You made some good points. I think Strauss pulled the rug out from under us a bit, although Nolan was laying it on a bit thick with Alden Ehrenreich dripping with contempt for the man after the big reveal (I was not aware of that part of the story, with the hearings). Nolan primed the audience a bit to dislike him after essentially seeing him as a harmless facilitator of Oppenheimer’s brilliance.

Have you seen this interview?

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/david-garrow-interview-obama

I would really like to see your take on this, given your book on Obama and interest in the guy. I felt like Garrow and the unpardonably wordy and opinionated interviewer were channeling you in certain points. The MLK digressions are also interesting, especially the dissonance needed to admit his faults and still see him as a saint.

I love the amazing Chad claw he has on her leg. He is really feeling her up.

As for breasts, I might not be the only one to be introduced to Emily Blunt the bombshell by Charlie Wilson’s War, another terrific movie, and to lament that she has never actually done a nude scene. Whereas Pugh is certainly a beautiful woman, but does not have the stunning looks of Blunt.

Great review! I saw it. I enjoyed it, but I was not blown away (pun intended). I thought the Trinity test was a bit anticlimactic (I expected a much bigger and more violent boom, I went to Imax especially for the nuclear spectacle). The way his line from the Vedas was introduced prior to everything else was a fumbling sort of foreshadowing, made comical by the context (basically a sex scene). I also felt that a lot of compelling characters were introduced but never actually used, like Boris Pash the security officer who got the most amazing description and an unnerving performance, but who never went anywhere.

I think the story, as imagined by Nolan with an ensemble cast of characters, would have been better served by a miniseries. I am also undecided whether the movie is part of Hollywood’s repeated downplaying of the Communist threat and infiltration of the US. Certainly, the haranguing of Oppenheimer is made to seem unreasonable and his fellow travelers are made to seem quite harmless (many no doubt were). The focus is, of course, not on them, but I doubt a Nazi or Nazi-idealizing secondary character line-up would be portrayed without any sort of menace, sinister undertones or evil foreshadowing.

Now I just have to see Barbie 😛

New Urbanists like the good liberal Colby Lefkowitz (who is on Twitter) call it Gentle Density.

I am a veteran of adult entertainment, having dated and loved women in this business.

Holy shit, Buzz! I never knew this side of you.

Of course they do.

Off-topic

California Housing Gotterdammerung

https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/ca-cities-to-lose-all-zoning-powers

They eventually came for the home equity of the people who were keeping population growth away from their neighborhoods (while voting for it to be in other people’s neighborhoods).

Places like Beverly Hills went from being required to build 3 homes over 8 years in the previous RHNA cycle to 3,000 homes now post-SB 828.

Santa Monica pre-2023 approved 1,600 homes, 551 of them below-market rate, over 8 years. Now Santa Monica must zone for 8,874 new homes with half of them below-market rate. Having been struck by the Builders Remedy and getting their zoning suspended, within one week developers officially filed to build 4,797 new homes with 829 of them low income.

Santa Monica met 50% of their dramatically increased 2023 – 2031 housing requirements, including a 50% increase in the amount of low income housing approved over the previous 8 years — without a cent of public subsidy — in just one week. This also consists of several high-rise buildings taller than anything allowed in Santa Monica’s zoning code or current housing stock.
……..
Oakland got its housing element rejected by the state for failing to zone for more high density housing in its white and affluent northeast neighborhoods. Oakland has written another draft that upzoned the Rockridge BART area for high density housing — more than 50 years after apartments were banned there — and is hoping for approval tomorrow.
……….
We’ve never seen anything like this in California housing history where a residential building of any height, with any amount of parking, can be placed in the wealthiest communities in the world provided its just 20% affordable and is safe. Zoning has often confined new development to low income, gentrifying enclaves due to NIMBYism in wealthier ones but also higher income enclaves being more profitable for developers. But now the wealthiest communities in the Bay like Marin County, Lamorinda and Silicon Valley may be getting highrises of housing for the first time in their history come the 1st with no ability to appeal.

This is very good for people making six figures while living like the homeless because of very high prices. But I can empathize with the existing property owners. And the diversity will also flow in, I guess.

This is absolutely retarded. It has to be some sort of “dog ate my homework” kind of excuse with something else being the trigger.

The wooden speech of wokeness in its liturgical definition phase. We just have to suffer through the obliteration of the old, the ravages of heretic pogroms, the zealous proselytization of non-believers outside of the core and the violent spasms of reformation (The Peace of Wokesburg anyone?) until we have finally domesticated this religion and we can have a bit of rationality in our lives again. We might be gone demographically by then.

