the "go home" thing is pretty common now. i've seen more normal young MAGA ppl i know tweet it. i've been rightwing longer than these kids have been alive, but it seems they want to turn me and my kids into democrats. we have to get violent if they're serious. no choice

https://twitter.com/OursIsTheFury90/status/1764816012694687818

(i tend to brush off nonwhites worrying about online meme-racism, but we all got our lines...alls fun and games until you turn into a permanent minority because everyone hates you)

for my whole adult life it has been a common refrain from conservatives that the roman empire fell because of debauchery and sexual license; often this is tied together with modern cultural, political and social concerns

the problem is conservatives don't have a strong case we don't know what the sexual mores of a given period were that well because we don't have a RGSS (roman general social survey). but, from the textual evidence we can see changes over time.

the biggest was the spread of christian morals with the christianization of the empire

we're seeing the likely ephemeral @VivekGRamaswamy boomlet before the air pops...will be some talk about his religion, therefore, caste...

a substantial minority of indian americans were born or raised in this country like @VivekGRamaswamy @VivekGRamaswamy ppl who grew up in the 80s and 90s, now xennials coming into public prominence and positions of influence and power. gen-xers like rho khanna and nikki haley and older millennials like vivek. they experienced america's conflict with iran, gulf war 1, then 9/11 and gulf war 2

my new followers, a thread on my steppe series...

Steppe 1.0, Going Nomad The early Indo-Europeans' great leap forward


Today 3.5 billion humans speak Indo-European languages, which dominate Eurasia from Spain to the Indian subcontinent. This is the legacy of the pastoralists who roamed the Pontic steppe north of the Black sea 5,000 years ago. They were the original Indo-Europeans. They pioneered the nomadic lifestyle, leaving behind hard toil at the plow and thankless foraging in cold Siberian forests. They chose instead to wander the open grasslands in search of fresh pastures for their herds. They were the first to unleash young warriors raised as roving nomads upon the world, predatory packs marching the breadth of a continent in a few centuries. We don’t know what they called themselves. We don’t know the names of those who led them. But their cultural innovations and the choices they made transformed our world and made us who we are today. These nameless people left no monuments or seminal texts. Instead, we live with their language, their gods and their genes.

These early Indo-Europeans did not rush into virgin lands. They first bowled over others who were similarly textless. So we have no written testimony of this scarcely human phenomenon steamrolling the settlements of stolid farmers whose ancestors had tilled the land for millennia. The nomads’ inexorable progress onward, onward, outward in concentric arcs, mowing down or swallowing up all who stood in their way, was marked by neither enduring architectural monuments nor ambitious infrastructure projects like Rome left those they subjugated. They came, they took, they surely slaughtered, and they clearly fathered. But with neither written words, nor enduring walls, how do we know them?

Like a black hole, they warped even the distant future of every adjacent nation they touched. And so, like astrophysicists studying a black hole, we grope our way to a picture of the prehistoric Indo-European nomads, not directly, but through the vast arc of Eurasian geography that curls around the windswept steppe to its west, south and east. These barbarian, nomadic Indo-Europeans gave rise to civilized, urban Indo-European societies as far apart as Italy, Iran, and India. The history, culture, mythology and linguistic patrimony of most of Eurasia, particularly its most dominant empires, bear unmistakable if begrudging testimony to violent brushes with the nomad peoples of the steppe. We must only be patient and creative enough to tease out these common threads, field by complementary field. Threads which in the end bind us all. Millennia later, we still bear the scars the invaders left on our ancestors, share their age-old obsessions and journey on their conveyances.

The nomads picked fights they thought they could win. The only way to survive a conquering force as relentless as the steppe raiders was to emulate it, as fully and as quickly as possible. Steppe genes were forced on our foremothers. And in a rushed bid for survival, the societies which resisted and eventually flourished in the face of nomadic predations absorbed as many superior steppe innovations as they could, both the tools and the cultural baggage. If you can’t beat them, you could do worse than to selectively join them. The medieval knight and the Manchu cavalry are but warped refractions of the roving Hun.

Today, we can trace back those shared threads in myths, mores and mother tongues that span most of the breadth of Eurasia. Archaeology brings us a wealth of circumstantial source materials to interrogate. And the past two decades have been delivering an ever greater granularity of detail in the DNA record of modern humanity’s near-universal steppe ancestry.razibkhan.com/p/steppe-10-go… Steppe 1.1a: A nowhere man's world Heraclitus held that “all is change”, contra his great rival Parmenides, who argued for a fixed eternity. Human history comes down on Heraclitus’ side, but given the pace of human affairs before the modern era, a lifetime might not be long enough to feel it for yourself. For the ancients, the torpor of the present always dominated, because their world changed imperceptibly. Pharaonic Egypt spanned more centuries than lie between Julius Caesar and us. But even a universe defined by eternal truths, like the power of god-kings on earth, can be upended overnight, leaving mortals to confront a startling new landscape of possibilities.

