Cuba, A Failed State?

President Biden insists that Cuba is a failed state.

Nope.

They have the best education system in Latin America.

The highest rate of physicians to population on Earth.

A medical system so good that extremely rightwing anti-Communist fanatics all over Latin America gave been flying there for years. A lot of people now fly there for medical tourism, but the state charges them.

Cuba is a world leader in the medical technology field, and it competes well against capitalist corporations.

They still make the best cigars on Earth.

A very high

This tiny island with noting under a total blockade just marketed an excellent Coronavirus vaccine, and it has four more in the pipeline.

Its COVID rate and death rate is the lowest in Latin America.

It has the highest number of agronomists per capita on Earth.

Some people are making good money with their small restaurants, especially the ones they set up in their homes or as bed and breakfasts. There are parts that are so prosperous you would think you were in Europe.

They’ve eliminated rural poverty.

And best of all, Cuba is beating the US in life expectancy and infant mortality! Pathetic! Cubans live longer and have less important mortality than we do, a country that is nine times wealthier!

Tell me again how great US capitalism is. We are an order of magnitude wealthier, and they’re beating us in essential health figures. US capitalism is pathetic! We’re getting our butt kicked by some tiny, impoverished, blockaded island! If our system is so great, why can’t we beat Cuba?

Alt Left: Cornel West Is a Great Man

Alt Left: Fascism and National Socialism: An Attempt at Some Definitions

Fascism:  An Attempt at a Definition

You can define a fascist country as an ultranationalist ethnic nationalist nation founded on a blood and soil mindset with an ideology based on Lazarus, the bird that rises from the flames. In fascism, there is a nationbuilding effort whereby the nation is seen to have fallen apart, typically by too much liberalism, pacifism, degeneracy, chaos, or economic problems.

The fascist comes in saying that they are going to bring back the glorious days of the founders of the land. So from the ruins of the present, the past will be mined to create a national myth and this mythos will be used to rise the country up from the ashes of ruin to the greatness it deserves.

Typically the unfortunate present moment is blamed on others, minorities or other countries that are singled out for hostility and blame.

Military missions of conquest are not unusual as the nationalist myth often if not always says that the borders of the land used to extend further than they do. Hence the project is Greater Ruritanian and reuniting all of the former Ruritanian lands which were stolen by the Other, the non-Ruritanians. In addition, if there are any Ruritanians residing in nearby lands, the project will be to reunite those areas with the homeland.

Fascism is typically conservative as the present moment is seen as tainted with modernism and democracy, both of which are associated with cultural degeneracy. Traditional sex roles are reinstated and the woman’s role is resigned to the kitchen, church, and home.

There is an exaltation of heroism, aggression, raw power, and even brutality, often in defense of the homeland. There is a self-sacrificing tendency where to die for one’s land is the greatest honor. And there is an exaltation of violence, usually for repression or invasions but sometimes in a Sorelian sense, violence simply for the sake of violence because violence is seen to have a mythic cleansing power especially over the permissive, excessively free, and degenerate present.

The military is exalted, battles of the past are discussed and exalted,  and often defeats are spun as victories as in the Battle of Kosovo with the Serbs in 1389. Men are exalted to be masculine, heroic, and sacrificing. Effeminate men, sexual outliers, crossdressers, and homosexuals are typically persecuted as grotesque and degenerate aberrations from tradition sex roles, which are seen as nearly divine.

School curricula are rewritten and often you end up with textbooks full of lies from front to end as in the nationbuilding in Poland after WW2. Statues are built to the greats of the land. Often there is Garden of Eden effect such that humanity is seen to have arisen exactly in the country.

At other times, the land is seen as the center of the Earth around which all other lands revolve. Examples in the Land of the Rising Sun in Japan and the land of the Four Winds in China.

The Land of the Rising Sun implies that when the sun rises in the morn, it first shines on Japan, hence Japan is the first nation to be brightened and in a sense becomes a satellite around which other lands revolve.

The Land of the Four Winds in China refers to the belief that the north, south, west, and east winds all arise directly in China itself and flow outward to the rest of the world from there. So China is the source or ground zero for all of the wind and moving air in the land. It’s literally the center of the world if not of the universe.

Trumpism is indeed fascism. Make America Great Again. See how that is talking about the ruins of the present and going back to an earlier time when the nation was great.+

A lot of out and out nationalist lying about history, minorities, languages – Hell, you name it, nationalists lie about it – usually goes into the construction of this mythological great past.

It’s called blood and soil because the ethnicity is seen as the “sons of the soil” or land itself, land that has been fertilized with the blood of the ancestors especially in n nationalist impulses where they fought invaders or minorities.

The blood also refers to the fact that there is only one ethnicity in fascism.

In Ruritania, all of the minorities have to become Ruritanians. Stop wearing minority clothing, practicing minority festivals and and lifestyles, give up the minority religion and especially stop  speaking the minority language.

Hence all minorities will become Ruritanians simply by assimilating to Ruritanian culture. Standard fascism gives minorities a break in that they are merged with the ethnic group even though they are a different ethnicity.

Racist Fascism or National Socialism

Racist fascism or Nazism is much worse because the minorities don’t stand a chance as their very blood itself itself is tainted, hence there is no way to escape minority status and become a Ruritanian. They are dealt with by segregation, expulsion, or murder, which can be genocidal.

They will be repressed, arrested, beaten, impoverished, uneducated, and often the state will move Ruritanians into their neighborhoods to drown them out. They will be tortured, their homes will be demolished and their neighborhoods will be bulldozed. Often their churches and monuments are targeted for destruction.

The intelligentsia  and the leadership of the land may be attacked and even killed, sometimes in  large numbers. This is done so the minority will be leaderless and even without thinkers.

They will also be killed, often in small numbers, but sometimes in much larger numbers, into the tens and hundreds of thousands or even a million as in National Socialist Rwanda. There were millions, 15 million, exterminated by the Nazis in World War 2. You keep hearing about the 6 million Jews, but did you realize that another 9 million people were also murdered? Well, they don’t count because they’re not Jews so they’re not special, as only Jews are special or “chosen.”

They are also often expelled from the land as their presence is seen as a literal toxin upon the body politic. Hence words like cockroaches, vermin, rats, infection, disease, virus, plague are used to describe the minority group. Nazis referred to Jews as rats and vermin and disease metaphors were also often used.

It is often stated that the nation has an “infection” – that is, it is literally infected with the minority group, which is a plague upon the land itself. Look around you and see how people act during plagues. Also, what do you do with a tumor? You cut it out. So you cut the minority out of the land, slicing them away with a scalpel. How do you treat an infection. You pour drugs at it to kill the infectious agents. Hence mass killing  of minorities is can be seen as germicidal and even a measure of positive public health.

The dehumanization makes it easier to mistreat them or even kill them.  After all, in Rwanda they were not killing humans. They were literally killing cockroaches. Six foot tall cockroaches with two arms and two legs, but cockroaches nonetheless. What do you do if you see a cockroach? You stomp on it and grind it into the floor. Hence “grinding the minority into the floor” is transferred to the minority group and mass murder is nothing more than squashing bugs on floors. Human bugs but bugs nonetheless.

Alt Left: Repost: Flynn Effect in North Africans/Turks Migrated To West Europe

From an article by Philippe Rushton, hereditarian, a revelation about yet another instance of skyrocketing IQ increases in the second generation born in the West after migrating from the less developed areas.

Previously, we noted that the children Jamaican immigrants to the UK (IQ = 71) have IQ’s of 85-86, typically within a single generation. That is a gain of 14.5 IQ points merely by being raised in the West. Hereditarians have offered many rationales for this. The usual is that the Jamaican immigrants were already very bright anyway (as we will see with Moroccans and Turks in Netherlands, this is not true).

Another is that Jamaicans in the UK are very heavily bred in with Whites to the point where they may be only 1/2 White. This is not true – UK Jamaicans are only 1

The children of Indian and Pakistani immigrants to the UK (IQ = 81.5) have IQ’s ranging from 92 (Rushton) to 96 (a figure I prefer). Call it 94. This is a gain of 12.5 IQ points merely by being raised in the West. The counter-argument here once again is that this group is self-selected.

Taken together, the children of Jamaican and East Indian immigrants see rises of 13.5 IQ points merely by being raised in the West. It is true that beyond the initial jump, we are not seeing more rises.

However, a strong initial jump is perfectly consonant with a hyperinjection of massive intellectual stimulation, good health care, proper diet, etc. This is probably all related to a higher standard of living. Higher standards of living seem to be somehow translating into long-term rises in IQ. The mechanisms can be debated, and we have done so on this blog.

Education, a massively-stimulating environment (computers, cell phones, TV, movies), proper nutrition, good health care, and myriad other things have been suggested, but the mechanisms for the rises are still somewhat mysterious.

Now, via Rushton, we have yet more evidence of a Flynn Effect in immigrants to the West. First generation Moroccans and Turks in Netherlands had IQ’s of 81. This is low. The Moroccan norm IQ is 84 and the Turkish norm IQ is 90. So, contrary to the argument that only the very brightest immigrants are going to the West, it seems instead that the less bright immigrants are arriving instead.

The second generation has IQ’s of 89. 89 is around the Turkish average, but it is 5 points above the Moroccan average. At any rate, it shows a Flynn gain of 8 points simply by migrating to the West. Rushton tries to explain this away somehow, but he doesn’t do a good job of it.

The evidence for massive IQ gains in second generation immigrants to the West is now becoming overwhelming and it is going to be harder and harder for hereditarians to explain this stuff away.

Comparison of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants to the West and the resulting Flynn Effect gains, apparently solely by being born and raised in the West. The common factor behind rising IQ’s in the West may be related to rising standards of living.

                   1st     2nd     Gain
UK Jamaicans       71      85.5    14.5
UK East Indians    81.5    94      12.5
ND Moroccans/Turks 81      88      7
Average            78      89      11.5

Alt Left: Repost: Mao Messed Up

I think an assessment of Mao ought to be made on a scientific basis, beyond politics. Anti-Communists and rightwingers have an extremely poor record as far documenting this sort of thing, so I almost want to dismiss everything they say.

Probably the best sources would be leftwingers or even Communists who also happen to be some sort of China scholars. To the detriment of Mao, a number of Leftists, socialists and Communists who are also China scholars are starting to contribute some very negative things about Mao.

The good side is quite clear. Life expectancy doubled under Mao, from 35 to 70, from 1949 to 1976, in only 27 years. Supporters of fascism and Hitler are challenged to provide evidence that Hitler’s rule benefited anyone. Nazism was at core a death cult. Life expectancy collapsed in Germany under Hitler and in all of the regions that were occupied by Nazis. Nazism wasn’t about improving life for the common man at all; it was about war and endless war and endless extermination of the less fit.

Communism, with the exception of Pol Pot’s rule, where life expectancy collapsed in Cambodia and 1.7 million died, has been quite a bit different. Most Communist regimes have killed people, but at the same time seem to have saved many lives, often millions of lives. So it gets hard to tally things up.

I suppose pro-Communists would say that the many deaths were necessary in order to save so many lives. That’s an interesting argument and ought to be taken up. Was there a way to save so many lives without killing millions of people? I hope there would be, but I’m not sure.

Pre-China Mao was vastly deadlier than China under Mao. The life expectancy figures make this clear. Czarist Russia was 3 times deadlier than the USSR under Lenin and Stalin. This is where this “greatest killers of all time” crap runs into the mud. If the death rate was 3 times higher per year under the Czar than under Stalin, just how was Stalin the worst killer of all time?

Same with Mao. I don’t have good figures, but once again, it looks like Nationalist China in the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s was 3 times deadlier per year, or maybe more, than Maoist China. If the death rate collapsed under Mao, how was he the worst killer ever? The truth is there are plenty of ways to kill a man. You can kill him with a bullet or by sending him to a camp, or you can kill him by disease and lack of food, the silent and uncounted method that the capitalists prefer.

Nevertheless, an accounting of deaths under Mao needs to be done. Just glancing at the data here, it’s already looking like Mao was way worse than Stalin. Way worse.

The initial consolidation of power in China was brutal. Whether the landlords were killed by the party or by the peasants is not that relevant. Mao said that 700,000 landlords were killed, and even he thought that was too many. China scholars think it is higher, from 1-4 million. I would dismiss the 4 million figure, but anywhere from 700,000-3 million is possible. Further research is needed here.

The Anti-Counterrevolutionary Drive of 1950 followed, an attempt to uncover supporters of the Nationalists and counterrevolutionaries. Tens of thousands were killed, or possibly up to a million, let’s call it 20,000-1 million. Further research is needed.

Anti-Christian Campaigns of the 1950’s. These were launched against mostly Christians, but also other religions. “Many thousands” are said to have died. Definitely some further work is necessary here.

Anti-Counterrevolutionary Campaign of 1953. Mao said, “9

The Great Leap Forward Famine happened between 1959-1961. Unlike the fake Holodomor of 1932-33, it’s looking more and more like most of the blame for this horrible catastrophe can be laid at the feet of Mao himself. The man was a fanatic. He was told that there was a famine, and in early 1959, he backtracked on some of his crazy ideas, while he blamed subordinates for the famine.

Then there was the Lushan Conference in May 1959. Mao accused Peng Dehuai, a critic of the Great Leap, of conspiring against him. Peng was purged, and the Great Leap went was ordered to go ahead full speed. If there had been no Lushan Conference, there would have been no famine. There followed two years of catastrophe, in which there was overprovisioning of grain from the peasants which was then stored in warehouses in cities, where it rotted or was exported for scarce foreign currency.

Much of the problem was that local officials were wildly exaggerating harvests, hence the overprovisioning at the state level. They thought that with bumper harvests, they could take grain from the countryside to the cities without problems. But there were no bumper harvests. Harvests had collapsed. Finally in 1961, the state figured out that it had screwed up royally and started mass importing grain. Caravans of grain trucks flowed to the countryside, and the famine was over. But many were too weak to even walk to the trucks to get the food.

Mao is blamed for an atmosphere of terror that led underlings to fake bumper crops where none had occurred. With no democracy in the party, no one wanted to contradict Mao. Mao himself had some utterly idiotic ideas, which he was allowed to implement due to lack of party democracy. After the Great Leap, the party realized it had screwed up bad. Even Mao knew that. The Cultural Revolution was in a lot of ways Mao’s attempt to regain face after getting egg on his face in the Great Leap.

As far as deaths during the Great Leap, this is still up in the air. Even Maoists admit that there were 15 million excess deaths in the period. Some of the higher figures use preposterous accounting techniques whereby people who had never even been born were counted as “deaths.” Tell me how that works. Nevertheless, the figure may be higher than 15 million. At any rate, it’s the worst famine in modern world history, and it’s a permanent blot on Mao’s record.

The Cultural Revolution was sheer insanity. Many received poor educations as schools were shut down. Many cultural relics and buildings were destroyed, and a good part of China’s cultural heritage was smashed up.

People were killed and hounded all over China for little or no reason. Red Guards rampaged all over China, torturing, humiliating, imprisoning and murdering all sorts of people, including local party officials, teachers and even university professors. When someone was hounded, the humiliation went on every day and there was no escape. No one would dare to come to your side, not even your spouse. Deng Xiaoping’s son was tossed out of a window and paralyzed from the waist down.

Red Guard factions battled each other in cities across China with weapons looted from local Army depots. Sometimes Army units joined in. Red Guards in one city would attack Red Guards in another city. Women and children were murdered and kids were even buried alive. Enemies were cannibalized in one area. Ridiculous, insane and anarchic, right? Sure.

In some parts of China, victims of the Red Guards are still angry. The Red Guards are still around, older now, but still living in the villages alongside their victims. Their former victims hate them. Lawsuits have been brought against former Red Guards, but the courts have thrown them out.

From a Communist POV, one of the most tragic things about all of these persecutions and killings, when one reads the details of the individual cases, is that many of the victims were not even counterrevolutionaries. Many were dedicated, hard-working Communists and revolutionaries, often devoted Maoists. Lord knows why they were purged and victimized.

The insanity and anarchy of the Cultural Revolution is one reason why the Party wants to keep a tight reign on power. China descends pretty quickly into wild and deadly anarchy.

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Chinese Communist Party publications and the theses and dissertations by students at Chinese universities, which tend to toe the party line. As a rule, the Cultural Revolution is regarded as a big mistake by ultra-Left forces, and the Party definitely wants to avoid such messes in the future. I’ve even some some Party critiques of the Great Leap, though not much is said about that. It’s clear that the high ranks of the Party regard the Great Leap as a disaster.

There continue to be some very serious human rights abuses in China, as this 89 page report from Human Rights Watch reports. Even from the POV of a Communist, some of the abuses of these petitioners seem just flat out wrong. There doesn’t seem to be any legitimate Communist reason to be attacking a lot of these poor petitioners.

Surely in a Communist system, petitioners should have the right to protest uranium pollution of rivers, corrupt officials abusing their posts and stealing land, etc. In what way are these folks counterrevolutionaries?

But it’s not true that everyone who protests in China goes to jail. There are around 100 public protests every single day in China, often involving large groups. Only a few of them get arrested, harassed, beaten, tortured or jailed. But I guess you never know when your card will come up.

The fact that some of the harshest critiques of Mao’s crimes, excesses and stupidities are coming out of the Chinese Communist Party itself shows that slamming Mao can be done within a socialist, Leftist or Communist framework.

Can it be done in a Maoist framework? This I’m not so sure of. The Party will not come out and make public its findings on Mao as the USSR did with Stalin because the party continues to wave the banner of Mao and practically rules under his name and visage. It’s possible that slamming Mao would so delegitimize the party that it might be fatal for the CCP. It’s a tough call. For the anti-Semites, I have a homework assignment for you. Since Mao was a Communist and Communism is Jewish, obviously Mao was a Jew. Please uncover the secret Jewish connections of Mao and his closest supporters in the CCP.

The 90 IQ Person

I know that your average White person attending a Trump rally had an IQ of 90 though. That’s within the normal range of course, but it’s in the Low Normal rather than the High Normal range. But as I note, even people in the Low Normal range can seriously kick ass in life. Check out James Oglivy, IQ 94.

Portrait of a 90 IQ Person – the Mexican-American or Hispanic American

It’s also right hanging on the bear edge of normal. To give you an idea of what a 90 IQ person acts like, your average Hispanic in the US has a 90 IQ. So picture your average Mexican or Mexican-American in the US, and there you have it. That’s 10 points lower than US Whites, and those 10 points are glaringly obvious when you spend a lot of time around them. I often characterize Hispanics as “not stupid at all, but not that smart either.” They’re not “dumb.” Your average Black is actually dumb or appears that way. Your average Hispanic instead seems “not dumb, but not that smart either.”