I was in DC last year and was surprised to hear that the African American Museum is so packed that, while free, you need to reserve a ticket to visit it. And every Uber driver listed it as first on their list of things to visit. It was a bit strange. Maybe it really is a wonderful museum, but it was booked whenever I had an opening in my schedule and I could not have anticipated needing to book it 2 weeks in advance just to visit. Also, it was a work trip, so I did not really have the possibility to do visits during workdays, and even those were booked. In contrast, the Air and Space Museum was easier to visit (still needed to book). I scheduled for the weekend a few days before and that was it. No limitations for the National Art Gallery, which was truly marvelous (the West Gallery, the classical one). Even the building was fantastic. I also very much enjoyed the National Building Museum, which had a temporary exhibit on The Wall TM (the US-Mexico border) which was very well done but also annoyingly saccharine in parts, including one of those “ask the visitor their opinion” walls where 90% of the messages were like “borders separate us, no human is illegal” and that kind of shit.

Ah, but you think that a “civilization” has to inherit the Earth. That is not guaranteed. It might even be a sort of Whig history.

Globohomo does double duty for gays and homogenization.

But I don’t think it is sexual orientation per se as much as the LGBT ideology accompanying it, now finding its expression in World War T, as our host would put it, which is steadily advancing towards the crib as well.

Chicago has been losing millionaires for years, according to the reports on the migration of High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI)

https://www.henleyglobal.com/newsroom/industry-insights/the-changing-face-of-millionaire-migration

Australia gained the most millionaires through migration in 2020 – 12 thousand.

This is a report from 2015 I remember reading, which mentioned Chicago losing millionaires, London staying the same, and Paris losing A LOT of millionaires. Destination countries – Australia, Switzerland, UAE and the US (other parts of it).

https://estudiosadventistas.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/nwh-millionairesfleeing.pdf

The Brazilian Deep State learned a few things from their American counterparts. Got a few hundred yokels to enter some buildings for a guy who is already practicing his golf swing in Florida. Perfect for Lula’s patrons to finally clear out any real political opposition.

Mind you, I don’t have a good opinion about Bolsonaro. I think he aspired to be a crook. But he had little power until recently and he therefore had to displace others from the trough to install family and friends. That was the leftist deep state that has controlled Brazil since the end of the military regime and whose works we saw in the huge corruption scandal that got Dilma Rousseff in hot water. Anything that displaces those guys, even another band of aspiring crooks, gives some breathing room for society to improve, especially since the newcomers are themselves not so stable or adept at using the state institutions for political repression. That Bolsonaro was also tough on crime was the cherry on the cake.

You imply that other people were natives in the Italian peninsula. He had always been in Rome, bigot! Romans did not exist!

… they still blew it in the end. Obviously we are in the process of doing the same.

It was unconstrained immigration that brought down Rome and will be the death of Western Civilisation.

Some Roman concrete is durable because it doesn’t incorporate steel reinforcement (rebar will rust and expand, eventually destroying structural concrete members) and also because it does not bear tensile loads, as do driveways, sidewalks, and road surfaces (concrete is quite good under compression but not tension).

The hydration reaction that causes cement to set is very exothermic. It produces a lot of heat which, in turn, increases the pace of the reaction, producing even more heat in a positive feedback loop until one of the reactants is used up, after which the resulting concrete cools logarithmically. This function of temperature versus time (called a “cure curve” in the industry) affects the strength of the final product.

The “hot mixing” technique that this article describes would not work for modern concrete applications, since it tends to make the resulting product more brittle. High temperature cure curves are actually something that modern engineers try to avoid. This is why massive concrete structures which cannot radiate heat effectively (like the Hoover Dam, for example) included pipes carrying cooling water throughout the concrete as it cured. Without this expedient, the dam would have baked itself into a crumbly mass that would not have held back the massive weight of the water it was stopping.

Modern structural concrete members, such as girders and columns, have to bear tensile loads due to wind-loading which causes them to bend and twist, and also due to vehicular traffic which introduces loading in between the fixed points. This is why they are prestressed with steel cables under tension, and this is why specifically modern blends do not use hot-mixing.

The Roman applications were very different. They used concrete in the slip-form method as a fill between facing walls, where it was sure to bear only compressive loads. Their blend produces a result which is more durable but attains to less maximum strength, and (critically) their building technique ensured that the concrete would be subjected only to compressive loads. The concrete was in its element, doing exactly what it wanted to do. Modern techniques, by contrast, force the concrete to sound an alien note and eventually it gives up.

Given these constraints, there is no reason why a Roman structure should age any faster than a slab of cherty limestone, which is what it chemically resembles.

Previously disregarded as merely evidence of sloppy mixing practices, or poor-quality raw materials, the new study suggests that these tiny lime clasts gave the concrete a previously unrecognized self-healing capability. “

Structure stands for 2000 years, building material exhibits a distinctive characteristic, obviously it’s a sign of poor construction.

https://twitter.com/elfnox/status/1604133652568449029

Haha, such a witty ditty.

Despite being European, I hate football and I have never seen a match to the end in my life. But, I learned from an Argentinian friend who would not go out for a dinner with friends during matches because “Argentina needs him in front of the TV to win” that Mbappe is supposedly dating transwoman Ines Rau.

https://www.nationalworld.com/news/people/who-is-kylian-mbappes-girlfriend-france-player-ines-rau-are-they-still-together-who-is-rose-bertram-3948964
https://sportsbrief.com/football/paris-saint-germain/22936-psg-star-mbappe-reportedly-dating-trans-model-ines-rau-transgender-woman-playboy-cover/

It’s interesting that she is another person in a long line of Blacks not descended from US slaves to achieve high position in your state on the basis of opportunities, narratives and affirmative action set in place for Legacy Blacks.

