Let's just get the Halloween season ball rolling by thanking Holo honey Raora for hosting a watchalong for a classic horror movie, The Thing! (The canonical 1982 version.) Irys also did a watchalong for it last year...
So does that mean that Raora is a daddy's girl like Irys? It's rare for girls to have cool tastes, usually only guys do. Ame also watched a lot of classic "guy's movies," but she's a bit on the tomboy side, whereas Irys and Raora are very girly.
So where do they get their preference for cool-guy culture? From wanting to bond with their dad! Their dad is a guy, and has guy tastes, so if they want to bond with him, they'll have to develop a taste for guy movies, guy music, and so on. Raora has fondly mentioned her dad quite a bit, more so than her mom or her sister, so I think she might be a daddy's girl -- very rare, and very appreciated! ^_^
On the Holo JP side, I'm pretty sure that the Koronator is a daddy's girl -- she's mentioned the two of them bonding over classic video games while she was growing up. Marine must be a daddy's girl -- she has fondly mentioned him quite a bit on stream (he thinks Choco is pretty, he has some rules for marrying Marine, etc.). And it sounds like Lui is closer to her dad than to her mom (who is more like Lui's brother), so I think she's a daddy's girl too. And they all have cool tastes! And they're not tomboys, so they found an interest in cool things so that they'd have something to bond with their dad over. ^_^
And those are only the ones I know about -- perhaps there are others, but I just haven't seen clips or heard them talk about their families on stream before. It seems like there are a lot more daddy's girls in Glorious Nippon than in other countries. And Japanese girls *do* have cooler tastes than girls from other countries.
Probably because their men are cooler -- descendants of samurai, ninjas, pirates, and warrior-monks (yes, Japanese Buddhist monks could marry and have children). In China and Korea, the dominant classes were scholar-bureaucrats and literally castrated eunuchs, along with the military. Girls are more likely to want to bond with their dad when he has an exciting personality, which comes from leading an exciting lifestyle (not the life of a scholar-bureaucrat).
Even among the non-warriors, Japanese men were more likely to be hunters and fishermen than the Chinese and Koreans were, because Japan is so mountainous that arable land is relatively less common, so intensive agriculture is not as common as it is in China and Korea. And fishing is just another form of hunting -- more adventurous, setting off into the unknown, having to fight against hostile natural forces.
If the fish are migratory like salmon, then fishing is more like pastoralism, and the fishermen are tending to a herd of underwater livestock, much like the Pacific Northwest Indian tribes -- which makes them a lot cooler, resembling pastoralists (risk-taking, badass, culture of honor) instead of intensive agriculturalists (boring, predictable, hardscrabble).
Mongolian girls also have cool tastes, like practicing horse-mounted archery for fun! Your daughters would be cool, too, if they looked up to their fathers as the descendants of Genghis Khan! Hehe.
I'll be posting more post-length comments in the comments section shortly, just wanted to get the ball rolling...
October 9, 2024
Halloween mega-post / thread: horror movies, music, video games, sublime aesthetics, vtuber recommendations, ancient Indo-European origins of trick-or-treating, etc.
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Watched Messiah of Evil (1974, filmed in '71), which languished in obscurity until brought back during the 2010s through digital restoration -- and likely enhancement over the original.
ReplyDeleteIt was shot in Techniscope, which only uses half the area of filmstock vs. the standard method, so it required a 2x blow-up to be projected like standard-size frames -- which literally magnifies its defects, like graininess. I'm pretty sure all of these newly restored for Blu-ray B-movies from the '70s or whenever have benefited from this digital enhancement -- if they didn't look so great due to budget limitations when originally filmed, why keep them that way?
You don't want to make them look unrecognizable, but cleaning up graininess, putting saturation into faded colors (this movie's color was done by Technicolor, but not with the rich, saturated dye-transfer process), etc., is what the filmmakers would have originally wanted -- they just didn't have enough money, as they were B-movies.
Anyway, this is a masterpiece of a B-movie, and is a reminder of how much craft was put into these in the good ol' days vs. the cursed slop that has been served up in this all-but-dried-up niche within the film industry.
Shot on film, not video.
Bare minimum of an original score, but still effective at setting an eerie creepy atmosphere, with an uncanny timbre due to its foreward-looking use of synths.
Heavy use of chiaroscuro lighting, both sculpturally and compositionally, a distinction I explored in this post about Venetian Renaissance colorito being the origin of this compositional chiaroscuro:
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/12/venetian-ethnogenesis-and-its-role-as.html
Rich and varied color palette (more saturated in the digital enhancement).
Striking and iconic locations -- maybe only seeming iconic after the fact, but the locations in this movie perfectly capture one of America's most iconic environments -- "Midcentury Modern small-town Southern California".
Ditto for the set design and set dressing, wonderfully capturing the Modern-meets-Boho look of many interiors of the '70s (vs. a more strictly Modern look to the '60s).
Costumes and hair / make-up are well done, too, from the blue-collar denim uniform and greasy slicked-back hair of the gas station attendant, to the Boho chic look of one of the traveling companion girls (red turtleneck, flowy patchwork skirt, long lustrous hair brushed straight into a fuss-free mane).
Eye candy actresses (including one of the original Price is Right models), who possess a healthy and natural libido. Here, their corporeal presence is more sensual, with no nudity or softcore scenes, but still adds an erotic charge to the dreamy yet dangerous atmosphere.
Acting that is sincere and competent and naturalistic, not lazy / phoned-in or self-aware / campy (which includes deadpan delivery of ridiculous dialog and actions). The protag's voiceover narration has some moments of melodramatic delivery, but it's meant to be reading her diary entry aloud, and people do get more melodramatic in their private diary entries than in their everyday speech face-to-face with others.
None of these elements are cost-prohibitive, and none of them use no-longer-existent technology. The only reason that the B-movies have become so crappy since the 21st century is that the cohesion, cooperative spirit, creative drive, and inspiration to create something larger and longer-lasting than your own self, has thoroughly evaporated in the stagnating and now collapsing American Empire.
As an aside, Messiah of Evil contains perhaps the earliest use of a supermarket as a utopia-or-dystopia location. See the galleries within these two reviews, though watch the movie to see its wonderfully Modern / Googie / butterfly-arched roof in the establishing shot:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.cinemadelirium.com/2011/04/messiah-of-evil-1973.html
https://www.johntrafton.com/messiah-of-evil
This movie was filmed in 1971, and went through release Hell until 1974. To my knowledge, the only other similar use of "brightly lit, clean, well-stocked supermarket as symbol for Midcentury material abundance and security" is from The Long Goodbye, where the protag goes shopping for cat food late at night -- as in The Messiah of Evil, the fact that these places were open at night was another sign of peak prosperity, having such a cornucopia available at your convenience. That movie was filmed in '72, released in '73.
The other major example, probably the most famous, is from The Stepford Wives, filmed in '74 and released in '75.
This is part of the broader trend of peak-American Empire aesthetics, where dystopia was bright, lush, and harmonious -- their assumption that such trends from the Midcentury would continue indefinitely, rather than darken, dessicate, and fracture. See this post of mine on the topic (with a still of The Stepford Wives' supermarket scene):
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2017/10/is-dystopia-bright-lush-harmonious-or.html
In addition to the supermarket, Messiah of Evil has a very brightly lit (at night) gas station, clean & pristine, 24-7 convenience, abundance and security. Not to mention the Midcentury Modern movie theatre (naturally open at night), shown and discussed in this review from a blog about movie theatres in movies:
https://theatresinmovies.blogspot.com/2017/01/messiah-of-evil.html
Two of the main characters are mobbed, killed, and eaten in these locations, portraying the enemies as outsider infiltrators of what is supposed to be a clean bright sanctuary. In the movie theatre, the bright lights come in before she is chased down and killed, so it up-ends the trope of the movie theatre's danger coming from its dark setting, where people are disguised by darkness.
These are therefore more like the rape scenes from A Clockwork Orange (another classic where dystopia is bright), which unfold in brightly lit locations -- a bright home interior at night, and a stage in a theatre that is otherwise dark but has a bright spotlight trained on the stage itself.
Not only does the contrast between the bright light and horrific violence make us feel like a sanctuary is being violated, but also like we wish it were taking place in the dark. For, although that makes it easier for the assailant to attack a victim, it also makes it easier for the spectators to be spared of the gruesome details. And it therefore adds to the pain and terror of the victim, to feel so exposed while under attack, without the dignity of having their attack kept private and unseen by a panopticon.
True Midcentury norms, though, there is minimal gore in Messiah of Evil. It's not torture porn either literally or figuratively, e.g. when a victim is humiliated or degraded. The harsh lit accompanying their death is more about heightening their -- and our -- sense of terror, than about humiliation, degradation, debasement, and torture.
To my knowledge, the first example of the turning of the tide against "supermarket as bright abundant utopia, perhaps overly utopian" is the gritty cop classic Cobra (1986):
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRGnchtk6hc
While a crazed criminal is holding a bunch of people hostage inside a supermarket, the bright overhead lights have all gone out, and there's only a bit of sunlight coming in through the windows. Most of the light comes from the smaller independently lit places like neon signs over the lunch counter, an illuminated giant Pepsi can display, etc. So it's more like a film noir exterior, only now on the inside of a building -- in neoliberal Hell, the Midcentury wholesome cornucopia of secure convenience, is dead.
Final note about Messiah of Evil. It's like a stylish European Gothic haunted-location movie, but set in, and adapted to, Midcentury America. It's not trying to Euro-LARP -- e.g., by setting it in a Colonial or Victorian mansion in New England or Dixie. That's too literal, too LARP-y.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of which -- why didn't we make a horror movie that's set in a Brutalist fortress? They're the closest thing we have to American castles. What might have been...
How to create a Gothic atmosphere in a land that is new, where all the buildings are relatively new as well -- where there are no ruins or creaking dilapidated relics of the place's glory days centuries ago?
The movie is not so focused on the plot, but on atmosphere -- creepy, eerie, unsettling / uncanny, familiar yet strange, apparently safe but actually menacing. The environment is not hostile per se, as in a tropical jungle or remote snow-buried mountain. It's the kind of environment that ought to be safe and welcoming, so if it is dangerous and menacing, it implies some kind of infiltration, contamination, corruption, and so on.
This is in fact a case of infiltration by evil outsiders -- not a superficially clean and safe place, which is actually run by sick-and-twisted insiders who disguise their sinister nature from outsiders.
There's something lacking in those tryhard chuuni portrayals of "clean but internally evil" places. They fundamentally rely on the audience perceiving the place as a wholly foreign and unfamiliar place -- so we arrive there giving them the benefit of the doubt, after all it's so clean and safe and charming, at least at first blush. If it is actually run by wicked villains and dangerous, then we've been hoodwinked -- something that could only happen if we were naive outsiders who were not in on the place's inner workings.
That can work if it's a tropical jungle that seems thriving with life, an earthly paradise, but turns out to be inhabited by savage cannibals.
Or a calm peaceful body of water -- which, deeper down and unseen from the calm surface, is inhabited by killer sharks.
Or a geographically isolated and culturally alien place, which is calm and peaceful enough at the outset -- like the tiny island community in The Wicker Man. The policeman arrives from mainland Britain, how is he supposed to be familiar with a remote little island? If there's no immediate evidence of savagery, give them the benefit of the doubt.
But movies and TV shows about mid-to-late 20th century America, for a contemporary audience of Americans, these environments are not strange unfamiliar places where we're naive and just giving them the benefit of the doubt. We know those places -- probably live there ourselves, not a dingy disgusting slum in America.
ReplyDeleteSo if there's a big reveal that it's actually run by a wicked in-group -- not infiltrated by villainous outsiders -- we have to reject its plausibility, and the premise of it being a threatening location is totally deflated.
Such places are only run by sinister insiders in the seething imaginations of social misfits from those very environments, who are taking out their social rejection on their rejectors by portraying them as evil, destructive, etc., despite all appearances of them being good, constructive, and so on. It's just high school reject BS.
That's not to say there can't be a few bad apples from the in-group, like homegrown serial killer Michael Myers in Halloween. But they can't be a cabal that leads the community -- we already know that's not who leads us, and we know that there can be bad apples locally and internally. A few bad apple misfits are not the ones who build, maintain, and supply the bright clean abundant utopia that those Midcentury environments looked like.
Whoever built them, cannot have been a cabal of evil insiders -- evil insiders give their communities the grayed-out, textureless boxes with cheap crap or empty shelves, fragmented, and routinely set upon by mobs or colonized by indifferent and alien-speaking foreigners.
And so, as the American Empire neared its collapsing stage in the 21st century, as the Euros neared theirs during the 19th century, our horror movies are much heavier on locations that are decaying, ruins, or relics of a bygone heyday, truer to the original Euro Gothic spirit. Like the Rust Belt-era Detroit suburbs in It Follows from 2015, and countless others that are heavy on "vintage traces left within the current hellhole" aesthetics.
How does The Stepford Wives pull off the "sinister cabal of insiders leading a bright clean utopia" trope, which would otherwise be unbelievable?
ReplyDeleteFirst, the movie is clearly satirical and black-humor in tone, not meant to be taken too literally as a plausible threat, unlike a vampire or zombie movie where the monsters are meant to be taken literally.
And yet it does have a serious thriller tone as well, unlike the campy remake from 2004. So, it is meant to be taken more literally than figuratively, if not as seriously as a standard thriller or horror movie.
More importantly, then, the environment *is* on the remote and foreign side, to mainstream audiences. It's upper-class New England -- not an all-American middle-class suburb or small town. Maybe the elites do live decadent scandalous private lifestyles, within the comforted seclusion of their insulated communities. These are the future Epstein Island crowd, wealthy New England professionals.
What kind of weird stuff does the Skull & Bones crowd get up to, within their insular Yale community? Perhaps the same kind of stuff that they get up to when they settle into family life nearby.
Being so elite, so New England-y (prehistoric America, before America truly became American), and so adjacent to secret societies, perhaps the sinister plot of The Stepford Wives sounded plausible -- because it didn't generalize to all of America, which would've been rejected as implausible by audiences who knew first-hand that it wasn't like that. If it's confined to an upper-class elite secret society in prehistoric America, well, maybe it could happen.
Another extensive gallery of stills from Messiah of Evil, just images, no words or review, to convince the visually-oriented that it's worth watching:
ReplyDeletehttps://film-grab.com/2015/06/28/messiah-of-evil/
Watching a bunch of classic Italian Gothic horror movies makes me appreciate why Italy was chosen for Gothic and related genres coming from the British Empire. It's because there's so much architecture still standing from the Dark Ages, and comparatively little from the Humanistic / Renaissance / Baroque / Neoclassical eras.
ReplyDelete"Gothic" is a misnomer, it's really Norman / Romanesque, but whatever.
And even more importantly, they showcase castles instead of cathedrals -- nothing against cathedrals, but why are they the only buildings that have made it into the architectural record? Even my beloved treasure trove, Romanesque Art in Italy by Decker, is mostly about religious buildings.
Well, if you like American Brutalist fortresses, or their Dark Age predecessors, you're in for a real feast for the eyes with the Italian horror movies of the 1960s and early '70s! Most of the interiors are sets constructed in studios, but some interiors are real locations, and all exteriors and establishing shots of the environment are real as well.
La Maschera del Demonio by Bava (AKA Black Sunday) is shot at Castle Massimo in Arsoli.
Il Demonio by Rondi (AKA The Demon) is shot around various Dark Age villages in the Basilicata region.
Danza Macabra by Margheriti (AKA Castle of Blood) is shot at the castle in Bolsena.
Operazione Paura by Bava (AKA Kill, Baby, Kill) is shot around the Dark Age village of Calcata.
And so on and so forth...
Sadly, none filmed at the Castle of Melfi in Basilicata, with its dramatic tall bridge entrance, but I'm sure there's one with a bridge somewhere in these classic '60s Italian Gothic movies!
Also none shot at Naples' prominent and iconic Castel Nuovo -- the "new" castle, as in the late 1200s, as compared to even earlier in the Dark Ages.
Southern Italy, even up to Rome and Lazio, was totally passed over by the ackshual Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical periods. There are still some Classical buildings from Roman times, but most of it is from the good ol' Dark Ages. ^_^
That's cuz they didn't spawn a new empire of their own, which is what gave birth to all those styles from Gothic onward. In the North, they had growing city-states, and the regional great power of the Venetian Republic, to deliver newer styles, though none as entirely-new and all-encompassing and replacing-the-past as if an empire had given birth to them.
But in the South, there wasn't even that partial trend away from the Dark Ages. Including the region around Rome, which was part of the Papal States, no longer an empire.
No piles and piles of wealth either, after the collapse of the Roman Empire -- except for the birth of commercial, mercantile, and financial sectors in the North in the late Middle Ages / early Renaissance.
In the South, they had to keep what they'd inherited from the Dark Ages, a decent amount of which *was* funded by wealthy people -- but wealthy foreigners, like the Normans, Angevins, etc. from wealthy countries like France. Although they were not French-French -- they were the ones from Western France getting sidelined by the French-French from Paris and the Northeast. The exact same people who married into British nobility.
Perfect setting for Gothic horror movies!
Related, Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew is filmed in various Dark Age villages in the South (Basilicata and Apulia), even though he scouted locations in Palestine itself, but thought they were too "commercialized".
ReplyDeleteIDK what that means, but possibly he was struck by how civilized and Classical the Levant's architecture is. That would have been appropriate for the times of Jesus himself.
But the birth of Christianity as a proper imperial religion stems from the Dark Ages, namely with the growth of the Byzantine Empire (that's who sponsored, hosted, and codefied all those Ecumenical Councils that standardized what Christianity is). That was from the very beginning of the Dark Ages, but still decidedly post-Classical, the beginning of the mystical, magical, and monastic Dark Ages.
So in choosing to film the movie in Dark Age villages (Mediterranean ones, still, not Dark Age Britain or France), Pasolini was channeling the origin of Christianity as a proper religion, with its mystical and monastic foundations, from the era of the Church Fathers -- rather than the civilized and Classical time-and-place of Jesus and the Apostles themselves, when "Christianity" was only an inchoate group of Jesus-followers from within the Second Temple Judaic ethnos and a handful of Gentile converts.
So really, it's not a 20th-C portrayal of the 1st-C events surrounding Jesus, but a 20th-C imagining of a 5th or 6th-C Byzantine-sponsored movie about the events of Jesus as the Byzantines understood them. I.e., if the Byzantines had film-making technology, what would their movie about "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" look like?
Pasolini was an atheist and Communist, but even he had the right intuition about channeling the Dark Age / Church Fathers / Byzantine zeitgeist that produced the religion of Christianity, rather than the Roman Classical zeitgeist of Jesus' own lifetime. It's a movie about Christianity the religion, not Christ the person.
Neat!
PS, possibly Pasolini was also struck by how post-Dark Age the Levant began to look once the Ottoman Empire took it over. Ottoman architecture is akin to Gothic, Baroque, and even Rococo, from their Euro contemporaries. Rooted to some extent in Byzantine shapes and volumes, but introducing lots more complexity and scales of volumes, more thin volumes (Ottoman minarets, Gothic spires), more light-airy-open spaces, tons of surface ornamentation, etc.
ReplyDeleteThat's not what you want to see when you're filming a movie about Jesus -- or the birth of the Christian religion in Byzantine times. It'd be like filming a movie about Arthurian romance, and there's Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical buildings crowding the frame. Boo! Too fancy, too civilized -- give us the noble savage aesthetic of the Dark Ages, where Christianity and Arthurian romance came from!
Ashkenazi wedding ritual spotted in traditional Basilicata Italian wedding ritual, as shown in Il Demonio (1963). The movie, although in the horror / possession / exorcism genre, is heavy on accurate ethnological details from rural Basilicata in Southern Italy. Especially relating to customs and rituals and superstitions.
ReplyDeleteThere's a wedding scene, and before the bride and groom enter the church, right at the entrance, the groom asks his attendant "Do I have anything tied?" and the attendant unties the groom's shoelaces. The bride asks the same thing, and her attendant says no, nothing tied. Only after ensuring that there is no item of clothing in a tied position, do they enter -- and do a little hop on their way through the door.
I immediately recognized this as a notable element for some, but not all, Ashkenazi weddings -- perhaps more on the Hasidic side. See here, on untying knots before proceeding down the aisle:
https://outorah.org/p/27241/
Hasidic Jews and rural Southern Italians have spent hardly any time together, and Hasidic Jews are very endogamous anyway, so there's minimal chance of this ritual spreading from Italians to Jews, or vice versa.
Rather, it must stem from a common ancestor -- and given how far back that is, it must be Indo-European, or some ancient but not prehistoric practice among some swath of the Indo-Europeans.
This is yet more evidence, from wedding rituals, that the Ashkenazi Jews come from an Indo-European background, not a Saharo-Arabian background, let alone a Semitic or Canaanite or Judaean background. They're converts from the Dark Ages, as outlined in the earlier posts.
Now I'll have to track down which other of the many customs, rituals, and superstitions shown in Il Demonio are also found in Ashkenazi Jews. Sticking just to weddings, there's an elaborate scene where the adults prepare the matrimonial bed before the newlyweds consummate their marriage. They toss a bunch of raisins onto the sheet and spread them into the shape of a cross, so that their dryness will soak up all the evil vibes in the room.
The cross shape is obviously a Christian-era adaptation. But throwing a bunch of bad-vibe-absorbing things onto the bed in order to protect the newlyweds must have analogs in other Indo-Euro cultures, whether Ashkenazi or otherwise. But that item will have to wait in line with all the others...
Anna Khachiyan looks nothing like Ayn Rand, as a reminder after listening to the recent Red Scare. Earlier she said she looked like her, but she didn't mention it this time -- that's right!
ReplyDeleteLast time I pointed out their non-resemblance, I pointed to an Ashkenazi who she does take after somewhat -- Britpop frontbabe Justine Frischmann, from Elastica, if you compare similar ages.
This ties back into that split within the early Ashkenazi community, where half of them were more Armenian / Iranian and the other half were more Slavic. They eventually merged, genetically and culturally, to form a unimodal genetic group today, instead of bimodal in the 14th C.
Supposedly, there's still something of a split between them, with the Western ones who bear Germanic surnames being more advanced or civilized or well-behaved or something, and the Eastern ones who bear Slavic surnames being less of those things.
