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I started reading and thinking about Theodore Kaczynski's Industrial Society And It's Future around the time that he died and everyone was talking about it. I think everyone was talking about it in rather generous terms, mining it for the most truthful and insightful things and only talking about that. I think that's excesively generous, considering it came to be known to us thanks to a homicidal terroristic bombing campaign. I think it deserves to be cut to the core of it's true arguments that he believed justified his bombing campaign. And I also think that if you actually do so, it's pretty low quality. Here is the original text of it if you care to verify or make a counter-argument.
The core of, and most important thing to remember about Industrial Society and it's Future is the Power Process argument, as written starting in paragraph 33. TK's argument is that in order to be truly happy and satisfied with life, a person must need to exert substantial effort, labor, and creativity towards satisfying the most basic physical needs of food, water, shelter, and security. Exerting their creative efforts towards other pursuits, including art, science, engineering, etc. isn't good enough, it's got to be for core survival. Exerting substantial effort in a conventional job, earning money, and using that money to purchase the elements of survival is also not good enough, it has to be direct. This is his definition of "freedom" - one is "free" in his opinion if they need to exert substantial effort directly towards basic survival. Thus, industrial society is fundamentally destructive to "freedom" in this definition in that it enables the majority of humanity to satisfy their needs of survival very easily and reliably, usually by doing things that have no direct relation to those needs. See him doubling down on this in paragraph 94.
I believe this argument is fundamentally nonsensical. Perhaps our society is lost and missing something, but I'm doubtful that large-scale hunter-gatherer societies (or at least as large scale as such societies can be) are overall substantially happier and more satisfied with life. It may be true that some individuals who are disaffected from mainstream society for various reasons are happier in such a situation, but I don't think society as a whole is. I frankly doubt it for individuals too - how many such people ever truly disconnect fully from industrial society and stay that way? I don't think TK is has any experience in anthropology, or has spent any significant amount of time with societies that currently do live in ways similar to what he advocates. Maybe he should have spent a few years living with the Amish or something before going on a bombing campaign, or visited some primitive tribes that are still around in various parts of Africa and South America.
He has some other interesting observations, but that's the core of it and why I wholly reject the philosophy.
One of his other points is around how society tends to bend people to fit it, rather than adjusting to fit people. Maybe there's a little point in how hard it sometimes tries to bend people. But there are plenty of options out there already for other ways to live, if you are willing to go looking for them and actually adopt them. In fact, it's not really "society" trying to bend people in my opinion, it's usually the people themselves or their close family members trying to fit in. Are "we" supposed to go find the guy who thinks he should try anti-depressants to fit in better and tell him he really ought to try joining a sailboat crew first instead? Maybe it's your job to realize you don't like your place in society and change it. And however you decide to deal with your disaffection with society, what gives you the right to claim you know what's best for everyone? Doesn't the fact that you are disaffected from society fundamentally mean that you don't understand it and aren't by any measure qualified to speak for it?
Speaking of people not fitting into society, what happens when it goes the other way? If we actually adopt his supposed preferred lifestyle and it goes exactly the way he hopes it does, I'd bet anything at least a few people would think that running water, grocery stores full of food, and antibiotics are actually pretty nice, can I please go back to that? Will the result of that just be, tough shit, this is all there is, starve and die if you don't like it? Has he done any sort of research or experiment at all to determine that 100% of humanity will actually be happer living like this, even when some of them starve to death because a harvest or hunt went bad for some reason and there's no such thing as long-distance trade, or they watch their loved ones die of things that are fixable in industrial society but pre-industrial hunter-gatherers are helpless against?
I think the bigger point though is - what do you want for the future of the Human Race?
If we go TK's way, we will be hunter-gatherers chasing buffalo around and picking berries forever. Your kids and their kids as far into the future as you want to go will never live any better than you. Some day, the rising output of the sun will destroy the Earth's biosphere, or maybe we get hit by an asteroid or gamma ray burst or something, and the entire human race goes extinct. We won't have a prayer of even knowing it's coming, much less doing anything about it, because being too busy working on basic survival to notice or think about such things is apparently the correct way to live. We were given this tremendous gift of intelligence, by evolution or God or whatever you believe, and we're supposed to just throw it in the trash because some guy was sad?
Or we go our own way and take industrial society as far as it can go. Maybe we build awesome spaceships and colonize the stars. Maybe we conduct diplomacy as equals with alien civilizations. Maybe we turn ourselves into a global hive mind somehow. Or maybe we blow ourselves up with antimatter bombs or get turned into paperclips by our superintelligent AIs or get enslaved by hostile aliens. Who knows what the future holds, but it sounds a lot better than being hunter-gatherers forever.
Marx spoke of alienation (Entfremdung), proletariat losing its will to live; it exerting significant effort during the course of performing its job. Renumeration was for him insufficent, labouring masses still required an intermediary between it and his goals. This lack of directness deforms its minds, as now it must burden itself with knowledge of temporary and society dependent constructs and interests not his own, in order to achieve his true desires. As efficiency demands greater and greater specialization, its minds grow distant from eachother and fill up with ever minuter tricks to gain producitivity.
Marx also took the same research approach as Kaczynski, which was to sit in a room and imagine how other people felt. The fact that two basement dwellers came up with the same idea is not an endorsement of that idea.
I have a great deal of disdain for both sets of ideas, so I am perhaps not being maximally charitable. However, there are certain lines of argumentation where the only real counter to the ideas is to say "have you bothered asking anyone else?" This feels like a consistent problem among certain types of thinkers. They go off into isolation and use their own brain as a model for how everyone else might think and feel, and to a large extent they really nail how they themselves feel, and describe it in such a logical way that other people can imitate that line of reasoning and come to feel the same way.
They have not come upon a universal way of thinking about their topic, but they and their followers believe it to be universal. When they start trying to implement it and get predictable pushback they come up with all sorts of pet theories about how those who disagree with them have somehow been subverted by evil elements. These ideas can be very effective mind viruses. But their implementation in the real world will always leave a great deal to be desired, because there was never any strong connection between the author and the real world.
I just randomly read TK’s manifesto this week and I thought of the alienation of labor. They both struck a chord with me that they are obviously correct about a problem in a society.
I also think they are wrong about the solution. That is, they’ve done half the work.
I'm not entirely convinced they are even correct about the problem.
We don't know for certain that people in hunter-gatherer societies also don't feel some sort of alienation with the labor they do. Our translations of current hunter-gatherer societies aren't great, we aren't even sure if they can count most of the time. And by definition they usually don't write anything down.
It reminds me more of the common complaint by marxists that the workers are forced to either work or starve. As if this is somehow a valid criticism of capitalism. Its a criticism of life and the universe in general. Sorry we can't just subsist on mana falling from heaven.
In my model there are more steps, and they've barely done any of the work:
Modern Marxists, but not historic ones. Lenin and Stalin were, for a couple of atheists, rather fond of "He who does not work, neither shall he eat."
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IIRC when they tried explaining depression to hunter-gatherers, the hunter-gatherers straight-up thought the idea was absurd.
I don't think all the West's problems come from this, but this is very definitely a big part of depression.
