The Open Thread is a place for open discussion among my readers. Post anything you feel like sharing! From now on, the Open Thread will no longer be monthly. Instead, there will be a new Open Thread whenever it is adequate. The stage is yours. Go ahead!
The latest Open Thread is made ‘sticky’ to improve access.
Please consider throwing a few coins into the tip jar, and buy my books! They are great. Your support is greatly appreciated.
I recently watched an abbreviated 6-hour play-through of Ghost of Tsushima, primarily because I don’t have 30 hours to sink into a primarily narrative-driven game. Even in the compressed stream I watched, the game looks really good. The recording cuts out a lot of the tedium of those games, i.e. most of the fighting and surely also many side quests. I found the treatment of the main theme (honor) tasteful. Surprisingly, the story was emotionally a lot more moving than I had initially thought. The story is about the first mongol invasion of Japan. The samurai initially get routed, largely because they stick to a system of honor that does not serve them well in battle. In contrast, the protagonist, the “ghost”, ditches the honor codex of the samurai, which allows him to eventually lead a successful offensive against the mongols. The ramifications of this decision are explored in cut-scenes. The protagonist also pays a heavy price in the end.
Technically, Ghost of Tsushima is spectacular. I dislike the heavy presence of (unattractive) women. There is apparently not a single hot chick in the game whereas most men are relatively attractive. What is worse, two women play a prominent role as they guide you in your development as a warrior. One is a grey-haired hag who is a master archer. She’s also strong enough to slit the throat of Mongolian hunks with ease. The other woman is a lot younger, but likewise rather unattractive. She basically guides you in the second half of the game, with the clear message that without her, you would not amount to anything as a samurai as she tells you how to attack the mongol camp. At some point, you get drunk with her as if she was a dude. This is yet another example of the writers just swapping the sex of a male character and nothing else. Those interactions are downright bizarre, to say nothing of the issue of historical accuracy. The game depicts those female warriors to be above men as they managed to survive while their inferior male comrades were slaughtered in the battlefield. It’s pretty cringe-worthy. As I found out, there were instances of female warriors, but not quite as they are depicted in the game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onna-musha
This aspect of Ghost of Tsushima could have been handled much better.
Ya it was a decent game. Great graphics and cinematography.
You’re right tho. It’s very repetitive and all the women in game are butt ugly. Funny because generally Japanese women are some of the most attractive asians IMO.
I also recall one of the two main female characters bitch about some older guy taking a younger wife, saying that this “always ends in trouble” and a few other things. This is completely unrelated to the story. She just runs her mouth on a character that seems to never appear in the game as some kind of “world building”.
Half a decade ago I wrote a blog post about a chick on roids who was scamming women online into buying her weight-loss and fitness programs. Her name was Sophia Thiel. Here is the article: https://blog.aaronsleazy.com/index.php/2016/12/08/sophia-thiel-and-sour-grapes-or-not/
Nowadays, this woman seems to have gotten off the roids. Now she is pretty fat. She also looks quite masculine. There is the phenomenon that male roiders come out as women, which is likely due to the body producing enormous amounts of estrogen in response to getting flooded with testosterone. Looking at Sophia Thiel, I wonder what the result of women on roids is. Their bodies do not produce much testosterone to begin with. Yet, by ramping up the production of estrogen, there have to be some consequences as well. According to what I read, an excessive supply of estrogen can lead, among others, to weight gain. Sophia Thiel is arguably experiencing this already.
EDIT:
Check out her YouTube channel to see how fat she has gotten:
https://www.youtube.com/c/PumpingSophiaThiel/videos
Bizarrely enough, she is still making fitness videos.
I have ordered 2 books from Yang Jisheng entitled “Tombstone” and “Turning heaven and earth upside down”. They are all in Chinese. I chose the Chinese versions which are much more expensive because they are not abridged. But you can buy English shortened version if you want.
These two books are about a series of tragic events in China during the 1950s up till 1976. These events are the Great Leap Foward, the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution. The Communist party of China today never officially acknowledges the destruction they caused to their motherland and to their fellow citizens. The number of death during the Great Famine is 35-36 millions. This number makes the Great Purge of Stalin pale in comparison.
What does this have anything to do with me? From the 1953-1956, the Communists in Vietnam consulted and applied Chinese method of reforming agrarian land distribution. The result is a tragic event of smaller scale. Sons spit on their father faces, daughters accuse mothers of imagined crimes, peasants denounce and torture landlords. All to turn upside down the social order, just to replace it with a more rigid and unfair one. Together, the Communists in both countries manage to spit on the face of the traditional values of the respective societies. They have chosen and taught men to be lower than beasts.
For those who still look at China through a tint rose glass, read these books. Communists never atone their past crimes.
And yet through all these events, still quiet flow the Huanghe and the Yangtze , as if nature has always been the quiet witness of all humankind’s brutalities.
