Cannibalism was SOP in European warfare of the time – read some contemporary reports from the Thirty Years War, Northern War, Cromwell’s war in Ireland and more. 17th century Europe was like real life zombie apocalypse.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?387622-cannibalism-in-medieval-europe-asia

Józef Budziło, the Polish officer, who was in the besieged Moscow Kremlin, described it in detail. Soldiers killed each other to eat. Lieutenant of Polish infantry, Truskowski, ate 2 his sons. Some haiduk (the Polish infantryman) ate his son too. Another haiduk ate his mother. Some comrade of Polish cavalry ate his servant…
Budziło described also some ‘tribunal’, where the rotamaster Lenicki, had to pass judgement, who could eat died soldier from his infantry unit. Either fellows from the same unit or some relative of died soldier, who was from another unit.

Cannibalism was seen at the time as act of desperation, more shocking to the contemporaries was that Poles threatened to destroy the cathedral, holy icons and relics of saints to force Russians to promise them safe passage.

massacre of innocent Poles

These innocent poles were cannibals. Literally cannibals – they (while in siege) cut the Russian prisoners of war, salted the meat in barrels and eat it.

The assertion that the November 4

“Russia celebrates as holiday massacre”

which happened on November 7 is the blatant chutzpah

In related news, Poland complains that Russia celebrates as holiday treacherous massacre of innocent Poles and builts its myth on Polish bones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_Day_(Russia)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Muscovite_War_(1605%E2%80%9318)#The_war_resumes_.281611.29

On 7 November, the Polish soldiers withdrew from Moscow. Although the Commonwealth negotiated a safe passage, the Russian forces massacred half of the former Kremlin garrison forces as they left the fortress.[1]:564 Thus, the Russian army recaptured Moscow.

Lot, it’s great to see you posting again. To partially answer your question, Russian TFR’s have generally been trending upward from 1.16 in 1999 to 1.762 in 2016. There was a slight dip from 2015 to 2016, most likely due to economic conditions. Fortunately, Putin at least appears to realize that demography is destiny:

https://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/family-is-high-on-russias-agenda/20022

Vladimir Putin recently held a meeting about economic issues at the Kremlin in which national demographic policy were reported to be the main items on the agenda. He argues that “preserving our people and supporting child birth are among the greatest priorities for our work”. Here are some of the more interesting reported excerpts from the Russian president:

There is no such as an informed Kyrgyz. If they do exist they know they are Kyrgyz and not Russian serfs.

It’s not to say that they are anti-Russia or anything, just that they value their independence. Don’t know why you think the West have anything to do with what happens there. If anything I’d watch out for the Muslim world, especially the Turks.

Why would Putin want those areas? Kazakhstan is a friend…

I hope you don’t think the events of Ukraine have anything to do with ethnicity? It had to do with politics.

This bullshit can be stopped in a matter of two days, simply by rounding up kyrgyz gastarbeiters and removing them from Russia(or even ovrag option if you know what I mean, nobody cares). Alas, it will never happen in the RF, it only ever opresses the founding stock.

Cuck.

russia should just do it like the chinese and kick all NGOs out of russia.

Interesting how ignorant I am — as a plain old American, i.e., White and here going back a little more than two centuries.

Anyway, when I saw something about Kyrgyzstan, my automatic association was with gold, because you really need to know about Kyrgyzstan only because of the influence of that huge gold mine there on the price of gold — at least theoretically, although the price of gold seems not to be subject to rational analysis.

So who knew there were people there, with history and all?

And not one mention of ‘gold’ in the article or in the comments!

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

Because, Donald Trump….General Mattis…and General Kelly…and the Ukranian cockroach Sebastian Gorka…..are fucking WAR CRIMINALS….

I gotta got this in:Why isn’t Caroline Orr..RWONK…married…..pregnant…with at least 4 Native Born White American Christian Children in tow…..and married to a Native Born White Christian Man?

Caroline Orr seems to be working on her career as a professional Cat Lady who votes enthusiastically for the OLD FARTING HAIRY LESBIAN WAR CRIMINAL HILLARY CLINTON….and agitating for the thermonuclear mass murder…for this is the policy consequence of “PUTIN ATTACKED OUR DEMOCRACY!!!”…of Conservative Christian Russia’s Children…..

Childless Cat Ladys as War Criminals…

It’s a shame P C Roberts doesn’t allow comments, which would drive readers to his postings.

This one looks important:

USA is collecting DNA from Russia, perhaps for the purpose of producing a Russia-specific biological weapon

http://www.unz.com/proberts/washingtons-barbarity-reaches-new-heights/

Russia should have enforced its borders in the parts of Central Asia where Christian Russians were numerous. But this could only be possible if the Native Born White Christian American Population showed a very deep interest in the Universe outside of NEGRO NFL WORSHIP…for then..I believe…the post-Cold War destabilization of Christian Russia’s periphery would not be tolerated, and both Hillary Clinton..Barack Obama…and..Donald Trump would all be indicted for War Crimes….

This is probably just another anti-Russian narrative cooked up in Western capitals in an attempt to throw a monkey wrench in the process of Eurasian integration. Informed Kyrgyz know that their future prosperity is with Russia and China and the New Silk Road and not with the West.

The US will cease to exist in a few years…three years to be exact=November 3 2020. I am quite certain that Putin and his advisors understand this very obvious point. Dead parrot sketch…..

