He monitored the situation.
Pretty successful poasting career though.
HABBENING: Trump is Banned From Twitter
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was written by Anatoly Karlin for Russian Reaction on January 8, 2021 .195 Comments
Anatoly Karlin is a transhumanist interested in psychometrics, life extension, UBI, crypto/network states, X risks, and ushering in the Biosingularity.
Inventor of Idiot’s Limbo, the Katechon Hypothesis, and Elite Human Capital.
Apart from writing books, reviews, travel writing, and sundry blogging, I Tweet at @powerfultakes and run a Substack newsletter.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
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https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1266285250038001664
Free market at work I suppose, maybe Trump didn’t shill for NASDAQ enough?
Here is some seethe and cope to enjoy.
The_Donald: TRUMP JUST GOT BANNED ON TWITTER
RT banned when?
Obligatory.
Trump Claims He Wanted To Assassinate Syrian President Assad, But Mattis Opposed it
https://i.ibb.co/tCjgNcr/Assad.jpg
Xi should invite him onto Weibo.
The ruling class has made it clear that they will never again risk the possibility of a populist president who represents the white working class. (Not that Trump ever was such a person, but he did play one on TV).
Ipse est situ vigilantia
Amazing the Syrian Presidency account is still up. Anyway, Trump fully deserved getting banned when he refused to stand up for r/The_Donald.
Another good #AssadCurse tweet:
https://twitter.com/Der_Gustavian/status/1347123628274548736?s=20
The cool people who always know best will say that Trump has only himself to blame. In one sense, that’s true.
Morally, Trump is blameless (in this matter; he can fairly be attacked concerning a number of others). He has done nothing wrong under the law by exercising his freedom of speech. Twitter is the evil, and arguably criminal party.
In another sense, however, he is guilty. Namely of negligence, in a similar way as the man who leaves his door unlocked in a modern multicultural area, and is then burglarized. That man is not therefore evil — he’s more likely to be too good for this world — but he still loses his property. And if we’re his friends, we might also not want to trust his judgment on other matters.
Trump had the powers of an office that, while not so omnipotent as often imagined, is still anything but a pushover. And he had millions of devoted followers backing him up. If he had wanted to talk to Big Tech from a position of power, he could have. He had the historic opportunity to put them in such a position that they would, today, be unable to censor him. And not just him. He could have saved untold thousands of others from a like fate — the vast majority of whom were and are his supporters. He could have hindered the censorship of various unfavorable news items last year that might well have made it impossible for
Bidenthe Camel to win even with all the millions of fake votes. There was so much that he could have done.For various reasons, mainly the flaws in his character which are familiar to us here, he did not do this. He went up against psychopaths like Zuckerberg and Dorsey, but was too good-natured to play hardball with them the way he would have needed to in order to win. And now, he pays the price. As will we all, very soon.
Trump accomplished much, and deserves credit for it. The establishment and media are discredited with wide sections of the American public. Perhaps he will even succeed in destroying the irredeemably corrupt Republican Party by separating the wheat in the base from the chaff in the top, in these last dramatic weeks of his epoch. If so, that will probably be his greatest achievement of all. Even if not, none can take away from him all the marvelous and wonderful things that he has nevertheless brought us.
Trump is and remains the greatest President since Herbert Hoover at least. His tragedy is not that he did nothing good, but that he did so much less than he might have. In this matter, as in so many others.
I also note that this is a Sinotriumph -all of China’s media accounts, including Chen Weihua (who famously called Senator Blackburn a bitch openly without even having his tweet deleted) and the Chinese Embassy to the U.S. (whose very based tweet supporting China’s advancements in the field of human rights in Xinjiang was condemned by the usual retards, including Sen. Rick Scott and Tom Cotton) are still up and running without so much as a warning.
https://twitter.com/chenweihua/status/1334561058799964164
https://twitter.com/ChineseEmbinUS/status/1347247602094534658
I, Edward Manfredonia, do not agree with President Donald Trump.
But how can one censor the President of the United States?
I, Edward Manfredonia, was wired by the FBI.
President Donald Trump is not the most corrupt President.
Main Stream Media praised the Clintons, who allowed drugs to be smuggled by Wall Street Millionaires into the United States.
President Donald Trump does not drink, nor does he smoke. And he did not receive oral sex from a young intern.
http://www.wallstreetcrusader48.wordpress.com
Thank you.
Edward Manfredonia
The more Trump is being cornered, like a rat – impeachment, bans, exile, prosecution of him and his family – the more the awakening is being forced unto him.
He might have not chosen to be the God Emperor, but only the Golden Path remains. It will not be pretty, misunderstood and full of hardship, but it is the only way.
Or he might choose to migrate to his friend Bibi and spend the rest of his days enjoying the sun…
Top troll in history.
https://twitter.com/barronjohn1946/status/1347694753786200064
I said many times that Trump tards will be wiped out and the liberal take over of the US, according to my estimates, is inevitable. I knew that before years.
Yes, russian media such as RT will be gradually banned too.
The world will divide into different regions with their own censorship and this time americans will have the luck to live in the one that will try to build the new USSR.
It was said that Biden will be focused domestic issues, and neglect the confrontation with the PRC.
His choice of defsev says as much.
Jack jumps around from health fad to health fad and wants nothing more than to hang out with black celebrities. The guy is a LARPing dork. Sorry if that obvious fact is lost in cultural translation.
More on the subject: now that Trump is gone, EU will no longer recognize Huan Guaido as president of Venezuela.
EU poodles were willing to play along with this farce for 2 years!
Guaido support is bipartisan so I don’t see why that would change.
It seems that Biden admin plans to restore diplomatic relations.
https://www.euronews.com/2021/01/07/eu-no-longer-recognises-juan-guaido-as-venezuela-s-interim-president
Apple and Google also banned Parler. I guess today is the date of the real coup? Not that these silicon idiots understand that this won’t make people less angry.
China needs to work on its PR:
https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1347517622527553537
Trump should have hedged his bets and started diversifying his social media presence, using Gab or Telegram as an alternative, back in late 2017 when it became apparent after Charlottesville that he would be subjected to a vicious campaign of slander and abuse for the remainder of his presidency, such a big figure moving to an alternative platform would have also caused a migration of supporters and detractors alike, breaking Twitter’s de facto monopoly.
Instead he just twiddled his thumbs (quite literally). He gets what he deserves, complacency is always punished in politics.
China wins on policy though. And all of this goodwill, USSR supposedly had, in the end didn’t do it much good. I wish Soviet communists set up reeducation camps for Muslims, instead of just pandering and subsidizing them.
Twitter has a definite twit factor that dumbs down by encouraging short tabloid bursts under a hypocritically censored situation. This account remains active despite these lies:
https://twitter.com/EvelynNFarkas/status/1288225051066720256
https://twitter.com/EvelynNFarkas/status/1291126655881273346
https://twitter.com/EvelynNFarkas/status/1291370299112423425
https://twitter.com/EvelynNFarkas/status/1296558937450385409
https://twitter.com/EvelynNFarkas/status/1299154579297390592
As late as this past August, Farkas stated that she sounded the alarm of Trump-Russia at the top of her Twitter account.
Wrong; more countries support the Xinjiang reeducation camps than oppose them, and these countries average much faster population growth than the countries opposing the camps:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/755149254414172251/789281704053309490/uyghurs.png
Somewhat related is this interesting, albeit flawed exchange involving John Bolton and Yanis Varoufakis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyXIOBIOTCE
Vintage NATO/EU country hosted establishment bias, as evidenced by the left panelist saying that Putin committed war crimes in Chechnya. Meantime, nothing said of US “war crimes” in Iraq where many more were killed.
Of coursed, US neocon/neolib leaning foreign policy establishment types will try to explain away why Iraq isn’t as bad as Chechnya. Sheer BS. US far away from Iraq. Chechnya is part of Russia. There was a growing terror threat in Chechnya which somehow had to be dealt with. On two separate instances in the 1990s, Chechnya twice had considerable autonomy. In each scenario, there was an increase in terrorism there.
The US Right is clueless, adrift
Bereft of the human capital to build effective clones of the Big Tech firms.
We need Self Determination
Or else our way of life will perish
You found this interesting, so tell me what the point disagreement between them, cause I sure not going to watch 2 hour long video.
i said they would delete him either on the day after the election, or the day of inauguration. but they got him sometime in between. i did LOL how they allowed him to come on one last time to concede and then shit on his voters.
it’s a really good thing that he’s completely banned from everything though, since the last thing you would want is Trump and company spending the next couple years sucking up all the nationalist energy. Trump is a total dead end. if anything is ever gonna be done about leftists, it’s really important that Trump and his family go away and never come back.
They only looked like trailer trash. They had the moneY and time to fly in from across the country. CA. TX. Also enough time to be 30 something gamers with tattoos. The Hikkomori class, not the workers.
I have no idea what your map is meant to be, but your statement implies that the Middle Eastern Muslim countries support the Xinjiang camps given that the majority of polled countries share a colour with them
This is absurd
Middle Eastern Muslim countries hate Israel with burning passion. That doesn’t stop them from normalizing relations with Israel, because power is what really counts.
The map clearly shows that this is a Western-manufactured controversy to damage China’s reputation, similar to Novichok hoax being deployed against Russia.
It is true, OIC member states have supported the Chinese position in regards to Xinjiang at the UN, only the Western nations that bombed Iraq and Syria seem to care about this Turkic Muslim group. I believe OIC member states have also sent delegations to inspect the camps as well and they found nothing much wrong.
Of course, the salient features is that China’s Belt & Road Initiative has earned China a lot of goodwill, so such things as detaining large swathes of an ethnic group can be overlooked by observers who would otherwise cry foul if the Yuan/Dollar/Pound were not flowing into their wallets.
Public statements of support and condemnation of Chinese policies in Xinjiang, based on joint letters at the UN
https://i.ibb.co/68hH2Mj/camps.png
Interesting exchange on a range of topics between a red, white and bull Bolton and handshakeworthy Greek leftist, relative to what an establishment NATO/EU venue will allow. The moderator favored Yanoufakis, who didn’t need any help.
WTF? Is THAT what he said that got himself banned? That’s as effeminate and harmless as it gets. Typical Trump playing both sides and covering himself. I can’t believe that is getting classified as inciting riots.
