ: Despite individually small samples, even Russia’s regional PISA results showed a recognizable gradient of increasing IQ as you go north.
In Sugonyev’s data, it becomes even more distinct, with IQ rising in the areas of Finno-Ugric admixture, and falling as one goes south and east.
There is perfect and unsurprising agreement on the brightest regions (the two capitals), the dullest ethnic Russian regions (Zabaikalye, Stavropol), and the dullest ones overall (DICh, Tyva).
There is excellent agreement between these results and both statistical assessments and stereotypes about individual regions (e.g. recent story about a criminal band of alcoholics attacking a military formation in Zabaikalye).
While absent from PISA, Yaroslavl oblast performed as well as the two capitals. As I have pointed out, this has “deep historical” antecedents: Yaroslavl gubernia was the most developed ethnic Russian region in the late Russian Empire outside Moscow and Saint-Petersburg.
2. Flynn Effect: While people born between 1973 and 1987 performed at a stable 19.5-20/30, the post-1988 period saw a steady improvement towards an average score of 21/30. This is equivalent to a 4-5 IQ points increase. This is very substantial, being equivalent to the difference between the duller ethnic Russian regions (e.g. Orenburg = 98.6, 66th/85) and the brightest Russian regions (e.g. Saint Petersburg = 103.5, 1st/85).
This is plausible, because Russia’s performance on PISA – in which 15 year olds are tested on math, science, and reading – likewise started going up from 2009, with PISA-equivalent IQ increasing from 95 during 2000-2009 to 99 by 2015 (see right).
3. “Patriotism“: Since we have n’s for individual regions, we can calculate what percentage of each region’s population took the test, which would presumably be positively correlated with interest in military service and a general “patriotism” factor. I will create a map of “patriotism” based on this data a bit later.
But TL:DR, for the curious: The second most “patriotic” region is Sevastopol (5.4/1,000 took the test), and Crimea as a whole (2.2/1,000) is well above the Russian (1.6/1000) – and this is bearing in mind that they only joined the “experiment” midway through. So much for muh Russian occupation. Some other patriotic regions include Altay, Murmansk, Buryatia, Amur, and Zabaikalye. Saint-Petersburg (1.8/1,000) is more patriotic than the Russian average, while Moscow (1.2/1,000) is less patriotic. The least patriotic regions include Dagestan (0.8/1,000), Tatarstan (0.7/1,000), Yakutia (0.7/1,000), Tyumen (0.5/1,000), Ingushetia (0.3/1,000), and Chechnya (0.2/1,000).
Prospects
This is a huge database that keeps growing every day, as more and more people take the test. So far we have only scraped the boundaries of what we can do with it.
While the data for regional IQs has finally been published, the finer details of demographic structure remain unanalyzed. Which regions saw the biggest Flynn effects? (Related question: Is the lagging Caucasus converging on the Russian average?).
The geographic data in the database is finer-grained than oblast level, which allows for the creation of much more detailed maps.
The IQ part of the test is followed by a couple of personality tests to assess the aspiring soldier’s suitability for military service. This can open up entirely new avenues of psychometric mapping and analysis.
This September is set to become a record breaking month, in an already record breaking year. Less than halfway through, I already have 26,000 visits (normal month of late: 30,000) and 80,000 pageviews (normal month of late: 120,000). Total pageview for 2018 now total a round 1,000,000. That’s 2.5x the rate of the entire of 2015, 2x the rate of 2016, and more than the 790,000 of the entirety of 2017.
***
Featured News
* SYRIA: Long awaited assault on Idlib is still up in the air. The Turks are digging their heels in, so perhaps the operation will end up limited to just taking the areas east of the M5 motorway? Anyhow, as I pointed out, it’s a tense situation – Russia is the midst of the massive Vostok-2018 (in which China is also involved); its armada is still of the Syrian coast; the US now has moved naval assets with a total of 200 Tomahawk missiles to the East Mediterranean. Intermittent reports from RT/Sputnik about an imminent gas attack false flag by the rebels and White Helmets. The Western propaganda wheels are also in motion.
* DONBASS: Assassinated Zakharchenko has been replaced by Denis Pushilin, with elections scheduled for November. Possible candidates include Pavel Gubarev and Khodakovsky. But Pushilin, a gray non-entity who promoted MMM pyramid schemes before the war, seems to be the Kremlin’s favored candidate. In other news, long-time informed DNR observer Alexander Zhuchkovsky reports that Prilepin’s battalion has been disbanded. Prilepin himself, a popular novelist, Donbass supporter, and editor of Svobodnaya Pressa (probably Russia’s best far left outlet), who had friendly relations with Zakharchenko, has reportedly been barred from entering the DNR, as have other close Zakharchenko associates. It’s hard to figure out what exactly is happening there, but my zradometer is tingling.
