Author: VD

Immigration and Empire are Degenerate

This is not news. Consider the following three paragraphs quoted from a book published more than a century ago, in 1911.

The unification of the inhabited world which forms the meaning and the greatness of the Roman Empire, is a process presenting two different sides to the observer. Kelts, Iberians, Rhaetians, Moors, Ulyrians, Thracians were to some extent civilised by the culture of Greece and Rome, and achieved by its help a great advance in economic and civic organisation as well as in education; Syrians, Egyptians, the inhabitants of Asia Minor only modified to a certain extent their manners and views in order to meet the requirements of the Empire. But if the intermixture of tribes and their permeation by Graeco-Roman culture was in one sense a great progress, it was at the same time, but from another point of view, a decline; it was accompanied by a lowering of the level of the culture which exerted the civilising influence. While conquering barbarism and native peculiarities, Graeco-Roman culture assumed various traits from its vanquished opponents, and became gross and vulgar in its turn. In the words of a biographer of Alexander Severus: good and bad were promiscuously thrust into the Empire, noble and base, and numbers of barbarians (Hist. Aug. Alex. Sev. 64).

The unification and transformation of tribes standing on low grades of civilisation leads to consequences characterised by one common feature, the simplification of aims — degeneration. This process is concealed for a while by the political and economic advantages following on the establishment of the Empire. The creation of a central authority, upholding peace and intercourse, the conjunction oft he different parts of the world into one economic system enlivened by free trade, the spread of citizenship and civil culture in wider and wider circles of population — all these benefits produced for a time a rise of prosperity which counterbalanced the excess of barbarous, imperfectly assimilated elements.

But a series of political misfortunes set in rather rapidly in the third century: invasions of barbarians, conflicts between rival candidates to the throne, competition between armies and provinces put an end to order and prosperity and threatened the very existence of the Empire. In these calamities the barbarisation of Roman culture became more and more manifest, a backward movement began in all directions, a backward movement, however, which was by no means a mere falling back into previous conditions, but gave rise to new and interesting departures.

We’ve already seen the first step: the rise in global prosperity that accompanied the neo-liberal world order. We are now well into the second step: degeneration. The third step is collapse. The historical process is inexorable and cannot be stopped except by removing all of the sources of the dyscivilizational degeneracy.

DISCUSS ON SG

Russia and the Immigration Challenge

Russia is now facing the challenge of all successful societies; how to deal with all the foreigners from less successful societies who want to benefit themselves by seeking work and opportunity there.

Russia is facing a challenge for which there is little historical precedent. The current and future influx of labor and permanent migrants from Central Asia poses questions that cannot be answered with conventional assimilation strategies. For this reason, Moscow must act early and decisively to avoid the mistakes made by Western Europe and the United States.

While discussions around migration policy spark heated debate at home and occasional diplomatic tensions with Central Asian neighbors, this is far preferable to allowing the issue to fester. Left unresolved, mass migration could pose a direct threat to Russia’s political stability and institutional coherence. That is why the response must be shaped in Moscow’s traditional style: flexible, pragmatic, and unburdened by rigid ideological dogma.

There is no shortage of cautionary tales. Western Europe’s migration dilemma stems from two primary causes: the collapse of colonial empires, and post-war economic expansion that created a demand for low-skilled labor. Former colonial powers such as France and Britain kept strong ties with their former territories and welcomed waves of migrants, only to realize later that integration would prove far more difficult than anticipated.

European states are built on the idea of the ethnically homogeneous “nation-state.” Historically, this has meant low tolerance for cultural and religious diversity. Over centuries, outsiders were either assimilated or excluded. When former colonial subjects began to settle in France, Germany, and the UK in large numbers, the response was muddled. France declared all migrants “French” with no accompanying effort to integrate them. Britain and Germany pursued a version of multiculturalism that effectively encouraged segregation under the guise of tolerance.

The United States followed a different path. Its economy was flexible, its social safety net limited. For decades, this allowed migration to be framed purely in economic terms: migrants were simply new workers. But with the rise of social and economic inequality, climate change, and political polarization, the American consensus fractured. Migrants became a political issue. Republican leaders began calling for mass deportations and border walls, while Democrats welcomed migrants as potential voters. The result: a divided electorate and an unstable political system.