People did remark on the average 90 IQ of Trump rally goers. Honestly, that 90 IQ is probably absolutely normal for your average working class White person, so it all adds up. They probably have IQ’s around that level.

Limitations of a 90 IQ

A 90 IQ can limit you in life. You are going to have one Hell of a time getting a university degree at that IQ, and indeed, most people in that range do not have a BA. But quite a few have qualified for shorter 1 or 2 year trade degrees and credentials, which are generally easier than a BA. Just forget about a Masters or a Doctorate. Forget about being a physician or attorney, or anything that requires a doctorate (dentist, pharmacist, veterinarian). But many other fields are wide open to someone like that.

Guess What? Criminals Are Stupid! Duh.

On the other hand, your average White American has an IQ of 100.

Incarcerated Whites have IQ’s 10 points below the average at 90. This is mirrored in other races. The average Black IQ is 87, but the average incarcerated Black has an IQ of 77. That’s pretty damn low.

This just goes to show you that not only are criminals basically stupid, the very idea of being a criminal in the first place (and especially a lousy enough one to get caught) is pretty damn stupid.

Even a lot of serial killers are not very smart.

The Pig Farm Killer in Canada has an IQ of 81. The famous duo of Henry Lucas and Otis Toole, who killed far fewer victims than they claimed (Lucas claimed hundreds of victims) were none too smart. This is apparent in any interview with them.

I doubt if the very prolific Black serials just caught have high IQ’s. Samuel Little comes to mind, along with Coral Watts. I think Watts had a 73 IQ.But he killed ~100 women and got away with it for a very long time.

Sure, there are smart crooks, but it’s exaggerated. White collar fraudsters also tend to be intelligent. In general, smarter criminals tend to get away with their crimes a lot longer, and quite a few had long criminal careers uncaught during which they piled up a lot of victims. Ted Bundy, IQ 135, is a good example. Edmund Kemper, the matricide killer in Santa Cruz, has a 145 IQ. There are videos of him on the Net. You can watch them and see how a 145 IQ  person comes across. He seems pretty damn smart and especially, he’s very fast with a rapid brain.

Alt Left: America Is Now an Exact Replica of a Latin American Rightwing Authoritarian State

The US is now a Latin American country. This is the perfect model of a Latin American extreme rightwing regime. The only thing missing is the death squads. I’m sure they’ll be coming along soon enough now.

Otherwise it’s a complete replication, all the way down to a very White rightwing ruling class who lord it over the browner proles.

Corrupt/stolen elections? Check.

Corrupt judiciary? Check.

Culture of lies? Check.

Culture of extreme militarism? Check.

Culture of violent anti-Communist fanaticism? Check.

Both an armed Left (leftwing guerrillas = antifa) and right (death squads/brownshirts/guarimbas = Proud Boys) engaging in violence against each other? Check.

Bread and circuses in the ruling class controlled media? Check.

Distracting the workers with fake divisive issues like abortion? Check.

Threats of rightwing coups, military or otherwise? Check.

A rightwing that literally believes that the Left has no right to rule? Check.

Frequent street violence and rioting? Check.

Sense of living in an alternate reality of nothing but lies? Check.

State rule by big capitalists? Check.

Increasingly militant, radical, and even armed Left? Check.

Increasingly radical and even militant educational sector, especially at the university level? Check.

Fake leftwing parties that only mask the rightwing authoritarian state = Democrats? Check.

Politicized, very rightwing military? Check.

Increasingly incendiary political discourse on both sides? Check.

Economic war waged against left governments in order to destroy the economy? Check.

Extreme and irrational conspiracy mindset on the part of the Right? Check.

Extreme rightwing that pretends to be populist and pro-worker in order to get elected? Check.

Frequent death threats against politicians? Check.

Belligerent, pro-imperialist foreign policy? Check.

Police/surveillance state? Check.

Absence of legal leftwing newspapers, newsmagazines, TV/radio stations? Check.

Alt Left: About That White Ethnostate The White Nationalists Want

She’s in Parties: All White state/country

Good luck attracting White liberals or Jews. How many Whites would support an all White state?

Can I get an amen?

Amen!

I think maybe 6-

They will all be xenophobloic racists, that’s for damn sure.  And extreme racists as far as racism goes. Say racism is on a spectrum, especially nowadays with theses fool definitions. These White nationalists are ultra-racists. They’re wildly racist. They’re so racist that they are so dramatically out of touch with everyday society as to be near cartoon caricatures.

The overwhelming majority of them will be reactionaries too, and particularly crazy ones at that. Not only that but almost all of them will support Jim Crow, the Confederates in the Civil War, apartheid in Rhodesia and South Africa, and the Nazis in WW2. They will all say slavery is no big deal. They will all oppose Brown vs. the Board of Education, and the Civil Rights, the Voting Rights, and Housing Rights Acts.

They will all support legal segregation and oppose all integration on the dubious basis of freedom of association. They all (even the White nationalist liberals, and there are a few) want to wipe out all social programs, which they call welfare. To them all social programs just means taking the hard-earned money of Whites and giving it out in freebies to a bunch of stupid, criminal, worthless niggers and beaners. They don’t see that many Whites use these programs too. In fact, if you mention that Whites use these programs, they will all say you are lying and laugh at you.

And they will be anti-liberal and especially anti-Communist fanatics. They will basically be fascists, in other words. Almost all White nationalists are pretty much fascists.

In a word, these people are wildly, cartoonishly ultra-racist fanatics. They are not good for Black people! They are not good for most Hispanics. They are not even any good for Asians. They are especially bad for Black people, for whom they reserve much of their ire. No Black person should have anything to do with these maniacs.  They hate you. Every single one of you. Trust me. I know these people very, very well.

TIL that everyone who likes being White, like the commenter and me, has to be an extreme rightwing fanatic! Can’t you like being White and be a Centrist? Or a liberal? A progressive? A socialist? Hell, even a Communist? Why not?

Why all “Whites” have to be ultra-rightwing fanatics is something I will never understand.

Alt Left: Sadism and Creativity in Society Are Related to Economic and Societal Structure

Another interesting post from commenter Brian. He ties societal sadism and Social Darwinism into economic changes and ties societal creativity into societal structure, in particular its degree of flexibility.

I completely agree that there is a sadistic tendency in people that is expressed toward those deemed socially inferior. I’ve seen it and, having been in foster homes for a time growing up, experienced it.

I’ve often wondered at what seems to be a mean-spiritedness of the culture in general during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and if this mean-spirited character was linked to industrialization and to the growth of severe inequalities in society, both class and race based.

Those inequalities existed before the industrial revolution, but industrialization marked a new level of complexity in social organization, and the rise of many “new men” as elites. In the transformation of a society toward a new economic system and set of social relations, old inequalities are exacerbated, and the new elites who have risen to the top seem eager to shore up their position by waging a reactionary crackdown on dissent and calls to moderate their avarice.

The Social Darwinist, let-the-undeserving-poor-rot, bootstrap mentality of the upper class was encouraged in the general population by those who had risen to the top as a way to justify their behavior, and it had the effect of drawing out the worst tendencies in human nature in society at large. It was a bully’s ideology and encouraged ordinary people to let out their inner sadism, which ordinarily – without authoritative encouragement – would have been more repressed.

This is how you get gleeful lynchings, the hanging of elephants from a giant chain, the proliferation of freak shows where people can satisfy their inner monster by laughing at folks with severe genetic deformities.

I wonder if this witches’ brew of inhumanity cooked up by the propagandists of the new robber baron class was a factor precipitating World War I. Indeed the displacements of industrialization along with repression of the working class by disconnected and haughty elites and the whole toxic culture this gave rise to poisoned Europe just as badly as it had the United States.

The periods of the cruelest treatment of ordinary people tend to coincide with episodes of great economic expansion, the rise of new men and new families to positions nearer the top of society, and the complexification of society in general.

Another example is a century earlier in Britain, around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was the very beginning of the industrial revolution – or the first industrial revolution, as opposed to the second which I was referring to above – and began with the Enclosure Acts that forced peasants off the common lands so they could become the new urban class of industrial laborers.

During this time the Bloody Code reached its bloodiest extreme and more than two hundred crimes could be punished by death, even as a number of minors were executed for rather petty crimes. These were the classic Dickensian times, and they are marked by great new opportunities for moneymaking that attracted a class of people willing to subject other humans to appalling degradations for their own profit.

When we think of the medieval period, we often think of brutal tortures. But in fact such tortures, while they occurred in the medieval period, were used far more extensively in the Renaissance and early modern times than in the medieval period as was the death penalty in general.

Once again, what we find at that time is a transformation in the socioeconomic system, specifically moving away from feudalism in Western Europe and the rise of a new middle merchant class across much of Europe, starting in Italy. Perhaps the use of such punishments is meant to break the spirits of those who suffer most during such transitional periods so they are less of a threat to the elites, especially the new and very insecure/paranoid elites.

I suspect that what we see today, with the mean-spirited attitude of the neoliberal age – the expansions of the prison system going back to the 70s and 80s (the very dawn of the neoliberal age) and the electronics and digital boom – is another such period of social complexification, economic transformation, dispossession of whole sections of society and even of regions in general like the rust belt, and the rise of many new men (and women now) into the ranks of the ruling class.

For around forty years I’ve been seeing among the upper middle classes and above is an increase in callousness, selfishness towards and even dehumanization of various groups of people, from Blacks to working class (now often poor) Whites and anyone who isn’t at least upper middle class.

To address the idea that such periods help to breed out criminal genes from a population, I do not doubt this is true. These phases of societal transformation seem to yield a more docile population on the other end of them. But I think this process will eventually eliminate the spark of genius in our population and in the West in general.

It largely has eliminated this spark already. At least in the realm of the social sciences of fundamental thought like philosophy, modern European philosophy having seen its best days some two to three centuries ago. Other fields that are downstream of basic thought have been able to flourish since then, but they will stagnate, and some are stagnating already.

Going back to civilizational and race theory, the difference between White civilization and Asian seems to be that White civilization has been far more creative for centuries now, despite Asians having higher average IQ’s. The spark of genius requires a high IQ but also creativity and originality, which mostly comes from people who are off-kilter and don’t easily fit into a very conventional, static society that looks down on new ideas or unusual behavior.

You, Robert, have mentioned before that many very intelligent and interesting people work in odd jobs and have little to show for their talents. I think such people have struggled in any society, but they struggle more as society becomes more closed-minded and starts distrusting anyone who isn’t stable, conventional, and predictable; in other words, someone who fits ready social expectations.

A lot of academics are very bright, but few have that special spark of brilliance in them, and if anything, having that is a detriment for someone in academia today.

As our society stiffens we will likely become less creative, whereas in the past few centuries, we’ve seemed to be able to accept originality even if many geniuses are not exactly paragons of stability. I am not saying that Asians are without creativity or the spark of genius, just that as their populations became more controlled and regimented, they exhibited fewer instances of real inspiration.

We are moving towards greater control and the consequent heavy formalization of life which sucks the naturalness out of life. We should probably expect relative cultural stagnation, at least compared to what we’ve been experiencing for centuries in the West.

The problem with African peoples and societies is an excess of naturalness or primal behavior, which, while it is energetic and creative, lacks the mental and social channels to develop it.

Higher intelligence on the other hand takes that same primal energy the Africans have in excess and focus that energy into socially accepted interests and goals. The problem with Asian societies is there is a serious lack of primal behavior, though I suspect some genetic potential for creativity remains in their populations and could be freed up if they loosened up a bit.

As to our current period of neoliberalism in the West, I think whatever good it did in juicing the development of the new electronic and digital economy is already finished and have been since probably 2008. At this point neoliberalism’s effects on society are very detrimental and could even touch off serious convulsions across Western society if it isn’t moderated.

Continuing on this path can only benefit a small handful of elites and only if they are able to maintain control. But they are gamblers, so they will try, and they seem unlikely to concede much to the population for the sake of reconciliation.

Alt Left: Why Do Racist Whites Report So Many Negative Interactions with Black People?

There are all these racist Whites who claim that their experiences with Blacks are usually negative and hostile. I don’t like to blame people for their own rejection, but these people are super-racists. Do they bury that when they deal with a Black person? Or do they just let it all hang out. I worked in Black schools for many years.

I usually tried to get any negative thoughts or feelings about Blacks (of course I have them too) out of my head when I went in to teach them. It wasn’t hard to feel good about Black teachers, administrators and even campus cops. I never saw any cases of them acting like “niggers.” They weren’t even “incompetent,” a line you hear all the time. You have to get advanced degrees to even get a job like that and then you have to take some pretty hard tests to get out (CBEST). In other words, most of the incompetents are weeded out right away.

I’d clear my mind and try to only have positive thoughts towards these people. It wasn’t a lie and they deserved it anyway. But that’s how you get along with people like that. Even if you have a class full of ghetto Blacks who might not act real fantastic, as long as they are halfway civilized, it’s pretty easy to just think positive thoughts about them. You can’t go into an environment like that thinking, “Goddamn these niggers.”

It’s just not going to work. This gets a lot harder in middle school and elementary school where so many of them act bad. But they didn’t all act bad. I even used to go out and buy tacos for my class for the kids who didn’t get free lunch (and they had no money for lunch anyway). I bought it for the cool ones, and they weren’t rare. Even in wild middle school classes, I’d try to focus on the ones who acted good and just think positive thoughts towards them.

I can’t help but think these racists’ racist feelings towards Blacks are obvious when they deal with Blacks and the Blacks just throw it right back at them. My experience was if you treat Black people with “unconditional positive regard,” they’re quite positive right back to you.

Alt Left: Against Affirmative Action and Lowering of Standards

I absolutely oppose all mandated affirmative action by the state and and all lowering of standards on testing to let more non-Whites in.

I’ve had to take tests all my life. Had to take an SAT test. Had to take tests to graduate college with a BA. Had to take tests to get into grad school. Had to take more tests to get into education grad school. Had to take more tests to get a teaching job. Went back to grad school. Had take tests to even get through the program. Had to take a truly murderous test to get my Master’s Degree.

I don’t think people realize how significant those tests are. I had to pass them. If I didn’t pass them, I flunked. I wasn’t admitted to the program. I didn’t get the degree. There was no coddling, no “Oh Bob is disadvantaged and part of some dumb race of people, so we have to lower standards for him.” Hell no. I don’t pass and I’m gone. It’s do or die. Pass or fail. And I passed, without anybody lowering one damned standard to let me through. If I had to go through all that crap, the rest of  you have to go through the exact same thing.

I never got a break or a lower barrier to jump over. Why the Hell should you? Because you’re dumb? Bad answer. Because you’re part of a dumb race of humans? Bad answer. You’re not all dumb.

I see smart Blacks – Black attorneys and physicians, Blacks doing every high level job Whites do, every time I turn on my TV. In my recent courtroom adventures, I saw four Black attorneys, two men and two women. They graduated law school. And they passed the damn bar. If they can do it, maybe you can do it. If you can’t do it, don’t cop out and blame racism. Go into some field where you can do well. It’s not that hard. Come on, people.

Another Republican Lie: The War on Poverty Failed, Made Blacks Poorer, and Much Worse Behaved

Doug: Jason, the compassion comes after we see facts clearly. I’ve mentioned countless times that we need vocation schools at the high school level to train those kids that are not college-bound in some kind of useful profession.

The Left will never allow it because those schools would be about 1/2 Brown/Black and 1/2 White kids…in other words, too much for them to admit. Instead we keep denying the obvious. Teacher’s unions, a pillar of the Left, would also not allow it either. They literally don’t want any choice for kids–from charter schools to vocational schools.

Another rich example of compassion would be to admit that Johnson’s $21 trillion “War on Poverty” has not only failed but it’s INCREASED poverty amongst Black persons. At least 3

There’s TANF, Section 8 housing, Food stamps, Medicaid, AFDC, Head Start, hiring quotas, set-asides, and sharply lowered standards in police and fire departments and colleges and grad schools. “Free money” student loans that will never be repaid. We have free breakfasts for Black children and even free lunches.

Taken together, US Blacks live in a state of “custodial care” by Whites because they can’t take care of themselves.

Nothing has worked. Nothing ever will. This money is paid to the most unworthy people in the world by the most worthy people in the world. Until people take responsibility for themselves, families, and communities, nothing will ever work.

All this because our society cannot admit that Black intelligence is too low, they have a bad attitude, and have too little logic. Black criminality is far too high to support any higher level of civilization.

But what’s worse is that all this money and it’s perverse incentives (to break up marriages) has worsened Black life in America since 1964 and we can’t admit that either!

Since the start of the War on Poverty, black kids are not doing better in school, housing projects built for ghetto blacks are all slums (a complete lack of personal responsibility), drugs, gun violence, incarcerations, STD infections, and abortions remain at epidemic levels. Black high school completion rates are about the same as ever, ie., <5

Black culture is actually much worse now. Black culture is in virtual collapse with 7

“Reparations” has help cause a complete and utter Black cultural collapse.

The result of the cultural collapse is evident from appalling crime statistics, 7

You can throw all the money in the world at social programs, but laziness, addiction, bad attitudes and decisions, low intelligence, little impulse control, and high levels of violence, they will override any and all social programs. Of course the Left never wants to hear about personal responsibility when they are the most irresponsible. They want to blame our economic system and take more and more of your tax dollars and piss that money away on programs that aren’t working.

Black kids will never be hired when they often can’t speak or dress right and have no self-respect, no discipline and no education. This is the problem today, and it was the problem yesterday and 50 years ago. No amount of money or bureaucracy can fix this. Why don’t we admit that we’ve failed?

Instead, you get 10

First, the parts where I agree with you.

hiring quotas, set-asides, sharply lowered standards in police and fire departments. Sharply lowered standards for college and grad school admissions. “Free money” student loans that will never be repaid. We have free breakfasts for black children and even free lunches.

There aren’t any hiring quotas or set-asides. They’re mostly illegal. I know Affirmative Action is banned for the federal government. I also know it is banned here in California, the most liberal state in the country. Some private businesses and corporations have their own goals or whatever, but no one is forcing them, and all evidence indicates that this has not caused a lot of problems for US businesses. If it did they would stop doing it.

Standards have not been lowered for much of anything, although they are still being lowered for Blacks and Browns to get into elite universities. Standards have been lowered for the Bar Exam in California, but that applies to everyone. Most tests to get a police or fireman job are still pretty hard.