* NYT LETTER. I don’t buy that the NYT letter was written by Pence – I’d need more evidence than a fondness for the word “lodestar”. Also skeptical that the NYT invented it, as Paul Craig Roberts suggests. Amusing text analysis showing that it was Trump himself (h/t Emil Kirkegaard). My guess is some Nikki Haley or some other deep state bug(wo)man.
* FAKE NEWS? The Duran: 1 million Uighurs in Chinese “internment camps” (Video). Making the Chicoms out to be Nazis is amusing, but I have always suspected it is BS. A country that has affirmative action for minorities and condemns “Han chauvinism” is not going to be devising “final solutions” to the Uyghur Question. However, the timing of this Western media campaign is interesting.
I looked at it using game theory, and concluded that the elite is likely to betray Putin. As soon as Putin indicates which group’s candidate he prefers, the optimal strategy for the other groups is to undermine that candidate — because if he wins, they stand to lose everything.
* STUPID SPOOKS. Former Putin bodyguard, former Ksenia Sobchak chaperone, and “highly qualified” person [according to Martyanov], and current head of the National Guard Viktor Zolotov posts a bizarre rant on YouTube where he challenges Navalny to a duel and promises to “grill him.”
I think this is a perfectly normal, rational response to Navalny’s corruption allegations.
* SELF-SUFFICIENCY. Vedomosti: Aeroflot will order 100 more SSJ-100′s [in Russian]. Good news – in any case, bearing in mind current affairs, it hardly has any choice.
* CARS OF STATE. Remember the indigenous Russian replacement for Mercedes used during Putin’s inauguration? That “Kortezh” line under the Aurus brand is going into serial production.
* ISOLATED RUSSIA. Taiwan removes visa requirements for Russian citizens. But China does not want Russia to reciprocate. For all my Sinophilia, I think we can talk if/when China recognizes Crimea.
* NEOLIBERALISM (THE GOOD KIND). Vedomosti: IMF supports Russia’s pension reforms [in Russian]. As RT’s Bryan MacDonald wisecracked, not often that US/UK media propaganda runs contrary to IMF advice. I covered the pensions protests here.
* ORTHODOXY. Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople is moving towards granting autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The Moscow Patriarchate does not recognize his authority to do so, and if this goes through, this may well result in a schism between Constantinople and Moscow. Will have more on this later.
* FAREWELL AMERICANA. After a glimmer of hope this summer, I am once again skeptical about MAGA’s prospects. 538 is giving 5/6 chance to Democrats winning control of the House. There’s even a 1/3 chance that they’ll seize both the House and the Senate. Now I know people like to make fun of Nate Silver for “failing” to predict Trump in 2016, but in all fairness, 538 gave him an approximately 1/3 chance – way more than most “experts.” Now is he assigning exactly the same likelihood to an all-consuming Blue Wave – and this is happening at a time when the economy hasn’t been doing so well for over a decade.
* Progressive Israel drafts law to imprison holders of the Palestinian flag.
* Since Putin is good friends with Bibi these days, perhaps he could take note?
* Taiwanese population might start declining by 2022, three years earlier than forecast. Its TFR has been lower than 1.3 children per woman since 2003.
* Do Chinese believe in HBD? spandrell says no:
People ask me all the time if Chinese people understand HBD.
Colleagues I spoke to were appalled. None of them had ever heard of a paper in any field being disappeared after formal publication. Rejected prior to publication? Of course. Retracted? Yes, but only after an investigation, the results of which would then be made public by way of explanation. But simply disappeared? Never. If a formally refereed and published paper can later be erased from the scientific record and replaced by a completely different article, without any discussion with the author or any announcement in the journal, what will this mean for the future of electronic journals?
Seriously, read the entire piece – this is really amazing stuff. American academia is reaching levels of Lysenkoism previously thought to be impossible.
Here is the paper in question (he had a Russian mathematician as a coauthor, but he was too weak to resist the SJW pressure and asked to be taken off):
Cooks that wanted to deviate from these recipes had to get approval from the Ministry of Health, a request that could take years to go through. Most people opted for the easier route, which is how thousands of nearly identical menus came to be established across the country. Paired with limited ingredient diversity, the nation suffered a creative drought: It wasn’t just that all the same dishes were served, but the dishes were prepared exactly the same way, resulting in identical versions of dishes, too. Each bite was calculated as a means of productivity, and dining for pleasure was considered extravagant. “Special” meals were no longer considered, and the scope of Czech cuisine shrunk.
The big reason that Bletchley Park was classified after the war was because the Brits distributed thousands of Enigma machines to its colonies after the war, who did not know they had been cracked. This allowed Britain spy on their communications for years afterwards.
* Good thread summarizing Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction, one of the most interesting and original books on Nazi Germany:
(00:01:12) Returning to seriousness, Brin says he is “deeply offen[ded]” by the election of Trump, and that the election “conflicts with many of [Google’s] values.”