Western Europe’s response has been even more fraught. In the absence of credible solutions, right-wing, anti-globalist parties have surged in popularity. But these movements are not necessarily friendly to Russia. Figures such as Marine Le Pen or Italy’s right-wing coalition may oppose liberal orthodoxy, but they remain staunchly pro-NATO and anti-Russian. Even in smaller countries such as Finland, parties that grew by campaigning against migration ended up supporting NATO expansion and promoting Russophobic policies.

This trend – a migrant crisis fueling political radicalism – is real. And it would be naive to think Russia is immune.

The USA dealt successfully with its first immigration challenge by shutting it down for more than 40 years from 1921. But relentless pressure by the immigrant lobby finally succeeded in cracking the borders open in 1965 and the USA is now thrashing about in its death throes as President Trump heroically seeks to somehow mitigate the damage while battling all of the immigrant-infested institutions and organizations that seek to put their foreign interests above those of the original nation.

In Europe, the problem has metastasized even faster; the EU is already falling apart barely twenty years after first being formed. And so it’s doubtful that the Russians will fall for the “nation of immigrants” line that was used successfully on the USA, the UK, and Sweden, given the disastrous state of all three nations that fell for it.

DISCUSS ON SG

DEATH AND THE PLACE OF THE SKULL

This is one of the short stories from DEATH AND THE DEVIL, which will be published in ebook format in the next week or two. The theme strikes me as appropriate for Good Friday.

It is a well-established fact across most of the known multiverse that death is, generally speaking, the end of life. This is the sort of obvious statement that most beings understand intuitively, in the same way they understand that water is wet or that the line of traffic you’re not driving in will always move faster than the one you selected.

What is less well established, and indeed known to only a select few cosmic entities, is that there are occasional exceptions to this rule. Not many, mind you—perhaps ten or twelve across the entirety of existence. But when they do occur, they tend to cause no end of paperwork.

Death was having what, for him, amounted to a moderately busy Friday. The Romans were at it again with their crucifixions, and while Death understood the practical necessity of his role in the great cosmic machinery, he couldn’t help but find the Romans’ enthusiasm for creatively prolonging the process somewhat trying. Crucifixion was particularly bothersome—it was slow, messy, and sometimes required him to hover about for hours waiting for the final moment to arrive. It was inefficient, and if there was one thing Death disliked, it was inefficiency.

Outside the walls of Jerusalem, on a small hill that locals called “The Place of the Skull” (humans did have a flair for the dramatic that Death could almost appreciate), three crosses stood starkly against the bright morning sky. A sizeable crowd had gathered—some jeering, some weeping, some simply watching with the detached curiosity of those who have nothing better to do with their afternoon than observe the suffering of others.

Death materialized beside the center cross, his black robe somehow remaining pristine despite the dust that swirled across the hilltop. His scythe gleamed with an impossible light, as if it were reflecting stars that weren’t visible in the daytime sky.

I AM EARLY, Death said, his voice not so much heard as felt, like the final note of a funeral dirge played on the bones of the universe. He consulted a small hourglass that appeared in his skeletal hand. The sand was still flowing, though it had noticeably thinned to the bottom half. There was time yet.

Death was not alone in his invisible observation of the proceedings. Slightly to his left, luxuriating in the heat that rose from the baked earth, lounged a figure that radiated a different kind of darkness. This darkness wasn’t the simple absence of light that characterized Death’s appearance, but rather a corrupted, oily absence of goodness.

“Lovely day for a crucifixion, isn’t it?” said the Devil, his voice as smooth as expensive honey with just a hint of ground glass mixed in. He wore the shape of a handsome middle-aged man with olive skin and curly black hair, dressed in a toga of deepest crimson that seemed to shift and flow like liquid. Only his eyes—amber with vertical pupils—gave away his inhuman nature.

Death did not respond. He had long ago learned that engaging the Devil in conversation inevitably led to tedious debates about the nature of free will or sales pitches for various soul-collection optimization schemes.

The Devil seemed undeterred by Death’s silence. “Quite the turnout for this one,” he continued, gesturing at the crowd around the central cross. “Special case, you know. I’ve had my eye on him for years. All those irritating miracles, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind.” He made a dismissive gesture. “Bad for business, you know, that sort of thing.”

Death remained silent, watching the sand in the hourglass.

“Oh, come now,” the Devil prodded. “He’s been a thorn in your side too! Remember, he’s the one who interfered with your soul-reaping.”

