Category: Uncategorized

Thanks as always to everyone who sent in questions. You truly strive diligently to increase quality outputs.

I should ask Ace of Normies about that: Do my doubts about Operation AIPAC Folly have to make me a Nazi? Or can I be an Italian Fascist? Because I must admit, comrades, that I’m a big fan of whatever that fez thing is that Il Duce was always wearing — kind of a cross between a fez and a ushanka. I gotta get me one of those.

Gadflight101 asks:

_{You wrote a few posts ago concerning a minority demographic:}

_{I’ve lived near them, among them, and with them.}

_{I’d welcome a compare and contrast with sub-continentals, drawing on your exposure to them as well.}

That’s a toughie, because my experience of Subcontinentals is almost exclusively of the higher castes.

It’s funny how, when you start reading academic scholarship about India, the first thing they tell you is that caste doesn’t exist; the British made it all up in the later 1700s; it’s a “technology of control” with which to oppress the browns and blah blah blah. Which may or may not be true (narrator: It isn’t true), but the Indians themselves sure do believe it. They’re all-in. The ones over here don’t talk about it much, because a) they’re all middle or higher, so they just assume their superiority, but also b) it’s like bowing (etc.) for the Japanese — you’re just not going to get all the nuances unless you grew up with it, so there’s no point.

But it’s key to understanding them. I am by no means Expert, but there’s a lot of that stuff floating in the background of everything they do, of which we are unaware.

The second thing to understand about them is their crippling inferiority complex, which naturally hits the higher castes extra hard. The British considered all Hindus, but especially higher-caste Hindus, to be militarily worthless. And not just that. Think of the worst 19th century European caricature of a Jew: scheming, devious, obsessed with money… then throw in fawning, oleaginous, pretentious. That’s the “babu,” according to the guys who ran the Raj. Useful enough in their place — they make first-class clerks, if you can stand the constant sucking up — but in need of constant supervision and a firm hand.

I suppose this is a rough analogue to “we wuz kangz!”, but with the OFE, you can kinda understand it. You can see why a slave rebellion never succeeded — even if they’d temporarily won, they’re a tiny minority; they would’ve been crushed in pretty short order; there was never a possibility of a Wakanda in North America.

That kind of inferiority complex — the “we never stood a chance” kind — is very different from the Subcontinental one, where half a billion of them were ruled, quite easily, by no more than a hundred thousand of us. They had their shot, in 1857, and it failed, for all the reasons that enabled the British to take over in the first place — instead of “Africa wins again,” call it “India loses again.”

They still haven’t gotten over that shit. If you keep that in mind, the Jeets make a lot more sense.

That’s one big reason it’s hard for me to compare the Jeets to the OFE. The other reason, as I said above, is the caste thing. I simply have no experience of the lower castes, who are the vast majority. My experience of the upper castes is that they’re uniquely frustrating, because they’re quite bright, IQ-wise, and the more you know of their history and culture, the more frustrating it gets. Indian philosophy, for instance, is awesomely subtle and complex. They were world-class mathematicians and grammarians. They give rabbis a run for their money when it comes to exegesis and argumentation (one reason sensible Britons in the Raj were against things like the Ilbert Bill is that you do not want to turn babus loose in the courtroom — you ain’t never seen a lawyer like a Jeet lawyer).

Obviously this is quite unlike dealing with the OFE. Dealing with the OFE is like dealing with children — you have to keep snapping your fingers and telling them to focus. With the (upper caste) Jeets, you know good and well that they can understand and execute complex instructions. The problems, then, are twofold: First, they’re gonna barracks-lawyer that shit; they just can’t help themselves; they seem addicted to complexity for complexity’s sake (like the other Aryans, their motto seems to be “why use five parts when fifty will do?”).

Second — and this is where they most resemble the OFE — they believe in the stupidest shit imaginable. I don’t know if there’s “Indian Twitter,” but if there is, it’s guaranteed to be very much like “Black Twitter.” Which has its own Wiki page, because of course it does, and apparently someone yclept Feminista Jones — no, really, although sadly it’s a nom de guerre — is big in it. What the Wiki article doesn’t say, but which is obvious to anyone who knows anything about the OFE, is that “Black Twitter” is a cesspit of truly bizarre lunacy like this:

and this

If “Jeet Twitter” exists, I guarantee you there’s stuff on there that makes the Negro Compliance Engine look sane. So you’re talking to Raju (a gross insult, by the way; never call an Indian “Raju”), and he’s got a PhD in Electrical Engineering or something, and it’s going really well… but then he tells you that his astrologer told him to sell his house, so he’s got an appointment with the realtor this afternoon.

