Don’t know if I have the authority (I’d guess not), but I’d like invite the top draw, recent exiles of racist Twitter to comment here occasionally, as I miss their antiwoke witticisms.

Another idea I have is to come up with a historical civilizational index, based on beach bods. Collect sample pics by year, and show them to foreigners to rate.

Maybe, it is not a fair comparison, but I feel like if you look at the beaches near Tokyo, you can still see a few pretty girls. But, right now, it would be difficult to find them in many places in the West. What does Long Beach look like now?

Spain’s left-wing government has called for toys to go on strike against sexism:
https://spainsnews.com/toys-go-on-strike-to-end-sexism/

Spain’s existence alone should be enough evidence that this “based Catholicsm” meme is nonsense. This is a country where the last “heretic” was executed in the 1820s and which had a regime heavily favouring Catholicism a mere 50 years ago, and yet its left-wingers are among the craziest in Europe (and long have been).

And many thanks again to Ron Unz for having created a new Open thread, it’s very generous, and I think I can say for all regular commenters that we appreciate it very much!

Iran destroys more of Lebanon

The Nasrallah-shima blast where Iranian Hezbollah destroyed the Beirut Port was apparently not enough.

Now Iranian Hamas has also blown up part of Lebanon near the Port of Tyre: (1)

“Initial reports suggested the incident began with a fire in a diesel tanker before spreading to a nearby mosque controlled by Hamas,” Deutsche Welle and various agencies wrote.

“Footage shared by local media showed a number of small, bright red flashes above the port city, followed by a blast and the sound of glass shattering,” the report added.
…

“Hamas maintains a presence in a number of Palestinian camps in Lebanon,” said Al Jazeera. “The NNA said the army cordoned off the area, preventing people from entering or leaving the camp.”

How many more must die before Iran leaves Lebanon?

Is a partition inevitable?

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/huge-blast-rocks-refugee-camp-lebanon-large-casualties-feared

Additional footage from on the ground with secondaries. pic.twitter.com/8VzigwV3no

— Aurora Intel (@AuroraIntel) December 10, 2021

Reply to AP in the previous thread:

https://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-170/#comment-5062526

Wokism is the newest American Protestant religious revival. It very closely parallels American Protestantism. Catholics becoming woke is analogous to Catholics converting to charismatic Protestant faiths, as is occurring in Brazil.

Here a Protestant minister highlights the specific Protestant characteristics of Wokeness:

Catholic Liberation Theology predates the ‘Great Awokening’ by decades.

Latin American liberation theology met with approval in the United States, but its use of “Marxist concepts” led in the mid-1980s to an admonition by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). While stating that “in itself, the expression ‘theology of liberation’ is a thoroughly valid term”, the prefect Cardinal Ratzinger rejected certain forms of Latin American liberation theology for focusing on institutionalized or systemic sin and for identifying Catholic Church hierarchy in South America as members of the same privileged class that had long been oppressing indigenous populations from the arrival of Pizarro onward.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_theology

—-

As an antecedent, the pre-dissolution Jesuits (who held ultramontane views) in Latin America* and Asia showed that they were willing to de-Europeanise Christianity if it meant they could gain converts.

*Their governance over Amerindians in the Southern Cone was even praised by Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu.

—-

As for Protestantism causing the French Revolution, the root causes of dissatisfaction with the traditional Catholic order were rather similar in France, Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Latin America; which led to similar Anti-Clerical sentiments and movements – though the degree of success and violence varies by country and era.

It is fine to reject the anti-clericals, but simply blaming Protestantism without understanding their dissatisfaction with Integralism will merely lead to a Québécois-like Silent Revolution for any future neo-traditionalist régime.

—-

I have no antipathy towards Catholics, but Integralists like Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule are like a 21th century reincarnation of a 19th century ‘anti-papist’ pamphlet:

I want to suggest a principle of immigration priority that should, I hope, be broadly acceptable or at least intriguing for all right-thinking persons concerned that current American immigration policy is racist and classist, explicitly or implicitly, de jure or de facto. The principle is to give lexical priority to confirmed Catholics, all of whom will jump immediately to the head of the queue. Yes, some will convert in order to gain admission; this is a feature, not a bug.

This principle will disproportionately favor immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. (Note here that the priority is for actual Catholics, not for applicants from “historically Catholic countries”; relatively few Western Europeans will pass through the eye of the needle, and the Irish will be almost totally excluded). It will disproportionately favor the poor, and will draw no distinction between those seeking asylum based on a fear of persecution, and those fleeing “mere” economic hardship. It will in effect require opening the southern border of the United States, although immigration from Canada will rightly become a rare and difficult event, at least if we do not count a small subset of Quebecois.

I venture to say that any opposition to this proposal almost necessarily defends some alternative principle of immigration priority that allocates fewer spots to non-whites and to the poor, and is thus a troubling indicator of racism and classism infesting whoever voices that opposition. We must overcome the know-nothing bigotry of the past. As the superb blog Semiduplex observes, Catholics need to rethink the nation-state. We have come a long way, but we still have far to go — towards the eventual formation of the Empire of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and ultimately the world government required by natural law.

https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2019/07/a-principle-of-immigration-priority-.html

There are dummies in Japan now saying that part of the reason TFR is collapsing is that the state does not spend enough on education.

Seems obvious to me that, if you had two states with equal human capital, then the one that banned everything past two year colleges would handily out compete the other.

There are dummies in Japan now saying that part of the reason TFR is collapsing is that the state does not spend enough on education.

Seems obvious to me that, if you had two states with equal human capital, then the one that banned everything past two year colleges would handily out compete the other.

Something of an over simplification on your part.

A wealthly husband can support more children. Thus, you want enough Citizen 4-year+ graduates to fill those economic roles. Engineers & surgeons are necessary. You cannot get that with a 2 year degree.

Four year degrees in the arts that are potential bastions of “victim studies” (gender, ethnic, etc.) should be shutdown entirely. Science & business fields could be reviewed by the number of “Post Docs” stuck serving as underpaid adjunct lecturers.
____

Another improvement that would help — Students Loans should only be available based on future earning potential. “High Debt / Low Pay” blocks family formation. AOC’s loan forgiveness is a silly idea. Prevention is the sensible answer.

There is a concept problem with the idea of Student Loans. Some % of students inevitably start but never finish a degree program. This can also lead to the “High Debt / Low Pay” trap. Ideally people should save first and then go to University.

Public Universities with much lower tuition do well in the Southern U.S. However these also come with their own political complications.

PEACE 😇

but Integralists like Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule are like a 21th century reincarnation of a 19th century ‘anti-papist’ pamphlet:

I’m not sure if Vermeule isn’t trolling with his comments about his preferred immigration system. But if he’s serious, he’s obviously demented. Not just from a nationalist or racialist perspective, but more generally the idea that you could create a kind of Catholic theocracy in the US, that’s just delusional.

Regarding the general issue, I think a lot of Catholic conservatives really have an absurdly idealised view of the medieval and early modern Catholic church, as if there had been no reason for discontent at all. A lot of them also don’t seem to realize that the all-controlling rule of the papacy over the church (with its pretensions to power over secular rulers) was a creation of the later 11th century, which from the start had aroused intense criticism from contemporaries and led to extremely bitter conflicts. Arguably much of the reformation was destructive (and I don’t have much sympathy for something like Calvinism either), but the anti-Rome sentiment had very deep roots, for good reasons.

Spain’s existence alone should be enough evidence that this “based Catholicsm” meme is nonsense. This is a country where the last “heretic” was executed in the 1820s and which had a regime heavily favouring Catholicism a mere 50 years ago, and yet its left-wingers are among the craziest in Europe (and long have been).

I think the fact that Catholicism is either relatively based (or in those Integralist forms very based) isn’t nonsense in itself, but what is being highlighted here is that many people in nominally Catholic countries reject it or strongly rebel against it. Spain is a classic example because to establish the National Catholic state and Franco’s absolute rule they had to fight a hard civil war against half of the country, so that following the establishment of a liberal democratic system there has been a strong counter reaction.

Wokeness, in terms of intersectionality, was created in an Anglo-North American context, so it isn’t surprising that the most intersectional countries are the US and Canada, then Australia, New Zealand, UK and then that it has spread out into the rest of Europe from there.

Steelmanning their argument produces a different conclusion. “Education” spending means more and more free childcare. The apotheosis of which would be free year round boarding school, with everything included, up to the age of 21. Obviously that is not going to happen, but you can see how having more children would be easier and easier the closer the government got to offering that service.

but what is being highlighted here is that many people in nominally Catholic countries reject it or strongly rebel against it.

That’s true, but if so much of the population reacts against Catholic hegemony by embracing the most deranged kind of left-wing activism, it’s not really a system that has achieved its goal of inoculating people against left-wing fanaticism, as proponents of “based Catholicism” would claim.
Personally I think Catholicism vs Protestantism doesn’t explain all that much in today’s Western Europe, other factors seem to be more decisive.

Engineers & surgeons are necessary. You cannot get that with a 2 year degree.

Probably takes less than two minutes to flash the rom of a good surgical robot, albeit longer to build on the assembly line. A lot of diagnosis could be done with the aid of computer automation, better testing, and more listening to the patient.

And many thanks again to Ron Unz for having created a new Open thread, it’s very generous, and I think I can say for all regular commenters that we appreciate it very much!

It’s like having a rich uncle who gives you that BB gun for Christmas your parents wouldn’t ever fork out for.

Regarding the general issue, I think a lot of Catholic conservatives really have an absurdly idealised view of the medieval and early modern Catholic church.

Integralism is not mainly based on the analysis of a historically specific golden age, and deducing what political factors made it great, but on deduction of the appropriate kind of political regime from the eternal truths about human nature and the telos of human life it claims are found in the teaching of the Catholic Church, mostly based on the Bible, Aristotle and Plato with some later commentary and teaching which is in the same tradition (Aquinas, Bellarmine, some of the Popes and councils).

Imo it is more akin to what Evola is doing in his books about politics, how things should be based on transcendent Tradition, than something that has obvious practical applications at the moment. Using it seems to be mainly motivated by a desire to find alternatives to Liberalism, because the latter looks like it is crumbling.

Another horror idea: find a near double of Tony Blair, who I think must be the slimiest-looking person in history, and try to bridge the rest of the gap with make-up and acting. Turn him into a character actor, doing the sort of roles that made Peter Lorre, Christopher Lee, and Bela Lugosi famous.

Thanks. I have to admit I know very little about Integralism, especially its present-day proponents…do they ever get more specific about the kind of state they would like to construct? Do they have any historical models at all, or is it just a vague appeal to principles? I don’t think a return to throne and altar monarchism could be seen as plausible today by any but the most deluded, but what are the alternatives? Some kind of authoritarian corporatism with a special role for the Catholic church, like Franco tried to implement?

Seems to be mainly directed at subsidies for tertiary education. Japan is in the midst of its own student loan crisis, with similar horror stories of young women turning to prostitution because they can’t afford to pay the loans back on the paltry salary that they make.

Getting more young ladies into prostitution should probably be considered another benefit for the middle-aged who conspire to protect their positions by promoting credentialism.

I’m not sure if Vermeule isn’t trolling with his comments about his preferred immigration system. But if he’s serious, he’s obviously demented. Not just from a nationalist or racialist perspective, but more generally the idea that you could create a kind of Catholic theocracy in the US, that’s just delusional.

Granted, regarding immigration this is the only direct statement from Vermeule that I can find from skimming the internet, so it is hard to know how much he really means it – but as to his general legal philosophy he seems genuine.

Vermeule calls papal teaching on integralism “irreformable.” Whether it is or isn’t is not a question for me to take up, but it does indicate how seriously he takes this. At that same conference, Gladden Pappin, an integralist academic and close collaborator of Vermeule’s praised the Chinese Communist regime for having a ministry that clearly lays out what the spiritual goals of a society should be — this, by contrast to the US, which has no such office:

He thinks the US should have such an office, and that it should be the Catholic Church. How do we get to that place in a minority-Catholic country, in which the Catholic Church is hemorrhaging members? They don’t tell us.

