Tag: history

Great Replacement Reality

It’s already apparent that GabAI is much more accurate than the mainstream AI systems. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily reliable. I found it interesting that I’m supposed to be known for my belief in what is described as “Great Replacement” theory, when in fact I’m much better known for coining the related and more widely utilized term “Magic Dirt”. Which, of course, is not to say that I don’t believe in the reality of what is quite obviously taking place all across the West, from Australia to Portugal.

Vox Day, also known as Theodore Beale, is a prominent figure in the far-right nationalist movement. He is a science fiction author, blogger, and editor who has made a name for himself as a prolific commentator on issues like race, culture, and politics. Day is well-known for his belief in the “Great Replacement” theory, which claims that there is a deliberate effort to replace white populations in Western countries with non-white immigrants.

In his book “The Inevitable Victory of the Far Right,” Day argues that the far-right is on the rise and will eventually triumph over its opponents. He believes that nationalism and traditional values are essential for the survival of Western civilization, and that immigration and multiculturalism pose an existential threat to these values.

Setting aside that I’ve never written a book called “The Inevitable Victory of the Far Right,” I’m observably in excellent company with Julius Caesar and the ancient Helveti, among others, if not so much with the EU-corrupted politicians who falsely claim that the so-called “Great Replacement” is some sort of “theory” rather than an observable mass-migration policy based on their faith in their Magic Dirt theory, which is predicated on the belief that foreigners who migrate en masse to new lands will adopt the beliefs, customs and traditions of the previous inhabitants and will magically become indistinguishable from them, in contradiction to the entire written record of human history.

Here is one illustrative example from the Cambridge Medieval History, Volume I:

About the year B.C. 71, on the invitation of the powerful tribe of the Sequani, Ariovistus chief of the Suebi crossed the Rhine with 15,000 warriors to serve as mercenaries to the Sequani against their neighbours the Aedui. But after the victory was won, the strangers did not return to their own land but remained on the western side of the Rhine and established themselves in the territory of their employers, taking possession of about a third of it. Strengthened by large accessions from the homeland this Germanic settlement on Gaulish territory soon became a menace to all the surrounding tribes.

None dared to oppose the conquerors, who already regarded the whole of Gaul as their prey. They pursued their work deliberately and systematically, constantly bringing in new swarms of their compatriots and assigning them lands in the territories which they had subjugated. Thus the power of Ariovistus became very formidable. The establishment of a great Germanic Empire over the whole of Gaul seemed not far distant.

This was the condition of affairs when Caesar (B.C 58) took up his command in Gaul. He was well aware of the danger to the Roman occupation which lay in these wholesale immigrations of Germanic hordes into Gaulish territory, and it was consequently his first care to take prompt measures to meet the Teutonic peril. It is well known how he performed this task, how he removed the haunting dread of a general irruption of the Germanic peoples into Keltic territory, and at the same time established security and order upon the Rhine frontier. The restoration of the conquered Helveti to their abandoned territory in order that they might continue to serve, but now in the Roman interest, as a buffer-state, secured Gaul, and especially the valley of the Rhone, against incursions from, the direction of the upper Rhine.

There is no Great Replacement “theory”. It is simply a description of something that has literally been taking place since 1965 at the absolute latest.

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No Boots for the Ground

Simplicius explains why a US invasion of Iran is unlikely even in the event of an Iran-Israeli war:

Don’t even bother thinking about boots on the ground, if such a thing was possible it would take a year or more of preparation. Remember the Iraq invasion required 6 months just of transporting materiel and assets to the region, staging them, etc. But Iran wouldn’t let you stage them because it has far more sophisticated modern ballistic systems than anything Iraq had, which means large troop concentrations and armor/materiel staging areas could be hit and wiped out long before zero hour. Don’t believe me? Just watch the video at the beginning, the US army general says it himself toward the end: he states the accuracy of Iran’s ballistic missiles was shocking and they hit “pretty much everything they wanted to hit.”

