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An appeal to the dissident right from the Russian opposition about the arrest of Pavel Durov
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:
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.
Oh my god... I can forgive boomer Westerners believing this sort of stuff, but if Russians buy it then we truly are lost.
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.
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.
Eh, the lack of success of dissident Russian liberals in their own country suggests that that ordinary Russians don't buy them. That said, one of my dear Russian-American (The mix of vestigial Russian accent plus taught in law school Southern accent is hilarious.) friends who I have an incredible amount of respect for (He's both genuinely smarter than me and vastly more driven.) used to be an uncritically turbo-America neocon who mocked me for my cynicism (I was an unironic Paultard in those days. Ah, high school.) and now is a pro-Trumper so disillusioned (and ruined in his Slavic friend group over the Z question, being unable to hide his great Russian chauvinism) that he moved to China.
I'd spend a lot of money for the privilege of a night talking with Artem in a bar (tough shit for me; he doesn't drink).
The lack of success by the Russian liberals should be attributed to the general depoliticization in the Russian society. It’s not that the Russians just don’t care about politics, the apathy comes from being disconnected with their country and the world in general. Why watch the news if you can’t tell what the truth is? “What’s truth anyway?” is a common way to think. If there’s no way of telling there truth from lies, there’s no meaningful way to act.
This mental state is not only dominant, but also deliberately cultivated in Russia by its government.
People say this all the time like it's some uniquely russian thing. If western media told me the sky was blue, I'd go out and check, just in case it had just turned into world-ending-evangelion-blood-red. Our institutions are hell bent on gaslighting us on even basic facts of life (re-birthing-persons). The media spent 4 years confabulation absolute bullshit about the sitting president, then they spent another 4 years pretending the fossil-in-chief still has all his marbles in order.
At this point I wouldn't even take arms against an invading Russian army, at least the russians wouldn't want to shove rainbow nonsense down my throat.
I'm not entirely sure what your comment is meant to highlight.
The comment I responded to says that Russian liberals failed because Russian people "don't buy it".
I said that Russians don't follow/believe liberals because they are depoliticized to a point where the majority of people don't believe any politician at all, not just liberal politicians.
The depoliticization aspect is unique to Russia. American society is deeply political. Both states are cultivated by propaganda.
What I'm saying is this is coming for us too. People will give up voting, what's the point when the deep state will just install whoever they please. The real question is if people are going to try and stage a boogaloo or just get high and give up.
I'd venture to say that it's a simplistic lens to view the current election, considering the history of Russia. The process of depoliticization has its roots in Stalin's purges, the threat of Gulags silencing any political dissent, the culture of snitching and secrecy. Russian people retreated from the sphere of politics into their own lives because their lives depended on it. The parallels do not seem convincing to me, and I'm not sure if there are any.
Oh no, the parallels are absolutely there. There is a reason you keep your mouth shut if you have right-leaning ideas in hollywood and in big-tech.
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