I feel proud of becoming a US citizen. Despite the recent rude awakening by reading the Dailystormer, I still think that the US is a great country to live in. Deep down I still want to salvage the West.
I guess no-one here share that sentiment, that is because you have never lived in a Communist country, never being imprisoned in your own homeland. You complain about this and that, yet you have never been taken away your basic rights.
I am confident that despite committing many atrocious acts within and without its border, the US still shines through as an example of a democracy that ensures the basic rights for her citizens, regardless of race.
I firmly want Trump or someone of that magnitude to be back. Make America great again, save America from the destruction of the leftist ideologies, save US citizens from the menace of LGBT, more importantly, upholding the great American tradition that we inherit from the Great Founding Fathers.
Forget about it, the US is now an empire in decline. Because of immigration, leftists will now win every future election (or they just rig it).
Most Americans probably don’t even know anymore the original idea of liberty that made it a great country.
And the “elites” all get brainwashed in university with identity politics.
I had no idea Calley served such a light sentence. Should have been much more harsh. There were 23 convictions and some of the guys died before the investigation began. Not sure about the sentencing of those guys.
I looked more into Hue and My Lai. The communists claimed that the civilians at Hue died by American artillary bombardment. Hanoi’s position today is that there was no massacre and it’s illegal for citizens to say there was. Also, about the Land Reform in the 1950s. Karnow explained how squads were sent out to capture landlords and take them back for execution. Sometimes they couldn’t find any, so they were ordered to arrest random peasants and execute them.
I’m not surprised there is evidence of Soviet involvement in the protests. Nixon thought as much. But he was shouted down. There’s no way they could have organised like that on there own. But people thought he was stuck in the Red Scare era and ignored him.
Another myth that is out there in the US is that we had no international support. But the South Koreans and the Aussies actually sent combat troops to assist us.
Shit, put this in the wrong spot. I meant to post this under the discussion about books on the Vietnam War.
“Also, about the Land Reform in the 1950s. Karnow explained how squads were sent out to capture landlords and take them back for execution. Sometimes they couldn’t find any, so they were ordered to arrest random peasants and execute them.”
Believe me when I say this key event is still a mystery. The most comprehensive book, which has the value of being written by an eye-witness, is Hoang Minh Chi “From colonialism to communism”. I have read this book over and over again in Vietnamese translation (Chi is a Vietnamese, but he writes mostly in English to appeal to Western readers). I also have 2 books that I haven’t had time to read much into: “The Fate of Peasantry: Premature Transition to Socialism in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam” and “Zwischen Theorie und Praxis: Agrapolitik in Vietnam seit 1945” by Pham Quang Minh. The German title is the most comprehensive treatment of this “thunder from heaven”. Sadly, my German is even worse than my Russian, so I can only look at its snippets.
I also have another book of Hoang Van Chi, “The New Class in North Vietnam”, it is a very rare book, published in Vietnam, in English. It is a compilation of translations of various articles published RIGHT IN THE COMMUNIST NEWSPAPERS, like the Nhân Dân (the People), Cứu Quốc (Salvaging the nation), etc. My goal when I could get back to Vietnam after this epidemic is to find all Vietnamese originals of these translations. They are indispensable to my research.
On one hand, you have guys like Edwin Moise “Land Reform in China and North Vietnam:
Consolidating the Revolution at the Village Level”, who base his research entirely on Ha Noi and Chinese sources and downplay the casualties caused by these movements (the guy was so naive to refuse the influence of Chinese advistors on the engineering of this “reform”, on the other, you have Chi who claimed that the figure of victims is 500,000. The true figure will never come to light. The evidence of the agrarian reform is too scanty, even compared to the same movement in China. This is the reason why I bought the “Tombstone” of Yang Jisheng. I want to understand better the precursor of Vietnamese land reform to understand the method Chinese Communists transfer to Vietnamese Revolutionaries.
Let me summary my view on the land reform in proper Vietnam. It is a insidious way to remove all non-Communist elements from the Party. The Lao Động Party (The labour party, the official name of the Communist Party during this period), has absorbed a large numbers of members from various backgrounds that could possibly display potential threats the Communist leaders. This is the consequence of the Communists to turn the Party from a communist nature into a party of freedom fighters against the French. With the help of Chinese advisors, the Party wish to purify all elements from the middle class, from the landlord class, and from the bourgeoise class, and give the power to the lowest class. It is a class struggle in true nature.
Now that I have flushed out all brutalities of this campaign, I can add some positive effects that it causes. It is true, in the end, the majority of the population, which were peasants, receive lands to produce foods. It is true, that after redistributing wealth, the lowest social strata escape the hardship imposed on them by the old society (feudalism, a loose term to call it). But then the Party wanted to collectivize all these farms, and thus peasants did not have the right to own the lands that they formerly executed the landlords for. That is the irony and tragedy of this whole thing.
