I will add my analysis of where the two sides currently sit; with the caveat that the two sides are actually many sides, making this is a simplification.

In Britain, for example, there are a Conservative Friends of Israel and a Labour Friends of Israel, comprising together 216 members of parliament and party officials.

There are many Conservative “friends” associations, including Rússia, Pakistan, Índia, Turkey and even Palestine. Often MPs are in seemingly antithetical groups. The same is true for Labour.

These expressions of “friendship” mean as much as one would expect; which is no more than not wanting Britain to engage in imperalistic actions against the object of that friendship.

Related: my new favourite phrase is “geopolitical fan fiction”. Thanks for the read!

https://images.app.goo.gl/XZkVtcgpwmL2LFot9

European, Asian, African

white, yellow, Black

There’s not much to answer in your posts. You start with your aim, then you try to force definitions suitable for your aim onto emotionally resonant words, before accusing anyone who questions you of moral crimes for not agreeing with your aims, definitions or moralistic judgements. You are therefore only in conversation with yourself.

You are like a satirical used car salesman. You need to sell your car to anyone who stumbles in, so you declare that your car is, “essential” for “humans”, which means that if anyone refuses, you can declare them “a monster, not even human”.

This is a very poor sales technique. It will work on no one. It will just cause people to find some way to leave the conversation and consider you an idiot.

Also, I am not looking to be sold anything, but to understand. What trauma did you personally suffer that you now try to resolve by seeing it through the prism of Israel-Palestine? Only children argue like you, so I can infer that your wounded inner child takes control on this topic.

This forum is, weirdly, a safe place, you can speak freely.

Thinking about eugenics makes me feel status anxiety.

This is not triggered by discussion of reducing Patau or other genetic illnesses. It is instead caused by reflecting on how the natural gifts which I have, that can never be taken away, would be diminished, in social value, by genetic engineering for good looks and intelligence. If the norm I’m these areas caught up and then overleapt me, I might feel smaller.

I assume this adequately explains the bifurcated progressive attitude towards eugenics. I don’t mind feeling smaller, but fear of such is what drives a lot of politics.

I kept thinking of this guy when I read this article:

Video Link

Which bearded man is the Saker’s Daisy Ridley?

You know nothing about me and don’t understand me at all, but I am not offended, you also know nothing about yourself.

To help: my understanding of life on this planet is that everyone would be fine if they could find the perspicacity and courage to just do what is in their heart.

The problem is that the vast majority of people cannot come close to doing this; which leaves the dual questions: how to help them, and how to deal with them while they are like this?

I am practicing answers for both while engaging with you, and my accompanying political beliefs may be reduced to trying to see where people are, what the possibilities are, and how peace and order might be established, from those facts, to allow the living to work on developing their perspicacity and courage.

Are you able to understand now?

I don’t believe that your “point of view” is based on “morals”. Like all charlatans, you dissemble incoherently while affecting to rectitude.

I knew a man who acted like you, but in his personal life. His girlfriend suffered for it, before she sensibly left him.

He would layer thin “moral” arguments into disagreements so as to control her. When she pointed out inconsistencies within those, he would respond with hysterical insults, implying that she was sinful, and bad, for refusing his control of her.

Over time, she was beaten down because, while he saw his pain, the pain he would only acknowledge as a weapon, she felt she could help; but she could not. Eventually she ended her self-sacrifice and learned her limits.

Now she is happy, while he continues to dwell in his delusions and fear. He argued about politics exactly as you do. Everyone was always against him and out to get him, at least after they knew him for a while. His paranoia was his self-fulfilling prophecy.

A single instance of a fantastically improbable event might just be the result of chance

All single event situations are extremely improbable, but they happen.

Radio broadcasting…

Not having to worship mediocre achievement as great, simply because the person, who achieved, shares my skin colour.

Not having to excuse harm for no other reason than the perpetrator is my race.

Can “Terror Machine” not use a pair of scissors to cut off his dangling straps or, at least, tape them up?