Most people have that reaction to depression. Unless they themselves are depressed. And even then if you are the one weird person with an affliction you are better off hiding it.
Scott has an article (book review?) about mental illness and social contagion. He talks about the inuit a hunter gatherer society. I didn't get the sense you could ever get an inuit to admit to depression, they'd basically be signing up for a lifetime of being made fun of for it.
I know he reviewed Crazy Like Us, but the Inuit weren't mentioned.
Found it: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-arctic-hysterias
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Well, I know I managed to somehow generate the same hypothesis as Kaczynski despite never actually getting around to reading his manifesto. Don't remember the details of how I came to the conclusion, though.
(Of course, physical activity and social contact per se are also relevant.)
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Should be noted that much of Marx-ISM was the handiwork of Friedrich Engels, who based his theories on his experiences of working-class life in Manchester, which he both observed personally to a great degree and also encountered through his working-class paramour Mary Burns.
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Didn’t he literally move to a shack in the woods?
Yes, but that would only let him know how he enjoyed the survival lifestyle, not how everyone else would respond.
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He did, but it's not clear to what extent he was actually living the kind of life he advertised, which would include getting all of his own food, water, and other supplies from nature by himself and never from stores or other things sourced from the "industrial economy". At the very least, the materials required for the bombing campaign most likely couldn't have been built without outside supplies. I rather doubt he did considering how little knowledge of living off the land he started with and how much time he must have devoted to the bombing campaign.
There's also the point of safety nets. In TK's advocated world, if you fail to hunt and gather or farm enough food, then you starve and possibly die, tough shit. Living in a shack in the woods in the United States, even if you mostly get your own food, you still have the option of going to a store if you fall short, or to a hospital if you get injured or sick. Maybe he would voluntarily refrain from those options, but I don't think we know.
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I think he’s sort of half right. I think what seems to work well for most people is a sense of accomplishment especially in doing something physical. I don’t see that it means literally going out and living in the woods. But the kinds of things that seem to be associated with well-being — physical activity, a sense of affiliation with other people, and a job in which they get a sense that their work matters — are somewhat similar to what TK is suggesting. Even time in nature is good for mental health. But even going that far, I don’t see it as following that we should go live in the woods and farm with a sharpened sticks. You can have those things without going that far. You can take up sports especially team sports. You can go hiking or fishing or rock climbing. You can found or join a group of people to do good in the world.
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The line about living with the Amish misses the depth of the technology stack. Every-one, including the Amish, benefit from access to high carbon steels. All the chisels and saws that carpenters use in a low-tech wooden life-style depend on heat treated steels that retain their cutting edge. Making the chisels and saws depends on hardened high carbon steel being harder than normalised high carbon steel, sufficiently harder that you can use files and hacksaws to form the blanks for your chisels and saws before you harden them in their turn with more heat treatment. It is all very delicate, depending on chemistry and metallurgy to get quench hardening to work right ("Silver steel" has added chromium to improve through hardening. Metallurgists need microscopes to see what is happening with the grains in the steel). (Things have moved on. Now-a-days you heat treat steel parts before cutting them to shape using carbide tooling,...)
I wondered if the Amish use cement. Maybe just lime mortar. It is a tough question. Yes, and attention to price and efficiency seduces you, so that you end up tied to industrial cement making. No, and your building techniques are in some ways pre-Roman; who wants to go back that far?
We are mostly ignorant of the long history of our technology stack and use phrases such as "back to nature" in ways that do no withstand scrutiny
You're mostly right. My statement wasn't meant to say "TK should go live with the Amish because they're exactly like what he proposes" - I don't think they are either. What I think is more like, the Amish are 70%-ish of the way from mainstream society to what TK says he wants, but they actually exist now, are accessible, and decent odds you could find an Amish church that would let you live with them for a while. Living with them would let him learn a lot about what it's actually like to live in such a society, how to live decently well with minimal contact with the industrial world, and get an idea about what it would be like to go further.
You are spot on and thinking about it I realise that I've seen TK's the lack of incrementalism before.
I was listening to radio broadcast about the Utopia Experiment. Dylan Evans sees total collapse coming and sets up his simple living experiment to try to get ahead of it. But quite early on, his attempts to make soap come unstuck because he has already given up the internet, so he cannot watch the "How to make soap" videos on You Tube. That is when I twigged that the story was going to turn into a mental health crisis. Going all in, rather than plotting a path and taking reasonable sized steps is usually a sign of mental illness. And so it was in Dylan Evans' case.
Reminiscent of Christopher McCandless too.
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He did, and then they built roads around the place he'd retired to and destroyed it, which he claims ultimately gave him the resolve to start his bombing campaign.
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Ted Kaczynski always struck me as the smart guy who was pissed off that the world wasn't being run in a way he approved of. He also struck me someone who suffered from profound social isolation, no matter where he was. I remember an interview with his brother David describing a failed hiking trip where they tried to live off the land. They couldn't forage enough food and David turned to some store-bought granola bars he'd brought. Ted had a massive temper tantrum about it which caused David to pack up and head back to the trail head. It's not like David was some citified yuppie either, he spent some time living off the grid in the Texas desert. He just wasn't the same as Ted and Ted was angry about it.
I also really don't think we can discount the effect his mental illness had on him. Without it he probably would have ended up just another North Pond Hermit.
One can blame this on the MK-ultra study or autism, but what Ted had is very simple: he's a uniquely principled man.
Reasoning oneself into violence from rational application of first principles isn't uncommon. And such a strong conviction is not only useful, I think it's admirable, and admired. Richard Stallman has a similar virtue if for principles that did not require violence.
Discounting Ted as mentally ill is something he was extremely keen for people not to do, and I think he has a point because it's a cop out for people to refuse to contemplate the disturbing: that maybe some of the failings of our world are worth killing for and that we do not do so more out of cowardice than practicality.
Being "uniquely principled" is a similar mode of failure to many rationalists: reasoning from first principles and not sanity-checking your conclusions.
You call it failure. I call it atypical but necessary.
Sometimes it is the entire world that is insane and must be reminded of it. Which is why we need people of such unyielding moral character, if in small numbers.
This is a slogan. It isn't actually true.
I disagree to such a powerful degree that it is hard to put into words.
All I can do is gesture at the whole of Abrahamic civilization and it's namesake.
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Crazy person claims he's totally sane
, everyone else is nuts. Film at 11.I never see this kind of lionization of ISIS or the Weathermen ETA in The Motte /ETA, so you'll forgive me if I'm skeptical of the hagiography.
Edit: missing a few words
Fair, amended.
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How many such people convince the jury and expert witnesses that they are?
Ted wasn't crazy. He was evil. His judgement was not impaired. He had full knowledge of the consequences of his actions and he still decided that killing was okay to achieve his political goals.
You and many others really enjoy the luxury of thinking nobody sane can just decide to start making people explode. But it is a delusion. There are endless perfectly sane justifications to kill one's fellow man and the reason it doesn't happen all the time is the one guy with the biggest stick renting it for money and nothing else.
I have a simple explanation for this and it's that you haven't looked for it. I've seen plenty of it. For those groups and all others. For the IRA, for the Confederacy, for Hezbollah, for Zapatistas, for CJNG, for all manners of people with guns and an idea.