* GLOBOHOMOBEZOS:
Facebook censors British former ambassador/dissident Craig Murray
Facebook censors ThinkProgress, leftist fanatics who had hailed the censoring of Roosh V just a couple of days before. Poetic justice?
* Reddit bans bunch of users it suspects of Iranian “influence operations” & announce “trusted reporter” program, moderator of pro-Russian subreddit points out it could be abused to silence dissident voices, Reddit admins immediately prove him right.
On a more serious note, this is a PR disaster. Even Margarita Simonyan herself visibly realizes as the interview goes on. Their tourism story reaches levels of implausibility that should not even be possible: We are just heterosexual business partners – but no, we won’t go into any details; our first sightseeing tour was cut short by snow, we live in the tropical part of Russia so we’re not used to it; we visited Salsbury twice just to confirm that yes, it has the highest spire of any English cathedral – no need to make a correction to Wikipedia!
Anyhow, I am not going to insult my readers’ intelligence by trying to fit their story into something consistent. In any case, since even the people who are generously compensated by Russian taxpayers don’t see it fit to do so, why should anyone else?
The only remaining question is:
The lingering one of whether this GRU hit was a “private” criminal one, or ordered by Putin. (In all fairness, this is now of largely academic interest. The Kremlin have just painted a bulls-eye on themselves).
Whether this PR travesty was a result of incompetence, sabotage, or an elaborate FU to the Britbongs. (Also largely irrelevant except insofar as it reveals something about the sustainability of the Putinist state; if the first option is correct, then with cadres like these, it needs no enemies).
Meanwhile, I expect this to lead to real world repercussions:
From now on, Britain has no out to quietly bury this affair, even if it wanted to. Further sanctions from the British are guaranteed.
Also I wonder if this is what finally gets RT booted off the British airways. If so – lame hill to die on.
It puts Germany, which has to date been courteously skeptical towards the Brits, in an impossible position. Had they kept that hapless duo off the airwaves, this is how it would have remained. But no longer.
Consequently, I would guess that further serious EU sanctions are now likelier than not.
Meanwhile, a State Department official announced that it is imposing “very severe” sanctions over Skripal. This probably came too soon after the interview to be a response to it. This suggests that the US is serious about hewing to the harsher options at its disposal under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991.
In the meantime, things are slowly building up to a head in Syria. Russia is currently in the middle of Vostok-2018, and still has a massive armada parked off Syria. Turkey has come out against the planned offensive on Idlib (so much for the fevered talk about a new Russian/Turkish/Iranian alliance), and is reinforcing its military presence there. DNR head Zakharchenko has recently been assassinated in the DNR; its new leader pending elections, Denis Pushilin, is a person with a murky past who is directly beholden to Moscow. The US has moved naval assets with a total of 200 Tomahawk missiles to the East Mediterranean. RT keeps reporting on imminent preparations by the rebels and White Helmets to stage a false flag gas attack, even as the Skripal affair has just undermined Russia’s credibility on gas attacks and false flag conspiracy theories.
Hopefully, probably, these are just a series of coincidences. But if this was a Hearts of Iron game, my suspicion is that the “World Tension” meter would now be unnervingly high.
Wei Geisheing (2013). Aerial Shanghai by Crane Operator 2.
Let’s take the standard assumption that national power consists of three main elements: Economic, military, and cultural (“soft”).
Why can we be confident that China is on its way to superpowerdom?
Economic Power
China has already overtaken the US in terms of GDP (PPP) in the mid-2010s at the latest {here’s my 2012 article on this}, and will almost certainly repeat that in nominal terms by the early 2020s.
Chinese development is extremely similar to South Korea’s but with a lag of 20 years {East Asia’s Twenty Year Rule}. Consequently, a China that converges to South Korean development levels in relative terms – something that we can expect to see by 2040 – will automatically be three times the size of the US economy just by dint of its demographic preponderance. This is furthermore assuming that there is no serious US economic crisis during this period (e.g. there are estimates that US GDP is 5-10% more than it “should be” thanks to the USD’s status as the global reserve currency – what happens if/when that ends?).
There is absolutely no reason why this process of convergence must stall at any point, since average IQ explains almost all economic success, and Chinese IQ is comparable to those of the most developed OECD nations. To be sure, as I pointed out, developed East Asian nations tend to underperform their IQ; they are only as rich as European countries about 5 IQ points below them, such as France (in contrast, the Americans over perform their average IQ, probably thanks to their smart fractions, the USD’s status, and economies of scale). Nonetheless, this does mean that the average EU level is eminently reachable. And it is even possible that China will eventually do relatively better than Japan or Korea because of the unparalleled economies of scale opened up to it by its 1.4 billion population.
As China continues to develop, its economy will likewise continue getting more and more sophisticated – as of this year, it has twice as many industrial robots as the entirety of North America, and more supercomputers than the US. {China Overtakes US in Scientific Articles, Robots, Supercomputers}
Hence the utter stupidity of comparisons to the 1980s American scare over Japan. China is not the next Japan – it is the next TEN Japans {2011 article on Top 10 Sinophobe Myths}.
