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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30063 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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An appeal to the dissident right from the Russian opposition about the arrest of Pavel Durov

Just like what’s happening in France today. In 2017, Putin accused Telegram of helping terrorists and pedophiles and tried to pressure Pavel Durov to provide the FSB with keys to decrypt private messages.

But after months of struggle and rallying, we managed to defend Telegram. It still operates in Russia today, virtually free of censorship. Although it’s in an increasingly precarious position.

Since then, Putin opened a criminal investigation against me, and my entire team was forced into political exile. We won the battle but lost the war.

Because back in 2017, we were naive and thought it was a uniquely Russian problem. We actually thought Putin was a backwater dictator preventing Russia from joining the family of free nations. Unfortunately, we couldn’t have been more wrong.

As it turned out, Putin was the trailblazer. He set the example for the rest of the Western political class with his censorship, destruction of privacy, and surveillance. It turned out, the West was simply trailing behind.

I’m now in exile in Latin America, witnessing the same silencing of people unfolding under Lula’s rule in Brazil. Reading about people getting arrested for tweets in the UK, and watching Pavel Durov get arrested in France. Something even Putin didn’t dare to do at the time.

These are not isolated issues. The political class is waging a global war against the people. It’s not just Pavel who came under attack in France last night; it’s our privacy and freedom of speech.

... I implore the global right to apply their resources to support Pavel Durov. We have what it takes to save Telegram and finally start winning.

The founder of Telegram was arrested in France and faces 20 years in prison. The charges ostensibly surround the use of Telegram for criminal activity, but the Guardian notes:

The app was also used widely by far-right agitators plotting anti-immigration rallies in England and Northern Ireland in the wake of the stabbing of three children at a Southport dance class last month.

The anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate concluded that Telegram had become the “app of choice” for racists and violent extremists and “a cesspit of antisemitic content” with minimal moderation or effort from the app to curb extremist content.

At the height of Twitter censorship, probably 95% of the Dissident Right was banned from Twitter and all went to Telegram. The only contingent of the DR left on Twitter were the Bronze Age Pervert-types who extoled "The West" and race realism but otherwise promoted a philosemitic undercurrent among the right-wing. This all changed with Musk's acquisition of Twitter/X and now nearly all of the banned are back on that platform.

Yesterday Elon Musk also gave exposure to the Telegram founder's claim that the FBI tried to recruit one of his engineers to introduce vulnerabilities into the application through open-source dependencies.

It's hard to overstate the fragility of "freedom of speech", although admittedly I mostly care about expression and information-sharing related to the topics that I consider true and important. And those are the political topics which are only actually threatened at this point. The political persecution of Durov not only threatens Telegram, basically what became the last "internet Ghetto" of the Dissident Right, but it puts pressure on all platforms to conform to EU censorship standards, which are becoming more stringent year after year. TikTok is likewise being banned for not sufficiently curtailing speech according to the interests of the Jewish lobby.

You have the EU censorship regime, the international NGO apparatus like ADL and Hope not Hate which put enormous political and financial pressure on platforms and governments to censor this speech. The current state of Internet discourse is also proof positive of Elite Theory. Only someone like Elon Musk could do what he did with X and (for now) get away with it. Musk himself has related growing scrutiny and lawsuits by the federal bureaucracy against his businesses as retaliation for his "free speech" policy in governing X, and I think he's almost certainly correct.

It really is, at this point, one man standing against the impending total-internet censorship of the Dissident Right. People were making fun of Musk for overpaying for X, but it's an important lesson, a lesson already known by many, that you can't put a price on memetic control over the collective consciousness.

Because back in 2017, we were naive and thought it was a uniquely Russian problem.

Oh my god... I can forgive boomer Westerners believing this sort of stuff, but if Russians buy it then we truly are lost.

The political persecution of Durov not only threatens Telegram, basically what became the last "internet Ghetto" of the Dissident Right, but it puts pressure on all platforms to conform to EU censorship standards

To a large extent this is self-inflicted. The writing was on the wall for a pretty long time now, and technologically nothing stands in the way of making an uncensorable service, but all these alt-tech CEOs keep making the same single-point-of-failure architectures. I suppose the issue is you can forget about making money from the uncensorable variant, but then again, I don't understand how Telegram is making any money to begin with.

It really is, at this point, one man standing against the impending total-internet censorship of the Dissident Right

The thought did occur to me that Elon's takeover is just bait to get dissidents to come out of hiding, so they can give the final blow when convenient, but I'm hoping that by now people are smart enough to not put all their eggs in one basket.

The writing was on the wall for a pretty long time now, and technologically nothing stands in the way of making an uncensorable service, but all these alt-tech CEOs keep making the same single-point-of-failure architectures

An "uncensorable service" where the only users there are like-minded people is not what the DR wants, certainly not what it needs. It needs to be present in the public square. That's why Musk's turnabout of Twitter censorship is so monumentally important. You have DR perspectives getting huge engagement with mainstream audiences. You have anti-Semitic posters publicly ratio'ing the ADL's annual memorial-post to the murdering pedophile Leo Frank. That is the stuff which is actually dangerous. All the DR being herded into some uncensorable service which gets no engagement or audience from the mainstream is worthless.