And I must say I appreciate the core of every single instance of it. People of great evil still possess this one rare and venerable virtue: they are great.
Romanticizing armed revolt and crime is a universal cultural touchstone. And wherever you live you are most likely heir to such a hagiography, for the people who founded your own society and its righteous promise of peace and order had to be knaves of this same kind to make it happen.
His actions didn't achieve his political goals. Considering the backlash too, the net consequences of his actions might have been a negative for his political goals.
Undertaking actions contrary to your goals (even for sociopaths whose goals don't include "fewer bombing victims") is only rational if there was reason to expect the exact opposite result instead and failure is just bad luck. And yet "murdering people is bad PR" should have been an easily foreseen consequence; it was not an unpredictable outcome.
I don't really understand how you can say that. He did get his demands met, his manifesto published, his ideas heard by the world and ultimately created a huge cult following. He went from being a crank in the woods to one of the most influential philosophers of his decade. One serious people find relevant and reference to this day and not merely to denounce him. Is that not political success?
It may be unfortunate, but killing people was a very successful way of promoting his ideas, and Ellul's brand of techno-skepticism is now infinitely more popular because of his actions that it would have been without. However many caveats people put in front of saying it, I've yet to meet someone who utterly denies the man had a point and his descriptive analysis was devoid of merit. And none of those people would have heard of him if he didn't use violence.
You may have had a point if we were talking about Timothy McVeigh, who was apparently truly surprised his revenge didn't trigger a second american revolutionary war, but I do not think for a second Ted ever thought his crusade would end in his life, by his hand. It was always about seeding his ideas. Which despite the ignominious cost, was an indeniable success.
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I simply believe it is in my interest to smear, discount and erase the ideas of those who try to spread them through terrorism. What they have to say is not valuable enough to warrant even one death.
Then you must erase all of humanity's patrimony. For it all has been spread at the point of the sword.
This is a childish notion. All ideas, including the want to prevent terrorism, require death. You just like your tribute to be paid behind your back.
It would take a rather broad standard of "requiring death" to encompass all ideas. I've heard all that jazz before. "If you don't take the jab they will Literally Kill You [if you care to escalate to that point]!".
What did TK offer in exchange for his oh so principled will to murder? Security? Prosperity? Stability? Justice? No, he killed for publicity to try and get people to read words he wasn't the first or the last to write, and those other ideologues have a clear advantage of not being terrorists.
Conviction is a dime a dozen. I could find thousands of convicted schizos on the Internet. Men with unshakable beliefs who are sadly only correct twice a day.
Making it subjective won't let you easily escape from this. All morality up and including some devotion to truth itself requires violence to be enacted in the world. Yes, all laws are mandates to kill and that's not speaking broadly, it's just how it is.
The State is by nature a terrorist organization insofar as terrorism is political violence. It exists for that sole purpose. And saying unsanctioned political violence is evil is only saying that one prefers an instantiated order over another one. Which is fine, but rests solely on moral evaluation and no other criteria.
You've decided this isn't an advantage and are just begging the question. It is an advantage. Ellul was never as popular as Ted.
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Yeah, you can nod along with TK on the alienation of modernity until he arrives at mass murder. Starvation is certainly one way to bring focus to life!
Estimates of the maximum extent of hunter gatherer populations are 1-20 million people total. Even if everyone were down with starving/freezing/baking to death 99.999% of the population in one year, we would have a prisoners dilemma in getting there. Any hunter gatherer society would be trivially conquered/genocided/colonized by any defecting society, of which there would surely be one because I’ll be in it.
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An important missing element in your description is that you need to be doing things that are hard but that you can actually succeed in. The "work hard" --> "achieve something you couldn't have without the hard work" cycle is important. Whether it's for literal basic survival or for some "surrogate" activity as he calls them seems a little bit less important to me.
A lot of the ennui plaguing people in modern society seems like it stems from everything either being trivially easy to get or completely unobtainable regardless of effort, so there's not much left that can fit into the power process. Technology has moved a lot of the "you have to work hard for it" things like food and shelter into the "trivially easy" category. We're left with "become a celebrity," "become a billionaire," etc., which require a ton of luck and grinding will only get you so far.
Interesting thesis. Perhaps this is part of why some people find things like kids, homeownership, getting degrees, getting promoted at work as meaningful, since those all fit in between "easy" and "almost impossible".
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There's a rule here for Make your point reasonably clear and plain. It's not clear to me what your point is, so why don't you just say it, whatever it is? Why are you making it all about me and my experiences? Exactly what is the "lie" that you are referring to at the end?
The lie of the social contract, whig history, and man's capability to set himself aside from the constraints of nature -- he seems (to me) to be saying reasonably clearly.
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For me it is a reasonable answer. There is a bias that you are upfront with that the ideas you are critiquing are from a terrorist, thus you are not separating the ideas from the man. But the thing is that it is not TK who is the originator of the ideas. It is Ellul! The core is simple, humanity is not supposed to serve the "machine" but the "machine" is supposed to serve humanity! And you wrote several paragraphs saying that we are supposed to serve the machine because it benefits all of humanity. I'm not so sure...
The parent I responded to there had written a longer response with more detail that I was meaning to respond to now, but I guess he deleted it. (It was pretty long but reasonably charitable and clear IMO, so I thought it deserved a reasonably high-effort response). Oh well, I guess I'll say most of the same stuff here.
I was actually biased to think moderately positively of TK before I read his piece, as most of the areas I read seem at least modestly biased towards him. I wrote about it a bit on this site. I wrote in that thread what actually changed my mind. I had basically presumed that his ideas were too censored and too difficult to get out there such that it drove him to terrorism. But he actually wrote himself in that very essay in P96 that he did violence because he did have opportunities to put it out there, but not to be distributed to his satisfaction. As I wrote there, I reject the idea that you get to do violence because nobody thinks your ideas are interesting. If nobody thinks your ideas are interesting enough to pay attention to, you should work on improving them and presenting them better, not blow people up.
That Mr. Ellul wrote similar things I think more proves my point than refutes it (I believe you both that he wrote similar things, but I'm not sure to what extent he rejected or endorsed violence to spread his ideas) - it's perfectly possible to have such views and advocate for them in normal and peaceful ways. I think that, considering the public image TK has gained from his bombing campaign (since we're all talking about him), it's perfectly reasonable to point out the holes in his ideas and remind people that he did make the decision that his ideas were important enough to justify aggressive violence - not even towards specific people responsible for opposing him or rejecting his ideas, but people he felt were part of the industrial system that he wanted to tear down.
I also believe that part of the generous interpretation many have given to his work is due to the re-definition of freedom that he used. A casual reading of many of his sections with the implicit belief among the general public in the western world that "freedom" refers to basically classical liberalism, things like free speech, free press, rule of law, etc leads many of his ideas to sound significantly more insightful and reasonable. But once you know that he redefined it to mean the "right"/need of individuals to go through the "Power Process" of doing substantial work for their basic needs, it all sounds rather different. Whether Industrial Society is inherently destructive of "classical liberalism" freedom is yet to be determined - that could be a complex and interesting discussion. But Industrial Society being inherently destructive to "power process" freedom is trivially obvious. I have a feeling that this may have been done on purpose. An honest writer simply looking to promote his ideas rather than mislead people would pick a different word, rather than one so loaded with pre-existing cultural baggage in the West.
