In my house live my pregnant wife and my son. Not my partner and my offspring. And no, wearen’t pregnant; my wife is.
According to the social engineers of the current year(s), we’re pregnant is cute and an expression of togetherness. That would be hilarious if it weren’t weird and dehumanizing. If I get a prostate cancer, everyone can rest assured that my wife won’t be fighting it. She can’t. And that’s okay. Just like it’s okay that I’m not pregnant because I can’t.
A few days ago, another group of social engineers published a new “study” on how to re-educate Latin Americans into accepting being called Latinx. I showed this to my Venezuelan colleague. And, before you ask, yes he is one of the Venezuelans who immigrated to Hungary allegedly in secrecy. So secretly that the media wrote about it. Anyway, suffice to say that my very well-educated Venezuelan colleague didn’t react quite well to being told by a gringo that he’s uneducated because he doesn’t accept the mutilation of his native tongue or that he’s a bad person because he doesn’t accept the inherent dehumanization that comes with so-called inclusive language.
This may not seem like an important issue, even though it’s in top 3 issues that may lose the Democrats the election in a week. But it’s important enough for those of us who, because of our work, have to stumble upon and sometimes work with these pendejos – the people who put their pronouns in their signatures (even though nobody asked), the people who write Bauarbeiter:innen unironically in German, todxs in Spanish and, of course, weird pronouns and the already known crap present in English.
Now, the good news is that those “culture warriors” (for lack of a better term) have managed to meaningfully push back at least in some corners, but it’s simply not enough. And one way to improve this is to emphasize to the normies how they’re being dehumanized by this.
One thing I’ve learned from the Sofa is that arguing logically with these extremists is pointless. What works is convincing the audience that what these loons propose is evil and deranged. And on this issue, the shortest way to do exactly that is to re-frame the whole discussion in these terms: The whole idea is dehumanizing.
Yes, it requires a bit of an appeal to emotion (like done in the first paragraph) but is it really appeal to emotion if it’s also true? That’s rhetorical, because ultimately it doesn’t matter. The real world is not the Oxford Debate Society as the boss is fond of saying.
The argument
Every time you use “inclusive language” you are purposefully minimizing and arguably dehumanizing the normal and normative Majority (capital M necessary here) without actually being inclusive at all.
My wife is certainly not more “included” when referred to as part of Lehrer*innen (teachers in “inclusive” German). And certainly the minority of male teachers aren’t more included either by being referred to as part of an awfully written concept that uses the feminine termination. And there is zero evidence that the 3 to 5 “transgender” teachers in the German-speaking world are suddenly more “included” because the way you say/write “teachers” has now been mutilated.
Peak-dehumanization happens when this ideology seeps into very concrete conversations – like those about sex. Including with confused teenagers.
A few months ago me and my wife were at a party with a truly diverse crowd – the diversity that matters, that is. And sometime late at night as a few of us were chatting and, as it always happens when it’s after 2AM and everyone has had a bit to drink, the conversation eventually drifted to politics and then to sex and sexuality. Nothing wrong with that, we’re all adults and since me and my missus are known to be sex positive, it’s no surprise (to us) that eventually such topics would be inserted into the conversation because even those who disagree with us yearn to talk with a truly sex positive couple.
But it wasn’t the disagreement that triggered my ire and the bigger ire from my wife – but the language.
At some point we were chatting about sex ed in the family as most attendees were parents of teenagers or tweens. It was already bad enough that the more lefty-inclined were using therapy language and ideologically charged terms as we were discussing whether the recent fads among the youth are really new or we’ve just become more open about discussing these things. But all hell broke loose with my missus when a British woman interjected:
Of course, it will be different for those who raise a person doing the penetration.
I was still thinking of a witty way to reply in such a way that mocks the very thought process that led to someone uttering such a string of words but, by the time my thought process could come up with something in a language I’m not that good at, my wife had already taken the initiative, showing once again that it’s men and women not bonus holes and persons doing the penetration. I mean… nobody insults a woman better than another woman!
Again, we were all adults, so the whole interaction eventually led to a very profound discussion about ideological poisoning and possession but, even so, the fact that someone seemingly intelligent can refer to our sons as the person doing the penetration got me thinking: How many such people are there? And how many of them are in position to educate our children?
Maybe there aren’t that many (I still cling to optimism) but if someone like me, effectively apolitical until three years ago, can encounter straight-up Reddit type of ideological language out there “in the wild”, then there must be more than a few of such people.
Why it matters
A Moldovan was saying 5 years ago, referring to russian-derived calques that are mutilating the Romanian language: The person who speaks badly definitely thinks badly – and will inevitably act badly.
There are of course many more quotes (some of them mis-attributed, some outright false) that convey the same meaning: Whoever controls the language, eventually controls thought. At least in part.
And this is why it matters. Adults fooling around at a private party at 2AM in Budapest, especially adults who could afford to fly in for the event and also afford families or other arrangements so they can leave their kid(s) safely behind – that is not an issue.
However, adults fooling around perverting descriptive language around children, is an issue. And it’s quite hard to argue that it isn’t. Because children learn through imitation.
My son is never late because he sees his father always striving to never be late. My nephew is always a bit late because, just like his father, my dear brother, he is more approximate with time management.
My son speaks politely because he saw his parents always speak politely first. My son will also unleash a torrent of highly creative insults if you piss him off needlessly because that’s what he saw his parents do. My son will also effortlessly stand up for himself in most situations because that’s what his parents and most of his peers do (and we made an active effort to handpick those peers, once again contrary to the “wisdom” shared online incessantly).
Children’s minds are easily impressionable. That’s why how we act around children matters. It’s not the be all and end all in every situation, like helicopter parents would have you believe, but it’s also not inconsequential as modernity tries to convince us all, parents and childless alike.
Oh, by the way, the word childless is now bad too. Apparently, the “inclusive” way is to say childfree. Am I the only one who notices the inherent dehumanization of the word childfree? It has the same undertone as cancer-free. Maybe I’m overthinking this, but it simply is dehumanizing to describe lack of life (because that’s what childlessness is) as inherently positive.
Advocates of “inclusivity” tell us that childless carries a negative connotation. But it doesn’t. Unfruitfulness, infecundity, barenness – all these have (arguably) a negative or at least judgmental connotation. But childless does not. It’s the neutral term. But under the dehumanizing ideology of inclusivity, neutral terms are bad.
That’s why we should use the dehumanizing angle more when pushing back against inclusive language. If not for ourselves, at least for our children.
I don’t want my son to dehumanize his future wife by calling her partner. In the language of Internet kids: that’s gay af. No, seriously, it is. And not just because the pendej@s say so, but because anyone who was alive in pre-history, let’s say 2010, can remember that the word partner to refer to one’s romantic partner was nearly exclusive to homosexuals. If you ask me, even that was dehumanizing. But extending that to everyone, is even more dehumanizing.
I don’t want my son to be dehumanized in the future by having his reality erased and replaced with “people of any gender”.
And, if my wife ends up giving birth to a baby girl, I’d very much like for her to be called a woman, not a bonus hole. And preferably to become a wife not a partner. She can become a business partner if she’s smart enough, but she’ll be someone’s girlfriend and someone’s wife.
Inclusive language, at best, sows confusion. It’s dehumanizing in the rest of the time.
And hopefully more people notice that and act accordingly. It’s not even hard. Oftentimes it takes under a minute. Like this:
Someone else: My partner doesn’t feel good about the vacation.
You: Oh, there’s more to work and you can’t go on vacation?
SE: No, we both secured the free days, but there are other concerns.
You: What do you mean secured freed days? You’re both leaving the company? Who’s going to take care of business?
SE:…
You: Aren’t you talking about your business partner?
And, just like that, you made someone else re-think about using partner in the wrong context.
You don’t always have to be an edgy culture warrior. You just always have to be normal. And, if you are a man, especially a father, you also have the duty to enforce normality around you as well. If not for yourself, at least for your child(ren). They deserve not to grow up among confused people and risk ending up confused themselves.
Whether you call it Rule 34, educational content or, as in past times when Broadway was more honest – The Internet is for Porn – the fact remains that sex sells and sex-related trade is a driver of most new technologies. How that makes you feel is a separate conversation for some other time.
Short history
The oldest ever video was shot in 1874 and it’s something really autistic – the passing of the planet Venus over the Sun. The second oldest is from 1888 and it’s a random scene from someone’s backyard/garden. Third oldest is Lumière’s now famous 1895 shot of workers leaving the factory. The scene is now relatively famous because more people look up on the Internet “oldest continuous/smooth video”. But at the time, that scene had an audience of 10. Not ten thousand, but 10 people.
Just a few months later, in 1896, the first two erotic movies are made – one in France and one in the United States. That is the moment when “motion pictures” became an industry. Sure, the two films from 1896 wouldn’t be considered “erotic” today – but they were in their time. It’s also unsurprising that they happened in France (then just as today one of the most sex-positive countries and home of the invention of cinema) and in the US (the place where permitless innovation was the norm and daring investments a routine practice).
Video cassette recorder on the Betamax format
If you know what Betamax is, you’re either very old (and from a rich Western background) or someone who worked with anything that could be acquired in the post-communist chaos of early 1990s (like me).
If you don’t know what Betamax is, you’re either younger than 20 or you already know what VHS cassettes are. Betamax was the other format of cassettes, produced by Sony, as opposed to VHS cassettes produced by JVC.
In fact, Betamax cassettes were slightly better (and smaller in size) and they were the first video cassettes to be produced. A huge intra-Japanese war ensued with the Japanese government trying to force all manufacturers to adopt Betamax (because it was the first).
But the war was swiftly won by VHS. Why? Logistics and porn. But especially porn. The porn producers’ decision to adopt VHS as the medium of distribution for their production ended up making VHS the standard for everyone regardless of how they wanted to use their recorders/devices. This got expanded to cameras/camcoders too – which initially had a VHS cassette and later on a mini-VHS for regular people, while professional studios maintained the bigger ones (I filmed with one of those as late as 2004).
Betamax cassettes were produced until March of 2016 (!!) and VHS cassettes are still being produced today, though not by big mainstream manufacturers.
DVDs? Same story. They became widespread when pornographers decided they’re great for distributing higher-quality video. Then came mainstream movies and music. The reason pornographers adopted the DVD so fast was simple: Finally they could offer their end-users the ability to jump to the… ahem… preferred scene and do so seamlessly and without risking ruining the medium – as it had been the case with VHS cassettes. Anyone who digitalized VHS cassettes knows what I’m talking about – the most watched scenes tend to be the hardest to recover from an old tape.
