Yevardiaղ
@haravayin_hogh
Mostly bookposting account. Threads in 'Highlights'
Good counterpoint. Underestimated how friendly on a personal level Israeli gov remains with Russia, even if they clash on MENA issues, they've always maintained an "understanding". Would be darkly hilarious for 🇺🇸🐘 if they had a full rapprochement if US ever withdrew support.
2029... Vance loses, Trump had a stroke so he can't play J6 hijinks this time. We're getting an AOC-like Democrat in charge. Bibi or his hard-right successor offer Xi Jinping all the data on the F-35 for de facto recognition the Palestinians will live east of Golan...
Bertrand Russell on how his gardner achieved happiness by killing rabbits↓ Remember to find joy in your work!
A thread on "The Radical Culture of Australia" by Richard Rosencrance from "The Founding of New Societies". An attempt to give an outline to our socio-political culture. 🧵
Around 25-50% of all pre-1945 films have been lost forever. Figures are much higher in Europe, still more in Japan, for obvious reasons.
the only surviving shot from the soviet film “ivan the terrible, part 3” by sergei eisenstein. it was commissioned by stalin in the 1940s, who admired the first part and disliked the second one so immensely that he banned it. one of the great lost movies.
Nemets' Canadian fulminations had me think of other "Spoiler Countries": States without an ethnicity/nation, which largely exist to spite another state from adding to its core population. Eg: 🇦🇹>🇩🇪, 🇽🇰>🇦🇱, 🇧🇪>🇫🇷/🇳🇱, 🇲🇦>🇪🇭. Though sometimes, spoiler states evolve real identies.
"How can these people be eating our lunch, if they are so fundamentally less risk averse than us, on every level?"
If you leave major cities of China and visit ‘smaller towns’ (still well over 1m people) - you can see haphazard traffic and women driving around on scooters with a 3 yr old clinging on in the back - no helmets. These are the people eating our lunch? Only because we let them.
Was Alexander the Great really a Slav? A scholarly investigation...
Thread answering whether the Ancient Macedonians were Greeks. The short answer is no. Macedonians would eventually merge with Greeks, in a process taking centuries. But at the time of Alexander, no Greek thought of them as co-ethnics, & the average Macedonian wasn't keen either.
Unlike other Balkanoids under Turkish rule, Bulgaria was too close to Ottoman capital for feasible armed revolt. Thus efforts at reasserting nationhood long focused on gaining religious autonomy. To this end an attempt at Catholic-Unionism was attempted, but soon ended in farce.
Prefer not to get on the soapbox, but when inner-circle establishment media figures who've largely made their careers off of "Counter-Jihad" like Piers Morgan are calling this out, they're smartly positioning themselves as they see the jig will soon be up. Ditto Epstein & MAGA.
‘Killed seeking aid.’ When did the world just sit back and let an increasingly rogue government do this to a civilian population, day after day?
One of many things that make humans uniquely unhappy is a monogamous ideal with a strong tendency towards polygamy. Evolved intelligence let Man go on with numerous other negative traits: Risky childbirth & back problems from new bipedalism, big & easily injured sex organs etc.
Unless you can spare a couple of centuries to run some massive social experiment to test this, any talk of whether monogamy / polygamy is eugenic or dysgenic is a just-so story that exists to justify a self-serving preference
Some MENA musicians I like: 🇹🇷-Bariş Manço, Erkin Koray, 3-Hürel 🇮🇱-Berry Sakharov, The Clique, Mashina 🇮🇷-Googoosh, Faramaz Aslani, Noosh Afarin Don't really get into Arabic or Mizrachi stuff as it's too different. The 60s-80s best pop/rock decades as in Western countries.
17th-Century Europeans kept inventing Christian genealogies for Ottoman and Safavid-Persian pretenders and local seccessionists. Sometimes, MENA rebels would even encourage these self-delusions in diplomatic correspondence. Modern echoes in "Judeo-Christianity" & "Counter-Jihad"?
Unless you can spare a couple of centuries to run some massive social experiment to test this, any talk of whether monogamy / polygamy is eugenic or dysgenic is a just-so story that exists to justify a self-serving preference
One nasty obscure thıng about Australia visitors get struck by is it has the highest level of roadkill of anywhere in the world -sometimes wallaby carcasses every 5 metres for kilometres. Few factors: Marsupials are quite stupid, SUVs, urban sprawl, native predators gone extinct.
US-Turkey relations during the Iraq War. Popular 🇹🇷-films depicting occupying US troops as lawless. Book-to-Film adaptation of Metal Storm, *alleging the whole war was to facilitate Israeli organ-harvesting*. Claims Ergodan's wife attended its premiere. But I can't find the film.
It's fitting that Afghanistan, the only country to have defeated Britain, the USSR and America - the three main drivers of our materialist, egalitarian modernity - would also be the only country to buck the trend and stand apart from Fukuyama's "End of History," at least for now
Apparently Afghanistan is the world's only state not to bother with the facade of "elections" at all. Incredible powermove from the Taliban. Even Saudi, Bantu or Uzbek despots feel compelled to put on some kind of charade, but the simple Pashtun is unfazed by such anxieties.
The Qing dynasty had key documents translated from Chinese into Manchu until the end, even as Qing's own homeland was demographically drowned by Han migration (despite official bans), their language & culture driven to extinction. They originally conquered China. A lesson there.
There is something poignant (and, philosophically, vaguely Chinese somehow) about the last professional Gaelic scribes being descendants of a hereditary family of chancellors. They continued to flow in their proper native course in disregard of the dam of historical circumstance.
The best account on Twitter for following the very long duration Irish/Gaelic literary history. Written material in Irish precedes those of nearly all the vernacular languages of Eastern Europe.
Here we see an Irish manuscript with Insular-style illuminations produced a thousand years later than the Book of Kells. A striking illustration of the efforts of the Gaelic Irish to maintain the continuity of their suppressed civilization. King's Inns MS 4, p. 28, 32, 38, 49.
The troop numbers cited for Alexander's campaigns were written by historians centuries after the fact and range from mostly (Diodorus) to absolutely (Trogus) worthless. They also continuously grow with each successive account, eventually reaching millions with Justin.
There are 10 pre-ww1 battles that are ranked 5 on the Zhukov Scale; 6 of these happened in China. One of these is Alexander's battle at Issus, in which he defeated Darius III.
This book is an interesting read on the first steps of counter-terrorism's shift in focus towards the majority. In Canada it was CSIS rather than the FBI, & took place in late rather than early 2010s, but was presumably quite similar in nature. 1) members of immigrant…