Nostr Web Client

I like imagining how many Genghis Khans there must've been before Genghis Khan. Their ancient way of living had to have survived from the very beginning, in roughly the same form. There's at least 20k years of lost history - that's the bare minimum. Every time the strong nomads found themselves surrounded by weak and stupid slave populations, they stopped their infighting and rampaged across Eurasia. It had to have happened over and over, considering how many civilizations disappeared, how much history is lost, and the simple fact that nomads still exist now. Persians, Greeks, and north Indians are all descendants of some nomadic progenitor culture that utterly wiped out the populations that previously existed there. The standard academic history says they were farmers displacing non-farmers, but that's obviously wrong - grain fed populations are too weak to kill off other grain fed populations, much less nomads. History's endless recurring wars that almost never moved borders attest to that. American history attests to it resoundingly - 5k Comanche warriors held the southwest against **_millions_** of grain fed settlers. The only real advantage the settlers had was that they could make guns, whereas the Comanches had to trade for their guns or steal them. And before that, it took about 250 years of coastal settlement before any European made it past the Appalachians, and then only because they had "gone native." French traders up the Mississippi were hardly French at all - they were only able to do that because they mixed and learned from the stronger natives. And the current relative weakness, both physically and mentally, of Americans is because of the government's decision to turn **_the entire_** Mississippi basin into a giant farm. But backing up a bit, those Comanches could have pulled a Genghis Khan if they had their own supply of horses and guns. I think history has a clear lesson : if you want to be in the "winning" group, don't eat carbs (sin is death! carbs are sin) and make sure you own and understand your own production.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1mo ago

and have lots of the best weapons you can get.

and that's not even actually that hard for anyone with elementary highschool chemistry. birdshit (keep pigeons) charcoal (build a charcoal kiln, it has many uses not the least of which cooking) and sulphur (which is used to inhibit mold on brassicas). voila, make appropriate devices, probably need to find some magnesium. well, aluminium and iron filings will work, just need some goop to stick it to some cord.

uh oh, i just told you a bomb recipe!

trebuches are pretty easy to make too, just rot down some animal carcasses, and voila, bring all the dirty varmints with diseases to the party.

what else is there. hmm. see, those indians needed science. that's how the relatively peaceful europe produced conquerors.

and yeah, as sun tzu explains, using unconventional warfare techniques to acquire weapons from the armories of the enemies is the correct way to do it. stealth, distractions, most important is scouts, you need scouts creeping around as close to the enemy as possible and relaying that information as quickly as possible to the planners.

also, it really reinforces the point. you can win with soft war and unconventional techniques, under some circumstances, but generally, when that fails, you have to have blades, projectiles and incendiaries, and men trained to use them, as well as men trained to make them.

there is no way to overthrow a dictatorship without breaking some eggs, burning some houses down and knocking down bridges.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Comte de Sats Germain 1mo ago

My highschool chemistry wasn't nearly as good as your highschool chemistry... And that's with the advantage of being a chemistry nerd from a very young age... Probably about 7 years' headstart. 🤔 Of course it didn't really start fitting together in a potentially creative way until I discovered the electronegativity chart, which was notably absent from all my classes, even in college, which is kinda concerning.

Yeah that level of chemistry - making things pop, basically, combining exotherm with pressure - I really think should be common knowledge. I think a decision has been made to occult useful chemistry because that keeps people incapable of resisting control. And its not only about violence - wanna turn a motor? Need something to push it. 'They' want us so retardedly incapable that we have to find a property with a natural pusher, water or wind, and then pay some licensed jackass to build a system. Boomer mentality. The least individually capable people in the world. They want everyone that incapable.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1mo ago

yeah Baron Mayer Rothschild literally said that "smart enough to do the work, dumb enough to not question why they are doing it"

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1mo ago

also, yeah, i was the last generation that was taught old school trivium "first principles" science. that's why i (along with my high intelligence) have the capacity to understand this stuff. i don't have much practical experience though, but i know pretty much the basics of how to produce all kinds of thermo/explosive basics, it's not really the most interesting part of the subject for me though. when i was in highschool, i was fascinated by organic chemistry, specifically polymers. as i've got older, i'm much more interested in things like soap and cleaning agents, fuel production, distillation, simple organic synthesis, and inorganic chemistry (of which largely the things that go bang or get very hot are about).

i'm most focused though, on understanding, now, what the essentials are for agriculture and hunting, and processing the production into food, and how to store it. but weapons are also very important, basic for hunting, but i want to have the lowest level fallback i can get. how to make a basic longbow, for a start, and then, how to craft a recurve bow. crossbows are only a small extra element of trigger mechanism and string puller, but can be made much larger for much longer range. and how to make various types of tips, what you can make the stick thing out of (i know there is a proper name) and in general the whole thing of fletching, putting the flights on the end, the proper ways to put the notch, and then, of course, how to use it effectively. it's something i plan to do in the near future. including the basic precursor, which is a knife. you need a knife to make a bow. knives are primary tools.

