Pasha
Defend Kebab
No bio...
User ID: 481
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1yr ago
I have been suspecting for a while that the governments have been so tolerant of crypto currency stuff because it’s actually a great way for intelligence agencies to move serious black money around without getting into Iran contra style problems.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1yr ago
Sometimes when I am really tired and want something entirely mindless I just switch on speed running videos and marvel at how much time and effort these seemingly intelligent determined capable men are spending on clipping a wall at a game released in 2003 to save off 750 milliseconds or something. Is there anything else that is such a massive waste of human talent than speed running communities??
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1yr ago
Israel has been restrained because it is indeed fighting for the subjugation of a population with a size equivalent to its own. The alternative to restraint is not killing "at least a substantial number of violent young men", it is genocide. The definition of "violent young men who might take up arms against Israel if provoked enough" is "99% of Palestinian men". In a society like Palestinians intentionally or unintentionally killing someone is enough to convince a dozen of their male relatives to swear an eternal oath of revenge against you and genuinely pursue this.
I generally sympathize with Israel much more than Arabs instinctively because I perceive them as civilized people dealing with barbarians (a specific type of Islamic barbarity that I personally have reasons to specifically hate). If Israelis become another tribe of barbarians engaged in genocidal clan war then I simply do not care.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1yr ago
I get the impression that regular holocaust narrative, where it’s the most heinous crime in human history bestowing endless moral authority to the god’s chosen people ultimate victim, is on its way out. It cannot survive pop intersectionalism. There are too many victim groups with a stake in the pie and they don’t have the baggage of having to defend Israel’s right to take over a land by treating its inhabitants as untermenschen and concentrating them in ghettos.
In the near future any slander against the holocaust narrative from the wrong people will still be a big taboo but it will be the “allies” with their own holocaust claims and grievances who will dilute the moral authority of the holocaust.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
Not even 100% sure why but he feels like a natural ally
I suspect because you don't know much about the topic and just project your own prejudices on him.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
I don't understand how moving things online saves energy. Now instead of heating 25 kids in one classroom, you have 25 kids in 25 bedrooms with the heater on. Same goes for basically any office space.
We have "survived" covid in large parts because all fiscal constraints were forgotten for 2 years and all Western governments engaged in massive scale money printing to stop any social unrest. This is of course not really possible anymore, as there is already massive inflation. "Close everything and pay people to do nothing" might seriously lead to empty shelves and worthless paper money this time.
Meanwhile the virus itself didn't put any actual constraints on healthy young/middle aged people (the demographic that does almost all the work) to go out and do actual physical work. Governments mostly just told them to put on a mask and continue with their jobs. Not having energy and materials on the other hand cannot be solved in such manners.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
11mo ago
Israel will never give citizenship to substantially more Arabs than its current ratio of around %20 Arab citizens. That would be totally suicidal, nobody in the country supports such a thing and it’s simply a fake solution made up by westerners (just like the “2-state solution”) to avoid thinking too hard about the unpleasant implications of the Israeli state.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1yr ago
Just finished Feynman’s autobiography. What a guy! You know a guy is being honest in his autobiography when half the book is filled with memories of blond babes and tits, and the other half is about him solving this or that very difficult physics problem.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1yr ago
Conscription in Turkey used to be universal and quite tough. This spawned about a million ways anyone with connections or money could get their sons an easy deployment or even an exemption. Meanwhile the average peasant would have to endure near slavery conditions in the hands of commanders. Also certain deployments in the Kurdish areas could be genuinely dangerous with serious casualty rates.
Nowadays anyone can legally pay some amount (not low, not crazy high) to do only a one month training course and be exempt from the rest of the service. The actual fighting army is a professional force and it pays a pretty decent salary for a stable job requiring no education.
The conditions in the training and service are much much better nowadays. Some of this is because Turkey is a wealthier and more middle class country now so overall conditions are better anywhere. But I suspect a big part is due to the need to recruit contract soldiers from the conscripts.
My lesson from this change is that without a very established civic culture and a homogenous society (not necessarily in terms of race but broadly in terms of group identity) it doesn’t work to try to take elites hostage in the system to force skin in the game. People with means almost always find ways to work around the system, and they cause enormous inefficiencies and dysfunction while doing so.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Going from memory of how a friend described his Oxford classics education to me a while ago, amount of tutoring required per student sounded quite minimal actually. Mostly the students did a gargantuan amount of self-reading and the tutors were there to direct their efforts and thinking rather than do anything particularly time intensive.