But I absolutely oppose all mandated affirmative action by the state and and all lowering of standards on testing to let more non-Whites in. I’ve had to take tests all my life. Had to take an SAT test. Had to take tests to graduate college with a BA. Had to take tests to get into grad school. Had to take more tests to get into education grad school. Then I had to take more tests to get a teaching job. Then I went back to grad school. I had take tests to even get through the program. Then I had to take a truly murderous test to get my Master’s Degree.

I don’t think people realize how significant those tests are. I had to pass them. If I didn’t pass them, I flunked. I wasn’t admitted to the program. I didn’t get the degree. There was no coddling, no, oh Bob is disadvanted and part of some dumb race of people so we have to lower standards for him. Hell no. I don’t pass and I’m gone. It’s do or die. Pass or fail. And I passed, without anybody lowering one damned standard to let me through. If I had to go through all that crap, the rest of  you have to go through the exact same thing. I never got a break or a lower barrier to jump over.

Why the Hell should you? Because you’re dumb? Bad answer. Because you’re part of a dumb race of humans? Bad answer. You’re not all dumb. I see smart Blacks, Black attorneys, physicians, Blacks doing every high level job Whites do, every time I turn on my TV. In my recent courtroom adventures, I saw four Black attorneys, two male and two female. They graduated law school. And they passed the damn bar. If they can do it, maybe you can do it. If you don’t do it, don’t cop out and blame racism. Go into some field where you can do well. It’s not that hard.

I’ve mentioned countless times that we need vocation schools at the high school level to train those kids that are not college-bound toward some kind of useful profession.

The Left will never allow it because those schools would be about 1/2 brown/ black and 1/2 white kids…in other words, too much for them to admit.

I definitely agree with you here, but I have no solution to this whatsoever.

Teacher’s unions, a pillar of the Left, would also not allow it either. They literally don’t want any choice for kids–from charter schools to vocational schools.

Charter schools don’t work. That’s now conclusively proven. The idea is that with charter schools, we get rid of the teacher’s unions, and then the kids will perform so much better. In other words, somehow teacher’s unions cause kids to fail in school!

It didn’t work because getting rid of teachers’ unions and presumably cutting their pay and benefits doesn’t make teachers work harder (Shocking!), and getting rid of teachers’ unions doesn’t make students perform better (Duh!). Teachers’ unions could care less about vocational classes. I taught school for many years. I met many vocational teachers. No one cares about them and their classes. Nobody wants to get rid of them.

Since the start of the war on poverty, black kids are not doing better in school…

A lot of falsehoods here. Black achievement has skyrocketed since the War on Poverty. Blacks have closed 1/3 of the achievement gap. Black Computer Science students saw their scores improve every year through the 2010’s. Black IQ’s skyrocketed since the War on Poverty. Their IQ’s are now 16.5 points higher than they were in 1965. Incredible!

Now we have “flash mob robberies” and “knockout assaults” that are overwhelmingly black crimes.

Anti-White flash mobs and the knockout game are not going on much anymore that I know of. That seems to have been a few years ago.

There are two groups of Blacks. One is ghetto culture, maybe 1/2 of Blacks. Obviously this culture is failed in all sorts of ways, but I can’t see any way to improve things. Surely cutting off all their money and making them vastly poorer won’t help a thing.

The other group is middle class Blacks, which may be up to 5

Black culture is actually much worse now. Black culture is in virtual collapse, with 7

Why did the single parenthood rate skyrocket? Because this is how Black people act in a free society. You want them to act better? Ok, put them in chains again like under Jim Crow. That’s literally how you do it. The single parenthood rate supposedly rocketed up due to “welfare,” but Blacks already had welfare since 1935. The Great Society didn’t increase welfare payments one nickel.

There were food stamps, Section 8, and Medicaid in the Great Society. So Black parenthood collapsed because now Black mothers could afford enough food to eat, to rent an apartment and to go to the doctor? Well, that’s just terrible! How dare they get all those things necessary for them to survive!

Black crime has collapsed. Sex crimes are 6

Section 8 housing

Section 8 rentals are not slums. They’re tearing down the housing projects. Now Section 8 is just a voucher that you take around to any renter who will take it. In this complex, a certain number of apartments are Section 8. I don’t know which they are or who rents them, but there are not many Blacks in this complex (thank God). It’s mostly Hispanics, a very few Whites, and yes, there are a few Blacks here and there and they’re at least a bit Ghetto too.

This is a beautiful complex, looks brand new, very well kept up. And there are Section 8 people here. The landlord does not tolerate any crap from anyone, and any tenants who act bad are quickly tossed.

The result of the cultural collapse is evident from appalling crime statistics, the fact that 7

AIDS cases are mostly Black? Well, those are mostly Black gay men I assume. Please tell me how the War on Poverty made Black gay men catch way more AIDS than non-Black men. By letting them survive? So if you let Black homosexuals survive, then they turn suicidal, go get fucked up the ass by a hundred guys, and get AIDS. Right? Just checking on your logic here.

STD rates are high among Blacks everywhere on Earth. A lot of Black people screw anything that moves, and they probably don’t take many precautions to keep from getting an STD. They also don’t go to the doctor like they ought to. This behavior is typical amongst the Ghetto Blacks. I’m not sure middle class Blacks are sexually any different from the rest of we White sluts and manwhores.

STD rates are extremely high in the Caribbean. They’re off the charts in Africa, where no Black gets a dime of social spending.

Fine. Take all the money away from social programs for Blacks and yell at them to take responsibility for themselves. Like millions of Bill Cosby’s like me haven’t been yelling at Black people every day for years to get their shit together? Is it working? I don’t think so. So your project to pull all that evil survival money away from Blacks so they have no money, no food, no place to live, and no way to go to the doctor.

And this will make them act better.

Yeah right.

And then you will holler at them, “We took all your free money away, now you’re on your own, and you have to get your shit together!” And Black people are suddenly going to act way better and get their shit together.

This is the Republican fantasy about Blacks, and it’s about as insane as the Left’s fantasies about Blacks seen via Critical Race Theory.

The Great Society was never intended to turn Black people into White people. All it was intended to do was to allow people of all races to survive at a basic subsistence level. Do you know what it is like to live on one of those programs? Or even be to poor enough to qualify for them. You never have any money. Life blows, every day, forever. You are living in a world of shit in a sense. Why the most pathetic people on Earth are the subject of all this vitriol is something I will never understand.

Head Start

Head Start is preschool. That’s all it is. It’s preschool for poor people. I know a guy who drove a bus in Eastern Pennsylvania. Part of his route was taking the kids to and from Head Start. 10

Also, if Head Start doesn’t work (false), then preschool doesn’t work. Then why on Earth are all these White parents so insistent on preschool for their kids? Are they are all stupid? What about all the studies showing how preschool benefits kids? They’re bad science? If preschool doesn’t work, a lot of Whites are wasting their money.

And it’s not true that Head Start doesn’t work. The intention was never to turn Black people into Norwegians and Japanese. That’s not going to happen (though my co-blogger is about as deferential and polite as a Japanese woman). You can’t turn Blacks into Whites, not with our present tools. The only thing we can do is try to turn Black people into the best versions of themselves that we can.

Let’s try another one. Head Start works great for White people, but it doesn’t work for niggers for “whatever X reasons.” Why doesn’t it work for them? And they are different species? Are they all born with an anti-preschool gene? Come on. What works for Whites works for Blacks too because Blacks are humans. What works for one group of humans works for another group of humans.

Head start works. Not only that but it’s cost effective. Blacks who go through Head Start are less likely to drop out of high school, be incarcerated, go on welfare, or have an IQ below 70 (so it even lifts IQ’s at the low end). It seems like what Head Start does is lift up the group of Blacks that fall on the tail end intellectually and behaviorally. It lifts up the bottom. And as I said, it even pays for itself.

TANF

Welfare (TANF) pays $300/month. You trying to tell me that women actually don’t keep men around because it’s so easy to live on $300/month? You’re crazy. Tell you what. You Republicans say it’s easy to live on $300/month. Cool. So you do it. Live on $300/month for a while and then get back to us and let us know how it went, ok?

A lot of White people use all these programs. The lie is that this is White people’s tax money going to a bunch of no-good niggers and beaners. However, lots of Whites are on all of these programs. 3

The biggest lie of all is that the War on Poverty failed. I’m sure people on food stamps are eating a lot better than they were. I am sure that people on Medicaid are getting more and better medical care than they were. I am sure that people on Section 8 are happy to be able to rent a place rather than being homeless. I am sure that women’s little kids on WIC are eating a lot better than they would.

None of these programs were intended to solve any basic problem with Black people or with any race of people. We weren’t throwing money at any problem. The programs were intended to give some very poor people a basic, very low, no-fun level of existence so they could survive.

There were some problems that got solved.

Food stamps was because a lot of people didn’t have enough money for food. Now they do. Problem solved.

Section 8 was for people too poor to even rent an apartment. Now they have a roof over their heads. Problem solved.

Welfare (which was started in 1935, not by the Great Society but anyway) was based on the idea that all children must be supported. By taking welfare away you are saying that kids have no right to be supported and they should just die if their mother is poor. It’s not about the mother at all. It’s all about the kids. Problem solved, basically.

Welfare didn’t cause single parenthood. We’ve had welfare since 1935 and there were no problems. It’s not some new thing that the Great Society started.

Medicaid was for people who could not afford to go to the doctor at all. Now they can. Problem solved.

WIC was initiated because a lot of women were so poor that their kids were not eating right. So it enabled them to buy food to feed their little kids. Problem solved.

All you people who object to WIC, I’ve got a question for you. You got a problem with little kids getting enough food to eat?

Not one nickel has been thrown at the education system to try to lift up Blacks and turn them into White people. All schools get the same amount of federal dollars. They are funded by local property taxes. If any money was spent it was simply to support schools in Black and Brown areas at a level similar to that of White areas , in other words, to provide Blacks and Browns with a basic low level education. What’s wrong with that?

“Welfare” hasn’t caused any of those problems you described. Let’s look at welfare, now TANF. We got rid of it. Yay! That was cool, man! Why didn’t I think of that! The idea was just like above, take the free money away from those damned niggers and yell at them that now they’re on their own and they have to get their shit together or else. That’ll show em! That’ll make em get their shit together!

Guess what? It didn’t work. At all.

It didn’t improve any social pathology factors, not even one. There were no societal benefits at all. The only thing that happened was that those women (and their kids!) got even more poor. A lot of them went homeless along with their kids. It was a huge failure.

Tell you what. Let’s try an experiment! Let’s look at places like the Caribbean and Africa where there are none of these evil social programs at all. There’s nothing, no social programs, zero. No money, you don’t eat, and then you die.

Ok, Blacks should be free of pathology right? Nope! They act way worse! The fewer social programs they get, the worse they act.

Let’s look at Blacks in Brazil. Few social programs. They act far worse than they do here.

Let’s look at Blacks in Europe. Especially those from Africa act at least as bad as our Blacks and probably even worse.

Fact: Black people have these pathologies you describe everywhere they exist on this planet.

Now why that is is up for grabs. Maybe it’s genes, maybe it’s environment, maybe it’s something in the air. I don’t know. That’s for the social scientists, if there are any honest ones left, to untangle. Not my job.

I figure these social programs are sort of “buy off” programs to buy off Black people who would ordinarily act pretty bad. The more we support them at basic levels, the less poor they are, and they happier they are. If you take away these programs, they would probably act far, far worse and they might even riot so much that they wreck the country. We are buying them off, giving them money with the caveat that they need to act better now, and it seems to work.

Alt Left: Repost: “Why Growing Up in India Makes You a Nasty, Cruel, Desensitzed Faux-nationalistic Gold-digger,” by Novusipsum

An older article that has aged quite well. It’s as true today and the day it was printed fully eight years ago. Not even one thing has changed even one bit. I hate to talk like this but I really think that India is hopeless. I hope I’m wrong but I gave up on this Dystopia of Damnation some time ago.

This is a great piece by an Indian blogger that he left on my blog as a comment. The original is here. It’s very good, and it’s actually quite well written. He takes on his country in a way that is not often seen in Indian writers.

I particularly enjoyed the bit about Kashmir because it rings so true. Almost every Indian I know goes nuts when I mention Kashmir. They raise their voice and start pounding on the table as their faces gets red. They tell me that the problem is 10

However, when I tell them that most Kashmiris hate India and that many Kashmiris have taken up arms against India, they insist that I am wrong. Most every Indian I met was exactly like this. They are like drones, utterly indoctrinated by some Borg. They are brainwashed on this subject as bad as a North Korean.

Most of these folks are what you might call middle class or upper middle class educated people. A number of them had university degrees and were quite intelligent. One man used to be a university professor.

Why Growing Up in India Makes You a Nasty, Cruel, Desensitized, Faux-nationalistic Gold-digger

1. School

While people remark on shortage of functional schools in India, I say the kids who don’t go to school have it good. The national curriculum is odious and objectionable, seeing as it is designed for kids who bow down before all authority and the various empty suits regardless of whether they make any sense at all. You cannot contest your teacher. At all. Ever. Such behavior is simply unacceptable. Put another way, the system is a hundred percent authoritarian.

School kills all your creativity. Creativity, especially of the extroverted kind, is not encouraged. There are tried and tested methods to break the will of those who are too free. The system is based on rote-memorization. You must bend your mind a certain way to do that: it means all the rules are already laid out and decided for you. You do not need to think. Your brain must function in a certain way. Any challenge to the established order will make you a pariah.

Kids learn how to secretly and openly hate each other over the grades they are given for breaking their own will and doing pointless mind-numbing work that will be of no use to them at any point in their later life. The focus is on merit – on who is better at following rules. No wonder India has not produced a single India-based world-class scientist, technician, engineer. Science, technology, and engineering after all,re fields where your ability to think is highly valuable.

Barack Obama does not need to worry about Indian kids out-smarting American kids. If they do, it will be by doing hours of grinding and rioting, and when they do, the rest of the world need to start worrying.

This system is evil!

2. Parents, Teachers, Peers

All these people are the product of evil Indian schools and other cramming establishments and will force you to succeed in a way that they deem appropriate. You must resist this but you can’t. They are everywhere.

Your peers will pressure you to bow down, submit, and ‘teach you the value of money’. In other words, how to be a vicious gold-digger. Money is nice but being a nasty, evil, little scummy gold-digger is a degeneration of your soul that even Indian’s ascetic scat-munchers do not attain.

Indian people are therefore nasty and selfish to the extreme. It is of no surprise, seeing their upbringing and their environment.

3. The environment

Your average Indian city, town, village is a primitive clusterfuck without running water or proper sewage disposal. Casteism is rampant; stupid people need little motivation to be proud of what is after all a genetic accident. They think their bloodline is ‘pure’ and grind the ‘lower’ caste people down into the dirt. Respect for human life and dignity in India has to be the lowest in human civilization.

The streets are narrow and dirty, usually overflowing with broken sewage and water lines (which frequently mix), and the garbage the average Indian household does not feel ashamed of throwing on the streets. Any kind of social grace is completely absent, people shove and push each other, vehicles honk incessantly and without reason, and the local temple’s loudspeakers blare out shitty religious hymns.

Living and growing up here, you will learn little by little to let go of your humanity. You will get desensitized to the beggars and lepers in the street: emancipated, poor and trodden down. You will see old men and women driven out of their homes by their sons, eyes pleading for mercy and trying to make sense of the plethora of people around them who ignore their plight and pass right by.

Your average Indian will not even notice the squalor on the street or the helpless human beings on the street. He will simply accept these things as a part of life, which is why things never improve. He is the selfish product of a callous, heartless, and evil system. He will never change, and western democracies should not allow such people into their homelands. Not even for a ‘visit’.

4. The Media

Catering to a large middle class that pretends to be educated, some people have taken the initiative to bring them these people latest news of the world. These people are funded by rich business interests with their own agenda as well as Hindu nationalists. They make the usual salutary noises about bad governance and bloated bureaucracy, things that are so odious that it even permeates the thick bourgeois skull. This is why the middle class types buy newspapers and watch news—they can relate to it.

But the most vicious thing the media does is to fill the average Indian with a sense of pride and nationalism, something that certainly goes against all basic logic and sanity. What people would be proud of a country like this? Only brain-washed, selfish jerks that the education system produces and the media maintains.

The average Indian is full to the brim with national pride that he has no logical reason to feel. His ideas on casteism and the workings of the society are reinforced by editors of the national dailies and the news channels.

His stance on Kashmir, a truly beautiful place inhabited by beautiful people, has been drilled into him incessantly. The parable of Pakistan exporting its terrorists (not that it doesn’t – and it turns out the Americans knew about it all along) to India and that the Kashmiris love India (Huh?) has been in print for thirty years now. Of course, India is always the poor, helpless victim.

5. College

Most people in India never even graduate from their high schools, let alone college. And I say good for them. Because the system feels the need to grind out all kind of potential competition it may get from any future thinkers.

If school doesn’t manage to turn you into a humanoid selfish fuck, your college certainly will. India’s unemployment problem is vast. Of the colleges that ‘guarantee’ any jobs such as professional degree mills like IIT, NIT, AIIM, etc., it is interesting to note that only Indians think these places are good. An independent peer review ranked the ‘best’ IIT at around 350th at world level. Yet the middle-class scramble for securing a seat there so intense it simply has to be seen to be believed.

Millions (you heard that right, millions) of middle-class Indians right now are rioting, grinding, and chewing equations, formulas, and facts for entrance exams that maybe a hundred of them really understand. These people aspire to be ‘engineers’ and ‘doctors’.

The workload is so immense that you can’t find time at age 16 and 17 to ogle girls (or boys), party, learn how to drink beer without making a face, or hang out with your friends. But what am I saying? Hell, most Indian people don’t find time to do that ever in their lives anyway.

College itself is a turdfest -professors with massive egos, an anal-retentive and callous administration, and overall awkward social interaction between the sexes. Girls hanging out with boys are labeled ‘hookers’ and ‘sluts’. Massive sexual repression is the hallmark of this point in your life, and given the pressure to rote more equations and secure a job, you’d be lucky escaping the place without a drug habit or a drinking problem.

Is there anything good about India at all? With fertile plains to the north, large iron ore deposits to the south, the biggest aluminum stores in the world and 3

The only thing wrong with India is Indians.