At this, Death’s eye sockets seemed to narrow slightly, the silver pinpricks of light within them intensifying.

YES, he said finally. I REMEMBER.

The memory was, for Death, quite a vivid one, despite having occurred several years earlier by human reckoning. He had appeared in Bethany to collect the soul of a man who had succumbed to an illness that baffled the local physicians. It had initially been a straightforward collection—Death had appeared at the appointed time, raised his scythe, and completed his duty with his usual efficiency. The soul had been collected, the hourglass emptied, the paperwork filed. End of story.

It should have been, anyhow.

Four days later, Death had received an urgent message from the Department of Post-Mortem Records about an “anomalous post-mortem event.” He had returned to Bethany to find something unprecedented—Lazarus, very much alive, moving about, eating, breathing, and talking, despite having been quite thoroughly dead, reaped, and buried days before.

More perplexing still was the matter of his second hourglass. Every mortal had exactly one hourglass, created at birth and destroyed at death. Lazarus’s hourglass had been properly disposed of following the collection of his soul. Yet somehow he was alive again, and he also had a new hourglass in the usual location—but from whence had it come? Who had authorized it? Death checked and rechecked the records, but he could find no indication of how this administrative nightmare had occurred.

And at the center of this troublesome accounting error was the same man who now hung on the central cross.

Continue reading “DEATH AND THE PLACE OF THE SKULL”

We Thought Wikipedia was Bad

Someone asked Deepseek about the founders of Psykosonik.

It’s almost impressive how it is completely incorrect in every way, except for the bit about Minneapolis.

  • Formed in: 1991 (Minneapolis, MN, USA)
  • Members:
    • Paul Sebastien
    • Theodore Beale
    • Daniel Lensmeier
    • Michael Larson
  • Label: Wax Trax!

We were on TVT, but they were our publisher, not our record label. Paul and I were the two founders of the band; we wrote three songs together, after which Dan, who was a DJ at our favorite club, The Perimeter, and Mike, the best friend of Paul’s younger brother, were asked to join the band so that we could play live shows. Paul and Dan were the main composers, I wrote most of the lyrics, and Mike contributed a lot of the sounds that Paul and Dan built the songs around, such as that rich wuah-wuah that begins Silicon Jesus.

DISCUSS ON SG

Everyone Knows

This X poll demonstrates the complete failure of the Narrative and the ability of the government-media complex to program people’s minds.

There have been a lot of science fiction and apocalyptic novels written about the second American civil war. But I don’t think any of them ever anticipated the possibility that it might be fought over the issue of whether the USA should be run for the behalf of a specific foreign elite or not.

DISCUSS ON SG

Clown World Fears Peace

The hypocrisy of Clown World truly knows no ends. For decades, we’ve been instructed that land mines are one of the worst sins of Man, and the European governments have sanctimoniously engaged in numerous demining campaigns in Asia and Africa. But now, without so much as any threats from Russia, a number of European governments have announced intentions of mining their borders.

They’re showing similar hypocrisy in their relentless attempts to disrupt the peace talks between Russia and the USA.

Numerous foreign actors are attempting to sabotage the dialogue between Moscow and Washington, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s investment envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, has claimed. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Dmitriev weighed in on his talks with US President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, in St. Petersburg last week, which focused on finding a settlement to the Ukraine conflict.

Dmitriev called the negotiations “extremely productive,” but claimed that third parties are trying to impede progress. “A lot of people, structures, and countries are trying to disrupt our dialogue with the United States,” he said.

“There is a very active propaganda campaign against Russia in the United States through various media, so it’s very important to communicate Russia’s position directly – and this has certainly been done,” Dmitriev noted. “There is a very useful dialogue going on. It is certainly going on in very difficult conditions – constant attacks and constant misinformation,” he said.

Americans are not going to fight on behalf of Europeans again. It’s just not going to happen. The sooner that everyone from the Baltic to the Middle East realizes that the US military is not going to protect them from anyone or anything, the better.

DISCUSS ON SG

Insufficient Brutality

GRRM explains why he’s still not finished with “the curse of his life”:

Game of Thrones novelist George R.R. Martin recently shared a new update on where he was with the next book in his Song of Ice and Fire, The Winds of Winter, and described completing it “the curse of my life.”