That is the stuff which is actually dangerous.

Do you not consider the clearly obvious possibility that following generations are indeed ever more antisemitic but also ever more brown and black, third-world ist, leftist/ ‘de-colonial’ and otherwise ‘anti white’ (by your standards)?

We probably agree on the existence of this relationship, but disagree on the cause.

Why does an ever more brown and black, third-world ist, leftist/'de-colonial' and otherwise 'anti white' Culture drive large audiences of white people towards anti-semitism? Is it a psychopathology, or is there a rational reason that these things are connected?

Obviously browns and blacks have more of a tendency to be a receptive audience, but that's not the cause of the relationship between those things. The cause is white people pattern-matching these cultural phenomena to the systems of power that have consciously brought them about and suppress opposition to them.

drive large audiences of white people towards anti-semitism?

I thought it was the memetic capacity of the dissident right driving people towards it, which is why you’re so keen on protecting access to big public platforms like Twitter?

Having more Muslims as members of a formerly entirely or near-entirely white community is naturally going to drive more white people towards antisemitism for the same reason that it will likely transmit to them other cultural values from that population too.

I thought it was the memetic capacity of the dissident right driving people towards it, which is why you’re so keen on protecting access to big public platforms like Twitter?

Where's the contradiction? Critically-minded white people who are confronted with the obvious hostility towards them by prevailing systems of power, the systems which have brought all the cultural trends you have mentioned, have a tendency to find the dissident right critique of that Culture to be persuasive. Nobody is more conscientious of the memetic capacity of that Critique than Jews themselves, which is why they are desperate to make sure it isn't platformed anywhere. What's the source of the memetic power? Mass psychosis, or force of truth?

Having more Muslims as members of a formerly entirely or near-entirely white community is naturally going to drive more white people towards antisemitism for the same reason that it will likely transmit to them other cultural values from that population too.

That's laughable, as if Europeans needed to cohabitate with Muslims to rediscover thousands-year-old criticisms of Jewish behavior by European intellectual tradition. The uncomfortable fact is that the influence goes in the reverse. There's no white DR person who was influenced to become anti-Semitic by transmission of Muslim cultural values. But the reverse is happening. You have black and brown figures with large audiences- Myron Gaines, Candace Owens, Sneako, the Tate family, who are all being influenced by traditional European antisemitism transmitted by DR figures like Nick Fuentes.

person who was influenced to become anti-Semitic by transmission of Muslim cultural values.

You don’t think any white people have been persuaded to the anti-semitic cause (and as an ethnonationalist who believes supporting diversity in western countries is anti-white I presume you accept wholly that anti-Zionism is antisemitism) by sympathy for Muslim Palestinian activism and its relationship with the left?

You don’t think any white people have been persuaded to the anti-semitic cause (and as an ethnonationalist who believes supporting diversity in western countries is anti-white I presume you accept wholly that anti-Zionism is antisemitism) by sympathy for Muslim Palestinian activism and its relationship with the left?

The story of left-wing antisemitism has nothing to do with transmission of Muslim cultural values to progressives. It's the classic story of the golem turning against its master. All of the "values" being appealed to by progressives to oppose Israel were foremost pushed by Jewish intellectuals and cultural influencers in order to oppose latent fascist tendencies embedded in white ethnocentrism- i.e. "The Authoritarian Personality". The fact this cultural Kritik is now being turned against the state of Israel has nothing to do with the transmission of Muslim cultural values, and has everything to do with Jews being increasingly unable to get away with the most vomit-inducing hypocrisy known to mankind, in which they incessantly give moral lectures to white gentiles about racism while creating the most violent ethno-supremacist cult in the Western world.

An "uncensorable service" where the only users there are like-minded people is not what the DR wants

Then why so much drama over Telegram? All the normies and right-thinking people use Whatsapp.

Then why so much drama over Telegram?

The entire DR was forced there by Twitter censorship, but absolutely nobody considered it desirable. Obviously, any platform used by the DR would be a target. TikTok, X, Rumble, Telegram are all facing enormous pressure. With TikTok being another example to disprove the naive notion that this is about illegal content. The bipartisan consensus to ban TikTok was brought about by the Jewish lobby demanding censorship of anti-Zionist speech. It wasn't about illegal content.

The entire DR was forced there by Twitter censorship, but absolutely nobody considered it desirable.

Alright, but you would agree that it got you through until Elon got ahold of Twitter? If so, all I'm saying is that it would be better if such places weren't designed with obvious flaws.

The bipartisan consensus to ban TikTok was brought about by the Jewish lobby demanding censorship of anti-Zionist speech. It wasn't about illegal content.

Personally, I'd be happy to see TikTok go away in Europe as well, but I'm under no illusion any of this is about illegal content.

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