Eetan
4mo ago
This isn't true. In western society that remark is hyperbole and we all know it, because nobody here is forcing tradition and religion down people's throats at gunpoint.
This subthread is not about Western society, it is about Iran.
He asked what a more traditional solution sounded like. Well, I gave him one. Current trends and demographics seem to be making the case that the latter is the more attractive long-term option.
Iran - society with all drawbacks of modernity and none of its benefits - is not attractive at all.
If your solution is Iranian one, it is unsatisfactory.
Eetan
5mo ago
Ethnic Expulsions would be the best thing for birth rates.
This is the theory. Now, let us look at the example of countries that recently tried this recipe for growth.
Bosnia And Herzegovina Birth Rate
Civil war, ethnic cleansing and atrocities galore, but any rebound and growth is not evident.
Eetan
5mo ago
I know this. I consider the bulk of international law illegitimate
Do you object to current international law concerning war in particular, or to the idea of laws and custom of warfare in general?
If the latter, then your beef is not only with soft modern liberal age, but with nearly all cultures of history, who had their laws and customs concerning wars.
There were always people who said "Might makes right!" "Fuck the law, we have guns". It this is what inspires you, go ahead, but better make dooubly sure that you really have the might and that you really possess enough guns.
I consider history when evaluating a populace, yes. And Palestinians are historically, as a group, bad.
So, "good people" should have carte blanche to massacre "bad people" with impunity. Who gets to decide who is "bad"? Well, the "good" people, they are experts on goodness and badness, after all.
To disagree is not just to disagree with me, but to disagree with the international community as understood by their actions (rather than their virtue signaling at the UN). Egypt has continually refused to either accept Gazan refugees or to annex Gaza. Ditto Lebanon and Jordan with the West Bankers. And those refugees in those two countries are not allowed to join society as a whole, instead are relegated to camps.
Palestinians are bad, because no one wants them, no one would welcome them as refugees.
As someone who identifies with Jews/Israelis, this is really the last argument you should use.
Eetan
5mo ago
If I am "supporting" the military with a vote, I also am not a civilian, because the purpose of voting is to avoid internal civil wars.
This might be your personal opinion, but international law disagrees and clearly lays out who is combatant and who is civilian.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/article-50
Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977.
Article 50 - Definition of civilians and civilian population
- A civilian is any person who does not belong to one of the categories of persons referred to in Article 4 A (1), (2), (3) and (6) of the Third Convention and in Article 43 of this Protocol. In case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian.
- The civilian population comprises all persons who are civilians.
- The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character.
These categories are there:
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciii-1949/article-4
(1) Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.
(2) Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions:
(a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
(b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
(c) that of carrying arms openly;
(d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
...
(4) Persons who accompany the armed forces without actually being members thereof, such as civilian members of military aircraft crews, war correspondents, supply contractors, members of labour units or of services responsible for the welfare of the armed forces, provided that they have received authorization from the armed forces which they accompany, who shall provide them for that purpose with an identity card similar to the annexed model.
...
(6) Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.
back to Oct 7 event:
Not really. They didn't make any real attempts to target IDF soft targets.
In December this figure was further revised using social security data to 1,139.[14] This number consists of 764 civilians, including 36 children, and 373 security forces,[14] the youngest of whom was 10 months old and the eldest 25 people over age 80.[14][175]
...
They also actively fled engagement with IDF instead, fleeing them, and targeting residences where they had zero reason to expect to particularly find IDF resources.
According to your previous definition, voting is act of combat and anyone who votes is therefore legitimate target.
Combined with their cowardly appeals
And now you keep adding another things.
Just say what you want to say: "We good, ug. They bad, ug ug. We kill them, this good, ug ug ug. They kill us, this bad, ug ug ug ug."
Eetan
5mo ago
As Chesterton says, Christianity has died at least five times and rose again stronger from the tomb. It's almost as if there's a theme somewhere in the Gospels...
You probably mean Hillaire Belloc, writer even more prolific than Chesterton and one half of "Chesterbelloc" inseparable duo.
In The Great Heresies he boasts how the Church survived attacks of Arianism, Islam, Cathars, Reformation and modern unbelief and ends in rather optimistic tone.
