Transhuman Debate 2.0

Will be happening tomorrow.

HOW DOES CONSCIOUSNESS ARISE? (1:00 – 1:30)
Andre Gomez Emilsson says neural signaling by classical means doesn’t seem sufficient for to achieve ‘global binding’ – due to signal travel time
Randal A. Koene says the brain (at least during times of conscious awareness) appears to be operating in a more discretized manner, where signal travel time is much smaller than the discrete intervals and therefore must be perceived as unitary and instantaneous even without non-classical causes.
——
SECOND AMENDMENT: ‘RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS’ (1:40 – 2:25)
Question: Should there be stricter gun laws, to improve public safety? Or should laws stay the same, because USA ‘freedom’ includes access to firearms?
Anti-Guns: Scott Jackisch, Robert Wasley
Pro-Guns: Anatoly Karlin, Mike Johnson
——
EUGENICS (2:40 – 3:40)
Questions: Do you want a future with Mandatory Pre-Natal Diagnoses, Designer Babies, One-or-Two Child Policies, and Parent Licenses that limit how many children you have? Should there be a transhumanist goal that all humans should have 140 IQ, plus great health and beauty? With Eugenics helping to achieve that? Or do you think the government should NEVER meddle in Reproduction?
Pro-Eugenics: Andre Gomez Emilsson, Hank Pellissier, Anya Petrova
Anti-Eugenics: Marc McAllister, Ted Peters, Brian Hanley

Unlike with the debate on open borders, which we won, I am far more skeptical of our chances on arguing for gun freedoms. I like shooting all sorts of guns. The Colt is one of the defining symbols of America. Since I am a great fan of (genuine) multiculturalism, in the sense of maintaining the integrity of many different national cultures, I also favor continued gun freedoms.

That said, I think it’s hard to argue against the basic premise that gun freedoms lower the “activation energy” for people to murder each other (at any given level of civilization/social civility/average psychopathy). To be sure, there are plenty of other factors contributing to – the percentage of Blacks, or the level of hard alcohol consumption – but these are all independent from the guns issue, and not easy to resolve either. For example, even the most homogenous, genteel, and civilized US states such as Vermont and New Hampshire have homicide rates of around 1.0-1.2/100,000, which despite the much talked about immigrant crisis in Europe still make them higher than those of Germany, Italy, Spain, France, the UK, and Poland (0.8-1.0/100,000). Switzerland is at a mere 0.3/100,000. Although the NRA likes to hold up Switzerland as a sort of European gun lovers’ paradise, the actual reality of acquiring a firearm is far more time- and-energy intensive than almost anywhere in the US. Now it is possible that the Swiss are even more genetically pacified than the milquetoast New Englanders, but the other, in my opinion more plausible scenario, is that this difference is mainly due to guns being easier to access in the US.

But I won’t regard you with yet another longwinded essay on the pros and cons of gun control. These are a dime a dozen.

Instead, I’ll just gather a few points that perhaps haven’t been annunciated a great deal in these debates because they come from unusual perspectives:

Utilitarianism: The extra deaths from higher gun freedoms have to be balanced by the fact that shooting and owning guns is a popular pastime for many people. Not to mention the cultural intangibles. For every foreigner who snickers at the (cartoonish) picture of rampage shooters running amok on American streets there is another foreigner who sees guns as an symbol of American asperity and badassery.

Class War: The people amongst whom gun culture is most engrained are Southern Whites, who are the only major demographic group against whom it is acceptable to be racist. This is a view shared not just by the liberals, but their own establishment conservative “allies,” as the NRO’s Kevin Williamson recently demonstrated. Gun restrictions would be yet another slap to their face.

Transhumanism: Admittedly, guns are not going to be of much use against a malevolent superintelligence. We are also beginning to see some really nifty aiming devices and even smart bullets coming onto the market. I suspect it will soon become possible for dedicated rampage shooters to increase their kill counts by an order of magnitude or so. That’s an argument for gun control if there ever was one!

On the other hand, technology has massively magnified the power of the government versus the citizenry – a development that has upended the balance of power between them that the Second Amendment was meant to encapsulate. The liberal argument that technological developments mean that guns are no longer relevant to resisting state tyranny can thus be inverted; given the reality of this historic, it is perhaps more important than ever to avoid subverting the Constitutional amendment that best symbolizes this balance.

Another futurist argument against gun control is that with the rise of 3D printing, it might soon be possible for anyone to produce passable firearms anyway. This has in fact already happened. This is not yet a big issue, but if/when this technology becomes widespread and anyone can produce a gun in their garage, all gun regulations might become moot anyway.

