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PaperclipPerfector  29d ago (text post)   29237 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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An appeal to the dissident right from the Russian opposition about the arrest of Pavel Durov

Just like what’s happening in France today. In 2017, Putin accused Telegram of helping terrorists and pedophiles and tried to pressure Pavel Durov to provide the FSB with keys to decrypt private messages.

But after months of struggle and rallying, we managed to defend Telegram. It still operates in Russia today, virtually free of censorship. Although it’s in an increasingly precarious position.

Since then, Putin opened a criminal investigation against me, and my entire team was forced into political exile. We won the battle but lost the war.

Because back in 2017, we were naive and thought it was a uniquely Russian problem. We actually thought Putin was a backwater dictator preventing Russia from joining the family of free nations. Unfortunately, we couldn’t have been more wrong.

As it turned out, Putin was the trailblazer. He set the example for the rest of the Western political class with his censorship, destruction of privacy, and surveillance. It turned out, the West was simply trailing behind.

I’m now in exile in Latin America, witnessing the same silencing of people unfolding under Lula’s rule in Brazil. Reading about people getting arrested for tweets in the UK, and watching Pavel Durov get arrested in France. Something even Putin didn’t dare to do at the time.

These are not isolated issues. The political class is waging a global war against the people. It’s not just Pavel who came under attack in France last night; it’s our privacy and freedom of speech.

... I implore the global right to apply their resources to support Pavel Durov. We have what it takes to save Telegram and finally start winning.

The founder of Telegram was arrested in France and faces 20 years in prison. The charges ostensibly surround the use of Telegram for criminal activity, but the Guardian notes:

The app was also used widely by far-right agitators plotting anti-immigration rallies in England and Northern Ireland in the wake of the stabbing of three children at a Southport dance class last month.

The anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate concluded that Telegram had become the “app of choice” for racists and violent extremists and “a cesspit of antisemitic content” with minimal moderation or effort from the app to curb extremist content.

At the height of Twitter censorship, probably 95% of the Dissident Right was banned from Twitter and all went to Telegram. The only contingent of the DR left on Twitter were the Bronze Age Pervert-types who extoled "The West" and race realism but otherwise promoted a philosemitic undercurrent among the right-wing. This all changed with Musk's acquisition of Twitter/X and now nearly all of the banned are back on that platform.

Yesterday Elon Musk also gave exposure to the Telegram founder's claim that the FBI tried to recruit one of his engineers to introduce vulnerabilities into the application through open-source dependencies.

It's hard to overstate the fragility of "freedom of speech", although admittedly I mostly care about expression and information-sharing related to the topics that I consider true and important. And those are the political topics which are only actually threatened at this point. The political persecution of Durov not only threatens Telegram, basically what became the last "internet Ghetto" of the Dissident Right, but it puts pressure on all platforms to conform to EU censorship standards, which are becoming more stringent year after year. TikTok is likewise being banned for not sufficiently curtailing speech according to the interests of the Jewish lobby.

You have the EU censorship regime, the international NGO apparatus like ADL and Hope not Hate which put enormous political and financial pressure on platforms and governments to censor this speech. The current state of Internet discourse is also proof positive of Elite Theory. Only someone like Elon Musk could do what he did with X and (for now) get away with it. Musk himself has related growing scrutiny and lawsuits by the federal bureaucracy against his businesses as retaliation for his "free speech" policy in governing X, and I think he's almost certainly correct.

It really is, at this point, one man standing against the impending total-internet censorship of the Dissident Right. People were making fun of Musk for overpaying for X, but it's an important lesson, a lesson already known by many, that you can't put a price on memetic control over the collective consciousness.

It really is, at this point, one man standing against the impending total-internet censorship of the Dissident Right. People were making fun of Musk for overpaying for X, but it's an important lesson, a lesson already known by many, that you can't put a price on memetic control over the collective consciousness.

It truly is amazing how quickly freedom of speech has been utterly abandoned by most of the West.