Of course this obviously can't be replicated anywhere else except in the most top universities of each country (who already usually have their own separate traditions of elite education) because you need a very impressive student body to sustain this.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Yes. I believe if you do a proper classics study in those unis even today the experience isn’t that far off according to a friend who did so a while ago. One of the most inspirational uni life stories I have ever come across is Bismarck’s actually. 3.5 years of non-stop drinking and partying and sword dueling topped with insane half a year crunch to graduate. Great recipe to create great men.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1yr ago
“Mainly consist” was the term I used. It’s a combination of a couple reasons:
- Female heavy degrees are almost always fake subjects polluting scientific integrity and draining resources. I have witnessed many times in my university life that the worst and most pointless courses/degree specialisations in even the hardest science tracks were devised with the expectation to attract more females. Fields like sociology, psychology, art history etc speak for themselves. Closing down these faculties or only restricting them to rigorous academic work would immediately cut down female population in universities severely.
- Keeping the intelligent female population of your nation in useless education until late 20s, wasting away the most fertile years of their life is just incredibly bad policy.
- There are very few significant achievements in human history that doesn’t originate from a tight-knit group of competent men heavy on camaraderie and ambition. Adding females to the equation always erodes this spirit.
- Endless education as a tool to escape “real life” is a problem afflicting both sexes but especially women fall very hard into this trap. Female brain is much more sensitive to approval from authority figures and the education system with its clear reward feedback loops seems to be almost addictive to a sort of high achieving woman.
- Women typically makes a lot less use of their education even when they enroll in more sensible degrees. They are easily spooked by competitive environments, they are tricked by social validation that comes with many low value professions, and they take long maternity leaves and work part-time because they enjoy to be with their family more than at work.
- Female style of office politics is absolutely poisonous to academia. When women takes over administrative positions at sufficient numbers, academic research just gives way to conformism and group-think.
- The fact that almost every above-average women in the society spends their prime pair bonding years at university campuses, and afterwards develop a refusal to date anyone below their education status, makes university de-facto mandatory for any men with some ambition. There is no reason why someone needs to go through a 4-year degree to become a film director, computer programmer or sales manager. People historically didn’t go to uni for such jobs. But if you try this today you are very likely forfeiting your mate prospects. Even men who don’t want/need uni education to be very successful, have to enter a good one and drop out to gain enough social clout.
I can really just go on. All of these are obviously gross generalisations and often apply to many men in some degrees as well but in the end these effects add up in a big way.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1yr ago
It’s viable if those panels and turbines are produced in Chinese coal powered factories and the US forever prices itself out of any competitive industrial production. It’s pretty damning that the production of renewable electricity generating devices never seems to use renewable energy itself.
Also after many times multiplying your electricity costs, you will still have to deal with blackouts regularly. Which means home generators for the rich and just “dealing with it” for the poor in practice.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1yr ago
The reason a "one-state" solution is impossible is that the current arrangement can only be maintained as long as that ratio doesn't go above 20%-ish (which includes various groups more sympathetic to Israel like Christian Arabs and Druzes). If there was a real one-state, it would not be a functional democracy and certainly not a Jewish one, which is the point of Zionism in the first place. There has never been any doubt that Zionists will not give Arabs political rights unless if they are small enough to not be threatening. Israel purposefully crafted its citizenship laws to exclude vast majority of Arabs, and only expanded the citizenship status slowly and to small groups once Jewish immigration meant that this would not alter the voting population much. It is extremely hypocritical to pretend this is not true and somehow non-Israel passport holder Arabs could get equal political rights if only they wanted. Even in best case scenario (where peace and friendship between the peoples are established by magic tomorrow), this would never be accepted by Israel as there are not enough Jews left in the world to immigrate and keep up the population ratio in Jews' favor.
The reason Israelis tell you this is because all the evidence points to it being true
What is that evidence exactly? West Bank is defanged and as a result it is rapidly being invaded by Jewish settlements inflicting death by thousand cuts to the already tiny Arab ghettoes. And this happens even while Arabs are very much sticking to their guns. Not to mention that the far-right is rapidly taking over Israeli politics. These people are the future.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
I believe this sentiment is actually very common with online Hindu nationalist types. My best guess is that they see Israel as a country of hyper-competent Brahmins (without the 1.5 billion riffraff bringing them down) and associate its enemies of "Muslim hordes" with Pakistan.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
Japan, South Korea and Taiwan don’t come to your mind when thinking about rapid capitalist technological development? Even when they chose the civilisational path of building extreme commie hermit kingdom, East Asian North Koreans probably did better than any other nation in the history probably.
Also the claimed IQ diff between Europeans and East Asians is about 5 points. Pretty minuscule with limited consequences if true.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
I am mildly interested in how the quest for Ukrainian nation building will develop my lifetime. Right now they manage to co-opt two very opposing sets of political and philosophical schools, largely due to wartime mobilisation censorship and patriotism. On the one hand the Ukrainian identity is being based on 19th/early 20th century style blood and soil rhetoric. The defenders of white Christian (even pagan) Europe against eastern orc hordes. Unspoiled real Slavs against the crypto-Tatar Muscovites. Real European Christians unlike those Eastern Orthodox peasants. On the other hand their only hope for national survival in this day and age is to tightly integrate with the “GAE”. So the Ukrainian army puts up EU flags in newly reconquered territories. Their parliament is busy rushing through gay agenda bills. Their politicians are making deals with Blackrock and learning the ropes of the WEF circuit.