Dorothy:”Toto….I don’t think we are in Kansas anymore…..”

Anatoly,

Thank you for the map. At times, I’m confused about where the “stans” are, although I take it for granted they are in the middle of nowhere. From Wiki, I understand that Kyrgyzstan is mountainous, the “Switzerland of Central Asia” with a population of 5.7 million … similar to that of Wisconsin.

From the map, it looks like Kyrgyzstan will be a whistle-stop on the Chinese “One Belt”, the new Silk Road en route to Iran and Turkey and from there possibly on to Southern Europe. From a geopolitical perspective, it appears inevitable that China will be the major influence in Kyrgyzstan as part of the Chinese “near abroad”.

This should not bother the Russians. The days are over for Russia pressing south across the Asian wastelands in the hope of eventually reaching a warm water port on the Arabian Sea. Russia’s future will more likely involve controlling the input points for “One Belt” rail transit en route from China to Europe via a more northerly route through Kazakhstan. This will also lessen the danger of ethnic and religious conflict in Russia to avoid the mess similar to what is brewing in Western Europe and North America with massive immigration from alien cultures and religions.

As enlightened self-interest, Russia should let Kyrgyzstan and their Asian/Islamic “near abroad” go … good riddance.

{Why were there Russians, who are eastern European Slavs, in Central Asia at all?}

Why are Anglo-Saxons, or more specifically “English speaking peoples”, as Churchill called them, who are from the British Isles, in: Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand?

Pretty much the same reason.

Except in the case of Imperial Russia, it expanded – principally Eastward and Southward – from its origins as Kievan Rus’, The Grand Duchy of Muscovy, etc in response to continuous invasions and raids from those parts. To put a stop to endless invasions from lawless lands.

For example, Imperial Russia took Crimea, because Tatars.Turks from East Asia who had established a Khanate there kept raiding Russians lands and abducting Slavs to be sold as slaves. Over centuries an estimated couple of million Slavs were abducted by savage Tatar nomads and sold into slavery. Finally, Russians had had enough and had become powerful enough to clear out the brigands from Crimea and annex to the Russian Empire.

And everybody lived happily ever after.

It’s ok to be Slav!!

Interesting article. More grievance politics, around the world.

With the collpase of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation became the last European colonial empire.

Russia has ethnic minorities of a certain dimension (about 19% of the population). So does Roumania. What it doesn’t have are concentrated assemblages of them which have each of the following properties:

1. Located on the external frontier

2. Endowed with a total population and primary settlement characteristic of a successful and free-standing society: one where you don’t need to go abroad to float equity issues, trade in futures and options, land a position at a research university, or receive sophisticated medical care.

3. Suitable as a political vehicle for a discrete ethnos.

The Caucasus territories are on the frontier, as is Tuva. With an exception set have populations characteristic of English counties. The one which doesn’t is Daghestan, which is a multi-ethnic jumble. The only ones with populations you’d expect to see a small but functionally independent country to have (think New Zealand or Singapore or Norway) would be Bashkorotstan and Tatarstan. Both are completely enveloped by Russian territory and both are an ethnic jumble (though less so than Daghestan). No segment of the population has a majority in Bashkorotstan and the Tatar majority has just over 1/2 of Tatarstans population.

You could complain that the Baltic states did not meet these criteria in 1990. The thing is, all three were more affluent than the Russian mean, all three had a coastline and ready opportunities to seek a patron in nearby countries which were better endowed (Finland and Poland to name two), and, with qualificaitons re Latvia, all three had a pre-eminent ethnos. You could complain Moldova did not meet the criteria either; the thing is, incorporating Moldova into Roumania is a ready solution.

Local autonomy and voucher-funded community schools are the solution for Russia’s internal minorities, not more fragmentation of sovereignty.

On Nov 3 2020…the destabilization of Christian Russia will continue apace when Hindu-Jamaican POTUS Kamala Harris is coronated as our Dear Leader.

Looking forward to it! Soon your national religion is going to be a mixture of voodoo and Tantra.

Why were there Russians, who are eastern European Slavs, in Central Asia at all?

Thank you, Mr. Karlin, for another informative and balanced article.

With the collpase of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation became the last European colonial empire. Putin’s apparent dream of re-establishing the Soviet empire is on the wrong side of history and is doomed to failure. That applies as much to former Soviet Republics like Kyrgyzstan or Ukraine as it does to the autonomous entities within the Russian Federation (Chechnya, Sakha …). The Chinese are busily undermining Putin with their Silk Road railway-building projects, disenclaving the Central Asian republics by linking them to, for example, Chinese, Iranian and even European ports, thereby breaking Russia’s starnglehold on their trade and communications. There’s no stopping the march of history! A riend of mine once compared the process to rowing a boat accross a river. If you row with the current, you keep some control over where you’re going. If you try to row against the current, you just get swept along. Putin’s (and Trump’s!) mistake is to try to row against the current of the times.

I am no expert but I have also read Bush senior opposed the break up of the USSR because he was worried about unleashing a series of border wars, the neocons hated Bush senior.

The only consequential conflicts over frontiers have been the war in the Donbass, a Russian initiative which began 23 years after the Soviet Union dissolved, the expulsion of ethnic Georgians from Abkhazia, and the episodic pitched battles over the Transdniester zone. In no case would the level of violence have justified an attempt at keeping a clanking multi-ethnic mess like the Soviet Union intact. I suppose you could add the Chechen insurrection, not that that was a fine example of effort well-invested.

