Sure, it’s something that people want to signal they support. That is because it is a prestigious view, and higher IQ people with correspondingly higher levels of social discernment realize that, and act accordingly.
But only so long as you stay within the reservation, as Glenn Greenwald’s revelation about the Harper’s letter demonstrates:
1/ Regarding the apparent fact that the Letter’s organizer wanted to have me sign but the luminaries actually in control cancelled me (I was never asked), it’s been obvious from the start that the Letter was signed by frauds, eager to protect their own status, not the principles. https://t.co/HfeMi8Gtzd
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 18, 2020
I do think there are some genuine free speech absolutists or near-absolutists in the Harper’s lineup.
Chomsky is one of them (he vouched for a French Holocaust denier at one point). Steven Pinker probably qualifies as well – standing up for Noah Carl at this particular time is surely “stunning and brave”, without irony.
But Bari Weiss (canceled Palestine activists left and right), Cathy Young (Soviet emigre who seems to spend more time on Twitter policing HBD crimethink than mumbling her libertarian platitudes), or Garry Kasparov (libertarian neocon in the US, populist “anti-regime” demagogue in Russia)? Come on.
These people are just concerned that they will find it marginally more difficult to utter some anodyne platitudes about how men are physically stronger than women as their pet lunatics take over the asylum.
The only thing that’s possibly cuter is seeing conservatives now make themselves out to be principled proponents of free speech, having spent the 2000s using their political capital to “cancel” critics of Israel & America’s Middle East adventures, even as leftists marched through the institutions. They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, hopefully they will be able to console themselves with how those Dems are the real racists as their civilization falls around them.
Oppressed e-dissident: Trumperino plz regulate the tech companies.
GOP: BAN FLAG-BURNING!
— Anatoly Karlin (@powerfultakes) June 24, 2020
The Chapo leftists are if anything the most refreshing, as their disavowal of free speech – or “freeze peach”, as they mocking call it – is, at least, bluntly honest.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
How well would the First Amendment work in the situation of the Imperium of Man in Warhammer 40k?
I mean all throughtout history humans have lead by some big guy, even in high IQ places like China Joseon Korea, or Tokugawa Japan, or ruled by an aristocratic elite, maybe that speaks to some fundamental aspect of human nature? How much freedom of speech did you have during the mid-Roman republic, which was arguably its peak, before it got to large to govern after the 2nd Punic War? Or how much freedom of speech did you have during the reign of the Five Good Emperors? I mean the founding fathers basically envisioned a very limited franchise ran by a landowning white male ruling class. In the Thirteen colonies the minimum qualification to vote was as much as 20000 square meters of land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_qualification
Or about 2.5 times the size of the White House, plus the north and south lawn, and the President’s Park, in some states it was as much as 100 acres.
Indeed.
« free speech » is a lame and gay concept. Real men rightfully want to crush their adversaries — and also to kill their offspring in order to avoid later vendettas.
I fully agree with AK that the leftist chapos are honest and consistent in that regard; whereas as usual NormieCons are stupid and weak.
Andrew Sullivan is dusting off The Dish, supposedly in a weekly format. Sullivan is at least willing to discuss heterodox ideas, it will be interesting to see who (and what) turns up there, apart from Bari.
Educated people are (over-)socialised and often believe in handshakeworthy things. This is a good point, however, it should bring to mind a clearer delineation of the utility and limitations of social surveys that intersect IQ/education with other topics.
Also, minor nitpick, you may want to remove the erroneous “is” between “that” and “people” in your first sentence
Not sure about other areas besides China as they hold no interest to me. But for all of the dynasties in China, the Mandarin class exercised a policy called keeping the peasants stupid and docile. It is why I strongly believe in the elite class of a country in affecting the course of a country instead of just base it on high avg IQ.
The so-called “cancel culture”, pertains to how contacting US lawmakers with constructively critical pro-Russian comments can lead to a knock on the door from the authorities, as opposed to seeking an open discussion.
Related, Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth calling for a “national dialogue” on the status of monuments, such as those honoring the likes of George Washington, while simultaneously declaring as fact, the put mildly dubious claim that the Russian government paid Afghans money to kill US troops.
This recently occurred during a Sunday morning CNN segment hosted by Dana Bash, who of course didn’t call out Duckworth on the latter’s stating a dubious claim as fact. CNN has been big on propping individuals saying that Trump has lied. Hence, it’s fair game to say that Duckworth lied on CNN without getting called out for it.
Duckworth and CNN aren’t alone. As one example, a former Obama admin official who frequents the Russia bashing US TV news circuit:
https://twitter.com/DavidTafuri/status/1280547260460404737
You’re a well known commodity in the US pro-Russian comment business. I’m curious as to whether you personally have received a “knock on the door from the authorities”?
In old times counter establishment always could establish bases in far flung provinces and conspire there. England was one the most centrally administered countries in the whole world in 18th century, but still Scottish Higlands and Ireland were full of conspiring Jacobite aristocrats, hell even Northern England was full of them, they had totally contrary attitudes and traditions compared to the ruling elite who were bourgeois whigs. The free speech has always been dependent on individual and prevailing situational context, if I am explaining it correctly, sorry English is not my native language. In old times there was no technological means for totalitarian control of speech.
Should probably be a special death tax on those who advocate for diversity. Could be used to strengthen borders and fund deportations.
Also, in other countries, should be a general tax on American cultural exports, to fund domestic cultural productions. Heavy censorship as well.
Under more reasonable conditions, such an occurrence would be considered a waste of tax payer’s money to the point that it’d never occur. On Russia related matters, many in the US body politic and mass media are in an opposite mode. Hence, the current status quo.
A few years ago, at a World Russia Forum affiliated event in NY, one of the people on the panel I was on said that some individuals were questioned by the Feds, as they left a function hosted at the Russian Consulate in DC.
Actually there is nothing stopping even the poorest peasant in imperial China from petitioning the emperor, or from studying and passing the imperial civil service exam, and then serving as the imperial chancellor, of course in reality one will need some financial resources to do so, but that is like black people complaining about Asian or White privilege in college admissions.
Go on the moral offensive and demand that Zionism be banned as hate speech against Arabs, Iranians, and Palestinians.
You can’t have free speech when everyone is still fighting to capture control of the culture. First one side has to win.
Every culture needs a mainstream, uniform code that is imposed and enforced from above for social stability. Once that’s securely established, more lattitude can be given to dissenting voices – although never unlimited lattitude.
And once a mainstream cultural code is created and accepted, loopholes can be developed, and various ways hypocrisy is allowed can be established.
Ironically, free speech can only flourish in a society with a strong central culture. In Europe, free speech was at its height when the mainstream felt secure in its cultural code. It could allow free speech.
But our times are still competing for that mainstream code – although that’s almost over.
So, basically “NO”…
Perhaps, you’re not as important as I thought.
No offense, Mickey. 🙂
Democrats are the real racists.
BLM proposes to kill 900 blacks a year via lawless murder to prevent 250 deaths due to resisting arrest.
Black Lives Matter: it’s important to end as many as possible. Every leftist policy is like this.
Making fun of the truth is probably not a good idea.
Racism is a noble feeling that deserves encouraging and promotion.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with racism, as it is rooted in biological reality.
I believe in free speech. Were I to restrict someone from speaking, I would also be prohibiting myself from hearing them. The violence I’d be doing to them would be equal to the violence I’d be doing to myself.
People feel that they need to shut down others from talking, but this is only because they can’t sit with their own feelings long enough to realise whatever it is they need to realise, otherwise they’d understand the above.
“When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.”
This Tafuri guy sounds like Exhibit A for solipsism.
I mean, lets say the story was true. Lets say it has become a Russian official policy to issue the Talibans some Verba.
Does Tarufi seriously think that ‘calling Putin out’, condemning and ‘canceling’ a portion of his income would make Russia change the policy so that ‘Americans wouldn’t die’?
This is a foreign policy worldview straight out of New York Times editorial office politics. Shame the bad guy and threaten their paycheck, and they resign and magically disappear, and utopia prevails. All that matters is feelings, and as long as we feel good and bad guy feels bad, victory is most certainly assured.
In the real world, victory of course doesn’t come – Russia is a big country and is not going anywhere any time soon, unlike a blacklisted NYT editor. So those emotional train wrecks get more and more neurotic. When they reach peak psychosis, thermonuclear war will be in the cards.
It is pointless to hear someone who is wrong.
Error has no rights
Relevant Twitter threads:
I, of course, agree with this. The “freedom of speech” in any society is always bound by the state, and the idea of absolute freedom of speech is libertarian folly. The debate should be over what speech is allowed and not and why, and what danger any curb on speech presents to a society’s health.
I do think freedom of speech can be a societal good on a grassroot level, such as this website, but it doesn’t scale well to whole societies.
The War for the Public Mind: Political Censorship in Nineteenth-century Europe, page 28
So out of major European powers, only Great Britain really met the criteria to be defined as a solid “free speech society”, hardly a European trend.
How am I to judge what is an error if I don’t get to hear it? I assume “top people” will make that decision for me.
The problem isn’t with the utterance of simple banalities that can be easily proven or falsified. Many areas of discussion — the most important ones — concern areas for which no honest observer is fully sure which view is the correct one and which is in error, but for which partisan proponents are passionately certain their view is correct.
I don’t think it is useful to discussion about “free speech”, which is based on such meaningless unfiltered kind of cattle that write in Twitter?
It would be more interesting to discuss about an argument in one of the texts about the trial of Socrates, or just something on this topic from such kind of arguments that can be read in essays of e.g. David Hume or Kant.
Another winning White Nationalist Strategy; relentlessly focus on and attack the one group of powerful Jews not hostile to you, Jewish nationalists, and alienate them unnecessarily.
And ally with a much weaker and more ineffectual group, Muslim nationalists, who, btw, are busy raping your daughters and trying to take over European lands.
With this kind of strategic genius, it is no wonder you guys are going from victory to victory 🙂
This is exactly my view too.
It’s rather like how confident societies are better at shrugging off criticism and ridicule than insecure ones. Martin Amis remarked a few years ago that Britain has become far touchier about its societal ills than in the past, and he linked this, as I remember, to the insecurity that comes with its turn from a world empire to a provincial European country among many others. When in decline, you feel there is more on the line.
True on a micro level, but on a macro level, other factors come into play. You should give a moment’s thought to the importance of social cohesion, social harmony, social trust, and other defining aspects of a good society. These might all be harmed by unbridled freedom of speech, so if you value them, a trade-off is in order.
Mr Karlin confuses “conservatives” with “neo-cons” when he writes that conservatives acted to prevent free speech in the early 2000s. Conservatives, most notably Pat Buchanan, vigorously opposed the Middle East adventure. Neo-cons are not conservative, most favor big government, homosexual marriage, radical feminism and are against states rights. The mainstream media characterization of conservatives is purposefully wrong. For instance, they call Trump a conservative where he is basically a middle of the road Republican with common sense views on illegal immigration. It’s kind of hard to find a real conservative in DC right now, Rand Paul is close, but his views on immigration are too liberal, We’re a long way from Goldwater.
What is missed here is that there are two types of free speech. Legally protected, and socially acceptable. Cancel culture has only been able to succeed because speech that is in opposition to leftist doctrine which is now the culturally dominant and therefore socially acceptable narrative has been able to vilify its victims via “social pressure.” The government is not yet jailing people or demanding people lose their jobs for socially unacceptable speech. Although so called “hate speech” is one caveat on the slippery slope…
People are being de platformed, fired, and ostracized on the social level. The government of course is not protecting any of these peoples first amendment rights. So de facto the first amendment is null and void.
