Armin
1yr ago
Because taxes are very high, a lot of the Italian economy is a bit grey, especially SMEs and local shops and sellers, and the population is old. A lot of people doing so can evade a bit of taxes.
Armin
1yr ago
All the Germans students I met voted Greens and considered racism the greatest European crisis.
Armin
1yr ago
Dissidents under Stalin were hunted down and shot.
Here the dissidents can actually win election and make laws.
Armin
2mo ago
I watched the video you linked. Nothing, at this point, will change my idea that American Leftism is only the left-wing version of libertarianism
"Are the drug dealers and homeless bothering you? Why do you bother?" is a complete abdication of any social responsability towards the others and the fellow man.
Armin
1yr ago
The psychological mechanism is less "Orders from above" and more "I am an enlightened journalist who is above the deplorable working class who votes right wing and likes cash", I guess.
Armin
4mo ago
As in the past, I still not believe that it will exist any anti-refugee movement started and staffed by women, also on the basis of intrasexual competition. There was none when the rape indexes went up in European countries that received immigrants, and as a consequence I believe that, if there will be any sort of "sexual tension" in the future, there will be no reaction from women at all.
Armin
1yr ago
The German Deep State is non existent, and if it exist, it is pro-american
Germany is more of a giant factory firm who needs to sell cars than a nation. In front of challenges their èlites will back down.
Armin
1yr ago
He did nothing, from what we know until know. The problem is purely political, because the deputy that was elected as a symbol of the fight against oppression of immigrants in the fields and against the right-wing rhetoric of NGO that steal public money in the name of inclusion and integration actually has a wife who is chief of an NGO that stole money for this reason and who imported immigrants to work in the fields.
Armin
1yr ago
Notice that, if rape is about power and not sex, the rhetoric can push on the notion of deconstruction of the hierarchy, and not on concepts like self-control like religions of old (that are bad because they are hierarchical).
Rape is about power, not sex = another instance of academics trying to do their distruption of eternal fascism.
Armin
1yr ago
Just saw it, and I was covering my head in embarassment.
The worst thing is that every "normie" aound me is acclaiming this episode as "the best"
Unreal, am I living in a different world?
Armin
1yr ago
My judgement of "radical leftists position" is not made by my personal thought about it. I am talking about the leftist spectrum represented in Western Parliaments, where you have a more leftist and a more centrist wing inside the left-wing coalition.
The centrist part of the coalition can be unsure or unwilling of adopting the issues of the most leftwing policies (because they are not popular!), but they will do in 3 years!
I will make a concrete example to explain myself, in the Italian Parliament.
DDL Zan, a law presented by left-wing elements of the left-wing coalition, is about hardening sentences against aggressions against LGBT people, and inserting the notion of gender identity inside the Italian Corpus of Law.
When it was proposed, almost three years ago, there was an uproar inside the left coalition, because it is composed also by Left Catholics, Radical Feminists and more Blairite-like people, all of them wary of DDL Zan for different reasons.
After some years, DDL Zan appeared again in the Parliament (Same legislature, so exactly the same people as parlamentarians!), but this time was supported not only by the entire Left coalition, but also by the centrists and liberal parties. The law did not pass only because all the right wing went against it.
Withouth any change of popular support or coming from the change of the actual politicians, a fringe policy was completely adopted by the entire left-wing spectrum without problems.
Noteworthy, and useless, to say that now the same people that created Zan are beginning to create now proposal that goes hard towards transgender education and representation. They will propose them, be rejected, and propose them again in two years only to be completely accepted.
Armin
1yr ago
Yup, my thesis on cancel culture is the following:
It was less aboyu converting people to the new cause, and more about having the justification to purge people from academia and cultural production factories, and putting new barrier at the entrance.
Armin
1yr ago
When in real life or in social, talking about this death, I say to people that the greatest risk is the permanent loss of British cultural independence, and the loss of their social-political-cultural rally point, they see me as a crazy
Incredible how the basic function of how institutions works has been completely lost in the liberal age
Armin
3mo ago
The surge of normie family women and Moral Foundation Theory
A lot has been written on how marriage and long term relationships, at least in the Anglo-saxon contest, move women right from the left. While I think this assessment is generally correct, anecdotic evidence that I gathered around tell me that is not exactly right.