I'm genuinely curious how this happened. Does anyone have a good model for it? Are we just lazy now, and unprincipled? Do people actually believe that 'hate speech' shouldn't be protected.

I don't know, it's just absurd to me on a very basic level that people think free speech isn't under massive attack.

Colonial wars in the middle east.

It was the first time enemies couldn't be seen as having any legitimacy. There were no rules of war, just terrorists that have no more rights than vegetables. They can't be negotiated with, they are barely treated as prisoners of war, have no arguments that can be accepted and anything that happens to them is justified. There is no judicial process for terrorists and anyone suspected of being sympathetic can have all their rights striped. Total surveillance is acceptable against terrorists.

Much of the legal framework for the deplattforming comes from the war on terror.

The west built up a huge apparatus of professional regime change counter terrorists who worked in the middle east from 2001-2015. Then they came home and brought their tactics with them. Secondly, the big challenge to the regime is no longer Al Qaeda it is the own population.

Right wingers who supported the wars in the middle east effectively scored the most epic own goal in history and shot them selves in the face. The repression of the last couple of years is the military industrial complex being used against the own population.

Covid broke people’s brains. Lots of the elites bought into it hook line and sinker and really believed that allowing misinformation to spread was yelling fire in a crowded theater, but the cats out of the bag.

Lots of the elites bought into it hook line and sinker and really believed that allowing misinformation to spread was yelling fire in a crowded theater

Irregular reminder that Schenck v. US, the "fire in a crowded theatre" case, ruled that people distributed leaflets claiming the draft was a violation of the 13th Amendment (forbidding slavery and involuntary servitude) was akin to that, and therefore punishable. That doctrine wasn't a slippery slope; it started at the bottom.

The US has more legally protected freedom of speech in 2024 than at almost any time in its history, sure.

Always has been.

Seriously, attacks on free speech have scaled more or less with communications technologies. Bad actors exploit new capabilities. The public demands action after Grandma gets scammed or cousin Joe buys some Krokodil. Laws expand to close gaps which were never foreseen by an era of printing presses and horse-delivered mail.

It’s amazing what can be justified by wartime exigency, too. America had a relatively sober censorship regime in WWII, perhaps a privilege of living so far from the fighting. I’d argue we threw away that goodwill in the McCarthy era. Other nations were worse off from the start.

The 90s might have been a high-water mark as electronic infrastructure rolled out faster than regulations. Plus the whole detente of a good economy as the sole surviving superpower. As we struggle to claim any of those things, we’re back to the old power struggles over who gets to see what.

My intuition is that free speech, like many things, is something that works well in a culturally homogeneous society, and begins to break apart otherwise*. When the majority are basically on the same page about most things of real importance, you can tolerate a small group of weirdos ranting about blacks/gays/Jews/or whatever. When you have multiple cultures, some with very strong group-consciousness, free speech easily becomes abusable as a tool to direct aggression towards other communities in a zero-state competition for state benefits and favours. The UK is the obvious example of this: Muslims routinely use freedom of speech to organise thousands of young aggressive men to march around cities intimidating anyone they don't like into hiding away. OTOH, counter-protestors having the freedom of speech to express their dislike of this situation will cause outbreaks of violence with the aforementioned groups that will quickly escalate beyond what the state can handle, hence why they just simply deny this right to the less-favoured group.

*The obvious counter-example is the US, which is certainly more diverse than almost anywhere else by most metrics. I think they get away with it as the sheer scale of the country means that even if two groups of people want to kill each other, while they're living thousands of miles apart there's little chance of large-scale violence occurring.

When you have multiple cultures, some with very strong group-consciousness, free speech easily becomes abusable as a tool to direct aggression towards other communities in a zero-state competition for state benefits and favours.

Oh, really? So having minority cultures with very strong group-consciousness causes directed aggression towards other groups in a competition for resources and power? Very interesting. It sounds like you would call me a "weirdo ranting about Jews" while you acknowledge a dynamic recognized by the DR which is denied by everyone else.

