#apparatchiks

[infinitysisters]

“Moral grandiosity seems to have infected the nomenklatura class of giant corporations. It is not enough for them to ensure that the corporations make a decent profit within the framework of the law; they must claim to also be morally improving, if not actually saving, the world.

So it was with Alison Rose, the first female chief executive of the National Westminster Bank, a large British bank 39 percent owned by the British government. When first appointed to the position, she said that she would put combatting climate change at the centre of the bank’s policies and activities. Whether shareholders were delighted to hear this is unknown.

But the bank, under her direction, went further. Its subsidiary, Coutts, founded in 1692 and long banker to the rich, compiled a Stasi-like dossier on one of its customers, Nigel Farage, before “exiting” him from the bank, to use the elegant term employed by Ms. Rose. (Defenestration will come later, perhaps.)

Farage is, of course, a prominent right-wing political figure in Britain, as much detested as he is admired. There was no allegation in the dossier that he had done anything illegal; indeed, in person, he had always acted correctly and courteously toward staff. What was alleged was that his “values” did not accord with those of the bank, which were self-proclaimed as “inclusive” (though not of people with less than $3.5 million to deposit or borrow). Farage was depicted as a xenophobe and racist, mainly because he was in favour of Brexit and against unlimited immigration. That anyone could support Brexit for any reason other than xenophobia, or oppose unlimited immigration other than because he was a racist, was inconceivable to the diverse, inclusive thinkers of Coutts Bank.

Ms. Rose saw fit to leak details to the BBC about Farage’s banking affairs, claiming to believe that they were public knowledge already. She did not mention the 40-page dossier that her staff had put together, about Farage’s publicly-stated views. The Stasi would have been proud of the bank’s work, which comprehensively proved him to have anti-woke views.

Whatever else might be said about Mr. Farage, no one would describe him as a pushover, the kind of person who would take mistreatment lying down. Even the Guardian newspaper, which cannot be suspected of partiality for him, suggested that the bank and its chief executive had questions to answer.

It was not long before Ms. Rose had to beat a retreat. She issued a statement in which she said:

I have apologised to Mr. Farage for the deeply inappropriate language contained in [the dossier].

The board of the bank said that “after careful reflection [it] has concluded that it retains full confidence in Ms. Rose as CEO of the bank.”

The following day, Rose resigned, admitting to “a serious error of judgment.”

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐚𝐧𝐤 𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐲 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 $𝟏 𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧.

The weasel words of Ms. Rose and the bank board are worth examination. They deflected, and I suspect were intended to deflect, the main criticism directed at Ms. Rose and the bank: namely, that the bank had been involved in a scandalous and sinister surveillance of Mr. Farage’s political views and attempted to use them as a reason to deny him banking services, all in the name of their own political views, which they assumed to be beyond criticism or even discussion. The humble role of keeping his money, lending him money, or perhaps giving him financial advice, was not enough for them: they saw themselves as the guardians of correct political policy.

It was not that the words used to describe Mr. Farage were “inappropriate,” or even that they were libelous. It is that the bank saw fit to investigate and describe him at all, at least in the absence of any suspicion of fraud, money laundering, and so forth. “The error of judgment” to which Ms. Rose referred was not that she spoke to the BBC about his banking affairs (it is not easy to believe that she did so without malice, incidentally), but that she compiled a dossier on Farage in the first place—and then “error of judgment” is hardly a sufficient term on what was a blatant and even wicked attempt at instituting a form of totalitarianism.

This raises the question of whether one can be wicked without intending to be so, for it is quite clear that Ms. Rose had no real understanding, even after her resignation, of the sheer dangerousness and depravity of what the bank, under her direction, had done.

As for the board’s somewhat convoluted declaration that “after careful consideration, it concluded that it retains full confidence,” etc., it suggests that it was involved in an exercise of psychoanalytical self-examination rather than of an objective state of affairs: absurd, in the light of Ms. Rose’s resignation within twenty-four hours. The board, no more than Ms. Rose herself, understood what the essence of the problem was. For them, if there had been no publicity, there would have been no problem: so when Mr. Farage called for the dismissal of the board en masse, I sympathised with his view.