Of this new tendency to sympathize with Catholicism--and in the case of strong characters to take the risk, to accept the Faith, and proclaim themselves the defenders of it--there can be no doubt. Even in England, where the traditional feeling against Catholicism is so universal and so strong, and where the whole life of the nation is bound up with hostility to the Faith, the conversions which strike the public eye are continually the conversions of men who lead in thought; and note that for one who openly admits conversion there are ten at least who turn their faces toward the Catholic way, who prefer the Catholic philosophy and its fruit to any others, but who shrink from accepting the heavy sacrifices involved in a public avowal.
...
Even the most misguided or the most ignorant of men, talking vaguely of "Churches," are now using a language that rings hollow. The last generation could talk, in Protestant countries at least, of "the Churches." The present generation cannot. There are not many churches; there is one, it is the Catholic Church on the one side and its mortal enemy on the other. The lists are set.
Thus are we now in the presence of the most momentous question that has yet been presented to the mind of man. Thus are we placed at a dividing of the ways, upon which the whole future of our race will turn.
The book was written in 1938 and, sadly for Catholic Church, Belloc's optimism turned out to be badly misplaced.
Catholic church rejected everything that would make it Catholic in Bellloc's eyes and is not looking very well.
Protestant churches are still there, and the churches that are thriving and growing are churches that would drive Belloc into rage and total despair, if he saw them.
As great sage said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."
Eetan
6mo ago
Do you have a single source to back that up?
In ancient Near East, periodical debt forgiveness was common(people were then not so advanced as to pull themselves by their bootstraps from hereditary debt slavery), but biblical system pushed it further, into land redistribution every 50 years.
Remember, equal land division was always in agricultural societies the most extremely extremist demand of the most hardcore rebels.
As late as 1793, sooo radical French revolutionaires decreed death penalty for anyone who would dare to propose "agrarian law".
Here it was the law and the norm, explicitly designed to stop accumulation of land by few families, stop emergence of large hereditary landowners and resulting feudal system.
Add ban on lending on interest (what, in peasant village conditions, meant extortionary loan sharking, not investment in productive enterprises) and limiting slavery (for Hebrews only OFC) to seven years.
Yes, there is no evidence that the biblical economic system was ever actually implemented, but was well thought off. Bible writers were well aware about conditions in their world (all powerful kings, crushing taxation, omnipresent serfdom and slavery, few oligarchs and plantation owners owning most land), didn't like it and tried hard to find way to avoid it.
It is significant, and it is even more significant than not even the most Old Testament loving Christians who brought back biblical punishments and biblical genocides, never ever thought about putting this system into practice.
Eetan
6mo ago
Time for current culture war item, reviving 20 years old controversies in much different world.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now a Christian
Some feel it as betrayal, some as vindication, but all see it as big thing. But is it a thing of any importance?
Reading through the manifesto, it seems strange. First, it does not contain the word "Jesus", not even once. Neither the word "salvation".
So what it talks about?
Threats to precious Western democracy, freedom, rules based international order and Judeo-Christian tradition
Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.
But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
historical facts as accurate as "Cleopatra was black"
To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities.
and mid-life crisis. Permanent Middle Eastern crisis is child's play compared to eternally recurring middle life crisis.
Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?
So why Christianity?
In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy.
How is Christianity supposed to help in fighting "China, Russia and Iran" is left unclear. Of these coutries, Russia explicitly claims to fight for Christianity against Western Jewish Nazi homosexual Satanism.
How would AHA answer Putin, how would she prove that his interpretation of Christianity is wrong and her "Judo-Christian" faith is the true Christian tradition and true message of Jesus?
And for wokeism, Christianity hadn't proved not to be very effective in fighting it.
(and if you need Christianity do defeat something so absurd as wokeism, you already lost)
SENIOR: What would you like for your birthday, son?
JUNIOR: I want to chop off my dick, dad.
SENIOR: Do not do it, son!
JUNIOR: Why?
SENIOR: (long pause and head scratching) The Bible! The Bible forbids it, son!
JUNIOR: Where?
SENIOR: (fast and frantic searching through book) Wait, son! It must be here, somewhere!
That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.
Curious what exact church AHA joined. Churches that simultaneously reject wokeism and support "civilization war" against Axis of Evil, churches that fly Ukraine, Israeli and Taiwan flags but lack rainbow, trans and BLM flags tend to be rather thin of the ground.