I've noticed a phenotypic sign of this -- the really Armenian and Iranian-looking Ashkenazis have Germanic surnames. Justine Frischmann, Susanna Hoffs, Karl Marx, Aaron Schwartz, Felix Biederman, and I forget what it is on Anna's maternal side but it's definitely Germanic, not Slavic.
The ones with Slavic names tend to look more European, maybe specifically Slavic, but not very Middle Eastern. Noam Chomsky, Michael Rappaport (a family that settled into the Slavic East), Mel Brooks (born Kaminsky), etc.
So, although these two sub-groups did eventually merge, it looks like the Armo/Iranian one was based further west in Germany, and the Slavic one was based further east in Slavic-speaking areas. Why did the Armo/Iranian one migrate even further westward than the Slavic one? IDK, but worth noting.
DeleteWhat about actress Fran Drescher?
Young Bernie Sanders and Elliott Gould (born Goldstein) also have that Armo/Iranian look, more than a generic Euro look.
ReplyDeleteAlso, CORRECTION: the Angevin dynasty in Southern Italy was *not* the same group of Angevins who got displaced by the expanding Capetian dynasty from Paris. They were in fact a cadet branch of the Capetians -- the Capetians who took over Anjou immediately after conquering it, gave rise to the "Capetian House of Anjou," who ruled over Southern Italy in the late Dark Ages.
So they had access to a whole lot of wealth, through their connections to the Parisian capital of the richest European nation of the 13th C.
But the Normans who ruled in Southern Italy were the original Normans, not a cadet branch of the Capetians who took over Normandy after conquering it. They were a separate line from William the Conqueror in Britain, but same ethnic and political background.
Speaking of Jews and Iranians, did you know that ironically for a time the Sassinid Persians set up a kind of Jewish puppet state in Jerusalem of the 610s during the "Last War of Antiquity":
ReplyDeletehttps://unamsanctamcatholicam.com/2022/11/07/jews-and-the-sassanid-capture-of-jerusalem/
Fran Drescher is fairly Caucasus-looking, although on her mother's side there's also some Romanian (who converted to Judaism), so she has an Eastern Mediterranean / Balkan look as well, which is similar to Anatolian-Caucasian-Iranian. And her surname is Germanic.
ReplyDeleteSeth Rogen is another fairly standard Euro-looking Ashkenazi, like Michael Rapaport, and his surname is Slavic (variant of Rogin, a Slavic place name from Belarus), and his mother's maiden name sounds way more Slavic than Germanic (Belogus).
Marvin Minsky has a Slavic surname (another place name from Belarus), although his mother's maiden name is Germanic (Reiser). He looks more Euro than Middle Eastern:
https://achievement.org/achiever/marvin-minsky-ph-d/
Russian oligarch Alexander Smolensky looks Prussian, not Middle Eastern, and has a Slavic place name for a surname:
https://www.jeremynichollarchive.com/image/I0000hAxTey_dxCw
Back to the Germanic-surnamed Jews, Anna always jokes about looking like Nathan Fielder (Germanic surname), or Marc Jacobs (ditto -- Hebrew origin for Jacob, but Germanic possessive suffix, not Jakobov or whatever).
Speaking of Hebrew-origin surnames, they seem to be Armo/Iranian. If there's a Germanic or Slavic suffix, that may clarify things, but bare Hebrew surnames seem Armo/Iranian.
Sam Seder looks Armo/Iranian. Abby Shapiro as well.
The star of Il Demonio and La Frusta e il Corpo (AKA The Whip and the Body), Daliah Lavi, was not Italian at all -- she's Ashkenazi, one of their early births within Israel. She looks Armo/Iranian, not Slavic. Her mother's maiden name is Germanic (Klammer), and her father's is a Hebrew root with a Germanic suffix (Lewinbuk / Levenbuch).
The same Hebrew root with a Slavic suffix -- Monica Lewinsky -- looks more Slavic than Middle Eastern, although there's always a bit of Armo/Iranian in any Ashkenazi.
Finally, exotic hottie Gal Gadot comes from two Germanic-surnamed parents. Mother's maiden name is Weiss, and father's surname is a recently Hebraized form of Greenstein. She has the Armo/Iranian look for sure, not Euro.
Natalie Portman looks like Ana Kasparian, and sure enough she has Germanic-surnamed parents (mother's maiden name is Stevens, father's is Hershlag -- Portman is a stage name).
Oh, and Anna K's mother's maiden name is Reynberg (though Anna's mother is Slavic on her maternal side, IIRC). Forgot to look that up before. Anna has Armo/Iranian roots through more pathways than just her Armo father! ^_^
Netanyahu's grandfather, Nathan Mileikowsky, looks standard Euro, not Middle Eastern, and has a Slavic surname and was born-and-raised in a Slavic area (present-day Belarus):
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Mileikowsky
Netanyahu's mother, however, has a maiden name Segal, variant of Siegel, which is Germanic. So Netanyahu has a bit of an Armo/Iranian look, though I think he mostly looks Euro like his Slavic-surnamed father and grandfather.
There was a total babe in my high school named Siegel, tan / vaguely exotic / Armo-ish, not the standard Euro look.
That's it, I'm convinced. Germanic surname = exotic Armo/Iranian, Slavic surname = standard Euro.
Are blond and redhead Jews mostly Slavic-surnamed? There aren't very many blond or redhead Ashkenazis, but the few who are seem to be Slavic-surnamed, or not Germanic-surnamed at any rate. Blond / red hair is way more common among Euros, especially Slavs, than Armos or Iranians. Light eye color is somewhat common among Iranians, so it's not as determinative -- also it's hard to tell from pictures, so I ignore that in favor of hair color.
ReplyDeleteMichael Rapaport, Alexander Smolensky, Dave Portnoy... not just facial features looking standard Euro, but hair color as well. Portnoy especially looks like a bog-standard Russian.
Bette Midler's roots are dark, not natural blonde or ginger. However, she doesn't look Armo/Iranian, despite both parents being Germanic-surnamed, so she's an example of the minority of Germanic-named Jews who look like a standard Euro rather than Mid-Eastern.
Barbra Streisand is not a natural blonde either. Unlike Midler, she does look Armo/Iranian, especially when young in the '60s -- straight out of "This was Tehran before the Islamic Revolution". Both parents Germanic-surnamed.
Amy Schumer is blonde, but she's half-WASP and clearly takes after that side. Her father looks pretty Armo/Iranian, as does her relative Chuck Schumer (both of whose parents are Germanic-surnamed Jews), when young.
https://shoespost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/42CB388100000578-4741738-image-m-38_1501319344783.jpg
https://www.schumer.senate.gov/imo/media/image/schumer_earlydays.jpg
Chuck Schumer's high school quiz bowl pic reminds me of Rod Serling, another Germanic-surnamed Jew who looks heavily Armo/Iranian.
https://www.schumer.senate.gov/imo/media/image/schumer_madison_hs.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rod-Serling-HS-yearbook.jpg
I knew someone in high school who was Ashkenazi, pale skin, orange-y dark blond hair, blue eyes, and his sister and parents looked the same way. Unfortunately they have a recent Israeli Hebraized surname, so I don't know if they were originally Germanic or Slavic surnamed -- but I'll bet dollars to donuts it was Slavic. None of them looked Armo/Iranian in their facial features either, more like standard Euro.
There's a good test -- survey a bunch of Ashkenazis, and ask them if they've ever been told, "Funny, you don't look Jewish". I'm sure the ones whose grandparents were Slavic-surnamed are more likely to say yes than those with Germanic-surnamed grandparents.
Woody Allen looks fairly standard Euro, and has reddish light brown hair. Not very Armo/Iranian. His grandparents are evenly split between Germanic and Slavic surnamed -- Konigsberg, Hoff, Copplin, and Cherry (I assume an Anglicization of Cherno or related Slavic word meaning "dark").
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Cherno, Mike Cernovich looks pretty standard Slavic (and like Dave Portnoy has dark blond hair), and has a Slavic surname. As fate has it, his wife is Persian, so their kids would look like the average Ashkenazi, an even mix of Slavic and Iranian.
Dov Charney has the same Slavic root in his surname, but his mother is Syrian Jewish -- which explains why he looks so Mid-Eastern.
Israel being on the opposite side of Iran and Russia goes to show that deep genetic similarities have little bearing on geopolitical and cultural conflicts. Races and ethnic groups are *not* extended genetic families, they're historically contingent socially constructed groups that rise and fall, that lose members or form new coalitions and integrate outsiders, especially if they're an expanding empire.
ReplyDeleteThe Ashkenazis control Israel, and their ancestors are evenly split between Iran and Russia (and their vicinity).
Greeks and Turks mostly overlap genetically, and they've been in conflict for awhile, too.
Afghans vs. Persians, ditto. Afghan conflict with Iran led to the rise of the Afghan Durrani Empire.
Not to mention civil wars among genetic twins. But even the wars between states cut against close genetic bonds -- if they speak different languages, worship different gods, wear different clothing, etc., they don't perceive their genetic affinity at all. They might as well come from different galaxies. Cultural forms, not genes or physical phenotypes, are what they use to determine who is Us and who is Them.
Japanese vs. Koreans is like the Turks vs. Greeks of East Asia. Very similar genetically, both spending a lot of time in the Korean Peninsula, related languages (agglutinative, vowel harmony -- at least ancestrally, somewhat today as well), borrowings from Chinese culture (Buddhism, Chinese writing), beef-eating East Asians rather than chicken-eating East Asians, living right next door to each other, and yet...
ReplyDeleteDoesn't matter if the Koreans are Northern communists or Southern woketards, they're both in conflict with the Japanese. But as the rump states of a collapsed quasi-empire, they can't cooperate with each other even in the face of a shared and hostile enemy who invaded, occupied, and annexed them in recent history.
Koreans are lucky that the age of nomads in Eurasia is over for now, otherwise a fragmented place like Korea would get easily overrun and annexed by Mongols or related people from the Steppe. That was effectively the role played by the expanding Japanese great power -- they're not on the Eurasian timeline, since they are not on the Eurasian landmass.
From the days of Japanese pirates (Wokou), up through annexation by the Meiji state, Glorious Nippon was an expanding nomadic confederation, in an era when such threats had long subsided on the Eurasian mainland. And they made quick work of the internally fragmenting Joseon Dynasty, as well as the collapsing Qing Empire in China.
Imagine lecturing either side of the Korean vs. Japanese conflict "no more brother wars" based on their shared genes and physical phenotypes. Sorry, dork, that's not how geopolitics works!
How daddy's girls help to preserve culture. Most cultural conservationists, curators of museums, and historians are male -- it's a task aimed at a society-wide scale, and that's far beyond the domestic scale that females are more comfy within. Males are more comfortable interacting with strangers within the same society, or being ambassadors between societies.
ReplyDeleteHowever, some women play a crucial role in cultural preservation -- by passing it onto their kids, by becoming a teacher or librarian who passes it onto many kids in their charge, or by becoming a performer who passes it onto a broad audience of spectators.
Such women are more likely to be daddy's girls, and imprinted on some key male-typical traits, in order to bond with their dad -- like a taste for cool culture, especially cool *older* culture that requires preservation, not just trendy new stuff.
Daddy's girls are more likely to pass this onto their kids, vs. a mama's girl not being into it in the first place, let alone feeling excited to pass it onto her kids, the schoolchildren under her watch, an audience of spectators, etc.
One reason why there are so many daddy's girls in Glorious Nippon compared to present-day America, is that their divorce rate is a lot lower, so their dads are actually present in the home. That's the first step toward becoming a daddy's girl who picks up on male-typical culture. She could become a mama's girl, but having dad present in the home a necessary step toward becoming a daddy's girl.
Back during our New Deal peak, everyone grew up with both parents present at home. My mom's visiting now, and every time she visits, there's some cool older piece of culture that she passes along -- this time, the TV show Ironside from the '60s and '70s, about a gruff police consultant and former head of detectives. Definitely a guy-oriented show. She hates chick flicks. And she's a daddy's girl -- which was made possible by her parents sticking together "till death do us part".
I've picked up all sorts of cool guy-oriented influences via my daddy's girl mom, over my life. I wouldn't have picked them up so easily if she were a mama's girl. And they would've been harder to pick up via my dad, since they divorced when I was young and I didn't see him much after elementary school.
Well, today we still have a high rate of kids growing up without dad, but it's compounded by the single moms not being daddy's girls like they used to be. My divorced mom was a daddy's girl, cuz her parents' generation didn't get divorced. But today's divorced moms are likely to have grown up in a broken home themselves, and therefore far less likely to have bonded with their dad over guy-oriented culture.
Every generation that this social disintegration continues, dads fail to pass on guy culture cuz they're not present in the home, and moms fail to as well cuz they weren't daddy's girls (due to growing up in a broken home themselves) and never picked up guy culture while growing up.
As for routes of transmission outside the home, fewer daddy's girls means there's far fewer women who are teachers or librarians who cherish guy culture and pass it on to their charges, and few female performers who are excited to enact or perform guy culture for a broad audience.
That leaves just a handful of guys as the transmitters, and even this demographic is shrinking over time cuz they're less likely to have had a dad in the home or a daddy's girl for a mom.
They can discover it on their own, or from peers, but that's far less reliable than transmission from an older curator of some kind. When there are older curators, the younger initiates can still rely on their peers to compare notes about what's cool, but they also have that crucial inter-generational route of transmission as well.
Speaking of Japanese daddy's girls preserving culture, I think Luna from Holo JP must be a daddy's girl. Or at least, a girl who likes her dad and mom equally.
ReplyDeleteShe's like the Koronator and the Pirate Goddess, in preserving the classics of Japanese culture -- she always has a few nostalgic songs in her karaoke setlist, she frequently plays retro video games, and even plays music on a Yamaha Electone (which is shown IRL, despite her being a vtuber). That's an electric organ, which has a nostalgic feeling since they were more popular in the Midcentury, before the rise of synthesizers and later computer-based "instruments".
All Japanese classrooms used to have an organ of some kind, perhaps a small electric one. I wonder if Luna was the one who played it in her classrooms growing up, and that's how she learned it?
In any case, there are several clips of her talking about her parents, and she is in fact close to her dad, sharing the fact that he watches the 3rd generation of Holo JP a lot, in addition to watching his own daughter's streams.
I'll consider that proof of her being a daddy's girl. ^_^
Was Moom raised Mormon? The remark about not being allowed to drink soda while growing up sounded very Mormon to me. Yeah, it's just one detail, but it's uncommon outside of Mormons these days.
ReplyDeleteOther Mormon traits:
Decent-sized extended family, who she hung out with a lot growing up. Family sizes are a lot smaller these days, and Zoomers like her are more likely to be only children compared to earlier gens. Mormons are much more fertile than non-Mormons.
Over-protective mother... although her father doesn't seem very Mormon to me, watching violent-themed TV shows with her nearby and not even registering it. Maybe only her mom is Mormon, and Moom was raised partly Mormon, but not fully due to Father Owl not being one or not practicing? IDK.
The family is Midwestern nice, which Mormons are on steroids.
Took her to dance lessons as a child. Mormons are big on dance and physical activities.
Western accent (most Mormons hailing from out West).
Given how much attention she gets from the other Holo honies, she's pretty, and Mormon girls are stereotyped as prettier than non-Mormon girls.
Sings well, like Mormons in general.
The most white-girl of Holo EN, and Mormons are normie white American on steroids.
The main thing being a large family that's very Midwestern nice and weren't allowed to drink soda growing up. That combo is very Mormon.
The only thing that's not is I seem to recall her mentioning a stepfather or someone her mother was dating in the past, and divorce is less common among Mormons. Perhaps they're part of that small minority of Mormons. But that is one strike against my hunch.
Another strike against my hunch is that Mormons tend to be overly trusting -- perhaps to the point of being naive and gullible. Utah is the capital of fraud, cuz they're easy targets for fraudsters.
ReplyDeleteWhereas Moom is the polar opposite -- suspicious, paranoid, into conspiracy theories.
Could be part of the small minority of Mormons like this, or maybe she's just not Mormon after all.
Large families these days tend to allow drinking soda, and parents who prohibit drinking soda tend to have small families / only children. The specific combo of large family, no soda, and Midwestern nice just has to be Mormon, at least partly.
On a totally unrelated note, if Canadians want to blend in as Americans more seamlessly, the American expression is to stand in "line" -- not "queue", which is a British word, one that Canadians have preserved as part of their Euro-LARP and refusal to fully merge with America.
ReplyDeleteI heard someone say that about a month ago, but didn't want to say anything at the time, in case it could've been easily traced back to the source I was responding to, and unmasked a supposed American as in fact a, dun dun dun, Canadian!
Sneaky leafs... ^_^
It's worth noting that the raison d'etre for Canada's existence as a separate nation was as The Remnant to which Loyalists fled after the American Revolution; it was the Taiwan of British North America:
Deletehttps://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheRemnant
Back to daddy's girls' preference for guy culture, while my mom's visiting so far we've watched Assault on Precinct 13 (the original) and Thief (1981). Daddy's girls love detective stories (what she watches the most on TV), although these were close enough -- cop / crime / heist.
ReplyDeleteThief belongs to that twilight of the '70s / New Deal moment, with stunning cinematography (lighting, color, and like Taxi Driver, Expressionist atmosphere in gritty locations -- not dull, drab verite gritty), a focus on some kind of underworld, and a somewhat compromised hero who tries to rescue some of its characters from the underworld. Neo-noir tone and look.
The other two major ones being Hardcore (1979) and Cruising (1980), which I saw and reviewed late last year or early this year. Thief came out right after them. Each was filmed the year before it was released.
And they hit all three major American cities -- L.A. in Hardcore, New York in Cruising, and Chicago in Thief. All by directors who were or became well-known (Schrader, Friedkin, and Mann), but were not pitched at the summer blockbuster market.
Only slight difference is Thief doesn't have a sexual underworld of any kind -- just heist. Otherwise it fits into this trilogy perfectly.
But this is the only one that's a true example of "the early '80s were still part of the '70s" since it was filmed in '80, not '78 or '79 like the other two, which make them wholly or partly '70s movies.
Not much else to add about Thief, having already written about the other two. But it does make for a perfect end to a trilogy.
Still thinking about Season Hubley as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl in Hardcore... her role alone makes it rewatchable.
ReplyDeleteMy reviews of Hardcore and Cruising:
ReplyDeletehttps://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/11/thoughts-on-hardcore-1979-by-schrader.html
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/10/seven-1995-as-origin-of-puritanical.html?showComment=1698264196831#c6785572610267383562
The comments on Cruising are in the context of other reviews on the theme of violence and disgust, getting back to sublime aesthetics -- which are about violence, not disgust.
Disgust as a replacement for violence is a Puritanical thing, rearing its literally ugly head in torture porn (where the violence is incidental to the disgust), which was the topic of the main post in which the Cruising review appears in the comments.
Nothing disgusting in Thief, BTW, since there's no serial killer / maniac, and no sexuallly deviant underworld. Maybe one aspect in which it's not so much like the '70s.
Who in JP Holohive is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl?
ReplyDeleteThe MPDG of Holo JP is the Legendary Idol Gamer Maid, Minato Aqua!
ReplyDeleteYes, we still think about her, she is not gone. I was looking through her YouTube archive to see what vods I can watch.
She played Ocarina of Time early on, although many of her retro streams have been privated or deleted due to copyright claims. I really want to watch her play Super Ghouls N' Ghosts for Halloween! ^_^
Maybe someone has an archive of it out there somewhere.
We will never forget you, Akutan...
Ceci from Holo EN is playing Majora's Mask, BTW! Another classic, which I always liked more than Ocarina of Time. The time mechanic is a bit annoying, but overall it's so much better. More varied environments, all the different masks, the darker tone (it's from the vulnerable phase of the 15-year excitement cycle, 2000, akin to the 1985-'89 vulnerable phase, when all those dark children's movies came out).
ReplyDeleteBeing Germanic has nothing to do with Midwestern niceness. There are plenty of Germanic people back East, and they're not Midwestern nice. And there are plenty of non-Germanic people out West, who are still very Midwestern nice. It's historically contingent geography, not genes or long-term cultural inheritance.
ReplyDeleteNamely, the cult of politeness arises on the meta-ethnic frontier, forcing people to behave friendly toward each other, since they need to band together to fend off / take over their nemesis.
Away from the frontier, no such need for politeness -- they're frank, brusque, no BS, crotchety, antagonistic if anything.
I reviewed this at length last year, probably in the comments to the post on waterfalls and American sense of place.
Italians have a rhyming phrase for this as well -- "Piemontesi, falsi e cortesi". Piedmontese, fake but courteous.
The modern Italian state was founded by an expanding cohesive group from Turin, in the far NW, along the meta-ethnic frontier with the expanding French Empire. They united Italy, and they have a cult of politeness that lets them cooperate on a large scale.
In the South, they're far from that frontier with the French Empire, they were not the leaders of unification, and they are famous for being straight-talking, no BS kind of people.
This is not genetically encoded, since Italian-Americans are almost all from Southern Italy -- and yet only the Italian-Americans back East are straight-talk / no-BS types, whereas Italian-Americans from the Midwest, Mountains, and West Coast are more polite and laid-back, not high-strung and brusque like their genetic twins back East.
The American meta-ethnic frontier is out West, against the Indians and later the Mexicans.
I like in Southwestern Ontario, and this description fits my father to a tee:
Delete"Away from the frontier, no such need for politeness -- they're frank, brusque, no BS, crotchety, antagonistic if anything."
Especially the last two adjectives
Beginning of comments about politeness and the meta-ethnic frontier, going into more detail than I just did:
ReplyDeletehttps://akinokure.blogspot.com/2023/07/waterfalls-as-uniquely-american-feature.html?showComment=1691315157731#c3085541285373437073
Relevant to Lebanon's continued bitchslapping of Israel out of its territory -- this time, Israel can't even secure a foothold for their attempted invasion. Some earlier comments on the Northern vs. Southern divide in Lebanon, based on proximity to the meta-ethnic frontier with their nemesis, Israel:
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2024/01/wide-ranging-thread-on-shoot-em-up.html?showComment=1707260583121#c1636230075666244536
Southern Lebanese already have more of a cult of politeness and stoicism, and that will become more hardened into their character over time. They're on the meta-ethnic frontier. So they have to cooperate for shared defense / annexing Israel, and that means they need to be very polite around each other.
Northern Lebanese are famous for being straight-talk, no-BS, high-strung, curse like a sailor, constantly feuding with their next-door neighbors. Like the TV comedic character Sayed from Zgharta.