Parent post also seems to be accusing me of not knowing enough about nature, hunter-gatherer lifestyles, etc. Presumably this is meant to lead to an argument that such lifestyles are actually much better than I had presented them as. At least, that's the most charitable interpretation IMO, part of my issue there is that he didn't actually make an argument for whatever it is he believed, just implied that I was ignorant. If I am, please go ahead and let me know what facts you know that make the arguments less valid, don't just imply that they're there.
I could counter-argue that while I am no expert on such lifestyles, he in turn may not know much about just how complex the logistical chain is that makes available all of the modern goods that we take for granted and exactly what life may be like when they are completely impossible to obtain. I specifically mean the "safety net" concept that I mention elsewhere in this thread. It may not be terribly hard to live a lifestyle superficially similar to what is described by TK, presumably Ellul, and others - I wouldn't be surprised if the number of people in the continental US voluntarily living like that is in the hundreds of thousands. But it's only superficial if you still have the grocery store to solve any food production problems that come up, the hospital to solve any medical problems, the hardware store for any tools you can't fabricate, etc. Even if you never actually go to any of those, the mere fact that it's possible tends to change peoples' behavior. How many people volunteer to put all of those perpetually out of reach for their entire extended family for all eternity?
Ellul is the originator of the ideas and he also rejected violence to spread them. Last time I checked the wikipedia article wasn't that bad. And to quote wikipedia... 'Ellul explained his view in this way: "By anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence."'
This is the main reason I think you got caught in such a critical response. It is that there is no separation of the ideas that Kaczynski based on Elluls work and Kaczynskis campaign of violence. It is not clear what are Kaczynskis contributions that you are criticizing here or if you are criticizing Ellul.
The Amish reject modernity but when their children come of age they get to decide through 'Rumschpringe' if they want to join the community or get access to all of modernity has to offer. Also the Amish are not hunter-gatherers so there is that.
I'm not here to accuse you of being ignorant but I could claim that there is not enough imagination what it could mean to resist industrialized society. The ideas resisting it has continued with people of like Paul Kingsnorth. But because someone decided to mail out bombs you are rejecting the ideas around resisting "the machine" even if there are people that have ideas that predate and supersede it without violence.
The new top-level post has better in-depth discussion on the relative merits of TK vs Ellul and their ideas, so I'll leave further discussion of that point there.
I do think a necessary point here is that TK explicitly advocated for the violent overthrow of technological society worldwide. I'm not an expert on Ellul, I've only skimmed his Wikipedia article, but he doesn't seem to go that way. He makes some of the same arguments, but he seems to push for broader awareness and acceptance of his viewpoint and possibly setting up some independent communities that implement them as much as possible on a voluntary basis. I think that's a critical distinction, and a good reason why Ellul deserves tolerant consideration and discussion while TK deserves much harsher criticism.
I'm perfectly fine with the Amish and other such societies because 1. They walk the walk, actually setting up long-lasting communities to practice their lifestyle that are about as non-dependent on mainstream society as you can reasonably be while living in a first-world industrialized nation, and 2. They don't seek to impose anything on anyone - they just want to live their way, and don't care at all how anybody outside their community lives. Rumspringa is proof that even their own children are encouraged to get a real and fair view of the world outside so that they can make a legitimate, free, and fully-informed choice on whether to stay within the community or leave it. TK did the opposite - he advocated for and actively tried to force everyone else to live in the way he thought was best while not doing so himself.
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It is clearly more likely that we get some kind of bizarre technological transformation in 20 years than that a collapse happens.
What's the difference? Apocalypse either way.
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Oh no, we'll definitely get a social collapse before we can get ourselves singularityed. It will be a bullshit one like a mix of The Camp of the Saints with flavors of Idiocracy. Complex systems will collapse, and when that happens you will not have a proper functioning power distribution system, to speak of a global "internet" will be hilarious. More like a few hundred local networks.
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Facing Facts, even fraught ones: the quest for proto-Indo-Europeans in 2023
The old belief regarding the Aryans, which preceded the Nazis, was that the Aryans (now called Proto-Indo Europeans) conquered Europe and down through Iran and India. There were different theories about the Urheimat of the Aryans. German nationalists thought the Aryan homeland was in Germany, and Indian nationalists would say it was India. In the post-war period, politically correct archaeologists insisted that the Aryan invasion theories were wrong and that Indo-European languages spread through non-violent "cultural diffusion." But this has been definitively disproved by recent genetic evidence. The old story was essentially true although it seems the Aryans most likely originated from the Russian steppe. They had several important technological advantages like domesticated horses, the wheel, and bronze so they pretty much conquered everyone and replaced a large fraction of the males over a wide territory.
Proto-Indo European studies has rapidly changed in the past 10 years as emerging genetic evidence has confirmed the old story and disproven the theories of cultural diffusion and the assertion that the Indo-Europeans left no significant genetic legacy. Razib Khan's article traces the origin of the "lost knowledge" of the Indo-European migrations and its rediscovery in the face of new evidence:
Steve Sailer, for his part, suggests that the rise of neo-Nietzscheans on the Dissident Right is due in part to the confirmation of the earlier, quasi-mythical stories of continental conquests by chad steppe warriors. Anecdotally I see this to be the case, with DR Twitter accounts heavily invested in Indo-European studies who closely follow the work of those like Harvard geneticist David Reich, whose lab in practice has probably done more than anyone to confirm the old story with genetic evidence.
So, is that it? Is the 1930s German model of European pre-history essentially confirmed? Not so fast, according to Khan, who tries to tackle that historical narrative from a different angle:
To summarize, at a high level, all indigenous Europeans are basically a genetic combination of three population groups:
Khan's position goes, the Proto-Indo Europeans and their descended cultures (i.e. Corded Ware, the common ancestor of the Italo-Celtic, German, and Balto-Slavic languages) were barbarians par excellence and destroyed the fledging civilizational potential of the Neolithic farmers, a potential evidenced by their construction of megalithic structures and farming mode of societal organization. He claims that the proto-Indo Europeans, in contrast, were "not civilization-bearers", they actually hindered civilization until some vague, exogenous "civilization's creeping spread" brought civilization in spite of the Proto-Indo European conquests.
Thus, Khan presents a novel Aryan-skeptic position: dropping denial of the Völkerwanderungs due to its untenability in the face of recent genetic evidence, but challenging the presence of a civilizational quality to the Proto-Indo European people.
One point Khan makes, which I certainly agree with, is that the Aryan is a synthesis of the three aforementioned population groups, as Khan states "the two traditions [Indo-European and Neolithic Farmer] would fuse to set the stage for the eventual rise of Greece, Rome and the world of the Celts." But this position is actually not much different from the 19th century German pre-history model of Europe, as described by a speech made by Hitler as chancellor of Germany:
The operative difference, here, is that the German school of thought assigned the civilizational quality of the people foremost to the Bronze Age conqueror-elites whereas Khan assigns that quality to the conquered. Civilization followed in spite of Indo-European legacy according to Khan. Who is correct? We likely won't see serious academic study of this question, but looking at the big picture we can see hints.