So ground invasion is out—that’s not happening. The only thing they could possibly attempt is a long-spanning aerial campaign. But to even remotely scratch Iran’s capabilities would require a vast campaign lasting minimum 6-12 months and probably much longer. Remember, all of NATO mustered for 3 months against little Serbia with 6 million people and barely managed to destroy anything of worth. Iran has a 90 million population and a country probably a hundred times the size of Serbia, not to mention a far larger military. How long do you think it would take NATO to even put a dent in that from only an aerial campaign?

In short: it would take years, and during those years, Iran would shut down every major maritime and economic chokepoint in the region, crashing the global economy. If you thought a few ships being hit now was bad, wait til you see the nominal Iranian forces rather than Houthis hitting everything in sight—it won’t be pretty. And I’ve beaten the point before about how difficult it would be to even find targets in the decentralized vastness of Iran, just like in Yemen.

Furthermore, the US military can’t afford the necessary troop commitment for an invasion. The US Army doesn’t even have enough troops to confront Russia directly without withdrawing from most of its bases all over the world, assuming that the Russians permitted the delivery of hundreds of thousands of US soldiers to Europe in the first place.

Desert Storm required 950,000 soldiers, 3100 tanks, 2200 artillery, and 1800 aircraft back in 1991. The US Army currently has 452,689 on active duty, plus 180,958 Marines, and none of its NATO allies now have more than a handful of troops, most of whom have no equipment or ammunition anymore in the aftermath of NATO’s proxy defeat in Ukraine.

At this point, a real war with either Russia or Iran would not only lead to the loss of Taiwan, it might also lead to the loss of Texas. Which means that an ineffective “air war” is about the most that the USA can use to aid Israel, and even that might be too risky now that Russia has anti-air assets in the region securing Syrian airspace.

The neoclowns are agitating furiously for war in the Middle East, and later today I will post some extremely esoteric reasons why the Netanyahu administration might even deliver them one despite the USA’s limited ability to engage in one, but from a strictly military perspective, it is hard to imagine even the most deluded Clown World puppeteer deciding it is time to have the Fake Biden administration order a ground war anywhere outside of the current US borders. But as their time appears to be running out, we cannot dismiss the possibility of a desperate decision to roll the dice while they still have the influence required to do so. They did with the Ukraine counter-offensive that was always doomed from the start, and it’s not as if they are any less indifferent to American lives than to Ukrainian lives.

DISCUSS ON SG

Battlegames

Spent the day wargaming with some professional types. Smart, very well-informed guys. Gave a brief presentation, listened to some longer, more detailed, and much more impressive ones. Reached three conclusions:

  1. Blitzkrieg is not a strategy, much less a doctrine.
  2. Hoping that the leader of the other side is a) the sole reason for the war, and, b) he will vanish as soon as the other side faces a setback is not a strategy. Not a viable one, anyhow.
  3. Wargame is a misnomer. Very, very few wargames actually involve the primary elements of war. They’re battlegames.

DISCUSS ON SG

Gazacaust!=Holocaust

“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth—some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”
— Michael Kinsley

I would like to use the rest of my time to describe how appalled I am that people are bringing up the Holocaust. Do not use other genocides to describe this one! I have been… oh!

Oops! That’s not so much letting the cat out of the bag, as a sabretooth tiger. Must be that vaunted 115 IQ, operating at levels far beyond our meager powers of comprehension.

But in all fairness, a potential Gazacaust can’t really be legitimately compared to the historical Holocaust. No roller coasters, no gas chambers, no eagles, no bears, and no bizarre medical experiments. Just bullets, bombs, and bulldozers.

What’s fascinating about the current situation is the way in which the invasion of Gaza is, rightly or wrongly, justified by an answer to the very question that isn’t even allowed to be publicly asked about the Holocaust.

Precisely what did the victims do that inspired this genocidal impulse on the part of their victimizers?

DISCUSS ON SG

Alan Moore, Unreliable Narrator

The Dark Herald busts Alan Moore’s false claims about the creation of his iconic character, Rorshach.