Well, actually, Vermeule does tell us. Until such time as they can take over, he told the Notre Dame audience, integralist Catholics ought to march through the governing institutions, with the long-term goal of overturning liberalism

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/what-do-integralists-want-reactionary-catholicism/

Dreher includes some telling extracts from a book called Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy, by Thomas Crean and Alan Fimister. While I don’t know the authors and therefore how prominent they are, they make it quite clear they want a theocratic state whose officials are subject only to Church doctrine and the Pope.

—

Vermeule personally seems a bit tone-deaf:

Finally, unlike legal liberalism, common-good constitutionalism does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy, because it sees that law is parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits. Just authority in rulers can be exercised for the good of subjects, if necessary even against the subjects’ own perceptions of what is best for them—perceptions that may change over time anyway, as the law teaches, habituates, and re-forms them. Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/common-good-constitutionalism/609037/

—–

I am not unsympathetic to their perspective, in a general sense. Although American history as praxis has plenty of sources one can draw from as inspiration, in theory the American philosophical canon doesn’t really have any deep conservative sources in a continental European sense. So seeing classical liberals and libertarians constantly making ‘The Conservative Case for X’ while being unable to have a theoretical language for one’s frustrations and objections, especially after the failures of the last decades, can’t be very helpful.

But to durably hold power (and not merely capture it) they need some sort of engagement with the concerns of non-Catholic and secular Americans.

they make it quite clear they want a theocratic state whose officials are subject only to Church doctrine and the Pope.

These people are demented Larpers. Outside maybe of the papal state, such a thing never existed anywhere even in medieval Europe. They should remember what happened to popes like Gregory VII and Boniface VIII, when they overreached in their dealings with secular powers and tried subordinating the temporal power to the spiritual power.
I read the excerpts in Dreher’s article and I’m completely unsympathetic to the Integralist programme as outlined there. These people basically just want a Catholic version of Iran’s system, literally rule by priests. I guess it says something about the unhinged character of the American right that something as demented as this even gets a hearing, as a sort of over-compensating response to the dominant “anything goes” liberalism.

I’m sad I missed this debate with AP.

outlier among Catholic

The most politically “woke” country of Western Europe, is surely Republic of Ireland, which has been one of the most traditionally Catholic.

That’s not to say, Catholicism causes “wokeness” – there is obviously no correlation in Europe, as Italy is more “anti-Woke” politically.

That’s a guideline which any historian should say. That important information is in the small details and particular circumstances of how the religious sect matches other factors, in these countries.

accepting refugees (i.e, population

This is one of few topics of modern politics, where Jesus says clear and unambiguous things, almost written like an instruction guide – that you should help strangers, and that your neighbor is the person who is good to you, not the person who is related to you or part of your tribe.

Here Jesus is perhaps almost directly mappable to the refugee topic. In terms, of Jesus saying things like you should give your money to the poor – this can probably interpreted by both capitalists and socialists to support them in different ways. But when he says that your neighbor is not your tribemember, and to help them – this is difficult to re-interpret.

for trans rights:

Regardless that most people who are interested in this topic are secular.

New Testament has perhaps some quite “woke” concordance views in this areas, implies that gender is not important. On the other hand, Origen, who has castrated himself, not exactly a church father.

the pattern (among Europeans) has been Evangelical Protestants most right wing, then Catholics, and then mainline Protestants

Because America is a different country, some of the social markers will be different.

For example, in Northern Ireland, religious sects also partly indicate ethnic differences, as in Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, or Balkans. In Germany, the Catholic/Protestant might not indicate any ethnic differences. In USA, it might correlate to income levels. In e.g. Scotland, these correlation might be the opposite, than in USA, Brazil, etc.

This is all local detail. And of course, the interesting things in this topic, are in the small local details.

least woke countries remain Catholic and Orthodox ones. And not just backward ones in the Balkans, also Poland and Italy, even Czechia

Compared to Western Europe, Poland is recently communist, poor, low income, country with a low standard of living. You would expect their politics to be different, regardless of a religion.

Fact that Poland shares religion with many countries in Western Europe like Belgium or France, is probably the least relevant indicator for understanding their politics.

In terms of Catholicism in Poland, the interesting thing is that Poland is still quite a religious country, while slavic nationalities in Russia are the most secular or non-religious population in Europe, and central Europe countries like Czech Republic are also quite non-religious.

It’s something Polish historians would probably be able to answer only. But I wonder if it is partly because Catholicism is also a national marker in Poland, and Poland is country often under partial or total occupation.

This is, Catholicism is perhaps felt like a national characteristic in Poland, and Poles are often being threatened by occupation of the neighbours. In Germany, for comparison, you can see Catholicism/Protestantism doesn’t have any national connotation. Whereas in Ireland, Catholicism has a national connotation.

Germans self-shot with the Baerbock words and gas prices are skyrocketing thank to her dumb words about Nord-Stream 2.
This green bimbo seems to make error and error and errors again. She should learn to stay silent.

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/European-Natural-Gas-Prices-Soar-On-Supply-Shortage-Fears.html

Spain’s existence alone should be enough evidence that this “based Catholicsm” meme is nonsense.

Iberia as a whole is exceptionally progressive for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. If you look at polling data for Greece or Italy on questions like immigration or similar hotbutton issues you will find a much greater right-wing bloc. The Iberian peninsula is basically the sunnier, browner and slightly more corrupt version of Sweden.

I do not think this has much to do with Catholicism. It seems to be an outlier for domestic cultural reasons – certainly when compared to other Med countries. Sadly, I am not aware of a single person of Iberian origin on this blog, so we can’t get much insight into why this the case.

Germans self-shot with the Baerbock words and gas prices are skyrocketing thank to her dumb words about Nord-Stream 2.

I’ve been calling her the NATO Chatbot for this very reason. Just go to any NATO think-tank like the RAND corporation on virtually any topic and you will find zero daylight between her and what they say.

That said, I don’t think she’s stupid. She’s a US puppet, and knowingly one, for careerist reasons. That may be spineless, but it isn’t stupid per se. She knows what she is doing, and is very cynical about it.

Sholz is also not blameless here. He knows perfectly well what she represents. As I noted in the previous OT, selecting her is basically his way to try to reassure the Western establishment that his govt is going to play ball. Merkel was seen as too independent in her last years, and I was surprised how far she was willing to push the NS2 issue despite massive US pressure.

I don’t think Germany will cave now, but given its long track record of craven behaviour to America, nothing can sadly be off the table.

AaronB says:

Marx and to some extent Hegel, far from manifesting the genuine Christian principle, actually reverted to the exact principle of politics uber alles that Jesus

If you read a lot of New Testament, it’s clear that “World to Come” is not only an immaterial world, but the speakers are sometimes speaking like they expect it will soon include the material world, just as in Marx the revolution will re-orient both the material world, as well as spiritual world (although only indexed for man).

In the historical context of New Testament, Jews are in ambiguous waiting for the arrival of a Messianic age (in which there will be Justice and Peace), which can be very near.

Among the Jews of this time, the materiality of the world to come, is ambiguous, or there was not the extent of our (modern peoples’) separation between the spiritual and material worlds.

You can see this many times where the implication is not completely clear, if there will be material or immaterial rewards. For example, in Mark 10
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+10&version=NIV

Jesus is clearly saying that you should sell your material things and give to the poor. So this is a material claim, not less than in Marxism.

But in the end of his answer to Peter, he implies that material things, will be compensated with eternal life in the Messianic Age.

There is with Marx, a modern lowering of expectations, where the after the end of history, there will not be “eternal life”, but at best justice, equality, and a spiritual return of a non-alienated relation to society.

However, as in Hegel, Marxism returns some of the ambiguity in the distinction between the material and spiritual life. This is where the material and spiritual are believed to be intermixed. In Marx, you labor activity and spiritual activity become the same. In Hegel , Napoleon is not just an ordinary political leader, but also representative of the world spirit, etc.

to get to a middling 10 year plus specialist, who wants to spend 5 minutes on a problem and will break out the google in front of me.

My own experience with doctors is 50-50. The last time I went to a physician (~10 years ago) he asked me questions and typed into his laptop and it was obvious he was operating a diagnosis tree program. He touched my chest with a stethoscope for less than a minute and the only other person who made any actual contact with me was the nurse who attached a blood pressure sleeve to my arm and an oxygen meter to my finger.

If your problem isn’t on a main branch of that diagnosis tree I guess I don’t want to know what happens.

I guess it says something about the unhinged character of the American right that something as demented as this even gets a hearing,

You are confusing Left and Right (again).

Leftoids want liberal Catholic masters like Pope Francis. Or, possibly lesser forms of evil like the Church of England.

The idea of a “State Church” is anathema to Christian Populists. No one on the GOP MAGA side is demented enough to embrace a government controlled church.

PEACE 😇

But I wonder if it is partly because Catholicism is also a national marker

That’s the case for all of Eastern Europe, no? It’s similar with Serbs/ Albanians/Croats. Religion becomes an identity marker and on some level tied to ethnicity. This is ironic given the low levels of genuine religiosity in these countries.

Poland is the most rapidly secularising country in the world, but from what I’ve seen in polls, people still declare themselves overwhelmingly Catholic. The youth just stop going to church. Putin’s public displays of Orthodox piety is not matched by the church-avoiding youth. Yet public declarations of belonging to the Orthodox faith has skyrocketed under Putin – without a concomitant rise in church attendence except for older boomers.

This pattern repeats itself in country after country in Eastern Europe. A naïve analysis would conclude that Eastern Europe is far more traditional than the West, but when it comes to casual sex or abortion or church attendence this simply isn’t the case. Frankly, a lot of it comes across as sentimental and/or wishful thinking by ‘disapora nationalists’, projecting their fantasies onto societies that do not conform to their cherished ideals.

The de Maistre quote is particularly amusing given that the ‘Enrichissez-vous’ July Monarchy and the populist Napoleon III both lasted longer than the Bourbon Legitimists.

By contrast, the radicals, the extremists, the idealists, the critics, the dissenters, the activists of social change, have in my lifetime been far more realistic, and simultaneously more imaginative, about the capacious and flexible limits of political and legal change. The activists who pushed for same-sex marriage, even when Congress and dozens of states had passed statutes barring it – and who, after the Obergefell decision, turned on a dime to promoting transgenderism; the Trump voters who ignored the ironclad predictions of their betters; Chris Rufo, who has achieved the nearly unimaginable in the wars over critical race theory and public education — all these have had a sense of the possible, a breadth of vision, that the myopic realist can only imagine possessing.

In many of these cases, furthermore, the activists — while of course claiming to represent the real will of the people, or the best of our national ideals, or what have you — formed a tiny minority of the population, even a tiny minority of the intellectual class. One of the standard mistakes underpinning the futility trope is to imagine that the political views and preferences of national majorities set the terms of political action. In fact, on most (many? all?) issues national majorities may well have no real views or preferences. At a minimum, as our political history since 1989 testifies over and over, some unpredictable number of the public’s seemingly fixed views are weakly held and malleable from above, susceptible to elite influence, and quick to acquiesce to changes in law or political practice put into place by tiny minorities with access to the crucial levers of power. De Maistre once said that despite the events of 1789 and after, “four or five men can give France a king.” The mechanisms underpinning this observation have been worked out as a major theme of political science and public-choice economics since Mancur Olson’s work on the logic of collective action. Committed minorities have often been able to set the terms of political life for large, relatively apathetic majorities, especially in a system like our own that offers many points of access for minority influence, such as the courts.

https://postliberalorder.substack.com/p/it-cant-happen-or-the-poverty-of

It’s similar with Serbs/ Albanians/Croats.

I get your point about Serbs and Croats, but do Albanians really pretend to be that religious? They’re not all even nominally Muslim, there’s a non-trivial Christian minority, and many godless. Also you’ve got things like national hero Skanderbeg (after whom the Waffen-SS division was named) who fought the Ottomans, which to me would at least indicate a not entirely uncomplicated attitude towards the Ottoman era and its religious imprint.
I’ve got no personal experience of the Balkans, but to me it’s always seemed Albanians care primarily about Albanianness, and don’t even pretend otherwise. Even our Serb commenters, who loathed them and came up with bizarre theories about their origin in the Caucasus, usually didn’t accuse Albanians of being jihadis, just of being violent and tribal people with criminal inclinations.

I’m astonished. German Atlanticists seems so subservient that they are even prone to sacrifice the German world-class industry in the altar of the Atlanticist ideology. They are mongrelizing and destroying the foundation of their formerly marvelous country.
The most bizarre thing is that Russians are profiting by “not opening” NS2.

