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Culture/Society

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Russia's Nationalist Turn
How Putin Created the Russian National State
•�September 28, 2021
•�9,200 Words •�795 Comments
For the first time in more than a century, the Russians have a state that they can call their own, a state run by and for the Russian people - the hallowed "Russian National State" (RNS) that has been the holy grail of Russian nationalism in the post-Soviet era. At first glance, this seems like... Read More
Rainbow Ascendant
•�August 13, 2021
•�800 Words •�129 Comments
I mentioned this Ipsos poll on global attitudes to LGBT in a previous Open Thread, but it really deserves a separate post on account of its significance. I think it demonstrates three things: LGBT rights (as in marriage and adoption) have become universalized beyond their Western core, with the Rest sliding into line soon after... Read More
Cultural Autonomy in Film
•�July 24, 2021
•�300 Words •�345 Comments
Chinese protectionism/censorship (they only allow 34 Hollywood movies a year) has helped incubate a domestic film industry. As Richard Hanania points out, citing a study by James McMahon, that as of now, 9 out of 10 of the highest grossing films in Chinese history are domestic, all released in the last few years. Something like... Read More
Egor Ligachev Dies at 100
•�May 9, 2021
•�1,000 Words •�261 Comments
Egor Ligachev, leader of the "conservative" wing of the CPSU under Gorbachev, died yesterday at the age of 100. He was a teetotaller who took good care of his health. The cause of death was bilateral pneumonia, though his son says it wasn't COVID-19. By all accounts, he was a decent and uncorrupt man, e.g.... Read More
Navalny's Fasting Protocol
•�April 18, 2021
•�200 Words •�57 Comments
I sympathize with Navalny's radical weight loss plan, I truly do. Following on from his looksmaxxing Novichok Protocol, like him or not, we have to recognize him as a man truly dedicated to self-improvement. That said, I would strongly recommend supplementation if you plan to fast for more than three days. I wrote a helpful... Read More
Goolag Censors #BlueAnon
•�March 7, 2021
•�200 Words •�29 Comments
#BlueAnon is a term to describe libs and their obsession with Russiagate and other conspiracy theories that may be somewhat more credible than the idea we're ruled by Satanist pedophiles - but not not by all that much relative to the sanity gap between them: (It might have some connection/overlap to #BlueMAGA, a term invented... Read More
Book Review: Michel Houellebecq - Submission
•�February 22, 2021
•�2,400 Words •�163 Comments
Michel Houellebecq - SUBMISSION (2015) Rating: 4/5 You can access all of my latest book, film, and video game reviews at this link, as well as an ordered, categorized list of all my book reviews and ratings here: Finally read Houellebecq's Submission a few weeks ago, filling in a major and hitherto embarrassing lacuna. He... Read More
News at 11: Scott Alexander Is a Crypto-HBDist
•�February 18, 2021
•�1,500 Words •�106 Comments
If you weren't under a rock the past week, you will have heard that the New York Times finally went through with its threats to publish Scott Alexander's real name in its write up about the Bay Area rationality community. It was a disappointing effort, if not unpredictable. The author, Cade Metz, has no interest... Read More
Putin's 5 Star Hotel in Gelendzhik
•�January 22, 2021
•�1,200 Words •�286 Comments
Good taste, not overly tacky (e.g. too much gold like with Trump). I'd probably build something like that as a strongman. There's nothing cardinally new about Navalny's video. The construction of a palace at Gelendzhik in Krasnodar Krai linked to friends of Putin was "leaked" to the world more than a decade by Sergey Kolesnikov,... Read More
Film Review: Leviathan (2014)
•�January 10, 2021
•�600 Words •�291 Comments
LEVIATHAN (2014) Rating: 2/5 � Finally watched this major Cannes hit, and understood why it was so popular with the "professional" critics, if not quite as much with normies (Metacritic: 92% vs. 73%; Rotten Tomatoes: 98% vs. 80%). No redeeming characters. Main "hero" is a boorish, highly unlikable, impulsive, and violent alcoholic. His wife is... Read More
Open Thread 135: A Dozen Years of Blogging
•�January 10, 2021
•�2,100 Words •�177 Comments
Jan 9, 2020 marks the 12th year since I began blogging about Russia in 2008, before expanding into broader geopolitical topics, HBD, and futurism within that same year. Here is a graph of my pageviews across my websites during this period. (I did not plot visits to my personal webpages akarlin.com and akarlin.ru for 2019-20... Read More
Raz of Chaz vs. MAGA Viking: Who Did the Techno-Barbarian Aesthetic Better?