I’ll also be moderate the eugenics debate. My position on eugenics is longstanding:

When you marry your college sweetheart instead of the crackwhore by the club dumpster, you are practicing eugenics. #TheTriggering

— Anatoly Karlin (@akarlin88) March 9, 2016

***

Interesting Links & Quick Takes

World

(1) Does Google basically work for the White House? Internet giant revealed to have offered to help overthrow Assad as Obama reveals broadband for Cuba at Daily Mail.

All that rhetoric about the Apple/FBI fight is complete nonsense. An entertainment spectacle for the masses. At the levels that actually matter, the big Silicon Valley tech companies are completely in bed with USG. The event described above happened in 2012, when the Clinton Clique was in control of US foreign policy and, as Wikileaks has revealed, looking for ways to justify an attack on Syria.

Will have a separate post on this later.

(2) @Eskaton on global warming, NRx, and Unz.com commentators:

@akarlin88 lmao @ master intellectual who doesn't understand that 2C warming would ultimately be massively beneficial to Russia.

— Eskaton (@strana_mechty) March 20, 2016

USA

(1) An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right by Breitbart’s Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos. Can’t be bothered to read it myself but people are generally saying its a fair portrayal so I assume its a good “Alt Right 101″ for normies.

That said, note that Razib Khan has explicitly said he is not Alt Right, and it is a huge stretch to describe The Unz Review as an Alt Right website considering that Unz prints people like Chomsky and Tanya Golash-Boza.

(2) Try to sugarcoat it as you will, but the prediction markets indicate that Trump’s abortion comments really were a big blunder. Possibly his biggest to date.

Russia/Ukraine

(1) ITAR TASS interviews Stephen Hawking on the future of space exploration, automization, his dream of going into space himself, and Russia:

After the Soviet Union’s collapse, you have not been to Russia. Would you like to visit this country again, for example, with your daughter Mrs. Lucy Hawking who studied Russian at Oxford University?

I enjoyed my previous visits to Russia and I would like to visit again.

Russia will celebrate the 55th anniversary of the first manned flight into space – the Cosmonautics Day or International Day of Human Space Flight. What were your feelings at that moment on April 12, 1961?

I was impressed that Russia was ahead of America in the space race.

It has been over 25 years since the Russian Federation took up the torch as a space power. Could you assess its current potential for space exploration?

The Americans rely on Russia for travel to and from the International Space Station. I think the future is in such international cooperation.

You backed an ambitious project The Breakthrough Initiatives last year. It is funded by the Russian businessman Yuri Milner and aims to search for extraterrestrial life. Almost immediately some sceptics described it as “a waste of money”. What is the likelihood that the project will be successful?

Within 100 years, I have no doubt, there will be humans living on Mars. I am a supporter of the Breakthrough Initiatives, founded by Yuri Milner, to search for extraterrestrial life. By analyzing data from radio telescopes and laser transmissions, they hope to find signs of intelligence, that Earth is not the only source of life in the universe. Such a discovery would revolutionize our view of the Cosmos.

Self-styled leader of the Russian opposition Garry Kasparov had a reply that was every bit as boorish as we have come to expect from him.

It's right for Stephen Hawking to talk about the potential of Putin's Russia since he's an expert on black holes! https://t.co/bWyCkeVOq0

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) March 30, 2016

(2) After more than a decade of searching for Putin’s $40 billion no $70 billion no $200 billion Reuters has finally discovered his daughter and three other women might have gotten free apartments from one of Putin’s businessman buddies. Quite the step down in status for a “pharaoh” who “doesn’t need a piece of paper attesting to his wealth”! After this revelation the regime will surely fall any day now.

(3) Operation Beluga: A US-UK Plot to Discredit Putin and Destabilize the Russian Federation by William Dunkerley.

Putin Derangement Syndrome. But maybe there is a method to the madness. According to former French intelligence officer Paul Barril, there is a largescale intelligence operation directed from Washington D.C. and London to undermine Russia and its leaders. Sounds farfetched? Sure. But then again, as we learn time and time again, conspiracies really do appear to be far more prevalent than we like to think (see the story on Google helping undermine Assad at the top). It is certainly noteworthy that the Western media hasn’t subjected any other foreign leader to a fraction of the bile it has hurled at Putin – not even at Assad. The only really comparable figure is Julian Assange, who was ironically another “traitor” to the Western cause (Putin was of course originally intended to be a loyal servant of Russia’s pro-Western oligarchs and its a safe bet the neocons saw his reclamation of Russia’s sovereignty as not only a betrayal but a personal humiliation). In light of Udo Ulfkotte’s revelations that that the CIA massages the stories that come out of the German MSM, and the power of governments to control media narratives across a whole swathe of European countries recently demonstrated by the Cologne Affair, these allegations are far more credible now than they might have been even a few years ago.