There is, of course, the question of the competence of the bank’s management. Last year, the bank’s profits rose by 50 percent (I wish my income had risen by as much). I am not competent to comment on the solidity of this achievement: excellent profits one year followed by complete collapse the next seem not to be unknown in the banking world. But the rising profits under Ms. Rose for the four years of her direction seem to point to, at least on some level, of competence. How many equally competent persons there are who could replace her, I do not know.

Still, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐛𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐚 𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐨𝐟 𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐮𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐬, as illustrated in this episode, is worrying. Would one trust such people if the political wind changed direction? Their views would change, but the iron moral certainty and self-belief would remain the same, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat. How many meetings have I sat through in which some apparatchik has claimed to be passionately committed to a policy, only to be just as passionately committed to the precise opposite when his own masters demand a change of direction?! The Coutts story is one of how totalitarianism can flourish.”

—

Theodore Dalrymple

[dizajn]

APPARATCHIK STATE OF ART by digitalartstrategist

[northwest-by-a-train]

.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

--

--

By: Leo Shane III

Published: Feb 5, 2024

Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough is overruling plans to ban the famous Times Square kiss photo marking the end of World War II from all department health care facilities, a move criticized as political correctness run amok.

The ban was announced internally at VA medical facilities late last month in a memo from RimaAnn Nelson, the Veterans Health Administration’s top operations official. Employees were instructed to “promptly” remove any depictions of the famous photo and replace it with imagery deemed more appropriate.

“The photograph, which depicts a non-consensual act, is inconsistent with the VA’s no-tolerance policy towards sexual harassment and assault,” the memo stated.

“To foster a more trauma-informed environment that promotes the psychological safety of our employees and the veterans we serve, photographs depicting the ‘V-J Day in Times Square’ should be removed from all Veterans Health Administration facilities.”

The memo garnered public scrutiny after it was posted online by the X account EndWokeness on Tuesday.

Just hours later, McDonough took to social media to reverse the memo.

“This image is not banned from VA facilities — and we will keep it in VA facilities,” said a post from his official X account. Department officials echoed in a separate statement that “VA will NOT be banning this photo from VA facilities.”

Officials said the memo should not have been sent out and was formally rescinded on Tuesday. They did not provide details of whether senior leaders were consulted on the matter ahead of Nelson’s memo.

The photograph was taken by journalist Alfred Eisenstaedt in New York City on Aug. 14, 1945, as Americans celebrated Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II. Other journalists, including military reporters, also captured the moment.

The shot shows a U.S. sailor grabbing and kissing a woman he did not know amid a joyous, party atmosphere in Times Square. The identities of the individuals in the photo have been disputed over the years.

In her memo, Nelson noted that use of the photo in VA facilities “was initially intended to celebrate and commemorate the end of World War II and the triumphant return of American soldiers. However, perspectives on historical events and their representations evolve.”

Nelson wrote that the non-consensual nature of the kiss and “debates on consent and the appropriateness of celebrating such images” led to the decision. Senior leaders did not provide an explanation for the reversal.

VA officials could not provide details on how many facilities are currently displaying the photo and whether veterans have complained about use of the image.

McDonough has made veterans outreach and inclusion key priorities for the department over the last three years, including rewriting the VA motto with gender-neutral language.

==

Activists always take it upon themselves to make themselves the center of any issue. If they feel offended, then everyone else must feel offended as well. Even - and usually especially - if the activist feels offended on someone else's behalf.

You don't get to pretend you're more offended than the people who were actually there and were actually involved.

[opanas-opanasovych-opanasenko]

holodomor denial is so funny sometimes, like "holodomor wasn't real because some Kazakhs died too" like m8 that just makes it worse

[sbcdh]

I believe the English phrase is “odd duck.” Yes. Jan Kargad was an Odd Duck. He was born in 1922, right after Georgia joined the Soviet Union, in a commune outside of Batumi. But this was not a normal commune no. His parents were strange people. A small group of Dutch fuckers, very protestant people, started a winery in the countryside where they could read their bibles. You would think they did not get along with the Marxists, but you would be wrong. They loved work. The bible loved work. There was no problem.

