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Happy New Year.
I wanted to mention that, without explanation, Twitter unlocked my account last Tuesday morning, three days earlier than stated.
I wanted to thank everybody who tweeted to Elon Musk to complain.
I see that Elon Musk’s net worth has dropped $200 billion. He’s a vastly better and faster decision-maker than I am. But I’d find Twitter to be a lot of bother, and I suspect he’d be better off with a trusted CEO to run Twitter for him so he isn’t asked to worry about petty issues like this.
Thanks to you all for your support.
Here are ten ways for you to help me carry on:
First: Most banks now allow fee-free money transfers via Zelle.
Zelle is really a good system: easy to use and the fees are nonexistent.
If you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay/Zelle. Just tell WF SurePay/Zelle to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrAT aol.com — replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.) Please note, there is no 2.9% fee like with Paypal or Google Wallet, so this is good for large contributions.
Zelle contributions are not tax deductible.
Second: if you have a Chase bank account (or even other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay/Zelle (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay/Zelle to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com — replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it’s StevenSailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.) There is no 2.9% fee like with Paypal or Google Wallet, so this is also good for large contributions.
Third, Zelle might work with other banks too. Here’s a Zelle link for CitiBank. And Bank of America.
Fourth: You can use Paypal (non-tax deductible) by going to the page on my old blog here. Paypal accepts most credit cards. Contributions can be either one-time only, monthly, or annual. (Monthly is nice.)
Fifth: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:
Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91617
I have no idea why somebody carefully hung this empty picture frame from a tree alongside the Fryman Canyon hiking trail, but I appreciate it, like I appreciate your support.
Sixth: You can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here.
Please don’t forget to click my name at the VDARE site so the money goes to me: first, click on “Earmark your donation,” then click on “Steve Sailer:”
This is not to say that you shouldn’t click on John’s fund too, but, please, make sure there’s a blue dot next to my name.
VDARE has been kiboshed from use of Paypal for being, I dunno, EVIL. But you can give via credit cards, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin, check, money order, or stock.
Note: the VDARE site goes up and down on its own schedule, so if this link stops working, please let me know.
Seventh: send money via the Paypal-like Google Wallet to my Gmail address (that’s isteveslrATgmail .com — replace the AT with a @). (Non-tax deductible.)
Eight: You can send me Bitcoin. Bitcoin payments are not tax deductible.
Here’s my Bitcoin address:
1EkuvRNR86uJzpopquxdnmF23iA3vzdDuc
Here’s the OCR
Please let me know if this works, ideally by sending me Bitcoin. Or let me know what else you’d like to send me.
If you’re sending to a crypto address that belongs to another Coinbase user who has opted into Instant sends in their privacy settings, you can send your funds instantly to them with no transaction fees. This transaction will not be sent on chain, and is similar to sending to an email address.
Learn more about sending and receiving crypto.
Send off-chain funds
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at the bottom
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Computer
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Sign into Coinbase.com
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Click Send at the top right
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Click your selected asset and enter the amount of crypto you’d like to send
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Enter the Receiver’s crypto address or scan their crypto QR code to see if the address belongs to a Coinbase user
Obsolete: Below are links to two Coinbase pages of mine. But these don’t work anymore. I will try to fix them. This first is if you want to enter a U.S. dollar-denominated amount to pay me.
Pay With Bitcoin (denominated in U.S. Dollars)
This second is if you want to enter a Bitcoin-denominated amount. (Remember one Bitcoin is currently worth many U.S. dollars.)
Pay With Bitcoin (denominated in Bitcoins)
▲▼Ninth: I added Square [which is now Block] as a fundraising medium, although I’m vague on how it works. If you want to use Square, send me an email telling me how much to send you an invoice for. Or, if you know an easier way for us to use Square, please let me know.
Tenth: Venmo: https://account.venmo.com/u/SteveSailer
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Congrats, Steve. Keep givin em hell.
So you’ll leave until Musk demonstrates that he has some vague idea of the American conception of freedom of speech and not, say, the French?
——-
Oh, right, it’s new year’s. In Detroit we stay away from the windows. I happen to think that almost nothing justifies gun grabbing and every cop who participates in a red flag swat should die, but I do think that every single moron who celebrates new year’s with what is, legally speaking, a “negligent discharge,” should have his guns grabbed. Have a proper range with proper stoppage behind the targets and kill tyrants in effigy = cool. Blast into the air like the bullets just continue harmlessly into space = you forfeit your rights.
Reminds us that it's hard to have a regulation free world, such a world depending on individuals acknowledging the importance of social peace and all that.
Looking forward to “One Day in the Life of Steve Sailerovitch”.
Elon has said he’s a believer in the Pareto principle. If you believe in that, making organizational decisions becomes far easier, faster, and more accurate.
Applying that principle makes organizing twitter for efficiency and administrating aimless narcissists as easy as shooting retarded ducks.
He’s probably having a great time. He must laugh every flipping day. Acting like a junior high vice principal with grown ass adults who behave like 14 year old mean girls, and rerouting the course of their silly, desperate online lives when he sees fit. In his spare time!
What a fun job!!
If it's taught him nothing else wading through the Twitter cesspool will surely have taught Musk that.
Who to appoint as CEO?
Caesars Wife is tough to find now-a-days.Replies: @PhysicistDave
It was kinda neat when UNZ showed your tweets on the side.
Man, oh, man, if you are still rattling the tin cup this late on December 31, your cupboards must be bare.
Well, hopefully his motivates someone to pony up. Happy New Year 2023!
Do you have any views on the Middle East and whether there will be a war between the US and Iran?
According to Haaretz
There is no way Israel will be able to bomb Iran alone and destroy the Iran nuclear program. They need the US to do most of the fighting.
Even though Iran is thrown off balance by the street protests and foreign supplied Kurdish separatists attacking Iranian security forces, Iran has gained in ability to defend its skies because Russia will deliver air defense systems and fighter planes as part of the new Russia-Iran alliance. Iran also has proxies surrounding Israel capable of firing rockets on Israel. 2023 will be a bad year to start the war because Democrats will get hurt in the election in 2024. Ideal time for war is the winter of 2025 during the post-election protests/riots throughout the country.
In other words, a DeSantis victory?Replies: @HammerJack, @anonymous
Why on earth aren’t you on Substack yet?
You shouldn’t need to panhandle like this. Guys like Ed West have 11,000 paid subscribers paying, what, $5-10 a month? You’re much more famous and more read than Ed—and I don’t mean that as a slight toward him; I consider him second only to you in terms of being compulsory reading on the intellectual right.
I would certainly get a paid subscription for your Substack and I feel like you’re being very boomerish and behind the times on this.
Congratulations on your reprieve.
Now, back to work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0sKalTgzPsReplies: @Inquiring Mind
Let out of Twitter Gulag early? That explains your large number of regime-propaganda posts about Ukraine recently.
If he actually cared about justice for white American citizens, he wouldn't carry on in this way. In fact, I cannot think of a single Alt-Right personality who earnestly works towards reform in a realistic way. They are having too much fun being the gadflies of the regime, but of course this makes them utterly dependent upon the regime they pretend to oppose.Replies: @Colin Wright, @puttheforkdown, @Pat Hannagan
Well, hopefully his motivates someone to pony up. Happy New Year 2023!Replies: @AndrewR
I assume the government is paying him to shill for US policy in Ukraine.
Xi Jinping however, had his plane escorted by Saudi Jets- I thought I counted seven, and upon landing was welcomed by a cannonade and a flypast of planes painting the sky in the colors of the Chinese flag. The Saudi King went to the airport to greet him; The king an old and infirm man who walks with a cane, not MBS. The three day visit mapped out the energy future for the World, the future of the Petro-Yuan and the death of the Dollar.
Who knew that demonizing as a murderer the most influential player in the commodity that props up one’s hegemony and sending carny barkers like Blinken to upbraid him for insufficiently celebrating sodomy would have consequences?Putin meanwhile commenced his second death of the year from cancer in all three lungs.Replies: @Dmon, @HammerJack
Steve's been pretty consistent on the war thing. Our wars, now Russia's war. "Let's skip it."
My take is as I've matured into an old man with more knowledge of history and watching the destruction wrought in the West today is "imperialism sucks". It made sense for Euros to go out exploring looking for pepper so their food didn't suck so bad. And there were some flat out wins like relatively underpopulated land to conquer/settle in the Americas and Australia.
But we really ought to have had the brains to realize nationalism makes more sense--separate people's separate nations--and wind the whole imperial nonsense up before the 1914 debacle. The 20th century was a golden age of white people's inventiveness, yet a debacle for us in terms of genetics and our nations, our future.
It's the people pimping Putin's old style Russian imperialism as some sort of great white hope who are confused, not Steve.Replies: @AndrewR, @Jack D, @PhysicistDave
Just imagine his poor old put upon mrs every year about this time: "For fuck's sake, Steve, you keep posting your absolute grovelling idiotic factless feelings about a country you've never given 2 seconds of thought at any time in our 60 years of marriage yet you can't think to at least get paid for it by the the Biden administration or at least put your name in with the FBI and CIA for kickbacks?!"
Have you noticed I'm still cooking our meals with Bakelite? We're so far beyond teflon we've been through it and back that now carbon steel is the go to kitchen pan! And it's like 10 times better than stonelike teflon which is about 1000 times better than bakelite! The entire baking industry has shown way more advancement than your idiot space agency and your infatuation with that obviously flat out lie, at least pan handle me a new cookware set this Christmas or you can camp out and cook your own in the clothes cupboard for the entire 12 days of Christmas, possibly extending into the duration of Lent!"
Good on ya Andrew R, you and BB73, may God hold you both in the palm of His hand in 2023 (and you too Duncsbaby).
As for you, Steve: FFs mate at least get some money from the government for posting their line. In any case, you're a good bloke, all the best in 2023, here's to you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yhd_qhIr2g
Steve why don’t you sell blown up photos of yourself like this that can be framed. Or sell framed blown up photos of yourself? To raise funds.
True that but it must be fun making people say “happy things”:
Applying that principle makes organizing twitter for efficiency and administrating aimless narcissists as easy as shooting retarded ducks.
He’s probably having a great time. He must laugh every flipping day. Acting like a junior high vice principal with grown ass adults who behave like 14 year old mean girls, and rerouting the course of their silly, desperate online lives when he sees fit. In his spare time!
What a fun job!!Replies: @Bill Jones
An old adage… or did I just make it up? growing old sucks… says that Personnel is Policy.
If it’s taught him nothing else wading through the Twitter cesspool will surely have taught Musk that.
Who to appoint as CEO?
Caesars Wife is tough to find now-a-days.
-------
Oh, right, it's new year's. In Detroit we stay away from the windows. I happen to think that almost nothing justifies gun grabbing and every cop who participates in a red flag swat should die, but I do think that every single moron who celebrates new year's with what is, legally speaking, a "negligent discharge," should have his guns grabbed. Have a proper range with proper stoppage behind the targets and kill tyrants in effigy = cool. Blast into the air like the bullets just continue harmlessly into space = you forfeit your rights.Replies: @bomag
Agree.
Reminds us that it’s hard to have a regulation free world, such a world depending on individuals acknowledging the importance of social peace and all that.
I don’t know if it helped, but I sent a tweet on your behalf.
I like to check Twitter for news, but otherwise, it’s a cesspool of hyperbole, and I generally feel angry after going through my feed. I should just give it up.
In ten years time the big event of 2022 will not be Russia coming to the aid of the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics against the Ukrainian aggression that started in 2014, it will be the visit of China’s Xi to Saudi Arabia.
Recall that just a few weeks before Biden, or what passes as Biden, had arrived in Riyadh to beg for more oil, got an Uber from the airport and was greeted by a fist bump. His two hour meeting was attended by several other characters, none of any note, before he was told to piss off home empty handed.
Xi Jinping however, had his plane escorted by Saudi Jets- I thought I counted seven, and upon landing was welcomed by a cannonade and a flypast of planes painting the sky in the colors of the Chinese flag. The Saudi King went to the airport to greet him; The king an old and infirm man who walks with a cane, not MBS. The three day visit mapped out the energy future for the World, the future of the Petro-Yuan and the death of the Dollar.
Who knew that demonizing as a murderer the most influential player in the commodity that props up one’s hegemony and sending carny barkers like Blinken to upbraid him for insufficiently celebrating sodomy would have consequences?
Putin meanwhile commenced his second death of the year from cancer in all three lungs.
Riding shotgun in the sky
Turning into butterflies
Above our nation
You shouldn’t need to panhandle like this. Guys like Ed West have 11,000 paid subscribers paying, what, $5-10 a month? You’re much more famous and more read than Ed—and I don’t mean that as a slight toward him; I consider him second only to you in terms of being compulsory reading on the intellectual right.
I would certainly get a paid subscription for your Substack and I feel like you’re being very boomerish and behind the times on this.Replies: @PiltdownMan, @Harry Baldwin, @Yahya, @Peterike
Mr. Sailer might not have as much freedom on Subtrack as he does here, even if it is a (pay)walled garden for writers and their followers.
Now, back to work.
https://youtu.be/IChJkgzWrJIReplies: @PiltdownMan
I have a hunch that this is the version that’s Mr. Sailer’s soundtrack.
If Twitter denied you enough food, that in itself is a war crime, and the Hague Tribunal should be notified.
In the future, I wonder if Establishment intellectuals will just use A.I.-generated apologetics for published output as directed to by the same Establishment?
The A.I.-“chatbot” examples that I’ve seen and have been told about are pretty jarring.
I also wonder if A.I. operatives will troll comment sections with perfectly sly demoralizing responses to any notions they are directed to not allow conversations to take?