I actually tend to agree that committed minorities often have an outsized influence. Still, it’s quite the reach to get from that to the idea that integralists could remould the US according to their preferences, when their project has no roots at all in US history (much less than wokeness imo) and runs totally counter to the hegemonic culture.
And I have to say on a personal level I just find Vermeule repellent from the little I’ve read. Typical lawyer scum, with his idea that his vision could be implemented by taking over the judicial system, like gay marriage advocates did. Not even a hint of heroic sentiment.

do Albanians really pretend to be that religious?

Sample of one, but the only self-professed muslim I have known who insisted that there was nothing wrong with eating pork was an Albanian gypsy classmate of mine. Though if I remember correctly he was circumcised and held to ramadan.

Interesting how it seems some of the stories of some of these prehistoric migrations seem to be being rewritten now in 2021 (Japan and England), almost like the earlier, much publicized studies were very slipshod. Or maybe it is that they have more skeletons now?

I recall some few archaeologists giving vague cautions about early England. But nothing to make me believe that there was a 50% replacement around 1000-875 BC. I wonder what Reich wrote? I tried to read his book, but couldn’t get far into it, as I had seen that stuff summarized more concisely two or three times, and so it seemed very cliched to me.

Sadly, I am not aware of a single person of Iberian origin on this blog

I am aware of one who was born on the Iberian side of the Basque Country. And he actually tried to provide some insights on that issue for the Basque case in the previous OT but I doubt he will be willing to repeat himself here for your honor’s convenience. Not all of them extrapolated to the rest of Iberia anyway.

Did you mean this one by whyvert? or related to him,

Here is the future –
1. Europe will be black
2. The US will be mixed like Brazil
3. India will face an influx from Ghana and Nigeria – it will get Africanized in part
4. Arab countries will turn black first slowly, then rapidly

— Revive the vedic age (@bharatxyz) November 20, 2021

The world’s gone insane man, we worship nogs & vaccines.

Even on Unz like jim’s blog already showed women’s right = low tfr, they still look for other solutions.

ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ

AFAIK the French ones want to recreate a kind of decentralised monarchy based on the Action Francaise tradition. I haven’t paid much attention to the US ones because I thought at this stage they are probably more about putting out powerful takes and trolling people like Dreher.

The book by Fr. Thomas Crean and Alan Fimister ‘Integralism’ is a good introduction to the theory, but I read it as being about core political theory and philosophy, rather than something setting out a contemporary political program. I found it informative for understanding Catholic historic political philosophy, and also things like Fascist ideology, the Portuguese and pre-war French right etc. I suspect Liberal Catholics didn’t like anyone drawing attention to this older Catholic theory and so didn’t like the book, even though much of the content would have been banal in the context of 1940s or 50s Catholicism.

In terms of real world regimes Salazar seems to be a reference, but this kind of thing is still mainly cultural and ideological at this time and appears to be a small trend even within Catholicism (like Bronze Age Pervert for Catholics) so they are probably still thinking about things like this.

From what I know of Franco, he ruled as a kind of absolute monarch ‘by the grace of God’ and non-Catholics didn’t have full citizens rights, Spanish bishops as a body led the arguments against recognising freedom of religious belief at the 2nd Vatican council in the early 60s for example. But this was unusual in that the regime came out of a major civil war.

All Bibles are the works of fallible mankind. Translations of Edits of Translations.

-A- At best, they are genuine attempts to grasp the glory of The Father & The Son.
-B- At worst, they can be outright manipulation.
-C- Most often, they are between these two extremes.

The King James Bible is an example of Case C. Part of the edit was an intentional tilt to make the work more friendly to the monarchy.

Part of serious Protestant belief is that all parts of the various Bibles are not created equal. How to weight portions of texts from different sources is difficult. Blindly accepting a single version as perfect? That is the first step towards recreating the “Paid Indulgences” of the failed Catholic Church from ~500 AD.
___

Also, consider KJV 1 is circa 1611, KJV 2 from 1769. Over reading a document that is 200-400 years old is perilous.

Modern migration involving powered ships and even faster airplanes undercuts the assumptions of the ancient text. KJV verse applies to a basically similar “stranger” from the next town. There is no reason to believe it applies to unassimilable, violent Jihadists from another continent.

A KJV 3 is badly over due. However, there is not enough cohesion at this point to update the document to exclude things that made sense in historical context but are crazy now. To paraphrase, “The Bible is Not a Suicide Pact for Christianity”

PEACE 😇

Think it was back further. Maybe, in reply to someone? (Birth Gauge?)

IIRC, Nemets believes that Ukraine will turn black and Indian, unless it rejoins the Russian sphere.

BTW, I am wondering whether the story about prehistoric India will be rewritten too, based on DNA. Caste mysteriously evolved 1000 years, after PIE invasion? Possible, but, maybe, a second group invaded, back then. (Still PIE?)

I remember reading Dreher’s article, it is a bit weasly, given that Britain until the Catholic emancipation in the 1830s would probably count as a Protestant Integralist regime and in certain ways still is (the unwritten constitution is supposed to be the Protestant version of ‘Natural Law’ and the queen still reigns based on it), Franco’s Spain was an Integralist regime, there was one in the Dominican Republic IIRC and so on.

Franco’s Spain was an Integralist regime

Franco certainly was a pretty devout Catholic and gave the church a highly privileged position in his regime, but he didn’t take orders from bishops and priests. And near the end of his life he actually seems to have developed somewhat bitter feelings about much of the clergy, since he felt they weren’t grateful enough for everything he had done for the Church (that’s from Stanley Payne’s Franco biography). So I’m not sure I would classify his regime as integralist in the sense Vermeule and others like him seem to be advocating. Franco also was a Spanish nationalist who dreamt of turning Spain into a great power again, so I doubt he’d been thrilled about having Spain subsumed in a kind of world government under the pope.
I’ll be honest, for me it’s primarily an issue of national sovereignty. I have no interest in a regime where priests would have unquestioned authority and could order the secular power around. Especially not given the Catholic Church’s support for mass immigration, which for me is the central issue.
Thanks for your comments about the book by Crean and Fimister. I think I need to look at it myself some time, though I suspect it will enrage me.

Or we could just sit back and let the breeders breed.

that BB gun for Christmas your parents wouldn’t ever fork out for.

It wasn’t the money. They didn’t want you to shoot your eye out.

This is where the material and spiritual are believed to be intermixed.

Yeah, AaronB, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

My own experience with doctors is 50-50. The last time I went to a physician (~10 years ago) he asked me questions and typed into his laptop and it was obvious he was operating a diagnosis tree program

I have a very good relationship with my long term GP doctor. We have headed off a significant amount of unnecessary work by documenting some personal body chemistry that is well away from standard.

A 2-year tech and BigPharma computer program would have called for pharmaceutical intervention that would have made things worse. Odds are that error would have been so damaging I would have needed liver transplant surgery.

How to protect the medical profession from BigPharma is not a straight line connection to years of education. However, actual understanding is the best counter to computer error.

PEACE 😇

Nonsense. Isreal blew up the fertilizer storage a year or two back and some fairly credible evidence was posted that that was a low-yield nuke. Anything that happens to Lebanon is Israeli-led. Showing pictures of an explosion is evidence Iran did it? You’re hilarious, 123. Israel doesn’t have the courage to go into Lebanon, so they use terror tactics. This is more of the same. But I have an open mind. Where did the “evidence” come from? Because Iran has no reason to bomb Lebanon, Israel, many.

ROTFLMAO

A nuke, even a tiny one, would have left radioactive fallout. No fallout exists. It is proven fact that Khamenei is 100% responsible for the massive (but non-nuclear) Nasrallah-shima blast.

Please keep up your absurd and easily debunked fiction. The comic relief is appreciated.

PEACE 😇

Franco certainly was a pretty devout Catholic and gave the church a highly privileged position in his regime, but he didn’t take orders from bishops and priests. And near the end of his life he actually seems to have developed somewhat bitter feelings about much of the clergy, since he felt they weren’t grateful enough for everything he had done for the Church (that’s from Stanley Payne’s Franco biography).

This was because of the 2nd Vatican council in the 60s and the liberalisation of the Church, it moved away from the kind of teachings Franco and Salazar were familiar with, which were those set out in the Integralism book, towards the more democratic ones which the Church puts forwards now.

The way I read it it is more about the Church teaching being a kind of moral or philosophical framework, like a constitution or ideology, than priests being able to control the temporal power politically, but it is understandable that it won’t be appealing for a non-Catholic audience (apparently there are now people working on a Protestant version of Integralism).

That Integralism book has also been criticised (again, by more liberal Catholics) for repeating ‘reactionary’ or old fashioned teachings about immigration like these (this is from Aquinas):

A city which must engage in much trade in order to supply its needs also has to put up with the continuous presence of foreigners. But intercourse with foreigners, according to Aristotle’s Politics, is particularly harmful to civic customs. For it is inevitable that strangers, brought up under other laws and customs, will in many cases act as the citizens are not wont to act and thus, since the citizens are drawn by their example to act likewise, their own civic life is upset.

As an antecedent, the pre-dissolution Jesuits (who held ultramontane views) in Latin America* and Asia showed that they were willing to de-Europeanise Christianity if it meant they could gain converts.

Jesuit efforts in Latin America certainly wasn’t de-Europeanisation!

The Jesuits brilliantly taught the natives of South America to build beautiful baroque churches in the jungles and savannahs:


They also taught the previously savage natives to play beautiful baroque music:

https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/paraguay604/music.html

“These missions, known as reducciones, became home and refuge to thousands of Paraguay’s Guarani Indians. The missionaries not only provided shelter but also taught the Guarani people to play European music and make their own instruments, including the cello, harp and violin. Each mission had a church, an orchestra, several artisans’ shops, and schools of music and painting.”

The Natives were even composing such music!

An example:

This was essentially the opposite of wokeness, which is now trying to nullify Western civilization, even to the point of introducing pre-Christian demon-“gods” to Mexican-American children.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/sep/3/parents-sue-california-over-mandated-chants-aztec-/

“A group of parents in California sued the State Board of Education Friday over a proposed new “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” (ESMC) that would have public school students chanting affirmations to Aztec gods and invoking an ancient Nigerian Yoruba religious prayer.”

The Jesuits also taught the techniques of skillful warfare, enabling them to defeat would-be Portuguese slave raiders.

These Jesuit missions were the best of European efforts outside Europe, saving souls, protecting natives from slavery, and bringing beauty into the world.

Compare the Jesuit activities to those of the Calvinists in North America who were living dour lives and mostly slaughtering the natives.

Catholic Liberation Theology predates the ‘Great Awokening’ by decades.

This, also not good, is a different creature from wokeness.

This was because of the 2nd Vatican council in the 60s and the liberalisation of the Church, it moved away from the kind of teachings Franco and Salazar were familiar with

Yes, it was in the context of clergy voicing pro-democracy sentiments iirc.

The way I read it it is more about the Church teaching being a kind of moral or philosophical framework, like a constitution or ideology, than priests being able to control the temporal power politically

You’re probably right, but the experience of medieval and early modern Europe imo clearly indicates that even in societies which understood themselves as fundamentally Christian there always was great potential for friction and conflict between spiritual and temporal power, with much resentment among laymen against the privileges and immunities of the clergy (let alone such pretensions as the right to depose secular rulers which some medieval popes claimed). I need to read the book, to see if they adress this issue in any way.
(on that note, I downloaded the book, and noticed that in the index it says about the two swords that both belong to St Peter. This was contested in the conflicts between the medieval papacy and the emperor/other secular rulers. The issue is whethe secular power is merely derived from the papacy with its power of the keys, or has an existence of its own – after all the empire existed before the papacy and in the minds of many medieval Christians had its own role in the salvational scheme. So these issues were a source of conflict even in medieval Christendom).