Well, that is not entirely true. Jan was a bit of a problem. He was born with a “weak constitution.” We do not know what that meant exactly, but farmwork would give him seizures and very high fevers. He was not a good child for farm work. So, they taught him arithmetic. Young Jan was in charge of counting grapes and bottles of wine and so on. Maybe the Apparatchik did not mind a child doing all the counting, maybe he was bribed, maybe he did not give a shit. I do not know. But Jan was in charge of all the counting and, what is the fucking word- logistics. Yes. Logistics. And he was very good at logistics. 

There are theories as to his upbringing yes. Studying the bible alongside Marx and Lenin and so on. But I do not believe this. In Chechnya in those days many studied the bible and Marx like Jan Kargad, but we did not become like Jan Kargad. I think perhaps it was the fevers. One sees things with a fever when it is bad enough, yes. 

Kargad also studied the capitalists. He was very good at this. He read Adam Smith, but also Issac Newton, the South Seas bubble, and most famously the Tulip Panic. They say his journals were filled with pressed tulips. He was a bit of a, what is the fucking English word- pervert. A pervert for organizing things and numbers and so on. Jan Kargad loves logistics like a man loves his wife, and tulips are a symbol of this for him. They became a microcosm for him. You see how the bud unfolds into many petals, its is very similar to how capitalism unfurls into its many aspects in the world. But, I am getting ahead of myself. 

One day, after all of his schooling, Kargad has a terrible fever, more terrible than any fever he has ever had. This is in the early 1940s some time. After this fever he becomes strange. Well, stranger than he already was. He speaks of men with golden dog masks, their necks chained to the sun, tulips growing from their eyes, all of that shit. He never goes outside again. He becomes fearful of the sun. He does not let it touch his skin. 

He writes intensely for the next three years. I have seen his original notebooks and they are stained with sweat. This man is not well, but he writes. He does not get help, because he is very good at analyzing agricultural output. I believe it grounded him some how, to spend days without sleep, reading spreadsheets about grapes and wheat and so on. 

He is no longer christian. He throws out all of the crosses in his home, and replaces them with grape-cutters. They are similar to a sickle, but with a long handle, for reaching up and cutting off high bunches of grapes. He becomes obsessed with this idea of the grape cutter, and he begins to paint. And this is where many first learn of him. He influences a group of artists who become famous in the southern soviet union, though they are occasionally derided as being “mystical.” I personally? I love the drawings. Many figures reaching up to pluck grapes from the sun. It becomes the central theme of his work.

Here people discover his strange writings. But first he is considered a strange mystic. His early writings are still very christian yes, and this influences how he is read in the west. Many think he is speaking of hyper-economics or whatever fetishistic bull shit the americans are calling it. But I do not think so. His work is very soviet. There are stories yes, of good soviet men drinking coffee and loving spreadsheets like a man loves his wife, and in this they become a little bit like Jan Kargad. They are –you do not have an English term for this– cutting grapes from the sun. But this is not a serious phrase you understand. These men are perverts.

[choppedcowboydinosaur]

If we're being serious if the media held all the politcians accountable for war crimes they would have gotten rid of all of them and Trump. Oh, who am i kididng they don't do that.

[teh-tj]

Greenbelt Maryland. Or, how America almost solved housing only to abandon it.