Alt Left: Complete Deterioration of Literary Criticism in the Last 40 Years

I like to read literary criticism sometimes because it’s some of the hardest stuff out there to understand, at least for me. Forget philosophy. Don’t even go there. Lit Crit is different. With Lit Crit it’s hard as hell to understand and it’s incredibly smart and dense, but you can pretty much understand most if not all of it, so it’s worth it. I call it giving my brain a workout, and to me it’s similar to going to the gym for your body.

I recently read a couple of Hemingway’s best short stories. Then I found and read two Lit Crit articles about them. Lit Crit is very useful this way. If you haven’t already read the work, I’m not quite sure how useful it is or how much you would get out it. But if you’ve read it, Crit is often great for explicating the work and explaining deeper meanings, themes, etc. hidden in the text.

One was in a journal called Journal of College Literature from 1980. It was remarkably down to earth for a Lit Crit journal, especially the issues around published around that time. So I started going through a few decades worth of the journal.

I noticed that the Lit Crit from ~40 years ago was much different and frankly much superior to the gobbledygook out nowadays. It then focused on individual books and was fairly straightforward, simply looking for explications of the events, characters, plots, and themes in the book.

As I moved forward a couple of decades, everything changed. Now it was all postmodernism. Lit Crit about individual works were less common. The crit became ridiculously politicized with SJW and PC Leftist slants towards everything. Now I am a Leftist myself (albeit a weird one) but for the life of me, I do not understand why we need to litter our Lit Crit with Leftist political theory.

In addition to Marxism, there was also inordinate focus on women (feminism, mostly a joke field called Women’s Studies), gays and lesbians (from the lens of a ridiculous and bizarre field called Queer Studies), Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other non-Whites (same thing- focus on non-fields like Black and Hispanic Studies), on and on.

Pretty much all they wrote about were these “oppressed minorities.” Cringey Queer Studies essays searched for and discovering non-existing homosexuality in perfectly straight stories (Did you know Moby Dick is a gay novel?) and secret homosexuality in completely straight authors (Did you know Shakespeare was gay?). It’s weird and stupid.

There was also a strange attempt to find some silly “woman angle” in novels where women were not particularly important to the story. There was also a focus on older books written by women and minorities which are apparently good books merely because they were written by a minority or woman and not for any other reason.

Why Lit Crit has to be all about oppressed minorities is beyond me. Fine, some minorities are oppressed. We need a politics to address that. But why trash up Lit Crit with leftwing obsessions with minority groups? Last time I checked, straights, Whites, and men also existed. Can we maybe keep the politics out of our Crit and just talk about the books without turning everything into a political rally?

Another worse problem went along with this. The essays became dominated by postmodernism and were much harder to understand. There were references to philosophy scattered all through everything (particularly unintelligible Continentals like Sartre, Derrida, Lacan, Cixous, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Foucalt, Frankfurt School, DeLueze and Guattari).

That’s all fine and dandy but why can’t we keep unintelligible philosophers out of our Lit Crit? What do incomprehensible Frenchmen spouting nonsense have to do with the novels we read?

It is true that the essays became much more demanding, but there was also a lot of silly talk about things like the Body (?), the Male Gaze (!?), the Text, the Author, the Reader (Barthes), on and on with weird, silly postmodern concepts.

In addition, somehow they became strangely repetitive in that they obsessed over the same postmodernist tropes and views in essay after essay. After a while, it seemed like I was reading the same essay again and again and learning little about the actual books being discussed. Finally, it became quite boring as a result of this repetition.

tl/dr: Lit Crit has completely deteriorated over the past 40 years. It’s now a swamp of barely comprehensible postmodernism and obsessions with women, gays and minorities. Leftist politics and incoherent Continental philosophers litter every essay, turning it from a brain workout into muddy slow trod up a mountain in the rain without boots or a poncho.

Alt Left: How About Voluntary Gay and Lesbian High Schools for Gay and Lesbian Teens?

Oli S: It’s interesting how often they make claims about pederasty/pedophilia from two angles. First they claim that gay people are more likely to be ‘molested’ into homosexuality and next that homosexuals themselves are more likely to engage in relationships with young people.

The critical flaw is that all the research on this shows higher rates, but it’s quite clearly attributed to the fact that gay teenagers don’t have many options their own age. They don’t want to risk being outed to their peers, so they turn to the Internet to find a sexual experience where they can be targeted by a predator.

Oli is apparently a new commenter here.

I have no idea his orientation and it’s probably not important, but how readers would feel about voluntary separate gay and lesbian high schools? They would not have to worry about peer pressure and being outed. You could even staff Administration ion with mostly gay and lesbian administrators and the teaching staff with gay and lesbian teachers, of which there are no shortages, trust me as I spent years working in the field.

Gay and lesbian teens could no longer complain about lack of sex partners and having to resort to sex with adults, particularly in the case of the boys.

However, I can see the sex scandals starting already.The gay teachers and admins will not keep their hands off the gay boys and girls. So this is the huge roadblock in favor of this plan.

They call me a homophobe. Fine. Now what sort of homophobe would support the idea of separate gay/lesbian schools – voluntary of course – to protect, nurture, and grow healthier gay and lesbian teens who hopefully transit into healthier gay and lesbian adults, which is something I very much support?

Because God knows the GLBT community definitely needs a dose of mental health. Gays and lesbians in general in the US and worldwide are not particularly mentally healthy. This does translate into societal problems, possibly feeding disease epidemics.

The suicide rate for gay and lesbian teens is not elevated, but the rate for adult gays and lesbians is off the charts. Up to 1/3 of suicides in some younger decadal cohorts (such as 30’s and 40’s) occur in gays and lesbians.

Only

Gay men and lesbians see their lifespans shortened by an incredible 20 years. I don’t think being homosexual per se is a death cult, but the gay and lesbian lifestyle (especially the former) sure seems that way. Heck, it’s more of a deathstyle than a lifestyle.

The anti-gay Religious Right is actually correct in a lot of the charges they make about homosexuality. The critique is largely fact-based. The problem with these folks is not that they lie about gays and lesbians because for the most part they tell the sorry truth.

The problem instead is that they are haters. I agree with most of the charges the social conservatives level against homosexuality, but I don’t hate gays and lesbians because of it. That’s a choice the Religious Right makes, and yeah, they do hate gays and lesbians for the most part, though if a gay or lesbian gets into one of their fake conversion programs, no doubt Religious Right folks might be very kind to them. Love the sinner, hate the sin, and all that.

Alt Left: An Overview of the Early Years of the Cuban Revolution, 1954-1961

transformer: What do you think of this article Robert? I don’t trust right wing sources but how literate was Cuba back in 1959?

That website is falsely named. It is not an “intellectual” website dedicated to the intellect and the pursuit of knowledge. Sure, it is an erudite, bright, and educated website, but the only intellectuals it appeals to are hard rightwingers. It’s basically the philosophy of your average American conservative Republican. Those sites are run by ideologues, and they are not very honest.

I will try to take apart this argument as best as I can, but if you Google these questions, there are many leftwing websites who offer far better rejoinders than I offer here, especially with more facts, figures, and dates.

That argument is not good because there was vast poverty in the countryside along with terrible health and dental care. There was vast inequality in Cuba. There was quite a bit of wealth in the cities, particularly in Havana, but the conditions in the countryside were awful, pure 3rd World.

To give an example, I believe that there may have been no doctors in Cuba outside of Havana. All of the doctors and dentists lived in Havana serving people with money for cash so they could make a lot of money. The Mafia owned Cuba, and Havana was a sleazefest full of criminals, gangsters, and prostitutes.

Blacks had essentially no rights at all. They actually lived under a strict Jim Crow-like segregation that was as bad as what existed in the South. The Blacks in Cuba were fucked.

The whole country was owned by foreign, mostly US, interests, including the sugar cane and tobacco fields, the cigar and nickel industries and the casinos and bars. A few country-sellers latched onto the large US corporations that ran everything in Cuba and got their fair share of the loot.

But the Cuban people as a whole, meaning the Cuban state, barely saw a nickel of profits from any of those foreign-owned fields and industries. There also was little or no trickle down effect from the foreign-owned industry. Most Cubans felt that Cuba had once more become a colony of the US. After all, it was more or less owned by US companies, right?

Cuba used to be a colony of the US. We stole it from the Spanish after the Spanish American War. US rule was not popular. Jose Marti is known as the liberator of Cuba. He led an insurrection in 1898 in which Cuba gained its freedom. The Philippines was also rebelling at this time.

But after the US left, in 1911, a new law was passed called the Platt (?) Amendment that basically said that the US still ruled Cuba and had a right to intervene in Cuba’s affairs anytime it wanted to.

Even the most rightwing anti-Castro Cubans are not particularly pro-US, and if you bring up that amendment, they’ve all heard of it, and they act angry about. After all, most anti-Castro types are Cuban nationalists. Cubans are very nationalistic and proud people. That amendment remained in place until Castro won the revolution in 1959.

Batista’s army collapsed without even much of a fight because at one point in the revolution, even the middle classes in the cities went over to Castro. When the middle class supports a revolution, you are out of power. Previously the middle class had probably been mostly neutral.

Batista was also horribly corrupt and no one was happy about that. As Castro overran Havana, Batista and his government flew out to the US on airplanes. The US lifted them out. There are still quite a few pro-Batista Cubans in the Cuban community in Cuba. That’s why the Cuban exiles are not popular in Cuba.

A lot of Cubans in the countryside were not literate. Even schooling was bad out there. And Castro did run a literacy program that got the country to 9

Castro was middle or even upper-class himself. He was Galician of almost pure Spanish blood (Cuba is full of Galicians). He had just graduated from law school, and he was in fact an attorney. So he was a very smart guy.

Che was actually a physician! He graduated from medical school in Argentina and was granted a license to practice medicine. I’m not sure if he ever actually practiced medicine. He was also a very smart guy.

Che took a motorcycle tour around Latin America, and he was appalled at the poverty he saw there. He had grown up in Buenos Aires in a moneyed family, and this was a hidden secret about the continent for him. A book called The Motorcycle Diaries was later published using the notes he took as he traveled around South America.

He became radicalized by his bike tour. He heard about the Revolution in Cuba, and he went there to help them out pure idealism with stars in his eyes. Che was also White like Castro and came from old Buenos Aires money. He probably had Italian and Spanish blood at the least, like most Argentines.

He married in Cuba and had a couple of kids before he was murdered by the CIA in a hospital in Bolivia in 1967 after being arrested in the nation for rebellion. He was very good to his wife and young children. The wife and children are still alive. You can even go see his son if you go to Cuba and have the right connections.

His wife and kids remember him very fondly. Che was a selfless and altruistic man. There is a slogan in Cuba: “Be like Che.” It is very popular. It means to be selfless and idealistic and sacrifice for others, to not be selfish and greedy. The slogan is popular among university students in particular. If you go to Cuba, you will hear Cuban university students, male and female, saying that their philosophy is to “be like Che.”

There must have been something wrong with the Batista system because a lot of university students, teachers, etc. took part in the early demonstrations against Batista. At some point, the Left went to the mountains and took up arms.

Either before or after, Batista ran death squads that rampaged through Cuba’s cities, murdering teachers, students, and the unarmed Left in general. They murdered thousands of defenseless and unarmed Cubans this way.

The army would not even fight for Batista. That’s how corrupt he was. In fact, many of the anti-Castro Cubans fought with Castro in the mountains to get rid of Batista, but they turned on him when he went Communist. They felt betrayed. I don’t mind these exiles so much. I have spoken with some of their children. At least they fought with Castro. But they tend to be very bitter. They think they got double-crossed and backstabbed by Castro.

Castro was originally simply a social democrat, and the initial revolutionary program was a social democratic one.

However, it was a very nationalistic revolution, and they started seizing foreign-owned businesses very quickly. The Cubans offered to pay off the owners for the market value of the businesses over a 30-year period. That offer it still in effect. 10

So their businesses didn’t really get confiscated. Castro offered to pay full value for them, but these stubborn reactionaries turned down the offer. It’s their own damn fault they lost their businesses.

The seizing of the foreign-owned property went on for a couple of years and was extremely popular among the extremely nationalistic Cubans. So you can see that Castro’s revolution, like Mao’s and Ho’s, was also and perhaps primarily a nationalist revolution.

Castro went to New York soon after he took power, and he was greeted with large crowds of cheering supporters. Castro talked about how much he loved America and Americans. I believe he was sincere. A lot of the US ruling class – the rich and corporations – were very suspicious of Castro from the start. They didn’t trust him. They didn’t hate him. They were just very leery of him.

Castro asked for US support and aid to help rebuild the country, but the US had turned hostile  by then due to the business confiscations and refused to give him a nickel. This went on for a couple of years with each side getting more hardened until Castro finally turned to the USSR in desperation in 1961 for support since the US was flipping him off.

Castro’s argument was that he tried to have a relationship with the US, and we told him to go to Hell, so we forced him into the arms of the Soviets. He sealed an alliance with the USSR in 1961. The US promptly imposed a cruel embargo on Cuba which has been there ever since.

The embargo’s official justification was to cause so much poverty and misery in Cuba that the people would rise up and overthrow Castro. Here it is 60 years later, and we still give the exact same reason for the embargo. If the embargo is intended to cause the people to overthrow Castro, when is it going to start working? So far it’s been 60 years of utter failure, but we keep chasing the White Whale.

Over the next year, Castro grew increasingly radical, and by 1962, he abandoned social democracy, his originally ideology, and took up Marxism-Leninism. After Castro went Communist, a lot of his old comrades turned against him along with many others who were not happy with his turn to the hard Left. These contras took up arms, formed guerrilla bands in the mountains, and waged a brutal civil war that went on until 1970.

Yes, the Cuban government executed 10,000 people between 1959-1970, but almost all were for “rebellion,” typically armed rebellion. There have hardly been any executions since.

Alt Left: Social Democracy Only Works in Homogeneous Societies Is Often but Not Completely True

RL:

The US and a handful of other countries are literally the only countries on this planet that regard social democracy with outrage and want nothing to do with it.

A commenter responds:

Mithridates: Yeah, I suspect much of this attitude stems from the ethnic divisions within the US that no one is ever allowed to talk about in any sort of frank or intellectually honest manner. Of course the Pluto/Mammon-worship inherent in the American mythos is a influential factor as well.

But let’s explore the first:

Basically, Ethnos A, the group responsible for most of the country’s productivity, is forced at gunpoint to redistribute a portion of their wealth to Ethnos B (and C in some regions), and a good portion of Ethnos B takes that money, pisses it away on all sorts of stupid instant gratification fuckery and doesn’t add much of anything to the country’s overall productivity; in fact, a sizable minority of Ethnos B behaves in public like zoo animals.

And then A’s gets called horrible bigots if they object to this, and especially if they object to being forced to live within shouting distance of B’s.

Most of the countries with working social democratic economic arrangements tend to have been ethnically homogeneous for most of the period when these systems were in place. And now these countries have tried the mass immigration experiment, and the same sort of shitty results is happening in those places that we here in the US have been experiencing for many decades now.

Natural Law says that humans are extra-clever social primates who are predisposed to be open to sharing among others they consider to be kin. There’s a certain other Ethnos I won’t mention by name or even a single-letter set of punctuation marks that exemplifies this principle very clearly.

Anyway, expecting all members of an Ethnos to consider the entire planet’s population of clever hominids to be a part of their kin group is quite an aberrant expectation; only weird ideologies can invert what to everyone else is a common sense understanding of Natural Law principles. And finally, loving one’s own kin does not necessarily mean hating other kin-groups.

Of course everyone has always known that this is the dirty little secret for Americans’ hostility to socialism. This is why all of the American White Nationalists are also hardline economic Rightists, Republicans and Libertarians despite this being bad for most Whites. Race trumps economics for a lot of folks. Whereas in Europe, most of the nationalist groups, even the White nationalists, are explicitly socialist.

You’d be pissed to, eh?

Actually I am fully aware of this argument, but I’m not pissed at all. For one thing, I have never been part of the wealthy White group, so Whites with money can go pound sand. They are my class enemies. I think in terms of economics. Screw race. Do the rich Whites want to help the poorer Whites? Of course not. So why should I support them. Also I know quite a few low-income Whites who use those redistributive programs that Whites hate so much.

On the other hand, I am not a typical White person. I am very hard to the Left; in fact, I am an out and out socialist.

Many countries have health care for all despite being ethnically diverse. However, in a lot of these countries, public health care and education is simply underfunded, so the dominant group, whoever they may be, simply goes to private hospitals and schools. India is an excellent example of this as is much of Latin America.

All of the Arab World has social democracy under the rubric of Islam, or in the case of Lebanon, ethnic peace, and Lebanon is unstable for ethnic/religious reasons. And some Arab countries with prominent religious of ethnic minorities are very unstable or at war.

All of North Africa has social democracy except Morocco, although minority Berbers are dealt with by denial of their existence and roping them into the main group, Arabs. Ethiopia has tremendous ethnic diversity and some religious diversity, but they have a good working socialist system. Eritrea is the same but the main divide there is religious rather than ethnic.

Zimbabwe has a good working system although it has many tribes. Argentina and formerly Bolivia and Ecuador has or had working social democracies, although all three countries had serious instabilities; in all cases the rich objecting to sharing with the poor and with a racial element in Bolivia. A number of countries in Latin America do have social democracies, but they don’t work very well because the rich don’t want to share with the poor.

In a number of those countries such as Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Haiti,and Mexico also have an ethnic element in that the dominant rich group tends to be Whiter or lighter-skinned though not usually White per who don’t want to share with the poorer, darker, folks who are more mixed with Indian and in some cases Blacks.

A number of countries in Latin America have homogeneous populations, but the rich still don’t want to share with the poor, so that doesn’t solve everything. And historically speaking, most nations were quite homogeneous, nevertheless the rich still shared just about fuck all with everyone else and needed an actual revolution to be convinced to do so.

Russia and China has very good working social democracies although they have many minorities, although China and to some extent Russia has some ethnic warfare. Ukraine has a good system despite minorities and ethnic warfare. Vietnam, Cambodia, Bhutan, and Laos have good systems despite having anywhere to a couple to many ethnic minorities. Malaysia has a working social democracy and it has a large ethnic divide. Japan has minorities with an excellent social democracy.

Most of the former Soviet republics probably still have working systems although most have large minority populations.Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran have social democracies and minority groups. However, in Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran are currently embroiled in ethnic separatist wars.

Most of the countries with non-working systems are not only rightwing but also quite poor. Hong Kong is an exception. The government is very rightwing, but there are not ethnic problems. It’s all one ethnic group, but the rich ones hate the poor ones, just as it was traditionally.