•�January 6, 2021
•�500 Words •�251 Comments
But let's move on to a far more important discussion: Raz of Chaz or MAGA Viking, who did the techno-barbarian warlord aesthetic better during their occupations of Capitol Hill and the Capitol, respectively? Both are very strong competitors to be sure. *** Points in favor of MAGA Viking: (1) Storming one of the key power... Read More
State Capacity and Vaccinations
•�January 3, 2021
•�500 Words •�234 Comments
Why is Israel vaccinating its population so fast relative to everyone else? I am seeing some smol brain takes on this. Sure, Israel might be a "small" country, but so is Belgium. Or US states like Massachusetts. But in the US it is those famous dense metropolitan centers of the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Alaska that... Read More
The Height of Nations 2019
•�December 24, 2020
•�500 Words •�79 Comments
Massive dataset: "2181 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in 65 million participants in 200 countries and territories." (A) Mean height of 19-year-olds in 2019. (B) Change in mean height of 19-year-olds from 1985 to 2019. Most countries have continued growing taller, especially in the Third World where the potentialities of Flynn!height gains... Read More
World Poll: Trads vs. Trans
•�December 23, 2020
•�400 Words •�83 Comments
«Ромир»/GlobalNR poll with n=7,100 respondents across nine countries has some interesting if broadly unsurprising results. (Extra coverage). Percentage that agree with: "Traditional gender roles for girls and boys are better suited for society." China - 82% Russia - 71% India - 69% Thailand - 48% USA - 47% Italy - 43% UK - 37% Brazil... Read More
Dr. Bildungsphilister
•�December 14, 2020
•�200 Words •�67 Comments
True elites: Rarely flaunt status or obsess over conventions - sometimes actively troll them, by dressing scruffily to formal events. Can be vulgar where appropriate, make no apologies about it. Don't make much of displaying their credentials ("we know the lion by his claw"). Proles misplaced into elites: Insist on proper norms and protocols. Are... Read More
Hybrid War Analyzing Borscht
•�December 3, 2020
•�100 Words •�240 Comments
Your tax dollars (as an American), hard at work supporting yet another grifter NGO: Just a few factual problems: The idea of putting beetroots into soups is hardly some great accomplishment. It is a "Ukrainian" dish only to the extent that they chose to emphasize that part of East Slavic cuisine. There are approximately zero... Read More
Malleability of Values
•�December 3, 2020
•�200 Words •�120 Comments
Poll shows that Russians are basically ~50/50 on whether women changing their surname about marriage should be "mandatory" or not. This happens to be the exact same figure in the US. Half of Americans believe it should be a "government requirement." And that survey is from 2019. This suggests that Russians aren't fundamentally more "conservative"... Read More
The West Is #1 in "Academic Freedom"
•�November 17, 2020
•�500 Words •�139 Comments
Some Berlin-based organization called the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) has compiled a global "Academic Freedom Index." It reminds one of that ranking showing the US best prepared for a pandemic, and indeed, to confirm my point, the GPPi proceeded to Block me when I made that point to them on Twitter. Evolutionary psychologist Lee... Read More
Will the Social Media Purges Accelerate?
