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I am working on two more interviews as we speak, plus at least another two articles.

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I repeat myself ad museum but a look at who pays into the EU Budget will emphasise how catastrophic a failed German economy would be. They effectively pay for the dole which sustains the Baltics and Club Med. Von Der Liar is a catastrophically evil and mediocre leader, a lethal combination. Mired in corruption on Germany and EU viz Pfizer deal, she must go asap. It is the clearest example yet how with rare exceptions like Delors, the Commission head is a fixer from a smaller nation, like amiable drunkard Juncket. De Gaulle inherited Hallstein but showed him the door. She should get the same, but Macron is not a CDG, not even a Mitterrand or Chirac.

cre

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Ad nauseum

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The “deal” is pretty simple- Germany gets a 40 percent undervalued currency for its exporters and a ring-fenced, protectionist trade area in return for some annual payments that amount to a tiny fraction of the benefits Germany receives.

The EU periphery gets lower interest rates, ECB support, an overvalued currency and stifling regulations. This really isn’t a bad deal for them as they are all interested in keeping their social democracies as sclerotic and uncompetitive as possible until demographics and deficits shatter the illusion of stability and “quality of life”

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One man's sclerosis and stagnation is another's paradise. Dynamic economies generate demanding constituencies and potentially empowers rivals with the wrong school ties. Europe's political class is aiming for an Old World version of the kind of managed underdevelopment typical of the Third World. For oligarchs and opportunists entrenched in the right positions the status quo is bearable so long as there is a berth for themselves somewhere in Washington or New York or wherever and no capital controls to net the gains already made.

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Very thoughtful contribution and will look at it carefully over the next few days. Bleak!! But reality often is bleak.

Your contribution is counter to my assumptions, and one of the reasons why Niccolo has carefully created an arena for civilised and informed debate.

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When you have developed your position, pls let me know.

FbF is certainly an oasis of sanity, civility and the free exchange of ideas. I intend to make the most of it until I hear the knock at the door at 3.00 am.

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I signed this Substack because Nic was censored by Twitter and enjoyed his posts. This place here is another level where he has provided a commons for us subscribers to communicate respectfully and freely.

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I bet a friend of mine that in 2016 that ten years from then the EU would not exist. He said that in the same time period Scotland would be independent from the UK. I think I'm going to win...

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It's my hope that the EU continues to exist, just re-purposed. If not, we are doomed to become powerless. You Brits are already there.

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As in we are subsumed by the GAE? I know I won't convince you but outside London there is a much more normal country.

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Powerlessness is the best doom on offer. We nearly achieved it but now, with the ongoing rejoiner coup, it looks like we're going to get dragged back into the EU power struggle.

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I agree.

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Never going to happen. The EU have been bitten once already and the public are already on edge. Push hard to re-join and it will be a less-polite civil war in the UK this time. This winter will demonstrate that.

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Which countries are the net contributors to the EU? Germany and the Netherlands?

The beauty of it all is that the exposure of Von Der Leyen's character serves many purposes simultaneously: advertises the opportunities available for those who play the game, demoralises the subject populations of Europe and delegitimises institutions that pose a potential threat to the imperial suzerain.

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Latest figures seem to be 2018. The really big ones are Germany, and for a while yet the UK. The extortion of a trade deal for the UK will be to keep cash flowing from there for 'access to markets'!!!

Ireland, Finland and the frugal Scandinavians are all small net contributors, Netherlands and France are sizeable enough givers.

The main 'tkers' are Poland and other East/central European states, esp Hungary. Portugal and Greece still taking after nearly 35 years.

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Complex, enduring, cross-subsidies between separate jurisdictions (each with their own ethno-cultural flavour and histories of development) sounds like a recipe for perpetual antagonism. Sooner or later European solidarity is certain to become exhausted.

Naturally, managing the mess pays well enough. I understand that Brussels now has more lobbyists than Washington. In place of paying feudal dues and tithes, the Euro elites extract taxes, consultancies...the ancien regime without the style or the wit. You have to laugh.

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Blinded by one's own fundamentalism is a tale as old as time. The reason for the narrative management is not for the public its for the progressives/liberals to sustain the sanctity of their own delusion. They aren't secular, they are just selfish

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Children can apply for assisted suicide in Canada? What the hell?