(4) There are huge exchanges of artillery in Donbass again, in a continuing development since mid-March 2016, with the Ukrainians firing heavy caliber shells of the sort banned under Minsk 2 and the NAF responding with counter-battery fire. The LDNR are very unhappy with the lack of Russian military support. The obvious reason for this is that two major Atlanticist events are coming up soon – the vote on the renewal of EU sanctions in late June (there is now a real chance that some Med country like Greece or Italy will veto them) and the NATO summit in Warsaw on July 8-9, when the details of future US military dispositions in Europe will be discussed. Presumably, Poroshenko wants to provoke Russia into doing something that would harden Western positions on those issues, regain their waning attention, and detract from his own plummeting domestic approval ratings (now lower than Yanukovych at his lowest). Putin is playing it safe and refusing to escalate. Tellingly, both the mainstream Russian and Western media have been silent on the uptick in violence. Unfortunately, for the longsuffering residents of Donbass it’s another story.

(5) Ukraine bans all Russian films made after 2013. I wonder if the svidomy realize this includes, say, Leviathan, perhaps the most prominent artistic “indictment” of Putinism made to date.

(6) Ukraine Today, Ukraine’s lame attempt at imitating RT, is shutting down broadcasting for lack of money. The next big thing on the Ukrainian English language news market is the Odessa Review, run by Vladislav Davidzon. You can see him basking beta-like in the glory of The Tie-Eater to the right.

Europe

(1) High ranking EU politician Frank Timmermans: “Diversity comes with challenges, but diversity is humanity’s destiny.”

Science – Tech, Futurism

(1) Black-hole computing: Might nature’s bottomless pits actually be ultra-efficient quantum computers? That could explain why data never dies by Sabine Hossenfelder.

Culture – History, HBD

(1) Gachter, Simon & Schulz – 2016 – Intrinsic honesty and the prevalence of rule violations across societies, as covered by James Thompson.

Get people (well, psychology students) from different countries to throw dice. The higher the numbers they report, the higher their monetary reward. Calculate the amount of “cheating” from basic probability.

The pattern is, as usual, quite familiar.

(2) German special forces uber-kommando Otto Skorzeny went onto serve Mossad after the war at Haaretz.

He had two funerals, one in a chapel in Spain’s capital and the other to bury his cremated remains in the Skorzeny family plot in Vienna. Both services were attended by dozens of German military veterans and wives, who did not hesitate to give the one-armed Nazi salute and sing some of Hitler’s favorite songs. Fourteen of Skorzeny’s medals, many featuring a boldly black swastika, were prominently paraded in the funeral processions.

There was one man at the service in Madrid who was known to no one in the crowd, but out of habit he still made sure to hide his face as much as he could. That was Joe Raanan, who by then had become a successful businessman in Israel. The Mossad did not send Raanan to Skorzeny’s funeral; he decided to attend on his own, and at his own expense. This was a personal tribute from one Austrian-born warrior to another, and from an old spy handler to the best, but most loathsome, agent he ever ran.

What a beautiful reconciliation.

(3) Fred Reed is on a roll:

• It Cometh from the Pit. and Hath a Knout
• My Biochemistry Made Me Do It: Confessions of a Genetic Subroutine

(4) Where microaggressions really come from: A sociological account by Jonathan Haidt. In his interpretation, SJWs might be truly novel from a sociological perspective: Where once cultures moved from a culture of honor, where insults are personally avenged, to a culture of dignity, in which the high class thing to do was to rise above verbal insults and seek redress for physical wrongs from the courts, we might now be moving to a culture of victimization, in which victimhood itself – real and perceived – becomes the highest virtue, while aggressors are to be punished both by society, by social media, and even by the courts. Although I consider myself as a mostly “dignity” person, I really do understand and even empathize with the “honor” position. But I can genuinely say that “victim” culture is truly alien to me. I cannot even begin to imagine how it must work at the psychological level, even if I sort of understand it in the abstract. To me it feels like a sci-fi civilization created by another species.

Life & Misc

(1) April Fool’s? It’s hard to beat Heartiste’s from 2013.

The Results of the Transhuman Visions 1.0 Debate

This January I said I would aim to do an open thread once every week. I was off by an order of magnitude or so. Well, better late than never.

My partner Mike Johnson and I, arguing the anti-Open Borders positions against Scott Jackisch and Randal Koene, won. Not bad considering H+ demographics!

Though there was widespread support for Universal Basic Income even before the debate, Anya Petrova and Barbara West managed to extend its lead even further arguing against Jay Cornell and event organizer Hank Pellissier.

Finally, there was a panel discussing the nature of the Singularity and whether it could even happen between Andres Gomez Emilsson, Randal Koene, Brian Hanley, Ted Peters, Dan Faggella, and myself. One very interesting observation I heard here is that we have yet to figure out how to reliably construct a simulation of a complex computer chip based off a series of cross-sectional scans of it. The challenges in doing something like that for the human brain would be many, many orders of magnitude higher.