Pay-per-view TV? Yeap, that’s pornographers’ work as well. And it was the same incentive: How to deliver content to clients in the most private way possible and as on-demand as possible while also charging money. Pioneered first in hotels and then in digital networks, pay-per-view TV became mainstream in early 2000s after the pornographers had perfected the model in the 1990s. In fact, the same pornographers then became consultants in tech and sale for mainstream content distributors later on.
The best example is Danni Ashe, the first big name in Internet pornography in 1994. Her career as a pornographer was, naturally, short. But her experience made her a sought-after consultant for every single big media corporation. She’s just the most famous example, but many others have been in the same position.
E-commerce? Yeah, that’s porn too. Long before anyone knew what e-commerce is, pornographers were already doing that as early as 1993. For the next 15 years, e-commerce meant porn. And then when it was perfected, industry insiders offered consultancy (for hefty fees) to everyone else on how to do it.
Likely the smartphone would’ve never become ubiquitous without the incentive for porn. In fact, the investments into 3G and 4G were only green-lit after consulting with the porn industry. It was (correctly) assumed that without the ability to distribute porn, the adoption of “smart” phones would be sluggish or simply won’t happen at all and thus investments would never be recovered.
By the way, this moment (around 2002 when 3G started to become a thing) is when you see a sharp rise in women consuming porn. A fact of life that anti-porn crussaders of 2024 have yet to integrate in their narrative(s), in part due to the women-are-wonderful effect.
Fast increase in bandwidth? Piracy and porn. Netflix came much later, when the market had “matured”. Netflix would’ve never happened without ThePirateBay and Porn.
From glorified tape recorder to useful technology
Michio Kaku calls present-day “AI” a glorified tape recorder. And he’s not wrong. As opposed to nearly every other take on “AI” on the Internet which competes in the “who can be the most wrong” Olympics.
But in order for “AI” (really just LLMs and 50 year old technology with bigger hard drives) to really become relevant, it will have to pass some tests. And the testing ground will be porn – regardless of what you and I think about that.
Just two days ago the first “AI” beauty pageant was announced. Well, sort of. It’s not exactly the first and the whole thing is not exactly new. But propaganda marketing matters because it creates perception. And in the world of propaganda, perception is reality.
But what will make or break this not-exactly-new-but-better-marketed technology will be “AI girlfriends” – which is a nicer way of saying porn. For now, there’s quite a bit of talk about how much that would be worth. But so far it’s only limited to chatbots.
May I remind you that chatbots for lonely people is not exactly something new. ELIZA is almost 60 years old.
Also, by “AI girlfriend” I don’t necessarily mean sex-bot androids with a language processor either – though that would certainly be a huge improvement. It will be enough if someone manages to create an advanced enough bot that can simulate a videochat-like conversation. That is to say… interactive porn by prompt.
By the way, interactive angle-changing for sport events that was the big thing in mid 2000s had been a thing in porn for over a decade prior. And the first interactive sports broadcasts paid for proprietary software to porn studios.
Similarly, the one who will be able to create interactive porn by prompt will get to set the standard for its “mainstream” offshoot (think realistic news anchors, entire sections of a featured movie and so on) and make big bucks out of it too.
There have already been some attempts at this, but they’re nowhere near close to good enough. And the only way they get good enough is through porn.
That’s when “media creators” should start worry. When the first company makes the first billion in revenue (VC investment doesn’t count) from selling access to PornGPT. That’s when we will also see the first really big REEEEE about porn in the 21st century, not dissimilar to the one from 1896 at the projection of (one of the) first erotic movies in a theater.
Or, alternatively, this doesn’t happen at all (or doesn’t happen in the next 50 years) because it’s too complicated without quantum computing – in which case “AI” goes where it deserves: A cute gimmick with niche applications – such as a glorified Grammarly to be used by kids to save time on bullshit assignments by bullshit professors/teachers in the bullshit institutions we still force them to attend because our societies are ruled by crazy people with bullshit ideas.
We’ll see what happens. But porn will be make or break.
Now, sure, all of the above-cited policies have various issues – from legality, enforcement or morality. But one thing is certain: The notion of regulating smartphones is no longer a fantasy – but a growing trend. So the debate is no longer whether smartphone use should be regulated, but rather how should this be done in such a way that doesn’t violate fundamental rights but at the same time addresses the issues that arose from excessive smartphone usage.
The issues
Jonathan Haidt, who is hardly a right-wing reactionary bigot, wrote in 2021 about the smartphone trap.
In a paper we just published in The Journal of Adolescence, we report that in 36 out of 37 countries, loneliness at school has increased since 2012. We grouped the 37 countries into four geographic and cultural regions, and we found the same pattern in all regions: Teenage loneliness was relatively stable between 2000 and 2012, with fewer than 18 percent reporting high levels of loneliness. But in the six years after 2012, rates increased dramatically. They roughly doubled in Europe, Latin America and the English-speaking countries, and rose by about 50 percent in the East Asian countries.
From 2012 onwards, and especially after 2015 (when smartphones became very cheap), mental health issues skyrocketed among teenagers in ways not seen in two or even three decades prior to the advent of smartphones.
The biggest issue is attention span. Nobody today denies that attention span in social media addicted societies has visibly decreased. Between 2000 and 2015, the median attention spans of Americans shrank by a whopping 25%. In 2000, the median attention span was 12 seconds. Fifteen years later, it’s shrunk significantly to 8.25 seconds. That’s less than goldfish, whose attention span runs for 9 full seconds.
Then there’s the bullying issue. I personally have very little sympathy in that department but, nevertheless, since this is a political issue, the rules of politics and propaganda apply, rather than reason. And in propaganda, perception is reality. Cyberbullying may or may not be a big issue but, if enough people believe it is, then it is an issue.
And then there are the sex-based effects. Both boys and girls are affected by social media use – it’s just that they’re affected differently and at different moments in their development. Puberty is a very hard period for nearly all teens. Social media use makes that far worse.
Instagram had particularly strong effects on girls and young women, inviting them to “compare and despair” as they scrolled through posts from friends and strangers showing faces, bodies and lives that had been edited and re-edited until many were closer to perfection than to reality.
On boys, the effects on self esteem are similar to those felt by girls for similar reasons: the building of an unrealistic image of others. What’s different is the age. Boys are negatively affected by social media after the age of 14, while girls are affected from the ages of 11-12. One main difference is that boys overcome it harder, later and slower than girls. To make things worse, not only the issue is rarely being studied (money from Samsung and Apple make sure this stays under-studied), but when it is studied, the specific impact on boys is ignored due to generalized gynocentrism in the Academia. But that’s a story for another day.
Then there’s the issue of social media being a black box. X/Twitter published its recommendation algorithm. A step in the right direction but far from good enough.
We still have no idea what (and why) is recommended by Meta products and by TikTok. Experiments show that using a Chinese IP address will yield a very different type of recommendations than using an American address. There is increased awareness that TikTok is essentially the CCP’s spyware program.
But all of this ignores the obvious issue: Smartphones themselves. It would be easier to manage all of these without or with less smartphone usage.
”Oh, but I can’t” is the language of addicts. Which is also coopted by vested interests and, of course, naive people with limited imagination.
What vested interests? The smartphone global market was over half a trillion dollars in 2021 and poised to grow to almost one trillion dollars ($947 billion) by 2030. That’s a lot of money. The mobile app market was another $230 billion in 2023. And that’s before including video games for smartphones which is another $140 billion. That’s a lot of money. The GDP of Switzerland is slightly smaller than the current market worth of the smartphone and smartphone-dependent industries. The GDP of oil-rich Norway plus Sweden combined will soon be (if they aren’t already) smaller than the vested interests in smartphones.
So the opposition will be fierce and very well funded. Not to mention the limitless armies of social media zombies who will gladly be the useful idiots of Big Tech like all good junkies. And this is why I think the regulation has to be better thought-out.
Schools are a no-brainer
Long lauded as the most progressive country in the world because of its embrace of digitalization, Sweden is also the first to openly say that it’s been a disaster. Swedish kids can’t write anymore. So the Education Ministry is slowly phasing out tablets and all other digital assets from the classroom. Who knew? Those backward peasants of the past had a point. Education works best on paper, they say. The Karolinska Institute goes even further and asserts what we’ve been telling you on the Sofa for years: Digital tools impair rather than enhance student learning.
Seven years ago the Dutch have noticed that about a third of primary school kids had severe difficulties in learning to write. Some have placed this on the fact that there are more and more kids in Dutch schools with a migrant background. But the figure is much higher than the proportion of kids with a migrant background. It’s not just immigrants. It’s quite a lot of kids who are, for all intends and purposes, illiterate.
As it turns out, knowing how to use TikTok isn’t really digital skills even though that’s exactly what the progressive boomers who introduced digital tools in schools sincerely believed. And, as usual for boomers, they were wrong.
In practicality, the easiest way to get a majority to support a restrictive policy is to phrase it like this: No devices that can connect to the Internet are permissible on school grounds. Yes to dumbphones, no to smartphones.
It’s imperfect, but it’s a step ahead. And, in fact, it’s merely a return to the status quo of 2010 – when a majority of students had a dumbphone.
Smartphone-free spaces
There is increased demand for them anyway, as more and more are starting to realize the danger and the trade-offs, but there is still not enough courage to start promoting it openly.
Just like there are places that have a dress code, there can and should be places that don’t allow smartphone usage at all. Preferably with a jammer installed too.
There is such thing as a “digital Sabbath” which, quite frankly, should be encouraged but, in my estimation, it’s a low-return practice.
Much more interesting is the sudden and spectacular rise in nearly every country of the so-called “unplugged summer camps” for children and adults. Some are organized by NGOs, but a lot of them are organized by for-profit corporations. Nothing wrong with that, mind you. But they sure need more promotion.
And this is where the State can have a say: If a road trip with schoolchildren is organized using school resources even partially, then it is only approved if it’s a smartphone-free environment. This isn’t hard to implement and would run into very little opposition. Basically, treat smartphones like alcohol. There is a drinking age that usually is lower than 18 – but school premises have to be 100% dry. Well, same logic can and should apply to smartphones too: while smartphones aren’t (yet) forbidden to minors, that doesn’t mean they can be or should be used anywhere.
Regulation at the point of sale
Most countries don’t allow the sale of alcohol or antipsychotics to minors. Or they do, but only in special cases and with various controls. Why exactly shouldn’t smartphones be treated the same?