I really don't care about the ethnic make-up or the future of Israel as a country.
You should. If Israel fails, Israelis will flee and settle in your country. I presume you are not very fond of Jews and are not eager to welcome Jewish refugees.
Israel doesn't seem to mind taking American money from non-Jews
Some Israelis do mind a lot.
so why would the would-be settlers need to be converts?
Because it would nullify the whole point of Israel (national home and place of refuge for Jews)
No, I think limiting the offers to people within a certain measure of competence would do roughly the same job. There are also plenty of low-quality White people that they probably would not want on their side.
People with "measure of competence" (living in developed countries OFC) have more options and opportunities than ever before. What could Israel offer them? Why would competent person want to live in trailer in the desert among people who really do not want him there?
Anyway, Israel is not lacking people with guns, Israel is not afraid of being overrun by mighty Arab armies.
Israel is afraid of being declared racist, fascist and white supremacist country and sanctioned like old South Africa. To avoid this, Israel needs to gain hearts and minds of people (elite human capital OFC, the masses will follow) in the Western countries and needs advocates, propagandists and tiktok influencers.
edit: more links added
Eetan
6mo ago
Let these Israelis figure out a way to survive without begging, without running intense propaganda campaigns on Westerners. Get creative for once. Idk, offer some training, weapons and land to disillusioned Western youth similarly to ISIS?
It is happening. The dirty secret is that many West Bank settlers are people with minimal Jewish ancestry or just plain converts, often from unexpected places.
It is not official policy, but you want to make it one, you want Israeli government official outreach program to promote and evangelize Judaism and offer Israeli citizenship (with free sand and rock) to prospective converts?
Program racially limited to whites (I presume that by "Western" you mean White) to avoid recruits like this?
Well, if you want to make Middle Eastern situation more heated and volatile, this will work.
Eetan
6mo ago
"Tide of public opinion" was creation of mass media that decided in Feb 2022 to play up this war as much as possible (instead of ignoring it like, for example, contemporary war in Ethiopia)
We can imagine alternate world where, on February 24, newspapers of record dedicated front pages to latest controversy about drag queens and somewhere on corner of page six was report:
KIEV: Today, Russian forces crossed border of Ukraine in territory disputed between Russia and Ukraine.
Situation is unclear, some local sources report about fights between Russian army and Ukrainian militias.
Russian government says it is involved in limited operation against Jewish Nazi Satanist homosexual terrorists based in disputed territory, and claims it holds no aggressive intent against Ukraine.
Ukrainian government denies presence of Jewish Nazi Satanist homosexual terrorists on Ukraine soil and denounces Russian actions as aggression against Ukraine.
World leaders call for cease-fire and negotiations between all involved parties.
In this world, only people who would be watching Ukraine would be people with relatives in the area and OSINT/war fans, "public opinion" would have different concerns.
Eetan
7mo ago
Are you a friend of this Karl May?
Every boy who grew in formerly Marxist Central Europe is friend of Karl May, because Marxists liked Karl May a lot, because they printed his books by the millions and made(together with Western capitalists) dozens of movies based on his works.
No surprise, these are extremely progressive works where working class heroes fight against big landlords, big ranchers, railroad and oil companies and other exploiters.
If Karl May was really cancelled in today's Germany, it is anything than victory for Marxism.
Yes, we shall judge Marxism according to the decades when Marxists were in power, not according to contemporary rainbow furry freaks, even when they wave red flags.
Just like we, for example, judge Christianity according to 15+ centuries when Christianity was in power, not according to disheveled freaks screaming at street and internet corners that the end is near.
Eetan
7mo ago
Right, just like the story behind the pope's decision is not as simple as "he's a central authority, of course it would happen"?
No, the story is: if you give one man unlimited and unaccountable power, do not be surprised and do not complain when he uses it against you and things you like.
Eetan
8mo ago
1/Victim blaming is not exclusive to blaming sexual assault victim, it is normal, at least in circles of tough keyboard warriors, to blame victims of non-sexual assault too.
"Serves you well, liberal soiboi! If you were real manly man like me, if you were spending all your free time in gym, if you practiced martial arts and carried gun, it would not happen to you!"
