domain:kvetch.substack.com
Jiro
6m ago
A. Woke implies an agenda of defending the oppressed, mass murdering tyrant also implies an agenda of defending the oppressed. In this case, there is very little to link wokes to tyrants -- if we observe that Nazis frequently wear uniforms, and postmen frequently wear uniforms that tells us very little if there is any unexpected overlap between Nazis and postmen
To be fair, "defending the oppressed" inspires and excuses actions. Uniforms do not.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
29m ago
It's not like there isn't room to criticize past societies, but I don't get the whole equality angle. Even feminists don't want equality.
Jiro
just now
With regard to the so-called ethnic campaigns I think it's necessary to point out that the ethnic minorities who were targeted (in a loose sense) in the purges all had ethnic homelands of their own which bordered the USSR and were either hostile states, former wartime adversaries like Poland or Finland, or colonized by a hostile state, such as Korea under Japanese rule.
It's very hard, without large scale immigration (either of you versus the equivalent of the native Americans, or of the minorities), to be in a situation where your country's ethnic minorities are not one of those.
Also, by this standard, the internment of Japanese-Americans in the US wouldn't count as anti-ethnic because the US was at war with Japan.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5m ago
None of what you've written here makes a particularly insightful point except to suggest "Here are things I believe are crazy, how about it?" And the not-veiled implication that only idiots would disagree with you--which hardly invites discussion. There are a great number of older threads worth reading on this site without shit-stirring for the sake of it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
25m ago
How about King Charles's mildly satanic painting?
I don't know why you'd make yourself look like you're bathed in blood or wreathed in unholy flame. Rand Al Thor can pull it off but he is the Dragon Reborn, greatest hero of two ages. When King Charles takes a cursed sa'angreal sword from an ancient fortress and faces down the forces of darkness, then he can appropriate fantasy hero aesthetics for official portraits.
I've argued in the past that there is a certain malign or subversive element in some elite art, consider people like Cleon Peterson or the Pope's rather unusual looking sculpture. Apparently that has all this special Christian symbolism - I would've thought that a cross would be more appropriate but what do I know?
There's also this (somewhat nsfw?) painting of a child getting throatfucked which somebody vandalized, much to the displeasure of Macron: https://x.com/Censor__This/status/1658938149844791300/photo/1
I could add in the CIA plot to spread abstract and modern art, though it's only relevant in the broader sense that art is political and related to politics. I don't have much of a thesis aside from 'a lot of modern art is quite disturbing and indicative of cultural trends towards shock value and dubious tolerance'. There's a time and a place for everything and sometimes that place is sites like bestgore, liveleaks or the artistic equivalent of AO3 rather than art galleries, in my mind.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
It's like we have become allergic to actual news or something.
Sort of. There's a few reasons for it:
- Seen it all before.
- The intro to the thread explicitly discourages "look at what these people did" posts
- After nearly a decade of commenting on this sort of stuff, I don't think there's a lot more to be said about any of it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9m ago
Holodomor was recognized as a genocide by the European Parliament with 507 votes for (and 12 votes against). Even a plurality of the far-left group GUE/NGL voted for it.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
19m ago
Sir, You Are Being Hunted might float your boat.
VinoVeritas
2hr ago
It's like we have become allergic to actual news or something. Why is every topic here now a snoozefest.
Here are a few suggestions. Pick up the ball and go
-
Conventional war in Eastern Europe
-
Genocide in Middle East
-
Unprecedented invasion of America
-
Unsustainable price increases in Western world
-
Canadian retroactive 'Hate Speech' laws
-
Lady flashing her tits at the Times Square portal
-
Lomez getting doxxed and turning out to be handsome, but also Jewish
-
Milei singing in a superhero costume
-
Eurovision being even more Satanic and odd than usual
-
Lizzo at the Met gala looking like a chicken nugget and being physically carried around by white attendants
-
GME and AMC popped 100% again for some reason
-
JK Rowling might get arrested for calling a man a man
-
Literally just pick a topic that's not obtuse guys. We're all collectively losing the reason to visit.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
It's been as while since I was into econ, so I'll probably butcher some of these ideas, but some brilliant soul had the idea that the best way to model the behavior of individual companies is to a assume their actions can have no impact on supply, demand, employment or any broader trend. They're scarcely more than amoebas in the ocean, driven by forces far beyond their comprehension, let alone their ability to influence them. It is this form of analysis, a vain attempt to present itself of as rational, that I think is the cope, and it's probably worse in politics than it was in economics.
The situation circa 2010 was uniquely suited to a libertarian opposition.