Private land ownership is still the most abused right right now in Vietnam. The top Communist party lackeys in both China and Vietnam could wrestle lands from peasants or even former soldiers who defend Communism.
From time to time, it has been proved beyond doubt that Communism is the most cunning, volt-face, insidious political movements that I have ever known.
Cuong, you make good points. Please tell me the books you have read about the Vietnam War. I have read Stanley Karnow’s “Vietnam, a History,”and it is excellent. Most Americans think they know about Vietnam but really don’t know a goddamn thing. Except what Oliver Stone told them.
@GoodLookingAndSleazy
The Vietnam War is a very complex event. Not a single book can provide you all necessary details. As you don’t speak Vietnamese, your sources will be overwhelmingly American. This means you can only perceive the war through the lenses of American policy makers and players (soldiers). But recently, there are more books translated from Vietnamese sources to help you to get a glimpse of the other side.
I am currently reading “China & The Vietnam Wars 1950-1975” by Qiang Zhai. This book is written based on newly declassified archives of provincial organs in China. It offers to answer why Chinese government decided to generously support the Vietnamese government during the war. It also traces the downfall of this relationship as it culminates in the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979. In general, it is the most comprehensive book in this topic.
I have also bought 2 books of the Russian scholar Ilya Gaiduk. They are entitled “The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War” and “Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954-1963”. I am waiting for them to arrive so can’t say much about it.
If you are interested in the military history of the war, then this book is good to help you to understand why North Vietnamese soldiers and Vietcong were so resilient to relentless:
“Inside the VC and the NVA: The Real Story of North Vietnam’s Armed Forces”
“Bare Feet, Iron Will ~ Stories from the Other Side of Vietnam’s Battlefields”
The official account of the North Vietnamese army has been translated in English, readily accessible to English readers:
“Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954-1975”.
But ultimately, for you to understand the confict, I think this book is the most appropriate choice for you:
Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 by Pierre Asselin (a Canadian historian)
Vietnam’s American War: A History by the same author (It is a general account of the Vietnam War, you may be interested after reading Karnow because it is a short book)
Regarding “Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965”. It is a very well-researched book, based mostly on archives of the US, British, French and Canadian on one side, and Chinese and Vietnamese on the other. He also has many interviews on youtube, so you can watch to supplement your reading. As Asselin said, most of the key archives in Vietnam still remain sealed to outsiders. The information that he painstakingly collected is very worthwhile to read.
Ultimately, you have the advantage of being a person who can approach and learn this topic with a fresh memory. Me, I have to undo years of Communist propaganda implanted in me during my early education to understand the truth.
There are many more books to read. If you are interested in Ho Chi Minh, then read:
“Ho Chi Minh: A Life” by Duiker
“Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years 1919 – 1941” (it is kind of pricey but worth it. It is drawn from many opened archives of the French Sûreté générale indochinoise (a repressive organ of the French colonial government in Indochina).
What you need to take away is that contrary to the Communist propaganda originated from Vietnam, China, and the USSR, the presence of America was quite important because it helped to salvage many people who were repressed and persecuted by the Communist government in North Vietnam. It is not a vain attempt, or a military adventure of American elite. The threat of Communist expansion was very real, because once Vietnam fell under Communist influence, Laos and Cambodia would be next.
America lost the war because she didn’t understand her enemy. The US war aim is just total destruction of the enemy. Had she focused on improving the plight of common in South Vietnam through aids and education, she stands a good chance to win the heart and mind of the people, thus removing the threat of Communism from its basis: poverty.
But I do have to say that American war crimes during this period make my blood cold. She ravages my homeland with all sorts of experimental weapons that the human tolls were staggering. It is very tragic. Overall, I think if Americans had understood better their enemies, they would not intervene militarily. There could have been many ways to draw Vietnam away from the claw of Communism, one of it is an effort to turn it, at least, into a non-aligned country like Yugoslavia.
Whatever it is, it teaches you that war is rarely the right answer to most political problems around the world.
Right now, I think it is relevant that American people should learn to accept the fact that the USA have to co-exist peacefully with China and Russia. We should escape the Cold War mentality and do not let ourselves being manipulated by the warmongering elites. The US might step down from the throne, but she could still co-exist with China without attempting to initiate another war.
I have researched deeply into the WW1, WW2 and many other wars, and I can say frankly that war is a very bad choice in most circumstances.
Thanks man, that’s impressive. I agree, I hate war. The US has made many mistakes internationally for 100 years.