There is no person alive today with 100% Yamnayan ancestry. According to David Reich:
The invaders of India who called themselves Aryan were already the product of this aforementioned synthesis, and today the Aryan people most closely resemble genetically Northern European peoples.
In contrast, the Sardinians provide insight into the pre-Bronze Age farmer populations, as:
Khan's thesis doesn't pass the sanity test, the broad-range correlation in Europe appears to follow: population groups with greater Indo-European ancestry trend as nations with higher technological innovation, economic status, empire-building, and global colonization, all of which follow the modus operandi of the Indo-Europeans. The Aryan is absolutely the synthesis of all three groups, but the claim that the "Indo-Europeans were not, crucially, civilization-bearers" doesn't hold any water. Classical Greece, Rome, India, Persia, were all spawned from Indo-European cultural, genetic, and linguistic legacy after the Bronze Age invasions.
I.E studies is going to likely remain a growing area of interest in the DR. It combines genetics, history, and mythmaking in a way that fosters a positive sense of identity and aspiration for pan-European camaraderie among the right wing. It tracks with the DR model of 20th century intellectual movements as subversive towards white identity and obscuring "forbidden knowledge".
The glorification of the Indo-Europeans on the right wing also marks a shift from a liberal/conservative "white people didn't do nothing" opposition to progressive racial narratives, to a Nietzschean glorification of a Bronze Age spirit.
Millenia later, time enough for psychopathic genes of original Indo-Europeans to be selected out and more pro-civilization traits emerge. Before it happened, Indo-Europeans achieved exactly zilch. Nothing "vague" about it, straight HBDIQ materialist science.
Razib is right, there is absolutely nothing to respect about continent size psycho killing spree, nothing to admire about people so stupid that cannot grok even idea of slavery.
...
Perhaps if you aspire to be school shooter or serial killer. If you have higher ambitions, the IE "legacy" has nothing to offer you.
Pre-history was a violent time, Western Hunter Gatherers were likewise displaced by the early European farmers. It's pretty tone deaf to compare school shooters to the migration of pre-historical population groups and subsequent violence, which was a pretty common experience across the world. The sheer scale of the IE conquests is what makes it stand out especially.
The Corded Ware culture is the common ancestor to Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, and Indo-Iranian languages. That makes it a candidate for the most important culture in world history, as far as "what did they accomplish", any reasonable perspective would likewise attribute the accomplishments of these cultures, in some degree, to the genetic and cultural contribution of their common IE ancestor.
Corded Ware was itself only 60% Yamnayan and most of the remaining European farmer, the synthesis is an indispensable part of the story of the European. But Khan's "imagine what the European farmers would have achieved if they wuzn't interrupted" is what I am challenging here.
He never says anything like that. You are tilting at windmills here. Razib thinks the Indo-Europeans were cool, he also thinks they were barbarians par excellence. Both are objectively true.
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Yes, ancient history was full of violence (just like modern history), but we (we non psychopaths) admire other ancient achievements.
There is difference between someone who, when thinking about Roman empire, thinks "The Romans built roads, bridges and aqueducts that lasted for millenia, they created unparallelled law, literature, art and architecture, they were so cool!" and someone who thinks "The Romans razed and burned cities so thoroughly that no trace remained, they perfected the art of torture, they decorated their roads with lines of crosses, they fed people to the beasts for fun, they were so cool!"
Spread of black plague was even wider and faster. Do you too find Yersinia pestis "inspiring"?
Nah. The looting and plundering phase of warfare is seldom romanticized, but warfare in general is not. Gladiator arenas are also one of the first things that come up when you ask people about cool things Romans did, and if you ever went to a museum of torture, it's hard not to be impressed by the sheer creativity of some of these inventions.
I would, if I was a bacterium!
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Come the fuck on, your first post was consensus building already, no need to take it a step further and paint like, 90% of the guys I grew up with - including myself - as God damned serial killers just because we think conquest is cooler than road building.
Well, conquest is parallel killing, not serial killing, so naturally there's less current resistance to it.
More seriously: although it's unfair to say that conquest is no more pro-social than serial killing, because conquest at least implies you have a social circle that includes enough people to form a cohesive army rather than one that might just include yourself ... they at least share the nature of "can be both morally and selfishly opposed by anyone outside that social circle", no? Alexander "the Great" is instead "gujastak", "accursed", in Zoroastrian literature; he was "the evil-minded (badgumān) tyrant who killed our ancestors one by one" to the first Sasanid. The more successful you are as a conqueror, the lower the ratio is of people who benefitted to people who were conquered.
On the other hand, it'd be easier to dismiss conquest as completely useless if history had a better track record of nations being able to combine and unify when necessary without it. Wiki's list of proposed state mergers is pretty short (even considering it doesn't have anything before 1300AD? really??), and if you then omit the failed mergers, the failed-shortly-afterward mergers, the barely-a-treaty "mergers", and the pseudo-voluntary mergers backed by threats of violence, it gets even shorter.
Damn it man, can't you see I'm trying to be cranky?
More seriously, the utility and sociality of war don't even enter the equation for me, I stop short after thinking about popular culture, which considers a lack of conflict a complete non-starter in terms of entertainment value. Our brains are wired to think conquest - competing and winning and celebrating your power - is cool regardless of its utility in our current climate. Boys and men in particular are drawn to it and no amount of peer pressure is going to change that. Eetan obviously wants to stigmatise indo-european studies, and I assume it's because he doesn't want the cw thread to fill up with Aryan supremacy shit - which I sympathise with - but all of the prehistoric civilisations were fascinating as hell and I have to push back against his attempts to stigmatise learning about them. And to then go the step further and claim only psychopaths enjoy battles is just preposterous.
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You don't have to be a psychopath to think genocide is cool. Psychopathy is the state of having no empathy for people in your ingroup. Lack of empathy for people in the outgroup is far more common and can't really be considered an abnormality.
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And yet the destruction of Carthage is well known even today, an entire religion was founded based on crucifixion, the "lines of crosses" scene is popular in modern entertainment (including Game of Thrones), as are gladiatorial battles against people and of course lions. It seems a lot of people think that stuff is cool. The popularity of Conan's paraphrase of Genghis Khan ("to crush one's enemies...") demonstrates this as well.
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They may not have had much in the way of settled civilization, being nomadic and far away from any enduring population centers, but for that very reason the idea that their only advantages were in... stupidity and an appetite for bloodshed, you're suggesting? should strike you as immediately implausible. Archaeological and linguistic evidence show that they and their close kin were the inventors of the wheel (or at least the first to find a use for it, in the form of wagons which enabled them to colonize previously uninhabited regions of the deep steppe, and chariots which were only later imitated by the big kids on the block) and the first to domesticate the horse -- at first for food, but later turning it into a practical means of transportation by inventing the bridle. They were the richest and most technologically advanced pastoralists the world had seen, while enjoying a higher standard of health and personal freedom than any contemporaneous agricultural civilization. The extant evidence probably underrates their cultural achievements, in that, as pointed out elsewhere in the thread, they were able to force their language and many of their customs even on those host cultures that they were not able to overwhelm numerically/reproductively.