Military Power
Military power is primarily a function of economic power. This is a relation that is so obvious and well-established that it barely needs further elaboration.
Chinese military spending is currently at a third of the US level, but it is soaring rapidly and – as in Russia – getting more bang for the buck due to China’s lower labor costs and large share of domestic armaments production. It is also seeing rapid technological convergence in key military technologies. Once this process is finished, it will be free to start engaging in a massive buildup, without the risk of its military falling into obsolescence. This is already happening: PLAN is slated to have more ships than the USN by 2030.
On my projections, comprehensive Chinese military power should exceed that of the US by the early 2030s, and Chinese naval power should overtake the US by the early 2040s – and this is under the assumption that China continued to spend a significantly lower percentage of its GDP than the US {Comprehensive Military Power}.
It’s also worth pointing out that as a Eurasian power connected to the rest of the World-Island through OBOR, and possessing unsinkable aircraft carriers in the form of its artificial islands in the South China Sea, China is less absolutely dependent on its Navy for its military security than the US. While China has been ballyhooed for its lack of power projection capability. As it happens, China recently announced plans to produce 1,000 Y-20 strategic heavy lift airplanes, which will eventually give it strategic airlift capacities well in excess of that of the US.
The fact that China is not (yet) throwing its weight around means absolutely nothing. “Lying low and not taking the lead” was a conscious approach formulated by Deng Xiaoping, and one that that has paid off handsomely to date. There is extremely little point to be had from forcing a confrontation when you are effortlessly and massively gaining in relative power on your potential adversaries with each passing year, at least so long as your red lines aren’t crossed (e.g. recognition of Taiwanese independence).
Cultural Power
According to the Nature Index, a proxy for high quality science production, China is now 50% – up from 25% five years ago, when the index was launched – as productive as the US, and far ahead of everyone else. Now I actually agree with China pessimists that the Chinese, or rather East Asians in general, are more conformist than Europeans, which limits creativity {Coffee Salon Demographics}. Japan’s and Korea’s underperform relative to their IQ on elite science even more than they do on GDP per capita. Nonetheless, even if China were to attain just the per capita performance of Japan and South Korea, it would still generate around 50% more elite level science than the US. By analogy with Japanese and Korean experience, I expect to happen by the 2030s.
I am more skeptical about China’s potential to be competitive in the cultural sphere. English is the world’s lingua franca, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Its literary, film, and video game output is derivative and uninspiring. They can’t even create a good state-owned propaganda channel – how many Westerners watch/read CCTV relative to RT? It is only in the past decade that Japan has started generating significant cultural power, a generation after they became rich. By extension, I suspect we may have to wait for the second half of the century for a Chinese cultural renaissance.
TLDR
Even assuming no disruptive developments in the United States, such as a catastrophic unwinding of the dollar or secessionism provoked by ideological polarization, the emergence of China as the world’s preeminent superpower by the middle of the 21st century is near inevitable. It is a mere derivative of its demographic preponderance, and the close relation between national IQ and socio-economic development (buttressed by the prior experience of South Korea).
By the 2040s, China will have by far the world’s largest economy in both PPP-adjusted and nominal terms (2-3x that of the United States), its most powerful military, and comparable naval power and elite scientific production. However, it should still lag the US in cultural productivity. China will only truly regain its mantle as the Celestial Empire in the second half of the 21st century.
***
PS. As with my standard “futuristic” projections, all this assumes there are no radical discontinuities in our world – no machine superintelligence, no mass gene editing for superhuman IQ, etc. That said, is seems probably that atheist, technophile China is very well positioned to compete in these “transhumanist” scenarios, should they materialize.
As their budgets have equalized with those of blockbuster movies, video games have likewise become a notable source of cultural influence. Meme phrases such as “the cake is a lie” (Portal), “war, war never changes” (Fallout), and “I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took an arrow in the knee” (TES5: Skyrim) have become as recognizable as any movie one-liners, at least the Gen X and younger crowd. They produce Culture Points for the countries and factions that they are associated with. Wolfenstein and Far Cry have joined the neoliberalism.txt culture war against Trumpism. Minecraft can be considered a digital complement to the Scandinavian world penchant for blocky chick, as expressed in Lego and IKEA. Deus Ex has become to cyberpunk in video games as Neuromancer is to cyberpunk in literature, Ghost in the Shell is to cyberpunk in anime, and Blade Runner is to cyberpunk on the silver screen.
One fascinating development in the past decade has been the relative success of Eastern European countries at producing video games. Though Visegrad and the Ukraine are overshadowed by the Anglosphere – Toronto alone probably rivals their entire output – their per capita performance is entirely respectable to that of the rest of Europe.
But I wouldn’t say that this was entirely unexpected, because as opposed to movies, it is much easier for video games to enjoy success beyond the cultural space in which they were created. Anglophone culture is globally dominant, and the world’s stock of A-list celebrities is so concentrated in Hollywood that the US rules the roost here almost by default.