Comte de Sats Germain 1mo ago

Bolts - the stick thingy, in crossbows and arbalests. For knives, the simplest and most effective route is flint knapping. Skipping the whole metallurgy chain let's you get to skinning and carving faster, and flint knives are sharper than metal knives anyways.

Intelligence wise, for me it's a curse. I'm not claiming to be a great wizard or anything, but I've got enough to know when I'm being excluded out of envy, and have to tactically pretend to be dumb so that people don't ostracize me right away. This "lived experience," to borrow a commie term ironically, is how I know that humanity is getting dumber over time - civilization commits a slow genocide against intelligence by ostracizing intelligent people and thus denying them the opportunities that would allow them to reproduce.

Social-natural selection selects for workers that don't think. Its shockingly evident in the chikdren of immigrants that come up from the south here - after generations in this environment, their modern descendants are, at best, programmed into belligerent social justice warriors, making all conversations with them a dangerous waste of time. And what story does their ancestry tell? Subjugation only, first as unquestioning catholics, and then as the survivors of encomienda. Compare with the population of North America - we mixed with natives, learned from them, and did not enslave them and exterminate them, which was the 500 years process in the Latin countries. The European settlers were largely from nobility - second sons with no inheritance other than their wits, which were substantial, and that's why they were nobility, mixed with undomesticated native Americans, and notably excluded catholics, who were and are so domesticated that they fail to question the obviously lying and corrupt clergy. The result was a warrior poet north vs a subservient horde of unthinking workers in the south. I doubt a sharper divide can be found anywhere on earth.

Anyways. None of this is intended to say that any human beings are less valuable than others. A being is a being, regardless of details.

Comte de Sats Germain 1mo ago

That summarizes ever grad student I've ever met

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1mo ago

yeah, i was surrounded by people like this. i called them "nerds" because they were conformist, unquestioning, and seemed to be far more interested in D&D and various minutiae of these silly games. and nowadays, it's more about people talking about movies, i couldn't yawn more.

we got much bigger fish to fry and childhood is over. if you aren't already planning towards how you are going to weather the global war that is coming, are still living in a city, and prepared to be able to survive without electricity, you are not ready, and i'm not even close to ready yet with that. grateful to nostr for giving me a thing to get really good at building stuff so i can make enough money to buy the fences, sheep, chickens, repairs, build the stuff to teach myself how to do stone age chemistry, weapons production and use, and military strategy (really need to get a paper copy of The Art of War).

Comte de Sats Germain 1mo ago

I've got a copy of it right here, the same copy I've had since I was 8 years old. Its my most prized book.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1mo ago

it's a very important book, one of the most important ever written.

easy to get it free on the internet, probably can even get english and croatian and make a two column side-by-side so that i learn a bit of croat in the process.

yeah, ok, you convinced me, i need to get a laser printer, and some binder things to make books. there is SOOO many i could think of to have a hard copy that are free to download. only hard part is finding versions that haven't got awful OCR errors that weren't corrected. but i could probably even get claude to do that for me, if i can't find a clean copy of anything.

Comte de Sats Germain 1mo ago

Haha, you convinced yourself, I'm just happy yo have been present for it.

Hey, make its a trilinear translation, if you can get an llm to do the heavy lifting - Chinese, for referencing the original (Chinese is only difficult because of the characters - if an llm is taking care of that, then the grammar is a piece of cake), English in the middle, and Croat below.

I hope I don't jynx it by saying this, but I've been feeling like I need to learn Sumerian writing. Those sticks look useful for a dense but readable way to encode information, like it could sit right in the sweet spot between machines and humans.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1mo ago

yeah, babylonian numbers are also very interesting, base 60. more than the number of letters in most modern alphabets.