Yes, “White male” culture is Apollonian. Almost everything else is Cthnonian, at least by comparison. None of this is new.

The problem is that humans need balance between the two, and the modern world forces people to be far more Apollonian than they would like. This drives some crazy.

Many women and black people seem to really struggle, for whatever reason, with the Apollonian mask required for public civic life.

Many middle-aged white men seem to really struggle, for whatever reason, with not over-identifying with that mask and having it squeeze the energy out of their private life.

That these basic human psychological impulses have become tied up with race and sex does no one any favours, but they are tied up, so that’s that.

How do we measure the extremity of “obese” versus “shorter than them”?

During our “epidemic of obesity”, such fatness may be common, but we are living in an extreme time.

Can men be expected to find extreme and unhealthy body shapes anything but a strong turn off?

Would “obese” and “dwarf” not be more comparable than “shorter than me”? Both come with probable health consequences and both are extreme.

Unfortunately for people with dwarfism, but fortunately for the obese, although their challenges may be similar, people with dwarfism cannot go on a diet to remedy their situation, while obese people can.

The other edge of this sword though, for obese people, is that they get morally judged for their choices.

Personally, I’d rather a choice and face social opprobrium than have no choice.

Still a midwit take.

If you feel pride, you feel pride. Be honest with yourself about it. If you don’t feel pride, be honest with yourself about that too.

See where courage takes you.

It’s not wise to rule out body types in the abstract. It is one thing to say that you’re generally more attracted to one type of person thanthe other; it’s quite another to say that you would never consider dating that type of person.

I don’t have a physical type, except a strong preference for athleticism, which does include “thin”. The reasons are many and personal; including those that others would be glad not to share.

Looking through your posts, it seems that you are sensitive to the pain fat people feel when judged in society. Some other commenters’ have concluded that this is because you’re substantially overweight; but I get the impression that it is more like because your husband is (substantially more so.)

This might be amusingly ironic for you. A board, which ostentatiously prizes wifely virtue, is, through oafishness, mistakenly criticising a wife who typifies it…

I don’t know what to make of your post. Are you a genuine political candidate?

It dropped substantially only in 1925

The whole idea of deciding what you will feel, because of some abstract nonsense you have concocted, for the sake of your ego stroking itself, is midwit.

Your comment has nothing to do with the one that I wrote, which you believe you were replying to.

What does your response have to do with mine?

It is midwit to argue whether feeling pride is appropriate or not. Either the individual feels it, or they don’t.

Morality, individual pragmatism, history, social good, they are, at best, explanations for why the person feels pride or not.

If those explanations cause us to deceive ourselves over how we feel, then those explanations are a problem.

“Should you feel pride” is irrelevant – and the first step towards a lie. “Do you feel pride”, is what matters.

Sorry, not sorry, but your whole perspective is midwit…

I would like some insight into whether the author really believes his own article.

Or does he just hope that if he repeats it enough it will become true?

Or does it bring in donations and is just a flat out fantasy?

In which case, the same questions as above, may be asked of the donaters.

I assume someone at some point must be sincere, but I have no idea how one might squint one’s eyes so hard, that reality looks anything like that which is decribed?

I suppose the picture attached at the top, which is pure psycho-sexual click bait, points in the right direction…

You’ve been able to go there to party for months now as a tourist from anywhere – only pretend restrictions on occupancy rates in bars. Land of the free and home of the brave.

Opinion polls have done everyone into politics a disservice. The cost of offering your “support” on a poll is zero; therefore a poll measures “support” in the same way that free lottery tickets would measure people’s propensity to gamble.

My friend’s client complains to her every week about how his girlfriend isn’t answering his phone calls. He always says “despite this, she is very loving” and they “have a great connection”.

The client cannot be shaken out of that delusion, even while, in practical terms, he sacrifices all alternatives.