According to HaaretzThere is no way Israel will be able to bomb Iran alone and destroy the Iran nuclear program. They need the US to do most of the fighting.Even though Iran is thrown off balance by the street protests and foreign supplied Kurdish separatists attacking Iranian security forces, Iran has gained in ability to defend its skies because Russia will deliver air defense systems and fighter planes as part of the new Russia-Iran alliance. Iran also has proxies surrounding Israel capable of firing rockets on Israel. 2023 will be a bad year to start the war because Democrats will get hurt in the election in 2024. Ideal time for war is the winter of 2025 during the post-election protests/riots throughout the country.Replies: @Prester John
“…the winter of 2025 the post-election protests/riots throughout the country.”
In other words, a DeSantis victory?
you’ll still delete comments that hurt your feelings.
while commenter ha (the guy you say is the most objective guy here) gets comments where he talks about grooming the underage children of other commenters instantly approved.
Steve Sailer considers himself to be a jus sanguinis member of the mainstream punditry class, and he is. He accepts himself as such and is accepted as such by them. The whole idea that he has been ostracized for his controversial views is a shtick he carries on which is composed of equal parts kayfabe, cope, and stylistic exigency. Kayfabe, because the controversy keeps his base engaged; cope over the fact that he isn’t more successful, which has to do largely with his own personality and not his positions; and stylistic exigency due to his habit of generating content by needling other journalists and academics with impish tweets and dishing on their responses. In this last matter he reveals himself as something of a parasite to his own class. He is the George Wickham of the ink-spillers.
If he actually cared about justice for white American citizens, he wouldn’t carry on in this way. In fact, I cannot think of a single Alt-Right personality who earnestly works towards reform in a realistic way. They are having too much fun being the gadflies of the regime, but of course this makes them utterly dependent upon the regime they pretend to oppose.
The way I'd put this is we all (and around where I live, it is close to 'all') agree that the current regime is intolerable. I mean regime in the larger sense of the whole government-media-academia-imposed paradigm.
Great. What we tend to overlook is that we all have very different visions of the Good Life to Come. I don't feel any need to unconditionally ban all abortion or to ferret out every closeted homosexual school teacher. Others probably don't think we should immediately sever all ties with Israel and impose an embargo on it. And so on. Eighty percent of us may agree Kamala Harris should be put to death in some peculiarly humiliating way. But the day after?
The agendas differ.
From this much strife may flow.Replies: @Mark G., @kaganovitch, @PhysicistDave, @Mike Tre, @Veteran Aryan
OK, now behave and repeat after us: “It’s a good life. It’s a good life!”
You shouldn’t need to panhandle like this. Guys like Ed West have 11,000 paid subscribers paying, what, $5-10 a month? You’re much more famous and more read than Ed—and I don’t mean that as a slight toward him; I consider him second only to you in terms of being compulsory reading on the intellectual right.
I would certainly get a paid subscription for your Substack and I feel like you’re being very boomerish and behind the times on this.Replies: @PiltdownMan, @Harry Baldwin, @Yahya, @Peterike
If Steve moved over to Substack, would Tiny Duck/Ebony Obelisk and Corvinus pony up $5 a month to continue to annoy everyone? Perhaps we could all chip in to cover their subscription costs, as so many people here clearly enjoy arguing with them.
This is a strange sort of assumption. I have noticed that Putinists always assume that anyone who believes something different from what they believe is some sort of paid shill, Fed, hasbara, etc. They can’t conceive that anyone could have sincere beliefs that are different from theirs.
I assume that most of the Putin shills aren’t being paid but are doing it anyway. Cognitive dissonance theory says that, pardoxically, the people who are NOT getting paid will be more invested in their task. If you are getting paid, you just go thru the motions whereas volunteers are true believers.
Also if Steve was getting paid by the government, why would he be shilling for nickels and dimes?
Or maybe you know this and are just trying to discourage people from contributing?
Such as your county.
Btw, how many Russians died fighting Nazis in WWII?Replies: @JimDandy
My position across a range of issues is influenced by my libertarian instincts. It could just be those on the other side on those two issues and others have strong authoritarian instincts. Them not believing that getting vaccinated should be voluntary and them not believing that donating money to the Ukrainian cause should be voluntary are therefore perfectly consistent. So, I tend to agree with you that positions being picked are in some cases based on belief systems and not due just to being on someone's payroll.
I guess I wasn’t aware you had been banished from Old Twitter but it is good that you are now free to comment there. I’m sure you mentioned it previously but such tidbits are not surprising or very memorable.
I wonder if you can post to “Mastodon” now? Or if you bother? I’ve never gone there but I hear that the voluntary exiles from Musk Twitter have gathered there. A real Comrade picnic, so I read. Lot’s of efforts to ban, ostracize, censor, etc. many of the minor deviationists there.
At least Mr. Unz has given you a popular outlet here, along with many other BadThink authors.
If it weren’t for your work and that of commentators and others here, many truths and facts would be veiled under the label of “unacceptable.”
Klown World retreats, slowly, only one step at a time…
If one wished to be generous to Musk it might be supposed that there's a horde of undead zombie algorithms yet to be staked wandering the mazes of code and Steve was a victim of these. Alternately Musk did it to him and then chickened out.
You shouldn’t need to panhandle like this. Guys like Ed West have 11,000 paid subscribers paying, what, $5-10 a month? You’re much more famous and more read than Ed—and I don’t mean that as a slight toward him; I consider him second only to you in terms of being compulsory reading on the intellectual right.
I would certainly get a paid subscription for your Substack and I feel like you’re being very boomerish and behind the times on this.Replies: @PiltdownMan, @Harry Baldwin, @Yahya, @Peterike
The famed Sailer commenteriat will pretty much die if he moves to Substack. The commenting system there sucks!
I wonder if you can post to "Mastodon" now? Or if you bother? I've never gone there but I hear that the voluntary exiles from Musk Twitter have gathered there. A real Comrade picnic, so I read. Lot's of efforts to ban, ostracize, censor, etc. many of the minor deviationists there.
At least Mr. Unz has given you a popular outlet here, along with many other BadThink authors.
If it weren't for your work and that of commentators and others here, many truths and facts would be veiled under the label of "unacceptable."
Klown World retreats, slowly, only one step at a time...Replies: @Bill Jones
I believe Steve was a legacy Banned (It’s now a Noun) who was unbanned in the first post-Musk wave and then managed to get himself ununbanned by hinting that perhaps all humanity wasn’t a blank slate and perhaps there is something in this gene thing.
If one wished to be generous to Musk it might be supposed that there’s a horde of undead zombie algorithms yet to be staked wandering the mazes of code and Steve was a victim of these. Alternately Musk did it to him and then chickened out.
Sláva Ukrayíni!
Objective and concise summary.
Xi Jinping however, had his plane escorted by Saudi Jets- I thought I counted seven, and upon landing was welcomed by a cannonade and a flypast of planes painting the sky in the colors of the Chinese flag. The Saudi King went to the airport to greet him; The king an old and infirm man who walks with a cane, not MBS. The three day visit mapped out the energy future for the World, the future of the Petro-Yuan and the death of the Dollar.
Who knew that demonizing as a murderer the most influential player in the commodity that props up one’s hegemony and sending carny barkers like Blinken to upbraid him for insufficiently celebrating sodomy would have consequences?Putin meanwhile commenced his second death of the year from cancer in all three lungs.Replies: @Dmon, @HammerJack
Agree. Once the petrodollar is gone, the best case for the US would be a relatively slow Britian-like slide into insignificance and penury, accompanied by replacement of the population with ethnicities more appropriate to its’ newfound 3rd world status. The scary thing is the worst case. The Deep State/Neocon Kontrol Klass is all in on this – they know what is at stake and they cannot under any circumstances let the US go down to a level where the curtain might be pulled back. I have no doubt that they have wargamed WWIII, and would be willing to let it fly as long as their luxury suite in the bunker is reserved.
The North American continent still has enormous, almost unfathomable natural resources that could be developed in a much less wasteful manner. Like Russia today, it is one of the few countries on Earth that has the capacity to be genuinely autarkic if it wanted to be. The best-case scenario would be to build a relatively closed, regional economy once we are freed from the encumbrances of the global reserve currency and a globally oriented political class. A Tokugawa America, thickly populated with yeomanry and small townsmen, would be a cozy and reasonably contented place and would be sustainable from now until basically the end of time, and I think this is much closer to the vision that obtained at its original founding. This is the end that I hope for and work towards, and I think it should be the goal of every dissident.Replies: @kaganovitch, @The Germ Theory of Disease, @Dmon
Or maybe Steve thinks war–especially unnecessary war!–and imperialism is stupid and destructive?
Steve’s been pretty consistent on the war thing. Our wars, now Russia’s war. “Let’s skip it.”
My take is as I’ve matured into an old man with more knowledge of history and watching the destruction wrought in the West today is “imperialism sucks”. It made sense for Euros to go out exploring looking for pepper so their food didn’t suck so bad. And there were some flat out wins like relatively underpopulated land to conquer/settle in the Americas and Australia.
But we really ought to have had the brains to realize nationalism makes more sense–separate people’s separate nations–and wind the whole imperial nonsense up before the 1914 debacle. The 20th century was a golden age of white people’s inventiveness, yet a debacle for us in terms of genetics and our nations, our future.
It’s the people pimping Putin’s old style Russian imperialism as some sort of great white hope who are confused, not Steve.
It was US imperialism, not Russian imperialism, that deprived them of the government that they had democratically elected.
And, when they chose not to join the new illegal puppet regime established in Kiev, it was the US that armed that puppet regime and egged it on in its murderously imperialist actions against the Donbass.
Facts matter.
No one here is advocating that we supply subsidies or weapons to Putin.
The issue is whether we should stop handing over American taxpayer dollars and weapons to the puppet regime in Kiev.
We simply need to end US imperialism in Eastern Europe and all around the world.
Seriously: try counting up all the countries all across the planet in the last seventy years that the US has attacked, invaded, conquered, or bombed. You will lose count.
Do the same for Russia. It is much, much fewer, and almost all are close to Russia, not half-way around the world.
The US government is the primary threat to world peace today.
Facts matter.
AD also wrote:Alas, as an old man, you cannot see the truth about the main imperialist power on the planet today.
As a young man, you were trained to applaud like a trained seal whatever atrocities the US government committed. I know: I was raised with that propaganda, too.
But you cannot escape that youthful conditioning.
Which is sad.
A simple question I think I may have asked you before without you answering:
Are you willing to condemn the sexual mutilation of children who are confused about their gender?
Or does your conditioning prevent you from answering that question?Replies: @AndrewR, @Mike Tre
This is a fun way to start off the year– though the man is still a subject of His Majesty:
DA Chisholm of Milwaukee County has never taken a cent from George Soros. He just does the Big Man’s will from the bottom of his heart– such as releasing Darrell Brooks on low bail. Saves the donor money, to direct elsewhere.
Such as your county.
Steve's been pretty consistent on the war thing. Our wars, now Russia's war. "Let's skip it."
My take is as I've matured into an old man with more knowledge of history and watching the destruction wrought in the West today is "imperialism sucks". It made sense for Euros to go out exploring looking for pepper so their food didn't suck so bad. And there were some flat out wins like relatively underpopulated land to conquer/settle in the Americas and Australia.
But we really ought to have had the brains to realize nationalism makes more sense--separate people's separate nations--and wind the whole imperial nonsense up before the 1914 debacle. The 20th century was a golden age of white people's inventiveness, yet a debacle for us in terms of genetics and our nations, our future.
It's the people pimping Putin's old style Russian imperialism as some sort of great white hope who are confused, not Steve.Replies: @AndrewR, @Jack D, @PhysicistDave
Who called Russia the “great white hope”? Maybe some low IQ clowns have but no serious person has done so. It really doesn’t seem like a nice place to live (relative to most of the US), and no one really expects them to “save” us, whatever that means. But they can be a useful ally against the American regime, which is the enemy of almost all Americans and indeed of humanity. And it was the US/UK regime along with their “allies” who instigated this war. Russia was backed into a corner and is making a huge gamble to do this. In total contrast, the US had no vital interest in this war but many in the elite class are profiting from it. And that’s all before we get into American history – which overwhelmingly shows the US has no moral right to take Ukraine’s side* in this war – or into basic geopolitical realities.
*Unlike certain NPCs, I think it’s far from certain that the US/UK/Zelenskyyy regimes’ policies are actually good for the Ukrainian people (assuming anyone outside of Ukraine actually cares about them except as a means of moral preening and harming Russia), so I’m wary to even say the US is “on Ukraine’s side” here.
I think the formulation that everyone is sensing, but which is seldom yet uttered explicitly, is not that Russia is going to save us, but that the Russian example is something that dissidents in the West need to emulate. Russia actually did what we must do and ought to be doing. Both friend and foe alike can feel this coming. Both state-sponsored phonies like Jack D and people who really care about the future of our countries, like presumably you and I do; and this is what forms the subtext of the entire discussion.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia started from a very low base and seemed all but totally defeated. But Russia did not give up. Russia found its voice and found a champion in Vladimir Putin. Gradually, they rebuilt beneficial coalitions with the surrounding peoples of the ex-Soviet empire. They brought the oligarchs under control and stopped the economic vivisection of Russian resources. They developed an entirely different approach to economics which was not dependent on financial shenanigans or monetary theory of any kind, but on actual commodities and energy and industrial production---and it worked. Most incredibly, Russia proved itself a good-faith actor to peoples all over the world by evincing a profound respect for law, treaties, agreements, concordances, even when others did not. It handles international relations in a way that is emphatically moral and respectful.
Dissidents in the West have also been all but totally defeated by Wokism. We are lacking a man of Putin's capabilities but we once almost had a champion in Donald Trump. That political energy can be kindled again with better candidates; we must never forget that there was something good in the core of Trumpism notwithstanding his personal shortcomings. We need to focus on economics and getting our own oligarchs reined in. These big corporations and their unholy alliance with the federal bureaucracy are the beating heart of the Left from whence all Wokism flows. Compared with this, mere racial issues are a sideshow, or at best one head of the hydra. We need to develop economic independence by getting out of debt, establishing ownership of resources, and carrying on mutually beneficial trades outside of the official monetary system. We, too, need to live our lives in a way that is high-minded, moral, fair, just and irreproachable before God and man so that people will be drawn to our example.