We should never have fought in Vietnam, but I hate how Hollywood and college professors paint us as the bad guys and the communists as the good guys. You are right about American war crimes, but in the US the war crimes of the communists are barely mentioned
You mentioned the Land Reform Act, there is also the Hue massacre, and I’m sure you are very aware of what happened when South Vietnam fell. My Lai (shit I hope I spelled that right) happened about a month after Hue I believe in 1968. The commies killed 10 times more than the Americans did, yet all we hear about is My Lai and nothing of Hue. BTW the Americans were court martialed, convicted, and imprisoned. The NVA probably got medals for Hue. They also act like we invaded, when the NVA was sending troops into South Vietnam before Johnson sent combat troops in 1964.
There’s lots of other lies too. Like saying the Golf of Tonkin incident didn’t happen. It did, but the reported second attack probably didn’t happen. The distinction is never made. They make it seem like we lost the Tet offensive. We won (as we did every major battle) and the Viet Cong was rendered almost useless after that. They say we retreated. The North signed a cease fire, and broke it just like they did during Tet in 1968. Nixon said he would go back in, but he was gone by 1975. They talk about about how popular Ho was, but fail to mention that 1 million Vietnamese fled the North when he took power. Also the commies were wrong in assuming Tet would bring about a popular uprising to their side. It’s also believed that the North wanted the VC eliminated.
Here’s my opinion on why the South lost. They were too factionalized politically and religiously to put up a United front against the communists. Too many corrupt leaders who could not rally the non-communist into an anticommunist coalition. It’s like they thought the US would be there forever, and only concerned with their own power like Diem.
I forgot to mention that Hollywood overinflates how unpopular the Vietnam War was in the US. Most Americans supported the effort until the early 1970s. And even then the antiwar people were a very slight majority. Within the margin of error.
Also look what happened in 1972. George McGovern got his ass whooped by Nixon like a redheaded stepchild. McGovern was the first liberal piece of shit the Dems nominated. They were a respectable party until 1972.
“The commies killed 10 times more than the Americans did, yet all we hear about is My Lai and nothing of Hue. ”
The Hue massacre is still a mysterious event. Both sides claim each other being a the perpetrator of this act. I personally think both sides committed crimes here.
“We should never have fought in Vietnam, but I hate how Hollywood and college professors paint us as the bad guys and the communists as the good guys. You are right about American war crimes, but in the US the war crimes of the communists are barely mentioned”
That is definitely a leftist propaganda. The Communists employed terrorist tactics among the population in the South to intimidate them. They then ordered their troops to never loot and rape the rural population to demonstrate that they were working for the population’s causes. This combination of fear and affection gradually shifts the loyalty of the peasants in South Vietnam. The US, however, was not able to deal with high intensity insurgents, attacked both civilians and suspected Communists. The South Vietnam army raped and looted the peasants, which made them turn to the Communists even more.
As for American atrocities, look up Agent Orange. Both Vietnamese and Americans suffer from this stuff.
This makes you question the ethics of the military industries complex in the USA. This defoliant chemicals didn’t noticeably enhance the combat of the US. It only caused much more suffering and deaths to both sides.
Also, I have read accounts of KGB and GRU defectors (from the Soviet Union). They said that the anti-war movements during the 1970s in the US received financial aids from the Soviet Union.
” BTW the Americans were court martialed, convicted, and imprisoned. The NVA probably got medals for Hue.”
I am not sure which event you are referring to. In the cae of My Lai, William Calley Jr only had to serve 3 years of house arrest.
There were many massacres like these, some US soldiers were convicted.
But you are quite right. For the Communists, they rarely court-martialed their officers.
I watched a couple videos of Assilen. I’m fascinated on some of his findings. Like that North Vietnam faced resistance in the North during the war. I always assumed only the South was fragmented, and the North was one, huge, United entity. Also that the huge domestic and international propaganda campaign they launched was largely responsible for their victory. I just assumed they were far superior to ARVN. I have to say they achieved every single goal they set.
In Vietnam, during the 1990s, there is a term coined to describe the internal division of the Communist Party of Vietnam. It is called “Vụ án xét lại chống đảng” (The case of revisionism against the party). This was an internal purge of Communist members who opposed the Party’s official trajectory.
It is believed that they were divided between pro-Chinese and pro-Soviets. Some would argue for unifying the country through peace, others such as Le Duan proposes to use force and escalate war to achieve the same objective.
I think Western scholars sometimes overplay this difference. After all, Le Duan was officially chosen to be the successor of Ho Chi Minh. While they may have differences in opinions, they are still unified in achieving a single goal: unifying the country and remove all foreign influences from Vietnam.
The insidious strategy here is this: the Communists downplay their ideological allegiance and overplay the nationalist aspect of their policy. In this way, they present themselves as liberators of a long chained people. The US public was fooled into believing that they were liberators and viewed them in utterly positive light.