The fact underlying this sad situation is that “his girlfriend ” lives in the same city and hasn’t seen him in over a year. She only replies to a few messages. It is a complete fantasy.

My friend wants to slap him and wake him up, but she recognises that he wouldn’t obsess over this delusion if he felt like he had a choice. The alternative, to confront himself, is too terrifying for him. He used to torture baby animals as a child, while under the care of a devouring mother…

As scary and evil as they paint the Israelis, so much worse must be the image of themselves they hold, that they cannot bare to look at. I am glad that competence and such psychological immaturity rarely go together.

I would stop openly being a woman here.

This isn’t a criticism of you, nor a form of substantive agreement with your comments.

It is the way in which people pile in, frothing and screaming buzzword insults, that tells me being openly a woman on Unz probably isn’t worth it.

I exclude Twinkie from this, as he is giving you as good as he gets….

Hat tip to “some guy” for the suggestion.

You are such a repulsive, self-absorbed, narcissist.

Glad this wasn’t written @ me.

Have you ever called or been called “repulsive” in real life?

Aren’t the Palestinians Arab?

The history of the Arabs begins in the mid-ninth century BC, which is the earliest known attestation of the Old Arabic language. The Arabs appear to have been under the vassalage of the Neo-Babylonian Empire; they went from the Arabian Peninsula to Mauritania.[1] Original Arabic tribes originated in what is now Hejaz and Yemen and then spread to levant to establish what is known the Ghassanid and Lakhmid kingdoms, in which they began to appear in the southern Syrian Desert from the mid-third century AD onward, during the mid to later stages of the Roman and Sasanian empires.[2] Tradition holds that Arabs descend from Ishmael, the son of Abraham.[3] The Syrian Desert is the home of the first attested “Arab” groups,[4][5] as well other Arab groups that spread in the land and existed for millennia.[6]

I looked up Barbara Specter. She seems to run a one woman “foundation”, on a shoestring, in Sweden.

It gets a little funding from some rich Swede, because she brands it in a few politically correct buzzword. Its focus is on teaching the odd liberal Jew, online, about their religion.

Why do you know about this complete nobody? It is like she runs a cornershop, has put a Pride sticker on the front window, and has gotten famous for being pro-gay. What a bizarre happenstance!

Yes, this is the case, but you can learn to access parts of yourself other than your anxious thoughts.

People often think they need permission from society, or from “reasons”, to feel pride or indeed, any other emotion, but this is erfect midwittedness.

Rather than beginning with what actually is, the midwit ego strives for inflation by making up a, sometimes reasonable, fantasy, that either justifies themselves or, worse, leads to them pretending to what they’re not.

For practical purposes, you may be right though. A midwit approach will work best for most people, as they will never fully understand what I am alluding to above. Like teaching schoolchildren Newtonian physics.

A dark sense of humour is healthy. It shows that the person can accept the worst in humanity. It is not a sign of sociopathy at all.

Most people who do evil cannot see evil in themselves and so do it repeatedly, because they do it unconsciously.

Amazing that it was just back in 2005 that Peter Tatchell could write this:

There is not a single world-famous black person who is openly gay.

I assume China is also beginning to lose working age population. Given the low and shrinking TFR there, the fall will be precipitous. The EU and other developed countries are in even worse shape in this regards.

Indian consumers will pick up some slack, but I am not optimistic as regards Africa, and nowhere else is growing.

That description perfectly captures the usual dynamic between Rosie and her interlocutors (much as she’d like to retcon her behavior today, she has hurled obscenities at many more commenters than just me

I don’t see her interlocutors being calm and objective, even if I do see them constantly claiming to be

East Asians aren’t as hopeless as Indians at sports, but they aren’t great. Being decent at an obscure one, like Olympic weightlifting in the lower weight categories, is fine, but not that great an argument for 2 billion people!

Also, why are so many categories low weight? Most serious weightlifters, who aren’t really short, must be in the top category…

Also, Iceland, with 300,000 people, is consistently better than China at football, with 5000 times that many. Icelandic people are weird though.