Russia is now a beacon for everyone in the world who wants to live a free, fair, and dignified life. Russia neither can nor should fight our battles for us, but it should inspire us to fight on.
I haven’t been following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter particularly closely. By all accounts, it appears to be going fairly disastrously for him so far. But I wouldn’t count him out just yet. I recently read Ashlee Vance’s entertaining biography of him, and Tesla, SpaceX, and (to a lesser extent) PayPal all had long periods where they seemed to be on the brink of failure. Musk stubbornly persisted to, years later, hundreds of billions of dollars.
With that said, I get the sense that Musk knows more about science and technology than people and politics. So Twitter, a social network, might not be the best fit for his talents. (Of course, a general irony of modern life, noted in e.g. The Social Network, is that Aspergery Silicon Valley nerds have managed to create computerized forms of social interaction that appeal immensely to airheaded teenage girls.)
Steve's been pretty consistent on the war thing. Our wars, now Russia's war. "Let's skip it."
My take is as I've matured into an old man with more knowledge of history and watching the destruction wrought in the West today is "imperialism sucks". It made sense for Euros to go out exploring looking for pepper so their food didn't suck so bad. And there were some flat out wins like relatively underpopulated land to conquer/settle in the Americas and Australia.
But we really ought to have had the brains to realize nationalism makes more sense--separate people's separate nations--and wind the whole imperial nonsense up before the 1914 debacle. The 20th century was a golden age of white people's inventiveness, yet a debacle for us in terms of genetics and our nations, our future.
It's the people pimping Putin's old style Russian imperialism as some sort of great white hope who are confused, not Steve.Replies: @AndrewR, @Jack D, @PhysicistDave
From Putin’s point of view, what he is doing IS nationalism – the borders of “Russian World” extend beyond the present day borders of Russia and he is just trying to get all the “Russians” to be ruled by Russians as they deserve.
The problem with nationalism in Europe is that, except in rare cases, (a) ethnic borders were not that clearly defined – different peoples lived side by side in overlapping territories and (b) a lot of ethnic groups had no tradition of self rule or did not even necessarily define themselves as a single nationality – there were people who spoke somewhat similar dialects but they didn’t even think of themselves as being, for example “Italian” or “German”. The one idea of a “one people nation” is really a modern construction. Even the UK was an uneasy union of the English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, etc.
There is no “fair” or mathematical way by which you can construct national boundaries and say “Austria begins here” – there are parts of Italy where they speak German. Switzerland is a complete mess in that sense. What do you do with a town that is a mix of Hungarians and Romanians and Roma and Jews with maybe some Armenians, etc. thrown in for good luck? Any borders that you set are going be “wrong” – there are going to be majority Serb towns in Bosnia and vice versa. If you “fix” the border and move the town to Serbia, the 48% of the population (maybe in 5 years it will be 52% of the population) that is Bosnian will be unhappy.
SO, the deal that was made after two world wars was that, because modern warfare is so destructive, we aren’t going to allow war in Europe as “diplomacy by other means” anymore and we are just going to leave the borders, right or wrong, alone. As long as everyone lives in a democracy, it’s not that big a deal – the stakes are not that high. Without nationalist agitators stirring up trouble, everyone gets along. Putin has broken that deal, bigtime. Yes, NATO should not have interfered in Serbia either but that pales beside what Putin has done to disturb the peace of Europe and anyway, 2 wrongs do not make a right.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jOwcKD1MsCE/mqdefault.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Dahala_Khagrabari_English.png
The latter was fixed recently:
Bangladesh, India in historic land swap after 70 years
Finally, a road sign for Steve's comment section:
https://i2-prod.mylondon.news/incoming/article24159407.ece/ALTERNATES/s1200d/0_ezgifcom-gif-maker-4.jpgReplies: @Coemgen
Let the people vote. If in five years they vote to move the border, let them move it.
Jack also wrote:Who is this "we," kemosabe?
Seems not to include by far the most populous, geographically largest, and most militarily powerful country in Europe.
'Fraid it is just your little Yankee imperialist fantasy.
Jack also wrote:Gee, Weimar was a democracy: how did their last election work out, Jack? Low stakes, right?Replies: @James B. Shearer
‘…I wanted to mention that, without explanation, Twitter unlocked my account last Tuesday morning, three days earlier than stated…’
But have you learned your lesson?
The latter was fixed recently:
Bangladesh, India in historic land swap after 70 years
Finally, a road sign for Steve’s comment section:
https://youtu.be/L3cyJL_7GSkReplies: @Reg Cæsar
The guy calling people “Putinists” whining that people “that can’t conceive…blah blah…sincere beliefs…blah blah”.
More excellent anti-semitic trolling from Jack D, my favorite anti-Semite.
“What is with these assholes calling people names? Oy vey!”
Agree: Johann Ricke
If he actually cared about justice for white American citizens, he wouldn't carry on in this way. In fact, I cannot think of a single Alt-Right personality who earnestly works towards reform in a realistic way. They are having too much fun being the gadflies of the regime, but of course this makes them utterly dependent upon the regime they pretend to oppose.Replies: @Colin Wright, @puttheforkdown, @Pat Hannagan
‘…In fact, I cannot think of a single Alt-Right personality who earnestly works towards reform in a realistic way. They are having too much fun being the gadflies of the regime, but of course this makes them utterly dependent upon the regime they pretend to oppose.’
The way I’d put this is we all (and around where I live, it is close to ‘all’) agree that the current regime is intolerable. I mean regime in the larger sense of the whole government-media-academia-imposed paradigm.
Great. What we tend to overlook is that we all have very different visions of the Good Life to Come. I don’t feel any need to unconditionally ban all abortion or to ferret out every closeted homosexual school teacher. Others probably don’t think we should immediately sever all ties with Israel and impose an embargo on it. And so on. Eighty percent of us may agree Kamala Harris should be put to death in some peculiarly humiliating way. But the day after?
The agendas differ.
From this much strife may flow.
These increases in life expectancy have stalled and now appear to be reversing. People are becoming poorer. There is a feeling there is a shrinking pie of government benefits to be passed out and this will lead to fighting among various groups of the nonproductive on who gets what percentage. Productive people will vote with their feet and leave Democrat run areas but will eventually run out of places to flee to. They will then just give up. There is already something like five million less men between 25-57 working now than in the past and a good percentage of these probably fall into the category of just giving up.
When things really hit bottom and the government runs out of money one of three things will happen. One possibility is that a series of reforms will be undertaken to shrink government. The second is that we slide into a populist dictatorship. The third is the country will break apart. I'm a long-term optimist so I believe in option one.Replies: @Colin Wright, @International Jew, @AndrewR, @Coemgen, @Dmon
A National holiday?
that's an unfortunate position. it's along the lines of believing you don't need to exterminate every last hidden cockroach in order to eliminate an infestation.
How about, “iSteve Rules!” T-shirts?
I wish I could hear some “Putin shills” on the local TV news but alas, it’s all globalist shills.
Btw, how many Russians died fighting Nazis in WWII?
"If you don't want to die in a nuclear apocalypse for the Neocons' bullshit narrative that Ukraine must forever have the right to oppress the people of the Donbas... you might be a Putinist."
You shouldn’t need to panhandle like this. Guys like Ed West have 11,000 paid subscribers paying, what, $5-10 a month? You’re much more famous and more read than Ed—and I don’t mean that as a slight toward him; I consider him second only to you in terms of being compulsory reading on the intellectual right.
I would certainly get a paid subscription for your Substack and I feel like you’re being very boomerish and behind the times on this.Replies: @PiltdownMan, @Harry Baldwin, @Yahya, @Peterike
“ Why on earth aren’t you on Substack yet?”
Yup. Steve, drop the weekly Taki column and put it on substack, with occasional longer form pieces. You’ll make bank.
Meanwhile, the great Darren Beattie mentioned you without any linking.
If he actually cared about justice for white American citizens, he wouldn't carry on in this way. In fact, I cannot think of a single Alt-Right personality who earnestly works towards reform in a realistic way. They are having too much fun being the gadflies of the regime, but of course this makes them utterly dependent upon the regime they pretend to oppose.Replies: @Colin Wright, @puttheforkdown, @Pat Hannagan
I dunno, that sounds like cope to me. Steve is still useful for his redpillin’ behind the scenes. They can’t all be front line fighters ready to lose it all.
Many so called “white activists” are too busy marrying Mrs. Wei Fuk Yu and talking about how Asians have higher IQ than Europeans to organize, I guess. “Look, we can’t be supremacists – we think they’re even better than us!” Sad!
Yeah. They extend into Ukraine – aka, “the border lands”. Better send another $40 billion because there’s a fucking skirmish in “the border lands”. What an invasion of Europe!!!
Our elites intentionally painted Putin into a corner. They knew what Putin would do. The question is, “Why did they do it?”
Xi Jinping however, had his plane escorted by Saudi Jets- I thought I counted seven, and upon landing was welcomed by a cannonade and a flypast of planes painting the sky in the colors of the Chinese flag. The Saudi King went to the airport to greet him; The king an old and infirm man who walks with a cane, not MBS. The three day visit mapped out the energy future for the World, the future of the Petro-Yuan and the death of the Dollar.
Who knew that demonizing as a murderer the most influential player in the commodity that props up one’s hegemony and sending carny barkers like Blinken to upbraid him for insufficiently celebrating sodomy would have consequences?Putin meanwhile commenced his second death of the year from cancer in all three lungs.Replies: @Dmon, @HammerJack
I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
Turning into butterflies
Above our nation
In other words, a DeSantis victory?Replies: @HammerJack, @anonymous
Unless we have a Democrat president (and the compliant media which goes with that) the 2025 Reparations Riots will make 2020’s FloydFest seem like child’s play.
In other words, a DeSantis victory?Replies: @HammerJack, @anonymous
If the 2024 election is rigged again because of a combination of media distortion and fraudulent ballots I think there will be riots in red states supporting a re-do election in the states where fraud occurred. Launching the war against Iran in the winter of 2025 is good timing.
Even when it is justified.
When I was at Stanford, I protested in various political protests, debates, etc. with fellow libertarians.
All very quiet and peaceful: we cooperated with the cops, we let the other guys have their say without heckling, etc. Because that is who we are -- old-stock Americans. Like the Iowans in The Music Man.
The biggest brouhaha was when, in a debate, one of my friends who was debating local liberal Repub Congressman Pete McCloskey, said that when he thought of Big Brother in 1984, he always envisioned Big Brother as looking like McCloskey.
His point was that the Congressman was a good-looking, sincere-sounding kind of guy, who was in fact a shill for the Establishment, and who therefore made a fine front man for the ruling elite.
Did get a rise out of the audience.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @anonymous
If I was Elon I would offer you the job of overseeing Twitter. That would be one , shit-lord, there-take-that, move. First though, I would put in earplugs to avoid hearing loss from the concussion of all the heads exploding.
If it's taught him nothing else wading through the Twitter cesspool will surely have taught Musk that.
Who to appoint as CEO?
Caesars Wife is tough to find now-a-days.Replies: @PhysicistDave
Bill Jones wrote to Zoos:
Alex Jones?
That’s much too black-pilled a take.
The North American continent still has enormous, almost unfathomable natural resources that could be developed in a much less wasteful manner. Like Russia today, it is one of the few countries on Earth that has the capacity to be genuinely autarkic if it wanted to be. The best-case scenario would be to build a relatively closed, regional economy once we are freed from the encumbrances of the global reserve currency and a globally oriented political class. A Tokugawa America, thickly populated with yeomanry and small townsmen, would be a cozy and reasonably contented place and would be sustainable from now until basically the end of time, and I think this is much closer to the vision that obtained at its original founding. This is the end that I hope for and work towards, and I think it should be the goal of every dissident.
What, no Afghan restaurants? The horror!
Hey, cool it with the anti-semitism, pal.
I would love to see it come about - I just think alot of sh!t is going to hit the fan first. The establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate followed a 150 year period of constant civil war. And the Japanese weren't so stupid as to allow non-Japanese to constitute half their population. America doesn't have a yeoman population anymore - alot of people are living a lifestyle of opulence undreamed of by any Sultan, but as soon as they get a flat tire, they're helpless. And also, don't forget that Tokugawa Japan had rigid class barriers enforced by a militaristic class of Samurai, gun confiscation and no personal freedom whatsoever for the vast majority of its' population.
Here's a little news item I noticed a while back.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/biden-nevada-toad-endangered-hampering-construction-geothermal-plant
Basically free, non-carbon emitting energy available for the taking, but Indian "burial grounds" and a fu#&ing toad stand in the way. Half the country sides with the toad. All those people are going to have to go away somehow before sanity can be re-established. And socially or economically, the process of them going away is not going to be pretty.
anonymous[278] wrote to Prester John:
No, we are the responsible ones that make civilization possible: rioting is just not what we do.
Even when it is justified.
When I was at Stanford, I protested in various political protests, debates, etc. with fellow libertarians.
All very quiet and peaceful: we cooperated with the cops, we let the other guys have their say without heckling, etc. Because that is who we are — old-stock Americans. Like the Iowans in The Music Man.
The biggest brouhaha was when, in a debate, one of my friends who was debating local liberal Repub Congressman Pete McCloskey, said that when he thought of Big Brother in 1984, he always envisioned Big Brother as looking like McCloskey.
His point was that the Congressman was a good-looking, sincere-sounding kind of guy, who was in fact a shill for the Establishment, and who therefore made a fine front man for the ruling elite.
Did get a rise out of the audience.
Jack D wrote to AnotherDad:
Self-determination of peoples, Jack: Article 1 of the UN Charter.
Let the people vote. If in five years they vote to move the border, let them move it.