**I AM NOT AN EXPERT! I AM JUST AN ENTHUSIST! DO NOT TREAT MY OPINIONS/SPECULATION AS EDUCATION!**

During the Depression America faced a housing crisis that rhymes with but differs from our own. It’s different in that there wasn’t a supply issue, there were loads of houses in very desirable areas, but they were still unaffordable as people’s incomes collapsed causing a deflationary spiral. While the housing supply subtly grew and succeeded demand, people simply couldn’t pay the meager rents and mortgages. Herbert Hoover failed to manage the Depression, while his inaction is greatly exaggerated, his policy of boosting the economy with works projects and protecting banks from runs failed and the depression only got more pronounced in his term. In comes Franklin Roosevelt, a progressive liberal much like his distant and popular cousin/uncle-in-law Teddy. Franklin’s plan was to create a large safety net for people to be able to be economically viable even if they’re otherwise poor. These reforms are called the New Deal and they did many controversial things like giving disabled and retired people welfare, giving farmers conditioned subsidies to manipulate the price of food, a works program to build/rebuild vital infrastructure, etc. One of these programs was the USHA (a predecessor of America’s HUD), an agency created to build and maintain public housing projects with the goal of creating neighborhoods with artificially affordable rents so people who work low-wage jobs or rely on welfare can be housed.

In this spirit, the agency started experimenting with new and hopefully efficient housing blueprints and layouts. If you ever see very large apartment towers or antiquated brick low-rise townhouses in America, they might be these. The USHA bought land in many large and medium-sized cities to build “house-in-park” style apartments, which is what they sound like. Putting apartment buildings inside green spaces so residents can be surrounded by greenery and ideally peacefully coexist. Three entire towns were built with these ideas outside three medium-sized cities that were hit hard by the depression; Greenbelt outside DC, Greenhills outside Cincinnati, and Greendale outside Milwaukee. The idea was to move people out of these crowded cities into these more sustainable and idyllic towns. There were many catches though, the USHA planned for these towns to be all-white, they used to inspect the houses for cleanliness, they required residents to be employed or on Social Security (which basically meant retired or disabled), they also had an income limit and if your income exceeded that limit you were given a two-month eviction notice, and you were expected to attend town meetings at least monthly. While the towns didn’t have religious requirements they did only build protestant churches. Which is an example of discrimination by omission. While a Catholic, Jew, Muslim, etc could in theory move into town they also couldn’t go to a Catholic church, synagogue, or Islamic center without having to extensively travel. Things planned communities leave out might indicate what kind of people planned communities want to leave out. Basically, the whole thing was an experiment in moving Americans into small direct-democracy suburbs as opposed to the then-current system of crowded cities and isolated farm/mine towns. This type of design wasn’t without precedent, there were famously company towns like Gary and Pullman which both existed outside Chicago. But those lacked the autonomy and democracy some USHA apparatchiks desired.

The green cities were a series of low-rise apartments housing over a hundred people each, they were short walks from a parking lot and roads, and walking paths directly and conveniently led residents to the town center which had amenities and a shopping district. Greenbelt in particular is famous for its art deco shopping complex, basically an early mall where business owners would open stores for the townspeople. These businesses were stuck being small, given the income requirements, but it was encouraged for locals to open a business to prove their entrepreneurial spirit. Because city affairs were elected at town meetings the city was able to pull resources to eventually build their own amenities the USHA didn’t originally plan for like a public swimming pool or better negotiated garbage collection.

These three cities were regarded as a success by the USHA until World War II happened and suddenly they showed flaws given the shift in focus. These towns housed poor people who barely if at all could afford a car, so semi-isolated towns outside the city became redundant and pointless. The USHA also had to keep raising the income requirement since the war saw a spike in well-paying jobs which made the town unsustainable otherwise. During the war and subsequent welfare programs to help veterans, these green cities became de facto retirement and single-mother communities for a few years as most able-bodied men were drafted or volunteered. Eventually, the USDA would make the towns independent, after the war they raised the income limit yet again and slowly the towns repopulated. As cars became more common and suburbanization became a wider trend these towns would be less noticeably burdensome and were eventually interpreted as just three out of hundreds of small suburban towns that grew out of major cities. They were still all-white and the town maintained cleanliness requirements; after all they lived in apartments it just takes one guy’s stink-ass clogged toilet to ruin everyone’s day.