At the end of the day, and the evidence is increasingly clear on that, smartphones are a tool of mass psychosis. Its side effects on minors through extended use are very similar to the use of various psychotropics. As such, there is an argument to be made that they should be treated similarly.
While the argument is very difficult to make when it comes to adults (and I’m not even sure it’s worth trying), it is in fact very easy to make and implement when it comes to minors.
You have to prove you’re 18 to buy a gun, buy a bottle of vodka, a pack of cigarettes (even 21 in some places) or to check into a hotel. But for some reason we’re supposed to believe this can’t be done with smartphones? Gimme a break!
Yes, such a regulation is imperfect (like all regulations) and there are workarounds, granted. However, it sets a different tone of conversations in the family. It sends the message that the expectation is children don’t use smartphones at all.
Currently, too many parents aware of the negative effects are put in the situation of actively fighting to opt out of the de facto mandatory smartphone for their children. Such a regulation would move the focus once again where it’s natural: You have to purposefully choose to opt-in and physically show up with your kid to get him one.
Just like a gun purchased online isn’t directly shipped to you, the same can be done for smartphones. An adult has to show up in person to pick it up. This isn’t hard. And whoever tells you otherwise is either an addict himself or acting on behalf of the aforementioned vested interests.
Right to log off
Belgium, France and Kenya so far have already enacted legislation (France did so 8 years ago!) that explicitly states the right of employees to go fully offline outside of their work.
There’s a EU Parliament resolution on that too from 2021, though it will probably go nowhere for reasons that are worth discussing some other day. Still, the idea behind it is sound, albeit poorly articulated in some places.
The fact is that so many people feel pressured to always be online. Whether the pressure is real or not is another discussion. In many cases it is real. And few people are like yours truly to have rudeness necessary to answer with “go fuck yourself, I ain’t your personal ChatGPT” to angry e-mails or messages complaining that it’s been over 24 hours since they wrote to me and I haven’t replied. Most people want to be nice. And they strive to be nice until they drive themselves crazy. And when they snap, everyone pretends to be shocked and insists they have no idea how this could’ve happened.
Such legislation should not apply just in work relations, but more generally. Just like the anti-censorship legislation in many jurisdictions which punishes attempts to censor someone else in public, the right to log off could be framed similarly: with punishments for those who pressure others into usage of digital tools.
You may think that what I just wrote is fantasy, but it’s already happening. Sweden and Ireland are getting ready to punish stores that refuse cash. “Digital exclusion” is increasingly discussed in the circles of power as a crime in and of itself.
Now, of course, this will be a difficult argument to make because the tech grifts are going to fight this tooth and nail (like they did in France). Why? Because “digital transformation” is in itself an $800+ billion grift. A lot of that money already goes on propaganda to convince people and businesses to surrender their privacy and mental health to tech grifters who promise to make our lives more convenient.
Of course, the fact that they absolutely don’t make our lives better is immaterial. With enough propaganda you can convince tens of millions of people to act against their best interests. Take self-check-out for instance. It’s an abject failure. Who pays for that failure? YOU, my dear reader. Where do you think those stores will recoup their investment from?
The tech grifters got their money and moved on to the next “digital transformation” grift.
This is the extent to which “the right to log off” should ideally go: Codify into law the assumption that digitalization is bad and move the onus on the proponent to prove otherwise. Again, this will be hard to achieve because those hundreds of billions spent on propaganda will be used to fight tooth and nail any measure that protects regular people against the predatory practices of Big Tech.
Miscellaneous policy changes
Just like uber-digitalized Sweden was able to roll back the “progress” (and continues to do so), it stands to reason that this is possible elsewhere as well. Special interests be damned.
There are many ridiculous policies in so many countries that de facto force people to have a smartphone. Under the umbrella of “combating digital exclusion” – a lot of those policies can be abolished or amended.
I’m still upset I didn’t get to test this in court during the pandemic project when the Romanian government was stupid enough to try to impose the so-called “passenger location form” which could’ve only be filled in electronically. You see, because Ceaușescu didn’t let us travel, traveling now is an unalienable right in our Constitution. I would’ve loved to take the case to the Constitutional Court. Unfortunately, someone else was smart enough to advise the government to abolish that ASAP. And so they did before I needed to travel abroad and get the chance to violate that policy and then challenge it in court.
But oftentimes it doesn’t require complicated challenges in court. Oftentimes it requires very basic discussions. Like, for instance, when cities remove the option to pay for public transport in cash. At any hint of pushback, the vast majority of such measures are thrown away. I have a long list of cities where this happened.
What’s important when lobbying against such policies or for various normal-friendly amendments is to avoid coming off entirely against technology. Not only is that politically dangerous, but you also lose allies. A good chunk of smartphone addicts are victims as well and they’re not in favor of digital exclusion necessarily.
A change of attitude and lead by example
The most meaningful and impactful change, however, will be brought by regular people and private businesses with enough cojones.
Every year I, personally, convince two people to either ditch their smartphones entirely or to reduce their usage to less than a tenth of their previous habits. How do I do that? By simply existing.
This is me, more or less unironically
You see, given that I made (and still make, to a certain extent) my living in data centers and other tech-related activities, I’m fully aware of the limitations of technology. And especially about how brutally unsafe your data really is. Once you explain that to people, free of the self-interested shilling that nearly all techbros practice (oftentimes without even realizing it), a lot of people start thinking. It becomes even easier if you’re able to explain that in proper language rather than using wooden language rife with jargon that no reasonable human being will ever learn.
But this is hard. Most of those who oppose the over-extension of technology into our lives do so under an impulse. They sense that something’s really wrong, but have little idea on how to describe it, let alone to explain it or propose meaningful change. This aspect is mercilessly exploited by both Big Tech and tech grifters, aided by the hordes of zombie addicts who feel personally attacked when you start discussing their habits in the proper negative light.
Nearly all of those who peddle techno-optimistic baloney online and offline do so not out of a sincere belief in technology, but out of personal financial interest. And they will fight tooth and nail to defend their grift. First and foremost to prevent YOU from understanding that what they’re doing is not progress, but a grift.
Nevertheless, we must persist. We will not change the world over night, but the world does change one person at a time.
Last week a father contacted me to thank me for mocking his concerns about what would happen if he continues to “fail” to buy his 4th grade(!!!) daughter a smartphone a few years ago. She’s now 16, still doesn’t have one and, as a result, blows her peers out of the water because she possesses the valuable skill of being able to talk to people (something which her generation seriously lacks) and the valuable skill of being able to focus a bit more than 10 seconds on something.
She took an apprenticeship at a carpenter’s store last summer and this summer wants to go to an outdoor camp organized by some church where they’ll learn to cook, set up a tent and things of that nature. She is, in my book, a normal teenager who is experimenting. Unfortunately, by the standards of her generation, she is abnormal and exceptional. Her peers are getting ready for the college scam and later on join the ranks of overly entitled know-nothings. Hopefully she’ll be able to withstand the peer pressure because her path is objectively better.
Instead of conclusions
Unfortunately, we were all too dumb or too lethargic to have this discussion when it would’ve made a bigger difference: say in 2005. Before 2005, smartphones were marketed nearly exclusively to the enterprise market one which, arguably, needs it more. The discussion on whether to allow extending this to the civilian market, and especially to children, would’ve been better suited in 2005. But we didn’t. Because reasons. No point dwelling on the past now.
But this leaves us in a reactive situation. This mess will have to be cleaned up. And the way to do that is under debate.
There is no single answer. There is no single policy, or even package of policies that can be adopted and everything will be fixed. This will be a long and messy process. And, for now, with a lot of trial and error until the discussion reaches pleb level. And it will take a while because bypassing Big Tech’s wall of censorship isn’t cheap or easy. It’s doable, but don’t expect huge leaps so early on in the game.
But the first, and arguably the most important step, is this: The discussion should no longer be accepted under the terms of “should smartphones be regulated”. Reject the very notion. That debate is over. It is clear that smartphones (and the wide Big Tech grift) must necessarily be regulated. The debate is now how should that be done in such a way that has the least amount of trade-offs. It’s not an easy balance. And all sides will make mistakes for sure. But that is the legitimate debate.
Or, alternatively, you can do nothing and guarantee a generation of zombies who will, for sure, make life far worse for nearly everyone else. In fact, such a scenario would be explicitly in my own financial interest, even though I’d hate its toll on my mental health 🤷🏻♂️
If you had told me on February 24, 2015, when I created the Freedom Alternative channel that almost nine years later I will still be writing scripts for new videos, I would’ve said that it’s likely, though not highly likely.
But if you had told me nearly 9 years ago that I’d be managing a workflow that involves work on 3 continents, a small team, and attendance to high-end meetings that shape the geopolitics of Europe and all of that under the banner of Freedom Alternative Network, I would’ve said you’re being too optimistic.
Make no mistake: I did this before and I was expecting to do it again. It’s just that I didn’t expect to be able to do it again as legit independent. And so soon!
As I’m writing these lines, I’m slowly wrapping up an episode on Kyrgyzstan from Kyrgyzstan in which I present the post-communist history of the country in a way that not even the darling of the Kyrgyz intelligentsia would dare (even though he believes it). Because he would risk being kicked out of the university if he says it like it is.
Nine years ago, being able to do this required the endorsement of a big studio and a certain narrative script had to be followed. Even the more independent-minded studios still expected you to use some tired clichés when presenting. Oh… and time limits. Everything had to fit in a segment.
I remember 11 years ago when one of the few reporters that I can respect even when I disagree with him made a segment on North Korea. A very good one, mind you. But… too short. He then struggled to tell the rest of the story in various other shows in other places, plus a book – The country with a single fat man. Only in the book he was able to go a bit more honest (and that’s because this is Romania. In the PC-driven West of 2013 he would’ve been in hot waters for fat shaming or who knows what else).
The fact that I, a bona fide nobody, can afford to do something like that is an honour, a privilege and a responsibility as well. And for that I have to remain grateful to the donors who keep this whole thing going and evolving in a way that I couldn’t have predicted (which means the enemy couldn’t have predicted either).
Every year around Christmas and the first three weeks of January we take a look around the operation on a technical and procedural level. This means backups, corrections, add of new pages/features, cleanup of things that are no longer necessary, archiving stuff (raw footage over the years means dozens upon dozens of terabytes) and other tinkering under the hood. It is the less pleasant and the less visible but equally necessary kind of work. Without it, not only you wouldn’t be reading these lines, but we would’ve achieved even less overall.