Jack also wrote:
Who is this “we,” kemosabe?
Seems not to include by far the most populous, geographically largest, and most militarily powerful country in Europe.
‘Fraid it is just your little Yankee imperialist fantasy.
Jack also wrote:
Gee, Weimar was a democracy: how did their last election work out, Jack? Low stakes, right?
This simply does not work. Who decides what is the group of people that will vote? If one set of borders will produce a 52-48 result one way then a slightly different set of borders will produce a 48-52 vote the other way. Or as they supposedly say in the Balkans "why should I be a minority in your country when instead you can be a minority in my country?"
And even assuming you can decide on the voters who will conduct the election? The incumbent government has many ways to ensure the vote comes out the way it wants.Replies: @Jack D, @PhysicistDave
The way I'd put this is we all (and around where I live, it is close to 'all') agree that the current regime is intolerable. I mean regime in the larger sense of the whole government-media-academia-imposed paradigm.
Great. What we tend to overlook is that we all have very different visions of the Good Life to Come. I don't feel any need to unconditionally ban all abortion or to ferret out every closeted homosexual school teacher. Others probably don't think we should immediately sever all ties with Israel and impose an embargo on it. And so on. Eighty percent of us may agree Kamala Harris should be put to death in some peculiarly humiliating way. But the day after?
The agendas differ.
From this much strife may flow.Replies: @Mark G., @kaganovitch, @PhysicistDave, @Mike Tre, @Veteran Aryan
What held the country together in the past, in spite of our differences, was a general feeling that life was getting slowly better for the average person. Average life expectancy went from 40 in 1865 to 78 in 2015. The average person could see with their own eyes that life was getting better for them and those around them.
These increases in life expectancy have stalled and now appear to be reversing. People are becoming poorer. There is a feeling there is a shrinking pie of government benefits to be passed out and this will lead to fighting among various groups of the nonproductive on who gets what percentage. Productive people will vote with their feet and leave Democrat run areas but will eventually run out of places to flee to. They will then just give up. There is already something like five million less men between 25-57 working now than in the past and a good percentage of these probably fall into the category of just giving up.
When things really hit bottom and the government runs out of money one of three things will happen. One possibility is that a series of reforms will be undertaken to shrink government. The second is that we slide into a populist dictatorship. The third is the country will break apart. I’m a long-term optimist so I believe in option one.
Looking back, that's exactly how I felt about things in the Sixties.
Yeah, all kinds of people were doing all kinds of awful things -- but the underlying assumption was that things were always going to improve. We'd hammer something out, and it would work better than it had in the past. People wouldn't starve, the Whooping Crane would come back, air pollution was getting addressed, etc.
Now...shit, it's just depressing. Which hell is going to prevail?
1. we slide into a (pseudo) populist (de facto) dictatorship (this may have already occurred)
2. the country will break apart
3. a series of reforms will be undertaken
The government already has run out of money, and we are watching the response in real time. Flood the country with foreigners in order to keep up the illusion of economic "growth", while going hyper-interventionist abroad in order to cow everyone into still accepting our worthless currency. In other words, Invade the World/Invite the World on booster shots.
Btw, how many Russians died fighting Nazis in WWII?Replies: @JimDandy
JackD’s new schtick is Jewish Jeff Foxworthy.
“If you don’t want to die in a nuclear apocalypse for the Neocons’ bullshit narrative that Ukraine must forever have the right to oppress the people of the Donbas… you might be a Putinist.”
Even when it is justified.
When I was at Stanford, I protested in various political protests, debates, etc. with fellow libertarians.
All very quiet and peaceful: we cooperated with the cops, we let the other guys have their say without heckling, etc. Because that is who we are -- old-stock Americans. Like the Iowans in The Music Man.
The biggest brouhaha was when, in a debate, one of my friends who was debating local liberal Repub Congressman Pete McCloskey, said that when he thought of Big Brother in 1984, he always envisioned Big Brother as looking like McCloskey.
His point was that the Congressman was a good-looking, sincere-sounding kind of guy, who was in fact a shill for the Establishment, and who therefore made a fine front man for the ruling elite.
Did get a rise out of the audience.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @anonymous
McCloskey, whose real name is Paul, is still alive at 95. He’s been a Democrat for the past 15 years. He voted for Biden/Harris in 2020– literally, as one of California’s 55 Electors.
I suppose he’d have many friends at this site, though, having been a target of the ADL. He sided with the wrong Semites.
Appropriate that he became a Dem.
Interesting guy, although a shill for the ruling elite. He was actually quite open about debating libertarian students at Stanford, so he made a useful foil for us. I actually voted for him once when his opponent publicly announced that he was a socialist. Another time, his opponent was a pro-market moderate Democrat, and so I voted for her. And on another occasion, I worked for a Libertarian Party candidate, a poli-sci doctoral student at Stanford who was a friend of mine (I wrote his position paper on housing policy), who ran against Pete.
I fear I lack any loyalty to any political party!Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Ralph L
This is really the crux of the matter.
I think the formulation that everyone is sensing, but which is seldom yet uttered explicitly, is not that Russia is going to save us, but that the Russian example is something that dissidents in the West need to emulate. Russia actually did what we must do and ought to be doing. Both friend and foe alike can feel this coming. Both state-sponsored phonies like Jack D and people who really care about the future of our countries, like presumably you and I do; and this is what forms the subtext of the entire discussion.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia started from a very low base and seemed all but totally defeated. But Russia did not give up. Russia found its voice and found a champion in Vladimir Putin. Gradually, they rebuilt beneficial coalitions with the surrounding peoples of the ex-Soviet empire. They brought the oligarchs under control and stopped the economic vivisection of Russian resources. They developed an entirely different approach to economics which was not dependent on financial shenanigans or monetary theory of any kind, but on actual commodities and energy and industrial production—and it worked. Most incredibly, Russia proved itself a good-faith actor to peoples all over the world by evincing a profound respect for law, treaties, agreements, concordances, even when others did not. It handles international relations in a way that is emphatically moral and respectful.
Dissidents in the West have also been all but totally defeated by Wokism. We are lacking a man of Putin’s capabilities but we once almost had a champion in Donald Trump. That political energy can be kindled again with better candidates; we must never forget that there was something good in the core of Trumpism notwithstanding his personal shortcomings. We need to focus on economics and getting our own oligarchs reined in. These big corporations and their unholy alliance with the federal bureaucracy are the beating heart of the Left from whence all Wokism flows. Compared with this, mere racial issues are a sideshow, or at best one head of the hydra. We need to develop economic independence by getting out of debt, establishing ownership of resources, and carrying on mutually beneficial trades outside of the official monetary system. We, too, need to live our lives in a way that is high-minded, moral, fair, just and irreproachable before God and man so that people will be drawn to our example.
Russia is now a beacon for everyone in the world who wants to live a free, fair, and dignified life. Russia neither can nor should fight our battles for us, but it should inspire us to fight on.
If he actually cared about justice for white American citizens, he wouldn't carry on in this way. In fact, I cannot think of a single Alt-Right personality who earnestly works towards reform in a realistic way. They are having too much fun being the gadflies of the regime, but of course this makes them utterly dependent upon the regime they pretend to oppose.Replies: @Colin Wright, @puttheforkdown, @Pat Hannagan
This is such an excellent comment I had to get in before my required commenting quotient of alcohol consumption had been surpassed.
So erudite, so astutely spot-on both with such a rapier like wit!
Where I would have come on as subtle as a brick, with a trailing music video, you have skewered Sailer with the elan of an ambidextrous fencer who has simultaneously mastered the craft of sommelier yet still grounded in knowing all your beers from basic ale and lager through to New England IPA.
My hat’s off to you, sir! And also to Sailer himself, who is so magnanimous as to not only allow this critical commentary through his moderation wall, as porous as that on your southern border, but actually tends to expedite it, seemingly sometimes reveling in it!
Please, as you were, allow my short inconvenience to justly acknowledge you with my sincere compliments, and all the very best on this 9th day of Christmas.
The way I'd put this is we all (and around where I live, it is close to 'all') agree that the current regime is intolerable. I mean regime in the larger sense of the whole government-media-academia-imposed paradigm.
Great. What we tend to overlook is that we all have very different visions of the Good Life to Come. I don't feel any need to unconditionally ban all abortion or to ferret out every closeted homosexual school teacher. Others probably don't think we should immediately sever all ties with Israel and impose an embargo on it. And so on. Eighty percent of us may agree Kamala Harris should be put to death in some peculiarly humiliating way. But the day after?
The agendas differ.
From this much strife may flow.Replies: @Mark G., @kaganovitch, @PhysicistDave, @Mike Tre, @Veteran Aryan
Eighty percent of us may agree Kamala Harris should be put to death in some peculiarly humiliating way. But the day after?
A National holiday?
The North American continent still has enormous, almost unfathomable natural resources that could be developed in a much less wasteful manner. Like Russia today, it is one of the few countries on Earth that has the capacity to be genuinely autarkic if it wanted to be. The best-case scenario would be to build a relatively closed, regional economy once we are freed from the encumbrances of the global reserve currency and a globally oriented political class. A Tokugawa America, thickly populated with yeomanry and small townsmen, would be a cozy and reasonably contented place and would be sustainable from now until basically the end of time, and I think this is much closer to the vision that obtained at its original founding. This is the end that I hope for and work towards, and I think it should be the goal of every dissident.Replies: @kaganovitch, @The Germ Theory of Disease, @Dmon
A Tokugawa America, thickly populated with yeomanry and small townsmen, would be a cozy and reasonably contented place and would be sustainable from now until basically the end of time, and I think this is much closer to the vision that obtained at its original founding.
What, no Afghan restaurants? The horror!
Reg Cæsar wrote to me:
Yeah, though for some reason I do not recall, he was universally known as “Pete.”
Appropriate that he became a Dem.
Interesting guy, although a shill for the ruling elite. He was actually quite open about debating libertarian students at Stanford, so he made a useful foil for us. I actually voted for him once when his opponent publicly announced that he was a socialist. Another time, his opponent was a pro-market moderate Democrat, and so I voted for her. And on another occasion, I worked for a Libertarian Party candidate, a poli-sci doctoral student at Stanford who was a friend of mine (I wrote his position paper on housing policy), who ran against Pete.
I fear I lack any loyalty to any political party!
The way I'd put this is we all (and around where I live, it is close to 'all') agree that the current regime is intolerable. I mean regime in the larger sense of the whole government-media-academia-imposed paradigm.
Great. What we tend to overlook is that we all have very different visions of the Good Life to Come. I don't feel any need to unconditionally ban all abortion or to ferret out every closeted homosexual school teacher. Others probably don't think we should immediately sever all ties with Israel and impose an embargo on it. And so on. Eighty percent of us may agree Kamala Harris should be put to death in some peculiarly humiliating way. But the day after?
The agendas differ.
From this much strife may flow.Replies: @Mark G., @kaganovitch, @PhysicistDave, @Mike Tre, @Veteran Aryan
Colin Wright wrote to Intelligent Dasein:
I grew up back in the ’60s in a very conservative, lily-white, lower-middle-class/working-class Midwestern suburb.
But when various people, including some members of my extended family and some of my old school friends or their sibs, “came out” as gay, the general reaction was: “Oh well, kinds weird, but — hey! — people gotta live their own lives!” Several of my teachers were pretty obviously gay but since they were good teachers — one was the best teacher I have ever had — no one really cared: of course, they had the good sense not to bring up the matter in class, which would have been irrelevant to their teaching duties.
And, across the street, we had a middle-aged couple “living in sin”: some of the ladies in the neighborhood tut-tutted about this, but my parents instructed us to treat them with the same respect that we would extend to any other adults.
My point being that the old America of my and Sailer’s childhood very much had a “live and let live” attitude. The only person I knew who was rabid about gays was an old New Deal FDR liberal: she was old enough actually to have voted for FDR.
Most Americans remain sane: it is the ruling elite and the elite wannabees who are spreading the hatred and insanity. They have mastered the art of treating any sane views as socially gauche and unacceptable, and so ordinary people stay quiet, at least out here in California.
But even here in California, let ordinary people know that you respect their right to hold their own opinions, and a lot will open up. The country is not yet lost.
Midwesterner here. A gay friend of my sister’s recently took a job in California. It’s in a small mountain town that has a three digit population and is in one of those NorCal counties that voted 60-70% + for Trump.
Being gay, he was nervous about taking the job because “he may not be safe”. He has since come to love the community.
In the Midwest town of 2000-2500 people where I went to high school you see rainbow flags in windows. *rolls eyes*
Going by Twitter many liberals are deeply invested in the belief that any community of roughly <50,000 people is an execution zone for PoC and non-straights. If only they left their bubble!
Steve's been pretty consistent on the war thing. Our wars, now Russia's war. "Let's skip it."
My take is as I've matured into an old man with more knowledge of history and watching the destruction wrought in the West today is "imperialism sucks". It made sense for Euros to go out exploring looking for pepper so their food didn't suck so bad. And there were some flat out wins like relatively underpopulated land to conquer/settle in the Americas and Australia.
But we really ought to have had the brains to realize nationalism makes more sense--separate people's separate nations--and wind the whole imperial nonsense up before the 1914 debacle. The 20th century was a golden age of white people's inventiveness, yet a debacle for us in terms of genetics and our nations, our future.
It's the people pimping Putin's old style Russian imperialism as some sort of great white hope who are confused, not Steve.Replies: @AndrewR, @Jack D, @PhysicistDave
AnotherDad wrote to AndrewR:
The people of the Donbass were Russian speakers who voted for the government that was overthrown in 2014 at the instigation of the US.
It was US imperialism, not Russian imperialism, that deprived them of the government that they had democratically elected.
And, when they chose not to join the new illegal puppet regime established in Kiev, it was the US that armed that puppet regime and egged it on in its murderously imperialist actions against the Donbass.
Facts matter.
No one here is advocating that we supply subsidies or weapons to Putin.
