upsidedownmotter
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User ID: 3544
upsidedownmotter
1hr ago
If he praised Applebaum, it was a long time ago. Some of his tweets:
Applebaum & The Atlantic are cynically preying on the neuroses of millions of meaning-starved wine aunts and their gay nephews w/this hysterical schizoposting
Imagine believing Applebaum knows the first thing about Turkey lmao
Very Serious Historian Anne Applebaum is taking time off from advocating for the abolition of age-of-consent laws to vent her other neurotic frustrations on the internet.
Kotkin is hysterical and raving like an insane person. Historians like him, Snyder, Applebaum are supposed to be our subject-matter experts, but all they’re capable of doing is screeching, “Putin evil! Putin bad!” A truly pathetic decline from our Cold War intellectual leadership.
If Ivan is dead, then who is making more shells and drones than the US or Europe?
They make two types of drones: one is constructed with low-tech parts from Iran, the other are decoy drones made of plywood and foam. Both are cheap, easy to construct, and automated and thus require little manpower. Therefore, comparing drone output between Europe and Russia is pointless. US drone, and military, technology is vastly superior.
upsidedownmotter
3hr ago
For 75 years, if your country was accused of being fascist in some way, at the least you’d be cut off from trade, and at worst bombs would be+heading your way.
Your chance of being bombed was much greater if your country was communist. The US got along much better with the fascists.
upsidedownmotter
3hr ago
Estimates vary widely as to how many people have returned, but it seems like as many as 50% of emigrants are still outside the country. This is a significant amount of people.
upsidedownmotter
3hr ago
Ivan living in the formerly-decrepit Urals industrial town that's now a booming part of the war economy is seeing his income rise.
Ivan was drafted and is now dead.
Those who could fled the country, the final phase of the brain drain that Putin has been contributing to since the 90s, and entire towns of young men have been decimated thanks to this war.
upsidedownmotter
3hr ago
The vast and dishonest Zionist campaign in media and astroturfed across the internet to pretend that nothing was happening in Gaza
This is curious to me and could probably be the basis for a much longer post about how differently people perceive the form and content of "mainstream media".
Case in point: unlike you, it seemed like every time I turned on the news in the months following October 7, I was greeted with videos of bombs falling on Gaza and children crying out in terror; when I read the NYT, pictures of bombed out hospitals and more dead children were plastered over the front page; when I tuned into NPR on my way to work, I was treated to interviews like this on a daily basis:
"I've seen a lot, and I never compare conflicts, but that's got to be the most nightmarish thing I've ever seen. And the most, one of the most, inhumane and cruel things I'll ever see," Jilani says in a voice memo about an 11-year-old girl in the emergency room at al-Aqsa who was severely burned in an explosive blast.
The message was clear: something terrible, uniquely terrible, was happening in Gaza and Israel was responsible.
Was there a campaign by Israel to downplay what was happening? I have no doubt, but I, the everyday consumer of news, was inundated with what appeared to be atrocity after atrocity, as if every other conflict happening in the world had paused or was insignificant in comparison.
upsidedownmotter
3hr ago
But "Revisionism" wasn't necessary, you just had to consult what mainstream historians, like Raul Hilberg, had been writing for decades.
If anything, this demonstrates that the mainstream historical account was always broadly accurate (Hilberg underestimated the death toll in 1961, we now know it was closer to 6 million).
upsidedownmotter
3hr ago
Yeah, it's basically what I expected: astroturfed post in which every heavily upvoted comment is pushing back against it and the original poster downvoted in every one of their comments. Of course there are Russia haters in these ostensibly non-political subreddits, but they're a minority, which is the opposite of what your comment implied.
upsidedownmotter
3hr ago
Holocaust Denial is receiving the most engagement at this moment than it ever has since it was formulated in the 1970s. By far. Yes it is going mainstream too.
Mainstream? As in, I'll turn on CNN and see it?
Yes, the internet has allowed thousands of people who would otherwise never know one another to share stupid antisemitic memes, but that hardly counts as entering the mainstream.