This strategy works very well because the Communists usually point out that prior to the second Indochinese War, they crushed the French. But the official name of the Party during this time is Viet Minh (Alliance of Viet). They used this as a front to mobilize supports from all segments of Vietnamese societies. After they achieved their goals following Dien Bien Phu, they purged all dissent elements from their ranks and files during the Agrarian Reform (1956).
The Communists since Lenin has always been absolutely cunning and calculating. They are all ready to change the names of their parties, temporarily form alliances with opposing sides, forging friendships with dissents, only to turn back on them when they have installed themselves in the position of power.
Now, if you extract the label Communism and insert Jews, you would get a similar model for infiltration in all levels of societies. This is how I have changed my mind after reading the Dailystormer. You have a model for a political party, you only need to change labels and adjust minor details to understand another party.
Very good point about the communist strategy in merging the nationalists with the communist cause. Americans see it as the same, and it is not. Americans can always get behind fighting for independence for obvious reasons. Asselin makes this point. That the North ran an excellent international diplomatic campaign.
Fun fact:. I graduated from SDSU, where Asselin teaches. I never took his course, unfortunately. I might have ran across his name when registering and dismissed it assuming he was a communist sympathizer, like the rest of the history department at SDSU. And all California Universities. We might have crossed paths on campus. Maybe even said hi. Who knows.
@Cuong Quoc Vu: I’m reading Theodor Mommsen now, will report back how much I liked it.
Since you are Austrian, you have many advantages over me. I have to read his book in English. I heard that his German is very lucid.
If you can read and dissect the work, you will also gain some understanding of his political thought on German politics during the second half of the 19th century. He often compared Roman political developments with the modern events during his lifetime.
Does anyone know what Alek is up to? I haven’t seen him post in over a month now.
I heard that this epidemic robs him of everything he has got. It is quite tragic to hear that. I think he is busy managing his affairs at the moment.
Ouch, that sucks! 🙁 I hope everything goes well for him, he’s a good guy.
Where did you hear this, btw, if you don’t mind me asking?
Aaron said he goes on furlough from here sometimes.
@Karl,
Well he said it himself.
CQV:
Ok, thanks. I missed that comment myself. 🙂
The US may want to rethink their ambitions of starting another hot war:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/71-eligible-gen-zers-dont-qualify-military-due-obesity-and-other-reasons
I dont think this is nearly as significant as the headline is making it out to be. With a population of 320 million or so, the available pool of recruits is still massive. Strained budgets in the future and deferred modernization of force structure are much bigger issues. Why, might you ask?
You can get around a shortage of manpower by:
1) outsourcing: this means hiring contractors to do a lot of the non-combat stuff like logistics, catering, etc… and hiring mercenaries (a classic of warfare since ancient times), or supporting local proxies to do your bidding (a communist favorite, and still Russian preferred policy today. Yeah, the US uses proxies too, but to a lesser degree, and they are much less skilled at it).
2) invest in a capital intensive military that uses technology as force multiplier, which they already do, but plan to do more. After 20 years of war against terrorism, they do this not so much because of a lack of manpower, but because of western aversion to sustaining casualties (aversion to casualties is a cultural trait that may or may not change under more pressing circumstances, personally I suspect they will be a lot more tolerant to casualties under pressing circumstances).
Neither of these two approaches in itself is new – this is how Sweden fought and won its part of the 30 Years War despite being a country with a small population. UK is another country that has fought like this and conquered a world empire a couple centuries ago (navy fleets are a paradigm of capital intensive with little manpower comparative to a land army, later they made up for their lack of men by use of proxies and raising of colonial troops).
Then, there is conscription. The US military forces are expensive not only because they are highly technological, but because they have a volunteer armed force that must compete with alternative employers in the labor market. All this implies that, even if your are recruiting from the bottom, your cost of labor, which is usually the main portion of a military budget, is closely linked to the cost of labor in your contry (Chinese and Russian soldiers are much cheaper).
To a degree, you can get around that by reactivating conscription and use this “forced labor” to fill out a sizable portion of your military, the way Russia does today. It may not even be as costly in political terms, provided you can couch the policy with appropiately patriotic appeals. Lack of high school diploma is not such a limiting factor, after all, a lot of the skills conscripts need to fulfill non-specialist functions are attainable via basic training.
No infantryman needs higher education to drive a military truck o clean rifles. This is especially so in the Army, while less so in the Navy and Air Force, which are more technology-intensive and require a higher proportion of specialists.
Making matters worse is the fact that a sizable chunk of the military platforms in service in the US armed forces are from the 1980s and early 1990s, and are rapidly approaching the end of their service lifes, while the newer generations of platforms that are supposedly going to replace them are not yet technologically mature enough, or too expensive to be acquired in large numbers, or both (see the F-35 joint strike fighter as a prime example).
Under these conditions, depleted national budgets and ballooning debts and deficits will probably much more consequential to the US capacity and willingness to use force in the coming decades.