It was a matter of no consequence that Norman Podhoretz did not much care for George Bush the Elder and it remains a matter of no consequence. Podhoretz almost certainly could not be bothered to ‘hate’ him. That’s the alt-right mind projecting on normies.

The Kyrgyz also place great historical significance on the 8th century Battle of Talas River, in which they defeated China and forever halted their westward expansion. It’s what has kept them from the fate of the Uyghurs, and why over the centuries geopolitics in Central Asia have been more about Islam and Russian expansion than China.

There has been an anti-war vigil 100 yards down from Renaissance Technologies…Robert Mercer these days…..since Oct 2001 at the start of the bombing of Afghanistan…nonpartisan. Across the street, the mentally retarded Patriotards who stand next to their life-size carboard Trump icons wave the flag….A screaming across the street:”SUPPORT THE TROOPS!!!”

On Nov 3 2020…the destabilization of Christian Russia will continue apace when Hindu-Jamaican POTUS Kamala Harris is coronated as our Dear Leader. Willie Brown’s girlfriend will be very enthusiastic about using Working Class Native Born White Christian American Teenage Males as cannon fodder on Christian Russia’s border….Will Native Born White Christian America go along with this? POTUS Kamala Harris’s Russophobic Hindu Attorney General Preet Bharara will use Police State Power to crack down on Native White Resistance to War with Christian Russia.

So what comes next?…A THERMONUCLEAR NUCLEAR SCREAMING ACROSS THE SKY…to paraphrase an American Novelist from Oyster Bay…

This is the larger context-TOPOS-for understanding the War on Christian Russia on Christian Russia’s periphery……..

Larger issue:

The tax $$$$ of Native Born White Christian Americans is being used to attack Christian Russia on the periphery…with the intent to crack Christian Russia wide open for Neocon+MEGA CEO gang rape.

If only there were protests in the street every Saturday and Sunday in the fall…instead of hours…weeks….years….enjoying NFL NEGRO BALL….

The tax $$$$=billions and billions(say it with a Carl Sagan accent)….that could otherwise be used for Space Exploration and free college education for millions of Native Born White American Christian Youth. This is War for Blair Mountain’s anti-cannon fodder program for Native Born White Christian America.

WAR IS A RACKET……

I did not know about that uprising but after living 20 years in Central Asia this does not surprise me a bit.
Regarding modern Russian “elites” behavior in this regard it always comes to my mind. If one does not respect oneself, nobody will.
Same goes for USA taking over Russian embassies. It calls for termination of diplomatic relation leaving only red hot lines of communication in place just in case. not for tit for tat adequate measures.
I wonder, is there some pipe which is under plans and going to run via Tajikistan and Kirghistan?
It would make things clear.

Any country writes a better history than it was, only Germany does the opposite.

AK, while I usually post negative comments on your work, this was a great article, instructive and well written.

How big a threat is Muslim immigration to Russia in your view?

Would the return of Russians in central asia to Russia be a demographic boost to Russia, or have basically all the working age and employable Russians already left?

Resistance against empire is often brutal… because empire-building itself is brutal.

Tragic, yes. But hardly exceptional.

Diversity is the product of empire.

“Why is it so imperative ? Sorry to be so argumentative, but I don’t see any problem.”

Because things may change very quickly. There may not be such an opportunity in the future. It was only the ineptness of Ukrainian nationalists that permitted Russia to recover the Crimea. You can’t rely on your opponents’ being stupid all the time ( which sadly seems to be a characteristic of Ukrainian nationalists )
Secondly, it is necessary to shore up the remaining Russian population, a large part of which has left since 1990. Those who have left are very largely newer Russian immigrants and their offspring. Those remaining are very likely descendants of C18th and C19th settlers. They are in Kazakhstan only because of the arbitrary borders decided by the Bolsheviks in 1922-24.

“Why will future Russians miss the Kazakh Steppe ? ‘

For the same that White Texans will miss Texas once they are expelled from it by the Mexican hordes. It was their home. Their ancestors may not have settled it as long as the Russians. It may not be very scenic ( the parts of Texas I’ve seen ). But it was their home.
Oops, reply to 17 Joe D

Peter Hitchens reproduced some newswire stories from the time that had the Russians protesting regarding the Donbass as well as Crimea, reality is there was little they could do about it. I am no expert but I have also read Bush senior opposed the break up of the USSR because he was worried about unleashing a series of border wars, the neocons hated Bush senior.

who do have a legitimate reason to hate Stalin

Uh, I think just about everyone has legitimate reasons to hate Stalin. For example, I would say that I, Millennial American, have many legitimate reasons for hating Stalin.

blew up their main WW2 memorial

Well there’s the thing, it’s not really “their” memorial. c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_National_War_Memorial_Gardens#Dedication.2C_neglect_and_renewal

IMO the Soviet apologists don’t really have a leg to stand on complaints-wise. At least this time no 14th-century monasteries were razed.

Like all commie art and architecture their monuments were bleeping hideous eyesores. Which doesn’t exactly help their popularity. Not that being aesthetically-pleasing is doing much good for the Confederates. The monument in question resembled demonic Hell architecture from Doom or whatever

not that the replacement, the new Georgian parliament building, which resembles a super-magnified fruit fly head, is much better.