This may be the fakest “scandal” involving Trump in a series of fake “scandals” involving him in the last few years, not that the imbecile deserves any sympathy – just that the other side appear to be almost pure evil ( pure evil would be Banderastan puppet regime)
On a separate issue – I see that an albino computer repair shop owner got possession and ownership of Hunter Biden’s laptop , full of illegal, criminal and security risk information on both him and his father……..because he handed it in and forgot about it, making it legally owned by the computer shop owner after a few months! WTF is this farce?
Biden ( the father) also deliberately lied because he said all of that was a result of Russian hacking – and dumb fat Americans accept this
Navalny’s only comment to what’s been happening in USA is “Russia sucks and has low wages”. LOL.
Besides @The Spirit of Enoch Powell’s observation that most of those “supporting” countries receive a bunch of Chinese payola, there is also the peculiar modern circumstance that in this supposedly democratic age, most governments are actively opposed to the people they govern. So just as the US and other “first world” governments are hysterically hostile to the citizenry showing up a the “People’s House”, but love love love them some foreign Uyghurs interned in China, likewise Arab and Muslim governments fear and suppress their own population, but actively court foreigners. Of the two, the Arab governments are less hypocritical. After all, they too keep the most politically threatening portion of their Muslim population locked up, so they are hardly in a position to criticize China for doing the same. Though I don’t think they forego criticizing China out of a Western sense of shame about their own actions. They just think they are doing right and so is China. Western virtue signalling is alien cult to them.
A good rule of thumb is that on any given issue nowadays, the opinion of the government is the opposite of the opinion of the governed. So @E. Harding’s global map, it’s a negative image of what the citizens of those countries actually think.
Missed opportunity here. This would have been a perfect moment for him to say:
“Американцы, вы невероятны!”
It looks like the vassals have found their voice now that Donald Trump is on his way out. One gets the impression they don’t fear Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Why should they when both preside over a country where half of it is willing to sack the capitol and the other half is willing to claim violent riots that cause billions in lost revenue and property damage are “mostly peaceful protests”?
Had to laugh out loud! Brilliant meme!
This is good news. Its widely known twitter users are in the 65-70 IQ range. Its estimated a single year of twitter usage drops your IQ by 3 points.
One day someone will show me what value all these pleb-platforms offer. Like I tell people… if you need Twitter and Facebook to reach an audience or reconnect to acquiantances, you just might be a retard.
The American meritocratic system strongly incentivizes (and disincentivizes) the smart fraction to adhere to the established line. This creates a positive feedback whereby the upperclass becomes ever more ideologically monolithic over time as members come to believe, rather than merely espouse, the approved narrative — winning converts through growing demographic size and discouraging dissenters through the power that size confers. People have evolved to sense a winner and ally with him, meaning there is increasingly less incentive to rebel against overwhelming — impregnable — opposition in a society where power rests completely in the hands of an ideologically monolithic smart fraction capable of both rewarding and destroying its opposition without recourse.
Mutual Assured Destruction. This is what underlies much of human social interaction. People have evolved to cheat when circumstances permit and to obey authority when they do not. In other words, people will disregard established conventions of behavior until the point where their interests are threatened, usually through an opponent striking back.
This concept applies to all manner of social interactions, including politics: the political class does what they think they can get away with, up until the point where there is a credible threat of punishment (being thrown out of office). The same is true for some fraction of the general population: some people loot when they know they won’t be punished; some men commit sex crimes if they think they won’t be caught (example: the gang rape of CBS reporter Laura Logan by a crowd of men who knew they’d never be identified).
In the past, when the republicans had significant demographic power, the left moderated its behavior because there was a threat of punishment in return for abusive behavior — the ballot box, for example; California voted republican in the majority of presidential elections between 1960 and 1992, after which the state never went republican again due to demographic changes, some of which are complex (the loss of blue collar manufacturing jobs and the tech industry boom) and some of which are easy to understand (the rise of the Hispanic demographic & concomitant emigration of middle-class White families). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that growing Leftist authoritarian tendencies have tracked with growing Leftist power.
What happens when there is no threat of reciprocal punishment for bad behavior? People loot, people commit crimes, and people establish dictatorships. The Left knows they can’t be stopped because 1) republicans are no longer competitive in presidential races 2) the legislature will be a permanent democrat party lock by 2024 3) two of the three most powerful states are controlled by the democrat party with Texas trending blue by 2030 4) the Left controls most of the media, certainly the most influential parts 5) federal government employees, including regulators, are democrats by nearly a 17 to 1 ratio, as judged by campaign contributions … etc.
They are all-powerful at this point, so they can do practically anything they want and get away with it — banning political enemies from social media and bank accounts, unpersoning dissenters, violent assault against political demonstrations, arson, monument destruction … etc.
What we saw this past summer was a triumphal display of absolute power exercised by those who wield it. They were rubbing your helplessness in your face because they knew they could get away with it.
The Left can now claim violent riots are “mostly peaceful protests” because they control the media, including outlets that will punish those who dare to tell the truth. They can claim unarmed protestors shot dead were treated better than the BLM mob that nearly sacked the White House and were merely dosed with non-lethal tear gas in response.
There is nothing the Left can’t do and get away with now, or at least until the point where they step on the toes of other powerful interests.
The only solution to this problem would be to separate, thereby removing the current elite, which is often located elsewhere on the continent. With the threat of punishment removed, the cycle of self-brainwashing and retaliation/reward ends. This will open the door to a new cognitive elite over time, perhaps one that will not work to crush the native population so harshly as this one does currently.
I would love to see someone sharp put together an actual analysis of what is happening with the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The commentary on this all the way to the highest levels seems completely conversational, with the evidence being satellite images, Adrian Zenz-sourced info, and Uyghur nationalist statements on one side, and CPC denial on the other. I have seen very little objective informed analysis on the topic despite spending time time looking for it.
What does seem uncontroversial is that the CPC has large prisons in Xinjiang, wants to stamp out ‘extremism’ and ‘separatism’, and is imprisoning a lot of people – and that Xinjiang is an extremely highly policed state. Also uncontroversial is that it serves numerous Western interests to emphasise Chinese govt failures. Beyond that it’s very murky.
complete agreement. There are some reports of western journalists who tell similar stories about how their research was obstructed by the police. That of course enforces the fantasies of western observers about “concentration camps” etc. But nobody really knows what is happening there. In general western journalism about China often overemphasizes anything extreme, exotic etc.
Broad points with my thoughts on Xinjiang
But the ultimate distortion of Xinjiang is understood only with knowledge of the famine in Yemen, the biggest crime against humanity this century. The full details and culpability of the US in it is ignored by the Western media. The US Air Force flew 2-3,000 refueling missions from 2015-18 in Yemen, fueling Saudi warplanes that bombed economic infrastructure in a deliberate campaign to strave Yemen to break the will of people to fight. The Saudis starved 1% of the population of Yemen. The US aided and abetted in mass murder but the Western media (or any media) virtually do not mention refueling by the USAF, the most culpable aspect of US in the crime. Compare how they go full throttle with Xinjiang internment. It serves as ultimate perspective on the lack of authenticity by right wing Americans and British in attacking China on Xinjiang. (Europeans get a pass on any charge of hyprocrisy because allowing two million Muslim migrants in 2015-16 shows authenticity and consistency in applying exacting standards of condemnation of human rights abuses.)
Appendix
The Economist in October 2020 even ran a piece actively burying culpability of Saudi and US in the famine. The Economist claims the country is on the “brink” of starvation when hundreds of thousands have died of hunger since the war began. And the attacks by Saudi warplanes on farms are “alleged”. In the second to last paragraph, the truth is revealed briefly for plausible deniability if they are called out.
Are we not supposed to notice that the rulers of “our” country, the USA, are busily imposing a government/corporation-enforced social-credit system similar to China’s? We risk China’s inhuman system becoming the norm across much of the world. God help us.
Soviets had so much soft power that their own citizens willingly gave up a shot at world domination in exchange for Pizza Hut and handshakes with Reagan
Trump represented the voice of the working class men and women – not just white but many black/latino/legal immigrant (as exit-polling data showed) – better than any POTUS for a while. His promises – mostly met – to end wars, invest more in the US, bring down drug prices and medical costs echoed as much with many Sanders supporters as on the right.
At the same time, Trump suffered a fatal flaw in that he is a narcissist and a megalomaniac whose need to shine meant a lot of bluster about promises he couldn’t keep. In addition he suffered from an inferiority complex of a blue collar billionaire who still is not accepted by blue-blooded/educated elites (as is seen in his constant need for excessive grandeur and tacky acoutrements). He also thought he could buy loyalty with flattery and such – one recalls him sucking up to Big Tech in a meeting just before he took office and of course his Supreme Court picks. He didn’t bother to learn the intricacies of politicking once in power and killing your enemies with kindness instead of by constantly denigrating them publicly.
He also had no patience for strategic planning: for example what did he think was going to happen before the election? Did he think just tweeting fraud will occur would prevent it? Were his lawyers even prepared? This kind of short sightedness lasted right into the march he called on Jan 6 which was attended by anywhere from 200,000 to 10x that (depending on who you believe). What did he think would happen? That Congress would not count the votes? Whether fraud or not, his only legal options had already failed but he lost the moral high ground when a small fraction of the dispersing crowd either were lured or took upon themselves to storm the Capitol. While hardly an insurrection as the hyperventilating punditry would have us believe, it gave the perfect excuse for a crack form leading Trump to meekly concede the next day. And they STILL banned him just to make their victory complete.
Trump’s biggest problem was that he always thought he was bigger than the movement he fired up. He had tremendous power and instead of building to the future, frittered it away.
The one good thing about the Trump era is that it exposed the abject hypocrisy and inner machinery of the US empire for all to see. A Government sanctioned ban on free speech for thousands – only barely legal because it is being being enforced – simultaneously – by private companies ostensibly on their own accord and not mandated (though strongly “encouraged”) by the Govt itself – makes mockery of any ideals that the Empire tries to pretend are the reasons for their instigations of coups and invasions abroad.
The Emperor has no clothes.