It was claimed 4 million were killed in Auschwitz until the 1990s, when the death toll dropped to 1.1 million.
This was the Soviet claim, and it was not accepted by other historians. For instance, in Raul Hilberg's 'Destruction of the European Jews' (1961) , he estimated a much lower death count for Auschwitz (around or less than a million if I recall) and a total estimated death toll of about 5 million.
I don't know if you're ignorant or simply lying to advance an agenda.
upsidedownmotter
4hr ago
Holocaust Denial is receiving the most engagement at this moment than it ever has since it was formulated in the 1970s. By far. Yes it is going mainstream too.
Mainstream? As in, I'll turn on CNN and see it?
Yes, the internet has allowed thousands of people who would otherwise never know one another to share stupid antisemitic memes, but that hardly counts as entering the mainstream.
upsidedownmotter
4hr ago
What?
upsidedownmotter
4hr ago
but also the Syrian massacres of Christians
This is getting A LOT of traction on Twitter - basically every big right-wing account/personality thinks Christians are being genocided, Assad should have remained in power to prevent this inevitability, and Jewish neocons are responsible - but there's very little verifiable information about actual killings.
upsidedownmotter
4hr ago
I frequent several subreddits dedicated to architecture and classical music, and any time a Russian building is posted — even if it was built hundreds of years before this war — or any time there’s discussion of the great Russian composers, there’s a very loud contingent of people either saying that Russia has no great culture, or else expressing disgust that anyone would post anything that paints any aspect of Russia in a good light.
Show me post within the last month that fits this description.
upsidedownmotter
5hr ago
I never understood the zeal for the Epstein thing. Even assuming all the conspiracies are true, why should I care more about this one pedophile simply because he's rich and connected? Of course the wealthy and powerful are involved in all sorts of debauchery and perversion, but the vast majority of people involved in child sex trafficking are sex tourists in third world countries + homegrown pedophiles. Epstein could have never existed and child sex trafficking would still be widespread.
upsidedownmotter
7hr ago
I'll try to find the time but I don't see how that squares with some of his recent tweets:
We’ve just got this giant trafficking and blackmail ring run entirely by Jewish Zionists and they’re out here working for Iran 🤣🤣🤣
When EVERYONE is partnered for progress and peace- if Israel chose to continue their supremacy and genocidal outlooks, they would condemn themselves to annihilation.
It gets really interesting when you look deeply into the 2017 Las Vegas shooting and Jared kushners relationship to Saud since(as well as trumps)
No serious person uses emojis.
upsidedownmotter
8hr ago
From what you've described, I presume he was strongly critical of Trump (who may be the most pro-Israel president in the history of the United States) in the interview with Rogan.
Joe Rogan hosted some guy named Ian Carroll on his podcast. Despite being pretty tuned in to the right-wing on Twitter, I had never heard of this guy. Apparently they spent a large portion of the podcast discussing Israel, and now Rogan is being criticized for hosting an antisemite on his show. According to the comments, the last 10 minutes were allegedly the most controversial.
I think the more controversial interview is going to be with Darryl Cooper next week. Rogan's audience seems to be broader than Tucker Carlson's, so if he rehashes some of the argument he made on Carlson's show, the "alternative" WW2 narrative pushed by Cooper is going to be heard by a lot more people. Moreover, Cooper is steadily releasing his series on WW2, "The Germans' War", so I'm sure he will have plenty to talk about.
Is this the turning point for WW2 revisionism entering the mainstream?
Another topic that is sure to come up is what's happening in Syria and Ukraine/Russia. A few recent tweets and retweets demonstrate his position:
I get that some people just hate Russia, but what exactly is the hawks’ plan? If Russia was brought to the point of having to evacuate Crimea & Novorossiya, it would mean an existential political crisis & possible state collapse, the consequences of which would be incalculable.
Maybe someone here knows better than me, but I don't see how evacuating Crimea results in Russia collapsing.
Christians are the most persecuted group in the world. Their plight is almost entirely ignored by corporate media. The horrible atrocities in Syria are part of this longstanding pattern. Pray for our persecuted brothers and sisters across the globe.