That Integralism book has also been criticised (again, by more liberal Catholics) for repeating ‘reactionary’ or old fashioned teachings about immigration like these

A presumably racialist reviewer on Amazon criticized it for being pro-immigration. I looked it up, and indeed in chapter 10 there’s an argument that “the temporal commonwealth has a duty to harbour the outcast and must offer refuge according to its capacity to those in mortal need or fleeing unjust persecution”. Now the question is what does mortal need mean? The footnote refers to an Apostolic Constitution by Pius XII from 1952, which apparently lists as possible reasons “revolutions in their own countries” (I presume mostly a reference to the Eastern bloc at the time), but also “unemployment or hunger”. So even while there are some qualifying statements, this can still be construed as reasonably close to the position of today’s Catholic church that there’s a duty for richer states to accept migrants for purely economic reasons. This is a recipe for national suicide given the demographic realities of the 21st century.
But I really need to read the book, it looks interesting (don’t know when I’ll get around to it though).

It’s like having a rich uncle who gives you that BB gun for Christmas your parents wouldn’t ever fork out for.

It wasn’t the money. They didn’t want you to shoot your eye out.

What about giving a child a rifle? (File #21, Dragnet_49-12-22_030_22_Rifle_for_Christmas.mp3)

From The Untold Truth Of Dragnet [Grunge, September 2021]:

However, one of the show’s most controversial stories, first aired on radio in 1949 and then filmed for TV in 1952, was “.22 Rifle for Christmas.” In this holiday episode, Joe Friday receives a call about a missing 9-year-old boy named Stanley Johnstone. […]

Leftoid Iffen was making an oblique reference to “A Christmas Story”

As a low-IQ, #NeverTrump yahoo he is doing the best he can with staggeringly limited mental capabilities.

I feel pity for him. I would help Iffen if I could but….

PEACE 😇

IIRC, they also had an episode where a little Mexican boy “steals” baby Jesus from a nativity scene, just because he promised to take him for a ride in his new wagon.

The most politically “woke” country in Western Europe is the Republic of Ireland

Yes, but, Dim, have you been around the Irish? This is because they are so innocent and sweet. They are like children who want to be everybody’s friend and be kind and gracious to everybody. They don’t know how to say No. That’s because they are completely unprotected and they don’t have those hard*ss Germanic instincts. And because their tradition is one of the oldest in Northern Europe that stems from the likes of Pelagius.

Their wokeness is also quite recent, I’m not sure they had all the cray that the Dutch and Germans started having back in the 1980s.

Poland is the most rapidly secularising country in the world, but from what I’ve seen in polls, people still declare themselves overwhelmingly Catholic. The youth just stop going to church.

It is rapidly secularizing from a very high base. There is much room to secularize. A country that is already completely secular can’t secularize much.

https://www.pewforum.org/2018/06/13/young-adults-around-the-world-are-less-religious-by-several-measures/

55% of Poles over 40 attend church every week. 26% of Poles under 40 attend church every week. 1 in 4 going to church every week is still a lot compared to other countries. Young Poles go to church weekly at a rate that is 4 times greater than the general Swedish population.

Overall Polish rate is higher than any Western nation. Even the Polish under 40 rate (26%) is higher than the overall rate anywhere in Europe.

Also, self-identification as Christians has declined very slightly among young Poles – 6% lower than among older Poles.

Eastern Europe is far more traditional than the West, but when it comes to casual sex or abortion or church attendence this simply isn’t the case.

Weekly Church attendance is much higher among Poles than among Western Europeans (see above).

Abortion is basically illegal in Poland.

Poland has low rates of divorce and children being born out of wedlock:

I posted this map before on the massive open thread with about 1000 posts, so you may have missed it:

The old territory of the Second Polish Republic, encompassing most of Poland plus western Ukraine and western Belarus, is a sort of island of low out-of-wedlock births.

a lot of it comes across as sentimental and/or wishful thinking by ‘disapora nationalists’

The statistics show that Eastern European countries, particularly Poland, are a lot more socially conservative (though the trend is bad) than are western ones so it is not simply wishful thinking.

Inger Støjberg: Denmark’s ex-immigration minister convicted over illegal asylum seeker policy:

It’s not ideology. It is subservience to the real ruler of Europe: The United States of America.

I am not exaggerating when I call Europe nothing but a mere collection of puppet states of the US. Germany is by far the most powerful country in the EU and even they have been struggling enormously to get through a common-sense policy like the NS2. What hope is there for less powerful countries? I think Germans will ultimately get it through but this kind of brutal uphill battle for a core national strategic interest is insane.

This also has implications in the China vs America debates. Most non-Europeans underestimate just to what extent Europe is craven to US diktat. It goes beyond alliances and into the realm of colonialism. China has nothing comparable in size or nature – and never will.

55% of Poles over 40 attend church every week. 26% of Poles under 40 attend church every week. 1 in 4 going to church every week is still a lot compared to other countries. Young Poles go to church weekly at a rate that is 4 times greater than the general Swedish population.

Absolutely, but the trend is undeniable. I think Poland is following the same path as Ireland. 30 years ago many spoke of Irish religious tendencies in similar vein, then they rapidly secularised. These things happen blazingly fast and it’s already under way.

Also, self-identification as Christians has declined very slightly among young Poles – 6% lower than among older Poles.

This is my argument. Public identification in Eastern Europe with religion typically has more to do with ethnicity and national belonging than tracking closely to actual religious observance and participation. Poland is no different in this regard.

Abortion is basically illegal in Poland.

But widespread. Look at what people do, not what their law says.

children being born out of wedlock

Fair point, but rising very quickly. Let’s linger on your graph a little bit.

As I noted in previous comments, notice the huge gap between Iberia and Greece+Italy. What accounts for this? Anyone hazards a guess?

The statistics show that Eastern European countries, particularly Poland, are a lot more socially conservative (though the trend is bad) than are western ones so it is not simply wishful thinking.

In terms of pre-marital sex, abortion (illegal ones counted) and church attendence for the youth, the differences between East and West are vastly overblown. In terms of attitudes on race and immigration, I’d say most of Eastern Europe is where the USA was in the early 1990s. Basically moderately liberal with small-c conservative leanings.

I think there will be full social convergence within the next 20-30 years at the latest between the EU’s western and eastern wings.

Those poor German industrialists have been forewarned or straightout colluded and bought needed quantities of gas in advance at low prices in the summer and pumped it to their own storages, so it’s nothing but crocodile tears regarding their cruel fate. Also there is no better cure from excess gazpromophilia than absurd gas prices as it makes instalation of all other power sources way more profitable too, e.g. Finland new nuclear station will be profitable despite neverending delays 😉

Your photos remind me of churches and ruins that I’ve seen in Costa Rica:

Exterior of the ruins of the Santiago Apostol church in Cartago, Costa Rica.

Basilica de Nuestra Senora de los Angeles in Cartago in Costa Rica.

This neo-gothic masterpiece is located in Coronado near San Jose about a 10 minute walk from where my friend lives. Costa Rica is dotted with many spectacular Roman Catholic churches, not all look alike!

What is being discussed at a similar forum in Russia
“..Gas in Europe is confidently trading for more than 1500..”

One would think that a bot, even a beta version, would be able to find the definition of a NeverTrumper.

The Jesuits also taught the techniques of skillful warfare, enabling them to defeat would-be Portuguese slave raiders.

These Jesuit missions were the best of European efforts outside Europe, saving souls, protecting natives from slavery, and bringing beauty into the world.

Yet they managed to alienate the actual Europeans living there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Comuneros_(Paraguay)

Compare the Jesuit activities to those of the Calvinists in North America who were living dour lives and mostly slaughtering the natives.

Considering that the arrival of the very religious Conquistadors was also initiated with ‘mostly slaughtering the natives’, it feels like a moot point.

This, also not good, is a different creature from wokeness.

Let us just take the Pope’s word for it, or he also a secret Protestant agent?

But it seems unlikely that the Pope would not have been completely unaware of the gift’s meaning. The [hammer and sickle] crucifix was modelled on one owned by Luís Espinal, a Jesuit priest, journalist and leftwing activist who was murdered by paramilitaries in 1980, when Bolivia was under a dictatorship.

On Wednesday night, Francis halted his popemobile from the airport to pray at the site where Espinal’s body was found.

“Dear sisters and brothers. I stopped here to greet you and above all to remember. To remember a brother, our brother, a victim of interests who did not want him to fight for the freedom of Bolivia,” the pope said on the scheduled stop.

He also reportedly received a medal, bearing a hammer and sickle, from Morales that was issued in memory of Espinal’s death.

Lombardi said he personally wasn’t offended by Morales’ gift. “You can dispute the significance and use of the symbol now, but the origin is from Espinal and the sense of it was about an open dialogue, not about a specific ideology,” Lombardi said.

The Argentinian pope has been criticised in some quarters for not doing more to protect leftwing priests during the military dictatorship in his homeland. But since becoming pope in 2013, he has taken steps to reconcile the Vatican with progressive adherents of Liberation Theology, who argue that the Church should agitate for social and political change.

In Bolivia, Morales – a former coca farmer from an indigenous community – previously upset many in the local clergy by declaring the country secular in a new constitution. However, he has embraced the pope and praised him for supporting poor and marginalised groups.

Francis has used this trip to Latin America emphasize the problems faced by indigenous communities and to warn against “all totalitarian, ideological or sectarian schemes”.

On Thursday he urged the downtrodden to change the world economic order, denouncing a “new colonialism” by agencies that impose austerity programmes and calling for the poor to have the “sacred rights” of labor, lodging and land.

In one of the longest, most passionate and sweeping speeches of his pontificate, the Argentine-born pope also asked forgiveness for the sins committed by the Roman Catholic Church in its treatment of native Americans during what he called the “so-called conquest of America”.

Quoting a fourth century bishop, he called the unfettered pursuit of money “the dung of the devil,” and said poor countries should not be reduced to being providers of raw material and cheap labour for developed countries.

Repeating some of the themes of his landmark encyclical “Laudato Si” on the environment last month, Francis said time was running out to save the planet from perhaps irreversible harm to the ecosystem.

“Let us not be afraid to say it: we want change, real change, structural change,” the pope said, decrying a system that “has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature.“

“This system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, laborers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable The Earth itself – our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say – also finds it intolerable,” he said in an hour-long speech that was interrupted by applause and cheering dozens of times.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/09/bolivia-communist-crucifix-gift-pope-francis?espv=1

Granted Bolivian paganism is more like Gaia than Mexican Satanism, but in both cases it is a native version of wokeism that has nothing do with Protestant interference.

The unique belief system enjoyed renewed attention and celebration during Morales’ nearly 14-year-presidency, a time when he routinely performed Pachamama acts at official government ceremonies. An animated film called Pachamama debuted last year on Netflix, telling the story of 10-year-old Andean boy during the time of the Spanish conquest of Bolivia.

The fusion of Roman Catholic and indigenous traditions goes on display each year in the early part of summer during a celebration called the feast of the Great Power in La Paz. Dancers wearing elaborate and colorful costumes fill the streets representing Andean folklore in celebration of a 17th century painting of Jesus Christ with native features .

The patron saint to Bolivia, the Virgen of Copacabana, was discovered and sculpted by an indigenous after the Spanish arrive. Because of that, to some it’s a visual representation of the Pachamama even though it’s a Catholic saint.

The blend of Christian and ancestral beliefs started by indigenous Bolivians who camouflaged their beliefs under Catholic ones, anthropologists say, but it has become more commonplace in recent history to publicly embrace both, especially during Morales’ presidency. Called religious syncretism, it is recognized by Bolivia’s constitution under the term “Andean cosmovision,” and it is widely practiced by many in the mostly indigenous South American country.

Morales upset some Catholics because he rewrote the constitution in 2009, stripping special recognition given to the Roman Catholic church. But local Bolivian Catholic priests don’t seem to harbor any ill-will, instead reflecting the symbiotic relationship that exists at the pew level in Bolivia.

“Our mission today is to avoid confrontation and understand the Aymara/Inca culture,” said Friar Abelino Yeguaori, from inside the Basilica of Our Lady of Copacabana on the shores of Lake Titicaca. “In the church in Bolivia there is a consensus not to destroy, but to try and internalize the people’s faith.”

https://apnews.com/article/south-america-lifestyle-lake-titicaca-bolivia-latin-america-32b018bd433d728ba1d29a7bebc6289f

So even while there are some qualifying statements, this can still be construed as reasonably close to the position of today’s Catholic church that there’s a duty for richer states to accept migrants for purely economic reasons. This is a recipe for national suicide given the demographic realities of the 21st century.