China is still far from a developed country. Its wage suppressing migration can be internal. This means that most immigrants are import/export businessmen. I wonder if it will change as the economic incentives for the richest Chinese change.

I don’t think you read his comment correctly. You seem to be incorrect, even opposite, in your interpretation of it, in a number of ways.

And this is straight up a bad faith argument. “Obscure”? Weightlifting is one of the purest physical attribute sports there is – it literally measures the most weight someone can lift in each weight category.

If you think that me saying Olympic weightlifting is an obscure sport makes for a “bad faith statement”, I cannot have a reasonable conversation with you. I don’t know a single person who could name a single Olympic weightlifter, or recognise them, and most would be unsure if it is even an event. It is absurdly obscure.

I get that this is an extremely emotional issue for you, but your wounding has nothing to do with me.

If you want to continue, you could reformulate your reply to something not hysterical.

You think you give logical and fact-based arguments, but you don’t really. It is all motivated reasoning directed by an unexamined emotional core. Enjoy your mid-life crisis, whenever it hits.

Are you really going to repeat that the idea that Olympic weightlifting is obscure is so absurd that it must be “a bad faith” argument? This was our disagreement, not all of the flapping that you have done after.

Do you also notice how you constantly change the goalposts? How your data doesn’t actually relate to the point? How you tie yourself in knots? How your first response was a hysterical reaction?

Mid-life crisis is coming soon…check back in if you need help.

sad and pathetic

Sorry for you. You’ll be seeing yourself this way over the next couple of years. Don’t worry though, it is all just your own judgement and not true. You’ll eventually be fine.

It’s bad faith, because popularity of the sport in question has little to do with whether the sport measures physical attributes (in this case pure strength) well or not.

This isn’t why you said it was bad faith – you said it was bad faith because it wasn’t obscure.

Nor is it why it being obscure is relevant. My implied point was about the number of people and funding that goes into developing the competitors. You just launched into a emotional reaction and imagined a whole bunch of stuff.

You are not acting like someone it is possible to reasonably disagree with.

In case you need it Twinkie, here is my original post for you to show that you can be reasonable with, and not just launch into a battle with your own demons.

East Asians aren’t as hopeless as Indians at sports, but they aren’t great. Being decent at an obscure one, like Olympic weightlifting in the lower weight categories, is fine, but not that great an argument for 2 billion people!

Also, why are so many categories low weight? Most serious weightlifters, who aren’t really short, must be in the top category…

Also, Iceland, with 300,000 people, is consistently better than China at football, with 5000 times that many. Icelandic people are weird though.

Ok, so you can change course, even if you can’t acknowledge your mistakes or apologise. Good!

Less good that you need to continue to make me your own demon though….

You get a C+!

Such events are great for detecting physical attribute variations among different population groups.

Olympic weightlifting at the lower weight categories is a single data point. It is a very small one too.

Almost no one tries to compete in it. It relies on being short, having a prideful government and probably a lot of scientific chemical assistance. In the huge ocean of competitive sports, it represents a few drops.

There is one, I think, East Asian (out of 2 billion people) world renowned sportsman in my lifetime and I am not even sure he was very good (Yao Ming).

Maybe there are others, but tiny European, Latin American and African countries have more.

Would that one even be famous if he weren’t the sole East Asian who succeeded at a sport anyone cares about?

One world renowned sportsmen from 2 billion people is the data point. Your obsession with Olympic weightlfiting for short people is funny.

Your tone is almost adult now. I’ll upgrade you to a B+.

I appreciate that you think that almost a third of the world’s population is good at sports because they do pretty well at the Olympics. In particular, you are very keen to highlight that East Asians are competitive at short people weightlifting and fighting with Judo.

Your argument restals on these being highly competitive, prestigious and not, in any way, niche. It reminds me of that guy who went on and on about African Scrabble players. Maybe he is right, but colour me unconvinced.