They're not the ones uniting Lebanon -- they lost the Civil War. Only this time, Israel is beginning to massacre Christians and blow up churches, in addition to massacring Muslims and blowing up mosques, rather than trying to play the Christians against the Muslims like in the '80s.
By targeting all of Lebanon, Israel is forcing all sects of Lebanese to band together, meaning accepting Hezbollah / Southern Shia leadership, for their shared collective survival.
Would-be traitors in the Christian North cannot partner with Israel this time around -- cuz Israel is indiscriminately bombing them, too. Israel is bombing them as part of their final "suicide by cop" / school shooter program. They know they're going out, and they want to take as many out with them, whether they were former allies or foes.
Maronites in the diaspora may not be aware of this, since they haven't lived there in generations. But Maronites who never left their homeland are becoming quickly aware of Israel's suicidal swan-song operations going forward -- not realpolitik trying to play the factions within Lebanon off against each other.
Now, it's either follow the lead of Hezbollah, or go extinct through Israel's school shooter suicidal rage.
BTW, WaPo (the Langley Post) just announced Dems will steal the election again. Pennsylvania's board of elections already said a month or so ago that they will steal their state's election, but WaPo is now adding Wisconsin to those telegraphing their steal.
ReplyDeleteUtter mouth-breathing morons on the right / Trumpian independents have never accepted the cold hard truth -- that Dems are just going to steal it again. They keep writing their impotent letters to Santa Claus, and posting cringe-y fanfic about what's gonna happen "When we win".
Cool story, dork -- how'd that work out in 2020? Republicans, including Trump threw you under the bus. Show no loyalty to those who have already betrayed you in the recent past, like the GOP regarding stolen presidential elections.
That's not to say they have no reason to vote -- the more real votes Trump gets, the farther the stealers have to go in order to complete the steal, making their steal all the more glaringly obvious to everyone, and thereby delegitimizing their usurper administration even more when it takes office. Just as with the Biden admin -- nobody obeyed any federal order that they weren't already on board with, and faced zero consequences. Masks, vax, border patrol, etc.
But that is the only honest way to talk about the upcoming election, if you're pro-Trump. None of this laughable nonsense about "When we win" -- the national state is already disintegrating, and you're talking about what you're going to do when you occupy a national-level office? You won't be doing anything, let alone forcing anything on your enemies -- any more than the Biden admin forced Trump voters into doing things they did not want.
But all of these pathetic lame LARP-ers on social media are greedy status-strivers infected and corrupted by overweening ambition -- so they have to imagine the ultimate prize, control over a national and even global imperial office! That's high status. Competing over a state's governor mansion, well, that's relatively small potatoes.
Only the latter has real authority and legitimacy left at this point. But greedy hucksters cannot accept reality, so they'll keep posting cringe-y fanfic about "When we win" national / imperial office.
Write better fanfic! At least be entertaining -- entertainment requires suspension of disbelief, plausibility. A powerful national government in the collapsing American Empire fails the plausibility test, the audience cannot suspend disbelief, so they just dismiss your poorly written fanfic.
Write something about the California rump state vs. the Mid-Atlantic rump state, or Texas vs. California, or Florida vs. Massachusetts... something believable at this point!
Would you say the German meta-ethnic frontier would be in the South around the Alps? It's on the meta-ethnic frontier with the historical Italic region. I have read that South Germans tend to be friendlier and more outgoing than North Germans. Feli from Germany (from Bavaria) seems to be a good example of this:
ReplyDeletehttps://m.youtube.com/@FelifromGermany/videos
I believe you said the Wessex-Cornwall boundary is a meta-ethnic frontier for England. It was there was the last holdout against the Vikings would form the foundations of a united England.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Halloween aesthetics, have you tried the new 'UFO 50' game on Steam, where various designers made a bunch of small tribute games to early NES-era classics? The 80s palettes, environments, and design sensibilities from America and Japan in the 80s are all there depending on the game, from Edenic landscapes to pastel color palettes, and a great many classic Monster-Party-type horror/noir sensibilities in their takes on the Macventure-type games.
ReplyDeleteThe German meta-ethnic frontier was in Prussia -- Prussians expanded and united Germany. Their meta-ethnic nemesis was the Poles and their Lithuanian allies in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, who had encircled them.
ReplyDeleteThey allied early on with another group of eastern Germans -- the Hohenzollern house from Brandenburg, which is why Berlin is the capital of Germany, and the cultural hotbed of German culture -- not Bavaria or Westphalia.
Austria's meta-ethnic frontier was in the east, against the encroaching Ottoman Empire. That's why Austrian ethnogenesis is centered in Vienna (still its capital), and other eastern cities like Prague and Budapest -- not Bavaria, like Salzburg where the no-filter, theatrical kinds of Austrians live, like Kiwawa.
Bavaria is like Southern Italy or back East in America -- warm people, in the sense of no cult of politeness or stiff upper lip (that's Southern English only, not the Norf), boisterous, rambunctious, no-filter, go crazy, theatrical, dancing, straight-talking, colorful language-speaking, comic / comedic improv, etc.
Speaking of the theatrical Norf, the vtuber Fallenshadow is from Liverpool, and she is definitely on the no-filter / tell it like it is / theatrical / performative side, not a mellow stiff upper lip type (while perhaps seething underneath) like they are in the South, along the meta-ethnic frontier (originally against the Vikings, then later against the French).
ReplyDeleteTrue to the general pattern, far from the meta-ethnic frontier, the Norf of England is fractured at all scales -- the Norf hates the South, but within the Norf, the NW and the NE hate each other, and within the NW, the Mancunians and the Scousers hate each other, and this neighborhood within Manchester hates that neighborhood within Manchester.
Similar to America, where the East hates the West, but within the East, the NE and SE hate each other, and within the NE, Bostonians and New Yorkers hate each other, and even within NYC, Manhattan hates Brooklyn, etc.
In the South of England, along the meta-ethnic frontier, the SW and SE do not hate each other, despite their regional differences. And within the SE, London and Oxford and Essex and Kent do not hate each other, nor do all the various neighborhoods within London. They had to unify in order to fend off the Vikings, and later the French, and there are still traces of that earlier split in cohesion between the South and the Norf -- albeit with plummeting levels of cohesion in the South, as the British Empire collapsed in the early 20th C.
Are Germanic-surnamed Jews more likely to be hippies, Romantics, and related types? It struck me that Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, is Germanic-surnamed Jewish. Although looking into her family roots, there's a Wool surname on her mother's side -- seems to be Estonian, maybe Jewish though not necessarily. So she may be a mix of Germanic and Slavic-surnamed.
ReplyDeleteThe Siegel babe I mentioned from my high school, I just looked her up to see what she's up to, and without doxxing her, I'll just say she found a career in nature conservation. A professional tree-hugger! ^_^ One of the few types of good Democrats, especially in her case as the area was under threat of development (and these days that only leads to crappy gray box apartments for yuppie transplants and/or foreign slaves).
I just googled "jewish hippies," and the leader of the Jewish version of "Jesus freaks" (AKA Christian hippies from the '60s), was "the singing rabbi" Shlomo Carlebach, who not only has a Germanic surname, he was born in Berlin. And he does look Armo/Iranian, not standard Euro.
Karl Marx is Germanic surnamed and born / raised in Germany -- and his early work was more in the Romantic movement of its time, like critiques of the alienation of labor under mechanization and industrialization. He also looks Armo/Iranian, not Euro.
Susanna Hoffs from the Bangles is very '60s hippie / psychedelic / Paisley Underground, and partnered with Matthew Sweet to release several cover albums of '60s, '70s, and '80s classics (mainly in the hippie-aligned genres).
Whereas the Slavic-surnamed Jews seem to be the more marketeering, sacrilegious, everything is up for sale type, a la Mel Brooks' line as Yogurt in Spaceballs about "Moichendising! Moichendising! Moichendising!" Peddlers, hawkers of wares, whatever you want can be bought for a price, clear out a sacred forest in order to put up tenement slums for rent-seeking. Anti-Romantic, and Market Liberal instead.
I don't think this traces to their earlier Armo/Iranian roots -- more like it reflects the fact that Germanic-surnamed Ashkenazis were more integrated into their adoptive societies, so when their host country underwent Romanticism, they did so as well.
When their hosts underwent Romantic nationalism, so did these assimilated Jews, just for their own real or imagined ethnos -- like Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism, who has a Germanic surname and whose family was German-speaking (while living in Budapest). He looks Armo/Iranian, not Euro. His family's original surname was Loebl, which has a Hebrew root but a Germanic suffix (diminuitive "-l").
And when American society gave birth to hippies, back to nature, and religious hippie-ism, the Germanic-surnamed Jews in America took that up as well. Whereas the Slavic-surnamed ones -- or non-Germanic-named ones, at any rate -- were more content to insulate themselves in a literal or remnant Ellis Island cultural enclave, unmoved by cultural currents in the American mainstream like hippies, Jesus freaks, tree-huggers, and NIMBYs.
I ignore the kibbutz phenomenon in Israel cuz it's not clear how much it was a hippie / Romantic / back to nature thing, and how much was simply providing material subsistence through cultivated agriculture for the good of the nation. Probably various strains within it. And I can't find too many key names to judge from.
(And yes I know Estonian is not Slavic, nor even Indo-Euro, but there are Slavic speakers there, and a strange surnamed like Wool or Vool could come from a Slavic root like Wolinski in Polish.)
ReplyDeleteMuch like Germanic-surnamed Jewish hippie Bernie Sanders, Ethan Allen founder Theodore Baumritter is Germanic-surnamed, and fled the urban Ellis Island enclave shithole of Noo Yawk, for a pastoral back-to-nature setting in rural Vermont. More colonial and trad than hippie, but still with a nostalgic and romantic view toward the past.
ReplyDeleteHe originally dabbled in Midcentury Modern, which was still assimilated into the American mainstream of its time, then went with American colonial revival in Vermont, also assimilated but in a more back-to-nature way.
Other Jewish hippie refugees in Vermont are Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield from Ben & Jerry's ice cream. One has a German surname, the other a bare Hebrew one. Neither wiki article says who their parents are / where they were from, so I leave that to someone else to track down.
Cohen looks a bit more Armo/Iranian than Greenfield does, BTW:
https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-ben-cohen-jerry-greenfield-founders-of-ben-and-jerrys-2020-6
The two biggest Romantic composers of Ashkenazi background were Germanic, not Slavic, Jews -- Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler. Looking through other Jewish composers from Europe, they almost all seem to be Germanic rather than Slavic, despite a high level of musical output from Slavs at the same time -- again pointing to the lack of assimilation into their host societies among Slavic-surnamed Jews vs. Germanic-surnamed Jews.
ReplyDeleteAlso worth noting that Noam Chomsky is an exception, in the Romantic / anti-Market Liberal vein, treasuring German and Austrian imperial culture, but with two Slavic-surnamed parents (Chomsky and Simonofsky).
Leading shill for YIMBY, open borders, market liberalism, and hating on Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, Matt Yglesias, may have one grandparent with an Iberian Christian surname, but the other is Jewish with a Slavic, not Germanic, surname (Bassine), and his Jewish mother has a Slavic surname too (Joskow). Looks like a standard Euro, not totally Slavic due to the Iberian side, but not Armo/Iranian like the Germanic-surnamed Ashkenazis.
ReplyDeleteNow I'm convinced about mistrusting Slavic-surnamed Ashkenazis, who never left their enclave, did not assimilate into the American mainstream, and therefore feel nothing wrong about melting down its sacrosanct material and cultural inheritance, and selling it off to the highest bidder in the name of higher profit margins.
Obviously the situation is different for people in the Levant, where leading Zionist invaders bore Germanic surnames. But here in America, it's pretty safe to say -- Slavic-surnamed Jews bad, Germanic-surnamed Jews good.
agnostic stumbles across the German Jew vs Ostjuden distinction.
DeleteHenry Kissinger is another example of an Armenian/Iranian looking Germanic surnamed Ashkenazi Jew.
ReplyDeleteRelated, most of the Jewish Russian oligarchs have Slavic surnames, and they're the ones who stole everything in the collapsing Russian Empire during the 1990s and sold it off to the highest bidder. Skimming the wiki article on Russian oligarchs, I only caught two big ones with Germanic surnames -- Rotenberg and Fridman. Probably some others in there, but there are many times more with Slavic surnames, like Abramovich, Berezovsky, Gusinsky, Abramov, Prigozhin, etc.
ReplyDeleteNot the Marxist kind of Russian imperial Jew like Trotsky, who was in fact born with a Germanic surname (Bronstein), and not the tree-hugging conservationist Romantic hippie kinds of Jews, who overwhelmingly bear Germanic surnames, and would not have melted down the Russian economy and sold it for scrap, in the nation's most vulnerable years.
Ukrainian arch-sell-out Zelensky is also a Slavic not Germanic surnamed Jew. He never assimilated, and is eager to sell out his people to the American Empire -- and get annexed by Russia anyway. Pathetic.
Realignment prediction: The non-Republican party will be lead by Slavic surnamed Ashkenazim who are willing to sell off everything in the collapsing American empire to China.
ReplyDeleteIt seems though the Germanic names have contributed a lot to the zombie Reaganism you rightly criticize. Where would you categorize one of the intellectual godfathers of neoliberalism, Ludwig Von Mises? Culturally German but originally from the Slavic boarderland province of Austrian Galicia. Viscerally Mises looks more Germanic to me. There is also his disciple Murray Rothbard with a Germanic surname but whose explicit "ethics" are more of the "for the right price everything is for sale" borderland swindler (a)morality. Milton Friedman and Paul "weezer" Gottfried too.
ReplyDeleteHave you seen the sequel series and the two film adaptations of Saved by the Bell? Here is your favourite character in all three:
ReplyDeletehttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tmCzlLFUfbw
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rJRgqaV5wxE
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u2r6pPrdLmg
Incidentally, the actress who plays Kelly Kapowski has a substantial amount of Easter Med (the master race according to Nicholas Taleb) ancestry:
"I'm a mutt. I have so much of everything in me, and half of it I don't even know. German on one side, Greek, Turkish and Welsh on the other. My mom is very olive-skinned; I get my blue eyes from my dad."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiffani_Thiessen
The Welsh, by the way, have similar features to Meds:
https://x.com/alessabocchi/status/1806367205879066703
And finally both Thiessen in real life and Kelly Kapowski come from California, which you consider the more wholesome half of the USA on the meta-ethnic frontier. It's quite a nice combination I must say.
I'd heard of this German vs. Eastern Jew distinction before, as I noted in a comment upthread.
ReplyDelete"Supposedly, there's still something of a split between them..."
But I hadn't delved into it before, and I certainly did not know back then about the bi-modal genetic space of Late Middle Age Ashkenazis, one Armo/Iranian and one Slavic, who have since merged but apparently still have some separation as well -- at least culturally, maybe genetically too. Unimodal today, but still lots more variance than in ancient unimodal populations who've had so long to intermix and sift out tail-end variants.
And it seems like the Ostjuden concept is different from what I'm discussing, which is finer-grained -- looking at surnames, not just place of residence. So there are "Eastern European Jews" who have Slavic surnames and others who have Germanic surnames, despite living among Slavic / Baltic / Finno-Ugric speakers.
ReplyDeleteTo me it looks like the German Jew phenomenon attaches to Jews with Germanic surnames *wherever* they reside -- in a German-speaking country, in a Slavic-speaking one, or in an English-speaking one like America.
Certainly the skin color, facial features, hair type, etc. attach to a Germanic surname regardless of residence. More Armo/Iranian, less Slavic or other standard Euro.
But the cultural traits seem to attach to a Germanic surname as well -- as though the early Ashkenazis of Armo/Iranian background (genetic and cultural) were more willing to assimilate, respect local norms, contribute to a shared greater good, etc., with their host society.
Whereas the early Ashkenazis of Slavic background were less willing to do so, carving out their own sphere, maybe viewing and behaving in an antagonistic way toward their hosts, especially regarding norms, taboos, markets vs. sacredness, etc.
And that those different approaches toward their host societies has remained from those Dark Age times up through the present, regardless of geography.
There seem to be parallels between the Iranian origin Germanic surnamed Ashkenazim and the Iranian origin Parsis in India regarding assimilation and respect for the host culture which is missing in Slavic Ashkenazim.
DeleteI think the German-surnamed Jews among the libertarian / Objectivist / neolib intelligentsia in America and elsewhere, has more to do with them being in the intelligentsia in general, regardless of which camp. As I mentioned about Trotsky (born Bronstein), they're all over the map ideologically -- their only shared trait is being part of the intelligentsia.
ReplyDeleteSo that seems to reflect their being more assimilated, elite, civilized, etc. Whereas the non-intellectual shills like Matt Yglesias, and the actual melter-downers and seller-offers of the host economy, are Slavic-surnamed ones. No fancy-pants ideology or Rube Goldberg logical arguments or elaborate novels to sublimate an otherwise base desire for greed -- just shill it, or get it done, and leave the sophisticated rationalizations up to their Germanic-surnamed fellow travelers.
BTW, back to Ayn Rand, her real surname is Rosenbaum, so she's another Germanic-surnamed one from the libertarian side.
Adam Friedland paying homage to Dick Cavett, a soft-spoken Anglo all-American type from Nebraska, is another example of Germanic-surnamed Ashkenazis wanting to assimilate and be respectful of host norms. And like Cavett he hails from out West (Vegas), so more mellow and not the brusque pushy everything's-up-for-sale Mel Brooks type. He looks like the midway between the Armo/Iranian side and Slavic / Euro side of the Ashkenazi whole.
ReplyDeleteRalph Lauren (born Lifshitz, mother's maiden name Cutler) is Germanic-surnamed, made his brand WASP-y and assimilating, and looks very Armo/Iranian:
https://www.ralphlauren.com/rlmag/lauren-family-album.html
However, Calvin Klein (mother's maiden name Stern) is Germanic-surnamed but looks standard Euro, one of the exceptions. But he was also assimilating, aiming for an all-American brand, just in the mod rather than trad style. Not mod as in alienating, antagonistic, weird, etc.
To speculate about why the Armo/Iranians among the early Ashkenazis may have been more willing to assimilate, vs. the Slavic ones being less willing, perhaps that reflected their longstanding cultural heritage of Persian diplomats and administrators in multi-ethnic empires, whether of Persian origin or not (e.g., being diplomats, bureaucrats, scholars, etc. within the Arabian-origin Abbasid Caliphate).
ReplyDeleteSlavs had no such experience at that time or since. Bulgarians might have (having been an empire at one point, and conducting business and diplomacy -- and warfare -- with the Byzantines). But that's not the Slavs who formed the bulk of Slavic converts to Judaism among the early Ashkenazi, who were further east.
The only empire to come out of Slavdom was Russia / Muscovite, and they were mostly expanding to incorporate other Slavs, and primarily Eastern Slavs at that. They only swallowed up some of the Balts and Western Slavs in the 18th C, and the Turko-Mongol Steppe people in the 19th C and after. That's too late to have left an imprint on the Eastern Slavs of the Dark Ages who formed one-half of the Ashkenazis.
Poles, Czechs, etc., also joined empires too late to have laid down a foundation of diplomatic / assimilating norms within multi-ethnic empires, for any of them that joined the early Ashkenazis. Poland's main ally was Lithuania, and West Slavs and Balts aren't totally alien to each other. Czechs and others only joined multi-ethnic empires with the expansion of Austria in the Early Modern era, not Classical or Dark Age times.
Since their Dark Age emergence as an ethnos, the Slavs were mainly tribalistic or Slavic at any rate, aside from the Bulgarians. Any Slavs, especially the Eastern ones who joined up with the Anatolians, Armos, and Iranians in the Khazar Khaganate to form the Ashkenazi foundation, would have brought a more ethnocentric approach to joining multi-ethnic coalitions circa 1000 AD.
Whereas Persians had been assimilating, or at a minimum being respectful and taboo-respecting toward foreign hosts / multi-ethnic coalition partners, since Classical times.
Old post of mine on why Parsis were accepted and treasured by their hosts, while Ashkenazi and Southern Chinese were not:
ReplyDeletehttps://akinokure.blogspot.com/2012/04/why-are-parsi-elites-welcomed-while.html
Perhaps I need to refine that to now talk more about German Jews vs. Ostjuden or specifically the Slavic-derived ones, not Ashkenazis as a whole.
But good point about the Persians making the same assimilating, benefit-the-host move within an entirely different part of the world from Eastern Europe, but with similar outcomes -- Indians love them so much their government was trying to PAY them to have more kids.
They're already rich enough, though, money is not the issue. It's high status, female education, a professional-class and endogamous group, etc., that's the problem for fertility.
You're gonna freak when I show a pic in the upcoming comments, about someone who looks like Freddie Mercury (a Parsi).
Time to question the whole Ashkenazi high IQ narrative. Not in the sense that they are ackshually lunkheads -- they're over-represented in all sorts of brainiac fields. See the Cochran, Hardy, & Harpending (2006) article on the "Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence":
ReplyDeletehttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16867211/
When Cochran asked around, and poked around historical records, he said nobody used to say "Jews were smart" before the Ashkenazis became well known for it. He said, people used to say Greeks were smart, Armenians were smart, and probably Persians were smart too.
Well, as fate would have it, (eastern) Greeks, Armenians, and Persians form one-half of the founding population for the converts to Judaism known as the Ashkenazis.
If half the population was already reknowned for their brains, BEFORE they went through the selection mechanism proposed in the article (limited to brainy economic niches in Europe, like tax farming, money-lending, and so on), then that put them on a rocket ride toward the braininess that Ashkenazis would become famous for in the 20th C.
Nobody ever said Slavs were smart -- nobody said *most* groups were smart. Only a few stuck out to observers. But Slavs were not one of them, certainly not in the Dark Ages. So the other half of the Ashkenazi founding population would have started from square one, so to speak, on the journey toward braininess -- handicapped quite a bit compared to their Armo/Iranian coalition members, who would adopt Germanic surnames.
So the overall story about the Ashkenazi undergoing selection for higher intelligence is even more believable, and requires a less "extreme" assumption about the per-generation increment in IQ. Remember, these were not random Armos and Iranians -- they adopted Judaism in order to become merchants, traders, financiers, and related professions within the Khazar Khaganate's sphere of economic and geopolitical influence.
The Armos and Iranians could hit the ground running. The Slavic members could have been chosen from among the smartest Eastern Slavs that there were, but I'm guessing they were still less smart on average vs. the Armo/Iranian sub-group, since the Slavic group had no history with this kind of profession, let alone external observers commenting that they were smart.
