#Soviet Union discourse blog

[centrally-unplanned]

A fun story, but ehhhhhhhhh a few things:

Whether measured in terms of access to an independent unit, floor space, or quality of services, housing shortage is a very serious problem in the USSR... the current [1989] average level is 15.8 square meters of usable space per capita, but due to the unequal distribution of housing the median is about 12 square meters. This is less than half of the average of Western Europe, and there are major differences in housing quality and efficiency. According to the 1989 census, about 13 percent of reporting households indicated that they did not have a separate housing unit and instead lived in such accommodations as communal apartments (5 percent) and workers’ hostels (6 percent) or renting space (2 percent).... Communal apartments, where several families share the same kitchen, bathrooms, toilets and corridors, are still prevalent, especially in cities with an old housing stock such as Leningrad, where 36 percent of the population was still living in such apartments in 1986...The USSR has one of the most severe shortages among socialist countries, which as a group performed consistently worse than market economies. Indeed, the ratio of households to dwellings in the USSR increased again during the 1980s...The current ratio implies that a large proportion of new social needs is unmet each year and that the backlog is expanding. The basic target of one housing unit per household set for year 2000 is unlikely to be reached. Another ratio with particular political visibility in the USSR is the number of persons per room; Lenin had defined housing adequacy as having one person per room. This criterion was originally used to reallocate existing units among workers. In Western countries, there are more rooms (usually one or two) than persons. In the USSR the usual situation for new units is still that the number of rooms is one or two below the number of persons. On average there were 1.4 persons per room in 1989. In state housing the ratio is 1.5, in private housing 1.2, and in communal apartments 1.8 person per room.

The Soviet Union sucked at constructing housing in comparison to Western countries. I have discussed this before so just quote dumping this one, but the USSR had many, many people living in shoddily constructed slum-like structures, and the majority lived in ludicrously cramped conditions - having your own room was a luxury. The way the Soviet Union "solved" homelessness (it didn't) was extremely simple - it was illegal to be homeless. Begging, 'wandering the streets', or other activities were classified as "disrupting the social order", and based on severity of the crime & context one would be sent back to one's registered family unit, placed in non-voluntary 'disability institutions' (the internat), or thrown in jail/sent to forced labor camps. Those who kept to the social order but lived in slums would wait in queue for new housing to go online that, by the late 1970's, was growing longer over time, not shorter, as the pace of household formation was outrunning housing construction.

See, the US could fix its homelessness problem this way. Homeless people...have families? Being human beings and all. You could A: make being homeless criminally illegal and actually enforce that, by B: mandating that those people go live in their state-recognized family domicile, regardless of the reasons they no longer do that, and C: throwing in institutions or jail those who can't or won't comply. If you think this is the right idea, you are in luck - vote for Donald Trump! He and his party would probably support your idea, I think you have a political home! Just...not the one you think you do.

I grant the USSR was not as bad at housing in comparison to other sectors of its economy, it was a 'relative strength' as one might say. The USSR was a poor country, particularly once you factor in that it was devoting ludicrous sums of money to its military, so its housing was bad, but not awful, for how poor it was, and it even had a few good ideas. However, given that so many countries today aren't poor, those places have little to learn from the USSR, having already eclipsed it fully. There is virtually no problem liberal developed countries have today that "Soviet housing" can help solve.

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ALSO BRUTALISM ISN'T SOVIET don't worry this part is wildly uncharitable I am just doing my thing here but it wasn't like a Soviet identity. They definitely have their share of it and built a bunch, don't get me wrong, but they didn't invent it (Sweden/France), they didn't formalize it (France+UK), they didn't push it to its limits (Yugoslavia), and they didn't even particularly love it. Many Kruschevkas, the "brutalist peak" of Soviet architecture, were brick, many were painted, Soviet office buildings moved toward glass-heavy modernist constructions, etc. They used *concrete* a lot, yes, but so did everyone, and using concrete in a building doesn't make it brutalist. Literally a "5-and-1", that modern US new construction thing, is a concrete podium with wood-framed upper floors, it has an entire base floor of concrete. Doesn't make it brutalist.

The Soviet Union had its time in the 60's with brutalism, and did enjoy it, but actually had large issues with it - in the end the USSR was supposed to be prettier, in an everyman sort of way, than the west. That was The Point of the system after all. Stalinist architecture was intensely neoclassical - like the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building, and then both during and after the 60's wave modernist styles were the ideal, a sort of "futurist" soviet building. While meanwhile everyman housing would use brick/concrete combos and often look like this, not really brutalist.

Now Eastern Europe did go more heavily into this style, Yugoslavia most notably and also places like Poland & East Germany. But West Germany built as many "brutalist" (I'm just setting aside the "is a random concrete apartment building brutalist by default" debate right now) mass-scale concrete apartment complexes as East Germany did. The reason you think of them as "Soviet" - actually more Warsaw Pact but again w/e - is that West Germany turned out to not like them too much and demolished a lot of them! As did France, and the UK, and so on. Now that Eastern Europe is getting richer they are demolishing a ton of them too - I highly recommend visiting New Belgrade now, because it only has a few years left as the palace of Third Way Brutalism. Hell, its been a while for me - it might already be lost.

When mass photography and the internet made a post-soviet Russia & Eastern Europe available to the world, what you were seeing was not, with a few exceptions, a love affair with Brutalism that the West never had. What you are seeing is the poverty of the Soviet system unable to build fast enough to replace the ex everyone else already moved on from 30 years ago.

i think soviet brutalist architecture is good because it houses countless people who would otherwise have starved on the streets and i think that's fundamentally good no matter what the building looks like and every dipshit who thinks they're dystopian because big concrete building scary are implicitly saying their aesthetic values matter more than human life

[somerabbitholes]

do you have any book or essay recs that are eye-opening or ones that challenges your thought process if u get what I mean

100%, here is writing that shifted something inside me:

Books

Figuring by Maria Popova: about how genius and creativity is a human project; she looks at all these ways in which ideas connect with each other; the book is just a really beautiful exploration of how the search for truth and beauty is a human project. She also runs a blog which is very good

The Lonely City by Olivia Laing has forever changed how I think about loneliness for the better, and I can only hope to have something as beautiful to say someday

Invisible Women by Caroline C Perez: I'm putting this here more because it could put in numbers and quantify the levels of gender disparity, and to my mind, give a sharper edge to the conversation that was feeling very abstract and theoretical to me

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman: this is a difficult read, mostly because the book is a 1,000-page stream of consciousness that is basically one long sentence. I loved it, and at the end of it I remember going wow, you thought this book up

A similar feeling came from reading The Indian Ideology by Perry Anderson, but I want to point out that this is a book that requires a reasonable level of familiarity with the discourse on secularism, democracy and social justice in India

The Tribe by Carlos Manuel Alvarez: essays, part-memoir, part-notes from journalism, about Cuba in the 2010s and especially after Castro died. It was such an excellent glimpse into what living during and through this shadow of the Cold War could be like

I'm currently reading Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, which does a similar thing with Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and until the mid-2010s. It's very very interesting and heartbreaking and emotive and informative all at once seeing how the Russian people thought about the end of the Cold War

Essays (there are definitely more, but I’m the worst at remembering names)

Geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance by Willem van Schendel

The Trouble with Wilderness by William Cronon

Marrying Libraries by Anne Fadiman (if this is not what love is, I don't want it)

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical by John Rawls

Fences by Zadie Smith (I read this in her collection, Feel Free but I think you can find it online too)

[therealvinelle]

What does Norway think of the us

Far too many things for me to begin to cover in a tumblr post.

Suffice to say: we arguably owe our welfare and current standing in the world and inarguably our liberty as a nation to the US. This has shaped our domestic and foreign policies for the past 80 years, and we are currently breathing into a paper bag about the fact that Uncle Sam is talking about breaking up with us.

Also beware, there are matters in this post which are a matter of political opinion (rare for this blog, I know), and there are nightmareishly long paragraphs in here, so read at own risk and sorry about the long paragraphs.

Readmore for length and in case I need to make edits.

Norway, the war, and the Marshall Help

Imagine: your country is invaded by Nazis in 1940, and remains occupied for five years. When you are liberated, your country's gold reserve is depleted, many places bombed, and the entirety of Northern Norway is so badly ravaged that the population is evacuated and the region deemed uninhabitable (you'll notice, today, the architecture up north is new. All of it.). To say nothing of the human toll: one third of our Jewish population was slaughtered in Auschwitz, the country is littered in war memorials and tombstones of men shot or otherwise killed by Germans, and every family has at least one wartime story.

(I will take a note to say that it's our own occupation that comes to mind when I see the war and genocide happening in Ukraine. The differences are many, but the shared horror of an invasion, the fact that this happens on European mainland and is perpetrated by a country we share a border with, makes it feel extremely close. More, if Ukraine loses... I'll get into that further below, but suffice to say "Norway's defense budget" these days is labelled "Ukraine aid")

What are you going to do when peace comes, and the time to rebuild is upon you? Well, it so happens the rest of Europe is asking itself that same question, and the United States meanwhile sees an opportunity to both help its allies, strengthen our bonds so that we'll be on the same side for the foreseeable future, and weaken the communist sympathies in Europe. It's a win-win type of deal, and so the Marshall aid is launched: billions of dollars ($13 billion then, $178 adjusted for inflation) are poured into Europe, bolstering the post-war economy and allowing the countries which accepted (all of Western Europe, save Spain and Finland. Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union declined as well.) to get back to their feet much sooner.

It's in this context that Norway's government's plans of a welfare society were possible to realize. Perhaps we would have managed it anyway, but the historically recorded fact is we did it with the help of the USA.

Then there's NATO, that beautiful response to not only the Eastern threat, but to the naivety that had reigned prior to World War II. Hitler had... helped himself... to increasing chunks of Europe, and country leaders kept saying "Well I don't want war, and I'm sure he'll be satisfied after that. Oh no, he invaded Poland?! Oh well I'm sure he'll be satisfied with- oh no, he's entered France!"

NATO means "Invade one, you fight us all", and while it may have come to mean "one invades Afghanistan, so now I guess we're all going" and even "boy Ukraine is having it rough huh. But we can't do anything without getting NATO involved, and that'll launch a new world war :/", and de facto "if NATO ever acts against Russia that will be world war three. Hang on, what's NATO for then?", NATO at its core still means "I am in NATO, so Uncle Sam will protect me. :)"

Which makes countries like Norway feel very safe. And, I cannot overemphasize, is why we've felt safe for the past 70+ years.