But when the war ends these two stories cannot coexist for long. You cannot arm neo-nazi battalions while going through the EU integration process. You cannot outright ban one of the largest churches as well as the linguistic communities in your country and try to enter the Schengen area. It’s not for nothing that half the EU funded ads targeted to my demographic on social media has some visible minorities (ie blacks) posing as proud Europeans. The nationalist Ukrainian state, if it ever stops being such a poor corrupt shithole and enters the EU, will have to cope with millions of African/South Asian/Middle Eastern immigrants as well as the European Court of Human Rights rulings which will not tolerate the blood and soil rhetoric in practice. It’s ridiculous contradictions all over and makes me profoundly sad that so many young brave people are dying for a political project doomed to fail if it ever succeeds.
Something has to give in at some point. I don’t know what but I am not very hopeful about the results.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
I think most EU officials (the ones smarter than Von der Leyen) have been silent so far in order to not increase Meloni’s support even more. Random Eurocrats warning you against voting a certain way is usually a strong reason for voting that way.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6mo ago
I think Kulak is either insane or at least relatively good at acting the part of the mad prophet but in general I can’t help but think he is closer to the truth than most other people in these internet spaces.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
9mo ago
Hey that is me sometimes.
Well sort of. I don't know what those Indians are smoking but as a Turkish guy living in Western Europe for a while at this point, I do sometimes get into discussions with friends of similar background to the tune of "here things aren't actually better sometimes huh?".
A lot of it comes down to all of us being potential upper-class candidates back home, way above average in education and social stature and earning good money etc. Very few things can really substitute for relative social standing. It is difficult to get any above-mediocre social standing in Europe as a first-gen immigrant. So some of what you are observing is snarky comments from bitter people, but they have good personal reasons for being bitter.
GDP is a fine indicator but it will hide a lot from you in terms of living standards if you are ignoring costs, housing and taxes. For example Turkish PPP is at 44k, while German PPP is 62k from quick googling (Greece 41k lol). That is not such a massive difference. Pretty much all Anglo countries and Western Europe is suffering from gigantic housing problems, especially in major cities, especially effecting people who by definition could not have gotten into the mortgage market 10 years ago (i.e. young immigrants you are most likely to come across in white-collar and university settings). High progressive taxation systems are crippling for people who feel they deserve an upper class lifestyle and are trying to build it up with high-value professional labour income. You are basically slaving away for funding the boomer retirees of your host country. These boomers aren't even your own family so you won't benefit from this even in the form of inheritances. This creates massive resentment.
Often the first-tier cities of decent third world countries are actually quite decent places to be. They tend not to have "progressive" policing structures so ambient crime can be less of an issue (big variance here). They often have ample housing, and recently built. The infrastructure is often much newer.
And lastly, don't underestimate how much cheap low-class labour can improve one's life quality and how difficult it is to get accustomed to living without it.
So the comparisons come from a mix of real and perceived advantages of the home country, as well as people expecting an upper-class lifestyle not finding it in their host country. Also India is definitely not it, but a lot of "emerging" countries "emerged" quite a lot in the last decades and sometimes the perceptions didn't quite catch up in the West (and GDP is just not very good for comparisons between service and industry based economies)
Pasha
Defend Kebab
9mo ago
Theory time: Israel is pushing very hard to start a regional war with US involvement before US elections so the next president (the one that won’t be a zombie presumably) has no choice but to continue.
This missile attack is a dramatic warning that Iran can decimate oil production and other regime critical infrastructure in every single American ally in the region. Iranian leadership has been very consistently acting like they are aware that they won’t survive a war with the US.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
11mo ago
Absolutely. If this was true France would have a revolution every second month. It’s really not that difficult to stop rioting and modern states got scary good at it.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
As in every society everywhere, the fact that they are "establishment" counts much more than the ideology they coalesce around. Humans are very open to changing their minds about philosophical trivia or their lifestyle when maintaining or gaining power and wealth is the expected outcome.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
I hear Africa is still pretty wild
Yeah a friend lived in Madagaskar for a couple months and the stories were wild. Perhaps I should give it a try. I am personally not a big fan of places where there is a real threat to your personal safety or health. Forces you to be a lot more cautious and timid, and stick to the well beaten path. Definitely learned my lesson in this regard after some nights out in Brazilian cities that I tried to act as if I am still in Istanbul.
You will never get anywhere in such a discussion unless you’re willing to admit that race is much more than just the tone of your skin, and males/females of different races are indeed substantially more or less attractive than each other in certain dimensions.
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