So the story of Ashkenazi IQ is really about eastern Greek / Armenian / Iranian IQ, which was already reknowned by the Dark Ages, then getting a turbo-boost when they were limited to brain-demanding professions within Europe.
ReplyDeleteIranians are still famous for their brains, with the nation of Iran being very competitive in the International Math Olympiad.
Well, what about the other half of the Ashkenazi founders, who were Slavic in origin, and kept / adopted Slavic surnames? Assuming they played the same role within Europe as the Armo/Iranian ones, they were subject to the same pressures for intelligence -- but they started the race with a handicap, perhaps a full standard deviation? IDK.
But regardless of the size of the handicap, it was there. With the selection pressures being the same on "the Ashkenazis" as a whole -- assuming the Gentile kings didn't discriminate between Armo-looking Jews and Slavic-looking Jews, and just said "you Jews take care of the tax-farming, money-lending, etc." -- that would've boosted both sub-groups of Ashkenazis by the same amount over the same period of time.
But with one starting with a head-start, they ended up brainier still than their coalition members who had the handicap.
And a small difference in the means leads to a huge discrepancy in the tails -- which is behind the explanation of Ashkenazi accomplishment having to do with IQ.
Yes, I know accomplishment is log-normal or fat-tailed, involving multiplicative rather than additive effects, drawing on personality traits as well as cerebral horsepower, but the point remains -- if one group is brainier than another on average, even by a seemingly meager amount, it can make a huge difference in the tails of the IQ distribution, or the accomplishment distribution (whatever shape those distributions may have).
So this led me to a hunch -- I wonder if all those famous Ashkenazis who served as data points for "over-represented Jews in accomplished fields"... were Germanic-surnamed rather than Slavic-surnamed?
ReplyDeleteBoy, when I get a whiff of something, I am ON that sucker like a bloodhound! Sure enough, think of "famous brainiac Jews" -- Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John von Neumann, and seemingly on and on down the list, they've got Germanic surnames (sometimes Germanic first names, too, though not necessarily).
I've already noted some exceptions of Slavic-surnamed Jews among the intelligentsia, and in brainy fields rather than pure BS word games -- Chomsky, Minsky, Kiparsky and Smolensky (both in phonology in linguistics), etc. But it's WAY easier to think of Germanic-surnamed ones.
So to avoid cherry-picking, I consulted wiki's list of Jewish mathematicians:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_mathematicians
There's too many for me to analyze, plus I only want to study the Ashkenazi ones, and world reknowned mathematicians, not random Italian Jewish mathematicians from the 1400s.
So to pursue the hunch, without diving too deep, I restricted the list to only those who have won the major global math awards -- the Fields Medal (most prestigious), along with the Abel Prize, and the Wolf Prize. The Wiki list begins noting how over-represented Jews are among the winners of these prizes... however, how many are Germanic-surnamed and therefore of likely Armo/Iranian background, and how many are Slavic-surnamed and of likely Slavic background, before either adopted Judaism in the Dark Ages?
Some are ambiguous, using only Wiki, so to really study this, someone else can look up the individual's 2 parents, or 4 grandparents, and assign them a number of Germanic-surnamed ancestors, from 0 to 2 or from 0 to 4. Then just average this across all winners of a medal, or perhaps merge all three sets of winners together.
And some of the bare Hebrew names present problems, as I noted earlier -- they seem to be Germanic, though, not Slavic.
At any rate, Fields Medal winners (14 total):
ReplyDeletePaul Cohen
Jesse Douglas
Vladimir Drinfeld
Charles Fefferman
Michael Freedman
Alexander Grothendieck
Elon Lindenstrauss
Grigory Margulis
Grigori Perelman
Klaus Roth
Laurent Schwartz
Wendelin Werner
Edward Witten
Efim Zelmanov
* * *
First, note how Armo/Iranian Ed Witten looks. Germanic surname and look of "This was my dad in Tehran before the Islamic Revolution" strikes again!
https://repository.aip.org/islandora/object/nbla:315124
The only unambiguous Slavic surname is Zelmanov, although Margulis seems to be a Baltic or Slavic adaptation of the Hebrew word for pearl, Margalit, and Jews with that surname do hail from the Baltic Sea region. So add that in with the Slavic ones, as Baltic and Slavic are sisters, both further from Germanic within Indo-European.
NB on Grothendieck -- that's the surname of his mother, a Protestant German, not Jewish. But his Jewish father, Alexander Schapiro, spells his Hebrew-ish surname with "Sch" -- the German way to spell that sound ("Sh" in English, or in Roman transliteration of the Cyrillic letter "sha"). And he was born in Berlin. So he goes in the Germanic Jewish stack with almost all the others.
Paul Cohen's entry says his ancestors were from Poland, but they don't appear to have had the Slavic variant of the highly popular Cohen surname, which has a "g" instead of an "h" (and is a soft, fricative "g" in standard Russian, not a hard "g"). The Slavic variant is Kagan, Kogan, etc. So I'm guessing he's of Germanic-surnamed background rather than Slavic-surnamed.
Jesse Douglas' surname is not of clearly either origin, although it's Celtic, so perhaps an Americanized form of something else they arrived with. However his mother's maiden name is clearly Germanic -- Kommel. Seems like a Germanic one, then.
So that makes 2 or 3 at most Slavic-surnamed vs. 11 or 12 Germanic-surnamed Ashkenazis. Pretty resounding victory for the Germanic ones.
Note also that the Germanic-surnamed ones hail from a variety of host nations -- from America, France, Germany, and yes even further east in Russia itself, having Slavic given names despite Germanic surnames, like Vladimir Drinfeld and Grigori Perelman.
It's whatever that surname is attaching to that matters, not the host nationality -- within reason, they're not going to get world-class math education in a shithole country. They had one empire or another to lift them up to great heights institutionally.
The point is, on a deeper genetic or cultural heritage level, the Germanic surname is more predictive than their current country of residence.
Abel Prize winners (10 in total):
ReplyDeleteHillel Furstenberg
Mikhail Gromov
Peter Lax
Grigory Margulis
Yves Meyer
Louis Nirenberg
Yakov Sinai
Isadore Singer
Boaz Tsaban
Avi Wigderson
* * *
Again, only 2 clearly Baltic or Slavic surnames, Gromov and the same Margulis as in the Fields list. Gromov is the surname of his non-Jewish Russian father, but his Jewish mother also has a Slavic surname, Rabinovitz (Hebrew root for Rabbi + Slavic patronymic suffix).
Sinai as a surname is hard to trace the origins of -- maybe a more in-depth family history would illuminate his case. But his mother is a Slavic-surnamed Jew from Russia, maiden name Kagan. So tentatively include him with the Slavic-surnamed ones, and it's still 3 out of 10.
Lax was from Budapest, which used to be part of a German-speaking empire (Austria), not a Slavic-speaking one. His mother's maiden name is Germanic (Kornfeld), and Lax itself seems to be Germanic too (for "salmon").
Tsaban is not an Ashkenazi surname at all, but from the Semitic-speaking adopters of Judaism (usually seen in the variant Saban).
So that's 6 Germanic-surnamed Ashkenazis vs. 3 Balto-Slavic-surnamed Ashkenazis vs. 1 Semitic-surnamed Jew.
Same overall picture as the Fields winners.
Wolf Prize winners (22 in total):
ReplyDeleteVladimir Arnold
Alexander Beilinson
Vladimir Drinfeld
Samuel Eilenberg
Paul Erdos
Mitchell Feigenbaum
Hillel Furstenberg
Mikhail Gromov
Joseph Keller
Mark Krein
Peter Lax
Hans Lewy
Benoit Mandelbrot
Grigory Margulis
George Mostow
Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro
Peter Sarnak
Saharon Shelah
Yakov Sinai
Elias Stein
Andrew Weil
Oscar Zariski
* * *
I'm not clear if Arnold's father was Jewish or not. If so, he's a Germanic-surnamed one. But his Jewish mother is Slavic-surnamed, maiden name Isakovich.
Beilinson is mostly non-Jewish Russian by background, but his surname does reflect a Germanic-surnamed Jewish grandfather from Russia.
Erdos has a Hungarianized surname, but is of Germanic-surname origin -- and looks incredibly Armo/Iranian.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffad047c7-ed70-4312-8c7b-1730865e38f7_1055x643.jpeg
His father's surname was originally Engländer, and his mother's maiden name was Wilhelm. From Budapest, formerly of a German-speaking empire.
Lewy has a Hebrew surname with no clear suffix, but his given name is Hans and he was born in Prussia, so I'm going with Germanic.
Mandelbrot means "almond bread" in German, even though he was born in Warsaw.
Shelah's father's original surname was Heilprin, Germanic. Can't find what his mother's maiden name was, though. Tentatively Germanic.
So that's 14 Germanic-surnamed vs. 7 Balto-Slavic-surnamed Ashkenazis, and Arnold could go either way. Still a clear victory for the Germanic-surnamed ones, and same overall picture as the Fields and Abel winners.
The Wolf Prize is chosen by Israel, perhaps they put a slight thumb on the scale for the Slavic-surnamed Ashkenazis, which Gentile juries do not. Why? IDK, but Israel has seen tons of immigration from Russia specifically and the former Soviet sphere, so maybe their juries are slightly biased toward Slavic-surnamed Jews, as compared with non-Israeli juries judging them. IDK.
BTW, Ludwig's father Karl Wittgenstein looks like Freddie Mercury (a Parsi, and so of Iranian origins). Germanic surname and looks like "This was my dad in a Tehran rock band before the Islamic Revolution banned electric guitars", strikes again!
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Karl_Wittgenstein.jpg
To quickly wrap up, I consider this case closed, in favor of my hunch. But this casts a whole 'nother light on the over-representation of Germanic-surnamed Jews in the intelligentsia -- perhaps they're simply more intelligent than the Slavic-surnamed Jews, *on average*. The latter are still there, but not nearly to the same extent.
ReplyDeleteAnd perhaps the Slavic-surnamed Jews are still smarter on average than their host Gentile population, though not by as much as the Germanic-surnamed Jews are vs. their host population.
Maybe 1/3 or 1/2 SD advantage for Slavic-surnamed Jews, vs. 1 SD advantage for Germanic-surnamed Jews. IDK exactly, but something like that.
And the extra advantage that the Germanic-surnamed ones have traces back to their Greek / Armenian / Iranian origins, back when outsiders remarked about how smart they were. They had a leg up on their Slavic-origin coalition members.
Funny how things work out...
I wonder if the Jewish American Princesses mostly have Germanic surnames as well. You said that when the Persians came out as a group they decided to adopt the stereotypical traits of Jewish American Princesses:
ReplyDeletehttps://akinokure.blogspot.com/2007/05/mass-immigration-is-bad-for-interracial.html?showComment=1178662920000#c5747810420754420801
Finally tracked down a woodland camo Army jacket, the 100% cotton type, before they cut costs and switched to inferior 50% cotton 50% nylon -- for a hot weather shirt / jacket that's supposed to breathe. That happened in 1996, and this one was made in '91. Still in perfect shape, and in my size too.
ReplyDeleteOnly $2 at a thrift store in the unglamorous part of town, along with a vintage solid wood hanger for only a quarter extra! ^_^
American camouflage patterns fit neatly into the broader aesthetics of American culture. They're part of the wavy lines, trippy shapes, piebald color combo, organic back-to-nature primitivist feel. Not neat, uniform, rigid, etc. -- more in the vein of Abstract Expressionist painting, drip-glaze pottery, lava lamps, psychedelic patterns (minus the floral / jewel colors, and on the earthy color side instead), slag glass lamp shades, and so on.
This all-American aesthetic was descrated and nerd-ified during -- when else? -- the George W. Bush administration, rationalized as part of the changes needed to put So Damn Insane in his place, and take over Afghanistan in revenge for 9/11 (which was committed by the Pentagon's Gulf Arabian allies). So much iconoclastic and nation-ruining garbage in just one administration...
No, RETVRN-ing to woodland camo is not a One Weird Trick to take back control of the Red Sea from the Houthis, or to enable Israel to secure a foothold in its latest failed attempted invasion of Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, or reverse Russia's reclamation of its former Ukrainian territory, or anything else that's going down the tubes in our collapsing empire.
But it will at least preserve what was great and cool and meaningful about our culture, rather than flush it down the drain and replace it with alienating ugly cheap slop, *on top of* all the other symptoms of a collapsing empire.
Not only Al Qaeda but also ISIS was funded by the CIA/Gulf Arab nexus in the Middle East. Note that ISIS never bothered to target American allies and client states like Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Israel or the UAE. It was always targeting enemies of the American Empire like Libya or Syria or Yemen or Hezbollah or Hamas or the Shia Muslims in Iraq being supported by Iran.
ReplyDeleteAt least the Arabians have surrendered, and there's no more ISIS or Al-Qaeda for America to team up with. Saudis and Qataris are already in rapprochement mode with Iran.
ReplyDeleteThat only leaves Israel to pick up where ISIS and Al-Qaeda left off, by bombing Classical Roman temples in Lebanon (Baalbek), which they're inching closer toward doing.
As with the America and ISIS teaming up to destroy Classical Roman architecture in Palmyra, Syria, the cuckservative GOP-slurpers will once again defend the iconoclastic eradication of the tangible living traces of Classical Roman civilization -- as long as an ally of the Pentagon pulls the trigger, like Israel.
Sad and pathetic -- but also, losing. Russia already bitchslapped ISIS and Al-Qaeda out of Syria during Obama and Trump's terms, and now Hezbollah perhaps with Iranian and/or Russian support (and Yemeni support) is bitchslapping Israel out of Lebanon again.
As in Palmyra, it's possible that Israel will be able to destroy a Classical Roman structure or two, but they won't be able to stick around long enough to erase all the traces of the Classical era in Lebanon. They haven't even been able to secure a foothold 10 feet on the Lebanese side of the border.
Sad, pathetic -- and losing.
Unlike the Arabians, who are rooted in the region, Israelis have no roots and no deep connections, so they do not plan to stick around long enough to consider their own long-term interests. So they will not surrender like the Arabians have -- they plan on going out like an alienated rootless school shooter, "going postal" worker, or other suicide-by-cop scenario.
And of course that's just one-half of Israelis, the other half will literally flee the country, as record numbers have already begun to do in the past year.
ReplyDeleteAs their settlements come under greater fire from Hezbollah, Iran, and perhaps eventually Russia (or at least, Russian-made weapons being used by locals), even more will flee in the next year, more in the year after that, accelerating until half of Israel is empty of its former population.
The other half stubbornly stay put and get blown away while trying to finish off their genocide with their last dying breath.
Neither half of Israel plans to have descendants in the land 100, 200, or 300 years from now. They have accepted that this is their end, the only difference is some will flee back to Eastern Europe and the others will commit suicide by cop in the Levant.
Did the initial Zionist invasion rely more on Slavic-surnamed Jews than other domains of Ashkenazi activities (e.g. the intelligentsia)?
ReplyDeleteIsrael is, on the whole, a much more callous, brusque, pushy, desecrating, "everything is up for sale", mediocre-IQ, no special intellgentsia or creative accomplishments, and so on and so forth.
That gives me the hunch that the Slavic-surnamed Jews had a much greater role in its founding, and maintenance, than other areas of Ashkenazi life and history (like composing Romantic symphonies, theoretical physics, etc.).
Here is a list of 75 pioneering Zionists, on the occasion of Israel's 75th anniversary, compiled by a pro-Israel org:
https://israeled.org/israel-at-75/founders/
I immediately see WAY MORE Slavic surnames than among a list of Jewish winners of mathematical prizes. Hold on and let me count them up, and it may take a little while to investigate those with Hebraized surnames, what their original surname was.
But just looking at the first few rows, yeah, it's obvious -- there are shitloads more Slavic-surnamed Jews here. Just like with Russian oligarchs who melted down and sold off the collapsing Russian empire's economy during the 1990s.
Among the 75 pioneering Zionists, 71 are Ashkenazi, 3 are Sephardic, and 1 is a Christian Zionist.
ReplyDeleteAmong the 71 Ashkenazis, I count 24 with Slavic surnames, 44 with Germanic surnames, 3 are unclear -- Levin (from Minsk), Szenes (from Budapest), Zangwill (Hebraized, mother nee Marks, parents from the Pale of Settlement).
Even assuming all 3 of the unclear ones are Germanic, that still leaves a roughly 1-to-2 ratio for Slavic vs. Germanic surnames.
That's a higher proportion of Slavic surnames than among Fields Medal winners, and other off-the-cuff lists of "eminent Ashkenazi Jews," but is about what the Abel and Wolf Prize winners look like.
So I'll say it's more Slavic-surnamed than typical lists of eminent Jews, though far from a majority Slavic-surnamed like the Russian oligarchs of the 1990s and after.
And so perhaps Israel's recent reputation owes more to the huge waves of Soviet Jews who came over in the 1970s and especially in the '90s-and-after. IDK what that population is like as far as their surnames go, but they were not intellectuals or creatives or community leaders like the "eminent early Zionists". Probably more Balto-Slavic-surnamed.
ReplyDeleteWiki's article on the 1970s wave of Soviet Jewish emigration says that the ones who chose Israel over America tended to be from the Baltics, Moldova, and Georgia (not Ashkenazi), while assimilated Jews preferred America. Assimilated ones, who chose America, tend to be Germanic-surnamed. Like Anna Khachiyan's mother, who chose America over Israel.
And by the 1970s and afterward, the early Romantic nationalist dream was already over -- you either liked how Israel turned out, or you didn't and chose America instead, as an Ashkenazi emigrant from Europe.
This random pic of Soviet Jews learning Hebrew in Israel is almost totally blonde, very unusual for the Armo/Iranian ones with Germanic surnames, and most likely the Euro-looking ones with Slavic surnames:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flickr_-_Government_Press_Office_(GPO)_-_HEBREW_TEACHING_CLASS.jpg
This article from 2000 on the difficulty of Soviet Jews to assimilate in Israel says they not only keep their Russian language, but also their Russian surnames instead of Hebraizing them. The list of people mentioned seems about half-and-half Germanic vs. Slavic.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2000/08/19/immigrant-tide-gives-israel-a-russian-accent/
The leaders of the two Soviet Jewish-oriented political parties in Israel are 1 Germanic (Lieberman) and 1 Slavic (Sharansky). About even.
Everyone agrees, though, that the influx of Soviet Jews has shifted Israeli politics toward the hard-right, i.e. the "suicide by cop" scenario vis-a-vis Hezbollah, Iran, Russia (which they fled), and so on. And they're obviously more anti-Palestinian as part of that.
They have even shallower roots in Israel, and definitely do not plan on having descendants around in the following centuries. Hence most likely to ignore the long-term and pursue short-term self-destructive actions.
Jewish Nobel Prize winners! Why didn't I think of that earlier? I'm ignoring the politicized Peace prize, and the subjective Literature prize.
ReplyDeleteWell well well...
Although the Economics prize is fake, it's revealing about which kind of Jews win it. 38 Jews have won it, seemingly 37 of whom are Ashkenazi (Modigliani being Italian Jewish).
I'm not going to investigate their entire family history, since I don't want to dwell too long on this topic anymore. I count 9 Slavic surnames, and a handful that are unclear (like two separate Diamonds), the rest Germanic. So that's about 1/4 Slavic-surnamed.
Chemistry has 37 Jewish winners, seemingly all Ashkenazi. BTW, this is the only Nobel that Israel is competitive in, contrary to the myth of Jewish / Ashkenazi accomplishment being genetic or narrowly cultural (i.e. about Jewish culture). Israel is not its own expanding empire with high cohesion, therefore has weak or mediocre institutions (universities, research institutes, etc.) compared to the former German, Austrian, French, British, Russian, and American empires that they were plugged into.
I count only 3 Slavic surnames, 1 unclear (Chalfie, although his mother's maiden name is Germanic), and another seemingly Germanic but also unclear (Calvin, whose mother was nee Herwitz, a Slavic surname). Split the difference and call it 4 with Slavic surnames, out of 37, or just over 10% -- only half as common among Chemistry winners as among Econ winners.
Physics, the big one, has 56 Jewish winners. 1 Italian, 1 Sephardic, 1 of mixed Sephardic / Slavic-surnamed Ashkenazi. So, 53 Ashkenazis. Of them, only 7 are Slavic-surnamed (very recent ones, too). Same result as in Chemistry, a bit over 10%.
Last, Physiology or Medicine has 60 Jewish winners, with 2 Italian, 1 Sephardic, 1 of mixed Sephardic / Germanic-surnamed Ashkenazi. So, 56 Ashkenazis. Of them, 5 have clear Slavic surnames, another 1 is probably Slavic (Cori, nee Radnitz, with obviously Slavic variant Radnizky found elsewhere), 1 could be but who knows? (Varmus, attested in Slovakia, but unclear if it's Slavic in origin or from Germanic-surnamed Jews), and 1 is unclear (Julius). Being generous, that's 7 with Slavic surnames out of 56, for that same magical answer of just over 10%.
This is another reason to consider only the Fields Medal to be the "Nobel in Math" -- its proportion of Slavic-surnamed Jews (about 15%) is in the same ballpark as the Nobels in Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology / Medicine (10-15%).
ReplyDeleteThe Nobel in Econ has twice that proportion of Slavic surnames, indicating not only that it's faker than the others, but that Slavic-surnamed Jews really are drawn more toward the "MOICHENDISING!" side of the spectrum, not the arts and sciences. As we already saw with the surnames of Russian oligarchs.
And so, pioneering Zionists being about 1/3 Slavic-surnamed is also high by the standards of "eminent Jews", judging from Nobel hard science winners.
And returning to IQ, this also suggests that Slavic-surnamed Ashkenazis aren't as high in IQ as the Germanic-surnamed Ashkenazis. They're plenty disagreeable and rule-bending. And by holding nothing sacred or taboo, they're fairly open to experience, the key personality traits. They were plugged into the same empires as their Germanic-surnamed Jewish brethren. So, evidently the only trait they're handicapped in is IQ, vis-a-vis the Germanic-surnamed Jews.
Which isn't too surprising, if those Germanic-surnamed ones were heavily sampled from the Greek / Armenian / Iranian sub-group of the early Ashkenazis. Outside observers have said those people were smart for a long time. Then they got their brains turbo-boosted by being confined to brainiac professions for centuries and being endogamous. Presto...