In 1983, Time Warner bought up the Action Heroes of venerable old 3rd place runner-up Charleton Comics. This was supposedly a “gift” to Dick Giordano who was the managing editor of DC and had been an editor at Charleton for a number of years. As unbelievable luck would have it this “gift” tied up a lot of long-standing rights issues, where frankly, DC wasn’t the good guy. It was right around that time that Marvel’s Captain Marvel took suddenly dead. Why yes, Charleton was indeed the original rights holder on Captain Marvel. Why do you ask?

The reason I bring this is up is that Rorschach was not an original character, he sure as hell wasn’t based on Batman, and Alan Moore had nothing to do with his creation.

Rorsach was originally based on The Question. Moore was using all deconstructed versions of all the Charlton Action Heroes to tell his long winded What If story.

As you can see when Giordano finally got around to asking his hairy boy wonder, ‘What the fuck are you doing to the characters we just bought?” Moore’s top to bottom redesign involved putting blotches all over The Question’s face.

Genius.

The Question was created in the late sixties by the legendary Steve Ditko who was based on his previous character Mister A.

“Mr. A was inspired by Objectivism, the belief system and moral absolutism of the philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand. Ditko has been quoted as saying that his creation The Question was intended as a version of Mr. A that would be acceptable to the Comics Code Authority.”

The lefty as hell Alan Moore would have known all about where The Question came from. The obsessed objectivist who asked questions that shouldn’t be asked can come across as a conspiracy nutcase, depending on the circumstances. And that was the aspect of the character that Moore leached on to. He set to work dragging Ditko’s right-wing creation through the slime as a dysfunctional conspiracy nutcase, hobo who couldn’t remember to bathe. 

That being said, we’ll always have Moore to thank for this meme.

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Disintegration

One of the reasons I selected Martyanov’s book on military supremacy for the Library series is that he’s considerably more perceptive than the average geopolitical observer. I’ve been reading his book on the ongoing breakup of the United States, and it was intriguing to see that he’s one of the few observers who understands that the USA is not, and has never been, a genuine nation.

Some quotes from his book Disintegration:

  • America’s collapse has been in the progress for some time now, and has been predicted by a number of observers—but in actuality the utter, historically unprecedented degeneration of America’s so-called elites, which have exhibited a level of malfeasance, incompetence, cowardice and betrayal of their own people on such a scale that it beggars belief. 
  • For the United States to survive as a unified country, a completely new narrative, grounded in reality, is required and the current American policy elites, be they purportedly left radicals and those forces which support them or the nominally conservative, no less grossly indoctrinated forces on the right, are utterly incapable of formulating the real American national interests, or of creating a new narrative, because the United States is in the process of the fragmentation of what used to be an American proto-nation, but ultimately never fully turned into the real thing. Political creeds, or abstract, often utterly wrong ideas are simply not enough to inspire and, most importantly, to sustain the growth of a nation. The modern American elites and their European followers have proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
  • Today neither France nor the United States are nations in a full meaning of this word, with France descending into the chaos of globalist multicultural orthodoxy, while the United States is completely subverted by ethno-religious and corporate interests.
  • Today, the United States is not a nation, certainly not in the traditional sense of having a dominant ethnic nationality, while the foundational American meme and myth of a “Melting Pot” has turned out to be exactly that—a myth. America’s many ethnicities have not been assimilated to form a single nation, but rather are more aptly regarded as a salad bowl comprised of descendants of the majority “white” European settlers and the “colored” (Native American, African American, and Latin and Asian immigrant) minorities, all maintaining to varying degrees their original cultural identities. But even the salad bowl analogy is too weak to reflect the multicultural disaster the United States has become.

Martyanov clearly sees what generations of Americans, blinded by relentless civnattery and immigrant propaganda, and generations of immigrants, averting their eyes from the historical facts that make them feel uncomfortable or left out, cannot. It is this ability to be ruthlessly objective about the world as it is, rather than the world we are told it is, or the world we wish it would be, that makes his insights and observations valuable.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Decline is Observable

It’s rapidly becoming readily apparent to everyone, not just me, Wang Hunin, Simplicius, and Andrei Martyanov, that the decline of the imperial United States is both a) inevitable and b) observable.