It’s just bizarre. And please bear in mind that I like India, and Indians. All the ones here have to go back, it goes without saying, but I quite like them in their place. But they are what they are.

I’m not sure that really answers the question, but it’s the best I can do this morning.

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urbando asks:

_{Today someone posted a video about Greek and Roman statues being colorfully painted “back in the day”. This brings to mind your assertion that “the past is a different country”, which certainly seems true.}

_{Heh, I haven’t watched the statuary video yet (though I probably will), but I noticed in the text the assertion that ancient Rome was much more diverse than we believe, as shown by the skin colors of marble statues. So there’s a motive for you, but the somewhat revisionist fact that the marble statues were painted has been around for many years (though generally ignored).}

_{So it would appear that there are many facts about the past that were at some point altered to serve . . . what? Is there an overriding principle at work here?}

There are many different biases at work, over many different eras. The thing about the statues isn’t necessarily bias though — as I understand it, it has only recently (as in, the mid to late 20th century) come to light that they were painted, as it takes some kind of micro chemical analysis that didn’t exist before in order to see it. I believe that’s true of medieval sculpture as well — what we see as stately, somber cathedrals were in reality garishly decorated like bouncy castles at a toddler’s birthday party.

Which is a damn shame if true, because I like our aesthetic better. I’m sure that if these were painted

it was tastefully done… by Late Medieval standards, so they were probably pimped out like a ghetto roller, all purple and gold and shit. (Those are the Mourners of Dijon, by the way (I prefer “Les Pleurants”), by Claus Sluter. They’re amazing:

Beautiful, somber… and, again, probably lime green and neon purple, because that’s how they rolled circa 1400)

As I mentioned yesterday, the idea that the Middle Ages were all brown and gray and sludgy is a Victorian slander. That’s where the very phrase “the Dark Ages” comes from, and while “dark” was originally intended to mean “unilluminated by surviving sources,” they quickly changed it to mean “black with dirt,” because Victorian smugness was almost Stephen Colbertian. Horror Victorianorum is the child of many fathers, but one of them — a big one, yuuuge — is basically this:

That’s your typical High Victorian scholar, writing about anything — history, culture, math, agriculture, you name it. At their worst, they’re just excruciating to read… and they were so often at their worst.

This is getting off track, but fuck it, it’s my blog, so: We’re used to thinking of guys like Edward Burne-Jones as kitsch. Even if you don’t know his name, you know his work, because a certain type of girl was guaranteed to have this

or this

on her bedroom wall. (Neither of which is actually Burne-Jones, by the way. The first is Ophelia, by John Everett Millais; the second is The Lady of Shallot, by John William Waterhouse. This is Edward Burne-Jones:

The Beguiling of Merlin. But you see what I mean — I didn’t remember the artist on the prior two, but I could type “Burne Jones Ophelia” into the search bar and Google knew what I meant). All those guys are Pre-Raphaelites, and thanks to the aforesaid girl and her aforementioned dorm room prints, we think of those guys as kitsch, but in their day they were rebels — daring, indeed transgressive, precisely because they didn’t think of the Middle Ages as a dirty, ignorant horror show.

When it comes to Classical Antiquity, I’m guessing a similar process was at work. The Victorians were big fans, and they did so much of the legwork, so they probably downplayed the very real diversity of the Roman Empire. We know so much more about trade patterns and such than they did, and from that we can reasonably conclude that metropolitan Rome, at least, was just absurdly diverse — Roman coins have been found as far away as Japan, and I’m pretty sure the Chinese had a word for “Roman;” Roman traders certainly made it to India, though possibly at one remove. This

looks like some typical DEI bullshit if you aren’t up on more recent scholarship — and who knows, it might have been intended that way — but it’s quite plausible based on what we now know. Of course Victorian scholars knew perfectly well that Alexander the Great made it as far as Afghanistan, but they had pretty compelling reasons to downplay that kind of diversity…

You see what I mean, I trust. History is always about Narrative, so ideology (in the broadest sense) is inescapable. Even if you try your hardest to avoid it, your scholarship is a product of your environment; biases you don’t know you have will creep in. That’s one of the reasons Historiography is different from History.

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Quotulatiousness brings us a link of note:

A student of mine got expelled: I realized she single-handedly brought down 25 other students around her on a daily basis.
byu/AgeOfWorry0114 inTeachers

I think this got discussed yesterday. He also brings us a sampling of Tweets (or whatever they call them on “X” now) of note:

Quotulatiousness remarks:

_{As I commented when I shared that last one, “So some of the books on the school library shelves are actually tripwires to detect wrongthink?”}

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that were the case. Gotta catch ’em early!