The issue is whether we should stop handing over American taxpayer dollars and weapons to the puppet regime in Kiev.
We simply need to end US imperialism in Eastern Europe and all around the world.
Seriously: try counting up all the countries all across the planet in the last seventy years that the US has attacked, invaded, conquered, or bombed. You will lose count.
Do the same for Russia. It is much, much fewer, and almost all are close to Russia, not half-way around the world.
The US government is the primary threat to world peace today.
Facts matter.
AD also wrote:
Alas, as an old man, you cannot see the truth about the main imperialist power on the planet today.
As a young man, you were trained to applaud like a trained seal whatever atrocities the US government committed. I know: I was raised with that propaganda, too.
But you cannot escape that youthful conditioning.
Which is sad.
A simple question I think I may have asked you before without you answering:
Are you willing to condemn the sexual mutilation of children who are confused about their gender?
Or does your conditioning prevent you from answering that question?
because it seems to me that one has to go.Replies: @Jack D
Well, I certainly hope so.
Sadly for Steve, he does it gratis.
Just imagine his poor old put upon mrs every year about this time: “For fuck’s sake, Steve, you keep posting your absolute grovelling idiotic factless feelings about a country you’ve never given 2 seconds of thought at any time in our 60 years of marriage yet you can’t think to at least get paid for it by the the Biden administration or at least put your name in with the FBI and CIA for kickbacks?!”
Have you noticed I’m still cooking our meals with Bakelite? We’re so far beyond teflon we’ve been through it and back that now carbon steel is the go to kitchen pan! And it’s like 10 times better than stonelike teflon which is about 1000 times better than bakelite! The entire baking industry has shown way more advancement than your idiot space agency and your infatuation with that obviously flat out lie, at least pan handle me a new cookware set this Christmas or you can camp out and cook your own in the clothes cupboard for the entire 12 days of Christmas, possibly extending into the duration of Lent!”
Good on ya Andrew R, you and BB73, may God hold you both in the palm of His hand in 2023 (and you too Duncsbaby).
As for you, Steve: FFs mate at least get some money from the government for posting their line. In any case, you’re a good bloke, all the best in 2023, here’s to you:
I haven’t spent a lot of time speculating about whether the Zelensky supporters, I won’t call them shills, are getting paid or not. I have noticed one thing, though. Medical freedom is the issue most important to me and I closely followed the discussions here about masks, lockdowns and vaccines during the Covid epidemic. Many of the proponents of those measures all seemed to have abandoned pushing for them at around the same time and then jumped over to pushing for intervention in the Ukraine.
My position across a range of issues is influenced by my libertarian instincts. It could just be those on the other side on those two issues and others have strong authoritarian instincts. Them not believing that getting vaccinated should be voluntary and them not believing that donating money to the Ukrainian cause should be voluntary are therefore perfectly consistent. So, I tend to agree with you that positions being picked are in some cases based on belief systems and not due just to being on someone’s payroll.
These increases in life expectancy have stalled and now appear to be reversing. People are becoming poorer. There is a feeling there is a shrinking pie of government benefits to be passed out and this will lead to fighting among various groups of the nonproductive on who gets what percentage. Productive people will vote with their feet and leave Democrat run areas but will eventually run out of places to flee to. They will then just give up. There is already something like five million less men between 25-57 working now than in the past and a good percentage of these probably fall into the category of just giving up.
When things really hit bottom and the government runs out of money one of three things will happen. One possibility is that a series of reforms will be undertaken to shrink government. The second is that we slide into a populist dictatorship. The third is the country will break apart. I'm a long-term optimist so I believe in option one.Replies: @Colin Wright, @International Jew, @AndrewR, @Coemgen, @Dmon
‘What held the country together in the past, in spite of our differences, was a general feeling that life was getting slowly better for the average person…’
Looking back, that’s exactly how I felt about things in the Sixties.
Yeah, all kinds of people were doing all kinds of awful things — but the underlying assumption was that things were always going to improve. We’d hammer something out, and it would work better than it had in the past. People wouldn’t starve, the Whooping Crane would come back, air pollution was getting addressed, etc.
Now…shit, it’s just depressing. Which hell is going to prevail?
These increases in life expectancy have stalled and now appear to be reversing. People are becoming poorer. There is a feeling there is a shrinking pie of government benefits to be passed out and this will lead to fighting among various groups of the nonproductive on who gets what percentage. Productive people will vote with their feet and leave Democrat run areas but will eventually run out of places to flee to. They will then just give up. There is already something like five million less men between 25-57 working now than in the past and a good percentage of these probably fall into the category of just giving up.
When things really hit bottom and the government runs out of money one of three things will happen. One possibility is that a series of reforms will be undertaken to shrink government. The second is that we slide into a populist dictatorship. The third is the country will break apart. I'm a long-term optimist so I believe in option one.Replies: @Colin Wright, @International Jew, @AndrewR, @Coemgen, @Dmon
They are indeed, the CPI just doesn’t show it. Imagine if the CPI measured the value of living in an all-white neighborhood with a public school in it that your kids could safely attend and not have half the resources diverted to teaching English to the children of illegals and the other half to policing black kids? That kind of neighborhood was once the default condition everywhere. Today, people pay a huge premium to live in such a neighborhood. Let the CPI take that into account and you’d find our real per capita GDP is lower now than in 1960.
It was US imperialism, not Russian imperialism, that deprived them of the government that they had democratically elected.
And, when they chose not to join the new illegal puppet regime established in Kiev, it was the US that armed that puppet regime and egged it on in its murderously imperialist actions against the Donbass.
Facts matter.
No one here is advocating that we supply subsidies or weapons to Putin.
The issue is whether we should stop handing over American taxpayer dollars and weapons to the puppet regime in Kiev.
We simply need to end US imperialism in Eastern Europe and all around the world.
Seriously: try counting up all the countries all across the planet in the last seventy years that the US has attacked, invaded, conquered, or bombed. You will lose count.
Do the same for Russia. It is much, much fewer, and almost all are close to Russia, not half-way around the world.
The US government is the primary threat to world peace today.
Facts matter.
AD also wrote:Alas, as an old man, you cannot see the truth about the main imperialist power on the planet today.
As a young man, you were trained to applaud like a trained seal whatever atrocities the US government committed. I know: I was raised with that propaganda, too.
But you cannot escape that youthful conditioning.
Which is sad.
A simple question I think I may have asked you before without you answering:
Are you willing to condemn the sexual mutilation of children who are confused about their gender?
Or does your conditioning prevent you from answering that question?Replies: @AndrewR, @Mike Tre
AD and Steve want the shameless American imperialism of this regime just without the black and LGBT worship
These increases in life expectancy have stalled and now appear to be reversing. People are becoming poorer. There is a feeling there is a shrinking pie of government benefits to be passed out and this will lead to fighting among various groups of the nonproductive on who gets what percentage. Productive people will vote with their feet and leave Democrat run areas but will eventually run out of places to flee to. They will then just give up. There is already something like five million less men between 25-57 working now than in the past and a good percentage of these probably fall into the category of just giving up.
When things really hit bottom and the government runs out of money one of three things will happen. One possibility is that a series of reforms will be undertaken to shrink government. The second is that we slide into a populist dictatorship. The third is the country will break apart. I'm a long-term optimist so I believe in option one.Replies: @Colin Wright, @International Jew, @AndrewR, @Coemgen, @Dmon
One thing that overwhelmingly unites Americans across the political spectrum is the idea that the federal government should have most if not all the power in this country. Political disputes in the US largely boil down to who should control DC, not how much power DC should have. The most obvious example from the last year is the insane Democrat reactions that resulted from SCOTUS giving power back to the states by overturning the ridiculous Roe v Wade ruling. Whatever one thinks about abortion, the US constitution clearly doesn’t mention abortion. The people protesting and threatening the justices would have invested their energy much more wisely in pressuring the state legislatures that wanted to restrict abortion. But because Democrats by and large cannot fathom the idea of taking power away from the federal government (except when it’s enforcing immigration laws or prosecuting communist terrorists), that idea didn’t occur to them.
They've used their control over so many things to achieve a strong Left bias in the Supreme Court from 1937 until just recently (mostly), that's for all of their lives for almost all of them, why should they try to switch gears unless and until they believe they can't return things to the natural order as they see it. It wouldn't take much, especially since they still retain decisive control over the Federal government and at this time it's questionable they'll ever lose another Federal election decided at the level of the individual states (Senate and President).
Not that they're patient, but note they don't even have to kill any justices or pack the court, Thomas and Alito at ages 74 and 72 are not spring chickens, soon enough the current "conservative" majority will be lost.
On the other hand accelerationists and the like can look at 1980 (Carter), and, oh, the finite capacity of the Strategic
Political Petroleum Reserve and hope a few more years of "Biden" and the like will set up landslides the Democrats can't beat with 2020 late election night Plan B cheating.Replies: @Reg CæsarThe North American continent still has enormous, almost unfathomable natural resources that could be developed in a much less wasteful manner. Like Russia today, it is one of the few countries on Earth that has the capacity to be genuinely autarkic if it wanted to be. The best-case scenario would be to build a relatively closed, regional economy once we are freed from the encumbrances of the global reserve currency and a globally oriented political class. A Tokugawa America, thickly populated with yeomanry and small townsmen, would be a cozy and reasonably contented place and would be sustainable from now until basically the end of time, and I think this is much closer to the vision that obtained at its original founding. This is the end that I hope for and work towards, and I think it should be the goal of every dissident.Replies: @kaganovitch, @The Germ Theory of Disease, @Dmon
“The best-case scenario would be to build a relatively closed, regional economy once we are freed from the encumbrances of the global reserve currency and a globally oriented political class. A Tokugawa America, thickly populated with yeomanry and small townsmen, would be a cozy and reasonably contented place and would be sustainable from now until basically the end of time”
Hey, cool it with the anti-semitism, pal.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jOwcKD1MsCE/mqdefault.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Dahala_Khagrabari_English.png
The latter was fixed recently:
Bangladesh, India in historic land swap after 70 years
Finally, a road sign for Steve's comment section:
https://i2-prod.mylondon.news/incoming/article24159407.ece/ALTERNATES/s1200d/0_ezgifcom-gif-maker-4.jpgReplies: @Coemgen
Don’t forget the Serbian-Croatian border, er, ah, borders. Their border disagreement has produced this:
These increases in life expectancy have stalled and now appear to be reversing. People are becoming poorer. There is a feeling there is a shrinking pie of government benefits to be passed out and this will lead to fighting among various groups of the nonproductive on who gets what percentage. Productive people will vote with their feet and leave Democrat run areas but will eventually run out of places to flee to. They will then just give up. There is already something like five million less men between 25-57 working now than in the past and a good percentage of these probably fall into the category of just giving up.
When things really hit bottom and the government runs out of money one of three things will happen. One possibility is that a series of reforms will be undertaken to shrink government. The second is that we slide into a populist dictatorship. The third is the country will break apart. I'm a long-term optimist so I believe in option one.Replies: @Colin Wright, @International Jew, @AndrewR, @Coemgen, @Dmon
Why not have your cake and eat it too?
I am an optimistic too. I am optimistic what will happen (in chronological order) is:
1. we slide into a (pseudo) populist (de facto) dictatorship (this may have already occurred)
2. the country will break apart
3. a series of reforms will be undertaken
The way I'd put this is we all (and around where I live, it is close to 'all') agree that the current regime is intolerable. I mean regime in the larger sense of the whole government-media-academia-imposed paradigm.
Great. What we tend to overlook is that we all have very different visions of the Good Life to Come. I don't feel any need to unconditionally ban all abortion or to ferret out every closeted homosexual school teacher. Others probably don't think we should immediately sever all ties with Israel and impose an embargo on it. And so on. Eighty percent of us may agree Kamala Harris should be put to death in some peculiarly humiliating way. But the day after?
The agendas differ.
From this much strife may flow.Replies: @Mark G., @kaganovitch, @PhysicistDave, @Mike Tre, @Veteran Aryan
” I don’t feel any need to… …ferret out every closeted homosexual school teacher.”
that’s an unfortunate position. it’s along the lines of believing you don’t need to exterminate every last hidden cockroach in order to eliminate an infestation.
It was US imperialism, not Russian imperialism, that deprived them of the government that they had democratically elected.
And, when they chose not to join the new illegal puppet regime established in Kiev, it was the US that armed that puppet regime and egged it on in its murderously imperialist actions against the Donbass.
Facts matter.
No one here is advocating that we supply subsidies or weapons to Putin.
The issue is whether we should stop handing over American taxpayer dollars and weapons to the puppet regime in Kiev.
We simply need to end US imperialism in Eastern Europe and all around the world.
Seriously: try counting up all the countries all across the planet in the last seventy years that the US has attacked, invaded, conquered, or bombed. You will lose count.
Do the same for Russia. It is much, much fewer, and almost all are close to Russia, not half-way around the world.
The US government is the primary threat to world peace today.
Facts matter.
AD also wrote:Alas, as an old man, you cannot see the truth about the main imperialist power on the planet today.
As a young man, you were trained to applaud like a trained seal whatever atrocities the US government committed. I know: I was raised with that propaganda, too.
But you cannot escape that youthful conditioning.
Which is sad.
A simple question I think I may have asked you before without you answering:
Are you willing to condemn the sexual mutilation of children who are confused about their gender?
Or does your conditioning prevent you from answering that question?Replies: @AndrewR, @Mike Tre
where are you on the youthful conditioning that our society must sexually mutilate every newborn boy with the 3-4000 year old practice of foreskin removal?
because it seems to me that one has to go.
One reason they can’t fathom this is that the Republicans have strong control over a very large number of states. As a not entirely unrelated proxy, as of yesterday Constitutional Carry, you don’t a license to carry a concealed gun, is the law of the land in half of them. Lots of these states not only are for abortion restrictions, some had laws that immediately went into effect after a court majority said [expletive deleted] to stare decisis WRT Roe.