Which brings us to the next section.

That border. That border!!

If you look at a map of Norway, you'll see a long and happy border to Sweden. There has been much discourse (and war, war, war) over that border, I for one still think it would be nice if they gave us back Bohuslän, but overall we are very close and good allies.

Look a little further up, however. Yes, past the border to Finland.

Is that...

(photo credit)

Oh no, it's Russia!

This hasn't always been an oh no. We lived peacefully side by side frankly always, and the Soviets liberated Finnmark from the Nazis which was wonderful of them. Then Norway accepted the Marshall Aid, however, and while our governing party had had strong communist sympathies prior to the war (and after...) this cemented our ties to the United States. Our side in the Cold War had been chosen.

Border relations with Russia have been good, they have had to be good, but NATO was our safety and security during a very tense period of time. (This comedy skit is very funny but... kind of true... as does the entire Whaledimir debacle (adorable whale charmed the country, but was Whaledimir a Russian spy? Somehow, the answer appears to be yes.) The Russo-Ukrainian war has made relations historically bad, however. (Norwegian news article on the topic, if you feel like translating.)

Where am I going with this?

Norway has a shared border with Russia. Norway would not be capable of defending Finnmark if Russia invaded from the shared border, and having Sweden and Finland join NATO makes us feel better but the defense strategy has still been (and remains) "we defend what we can until US reinforcements arrive". One of the sexiest things the US has done this year was send a massive war ship sailing into our waters, just to say hello and show off their presence. MUCH APPRECIATED.

And, again, this might seem very remote and like the plot of a bad political thriller to the cursory anon and even to many Norwegians, but we were invaded in the last century, we have a shared border, a strategically important coastline and a lot of natural resources (oil!), and should Ukraine (god forbid) lose the war, the question will be this: what does Russia do next? What, specifically, does NATO and the US do if Putin for instance decides to take Svalbard? Is anyone risking nuclear war over Svalbard? What about Finmark? What about cyber attacks, underwater cable att- oh wait there were two underwater cables cut open yesterday.

Gee, that's not worrying at all.

In summation

America is a very important trade partner, and the cultural and political influence you have on us (on all of Europe, really) is immense. I imagine most asked would focus on that, especially on Norway's thoughts on the election, but you asked me and so you get my answer. Your election was a sports match to us (or at least covered by media and social media like one).

I will say this: Trump's first victory had us worried, and we have spent more on defense since then, but his second victory proves the first was not a fluke and the United States is shifting away from us. This is not something we can influence, as it is the will of the American people (or at the very least what they voted for), what we must do is adapt. I, a lifelong opponent to Norway joining the European Union, now see no other way if Norway is to prosper (though the EU also needs a major makeover to survive now, on our own without the US we are all shaking in our knees here in Europe). Likewise, to paraphrase a very good op-ed, Norway's national security neither can depend on a few undecided voters in Wisconsin who aren't thinking about Europe or Norway at all, nor should it.

We have been too dependent on the United States, this has been mutually beneficial and if it was up to us, this wouldn't change (I am now ignoring a faction on the far left which has been saying "Guys, I have a great idea: we should leave NATO :)" and another faction on the far right which is so eager to please Trump-senpai they think Norway is supporting Ukraine's effort because we're stupid), sadly it seems the US wants it to change.

We shall see what happens.

[mwg-drwg]

Welcome guide for redditors

A lot of the guides I've seen don't actually seem to understand how reddit works in comparison to tumblr so I'm here to fix that

"Following" blogs is the same as "subscribing" to a "subreddit" be sure to "follow" "lots" "of" Blogs "."

You can edit other peoples posts on tumblr, to do this reblog a post and retype the entire post in the way you'd like and tag it with #edit

Reblogs are used in the same way as comments you should reblog and type your thoguhts always, be sure to @ the person who made the post or they wont see it

engage in discourse it is the best way to attract like minded followers to your profile

when engaging in discourse be sure to shoehorn in sick burns as people respond well to this

to start a new post you just need to reblog someone elses post and add your post underneath tumblr automatically seperates your new post from the reblog

This website has rules against talking about the soviet union brought in by the new owners, we are trying to get this removed it is just like the reddit shutoff protest - section 3.4 of these rules is the worst, on google search "SU rule 3.4" to find out more as i cant discuss it here

use 3 colours on your post to help people see it better

if people dont respond to your post you reblog it with popular words like "swag" and "top post" - the algorithm will boost your post!

threats of violence are allowed and encouraged

at the end of the day you should write a "post summary" in your diary and file it away

write "PROTECT ME" on posts that frighten you

pray at the end of the day after every post if possible

god won't be so merciful

push over a pedestrian when possible

release GMO micro organisms into the envrionment

murder wihtout consequence

tags are reblogs

reblogs are follows

follow for follow to make a mutual send the 6 asks daily to maintain this

if they unfollow you send them repeated asks about it it was obviously a mistake youre so funny

report people who post about "vriska" as this is a homophobic and transphobic dogwhistle

[arcticdementor]

When we hear the term “Deep State,” we tend to think of people staffing the federal bureaucracy. I want to suggest to you that that is an incomplete way to think about it. The Deep State in Western liberal democracies consist not only of government bureaucrats, but also of the leadership in major corporations, leading universities, top media, medicine and law, science, the military, and even sports. A more accurate way to think about what we are dealing with comes from the Neoreactionary term “the Cathedral,” which NRxers use in more or less the same way that 1950s Beats used the term “the Establishment.” I like the term “Cathedral” because it entails the religious commitment these elites have to their principles. You can no more debate these principles with them than you can debate with a religious fundamentalist. They adhere to them as if they were revealed truths.

Yet they still like to pretend that they are liberals — that they favor open, reasoned discourse. This is, in fact, a lie. It is a lie that they depend on to conceal the hegemonic intolerance that they wish to impose on everybody under their authority.

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It is true that no society can tolerate everything. What the Cathedral is now doing is radically limiting discourse, and demonizing as heretics all those within its purview who dissent, no matter how reasonable their objections. (And now Facebook is incentivizing some of its users to report their friends as potential “extremists.” Please get off Facebook now!) The Cathedral seeks to make all of society over in the mold of a college campus. The Cathedral is growing ever more radical. In recent months, we have seen the US military embrace wokeness (to use the slang term for the most vibrant and activist form of the Cathedral’s religion). You would think that it makes no sense for the leadership of a racially diverse armed forces to embrace and indoctrinate its officers in a neo-Marxist theory that causes everyone to see everyone else primarily in hostile racial terms, but that is exactly what has happened. In time — and not much time, either — we are going to see young people who were once from families and social classes that once were the most stalwart supporters of the military declining to join the armed forces in which they are taught that they are guilty by virtue of their skin color.

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That’s the Cathedral and its values. The Cathedral has also taken over corporate America, and the professions. I hardly need to elaborate on this further, not for regular readers of this blog. It was a hard knock this past week to see that the US Supreme Court, which some of us had thought would be the last line of defense for anybody traditional in this soft-totalitarian Cathedral theocracy, refused to take on the Gavin Grimm case, and the Barronelle Stutzman case. The Cathedral line in favor of privileging LGBTs over religious people and secular people who don’t accept the full LGBT gospel is hardening.

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I realized over the weekend why I have been so affected by the experience of being here in Hungary these past three months. It has clarified for me the nature of this conflict. First, take a look at this powerful piece by Angela Nagle, writing about the views of Irish intellectual and cultural critic Desmond Fennell. 

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What does this have to do with Hungary? Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his government have brought down the wrath of European Union leaders over Hungary’s recent law restricting sex education for children, and information about LGBT presented to children. The prime minister of the Netherlands, in extraordinarily bellicose language, threatened to “bring Hungary to its knees” over the law. I am reliably informed by an American source in a position to know that in Washington, even among conservative elites, Viktor Orban is seen as nothing but a fascist. I have been writing all summer about the radical disjunction between Hungary as it is, and Hungary as described by Western elite discourse (media and otherwise). This is by no means to say that Orban’s government is flawless — it certainly is not; corruption, for example, is a big deal here — but to say that there has to be some reason why Western elites of both the Left and the Right despise Hungary so intensely, and slander it so.

There’s a lesson in all this, I believe, for where conservatives and traditionalists in the West are, and where we are likely to go. I have come to believe that the standard left-liberal and right-liberal critiques of Orban — “Magyar Man Bad” — are just as shallow as the “Orange Man Bad” critique of Donald Trump. I say that as someone who was critical of Trump myself, though I credited him for smashing the complacent GOP establishment. I write this blog post in the spirit of Tucker Carlson’s excellent January 2016 Politico piece titled, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar, and Right.”

I’ve been reading lately a 2019 book, The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes. Both men are liberal scholars who undertake to explain why liberalism failed in Central Europe and Russia after the fall of the Cold War. It’s a remarkably insightful book, one that any conservative with an interest in the problem should read, even though its authors are liberal democrats. They write:

A refusal to genuflect before the liberal West has become the hallmark of the illiberal counter-revolution throughout the post-communist world and beyond. Such a reaction cannot be casually dismissed with the trite observation that “blaming the West” is a cheap way for non-Western leaders to avoid taking responsibility for their own failed policies. The story is much more convoluted and compelling than that. It is a story, among other things, of liberalism abandoning pluralism for hegemony. [Emphasis mine — RD]

You would have thought that in any reasonable pluralistic polity, a sovereign nation choosing to restrict what its children can learn about human sexuality would be of little interest to other nations within that polity. After all, Hungary is not France any more than Estonia is England. There is an immense amount of diversity in Europe. But see, the Cathedral’s liberalism — whether in America or in the EU — is not pluralistic, but hegemonic.

Krastev and Holmes (henceforth, “the authors”) point out that after 1989, the West expected Central European countries to imitate them in every way. The authors — who, remember, are liberals — write:

Without pressing the analogy too far, it’s interesting to observe that the style of regime imitation that took hold after 1989 bears an eerie resemblance to Soviet-era elections where voters, overseen by Party officials, pretended to “choose” the only candidates who were running for office.