If there was a large Jewish community being slaughtered in Syria, Israel would defend them militarily and they’d be right to do it. Christians get slaughtered anywhere in the world and Christian countries actively ignore it and really couldn’t care less. Why would people want to join a faith whose followers can’t be bothered to stand up for each other?
upsidedownmotter
1d ago
The right-wing rehabilitation of South Africa bears a resemblance to the rehabilitation of Hitler among some on the right.
upsidedownmotter
3d ago
My only explanation is privacy. I don't know whether this is a good explanation.
upsidedownmotter
3d ago
‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves
The first step to authoritarianism is creating a climate in which dissent is punished.
Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.
As professor Levitsky astutely points out,
“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,”
The atmosphere is becoming so toxic and dangerous people are afraid to even come out publicly with criticism.
One prominent first-term critic of Mr. Trump said in a recent interview that not only would he not comment on the record, he did not want to be mentioned in this article at all. Every time his name appears in public, he said, the threats against him from the far right increase.
Business leaders are generally reticent to criticize presidents when they are in office,
But that business leader thinks that chief executives see the way that Mr. Musk is going about slashing the federal work force as “totally crazy” — but would say so only on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution.
Congressmen have to expend thousands of dollars out of concern for their personal safety.
Mr. Swalwell, who receives plenty of threats himself, said that he spends hundreds of thousands of dollars of his campaign and office funds on security for his own family, and that his daughter recently included a member of his security detail in a drawing of her family for her kindergarten class.
Both republican and democratic defense secretaries are speaking out about Trump firing senior military leaders in an unprecedented fashion.
In a letter to lawmakers last week, five former defense secretaries who served under Republicans and Democrats — Lloyd J. Austin III, Jim Mattis, Leon E. Panetta, Chuck Hagel and William J. Perry — condemned Mr. Trump’s firing of senior military leaders last month and asked that the House and the Senate hold “immediate hearings to assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s dismissals.”
Instead of being afraid, more of us need to speak out for the values of democracy. It is harder to suppress voices this way. And people who are threatened by Musk and Trump especially need to be supported.
upsidedownmotter
3d ago
What's your view on the other big SCOTUS case?
upsidedownmotter
3d ago
Trump to revoke legal status for 240,000 Ukrainians as US steps up deportations
Apparently underway before the White House blowup with Zelensky, These people are in the US as parolees essentially, so removing this legal status would allow them to be deported quickly.
Other big story is Afghans who worked with US troops may have their legal status stripped.
Rafi, a former Afghan intelligence officer who asked to be identified only by his first name to protect family members still in Afghanistan, entered the U.S. legally in January 2024 using the CBP One mobile app at the U.S.-Mexico border. He was given a temporary humanitarian parole status that allowed him to live and work in the United States for two years.
“As a result of his active efforts against the enemy, he is currently in extreme danger, and in need of assistance in departing the country,” the former CIA officer who trained him wrote.
The officer described Rafi as “truly one of the most dedicated and hardworking individuals I had the honor to serve with in Afghanistan.”
If the US invades your country and you fight alongside the invaders, the least you could be rewarded with is protection.
Every poll I've seen also shows Americans overwhelmingly support hosting Ukrainian refugees. If thousands of Ukrainians are deported to Ukraine, especially if fighting is still ongoing or resumes in the near future (more likely than not given Russia's stated territorial ambitions), I wonder if this event will be remembered in the same way turning Jewish arrivals by boat prior and during WW2 is remembered.
I'm also curious if this is a tactic to inflate deportation numbers. There is no way they hit their goal of deporting millions of illegals who have been in the country for decades, so you focus on people like this who are easier to track down and deport (and ironically, genuine refugees). The number of deported people is a lot higher after two years, but you haven't actually made a dent in the illegal population.
I know this place is quite reactionary and conservative, but is there anyone who actually still believes that the US should be a safe haven for at least some amount of people escaping war and violence, especially if those people are disproportionately women and children like the Ukrainians?
Where and when was this? That story has been outside the mainstream for many decades, and in fact some museums present it as a "myth". Are you sure it wasn't this?
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