domain:alexberenson.substack.com
Goodguy
4hr 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.
Outlaw83
4hr 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
4hr 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.
Outlaw83
4hr 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.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4hr 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.
Tenaz
4hr 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
4hr 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
4hr ago
This came off wrong... I meant "embrace Davos conspiracy theories"....
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4hr 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
5hr ago
Good point in retrospect, the average dissident thread on X is now better than most here
VinoVeritas
5hr 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)
VinoVeritas
5hr 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.
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.
ulyssessword
5hr ago
Go right ahead. What's interesting about those topics, where can we hear more about them, and what are your opinions on them?
VinoVeritas
5hr 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
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Lady flashing her tits at the Times Square portal
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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
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GME and AMC popped 100% again for some reason
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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.
VinoVeritas
6hr ago
Black women are well known for large secondary sexual characterics (sic) like big ass and breasts, that's hardly masculine.
Are you thinking of the average American black, who is morbidly obese?
VinoVeritas
6hr ago
Is there a country on earth in which you would be arrested for saying this, vs, top of my head example 'maybe about a million people, 2 at most' about the holocaust?
There's nothing to do about this discrepancy but 'don't pass go, go straight to jail'
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
6hr ago
The influence they've exerted since 2005 has been driven primarily by Hamas who keep starting conflicts with them.
Starting conflicts? Israel is a colonial power and an imposition on the region, and did not exist a century ago. If I break into your home and kick you out, I don't get to call you the aggressor when you return in a few months and try to retake your home.
Would it be acceptable for the IRA to conduct acts of terrorism against the British due to the lingering impact of British colonialism in Ireland?
The IRA continued to conduct acts of terrorism against the British until the British left (and even then there's still Northern Ireland). The USA was kicked out of Afghanistan, but Israel is actually still there! If the Palestinians wiped Israel off the map and took control of the entire region, I absolutely would consider it unacceptable if they continued to blow up synagogues in other countries.
Why even grant any diplomatic concession to an adversary if your prior acts are apparantly justification for continued violence on their part?
If I steal 500 dollars from you, then make a diplomatic concession where I return 5 dollars, would you consider the matter settled? If giving you back that 5 dollars isn't enough to make you happy, why should I give anything back at all?
Israel should exist for the same reason any country should exist - the vast majority of people living there are born there and have no where else to live, and as such it's their home.
Same argument applies to the Palestinians. If destroying their homes to make way for Israel is acceptable, destroying Israeli homes to make way for Greater Palestine is equally acceptable.
gattsuru
6hr ago
No clue. Attempts to formalize and distribute governance haven't even been great at stopping progressive organizations from being skin-suited from the inside; in neutral ones, they've been largely been explicit targets.
In terms of success stories, you've basically got SQLite. Which probably has had some effect -- it operates in a nexus of spaces where both liberal and leftist interests often drive focus. But I'm not sure it would work for many other projects.
Tenaz
6hr ago
Rittenhouse has bent the knee but even if he hadn't, we're not that far gone yet.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
6hr ago
I can make it happen. DM me.
quiet_NaN
7hr ago
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.
There are some possible interpretations of this paragraph:
- 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 -- anything from 'postmen and Nazis are exactly the same group' to 'there is no postman who is also a Nazi' remains possible.
- B. 'Every mass murdering tyrant in modern history had a stated agenda which was woke'. This is a much stronger statement. Unfortunately, even if I were to not dispute that every left-wing or communist regime from the Republican side of the Spanish civil war to the Khmer Rouge qualifies as woke there are a few counterexamples -- for example the Nazis, Imperial Japan, Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah or the Young Turks all committed their worst atrocities for explicitly racist or religious reasons. (WP List) For convenience and tradition, let us focus on the Holocaust. If you prefer interpretation B, what is your explanation? Does Hitler not qualify as a tyrant? Was the Shoah the product of an anti-racist agenda? Do we start with our weekly epistemic discussion about the Holocaust?
That being said, I think your overall point is not wrong. Left wing ideologies could be classified on a splintered-dogmatic axis. The splintered left might agree on hating fascism and strongly disliking capitalism, but have a multitude of opinions on what kind (if any) of state they want, if feminism was a distraction from the class struggle or an essential problem to be solved first and so on. The central example of the dogmatic left would be the communist parties. I am not sure how the ratio of contrarians to dogmatists was at the best of times (say Western students in the 1960ies), but I think there were some genuine object level discussions not entirely unlike in the ratsphere. I was not born back then, so I can not say for sure.
Of course, the big atrocities of the left have mostly been committed by the dogmatists following the party line with a comical overconfidence that what they did was right.
I find social justice progressivism firmly on the dogmatic side. Where 20 years ago the Israel-Palestine conflict would have ripped apart leftist groups in the middle, today the consensus of SJP seems to be that Israel are the 'white' colonizers and therefore in the wrong, end of story.
And unlike my own Grey Tribe, the left (especially the dogmatic left) has never been very great at noticing the skulls.
gattsuru
7hr ago
Paul Prediger, nee Gauge Grosskruetz, aka bye-ceps, has also filed a civil suit. But yes, I genuinely expected feds to go after him, and it hasn't happened, and that surprised me and does show some limits.
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.
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