It is absurd to destroy someones life and livelyhood over something they’ve said, no matter how distasteful or factually incorrect it may be short of libel. But look at the absurdity going on all around us since the late 60’s. The only way to stop the madness is for enough people to have the balls to say what they want, and accept the consequences. Yeah not the way it should be in a civil society, but we haven’t lived in a civil society since the late 60’s.
free speech is a thing that only western european man wanted. and only some of the time – it wasn’t always the majority opinion among western european rulers, only during certain time periods over the last 2000 years or so was this the prevailing opinion among them. but it was characteristic of them.
no other humans have ever been interested in such a thing as free speech, heck, no other humans even recognize a concept such as a civil right, let alone specific enumerated ones. all other human rulers rule their subjects at whim, and don’t even recognize a concept such as written law.
once the western europeans are mostly displaced from the ruling class, free speech will completely disappear, and never reappear ever again. it was a historical aberration, completely GENETICALLY tied to western europeans. same as a ‘civil right’ for the average citizen to own small arms. which will also go away. everything like this will go away. third world rules will return and apply universally again. might makes right. at least Jared Taylor was correct about something for once.
even the ‘middle class’ is a historical aberration, and the western nations are returning to serfdom, which is the default human condition.
If you read Plato’s the republic, the greeks did not recognize the philosophical concept freedom or free speech either, or at least the philosophical concept freedom and free speech as post 18th-century people recognize it, in fact you can persuasively argue that 18th century philosophers basically corrupted and twisted the meaning of freedom into something very different than what the original Greek philosophers conceptualized it to be.
Didn’t say that and certainly more important than you. Based on your trollish reply, don’t bother with any follow-up.
Going out now to do something which you can’t. My nah, nah, nah moment.
The political right always wants to play by Marquise of Queensbury rules… The civilized “we disagree with what you say, but respect your right to say it” approach. “We’ll openly debate you with facts and logic.” Ideally the best way in a civilized society. However the left is about crushing the enemy, completely, totally.
The cancel culture maniacs are Bolsheviks, if they could they wouldn’t just be destroying people’s financial and social status, but would be hauling them off to gulags and or killing them period. The right will never play to win… Never!
As for NYT editors, Max Frankel was pretty good. Can’t say the same about Bari Weiss.
Tafuri is definitely a pure projection sort.
Well, considering that even the West had only real freedom of speech since the 60s, in terms of things like legalizing porn, that seems too short to be due to genetic factors.
Agree… But it doesn’t have to turn out as you predicted. Western Europeans can maintain the “civil rights”, free speech, right to bare arms, bourgeois middle class you mentioned if they are willing to fight and die for it. From the Magna Carta to the U.S. Constitution men had to be willing to fight, lose their fortunes and reputations and ultimately die to acquire it and maintain it. Too few want it badly enough to do that. It’s taken for granted that the founders fought for it and its just always going to be there maintenance free. Freedom is never free.
Ok, but Great Britain was by far the most socially secure and settled of the European countries, and the earliest to be so.
It was also notoriously the least “intellectual” – (although ironically perhaps the most “intelligent”. Schopenhauer would constantly describe Britain as the most talented and intelligent nation in Europe, but he was incredibly frustrated at how they refused to take ideas as seriously as on the Continent) – which means that they had a strong inherited Tradition that they did not seriously question.
In other words, they did not take ideas as seriously as on the Continent. They were not about to let society be totally upended because of some abstract ideas, like the much more intellectual – but perhaps less intelligent – French.
In such an environment, where ideas were more of a game (the famously flippant British attitude), free speech was uniquely positioned to flourish, based on a level of social security not found elsewhere.
This is the logic of a self-doubting authoritarian, not that of a strong leader. (Although, again, the format of the discussion makes all the difference. Challenging Putin on the facts in private is something other than challenging him on the facts before an audience of millions.)
The trouble is precisely that, from a Machiavellian angle, it is sensible and has the desired effect. The target is not the heretic, but the heretics-in-waiting.
There’s truth to this, but to stress my earlier point once again: there’s a world of difference between respecting differences of opinion in private settings, which most leftists do, and respecting them with great power at stake. Public debates are better seen as boxing matches than true and honest exchanges of opinion.
Might be one of the most apt ways you could describe the state of the western world. “Intellectualism” without intelligence, pretention without taste, “ideals” without virtue, and “humanitarianism” without charity. Clownworld has a way of taking the worst parts of everything into itself with none of the positive.
But on free speech in particular, it’s one of the peculiar foibles of a rich and stable society that has never had to reckon with its self contradictions (much like “equality before the law” and other inconsistent liberal shibboleths). But the prosperity (particularly of the middle class) and stability it has enjoyed so long is starting to wane, so too must it break with the fictions of liberalism in order to try to salvage its position. It is going about it in the worst possible way of course, in abolishing the fiction of free speech in order to try to maintain the fictions of progress and equality.
Exactly this, and not only is it tactically advisable, it’s obviously moral to do it to genuinely evil ideas.
There are tons of diabolical positions that are also easy for sophists to argue for, it would be much better if they were just illegal to say in public. Obviously arguing for immigration, sodomy, and anti-“racism” are among them, one need only observe the hypnotic reaction people have been conditioned into with terms like “hate” to see that to convince people of the truth of these false positions with emotional bullying is easy, whereas getting them to see the deep harms and ultimate evil of them is difficult. Now that their proponents are winning they want to outlaw dissent, so why would anyone think we should not reciprocate when we can? Better just to use the social proof of authorities outlawing them than to do all the pointless and difficult work of deprogramming people who were too trusting to see through dishonest rhetoric.
Yes, confidence and strength make you more tolerant. Like a strong immune system can deal with much more.
The culture code that is emerging is very new – it isn’t confident yet. It basically just won yesterday. So it can’t tolerate dissent yet.
Over time, what will happen is human nature will find a way to assert itself using the language of the new code.
For instance, its obvious to us that today’s anti-racism is actually the epitome of racism – human nature found a way to assert itself using the language of the code.
In 50 years from now, it isn’t hard to imagine how white supremacy might use the language of Black Lives Matter to promote anti-black racism, or how anti-feminist men might use the language of feminism to promote patriarchy.
I can probably promote any point of view you wish using any language code you wish. Christianity has very clear anti violence language, yet human nature used that cultural code to promote some very violent endeavors.
That is why language is simultaneously important and unimportant – the language code acts a symbol of which side is in power, but is not necessarily intended to map onto reality.
True power relations occur beneath the level of language, and know how to utilize any language code for their benefit. That is why rich powerful whites do not mind anti-white language – they can easily use this culture code to promote their interests, because they have actual power.
I look forward to the day when right-wingers will use the language of BLM to promote pro-white causes 🙂
When will we institute based speech? Fuck free speech, you can only say based things
Not doing so and we pull a Vlad Tepes on yo ass
Since they wanna play that game, let em we’ll do it even more extremely
While I suppose we could concede that there was relatively few points of significant domestic unrest after the Glorious Revolution (though instead of such a propagandistic term it should perhaps more appropriately be known as the “Orange Revolution”) and during Britain’s imperial era in comparison to her continental counterparts, I would disagree that it was based on “strong inherited Tradition”, much less in its capitalised form.
While there were a few periods of Reaction such as during the Napoleonic Wars and the Gothic Revival, overall the British aristocracy’s response was merely to unconsciously accept the maxim that “all that is solid melts into air”.
The British aristocracy gradually merged with the classical-liberal bourgeoisie, socially* and ideologically and from a longue durée perspective it can be seen that the Tories could slow down Whigs’ beliefs but could not swim against the currents.
Though many European countries (Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Greece, Habsburg realms, etc.) underwent greater violent changes** I believe that they also had a greater chance of changing their destiny.
So, no I don’t think Britain during the nineteenth century had a strong capital-T Tradition.
Perhaps ironically, despite having become a mere section of the European appendage of the American weltreich, where “all that is holy is profaned”, a social legacy distinct from other European countries is the strength of the class system.
*Though even by the time of Jane Austen there were still divisions.
**The bourgeoisie did enter high society during the Long 19th Century (many of George V’s hanger-ons and Wilhelm II’s Kaiserjuden among others had a similar noveau riche industrialist background).
(This is still simplification but if I add more I think my comment will err on the side of inscrutability)
There’s probably some truth to this, and AaronB’s post. However, societies that restrict freedom of speech strongly enough probably select for touchiness(also weakness in general). Speech restriction leads to sycophants and rulers who like to surround themselves with sycophants.
While I neither endorse nor disavow this type of behaviour, I think this type of format appears common in revolutionary groups.
You can do that without restricting speech.
All this tells me British were fat, rich conformists who didn’t care for challenging prevailing authority and culture. Or, to put it more precisely, British elite front run and managed authority and culture preemptively to maximize their own benefits, and general public was none the wiser. As befitting an ascending Empire.
I bet if British put up a play “Hey, we just starved a million Irish to death, lets give them all the power and money in reparations now” and it gained traction, it would get banned quickly.
The moment British got under even a little bit of social stress (World War I and people asking questions about it), they rediscovered censorship and propaganda just like everybody else.
Russians and Germans in contrast weren’t afraid to give their authorities a piece of their mind. Hence than banhammer.
Your English is just fine. You make perfect sense.
Mr.Karlin: You stated:
R.C. notes:
I say there’s an older statute for how to cover this situation. When I lived in California in the late 70s & early 80s, whenever we’d get a call from home (then, Florida) it was always an occasion for fear because the cost of long distance was SO EXPENSIVE it was usually to tell you someone died.
Our Sherman Anti Trust Act (~1880s?) fixed that finally and Long Distance rates dropped through the floor when such an anti-trust action by OUR GOVERNMENT!, no less, broke up Ma Bell into the “Baby Bells.”
BUT what happened from the 90s through Trump? The FCC allowed the remerger of those into two or three companies now.
The tech mega-companies must get the same treatment. (The breakups, not the remergers.) Then, competition would likely find freer places getting more business. Hopefully, we can return to a time when one could write non-PC words and thoughts without undergoing star-chamberesque witch trials by the SJW BFM BM Asswipes.
The same logic which needs to legally prevent them from preventing us is the same which proves that these lockdowns and the drug war are unconstitutional and immoral destructions of an individual’s right of choice, (aka, ‘freedom’) period.
R.C.
Agree with you on the whole (but only in part on the specifics). I think we can agree that having pedophiles play devil’s advocate in family debates would be harmful to any society, no matter your political outlook, and that such people are best banned from public platforms.
Oh yes, to be sure. It’s straight out of the Alinsky playbook (“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules”).
But I like to think that a sane, secure leader is more than ready to listen to dissenting voices. This has certainly been my experience dealing with good leaders. More often than not, they are delighted to hear the naked truth.
In the abstract, yes, but speech, or at least its consequences, will have to be restricted on some level, don’t you agree? What else do you do about straight falsehoods — perhaps even genocidal ones — working their way from the grassroot level up to the top of national debate?
You already see alt-right people defending immigration restriction in terms of preserving the diversity and uniqueness of native (i.e. European) cultures. That used to be a left-wing white argument for not trying to assimilate Native Americans and the like.
Similarly, ‘white genocide’ seeks to invert the original use of the word, referring to European countries (or Turkey) persecuting minorities.
Trump is somewhat postmodern in his lack of concern for truth, though I doubt he has a real philosophy behind it.
I am not sure.
I do know however that we already do that and that truth gets suppressed as often as lies.
Discerning the difference is about listening first, and if speech is prohibited then you can’t listen.
Notions of what is masculine vary widely correlating with social class. You come across as being solidly in the WWE-fanboy category. Power may be a greatly celebrated masculine attribute across classes but this dull machismo notion of it is retrograde & weak within the modern world as commonly encountered.
You are off by a century. The Nouvelle Droite already had the idea of flipping their enemies’ arguments during the Sixty-Eighter cultural revolution, though it should be said that they and their opponents were far more intellectual than today’s midgets.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves if we value the Truth. If not, free speech might be dispensed with. Otherwise free speech is important because only in the free discussion of all topics can an approximation of Truth be found. Current year demonstrates that Truth is not of value to the postmodern people. This means that falsehood shall increase until the society drowns in its lies. Then perhaps we might ask again whether we should value the Truth.
You make a good point. Britain was not immune to long-term European trends. And if anything, Britain today is more radical than France, which is known for being more traditional.
