Saudi Arabia's Modernization and Liberalization, Germany's AfD Ascendant, Slow US Adoption of 5G Tech, We're All Bourgeois Now, Single Origin Theory Of Humans Dead?
My understanding of the subject (a few Razib Khan podcasts and internet racists) is that even if you are critical of it you have to be very very wary in how you phrase your criticism, because it's a hypothesis that has an additional political charge to it now. So the result is people who are shifting the paradigm still use the old language at times, which gives the appearance it remains on solid ground
So from an inveterate Catholic who will die on the hill of Monogenism, does this basically entail that the only way to account for the human genome is multiple different interbreeding tribes?
There are archaic populations that have contributed to the human genome for some modern day people. However, this can only be proven mathematically (through statistical analysis of genomics) as none of these "ghost populations" have thrown up any DNA via remains as of yet. Being Africa, the climate is not the best for preserving ancient DNA samples in the ground.
So the sequence provides implicit but logical proof that there must be some other group in the mix? I don't understand evolution all too well, as I did receive a creationist-ish account of biology back in high school that was pretty persuasive. Im less convinced now, but I think biological evolution and abiogenesis have the possibility to create serious epistemological problems if you use an Aristotelean framework (which I do). Also love your work, btw.
1. Quoting from the Der Spiegel article that I linked
2. "Racist Terminology" is a subjective term
3. You yourself have just admitted that nothing in platform can be found about mistreating the disabled. In Canada they are euthanizing the poor. Is Canada's government "extremist"?
4. Climate Change orthodoxy can be challenged and is not a marker of an extremist
I do not see what makes the AfD "extremist", much less "dangerous".
As a Hungarian, I find all German behavoir extreme.
Their liberalism is extreme, their environmentalism is extreme. I expect their naked xenophobia to be just as extreme.
Their powers’ treatment of Hungary is extreme. Whenever they talk about us itis vile, the way German police treats visiting Hungarian fans is extreme.
Save for a few Osties maybe, Germans are extreme. They are also, as one of my friends once put it to me, funnily obstuse, even those who kind of start to see the light, just hit a wall and you can’t drag them across.
I wouldn’t care if our relations were business only. The Japanese are like everyone else, just more so - well, they’re not trying to fuck around in MY country. Maybe more AfD would be healthy for Germany, deal with things at home.
If a given position is supported by a large plurality of the population, it is by definition not extremist. The way that word is used, and the way you use it here, is the same way scare words like 'fascist', 'racist' and so on are thrown around - scare words with no content beyond 'I don't like these people', no more semantically meaningful than an animal's grunt.
And yes, I just compared leftists to grunting animals.
Since you consider one of Germany's most popular political parties 'extremist', you quite clearly are not using words according to their meaning. Unless in this case the meaning is 'disagrees with your personal political ideology'.
"day conversations on the bus/in the supermarket/at the barbers or wherever"
That proves only that they are demonized in the press. You don't want people who you just casually meet to get a bad impression from you just because of some misinformation in the press.
AfD suffers from the same problems that you see in every organization with ideas that are attacked by the mainstream media. Many people with important jobs try to hide their association out of fear for their career. As a result more extreme/less polished voices get more visibility. And the media will feast on every such voice that they notice. You see the same with the organizations of Trump and Sanders in the US and many "extreme right" parties in Europe. But - as George Menyhei mentioned - in their policies the mainstream parties are nowadays often at least as extreme.
That's very true. But it's not just pressure from the media. If you're a civil servant, you can get into big trouble for anything openly right-wing, and that's only set to intensify, since the interior minister (an "antifascist" ideologue) wants to make purges of the civil service easier. Sections of AfD are already officially under surveillance by the inland security service, so one can see where this is going.
"Words have meaning..." you say. Unfortunately, words like "extremist" and "racist" and "fascist" have been redefined to enable a deeply dishonest motte-and-bailey game by the Left. They -- perhaps, I should say *You* -- use these cleverly redefined words, rather than more accurate terms, because you count on invoking the emotional weight these words historically have had, yet when pressed to explain how these words apply to their present targets (in light of the emotional connotation they dredge up based on their historical usage), you retreat to some mealy-mouthed modern redefinition that warrants none of the emotional response you are aiming for. Keep this game up, and I will start dropping Solzhenitsyn quotes on you, because you are playing a dishonest game, and you know you are playing a dishonest game, even though you are pretending not to and feigning confusion when called out on it. The whole charade is really tiresome.
Haha... I was reading your comment with interest, and then I saw this: “the matter of climate change denialism.”
I’m one of those. Like you, I parroted that belief at one time, thinking that there was actual good science underpinning it. It took about 4 years of study and research to get to where I am now: one of those “denialists.”