But only to a crazy degree for these Germanic-surnamed ones, and to a so-so degree for the Slavic-surnamed ones. I'm not sure the Slavic-surnamed ones have much of an edge over the typical Gentile in an imperial culture, like a German or Austrian or French or Brit or Russian. Ashkenazis as a whole may be over-represented in these accomplished fields, but only 10-15% of them are Slavic-surnamed.
At any rate, nice to see the Nobel Prize winners corroborate the big picture I've uncovered here.
There are 0 Israeli winners of Nobel Physics or Physiology / Medicine, and only 1 among the Fields medalists (Lindenstrauss). List of Jewish Nobel Laureates, BTW:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates
Israel is a vortex for would-be Ashkenazi accomplishment in pretty much any field other than chemistry and getting annexed by Lebanon.
There are 24 Jewish winners of the Turing Award, the "Nobel of Computer Science", with 1 Sephardic and 23 Ashkenazis.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.jinfo.org/Computer_ACM_Turing.html
Only one has a Slavic surname, Minsky. Liskov is her married name, both her parents are Germanic-surnamed (Huberman and Dickhoff).
Pnueli seems to be a variant of Pineles, and that surname is from the Austrian expansion into Galicia, when Lvov was called by the Germanic name Lemberg, and whose given names within the clan are also Germanic rather than Slavic. So he's of Germanic-surnamed origin.
Adi Shamir's family background is totally opaque regarding their original surnames. They're Israeli and have Hebraized their given and family names for awhile. So he's the only unclear one.
There are 2 of Budapest origins with Hungarianized surnames, but those tend to be Germanic rather than Slavic, as they were part of the German-speaking Austrian Empire.
And once again those with bare Hebrew surnames from Europe have Germanic-named ancestors, not Slavic-named.
Even if Shamir is originally Slavic-surnamed, that's still only 2 of 23, or just under 10%, in the same ballpark as the 10-15% of Nobel science winners. And perhaps he's not, and Minsky's the only one, in which case Slavic-surnamed ones are only 4%. But without delving too deeply into their family trees, I'll just go with the same 10-15% result as in the Nobel science winners.
Israelis generally do not do well in this hard field. There are 4 winners who have partial affiliation with Israel -- Rabin, Pearl, Goldwasser, and Wigderson -- but they generally did their graduate training in America and held most of their academic positions in America and published their major work in America.
Rabin went back-and-forth between Israel and America, Wigderson returned to Israel for 15 years before returning to America since 2003, Goldwasser only has a concurrent appointment to an Israeli entity but doesn't seem to divide her time between America and Israel (and was born, raised, educated, and employed here), and Pearl left Israel for graduate training in America and has stayed here ever since.
This reinforces the picture that Israel has weak or mediocre institutions, and those with promising talents generally try to get out of it to put their talents to work elsewhere, like the American Empire (at least, when it had high cohesion).
What would you say are the meta-ethnic frontiers of China and India (for India, I would say the Northwest as it saw constant waves of invaders)?
ReplyDeleteDid you see this Steve Sailer article on how Los Angeles is being filled up by the "Peoples of the Three Defunct Empires: Persian, Ottoman, and Soviet"?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-utopia-of-the-nuclear-family/
C'mon, the meta-ethnic frontier in China is baby-level stuff. Northern China along the frontier with Steppe nomads.
ReplyDeleteIndia is not a single country, but an entire subcontinent. So sometimes it has several meta-ethnic frontiers leading to several expanding cohesive empires at the same time, similar to there being independent expanding empires in France, Britain, and Iberia in "Western Europe" during the early 2nd millennium.
I recall reading somewhere that the even the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution wasn't as bad near the Northern frontier but was worst in Guangxu province in the South (where it descended into cannibalism).
DeleteOne crucial way in which white founding stock Americans are not just part of the Anglo / Western pattern of living in nuclear rather than extended families -- and which all Republican rationalizers of our current degeneracy fail to mention -- is that Olde Worlde people don't live 17 hours away from the next layer outward in their kinship circle.
ReplyDeleteThis applies at all scales -- the individual lives vast distances from the other members of the nuclear family, the nuclear unit if it's even cohesive still lives vast distances from the aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.
English nuclear families can visit their cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. easily if they want to. In America and Canada, everyone's so spread out, constantly roaming around, and looking out only for the individual, that we rarely see our extended families, and hardly even see our nuclear family members. "Keeping in touch through a Facebook group / group chat" is fake, not real.
Before the status-striving transplant phenomenon of the current neoliberal era began, circa the 1980s (yuppies), Americans at least stayed near their nuclear family members. But even during our Midcentury utopia, they didn't live close to the other units in their extended family, outside of a few deeply rooted places lika Appalachia.
That's why our families, communities, economy, cultures, and entire society is far more fragile than back in the Olde Worlde. Very hard to pass things on, maintain and develop them among a cohort, and so on, when we're so spread out. That only leaves non-kin interactions to do these things, but that's not as reliable as among-kin interactions.
So no, we're not trad Olde Worlders, we are fragmented and fragile New Worlders. Maybe in another 1000 years, America will become stultified demographically like Britain, and nuclear families will live near their closest units. But not now, and enough with the cope about America being a bastion of nuclear families, at the very moment when our fragility is exposed during imperial collapse.
Regarding your idea that Los Angeles may be at the heart of a future American Byzantium, it is interesting that like Constantinople, it has become a favoured location of exiles from other fallen empires? Medieval Byzantium had the Varangian Guard composed of Norsemen and later exiled Anglo-Saxons from the Norman Conquest. Los Angeles has exiles from the fallen Russian, Persian, and Ottoman Empires.
ReplyDeleteSpotted Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle at the donated / for sale section of the library -- and not a library copy, meaning from someone who bought it and read it a few years ago.
ReplyDelete^_^
Based on yard signs in the nearby affluent neighborhoods, Trump is easily going to win with voters for a 3rd time in a row. Way more than the last two times, when yuppie yards were heavily Dem. At the least, he'll do as well as before (if these news ones were "silent Trump" voters the past two times), or better (if they're indies who switched from Clinton / Biden to Trump).
ReplyDeleteBut when Democrats steal it again, as they've already telegraphed in PA and WI ("results will continue to be discovered in the days, weeks, and months after the election is already over"), Trump will yet again shrug his shoulders and the entire Republican party will throw their voters under the bus, with the GOP possibly bringing criminal charges against anyone who says Dems stole it again.
At this point, winning federal office is solely about looting the "treasury" (meaning the printing presses at the Central Bank) to line your own pockets -- you can do that whether the citizenry accepts you as legitimate or not. There is no more legitimacy or authority at the central federal level, so actual governance is de facto a state-level or lower-level affair going forward.
GOP cheerleaders can still make a passionate case for voting Trump, while acknowledging the Dems stole it last time and are telegraphing their steal again this time. Namely, to make the gap as wide as possible, so that the stealers have to work even harder, produce an even more ridiculous result, and even further delegitimize the incoming usurper part II administration.
ReplyDeleteBut they won't do that cuz they keep deluding themselves with cope about "when we win," we're gonna do this, do that, do the other thing -- which requires the central state to maintain legitimacy and authority in the meantime, until "we" occupy the White House again, however-many Democrat steals there may be until then.
You can't ram through your national or international plans if the central state becomes neutered -- nobody would carry out the orders!
Trump was already cucked into impotence when he *did* occupy office. Sent 1000s of American boots on the ground in Syria and bombed Syria, for the first time -- a new war in the Middle East. Trade deficit skyrocketed, no factories on-shored. NATO expanded, not dissolved. Immigration, including illegal, skyrocketed every month, far worse than under Obama, except for the Covid hysteria months, when every nation (lib or con) shut its borders. Sat on his fat ass doing JACKSHIT while BLM and Antifa burned down half the nation -- no mobilizing the federal military, assuming control of National Guards for the afflicted states, etc.
Well, with the usurper admin under Biden and soon to be Harris, now the central state doesn't even have that level of efficacy anymore. They threatened us about masks and vaxxes, we told them to go shove it, facing zero consequences. FEMA has been increasingly marginalized during the rescue for Helene victims, with randos and lower-level orgs filling the gap. Ditto for anything that hits Florida -- that's all prepared for and helped out afterward by state-level orgs in Florida, like their National Guard, not FEMA or other fed agency.
So "when we win," GOPers will have even less ability to enact their plans than under Trump's term. But to maintain their fanfic for their infotainment-craving audiences, they have to keep the delusion going about a mighty federal state that can enact sweeping massive changes, however long it has to stay at it, if only the right people could occupy the White House...
Write better fanfic.
Probably won't vote for prez this year, but will vote for Sherrod Brown for Senate, and Republican for state and local offices.
ReplyDeleteNational authority effectively doesn't exist, but you still have to keep your state and city from coming under Democrat control -- then shit really hits the fan. There *is* still plenty that state and local govs can do to make the place pleasant or poisonous.
I won't vote Republican for any national office until my dad gets his pension from the military, the most Republican sector in our society. Chatted with him again over the weekend, and they're still giving him the run-around -- and each round goes 3-6 months of silence, then some kind of buck-passing, ass-covering, or denial.
99% is accounted for, but they keep coming up with a new 1% detail that needs to be accounted for, even if he says forget about that little thing, I don't want it to factor in if it'll make the pension kick into effect faster than 10 years late. To be clear: they pay 0 until they pay everything. It's not like he's getting 99% of what he's owed, and is trying to get that final 1% payment -- he's getting absolutely fucking NOTHING from those war-losing, domestic base-destroying scum.
I have never seen an organization wage such a mighty struggle to deprive its own clients of what they're due from their patrons. They, and their party, will never get my vote at the federal level (state and local doesn't control military pensions from federal orgs like the US Navy, so they're not at fault here).
Luckily the Democrats are still sending out Social Security checks immediately and fully, with no years upon years of 0% payment because "uh, we, er, have to, um, figure out this last 1% detail, give us another 3 years, and maybe we'll pay out more than 0". They obviously won't pay him a bonus to make up for lost time, inflation, etc. during their years of refusal to pay even one red cent.
Nobody but slop-slurping slaves would vote, let alone enthusiastically, for patrons whose dedicated mission is to deprive their clients of the promised protections and provisions. And I ain't nobody's slave, certainly not a sad and pathetic org that's currently getting its ass handed to it by Russia, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran -- and soon maybe China, too, for good measure!
"Sorry, your veteran dad's pension can't be paid even one red cent until we flush another trillion dollars down the Ukrainian, Israeli, Iraqi, and wherever-else toilet..."
Go fuck yourselves.
Just remember, a military this weak and fragmented and traitorous to its own clients is in no shape -- negative shape -- to carry out anything against foreigners (lost every war after WWII), or domestic citizens either. You don't have to obey a single order the military tells you, as our empire collapses -- unless they're a well-paid and well-protected National Guard of some governor. But the federal military? They're just bluffing, forever. Tell them to save their reeking breath, and go get butt-stuffed by Lindsey Graham back in the swamp.
Also considered voting Green for prez just to troll libtards, while still withholding my vote from the GOP until my dad gets his military pension.
ReplyDeleteBut the VP candidate is an off-putting woketard, so don't think I'll be doing that either.
Back when I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, half of his platform was identical to Pat Buchanan's or Ross Perot's, especially on scaling down our military waste, halting our de-industrialization (that was 2000, only 7 years after NAFTA -- now we need to *re*-industrialize), and closing up our open borders.
But those days of the Green Party are long gone, as it is for Democrats / the Left in general.
About the only distinctive thing about them this year is being anti-Israel / anti-American-funding-for-Israel. I thought about it, but with a woketard on the ticket, my vote could be misinterpreted as "I want even more woke Democrats!" Sorry, only anti-woke left candidates, if you want it to go anywhere these days...
It's not the woketard 2010s anymore, time to get with the times.
While we are on the subject of the meta-ethnic frontiers of old empires forming the core of new ones, another possible example may be the Russian Empire as the successor to the Mongol Empire. It represented the westward fringe of the original invaders much as modern-day France was to the Franks.
ReplyDelete"What changed Russia, and severed the world of Kievan Rus from the west was the Mongol conquest of the 1250’s and the subsequent Tatar Yoke under the Golden Horde. Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith has referred to the Russian Empire that emerged in the 16th century as a successor state of the Mongol Empire, and this is not an unreasonable assertion. It was the Mongol conquest that brought to prominence the little-known Rurikid princes of Moscow, then a minor town in the northeast, elevating the Danielovich line that would give rise to the Tsars. The rulers of Moscow retained their ancestral language and religion, but their participation in the political games of the steppe (including intermarriage with Genghis Khan’s Golden Family) transformed them in ways that likely gave Russian despotism a unique flavor."
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/getting-a-sense-of-the-russian-soul
Just read War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin, it's not long, clearly written, packed with info and insight -- general model and particular cases -- and it's for a popular audience.
ReplyDeletePlus it has both the asabiya / meta-ethnic frontier / imperiogenesis model, and for no extra charge, the model of over-production of elites / harmonious vs. competitive phases / imperial breakdown.
So many of these cases are right there -- Celts spawning the Roman Empire, Mongols spawning the Russian Empire, Moors spawning the Spanish Empire, Vikings spawning the French Empire, Romans spawning the Frankish Empire, and so on and so forth.
With that basic framework, you should be able to figure out the cases that he did not include in the survey.
E.g., the Vikings spawned the English / British Empire at roughly the same time they spawned the French Empire -- something apparently only I have elucidated, cuz everyone still thinks Harold Godwinson was the "last king of the Anglo-Saxons" and William the Conqueror was French.
Despite Harold being a Norse name, his Anglo-Saxon father being a nobody politically, and his Danish Viking mother (Gytha Thorkelsdottir -- how's *that* for a British name?) being part of the ruling dynasty throughout the Viking Empire, like her brother being the sitting King of Denmark, and her father being a raiding chieftain in his own right.
Norse-named Harold Godwinson was the last VIKING king of England, during the height of the Danelaw, which began several centuries earlier with the invasion of the Great Heathen Army.
William the Conqueror was Norman, not French, and he married into Anglo-Saxon royalty / nobility, followed by the Plantagenets from Anjou -- also in the west of France, hence not French (Parisian, Capetian).
But nobody, Brits or otherwise, wants to remember the events surrounding their empire's formation, when they were somebody else's bitch. Better to just elide over all that, or leave off right before you get there -- a la Geoffrey of Monmouth abruptly clapping the book shut on his history of the kings of England right before the Viking invasion, occupation, and rule over much of Britain.
I'll keep repeating this true history of the British Empire, cuz everyone is so brainwashed about it, not just the Brits either.
The last King of the Anglo-Saxons was really Alfred the Great, end of the 9th C, as the Great Heathen Army became entrenched, not just occasional raiders, and Alfred conceded by dividing the land between Anglo-Saxons and the Danelaw.
ReplyDeleteAlfred certainly didn't have a Norse name or Viking parentage on any side, let alone parents from the ruling dynasty in Scandinavia. He was as Anglo-Saxon as they came.
On the topic of the birth of the Muscovite Empire (Russia), the Danilovich dynasty are the ones responsible for all the mythology about Rurik, their legendary foreign founder. Nobody at the time, in Kiev or Bulgaria or Constantinople, spoke about Rurik during his supposed own lifetime.
ReplyDeleteIt was a later invention by the Danilovich line, who had to justify their rise to power through non-legendary, non-ancient means. From the wiki on Yury of Moscow:
"He contested the title of Grand Prince of Vladimir with his uncle Mikhail of Tver. As Yury's father had never held the title, he had no legitimate claim. Despite two failed campaigns by Mikhail to subdue Yury, the latter allied with the Golden Horde and married the khan's sister Konchaka, and was made grand prince after Mikhail's execution in 1318."
The highest title was Grand Prince of Vladimir -- this was before the rise of Moscow. And this office was appointed by the Khan of the Golden Horde (the Turko-Mongol invaders who made Russians their bitch). It was designating who would be the local agent or administrator in lieu of the Turko-Mongols themselves running their conquered territories.
By tradition, a claimant had to be a descendant of someone else who had held the title. But Yury's father had not held it, so he had no traditionally legitimate claim. His uncle, Mikhail of Tver, was the sitting Grand Prince of Vladimir, and he was appointed to that office by traditionally legitimate means (by descent from another holder).
So Yury of Moscow toppling and usurping the Grand Prince of Vladimir role was recent, unprecedented, and illegitimate according to tradition. So they needed to spin some myth about even older, even more legitimate, descent from Rurik, a Viking prince.
How did that make Rurik and his supposed descendants more legitimate than the recent holders of the office? Cuz Rurik was a Viking, and that was before the arrival of the Turko-Mongols. The legend continues that his line continued through the Grand Princes of Kiev, an early outpost of Christianity in the Eastern Slavic lands -- also before the arrival of the Turko-Mongols.
And therefore, Yury of Moscow was not a mere opportunistic usurper who began his political dynasty in the present -- he was RETVRN-ing control of Eastern Slavdom to the pre-Turko-Mongol ruling dynasty (the Vikings / Rus). A restoration. The recent Grand Princes of Vladimir were mere appointees by the Turko-Mongol Khan -- their meta-ethnic nemesis! Who gives a damn what the Khan says? The Golden Horde are foreign invaders, and their appointments count for nothing. They're totally illegitimate among us Slavs.
And Russians have abided by the Rurik myth ever since, much like the Brits and Brutus or the Romans and Aeneas -- and the Americans and ancient civilized aliens. ^_^
Also the Mormons and their myths / stories about the Lamanites.
DeleteSo no, the Russian Empire was not the spiritual successor to the Turko-Mongol Empire. Temporal successor, obviously. Being spawned by the Turko-Mongol invasion, of course. But they did not inherit much from their meta-ethnic nemesis, which would have been treasonous.
ReplyDeleteThey not only kept their older language and religion -- they kept their subsistence mode, rather than adopt nomadic or even semi-nomadic pastoralism. In fact, during the Slavic migrations of the 2nd half of the 1st millennium AD, Slavs were fairly nomadic, like everyone else was back in those days.
But like everyone else, they'd become far more sedentarized, and adopted intensive agriculture, by 1200 or 1300. They were sitting ducks for raiders, they were not raiders themselves. They were not horse people anymore (unlike their prehistoric Proto-Indo-European ancestors).
As for political structures, Russians were also the opposite of the Turko-Mongol nomads -- 1300 was right at the big transition between the Age of Nomads (Dark Ages) vs. the Age of Central States across Eurasia, returning to the state of affairs during Classical times (roughly 700 BC to 300 AD).
The Golden Horde was a nomadic tribal confederation typical of the Dark Ages, much like the earlier Turkic Khaganates, not a sedentary large-scale bureaucratic central state, which is what the Russian Empire became (and the Spanish, British, French, German, Austrian, Ottoman, etc.).
Terms like "despotism" are just Western projection and cope -- every empire was despotic during the Age of Central States, including the height of absolutist monarchy in Western Europe. "L'etat, c'est moi" -- nothing despotic about that ruler, eh?
And conversely, there were no despots during the Dark Ages, when central states were weak -- and therefore, when their rulers were weak. Even as the British Empire was expanding, its king was still so weak that the next layer under him, the barons and other lords, imposed the Magna Carta on him in 1215, amidst a backdrop of several Barons Wars against the king.
But the Mongols of the same time were no different -- whenever the sitting khan died, everyone high-tailed it back to their homeland to hold a council on his successor. And during the rule of any given khan, de facto power was carried out by smaller regional leaders, within the various divisions of the Mongol Empire, such as the Golden Horde. Genghis Khan himself was not an absolutist despot -- no one can be, when states are decentralized and weak.
Nor was the sedentary empire of East Asia in the Dark Ages, the Tang Dynasty, a despotic central state. They came to be ruled de facto by regional military governors, the jiedushi. And the central state remained weak for its entire second half, following the An Lushan Rebellion. Just cuz they -- and the English -- were more sedentary and bureaucratic than their Mongol and Viking nemeses, didn't mean they were strong central states by historical standards, or that they were despotic. Their rulers were precariously in power.
And of course, the most famous term we have for despot is actually "dictator" or "Caesarism" -- referring to the Classical-era Western civilization of the Romans, not Easterners (who were also despotic, during the same time).
Despotism is only about this 2000-year cycle in strong vs. weak central states, reflecting the struggle between nomads and sedentary civilizations. It's not about geographic variation within a given time period. The only non-temporal angle to it is subsistence mode, with noble savages like hunter-gatherers being incapable of despotism, but intensive agricultural societies being capable of it (necessary, not sufficient, since even agrarian societies are weak during nomad-dominant times).
Anyway, back to the nuclear family / Hajnal Line stuff. This is more right-wing cope, coming from Americans, Canadians, Australians, or New Zealanders.
ReplyDeleteAmerica became devastated by the divorce epidemic in the 1970s, and although the tide has recently and subtly turned, we are still a society of broken homes. I don't remember the exact figures, but something like a quarter, third, or half of Millennials grew up without both parents in the home. Off-the-charts levels of disintegration of the nuclear family.
Conservatives used to talk about nothing *other than* the disintegration of the nuclear family, including among whites, including among founding stock, etc. -- not just trying to blame American national stats on our large black sub-population.
But that was more of a New Deal / peak Americana concern, and gradually as the Reagan Revolution destroyed more and more of our Midcentury utopia, conservatives shut their mouths about the nuclear family disintegrating, since now their own guy was in charge. And their own guy signed the first no-fault divorce law into effect as California Governor in 1969. If it's good enough for Saint Ronnie, it's good enough for us GOP slop-slurpers.
Then after the 2008 Depression, from which our economy never recovered (only papered over with $10 freshly printed dollars), the right-wing brain trust went into overdrive to not only ignore our societal disintegration, but declare that it was ackshually amazingly strong, integral, cohesive, part of an unbreakable and unshakeable tradition, whether held together by genetic or cultural mechanisms over time.
The main popularizer of the Hajnal Line was HBD Chick, and AFAICT her posts on the topic begin in the 2010s. Maybe her blog as a whole began in the 2010s (can't tell, it doesn't have a sidebar with posts sorted by year).
Now, if you're just studying how Southeast England is different from Serbia, the Hajnal Line stuff is productive. And maybe some Euros got into it for that reason, curiosity about their own continental variation in marriage and kinship patterns.
But 99% of the audience for that was actually New Worlders, not Olde Worlders. And we are *not* a nuclear-family society -- we are a single mother society. Our nuclear families have been disintegrating for over 50 years at this point, and there are no signs of them bouncing back to how they were in the early or mid 20th C or 19th or earlier centuries. IOW, back when we were not yet America, but Olde Worlde off-shoots in the New World.