From the steppe, the frontier of opportunities unfurled endlessly to west and east. Nomads traversed the breadth of Eurasia in a matter of years, forever chasing the next conquest. A steppe warrior born in a tent on the open plains might die in a sumptuous palace overlooking a teeming city. We’ve seen epochal change in the blink of an eye in our own lifetimes. Remember the payphone? Quick, where’s your nearest one? Even the name of the 2002 film Phonebooth would bewilder most children today. Maroon 5’s 2012 Payphone video was already on the cusp of being nonsensical when it was made. Less than a decade later, my child of the twenty-teens stares just as uncomprehendingly at the video’s flimsy little flip phone as at the hulking phone you feed quarters. Mobile technology in just a few years rendered obsolete what had been a ubiquitous urban fixture for generations, churning through each sequential successor in short fractions of decades.

5,000 years ago, the Pontic steppe witnessed such a wholesale overnight transformation. The region’s Yamnaya culture metamorphosed to such an extent that its descendants could dominate Eurasia from one end to the other within just four generations. The Yamnaya rolled up their tents (quite literally), abandoned their settlements and guided their ox-drawn wagons over the horizon to parts unknown. The adoption of a revolutionary technology, specifically the wheel, and more generally a Yamnaya openness to novelty, produced a massive historical inflection point. They adapted, they assimilated and they expanded over the face of the earth until 45% of the world today speak first languages descended from theirs.razibkhan.com/p/steppe-11a-a…

in the *hidden tribes* survey only progressive activists don't think there are issues with free speech hiddentribes.us/media/qfpekz4g…

i think it's cuz they run major speech-generating institutional organs of society progressive activists have the highest incomes (probably matched by devoted conservatives). basically the ideologues are well-off

since i was a kid in the 1980s the gov. with the help of the dominant media have portrayed us as the 'good guys' and those we opposed as 'bad guys.'

i do think we're often good...but...most of our actions are dictated by self-interest (not all!) during the 1980s in the iran-iraq war the iranians were the 'bad guys' and the iraqis were the 'good guys.' then the war ended, iraq invaded kuwait, and the iraqis were 'bad guys.' so we made up some stuff about kuwaiti babies being killed to reinforce that...

kind of negative sometimes on the 'conservative movement' is what massive cowards young right-of-center people are in talking about their views. fucking cowards with zero courage and honor running around with racist anons and they/them pronouns in their real name accounts the examples are legion and it's pretty constant. so don't worry if you think i'm pointing a finger at you. i probably am, but you're in "good company." your whole fucking generations is damned

(not make your racist replies to me with your anon accounts fucking animals)

kindle deals this month (OK, ones i bought :)

Alexander the Great: A New Life of Alexander amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS… Forgotten Continent: A History of the New Latin America amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS…

some ppl r taking the below comment to mean i'm 100% without hope or arguing we should just concede and walk away from fighting for what we believe

of course not. what do u think i do? i don't give a shit how many online mobs come screaming at me like mean girls. over and over

https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/1652022379558649858

unlike most ppl i know who r disquieted by current trends who are "waiting until tenure" or "waiting until associate professor" or "waiting until the big grant" i have seen the march of the generations. the future is stocked with cadres who care more about revolution that truth

i'm in multiple chats/channels where academcs, americans and non-american, believe that the DEI pushes are basically stacking the deck against foreign candidates/ppl with immigrant backgrounds. some ppl r reporting pretty open anti-asian/immigrant sentiment i figure i should tweet it out since i hear about this so much it's a boring observation...but perhaps not to others, idk

A Tiny Number of Shoplifters Commit Thousands of New York City Thefts nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyr… pareto principle on steroids. obv driven by shoplifting rings that are selling stuff on craigslist etc. that a leftwing influencer her says is fake news

also, this is bad for the poor the same leftwing influencer (michael hobbes) says this is a victimless crime. setting aside the kulak-i mean, small business owners, even large corporations notice theft. they eventually close down their stores in poor/underserved areas

who does this hurt? the poor.

for those of you who aren't virgins, sanderson is a very nice mormon guy who writes a lot of fantasy and has a lot of money. the author of the piece is a sneering asshole

but just remember that almost all "profiles" are creative fiction, not reportage wired.com/story/brandon-… if the author/publication likes you, it will be a puff piece. if the author/publication does not, it will be a hit piece. but > 500 words, it's filled with lies and misrepresentations and is basically fiction

every time you read a profile of someone you know this is 100% clear

saw stuff about "caste discrimination is pervasive" among indian americans on my TL...to my knowledge, this is a total fabrication

i've said enough negative things about how some indians/browns behave in the west...i don't hold back

but i dislike lies a lot i condensed most of the important points in my blog post: gnxp.com/WordPress/2023…

but to review...