Germany, and other Western nations, are ruining their economies and people’s lives by shutting down good reliable baseload energy on a chimera that has become lodged in the minds of many people, including yourself.
What we should never do, is lose our minds. Our nuclear plant still operates, in fact it’s getting new reactors. See?
I used to say that shutting down German reactors was the stupidest move from a nuclear safety perspective, as those were run by Germans; in retrospect, maybe this was for the better.
Also, getting hooked on Russian natural gas to “decrease greenhouse emissions”, each watt of renewable backed by a new watt of natural gas, was also brilliant. Both from an Earth saving perspective, and geopolitically. Bravo!
I see that you get quite the paprika in the reactions here. It’s not just your positions: it’s the rarity of Germans engaging in the international online space.
You do speak English, but so few of you are present. In dissident circles, almost none.
So when one shows up, they get piled on.
Germans seem parochial by being so inwards focused. This would be great, if your politicians also followed suit, but they don’t. This discrepancy is so great that featuring German little people’s opinions in Hungary can get you the front page.
Honest question - how much will draconian climate policies in the West even move the needle - most emissions in the East/South and will be increasing for the foreseeable future. I doubt these regimes will ever be serious about carbon to the extent regulation would materially limit their economic output and geopolitical power (most of the West's climate policies to date have been a win for China)
AfD's youth section has just been declared anti-constitutional on the grounds that it considers there's such a thing as ethnic Germans, and policies which will eventually reduce them to a dwindling minority in Germany might not be a good thing for them. That's the crux of the issue, any group that addresses it explicitly will be targeted by the establishment. These claims about "very vile, racist terminology" (imo mostly baseless, especially given what's been going on in Germany since 2014/15) are just intended to obfuscate the issue.
Yeah, this is fair, also from what I have read. Although its important to point out that similar criticism, like yours, has been made of Fratelli Italia and Meloni in Italy. At the same time, at least in Italy, it became clear that some of those fringe elements, and not so fringe, were not what actually made her or FdI so attractive, but rather her anti-socially liberal (or in the US "woke") approach to governance and her strong state, but capitalist mindset, which hoped to shake up the bureaucratic establishment just enough to make a real difference. The interesting thing is that, as a result, those elements have either been silenced or even removed entirely. What remains is an impressive counter to a very leftist narrative that was really hurting Italy in every possible way. She's no saint, just like many of the prominent players in the AfD (I assume), but she is a very good, very reasonable politician and anything but the "fascist" they made her out to be. Similar story obviously with the MAGA movement.
AfD, MAGA, and brexit must be crushed under the boot of the WEF Wehrmacht globalist “democracy”. EU/ESG/greens are the fourth reich. Here are a few modern German words that describe our clown world situation: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-speak-german
1990s Franjo Tudjman was like the exact opposite of the current center-leftist German position. "The WW2 fascist Croatian government (that I personally fought against) wasn't THAT awful, but even if it was, so what."
I'm not sure if Polansky's essay dealt with urbanization as a gateway to safetyism, but as someone who's lived in both urban and rural areas as an adult there is definitely a greater acceptance of danger in rural areas. Nature is a MFer.
Where I live now, I frequently deal with bears. They are not so bad if one behaves properly and doesn't leave food (trash) readily available for them. In fact they are quite beautiful to see. Where I lived there were drug dealers and homeless all around. No protocol for dealing with the filth they created that kept one safe. I suppose if I weren't bourgeois but heroic, I would have gone "Death Wish" on them. I moved instead. Now instead of finding human feces in front of my door, I occasionally find bear scat (and deer, etc).
There's probably something to this. Not for nothing that you find so many farm boys in the military, which in turn is one of the last redoubts of aristocratic warrior virtue - insofar as that can exist in the modern context.
To link two of the topics, note for instance how the AfD couches its opposition to mass immigration in terms of safety (crime, terrorism, etc) and economic loss (welfare and such), whereas the regime simply denies the former and insists that to the contrary, MENA migrants will be a boon to the public treasury. Both sets of concerns are quintessentially bourgeois.
However, the *opposition* to the AfD seems to emerge from something even more primal than WWII blood guilt. It is expressed in the syntax of extremism, terrorism, and violence - as though the AfD were an incipient horde of axe-wielding Germanic barbarians looking to string up brown people as sacrifices on Odin's tree. It's as though the real concern is that there might be a reversion to pre-bourgeois values.
In the end, it comes down to a debate over who is and is not bourgeois - the AfD says migrants aren't and will never be, while the left tries to exclude the AfD from the bourgeoisie. All while everyone pretends they aren't bourgeois in the first place. It's all rather comical once observed from outside the bourgeois framework.
The regime understands this better than anyone else, hence the abundance of cannabis, opioids, porn and fast foods as well as the inept regulation of social media.