Mass Effect: Andromeda vs. The Witcher 3.
Video games are different. You don’t need celebrity actors – you mainly just need a technically talented programming and design team, some competent (not necessarily brilliant) translators and localizers, and good marketers. Places like Eastern Europe can be highly competitive, since they have high human capital at highly competitive wages, and don’t have to bow down to SJW ideology like Western media companies, which annoys most gamers.
Most of Eastern Europe except Russia, anyhow, which curiously seems to be underrepresented in video game development. GameDevMap is a database of almost 5,000 global video game companies. The United States, as expected, is far in the lead, with 1,525 companies; Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the UK all have around 200-300 companies. Poland has 94, the Ukraine has 42, and Czechia has 39; Russia has just 73 companies, below Poland in absolute terms, and well below all of them in per capita terms.
This quantitative assessment is backed up by qualitative judgments, as I will shortly explain.
Poland Can Into Vidya
Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay.
Poland is a video game powerhouse, home to CD Projekt, the creators of The Witcher series – a more polished and much harder equivalent of The Elder Scrolls (though the latter is legendary for its wealth of mods). With the development of Cyberpunk 2077, they may well ouster the faltering Deus Ex series as the mainstay of cyberpunk in video gaming and come to become Europe’s equivalent of Bethesda, a behemoth that alternates between developing The Elder Scrolls (medieval fantasy) and Fallout (nuclear post-apocalypse). Poland also produced the Dead Island zombie FPS survival series, the Bulletstorm series, and emerging classic This War Of Mine.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance
Czechia also packs an incredibly hard punch for its demographic size. It has created the ARMA tactical FPS series, which is especially noted for its relative military realism. It grew out of Operation Flashpoint, which was released in 2001 and might have been the first Visegrad game to really make a splash. They also developed DayZ, which grew out of an ARMA mod; unfortunately, that project has been a complete failure, becoming a byword for the pitfalls of Steam’s Early Access program. Still, having spent many months in the top seller list, it must have nonetheless made Bohemia Interactive a lot of money. Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers are also both Czech games. I am not familiar with them, though the reviews I’ve read weren’t glowing with praise.
However, this doesn’t mean that the Czech video game industry is in the doldrums. Several months ago, new company Warhorse Studio released Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a first person RPG which has become famous for its degree of medieval realism – the architecture is very historically faithful, features the most accurate recreation of medieval swordplay of any major game, and comes accompanied by an in-game encyclopedia so that you actually learn things about medieval Bohemia. One of the more obvious things is that there weren’t any Negroes in that region in the 15th century. Chief developer Daniel Vavra’s resistance to SJW demands to “diversify” medieval Bohemia provoked leftist attempts to boycott the game; the happy reality is that it has sold very well and is becoming a classic in the genre.
Metro 2033
Stalker and Metro 2033 are both made by Ukrainian companies. Funnily enough, both are based on originally Russian cultural products – the Strugatsky brothers and Dmitry Glukhovsky, respectively. In a curious analogy, both the Strugatskys and Glukhovsky were/are dissidents against their surrounding culture – the “Land of the Unknown Fathers” in The Inhabited Island was too obviously a satire on the USSR to be unintentional, while Glukhovsky has come out as strongly pro-Ukrainian since 2014, to the extent of ruining the final book in his Metro trilogy with heavy-handed political commentary. Another great Ukrainian success was Cossacks, which might have been the first real time strategy game to feature hundreds of units operating smoothly on standard PCs – a stark contrast to Age of Empires II, which could support a maximum of no more than 125 units on the computers at that time without lagging.
World of Tanks, one of the world’s most popular military simulators, was developed in Belorussia.
Underrail, an RPG set in an underground post-apocalyptic world and the closest thing there is to the early Fallout games, was developed by a single dedicated Serb.
Mount & Blade: Warband (Napoleonic Wars mod)
Finally, I must commend the Turks for creating Mount & Blade: Warband, the best video game ever created. I hope they release Mount & Blade: Bannerlord sometime this century.
As for Russia… well, it’s been underperforming ever since Tetris, created by a Russian, with 90%+ of profits accruing to a Japanese corporation thanks to the USSR’s complete inability to commercialize anything. For whatever reason, the only sustained success Russia has had in video games seems to be in air combat simulators: The Su-27 Flanker and Il-2 Sturmovik were some of the best in the genre, and the tradition continues with War Thunder. Otherwise, the only game that comes to mind is Pathologic, which is extremely niche, even if it has become a cult classic (perhaps Pathologic 2, currently in development, will draw a bigger player base). Escape from Tarkov, a gritty multiplayer FPS, also seems promising.
Nonetheless, all post-Tetris Russian games combined don’t add up to the individual cultural impact of just Stalker, The Witcher, or even World of Tanks.
So why is Russia lagging on the games front?