It wasn’t really the “main” WWII monument in Georgia either. Some of them even manage not to be ugly!

Why is it so imperative? Sorry to be so argumentative, but i don’t see any problem. Russia hasn’t been kicked out of Baykonur. Kazakhstan hasn’t made any overtures to the West; I’m sure NATO would love a base in KZ like they have at Manas. I personally am not aware of any irredentism among ethnic Russians, although of course that could change in the future.

Also, I’m afraid you overestimate the historic Russian population of the area)) We all have yandex and google, so you can find the information yourself.

And I don’t think Putin will be remembered for losing northern Kazakhstan. This part of the former USSR never had the meaning to Russians that other parts of the empire did and still do. In the future, children will learn about what is now the Ukraine and Crimea in history class, and they will learn about the Causasus in literature class. Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn lived here for years, yet it never captured their imagjnations as, for example, the Caucasus captured Lermontov’s. Unless followers of Dugin come to power, why will future Russians miss the Kazakh Steppe?

It seems to me that the Soviet borders roughly correspond to topograhic features, a bit of a rarity.

https://www.google.kz/search?q=великая+степь&client=tablet-android-samsung&prmd=ivmn&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiYgeHUtJzXAhVJPRoKHWxCBHAQ_AUIEigB&biw=800&bih=1280#imgrc=nVw3Sh-TRxvznM:

That’s similar to how I see it in that the border should ideally be somewhere around the middle of country, which is where the drainage divide is, i.e. the Ural and the Arctic-flowing rivers basin goes to Russia is what should have happened.

According to the last census, in 2009, Russian still constituted 23.7% of the population. It may be higher, since Muslim states routinely under enumerate non-Muslims, eg as in Egypt.
Large numbers of Russians have indeed emigrated since the start of the 1990s, which makes it imperative that annexation of historic Russian areas in northern Kazakhstan is done as soon as possible.
Putin has been fortunate so far. Ukrainian nationalists have been very inept at opposing him. Had they maintained good relations, whilst promoting movement of Ukrainians into the Crimea, then maybe 25-30 years from now the Crimea may have become majority Ukrainian. Crimea would have been lost to Russia forever.
Obviously, at the break up of the USSR, Russia should have had a stronger, more pragmatic leader, who would only have permitted break up on borders much more beneficial to Russia. Instead, it had Yeltsin.
Putin may not be remembered as the leader who recovered Crimea, if he loses northern Kazakhstan.

I believe as we speak that there are some border counties where there is a Russian plurality.

The dimensions of the Russian minority in Central Asia have plummeted in the last 4 decades. In 1979, about a quarter of Kyrgyzstan’s population was Russia and the ratio of Russians to Kyrgyz was 0.53. Now just 7% is Russian and the ratio of Russians to Kyrgyz is 0.11. Russians are now a low-single-digit minority in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.

Outmigration and fertility differentials have had a less dramatic effect in Kazakhstan, but the basic story is the same. In 1979, 40% of the population was Russian and another 10% Ukrainian or German. Kazakhs formed 36%. Kazakhs are now 2/3 of the remaining population and outnumber Russians 3-to-1; Ukrainians, Germans, &c make up less than 4% of the population.

Thanks for the details.

are you suggesting Russia bring back the Golden Horde?

No way – that’s crazy business! I thought that was Kievan Rus style.

Peace.

The northern quarter or third of Kazakhstan has been solidly Russian since the C18th at least. The present Russian-Kazakh border does not conform to the steppe-forest transition. Rather, it’s steppe on both sides.
I will leave Master Anatoly’s Russian commenters to skewer the rest of your ignorance.

I was wondering why neocon flagship The Times had an editorial eulogising Kyrgyzstan.

At the end of another six-year term, Putin will be seventy-one. At that point, either the constitution has to be amended so that he can have yet another term, or he has to sit out another six years until he is seventy-seven. Probably Putin will try to anoint a successor. People speculate about whom. Maybe this will become clearer if a new prime minister is selected.

As for reinstituting the monarchy, I don’t see this happening any time soon. So far as I can tell, this is simply not a popular position. I myself feel that constitutional monarchy has some advantages. You can be patriotic by honoring the monarch while still saying the monarch’s prime minister is a dirty scoundrel.

Anyway, I don’t follow Russian (or any other) politics very closely, but this is a matter of concern, since there is not much precedent, and I’m interested to hear what more knowledgeable people think.

As for the coronation get up, are you suggesting Russia bring back the Golden Horde?

Hey TBRS,

The big unknown is what happens at the end of Putin’s next term.

If he’s doing well, and the people like what he’s done, wouldn’t he just encourage them to vote for a successor? I would imagine his endorsement would be help boost that person in the polls.

The other thing to consider; why should it end? It’s been exactly 100 years since the last Tsar, right? Time for a national referendum?

Possible coronation get-up?

Peace.

I don’t know why its Soviet-era boundaries are a tragedy. Look at a topographical map. Steppe transforms into Siberian forest in the general area of the border. Post-Soviet borders are usually illogical, but in the case of the RF-Kaz one, it’s as good a place as anywhere else for a border.

Who is the intended audience?