Yes if only instead of competent or even brilliant predation they could tune their minds to good governance. Its the insane villainous grandchildren of the benevolent geniuses of the New Deal.
The rhetoric of heroism was integral to the militarism that swept Germany in the 19th c (which utterly appalled Nietzsche) and that went psychotic in the 20th. IMO fascism tried to market a prole parody of a heroic role to the workers drafted into uniform. So a degree of suspicion of the old culture makes perfect sense for the current regime, though it has obviously gone too far.
The bourgeois issue will be moot once deindustrialisation and pauperisation sets in on a grand scale.
Well it was the Junkers who put H. in power in the first place (the Weimar gov't planned reforms to farm subsidies, so the ultra-conservatives convinced Hindenburg to trust the NSDAP which was backed by industrialists and a few aristos).
The plebeians were pushed out (or constrained) after the Night of Long Knives. Then the upper-middle and professional classes asserted themselves.
The trouble with wars is that they accelerate change exponentially. Reactionaries should understand this, but they never seem to do so.
Brezhnev was indeed a veteran. He got on very well with fellow veterans from the West...especially Richard Nixon and Captain Bob Maxwell (Ghislaine's dad). The latter was apparently a drinking buddy.
Frankly Brezhnev does not look too bad compared to Yeltsin. Ditto his generation. They were all ridiculous dinosaurs by the time I was a teenager but the replacement generation of leaders around the world have been utterly destructive. And smug as hell about it all.
Thanks, his insights and general vision are insightful. The Worker is a Typus - a general Type not individual who by working is a worker, as opposed to bourgeois who are defined by status and overwhelming need for safety and danger to be banished.
It’s very dense , I am used to dense concepts and he’s a challenge.
I'm skeptical that authoritarian methods are effective at combating corruption. Without transparency, the political and ruling classes can fleece the state at any time of their choosing. A change in leadership, management, or even a change in heart can allow corruption to come roaring back. And in any authoritarian system, there are no checks and balances to halt it.
Xi, Putin, and MBS will not remain in power forever. Eventually, these nations are headed for bad times.
MBS wasn’t combating corruption - he was using corruption as an excuse to fleece and intimidate princelings who might have opposed his rule and his reforms. Not too dissimilar from Xi. A difference is that the CCP has created a system that allows some non-cadres to be successful. However, the junta still wants to ensure that the cadres run everything and get the best opportunities, so everyone who is successful must become a cadre or otherwise toe the line.
Will be interesting in KSA, because one can become a cadre in China but one needs to be born a Prince in Saudi, and the princes/sheiks control everything.
Scott Alexander actually just published a reader book review on corruption and the central theme is "the optimal amount of corruption is not zero". But finding a stable equilibrium is hard even in a democracy
I think China will be ok for a while. I cannot fathom what happens to Russia when Putin goes. MBS it's quite early, the big question I think is how to address the cartoonishly hereditary nature of power in Saudi Arabia
Alexander Hamilton (the black man) also made it clear during the drafting of America's Constitution that corruption is the only way a government can ever get anything done
MbS has a long way to go before it can be said that he’s been ‘successful’. Most of the reforms (particularly wrt women) are hugely overhyped - and western expatriates are still hesitant to leave the UAE for Saudi whatever the policy requirements (or financial incentives). He certainly didn’t make any friends by routing out “corruption” (his own excepting of course), the large majority of the Saudi population are not tech investors, they’re regular middle and lower-middle class families currently being told that every cultural and religious value they hold is essentially worthless. Many cities in the Gulf are attempting to replicate the ‘Dubai model’ without taking into account that the 91% of the population that make the Dubai model possible aren’t Emiratis or even Arab. And I’ve yet to hear another living person say - “Hey, weekend in Riyadh?” Maybe they’ll put them at the Ritz...
It is very hard to know what to make of Sa'udi Arabia. The various regions have historically had separate rulers and Wahabism was based in on or two portions of the east, with the Hejaz being quite different. And then there is the tribal issue...My guess is that the reforms are tentative and MBS is sitting atop a potentially active volcano. The politics with the Al-Sa'ud are notoriously opaque. The anticorruption drive made MBS mortal enemies in the West amongst the Deep State beneficiaries of largesse from the princes MBS put the squeeze on.
I wonder to what degree Dubai is like Singapore. It is small and has a niche that the surrounding larger states (KSA) can't replicate. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand have long had Singapore envy.
“ Germany’s Der Spiegel (the country’s version of the USA’s Time Magazine) is a horrible, horrible publication. Objectivity is at most an afterthought, if thought of at all.”
The greatest accomplishment of the AfD, from a Hungarian standpoint, is the erosion of any illusion that Germany is a democracy so pristine, that they have any credibility to lecture us.
