1908–1914 In 1908, Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was hugely provocative against the Slavs (Russia) and especially against the South Slavs (Serbia) They annexed it from the declining Ottoman Empire, but Serbia felt that they should be the ones to annex it from the Ottomans, and, more importantly Russia felt that Serbia should be ones to annex it, that Bosnia and Herzegovina were slavic, and should have been annexed by slavs. Austria got away with this because Austria and …
Author: Jim
War and rational choice
It looks like the Ukraine war is going to be fought to its ultimate conclusion. All Ukrainian men who have not managed to escape the regime will die (the regime being composed of men who do not actually think of themselves as Ukrainians) It is never rational to fight a war all the way to its ultimate end. War is a test of will and capability. If both sides knew the other’s will and capability, and both sides were rational, …
Tech decline
Where is my flying car, bro? Well, back before world war II, there were flying cars, in that affluent middle class people who owned enough land, usually rural middle class people, often had their own personal airport, and a private plane that could take off from a very short and very rough runway — which was typically a gravel track that got graded from time to time. The British airforce in world war one and two recruited its pilots from …
Venezuelan conflict
Venezuala is yet another step towards World War III. Venezuela implemented a bunch of utterly catastrophic and self destructive economic policies. Among these was the rational sounding policy of capturing Venezuela’s vast oil wealth which was going abroad, and applying it to the purposes of Venezuelan government. This resulted in the US issuing a bunch of economic sanctions, similar to those applied to Russia, but vastly less extreme. The damage done by those sanctions was probably insignificant compared to the …
Trump’s twenty eight point peace plan
Peace plan proposals appear in italics. My analysis appears in plaintext. The peace plan appears to be confused amalgam of two contradictory peace plans: The European and Ukrainian peace plan that Russia accept defeat and humiliation, and the Russian peace plan that the Ukraine gives up the Donbas for a hundred day truce during which it will hold free and fair elections, electing a government that will likely be a peace government willing to give Russia everything it has been …
Thermidor breaks left
Thermidor always breaks left or right. Because Thermidorians see themselves as sinners, and the radical left as their moral superiors, they find it very difficult to organise effectively against their radical left opponents. Some times they recognise this and hire reaction to the dirty work for them, as Cromwell hired Monck, and the French Thermidoreans initially tolerated the white terror of the incroyables. Sometimes they fail to hire reaction, and wind up rolling over for the left. When Charlie Kirk …
The fall of Pokrovsk
I don’t do news of the day, for its meaning is seldom apparent until months or years after it happened, but fall of the Pokrovsk agglomeration (soon to return to is pre 2014 names of Krasnoarmeysk and Mirnograd) indicates that the Ukraine war is much closer to its end than its beginning, and tells us much about the future of warfare. There was no house to house fighting in Krasnoarmeysk. Either there were very few Ukrainian troops, or after weeks …
What women want
Women want what they do not want, and love what they hate. Men understand what they want in love, sex, and romance, and act to attain it in a way that seems to them realistically likely to attain it. There is a straightforward connection between desire, intent, and action. Women are not like that, and consent culture has imposed upon them an insoluble task to which they were not exposed to in the ancestral environment of evolutionary adaptation. They face …
We cannot live with these people
Charlie Kirk was a normiecon, and a highly effective and influential influencer. So they murdered him and celebrated it. And still do. The left, all of it, is persistently issuing a blood libel against the right, which justifies them murdering us in “self defence”, and instead of disowning leftwing murders (“I oppose all violence” he piously says) repeats the blood libel, justifying leftists’ murders of rightists in the same breath as disowning them. For these people, all of them, disagreement …
Denazifying the Ukraine at Pokrovsk
According the PBS Frontline report, the Russians are dying like flies and losing equipment at a stupendous rate, yet strangely, they have a lot more volunteers and a lot more equipment than they did a year ago, while the Ukrainian army is shrinking dramatically. Odd that. The Pokrovsk agglomeration (Pokrovsk, Rodynske and Myrnohrad) is a city bigger than Bakhmut — remember how long and terrible the battle for Bakhmut was. But on August the fifth the Pokrovsk agglomeration had been …