So, ever since I came back from Asia, my allotted time for Freedom Alternative time has been divided between making new videos and tinkering in the background alongside a few other people in order to fulfill even more of the wishes expressed in last year’s article on resilience.
A full announcement will be published when the period allotted for this will be over later on this month but, if you want a sneak peak, check out the Services server. It is not yet fully ready for public consumption but that’s the place where (most of) these writings will be moved going forward. It remains to be seen how the final form and procedure will look like.
At this point, even if I trusted someone enough to be my communications manager (and I might have to find such a person this year), the communications overall are overwhelming. There’s no way I can manage all of that without either going insane or start ignoring people I shouldn’t or waste time on and with people I should be ignoring. There is no solution, of course – but one acceptable trade-off is profesionalization via procedures and layers.
And that’s what the partial opening up of the internal system is for. Since I can’t convince everyone of consequence to be in the relevant Telegram group(s), then what I can do is have everyone submit communications on the same URL. How to do that without spam and how to mitigate other risks is still under testing. But one thing is certain: In order to have a fruitful 2024 and beyond, direct communication between yours truly and most people reading this will have to be winded down.
So, through a combination of a FAQ page, ticketing system and, hopefully soon enough, delegation of most of the answers… next time I reset passwords on the paywalled content, I will have to answer fewer e-mails and even fewer Telegram messages. Same with requests: I will shamelessly ignore any request that is not in the Internal System™. There will be complaints and I will try to mitigate the most reasonable ones but, overall, this has to be done. The alternative is worse. Manually managing 6 categories of contacts is no longer feasible.
Also soon enough I will add paywalled articles as well. They will look something like this. But, again, needs more testing. Especially considering that I have no intention on collecting data (by making any of you create accounts) because that’d be another headache for me and for y’all. So a method of a relatively universal credential will have to be found. I don’t know yet how that will happen, but it will. Eventually.
So, yeah, that’s basically what’s been going on in the early days of 2024. Oh, and I’m also researching for the Latin American tour. And scheduling payments and soooo… much more. No pressure 😂
And with that said, see y’all soon. I got some pages to fix, create, link and synchronize.
It very rarely happens to find myself somewhat on the side of the establishment. Least of all on an international issue.
Last time I was on the side of the establishment neither the concept nor the disgusting real-life manifestations of luxury beliefs had not reached my country, yet.
Yet here we are, in 2022, as the establishment suddenly finds out that Ukraine exists, that Duginism is real (NPR link because in 2016 NPR readers were trolling me for talking about this) and that Germany is run by Putin’s useful idiots. All of these are topics that us, at Freedom Alternative Network (as well as our partners and friends in Germany, Slovenia, Sweden, the USA and, yes, Ukraine) have covered, shilled, explained and analyzed in great detail for years on end.
Just 56 days ago Facebook was banning me again for discussing Russian violence. Then 10 days later Russian violence commenced on a big scale and then Facebook said its kosher even to engage in sweeping generalizations against all Russians everywhere.
Suffice to say that I have a high interest in this conflict (which I’ve made known for years) in the direction of Ukraine eventually winning (or at least not losing).
With that said, this doesn’t change the fact that the so-called “Western culture” (a shell of its former self) approaches this in a way that not only seems crazy but it IS crazy. Luckily, Russian propaganda is not what it used to be. 2010-tier Russian propaganda would have a field day these weeks by simply repeating and mocking the myriad of absurdities done in or by the West since the commencement of the conflict.
When it’s “cool” to be pro-Ukraine
As it was the case with the pandemic (in which it became “cool” to behave like a fucking lunatic in public), it is now cool to behave, say and do things that no normal person would or should do.
The connection with the pandemic was also made by the establishment – of course, in Canada, the place run by Justin “I like China’s basic dictatorship” Trudeau where “studies have shown” that those who haven’t taken up the myocarditis-inducing experimental gene therapy clotshot are more likely to be putinists.
And then the HONKs just kept on pouring.
Under the eternal “we gotta do something” – a slew of stupidity in public was triggered allover the place.
Take the Waterloo Warbirds from Ontario, Canada. They could have organized an aviation show and donate some money for the accommodation of Ukrainian refugees. Or they could’ve encouraged people to enlist the Ukrainian Foreign Legion since Waterloo Warbirds surely attracts a lot of guys with military and combat experience – which is exactly the kind of people needed today.
What did they choose to do? Vandalize their own museum-worthy airplanes with the markings of the Ukrainian and Polish Air Force. Outstanding!
Surely Putin is going to surrender tonight! Or, at the very least, two Ukrainian refugees will be saved. Virtue signaling saves lives, dontcha know?
Or take Zürich Insurance Group Ltd. (ZURN) who could have made a good insurance offer to Ukrainian farmers (that would actually help not just the farmers, but many countries in the world!) since ZURN is one of the largest and best insurers of farmers in the world.
Or maybe they could’ve donated a sum of money for the relocation of the children evacuated from Mariupol. Or, why not, a sum of money to the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces.
Instead… their contribution is… removing the Z from their logo. I’m sure President Elenski [sic!] is now happier knowing that the whole might of the corporate power wielded by the Swiss insurer is put to the highly important use of purging a letter from their logo… What’s next? Banning the letter Z altogether?
Germany is one of the countries that is at fault for the invasion (in fact I would argue that Germany is indeed equally at fault as Russia is – since German weapons have continued to flow into Russia even after 2014). So in these circumstances they could have sent a lot of weapons to Ukraine (I mean functional ones – not just dumping its expired stockpile inherited from the DDR). Or they could have send some money. There are Polish corporations that contributed financially for Ukraine more than the German government. I’m just saying.
Instead, Germany is busy policing the wrong kinds of Zs in public. Yeah, that will help 👌🏻- I’m sure Putin is drafting his unconditional surrender speech as we speak after he heard that Z is haram in some parts of Germany!
Cluj Napoca, March 26, 2022 The message reads “No warrior” Likely the intention was to write “нет войне” (no war) – the slogan made famous by the Russian protesters in Russia.
Recently-renovated buildings allover Europe are being tagged vandalized with wrongly-written Cyrillic messages because surely the Ukrainian refugees in my hometown need to see wrongly written messages on clean buildings. Otherwise they would’ve never known that we really don’t like Putin.
Cluj-Napoca, March 26, 2022 Text reads: “Romanians are your friends”
The hundreds of volunteers available on the borders 24/7 and the hundreds of thousands of Romanians available in the support groups that offer quite literally anything to the refugees are not a good indication that Romanians are, by and large, being very friendly to our neighbors fleeing the horrors of war.
No, what we needed was graffiti about that!
And then there’s the relentless promotion of Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the point of selling Zelenskyy pillows (I wish I were joking) and turning the guy into a demigod.
Look, I won’t lie: I supported Petro Poroshenko in 2019 and I considered (and in fact I still do) that the Ukrainian people made a mistake voting not just with Zelenskyy, but with Sluha Nardonu party as well (a political party made up almost entirely out of amateurs). However, it is also clear (regardless of my opinion about Zelenskyy) that Volodymyr is living up to his position in a very honorable fashion (much better than anyone – including his own party – had expected).
With that said, the aggressive promotion of the guy everywhere is likely to turn against him at some point. Like all waves of emotion, this one shall pass too. And when it will (and it will!) – what will there be left? Because Zelenskyy needs the credibility and gravitas necessary after the war as well – when he will have to negotiate loans and investments and all sorts of arrangements that will be necessary for the reconstruction effort. But with all of the political capital spent now on needless promotion… this will be tricky.
You will also never convince any skeptic by calling a Putinist everyone who isn’t full of awe with Zelenskyy.
Nobody will be swayed by your Ukrainian flag on your profile either. Least of all if you’re one of those people who demanded that those who don’t subject themselves to experimental medical treatments should have their fundamental rights revoked. And no, pointing out the hypocrisy of the people shouting “freedom for Ukraine” while the same people were shouting “lockdown the unvaccinated” doesn’t make one a Putinist either!
Heck, one of the many reasons I support Ukraine is precisely because it treated the pandemic the way it should’ve been treated: without panic, without mandates and without hysteria. During the pandemic I’ve been to the country four times precisely for this reason. And I will continue to avoid certain countries and intentionally patronize others for many years to come because of their pandemic policies.
Also, the war isn’t ending earlier if you shout “Slava Ukrayini” against anyone who asks questions about Ihor Kolomoyskyi, or is skeptical about some numbers concerning casualties. Heck, you should assume that the numbers thrown around are inaccurate at least because you can’t properly evaluate casualties during an active war scenario but also because wartime disinformation is part and parcel of any war.
Yes, the word disinformation is a loanword from Russian itself. But the practice predates the USSR and the KGB’s black propaganda/active measures department. Heck, the word propaganda comes from the Vatican in the 17th century. Anyone pointing this out isn’t a “putinist” or “a war criminal” or an “anti-western shill” or whatever.
Also, someone pointing out how this crisis is being used to normalize being stupid in public is also not a “putinist”.
Théâtre Orchestre Bienne Soleure from Switzerland banned the performance of Thaikovsky’s Mazeppa “due to the current situation in Ukraine“. Mazeppa is an opera whose plot takes place in Ukraine and is about Ivan Stepanovych Mazeppa, Hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks (kinda like the founder of the modern Ukrainian nation) and Vasyl Leontiyovych Kochubey a very rich Ukrainian nobleman and statesman who bankrolled the school(s) of thought that the Ukrainian nation of today take as reference point.
And then there’s the ban on Russian cats (including Russian breeds that have never been in Russia and have non-Russian owners).
Now look, I love the Ukrainian people. And I have 7 years of content to prove it. But I also have 7 years of public content to prove just how much I love kittens. What did those kittens do? Meowed in Cyrillic?
And then there’s the issue of 16 and 17 year old Russian and Belarussian minors who will be banned from playing hockey in Canada. I’m sorry, these boys were aged 8 and 9 (or some even younger) when the decisions concerning Ukraine were made in the Kremlin. There’s no way you can convince anyone who is not a loon that punishing children has anything whatsoever with #StandWithUkraine.
This is the problem when a legitimate cause becomes a “cool” thing: all sorts of people who until this morning (in historical terms) had no idea where Ukraine is on the map end up making decisions trying to “do something” when nothing was asked from them in the first place, and in the process end up doing more harm than good.
So what’s the problem?
Okay, so many in the West are being stupid in public under the emotional moment – since war in Europe hadn’t happened this century. Well, even that is wrong since Russia has been at war with Ukraine for 8 years, but let’s put that, too, aside for a moment.