If all major key powers go to war (including the US, Russia and China), then military conscription is the main method of procuring manpower. This is a lesson dated back to the Warring States Period in China.
I think Yarara has made a sharp observation. The US has a large pool of manpower to draw from. She could also relax her immigration procedure to obtain more manpower (at the expense of loyalty).
But as a lesson drawn from the Vietnam War, the soldiers need a just cause to go to war and risk his life. If the US keeps treating her citizens as cattles like now, the soldiers would just turn their back and refuse to fight, just like the Imperial Russian Army in WW1. Also, if the government doesn’t tighten up her control of media, they would also refuse to fight, and the anti-war movements would threaten the front just like Germany during the end of WW1.
A combination of Russia and China would be too much for the US. I won’t count NATO as they seem like a coughing old man.
Mass recruitment will only happen in context of total war. Do you think that is likely considering every major power has enough nukes to destroy the whole world?
@CQV: the drawn out long war scenario like ww1, ww2 etc is actually atypical, most wars are much shorter in time and limited in scope.
Given the operational tempo of modern warfare, recruitment will be unlikely to make any difference once the war has started.
It makes sense to train people for a reserve, in a long term buildup. Calling up reservists in a crisis is much quicker.
@Skepdic: thats a tough one to answer, because there have been no great power wars since the introduction of nuclear weapons, so there is little evidence and much to speculate on. Nukes are widely credited with bringing stability to the system, but the evidence for the causal link is murky and contested at best.
For example, nuclear weapons do not deter everything, nuclear powers have been attacked by non nuclear states. China went to war against the US in Korea (US was already a nuclear power), Egypt attacked Israel in 1973 (Israel was already widely known to have nukes, even by the egyptians), Argentina attacked the UK in 1982, India and Pakistan went to war in 1999 in Kargil (both were confirmed nuclear powers at this time). And USA and the USSR were on the brink of nuclear use several times.
Ever heard of the stability-instability paradox? It is usually applied to the indirect armed competition between superpowers during the Cold War, but according to its logic it could also mean that since nuclear weapons deter the other guy from totally crushing you, they could happily fight things out at the conventional level as long as certain critical red lines are not crossed (eg “as long as the homeland territory is not invaded”, “as long as the existence of the state is not in peril)”.
How to define these lines unambiguously, however, is a topic all in itself….
“@CQV: the drawn out long war scenario like ww1, ww2 etc is actually atypical, most wars are much shorter in time and limited in scope.”
But then what is the war aim of both sides. In ancient time, the Punic Wars. If it is a total war between them, then it is going to be long drawn out.
I think it is a general tendency for the big guys to stay away from direct confrontation.
War aims? Depends upon each war. Sometimes wars start with some aims, but these change as the conflict progresses. Sometimes wars are planned in cold blood (Bismarck, Napoleon), sometimes wars begin without any of the participants actually wanting a war, but they do because of misperceptions (Vietnam), miscalculations (Falklands), opportunism (Iran-Iraq war) o sheer diplomatic recklessness (Hitler).
War is q multicausal phenomenon, but at the root of it, war is the continuation of politics by other means. (Clausewitz)
“but they do because of misperceptions (Vietnam)”
There is no misperception. The US was right because the expansion of Communism in East Asia. The secret intelligence service of the US was right when they assessed Ho Chi Minh as a secret Communist back in 1945. The Communists were totally right that the US aim was to divide the country into halves.
I would say that war aims of major states may be total war to eliminate completely each other, or smaller and modest aims. In the case of the former, it is going to be a long drawn out war.
As such, I don’t think the WW1 and WW2 are exceptions. Perhaps it is rare in the history of the West to have these wars in pre-modern time. But in East Asia, it is absolutely not rare.
@CQV
No one is disputing that communism was advancing there, what I meant there is that its importance was mispercieved as being a big deal. Indochina was strategically of little relevance to the US (unlike Japan, Korea or Indonesia), it did not justify spending blood and treasure there.
Pretty much like terrorism is percieved to be a much bigger deal in the west that it actually is.
@Yarara, I have 0 knowledge of Korea. Do you know why Korea was more important to Vietnam in terms of strategic significance? I thought both South Vietnam and Korea would be important to the US because of their proximity to China, obviously an adversary of America?
Also, I saw a comment of you on the other blog of Sleazy on a book called “Germany’s Aims in the First World War” by Fritz Fischer. You said that the author has not done a good job. Do you mind if I ask you to dwell more deeply into this mater.
The relevant page is here:
https://www.aaronselias.com/2020/05/03/remarks-on-arthur-bryants-unfinished-victory-1940/
“Sorry to break it to you, but Fischer is garbage. He quotes his sources very selectively, or misinterprets them outright to fit his narrative”
Korea has always been the natural gateway for invasions between China and Japan, both of which have been significant powers for decades. One is a staunch US ally, the other a longstanding rival.