Some are just poor. Most of Africa has social democracy, but it often doesn’t work well due to poverty. To some extent this is true in Pakistan, Mongolia, Yemen, Moldova, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Burma, and Thailand. It is also true in Ecuador, Guatemala, most of the Caribbean, Chile, and Paraguay. In these places, social democracy doesn’t work more due to poverty than to diversity.

A Bit on Breton and Other Minority Languages of France

@SHI, responding to this post:

Sounds like Welsh or something in the Celtic languages family.

Perhaps, Breton or any other minority languages? I think it’s spoken in modern France.

Yes, it is Celtic. Good job for getting that.

Nope, it’s not Breton. Yes, Breton is spoken in Brittany in France at the far northwestern part of the country. It stems from a migration by Welsh speakers to that part of France in 1300, so it’s close to Welsh. Apparently they can’t really understand each other though. I would guess ~3

Both languages are part of a branch of Celtic called Byrthonic. Believe it or not, 2,000 years ago, Byrthonic languages were the only languages spoken in England and Wales. They’ve gone extinct now except for Welsh, Manx, and Cornish.

The other branch is called Goidelic and includes Irish and Scottish Gaelic.

Although Breton has 500,000 speakers, it’s not in very good shape because France tries to destroy every non-French language spoken in the country. Most speakers are older and there are few young speakers.

However, a number of private schools have been set up to teach children. The teach them a new form called Unified Breton, which oddly and comically enough is so different from the other Breton languages spoken that the older speakers cannot understand these New Breton speakers.

France has even attacked the other langues d’oil, of which French (Parisien) is only one. Parisien happened to be the langue d’oil spoken in Paris, so it became Standard French. However, in WW 1, 8

They spoke the other langues d’oil, the various Occitan languages (perhaps as many as 18),  Arpitan  or Franco-Provencal (which may also be u to 20 languages), Souletin Basque, Breton (four different languages), Alsatian (German), or West Flemish. Incredible, isn’t it? The other langues d’oil are in horrible shape, though most have not gone extinct yet.

They split from Parisien and the other langues d’oil from Old French around 1,000 years ago, so they are very divergent. Intelligibility between Poitevin and Lorraine is estimated at

SHI: It’s clearly not Manx or Cornish.

Ha ha, what makes you so sure about that second opinion, my man?

Do Blacks Single Out Whites for Ill Treatment?

Kit: The author of the OP says he meets more Black people who mistreat him or whatever, than Whites – that’s because he is White. Those very same kind, wonderful White people would treat him very differently if he were Black. As a White person I have experienced this and witnessed it.

First of all, I would like to welcome our new commenter to the site.

I’m not sure what the argument is here. If the commenter is arguing that White people have been nice to me because I’m White, and they might have treated me a lot differently if I had been Black, I don’t have any answer to that question, but I’ll grant that there might be something to it. I can’t change from White to Black, so it’s hard to test the theory.

On the other hand, if the commenter is saying that Blacks treated me poorly because I’m White and they would have treated me a lot better had I been Black, I’m not so sure that that is true?

With all due respect, I don’t believe this. My brother says this too. He says they treat you badly because you’re White. They’re all out to get back at Whitey, and they screw us over any chance they get. I don’t believe this but there’s no good way to prove it one way or the other.

If this were true, they’d be very nice to their own kind, and that’s not so. The overwhelming majority of Black crime and no doubt shitty Black behavior in general is directed at their own kind. Blacks are 1

As far as White people being nice to me because I’m White, well, maybe so. But a lot of those same people seem to be pretty nice to Black people too, though I don’t usually get the opportunity to test that out. I’m not Black and there are not many Blacks around, so I don’t see how they get treated.s

There are other things. I lived in White towns. I lived next door to some of the worst people in town. But their bad behavior only hit a certain level. It was mostly self-destruction and being total slobs. And these were poor Whites or White trash as people like to call them. The lowest Whites of them all. And even they did not act all that bad.

Then I moved to an Hispanic community and their bad people were much more frequent in number, maybe three times more, and they acted far worse than the White bad people did, maybe three times worse . It’s like they were setting the bar lower for bad behavior. But keep in mind that these were barrio Hispanics, and a lot of Hispanics don’t act like that.

Then I noticed the Blacks around here. Well there probably eight times more of them per capita than Whites! And their behavior is much worse than Whites, maybe eight times worse. It was also a lot worse than Hispanic bad behavior, maybe three times as bad. Now granted these are ghetto Blacks, ok? A lot of Black people (maybe half?) don’t really act like that in a major way.

And although not for the first time in my life, after having seen the different races in their native habitat like that and particularly living in a White town and then living in an Hispanic town and noticing the dramatic difference, I started really thinking about race and behavior in a huge way. It was like a door slammed right in my face. And this was when I was in my 50’s, mind you.

I also taught school. I taught in White schools, Hispanic schools and Black schools. Same thing. The Whites act best, the Hispanics are somewhat behind (though Hispanics act pretty good in school for some reason, maybe because they are taught to respect authority), and the Blacks were way worse. Like way, way, way, way worse.

Keep in mind that the Hispanics were barrio Hispanics. I also taught middle class Hispanics, and they absolutely acted way better. High school is probably about the same. They might even act better than Whites because of the respect for elders I discussed earlier. Junior high is pretty nuts, probably a lot worse than a White junior high. But junior high kids of any race don’t act real great.

Keep in mind that these were ghetto Blacks. I also taught middle class Blacks at a junior high. They drove me crazy and didn’t act good at all, but they weren’t really aggressive, hostile, and evil. Mostly they just would not sit down. Especially the girls. I used to think that there was a buzzer on their chairs, and after they would sit down for 30 seconds, the buzzer would buzz their butts and make them jump out of out of their chairs and start walking around and chatting.

And there again I saw all three races isolated, each in a majority group environment, and I saw this over and over for a number of years. After a while, you really wake up and start smelling the coffee.

However, I would say to be fair that there is a huge behavioral difference between middle class Black schools and ghetto Black schools.

There is a similar but not nearly as large difference between middle class Hispanic schools and barrio Hispanic schools.

With Whites, interestingly enough, there does not seem to be much difference between poor or working class White schools and middle class White schools.

All three of the cases for the three different races are quite different, and I am not sure why that is.

Minority Languages in Russia

I’ve been working on this article for at least a year now, but actually I think it has been in my files for longer, up to five years. You can see that much of the information is a bit out of date as a result. A lot of this information was translated from Russian sources. The translations to English were poor, so the whole mess needed a huge rewrite from mangled Russian to English translation to a more proper English.

I’ve done this a number of times before and it was never easy. For some reason this is always a lot harder than it seems. For one thing, I had to eliminate entire sentences because I couldn’t properly understand what they were saying or they were saying something that didn’t seem correct to me.

For that matter it is quite hard to rewrite something written in seriously mangled English by someone who can’t write or even worse by someone who has English as a second language and doesn’t write it well. You would think it would be easy to turn mangled English into proper English, but it’s just not.

This post is pretty long. It runs to 33 pages on the web. If it were in a book, it would run to 16 pages.

According to the Constitution of Russia, Russian is the official language on the whole territory of the Russian Federation, but regions are given the right to establish republics and set their own their national languages. The Constitution also guarantees the right of all the peoples of Russia to preserve their native language and to create conditions for its study and development.

According to the Basic Law of Languages, citizens have the right to use their native language as the language of communication, education, learning, and creativity.

We will now look at the study of native languages in the schools of the Russian Federation in the areas within the jurisdiction of the regional authorities. In Russian schools, 89 different languages are studied, of which 39 are used as the language of instruction.

Adygea

In 2007 Parliament passed a law mandating the compulsory study of the Adygean language for Adygean children in schools where Russian is the mode of instruction. However, this law was repealed in 2013. Recently, March 14 was designed the Day of the Speaking and Writing the Adyghe Language. Parents of preschoolers may also choose to put their children in Aegean-language public kindergartens.

The Ministry of Education and Science reported the results of Adygean language teaching in the schools: in 43 preschools, 4,759 Adygean children study the language. In 127 preschools, children are taught the basics of Adyghe culture, customs, and traditions.

All students in Russian-medium schools must study the history and geography of Adygea, and Russian-speaking pupils have a choice of studying Adyghe Language or Adyghe Literature. 22,000 students are currently studying Adygean Language, and 27,600 are studying Adygean Literature.

Altai

There are regular proposals from the Altai people and educators to mandate the compulsory study of the Altai languages Northern Altai and Southern Altai for Altai children. Both Northern and Southern Altai are divided into three divergent dialects each, so there are actually six separate Altai languages. The three languages of the northern and southern groups each were combined into a Northern Altai and Southern Altai official language respectively.

Recently, an attempt was made to pass such legislation, but government legal scholars felt the law would violate children’s rights.

In Gorno-Altaisk on March 15, 2014 at the 9th Session of the Altay Culture Meeting, representatives of the Altai people went further, adopting a resolution to mandate Altai languages study for all students, no matter their ethnicity. However, attendees warned about a Russian backlash.

They felt that such a law would inevitably lead to rising dissent among Russians and other non-Altaians in the republic. This unrest could conceivably lead to the elimination of republic status for the Altai Republic itself.

Bashkortostan

A law is in place in Bashkortostan mandating the compulsory study of the Bashkir language by all students. Each educational institution gets to decide how many hours per week they wish to devote to Bashkir study. Parents of Russian children regularly protest this law and propose to make the study of Bashkir voluntary instead. Chuvash parents have also protested the law. Ethnic tensions have heightened in the area recently.

Buryatia

The question of the possible introduction of compulsory study of the Buryat language in republic schools has been discussed recently and has wide public support. Recently, a video titled, Buryad Heleeree Duugarayal! – “Let’s Speak Buryat!,” was released, urging Buryats to not forget their native language.

However, regional authorities decided to keep the study of Buryat optional in the republic. A few deputies appealed the ruling, and various amendments were adopted at their request, but the amendments did not substantially change the authorities’ decision to keep Buryat study optional. Opponents of the idea of compulsory study of Buryat in the schools fear that it will lead to the emergence of ethnic tensions.

Chechnya

In Chechnya, the national language is taught in all schools of the republic as a separate subject. Since 9

Despite the fact that the national language is widely used in everyday life, nevertheless, the scope of its use continues to steadily narrow. At the last roundtable of the Ministry of Culture of the Chechen Republic, officials noted what they felt was the alarming process of mixing Chechen and Russian in speech as well as a gradual tendency towards replacement of Chechen in the official sphere.

According to the director of the Institute of Education of the Chechen Republic, Abdullah Arsanukaev, the introduction of Chechen language instruction in the schools could ameliorate this situation. The government for its part is working to equalize Russian and Chechen ​​on the official level. It is expected to create a state commission for the conservation, development, and dissemination of the Chechen language.

Chukotka Autonomous Okrug

The main languages ​​in Chukotka are Chukchi, Eskimo, and Even. The government is now working on a program for the development of the these languages. So far, the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Chukotka has organized courses in Chukchi and Even.

Chukchi is the language of everyday communication for most Chukchi in the family and when engaging in traditional economic activities. In schools in Chukchi villages, Chukchi classes are compulsory in primary school and optional in high school.

Chuvashia

The Chuvash language is taught as a compulsory subject in schools and in a number of universities for one or two semesters.

“In the beginning, a lot of parents opposed their children studying Chuvash. But today I can say with confidence that these parents no longer feel this way. In contrast, some even want their the child to know the native language of Chuvashia, and probably rightly so,” says Olga Alekseeva, a teacher of Chuvash language and literature in School № 50 in Cheboksary.

The acuteness of the language issue in the country can be judged by recent events – in 2013, a court found Chuvash journalist Ille Ivanova guilty of inciting ethnic hatred for a publication about how the Chuvash language was disadvantaged in the Chuvash Republic.

Discussions around the native language exacerbated the recent language reform. According to opponents of reform, the new rules impoverished the language and could catalyze its Russification.

Crimea

The newly adopted constitution of the new Russian region declared three official languages ​​- Russian, Ukrainian, and Crimean Tatar. Education in schools will be carried out in these three languages​​.

Russian-speaking parents of children from Buryatia, Bashkortostan, and the Tatar Republic residing in Crimea have already appealed to the President of Russia and the leadership of Crimea requesting making the study of Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar voluntary in Crimea.

Activists fear that unless the law is rewritten, in the future, all children regardless of nationality will be obliged to study all three official languages. Signatories cite the example of their national republics, where Russian-speaking students have to learn a foreign language, the titular language of the republic.

Dagestan

The people of Dagestan speak 32 languages​​, although only 14 native languages are officially recognized. Elementary schools allow instruction in 14 different languages, depending on the region. The rest of the instruction is in Russian.

According to Murtazali Dugrichilova of the North Caucasus radio station Freedom, the native language of the ethnic group is spoken in the most parts of the country as the language of the home. “In rural areas, all of the local languages are spoken. In large cities such as or in Makhachkala or Derbent, teaching in national languages is optional,” he said.

In the future, at the suggestion of Ramadan Abdulatipova, Dagestan will form a commission on the use of Russian and local languages ​​of the republic. It is also expected that after the adoption of the law “On Languages ​​of the Republic of Dagestan,” all 32 languages ​​in the country will receive the status of the official language.

Director of the Institute of Language, Literature, and Art at the Dagestan Scientific Center Magomed Magomedov believes that after enactment of the new law, all of the native languages of the region will be present in the school system.

Dagestan took into consideration the negative experiences of other national republics in this area, and according to Magomedov, the law will prohibit demonstrations and pickets about language issues.

Ingushetia

According to the law “On the State Languages ​​of the Republic of Ingushetia,” Ingush and Russian are both used as official state languages in all educational institutions in the country.

Experts believe that the preservation and development of Ingush is necessary to ensure it is on an equal footing with Russian in all aspects in the republic. In addition, there has been a lot of discussion about the need to develop new words in Ingush for modern things such as industrial terminology.

Kabardino-Balkaria

In Kabardino-Balkaria, the debate over language issues flared up in connection with the adoption of amendments to the law “On Education.” The law mandates that both languages,​ Kabardian and Balkar, be used in education for children who have one of these languages as a mother tongue.

Kalmykia

According to the law “On Languages ​​of the Republic of Kalmykia,” in schools where instruction is in Russian, the Kalmyk language will be introduced starting in first grade as a compulsory school subject. Representatives of non-Kalmyks in the republic are unhappy with this law, but they have not said much about it.

Language activists point out that Kalmyk has a low status in Kalmykia. As an example, they cite the fact that cultural events and even national holiday celebrations are exclusively in Russian.

Karachay-Cherkessia

In the republic, Abaza, Karachay, Nogay, Circassian, and Russian are all official languages​​. The Constitution of the republic mandates compulsory education in the native language for students who have one of the above as a native language.

In addition, according to the law “On Education,” in those Russian-language schools, students who have a native language other than Russian must be taught their native language as a compulsory subject. National activists think that the best outcome is achieved when native languages are used as a mode of instruction and not taught as a special subject. At the moment, the republic is in the process of updating textbooks in Abaza, Karachay, Nogay, and Circassian.

Karelia

Karelia is the only national republic of the Russian Federation in which Russian is the only state language. One of the problems with raising the status of the Karelian language here has been the fact that Karelians are a minority in their own republic, and as a consequence, the republic has only a relatively small number of Karelian speakers.

Recently, President Anatoly Grigoryev of the Karelian Congress fielded a proposal to declare three official languages in Karelia ​​- Russian, Karelian, and Finnish. They modeled this notion on Crimea, where authorities promised to introduce trilingualism as the official policy.

National languages are optionally taught in preschool, elementary school, and high school. According to the Ministry of Education in 2013, 6,500 students studied Karelian, Finnish, and Veps.

Khakassia

As in many republics, the Khakass language is preserved mainly in rural areas that are densely populated by indigenous peoples. Compulsory Khakass language study is mandatory in all national schools in the republic.

Meanwhile, Political Science professor Gunzhitova Handa said that in Khakassia on September 1, 2014, Khakass classes became mandatory from grades 1-11, with an exam in Russian, Russian-Khakass, and Khakass schools.

Khanty-Mansiysk

According to NGO’s, there is only one native language course for the 4,000 speakers of Khanty and Mansi in the republic. Language loss in both languages has been accelerating in recent years. Representatives of youth organizations of indigenous peoples of the North have offered drastic solutions, including depriving national benefits to Khanty and Mansi peoples who do not know their native language.

According to the Hope Moldanova, president of the Ob-Ugric Peoples youth organization, “Young people have a different attitude towards their native language nowadays. Some of them are fluent in two languages but only understand but do not speak their native language, and others think it is sufficient to only know Russian, which is spoken by the majority.”

She too is concerned that the new generation is less interested in the national languages​​. Due to the low demand for the specialty, Ugra State University even closed its Finno-Ugric language Department.

Khanty still has 10,000 speakers in three divergent dialects.  The dialects are so divergent that they are actually separate languages. 4

In the east, there are still some child speakers but there has been a general shift to Russian. Intergenerational transmission of Khanty has stopped in the south. Schools in Khanty-speaking areas generally use Russian as  the mode of instruction.

Mansi has 1,000 speakers, 5

The northern dialect has most of the remaining speakers. There are only a few remaining elderly speakers of the eastern dialect. The southern dialect went extinct before 1950, and the western dialect is probably also extinct.

Komi

The Ministry of Education introduced the compulsory study of Komi language from the first grade in 2011. Later that year, in September 2011, the Constitutional Court ruled that the study of the Komi language in schools of the republic was mandatory. Now schools may choose two different Komi language study programs – “like a native” (up to 5 hours per week) or “as a state language” (2 hours per week in the primary grades).

According to Natalia Mironova, an employee of the Komi Scientific Center’s Ural Branch, this has led to latent discontent among the youth. She said high school students do not understand why they should waste time studying the Komi language when it takes away precious time they could be using to study for their math exams.

Mari El

In the Republic of Mari El, where the official languages ​​are Russian and Mari (Meadow Mari and Hill Mari), mandatory study of Russian and one of the Mari languages was introduced in 2013. Analysts say that among the Russian population, there is growing dissatisfaction with the fact that they are forced to learn what they consider to be an unnecessary language, but there have been few protests about the matter.

Mordovia

The republic introduced the compulsory study of either the Erzya or Moksha languages ​​in all schools of the republic in 2006. Originally, mandatory study of these languages only took place in national schools in districts and villages where there were many Erzya and Moksha people residing. Prior, since 2004, teaching of these languages had been optional in Russian-language schools.