2/Victim blaming is not for benefit of the victim, it is to assuage the blamer that nothing bad can happen to him, that he has nothing to fear as long as he follows the checklist and does everything right.
Eetan
8mo ago
Their methods and their numbers are good enough for Pentagon, the unfortunate leaks showed that Pentagon uses Oryx data.
Belllingcat and Oryx are anything but "random internet people".
Eetan
8mo ago
The military's logistical pipelines become an order of magnitude less complex
With collapse of US (and world) economy, logistical pipelines become nonexistant.
Do not imagine masses of shiny wunderwaffen crushing the rebels, imagine Second Civil War as two (at minimum) African style armies with pickup trucks and jerry rigged armored vehicles duking it out in Mad Max apocalypse land.
Eetan
8mo ago
...That would be a start, anyhow.
And that would be also an end, end of Christianity. This long effortpost was the perfect illustration of my point.
You do not say "Christianity is good because it is true. God is real, the Bible is true word of God, Jesus is true son of God who died for your sins and rose from the dead. Follow him as the only way to save your soul from eternal fire that awaits you for your sins."
You say: "Christianity is good because Christian society is better than "materialist" one, because it delivers 0,46% higher GDP growth, 7,91% lower crime rate and scientific papers that replicate at 6.38% better rate. Go dilligently to church every week, it will somehow make everything better."
I hate to sound like a broken record on incompetence=evil, but the difference is that confessional Christian regimes tend not to kill millions of people on accident, and when they do it’s a result of empowering ruthless people with vague mandates rather than something inherent in the system.
If good system somehow keeps empowering "ruthless people" who kill millions of people, what exactly makes it good?
Doctrinaire Marxist regimes have a much worse record.
Well, this is hotly debated. Limiting ourselves to modern times, do you consider British Empire to be "confessional Christian regime"?
Anyway, there is no comparison.
Marxism does not claim to be religion based on faith, Marxism claims to be science, describing objective laws governing history, Marx wanted to be someone who explains evolution of human society just like Darwin explained evolution of life.
It is appropriate to judge Marxism by scientific standards (Prager university tier takes "Marx was sleeping with his maid, therefore Marxism is BS" are embarrassment).
It is appropriate to ask whether Marxist predictions - tendency of the rate of profit to fall, immiseration of the proletariat etc... came true. It is appropriate to ask whether Marxists got ever close to delivering what they promised.
I mean there’s also that believing Christians tend to be much better citizens than committed marxists.
Citizens of what? Citizens of bourgeois and feudal states certainly not, committed Marxists were undermining them as hard as committed Christians were undermining pagan states.
Citizens of Marxist state? All achievements of USSR - victory in civil war against overwhelming odds, breakneck speed industrialization and development and then victory in greatest war in history, were due to sacrifice of tens of millions of true believing Marxists.
Yes, when the true believers who really believed they were building better world died off, the later generations lost their faith and sold everything for blue jeans and chewing gum. And they lost their faith, because the great promises never came true, and they knew thay are not coming true, because they were supposed to happen here on Earth, not in heaven after death.
Eetan
9mo ago
Very good article, recommended by anyone from Bari Weiss to dead bird Nazis.
The "gotcha" thing most people take from it is are Obama's fantasies of having sex with men, or in the case of conspirologists, that Obama is the real "big man" from Hunter's mails and the real grey eminence in charge of the White House.
More important, in my wiew, is Obama's cosmopolitan background, the fact he could reinvent himself as "black American" even when he has nothing in common with them.
The contrast to Barack could not be greater. He doesn’t know the daddy. He sort of knows the mother. He’s living with these elderly white people, and he’s being shuttled between Indonesia and Honolulu. And both in high school and at Oxy, and those three years in New York, his friendship network is all these guys like Chandoo Hasan, who are fellow international stateless children.
...
Birtherism was a classic Trump move because it found a really quick way to encapsulate a feeling that people had, even if the facts weren’t true. The literal accusation—”Oh, he was born in Kenya, and his birth certificate is a fake”—was false, and it made Obama really mad. The word they kept using was racist. But I was like, “Did anyone ever suggest that Jesse Jackson or Lebron James was born anywhere besides the United States?” It was not about racism, I think—at least not primarily. It was about foreignness, un-American-ness. I think that what Obama feared was that showing the birth certificate would make his Hawaiian-Kenyan-Indonesian outsiderness even more plain.