As a supporter of assisted suicide, this shocks me and has gone too far. If anyone finds it unnecessary, read about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's disease. Tuesdays with Morrie is an account of a professor dying from this disease.

If you’d rather slowly lose the ability to move, become bedridden, and lose the ability to speak, swallow, and eventually breath over a few years instead of choosing assisted suicide after being diagnosed, you’re far braver than I am.

Or, more controversially, go visit your nearest nursing home. You really want to live like that for ten years or more? Perhaps my thoughts will change as I age, but I see a need for assisted suicide.

But Niccolo is right, the not-real slippery slope is always real. As soon as it becomes acceptable, people will push for more conditions to be included; the inclusion of mental disorders is particularly concerning.

One, mental disorders are easy to fake (On Being Sane in Insane Places). Two, mental disorders can be over diagnosed or even manufactured by society; multiple personalities, “repressed memory recovery”, ADHD, and gender dysphoria are some examples. Three, plenty of people are suicidal and this is a route to socially approved suicide.

On one hand, I’m not that worried; beyond the immorality of it, killing children is killing future producers and consumers. The state and capitalism won’t allow that to last, will it? Or are there some dark benefit to this that I am missing?

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The most cynical read is how it can save on future health care costs that continue to balloon. For the rest, we'll have to wait to find out.

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There is a way to avoid the hideous sights in nursing homes and that is withdrawal of care. Antibiotics and central heating have allowed lives to be prolonged unnaturally. I try to encourage families and patients to write advanced directives but the former can't or won't face it and the latter are often too far gone to make that kind of decision.

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Agreed! Americans fear death and unnaturally prolong life. Beyond the costs, which are astoundingly high, we keep people alive despite the quality of said lives being poor. Death is inevitable and we need to accept that.

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It is perfectly possible although rare to have a decent, civilised life into your nineties. Those who I've met in this situation were mostly lucky but also active, ate sensibly and didn't smoke. They also drank in moderation. I have no desire to see their lives come to an end whatsoever, it is those who are little more than adult babies in nursing homes and can barely respond to crude stimuli, let alone sit up and talk that ought to be allowed to die in peace.

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Excellent links and observations, thanks!

Re: Germany. I have no sympathy for nations/companies who become reliant on supply chains controlled by hostile, unpredictable actors - whether that is Germany in the case of Russia or the USA (in tech, manufacturing and consumer products) in regard to China.

Merkel obstinately pursued Nordstream 2 when it was made very clear that the US and much of the EU were strongly against it. That Russia would be an unreliable partner has been long evident - it occupies and has neutered Moldova, has invaded Georgia and Ukraine (in order to partition or annex territory), has intervened in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and has subjugated Belarus (with the cooperation of its government. Merkel should have encouraged fracking rather than banning it, built more nuke plants and LNG terminals and backed pipelines coming from the Eastern Med, Mideast and North Africa rather than those controlled by Russia. These were all Merkel’s failures.

The US is a hegemon in its hemisphere and often in Europe. Russia and China are moving toward the same in their near abroad. The EU needs to realize that Africa and the Middle East are part of its near abroad. Either these areas will be developed and managed or there will be a billion immigrants heading to Europe. The EU needs to invest heavily in North Africa and integrate its solar and fossil fuel resources into the European region while developing their economies- which means building factories for assembly there and importing goods from there rather than the typical German colonial/mercantilist approach of exporting products, taking advantage of the chronically undervalued Euro (from the perspective of Germany, as if it still had the D-mark it would likely be 30-40 percent more expensive than the €

In Latam, most American subsidiaries are effectively local companies. America doesn’t export to Latam- it builds and sells locally (or imports from there in the case of Mexico).

Unfortunately mercantilism and corporate fascism (running politics and the economy for the benefit of large companies) is entrenched deeply in Germany’s psyche. We’ll see if that can change.

By the way - one pipe of Nordstream 2 is operational and Russia has recently offered to supply gas through it. Some think the destruction of Nordstream 1 was an act to save Gazprom from being sued for non-performance on its supply contracts. Problem solved. Also sends a warning to Europe about how precarious its Norwegian and UK energy sources might be.

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Think the story you mentioned is The Carnival by Michael Fedo.

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That's the one! Thank you.....it's been well over 30 years since I read it.