This Deutsche Welle report from 2021 is notorious, it has Jews fleeing the castle district out of fear. For those who are unaware, that’s the touristy bit in Budapest where people take selfies.
"The greatest accomplishment of the AfD, from a Hungarian standpoint, is the erosion of any illusion that Germany is a democracy so pristine, that they have any credibility to lecture us."
Stanley Payne has called Germany a "guided democracy", imo very true.
Btw, there was this incident recently when German Antifa types travelled to Budapest and attacked pedestrians they took to be right-wingers, gravely injuring some. Is this a big news story in Hungary (predictably enough it isn't in German media)?
I think bourgeois is kinda old fashioned, ain’t. Yes Bill Gates still wears a Shetland pullover, but perhaps Nike sneakers. Maybe they became in some moment bourgers eaters.
The “Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution” is the most blatant manifestation of Teutonic character I’ve seen since the Mannaschaft beat the Brazilians like a drum in a World Cup semifinal lol.
Rarely see him discussed but Filmer v. Hobbes arguably shaped what Britain and, by extension. Atlanticism became – Filmer traditionalism seemingly lost out due to the overpowering rise of the commercial oligarchy (facilitated - unintentionally or not - by Cromwell and completed with the importation of William of Orange fulfilling the weak executive Italian city state model)
Sir Robert Filmer was a key theorist of the divine right of kings from the Civil War era (mid 1600s). He argued that the state was a family, the king the father of his people.
A prof of mine would reference him all the time as a sort of inside joke about being a philosophy nerd, and then the next year another prof assigned him to us.
Filmer hasn't been taught in modern universities to my knowledge - it always begins with Hobbes. Phillip is correct - essentially viewing society as an extension of the family receiving its legitimacy through God as opposed to a pragmatic contract for material security.
In UG polsci, we got very brief takes on Filmer as the focus of Locke's first treatise on Government, after which we moved to marinating in/day-spa-ing in the Second treatise on toleration which sets up Locke to be proto-mill and grad-daddy of awesome liberalism. The assigned book had both treatises so I remember thumbing through Locke's reply to Filmer's arguments. I can recall the font, the colour, the smell of the book, but none of the content. Basically you only come across serious discussions of Filmer if you were reading the neoreactionaries 15 years ago or Yarvin.
Of note with the Saudis: they appear to be negotiating with Yemen in open defiance of American wishes on the subject. I assume America doesn't want to help Iran ever since they went Russia drones. MBS continues to stun me, though I know better than to assume these changes are secure
I met a German who kept using American language for Trump voters and the alt-right to describe the AfD to us Americans. Thought it was really funny he wouldn't just call them Nazis but maybe he knew here in America no one that gets called a Nazi is really a Nazi. Also beyond the Rosa Luxemburg reference, Linke is directly descended from the ruling East German parties. Journos are quick to note when, say, the Swedish Democrats can be traced back to Nazis, but of course it never goes the other way
atta boy
My substack is for true warriors though, but I agree.
I call my readers “aristocrats”, and the conversion rate is above average.
Chatter precedes actual change in opinions. Single-Origin Theory still rules, but is now taking more hits.
My understanding of the subject (a few Razib Khan podcasts and internet racists) is that even if you are critical of it you have to be very very wary in how you phrase your criticism, because it's a hypothesis that has an additional political charge to it now. So the result is people who are shifting the paradigm still use the old language at times, which gives the appearance it remains on solid ground
Precisely. The key term here is "ghost populations", which is mentioned in the Nature abstract.
So from an inveterate Catholic who will die on the hill of Monogenism, does this basically entail that the only way to account for the human genome is multiple different interbreeding tribes?
There are archaic populations that have contributed to the human genome for some modern day people. However, this can only be proven mathematically (through statistical analysis of genomics) as none of these "ghost populations" have thrown up any DNA via remains as of yet. Being Africa, the climate is not the best for preserving ancient DNA samples in the ground.
So the sequence provides implicit but logical proof that there must be some other group in the mix? I don't understand evolution all too well, as I did receive a creationist-ish account of biology back in high school that was pretty persuasive. Im less convinced now, but I think biological evolution and abiogenesis have the possibility to create serious epistemological problems if you use an Aristotelean framework (which I do). Also love your work, btw.
1. Quoting from the Der Spiegel article that I linked
2. "Racist Terminology" is a subjective term
3. You yourself have just admitted that nothing in platform can be found about mistreating the disabled. In Canada they are euthanizing the poor. Is Canada's government "extremist"?
4. Climate Change orthodoxy can be challenged and is not a marker of an extremist
I do not see what makes the AfD "extremist", much less "dangerous".
You're right, I failed to link the article. Here it is (edited into the main body) - https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/normalization-on-the-extreme-right-alternative-for-germany-party-again-gaining-ground-a-f84407e5-4176-4e3a-906e-76cdeec781bf
As for the rest of your post, just because you say something is "extremist" doesn't make it so.
