How to prevent populists and Putin’s collaborators from coming to power?
Next year there will be an election in Czechia, and the ruling coalition is bound to lose. The potential winners are pictured above, Andrej Babiš is one of the richest Czechs, and he heads his own oligarch project, he recently made alliance with Orban and the Austrian Freedom Party against the EU green deal and migrant deal. But Babiš will adopt whatever ideology that will win him elections.
Tomio Okamura made political capital during the migrant crisis of 2015. His party has been the focal point of discontented voters for a while. But there are other players on the right now that threaten his position. Kateřina Konečná heads a coalition of Communists and other traditional leftists. Babiš might form a coalition with these parties, or he might be joined by the currently ruling Civic Democrats, if the latter change leadership.
In my opinion, the current globohomo coalition is going to be undone by its own policies. Green deal and immigrants will conjure an uprising, whether they want it or not. High energy prices will lead to deindustrialization. AI revolution will require a lot of energy.
A research paper about Ukrainian nationalism presented at the Haci Bayram Veli University in Ankara, led to the dismissal of the secretary of the visa department in the Estonian embassy. In an essay published in the Journal of Crises and Political Research, Maria Sarantseva writes that the Ukrainian nationalism experienced growth after the fall of the USSR. The ideology of nationalism, in her opinion, promotes the idea of supremacy of the Ukrainian nation, and also blames the USSR and Russia for everything wrong. The Estonian embassy could not continue a contract with an author of a paper that is filled with Kremlin narratives.
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Talk about Ukrainian Nazis and discrimination in Ukraine dispels the myth that Ukraine is an innocent victim of unprovoked Russian aggression, the latter which was an attack on a democratic country. If you work for the government, you can lose your job if you stray from the official narrative by providing any context or commentary. And you may go to court if you are too outspoken. This form of repression is typical for all East European countries.
Lizzo was campaigning for Kamala in her hometown, which happens to be Detroit, and she was no doubt expressing local patriotism. Little do people that laugh at this realize that Detroit is not what it used to be. My information is it lifted its ass out of the gutter, and the Murican rust belt is actually getting revitalized.
I hear Ukrainian authorities will open criminal cases against that show the brutality of recruitment in Ukraine. (see here and here) Fuck the Ukrainian government…
Gennady Beybutyan was found dead in Odessa. He headed an organisation, which participated in the forcible mobilization of the citizens.
According to Ukrainian media, Beybutyan’s body was found next to Tesla parked by the side of the road. Preliminary information says he was shot.
The members of Beybutyan’s organization are known as “volunteer helpers” of the police, they are actively cooperating with the military recruiters, doing forcible mobilization. Also, they act as middle men in collecting bribes for recruiters.
Ukraine is crawling with acts of sabotage, protests, and violence. People have had enough, and chaos is setting in…
I was briefly a member of this right-wing party here in the Czech Republic and one of our slogans was: “We are defending the normal world.”
I never realized that the fight against normalcy is the left’s way of attacking capitalism. Check out this document I found on the internets. I quote:
Queer is not merely another identity that can be tacked onto a list of neat social categories, nor the quantitative sum of our identities. Rather, it is the qualitative position of opposition to presentations of stability — an identity that problematizes the manageable limits of identity. Queer is a territory of tension, defined against the dominant narrative of white hetero monogamous patriarchy, but also by an affinity with all who are marginalized, otherized and oppressed. Queer is the abnormal, the strange, the dangerous. Queer involves our sexuality and our gender, but so much more. It is our desire and fantasies and more still. Queer is the cohesion of everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world.
Heterosexuality is capitalism. I don’t know but homosexuals, especially male homosexuals are some of the most bourgeois people I know. I guess they are not queer enough.
As queers we understand Normalcy. Normal, is the tyranny of our condition; reproduced in all of our relationships. Normalcy is violently reiterated in every minute of every day. We understand this Normalcy as the Totality. The Totality being the interconnection and overlapping of all oppression and misery. The Totality is the state. It is capitalism. It is civilization and empire. The totality is fence post crucifixion. It is rape and murder at the hands of police. It is “Str8 Acting” and “No Fatties or Femmes.” It is Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It is the brutal lessons taught to those who can’t achieve Normal.
Queer eye for the Straight Guy.😆
Clothing game my friends is real deal, I got laid twice on account of my wardrobe. It works. I think the PUAs call it peacocking. Total cringe!
When we speak of social war, we do so because purist class analysis is not enough for us. What does a marxist economic worldview mean to a survivor of bashing? To a sex worker? To a homeless, teenage runaway? How can class analysis, alone as paradigm for a revolution, promise liberation to those of us journeying beyond our assigned genders and sexualities? The Proletariat as revolutionary subject marginalizes all whose lives don’t fit in the model of heterosexual-worker. Lenin and Marx have never fucked the ways we have.