We decided we are going to do more of these events in a debate as opposed to a lecture/conference format because the audience feels more engaged that way.

Speaking of more events, the next Transhuman Visions 2.0 debate is on April 2, 2016 at the Octupus Literary Salon in Oakland, CA – you can still get tickets here – and will feature debates on consciousness, the transhumanist position on gun rights, and eugenics (yes Hank is brave enough to go there).

We also have some other plans for ensuring a future for futurism in the Bay Area, especially since it hasn’t been going so well in recent years – The Singularity Summit brand were acquired by Kurzweil’s Singularity University, a commercialized gimmick for businesspeople to look hip and tech-savvy; the Future Salons that connected innovative businesses at the cutting edge of technology and interested laypersons have withered away; and Hank himself is finding it difficult to find the time to organize his Transhuman Visions conferences. We are working on creating an umbrella organization to revive all of these activities but it is as of yet too early for any announcements.

I have gotten tangentially involved in a startup that could either flop or take Uber out of business. Unfortunately, I can’t say much more right now.

I have read Vodka Politics by Mark Schrad, whom I otherwise came to know through discussions on Russian demographics on my blog and later personal communications. Its thesis that vodka was the basis of Russian autocratic power is an interesting and original one, even if I think he sometimes overdoes it. I look forwards to reviewing it.

I haven’t had much time for other forms of culture like movies or video games. I did finally buy Fallout 4 and start exploring the Commonwealth Wasteland. So far it has been quite enjoyable though I don’t see myself replaying any of it.

***

Interesting Links & Quick Takes

World

(1) Obama’s huge interview with The Atlantic.

This is worthy of a separate post (or even series of posts), for now I will leave you wish Alexander Mercouris’ very important observation that hidden within it is an implicit admission that, contra his public rhetoric at the time, the US intelligence services had no conclusive evidence that Assad was responsible for the Ghouta chemical attacks (a claim that has since been further demolished by Seymour Hersh, the MIT study, and other experts).

This also means that it was Russia’s diplomatic offensive in 2013 that saved the world from essentially a repeat of the Iraq War (at the cost of having its reputation further tarnished by the neocon-run Western media).

(2) Russia’s Syrian Withdrawal – Why It Happened and Why Regime Change Remains Off the Agenda by Alexander Mercouris.

(3) Russian Diplomat Drops a Bombshell: US Expected ISIS to Seize Damascus by October by Alexander Mercouris.

(4) The American Colonial Office by Mark Yuray. Cargo cultism is a global phenomenon.

(5) Enough is enough — U.S. abdication on Syria must come to an end by Michael Ignatieff and Leon Wieseltier. These neocon freaks literally wanted the US to fight Russia this February.

USA

Let’s be honest: American politics are now all about Trump, Drumpf, and The Trumpinator.

(1) There was Bush Derangement Syndrome. As far as I know, I was the first pundit to come up with the term “Putin Derangement Syndrome,” to describe the Western media’s habit of blaming Putin for everything bad in the world regardless of what he actually does (the latest version of this is the “Putin is Weaponizing X” theme).

I believe the time has long come to officially recognize Trump Derangement Syndrome to describe the extraordinary level of vitriol and misrepresentation directed again him by the Establishment, including an extraordinary alliance of the radical Left, liberal progressives, the conservatives, and the neocons – even though Trump is objectively far more moderate than Cruz on social matters, doesn’t support a new war every year like Hillary Clinton or [insert moderate Republican empty suit], and has avowed his support for Israel.

If a man’s character is defined by his enemies, then Donald Trump must be a veritable saint.

• Everyone on The National Review in a bizarre Two Weeks Hate session.
• “White Working Class Deserves to Die” Kevin D. Williamson deserves special distinction.
• Basically all the neocons fleeing the sinking cuckservative ship into the Clinton Clique’s warm embrace – Eliot Cohen, Eliot Abrams, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan…
• Ross Douthat – Over and over again to the extent that his once interesting NYT column is now basically just one long anti-Trump jeremiad.
• Pussy Riot
• Larry Summers, who helped set up Russia’s oligarchic system in the 1990s.
• Derek T. Muller, arguing in favor of manipulating arcane Electoral College rules from the 19th century to invalidate Trump’s Presidency should he win the popular vote.
• Neocon Max Boot says he prefers Stalin to Trump.
• But this Tiananmen Protester says that Trump is like a Communist leader. Which then begs the question… why wouldn’t Boot support him?
• Trump is Bad Because he Did Business with Russia (just like Mitt Romney!) Josh Rogan.
• Mormons who think drinking tea and Melania’s boobs are very bad.
• Charles Murray – The quintessential 1950s era American, who understands Fishtown unlike many of his conservative compadres and knows first hand what it is like to be on the receiving end of a broad vilification campaign, but in the end cannot reconcile his genteel libertarianism with his perception of Trumpian “fascist tendencies.”