By the 1950’s these towns were fully independent. Greendale and Greenhills voted to privatize their homes and get rid of the income limit all together so the towns can become more normal. Greenhills, Ohio still has many of these USHA-era houses and apartments, all owned by a series of corporations and private owners. Greendale, Wisconsin property owners have demolished most of these old houses and restructured their town government so most traces of its founding are lost. But Greenbelt, Maryland still maintains a lot of its structure to this day. Greenbelt has privatized some land and buildings, but most of the original USHA apartments are owned by the Greenbelt Homes, Inc cooperative which gives residents co-ownership of the building they live in and their payments mostly go to maintenance. Because Greenbelt was collectively owned the House Un-American Activities Committee would blacklist and put on trial most of Greenbelt’s residents and officials. Though they didn’t find much evidence of communist influence, the town was a target of the red scare by the DMV area, residents were discriminated, blacklisted, and pressured into selling their assets. While Greenbelt did commodify some of the town, the still existing co-ownership shows the town’s democratic initiative to maintain its heritage. The green cities desegregated in the 50’s and 60’s depending on state law, Greenbelt was the last to desegregate under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while discrimination persisted for years by the 1980’s the town would become half non-white, today the town is 47% black and 10% Asian.

Though these towns largely integrated with a privatized and suburbanized America, they do stand as a memorial to an idea of American urbanism that died. They were designed for walkability and were planned to be more democratic and egalitarian towns, with the conditions that came with segregation and government oversight. You can’t ignore the strict standards and racism in their history, but you can say that about many towns. How do you think America would be different if more cities had green suburbs that were more interconnected and designed for community gatherings?

[infinitysisters]

“𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐲 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐞 𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐟 𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐩𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭

Anaxagoras maintained that snow is black, but no one believed him. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐬𝐲𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐚 𝐧𝐮𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐥 𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐧 𝐨𝐧 𝐰𝐡𝐨𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐫𝐲 𝐝𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐝𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧 𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐤𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤.

Various results will soon be arrived at.

First, 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐛𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞.

Second, 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐦𝐮𝐜𝐡 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐛𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐨𝐜𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐛𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐞𝐧.

Third, that 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐬𝐞𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐜 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝𝐥𝐲 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐞𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞.

Fourth, 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐛𝐞 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐚 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐛𝐢𝐝 𝐭𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐲. (aka “crackpot conspirarcy theories”)

But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.

Although this science will be diligently studied, 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐞 𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐝𝐥𝐲 ��𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐬. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐩𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐛𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝.

When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen…

Some of these effects depend upon the political and economic character of the country concerned; others are inevitable, whatever this character may be.”

—Bertrand Russell

𝘐𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘚𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘵𝘺 (1954)

[liberalsarecool]

The Republican Party under Trump has fallen so far out of the political and cultural mainstream that the central aim of its most ambitious representatives and apparatchiks is to use the power of the state to bend that mainstream to their will.

In their minds, they’re only fighting back against a domineering cultural left. But the truth is that Republicans are alienating a large part of the American public and they just don’t see it.

And because they don’t see it, they’ve given Democrats an opportunity to do what Nixon did: to make their party the party of the silent majority and to define Republicans as one of the worst things a party can be in modern American politics.

Weird.

-Jamelle Bouie, NYT

One of the only NYT writers worth following.

[elenatria]

And now, whenever I read "kolkhoz" all I see is THIS.

My poor little KGB drama boi. 😭💗

Forgive my ignorance but what is the difference between a collective farm and a state-run farm? I thought all agriculture was state-run?

A kolkhoz was a collection of single farms that agreed to run them collectively. Upon joining a kolkhoz, farmers donated to it all of their "excesses" like land, livestock, tools, seeds. They could only keep for themselves their house, a bit of land surrounding the house, one cow and a handful of smaller animals. In exchange for the farmers' work, they could get a percentage of the kolkhoz' profits. More often than not, kolkhozes were forced to sell their products to the state for very cheap, so the profits were meagre at best.

Kolkhoz was run by assembly. The assembly elected the Chairman and Board.

Sovkhozes were a state-run "companies" and farmers were officially their employes and received monetary salaries.