Nothing stays the same.
I think the change happened after WW2. Before that, Britain was more stable, rigid, conservative, unchanging, class-bound, but also for that reason less threatened by ideas, and more playful about them.
That’s true. But I think its too early to work.
Evidently, right now large numbers of people are unhappy with the prevailing system, especially Romantic white youth. And that system is associated with science, technology, and white culture.
In 30 years from now, it will be evident that the new BLM system did not heal peoples dissatisfactions.
So the field will be ready then to use the language code against the system itself.
The mesianic dream of judaism is incompatible with any european self respect ,there is nothing you can offer us that will make us side with you even in the case you really wanted a sincere allianze.
That of course doent mean we are allying with muslims we are symply not being hipocrite
While I might support the nationalism of a genuine people (Italians, French, Israelis, Russians), I don’t support “white nationalism” and don’t wish to ally with it. Its retarded.
Its just that specifically American white nationalists seem hell bent on focusing on and making enemies of Zionists – Jewish nationalists – the one group of Jews who don’t really care about you one way or another.
And allying with Muslims – a group of people who despise you want to make you into Dhimmis.
So….good luck with that.
Definitely a lot of the current nonsense has to do with prosperity, which is now waning.
« free speech » is a lame and gay concept. Real men rightfully want to crush their adversaries — and also to kill their offspring in order to avoid later vendettas.
Why don’t you go to that statue of Christopher Columbus in Chicago? You’ll find plenty of opportunities to fight your adversaries. Of course, you’ll be greatly outnumbered, and you’ll be the one who gets crushed. You may even get killed.
A wise person understands the concept of “rapport des forces.” You are greatly outnumbered by people who have no inhibitions against causing you bodily harm. So please cut the he-man talk, and make alliances with those who agree with you on key goals.
The free speech crowd may be “lame” and “gay,” and they’re not brave men who write brave comments under an assumed name. But at least they are doing things in the real world.
To a good extent, there was a payback mentality relating to the Vietnam War.
Pelosi is being dishonest when she mind reads Putin for wanting to put out this claimed bounty. Following 9/11, Putin shared Russian Intel on Afghanistan with the US and allowed for US military flight to Afghanistan via Russian airspace.
Related:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/02/traditional-russophobia-in-an-unusual-election-year/
Free Speech is valued almost universally through out history. The tolerance of different opinions is rarely argued against. And the powerful rulers, most of them, understand its value and respect and even encourage its practice.
A good thing needs to be cultivated, protected. That there are opportunists is hardly a reason to be against it.
The modern American version of the idea makes it more and more about pornography and petty insults, and sowing division and exploiting society’s fractures. This is unfortunate.
I don’t get philosophical debates on free speech when:
The left dominates mainstream discourse
So we can sit around and talk about some theoretical society with perfectly free speech but we’re under the boot of the left and it is getting worse.
The problem I see is that establishment right aka Conservative Inc doesn’t support free speech either when it comes to anything related to race.
I realize a lot of talk about race is offensive to Christian conservatives but allowing the left to maintain speech control only strengthens their position. But more importantly the “nice guy” conservative approach has been tried and failed. Conservative Inc also gets into too many awkward positions where it mocks liberals for not wanting to face the facts and then censoring anyone on the right that even hints that some racial equality may not be environmental in origin.
So truly free speech certainly undermines the left.
The question of how much free speech is good for society is a perfectly fine question once society is no longer in the hands of devious and destruction elements.
Free Speech is valued almost universally through out history.
I don’t think this is true.
Most of Western Europe doesn’t have free speech laws.
In Sweden you can go to prison for posting here.
A judge can decide you are “agitating racial minorities” and doesn’t have to explain any further.
Off you go.
This already happened to a woman that complained about Muslim rape.
There is one obvious exception–wartime. During wartime virtually every country shuts down any speakers who support the enemy.
Since the SJWs are at war with western civilization, they want to eliminate free speech.
Easy Peasy.
I disagree that Chomsky and Pinker are genuine free speech absolutists.
They’re just very high verbal IQ verbalists who are confident that they will be able to gatekeep “bad ideas” from disseminating widely with their debating skills and by having like minded allies (generally co-ethnics) in the media.
Pinker explicitly argued against the principle of being open to and addressing all ideas in order to avoid seriously engaging with Kevin MacDonald’s work:
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Pinker.htm
Conservatives aren’t principled proponents of free speech but rather will support it for pragmatic political reasons to fight the propaganda war and try to attain political power. The more center right and normie conservatives generally won’t admit this and will still pay lip service to the principle of free speech, but the more far right which tends to be more explicit about illiberal and authoritarian ideology are more likely to admit that free speech is just a pragmatic means to an end in the current political and historical context of the US:
“Richard Spencer: The Alt-Right Is Not Pro-Free Speech”
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/richard-spencer-the-alt-right-is-not-pro-free-speech/
Hello fellow deep thinking free speech supporter.
Richard Spencer, really?
lol, this place is gonna be crawling with shills for months.
In ancient India there was genuine free speech, even by western standards. From the time of the Buddha till the Guptas, there was free discussion between traditionalists, atheists, materialists, fatalists, polytheists, hedonists etc, etc… There were huge public debates between different religious and philosophical schools and no one was persecuted because of their opinions. There was public opinion that good king or administrator protects all different viewpoints and behaves in non partial manner. There were Jain kings who funded Hindu and Buddhist temples and there were Hindu and Buddhist kings who did vice versa. There were even Charvaka or Lokayata kings who funded religious institutions. Charvaka was a materialistic philosophy that did not believe in afterlife or in gods or spiritual stuff. They just wanted a good and happy life. In ancient China there was also most of the time society that had fertile and free discussions about the nature of civilization and human life. Emperors like Qi Huang Di or Wuzong of Tang, were mostly short lived exceptions in long Chinese history. Of course you could not criticize the emperor but if you did your work well and fulfilled your duties in civic and family life, no one would care much about what you believed and discussed with your friends. But later Chinese dynasties like Ming and Qing were more totalitarian and enforced stricter control with religion and speech, but early dynasties did not have salafi Muslim groups like Qing had, nor Christian groups that were under the influence or control of foreign imperialistic powers. I am friend of European culture, and technological achievements of European civilization are without peers in human history. But then there is this kind of stupid eurocentrism, that makes as much sense as Nordicism of early 20th century.
BTW, this is AK’s 2000th post on this blog!
YES, IT IS OVER TWO THOUSAND!
Congratulations to AK and all commenters!
I sent you an absurd article on twitter and you cancelled me @Matt46342502? What the hell?
The obvious problem with a property qualification is that those without property are still taxed to fund the government.
By all means restrict the franchise to property-owners – so long as
• any rules passed by the legislature only applied to property-owners; and
• the entire upkeep of government is funded by taxes on property-owners; and
• when (not if) the government decided to have a war, only property owners would be obliged to participate or be subject to conscription.
Now… you see why the franchise has to be extended?
Governments need stupid gullible meatheads (mostly net-tax-recipients – people below the 80th income percentile). That helps ensure electoral support for cronyist policies. Then to fund the cronyist policies it needs tax receipts from the non-propertied net-tax-payers.
Otherwise, government turns into the propertied classes trying to steal from each other – which is not the central aim of the game.
The central aim of government is – and has always been, and will always be – to help the capital-owning classes to steal from everyone else. The form of government does not matter one iota: government is always capital’s bitch.
“Free speech” is code for “abolish blasphemy and decency laws”. The only point was dismantling Christianity; once that was done, there’s no more need for dogwhistle euphemisms.
Karlin is absolutely right about the virtue signalling aspect. The content of the letter is great but it’s a shame that it seems, based on the signatories, intended for the left. And pathetic to see this childish popularity aspect of it indicated in excluding Greenwald, an equal-opportunity offender who doesn’t apply his social intelligence as diligently as the others in cultivating alliance within this gregarious industry. Krystal Ball has an outstanding 6 minute monologue on the subject.
Chomsky is just too wily for his disciples, most critics and normies to decode. He truly deserves the moniker The Cleverest Zionist .
Pinker is after all a ‘cultural Jew’. Tribal interests outrank so-called free speech. He is even cited as an authority on heretics like MacDonald by SPLC gatekeepers.
In the sixties, when modern ideal of unlimited free speech began, laws against sedition and treason were the main targets.
https://www.indybay.org/uploads/2003/03/15/shoot_their_officers.jpg
It was not about Christianity, it was about protesting Vietnam war by any means necessary, including incitement to desertion and mutiny, including stealing top secret documents and printing them in top national newspaper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers
The sixties are over, do not try it today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Imprisonment_in_the_UK
Also Chomsky:
“Surely people differ in their biologically determined qualities. The world would be too horrible to contemplate if they did not. But discovery of a correlation between some of these qualities is of no scientific interest and of no social significance, except to racists, sexists and the like. Those who argue that there is a correlation between race and IQ and those who deny this claim are contributing to racism and other disorders, because what they are saying is based on the assumption that the answer to the question makes a difference; it does not, except to racists, sexists and the like.”
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/should-research-on-race-and-iq-be-banned/
“Conservatives” (i.e. DC homosexuals receiving paychecks from Jews) supported “free speech” when it was a matter of permitting Jews to be wreckers. When cultural ascendancy of the culture wreckers begins to manifest, then they no longer have any real intention of supporting “free speech.”
The “conspiratorial” explanation of politics really is the best explanation. What things appear to be to the common person has no relation to what is actually going on. The Republican Party has never been effectively conservative. The USA does not tolerate genuine conservatism at the national level of politics.
Trump’s failure is in some ways a blessing, since it removes the false feeling of relief and security the GOP voters gained from the 2016 election.
What type of take is that?
“Those two smart people aren’t for free speech, because, despite being for it, they’re only for it because they believe that, with free speech, coherent ideas outcompete idiotic ones…”
Because the argument is that non-holders of property and non-tax payers are basically social parasites, and hence should not get the vote? I mean the majority of the people in the altright are also against the female right to vote.
Why?
For many countries, the complete observance of free speech would eventually result in American cultural hegemony. Seems undesirable.
I agree, arguably on a domestic level, but definitely on an international level, culture and metapolitics operate not according to a classical liberal laissez-faire framework but rather closer to the cultural and translational world-systems theory framework.
They’re just very high verbal IQ verbalists who are confident that they will be able to gatekeep “bad ideas” from disseminating widely
This was part of the plan for the social sciences and other departments that the left took over until the internet came along.
Create a gatekeeping system where collective voices use ideology supporting terms and ideas to lock out unwanted facts.
If someone goes rogue and submits an unwanted study to a journal then the press is the last line of defense and will make certain that no one reads it.
This is why the internet makes liberals go crazy. You can point out in a few sentences how an entire study is a steaming pile of BS. A study that a couple libs spend thousands of hours on with the assumption that the underlying message would be protected.
Even worse for the liberals is that we can take departments like Sociology and question their entire foundation. If you aren’t using the scientific method then what is your purpose?
“Conservatives” (i.e. DC homosexuals receiving paychecks from Jews) supported “free speech” when it was a matter of permitting Jews to be wreckers.
The Anglo conservative establishment has never supported free speech and that is not the fault of the Jews.
They view it as corrosive to social institutions that stabilize society. Race and religion are two areas where they are not keen on open discussion. Wealthy Whites are afraid that the order will collapse if common Whites are allowed to question both race and capitalism. They are afraid of a 1930s return where capitalists are not beloved by anyone. This is partly why so many of the 1% have gone globalist. They only fear White people tearing down the order.
But if we are going to have free speech then let’s actually have it.
Not the current phony form that the left controls and the conservative right accepts.
Open discussion on race is kryptonite to liberalism. Conservatives don’t like religion being questioned but the left already bashes and mocks Christianity on a daily basis. The current liberal control on free speech allows Christianity and Whites to be endlessly attacked but simple questions about race and evolution are strictly forbidden. Conservative sacred cows are already gored mercilessly and yet so many conservatives bow to the order. It makes more sense to allow full free speech especially since the Conservative Inc approach is a losing strategy.