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BTW, how did you know that?

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Same for me, been a long time. You jarred my memory so I searched google for something like “short story theme park teen eugenics”.

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So the story is from the middle of the last century:

"Fedo went on to spread his knowledge about rights through his own experiences and struggles. “The Carnival” was created by 28-year-old Michael Fedo and went on to be read by many around the world, however, he did not receive anything through the popularity of the story because he had sold all his rights to Scholastic who now receives all profit made from his original story."

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Wonder if that's where Bob Odenkirk and David Cross got their idea for "The Devastator." Odenkirk's t-shirt during the interview slays me.

https://youtu.be/p5Oi57fqdU0

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That was a brilliant show.

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I’m also not an ethicist but I’ve seen here how application of Islamic principles in medicine skews end-of-life decisions (Dr’s are legally obliged to do everything possible until the patient is dead - that means unless you die in your sleep you die hooked up to machines) - it’s really terrible in most cases. Obviously depressed teenagers shouldn’t be put to sleep by the state - that’s insane, but it’s the logical outcome (as stated in the article). I have no idea what the solution is. Both things seem awful to me.

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Reading this and many, many of the linked articles was a great way to spend my morning. Thanks!

I think the explanation for the coverage here and elsewhere of the Common Sense piece on Canada's assisted suicide phenomenon should be understood as an instinctual recognition of the threat to humanity that this phenomenon is. Not the threat to the species per se, but in that most human value of how we look with our own eyes at another human and value that person. The worship of compassion, the senseless desire to remove pain from the human experience, above all else is a false idol, a wicked, selfish and vane substitute for the wordless humanity we share.

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Thoughtful take, thank you.

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“Tenderness leads to the gas chambers.”

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Just found this article: "The anxious foresight required for avoiding policy catastrophes—that is, the ability to think tragically in order to avoid tragedy—has either been insufficiently developed or nowhere in evidence in Beijing, Moscow, and Washington."

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/downside-imperial-collapse

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I went down a Yukio Mishima rabbit hole recently. Unfamiliar readers may enjoy this piece:

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/25/specials/mishima-mag.html?_r=2

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It’s interesting how Schneider fairly explicitly states that the point of the trans movement is to be able to say that nothing in existence is immutable and fixed. Reminds me of a scene from a book about Baron Ungern-Sternberg (by a guy named Victor Pozner) in which Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was used as an argument against all of history and the ancien regime.

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Good catch.

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great stuff as usual, I have been converted to zionism after reading this week's entry.

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Q: Is this because you're a Jew, or that you're in favor of Judenrein?

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Excellent as always.

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I'm a medic and am firmly anti-suicide. It's the Left parasite again poisoning everything. As usual they've seized control of the language: "assisted dying", "medically-induced" etc etc. It's killing. Our profession(s) have enough trouble with those who think they're God without giving them actual power of life and death.

Also, his example of giving dying patients opiates is a fucking lie. They're dying within hours and maybe days at best and are in terrible pain and distress. The overlap between the opiates killing them because they're so weak and being in large enough quantities to give relief is minute. This is emphatically not the same as someone going 'it's all too much, goodbye world'. You could extrapolate that logic to 'one day I will have a terminal illness of some kind and I cannot face it. I will therefore kill myself at age 25 to avoid a painful death'.

For those who think this will never happen: remember when less than twenty years ago homosexuals were barely tolerated and had to be discreet? Yes, when the idea of two men marrying was in inverted commas and parading naked in public with children would've been seen as an obscene joke? Not so funny now is it?

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As Eugyppius' substack has been chronicling the stubborn refusal of Germany's political class to move on from Covid mitigation, I've been constantly saying this winter Germany won't be able to afford such self indulgence.

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I hadn't known of Eugyppius' substack -- thank you for referencing it! Yes, excellent reading... sorry I didn't know of it back in 2020, but never too late.

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Whenever I read this argument: "the obsession, bordering on pathological, that national conservatives display regarding LGBTQ equality, and trans people in particular" the image that comes to mind is being a small kid and having a bigger kid hitting me w my own fist and yelling "Stop hitting yourself!"

