Ostokhon

The only thing gayer and more pathetic than the plethora of muzrats and whiteboi lefties seething over some dancing girls are the Iranians advancing muztard rhetoric. What are you trying to do, score some points with Ahmed from Pakistan and Steve in Canada?

Balaji and Roman Helmet Guy have been beefing for a few days and I have to say that Balaji has been far more cogent and correct. I dont agree with everything he has said but he’s more directionally correct than not. Also Roman Helmet Guy seems to reductio ad anti-indianism whenever he’s losing. Gross. Balaji once pointed out to me that Chinese entrepreneurial types seem to be willing to build screw factories. Americans are not. And it just flows from there. Chinese manufacturing weight is going to be challenging to counter. perhaps this point is arguable on the margins, but the subsequent US withdrawal towards Asia and the resulting chaos is not. Math is math. Balaji’s belief that there needs to be counterforce to the emerging chaos is also correct. I respect him trying to build that. A US loss and Chinese victory and nothing in between is terrifying and that Balaji is looking for a light at the end of the tunnel is noble.

Does your culture venerate the Autism Warrior or the ADHD Warrior?

It is very odd to me that so many people seem so incredibly focused on proving that they're tangentially related to Scythians, given that we actually don't have many written records about them, have a limited understanding of their culture, and they largely did not engage in the kind of massive state-building conquests as later Turco-Mongol nomads. They were a people peripheral to several worlds we actually understand reasonably well - Europe, the Middle East, settled Central Asia, India, China - but rarely at the center of events, apart from Central Asia and Northern India. What's weirder, though, is that a lot of people seem *hostile* to actually learning about them because they *want* the fantasy - that they were based heroic blonde warrior nomads or that they were actually literally just Turkic. There's an outright refusal to engage with the evidence we do have. People seem to genuinely want some combination of Nihal Atsız and Robert E. Howard and just tell you to shut up if you try to have an actual conversation.

Excerpt from the Southern Arc paper: "The ancestors of the Yamnaya were, however, substantially drawn from West Asia, mainly from the Caucasus, a process that had started by ~7,000 years ago, but also from the more southern Anatolian-Levantine continuum. The Bronze Age expansion of the Yamnaya into the Caucasus can thus be seen as a return to the homeland of about half their ancestors." Willing to have a discussion on this. Why do so many Indo-Europeanists on X reject the "Hungarian scenario" — where a relatively small foreign group imposes its language on a larger local population, either through conquest or peaceful osmosis? This is hardly exotic in history: Ossetians, Finnic peoples, Turks all offer analogues. Is there any clear argument against a pivotal Caucasian role in PIE ethnogenesis and language origin? And does the notable absence of CHG on chrX not hint that the famous Kóryos rite was a late arrival to the steppe — rather than an indigenous institution?

Hey so about that (Sotadian Belt civilizations never expanded deep into nomad territory pushing them away and occupying them, it was the other way around)

Ancient Persian aqueducts tapped groundwater through underground gravity tunnels, reducing evaporation. This made them better in harsh arid environments than the Roman aqueducts.

sasanian crowns are so funny to me like dawg take that shit off

I could never buy into this "Persia used to have the most advanced, innovative & intellectual culture in the world!" theory commonly bandied about. The stumbling block for me was that they never developed a script designed for their own language, but always adopted someone else's