To avoid this picking over scraps, I will settle for you telling me 5 internationally well-known East Asian athletes, just 5, and we will see how that third of the world’s population punches…

You have a number of defence mechanisms against being wrong. Boring autistic download is my least favourite.

Well-known by whom? You? 95% of people who don’t know much about sports beyond what they see on TV occasionally

Yes, because those are the most competitive and well remunerated; hence they are well the best athletes are. Can you name just 5 East Asian world known sportsmen now?

Do you seriously think that their PED use, if any, is more sophisticated and detection-proof than the Russian one? I think that’s unlikely. Their rise and sudden drop of Russians coincided perfectly with much stricter testing at the Olympics.

The Olympics testing can be worked around by any amateur with a brain; nevermind the CCP

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-32983932

I see no way to prevent a resurgence of this absent formal sanctions for promiscuity

You see a way to impose “formal sanctions for promiscuity”?

No thanks

Objectivity is possible. Reality does exist. You’re just entirely incapable of noticing your own emotional impulses, when it comes to politics, so they own your arguments completely.

Nothing is wasted. You had different challenges to overcome and lessons to learn. Probably best you identify what they were and appreciate their gravity, as this kind of easy self-disgust hurts.

Arabs did not exist in that land prior to Mohammed’s conquests.

The Palestinians call themselves Arabs, speak Arabic and look like Arabs. They also worship the main Arabic God. The adopted moniker of “Palestinian” is the only evidence I have that they are not.

So are they? I don’t know.

I never said it meant anything at all. That is your fantasy. As is the rest of your post, which may be entirely invented. I really don’t know and don’t care. I just got confused because Palestinians say they are Arabs and yet Arabs most certainly did not live in the region until much later than it was called that.

You seem to have a very strong narrative in your head about that part of the world? Why is that?

Benny Morris seems to have learned a lesson that all humans could learn. Walking a mile in someone else’s shoes will bring out all sorts of dark truths. We judge what we don’t understand.

I knew a guy from that background, but his father was wealthy. He asked his father for money for various hare-brained business schemes over the years. Eventually the father said, “just write me a business case”. The guy then promptly asked me to write it for him.

I downloaded a template for a simple one and offered to sit with him and write it on a number of occasions. Somehow this never happened. He always seemed to think that I should just write it for him as it would be easy for me. I doubt he got that “investment money” to this day.

Great satire, only you made the barriers to entry too hard. This guy was educated and not totally irresponsible, but a 3 page business case, like the one you would write for a lemonade stand, was too much for him.

Why would the Jews of Israel agree to your plan to “resettle them”, or, just as likely, murder them all?

I am not making a moral judgement against either parts of your plan. I am just wondering if you think that your argument, that their ancestors took some desperate measures in desperate times, will persuade them all to just jump off a cliff?

It seems to me that the Palestinians have lost hard. I don’t see some tremendous moral case to be made for them either, I just see a leadership that has lacked the courage to explain to their people their defeat, and so they continually snatch a worse one from the jaws of peace. I probably wouldn’t have the courage either, but, from Israel’s perspective, they one day will.

This reduces Palestinians to living in a fantasy world, egged on by oddball internet Nazis and other deluded miscreants, who just want to watch the world burn. Let’s all be honest.

The most dementing fact of which, is that they lack the courage to admit to themselves that this is what they want, so they have to engage in endless moralistic Jeremiads and drive themselves ever crazier in the process.

The Jeremiads serve the function of putting their shadow desires for blood and fire into some other force’s hand; sadly such dishonesty hollows out an individual and so I doubt it benefits their personal lives and general sense of feeling, one iota.

Either everyone needs to focus elsewhere and the Israel-Palestinian factions can sort themselves out, or it is 1967+ for Israel and we do the same, or it bleeds on until the Palestinians get an even worse deal. Unless you can find a huge army willing to suffer ridiculous casualties in order to kill millions of Jews, Israel isn’t agreeing to anything less favourable than 1967+; as the current situation is probably preferable to even that.