[balioc]

A Simple Model

Both of the major US political parties are really very bad, right now.

(Blogger Has Amazing Novel Insights!)

The electorally-significant Dems, having finally lived up to their destiny as the new Party of the Elite, are a pack of careerist apparatchiks incapable of any vision beyond "keep the engine of the world chugging along for another day." (Turns out, that's the kind of person you have to be in order to rise to the top of the Party of the Elite.) They are aligned with enough of the major institutional power-players of American society that they're pretty much at the mercy of those power-players. They can be counted on to provide the kind of ass-covering deceit that big bureaucratic institutions generally provide (cf. Covid guidance). The last wave of "big change ideas" that were cutting-edge in the early-to-mid 2000s - marijuana legalization, public healthcare, stimulus spending, No Really We Could Just Have Open Borders, etc. - has been thoroughly assimilated, dealt-with or not-dealt-with to varying degrees, and they're not really having any new ones.

Mostly separately from that, by a weird quirk of intellectual history, the otherwise-extremely-stodgy modern Dems managed to attach themselves to a very unpopular version of identitarian group-liberation ideology. There are arguments to be had about how much this matters in the long run, how long-lasting the effects are going to be, how likely the problem is to solve itself (and under what circumstances), etc.; but one way or another, (a) it's a political albatross, and (b) it's created a bunch of actual-factual problems on the small-to-medium scale.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have become so totally unmoored and directionless that their political program consists entirely of lashing out at things they don't like. The coalition has no center, and no integrity, save for its opposition to the elite sociocultural establishment. It is capable of embracing insane/inane "ideas" like tariff-based tax systems, border-wall-building, The Plague That's Killing A Ton of People Just Isn't Happening, etc.; it can be easily baited into gleefully embracing things as evil as police brutality and war crimes, just by presenting it with a smarmy opposition on those issues. It can toss random bones to constituent ideologies like right-libertarianism or religious social conservatism, but not advance their agendas in any overarching way. It is actively opposed to institutional competence, because competent institutional actors are assumed to be Of the Enemy, which is more important than anything else. It doesn't even try to keep most of its (insane) promises. It is increasingly dominated by naked grift, mostly directed at its own base. It is, in short, the kind of party that could nominate and then elect Donald J. Trump twice.

...either of these parties could easily, by this point, have become Totally Nonviable. This hasn't happened, mostly because both of them are coasting on their legacies, and through spinal reflex doing just enough to keep those legacies on life support. The Republicans are the traditional party of the rich and respectable, and even though they're increasingly unappealing to the country's newer middle-class cadres, they're still the party of Big Tax Cuts etc., which...stanches some of the blood flow. Meanwhile, the Democrats are the traditional party of minorities, and - although they're less and less able to depend on those minorities, as we just saw in the 2024 election - there are enough credible signals that they're Less Racist Than the Other Guys to keep the minorities more-or-less voting for the apparatchiks.

At this point, both parties are mostly selling "at least we're not the other guys." This is a very easy and low-energy thing for them. It requires no vision and relatively little competence; it plays on partisan hate and fear, which are more reliable and easier-to-stoke than hope or inspiration, in an environment suitable to them.

They will both continue selling that thing, rather than anything else, until forced to change. Which is to say, until one of them actually becomes Totally Nonviable and has to spend some time in the wilderness becoming a genuinely different kind of party. (Or, hypothetically, until one of them actually gets replaced by an outside institution. Good luck.)

Which is to say, we are going to be in this nightmarish stalemate until one of the parties breaks the other one over its knee, in the world's most depressing geriatric cage fight. This is actually even more important than it sounds, because the political situation is yoked to the sociocultural situation. We're going to be stuck in some version of this dumbass culture war until there is an ideological power capable of uniting the warring tribes, a power that is stronger than their toxoplasmic hostility to one another; that power could imaginably be a sui generis religious movement or something, but it's much more likely to be some kind of all-encompassing We're Actually Good political thing, a new Reaganism or War Rooseveltism or whatever.