Unsurprisingly, there is near perfect overlap between the Russian PDS sufferers, or demshiza, and knee jerk aversion to Trump.

• Famous activist for Russian democracy (in WSJ op-eds) Garry Kasparov.
• Pussy Riot.
• Basically everybody in the skinny jeans-wearing, Jean Jacques cafe-frequenting, pseudointellectual Gazprom-subsidized Echo of Moscow crowd: Glorified photographer Ilya Varlamov, Karina Orlova, and the high priestess of Living Not By the Lie herself, Evgeniya Albats.
• Democratic journalist “Putin stole my wallet” Anne Applebaum.
• Democratic journalist “Putin stole my dry cleaning ticket” Miriam Elder.
• Democratic journalist “Je Suis Refugee (from pro-Putin Russian Cattle)” Julia Ioffe.
• Democratic journalist “Je Suis Fromage” Masha Gessen.
• Editor of The Moscow Times, once the most prominent newspaper for Western expats in Russia, Michael Bohm segues seamlessly from Putin Derangement Syndrome to TDS.

(2) Fortunately, there are many based people to counter the cucks too.

Not surprisingly, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, an Orthodox-Levantine American, has fewer reasons to subscribe to neocon schemes than almost anybody else, not to mention the brains to see through them:

The *establishment* composed of journos, BS-Vending talking heads with well-formulated verbs, bureaucrato-cronies, lobbyists-in training, New Yorker-reading semi-intellectuals, image-conscious empty suits, Washington rent-seekers and other “well thinking” members of the vocal elites are not getting the point about what is happening and the sterility of their arguments. People are not voting for Trump (or Sanders). People are just voting, finally, to destroy the establishment.

(3) There are some reasoned analyses of Trump from ideological opponents who manage not to descend into TDS:

• Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here’s why by Thomas Frank in the Guardian.
• The rise of American authoritarianism by Amanda Taub (Vox).
• Trump is not the New Hitler, but the New Andrew Jackson by T. Greer of Scholar’s Stage.
• Trump’s Family Endured Anti-Immigrant Zeal by Leonid Bershidsky.
• Trump and Putin by Danielle Ryan.
• Trump’s America by Charles Murray.

(4) Scott Alexander reviews The Art of the Deal:

“As best I can tell, the developer’s job is coordination, by which I mean blatant lies. The usual process goes like this: the bank would be happy to lend you the money as long as you have guaranteed renters. The renters would be happy to sign up as long as you show them a design. The architect would be happy to design the building as long as you tell them what the government’s allowing. The government would be happy to give you your permit as long as you have a construction company lined up. And the construction company would be happy to sign on with you as long as you have the money from the bank in your pocket. Or some kind of complicated many-step catch-22 like that.”

In other words, sounds like a job for someone at the upper end of the both the IQ and psychopathy bell curves. Prime Presidential material!

(5) The Color of Crime, 2016 Revised Edition by Edwin Rubenstein. Steve Sailer keeps emphasizing the value of storing some “a number of highly stylized but reasonably accurate interconnected numbers” in your head. I think to describe US murder and crime rates, a reaosonable approximation would be 10, 2, 1, 0.5, corresponding to Blacks, Hispanics, Caucasians, and Asians, respectively.

(6) Heartiste proves that physiognomy is real.

(7) My Last-Minute Decision to Enter the U.S. Senate Race in California by Ron Unz. Needless to say, I wish him the best of luck.

(8) Ron Unz on Trump:

Earlier this year, an ardent Trump supporter declared that his favored candidate was 95% a clown but 5% a patriot, and therefore stood head-and-shoulders above his Republican rivals, and this sounds about right to me.

(9) Bernie Sanders’ Electoral Fortress of Whititude by Steve Sailer.

Bernie wants to extend gibs for all. Whites, as well as ideologically Leftist Blacks, support that.

Hillary Clinton instead just wants to continue buying off different social groups with cash and affirmative action while letting the oligarchs be and pursuing the neocon agenda abroad with far more enthusiasm even than “don’t do stupid shit” Obama. Therefore, ethnocentric but not particularly Leftist Blacks – the majority of them – naturally support Clinton.

Or to put it more crudely: Mo money fo dem programs > free higher ed, medicine, civil rights, no more wars for the neocons.

(10) The Donald Trump Phenomenon by JayMan. Ironically, its much harder to explain Trump in pure HBD terms, and I am in qualified disagreement with this thesis. There will be a separate post on this.