If your voice matters, where do you want it to weigh in this appraisal of reality? Do you really want what little impact it has to continue to encourage the Palestinians into the jaws of even worse defeat? Does it make you feel good?

Or maybe that is the point, and you just love it all, like people love WWE…

Yes, describing such actions without context is a form of demonisation; and it encourages the least psychologically capable to bring out their own demons in return.

One of the most dangerous aspects of the progressive narrative in the US is how it actively punishes context. Context is “diminishing lived experience “, or some other trash.

Haidt and Lukianoff got it exactly right when they pointed out that progressive talking points nowadays look a lot like the inverse of how you help troubled teens with CBT and DBT. It is a philosophy of personal derangement.

Or like telling a jilted wife to ignore her own actions and instead to obsessively ruminate on her ex-husband’s minor malfeasances.

In all of these cases, you’ll find that the moral judgements and allegations get ever more extreme and the emotional turbulence and unknowing self-destruction more wild.

You can help people trapped in this spiral in a number of ways. You can hold a mirror up to them, even amplify them, and hope they recognise themselves. You can put distance between them and the person/people they have demonised, so that they can eventually reflect. Or you can just help yourself and stay the f*ck away from them. It is therefore a very tricky problem when it is one of domestic politics and mass movements! It is long past time that the media showed progressive behaviour, without judgement or commentary, as it is on the ground at its most voluministic; so everyone, and even they, can see.

I suspect they don’t, because they harbour their own Hitler in the darkest parts of their soul, and subconsciously they fear this apparition will get out if they see too much. Instead, they avoid what will trigger their repressed racism and project it onto ordinary white Americans, thereby encouraging #BLM activists to behave in ways ever more likely to bring out the repressed racism in people. What a mess!

Identitarianism in America is a jewish project.

I was reformulating Jonathan Haidt’s critique of identitarianism. He’s Jewish and it is the one which I find the most compelling. I am therefore unlikely to believe that identitarianism is a “Jewish project”.

talmudic projects in America and around the world have either fallen flat on their face, or showing cracks in the corners and center.

I know a Jewish woman. I asked her if she knew what the Talmud was. She considers herself religious and is extremely intelligent and well-educated, but she told me that she had “a copy”.

I asked to see it. She promptly fetched a thin book, which she thought was “the Talmud”, rather than a tiny primer in English.

I doubt most Jews have any more idea about that millenia long commentary on the Old Testament than the ordinary Christian does about St Augustine of Hippo’s voluminous tracts!

The most evil book pretending to be a religion that was ever writ.

I am informed by Unz.com that some Rabbi, a thousand years ago, wrote some unpleasant things about his Christian neighbours. I believe that everything in the Talmud can be argued against, as it is merely a collective commentary, and I notice that Jews argue against similarly medieval statements quite a lot. I don’t see the big deal.

Personally I’m all for adopting it, since it would make more people realize just how much of the earth these poor little Third World people actually control. Latin America is literally twice as large as the United States. Africa is almost exactly three times as large as Europe. They already control all of that territory, and now they want to take what we have.

I’m pretty sure that the Congo has just as many amazing cities, cultural creations and vibrancy as Western Europe, which it is almost the size of. We just don’t teach about it in schools because we’re racist.

I find your post indistinguishable from that of someone having a mental breakdown. Need I say more?

Do you appreciate that this theory has no more evidence for it than a handful of inevitable coincidences?

I say “inevitable ” because with any event of this size, there will be many seemingly coincidental occurrences, and these ones are very minor.

To take an example, you make a big deal out of the military games taking place in Wuhan, very vaguely, at the time which Covid-19 got started; but China is not North Korea, and US citizens go to China, and Wuhan, all of the time.

It is extremely easy to visit China and be anonymous when doing so. If anything, the rough coincidence, of the US military-affiliated athletes being there, argues against US seeding.