The problem, however, is that potentially good energy, as well as resources are being spent on futile endeavors. And in the process many innocents suffer.
This war will not end tomorrow. Maybe even not next month. But it will end at some point. And Ukraine as a country and the Ukrainian people (including and especially the displaced and the refugees) will need a lot of help then too. At this pace, however, by the time the war ends, a significant proportion of Western societies will end up being indifferent or even outright hostile – not because of Russian propaganda/disinformation, but precisely because they’ve been saturated with excessive messaging from their own.
It is not normal to open a news website from a country that is not Ukraine and to find on the first two, three or four pages only news from/about Ukraine or Russia. Just like it wasn’t normal between 2014 and 2021 to open a news website from the West and see NO piece of news from/about Ukraine at all. Some balance is badly needed! But who even has the credibility for that anymore?
During the pandemic multiple institutions (including and especially media institutions) have burned their trust capital by publishing disdainful nonsense and outright lies that now, rightfully so, enough citizens are having a hard time taking the media seriously on anything.
Heck, in Romania, two guys who voluntered to help the refugees were still not convinced that the war is real. So they went all the way to Kyiv to check it out for themselves. Well, they did find out and, to their credit, didn’t freak out either. The bien-pensantsdu jour laughed at them but I didn’t. It’s how I function as well. Heck, in 2020 I went to Sweden to check the mountains of dead bodies that the media guaranteed will be there because Sweden didn’t engage in sanitary fascism like Italy did. Of course, no mountains of dead bodies were found so I deemed the media’s stories to be what they were: utter nonsense.
The problem is that most people can’t and won’t function like that. Few people would risk going to Kyiv just to see whether the war is real. Just like few people in 2020 risked flying to Sweden in the middle of an allegedly deadly pandemic wave. The pandemic wave was real, it’s just that it was nowhere near as deadly as the media claimed.
So now, when the media IS much closer to the truth than it was during the pandemic, les bien pensants are shocked to learn there are people who just don’t believe it.
Yes, I agree it is terrible to see people who deny real suffering provoked by the Kremlin upon people who’ve done nothing wrong to the Kremlin – but we should keep in mind that calling those people “putinists” won’t solve the issue. And the issue is that the West is a shell of its former self. Its leaders are weak, its institutions are not trustworthy and its media has lied so blatantly for so long that it will take years to build back the lost trust. And Ukraine doesn’t have years. Not to mention that almost nobody in the West is even concerned with this issue.
It also doesn’t help that the loudest ones for “the Cause” are those with zero credibility on the topic. Pundits and “stars” with de facto zero knowledge about this now have strong opinions on the geopolitics of this region.
To these people the situation is just another trendy story. The mess will still have to be solved by people with beliefs and values more similar to mine, rather than similar to Patricia Arquette’s.
Yes, Ukraine needs help, and Putin must be defeated. And of course the war is real. And of course some sanctions are warranted.
But if the West doesn’t seriously clean up its room, it will all have been in vain.
The West’s main advantage over the last century has been precisely its ability to engage in open debate and tame the passions of the publics thus preventing mass hysteria from enacting hasted decisions that could bite the society in the ass later on. The West is losing that important advantage (if it hasn’t lost it already). And that vantage point must be recovered.
There is some good news too, though: Ukrainians are not like that. They’re proving it on the battlefield as we speak but it’s easy to see it if you just speak to more than 10 Ukrainians. As a people, they’re built from a different “material”. They just don’t give up.
And the harshness even before the war (and even more so now) has forged a nation that will not look kindly on Western political correctness. In Ukraine, even those with PC/leftist values have been in the trenches against Yanukovich and then against Russia. Multiple times. And still are. Hard times create strong men. The West has had too much good times for way too long. And it shows.
Just before the war the very same Western media, that now calls you a “putinist” for discussing Zelenskyy’s acting career, was itself broadcasting Russian disinformation about Ukraine focusing its attention on political parties that never exceeded 3% but almost never talking about the very real harm caused by the Kremlin continuously since 2014.
Men wiser than me say that time heals everything. Which is true. But sometimes healing comes through disappearance. The Byzantines are a good example.
So instead of turning onto your fellow citizens for failing to say the right things on this crisis (or the next one) – it is much more important to turn to our institutions and “important people” and tell them to either stop being stupid in public or fuck off outright.
That’s it. Now I’m off to prep the trip to Hungary. Lots to cover from there too.
One of the reasons half of our recommended reading list is about language and framing is because it is the most important tool of politics of any kind. The way an issue is framed and the language used to frame it gives the operative the most important clue about the bigger picture.
This is true regardless of whether you are defending the status quo (let’s say you’re Pfizer or Associated Press), engaging in counter-revolutionary activities (classical liberalism, old conservative, etc.) or in outright revolutionary ones (progressives, neoliberal leftism, etc.).
In the first 8 days of 2022 several important developments occurred in this department.
First, dr. Robert Malone framed the issue of “mass formation psychosis” as it applies to the hysteria around the Wuhan Flu. Then that issue got seen by at least 100,000,000 people. Then it became a common talking point.
These firs three elements are not new. It happened before with “Let’s go Brandon” or “Make America Great Again” or “Yes, we can!” (to also give a left-wing example).
What distinguishes “mass formation psychosis” from other recent examples is its subsequent route. Immediately after it was uttered, the establishment (particularly Google) tried to censor it. When that failed, it tried to bury it under intentional disinformation disguised as “fact-check”.
Then the establishment tried to dismiss it as a conspiracy theory. As if stress-induced hysteria is something new and not a widely studied phenomenon that has been observed for centuries already. Since calling it a conspiracy theory is obviously failing too, now the establishment is calling it an “unfounded theory“.
The argument is now not that the phenomenon is unreal, but that the specific terminology used by dr. Malone is inappropriate and that it doesn’t have enough academic support.
In other words, the establishment is whining that we are using language outside of their control. And we’re doing it effectively and it’s starting to be a serious stressor for those who lick the boot of the Regime. After all, nobody likes to be called delusional – so if you can effectively emphasize and prove to a neutral audience that those who support mandatory experimental myocarditis-inducing gene therapy clotshots for a cold are indeed delusional, that’s a big problem for the Regime.
It is beyond obvious that mass hysteria exists. The NIH itself was discussing mass hysteria in the context of the Wuhan Flu as late as February 2021. So nobody seriously argues that this isn’t a real phenomenon. If you see someone arguing against that, assume that someone is a paid shill or an idiot.
The problem for the Regime, however, is that the sidelines (or the opposition) have been able to set a narrative point. Random normies that have nothing whatsoever to do with this information war (because that’s exactly what the pandemic is at this point) are now refusing to give a damn about what the Regime has to say and they routinely successfully dismiss the Regime’s “measures” with just one syntagm: Mass formation psychosis.
The next step of the Regime will be to double down on the bullshit. Sure, it won’t work, but it will buy time for the Regime. It’s the best they can do.
At this point, there is no retreat or “peace treaty” as an option. It’s either us (normal, outside of the crippling fear of a cold and outside of the special interests driving this lunacy) or them (the Regime). There is no middle ground and there will be no middle ground. Claiming otherwise is wishful thinking.
So, what’s next?
Well, we just have to keep on pressing. There is no silver bullet, but there are thousands of highly efficient bullets.
For now, we must continue to increase the personalcost of those who support the Regime. Infiltrate their circle of friends, ruin their credibility, cut them from their support network(s), ruin their careers (political or otherwise), go through the tedious (but highly rewarding) process of demoralizing them (Alinsky’s 13th rule) and, of course, never stop ridiculing them (Alinsky’s 5th rule).
Make it personally costly for any footsoldier of the Regime to continue to be one. Just next week, for instance, a police officer is due to pay me half of his wage (under court order) for having had the audacity to fine me for not wearing facial underwear on the street a year ago. Now is that police officer more likely or less likely to bother normal people on the street in the future?
The point is to remain intransigent. NONE of the points made by the Regime are legitimate. And never have been. Do not allow anyone around you to start from any other premise than the inherent illegitimacy of the Regime. In other words, language matters. The way you frame things is what drives the thought process.
Also, you should continue to look at things locally first because not all countries or regions are at the same point on the narrative curve. Some have longer inertia (e.g. Israel), some are relatively in sync with the English-language bubble and some have already finished or are close to finishing the curve (e.g. Sweden, FL, TX, etc.).
Oh, and more thing: Do not forget to keep lists of all of those who collaborated with the Regime. These people must be punished in every imaginable way within the confines of the law. And you’d be surprised just how wide the confines of the law are if you have enough imagination.
When I’m writing this, the controversy related to Novak Đoković being held in the Melbourne airport is yet to be resolved. So many of you will already know the result by the time you’ll be reading this.
Nevertheless, regardless of how this controversy will be resolved (Nole being deported, Nole being allowed in or Nole sent to one of Australia’s concentration camps remote quarantine facilities for a few days) – the event itself has the potential to be a turning point in ways I am sure the Australian “authorities” did not foresee.
Something clicked
From the moment it became public knowledge that the Serbian athlete will be allowed to compete without having to take the myocarditis-inducing experimental serum, something clicked both in the minds of those ignorant about the inherently political nature of the “pandemic” and in the minds of those who have been judiciously supporting the Regime so far.
It became clear that his participation could be similar to the one of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know – it’s an unfair comparison but… is it really?
The Reich denied that black athletes can be excellent. Australia denies that normal people should be able to conduct their business without taking bloodclots-inducing experimental serums.
The Reich claimed to control everything – including reality itself. Jesse Owens showed that to be horse manure. The “pandemic” Regime in Australia claimed to control the border and rigorously enforce the “vaccine” on everyone and made millions of people to believe there is no escape. Here comes Novak Đoković with the potential to prove otherwise.
There are plenty of semblances between the two Regimes. Much more than the useful idiots and the paid shills of the Regime would want you to ponder upon.
Sure, Australia doesn’t (yet) gas people who disagree with the Regime and doesn’t (yet) build ghettos to dehumanize them. But make no mistake: that will come too if this tinpot third-world shithole is not stopped. And it’s coming to Europe too. Just today, Emmanuel Macron outright said that those who refuse the clotshot aren’t citizens.
But then again, it doesn’t have to be identical with the Third Reich of 1940 in order for the analogy to be appropriate. Australia today is closer to the Reich of 1936 than the powers-that-be would want you to consider.
However, unlike 1936, the plebs can now read for themselves (sometimes – even when Alphabet/Faceberg/Twitter censor things) and make the connections themselves.
And this leads us to the core issue: The plebs don’t like it.