The US is not an exception to this by any means. It's just that Jews were the minority group with the very strong group-consciousness that has used free speech to direct strong cultural aggression towards White culture and identity while simultaneously demanding fealty to their own group identity.

The "weirdos ranting about Jews" are just saying what you are accusing Muslims of doing, but Muslims don't even have such prominent control over academia, Hollywood, and other institutions of cultural influence. If they did, and used their influence to elevate their own group identity and criticize the identity of their outgroup so prominently, you would certainly accuse Muslims of doing what anti-Semites accuse Jews of doing.

Simple feminization of society, and the result of the alliance between feminist power groups and western èlites.

It is telling, though, that Musk is regularly in Europe and yet has never been arrested, while Durov has avoided it for some time and was arrested upon landing in France for the first time in a while.

In reality, everything that the EU wants Durov to remove from Telegram is stuff Musk’s X already does remove and is happy to remove if a takedown notice is filed.

In reality, everything that the EU wants Durov to remove from Telegram is stuff Musk’s X already does remove and is happy to remove if a takedown notice is filed.

As someone who's never used Telegram, to what extent do you think this is due to right-leaning Western content, versus its affiliations and use by the Russian military and PMCs?

From the comments I've seen on this topic, it's probably at least 90 % the latter. I share the view that Durov's arrest is very worrisome from a free-speech perspective vis-a-vis Europe, but it's almost guaranteed to be because they think he's hiding some secret connection to the Russian government and think they can wring info or concessions out of Telegram on that font. The European elites absolutely care way more about foreign policy and the Russia-Europe conflict more than they care about "dissident Right" or what have you.

The appeals by Russian opposition inside of Russia are probably going to be of scant help to Durov, since the standard European view is that pretty much all oppositional figures remaining inside Russia are fake opposition that actually serves Putin. Again, that's not the smartest way to view it, but that's how it is.

In reality, everything that the EU wants Durov to remove from Telegram is stuff Musk’s X already does remove and is happy to remove if a takedown notice is filed.

That's only if you take the EU and US at face value, that they are just really passionate about fighting pedophilia and terrorism, and don't assume that they are also trying to disrupt dissident political communication and organization. Which they obviously are. Musk made headlines just last month by claiming:

The European Commission offered 𝕏 an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us.

The other platforms accepted that deal.

𝕏 did not.

So the EU is obviously pressuring Musk to remove content which is not already removed, at least according to his perspective.

There has also been a lot in the news about the EU and US pressuring Musk:

Elon Musk is under renewed pressure from the US and EU over his ownership of Twitter, as regulators clamp down on the billionaire’s push to transform the social network into a freewheeling haven of free speech.

The European Commission on Wednesday threatened Musk with a ban unless Twitter abides by strict content moderation rules, as US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen indicated that Washington was reviewing his purchase of the social network.

The warning from Brussels came in a video call between Musk and Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner in charge of implementing the bloc’s digital rules, according to people with knowledge of the conversation.

Breton told Musk that Twitter must adhere to a checklist of rules, including ditching an “arbitrary” approach to reinstating banned users, pursuing disinformation “aggressively” and agreeing to an “extensive independent audit” of the platform by next year.

Musk is also a much, much harder target than Durov. They can't arrest him, but they probably can get away within giving X huge fines or banning it, and they have threatened to do both on many occasions since his acquisition of the platform.

The CEO of Rumble has fled Europe. Reminder that this is the "liberal free world."

So you have TikTok- forced divesture clearly going to be banned. Telegram, founder arrested. Rumble CEO has fled Europe. Musk is battling the NGOs and EU as well. This is not just about illegal content, it's about buckling down internet discourse for good.

They can't arrest him,

Why can’t they arrest him? Will Joe Biden sanction France if they do?