Jack Dorsey is a nasty piece of work but Twitter, for now, can do as it pleases as a private company. What really concerns me is the Tech Tyrants blocking Trumps e-mail service. E-mail correspondence is not public so what Trump decides he wants to say to me via email should be of no concern to yahoo or google or any other internet outfit.
It’s worse than that. What’s clear is that the US Government now smoothly aligned once again between the politicians and the intelligence services is supporting the ban: Dorsey would not dare ban people if he thought he could get in trouble with the people who run Government.
Essentially the US Government is not just OK but backing large sections of its citizenery’s right to speech, to share information and right not to be persecuted for their politics taken away, because hey all this is being done by private companies and not directly by the Government (tho the revolving door between these companies and the Govt is fairly clear) so the Bill of Rights don’t really apply.
The slipper slope has been breached: now everything is up for grabs to curtails not just one’s civil liberties but ability to function in the modern world.
Europeans aren’t scared by Biden, some encouraging moves made by Germany just ignoring Biden.
Not too late, Parker is getting a sufficient network now to make itself sustaining, Trump setting up shop on Parler would be sufficient.
The Biden coup knows they are not the majority so they need to silence the opposition, could be overplaying their hand here, the US is still a federal country, some states might start doing their own thing.
Farkas is fugly.
Parler is no longer available on Google Store.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55598887
Col. Gaddafi and Gen. Soleimani smile down from heaven.
Very coordinated effort by the social media companies it seems. A lot of the internal politicos of Google, Facebook etc (like the “Alphabet Workers Union”) were calling for this a while ago, they must have cross networked with eachother.
Quite astounding to see such a reaction to such a milquetoast “conservative” figures who did nothing much over the past 4 years. Something odd about American society where they take everything too seriously.
Apparently the Chinese Embassy tweet was deleted less than thirty minutes after I posted my original comment. This is the equivalent of a mod banning an anti-establishment leftwing poster after banning an establishment rightwing one to justify the mod’s center-left political bias.
What was the comment:like ratio roughly the last time you saw it up? I am guessing the replies (mostly angry) outnumbered the likes by a lot.
It’s symbolic: they demonstrate that they can cancel anyone they dislike, even an acting POTUS. They demonstrate that the 1st amendment doesn’t apply to them. That the constitution of US is not important for them.
I hope that Ayatollah Khamenei would use his official Twitter account to condemn this blatant attacks on fundamental individual freedoms in the US of A. (Sarc.)
Maybe the Iranians and Chinese don’t yet feel the demographics shift has occured to an adequate enough degree yet, but if they are smart, they should start pushing White nationalist/Far Right stuff in the near future to cause as much chaos as possible.
https://img.ifunny.co/images/b92f9296a859590616c61baece88b5cf2acfd69a88dccc7c51a1466e72798759_1.jpg
From Yemen with love:
https://besttv232-ynet-images1-prod.cdn.it.best-tv.com/PicServer5/2018/05/02/8507430/10051473_10054182_rumble.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b9/c8/a5/b9c8a5ac1c6fedd4e7bb659f4b926e34.jpg
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/yemen/images/qat.jpg
True men are beating the crap out of the KSU and UAE Israeli-American proxies, while wearing flip-flops, skirts and chewing khat.
https://bangordailynews.com/2019/12/09/opinion/saudi-arabia-will-never-win-its-war-in-yemen-the-time-for-a-cease-fire-has-arrived/
Meanwhile in the West the Kabuki political theater features new performances of sitcom and dance:
https://sun9-5.userapi.com/impg/T6UmdWAQb_Hmwnz-uaEhbI-9jSOZVLUGQLluqg/_ZsrJmdzJlg.jpg?size=948×960&quality=96&proxy=1&sign=6e89466db1efd2cd6a8b761d75ceb5d0&type=album
https://d1yjjnpx0p53s8.cloudfront.net/styles/logo-original-577×577/s3/0006/5297/brand.gif?itok=sj_JokPW
https://youtu.be/5JuPyFhs-3U
Perhaps Western patriots should chew some khat…
Let us see how fast you get banned from Twiiter if you start asking the question.
The only reason why is site is allowed to still be up may be that this site is a honeypot and an agglomeration to keep all of the interesting people in one place.
He got a post deleted today too, about dangerous western vaccines.
Help me find my friends…
Seriously though, if it was a honeypot, I would have received a knock on the door already. And Unz wouldn’t have helped German_read secure his identity. Although it is indeed a bad and dangerous habit for Germans to post here… First Amendment increasingly means nothing either.
Just wait until Jan. 21, 2021? And if you are like from someplace outside the West, you probably need not worry too much, unless you make yourself too conspicuous and look like a VIP.
It is a well known fact that only Russian vaccines are dangerous. Anyone pretending the opposite deserves being censored and is certainly a paid Russian troll and a Putin shill. And that includes the Iranian Supreme Leader. (Sarc.)
We discussed this a while back didn’t we? This site simply isn’t high energy enough, there is a fairly long moderation delay on most of the far right articles and this is not conducive for a quick exchange of ideas back and forth, where some individuals can make outrageous statement to whip up a mob. The readership of this site is also fairly small, and the site is not connected to anything else so we cannot really “pollute” other areas as easily as one could on Twitter or Reddit.
Also, they did ban links to this site on Facebook.
To be fair, there has been some articles in Western media saying that the Russian vaccine works and isn’t a scam. There is a noticeable pattern. The journalists that write nuanced articles about it are the ones that cover pharmaceutical topics. The journalists that only smear the Russian vaccine are “Russia journalists”.
Example of non-negative article from today: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-08/how-does-russia-s-covid-19-vaccine-compare-with-pfizer-moderna
Was German_Reader under pressure from the German authorities? I was wondering why his name was greyed out and his comments archive hidden.
People knowledgeable in vaccine development understand that Russian vaccines are no worse than the Western ones (except perhaps for the EuGMP certified production, which might indeed make a difference). But the Western middle class should be convinced that the West still has the technological edge in all fields. Also, if Russian vaccines are cheaper, then the price tag difference and the Western governments prioritizing the Western vaccines, should be explained by the Russian vaccines being inferior.
I try and do my part, spend valuable personal time scouring the internet looking for appropriate figures, and you don’t even give me a high five? I still think that it’s a good idea! 🙂
https://comicvine1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/original/2/27002/511251-15watcher.gif
“TrumpleStiltskin” ANTIFA’s Overlord and answer to combating systemic racism (sorry, I couldn’t locate a black model).
Honestly, at this point, I think that Trump being banned is probably the best outcome. It is worth more than his tweets.
Sure, he might have moved some traffic, if he switched earlier, but not enough to change the fundamental dynamics, or political outcomes. The most popular platforms will be determined by apolitical people, probably teenagers. Gab will remain niche, as it appeals to free speech fundamentalists.
More troubling is that the moves against alternative sms apps were just as swift. Hosting will soon be denied for any twitter-variant that espouses a “free speech mantra”. Under the pretense that the platform is used to “organize violence.”
I’m not sure if the dems are so gung-ho on killing twitter’s competitors to completely cut Trump off from the public and quash his support, or if they just want to maintain twitter’s monopoly status.
I assume because German Reader is a professional historian, and yet uses Karlin’s forum to sometimes to talk about particular topics which might be related to his professional opinions.
Therefore, if he writes his opinion about a historical topic which he is known for in professional life, then his colleagues could (if they were searching on Google about this particular historical topic) think that it can be him.
Then they could see his opinions on another historical topic, and match them together. A few weeks later, on the front cover of the magazine of the German historians’ union: “Scandal: expulsion from the union of one our celebrated colleagues, who was posting on a forum hosted by holocaust deniers”.
This is why if you want to be somewhat not considered crazy by your colleagues, you shouldn’t write on topics that are related to your profession, in forums which have a lot of mentally ill people.
Even German Reader is politically very moderate, but it probably would look bad for his career to post his professional opinions in the same forum with the immoderate views people here (in this forum, there are a lot of users with racist views, for example).
By inverse comparison with German Reader, there is AP, who is some kind of medical sector worker. But he never discusses about his particular theories in the medical sector, but rather argues about history.
Here is how German Reader could return to enjoying forum. Just avoid talking about topics or keywords related to the professional career, but instead focus on topics which he has no professional connection to. It’s unfortunate for us on the forum, as we lose reading the posts of a professional historian. But he could post those views on a forum for people from his sector.
Some codes are going to be very useful going forward. What I would like to see is a presentation of how the homosexuals did it in the first half – 2/3 of the 20th century when their favorite pastime was against the law almost everywhere. There may be a great deal we can learn from their experience.
David Icke actually makes much more sense if you read j– for reptile. He might have been in danger of getting disappeared without this code.
There’re other versions of this censoring mindset as discussed here:
https://irrussianality.wordpress.com/2021/01/02/canadian-military-propaganda/#comment-35681
Last night, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson propped Parler as an alternative to Twitter, while noting how Big Tech is now trying to limit Parler’s reach.
Mass media doesn’t score well among the public for good reason. Many know that the interaction isn’t often fair and balanced. Keep hitting back at them.
Biden or Blompf in office means nothing. ADL, SPLC and Council of European Jews (Moshe Kantor) design and decide the hate speech laws. Ultimately the ADL is also responsible for banning Drumpf and everyone before him. Good thing the golem was monitoring the situation and move the embassy, got him far.
There is a whole discussion about “rootless cosmopolitans” y’all tankies aint ready for. https://twitter.com/cursedsalad/status/1025301685604777985
Anon, please…I have been hearing the exact same stuff from half-chan for about five years. Since Brenton Tarrant and the Infinitocaust we have a pretty good idea about how actual Fedtards operate, how and why stuff is actually shut down. And in case you forgot Snowden: they got all internet-traffic anyway. Including Tor, especially Tor. There is how you observe trends.
Why on earth would you expose anyone to the material reprinted here just to monitor the situation?
https://twitter.com/cursedsalad/status/1347728800549888000
Good one:
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/512028-google-twitter-trump-ban/
Unless he reveals personal information or personal specifics (say, university he teaches at or went to, what sort of research he did in recent times and where etc) I don’t see how anyone could identify him in real life from his posts alone, I don’t think German police have yet gotten that schizo that they will start obsessing over posts on fairly obscure forums like this one.