•�November 8, 2020
•�100 Words •�75 Comments
As with wokeness, blackpill seems the safer bet. Emil Kirkegaard noted that Amren is now banned from Twitter (including in DMs). This is not a one off, some searching shows that DavidDuke.com was banned a couple of months ago. So I would agree with Emil that there's a very good chance bet that hyperlinks to... Read More
New WVS 2017-2020 Shows US Religiosity Collapse
•�October 22, 2020
•�700 Words •�69 Comments
The 2017-2020 wave results of the World Values Survey are out (h/t Thulean Friend). You can access them and look at the data here. They do waves of surveys encompassing a few dozen countries every five years, making the WVS a highly useful resource for comparative sociology*. One such question is repeatedly ask is if... Read More
US College Free Speech Rankings 2020
•�October 22, 2020
•�300 Words •�26 Comments
This interesting and seemingly comprehensive survey of free speech attitudes at US colleges was posted a few weeks ago: 2020 College Free Speech Rankings (also reproduced here). Useful complement to the FIRE Disinvitation Database. Although it's well known that there has been a large-scale shift against the concept of free speech on the Left over... Read More
Russian Bioleninists Come to Belarus
•�September 23, 2020
•�400 Words •�115 Comments
As the protests become more marginal and zmagar-dominated, they are also drawing an ever increasing mass of Russian Bioleninists. Not very important in the grand scheme of things, but it's amusing to observe. *** The Encounter: The liberal hipster Yuri Dud', who was recently in Poland, also ran into some Based Polish Nationalists there: But... Read More
Film Review: Cuties (2020)
•�September 19, 2020
•�1,200 Words •�270 Comments
CUTIES (2020) Rating: 3/5 You can access all of my latest book, film, and video game reviews at this link, as well as an ordered, categorized list of all my film reviews and ratings here: � The latest conservative triggering is over a French film called Cuties (Mignonnes). Having premiered this January without incident, it... Read More
Open Thread 119: Puttin' the Putin Back Into Poutine
•�September 17, 2020
•�200 Words •�113 Comments
h/t "Horace Finkelstein" for the meme What I think is a major missed market opportunity: Bring poutine to Russia. Cheap, satiating calories Latitudinal compatibility (Canada) - as with technologies and many other things, it's often been observed that culinary foodways tend to spread most successfully across latitudes Fast food Can make Putin-related puns There are... Read More
Belorussian Vexillology
•�August 20, 2020
•�400 Words •�18 Comments
There's some people who seem to believe that displaying or posting the white-red-white flag commonly used in Belorussian opposition protests is supposed to "trigger" Russians and/or Russian nationalists, or something. But really, why should even - or especially - Russian nationalists prefer one larp flag - that of the BSSR from 1951-1991... ... over another... Read More
Black Hundreds Return to Moscow!
"Listva" Bookshop Opens Up in Russian Capital
•�August 10, 2020
•�700 Words •�33 Comments
Black Hundreds CEO Dmitry Bastrakov giving the opening speech. On August 8, 2020 Moscow saw the opening of the bookshop Listva in Moscow. This is their first expansion outside the original Listva bookshop in Saint-Petersburg, where - incidentally - I had been invited to give a lecture on dysgenics last November. There will now be... Read More
Why Belarus Isn't Ukraine
•�August 7, 2020
•�3,200 Words •�159 Comments
Night in Novogrudok, Belarus (2017) by Pavel Gamburg. Even though we tend to take it as a given, it isn't exactly obvious why Belarus should be so much more "Russophile" than the Ukraine. The lands of White Russia were "regathered" into the Russian Empire well more than a century after Left-Bank Ukraine (the lands east... Read More
PEW Poll on Religiosity 2020
•�July 31, 2020
•�200 Words •�145 Comments
Major new study from PEW on religion in 2020. It is amazing to think that basically equivalent numbers of Russians and Poles connect morality to God, that would have seemed a very bizarre situation a couple of decades ago, when Russia was associated with pseudo-lesbian pop duo Tatu while Poles would make the cross when... Read More
Blue Check Genocide
•�July 15, 2020
•�100 Words •�45 Comments
Big Habbening on Twitter. Large-scale Bitcoin scam affecting high profile Blue Checkmark accounts, from Obama to Elon Mask. Hacker made off with something like $10 million. Even some minor circumstantial evidence that legendary Nazi troll hacker weev was behind it. All the Blue Checkmarks have been silenced until @jack figures out what is going on.... Read More
Hagia Sophia Becomes Mosque
•�July 13, 2020
•�200 Words •�425 Comments
At the end of the day, the battle was lost in 1453. The best chance there was to reclaim Constantinople for Christendom was in 1917. Admiral Kolchak was to command an amphibious assault on the Bosphorus, spearheaded by regiments named after Tsargrad and Admiral Nakhimov (amongst others). Instead, it was Russia that was taken over... Read More
The Rzhev Dementor
•�July 1, 2020
•�300 Words •�139 Comments
New monument to the Soviet soldiers who perished in the Battles of Rzhev (1942-43) during the Great Patriotic War. Putin and Lukashenko attended the opening ceremony in Rzhev yesterday. The lower half of the statue dissipates into a flock of cranes, referencing a famous song that is based on a poem by Dagestani writer Rasul... Read More
Woke Capital Making Inroads Into Russia
•�June 29, 2020
•�1,900 Words •�73 Comments
Yandex.Taxi is Russia's Uber. According to its terms of service, a driver can refuse a passenger a ride for any reason; he or she is deducted a fine and that's the end of the matter. But, like many laws and regulations, this apparently no longer applies to Black passengers. Drivers are obligated to give them... Read More
Canceling Colbert. (The French One).