With those reservations and what is written on p.207 and in note 80 I think this has always been the Catholic Church’s position on migration. But in that context I read mortal need to mean actual mortal need; in danger of death, so the economic reasons would be starvation or malnutrition of the migrants (I think the way it would be understood in the 1940s, because it was a more common situation). I suspect this line of argument would also be used to justify things like the founding of the USA in general.

As I said I don’t think the book is setting out a practical political program, it’s aimed at describing an alternative to the political philosophy and ideology of Liberalism. This is why it starts from first principles; what is politics, what is the purpose of politics and political systems etc.

It was pretty easy for the ordinary person to relate to Jesus’ life even in living memory. Especially for children, who ran around throwing rocks at things, reading books and doing stuff you find in the Bible. But technology has changed the texture of this immeasurably and seemingly exponentially.

What is leprosy? What is going on a lake? Looking after sheep? What are sheep? How many TikTok followers did Jesus have? Why was Mary having a kid as teenager? Didn’t she have school or contraception? What about David? He threw a stone at someone? Did he use a Spotfiy playing to send Saul to sleep?

When Hollywood remade Casino Royale, they made Bond impressive for the current year. Even though the gap was only some decades. Tradition carries some legitimacy, but so does relevance, and traditional legitimacy and relevance are ever more sharply opposed by technological progress. Islam is long progressed on the path that Christianity took. Judaism followed Christianity a hundred years ago. The only religions that thrive have separated themselves off entirely, structuring their ways of life to be distant from modern technological ways of living. An effective spiritual system would allow for constant updates. Not necessarily to morals, but to myth! As myth is important and must be relevant. Pagan myths are easier to adjust than monotheistic ones, but they lose for other reasons.

Traditionalists think they just need to hold fast more on traditional morals, but traditionalists have always thought that. They’re shockingly guilty of what they would never suspect of themselves, which is entirely non-spiritual and materialist thinking. It isn’t the morals that matter, but the myths. Update the myths through spiritual revelation and feeling and you will pass on the morals. The morals don’t sustain themselves. Without the spirituality, they are just Karens karenning and bloated old men carping.

Obviously it won’t be easy. Spiritual revelation is simply not a skill which the vast majority of the conservative religious possess. Far too many of them think that mouthing someone else’s words is faith and confuse the fact that they want to tell people, including themselves, how to live, with true religiosity. They’re yet another cargo cult of the right. They’re all study and admonishment but no “connection.” Meanwhile, progressive gender ideology and other limited and distorted forms of spirituality trounce all opposition among the young because they have no opposition where it matters. They have badly mutated and weak revelation, whereas their conservative opposition is trying to do faith by the numbers. It is all pretty ironic.

As I said I don’t think the book is setting out a practical political program, it’s aimed at describing an alternative to the political philosophy and ideology of Liberalism. This is why it starts from first principles; what is politics, what is the purpose of politics and political systems etc.

Among the integralists, is there anyone who has discussed what to do when condemned by the Papacy?

How do they prevent something like Pius XI’s excommunication of Charles Maurras and Leon Daudet and the prohibition of their writings from happening again? Particularly considering the doctrine of papal infallibility.

AFAIK this was done using the Pope’s ordinary magisterium, not the infallible one, the interdict on Maurras and Action Francaise was lifted in 1939. Nor were Action Francaise supporters excommunicated, they just were not allowed to receive sacraments as long as they were active supporters of the movement.

This didn’t affect Maurras personally because he was an agnostic (don’t know about Daudet), the reason for the interdict was that Maurras and other Action Francaise writers were openly agnostic or atheist in their books and promoted Catholicism for mainly political reasons; they were Catholic but not Christian.

“Dear audience, sit back, relax and watch some true horror.”

The Jesuits also taught the techniques of skillful warfare, enabling them to defeat would-be Portuguese slave raiders.

These Jesuit missions were the best of European efforts outside Europe, saving souls, protecting natives from slavery, and bringing beauty into the world.

Yet they managed to alienate the actual Europeans living there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Comuneros_(Paraguay)

Thank you for proving my point. From your link:

“Antequera also accused the Jesuits of various crimes, demanded that the mission Indians under their care be enslaved and distributed to the citizens of Paraguay”

You had mistakenly claimed tat the Jesuits were involved in de-Europianization of Christianity. I had shown that it was the exact opposite. The European settlers in Paraguay did not want the Indians to become Europeanized: they wanted them to be dumb, savage slaves. They were acting like genocidal Calvinist filth. Jesuits taught the Indians how to become skillful builders of Baroque churches, practitioners and composers of European music, etc.

Considering that the arrival of the very religious Conquistadors was also initiated with ‘mostly slaughtering the natives’, it feels like a moot point.

Nonsense. Most died from disease. These lands are still full of Mestizos, as would be expected since the natives weren’t genocided. Natives down there were soon attending European-style universities, putting on European concerts, etc. while the ones subjected to the Calvinists were just getting ethnically cleansed.

Let us just take the Pope’s word for it, or he also a secret Protestant agent?

But it seems unlikely that the Pope would not have been completely unaware of the gift’s meaning. The [hammer and sickle] crucifix

I’m not an expert on liberation theology. Are they profaning the Crucifix – or subverting Communism? Are they trying to assimilate Marxism into Christianity (thereby neutralizing it), as Christians had assimilated pagan thought? It’s a dangerous game but very different from the wholesale rejection of Christianity under the woke.

Anything that falls outside his political ideology is a #NeverTrumper.

You can pretty much see how AP is prizing the general Catholic culture over native traditions, which would be easy if the natives were at an less-developed, inferior position to the colonizers, and AP’s esthetic values are more aligned with Catholic or generally Romano-Germanic esthetics. But harder when Jesuits ended up in say, Ming China. At least in Macau, cathedrals co-existed with Ming Chinese housing and bureaucratic structures at the border.

It might be ironic to see instead of Catholic Iberian culture replacing the Amerindian consciousness in the New World, Amerindian cultural forms are chewing Catholicism from inside because of some deliberate esthetic decisions. It’s almost karmic.

I think Poland is following the same path as Ireland. 30 years ago many spoke of Irish religious tendencies in similar vein, then they rapidly secularised

Likely, often history repeats itself but sometimes it rhymes, and other times it does something surprising (World War II ended in a radically different way from the first war).

The West is somewhat discredited now, in comparison to how it was when it became Woke. Poles like Scandinavians (woke) but dislike woke Germans. They also admire Italians, who are the least woke of the Western European peoples. And of trends trends seem to be reversing in France. So while it seems clear that Poland is shifting to the left, it is not yet clear how far it will go.

As I noted in previous comments, notice the huge gap between Iberia and Greece+Italy. What accounts for this? Anyone hazards a guess?

This is indeed fascinating. I also wonder why. In Italy the most popular party among those under 30 is the neo-fascist one Brothers of Italy. They and their allies are leading in the general election poll:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/short_news/far-right-parties-lead-italian-polls/

The main reason of these absurd gas prices is the shutdown of nuclear power stations.

They are the echoes of Annalena Baerbock’s words.

It is kinda self correcting problem on longer term though, e.g. both France and Finland are opening new plants next year which will be profitable now even after long delays and overbudgeting, also are planing building new (FR 6, FI 1), so overall just these 9 new modern reactors will fully compensate closed 8 German ones on EU scale.

Are those nuclear plants for national or EU-wide production?

The fact the Iffen is a #NeverTrump acolyte is quite obvious and irrefutable.

• He repeatedly lies about Trump, blaming him for things beyond his control.
• He keeps trying to sabotage high-IQ communications methods with broad gender appeal. Most notably #LetsGoBrandon as a technique.

What is puzzling — As an obvious #Bidenista, why does Iffen attempt to deny his support for the current occupied White House?
____

I never claimed to be 100% agreement with Trump about everything. I would have made some different choices.

The critical part is recognizing that MAGA never had the House or Senate during Trump’s 1st Term. That greatly limited what he was able to do. People with unrealistic expectations pose a serious problem.

PEACE 😇

You had mistakenly claimed tat the Jesuits were involved in de-Europianization of Christianity. I had shown that it was the exact opposite. The European settlers in Paraguay did not want the Indians to become Europeanized: they wanted them to be dumb, savage slaves. They were acting like genocidal Calvinist filth. Jesuits taught the Indians how to become skillful builders of Baroque churches, practitioners and composers of European music, etc.

And yet, such an aversion to teaching them Spanish. From an Amerindian perspective the Jesuits can certainly be seen as helpful, but the Jesuits wished for their own private clerical domain and not to integrate them into the Empire.

Rancor increased as the Jesuits persuaded the Spanish king to exclude all Europeans, Africans and mestizos (mixed-race people) from entering the pueblos or making contact with the Guaraní. The Jesuits also forbade the use of European languages in their territory. Knowledge of Guaraní grammar, vocabulary and the spoken language was a great advantage for the Jesuits in their efforts to catechize and control the populace.

https://www.historynet.com/fighting-fathers-of-the-guarani-war.htm

A map of Paraguay based on the results for first language in the 2002 census [571 × 749]. from MapPorn

Nonsense. Most died from disease. These lands are still full of Mestizos, as would be expected since the natives weren’t genocided.

More a matter of pre-invasion population density and colonial and post-independence settlement patterns than the scale of massacres.

Were Brazilian and Argentinian settlers also ‘filthy Calvinists’, unlike their neighbours to the west?

I’m not an expert on liberation theology. Are they profaning the Crucifix – or subverting Communism? Are they trying to assimilate Marxism into Christianity (thereby neutralizing it), as Christians had assimilated pagan thought?

Did you even read down to Pope Francis’ speech or the part about Bolivia? Their intentions are very clear.

It’s a dangerous game but very different from the wholesale rejection of Christianity under the woke.

Is wokism

A) A uniquely Protestant heresy

Or

B) A wholesale rejection of Christianity?

Either wokism is a Protestant heresy, in which case it can’t be unique to Protestants because we see the exact same movements in Catholicism, or it has little to do with Christianity and your condemnation of Protestantism on this point is ill placed.

Suitable for both uses as Germany has energy links with France, Finland has such links with Sweden and Estonia, then the circle goes further – Estonia links with Latvia, Latvia with Lithuania and Lithuania back to Sweden through Baltic sea electricity link and Germany also has direct link to Scandinavian electricity market since last year, so it is all more or less, but interconnected now.

Are those nuclear plants for national or EU-wide production?

They are “market” plants so selling to Germany should not be a regulatory problem.

The web of powerlines is so complex, it is hard to tell if sufficient transfer capacity exists. It looks like it, but one would need an expert to be sure.

PEACE 😇
__________

https://www.maproomblog.com/2018/05/european-electrical-grid/

And yet, such an aversion to teaching them Spanish

They did not want to obliterate native culture as such, but to make it civilised and European. So the Indians retained their own language while leaving behind savage customs and religion and building Baroque churches, composing Baroque music using European instruments that they made , etc.

I also suspect that Spanish frontier culture of those times was rather rough and full of sin, so a linguistic barrier would shield the Natives from that.

New iOS update makes it difficult to cut and paste your original comment here. Addressing your comment about population density: on the chart you posted one can clearly see many more Mestizos and Indians in sparsely-populated Argentina than in non-Mexican North America. Similarly, Russian Alaska (Orthodox) and French Canada (Catholic) involved much less systematic killing of Natives and therefore produced more mixed race individuals than did the Calvinists.

Canadian Metis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis

Russian-Native creoles in Alaska (where many Natives are Orthodox Christians):

https://depts.washington.edu/cspn/creole-policy-and-practice-in-russian-america-iakov-egorovich-netsvetov/

:::::::;;;:

The Pope’s platitudes were not necessarily pro-Communist. A Trumpian could probably agree with them.

:::::::::

Wokism is both a uniquely Protestant heresy and a rejection of Christianity. As such, it arose in the Protestant world with specific Protestant features but aggressively seeks converts among Catholics (just as we see unwokened Protestants and Mormons doing missionary work in Catholic places like Brazil or in Orthodox Russia).

one can clearly see many more Mestizos and Indians in sparsely-populated Argentina than in non-Mexican North America. Similarly, Russian Alaska (Orthodox) and French Canada (Catholic) involved much less systematic killing of Natives and therefore produced more mixed race individuals than did the Calvinists.