I recall there was an adviser to the Tory party called Andrew Sabisky who had used his real name on some forum discussing race and IQ, I think he may have commented here on Unz as well at Thompson’s blog.
once again – why POTUS being POTUS in action (or even exPOTUS) does need some specific media platform at all, when he can easily poast his uncensored stream of consciousness on his own site, something like realPOTUStoday.com without much loss of publicity anyway? Only thing that matters is what he poasts, not where he does it.
So you are a top research scientist who works on top secret government subjects who posts about how much he or she hates his or her government on this website, all while having a top secret security clearance………………………….
Or someone leaks to your employers at Guinness or Opel that you have an alter ego here?
For western dissidents, its better to use Russian and Chinese VPNs and proxies. Phones and apps too.
The 5 eyes are going crazy over chinese tech precisely due to that. Because it makes it hard for them to spy.
All western dissidents should support Huawei and make Trump tards have a heart attack. : )
(Trum tards never understood that the only thing that could stop the Liberal World Order (LWO) is multipolarity, including China, Russia and oh my god Iran.)
Russia is moving this way by requring a russian app suit for all phones and PCs.
Shock prediction: Biden actually does turn out to be the next Lenin!
No, I don’t mean that he starts liquidating the bourgeoisie but that he turns out to be a paid agent of Germany, installed to dismantle America’s empire in Europe and to hand it over to the Germans. Western EU countries were pouring money to the Clinton foundation in anticipation of Hillary’s 2016 victory and we can bet that they’ve similarly poured money, promises of contracts and all sorts of bribes into the Biden/Harris ticket.
American progressives won’t see it coming because they imagine Europe to be the superior, progressive and sophisticated continent that just wants to be their friend after they’ve defeated the evil ugly redneck badwhites. Biden will help destroy the resistance of Poland and Hungary only to end up handing them over to German rule and he will fend off Russia to help integrate even more Eastern European puppets into the Franco-German empire. Meanwhile the EU will grow closer to China and it will keep pipelines to Russia open even as they wag their finger about Russia’s lack of black trans lives parades.
More like castrated Poodles.
The earnest cries of anguish and horror at the Great Ransackening made me physically sick.
I now know the contempt a prison guard feels for eager prisoners.
I see that Ron Unz has noted a Parler affiliation at the homepage. I’ve never been to an Olive Garden. Anderson Copper might soon change that.
Amazon Employees for Climate Justice…
Probably they found this bogus name for their bogus employee association because one does not expect social justice or economic fairness from the Amazon megacorp.
They should have called it: Amazon Employees for Better Weather
Anyway, Parler would be no longer hosted on Amazon servers. After being ditched by both Google and Apple, the final blow from Amazon would put Parler offline starting tomorrow morning.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/amazon-employees-demand-company-drop-parler-aws-cloud-app-becomes-1-download
This is the first “App excommunication” that I am aware of. Perhaps we might see this as a new era in the information technology evolution. To use a variation on the famous Monty python line: ” Nobody expected the GAFTA inquisition”…
I have an idea: A 28th amendment to the US Constitution, absolutely guaranteeing the Right to Post.
It will be officially recognized that the Internet is not real life, and therefore that there should be no restrictions on what people can post, be it text, images, audio or video. Nothing that you post can be held against you in real life. Be it based, cringe, redpilled, bluepilled, woke, racist, socialist, nationalist, libertarian, funny, serious, or anything else, posting will be free of the tyranny of mods, censors and scolds.
Many insufferable volunteer thought police enforcers have emphatically proclaimed: “Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences.” Very well, but the new freedom to post will absolutely mean freedom from consequences.
In fact, I think this idea should be applied globally, through the Responsibility To Post (R2P) doctrine. Wherever oppressive governments prevent their citizens from posting online, we will initiate humanitarian interventions to free them, and be greeted as liberators. Our old wars were fought to protect “gay and women’s rights;” our new wars will be fought to protect the right of posters to call things “gay” on the Internet and do targeted harassment of women.
I have a dream, that one day a man’s posts will be judged not by the color of his ideology, but by the content of his content.
Interesting theory, but I don’t see any indications that European leaders are up to this level of 4D chess, nor is there enough unity between France and Germany to pull it off.
So, you’re saying Twitter treats China as if it is serious while treating Trump and the senatorette as if they are not. Hmmmmmm
Does it mean satanic murderous pedophiles can post explicit home made documentaries about such pleasurable activities too? 😉
Did you hear the John Lear scaring the living crap out of Art Bell presentation? If you have not it is a pretty wild listen.
I do not personally believe that beings with Star Trek tech wouldn’t have better things to do than tease the apes on gaia. Unfortunately the spooks’ livelihood depends on them keeping secrets from us civilians. This leaves a huge vacuum into which creative imaginations can imagine scenarios which obliterate the conscience of William of Okham.
Also, Okham’s Razor is not a law of nature like gravity. To me the best resources on the topics are the following:
https://www.amazon.com/Trickster-Paranormal-George-P-Hansen/dp/1401000827
and
https://www.amazon.com/Patrick-Harpur/dp/0937663093/
And also I apply my own creative imagination with the Bloody Battle Ax of Okham:
https://www.amazon.com/William-Ian-Miller/dp/0198768923/
Yes. His inability to defend his followers or even think about them much led to all this. He should’ve tried to destroy the tech giants (or at least find a way to circumvent them) after the first purges in 2017.
He should’ve moved to another platform and started legal actions against them, antitrust or whatever.
btw, it looks like all this drama is yet not over completely, if Pence really thinks about the need to have the potential counter leverage against Trump for the remaining 10 days at least, which might be even more interesting:
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/09/politics/mike-pence-25th-amendment/index.html
Several demon-worshippers (i.e. Tantric Buddhists and Hindus) frequent this comments section
March 2021:
“I’ve been too busy on important web hosting cloud service work to contribute recently, but I’m ready to launch unzcloud, together with twunzer and unzbook social networking services” – Ron Unz
Twitter wasn’t that dominant and influential company to begin with, without Trump they will die.
Gab is the best option, I only read a few people on twitter, please delete twitter and only post on Gab and twitter will be over.
Jesus Christ… I didn’t know there was a German derangement syndrome and unironic #Germangaters. That’s enough Unz comment section for a while.
What exactly is the point of these alternative platforms? Migrating to things like Gab means giving up on any chance at all of reaching normies and moderates. It means confining yourself to an echo chamber.
If everyone here on Unz Review deletes Twitter then Twitter will lose about 0.001% of its user base.
And if any of these alternative platforms ever becomes a serious threat to the social media giants you can be confident that the alternative platforms will be shut down.
Alternative platforms are a nice idea, but really they’re irrelevant.
Galkovsky-tier power levels here! 😉
Yes, it pays to be realistic about these things.
Twitter has 6 billion visits a month. Parler and Gab have a few millions (before Jan), or 0.1%-0.2% of Twitter’s. Perhaps they’ll go up to a whole 2% in January, before interest flags again.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1276557546657058822
Certainly. a service like Gab has room to grow? If a few celebrities and/or alt-rightists join, this would help promote its rise. Trump should be the first, his fans (or whatever is left of them) could use this platform to continue getting the word from their leader. That is, until Gab would become compromised like Fox. I watched Fox recently and its content was identical to what you would find on most any other neo-lib news source (when did it change so much?). But getting back to Gab, in a year or two, it could become a legitimate alternative to twitter, and perhaps garner as much as a 10% market share? I’d venture to guess that Fox never garnered more than a 20% market share rating?…
Well in defence, do discussions in this more “intellectual” and “highbrow” website result in anything more productive than what goes on at Stormfront?
What’s happening now on Western social media is that bans are starting to handed out very easily and quickly to anyone not aligned with the Western liberal establishment. One consequence to consider is that it will be increasingly easy for Western governments to use social media as tools in international politics.
Let’s take an example. Say a country like Egypt isn’t obedient enough to Western demands, maybe they’re getting to close with China or something like that. Then the Western powers can just start up a propaganda campaign and call out Egypt on some (possibly made up) human right abuse. Because Western governments control most human rights organisations it will be easy to use that power to call on social media to ban all accounts that defend the pro-Egyptian position. What can Egypt do?
The whole storming Congress thing is a disaster and shows just how useless at organising and PR the right are.
I’ve noticed that many people who were previously on the fence or even mildly supportive of Trump now despise the MAGA movement and are willing them to be crushed by the state. If there was any doubt of the legitimacy of the election, it’s all forgiven now in the minds of most people.
The irony is Trump was actually slowly building support for his position that the election was rigged, but now MAGA have just gone a completely squandered it. Even if it was rigged, no one cares now, they see it as deserved.
I can watch a very strange and complex structure in my backyard on a daily basis. It uses pure light and some invisible stuff that it absorbs from air and the ground to produce matter. One day I might probably be able to take some of this matter and transform it into heat.
What’s more: this structure reproduces itself every year.
It’s called a tree. There are actually a few of them around. And there is something strange about their DNA:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2010/06/28/91041/quantum-entanglement-holds-dna-together-say-physicists/
Perhaps we should call this paranormal.
Galkovsky did nothing wrong…
OT: Is it true that Sergey Merkurov’s erotic alphabet was published in the USSR to combat illiteracy among adults?
http://folksonomy.co/?permalink=3700
No.
В Советском Союзе секса нет!
LOL.
Gab does have room to grow, but I don’t think President Trump joining Gab (now) would benefit them.
Instead, it would lead to a determined effort to immediately destroy Gab. And while Gab is a lot more resistant to deplatforming than Parler, I think the Eye of Sauron would wreck them.
Fortunately I don’t think Trump is likely to do that, as he himself certainly wants to be heard.
Trump moving to Gab in 2017 along with a whole host of conservative figures and donors would have been a different story, but then that would also mean that Trump were a competent and strategic thinker.
What is useful is to have Gab, to share the same content on Gab you do on Twitter, and also to provide support to Torba’s efforts.
Also, and while I don’t approve of this, it’s beneficial to report non right-wing people to the jannies. The more people who get censored by the massive platforms the more growth potential there is for Gab and other alternatives.
And platforms are just one area of trouble. We also need resistant solutions in hosting, DDoS protection, backbone, domain registration, and of course payments. Unfortunately all of these things are either capital-intensive or highly regulated or both.