I saw that on Twitter. And the morons supporting him. Nary a peep about illegal immigration. Nor about what kind of legal immigration. They just want biomass. The rest will solve itself.

I remember once mentioning a sci fi story about a planet with such low population density each person had their own private estate the size of a whole country with a woman from Brussels, she said it sounded like heaven.

I think it’s Aurora and other spacer worlds (especially Solaria) from Asimov’s Robots series. Everything was automated. But it was not meant to be a utopia. The Spacers became childless alienated misanthropes; the worst of them, on another Spacer world, Solaria, were incapable of even being in each other’s presence and had cybersex. The later books in the Foundation series reveal that Aurora simply died out. So, I guess it is a cautionary tale. Everything in moderation, including density. Of course, I would think that modernity leads to alienation, atomization and anti-social behavior in both extremes – extreme low density and extreme high density.

I wanted to comment on how funny it is for someone calling himself Redneck farmer to agree with a comment saying that “[t]he Berlin Philharmonic is one of the great wonders of this or any other age.”

Argentina is a mess, unfortunately, from an economic standpoint. I view it as a pressure cooker which will blow at some point unless reforms are undertaken, which is sadly not likely in the current political dispensation. I guess you can be safe in the rural areas, where the wealthy farmers are armed and will protect their land from looters.

So you are also of the opinion that the Arab way was better?

Elite overproduction leading to resentment leading to agitation until a political formula is found that lets the excluded elites mobilize some part of the population to allow them to replace or join the existing elites. Turchin was right.

I saw this funny tweet on this woman that said something like:

“Based educator refuses to teach non-White children the language of power.”

Congratulations! You deserve it and should also consider writing another book, from scratch I mean.

Your articles on academic mismatch are still timely. Your newer stuff on the Summer of Love and the rise in crime and also car crashes is just beginning to seep into the public consciousness.

I think your movie reviews deserve a separate collection. Maybe do an ebook.

Those drawings are hideous! Why can’t they do some classical style portraits?

Leaving aside the promiscuous way in which American political language uses the word socialist, I want to say I am a fan of Christopher Caldwell. He writes fantastically well. His book Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe was a mindblowing read during the first rapefugee crisis, having written it in 2009, before the issue blew up.

He was into climate change before anybody else jumped on the bandwagon so I appreciate him for that.

But his real accomplishment, in my view, is the town of Poundbury and its use of vernacular architecture. He has consistently spoken out against shitty soulless modernism and the role of architecture in promoting wellbeing, not just through conservation of existing examples, but also through its use in new development.

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

been deeply political (Juan Carlos and his connections to the fascist dictatorship)

Juan Carlos is the real hero here, regardless of his later embarrassments about money and women.

Ingratiating himself with Franco to become his heir after the assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco (the unofficial heir of the regime) and then using his power after Franco’s death to dismantle the Francoist state and launch liberal democracy, while resisting an attempted coup in his name to make the country autocratic again. Of course, depending on your views, you might think he made a terrible mistake, but I never understood the mindless vitriol of Spanish socialists and inherited republicans who actively loathe him (I know a few). Probably because he did their job better than they ever did.

Oak Park probably has Asabiyyah! A country without is not a good environment in which to train competent activists. They are probably used to pointing and spluttering about racism and getting their way. Just like the US is a goldmine for conmen. Places with group cohesion, like some ethnic neighborhoods etc., are much tougher to crack. They act purposefully, degine and uphold collective interests (even if unofficially), buy people off or ingratiate themselves with them, so that a person who might think of raising a stink over the issue finds they have no support from the usual suspects and goes off to find a more vulnerable target.

Because the first Blacks to move after desegregation were naturally the ones with the most money. The population may have had lower incomes on average, but that still leads to plenty of very rich people and middling rich people who would like to upgrade their neighbors. Also, suburbanization was in full swing. The Whites also had more options, like going to where land was much cheaper, before they were joined by the flood of white flighters. There was therefore less competition for the inner cities.

It was necessary, because we wanted to maintain ties with our own diaspora, which was becoming larger. We knew it would, because we also intermarry a lot, so having the kids take Romanian citizenship as well was a priority for maintaining ties, keeping them in the Sunday language schools etc. We also have a good bit of migration to Romania, including through mixed marriages, and wanted to keep them here. We did not close our embassy in Damascus during the civil war because there are 30k mixed Romanian Syrian families there.

Maybe we could have specifically excluded double citizenship with Hungary, but it would have been needlessly divisive and, despite what the detractors say, the government has erred on the side of constant appeasement of Romanian Hungarians and Hungary itself, so we would not seem bullies. That made us easily bullied.