$10 *trillion* freshly printed dollars
ReplyDeleteThe reasons for America becoming a single-mother society, not a nuclear family society (let alone an extended-family society), are irrelevant here. The point is: no New World society falls within the Hajnal Line, and we don't get to pat ourselves on the back for being part of the nuclear family societies like England and France, unlike those boo, hiss extended family societies.
ReplyDeleteAmericans don't get any self-congratulatory credit for Shakespeare, Chaucer, fish and chips, blood pudding, the Great Vowel Shift, or anything else that belongs to the Brits themselves, not their off-shoots in the New World.
It's just another desperate attempt at Euro-LARP-ing by New Worlders, but this time for reasons of material, not just cultural, cognitive dissonance. Namely, our society's going down the toilet, and we need to make ourselves feel superior in some way, so single out some inferior who we can feel above.
"Well, our society's going down the toilet, but at least we're not like those Serbians who live at home until they're 35 years old, and with their extended families huddled into one building!"
This is right at the same time as Millennials, and later Zoomers, adopted exactly that living pattern! Yes even the white founding stock ones, not only immigrants from outside-Hajnal-Line societies.
But they couldn't handle the collapse of their living standards, so they had to cope by saying this is some freakish radical break with our glorious tradition as Hajnal Line members. Sorry, not in the New World.
It is true that Americans used to be prosperous enough to leave the home early, found their own household, and partake of all that nuclear-family society way of life.
However, America is a very young society, and its material niches were wide-open from the get-go. Unlike in Mexico where there was already a large-scale society. Even if we hadn't eliminated most of the Indians, they weren't cultivating most of the land, weren't using it as pasture for livestock, etc. They were not very numerous in America. Wide open for the cultivating, and later the industrializing -- and then de-industrializing.
Therefore, we can't judge what American society is like in a steady state, or at least a long-term average around which things oscillate by the centuries. We were nowhere close to our carrying capacity, near the brink of having filled up as much of the niches as we could.
As America has filled up to carrying capacity, and therefore is close enough to a steady state or long-term average, we don't look anything like a nuclear-family society where kids leave the home early and start their own households early.
ReplyDeleteRather, as our niches have filled up, steady-state America looks more like a single-mother society, where kids stay at home for a long time (at least through their 20s), when they do move out, it's first to move in with housemates rather than becoming the head of their own household, they are not getting married and starting a family in that "leaving the nest" household, and in fact probably won't get married or have many kids at all.
Obviously the falling fertility rates reflect our having hit carrying capacity, and we aren't going to shrink into a tiny population. But even when people do start having sex again, and having kids again, they won't be married, and probably won't have both parents present in the same home a la common-law marriage and related patterns from Scandinavia.
Conservatives used to blame the welfare state for taking over the role of the father. Well, welfare payments of various sorts have all fallen off a cliff during the neoliberal Reagan Revolution. Cash payments are down in real terms, and even for those with jobs, the minimum wage has collapsed in real terms -- that, too, is part of the welfare state. Our state, welfare and otherwise, has been weakening since Reagan took over. It was relatively strong during the New Deal, which has been dead for decades now.
Well, Reaganites killed off the welfare state as much as they could -- and yet, single motherhood has only become more common. Living at home past 30, more common. Not having sex, not having kids -- more common. Single motherhood etc. had nothing to do with welfare, just one of many rationalizations to destroy the welfare state so that greedy elites could keep more of their wealth to themselves rather than spread it around to the whole society.
Then they'll shift to blaming women in the workforce as the reason why we're a single-mother society. By accident (since all they do is blindly shift blame), this is much closer to the truth -- subsistence modes where food production is easy enough for women to do, like tropical gardening, are single-mother societies, where dad may or may not be present, may or may not be a productive member of society, etc.
ReplyDeleteWell, "service" work is easy enough for women to do, unlike half of agricultural jobs (which only men can do), most of pastoralist work (mainly men's work -- the most patriarchal societies are herders), and much of industrial manufacturing work (why so many men were working in factories, and few women, leading to the male breadwinner role of the good ol' 1950s).
We are not going to devolve back to hunting and gathering, which is a nuclear family society with dads present throughout development.
We are also not going to devolve back to pastoralism, outside of a few niches. Ditto for not returning to intensive agriculture as everyone's job.
That means only re-industrialization will make us a nuclear-family society again, since it's more biased toward men's work than the service economy or info/knowledge economy is. And most women will enjoy that -- not having to work for a wage, being taken care of by a high-earning factory worker husband (or white collar professional in the manufacturing sector), and getting to stay home and do family life instead of girlbosses and rat races.
Until then, we will remain a single-mother / housemates society, not a Hajnal Line society with nuclear families and independently-headed households.
All this right-wing bashing on extended families is pure cope to deal with the disintegration of nuclear families, and living standards in general.
They try to spin it as a "virtuous loser" tale about being out-competed by their inferiors from extended family societies. But that conflicts with their supposed Darwinian bent -- only fitness determines who's inferior or superior. So it forces right-wingers out of Darwinism, and into non-genetic measures of superiority (like high culture, or middlebrow culture).
But it also forces them to stop thinking about adaptation to environments. Maybe single mothers and housemates are what adapts Americans to their environment.
"Well, then we have to change the environment! ... uh-oh, that sounds like sOcIaL EnGinEeRiNG... does not compute, uh, ABORT MISSION!"
It's the blind leading the blind, the copers leading the coping.
It is obviously not a case of universal or global fitness superiority of extended families, or else the Hajnal Line societies would never have flourished in the first place. Clearly they're at least locally and regionally stable, though also not globally stable -- or else the outside-Hajnal societies would never have flourished.
They just want something to whine about for their own internal disintegration, and blaming outsiders for it somehow. At least they were somewhat honest when blaming the welfare state -- not true, but at least not a lame "foreign invaders destroyed our society" story. And ditto for "women in the workforce" -- also not something that foreign invaders imposed on us, but that we did to ourselves.
Anyway, Hajnal Line talk is pure cope, Euro LARP, and only re-industrialization will set us back on course for nuclear family stability, independently headed households instead of housemates, and so on and so forth.
Last remark on the Hajnal Line BS. It was also used by New World right-wingers to rationalize the disintegration of our extended families, why we rarely interact with our cousins, aunts / uncles, grandparents, etc.
ReplyDeleteOriginally, the point was that in Europe, everyone interacted with their extended families regularly -- but some countries did that with them living in the same house / compound / neighborhood, while other countries did that with them living in separate households that required a bit of orchestrating to get together.
In America, it's a miracle if you even see your own siblings or parents in adulthood / after "leaving the nest". Let alone cousins, aunts / uncles, grandparents, etc.
People in Southeast England don't go 5 years without seeing their siblings in adulthood. Or see their aunts, uncles, cousins maybe once per decade. At that frequency, you effectively are no longer family members -- and that's what it's like in America.
But in order to cope with the disintegration of the nuclear *and* extended families, New World right-wingers said ACKSHUALLY that's a good thing -- we wouldn't want to end up like those backward shithole countries in the Balkans where 10 generations live under a single roof, the kids don't leave home until 40, and so on and so forth.
ACKSHUALLY, never seeing your extended family is just Americans carrying on the noble Anglo / Western tradition of being oriented around nuclear rather than extended families. Total bullshit. People in England have familial bonds that extend outside the nuclear unit, they just don't live together or right next door to each other.
And aside from rarely seeing our extended families in adulthood, most Americans don't even interact with them during childhood either. Cousins rarely see each other here, cuz the parents who are siblings are all spread out.
I have a cousin who I've only seen once in my entire life, another who I've never seen at all (from my uncle who moved back to Japan), and two others who I've met only 3 times since adolescence and another single time that I don't remember when we were babies.
That's on my dad's side. My mom's side is Appalachian, so that's the exception to the American rule -- I saw my cousins on that side a lot growing up, and still to this day, compared to other Americans. That side holds huge family reunions, too. But that's the exception.
People in Southeast England don't go their entire lives with barely ever, or perhaps never, seeing their cousins on an entire side of their family.
We are not carrying on an Olde Worlde tradition, we are blazing a horrible deracinated trail to Hell when it comes to kinship -- easily the weakest and most shameful domain of our otherwise great society (well, y'know, until it began collapsing). Rarely / never interacting with extended family, single mothers, broken homes, living with a rotating rootless roster of housemates, etc. Horrendous.
Oh, and the figure for Millennials and early Zoomers growing up in broken homes is 40%. From the General Social Survey, the variables "family16" and "cohort".
ReplyDeleteIt's the same for whites as the population as a whole -- 38% of white Millennials and early Zoomers grew up in broken homes.
Black Millennials and early Zoomers are much more likely to grow up in broken homes, about 65% of them.
Everyone else, meaning Hispanics and various Asians, is slightly less likely than whites to grow up in broken homes, about 35% of them.
But no, the national figure is not being heavily skewed by blacks -- who are only 10-15% of the population.
If we mean "last Anglo-Saxon king" in the sense of untainted by dynastic ties to the Viking invaders, that would be Edward the Martyr, who briefly reigned as a minor before being killed by his wicked stepmother, Queen Aelfthryth, in 978, so that her own son, Aethelred the Unready, could be installed as king instead.
ReplyDeleteAlthough Aethelred did not have Viking lineage, he did marry into Viking dynasties, opening up England to multiple routes of Viking rule over England -- which was already the majority of the land after the Great Heathen Army extended into the Danelaw.
Aethelred married Emma of Normandy -- you read that right, Normandy. That was in 1002, a full 2 generations before the so-called Norman Conquest of 1066 and after. Emma was not some random woman from the land of Normandy -- she was from the dynastic lineage of the House of Normandy. Her brother was the sitting ruler of Normandy (Richard II, Duke of Normandy), and her father was its ruler as well (Richard I "the Fearless," Count of Rouen). Richard the Fearless' father was William Longsword, and *his* father was Rollo -- the original Norse-speaking Viking raider who was conceded control over Normandy by the Capetian rulers in Paris, to keep the Vikings at bay.
Emma of Normandy's mother was Gunnor, of some kind of Danish noble lineage (not some random woman from Denmark). So Emma was from Viking dynasties through both sides of her family -- somewhat diluted on the Norman side, since they had somewhat assimilated to Frankish norms after Rollo's reign (William Longsword was born overseas, but was baptized around age 19, and changed his name from whatever the Norse original was, to the non-Norse name William).
By marrying her, Aethelred opened up England to Viking rule through multiple routes, in addition to the direct route that already existed in the Danelaw. He was the first to give up on Anglo-Saxon rule, and begin marrying into the dynasties of the invading Vikings.
Godwin, father of Harold Godwinson, did the same thing not long after Aethelred married Emma of Normandy -- he married Gytha Thorkeldottir, and even gave up on giving Anglo-Saxon names to his children, most of whom have Norse names like Harold, Sweyn, Tostig, Gyrth, Gytha (later changed to Edith), etc.
I say Alfred the Great was the last Anglo-Saxon King of England cuz he still controlled a decent chunk of it, before conceding the Danelaw to the Vikings. His descendants were only nominal kings of "England" once the Vikings took over.
But in any case, the literal Normans -- the House of Normandy, descended from Rollo -- had already entered English political rule several generations before the Battle of Hastings, and not through violent conquest. Aethelred saw what he thought was the writing on the wall, and figured an indirect Viking from Normandy was better than a direct Viking already in the Danelaw
Godwin married a direct Viking and was more of a straightforward traitor to his Anglo-Saxon background. He only received the office of Earl of Wessex after siding with the Viking invader ruler of the Danelaw, Cnut the Great -- he was a first-time appointee by the meta-ethnic nemesis, not from a distinguished line of Anglo-Saxon rulers in their own right. And his office bore a Norse name, Earl (cognate with Jarl), not the Anglo-Saxon title Ealdorman or whatever else.
Harold Godwinson is as Anglo-Saxon as Takeshi Johnson, claimant to the US presidency in an alternate history where Japan won WWII, took over much of America, and a small-time native political striver named John married into the invading Japanese dynasty, whose son does not even bear an English or other American name, but Takeshi, bowing to his Japanese invader overlords.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure when or who the myth of Harold Godwinson as the "last Anglo-Saxon king" came from, but it is spiritually descended from Geoffrey of Monmouth's pioneering mytho-history of the kings of Britain -- which originated the legendary foreign founder myth (Brutus, supposedly a Roman, and if you also buy into Roman mytho-history, an indirect Trojan via their legendary foreign founder, Aeneas).
ReplyDeleteGeoffrey left off right before the arrival of the Great Heathen Army, when the Vikings made the English their bitch for centuries.
Historians after Geoffrey had to pick up the thread somehow -- British history can't stay stuck in the 8th or 9th century forever. But the idea seems to have been, minimize the Viking invasion, occupation, and direct and indirect rule over England. No Englishman wants to remember the centuries when they were someone else's bitch.
Therefore, portray Alfred the Great as a mighty ruler over a united England -- not just a patchwork of tiny Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Rather than the reality of him being the first Anglo-Saxon ruler to concede the territory of the Danelaw to the Viking invaders, admitting defeat and opening up direct Viking rule over much of England.
And wrap up the "Viking presence" chapter as soon as possible -- with Cnut the Great. Hard to sweep him under the rug. But whitewash -- Anglo-wash? -- Aethelred the Unready's marriage into Viking dynasties through Emma of Normandy, also Anglo-washing the pre-1066 presence of Norman political ruler in England. Whitewash Godwin's appointment to his office by the Viking king, whitewash his title being Norse rather than Anglo-Saxon, and whitewash the Norse names of his children, and his wife being a direct Viking dynast, and don't ever mention her uber-Norse name, Gytha Thorkelsdottir.
In this way, the Viking presence is just a brief unpleasant blip, not centuries of expanding hegemony and submission by the Anglo-Saxons themselves, who conceded huge territory, married into the Viking dynasties rather than vice versa, and even began naming their children -- future claimants to ruling status -- with Norse names.
With the meta-ethnic nemesis all but memory-holed, the Normans seem to show up out of nowhere, battling the Anglo-Saxons rather than the Vikings. This does admit that the rulers of England have been foreigners ever since -- Norman, and soon after, Angevin -- but that's the bare minimum they have to admit, while still saving face. Nobody can claim that Anglo-Saxon rule continued uninterrupted.
But there are two flavors of foreigners -- benign ones who don't totally destroy, desecrate, lay waste to, and submit and humiliate the natives, and a meta-ethnic nemesis that represents a clash of civilizations, centuries of humiliating submission, and all sorts of other unpleasantness.
ReplyDeleteAnglo-Saxons vs. Normans is not a clash of civilizations. Both, as of 1066 and after, were Christian, and Western / Roman-descended Christian at that. Both were sedentarized, not nomadic raiders. Both eventually adopted the same language, English, rather than the invaders refusing to adopt the local language or imposing their own on the natives. Both were from geographically close lands, on either side of the narrow English Channel, and with no evident long-brewing beef as in a meta-ethnic frontier situation. They were slightly different neighbors, not bewildering strange Others.
And they fought in a "may the best man win" fashion, not massacring non-combatants like church officials, not razing non-military buildings like churches, not over-killing or humiliating the bodies of their slain enemies as in the ritual execution of cutting the ribs from the spine and spreading them outward in a "blood eagle" pattern. Not drinking out of their enemies' skulls, or whatever else a barbarian invasion might have done. Not the kind of behavior that would -- purely hypothetically speaking -- get you branded as a Great Heathen Army.
Easier to bury the hatchet, let bygones be bygones, and move on from fair-fought battles long ago.
Not so easy to bury the hatchet regarding the meta-ethnic nemesis, so just sweep that whole long episode under the rug as much as possible without straining credulity.
I wonder if, after Israel gets dissolved / dispersed / annexed by Lebanon, the Lebanese will eventually sweep the Israeli invasion of the Levant under the historical rug. It would be entirely fitting with the rest of history. Israel is the meta-ethnic nemesis to everyone around it, not just Palestinians but the Lebanese as well.
ReplyDeleteOnce Israel has been neutered, and Hezbollah unites Lebanon, which expands its political and cultural influence throughout the Levant -- perhaps teaming up with the Houthis to form a sphere of influence that includes the Hejaz, taken over from the moribund Saudi Empire -- nobody from the winning side will want to remember the long time when they were someone else's bitch.
It may sound crazy to today's Palestinians and Lebanese -- they emphasize what a disruptive clash of civilizations it is to have Zionists invading the Levant. But then, the Romans right at the time of their defeat of their meta-ethnic nemesis, the Gauls, were still emphasizing how crucial the Gallic threat was to the formation of the expanding Roman polity. Cicero and Livy both said so.
But after awhile, nobody remembers the Gauls as the original meta-ethnic nemesis that spawned the Roman Empire to beat it back. The Gauls are just some other random group of non-Italians who live in Europe, far from Rome at that. So the Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar are portrayed as just one of many successful wars of expansion by the Romans against non-Italian people. Nothing about how this was their ultimate payback against the invading Gallic hordes of the 4th C BC.
So I'm sure the historians in the future Levantine Empire will record their defeat over the Israelis, but will portray it as just one of many successful episodes in their expansion. They will sweep the more-than-a-century Zionist invasion of the Levant under the rug as much as possible. None of them will want to remember the humiliations over the decades, the occupations, the playing of one Lebanese sect against another, the indiscriminate bombing of entire residential buildings, hospitals, schools, etc.
It'll just be, "Yeah, these Zionists showed up one day, were kind of a nuisance, and then yadda yadda yadda, we dispersed the last Israelis back to Poland before administering the Holy Land ourselves."
They will want to preserve the good vibes of their victory, not stew in resentment over their earlier defeat and humiliation by their meta-ethnic nemesis. Nobody ever does, and nobody ever will.
I know it sounds crazy, but in a few hundred years, the Zionist invasion of the Levant will be as well remembered by the Levantines as the Great Heathen Army and the Danelaw are remembered by the British (barely at all).
Another aspect of the clash of civilizations between Vikings and Anglo-Saxons, but not between Normans (or Angevins) and Anglo-Saxons -- architecture. What the hell did the Vikings ever build in Britain? Not much at all:
ReplyDeletehttps://heritagecalling.com/2022/12/15/traces-of-the-vikings-in-england/
No residential buildings in a Viking style, certainly no Christian buildings but not even Norse pagan buildings (whether in their own Norse style or adapted to Anglo-Saxon styles), no civic architecture in a Viking style, etc. At most, Viking styles on monumental grave architecture, like tombstones. The rest of their material record is jewelry, weapons / tools, and pottery, not architecture.
The Normans and their Angevin followers brought over Romanesque architecture from the Continent, although the earlier Anglo-Saxons were also builders in a related style -- since they were all from the Dark Ages, and all Dark Age architecture is similar. E.g., the Saxon crypt in St. Wystan's Church (in Mercia, now Derbyshire) looks like Continental crypts of the 2nd half of the 1st millennium AD.
And although some Norman buildings in Britain was left to decay into ruins, and others demolished, to make way for Gothic, they were not systematically and iconoclastically destroyed in order to erase the traces of the Normans. English and British people love the Normans -- they liberated them from the Viking invaders and rulers. Why would they want to destroy their buildings per se?
Some were preserved with a Norman piece and later Gothic remodeling or additions, like Winchester Cathedral, built at the main city of Anglo-Saxon Wessex (and replacing earlier Saxon buildings, the Old Minster and New Minster).
ReplyDeleteThe 11th-C crypt (with a modern sculpture), in all its low-ceiling, massive-wall, thick-pier, cozy cave, mostly windowless sublime glory, and fuss-free level of surface ornament:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anthony_Gormley%27s_Sound_II_-_Winchester_Cathedral.jpg
The Norman transept (short axis of the cross-like floor plan) and tower:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Winchester_Cathedral_November_2020_39.jpg
The rose window is clearly a later Gothic remodel, but you can see that some of the windows are as well. I don't know the whole history, but the original may have had true windows at the 3rd level up (clerestory), those were typical of Dark Age buildings -- high enough that you don't have to worry about nomadic raiders entering through them.
But their arches are still circular rather than pointed (as in Gothic). The tracery is Gothic, and it's enclosed by a pointed arch -- the first layer of stones above the border is the transition between the pointed Gothic arch addition and the original circular Romanesque arch, and this row of stones is thick at the top of the arch and tapers toward either side, to blend the two different arch shapes together.
You can tell the 2nd level of windows were probably originally false, or blind arcading -- since two of them have been left blind. The two in the center have been remodeled in the same way as the 3rd level ones, but the two on the far left and right sides are still filled in with stones, not open windows. So probably those center two were filled in as well originally. Can't take chances as the windows get closer to the ground, when nomads are raiding around the place.
I'm sure some or all of those on the 1st level were originally false / blind arcading as well. To the far left you can see some blind arcading still remains at that height.
On the tower, even though the windows are way up in the air, they were still made mostly closed-off -- small surface area, and half of that covered with shutters. You can never be too careful with windows in nomad-dominant times...
The rest of the exterior, and just about all of the interior, looks like Gothic and other styles from when the Age of Nomads was nearing a close and then done with for good (well, until 2300 at any rate). Light, airy, open, the opposite of the interior style of the crypt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WinCath30Je6-4836wiki.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Winchester_Cathedral_West_Facade_sunset.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Winchester_Cathedral_Choir,_Hampshire,_UK_-_Diliff.jpg
That Norman crypt vs. Gothic nave (long axis of the cross-like floor plan, and the main space of the cathedral) is an excellent demonstration of how easy it is to create striking and stimulating chiaroscuro lighting in a mostly windowless space, and how blandly and soul-crushingly evenly and brightly lit it gets when there are huge windows everywhere.
ReplyDeleteChiaroscuro depends on there being half or more of the space cloaked in darkness, with only one or a few sources of light that do not reach everywhere. That is only possible when there are few and narrow windows / skylights.
When there are tons of windows, each of large size, light floods into every nook and cranny of the space, and it's not just bright -- it's evenly lit, bland and sense-depriving due to lack of contrast.
I know Euros have been conditioned by their upbringing to enjoy sensory-deprivation spaces since 1300 or so, but as an American, they just make me long for a wood-paneled basement at night with a few mood lamps on.
Imagine craving a panopticon space like a Gothic cathedral, instead of a cozy and secure Romanesque cave-fortress...