From which Soviet Republic do the swarthy men of ж hail from?
https://i.ibb.co/FWv84p6/image.png
It’s a disaster, but not because of incompetence per se.
I’m reminded of something E. Harding said:
The optics of this were pretty decent. No one in Nazi regalia, fun and memeable viral images like the cool viking guy, and relatively few people hurt.
Didn’t matter once The Enemy decided it was 9-11 all over again.
Now it’s still incompetent of course in that there was no strategy per se. The idea was to break into Congress to…stop the steal. Somehow. Yeah, great idea guys. Maybe next libertarians can break into the Federal Reserve to demand an audit of the FED.
I’m reminded of Bismarck’s dictum that war must only be carried out for a policy.
Agreed with Thorfinnsson’s points, though IMO the problem goes deeper – social media are natural monopolists in their niches due to economies of scale, and Twitter dominates its niche. Everyone is there, from random office plankton and e-thots to politicians, authors and academics, celebrities, etc.
Will, say, Adam Tooze move to Gab anytime soon? Probably not.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1347695315655266305
Create its own Internet.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1277760130487025667
New York Times disagrees
Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism
Was Soviet Union really just like a lifelong high school experience, very little hassle and instead a happy-go-lucky lifestyle? Seems nice if true.
Completely true, and so of course the solution is online civil rights legislation (or taking power), but that’s not in the realm of the possible right now. Within the United States there could be some improvement if the Republicans regain federal power, but they’re not called the Stupid Party for nothing.
Therefore we have to focus on what’s possible. Alternatives are, after all, better than nothing. And the good news is that because monopoly service providers don’t have incentives to improve their product, the product tends to deteriorate. And one can cynically contribute to that deterioration by abusing the reporting features of the platforms.
There are far more possibilities outside of the United States, where recent actions have sparked global discussion about the power of GAFA. I’ve been seeing a lot of takes abroad about the need to create sovereign platforms, including even from places like Mexico. You’ve seen this as well as you shared Balaji’s thead on the matter.
Actually facebook messenger has improved a lot, compared to even 5 years ago, it now basically functions as an email.
Whatever The Jack Off tries he still looks like yogurt with a beard.
Can Mail dot Ru offer web hosting services to the US, similar to Amazon Web Services?
It would be ironic if half of US internet ended up going through Russian or Chinese servers to avoid domestic censorship.
Also, as payment processors such as Visa/MasterCard start banning people, I see bright future for cryptocurrencies.
Fair enough.
I haven’t had a Facebook since 2012 so my impression is from the outside looking in.
For years, Twitter has been the one of the worst websites from the view of degrading the consciousness of its users.
Cause of this has not to do with censorship (besides it is a private website made by Jack Dorsey – you sign up to someone’s personal website, then you expect that they can ban you). Twitter would improve probably even (although not from a financial viewpoint), if there was more censorship, to remove people who post when they are drunk, misspelled words, and who are not famous celebrities.
Intrinsic problem of Twitter are the effects of the 1. “follow” feature, 2. “retweet” feature, 3. “character limit” feature.
“Follow” feature, means that people who agree with each other are matched together. Discussion becomes more informative to read, or balanced, as a result of the crash of two sides who disagree with each other. This is why Plato’s early dialogues are more interesting to read than the late ones, when Socrates becomes just façade of Plato’s theories, lecturing people who do not argue with him. Twitter matches people who agree with each other, so it is immediately encouraging unbalanced and uninteresting discussion.
Retweet feature, means that people feel rewarded for posting clickbait and things which their followers will agree with. It encourages generally attention seeking behaviour and literary equivalent of “circle jerks”, where users are encouraged to write something their audience will agree with.
Character limit feature, reduced qualifying subclauses write people in their sentences. It means Twitter users are writing more bold and therefore usually stupid claims.
There is some aesthetic aspect to Jack Dorsey banning Trump at the end of his presidency, as Trump’s political career is partly his website’s creation. Trump’s presidency was some kind of “Frankenstein” story for Twitter. But of course, Twitter platform is more itself monster, than the creature it created.
I was young back then, finishing high school. Therefore for me it was all fun and games. But my parents, who were in their 40ies when it ended, also sometimes have nostalgic recollections about their Soviet experience. Which is kinda funny because althoug they are both strongly conservative, my dad has mainly a positive appreciation of Communism, while my mom is anticommunist at least since the Perestroika period.
Life was simple, everything was taken care of by the state. That is, except for the chronic shortages of a lot of products that in the West were normally accessible in any grocery store. In the mid-80ies this supply problem was partially fixed in the large towns, but was still persistent in the countryside and smaller urban centers. This and the fact that you were not free to travel are often what old Soviet people would mention as problematic about the system.
Perhaps less hassle because of having less choices. Some people have no problem with it but it’s not a good thing altogether.
Seems like they were more spiritually free, the luxury of choosing 34 different brands of crisps (all made by Walkers/Frito-Lay) may seem like freedom to some, but it isn’t really.
Western life really is quite terrible to be honest, the older one gets the more one realises this, it is completely empty, I think life in the USSR seemed much more rewarding mentally, there seemed to be a real community spirit. Even in the UK when we had our own “socialism” and nationalised industries, sure there were still outhouses and the walls were of bad quality, but there was still a feeling of camaraderie amongst the workers.
The sort of society we live in today can best be seen in America, it makes people go loopy in the head
https://www.bitchute.com/video/xy0M0AFkX1hk/
No, it was just much more organized as a social system. If you just went with the flow you had no problems at all. Study well, do your military service, then go work in a factory or go back to your Kolkhoz or keep studying in an Institute/University.
Get married, get your first appartment as a young couple after a few years of marriage, have kids who go to kindergarten and school a walking distance from your appartment.
The polyclinic is also walking distance. The physician comes to your place if you’re sick, the ambulance is free as is hospital. You basically don’t need a car because there is so much dirt cheap public transportation. Kids go to free summer camp and you get sometimes a free trip to the Black Sea resort in the Caucasus or Crimea.
Crime was relatively low.
Kids grow up and repeat the cycle, you end up helping with taking care of the grandchildren. Men die earlier because of smoking and alcohol, women live longer as a babushka with a usually minuscule pension. Simple, less chaotic, quite predictable and boring existence. Soviets got bored, that’s why they gave up.
Egypt can move into China – Russia – Iran orbit. The more the West declines (it is declining vis a vis others), the more the West’s markets, technology and propaganda will matter less.
Or it can simply bully the West that it will move to the other side. The more the West declines, the more it will have to offer better offers to other countries to stay under its wings. Bullying in not be sufficient when there are many alternatives.
True, but most doesn’t realize it before they have it. Pre-neoliberalism Western Europe is a better place to look at than communist Eastern Europe (which wasn’t an unlivable hellhole or something like that certainly worse is most aspects).
The key to breaking the US tech monopoly is multipolarity. Support Chinese tech/apps, support Russian tech/apps, support Iranian tech, support Turkish tech, support Indian tech, support anything that isn’t the West. This in turn will cause a fragmentation in the global IT sphere and many countries creating independent IT eco-systems.
You need to break the Western monopoly and the way to do that is multipolarity.
Westerners must learn important lesson. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. They just became a victim of it. Support a multipolar world with many power centers and regionalisation/fragmentation of the world.
This is the way to destroy the Liberal World Order (LWO).
Pre-neoliberalism West was social-democrat, ie center left. That’s what the Soviets were promised when they were offered convergence if they abandoned totalitarian Communism. Of course, what was promised was not delivered, quite the opposite. But the Soviet dream was to become more like Finland, Yugoslavia or even Hungary. None thought it would end up with such a wild and unhinged crony capitalism.
Good observation. Instead of social democracy they got Dickensian England that was resurrected by Thatcherism and Reaganomics in late 1970s which was just fine to former KGB siloviks and party apparatchiks turned criminals and future oligarchs. So while the majority as you say was dreaming to be like Finland the minority that got accustomed to the power and privileges by Soviet standards also wanted lots of money unfettered by state control.
The operation of transformation had to be fast and chaotic to prevent people from figuring out what was going on. If the transformation was orderly and slow it was likely to be stopped half way. People were desensitized to tolerate what was happening by its alleged inevitability and that the first million must be stolen to start the capitalism.
People were fooled not because they were stupid but chiefly because they were amoral or were to ashamed to form moral arguments.
This is what the West is afraid of (source – US National Intelligence Council)
https://imgur.com/a/ZLm3ZQl
You are correct about the fast pace of change being essential for the takeover and privatization of the socialist economy by the organized crime allied to nomenklatura and the rogue security agencies personnel.
But I would object about the majority of Soviet citizens being amoral, they were simply put under an extreme pressure and on the brink of mere survival. Those who attempted an organized resistance were crushed in 1993. Many people died there, the exact numbers are still classified, but my estimate would be at least several hundreds executed point blank in the very center of Moscow with the nascent oligarchic media justifying the massacre.
The last attempt at regaining some sort of left leaning social system was during the 1996 election was thoroughly falsified, as admitted by Dmitry Medvedev himself, and which was conceded by the communist party in exchange for an official opposition status. So it actually took a minimum of 5 years to completely eradicate pro-Soviet opposition and replace it with subservient pseudo-communist party of Russia. But the maximum damage was done from 1990 to 1993.
Do you think the huge popularity of Aldi and Lidl in the UK in recent years is an indication that most people long for a more simple life with less choices?
Obviously Aldi and Lidl are private companies, but I think their stores have a more regimented, “socialist” feel compared to the likes of Tesco, etc.
People like ALDI and Lidl because they’re cheap and the stores are small.
The stores do have less choice, but people are shopping at these not because of less choice but because they’re one-third cheaper than traditional grocers and shopping takes less time.
Of course, getting the current crop of media/social networking biggies to become more compliant with US freedom of speech norms, and overturn the inability of suing such social media giants for libel and other infractions that hide under protections currently afforded by undemocratic laws such as Section 230 of the CDC? I’m assuming that they haven’t been able yet to defer paying taxes to the Fed, under similar BS laws? Overturning such protections needs to become a big priority.