You only need one person to seed a virus and that person could have gone there whenever. They would have therefore chosen any other time.

A much more obvious coincidence is Covid appearing in the same city as the Chinese lab that would be most likely to have developed it.

Now you might argue that this is why the US seeded it there, but the US did not set the location of the military games, so that would defeat your previous coincidence.

Ultimately, this is all just internet fantasy, but, clearly, a virus which the Chinese were well-equipped to deal with, originating in the same city as the lab which they would develop it in, and which, in every country, has least affected people of East Asian genetic descent, would more obviously be a Chinese lab leak than anything else artifical.

Perhaps you too appreciate Milton references? There’s a scene similar to what you describe.

Honestly, though, my handle is from media far lower brow.

I wrote the following reply because I misread you as accusing me of demonisation and failing to provide context. I’ll post it as written, since it contains a couple of points I wanted to make anyway and I can’t be bothered rewriting it:

Makes sense. Sorry for the confusion.

certain facts should be brought out into the light.

I don’t know what should be done, really about anything at all. I barely know what I should do this afternoon!

I am also not sure if those facts are particularly obscured. 1948 was a long time ago. The existence of intercommunal violence, in a small scale conflict, way back when, need not be obscured to be ignored.

I do agree though that European countries could benefit from a strong dose of realism, and that this could help.

When you have moral pedants, unable to even enforce their own borders, because enforcement looks like it always does, you will probably suffer the consequences.

Maybe an almost random approach to who can enter your country is best, but it seems extremely unlikely. All reason says that a strongly discriminatory regime would produce far better results.

This is what I do for my friends, employees and romantic partners; but maybe I am doing it wrong and I should follow the progressive immigration line and just go with whomever turns up?

The US exited WW2 in glory and global power. I can see how ordinary Americans think it was worth it. Buchanan faced an unenviable task.

Similarly, the other wars appear to be as popular as it is likely that the respondees perceive the US to have won them. I suspect that the natural buzz around those, rather than victory per se, determines popular attitudes to them, especially the further back in the past they are.

Where did I do that?

Pride, self-esteem, validation, they are all things which some people need, but that need is a warning sign. The bigger it is, the bigger the warning sign too.

If someone needs to be celebrated by society for the sex they choose to sleep with, or told they are wonderful because of the colour of their skin, or fed stories of oppression, so that they can be mediocre, yet consider themselves superior, then that is OK, even if it discourages them from self-reflection. Not everyone has the courage right now, or resilience.

My concern is that accompanying those participation medals, with actual power, is like trying to quench a fire, by pouring on gasoline.

Perhaps my concern is wrong, but then murders would have gone down after Floyd’s death set off another black self-esteem and empowerment year; instead, they exploded.

Several recent mea culpa’s for criticizing Israel have made the news as has also the virtual crucifixion of a congresswoman for her citation of the holocaust.

What is a “virtual crucifixion”?

You have no idea what is coming.

What is coming? And how do you know about it?

“Transhumanism” as merely the tag, applied to the coming links, of a long chain of human technological progress, stretching back thousands of years, is a useful conceptualisation. It makes things clearer. Thank you AK.

It renders nationalists, who oppose it, like the Japanese of the Sakoku period. They would fix their nations in time, thereby rendering them vulnerable to obsolescence in the future.

This is interesting, because most philosophical nationalists seem to consider their nation like a person, or an organic entity; which makes their dislike, of a nation’s self-directed growth, equivalent to a fat diabetic who refuses to lose weight, as it would be change, and “change is a self-betrayal.”

Nationalists can choose this path, but, like the diabetic, their nations will suffer the consequences.

Nah. Potato wasnt a significant factor – potatoes are about as nutritious as rice and just as easy to grow and as ubiquitous. So why did Asia not become Europe and industrialize? Because it did not plunder the wealth and manpower of other peoples

I can see how inventing all of the amazing technology that Europeans invented, would help to plunder the wealth of peoples. I cannot see how it would work the other way around though.