Later inhabitants of the steppe -- the Cimmerians, Scythians, Goths, Huns, Mongols, etc. -- also made a name for themselves by terrorizing the settled peoples of Europe and Asia. The low population density and lack of geographic barriers to movement removed the ordinary mechanisms by which tribal hierarchies are solidified into inward-looking governments, while the people adjacent to the steppe always made for tempting targets. The Indo-Europeans just did it first and best.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_from_Sardinia
Not bad achievements for small island, sparsely populated and desperately poor for all of recorded history. Continent of such people had no need to be "liberated" and "uplifted" by invasion of Ted Bundys and Jeffrey Dahmers.
Which accomplishment on that list do you find the most significant?
Most significant accomplishment of Sardinians?
Rule of law and limited constitutional government, much better system than, for example, "one failed artist can do whatever he wants, including declaring war on the whole world".
All of this without even one drop of very special Aryan blood. Remember, by Aryan theory these people should be capable only of grunting and rooting for grubs.
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The Greeks and Spanish seem to have a very low amount of Indo-European ancestry according to your graph despite being some of the great civilisations of Europe, am I misreading you somewhere?
A lot of Spain’s initial leadership during its golden age was actually Dutch/Belgian by ancestry and the Spanish upper classes at least claimed to be of mostly visigothic descent in contrast to the peasants. I don’t think that’s the explanatory factor, I just think we should note that if we’re discussing HBD in relation to the Spanish empire we should note the nobility were more Germanic than average and the military was dominated by Dutchmen.
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The Aryan Invasion Theory is to Indians what HBD is to Western liberal-leftists. No matter how much data and evidence is served up, many simply refuse to accept the facts, period. Incidentally, I've found Hindu nationalists to be the most strident in their opposition, which goes to show that science denial isn't a left-wing problem alone.
It's mildly amusing to me that the genetic evidence simply piles up ever greater in the West whereas the debate in India becomes ever more disconnected from reality the more the Hindu nationalists start to dominate discourse. Khan's own attempts at watering it down could perhaps be because a significant fraction of his audience and social circle are Indians. It's simply a touchy topic and perhaps he is trying to triangulate. I agree with you that his interpretation is iffy at best.
Why are Hindus so touchy about this? Brita, for example, do not care much that they are a result of a number of wholesale population replacements.
A lot of Asiatic nationalism revolves around this sort of idealized, semi-mythological conception of a pure race undefiled by foreigners or untermenschen. A lot of Western nationalism too, but less so in Anglo countries. Hindus are a lot like Turks in this regard; the most virulent Turkish nationalists reject the obviously mixed nature of Turkish genetics and instead insist that they are a pure Turkic race, straight from the mountains of central Asia, the sons of Asena, etc etc.
Makes sense, but new genetic evidence makes it rather hard to sustain. Eg from what I remember, the Turks (or maybe just the non-peasant ones) are something like half Greek by ancestry, due to many centuries of Greek settlements.
Westerners are indeed not so much into purity, but that might be just a result of decades of extremely relentless anti-Nazi indoctrination.
You don't need genetic evidence. Have you seen a Turk from Turkey? They look nothing like a Kazakh or even an Uzbek.
It's not like the Turks' love for assimilation or the fact they didn't kill everyone in the territories they now control is something not in the historical record.
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If I were to hazard a guess: India's history is (mostly) just being invaded by foreigners. There were a few exceptions (e.g. the Chola Empire), but by and large this was the general pattern. The AIT is the "ürinvasion" so to speak, and if it gets accepted as fact then it sort of acts as a template for the rest of India's history. If you actually spend some amount of time in Hindu nationalist spaces online, they are all pushing the "out of India" theory. It's pure cope, of course.
But so is England, though maybe in not so recent memory, so it might have lost the emotional impact.
Ah, but England has the legacy of Empire, theirs was arguably the greatest and most influential in the history of the world. Despite all the contemporary controversy, it's certainly impressive and most opinion polls show that the English are largely proud of it.
As for the invasion by the Danes and later the Normasns...they were a closely related people, unlike the Central Asians and later the Europeans for India. On top of that, there was never much of an independent Indian empire, except perhaps the Mughals but of course they were of the 'wrong' religion. So it is understandable that isn't something Hindutva types would like to advertise.
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What is a "Hindu Nationalist" for someone on the Motte?
For the largely American/European population it is most likely an angry Twitter user of Indian origin they saw replying to Razib or an English speaking journalist reporting on India on twitter.
Indians do not really have any civilizational memory of Aryans like they have of Turks or the British and will react with skepticism. If we did not have genetic studies it would never have even become a topic of discussion. There are no physical imprints of that time.
Why are they so dead set against the idea of an Aryan invasion?
As I have mentioned in the past, India has innumerable ethnic fissures and this whole discussion of "Aryans" in India is often pushed by politicians trying to reap votes on the back of community tensions. Any discussion of Affirmative action that tilts away from "We need more affirmative action" is pushed back with "We have been oppressed for 3000 years. You think 70 years of Affirmative action is enough to fix this?". While there is some truth to this for some Indian communities, this is often pushed by influential land owning groups who want to claim oppression.
We currently have over 50% quotas for disadvantaged groups in most Indian Government institutions. Tamil Nadu, where this topic is the hottest has 67% quotas. There is no end date or benchmark given for when this will end given how useful this is for Indian politicians.
Most Indians on twitter have not really studied the scientific literature behind this issue and will pattern match any Western commentators wading into this issue to the above.
My opinions on this issue? (Notice that I call this opinion, I don't consider it relevant beyond Intellectual masturbation)
Even Razib acknowledges that the impact of the Aryans was far greater on culturally rather than genetically. And to be honest, the cultural footprint is also largely syncretic with prehistoric animistic traditions.
Except some populations in North-West India most Indians regardless of caste are largely "Not Aryan". South Indian Brahmins may have predominantly North Indian paternal ancestry, but North Indians are not "Aryan" either. Sure, some upper caste folks may have higher Steppe contributions but even then they are still largely "Not Aryan". We also have upper caste groups that do not have high Steppe ancestry.
https://twitter.com/ArainGang/status/1705319485178314918
If you compare this to ancestry studies of populations in South America you will find a lot of people are significantly European by ancestry and even more significantly European on the paternal side along with near complete Native-American ancestry on the maternal side. You will not find this even in Indian upper castes.
Now, sure you can say that most of the Steppe ancestry was passed down by men and bands of roving men in those times can hardly be pacifistic peace loving eccentrics. And perhaps, the only reason India is not fully "Aryan" is because there weren't enough Aryans to replace the pre-Aryan population, but given the ways things have played out I do not see any justification for any steep racial divide.
I can't speak for others, but for me it is someone who cares deeply about Hindus and (often, but not always) views India primarily as a Hindu civilisation. Other dharmic faiths are welcomed but the Abrahmic ones are generally seen as a spiritual threat at the least. I think this is the baseline criteria for someone who I'd consider a Hindu nationalist. I've talked to many of them, most of whom who tell me they are Hindu nationalists, and generally speaking a significant proportion go much further than this, e.g. some incorporate jati identity and often view things like the SC/ST act as no different than moslem appeasement etc.