They can't arrest him, but they probably can get away within giving X huge fines or banning it

The problem with Musk is that he's actually pretty well leveraged into their national security and other policy objectives (and to a point, this affects the US as allied with Europe as well); SpaceX's products outperform the Ariane 6, and then there's Tesla (whose cars could be bricked on Musk's whim; they have been before).

I absolutely do believe the Europeans (though really, this is just the Americans by proxy) are stupid enough to try that (the UK has already made overtures in this direction), but Musk is simply too useful to the Americans (who, bipartisanly, have outsourced a significant chunk of their policy goal accomplishing infrastructure spending to him) to allow that, at least for now.

I would suspect Musk of having built in a dead man switch of some sort into some of his products. It's the kind of Bond villain thing I can easily imagine him nerding out about, and I'm sure he understand that riding the edge of "being too useful for the regime" and "being a thorn in their side" requires some sort of insurance policy as some in the regime might think that they can keep the upside if they get rid of him.

some sort of insurance policy

Which is also why EU regimes can't just outright ban Twitter or enforce the policies they want upon it; that has a 100% chance of causing a riot (and it's also how the higher-ups already coordinate their human botnets and I don't think they want to give up their brownshirts). That's also why if other countries want to enforce their desired policies they have to target the [domestic] posters themselves.

Which is also why EU regimes can't just outright ban Twitter or enforce the policies they want upon it; that has a 100% chance of causing a riot

Banning Twitter wouldn’t cause a riot, this hugely misunderstands the rioters and their motivations.

They've already threatened Musk several times and are taking action against X; there's no arrest warrant for him for two reasons

  1. He's not as far along in the process and

  2. He's an American citizen. The Biden and Harris administrations may not like him, but it would still be a problem if France arrested him for this sort of thing.

In reality, everything that the EU wants Durov to remove from Telegram is stuff Musk’s X already does remove

No, this blue-pill stuff wore through a long time ago. It's about not tolerating right-wing speech, not about whatever fig-leaf they put on it.

I think in Telegram’s case it’s about more than just right-wing speech, to put it mildly.

He's an American citizen. The Biden and Harris administrations may not like him, but it would still be a problem if France arrested him for this sort of thing.

It would be no problem at all. American citizens are arrested abroad for crimes that are not crimes in America all the time, and beyond some vague consular action that occasionally partially (but not wholly) limits a sentence the US is often fine with it.

The EU would certainly have a problem if it tried to extradite Musk, but arresting him? That would not affect the status quo.

American citizens are arrested abroad for crimes that are not crimes in America all the time, and beyond some vague consular action that occasionally partially (but not wholly) limits a sentence the US is often fine with it.

But how often does this happen for speech made in the US?

The backlash to arresting musk would be much, much worse than the backlash to arresting a literally who?.

I'm not so sure. The media hate machine has, I think, been extremely effective against Musk. I think most Americans would enjoy seeing him in jail.

You think?

I could see it among the Extremely Online crowd, but nothing close to a majority. Ex. neither of my parents, their coworkers, maybe their whole generation. People are still buying Teslas and such.

Buying a tesla is hardly a vote on the personal approval of its CEO. People just don't look at major purchasing decisions that way.

I’d argue they don’t look at arrests that way, either.

Musk has earned personal disapproval for appearing abrasive and immoral. He doesn’t have the criminal reputation that would make people say “ah, I knew it.”

More comments

And sometimes the US is not fine with it, as we saw with Brittney Griner. That arrest certainly affected the status quo. What elements of the situation would make Musk's arrest by a US ally over twitter moderation less disruptive to the status quo than Griner's arrest by an enemy for narcotics possession?

my assessment is that this is an example of the regime laundering nakedly illegal abuses of the criminal justice system against law-abiding dissidents through the cutout of a close ally. I do not believe the existing harassment happens without regime approval, and certainly an arrest would not. I think the regime should be held directly responsible for such harassment. does that seem wrong to you?

What elements of the situation would make Musk's arrest by a US ally over twitter moderation less disruptive to the status quo than Griner's arrest by an enemy for narcotics possession?