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The authors explain that the reforms demanded by the West weren’t like “grafting a few foreign elements onto indigenous traditions,” but rather “put inherited identity at risk” and stoked “fears of cultural erasure.” From my perspective, this is what you see when you get over here and start looking more closely at what George Soros and people like him, both within and outside of government, did, and seek to do. And so, as the authors put it:

[P]opulism’s political rise cannot be explained without taking account of widespread resentment at the way (imposed) no-alternative Soviet communism, after 1989, was replaced by (invited) no-alternative Western liberalism.

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know about Viktor Orban. After the 2008 crash, Western governments bailed out banks left and right. When Orban came to power in 2010, he chose not to do that, instead taking the side of hard-pressed Hungarian homeowners who had been allowed to take out home loans in Swiss francs. He and his party passed a law to protect homeowners at the expense of the banks.

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Remember, they wrote this in 2019, but think of this principle applied to now. If you are Viktor Orban, and you look to the West in 2021, you see a United States that is destroying itself with Critical Race Theory wokeness, which is starting to come to Western Europe. You see the Left here in Hungary starting to embrace it (e.g., the Black Lives Matter statue the liberal Budapest city government erected earlier this year), and you know that it will be bad for your country if this poisonous ideology takes root. So you encourage Hungary’s national soccer team not to take the knee before matches.

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And so, the disintegrating West, headed towards shipwreck, is going to bring Hungary to its knees for trying to protect itself.

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The authors go on to say that what it means to be a good Western liberal is changing so fast that people in the East never know for sure what vision of society they are supposed to imitate. Think about what it was like for us Americans. I was born in 1967, and educated by schools, by the media, and by every aspect of culture to believe in Dr. Martin Luther King’s colorblind vision. I took it seriously, and I believed in it, and do believe in it. But now the same liberals who argued for that are now arguing that this vision was wrong — that to truly be against racism, you must train yourself to think in exactly the same categories that white segregationists used prior to the Civil Rights revolution. It makes no sense. You come to understand that you have been conned. Never, ever believe liberals: they will change the rules on you, and blame you for your own confusion.

The authors go on to say that sex education in the schools has been a huge flashpoint of conflict within Central and Eastern European societies. It has to do with parents losing the ability to transmit their values to their children. In the flush of post-1989 enthusiasm, young people didn’t so much rebel against their parents as to feel pity for them, and to stop listening to them. The young took their catechism from the Western cathedral. Sex ed was a neuralgic point of the overall struggle between Central European populists, who believed that the traditions and the national heritage of these countries were in danger of being wiped out by the West. Imagine, then, what Hungarian voters must think when they hear the Dutch prime minister threaten to bring their country to its knees because he knows better what they should be teaching their children than they do.

The authors tell a story about how Viktor Orban, at the time an up-and-coming liberal from the countryside, was publicly humiliated by a well-known liberal MP from Budapest’s urban intelligentsia, who adjusted Orban’s tie at a reception, as if doing a favor for a hick cousin.

They go on to explain Orban’s illiberalism by quoting his criticism that liberalism is “basically indifferent to the history and fate of the nation.” Liberal universalism “destroys solidarity,” Orban believes. (“If everybody is your brother, then you are an only child.”) Orban believes that liberal policies will lead to the dissolution of the Hungarian nation because liberals by nature think of the nation as an impediment to the realization of their ideals.

The authors go on to say that Orban has long campaigned on the abuse of the public patrimony by the regime that governed Hungary after 1989, when Communist insiders used their connections to plunder what was left of the public purse, and left the weak to fend for themselves. This attitude explains Orban’s hostility to the banks after the 2008 crash. “[I]n Central and Eastern Europe, defending private property and capitalism came to mean defending the privileges illicitly acquired by the old communist elites,” they write.

(Readers, did you know any of this context about Orban and other critics of liberalism from Central Europe? Doesn’t it make you wonder what more you’re not being told?)

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What’s preposterous about it? I know these guys are liberals, but what Duda identifies is the difference between soft totalitarianism and hard totalitarianism. In both cases, the Poles don’t get to decide for themselves.

There’s more to the book, but I’ll stop here for today. You don’t have to believe that Viktor Orban or any of these other politicians are saints in order to understand why they believe what they believe — and why people vote for them. The Cathedral did the same thing to Trump and to Trump’s supporters. Yes, there were some Trump voters with disreputable motives, and in any case Trump was by and large not an effective president. But the anti-Trump opposition’s passionate belief in its own righteousness rendered it helpless to understand why so many people hated it, and do hate it still. Trump’s own incompetence made it harder to take that critique seriously.

Trump lost, and most everything he did was wiped away by his successor. Viktor Orban wins — and that is the unforgiveable sin in the eyes of the Cathedral.

Here is the radicalizing thing, though. As you will know if you’ve been reading this blog, Viktor Orban appears to be building a conservative deep state in Hungary. His government has transferred a fortune in public funds and authority over some universities to privately controlled institutions. It is difficult to accept this, at least for me. At the same time, it is impossible for me to look at what has happened in my own country, with the Cathedral now extending its control over every aspect of American life, and to criticize Orban for this. The alternative seems to be surrendering your country and its traditions to the Cathedral, which pretends to be liberal, but which is in fact growing even more authoritarian and intolerant than anything Orban and his party stand for.

It is becoming harder to think of liberalism in the sense we have known it as viable anymore. Me, I would actually prefer to live in a more or less liberal, pluralistic society, where California was free to be California, and Louisiana free to be Louisiana, and so forth. This is not the world we live in.

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The controversy around Viktor Orban is not only about an obstreperous Hungarian politician who doesn’t play well with others. It’s about the future of the West.

UPDATE: To put it succinctly, we might need soft authoritarianism to save us from soft totalitarianism.

[radiumeater]

another american speaking over slavs and their life experience with communism

Wild how certain anti-communist radical feminists will go on and on about how the “lived experience” model of discourse is completely bunk and how we need to look at the actual statistics rather than bowing down before every individual anecdotewhen it comes to the topic of, say, prostitution and western “sex workers” talking about how “great” it is, but the moment someone even vaguely from a post-socialist state says something bad about communism it’s taken as gospel. In reality, much like with the “sex work” example, individual testimonies are useless without the context in which those individuals had those experiences, because different people living within different contexts experience the same situations differently. Any “my grandfather was shot by the communists” story is worthless without an examination of class character in every aspect of this story, from the grandfather to the specific period in which he existed to the person telling the story. Looking at the actual statistics and general evidence on the period paints a different story than the one put forward by the types to whine about american communists “talking over” anti-communist eastern europeans (all the while said anti-communist eastern europeans find themselves talking over the mass of pro-communist eastern europeans, the majority of the populace who saw a decline in living conditions after the dismantling of socialism). Polls show: Eastern Europeans miss Communism.Majority of Eastern Germans Feel Life Better under CommunismAn experiment in living socialism: Bulgaria then and nowWe Lived Better Then

Confidence in Democracy and Capitalism Wanes in Former Soviet Union

Declining Support for Move to Market Economy& Many Say Economic Situation Is Worse Today

Hungary: Better Off Under Communism?In Romania, Opinion Polls Show Nostalgia for CommunismPoll: Many Czechs say they had better life under CommunismFormer Soviet Countries See More Harm From BreakupSerbia Poll: Life Was Better Under TitoIn Russia, nostalgia for Soviet Union and positive feelings about StalinPeople in Georgia, Russia, Armenia and Moldova more likely to have a favorable view of Stalin than GorbachevI would also recommend looking into the tumblr blogs juchechat, thesovietbroadcast, and stalinsociety. 

[daveslutstaine]

This is a free coupon/excuse for you to infodump on the current topic you're obsessed with. Take some time away from internet discourse and share with us something you find interesting! ✨

YEEE AAAAAAAAH BABY okay so there's this composer that I've been really getting into lately and no it's not Vivaldi. Though I love my little funky Italian man that will always hold a special place in my heart, this one is a different guy whose pieces trigger something in me that I cannot explain. His name is Dmitri Shostackovich and I've been obsessing over two pieces of his in particular and those are Waltz No. 2 which was written for the Soviet Union's Jazz Orchestra and AAAA let me tell you it is a beautiful piece! It feels familiar, yet it feels so new. I guess that's because it reminds me of Tchaikovsky in a way, and I grew up with Tchaikovsky so that's probably why. It also reminds me of a song on the game Skull Girls, so that's probably another reason why it seems so familiar to me. I can't get over how pretty it is! It's so somber and joyful at the same time!

Oh and another piece of his that I've been obsessively listening to for quite some time is String Quartet No. 15! I've mentioned this is posts before but I've genuinely contemplated making it my blogs' music on the mp3 player I have on it. You know that one song that you find and you go "YES! This is it! Finally a song that resonates with That One Emotion I keep feeling but can never find anything that matches it!" Well that's what that song is to me. Fun little fact about this song, after it was rehearsed by a quartet that Shostackovich had presented it to, one of the cellists died unexpectedly the next day. Well that's not a very "fun" fact so to speak of, but I found it interesting nonetheless.

Another work of his I really like is String Quartet No 8. which is probably the most recognizable of his work, or at least it was for me. I don't remember where or when I heard it, but I remember shooting up in bed while listening to it one night and going "Oh so it's THAT song". Again I don't recall when or where I heard it, but man that was a strong memory it triggered. Anyway it's a lovely song, and the borodin quartet did such a wonderful job playing it! I once read that when Shostackovich heard them play his composition, he cried afterwards. Apparently this was a really personal piece for him. I heard he dedicated it to the victims of the WW2, or as he put it, "to the victims of fascism", though I have read that one of his friends said that it was a eulogy of sorts for him, and that he was planning to take his life afterwards, though I cannot confirm or deny that.

Anyway I really really like this composer! I wish I could get into his head and see how he thinks and how he came up with these and just poke around in his head a little. I've seen images of him with his pet pigs and that's just cute to me! I don't like him like that or anything, I think he's a fascinating guy ya know? I could go on and on about him and his works but this response is already long and incoherent enough. Maybe in the future I'll make much more coherent posts about him and his works, but for right now, I think I'll leave this as is. Thank you so much for this btw ❤❤❤❤

[robwilsonimages]

Reading Images

Rob Wilson

Blog Entry 2

28th October 2019

The previous article discussed the necessity of applying critical thought to your images as a photographer. In this entry, I shall apply ‘Critical thinking as a careful and sensitive reading of the text’ (Moore, 2013, p. 514) to two of Stephen Shore’s images from Uncommon Places (2015). ‘Uncommon Places’ is a critical resource for my own MA project. It serves as both an inspiration and a reference point. Therefore, an understanding and detailed analysis of the book is vital as I move forward with my own work.