(11) EXCLUSIVE: Twitter Shadowbanning ‘Real and Happening Every Day’ Says Inside Source by Milo Yiannopoulos. I have to admit this is a very clever way of purging undesirables. Also: 5 Ways to Get Banned From Twitter.

(12) Internet Nazi/troll Andrew “weev” Auernheimer documents @Jokeocracy’s hilarious Twitter suicide bombing.

Russia/Eurasia

(1) Is Putin Weaponising Stupidity? by Rob Slane. This is going to become a classic.

All well and good you might say, but it does beg a question: Why would Putin want to make Western leaders do and say stupid things? What benefit would he get out of Weaponising Stupidity? Again the answer is obvious, is it not? The more the leaders of Western countries and the media have displayed their folly and sheer ignorance, the more they have dragged their countries towards collapse. And since Putin’s goal is obviously to Weaponise the World, no doubt for his own dastardly reasons, you can begin to see how it would be in his interests to use Stupidity as a Weapon to achieve his aims. Can’t you?

Then again, I don’t want to be overly dogmatic about my new theory. I may be wrong. In fact, I still hold out the possibility that the truth might well be much simpler. It could just be a case that we really are run by ignorant buffoons who never learn, and even if Mr Putin were inclined to develop a way of Weaponising Stupidity, he’d actually be wasting his time.

(2) Russia’s Foreign Policy: Historical Background by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. I found it rather rambling and schizophrenic, to be honest – Russia saved Europe from the “heavy Mongolian yoke” but at the same time was “energized” by it. Though admittedly it does rather reflect the muddle-headedness we see in the Kremlin. Still, its a whole lot better than the mendacious tripe that passed for Western “analysis” of this essay.

(3) Lev Gumilev: passion, Putin and power by the Charles Clover in The Financial Times.

It’s actually not a half-bad summary of Gumilev’s theories on passionarity (an original Soviet version of “asabiya”) but he rather overstates Eurasianism’s real influence on Russian politics. The foremost proponent of Eurasianism, Dugin didn’t have enough pull to avoid getting fired from Moscow State University. Support for “Greater Russia” is far from exclusive to Eurasianists, and including figures like Solzhenitsyn – who is definitely not a Eurasianist. A Ctrl-F on Putin’s speeches reveals considerably more mentions of people like White reactionary philosopher Ivan Ilyin, or even the Christian liberal Vladimir Solovyev, relative to Lev Gumilev. That is because Putin, as someone without strong ideological predilections of his own, is open to mixing and matching ideologies from all over the spectrum, and in any case Gumilev’s work has also been used to provide fuel for non-Russian and in fact not exactly Russophilic movements like particularist Turkic nationalisms.

(4) Autonomy vs. Sobornost by Paul Robinson.

(5) Khodorkovsky, The Murder Case by Alexander Mercouris.

(6) Blast from the past: How to read the Western media by Patrick Armstrong.

HOW TO READ THE WESTERN MEDIA. When they say Kiev forces have re-taken the airport, know that they have lost it. When they say giving up South Stream was a defeat for Putin, know it was a brilliant counter-move. When they say Russia is isolated (a stopped clock, here’s The Economist in 1999!), know that it is expanding its influence and connections every day. When they say Russians are turning against Putin, know that the opposite is true. When they speak of nation-building in the new Ukraine, know it’s degenerating into armed thuggery (see video). Know that when they speak of Kyrzbekistan, they’re not just stenographers, they’re incompetent stenographers. Take what they say, turn it upside down, and you’ll have a better take on reality.

Ukrainian Conflict

(1) Ukrainian Government Crisis – Kiev Swirls in Oligarch-led Intrigues by Alexander Mercouris.

(2) Northern Gabon? How about Liberia! Yet another zrada for the svidomy, delivered by Condoleezza Rice.

(3) Why Ukraine needs Russia more than ever by Nicolai Petro. Unfortunately, things like the economy are tertiary concerns for the svidomy relative to the Grand Imperative of dismantling the Soviet legacy, such as polio vaccinations.

(4) Why Russia Stopped at Crimea by Leonid Bershidsky. Covers the recently released audio recordings in which the leaders of the Maidan coup acknolwedged that the vast majority of Crimeans supported incorporation into Russia and (with the exception of Turchinov) saw that military resistance would be futile. The Maidan’s foreign ideologues were non too happy with him.

(5) Report on Donbass by Paul Robinson, on the International Crisis Group’s recent assessment of the situation there.