All countries, but above all great powers, strive to control the territories between them and potentially dangerous rivals.
Geopolitically, these are called buffer zones. A buffer zone is not a neutral middle ground, a buffer is an area you try to control, between you and your rival. In case of war, it will be the first battleground. Poland and Belgium, whether they like it or not, have traditionally had this role in Europe, for example.
When the US rushed to the Yalu river during the Korean war they ran up against a chinese red line, so China intervened to push them back. Now both Koreas are each powers buffers against each other.
Fischer misinterprets the historical evidence to make the case that Germany was guilty of deliberately pursuing aggression in WW1.
I promise I will elaborate on Fischer another day, right now I am afraid I have a girl with me, and she is giving me a stink eye for paying more attention to my phone than to her. 😉
I’ve been saying for a while that given the overwhelming evidence against any of the imposed restrictions, there is a non-zero chance of a repeat of the Nuremberg trials.
And guess what:
https://leohohmann.com/2021/02/28/legal-team-wants-second-nuremberg-tribunal-to-try-global-lockdown-promoters-for-crimes-against-humanity/
Further, the death rate from the jab is astonishingly high:
“As a matter of comparison: There are 20 to 30 deaths reported every year to VAERS related to the flu shot. That’s with 195 million receiving flu shots. Compare that to the COVID shot, which resulted in 2,602 reported deaths through 77 million vaccinations.”
Source:
https://leohohmann.com/2021/04/30/highly-cited-covid-doctor-comes-to-stunning-conclusion-govt-scrubbing-unprecedented-numbers-of-injection-related-deaths/#more-6304
To properly pull off a repeat of the Nuremberg trials, we first need someone to wreck the US militarily. Then we’ll get a bunch of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian judges to conduct a show trial. Maybe we can also systematically use torture to get confessions and to get more absurd confessions, we’ll just use more torture. To to it all off, we do a few public hangings. It worked splendidly last time, so we only need to follow the existing playbook. In all seriousness, though, I would love to see the US (and international) elites brought to heel. Yet, where is the army to back up this plan?
I can’t comment on the “how it has to go down this time”, nor am I all too sure if there is a need for military backing, like in the first trials. After all, today we’d not be prosecuting a competent military elite who ran an entire country. We are dealing with a bunch of moronic pedophiles, who hide behind big corp and digital censorship.
However, I have something important to say about a possible NT v2. It is absolutely not about hanging a handful of folks or sending people like Speer to jail, who had a satellite role at best in the whole thing back then. Also, it’s clear that these unlucky few were just representative of the entire regime. Many a solid Nazi had gotten their asses over to Latin America and the US many months before Germany capitulated.
The important thing was that they were high-profile targets and that made the whole thing quite romantic. Most important, though, was the outcome. It’s not about the defendants, it’s about the plaintiff. The NT v1 were very much a recognition of the harm done and they defined who has to pay for it. Lastly, the NT v1 gave birth to the Nuremberg Code and to a new understanding of civil rights. The German Grundgesetz was heavily inspired by this new understanding. (Yes, I know, it’s a wanna-be constitution, but still).
So, it’s really not about comparing the Nazi-regime crimes with the Covid hysteria crimes (Aaron – maybe a topic for a separate blog? This looks like an interesting intellectual exercise), but it is about recognition for all the unjust, unnecessary and to some extent mean-intention driven suffering on a global level, we head to experience. We cannot even try to forgive without such recognition.
I’d like to highlight a particularly good podcast with Jeffrey Tucker from aier.org. He has a very sane view on the topic. See link below.
https://expatmoneyshow.com/episodes/jeffrey-tucker/
On average 1.5% people die after contracting COVID infection.
2602 deaths on 77 million vaccinations means vaccine has 443 times lower mortality rate compared to COVID infection.
Your first figure is completely off. Also, it would be very interesting to look at how many comparatively young people died of the vaxx vs Covid. From what I gather, the risk of dying of Covid if you are young and healthy are practically zero whereas there are plenty of people in this group who were vaxxed to death.
Today I watched a documentary on HIV/AIDS that points out some of the b.s. that went on in that corner. You can probably still find it on YouTube. It’s title is “House of Numbers”. I was particularly amused when Dr. Fauci confidently and in a dismissive manner states what some luminary in the field proved was nonsense. The biggest takeaway for me was that the playbook for AIDS/HIV is quite similar to the current one for Covid, with engineered panic at its center.
AS long as we are back on the subject of viruses, I have just come across this interesting article detailing the evidence for natural origins vs lab escape theory. It is neither the first nor the only reputable source to substantiate this claim, but I have found it to be the more exhaustive so far.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/
It fits with much of what I have observed during the last year and a half, and does a good job at explaining why the chinese communist regime, US health bureaucrats, and virologists more broadly have been behaving the way they have throughout the pandemic.