Is Canada's government extremist for killing its poor via euthanasia?
As a Hungarian, I find all German behavoir extreme.
Their liberalism is extreme, their environmentalism is extreme. I expect their naked xenophobia to be just as extreme.
Their powers’ treatment of Hungary is extreme. Whenever they talk about us itis vile, the way German police treats visiting Hungarian fans is extreme.
Save for a few Osties maybe, Germans are extreme. They are also, as one of my friends once put it to me, funnily obstuse, even those who kind of start to see the light, just hit a wall and you can’t drag them across.
I wouldn’t care if our relations were business only. The Japanese are like everyone else, just more so - well, they’re not trying to fuck around in MY country. Maybe more AfD would be healthy for Germany, deal with things at home.
If a given position is supported by a large plurality of the population, it is by definition not extremist. The way that word is used, and the way you use it here, is the same way scare words like 'fascist', 'racist' and so on are thrown around - scare words with no content beyond 'I don't like these people', no more semantically meaningful than an animal's grunt.
And yes, I just compared leftists to grunting animals.
How's that for dehumanization?
Since you consider one of Germany's most popular political parties 'extremist', you quite clearly are not using words according to their meaning. Unless in this case the meaning is 'disagrees with your personal political ideology'.
"All of my friends agree with me though!"
Cope harder.
"day conversations on the bus/in the supermarket/at the barbers or wherever"
That proves only that they are demonized in the press. You don't want people who you just casually meet to get a bad impression from you just because of some misinformation in the press.
AfD suffers from the same problems that you see in every organization with ideas that are attacked by the mainstream media. Many people with important jobs try to hide their association out of fear for their career. As a result more extreme/less polished voices get more visibility. And the media will feast on every such voice that they notice. You see the same with the organizations of Trump and Sanders in the US and many "extreme right" parties in Europe. But - as George Menyhei mentioned - in their policies the mainstream parties are nowadays often at least as extreme.
That's very true. But it's not just pressure from the media. If you're a civil servant, you can get into big trouble for anything openly right-wing, and that's only set to intensify, since the interior minister (an "antifascist" ideologue) wants to make purges of the civil service easier. Sections of AfD are already officially under surveillance by the inland security service, so one can see where this is going.
"Words have meaning..." you say. Unfortunately, words like "extremist" and "racist" and "fascist" have been redefined to enable a deeply dishonest motte-and-bailey game by the Left. They -- perhaps, I should say *You* -- use these cleverly redefined words, rather than more accurate terms, because you count on invoking the emotional weight these words historically have had, yet when pressed to explain how these words apply to their present targets (in light of the emotional connotation they dredge up based on their historical usage), you retreat to some mealy-mouthed modern redefinition that warrants none of the emotional response you are aiming for. Keep this game up, and I will start dropping Solzhenitsyn quotes on you, because you are playing a dishonest game, and you know you are playing a dishonest game, even though you are pretending not to and feigning confusion when called out on it. The whole charade is really tiresome.
Haha... I was reading your comment with interest, and then I saw this: “the matter of climate change denialism.”
I’m one of those. Like you, I parroted that belief at one time, thinking that there was actual good science underpinning it. It took about 4 years of study and research to get to where I am now: one of those “denialists.”
Germany, and other Western nations, are ruining their economies and people’s lives by shutting down good reliable baseload energy on a chimera that has become lodged in the minds of many people, including yourself.
I agree that we should do something.
What we should never do, is lose our minds. Our nuclear plant still operates, in fact it’s getting new reactors. See?
I used to say that shutting down German reactors was the stupidest move from a nuclear safety perspective, as those were run by Germans; in retrospect, maybe this was for the better.
Also, getting hooked on Russian natural gas to “decrease greenhouse emissions”, each watt of renewable backed by a new watt of natural gas, was also brilliant. Both from an Earth saving perspective, and geopolitically. Bravo!
I see that you get quite the paprika in the reactions here. It’s not just your positions: it’s the rarity of Germans engaging in the international online space.
You do speak English, but so few of you are present. In dissident circles, almost none.
So when one shows up, they get piled on.
Germans seem parochial by being so inwards focused. This would be great, if your politicians also followed suit, but they don’t. This discrepancy is so great that featuring German little people’s opinions in Hungary can get you the front page.
Honest question - how much will draconian climate policies in the West even move the needle - most emissions in the East/South and will be increasing for the foreseeable future. I doubt these regimes will ever be serious about carbon to the extent regulation would materially limit their economic output and geopolitical power (most of the West's climate policies to date have been a win for China)
Provide specifics, please.
Ok, so you haven't any, other than the AfD is outgroup.
Absurdly tendentious comment.