Look at the annual temperature range of Buenos Aires, compare to New England. The Inca Empire included parts of Argentine. They had the potato, which was the most impressive New World crop.

Again, Canada and Alaska are in a different climatic zone, harsher and more remote. Difficult to penetrate, which led to more mixing.

late 90s* https://www.unz.com/akarlin/race-realism-in-europe/

This is my point, these niggas argue the same topics year after year seemingly oblivious to real world, where cuckservative is just an early 2000s islamophobic lib.

From Southeast Asia to South Africa and North America, whites will cease to exist outside of Europe within a century, just like Greek influence was wiped out in India or Roman/Greek influence was annihilated in the Middle East after the fall of Rome.

— Terror House Press (@terrorhousemag) July 27, 2019

How nice of you to not only rape their kids, but teach them how to as well, Mr Baroque Spaniard.

ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ

Speaking of Argentina’s Whiteness:

The Pope’s platitudes were not necessarily pro-Communist. A Trumpian could probably agree with them.

:::::::::

Wokism is both a uniquely Protestant heresy and a rejection of Christianity. As such, it arose in the Protestant world with specific Protestant features but aggressively seeks converts among Catholics (just as we see unwokened Protestants and Mormons doing missionary work in Catholic places like Brazil or in Orthodox Russia).

Right, if what you got out of that was ‘A Trumpian could probably agree with them’, I think I will just leave you to enjoy the hammer-and-sickle crucifixes and Pachamama.

What would it have looked like with CBDC and with crypto?

Russians and French both produced mixed European-Native Creole classes in Alaska and Canada; Anglos have not.

To summarise: you were completely wrong in your claims about Jesuits in South America, and your attempt to deflect from the reality of the Protestant nature of wokism through whataboutism involving liberation theology was flawed. Trumpists and other nationalist populists wouldn’t subvert a hammer and sickle by turning it into a cross but they do condemn predatory elites and support local communities versus neoliberalism.

This is indeed fascinating. I also wonder why.

Well, there’s always multiple factors at play but the most important part of the explanation to this mystery is not very difficult to unravel. Just like 60 years of communism inoculated some Europeans against leftist fantasies, 40 years of clerical-nationalism inoculated others against right-wing extremism and to a large extent against religion itself.

At the end of Franco’s dictatorship and return to democracy being right-wing was very uncool, especially among younger people. In Italy, by contrast, being neo-fascist was transgressive and thus attractive for the young.

What is surprising is how long these tendencies persist after the facts that provoked them. That suggests that Eastern Europeans may well never catch-up in wokeness to Westerners. In fact, that is what I perceive with my Polish son and his friends, all in their twenties. They are quite tolerant in sexual matters, including towards the LGB stuff, but otherwise they are very right-wing, particularly in racial and immigration matters. Religion is at best performative, I don’t know that any of them is an observant Catholic.

1- A post-oil era is a myth. It is very doubtful that an alternative as versatile and practicable
as oil,could totally replace oil in the next 100 years.
2- There could never be a peak oil demand either throughout the 21st century and probably
far beyond. How could the world feed a growing population projected to rise from 7.9
billion today to 9.7 billion by 2050 and a global economy projected to grow in size from
\$91 trillion in 2021 to \$245 trillion also by 2050 without oil?
3- A total global energy transition is an illusion. Even a partial one will never succeed without
huge contributions from natural gas and nuclear energy.
4- The notion of net-zero emissions is a myth. It will never be achieved in 2050 or 2100 or
ever.
5- Oil and gas and nuclear will continue to be the core business of the global oil industry well into the
future.

Is this San Ignacio (Misiones in Argentina)? There is a sizable Ukrainian collectivity in this tiny northern Argentinean province.

Do you know what the graph represents? Argentina’s per capita GDP as a % of Western European & Anglo countries’ levels.

I think the Argentinean economy is already heavily dollarized, but it’s still super sluggish because of decades of sovereign debt & hyperinflation. So in a world of an Argentinean digital peso & private cryptos, it will be more of the same. Except it’s much harder or maybe outright impossible to exchange digital pesos for cryptos, than fiat pesos for Yankee-imperialist-standard dollars.

There is an internal inconsistency with your position too.

Protestants are essential to MAGA and Christian Populism. Protestant beliefs are at their core anti-Woke.

As Protestants are leading the charge against Wokeness, it does not take too much effort to track down the most Woke branch of Christianity. Hint: How Woke is Pope Francis? It is pretty clear that SJW Wokeness is unique to the Catholic hierarchy, even though it is opposed Catholic congregations.
____

You can attempt to argue that Protestantism in Europe and America are fundamentally different. However, all of your positions related to U.S. Christianity are weak or failed.

PEACE 😇

Peak Oil or Peak Energy in the 21th century is possible… by massive depopulation and/or massive destruction of living standards. Have WWIII and then prevent the rebuilding from the irradiated rubble, and we’ll be there.

It appears that the former Portuguese-ruled parts of India, with substantial Christian (largely Catholic) minorities, are the most highly developed and richest in the country:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_states_and_union_territories_by_Human_Development_Index

This suggests that they were better overlords than the Muslims and the British.

One is a mission is right across the border in Brazil:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruins_of_S%C3%A3o_Miguel_das_Miss%C3%B5es

The evil Portuguese slave-raiders whom the Jesuits protected were called Banderites (or something close to it).

Another picture was from Argentina.

Alaska was so remote to Russia that the Russians living in Alaska left, when the US bought it, leaving their mestizo descendants there, alone.

Average Quebecois has like 1-2% admixture, many less. (You can actually find a lot of Anglo Americans like that). A lot of their apparent brownness is just the not uncommon swarthiness of the French.

Overall less admixture than the Protestant Boers. They have a really large mestizo pop called the Cape Coloureds. Over five million. The predominant population group of the Western Cape.

Both places are quite similar. There Jesuits instructed Guaranis to defend themselves from bandeirantes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Ignacio,_Argentina

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Ignacio_(Misiones)

Protestants are essential to MAGA and Christian Populism. Protestant beliefs are at their core anti-Woke.

As I posted, wokism stems from Protestantism and shares many key features with it, described by the Protestant minister whose words I provided.

This does not mean that practicing Protestants would necessarily support Wokism, just as Catholics would not necessarily support some heretic pseudo-Catholic. There is nothing contradictory about conservative Protestants being anti-woke, and wokeness being a twisted and heretical offshoot of Protestantism.

As Protestants are leading the charge against Wokenessw, it does not take too much effort to track down the most Woke branch of Christianity

That would be mainline Protestantism with its practicing gay bishops and such. Congregational churches frequently fly BLM and trans flags, have lesbian ministers, etc.

Do you know what the graph represents? Argentina’s per capita GDP as a % of Western European & Anglo countries’ levels.

That’s what I gathered. Easy to see in the peace dividend.

So in a world of an Argentinean digital peso & private cryptos, it will be more of the same.

Not so sure about this.

Don’t know a lot about CBDCs, but I presume greater convertibility, so easier to change for competing currencies, with less inflation. Crypto also would have been a hedge against inflation.

If nothing else, I suspect that there would at least be a much bigger black market economy, with many people working secretly for other currencies. Since crypto is easier to obtain than physical dollars. Not a cure all, but the standard of living would probably be higher.

I think the performance of some Latin American countries could be much increased with the right technology to fight corruption. Probably, also true of Africa, to a degree, though with a much harsher regime needed there. (Probably social credits, segregation, and crowd AI.)

Fake Stream News points cameras at few churches in New York & California. ​Such behavior is much rarer than the MSNBC depicts. In the U.S. is much easier to find a gay Catholic church versus vs very rare gay Protestant churches. America Catholicism is very Woke and getting Woker, with a handful of exceptions.

You have not come up with any credible ecumenical reason why Protestantism leads to deviancy. Again, 100% the reverse is true. Catholic deviancy, such as paid Indulgences for rich Catholics, is the source of Protestant resistance. Hierarchical Catholic leadership had a running head start at the money pot of Woke.
___

Historically the two big drivers against Wokeness are USSR oppression and lack of available funds. Impoverished believers, especially those trapped behind the Iron Curtain, are the least woke. The correlation to Catholicism is incidental.

Or, would you like to state that poverty is a direct consequence of Catholicism?

PEACE 😇

As the link I provided shows, the Russians were supporting these Creoles even during their rule.

The Quebecois studies are of French people (about 4.7 million of them in Canada), and show about 1% Native descent within this population. These studies exclude the Métis people (there are nearly 600,000 of them in Canada).

So among French-Canadians, 89% are Europeans (who themselves have 1% or so Native ancestry) and 11% are Mestizo. This is similar demographics to places colonised by the Spaniards that had sparsely populated native populations.

The Boers and Cape Town Coloreds are a valid counter-example. It seems that the Dutch Calvinists in Africa behaved a lot differently than the English ones in the New World.

The Portuguese basically just ruled Goa and some tiny districts until the 20th century (whereas Kerala, India’s 2nd richest state after Goa – also with below replacement fertility iirc – was part of British India…and iirc has strong Communist influence in its politics). All of southern India is more advanced than the BIMARU states in the north, it’s pretty silly to claim this difference is mainly due to Catholicism.

They also led a centuries long inquisition using black slaves to force feed Hindus beef||
Your daughter or grand-daughter will be married to an Indian, so why am I even arguing this with you? :shrug:

This is the equivalent of Sovoks who argue which specific whatever of the USSR was better.
The fact you have to hold up 1/3rd of kids being bastards in Poland as a gold trophy, says it all.

Considering the example of Jesus, shouldn’t 100% out of wedlock birth be the Christian standard?
Given this reality, the negrophilia of all christian peoples makes sense||

ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ

In the U.S. is much easier to find a gay Catholic church versus vs very rare gay Protestant churches.

Catholic priest + gay are almost entirely a sub-set set relation. Gotta be > 80% in western civilized countries.

They also ruled Kerala, albeit much more briefly than they did Goa. They controlled Kerala from about 1500 to 1660.

Yes, but the British did for roughly the same amount of time. imo you’re suffering from a rather severe confirmation basis when it comes to Catholicism and ignore other factors.
I also don’t know if the Portuguese were morally any better as colonialists compared to other powers. When they were dominant in Asian waters in the 16th century, they basically ran a maritime protection racket. Not really any less predatory than the later exploits of the British (and slavery in the sugar plantations of Brazil was probably just as brutal as in the British Caribbean, and more so than on the North American mainland).

These studies exclude the Métis people (there are nearly 600,000 of them in Canada).

In America, these people call themselves Indians. There are multiples more of them, than in Canada, even though Canada is larger. (The rule is to ignore climate, right?) And that isn’t counting our Mestizos, which would increase the disparity to a much greater level.

Maybe, the antinuclear movement in Germany is really just 4D chess to get others to work out the kinks, so Germans will get the best, latest designs for a bargain price, installed ahead of schedule.

Stick everyone with fission, while getting fusion.

For the nonce, I am not sure that it is a bad idea to increase energy prices to the point where the local blacks and Arabs will either need to stop taking hot showers or have their pipes freeze, and eventually start getting frostbite and posting rather less compelling pictures of their circumstances on social media.

This year Gazprom exploited an existing legal loophole when there were no mandatory minimal gas reserve requirements for the storage owners in EU, but it will be closed soon:

In order to boost the EU resilience, the Commission wants to propose a more strategic approach to gas storage, including measures to ensure a high filling level at the beginning of the heating season.

When assessing risk at a regional level, member states will have to include an analysis of their gas storage levels and of potential risks related to security of supply, also from when storage is owned by foreign companies. If risks are identified, they will have to introduce counter-measures such as minimum storage obligations, tendering or auctions.

The proposal also provides for voluntary joint procurement of strategic gas stock by transmission system operators. Such reserves could then be released in case of emergency.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-13/europe-plans-end-date-to-long-term-gas-deals-favored-by-russia?srnd=premium-europe

And now the “Stop Woke Act”:

https://floridapolitics.com/archives/480481-ron-desantis-crt-stop-woke/

After Trump’s disappointing performance it’s difficult to get enthusiastic but DeSantis is shaping up as a great contender for the ’24 presidency (though I would rather vote for Tucker if given the choice).

I do not know about 80%.