Race, gender, and sexual orientation, for three.

American citizens are arrested abroad for crimes that are not crimes in America all the time, and beyond some vague consular action that occasionally partially (but not wholly) limits a sentence the US is often fine with it.

Sometimes. But sometimes it causes minor diplomatic incidents: the Executive Branch pulled at least a few strings to get Brittney Griner and Evan Gershkovich home. Or five US citizens imprisoned in Iran. The State Department presumably has some judgement in terms of what they consider "wrongful detention," though.

Do we think the Biden / Harris administrations are as favorable to Griner as they are to Musk?

Given the news recently about NASA turning to SpaceX to help bring the two stranded astronauts back to Earth, and pointedly rejecting Boeing's pleas that their Starliner capsule was fit for the task, I'd say they'd probably be more favorable to Musk if he were detained on foreign soil. They clearly don't like the guy, but it would require pigheaded dogmatism to overlook his benefit to the US government and leave him to languish in a foreign prison.

Then again, pigheaded dogmatism would not shock me from these people.

NASA is definitely likely to be his biggest ally for sure, but who listens our cares about what NASA has to say? They are politically irrelevant except as a pork delivery system, which SpaceX a actually threatens. DOD might actually be the most influential voice urging his indispensibility, though their influence over State is likely weak and not enough to overcome the political hatred of Musk combined with the lobbying of the traditional defense contractors. The voting public are largely convinced that Musk is a grifter and a loud mouth, and that the companies he heads would be much better off without him.

I think that almost exclusively is going to depend on how many voters would be incensed or placated by that decision. Biden's supporters are perhaps more sympathetic to Griner than Trump's, but Gershkovich is a WSJ reporter. Musk has -- and I say this as someone who isn't a particular fan of the man -- managed to make himself centrally important to very public facing political objectives (NASA ISS/Artemis, DOD space launch) and employ tens of thousands of Americans in a way that would almost certainly haunt any politician and his or her party stupid enough to not bail him out.

But Musk is also a rather volatile figure and I could imagine quite a few scenarios in which he loses that central importance pretty quickly and becomes unsympathetic to the average voter.

That pretty clearly isn't supposed to matter. If it does matter, the fact that it matters should be made as legible as possible, to remove as much misunderstanding as possible from what follows.

To be explicit, you believe that the US government can extend or withdraw protection from foreign laws as it sees fit, more or less arbitrarily, that this power is likely to be used to reward domestic allies and punish domestic opponents, and that this is the normal state of affairs we're currently living in, such that Musk's arrest shouldn't cause an update.

Specifically, you believe that Musk being arrested for first-amendment-protected behavior would be fine, provided it's not the US government arresting him, and despite the fact that it is entirely within the US government's power to prevent his arrest.

Further, you believe this reality to be common knowledge.

Would that be accurate?

Yes? If an American is arrested for hate speech ‘committed’ while in an allied Western country in Europe, what does the US government do? Presently the answer is almost certainly nothing.

I don't have much evidence to support this, but my gut feeling -- which is probably representative of the voters that the politicians are at least a bit responsible to -- is that this will depend on context quite a bit. An American citizen arrested for "hate speech" that happens in Europe and is relevant to European politics (say, participating in a riot in the UK) would be treated very differently than an American tourist arrested for something they posted in America on Twitter last year.

Extraterritorial jurisdiction is complicated and probably doesn't have broad support on either side of the Pond. Europe complains when the US does it, too: the entire Assange extradition thing wasn't, from what I can tell, particularly popular in Sweden or the UK.

In reality, everything that the EU wants Durov to remove from Telegram is stuff Musk’s X already does remove and is happy to remove if a takedown notice is filed.

Interesting. My guess would be that Musk has more money / allies, which is why a minor country like France won't touch him, even if he allows more illegal content.

Most of the content in the leaked quasi-indictment is stuff that is explicitly banned on X to no lesser extent than it is on Facebook.