They’ve used their control over so many things to achieve a strong Left bias in the Supreme Court from 1937 until just recently (mostly), that’s for all of their lives for almost all of them, why should they try to switch gears unless and until they believe they can’t return things to the natural order as they see it. It wouldn’t take much, especially since they still retain decisive control over the Federal government and at this time it’s questionable they’ll ever lose another Federal election decided at the level of the individual states (Senate and President).
Not that they’re patient, but note they don’t even have to kill any justices or pack the court, Thomas and Alito at ages 74 and 72 are not spring chickens, soon enough the current “conservative” majority will be lost.
On the other hand accelerationists and the like can look at 1980 (Carter), and, oh, the finite capacity of the Strategic
Political Petroleum Reserve and hope a few more years of “Biden” and the like will set up landslides the Democrats can’t beat with 2020 late election night Plan B cheating.Wisconsin, Michigan, and perhaps other states simply had the pre-1973 law still on the books, which were revived by default. Michigan quickly put a new law on the ballot, which passed. Wisconsin, with divided government, has done nothing, and probably won't anytime soon.
Great comment. If I may expand on your conservative upbringing to the present:
Midwesterner here. A gay friend of my sister’s recently took a job in California. It’s in a small mountain town that has a three digit population and is in one of those NorCal counties that voted 60-70% + for Trump.
Being gay, he was nervous about taking the job because “he may not be safe”. He has since come to love the community.
In the Midwest town of 2000-2500 people where I went to high school you see rainbow flags in windows. *rolls eyes*
Going by Twitter many liberals are deeply invested in the belief that any community of roughly <50,000 people is an execution zone for PoC and non-straights. If only they left their bubble!
Even when it is justified.
When I was at Stanford, I protested in various political protests, debates, etc. with fellow libertarians.
All very quiet and peaceful: we cooperated with the cops, we let the other guys have their say without heckling, etc. Because that is who we are -- old-stock Americans. Like the Iowans in The Music Man.
The biggest brouhaha was when, in a debate, one of my friends who was debating local liberal Repub Congressman Pete McCloskey, said that when he thought of Big Brother in 1984, he always envisioned Big Brother as looking like McCloskey.
His point was that the Congressman was a good-looking, sincere-sounding kind of guy, who was in fact a shill for the Establishment, and who therefore made a fine front man for the ruling elite.
Did get a rise out of the audience.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @anonymous
What if there is massive fraud in Milwaukee County and Biden wins Wisconsin in 2024? According to the investigation of Michael Gableman authorized by the Wisconsin legislature there was massive ballot fraud in nursing homes in Milwaukee County in 2020. Would you support truckers boycotting deliveries to Milwaukee County until there is a re-do election?
What we are seeing in the US right now is a quiet, growing General Strike: "quiet quitting," the millions of working-age males who have dropped out of the work force completely, etc.
I don't know how to get America out of the mess it is in. I do know that the details of history are unpredictable (the defenestration of Prague, the assassination at Sarajevo, etc.) and a lot of unpredictable things are going to happen.
If everyone who is loyal to the American Republic keeps that in mind and is ready and willing to use such events to move towards the restoration of the Republic, we might succeed.
Or not.
I don't know.
What we need is to be unyielding in our principles, but flexible in our tactics.
The Left knows that: Covid hits, and they are ready to use it to expand state power, which is always their unchanging goal.
Those of who favor restoring the Republic need to think the same way: no matter what events transpire, how can we use those events to annihilate the Left and restore the Republic?Replies: @anonymous
The North American continent still has enormous, almost unfathomable natural resources that could be developed in a much less wasteful manner. Like Russia today, it is one of the few countries on Earth that has the capacity to be genuinely autarkic if it wanted to be. The best-case scenario would be to build a relatively closed, regional economy once we are freed from the encumbrances of the global reserve currency and a globally oriented political class. A Tokugawa America, thickly populated with yeomanry and small townsmen, would be a cozy and reasonably contented place and would be sustainable from now until basically the end of time, and I think this is much closer to the vision that obtained at its original founding. This is the end that I hope for and work towards, and I think it should be the goal of every dissident.Replies: @kaganovitch, @The Germ Theory of Disease, @Dmon
“A Tokugawa America, thickly populated with yeomanry and small townsmen, would be a cozy and reasonably contented place and would be sustainable from now until basically the end of time, and I think this is much closer to the vision that obtained at its original founding.”
I would love to see it come about – I just think alot of sh!t is going to hit the fan first. The establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate followed a 150 year period of constant civil war. And the Japanese weren’t so stupid as to allow non-Japanese to constitute half their population. America doesn’t have a yeoman population anymore – alot of people are living a lifestyle of opulence undreamed of by any Sultan, but as soon as they get a flat tire, they’re helpless. And also, don’t forget that Tokugawa Japan had rigid class barriers enforced by a militaristic class of Samurai, gun confiscation and no personal freedom whatsoever for the vast majority of its’ population.
Here’s a little news item I noticed a while back.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/biden-nevada-toad-endangered-hampering-construction-geothermal-plant
Basically free, non-carbon emitting energy available for the taking, but Indian “burial grounds” and a fu#&ing toad stand in the way. Half the country sides with the toad. All those people are going to have to go away somehow before sanity can be re-established. And socially or economically, the process of them going away is not going to be pretty.
Steve,
How does this incident fit into one’s theory about the demographics of shootings. The names of the shooter and the victim tell the entire story.
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/dekalb-county/its-sad-day-tire-shop-employee-killed-by-customer-who-thought-car-was-being-stolen-police-say/LZHTTJMPU5DWFGITDRA75QPN7Y/
Appropriate that he became a Dem.
Interesting guy, although a shill for the ruling elite. He was actually quite open about debating libertarian students at Stanford, so he made a useful foil for us. I actually voted for him once when his opponent publicly announced that he was a socialist. Another time, his opponent was a pro-market moderate Democrat, and so I voted for her. And on another occasion, I worked for a Libertarian Party candidate, a poli-sci doctoral student at Stanford who was a friend of mine (I wrote his position paper on housing policy), who ran against Pete.
I fear I lack any loyalty to any political party!Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Ralph L
He is a Junior, and the middle name is Norton. Whaddya gonna do?
Nelson T Shields III, founder of Handgun Control, Inc, was also known by “Pete”. As was Pete du Pont (a IV), but that was a simple translation from Pierre. He and Alfonse D’Amato were victims of a journalist’s prank in which imaginary harassed schoolboys with the same first name wrote to them for advice.
They've used their control over so many things to achieve a strong Left bias in the Supreme Court from 1937 until just recently (mostly), that's for all of their lives for almost all of them, why should they try to switch gears unless and until they believe they can't return things to the natural order as they see it. It wouldn't take much, especially since they still retain decisive control over the Federal government and at this time it's questionable they'll ever lose another Federal election decided at the level of the individual states (Senate and President).
Not that they're patient, but note they don't even have to kill any justices or pack the court, Thomas and Alito at ages 74 and 72 are not spring chickens, soon enough the current "conservative" majority will be lost.
On the other hand accelerationists and the like can look at 1980 (Carter), and, oh, the finite capacity of the Strategic
Political Petroleum Reserve and hope a few more years of "Biden" and the like will set up landslides the Democrats can't beat with 2020 late election night Plan B cheating.Replies: @Reg CæsarLots of these states not only are for abortion restrictions, some had laws that immediately went into effect after a court majority said [expletive deleted] to stare decisis WRT Roe.
Wisconsin, Michigan, and perhaps other states simply had the pre-1973 law still on the books, which were revived by default. Michigan quickly put a new law on the ballot, which passed. Wisconsin, with divided government, has done nothing, and probably won’t anytime soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0sKalTgzPsReplies: @Inquiring Mind
A GULAG is not simply a prison, it is a prison with hard labor under harsh conditions feeding inmates starvation rations.
If Twitter denied you enough food, that in itself is a war crime, and the Hague Tribunal should be notified.
Appropriate that he became a Dem.
Interesting guy, although a shill for the ruling elite. He was actually quite open about debating libertarian students at Stanford, so he made a useful foil for us. I actually voted for him once when his opponent publicly announced that he was a socialist. Another time, his opponent was a pro-market moderate Democrat, and so I voted for her. And on another occasion, I worked for a Libertarian Party candidate, a poli-sci doctoral student at Stanford who was a friend of mine (I wrote his position paper on housing policy), who ran against Pete.
I fear I lack any loyalty to any political party!Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Ralph L
IIRC, Zonker’s mother in “Doonesbury” was the sole but vocal supporter of Pete McCloskey at the ’72 Repub Convention. That may have been the last time I’ve read his name.
Let the people vote. If in five years they vote to move the border, let them move it.
Jack also wrote:Who is this "we," kemosabe?
Seems not to include by far the most populous, geographically largest, and most militarily powerful country in Europe.
'Fraid it is just your little Yankee imperialist fantasy.
Jack also wrote:Gee, Weimar was a democracy: how did their last election work out, Jack? Low stakes, right?Replies: @James B. Shearer
Let the people vote. If in five years they vote to move the border, let them move it.”
This simply does not work. Who decides what is the group of people that will vote? If one set of borders will produce a 52-48 result one way then a slightly different set of borders will produce a 48-52 vote the other way. Or as they supposedly say in the Balkans “why should I be a minority in your country when instead you can be a minority in my country?”
And even assuming you can decide on the voters who will conduct the election? The incumbent government has many ways to ensure the vote comes out the way it wants.
Does anyone imagine that after one (fake) referendum in Russian ruled Kherson to join Russia that there could ever be another referendum to LEAVE Russia? Or that Putin would allow an independence referendum in say Chechnya? It's just inconceivable.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
JBS also wrote:Then your voting district is too large. Break it into smaller pieces in each of which there is a consensus.
Look: I'm an anarchist -- I view every government as simply a means to take resources from the productive members of society and hand them over to the members of the government and their supporters.
But, at a practical level, self determination very often has worked: in the breakup of Czechoslovakia, for example.
Yeah, abolition of government would be ideal.
But in the real world, secession has very often proven to be the most practicable option.
Specifically, in the case of the Donbass the problem has not been 48 percent of the population insisting on staying with Kiev. The problem has been that the puppet regime in Kiev insists on forcing the Donbass to join in the Kievan putsch.
But Putin has ended that.
This simply does not work. Who decides what is the group of people that will vote? If one set of borders will produce a 52-48 result one way then a slightly different set of borders will produce a 48-52 vote the other way. Or as they supposedly say in the Balkans "why should I be a minority in your country when instead you can be a minority in my country?"
And even assuming you can decide on the voters who will conduct the election? The incumbent government has many ways to ensure the vote comes out the way it wants.Replies: @Jack D, @PhysicistDave
Or as Erdogan of Turkey supposedly said (although who knows who really said it first), democracy is like a trolley. You ride it to your desired destination and once you get there, you get off.
Does anyone imagine that after one (fake) referendum in Russian ruled Kherson to join Russia that there could ever be another referendum to LEAVE Russia? Or that Putin would allow an independence referendum in say Chechnya? It’s just inconceivable.
because it seems to me that one has to go.Replies: @Jack D
If a practice has been going on for 4,000 years and the group that practices it is not extinct after all that time (unlike most other groups from 4,000 years ago – when was the last time you met a Hittite?), it must not be dysgenic, wouldn’t you say?
The Exodus did not occur: the Israelites were just Canaanite hillbillies who worshiped a local war god, Yahweh, along with many other gods, just as the Ammonites worshiped Milcom, the Moabites worshiped Chemosh, and the Edomites worshiped Qos.
All just Northwestern Semitic polytheists.
The kingdoms of Judea and Israel coalesced around three thousand years ago, but we know, from both archaeology and the Old Testament itself, that they were polytheists.
The distinctly Jewish identity only came into being after the return of a few crack-pot zealots from the "Exile" in Babylon. We know this from Ezra's bitching about the "people of the land," the actual inhabitants of the area, who were reluctant to get with the program of the zealots like Ezra and, in particular, from Ezra's bizarre insistence on breaking up marriages in which the wife was a "foreign" woman.
In short, "the Jews" were a creation of the Persian and post-Persian periods, a bit over two thousand years ago, not four thousand years ago. With a bunch of fake, make-believe history (such as the patriarch Abraham who supposedly hailed from "Ur of the Chaldees," except that the Chaldeans were not in Ur at the time Abraham supposedly lived).
You seem not to be up on current archaeology and history of the Levant.
I can suggest some books for you to read.
If you are interested.
Oh, and the most recent genetic research suggests that Ashkenazi Jews may be more Italian than Jewish anyway.
Do you like pasta?Replies: @Jack D
These increases in life expectancy have stalled and now appear to be reversing. People are becoming poorer. There is a feeling there is a shrinking pie of government benefits to be passed out and this will lead to fighting among various groups of the nonproductive on who gets what percentage. Productive people will vote with their feet and leave Democrat run areas but will eventually run out of places to flee to. They will then just give up. There is already something like five million less men between 25-57 working now than in the past and a good percentage of these probably fall into the category of just giving up.
When things really hit bottom and the government runs out of money one of three things will happen. One possibility is that a series of reforms will be undertaken to shrink government. The second is that we slide into a populist dictatorship. The third is the country will break apart. I'm a long-term optimist so I believe in option one.Replies: @Colin Wright, @International Jew, @AndrewR, @Coemgen, @Dmon
“When things really hit bottom and the government runs out of money one of three things will happen. One possibility is that a series of reforms will be undertaken to shrink government. The second is that we slide into a populist dictatorship. The third is the country will break apart. I’m a long-term optimist so I believe in option one.”
The government already has run out of money, and we are watching the response in real time. Flood the country with foreigners in order to keep up the illusion of economic “growth”, while going hyper-interventionist abroad in order to cow everyone into still accepting our worthless currency. In other words, Invade the World/Invite the World on booster shots.
https://youtu.be/L3cyJL_7GSkReplies: @Reg Cæsar
Europe’s very own Bir Tawil!