I would strongly prefer for the Democrats to win that fight. I would strongly prefer to be ruled by the bleak sclerotic establishment, during the period when the opposition is getting its shit together and coming back to force a New Better Binary, rather than by a gang of nihilistic hucksters likely to dismantle random parts of the system and to make essentially-random diplomatic gestures to volatile dangerous foreign powers.

Until recently, I would have said that the Democrats were going to win that fight, in the sense that the contemporary Republicans literally couldn't. I thought that nihilistic hucksterism would always provoke enough horror, when given the power to do anything, that the bleak sclerotic establishment would have room to push its way back. Maybe that's still the case. But, like so many people, I've become more pessimistic.

[seat-safety-switch]

It's not fair that I can't use a cool train to get to another city. Sometimes I don't want to drive, or I want to read on the way, or I want to get hammered on the snack lady's cart full of overpriced novelty alcohol. Or, in most cases, it's that my car simply is unlikely to make it without exploding into some sort of Slinky-like arrangement of twisted metal and flaming fluids.

In this particular case, I wanted to buy another hooptie from the adjacent city. It is almost always the case that the desirable shitboxes crop up in the next town over, possibly because I've factory-farmed to extinction all the ones here. It would be silly to drive a car there, only to leave it behind so I could drive the new car back. And all of my friends are tired of my shit, as "give me a ride" often turns into "slowly pace me on the secondary highway for a couple hours while I stop every fifteen minutes to fix something that fell off."

Self-driving cars can't do that, either, because the United Nations decided that it was tantamount to torture to make them watch me do this to their fellow mechanical citizens. Yeah, tell that shit to my dentist, you Volkswagen-loving apparatchiks. Again, a train would be the perfect option, but it doesn't exist, so I have to use the inter-city bus line. That's great: nice and cheap, and it eventually departs and eventually arrives if you're not too worried about when "eventually" is. There's just one big problem.

You see, a bus uses an internal-combustion engine. Don't worry, I'm not going to get all "spinning magnets are the best" on you, I've blown up enough starters and alternators to make a mechanical engineer shit his pants and emotionally regress to preschool. This means that I feel compelled to operate the vehicle. Bus drivers do not like it when you do their job for them, so I spend the entire time biting my hands, trying not to floor the throttle and steer wildly into the left lane. While this is not atypical for bus passengers, it is considered incredibly rude.

As a result, I pretty much just end up playing car-racing videogames on my phone. This doesn't relax me in the least, mostly because Asphalt: Urban GT 2 for the Nokia N-Gage doesn't let you repair rust. How can you trust a car if you can't try to jack it up through the floorboard?

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Tabia Lee

Published: Oct 18, 2023

The blatant antisemitism on college campuses has shocked millions of Americans over the past week and a half.

But not me.

I saw antisemitism on a weekly basis in my two years as a faculty “diversity, equity and inclusion” director.

In fact, I can safely say that toxic DEI ideology deliberately stokes hatred toward Israel and the Jewish people.

I was hired to head the DEI department at Silicon Valley’s De Anza College in 2021.

As a black woman, I was the perfect person for the job — on paper.

Yet I made the mistake of trying to create an authentically inclusive learning environment for everyone, including Jewish students.

Turns out, a toxic form of DEI (which is more accurately called “critical social justice”) demanded I do the opposite.

Before I got to campus, Jewish students had endured a litany of hateful and hostile acts.

The school had hosted a Hanukkah party that featured no Hanukkah imagery but plenty of pro-Palestinian protesters.

The student body had passed resolutions on “divesting” from Israel —  the first college of its kind to do so — and criticizing Israel’s “attacks against humanity.”

Multiple Jewish students told me the campus was essentially an antisemitic environment.

I tried to right this wrong. First, I hosted Jewish speakers on campus, with the goal of promoting diversity and inclusion by sharing different perspectives.

Critics called me a “dirty Zionist,” and the school refused to promote the events.

I then pushed the administration to issue a strong condemnation of antisemitism.