•�June 24, 2020
•�200 Words •�26 Comments
As I keep saying, the #BLM lunacy is transcontinental, spreading from the imperial center to the colonies. France renames a school from Colbert, the founder of dirigisme and one of the founders fathers of economic protectionism, whose reforms allowed the Sun King to achieve Napoleonic Wars-level mobilization rates and fight half of Europe... to Rosa... Read More
California Isn't the SJWtopia of Right-Wing Fantasies
•�June 17, 2020
•�400 Words •�96 Comments
California is liberal, sure, but it is much more heterodox/"PC-totalitarian" than New England, where the Puritans of yore have merely put on problem glasses. California is more of a colorful playground for all sorts of eccentrics. Personally, I would characterize it as a nation-state sized coffee salon, even by American standards - just look at... Read More
Consecration of the Fortress Monastery
•�June 15, 2020
•�41 Comments
The Cathedral of the Armed Forces at Patriot Park was consecrated yesterday. Though I'd say its interior aesthetics look more like something out of Morrowind, not Warhammer 40K.
Racist Russian Gamers: America's Most Persecuted Minority
•�June 10, 2020
•�200 Words •�27 Comments
Racists, Russians, gamers, and now Karens are America's most persecuted minority. So if you tick four of those boxes, you can be sure that the Man will really be out for you. So far as I know, this is the first time in history that Valve - the parent company of Steam, the world's most... Read More
Jon Hellevig, RIP
•�June 7, 2020
•�800 Words •�1 Comment
May 26, 2020 saw the death of Jon Hellevig, one of the most interesting and colorful figures at the intersection of the Moscow expat and "Russia watching" worlds. (Before you ask, as it's topical in the news - no, not COVID-19). The Swedish-Finnish descendant of three Tsarist generals - his great-great-grandfather Gripenberg was a governor... Read More
Russian Chud Bogdan Vechirko Launches Personal ATO in Minneapolis
•�June 1, 2020
•�100 Words •�206 Comments
This Bogdan Vechirko story is just perfect on so many levels of "meme convergence": > Be Ukrainian nationalist from Vinnytsia. > Leave for work in a Western country, just like any Ukrainian nationalist would given the chance. > Work intermittently as truck driver in US since 2015. > Become #MAGA chud. > Launch your very... Read More
Latest News in Zoology
•�May 29, 2020
•�100 Words •�39 Comments
So this is what Virgil was planning while "dead". Come to think of it, isn't this, like, the ultimate proof of White Supremacy. We even do the chimpouts better. Burning down a pigsty is much cooler than looting some gay store. In other news, Twitter's gone to war with the bad orange man: Will The... Read More
The Wealth & Masks of Nations
•�May 24, 2020
•�2,400 Words •�94 Comments
There are at least many views on the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of lockdowns. The balance of the evidence suggests that they do work, though the effect is confounded in complex ways by people spontaneously engaging in risk-reducing (but GDP-lowering) behavior. Be that as it may, the point is becoming moot, since they are ending across... Read More
Film Review: Contagion (2011)
•�May 20, 2020
•�400 Words •�17 Comments
CONTAGION (2011) Rating: 4/5 You can access all of my latest book, film, and video game reviews at this link, as well as an ordered, categorized list of all my book reviews and ratings here: Contagion (2011), which I watched in February - my only film so far this year - chronicles the spread of... Read More
Coronated States of America
•�May 19, 2020
•�200 Words •�26 Comments