Does anyone imagine that after one (fake) referendum in Russian ruled Kherson to join Russia that there could ever be another referendum to LEAVE Russia? Or that Putin would allow an independence referendum in say Chechnya? It's just inconceivable.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
A Chechen independence referendum should be held in the rest of Russia!
What if Steve was petit canard, would he still have to pay? Vendre un canard à moitié.
The way I'd put this is we all (and around where I live, it is close to 'all') agree that the current regime is intolerable. I mean regime in the larger sense of the whole government-media-academia-imposed paradigm.
Great. What we tend to overlook is that we all have very different visions of the Good Life to Come. I don't feel any need to unconditionally ban all abortion or to ferret out every closeted homosexual school teacher. Others probably don't think we should immediately sever all ties with Israel and impose an embargo on it. And so on. Eighty percent of us may agree Kamala Harris should be put to death in some peculiarly humiliating way. But the day after?
The agendas differ.
From this much strife may flow.Replies: @Mark G., @kaganovitch, @PhysicistDave, @Mike Tre, @Veteran Aryan
Now here’s a problem that cloning could solve.
Good joke, but that’ not how it works in real life. You would think they would say, “let’s get rid of these alien pains in the ass and what remains will be a stronger, more unified country.” But in reality most people don’t want their country to shrink in territory.
Sometimes the result is ironic. Before Putin stole Crimea and the Donbass from Ukraine, there really wasn’t a lot of anti-Russian feeling in the country. Most Ukrainian citizens were either themselves Russian speakers or accepted the idea that Ukrainian and Russian history were intertwined such that it was natural for Ukraine to look east for its role models. BUT, by doing what he did, a lot of the citizens of Ukraine who were most sympathetic to Russia were no longer voting in Ukraine and the ones that were left were less sympathetic than before. So the Russians were sorta shocked (still are) by how much the Ukrainians now hate their guts, especially now that the have tried to take a THIRD bite at their territory. It would be like Americans finding out that Canadians secretly hate them. Not just in a nasty remarks way, but like in a wanting to kill them way.
!!!!
‘…Before Putin stole Crimea…from Ukraine…’
!!!!
I’m not so sure it’s their territory shrinking that irks them, rather the idea that the hated alien people are going to benefit. “We hate those bastards, why should they get to take away any of our land?” They are not much interested in the question of how it was they ever came to control that land in the first place.
Jack D wrote to Mike Tre:
Jack, there were no Jews 4,000 years ago.
The Exodus did not occur: the Israelites were just Canaanite hillbillies who worshiped a local war god, Yahweh, along with many other gods, just as the Ammonites worshiped Milcom, the Moabites worshiped Chemosh, and the Edomites worshiped Qos.
All just Northwestern Semitic polytheists.
The kingdoms of Judea and Israel coalesced around three thousand years ago, but we know, from both archaeology and the Old Testament itself, that they were polytheists.
The distinctly Jewish identity only came into being after the return of a few crack-pot zealots from the “Exile” in Babylon. We know this from Ezra’s bitching about the “people of the land,” the actual inhabitants of the area, who were reluctant to get with the program of the zealots like Ezra and, in particular, from Ezra’s bizarre insistence on breaking up marriages in which the wife was a “foreign” woman.
In short, “the Jews” were a creation of the Persian and post-Persian periods, a bit over two thousand years ago, not four thousand years ago. With a bunch of fake, make-believe history (such as the patriarch Abraham who supposedly hailed from “Ur of the Chaldees,” except that the Chaldeans were not in Ur at the time Abraham supposedly lived).
You seem not to be up on current archaeology and history of the Levant.
I can suggest some books for you to read.
If you are interested.
Oh, and the most recent genetic research suggests that Ashkenazi Jews may be more Italian than Jewish anyway.
Do you like pasta?
2nd, it's ridiculous to say that Jewish identity did not exist before the exile. Many of the key elements of Jewish history - the reigns of David and Solomon, the construction of the 1st temple, etc. predate the exile. Just because Ezra lamented various sinful practices doesn't mean that Judaism did not exist. Ezra kvetched a lot. That's what prophets do.
All religions and all peoples evolve over time. Present day Brits are not 100% the same people that the Romans found and an Anglican church service today would not be very familiar to an early Christian either. This doesn't mean that English history started in 1066 or that Christianity did not exist in England before Henry VIII.Replies: @Inquiring Mind, @PhysicistDave
This simply does not work. Who decides what is the group of people that will vote? If one set of borders will produce a 52-48 result one way then a slightly different set of borders will produce a 48-52 vote the other way. Or as they supposedly say in the Balkans "why should I be a minority in your country when instead you can be a minority in my country?"
And even assuming you can decide on the voters who will conduct the election? The incumbent government has many ways to ensure the vote comes out the way it wants.Replies: @Jack D, @PhysicistDave
James B. Shearer wrote to me:
Well, it has worked in a number of situation I mentioned above.
JBS also wrote:
Then your voting district is too large. Break it into smaller pieces in each of which there is a consensus.
Look: I’m an anarchist — I view every government as simply a means to take resources from the productive members of society and hand them over to the members of the government and their supporters.
But, at a practical level, self determination very often has worked: in the breakup of Czechoslovakia, for example.
Yeah, abolition of government would be ideal.
But in the real world, secession has very often proven to be the most practicable option.
Specifically, in the case of the Donbass the problem has not been 48 percent of the population insisting on staying with Kiev. The problem has been that the puppet regime in Kiev insists on forcing the Donbass to join in the Kievan putsch.
But Putin has ended that.
anonymous[108] asked me:
Sure, but it probably won’t happen.
What we are seeing in the US right now is a quiet, growing General Strike: “quiet quitting,” the millions of working-age males who have dropped out of the work force completely, etc.
I don’t know how to get America out of the mess it is in. I do know that the details of history are unpredictable (the defenestration of Prague, the assassination at Sarajevo, etc.) and a lot of unpredictable things are going to happen.
If everyone who is loyal to the American Republic keeps that in mind and is ready and willing to use such events to move towards the restoration of the Republic, we might succeed.
Or not.
I don’t know.
What we need is to be unyielding in our principles, but flexible in our tactics.
The Left knows that: Covid hits, and they are ready to use it to expand state power, which is always their unchanging goal.
Those of who favor restoring the Republic need to think the same way: no matter what events transpire, how can we use those events to annihilate the Left and restore the Republic?
What we are seeing in the US right now is a quiet, growing General Strike: "quiet quitting," the millions of working-age males who have dropped out of the work force completely, etc.
I don't know how to get America out of the mess it is in. I do know that the details of history are unpredictable (the defenestration of Prague, the assassination at Sarajevo, etc.) and a lot of unpredictable things are going to happen.
If everyone who is loyal to the American Republic keeps that in mind and is ready and willing to use such events to move towards the restoration of the Republic, we might succeed.
Or not.
I don't know.
What we need is to be unyielding in our principles, but flexible in our tactics.
The Left knows that: Covid hits, and they are ready to use it to expand state power, which is always their unchanging goal.
Those of who favor restoring the Republic need to think the same way: no matter what events transpire, how can we use those events to annihilate the Left and restore the Republic?Replies: @anonymous
How do you distinguish the Left from Jewish power?
And a decent number of Jews are not Leftists.
Isn't that sorta elementary?Replies: @anonymous
The Exodus did not occur: the Israelites were just Canaanite hillbillies who worshiped a local war god, Yahweh, along with many other gods, just as the Ammonites worshiped Milcom, the Moabites worshiped Chemosh, and the Edomites worshiped Qos.
All just Northwestern Semitic polytheists.
The kingdoms of Judea and Israel coalesced around three thousand years ago, but we know, from both archaeology and the Old Testament itself, that they were polytheists.
The distinctly Jewish identity only came into being after the return of a few crack-pot zealots from the "Exile" in Babylon. We know this from Ezra's bitching about the "people of the land," the actual inhabitants of the area, who were reluctant to get with the program of the zealots like Ezra and, in particular, from Ezra's bizarre insistence on breaking up marriages in which the wife was a "foreign" woman.
In short, "the Jews" were a creation of the Persian and post-Persian periods, a bit over two thousand years ago, not four thousand years ago. With a bunch of fake, make-believe history (such as the patriarch Abraham who supposedly hailed from "Ur of the Chaldees," except that the Chaldeans were not in Ur at the time Abraham supposedly lived).
You seem not to be up on current archaeology and history of the Levant.
I can suggest some books for you to read.
If you are interested.
Oh, and the most recent genetic research suggests that Ashkenazi Jews may be more Italian than Jewish anyway.
Do you like pasta?Replies: @Jack D
First of all, the Babylonian Exile was not “a bit over two thousand years ago” unless a “bit” is five or six hundred years.
2nd, it’s ridiculous to say that Jewish identity did not exist before the exile. Many of the key elements of Jewish history – the reigns of David and Solomon, the construction of the 1st temple, etc. predate the exile. Just because Ezra lamented various sinful practices doesn’t mean that Judaism did not exist. Ezra kvetched a lot. That’s what prophets do.
All religions and all peoples evolve over time. Present day Brits are not 100% the same people that the Romans found and an Anglican church service today would not be very familiar to an early Christian either. This doesn’t mean that English history started in 1066 or that Christianity did not exist in England before Henry VIII.
2nd, it's ridiculous to say that Jewish identity did not exist before the exile. Many of the key elements of Jewish history - the reigns of David and Solomon, the construction of the 1st temple, etc. predate the exile. Just because Ezra lamented various sinful practices doesn't mean that Judaism did not exist. Ezra kvetched a lot. That's what prophets do.
All religions and all peoples evolve over time. Present day Brits are not 100% the same people that the Romans found and an Anglican church service today would not be very familiar to an early Christian either. This doesn't mean that English history started in 1066 or that Christianity did not exist in England before Henry VIII.Replies: @Inquiring Mind, @PhysicistDave
I love you, man, and may many blessings be upon you.
But the Documentary Hypothesis, that the Torah wasn’t penned by Moses, was a redaction of multiple authors and was circa 5th century BCE and that historical confirmation of King David let alone the Exodus is thin among scholars of the Ancient Near East, let’s just say these ideas are not widely promulgated in Fundamentalist Christian circles.
The Tel Dan stele, from the 9th century BCE, refers to the royal "House of David" which is the obvious translation. Those who propose alternative translations, such as House of Uncle, House of Kettle and House of Beloved, are just ridiculously, willfully blind, like the Putinists on Unz. "House of Kettle" indeed.
I don't believe that the Bible is the infallible word of God but neither do I believe that it is a complete work of fiction either. Remember that David lived circa 1000 BCE, roughly the Iron Age.
There are few if any accurate historical records concerning events that happened in the Iron Age. The first significant written record of Britain and its inhabitants was made by the Greek navigator Pytheas, who explored the coastal region of Britain around 325 BC, 700 years later. King Arthur, who is probably about as real as King David (a mixture of fact and fiction), would have lived around 500 AD or 1500 years later (and only 1500 years ago), and yet the historical/archeological record for his existence is just as foggy.Replies: @PhysicistDave, @silviosilver
sailer deleted my first reply to this. he must be another genital mutilation enthusiast.
Redneck, maybe our host, Ron Unz, could be persuaded to support a literary writer doing a sort of One Day in the Life of John Dennison modeled in tone on Denisovich. My memory of Denisovich is very hazy, but I can sort of easily imagine a skilled writer portraying a soulless, racketeerized America in which Dennison/Denisovich tries to find his moral heading.
anonymous[795] asked me:
Ummmm…. well, you see, most Leftists are not Jews (Biden, Pelosi, Jay Powell, et al. ad nauseum).
And a decent number of Jews are not Leftists.
Isn’t that sorta elementary?
2nd, it's ridiculous to say that Jewish identity did not exist before the exile. Many of the key elements of Jewish history - the reigns of David and Solomon, the construction of the 1st temple, etc. predate the exile. Just because Ezra lamented various sinful practices doesn't mean that Judaism did not exist. Ezra kvetched a lot. That's what prophets do.
All religions and all peoples evolve over time. Present day Brits are not 100% the same people that the Romans found and an Anglican church service today would not be very familiar to an early Christian either. This doesn't mean that English history started in 1066 or that Christianity did not exist in England before Henry VIII.Replies: @Inquiring Mind, @PhysicistDave
Jack D wrote to me:
David and Solomon are now widely viewed as mythical, Jack — see Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman’s David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition. If they existed at all, they were nothing like the OT figures.
And the OT makes very, very clear that the ancient Israelites were polytheists — they were just part of the Northwestern Semitic ethnic group along with the Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, et al.
And as the link I provided shows (by a Jewish scholar, Henry Abramson, by the way!), Ashkenazi Jews are probably more Italian than Mideastern.
Jews are an artificial ethnic construct created a bit over two thousand years ago during the Persian and post-Persian period. And Ashkenazi Jews may not have that much connection to the ancient Jews.
You claimed Jews go back 4,000 years.
You are mistaken.
You might also benefit by reading Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years by Holocaust survivor Israel Shahak: the religion constructed during the Persian and post-Persian periods, as I briefly alluded to in my cites of Ezra, is one of the world’s nastier religions, as Shahak goes into in great detail citing primary sources (okay, not as bad as the Aztec religion!).
I have repeatedly made the point that not all people of Jewish descent endorse or should be held responsible for the evils of Judaism, just as I should not be held responsible for the evils of Nazism, even though I am partly of German descent.
But you need to face up to the truth. Judaism is a post-Exilic, Persian-period construction, and, as my cites of Ezra and even more the book by Holocaust survivor Shahak show, it is a pretty nasty construction.
Facts matter. Especially facts you would rather not face up to.
You know, I thought that my opinion of you could not go any lower but I was wrong about that.
Okay, so let's take the famous genocidal passage about Saul and the Amalekites from the book of Samuel.