AfD's youth section has just been declared anti-constitutional on the grounds that it considers there's such a thing as ethnic Germans, and policies which will eventually reduce them to a dwindling minority in Germany might not be a good thing for them. That's the crux of the issue, any group that addresses it explicitly will be targeted by the establishment. These claims about "very vile, racist terminology" (imo mostly baseless, especially given what's been going on in Germany since 2014/15) are just intended to obfuscate the issue.
Yeah, this is fair, also from what I have read. Although its important to point out that similar criticism, like yours, has been made of Fratelli Italia and Meloni in Italy. At the same time, at least in Italy, it became clear that some of those fringe elements, and not so fringe, were not what actually made her or FdI so attractive, but rather her anti-socially liberal (or in the US "woke") approach to governance and her strong state, but capitalist mindset, which hoped to shake up the bureaucratic establishment just enough to make a real difference. The interesting thing is that, as a result, those elements have either been silenced or even removed entirely. What remains is an impressive counter to a very leftist narrative that was really hurting Italy in every possible way. She's no saint, just like many of the prominent players in the AfD (I assume), but she is a very good, very reasonable politician and anything but the "fascist" they made her out to be. Similar story obviously with the MAGA movement.
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AfD, MAGA, and brexit must be crushed under the boot of the WEF Wehrmacht globalist “democracy”. EU/ESG/greens are the fourth reich. Here are a few modern German words that describe our clown world situation: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-speak-german
1990s Franjo Tudjman was like the exact opposite of the current center-leftist German position. "The WW2 fascist Croatian government (that I personally fought against) wasn't THAT awful, but even if it was, so what."
I'm not sure if Polansky's essay dealt with urbanization as a gateway to safetyism, but as someone who's lived in both urban and rural areas as an adult there is definitely a greater acceptance of danger in rural areas. Nature is a MFer.
Where I live now, I frequently deal with bears. They are not so bad if one behaves properly and doesn't leave food (trash) readily available for them. In fact they are quite beautiful to see. Where I lived there were drug dealers and homeless all around. No protocol for dealing with the filth they created that kept one safe. I suppose if I weren't bourgeois but heroic, I would have gone "Death Wish" on them. I moved instead. Now instead of finding human feces in front of my door, I occasionally find bear scat (and deer, etc).
There's probably something to this. Not for nothing that you find so many farm boys in the military, which in turn is one of the last redoubts of aristocratic warrior virtue - insofar as that can exist in the modern context.
To link two of the topics, note for instance how the AfD couches its opposition to mass immigration in terms of safety (crime, terrorism, etc) and economic loss (welfare and such), whereas the regime simply denies the former and insists that to the contrary, MENA migrants will be a boon to the public treasury. Both sets of concerns are quintessentially bourgeois.
However, the *opposition* to the AfD seems to emerge from something even more primal than WWII blood guilt. It is expressed in the syntax of extremism, terrorism, and violence - as though the AfD were an incipient horde of axe-wielding Germanic barbarians looking to string up brown people as sacrifices on Odin's tree. It's as though the real concern is that there might be a reversion to pre-bourgeois values.
In the end, it comes down to a debate over who is and is not bourgeois - the AfD says migrants aren't and will never be, while the left tries to exclude the AfD from the bourgeoisie. All while everyone pretends they aren't bourgeois in the first place. It's all rather comical once observed from outside the bourgeois framework.
It's just another example of the ever-narrowing definition of "democracy". Everything outside of its tightening bounds is "extremism".
Democracy means never doing what the people want, because doing what the people want would destroy our democracy.
Wanting to feel safe is a prerequisite for a civil society. Fearful people can become violent.
The only safety is being dangerous.
Truer words...truer words....
The regime understands this better than anyone else, hence the abundance of cannabis, opioids, porn and fast foods as well as the inept regulation of social media.
Yes if only instead of competent or even brilliant predation they could tune their minds to good governance. Its the insane villainous grandchildren of the benevolent geniuses of the New Deal.
The rhetoric of heroism was integral to the militarism that swept Germany in the 19th c (which utterly appalled Nietzsche) and that went psychotic in the 20th. IMO fascism tried to market a prole parody of a heroic role to the workers drafted into uniform. So a degree of suspicion of the old culture makes perfect sense for the current regime, though it has obviously gone too far.
The bourgeois issue will be moot once deindustrialisation and pauperisation sets in on a grand scale.
Insightful. Hence the profound distrust of the Prussian military nobility for the plebeians of the NSDAP.
Well it was the Junkers who put H. in power in the first place (the Weimar gov't planned reforms to farm subsidies, so the ultra-conservatives convinced Hindenburg to trust the NSDAP which was backed by industrialists and a few aristos).
The plebeians were pushed out (or constrained) after the Night of Long Knives. Then the upper-middle and professional classes asserted themselves.