When the compulsory study of these languages was introduced, there ​​were signs of dissatisfaction on the part of the Russian-speaking parents. Now, the number of dissatisfied parents has significantly decreased, and their voice is almost imperceptible.

Nenets Autonomous Okrug

In NAO there are 43,000 people, of which about 7,500 are the members of the titular population, the Nenets. The main problem in the study of the Nenets languages, Forest Nenets and Tundra Nenets, is the lack of books and teachers.

Tundra Nenets still has a good number of speakers, but Forest Nenets is only spoken by a small population. Tundra Nenets has speakers of all ages and is still spoken by children. However, in the west of the republic, a shift to Komi and Russian is underway.

According the Lyudmila Taleevoy of the Methodist SBD Nenets Regional Center for Education Development, the pedagogy programs at the university level no longer prepare specialists in teaching Nenets. Instead, children are taught Nenets by Russian-speaking teachers who studied Nenets when they were students. An old outdated Nenets grammar is used in instruction.

North Ossetia

According to the regional law on languages​​, children have the right to choose schooling in one of two languages – Russian or Ossetian. Ossetian consists of two dialects, Iran and Digorian. The two dialects are so divergent that they are basically separate languages.

According Ossetian journalist Zaur Karaev, all students who have another language as a native tongue, such as Armenians, Ukrainians, Azerbaijanis, and others, must study their native languages in language classes in the primary grades. The language teaching program is more complicated in high school.

Tatarstan

In Tatarstan, where only half of the population is a member of the titular ethnic group, the Tatars, the study of the Tatar language is compulsory for all. Non-Tatar speaking parents regularly protest this law. They even appealed to the Prosecutor’s Office claiming that the law discriminated against Russian-speaking students, but an inquiry by the prosecutor’s office found no violations.

Meanwhile, Tatar nationalists for their part remain alarmed about the state of the Tatar language. According to them, Tatar has a low status in the republic – for instance, in the streets, most writing on storefronts is in Russian, not Tatar. There are also problems with Tatar in TV media, and there is no university that conducts all of its teaching in Tatar.

Nevertheless, the republic regularly implements Tatar language projects and programs, a recent one being the introduction of the Tatar study in kindergartens.

Tuva

In contrast to most of the other republics, in Tuva, it is the Russian language that is in bad shape, not the titular language, Tuva, which is in much better shape. In 2008, a report noted that Russian was in terrible shape in Tuva.

According to Valerie Kahn, a researcher in the Sociology and Political Science Departments at the Tuvan Institute of Humanitarian Research, the authorities were forced to pay attention to this problem. 2014 was declared the Year of the Russian Language in Tuva. As a consequence, systematic measures have been taken to ensure that children in rural areas can learn Russian.

According to Khan, the Tuvan language is in excellent shape. Travelers also note that residents of the republic mostly communicate in Tuvan, although most signs on the streets are in Russian.

Meanwhile Tuvan journalist Oyumaa Dongak believes that the national language is oppressed. On her blog she notes that it is difficult to find Tuvans who speak pure Tuvan without Russian admixture, and even in the government, most employees do not know Tuvan. At the same time, she points out that the state allocated $210 million for the development of the Russian language and nothing for Tuvan.

Udmurtia

The State Council of Udmurtia recently rejected an initiative on compulsory study of the Udmurt language  in the schools of the republic.

Earlier, a similar initiative was made by the association “Udmurt Kenesh.” According to them, the compulsory study of the Udmurt will fight the loss of the Udmurt language in families where the parents do not speak Udmurt with their children as well as develop a culture of multilingualism among citizens. Russian activists have sharply opposed the proposals.

According to the interim head of Udmurtia, Alexander Solovyov, the budget annually allocates money for teaching and training in the titular language.

Yakutia

According to the law of the Sakha Republic “On Languages”, the languages ​​of instruction in secondary schools are Sakha or Yakut, Evenki, Even, Yukaghir, Dolgan, and Chukchi, and Russian in Russian-language schools.

In the non-Russian medium schools, Russian is taught as a subject. Local official languages of various parts of the republic ​​are also taught as a subject in Russian schools in areas in the north where there are large numbers of Evenki, Even, Yukaghir, Dolgan, and Chukchi speakers. In spite of the measures to preserve native languages other than Yakut, all except Yakut have been losing speakers in recent years.

In fact, Evenki, Even, Yukaghir, Dolgan, and Chukchi are only used as the principal means of communication in seven villages and towns. In all other places, most residents no longer speak those languages, and the languages are used mostly by the middle aged and elderly, and even then only in the home or in families that preserve traditional lifestyles like reindeer herding.

In Even areas, Even is taught as a subject from preschool through primary school. Even is an  endangered language. Even has 5,500 speakers.

In areas where the Evenki live, Evenki is taught from preschool through primary school, with an optional course in the eighth grade. Evenki is considered an endangered language. It has 25,000 speakers.

Dolgan, a language very closely related to Sakha, only has 1,000 speakers, and the number continues to decline. Mixed marriages are a problem as when a Dolgan speaker marries a speaker of another language, the children are raised in Russian and hence inter-generational transmission is broken. However, Dolgan is still spoken by all ages and is still being learned by children.

Chukchi still has 5,000 speakers and is considered to be in good shape. It is used in mother tongue education in regions where Chukchis predominate.

Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug

Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug faces problems common to republics where languages with only small numbers of speakers remain. The main indigenous languages ​​spoken here are Nenets, Khanty, and Selkup.

YaNAO has problems with  shortages of teachers for all three languages for both native language study classes and mother tongue education, which is offered in the nomadic schools. Other problems these languages face are language teachers who lack language teaching skills for beginning language learners and a shortage of instructional materials in the languages.

The Selkup language has 1,000 speakers, but it is in fairly good shape. It is only taught in the north of the speaker region and even there only until the fourth grade. In a couple of areas of the north, the language is still spoken by Selkups of all ages and also spoken by non-Selkups who reside there. In the north, 9

Problems

Virtually all minority languages in Russia suffer because parents and students themselves prefer to learn and speak Russian. This is not surprising, as Russian is not only spoken by the majority of the population, but it also remains the main language of interethnic communication in multinational Russia.

Students must pass the compulsory USE exam, a Russian proficiency test, in order to graduate from high school, hence students tend to study Russian more than other languages, including their own native language, in order to pass the test.

Nevertheless the fact remains that the native language remains the basis for the culture and preservation of the ethnic group. If the languages dies, the culture and in a sense the group itself die with it. Hence, promotion of native languages remains an important goal in Russia. Each region is trying to solve the native language problem in its own particular way.

Compulsory study of the official language of the particular region for all students has not had good results. For example, in Tatarstan, all students are required to study Tatar whether even if their native language is not Tatar.

This led to opposition by Russian-speaking parents who saw no use in their children studying Tatar. Further, it has led to the feeling that people who do not speak the language of the titular republic are being oppressed on the basis of their nationality.

Voluntary native language classes in schools do not lead to increased interest in native languages among youth. Realizing this, many regional governments have begun moving the national native language more into day to day life; for instance, by translating books and street signs into the national language.

Communication in the family itself from p parents to children remains the best way to preserve native languages. Peoples who pursue traditional occupations also tend to preserve their languages longer. Also, not everything can be translated into Russian. For instance, in the north, people still use their native language for items and concepts that have no good translation in Russian.

With the Internet has come increased interest among native peoples in preserving their culture and consequently the Net now offers more opportunities to learn native languages. On the other hand, the presence of Russian on the Net had a bad effect on native languages.

For instance, with the advent of the Internet, many more Russian borrowings and neologisms went into native languages. In addition, people on the Net using native languages often do not write their languages properly. This leads to impaired learning of the correct rules and spelling of the language.

As the head of the Center for National Education Problems FIRO MES Artyomenko Olga, a number of republics are reducing the hours of Russian instruction in the schools.

According to her, changes in the laws are needed in order to remove tension between ethnic groups and improve the quality of language instruction.

In particular, she recommended the removal of terms such as “non-Russian native,” “nonnative Russian,” and “Russian as a foreign language” from the laws of Russia.

A bill to update the legal place of the native languages of Russia has been in the works for a long period of time by the State Duma Committee of Nationalities. The bill has been received positively by the regions. Nevertheless, it has not yet passed the Duma.

Even in the Hood, There’s Better and Worse Areas

Jason: I’m sorry you had a rough time in LA – but I wouldn’t take it to heart.

Ah, it’s ok, man. That was a long time ago. I get over things. Here’s another meaning of life lesson. Get over stuff. Don’t hold grudges. Sure it made you mad when it happened back then but that was then and this is now. Drop it. Get over it. It’s the past and the past is dead.

Life’s basically a shit test, right? Well that was one serious shit test, teaching those Black kids. But from 10th-12th grade, they act pretty good. That’s because you can legally drop out by 10th grade and all the bad ones are on the street, in juvenile hall, or dead. The only ones that are there want to be there.

They won’t do any work of course, but they are quite jolly, and the whole class is pretty much a sort of chatty party. I gave up on trying to get them to do any work. I would just go over and sit with the kids and join the chat party, usually. They were very friendly so it was easy to join their chat party. And get paid $20/hour for doing so, too. And this was 30 years ago. It’s probably a lot more now.

The Black administrators know it’s a fucking zoo, and they basically don’t care. It’s sort of like a an actual warzone. You’re a hero just for showing up on the front and you’re a hero just for surviving another day alive. The Black admins treat you like a rescuing hero just for showing up for work.

“Whoa! Look at this heroic White man, come to the fort to teach our people!”

Plus they figure you’re not that racist because no racist White would do a job like that. I don’t care what SJW’s say. They just wouldn’t. Everyone who is there is there by choice.

Jason: Well, people are always saying “man up” – but honestly, if you were saying “join the KKK”, then that stuff bothered you.

Well, yeah. Sure it bothered me. It stresses you out really bad. Sometimes on break I would fume and rage in my classroom alone, pounding on desks and cursing to myself. I used to have a lot of fantasies.

I’m not sure if I fantasized about killing them, though I might have. A lot of them pretty much deserved it, but they wouldn’t be worth the homicide rap. Anyway even a lot of them probably start acting a lot better in adulthood if they even make it that far, so murdering them in their temporary sociopathic youth wouldn’t be right ha ha..

I do remember fantasies of tying them to their chairs so they couldn’t pop up out of their chairs every 30 seconds like human jack-in-the-boxes. That actually didn’t seem all that cruel to me, and it seemed to be the only sane way to deal with them.

Jason: It’s just that majorities tend to be tyrannical – picking on the minority – especially if you got on their bad side.

I’ve seen them act pretty bad towards Black teachers too, especially Black men. I saw a couple of Black men who looked like they were being driven insane or to ill health by those kids.

One man had bloodshot eyes – hypertension or heart disease? The poor guy looked like his heart was going to literally explode and splatter all over the room. I felt so sorry for him.

Another poor Black man, a fellow sub, actually was literally being driven crazy. He was shaking, raging at the kids, and he’d also turned paranoid. He was start shaking and raging at the kids and the kids would start ridiculing him. The Black boys would say, “Ohhhhhh, you’re niiiiiiiice.”

It was mean but their insults were actually pretty funny. They’re evil but a lot of them are still pretty damn funny. I talked to him though, and I really liked him a lot and vice versa. He wasn’t a bad person. Just a good person being driven insane by bad people.

There was a light-skinned Black man, a fellow sub, who was being driven crazy by them too. He and I became pretty good friends. He would come over to my class and help me teach or hang out with me on breaks. I forget why he was in the class with me. I think we were teaching the class together for some insane reason.

This was all at junior highs in Compton and one in LA. For some reason the female teachers control them a lot better at that age.

Black kids are a handful, man, especially in the ghetto. Black adults act far better than Black kids. Imagine teaching a class full of Black adults. Unless it’s a class in a prison, they probably act pretty damn good if they’re civilized enough to set foot in a classroom as an adult.

Now, why would some comment about Black teenage fathering push the brats overboard?

They’re ghetto shits, typical ghetto monsters. It was at a place called Centennial High School. You can look it up. And I was in Compton right next to Willowbrook, too. Which is right next to Watts. Even in the hood some places are better than others. That for example would be the very deepest and frankly Blackest heart of Compton.

As you get deeper and deeper into the hood, people seem angrier and angrier, and there’s more and out and out ghetto nig behavior. But it’s not real dangerous, at least in daytime. I used to leave a lunch and walk over to fast food joints and buy food. There were just crazy crackhead women walking around, but they aren’t dangerous. They’re just nuts.

And even the Black teachers start looking hostile, especially the women, and Black teachers are generally quite nice and civilized. They just look pissed off and when they saw me, they got even more pissed off.  Their faces got this stone cold, hard, and determined look. Resentment, I would call it.

And the faces on the residents actually get darker too. Go to the hood sometime and drive towards Watts if you dare. Once you get to Watts the Blacks themselves will actually be a lot darker. I saw Blacks in Watts who had faces that were so Black they were almost blue, blue-black or very deep purple. The behavior and the humans themselves get darker as you move deeper into the heart of the ghetto.

He Wanted a Twin, Or Worse, a Reflection in the Mirror

My mother and father went to UCLA. My Mom for a mere year, my father til graduation. And came back later for a Masters in Counseling, after which he set about for the entire time I knew him demonstrating that he had learned almost nothing from those pounding years of hard core psychology classes. And the books in the world can’t penetrate a brick wall in the head.

I was supposed to go to UCLA, but I was as huge disappointment. I couldn’t pass Algebra 2, even with this Grade-A IQ of mine. Disappointment all around.

Why was I supposed to go there? He went there. What was I supposed to major in? History? Why? That’s what he majored in! What was I supposed to do afterwards? Teach school. Why? That’s what he did! Starting to get the picture? He didn’t want a son. He wanted a junior twin. Worse, an exact replica cutout from the mirror, 35 years too late.

Why do parents do this shameless bullshit? Yeah, I resented it. I’m not your toy or your reflection in the mirror, pal! I’m actually a real human being, separate from you. You know, a separate person, with my very own thoughts, feelings, desires, values, girlfriends, orgasms, bong hits, parties to go to, you name it, guy. I think people like that have an Object Relations problem. A lot of people have this.

Borderlines are notorious. The Borderline cannot see you as an individual person with your own feelings, thoughts, desires, sleep patterns, favorite foods, quirks and gifts, home runs and strikeouts. A lot of personality disorders share this.

This is one of the most important lessons you can learn in life – that others are completely separate from you. It’s painful in a way because we really want others, especially those we love, to be a part of us in a sense – to agree and disagree with us on everything, but it just doesn’t work that way, and thank God for that.

Alt Left: Should Designated Victim Minors Be Put in Special Protective “Schools for the Bullied?”

Jason: Well, do you feel there should be special education in regular schools – not special schools? I mean, honestly, the people who seem retarded are bullied but so are the retarded at the same rate simply because as you say boys (and girls) are acting according to instinct.

I don’t know. Perhaps we could set up special schools for designated victims. Of course then the “normal bullies” wouldn’t have anyone to bully, but I’m sure they will make do. They will just bully their siblings or whatever.

It is a very interesting idea. A lot of people won’t do it because there will be stigma attached with having to go to the Bullied School because you were such a fucktard that everyone bullied you. You could get bullied on that basis right there.

Also as pointed out below it might be just overprotecting kids from the hardships of life, making them unprepared for the real world.

Another problem would be as stated above that the stigma of going to Fucktard School for the Bullied might be pretty extreme right there. Maybe a lot of boys or parents don’t want that shame on the bullied one’s resume.

Another problem is that the bullied might just form a hierarchy of the bullied and bully each other. Not sure how likely that is but I’m sure it is somewhat likely.

But I’m not really a fan of bullying in sense. I have had clients and friends who got bullied, mostly in junior but also in elementary school, and they are still fucked up over this to this very day. Basically they have low self-esteem. Otherwise they function well. Perhaps some of these people were designated victims.

Be that as it may, even designated victims are human, and the bullying they get is horribly painful for them, and it even screws them up far into adulthood. I mean what did these designated victims really do? Nothing, honestly. We punish traffic offenders worse than those people deserve to get punished.

The downside is that getting bullied often toughens boys so it makes them mature. Also a lot of people get bullied hard over certain things, and then you meet them later, and they are completely normal. The behaviors they were bullied over are gone.

Did the bullying make them stop their stupid behaviors? I have no idea. Maybe they just did it on their own. But I tried to shape up after I got bullied. I tried to be a cool guy so I didn’t get bullied anymore. I think bullying probably does force some people to shape up and get their shit together.

Then others are damaged far into their 30’s.

It’s like a test of pure fire. Boys are iron and the bullying is an iron force with fire. It turns boys into men, hopefully. The ones that make it past the bullying and get their shit together are like stainless steel, forged in the fire of cruelty, harassment, undignified insults, and humiliation. On the other hand a lot iron boys walk through the fire and don’t get turned into steel at all. They might just rust or turn brittle, I have no idea.

Alt Left: Janet Fiamengo, “Feminists Play Fast and Loose with Data Again”

Feminist messing with rape data and blowing the rape rate far higher than it actually is. The latest fake feminist study.

Ever heard the figure that 2

So how many women really get raped at university? Try 2.

Ever seen the figure of how many women get raped over a lifetime? I forget the figure but it’s more fakery. What’s the real figure? Try 1

How many rape claims are false? Feminist claim it is 2-

You hear crazy figures like out of every 1,000 rape cases, only 6 result in a conviction and incarceration.

Well, I know a cop. He told me that in his city, they throw out 9

There are also some fairly valid reasons why the rest of rape cases that are actually filed – 100 out of 1,000 – eventually filter down to 6 out of 1,000.

Actually most rapists are not particularly dangerous. The truly dangerous rapists are the sadistic rapists. Feminists will say all rapists are sadistic, but really only 5-1

There are other rapists, two categories having to do with power. One is called power reassurance. This man feels he is inadequate and rapes to make himself feel like a man again. These are often the “gentleman rapist” types. They really exist. They won’t hurt you and they often apologize to the woman after it’s over.

There is the power-anger rapist. This man is angry at women for whatever reason, which could be due to all sorts of things. He hates women or at least is very angry with them. They usually don’t kill but they can, especially if the woman puts up a fight.

In those cases, he can indeed hurt the woman and sometimes even kill her. If he kills her, he feels bad about and leaves soon afterwards. They often do hurt women though because roughness, beatings, etc. may accompany the rape due to his rage at women.

Spot the Language 30

Just no. You’re never getting this one either.You will never get the language, so just give me the general region where it is spoken and if possible the language family this is a part of.