Eventually, all of its neighbors introduced double citizenship, partly because of the same reasoning, but also because we had the largest minority of Hungarians and had set an example that could be used against them. We had cause to regret it because the Romanian Hungarian minority especially became very relevant to Hungarian politics, which attracted a lot of funding, political attention and political showmanship, like Orban’s frequent visits and speeches like he owns the place, like the widely criticized speech in the Băile Tuşnad Summer University with the so-called racist comments recently.

I always appreciate your comments and the effort you put into them, but the ideas here are a hard pass for me. It is possible to dislike Globo-Homo and Russian imperialism as well. Russia is not some leading light of the world and while I can agree that some governments and people find profit in closer ties (the Tajiks, for instance, export a lot of labor there) and others are resisting Globo-Homo and having a hard time of it, I cannot blithely accept your civilizational interventionist angle. We have a joke here – “why do we prefer American imperialism to the Russian one? At least the Americans fuck us with lube and a condom”. Hasn’t aged well in the monkeypox era, but the underlying reality is still there. Neither is Russia some paragon of Christianity and racial conservatism.

EU trade zone opportunities are a separate argument from Eurozone macroeconomic weaknesses related to “Optimal Currency Areas” and how not being one results in divergent economic evolution. Stiglitza has a book on the eurozone, and Yanis Varoufakis has multiple ones (better than Stiglitz’s more remote perspective).

I thought you were a Mensch, Buzz, what the hell? We need more nationalistic Romanians marrying Westerners to argue for our ethnic interests like unification with the R of Moldova.

Anyway, while I agree that Poland asking for reparations is either theater or long-shot opportunism, someone asking for territories is not the same, especially when the demographics of the territory make it impossible to assimilate. Maybe it would be similar if Hungary were to demand the Hungarian-majority center of Romania or some theoretical compact territory on the border, but taking Transylvania means taking 6.7 million people, of which only 1.3 are Hungarians.

Orban already gave citizenship to the Hungarians in Romania, Romania was simply the first country among its neighbors to permit double citizenship and thereby allow it.

Ethnic nepotism and resume minmax-ing?

Through their exposure to the British Empire, indians have become adept at navigating Anglo-Saxon hierarchies and taking advantage of them in a way that the fancy Asians have not.

“This kinda blew our minds”

Is this appropriate language for a scientific paper? Are they going to write “the confounding forces are hella strong”?

When did this informality creep into academia as well?

I do not think monkeypox is the approved name, comrade! They have already suggested something boring!

Off-topic – this is glorious

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-07-27/americans-are-flooding-mexico-city-some-mexicans-want-them-to-go-home

Well, it might be because of reactions to US decline, but I think it pretty natural that more and more citizens of the hegemon would move away from their country, even as the people of the rest of the world move there. I think the US is an outlier through sheer size, since the UK and other previous powers had an even greater amount of emigration. It should have more to conform to historic norms. One doesn’t get an empire without boots on the ground, in every sense of the word, not just militarily. That is because they can exploit their Americanness to get a good deal somewhere else and live a better life than many of them could at home – think of African or other third world companies looking for a White, Western face to improve their local image or of all the Americans teaching English in China. Also, that Protestant adventuring that Steve Sailer sometimes mentions is still there, with Americans everywhere, even in the Donbass fighting for the Russians, as well as on the other side.

On-topic: Kamala uttering hate facts without realizing it was totally crazy.

Thank you for your explanations!

I am surprised at the vehemence of the disputes here and of the attacks on our host. Not even arguing about HBD and Jews has elicited this sort of hostility in the past.

Jack D, Navalny becoming President of Russia might end this war, but you are overestimating the extent of his affiliation with the West and its perspectives. Navalny himself has said that Crimea is Russian land and it should stay that way. Presumably, any land that Russia decides to annex in this war, despite being less valuable geopolitically than the Black Sea Fleet’s homebase, would also become finders keepers for Navalny.

Romania under Ceaușescu was a pariah state

While I am supportive of being in the EU and NATO, with caveats for globohomo, Romania was the opposite of a pariah state, except maybe within the Warsaw Pact where, according to historian Larry Watts, it had ceased being invited to military exercises and planning sessions, with plans being drafted to invade it if necessary.

Romania under Ceausescu, and building on his predecessor’s achievement in getting rid of the Soviet troops, led a foreign policy that was strongly independent of Moscow and had significant ties to Western powers, especially the US and France. Aside from oppressing the population, the Securitate’s main targets were Soviet spies and controlling Soviet trained military officers and other experts, who were considered inherently untrustworthy and gradually sidelined and eliminated, a process which was only completed in the post-2000s era in countries like Poland and Hungary.

This is Nixon visiting Romania

Charles de Gaulle and later French Presidents visited several times, setting up the cooperation with France for the auto industry, and a whole host of Western leaders (including royalty) paid visits to the country, all the way into the mid 1980s. Ceausescu was even honored once to ride in Queen Elizabeth II’s coach on a state visit to the UK, though apparently she found him and his wife (the mala mujer nobody is ever nostalgic about) to be dreadful.