The trouble with wars is that they accelerate change exponentially. Reactionaries should understand this, but they never seem to do so.
The Junker reactionaries now never served a day and are professional salaried leftists and Democrats. So we’ll have war to stave off reform.
Brezhnev whatever you want to say about him understood that if nuclear weapons were used “the nations would never keep control.” He knew war.
Brezhnev was indeed a veteran. He got on very well with fellow veterans from the West...especially Richard Nixon and Captain Bob Maxwell (Ghislaine's dad). The latter was apparently a drinking buddy.
Frankly Brezhnev does not look too bad compared to Yeltsin. Ditto his generation. They were all ridiculous dinosaurs by the time I was a teenager but the replacement generation of leaders around the world have been utterly destructive. And smug as hell about it all.
Philip
Der Arbeiter
Ernst Junger
The Worker
More than poverty is possible, indeed beckons.
I already bought a copy on Amazon after reading your endorsement. It has arrived, but I have one or two other things to complete first.
Thanks, his insights and general vision are insightful. The Worker is a Typus - a general Type not individual who by working is a worker, as opposed to bourgeois who are defined by status and overwhelming need for safety and danger to be banished.
It’s very dense , I am used to dense concepts and he’s a challenge.
I'm skeptical that authoritarian methods are effective at combating corruption. Without transparency, the political and ruling classes can fleece the state at any time of their choosing. A change in leadership, management, or even a change in heart can allow corruption to come roaring back. And in any authoritarian system, there are no checks and balances to halt it.
Xi, Putin, and MBS will not remain in power forever. Eventually, these nations are headed for bad times.
MBS wasn’t combating corruption - he was using corruption as an excuse to fleece and intimidate princelings who might have opposed his rule and his reforms. Not too dissimilar from Xi. A difference is that the CCP has created a system that allows some non-cadres to be successful. However, the junta still wants to ensure that the cadres run everything and get the best opportunities, so everyone who is successful must become a cadre or otherwise toe the line.
Will be interesting in KSA, because one can become a cadre in China but one needs to be born a Prince in Saudi, and the princes/sheiks control everything.
Scott Alexander actually just published a reader book review on corruption and the central theme is "the optimal amount of corruption is not zero". But finding a stable equilibrium is hard even in a democracy
I think China will be ok for a while. I cannot fathom what happens to Russia when Putin goes. MBS it's quite early, the big question I think is how to address the cartoonishly hereditary nature of power in Saudi Arabia
A classic essay from 2001 by Dalrymple on why a little bit of corruption is actually a "good thing".
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-uses-of-corruption
Alexander Hamilton (the black man) also made it clear during the drafting of America's Constitution that corruption is the only way a government can ever get anything done
Yes but now we have hyper-corruption and sclerosis, paralysis.
We need a White Hamilton this time.
For your sins you lot might just get a subcontinental one instead.
I doubt this, they’re too bloody “off” for us , not a good fit.
They soooo imitate the Jews, and come off as Kardashian comedy.
Its a Benny Hill sketch IRL
The Bidens must have taken that essay to heart.
A brilliant essay by Dalrymple that I had not seen before. He has written many gems.
BTW, great Saturday edition.
If ISIL were to seize power in Saudi Arabia, would they not insist on beheading every member of the royal family?
Poetic justice.
If extremists ever came to power they would most likely be backed by disaffected elements within the Al Sa'ud family itself.
MbS has a long way to go before it can be said that he’s been ‘successful’. Most of the reforms (particularly wrt women) are hugely overhyped - and western expatriates are still hesitant to leave the UAE for Saudi whatever the policy requirements (or financial incentives). He certainly didn’t make any friends by routing out “corruption” (his own excepting of course), the large majority of the Saudi population are not tech investors, they’re regular middle and lower-middle class families currently being told that every cultural and religious value they hold is essentially worthless. Many cities in the Gulf are attempting to replicate the ‘Dubai model’ without taking into account that the 91% of the population that make the Dubai model possible aren’t Emiratis or even Arab. And I’ve yet to hear another living person say - “Hey, weekend in Riyadh?” Maybe they’ll put them at the Ritz...
Thank you for the local insight, Tracy
I sound like a raving lunatic lol
Sounded reasonable to me, the Billionaire Psycho.
It is very hard to know what to make of Sa'udi Arabia. The various regions have historically had separate rulers and Wahabism was based in on or two portions of the east, with the Hejaz being quite different. And then there is the tribal issue...My guess is that the reforms are tentative and MBS is sitting atop a potentially active volcano. The politics with the Al-Sa'ud are notoriously opaque. The anticorruption drive made MBS mortal enemies in the West amongst the Deep State beneficiaries of largesse from the princes MBS put the squeeze on.