In socialist utopia, women would not be forced to commodify their vaginas, and homelessness would be nonexistent. Who is going to make puberty blockers in your socialist utopia. In my opinion, the rich love this queer attack on capitalism, they fear the angry armed worker, and not some degenerate tranny.
See, we’ve always been the other, the alien, the criminal. The story of queers in this civilization has always been the narrative of the sexual deviant, the constitutional psychopathic inferior, the traitor, the freak, the moral imbecile. We’ve been excluded at the border, from labor, from familial ties. We’ve been forced into concentration camps, into sex slavery, into prisons. The normal, the straight, the american family has always constructed itself in opposition to the queer.
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Straight is not queer. White is not of color. Healthy does not have HIV. Man is not woman. The discourses of heterosexuality, whiteness and capitalism reproduce themselves into a model of power. For the rest of us, there is death.
HIV is not healthy, it is being pozzed and having to pop pills to contain the virus and stay alive.
A fag is bashed because his gender presentation is far too femme. A poor transman can’t afford his life-saving hormones. A sex worker is murdered by their client. A genderqueer persyn is raped because ze just needed to be “fucked straight.” Four black lesbians are sent to prison for daring to defend themselves against a straight-male attacker.
The horror! If you feel like you are trans, why don’t you make money for your hormones? Do you want the public to pay for your own treatment?
If history proves anything, it is that capitalism has a treacherous recuperative tendency to pacify radical social movements. It works rather simply, actually. A group gains privilege and power within a movement, and shortly thereafter sell their comrades out. Within a couple years of stonewall, affluent gay white males had thoroughly marginalized everyone that had made their movement possible and abandoned their revolution with them.
If history proves anything is that all leftist movements lead to failure, and reaction.
The “LGBT” political establishment has become a force of assimilation, gentrification, capital and statepower. Gay identity has become both a marketable commodity and a device of withdrawal from struggle against domination. Now they don’t critique marriage, military or the state. Rather we have campaigns for queer assimilation into each. Their politics is advocacy for such grievous institutions, rather than the annihilation of them all. “Gays can kill poor people around the world as well as straight people!” “Gays can hold the reigns of the state and capital as well straight people!” “We are just like you.” Assimilationists want nothing less than to construct the homosexual as normal — white, monogamous, wealthy, 2.5 children, SUVs with a white picket fence. This construction, of course, reproduces the stability of heterosexuality, whiteness, patriarchy, the gender binary, and capitalism itself.
Last week, Ulrich Bindseil and Jürgen Schaaf of the European Central Bank (ECB) published a paper entitled “The distributional consequences of Bitcoin” in which they made a host of dubious claims about Bitcoin.
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Here are the claims:
The main premise of the paper is that if bitcoin’s price continues to rise, early bitcoin investors — the “early birds” (the authors’ term) — will gain wealth at the expense of the “latecomers.” While this is true if the early birds hold all of their coins to no end, the dynamic is no different with any other publicly-traded asset. The bigger point that the researchers miss, though, is that some of us are both “early birds” and “latecomers.” I first bought bitcoin in January 2018, and I also bought some last week. Did I impoverish myself in this scenario? No, I didn’t. Nor has anyone who has dollar-cost averaged into bitcoin over any period of time.
One of the other primary arguments in the paper is that Bitcoin has failed as a payment technology. In making this claim, the authors fail to even mention the Lightning Network, a layer built on top of Bitcoin that enables fast, cheap bitcoin payments. In recent years, the Lightning Network has grown exponentially.
Throughout the piece, the authors bring up how bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are the preferred currencies of criminals and bad actors worldwide.
The authors also make the claim Bitcoin is a threat to democracy because crypto PACs now donate to politicians. The presupposes that every other lobbying group out there isn’t a threat to democracy, which is laughable… Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s former opposition, popularized using cryptocurrencies for donations when the Putin regime limited its access to traditional financial rails.
The authors also suggest that central banks can just tighten monetary policy to counteract the “bubble” forming in bitcoin’s price.
Imagine that, an asset appreciates. I hope you are stacking those sats my friends. BTC is actually used as payment in places where banking system is not very developed. In the EU, the adoption of BTC as a payment system is of course much slower. BTC is not a good option for criminals as the ledger is open and transactions can be traced to specific names.
The US Federal Reserve is not far behind in the stuck up dinosaur, legacy finance race…
If anything, Elon Musk is a master of PR. He is a master of Hype. But not all his illusions turn out to be a success. Remember Hyperloop? I am personally not against technology, quite the opposite but I am a technology sceptic. Dependence on technology keeps people vulnerable and enslaved. Also, seeing technology as a panacea to world’s problems is wrong…
Self-driving cars were all the hype for many years now and nobody has yet come up with a working and safe, commercially viable vehicle.