Speaking with Time, Martin was asked for an update on the novel after he did press for Colossal Biosciences and its genetic altering of DNA to create what they are calling dire wolves. He answered, “That’s the curse of my life here. There’s no doubt that Winds of Winter is 13 years late. I’m still working on it. I have periods where I make progress and then other things divert my attention and suddenly I’m working for-. I have a deadline for one of the HBO shows. I have something else to do.”

“But, you know, the two things are not connected. I swear,” he continued. “I open a book store and people say, ‘Why is George R.R. Martin opening a book store? He could be writing Winds of Winter.’ And now we’re getting this. I don’t actually work in the book store. I own it. I hired people to do it. If you go into the book store, yes, a lot of my books are there, which I’ve signed, a lot of books by other people. I’m not going to ring up your register. I’m not going to order what books are coming in.”

He’s actually correct. Martin’s problem isn’t distractions, it’s the technical corner into which he wrote himself. Even AI can’t really help him finish the story properly, because he has far too many perspective characters. Ironically, given his reputation courtesy of the Red Wedding, Martin’s problem is that he’s too delicate.

If I was tasked with finishing ASOIAF, I could do it, but at a cost that would upset a lot of fans because I would kill off two-thirds of the perspective characters with either sorcery, a plague, or by having the White Walkers get a lot further south than Martin appears to have wanted to permit them to reach. There are other possibilities too, but if he doesn’t get rid of most of the perspective characters, he’s not going to be able to finish the series.

DISCUSS ON SG

Importing Taiwan’s Semiconductor Industry

There is a lot more going on in the trade war between the USA and China than just escalating tariff rates. The Chinese are obviously concerned that the US is going to essentially import all of Taiwan’s most valuable intellectual capital.

In response to media query on concerns on the Taiwan island over the US hollowing out its semiconductor industry are growing, Zhu Fenglian, a spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, said that the concerns of Taiwan’s industry are not groundless. TSMC has long become a political pledge of the DPP authorities’ attempts to seek “Taiwan independence” by leaning on the US. It is only a matter of time before Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is handed over by Lai Ching-te, who is a “professional traitor of Taiwan.”

According to Reuters reports, TSMC and Intel recently discussed a preliminary agreement to form a joint venture to operate the US chipmaker’s factories. TSMC will take a 20 percent stake in the new company. Taiwan’s major chipmaker United Microelectronics and US-based GlobalFoundries are looking into the possibility of a merger.

As hard as it is to build, it falls as quickly as a spark sets hair on fire. If the DPP authorities are allowed to continue down the dangerous path of selling out Taiwan and ruining Taiwan, Taiwan’s industrial sector and the public will not only lose their current jobs, but also the opportunities for future development, said Zhu.

This is where trade war can lead to actual war. Remember, what President Trump is attempting to do is set up the USA in the best possible position for when the current international trade regime collapses entirely. Getting Taiwanese semiconductor companies to move to the USA would be a major coup, and it’s obviously one that the Chinese authorities will seek to prevent.

DISCUSS ON SG

Trans Women are Not Women

The UK Supreme Court has correctly observed that the adjective modifies the verb:

The Supreme Court has announced that the definition of a woman is based on biological sex in a landmark judgement. Lord Hodge said that five Supreme Court justices had unanimously decided that ‘the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act refer to a ‘biological woman and biological sex’.

He recognised ‘the strength of feeling on both sides’ and cautioned against seeing the judgement as a triumph for one side over another, stressing that the law still gives trans people protection against discrimination.

But the decision could have far-reaching implications on how sex-based rights apply, including how women-only spaces are allowed to operate.

It is interesting, however, to observe how many NPCs can have their programming rearranged by nothing more than repetitive exposure to even the dumbest rhetoric.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Invention of William Shakespeare

The conception that most of us have of the playwright from Stratford-on-Avon is almost entirely a modern construction:

One of the book vendors proudly presents you with the first-ever collection of Shakespeare’s works, put together the previous year by the renowned printer, William Jaggard, for the publisher, Thomas Pavier. But as you excitedly look through the pages, you become even more confused. Only three of the nine plays in the collection seem authentic. One of the plays is A Yorkshire Tragedy, which you had already pruchases, and another, Sir John Oldcastle, is also unfamiliar and not part of any modern Shakespeare collection. Still another, The Whole Contention Between the Two Famous Houses, Lancaster and York, is a combination of two heavily revised renditions of 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI. Two other plays—Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor—are much simpler and briefer adaptations of the authentic versions of these plays. Another play, Pericles, is conventionally considered an inauthentic, slap-dash treatment of a longer, genuine form that has been lost. The only three that seem normal are The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