The International Crisis Group’s report makes other important points. First, Moscow appears to want the Minsk agreements to work, as shown by the fact the kurators are enforcing the ceasefire. The Russian presence in Donbass is probably reducing violence, not increasing it. Second, support for the rebellion is not overwhelming, and so there is a prospect of convincing the people of the DNR and LNR to reintegrate with Ukraine. But the longer Kiev maintains its policy of blockading Donbass, the more remote this possibility becomes. Ukrainian policies are thus probably counterproductive. Third, Moscow is not pursuing some grandiose plan to restructure the international order, expand its empire, or any of the like. Rather, it is improvising in an effort to find a way out of a situation it does not want. This refutes claims that the war in Donbass is just a first step in a broader plan of Russian aggression, which must be halted now lest Russia be encouraged to advance further (e.g. into the Baltic states).

(5) Blast from the Past: Eduard Limonov predicts the Ukrainian Conflict in 1992 (in Russian).

(6) Crime and murder rates soar in Ukraine. Separate post forthcoming.

(7) Broken Ukraine by Linh Dinh.

Europe

(1) A Stolen Europe by The Saker. I agree with 80% of it.

(2) Le Mépris by Guillaume Durocher. “Meanwhile, South Africa is obviously an affirmative-action BRIC” – top kek.

(3) Former paid agent of Swedish Security Police dictated Amnesty Sweden’s stance against Assange by Marcello Ferrada.

(4) How Europe’s most liberal nation gagged its own people on migration attacks by Sue Reid. However, Sweden gets 100/100 on freedom from freedom experts Freedom House so this is okay.

(5) The Swedish media war on Assange – “Australian pig”, “retard”, “white-haired crackpot”, “scumbag” – Truly the very paragon of the adversarial, uncowed press speaking truth to power.

(6) Lying Press? Germans Lose Faith in the Fourth Estate at Spiegel. Features a nice infographic of the wax and waning of the term “Lügenpresse.”

(7) Ex-German media boss admits on live radio the national news agenda is govt controlled by Bryan MacDonald. Also from Breitbart.

(8) Member of German Left Youth Party Apologizes to Refugees on Facebook After Alleged Sexual Assault by Migrant by Marc Geppert. This is well in line with her party’s ideology.

(9) The Guardian is SHUTTING DOWN comments on its immigration articles.

(10) Rotherham Police Had Sex With Abused Girls And Covered For Relative Sex Groomers by Liam Deacon for London Breitbart.

Maybe it wasn’t even so much that Rotherham police didn’t want to appear racist as didn’t want to appear rapist.

(11) Angela Merkel Diagnosed by Psychoanalyst as ‘Narcissistic’, Verging on ‘Mental Breakdown’ by Sarkis Zeronian.

(12) The Case for Surge Funding by George Soros. But since Putin is “weaponizing” refugees to undermine Europe – indeed, according to Soros himslef, Putin is a bigger threat to Europe’s existence than Isis – does this mean that Soros is admitting that he is… an agent of Putin?

(13) George Soros: A psychopath’s psychopath by Sam Gerrans.

(14) Israel’s unwanted African migrants by Kathy Harcombe. How sad.

Science – Tech, Futurism

(1) How Google’s AI Auto-Magically Answers Your Emails by Tim Moynihan. Hello ELOPe!

(2) Human Germline Engineering: the Game-Changer by Jim Daniel.

(3) John Horgan interviews Eliezer Yudkowsky. I’ll have a separate post on this.

(4) Why fruits and vegetables taste better in Europe by Julia Belluz. My theory: American hypercapitalism in agriculture, which prioritizes calorie maximization over flavor and nutrient density. Would also explain why US obesity crisis preceded Europe’s by about 20 years.

Culture – History, HBD

(1) Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle by Andrew Curry. There were up to 5,000 warriors at this particular battle, which is quite remarkable since that would imply the military “mobilization potential” of those old Germanic tribes was if anything even greater than that of an ancient state like Egypt with a literate priestly caste. Though as T. Greer points out, Azar Gat argues that the upper bounds of mobilization potential were the same across most civilizations.

(2) The kindness of beasts by Mark Rowlands. The view that animals don’t have some sort of moral mechanism has always struck me as highly autistic. But apparently this is just one of the many other functionally-creationist ideas, like Blank Slatism, that are quite common amongst the “scientific” community.

(3) Review of Houellbecq’s Submission by Unz commentator Lazy Glossophiliac. Surprisingly, he didn’t have much good to say about it.

(4) viscous populations and the selection for altruistic behaviors and family types in eastern europe, 1500-1900 by hbd*chick. I’ll have a separate post on this.