 Reading Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places

Reading and interpreting a photograph is difficult. As Burgin (2003, p. 131) states:

‘The intelligibility of the photograph is no simple thing; photographs are texts inscribed in terms of what we may call ‘photographic discourse’, but this discourse, like any other, engages discourse beyond itself, the ‘photographic text’, like any other, is the site of a complex ‘intertextuality’, an overlapping series of previous texts taken for granted at a particular cultural and historical conjunction.’

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s most famous image illustrates the challenges of understanding this ‘intertextuality’ of meaning.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint Lazare, 1932

Cartier-Bresson’s own words illustrate his feelings and intentions about his work. It applies perfectly to this image.

‘Above all, I craved to see the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.’ (1952, in Scott (2007), p. 212)

This is photography’s decisive moment, yet it is viewed in multiple ways. For Time magazine (2015, pp. 190-191) the jumping man ‘evoke[s] the dancers in the poster behind him’, and the image was ‘a masterpiece of form and light’. For Clarke (1997, p. 208), ‘The image is full of humour, of irony, but also full of implied philosophical reflection on what the moment might mean and how it is to be read’. Philip Jones-Griffiths viewed the photograph very differently. For him, the photography was a harbinger of the doom that was to strike Europe. He noted the Jewish name on the wall, the wreckage in the water, and the man jumping ‘into the unknown’.

‘He (Bresson-Cartier) was Nostrodamus. He predicted what was going to happen to Europe in that one single image.’ (The Genius of Photography, 2007)

There is no single reading of any one image. Fortunately, the work of photographers, cultural theorists, and semioticians has provided us with means with which to analyse and interpret photographs. A particularly useful toolset was provided by Shore himself in The Nature of Photographs (2007), most particular the four factors used to consider images at a ‘depictive level’ (pp. 37-96). These are: flatness, frame, time, and focus. Additionally, Bate (2016, pp. 25-43) offers a guide to semiotic analysis, most usefully in his discussion of rhetoric in photography (pp. 35-43). It is these tools that will be used to ‘read’ two images from Uncommon Places (Shore, 2015).

 Placing Shore’s Work

Shore’s Uncommon Places is difficult to place in any particular photographic genre; it is neither conventional landscape photography as notably made by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, or Faye Godwin, nor is it documentary photography produced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Don McCullin, Raghubir Singh among countless others. Yet, it contains elements of both. It documents American towns, cities, parks, and life, but is formalised in the style of classic landscape photography as, like many of the most notable landscape photographers, Shore made the images using a large-format view camera which requires a notoriously slow and meticulous shooting process.

Soutter (2013, p. 34), when discussing Church Street and Second Street, Easton, Pennsylvania, 1974, states that:

‘The viewpoint of the image places us right on the street and makes us aware of the photographer’s physical presence.’

This is not just true of this image, but of all those in Uncommon Places. The viewer is there on the street next to Shore as he works. Equally, the German photographic artist, Hilla Becher, felt that Shore represented the places he photographed with warmth and fondness (Soutter, 2013, p. 34). His generosity towards the geography of American and attention to detail are present in every single image.

Stephen Shore, Horseshoe Bend Motel, Lovell, Wyoming, July 16, 1973 (2015, p. 23)

Like much of Shore’s work, many would consider it banal. The image, with its absence of people, feels deliberately static. Yet, analysis reveals a meticulously composed image.  When we first examine it, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the sign on the left for ‘Horseshoe Bend Motel’. Our eyes pause for a moment before moving to the vivid first rainbow and the larger hotel sign on the right. We then move forward in a shallow ‘C’ curve through the picture from the lorry and its trailers, to the old trucks, before we finally rest on the green car. It is only on a further viewing do we notice the second rainbow.

The physical photograph itself may be flat, but the image is full of depth and detail. The placement of the vehicles, at clock points, is remarkable. The lorry is at almost two o’clock, the aquamarine truck at three o’clock, the blue truck at five, and the green car at seven. The framing suggests a world continuing beyond. The roads heading out of the frame hint that a journey lies beyond what we see. We cannot see the front of the green car. Where does it point? What is in front of it?

The America of this picture is in 1973 and it is a dark time in its history. It was the year of the crimes of Watergate. US involvement in the Vietnam War was reaching an unsuccessful conclusion with the withdrawal of American troops and the initial release of POWs. The Cold War with the Soviet Union was, despite summits between the two, still at its height. From October, the global economy is rocked by the Oil Crisis introduced by OPEC as a response to the backing of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. 

Yet, in the image, time seems lost. The place appears slightly dated and forgotten even for its time; the blue and aquamarine trucks far predate the image hinting at a more innocent pre-Vietnam America. However, beyond some slightly overgrown grass, the scene is not shabby or broken. The hotel signage is well kept, but their dull browns emphasize the forgottenness further still. It is devoid of human life. The hotel sign begs us to return, but the viewer will only return to the picture and not to the place nor to the America before Vietnam. Yet, there is a hint of hope. The rainbows and clearing cloud encourage us to look to a brighter future and better things to come for the Horseshoe Bend Motel, and for America itself.

Stephen Shore, Church Street and Second Street, Easton, Pennsylvania, June 20, 1974 (p. 55)

This image, also of an everyday scene, offers us a single-point perspective on a street that recedes into the distance before it turns right and disappearing out of sight. Beyond the road is a wooded suburban area of trees and houses that intimate at further worlds beyond the frame. Above, the sky is bright, but overcast. Little shadow can be seen in the picture. Our consideration of the receding street and sky is interrupted by a large grey and green building. In front of the building sits a striking red VW Combi, the vehicle of choice for hippies in the 1960s and 1970s; it is a symbol of alternative exploration and travel.

Above the Combi, caught in time, is a boy sitting in the window. On the window, below the boy, something illegible is printed. It is only a very close examination that reveals the writing is the sign for a dentist’s office. This close examination reveals a final surprise: the boy has breathed onto the window and created a fog. Without the boy and his fog, the picture would be, as is consistent with Uncommon Places, beautifully composed. However, there would be little of further interest. He and his fog are, without a doubt, perfect exemplars of Barthes’s punctum (1980).

We, the viewers, consider who the boy is and why he is at the dentist. We also question what his relationship is with the VW Combi. Is the vehicle there to collect him? Is it his mode of escape? Most of all though, we wonder why he has blown a breath-fog over the window. Is it some small act of rebellion, is he keeping himself amused, or is it just boredom?

Shore himself, when discussing this image gives valuable insight.

‘I am relying on the descriptive power of the camera to make a complex picture that the viewer moves their attention through. So, what I am doing is creating a small world for the viewer to explore rather the impression of what its like to look through my eyes.’ (MOMA, 2015)

It is through that descriptive power that we are brought into the picture and our attention drawn, most particularly, into the boy’s world. He signifies the frustration that everyone who has lived in a dull suburbia has felt: a desperation to break the monotony and a desire to find something interesting to do. It is through his escape route, the hippy’s Combi, that his desperation and desire can possibly be fulfilled.

At a superficial level, the two images are similar. They feature scenes of everyday America that are initially unrelenting in their ordinariness. Yet, careful consideration reveals to the viewer universal truths about our suburban geographies: the hope and promise of brighter and more interesting futures among the banal. This leads us to a truth about all the images in Uncommon Places: there is always something more going on beneath the surface.

  References

Barthes, R. (1980). Camera Lucida. 2010 ed. New York: Hill and Wang.

Bate, D. (2016). Photography: The Key Concepts. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury.

Burgin, V. (2003). Looking at Photographs. In: L. Wells, ed. The Photography Reader. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 130-137.

Cartier-Bresson, H. (1952). The Decisive Moment. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Clarke, G. (1997). The Photograph. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

MOMA (2015). How to see the photographer with Stephen Shore. [Online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T029CTSO0IE [Accessed 30 October 2019].

Moore, T. (2013). Critical thinking: seven definitions in search of a concept. Studies in Higher Education, 38(4), pp. 506-522.

Scott, C. (2007). Street Photography: From Brassai to Cartier-Bresson. 1st ed. Lond: I.B. Tauris & Company Limited.

Shore, S. (2007). The Nature of Photographs. 2nd ed. London: Phaidon.

Shore, S. (2015). Uncommon Places. 2nd ed. New York: Apeture.

Soutter, L. (2013). Why Art Photography?. 1st ed. Abingdon: Routledge.

The Genius of Photography. (2007). [Television Series] Directed by Tim Kirby. United Kingdom: BBC.

Time (2015). 100 Photographs: the most influential images of all time. 1st ed. New York: Time Inc Books.

Wells, L. (2003). The Photography Reader. 1st ed. Abingdon: Routledge.

[edwad]

Whats the main reason you keep your political idea out of your blog? Do you just care more about the economics side or do you wanna avoid the discourse

i dont think i keep the politics out really. a lot of people know approximately where i stand on issues even if i dont try to stuff myself into a tendency (although ive spent a decent amount of time talking about my relationship to tendencies in the past), but a big part of it is that i think a lot of the debates we have, especially on here, are pretty useless or rest on foundations that ought to be considered more thoroughly (or at all). i mean, this is a microblogging platform and i dont expect the revolution to start with the tumbleft vanguard and a lot of people on here take themselves too seriously so over time ive just stopped engaging in things. i used to be a lot more active on here and militant in disputes, wearing myself down over every little thing, but ive got way too much going on in the real world (between my own personal life and my actual practical political work) to really worry about debating the soviet union for the 20000th time in an internet echo chamber. i think it can be a worthwhile debate and we cant avoid it, but i think tumblr isnt the most fruitful forum for that sorta thing and we’ve all already decided where we stand anyway and nobodys changing their mind on these issues until next year when we all pick new tendencies.

all that being said, yeah i do like economics and thats my primary interest and the deeper i get into that, the less tumblr even interests me because nobody on here talks about stuff that i really want to engage with. ive gotten burned out by the intellectual rut that is the tumblr left and i can feel myself politically stagnating the more time i spend on here because its always the same stuff and theres nothing new really. idk im really just tired of it all.