Topics like this are originally what got me interested in your blog. Before moving to Russia, I needed a dose of reality in order to overcome anti-Russian bias that I had absorbed over the course of my life. My own banal and biased observation, after having lived in Russia for a few years, is that while there are still many problems, and despite the recent recession, various aspects of life get incrementally better and the improvement is noticeable even in my own daily life. The big unknown is what happens at the end of Putin’s next term.

Does the book have a title ( working or otherwise ) yet?

You did agree with me ( paraphrasing Solzhenitsyn ) that the loss of Kazakhstan is inevitable, but losing it on its Soviet Era boundaries would be a tragedy.
This was an unsubtle hint on my part that you hadn’t written anything specifically on Kazakhstan for quite some time. In fact, I don’t think you’ve written anything since you’ve returned to Russia.
Any chance of one soon ?

I said the nobility had Enlightenment ideals and had sympathies for revolutionary causes and therefore wouldn’t supress them with sufficient force to prevent them from winning.

Lol. Enlightenment ideals my ass. The system had rotted throughout; as Lenin said: the elites are unable and the low orders unwilling. Very similar to the Communist Party apparatus in 1989-91.

Somebody once said the Soviet Union was the bastard offspring of Karl Marx and Catherine The Great.

Communism was cruel in all the other countries is took over, even the ones without any Tsars.

Tsarist apologists tend to forget the Catherine The Great bit.

I did not indicate I was a Tsarist apologist. I said the nobility had Enlightenment ideals and had sympathies for revolutionary causes and therefore wouldn’t supress them with sufficient force to prevent them from winning.

As an example, here is the Tsars liberal views on capital punishment:

And the left dumb and stupid built nuclear stations

Chernobyl, LOL.

launched space ships

With a little help from the German rocket program and scientists.

striking workers were gunned down by soldiers or police, most notably on the Lena in 1912

Shooting strikers and demonstrators was common in that era, Russia may have been worse but not exceptional. Other events include the Amritsar massacre by British troops in 1919 with 379-1000 killed and the American Ludlow Massacre in 1914 with 69-199 killed.

Even the idea that leading revolutionaries were always treated with kid gloves is false. … both Pilsudski and Dzerzhinsky had teeth knocked out

Pilsudski was arrested for being involved in a plot to assassinate the Tzar. Knocked out teeth is a more lenient penality than many other governments would apply. In any case, they both survived and were released so they could go on to play their role in the future revolution.

I will list the penalties applied to Piłsudski and Dzerzhinsky that you mentioned, plus Lenin and Trotsky.

People of Russian ancestry do better on the GSS wordsum test than any other group (with triple digit sample sizes). You know why, of course.

Camels are native to Winston-Salem.

“If the aristocrats and bourgeoisie were really “brightest…”
They were. Consider such abstractions as honor, honesty, dignity in the context of the known involvement of the foreign bankers in supporting the profoundly anti-Russian coup d’etat carried by Bolsheviks.

Uzbeks, a South Asian people… I didn’t know they were smoking marijuana in USSR. I will tell you who the real SA are: the National Spelling Bee champions of the last dozen years or so. Get outta here!

If language is not innate, IQ either…

The instinctive structure that predicts IQ as well any other intelligence expression is innate or genetically transferable.

The same for language,

what happen with language as well its subsequent development with literacy and numeracy reflect in IQ scores.

Improve the condition, give the good schooling and IQ will rise.

IQ look like a passive condition…

The information given was not, “camels are not native to Germany”, the information given was “there are no camels in Germany.”

Assuming the information correct, (which is the entire point of the exercise) how would one logically answer the question, “are there camels in “blank” part of Germany?

Critical thinking is something educators are always complaining that you need to teach American students because they never show enough of it. They’ll just sit in their classroom seats like bumps in the road unless you start demanding abstract intellectual analysis from them. It’s hardly confined to Russian villagers.

Critical thinking is not some innate capacity like IQ. IQ is what you have. Critical thinking is what you do with it. Critical thinking is a habit of mind that must be developed. You need to acquire the attitude that all new information must be actively examined and thought about relentlessly. It’s like brushing your teeth. It really is a habit. If you live in an environment in which other people make all the decisions for you, you never develop critical thinking. Children and liberals don’t have it because someone else is always doing it for them, (e.g. their parents and the ideological priestly cast of SJWers who lay down the law for their supporters.)

The neurons and synapses you need for criticial thinking skills must be created with the sort of willpower and mental self-pushing that stroke victims must use to grow new neurons so they can make unresponsive limbs work again. It’s nothing more than that. It’s just pushing the brain very hard to grow more neurons and make more connections.

If you grow up in a state of nature and every challenge you meet in life is environmental, never intellectually abstract, then of course you’ll have a tough time reasoning about abstract concepts. That part of your brain is just extremely underused, and the amount of brain matter devoted to it is very small, and it’ll grow less responsive with age if it’s not used. Synapses must be used and new neurons and synapses grown to make create the framework necessary for making new intellectual connections, and that’s a lot of brainwork.

Deaths of ethnic Poles (2-3 mln) during WW2 were compensated by 1950. Concentration of population, necessary for societal advance, was higher in Poland. After WW2, Poland was given a privileged position in Soviet bloc. Poland had not to pay reparations like Germany, Polish students were welcomed in Russia’s universities, Polish industries got lucrative offers and technologies for free (e.g. MI-2 helicopters, shipbuilding, computers) and were in many ways sponsored and subsidized. Levels of political freedom, owning private properties, small-businesses in Post-war Poland were also unthinkable in USSR.