(5) Stereotypes are relevant for judgments about individuals even when one has individualized information by Emil Kirkegaard, quoting from Neven Sesardic’s book Making Sense of Heritability:

The point to remember is that when many people say that “an individual can’t be judged by his group mean” (Gould 1977: 247), that “as individuals we are all unique and population statistics do not apply” (Venter 2000), that “a person should not be judged as a member of a group but as an individual” (Herrnstein & Murray 1994: 550), these statements sound nice and are likely to be well received but they conflict with the hard fact that a group membership sometimes does matter. If scholars wear their scientific hats when denying or disregarding this fact, I am afraid that rather than convincing the public they will more probably damage the credibility of science.

(6) The incredible correlation between IQ & income by Pumpkin Person.

A correlation of 0.49 is more than double the 0.23 correlation between IQ and income reported in a 2006 meta-analysis by Tarmo Strenze and nearly triple the 0.16 correlation between IQ and net-worth found in a 2007 study by Jay L Zagorsky, however it is similar to the 0.4 correlation between IQ and income asserted by authoritative Arthur Jensen in his 1998 book The g Factor.

This is an impressive post that Garett Jones and Dalliard ought to take a look at.

(7) Interview with Richard Lynn at Amren.

When I was in school I was bored by science. It all seemed so cut and dried. All you had to do was learn it. I found a lot of it very tedious, especially the practicals. You could spend a sunny afternoon pouring sulfuric acid on potassium and discover you ended up with potassium sulfate. I was quite happy to learn that this was so. I have a touch of ADHD that make it difficult for me to pay attention to lessons I find boring, and this made science classes even more uncongenial. I liked history and literature, in which there were differences of opinion and we were encouraged to make up our own minds about what was right. I have found this early education valuable, as I have often taken a different view to the received opinion. So when I went up to Cambridge in 1949 I began reading history. I liked it, but I did not fancy making a career in it. So much history has been done already that all you can do is add a footnote of the kind written by one of my contemporaries: “Trade between Bristol and Bordeaux, 1485–1490.” Or you could write another account of, say, the First World War, suggesting slightly different interpretations of some events. I did not think I would find any of these prospects satisfying. So I opted for psychology, a new science with a lot of scope for making new discoveries.

(a) He describes my own attitudes towards school/science perfectly. Near 100% analogous experience! (b) TIL that “Flynn” effect was actually first noticed in the 1930s! (c) I guess he jumped the shark in emigrating from Ireland to Northern Ireland, since in most respects the former is now more advanced.

(8) The Science On Genes And IQ: An Unstoppable Train by John Derbyshire.

It’s interesting that two people who have studied this topic and thought deeply about it but from different perspectives—Murray as a sociologist, Khan as a population geneticist—should be in such close agreement on the timescale here. Murray says “within three years”; Khan, “in the next <5 years.”

I really should hurry up with Apollo’s Ascent to take advantage of the furore this will create soon.

Life & Misc

(1) Is commercial pet food killing your pets? by P.D. Mangan. The answer is of course yes. I have always been sympathetic to this viewpoint. After all, if humans tend to fare better on a paleo diet, despite 10,000 years at most of agricultural adaptation, then it must be all the more relevant to our canine and feline friends.

Incidentally, this also affects research on life extension. For instance, it has always been fairly likely that people trying to eke out a few more years in life expectancy through caloric restriction were wasting their time, because of the cardinal differences in their life history cycles. But it turns out that even the mice experiments might have all been useless:

Geez, what do you think that does to calorie restriction and other anti-aging experiments done on mice, where the control animals are allowed to eat as much food that’s loaded with toxic amounts of iron as they want? Makes these experiments garbage, that’s what.

Calorie-restricted animals aren’t just eating less food, they’re consuming far less iron. And we already know that one of the results of calorie restriction is that CR animals end up with far less iron in their bodies.

In short: Don’t bother. If you really want to live a lot longer your best bet is probably to donate to organizations like the SENS Foundation, and encourage others to do the same.

(2) Nonfiction Writing Advice by Scott Alexander.

(3) Fallout vs. Skyrim. Who would win?

(4) Greg Egan derives a self-contained physics system from first principles for his Orthogonal hard sci-fi series. Changing one minus sign to a plus sign in an equation enables FTL travel.

(5) Andy Weir’s Quora advice for new writers:

1) You have to actually write. Daydreaming about the book you’re going to write someday isn’t writing. It’s daydreaming. Open your word processor and start writing.

2) Resist the urge to tell friends and family your story. I know it’s hard because you want to talk about it and they’re (sometimes) interested in hearing about it. But it satisfies your need for an audience, which diminishes your motivation to actually write it. Make a rule: The only way for anyone to ever hear about your stories is to read them.

3) This is the best time in history to self-publish. There’s no old-boy network between you and your readers. You can self-publish an ebook to major distributors (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) without any financial risk on your part.

(6) The Mongolian Death Worm via Wikipedia. Tolkien’s Were-Worms, sandworms, Tremors, Robert Jordan’s Worms/jumara, etc. – inspiration?