After you complete your visit of all book vendors in London, and are assured that these are all the plays ever printed that were ascribed to William Shakespeare, you now own only 22 plays—of which a dozen of them are either apocryphal, or they are brief, strange, less literary adaptations of more familiar plays. That’s 12 of 22 that are seemingly wrong. You ask sellers about Othello, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra—but none of these have been printed. And many Londoners have never even heard of these plays.

Giving up in frustration, you at least take some comfort in the thought that at least you get to see an authentic Hamlet. You rush across London Bridge with your assortment of plays under your arm to the Globe Theater, squeeze amongst the groundlings standing before the stage—and wait for that most famous of speeches in English theater history. And the actor playing Hamlet walks out onto stage, holding a book in his hand, and says:

To be or not to be. Aye, there’s the point,
To die, to sleep, is that all? Aye, all:
No, to sleep, to dream, Aye, marry, there it goes…

What?!? You know this quote is all wrong, even bizarre — a sort of brief, informal rendition of the opening to the real “To be or not to be” soliloquoy…

Who wrote this shorter, funnier, more action-packed Hamlet? Since the changes applied to this version are so inferior and differently styled from other Shakespeare plays, most scholars assume it was the result of a conspiracy. One or two of his greedy fellow actors supposedly created a briefer version of the play that they then sold to grasping printers and publishers eager to produce a work with Shakespeare’s name on the title page.

The truth is much simpler: William Shakespeare wrote it, which is why his name is on the title page. After all, we know Shakespeare did adapt an older version of Hamlet—and this first quarto of 1603 is the adaptation that Shakespeare’s company then performed. Of course, he wrote it. The original Hamlet, the one that Thomas Nashe referenced in 1589 as having been written by an “English Seneca,” is actually the authentic masterpiece that everyone is familiar with today. (And again, in an upcoming paper, Schlueter and I will show that Nashe was indeed referring to Thomas North as English Seneca—and that Jonson and Lodge also identified North as the original author of other Shakespearean plays too.)

What is more, Hamlet is not the only such example. Although this is not widely known, the plays Henry V, Richard III, Henry VI, part 2 and Henry VI, part 3 also exist in two very different versions: in the genuine, familiar literary form — and as a rewritten, briefer, less erudite, faster-paced staged adaptation. In each case, conventional scholars had always assumed that Shakespeare had written the longer masterpiece, yet it is only their lesser, rewritten theatrical renderings that had ever reached print during Shakespeare’s lifetime — and by 1620 each of these lesser adaptations had been attributed to the Stratford dramatist via the title page. Again, these rewritten versions are so inferior to the originals that orthodox scholars have had a difficult time accounting for Shakespeare’s name on the title pages. So, up until now, conventional scholars had blamed all these lesser works on a system of conspiracies, occurring over decades. Supposedly, various groups of unknown anonymous actors working within the Stratford dramatist’s theater companies rewrote these plays and then secretly sold them to corrupt printers with Shakespeare’s name on the title pages. In reality, of course, there were no conspiracies: These are actually the plays that Shakespeare really wrote—or at least adapted, directed, and produced.

As usual, the analyses of academic historians are fundamentally limited by their insistence on the relevance of their ontological ceilings. Consensus incredulity is an extraordinarily stupid and highly fallible metric, and yet, it’s actually codified into the academic and scientific worlds as “peer review”.

The problem is that most people are fundamentally unable to even imagine what a world without copyright, without mass market publishing, and without publishing gatekeepers would even look like. The ability to self-publish on Amazon and effectively imitate an author’s style using AI is just beginning to give us the faintest glimmerings of what a free-for-all writing, crediting, and publishing must have been in the early 1600s.

I find Mr. Mccarthy’s work on the real Shakespeare and the various elements that have gone into the mythical modern construction to be some of the most fascinating archeo-history that I’ve ever seen in my life. The fact that it is all document-driven rather than theory-driven makes it vastly more interesting as well as far more convincing than other efforts of this type.

DISCUSS ON SG