Eetan
7mo ago
"Guess which people are more conformist and which are more bold and daring?"
Descendants of serfs who were subjugated to their lords for millenia with little protest, or descendants of peasants who were continuously revolting for all recorded history? Hard guess.
Eetan
7mo ago
No, this is a code for: "we want traditional European urbanism without traditional European rule of law"
Eetan
7mo ago
In particular, I used to have the naive anti-conspiracy view that it's almost impossible to keep an important one going due to a single defection blowing everything up, even if smaller and/or more specific ones may happen.
As spook world "standard candle" we can always use one well proven evil conspiracy, the infamous MKULTRA (and adjacent projects).
For 20+ years, in peace time, thousands, possibly tens of thousands of professionals engaged in Nazi/Imperial Japan style extremely unethical human experimentation. And it was all successfully kept secret (until handful of files who escaped destruction were discovered by accident).
All commonly proposed mechanisms to uncover and stop such nefarious activity failed.
No one talked (or if someone talked, no one listened to him)
No investigative journalists uncovered this scandal.
No elected representative of the people did anything.
No conspiracy theorist found what is going on, when MKULTRA was revving up, tinfoil hat crowd debated whether Eisenhower is willing Communist agent or naive Communist dupe.
One exception was this book from 1967, describes mind conditioning methods similar used by MKULTRA
If course, in the book the perpetrators are nasty South American Nahzees who want to manipulate stock market and get rich, not American patriots bravely fighting communism (and the book was, anyway, just drop that vanished in ocean of conspiracy/parapolitic writing at the time).
Eetan
7mo ago
Yes, it is all contextual. "Charismatic" colonels are few, most officers are cogs in the machine (just like most CEO's). Analogically, you can say that popular and well connected investigative reporter is rather powerful, but how many of these are in NYT of today?
Eetan
7mo ago
Rome succeded in Romanizing the people it ruled beyond the wildest expectation, Gauls and Hispanics speak Latin to this very day. Goths, Vandals, Saxons etc were never ruled by Rome.
Eetan
7mo ago
In related news, coronavirus research in Wuhan lab goes on.
No need to be worried, plebes. Trust USG, trust CCP, trust the experts.
Eetan
7mo ago
Why are NTY journalists who are literally on less than subsistence pay higher on the totem pole than your average chemical industry executive? Power. They can ruin that executive and make him kill himself if they round up enough of their colleagues. You can't buy that. Billionaires have tried and failed.
This is like saying that cop is more powerful than CEO, because cop can arrest the CEO not the other way around.
NYT can indeed "ruin" even otherwise rich and powerful people, but the decision to "ruin" someone is not made in any democratic way (by "rounding up" friends) and is made far above any "subsistence pay" regular journalist.
Eetan
7mo ago
In this clip, Sam basically fails to articulate a single moral principle beyond "Well, that's just what our society had decided is right and wrong" and when dude says society can change it's mind over time, Sam's only meek response is "Please don't".
Pitiable performance indeed, and the fact that we still have such debates is even more pitiable.
Morality based on divine command is, historically, extremely late development (and it is debatable how effective it was). 2000+ years ago, if someone asked: "Why shouldn't I rob, rape and kill my fellow citizens of my city?" the answer was not "Zeus forbids it" or "After you die, Zeus will torture you forever in Tartarus".
The answer was, TL;DR: "Because good person does not do such things, and you want to be heckin' good person" and "If you are caught, you will be crucified/impaled/skinned alive/fed to wild beasts".
Eetan
7mo ago
I interpret the question as deliberate shitposting and trolling in bad faith to rev up outrage and gain more clicks, as does nearly everyone replying to it.
Just like whole "New Hampshire Libertarian Party".
Eetan
7mo ago
Looked up the first person, Jeremy Kaufmann. More recent xeets:
Today I will be doing my duty to help save the word libertarian
Regardless what you think about Ukraine war, this perfect representation of Greedy American stereotype is not the best way to win hearts and minds for cause of libertarianism.
Most generous thing to say is that Mr. Kaufmann should concentrate on New Hampshire gasoline tax and leave world politics to others.
Eetan
7mo ago
In practice, nuclear weapons have some tactical uses,
In practice, no one knows.
On both sides of iron curtain, thousands of books were written about tactics and strategy of nuclear warfare, but it is all, so far, only theory. It would not be surprising if real WWIII proves all of it as useful as was pre-1914 military science shown useful in WWI.
Eetan
7mo ago
Jewish orgs are already drafting lists of specific students they want to see deported
Exactly the kind of Jewish orgs you would expect.
Eetan
7mo ago
If The Donald wrecks the economy enough to ensure blue landslide, then nothing of this would matter.
Eetan
7mo ago
From Red perspective, this makes sense. Not many foreigners or green card holders are involved in Red protests and activities, even if the Blues gained the upper hand again and wanted to use this precedent.