My request was refused. Some campus leaders and colleagues repeatedly told me I shouldn’t raise issues about Jewish inclusion or antisemitism.

I was told in no uncertain terms that Jews are “white oppressors” and our job as faculty and staff members was to “decenter whiteness.”

I was astounded, but I shouldn’t have been.

At its worst, DEI is built on the unshakable belief that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed.

Jews are categorically placed in the oppressor category, while Israel is branded a “genocidal, settler, colonialist state.”

In this worldview, criticizing Israel and the Jewish people is not only acceptable but praiseworthy.

(Just as it’s OK to attack America and white people.)

If you don’t go after them — or worse, if you defend them — you’re actively abetting racist oppression.

I have never encountered a more hostile environment toward the members of any racial, ethnic or religious group.

I was ultimately fired by De Anza College, and I suspect my defense of Jewish students played a part.

Yet I’ve subsequently found that my experience isn’t unique.

Countless faculty and students on campuses nationwide have told me the DEI ideology encourages antisemitism.

One study found 96% of Israel-focused tweets by campus DEI staff criticized the Jewish state.

And that was before Hamas launched its brutal assault on Israel this month.

Now the colleges and universities beholden to DEI are hurting Jewish students with their silence, their moral equivocation about terrorism against Israel or their outright praise of the terrorists.

Many of the student groups most invested in DEI are actively siding with Hamas.

Look no further than “White Coats for Black Lives,” a national group of medical students with chapters in more than 100 public and private universities. 

On Tuesday, just days after Hamas murdered Jewish families in their beds, the DEI-driven group proudly declared it has “long supported Palestine’s struggle for liberation.” 

How could a Jewish patient ever trust a medical trainee or professional who subscribes to such blatant antisemitic hatred?

It’s tantamount to threatening their lives, and it raises questions about whether such hate-filled people should even be allowed to practice medicine.

This outpouring of antisemitic hatred is the direct result of DEI’s insistence that Jews are oppressors.

What started with rhetorical attacks has morphed into defending and calling for violent attacks.

It’s inevitable for an ideology that demeans an entire group of people while accusing them of perpetrating massive injustice.

When you stoke that kind of division and anger, you unleash fires you can’t control.

Sure enough, the fire of antisemitism is now burning bright on college campuses.

It needs to be extinguished immediately so it doesn’t spread and do more damage.

I know just the place to start.

Administrators and lawmakers need to get toxic DEI out of higher education.

If they don’t, there will be no true diversity and inclusion on campus, but there will be even more shocking hatred toward Jews.

Tabia Lee, EdD, is a senior fellow at Do No Harm. 

==

DEI needs to be abolished.

[darkmaga-returns]

On January 19th, TIME magazine published an astonishing article, amply confirming what dissident, anti-war academics, activists, journalists and researchers have argued for a decade. The US always intended to abandon Ukraine after setting up the country for proxy war with Russia, and never had any desire or intention to assist Kiev in defeating Moscow in the conflict, let alone achieving its maximalist aims of regaining Crimea and restoring the country’s 1991 borders. To have a major mainstream outlet finally corroborate this indubitable reality is a seismic development.

The TIME article’s brief first paragraph alone is rife with explosive revelations. It notes when the proxy war erupted in February 2022, then-President Joe Biden “set three objectives for the US response” - and “Ukraine’s victory was never among them.” Moreover, the phrase oft-repeated by White House apparatchiks, that Washington would support Kiev “for as long as it takes”, was never meant to be taken literally. Instead, it was just “intentionally vague” newspeak, with no implied timeframe or even desired outcome in mind.

Eric Green, a member of Biden’s National Security Council who oversaw Russia policy, states the US “deliberately…made no promise” to President Volodymyr Zelensky to “recover all of the land Russia had occupied” since the conflict’s inception, “and certainly not” Crimea or the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. He said the White House believed “doing so was beyond Ukraine’s ability, even with robust help from the West.” It was well-understood such efforts were “not going to be a success story ultimately” for Kiev, if tried.