If we take Poland, for instance, there was no Civil War, moderate losses in WWI and WWII – still no spaceships, nuclear or electronic research, significant cultural developments

Per capita, Poland lost more people in World War II than Russia did. It was also more devastated. After the war it was an occupied “protectorate.” And, it has less than 1/4 Russia’s population.

Alexander Yakovlev ‘cited documents’ is plain Russophobic crap. While in Civil Wars many people die on both sides, the intellectual potential remains. If we take Poland, for instance, there was no Civil War, moderate losses in WWI and WWII – and with millions of population – still no spaceships, nuclear or electronic research, significant cultural developments. But the deathcamps were built in Poland, killing over 60000 people in 1919-1921.

That IQ has little to do with intelligence can be shown by various examples.
In Neurenberg the accused politicians were IQ tested.
Göring scored the highest, Schacht was next.
Göring made a mess of industrialisation and the Luftwaffe, Speer in 1944 organised German production is such a way that it was the highest ever.
Forgot the IQ of Speer, but he was lower.
Schacht in just three years reduced German unemployment from six million to one.
Richard Feynman’s IQ, someone wrote here, was 127.
Yet he was one of the best physicists ever.
It of course is difficult to separate intelligence from experience.
Yet the Polynesians were able to navigate over thousands of miles, no compass, no sextant, no chronometer.
European captains did not have the Polynesian skills, mainly reading the waves, and wave patterns.

I am shocked to shsre a name with such a primitive. Perhaps, however, we share superior spirituality through shared inheritance from our witchdoctor ancestors.

Perfectly intelligent questions for someone someone attending his first lecture on the subject of Intelligence, measurement of it and its heritability, but you have a lot of reading to do if you don’t know that absolutely know serious scientist or psychometrician thinks that whatever is measured or assessed as intelligence or a proxy for it is other than partly heritable and partly environmental or cultural. That is both Nature and Nurture count.

First there was that weirdo, Razib Khan, then the others… sigh!

Seriously, do you “dimwits” with a spiritual quotient in the 50′s, never ever tire of debating about IQ’s.

Why don’t you fellows discuss SQ and work towards improving it? Let me tell you it’s one Q which can actually be improved with little effort.

Some estimates for hangings and somewhat more extra-judicial state killings in 1905-8 go up to 5,000 or more, with significantly more ruthlessness in non-ethnic Russian areas like Poland. Which might explain the dental damage Pilsudski and Dzerzhinsky suffered.

Sure. But compare those numbers to what the Cheka was up to. A low estimate of 10,000 in one month (September 1918-Ovctober 1918) when they didn’t even control most of the country. Pilsudski lost his teeth, but wiki states “according to documents cited by the late Alexander Yakovlev, then head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, priests, monks and nuns were crucified, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled, given Communion with melted lead and drowned in holes in the ice. An estimated 3,000 were put to death in 1918 alone.”

And an exponential increase since 1918. Here are estimates for 1917-1921; the go up to 1.7 million.

Lenin was outside Russia throughout the whole period 1900-1917,

Lenin’s brother was executed for an assassination plot. He wasn’t. Would the Bolsheviks have been so lenient, enabling him to move abroad?

Somebody once said the Soviet Union was the bastard offspring of Karl Marx and Catherine The Great. Tsarist apologists tend to forget the Catherine The Great bit.

There is some truth in the quote, although you should add Robespierre to the list, and acknowledge that the offspring was even worse than he was.

… and, while we mull over arcane details from these dodgy K places – Rome burns …

“The USSR really did expel, kill off, or otherwise limit the reproductive fitness of its best and brightest.”
And the left dumb and stupid built nuclear stations and launched space ships into orbits not including other great fits and considering where Russia was in 1914 with some 80% of population being illiterate.
Something cheesy with this IQ study. I sense political prejudice based upon wishful thinking when it comes to Soviet history.

Some estimates for hangings and somewhat more extra-judicial state killings in 1905-8 go up to 5,000 or more, with significantly more ruthlessness in non-ethnic Russian areas like Poland. Which might explain the dental damage Pilsudski and Dzerzhinsky suffered.

Most of the leadership of Russia’s revolutionary groups stayed abroad, and were wise to do so. Lenin was outside Russia throughout the whole period 1900-1917, except for a clandestine visit after the 1905 outbreak in which he mainly stayed in Finland, where the Tsarist state’s writ did not run completely.

Somebody once said the Soviet Union was the bastard offspring of Karl Marx and Catherine The Great. Tsarist apologists tend to forget the Catherine The Great bit.

You people are like feminists, if generalizing “demonstrates” the superiority of women, it is all over the news, if does not, it just does not exist or matter.

Bring forth a more mature view of IQ and completely abandon any notion of “race” that is not based on hybridity. Until then, you will continue to be no more than a sideline joke.

“There are no camels in Germany”

They were used as currency after the Second World War:

https://economix.fr/docs/54/BignonCigarette.pdf

Actually Tsarist authorities were quite capable of putting down revolts like 1905 with mass repression, including thousands of hangings…

The total number of executions of civilians from 1905-1908 was a little over 2,000.