1-Muslim nationalists, who, btw, are busy raping your daughters and trying to take over European lands.”
Are you talking of the Zionism’s -diaspora- land wealth -slave -economy grabbing and Purin celebrating practices ?
2-“powerful Jews not hostile to you, Jewish nationalists, and alienate them unnecessarily.”
From 1880 to 1920 ,Jews immigrated and established themselves in Palestine. Palestinians were showered with constant streaming lies by the Jewish leaders ,Jewish the press and by the Jewish rabbi about Zionism’s actual plans . If the Arabs struck them off the map there and then in 1913, the world would have been free of hatred tension and wars in much of the worlds for most of the 20 the century and 21 st century .
“But at least they are doing things in the real world.”– But dressed in costumes and behind masks and with “daddies who work for the courts”.
History repeats – first time as tragedy, second time as farce.
“Free love” was already fashionably discussed in 1840s Paris, and of course, had been promoted in the most radical form (in comparison more moderate views of Engels later) already by writers like Charles Fourier.
1840s Paris was later idealized in the later 19th century (e.g. my mental association of this place is to “La bohème” by Puccini), in the way 1960s San Francisco could be in the later 20th century.
Illiterate people claim things like “free love” are from the 1960s California. However, really “free love” sounds more like language of the 1860s, than 1960s. For example, Nietzsche is often writing his criticisms of the supporters of “free love” in his books, and views it them as quite common and annoying people. (And of course, Wagner was a supporter of free love movement – and lived it with many romances -, before he discovered Schopenhauer, and has to re-write the Ring)
Some might argue, we have first time as farce, second time as tragedy – with free-love in modern history. And it’s questionable whether the 1960s was not already the 3rd or 4th time in modern history.
Have you read Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State? If so, what is your opinion on it?
I am wondering whether to read it eventually or not.
The property qualification was usually 40 pounds, equal to $8k – $9k purchasing power, or 2.5 – 4 years income for a free White of the time. (Tax was negligible, though.)
I showed how they really aren’t for free speech. They’re gatekeepers for “free speech”.
If you followed the link I provided, Pinker explicitly argues against allowing “bad ideas” to compete. He advocates ignoring and suppressing certain ideas.
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Pinker.htm
China has had a eugenic tradition going back long in its history and which it continues to this day (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838). Smart elites understand that you can build a much more powerful country with smart proles — Brahmins alone aren’t gonna build a space program or Silicon Valley in Uganda. Meanwhile, the West has undergone dysgenic selection for several decades (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-human-genetics/article/how-intelligence-affects-fertility-30-years-on-retherford-and-sewell-revisited-with-polygenic-scores-and-numbers-of-grandchildren/AB8EF68EE05C8DFD0A1C424B4FF7BC1F#), possibly even centuries, and is reaping its benefits as we speak.
I remember reading an interesting theory on how the British damaged themselves beyond repair from WW1/WW2 dysgenics.
The main problem being they sent too many royals and nobles to the front to be slaughtered since they were more egalitarian about who served. Perhaps the Germans were more selective but I don’t see any reason to believe this. In WW2 they lost entire army divisions.
The other problem being that cowards and liars stay home and breed. This affected all countries in WW1/2.
This problem of war dysgenics used to be discussed openly but that ended with WW2. In fact California was considered a world leader in the science of eugenics.
Amusingly the modern liberal declares himself to be rational and scientific and then turns into a weeping 5 year old when you dare suggest that humans have genetic properties similar to all other species and are thus subject to natural selection. Actually that is too generous, 5 year olds probably have a better grasp of genetics as they aren’t conditioned at that age.
The liberal belief in static human genetics is downright bizarre and in fact even when I was a liberal I found it disconcerting.
I am pretty sure they were aiming for population control so they can focus on the economy, not eugenics on the rural peasants. Cause one child policy wasn’t just for rural peasants but it was even more strictly enforced on the city dwellers. Of course they encourage smart people to Mary each other. Or other talents. The best example would be yao Ming. His parents were encourage to marry each other, he was also encouraged to marry a girl from the Chinese basketball team. But that isn’t eugenics. Eugenics = stoping the retards like covid hoaxers from breeding.
No idea about the nationalist govt after the fall of Ming n 1949.
The Mandarin class in China was directly responsible for the dynastic cycle. 100%. And their policy was to keep the peasants stupid n docile. It was why Chinese coolies were more valuable than black slaves.
You could make your “point” much pithier if you just said “silence = violence”…
Medieval European universities enjoyed institutionalized freedom to say many things that would otherwise punished as heresy or treason.
That’s too simple and doesn’t fit all historical data – but it is basically correct: an agreed on culture is required for free speech. I can’t have ‘free speech‘ with someone who claims that ancient Egypt or Greece were examples of ‘flourishing black civilisation‘. That discussion becomes absurd.
Homogeneous societies with low Gini index (high level of equality) also do better with free speech. Unfortunately even some of them (e.g. Scandinavians) have foolishly imported absurd cultural ideas and are now among the worst. The destruction of the Western cultural code has been catastrophic. It inevitably follows from two basic pathologies that West has been unable to address:
– cheap labor obsession by ‘business’ assisted by academia, media and governments
– open borders, migrants, and selling your country to outsiders.
That doesn’t make for a stable society that can practise free speech. It just took a long time to get to this point. I don’t think there is a way to reverse it.
I am pretty sure they were aiming for population control so they can focus on the economy, not eugenics on the rural peasants.
It was both.
Rural dwellers were more likely to be able to afford the fine of having another child.
If they had wanted to apply it equally then they would have used the threat of imprisonment.
Britain is in a hopeless situation, seemingly under attack from all sides. The US is threatening us, China is threatening us, the EU is threatening us.
Why is Britain expected to be loyal to one side or the other and not able to act independently like Germany and France, etc, largely do? It seems to me that those countries have positive relationships with both China and the US, and are able to buy Huawei infrastructure without the US threatening them with pariah status if they don’t refuse to deal with China. I don’t get it.
That’s not the right analogy. The “silence = violence” formulation refers to the supposed moral obligation of a passive audience to speak out on behalf of black interests. A passive audience has no such obligation. Moreover, it can speak out against black interests if it wants to.
Pinker on the other hand is a public intellectual who morally advocates for Enlightenment values and free speech. Which is why he has to engage in sophistry and pretend like he’s not against free speech when he supports ignoring and suppressing certain ideas because they’re “bad”.
It inevitably follows from two basic pathologies that West has been unable to address:
– cheap labor obsession by ‘business’ assisted by academia, media and governments
– open borders, migrants, and selling your country to outsiders.
That doesn’t make for a stable society that can practise free speech. It just took a long time to get to this point. I don’t think there is a way to reverse it.
Oh it can be reversed.
Advancements in genetics will eventually make the left cry uncle. They will switch from “race doesn’t exist” to “race exists and we need to tax Whites to genetically engineer equality” which will then be the end of the circus.
Whether or not the US will survive by then is a fair question.
Maybe Britain is not he belly of the beast, but at least its the cradle of the beast. Serves you right!
I only skipped through the text. (It does seem quite an easy to read one).
I think Engels’ predictions for the continuation of monogamy in communism are accurate if he wrote in a more moderate way, but he is over-optimistic that prostitution would disappear. (We know even in economic utopia of Sweden which has almost destroyed all poverty domestically, and where no women need to work as prostitutes, and where it is illegal to anyway; still a proportion of Sweden’s prostitution demand is offshored, as sex tourism in South-East Asia).
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/origin_family.pdf
There is no reference to Schopenhauer in the text, but it seems like Engels does write communist response to typical debates about problems of prostitution of earlier decades (a vast scale of prostitution is something which was shocking about 19th century cities):
Here is Schopenhauer in 1851:
Schopenhauer’s 1851 essay here:
https://www.theabsolute.net/misogyny/onwomen.html
There was unrest.
The Irish never settled down. The Old and Young Pretenders marched armies south from Scotland. The American colonies were in a perpetual state of low level revolt until they broke into full scale rebellion leading to independence. The Chartists incited working class protest brutally put down.
Britain managed to contain all these forces in the middle of a huge technological explosion. The mere stirrings of such destroyed France.
Liberals have no problem with going ‘irrational and contradictory‘. They actually enjoy it, it allows them to ignore math that they are not very good at.
The root cause of the Western dysfunction is the sick idea that business should be built on the cheapest labor possible. All else follows from it: open borders to make labor more ‘competitive‘, and changed culture to better manage the resulting mess. Eventually you have to restrict speech to make status quo tenable. That’s where we are today, and it is not about to reverse.
As long as the conservatives refuse to address this root cause nothing can be done. Too many are stuck in their crazy libertarian unworkable fantasies or focus only on symptoms. But they have a blind spot when addressing the very basic labor supply equation and the fact that you cannot have a viable society in the long run without some balance between incomes and consumption. All else is empty talk.
I’m a genZ ideological omnivore. Chapo brought me here and this place confirmed my disbelief in the holohoax narrative. Has Unz Review considered getting on tiktok?
That’s always been the case. Look at HUAC’s investigations into Hollywood in the late 40s and early 50s – that was clearly an attempt by the political Right to suppress free speech that they didn’t care for.
Nobody actually thinks that free speech should apply to their political enemies.
I agree entirely.
You’re relying on rational argument. You won’t get anywhere with those tactics around these parts.
OK, how about we take the vote away from women but the legislature is then not permitted to make any laws that apply to women?
Alt-righters are against women having the right to vote because they represent a political movement that has failed dismally to attract any support from women. Women consider the alt-right to be a collection of sad socially inept losers and dangerous nutjobs. In this case women are absolutely correct.
What does the fact that China, a country with not much free speech is outperforming countries that have a lot more free speech by law show about the value of free speech?
Britain lost all its self-respect when she lost her Empire. The Empire was really the only thing that gave Britain the illusion of greatness. When the British lost the Empire they came face to face with the reality of being a third-rate power, entirely subservient to the United States.
They then came up with the sad pathetic fantasy of the Special Relationship with the US. It’s actually the kind of special relationship a prostitute has with her pimp. And being a prostitute Britain knows how pimps deal with prostitutes who get uppity.
America was built on the idea of cheap labor and population replacement, starting from 1493 and Columbus.
It won’t change until the entire idea of “America” is destroyed.
Isn’t UK part of five eyes?
If so, there is your reason why UK can’t act independently. UK are essentially a vassal.
Why would you think free speech = higher performance?
Also, why would you think any country have any free speech?
Um, city dwelling Chinese were waaaay better off than their rural counter parts in communist China.
Your statement would make sense in reverse.
This is a quote from Lao Zi but it is just that, a famous saying, through out the history of China. What China practiced, is to educate the people. Other than a few exceptions, the people were not deliberately kept from books and learning.
Free speech in America according to Alexis de Tocqueville:
Yes to free speech as long as it is USA, USA… chant. (Btw, I had an experience of making some American turning defensive when I complained about the humidity in the Midwest. He was a college professor from Illinois.)
Free speech is not threatened when independent thought is absent.
In the tyranny by vox populi the fate of dissenters is worse than death.
The banality of life in America makes free speech irrelevant and superfluous.
Say what? You’re absolutely, positively, 100% insane.
The Jewish media doesn’t give a shit about Vietnam. They want to do what Jewish media does best – slander Christ and spread pornography. That was ever all that ‘free speech’ was about.
“Something funny you can read in early Marx, is writing during honeymoon in 1840s Paris. At this time, some of the fashionable ideas in the city were about “free love”, and Marx (who has a young wife now) is arguing to support of monogamy. This is – in the 1840s.” – His wife must have been aging fast because five year after their marriage in The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels were against marriage and for free love.
Your point is well taken. Among the exceptions Ron Unz comes first to my mind.
BTW, Chomsky’s observation is among my favorites:
“If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”
Chomsky is an old coquette.
The Americans committed a major error in letting Vine go bankrupt.
