You’ll be hard pressed to find a more cynical pack of non-believers than a Ministers’ Convention.

Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein is also very good.

Anyone notice how the population of religious people globally is falling at a rapid rate, but the power being amassed by religious communities and officials continues to appear unassailable from within liberal-ish institutions?

It’s almost as though the promise of liberal democracy and secularization is being renegged upon as soon as it inconveniences old bourgeois institutions. Damn shame there’s no group of 19th century intellectuals and revolutionaries who could have warned us about this. Oh well… I’m sure this will be fine.

Enjoy another 30 Years War, Europe. You’ve earned it.

Networking Effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

De-nazification was a lie. The East and West German governments were flush with ex-Nazi mid-level bureaucracts by the end of the 1940s, with Nazi officer survivors holding positions as senior as cabinet secretaries and high courts.

Germany’s post-World War II government was full of Nazis. A new study says that half of all senior officials in Germany’s Justice Ministry in the 1950s and 1960s were former Nazis.

While US authorities sought justice by putting 16 lawyers and jurists who played a role in the Nazi regime on trial in 1947, Germany tried one lone prosecutor after establishing the West German Federal Republic in 1949.

Many of those working for the ministry in the post-war years came from backgrounds as lawyers or judges in Nazi Germany, and came to the department to provide legal advice as West Germany rebuilt itself. By coming together and closing ranks, the network of former Nazis not only protected one another from legal prosecution but also bound together to create the nation’s laws.

Nevermind the NATO commanders with Nazi careers who helped to form the post-war anti-communist movement’s backbone.

I’m going to punch him in the face, mid-scream, as hard as I can, probably multiple times.

I mean, I certainly get the sentiment. But these are the same people with a gestapo that’s dragging people off by their hair, throwing them into cargo planes, and shoveling them into an El Salvadorian concentration camp.

What’s frustrating is to see the last 10% not following the first 90% off the job in solidarity. Americans who are willing to work 36 hour shifts aren’t doing their peers or their countrymen any favors, even if they do work for the CFPB. That department cannot fulfill its purpose under the current management and you’re foolish if you continue to perpetuate the hoax that it is functional.

ARE WE LEARNING HOW “SOCIAL MEDIA” WORKS YET HUMANITY?

Apparently not, because people keep feeling surprised and offended when the Networking Effect happens.

Seriously. How many more fucking times do we need to go around this goddamn merry go round until we just start calling each other on the phone and meeting face to face again

Idk, when are we going to get low-cost public transit and VoIP that’s not like talking over two tin cans connected with string?

I can’t believe the guy who originally administered the creation of Twitter would do all the exact same things that originally made him billions of dollars selling the company to Elon Musk.

There’s no way he’s just speed-running what he did last time in hopes of another $44B buyout.

Glorifying a system can never be the answer.

Systems and institutions are what we rely on to provide a secure future for ourselves and our loved ones. You don’t need to glorify them, but you do need to value them on their merits.

Keeping a critical eye on the status quo is the only way to develop a better future in any system.

There is a huge difference between being critical and being cynical, particularly when it comes to domestic reporting of “enemy” nation-states. What we have in the US rhetoric directed towards China (and Iran and Cuba and North Korea and now increasingly Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico and Lula in Brazil) is best described by the historical scholar Michael Parenti describing the US attitude towards the USSR.

The anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

Criticism of these foreign - often significantly more stable, free, and prosperous - nations is nonfalsifiable orthodoxy. They are always simultaneously engaged in crushing authoritarianism and riddled with legions of angry insurgents. It somehow manifests all the worst aspects of capitalism because its state orthodoxy is socialist.

Until you actually fucking go there and talk to people and realize this isn’t a nation of Machiavellian lies and Potemkin villages. It’s just a place where a larger number of people have found a better way to live, absent an American telling them how to do it.

Talk to people that live within the system is all I can tell you.

You mean the relatives we were visiting?

China isn’t perfect either.

I’ll never understand the absolute terror Americans have for “imperfect China”

none of this discussion is about nuclear power or thorium and just about people wanting to feel morally correct about something and snarling back and forth at each other

I’m posed to snarl because I’ve seen this so many times before, as a justification to invade and destroy advanced industrial states that don’t bend the knee to the US State Department.

The reason you get thorium reactors out of China and Mars landers out of India comes down to two words “Peace Dividend”.

Our species is so cooked.

There’s a brighter future on the horizon. But you don’t get there by taking Marco Rubio at face value.

The UN inspection committee could not find evidence to support your claims.

Why are you asserting the existence of a genocide in Xinjiang while endorsing the engineered famine across the border in Afghanistan?

You want Iraq 2.0?

After Yemen, Syria, and Libya I think we’re closer to Iraq 6.0

While the president brags about his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran and throttling its oil exports, its weapons sales to Russia get a pass.