Context: Every month I begin to see some of my female friends and acquaintances, generally middle-upper class women, getting married and having children (age=27 - 32). After the birth their social profiles become typical of a mother with a child; continuous social media posts of their children, mom's initiatives, kindergardens, lovely picture with their newly wed husbands etc But it was very curious to see that this sudden change of social media posting have not changed their past habit of "left-wing posting" about Palestine, gay marriage, feminism etc. Instead, it accelerated a lot.
Sometimes ago, someone here was talking about Moral Foundation Theory and how left and right (and men and women) are different from each other, and how mainstream marriage culture follows more the conservative moral framework than the leftists framework.
But I would like to add that, in my opinion, we are seeing a shift of moral mainstream and normie society going from following the Authority/Sanctity/Loyalty to the Care/Fairness framework. If this happen, the consequence is that people following the rightists moral framework will never find refuge in mainstream family-making society, because this society is becoming morally Leftists. I do not think that we have ever seen, in the history of humanity, a shift like this.
Armin
1yr ago
I am curious, because I saw it written many times here, but had no chance to investigate more.
What happened to the Alt-Right movement, and what makes it very different from the dissident right of now?
Armin
1yr ago
The main focus of the New Left is the analysis of hierarchies, power and how different groups and concepts and words interact with each other in the creation of hierarchical organization, born from the desire of finding, analyzing and deconstructing every structure that can remotely generate fascism again.
While sex is a biological function, and so is extremely difficult to dismantle without sounding as a crazy ideologue, power was the perfect word to use.
If rape = power we switch the focus from "maybe males biologically leans to lust, sex and degeneration, and that is life" to "Patriarchy and male dominancy derive only from the fact that exist a hierarchy of male power that provokes rapes, oppression or discrimination"
If it is the second case, this hierarchy can actually be deconstructed through education, word-renaming and all the usual instruments, causing another crack in the Hierarchy.
Armin
6mo ago
Braverman out for having said that the police is way harder on right-wing groups than on pro-palestinians David Cameron in as a Foreign Minister
I really would like to understand how leftists can think that the tories are a right-wing party. I think it is clear which direction they are taking. The point is, do they have any strategy or it is a reflection of what the upper-cadrè of the tories think?
Armin
6mo ago
How do I find non-fiction books free of excessive progressive influence?
I am pretty wary of the progressive entrenchment of anglosaxon academia and book publishing. At the same time, I love to read new books who goes out about particular topics I care about.
I am Italian, so I have access to the massive Italian catalogue of non-fiction, but how can I filter anglosaxon books without extensive research on every author?
At the same time another question; usually, how do you search for new books? Especially, do you use any app/software to do so?
Armin
1yr ago
More than the macho nationalism, which was very present also in the past, is the Libertarianism that probably makes the women flee.
There is nothing more repelling imho of the freedom-loving men who claim to be the only ones free in our society. Women cares about community, the problem is that the global/left communities appear more stable and welcoming and normal that the libertarian community.
Armin
7mo ago
A bit unrelated, but this give credence to the Fisted By Foucault theory on how Anglo-Saxon Academia is still an anti-systemic force. The Biden administration was quick to condemn and give support in any case. The Marcusian strategy "no enemy to the left" still holds strong, but at this point not many people are going to support the most extreme left-wing cause.
Btw, probably the most important point for the right that came from all of this is the fact that "decolonization", as all Marxian jargon like Anti-Imperialism, is only an academic term to justify whetever happens to the enemy.
Armin
1yr ago
Maybe it is because I am European and I come from a different political culture, but a lot of these actions make no sense to me.
It is NPR public and at the same time insanely left wing? It is simple, you are the government! You decide who staff the NPR and PBS and whatever! Are the journalists there unsatisfacted? They will leave or bow. Is the problem classical music or traditional western music or whatever? Fund another national public broadcast who will do these things!
I understand the libertarian political culture, but leaving these things at the force of the market will help only the left, not the right.