I wouldn’t consider Ireland and America core British territory. I’ll concede the Jacobite rebellions. As for the Chartists, considering that they passed parliamentary reform a mere decade after Peterloo the reaction was rather brief.
Well, no, that was my (perhaps clumsily made) point. They didn’t “contain” liberalism, they merely gave up in a slower manner.
As for what the predominant causes of the French Revolution were, that is another discussion.
That is a significant issue, but I don’t believe it is the root cause. If this were the case immigration and foreigner policies would be a lot closer to the more effective expats+coolie slavery policies of Gulf Arabs (for a given quantity of effectivity).
He tried to warn you
https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-i-am-as-a-european-absolutely-shocked-by-european-people-i-am-also-shocked-by-european-ernst-zundel-83-67-28.jpg
I think one of the biggest flaws of the West is its belief in particle-ism, or at least that is what I’d call it. We seem to have trouble viewing things holistically, as systems. It is more than just how individualism is promoted, but it is undoubtedly related.
Ideas certainly do not have level playing fields. Even the phrase “the marketplace of ideas”, when looked at critically, suggests things like availability, branding, fashion, and appeal. Target demographics. Distribution networks. Real estate. Negotiating power that comes with scale.
The notion that the best ideas will win out is fundamentally blank-slatist. It doesn’t comport with observation. It doesn’t explain why the Cathedral exists. In some measure, the US is though of having the most free speech, but if you think about it quota systems, or affirmative action, which is common in the US is really just an attempt to control speech. Their original use was against Jews. Quite moderate in operation, but they might have prevented the formation of the Cathedral, if allowed to continue.
I believe the Chinese actually got rid of prostitution during the Cultural Revolution. STD rates plummeted. Of course, they have it back now.
It is incredible how little liberals even pretended to care about the persecution of Holocaust fact-checkers
Free love began with the French Revolution, which also enlisted Sade, although it had centuries-old precursors going back to the courtly romances of the troubadours (e.g. Tristan and Isolde), and famous historical lovers such as Peter Abelard and Heloise.
TIL I learned that Hammurabi was a “western european man.”
Alternative: TIL, once again, that prime noticer is a prime idiot.
Mandarins want chaos and rebellion?
What?
Maybe he is mistaking Mandarins with the other Mandarin from the comic book?
Nope.
Yes, anyone can buy those books and try to become a scholarly Mandarin. But if you are a peasant who are just one drought away from starvation, do you think you have the ability, time, income to devote to those books to become one?
They owned 80% of the land while paying no tax, not unlike the wealth of the super rich in the USA and the west.
The rest of the populace was propping up the country with just 20% of the land. USA is not this extreme yet with the wealth distribution, but getting there.
When the peasants start to face a choice of rebellion or starvation, what do you think they will choose? That is the dynastic cycle of China.
I am not sure if I will get to see this happen in the USA. The start of all this was the 1970s.
Then why did China have a much lower literacy level than Europe, even when it was materially richer?
This is not the 1900s anymore. The issue is not whether ditch-diggers are paid adequate wages.
Labor and income are two totally separate issues, and they will become even more separated as more and more jobs of all kinds are replaced by robots, computers, etc.
This will create greater and greater income inequality as relatively few folks will be needed in the future economy.
If you want to talk about what to do about the majority of future unemployable folks, then go there.
But–don’t pretend this is about “labor”–that is outdated leftist ideology.
Well I do not really know what people’s motives and agendas are, and I do not really claim to be able to psychoanalyze someone from behind a desk, but then with regards to Unz, there really is a thing as a self hating, just as there is such a thing as a self hating Chinese or self hating white, not that I am claiming that he is one or the other really, since I really do not know how his childhood relationships with his parents are, or how his relationship with his co ethnics are, or with his own culture are.
Actually China had a higher literacy level than medieval Europe, the same also with Tokugawa Japan and Joseon Korea.
Haha no
… who happens to be right about this:
“If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”
Communist Manifesto does not support “free love”, as opposed to monogamy. The issue is about “bourgeois marriage” – but Marx and to lesser extent Engels consistently support monogamy in their writing (if not necessarily living by it in private – even Marx possibly has an affair with his maid in 1850).
Here are relevant parts in Communist Manifesto:
^ This was as an accusation against communism (community of women), rather than something Marx/Engels believe will occur.
^ Here part of a criticism of Christian Socialism.
^ And here is the famous “positive content” which was later elaborated by Engels. They speculate about how relations would be transformed, and argue that “bourgeois marriage” will no longer have relevant economic conditions.
However, the view which is elaborated later on this topic by Engels had such a utopian conclusion that communism will cause the final victory of monogamy :
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/origin_family.pdf
Marx/Engels of course, are viewing themselves as “scientific socialists” – so they try not to be normative, but to simply describe what they think will likely happen in communism.
One of the rhetorical things they do, is to claim that what will happen in communism is epistemically impossible to access from our capitalist historical stage.
The fact their predictions are almost always positive ones, is not exactly very “scientific” (it can seem more like religious optimism).
However, the fact they view monogamy as one of such positive triumphs (they are not Charles Fourier).
A unusual thing about America, is that prostitution has been more greatly suppressed than in most non-Muslim countries of today, including from a lot of the cultural layer – although I assume it is offshored to some extent to Mexico.
At the same time, America is supposedly stereotyped as the “land of buying and selling”. Yet there is far less mainstream prostitution in USA, than in Europe, Russia, China, Japan, etc.
One of the main criticism of Marx/Engels against bourgeois capitalism, was against the ubiquity of prostitution, which was one of the most visible “industries” of the 19th century cities.
However, in Soviet times, propaganda could not very effectively criticize America in this area, as prostitution was to some extent more mainstream in the Soviet Union.
Although in most of the 20th century societies, there does seem a significant marginalization of prostitution, compared to in 19th century. It seems like half the time I read 19th century literature (especially French literature, although in Russian to lesser extent), it will be significantly about the topic of prostitutes and women in such positions.
Yes, this is iron clad logic that impresses infantile minds who are infatuated with utopian thinking. That’s why this is an excellent example of coquetry on the part of Chomsky.
“These interpretations of Marx’s and Engels’ position on the family, while often raising important points, tend to obscure somewhat the radicalism of theirviews. Marx’s and Engels’ critique of the family consisted of three main elements: (1) a depiction of the hypocrisy and inhumanity of the contemporary bourgeois family; (2) the historicisation of the family, i.e. a historical account of the origins and development of the family in the past; and (3) a vision of the future ‘family’ in communist society. While Marx once alluded to a higher form of the family in communist society, he and Engels usually wrote about the destruction, dissolution, and abolition of the family. The relationships they envisaged for communist society would have little or no resemblance to the family as it existed in nineteenth-century Europe or indeed anywhere else. Thus it is certainly appropriate to define their position as the abolition of the family. Only by making the term family almost infinitely elastic can they be said to have embraced merely a reformulation of the family.”
“Marx’s and Engels’ conception of the abolition of the family was quite radical, though perhaps less so than Fourier’s earlier formulations. They never masked their contempt for present family relationships and their hope for radically new social relations in communist society. Their historicisation of the family abetted their position, since it implied that no transhistorical norms for the family exist”
https://www.csustan.edu/sites/default/files/History/Faculty/Weikart/Marx-Engels-and-the-Abolition-of-the-Family.pdf
Thank you for stopping by to display your blind spot.
I used the term ‘labor’ as a short-hand for work of any kind, nothing to do with ‘ditch-diggers‘. The western business wants the cheapest possible workers, their spreadsheets work out better that way. This leads to business pushing for open borders, and the ‘conservative’ businessmen are as bad as the ‘liberal’ ones. They want an oversupply of labor on all levels – from services to doctors and nurses, from engineers to security guards. That leads to lower incomes and compliant workforce. Over time it destroys the society – and libertarian fantasies about Ayn Rand supermen are just that: fantasies.
We can discuss AI and robots, but they are not the reason we are f..ed today – not yet. Western dysfunction today is largely driven by its open borders policies and by promoting global competition for work. You can’t have a middle class society that way, and you can’t have normal culture or eventually even free speech.
I understand that many conservatives live in denial of this reality, they like to play stupid IQ games, boast about their own ‘productivity’, fancy mythological leftist criminal past (how about them feudals and capitalists, no crimes ever committed there? right). It leads to a cul-de-sac. Today conservatives don’t understand that the anger among people is ubiquitous, that one doesn’t have to agree with the sculpture burners or color-obsessed fanatics, to stand aside and not defend the system. How many different ways can you come with to preserve the status quo?
Revolutions happen when most people are angry about something, it doesn’t have to be the same thing, and historically it never is. Breaking statues is the usual first step, usually followed by breaking heads and more. But I am sure you prefer to play with your robots…
You and I agree on this point–and I am telling you that robots and computers will soon be the cheapest possible workers in many industries, including service industries.
It just does not make sense to propose driving “forward” while looking in the rear view mirror.
Until the Perestroika the prostitution was quite uncommon in the USSR and nearly completely limited to either servicing the foreign currency carrying tourists and businesses travellers or catering to the professional criminals. After the fall of the USSR it changed completely with a large flow of Russian women trafficked as sex workers abroad and also the prostitution in Russia going mainstream.
The situation was similar with the drugs, there were some available in the USSR, but nothing comparable to what came in the 1990-ies.
The Soviet society of the 70 and 80ies was in fact rather puritanical. That was one of the factors that contributed to the youth rebelling against Communism. They wanted sex, drugs and rock n’roll.
And they got some:
https://youtu.be/Gsbh6xmdOSw
We are not driving anywhere, that’s a wrong analogy.
The issue is the unshakable desire by the Western businessmen for the cheapest possible workers, from importing slaves to migrants, from 5-year old kids in coal mines to Indian IT workers. It destroys the system, it is a mental disease. If you actually think about it, it makes no sense for a society. And yet it is accepted by the conservatives as ‘good for business‘ and celebrated by the liberals because they are non-serious, silly people.
i’m not sure if AK is joking, but if not, he’s wrong. if you oppose the first amendment as regarding speech as currently interpreted, then you’re dumb, and anything you have to say can be safely ignored.
the only other country with similar protections is japan, because the US wrote its constitution.
and so much for the ne asian IQ thing. ne asians, including the japs, support free speech much less than americans or even europeans and latin americans. china people are dumb.
Yeah I know…
I’m so fed up with censorship I lose sight of what you’re saying.
Thanks for reminding me.
(Sorry, meant to post this to Dmitry)
There is probably a lot of sex tourism originating from America, but still prostitution seems surprisingly common here. Though, I do believe it to be more suppressed than in most other countries, you can undoubtedly find it in any major city.
It seems kind of odd, to think about. A lot of America’s old mores have been disregarded or substantially weakened. There’s been dirty stuff on TV (at least suggestive) for probably at least 40 years or more. Marijuana has been legalized in a lot of states, as has gambling. One can buy alcohol on a Sunday, but somehow the social stigma against prostitution seems to remain.
Not that I approve of the trade, but it almost seems like a conspiracy to embarrass powerful men. That or perhaps women are against it – I’m not sure.
Polemical strategy of Marx/Engels, exaggerates the extent to which problems of family life, are based on bourgeois property relations.
However, that doesn’t imply they “want to abolish family”, and we know from explicit statements they hope it will increase monogamy.
Scientific socialism, – followed more by Marx than Engels – tries to avoid to speculate on what will be family relations after the end of capitalism. Moreover, it views such change of relations (i.e. “abolish of family”) as not normative, but rather something which will be “scientific” (possibly unknown) effect of the change of economic structure.
In terms of positive predictions about it- but Marx and Engels say they hope it will increase monogamy.
So in both cases they are “hoping” for increase in monogamy in their theory, although not necessarily as they lived in their real life.*
Engels’ views are actually quite similar to a modern one, which we grow up with in our 21st century culture. He believes that relationships should only be based on love, and there should be no property considerations.