One popular trope is that the US splits into its constituent "American nations" in the aftermath of some disaster or apocalyptic event. Alfred Twu has been tracking this for Corona, best thread here. Logical. In a country where states have so much power, much of the response would likewise be at the state level, with... Read More
Movies from Boxes of Scraps Built in a Cave
•�April 22, 2020
•�200 Words •�41 Comments
This five part movie about the adventures of an Astartes spec-ops squad in the Warhammer 40k universe is my favorite cinematic product of 2020. It's hard to know where to even start - the atmospherics, animation, pacing, special effects, the sounds and music - they are all perfect. Perhaps my single favorite thing is how... Read More
Shrine Lickers
•�March 30, 2020
•�100 Words •�25 Comments
The Virgin hazmat suit recluse vs. the Chad public shrine licker: However, the actual Iranian government - literally run by mullahs - was less appreciative of their devotion. The shrine lickers were arrested and are facing sentences of 74 lashes and/or imprisonment. And yes, they also closed down the mosques. Ironically, actual theocracies may have... Read More
Our Russia in Data
•�January 30, 2020
•�400 Words •�40 Comments
One of the nicest sites on the Internet for data freaks is Max Roser's Our World in Data, which produces lavishly illustrated graphs on a wide variety of political, economics, and society-related topics. The links to the original data sources are also very useful. I found something similar (if much smaller scale) for Russia at... Read More
Tver 2019
•�December 21, 2019
•�2,000 Words •�23 Comments
I was in Saint-Petersburg this November 18-25, and I thought I would round off the trip by stopping by the historic towns of Tver and Torzhok on the way. Thanks to the new High-Speed Rail infrastructure, this is pretty easy, and this along with the urban beautification campaign launched by its new, HSE-educator mayor Alexander... Read More
Obninsk & Borovsk 2019
•�December 14, 2019
•�1,900 Words •�28 Comments
I have long wanted to make a "pilgrimage" to Borovsk, home to the museum-apartment of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, one of the three major thinkers - along with Nikolay Fyodorov and Vladimir Vernadsky - who could be said to be the fathers of Russian Cosmism, which is the precursor to modern transhumanism. Fortunately, to reach Borovsk, the... Read More
Volokolamsk 2019
•�December 10, 2019
•�1,200 Words •�17 Comments
You may remember me writing about my visit to Volokolamsk in 2017, which did not leave the best impression. However, even these out of the way towns are steadily getting better, as my subsequent visit this summer would demonstrate. *** Some typical views driving about Volokolamsk. This is a monument to the Bus Driver. The... Read More
"Beyond Meat" Is A Big Broccoli Psyops
•�November 11, 2019
•�300 Words •�163 Comments
After an epic search for one of the ten Teremok restaurants in Moscow that serve the Немясо (Beyond Meat) patty... ... I finally found one and sampled it. It was OK, I guess. Quite edible. Might even be good with condiments. But it tastes *nothing* like meat, contra MSM pundits. Consequently, I am now convinced... Read More
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Anatoly Karlin
About Anatoly Karlin

I am a blogger, thinker, and businessman in the SF Bay Area. I’m originally from Russia, spent many years in Britain, and studied at U.C. Berkeley.

One of my tenets is that ideologies tend to suck. As such, I hesitate about attaching labels to myself. That said, if it’s really necessary, I suppose “liberal-conservative neoreactionary” would be close enough.

Though I consider myself part of the Orthodox Church, my philosophy and spiritual views are more influenced by digital physics, Gnosticism, and Russian cosmism than anything specifically Judeo-Christian.