Overturning Section 230 might not have the benefits that supporters think. Instead of ending censorship, it might just make it far more draconian. Imagine lawyers (or, realistically, lawyer-approved AI) censoring every single post rather than jannies occasionally doing so.
Poland has just introduced legislation which would fine social media companies over $2m per incidence of censorship for anything that does not violate Polish law. Something like that is required–a guarantee of online civil rights.
That said officially anyway a number of Republican officeholders such as Senators Cruz, Hawley, and Graham do support ending Section 230. Their efforts should be supported in the event the GOP retakes Congress.
They pay tax, but not much owing to various (legal) tax minimization strategies. They might end up paying more tax in the future depending on what the Democrats decide to do. There’s talk of Biden going after Ireland for instance. And Twitter for its part doesn’t actually make money.
I think Westerners fill the hole in their souls with consumerism, most notably with electronics and luxury cars, I was talking to my grandparents and they said how life was very simple and they were happy in their youth, there were not so many of these megastores like Tesco and ASDA, and small businesses with unbranded stuff made in-house still thrived.
The popularity of Aldi and Lidl really took off during the 2008 Recession, that is when I remember my family started shopping there mainly, after the recession had subsided, people realised that even own brand products by stores taste/function just as well as branded ones. Lidl is known for making knock-offs of big brand good products in a way that would make even the Chinese blush, their cola for example, Freeway, tastes very much the same as Pepsi, the packages on other such foodstuffs are designed in a way to imitate the branded version (Lurpak Vs Danpak) etc
I stopped watching television a while ago, but when I do occasionally watch it, I just don’t the adverts incredibly annoying, a lot of the stuff being flogged off is stuff that one doesn’t even need!
Consumerism is the number one reason for the massive buildup of pollution as well, back in the day products were built to last and be maintained, nowadays they break easily so we buy new ones, the companies know people get a rush from buying things as Western culture has been hollowed out.
A lot of right wingers complain about the mixed race couples seen on Christmas adverts, but this does beg the question, since when did we start depending on Christmas adverts to create the festive mood? Why are there not organic celebrations and people going to church anymore?
Babushkas were useful for spending time in food lines so others in the family didn’t have to. The food would run out later in the day so they would have to get up very early.
Harris is owned by Silicon Valley and this is why Biden chose her rather than some other Black female.
Segments of the elite also naively believed this but were simply outnumbered and overwhelmed by the opportunists.
Often, officials in Russia today are some of the most aspirational neoliberals (for example, in terms of vocabulary), but they are not fair representatives of the original ideology.
There is a contradictory sense that the economics lectures had a strong impact on many officials’ minds, but also that most of them exited the lecture halfway, and did not understood detail in the professors’ explanations.
For example, Putin describes removing the presidential term limits (there was limit of two consequence terms in the Russian Federation) as insulating us against “external shocks”. Vocabulary of “external shock” is from neoclassical (i.e. neoliberal) economics, and introduced by efficient markets economists (rejected by Keynesians). Yet for Putin, this vocabulary was chosen as the justification to remove term limits.
Another recent example was when heads of Russian (government funded) space industries, were complaining on Twitter that Musk is unfairly winning US government contracts against them, in the context of “dumping”. But they themselves are government corporations, trying to attain to US government contracts, so the ideology is a self-contradiction. Heads of government industries use neoliberal vocabulary, but in context which sounds more like parody of the original ideology. ( https://i.imgur.com/GwdQckm.jpg. )
When they face against the neoliberal textbooks with policies like “import substitution”,which became the fashionable word across Russian media in response to sanctions , they use vocabulary which was invented by Chatham House in London in the 1980s to criticize that policy’s use in the context of Latin America.
So in Russia, in last years, was elevated this vocabulary of “import substitution”, as a national media obsession and aspiration, when the terminology originated from criticisms of the policy, written by Chatham House in the 1980s. Of course, “import substitution” was the economic policy of the USSR, and it’s not a creation of 1980s London. But the terminology enters Russian in the early 2000s, as a criticism of the policy. (e.g. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/400494.) Today the result of the policy is as an excuse to subsidy through higher prices, other things equal, from consumers to business owners who are often friends of government, while the “internal market” is also smaller today than than it was then.
If you look in the current pandemic, Boris Johnson has seemed to support in the early weeks almost a liberal attitude, which was partly promoted to him by neo-social darwinist advisors. In previous years, Johnson himself could sound very neoliberal, and almost was speaking like the parody of the ideology in Ayn Rand/Gordon Gekko https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/27/boris-johnson-thatcher-greed-good
However, Johnson’s laissez-faire policy to the pandemic, was soon reversed in the United Kingdom, and public opinion seems to support quarantines now, with a slogan to “save the National Health Service”.
In comparison, in the Russian Federation, policy travelled in the other direction. Putin had signalled he might be quite strict against the pandemic, but after the quarantine in the first wave, there is a currently very liberal policy in the second wave. For example, children will now not even sent to distance learning in many regions. There is a strong prioritization of economy in the Russian government. And we saw something similar in a supposedly “centre-leftist” Sweden last summer.
He was simply saying that there was no Uyghur genocide just as there was no white genocide. Because using the same metrics either both are genocides or neither of them are, and he thought it was the latter case. Supporting white nationalists would bring them nothing anyway.
There’s also a shortage of black politicians who are presentable to non-black voters, even with extreme control of the discourse. Harris, in addition to being owned by Silicon Valley, has relatively few connections to traditional American blackness (despite attending Howard). In this she resembles Barack Obama, although she’s far less likeable and charismatic than Obama.
But that is perhaps yet another asset as it means she could never go off the reservation to build her own movement. Completely controllable.
Big Brother acknowledged that we live in “1984”: Google banned #1984 hashtag.
Notice that China is also going through this, with a brutally materialist “robber baron capitalism” there.
It seems to be difficult to escape this situation, for medium income countries of the early 21st century, at least outside the EU (where there is internal subsidization).
China, Mexico, Brazil or Argentina, are all likely more unequal and corrupt than currently in the Russian Federation.
In this context, recall that socialism for Marx would only be a product of the most wealthy and industrialized countries, which had already conquered the state of nature. i.e. he was imagining from the highest income countries of his time, which would be something like Norway today. Socialism was to be product of wealth.
Norwegians probably are closest in the first half of the 21st century, to the kind of lifestyles that socialist writers had been aspiring to, mainly because they afford such a luxury.
In “German Ideology”, Marx/Engels’ description of life under communism, sounds like daily routine for someone who made a successful exit from their startup, or e.g. Jack from Twitter: “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
China already has Weibo and you’re not forced to post on it. Social credit is a meme.
https://i.ibb.co/7nFprMC/1610316960523.jpg
I don’t think China is less corrupt or more unequal than RusFed.
I believe it was more a question of technological development and “class consciousness” of the proletariat than wealth of countries per se. I agree that Norway is a fine example of European social-democracy.
I understand that you are being a bit flippant with this part of the comment, but in all seriousness Communism promised this to the masses, not select individuals. We might get there a few generations after the Great Reset, when the depopulation has run its course, transhumanism has made us into perfect human beings, while automation and AI have made most of human work obsolete.
But human plans have an unfortunate tendency to screw up, therefore I don’t think it is quite probable that we will make it that far as a civilization. Humans are hierarchical primates, therefore as a biological species we are not made to thrive in an equal environment. Even if it is a wealthy equal environment. We simply stop breeding…
It turns out that one of the zip tie carriers was Lieutenant Colonel Brock USAF (retd). Following the end of his time in the reserve, he seems to have served in Ukraine as one of the insurgent’s mercenaries, specifically hired to remove the Ukrainians from the airfield, which the insurgents couldn’t do. (Hiding amongst civilians being their chielf fighting skill). His wife is Russian. His American family have drifted away from him due to his extremist views. Lives well in Texas.
Twitter is flushing out other AF Redhats at the spear tip.
Sorry to be so blunt, but:
П☆здеть не камешки ворочать.
(Bullsh☆ting is easier than moving (heavy) stones.)
China should be actively pursuing racism as strategic goal in order to prevent hundreds of millions of Africans from invading China when the African population bomb reaches peak explosive power. With this view in mind, supporting European nationalists helps damage the West’s ability to project poz.
I have previously suggested that nobody would notice, if they gradually replaced the actors playing Japanese army officers in their ubiquitous WW2 dramas with black Africans, before changing the Rising Sun to the Pan African flag, or perhaps a black fist on the same field.
They wouldn’t need to fire the Japanese actors either, but just make them reprise their roles as allies to China, in the greater struggle against African invasion.
Import substitution is both a failure and a good way to supress innovation by creating the expectation that the state will save failing firms. Even if it resulted in efficiency (it hasn’t – handouts never do), chasing efficiency is in itself a way to supress innovation. At best Russia can hope to acheive a better yesterday. At worst, Argentina keeps beckoning. Their heads understand the need for a market economy, they half understand the jargon but have no heart for it at all. Lavrov worst of all but he is mostly out of the way.
Most Import Subsitution money has gone to pharma and food processing. It has acheived very high cost production. Production costs are so high due to low productivity that Russia is imposing export tariffs on field crops to reduce feed prices to keep the new chicken, pork and dairy production units afloat. Beloved Chinese comrades are not buying much Russian pork despite a dramatic slaughter of their own swine due to African Swine Fever.
The Russian state sector is in a mess. The new waste management policy is resulting in contract going to Putin era oligarchs when in most countries they have been a launching pad for smaller operators.
I still recommend the Russian private sector. The very low Ruble exchange rate means goods and services are competitive and assets can be bought cheaply. Established, successful state contractors do very well.
On twitter I sometimes follow what liberast creeps and freaks like Karlin ( creep NOT freak), Maxim katz and Vasilyeva ( ugly dumb bitch who writes for Anglo paper ” daily telegraph”) are saying.
It doesn’t even come close to creating an echo chamber or group-think mentality for myself.
I think you are incorrectly conflating the technology and dynamics on twitter……. with the constant Americanisation of global society. American freakshow idiot politics shows itself as hyper-polarised, ugly and anti-intellectual – so this filters down into global society in discourse on twitter AND TV AND radio, in the park and everywhere else (or at least the impression is given of that) . So it’s nothing to do with twitter in my opinion. Trump’s best advertisement of himself is at his mass public rallies and on TV debates NOT on twitter.