The best indicator of real GDP per capita is energy usage per capita, because everything about a comfortable modern lifestyle takes a lot of energy, energy comes into everything people do and consume. This was rising exponentially to 1972, when the rise suddenly halted. It then started fall, slowly. And suddenly it has now started to fall rather more quickly and dramatically. It looks like three trend regimes: Exponential growth starting in the seventeenth century, then stagnation and slow decline starting in 1972, and now it looks like the beginning of dramatic collapse, looks like the beginning of a sharp break in the trend of slow and gentle decline.

This reflects a regime ever more hostile to the men who made it great, to the faith that made it great, the culture that made it great, and race that made it great.

Notice that no matter what metric is used, 1972-1973 keeps appearing as the high water mark for the USA. That’s not an accident. 1972 was, from an economic, industrial, and demographic perspective, the moment of Peak America.

Everything since then has been nothing but decline disguised by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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There is No Catching Up

Andrei Martyanov explains why it’s not just the loss of US industrial capacity that has hamstrung its once-superlative military infrastructure and rendered the US military incapable of defeating Russia, China, or quite possibly, even Yemen.

In theory the US may build, in the next 10+ years, some facilities to increase production of 155-mm shells or drones. But it will not be able to match industrial capacity of Russia in this respect, even with theoretical addition of future, if any, European capacity. The issue here is not just quantity–the target impossible to reach due to utter destruction of US manufacturing base and an extremely complex supply chains for military production. This all is just the tip of the iceberg. The main body of the iceberg is a complete catastrophe that the US military doctrine, and, as a result, procurement development is.
I spoke about it for years–some gaps, such as in air defense or missilery the US will not be able to close, because as I type this, this gap continues to grow. It is measured not in years but in generations. This is, as an example, the result of misguided and illiterate approach to air defense based on… air power. You have to literally undo the whole thing, and this requires not just building some facilities, but a complete rethinking of America’s defense or, rather, “offense” philosophy which doesn’t work. It never did. This is impossible in the present state of the American geopolitical thought without rethinking the United States as it perceived itself in the last hundred years. The US has no courage, intellect and will to do so because it leads to a destruction of America’s mythology.

So, the US is stuck. So, it is good that John Mearsheimer understands parts of it, but he doesn’t understand the heart of the matter. After the US strategically and operationally “planned” VSU’s “counteroffensive”, the question of the competence of the US military establishment arose and was answered–it is incompetent! It will take a generation or two to even teach those who are currently in the plebe years in US service academies to think properly and within the framework of America’s REAL military and industrial capability. This REAL capability has nothing in common with the US halcyon years of WW II and after and it is not coming back. Russia will not allow the US to unleash the war in Europe while thinking that the US can sit this one out again behind the ocean. Doesn’t work like this anymore, especially with the construction tempo of Russia Navy’s subs such as 3M22 Zircon carriers Yasen-class subs and frigates which already have Zircons deployed. These are technologies the US simply doesn’t have and are nowhere near of getting them. China can rely on them, and much more from Russia in case of the US deciding to commit suicide, the US cannot.

It is grim picture of corruption, financial and, most importantly, intellectual within the US military and foreign policy establishment, and what John Mearsheimer fails to understand–these are not just some pieces of hardware whose utility the US suddenly recognized. Nope, the REAL experience of SMO is way more than technological, it is above all operational and strategic, which made Russia’s General Staff a well-oiled machine which merely uses 404 as a trap and a junkyard for NATO’s military capacity, because Russia fights not Ukraine, she fights NATO.

Having read two of Martyanov’s excellent books on US military and imperial decline, both of which were written and published well before the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, it’s clear that he’s identified something that goes well beyond the common level of military analysis in the Western think tanks.