In fact, I wonder if Italian painters pioneered chiaroscuro and Venetian colorito due to the absence of light-airy-open buildings there. Romanesque and other Dark Age styles persisted there for a long time, and were not replaced by Gothic -- which was an imperial style, from France and later England and a related Spanish variant, and Italy was not an empire with piles of new wealth with which to build huge new structures.
ReplyDeleteMuch later, during the Neoclassical and Romantic eras, Italians started to build more light-airy-open types of buildings, and even somewhat during the Renaissance. But the Renaissance was not throughout all of Italy, and its funders were not as wealthy as kings and emperors -- they were wealthy, but not super-duper-wealthy, dukes or counts.
But in the 1400s through the 1600s, there were few Gothic-esque buildings in Italy. The perfect environment to make painters attuned to chiaroscuro lighting! ^_^
French painters hadn't seen a chiaroscuro interior since the Dark Ages (truly an apt label for the era, hehe).
Election theft update: now we're up to Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and the biggest one Pennsylvania, all declaring ahead of time that their Democrat-controlled election boards will be stealing the election in their state.
ReplyDeleteCode words: "Results will continue to be discovered in the days, weeks, and months after the election is already over". So that's why they won't be reporting who won on election night, or perhaps for days, weeks, and months after it's already over.
Therefore, entire election is already over, Dems will steal again, GOP including Trump himself will cuck their own voters again, and there will be an even more self-delegitimized admin coming in 2025, as the central state continues to fragment into pieces and de facto policy devolves to the state level or lower.
It's the most normie thing in the world to openly and unambiguously state that the 2020 election was stolen, and that this was the first time that results continued to be discovered for days, weeks, and months after the election was already over.
No other one like it in history -- hence no BS qualifying remarks about how "every election is rigged.... by big money's influence". STFU, they straight up stole this one on election night and for months later, reporting boatloads of votes that were not real, regardless of how they pulled it off mechanically (irrelevant).
Real votes are tallied up and reported by election night, as they always have been, whether a Dem or Repub won, whether in our early history, peak, or stagnation phase. Only in this collapsing stage has the electoral process become openly and lazily illegitimate.
If you're voting Trump, there's still a reason to cast your vote even while acknowledging that the Dems are going to steal it and Trump will surrender just like last time. Namely, by making the gap between real and fake as wide as possible, that will delegitimize the usurper admin as much as possible, ham-stringing their BS agenda from even 1% implementation.
Well, domestic agenda, anyway. They can still destroy our currency to print more money to send down the Ukrainian or Israeli drain, etc. But whatever their domestic agenda is, where they rely on legitimacy and good faith and compliance from the general public -- that'll be dead in the water.
If you shrug your shoulders and don't vote, then the Dems could actually win *without* stealing, and that would be far worse than them taking office after a laughably clumsy steal. They might thikn they had a popular mandate like under Obama, who didn't have to steal.
Also remember that 99% of the media, including social media / podcasts / etc., including right-wingers, have been lying to you the whole time after 2020 about these very plain facts that the most normie masses have not only internalized, but complain about on public forums.
ReplyDeleteSo why do talking heads, or reacting avis, on Twitter continue to lie about this? Cuz they have sad pathetic delusions of becoming influential in politics -- actual results, not "political commentary," which is impotent, free, and they are already doing.
If Trump or some other guy has to take office for their agenda to be implemented, then that office must retain its legitimacy, authority, prestige, and so on, in order for their guy to wield it for their agenda. No point taking over a national office if there is no more de facto power left at the national level (domestically), cuz Dems have delegitimized it into ruins after 1 and soon to be 2 risible steals.
So the right-wingers, Trump activists, etc., in the media are actually the most slavishly devoted to papering over and shoring up the tattered reputation that the central government has already begun to descend into, and will only sink deeper.
They may have said it was stolen the day after the election in 2020, and grumbled about it until the usurper actually took office, and that was that. But then they shut their mouths for the next 4 years, and are still shutting their mouths about it, in a deluded attempt to preserve the legitimacy of the central state, while it its credibility continues to be shredded by Democrat election stealers.
Given that Trump surrendered last time, he will surrender again. There will be no anti-steal protest at the scale of the last one, since activist energy, politicized violence, etc. has dried up. It peaked from 2014-2020, maybe trickling into '21, including on the pro-Trump side. But as of '24, it's over, and will only be more over by '25.
Protesters against the Democrat steal will not romp around the Capitol Building this time, just like libtards could not even work up the energy to march when one of their sacred cows, Roe v. Wade, was overturned in '22 -- let alone blow up buildings, set shit on fire, murder innocent civilians, and all those other familiar tactics from the BLM / Antifa chaos of 2014-2020.
Open possibility that you could bet on, since it is actually up in the air, and not already certain -- will Trump at least make a public statement on a mass medium to the effect of "There better not be any massive ballot dumps at 4 AM..."
ReplyDeleteHe made that statement last time on the national TV media, sometime after midnight but before 4 AM, and it was clipped to online social media. So there's a precedent for it -- could happen again.
But maybe like the flagging energy that will prevent anti-steal protesters from romping around the Capitol Building again, Trump won't have it in him in '24 to utter this much of a protest.
Bet on this outcome, discuss this outcome -- or which state has a governor, state legislature, etc., that openly declares the Democrat steal is illegitimate, we won't be taking orders from the usurper admin, especially since Harris didn't even go through a primary with her own party's voters this time around (and obviously indies and Republicans have rejected her).
Bet on how soon it will take before such events happen, if not in '24.
Enough of this BS about "Who's going to take office in January '25 -- Trump or Harris?" That's already certain to be Harris.
The only time it was uncertain, was when I mentioned it (while no others in the media would, whether right-wing or libtard). Namely, when it was clear they were going to coup Biden, which was telegraphed by all those polls saying Trump was going to beat Biden.
Their polls said Clinton was going to beat Trump, and they didn't care. Their polls said Biden was going to be Trump in '20, which was not true, but they didn't care -- they were going to steal it anyway.
So why bother flipping the script and releasing polls for months on end that consistently said Biden will lose to Trump? They flipped for a reason, and that needed to be explained.
Since no one in the media could see this, I explained it. Either:
1) Dems have had enough of the total failure and breakdown of the central state under their usurper admin, and want to hand "control" of it over to Trump like a hot potato. Or:
2) Dems only wanted to coup Biden, outside of a primary (whether one they stole again as in '20, by eliminating all candidates they didn't want, one week before Super Tuesday). So paint him as a sure loser to Trump, to rationalize why Biden needed to be couped. Then just steal the general election from Trump like last time.
And presumably Harris would be promoted to the top of the ticket as the soon-to-be usurper, at which point the polls would be flipped back to the 2016 and 2020 pattern, where Trump is tied or losing -- NOT the "coup Biden" pattern where Trump is consistently beating the Democrat by comfortable margins.
After Biden was couped this summer -- which no dum-dum right-winger with a media megaphone saw coming -- I noted that this eliminated option 1, and they were going with option 2, coup Biden but steal for his replacement.
So you can't discuss that anymore. But for the love of God, make your fanfic infotainment entertaining. No one gives a shit about the already-declared-to-be-stolen general election outcome, which won't even be reported in its final state until days, weeks, and months after the election is already over. There will literally be NOTHING to comment on, on election night and at least the day after, probably not for a week minimum.
Russian Dark Age architecture. Although I've never been a Russia-hater, I still find it hard to connect with their culture, outside of the 20th C when we converged quite a bit (like the Space Race, science fiction, Art Deco and Brutalism, etc.).
ReplyDeleteI think the reason is that, as an American, whose culture is from a nomad-dominant phase of the 2000-year cycle between nomadic and central state dominance, I want to see familiar things from the Olde Worlde.
It's not something specific to Russia either -- I don't care that much about the Classical era, although the pre-Classical world is fascinating. And I don't care so much about the Central State era of circa 1300 and after, as much as I do about the Dark Ages.
There's plenty of high culture to appreciate from Europe in the Central State era, it just doesn't immediately resonate with Americans as the Dark Age culture does.
And Russia as a culture and political entity is a product of the post-1300 era (really, post-1400 or post-1500). They don't have much of a Dark Age culture.
I went looking for pictures of Russian "castles" -- all the results are actually of "palaces". I didn't ask for palaces, which are too light-airy-open and frankly effeminate and gay. Where are the castles? Where are the crypts?
Ditto for religious buildings -- where are the huge hulking masses with thin slitty windows, creating mystical and mysterious chiaroscuro lighting for the interior?
That must be why I've always been fascinated more by Bulgaria than Russia. Bulgaria was *the* Dark Age Slavic state and culture -- and empire. The Kievan Rus were just a trading outpost between the Viking Empire and the Byzantine Empire (and Moscow was not even a proper city way back then). Everything an American could want, Bulgaria has.
Including exotic hotties, since they're closer to the Mediterranean and Anatolia...
Some of that is due to Eastern Slavs favoring wood as their construction material, so even if there were Dark Age structures, the wooden ones are very unlikely to have survived until now.
ReplyDeleteBut there are some stone-made buildings from before 1300 that look very much like their contemporaries in Western Europe, in crucial ways (and uniquely Russian in other ways). There's a brief Russian Wikipedia entry for "Russian Romanesque", which says that Russian academics are split on how Russian vs. how Western the style is, with some favoring the idea that it was imported from the West to Russia by Western builders (put it through Google Translate):
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0
But given everything I've detailed about the cultures of nomad-dominant vs. sedentary-dominant phases of the cycle, there's no reason to assume that this style is foreign to Russia in the 12th C. That's cuz EVERYBODY'S architecture looked like that, from one end of Eurasia to the other. We should expect the same for Russia -- hulking masses with thick walls, few / thin / slitty windows, assemblages of huge geometric volumes, perhaps surrounded by equally massive and thick walls, towers, and other fortifications.
There may be small-scale, fine-grained details that Western builders brought to Russia, but the overall style of pre-Mongol Russian architecture is the same as Western Europe -- and the Middle East, and China, of the same time period. And nobody supposes that Middle Easterners and Chinese were also present in Russia, building those churches. It's convergent evolution -- the same nomad-dominant environment produced highly similar outcomes for all of Eurasia, independently within each region.
Now a quick survey of pre-Mongol "Russian" architecture, although this was before the rise of Moscow and the Russian Empire. Perhaps "Pre-Mongol architecture within the later Russian Empire".
ReplyDeleteI've thrown in some from the Golden Horde era (up through the late 15th C), when Muscovy had not yet united and kicked out the Mongols. They look overall similar to the strictly pre-Mongol buildings from the 12th C, since the struggle between nomads and central states was still in favor of nomads during the 15th C in the Eastern Slavic lands.
That's why there are still fortified walls, towers, gates, drawbridges, etc. that look like they're from the Dark Ages in Western Europe, still being built in "Russia" during the 15th C, which was the Renaissance era in the West.
Well, in "Russia", the nomadic threat had not yet receded, not until the 16th C, which is when Russian architecture starts to look more like the Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, and related styles in the West.
Russia was a couple centuries late to these trends cuz they were still dealing with the very last of the nomadic empires, so they could not adopt light-airy-open architecture during the 1300s when the West did, when the nomadic threat was mostly over in the West.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormition_Cathedral,_Vladimir
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Gate,_Vladimir
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Saint_Demetrius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pskov_ChurchStBasil_Hill5c.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pskov_Krom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Sophia_Cathedral_in_Novgorod
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novgorod_Detinets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormition_Cathedral,_Moscow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Kremlin_Wall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Moscow_Kremlin_towers
Forgot to mention blind arcading, or other blind items like windows, as a signature of Dark Age / nomad-dominant architecture. That's all over these pre-1500 buildings in Russia.
ReplyDelete"Blind" means it doesn't actually open behind the element, it's a solid wall with a shallow relief sculpture in the shape of the truly open type of the element.
So arcades, where there are a bunch of columns supporting arches overhead, have to be open underneath the arches, to be true. Blind arcades are where this column-and-arch pattern is just a bas-relief sculpture on top of a totally solid, closed-off, thick-ass wall.
Blind windows are rectangles that are recessed into the wall, perhaps at several smaller scales, but do not actually open through the wall.
Why aren't these elements open? Cuz that would allow nomadic raiders to just waltz on through and kill, rape, and pillage, and waltz right back out, and be on their merry nomadic raiding way.
Blind elements allow for some superficial ornament, recalling the true type, without introducing the functional vulnerability of open holes through a wall during a period of ubiquitous nomadic raiding parties.
The closest I could find to a Dark Age crypt in Russia, the Chamber of Facets in Novgorod, built 1433. Russians classify it as Gothic, but the overall impression is still very Romanesque -- hulking blocky presence, few / thin / small windows, low ceilings, massive columns relative to the interior space as a whole, and chiaroscuro lighting.
ReplyDeleteThe vaults do have a fan shape, as in English Gothic, but Gothic vaults are way high up in the air and supported by thin spindly columns (and by flying buttresses on the exterior), for the delicate / light / airy / open look. The vaults in the Chamber of Facets look like a standard Romanesque crypt, with low ceilings, bulky columns supporting them, huge amount of space taken up by the vault, darker and more mysterious, more of a cozy cave feel.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:VNovgorod_VladychnayaChamber_VN28.jpg
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:Vladychnoe_Chamber.jpg
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:%D0%93%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%BB_%D0%92%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B4%D1%8B%D1%87%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B9_%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8B.jpg
The movie Alexander Nevsky by Eisenstein is set in Novgorod and Pskov in the 13th C, during the invasions by Swedes, Mongols, and now the Teutonic Knights. They were all basically nomadic raiders, not representing a strong central state.
ReplyDeleteIf you're a Tengrist, they call it a raid -- if you're a Catholic, they call it a Crusade. Maybe it's the declaration of a high-minded manifesto. Westerners just put more effort into rationalizing their nomadic raiding parties, while Easterners don't bother and just get the job done.
Nomadic Catholics raided and sacked much of the Levant, although unlike the Vikings, at least they built tons of amazing Romanesque castles, which are still standing today, after the raiders were repelled. Built to last.
And the Crusaders who besieged, sacked, and destroyed their "fellow" Christians in Constantinople in the early 1200s were just another nomadic raiding party, as far as the Byzantines were concerned.
Nomads don't have to be a meta-ethnic nemesis, they could be highly similar to your own culture. They could even be entirely internal to the places they're raiding, as in the American Wild West, where American outlaws on-the-move were always a threat to sedentary law-abiding people out West.
Anyway, Alexander Nevsky was sadly not shot on location, but the sets were constructed to look like the original Dark Age style. And several log-built structures as well, which like the stone structures, are big bulky masses with few openings -- much like the log cabins and other wooden structures in America. Very cozy chiaroscuro lighting inside them.
Novgorod and Pskov are far from the meta-ethnic frontier with the Steppe peoples, which is closer to Moscow and eastern Ukraine. So the North of Russia tends to be less Russian than Southern Russia, in the same way that the Eastern US is less American than the Western US, or Northern Britain is less British than Southern Britain, etc.
That means they tend to embody the older culture, before intense ethnogenesis was started by the conflict with the meta-ethnic nemesis. Also, they tend to have less wealth, since the growth of the empire leads to piles of new wealth streaming into the headquarters. Less wealth means just leave the older styles as they are, not enough money to raze and rebuild them in contemporary styles.
But by now, even Novgorod and Pskov have been pretty well absorbed into the Russian Empire, and those good ol' pre-Mongol buildings are surrounded by all sorts of Early Modern and later buildings. That's why Eisenstein could not shoot on location and had to construct old-timey-looking sets outside of Moscow.
They're very convincing and well-made though, you wouldn't know they were just sets unless you could inspect them up close. Great introduction to Dark Age / pre-Mongol architecture in what would become Russia.
Not related to architecture, but one striking stylistic feature of Alexander Nevsky is how much negative space is taken up by the sky, in many many compositions.
ReplyDeleteSometimes it will show a few human figures in a medium-shot, close enough to make out their faces, who take up 1/3 of the area, and the other 2/3 is the sky.
Other times, 90% of the area is the sky, and only a thin little strip of ground along the bottom, and a tiny row of people who look like ants compared to the giant sprawling expanse of the sky. Even during epic battle scenes, when you'd think the cinematographer would try to emphasize the larger-than-life nature of the soldiers by shooting them close-up and filling most of the frame. When they're shot from a distance, and dwarfed by the sky, they don't look heroic or epic at all.
I'm not sure how this fits into the rest of Russian visual art history. Is the vast sky supposed to represent God or the Holy Ghost or some other natural force that was supervising the battle, and taking care of the tiny little Russian soldiers down below?
Or a la Soviet emphasis on the common man, this compositions drives home how small and humble they are? Or to say that even though a major battle is upcoming, it's still just a small affair compared to God's domain, or something?
To emphasize how primeval the environment is? -- no tall buildings around to get in the way of the open sky, and no tall forests either, just flat earth all around. Makes it feel more pre-Modern.
IDK what the symbolic reason is, but it is a very striking look that pervades the movie.
Nothing like starting a round of cat-calling, or wolf-calling, on Halloween! Or rather, "The Saturday Before Halloween" cuz Millennials and Zoomers are too conformist to party on a week night / school night.
ReplyDeleteWhile cruising down the main drag through campus and part of downtown, I was naturally letting out wolf calls at regular intervals, to get everyone in the proper spirit. As well as blasting my Halloween mix CD out the windows.
Then it struck me to add a Halloween twist on an ol' favorite, shouting "I SMELL PUSSY!!!" but with a sexy girl cosplay inserted. Followed up with an AWOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
IIIII
SMELLLLLLLL
VAMMMMMPIRRRRE
PUSSYYYYYYYYY!!!!!
AWOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
IIIII
SMELLLLLLLL
WITCHESSSSS
PUSSYYYYYYYYY!!!!!
AWOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
IIIII
SMELLLLLLLL
WEREWOOOOOLF
PUSSYYYYYYYYY!!!!!
AWOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
The last one matched the wolf call best, for all those wolf girls out there. [devil horns emoji]
And yes, every single time, multiple groups of babes howled back at me! [tongue out emoji] They catcalled back to the standard AWOOOOO as well. They were in a howling mood!
It was dark, although with street lights, so I don't know if they could see it was a super-hot guy doing the wolf-calling or not, or maybe they can tell from my voice. Or maybe it wouldn't have mattered, and they were just excited to get hyped up for (The Saturday Before) Halloween.
In any case, who cares? It was awesome!
I screamed all sorts of other non-sexual things, too -- "Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!" at some chick was was dressed up as him, "It's-a me! Mario!" for some dude dressed up as him, and "Witness the thickness, awoooooo!!!" to some girl with a comical set of bulky throw pillows padding her tits and ass.
Whatever rouses the carnivalesque spirit from its slumber! Time to turn things upside-down -- for one night!
If you're in the Pacific Time Zone, you've still got time to try these out tonight! Tested and approved! Accept no imitations...
The trick is not to target the call to just one girl. I wasn't saying "vampire" to a specific girl dressed up as a vampire. Just shout it no matter who is around, and they'll get it -- somewhere in the crowd, there's vampire pussy, and this guy is being driven crazy by the smell of it!
ReplyDeleteEven in unmodified form, "I SMELL PUSSY!" doesn't single out any specific girl. Maybe that makes them feel less called-out and potentially uneasy for such a frankly sexual thing to shout out.
"Y-you mean... mine? Hers? Someone else's? Well, there's a lot of it out here, I guess he means we're all just so hot, he's being driven uncontrollably crazy by the whole crowd of us!"
Damn right, I am!
Thankfully, few people staring down at phones while out in public. I've noticed that creeping back somewhat in everyday life, but not on (The Saturday Before) Halloween at least. Frees up their eyes to rove and lock on to random hot guy who's already checking them out. I'm not a helicopter-parented Millennial or Zoomer, I can stare into your eyes properly, without awkwardness or tryhardness.
Again YMMV depending on what you look like, or what your expression is like. Nothing corny or tryhard, just an intense direct stare with an otherwise cool and collected face, like you're being driven crazy but are handling the pressure in the heat of the moment.
These were mostly college girls, maybe some other 20-somethings further from campus. Did not see too many of the 30-something and above crowd like there used to be in the 2010s, with ironic self-aware "costumes" like "the economy" or a pedophile Catholic priest with a dummy boy stuck to his crotch, etc.
Like the past few years, far fewer actual costumes, and more everyday outfits -- not even "going out for a special Saturday night," just relaxed-leg jeans in medium/light blue, and a crop top, and a center part, like any ol' day in the life of a Zoomer babe.
And basically no more gory / gross / disgusting / bOdY hOrRoR costumes, like zombies or ax murder victims, etc.
Pretty lowkey, like Zoomers as a whole, almost like what they would've dressed up as in the '50s... but with more cheeky-peeky to the bottoms. Mmmm.
Best to pick a really crowded slow-traffic area, and that shouldn't sound counter-intuitive. You're trying to savor the atmosphere, pump everyone up, and that means you need a big crowd nearby for maximum impact, and to be forced to drive slowly so you aren't just doing a rapid drive-by cat-call or stare.
ReplyDeleteWading through the crowd, not jet-skiing right over it.
And try to get stopped at the front of the red light line. If it's stale green or yellow -- stop! When you're at the front, now all the people crossing the crosswalk will hear your music, see your face, etc., so you can have even greater impact.
If the girls are young enough, they won't be able to control their emotions, so they'll get all smiley and giggly and exaggerated in their gait and arm movements, stroking their hair, sometimes looking right into the windshield, and so on.
"Damn, what good luck! The car we're crossing right in front of has a hot guy / cool guy / awesome music guy behind the wheel! :))))"
As long as you're at least one of those roles, they'll appreciate it. Guys will too, other than the hot guy part. Cool guy, awesome music guy -- guys are hyped for there to be a ringleader or instigator like that in a party atmosphere, similar to a DJ in a club.
Even if people still went to danceclubs (they don't), I would never get a DJ gig, though, cuz then you can't be dancing to it on the floor with everyone else. I could attract groupies either way -- but I'd rather it be for "omigosh, LOOK at that guy DANCING up there!" than "why the DJ kinda cute, tho???" Always better to showcase the physical / genetic side of you in a lek, which is what a club is.
Watched Nosferatu: The Vampyre by Herzog last night, and although made by Euros, it looks damn American -- or like Euro art from their peak several hundred years ago. No even lighting, no desaturated color palette, none of that flaccid stuff from their collapsing-empier period. Even most of their 19th-C stuff is so weak compared to a couple centuries before, it's crazy.