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Quotulatiousness brings us another link of note:

_{You Are Not The One – Chinese Dating Dystopia}

I really don’t know what to say to this. I am, on the whole, an admirer of Classical Chinese culture. And I find East Asian girls attractive, on the whole. But I don’t like to admit it (either of them), because of the whole “yellow fever” thing that really seemed to get going in the 1980s. Maybe it was earlier, I dunno, but when I first started getting interested in girls it was the 1980s, and one of the first girls I was interested in was Chinese. ABC, technically — American-born Chinese — which she was quick to point out, but I didn’t get why it mattered. To me, she was just a pretty girl, because I lived on the fringes of Techopolis, so my school was stuffed to the rafters with Asians, East and South; I thought that’s just how things are. I didn’t understand the snickering references to “yellow fever” until we’d dated for a bit; then I got it.

And it sucks. You can’t avoid it. You’re going to hear all about the stereotypes, to the point where you start wondering if maybe you do actually have “yellow fever.” Or if you don’t, you worry that she thinks you do. It causes strain on male friendships, because of course NOWAG…

….huh, that’s funny, I was going to link the acronym for those who might not know, but the Internet seemingly goes out of its way to avoid a listing; not even the invaluable Urban Dictionary seems to have one (their search for “nowag” goes to this). So I guess it’s up to me: NOWAG stands for “No One Wants Asian Guys,” and I don’t recall hearing the word back in high school, but everybody grokked the concept. The bitterest accusations of “yellow fever” came from Asian guys, and a lot of my friends were Chinese.

More than that, one of the key components to “yellow fever,” at least as its detractors portray it, is that whole thing about how Chinese girls are more “submissive.” Which I have never found to be true, at least among American-born Chinese; they are not fainting flowers; Tiger Mom has to come from somewhere, after all. I don’t know how they are in China — I’ve never been there — but it flies in the face of everything we know about female psychology to think that a culture in which women are in desperately short supply would produce submissive women.

Look at how entitled Western women are. They’re an actual numerical majority of the population, and every five-in-low-light-after-a-few-drinks thinks she’s a nine. Now imagine a world in which women are the minority, and extrapolate from there. I just don’t buy it. I bet Chinese women in China are just excruciating. I don’t care how hot they are, I’m not putting up with that.

But as I said, I don’t know; I’ve never been there. And I’m the last guy to downplay the long duree effects of culture, so maybe Chinese women still act like it’s the Tang Dynasty. I know how I’d bet, though, and the linked article seems to at least hint in that direction.

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Dinodoxy asks:

_{Is it fair to call someone hurling vitriol at America and wishing it harm Anti-American?}

_{When I was a kid, i’d hear the phrase America, Love it or Leave it! Bandied about, usually by lefties as a caricature of righty. But righty kind of embraced it and certainly agreed with the sentiment.}

_{What, if anything, is wrong with that sentiment?}

I answered it yesterday for myself: love my people, hate my government, which is doing its damnedest to replace my people (and succeeding wildly). I am certainly “anti-American” in that sense, and I’d own it if I thought it would make the slightest difference. As for leaving it because I don’t love it… well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? The Government that I hate isn’t American; that’s the point. They’re fucking alien parasites. And of course I don’t (just) mean (((these people))), although Operation AIPAC Folly has made it crystal fucking clear that there are a LOT of those, whether or not they’re genetically Tribal.

Call them Lizard People, for convenience, and take Hillary Clinton as an example. She’s pretty much a nihilist:

She believes in nothing that doesn’t come with a big fat paycheck, anyway. The idea that she should do anything for the benefit of anyone who isn’t paying her is laughable; she clearly regarded her very high position in the “American” government as an ATM. She’d be happy to bomb Iranians for Israel, but she’d be just as happy bombing Israelis for Iran. She pushed culturally destructive nonsense, of course, but that’s because that’s where the money was; she’d have been just as happy to mandate gun ownership and school prayer, had the Right paid better.

How can anyone not despise these “people”? And that’s “our” government. Hell, most of them don’t even actually hate us. In a way, I’d be much happier if they did hate us; at least we’d be justified in doing the necessary. We’re just inconvenient to them. Bertolt Brecht — himself a filthy Commie, of course — summed up their attitude perfectly: it’s more convenient for The Government to dissolve The People, and elect another.

Again, how can you not hate them for that?