I don't see how that explains anything. It's not like the move away from libertarianism was primarily motivated by the opposition to the left, which is still extremely hostile to it. It was a repudiation of the neocon agenda first. To the extent it went against libertarianism, it was focused on economics, and to the extent that was different from what the establishment of either party wanted to do, it boiled down to the opposition immigration and free trade. Even after Trump took power, he did remarkably little to exercise it in order to implement a cultural agenda. At the tail end of his presidency we started seeing some executive orders that would herald the type of opposition we see coming from DeSantis and Abbot, but they came so late that Biden repealed them before they could have any impact.
In my opinion this shows that his timeline is mostly correct, and the fact that DeSantis and Abbot are being singled out for criticism shows they're doing something different from the other Republican governors.
"The right realizing that they were at war", might not be the right explanation for what we're seeing, but at least it's an explanation. I still don't see your argument as anything more than a restatement of the fact that the right moved away from libertarianism.
VinoVeritas
1hr ago
The last time I made a post it was a nice thoughtful thing about how Trump should change his mind and leave abortion 'to the states' rather than try to come up with a cut-off date
Speaking plainly, the response was abysmal, and, it turned out Trump did what I thought he should anyway. The time spent writing the post had negative value.
But just for good faith efforts sake on point #1 here is our sectary of state playing guitar in Ukraine while the war rages:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/us/politics/blinken-ukraine-guitar.html
I would think this was incredibly humiliating to our people to have our representative act like this, but for the fact we don't really have 'a people' anymore and this is much less humiliating than Biden shaking hands with a ghost or Mitch McConnell having what quite sincerely appeared to be yet another stroke when asked about running for re-election
#2 genocide in Middle East, here is a video of Israeli's destroying aid meant for the millions of people they've made homeless, and are now pushing out of their squalid refugee camps. https://youtube.com/watch?v=3wfQtRgcZ_I
It is unthinkable to me that any adult with full cognitive faculties could think these people were the good guys chosen by God. But, it is not a surprise to me at this point that millions of seemingly adult people are actually functionally children who only do as they're told. The irony that the bible could not be more explicit that Christ-denying Jews were not grafted into the Tree of the Covenant is just the cherry on top
#3 There are 10's of thousands of people crossing the border illegally every day in every western country and nobody seems to care beyond how we're going to raise more taxes to pay for them. Our already destroyed cities are having their dicks ground into the dirt. The tallest highrise in St Louis just sold for like $3 million bucks. Denver is literally broke from it https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/denver-only-has-enough-money-to-fund-migrants-for-two-more-months/ar-BB1hRFYT?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=54d5d35986d04a1ca96ee78f18d7de36&ei=17 (that story was from 3 months ago)
ulyssessword
1hr ago
Go right ahead. What's interesting about those topics, where can we hear more about them, and what are your opinions on them?
Goodguy
30m ago
I don't know if you would get arrested as opposed to just fined, but there are countries with laws against denying certain Soviet atrocities.
Generally speaking, I don't know how likely one would actually be to face legal penalties, but I think that there are many places in the former Warsaw Pact where claiming in public that Soviet atrocities were exaggerated could lead to physical violence coming from ordinary citizens.
To add to The_Nybbler's point, oral arguments in Rahimi were November 2023, a case where an incredibly unsympathetic defendant (alleged multiple shooter, drug dealer, and girlfriend beater) was indicted for possessing a firearm while subject to a domestic restraining order. We won't know for certain how the court rules until the opinion drops, and that probably won't happen for a month (or up to three).
But it's extremely unlikely that this will result in a significantly broadened understanding of the Second Amendment. The most optimistic takes in the gunnie world hope that the Court will allow Rahimi's conviction and just require a finding of 'dangerousness'. Most expect that they'll overturn the lower court, or leave only the most narrow process grounds to protect Rahimi.
And there are reasons beyond oral argument tea-leaf reading for that. It's already happened before in Gary/Greer, where unsympathetic plaintiffs made it easy for the court to decide that for process reasons a prohibited person didn't need to be proven to know they were prohibited.
But even more broadly, there's just not that much of the court touching this right to protect all but the most aggressive infringements in the cleanest-cut cases across the wide scope of all people in a jurisdiction, and sometimes not even that, even as case after case was teed up.
If the Court wanted to protect the rights of people who hadn't been violent, they had a case where a man was banned from possessing guns because he was convicted of counterfeiting cassette tapes in 1987. And they punted. If the Court wanted to protect the rights of people who had suffered mental illness long ago and recovered, they had a case where a man was banned from possessing guns because he had a depressive episode in 1999. And they punted. States requiring guns to have technologies that don't exist? Taking private property without warrant or compensation or grandfathering? License denials for driving while black a police encounter that did not result in an arrest or any evidence of wrongdoing? Punt punt punt.