But if anyone runs a fleet of these robo-taxis, especially in an urban area with a high density of wealthy individuals, he could be making a killing. No need to pay drivers. If this makes it possible to replace the car entirely, this creates extra money in people’s pockets. Cars are already expensive, in the UK having a car and paying for road tax, congestion charges, and insurance can cost several thousand pound per year.
Come to think of it, a humanoid robot is such a cringe technology. What tasks would it be able to perform? Besides, the joy of living is doing many of these tasks yourself. So on one hand, I would not mind a robot that would clean my AirBNB, so I can dedicate my time to something else but cleaning it myself is also good.
Little did wannabe warlord and catering magnate Yevgeny Prigozhin realize his short-lived mutiny would result in his demise, leaving behind a legacy—and admirers—far beyond Russia’s borders, particularly in China, where Prigozhin has become a cult figure on closely monitored social media.
Prigozhin’s following among top military bloggers on Weibo, one of the largest social media platforms in China, mirrors that in Russia. From Moscow to Beijing, Prigozhin is seen as the embodiment of a more vigorous and genuine patriotism, a man who prioritized the motherland’s interests over his own life. He is celebrated as a man of the people, despite the wealth he generated from the Wagner Group’s operations.
His blunt criticism of Russia’s top military leaders bolstered his image as a truth-teller willing to risk his life. This resonated in China, where a purge of top military officials in the People’s Liberation Army is underway due to accusations of corruption and of betraying the ideals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Amid rising tension between Beijing and Washington, many Chinese military bloggers suspect U.S. involvement in Prigozhin’s death, despite there being no evidence of this. A poll on Weibo, limited to 1,000 respondents, showed a majority asserting that the United States orchestrated Prigozhin’s plane crash to incite civil war in Russia. A smaller number of voters pointed the finger at Russian President Vladimir Putin, stating that allowing Prigozhin to walk away unpunished could set a dangerous precedent.
Prigozhin according to my information never opposed Putin, and he could have been assassinated by somebody in the Russian government that he had beef with, and against whom he mutinied. Who that was I don’t know…
I thought Ukraine was supposed to win with the support of Western democracies. We have been told, by Karlin for instance, that the West has a GDP far surpassing Russia, and the Russians would simply lose…
It is rather questionable the amount of help Russia received from the likes of China, North Korea, or Iran. We have all heard about Iranian drones the Shahid-Geran but it is unclear how many of those drones Iran has delivered, or whether the Russians haven’t acquired the technology and don’t produce the drones themselves. I think the second option is more probable, and the Russian have actually perfected the Iranian prototype.
There was a story about the Russians firing a North Korean version of Iskander, the Kimskander. There was also a story about North Korea providing artillery shells. There was also a story that the North Korean shells are shit and they explode prematurely. If the second information is true, and not just a propaganda, this form of help wasn’t worth much. On the other hand, we have also heard that Russia is perfectly capable of producing shells by themselves.
Recently, a story about North Korean soldiers being sent to Ukraine has surfaced. The Kim regime could be interested in providing its troops with some combat experience but is this a game-changer? On the other hand, Ukraine has attracted thousands of volunteers from the West, from Georgia, Chechens and Islamists from North Caucasus and the Middle East. This is a very internationalized conflict, and many parties would like to be present.
China’s position is not exactly supportive of Russia’s efforts. You don’t hear about the Russians firing Chinese ammo and rockets on Ukraine. Recently, I heard China is developing drones together with Russia. I think I saw a document that said China will work with Russia but not to the detriment of its own interests. Hence, China is happy to import Russian oil and gas but Chinese banks might be reluctant to service Russian clients because of sanctions. Also, many of those FPV drones Ukraine was using to destroy Russian tanks were bought from China. China recently said they will not allow export of technologies that might be used for military purposes but I don’t think Beijing has the infrastructure to police people in Czechia that send drones to Ukraine.
And this brings me to another point. Ukraine is benefiting from an international financial system. I have seen zero fundraisers for Russia or the republics of the Donbas but I have seen a lot of fundraisers for Ukraine. That is on top of packages sent by Western governments. Russia has only itself to rely on, and Ukraine is still losing. The whole point in having Ukraine fight Russia was to deal a blow with Russia by proxy. Russia is seen, by the West as a competitor that ought to be contained by constantly mounting sanctions, negative PR, and proxy conflicts on its borders. This stress is supposed to halt Russia. And nobody gives a fuck if some Ukrs are going to die at this.
What major historical events do you remember?
I remember the fall of Communism but I lived in a small town in Bohemia so the events there were nothing dramatic, overall nothing is ever dramatic in Czechia. Technically everything is a historical event in some environment. Little do you know but you could be making history right now, and future generations will remember your ass.
Insomniac Resurrected 