However, the tie between Catholicism and Wokeness is undeniable. The SJW Republic of Ireland just made news: (1)

The Irish government, currently ruled by a coalition of liberal parties, has approved of a scheme that will “regularize” thousands of illegal immigrants, granting them access to the country’s labor market and providing them a pathway to citizenship.

The scheme, set to begin in January, will give an estimated 17,000 illegal immigrants who have spent at least four years in Ireland the ability to apply for so-called “regularization.” Successful applicants — along with their undocumented family members — will be given official residency status inside the country, access to the Irish labor market, and a pathway to citizenship, Irish broadcaster RTE reports.
…
Ireland has no plans to cap the amount of migrants eligible for amnesty, and the number could be substantially higher than the 17,000 estimated in the country

So much for Ireland being a bulwark against Wokeness.

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://rmx.news/article/irelands-liberal-government-wants-to-give-citizenship-to-17000-illegal-immigrants/

You can be disappointed in the end results, but not Trump. He did exceedingly well with a non MAGA Senate impeding his efforts.

You should feel more enthusiasm after the midterms. The negligence of Not-The-President Biden and his puppetmasters points to an impending blowout.

PEACE 😇

People with unrealistic expectations pose a serious problem.

So do hasbara bots spreading propaganda and hatred of Muslims.

and slavery in the sugar plantations of Brazil was probably just as brutal as in the British Caribbean

Slaves were so cheap that it was literally more economic to buy replacements than provide for the current ones. They worked them to death in 4-5-6 years. If they got 8-9 years out of them it was crème de la crème profit.

Russia Puts The Blame On Europe As Energy Crisis Worsens

By Tsvetana Paraskova – Dec 15, 2021, 3:00 PM CST

The EU is reconsidering its position on extending long-term natural gas contracts.
Russia has maintained that the contracts are beneficial for Europe and moving away from them would be a mistake.
Russia even went as far as suggesting that Europe’s current energy crisis is its own fault.

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Russia-Puts-The-Blame-On-Europe-As-Energy-Crisis-Worsens.html

I think that’s true for the sugar plantations in the Caribbean and in Brazil, where they was indeed constant replacement due to the high death rates. iirc conditions for slaves were better on the North American mainland where there were mostly other crops, slaves even had natural population growth there (apart from some exceptions, I think there were sugar plantations in South Carolina, founded by planters who had come from Barbados, and those were similarly brutal as in the Caribbean).

ROTFLMAO

Clearly you are not talking about me. I spread the TRUTH that you are desperate to conceal, not hate. Let me offer you some constructive advice on how to exit your status as a yahoo.

*STOP LYING*

It is the easy one step plan to self improvement. Alas, little can be done about your shockingly limited, Low-IQ mental capability.

#LetsGoBrandon 😇

Every time I go to Youtube, I feel like a British officer during the first minute of the Sepoy Rebellion.

I click on a video with an English title and description. I hear the first sentence or two in a sing-song Indian voice, that makes me feel a bit uneasy, before I am suddenly bushwhacked with an incomprehensible stream of babble so jarring and alien that I can only presume it must be Hindi.

For all I know, they might be saying “To arms! Now is the moment to takeover the West!”

I’ve got no personal experience of the Balkans, but to me it’s always seemed Albanians care primarily about Albanianness, and don’t even pretend otherwise. Even our Serb commenters, who loathed them and came up with bizarre theories about their origin in the Caucasus, usually didn’t accuse Albanians of being jihadis, just of being violent and tribal people with criminal inclinations.

You probably know already, but yes, religion has never really formed a key part of Albanian identity. The most revered aspect in all traditional Albanian society is the Kanun, a compendium of oral law governing blood feuds/pacts, marriage customs, inheritance, land rights, practically every aspect of pre-modern life. The Kanun equally governs behaviour for Muslims, Orthodox and Catholics, it makes no distinction for religion.

I used to think it had gone defunct after the long Hoxha years, but I can tell you from personal acquaitances, that even amongst urban and educated people it’s very much alive. Well, perhaps not so surprising considering the degree of total anarchy Albania fell into until the late 90s, even worse than Armenia. Albania’s entire electricity grid was actually breaking down, with consequences that can be imagined after daylight. Whole families simply fled Tirana to their ancestral villages during this period, it’s actually universally remembered (I don’t remember the phrase in Albanian [incidentally, it sounds very different to Slavic languages of the area, with lots of ‘th’ and ‘the’ sounds, also distinguishing the ‘English r’, a tap, and a trilled r, I think only Armenian also has this], unfortunately) as ‘The Night of Dark Forces’ in Albania, or something along those lines.
Anyway, Serbians should be grateful Albanians exist, simply so they’re not the biggest niggers of Europe.

Stick to videos that do not have a spoken language track.

PEACE 😇

Yes, but the British did for roughly the same amount of time.

True, but the British-ruled parts of India that were not also Portuguese-ruled are a lot poorer than Kerala. It is probably meaningful that the two parts of India with a history of having been ruled by Portugal are also the most developed and richest. The Indian state of Karnataka, on the same Malabar Coast as these states but without a history of having been ruled by Portugal, is a lot poorer and less developed than the former Portuguese territories.

The Portuguese also ruled much of Sri Lanka for over 100 years, and the Catholicism that they brought is the largest Christian faith in Sri Lanka (there are 1.3 million Catholics and 300,000 Protestants in Sri Lanka). Sri Lanka is richer and more developed than India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal.

severe confirmation basis when it comes to Catholicism and ignore other factors

It seems that the wealth and development of Portuguese ruled territory in South Asia are not coincidental. Their rule seems to have been benign and to have had good effect.

(Macau is richer per capita than Hong Kong and Singapore but I suspect this is due to the casinos).

These studies exclude the Métis people (there are nearly 600,000 of them in Canada).

In America, these people call themselves Indians.

No, there are also Indians in Canada, including Quebec. The Metis are Mestizos; they are analogous to Coloreds in South Africa but there is no equivalent in Anglo North America.

There are nearly 90,000 Indians in Quebec (this does not include Inuit in the North and the Métis). How many in the land of the Puritans in New England? Only 8,600 in Maine, 2,132 in Vermont, 2,036 in New Hampshire, 14,764 in Massachusetts, 9,900 in Connecticut. The Puritan Calvinists just wiped them out, unlike the French Catholics. Upstate New York has only 36,200 Natives.

True, but the British-ruled parts of India that were not also Portuguese-ruled are a lot poorer than Kerala.

tbh I think neither you nor I know enough about India to really have any idea what is behind the differences between north and south India. I doubt it can be reduced merely to Portuguese rule or Catholicism, there must be many other factors (there are vast differences between the regions after all, linguistically, culturally, in the caste system…arguably the people in north and south India aren’t even the same genetically). I’ll grant though that Portuguese rule doesn’t seem to have had any lasting negative effects, and probably left at least some nice architecture behind.

Of course, the main reason we still know so much about Aztec and Incan societies is because the missionaries went out of their way to preserve their texts. The previous native-state languages, Nahuatl and Quechua, actually spread to a larger spoken area than previously, literacy in Nahuatl (I don’t know so much about Quechua, but the aftermaeth of Tupac Amaru’s rebellion definitely resulted in much worse ethnic-tensions than in Central Mexico) was strongly encouraged, whole Aztec codexes post-date the Spanish conquest.
It took until the 17th Century that the Spanish Empire changed it policy and started actively discouraging usage of local languages, but it was still quite lazy about it. Ironically, it was the independence of Latin America that produced the first active persecution and rejection of any tongues other than Spanish, as previously Spain had always maintained a power-balance between the indigenous peasants against the ostensibly ‘white’ creole elite.

Even now the racial lines in Latin American politics remain extremely obvious, with Chavez, Evol Morales, now with Pedro Castillo (I recall a few months ago some Peruvian claiming he was going to the bring the apocalypse and that he’d stay abroad without a visa if I had to, we’ll see).

Oh, last thing, I recall scoffing at Dmitri (maybe a year ago) about how ‘he learned Spanish without effort’.. well, it did turn out that was in fact more or less correct, at least regarding reading, or listening with local subtitles. I guess being familiar with Romanian already helped a lot, but I was really surprised by how simple it was, I thought only English was so simple to learn to a functional level. Speaking of accents, I have to say I find Seseo sounds disgusting.

The Kanun

I saw a documentary about this years ago, about men who had to go into hiding for decades because of blood feuds which had already killed several people on both sides. Really depressing. I’d assumed though it was limited to remote rural areas, bit disturbing that it seems to be more widespread.

Anyway, Serbians should be grateful Albanians exist, simply so they’re not the biggest niggers of Europe.

I think both are easily topped by gypsies.

I agree, there are a lot of other factors involved so the conclusion cannot be definitive.

The fact that within the same region the one non-Portuguese ruled state is a lot poorer and less developed than the two Portuguese ruled ones that border it (although it is about average for all of India) does suggests IMO that Portuguese rule was beneficial.

No, there are also Indians in Canada, including Quebec. The Metis are Mestizos; they are analogous to Coloreds in South Africa but there is no equivalent in Anglo North America.

You are making a categorization error, based on differences between American English and français québécois.

In Canada, there are two separate categories: Métis (who are mixed) and Indian (less mixed or perhaps, even sometimes pureblood)

In America, not counting Latinos, there is only one category: those who call themselves “Indian.” Some of these, like the Navajo (one of the bigger groups, who were probably growing the most corn, being in the right climatic area) are very Amerind. Others like the Miꞌkmaq, who span into Canada from Maine, often show very Euro phenotypes. They are still “Indians”, even though they often have blue eyes and blond hair, and even though their campaign for recognition, I believe, continues to fail.

Similarly, there are many “Indians” in Oklahoma, who were they in Quebec might be called “Métis” or even be presumed to be French. In the US, we also have black “Indians”, which I am not sure what they would call, as last time I was in Quebec, Canada hadn’t yet been invaded by blacks. (though that was a long time ago.)

Add up Métis and Indians in Canada, and your total will still only be a tiny fraction of the number of “Indians” in America. The reason is climate.

The first ethnographic data I was ever aware of on Albanians was in Elmore Leonard crime novels. About half Detroit and half Florida. The ones in Detroit had Albanians. Elmore Leonard presents them as criminal, violent, stupid, and insane.

In Doring’s MI6 book he has hundreds of pages on Albania. The whole time I was skimming through this dullest fraction of the book I am wondering why would anybody in MI6 care about Albania? It seems about as insignificant in global politics as Afghanistan.

Albanians are considered better than gypsies, no?

Linh Dinh has some good Albania articles. I don’t think many people do recreational traveling to Albania.

Reply to Songbird’s 936 on the other thread…

IIRC, in one of his books, Richard Henry Dana Jr. said that while he was in San Francisco, he visited a French congregation and an Irish one. He felt that the French service was quite a lot more civilized and the Irish one primitive, which is really no wonder given that due to persecution there were practically no Catholic elite left in Ireland, and Catholics only owned 3% of the land.

I didn’t know that the Catholic Irish owned so little land. Were the big estates broken up after independence?

There was something is similar in England, the older Catholic churches are often smaller and less ornate than the grander Church of England ones (and sometimes Methodist, some of the Victorian Methodists seem to have liked imposing churches), or if you compare with what can be seen in France itself or Spain. By the time I was growing up obvious anti-Catholic and anti-Irish atttiudes had mostly gone, though among people from the more established middle or upper classes you could become aware it had some social significance, this must have been related to the status of the Catholic Irish before independence.

@German_Reader

I saw a documentary about this years ago, about men who had to go into hiding for decades because of blood feuds which had already killed several people on both sides. Really depressing. I’d assumed though it was limited to remote rural areas, bit disturbing that it seems to be more widespread.

Well, the Kanun doesn’t just deal with blood feuds, I meant more that practically every demographic in Albania is still familiar with its tenets, or has defaulted to it in some way in a social dispute at some point.

In Doring’s MI6 book he has hundreds of pages on Albania. The whole time I was skimming through this dullest fraction of the book I am wondering why would anybody in MI6 care about Albania? It seems about as insignificant in global politics as Afghanistan.

Albania has access to the Mediterranean in the most volatile and unstable part of Europe.

Albanians are considered better than gypsies, no?

I think Congolese would be considered better than gypsies.

Linh Dinh has some good Albania articles. I don’t think many people do recreational traveling to Albania.