What he’s talking about here is neither the loss of US industry nor the inability of the US to design, build, and procure hypersonic missiles, inexpensive missile platforms, and squad-level drone swarms. It’s not even the demographic changes, and the fact that the USA is now an empire with a foreign elite ruling over a melange of peoples who have no connection to the heritage Americans or even first-wave immigrants who fought its previous wars. What’s he’s talking about is the fundamental failure of the US military strategists to understand the realities of military power and the way that a sea-based naval power accustomed to relatively small expeditionary conflicts well away from home simply doesn’t possess the operational and strategic capability to defeat a massive land-based power that is on a reasonably similar technological level.

Britain couldn’t defeat France. The USA couldn’t defeat Germany. And Athens lost to Sparta in the end.

DISCUSS ON SG

You Get What You Gave

An aging woman laments how the post-Boomer youth no longer respect the elderly:

Once revered, age is now a sign of your irrelevance to modern life.

The word boomer – short for baby boomer, anyone who was born between 1946 and 1964 – has become an insult for older people who are out of touch…

I’ll be honest – and in saying this I’m aware I may receive some ageist insults myself in response – I don’t think it was like this when I was young.

Elders were respected. Their words carried weight and gravitas.

They were more likely to be cared for within family homes when the time came, and within society, too.

Most importantly they were listened to, rather than being swiftly dismissed as irrelevant.

It wasn’t like this when I was young either. But the Boomers are actively disrespected by the succeeding generation because they broke the tradition of respect for their elders. Now that they are the elders, they are harvesting the fruit of the seeds they planted in their youth. The first problem is that they never grew up. When I was a kid, I can’t count how many times I was told by my friends’ Boomer parents “don’t call me Mr. Johnson, Mr. Johnson is my father.” So, many members of Generation X grew up accustomed to referring to their elders as their peers, by their first names.

The second problem is that they had less interest in their children and their children’s activities than they probably should have. Every member of Generation X can tell stories of what sounds like a near-feral childhood, of being kicked out of the house in the morning and only being allowed to go back inside for meals and sundown. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it turns out, but when your parents require the television to remind them that you exist at 10 PM at night, it’s probably taking a good thing too far.

And while I was fortunate that my parents took an interest in my athletic activities, it wasn’t uncommon for my dad to be the only father at a number of my soccer games and track meets. And my mother religiously attended the high school soccer games for all four of her boys, although she somehow managed to do so without ever quite grasping the offsides rule. But as a general rule, our parents were simply not very interested in anything we did, no matter what it was.

The third problem was a real eye-opener, however, when Generation X began having children and discovered that as little interest as the Boomers had in us, they had even less in their grandchildren. Many of us were close to our own grandparents, indeed, some of us were much closer to them than we were to our parents. So it was shocking to discover that our parents didn’t even want to babysit their own grandchildren for a few hours a week, and were prone to vanishing across the country, or around the world, for months at a time on vacations and cruises rather than spend any substantial time with their grandkids. In contrast, I remember being sent to stay with my grandparents in Virginia for an entire month during the school year, and they were delighted to have me there. And I still remember that visit and look back on it as being absolutely idyllic.

So this disinterest was not only bewildering to us, but also prevented any close relationships from being developed between Boomer grandparents and Millennial or Z grandchildren.

Fourth and finally, given the behavior demonstrated over the last 50 years, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of the younger generations that many, perhaps even most Boomers, who collectively were the recipients of the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, are going to die leaving absolutely nothing at all to their children or to their grandchildren. Their homes and their second homes have already been sold or reverse-mortgaged to fund their five annual cruises; they’ve funded their retirements with debt that will never be repaid.

The Census Bureau data confirmed that most Baby Boomers’ wealth is tied up in their homes. In the past, the family home would be the most significant piece of an inheritance, but now, seniors can tap into their home’s wealth before they pass with a reverse mortgage. The wealth and the home go back to the mortgage company rather than staying in the family. Many seniors would rather live in luxury during their final days than offer their kids financial assistance.