And this is without mentioning the extraordinary ties to China, where I’ve seen matinees still showing classic Romanian movies, to the Arab socialist states, Pahlavi Iran and then Khomeini Iran (!), African countries etc. If anything, my country has sacrificed global exposure in recent years, after getting out of its 1990s slump, for a security-minded full speed “drang nach westen”, neglecting investing in diplomacy in emerging and developing areas which are full of traditional Romanian partners. Some of our embassies are lilliputian, such as the one in India, and many states don’t even have commercial attaches, despite the potential for cooperation. Economic weakness and structural change post 1990 (the bankruptcy, looting and neglect of former state champions) are part of the reason, but also a much more constrained vision on the part of Romanian elites.

Romania, instead, became a pariah state among its own people, as Ceausescu’s drive to increase exports and birthrates, while eliminating the national debt (later to be forgiven to other former Commie countries) led to falling living standards, shortages of key products, and personal tragedies, driving the animosity of the late 1980s that eventually culminated in the only bloody anti-Communist revolution in Europe. Being born right before the end of Communism, my parents had experience in not finding baby formula or food, in not having heating or electricity etc.

So, yeah, not a pariah.

As for the discussion on Russia and Ukraine, which I have stayed out of for the most part, because I already have outlets for my views and, in this Forum, my opinion would be quite predictable, I understand the Russian angle on NATO but am naturally inclined to hope for a Ukrainian victory or at least a weakening of Russia. This is because of my own national and ethnic interests. I was among the people surprised by Russia’s lack of success and was also thinking that they would win *something* much sooner.

I do not agree with Ukrainian membership in NATO, and I do not agree with a fast track for Ukraine’s entry into the EU, given its size and the potentially fatal pressure it would place on an already divided, heterogeneous and dysfunctional EU. Romania has consistently tried to Europeanize problems in its shitty neighborhood, by supporting EU integration for the Western Balkans and for Turkey (not anymore), but there is a limit to how many burdens you can place on the EU before it cracks. I am also not starry-eyed about Ukraine, which is not much different from Russia, with its own violent mobsters, oligarchs, and simple miming of democracy and rule of law. I am dumbfounded by how people are being fooled by the Ukrainians, especially progressives, and by the Zelenski personality cult taking hold. I guess this is what constant exposure to propaganda does to you. Nevertheless, I am strongly in favor of assisting refugees, including those wishing to stay in my country. After years of carping on the fakefugees crowding into Europe and ignoring the first safe country rule, I would be hypocritical to want to keep out my actual neighbors.

This might make passports a problem when traveling as a family. I read that Icelanders, who have patronymics and matronymics, have a problem being identified as a family unit when traveling, because people do not expect every person in the family to have a last name. I dated a Spanish girl, and the double-barrelled name was exotic, but when doing paperwork on her car which was in her mother’s name, she always had to explain the relation, because they had different last names.

Moldavians are Romanians and the separate identity was only cultivated by the Soviets instrumentally, especially since more than two third of medieval Moldova and the attendant population are in Romania.

Maybe through Margaret of Anjou, Queen of England, by way of Sophie Okonedo through the Hollow Crown Season 2.

I remember that movie scaring me when I was young. I even watched the crappy sequels.

That looks cool, but all around expensive and non-standard. I think cheapo guns with expensive targeting systems are the way to go.

Apparently in the Current Year it’s obligatory to retcon Black People into all of history, recent or ancient. Next time someone does something about the Pilgrims, I am waiting to see how they introduce Black People onto the Mayflower.

Have you seen Bridgerton on Netflix?

It is embarrassingly diverse. Initially, you could put it down to raceblind casting, but with the second season they are insisting that their show is shedding light on the fact that Britain was not all White. So now it’s history!

The Based Europe meme is wishful thinking.

I love the corporate Lord of the Rings references – Anduril, Palantir. I am sure there are a thousand companies with similar names, just too small to hear about.

I think the real next phase of the drone conflict will be with the advent of drone swarms. Anti-drone systems will then look like old anti-air guns, so more like machine guns than missiles, and possibly fitted on flying (hovering) platforms. The economics of lobbing missiles at cheap drones are daunting.

The drones will be used to establish pervasive surveillance with info aggregated to the troops’ maps, to run electronic warfare (like jamming), for suicide attacks. Even a swarm of loitering munitions counts as a drone swarm, only these are suicide drones.

Meanwhile, drones are the new UFOs, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/18/attack-of-the-drones-the-mystery-of-disappearing-swarms-in-the-us-midwest

Aaaaand, it’s gone!

Off-topic because I was away from the blog and missed getting in on the mountains of comments that war-related posts here have generated.

Did they settle with Vietnam for the Paracelsus Islands too?

The map is incomplete. The AEGIS Ashore Ballistic missile defense system is in Deveselu, South-Eastern Romania. What is marked on the map is Mihail Kogalniceanu Airbase, which was a way station to the Middle East.

Off-topic:

I found this hilariously catchy tune from a Bosnian rock group. One could use the first part as an immigrant anthem. There is a twist after the halfway mark.

The link leads to another article! One on the effects of the vaccine on myocarditis incidence in Danes.