I don’t think it’s brain drain, as commenter Daniel Chieh suggests. This should be even truer for East Europeans (Poles, Czechs, now even Ukrainians) who have access to Western labor markets – but as per above, all of those places are extremely productive. And it’s not a big deal for IT anyway. There’s plenty of IT jobs where you can earn Western salaries doing projects remotely while enjoying East European living costs. I know a few such people in Moscow alone.
It is because Russia is too underdeveloped? Well, if the Ukraine can create high-end video games – with a market that’s ten times smaller and an even worse business climate – then Russia certainly should be able to. Moreover, I have a theory that certain forms of backwardness – specifically those characterized by high average IQ coupled with bad institutions, instability, and a surfeit of roving bandits – should actually be GOOD for video games. In such an environment, there will be few people willing to built anything substantial like a multi-billion dollar factory (hence why Ukrainian heavy industry continues to coast on the ever depreciating Soviet legacy). But how much capital do you need to launch a middle-sized video game studio? Can’t imagine it’s much more than $100,000. Most of the value is in the brains. And if instability strikes, you just bug out to someplace like Cyprus or Malta (like 4A Games, the makers of the Metro series, did in 2014).
This would explain the remarkable fact that the Ukraine of all places has had more success with making successful video games than Russia, even to the extent of adopting Russian content, with the occasional amusing Ukrainian twist. For instance, in Metro 2033, ROGPR founder Kirill Nesterov once drew my attention to the fact that the abandoned stores in post-apocalyptic Moscow had Soviet-style scales (see right) – even though they had long since vanished from Russia’s capital by 2013, which is when the nuclear war is supposed to have begun. We can only assume that such scales survived in the Ukraine for much longer.
Unexpectedly, and paradoxically, another explanation might be that Russia is too advanced.
Due to its semi-closed IT market, and reasonably large economies of scale, it is the only European nation that has managed to build a comprehensive and at least partially autarkic IT ecosystem of the sort that only fully exists in the United States and China. Unlike Eastern Europe, there are legitimate tech giants in Russia. Yandex is not only Eurasia’s foremost search engine, but also runs its main cartographic resource (Yandex Maps), one of the region’s major payments processors (Yandex Money), and a very competitive taxi service (Yandex Taxi) which it plans to augment with self-driving cars through AI development. Kaspersky is one of the world’s premier anti-virus companies. 1C Company produces the most widely used accounting software in the former USSR. Vkontakte is a full-fledged, if inferior, analogue to Facebook; it is controlled by Mail.ru group, which also owns Qiwi, another major payments processor. These examples can be expanded on at length.
Consequently, I submit that there are three main factors as to why Russian tech is much less video game-”loaded” than the rest of Eastern Europe:
1. I assume that Russia’s own, partially independent IT ecosystem soaks up a much larger share of the local programming talent than is the case in East-Central Europe, where the great bulk of the IT ecosystem is an extension of Silicon Valley.
2. Since Russian non-IT companies are much less integrated into the global economy than East-Central Europe, I assume that its financial, oil & gas, and even defense companies will also soak up a relatively larger share of the local programming talent.
3. Finally, again thanks to Russia’s IT ecosystem being partially separate from the West, there may also be more money to be made making Russian analogues of American apps and platforms. After all, if such apps already exist and are successful, there is a good chance that they would also be successful in Russia, whereas the commercial success of a video game is far less predictable. It is therefore illogical for Russian tech entrepreneurs to go into video games.
If these arguments are broadly accurate, then we should not expect a video game renaissance in Russia anytime soon. On the other hand, I suppose it is an adequate price to pay for having one’s own IT ecosystem.
I also expect that much the same arguments will apply to China, which has not produced many (any?) video games of note either.
Anyhow, it’s fascinating to see the Russia Truther/neoliberalism.txt convergence with J.R. Nyquist’s “Final Phase” theories, in which the USSR faked its own collapse as part of a deception operation to destroy the West. Proponents of this theory usually subscribe to the eschatological interpretation that Russia is Gog/Magog, and is destined to face an appointment with destruction on the mountains of Israel at the end of the world. (Or something like that – ask Unz.com commenter Quartermaster, as someone who subscribes to this theory I am sure he knows more).
Chris Nethery (Bio: *WINNING* the war against Russia’s influence operations and attacks on Western democracy, though Twitter and shitty website featuring Putin’s 39th brain DUGIN) doesn’t seem to be on the absolute fringes of Russia Trutherism. He has almost twice as many Twitter followers as I do. So when I speculated that in time the Holocaust could be ascribed to the USSR (= Russia = Nazis), it wasn’t entirely tongue in cheek.
Starting on Friday, September 7, Amazon has gone on a rampage and banned the paperback and Kindle editions of nine of my books, including my new release Game. The sales pages now give you an error message. Despite repeatedly trying to get answers from Amazon via phone and email, they will not tell me why the books have been removed. …
None of my books contain child rape scenes, physical abuse, pornography, or sexual violence, [like a whole bunch of other books that Amazon sells] and yet they were banned.