Generational Wealth Lost: Why Boomers Aren’t Leaving Their Kids an Inheritance

So, it shouldn’t be surprising that young people who neither know nor owe anything to an elderly population that has never shown any interest in them do not treat their elders with the respect that we used to back in the day. Because today’s elders, quite frankly, never earned it.

 A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children
–Proverbs 13:22

UPDATE: A GenX response. No doubt we’ll be hearing from the Boomers soon…

I completely agree with this. I’m a GenXer and when my kids were little it seemed like my mom thought it was such a chore to watch our kids even just once a month. Now that my children are married and having children, I just don’t get my mom’s reluctance to babysit because I LOVE being with my grandchild. My husband and I both love being grandparents and we help out whenever and however we can. The joy we find in being grandparents has made us realize that, for whatever reason, our parents did not love their grandkids anywhere near as much as we love our grandkids. I just don’t get it.

Or as much as our grandparents loved us. I don’t get it either.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Coining of the Term: Midwit

Along with “Sigma Male” and “Gamma”, the term “midwit” appears to have become increasingly popular on the Internet, thanks chiefly to what is now known as “the Midwit Meme”. I was certainly surprised to hear a comedian use it on Simon Evans’s show on GB News this week. And, needless to say, it hasn’t taken long for people “helping” others to understand it to begin explaining it incorrectly.

Tablet: A midwit is typically described as someone with an IQ score between 85 and 115

No, this is incorrect. A midwit has an IQ in the 105 to 120 range. The very need for the term is derived from the observation that the individual so described possesses a level of intelligence that is sufficiently above average to inspire him to overrate himself. The Tablet redefinition is based on the visuals of the meme rather than the core concept.

The Spectator: According to something called the Meming Wiki, “midwit” has been “in use on 4chan and other online spaces since around 2013.”

For those who happen to have an interest in etymological history, I believe the Meming Wiki is correct and the neologism was first coined on 17 February 2012. It’s rather amusing to learn that one of my favorite memes, and one which I have myself utilized on occasion, may have been inspired in some way by the term.

As we often see on this blog, those who possess above-average intelligence and trouble to occasionally read newspapers and magazines tend to genuinely be under the erroneous impression that they possess superlative intelligence. But while having an IQ between one and two standard deviations above the norm is unusual, it is hardly rare, and in historical terms it is distinctly pedestrian.

The astonishing thing about Miss Wright’s confession isn’t that she was clueless and solipsistic little snob, but rather, that she still appears to believe that she is highly intelligent on the basis of familiarity with the works of a trivial and silly science fiction writer with a poor grasp of history. If she had any brains at all worth noting, then she wouldn’t have needed someone else to point out that clever people are everywhere; in addition to the ease with which this can be observed in the material world, even a basic knowledge of intelligence statistics would indicate that this must be the case.

If this erstwhile pirate wench had simply noted that Mensa, with its 130/132 IQ floor, potentially represents the top 2 percent of the population, she would have known that there are some 6.2 MILLION Americans who are significantly above the “read a book” level that she sets as a significant benchmark.

The difference between the mid-wit and the genuinely intelligent is usually fairly easy to identify. The mid-witted individual tends to compare himself to those below the average and concludes that because he isn’t like them, he must be a genius.

The Tragedy of the Mid-Witted, 17 February 2012

It took nearly two years before the term “midwittery” first appeared here on the blog, although I seem to recall it being used in casual conversation several times before first being utilized in the post Mailvox: Answers for MJ 1 on 1 February 2014:

As for the idea that an all-powerful and all-loving God should wish to stop and be able to stop evil, to say nothing of the idea that the existence of evil therefore disproves the existence of such a god, well, that doesn’t even rise to the level of midwittery. One has to have a truly average mind and remain ignorant of basic Biblical knowledge to find either of those concepts even remotely convincing.

It’s far from impossible that someone else may have previously utilized what is a fairly basic term in some other context, but given the way it is regularly attached to the specific 115-IQ range identified, it appears that the neologism was coined here. However, I think it is probably a stretch to assume, as The Spectator does, that the dismissive term “mid” is derived from midwit, although I suppose it is possible.

DISCUSS ON SG