Yeah, I'm aware that reservation policy has degenerated into a racket a long time ago, e.g. many OBCs are now knee-deep into those waters. I'm generally speaking against affirmative action, but I don't think a good argument is to say "well, because AIT is pushed by rent-seekers, that means we have invent a new history". I can understand this from a pragmatic political perspective, but the facts remain the facts. The evidence for AIT is overwhelming and crushing. Moreover, it is only getting stronger by the year. The debate in India has completely severed itself from the academic discussion and becomes increasingly unmoored by the day.
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As others have suggested, your chart doesn’t really suggest that there’s as much correlation between Yamnaya ancestry and quality of civilization as you suggest - the Scottish are quite a bit more Indo-European than the French, the Ukrainians vastly more Indo-European than the Greeks… The Scots were disproportionately represented in the British imperial workforce, true, but Scotland is still poorer and has shorter life expectancy than most of England. For the entire period between 1971 and 2010, all 10 of the 10 “most deprived” local authorities in the UK were in Glasgow alone. What great achievements did the Indo-Europeans have before they invaded Europe? And what makes them German as opposed to Baltic, Ukrainian, or Czech?
I'm not suggesting every single group with greater Yamnayan ancestry has greater achievement than those with less. I am suggesting there is a relationship in the split between Northern and Southern Europe, broadly speaking, that is partially explained by differences in genetics. Key features of Northern European civilization, like the industrial revolution emerging in the North Sea area and colonial ambitions, are also reminiscent of the I.E expansions. Attributing those accomplishments solely to neolithic European farmers is unlikely and self-serving, given those accomplishments and behaviors seem most concentrated where I.E left the greatest genetic legacy.
I think geography and climate probably explain a lot as well.
As far as geography, things like trading, contact with other cultures, wars, etc. probably play a rather large role in creating the culture of society. Take a bunch of really generically good, smart people and stick them on an island … and you’ll have feudal Japan. Stick the same type of smart people on islands surrounded by trading partners, and have them fight wars with each other and with other people … you get Ancient Greece.
Climate likewise would likely drive cultural development. If you live in Northern Europe or China, you live in a place where food must not only be grown, but preserved. You live in a place where you have to build sturdy and warm shelters, produce warm clothing, etc. this quite obviously selects very strongly for a culture that plans ahead. If the reverse is true and you live in a tropical paradise, there’s absolutely no reason a culture would ever develop even farming, let alone food preservation, advanced construction, or high cooperation. Everything is simply available for th3 plucking, and other than shelter against rain, you don’t need protection from the elements.
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The obvious test is ‘is there a contrast between Americans of Italian descent and those of Irish descent’- these are both largely unselected diaspora populations living in the same area of the country, and clash on the genetic frequency you’ve identified. I don’t think you’re going to find huge outcome divisions.
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I don't understand why it's important whether Indo-European invaders were more predisposed to creating civilization than local populations at the time they invaded. The admixed population has evolved since then. Isn't the current state what matters? Similarly, it could totally be the case that the local populations were better in some way. But they're gone now. The comparison isn't against an extinct population, it's against the other populations here now. Not that population-level comparisons even make sense when you can compare individuals.
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It's not particularly clear to me what the relevance of any of this is, or why we should care?
The Kurgan hypothesis is pretty well confirmed, as I understand it, so the idea that Proto-Indo-European people spread outwards from the steppe and used violence in the process is hardly new, nor the idea that it's possible to, at least in part, trace descent from them across a wide area. But this is a very niche area of history, of interest to only a small group of specialists.
Moreover, as has been noted below, there doesn't seem to be any particular correlation between degree of PIE descent and what we might call civilisational complexity. Degree of PIE descent doesn't seem to mean anything significant or practical today - it is, at best, a mild curiosity.
I don't deny that history is interesting in its own right. However, it sounds like you're interested in present-day political implications? So to ask you directly - what do you think the significance of this is? So far you've pointed to, well, a bunch of creepy fringe figures on Twitter, but of course what they believe isn't exactly significant.
I think you are extremely mistaken if you think that 'the right wing' in a broad sense has any idea about Proto-Indo-Europeans, or that it gives a damn one way or another. You link a short clip on Twitter that is totally inexplicable to anyone who isn't already deeply invested in a tiny subculture of conspiracy-minded anti-semites.
I know BAP had a moment, but if you think that there's a wider 'BAP school', so to speak, that's going to become a major, even mainstream influence on the right... well, I think you will be surprised.
SecureSignals is a neo-Nazi. He has been ordered by the mods to diversify his posting from anti-Jew rhetoric. So he's posting things he finds out about - which, by nature, tend to be things of interest to a neo-Nazi - that are not related to Jews. It should be fairly obvious why the ethnogenesis of white people is of interest to a neo-Nazi.
And I, for one, actually found this significantly more interesting than the rest of @SecureSignals' posts, so I'm not particularly feeling like criticising him for it even if the circumstances aren't ideal.
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I feel like in the post Gun Germs and Steel world, that any civilizational thesis of this scale that doesn’t grapple with the enormous consequences of climate, access to resources and diseases is intrinsically weak.
In the world of an almost universally mocked book that has been shown to be a laughingstock over and over?
What the hell are you talking about? It literally won the Pulitzer Prize…
By being a pop science book that appealed to center-left sensibilities. For the past two decades almost all of his major claims have been shown to be either untrue, or simply unsupported. The GGS central hypothesis is almost certainly incorrect.
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The blog post this is based on draws heavily from David Anthony's The Horse, The Wheel and Language. Horses and wheels, were; if anything, just as important to European colonization of the Americas as guns or steel. The Indo-Europeans also brought metal working to places like Britain that hadn't seen them before.
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Did anyone of you had Waffen SS fighter getting standing ovation in Canadian parliament for their 2023 bingo card?
Congratulations - you will be rich.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66908958
Now I doubt that the svastika will be on the Canadian flag anytime soon. But the fact that the ideology blinded the people to make even a basic background check on the so called hero is troubling. And there seems to be some kind of full blown damage control operation going on.
Anyway a lot of Canadian politicians will have to figure out how to unsuck this dick. ADL seems to be silent as of now. Media try to bury the waffen ss part in the bottom of the articles, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more fanatical ex blue checkmarks try to write opinion piece explaining how this unit were somewhat different than the rest of the Waffen SS.
I just love it. It's such a funny thing, especially the part where the speaker said the "thank you for your service" incantation. I didn't think we would surpass (multiple, separate occasions) photos of our "woke dream" PM doing blackface in terms of pure lol factor, but this has to be close. The politician who got caught on a home camera peeing in a coffee mug is maybe a close 3rd. Canada politics man.
I was crying laughing. It had to be Trudeau.
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Imagine all the staff people who didn't realize "fought against Stalin in WW II" probably meant was a Nazi (Finns excluded, of course).
Well, for a time ‘fought with Stalin’ also meant you were probably a Nazi.