The best result the gunnie sphere other than Bruen was Caetano v. Massachusetts (2016! and see the massive resistance in O'Neil v Neronha, only finished in 2022). After that, there's maybe the GVR on Duncan v Bonta... except they GVR'd it to the Ninth Circuit, which even at the time had literally never allowed the Second Amendment to do anything, and since broke rules to slow Duncan down further. It's not like Bruen is even the only example: Caniglia v. Strom, was more a Fourth Amendment case, but see the later punts on the massive resistance it has faced by lower courts.
Maybe I get surprised here, or VanDerStok is where (... in 2026? assuming it doesn't get punted then?). But despite an environment with a massive variety of low-hanging fruit, these are the only things the Court cared about, and that's not random.
Take their names away. You could try enforcing uniqueness across the public-facing Internet (it won't stop organization in private channels, but because visible attention-whoring is the driver of this damage, this will make it inconvenient).
For owners and higher-ups, use a unique username that's divorced from your other identities.
Off-topic chat is banned from the project's mailing list.
This is 4chan 101 stuff. The problem with it is that it requires foresight and isn't obvious to people who don't understand why those measures are necessary, which people who tend to post about more interesting things clearly underestimate.
Outlaw83
44m ago
No, it's because almost every woman who of even moderate attractiveness has dealt with weirdness from a decent amount of men, from a pretty young age, and it turns out, they don't like it very much.
This isn't a political, ideological, or social thing, as seen by the almost regular stories of pastors and priests doing things people claim people preforming at DQSH do, and by the same token, the stories of creepy men in various liberal-coded spheres.
Outlaw83
47m ago
"Both single men and single women lived under the surveillance and control of their social circle to a degree."
Yet, somehow, prostitutes continued to be healthily employed in every major and probably minor European city even during the most buttoned up times. Which proves the feminists point - there was never actually true equality, even in repression.
What Big Teeth You Have!
Identity Politics and the Russian Revolution
1. Introduction
The Oxford English Dictionary defines wokeness as being alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism. To be woke, by that definition, is to be a noble thing indeed: a defender of the oppressed and downtrodden. This is the ethos of a fairy tale hero like Robin Hood, or Prince Charming, or the valiant huntsman who vanquishes the big bad wolf and saves Little Red Riding Hood and her sick, old grandma. Not coincidentally, it has also been the stated agenda of every mass murdering tyrant in modern history.
The propaganda of Soviet communism was rife with woke sounding platitudes. For example,
- Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others. [Stalin: Interview with Roy Howard, 1936]
- The Social Democrats' ideal should [be] the tribune of the people, which is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects. [Lenin (1902): What is to be Done?]
- They [blacks] have the full right to self-determination when they so desire and we will support and defend them with all the means at our disposal in the conquest of this right, the same as we defend all oppressed peoples. [Trotsky (1933): The Negro Question in America]
The problem is that Soviet communism did not really accomplish any of those things. What it did accomplish was to murder some 20 million of people [source], and to terrorize hundreds of millions more over multiple generations. The people of the Russian empire, including many of the soon-to-be victims of Soviet terror, for the most part did not see this coming. As Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote,
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the "secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums. [The Gulag Archipelago]
I invite you to consider the scenes Solzhenitsyn describes above, imagine them as vividly as you can, and multiply by 20 million. Next, imagine the continuous, lifelong fear that you could be next no matter what you do, and that you will be next if you say publicly certain things that you know to be true; multiply that by 300 million (over three generations), and add to the total. If you can get your head around that quantity of human suffering and loss, then you have grasped the magnitude of the evil of Soviet Communism.
As merciless and malevolent as Soviet communism was, how could the Russian people, especially the intelligentsia, have failed to apprehend its true nature until it was too late? First, the Bolshevik revolutionaries didn't say they were merciless and malevolent; quite the opposite! Who could be against their stated agenda of fighting tyranny no matter what class of the people it affects? or self-determination for historically marginalized peoples? or abolishing oppression of some by others? One of the lessons of the Russian Revolution -- along with the histories of Naziism and of Chinese communism which followed later in the same century -- is that when the leaders of a political movement expound the lofty mission of defending the downtrodden and looking out for the little guy, that may not be what they are actually up to. Often, indeed, they are up to the very opposite, and it is not always easy to tell.