[libertariantaoist]

When in the course of human events the political bonds that used to tie the people together in freedom have become shackles that have made them dependent on government—then at that critical juncture, it is time to officially declare a state of dependence.

This Declaration of Dependence replaces one of the greatest political documents in history, the Declaration of Independence, which, 241 years ago, gave birth to one of the greatest nations in history.

In the context of those times, the former Declaration was a remarkable document, in that it turned upside down the prior belief that man was subservient to the government.  Now, 241 years later, Americans are once again subservient to the government.

Over 60% of Americans now live in a household where at least one family member is dependent on the government in some way—either working for the government, or working in a private-sector job that depends on government regulations (e.g., tax attorneys), or receiving welfare, an entitlement, a subsidy, or a government disability payment.  If the black hole of the government education monopoly is included, the dependency index climbs to over 90%.

The left wants to increase dependency even more, even though the nation has a $20 trillion deficit and many states have such huge public pension obligations that they can’t properly maintain the infrastructure needed to deliver basic government services.  The right, on the other hand, wants to increase military spending even more, talking tough about cutting social-welfare spending while hypocritically collecting some form of government payment.

Americans can’t even go to the doctor without signing a government-mandated privacy form and then having their intimate information compiled with information from other patients and reported to the government and other third parties by medical billing clerks in a backroom—clerks who outnumber doctors and have a certificate in medical billing from a diploma mill, the cost of which was likely paid with a government tuition loan.   In essence, citizens are subsidizing other citizens to learn a trade that subtracts from the nation’s productivity and well-being, drives up the cost of medical care, and results in patients being spied on.

Likewise, physicians and others in the medical profession, having sold their Hippocratic Oath to the government in exchange for a guaranteed income, don’t mind federal agents looking over their shoulder as they are examining patients’ private parts.  In fact, the American Medical Association, which endorses the nationalization of medical care, makes a lot of money from providing the government with a coding system that the billing clerks use to track medical procedures.

Americans obediently comply with such diktats without a second thought, unlike how the colonists reacted to King George’s diktats 241 years ago—diktats that in some respects were less onerous than today’s diktats.  Come to think of it, the king and all of the king’s men didn’t have the imagination, control needs, or the power to impose the number of diktats that Americans live under today.  For example, it didn’t cross their minds to make their subjects fill out a form when they went to a doctor for bloodletting.

The people have become so conditioned to coercion that neither they nor their elected representatives even ask if a social problem can be solved without the use of government force—without the government forcing people to do something they don’t want to do, such as forcing them to subsidize their louche neighbors.  The first impulse nowadays is to resort to force instead of volunteerism, charity, or free exchange.

This conditioning can be seen in the debate over medical care/insurance, where virtually no one in the intelligentsia, media, or government first asked if the problem of the uninsured could be solved without the use of force.  Then Americans wonder why civil discourse is so acrimonious, not understanding that comity is at odds with pillaging and plundering.

When in the course of human events the people become sheep, they will be shorn.  But at least the shearing will be done in compliance with OSHA regulations, overseen by well-paid government OSHA apparatchiks who vote Democrat and by well-paid private-sector OSHA consultants who vote Republican.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are not born equal, at least not in terms of intelligence, drive, determination, attractiveness, or the quality of their parents.  A corollary is that all human organizations are hierarchical, with the most talented, ambitious, lucky, crooked, or ruthless at the top, and with everyone else layered at different levels below, depending on their respective talent, ambition, luck, crookedness, or ruthlessness.

Contrary to what such neo-Marxists as Bernie Sanders and the Occupy Wall Street movement believe, wealth and power are less concentrated in democratic/capitalist countries than in socialist ones, and certainly far less than in communist ones, where a tiny minority has near-absolute power.  They are correct, however, that America is becoming more hierarchical and more unequal in the distribution of income and wealth, with income increasing faster for the capital class (the so-called one percent) than for the working class, because those with capital get returns on their investments that are higher than the returns on labor. But the neo-Marxists don’t acknowledge their own role in causing this to happen—specifically, their tax, regulatory, welfare, and immigration policies, which are hollowing out the middle class and making it difficult for middle-income people to acquire capital and move up.

Or maybe this is exactly what the neo-Marxists want; that is, a two-class society without a thriving middle class.  After all, with a two-class society, the likes of Bernie Sanders would be in the ruling class at the top, and everyone else would be in a homogenously poor and dependent class below, just as it was in the Soviet Union and Red China—and just as it is developing in Venezuela today.

America is well on the way to this socialist nirvana.  The ruling class consists of those with government sinecure and pensions, as well as those in the private sector with government contracts, or government protections from competition, or government subsidies, or lucrative jobs created by the regulatory state, or financial windfalls bestowed on them by the Federal Reserve and Treasury.    The evidence can be seen in the wealth in the imperial city of Washington, which stands in stark contrast to the declining fortunes in the hinterland.

The numbers on the growth of government are just as stark, although you won’t see the numbers in the ignorant media.  For example, in 1941, there was one government employee at the federal, state and local levels for every 27.7 citizens.  Today, the ratio is one for every 14.6 citizens.  If the ratio of government employees had kept pace with population growth since 1941 instead of exceeding it, there would be 10 million fewer government employees today.  (Note:  These figures do not include the private-sector workers who are de facto government workers because they hold jobs outsourced by the government to the private sector.)

Keep in mind that the 10 million excess employees receive compensation (pay, benefits, pensions, and time off) that is about 40% higher, on average, than the compensation of their private-sector counterparts.  In addition, they have job security not found in the private sector.  Equal pay for equal work is the law of the land, but not for government workers.

All levels of government now consume nearly 50% of national income, versus about 12% prior to 1930.    Unlike businesses that operate in a relatively free market, where survival depends on doing more with less, government not only survives but thrives by doing less with more.

As government has grown, the American populace has been transformed from self-reliance to dependency, and from there to entitlement.

The prevailing entitlement mentality can be seen all around us, even in parking lots, of all places; and in particular, handicap parking places.  Most of the spaces are used by ambulatory Americans who are quite able to walk another 100 ft. to a store from a regular parking space but simply choose not to.  This is because the handicap spaces are considered a right by those who park in them, whether they are liberals who drive a Prius with a “Coexist” sticker on the bumper or conservatives who drive a mammoth truck with a “NRA” sticker on the bumper.   Many of the faux disabled are grossly overweight and could benefit from parking at the far end of a lot and waddling the extra distance.

If you think it’s hyperbolic to say that many Americans consider it a right to park in a handicap parking spot, then run for public office and see what happens if you suggest that the spaces be restricted to the wheelchair bound, which was their original purpose.

It’s a short mental leap from thinking that a handicap parking space is a right to thinking that it is a right to get medical care at someone’s else’s expense, or anything else that the majority considers a right.

Of course the founders had different ideas about rights, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights.   That some of them were slave owners and men of wealth and privilege made their intellectual feat even more remarkable, for as they were well aware, their ideas would lead to the empowerment of the common man and lay bare the contradiction of slavery and the taking of native lands.

Something else can be seen in parking lots in every part of town:   expensive cars and trucks loaded with gadgets galore.  Americans spend more on vehicles than on medical care/insurance, yet think they have a right to drive a status symbol while sending the bill for their medical care to their neighbors.  It’s a similar story with tuition loans, which, on average, are about $30,000, or about the same amount as the average car loan.  You won’t see this story in the ignorant media, but there are plenty of people who have $30,000 in tuition debt and $30,000 in car debt but expect taxpayers to write off their tuition debt.  As Bernie Sanders and his cadres would say, it’s only fair.   Actually, it’s only fair to forego a new car and take a bus or bike to work so that someone else isn’t stuck with your tuition bill.

In the same vein, it’s only fair to keep yourself in good physical shape if you advocate that others pick up the cost of your medical care, although this point isn’t made by today’s churches, schools, media, politicians, and philosophers.  Instead, they define fairness as collectivism and redistribution, with no expectation of personal responsibility in return.

Envy, which is an unattractive evolutionary trait of humans, is the driving force behind such thinking.  Envy is such a strong influence on human action that, as behavioral experiments have shown, most people would prefer that everyone be equally poor than everyone be wealthier if this means that some people will be wealthier than others.

Envy is particularly disastrous for society when it is coupled with a lack of self-control, because, for both individuals and society as a whole, success depends on the ability to say no to immediate gratification and to save and invest the fruits of one’s labor for self-improvement, a rainy day, a medical emergency, and old age.

Self-control has plummeted in society as immediate gratification has been encouraged by the government, business and permissive parents.   Easy credit, easy money, a constant bombardment of advertisements on TV and the Internet, and depraved entertainment from Hollywood have had a terrible effect on society.   Indebtedness, obesity, single-parent families, and drug overdoses have skyrocketed, with the last reaching epidemic levels, especially overdoses from opioids and fentanyl imported from China.

Few people see the irony of China exporting fentanyl to the West, because few people study history and know that Great Britain had imported opium to China in what became known as the Opium Wars, resulting in scores of Chinese spending their days in a stupor in opium dens.

What goes around comes around, and the West’s imperialism has come around and around and around.  Picking up where the empires of Great Britain, France, Spain, and others left off, the United States has morphed from a republic into an empire; and like all empires throughout history, has stuck its nose into so many corners of the world that it can no longer afford to protect its legitimate interests and prevent the inevitable blowback.  It is not remembered by those who don’t know history that all it took for the almighty British Empire to become a shadow of its former self was one war.  In just several years England went from a powerful creditor nation to a debtor weakling.  Those who think it can’t happen to the United States are delusional and go by the name of John McCain.

Meanwhile, the American media are stuck in the past and thus have sullied their noble and important mission of speaking for the powerless against the powerful.  They don’t realize that the make-up of the powerless and powerful has changed since the Progressive Era and, once again, since the civil rights decade of the 1960s.  Civil rights groups, environmental activists, the welfare industry, government regulators, and law enforcement have become as powerful, elitist, hidebound, self-serving, and corrupt as the stereotypical Robber Barons and corporate fat cats of yesteryear.