This is a very interesting and ominous development. I strongly doubt Durov will actually serve serious jail time. The interesting questions then are:

Exactly what concessions will France / the EU / whoever wring out of Durov and Telegram in exchange for his release?

What should we take from the fact that this level of lawfare has not yet been used (at least not visibly) against any of the other social networks or messaging platforms? Are they all cooperating sufficiently, despite claimed E2EE protections on some things? Do they have some other sort of leverage or protection? Or maybe the powers that be are just afraid of possible backlash, so they're going after Telegram first to see what they can get away with, and if it goes well, further action on other platforms may follow.

Exactly what concessions will France / the EU / whoever wring out of Durov and Telegram in exchange for his release?

If he cuts a deal, we’ll likely never know unless he defects afterwards, which seems unlikely unless he never wants to leave the UAE again.

There are worse places to live in, if you have money.

There are, but he has precedent for trying to cut deals, and the FSB is scarier than the French when it comes to overseas ‘operations’, so I assume he will take it and move on happy and rich. Even when it came to the Russians, after he left he apparently negotiated with them quite extensively.

Because back in 2017, we were naive and thought it was a uniquely Russian problem.

Oh my god... I can forgive boomer Westerners believing this sort of stuff, but if Russians buy it then we truly are lost.

The political persecution of Durov not only threatens Telegram, basically what became the last "internet Ghetto" of the Dissident Right, but it puts pressure on all platforms to conform to EU censorship standards

To a large extent this is self-inflicted. The writing was on the wall for a pretty long time now, and technologically nothing stands in the way of making an uncensorable service, but all these alt-tech CEOs keep making the same single-point-of-failure architectures. I suppose the issue is you can forget about making money from the uncensorable variant, but then again, I don't understand how Telegram is making any money to begin with.

It really is, at this point, one man standing against the impending total-internet censorship of the Dissident Right

The thought did occur to me that Elon's takeover is just bait to get dissidents to come out of hiding, so they can give the final blow when convenient, but I'm hoping that by now people are smart enough to not put all their eggs in one basket.

I can forgive boomer Westerners believing this sort of stuff, but if Russians buy it then we truly are lost.

I guess what he means is that "it never occurred to us that it can happen to us in the West"

if Russians buy it then we truly are lost.

Eh, the lack of success of dissident Russian liberals in their own country suggests that that ordinary Russians don't buy them. That said, one of my dear Russian-American (The mix of vestigial Russian accent plus taught in law school Southern accent is hilarious.) friends who I have an incredible amount of respect for (He's both genuinely smarter than me and vastly more driven.) used to be an uncritically turbo-America neocon who mocked me for my cynicism (I was an unironic Paultard in those days. Ah, high school.) and now is a pro-Trumper so disillusioned (and ruined in his Slavic friend group over the Z question, being unable to hide his great Russian chauvinism) that he moved to China.

I'd spend a lot of money for the privilege of a night talking with Artem in a bar (tough shit for me; he doesn't drink).

The lack of success by the Russian liberals should be attributed to the general depoliticization in the Russian society. It’s not that the Russians just don’t care about politics, the apathy comes from being disconnected with their country and the world in general. Why watch the news if you can’t tell what the truth is? “What’s truth anyway?” is a common way to think. If there’s no way of telling there truth from lies, there’s no meaningful way to act.

This mental state is not only dominant, but also deliberately cultivated in Russia by its government.

but also deliberately cultivated in Russia by its government.

People say this all the time like it's some uniquely russian thing. If western media told me the sky was blue, I'd go out and check, just in case it had just turned into world-ending-evangelion-blood-red. Our institutions are hell bent on gaslighting us on even basic facts of life (re-birthing-persons). The media spent 4 years confabulation absolute bullshit about the sitting president, then they spent another 4 years pretending the fossil-in-chief still has all his marbles in order.

At this point I wouldn't even take arms against an invading Russian army, at least the russians wouldn't want to shove rainbow nonsense down my throat.