Mr. Sailer, here is an off-topic for you:

One of the best security-oriented publications online just published a doozy of an article, in which the racism of mistaken yellow peril is matched by the racism of mistaken yellow dismissal. Some of what it writes is obviously true, but the interpretation is so uncharitable and so in line with supporting modern day positions and policies, that the article really does cross into Sailerbait.

https://warontherocks.com/2021/12/never-thought-they-could-pull-off-such-an-attack-prejudice-and-pearl-harbor/

By the timing of this post, am i right in assuming that you too are a Marginal Revolution reader? Cummings has some fantastic materials, but other posts of his are total slogs to get through.

On the one hand, I agree with you. I wish there were no Eastern Europeans in Britain or anywhere in the Western EU in large numbers for that matter. The trick when gauging immigration is whether the origin country is happy to see the back of them. Mine is not, although it is trying to delude itself that being an immigrant (deserter) is virtuous ever since the diaspora became an important electoral force. But I would contend that this immigration is nothing compared to the damage done by non-European immigrants and is also limited by the rapid contraction of the origin countries, as opposed to Pakistan. For all the whinging about Eastern immigration that you heard since 2007 with Romania and Bulgaria, we are finite (and small) quantities and elderly populations already, and sub-replacement TFR.

What I think happened was that the Christian European immigrants became the only acceptable target for anti-immigrant sentiment, because of the political correctness and outright protection awarded to the Pakistanis and other groups, especially as citizens. So the Romania and Polish menace grew in the minds of Britons, even to the ridiculous point where Nigel Farage said that Britain does not need Poles, it can get as many subcon immigrants as it wants (and more besides, I would wager). Nor has the UK encountered difficulty in deporting criminals from these groups, as it has for Pakistan.

In any case, my country is slowly dying from the brain drain and the movement of its young workers abroad, though it does not know it yet. The exodus of gypsies is a sweetener, but it is not enough to make up for the loss in the young population. For my mind, send them all back. We are better off for it.

Integrated, yes. Assimilated, I am not so sure. Let’s not forget that there are indigenous Turkish communities all over South Eastern Europe, including 10% of the Bulgarian population. The Turks have a virile/muscular culture with strong memory and strong dislikes (of Kurds for instance).

In fact, Brexit was a disaster for Eastern Europe, because the Brits, for all their faults, were a useful counterweight against the integrationist crowds. Without them, the only thing stopping complete Franco-German domination of the EU is their own squabbling. Make no mistake, the Europe of Nations was dealt a grievous blow by Brexit. The European Green New Deal is the first extremely statist move to emerge from that.

I will not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I agree with everything you said but I still loved the movie. I doubt I have seen a better adaptation other than Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter (both big budget affairs as well).

My biggest gripe is with the fight scene and with the casting of Kynes.

The veterans of World War II were all for modernity. They hated everything that smacked of their horrible depression past. They hated Tiffany lamps (that’s why they’re rare), they hated hated trains (read: troop trains), they hated Victorian anything, and they loved clean. Any thing clean looking. Look at their yards. And if they are anything, these modernist monstrosities look clean. Maybe now that they’re almost all gone, another aesthetic will take hold. But their aesthetic has a long reach and a strong hold on later generations.

Besides which, architects are just in a contest to make something different. Not livable. Just different. Not good-looking. Just different. Then they are ground-breakers. Visionaries. Fucking shits.

You see that a lot of these buildings are presented as renderings, to make them more pleasing by showing them in the right light, without any patina of time or the grime that pollution produces. As soon as you build them, especially integrated in their surroundings, the crime is revealed.

Celebration, Florida, is often held up as an example of New Urbanism, with nice architecture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida

DIE is an interesting acronym, but DEI is also revealing, because it means “of God”, as in Opus Dei.

A quiet nod to the messianic convictions of its practitioners?

Stunning and brave! They are the real fish of the North Atlantic, not like those mackerel!

“Some of my friends spend more time with their parents, but I have to give you a lot of credit because those kids are in two-parent families. Our criminal justice system is horrible and messed up, and you are trying to help it get fixed.”

File this under things that never happened lol. Don’t these people feel any shame at putting their ideas in the mouths their kids. You see it on Twitter, too – things to ideological and effed up to have been uttered by a kid get reported by their parents. From the mouths of babes!

My generation is almost completely one of only children, due to fertility collapse after the fall of Communism and its pro-natal, anti-contraception policies and also due to the economic crisis accompanying transition, which took between 10 and 15 years in most countries.

I remember hearing the same thing back then and I mostly hear the same thing now, but it is mostly conversational since most people still have one child. A growing proportion are having 2 again, I know a few couples my age that have three, but I think they are balanced out by the growing childless group (because of medical and career issues).

I get you, but my point in saying they are mainstream is not that their views fit with the media industrial complex, or that they are very widely read, but that the website is normie friendly. It is not Unz or Vdare. The contributors are generally people who are still in respectable society, not on the fringes, and, while a particular article might be risky to pass on (from the pov of somebody fearing ostracism and loss of livelihood), sending someone quillette links is unlikely to raise the same eyebrows as sending vdare or counter-currents. Remember when Stephen Miller was confirmed to be a Nazi because he had share Vdare articles?