I like to toss out this language when I ask linguist morons who insist that all languages are equally difficult or easy to learn. I ask them,

Is (this language) as easy to learn as Malay? Is Malay as difficult to learn as (this language)?

This language actually has 15,000 speakers. It is spoken in a part of the world where there are many small languages spoken by different tribal groups. They typically have only small numbers of speakers, and in general they are not official languages where they are spoken.

This language is interesting because studies have shown that it is so complicated that even native speakers often make errors when they speak. There is also a possibility that there may be 70,000 possible forms of any verb.

Unfortunately, this language has no official status. For the first five years of education, another language in this group, albeit with many more speakers, is used as the mode of education. After that it switches over to education in the large language of the state which these people are citizens of, which is completely different from this language. As a result, children have a better command of the state language than their native tongue.

Nevertheless, most people over age 35 are fluent speakers of this tongue and it is still the first language of most children. It has two different alphabets, a non-Latin one which is most used and a Latin one, an example of which can be seen below.

Neither are much used and speakers of this language are more literate in the language used in the first five years of elementary school than they are in this language. These languages are known, in addition to their maddening complexity, for having very large inventories of both vowels and consonants. And just to give you a huge hint, yes, the speakers of this language are Muslims, as are almost all speakers of this language family.

Kʼetʼus Hunar

Zewnoƛax zewčʼeyƛax bˤeƛon bocʼin zirun qayno. Sidaquł šigoħno sadaqorno boyno ħukmu: yaqułtow begira bocʼi ħonƛʼār miƛʼeł xizāz xizyo rišʷa yoł. Bˤeƛā begirno qay łˤāł xizāz, bocʼin zirun regirno ħonƛʼār miƛʼeł xizāz. Ɣudod, žedi raynosi beƛʼez reqenyoxor, ziru boqno uhi-ehƛada buq boƛāxzāzarno boqno. Zirus uhi-ehi teqxoy, ɣʷaybi kʼoƛin elār, bocʼi buq bātuzāzarno boqno bikʼin reqenyoƛer, besurno ƛʼarayaw miƛʼi. Miƛʼin bisno bocʼin zirun xizor rutin qʼayƛʼār.

Rizirno cʼidoƛʼor ƛoħon begirno łāƛʼor qay. Kikxogon zewno bočʼikʼxo kʼetʼu. Qayir zewāčʼey rikʷayxo; nešuruxay nełor rikʷayxo zewčʼey. Kʼetʼu, ełor baynosi qay, boqno kʼekʼbikʼa. Kʼekʼbikʼni teqnosi, qay łikin rixerčʼeytow boxin xizor. Bˤeƛā esirno: “Šidā boxā rayirčʼey łin?” Elo didiyƛa žekʼu yoł-ƛin eƛin qayā. Aħugon rikʼin łāxor zirun qayno.

Žedi raynosi kikxor žedā esirno kʼetuq: “Mi šebi?” Di žekʼu yoł-ƛin eƛin kʼetʼā. Šebi že debez ħiroƛʼ esirxo zirā. Tupi ƛin eƛix kʼetʼā. Dicce rˤuƛʼno zirun qayno, amma biyxoy kʼetʼu yāłru, xizyo łˤonon zenzi rikʼin raħira reƛ. Bˤeƛo buqełno bičin ažoz kʼodrexāzay, rołikʼno aħyabin kecno, kʼetʼu tataniłxo zewno cʼidox.

Bˤeƛā kʼekʼrikʼerxo zewno aħyabi. Že rikʷayxoy, kʼetʼuz rokʼƛʼor rayno, že elo aw ƛin, hudu betʼtʼun kʼoƛin elor. Dicce bˤuƛʼzāq bˤeƛqo regin ixiytʼatow qˤaƛubin, boxin ciqxār. Bocʼezno qayizno, ziruzno rokʼƛʼor rayno baysi bāsu ixiytow ħaywan šebin, nełoq že riqičʼey kʼiriłno roxin. Cʼikʼiy reƛ miƛes ƛexun kʼetʼur. ʕoƛiran ɣˤudeł kʼetʼu bišno, racʼno baɣʷace dawla bocʼesno zirusno.

Alt Left: “Some in Hong Kong Feel Frustrated as Their City Loses to Mainland China,” by Andre Vltchek

I am sure most of you have heard of the riots convulsing Hong Kong. The Western media is only providing one point of view about these riots – heroic rioters fighting evil Communist dictatorship for freedom and democracy and sugar and spice and everything nice.

I urge you to think again. I don’t support these rioters. There’s really nothing to support. Further, as I hope to show in future pieces, the rioters absolutely do not have majority support. If you go against them, they beat you with clubs, fists and boots. They are destroying public property all over Hong Kong for no particularly good reason.

These are the children of the rich and the upper middle classes. The working class of Hong Kong, the poor, and older people are nowhere to be seen. Go talk to some of them and they will all tell you that they oppose these destructive riots.

If there was a referendum tomorrow on what the rioters want, it would lose. The rioters represent a significant group, but they are not a majority. They only have 35-4

Your average working class, poor, or older Hong Konger is a fairly conservative person. These silly riots go against traditional Chinese values. Sure, China is revolutionary, and that involves chaos and destruction, but since when are contras revolutionaries? Contras are never revolutionaries.

The young rioters think they are citizens of something called Hong Kong that is not a part of China. The silent majority with their more conservative values are proud to be what they have always considered themselves to be: citizens of China and heirs to its great civilization.

The rioters don’t get it. Hong Kong is not some separate thing. Hong Kong is part of China. It always was part of China. Sure, the British stole it for a while (during the Opium Wars to boot), but it was still part of China even then.

Hong Kong is now back to China where it has always been. The rioters are citizens of China, not some fake thing called Hong Kong. They obviously lack majority support in China proper, where recent polls show ~8

The CP runs China. Almost everyone in China supports the CP. I hate to tell people to love it or leave it, but if these kids don’t want to be part of China, perhaps they might wish to leave. Macao is right next door. And then there’s Taiwan. Or just calm down and quit being tools of the West.

I would like to add that a century of extreme anti-Communist propaganda is also driving these riots. Most Hong Kongers are extremely anti-Communist. Except now they live in a Communist country. Maybe it’s time they made some adjustments. You can only push a rock uphill for so long. At some point, even Sisyphus wears out and becomes just one more victim of the Law of Gravity. Maybe some causes are doomed from the start.

Some in Hong Kong Feel Frustrated, as Their City Is Losing to Mainland China

Hong Kong is losing to Mainland China. Its poverty rates are high; it suffers from corruption and savage capitalism. It is now the most expensive city on earth. People are frustrated, but paradoxically, they are blaming socialist Beijing for their problems instead of the legacy of British colonialism. ‘Across the line’, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, Xiang and other cities are leaving Hong Kong behind in almost all fields.

When my dear friend and great concert pianist from Beijing, Yuan Sheng, used to live in New York, recording, giving concerts, and teaching at prestigious Manhattan School of Music, he told me that he used to cry at night:

“In the United States, they smear China. I felt hurt, defenseless.”

He returned to Beijing, gave back his Green Card and began teaching at Beijing Conservatory. He never regretted his decision. “Beijing is much more exciting than New York these days”, he told me.

It is obvious that Beijing is booming: intellectually, artistically; in fact, in all fields of life.

Yuan’s friend, who returned from London and became a curator at the iconic “Big Egg” (the biggest opera house on earth), shared her thoughts with me:

“I used to sit in London, frustrated, dreaming about all those great musicians all over the world. Now they come to me. All of them want to perform in Beijing. This city can make you or break you. Without being hyperbolic, this is now one of the most important places on earth.

Just under one roof, in one single night, we can have a Russian opera company performing in our big halls, in another there is a Chinese opera, and there is a Bolivian folklore ensemble in the recital hall. And ours is only one of Beijing’s theatres.”

When Chinese artists and thinkers are fighting for the prime venues with their Western counterparts, it is usually Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen ‘against’ London, Paris, and New York. Hong Kong is ‘somewhere there’, behind, suddenly a backwater.

While Hong Kong University and the City University of Hong Kong used to be the best in China, many mainland institutions of higher learning, including Peking University and Tsinghua, are now producing many more cutting-edge creative thinkers.

I spoke at all of these schools and can confirm that the young people in Beijing and Shanghai are extremely hardworking and endlessly curious, while in Hong Kong, there is always that mildly arrogant air of exceptionalism and a lack of discipline.

It used to be that the so-called “Sea Turtles” (students who went abroad or to Hong Kong and then returned to Mainland China), were treated like celebrities, but now, it is much easier to get a job with Mainland China’s diplomas.

Recently, while filming the riots in Hong Kong, I was told by a receptionist at one of the major shopping plazas:

“We do not treat visitors from Mainland China well. And they lost interest in Hong Kong. Before, they used to come here to admire out wealth. Now, most of them are avoiding this place. What we have, they have too, and often better. If they travel, they’d rather go to Bangkok or Paris.”

These days, the contrast between Xiang, Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong is shocking. Mainland infrastructure is incomparably better. Public areas are vast, and cultural life much more advanced than in the former British colony.

While the Mainland Chinese cities have almost no extreme poverty (and by the end of 2020 will have zero), in Hong Kong, at least 2

Hong Kong is the most expensive place on earth. Just to park a car in the city could easily cost over US $700 per month, and that’s just for working hours. Tiny apartments cost over a $1 million. Yet Salaries in Hong Kong are not higher than those in London, Paris, or Tokyo.

The city is run by an extreme capitalist system ‘planned’ by corrupt tycoons/developers. The obsolete British legal system here is clearly geared to protect the rich, not the majority. That was essentially why the “Extradition Bill” was proposed: to protect Hong Kong inhabitants from the unbridled, untouchable, as well as unelected de facto rulers. But after months of riots sponsored by the West, the Hong Kong administration scrambled the bill.

But there is also this ‘deal’ negotiated before Hong Kong was returned where it belongs – to China: “One Country, Two Systems”. It is an excellent contract for the turbo-capitalist magnates and for the pro-Western “activists”. And it is an extremely bad one for the average people of Hong Kong.

Young hooligans know very little about their city. I talked to them extensively during their first anti-Beijing riots in 2014, the so-called “Umbrella Revolution”.

Correctly, then and now, they have been frustrated about the declining standard of living and the difficulties of getting well-paid jobs and finding affordable housing. They told me there was no future for them and that their lives were going nowhere.

But quickly, their logic would collapse. While realizing what tremendous progress, optimism, and zeal could be observed in the People’s Republic of China under the leadership of the Communist Party, they still demanded more capitalism, the very thing which was actually ruining their territory. In 2014 and now, they are readily smeared the Communist Party.

Being raised on the shallow values of selfishness and egotism, they have now betrayed their own country, and have begun treasonous campaigns, urging foreign powers, including US and UK, to “liberate them”. All for a fleeting moment of fame, for a “selfie uprising”.

To liberate them from whom? China does not (unfortunately for Hong Kong) interfere in Hong Kong’s economic and social affairs. If anything, it builds new infrastructure, like the enormous bridge now connecting Hong Kong with Macau (a former Portuguese colony) and a high-speed train system linking Hong Kong with several cities in Mainland China.

Huanzhou high-speed train station, one of the biggest in the world

The more restraint Beijing shows, the more it gets condemned by the rioters and Western media for ‘brutality’. As more subway stations and public property get destroyed by rioters, more sympathy flows for them from the German, US, and British right-wing politicians.

For decades, the British colonialists humiliated  the people of Hong Kong while simultaneously turning their city into a brutal and by the Asian standards ruthless and fully business-oriented megalopolis. Now people are confused and frustrated. Many are asking, “Who am I?”

For Hong Kong, this is a difficult moment of soul-searching.

Even those who want to “go back to the UK” can hardly speak English. When asked why they were rioting, they mumble something about the democracy and freedom of the West, plus the evilness of Beijing. Brochures from obscure, extremist Japanese religious cults are distributed amongst the rioters.

It’s pure intellectual chaos. Rioters know nothing about Syria, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and other countries which are being ruined by the West.

Leaders like Joshua Wong proudly collude with the Western embassies. To praise Chinese socialism publicly is now dangerous – people get beaten by the “pro-democracy” rioters, for such “crimes”.

Highly educated and overly-polite Singapore is literally sucking out hundreds of foreign companies from Hong Kong. Its people speak both English and Mandarin. In Hong Kong, the great majority speaks only Cantonese.

Many foreigners in Hong Kong are also relocating to Shanghai. Not only big businessmen: Shanghai is now full of European waiters.

Even tourism is down in Hong Kong, by 4

Absurdly, the rioters want precisely what the Communist Party of China is providing: a real struggle against corruption, a determined attempt to solve housing crises, the creation of new jobs, and the provision of more public services. They want better education and generally a better life. They want “Shanghai or Beijing”, but they also say that they want to be a colony of the UK or a dependency of the USA.

They loosely define communist goals, and then they shout that they are against Communism. In short, politically speaking, they are very confused.

HNKChina is now ready to celebrate its 70th Anniversary of the Founding of The People’s Republic of China.

Clearly, the West is using Hong Kong to spoil this great moment.

After leaving Hong Kong, in Shanghai, I visited a brilliant socialist realism exhibition at the iconic, monumental China Art Museum. The country under the leadership of President Xi is once again confident, revolutionary, and increasingly socialist, to horror of declining West.

It is a proud nation with great, elegant cities constructed by the people, for the people, and with a progressively ecological countryside. Its scientific, intellectual ,and social achievements speak louder than words.

China Art Museum, Shanghai.

The contrast between Hong Kong and Shanghai is tremendous and growing.

But do not get me wrong: I like Hong Kong. I have  more than 20 years of history with that old, neurotic, and spoiled lady. I can feel her pulse. I love old trams and ferries and out-of-the-way islands.

But Hong Kong’s charm lies in its decay.

Mainland China’s beauty is fresh. China is one of the oldest cultures on earth and one of the deepest. But it feels crisp, full of hope, and positive energy. Together with its closest ally, Russia, it is now working and fighting for the entire world; it is not selfish.

Hong Kong is fighting only for its vaguely defined uniqueness. Actually, it is not Hong Kong that is fighting, as most of people there want to be where they truly belong – in their beloved nation – China. It is a gang of kids with their face masks that is fighting. In brief: a relatively big group of pro-Western extremists whose leaders are putting their fame above the interests of the people.

Hong Kong has no “Big Egg”: no famous theatre where the greatest musicians are stunning the world. Its only art museum has been closed for reconstruction for years and will re-open only at the end of 2019. Its cultural life is shallow, even laughable, especially pathetic for the place that is branding itself “Asia’s World City”. There are no great discoveries made here. It is all business. Big, big business. And creeping decay.

Beijing could ‘liberate’ Hong Kong easily to give it purpose, pride, and future.

But young hooligans want to be liberated by Washington instead. They want to be recolonized by London. And they have not consulted their fellow citizens. That clearly reflects their idea about ‘democracy’. Not the “rule of the people” but the “rule of the West”.

Not only do they feel spite for their country, but they also scorn and intimidate their fellow citizens who only want to live meaningful lives based on Chinese values.

Andre Vltchek is philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He’s a creator of Vltchek’s World in Word and Images, and a writer that penned a number of books, including China and Ecological Civilization. He writes especially for the online magazine New Eastern Outlook where this article was originally published. 

The Secret to China’s Success – The Capitalists Are Kept out of Politics

China isn’t really a capitalist country. Why not? Because the capitalists are not in politics. They don’t run the country. The market or the capitalists are a tool to develop the forces of production instead of a form of Politics as they are most everywhere else, where they manage to conveniently screw up most everything for the masses.

The Communist Party rules China and the Hell if they are going to let the capitalists take over their country and run it into the ground like they do everywhere else. Instead the market is simply a tool, and the capitalists are barred from politics as they ought to be.

Capitalists should just make stuff. They’re pretty good at that. Once they gain political power, they seem to blow up everything and turn it all to Hell. Want some evidence? Open your eyes and look around at the capitalist world. See?

In China the capitalists have to go along with the Communist Party’s plans. New labor laws? Suck it up, capitalists. New pollution controls? Better fix those smokestacks, capitalists. The capitalists don’t have any say in this because if you let them take over, they always vote to ruin labor and destroy all the environmental laws because that’s what the profit motive demands.

Capitalists in China have to follow the Party’s five year plans. They have to do what the government says, or orders, for that matter. If the capitalists defy the party and don’t do as they’re told, the Party will just go in and confiscate all their property.  They’ll steal all your stuff. So that’s good motivation to get along and go along. Then they will either nationalize it or turn it over to one of their friends who is a bit more obedient.

There is a Party committee that sits on the board of directors of all large corporations. Large corporations are frequently bought out and nationalized. The state must own a proportion of all foreign corporations that set up shop in China. Apple wants to set up a factory? Fine, but the government gets a piece of that.

The banking is almost all controlled by the state. This is how China among a few other countries weathered the bankster economic crash of 2008. The state owned the banks so China was not plugged into world capitalist finance.

Japan is similar. There are a few very large banks at the top of the economic pyramid, and they are owned by the state.

Like in Korea, economic decisions about the development of the country are made by teams made up of the government and corporations. Korea’s giant conglomerates are nearly state-owned in part.

The Russian government is similar. It either owns outright or owns 5

A number of China’s state corporations are among the largest companies on Earth. They are right there in the Forbes 100 or even in the Forbes 50. They are immensely profitable and they generate a tremendous amount of money for the state, which is then used to develop the country or distributed to the people in one way or another. What’s wrong with that?

The Chinese state spends a staggering amount of money developing their country.  They do things quite easily, quickly, and even cheaply there – such as developing deep water ports or high speed rail systems – that either take forever and cost a fortune in the US or are simply not done, as they are economically unfeasible.

For instance, the US has decided that high-speed rail is not economically feasible in the US. How is it economically feasible in China, Japan, and Europe then? That argument is senseless.

China is presently pouring vast amounts of money into the rural areas, as they have been neglected. A lot of rural people move to the cities to seek their fortune. A lot of them don’t make it. China allows them to keep their farms as insurance when they do this, so rural folks who don’t make it in the cities always have the fallback of moving back to their farms. Hey, at least they can eat and survive.

This is where having the state own all the land in China comes in. Since the state owns all the land, the rural farms can remain as a backup insurance policy for rural workers who migrate to the cities and don’t make it.

If land in China was privately owned, that backup would not be available, and Chinese cities would be teeming with awful slums made up of rural dwellers migrated to the city. This sad scene is typical all over the capitalist world. But maybe it’s not necessary.