I'm not entirely sure what your comment is meant to highlight.

The comment I responded to says that Russian liberals failed because Russian people "don't buy it".

I said that Russians don't follow/believe liberals because they are depoliticized to a point where the majority of people don't believe any politician at all, not just liberal politicians.

The depoliticization aspect is unique to Russia. American society is deeply political. Both states are cultivated by propaganda.

What I'm saying is this is coming for us too. People will give up voting, what's the point when the deep state will just install whoever they please. The real question is if people are going to try and stage a boogaloo or just get high and give up.

I'd venture to say that it's a simplistic lens to view the current election, considering the history of Russia. The process of depoliticization has its roots in Stalin's purges, the threat of Gulags silencing any political dissent, the culture of snitching and secrecy. Russian people retreated from the sphere of politics into their own lives because their lives depended on it. The parallels do not seem convincing to me, and I'm not sure if there are any.

Oh no, the parallels are absolutely there. There is a reason you keep your mouth shut if you have right-leaning ideas in hollywood and in big-tech.

The writing was on the wall for a pretty long time now, and technologically nothing stands in the way of making an uncensorable service, but all these alt-tech CEOs keep making the same single-point-of-failure architectures

An "uncensorable service" where the only users there are like-minded people is not what the DR wants, certainly not what it needs. It needs to be present in the public square. That's why Musk's turnabout of Twitter censorship is so monumentally important. You have DR perspectives getting huge engagement with mainstream audiences. You have anti-Semitic posters publicly ratio'ing the ADL's annual memorial-post to the murdering pedophile Leo Frank. That is the stuff which is actually dangerous. All the DR being herded into some uncensorable service which gets no engagement or audience from the mainstream is worthless.

That is the stuff which is actually dangerous.

Do you not consider the clearly obvious possibility that following generations are indeed ever more antisemitic but also ever more brown and black, third-world ist, leftist/ ‘de-colonial’ and otherwise ‘anti white’ (by your standards)?

We probably agree on the existence of this relationship, but disagree on the cause.

Why does an ever more brown and black, third-world ist, leftist/'de-colonial' and otherwise 'anti white' Culture drive large audiences of white people towards anti-semitism? Is it a psychopathology, or is there a rational reason that these things are connected?

Obviously browns and blacks have more of a tendency to be a receptive audience, but that's not the cause of the relationship between those things. The cause is white people pattern-matching these cultural phenomena to the systems of power that have consciously brought them about and suppress opposition to them.

drive large audiences of white people towards anti-semitism?

I thought it was the memetic capacity of the dissident right driving people towards it, which is why you’re so keen on protecting access to big public platforms like Twitter?

Having more Muslims as members of a formerly entirely or near-entirely white community is naturally going to drive more white people towards antisemitism for the same reason that it will likely transmit to them other cultural values from that population too.

I thought it was the memetic capacity of the dissident right driving people towards it, which is why you’re so keen on protecting access to big public platforms like Twitter?

Where's the contradiction? Critically-minded white people who are confronted with the obvious hostility towards them by prevailing systems of power, the systems which have brought all the cultural trends you have mentioned, have a tendency to find the dissident right critique of that Culture to be persuasive. Nobody is more conscientious of the memetic capacity of that Critique than Jews themselves, which is why they are desperate to make sure it isn't platformed anywhere. What's the source of the memetic power? Mass psychosis, or force of truth?

Having more Muslims as members of a formerly entirely or near-entirely white community is naturally going to drive more white people towards antisemitism for the same reason that it will likely transmit to them other cultural values from that population too.

That's laughable, as if Europeans needed to cohabitate with Muslims to rediscover thousands-year-old criticisms of Jewish behavior by European intellectual tradition. The uncomfortable fact is that the influence goes in the reverse. There's no white DR person who was influenced to become anti-Semitic by transmission of Muslim cultural values. But the reverse is happening. You have black and brown figures with large audiences- Myron Gaines, Candace Owens, Sneako, the Tate family, who are all being influenced by traditional European antisemitism transmitted by DR figures like Nick Fuentes.

person who was influenced to become anti-Semitic by transmission of Muslim cultural values.