ReplyDeleteOne of the darkest movies ever, but with chiaroscuro contrast (both sculptural, and compositional), rich saturated colors and often contrasting dark and bright tones, lush verdant greens, menacing sublime natural landscapes straight out of German Romanticism, and a fairly pre-Gothic / Romanesque cozy labyrinthine crypt feel to Dracula's castle.
That would be Pernštejn Castle in the Czech Republic, founded in the late 1200s, but expanded upon until the early 1500s. You can see some post-Romanesque features, like some of the window bays are large -- but they're at tower height anyway, not near the ground. Arches are pointed, big deal. It still looks fairly Romanesque, maybe a transition between that and Gothic / Renaissance. It doesn't look like a palace with windows everywhere, or Gothic tracery / huge rose windows / etc.
The unique aspect to this telling of the Dracula tale is that he's not a charming seducer type -- he's a awkward gay weirdo or misfit. It lowers the menacing level of his character, but he still projects the "potential school shooter" level of threatening.
The overall environment, natural and built, is more threatening, menacing, and violent -- he seems to be merely caught up in the same environment, and being weak in character, giving into it and adapting to or imprinting on it, becoming a kind of serial killer as a result -- not as some inherent tendency he had, like the Dark Triad type that Dracula is often portrayed as.
It may sound like it wouldn't work to make Dracula a relatively passive and wimpy character, someone we pity instead of fear, but most of the lead-up to his appearance sets the actual tone of the threat. It's the cursed Carpathian Mountain region itself as the menacing villain, and Dracula is just one piece of it.
I wasn't disappointed, but then I love sublime natural landscapes and all that Romantic stuff. If you go into it expecting a focus on the environment and atmosphere and energy or vibes of a cursed geographical region as a whole, rather than a showdown with one particular antagonist, you should have no problem enjoying this shifting of focus away from the infamous title character.
And every still looks like it could have come from the first half of the 1600s, or first half of the 1800s -- very striking, and the best that the Euro empires' visual culture ever produced (aside from the earlier Venetian colorito Renaissance).
That ties into what I found lacking about Cruising, where the environment and people in it are shown to be just utterly disgusting and debased, that it's hard to sympathize with them when they're killed. They're not wholesome relatable types.
ReplyDeleteWell, neither is the awkward gay misfit portrayal of Dracula, but his environment isn't based on disgust, debasement, filth, contamination, spoiling purity, and so on. It really is a treacherous landscape, steep hills and mountains, massive sharp boulders to climb over, violent waterfalls, and buildings like the labyrinthine crypt of Dracula's castle. (That quality makes the castle cozy to someone who lives there full-time, but bewildering and menacing to an outsider like Harker.)
You just couldn't do "German Romantic landscape art", but set in the gay S&M clubs of New York in the '70s. It's not sublime, cuz there's no element of violence or danger -- only the risk of contamination, filth, disgusting substances, etc. Fear and disgust are not the same emotion, and disgust does not depend on the concept of violence like fear and terror does.
There is a decrepit feel to Dracula's castle, but it doesn't dwell on pushing your disgust buttons. The castle's decrepitude is just one aspect of the region being cursed as an entire environment, and all those other aspects are not about decay and rot, but things that threaten to physically harm or endanger you.
Also watched The Vampire Lovers (1970) for dinner tonight, probably the first Hammer horror movie I've seen. No wonder I was raving about vampire pussy while out and about tonight...
ReplyDeleteIt's not cheesey or campy, the most important thing about B-movies. It's played straight, with pretty good acting. Great lavish sets and a few menacing real locations. Fairly dark look, only occasional striking chiaroscuro lighting, but it is supposed to be more about a charismatic and seductive vampiress, not so much emphasis on the violence. So it doesn't have to look so striking for its purpose.
If she were more of a femme fatale type, it would need darker and more chiaroscuro lighting -- but she's mainly seducing other girls, and in a playful lighthearted and tender way, like "oh just us gals playing around..." She can't be openly sexually seductive, but playful and vulnerable to lure them in without arousing their suspicions at first, so that's why the lighting and sets look somewhat more suited to a lighthearted narrative.
They sure do emphasize her bustiness... are vampiresses supposed to be boob women rather than butt women? Elvira is, too.
IDK, guess it depends on what type of vampiress they are. Physical, athletic, corporeal kind -- has to be a butt woman. But depressive, clingy, a lil' bit crazy -- definitely a boob woman. So it depends on her being portrayed as a predator, stalker, or hunter (butt woman) or as a conniving, tricking lure-them-in-to-you type (boob woman).
Another not-so-vampiric aspect of Ingrid Pitt, who plays Carmilla, is her delicate upturned nose. Makes her look too cute and delicate to be the predator / stalker / hunter kind of vampire. Or even a witchy type who overwhelms the victim in a non-physical way, with mental / emotional energy or black magic vibes or whatever.
ReplyDeleteNot like Ania Pieroni, who is also 5'11, and more physically imposing than most women:
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2019/10/anna-khachiyan-and-mediterranean.html
But in the context of The Vampire Lovers, it's not a detriment to the role she's playing, since she has to lure in her mainly female targets, and girls find a girl with a delicate upturned nose non-threatening and cutesy and friendly and playful -- so what's the harm in getting close to her?
She also played the title role in Countess Dracula, which seems to be more of the standard predatory / hunter kind of vampire, and I don't think her nose would work so well in that role. But IDK without seeing it.
Several commenters on Nosferatu: The Vampyre seem to think that Lucy shows some kind of erotic attraction to Dracula, and experiences a sexual awakening of sorts when he finally bites her neck and drinks her blood.
ReplyDeleteThis is just projection from the awkward misfit types who tend to be critics, imagining that a young babe who's not only amazingly beautiful but also pure of heart would be strangely yet irresistibly drawn to hideous misfits like the critics themselves.
Sorry, dork, it doesn't work that way. Beauty and the beast relies on the beast being handsome in some way, albeit as an animal rather than a human being, or as a lovable big galoot type (like Ludo from Labyrinth). Scrawny pale hideous awkward misfits -- do not work in beauty-and-the-beast stories. And that is clearly not what is going on in this movie.
Rather, Lucy is sacrificing herself to redeem her husband, and save the broader community that has come under threat with Dracula's arrival. It's a bold, brave, courageous decision, and she faces it like Joan of Arc being burned at the stake.
Her facial expression does not include joy or pleasure, nor pain (for the kind of girl who makes a furrowed-brow rather than smiling expression during sex). It's simply shock or surprise -- aha! so this is what death feels like, this is what martyrdom feels like, I've done it, our side will be victorious, I actually defeated the monster!
For reference, it's similar to Helena's expression when she wakes up from the dead, in the music video for "Helena" by My Chemical Romance. Nothing distinctly sexual or erotic about it. Shock and surprise, maybe "astonishment" or "awe-struck" for a longer-lasting emotion than a fleeting jump scare, as Lucy confronts death as a martyr.
The atmospheric or environmental scale of the evil in Nosferatu: The Vampyre, as opposed to the individual scale, is also reflected in the nature of the changes to Vismar when Dracula arrives there from his cursed Carpathian homeland.
ReplyDeleteIt's not like a single individual, or a small cadre of those he converts to vampirism, is responsible for the terror, a la a serial killer like Jack the Ripper, a slasher movie villain, or most portrayals of Dracula (like Coppola's).
Instead of one or a few maniacs on the loose in the otherwise identical city, the entire environment becomes cursed -- hordes of rats roam everywhere, maybe carrying the plague / maybe not, crew-less ships careen straight into the walls of a canal and strip off entire branches from nearby trees, the townspeople begin living outdoors like bums, while also indulging in a danse macabre and final supper spectacles, and all other signs of life are drained out of the environment as a whole.
So rather than one individual transmitting a curse to another individual, by biting them, it's an entire community-level curse that travels from one geographic region to another, where it casts a pall upon the entire community.
It's even higher-scale than a "haunted house" plot -- that's higher than a cursed individual, but still confined to a single household. In this movie, it's the whole natural and constructed ecosystem that is afflicted by a curse -- and unlike a haunted house, it can transmit this curse to a distant ecosystem, by migration of its inhabitants.
This diminution of the role of the individual, and focus on the overwhelming expanse of the environment -- again, Dracula is merely a weak individual who succumbed to the awesome forces of his cursed environment -- reinforces the theme of the sublime.
That goes for the color palette as well -- the colors are varied, rich, and saturated, yet they are not beautiful and luscious on the whole. The saturated colors signal the overwhelming power, or vital force, that is contained within the natural and built environment -- but this power is used to threaten and harm its inhabitants, in a kind of curse, not sustain them, help them thrive, etc., as saturated colors would do in a landscape that was beautiful rather than sublime.
ReplyDeleteIt's a very welcom reprieve from the aesthetic of "cursed locations" where they're lifeless, monochrome, bleached of colors, and desaturated where they do have any color remaining, dessicated, ashen, ready to or already crumbling into dust that will be easily blown away by a light breeze.
That kind of environment is not actively threatening, as it contains no power or force of its own. It's desolate and inhospitable, but not alive enough to actively threaten and harm anyone.
Rich saturated colors work better for portrayals of the environment itself as an active menacing antagonist -- they're charged up with enough life-like energy to do us harm, unlike the barren dusty husk environments.
Note the extreme contrast in color saturation between the Carpathian environment, and Dracula himself, who is pale, monochrome, almost translucent, low-energy, shriveled into half-decomposition, truly corpse-like. Not the vivacious charismatic type of vampire who can actively threaten others.
ReplyDeleteHe's just another victim who was chewed up and spit out by this succubus of an environment, which has transferred the life-energy of its victims into sustaining its own very high levels of vigorous activity, color variation, and rich saturated levels of color.
Avoiding an individual predator is difficult enough -- imagine an entire environment acting as an apex predator! Sublime.
Since you are the blogger who came up with the theory that gay men / bisexual women = more immature development than the average person and lesbian women = more mature development than the average person, is there a male equivalent of lesbians in the sense of young men having the traits of a middle aged man?
ReplyDeleteMen don't have a menopausal phase like women do so I don't think there's an male equivalent of lesbianism. It's how wealthy old men are able to still have sex with young sugar babies despite the massive age gap.
DeleteAlso, about the topic of bisexuals being MPDGs and lesbians being the target of a MPDG, can gay men also be MPDGs? Or are they too childish to play the role of an MPDG?
ReplyDeleteIs trick-or-treating back from the dead? I've been covering the death of trick-or-treating and Halloween in general (and other American holidays, traditions, etc.) on this blog since the late 2000s.
ReplyDeleteAnd I noticed these trends even earlier, before I had a blog, back in high school, when I was too old to trick-or-treat myself and decided to play the host role instead. Played spooky music out the house windows, got dressed up myself, had it all planned out... and hardly anyone showed up, year after year. That was in the mid-to-late '90s. A major reversal of growing up in the '80s, and even the early '90s.
At first I attributed it to the cocooning phase of the crime-and-cocooning cycle, which I still believe is the main factor.
But there's clearly also the imperial collapse factor going on now as well, where our culture is being killed from within, as part of our hangover after our soaring high as an empire. All sorts of traditions, customs, holidays, etc. are being wiped out.
And as I said last year, and it remains fairly true this year, it's like the whole "spooky month" came and went with no spooky spirit to it. Hardly anyone participated in it, in any way.
And yet, I just experienced one of the most palpable signals that cocooning is reversing, something I predicted well over 10 years ago when I developed the crime-and-cocooning model. Based on the last cocooning and falling-crime period lasting about 25 years (1934 to 1958), I figured it'd last about that long this time. Since crime rates peaked in 1992, that meant the falling-crime and cocooning trend would last through about 2017 and reverse soon after that.
Crime rates did in fact explode in 2020, and lockdowns notwithstanding people are starting to let their guard down again. It goes in fits and starts -- while driving through campus recently, I did notice that having a phone out and staring down at it, even while walking around, is still the go-to public behavior for the majority of college students.
But I have noticed lots more kids hanging out unsupervised, and I mean elementary school kids, the ones who basically vanished from public spaces over the last 30 years. And the ones whose ubiquitous public presence -- always unsupervised -- was a defining feature of the outgoing / rising-crime phase of the cycle (the '60s, '70s, '80s, and early '90s).
That's right, reversal of cocooning report: trick-or-treaters came tonight, more than I've ever seen in my life as a host, going back to the mid-'90s.
ReplyDeleteThis is a more reliable sign of cocooning reversing than the occasional report you'll read about, "I don't know what you mean about Halloween being dead -- it's still alive where I live." That's nice, but it's been dying for 30 years, you're just lucky to live in one of the vestigial areas of its practice.
But when it is resurrected in a place where it had been dead for several decades, that's the reversal of cocooning. "It hasn't died *yet* in my area" is perfectly consistent with it dying in the nation as a whole. But "It just came back from the dead in my area" is not -- that means there's a huge shift in the opposite direction after a long time.
"But it's not October 31st" -- a group within our forested-village apartment complex decided to organize a trick-or-treat event on the 30th, the day before the kids will be fanning out into the neighborhoods nearby with single-family homes lining the streets. We don't live in a high-rise or 5-over-1 or anything like that, good ol' 2-storey buildings and sprawled out into a complex like God intended.
This is my 10th Halloween here, and nothing like this has ever happened. Certainly no trick-or-treaters on the 31st, but no organized event any other time either.
That's why I say this is a strong signal -- many adults had to organize this, not just one lone parent who doesn't want to helicopter-parent their kids. And many adults had to play the host role, for it to be a success.
I didn't walk around to see how many other places had the little sign on the door letting the kids know that place is hosting, but I could hear the kids going nuts from a distance, so I assume there were quite a few hosts, not just the other parents. I don't have kids, and I hosted.
Another good omen is that the flyer we got in the mail letting us know about this event, did not come with the standard set of libtard helicopter parent low-trust holding-everyone-hostage BS about, "Please do not include candy with peanuts, or at least have a separate bowl for peanut-containing candy so it doesn't contaminate the peanut-free bowl, for children with allergies" bla bla bla.
There wasn't much HR-speak on it at all -- sounded like a parent from the '80s had written it!
I've heard that in the good ol' days, kids who lived in apartment complexes or even dense high-rises still did trick-or-treating, just within their own building or neighboring buildings. So this was quite a blast from the past.
As for the event itself, I tallied up 16 trick-or-treaters in 7 separate groups. Ages ranged from pre-schoolers to high-schoolers, although it seemed like there was a gap for middle-schoolers.
ReplyDeleteCuz they're in a no-man's-land between the pre-school / elementary school group, where they can non-ironically indulge in trick-or-treating, and high schoolers, where they can get over the "baby" stage of trick-or-treat and do it in a cooler / older way while feeling secure. Middle schoolers aren't cool enough, but are also trying to distance themselves from kiddie behavior? IDK, but now that I look at my tally, there's a gap there for some reason.
Highly female, with 12 girls and only 4 boys.
Cuz girls are less glued to a video game, and are willing to leave the home for fun? Or cuz it involves a costume, and that's coded as feminine -- playing dress-up? IDK, but it wasn't like that at all in the '80s... if anything, the opposite, since we were roving bands of unsupervised hell-raisers. And wearing a costume was pretending to be something cool or badass or whatever, not playing dress-up, and not coded as feminine back then.
Costumes have moved away from anything scary / monsters / etc., whereas when I was a kid, we not only wanted to be something scary, we wanted to actually scare other people as part of the evening's carnivalesque hijinx and pranks.
Although it's hard to tell, cuz that was for boys, and there were so few boys to judge from tonight. The girls tonight were generally the same as back in the good ol' days, something cute or pretty yet fantastical, like a fairy or bumblebee. One of the high school girls was a little more daring, with a pirate-babe costume (pirate look, but with a mini-skirt).
Not a whole lot of branded costumes, although there were 2 minions, 1 pikachu, and maybe another 1 or 2 that I couldn't tell. And again, no Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Man, etc. More like stock characters and archetypes, a trend that's been going on for awhile.
And yes, 16 trick-or-treaters is an order of magnitude higher than I've seen in my life as a host, back nearly 30 years. It's always been single digits, when they showed up at all.
In a further sign of reversal of cocooning, this time the parents generally kept their distance from the host, with only 1 of the 7 groups having a parent standing right next to them, and another group where the kids showed up fast with seemingly no parents, but then the parents caught up and were close to them and me.
ReplyDeleteAnd even that 1 group with a parent standing near, did not have a parent physically holding onto the kid, as used to be common back in the early 2010s when I last saw trick-or-treaters.
Several groups had no supervision (the older ones), but several of the younger groups had parents -- but who stayed on the main path through this part of the complex, not walking up the sidewalk to my specific building, let alone stepping up onto the porch as well, to hover over their kids.
*That* is something I haven't seen since the mid-'90s, when helicopter parenting was just getting started. Every group back then had parents nearby, but remaining at the main path or street, allowing the kids to walk up the driveway / sidewalk / etc. themselves.
Now that helicopter parenting is reversing, they've already started to give their kids freer rein when they're taken out trick-or-treating.
The parents weren't aloof or unfriendly -- we exchanged smiles and "Happy Halloween!" and all that -- they were just letting their kids make part of the trip themselves.
We're still not to '80s levels of unsupervised kids, and high-trust, but we're at least heading in that direction for the first time in 30 years.
As for the ritual, almost all of them knew to say "trick or treat," except for one boy who I had to gently remind about "What do you say..." -- I'm a stickler about these rituals. That's how the traditions get passed down, they have a memorable and memorized set of utterances -- "till death do us part," "ashes to ashes," "trick or treat," and so on.
ReplyDeleteThere was one group of somewhat new immigrants, who looked / sounded Levantine, where the kids didn't know even after I prompted them. Their parents didn't grow up with this tradition back in their homeland, and the schools here are not teaching the children what to say, since they probably assume that no one goes trick-or-treating anyway -- and if they do, they know what to say. Not recent immigrants, though.
There's all sorts of American customs that aren't explicitly taught in school books, as I'm sure is true of their customs in their homeland.
I attribute this gap in their practice to condescending libtards who control the schools, immigrant assimilation orgs, etc. They believe all cultures are the same -- false -- and that they'll seamlessly integrate here -- also false. They *can* integrate, but "can" does not mean "will automatically".
The kids and parents all spoke English, mixed with a bit of Arabic, so they'd learned that much. Plus their hair, clothing, etc., did not mark them as wildly outside of American norms (no hijab, no burqa, etc.). It would have been simple for them to pick up the small extra bit of knowledge about the guests saying the words "trick or treat" in order for the host to hand over the treats.
But once you admit that, you admit that there are all sorts of customs that they'll have to be explicitly taught in order to fit in. And these NGO libtards just don't care about immigrants assimilating anymore.
If I were an immigrant trying my best to assimilate, I'd be pissed at these libtards for neglecting to tell me all the ins and outs of the major customs. "Why didn't you tell me my kid has to say the words 'trick or treat'? Now we looked like outsiders in our community, thank a lot, you condescending libtard!"
Not that I withheld the candy from them or took a stern tone of voice or anything. But that was the only group where the ritual wasn't fully completed, and presumably it'll be like that for other American rituals as well.
I'm sure at some point the kids will be explicitly taught about it, or more likely, learn from their peers. But it's a reminder of how hard it is to actually assimilate, and how their numbers must be minimized if that is to be successful. Tonight they were the only non-American group, and could easily observe their American peers and maybe picked it up tonight after visiting some other home. If half or more of the groups were foreigners, they'd be unlikely to pick it up, and would form an enclave that preserved their own homeland customs.
I wanna hear Anna and Dasha talk about their immigrant experiences with Halloween, and trick-or-treating! How they themselves experienced it, what their parents thought, etc.
ReplyDeleteIn middle school, one of my best friends had 1st-gen immigrant parents, and they didn't even know that trick-or-treating existed at all. So their first Halloween in America, when a group of kids showed up in masks holding out bags and asking for something, his mother thought they were vandals or thieves or something, freaked out, and chased them away with a broom or baseball bat or something, lol.
My cat didn't know how to handle the total reversal either. He'd never experienced this in his life! At first he was nervous, keeping to the stairs where he had a secure high-ground.
ReplyDeleteBut he's a very social and affectionate cat -- and curious, naturally -- so eventually he came down off the stairs and sat watching the goings-on while right inside the storm door, since tonight the main door was left open.
And sure enough, when the next group stepped onto the porch, I could hear a girl say while looking through the storm door window, "Oh wow, he's a BIIIGGG BOOOYYYY.... soooo fluffyyyy...."
Good thing I just brushed him beforehand, so he looked extra-handsome for his new fan-club members. ^_^
All in all, one of the most fulfilling experiences I've ever had. After nearly a lifetime of the traditions and rituals I grew up with fraying into pieces, finally one of them is rising from the grave.
ReplyDeleteAfter you receive one of these rituals, you're supposed to pass it on in your own turn when you're old enough. Well, I've been trying to since I was a high-schooler, but there was nobody receptive. That robs you of being part of a meaningful community -- you're neither receiving from it, cuz you're too old to play that role anyway, and you're not passing things along into it, cuz it's totally fragmented and nobody trusts anyone outside their nuclear family (if that).
That's why people drop everything they're doing on the rare occasion when they see a kid with a lemonade stand these days -- "Finally, I get to be a *customer* rather than seller, and help support this tradition getting passed on!"
Or Girl Scouts selling cookies, Boy Scouts selling Christmas trees, etc. By the time you're a young adult, you're too old to play the Scout role, but there are two sides to all of these traditions. You want to be on the side now that is supporting them, rather than being one of them and seeking others' support.
The more these rituals and traditions and institutions disappear, the fewer roles we have to play, the less rich and developed our self becomes, and the more ground-less / unmoored / anxious we get about our place in the community.
You only lose your egocentrism and solipsism by playing roles within a social unit beyond your own self.
It strikes me how whenever I see a streamer doing "character customization" in a simulator (not a video game), it's always about individual characteristics -- hairstyle, height, body shape, personality traits like bravery vs. cowardice, and so on and so forth.
It's never about specifying the roles the character plays -- son, father, husband, neighbor, cat-owner, middle manager, etc.
Even when the simulator lets you specify your class, it's always egocentric -- you're not a thief as part of a broad organization of thieves that you regularly interact with, it's just some skill you picked up, and have a personality that suits you to it.
As always, the exception is Glorious Nippon, like when Holo JP did GTA roleplay (a genre I normally don't like). They adopted roles, made social connections, had small-scale institutions that they fit into, and so on. It wasn't just a bunch of individuals doing their own thing.