Armin
2mo ago
I does not understand why cutting of public funding should fix the radical left problem in universities. In my country the wokest universities are the private funded ones where rich people go, the same with private media etc.
Armin
3mo ago
Everytime I read about Sub-saharian, especially West African, militaries and governments and alliances, I always think: Do they exist?
Wikipedia tells me that the Nigerine Armed Forces decided to expand from 25.000 to 100.000 men in the next five years. Is this real? Is this gonna happen? The Nigerine Armed Forces exists at all or it is something written on paper as a good chunk of the Afghan Army was?
This Alliance of the Sahel exists? Or it is made only by a bunch of rich tribal leader and "soldiers" surrounded by thugs and Wagner mercenaries, who decided in a single meeting on what to do?
Armin
1yr ago
How many men do you know that would answer differently? I realise this is one of your weaker assertions regarding gender differences (with the stronger one being "It is not possible for them that something contemporary can be worse than something present in the past"), but to my eyes answering earnestly with anything other than "now" is a mark of edginess: you must either be so dramatic that you refuse to let yourself consider the less-glamorous parts of your value function, or so psychologically deviant from the grillpilled median that you genuinely would trade off arguable spiritual benefits of past societies for all our material advances in technology, medicine, peace et cetera. Ironically, the only people over the age of 18 I know irl who would answer differently from "now" are women in my family: my mother who would return to the Soviet Union per the "dramatic" exception, and her mother who would choose some point in time before 1900 for being a religious extremist.
Notice that these discussions were not serious intellectual inquiries about the past, they were more of light topics when you shot out random questions. And men almost always answered with any epoch that you can think of. Obviously anyone put always first the "but the medicine", but that was logical and assured from the beginning, I still have not met someone that likes to die because of the lacks of antibiotics.
If you have come to be known as the "actually arguing to retvrn to the past" guy in your social circles, consider that your arguments about more detailed pros and cons of past societies might no longer actually be received on their own merits either. People might not be willing to entertain an "isn't it curious how quickly they could build a bridge or train station in the late 1800s compared to now?" in the spirit of intellectual inquiry if the expectation is that it will be used as ammo for "...and therefore we should restore the hereditary monarchy", and if you are a woman in $current_year, pointing out that the hereditary monarchy entailed wrongs against your gender that are nowadays treated as blasphemous is as convenient a way to shut down the discussion as any. In other words, your problem may not actually be that women are politically qualitatively different, but rather that you haven't found a social circle that agrees with your politics, and it is merely a downstream annoyance that women have a particularly quick and easy way to weaponise the disagreement.
This is a weird assumption from your side: I am not the "retvrn guy" neither in my circles nor personally speaking, and my social circle is radically diverse in terms of ideologies and nationalities. And again, it happens also when I met people that do not know me well or very well.
I was reflecting on how western politicians today use terms and words that have double meaning with the media and the electorate, with one meaning the one that people usually understand, while the other is academia-made and is often a true example of Motte-and-Bailey.
For example, terms like minority;
Minority for the common man (and the electorate!) means a group that is inferior in numbers in comparison to a majority. So, if you survey with a poll the opinion of the people, it appears that the majority (!) is in favour of helping minorities (because it is the right thing to do!).
Meanwhile, the de facto academic term for minority is "a group that is ontologically oppressed, and so it needs social justice in order to destroy the oppressive hierarchy of the majority"
This has as a consequence;
That politicians and their class of activists have the second definition in their minds, and do policies that follow it.
Meanwhile you (an individual in a debate, a party, a media organization) cannot dispute the effect and the reasoning of the former set of policies because, if you do, everyone and your mom assume that you are against the minorities as affirmed by the common sense definition, and so you are a political extremist!
This manipulation of language at a core level create a situation where extremists do policies that are extreme and unpopular while being elevated as sympathetic moderates, and the moderates that try to oppose them for whatever reasons are labeled as political extremists.
I have no idea if this kind of method to do politics was common in the pre- internet or pre-neoliberal era or whatever, but it creates an insurmountable situation where, unless the people "begin to notice", it is impossible to oppose the manipulators, starting from the point that the manipulators have probably the majority of media and capital behind them.
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