The one time I met him, we talked about rap music at a fundraiser. The thing I was struck by, having spent a bunch of time in Bali, was the way he stood and the way he held his head while he listened. I recognized Indonesia in the tilt of the head and the stillness of his body. It was very familiar. Americans don’t have that kind of pose, or poise.
In Anatoly Karlin's speak, we have here typical example of "elite human capital", who can fly like bids everywhere, who are at home anywhere and nowhere.
These people are indeed the winners, the world belongs to them. For all eternity, as Karlin believed when he left Russian cause and crossed to their side, or for shorter time? Time will tell.
Eetan
10mo ago
You are right, not so small minority (but still a minority)
The number of teenagers and young adults in the United States who identify as transgender has doubled in the past five years, according to a new study.
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Pop-Update-Jun-2022.pdf
Percent of each age group that identifies as transgender in the U.S.
13 to 17 1.4% 300,100
18 to 24 1.3% 398,900
25 to 64 0.5% 766,500
65 and older 0.3% 171,700
13 and older 0.6% 1,637,200
Eetan
10mo ago
Typical insecure nationalist thing. This will have no other result (after should popularity boost) that people all over the world, even ones who do not care about Turkey at all, would call the country T-U-R-K-E-Y with great relish to the end of time. Because Erdogan does not have any power to "force foreigners to use their endonym".
Chad move would be to embrace brave and noble Turkey as your national bird, build giant statues of majestic turkeys in Turkish national costume elsewhere, paint all airplanes in turkey colors, put traditional turkey dishes in every restaurant and bask in the free name recognition. No one knows what is "Türkiye" and no one cares. Everyone heard about the bird.
Yes, I know that Benjamin Franklin never proposed to make the glorious gobbler American national symbol, but he should have.
Eetan
10mo ago
Tough, stereotypically maximally manly men, often unironical veterans of gorilla warfare with hundreds of confirmed kills who in advanced age suddenly find they were, deep inside, little girls all the time, are small percentage of transgender population.
They are, as Steve Sailer noted, the public faces and enforcers of the movement, but they hadn't started it and are not leading it.
Eetan
10mo ago
The scandal is not only the abuse, but the systematic coverup.
Do American public schools, as SOP and official policy, protect the abusive teachers, silence the accusations and if the miscreants became well known, reassign them silently somewhere else so they can continue?
(wouldn't surprise me if it was the case)
Civilization is creeping in, so you probably only have 5-10 years left, but the ruling class are keenly aware that preserving a certain charming pastiche backwardness (while also being very safe, clean and welcoming) is the future of the economy, and they act accordingly. It’s also a lot of fun to be in a Buddhist country that hasn’t yet been turned into a strip mall like the more developed parts of the rest of Southeast Asia.
The rulers also decided that cryptocurrency is the future, and heavily invested in crypto mining.
Quietly, but infrastructure of such magnitude is not something that can be hidden. Something for people who worry how easily you can get away with AI development in coming Katechon Pact world.
Eetan
3mo ago
This is a funny way to put it, because the whole gas chamber story is really what aims to resolve the ambiguity not just on the Eastern front, but on the entire war. Imagine how ambiguous the entire war effort and war consequences become if you take the gas chamber story away.
"Great Patriotic War" is considered sacred only in Russia, much more so in recent post-Soviet times than during USSR.
In the West, modern academic consensus is now that WW2 (at least the 90% of it that happened in the East) was fight between 100% evil and 99,9% evil.
Ernst Nolte was cancelled in his time, but his thesis won, to the dismay of remaining old time leftists.
And this trend will accelerate, both due to WW2 receding in historical memory and current events in Eastern Europe and Middle East.
No one is going to build any memorials to Nazi Germans any time soon, but Soviet monuments are going down everywhere outside Putin country.
Looks like mission accomplished, and without any questioning of "gas chamber story."
Still the ratio between people coming to US and people leaving speaks for itself.
Seeing people voting with their legs is about the only objective measure of oppression that exists. Genuinely oppressed people are running away from their persecutors (if they have the opportunity, most oppressed people in history had nowhere to go).
Not anymore, most Africans now live in favela style housing in mega cities. Hellish by our standards, paradisical by standards of their previous village life.
More options
Context Copy link