Eetan
7mo ago
Why is LGBTQ so important for liberals in terms of foreign policy?
Good question.
To steelman it in proper hardcore IR realist style, it is about (Blue)American Empire acquiring permanent class of supporters, collaborators and fifth columnists world wide.
What were German minorities for Third Reich, what were Communist sympathizers for Soviet Union, LGBTQ+ are for Global Rule Based Order. And unlike these, they are permanent presence. You can get rid of ethnic minority, you can get rid even of ideological/religious minority if you are willing to get dirty, but LGBTQ+ are born every day. Even most hard core regimes would balk at gulaging/executing 5% of population in every generation, for forever.
Yes, this sucks if you are LGBTQ+ (or suspected to be one) in unfriendly territory, but it rocks if you are GAE.
Eetan
7mo ago
My experience has been that normie conservatives basically all hold that Hitler and Stalin were equally or near-equally bad, and that fascism and communism are equally bad.
Yes, normie cons always held this view, and now normie libs hold it too (even more so due to current events in Eastern Europe).
On the left people will absolutely argue that communism is good
"left" as online people with hammer and sickle (and often rainbow, trans and Palestine flags), not as anyone remotely close to respectability.
occasionally you get someone who will argue that Stalin, while very bad, wasn't as bad as Hitler
Yes, this is the other mainstream respectable academic view. The 50's are over, you will not any more find Stalin's admirers in the academia and respectable professions(excepting Grover Furr)
Including professed Marxists like Zizek, here is his take on difference between Stalinism and Nazism
(most people would see killer who forces you to bow before him and lick his boots before he kills you as not lesser evil than ordinary killer who just does the deed withou any ceremony, but YMMV)
Eetan
7mo ago
Yes. Great power should be able to easily overrun small shithole country in three day special operation (and then get bored by decades of guerilla warfare and go home).
The implications of late Eastern European events are:
Either Russia is shithole country too or Ukraine is Great Power too.
Eetan
7mo ago
Those who could fled the country
"Laptop class" from big cities with passports and money, and large numbers of them since then returned, when they were less than welcomed in the West and their cash ran out. Thank NAFO types, well done.
Eetan
7mo ago
Mainstream? As in, I'll turn on CNN and see it?
When respected university press publishes book by Germar Rudolf, respected reviewers call it "stunning work" "scholarship of the highest calibre" "book that enduringly changes what we see" and the book is awarded many prestigious prizes, you could say that Holocaust revisionism had gone mainstream.
Eetan
7mo ago
There are extremely few Joe Sixpacks in the US, even among the otherwise immigration skeptical, who don't think that Middle Eastern Christians should be allowed to move here
This thread originated with claim that "Christians are the most persecuted group in the world", not only Middle East.
Would be Joe Sixpack happy with new Latino, African, Indian and Chinese Christian neighbors? According to web page cited elsewhere in this thread, number of persecuted Christians in the world is about 380 million (and it will vastly increase when it becomes known that being persecuted Christian is a guaranteed ticket to the land of freedom).
weed out Muslims pretending to be Christian for nefarious purposes.
Nothing "nefarious" in trying to escape dirt poor and war ravaged place, and how would you indeed find out, of millions of asylum claimants, whose faith in Christ is genuine? Bible knowledge tests? Polygraph examinations? Brain scans?
Eetan
7mo ago
No one even slightly mainstream questions that America in WW2 was good guy.
If "WW2 revisionism" means the idea that the major combatants, Nazis and Soviet, were just about equally bad (Nazis 100% and Soviets 99,9% evil), it is not universal point of view, but, by now, common one that can be published in mainstream academic press.
The implications are now just starting to percolate into mainstream debate, and the question "Was it right choice for High Elves to join fight between Orcs and Ogres, and if so, on whose side? is now open.
Eetan
7mo ago
I had no idea who Ian Carroll was
Someone with 1,2 M Xitter followers is not exactly nobody.
Here is his Xitter and his Youtube channel
Eetan
7mo ago
This is one of the drawbacks of a purely spiritual religion that isn’t concerned with genetic ties.
This is drawback of being world religion with billions of adherents. If you really tried to "defend" every persecuted Christian everywhere, you would find yourself in perpetual Iraq style quagmires all over the world (which would be rather suboptimal situation even for world's first super power).
Eetan
7mo ago
how evacuating Crimea results in Russia collapsing.
Losing Crimea implies total destruction of Russian army as organized force, and this definitely means, if not Russia collapsing, Putin's system collapsing, with unpleasant results for Putin (and his friends who fail to swith sides early enough).
What, in this scenario, comes after Putin is debatable.
Even stronger case could be made that no matter how weak is traditional European feudal system, it is excellent in suppressing peasant rebellions. There is no case in recorded European history of peasant revolt even slightly endangering TPTP (unlike China).
See the ease how even the most extensive revolts were put down. And they were, by Chinese standards, not very revolting at all.
edit: links linked properly
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