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I’d bet 95% of them don’t even pay attention during every session. And they just follow along with the clapping figuring the people in charge are NOT getting them to clap for a Nazi soldier.
More surprising that Zelensky didn’t stop it since the Ukranians most of the time have decent meme game.
He looks positively gleeful during the ovation -- probably didn't occur to him that it could be a problem.
I realized a bit into this war that Russian Nationalist and Putin himself use the word Nazi in ways that we do not in the west. Often it seems like they used it to just refer to the west - the people who call themselves Neoliberal today are Nazis to the Russian Nationalists. Perhaps more simply western society itself gaining influence in the area Russia views as there backyard.
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You appear to be forgetting at least Poland, probably also other.
But wasn't the fight between Poland and the Soviet Union over within about 2 weeks?
Two weeks' time, but there were nearly half a million Poles fighting, and since the German invasion of Poland was a couple weeks earlier I'd bet approximately 0% of the anti-Soviet fighters were Nazis or Nazi-sympathetic.
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was still wrong
also, there was further partisan activity, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursed_soldiers
Interesting. I had never heard of them.
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So what actually happened? They just didn't do a background check? Historical illiteracy? Aide who hates his job let him through for a giggle?
For added hilarity, it was on Yom Kippur.
Trudeau has said that Canada has committed genocide. Perhaps they're just owning it.
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Expecting historical literacy from a college-educated progressive is like expecting fluent latin from a duck.
Do I even need to tell you why this warrants a warning?
Weird meta-thought: if Hylinka had gone for a paraphrase of the Dr. Samuel Johnson quote about a woman preaching being like a dog walking on its hind legs (not done well, but you are impressed that it is done at all), would that have passed muster by seeming high-effort? Same sentiment, better language.
Hard to say. Maybe?
The decision to drop an official warning is not made on the basis of any hard-and-fast criteria. We let, honestly, a lot slide. There's only so much time in the day, and depending on what else is in the mod queue, the applicable standards may flex. Our approach is, in other words, inescapably conditional, adaptive, and imperfect.
Ultimately, if you're trying to get away with just enough badness in a post that you won't get called on it... odds are pretty good you won't get called on it. Until, of course, you do. Like driving over the speed limit, most of the time you'll get away with it, but if you do it a lot, you raise the odds of facing consequences for that.
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No you don't. At the same time it was on Yom Kippur and from Justin Trudeau of all people.
You can't tell me this aint something directly out of a Tom Wolfe or David Foster Wallace novel. A duck speaking fluent latin would have been less absurd.
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Let’s not forget when then-Congressman Adam Kinzinger praised the totally 100% real heroism of the fighter ace the “Ghost of Kiev”. Or when NATO shrugged its collective shoulders when Ukraine fired a missile at Poland, blamed it on Russia and then lied about it even after contradicting evidence came to light.
Nobody in the West is acting seriously about this war anymore. The battle lines are frozen. Russia isn’t giving up territory it has annexed. Ukraine will be just another failed state, just another sacrifice made on the altar of neoliberal democracy.
I’m not sure they were ever taking Ukraine seriously. The minute the Russians crossed the border, it was treated like a kids’ story. Ukraine good, NATO good. Russia bad. Ukraine will win, Russia is pathetic and weak. Made up stories of heroism. And of course boycotting and deplatforming and renaming anything Russian. Cancel the Russian opera singer, if you can’t ban Russian athletes, make them compete under a different flag, and of course shame anyone who doesn’t use the proper names (Kyiv, Ukraine (no the), Chicken Kyiv, The Russian Invasion of Ukraine) or companies that don’t leave Russia within the first ten minutes. Anyone who questions the narrative is either a Russian Troll or fooled by one.
Now a lot of the above, worryingly, sounds a lot like what was going on in WW1. We at least in America, saw the war as a chance for glory, we cheerfully shit on the Germans and renamed Sauerkraut to Liberty Cabbage. And eventually we found out just how bad war can be.
I would like to chalk this up to the foolish youth of American nations who haven't yet tired of the millennias of ruin warfare can bring.
But the truth is probably more grim. I recently watched They shall not grow old which is ostensibly about the British youths in WW1, and they too had a cheerful glee about them to start with, despite being part of a culture that has seen its fair share of horror at that point (if not of the industrial kind).
Maybe people are just eternally naïve about such things. There are seemingly endless examples of bloody conflicts that everyone was strongly convinced would be over by Christmas. The power of delusion is strong, and maybe it has to be to muster the will to defend oneself in the first place.
It's about exposure to reality and control of narrative. These proxy wars will continue to happen, even "real" "wars" will continue to happen. New soldiers are born every day, and they will be continuously fed into the meat grinder, until the mass of the populace gets exposed to the harsh reality of war, it will never end. This war needs to happen on US ground, everyone must feel the pain viscerally, personally for it to be real. When people die somewhere else, it's an abstract thing. It doesn't really register to the common person. If it does it will be swept away by some other personal problem or the news cycle will shift and some other bullshit will fill their attention.
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Have you read this article? https://www.ecosophia.net/notes-on-stormtrooper-syndrome/
I think you'd find it interesting given some of the points you've made above.
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Well, the important part is that if it was Ukrainian missile, then it was a collateral damage of anti-air missile.
That does not appear to match reality, as far as I know.
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The memory of the Commonwealth, the Soviets and Americans fighting on the same side has long faded. Plus the Cold War happened. It's no longer part of the public consciousness.
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Isn’t this basically “Ukraine good, Russia bad.” No need to think through the details.
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It’s denialism about the role of nazism in Ukrainian nationalism. Like it or not Ukrainian nationalism involves lionizing figures who supported the nazis and often as not lionizing actual neo nazis themselves, and I mean actually literally nazis not just politically incorrect. A general policy of denial had the side effect of bringing in an actual literal SS trooper. This man is viewed as a hero by lots of Ukrainians for the same reason lots of southerners view Lee and stonewall Jackson as heros. But pro-Ukraine western posturing denies that and then gets caught with its pants down. Simple as.
I think at least we can say, Nazism doesn't mean what it means to us to people who lived in Eastern Europe.
One of the more surreal things I've experienced lately was when I asked on the Motte Telegram back around the start of the war (which has a couple of actual Ukranian residents), basically, so what's the deal with Jewish Zelensky having an apparently-actual-Nazi unit (Azov battalion) serving in his army? Taking Western views at least sort of seriously, surely an actual Nazi unit would refuse to take orders from a Jewish President, and a Jewish President would surely boot an actual Nazi unit out of the army he was Commander-In-Chief of. But all the Ukrainian residents were like, yeah, so what, why do you think this is weird? Even for English-speakers who presumably have at least some exposure to the Anglosphere, the idea that Nazis and Jews might not like each other much just seemed incomprehensible to them.
In the abstract there's room for nuance in this discussion, but in the context of the year of our lord 2023, it will never not be funny that an actual member of the Waffen-SS got a standing ovation from the very people who claim "honk honk" is code for "heil Hitler".
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The way I understand it, the Azov aren't that Nazi and Zelensky is really not that Jewish. And even Hitler had a Jew or two he liked.
They are about as Nazi as the IRA were terrorists.
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