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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27876 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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It's a bit funny to read this at the same time we're seeing a swing towards right wing curmudgeons in various countries like Argentina, Chile, the Netherlands, and possibly even Sweden and Ireland now.

The OP didn't deny that the right could have success in elections.

a swing towards right wing curmudgeons

There was a lengthy comment by a guest in one of Neema Parvini's recent videos relevant to this point (at about 1:23:00); let me see if I can transcribe it:

The time scale isn’t to do with presidencies, and people think in time horizons that are far too narrow. Policy is not decided every four years. Policy is not made up every four years. There is permanent continuation policy of the American government and the American Empire that has taken place since 1945; and that much is very, very evident.

The people saying leaders matter — Trump was never the leader of America. Trump was never in power. That is the lesson you should take away from this. He didn’t know how many troops were in Syria; they simply lied to him and waited until he left office. Donald Trump was not in power because the levers of power lead nowhere; and emotionally attaching to who is in the presidency is part of the problem that we have, in that most Western policy in most places is on rails. I do not believe that the last ten years of the Tory government in Britain, to answer AA’s question, would have been particularly different under a Labour government. The Equality Act is something that was dreamt up by Labour and brought by the Tories.

People talk about the Uniparty. It’s really a basic bitch Libertarian talking point, but they’re right. There really is no difference in terms of macro-policy, in terms of a decades-long time scale, whether you have a blue government or red government, because nations are not ruled by elected officials. Democracy does not function. Nations are ruled by the permanent bureaucracy, which does not change.

And to bring my final point into this, a political victory, and a real transfer of power is what took place in Ukraine in 2014, with a process known as “lustration,” where they banned every government official — including judges — from being part of the government for five to ten years. That is what it looks like when an American-directed vassal actually wants to change who is in office.

Who is in office does not change in Western democracies, and that is a fundamental misunderstanding of this point. We shouldn’t celebrate this, and we shouldn’t have an emotional stake in it, because who is in power is not changing. It is not changing in the Netherlands, it is not changing in Argentina, and it has not changed in Italy. Who is in power has not changed, and I think that is really why talking about the posters put over the permanent regimes and bureaucracies — which largely are vassals of global American power, let’s be fair — is relatively meaningless. It’s impossible to say whether you were better off or worse off under certain regimes, because the regime does. Not. Change.

Yes, as has happened various times since 1789, but never for long.

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