Those who licked the boot of the Regime (and observed every single stupid “rule” that has nothing whatsoever to do with health – but everything to do with Control) are either asking for Nole to be forced to be as stupid as they are or… they’re starting to have doubts.
Timidly, sometimes quietly, sometimes not so quietly, more and more Australians (and not just Australians) are asking the obvious: Hold on a sec, are we the baddies here?
If Nole can have an exemption from the clotshot, then maybe the whole blanket mandate is a bunch of horse manure? If Nole can be just fine without taking the clotshot, then maybe, just maybe, the shot itself is at the very least useless for young and fit people? (hint: it is)
Australia has already seen violent protests against sanitary fascism – but those, as necessary as they were, came from people like me: people who smelled the BS right from the getgo and took the Wuhan Cough as what it is: a semi-serious respiratory virus used as an excuse for the installation of a dictatorship.
But what Australia hasn’t seen yet is a mass questioning of the Regime itself. Don’t be fooled by Twitter bubbles. Just as we speak there are millions of conversations taking place allover Australia about the Regime.
Sure, many will still end up agreeing that Novak Đoković is killing grandma or whatever bullshit the Regime is still selling to the plebs as an excuse to curb their freedoms. But a lot more won’t. Many of them will not voice it publicly, necessarily. But the seed of doubt will have been firmly planted.
And, as time goes on, that seed will start to flourish. And they will end up resenting the Regime. And that resentment will turn to anger. And, some of them will end up turning that resentment into action. Some of them foolishly – like the chap who self-immolated over the vaccine mandate (instead of taking a few members of the Regime with him) – but, surely, some of them will turn to much more effective action: political.
Of course, we can’t know now how many. But, the slave mentality of the Penal Colony notwithstanding, it’s impossible not to see a rise in dissidence Down Under after this incident.
This cannot and should not be forgiven
The biggest mistake those who oppose the Regime can make is to forgive. None of this should be forgiven. Ever. And every single apparatchik of the Regime will necessarily have to be punished in any way possible.
One thing is certain, though: Nobody can, in good faith, argue against the point that Australia is, at best, an autocratic illiberal Regime. In fact, Australia is no better than Mugabe’s Zimbabwe – a third world tinpot dictatorship in which arbitrary nonsense is the norm.
Taking Nole’s phone and effectively jailing him for the crime of being healthy without clotshots is something that cannot ever be forgiven. Even the Third Reich treated politically incorrect foreign athletes better in 1936.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m insulting the victims of fascism or whatever cope will be thrown at me this time around from the bien pensants du jour. In reality I am doing the opposite: I’m honoring the memory of the victims of fascism by speaking out in order to prevent that tragedy from happening again. You know, I kinda take #NeverAgain seriously.
And remember: Australia has apartheid, remote camps for dissidents, non-stop surveillance that would make STASI or the KGB envious, massive censorship apparatus and you can’t leave the country. There is no significant moral difference between the current Australian “pandemic” Regime and the Chinese Communist Party. Scott Morrison may indeed be genuinely anti-China (and good for him, and some of his actions on that front are commendable) but Australia, at this point, is just the People’s Republic of China with a smiley face.
The rest of the so-called “free world” isn’t too much behind.
We, as citizens, can change that and prevent that from happening. But, I suspect enough countries won’t. Western Europe is lost already and it’s basically an open-air concentration camp in which you get thrown down the pavement (including grandmas, women and children) for disagreeing with the Regime (it’s happening as a matter of routine in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany already). In Australia they outright shoot you.
But don’t forget: Novak Đoković is a Serb. And Serbians have a tendency of not going down easily. In fact, the foundational myth of the Serbian people is based on a resounding defeat in which the Serbs refused to lose until they took the enemy with them – making the victory incredibly expensive for the enemy.
Or… perhaps this will be a nothingburger. Perhaps the Australian psyche is so blasé from the Regime’s military-style propaganda that this incident will not wake them up from the psychosis too many of them are into. I guess we’ll see in a few months 🤷🏻♂️
Just recently, the donors of the Network have fulfilled the fundraiser towards a 2-week-trip to Republic of Moldova to cover the campaign for the upcoming snap elections. We are grateful for your generosity and we already started putting the logistics together (put our paperwork in order, make sure we have a place to stay, transportation, etc.) – but… that’s the easy part.
The hard part is getting ourselves in the mental framework to do this job properly for you. So before we hit the road, we’ll try hard to get you up to speed and in the mental framework as well.
We’ve covered events before (elections, summits, controversial marches, tensed political events, etc.) both in English and in Romanian. So we approach this with a reasonable amount of confidence that we’ll be able to deliver on the expectations the fans and donors have on us.
However, what we never did before is to try to convey the inner-workings of an inside joke to a group that is outside of it. Just like it’s difficult to explain the implications of a remark like “Okay, boomer!” or “Top kek!” to a Romanian who doesn’t speak English and doesn’t hang out in the godforsaken corners of the Internet that many of y’all do, the same is true when it comes to explaining the implications of many things Moldova to those who don’t speak Romanian. Yet that’s exactly what we’ll have to do.
Heck, sometimes we need to explain to Romanians on the right side of the Prut river some of these things because no matter how similar the two societies are (the Romanian and Moldovan) there are still shockingly many differences.
Despite having Romanian as the official language, Russian is still pretty common in Moldova. And that’s not so bad. The worst part is that the common parlance on the left side of the Prut river is rife with calques – especially phraseological calques – in which an idiom from Russian is translated word-for-word into Romanian and then you’re just expected to “get it” – and you can’t unless you either lived in Moldova for years or you speak Russian well enough to figure out the context on the spot.
Such situations exist in every country, of course. For instance the French phrase ça va sans dire got calqued in English as “it goes without saying” and today it seems normal. Nobody bats an eyelid when hearing it and everyone understands what the speaker meant. However, in most countries of Europe, such imports into the language occurred decades or even centuries ago.
In Moldova, most of them occurred in the last 20 years or so – as more and more people started to speak Romanian in public (since Russian was no longer mandatory) but those generations were educated in the Soviet system. Perhaps this explains why so many young people are running in this election (more on that later).
Here’s a video that is impossible to translate fully into English, Romanian or Russian. You basically need to speak the latter two really damn well (or to have lived in Moldova for many years) to get an idea of what this very smart history teacher is trying to convey. Good luck:
At the same time, however, Moldova is still going through an identity crisis. Is it really a country? If it is, then surely some particularities aren’t a big deal. After all, the German spoken in Austria isn’t exactly identical to the one spoken in Germany, n’est-ce pas?
If it isn’t a country, then why bother since it will soon be integrated into something else? But hold on – what something else? This election, a party called “The Patriots of Moldova” is running on the platform to make Moldova a federal subject of Russia with certain conditions.
Also in this election, with bigger chances of passing the 5% threshold to get into the legislative, there’s a Romanian party running whose objective is also the dissolution of Moldova through complete and unconditional integration of the country into its western neighbor – Romania. The Alliance for the Unification of Romanians already shook the leftist-elitist political class in Romania after they “unexpectedly” got into the Parliament – so now that they’re running in Moldova as well with the same unionist message, the powers-that-be are treading more carefully. More on that later.
And then there’s the Transnistria issue. Or the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic. A place so weird that it’s hard to explain even to Romanians, let alone to those not familiar with the shenanigans of the Soviet Union or Russia.
So, let’s try: The Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (PMR) is a sliver of land on the left side of the Dniester (Nistru) river sandwiched between Ukraine and the rest of Moldova that’s on the right side of the Dniester river.
From an international law perspective, the PMR belongs to Moldova. De facto, however, as a result of the 1992 Transnistrian War, the PMR is a separate country with its own currency (recognized only by Russia) which only recognizes the Romanian language if it’s written in the Soviet Cyrillic script.
Point of information: there was a moment when the Romanian language was written in the Cyrillic script but that stopped almost 200 years ago. Also, the script used in the 1830s is not the same used today in Transnistria under the official name of “Moldovan Cyrillic Alphabet“.
Well, usually, the votes from this region (which de jure belongs to Moldova) would routinely go towards pro-Russian factions. This time around, the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) decided not to allow any polling stations in Transnistria because the Chișinău authorities can’t control them properly. All fine and dandy but in previous elections, it happened multiple times for voters to be physically carried over the “border” to cast votes (sometimes multiple votes per person) for the preferred Russian faction.
Readers from the ex-Yugoslav space may be more likely to get the idea of this practice as it also happened last summer in 2020 in Montenegro and it routinely happens in Bosnia or Serbia – particularly in the buffer area Republika Srpska (which de jure belongs to Bosnia and Herzegovina Federation but the populace’s loyalties routinely lie with Belgrade).
Moldovan /politics/
Moldovan politics in general are basically a meme, but this is particularly true this time around.
The political party supported by the Romanian Government and the European Union is called /pas/ – yes, kinda like /pol/ – except it has terrible memes and imagery.
The Party for Action and Solidarity – /pas/ – also doesn’t really think Moldova is a country. But they also don’t think Moldova should be Russian or Romanian. They’d prefer Moldova to be a blob of everything for everyone (globohomo basically) and maybe a “civic nation” à la française but without too much Allahu Ackbar like the original.
The slogan? “We are kickstarting the good times” (Pornim vremurile bune) – an NPC slogan by an NPC party for NPC voters. The same NPC voters who made other no-names relevant in Moldovan politics in the past. Or, as our favorite Moldovan analyst Marcela Țușcă would put it: “The goodniks” (with the implicit assumption, of course, that those who defy the Progress and Good brought by /pas/ are, of course, nogoodniks. The root of the word goodnik is Russian and Yiddish and may have come into English from present-day Moldova)
/pas/ wants to dissolve Moldova into the wider EU (and, make no mistake, it stands a good chance of succeeding since it will likely form the next government). The AUR wants to dissolve Moldova into Romania – and if they get into the Parliament they may even end up in Government. The “Patriots” want to dissolve it into Russia (these guys are way too late to the party, though).
Then there’s BECS. No, it’s not a misspelling of the Hungarian name for Vienna (Bécs) but an acronym standing for Blocul Electoral al Comuniștilor și Socialiștilor (The Electoral Block of the Communists and Socialists). This alliance is run by two pro-Russian ex-presidents – Vladimir Voronin and Igor Dodon.
For those who may have followed Moldova in the past, Vladimir Voronin is that president against whom the people rose up on April 7, 2009 in a similar fashion their western neighbors had risen up 20 years earlier against Ceaușescu.