On the other hand, it is not outright impossible to tell. Tyrannical movements may wear sheep's clothing, but they cannot hide their fangs. Hallmarks of tyranny, which are often visible even in the early stages of tyrannical movements, include identity politics, censorship, thuggery, and authoritarianism. Soviet communism exhibited these hallmarks from its beginnings, as did the Naziism in Germany and communism in China. This essay will discuss the visible role of identity politics in the early stages of the communist movement in Russia.
2. Identity Politics in Soviet Russia
Grandmother, what big teeth you have! [Little Red Riding Hood]
The chief intellectual and political leader of the Russian communist revolution was a one Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known today as Vladimir Lenin. Like the thinker Karl Marx before him, the doer Lenin often spoke in terms of "class enemies": not individuals who had exploited other individuals, but kinds of people who had historically exploited other kinds of people. For example, in 1905, closely following the fashion of Marx, Lenin wrote:
Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the landowners and that of the capitalists. [Lenin (1905): Socialism and Religion]
For Lenin and the Bolshevik party he led, the exploiting class, namely the bourgeoisie, consisted of (1) the aristocracy, (2) kulaks (farmers who owned at least 8 acres of land), (3) industrialists, and (4) ideological enemies -- meaning basically any white-collar worker who was not a communist. Anyone denounced as falling into one of these four categories would eventually be marked for persecution and often death in the USSR, regardless of their personal history as an alleged exploiter.
It is true that working class Russians of Lenin's time often lived in grinding poverty, that many aristocrats and industrialists enriched themselves at the expense of that working class, and that these same aristocrats and industrialists often exhibited depraved indifference to the wellbeing of their fellow men. At the same time, it is true that not all landowners and industrialists were equally exploitative, and that some dealt more honestly and charitably with their fellow men than most workers would have done in the same shoes. Moreover, it is also true, especially of the kulaks (successful peasant farmers), that many earned their way, partly or wholly, into their positions of relative wealth by their own diligence and foresight. But the communist picture of the world washes over the whole story of individual difference in merit, conduct, or culpability. Lenin's narrative of class struggle conveniently drew a circle around everyone who owned land or other valuables, labeling them as "parasites" and "class exploiters". This in turn licensed the indiscriminate looting and confiscation of those valuables -- at first by rioting thugs and later by the communist government -- not only with a clear conscience, but with a pretext of righteous indignation. So one signal that was missed by the Russian intelligentsia was this: when an ideology labels a group of people wholesale as historical class exploiters -- be it the Jews, the Tootsies, or the bourgeoisie -- this telegraphs a predatory intent toward that group, which may remain largely hidden unless and until the predators gather enough strength to act on it.
In 1916, just before coming to power, Lenin's tone was confrontational, but not as overtly malicious as it would later become. On the eve of his successful coup d'etat, Lenin wrote that violence would probably be necessary to bring about the revolution, but that it might not, and that in some sense he hoped it would not:
Peaceful surrender of power by the bourgeoisie is possible, if it is convinced that resistance is hopeless and if it prefers to save its skin. It is much more likely, of course, that even in small states socialism will not be achieved without civil war, and for that reason the only program of international Social-Democracy must be recognition of civil war, though violence is, of course, alien to our ideals. [Lenin (1916): A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism]
In hindsight the last clause (violence is alien to our ideals) was a complete lie. Within two months of assuming to power, Lenin was taking a far more menacing tone:
No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies! All of them are of the same brood—the spawn of capitalism. [Lenin (1917): How to Organize Competition]
We now know that Lenin's talk of war and death was not just talk. After seizing control of the government, the Bolsheviks instituted the Cheka, the first incarnation of the Soviet secret police. The immediate business of the Cheka was to carry out the Red Terror, which would take the lives of tens of thousands of allegedly "bourgeois" Russian civilians. This terror campaign was consciously named and patterned after the infamous Reign of Terror that had followed the French Revolution in the late 18'th century. One difference, however, was that the French pogrom was labeled a "Reign of terror" in hindsight by its detractors, while the Russian version was called that by its own architects as they planned it out.
As important as the extermination of class enemies (Lenin's word), another job of the Cheka was to systematically confiscate the belongings of all "enemies of the people" -- where an enemy of the people, again, was anyone with enough property to be worth stealing. There were some obstacles to achieving this objective: gold, jewels, and works of art, and other valuables could be carefully hidden and it often were. Indeed, the stories of men, women, and children desperately hiding themselves and anything of owned of value is one of the most poignant chapters in the story of the revolution. But the Cheka soon found a solution to that problem, which became part of their standard playbook: (1) kidnap a member of the bourgeois offender's family, (2) guess how much the family could pay and ask it in ransom, and (3) collect whatever payment the family could come up with, or kill the captive, or both. Thousands of the deaths in the Red Terror were the results of this scheme.