Bolsheviks terrorists surpassed this within a few months of rule.

and striking workers were gunned down by soldiers or police, most notably on the Lena in 1912

A little under 300 victims in order to crush unrest at a goldfield.

In 1920-1921 about 240,000 Russian people were killed by Reds during unrest by Russian peasants in the Tambov region. Some of them were poison gassed.

Even the idea that leading revolutionaries were always treated with kid gloves is false. Perhaps it was because they were Poles, but both Pilsudski and Dzerzhinsky had teeth knocked out during Tsarist police “questioning”.

How would their like have fared in Cheka custody?

The Reds took advantage of the Tsarist authorities’ relative decency.

Actually Tsarist authorities were quite capable of putting down revolts like 1905 with mass repression, including thousands of hangings, and striking workers were gunned down by soldiers or police, most notably on the Lena in 1912. If anything, the latter event revived the fortunes of Russian radicals because of the outcry.
Even the idea that leading revolutionaries were always treated with kid gloves is false. Perhaps it was because they were Poles, but both Pilsudski and Dzerzhinsky had teeth knocked out during Tsarist police “questioning”.

“There are no camels in Getmany” is false.

Exactly. Such questions even have no option of doubting them. You must simply comply by answering mechanically “yes-no” like a robot, otherwise you’ll be deemed to be stupid and not to understand logic. I have a suspicion why the Western people are so gullible and submissive. Their high IQ allows them only strict logical mechanical thinking.

My colleagues and I tried leading creative exercises in Azerbaijani after we learned it well enough. No good.

I bet you had not learnt it enough. This why it was “no good”. When it goes to language learning it is English-speakers who happen to be the stupidest.

We also had Azerbaijani teachers who would translate our instructions. Again, no good.

It is not enough. In ideal you need a bilingual teacher who has a degree in ESL, only then s/he can a normal communication.

Overall I think all this teaching English by native speakers stuff is a global scam. Many of those teachers has even no ESL diplomas. They are being paid just for being native speakers which is ridiculous. In most cases they teach nothing.

Still, it does not mean Daghestan is Turkic. To say that is just to show one’s utter ignorance.

I have had a different notion of the word “public”. The only public here I see is he had been shot on camera and the video is in Youtube, though, with only ~70k views which is not much by today’s Youtube standards. So it is not like he has expressed his opinion on many talk shows on TV which are popular today. Neither has he said anything specific like “Central Asians/North Caucasians have different brains than Russians, hence…” I’m sure if he said that really in public, to millions of people, it would be a scandal.

My great-grandfather considered it a prestigious form of philanthropy to have a bunch of socialist intellectuals living at the estate. He also happened to be the local White Guard leader so the local White Guard headquarters was transformed into the local Red Guard headquarters by the simple act of his Red “friends” moving from the servant house to the main building.

One of the Reds was kind enough to tip him off about the impending revolution so the family rode away just in time – landowners who failed to hide were murdered. Most of the blame of my hometown falling to the Reds falls simply on my great-grandfather failing to view the Reds as more than harmless idealists and rather many people died as a result. This naive attitude towards the Reds had spread everywhere.

Even worse was the tendency of the liberal and moderate leftist bourgeoisie to be so concerned about Tsarist aristocrats or the military taking back some of the power and liberties that they had gained after the abdication of the Tsar. Kerensky pulled the brilliant move of arming Bolsheviks to use them against general Kornilov; if he had instead unleashed the generals on the Bolsheviks he might have lost some power but he probably wouldn’t have been fleeing for his life.

White victory was only possible in Finland because the bourgeoisie in Helsinki had a front row seat to watch the disastrous example of what not to do in Petrograd and they briefly stopped treating “reactionary” officers as a threat worse than Bolsheviks.

the aristocrats and bourgeoisie … let themselves be killed?

Yes, they did.

There was widespread sympathy amongst the upper classes for the revolutionary causes, just like there is now in our society sympathy for leftist causes and leftist radicals. See our own SJWs.

Most of the 1917 revolutionaries had been in prison or exile for their revolutionary activities. They were known to be working towards Communist revolution and all that would entail, but they were not executed. They only received short prison sentences or brief exile. A pre-Enlightenment medieval government would have tortured them to death for treason and punished their families too, as also the victorious Communist governmet would do. They acted like a villain that captures James Bond and rather than just killing him, straps him into a laser table and leaves so he can escape and come back later.

Central Asia did have a period of incredible intellectual output in the 800-1200s … What do you think changed?

Central Asia?

1200s?

Hmm

More Lenin:

Vladimir Lenin
… Lenin’s father … earned … the Order of St. Vladimir, which bestowed on him the status of hereditary nobleman
…
Every summer they holidayed at a rural manor in Kokushkino
…
Lenin’s mother bought a country estate in Alakaevka
…
Lenin … worked as a barrister’s assistant
…
Financed by his mother, he stayed in a Swiss health spa before travelling to Berlin

If the aristocrats and bourgeoisie were really “brightest”, why they lost the Civil War

Its not as if peasants with pitchforks rose up.

Vladimir Lenin
… Born to a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk … studying physics and mathematics at Kazan Imperial University

Leon Trotsky
… family, of wealthy farmers … his father sent him to Odessa to be educated … He was enrolled in a German-language school

Rich enough to attend university when only the wealthy could afford it.