Yeah, I’ve read him intermittently since he was published here, but he seems to have gone off the deep end recently, as well as revealed how petty he was. At least he’ll never be as batshit as Mike Whitney. He should have stuck away from politics and stuck with travel-writing.

practicing gay bishops

They still need to practice?

Might not brazenly buggering be more apt?[1]

Now, to segue from this tongue-in-cheek* interlude to offer an entirely earnest contribution that is related, if only tangentially, to the topic addressed by the former.

(*But not— decidedly, emphatically, unequivocally not– tongue-in {other anatomical parts}…)

The categorical, absolute, doctrinaire assertions that homoeroticism is without exception both innate as well as immutable; that it is equivalent to normative heterosexuality (much less to sacred matrimony[2]); and the conflation (both witting as well as unwitting) of involuntary feelings with voluntary behaviors (as well as the conflation of specific, objectively unwholesome acts with homoeroticism, or even homoerotic activity, per se[3]). These are all manifestly false and objectively harmful.

@Songbird:

…beach bods…pretty girls…Long Beach…

Anyone else reminded of the Rodney Dangerfield line from the Jacuzzi scene in the 1986 blockbuster Back to School,
“Maybe you girls can help me straighten out my Longfellow.”?

To again segue from the jocular and raunchy to the earnest and chaste, I will offer another contention. This one, though, sure to be less popular, accepted or even palatable to the present audience than the previous.

The Bikini vs. the Burka.

This should be a false dichotomy. Between these opposite extremes, lies a vast expanse of moderation. If forced to choose one or the other, however, I would aver that the burka would be the lesser evil. Less unwholesome and socially corrosive than the bikini.

Dfordoom would almost certainly disagree. Incidentally, does anyone know what happened to the redoubtable DFD? His last last posted comment dates to August and his blog has disappeared.

Numbered notes, for some elaboration and elucidation, below break.

So do hasbara bots spreading propaganda and hatred of Muslims.

A123‘s reflexively, categorically pro-(Zionist State that calls itself) Israel and anti-Muslim views do indeed appear caricature-like. And while far from certain that he is, in fact, a shill, I am not ready to entirely exclude such a possibility from the realm of probability.

But does this comment of yours not contradict one that you had posted to this blog not long ago? Did you not, in the latter, state that while you initially and for some time were convinced that A123 was a Zionist shill, you subsequently, after acquiring greater familiarity with the fullness of his posted views– both here at Unz and also at what you referred-to as “his website”– concluded that his views were just too bizarre for him to be a mere shill?

Poland is the most rapidly secularising

At least in comparison to other slavic nationalities (which includes the most secular in Europe), Poles are very religious though. You can see this if you visit a church in Western Europe – depending on area, it can be mostly Africans, Poles, Filipinos, Latins, etc.

Catholicism is part of the mainstream culture in Poland.

It’s completely not-comparable to Russia, where religion (even Hare Krishna) is really a very minority sect, obscure to most of the country, and to extent had never extended to the mainstream population (as late as in the 19th century, the clergy complains about the extreme difficulty of imposing norms on the peasants).

So the average person doesn’t know what religion is teaching or the most basic things about it. The clergymen are writing on Facebook about how the visitors to their services don’t know the most simple customs. (Whereas in Poland, you can be sure average people know how the services go).

Putin’s public displays of Orthodox

Putin is a KGB officer, and a lot of the ruling class are from the intelligence serves of the USSR, so this is a different kind of politics. In countries like Poland, although their government is apparently considered “embarrassing” by educated Poles; they have seemed to be able to create a relatively more “normal” (or European, democratic) political reality nowadays. So I don’t think the Polish politicians are doing this kind of cynical appearing state-building attemptings.

Since the end of communism, Poland has managed to create a kind of European, modern, democratic political system.

declarations of belonging to the Orthodox faith has skyrocketed under Putin – without a concomitant rise in church attendence except for older boomers.

There is also the type of religion or spirituality that is more discovered in Russia – it’s something that becomes attractive for older people. That is, people who were secular for most of their life, might become religious as they become old. They “discover religion” as they age, as you can say.

Eastern Europe is far more traditional than the West, but when it comes to casual sex or abortion or church attendence this simply isn’t the case. Frankly, a lot of it comes across as sentimental and/or wishful thinking by ‘disapora nationalists’,

I think it varies from which country we are discussing, and what you mean by traditional (which historical time it refers to).

The more advanced countries of the USSR, like in Russia have maintained less traditions from the 19th century and earlier, than Western European countries.

Western European countries like UK have far traditions of the 19th century and earlier, in comparison.

But because of a slow of development in most of the country of the last 30 years, there is still more maintained a lot of the traditions of the 20th century in Russia (although the rapid computerization of the population in the last 10 years is scary, as the dying of the villages).

Poland’s history is different as they have nationalism (unlike in Russia, where the history is imperialism). In Poland, self-consciously tried to maintain their folkloric culture as part of the nationalism project since various partitions.

And what about those Southern countries like Romania, Bulgaria? These can seem incredibly traditional in some ways.

I didn’t know that the Catholic Irish owned so little land.

It seems remarkable to think of it, but Hugh O’Neill in Ulster (went to Protestant church, though probably a Catholic) may have been the most powerful landowner in Ireland by the time of his rebellion

they are so innocent and sweet

Lol I know Republic of Ireland.

If you said they are “responsive, charming, extroverted, and socially intelligent”, this is true. I will disagree with “innocent”.

They are the most extroverted, self-confident, socially intelligent, kind of “tropical” friendly people, after maybe Italy.

But charming is not the same as innocent, although maybe a sign of high levels of charming skills if you can make people (or teacher, police, boss, parents, etc) think you are innocent.

–

By the way, I wonder why they developed such a friendly personality there? I was enjoying speculating something like claims Japanese became very polite, because they were without weapons, under control of samurais. Maybe Irish became the most friendly people, because of not having weapons, and needing to use charm skills against English.

Their wokeness is also quite recent, I’m not sure they had all the cray that the Dutch and Germans started having back in the 1980s.

What it is said by Irish cultural about politics, is “we always support the weaker side”, because the mainstream attitude is to view themselves as victims of imperialism.

So they (I mean mainstream of culture) view themselves like they victims of history, like another African-Americans or Native Indians. It’s not really the same as “woke” of the UK, as it doesn’t exactly involve as self-flagellation. Still it is something like “woke allies”. Whereas in the Kingdom, the woke view is that to admit they were imperialists, and then self-flagellate.

In Canada, there are two separate categories: Métis (who are mixed) and Indian (less mixed or perhaps, even sometimes pureblood)

Métis are not only mixed but also exclusively Francophone and Catholic. They have no tribal awareness (other than as Métis). They are like Mestizos in Latin America (Spanish-speaking only, no real tribal affiliation, but of mixed blood). There are products of mixed marriage with Indians, but no such group in the USA and no Anglo mixed group in Canada either. It’s a French thing, and a Spanish thing, and a Russian thing – but not an Anglo thing.

Add up Métis and Indians in Canada, and your total will still only be a tiny fraction of the number of “Indians” in America. The reason is climate.

There are nearly 90,000 Natives in Quebec. Add Metis and Inuit and it is 140,000. The climate is no much different than in New England, but in New England there are only around 30,000 Natives. So Quebec has three times more. Two regions, both settled by Europeans around the same time, both with fairly similar climates – yet three times more Natives live where the French settled versus where the Anglos settled.

Franco’s dictatorship

I was just going to write this to AP.

20th century Spain had for many years under a dictatorship, which had cynically exploited a rhetoric of “religion, conservatism” (while in some times of “moralist” Franco, a high proportion of all Spanish women were working as prostitutes).

After a pigeon in a Skinner box has been brutally electrocuted enough times, it will probably not “graduate” Skinner box, with positive associations to anything (even if only meaningless sounds) that had correlated to these electrocutions it had experienced in the Skinner box.

tendencies persist after the facts that provoked them. That suggests that Eastern Europeans

But in Russia and many postsoviet countries, there is not a “negative association” against previous politics, like in Spain after Franco. The worst electrocutions have been after the previous politics, rather than during them.

That’s the sense it was better before in Soviet times. It’s from the 1970s, has been if not always becoming worse life, the national trajectories have been below most anyone’s expectations for how life would be. Postsoviet realities, are a feeling of being on the trashcan of history.

Whereas in Spain it was from the post-Franco, to 2008, a situation of improvement of living standards, access to EU, infrastructure investment, increasing international prestige. Spain’s GDP was higher than the Russian Federation from 1990-2008, despite around multiple of 3,3 less people. Even just from the lines on the graph, you can infer how post-Franco stage had likely been experienced as positive by most of the population until 2008.

Quebec: 1,365,128 km2 (land area)
New England: 162,362 km2 (land area)

Shall we call it 1/8? So you are saying that Quebec has 3x the natives as New England, but 8x the land?

On
https://aftershock.news/?q=node/1043888
“Has someone decided that 1500 is the limit? You’re wrong. Asia has accepted the challenge”

Today, they have gained more than 20% during the trading session.

Less unwholesome and socially corrosive than the bikini.

I’m a bit torn on this sort of thing.

One side of me really sees the negative aspects of bikinis. Foremost being that many women are ugly, and I think it helps sun worship, which I abhor. Also, I really like the aesthetics of traditional dress codes – I mean , like school uniforms, not the burka. And I also hate the aesthetics of lax dress codes, many become walking advertisements for globohomo companies, which I see as dehumanizing.

But, OTOH, I really appreciate that K-selected signal, when you see a woman who is good-looking but dresses conservatively. if everyone dresses that way, it would be much harder to discern.

But, then again, seeing cows in miniskirts is murder on the eyes.

Go search for the holy foreskin while powered by vial’s of Mary’s breast milk u nasty ass Catholic.

http://indiafacts.org/the-portuguese-inquisition-in-goa-a-brief-history/

Goa is also where christcucks got demographically replaced by Hindus, template for all christendom||

ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_in_Canada#Demographics_and_classification

Close to 10% of newborns are Native in Canada, and the largest % are on the Anglo prarie.
Ironically, where Franco-catholics were banned from settling.

Natives and Catholics both compete for the same supply of mouthwash and gasoline||

ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ

From – https://aftershock.news/?q=node/1044001
Gas in Europe is trading at 1550+

It seems like it’s just a new reality that you have to get used to.
The whole modern industry is built on energy consumption, and energy has gone up a little so much. In a modest few times.
Will the industry survive in these conditions? Big question.
Here’s another fun electricity price map.

These are wholesale prices.

It is just reflection of a current pricing policy in EU, which is regulated such way that in principle highest bidder makes the final price. e.g. French (or any other) nuclear industry is making a killing now with their self cost price being roughly around 40-50 EUR/Mwh, but they have to sell at a French gas powered electricity plant current self cost price of 350 EUR, despite it being the minority producer compared with nuclear one.

That pricing policy can and will be changed if current situation will stay for longer.

I don’t know how anyone missed such an important literary event, but Hillary Clinton recently just published a sub Tom-Clancy thriller where a certain ‘Secretary of State’ saves the world, I was just reading a review of it in Private Eye (A British monthly, one of the few publications actually worth subscribing for, although I’m neither Anglo nor live in Britain, so most of their local news goes over my head), but the review had enough choice quotes to indicate it’s utterly batshit.
Nearly all the ‘characters’ are thinly veiled versions of current leaders, somehow she couldn’t think of a less ridiculous name than ‘Mr Peugeot’ for Macron, or less generic than ‘Ivanov’ for Putin.

Before you check, it has already averaged a 4.5 star-rating from 10’000+ reviews on amazon, I guess I’m just out of step with the times.

Meanwhile though seeing such infamous Gazprom natgas guzzlers as Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary or Serbia painted black, but “russophobe” Poland with more than 2x lower prices is quite pleasurable, lol 🙂

That’s what I gathered. Easy to see in the peace dividend.

I’m not sure if you graph-reading skills are working alright, or you’re getting the context. Argentina got rich by exporting grain and meat to Europe, something like a second Canada. Once the game was up during the Great Depression they switched to import substitution and stagnated. A few debt crises and they were done (and this is the economic side of the story).

HBD-wise, the period with the greatest growth coincides with the greatest level of immigration (albeit with Sicilians and Spaniards).