Were they banned because they were effective at helping men? Was it because executives at Amazon disagree with my political opinions? Was it an action from a rogue employee? They won’t tell me. Whatever the case, someone in the company clicked the delete button and I’m supposed to accept it, but it’s hard to do that when your livelihood depends on the basic assumption of fair business practices.
Is it just me, or is neoliberalism.txt really going on a rampage these past few days? (Just the other day, Sam Hyde’s subreddit /r/milliondollarextreme was shut down; a few days before that, @jack finally purged Alex Jones from Twitter).
Anyhow, I am aware that traditionalist and nationalist readers may have issues with Roosh V. Isn’t “game” driving licentiousness as surely as unleashed female hypergamy? Is it really a good idea to allow swarthy “players” such as Roosh into your country?
Well there’s a few things one can say to that.
1. It takes two to tango. As he himself has admitted, Roosh V is a product of modern society; there was no niche for people like him back in the 1960s. As for his international “bang” guides – well, the numbers of people who are going to embark on this “hobby”, damaging as they may be to the women in the countries they’ll drop by, are ultimately drops in an ocean. I am sure there are 1-2 orders of magnitudes more straight out sexpats in the Ukraine as opposed to aspiring Casanovas.
2. The rumors about Roosh V being a rapist are the result of a smear campaign. The only crime he is guilty of is being a humorless censor himself.
3. Needless to say, GloboHomoBezos is not “protecting” us from Roosh because he wants to maintain traditional values and/or secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.
There’s no breaks on this train. To date, Amazon has mostly limited its censorship to Holocaust denial books; a disagreeable policy, to be sure, but tolerable so long as it remained the limit – which it did for an impressively long time. But now the Eye of Bezos has shifted its gave on the “manosphere”. It can’t be long before books on all sorts of other “controversial” topics become memoryholed and “contrarian” thinkers become unpersoned. It’s time to stop relying on that platform.
Here’s a quick guide to offshifting from the Amazon ecosystem:
1. Get pirated, DRM-free books at http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ (though do show the authors appreciation by sending a donation and/or formally buying their books if they deserve it)
3. Comprehensive guide to removing DRM from your existing, legal book collection at Apprentice Alf’s Blog.
4. I use the Moon Reader to read my e-books on my Android phone. Reputable e-book readers should all work with .epub format. There are plenty of free converters to epub (.mobi, .fb2) on the Internet.
PS. The blaqpill here is that here’s few people disciplined enough to wean themselves off Big Tech ecosystems so fully and radically (each sale on Amazon still contributes to Amazon’s $1 trillion+ valuation), and conscientious enough to reward content creators whose material they pirate. So neoliberalism.txt censorship is still going to be effective at stemming crimethink. Indeed, it may be more effective than the traditional, heavy-handed censorship practiced by ancien regimes, because criminalizing content outright just makes it cool.
There’s been some discussion in the previous thread over whether or not Russian religiosity has increased since the end of the USSR, when for obvious reasons people weren’t polled on these questions.
It’s quite obvious to me that religiosity has increased.
1. Personal observations: Church services in provincial Russia 15 years ago – almost all elderly woman; today – still mostly elderly woman, but now joined by elderly men, middle-aged women, some families.
Commenters such as jbwilson24 and Big Red Scary concur so I don’t think I’m imagining things.
3. The rise of Russian religiosity has been observed in many sociological works. It is not exactly a controversial theory.
Still, I agree that we need hard numbers.
Fortunately, the World Values Survey does “waves” of opinion polls once every five years across a broad swathe of the world’s countries on all sorts of questions.
Here are Russia’s results in comparative perspective.
Belief in God
1992
1997
2002
2007
2012
Belarus
36.4%
67.9%
84.9%
Poland
92.2%
Romania
92.3%
92.3%
Russia
35.2%
60.1%
73.3%
Sweden
48.2%
46.6%
50.3%
Ukraine
64.7%
87.8%
UK
USA
93.8%
94.2%
87.7%
Percentage of Russians believing in God has more than doubled since the early 1990s.
Importance of God in your life (/10)
1992
1997
2002
2007
2012
Belarus
4.15
5.97
6.51
Poland
8.73
7.95
Romania
8.03
9.17
8.93
Russia
4.00
5.39
6.12
6.68
Sweden
3.94
4.10
3.91
3.65
Ukraine
5.96
7.23
7.18
UK
5.26
5.59
USA
8.78
8.14
8.47
8.22
7.77
On average, Russians went from rating the importance of God from 4.0/10 to 6.7/10 from 1992 to 2012, an almost three point increase. In contrast, the United States – which has become markedly more secular in the past decade according to both my observations and opinion polls – only dropped by one point between 1992 and 2012 (though I suspect the fall has continued and maybe even accelerated since 2012).