But what can you do? You can’t leave “America” to get away from these “people.” Where would you go? They’re everywhere. They run everything, and the entire West is dying because they have decided it’s more convenient to dissolve The People, and elect another.

I’m not anti-American; I’m anti-Lizard People. But the Lizard People have turned the entire world into a shitty caricature of America. From Albania to Zimbabwe, it’s the same fake and gay, ‘groided out crap. Yeah, I hate it.

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yknowthatguy asks:

_{If shame (for hypocrisy, for not upholding vigorous academic standards, for not doing the job they’re being paid to do) doesn’t work, what would? I’m tempted to lean on my GenX instincts to give a sideward glance and say, “Pfft. Lame!” but would that even make a dent?}

No. The incentives are just too good for them.

I’m not sure I can adequately convey to y’all just how nice the Ivory Tower life is. It was nice for me, and I hate the typical egghead with the heat of a thousand suns. I got paid to chase down my weird, nerdy interests, which included travel to exotic places. I got paid to sit on my ass, read books, and ogle college girls. I got paid to teach — which I love — and when you consider how light that workload is, it’s even better; I could wrap it up and hit the golf course (by which I mean the bar) by 2pm on most days. I would’ve done all that shit for free, but I got paid to do it.

And that’s just the “work.” The physical environment is great too. There are some characteristic problems — rent / home prices are through the roof anywhere near campus, etc. — but there are some easy workarounds; I had a very nice pad in one of the nearby farm towns, where none of my colleagues would’ve dreamed of going (too many tractors, too much Jesus, and so on); I effectively doubled my salary by living someplace with a normal cost of living, and the commute was no worse than what they were doing when you factor everything in. But inside College Town, everything caters to the eggheads, so everything is open 24/7, there’s a whole bunch of exotic stuff, and so on — you basically have the amenities of a midsize city in a small town, plus small town crime rates and so on. Plus there’s all the “environmental” shit the eggheads insist on — a whole bunch of parks and hiking trails and shit. It’s nice.

What would you put up with to keep living like that? Would you sell your soul? What if, like Nine Inch Nails, you’ve got no soul to sell?

I know, that’s a bit of a stretch, but Music Blog Kayfabe is a harsh mistress.

Plus, we all know the answer anyway. You can rationalize anything if it’s for The Revolution, and frankly I think that’s a big reason they’ve gone so apeshit with the politics lately (apeshit by university standards, I mean, which were already the highest in the world): They know they’re sawing off the branch they’re sitting on, but damn it, the College Town life is just too sweet to give up. So they justify having no standards — hell, to having anti-standards — by making it for The Revolution. Sure, sure, they’re admitting a whole bunch of illegals who can’t even speak English, but at least Jose and Juanita will listen to a lecture or two about Intersectionality!

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Cato asks:

^{What’s a historian’s view of why JD and the Trump Posse haven’t already invoked the 25th? Dude is off the deep end. Are they wholly owned by Bibi too?}

I think it’s too early for an Historian to say, but I can give you my personal read: If they replace him now, JD is fully on the hook for Operation AIPAC Fury. Even if you don’t think that’s going to end in truly disgusting national humiliation — I do, obviously, but it’s surely debatable — the crazy high gas prices aren’t. If the Dems get a majority in the upcoming midterms — and I’d be amazed if they don’t — whoever’s President is going to be facing Operation Endless Impeachment; exactly nothing will get done except by executive order, and they’ll Hawaiian Judge those even more than they’re already doing, because now the wind’s at their backs.

Of course that makes JD sound awfully mercenary, but… there it is. But in his defense, Weekend at Brandon’s showed us that a non compos mentis “President” can be managed to a great extent; there are workarounds. More to the point, Trump’s bluster has been turned up to 11, but Operation AIPAC Folly aside, he still seems pretty savvy in most other respects. And even that might not be so bad — he’s still got plenty of support from “MAGA,” even there, and who knows? Maybe that’ll translate into GOP support in the midterms.

Even if it doesn’t… well, as Nehushtan likes to point out, the erections aren’t between “Republican” and “Democrat;” they’re between actual candidates, and the Dems have gone completely fucking bonkers. Openly bonkers, I mean — they’re now actually saying all the shit they used to keep quiet. I’ve seen ads around here, and even though the Donks are trying to seem reasonable to con the rubes, the essential insanity bleeds through.

I guess what I’m saying is, as crazy and senile as Zion Don seems to us, it might not actually be that bad. Not bad enough to pull a 25th Amendment, anyway, and certainly not from our side, given how eager the Dems are to do it for us.

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I think that covers the waterfront, gang. Thanks for reading, and have a good weekend.