The ancient Jews invented the idea of carrying out genocide for religious reasons:The only good thing that can be said for this is that it is probably a sick genocidal fantasy invented by later chroniclers.
But for two thousand years, Judaism has been including this horrific tale in its sacred Scriptures.
Are you unable to bring yourself to admit that this is deeply evil, Jack?
You cannot face up to the fact that Judaism is truly a horrific religion?
What is wrong with your soul, Jack?Replies: @Inquiring Mind
Jack D wrote to me:
But you will not actually read the book by Holocaust survivor Israel Shahak, will you, Jack?
Okay, so let’s take the famous genocidal passage about Saul and the Amalekites from the book of Samuel.
The ancient Jews invented the idea of carrying out genocide for religious reasons:
The only good thing that can be said for this is that it is probably a sick genocidal fantasy invented by later chroniclers.
But for two thousand years, Judaism has been including this horrific tale in its sacred Scriptures.
Are you unable to bring yourself to admit that this is deeply evil, Jack?
You cannot face up to the fact that Judaism is truly a horrific religion?
What is wrong with your soul, Jack?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_Dan_stele#%22House_of_David%22
The Tel Dan stele, from the 9th century BCE, refers to the royal “House of David” which is the obvious translation. Those who propose alternative translations, such as House of Uncle, House of Kettle and House of Beloved, are just ridiculously, willfully blind, like the Putinists on Unz. “House of Kettle” indeed.
I don’t believe that the Bible is the infallible word of God but neither do I believe that it is a complete work of fiction either. Remember that David lived circa 1000 BCE, roughly the Iron Age.
There are few if any accurate historical records concerning events that happened in the Iron Age. The first significant written record of Britain and its inhabitants was made by the Greek navigator Pytheas, who explored the coastal region of Britain around 325 BC, 700 years later. King Arthur, who is probably about as real as King David (a mixture of fact and fiction), would have lived around 500 AD or 1500 years later (and only 1500 years ago), and yet the historical/archeological record for his existence is just as foggy.
Personally, I am rooting for the historicity of King David, since he is my namesake, but the evidence is about as thin as for King Arthur.
Read the book I cited, by Jewish scholars.
Now, getting back to the Amalekites: bizarrely, a bit of googling shows this is still to this day a topic of discussion among serious Jewish believers! And, apparently, still a part of Jewish liturgy.
Just for one example out of a huge number that come up via Google:This is profoundly evil: your ancestors claim to have carried out a monstrously evil genocide roughly three thousand years ago.
Okay -- but many Jews still celebrate that genocide to this day???
I am not holding you responsible for the monstrous crimes your ancestors claimed (probably falsely) to have committed.
But I am holding you responsible for being part of a religion that, to this day, celebrates that alleged genocide.
There is something wrong here, Jack.
As my friend R. G. Camara will be happy to testify, I have no qualms criticizing Christianity and other religions. And you have never complained when I or anyone has done so.
But if I point out documented truths about Judaism that show that it is evil?
No, Jack, that you cannot tolerate, can you?
You cannot face up to the evil that is in your heart, can you, Jack?
Okay, so let's take the famous genocidal passage about Saul and the Amalekites from the book of Samuel.
The ancient Jews invented the idea of carrying out genocide for religious reasons:The only good thing that can be said for this is that it is probably a sick genocidal fantasy invented by later chroniclers.
But for two thousand years, Judaism has been including this horrific tale in its sacred Scriptures.
Are you unable to bring yourself to admit that this is deeply evil, Jack?
You cannot face up to the fact that Judaism is truly a horrific religion?
What is wrong with your soul, Jack?Replies: @Inquiring Mind
https://drmsh.com/the-giant-clans-and-the-conquest/
Michael Heiser, a Christian apologist and Hebrew scholar with his own style of biblical literalism, offers his justification for passages such as what you quote. Explaining what Dr. Heiser “is about” is potentially lengthy, but his version of biblical literalism is supernatural beings and phenomena having a physical manifestation. There is a version of this in popular culture — think of Clarence in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
If this sounds goofy, Christian doctrine has Christ as being both a supernatual being, one of the persons of the Trinity and at the same time being this guy who preached in 1st century C.E. Palestine.
What Heiser is claiming, based on his reading of the passage in Genesis about “the sons of God” who had physical relations with “daughters of men” bred a race of giants who were evil supernatural beings with a physical nature, whom the Lord wanted the Israelites much later on, yes, to genocide. Heiser criticizes Christian pastors who accept a supernatural aspect to Christ but brush aside what Heiser thinks is the correct supernatural interpretation of other accounts in the Bible.
Of course mainstream, American modern-day Judaism dismisses all of this. You are quoting whom I presume to be Jewish scholars claiming that passages such as this are mythology and hence their message is to be taken metaphorically regarding Good fighting Evil.
It can be fun to ask modern fundamentalist Christians if they really believe that angels can have sex with human women and create offspring? Of course, there was Mary and the seed of the Holy Spirit...
Most Christians, of course, see the words in Genesis 6 but somehow do not actually read those words.
Funny how religion works!
IM also asked me:Well, no: the passage from 1 Samuel 15 is pretty literal, nothing much supernatural or allegorical about it.
I know it probably did not actually happen, but that does not seem to be the attitude of most practicing Jews.
Indeed, as I pointed out above to Jack, a bit of googling shows that a lot of serious Jews take it very seriously and literally.
The problem is that they celebrate it! And this is just one among many examples in the Old Testament. The stories of the Conquest are full of evil bloody-mindedness like this (the most famous being, of course, Jericho).
And then there is, of course, the killing of all of the first-born sons of Egypt, and so on. That is the whole point of "Passover": the Jewish homes were passed over by the Angel of Death. Of course, it did not really happen, but it is still really, really nasty stuff. We are all so familiar with it that we do not pause and think it through.
Now, yes, none of this really happened.
But, imagine that we had a holiday on which we celebrated a make-believe mass killing of all the Jews in England in the Middle Ages. Even though that did not really happen, it would be horrible to celebrate such a holiday.
I have found very, very few modern practicing Jews who are willing to say,"Well, none of it really happened, but it is still horrifying that our ancestors celebrated supposed mass murder and we condemn all of those incidents in the Hebrew Bible."
It's as if modern American Protestants still celebrated the Salem witch trials.
And, unfortunately, these sorts of traditions have real effects. If you are taught from childhood, when you are too young to know that it is all myth (and again, most adults do not know it is all myth! Jack D seems not to), that it was a very, very good thing that your ancestors slaughtered the Canaanites and Amalekites and that your God wiped out the Egyptian first-born... well, why the hell shouldn't you do the same things to the Palestinians.
And to anyone else who gets in the way of the Jews.
In a way, the truly amazing thing is that a significant fraction of people of Jewish descent transcend this evil and treat all human beings as being of equal moral value. I have known many such people of Jewish descent.
But Jack D is not among them.
He is one of those who has a sickness in his soul.
The Tel Dan stele, from the 9th century BCE, refers to the royal "House of David" which is the obvious translation. Those who propose alternative translations, such as House of Uncle, House of Kettle and House of Beloved, are just ridiculously, willfully blind, like the Putinists on Unz. "House of Kettle" indeed.
I don't believe that the Bible is the infallible word of God but neither do I believe that it is a complete work of fiction either. Remember that David lived circa 1000 BCE, roughly the Iron Age.
There are few if any accurate historical records concerning events that happened in the Iron Age. The first significant written record of Britain and its inhabitants was made by the Greek navigator Pytheas, who explored the coastal region of Britain around 325 BC, 700 years later. King Arthur, who is probably about as real as King David (a mixture of fact and fiction), would have lived around 500 AD or 1500 years later (and only 1500 years ago), and yet the historical/archeological record for his existence is just as foggy.Replies: @PhysicistDave, @silviosilver
Jack D wrote to Inquiring Mind:
Few scholars think that Arthur was historical.
Personally, I am rooting for the historicity of King David, since he is my namesake, but the evidence is about as thin as for King Arthur.
Read the book I cited, by Jewish scholars.
Now, getting back to the Amalekites: bizarrely, a bit of googling shows this is still to this day a topic of discussion among serious Jewish believers! And, apparently, still a part of Jewish liturgy.
Just for one example out of a huge number that come up via Google:
This is profoundly evil: your ancestors claim to have carried out a monstrously evil genocide roughly three thousand years ago.
Okay — but many Jews still celebrate that genocide to this day???
I am not holding you responsible for the monstrous crimes your ancestors claimed (probably falsely) to have committed.
But I am holding you responsible for being part of a religion that, to this day, celebrates that alleged genocide.
There is something wrong here, Jack.
As my friend R. G. Camara will be happy to testify, I have no qualms criticizing Christianity and other religions. And you have never complained when I or anyone has done so.
But if I point out documented truths about Judaism that show that it is evil?
No, Jack, that you cannot tolerate, can you?
You cannot face up to the evil that is in your heart, can you, Jack?
Inquiring Mind wrote to me:
Yeah, the Nephilim, from Genesis 6.
It can be fun to ask modern fundamentalist Christians if they really believe that angels can have sex with human women and create offspring? Of course, there was Mary and the seed of the Holy Spirit…
Most Christians, of course, see the words in Genesis 6 but somehow do not actually read those words.
Funny how religion works!
IM also asked me:
Well, no: the passage from 1 Samuel 15 is pretty literal, nothing much supernatural or allegorical about it.
I know it probably did not actually happen, but that does not seem to be the attitude of most practicing Jews.
Indeed, as I pointed out above to Jack, a bit of googling shows that a lot of serious Jews take it very seriously and literally.
The problem is that they celebrate it! And this is just one among many examples in the Old Testament. The stories of the Conquest are full of evil bloody-mindedness like this (the most famous being, of course, Jericho).
And then there is, of course, the killing of all of the first-born sons of Egypt, and so on. That is the whole point of “Passover”: the Jewish homes were passed over by the Angel of Death. Of course, it did not really happen, but it is still really, really nasty stuff. We are all so familiar with it that we do not pause and think it through.
Now, yes, none of this really happened.
But, imagine that we had a holiday on which we celebrated a make-believe mass killing of all the Jews in England in the Middle Ages. Even though that did not really happen, it would be horrible to celebrate such a holiday.
I have found very, very few modern practicing Jews who are willing to say,”Well, none of it really happened, but it is still horrifying that our ancestors celebrated supposed mass murder and we condemn all of those incidents in the Hebrew Bible.”
It’s as if modern American Protestants still celebrated the Salem witch trials.
And, unfortunately, these sorts of traditions have real effects. If you are taught from childhood, when you are too young to know that it is all myth (and again, most adults do not know it is all myth! Jack D seems not to), that it was a very, very good thing that your ancestors slaughtered the Canaanites and Amalekites and that your God wiped out the Egyptian first-born… well, why the hell shouldn’t you do the same things to the Palestinians.
And to anyone else who gets in the way of the Jews.
In a way, the truly amazing thing is that a significant fraction of people of Jewish descent transcend this evil and treat all human beings as being of equal moral value. I have known many such people of Jewish descent.
But Jack D is not among them.
He is one of those who has a sickness in his soul.
And a decent number of Jews are not Leftists.
Isn't that sorta elementary?Replies: @anonymous
A basic question. Who created the Leftists?
Yes, I know that Marx was Jewish -- but he was very much a Johnny-come-lately. And, Engels, the brains (and money-bags) of the pair, was not Jewish.
Facts matter.
As I have said in my exchange with Jack D, the basic message of the Hebrew Bible is that Jews should commit atrocities against innocent people when it advances Judaism. Pretty nasty stuff.
And of course Jack plays the old game of being deeply shocked and hurt when I merely cite passages from the Old Testament that are indeed deeply horrifying -- as if I were the one who wrote those evil passages!
But such despicable behavior should not be used as an excuse to distort other facts: Jews did not invent Leftism. Gentiles did.
The history is quite clear.
Facts matter.
anonymous[943] asked me:
It goes back to the French Revolution (e.g., Babeuf) and the later “utopian socialists.” You can trace it back to “Christian Communists” such as the Diggers in the English Civil War.
Yes, I know that Marx was Jewish — but he was very much a Johnny-come-lately. And, Engels, the brains (and money-bags) of the pair, was not Jewish.
Facts matter.
As I have said in my exchange with Jack D, the basic message of the Hebrew Bible is that Jews should commit atrocities against innocent people when it advances Judaism. Pretty nasty stuff.
And of course Jack plays the old game of being deeply shocked and hurt when I merely cite passages from the Old Testament that are indeed deeply horrifying — as if I were the one who wrote those evil passages!
But such despicable behavior should not be used as an excuse to distort other facts: Jews did not invent Leftism. Gentiles did.
The history is quite clear.
Facts matter.
The Tel Dan stele, from the 9th century BCE, refers to the royal "House of David" which is the obvious translation. Those who propose alternative translations, such as House of Uncle, House of Kettle and House of Beloved, are just ridiculously, willfully blind, like the Putinists on Unz. "House of Kettle" indeed.
I don't believe that the Bible is the infallible word of God but neither do I believe that it is a complete work of fiction either. Remember that David lived circa 1000 BCE, roughly the Iron Age.
There are few if any accurate historical records concerning events that happened in the Iron Age. The first significant written record of Britain and its inhabitants was made by the Greek navigator Pytheas, who explored the coastal region of Britain around 325 BC, 700 years later. King Arthur, who is probably about as real as King David (a mixture of fact and fiction), would have lived around 500 AD or 1500 years later (and only 1500 years ago), and yet the historical/archeological record for his existence is just as foggy.Replies: @PhysicistDave, @silviosilver
That doesn’t change the fact that Judaism glorifies genocide. If it’s not the actual word of God, I don’t what else to call it except a “nasty construct.” Rather than deal with this, you choose to pout about “anti-semitism” (yeah, you didn’t say it, but obviously you’re thinking it).