I wonder to what degree Dubai is like Singapore. It is small and has a niche that the surrounding larger states (KSA) can't replicate. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand have long had Singapore envy.
I’ve been to Dubai, I haven’t been to Singapore. Dubai is Las Vegas with more flash money upfront and more poverty behind.
“ Germany’s Der Spiegel (the country’s version of the USA’s Time Magazine) is a horrible, horrible publication. Objectivity is at most an afterthought, if thought of at all.”
Someone burned himself sourcing Spiegel
The greatest accomplishment of the AfD, from a Hungarian standpoint, is the erosion of any illusion that Germany is a democracy so pristine, that they have any credibility to lecture us.
They still do.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HNbRlnNC3Fs
This Deutsche Welle report from 2021 is notorious, it has Jews fleeing the castle district out of fear. For those who are unaware, that’s the touristy bit in Budapest where people take selfies.
Check the comments!
"The greatest accomplishment of the AfD, from a Hungarian standpoint, is the erosion of any illusion that Germany is a democracy so pristine, that they have any credibility to lecture us."
Stanley Payne has called Germany a "guided democracy", imo very true.
Btw, there was this incident recently when German Antifa types travelled to Budapest and attacked pedestrians they took to be right-wingers, gravely injuring some. Is this a big news story in Hungary (predictably enough it isn't in German media)?
Of course, we don’t have such political violence nowadays. The Germans coming here to assault random people, in a group, is big news.
Total disapproval.
Thanks for the answer. I'm sorry for all the German bullying of Hungary, some Germans at least are pretty embarrassed by it.
I think bourgeois is kinda old fashioned, ain’t. Yes Bill Gates still wears a Shetland pullover, but perhaps Nike sneakers. Maybe they became in some moment bourgers eaters.
How would the Taliban stack up in the era of bourgeoisism?
They are not liking office life, that's for sure.
The “Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution” is the most blatant manifestation of Teutonic character I’ve seen since the Mannaschaft beat the Brazilians like a drum in a World Cup semifinal lol.
Great work as always on the commentary!
Glad you enjoyed it.
Rarely see him discussed but Filmer v. Hobbes arguably shaped what Britain and, by extension. Atlanticism became – Filmer traditionalism seemingly lost out due to the overpowering rise of the commercial oligarchy (facilitated - unintentionally or not - by Cromwell and completed with the importation of William of Orange fulfilling the weak executive Italian city state model)
I actually don't know anything about this. Can you point me in the right direction re: Filmer?
Sir Robert Filmer was a key theorist of the divine right of kings from the Civil War era (mid 1600s). He argued that the state was a family, the king the father of his people.
I've studied obscure guys like Pufendorf in uni, but I must have forgotten about Filmer since it's been such a long time.
Pufendorf? He is obscure!
A prof of mine would reference him all the time as a sort of inside joke about being a philosophy nerd, and then the next year another prof assigned him to us.
Filmer hasn't been taught in modern universities to my knowledge - it always begins with Hobbes. Phillip is correct - essentially viewing society as an extension of the family receiving its legitimacy through God as opposed to a pragmatic contract for material security.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/patriarcha-the-complete-political-works/29979483/item/46755798/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=shopping_new_condition_books_high&utm_adgroup=&utm_term=&utm_content=545822004371&gclid=CjwKCAjw1MajBhAcEiwAagW9MTmKT6VJmOeHdNIdferrdL9s51ykuQ1RysBrjvNSIggT4NQjd-GthxoCoFcQAvD_BwE#idiq=46755798&edition=60546400
In UG polsci, we got very brief takes on Filmer as the focus of Locke's first treatise on Government, after which we moved to marinating in/day-spa-ing in the Second treatise on toleration which sets up Locke to be proto-mill and grad-daddy of awesome liberalism. The assigned book had both treatises so I remember thumbing through Locke's reply to Filmer's arguments. I can recall the font, the colour, the smell of the book, but none of the content. Basically you only come across serious discussions of Filmer if you were reading the neoreactionaries 15 years ago or Yarvin.
Of note with the Saudis: they appear to be negotiating with Yemen in open defiance of American wishes on the subject. I assume America doesn't want to help Iran ever since they went Russia drones. MBS continues to stun me, though I know better than to assume these changes are secure
https://libertarianinstitute.org/news/south-yemen-intensifies-push-for-secession-as-biden-eyes-a-continuation-of-the-war/
I met a German who kept using American language for Trump voters and the alt-right to describe the AfD to us Americans. Thought it was really funny he wouldn't just call them Nazis but maybe he knew here in America no one that gets called a Nazi is really a Nazi. Also beyond the Rosa Luxemburg reference, Linke is directly descended from the ruling East German parties. Journos are quick to note when, say, the Swedish Democrats can be traced back to Nazis, but of course it never goes the other way