At the same time, millions of the so-called poor, disadvantaged and disabled are ripping off their neighbors, by feigning disabilities, falsely claiming discrimination and workplace injuries, taking out student loans with no intention of paying them back or getting a degree, loafing instead of working in spite of being quite able-bodied, and demonstrating great creativity in manipulating the system to their advantage.  Yet you won’t see any exposes on this in the indoctrinated and shopworn news media.  One has to watch “Judge Judy” to see the extent of debasement and debauchery in a large segment of society.

The founders understood the dangers of factions but couldn’t foresee that the nation would move way beyond factions someday.  The polity is now organized around interest groups, or theft rings, which compete against each other, not only to hold onto their government rice bowl but also to fill the bowl with even more government subsidies, handouts, and privileges before another group snatches the loot.  They include, among hundreds of others, the American Association of Retired People, the American Medical Association, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Association of Realtors, the Chamber of Commerce, the American Banking Association, Planned Parenthood, professional baseball and football, the farm lobby, the ethanol lobby, the solar lobby, the sugar lobby, the defense lobby, the welfare lobby, the mass transit lobby, and probably a lobotomy lobby.

We, therefore, the unfree people of the United States, solemnly publish and declare that we have given full power to the central government to make all decisions for us, to coddle us, and to shower us with free stuff until the nation goes bankrupt.  And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of the divine nanny state, we mutually pledge to the munificent government our lives, fortunes, and our sacred honor.

[shinssoliloquy]

I just keep on yapping.

Lately I started to wonder what made me so into speaking off the cuff in the first place. Was it being told that I was one of the more coherent speakers in first grade, somehow stopping me from ever failing that grade in the first place. Whenever I think back on that time I start to realize how much of an incoherent fuck face I was. But it wasn’t my fault being the only person who could speak fluent English in my old elementary school. I even passed that kindergarten just by my knowledge of English alone. That kind of cemented my need to prove my intelligence by the verbosity of my own words, Kind of an unneeded sentiment and it can easily disprove itself just by sheer glass ceiling I can reach by just proving my worth by words alone. It can mean nothing and do nothing but I still talk, I still yap. Do I like typing? A symptom of undiagnosed autism and a need to just want to do stuff with my hands. I just cannot stop yapping my yap it seems. I also really like the word Yap.

Back in Middle school we were tasked to write two big essays for my social studies class. They one essay was talking about class differences from the angle of the poor and one was talking about how to find a way to quell the unease of the public. I was just finished reading watchmen at this time and I was also really into the USSR. This went as well as you’d expect. I suggested Ozymandias’ plan unironically and I don’t know if my teacher knew about the comic or was just reading one of his students unironically suggesting genocide in order to resolve peaceful relations with other countries, but that was basically what I submitted and It ended up the best one and almost the top essay of my grade at the time, It would’ve been almost perfect if I didn’t treat my paper like shit too but, it happens. My other essay had me basically dictate the entirety of the rise of the soviet union. Talking about the bourgeoisie and how these revolutions dictated the course of political discourse for centuries. it ended up being 20 pages long, and was showcased by my teacher too at the time. I was basically known as that guy who could write essays for you for basically free and was already overworked at the age of 12. Pretty awful time to be alive but at the same time maybe I was at fault for thinking I was such a genius. I’ve literally just plagiarized plots to already existing stories. I was basically a writing youtube pooper with how I used this to fit in my own narrative at the time, There’s probably a literary term or smart alec term for this kind of taking and stretching but I do not have time or care enough to look it up, Writing youtube pooper just sounds good in my head.

I’d go to my social studies teachers office and see my essay plastered alongside some of her other favorite essays, Probably taken off by now in due part by other better writers taking my place, But I’ve always felt at the time that that was I was destined to do. To go on long monologues about whatever political inclination or alignment I’ve had at the time. I even would’ve made a podcast If I knew what those were at the ripe age of 12, even continuing till the riper age of 22.

My friends would obviously know about my proclivity to yapping incoherently at moments at a time, Some are even quick to call me out on it. But some of the best moments I’ve had with friends is just being able to go on long tangents together about whatever discussion or debate we’d be having at the time. It developed my mind in the process and my writing skills since they’ve been stunted at age 13-16. Regardless though people still label me as tl;dr or the guy that just writes long paragraphs about the texture of mustard for example. Or why it’s ok to dip your bread in mountain dew. All conversations for some reason I’ve had or was really proactive in my defense at the time.

I almost forgot one other essay I had to write for English class, We were supposed to detail a problem we have with current culture and I decided to list my disdain for music cliques and trends. Particularly with current pop music at the time, I remember during this same day we had to commemorate 9/11 too, Which was interesting. I listed some of my old favorites, I listened to old school hiphop at the time So I’ve talked about how Biggie and Nas type people aren’t writing the same sort of lyrics with deepness and meaning that I for sure was the arbiter of, at age 11. Needless to say it was an embarrassing display but I still got an Okay grade for that, people just don’t have standards or my teacher was just surprised to see a kid verbosely talk about music he doesn’t listen too.

So all of that to say, Why do I enjoy talking. An antiquated sense of ego or I just like typing words and putting my thoughts out there, Wow why not just write a book then. Well This is a precursor to that, practice for when I actually tackle big buff novellas. I have had a bad habit of speaking off the cuff and which Is why I’ve asked myself that in the first place. Eventually I need to learn to keep my thoughts concise and vigilant, properly enunciate my words in text form for people to consume in a safe and ordinary manner but my ideas are still there. Whether those ideas are good enough to he talked about in the first place has yet to surface. I don’t know myself, and I’m the one writing these damn blogs!

Basically, I’m a charlaten, a fraud, pseud, a nitwit, a buffon but I’m more than happy to have people develop themselves and have my words affect them in the process, Just yet to see when that’ll suffice. But I probably shouldn’t put much weight on what words have on people rather than actions. I’d just be repeating myself from when I was 12 am I not.

I don’t think I’ve ever said if I still agree with some of my old essays. Well it’s a this and that, I can’t deny I still carry some of the opinions I’ve had as a baby just more well educated and well researched now. But still not as reactionary as I was back then, I can’t say I did or didn’t change at all. But maybe critiquing my writing when I was a toddler isn’t necessarily a next best step either

[polixy]

Despite concerns about global democracy, nearly six-in-ten countries are now democratic

Despite concerns about global democracy, nearly six-in-ten countries are now democratic;

In spite of widespread concerns across the globe about the future of democracy, public support for it remains strong, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted earlier this year in 38 countries. And by one measure, the number of democratic nations around the world is at a postwar high.

  As of the end of 2016, 97 out of 167 countries (58%) with populations of at least 500,000 were democracies, and only 21 (13%) were autocracies, both post-World War II records. The rest either exhibited elements of both democracy and autocracy (26%) or were not rated. Broadly speaking, the share of democracies among the world’s governments has been on an upward trend since the mid-1970s.

To track the spread of democracy around the globe, we used the ratings contained in the Center for Systemic Peace’s Polity IV dataset. Polity is a widely used resource in political science that analyzes and codes how political authority is gained and used in every fully independent state with a population of 500,000 or more (167 of the world’s 200 or so sovereign states in the current version). Polity assesses six key factors, from openness of political participation to constraints on the chief executive, to place each country on a 21-point scale ranging from +10 (“consolidated democracy”) to –10 (“hereditary monarchy”). Polity doesn’t rate countries whose central government has completely collapsed, those that are subject to foreign intervention or occupation, or those in the midst of a regime transition; there were five such countries in 2016.

Following the Polity guidelines, we categorized all countries scoring from +6 to +10 as democracies, those from –6 to –10 as autocracies and everything in between as “mixed.” We then tracked the changing prevalence of democracy and autocracy in the seven decades since the end of the Second World War.

In 2016, 33 countries were considered fully consolidated democracies, with a Polity rating of +10. However, that was two countries fewer than in 2006, the peak postwar year for consolidated democracies.

Belgium, which had been at +10, fell two points following its June 2007 parliamentary election, which deepened divisions between the country’s French- and Flemish-speaking communities and sparked a long-running political crisis that at times threatened to split the country. And the United States, also formerly at +10, was docked two points last year due to an increase in “factional competition.” The Polity researchers noted that “political discourse in the United States had become increasingly partisan” during Barack Obama’s administration, and that Donald Trump “used combative rhetoric to excite ‘populist’ support and seize the Republican Party nomination.” Trump’s “surprise” Electoral College victory, they added, “polarized political competition into ‘anti-establishment’ and ‘anti-Trump’ factions.”

In 1977, only 35 of the 143 countries rated by Polity (24%) qualified as democracies, while 89 (62%) were classified as autocracies of one stripe or another (including nine absolute hereditary monarchies). Although the number of democracies began edging higher in subsequent years and the number of autocracies gradually fell, half of the Polity-rated countries were still considered autocracies as late as 1988.

But democracy spread rapidly as the Soviet-led bloc, and then the Soviet Union itself, crumbled between 1989 and 1991. Only 15 of the 72 countries rated as autocracies in 1988 were still rated this way in 2016; 25 had become democracies, and most of the rest had mixed ratings. (Two, Haiti and Libya, were not rated because of regime instability; four others had ceased to exist.) Among the 30 new nations formed since 1988, 17 were rated as democracies in 2016, six were autocracies, four were mixed and three were not rated due to instability or foreign intervention.

Polity’s democracy ratings are by no means the only ones out there, though because of differing methodologies they tell somewhat different stories. Freedom House, for instance, rates 87 out of 195 countries (45%) as “free,” using criteria that include both political and civil rights. And though nearly half of the 165 countries in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index are democracies of one sort or another, only 19 are considered “full democracies” – seven fewer than in 2006.

The Pew Research survey found that majorities in each of the 38 countries polled consider representative democracy a very or somewhat good way to govern their country; majorities in nearly all of the surveyed countries said the same thing about direct democracy. But nondemocratic alternatives also had support: Across the surveyed countries, a median of 49% said governance by experts would be a good way to run their nation; the corresponding figures for military rule and rule by a strong, unconstrained executive were 24% and 26%, respectively.