In the longterm, I expect Russia’s figures to converge with Poland’s, which is to the contrary secularizing (and becoming more socially liberal).
Anyhow, I think we can consider this question answered.
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.
Nationalism vs. #RefugeesWelcome
that's how the media will spin it but imo the reality is
"genuine refugees" vs "those people"
a follow up question that would tease this out might be something like
"what percentage of current refugees into the EU (or US) are genuine refugees?"
also...
Thanks for the intro to l-citrulline. Currently if I feel I need an elixir for good blood flow, I'll take a magnesium supplement or 6 or more Wobenzyme tablets. Being a Germanophile, you're aware of the benefits of Wobenzyme?...
Lol this is too much of your Indian ancestors' faith in karma, reincarnation, etc.
There's cool people who are ugly, and beautiful people who are not cool, and every combination in between.
The same, even for women and relationships. Ugly women can be nicer than beautiful ones, and vice v...
than nationalist cultures like Spain, France, Germany, etc
Germany and Spain are "nationalist"? Lol.
The French of course have exaggerated ideas about their own importance, but even that is different from "nationalism" as most commenters here would understand it.
My impression is black-white mixing is heavily promoted in Britain, just think of the opening ceremony of the Olympic games in 2012...apart from its ridiculous celebration of the NHS, one of the main themes was how great black-white (usually black man, white woman) couples were, almost as if they...
not sure that was clear enough - late weaning is generally a thing with hunter gatherers as it helps to space out pregnancies which provides a buffer between them and the Malthusian limit.
cities that escaped postwar desecration are very beautiful and there are
There are English cities which have been constructed by some kind of enchanted elves.
And there are English cities, where architecture was outsourced to the urban planning department of Tolyatti municipality.
-
In Londo...
Opening up to immigration for one group leads to opening up to immigration for anybody. Letting Ukrainians in was a mistake. Letting in Filipinos is the next step.
red meat probably really is somewhat worse for you than white meat
i wonder about this - apparently the digestive systems gets less efficient as you age (weaker stomach acid) so if red meat is harder to digest then maybe it's more a question of red meat + middle age than red meat on its own.
...
If so what did hunter-gatherer children do? More gathering with mom?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketotic_hypoglycemia
The typical patient with ketotic hypoglycemia is a young child between the ages of 10 months and 4 years. Episodes nearly always occur in the morning after an overnight fa...
It depends if the school is marketing in Russia, or not.
Probably more secure British schools, are not marketing in Russia. But some British schools have almost converted their business to marketing for Russian/Chinese/Nigerian students.
Parents probably often give less importance about ...
So it means that it was a really major fuckup. A number of former or currently active intelligence operatives have been exposed by this unprofessional incident.
Basically all explanations are very unfavorable to Russia, be it the “British version,” or some other explanation, they will invari...
"Seeing so many young English girls dragging around their illegitimate mulatto half-breed offspring"
Where in London did you see this? It is a common sight in various depressing post-industrial towns, not so much in urban centres that are prospering.
The grain diet of the peasant warriors stunted their bones, rotted their teeth, and left them weak and prone to disease. In contrast, the poorest Mongol soldier ate mostly protein, thereby giving him strong teeth and bones.
one aspect of this is there's a vitamin K2 created by grass-eating bac...
I could list different reasons for this Anglophilia.
1. The most bourgeois parts of UK, are a paradise.
2.UK itself has been for centuries an international (imperial) oriented country. So for foreigners, always feel welcome and assimilated there, whether Louis-Napoleon, Karl Marx, or Kin...
Indeed this is the first time I've heard of it. Like every other American boy breakfast was cereal with 2% milk and a glass of orange juice. No shortage of carbohydrates there.
What's the deal here though? Gluconeogenesis inadequate for growing brains? If so what did hunter-gatherer childr...
London is non-English, but in a different way to the regions and in a different way to many people who haven't been there seem to imagine it to be. It's not necessarily the percentage of foreigners that makes it so, it's more how they interact with wider society; you tend to get a lot more profe...
I know Polish people in my real life, and of course they are very different national identity. They have a unique culture, history, sense of humour, personality. They are a very distinct culture and nationality. It’s just meeting people from another European country.
On the other hand, Russi...
No, not apt. Russia never had a lack of living space, least of all in the 17th century, following plagues, starvation and depopulation.
Russia lost up to a third of her population during the Time of Troubles, and then conquered Siberia just a generation or two right after.
"even the language was forcibly made unrussian."
How ridiculous a notion. As mixed up as if somebody were to state:
"Even the Russian language was forcibly made unukrainian."
They’re both separate languages that were developed over time in their own respective zones.
You are m...
Nobody said anything about Central Asia except you, for some inexplicable reason. What does Central Asia have to do with anything? Might as well mention India and boots, while you're at it.
Then you skip to Manchuria for another inexplicable reason.
You are an American, so clueless on Russi...
RSS