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*Marx aspired all his years to be practitioner of 19th century bourgeois family life, but failed to the extent doesn’t have enough money for it. He is often desperate for money to pay for horse riding and piano lessons for his daughters, and he is also angry when his daughters play with proletarian children because they might lose their manners. Marx is one of the most “class conscious” bourgeois people.
Engels was womanizer and “bachelor”. But the real reason he opposes marriage in his real life, is probably because he cannot marry his long term girlfriend, as she was working class, while he is from the “haute bourgeoisie”. (Engels’ girlfriends are a couple of class below him – i.e. to unacceptable extent for him to marry).
In terms of its visibility – but in terms of the reality existed plenty.
https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1634001
That’s not to say there was not less in Soviet times than both nowadays, and in the pre-revolutionary times. There likely was a lot less in terms of volume, than today, so the Soviet Union was probably somewhat successful in reducing prostitution (although, countervailingly, capitalist USA was likely more successful in reducing prostitution than communist USSR had been).
But it would still be a lot of prostitution, and more than enough to invalidate the USSR in terms of the optimistic dreams of Marx/Engels on this topic. (Although still USSR would be invalidated to Marx/Engels in far more different and diverse ways, than on this topic).
You are talking about “elite prostitutes”, which were often working under roof of the KGB.
As we know, such things in history do not “change completely” in any short time, although the visibility is more rapidly variable than the phenomena which becomes visible or invisible.
What happens, is that what was previously hidden, then became more openly visible and discussed.
Prostitution became openly visible, while it was hidden in Soviet times. Today it is probably several percentage points of the GDP in Russia – but if you talk to old people this is not the kind of thing they will be shocked about. It’s phenomenon as old as time.
How about this–make a list of every worker benefit that was created/improved in the last hundred years:
–Higher wages
–Shorter hours
–No child labor
–Health insurance
–Pensions or 401Ks
–Unemployment insurance partially paid by employer
–Disability insurance partially paid by employer
–Social security partially paid by employer
–Medicare partially paid by employer
–Protection against discrimination by gender, race, sexual orientation etc.
(feel free to add to the list).
Now–take this list down to your local bank branch.
Walk up to the ATM machine.
Read the list–passionately, with vigor.
Now, relax.
Meditate.
Clear your mind of all thoughts.
Observe what is directly in front of your face.
The empty screen staring back at you–that is the future of the labor union movement in the age of mechanization.
In post-war epoch, American film industry/Hollywood was extremely morally puritanical, while at the same a large proportions of films does imply sex, and most films used beautiful actresses to boost their ticket sales.
An example of the puritanism, is how Ingrid Bergman in 1950 has a romantic affair to Roberto Rossellini, who was married then. As a result, she was banned from working in Hollywood, and attacked by US Senate.
Here was an increase in sexual puritanism in 20th century entertainment, compared to in 19th century.
Nobody (even in America) would even notice that an actress (or ballerina, opera singer, etc) has romance with a married man in the 19th century. Rather, people might be more surprised if actresses (ballerinas and singers) did not have romances with married men.
Moreover, Ingrid Bergman was famous and a profitable for the film industry, to a significant extent because of sexual attraction of the audience to her.
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In 1972, US Senate officially apologized to the actress.
1973 American television discusses with the actress about this controversy, with retrospective shock. So everything in the way they discuss it, is like there had been a very significant change of attitudes between 1950 and 1972. At 9:00
https://youtu.be/OIE4KGFLGQE?t=534.
Edit – She was also married at the time, so they were both married when they had the romance – and the shock of the 1950 American public was more that married woman, would betray her husband (although this is the character she was popular for depicting in the film Casablanca).
Ironically, she had betrayed her husband with multiple other romances already in the pre-war period, and sometimes she had had “several lovers at the same time”.* But in 1950, it was a scandal. By 1973, people are laughing about it on television.
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* https://people.com/archive/cover-story-the-dark-side-of-ingrid-bergman-vol-25-no-2/
I don’t know how old you were in 1991, but I was old enough to be aware of the tremendous and violent nature of the change that occurred on all levels of the Soviet society.
From 1989 to 1991 I have helped some farsovshhiki friends barter and trade with the foreigners at the since demolished hotel Rossia and the still extant hotel Metropol in Moscow. I have also done the same thing in Peterhof (Leningrad oblast) with some of my relatives.
The reason for my involvement was simple and trivial: I studied in a French language school in Moscow, which gave me a decent level of spoken and written French and was also able to speak some quite primitive English. In 1993 and 1994 I worked at Izmailovo selling stuff to tourists, then I also worked in a more upscale art gallery in Downtown Moscow. Some of my friends did the same in Piter well up to 1998.
I have seen a couple dozen prostitutes in the hotels before 1991, but I have also seen hundreds of them departing to Istanbul and Budapest from Sheremetyevo after 1992. One of my childhood friends at the time (died in prison since, one among the many people I know who died in the 90ies) said quite crudely: наши русские бабы уже наверное всех Турок пере–ли.
There really was before 1991 and after 1991, this was not a progressive change, but an abrupt shift. The society in 90ies Russia went through a paradigm shift of incredible intensity condensed in a short number of years (1991 to 1998), to all those who came of age after 2000 this change is nothing more than fuzzy childhood memories, but for me it is still vivid how crazy it was.
Outstandingly crazy, violent and insane.
China is a meritocracy. There is free speech in limited, useful spaces.
I would say that America was still quite conservative in the early 1970s. For instance, a popular family sitcom was called the Brady Bunch (started 1969). It involved a big step-family, where the husband and wife each brought three children to the new marriage. The writers wanted to make one of them previously divorced, but it was not allowed.
Of course, that was designed as a family show, so it was perhaps more resistant to the general push by Hollywood to move the culture, which began around that time – perhaps a little earlier. But I’d say middle class people were still quite conservative in the early ’70s.
I used to think Ingrid Bergman was quite pretty until I learned her history. With Casablanca, the idea was that her character had reason to believe her husband was dead. I think she generally played innocent characters, like a nun in one film, and I think there is some idea that was meant to be subversive. Some of the tales out Hollywood in that era are really quite shocking. Shirley Temple later told a disturbing one.
Americans seem to have an odd attitude towards sex, presumably another of the pernicious legacies of Puritanism. Americans are obsessed with sex but they still think it’s dirty and wrong. They seem to have trouble regarding it as a natural part of life.
The homosexual marriage thing is a good example – a desperate attempt to convince themselves that homosexuals really just want a little house with a white picket fence and a couple of kids and a dog. They want to believe that homosexual marriages are just like those perfect marriages in 1950s sitcoms. There’s an incredible resistance to the idea of admitting that male homosexuals have no interest in respectable bourgeois marriages.
Americans invented what you might call Puritan libertinism.
Americans cannot accept the idea that prostitution might be merely a career choice for some women. They have to moralise the subject.
Not by choice. The studios adopted the Production Code reluctantly under extreme pressure and they always hated it. Take a look at the “pre-code” movies of the early 30s to see the direction in which Hollywood have have preferred to go – cheerful immorality, comedies about how much fun adultery could be, nudity, rape, broad hints of sexual deviance.
It wasn’t the choice of audiences either. In the 50s Americans flocked to art-house cinemas to see European films that weren’t bound by the Production Code, hoping to get a glimpse of Brigitte Bardot’s naked bottom in movies like And God Created Woman. They’d even (God help them) sit through an Ingmar Bergman movie in the hope of seeing some bare female flesh.
The ’50s was a prime example of the contradictory attitudes towards sex common in America – the desire for sexual naughtiness whilst knowing that sex was dirty and wrong.
Burlesque was another example – it was fine to ogle women’s bodies but if the audience ever got a glimpse of a nipple the world would come to an end. And magazines like Playboy – looking at boobs and bums was good clean healthy fun but a glimpse of pubic hair was dirty and disgusting.
It’s amusing that The Brady Bunch was airing on television at the same time Deep Throat was released. That era was a fascinating mixture of extreme Puritanism and extreme libertinism. Marcia Brady and Linda Lovelace were American pop culture icons at the same moment in time.
The question was – who was going to win? Marcia Brady or Linda Lovelace? At the time it seemed the fight could go either way.
In all fairness, The Brady Bunch wasn’t really that popular during it’s initial run and barely lasted as long as it did. It really took off when it started being rerun in syndication, around four when kids were home from school, and became the iconic show it’s known as today. It also seems that the blended family aspect of the show was mentioned in the opening narration, but most of the plots were just family sitcom faire with the step-family angle not really being emphasized too much.
Of course, it’s been years since I’ve watched the show, so I could be misremembering.
I recall once seeing the ending scene of some 1950s movie in which man and his newlywed bride ride off somewhere. She says, suggestively as the camera shows a close-up of her, “it’s going to be a long, hard journey.” Were these sorts of double entendres commonplace? At any rate they were charming and reflected a nicer and more decent society.
And in 1973 people would be laughing about the puritanical nonsense (directed towards taboos involving race) that is commonplace today.
In terms of lack of censorship, 1970s to 1990s was a sort of “golden age.”
This manifestation of modern prudery is absolutely hilarious:
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2020/07/a-bird-named-for-a-confederate-general-sparks-calls-for-change/
Something much smaller has also elicited debate over its Confederate name: McCown’s longspur, a bird that lives in the Great Plains and looks a bit like a sparrow. It was named after John Porter McCown, who was involved in forcible relocations of Native Americans during the 1840s, and who left the United States Army to serve as a Confederate general during the Civil War.
By memorializing someone who fought to defend slavery, the longspur’s name, some birders and scientists say, adds further barriers to inclusion in the world of bird researchers and enthusiasts—an overwhelmingly White community where people of color have repeatedly reported feeling ignored, excluded, and even deeply unsafe.
The dustup over the longspur’s name began in 2018, when Robert Driver, a graduate student studying birds at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, submitted a proposal to the North American Classification Committee (NACC) of the AOS to change the bird’s name, citing McCown’s position in the Confederate Army. McCown, Driver wrote, “fought for the right of states to preserve slavery.” All researchers, he argued, “should be able to conduct future research on any bird without feeling excluded, uncomfortable, or shame when they hear or say the name of the bird.”
:::::::::::::::
If I were a person of color I would be offended if I or my people were accused by some patronizing progressive of being so delicate that the name of some obscure bird would make us feel ashamed, afraid, and fearful; or, that we feel inherently “unsafe” in the company of birdwatchers.
You’re right, I thought it was made for direct syndication, but I was wrong.
I’ve been looking over popular TV shows from the 1970s, and one can definitely perceive a lot of rot. But I would describe it more as push from Hollywood, rather than pull from the audience. A lot of popular shows suffer from the problem that they are on a long time, so you see the Overton Window moving.
I was born in the early 1990s, and we did not see any significant prostitutes in open visibility when I was a child – and neither today when I visit the city of my childhood (although there are sometimes giant billboard advertising open brothels as “massage parlours”, and which do not seem to offend the authorities).
I’m sure, there is a indeed significantly higher volume of prostitution today than in Soviet times, such that today it is some percentage points of the GDP – but historical roots of this have been developed for years, and were continuing in the Soviet times. Prostitution was ineliminable to revolutions and political changes.
Just as in Italy, they do not suddenly become interested into pasta and pizza, overnight. Or Japanese does not suddenly become interested to anime, but has centuries of pre-development. The roots of prostitution in Russia have been continuous for centuries. If you want to understand why prostitution is so developed in Russia, it’s because it’s been happening for a long time – sometimes more visibly, sometimes less. Sometimes larger scale; sometimes less – but always an underground part of the culture, or sometimes emerging to overground as in the wild 1990s.
People don’t turn overnight from nuns, to such mass exportable “natashas”, as they call them in Turkey. Prostitution was already developed in Soviet times, and scale and visibility is what has taken off with capitalism.
However, in America – there is a century of wild, unrestrained capitalism, not less than in the wild 1990s – and yet mainstream prostitution has been less in America, than even in Soviet times.
A surprising part of the motivation in Marx/Engels argument and criticism of capitalism, relates to prostitution and how money corrupts romantic love. Marx is especially developing from German Romanticism (there is a lot of influence of Goethe in his writing as well).