No matter how you look at it, these guys represent the distant past. Vladimir Vornin just turned 80 a month ago and Igor Dodon is increasingly unpopular even in his own party (The Socialist Party of Republic of Moldova – PSRM) as the base of PSRM perceives him as having lost the support of the Kremlin. Whether that’s true or not we will surely find out by July 14. One thing is certain though: The path to victory for BECS is pretty narrow because in addition to fielding very pasée frontrunners, their message – one of independence – is a lot less popular than it was even a year ago, let alone 5 or 10 years ago. The faith in Moldova as a viable independent state is running dry. More cynical observers may even go as far as to say that Moldova as a state died a long time ago but it didn’t find that out yet.
Then there are two contenders named after two people: The electoral block “Renato Usatîi” and the Șor Party (named after Ilan Șor).
Renato Usatîi is the mayor of Bălți, a town known as a Russian-speaking stronghold. We will go there and will show you how it evolved. For now, it is worth noting that Renato Usatîi was instrumental in unseating Igor Dodon back in November 2020. He ran in the presidential election, came in third with ~17% of the vote and in the second round he advised his voters to reject Igor Dodon.
However, while him personally is quite popular, the electoral block bearing his name is not sure it will get the 5% necessary to be in the next Parliament.
One reason him personally is popular is because under his leadership the municipality of Bălți suffered a transformation mostly for the better – and it even attracted international attention as to how transparent his administration is and just how much has corruption been reduced. Now, make no mistake, it’s still pretty corrupt, but before Usatîi, Bălți would make some Brazilian local authorities blush.
Usatîi would like to create the Moldovan equivalent of the Mossad to hunt down corrupt politicians, abolish district (raion) authorities and intensify economic cooperation with Romania and Ukraine.
Ilan Șor is the former mayor of Orhei. At the age of 34 he has a resume similar to more seasoned oligarchs. Born in Tel Aviv (from parents that had fled the USSR), grown up in Moldova since age 3, Ilan Șor came out as a strong advocate for the Russian-speaking population. He is married with Jasmin – a successful Russian pop-singer. He owns a football club, several duty-free stores, he got elected as mayor of Orhei whilst on house arrest and also got involved in the so-called “the billion scandal” in which roughly one billion dollars (one eighth of Moldova’s GDP) vanished from Moldova’s banks. Just like that. He is currently in hiding. And he’s just 34 years old!
The Șor Party could accurately be described as national-socialist. They believe in Big Government, Big Welfare State, nationalization of foreign energy firms, collective farming (they literally advocate for the return of the kolkhoz) and all around socialism. However, they distrust big transnational involvement (such as the European Union), they like the Church (and cultural conservatism in general) and, unlike the Western Left, they also support law and order (including death penalty).
At the moment of this writing 19 political parties and “electoral blocks” signed up for the election. That number may change as a few others are wrapping up their paperwork. Besides, in Moldova it is perfectly possible to be disqualified three days before voting day. Ask Renato Usatîi about that.
The Moldovan /press/
Partisan press exists in every country on Earth so the fact that such thing exists in Moldova as well comes as no surprise.
However, the way in which this is done oftentimes shocks even seasoned political operatives from the Intermarium area (who should be, and are, accustomed to this neighborhood’s way of doing things).
There is not much etiquette. It’s just straight-up agenda-driven reporting without any pretense of being anything else. In a way, that can be a good thing but the readership makes things depressing to look at and analyze.
Shilling is also at a level not seen in Eastern Europe for 20 years. To call it low-tier bait would be an understatement. Take for instance this article from Timpul. The headline reads: ”The communist Securitate officer is still on PAS’s list. On April 7th he was KIDNAPPING young people off the streets and taking them to police precincts” – and then throughout the article the individual in question is called a torturer (torționar). The Romanian word torționar is associated with the odious crimes against humanity committed in Communist-era prisons such as the Pitești experiment.
Now, make no mistake, this individual from /pas/ may indeed be a terrible commie bootlicker – but he is no torționar.
Similar type of gross exaggeration comes from all sides. In the pro-Russian media Romanians are casually called ”fascists”, ”imperialists” and even worse names are reserved for those further west.
Those who complain about the American media as being “hyperpartisan” should take a trip to Moldova to see what a real hyperpartisan media landscape looks like.
The more ”credible” media outlets (and by ”credible” one should understand slightly less hysterical but also very partisan) have meme names or meme practices.
It is unclear where this practice of writing /like this/ came from but it’s so common that the /pas/ logo doesn’t look so weird as it would look for those not accustomed to the Moldovan way of doing things.
Back in 2017-18, the Social Democrats in Romania (then in power) pejoratively called those who protested against them haștagiști (lit. the hashtag-ers). Well, in Moldova there is a legit media outlet called Diez (lit. hashtag).
And to make sure it lives up to the meme – the motto is ”News for young people”.
And the meme-stereotype goes even further: All of the news on the website are incredibly short. Basically the founders assume that their target audience is kinda retarded and lacks the attention span to read 1000 words. So most of their “articles” are under 200 words. Meme /press/ 🤷♂️
Youth politics
Drawing from the wisdom that Moldova is like the European Union in miniature, the worst excesses of the EU and many of the worst excesses of Russia are present in Moldova if you know where or how to look. Oftentimes the presence is pretty glaring.
Earlier in this article we mentioned that so many young people are running in this election. But just how young? Well, one of the few articles that is longer than 200 words on Diez.md is the one with the whole list of people younger than 30 that are running in this election.
While in the EU political parties go out of their way to accommodate young people – some even going as far as instituting a mandatory quota – in Moldova no such thing is necessary. If anything, some parties would probably need some pro-boomer policies 🤪
It is true that many of those young people are not on the so-called eligible spots (meaning they’re so far down the list that only a miracle or an extreme tragedy would take them into the next Parliament) – but, even so, the number of very young people involved officially in national politics is still quite astonishing in itself.
For instance, if /pas/ manages to win 51 seats, that would mean 2 legislators born in 1991 and one born in 1993.
If the political party PACE wins 13 seats, then that would put in the next Parliament a legislator born in 2002. That would mean a legislator who was in utero at the time of 9/11 and under the age of 7 at the defining moment of Moldova’s post-Soviet history (namely the April 7th protests). It’s unlikely that PACE would surpass the 5% threshold, but the intellectual exercise in itself should tell you just how young the political class is poised to be in Moldova in just a few more years.
The electoral block “Renato Usatîi” is unsure if it will be in the next Parliament. But if it manages to get 8 or 9% of the vote, this will mean at least one legislator from them born after 1998.
Platforma Demnitate și Adevăr (the Dignity and Truth Platform) may get into the Parliament unless it withdraws to support /pas/. If they don’t withdraw, they will send at least one legislator born in 1994.
If the Alliance for the Unification of Romanians (AUR) repeats in Moldova the score it has gotten in Romania, they will send one legislator born in 1994 and another one born in 1991. That would mean people who weren’t even born when the Soviet Union was still a thing.
A lot of things can happen (Moldovan elections, when looked at for this kind of nitty-gritty, is notoriously unpredictable) but the point remains: All political parties have on their lists people who could never be elected in most of the EU (as they wouldn’t be allowed to run due to their age).
On the other hand, Moldova is a mess. So it’s not like these young people can really make things significantly worse, relatively speaking.
After all, there’s always room for worse (întotdeauna se poate mai rău) as Romanians bitterly (and cynically) say when referring to the Regime but, realistically speaking, a few 20-somethings in the next legislative body of Moldova will probably be no big deal overall. Other issues will come up much faster than the perceived lack of experience of a few MPs.
However, what’s a lot more interesting is the trend. While this won’t make much of a difference on July 11, 2021, at least some of those born between 1991 and 2003 (!!) that are now running (and will predictably fail to win a seat) will stay around in politics. How will their mentality be affected? What kind of worldview will they end up developing as a result of getting into politics at such a young age?
To give you an idea about how out of touch the legacy institutions are, Radio Free Europe was running a report a week ago lamenting that young people in Moldova aren’t interested in politics. Well… it’s quite hard to reconcile that kind of messaging with the reality that there are more young people per capita running in the upcoming Moldovan election than in any EU country in the last two decades.
Is that a good thing? If not, why not?
These are questions we will have to explore in the field in the upcoming weeks we’ll be spending on the left side of the Prut river.
As a rule, wherever there’s young people and politics radicalism and radicalization isn’t far away. Will this “rule” hold true for Moldova as well? Keep in mind that the economic level of Moldova is very backwards (it is the poorest country in Europe after all) which can foster resentment and radicalization even faster than in the West.
Many American youth got radicalized (to the Left or to the Right) because they can’t purchase a new home in a nice suburb. In Moldova the concept of a new home is pretty alien. The median household income in Moldova is $2,145 per year. In other words, we at the Freedom Alternative Network, will end up spending in two weeks to study their elections more than the official median household income for an entire year.
Now, of course, it’s not that bad because, like it’s usual in such countries, there’s a lot of gray market, then there’s the huge diaspora and the remittances they send (a third of the population lives and works abroad) and the prices are oftentimes lower both in relative and absolute terms for many basic items. Also, adjusted for PPP $2145 is around 5000 in 2019 Int$.
Still, the fact remains: There’s much more poverty in Moldova than anywhere else in Europe. So when you have cynical youth in politics… things can go wrong.
The powers that be
It is not fair to use phrases like the deep state or the System (mandatory capital-S) when it comes to Republic of Moldova.
While, of course, such thing as a deep state exists in Moldova as well, it is far less established than it is even in the neighboring countries (Ukraine and Romania) let alone the United States or Great Britain.
This is the case because, as we mentioned a few times in this article, very few people have a firm commitment to Moldova continuing to exist as a country and State.
Sure, that doesn’t mean there aren’t bigger ones too. We mentioned earlier the $1 billion just vanishing from Moldovan banks. There was also the incident when the president was getting a nice bag full of cash (allegedly).
But corruption notwithstanding, the shadowy deals in Moldova aren’t happening as part of an established framework that we’d call the Civil Service, or the deep state or whatever name you want to give to such a structure you know it exists in your country as well.
In Moldova, however, it is much more accurate to talk about the powers that be. And who are those powers? Well, it’s not difficult to guess. Who holds authority over Moldova?
The current president, Maia Sandu, is openly supported by two of the governing parties in Romania (PNL and USRPLUS). In the past, the Romanian diplomacy would somewhat bother, occasionally, to halfheartedly deny that it is being involved in Moldovan politics. Those times are long gone.