Topics: Democracy, International Governments and Institutions

; Blog – Pew Research Center; http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/12/06/despite-concerns-about-global-democracy-nearly-six-in-ten-countries-are-now-democratic/; ; December 6, 2017 at 07:07AM

[arts-culture-honours-programme]

East of Eden: Secret Soviet Rock Life

Mariya Bakhmach 

Рок никогда не был движителем масс. Просто музыка выражала что-то, что и так было в воздухе. (Rock was never a mass movement. It was just the music that expressed what was in the air at the time) - Boris Grebenshikov

“Rock ideology is, first and foremost, an ideology of authenticity” was once said by Jack Hamilton (Hamilton, 2016). And it is true since the discourse of rock music within cultural sociology has been rotating a lot around the question of race, cultural appropriation, and its reception. The racial sincerity of this music genre has been widely discussed in a number of ways. Starting from the linking the whitening of rock’n’roll to civil rights movements in 1960’s and arriving at such works as “Media Depictions of Harm in Heavy Metal and Rap Music” by Amy Binder, where the rock is already discussed as a totally white phenomenon per se. A lot has been said and even more has been thought out, but still, in many cases, the study of rock remains predominantly focused on the Western World. In this blog post, I would like to make a shift and “go east” to elaborate on the history of rock movement in the former Soviet Union and more precisely Russia. Can Soviet rock music be perceived as an autonomous authentic experience? And if according to Peterson “authenticity is often artificially constructed”, are there any traces of how Soviet rockers tried to position themselves in the world of music (Peterson, 2005)? An answer to those question will follow up. Stay tuned and let the story begin…

First of all, it might be interesting for you to know, why would I focus on such a narrow topic as Soviet Union Rock. Why would anyone talk about the music genre of the country, which does not even exist anymore? Or, in other words, how is this blog post sociologically relevant nowadays? Let me explain briefly. At the moment of its downfall in 1991, the population of the Soviet Union used to be 293 million people. Two of those people were my parents apparently. They used to be rockers and so were their friends and friends of their friends and so on and so forth. Then they gave birth to me and later on to my music taste. Their friends also had children, who also grew up disposed to the same set of rock songs and artists, the majority of which were from the Soviet Union. Later on, some of us will move on the Beatles and the Rolling Stones or its modern analogs, but the core will remain still, we grew up on Soviet Rock, the genre the majority of the world doesn’t know exist. In the era, when authors like Pamela Perry, raise the question of the whiteness being the synonym to the loosen cultural ties, it might be interesting to take a look at the way, other ethnicities rather than Western European and American, make sense of their own cultural tradition, the part of which has always been music (Perry, 2001).

According to Joane Nagel, “the origin, content, and form of ethnicity reflect the creative choices of individuals and groups as they define themselves and others in ethnic ways” (Nagel, 2014). If we try to apply this to the Soviet and, in some cases, Post-Soviet people, we will see that some of their creative choices when it comes to self-expression and aesthetic taste formation are still pretty much determined by the area and time they were brought up in. Soviet Rock music has been in many cases one of the crucial points of the formation of their identity within the society. No matter whether you belonged to the rock subculture or opposed it, your position was a part of the active social interaction.

Now it is time for a brief introduction into what is this music genre we are talking about, where it came from and how is it different from any other. Soviet Rock has emerged in the 1960s and has quickly broken apart from its western origins. Firstly, it was clearly influenced by the Beatles, who were crazily popular at the time worldwide. Some of the times witnesses would say that: “So it was like a fairytale, thousands of kids grabbing this window from the West to change their image just a little” (Woodhead, 2013). Rock’n’roll music would be associated with freedom of self-expression and speech. Later on, the audience has moved from passive stage of admiration to the reproduction. At this stage in mid-1960’s “listening wasn’t enough – they wanted to do it themselves. They played cover versions of Beatles songs, trying to copy the English words, but most of them had no idea what they were singing about” (Woodhead, 2013). So slowly transitioning, the Soviet independent music scene started to emerge.

Some of the most prominent bands of the movement were Aquarium and Grazhdanskaya Oborona. The first one represented some kind of countercultural intellectual elite scene at the time while another one focused on the ideas of the resistance towards the Soviet politics. A little closer look at their formation might help to see what the genre looked like (and sounded) back at the time.

Aquarium was a rock band established in June 1972 by Boris Grebenshikov and Anatoly Gunitsin. It’s sound and style was heavily influenced by the eastern philosophy and theatre of absurd. The band characterizes the shift of Soviet Rock from the subcultural scene into the formation of a distinct counterculture [8]. The lyrics of the songs are revolutionary, similar to the early 20th-century poetry of Vladimir Mayakovski, and a lot of them express social protest. They use subcultural slang, literary allusions, swear words and raise such taboo themes like sex and liberation from the communist regime. The band brought up the notion about popular among subcultures at the time Buddhism, Hindu, and Rastafari. They also made covers of such popular artists of their time like Jim Morrison of the Doors and Bob Dylan making them accessible to the general non-English speaking public of USSR. Unlike many Western bands at the time, Aquarium did not have much commercial success during the existence of Soviet regime despite their countrywide cultural following.

Grazhdanskaya Oborona (from Russian “Гражданская оборона” Civil Defense) was a psychedelic punk rock band established in 1982 by Yegor Letov and Konstantin Ryabinov [8]. No other way can summarize the biography of the band, then this quote from Letov: “The mother of our (second guitarist) Babenko, she was a sort of a party official, she listened to our records and went to the KGB and said, "Comrades, my son is involved in an anti-Soviet organization" [9]. The lyrics of their songs were quite often anti-authoritarian and politically prominent, reflecting the concerns of the mass audiences and everyday struggles of everyday life. Occasionally, the band would mix in Siberian folklore and pre-Christian beliefs motives due to its situation in Omsk, a city east of the Ural Mountains. Grazhdanskaya Oborona was getting more and more popular among radical Soviet youth until its sudden hiatus in 1990, which band commented as an attempt to avoid the commercialization of their music and countercultural message.

Studying the emergence of the Soviet rock from the cultural sociological perspective, one can argue that the western influences in this music can be easily traced and the whole uniqueness of the phenomenon can be doubted. However, on the other hand, if “authenticity does not inhere in the object, it is said to be authentic and made by someone and either accepted or rejected by relevant others”, then this we can argue for it to be highly distinct (Peterson, 2005). Soviet rockers would construct their own musicscapes and elaborate on the society around them in order to create something relatable and personal for the youth of their time. And the children of that youth, and grandchildren of this youth, because this is how their “unspoken” rock history goes...

  References

1)     Hamilton, J. (2016). Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. Harvard: Harvard University Press. pp. 17-28.

2)     Nagel, J. (1994). Constructing ethnicity: Creating and recreating ethnic identity and culture. Social Problems 41: 152-176.

3)     Perry, Pamela. 2001. White means never having to say you're ethnic: White youth and the

construction of “cultureless” identities. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 30 (1): 56-91.

4)     Peterson, Richard. (2005). In search for authenticity. Journal of Management Studies 42(5): 1083-1098.

5)     Rock in the USSR: Leningrad's short-lived subculture – in pictures

Retrieved on 27/10/2017 from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2016/sep/06/soviet-union-rock-music-late-1980s-american-culture-perestroika.

6)     Warikoo, Natasha. (2007). Racial authenticity among second generation youth in multiethnic New York and London. Poetics 35: 388-408.

7)     Woodhead, L. (2013). How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin: The Untold Story of a Noisy Revolution. USA: Bloomsbury. pp. 26-29.

8)     Рок музыка в СССР. Энциклопедия групп. (Rock music in USSR. The Encyclopedia of bands.)  

Retrieved on 29/10/2017 from: http://sovr.narod.ru/books/rock_muz_enc/00002.html.

9)     Егор Летов: «Конец наступает тогда, когда уничтожается живая энергия творчества» (Yegor Letov: The end comes, when the force of art gets demolished)

Retrieved on 29/10/2017 from: http://grob-hroniki.org/article/1990/art_1990-10-xxb.html.

[muzaffar1969]

http://ift.tt/2ricfeA

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Last week was interesting for me. I spent about half my time getting up to speed with the latest happenings in the crypto-coin world, and got really excited about a lot of what I saw. In fact, this was the first time I became totally consumed by the space in several years, going back to when I first investigated and started becoming involved with Bitcoin.

What really caught my attention is the booming ICO market, and while it’ll invariably produce its fair share of total scams, I find it nonetheless captivating. I’m attracted to its dynamic wild west spirit, as well as its capacity to function as an alternative funding mechanism for startup projects utilizing a wider participatory structure consisting of anyone with a bit of crypto currency and a high-risk tolerance. It’s an entirely new experimental ecosystem funded by crypto currencies (mostly ethereum, but also bitcoin). It’s pretty mesmerizing (for more see: A New Financial System is Being Born).

Spending so much time on this esoteric world kept me away from following U.S. politics as closely as I typically do, which was a great thing.

The level of discourse from nearly all sides of the political spectrum has turned so toxic, divisive, hysterical and counterproductive, leaving that environment for several days made me feel great, as if I had taken a vacation from idiot island. As such, today I once again decided to spend some time reading up on the crypto-coin space and getting further up to speed on ICOs and how they work. That said, I realize I still need to pay attention to the crazy happenings in the wider world around me, so I thought I’d share an interview with a rarity in today’s political discourse, a voice of reason.

What follows are excerpts from a Slate  interview with Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton:

Stephen F. Cohen has long been one of the leading scholars of Russia and the Soviet Union. He wrote a biography of the Bolshevik revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin and is a contributing editor at the Nation, which his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, edits and publishes. In recent years, Cohen has emerged as a more ideologically dexterous figure, ripping those he thinks are pursuing a “new Cold War” with Russia and calling for President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to form “an alliance against international terrorism.” Cohen has gone so far as to describe the investigations into the Trump campaign and Russia “the No. 1 threat to the United States today.”

Cohen has been criticized by many people, myself included, for his defenses of Putin. (He once said the Ukraine crisis had been “imposed on [Putin] and he had no choice but to react.”) He scolded President Barack Obama for sending retired gay athletes to Sochi and recently went on Fox News to speak up for Trump’s war against leakers.

I spoke by phone with Cohen, who is also a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton and the author of Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War. During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed why Cohen won’t concede that the Democratic National Committee was hacked, whether it’s fair to call Putin a murderer, and why we may be entering an era much more dangerous than the Cold War.

  I heard you recently on Fox News. You said that the “assault” on President Trump “was the No. 1 threat to the United States today.” What did you mean by that?