Glad to see you as well! I have been following the site, though I felt I had little to add and, in truth, I have not had the same time to reach the comments as I used to. Everything ok with you?

It is, but what of it? They have interesting articles. Certainly, they might be controlled or tolerated opposition, but they have some of the most daring mainstream content I have seen online, including attacks on transgenderism, on Black Lives Matter and so on.

https://quillette.com/2021/05/28/black-lives-matter-and-the-psychology-of-progressive-fatalism/

Off-topic:

I had to abandon my lurker ways to inform Mr. Sailer that, finally, people have been noticing the concept of hate crime hoaxes.

A victory of sorts?

https://quillette.com/2021/08/27/the-victim-race/

If teenagers are prepared to harm themselves in cyberspace to attain the status of victim, it should not be especially surprising that some adults do so in the real world. In the most notorious example of this behaviour, actor Jussie Smollett told police he had been the victim of a racist and homophobic attack on January 20th, 2019. He immediately found himself at the centre of media attention and public opinion. But the subsequent investigation revealed that Smollett had paid two men to assault him and that he had sent himself the threatening letters he had received the week before.

Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War

But is that really true?

In Hoax, Professor Wilfred Reilly examines over one hundred widely publicized incidents of so-called hate crimes that never actually happened. With a critical eye and attention to detail, Reilly debunks these fabricated incidents—many of them alleged to have happened on college campuses—and explores why so many Americans are driven to fake hate crimes. We’re not experiencing an epidemic of hate crimes, Reilly concludes—but we might be experiencing an unprecented epidemic of hate crime hoaxes.

The actor even ended up marrying Reese Witherspoon!

I don’t want to belittle the extraordinary Japanese, but didn’t they get modern quality control theory from Deming? They saw that it would be useful and adopted it earlier and took it further than others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

There are a lot of articles written on Deming and Japan.

Mostly, when people argue against East Asians, they say that they cannot come up with disruptive paradigm changes on their own at the level where they can thrive. Always, some thing or another, like deference to authority or too much centralism, ends up quashing it in the absence of outside pressure. I don’t really agree, but still, I think this is what @stillCARealist meant.

The outfit looks Chinese.

But no country will go back to something what Germany, Italy or Romania had before WWII.

What did Romania have? The National Legionary State was a blip in time, the royal uniparty dictatorship of Carol II was the same. They literally could not survive the various internal forces. The country had had constitutional monarchy since we brought in the Hohenzollerns in 1866 (promoted to King in 1881, with the full independence gained in 1878), and an elective monarchy in the brief period before.

As for Prussia, I never really understood Cioran there. If anything, we would be Habsburg and look towards Austria. Sure, by comparison to the Balkans, many people look positively Prussian. But I think I am not mistaken in saying that Austria represented, at least through its own propaganda, a softer and more liberal germanism than the Prussian militarism that was later pegged as the spiritual ancestor of the Nazis (finished reading Iron Kingdom recently). The main difference was, of course, in how society was structured. The really old Prussianism was based on the East-Elbian Junckers like Bismarck, big conservative landowners who begat a military elite and a certain ethos. We did not have that in Transylvania, the Germans were a quite small and mostly urban minority, and, if some resemblance could be found in the big landowners there, like the guys I mentioned in my other post, it certainly did not apply to the Romanians. Some things definitely rubbed off on them but I think Cioran was just tooting his own horn by appealing to the epitome of efficiency as contrasted to Balkan slovenliness. Vienna was the good cop in the Austro-Hungarian “buddy act”, especially the idea of the rich, sophisticated, urban, refined Vienna as a model, as well as its role as an enlightened arbiter to which the Romanians could appeal for rights and for emancipation. To this day, there is a Habsburg nostalgia and idealization among many people I spoke with. We were always too intimate with the Hungarians to view them in the same way.
As for the region’s liberalism, it comes with the older pattern of urbanization. The components of Romania were not just under different imperial influences and sometimes bootheels, but literally also under different social hierarchies and patterns of social relations. The cities you cited (and more beside them) are also much closer, in geographic and in real terms, to the economic dynamo of Central Europe and always have been. The real question is why the Royals never thought to move the capital to Alba Iulia or Brasov (Kronstadt in German, from its latin name, Corona, literally Crown). Maybe they did not have time. Had they moved the capital, the pattern would be even more striking without Bucharest in the South at its current size (attained during Communism).

There are some grumblings from local media figures, but I do not pay them much attention for various reasons.

Point taken. But that means that all current uses of the word ghetto, outside of some third world examples like unclean castes in India, are inappropriate. The US ghetto, the European ones in the no-go areas etc. As for the Hungarians, isn’t it a form of ghettoization if your own local leaders promote policies that “keep you on the (vote) farm” by lowering mobility? It is obvious that, aside from going to Hungary, there is no other mobility option if you, as an adult, can’t speak passable Romanian. Or maybe it’s enclavization again, and the word ghetto is a pejorative reflecting my own bias against what is happening. I was surprised recently to learn that the Hungarian government is funding Romanian language courses for Hungarians in the middle of Romania, as a means of increasing their prosperity.