Also, the current president is openly supported by Berlin (and, by extension, by Brussels too). Just this month, the EU approved €600 million for Moldova as part of the “economic recovery and resilience” mechanism which was supposed to be for Member States only. But then again, it’s Moldova. And the powers that be have already reached an agreement.
If it’s supported by Berlin, then Moscow likely agrees. Following the recent Putin-Biden summit, it’s quite likely to see a sudden disappearance of Muscovite objections over Moldova’s westward lurch. Call it a hunch, if you want.
In addition to Bucharest, Berlin, Brussels and Moscow, there are also business actors who are indeed part of the powers that be from Moldova’s standpoint. These include, but are not limited to, Banca Transilvania (Romania), Rompetrol (Romania), Lukoil (Russia), Orange (France) and the commerce lobby (mostly Ukrainian and Romanian – for obvious reasons).
If these powers that be reach an understanding (and they likely will, if they haven’t already) then the political forces that disagree with a core component of that said understanding may end up in trouble.
What the public sees
All while this is happening in the background, the public continues to argue in other parameters.
It is worth noting that in Moldova, oftentimes, the public is privy to the real discussions as well. Not necessarily by design, but because the country is small enough that you can’t really keep a secret.
Nevertheless, this election may be the first one in which themes from Romania overlap and makes the public discourse a lot more complicated (and nuanced) than in the past.
Just two years ago the discourse was “pro-Russians” versus “pro-Europe”. That’s it. Even though at least a third of the populace wants unification with Romania, the powers that be always made sure that that option is not on the table. And the same is being attempted now as well.
Mark Tkaciuk former ideologue of the Communist Party founded a new party a month ago with a view to run for this election. Yet he isn’t campaigning. Instead he is fighting tooth and nail in the courts to get the Alliance for the Unification of Romanians off the ballot. Why?
It’s difficult to assess since we’re not yet in the field but the easiest explanation (which routinely turns out to be the correct one) is because the powers that be don’t exactly like AUR. It’s not that there’s anything inherently bad about AUR – but if the understanding is for /pas/ to govern (which is the most likely outcome anyway) – it is preferable to have /pas/ get a majority in the Parliament in a coalition with Renato Usatîi (thus returning the favor from November 2020 when Usatîi helped /pas/ leader Maia Sandu win the run-off against the Kremlin-backed candidate and incumbent president Igor Dodon).
Mark Tkaciuk in fact admitted (sort of) on TV that the main beneficiary of removing AUR from the ballot would indeed be /pas/. But why would a Russian shill want to help the pro-EU party?
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Prut river, AUR is routinely painted (falsely) as a pro-Russia party. So imagine the 🤡: The same political party is ”pro-Russian” in Bucharest but openly and harshly pursued by legit pro-Russians with a view to have it disqualified from the race in Chișinău. Welcome to politics in this part of the world!
Meanwhile, the allegedly anti-Russian and pro-EU /pas/ has on its list a lady who thinks Romanians are fascists, a chap who believes (just like Stalin unironically) that such thing as the Moldovan ethnicity exists, and another chap who believes such thing as the Moldovan language exists. All of these represent legit pro-Russian shilling and talking points but… the powers that be decided that /pas/ is anti-Russian, therefore you WILL believe that. Or else your mother is Putin. Or something.
However, even though the efforts to remove AUR from the ballot are ongoing and could help /pas/ and president Maia Sandu, the president herself made an unexpected move and asked the Migration Board to review the case of AUR president and founder George Simion – who got banned from the country for 5 years in 2018 by the pro-Kremlin regime at the time. Errr… that’s a long story in itself.
And then there’s the whole business with the Diaspora. Unlike Ireland, Greece, Armenia or Israel (countries which also have huge diasporas) – Moldova permits equal voting from all citizens wherever they are in the world and organizes polling stations for them at consular offices. Romania does the same too although at a much bigger scale.
Well, the diaspora vote tends to skew heavily for the pro-western and unionist parties. So it is in the best interest of the socialists and communists to frustrate the diaspora vote as much as possible.
In the past the diaspora vote was pretty balanced since a huge chunk of the diaspora lived and worked in Russia. But, over the last 5-ish years, the Moldovan diaspora started to look more like the Romanian one (in part because many of them acquired Romanian citizenship) and worked more in the EU (including Romania) and, with that, also came a shift in the vote, geopolitically speaking.
Every single election season there’s a dispute about the number of polling stations in diaspora. The ‘right’ (read: not Russian commies) prefer more polling stations in the west and as few as possible in Russia. The ‘left’ prefers the opposite.
In the last two weeks there were even small protests in Germany, Romania, the UK, Italy and other places against CEC’s decision not to severely increase the number of polling stations in the West to avoid the long and excruciating queues observed in 2020. But CEC is run by a Socialist (Maxim Lebedinschi) so… yet another court battle.
One thing the Moldovans get better than Romania: Their court battles on these matters are surprisingly swift. Which can be both a good thing (speedy trial is generally good) but also annoying (it encourages frivolous lawsuits that harass parties and waste their time and distract from campaigning).
And then there are the promises. We won’t get into that now because it’s much better to show them to you on tape. Because you’d never believe us otherwise.
Nobody in the EU (or North America, or indeed South America) dares to promise in the election that they will quadruple all wages. Nobody. No matter how populist(ic) a candidate or a party may be. But such promises are thrown around like candy in Moldova. More on that in a few weeks.
Conclusions
Of course, this article barely scratches the surface on what Moldovan politics are. There’s no way an article, no matter how long, can cover everything.
Three months ago we invited on the Sofa a fan of /pas/ just to walk us through the political history since April 7, 2009 (the turning point in Moldovan politics the way December 1989 was the turning point for Romania). The chap doesn’t really like to speak a lot. We still ended up talking for over 3 hours just to list all of the events and explain the terms. Translating that into English would take two weeks at the very least and a re-edting to include extra explanations.
Perhaps we’ll just have to do it allover again in English. If he’ll want to, of course. Until then, those who speak Romanian may want to review the Sofa’s older videos with Marcela Țușcă, especially this one.
For this tour, we will only explain in English the aspects not yet explained in previous materials. For the coverage in Romanian, we will assume that everything discussed in the over 12 hours of Moldova-related content from podcasts and interviews is already known.
One definitive conclusion that we can draw now is this: The two weeks spent in Moldova are not going to be a walk in the park. Meme country with meme politics reported by a meme press… untangling that ain’t going to be easy, that’s for sure.
Every crisis becomes a religion if it lasts long enough.
One factor in that transformation is the Beautiful Theory phenomenon: the power elite insists its remedies are logical and politically correct so they must work, even if the actual evidence shows they obviously don’t.
When Beautiful Theories crash into hard, cold reality and shatter, faith is the glue used by the elites to put their precious ideas back together. They need militant faith to get the job done: true believers eager to crush doubt and compel obedience by making war on the infidels.
Some are swept into the faith because they desperately crave a sense of control over the crisis. They need to believe Something Can Be Done, and they’d rather invest their faith in debunked Beautiful Theories than have no faith at all. Faith is a coin that demands to be spent.
Some crave social approval, and the purveyors of Beautiful Theories have immense political, economic, and cultural power to make their faith seem fashionable. Virtue signaling is such a plague in modern society because the signals are prepackaged and made very easy to send.
Some aren’t even hoping they can assert control over a crisis by converting to its religion. They’ll settle for just having some meaning, some simplicity, a sense that the righteous will fare better than the unbelievers, that virtue will be rewarded while sin is punished.
That’s a very common impulse with the Church of Covid, since the Beautiful Theories were so very obviously wrong. There isn’t much left of the faith except the visceral communal satisfaction of hoping unbelievers will be punished for their blasphemies with sickness and death.
That sort of thing happens with all of the crisis religions, although not usually as quickly and obviously as with the Church of Covid. Look at the endless stream of movies about how the world became an apocalyptic hellscape because people didn’t believe in global warming.
The last resort of every crisis religion, the last thing that puts asses in the pews, is that addiction to misery porn, the collective hope that unbelievers will suffer someday, and everyone will admit the True Faith was right all along as Judgment Day crashes down upon them.
The elite will never have the humility to admit they were wrong, and they’ll never give up on politically or financially profitable “solutions” even when they obviously don’t solve the problem. Founding a crisis religion means they never have to say they’re sorry.
That applies to some very longstanding crises, like the War on Poverty, whose nostrums long ago transformed into fantastically expensive articles of religious faith even as mountains of data accumulated that proved they were utter failures, and often made the problems worse.
You can look for some telltale signs of a crisis transforming into a religion. The most obvious one is when the high priests tell you the “war” you’ve been drafted into will never end. They become very angry when asked to define success or failure, or lay out exit strategies.
Watch for the moment when you’re told “science” means not asking questions, defying dogma, or challenging “consensus.” That is the literal definition of faith, not science.
Always keep an eye out for Moving Goalposts, which are the signature miracle of crisis religions, their version of parting the waters or loaves and fishes. Crisis religions work very hard to make their faith unfalsifiable by constantly changing the standards of evidence.
Check to see if certain people are accumulating huge amounts of money and power from a crisis. That’s a pretty good sign it’s turning into a religion. A crisis should be solved as quickly and efficiently as possible. Don’t let it fester long enough to become a special interest.
Above all, look for the whiff of arrogance to develop around a crisis. Wise religions and effective crisis managers have something in common: a sense of humility. Crisis religions are militant faiths that quickly become arrogant, smug, and totalitarian.
Dedicated people who truly want to solve a problem will look for evidence their analysis is wrong, or their policies aren’t working, and make adjustments as quickly as possible, no matter the cost or embarrassment to themselves. This is humility.
Crisis religions are arrogant. They reject criticism, insist their Beautiful Theories must be right because they’re ideologically pure – they fit snugly into a worldview that must not be challenged. Their plans only fail because their commands were disobeyed or sabotaged.
The high priests of a crisis religion see devils everywhere, leering at them from the rubble of every failure. Only sin can explain why their Beautiful Theories are tarnished. Failure is never their fault, so it must be yours. They find your lack of faith disturbing.
And you know what? A lot of people want to see the world that way, including a great many self-described atheists. They hunger for the comfort of faith and the vibrant energy of militancy. They want to be right, and they want the wrong to suffer for their folly.
Conservatives think religious faith in the State is terrifying and wonder why so many embrace it. It’s because uncertainty is much more frightening. A simple false story is better than a complex true one, and with enough faith, maybe we can force the simple story to be true.
And to make sure it lives up to the meme – the motto is ”News for young people”.