In the spirit of bipartisanship, I think we can all agree it is time to invade Iran.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/13/michelle-bachelets-failed-xinjiang-trip-has-tainted-her-whole-legacy/

The Western response to UN officials investigating Xinjiang and failing to find confirmation of the salacious rumors is to call the UN a failure.

The same criticisms hurled at UN investigators attempting to confirm these accusations today are mirrored by IAEA efforts to find nuclear weapons in Iraq. You’ve got Christian nationalists pushing far-right warmongering and fear mongering, in an attempt to curb China’s growing economic clout in the region. And it has culminated in the Trump presidency, and the full collapse of the US as a credible source of intelligence.

Sometimes a country will inflate the appearance of problems in an enemy nation in order to stoke resentment at home and justify military action abroad.

In Iraq, we made up a bunch of lies about soldiers murdering babies in incubators. After Vietnam, we had Cold Warriors repeating the POW/MIA lies that suggested they were holding hundreds of American hostages for decades, in order to justify continued sanctions and embargos. The slanders against Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Iran have been relentless, all while the US conducted insidious guerrilla wars that have raped, mutilated, and killed countless civilians.

At some point “Both Sides Are Bad” doesn’t cut it. You have to address your own nation’s sins - the lies, the sabotage, the assassinations and us sponsored genocides - before a rational listener can take criticism of your political rivals seriously.

Russia used to export a lot of refined products, so they loose the profits of doing the refining.

They liquidated a bunch of their industrial refining capacity in the late 90s/early 00s thanks to Yeltsin’s implementation of Shock Doctrine economic reforms.

My home town of Houston hosts a bunch of Soviet made refinery equipment bought for pennies on the dollar from overseas.

That’s got nothing to do with current EU sanctions. If anything, Russian reinvestment in heavy industry has been one of the brighter spots of the Putin Regime and a major source of his popularity.

Last year 17.5% of EUs LNG imports came from Russia. There is no reason for doing that more then three years after the full scale invasion.

There’s a strong economic reason to obtain gas from the lowest cost provider. LNGs floated in from the US can’t meet demand and cost 10x Russia rates at market.

Combine that with the US tariffing of trade deficits and insourcing of energy consumption for AI development and you’ve left Europe with no other option for gas power.

I can’t speak to Shanghai. I’ve only been to Hong Kong, Beijing, and Zhuhai - just outside of Macau - and with family (my eight year old niece isn’t much of a clubber yet).

But all the youth culture I experienced there was thriving. Not exactly going up and asking people their preferred sexuality, but there were plenty of groups that had all the iconography of queerness. There’s still a social stigma against queermess that’s held over from prior generations. But there also isn’t mass shootings or vehicular manslaughter targeting queer communities.

My father in law (a diehard libertarian Cold Warrior type) was taken aback at how clean the cities were and how safe he felt the whole time he was there. Might be due to his overexposure to Western cinema that paints China (and Mexico and Brazil and South Africa and really any country without a critical mass of white people) as dens of vice and violence. But for some reason, having streets devoid of poverty in the US is aspirational. Having them devoid of poverty outside the US is dystopian.

The low homelessness might have something to do with China’s stellar public housing policy. The dedication to clean streets and regular maintenance of buildings may have something to do with their prioritization of long term durability over short term profits. And the degree to which they’ve adopted industrial technology makes these enormous, low cost mixed use urban centers possible. It isn’t just random people being wisked away to El Salvador at the whims of a partisan government.

Humans are all different, if you want to consider everyone’s opinion it takes a lot of time (which China did not have in the last few decades).

Chinese civil government doesn’t operate in the same adversarial climate as in the US. You don’t have Crossfire hosts screaming at each other or Palestine protesters and Zionists brawling on college campuses. You don’t have bloggers and AM Radio guys stoking stochastic violence against minorities in order to generate private fortunes or billionaires buying up major publishers in order to suck up to or strong arm political leadership.

Mass Line theory of government tries to be more scientific in it’s approach to polling public sentiment, reaching public policy, and mass marketing changes to traditional views. China’s approach to domestic reform is slower, more small-c conservative, and focused within the party rather than between parties.

Americans don’t understand that system, so it frightens them. But Americans have made an industry of frightening one another. So Sinophobia is just one more buggabo.

Every time I read a headline about how there’s a genocide in Xinjiang, it’s in the same newspaper that insists Israel Has The Right To Defend Itself and Yemen needs to be bombed to powder.

At some point, it reads like liberal agitprop. An excuse to scare liberals into hating a foreign country so we can justify… what? Tariffs? TikTok bans? Nuclear war?

Same with LGBTQ rights. We’ve got a DOGE department doing a pogrom on “woke” government workers while I still get an earful about how mean China is to minority groups?

What am I supposed to take away from this?

Russia still looses Money on this

The margins on O&G are enormous. They’re not pumping gas for charity.