My motive shouldn’t matter in assessing my argument’s validity. Sure, I think anyone would feel a bit attacked by the implication that their ethnic group was “genetically inferior”. I’m willing to consider the possibility that Central Asians (and Africans and Arabs and Indians) may be less intelligent than Europeans genetically, but I think alternative explanations need to be ruled out first. Kazakhstan’s salt wasn’t iodized until recently, in Tajikistan cousin marriages are even more common than they are in the GCC countries, and 40+% of Tajiks are acutely malnourished. Hell, UNICEF puts Tajikistan in the same category as the Congo. That’s pretty bloody malnourished.

Moreover if Central Asians (and Persians, and Arabs) are genetically less intelligent, how come we produced advanced urban civilizations while Slavs were very tribal/nomadic (I have Tajik and Uzbek ancestry too, btw :p)?

Sources:

http://data.unicef.org/topic/nutrition/malnutrition/

https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Enlightenment-Central-Conquest-Tamerlane

AK— Central Asia did have a period of incredible intellectual output in the 800-1200s (think of all of the ethnic Persian/Tajik luminaries, Khwarizimi, Bukhari, Rumi, Farabi, Bukhari). What do you think changed? Might Tajiks have a slightly higher genetic ceiling relative to say Karakalpaks? And Timurid architecture was pretty impressive too. Obviously “Middle Eastern admixture” is no impediment to producing geniuses.

Even assuming your estimates/the sources you cited are accurate, why do Mongolians show an average IQ of 101 (according to Lynn). Isn’t that a bit strange considering the fact that Kazakhs allegedly only average 85 or so? What would explain the differential there? Colour me surprised to find that Lynn “cooked” some of his data.

PS: An anecdote here, I’m a Kazakh expat raised in a Western country, and I estimate my own IQ to be 125-130 based on standardized tests/conversion tables. And I’m by no means from an “elite” background.

Then why do Tajiks, who easily have the most Middle-Eastern admixture of the above populations do so much better than the Kazakhs Clearly the real factor here is nutrition and the relative isolation of Central Asia– if anything, the current situation bodes well for the genetic potential of Tajiks– Tajikistan is malnourished to the same level that some Sub-Saharan countries are. I’m still skeptical about such cut-and-dried explanations for the IQ gaps we’re seeing– lead, malnutrition, and poverty can all have dramatic effects

.

Do you think, maybe, your (assumed from your screen name) heritage has a little bit to do with your skepticism? Because if they is one thing I can infer from 4 years on this site, it is that the lions share of Slavic Muscovites who’ve been to Astana would accept the genetic inferiority thesis with no prodding necessary.

Give me an example of syllogism that might be useful for a nomads or farmer?

I do not see how such constructs like:

Major premise: All humans are mortal.
Minor premise: All Greeks are humans.
Conclusion: All Greeks are mortal.

Major premise: All mortals die.
Minor premise: All men are mortals.
Conclusion: All men die.

are of any usefulness. They always include the word “all” which is a general quantifier that does not exist in empirical world.

Don’t you see that from the point of empirical metaphysics we have no reason to ever accept a major premise? We always proceed from minor premises that we verify empirically to expand the domain of validity of this premise. The empiricist will never accept the major premise. iT is impossible.

If Luria told the Uzbek that he travelled through North and saw all bears that live there and saw only white bears and and then ask the Uzbek if there are brown bears there the Uzbek would think this guy must be an idiot. He was there, he did not see any brown bears why he asks me who was not there if there are brown bears?

Because what seems increases intelligence is the climatic dynamic of tempered climate and not in very harsh climate.

Azeris are basically Caucasian with small inflow, while Kumyks had a larger turk input but are mostly caucasian autosome(https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/29/1/359/1750206/The-Caucasus-as-an-Asymmetric-Semipermeable, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17278621, http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1005068), clustering with azeris.

Nogais are predominantly central asian but have large amounts of scythian and caucasian ancestry(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2488347/), moreover, they are a tiny minority, about 1.5% of Dagestan’s population.

If a person is incapable of abstracting from reality and grasping such basic syllogisms, I doubt said person is capable of solving even the most basic algebraic equations

German Zookeeper Killed By Camel

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1987-06-14/news/8702130621_1_camel-zoo-keeper

The cautious, pragmatic, illiterate Uzbek logics better than the ignorant, theorizing, educated Luria.
I know who I’d ask for travel directions.

Absolutely right on the Evenks– I don’t think they have any West Eurasian admixture– and if they do, it’s very paleolithic (think ANE-type). HarappaWorld indicates >95% E. Eurasian admix, with very very little W. Eurasian imput.

http://www.unz.com/akarlin/paper-review-iq-of-peoples/#comment-1895604

Middle-Eastern admixture in Central Asia

Then why do Tajiks, who easily have the most Middle-Eastern admixture of the above populations do so much better than the Kazakhs (who appear to be a mixture of Siberian/NE Asian and Caucasus/Steppe ancestries)? And Kyrgyz? Clearly the real factor here is nutrition and the relative isolation of Central Asia– if anything, the current situation bodes well for the genetic potential of Tajiks– Tajikistan is malnourished to the same level that some Sub-Saharan countries are. I’m still skeptical about such cut-and-dried explanations for the IQ gaps we’re seeing– lead, malnutrition, and poverty can all have dramatic effects.

AK,

What do you think the genetic IQ potential of the Central Asian groups is?