Martin Latsis, one of the men appointed to oversee the Cheka, wrote explicitly of the role of identity politics in the Red Terror:
We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look in materials you have gathered for evidence that a suspect acted or spoke against the Soviet authorities. The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, education, profession. These questions should determine his fate. This is the essence of the Red Terror. [Latsis (1918), Red Terror, no 1]
Publicly, Lenin stated that Latsis's methods were excessive and that he talked too much about collective punishment -- but my opinion is that Lenin simply didn't want the quiet part said out loud. Lenin never removed Latsis from his position, and Latsis's views, as reflected in the quotation above, essentially governed the tactics of the Cheka under Lenin's command. The Red Terror was the first modern experiment in social justice -- carried out under the same pretext embraced by the contemporary social justice movement (historical class exploitation), and with indiscriminate cruelty that was scarcely hinted at before the fact.
VinoVeritas
1hr ago
No, 'unironically,' the people who gave you a choice between an untested Pfizer, Astra-Zeneca, or Johnson and Johnson gene treatment and your job do not have your best interests in mind.
NB Those have all been taken off the market because they're undeniably dangerous.
hanikrummihundursvin
6hr ago
All justice is "social justice". All politics is "identity politics". It's just a matter of who you care to ingroup and outgroup, how far into the future your mind can wander, and how good your brain is at pattern recognition.
No one who has been forced into a precarious situation settles for equal suffering and death. Everyone wants to live. What separates people is how daring and how prepared they are to do what must be done. And anyone who sits on a fence, safe and sound, warm and well fed, commenting on the situation like a disembodied brain pretending to be above it all is stupid. Walking their progeny from a good place to a bad one. You are going to have to fight. If not you then your descendants or theirs.
Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents made the point that what separates most people from right wing radicals is foresight. I feel this echo throughout a lot of western culture and politics. There seems to be a distinct lack of care or awareness of the future. Even with regards to the most salient 'future' driven contention of 'the left'; the environment. It is fraught with short sighted stupidity. The warming of the globe is not a bad thing for the globe. It's bad for the people living on it. Yet overpopulation is not seen as a problem. Immigration is great and so on.
There is no serious thought going on. No realism. No foresight. It's all short sighted nonsense that leaves an entire portion of the world incapable of understanding sacrifices for their future.
Outlaw83
57m ago
As a leftie, there was no way to get Medicare for All from Pelosi, because not only does M4A not have the 218 votes you need in the House, it'd die on the Senate. All that would result of such a vote is a bunch of terrible primary challenges that would fail, because the median Democrat, while preferring Medicare for All, it's not a support it or else issue. Stuff like abortion, gay rights, thinking Trump is bad, those are actually support or else issues to the Democratic base of African-American women, suburban Mom's and so on.
Plus, in the long run, Biden did far more of what lefties expected economically. Unfortunately, some of the dumber ones are now upset about that full employment and higher wages means higher prices for Chipotle or Doordash.
Tenaz
1hr ago
If nothing else, we care because others care. Whatever your beliefs about the Powers That Be, they are not yet omnipotent, and flagrant (well... more flagrant anyways) disregard of the constitution will radicalize some normies into enemies.
2rafa
1hr ago
Most of those things are discussed pretty regularly here. Others are just uninteresting. Another dissident right personage turns out to be Jewish? At this stage it would be surprising if someone prominent on the DR wasn’t Jewish (Sailer DNA test reveal when). Big price rises in the US, particularly in service (stuff like fast food etc) are just due to labor shortage related pay increases for the poorest workers since 2020, they’re not hugely interesting. Day traders being retarded again? As I recall the statistics showing, something like 95-99% of them lose money in the long term. Eurovision being gay and weird, really? (Also this was literally a discussion last week).
If you have a good idea, make a top-level comment.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
This came off wrong... I meant "embrace Davos conspiracy theories"....
Why? God is ineffable. If he picks some nation as his chosen and lets them get away with treating their neighbors as waste, who are you to say that you are right and God is wrong. He reportedly fucked with the Egyptians, alternating between sending additional plagues and hardening the heart of their pharaoh so that he wouldn't just give up and let the Jews go. Now he's hardening the resolve of the Palestinians, so they don't stop dreaming about their state from the sea to the river, and the Israeli Jews can have an excuse to grind them into dust.
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