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Oh my god... I can forgive boomer Westerners believing this sort of stuff, but if Russians buy it then we truly are lost.
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.
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 guess what he means is that "it never occurred to us that it can happen to us in the West"
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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Then why so much drama over Telegram? All the normies and right-thinking people use Whatsapp.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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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