As noted, all land in China is owned by the state. Every inch of it. This is important as the private ownership of land is one of the main reasons that the India – Pakistan – Nepal – Bangladesh South Asian region is such a shithole. The best single thing India could do would be to abolish the private ownership of land.

In China, you get to own your house but not the land it’s built on. Sure you can lease out state land, even for a long time, but you can’t own it. In Netherlands, similarly all land is owned by the state. It’s not a bad idea.

A vast amount of the Chinese economy – 4

The state owns the vast irrigation system that underpins the entire rural economy. If that were privatized, all Hell would break loose. Think about it. You can’t have private corporations running the irrigation networks. Hell, we don’t even have that in the US.

The state used to run small schools and even medical centers in most rural villages, although they are getting away from that. Education is free through the graduate level. This also helps free graduates from being mired in poverty in debt for years or decades after they graduate. They keep their money to spend in the economy instead having most of their money go via debt bondage to parasitical bankers who don’t create anything of real value anyway.

Most capitalist banks in the West are giant loan-sharking institutions or casinos in the sky. Speculation isn’t real investment. It’s like going to the casino. If everyone just goes to the casino, this is good for the economy how? This is what happens when all that’s left of your economy is the economic mirage called “finance.”

Similarly, China now covers almost all typical medical care that people need. The state pays 8

This is a black mark to me, but it’s still better than our for-profit medicine system that wastes incredible amounts of the productive forces on overhead and executive payouts.

Medicare’s overhead is

Once again, when the state covers your medical care, workers can not only relax, but they also don’t have to go into debt, bankruptcy, and poverty to  pay their medical bills. All of which helps whom? The vultures called for profit hospitals and insurance companies?

Why should sick people be financially ruined and living on the streets because they were so sick that they had to give every time they owned to some human shark in a corporate suit? In what possible world is this a just or even acceptable outcome?

Instead of being ruined, losing everything they own, and going homeless due to medical bills, with state health care, workers can keep working at their jobs and keep their money and their wealth as the state foots the doctor bills. So these workers remain productive and continue to spend money in the real economy. Win-win.

PUA/Game: The Young, Rich College Coeds I Met at USC 1982-1983

SHI: I found the girls from the wealthy group superficial, flaky, and snobbish. No shit, that’s how they were raised. Their parents were assholes too.

Jason: But they are of course in massive denial of this. Well, I did get one to admit he was an ass – sort of.

Yeah, who knows? Who knows what those people think?

SHI is correct for rich Indian women, no doubt. But American rich women seem a lot different.

Although I went to USC and I met a lot of young women from wealthy families. I was in a teaching program, and those are full of women with only a few men. Stud’s paradise. The few guys around are often lame, cucked, repressed or autists.

I was friends with this Japanese dude who was almost too Beta to even get laid, though he had a girlfriend who wanted to fuck him obviously. But he was too scared – nerdy = autistic – to do it, and he would make an excuse and turn her down. He was nice but very conventional.

He was also a writer. I spent a lot of time over at this guy’s house in Torrance. I was “Duude.” That was actually my name to him. He thought I was a crazy, offensive, super-asshole, which is of course true. He just thought I was an outrageous “funny asshole.” He rather liked me.

There were also these aide types around in the administration of the teaching program. Almost all women, one dyke, a lot of the rest single, one man in the whole program, decent enough guy. I think he ran the thing.

So the office was full of these horny single woman staffers. Like 10-20 years older than me. I chased them too because I’m an asshole, and I don’t care. This one hottie I befriended. She seemed really uptight. Lived alone. But obviously liked cock.

I used to have breakfast and lunch with her. One time we were talking about gay men, and I mentioned that people say they hate women, but really they don’t. Most women think this is a thoughtful conversational topic. And then I said, “But I think to truly hate the opposite sex, you really would have to be a heterosexual!”

She fell out of her chair, and every woman I used this line with loved it. Because straight women sort of hate and love men, and straight men sort of hate and love women.

We are wonderful and horrible to each other. Men hurt women badly and vice versa. Both sides accumulate battle wounds and bitterness over time. Everyone knows this but if you mention it, the defenses like Denial come out fast. But women think that statement hits it on the head.

We used to go out to the movies. I was an alcoholic at that time, drinking 10 beers a day and doing student teaching. I was also a mental mess and was going insane. She lived alone near Beverly Hills and slept alone on a pad in the living room. I made out with her pretty good at the door but she stopped short of that and would not let me come in.

She wanted to fuck me but stopped herself because “she had been married and traveled all over and I had not,” so we had nothing in common. So no sex. No pussy. Plus she was 15-20 years older than me. Mommy type. Mommy-son dynamic. Weird but fun. Maybe.

I actually dated quite a few of those USC coeds. If anything, they were a bit uptight and not real loose sexually. It wasn’t real easy to fuck them. They were sort of inexperienced/prudish, but not in a bad way. Others were living with a boyfriend.

I became good friends with one, and I used to hang out at her house. She was Jewish. We never had sex but we used to talk about porn, and she knew the names of female porn stars. But I don’t think she was an easy fuck, or at least she never fucked me.

I met another one, totally hot, Sandra, who drove a late model Mercedes and lived in her own expensive house  in Pasadena. She was well known for being a slut ,and the other women hated her. She was nice and actually I probably could have fucked her as she gave off vibes like that, one day in particular, but I blew it.

I made friends with an extremely uptight Black woman named Betty. I guess she liked me but she was ugly and ultra-uptight. She eventually decided I was an asshole after blowing her off for many months.

There were other Black women in the program.  They lived in South LA but they were extremely civilized, nice girl, often really religious types.

I used to hang out with one in the library. One day she laughed at me and asked, “Boooob. Are you shyyyyy?” I never went out with her, but I probably  could have. But as she was a church girl, she probably didn’t put out. But she sure was nice. And in a Black people sort of way, she was rather hot.

I dated a Venezuelan woman but it never went beyond lunch dates. She wasn’t exactly an easy fuck either.

I dated a repressed Black woman who lived in Marina del Rey whose father was a physician.

We were working as aides at an elementary school, and we would meet at 8 AM and all have breakfast in the lounge.

I guess the Black woman liked me. One day we were talking about the football game, and she looked at me and said, “Damn I sure wish someone would take me to the football game!” And then she repeated that a few times looking right at me. Not being a total idiot, I got her number, and we made plans.

We went to a football game, and a bunch of White conservatives saw me with a Black chick and laughed at me in a very racist way, like sneering Southern rednecks treating me like an object of derision and hilarity.

Back then it was like if a White guy was with a Black chick, he was a fucktard because that meant he couldn’t get a White woman, so he had to resort to Black chicks. Because obviously they are bottom of the barrel, right?

I went out with her again at her apartment where she lived with her physician father, who I met. She lived in the Marina. I forget what happened but we went to some disco and went out dancing. Nothing happened in this relationship, not even a kiss. She was insanely uptight and apparently inexperienced sexually.

Later she hated me. Some weird guy was calling her up all the time saying sexual things and threatening her. She was convinced that this was somehow me. She also thought I was the biggest fucktard idiot total loser of a man on the face of the Earth. I have no idea why she thought that because she never acted like that on dates.

She was basically out of her mind. She told everyone that I was doing this to her, and I think even tried to get authorities involved. Just another land mine in the minefield called Women.

Women are dangerous.

There was this other very proper White woman who nevertheless usually spent the night at her boyfriend’s house. She ate breakfast with us every morning. So she was getting fucked all the time. Most of the others were not. Seemed like she and maybe a few of the others were the only women having any sex.

She actually seemed like she really liked me too.

Almost all those women had parents who were dentists, lawyers, or physicians. I carpooled with this super uptight women who was going to Dentistry School.

She was sexually repressed and uptight, and sitting next to her in the passenger seat, she would look at me and nervously touching her pussy while she drove. Like her pussy was all backed up, female equivalent of blue balls. Which actually exists. She wasn’t getting laid at all obviously and she probably was very inexperienced.

I have seen other young women who were not getting any sex and probably not masturbating either. They also seemed “backed up” with female equivalent of blue balls and touched their pussies a lot nervously.

There was also some older couple in the car with us, no idea, maybe her parents. I managed to piss all these uptight, conventional, extreme Normie people off by being my usual offensive asshole self.

That woman really hated me, and her parents thought I was pure scum, which is sort of true. I didn’t really care because they were just typical Normie White people fucktards, completely uptight, conventional, critical, with 1 million prohibitions and what you can say or do and be appropriate.

She seemed like she was interested in me sexually though, even though she hated me. Which is pretty typical for a woman anyway.

There was a seriously hot Black woman with a physician father. She was in one of my night classes, and she and I became quite close, had all sorts of great conversations, and spent time together. She was my best friend!

She was very, very nice and absolutely gorgeous, but rather uptight and seemed like she was sexually repressed or possibly just inexperienced. I simply blew it with her because I was completely insane at that point in my life, and it was sort of clear to anyone who studied me a bit. So like a fucktard I never asked her out. She sure liked me though. I mean a lot. A lot a lot a lot a lot.

There was also this Korean woman whose parents were doctors. She was also in the night class with the Black woman and she was also in one of my day classes with the blond sorority cunt.

She was the sweet, kind, loving, super-friendly, knockout gorgeous Asian woman of your dreams, straight out of all the stereotypes you ever heard about these women. She embodied them all, literally an animated and mortal human stereotype in flesh and bone.

She seemed like she really liked me. I mean like really really really really liked me, but like a moron, I never asked her out.

To tell the truth, she also seemed very sexually inexperienced, but not uptight or prudish, more in that strange Asian woman way where they aren’t getting any but it’s not due to being prudish because they’re not. Instead they are sort of normal and ok with it as this is what an unmarried woman is supposed to be like in their society.

I probably could have easily dated half the women in the program, but I simply blew it with a lot of them. And I did  date quite a few of them anyway. They were mostly repressed, uptight, and sexually inexperienced. But most were very sweet and nice.

Also keep in mind that I was at the peak of my looks, and women said I looked like Tom Cruise and Rick Springfield. I got offers to be a male model, which I turned down due to homophobia. In retrospect maybe I should have braved the fags and taken the jobs.

So maybe these women were just really nice to me because I was Chad. Had I not Chad’s looks, perhaps my experience would have been very different.

I also had good Game even then, so maybe that too. But I needed the Looks.

You got the Looks? Fine. Add the Game on top of the Looks, and now woo woo you’ve got a killer machine. It’ll teach you ev-ry thing.

No Looks? Add Casanova’s Game and it might just be worthless, or worse, creepy and dangerous.

YMMV.

What Are the Differences Between IQ’s of 120, 125, and 130

Rahul: Lindsay, how the hell are you!? It’s been a while. In your experiences, what is the difference between somebody with a 120 IQ and a 130 IQ, or the different between a 120 and a 125 IQ?

In many to most cases, practically nothing! Honestly.

Let’s look at the scores of some of our co and authors here:

  • Brian 135.
  • Petra (friend) ~130. But she has no interest in brainy stuff. She read my Turkic paper and she kept asking me, “Why would anyone even write a paper like that? What for? What’s the point?” But smart women are not into the airy world of abstract ideas.
  • My father 129. My father had some issues with highly abstract thinking. He just couldn’t seem to get his mind around certain things. I think I was explaining one of those weighed voting schemes to him and he never got it. Zen Buddhism made no sense to him. He kept pounding the table and asking, “What’s the point? What’s the point?” He was very stubborn-minded and closed-minded and rigid, and that can make you seem stupid about some things because you won’t open your mind enough to explore new subjects. Instead you reject them out of hand, say it makes no sense or you can’t understand it or whatever. But he read way faster than I do (he gobbled up a book a day), and although he did not display his ultra-intellect too often, when he did, he was extremely intelligent, especially in things like History and Political Science.
  • Shi 125.
  • Alan 123.
  • Wade 123.
  • Tulio 121.
  • My best female friend S. ~120. S. was not quite as intellectual as the rest, but she was also a heavy pot smoker and basically an alcoholic. One time I told her about some abstract concept I was thinking of (relating to the underlying mechanisms behind life on Earth or some insane crap) and said she probably wouldn’t understand it. She said, “Try me!” and I explained it to her, and she got it right away.
  • Phil 118.
  • Alpha ~115-121? She’s never told me and she probably won’t tell us, so this is strictly as WAG, and I could be way off, but in the conversations I’ve had with her on this, I am thinking it might be around this level. She was a graduate student in one of this country’s top universities. And whatever he # is, I assure you, Alpha is just as smart as I am.
  • Dota 117.
  • Matt 115. Very insecure about his score, but he’s as smart as I am.
  • Phil (friend) 115.
  • Betty (friend) 115. She originally got 107, but she retook the test and got 115 and recently took another one and got 140 on 1/2 of the test and a lower score on the other half. She always seemed to be just as smart as I am although she was much younger.
  • J.(ex-gf) 115. She was maybe not quite as intellectual as the others but she is a brilliant artist, actually a great artist. And I was definitely smarter than she was, but she was no dummy, and she was a very eager and attentive student to my professor role. I mean she deserves the term. She sells her stuff on the market for big money.
  • Forget his name former commenter 106. But he was just as smart as anyone listed above. I know, it’s crazy.

Most of those people above are about as smart as each other, and from what I can tell, they are just as smart as I am, and my score is 12-32 points higher than most of theirs. That’s 1-2 full standard deviations, and here on the ground, you can’t see much of anything at all.

For degrees, jobs, and prizes, you need these minimum IQ*’s, with averages in quotes:

BA  105 (average 115)
MA  108 (average 118)
PhD 115 (average 125)
MD  125 (average 130)
University professor 135 (average 145)
Congressman 135 (average 145)
Nobel Prize 150 (average 160)

*You can get those degrees, jobs and awards with lower IQ’s than the minimum, but it might require a lot of work. You’d have to work your rear end off, and you are going to struggle at least somewhat.

Alt Left: Container Theory: The Intersection of Nation-State Culture and Propaganda

I think I will just leave this beautiful comment as it is. That’s how perfect it is.

Found on the Net:

It needs to be understood what happens when a human is trapped inside one of the Nation-state Containers.

Why? Because understanding Container Theory is necessary in order to attempt to transcend the Nation-state Containers worldwide. The victim of propaganda lives in a nation- state controlled-information environment – a controlled reward environment not much different from a rat in a cage.

To illustrate my point, consider the children exchanged at birth scenario.

A child born to a NYC Jewish parent is exchanged with a child born in Iran to Shia Muslin parents and both children grow up in their adopted nation-states ignorant of where they were born or their parentage. So the biological parents do not raise their own child, and the children do not visit either the other child or their true biological parents – in fact, they do not even know they exist.

The child is not told they are adopted, and 24 years later, the two children exchanged at birth don’t know each other and cannot speak each other’s language, and in short, the children consider each other to be enemies. This is the result of Container programming, and Container Theory suggests that when done properly, it can keep the wars going for ever.

It seems to me the media is the one factor that allows leaders of nation-states to engage in personally-enhancing crimes and to inflict human rights damage on the people in foreign nations.

How can the problem of media support for lies, propaganda, and so on be framed into a proper thesis?

Via Container Theory, that’s how.

Few inside of the containers know the media-fed propaganda is not only false or misleading but is also psychologically engineered to insure that the propaganda victim does not discover the malicious nature of the psycho-engineered contents they see on available media.

Nothing comes to the victim’s attention that suggests the media is telling a fib or supporting a crime. In short only a few ever get a chance to look outside the Container walls to see or even look for the truth.

Most of those who do seek out the truth discover the same thing in every country – non-truthful propaganda is media-controlled and protected by law in every nation-state Container that the truth seeker peers into.

Those few humans who do understand the predicament of 24/7 information content control as delivered on media are blacklisted, treated as spies or traitors, shunned from workplaces, or denied access to jobs, etc. That’s not when they are simply out and out murdered by their own nation-state.

The two objects above in NYC, one born of Jewish race and religion vs. the other born of Iranian race and Shia Muslim religion, are presently opposite polar objects in our global society. The point being that opposite mindsets are man-made, not inborn. Human behavior (mindset-driven) is a result of information available in the cage (propaganda).

Teaching, a reward system, and propaganda in the caged environment allows the human rat to be made into whatever the those in charge of the the nation-state desire. When criminals are in charge of the information, teaching, and reward system, they can use those systems to mold the innocent minds of those contained.

Establishing control over the thought processes via directed learning (education), and a reward system allows propaganda to establish for the masses a belief system. The rule of law, award system, and directed learning are control systems which can be varied and modified by properly engineered propaganda.

If criminals gain control of the nation-state system (a Container full of humans), they can use propaganda to polarize the people in one Container against the people in another Container, getting the people of one nation-state to hate the people or ways of a targeted nation-state.

It is this Container Effect that allows criminals or crazies in charge to use the national resources and the people of a Container (nation-state) to conduct their wars for profit, power, and prestige.

Some suggest bombing several cities in America to stop the USA from its behaviors. But Pearl Harbor and 9/11 both prove propaganda can use these events to activate the masses against those that the containerized populations have been polarized to hate.

The invasion of Iraq is a prime case in point – no facts showed that Iraq did the 9/11 event, but private media (9

After 9/11, millions joined the government military to help avenge the atrocity. But what these avengers actually did was put billions of dollars of profits into the pockets of the privateers who used it to organize the invasion of Iraq.

When it comes to foreign policy, most Americans believe the official story because it can be quite painful not too. In addition, Americans are so media-encapsulated that they believe anything the MS media distributes to be the truth. American’s have no history of questioning their media, and the government usually ends up taking the blame for the media’s mistakes, while media in most Western nations is privately owned.

Propaganda + reward system + education + social conditioning + directed creation of mindsets by positions of power = The Container Effect.

Basically humans are information sponges, absorbing from the societies in which they reside or are raised:

1) information and knowledge

2) how to engage only in normative and acceptable behaviors

The biology of the parents matters not, as the biology is merely a system of construction and maintenance that maintains a physical structure (the body) able to support the molding of one’s mind to maximize accommodation to the system.

It’s only the mindset that the psycho-engineers designs into the propaganda that counts. Container-trapped humans adopt by osmosis the psycho-engineered propaganda taught to the newborn. In that case, the physical structure of any human is not important; it’s the mind that creates the mindset controlled behavior that counts.

The most pressing need of humanity worldwide is to break out of these Containers and gain access to truthful media everyday in every place.

I say again to stop the wars, it is first necessary first so overcome the Container Effect.

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