Can you explain how you see a pile of silver turning into the agricultural revolution for me, as an example?

This is important because it was obviously technology that drove European industrialisation, not something like slavery. As we can see from low labour cost nations, slavery is a strong disincentive for industrialisation; while technology is the requisite.

You make a distinction between “innovation ” and “invention” that is without a difference.

You also seem to have a limited understanding of the technological progress involved in industrialisation. The avalanche of European invention was exceptional.

You later offer a narrative whereby silver and cheap, or free, labour leads to automation, because “it freed up labour”, but that makes no sense.

Slavery clearly disincentivises automation and the inventors who drove automation, during industrialisation, were not peasants liberated from the plough.

In fact, the entrepreneurial spirit, that was engaged in exploring the world for silver and negotiating deals with African Chiefs for their captured enemies, before they were ritually executed, is exactly that which would have sped up industrialisation were it not, instead, diverted to the short-term gains of imperialism.

Necessity is the mother of all invention and free labour and mountains of silver greatly reduced the necessity for technological progress, even as technological progress made it greatly easier to acquire free labour and mountains of silver.

It wasn’t only physical technology either, but also social innovation that drove industrialisation and allowed colonisation. The roots of this all go back a long way, as shown in the following two paragraphs:

As early as the 12th century, some fields in England tilled under the open field system were enclosed into individually owned fields. The Black Death from 1348 onward accelerated the break-up of the feudal system in England. Many farms were bought by yeomen who enclosed their property and improved their use of the land. More secure control of the land allowed the owners to make innovations that improved their yields. Other husbandmen rented property they “share cropped” with the land owners. Many of these enclosures were accomplished by acts of Parliament in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The process of enclosing property accelerated in the 15th and 16th centuries. The more productive enclosed farms meant that fewer farmers were needed to work the same land, leaving many villagers without land and grazing rights. Many of them moved to the cities in search of work in the emerging factories of the Industrial Revolution. Others settled in the English Colonies.

I assume your Unz persona is just a LARP but, if it is authentic, maybe ask your parents to openly say why your daughter is happy to speak with them and not you?

Even if she is motivated by greed and religious hatred, as you seem to be implying, she will have other sincere reasons, that you might want to consider.

Again, if not a LARP, your comments fill me with doubt that you have taken responsibility, rather than just finding fault in others.

The latest argument for a Chinese biolab leak is compelling.

Wuhan is the location of the world’s number one lab for gain of function research for bat coronaviruses.

Covid-19 looks like a bat coronavirus that has gone through gain of function research. It could have emerged in nature, but that would be astonishing.

It would be even more astonishing for it to emerge in the one city in the world where such viruses would most likely be artificially created. The bat virus caves are a long way away.

Were it Americans, I would imagine they’d pick any time except the international military games. Not just for the suspicion, but also because it would greatly increase the probability of international blowback.

I cannot verify the above points, but I can say that if they are verified by credible experts, I think it is highly probable that the Wuhan lab caused this.

Thanks for adding evidence to my observations. I agree that China was more advanced agriculturally than Europe in 1100. Europe then rose and rose with phenomena like the Rennaisance.

I could help you. I am extremely talented at understanding the depths of other people. I would also gain knowledge useful to me from such an interaction, so you would be helping me out in turn. I understand that being shown what is where in you, could appear to be a scary proposition, but it is probably time that you gained some clarity on this, no?

I did some reading:

This is how a Jew felt about the Talmud, before “falling in love with it” for the same reasons she was disappointed.

She was profoundly disappointed. Unlike the lofty, magisterial prose of the Torah, she found the Talmud to have “all the imperfections, the trivialities, the multiplicity of voices, the wild associations – everything that characterises human conversation.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24367959

It sounds fun and free-spirited, but hardly the type of text you can selectively quote from and still say anything useful about a religion.

Amusingly, Unz.com seems to be set up as the Talmud to Ron Unz’s American Pravda series.