Look at this ” Black Friday” thing – something totally specific to American calender and culture with their Thanksgiving and different date Christmas…… but in Russia we did record ” Black Friday” sales!! Same with other countries. It’s Americanisation not twitter to blame for this .
I see a bit of the English premier league football matches on TV and these idiot footballers are doing this idiotic “take the knee” BLM garbage and the stadiums are covered in all BLM or antiracism imagery. WTF? Absolutely zero blacks ( or anybody) are getting shot dead by police in UK streets from what I hear. Black history there is completely different to US. There is no reason for them to do it, but the only reason they do is Americanisation of society on cultural and economic levels .
Russian world on twitter is the best example to counter your argument – Dmitry Medvedev is the most popular Russian on Twitter…… despite being a man who doesn’t say much and of low charisma even though we are a major country in social media. Ukraine the same – the most popular accounts in Ukraine are Russians or Ukrops in Russia (not politicising) working in showbusiness…… not Banderetard or Soros-backed scum, despite significant effort being expended on these losers.
Why did I mention these 5th columnists Karlin, katz and Vasilyeva? Because all these obscene people have self-discreditingly taken the Sputnik- V vaccine! Karlin has just cretinously promoted and believed the laughable poisoning “expose” by Western imbeciles, of the FSB to Navalny – the same “poisoning” by Novichok that any expert or even person with minimal knowledge in Medicine, Chemistry or on how Russian intelligence operate knows is completely impossible to have occurred… and left Navalny massively ridiculed and discredited even more in the last few months. Karlin also believed in and promoted the same excess death BS about Russia from Coronavirus.
How can you claim to believe this BS is done by the Russian state….. and then shamelessly claim to take this vaccine that requires an individual to have faith in the honesty, integrity and competence of that same state apparatus AND in the great skill and heritage of the Soviets? Its just shameless hypocrisy and fakery by Karlin to take it for both those reasons and those 2 other lying scum talking about “the regime”, but then permanently self-discrediting themselves by taking it! Russian patriotic media should do their job by killing all these types of liberasts taking the vaccine…. with an avalanche of negative coverage against them. Its a perfect opportunity.
My main point is that if Twitter or SM was as you say it is, then all 3 of them would have refused the vaccine as the echo chamber would be a perfect arena to discourage these people from taking it.
As befits a Redhat, Munchel was driven to the revoloution by his mother with whom he lives.
You gave me one more reason not to treat that Dugin personage seriously.
One, Biden never won the vote, but he is not a usurper. He is just a corrupt senile nonentity usurpers use as a figurehead.
Two, Big Tech and bansksters are the globalists. They paid for the fraud and gave it cover online and in MSM.
Three, nobody can liberate America except Americans themselves. 2020 showed that “elections” are a ruse, so other means must be used. Frankly, I don’t see it happening.
Four, the Empire and those imperial vassals who are irreversibly infected by the rot are going down the drain. Those who are not infected, China, possibly Russia, and several other countries, will gain long-term. But that won’t be Russian spring. If the world survives the demise of the Empire, it would be a multi-polar world.
Oh yes. Those cell phones. The FBI know the geocoordinates of the Capitol.
Yes. Through Harris we have a solidified Democratic-Tech-Corporate Party. The mixing of political party/control and corporations is a hallmark of fascism. There is a parallel process going on in China, although from a radically different starting point than in the USA.
So it seems that technologically advanced fascism will be the dominant form of society in the 21st century – how funnily ironic that the parties in control of these systems will from the Left, and that they will proclaim themselves to be antifascist.
Dugin is …, well he’s just being himsel really. A bullshit compiler of other people’s ideas.
Sort of OT, but a friend of mine has workers at his house who were at the Capital building during the “mob uprising.” They claim the media lied completely about the event and showed a very cherry-picked view. March started with a prayer for the country, it was mostly peaceful. They were let in by the cops, who were friendly with them. A much smaller group were violent and acting out, fighting with the cops, breaking windows; these made the headlines. The workers speculate that it was a deliberate provocation. Workers weren’t QAnon weirdos, but Trump-supporting immigrants from formerly Commie-occupied Europe.
“Many people died there” – I was not aware of it.
They should have stormed Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/Youtube HQs and maybe even data centres. If not that, then the Federal Reserve building.
How is it that Twitter doesn’t make any money? Are they domiciled anywhere in the US, pay any taxes at all here? Any US company should have to be subject to US corporate tax laws, and consequently with freedom of speech laws too. IMHO.
Social media outlets will tire of incessant lawsuits and will be forced to resign their self ascribed powers of censoring legitimate opinions.
If Poland can do it, so can the US – Viva la Poland!
What is coming our way has not much in common with the historical Fascism of Mussolini. What we will be dealing with is corporate techno-ecological totalitarianism. Although it has certain characteristics in common with both Fascism or Communism, it is an absolutely novel type of social organization, which is only possible nowadays due to the technological advances of the last 10 to 15 years. I think we might see it as a chimera of the Brave New World and 1984, with perhaps a little Gattaca and Matrix thrown into the mix. Cloud Atlas also comes to mind.
Interesting times ahead.
Not Soviet citizens – Soviet elites.
The 1990 referendum of keeping the union intact shows you as mistaken
Tell your friend that the workers need to lie low for a few months and keep their mouths shut.
What exactly is the incentive for the CCP to force ordinary Chinese people to make pro-CCP posts?
The CCP has complete control over their country and the support of their population: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/
The country is also led by a man whose family suffered terribly from the Cultural Revolution (his father was purged and his sister committed suicide) and as such has a powerful aversion to mass, public politics.
LOL Phillip- how much of a dumb creep are you to choose one of the best performing industries, featuring record yield and production in everything (except beef) to try and falsely slander Russia?
You’re post is a lie from start to end. I suspect Russian state and private companies gradual improvement and refusal to be exploited (or at least exploited less) by corrupt, useless and parasitic western prostitute “businessmen” as you is the motivation for your posts.
Why is trash as yourself even operating in Russia? Western rapist fugitive?
On waste management there are plenty of smaller private firms subcontracted work to, showing plenty of innovation you idiot…. but ad hoc local mafia management of this issue has been common…. and in new plan and very recent years plenty of new investment in infrasture that was old or completely non existant in Soviet time in certain areas has occurred.
There is another dimension to this in Moscow region morphing more into part of Moscow the city ( ie high quality area) and housing market of Newbuilt houses and mortgage market with this, in all the country rapidly expanding
since when did we start depending on Christmas adverts to create the festive mood? Why are there not organic celebrations and people going to church anymore?
Since the 20th century, particularly the period of the 1940s to 1960s. For most people, that was when mass consumer culture replaced traditional culture. And most people — at the time — were happy with that change. There were several reasons why they willingly and even gladly went along:
It offered more freedom. You could pick and choose what you judged to be best for your situation.
In general, it was improving life for almost everyone. People were living longer and better lives. When I interviewed elderly people for my fieldwork, a recurring comment was “Everything changed in the 1940s.” There were jobs for everyone. Class barriers no longer mattered so much. And doctors really could help you! It seemed that every year brought some new discovery in science and technology that made life better.
Today … well, things no longer seem so great. If I want intellectual variety, I don’t pick up a newspaper or go to a bookstore. I get the impression that the range of permissible thought has shrunk considerably — and will continue to shrink.
Class barriers are now reforming. The middle class is shrinking, and the upper class is adopting the sort of scornful attitude that I used to read about in books. Life expectancy is now declining in the U.S., and I expect the rest of the West will follow that trend.
I could go on, but you get the drift. Mass consumer culture no longer seems so wonderful.
The first people were killed by snipers in Ostankino the nigh before the assault against the parliament. The exact numbers killed in and around the parliament are still unknown, but people died inside the building when tanks opened fire on the higher floors using incendiary vacuum munitions.
Some people were gunned down and ceushed by the tanks and armored vehicles when they tried to flee. Among them was the priest of a nearby church who tried to stand to the armoured vehicles praying and waving a cross. A tank simply rolled over his body.
Also, the whole neighborhood was patrolled by numerous plain clothed death squads organized by the FSB and armed by Sergei Shoigu with the help of some Moscow Mafia clans and the Russian wing of Betar. People escaping the building were captured and often beaten to death or shot on site. Many insurgents arested inside the building were assembled on the Krasnaya Presnya stadium behind the parliament and were executed during the night. The execution on the stadium lasted several hours, from around 10 pm to around 5 am the next morning. The death squads have specifically targeted younger men, probably because they reasoned that killing them would prevent future militancy.
All in all the number of those killed in 24 hours was between a few hundred to more than a thousand people.
https://pikabu.ru/story/rasstrel_na_stadione_krasnaya_presnya_5384892
I was not in Moscow at the time, I spent the whole autumn of 1993 abroad. That is the only reason why I wasn’t among those who stood in defense of the parliament. My mother was there every day, she was among the women who cooked and looked after the children that some of the people brought with them. The day before the onslaught she felt unwell, she stayed at home. My dad since the very beginning told us that Yeltsin would use violence, but we did not believe him.
In 1991 the Red Army soldiers did not shoot on the protesters, we thought that the situation would be similar especially that the constitution of the time was clearly legitimizing the parliament and allowing for Yeltsin’s impeachment. But Yeltsin simply ignored the constitution and went all in with the blessings of the West European countries and the US. I remember watching French TV and reading newspapers in Paris, they praised Yeltsin’s bloodbath.
Later on the politicians at the head of the parliamentary insurrection were pardoned and their leader Rutskoy was even named governor. The amnesty bargain probably included keeping the exact number of those killed secret and abandoning any attempt at bringing the murderers to justice. Yeltsin changed the constitution and that was it, people died in vain.
LOL – wise decision. Ano4 ” brand” had become too toxic from association with that Israel-Vietnam young boys thing and your Liberastic pompous degeneracy….. you had to rebrand
Since the Trump/ capitol building event I finally took the time to look into this pizzagate bizarre allegation. I don’t normally follow this type of thing…. but it could be true after looking at it.
James Alefantis = J’aime l’enfants
Bashibuzuk =???
Please explain, because you are clearly a James Alefantis type of guy!