I would say that, on the contrary, Romania is a model in the region for how few actual regional divisions there are. Sure, the narcissism of small differences still reigns and jokes about the varieties of Romanians abound, but we have never had regional or separatist parties in our entire history, not just the post-Communist one. Every Romanian party is well represented in every region, even though there are political affinities like the South and the East for the so-called socialists, the West for the so-called liberals, rural vs urban etc. UDMR is the exception but, even, there, its ties to Romanian parties are so great that, when it risked not getting 5% in the European Parliament elections, the social-democrats used their machine politics to get Romanians and Gypsies in other regions to vote for them. You say counties with a few dozen Hungarians send thousands of votes to UDMR. It is astounding how little traction autonomist and separatist discourse have achieved (I mean the Romanian one), much of it sponsored from abroad by our allies as much as our enemies (if not more). There is a visceral feeling in even the most educated Romanians against such talk and the traitor intellectuals are a small, if vocal minority. For instance, the President of the Romanian Academy is a model of benign nationalist sentiment (the Romanian version of cuckservatism).

They are ghettoized wherever they are so concentrated that one can get by in life without ever interacting with Romanians, thereby obviating the need to ever learn to speak fluent Romanian. Rural Harghita and Covasna are examples. Then, not speaking the language of the majority and being in a region that was also geographically difficult until the modern day (which is how the enclave survived demographically until urbanization trends and Communist policies made the cities more Romanian), they are also not as well integrated in the national economy. People harp on crossborder trade and investment, but the first and largest form of trade and investment is cross-community within the same nation. What company would base its investment in Romania in the one place where not only do the potential employees not speak Romanian, but there is an underlying ethnic tension in interactions, as Romanians themselves feel snubbed by standoffish Hungarians, while Hungarians feel humiliated by their poor Romanian language skills (since is Romanian is taught alongside other foreign languages in school, as a foreign language)? This is why Hungarians from Transylvania routinely work anywhere in Romania, including Craiova in the South (as I have discovered), but Hungarians from the center of the country either stay there or move to Hungary. Even though they are right next to one of the most productive areas of the country, the Renault factories producing Dacias and all of their local supplier base in nearby Brasov county, not to mention Cluj and other areas. And this is one of the reasons why Har-Cov is so poor compared to the rest of the historical region, even comparable to the poorer areas in Moldova, a region bereft of infrastructure, the prior Habsburg development advantages, the connectivity to international neighbors for trade (the Republic of Moldova has an economy the size of Iasi City, with its 300 thousand people, and Ukraine is also much poorer than Romania). This is why I also predict that the completion of the highway from Targu Mures to Cluj and with one and later two connections to Hungary will not change things much – the gap will remain, even though the area will still grow economically.

Also, very funny post-edit. Apparently, anti-gypsy speech, actions and materials are not punishable if done for science or the arts, research, public education or public debate. Let’s see how long that lasts.

And people can be forgiven the acts if the immediately denounce the organization, especially if its existence is not yet known or even before it has committed any such crime (!!!). Wow, damn. We reached deep into the Communist savoir-faire for that one.

https://www.g4media.ro/proiectul-privind-combaterea-antitiganismului-a-fost-adoptat-pedepse-cu-inchisoarea-pentru-actiuni-de-ura-impotriva-romilor.html

Starting today, noticing about Gypsies is a crime in Romania, punishable by three months to three years in jail.

Holy shit. They did that? But complaining about them is the national sport, a pressure valve like swearing at politicians.

Edit – Well, looks like they did. Have you seen the Romanian Government Strategy for Inclusion of Romanian Citizens of Roma Ethnicity 2021-2027? It reads like a woke wishlist by Eastern European standards. Look at Specific Objectives 5 (cultural identity, historic reconciliation) and 6 ( discrimination, hate speech). They have the largest number of pages, despite not being the first. Everything our nascent NGO social justice – industrial complex could want.

http://www.anr.gov.ro/index.php/transparenta-decizionala

Sorry guys, link in Romanian only. We have a Roma National Agency. Do you have a Department of African American Affairs? No, you don’t.

Haha, thank you for standing up for my people. Dacian Julien Soros is also Romanian. I took my handle when I stopped lurking to answer something related to my people and did not think I would become a regular commenter, so I never got something fancy that would help with the personal branding.

Indeed, they have the look, some more than others. But half of them can just as well be Romanian lumpenproles, and they are known to mix when it comes to dark deeds. But the way to know for sure would be to watch for other tells – weird or specific names, a voice/accent like they have a perpetually stuffed nose (I do not know if they have a genetically transmitted deviated septum), or women with flowery dresses and conspicuous jewelry. As with African-Americans, there is important European admixture, with some being indistinguishable. Though I have seen guys who look like they decamped from Punjab yesterday. And there was no one drop policy on the other side to keep the majority from having some gene influx as well, so being very Roma is also a cultural/familial thing.