I stand by my early assessment that the virus was not deliberately engineered as a bioweapon, and this scenario supports my hypothesis. This catastrophe has almost certainly been the result of a mix of scientific hubris, incompetence, communist obfuscation, and people responsible attempting to cover their asses ever since it hit the fan…
Ahm, so you’re going for a hybrid version of both, right?
“A third scenario of origin. There’s a variation on the natural emergence scenario that’s worth considering. This is the idea that SARS2 jumped directly from bats to humans, without going through an intermediate host as SARS1 and MERS did. A leading advocate is the virologist David Robertson who notes that SARS2 can attack several other species besides humans. He believes the virus evolved a generalist capability while still in bats. Because the bats it infects are widely distributed in southern and central China, the virus had ample opportunity to jump to people, even though it seems to have done so on only one known occasion. Robertson’s thesis explains why no one has so far found a trace of SARS2 in any intermediate host or in human populations surveilled before December 2019. It would also explain the puzzling fact that SARS2 has not changed since it first appeared in humans — it didn’t need to because it could already attack human cells efficiently.
One problem with this idea, though, is that if SARS2 jumped from bats to people in a single leap and hasn’t changed much since, it should still be good at infecting bats. And it seems it isn’t.
“Tested bat species are poorly infected by SARS-CoV-2 and they are therefore unlikely to be the direct source for human infection,” write a scientific group skeptical of natural emergence.
Still, Robertson may be onto something. The bat coronaviruses of the Yunnan caves can infect people directly. In April 2012 six miners clearing bat guano from the Mojiang mine contracted severe pneumonia with COVID-19-like symptoms and three eventually died. A virus isolated from the Mojiang mine, called RaTG13, is still the closest known relative of SARS2. Much mystery surrounds the origin, reporting and strangely low affinity of RaTG13 for bat cells, as well as the nature of 8 similar viruses that Shi reports she collected at the same time but has not yet published despite their great relevance to the ancestry of SARS2. But all that is a story for another time. The point here is that bat viruses can infect people directly, though only in special conditions.
So who else, besides miners excavating bat guano, comes into particularly close contact with bat coronaviruses? Well, coronavirus researchers do. Shi says she and her group collected more than 1,300 bat samples during some eight visits to the Mojiang cave between 2012 and 2015, and there were doubtless many expeditions to other Yunnan caves.
Imagine the researchers making frequent trips from Wuhan to Yunnan and back, stirring up bat guano in dark caves and mines, and now you begin to see a possible missing link between the two places. Researchers could have gotten infected during their collecting trips, or while working with the new viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The virus that escaped from the lab would have been a natural virus, not one cooked up by gain of function.
The direct-from-bats thesis is a chimera between the natural emergence and lab escape scenarios. It’s a possibility that can’t be dismissed. But against it are the facts that 1) both SARS2 and RaTG13 seem to have only feeble affinity for bat cells, so one can’t be fully confident that either ever saw the inside of a bat; and 2) the theory is no better than the natural emergence scenario at explaining how SARS2 gained its furin cleavage site, or why the furin cleavage site is determined by human-preferred arginine codons instead of by the bat-preferred codons.”
I’m wondering what are your comments on the last 4 chapters of The Rational Male-Religion by Rollo Tomassi, especially the chapter titled “Sex”.
I have not read this book and don’t think I will. What is your take on those chapters?
I am watching Kevin MacDonald right now to understand first his books. I don’t have enough space right now to buy his triology, but I will definite read him. I have ordered a book written by Hilaire Belloc. It is a very good book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe-S_Kl_L0o
Watch 23:54 onwards.
It is mind-blowing to me that the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) was established by a majority of Jews. Covertly, they fought for the end of discrimination of Jews, but outwardly, they say they fought for Black. This is according to MacDonald.
With this level of cunning and deceit, it is not strange to see how Jews could help to establish the Cheka and make it an establishment for repression of the general population. As a Vietnamese, I always thought the Chinese are cunning and deceitful, but the Jews outclass them in almost all aspects.
The 1965 Immigration Reform Act is probably the best example of Jews fighting for opening up immigration to non-whites for their own preservation. Don’t get me wrong, it’s ok to let in quality non-white immigrants. But throwing the gates wide open to the Third World was a big mistake. It’s gotten to the point where legality doesn’t even matter. It’s completely out of control.
The govt should have slowly adjusted outdated immigration policy. Rather than turning it on its head.
Today at the grocery store I noticed a magazine with 1950s actress Grace Kelly on the cover. I’m always taken by her beauty.
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/grace-kelly.html
In contrast, today’s women in magazines and movies have been cosmetically enhanced. In many cases, you are furthermore looking at a mirage due to photoshopping, body-doubles, or filters.