I guess peering into these people's thoughts they really think that they can demonize or ignore biology and evolution, teach some gnostic nonsense (to small children!) called "Gender Theory" that mostly exists bc various strangers called Judith Butler "Sir" by mistake, relocate the soul a foot south in the crotch rather than the chest, and convince a generation of children that biology is an imposition but sex-change operations are liberation—and that there would be NO opposition to any of this! That parents etc would just bow down in gratitude at being led to the postmodern Promised Land? That anyone who opposes teaching this in grade school is some sort of dangerous bigot!

And then they gaze into their self-flattering mirrors and believe that they're cutting-edge deep thinkers while their opponents are retrograde religious freaks who exist in a world of imaginary concoctions. LOL!

While I can't say I'm a big believer in Jehovah, he certainly has a better track record and at least a lot of quality art and literature inspired by him, while the worshippers of the Self and its various metaphysical emanations just repeat the same sterile whines and sell them in different bottles.

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I'd put it differently. Politically, the transgendered are exemplars of the Sado-Malthusian version of ultra-liberalism: they are the embodiment of transhumamism...the belief that the self must be liberated from all unchosen obligations, even those imposed by physics. This offers extraordinary opportunities for the biomedical industrial complex (iatrogenic rent-collection) and perhaps even greater ones for a regime that thrives on curated dysfunction and seeks to encourage fissures and fractures of all kinds within the community so as to leverage the maximum advantage over whatever has survived of the family unit. Every child recruited to a 'glitter family' constitutes a victory over the populace (especially the Deplorables). The willingness of parents within the equestrian classes (the professional and managerial strata) tests the sincerity of their belief in regime ideology, while the court enforced support of gender affirmation is the ultimate humiliation ritual for the Deplorables. Psychically/sexually disordered individuals within the teaching and social work professions get the thrill of disrupting the reproduction of other peoples' children...revenge for the affront they feel at witnessing the successfully accomplished fertility of others. Gender affirmative paedagogy and paediatrics also helps prepare the next generation of Tranissaries to serve the regime.

Theologically, this may be understood as some kind of reflexive theurgy...a simultaneous parody of both revealed religion and Gnosticism...man/woman as his/her own Demiurge. Psychically, it is about humans attempting to assert sovereignty over themselves by sacrificing their sexual characteristics...an unconscious but unmistakable imitation of the priests of Cybele who castrated themselves in honour of Attis on the 'dies sanguinis' (the day of blood, the vernal equinox).

In Freudian/Jungian terms: the repressed has truly returned and has never looked so 'fabulous'.

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Yes it all does feel very gnostic, this mystical ineffable thing called Gender, which connects us all to the divine essence and supplants all other ways of knowing (including biology). And mutiliating yourself to get closer to the Holy has a long history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skoptsy

Much as u said, Gender is an all-purpose tool for the New Left's eternal crusade to dismantle Western civilization (and express their bottomless ressentiment) and build the Brave New World where they all rule and we all obey.

But also I think another aspect is the Civil Rights Narrative (more or less: oppressed victim group begins movement for equal rights; inspires a generation of students, activists, politicians, etc to join the cause; achieves victory aka Justice and proves again who's on the Right Side of History™) and the role it plays in modern America: this is our Sacred Narrative, our hero's journey, and for journalists and politicians (and the empty souls who trail in their wake) it's some cross bw a Hollywood blockbuster franchise, a corporate product launch, and a BREAKING NEWS narrative for the media.

Or more simply, the Narrative feeds a lot of people, bolsts a lot of businesses and careers, opens all sorts of revenue streams and new academic specialties, and provides a Holy cause and narrative for our post-God society. And Transmania does all these things...

Hope that makes sense....Cheers!

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CP, it all makes perfect sense. The confluence of factors is extraordinary. At the heart of it is the neuroscience behind Hegel's intuition about the master/slave relationship: people are compelled by our nature to seek recognition. There are now people who are driven by a desire to be recognised for who/what they think they are, while simultaneously seeking to leverage this recognition into the means to establish power over others.

It is all who/whom played out in a society that is transactional and profit-driven and confused beyond reason by fantasies of self-realisation and expectations of entitlement and self-creation.

Ours is a species of ape who exult in sending each other mad. It is as simple as that.

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"Ours is a species of ape who exult in sending each other mad."

Might be stealin that!! Well done!

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As Byron put it: mediocre artists imitate, great ones steal!

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