  Threat. OK. Threat. That’s a good word. We’re in a moment when we need an American president and a Kremlin leader to act at the highest level of statesmanship. Whether they meet in summit or not is not of great importance, but we need intense negotiations to tamp down this new Cold War, particularly in Syria, but not only. Trump is being crippled by these charges, for which I can find no facts whatsoever.

  Wait, which charges are we talking about?

  That he is somehow in the thrall or complicity or control, under the influence of the Kremlin.

  I think it would help if he would admit what his own intelligence agencies are telling him, that Russia played some role in …

  No, I don’t accept that. I don’t accept that at all, not for one minute.

  People in the Trump administration admit this too.

  Well they’re not the brightest lights.

  And the president is?

  No. You didn’t ask me that. You asked me, you said, some of the president’s people. You’re referring to that intel report of January, correct? The one that was produced that said Putin directed the attack on the DNC?

  I was referring to that and many news accounts that Russia was behind the hacking, yes.

  The news accounts are of no value to us. I mean you and I both know …

  No value? None?

  No. No value. Not on face value. Just because the New York Times says that I don’t know, Carter Page or [Paul] Manafort or [Michael] Flynn did something wrong, I don’t accept that. I need to see the evidence.

  OK, let’s just go back to what you were saying about Trump being hamstrung.

  You need Trump because he’s in the White House. I didn’t put him there. I didn’t vote for him. Putin’s in the Kremlin. I didn’t put him in the Kremlin either, but we have what we have, and these guys must have a serious dialog about tamping down these cold wars, which means cooperating on various fronts. The obvious one—and they already are secretly, but it’s getting torpedoed—is Syria.

  So we come now with this so-called Russiagate. You know what that means. It’s our shorthand, right? And Trump, even if he was the most wonderfully qualified president, he is utterly crippled in his ability to do diplomacy with the Kremlin. So let me give you the counterfactual example.

  Imagine that Kennedy had been accused of somehow being, they used to accuse him of being an agent of the Vatican, but let’s say he had been accused widely of being an agent of the Kremlin. The only way he could have ended the Cuban Missile Crisis would have been to prove his loyalty by going to nuclear war with Russia. That’s the situation we’re in today. I mean Trump is not free to take wise advice and use whatever smarts he has to negotiate down this new and dangerous Cold War, so this assault on Trump, for which as yet there are zero facts, has become a grave threat to American national security. That’s what I meant. That’s what I believe.

  To use your Kennedy example, there was no evidence that Kennedy was an agent of either the Vatican or the Kremlin—

  No, but Isaac you’re not old enough to remember, but during the campaign, because he was the first Catholic, they all went on about he’s an agent of the Vatican.

  I know that. I’m old enough to have read “news accounts” of it. Anyway, there was a hacking of the DNC and—

  Wait actually no, Isaac stop. Stop. Now, I mean we don’t know that for a fact.

  That there was a hacking of the DNC?

  Yeah we do not know that for a fact.

  What do we think happened?

  Well …

  So you’re really going to argue with me that the DNC wasn’t hacked?

  I’m saying I don’t know that to be the case.

OK.

  I will refer you to an alternative report and you can decide yourself.

  Can we agree on this much at least: that Trump said there was a hack, refused to say who he thought did it, encouraged the hackers to keep doing it, at the same time that he was getting intelligence reports that it was the Russians, and that he continued to talk very positively about Putin after he was told this?

  You’ve given me too many facts to process, but if Trump said he knew it was a hack, he was not fully informed. We just don’t know it for a fact, Isaac.

  So we don’t have any forensic evidence that there was a hack. There might have been. If there was a hack, we have no evidence it was the Russians, and we have an alternative explanation that it was actually a leak, that somebody inside did a Snowden, just stuck a thumb drive in and walked out with this stuff. We don’t know. And when you don’t know, you don’t go to war.

  Let’s turn to Putin and America. Why do you think we have entered a new Cold War?

  My view is that this Cold War is even more dangerous. As we talk today, and this was not the case in the preceding Cold War, there are three new fronts that are fraught with hot war. You know them as well as I do. The NATO military build-up is going on in the Baltic regions, particularly in the three small Baltic countries, Poland, and if we include missile defense, Romania. That’s right on Russia’s border, and in Ukraine. You know that story. That’s a proxy civil war right on Russia’s border, and then of course in Syria, where American and Russian aircraft and Syrian aircraft are flying over the same airspace.

  And there is the utter demonization of Putin in this country. It is just beyond anything that the American political elite ever said about Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and the rest. If you demonize the other side, it makes negotiating harder.

In 2017, being a voice of reason has become a revolutionary act.

May 31, 2017 at 09:15AM http://ift.tt/2qzlia1 from Tyler Durden http://ift.tt/2qzlia1

[cubaverdad]

Eliécer Ávila, The 'New Man' Who Became An Opponent

Eliécer Ávila, The 'New Man' Who Became An Opponent 14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 8 April 2017 – Walking along the streets with Eliécer Ávila can be a complicated task. His face is well known thanks to a viral video broadcast almost a decade ago. However, before fame came into his life, this young man born in Las Tunas was a model "New Man": the most finished product of ideological indoctrination. Like all Cuban children, Avila shouted slogans during his school's morning assembly, participated in countless repudiation activities "against imperialism" and dreamed of resembling Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. But while, in school, they taught him the social achievements that the Revolutionary process brought to the population, at home reality was stubborn and showed itself to be something quite different. The residents of Yarey de Vázquez – the Puerto Padre municipality of Puerto Padre where the leader of the Somos+ (We Are More) Movement was born – are poor, the kind of poverty that grabs you by the throat. A place lost in nothingness, where many families still use latrines for their bodily needs, and live in houses with roofs made of palm fronds. Surrounded by pigs, chickens and tedium, Avila realized that his life did not resemble the official version he was being taught. Born in 1985, in the middle of that "golden decade" when the Soviet Union was propping up the island, he was barely walking a year later when Fidel Castro ordered the closing of the free farmers markets in the midst of the "Process of Rectification of Errors and Negative Tendencies." Eliécer Avila reached puberty during what was called the Special Period. With the voracity that still characterizes him, he faced many days of his adolescence with his plate half full, or almost empty. He hand stitched the shoes he wore to school, invented all kinds of "outfits" from his grandfather's old shirts, and turned off the light when it was time to strip down to his underwear, so no one could see the holes. With a natural leadership quality, in which a certain humor mixes with an undeniable histrionic capacity to narrate anecdotes, the young man made his way through those years without climbing aboard a raft to escape the country or ending up in jail. Those who knew him predicted a future in politics, because of those "fine lips" that helped him in student meetings and in romantic conquests. A little bit later, luck smiled on him. He was able to enroll in the University of Computer Sciences (UCI), founded in 2002 in the middle of the Battle of Ideas. UCI was located on the site that had once been the Center for Exploration and Radioelectronics Listening, known as the Lourdes SIGNIT Station, where until 2001 Russia – and the Soviet Union before it – had had its largest spy station outside its borders. UCI was a school for trusted young people to become computer soldiers for a Revolution that fears the Internet. While a student at UCI, Avila led Operation Truth. His task was to monitor digital sites and blogs critical of the Government. In those spaces, the young revolutionary sharpened his arsenal of tools for political struggle that included everything from hacking to the execution of the reputation of anyone who opposed the Plaza of the Revolution. Little by little, like acid that filters through the cracks, those anti-government arguments he read on the web began to sink into his mind and mingle with his own disagreements. Restless, in 2008 he took his turn at the microphone during a visit to UCI of Ricardo Alarcón, then president of the National Assembly. The minutes of that public appearance that followed marked the rest of his life. The video of the collision between Ávila and Alarcón jumped to first place in the hit parade on the clandestine networks that distributed audiovisuals. No one wanted to miss it, especially the moment when the leader of Parliament justified the travel restrictions imposed on Cubans by saying how congested the skies might be, if everyone were allowed to board an airplane. Now, nine years later, the young activist prefers not to be called "Eliécer, the one who debated with Alarcon," but for the rest of his life it will be his most important letter of introduction to millions of Cubans. His challenge of power, with simple questions and a firm voice, has been one of the most accurate and best documented gestures of rebellion in almost six decades of Castroism. After that, he received his punishment. After graduating, the authorities sent him to a remote Youth Computer Club to purge his audacity. It was the decisive moment in which he decided to cross the red line towards independence. He left the state sector, founded the Somos+ Movement and relocated to Havana. One audacious act after another. The attacks rained down from all sides. State Security raised the level of pressure on his environment, traditional opposition leaders threw darts at the upstart, and there was no shortage of those who claimed that he was only a mole for the political police disguised as a dissident. Since then, Ávila has tried to give shape to a civic discourse that uses new technologies and a less politicized language, closer to the concerns of ordinary people. But, like every dissident, he is caught in the grip of charges of illegal action, subjected to constant vigilance and assigned the halo of demonization imposed on anyone who does not applaud power. The numerous trips abroad that he has made since the Travel and Immigration Reforms of 2013 have allowed him to know the world, only to discover that the most exciting and indecipherable of the territories that await him is located in the future Cuba. That country so many have dreamed of and that is taking so long to arrive. Recently he went a step further and announced that he was prepared to represent the electors of his constituency as a delegate. A somewhat remote possibility, given the oiled mechanisms of control over the People's Assemblies maintained by the ruling party where, by show of hands, the attendees must nominate the potential candidates. This week, the guajiro of Yarey de Vázquez has crossed another line. A public protest at José Martí International Airport has resulted in his house being searched, and him being arrested and charged with "illicit economic activity." The trigger was the seizure of his laptop at Customs when he returned from Colombia. Now, it is expected that the siege around the young leader and his Somos+ Movement will continue to close. Nothing is more disturbing to a system that has played with social alchemy than a creature from its own ideological laboratory turning against it. Eliécer Ávila will be doubly punished because power acts with more fury against its own, when it rebels. More articles in English by and about Eliécer Ávila can be read here. http://ift.tt/2oYmq9p With online translation: http://ift.tt/2oZpaAo Source: Eliécer Ávila, The 'New Man' Who Became An Opponent – Translating Cuba - http://ift.tt/2oYxP97 via Blogger http://ift.tt/2oki3nT