You don’t think any white people have been persuaded to the anti-semitic cause (and as an ethnonationalist who believes supporting diversity in western countries is anti-white I presume you accept wholly that anti-Zionism is antisemitism) by sympathy for Muslim Palestinian activism and its relationship with the left?

You don’t think any white people have been persuaded to the anti-semitic cause (and as an ethnonationalist who believes supporting diversity in western countries is anti-white I presume you accept wholly that anti-Zionism is antisemitism) by sympathy for Muslim Palestinian activism and its relationship with the left?

The story of left-wing antisemitism has nothing to do with transmission of Muslim cultural values to progressives. It's the classic story of the golem turning against its master. All of the "values" being appealed to by progressives to oppose Israel were foremost pushed by Jewish intellectuals and cultural influencers in order to oppose latent fascist tendencies embedded in white ethnocentrism- i.e. "The Authoritarian Personality". The fact this cultural Kritik is now being turned against the state of Israel has nothing to do with the transmission of Muslim cultural values, and has everything to do with Jews being increasingly unable to get away with the most vomit-inducing hypocrisy known to mankind, in which they incessantly give moral lectures to white gentiles about racism while creating the most violent ethno-supremacist cult in the Western world.

An "uncensorable service" where the only users there are like-minded people is not what the DR wants

Then why so much drama over Telegram? All the normies and right-thinking people use Whatsapp.

Then why so much drama over Telegram?

The entire DR was forced there by Twitter censorship, but absolutely nobody considered it desirable. Obviously, any platform used by the DR would be a target. TikTok, X, Rumble, Telegram are all facing enormous pressure. With TikTok being another example to disprove the naive notion that this is about illegal content. The bipartisan consensus to ban TikTok was brought about by the Jewish lobby demanding censorship of anti-Zionist speech. It wasn't about illegal content.

The entire DR was forced there by Twitter censorship, but absolutely nobody considered it desirable.

Alright, but you would agree that it got you through until Elon got ahold of Twitter? If so, all I'm saying is that it would be better if such places weren't designed with obvious flaws.

The bipartisan consensus to ban TikTok was brought about by the Jewish lobby demanding censorship of anti-Zionist speech. It wasn't about illegal content.

Personally, I'd be happy to see TikTok go away in Europe as well, but I'm under no illusion any of this is about illegal content.

but if Russians buy it then we truly are lost.

The dissidents the Western governments target and the dissidents the Russian government targets are usually not the same. So when you are targeted by Russia but not France, it's easy to believe that "sure they do it in the West too but Not Like That".

If you're a non-progressive (pisses off the West) libertarian (pisses off Russia) then sure it's all the same to you.

What are the alternatives? If you can't control your creation, it falls under the sway of the swarm. If you retain control, you can be coerced.

I don't think it's difficult to make a system where two people who want to talk to each other in private can. The difficult part is linking two people who don't know each other but would like to.

How many people even use Telegrams built-in discoverability mechanisms instead of "hey, here's a link to a group I started"?

Yeah, you have to say goodbye to control over your creation, but that's the world we live in. The creators of Signal don't seem to mind, so I don't know why that wasn't good enough for Telegram.

How far have the founders of Signal lost control of the code? If it’s an open-source project, presumably there are owners and admins of the main fork, and if those aren’t the makers then I imagine a code of conduct will appear in due course. Likewise if there’s no company hiring and paying employees, sooner or lately one of the volunteers will turn out to be law enforcement. It’s legitimately tricky I think.

If you want to say true invulnerability is impossible - fine. I'm just saying the current batch of alt-tech leaders are at best asking for it, and at worst they're deliberately building honey-pots.

I wasn’t arguing, more trying to figure out what I would do in that situation and where the vulnerabilities would be.

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