Marx in his youth was obsessed about romance, and corruption of money on romantic relations is one the main reasons he hated 19th century capitalism.
So in the famous essay “Power of Money”, he writes (more broadly here referring not just to prostitution, but all kinds of romantic relations involving money):
And then his values for communism is such utopian German romantic view
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/power.htm
In Soviet Union – such things which Marx hated like prostitution, are still continuing – and even occasionally recruited by the state (as in prostitution in Moscow under the roof of the KGB). Of course, it’s not a perfect refutation of Marx, as there was still money to exchange for love in the USSR. But I’m sure even without money, there will still be more than enough power to corrupt the Marxist conceptions of romantic love.
Freud was very fashionable in 1940s-1950s America – especially I guess among films writers who would go to some psychology lectures in the university -, so a lot of this was intentional, and sometimes as a joke.
For example, in the final scene of “North by Northwest” there is a train entering a tunnel, which is one of the most cliche dream symbols for sex. Alfred Hitchcock says this was an intentional, as a joke about people who were looking at his films for such symbolic interpretations.
I think this is because American cinema had then less possibilities for stratification into genres like “action films”, “romantic comedy”.* There were less possibilities for attracting audience with “special effects”, “car chases”, let alone CGI.
So for the highly competitive film industry to succeed in ticket sales, the Hollywood relied especially in that time on having the most beautiful actresses and actors, romance, and on the sexual attraction of the film stars to the audience.
So men and women had to go to the same films. Things like 50 Shades of Grey and Fast and Furious couldn’t exist without multi-screen cinema.
Also demand for non-beautiful actress and actors rely to some extent on men and women watching different films. So in films, where women mostly watch,* the actresses can be less beautiful than you would expect for cinema. E.g. Dakota Johnson in 50 Shades of Grey. This required multi-screen cinema, to be commercially viable. Dakota Johnson (and neither her mother) would probably not have a career in the Hollywood of Grace Kelly.
Yes, it is really amazing how it entered so easily into pop culture, like how the Washington Post used it for Watergate. Roger Ebert reviewed it.
I think it just goes to show how important good censorship is.
What do you expect?
Physically beautiful people, will likely on average be more sexually promiscuous, whether because of greater opportunities, as well as perhaps for hormonal reasons.
In addition, extroverted, exhibitionist character traits, in a population will correlate with sexually promiscuousness.
Finally, people with narcissistic personalities, will often be more charming socially, and this is attractive to the audience in the cinema, and therefore actresses with this quality will have more charisma in the film.
Personal life of actresses like Elizabeth Taylor or Ingrid Bergman is almost very predictable from how they look in the screen.
Her character betrays her husband to Bogart’s character in city of Casablanca as well though (while her husband is in a resistance meeting), although it is not shown very directly.
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By the way, though, do you ever go to the opera? Characters in these old films – even with all their love affairs – are still quite puritan compared to characters in many 19th century operas.
Have you noticed that cinema in that time, were also substituting for different art forms, and with different kinds being popular in different country.
Hollywood films in 1940s, sometimes have an atmosphere like an opera, which Americans do not have popularity for opera natively in their country.
Casablanca (which was directed and with music, and most of the actors are Jews from Vienna and Hungary – it has an atmosphere like Sachertorte), is very similar to opera.
Even the story with the police chief sexually exploiting girls, reminds me of Baron Scarpia in Puccini’s opera Tosca.
On the other hand, in Italy at the time – where there is plenty of opera – the most famous film movements in the 1950s, are like documentary style. I.e. “Italian neorealism”.
Although by 1960s Italy, with popularity of things like Spaghetti Western, they are really reverting to feeding the audience opera.
People were literally starving in 1991 – 1992. Including in the Moscow region, I don’t recall the exact numbers but a few dozen people died of hunger in Krasnogorsk and Zelinograd.
Some of my relatives ate once a day some potatoes that they salvaged from the nearby kolkhoz field after harvest and black bread, some veggies that they made grow on a communal garden’s 100 m2 plus what they could fish or gather in the forest (mushrooms, berries). And these were normal Soviet middle class educated people I am talking about, not some homeless hobos.
Nobody needs morality when there isn’t enough to eat. That’s the difference: in USSR young women turned into an Interdevochka because they wanted nice clothes, french perfume, dollars to buy stuff in a Beriozka (altough it was complicated to enter one of these without a foreign passport). They turned into a priblatnyonnaya shalava because they were from a dysfunctional family or had criminal friends or lovers. Both situations were rather uncommon. In Yeltsin’s Russia women sometimes turned to prostitution to survive and feed their families. It was hardly a choice when your kids were not eating properly or if you yourself were starving.
Add to that the tsunami of drugs and cheap alcohol (Спирт Рояль – Вкус Америки), and you get an additional reason why good girls (and boys) turned bad. First time I saw someone smoking weed from Chuya valley was in 1990 in Leningrad, first time I had a friend ravaged by heroin was 1992. He was the first to go among my friends. Among my childhoods buddies at least 4 people died of drug and alcohol abuse. Some other became handicapped for life or just good for nothing alcoholic or dope fiend losers, while they were quite normal as young kids. I remember seeing my younger brother friends getting wasted on booze at age 13, they mixed cheap alcohol with Hershey’s Cola. When you need smack or you are drunk most of the time you don’t care about selling your body. And the organized crime became so strong during the 90ies that some women were simply forced into prostitution, they have been left no choice really.
And then the explosion of STDs came, there were STDs in USSR of course, mainly because high quality preservatives were rare, the Soviet-made were horrible. But in the 90ies the societal collapse unleashed unbridled sexuality and just a kind of nihilistic attitude in the young people. That’s when AIDS became endemic in Russia.
It was a terrible time, its social consequences are only to be rivaled by the 1917 revolution and the civil war, Piter the Great reforms and the Time of Troubles and the ensuing Raskol.
It was almost a genocide really, if it would have continue like that for some 10 more years, there might today be no Russian Federation to speak of.
Make an experiment: go to any average Russian cemetery, in a normal Soviet era working neighborhood, walk for an hour and look at the dates of life and death of those who died in 1992 – 1998, you will understand better what I am writing about. And remember, those who got buried are the ones whose family had enough money to ensure a proper burial.
Not any women I know… You a feminist supporting incel?
Yep!
And then there is literature.
The first work of fiction to be printed in English was Thomas Mallory’s Morte De Arthur. It starts with murder, moves on to the rape by deceitful black magic of the murdered man’s wife and then the theft of the baby. This is followed by much perverted religion, violence, lust until an incestuously conceived son kills his father. It was very popular amongst women.
Hollywood has never had the courage to put the uncensored story onto the big screen. John Borman’s Excalibur came close. The Irish accents put me off a bit.
There was a time in Saratov, even in this century when lamposts and entrances to stairwells were all plastered with stickers advertising prostitutes. The one day in 2010, Putin reached that part of his reform list. Luzhkov, the main pimp in Moscow was sacked and orders went out to clean off the lampposts and stairwells across Russia.
Malory is a vastly inferior and basically unreadable copy of Chretien de Troyes’ brilliant work. Since Malory himself was a criminal and rapist, it’s not surprising that this is reflected in his work. Chretien de Troyes on the other hand was a monk and is capable of adding a transcendent dimension to the Arthurian literature, which otherwise tends to degenerate into a tedious list of combats.
I am sure there are many beautiful people and even actresses who are traditional.
I think the average personality factors/political compass of actors and actresses is important in the formation of Hollywood corruption, but there are additional factors, such as the scale of youthful bodies imported into the region. It commodifies beauty. Then there is the power dynamic, where they are competing against the commodity, by pimping themselves to directors and producers, etc.
I only listen to opera and seldom at that. I’ve disliked all stage theater, ever since I was a kid, and seen them make Shakespearean characters gay.
My wife’s brother recalled coming across a classmate from MGU (probably the top university in the USSR, although specialized schools such as Phystech were its equal), brilliant guy who had done research in several languages, peddling books on the street.
Elite families experienced strangely uneven shortages. My wife’s family could get unlimited black caviar from some store for Party people. But they couldn’t get meat very often, so for awhile they just ate caviar and noodles and not much else.
My first trip to Russia was in 1999 so I just caught the tail end of this degeneration. I remember even then seeing 12 year old boys smoking and drinking in a courtyard outside some apartments. I watched Putin become president on TV during New Year’s.
I knew a guy from Dnipropetrovsk who studied in Lviv in the 1990s. He said that Lviv, in contrast to his hometown, avoided that criminal ultra-nihilism. His father back home was beaten to death for about $200.
Our neighborhood was a normal Soviet Moscow rayon built in the 60ies, a walking distance from the MKAD. Although we had our lot of petty thugs, it was not as criminalized or violent as Lyubertsy. We had a few teenage gangs, some wanna be bikers (of no affiliation to the Western criminalized biker gangs), mainly a normal early 80ies Soviet environment with an average neighborhood school.
The majority of the kids in the school were from the three kindergartens that we had in the neighborhood. So we knew each other well. By my fourth grade I transferred to a French language school in downtown Moscow, but I continued to socialize with my neighborhood kids.The majority of their parents were normal Soviet people, either working class or administrative workers with some military and technical intelligentsia. Not that much alcoholics by the Soviet standards, no drugs, and of course no prostitution to be aware of.
We lived relatively well and as children we were rather happy. As teenagers we were quite excited about the opening up of the society in the 85-89 years. We played rock music, Russian and Western, procured ourselves Rock band t-shirts, patches and pins, went dancing, to the movies and camping among friends. There was the pioneer summer camps organized with different industries and a lot of kids spent their summer vacations there until they reached 16. The older teenage guys and girls often earned money in the summer by joining stroy otryad (building brigades) dispatched to different areas of USSR to help with the building of different housing and industrial buildings.
The whole situation deteriorated rapidly starting from early 1990. Years from 1991 to 1993 were the worst, especially 1993 when Yeltsin massacred the Supreme Soviet defenders, after that it started to gradually improve. Although there was the 1998 crash that hampered the recovery. By that time we have already left Russia because my parents have had enough of it and had high technical skills in their respective professional fields that were useless in Yeltsin’s Russia, but were useful in many other places, including some third world countries.
Last time I was in the old neighborhood was in 2018. Although they have been repaired, the buildings have grown more decrepit, there were no children playing outside, no young families walking with their strollers that we always saw when I was young and no babushkas sitting by the entrance to the stairwell. When the night came there was nearly no one around, only some occasional passersby in the street below our building. It was early quiet and in fact a little bit depressing. The new neighborhoods built these last years in Moscow are more lively and seem a better place, although they have less parks and mature trees.
HIV in Russia is spread by injection drugs. This is partly why it is today most endemic in industrial cities that had comparatively (relative to other cities) robust income during the 1990s.
That is, there is more HIV in cities which had better 1990s and 2000s economy, as this is where drug trafficking had focused – on hardworking cities with comparatively more robust industries and less economic collapse.
Additional thing, you need to look at, if you want to understand HIV epidemic in Russia, you have to look at the drug importation route, in particular silk road from Afghanistan. The epidemic begins in the late 90s, although it has become much larger after the economy was returned to success in the 2000s.
HIV is difficult to spread by heterosexual vaginal sex, unless in long-term relations (it usually requires multiple months to spread between couples). In Russia, typically, HIV spread by injection drugs, and then from them, to long-term heterosexual partner.
It’s not a normal situation, but a small minority of women that become prostitutes. The number and demand for prostitutes is always many times larger, than the number of prostitutes – just as with professions like hair dressers.
1 prostitute can see hundreds of customers. Note customers also require disposal income – so demand is not growing when economy is collapsing, even if there is a flood of supply – hence why they were flooding into Turkey. To have constantly growing number of prostitutes employed, you need a growing number of customers and income.
Women saying they had become a prostitute to feed your family, is also weak excuse for their intentional decisions, as almost all women does not become prostitutes, and yet most of the population needed some degree of “survival skills” in the 1990s.