Your understanding of Xi is as poor as your understanding of China. Xi despises people who “make the correct noises” and generally has no interest in getting more people into politics of any kind, because it’ll just make his and his cadre’s life harder. Easy example below:
https://qz.com/220182/to-fix-the-communist-party-chinas-leaders-plan-to-shrink-it/
He then proceeded to go on a war against “careerists” for that specific reason – to try to remove individuals in the Party who made the correct noises but had no interest in doing their jobs. To increase the number of people to fight over party positions is insane.
Even if he wanted to know what everyone was thinking, he has plenty of technological methods to do so and that’ll be more honest and reliable than wasting people’s time on posting things.
Kings don’t go around holding rallies about how great the King. Power is conserved.
Anyway, you’re wrong on most things(much like your Trumpist glee), so its another notch on your belt of wrongness.
Is IslamoGloboHomo something like this?
https://i.imgur.com/HF3QikI.jpg
I guess it’s not something we can say more than vague intuitions about.
I’m curious, because I saw such often insular Chinese youth/students in Western Europe, walking on with sneakers that are way more than I could dream to buy. Similarly, when luxury apartment building being constructed, and people said to me “these are millionaire apartments are being bought almost all by Chinese students”.
I will assume these kind of Chinese youth (this is just assumption), are children or family members of the country’s party officials.
For Marx’s theory, communism requires a mastery of nature, and as a result of that mastery there is an end of scarcity of resources.
In pre-history, we had a kind of communism, but under such “Hobbesian” tyranny of nature and its scarcity of resources. Man increasingly masters nature as he passes through the historical stages (slavery, feudalism, bourgeois capitalism), and the final stage of history corresponds with the theoretical end of scarcity – or where we become conscious that scarcity is now only a result of division into classes.
Certainly, at least economic development (in which there is theoretically no scarcity) is a necessary condition for this post-historical communism, in Marx’s theory.
And here is his interpretation of Hegel. Only in the dusk of a historical stage will allow for consciousness of it.
In Marx’s theory, communism will be partly result of wealth (as one necessary but not sufficient condition), rather than cause of it.
Keynes updated Marx’s theories (in less interesting way), in 1930s, in the essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, where he discusses life with a 15-hour working week ( http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf )
Today this almost communist lifestyle, can almost among a majority perhaps only in some wealthy places. Norway is probably close.
Although it seems a little comic, that perhaps in Monaco, could be an ideal candidate for world communism. Cleaners and butlers in Monaco could afford to attain class consciousness, expropriate the expropriators, share the principality’s luxury apartments equally (including with their former bourgeois owners), and without any scarcity of resources at the end of history.
In any case, interesting books are unlikely to be ones which were published recently (unless you are born into some kind of literary golden age, which are very rare in history).
Moreover, interesting books were usually written in far more politically and economically restrictive environments, than anything that exists today.
Today, you have more access to interesting books, than any previous generation. And time has provided a useful filter on them for you as well.
The main problem with reading, is not lack of books, but lack of time to read them. Most of us can only read a book cupboards, before we will have died from old age. So using age of books, as a selection filter, should be welcome. If there is a selection of surviving books written 20 centuries ago, they are probably going to be more interesting, than a selection of books written one century ago, and the selection surviving from a century ago will likely still be better than one from ten years ago.
In the West, the century so far, has been mainly characterized by unprecedented luxury, and perhaps one symptom of which is unparalleled levels of complaining. Perhaps many peoples’ psychology is not well adapted for this.
I’m not saying this is a representative sample, but I have been reading recently people complaining about “you don’t understand how terrible quarantine is – because I have to cancel my children’s violin lessons”, or the “what oppression that I have to wear a mask for a few minutes when I am outside”.
You coupled wrongness with non-sequitor rambles to provide entertainment, I see.
The aristocracy and the higher financial elites always had it good. They did not need waiting for Marx to learn them how to get to live more comfortable lives.
A lot of people today, even in the West, unfortunately have it nowhere as good as les Monégasques. In Russia, only 25% would qualify for being considered as middle class. Some 10% would be relatively wealthy, perhaps 1% would be ultrarich, while some 40 percent would be working poor and the remaining just miserable.
30 years ago 70% were close to what we call today in the West lower middle class and 20% were higher middle class. The affluent and the miserable were both an absolute exception.
But what is important is whether the standard of living is increasing or not. In China it does, in Russia it’s hard to tell, while in the West it’s going down.
I wrote since the very beginning that it was a provocation. Nothing surprising about it since the Democrats are playing without rules. They stole the election and they used this provocation to ensure that there will be independent inquiry into the election results. They wouldn’t have done it if they expected to have fair elections next time. American republic is no long6a democratic country.
It can depend on what country you compare to.
In my view, middle class for Russia includes, for example, anyone buying a new apartments, – and who can things like an ability to escape from bad neighbours. There is affordable housing and financing, so it is quite a large proportion of people in Russia at the moment that can move to better housing, and in other ways join a modern consumer economy.
In terms of materialist things like average incomes, I agree that psychologically, the sense of trajectory is important and measurable that China is doing well at the moment. China is also climbing from a low base – so average people might feel more easily grateful just being able to buy washing machines and smart phones, or moving into modern housing.
In per capita terms, China has the consistent growth of the last decade, while many other countries are flatlining last decade (whether Russia, Brazil or even Sweden and United Kingdom), or declining (like Greece, Italy, Spain).
But China might be just reaching a “middle income trap”. Part of the reason of the slow growth of the last decade in Russia, can be the difficulties of the middle income trap, and China might have a similar experience soon.
In this measure (using Atlas method of GNP per capita) even UK and Sweden have suffered from a “lost decade”.
https://i.imgur.com/p1nahSS.jpg
It is amusing. To some people on the Right having to wear a mask is exactly the same as being rounded up and sent to the GULAGs. Having to cancel the kiddies’ violin lessons is the same as facing starvation.
So many snowflakes these days, on both Left and Right!
Democracy was always an illusion. At any time since democracy first became fashionable in the 19th century it was always the case that no genuine alternative was ever going to be permitted. That was as true a hundred years ago as it is today.
With the exception of China which actually has large growth those graphs are just exchange rates. If you look at those Western European countries in your graph their GNI per capita close to doubled between 2002 and 2008. But that was almost entirely because the dollar was at its strongest in 2002 and at its weakest in 2008. Similarly the “lack of growth” since 2008 is mostly the dollar becoming stronger.
The Spirit of Enoch Powell has already mentioned something like this, but this unprecedented material luxury seems to be accompanied by an increasingly palpable sense of vacuity (at least in the UK, possibly France as well from what I read.) In cultural and spiritual terms I get the feeling that Britain is becoming something like a husk. You have access to an unprecedented range of books and cultural production but a great part of it no longer feels connected with or relevant to reality around you.
What’s your opinion of Montreal as a place to live?
It seems unlikely. Maybe it will grow to the point where it has 0.3% of Twitter’s user base.
If it starts to grow significantly it will be crushed. And most people will not care because most people have never heard of Gab.
That would seem to be a good idea.
Yes. Which means that western dissidents will have to become much more pro-Russia and pro-China.
If the enemy is neoliberalism then that makes China one of the good guys.
Yes, this is what i have been saying from a long time. Only the rest of the planet has the power to stop the Liberal World Order, that took over the West. And i think that the West is gone, it can not be salvaged anymore. I have a certain methodic to know if certain country will become more liberal or not, and the West will become much worse.
Not only. Support the rise of all other countries. Support Iran, Turkey, India, independence for Japan. Anything that isn’t the West. Because the situation is so serious, it forces you to support anything that isn’t the West, to throw a spanner in the works.
Only the West has the capability to rule the World. No one else has this capacity, not China, not Russia, not Islamic World, not anyone else.
So it is the West that needs to be cut down to size and the rest of the world are the good guys, because they don’t have the capability to take over the world, and mostly prefer a multipolar world where there is space for different cultures and systems for everyone.
This is why multipolarity is a huge threat to the Liberal World Order. Because it stipulates that countries should be independent and doing their own thing, having their own thing in their area.
In this way, there is a space for revived US or Europe too, having their own culture and their own system in a world of many systems.
And this is where the world is going. This is the West’s rulers biggest fear. The long term decline of the West vs the rest of the World. They fear it, and they are trying to stop this.
https://imgur.com/a/ZLm3ZQl#5POdSd3
I was a pro-western supporter until i understood that the West can no longer be saved and is becoming a threat to the World, a zombie of its former self, a new USSR. It it wins, the liberal world order will have control everywhere and there will be nowhere to hide, no hope for reversal. You need to get rid the zombie before it manages to infect the rest of the world.
So it is imperative to support all anti-imperial attempts by anyone, to sabotage it by any means possible. Because the LWO is being build by the smartest people in the world, having control over half of the world economy. It is a danger to the liberty of the whole world. Only the combined force of the rest of the planet can stop it. The rise of the rest of the planet is necessary to stop this.
This is incorrect, there was no removal of term limits, they are still in place. The only change is that Putin’s terms, specifically, were reset to zero to allow him to serve two more terms.
If we want to pedantically interpret in a literal way, their “legal obfuscation” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscation ).
The reason of the “zeroing” maneuver, is because from a legal perspective, “even implausible deniability is better than no deniability”.
“According to our rules, he cannot eat another piece of cake, but – the status of this cake can be zeroed; technically, our rules allow him to eat another piece of cake.”
The topic of legal maneuvers is not interesting, but the impartial sounding language of authority is nowadays from neoclassical economics (“zeroing” will insulate us from “external shocks”).
Concepts of alienation in modern life, can be accurate.
But the sense of alienation is not something new to our century.
It was the 19th and 18th century, that motivated most of the theories about alienation of modern life from Rousseau to Flaubert, or from Hegel and Marx’s concept of “alienation”.
Some of our alienation has probably intensified in recent years, as a result of the internet. Internet encourages us now becoming even more detached from real life.
On the other hand, I cannot imagine that I am feeling less alienated with my luxurious 21st century life, than someone who was working in a 19th century coal mine, and would not see daylight for months.
A good book can often be quite universal
For the last few thousand years, few of us live in a way very directly connected to Thucydides or Plato or Aristophanes. But the books are strangely eternal in what they describe