Rapid rise in death rate is directly because of the alcoholism epidemic which accompanied economic collapse. If you removed the alcoholism epidemic, then this public health crisis would not have existed.
Calling it “genocide” is a cliche rhetoric, but there’s a great difference between economic collapse combined with alcoholism crisis – and genocide.
If 1930s America had also had an alcoholism crisis, the death rates would have exploded in the same way. Nobody calls 1930s America “genocide”, however, as it has not been politicized for rhetoric in the same way, and there was not a similar alcoholism disaster.
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By the way, this is the one of ways of visualization
https://i.imgur.com/k2mkeJU.jpg
Note that life-expectancy is increasing dramatically in the 1980s – when there is anti-alcohol campaign.
Lol AP what is so scary about this? That’s what I was doing 12-16 year old boy, and I was not a hooligan. What did you do with your friends when walking home from school, if not sometimes sharing a cigarette someone stole from their parents.
Apotheosis of my alcoholism was when I was around 14-15. I remember drinking fully a bottle of red wine in a minute or two, and then vomiting disgusting red stomach liquids for the next hour at that age, and knowing it was not to be repeated.
In my case, such “experiments” was a successful way to lose any desire for overly heavy drinking for the rest of life. Nowadays, I have never had interest or desire in too heavy drinking.
Okay so according to your analysis nothing really bad happened in the 90ies and Russians are just alcoholics, drug addicts and their women are natural born sluts.
As usual with your type of analysis it ends up with a “they did it to themselves ” feeling.
Лох сам себя обидел, а фраер сам на нож упал.
You feel better now?
Although why should you need to argue that лихие 90ые were a blessing in disguise?
Something in your family background maybe?
Sure, but we can predict that beautiful actresses who are “traditional” in relationships (traditionally actresses are close to prostitutes, but anyway), will be a dramatically lower proportion, than among normal people.
Actresses which combine beauty, narcissism and exhibitionism, are surely such a recipe for the personal life of Ingrid Bergman or Elizabeth Taylor – but also for the onscreen charisma.
According to Wikipedia, Ingrid Bergman wanted to be an actress since she was young child. I.e. she might have personality which is extroverted, exhibitionist, narcissitic, etc.
Note a lot of the personality traits associated with this disorder, are just the job description of glamorous film stars.
http://sites.oxy.edu/clint/evolution/articles/WhyAreNarcissistssoCharmingatFirstSight.pdf
And those identified as “narcissists” are usually believed to be – whether surveys are reliable or not – far more promiscuous than average people.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/darwins-subterranean-world/201806/the-promiscuous-narcissist
You have some unusual reading comprehension, or rather you desire to talk to yourself. Instead of answering my comment, you have made some unrelated claims which were written by your imagination.
So you are arguing something with yourself, rather than with me. It’s common here I am used to it and still don’t mind to answer your comments, even though they don’t have anything to do with what I wrote.
A strange reading comprehension, or strong imagination, to infer from the post above.
Who does what to themselves?
Women who became prostitutes, did (unless kidnapped by a gang, which is not the typical example) choose to it themselves – and don’t exaggerate about the number of women who become prostitutes. If 1% of the women have become prostitutes, this would still be vastly most prostitutes than there could have been possibly customers for.
Number of prostitutes in Russia is some hundreds of thousands at most across the 1990s, in country of 150 million in the time. Number of men use see prostitutes, is order of magnitude higher, of course. But this demand requires a disposable income, and income to support it limited by economic collapse.
Economic collapse is not choice of individual. But becoming prostitute or alcoholic – is mostly choice of individual, in my opinion. Although this moral discussion has no relation to my earlier comment, and seems to be a discussion between yourself and yourself.
When talking about whole populations, then culture and genetics can contribute to increase probability of person to become prostitute, alcoholic, etc. In alcoholism, in Russia, there is a cultural basis for alcoholism. However, it’s more in countries like Poland or England.
In Poland, there is no alcohol crisis in the 1990s. So what is different in Russia to result in the public health crisis? Part of this is the response of the authorities, part is social and ideological collapse. But the mechanism of death increase in 1990s, was through alcohol.
Who says those years are a blessing in disguise?
Look at the graph.
https://i.imgur.com/GhjdkI9.jpg
By comparison, “Lost Decade” in Japan is a utopia.
In terms of my own family, though, yes we were ok and I have positive memories.
I enjoy reading your posts which are literary. Still you write posts to someone else not myself.
Where is anything I have written about “tales of how wonderful life 1990s”? You’re arguing with imaginary third interlocutor. If you want I can forward them as emails to the Yeltsin Centre.
Economic collapse, health crisis, collapse of life expectancy, crime-wave – it’s not my utopia. But in Yeltsin Centre, they can find innumerable positive things to teach children about democracy.
I have “positive memories”, in terms of the life itself. In my early childhood, we were in an ordinary apartment and we lived in a below average, provincial neighbour city of a major city. Still – life was great then.
I have positive memories of 1990s culture, music – this is something most has for the world into which we are thrown.
Schopenhauer believes our soul has in some way chosen the time and place of our birth. So perhaps for me, the 1990s were the decade my soul has been attracted to and chosen for my birth.
Well, my Jewish-roots grandfather loves the Soviet Union. I would not talk to him about politics.
In terms of Jews’ ethnic view of 1990s. I can say only about Israel, as this is where I have my experience of Jews.
I visited Israel first only in 2010s, and by then it is already a very different (economically and culturally booming) situation in the country.
But a million Russian-speaking population of Israel went to Israel in the 1990s, and they were mostly sounding brutalized by it, and did not enjoy themselves. They went out of a fire into fire.
On the other hand, they got a lot of vitamin D and olive oil, so maybe 1990s will be good for their health in that sense.
I stayed in Bat Yam 2 years ago (my friend is living there), and did feel a bit of 1990s atmosphere – mixed with Middle Eastern brutality.
I didn’t write that it was scary, rather that it is sad and pathetic, like having prostitutes everywhere.
I wasn’t smoking and drinking at age twelve LOL. Nor did I know anyone who did those things. In America the poorest and most dysfunctional of kids (in bad trailer parks, or urban ghettos) do such things. In the USA average first cigarette is at age 15 and in Europe age 16:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/22/health/cigarette-smoking-teens-parent-curve-intl/index.html
It speaks to the degeneracy of the Russian 90s that this phenomenon (smoking and drinking at age 12) was commonplace and that regular, “non hooligan” kids, did these things.
Speaking of 90s and Buddhism, what do you think of Pelevin’s Чапаев и Пустота? I read it in English either in 1999 or 2002; it reminds me strongly of 90s Russia.
Why is it degeneracy and why only in 90s?
I think smoked first when I was about 10-11 years old. Parents are out, find parents’ cigarettes, and think it would be fun to smoke. Also any child has been interested in their parents’ cigarette lighter for years.
Of course, cigarettes are now known to be unhealthy, but they have been universally accepted part of life across the 20th century and including in the early 21st.
I think smoking and alcohol, are quite a universal part of 20th and early 21st century childhood years in every industrialized country. And I’m sure in America is not there any difference, for a large number of children..
How will you not be interested in trying cigarettes and alcohol, unless your parents are both health fanatics, that do not have cigarettes and alcohol in the home? What did you do when with your parents’ cigarettes and alcohol?
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We can look at films in America. Obviously, films are not real life – but they usually have to be perceived as referring to cultural life understood by the domestic cinema audience. And in American films about childhood, children are exactly the same with alcohol and cigarettes.
“Stand by me” (film about 12 year olds) had a large popularity with the domestic audience, so I doubt the characters’ mentality was perceived as wildly inconsistent to domestic audiences’ own childhood.
I never saw that movie and it wasn’t very popular (made less than 60 million dollars). From Wikipedia it appears to be about some young marginals from criminal background families (older brother stole a car, someone stole father’s pistol).
I can say that neither I nor any of the people I knew smoked or drank at age 12. It would not even have occurred to us to do that. Nor would it have occurred to us to steal a parent’s pistol or steal a car as was depicted in the movie you cited, though some of us had .22 rifles and were allowed to shoot cans in the woods.
Smoking and drinking at age twelve isn’t even universal among kids in ghettos (though it is not uncommon in such settings). I suspect child protective services would take kids away if they do so regularly. For you, growing up in debauched Russian 90s, it was common even among “normal” people. But not in the USA.
There’s a huge difference between age 15 and age 12. In the USA and normal countries, the average first cigarette is at age 15 and average first drink is at age 14.5. Twelve year olds smoking and drinking with their pals is for urban ghettos or out-of-the-way trailer parks. It was shocking and exotic to see this happening in Moscow by white kids who didn’t look like total lumpens.
I absolutely agree. As a father I made an effort to stop smoking before my kids grew enough to understand what I was doing. The smoking habit is really bad. Even occasionally drinking in moderate amounts (not enough to get drunk) is less damaging than smoking. I have also made sure to educate my teens against binge-drinking and towards appreciating high-end alcohol that will cost them too much and make them think twice before buying. Although frankly, it is better to not drink either.
That being said, I’ve tried my first cigarette at age 6 (no kidding) with older boys who were probably 9 – 10 years old although none of us inhaled the smoke. It was mainly to impress each other and to emulate the men in our families the majority of whom were smokers in the 70ies. Of course the parents were completely unaware of us stealing the cigarettes otherwise we would have earned ourselves a thorough and rigorous belting.
I really started smoking when I was 14 – 15 years old and only could stop at 28 after 3 long years of fighting this bad habit. Giving up drinking was easier, but I never enjoyed the feeling of being drunk although I like the taste of many alcoholic beverages. Vodka was never one of them, which always surprises the people around me given my Russian roots.
I think the current year has at least this good that kids seem to smoke less and drink less than we did at their age. Although now there is a lot of pot available and all these Red Bull drinks that are probably also damaging to the young.
I’m talking about 2000s, but it should have reduced now as people became more health conscious and smoking cigarettes rates are collapsing, alcoholism is reducing according to official statistics at least.
There isn’t much relation to smoking cigarettes, and “debauchment”, as historically countries with the highest quality of life like Sweden and Japan had extremely high levels of smoking and drinking during their economic and social golden years.
So in 1970s Sweden or Japan, there would be higher rates of smoking cigarettes than in Russia today.
Children characters in the film are portrayed as a lower middle class, in small provincial city – they have nice houses, and the main character (who is probably, partly just autobiographical representation of the author Stephen King) is planning to become a writer, and has stereotype of American middle class parents. Their badly behaved friend has father who is an alcoholic and is a bit hooligan.
It’s one of the most popular films about American childhood. In IMDB it has over 350000 users rating it, so it has a lot of popularity in America. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092005
(Even in kinpoisk it has 22000 ratings, so it’s a popular film internationally as well).
Considering the audience does not reject the scenes in the films and television, I don’t believe culture of American youth, can be so different to in other industrialized countries, that they will not smoke and drink alcohol.
This “normal youth”, was portrayed in American culture until 1980s or something, then perhaps it is more likely that your non-alcohol, non-smoking, youth is an unrepresentative sample.
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Although I notice that nowadays, (unlike in 1980s films), some American media like Saturday Night Live is stereotyping drinking/smoking children as e.g. Italian. At 4:30
Oops I mean this episode, at 4:30 . Maybe not the most inaccurate satire of Italians in SNL. (Well at least, in Italy, it’s common that parents to give wine diluted with water to their children, although not cigarettes I hope.)
At least nowadays, unlike the 20th century, there is an option to more easily substitute cigarettes for nicotine gum, or something like Juul . Nicotine without the other components of tobacco smoke, is probably not too dangerous in moderation.
Drinking small quantities of alcohol and not every day, may possibly be more healthy or as healthy, than to never drink alcohol.
At least it’s underdetermined and ambiguous enough, to be a topic that has been debated for decades – so moderate alcohol consumption is not something that will likely go too far in either direction (good or bad).
Problem would be more indirectly, though, i.e. by causing insomnia – I think a can or two of Monster can disrupt sleep more than drinking coffee.